Category: Sustainable World -Farm Environmental

Two-thirds of Earth’s land is on pace to lose water as the climate warms – that’s a problem for people, crops and forests

Two-thirds of Earth’s land is on pace to lose water as the climate warms – that’s a problem for people, crops and forests

Yadu Pokhrel, Associate Prof. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Michigan State University and Farshid Felfelani, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Michigan State University            January 11, 2021
<span class="caption">Cape Town residents queued up for water as the taps nearly ran dry in 2018.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="link rapid-noclick-resp" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cape-town-residents-queue-to-refill-water-bottles-at-news-photo/913638526" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-ylk="slk:Morgana Wingard/Getty Images">Morgana Wingard/Getty Images</a></span>
Cape Town residents queued up for water as the taps nearly ran dry in 2018. Morgana Wingard/Getty Images

 

The world watched with a sense of dread in 2018 as Cape Town, South Africa, counted down the days until the city would run out of water. The region’s surface reservoirs were going dry amid its worst drought on record, and the public countdown was a plea for help.

By drastically cutting their water use, Cape Town residents and farmers were able to push back “Day Zero” until the rain came, but the close call showed just how precarious water security can be. California also faced severe water restrictions during its recent multiyear drought. And Mexico City is now facing water restrictions after a year with little rain.

There are growing concerns that many regions of the world will face water crises like these in the coming decades as rising temperatures exacerbate drought conditions.

Understanding the risks ahead requires looking at the entire landscape of terrestrial water storage – not just the rivers, but also the water stored in soils, groundwater, snowpack, forest canopies, wetlands, lakes and reservoirs.

We study changes in the terrestrial water cycle as engineers and hydrologists. In a new study published Jan. 11, we and a team of colleagues from universities and institutes around the world showed for the first time how climate change will likely affect water availability on land from all water storage sources over the course of this century.

We found that the sum of this terrestrial water storage is on pace to decline across two-thirds of the land on the planet. The worst impacts will be in areas of the Southern Hemisphere where water scarcity is already threatening food security and leading to human migration and conflict. Globally, one in 12 people could face extreme drought related to water storage every year by the end of this century, compared to an average of about one in 33 at the end of the 20th century.

These findings have implications for water availability, not only for human needs, but also for trees, plants and the sustainability of agriculture.

Where the risks are highest

The water that keeps land healthy, crops growing and human needs met comes from a variety of sources. Mountain snow and rainfall feed streams that affect community water supplies. Soil water content directly affects plant growth. Groundwater resources are crucial for both drinking water supplies and crop productivity in irrigated regions.

While studies often focus just on river flow as an indicator of water availability and drought, our study instead provides a holistic picture of the changes in total water available on land. That allows us to capture nuances, such as the ability of forests to draw water from deep groundwater sources during years when the upper soil levels are drier.

The declines we found in land water storage are especially alarming in the Amazon River basin, Australia, southern Africa, the Mediterranean region and parts of the United States. In these regions, precipitation is expected to decline sharply with climate change, and rising temperatures will increase evaporation. At the same time, some other regions will become wetter, a process already seen today.

Map of water storage loss

Our findings for the Amazon basin add to the longstanding debate over the fate of the rainforest in a warmer world. Many studies using climate model projections have warned of widespread forest die-off in the future as less rainfall and warmer temperatures lead to higher heat and moisture stress combined with forest fires.

In an earlier study, we found that the deep-rooted rainforests may be more resilient to short-term drought than they appear because they can tap water stored in soils deeper in the ground that aren’t considered in typical climate model projections. However, our new findings, using multiple models, indicate that the declines in total water storage, including deep groundwater stores, may lead to more water shortages during dry seasons when trees need stored water the most and exacerbate future droughts. All weaken the resilience of the rainforests.

A new way of looking at drought

Our study also provides a new perspective on future droughts.

There are different kinds of droughts. Meteorological droughts are caused by lack of precipitation. Agricultural droughts are caused by lack of water in soils. Hydrological droughts involve lack of water in rivers and groundwater. We provided a new perspective on droughts by looking at the total water storage.

Diagram of water cycle
Water in the environment. U.K. Met Office 

 

We found that moderate to severe droughts involving water storage would increase until the middle of the 21st century and then remain stable under future scenarios in which countries cut their emissions, but extreme to exceptional water storage droughts could continue to increase until the end of the century.

That would further threaten water availability in regions where water storage is projected to decline.

Changes driven by global warming

These declines in water storage and increases in future droughts are primarily driven by climate change, not land-water management activities such as irrigation and groundwater pumping. This became clear when we examined simulations of what the future would look like if climate conditions were unchanged from preindustrial times. Without the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, terrestrial water storage would remain generally stable in most regions.

If future increases in groundwater use for irrigation and other needs are also considered, the projected reduction in water storage and increase in drought could be even more severe.

Read more:

Yadu Pokhrel receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Farshid Felfelani receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Study: Wildfires produced up to half of pollution in US West

Study: Wildfires produced up to half of pollution in US West

 

 

Even as pollution emissions declined from other sources including vehicle exhaust and power plants, the amount from fires increased sharply, said researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego.

The findings underscore the growing public health threat posed by climate change as it contributes to catastrophic wildfires such as those that charred huge areas of California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020. Nationwide, wildfires were the source of up to 25% of small particle pollution in some years, the researchers said.

“From a climate perspective, wildfires should be the first things on our minds for many of us in the U.S.,” said Marshall Burke, an associate professor of earth system science at Stanford and lead author of the study.

“Most people do not see sea-level rise. Most people do not ever see hurricanes. Many, many people will see wildfire smoke from climate change,” Burke added. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers used satellite images of smoke plumes and government air quality data to model how much pollution was generated nationwide by fires from 2016 to 2018 compared to a decade earlier. Their results were in line with previous studies of smoke emissions across earlier time periods and more limited geographic areas.

Large wildfires churn out plumes of smoke thick with microscopic pollution particles that can drift hundreds or even thousands of miles. Driving the explosion in fires in recent years were warmer temperatures, drought and decades of aggressive fire fighting tactics that allowed forest fuels to accumulate.

Air pollution experts say that residents of the West Coast and Northern Rockies in particular should expect major smoke events from wildfires to become more frequent.

There’s little doubt air quality regulations helped decrease other sources of pollution even as wildfire smoke increased, said Loretta Mickley, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University. But it’s difficult to separate how much of the increase in smoke pollution is driven by climate change versus the forest fuel buildup, she added.

Mickley and researchers from Colorado State University also cautioned that fires can vary significantly from year to year because of weather changes, making it hard to identify trends over relatively short periods such as the decade examined in the new study.

An AP analysis of data from government monitoring stations found that at least 38 million people in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana were exposed to unhealthy levels of wildfire smoke for at least five days in 2020. Major cities in Oregon suffered the highest pollution levels they had ever recorded.

Smoke particles from those wildfires were blamed for health problems ranging from difficulty breathing to a projected spike in premature deaths, according to health authorities and researchers.

Fires across the West emitted more than a million tons of particulate pollution in 2012, 2015 and 2017, and almost as much in 2018.

Scientists studying long-term health problems have found correlations between smoke exposure and decreased lung function, weakened immune systems and higher rates of flu.

The new study matches up with previous research documenting the increasing proportion of pollution that comes from wildfire smoke, said Dan Jaffe, a wildfire pollution expert at the University of Washington. Jaffe added that it also raises significant questions about how to better manage forests and the role that prescribed burns might play.

“We have been making tremendous progress on improving pollution in this country, but at the same time we have this other part of the puzzle that has not been under control,” Jaffe said. “We’re now at the point where we have to think about how to manage the planet a whole lot more carefully than we’ve done.”

Fact check: Denmark is among world’s happiest countries, but it’s not No. 1

Fact check: Denmark is among world’s happiest countries, but it’s not No. 1

The claim: Denmark is ranked the happiest country in the world; 33 hours work in a week, $20 minimum wages, free university, medical and child care

Every year ahead of the United Nations’ World Happiness Day, on March 20, a report is released that ranks 156 countries on their happiness based on income, life expectancy, freedom, social support, trust and generosity.

According to one social media post, Denmark has turned up at the top of list.

“Denmark is ranked as the happiest country in the world with 33 hours work in a week, $20 minimum wages, free universities and medical care, free child care and low level of Corruption,” reads a Dec. 30 Facebook post to the group Mysterious Facts which has since been deleted. The user who posted it did not have a way to be contacted.

Fact check: Clinton, Obama left federal government with a lower deficit than when they arrived

Nordic countries ranked high in reports, but Denmark isn’t first now

This year, the Gallup 2020 World Happiness Report rated Finland as the world’s happiest country for the third year in a row, with Denmark in second and Switzerland third.

The report rates the countries based on different aspects of social environment, such as having someone to count on, having a sense of freedom to make key life decisions, generosity and trust.

Considered risks are ill-health, discrimination, low income, unemployment, separation, divorce or widowhood and safety in the street. The “happiness costs of these risks are very large,” according to the report.

The meme provides no source of information or date; it is possible the first claim could have been true at the time the meme was created, as Denmark has been previously ranked first in World Happiness Reports.

A search of the text included in the post results in a blog post with an almost identical version of the claim from 2016, a year when Denmark was ranked first. Denmark also made the top of the list in 2012 and 2013.

Nordic countries, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, have appeared on the top 10 of the World Happiness Report since it started publishing its annual rankings in 2012. In 2017, 2018 and 2019, Nordic countries occupied the top three spots.

The report found that Nordic citizens are exceptionally satisfied with their lives because of reliable and extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, well-functioning democracy and state institutions and small population.

Fact check: Over 159 million people voted in the US general election

Work hours, university, medical and child care

Beyond overall happiness, the post makes claims — some true — about why Danes might be so happy.

While the post states an average workweek in Denmark is 33 hours, a full-time workweek in Denmark is typically 37 hours distributed over five days, according to the city of Copenhagen. It/ notes that workweeks can be longer for those in a managerial position or self-employed.

Staying extra hours is discouraged, and most employees leave the office around 4 p.m. to pick up their children and begin preparing for dinner, according to the official website of Denmark. In the last weeks of July, offices are shut down as Danes take time off to enjoy a short summer and every employee is legally entitled to five weeks of paid vacation per year.

Employees are also not allowed to work more than 48 hours per week on an average of a four month period due to the EU’s Working Time Directive, which was implemented in Denmark’s Working Enviornment Act in 2017.

The post states the nation’s minimum wage is $20 an hour. But Denmark lacks a federally mandated minimum wage, according to Investopedia. However, trade unions work to ensure that workers are paid a reasonable rate and try to keep the average minimum wage at $20 per hour. As of 2020, minimum wages in the country hover around $16.60 per hour, according to Check In Price.

Minimum-wage.org, says Denmark’s average minimum wage is $18 per hour and annual minimum wage is $44,252.00. A November 2020 article from Market Watch says wages in Scandinavia are among the highest in the world at $17.69 per hour.

Schooling is largely free, as the post claims. Higher education in Denmark is free for students from the European Union or European University Association and for students in exchange programs, according to the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science. Education is also free for students who have a permanent residence, a temporary residence with possibility of obtaining permanent residence or a resident permit.

It is also worth noting that every Danish student receives a rough estimate of $900 per month, the Washington Post reported.

In Denmark, the health care system is financed through an income tax of 8% and provides universal access to citizens and legal residents, USA TODAY reported. So while the post states medical care is free, it lacks the context that taxpayers do cover the cost.

The public child care system in Denmark is based on a partially free system, and some day care institutions have waiting lists. However, most guarantee a place for children from the age of 1, according to Work in Denmark. The child care facilities receive financial support from the state and the most payable out of pocket amount by parents is 30% of the cost. Child care is not free, as claimed.

The reason Denmark can afford to provide these services is because it has one of the highest tax rates in the world, with the average Dane paying a total of 45% in income taxes, according to BBC. In fact, most Scandinavian countries offer higher education, child and medical care, and parental leave due to their high levels of taxation. In 2018, Denmark’s tax-to-GDP ratio was 44.9%, Norway’s was 39% and Sweden’s 43.9%, which compares to a ratio of 24.3% in the U.S., according to the Tax Foundation.

The post is accurate in claiming that Denmark has low corruption. The 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Denmark as the least corrupt country in the world for the fifth year in a row due to its degree of press freedom, access to information, independent judicial systems and strong standards of integrity for public officials.

In 2018, New Zealand and Denmark were both ranked as the least corrupt, according to World Population Review, which notes that there is no exact way to measure corruption but many use the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International.

Our ruling: Partly False

The claim that Denmark is ranked the happiest country in the world due to its short workweeks, high minimum wage, and free university and health and child care is rated PARTLY FALSE, based on our research. Finland has been ranked the happiest country in the world for the last three consecutive years, with Denmark holding a spot in the top three. Denmark also has 37-hour workweeks, not 33, and there is no minimum wage. Services of higher education, child and medical care and parental leave are available due to their high levels of taxation; they’re not offered for free.

Our fact-check sources:

Study: Warming already baked in will blow past climate goals

Associated Press

Study: Warming already baked in will blow past climate goals

 

The amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit climate change, a new study finds.

But it’s not game over because, while that amount of warming may be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s authors say.

For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied.

But Monday’s study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates that a bit differently and now figures the carbon pollution already put in the air will push global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times.

Previous estimates, including those accepted by international science panels, were about a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than that amount of committed warming.

International climate agreements set goals of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, with the more ambitious goal of limiting it to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) added in Paris in 2015. The world has already warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).

“You’ve got some … global warming inertia that’s going to cause the climate system to keep warming, and that’s essentially what we’re calculating,” said study co-author Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Think about the climate system like the Titanic. It’s hard to turn the ship when you see the icebergs.”

Dessler and colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Nanjing University in China calculated committed warming to take into account that the world has warmed at different rates in different places and that places that haven’t warmed as fast are destined to catch up.

Places such as the Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica are a bit cooler, and that difference creates low-lying clouds that reflect more sun away from earth, keeping these places cooler. But this situation can’t keep going indefinitely because physics dictates that cooler locations will warm up more and when they do, the clouds will dwindle and more heating will occur, Dessler said.

Previous studies were based on the cooler spots staying that way, but Dessler and colleagues say that’s not likely.

Outside experts said the work is based on compelling reasoning, but want more research to show that it’s true. Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the new work fits better with climate models than observational data.

Just because the world is bound to get more warming than international goals, that doesn’t mean all is lost in the fight against global warming, said Dessler, who cautioned against what he called “climate doomers.”

If the world gets to net zero carbon emissions soon, 2 degrees of global warming could be delayed enough so that it won’t happen for centuries, giving society time to adapt or even come up with technological fixes, he said.

“If we don’t, we’re going to blow through (climate goals) in a few decades,” Dessler said. “It’s really the rate of warming that makes climate change so terrible. If we got a few degrees over 100,000 years, that would not be that big a deal. We can deal with that. But a few degrees over 100 years is really bad.”

Editorial: Plastic trash is not just litter. It’s a climate change problem, too

Editorial: Plastic trash is not just litter. It’s a climate change problem, too

The Times Editorial Board                             January 3, 2021
CLIFFE, KENT - JANUARY 02: Plastics and other detritus line the shore of the Thames Estuary on January 2, 2018 in Cliffe, Kent. Tons of plastic and other waste lines areas along the Thames Estuary shoreline, an important feeding ground for wading birds and other marine wildlife. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), at current rates of pollution, there will likely be more plastic in the sea than fish by 2050. In December 2017 Britain joined the other 193 UN countries and signed up to a resolution to help eliminate marine litter and microplastics in the sea. It is estimated that about eight million metric tons of plastic find their way into the world&#39;s oceans every year. Once in the Ocean plastic can take hundreds of years to degrade, all the while breaking down into smaller and smaller &#39;microplastics,&#39; which can be consumed by marine animals, and find their way into the human food chain. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) ** OUTS - ELSENT, FPG, CM - OUTS * NM, PH, VA if sourced by CT, LA or MoD **
Plastics and other detritus line the shore of the Thames Estuary in Cliffe, England, in January 2018. (Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)

 

-elect Joe Biden will have a long to-do list the moment he takes over the White House this month. Plastic trash should be one of his priorities. Here’s why.

Single-use plastic is a climate change issue — as well as an observable, measurable menace to the environment that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic and the need for plastic protective gear. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels, and millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions are released from the extraction of these resources, and the manufacture and incineration of plastic.

The end life of plastic is just as concerning. Very little of the plastic produced has been recycled, less than 10%. Even more of it has been burned. But the vast majority has been left to molder in landfills and, increasingly, pollute the environment. We hear mostly about ocean plastic and the harm done to marine life that mistakes plastic bags and bits for food. But microplastic is even more worrisome. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade but instead breaks down into tiny particles, which have been found in every corner of the planet, on land and in the air, in drinking water and food sources, and, ominously, in the placentas of unborn fetuses.

We don’t yet have good data about what that means for human health, but considering the toxins used in manufacturing plastic — benzene, lead, endocrine-interrupting phthalates, just to name a few — it can’t be good.

Yet, frustratingly, Congress and past presidents have not given this global environmental disaster the attention it requires. Instead, they have viewed single-use plastic — which constitutes about 40% of plastic used each year — as a litter issue that local governments must solve through better recycling and waste management policies. That attitude must change, because the recent global breakdown of the market for recyclables has made it clear that recycling has never been, nor ever will be, able to keep up with plastic trash use.

What can be done?

That has long been on the minds of environmentalists, who have been lobbying for federal action to reduce disposable plastic for years. To that end, more than 600 environmental, social justice and community organizations have signed on to a sweeping plan that focuses on executive action that Biden can take immediately. So far, Congress has been unwilling to consider serious action on reducing plastic production, perhaps cowed by the powerful petrochemical lobby. The only significant plastic-reduction legislation last year, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, could not even get a hearing in the Senate.

Meanwhile, things are about to get worse. The petroleum industry is pivoting to increased plastic production, with some 30 new plastic-making facilities in the works in the U.S., according to the Center for Biological Diversity. (Among the reasons community and social justice organizations have become involved is that industrial pollution disproportionately affects low-income communities.)

The plan outlines eight steps that include directing federal agencies to use the power of procurement to reduce the amount of disposable plastic they buy, denying permits for expansion of plastic-making facilities and joining international efforts with new or strengthened multilateral agreements aimed at reducing single-use plastic. It’s a good blueprint, but Biden’s team should also look to California for inspiration.

California has been the leader on reducing plastic waste and was the first state to ban single-use plastic bags (a ban that was temporarily rescinded last year as a pandemic measure) and may well be the first state to transform the way goods are packaged. The state Legislature came tantalizingly close to passing the groundbreaking California Circular Economy and Plastic Pollution Reduction Act in 2020, which would have required that products sold in plastic packaging in the state have a proven recycling or composting rate of 75% by 2032. The proposal is still very much alive, and if the Legislature doesn’t pass it in 2021 — though it should — a similar proposal is likely to be on the 2022 statewide ballot.

But California, while influential, can’t solve this crisis alone. The U.S. has been a leader in producing plastic trash; it should be a leader in reducing it as well.

Photos of the Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley in 2020

DeSmog

Photos of the Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley in 2020

By Julie Dermansky                             December 30, 2020 

 

The disproportionate toll that COVID-19 is taking on the Black community brought environmental justice issues to the forefront during 2020. Calls for dealing with climate change and environmental justice were elevated by president-elect Biden, who spoke about endangered communities in the last presidential debate and on his campaign website, calling for environmental justice and “rooting out the systemic racism in our laws, policies, institutions, and hearts.”

That toll is apparent in Louisiana where I continued to document the struggle for environmental justice for DeSmog throughout 2020. These photos are part of an ongoing DeSmog series on the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as ‘Cancer Alley’ which hosts more than 100 petrochemical plants and refineries. Environmental racism and pollution have left fenceline communities especially vulnerable to COVID-19.

At the start of the pandemic, Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish, a Cancer Alley community group, worried that the industrial sites around their homes might end up releasing even higher levels of air pollution since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it was relaxing some of its pollution reporting and monitoring rules for industrial plants due to the pandemic.

The group has been particularly concerned about the nearby Denka plant, which emits numerous toxic chemicals including chloroprene, a likely human carcinogen, that’s used to produce the synthetic rubber Neoprene.

Members of RISE St. James, another Cancer Alley community group focused on stopping new petrochemical plants from being built in St. James Parish, were alarmed about the conversations about racial disparity regarding the virus’s impact by Louisiana officials. They felt that elected officials, more often than not, failed to mention the role pollution plays in compromising the health of many African-American communities that are near refineries and chemical plants, a pollution burden that scientists say increases the risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19.

RISE St. James and allies have been fighting to stop the plastics manufacturing company Formosa from building its proposed $9.4 billion petrochemical complex that would likely more than double the toxic load in their already polluted air.

“Despite so much heartache in 2020, we have seen some success in our fight for clean air this year,” Sharon Lavigne, the founder RISE St. James said on a call. “This year it is becoming clear that the law is on our side. Recent court rulings give me hope that victory will be ours.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced on November 4 that the agency would reevaluate its wetlands permit for Formosa Plastics. And on November 18, state judge Trudy White sent critical air permits for Formosa’s project back to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ), directing the agency to take a closer look at how the plastics facility’s emissions will impact the predominantly Black community living nearby.

Lavigne was also happy to learn on December 19 that a Louisiana district attorney chose not to prosecute her allies, Anne Rolfes and Kate McIntosh — environmental advocates with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade — for delivering plastic nurdles to fossil fuel lobbyists’ homes. They were facing federal charges for a stunt tied to a ‘nurdlefest,’ a December 2019 event in Baton Rouge aimed at raising awareness about plastics pollution.

But Lavigne is painfully aware she and others fighting for environmental justice in Cancer Alley can’t let their guard down. Earlier this month Governor John Bel Edwards announced that Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (MCC) is considering building a large Methyl methacrylate (MMA) chemical plant in Cancer Alley, and the state is offering the company $4 million incentives to do it.

1. Sharon Lavigne, founder of RISE St. James, with Pam Spees of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Anne Rolfes, founder of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, speaking to the press before a St. James council meeting where they asked the council to rescind a land use permit it granted to Formosa after a report was published showing the site has human remains that likely belonged to slaves on Jan. 21, 2020.

2. Wilma Subra, a technical advisor to the environmental advocacy group Louisiana Environmental Action Network going over data on reported chemical releases during the public meeting in Baton Rouge a week after the fire at ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge refinery on Feb.19.

3. Mary Hampton, President of the Concerned Citizens of St. John The Baptist Parish at a community meeting where David Gray, a regional EPA official, explained changes the agency is making to its ongoing air monitoring of chloroprene in St. John the Baptist Parish on Feb. 11.

4.Sharon Lavigne, the founder of RISE St. James, in St. James Catholic Church on April 8. 2020, where she told me: “Black people are being polluted the most in the 4th and 5th District in St James Parish, so of course we are hit the most by the pandemic. We are already hit by the pollution in the air. The pandemic adds to what we are already going through.”

5. Gail LeBoeuf, a St. James Parish resident taking part in a protest against pollution from petrochemical plants at the St. John the Baptist Government Complex on April 11.

6. Rep. Cedric Richmond speaking to Cancer Alley community members who protested in front of The New Orleans Advocate on April 24. Richmond, who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in fossil fuel campaign contributions during his tenure representing the cancer alley area, announced Nov. 12 that he was giving up his seat and joining Biden’s White House team as a senior adviser.

7. Courtney Baloney, the owner of the Treasures of Life funeral home, in St. James Parish, ready to start work on the body of a confirmed COVID-19 victim on May 30.

8. A pregnant woman at a rally in Duncan Plaza in New Orleans on the first of seven days of protest in solidarity with George Floyd on May 30.  A coalition of social justice groups, led by Take ‘Em Down NOLA and the New Orleans Workers Group, took to the city’s streets, protesting Floyd’s murder and raising awareness of the many injustices plaguing people of color from May 30 through June 7.

9. Protesters fleeing from a line of police on the Crescent City Connection on June 3 after police began firing tear gas and projectiles at them. The tear gas was fired despite health experts warning that the use of tear gas, a toxic irritant that can cause long-term lung damage, may worsen the spread of coronavirus.

10. Anne White Hat, one of the Indigenous leaders of the L’eau Est La Vie Camp that fought against the Bayou Bridge pipeline, speaking at a rally across from Jackson Square on June 6 in New Orleans.

11.  Sharon Lavigne speaking at a Juneteenth ceremony at the site of a former burial ground for enslaved African Americans on the site where Formosa plans to build a petrochemical complex on June 19.

12. Mark Benfield (right), a professor at Louisiana State University, with Dr. Liz Marchio, a local scientist, collecting nurdles under a wharf in New Orleans on August 25.

13. Sharon Lavigne, the founder of RISE St. James at a permit hearing for YCI Methanol Plant in St. James Sept 10, 2020. YCI applied for permits that would let them dump 61 hazardous chemicals into the Mississippi River, right near two St. James drinking water intakes. YCI’s wastewater could affect everyone downriver from their plant, including residents of New Orleans.

14. Residents of Cancer Alley marching with supporters in Lutcher, Louisiana, on October 17 during a protest against Amendment 5, which appeared on Louisiana’s November 3 ballot. If passed, the measure would have allowed manufacturers to negotiate lower tax bills with local governments, giving the petrochemical industry a way to permanently avoid paying property taxes. The amendment was rejected by Louisiana voters.

15. Wilma Subra, technical advisor for LEAN speaking against air permit modifications requested by the Marathon refinery at a LDEQ public hearing on Nov. 10 in St. John the Baptist Parish.  If the modifications are approved, the company will be permitted to release more toxic pollution than it already does. Few community members came to the meeting due to the pandemic.

16. Anne Rolfes, founder of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade speaking against a permit modification sought by So LA Methanol, another plant poised to be built in St. James, at an LDEQ permit hearing on November 19.

17. New Orleans advocates for federal action to address the plastic pollution crisis projecting an anti-plastic message onto a New Orleans post office on December 7. Similar projections took place in San Francisco, Houston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.


LEAD PHOTO: Robert Taylor visiting the Zion Travelers Cemetery, next to the Marathon Refinery, in Reserve, Louisiana where some of his relatives are buried. 

All photos by Julie Dermansky for DeSmog

These Are Some Climate Stories That Flew Under the Radar in 2020

DeSmog

These Are Some Climate Stories That Flew Under the Radar in 2020

By Sharon Kelly                                     December 28, 2020

 

2020 wildfires

At the start of December 2020, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres spoke at Columbia University, appearing not before a packed auditorium as in years past, but before a “virtual” audience, making his annual State of the Planet address. “To put it simply,” he said, “the state of the planet is broken.”

“Today, we are at 1.2 degrees of warming and already witnessing unprecedented climate extremes and volatility in every region and on every continent,” Guterres said.

“Let’s be clear: human activities are at the root of our descent towards chaos,” he went on. “But that means human action can help solve it.”

The speech was a fitting postscript for a year that brought not just the Covid-19 pandemic, but also a pummeling of catastrophes worldwide, many related to climate change.

But amid those disasters and under an openly hostile-to-science Trump administration, momentum continued to quietly build — albeit excruciatingly slowly — away from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas and towards, perhaps, meaningful action to slow the climate crisis.

The past year may be a difficult one to look back on — but amid the crises, there are signs that long-entrenched powerful interests may in fact be dug in on shaky ground.

Unprecedented Disasters

2020 may well be the warmest year ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in mid-December.

Amid that heat came a seemingly unending series of climate-linked disasters, prompting the Red Cross Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain to warn in November that “climate change will have a more significant medium- and long-term impact on the human life and on Earth” than even Covid-19.

The U.S. was hit by a billion-dollar weather and climate disasters 16 times between January and September, according to NOAA — an average of one major catastrophe every 2.5 weeks for 40 weeks.

During this record-shattering Atlantic hurricane season that brought 30 named storms (the historic yearly average is 12), other multi-billion-dollar disasters barely registered in the national media. NOAA’s list includes eleven outbreaks of derechos, tornadoes, hail, or “severe weather” in the central and southern U.S., along with three named hurricanes (Laura, Sally and Isaias).

“It was such a busy and crazy a year that a derecho that savaged the Midwest somehow flew under the radar, despite damage nearing $10 billion, and is barely remembered,” the Associated Press reported of the August events.


Grain bin at the River Valley Cooperative in Martelle, Iowa – the tallest structure in this town of 250 people – which collapsed onto itself, spilling thousands of bushels of corn to the roadway, due to derechos in August. Photo Credit: Phil Roeder, via Flicker. 

And while major storms themselves made headlines, the toxic pollution that followed in their wakes often barely registered in the national press — and at times, went unmeasured because monitors were offline.

Fires Around the World

In January, as Wuhan entered its first lockdown and quarantine and the first Covid-19 cases were diagnosed in the U.S., Australia was battling deadly bushfires that ultimately raged across an area twice the size of Florida.

By summer, it was the U.S. Pacific coast that was burning. A horrific fire season this year turned skies blood-red from California to Washington state.


San Francisco smothered in smoke, September 9, 2020. Credit: Christopher Michel, via Flickr

As of December 18, the National Interagency Fire Center had tracked 56,914 wildfires in the U.S., which burned across more than 10.25 million acres.

“We’re seeing fires in places that we don’t normally see fires,” Crystal A. Kolden, a University of California, Merced professor of fire science, told the New York Times in September. “Normally it’s far too wet to burn.”

That’s in part because 2020 also brought an extraordinary — but relatively less discussed — drought that spread across a third of the U.S. “Compared to late 2019 and early 2020, when there was very little drought in the continental United States, this is quite an extreme single-year event that developed rapidly over the course of 2020,” Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “But if you look over longer time scales, I would argue this is really a continuation of a multi-decadal event that began around 2000. There have been some breaks, but the Southwest has been in more-or-less continuous drought conditions since then.”

Not only did California’s wildfires continue into December, but a third major wildfire system further south also burned this year while attracting less global attention. In Brazil, the Pantanal wetlands — afflicted by drought — caught fire repeatedly this year and burned rapidly, with the blazes consuming a quarter of the tropical wetlands in what the World Wildlife Fund* calls “one of the most biologically rich environments on the planet.”

And this summer, the Arctic, which has seen climate heating at roughly double average rates, not only experienced an abnormally hot summer — with temperatures in the Siberian town Verkhoyansk hitting 100.4°F, the highest temperature ever recorded within the Arctic circle — but the Siberian tundra then broke out in wildfires of its own.

Plummeting Fossil Fuel Prices

But amid all the crises, signs of a different shift have begun to emerge — one that may have some potential to alter the climate trajectory we’ve stayed on for decades.

The oil, coal, and gas industries went into 2020 in rough financial shape, generating the lowest returns in the S&P 500 in 2019 after underperforming compared to the rest of the economy for a decade. That was before the price of oil plunged — and even, for a very brief moment in April, dipped far below zero.

Take, for example, ExxonMobil, which has continually doubled down on fossil fuel expansions. “The company, for decades one of the most profitable and valuable American businesses, lost $2.4 billion in the first nine months of the year, and its share price is down about 35 percent this year,” The New York Times reported in December. “In August, Exxon was tossed out of the Dow Jones industrial average, replaced by Salesforce, a software company.”

Also in December, Exxon’s former CEO Lee Raymond, incidentally, quit the board of JPMorgan Chase, a role he’d held for more than three decades. Divestment campaigners at 350.org took credit for an ouster, calling it “a sign of the changing winds of financial institutions taking climate action seriously.”

Cheap Renewables

In contrast, renewable energy sources like solar and wind have proved to be relatively resilient — or, in the words of Fatih Birol, director of the International Energy Agency, in November, “immune to Covid.”

Utility-scale renewable energy saw costs continue to fall, making renewable energy often cheaper than fossil fuels — and installations reflected that competitiveness. “For solar, for example, new U.S. residential installations will be basically flat for 2020, and new non-residential (commercial, industrial, and institutional) megawatts will be down from 2019’s tally,” The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental organization, writes. “But large-scale projects have mostly been able to keep happening, boosted by favorable (but declining) tax incentives, and their successes will be enough to actually propel solar to a record year: We look set to have a total of more than 19,000 megawatts in new solar power capacity, 43 percent above 2019’s installations, and 20 percent above the previous record.”


Solar installer. Photo Credit: Tool Dude, via mechanicalcaveman.com

 

Building electrification efforts also spread in 2020. As of December 2, Sierra Club tracked 40 communities in California that had made that commitment, and 50 more considering all-electric policies. While electricity is still mostly generated by fossil fuels, those efforts lay the groundwork for renewable energy and proponents claim they will help reduce a single-family home’s emissions by up to 90 percent within 30 years.

Exposing Risk

This year also saw investigative reporting into ways that, for example, automakers GM and Ford have known for a half-century that climate change was underway and failed to act. Journalists have also exposed the ways that PR firms like FTI Consulting used deceptive campaigns and front groups to spread pro-fossil fuel propaganda.

The impacts of climate change drew closer scrutiny from large financial institutions. “More banks are getting buyers in coastal areas to make bigger down payments — often as much as 40 percent of the purchase price, up from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that lenders have awakened to climate dangers and want to put less of their own money at risk,” the New York Times reported this summer. “And in one of the clearest signs that banks are worried about global warming, they are increasingly getting these mortgages off their own books by selling them to government-backed buyers like Fannie Mae, where taxpayers would be on the hook financially if any of the loans fail.”

That, of course, isn’t exactly a heartwarming story of hope — but it is a sign that efforts by fossil fuel companies to sow confusion and doubt on climate change are becoming less and less compelling to decision-makers.

Moving Forward

The year also saw Black Lives Matter protests become what the New York Times called the “largest movement in U.S. history” in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This summer’s uprisings across the U.S. brought growing attention to widespread, institutionalized racial injustice — and echoed with the idea that, as marine biologist and Urban Ocean Lab founder Ayana Elizabeth Johnson put it in a June column in Time magazine, “we can’t solve the climate crisis unless Black lives matter.”

In 2021, in addition to taking a more intersectional approach towards environmental justice, climate activists have vowed to keep the pressure on the incoming Biden administration — which has promised to move the U.S. towards a net zero pathway. If it does so, the U.S. will join China, Japan and South Korea which all announced net zero emission targets this year.

This shift, according to the Financial Times, means that the Paris goals aren’t entirely out of reach. “‘If all these countries meet their long-term targets of net zero, then the Paris agreement goals are within reach again,’ says Niklas Höhne, professor of environmental systems at Wageningen University in the Netherlands,” as the FT reported in December. “Warming of 2.1C is now likely by the end of the century — much lower than seemed likely only a few years ago, according to analysis he has done with colleagues at the NewClimate Institute and at Climate Analytics, both non-profit research groups.”

The picture, of course, looks a lot more grim when you take into account countries’ questionable records of delivering on Paris pledges, the FT adds.

While this was a year of compounding and overlapping crises and tragedies, there is perhaps some glimmer of hope to be found in the fact that some of the past year’s under-reported stories could signify — depending on what we all do in the coming days — that structural shifts may be underway and that, as U.N. Secretary Guterres suggested, as 2020 comes to an end, some elements of the climate crisis remain unwritten.

*Updated 1/4/2021: The World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) name has been corrected from “World Wildlife Foundation.”

Main Image: A wildfire at Florida Panther NWR, April 2009. Photo Credit: Josh O’Connor – USFWS.

Florida shuts down bay known nationally for its oysters

Florida shuts down bay known nationally for its oysters

Brendan Farrington                            

 

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Because of a dwindling oyster population, a Florida agency voted unanimously Wednesday to shut down oyster harvesting in Apalachicola Bay through the end of 2025, dealing a blow to an area that historically produced 90% of the state’s oysters and 10% of the nation’s.

People in the area are divided between coming up with a long-term plan to save the industry, and allowing it to continue on a limited basis. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation commission did express the hope of reopening the bay before the ban on commercial and recreational harvesting ends if oysters recover sooner.

“If we can get there faster, that’s everyone’s desire,” Commissioner Michael Sole said. “Look, time is money for these people. I understand why we’re saying a five-year time horizon, I just think that should be the outside edge of our closure and we should be driven to doing what we can to make this as fast as possible.”

The state is using a $20 million grant to help restore the bay, which used to support more than 100 families with its abundance of oysters.

“It breaks my heart, man. I’ve watched boats out there my whole life,” said Brandon Martina, who works at Lynn’s Quality Oysters, a bay-front business his family has run since 1971. The business started out as a wholesale oyster-shucking house, but as supplies dwindled, they converted it into a retail seafood shop and restaurant.

But instead of serving Apalachicola oysters, they’re buying them from Texas.

“We went from running tractor-trailer loads to getting maybe eight to 10 bags a day, so we just started doing a hatch shell bar,” he said.

The commission issued an emergency order in July shutting down oyster harvesting on Aug. 1 until it could consider the five-year shutdown. The industry has struggled for years, in large part because of a drain on freshwater flowing into the bay. Atlanta uses the water upstream as a water supply, and as it has drawn more water, it’s affected the salinity level in the bay that helps oysters thrive.

David Barber owns a wholesale and retail oyster and seafood business in nearby Eastpoint. He’s one of less than a handful of wholesalers in a region that used to have dozens, but now he’s selling Texas oysters.

Still, he thinks a five-year closure is going too far, saying the right conditions could help oyster populations spring back quickly.

“They should listen to the people who work the bay, especially some older guys,” Barber said. “I don’t think nobody in the county is against them closing it for a little while to let them repopulate. … If it takes five years, that’s another thing, but they can do it year by year.”

The sweet, salty, plump mollusks are prized well beyond the region, and tourists have flocked to tiny, lost-in-time Apalachicola — population 2,354 and known to locals as Apalach — to enjoy water views at restaurants that served raw, shucked oysters pulled out of the bay that morning.

The once-booming oyster industry is part of the lifeblood of Apalachicola, a town that has had to reinvent itself over the past two centuries. In the 1830s as the cotton industry grew, the town became the third-largest port on the Gulf of Mexico, trailing only New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama.

Cotton made Apalachicola wealthy, but after the Civil War it turned to a new source of wealth: lumber. When lumber faded, it reinvented itself again and prospered on shrimping and oyster harvesting.

As the seafood industry took a hit, Apalachicola turned to tourism and is now known for it’s 19th- and early 20th-century buildings, quaint independent shops, restaurants, bars and easy-going pace.

Still, the oyster industry provides jobs, leaving many to have to look elsewhere for work. For decades, Apalachicola by far led the state in oyster production, but the decline began about three decades ago and the industry nearly collapsed in 2012.

Shannon Hartsfield used to work the waters, but gave it up eight years ago because of shrinking oyster supplies. He now works with university researchers studying the bay and efforts to help it recover.

“It doesn’t need to reopen until it can sustain 100, 150 families instead of just three or four,” Hartsfield said, recalling the days when the industry was booming. “Shoot, all the way down the beach there were oyster houses, and right now there’s only one. David Barber is the only one that’s even got a shucking house in Eastpoint, and there’s only two in Apalach. That’s crazy. Between Apalach and Eastpoint there were probably over 60 processing plants.”

The North Carolina hog industry’s answer to pollution: a $500m pipeline project

The Guardian

The North Carolina hog industry’s answer to pollution: a $500m pipeline project

Michael Sainato and Chelsea Skojec                 December 11, 2020
<span>Photograph: Gerry Broome/AP</span>
Photograph: Gerry Broome/AP

 

Elsie Herring of Duplin county, North Carolina, lives in the house her late mother grew up in, but for the past several decades her home has been subjected to pollution from nearby industrial hog farms.

“We have to deal with whether it’s safe to go outside. It’s a terrible thing to open the door and face that waste. It makes you want to throw up. It takes your breath away, it makes your eyes run,” said Herring.

She explained they also deal with constant trucks on the road, hauling pigs, dead and alive, in and out of the area, feed trucks, and the flies and mice that the farms attract.

Eastern North Carolina has about 4,000 pink hued pools of pig feces, urine and blood as a result of the hog industry, where 9m pigs produce over 10bn gallons of waste annually in the state. When the waste lagoons reach capacity, excess waste is sprayed on to nearby fields. In 2000, Smithfield Foods agreed with state officials in North Carolina to finance research to find and install alternatives to the waste lagoons and spraying systems, but none were deemed economically feasible.

But now – instead of implementing safer waste systems – Smithfield Foods is pushing to use the hog waste lagoons to collect, transport and sell the methane gas they produce. That terrifies many local people and environmental activists who see it as seeking to profit from an ecological problem rather than fix it.

“It only lines their pockets. They’re trying to sell it as renewable energy. It’s only renewable if pigs continue to poop, which is why I’m afraid they’re going to push the moratorium on new hog farms, because if you have that great of a demand, you have to supply to meet it,” added Herring.

“They’re not treating the waste, they’re converting it, so how is that hog waste ever clean?”

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality is considering the first permit approval for an industrial-scale biogas project in North Carolina, which would cap waste lagoons from industrial pig farms in the state, capturing the methane and transporting it through pipelines to a processing plant.

The product, called biogas, is being proposed by a $500m joint venture between Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy, Align RNG, as a solution to the hog waste pollution problems plaguing North Carolina, but residents and environmental organizers are raising concerns that the project will worsen the problem.

Related: ‘Suffocating closeness’: US judge condemns ‘appalling conditions’ on industrial farms

“The biogas is a false solution,” said Naemma Muhammad, a community organizer and resident of Duplin county. “It doesn’t solve the problems we’ve been dealing with for three decades, which is to get rid of the lagoons and spraying systems so people can breathe and enjoy their property in the way they intended. We don’t need anything to encourage this industry to continue business as usual.”

The Grady Road Project includes trapping methane gas at 19 industrial hog waste sites in Duplin and Sampson counties in North Carolina, where over 30 miles of pipelines will be constructed to a central processing facility and distributed through existing natural gas pipelines. Duplin and Sampson counties are the top-hog producing counties in the US. The project is one of several biogas proposals being pushed by Smithfield and Dominion Energy.

Muhammad noted residents still don’t know where the 30 miles of pipeline will be laid or which waste lagoons will be used for the project, and the pipelines will pose greater risks of spills and leaks to the wetlands and groundwater in the region.

Jets of liquified hog waste shoot from spray guns and on to a field near Wallace, North Carolina.
Jets of liquified hog waste shoot from spray guns and on to a field near Wallace, North Carolina. Photograph: Allen G Breed/AP

 

The methane capturing also produces other pollutants, posing greater risks to nearby communities when waste is sprayed on fields and spills are common, especially during strong storms.

“The process creates excessive concentrations of ammonia by extracting the methane,” said Sherri White-Williamson, the environmental justice policy director of North Carolina Conservation Network. “This is another way for the industry to be able to keep the lagoon sprayfield system in place. This is not a good system and to continue to find ways to justify keeping that system in place makes no sense.”

The waste produced by the industry has a long documented impact on the health, living conditions and pollution of communities near these hog farms, recognized as environmental racism as Black people, Native Americans and Latinos are more likely to live there than white people, according to a 2014 study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Living in the vicinity of a hog industrial operation has been linked to chronic illnesses such as asthma, anemia, kidney disease, certain cancers and high blood pressure.

“Methane aside, hundreds of other air and water pollutants remain uncaptured and are emitted untreated by the lagoon and sprayfield system to the environment and the communities which surround these facilities,” said Ryke Longest, the co-director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Duke University.

Will Hendrick, the staff attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance, noted North Carolina’s senate bill 315 passed in 2020 removed environmental standard requirements to pave the way for proposals such as the biogas project, despite other existing and cleaner technologies to produce biogas.

Young hogs at Everette Murphrey Farm in Farmville, North Carolina. Waste from the industry has had a long documented impact on the health of nearby communities.
Young hogs at Everette Murphrey Farm in Farmville, North Carolina. Waste from the industry has had a long documented impact on the health of nearby communities. Photograph: Gerry Broome/AP

 

Those standards called for new or modified permits to address five environmental problems with hog waste, including the elimination of animal waste discharge to surface water and groundwater, and substantially eliminating ammonia, odor, disease transmitting vectors, and nutrient and heavy metal contamination.

“The biggest problem with their biogas proposal is it fails to address those five long known well-documented problems,” said Hendrick. “Now suddenly they have money to invest in waste management technologies, but are conveniently overlooking their commitment to the people of North Carolina.”

The hog industry tried to appeal nuisance lawsuits won by residents in North Carolina over the effects of waste and odors from hog industry farms, and North Carolina legislators passed laws in response to the lawsuits limiting the ability of residents to sue the industry. A federal court recently upheld the verdict, in which a federal judge noted there was ample evidence farming practices persisted despite known harmful effects to neighbors. Herring was a party to that suit.

According to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, a decision on the permit application will be decided within approximately 30 days after the hearing, which will be scheduled after 20 November.

“We care about their health and the health of our environment. That’s why we started this project in the first place, to improve the region’s air quality and protect the climate for future generations,” said a spokesperson for Dominion Energy. They claimed the project will reduce emissions in the area by more than 150,000 metric tons a year.

“We will continue reaching out to make sure everyone’s voice is heard and everyone has the facts. The community has our pledge we’re going to do this the right way.”

A fork in the road for responsible NC hog farming

A fork in the road for responsible NC hog farming

Derb Carter                      

Last month, a federal appeals court ruled that it was proper for a jury to award monetary damages to neighbors of a Smithfield Foods controlled hog operation in Bladen County. The neighbors complained that the putrid odor and other adverse impacts adversely affected their rights to use and enjoy their property. In affirming damages are proper, one judge concluded: “It is past time to acknowledge the full harms that the unreformed practices of hog farming are inflicting.”

Twenty years after Smithfield entered a formal agreement with the North Carolina Attorney General to convert its primitive lagoon and sprayfield waste management systems on all company-owned and contract farms to environmentally superior systems that are economically feasible, Smithfield has not converted any.

Smithfield industrial hog facilities continue to store vast amounts of raw hog waste in excavated lagoons and then spray it on to neighboring fields – polluting water and air. For many neighbors, the stench and filth outside their homes is unbearable.

Now, Smithfield is proposing to cover hog lagoons on many of its hog operations, capture methane or biogas, and construct miles of pipelines to convey the gas to a processing facility it proposes to construct in Duplin County in a joint venture with Dominion Energy. The processed gas would be injected into a natural gas pipeline and used as an energy source. While removing emissions of methane that would otherwise contribute to climate change and utilizing it for energy has merit, Smithfield’s approach is dependent on perpetuating the flawed, harmful lagoon and sprayfield waste system.

Flushing millions of gallons of raw hog waste from industrial-scale barns into lagoons and then spraying on nearby fields has had, and continues to have, substantial adverse impacts on the environment and many communities in eastern North Carolina.

Numerous studies have tied the lagoon and sprayfield system to increased nutrient levels that plague our coastal waters, leading to periodic algal blooms and fish kills. Capping lagoons to collect methane will actually increase the amount of nutrients generated from the hog waste, leading to more water quality problems.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In Missouri, Smithfield now touts its “next generation technology” to manage waste that it agreed to install on all of its hog operations there. This wholesale conversion to improved waste management was forced by lawsuits from neighbors and that state’s attorney general. It is operational and profitable on hundreds of Smithfield hog operations in Missouri.

Smithfield’s new waste management technology in Missouri appears to have been enabled by the revenue generated from marketing biogas. In addition to capturing and utilizing methane from the waste, Smithfield’s Missouri hog operations converted to mechanical barn scrapers instead of barn flushing. This reduced the amount of waste laden water and reduced odor from operations by 59 to 87 percent.

Smithfield has requested that North Carolina state agencies approve necessary permits authorizing the proposed biogas project. The pending decision places eastern North Carolina at a significant fork in the road. As Smithfield has requested, the state can allow Smithfield to simply cover lagoons, capture and profit from biogas, and perpetuate the flawed lagoon and sprayfield system.

Or the Attorney General can hold Smithfield to its commitment to use economically feasible and superior waste management systems that substantially eliminate impacts to neighbors and the environment.

Before allowing Smithfield to develop its proposed biogas venture, the Department of Environmental Quality should ensure the company at a minimum employs a complete waste management system that not only taps methane but substantially reduces or eliminates odors, nutrients, and pollution.

It is past time that Smithfield acts responsibly. If it can clean up its act in Missouri, it can do the same in North Carolina.

Derb Carter is director of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s North Carolina offices.