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Is This Giant Hydroponic Greenhouse in Kentucky the Future of Farming?

Rolling Stone

Is This Giant Hydroponic Greenhouse in Kentucky the Future of Farming?

Austyn Gaffney August 22, 2021

appharvest-lead - Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone — appharvest-lead – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

When Jonathan Webb arrived at the 500-acre former cattle farm he purchased in 2019, it was essentially an empty green field. He bought an RV and set it up on a hill with the water tower behind him and Daniel Boone National Forest out front. When massive, earth-moving construction started the same year, Webb joked with locals that he was building a giant communication tower to the aliens, helping other intelligent life find Morehead, Kentucky.

But Webb’s real interest was saving Planet Earth.

“We believe that Planet Earth is the hidden gem of the known universe,” Webb tells me during a tour of his AppHarvest facility, the $150 million, 60-acre greenhouse (think 50 football fields) that briefly ranked as the 9th largest building in the world when it opened in October 2020.

“I’m a huge believer that nature is the most technologically advanced thing we have on Planet Earth, and we need to harness it,” says Webb, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of AppHarvest. The corporation went public in February, earning a $1 billion valuation. “Whoever developed nature out there, that’s higher forms of intelligence. Building an iPhone? That’s easy. Go build organic biomatter and have it grow all over the place.”

The Morehead facility is the first of 12 high-tech farms that Webb is planning to build throughout eastern Kentucky. At its core, AppHarvest runs on the agricultural resources that have helped humans feed themselves for over 10,000 years: sun and water. But there’s two caveats: First, AppHarvest doesn’t use soil; its hydroponic system means it is heavily reliant on man-made fertilizers (but without pesticides). Second, the greenhouses use technology like robotics and AI to better predict crop health and yield. Webb, in fact, balks at the term greenhouse, preferring to call his colossal projects “data driven farms.”

“A greenhouse is not a greenhouse in the same way a sports car in 1940 has nothing in common with a 2021 Tesla except for four wheels and a steering wheel,” he says.

Webb’s goal is to lower domestic dependence on pesticide-laden foreign imports, which provide 70 percent of U.S. vine crops at the grocery store (tomatoes, berries, cucumbers, peppers). And Webb, a Kentuckian himself, wants to provide jobs to Appalachia. But his motivation goes beyond that, he says, to the same obsessive anxiety many in his generation are facing: the screeching freight train of climate change.

“I know people don’t really believe me, but every night, including last night, I am personally terrified about the future of human existence,” Webb says. “I mean 2050, it’s coming, and our heads are in the sand, and Rome is burning, and we’re not moving fast enough.”

The 0 million AppHarvest facility in Morehead, Kentucky, with a 60-acre greenhouse. AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb prefers to call it a “data-driven farm.” - Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone — The 0 million AppHarvest facility in Morehead, Kentucky, with a 60-acre greenhouse. AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb prefers to call it a “data-driven farm.” – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

Webb’s plan for a new agricultural economy could bolster a region known for landscapes and livelihoods heavily scarred by the coal industry, a primary driver of the greenhouse gas emissions feeding the climate crisis. The reality of this crisis escalates daily: heat waves and unrelenting wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, drought evaporating drinking water in the Southwest, metronomic hurricanes emptying coastal towns, and extreme ice storms and flooding events devastating croplands and communities across the Midwest and the South.

Webb claims AppHarvest’s “controlled-environment agriculture” is the third wave of tech-laden solutions, following renewable energy grids and electric cars, and will help shore up a U.S. food supply amid these unpredictable weather extremes.

But is controlled environment agriculture at AppHarvest’s scale a climate solution, or just another energy-intensive distraction? And are Kentuckians truly going to be the beneficiaries of a company following a corporate playbook, beholden to corporate shareholders? Webb’s is an unapologetically eco-modernist approach, with a full-throttle embrace of capitalism — though, in a strange contortion, he self-identifies as anti-establishment. “I’m anti-Wall Street. This is the first stock I’ve ever owned,” he says, adding that he has since bought into both Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and a few others. “But the reality is, how do we use the private sector for good?”

The ecoleft would say that runaway technology and capitalism got us into this climate mess, and are the last tools we should be reaching for, but Webb is betting big that they are wrong.

“We can use private sector capital to rebuild this world,” says Webb. “We can’t just demonize the systems in place. We need to use them. We’re all pawns. Play the game and win. This generation has got to be the one of action and less talk at this point. There’s nothing to talk about anymore. Just do it.”

At 7 a.m. on a Tuesday in early June, Webb is already bursting with energy, hands shoved in his pockets, rocking back and forth from his heels to his toes. He’s dressed in his typical uniform: grey running shoes, acid-wash jeans, a baseball cap atop shaggy strawberry blond hair, round tortoiseshell glasses and a mustache. His black T-shirt reads “APPH Nasdaq Listed,” a celebration of when AppHarvest went public on February 1st, 2021.

He jumps between topics quickly, pausing to tell me he has attention deficit disorder in the midst of a speech about their pest-management system. Travis Parman, an AppHarvest spokesperson, jokes that their management team is pinged left and right by Webb. “If it’s in his head, it’s in a text,” Parman says.

Beneath Webb’s fast-talking, grand-metaphor-inducing world visions might be a bit of a savior complex, complete with a tidy origin story of the genius striking out on his own, a la the founders of Google in their garage. Except with Webb, it was a small cabin in Pikeville, Kentucky, where he says he showed up with a backpack, his laptop and a dream (he was also given an office at the University of Pikeville). Three years later, he has a management team and board of directors culled from Impossible Foods, ExxonMobil, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Plus Martha Stewart, who joined after a visit from Webb in 2019.

While Webb’s ambitions are grand, he’s no stranger to large-scale, new-economy projects. When he graduated from the University of Kentucky’s business program in 2008, at the height of the recession, he applied to hundreds of jobs before finding his way into a career in Washington, D.C. during the Obama administration, building solar grids on Department of Defense land. There, he watched the solar and wind industries blast off over the same decade that coal irrecoverably collapsed due to competition from natural gas, mechanization, and thinning seams.

At the same time, Webb began hearing about food security. By 2050 the world will need up to 70 percent more food than it currently produces to feed a predicted 9.7 billion people and a rising middle class, according to an oft-cited 2009 report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Webb read about a solution in a 2017 National Geographic article, “How Netherlands Feeds the World,” highlighting enormous Dutch greenhouses that provide huge quantities of food year-round with a smaller square footage than traditional farming. He quit his job and started AppHarvest that same year.

“To get to 50-70 percent more food, as we currently grow it, we would need two Planet Earths,” says Webb. And there are more demands on the planet than just agriculture. Conservation biologists like E.O. Wilson predict we need to preserve half of the world’s land and water to protect 80 percent of the remaining biodiversity on the planet.

“So how do we free up land and water?” Webb asks, spreading out his arms in front of the greenhouse, “You’re looking at it.”

Jonathan Webb, CEO of AppHarvest. “If we do half of what we’re talking about, we will be one of the largest food and agricultural companies in my lifetime,” he says. - Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone — Jonathan Webb, CEO of AppHarvest. “If we do half of what we’re talking about, we will be one of the largest food and agricultural companies in my lifetime,” he says. – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

At the entrance to the greenhouse’s west side, Webb dons a mad scientist lab coat and we take off on a Power Bee, a tiny yellow vehicle pulling two metal carts. The Bee beeps our way through hundreds of rows of tomatoes, the glass-paneled ceiling towering above us like an airport hangar, with Webb greeting everyone we pass — “Let’s rock and roll” being a preferred salutation.

Annually, up to 45 million pounds of tomatoes (from about 720,000 plants) will be harvested from this single greenhouse. Each tomato plant — red, round beefsteak tomatoes on the east side, and tomatoes-on-the-vine twisting through the west side — is carefully monitored through a control room decked out with standing desks and large screens where the temperature, nutrients, water, and light are watched and tweaked. Soon, other AppHarvest greenhouses will grow things like lettuce and strawberries.

AppHarvest claims to produce up to 30 times the yields of conventional agriculture. “This 60-acre under-glass facility can do the equivalent of 1,500-2,000 [open-field] acres in California or Mexico,” says Webb as he peels past a group of workers, some with wet towels on their heads and others with grey fans that look like large headphones around their necks, provided after workers complained of the heat.

AppHarvest says they’ve also reduced water consumption by 90 percent compared to traditional open-field agriculture by using a closed loop irrigation system that’s 100 percent reliant on rainwater, which makes Kentucky an optimal location — the state has had its wettest decade on record, and in 2020 was the wettest state in the U.S.

“You look at all these tech billionaires looking to leave the planet and go to Mars, but water is the one thing Planet Earth has that nowhere else in the known universe has,” Webb says, talking quickly. “When water becomes the price of oil, that’s that Mad Max post-apocalyptic world that’s on the horizon if we don’t get it straight.”

Kentucky is also optimal because the location cuts down on shipping distances, AppHarvest says. Seventy percent of the U.S. is within a day’s drive of Kentucky, reducing transportation emissions by 80 percent. And, they tout, a 50/50 mix of LED and traditional light bulbs has reduced their electricity consumption by almost 20 percent.

But energy is perhaps the most pressing problem in controlled-environment agriculture, especially in Kentucky, which, as of 2019, still depended on coal for 73 percent of its electricity generation.

“Here in Kentucky, electricity primarily comes from coal, so with an AppHarvest tomato we’re trading fossil fuels for this product,” says Martin Richards, formerly an organic farmer and now executive director of Community Farm Alliance, a Kentucky nonprofit founded by dairy and tobacco growers in 1985.

In controlled-environment agriculture, most of the resources naturally utilized in traditional farming are provided artificially, which can make greenhouses hugely energy intensive.

“You have to construct greenhouse facilities, and then literally build systems that replace what nature would otherwise provide,” says Ricardo Salvador, director and senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ food and environment program. “A good rule of thumb on the thermodynamics of it is the more technology you use, the more energy you use, and the more carbon dioxide equivalents you’re going to generate.”

A 2015 study in Yuma, Arizona comparing hydroponic lettuce with conventional lettuce growth reported that while hydroponics produced over 10 times the conventional yield, growers also used 82 times more energy.

AppHarvest’s baseline carbon footprint has not yet been determined since operations began in October 2020. They say they are waiting to have a year’s worth of data and expect to include it in their 2021 sustainability report.

But Webb is quick to denounce criticisms. When I ask him about the energy problem, he says AppHarvest is an agricultural company, not an energy company: “Tesla, they build electric vehicles that go on the grid. They’re not building solar for every car in the same way we’re not building solar for our fruits and vegetables.”

AppHarvest is, however, trying to lower its fossil fuel use, says Jackie Roberts, the company’s chief sustainability officer. She’s working with Schneider Electric, a sustainable energy specialist, on a request for proposals to add renewables into the grid.

Michael Hurak, an AppHarvest employee, trims the tomato plants, which grow without soil, using hydroponics. AppHarvest also uses robotics and AI to precisely predict crop health and yield. - Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone — Michael Hurak, an AppHarvest employee, trims the tomato plants, which grow without soil, using hydroponics. AppHarvest also uses robotics and AI to precisely predict crop health and yield. – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

The long-term goal is “minimal carbon emissions,” she insists, but until then, she says, the benefits of AppHarvest’s net ecological footprint outweigh the adverse effects of its energy consumption, including its ability to conserve water and avoid agricultural runoff from fertilizers and pesticides.

The result, Webb hopes, could be not only a more sustainable system but a model for other greenhouses globally. After AppHarvest went public, he says he began getting calls from foreign dignitaries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. “We’re having the global food security conversation on a farm in freaking Morehead, and the brightest people in the world are going to be part of these conversations,” he says. “I’m a huge fan of underdogs, and you talk about the underdog concept of we’re the first publicly traded company in this sector, and we’re in rural America.”

“If we do half of what we’re talking about,” he adds, “we will be one of the largest food and agricultural companies in my lifetime.”

A few minutes into our tour, Webb suddenly stops the Power Bee in front of a dozen employees huddled together in matching blue T-shirts. (Blue signals they work with tomatoes-on-the-vine; orange T-shirts signal beefsteaks.)

“Hey, my man, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re going to do an all hands on Thursday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. to celebrate our accomplishments,” Webb says to their supervisor, jumping down from the Power Bee. An “all hands,” Webb explains later, is essentially a pep rally to boost employee morale via rock concerts and games of corn hole, and a chance to give back to his community of workers.

Employees at AppHarvest make a “living wage” which drills down to roughly $13/hour for entry level employees (a productivity-guided “piece rate” can earn workers up to $20/hour), along with “whole family” benefit packages including health, dental, vision, and life insurance, with 100 percent of premiums paid for all family members, a 401K match program, shares in the publicly traded company, and monthly CSA boxes. AppHarvest estimates an entry-level worker earns 71 percent of Rowan County’s household median income.

These workers include former coal miners and tobacco growers, according to Parman, the AppHarvest spokesperson, but the company also plans to locate all 12 of its agricultural facilities in Kentucky college and university towns, tapping students for skilled engineering jobs, especially in the robotics and AI sector.

According to Webb, more than 8,000 people applied for positions at AppHarvest in less than a year; over 500 were hired. That number will grow to more than 1,500 employees by the end of 2022 once new farms are up and running, including Berea, a 15-acre leafy-green facility, and Richmond, a 60-acre tomato facility. On June 21st, AppHarvest broke ground at yet two more facilities, a second 10-acre farm for leafy greens adjacent to the Morehead campus, and a 30-acre strawberry farm in Somerset.

“I personally believe the hardest working men and women in the U.S. are in eastern Kentucky, and it’s deplorable how we’ve shut down the coal mines and no one said what’s next,” Webb says.

When he talks about why he started AppHarvest in Kentucky, Webb leans heavily into his ties to Appalachia. His grandmother, he says, was born in eastern Kentucky, and grew up in a home with a dirt floor; her father died in a coal mining accident when she was three years old. Webb’s own father grew up in a children’s home until he was 12, and neither of his parents have college degrees. His sister, who married a man from Pike County, Kentucky’s easternmost point, works as a state social worker. Webb himself is originally from outside Lexington, and he’s vague about where he currently resides (aside from a smattering of RV’s across construction sites). Instead he calls himself “a resident of Kentucky.”

His narrative caught the attention of Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat elected in 2019, who has made ag-tech his top economic development priority. In June 2020, Beshear announced a partnership between Kentucky, the Dutch government, and other organizations, facilitated by AppHarvest, committed to making Kentucky the U.S. Agri-Tech capital.

Webb wants his Morehead facility to become a kind of campus for America’ new ag-tech economy, and to create a pipeline for eastern Kentuckians into jobs in the industry. Out of the first $1 million raised in venture capital funding in 2019, AppHarvest donated a quarter of those funds to education. Before Morehead was under construction, AppHarvest built a container farm at Shelby County High School, and later, at Rowan County Senior High School.

Employees in the pack house of AppHarvest. Entry-level workers make an hour plus benefits like “whole family” health care and shares in the publicly traded company. More than 8,000 people applied for positions at AppHarvest in less than a year; over 500 were hired. - Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone — Employees in the pack house of AppHarvest. Entry-level workers make an hour plus benefits like “whole family” health care and shares in the publicly traded company. More than 8,000 people applied for positions at AppHarvest in less than a year; over 500 were hired. – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone.

“We know AppHarvest is the future of farming for Rowan County because we’re all hills and not a lot of flat land,” says Brandy Carver, principal of Rowan County Senior High School. According to Carver, before AppHarvest the main industries were Morehead State University, St. Claire Regional Medical Center, and SRG Global, a plastics factory. “AppHarvest in general has been a great opportunity for the community here, so we do anything we can to help students be more prepared [to work there] because we know it’s a viable job opportunity when they leave high school,” says Carver, adding that on a recent tour of AppHarvest, she saw a half-dozen former students just in one section of the greenhouse.

But not everybody sees a bright shiny future in Webb’s vision. As agri-tech takes hold in Kentucky, it could complicate the prioritization of small, organic farmers caretaking the land, water, soil, and local economies, says Richards of the Community Farm Alliance (CFA). “AppHarvest isn’t farming. It’s industrial food production,” he says. “When you’re farming, it’s about a relationship with a piece of land and good stewardship.”

Richards ran Earth Heart Farm in southern Woodford County for 20 years, transitioning the landscape from tobacco monoculture to organic produce. Unlike energy-intensive indoor agriculture, which emits carbon, small organic farms can cut out pesticides and fertilizers while also sequestering carbon in the soil by limiting bad land-management practices like tilling and overgrazing. Food grown in soil might also be more nutritious, at least according to soil loyalists who are skeptical that food can be as healthy grown in an artificial environment.

“We want to make it clear our competition is not the American farmer,” Webb says, adding that they began with tomatoes to compete with Mexico’s number-one import that relies on chemical pesticides AppHarvest doesn’t use. “The dirty stuff, that’s our competition, and we will ruthlessly go after them. Our goal is to put them into bankruptcy. The food and agriculture companies of today are the cigarette companies that existed in the 1970s.”

While Richards supports taking on dirty agriculture, he’s uneasy about the possible unintended consequences of AppHarvest’s model, and whether the benefits will reach Kentucky farmers. While the original goal was displacing produce from Mexico, Richards says AppHarvest is now displacing local farm products in Kentucky as AppHarvest tomatoes show up in state supermarkets like Kroger, Meijer, and IGA. For nearly a decade, CFA has worked to create “Kentucky Double Dollars,” a food-access program that provides incentives for folks using federal food benefits like SNAP to support Kentucky farmers at retailers. When AppHarvest tomatoes show up at those same retailers, those hard-won benefits are then going to AppHarvest, instead of small farmers.

“It is a bit of a slap in the face for those of us who’ve been doing this work for a long time to see that work ultimately go to this for-profit and their shareholders who aren’t even in Kentucky,” Richards says.

AppHarvest was founded as a public benefit corporation and a certified B-Corp, meaning it’s a for-profit company with a duty to consider stakeholders’ best interests, but those interests must include public-facing goals such as driving environmentalism in agriculture, empowering Appalachians, and improving the lives of their employees and communities.

Salvador, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says while the employment AppHarvest provides for Kentuckians is a social good, “In the end they’re still employees, and the major benefit goes to folks that provide the capital, who live and run businesses in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The money made is going to concentrate in those areas. For real economic development, you really want entrepreneurs and for folks to produce outdoors.”

AppHarvest’s big-business agricultural model could be a generational boon for the region, but it’s not a sure thing. There’s a lot of excitement about ag-tech right now, and venture capital is pouring into the sector, but it’s a new enough frontier that an operation growing at the scale and speed of AppHarvest hasn’t really been proven out yet, at least not in the U.S.

AppHarvest’s 2020 sustainability report predicts investing $1 billion by 2025, but they’ve yet to make a profit. During 2021’s first quarter as a publicly traded company, AppHarvest sold almost 4 million pounds of tomatoes, reaching $2.3 million in net sales — pretty measly for a public company with a $1 billion valuation — and the company is still under a $28.5 million net loss.

That worries Richards, who’s spent decades watching the chokehold of boom and bust economies across Kentucky. When CFA was founded during the 1980s farm crisis, their first act was to set up a suicide hotline for struggling farmers. “I’ve certainly seen this in rural communities in Kentucky that depended on tobacco or coal,” Richards says. “Those things are part of the culture, but the communities have been in crisis. When they lose the resource, they lose their identities, and it creates a lot of fear.”

Webb drives a cart down the main aisle of the west greenhouse. “We have two distinct paths, and there’s no middle,” Webb says of the choices facing civilization. “We’re going into a post-apocalyptic Mad Max world or we’re going into an Avatar-type world where we’re going to use technology and align with nature, but there is no in between.” – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

According to a 2021 Air, Soil and Water Research article, the two biggest costs in controlled-environment agriculture are energy and labor, which together make up three-quarters of the total. An IDTechEx report cited bankruptcies littering the industry, including PodPonics and FarmedHere, “operators of the largest vertical farms in the world,” which shut down in 2016 “after struggling with spiraling power and labor costs and organizational complexities,” the report stated.

“A lot of indoor farms are struggling,” Eric Stein, a professor at Penn State Great Valley School and executive director of the Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture, tells Rolling Stone. “They’re not making a lot of money and many are losing money. Some are breaking even.”

But, he adds, “Greenhouses [like AppHarvest] are more likely to be profitable than an indoor farm at this point because they have a longer history of implementation and refinement.”

AppHarvest’s glass design uses sunlight and has lower energy costs than typical indoor farms, which rely entirely on lighting in enclosed factories. “The Dutch perfected these things over the years, and AppHarvest has collaborated with Dutch companies for these greenhouses,” Stein says, who himself has bought a couple hundred shares in AppHarvest. “Eventually most tomato greenhouses are profitable, otherwise they wouldn’t be replicated around the world. It’s just going to take a while to recoup the capital costs. They’re not insignificant.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that AppHarvest hasn’t released information on their energy costs yet. According to Stein, getting hard data on energy usage from growers is a challenge. “No one wants to release [that data] because of their investors. The investors want their money back over a certain amount of time, and this is a very touchy subject. One has to be clear that this is not like Silicon Valley. It may use Silicon Valley money and terminology, but these [greenhouses] are not unicorns. These are not things that are going to give you a 500 percent return on your investment. You’d be lucky if you got a 15-20 percent year on profitability.”

But Webb is confident there is nothing but growth in AppHarvest’s future.

“The whole build-it-and-they-will-come thing, that’s happening,” he says, referring to the 1989 movie Field of Dreams. “Our headquarters will be here [in Morehead], but for us at AppHarvest, it’ll be a question of how quickly we want to enter the global stage. We’re not ready today, but we’re well aware that once we have several going [in Kentucky], we’re going to be in one or two continents overseas pretty quickly.”

At the end of my tour through the greenhouse, Webb walks me over to his RV, reducing the choices facing the world into two multi-million-dollar box office dystopias: Mad Max or Avatar.

“We have two distinct paths, and there’s no middle,” Webb says. “We’re going into a post-apocalyptic Mad Max world or we’re going into an Avatar-type world where we’re going to use technology and align with nature, but there is no in between. It’s one or the other.”

Webb, and his mission, can come across as evangelical. He grew up in church, and he describes his parents as devout Christians. When he pitches his founder’s story, when he talks about the climate crisis, when he pivots toward capitalism as a solution, he’s proselytizing.

“Who’s your maker? Where are you going? Who do you have to answer to? Whether it’s nature, or the universe, or whatever god you pray to, having morals and ethics in what you consume, and the way you work, and where you choose to work, and how you choose to work matters,” Webb says. “We have to make an ethical choice.”

Tomatoes on vines in the west greenhouse at AppHarvest, and lettuce plants in the AppHarvest container farm at Rowan County Senior High School. - Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone — Tomatoes on vines in the west greenhouse at AppHarvest, and lettuce plants in the AppHarvest container farm at Rowan County Senior High School. – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

Outside his RV, he gets agitated, quickly tossing a football between his hands and pacing between a picnic table and his fire pit.

“We’re literally trapped here on Planet Earth unless you’re the billionaire that’s going to spend $28 million to go fly with Jeff Bezos. Like, are you fucking kidding me? The rest of us, and I would put myself in that camp, although things are changing financially every day, I’m not flying off Planet Earth.”

Webb punts the football he’s been spinning, and it arcs toward AppHarvest and the hills behind it.

“Help!” he shouts, looking at me, and then up to the sky. “Help Planet Earth survive so we can stay here.”

He looks frazzled, and he looks like he means it. In Kentucky, Webb isn’t short on disciples. The picnic table could be a pulpit. The gleaming glass of AppHarvest could be his congregation. The tomato could be an apple; the apple could be capitalism; capitalism could be the original sin. The original sin could be the pathway to a better future, or it could just be another LED-lit mirage.

Wildfires are burning up trees meant to fight climate change: ‘It’s definitely not working’

USA Today

Wildfires are burning up trees meant to fight climate change: ‘It’s definitely not working’

Janet Wilson and Christal Hayes, USA Today August 22, 2021

The Monument Fire burns in northern California on August 2, 2021, near forests set aside to offset industrial carbon pollution. Healthy forests store carbon naturally, but when they burn, the carbon literally goes up in smoke, adding to global climate change instead of helping to slow it.

LOS ANGELES – Thousands of acres of forests have been set aside in the West to help curb climate change. But increasingly, wildfires are burning them up.

The bitter irony was highlighted Wednesday in comments by California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Chief Thom Porter, who said the blazes in the West were taking out years of work combating climate change.

Some of the blazes are raging in areas that are “a huge part of California’s climate initiative,” Porter said. “We are seeing generational destruction of forests because of what these fires are doing. This is going to take a long time to come back from.”

Porter was talking about forests dedicated to carbon offset programs, which have been billed as a tool to fight climate change. The underlying goal of such programs is to ensure large swaths of trees continue growing. As they grow, the trees suck carbon out of the air and store it.

“When trees grow, as they get bigger, they pull carbon out of the atmosphere and they store it in their trunks, the branches, the leaves, every part of the tree, and that’s good,” said Danny Cullenward, policy director of Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that researches climate policy.

But there’s an increasing problem: The plan works only “as long as the tree is alive and hasn’t burned to the ground.”

If the trees burn, they not only stop capturing carbon – they also release massive amounts of it into the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas that has been piled sky high into the atmosphere, and according to a landmark United Nations report this month, is causing increasingly catastrophic climate change, with fiercer lightning storms and hotter, drier conditions in forests across the planet.

‘Code red for humanity’: UN report gives stark warning on climate change, says wild weather events will worsen

‘Catastrophically destroyed’: Dixie Fire wipes out California gold rush town of Greenville

The monster Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which burned for about six weeks until it was contained in mid-August, wiped out an estimated 24% of a huge carbon offset project used by Microsoft and others, according to Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that has a live map updating the overlap of the fires and forest projects. In eastern Washington on tribal lands, five blazes have burned about 12% of the huge Colville forest project.

“This summer and the past few years have made it incredibly clear that forest offsets face substantial risks from climate change, including major wildfires,” said University of Utah ecologist William Anderegg. “A major forest offset project burned in 2020, and there are currently at least four offset projects burning in 2021.”

And in California and Montana, several fires now burning have overlapped with projects or are within a few miles of them.

‘Get out now’: Monstrous Dixie Fire moves closer to small California town; Caldor Fire threatens more communities

Opinion: Borders can’t contain climate change: California’s crisis is a world management issue

Some trees involved in the projects were always expected to burn. A system called “buffer pools” was set up to ensure that trees that go up in smoke or otherwise are lost would be factored into the planning of carbon offset programs, much like an insurance policy. But researchers say the pool is not keeping up with the rate with which wildfires are destroying trees.

“We haven’t set up a real insurance program, and all of these climate claims are going up in smoke,” Cullenward said. “If you’ve got a forest offset project on fire, it’s definitely not working.”

The programs are often used by major companies like Microsoft and BP and were built on a long-standing recognition of trees’ powerful ability to trap carbon dioxide, converting it into beneficial organic matter for a century or longer.

But a June 2020 review in the prestigious journal Science concluded that while forests could provide limited help, they should not be relied upon as a major tool to combat climate change.

“Using forests as natural climate solutions must not distract from rapid reductions in emissions,” it said.

The problem playing out in the West is far from unique. Heat waves and historic droughts tied to climate change have contributed to more intense wildfires around the globe.

Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, said hotter climates may have different consequences across the globe. In some areas, climate-change-induced droughts will fuel wildfires. In other areas, more rainfall could increase tree growth, allowing some regions to absorb more carbon and help slow climate change.

But hope that trees alone will make a significant impact has been fading in recent years. Notably, a study published last month said parts of the Amazon rainforest are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb.

Investigation: Hundreds of U.S. cities adopted climate plans. Few have met the goals, but it’s not too late.

Increases in fires combined with persistent droughts in the West might signal an adjustment is needed in plans to use trees in the West to fight climate change, especially because forests going up in flames can be a huge source of carbon emissions.

Different trees and the climate they are grown in can alter how much carbon they hold. A massive redwood, for instance, can hold as much as 250 tons of carbon over its lifetime. Other trees can absorb about 50 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a year. But when they burn, those carbon gases are emitted into the atmosphere, compounding the problem.

California’s historic 2020 fire season, which included five of the largest blazes in state history, released about 107 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere – the equivalent of more than 23 million cars driven for one year.

“We really are in a pinch to do everything we can possibly do in the next 30 years or so to try to keep climate change from kind of spiraling out of control,” Searchinger said.

Multiple people missing amid ‘catastrophic’ flooding in Tennessee, North Carolina

USA Today

Multiple people missing amid ‘catastrophic’ flooding in Tennessee, North Carolina

Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY August 21, 2021

Multiple people are missing across Tennessee and North Carolina amid heavy rainfall that brought on severe flooding. North Carolina was recently battered by the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred, causing at least four deaths in Haywood County.

Rainfall in middle Tennessee has shattered records for water levels on the Piney River, according to the National Weather Service. More than 11 inches of rain was dumped on parts of Hickman County early Saturday morning. A state of emergency is in effect through Saturday afternoon in Dickson, Hickman, Houston and Humphreys counties.

McEwan, Tennessee, saw 14.5 inches of rain, the Tennessee Valley Authority said. A flash flood emergency is also in effect in Waverly, McEwen and Tennessee Ridge through Saturday evening.

The situation was “life-threatening,” the Nashville National Weather Service said in a tweet Saturday.

“People are trapped in their homes and have no way to get out,” NWS Nashville meteorologist Krissy Hurley told The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. “Water is up to their necks. It is catastrophic, the worst kind of situation.”

Several people are missing in the region, according to Hickman County Chief Deputy Rob Edwards.

An additional 1 to 2 inches of rain is possible in areas that already received between 8 and 12 inches Saturday morning, the National Weather Service said.

In North Carolina, four people have been confirmed dead in the flooding brought on by Fred this week, after two bodies were recovered Saturday. Their identities have not been made public. Franklin McKenzie, 67, and Frank Mungo, 86, were previously identified among the dead.

Seven people are still missing in Haywood County, including Judy Ann Mason, who has been missing since around 3 p.m. Tuesday from Laurel Bank Campground in Canton, a family friend told The Asheville Citizen Times.

Mason’s daughter, Naomi Haney, said the last text she got from her mother was, “Anything can happen to anyone any time.”

Day three of search and rescue was underway Saturday in Haywood, with teams from the other side of the state assisting in the search of miles of riverbank and rugged terrain.

Haywood County flood survivor: ‘I just saw everything floating away’

Cruso, North Carolina, is a small town that received some of the worst damage in the storm.

“It’s gone. There’s nothing there,” Sherrie McArthur, who owns Laurel Bank Campground in the area, told the Citizen Times. “I had 100 sites, and they’re all gone. I had campers in there — most all of them are gone, except maybe 10. What is still left is squashed, crushed. Some of them went totally down the river — I don’t know where they’ll be.”

Emergency officials with cadaver dogs were on site Thursday, McArthur said.

Contributing: Brinley Hineman and Rachel Wegner, Nashville Tennessean; John Boyle and Joel Burgess, Asheville Citizen Times

What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban

The Atlantic – Ideas

What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban

I spent 600 hours listening in on the people who now run Afghanistan. It wasn’t until the end of my tour that I understood what they were telling me.

By Ian Fritz August 19, 2021

Illustration of sound waves and a bullet Adam Maida / The Atlantic

About the author: Ian Fritz served in the U.S. Air Force from 2008 to 2013.

When people ask me what I did in Afghanistan, I tell them that I hung out in planes and listened to the Taliban. My job was to provide “threat warning” to allied forces, and so I spent most of my time trying to discern the Taliban’s plans. Before I started, I was cautioned that I would hear terrible things, and I most certainly did. But when you listen to people for hundreds of hours—even people who are trying to kill your friends—you hear ordinary things as well.

On rare occasions, they could even make me laugh. One winter in northern Afghanistan, where the average elevation is somewhere above 7,000 feet and the average temperature is somewhere below freezing, the following discussion took place:

“Go place the IED down there, at the bend; they won’t see it.”

“It can wait ’til morning.”

“No, it can’t. They [the Americans] could come early, and we need it down there to kill as many as we can.”

“I think I’ll wait.”

“No, you won’t! Go place it.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes! Go do it!”

“I don’t want to.”

“Brother, why not? We must jihad!”

“Brother … It’s too cold to jihad.”

Yes, this joke came in the middle of plans to kill the men I was supposed to protect, but it wasn’t any less absurd for it. And he wasn’t wrong. Even in our planes with our fleeces and hand warmers, it really was too damn cold for war.

Read: This is not the Taliban 2.0

In 2011, about 20 people in the world were trained to do the job I did. Technically, only two people had the exact training I had. We had been formally trained in Dari and Pashto, the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan, and then assigned to receive specialized training to become linguists aboard Air Force Special Operations Command aircraft. AFSOC had about a dozen types of aircraft, but I flew solely on gunships. These aircraft differ in their specifics, but they are all cargo planes that have been outfitted with various levels of weaponry that range in destructive capability. Some could damage a car at most; others could destroy a building. In Afghanistan, we used these weapons against people, and my job was to help decide which people. This is the non-euphemistic definition of providing threat warning.

I flew 99 combat missions for a total of 600 hours. Maybe 20 of those missions and 50 of those hours involved actual firefights. Probably another 100 hours featured bad guys discussing their nefarious plans, or what we called “usable intelligence.” But the rest of the time, they were just talking, and I was just eavesdropping.

Besides making jokes about jihad, they talked about many of the same things you and your neighbors talk about: lunch plans, neighborhood gossip, shitty road conditions, how the weather isn’t conforming to your exact desires. There was infighting, name-calling, generalized whining. They daydreamed about the future, made plans for when the Americans would leave, and reveled in the idea of retaking their country.

But mostly, there was a lot of bullshitting.

Pashto and Dari naturally lend themselves to puns and insults—there is a lot of rhyming inherent to the languages, and many words share double meanings. Part of this bullshitting stemmed from a penchant for repetition. The Afghans I met would repeat a name or statement, or anything really, dozens of times to make a point. But this repetition intensified when talking over radios. A man named Kalima taught me this. None of us know who Kalima was, though it’s generally accepted that he wasn’t anyone important. But someone—we don’t know who—really wanted to talk to him. So he called his name.

“Kalima! Kaliiiiiiima. Kalimaaaaaaa. Kalima Kalima Kalima Kalima Kalima.”

He called his name again and again, at least 50 times, in every possible combination of syllabic emphasis. I listened the whole time, but Kalima never responded. Maybe his radio was off. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk to this guy. Maybe he was dead. It’s possible that I had killed him. I never heard a Kalima answer the radio after that.

All this bullshitting flowed naturally into the Taliban’s other great verbal talent, the pep talk. No sales meeting, movie set, or locker room has ever seen the level of hyper-enthusiastic preparation that the Taliban demonstrated before, during, and after every battle. Maybe it was because they were well practiced, having been at war for the majority of their lives. Maybe it was because they genuinely believed in the sanctity of their mission. But the more I listened to them, the more I understood that this perpetual peacocking was something they had to do in order to keep fighting.

Read: Why the Afghan army folded

How else would they continue to battle an enemy that doesn’t think twice about using bombs designed for buildings against individual men? This isn’t an exaggeration. Days before my 22nd birthday, I watched fighter jets drop 500-pound bombs into the middle of a battle, turning 20 men into dust. As I took in the new landscape, full of craters instead of people, there was a lull in the noise, and I thought, Surely now we’ve killed enough of them. We hadn’t.

When two more attack helicopters arrived, I heard them yelling, “Keep shooting. They will retreat!”

As we continued our attack, they repeated, “Brothers, we are winning. This is a glorious day.”

And as I watched six Americans die, what felt like 20 Taliban rejoiced in my ears, “Waaaaallahu akbar, they’re dying!”

It didn’t matter that they were unarmored men, with 30-year-old guns, fighting against gunships, fighter jets, helicopters, and a far-better-equipped ground team. It also didn’t matter that 100 of them died that day. Through all that noise, the sounds of bombs and bullets exploding behind them, their fellow fighters being killed, the Taliban kept their spirits high, kept encouraging one another, kept insisting that not only were they winning, but that they’d get us again—even better—next time.

That was my first mission in Afghanistan.

Time went by, and as I learned what different code words meant and how to pick voices out of the sounds of gunfire, I got better at listening. And the Taliban started telling me more. In the spring of 2011, I was on a mission supporting a Special Forces team that had recently been ambushed in a village in northern Afghanistan. We were sent in to do reconnaissance, which sounds impressive, but logistically means flying in a circle for hours on end, watching and listening to locals. We came across some men farming, working a plot of recently tilled land. Or so we thought. The ground team was sure that these were the guys who had attacked them, and that instead of farming, they were in fact hiding weapons in the field.

So we shot them. Of the three men in that field, one had his legs blown off. Another died where he stood. The last was blasted 10 feet away, presumed to be dead from the shock wave obliterating his internal organs. Until he got up and ran away. He and his friends came back, loaded the newly amputated man into a wheelbarrow, and carted him off to a car waiting nearby. It seemed that they were trying to escape, but revenge was just as likely a scenario, and the ground team was worried that they would get more men, or more weapons, and retaliate. But I could hear them, and they didn’t sound interested in retribution.

“Go, drive! We are coming. Abdul was hit. We have him in the car.”

“Keep going! Don’t let them shoot us!”

“Yes, we are coming. We will save him.”

They were trying to get their friend to a doctor, or at least someone who could save his life. And then their car slowed down.

“No, brother. He’s dead.”

The rest of them were no longer a threat, so we let them go.

Throughout my deployment, time and again, our kills outnumbered theirs, they lost ground, and we won. This happened so regularly that I began developing a sense of déjà vu. This feeling isn’t uncommon when you’re deployed; you see the same people, follow the same schedule, and do the same activities day in and day out. But I wasn’t imagining it. We really were flying the same missions, in the same places, re-liberating the same villages we had fought in three years ago. I was listening to the same bullshitting, the same pep talks, and the same planning, often by the same men, that I’d heard before.

On yet another interminable mission, we were supporting a ground team that had gone to a small village to talk with the elder. Together, they were establishing plans to build a well nearby. We circled overhead for a few hours, and nothing interesting happened. No one was doing anything suspicious on the ground; no one was talking about anything remotely militant on the radios. The meeting was successful, so the team headed back to its helicopters. And then the Taliban attacked.

“Move up, they’ve gone to the eastern ditch. They’re running, move up!”

“Bring the big gun; get it ready. They’ll be moving again soon.”

The ground team had to sit and wait for its helicopters to be safe to take off.

“Hey, gunship, where are they, what are they doi—fuck, I’m hit.”

The Taliban knew that they’d hit the team leader. I know because while I listened to his scream, I heard them celebrating.

“Brother, you got one. Keep going; keep shooting. We can get more!”

“Yes, we will, the gun is work—”

They stopped celebrating, because my plane shot them. This was the worst day of my life. It wasn’t the shooting or the screams or the death that made the day so terrible; I’d seen plenty of that by then. But that day, I finally understood what the Taliban had been trying to tell me.

On every mission, they knew I was overhead, monitoring their every word. They knew I could hear them bragging about how many Americans they’d managed to kill, or how many RPGs they’d procured, or when and where they were going to place an IED. But amid all that hearing, I hadn’t been listening. It finally dawned on me that the bullshitting wasn’t just for fun; it was how they distracted themselves from the same boredom I was feeling as they went through another battle, in the same place, against yet another invading force. But unlike me, when they went home, it would be to the next village over, not 6,000 miles away. Those men in the field may have just been farmers, or maybe they really were hiding the evidence of their assault. Either way, our bombs and bullets meant the young boys in their village were now that much more likely to join the Taliban. And those pep talks? They weren’t just empty rhetoric. They were self-fulfilling prophecies.

Because when it was too cold to jihad, that IED still got planted. When they had 30-year-old AK-47s and we had $100 million war planes, they kept fighting. When we left a village, they took it back. No matter what we did, where we went, or how many of them we killed, they came back.

Read: What we got wrong in Afghanistan

Ten years after my last deployment, and after 20 years of combat with the world’s richest, most advanced military, the Taliban has reclaimed Afghanistan. Whatever delusions existed about whether this would happen or how long it might take have been dispatched as efficiently as the Afghan security forces were by the Taliban over a single week. What little gains have been achieved in women’s rights, education, and poverty will be systematically eradicated. Any semblance of democracy will be lost. And while there might be “peace,” it will come only after any remaining forces of opposition are overwhelmed or dead. The Taliban told us this. Or at least they told me.

They told me about their plans, their hopes and dreams. They told me exactly how they would accomplish these goals, and how nothing could stop them. They told me that even if they died, they were confident that these goals would be achieved by their brothers in arms. And I’m sure they would have kept doing this forever.

They told me how they planned to keep killing Americans. They told me the details of these plans: what weapons they would use, where they would do it, how many they hoped to murder. Often, they told me these things while doing the killing. They told me that, God willing, the world would be made in their image. And they told me what so many others refused to hear, but what I finally understood: Afghanistan is ours.

The fight over water in Florida has had some surprising winners

The Christian Science Monitor

The fight over water in Florida has had some surprising winners

Stephanie Hanes August 20, 2021

He shakes his head.

“It’s covered,” he says of the underwater grass. “It shouldn’t be like this.”

The others on the pontoon boat nod in grim agreement. As volunteers with Rainbow River Conservation, an environmental group focused on protecting this unique waterway, they know how to spot trouble hiding in what looks, at first glance, to be a picture-perfect image of central Florida.

Alongside the kayakers and families on inner tubes – and the anhinga drying its spread wings on a Spanish-moss-draped branch – the conservation volunteers recognize the impact of some of Florida’s biggest environmental challenges: nitrate pollution, water shortages, and over-development. The spring that feeds the Rainbow River, where fresh water from the Floridian aquifer bubbles to the surface in swirls of blue, is releasing fewer gallons of flow each year – a sign of the severe pressures on the state’s underground water system.

But the volunteers see something else happening here as well.

In a state where business interests regularly trump environmental concerns, the Rainbow River is a site where grassroots conservationists have fought against development – and won. Environmentalists here have joined forces with others who care about the unique springs ecosystems, and now the Florida Springs Council sends a lobbyist to Tallahassee. Longtime environmental activists say they are noticing a growing public recognition of the urgency to protect Florida’s water, spurred, perhaps, by a new documentary on state public television about threats to Florida’s aquifer.

“We’re seeing exponential growth in the number of people paying attention,” says Ryan Smart, the director of the Florida Springs Council, a nonprofit coalition formed in 2014 that coordinates advocacy efforts among more than 50 local conservation groups. “I don’t want to say that things are improving on the ground yet – we’re still a long way from that. But we have had successes.”

Some of this new focus has been sparked by recent environmental traumas, says Justin Bloom, founder of the Suncoast Waterkeeper conservation group.

“I do think that there is a growing awareness and concern,” Mr. Bloom says. “Unfortunately, it seems that it is born of crisis.”

Development at the expense of water

Earlier this year, the operators of Piney Point, an abandoned phosphate plant in Manatee County, dumped more than 170 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into Tampa Bay to relieve pressure on the walls of a 77-acre holding pond that officials worried was about to break and flood surrounding neighborhoods. Over the past month, a red tide algae bloom has inundated the bay, killing aquatic life and leaving swaths of St. Petersburg reeking of dead fish. In June, Florida wildlife managers reported that 750 manatees had died so far this year, the most deaths ever recorded in a five-month period. Many of the animals, officials said, starved to death because the sea grass they eat has been dying off.

For Florida conservationists, this spate of environmental disasters is unsurprising, yet still devastating. For a decade, many environmentalists claim, Florida officials have supported developers and other business interests at the expense of the state’s ecosystem – particularly its hydrology.

Although Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has called protecting Florida’s “vital water resources … one of the most pressing issues facing our state,” and has proposed using some $625 million for restoration projects in the Everglades and elsewhere, critics say these are scant efforts in the face of policies that systematically create water and environmental problems.

This is particularly apparent in Florida’s springs and connected waterways, like Rainbow River, says Bob Knight, founder of the Florida Springs Institute, an education and advocacy nonprofit. The state’s springs ecosystems – the glass-clear, 72-degree water and the unique aquatic life that lives in it – are a product of Florida’s geology.

Not terribly long ago, in geologic time, Florida was itself underwater. Today, much of the peninsula is limestone, formed from the remains of ancient sea creatures. As sea levels retreated, scientists say, acidic rain bored holes in the rock, creating a formation regularly described as akin to Swiss cheese. Rainwater seeping into the ground filled up these pockets; as more rain came, some of the water was forced back to the surface and created springs. The springs then fed rivers, which, in turn, watered the state and supported other freshwater ecosystems, such as the Everglades.

When Dr. Knight first saw these springs as a child in the 1950s, he was awed. The sites hadn’t changed much from the descriptions he’d read of them from a century earlier, he says: crystal clear, blue water surrounded by lush forests. All of the springs produced voluminous amounts of fresh water, with hundreds of millions of gallons bubbling up from the aquifer.

Before Disney World opened in 1971, the more than 1,000 springs in north-central Florida were among the top tourist draws in the state. As early as the Civil War, visitors flocked to Silver Springs, taking glass-bottom boats across the aquifer-fed pool; later, movie makers used the springs for scenery in films such as Tarzan.

But once air conditioners became accessible to everyday homeowners, Florida’s population boomed. Between 1960 and 2010, the state’s population grew from about 5 million to 19 million. Now, nearly 1,000 people move to Florida every day, according to state officials. The most recent census data puts Florida as one of the country’s fastest growing states by population – about 15 percent since 2010. Many of the fastest growing cities in the country are located in Florida – including Ocala, in the center of the state, near Rainbow River. And all of these new residents, of course, use water – not only to drink, but for landscaping.

“Florida has been very heavily developed,” Dr. Knight says. “And in the process, millions of wells have been put in the ground. … It’s like putting needles in a balloon or air mattress. The pressure in the aquifer fell.”

When the aquifer is tapped in too many places, he and others explain, the flow of nearby springs decreases. That not only means less water, but less flushing of pollution, such as runoff from lawns and agriculture, and that can result in algae and other contamination. Some springs in the state have dried up completely.

“They do die,” says Mr. Smart, director of the Florida Springs Council. “They can die because the flow stops, or because they become so choked with algae.”

Jayantha Obeysekera, director of the Sea Level Solutions Center at Florida International University, notes that as the aquifer pressure decreases, not only does the spring flow lessen, but there is less resistance in the ground to what is called “saltwater intrusion,” ocean water pushing into the aquifer. Already, numerous wells in coastal areas have been made useless by seawater.

All of this has created water shortages in the state, and residents are regularly reminded to conserve water. But homeowners are not the only ones tapping the aquifer.

Agriculture draws thousands of millions of gallons from Florida’s aquifer every day; so do the mining industry and other industrial sectors. And while the state’s water-permitting process is supposed to protect river flow, environmentalists have long complained that local officials almost always approve water-use permits for developers and other businesses. Last year, for instance, a state water agency gave Mosaic, a large phosphate company, authority to pump 70 million gallons of water a day for the next 20 years out of a region whose residents have been under water restrictions. Earlier this year, community members protested a request by the company Nestlé to pump a million gallons of water each day from Ginnie Springs for its bottled water business. The state water board ended up approving the company’s plans.

The fight at Rainbow River

So when the Rainbow River Conservation volunteers heard that Jim Gissy, a senior executive with Westgate Resorts, had plans to develop a large swath of land he owned on the banks of Rainbow River into an eco-destination, they panicked, knowing that developers tend to get what they want in Florida.

Along with others, Dr. Eno, president of the Rainbow River Conservation Board of Directors, decided to fight. Gretchen Martin, whose home is on the river, knocked on every door in Dunnellon, talking to residents about what the added traffic and pollution from the resort might mean for the water, not to mention the draw on the aquifer.

“We didn’t believe that most people in our community knew what was going to happen,” she says. “And really, 98 percent of people either didn’t know about it or didn’t want it.”

More than a hundred protesters packed a city council meeting – a rare occurrence for a municipality with a population hovering around 2,000 people. The volunteers distributed yard signs and took to social media, working with the Florida Springs Council to spread the word about the development to environmentalists outside the area. Thousands of people signed a Change.org petition opposing Mr. Gissy’s plans.

Late last summer, the developer withdrew his proposal. He has told media outlets that he had been assured by the city council that the potential for jobs would make the project popular, and that he was frustrated by the opposition. But he also told residents that if they didn’t want the resort, he wouldn’t build it.

Instead, he said, he would attempt to sell the land into conservation.

At the next election, in the fall of 2020, Dunnellon voters ousted two of the council members who had supported the development. The mayor, Dale Burns, also lost his reelection campaign.

“That whole episode probably has changed a number of minds,” Dr. Eno says. “People are more aware than they were. I think we changed the tide in some respects.”

He looks out over the water and sighs. “There is a lot more to do,” he says.

Clean needles depend on the blue blood of horseshoe crabs

Associated Press

Clean needles depend on the blue blood of horseshoe crabs

Meg Kinnard August 20, 2021

Vaccine Safety-Horseshoe Crabs

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, right, listens as Foster Jordan of Charles River Labs, left, talks about the properties of horseshoe crab blood, which is a vital component in the contamination testing of injectable medicines – including the coronavirus vaccines – at Charles River Labs on Friday, Aug. 6, 2021, in Charleston, S.C. McMaster says the South Carolina company that bleeds horseshoe crabs for a component crucial to contamination testing of injectable medications is vital to development of a domestic medical supply chain. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster holds a model of a horseshoe crab, whose blood is a vital component in the contamination testing of injectable medicines – including the coronavirus vaccines – at Charles River Labs on Friday, Aug. 6, 2021, in Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster watches a video on the bleeding of horseshoe crabs, whose blood is a vital component in the contamination testing of injectable medicines – including the coronavirus vaccines – at Charles River Labs on Friday, Aug. 6, 2021, in Charleston, S.C. McMaster says a South Carolina company that bleeds horseshoe crabs for a component crucial to contamination testing of injectable medications is vital to development of a domestic medical supply chain.(AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, right, holds a bottle containing horseshoe crab blood, which is a vital component in the contamination testing of injectable medicines – including the coronavirus vaccines – with Foster Jordan of Charles River Labs on Friday, Aug. 6, 2021, in Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster listens to a presentation on horseshoe crab blood, which is a vital component in the contamination testing of injectable medicines – including the coronavirus vaccines – at Charles River Labs on Friday, Aug. 6, 2021, in Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — It’s one of the stranger, lesser-known aspects of U.S. health care — the striking, milky-blue blood of horseshoe crabs is a critical component of tests to ensure injectable medications such as coronavirus vaccines aren’t contaminated.

To obtain it, harvesters bring many thousands of the creatures to laboratories to be bled each year, and then return them to the sea — a practice that has drawn criticism from conservationists because some don’t survive the process.

The blood, which is blue due to its copper content, is coveted for proteins used to create the LAL test, a process used to screen medical products for bacteria. Synthetic alternatives aren’t widely accepted by the health care industry and haven’t been approved federally, leaving the crabs as the only domestic source of this key ingredient.

Many of these crabs are harvested along the coast of South Carolina, where Gov. Henry McMaster promoted the niche industry as key to the development of a domestic medical supply chain, while also noting that environmental concerns should be explored.

“We don’t want to have to depend on foreign countries for a lot of reasons, including national security, so it’s good to see this company thriving in the United States,” McMaster told The Associated Press. He spoke this month during a visit to Charles River Laboratories at its Charleston facilities, to which AP was granted rare access. “We want to do everything we can to onshore all of these critical operations.”

Horseshoe crabs — aquatic arthropods shaped like helmets with long tails — are more akin to scorpions than crabs, and older than dinosaurs. They’ve been scurrying along the brackish floors of coastal waters for hundreds of millions of years. Their eggs are considered a primary fat source for more than a dozen species of migratory shore birds, according to South Carolina’s Department of Natural Resources.

Their value to avoiding infection emerged after scientists researching their immune response injected bacteria into horseshoe crabs in the 1950s. They ultimately developed the LAL test, and the technique has been used since the 1970s to keep medical materials and supplies free of bacteria.

Their biomedical use has been on the rise, with 464,482 crabs brought to biomedical facilities in 2018, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

In South Carolina, that’s done only by Charles River, a Massachusetts-based company that tests 55% of the world’s injectables and medical devices — like IV bags, dialysis solutions and even surgical cleaning wipes, according to company officials.

“We are almost the last line of defense before these drugs leave the manufacturing area and make it to a patient,” senior vice president Foster Jordan told McMaster. “If it touches your blood, it’s been tested by LAL. And, more than likely, it’s been tested by us.”

Charles River employs local fishermen to harvest the crabs by hand, a process governed by wildlife officials that can only happen during a small annual window, when the creatures come ashore to spawn.

Contractors bring them to the company’s bleeding facilities, then return them to the waters from which they came. During a year, Jordan said his harvesters can bring in 100,000 to 150,000 horseshoe crabs, and still can’t satisfy the growing demand.

“We need more, though,” Jordan told McMaster, adding that his company is working with the state to open up more harvesting areas. “The population’s steady. … We need access to more beaches, to get more crabs.”

The practice is not without its critics, some of whom have argued that bleeding the crabs and hauling them back and forth is harmful. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 10% to 15% of harvested crabs die during the process.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the species overall as “vulnerable,” noting decreasing numbers as of a 2016 assessment. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission listed 2019 stock as “good” in the Southeast, but “poor” in areas around New York.

Conservationists sued last year, accusing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of shirking its duty to protect areas including South Carolina’s Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge by allowing horseshoe crab harvesting. They argued that taking out the crabs affects other species in the protected area. A federal judge temporarily halted the harvest, but was reversed following Charles River’s appeal.

The environmental groups asked to withdraw their complaint this month after federal officials imposed a permitting process for any commercial activity in the refuge, including horseshoe harvesting, beginning Aug. 15. Even if such permits are denied, Jordan told McMaster that only 20% of its harvest came from the refuge, with most coming from further down the South Carolina coast.

There is a synthetic alternative to the horseshoe crab blood, but it hasn’t been widely accepted in the U.S., and meanwhile, Charles River’s international competitors are making synthetics and also pressing for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, which Jordan said could hamper domestic efforts like his own.

“My mission is to make sure that any competitor that comes into the United States, from China or any of these other producers, has to go through the same regulatory process that we had to go through, to make sure that it’s safe,” Jordan said. “If all these synthetics start coming in from other countries, we’re going to lose the protection that we’ve had for all these years, and the safety, and the control of the drug supply.”

“We want to have as much stuff made here as we can,” McMaster said in response.

As for the environmental concerns, the governor said maintaining a healthy balance between scientific demands and the state’s ecosystems, which bolster a significant portion of South Carolina’s tourism economy, is paramount.

“It’s like a house of cards. You pull out one part, and the rest of it will fall,” McMaster said. “So I think we have to be very careful, and be sure that any company, any business, any activity, whether it’s commercial or otherwise, meets whatever requirements are there to protect the species — birds, horseshoe crabs, any sort of life.”

Heat pumps ‘worse’ than gas boilers for warming up homes, admits Energy Secretary

The Telegraph

Heat pumps ‘worse’ than gas boilers for warming up homes, admits Energy Secretary

Edward Malnick August 21, 2021

Boris Johnson’s proposed green alternative to gas heating is inferior to traditional boilers, the Business and Energy Secretary has admitted, as he insisted that heat pumps were not “much worse” than the technology they are designed to replace.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Kwasi Kwarteng conceded that, while gas boilers had been “refined over many years … heat pumps are still in their infancy”.

Fears that the new technology provides significantly less heat in homes than traditional boilers were being “exaggerated”, Mr Kwarteng insisted.

He added: “I don’t think actually heat pumps are that much worse than boilers. All I’m saying is that they could be improved if there was more investment.”

Mr Kwarteng says that providing incentives to firms to invest in the UK production of heat pumps and hydrogen will help the Government meet its target of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero, as well as help to “drive economic growth”, create new jobs, and bring down the costs of the technology.

How heat pumps work

Speaking as the Government finalises its heat and buildings strategy, Mr Kwarteng addressed concerns about the costs of the policy by insisting that ministers would not seek to achieve the target by “writing checks” alone.

“We’re not going to get to a hydrogen economy just by the Government writing checks,” he says.

“We’re going to do that by the Government, yes, writing some checks, if I want to put it crudely, but critically, by attracting private investment.”

Mr Kwarteng warns of a “serious cost of living issue”, as he insists that higher taxes are not inevitable to fund the shift to green technologies, adding: “We’ve got to incentivize economic activity. And you don’t incentivize economic activity, you don’t incentivize investment, you don’t incentivize work, by increasing taxes.”

Mr Kwarteng insists that the costs of new technologies will fall “very quickly” as firms begin to invest in alternatives to gas boilers, stating that consumers could “benefit” in as little as five years.

In remarks that could spark a row with renewables firms, he claims that “the point at which we no longer need to keep subsidizing” offshore wind farms, “has almost arrived”.

Mr Johnson has said that he wants 600,000 heat pumps replacing gas boilers every year by 2028. While gas heating can pump 60C water into radiators, the Government’s Climate Change Committee assumes heat pumps will operate at 50C.

Mr Kwarteng admitted that he currently still has a gas boiler, but said he is planning to buy a heat pump.

Different types of green heating solutions will be appropriate for different types of properties, he said.

Mr Johnson has acknowledged that heat pumps are currently unaffordable for many people at “about ten grand a pop”.

Mr Kwarteng said: “I do have … a gas boiler … but I’m in a position where because I earn a certain amount of money, I can afford that transition, and I’m looking to make that transition. But I would be very reluctant to impose things on people who can’t afford to make the transition. We’ve got to make that work for people.”

Our green industrial revolution will grow the economy using free-market conservative principles

He is the cabinet minister charged with delivering the Conservatives’ commitment to reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

But, amid mounting fears on the Tory backbenches over the financial burden that the transition may put on consumers, Kwasi Kwarteng expresses sympathy with those who warn against higher taxes.

Asked if some form of higher tax is inevitable to fund the move to net zero, Mr Kwarteng simply says, “No”.

“Where I am on this is, I think there is a serious cost of living issue,” says the Business and Energy Secretary, in remarks that voice a concern discussed at the highest levels of government.

“Clearly, given where we are in public finances, given all the difficulties that we’ve really soldiered through as a nation, heroically I would say, there’s bound to be concern about taxes and costs.

“The Government has always, in this transition, wanted to protect vulnerable people, which is absolutely right. And the other thing is, this is a gradual process.”

Some reports give the impression “that we were going to send people round to rip out boilers next week. That isn’t going to happen … and it’s going to be a very ordered process.”

As well as harboring concerns about the potential impact of higher taxes on individuals who are already struggling amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr Kwarteng, who has long been seen as a leading Tory free marketeer, believes that they could stifle the economy.

‘I’m always very skeptical about tax rises’

Speaking about the prospect of tax rises more generally, the former City analyst states: “Within government I’m always very skeptical about tax increases.

“Yes I think there’s a desire to balance the budget. I think the Chancellor’s instincts are absolutely right to do that. But I’m always wary of the fact that at the end of the day, we’ve got to incentivize economic activity. And you don’t incentivize economic activity, you don’t incentivize investment, you don’t incentivize work, by increasing taxes. It’s that simple.”

The Business Secretary, 46, says there are “times in our history when we’ve forgotten” Britain’s entrepreneurial spirit and have taken “a much more statist approach. But fundamentally, I think, we are a nation of shopkeepers, we’re a nation of small businesspeople. My job as Business Secretary is to foster that spirit.”

The net-zero target, which was enshrined into law under Theresa May, inevitably involves a degree of statism, and it is opposition to government diktats that drives some of the backbench Tory criticism of the policy.

But Mr Kwarteng, who was appointed in January, insists both that the heavy lifting can be done by the private sector, with early financial support from the Government to kickstart new green industries, and help ensure that the poorest households are not saddled with large bills.

‘Huge economic opportunity’

The policy itself, he says, presents a “huge economic opportunity”. A whiteboard in the Business Secretary’s office lists a recent series of major investments announced by firms at the forefront of Britain’s “green industrial revolution” – topped by Nissan’s £1billion battery “gigafactory” that will enable the firm’s Sunderland car plant to ramp up production of electric vehicles.

“What we’re doing in the UK, is using net zero to drive economic growth, to drive jobs as well. I think this is a great historical opportunity.”

Mr Kwarteng insists net-zero will boost British jobs and kick-start the economy - Geoff Pugh

Mr Kwarteng says the push for net zero represents “a reconfiguration of our industrial base”, as he points out that the areas in which manufacturers putting down roots to make electric cars and parts for wind turbines are “northern, levelling up type places, places of the historic industrial heartland, which have seen limited investment in the last 20 to 30 years.”

The Government’s strategy will include subsidizing new industries, such as the manufacturing of electric heat pumps to replace gas boilers, and the production of hydrogen, in which ministers believe Britain can become a world leader.

‘Offshore wind has been a great British success story’

But Mr Kwarteng insists: “The aim of the game isn’t to see how much government can spend using taxpayers’ money. The aim of the game is to try and use public money sensibly to attract private investment. And just to bear this out in reality … Offshore wind has been a great British success story … 35 per cent almost of global offshore wind capacity is round here, the UK.”

If Mr Kwarteng intends to model the Government’s plans for hydrogen and heat pumps on its approach to offshore wind, consumers may be forgiven for expecting a repeat of the billions of pounds that have been spent subsidizing the industry to date. And with prominent firms insisting that subsidies for offshore wind farms must continue, when will those actually come to an end?

“This is an interesting question,” Mr Kwarteng replies. “My understanding is that the point at which we no longer need to keep subsidizing it has almost arrived.”

Creating an “attractive environment” which will draw investment from green energy firms to the UK is “the real secret to this.”

“Similarly with hydrogen, we’re not going to get to a hydrogen economy just by the government writing checks. We’re going to do that by the Government, yes, writing some checks, if I want to put it crudely, but critically, by attracting private investment. And it doesn’t work without substantial investment from the private sector.”

Surprisingly, Mr Kwarteng denies that consumers will have to pay more to go green, saying that “costs can fall very, very quickly”.

Consumers will ‘benefit’ in as little as five years

“By investing in this, I think we’re going to be driving costs down.” Consumers will “benefit” in as little as five years, he insists.

Unlike Alok Sharma, his predecessor and the minister in charge of the Cop26 climate conference, who drew some flak for the revelation that he still drives a diesel vehicle, Mr Kwarteng, the MP for Spelthorne, west of London, does not own a car at all. “I didn’t sell it just because you were coming,” he jokes. “I haven’t driven a car in London for 10 years.”

He does, however, admit to having a gas boiler, despite the Government’s drive to persuade people to switch to alternatives such as heat pumps.

“I do have a boiler, which is a gas boiler … but I’m in a position where, because I earn a certain amount of money, I can afford that transition, and I’m looking to make that transition.”

A recent focus group carried out in Redcar, Teesside, by the Onward think tank, identified a mistrust of the Government’s messages on ditching traditional cars and boilers, on the basis that people had previously been urged to buy diesel vehicles and so-called eco-friendly boilers, both of which are now being overtaken.

“I think that’s entirely legitimate,” Mr Kwarteng admits. “I remember the diesel campaign, and we listen to those sorts of things. People have got a point.

“I think the science is much better … I also think that if you look at the opportunity, electric vehicles intuitively are much cleaner than diesel would be. And also, this is where the economic argument fits in, a lot of the people in Redcar … will be directly employed by the companies on my board. And they’re directly invested in Britain being a leader in these technologies in a way that frankly, with diesel cars, we weren’t really at the races there.”

Biden Insiders: Our Afghanistan Exit Is a Part of a Much Bigger Reset

Daily Beast

Biden Insiders: Our Afghanistan Exit Is a Part of a Much Bigger Reset

David Rothkopf August 20, 2021

In world affairs, first impressions can be misleading. Soviet and American generals were photographed toasting the triumph of a great alliance in 1945 but in the blinking of an eye the Cold War was underway and we were great enemies. Crowds pressed against the U.S. embassy gates as Saigon fell and America lost a long, bloody war mere decades before Vietnam embraced a market economy and became a top tourist destination for Americans.

Statues are toppled, regimes collapse, city squares are thronged with tens of thousands of people demanding change, “Mission Accomplished” moments occur, and yet what follows is not what the pundits caught up in the drama and imagery of individual events predict. With time, members of the Biden administration anticipate, we will come to see the events of the past week very differently.

In fact, with perspective, we may well come to see their exit from Afghanistan as part of a major, generational, foreign policy reset. In fact, if events unfold consistent with the president’s vision, this moment will be seen as a watershed in a return to American global leadership after two decades of misguided, erratic, damaging foreign policy in the wake of 9/11.

America’s Catastrophic Afghanistan Exit Has Many Fathers

In other words, we are likely to come to see the events of the past week not only very differently but in the opposite light of that depicted by many commentators who, understandably but at the expense of the long view, were reacting to the horror of what we all saw happen in the streets of Kabul.

What is more, even as the talking heads and the Twitterverse and the editorial writers and the political opportunists were decrying the process by which the decision to leave was made, questioning the judgment of Biden and his team, the departure from Afghanistan, even if it unfolded badly, was actually the product of a laser-like focus on the big picture and the long-term interests of the United States on the part of the president and his top advisers.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the administration’s reasoning to me as follows, “The investment we made in Afghanistan over the course of 20 years was enormous. Two decades, one trillion dollars, 2,300 lives lost, thousands more with visible and invisible wounds. It’s no secret that our strategic competitors would like nothing more than for America to be bogged down in conflict for another two years—or two decades. The only element that rivaled the cost of this conflict was the opportunity cost. The president concluded it was time for us to end this war.”

A senior White House aide put it this way: “The president firmly believes that leaving Afghanistan improves our ability to be a stronger world leader, more engaged with allies, and more effective internationally.” The aide went on to echo Blinken, thus underscoring the centrality of the idea of returning our focus to great power competition for Biden and his team, saying, “As the president has said repeatedly, there is nothing that Russia or China would like to see more than the U.S. tied down in an endless war in Afghanistan. This is especially true as the terrorist threat grows in other places, and the geopolitical challenges elsewhere mount.”

Senior aides to the president repeatedly stressed to me that the actions in Afghanistan are all part of a much broader, carefully considered strategic shift for the United States. It will mean nothing less than finally bringing an end to the post-9/11 era. It will close the books on the recklessness and excesses of the war on terror, an end to the dangerous delusions of American exceptionalism and hubris-infused unilateralism.

The Biden team view is based on the idea that becoming bogged down in a 20-year war with an unclear mission that drained our resources and distracted us from our priorities made us weaker, that entering Iraq without justification made us weaker, that retreat in the wake of the calamities of Bush foreign policy made us weaker, that Trump attacking our alliances and undermining the rule of law at home made us weaker. The gross failure of leadership in managing COVID made us weaker. A president inciting an attempted coup made us much, much weaker.

Biden’s Right That It’s Time for Us to Leave Afghanistan

President Biden, recognizing all this, is seeking to systematically, comprehensively, and irreversibly undo that damage and to strengthen America, preparing us to lead in the decades ahead. As much as it means ending America’s longest war, it also means shifting the trillions spent on fighting to investing in ourselves, our infrastructure, our schools, and our health care system. Build Back Better is not simply a big domestic program in the eyes of the administration. It is, as was the interstate highway system to Dwight Eisenhower, an investment in our security and our competitiveness. Proposed major initiatives in cyber security, power grid resiliency, expanding broadband, and combatting climate change make that crystal clear.

The effort also turns on efforts to undo the damage to our international standing done by unilateralism, contempt for the rule of law, attacks on democracy here at home, and the rise of domestic violent extremists who today pose a greater risk than overseas terror cells. Elements of the effort have included re-entering the Paris Climate Accords and rejoining the WHO, leading the way on vaccine diplomacy, recommitting ourselves to strengthening international institutions and our alliances, seeking to negotiate a re-entry of the U.S. into the Iran nuclear deal, and, perhaps above all else, preparing for the challenges and opportunities of the rest of the 21st Century. A shift in our focus and the deployment of our resources from the Greater Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region is another key part of that.

The critics who have emerged in the past week have often been as misguided and unappreciative of the bigger picture as they have been scathing. One top European foreign policy expert said America had “cut and run”—pretty preposterous after 20 years of engagement, roughly 19 years too many. One right-wing American pundit called the exit from Kabul “the worst presidential dereliction in memory” which, I hope, has his friends and family getting him the counsel of a good neurologist as he clearly is suffering from severe short-term memory loss. One member of Britain’s Parliament suggested the U.S. was returning to “isolationism” which is, again, pretty ludicrous given that our exit comes at the end of the longest war in our history. It seems the honorable gentleman thinks the permanent engagement of colonialism is the desirable opposite of isolationism.

There were certainly mistakes made in planning and executing the U.S. pullout of Afghanistan—although many observers understate the responsibility the Taliban, the Afghan government, and the Afghan military have for the horrific scenes we witnessed. But even at the end of just one week, thanks to the fast action of the president and the U.S. military, the picture is very different. Evacuations are proceeding at a remarkable pace. The military side of the Kabul airfield has stabilized and is orderly. Our embassy team and the diplomats of our allies are safe. The U.S. has demonstrated its commitment to getting American citizens, allies, and as many Afghans who worked with the U.S. as possible out and doing so swiftly.

The events of the past week have been harrowing. They should not be minimized. America should actively work to find places within our borders and worldwide with our friends and allies for every Afghan who seeks refugee status. We are already beginning the work of finding other mechanisms—diplomatic, political, and economic—to foster security and justice to the extent possible within Afghanistan. But the administration also recognizes that many other nations suffer as do the Afghans (the people of Haiti, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and oppressed women in societies worldwide all wish they could get the calls for aiding them that have come this week for the people of Afghanistan) and that the most important thing the U.S. can do to influence good outcomes worldwide is to restore our standing, restore our vitality at home, strengthen the international system, consistently let our values lead us, and start again to lead by example.

We have ignored much of that work during the past 20 years, a period that is likely to go down in history as among the worst ever for U.S. foreign policy. President Biden and his team have had the courage to recognize that to lead again as we once did, to lead to our full potential, we must have the courage to acknowledge and correct errors like the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, they seem to have clearer memories of the long litany of often egregious, sometimes crippling missteps America’s leaders have made during the first years of this century than do their critics. Fortunately for all of us, they also appear to have a much clearer understanding of what must be done if the U.S. is to finally put those errors and misspent years behind us and attend as we urgently must to the challenges and opportunities of the decades ahead.

Climate Change Is Robbing Our Kids Of The Carefree Childhoods We Knew

Scary Mommy

Climate Change Is Robbing Our Kids Of The Carefree Childhoods We Knew

Elaine Roth July 27, 2021

I grew up in the late ’80’s and early ’90’s. When school let out for summer, unless it rained, my brother and sister and I were outside. In the mornings, we rode bikes. In the afternoon, we played hide and seek with our neighbors unless a friend invited us to the town pool. At night, we caught fireflies (I knew them as lightning bugs) with our cousins. (In between, we argued, we complained, and we drove our mom bonkers, which isn’t relevant to my point, but seems important to add for full disclosure.)

We didn’t think about heat waves or air quality index. We woke up and as long as it wasn’t raining, we went outside. Often, my mom shooed us out the door with a quick “go outside” the minute we even skated around the word “bored.”

But, that’s changing. The days of saying “go outside” to kids as a safe, easy, available option for combating summer boredom are coming to an end. Due to climate change, kids often can’t just go outside.

Wildfires, floods, extreme heat, hurricanes, poor air quality are all driving kids indoors, and changing the way kids experience childhood forever.

Wildfires Impact Air Quality Forcing Kids Indoors

A couple of weeks ago in mid-July, the sun in New York City turned red. Officials issued an air quality alert. By the late afternoon, the air quality had reached a level that was “nine times above exposure recommendations from the World Health Organization.”

At that level, the EPA recommends children stay indoors. Indoors—as in, not riding bikes or playing at the park or doing the things that define childhood for many of us. (Elderly folks, those with heart or lung conditions, or those with diabetes should also stay inside.)

The cause: wildfires burning on the other side of the continent.

Wildfires, which are starting earlier and burning more acreage every year, due to climate change.

In some parts of the West, not only is the air quality forcing children indoors but recreation areas have been forced to close down due to smoke and ash. Playgrounds have become too hot to play on.

It’s Too Hot To Play Outside

Heat waves aren’t new, but they are starting earlier and ending later. According to the EPA, heat waves seasons last almost two months longer than they did just fifty years ago. Which means parents can’t just send their kids outside for the day anymore and expect the worst thing to happen is a few scraped knees.

Kids are more susceptible to heat than adults. They breathe at a higher rate and become dehydrated faster than adults.

In the past, many kids looking to beat the heat could escape to a pool. As climate change continues to upend summer as we once knew it, that might not be the case. Pools might be forced to closed for periods of time. That’s already happened in some places. In Portland, Oregon, some pools were forced to close when temperatures spiked above 110 degrees. The Parks and Recreation agency explained that it was too hot for employees and guests to be outside.

Likewise, pools in Florida were forced to close when hurricane Elsa—the earliest “E” storm on record—came through.

If you’re thinking, kids can just hit the beach. Well—maybe not. The beaches aren’t free from the effects of climate change. Rising sea levels are causing some beaches to disappear and others to be inaccessible.

With no pools or beaches, kids looking to beat the heat are once again finding themselves indoors.

Summer Outdoor Camps Are Impacted

Climate change is coming for summer camps, as well. A camp in Washington was forced to delay its start due to the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest that caused record breaking temperatures. Another camp in Colorado has been forced to evacuate twice in the past five years due to wildfires. A high school football camp in Arizona was forced to move inside after a streak of 115-degree days.

Camps in general are experiencing longer heat waves and the need for more indoor, or air conditioned, activities.

“The reality is yes, they are having more high-temperature days, and generally more heat waves, and other impacts, as well,” Donald J. Wuebbles, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois told the New York Times in regard to summer camp. “When we do get rainfall it’s more likely to be a bigger rainfall and when we get a drought it’s more likely to be a bigger drought.”

Fireflies Are Endangered

Childhood will look different even in the evening, when presumably the temperature has cooled down enough to allow kids to emerge from their air-conditioned shelters. Many of us spent summers catching fireflies. But now, fireflies may be heading toward extinction. Granted that’s not because of climate change per se—it’s more a function of urbanization and light pollution— but it’s another way that childhood will be fundamentally changed.

The scary thing is—things are likely only going to get worse. A recent New York Times article posed the question: Is This The End Of Summer As We’ve Known It? The answer is probably yes. A 2019 report found that by mid-century the United States will experience twice as many days with a heat index above 100°F and four times as many days with an index above 105°F.

Time outside is critical for children. Outdoor green space can improve kids’ health—both physical and emotional. After a year of being stuck inside due to COVID, kids need time to be kids more than ever. Unfortunately, climate change is making that difficult or impossible. It’s redefining childhood in a way that’s unspeakably sad. In a way that’s impacting our kids in ways we can see and ways we can’t.

Millions of electric car batteries will retire in the next decade. What happens to them?

The Guardian

Millions of electric car batteries will retire in the next decade. What happens to them?

XiaoZhi Lim August 20, 2021

<span>Photograph: STR/AFP via Getty Images</span> — Photograph: STR/AFP via Getty Images

A tsunami of electric vehicles is expected in rich countries, as car companies and governments pledge to ramp up their numbers – there are predicted be 145m on the roads by 2030. But while electric vehicles can play an important role in reducing emissions, they also contain a potential environmental timebomb: their batteries.

By one estimate, more than 12m tons of lithium-ion batteries are expected to retire between now and 2030.

Not only do these batteries require large amounts of raw materials, including lithium, nickel and cobalt – mining for which has climate, environmental and human rights impacts – they also threaten to leave a mountain of electronic waste as they reach the end of their lives.

As the automotive industry starts to transform, experts say now is the time to plan for what happens to batteries at the end of their lives, to reduce reliance on mining and keep materials in circulation.

A second life

Hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into recycling startups and research centers to figure out how to disassemble dead batteries and extract valuable metals at scale.

But if we want to do more with the materials that we have, recycling shouldn’t be the first solution, said James Pennington, who leads the World Economic Forum’s circular economy program. “The best thing to do at first is to keep things in use for longer,” he said.

“There is a lot of [battery] capacity left at the end of first use in electric vehicles,” said Jessika Richter, who researches environmental policy at Lund University. These batteries may no longer be able run vehicles but they could have second lives storing excess power generated by solar or windfarms.

Several companies are running trials. The energy company Enel Group is using 90 batteries retired from Nissan Leaf cars in an energy storage facility in Melilla, Spain, which is isolated from the Spanish national grid. In the UK, the energy company Powervault partnered with Renault to outfit home energy storage systems with retired batteries.

An employee installs a lithium-ion battery cell into a testing system at the Powervault office in London. Powervault is one of several companies giving a second life to lithium-ion batteries. — An employee installs a lithium-ion battery cell into a testing system at the Powervault office in London. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Establishing the flow of lithium-ion batteries from a first life in electric vehicles to a second life in stationary energy storage would have another bonus: displacing toxic lead-acid batteries.

Only about 60% of lead-acid batteries are used in cars, said Richard Fuller, who leads the non-profit Pure Earth, another 20% are used for storing excess solar power, particularly in African countries.

Lead-acid batteries typically last only about two years in warmer climates, said Fuller, as heat causes them to degrade more quickly, meaning they need to be recycled frequently. However, there are few facilities that can safely do this in Africa.

Instead, these batteries are often cracked open and melted down in back yards. The process exposes the recyclers and their surroundings to lead, a potent neurotoxin that has no known safe level and can damage brain development in children.

Lithium-ion batteries could offer a less toxic and longer-lasting alternative for energy storage, Fuller said.

The race to recycle

“When a battery really is at the end of its use, then it’s time to recycle it,” Pennington said.

There is big momentum behind lithium-ion battery recycling. In its impact report, published in August, Tesla announced that it had started building recycling capabilities at its Gigafactory in Nevada to process waste batteries.

Nearby Redwood Materials, founded by the former Tesla chief technology officer JB Straubel, which operates out of Carson City, Nevada, raised more than $700m in July and plans to expand operations. The factory takes in dead batteries, extracts valuable materials such as copper and cobalt, then sends the refined metals back into the battery supply chain.

Yet, as recycling becomes more mainstream, big technical challenges remain.

One of which is the complex designs that recyclers must navigate to get to the valuable components. Lithium-ion batteries are rarely designed with recyclability in mind, said Carlton Cummins, co-founder of Aceleron, a UK battery manufacturing startup. “This is why the recycler struggles. They want to do the job, but they only get introduced to the product when it reaches their door.”

Cummins and co-founder Amrit Chandan have targeted one design flaw: the way components are connected. Most components are welded together, which is good for electrical connection, but bad for recycling, Cummins said.

Aceleron’s batteries join components with fasteners that compress the metal contacts together. These connections can be decompressed and the fasteners removed, allowing for complete disassembly or for the removal and replacement of individual faulty components.

Easier disassembly could also help mitigate safety hazards. Lithium-ion batteries that are not properly handled could pose fire and explosion risks. “If we pick it down to bits, I guarantee you, it’s not going to hurt anyone,” Cummins said.

Changing the system

Success isn’t guaranteed even if the technical challenges are cracked. History shows how hard it can be to create well-functioning recycling industries.

Lead-acid batteries, for example, enjoy high rates of recycling in part due to legal requirements – as much as 99% of lead in automobile batteries is recycled. But they have a toxic cost when they end up at improper recycling facilities. Spent batteries often end up with backyard recyclers because they can pay more for them than formal recyclers, who have to cover higher operating costs.

Lithium-ion batteries may be less toxic but they will still need to end up at operations that can safely recycle them. “Products tend to flow through the path of least resistance, so you want to make the path which goes through formal channels less resistant,” Pennington said.

Legislation could help. While the US has yet to implement federal policies mandating lithium-ion battery recycling, the EU and China already require battery manufacturers to pay for setting up collection and recycling systems. These funds could help subsidize formal recyclers to make them more competitive, Pennington said.

Last December, the EU also proposed sweeping changes to its battery regulations, most of which target lithium-ion batteries. These include target rates of 70% for battery collection, recovery rates of 95% for cobalt, copper, lead and nickel and 70% for lithium, and mandatory minimum levels of recycled content in new batteries by 2030 – to ensure there are markets for recyclers and buffer them from volatile commodity prices or changing battery chemistries.

“They aren’t in final form yet, but the proposals that are out there are ambitious,” Richter said.

Data could also help. The EU and the Global Battery Alliance (GBA), a public-private collaboration, are both working on versions of a digital “passport” – an electronic record for a battery that would contain information about its whole life cycle.

“We are thinking about a QR code or a [radio frequency identification] detection device,” says Torsten Freund, who leads the GBA’s battery passport initiative. It could report a battery’s health and remaining capacity, helping vehicle manufacturers direct it for reuse or to recycling facilities. Data about materials could help recyclers navigate the myriad chemistries of lithium-ion batteries. And once recycling becomes more widespread, the passport could also indicate the amount of recycled content in new batteries.

As the automobile industry starts to transform, now is the time to tackle these problems, said Maya Ben Dror, urban mobility lead at the World Economic Forum. The money pouring into the sector offers an “opportunity to ensure that these investments are going to be in sustainable new ecosystems and not just in a new type of car”, she said.

It’s also worth noting that sustainable transport goes beyond electric cars, said Richter. Walking, biking or taking public transportation should not be overlooked, she said. “It’s important to remember that we can have a sustainable product situated within an unsustainable system.”