Study: Pandemic’s cleaner air added heat to warming planet
By Beth Borenstein February 2, 2021
In this Nov. 12, 2020 file photo, people take selfies of the Pudong skyline as they stand on the Bund in Shanghai, China. A new study finds that cleaner air from the pandemic lockdown warmed the planet a bit in 2020, especially in places such as the eastern United States, Russia and China. Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021 study found the pandemic lockdown reduced soot and sulfate air pollution, but those particles also reflect the sun’s heat and help cool areas briefly. (AP Photo)
Earth spiked a bit of a fever in 2020, partly because of cleaner air from the pandemic lockdown, a new study found.
For a short time, temperatures in some places in the eastern United States, Russia and China were as much as half to two-thirds of a degree (.3 to .37 degrees Celsius) warmer. That’s due to less soot and sulfate particles from car exhaust and burning coal, which normally cool the atmosphere temporarily by reflecting the sun’s heat, Tuesday’s study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters reported.
Overall, the planet was about .05 degrees (.03 degrees Celsius) warmer for the year because the air had fewer cooling aerosols, which unlike carbon dioxide is pollution you can see, the study found.
“Cleaning up the air can actually warm the planet because that (soot and sulfate) pollution results in cooling” which climate scientists have long known, said study lead author Andrew Gettelman, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His calculations come from comparing 2020 weather to computer models that simulated a 2020 without the pollution reductions from pandemic lockdowns.
This temporary warming effect from fewer particles was stronger in 2020 than the effect of reduced heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, Gettelman said. That’s because carbon stays in the atmosphere for more than a century with long-term effects, while aerosols remain in the air about a week.
Even without the reduction in cooling aerosols, global temperatures in 2020 already were flirting with breaking yearly heat record because of the burning of coal, oil and natural gas — and the aerosol effect may have been enough to help make this the hottest year in NASA’s measuring system, said top NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, who wasn’t part of this study but said it confirms other research.
“Clean air warms the planet a tiny bit, but it kills a lot fewer people with air pollution,” Gettelman said.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Kenyan woman finds a way to recycle plastic waste into bricks that are stronger than concrete
Catherine Garcia February 3, 2021
Using her ingenuity and engineering skills, Nzambi Matee found a way to help the environment by converting plastic waste into building materials.
In 2017, Matee opened a factory in Nairobi called Gjenge Makers, where workers take plastic waste, mix it with sand, and heat it up, with the resulting brick being five to seven times stronger than concrete. The factory accepts waste that other facilities “cannot process anymore, they cannot recycle,” Matee told Reuters. “That is what we get.”
The bricks are made of plastic that was originally used for milk and shampoo bottles, cereal and sandwich bags, buckets, and ropes. Every day, Gjenge Makers produces about 1,500 bricks, in different sizes and colors. Matee is a materials engineer, and she designed the factory’s machines after becoming sick of waiting for government officials to do something about plastic pollution. “I was tired of being on the sidelines,” she told Reuters.
Since opening, Gjenge Makers has recycled 20 tons of plastic waste, and Matee plans on adding a larger production line that will allow the factory to triple its output.
Trump’s assault on the environment is over. Now we must reverse the damage
Jonathan B Jarvis and Gary Machli February 1, 2021
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Now that the Trump administration’s four-year assault on environmental protection and conservation has crested, the work of restoration must begin. As professionals in the field of conservation, we watched with dread and dismay as the laws, policies, science, and stewardship of waters, air, wildlife, and public lands were systematically dismantled.
While the damage is profound, the Biden-Harris administration can reverse these harms, restart fundamental environmental policies and programs, and restore the federal commitment to environmental protection and lands and waters stewardship. What is needed is a tactical plan for restoration.
Ten months before the November 2020 election, we convened a team of diverse environmental leaders with government, nonprofit, private sector, and academic experience. They were from both coasts and the heartland, the north-west and the south-east, rural America and large cities. Meeting virtually as The Restoration Project, they worked over several months to create a carefully researched and prioritized list of the top 100 important actions to be taken to restore the nation’s environment. The plan was delivered to the Biden-Harris transition team in November, and we are releasing it today to the public here.
Some of the plan’s top priorities have already been met, including rejoining the Paris Climate agreement (#1), issuing executive orders on meeting climate change goals (#2), and halting the Keystone XL pipeline (#25). Other restorative actions will take longer, especially where the Trump administration locked in changes with new federal regulations.
For instance, final regulations were issued by the Environmental Protection Agency that weakened fuel economy standards for cars and trucks from 54 mpg to 40 mpg by 2025, which may exacerbate the climate crisis. The EPA also finalized the so-called “transparency rule” that would restrict the agency from considering scientific studies that do not reveal raw data, including confidential or personal identifying information. The result is that studies including such personal information can no longer be used to evaluate toxic substances that endanger public safety. The team prioritized these reversals among its top 10, and recommended either they be repealed by Congress or a new rule be promulgated, a process that will take several years.
Some of the “harms” are already being challenged in the courts, such as drastic reductions of both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. In other cases, the courts have ruled the Trump action as illegal, as in the replacement of the Clean Power Plan with one that did not protect air quality. The Biden-Harris administration can restore the boundaries of the two national monuments and issue a new, stronger plan for clean air.
The Trump administration rolled back a series of protections for the nation’s wildlife, mostly through policy directives within the interior department. The plan calls for the new interior secretary to restore protections for migratory birds that could be killed by industrial development, eliminate the practice of shooting female grizzly bears in their dens in Alaska, and prevent the shooting of polar bears by private companies exploring for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The plan also calls for a restoration of protection for special places that we all thought were legally protected from development and impact, including road building and logging in the Tongass National Forest of Alaska, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and oil and gas development adjacent to Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
The detailed approaches required for restoration and outlined in the report – executive orders, policy changes, and prudent use of the Congressional Review Act– may seem mundane, but this is what we must do to restore what has been lost, threatened, and harmed. Some of the actions will be easily completed in the first 100 days of the administration and others will take years to reverse, requiring patience and persistence. We recommend that the administration track and report to the American people progress on the accomplishments detailed in the plan.
The Restoration Project was written for the government as a tactical plan for progress. But it is also a call to action for a broader conservation movement that includes those working to restore civil rights, rural economies, public health, scientific integrity, and environmental justice. The new administration should be supported in its progress, applauded for its successes – and held accountable when action is forestalled or lacking.
Jonathan B Jarvis served 40 years with the National Park Service and was its 18th director. Dr Gary Machlis served as science advisor to the director of the National Park Service and is a professor of environmental sustainability at Clemson University. They are the co-authors of The Future of Conservation in America: A Chart for Rough Water (University of Chicago Press).
Op-Ed: We need open space, and Washington can help us get it
Tim Palmer February 1, 2021
Runyon Canyon Park, in the Hollywood Hills, was the beneficiary of federal Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars in recent years. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
We who live in the West benefit from public ownership of 47% of the land across 11 states, most of it managed by federal agencies. It’s our wild backyard — mountains, forests and seashores available to all for free or for a nominal entrance charge. But only 4% of the land in the rest of the country is publicly owned, and even in the West, much of our “commons” is remote, far from cities where people may need it most.
Fortunately, we have a national program for adding to America’s open-space estate: the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Since 1964 a portion of the receipts from offshore oil and gas leases has gone to federal, state and local agencies to acquire and preserve land for recreation and conservation. Unfortunately, Congress diverted much of the money — $22 billion by one estimate — to other federal programs.
Then in 2019, after the fund came close to sunsetting, it was permanently authorized, and in 2020 the bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act mandated that the $900 million a year now set aside for the fund must be tapped solely for conservation and recreation.
The money is administered through four federal agencies — the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service — for state, local and national projects. In Southern California in recent years, Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars have helped refurbish L.A.’s Lincoln Park swimming pool, added to Runyon Canyon hiking trails and improved steelhead habitat in Malibu Creek. At the national level, the fund has increased park service holdings by more than 2 million acres. Imagine how much more could have been done with the billions Congress repurposed over the years.
Since the fund was established, our need for recreation areas and public land has only grown. Fifty-five years ago, the U.S. population was 194 million; today it’s 330 million, with most of us crowded into urban areas. The increase in outdoor activity during the pandemic — up sharply according to federal and local sources — is just one indicator of our collective need for more and better access to the outdoors. And the conservation fund’s programs have benefits that stretch far beyond recreation.
Consider, for example, the climate crisis. Each year billions of taxpayer dollars are spent trying to protect homes from fires, floods and sea level rise, much of it induced or made worse by global warming. Disaster relief follows, along with subsidies to rebuild, followed by a repeat of the whole process. Think instead how we could avoid public and private losses if those who have settled or invested in the path of fire and flood could have the option of selling their land for open space and recreation areas that can double as buffers against disasters and hazards.
In addition to tax savings and safety nets, parklands provide reservoirs of carbon sequestered in unlogged forests, reducing the greenhouse effect that’s the root cause of global warming. Land kept free from development protects watersheds that are the sources of our drinking water. And with climate change triggering a shocking loss of biodiversity, the U.S. should join 50 other nations in committing to protect 30% of the world’s wildlife habitat.
“Getting the annual appropriation for the Land and Water Conservation Fund was an extraordinary accomplishment in the last Congress,” said Zach Spector of the Western Rivers Conservancy. “The need now is to see that the federal and other agencies have the wherewithal to spend that money.” It is not an idle challenge, coming at a time when the government groups charged with protecting and adding to public land have lost staff, expertise and morale to attrition, erosion and outright hostility from the Trump administration.
Despite our divisions, many Americans agree that safeguarding more land for public use and conservation is how we improve America. The popularity of land-protection programs has been evident over the last several decades in the passage of multiple open-space bond initiatives in California. Sponsoring several, Jerry Meral, formerly of the Planning and Conservation League, said, “Voters repeatedly indicate that they support funding to secure more parklands and open space.” As another barometer of opinion, support for the Land and Water Fund in 2019 and 2020 came from both political parties, one of few issues to gain bipartisan votes during four years of toxic partisan mayhem.
We now have an opportunity to do for coming generations what insightful predecessors did for us when they set aside the parks, forests and vistas that we use and admire today. We must make sure Congress and the new administration double down on protecting our most valuable remaining open space.
Tim Palmer is the author of “America’s Great Mountain Trails,” “Rivers of California” and other books.
Op-Ed: Collapseologists are warning humanity that business-as-usual will make the Earth uninhabitable
Christopher Ketcham and Jeff Gibbs January 31, 2021
(Photo illustration by Nicole Vas/Los Angeles Times; John Antczak/Associated Press)
Hundreds of scientists, writers and academics from 30 countries sounded a warning to humanity in an open letter published in the Guardian in December: Policymakers and the rest of us must “engage openly with the risk of disruption and even collapse of our societies.” “Damage to the climate and environment” will be the overarching cause, and “researchers in many areas” have projected widespread social collapse as “a credible scenario this century.”
It’s not hard to find the “collapseology” studies they are talking about. In a report for the sustainability group Future Earth, a survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, freshwater shortages and the broad degradation of life-sustaining ecosystems “have the potential to impact and amplify one another in ways that might cascade to create global systemic collapse.” A 2019 report from the Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration, a think tank in Australia, projected that a rapidly warming world of depleted resources and mounting pollution would lead to “a largely uninhabitable Earth” and a “breakdown of nations and the international order.” Analysts in the U.S. and British military over the past two years have issued similar warnings of climate- and environment-driven chaos.
Of course, if you are a nonhuman species, collapse is well underway. Ninety-nine percent of the tall grass prairie in North America is gone, by one estimate; 96% of the biomass of mammals — biomass is their weight on Earth — now consists of humans, our pets and our farm animals; nearly 90% of the fish stocks the U.N. monitors are either fully exploited, over exploited or depleted; a multiyear study in Germany showed a 76% decline in insect biomass.
The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic, institutional failures and economic crises in the world’s most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in resilience.
The international scholars’ warning doesn’t venture to say exactly what collapse will look like or when it might happen. Collapseology is more concerned with identifying trends and with them the dangers of everyday civilization: ever-expanding economic growth, rapacious consumption of resources and the saturation of the planet’s limited repositories for waste.
Among the signatories of the warning was William Rees, a population ecologist at the University of British Columbia best known as the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept, which measures the total amount of environmental input needed to maintain a given lifestyle. With the current footprint of humanity — most egregiously the footprint of the energy- and resource-entitled Global North — “it seems that some form of global societal collapse is inevitable, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,” Rees said in an email.
The most pressing proximate cause of biophysical collapse is what he calls overshoot: humans exploiting natural systems faster than the systems can regenerate. The human enterprise is financing its growth and development by liquidating biophysical “capital” essential to its own existence. We are dumping waste at rates beyond nature’s assimilative capacity. Warming temperatures, plunging biodiversity, worldwide deforestation and ocean pollution, among other problems, are all important in their own right. But each is a mere symptom of overshoot, says Rees.
The message we should glean from the evidence is that all human enterprise is ultimately determined by biophysical limits. We are exceptional animals, but we are not exempt from the laws of nature.
Another of the signatories on the warning letter is Will Steffen, a retired Earth systems scientist from Australian National University. Steffen singles out the neoliberal economic growth paradigm — the pursuit of ever expanding GDP — as “incompatible with a well-functioning Earth system at the planetary level.” Collapse, he told an interviewer, “is the most likely outcome of the present trajectory of the current system, as prophetically modelled in ‘Limits to Growth. ‘ ”
“Limits to Growth” is a 150-page bombshell of a book published in 1972. The authors, a team of MIT scientists, created a computerized system-dynamics model called World3, the first of its kind, to examine worldwide growth trends from 1900 to 1970. They extrapolated from the historical data to model 12 future scenarios projected to the year 2100.
The models showed that any system based on exponential economic and population growth crashed eventually. The gloomiest model was the one in which the “present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged.” In that “business as usual” scenario, collapse would begin slowly in the 2020s and accelerate thereafter. Updates to the “Limits” study have found that its projections, so far, have been spot-on.
Only if we discuss the consequences of our biophysical limits, the December warning letter says, can we reduce their “likelihood, speed, severity and harm.” And yet messengers of the coming turmoil are likely to be ignored — crowned doomers, collapseniks, marginal and therefore discountable. We all want to hope things will turn out fine. “Man is a victim of dope/In the incurable form of hope,” as poet Ogden Nash wrote.
The hundreds of scholars who signed the letter are intent on quieting hope that ignores preparedness. Let’s look directly into the abyss of collapse, they say, and deal with the terrible possibilities of what we see there “to make the best of a turbulent future.”
Christopher Ketcham is the author, most recently, of “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West.” Jeff Gibbs is the writer and director of the documentary “Planet of the Humans.”
Farming needs to go back to old fashioned methods to help the environment, says PM’s father as he takes on new climate change role
Helena Horton January 31, 2021
Stanley Johnson will be asking the government to commit to wilder farming at COP26 – Eddie Mulholland
Farming needs to go back to old-fashioned methods to help the environment, the Prime Minister’s father has said, as he takes on a new climate change role.
Stanley Johnson is today announcing that he is the new International Ambassador for the Conservative Environment Network (CEN).
The author has long been a campaigner on green issues, and is a passionate advocate of “rewilding”, recently visiting some reintroduced bears in Italy.
He is expected to lobby for wilder farming at the major climate change conference COP26, scheduled to take place in Glasgow this summer.
Mr Johnson, a passionate rewilder, told The Telegraph about his vision of farming, explaining: “It’s not rewilding as such but going back to methods of farming which are very much the way things were. Rain fed agriculture, grass fed agriculture, even not ploughing up. You may gain more in carbon terms from doing that than from planting a load of trees.
“There is an absolute need for a change in the farming system in Britain and as we come out of the EU that’s an amazing way to do that. I have just agreed to be the international ambassador for the Conservative Environmental Network. We are going to be focusing on the Climate Change Conference. It’s an honourary assignment of course I’m not going to ask to be paid at my age!”
His son, Boris Johnson, currently has no plans to ban intensive farming and force farmers to go back to ancient methods, though the government is bringing in a payments scheme for farms which use their land to improve the environment.
However, Stanley said that he has tried to make his land suitable for the rewilded creatures, but it has been a struggle, and he wants to be allowed to release them on the river running through his Exmoor estate. However, this is not allowed under current rules, in place to prevent the animals running amok.
He is pushing for his son to get the government to publish its National Beaver Strategy to enable them to be let loose up and down England’s waterways.
He told The Telegraph: “Beavers have been put on hold at the moment because of coronavirus, but I need to think about how I am going to do it. You have the pen, a biggish pen covering a couple of acres and some running water, you could just make a pond. I need to be very careful because the pond could dry up or the whole place could flood and they could be washed away down the river and I’d get in trouble. Of course I have the river, but they can’t be released there until we have a National Beaver Policy!”
To Help Save Bumble Bees, Plant These Flowers in Your Spring Garden
Madison Dapcevich January 30, 2020
The endangered yellow-faced bumble bee consistently chose the large-leaved lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus), seen above, even when others were available. vil.sandi / Flickr /CC BY-ND 2.0
In an effort to aid North American bumblebee conservation, a group of California researchers has identified which flowers certain bee species prefer.
There are nearly 20,000 known bee species in the world, 4,000 of which are native to the U.S., according to the U.S. Geological Society. Bees pollinate roughly three-quarters of all fruits, nuts and vegetables grown across the country and one of every four bites of food can be credited to bee pollination. But bees are in major decline as nearly 40 percent of honey bees have declined in the last year, according to ABC News. Populations have dropped for a number of reasons, including parasites, pesticides and a lack of flowers on the landscape — all factors that highlight a need for understanding habitat needed to sustain and recover populations.
Working with the Entomological Society of America, scientists set out to determine which flowers bumble bees prefer in an effort to aid land managers seeking to restore critical habitat.
“It’s important to consider the availability of plants when determining what’s selected for by bees,” Jerry Cole, study author and biologist with the Institute for Bird Populations (IBP), said. “Often studies will use the proportion of captures on a plant species alone to determine which plants are most important to bees. Without comparison to how available those plants are, you might think a plant is preferentially selected by bees, when it is simply very abundant.”
To come to their conclusions, researchers captured more than a dozen different species of bumblebees on more than 100 different species of flowers in the Sierra Nevada region of California. Researchers recorded what species of flower each bee was captured on and then estimated the number of plants found in each plot. The findings suggest that different bumblebee species select specific flowers even when foraging across the same landscape.
“We discovered plants that were big winners for all bumble bee species but, just as importantly, plant species that were very important for only a single bumble bee species,” said Helen Loffland, a meadow species specialist with the Institute for Bird Populations. “This study allowed us to provide a concise, scientifically based list of important plant species to use in habitat restoration that will meet the needs of multiple bumble bee species and provide blooms across the entire annual lifecycle.”
The yellow-faced bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii) was most abundantly observed. The endangered insects preferred large-leaved lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus) and consistently chose the flowering plant even when others were available. Three of five bumblebee species were found to prefer A. urticifolia, a flowering plant in the mint family.
Some of other favorites? The fuzzy buzzing insects also preferred Oregon checker-mallow (Sidalcea oregana), Alpine mountainbalm (Monardella odoratissima), tall fringed bluebells (Mertensia ciliate) and cobwebby hedge nettle (Stachys albens).
It is important to note that bees likely don’t have natural preferences but instead choose flowers based on quality or quantity of nectar or pollen. People should interpret the results with caution because the researchers did not conclude whether plants were being used for pollen or nectar sources, CNN notes.
The U.S. Forest Service says that it is using the study results to identify areas where restoration efforts may make more ample bee habitat.
“This sort of knowledge can really increase the effectiveness of restoration for bumblebees in a way that is relatively easy and cost-effective to implement,” said Loffland, adding that the findings can be helpful to landowners who are restoring or managing areas that are habitat for native bees.
Climate change: 7 things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint
Yvette Killian, Producer
It’s the season for resolutions and for finding ways to reduce your carbon footprint and help the planet.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance Live, Kathryn Kellogg, founder of Going Zero Waste, a lifestyle website that provides information on living a more sustainable life, outlined the top seven things individuals can do now to mitigate climate change.
For starters Kellogg advocates reducing consumption of animal products, which in addition to meat, includes cheese and butter. According to a New York Times report, meat and dairy account for approximately 14.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas every year — the same amount as the combined emissions from all the cars, trucks, airplanes and ships in the world today.
“By cutting out a few of those products, adding in a little, a few more fresher products, we’ll be able to have a more positive impact on the planet and hopefully maybe even meet some other of your New Year’s resolutions like eating a little healthier,” said Kellogg.
This ties into her second tip — eating locally and seasonally. The less food has to travel to the consumer, the lower the carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere and less pollution created.
Directly above shot of various grilled vegetables served in plate on table at home during Christmas
The third way to be greener this year, said Kellogg, is to take a hard look at how you’re using energy. Be mindful of how much energy you’re consuming, unplug and shut off devices when not in use and use energy efficient appliances when possible.
“On average, 10% to 15% of the home’s electric bill comes from something called a phantom electricity. This is when you have something plugged in and charging, but it’s not actually charging. So for instance, you have your laptop charger plugged in, but it’s not hooked up to your laptop. You have your phone charger plugged in but it’s not hooked up to your phone. These things are still drawing power and it’s wasting energy and of course it’s costing you a lot of money,” she said.
Fourth on Kellogg’s list of climate resolutions: Reduce flying and driving, consider alternatives like mass transit and electric vehicles, but she cautions, that doesn’t mean rushing out to buy a new car.
“When it comes to looking at electric and hybrid vehicles, unless you have a very, very high emitting vehicle, one of the best things you can do is keep what you already have, because of course, a lot of emissions are made in the creation of an item,” she said, noting that driving less and carpooling are best ways to reduce emissions.
Fifth on the list is “stop before you shop.” That means buying less. According to Going Zero Waste, the average American throws out 4.4 lbs. of trash a day and Kellogg councils those looking to reduce consumption to ask themselves the following questions:
Do you really need it?
Is it really necessary?
Can something else make do?
Do you need to own it?
If the answer to these questions is still yes then at least “buy well,” which means thinking about where it came from and where it’s going after you’re through with it, Kellogg said.
This connects to the sixth step in reducing your carbon footprint this year: consider buying secondhand. The U.S. secondhand apparel market is currently valued at $379 billion according to Greenbiz. In 2019 the secondhand clothing market grew 21 times faster than traditional apparel markets and projects that the domestic secondhand clothing market will more than triple in value in the next 10 years going from $28 billion in 2019 to $80 billion in 2029, the company said.
“One of the most eco-friendly things you can buy is something that has already been bought, no new resources are needed and the creation of that item. So by buying something that’s already in the waste stream, you’re going to be able to prevent something from going to the landfill,” said Kellogg.
A worker walking between the heaps of garbage
The final thing is composting. According to Kellogg, half of household waste can be composted which leads to a reduction in methane and greenhouse gas emissions.
“I think that the main issue is everyone views it as very all or nothing. So it’s really intimidating to start. And a lot of people think, oh, if I want to help the planet that I have to go vegan, and I can’t do that, and it’s all about just taking those first initial steps,” said Kellogg, adding that it’s easy to make small lifestyle changes. “If you don’t want to go vegan tomorrow, fine. What if you can just start participating in meatless Mondays, and just try an experiment with a few new dishes. You don’t have to be all or nothing, you just have to get started.”
Goodbye, gas heat? Proposals in Washington state seek to phase out fossil fuel heating in buildings
By Tom Banse (Northwest News Network) January 26, 2021
A long goodbye to natural gas furnaces and water heating — and possibly other gas appliances — could begin with action by the Washington Legislature this winter. Separately, the Seattle City Council this week begins consideration of a similar proposal to eliminate fossil fuel-based heating in new commercial buildings.
“Buildings are one of our state’s most significant and fastest growing sources of carbon pollution. We must do better — and we can do better,” testified Michael Furze, head of the state energy office, on behalf of Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee.
Natural gas utilities and major business associations spoke against the state legislative proposal during an initial public hearing on Friday. The opponents said they want to preserve consumer choice and questioned whether the Pacific Northwest electric grid could handle a big increase in winter heating load.
In December, Inslee unveiled a package of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including this proposal to phase out natural gas for space and water heating. As initially conceived, Washington state would have forbidden use of fossil fuels for heating and hot water in new buildings by 2030. The plan sought to convert existing buildings to electric heat by 2050.
The scope of the measure was revised earlier this month when Inslee’s allies in the state legislature introduced identical proposals in the House and Senate to amend the state energy code. The 2030 date to ban heating with fossil fuels in new construction remains. There is no mandate to convert existing buildings from gas to electric heat, but an expectation that utilities will offer incentives for conversions.
Buildings account for the second biggest share of carbon pollution in Washington, after transportation, largely due to gas furnaces and water heaters such as these. Tom Banse / NW News Network
“If we don’t start with clean new buildings, we’re going to be bailing water out of a boat while we’re still drilling holes in the bottom of it,” said state Rep. Alex Ramel (D-Bellingham), the prime sponsor in the House. “That’s why we need to accelerate and strengthen our state’s energy code.”
The legislation is silent about use of natural gas for cooking and clothes dryers. In an interview, Ramel said lawmakers want to transition those appliances to clean energy as well. However, the details may be worked out later between natural gas utilities and regulators at the state utilities commission.
During the well-attended virtual public hearing before the state House Environment and Energy Committee, Cascade Natural Gas, Puget Sound Energy and the utility trade group Northwest Gas Association raised objections.
“[This bill] would jeopardize energy reliability, drive up costs to customers and put gas industry employees across Washington out of work,” said Alyn Spector, energy efficiency policy manager for Cascade Natural Gas. “This is not the time to eliminate good paying jobs.”
Business lobbying groups, including the influential Association of Washington Business and the home builders’ Building Industry Association of Washington, also voiced their opposition.
“As we saw this summer in California, we cannot take a healthy grid for granted and losses from even short-lived interruption of power supply can run into the billions,” said Peter Godlewski with AWB. “Shifting consumers and businesses away from natural gas to electricity puts severe pressure on the electric grid as a time when we’re retiring more generating capacity than ever.”
At this juncture it is hard to gauge the prospects for the gas heat phaseout proposal. Inslee, who made combating climate change a central plank of his brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has the benefit of large, supportive Democratic majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. But the capacity of lawmakers to get much done beyond the basics of passing new state budgets and dealing with the coronavirus pandemic while conducting most business virtually remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, an assortment of West Coast cities are tackling carbon pollution from buildings independently. Around 40 climate-conscious California cities and counties have already passed laws or codes to require new buildings to be all-electric.
Later this week, the Seattle City Council begins consideration of an ordinance to ban the use of fossil fuels for heating in new commercial and large apartment buildings. The proposed policy change does not apply to single family homes and duplexes because the city’s energy code that is open for amendment pertains only to commercial buildings. The effective date of Jan. 1, 2022, is much sooner than the state legislature’s proposal in the same vein.
“In Seattle, 35 percent of carbon emissions are from the building sector and they are rising,” Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment Director Jessica Finn Coven told state legislators in testimony Friday. “Constructing homes and buildings right the first time reduces the likelihood of costly retrofits in the future.”
The Bellingham City Council has also teed up electrification of buildings as part of a broader climate action package. In an email, Bellingham City Council member Michael Lilliquist said the pandemic had slowed down the work, but it is proceeding. He said city staff were running all of the proposed climate measures through a rigorous, multi-step evaluation process.
“We are not yet at the stage to offer specifics that can be incorporated into an ordinance or program,” Lilliquist said.
Scientists Launch ‘Four Steps for Earth’ to Protect Biodiversity
Olivia Rosane January 25, 2021
A dugong, also called a sea cow, swims with golden pilot jacks near Marsa Alam, Egypt, Red Sea. Alexis Rosenfeld / Getty Images.
In 2010, world leaders agreed to 20 targets to protect Earth’s biodiversity over the next decade. By 2020, none of them had been met. Now, the question is whether the world can do any better once new targets are set during the meeting of the UN Convention on Biodiversity in Kunming, China later this year.
To help turn the tide, a group of 22 research institutions have come together to develop four steps to protect life on Earth, the Environment Journal reported.
“The upcoming Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting, and adoption of the new Global Biodiversity Framework, represent an opportunity to transform humanity’s relationship with nature,” the researchers wrote in One Earth Friday. “Restoring nature while meeting human needs requires a bold vision, including mainstreaming biodiversity conservation in society.”
By mainstreaming biodiversity, the researchers mean that biodiversity should be considered by everyone who makes decisions about the use of natural resources, not just specialized conservation organizations.
To help with this goal, the researchers, led by the University of Oxford’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, developed a framework they are calling the “4Rs,” according to a University of Oxford press release. The point of the 4Rs is that they can be used by any group or individual, from the national to the local level, that needs to make a decision that will impact species and ecosystems.
The 4Rs are:
Refrain: Avoiding negative impacts on nature.
Reduce: Minimizing the harm caused by any unavoidable impacts.
Restore: Acting to quickly counteract any harm caused to nature.
Renew: Working to improve damaged ecosystems.
“This paper represents a real team effort, with authors from academia, business and government,” lead author and Oxford professor E.J. Milner-Gulland said of the goals in the press release. “We’re excited to launch this idea and hope that it will be useful to many different groups as they work to realise the vision of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. It’s a huge challenge, with many different facets, and we hope that Four Steps for the Earth will provide an intuitive and flexible framework for tying all the threads together.”
In the paper, the researchers provided examples of how the framework has been used by groups ranging from the city of London to Indigenous communities. In one example, a fishery in Peru used it to reduce the accidental catching of sea turtles. Goals were set for limiting the number of different species of sea turtle accidentally caught at the local level, and this was connected to regional conservation efforts for the animals.
The researchers also explained how different institutions could use their framework to guide their actions in the future.
“This framework will, hopefully, present a turning point in the way institutions such as Oxford think about their biodiversity impact,” Oxford project coordinator Henry Grub said in the press release. “Our impacts cannot be overlooked because of the positive research we do – rather we hope the ‘4Rs’ will transform efforts to tackle the environmental impacts of the food we eat in canteens, the paper we put in printers, the land we build on, and much more.”
