Politics and American Democracy – Page 220

Nalleli Cobo: How a nine-year-old fought an oil company and won

BBC News

Nalleli Cobo: How a nine-year-old fought an oil company and won

Patricia Sulbarán Lovera – BBC Mundo, Los Angeles March 5, 2021

When a Latino community in Los Angeles began their fight against an oil company they claimed was polluting their neighborhood, a young woman played a central role.

Nalleli Cobo was nine years old when she started suffering from asthma, nosebleeds and headaches.

It was the beginning of a battle against an active oil well site located in front of her house in South Los Angeles.

Nalleli and her mother soon found out that some of their neighbors were also getting sick.

The community, mostly composed of low-income families, protested until the site was temporarily shut down.

Cobo didn’t stop there. Joined by a group of young activists and organizations, they sued the city to demand more regulations in oil extraction. And they won.

A criminal case against the company, Allenco, and its handling of the site, resumes later this month. They declined to comment for this story but have previously stated that they invested capital to comply with regulations.

She has been compared to Greta Thunberg, although her name has been recognized locally for over a decade.

Nalleli Cobo and Greta Thunberg have worked together on environmental campaigns.

Cobo paused her activism activities in early 2020 after being diagnosed with cancer at the age of 19.

Her doctors don’t know what caused her illness.

After three surgeries and medical treatment, she has recently been declared cancer-free.

This is her story.

I grew up in University Park, in South Central Los Angeles, 30ft across the street from an oil well owned by AllenCo from 2009.

I lived with my mom, my three siblings, my grandma, my great grandpa, my great grandma all in one apartment. We were eight people, including me.

My mom is from Mexico and my dad is from Colombia. He was deported when I was two years old and my mom raised me.

It was the year 2010 and I was nine years old. All of the sudden I started having stomach pains, nausea.

I got body spasms so severe I couldn’t walk, my mom would have to carry me because I would freeze up like a vegetable.

I got nosebleeds so severe that I would have to sleep sitting down so I wouldn’t choke on my own blood at night.

Nalleli Cobo at 9 years old — Nalleli Cobo started suffering from nosebleeds, body spasms and other symptoms at nine years old

I was being poisoned in my home by a silent killer.

It was crazy to notice not just how my health was affected but everybody else’s in different ways.

My mother got asthma at 40 which is really rare, my grandma got it at 70 which is even more rare. My sister had fibroid problems, my brother had asthma, everybody had some kind of health issue.

But it wasn’t just my family, it was most of our community.

Moms started talking to each other and the word spread that there was there was something wrong.

We could smell it in the air. It smelled like rotten eggs and once it got into your house it wouldn’t go away, even if you close the windows, turned on fans and put air purifiers in the traverses of the windows.

Other times it would smell like guava or chocolate. These were artificial smells.

At the beginning, we started looking into if it was a leak in the building until we found a group of toxicologists to come speak to our community.

They explained that certain chemicals are used for oil extraction and emissions can harm human health if exposed for a long time.

The oil well that AllenCo operated from 2009 is located in a residential area, close to buildings and schools in South Los Angeles.

A pipeline that signals "Warning Petroleum Pipeline" close to Nalleli's childhood home. — A pipeline that signals “Warning Petroleum Pipeline” close to Cobo’s childhood home.

That is when we made the connection with the oil well across the street.

So we started organizing in the community and created the campaign People Not Pozos (“pozos” means oil wells in Spanish).

We filed complaints with the South Coast Air Quality Management District and we knocked on doors asking people if they’d be willing to share their stories at a City Hall hearing.

It was so powerful to know that this community, the Spanish-speaking, black and brown immigrant community that nobody cared about was coming over to the City Hall to make our voices heard.

Nalleli Cobo speaking in a public hearing with LA elected officials.

They would ask me if I could share my story and I would use my little note cards and talk.

I was always super shy but I always felt comfortable doing public speaking.

The Los Angeles Times wrote a story about us and it captured the attention of former US California Senator Barbara Boxer.

At the press conference, Boxer brought investigators from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and they went in to do a check up.

They were in there for a few minutes because they started getting sick from the smells.

(After local and federal investigations, AllenCo agreed to shut down the site temporarily).

(The city of Los Angeles sued the company and in 2016 secured a court order that requires AllenCo to follow stringent regulations if it wants to resume drilling).

We were happy when this was announced but it took time. We started organizing in 2010 and it shut down in 2013.

And now we want it to shut down permanently.

Nalleli Cobo in January 2020. — Nalleli Cobo became a figure of environmental activism in Los Angeles.

When we started campaigning, we noticed that we weren’t the only community being affected.

There are 580,000 angelenos that live within a quarter of a mile or less to an active oil and gas well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4KpTsapzUg

Most are low-income communities of color.

Whenever I go somewhere to talk about this and I say I’m from Los Angeles, people are like: “Oh! That’s awesome, the Walk of Fame, Hollywood, celebrities…”

Well, LA is home to the largest urban oil field in the country and we don’t talk about it.

I am one of the cofounders of South Central Youth Leadership Coalition and along with other organizations we sued the city of Los Angeles in 2015 for a violation of the California Environmental Quality Act.

We won, and that means that when opening or expanding wells there is a new application process.

Even though I moved out of University Park, I’m campaigning to set up a 2,500 feet health and safety buffer zone between oil wells and schools, hospitals and parks.

At the same time, I am a normal kid. I am obsessed with makeup, I am a dancer, I love travelling and I am in college.

The only thing that makes me different is that I found my passion much earlier.

Nalleli Cobo and Mark Ruffalo in a tour around oil wells in Los Angeles in 2016. — Cobo’s activism has been praised by Hollywood figures such as Mark Ruffalo and Jane Fonda

I was diagnosed with cancer on January 15 of 2020.

For a while I kept it quiet because it was such a scary word to process. The “C word” is something you never expect to hear at such a young age.

My mom and I were also worried about medical bills because I had to undergo surgery.

But we were fortunate enough to reach our goal through a crowd funding campaign.

Physically and emotionally the hardest thing was getting a radical hysterectomy. It took me 6 weeks to get out of bed.

My mom had to bathe me for six months and I had to take dozens of pills.

My oncologist still doesn’t know why I got cancer; they have been able to know by doing tests that it is not genetic.

I told them where I had grown up and asked if there was an environmental test I could take.

She said that, until we have new science, I am just a question mark.

I am recently cancer-free as of 18 January and feel really happy and excited about that.

I want to pursue my career as a civil rights attorney and go into politics afterwards.

My definition of environmental justice is the ability to breathe clean air despite my age, my gender, my ethnicity, social economic status or zip code.

It is fighting, it is protecting my community, my home.

Earth’s largest-ever mass extinction is a warning for humanity

CBS News

Earth’s largest-ever mass extinction is a warning for humanity

Katherine Niemczyk March 4, 2021

Right now our planet is in the midst of what science says is an unprecedented rate of change, unlike anything seen in tens of millions of years. Overconsumption, unsustainable practices and the release of immense amounts of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels are altering our life-sustaining climate at a dangerous pace, oceans are acidifying and losing oxygen, and species are dying off.

But this is not the first time that life on our planet has faced an epic challenge. The worst came a little over 250 million years ago — before dinosaurs walked the earth — in an episode called the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, or the Great Dying, when 90% of life in the oceans and 70% of life on land vanished.

Recently, two groundbreaking studies on the Great Dying reveal that the causes of that mass extinction bear some striking similarities to what’s happening today. In fact, in some ways the pace of change, such as the rate of release of greenhouse gases, is much faster today than it was 250 million years ago.

Scientists say historic episodes like this offer a timely warning to humanity of what can happen when ecosystems change too fast for life to keep up.

In fact, the evidence compiled by scientific research on today’s pace of change is ominous to say the least. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing at a pace 100 times faster than it naturally should. Our planet is warming 10 times faster than it has in 65 million years. Our oceans are acidifying 100 times faster than they have in at least 20 million years, and oxygen dead zones in our oceans have increased tenfold since 1950.

Given the similarities, and what is at stake today, digging into the causes and impacts of the Great Dying can open up a window into a possible dire future for our planet — and also elucidate how urgent action is needed to avoid ecosystem and societal collapse.

What led to the Great Dying?

Digging is exactly what Professor Uwe Brand does for a living. As a geoscientist from Brock University in Canada, his job is to dig deep into Earth’s past by digging into the Earth itself, looking for clues about what the planet was like millions of years ago.

In this capacity, Brand is like a crime scene investigator looking for forensic evidence to help him put together the pieces of the Great Dying puzzle, an event which preceded his existence by hundreds of millions of years. Not an easy task.

For this story, CBS News interviewed Brand to help us understand how this all happened. “I call it the perfect storm,” said Brand, because as he explains, it was not a single game-changing event like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Instead it was a domino effect — a series of events, all related to each other, which eventually put a nail in the coffin.

After decades of uncertainty, two studies published around the same time illuminated how it happened. Brand was co-author of one of these studies, an October 2020 paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience examining the causes of the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction.

In the study Brand was involved in, the authors employed a technique using the element boron from fossil brachiopod shells, which they found in rocks in modern-day Italy, to derive a record of ocean acidity during the time of the mass extinction. This, combined with carbon isotope data using a sophisticated model, enabled the researchers to reconstruct the likely chain of events that killed almost all life on Earth 252 million years ago.

In another paper that was released at around the same time, researchers discovered a rare molecule called coronene in Italy and China which can only be formed when underground deposits of fossil fuels are super-heated. This was another clue which helped put the pieces together.

Here’s how Brand describes how the events unfolded: Over the course of a million years, extensive volcanic activity in what is now Siberia flowed through cracks and crevices of sedimentary rocks, searing oil and gas deposits as it moved along, producing the coronene scientists recently discovered.

Lava in the Kilauea region near Hilo, Hawaii, in 2018. Scientists believe massive volcanic activity some 250 million years ago led to widespread extinctions. / Credit: DVIDS/Hawaii National Guard

Consequently, massive lava beds were created. “It would cover at least half of the United States and to a thickness of at least several kilometers,” said Brand.

This process gradually released gigantic amounts of heat-trapping carbon gases at levels much higher than today. For comparison, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations during that time period are estimated to be a few thousand parts per million (ppm), whereas today, our CO2 level, while higher than it’s been in the last 3 million years, is still significantly less, at 415 ppm (but rising fast).

The immense amount of greenhouse gases present back then warmed global atmospheric temperatures to levels 18 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today. Because of the impact this had on ecosystems, it forced land animals to rapidly adapt, move or die. Seventy percent did not make it.

In the ocean, atmospheric carbon dioxide was absorbed, mixing with water and forming sulfuric acid, acidifying the seas. As a result, coral disintegrated and the shells of ocean creatures dissolved.

Back on land, the hotter climate shifted vegetation and ignited fires. That exposed more rocks, and erosion went into overdrive. As a result, an overabundance of nutrients flowed into the oceans, causing at first an explosion of life. But then there was the inevitable death and decomposition, which ate up most of the life-giving oxygen in the ocean. Ninety percent of ocean life died. Brand says existence was getting hit from all angles.

“These are not individual and separate causes, but they all acted together, they acted in concert, and that is why I call it the perfect storm. You got hit on this side with temperature, on this side with acidification and then finally the knock-out punch came from deoxygenation.”

Learning from history

As catastrophic as the Great Dying was, scientists are concerned the Earth could now be headed for another disaster. Right now, the planet is warming abruptly to levels not seen in over 100,000 years, oceans are acidifying and oxygen dead zones are multiplying.

And astonishingly, Brand says that the rate of release of heat-trapping greenhouse gases now is much more radical than it was back then. “Right now our emissions are 10 to 20 times higher than what happened at the end of the Permian mass extinction, which was the largest and biggest mass extinction,” he said.

To save ourselves, he says we must learn from events like the Great Dying. “You know what they say, learn from history, because if you don’t you will repeat it.”

“The way I see it is, it is going to happen if we don’t stop it or don’t mitigate what we are doing,” he said. But Brand stressed that we still have time to turn it around by moving away from the burning of fossil fuels.

Biodegradable plastic production in China outpacing ability to break down waste, says Greenpeace

The Telegraph

Biodegradable plastic production in China outpacing ability to break down waste, says Greenpeace

Marcus Parekh December 17, 2020 Greenpeace

A man carries a bag of plastic bottles on a roof at a recycling centre in Hefei - Jianan Yu /Reuters — A man carries a bag of plastic bottles on a roof at a recycling center in Hefei – Jianan Yu /Reuters

China has begun producing biodegradable plastic at such a rate that it can no longer break down the material at the same pace, according to a new report from Greenpeace.

According to the report, companies in China have ramped up production of biodegradable plastic to a capacity of 4.4 million tons per year. That capacity is expected to reach five million tons in the e-commerce sector alone by 2025, when a nationwide ban on non-biodegradable plastics is set to come into effect.

“Switching from one type of plastic to another cannot solve the plastics pollution crisis that we’re facing,” said Dr Molly Zhongnan Jia, a Greenpeace East Asia plastics researcher. “We need to take a cautious look at the effect and potential risks of mainstreaming these materials, and make sure we invest in solutions that actually reduce plastic waste.”

Non-biodegradable plastics take decades to decompose and release microplastics, which contaminates soil, water and the food chain.

People sort plastic bottles for recycling at a reclamation depot on in Qingdao - Hong Wu /Getty Images AsiaPac — People sort plastic bottles for recycling at a reclamation depot on in Qingdao – Hong Wu /Getty Images AsiaPac

By contrast, current forms of biodegradable plastic take up to six months to be broken down, but they require specific industrial treatment at high temperatures and humidity. If the material is left in landfill, the process takes much longer and still releases carbon into the atmosphere.

Most households do not have the ability to properly dispose of biodegradable plastics as they are often not suitable for household recycling and composting.

This results in many forms of biodegradable plastic being thrown away after a single-use, compounding the problem of plastic pollution.

“Reusable packaging systems and a reduction in overall plastic use are much more promising strategies to keep plastic out of landfills and the environment,” said Dr Jia.

Arizona GOP lawyer tells Supreme Court the party needs certain voting restrictions to compete with Democrats

The Week

Arizona GOP lawyer tells Supreme Court the party needs certain voting restrictions to compete with Democrats

Tim O’Donnell March 2, 2021

The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments by Arizona Republicans in defense of two voting restrictions they are looking to keep intact. At one point, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Michael Carvin, a lawyer representing the Arizona GOP, what the party’s interest in maintaining the policy of discarding ballots cast at the wrong precinct was. Carvin answered, without hesitation, that removing the rule would prevent Republicans from competing in the state.

“It puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” he told Barrett. “Politics is a zero sum game. Every extra vote that they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us. It’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election.”

Critics argued Carvin was essentially admitting some Republicans believe “it is okay to manipulate elections to gain partisan advantage.”

Per Reuters, part of the reason voting rights activists have targeted the precinct rule is that voters sometimes inadvertently cast their ballots at the wrong polling station because their assigned location is not always the closest one to their homes. However, Reuters reports the high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is likely to uphold the restriction, as well as another that makes it a crime to hand over someone else’s ballot to election officials during early voting.

Right to Work Defeated in Montana and Colorado

ucomm Blog

Right to Work Defeated in Montana and Colorado

However, a Right to Work bill continues forward in New Hampshire

By Brian Young March 02, 2021

Photo By: KPAX

In Montana, Republicans have control over the entire state government, a first in over 16 years. Yet, over the past month, union members and employers have successfully pushed legislators to vote against Right to Work. On Tuesday, with union members filling the gallery and lining the hallways, legislators voted down the bill by a vote of 38 in favor to 62 opposed. In a show of bipartisanship, 29 Republicans joined with 33 Democrats in opposing the bill.

In speaking in opposition to the bill Rep. Derek Harvey, a Democrat from Butte spoke about the role that unions played in his city producing the copper that fueled the industrial revolution, electrified the nation, and supplied ammunition during both World Wars.

“I know my past. I know my town’s past. I also know the history of a man named Frank. Frank (Little) was standing up for his fellow workers when one night he was drug out of his boarding house and beat nearly to death and drug behind a car through the center of my district,” Harvey said before going on to list the Anaconda Road massacre and labor strikes of 1914 that led to martial law in his district. “This is an outrageous bill, and it’s an outrage that it’s made it (this far) through the process.”

Members from around the state came to the Capitol to pressure lawmakers into voting against the bill.

“These are not partisan members,” said Al Eklbad, Executive Secretary of the AFL-CIO, who was among those in the hallway. “These are people who believe in their collective bargaining rights. They vote for a lot of different issues but the bottom line is our membership will stand for its right to collectively bargain.”

In Colorado, a similar Right to Work bill was rejected. By an 8-5 party-line vote, the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee voted down the bill. “What we didn’t hear today was any examples of people saying that they had bad impacts from a union,” committee chair Dylan Roberts said. “What we did hear a lot of evidence of was the benefit of a union for workers across the state from all different types of professions. We certainly need to take more steps, whether government or non-governmental, to improve our economy but I don’t think that this is one of those things.”

Mark Thompson, a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America testified against the bill saying “This is union-busting legislation — it always has been, always will be. This is strictly to weaken unions.”

With Montana and Colorado blocking Right to Work bills, New Hampshire is the only other state currently considering a Right to Work bill. That bill passed the State Senate by 13-11, with only one Republican voting against the bill. The Right to Work bill now heads to the State House.

A Texas city had a bold new climate plan – until a gas company got involved

The Guardian

A Texas city had a bold new climate plan – until a gas company got involved

Emily Holden for Floodlight, Amal Ahmed for the Texas Observer and Brendan Gibbons for San Antonio Report March 1, 2021

When the city of Austin drafted a plan to shift away from fossil fuels, the local gas company was fast on the scene to try to scale back the ambition of the effort.

Like many cities across the US, the rapidly expanding and gentrifying Texas city is looking to shrink its climate footprint. So its initial plan was to virtually eliminate gas use in new buildings by 2030 and existing ones by 2040. Homes and businesses would have to run on electricity and stop using gas for heat, hot water and stoves.

The proposal, an existential threat to the gas industry, quickly caught the attention of Texas Gas Service. The company drafted line-by-line revisions to weaken the plan, asked customers to oppose it and escalated its concerns to top city officials.

In its suggested edits, the company struck references to “electrification”, and replaced them with “decarbonization”– a policy that wouldn’t rule out gas. It replaced “electric vehicles” with “alternative fuel vehicles”, which could run on compressed natural gas. It offered to help the city to plant more trees to absorb climate pollution and to explore technologies to pull carbon dioxide out of the air – both of which might help it to keep burning gas.

Those proposed revisions were shared with Floodlight, the Texas Observer and San Antonio Report, by the Climate Investigations Center, which obtained them through public records of communications between city officials and the company.

The moves have so far proven a success for Texas Gas. The most recently published draft of the climate plan gives the company much more time to sell gas to existing customers, and it allows it to offset climate emissions instead of eliminating them. The city, however, is revisiting the plan after a backlash to the industry-secured changes.

The lobbying in Austin is not unique. It echoes how an electricity and gas company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars scaling back San Antonio’s climate ambitions by funding the city’s plan-writing process, replacing academics with its preferred consultants and writing its own “Flexible Path” that would let it keep polluting.

The American Gas Association in a statement for this story said it “will absolutely oppose any effort to ban natural gas or sideline our infrastructure anywhere the effort materializes, state house or city steps”. But it argued that position is “not counter to environmental goals we all share”, and said “natural gas is key to achieving the cleaner energy future we all want”.

Texas’s reliance on gas was on display in mid-February when more than 4m households lost power for days after a freak winter storm battered the state. Gas power plants dominate the Texas grid, providing 47% of the state’s electricity. Many of those plants and the natural gas pipelines leading to them failed in the cold conditions.

More than a third of Texas households also rely on gas for heat. Competition for gas-fueled power and heat forced prices to surge as high as 16,000%, one power company said. Utilities now face massive bills from their gas suppliers – and many are passing the costs on to customers in the form of sky-high bills.

The CEO of Comstock Resources, a gas company owned by the billionaire Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, described the gas industry windfall as “hitting the jackpot” in an earnings call.

A nationwide fight goes local

The gas industry is battling climate change reforms in cities around the US – with support from Republican politicians.

In Texas, lawmakers have introduced two bills that would prohibit local governments from banning gas connections. “There hasn’t been a city necessarily that has banned natural gas yet, but we have whispers from the Austin city council, the city of Houston, even smaller cities,” said Jeff Carlson, the chief of staff for Representative Cody Harris, who introduced one of the bills.

Four other state legislatures passed similar laws last year, and 12 more have seen proposals for them in 2021. The gas lobby, the American Gas Association, has said it isn’t actively coordinating support or lobbying for state laws to prohibit gas bans, but its internal records indicate a different story.

“We are increasingly active in the States,” the association’s president, Karen Harbert, said in a November letter to members explaining how the organization spent membership dues in 2020. She said the association is participating in several “Pro Natural Gas Coalitions” to bring allies together.

“Over the course of the year, legislation preserving energy choice for customers passed in Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee,” Harbert said.

Another internal association email in February 2020 shows the senior director of state affairs, Daniel Lapato, asking a publicly-owned gas utility to back the Tennessee bill that ultimately passed.

The gas burned in buildings causes about 12% of US climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Cities are trying to shrink those heat-trapping emissions with building codes and mandates to switch from gas to electric appliances.

In Texas, they could have a significant impact. Texas burns far more gas than any other state, 14.9% of the US total.

Gas is cheap, and affordability is a major concern in Austin, where families and people of color continue to get priced out of the fast-growing city.

But even so, Austinites don’t necessarily want gas, said Chelsea Gomez, a community ambassador who consulted on the city plan. “When you talk to people, they don’t want natural gas as a middle man to a sustainable future – they want solar panels to be affordable for them,” said Gomez. “People want better [options].”

Burning gas indoors exposes people to dangerous pollutants that are linked with heart attacks, respiratory disease and asthma. One study found that children in homes with gas stoves were 42% more likely to have asthma than children in homes with electric stoves.

The fossil fuel also has clear climate impacts. In Texas, the number of days that are 100F or hotter has more than doubled over the past 40 years and could double again by 2036, according to a study from the Texas state climatologist. Extreme rainfall and urban flooding are increasing, hurricanes are getting more intense and the Gulf of Mexico is rising. Droughts and wildfires are becoming more severe.

Those effects were what Austin was trying to help to limit when Texas Gas Service got involved.

‘Crashing the party’

After one early meeting in June with the city’s climate program manager, Texas Gas’ regulatory affairs manager, Larry Graham, said in an email to Austin’s climate program manager, Zach Baumer, that the proposal for all-electric new construction had “gotten the attention of people at the highest level of our company”. The city released the internal emails, along with the draft versions of the plan, in response to a request for public records.

By July, employees of the company’s parent corporation, One Gas, were weighing in on the proposals from their headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

It was a level of involvement that raised red flags among city employees.

Baumer later emailed Graham that his company was “kind of crashing a party” when it attended meeting after meeting.

Still, the city officials listened to Texas Gas’ feedback. The climate plan originally called for completely eliminating natural gas use in all buildings by 2040. A few months after the gas company’s lobbying efforts, the city moved the goalposts: Only 25 percent of existing buildings would need to transition off gas by 2030, although all new buildings would have to be off gas by then too.

Texas Gas would be allowed to offset its pollution, by purchasing credits for climate work elsewhere in the country, upgrading leaky pipes and using “renewable” gas from a wastewater treatment plant – efforts which environmental advocates said weren’t enough.

An aerial view of homes, buildings and electrical lines running through an Austin neighborhood on 19 February. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The steering committee was incensed, according to a handful of participants interviewed. The members were selected from the community to focus on equity and write an ambitious plan, but the industry was already thwarting them.

Baumer said he quickly realized his mistake.

“Everybody was pissed at me. I had to call and apologize to people because we sort of gave into what Texas Gas wanted,” Baumer said. “I thought I was making a compromise position. The people who were part of the plan didn’t think that.”

Shane Johnson, the co-chair of the steering committee who works for the Sierra Club, called Texas Gas’ influence “unnerving”.

After environmental advocates balked at the revisions, the city agreed to revert back to the original, more aggressive goals.

Texas Gas, when asked for comment, said it was “invited to participate in the revisions to the Austin Climate Equity Plan and [has] remained an engaged partner ever since”. The company said it has participated in Austin climate initiatives since 2014 and shares the aspiration of reducing carbon emissions.

“We believe that by working together we can improve our community and create effective, long-term strategies that reach the city’s sustainability goals in an equitable and affordable manner for all residents,” Texas Gas said.

In September, when the company seemed to be losing the fight over the proposal, it sent an email to customers claiming it would “severely” drive up costs and “threatens to take away the rights of people to choose their source of energy”.

San Antonio

In San Antonio, local business interests – from the city’s utility company to car dealerships – were even more successful in scrubbing language that called for a full transition away from fossil fuels.

CPS Energy, the city-owned utility that supplies power and gas to San Antonio, spent $650,000 to fund the climate planning process and helped put its preferred consulting firm in charge instead of faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

As committees were meeting in 2018, CPS Energy leaders announced they had already developed their own plan for the coming decades, called the “Flexible Path”. It called for CPS Energy to get half its energy from wind and solar sources by 2040, while also continuing to operate its coal plant into the 2060s.

A draft plan in 2019 refused that approach, but the utility kept pushing back. In April 2019, CPS CEO Paula Gold-Williams called for an “in-depth cost analysis”. In a letter to San Antonio’s chief sustainability officer Doug Melnick, she suggested the draft would be too costly for customers and might jeopardize grid reliability. She won. The next draft in August 2019 adopted CPS’s “Flexible Path”. It didn’t attempt to address one serious flaw: the “Flexible Path” wouldn’t get San Antonio to its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050.

CPS did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

In response to the lobbying, the city’s final plan watered down key emission goals, replacing specific strategies to cut emissions with vague and sometimes misleading platitudes.

The climate activists did have some successes. They got the city to include interim goals – to cut climate pollution 41% by 2030 and 71% by 2040 as checkpoints on the path to carbon neutrality by 2050.

Greg Harman, a clean energy advocate with the Sierra Club who served on one of the climate plan committees, said Texas’s reputation as hostile to climate action is both earned and imposed on the state by the energy industry. Like the rest of the US, surveys show a majority of Texans believe that climate change is real and a cause for concern.

“We’re a complex and interesting state, we just happen to have a lot of energy resources,” Harman said. “But the cynics are right to be cynical.”

From Pollution to the Pandemic, Racial Equity Eludes Louisiana’s Cancer Alley Community

DeSmog

From Pollution to the Pandemic, Racial Equity Eludes Louisiana’s Cancer Alley Community

By Julie Dermansky February 25, 2021

Courtney Baloney in full PPE at work in his funeral home, the Treasures of Life Center for Life Funeral Services in St. James Parish. Credit: Julie Dermansky

Mary Hampton, president of the Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish, a community group in Louisiana fighting for clean air, opted to do everything in her power to avoid getting the coronavirus after Robert Taylor, the group’s founder, was hospitalized with COVID-19 earlier this year. So she got vaccinated as soon as she could. “Either the vaccine is going to make me sick,” Hampton reasoned, “or the virus is going to kill me.”

Like many African Americans, Hampton’s hesitation around vaccination stems from hearing about the way Black men were left to suffer during the Tuskegee syphilis study, an experiment between 1932 and 1972 which withheld lifesaving treatment, and from her own lifetime of experiences with unequal healthcare access. She told me that she and her family often had to wait hours to see a doctor for medical care while white people would go right in.

Mary Hampton at her home near the Denka plant, in St. John the Baptist Parish on February 9, 2021. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

The Denka Performance Elastomer Plant in St. John the Baptist Parish. Credit: Julie Dermansky

Hampton and Taylor live less than a mile from the Denka Performance Elastomer chemical factory in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish. This community lies in the middle of Cancer Alley, an 80-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that is lined with more than a hundred refineries and petrochemical plants.

Their fenceline community had been exposed to harmful air pollution for 46 years before DuPont sold this petrochemical factory, which produces synthetic rubber, to Denka on November 1, 2015.

Robert Taylor visiting the Zion Travelers Cemetery, next to the Marathon Refinery, in Reserve, Louisiana where some of his relatives are buried on December 3, 2020. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

Then, in late 2016, Taylor started the citizens group when the small, majority Black community learned that for decades this factory had been exposing them to many toxic chemicals, including chloroprene, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found is a likely human carcinogen.

According to the EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment published in 2015 — which evaluates air contaminants and estimates health risks — residents near Denka’s plant were determined to have the highest lifetime risk of cancer from air pollution in the country, nearly 50 times the national average.

Covid Hotspot

In mid-March last year as the pandemic spread in the United States, Louisiana was identified as a hotspot for the virus, with the steepest curve of COVID-19 infections in the country.

At an April 5, 2020 press conference, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards identified the African-American community in St. John the Baptist Parish as having an alarming death rate. A few days later, the governor announced the new Louisiana COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, created to look at how health inequities are affecting communities most impacted by the coronavirus.

Bodies coronavirus victims at the Treasures of Life Funeral home during the second surge of the pandemic. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

Almost a year later, Hampton told me that she doesn’t find anything equitable about how her community has been treated during the pandemic. The Concerned Citizens group believes that equity for their community should start with the government making the Denka plant cut its emissions to meet the maximum level of chloroprene deemed safe by the EPA for humans to inhale over a lifetime.

The Concerned Citizens group isn’t satisfied with Denka’s emission reductions, which were cut by as much as 85 percent after the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and the EPA ordered Denka to do so. Emissions, however, are still consistently above the EPA’s recommended level, and the group wants the government to do more.

If the state is serious about creating health equity, Hampton thinks her community should have received access to the vaccines first, given their compromised immune systems and chronic exposure to harmful air pollution. “But that isn’t happening,” Hampton explained.

“I was able to get a vaccine since I’m over 80 years old, but I couldn’t get them for my children who are all in their 50s, and they need them too.”

CF Industries in St. James Parish at the foot of the Sunshine Bridge. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

Covid and Chronic Pollution

Dr. Chip Riggins with the Louisiana Department of Health told me by phone that the state is doing everything it can to get vaccines to the Mississippi River Parishes including St. John the Baptist and nearby St. James Parish, but admits it isn’t happening as fast as they would like. Riggins explained numerous obstacles, from lack of pharmacies and health centers particularly on the West bank of the river to bad weather and a limited quantity of supply with the vaccine rollout.

Kevin Litten, a communications strategist with the Louisiana Department of Health, said via email, “Statewide, we have seen COVID-19 disproportionately affect communities of color.”

He pointed me to Louisiana’s COVID-19 dashboard and data provided on the department’s website when I asked if the health department could quantify the disparity in cases and deaths in St. John the Baptist and St. James Parish, compared to the rest of the state.

Rock Zion Baptist Church near Baton Rouge next to an industrial site. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

Dow’s St. Charles Chemical plant in Hahnville that recently made a settlement with the government to lower harmful emissions. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

A new study published in the European Journal of Environment and Public Health did just that. It used that exact data to evaluate the relationship between chronic exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 in Cancer Alley. The study found higher rates of COVID-19 infection and death in Cancer Alley’s 11 parishes. Residents of St. John the Baptist were more than five times as likely to die of the disease than people in other parishes, the researchers found.

The findings support other research connecting the impacts of chronic air pollution on the pandemic in China, Europe, and other parts of the United States.

“These effects in the United States are due to inaction on environmental and structural injustices and health inequities in Louisiana,” the authors wrote. (Longtime Cancer Alley advocate and Louisiana GreenARMY founder, retired Lt. General Russel Honoré contributed to the study.)

The Burden on Black Communities

Courtney Baloney at work at his funeral home in St. James Parish, LA. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

One place where these racial injustices and inequities become magnified is in funeral homes. Courtney Baloney, the owner of the Treasures of Life Center for Life Funeral Services in St. James Parish has been busy since the start of the pandemic. I photographed Baloney at work early in the pandemic and returned to his funeral home when the second surge of infections and deaths started late last year and into this year.

Baloney finds it heartbreaking to watch the pandemic’s impact on the community, and he goes the extra mile to give those who have lost loved ones to the coronavirus all the support he can.

The Louisiana Department of Health acknowledged that it isn’t looking at potential connections between air pollution and COVID-19 hospitalization and death rates in Cancer Alley communities like St. John the Baptist Parish. “With COVID-19 being so new to Louisiana, the U.S., and the world, connecting the effects of the disease to environmental implications is still highly challenging. In Louisiana, we don’t currently have enough information to make these connections,” Litten said by email.

Baloney isn’t surprised that the Louisiana health department isn’t looking for a connection between air pollution and the pandemic’s death count, but he says that he sees the impacts in his own Cancer Alley community and in his work every day.

The Tulane Environmental Law Clinic published an analysis of the connection between COVID-19 and fenceline communities in May 2020. That early study found Black communities are overburdened with both COVID-19 deaths and air pollutants that harm the respiratory and immune systems.

“The COVID-19 pandemic reveals the urgent and critical need to reduce the burden of air pollution on Louisiana’s black and economically disadvantaged communities,” Kimberly Terrell, one of the authors of the report, later published in the journal Environmental Justice, said in a news release. “Our study, along with many others, provides evidence that long-term exposure to harmful air pollutants should be considered a pre-existing condition for COVID-19.”

Wilma Subra is a technical advisor to the environmental advocacy group Louisiana Environmental Action Network and has been working with the Concerned Citizens group since 2016. “If you wanted to study the connection between pollution and the impact COVID-19 is having on fenceline communities, more monitoring for volatile organic compounds and particulate matter should be done,” she told me. According to Subra, ideally the state should be monitoring both of these type of pollutants at the fencelines of all polluting plants next to residential areas. “Then you would look at results compared to the hospital records of the people that get the sickness,” Subra said

Taylor, now out of the hospital and regaining his strength, told me over the phone that he is not surprised that the State of Louisiana is not examining the potential connections between the bad air in his community and impacts from the coronavirus.

He and members of his group believe that state environmental regulators and the health department have been working against the group from the start. Taylor pointed out that Dr. Chuck Carr Brown, Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, labeled the group as fearmongers at December 2016 Parish Council meeting when they asked the parish council to force Denka to cut chloroprene emissions to the level deemed safe by the EPA. Brown later tried to backtrack his comment but never expressed support for Denka to lower emissions more than 85 percent.

A health study done by the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR) that was released in July 2019 provided evidence that Taylor’s community is at pronounced risk of cancer and other negative health effects due to toxic chemicals in the air. A peer-reviewed and updated version of that report, which Taylor and Hampton contributed to, was published this year on February 18 by the journal Environmental Justice.

In November 2019, the Louisiana Department of Health announced plans to conduct a first-ever scientific inquiry into cancer cases around the Denka plant near St. John the Baptist Parish.

“Instead of doing anything to help us after the health study was published, the state decided to do its own study,” Taylor said. While he welcomes the state’s effort, he doesn’t think it should stop state regulators from acting to protect the community from the plant’s emissions in the meantime. “The EPA indicated an elevated risk of cancer for our community. We shouldn’t have to wait till we get cancer and can prove the EPA right.”

The Board of Health tasked the Louisiana State University to send students to homes within a 1.5 mile radius of the Denka plant to collect data on incidences of cancer and then match the data from residents with medical reports. If the data differs from what they find in the Louisiana Tumor Registry, which tracks the state’s cancer incidences, then that data will be updated.

Due to the pandemic, the survey is being done by phone instead of in person. However, Taylor doesn’t see how that approach can succeed in this community. He has yet to receive a call from anyone tied to the study, and the few community members he knows who have received a call told him that the questions they were asked didn’t make much sense to them. Hampton pointed out that community members she knows who did participate didn’t feel comfortable talking about their family’s health status over the phone.

Counting Deaths

A victim of Covid-19 being buried in St. Charles Parish, LA, on January 30, 2021. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

While the Louisiana Tumor Registry’s records don’t show an increase in deaths caused by cancer incidences linked to industrial pollution in Cancer Alley, some environmental advocates say they don’t have much confidence in the accuracy of those records. Neither does Baloney, the funeral home owner, who says he has no doubt that the oil refineries and petrochemical plants around him impact his community’s health.

The tumor registry bases its cancer count on reports from medical records, Baloney pointed out, but he has tended to many families who lost loved ones who hadn’t sought medical help before they died. With the increased deaths during the pandemic, the tumor registry will likely see a decline in deaths attributed to cancer, he says, because the coronavirus was the main cause of death for so many people, even if they also suffered from cancer.

Courtney Baloney leading pallbearers at a funeral in St. John the Baptist parish on October 10, 2020. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

Woman wearing an K95 mask at a funeral on January 30, 2021 for a loved one who died from Covid-19. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

Funeral in St. John the Baptist Parish in October 10, 2020 while the second surge of the pandemic hit Louisiana. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

On top of that, Baloney suspects that the state of Louisiana has undercounted the number of deaths due to the coronavirus from the start, due to the lack of free testing sites in Cancer Alley. Numerous people whose bodies he embalmed last year were never tested or examined by the coroner, so there is no way to determine whether or not the people he helped lay to rest died of COVID-19.

Some churches in Louisiana still don’t hold funeral services, and many of those in Cancer Alley communities don’t allow open caskets. That reality hits especially hard for Black families, says Baloney, because viewings are a deeply ingrained part of Black culture in America.

People leaving Samuel Gordon’s funeral in St. James Parish on December 5, 2020. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

Family members at Samuel Gordon’s funeral in St. James Parish in a church set up where every other row was in use. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

Samuel Gordon’s burial in St. James Parish on December 5, 2020. Credit: Julie Dermansky.

He considers depriving Black families a viewing following the death of a loved one to be another form of racial injustice. According to the CDC, there are no known risks of attending a service for someone who died of COVID-19. When churches are open for funerals but forbid viewings, Baloney says he holds viewings at his funeral home, and when necessary, the funerals too. He says he makes sure those attending follow safety protocols for social distancing and masking.

With a front-seat to the grief and devastation caused by this pandemic, especially for Black communities in Cancer Alley, Baloney says he is looking forward to a return to normal. But like many, he feels that time can’t come fast enough.

Photos in this report were produced with the support of a grant from the Magnum Foundation.

Atlantic Ocean circulation weakens, sparking climate worries

CBS News

Atlantic Ocean circulation weakens, sparking climate worries

Jeff Berardelli February 26, 2021

An influential current system in the Atlantic Ocean, which plays a vital role in redistributing heat throughout our planet’s climate system, is now moving more slowly than it has in at least 1,600 years. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience from some of the world’s leading experts in this field.

Scientists believe that part of this slowing is directly related to our warming climate, as melting ice alters the balance in northern waters. Its impact may be seen in storms, heat waves and sea-level rise. And it bolsters concerns that if humans are not able to limit warming, the system could eventually reach a tipping point, throwing global climate patterns into disarray.

The Gulf Stream along the U.S. East Coast is an integral part of this system, which is known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. It was made famous in the 2004 film “The Day After Tomorrow,” in which the ocean current abruptly stops, causing immense killer storms to spin up around the globe, like a super-charged tornado in Los Angeles and a wall of water smashing into New York City.

As is the case with many sci-fi movies, the plot is based on a real concept but the impacts are taken to a dramatic extreme. Fortunately, an abrupt halting of the current is not expected anytime soon — if ever. Even if the current were to eventually stop — and that is heavily debated — the result would not be instant larger-than-life storms, but over years and decades the impacts would certainly be devastating for our planet.

Recent research has shown that the circulation has slowed down by at least 15% since 1950. Scientists in the new study say the weakening of the current is “unprecedented in the past millennium.”

Because everything is connected, the slowdown is undoubtedly already having an impact on Earth systems, and by the end of the century it is estimated the circulation may slow by 34% to 45% if we continue to heat the planet. Scientists fear that kind of slowdown would put us dangerously close to tipping points.

Importance of the Global Ocean Conveyor Belt

Because the equator receives a lot more direct sunlight than the colder poles, heat builds up in the tropics. In an effort to reach balance, the Earth sends this heat northward from the tropics and sends cold south from the poles. This is what causes the wind to blow and storms to form.

The majority of that heat is redistributed by the atmosphere. But the rest is more slowly moved by the oceans in what is called the Global Ocean Conveyor Belt — a worldwide system of currents connecting the world’s oceans, moving in all different directions horizontally and vertically.

Through years of scientific research it has become clear that the Atlantic portion of the conveyor belt — the AMOC — is the engine that drives its operation. It moves water at 100 times the flow of the Amazon river. Here’s how it works.

A narrow band of warm, salty water in the tropics near Florida, called the Gulf Stream, is carried northward near the surface into the North Atlantic. When it reaches the Greenland region, it cools sufficiently enough to become more dense and heavier than the surrounding waters, at which point it sinks. That cold water is then carried southward in deep water currents.

Through proxy records like ocean sediment cores, which allow scientists to reconstruct the distant past going back millions of years, scientists know that this current has the capacity to slow and stop, and when it does the climate in the Northern Hemisphere can change quickly.

One important mechanism through the ages, which acts as a lever of sorts controlling the speed of the AMOC, is the melting of glacial ice and resulting influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic. That’s because fresh water is less salty, and therefore less dense, than sea water, and it does not sink as readily. Too much fresh water means the conveyor belt loses the sinking part of its engine and thus loses its momentum.

That’s what scientists believe is happening now as ice in the Arctic, in places like Greenland, melts at an accelerating pace due to human-caused climate change.

Recently scientists have noticed a cold blob, also known as the North Atlantic warming hole, in a patch of the North Atlantic around southern Greenland — one of the only places that’s actually cooling on the planet.

The fact that climate models predicted this lends more evidence that it is indicative of excess Greenland ice melting, more rainfall and a consequent slowdown of heat transport northward from the tropics.

Almost all of the globe is warming except for a cold blob in the North Atlantic. / Credit: NASA

In order to ascertain just how unprecedented the recent slowing of the AMOC is, the research team compiled proxy data taken mainly from nature’s archives like ocean sediments and ice cores, reaching back over 1,000 years. This helped them reconstruct the flow history of the AMOC.

The team used a combination of three different types of data to obtain information about the history of the ocean currents: temperature patterns in the Atlantic Ocean, subsurface water mass properties, and deep-sea sediment grain sizes, dating back 1,600 years.

While each individual piece of proxy data is not a perfect representation of the AMOC evolution, the combination of them revealed a robust picture of the overturning circulation, says lead author of the paper, Dr. Levke Caesar, a climate physicist at Maynooth University in Ireland.

“The study results suggest that it has been relatively stable until the late 19th century,” explains Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

The first significant change in their records of ocean circulation happened in the mid 1800s, after a well-known regional cooling period called the Little Ice Age, which spanned from the 1400s to the 1800s. During this time, colder temperatures frequently froze rivers across Europe and destroyed crops.

“With the end of the Little Ice Age in about 1850, the ocean currents began to decline, with a second, more drastic decline following since the mid-20th century,” said Rahmstorf. That second decline in recent decades was likely due to global warming from the burning and emissions of fossil fuel pollution.

Nine of the 11 data-sets used in the study showed that the 20th century AMOC weakening is statistically significant, which provides evidence that the slowdown is unprecedented in the modern era.

Impact on storms, heat waves and sea-level rise

Caesar says this is already reverberating in the climate system on both sides of the Atlantic. “As the current slows down, more water can pile up at the U.S. East Coast, leading to an enhanced sea-level rise [in places like New York and Boston],” she explained.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Europe, evidence shows there are impacts to weather patterns, such as the track of storms coming off the Atlantic as well as heat waves.

“Specifically, the European heat wave of summer 2015 has been linked to the record cold in the northern Atlantic in that year — this seemingly paradoxical effect occurs because a cold northern Atlantic promotes an air pressure pattern that funnels warm air from the south into Europe,” she said.

According to Caesar, these impacts will likely continue to get worse as the Earth continues to warm and the AMOC slows down even further, with more extreme weather events like a change of the winter storm track coming off the Atlantic and potentially more intense storms.

CBS News asked Caesar the million-dollar question: If or when the AMOC may reach a tipping point leading to a complete shutdown? She replied: “Well, the problem is that we don’t know yet at how many degrees of global warming to hit the tipping point of the AMOC. But the more it slows down the more likely it is that we do.”

Moreover, she explained, “Tipping does not mean that this happens instantaneously but rather that due to feedback mechanisms the continued slow down cannot be stopped once the tipping point has been crossed, even if we managed to reduce global temperatures again.”

Caesar believes if we stay below 2 degrees Celsius of global warming it seems unlikely that the AMOC would tip, but if we hit 3 or 4 degrees of warming the chances for the tipping rise. Staying below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a goal of the Paris Agreement, which the U.S. just rejoined.

If the tipping point is crossed and the AMOC halts, it is likely the Northern Hemisphere would cool due to a significant decrease in tropical heat being pushed northward. But beyond that, Caesar says that science does not yet know exactly what would happen. “That is part of the risk.”

But humans do have some agency in all this, and the decisions we make now in terms of how quickly we transition away from fossil fuels will determine the outcome.

“Whether or not we cross the tipping point by the end this century depends on the amount of warming, i.e. the amount of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere,” explains Caesar.

One Third of Freshwater Fish Face Extinction, New Report Warns

EcoWatch – Fish

One Third of Freshwater Fish Face Extinction, New Report Warns

Olivia Rosane February 23, 2021

The numbers of migratory freshwater fish such as salmon have declined 76 percent since 1970. Mike Bons / 500px / Getty Images

The latest warning of the Earth’s mounting extinction crisis is coming from its lakes and rivers.

A new report from a coalition of 16 conservation groups warns that almost a third of freshwater fish species face extinction because of human activity.

“Nowhere is the world’s nature crisis more acute than in our rivers, lakes and wetlands, and the clearest indicator of the damage we are doing is the rapid decline in freshwater fish populations. They are the aquatic version of the canary in the coal mine, and we must heed the warning,” Stuart Orr, WWF global freshwater lead, said in a statement Tuesday announcing the report.

WWF is one of the many organizations behind the report, along with the Alliance for Freshwater Life, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy, to name a few. Together, the groups emphasized the incredible diversity of the world’s freshwater fish and their importance for human wellbeing.

There are a total of 18,075 freshwater fish species in the world, accounting for 51 percent of all fish species and 25 percent of all vertebrates. They are an important food source for 200 million people and provide work for 60 million. But their numbers are in decline. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species has declared 80 to be extinct, 16 of those in 2020 alone. The numbers of migratory freshwater fish such as salmon have declined 76 percent since 1970, while mega-fish such as beluga sturgeon have fallen by 94 percent in the same time period. In fact, freshwater biodiversity is plummeting at twice the rate of biodiversity in the oceans and forests.

Despite this, freshwater fish get much less attention than their saltwater counterparts, the report authors say. Titled “The World’s Forgotten Fishes,” it argues that policy makers rarely consider river wildlife when making decisions.

The main threats to freshwater fish include building dams, syphoning river water for irrigation, releasing wastewater and draining wetlands. Other factors include overfishing, introducing invasive species and the climate crisis.

“As we look to adapt to climate change and we start to think about all the discussions that governments are going to have on biodiversity, it’s really a time for us to shine a light back on freshwater,” Orr told NBC News.

To protect these forgotten fishes, the report authors outlined a six-point plan:

1. Let rivers flow more naturally;
2. Improve water quality in freshwater ecosystems;
3. Protect and restore critical habitats;
4. End overfishing and unsustainable sand mining in rivers and lakes;
5. Prevent and control invasions by non-native species; and
6. Protect free-flowing rivers and remove obsolete dams.

They also called on world leaders to include freshwater ecosystems in an ambitious biodiversity agreement at the upcoming UN Convention on Biological Diversity conference in Kunming, China.

But the solution will require more than just government action.

“It’s now more urgent than ever that we find the collective political will and effective collaboration with private sector, governments, NGOs and communities, to implement nature-based solutions that protect freshwater species, while also ensuring human needs are met,” Carmen Revenga of The Nature Conservancy told BBC News.

Extinction: Freshwater fish in ‘catastrophic’ decline

BBC News

Extinction: Freshwater fish in ‘catastrophic’ decline

Helen Briggs, BBC Environment correspondent February 22, 2021

Salmon in a Scottish river — Healthy rivers are essential for fish to thrive

A report has warned of a “catastrophic” decline in freshwater fish, with nearly a third threatened by extinction.

Conservation groups said 80 species were known to have gone extinct, 16 in the last year alone.

Millions of people rely on freshwater fish for food and as a source of income through angling and the pet trade.

But numbers have plummeted due to pressures including pollution, unsustainable fishing, and the damming and draining of rivers and wetlands.

The report said populations of migratory fish have fallen by three-quarters in the last 50 years.

Over the same time period, populations of larger species, known as “megafish”, have crashed by 94%.

The report, The World’s Forgotten Fishes, is by 16 conservation groups, including WWF, the London Zoological Society (ZSL), Global Wildlife Conservation and The Nature Conservancy.

Dead fish, Brazil — Dead fish in the water near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In UK waters, the sturgeon and the burbot have vanished, salmon are disappearing and the European eel remains critically endangered.

According to the WWF, much of the decline is driven by the poor state of rivers, mostly as a result of pollution, dams and sewage.

It has called on the government to restore freshwater habitats to good health through proper enforcement of existing laws, strengthening protections in the Environment Bill and championing a strong set of global targets for the recovery of nature.

Dave Tickner, from WWF, said freshwater habitats are some of the most vibrant on earth, but – as this report shows – they are in catastrophic decline around the world.

“Nature is in freefall and the UK is no exception: wildlife struggles to survive, let alone thrive, in our polluted waters,” said the organization’s chief adviser on freshwater.

“If we are to take this government’s environmental promises seriously, it must get its act together, clean up our rivers and restore our freshwater habitats to good health. ”

Sturgeon, Caspian river — Large fish such as sturgeon are dying out faster

Carmen Revenga of The Nature Conservancy said freshwater fish are a diverse and unique group of species that are not only essential for the healthy functioning of our rivers, lakes and wetlands, but millions of people, particularly the poor, also depend on them for their food and income.

Commenting, Dr. Jeremy Biggs, of the Freshwater Habitats Trust, said to protect freshwater biodiversity, we need to consider both large and small waters, and to protect all our freshwaters: ponds, lakes, streams and rivers.