Take a look at some of the lakes in California that have been swallowed up by the ‘megadrought’
Grace Kay
California has been hit by a “megadrought” that has dried up key reservoirs in the state.
Entire lakes have shrunk exponentially, leaving yachts and docks beached on dry land.
Nearly 95% of the state is experiencing “severe drought” and is susceptible to wild fires.
California is facing its worst drought in over four years.
Over 37 million people have already been impacted by the “megadrought” and nearly 95% of the state has been classified as experiencing “Severe Drought,” which puts the land in significant danger of wildfires, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).
Last year, California land was consumed by over 8,200 wildfires – a number double the state’s previous record. This year, scorching weather has dried out reservoirs and made the state even more susceptible to breakout wildfires than the record 2020 season. NIDIS analysts call the outlook for the land “grim.”
Water levels of California’s over 1,500 reservoirs are 50% lower than they should be at this time of year, Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC-Davis told the Associated Press.
In April, scorching weather turned the San Gabriel reservoir lake bed to dust. The reservoir is not expected to see rain fall until the end of the year.
On Wednesday, the drought dried up a lake so much that it potentially exposed a decades old mystery, allowing officials to find a plane that had crashed in 1965.
The California drought has been caused by climate change which has pushed temperatures an average of about 2 degrees hotter, drying out soil and melting Sierra snow rivers, which causes less water to soak into the ground, as well as flow through rivers and reservoirs. The state also endured two unusually dry winters that didn’t bring needed storms to the area.
Officials are predicting the water level of Lake Oroville – a primary body of water that helps the state generate energy through hydroelectric power plants – will hit a record low in August. If that happens, they would need to shut down a major hydroelectric power plant, putting extra strain on the electrical grid during the hottest part of the summer.
It’s going to be a rough summer for boat owners in the state.
Pictures from the Associated Press show massive lakes have run dry, leaving boats and docks completely beached
Experts say the drought could devastate local wildlife populations, as well as California’s tourism industry.
In April, Governor Gavin Newsom held a press conference in the dried up waterbed of Lake Mendocino. Where he stood there should have been about 40 feet of water.
“This is without precedent,” Newsom said. “Oftentimes we overstate the word historic, but this is indeed an historic moment.”
The month before, the California Department of Water Resources reduced farmers and growers to 5% of their expected water allocation in March. A move that has farmers leaving large portions of their land unseeded, while other have been forced to purchase supplemental water, which comes at a hefty cost. Supplemental water was priced at $1,500 to $2,000 per acre-foot in mid-May, according to a report from California Farm Bureau.
It has also made it difficult for ranchers to feed and water their livestock
As California temperatures continue to rise while water reservoirs fall, the state could be in for a devastating summer. From increased fears for wildfires to the impact on state agriculture and tourism, California residents are bracing for the worst drought season since 2014.
Everyone assumes this is the result of the obesity epidemic – too many calories in, too few out. Children and adults are getting fat, so they’re getting sick. And it is generally assumed that no one specific food causes it, because “a calorie is a calorie”.
I’ve been studying the role that sugar plays in contributing to chronic disease for years, and my research group at the University of California, San Francisco has just published research in the journal Obesity that challenges this assumption. If calories come from sugar, they just aren’t the same.
Diabetes is increasing faster than obesity
It’s clear that the cause of rising rates of health conditions like Type 2 diabetes isn’t as simple as people just eating too many calories.
Obesity is increasing globally at 1% per year, while diabetes is increasing globally at 4% per year. If diabetes were just a subset of obesity, how can you explain its more rapid increase?
And certain countries are obese without being diabetic (such as Iceland, Mongolia and Micronesia), while other countries are diabetic without being obese (India, Pakistan and China, for instance). Twelve percent of people in China have diabetes, but the obesity rate is much lower. The US is the fattest nation on Earth and our diabetes prevalence is 9.3%.
If normal weight people have these conditions, how then are they related to obesity? Indeed, we now know that obesity is a marker rather than a cause for these diseases.
Epidemiological studies have found a correlation between added sugar consumption and health conditions like cardiovascular disease. So could cutting excess sugar out of our diets reverse metabolic syndrome?
What happens when you stop feeding kids added sugar?
Our group at UCSF studied 43 Latino and African-American children with obesity and metabolic syndrome over a 10-day period. We started by assessing their metabolic status – insulin and glucose levels, as well as blood fats and other markers for disease, like lactate and free fatty acids – on their home diet.
For the next nine days, each child ate an individual tailored diet. We catered their meals to provide same number of calories and protein and fat content as their usual home diet. We gave them the same percentage of carbohydrate, but we substituted starch for sugar. The big difference: this special diet had no added sugar. This means their diet had no sugar from sugarcane or high fructose corn syrup. The kids consumed foods such as fruits and other whole foods that naturally contain some sugar. These foods also have fiber, which reduces the rate of sugar absorption, so they don’t affect the body the same way that added sugar does.
We took chicken teriyaki out. We put turkey hot dogs in. We took sweetened yogurt out. We put baked potato chips in. We took donuts out. We put bagels in. We gave them unhealthy processed food, just with no added sugar. Each child was given a scale to take home, and if their weight was declining, we made them eat more. Then we studied them again.
The children had eaten the same number of calories and had not lost any weight, and yet every aspect of their metabolic health improved. With added sugar cut out of their diet for 10 days, blood pressure, triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein (LDL, or “bad cholesterol”), insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance all improved. And remember, we weren’t giving them just leafy greens and tofu – we fed the kids processed foods, just ones without sugar.
Further studies are needed to see if this will also work in adults, and if the benefits are short-term or long-term.
Sugar is like alcohol
This study demonstrates that a calorie is not a calorie, and that sugar is a primary contributor to metabolic syndrome, unrelated to calories or weight gain. By removing added sugar, we improved metabolic health.
Sugar may not be the only contributor to chronic disease, but it is far and away the easiest one to avoid. Kids could improve their metabolic health – even while continuing to eat processed food – just by dumping the sugar. Can you imagine how much healthier they’d be if they ate real food?
The naysayers will say, “But sugar is natural. Sugar has been with us for thousands of years. Sugar is food, and how can food be toxic?”
material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy.
Sugar by itself furnishes energy, and that’s about it. In that sense, sugar is like alcohol. It’s got calories, but it’s not nutrition. There’s no biochemical reaction that requires it. And at high doses, alcohol can fry your liver.
Same with sugar. Fructose, the sweet molecule in sugar, contains calories that you can burn for energy, but it’s not nutrition, because there’s no biochemical reaction that requires it. In excess, it can fry your liver, just like alcohol. And this makes sense, because where do you get alcohol from? Fermentation of sugar.
Too much sugar causes diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease and tooth decay. When consumed in excess, it’s a toxin. And it’s addictive – just like alcohol. That’s why children are getting the diseases of alcohol – Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease – without alcohol. But our research suggests we could turn this around in 10 days – if we chose to.
Robert Lustig does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Op-Ed: My front row seat to the radicalization of the Republican Party
Jackie Calmes
Since before he became president, Joe Biden has told crowds, “Folks, this is not your father’s Republican Party.” As a political reporter, I’d been hearing that lament since the late 1990’s, from far better sources — those Republican fathers’ sons and daughters.
The radicalization of the Republican Party has been the biggest story of my career. I’ve been watching it from the start, from the time I arrived in then-Democratic Texas just out of college in 1978 to my years as a reporter in Washington through four revolutions — Ronald Reagan’s, Newt Gingrich’s, the tea party’s and Donald Trump’s — each of which took the party farther right.
From this perspective, it seems clear that the antidemocratic drift of the GOP will continue, regardless of Trump’s role. He didn’t cause its crackup, he accelerated it. He took ownership of the party’s base, and gave license to its racists, conspiracists, zealots and even self-styled paramilitaries, but that base had been calling the shots in the Republican Party for some years, spurred by conservative media. Now, emboldened, its activists will carry on with or without him.
The first elections I covered in 1978, at the midterm of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s reemergence from its Watergate ruins and the shift of its base from the north to the south. In a poll a year earlier, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans had identified as Republicans. Texas was a Democratic bastion. But many Democrats I met there were more conservative than Republicans I knew up north; they often bucked the national party, yet remained “yellow dog Democrats” in state and local elections — so loyal, the saying went, that they’d vote for a yellow dog over a Republican, just like voters elsewhere in the South.
Republicans revived nationally in the late ’70s largely because of the governing Democrats’ misfortunes — a global energy crisis, double-digit inflation, a stagnant economy, party infighting.
Evangelicals threw off their longtime aversion to earthly politics and took over local party organizations, becoming culture warriors. By mid-1978, the property tax revolt in California kindled an anti-tax movement nationwide. With both moderate establishment Republicans and insurgent conservatives seeing the possibility of retaking the White House in 1980, the two camps intensified their decades-long war to define the party.
It’s clear now that the norms-abiding moderates never had a chance. As right-wing activist Paul Weyrich warned, “We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure in the country.” That could stand as conservatives’ mission statement today.
That November, my election-night story for the Abilene Reporter-News included mention of the defeat of a young George W. Bush for a House seat representing Midland and Odessa.
Yet he and other Republicans across the South did better than expected. Some actually won, including third-time candidate Newt Gingrich in suburban Atlanta. Texans elected the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. It all signaled the wave Reagan would ride two years later, carrying other Republicans in his wake. The Democrats who won congressional races across the south, replacing some New Deal liberals who retired, were more conservative and allies-in-waiting for Reagan, many of them future defectors to his party.
By 1984, I’d moved to Washington to cover Congress and got to know Gingrich. While he was a backbencher in House Republicans’ seemingly permanent minority, he led a maverick faction calling itself the Conservative Opportunity Society (Gingrich himself was more opportunist than truly conservative, his lieutenants grumbled to me).
After he read stories I’d written about the ethics scrapes of some Democrats in Congress, Gingrich would have an aide in his congressional office contact me with dirt on others, often just allegations culled from the lawmakers’ local newspapers.
That was just one sign that he was a new breed of Republican, more interested in ruthless partisanship than in passing laws and representing constituents. His goal was nothing short of ending Democrats’ decades-long lock on the House majority and leading the next Republican revolution.
In 1990, Gingrich — by then the second-highest ranking House Republican leader — made a prediction that I found unbelievable: Republicans would win a House majority in the 1994 midterm elections. He explained to me that if George H.W. Bush lost reelection in 1992, with a Democrat in the White House the Republicans could benefit from the midterm jinx for a president’s party, and win enough seats to take control.
Gingrich did his part to weaken Bush. Most famously, he led a conservative mutiny against a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal the president had negotiated, assailing him for violating his “no new taxes” campaign promise.
With Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton, Gingrich immediately looked toward 1994. Since the late 1980s, he had mobilized a nationwide network of right-wing talk-radio hosts emerging in local markets. They echoed his talking points daily.
On election day 1994, Gingrich was confident of big gains — if not a House majority — and certain that conservative media had helped. “I think one of the great changes in the last couple of years was the rise of talk radio, which gives you an alternative validating mechanism,” separate from the mainstream media, he told me. In fact, he was about to be interviewed by a new local host — a young guy named Sean Hannity.
The Republicans triumphed beyond even Gingrich’s messianic dreams, winning House and Senate majorities for the first time since 1952. As the new speaker who’d taken the party to the promised land, Gingrich led a cult of personality presaging Trump’s.
“Be nasty,” he’d tell followers, and he kept conservatives perpetually angry at Democrats and at government generally, with the aid of his right-wing media megaphone.
On the first day of the new Republican-controlled Congress in January 1995, Gingrich had set up “Radio Row” in a Capitol corridor — table after table of talk-show hosts interviewing Republicans for conservative audiences back home. Rush Limbaugh, the king of them all, was declared an honorary House Republican. Collectively, these local celebrities became a power center within the party.
Gingrich would find governing harder and less popular than campaigning, however. He overreached to please the base, shutting down the government in a doomed bid to force deep cuts in domestic programs, and then impeaching Clinton. Within four years, after election losses and scandals, he resigned.
Back in Texas, then-Gov. George W. Bush positioned himself as the un-Gingrich for mainstream voters — a “compassionate conservative” — while telling those on the right he was different from his father: that Jesus Christ was his personal savior, he’d slash taxes, and his foreign policy would eschew interventionist nation-building. (He’d break that last promise big time in Iraq.)
But even as Bush sought to soften his party’s hard lines to win election, the GOP’s nationalistic, protectionist and even nativist populism ran deep. As president, Bush had hoped to build a broader party — for example, by giving millions of undocumented, longtime residents a path to citizenship. But the growing xenophobia among the party’s increasingly white, older and rural base foiled him.
Trump didn’t unleash those forces 16 years later. He simply harnessed and amplified them.
By the end of Bush’s presidency, conservatives were rebellious against both Bush, for his immigration proposals, Mideast wars and rising debt, and the Republican majority in Congress for its overspending and corruption.
After the near-collapse of the financial system and its bailout by the Bush administration, in 2008, Barack Obama became the first Black American elected president. Almost immediately, the third Republican revolution took shape, this one a headless movement from the bottom up: the tea party.
Republican Party leaders sought to unite with tea party activists against their common enemy — Obama. In the midterm elections of Obama’s two terms, Republicans regained control of the House in 2010 and then the Senate in 2014.
Yet just as Gingrich found with Clinton, sharing responsibility for governing requires occasional compromise with the Democratic president on must-pass bills. And compromise infuriated the Republican base and conservative media. “They don’t give a damn about governing,” former Rep. Tom Latham, an Iowa Republican, told me in 2015. Latham, who was first elected in the 1994 Gingrich revolution, had just left Congress in frustration after 20 years.
A year later, against a field of establishment Republicans vying for the presidential nomination, Trump quickly rose to the top, speaking a language of aggrievement that resonated with the mostly white, less educated voters living in rural America and long-struggling industrial areas like my Ohio hometown.
They jumped on the Trump train and stayed on even after he’d lost reelection and the GOP’s control of Congress. As Donald Trump Jr. said of other Republican officials on Jan. 6, just before the attack on the Capitol, “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”
It was a straight line from Gingrich’s uncompromising, smash-mouth politics to the tea party and then to Trump.
Should Trump remain exiled at Mar-a-Lago, his MAGA army will soldier on, forcing party officials and 2024 presidential aspirants to fall in line. And if Republicans lose in 2022 or 2024, many seem poised to reject the result, turn to force or countenance those who do — Trump or no Trump.
Jackie Calmes is the White House editor for the Los Angeles Times. This article is adapted from her book “Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court,” which will be published June 15.
Maine tries to shift the cost of recycling onto companies instead of taxpayers
Frances Stead Sellers, The Washington Post
1 / 4
In This Article: Nicole Grohoski, American politician
TRENTON, Maine – At the height of tourist season, the recycling bins at this coastal town used to swell with glass and plastic, office paper and piles of cardboard from the local boatyard. But the bins are gone, and their contents now join the trash, destined either for an incinerator to generate electricity or a landfill.
Trenton is one of many Maine towns that had to cut back or close their recycling operations after events both global and local. In 2018 China, which used to take much of America’s plastic waste, banned most of those imports. Last year, a plant in Hampden, Maine, that promised to provide state-of-the-art recycling for more than 100 municipalities shut down.
With mountains of boxes and bubble wrap from online pandemic shopping now going in the trash, lawmakers are trying to make Maine the first state to shift some of the costs of its recycling onto companies – not taxpayers. If the bipartisan bill passes, Maine will join several Canadian provinces, including neighboring Quebec, and all European countries, which have for decades relied on so-called extended producer responsibility programs, or EPR, for packaging.
“It’s good that the bottom fell out,” said Rep. Nicole Grohoski, D-Ellsworth, the bill’s Democratic sponsor, whose district includes Trenton. She doesn’t believe the old system of shipping products halfway around the world to China made sense as countries try to reduce their carbon footprints.
“We have to face this problem and use our own ingenuity to solve it,” Grohoski said.
The proposed legislation, which is vehemently opposed by representatives for Maine’s retail and food producing industries, would charge large packaging producers for collecting and recycling materials as well as for disposing of non-recyclable packaging. The income generated would be reimbursed to communities like Trenton to support their recycling efforts. EPR programs already exist in many states for a variety of toxic and bulky products including pharmaceuticals, batteries, paint, carpet and mattresses. At least a dozen states, from New York to California and Hawaii, have been working on similar bills for packaging.
“Ten years ago, this would have been unthinkable,” said Dylan de Thomas, vice president of external affairs at the Recycling Partnership, who said he is seeing far more openness to EPR bills from such corporate giants as Coca-Cola and Unilever than in the past.
“It’s a reflection of the pressure they are seeing from corporate investors,” said de Thomas, who anticipates there may be similar shifts in national policies.
“That’s the big enchilada,” he said.
EPR programs for packaging, which accounts for about 40 percent of the municipal waste stream, have worked well in other countries, said Scott Cassel, CEO of the Product Stewardship Institute, who said benefits include new jobs as well as reinforcing the circular economy – or continual reuse of resources.
“These are tried-and-true strategies,” he said. None of these first bills will be perfect. But this is a path that we need to start down in the U.S.”
In Maine, the bill’s opponents raise concerns about the logistics retailers may face policing the new policies and the potential for food costs to rise for consumers who are just emerging from the pandemic. They cite a study from Toronto’s York University, which analyzed New York’s EPR bill and estimated an additional $36 to $57 per month in grocery costs for the average family of four. EPR advocates contest those findings, saying there is little evidence of significant costs ending up with consumers in other countries.
For many rural Mainers who don’t enjoy the benefits of free curbside waste collection, the debate over recycling seems irrelevant. They haul their own trash to transfer stations to avoid the $6 weekly charge for having it collected.
“I’ve never been one to recycle,” said Penny Lyons, a Trenton resident, although her family has a stash of bottles and other beverage containers on a flatbed trailer that can be turned in for cash. Her husband, who works in car sales, is able to dispose of their solid waste at work, she said.
Chocolate maker Kate McAleer, who owns chocolate maker Bixby &. Co, said that to follow federal food safety guidelines her company uses metalized film that is a challenge to recycle but protects against pests, air, sunlight and tampering. Changing that would have an impact on her products’ shelf life.
She doesn’t believe legislators understand the complexity of food safety. “I think they think there are solutions that there aren’t,” Bixby said.
Christine Cummings, executive director of the Maine Grocers and Food Producers Association, said her primary concern is “the unknowns” for businesses in a state that sits at the end of distribution routes and relies heavily on incoming goods.
“What is this going to do on our supply chain?” she asked.
Grohoski dismisses such concerns.
“We won’t be out on a limb for long,” she said, anticipating that if her bill passes, other states will soon follow suit.
In the meantime, some communities are paying a premium to continue recycling programs by shipping materials south to Portland, the state’s biggest city. Others are devising ways to process and sell recyclable materials.
In Unity, Maine, about 90 miles north of Portland, Steve Wright and Jeff Reynolds are running an eight-town sorting operation, feeding paper and plastics into giant green balers and glass into a machine that grinds bottles into a glistening powder that can be used for insulating boxes around lithium batteries or with aggregate to make driveways.
Each of the surrounding towns pays in according to its population – Unity has 2,000 residents – and individuals from further away can join for an annual fee of $30.
The pandemic has increased the piles of cardboard, particularly from pet owners leery of going inside stores, Wright sad..
The operation is powered by 40 solar panels and has room to expand – particularly if the EPR goes through.
“We have to move now,” said Rep Stanley Paige Ziegler, D-Montville, whose district includes Unity and who has worked alongside Grohoski to advance the EPR bill.
Sarah Nichols, Sustainable Maine director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, sees the bill as the logical next step for a state that has led the way in environmental policies. Maine passed one of the first bottle bills in the 1970s and in 2004 the first laws requiring manufacturers to pay the entire cost of recycling computers and televisions. In 2019, the legislature passed the nation’s first statewide ban on Styrofoam food containers that will soon go into effect.
“Maine is seen as a national leader in environmental policy,” Nichols said. “That’s why people move here and visit. It’s part of our state’s personality.”
Nichols points out that Department of Environmental Protection estimates show it can cost 67 percent more to recycle than dispose of packaging. Taxpayers pay at least $16 million annually to manage packaging material through recycling or disposal – costs they have no control over.
Nichols argues the EPR bill would give manufacturers an incentive to reduce packaging and design packaging that is more easily recycled.
Old recycling habits die-hard at the transfer station in Southwest Harbor, with its stunning views toward the forested slopes of Acadia National Park.
Residents drive up to pitch their waste into bays still bearing green signs reminding them of the old days when they sorted their waste: Glass, tin, aluminum and plastic in one; magazines, catalogues and other paper goods in another.
The baler that used to package up paper hasn’t been used for a couple of years, according to the site’s owner, Mark Worcester. Instead, Worcester is sending out a 25-30 ton container of trash – sometimes two – every day, usually to be incinerated for electricity.
“We get tons and tons of cardboard,” Worcester said.
On a busy Saturday morning, car after car pulled up loaded with packaging materials, folded ready for the recycling that would not happen.
“It’s a reflex,” said Jon Zeitler, as he broke down a box and chucked it into the bay that used to be for paper goods.
“Mentally, I have to,” said Jonathan Quebben as he, in turn, pitched his cardboard in.
Susan Raven, a third-grade teacher, said she has made a point of telling her students how to be responsible custodians of the earth. But it’s hard for them to put that into practice, she said, as she pulled out of her car’s trunk the plastic boxes her family of four always used to sort their recycling and then pitched it all into the trash.
South Dakota rocked again as a wind turbine plant shuts its doors
Salena Zito
John F. Kerry, the special presidential envoy for climate, said only months ago that those losing fossil fuel jobs in coal and hydraulic fracturing will find they have a better choice of jobs in either the solar industry or as wind turbine technicians.
That was then. Now, a wind blade manufacturing plant located in Aberdeen, South Dakota, has announced it is shutting its doors permanently in less than two months.
The disappearance of Molded Fiber Glass will displace over 300 workers and their families. It marks another major loss of energy jobs in the state following President Joe Biden’s halting of the Keystone pipeline on the first day of his administration.
MFG said in a news release that the closure will happen because of changing market conditions, foreign competition, and proposed revisions to tax policies affecting the wind energy industry in the United States.
Since 2007, the Aberdeen plant has been producing wind turbine blades. The plant will remain in operation for the next two months until it has fulfilled existing orders.
A family member of one of the workers said they were informed of the closure last Monday. Employees were completely taken off guard by the announcement. She was also perplexed by it. “They should be swimming in orders right now,” she said.
In 2017, MFG threatened to kill 400 jobs at the plant and shut down because of the “proposed revisions to tax policies.” At that time, Republican U.S. Sen. John Thune stopped the closure by pushing for revisions of the 2017 tax bill to be more favorable to the industry.
Thune, in an emailed statement, said it is troubling that at a time when wind energy is seeing record investment that this growth is not translating to American jobs. It’s especially hard for those working these good-paying jobs in Aberdeen to face uncertainty yet again. Thune criticized Biden’s statement from his address to Congress: “There’s no reason, the president said, “the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing.” But Beijing is getting all the business.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s recent ranking of global wind turbine manufacturers last year showed that seven of the top 10 wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese companies. General Electric, an American company, is first, but Goldwind of China is in second place. The study also found more than half of the world’s newly installed wind power capacity was built in China in 2020.
Last month, Thune proposed an amendment to the Democrats’ expansive energy tax credit bill, requiring the administration to certify that U.S. manufacturers would not be undercut by foreign suppliers using low-cost labor and creating higher emissions. MFG, in closing its 14-year-old plant, cited precisely these two adverse factors as its reasons.
One day after the announcement, TC Energy, the Canadian pipeline company that sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline, announced that it was terminating the project, a 1,700-mile pipeline intended to carry 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, passing through five states, including South Dakota.
Although the wind and pipeline industries are different sides of the climate change coin, both were considered economic lifelines to small-town South Dakota. Both promised economic stability and a revenue stream that would keep many towns hopping until tourism hit its stride once again.
“We are a smallish community of 28,000 people, so 300 jobs is a big deal,” said the family member of a worker. “Granted, two facilities in town, 3M and Banner Engineering, have recently doubled capacity, so most of the hourly employees should be absorbed by that,” she said. “However, some of these people have been with the company since 2008. How do you start over after 13 years?”
It is a question that has been asked by many Americans in manufacturing jobs, who have had to compete with cheaper overseas products for generations. And it is a question many workers in the energy industry may be asking soon.
Aldi claims first place in major retailer race to 100 pct renewables in Australia
Aldi Australia says it has hit the target of powering all of its operations with 100 per cent renewable electricity six months ahead of schedule, marking a national first for major supermarkets and setting a cracking pace for the rest of corporate Australia.
The Australian arm of the German supermarket chain said on Tuesday that it had achieved the milestone this month, putting it well ahead of the targeted end-of-2021 deadline, which the company set for itself in August of last year.
The achievement – notched up through a mix of on-site solar, wind farm off-take deals and renewable energy certificate purchases – makes Aldi the first supermarket chain in Australia to have all offices, stores and warehouses powered entirely by renewables, and cuts its carbon footprint by 85 per cent.
And that is no small achievement, considering Aldi is the 67th biggest user of electricity in Australia, with 555 stores and eight distribution centers nationwide.
“We have always been a business that prioritizes doing the right thing over talking about it,” said Aldi Australia CEO Tom Daunt in a statement.
“We hope that other businesses across the country are encouraged by what we have been able to achieve and accelerate their own plans around renewable energy.”
As RenewEconomy sister site One Step Off The Grid reported here, Aldi’s rooftop solar roll-out kicked off at a Tweed Heads store in Northern NSW in 2015. By the end of 2021 it will have been extended across 274 stores and six distribution centers.
Much of the on-site solar has been installed in partnership with NSW-based outfit, Epho, which last year noted that the average Aldi store was generally fitted with a 100kW rooftop PV system, which “coincidently is also what is needed to off-set the day-time energy consumption of the store.”
On the distribution centers, Epho said the commercial arrays had ranged in size from 1.5MW at the Dandenong facility in Victoria, to 1MW in Brendale Queensland, and 650kW in Regency Park, South Australia.
“Last year, at the peak of the program, we delivered 100 solar systems on Aldi stores in 100 business days,” said Epho managing director Oliver Hartley in a statement this week.
“This kind of speed is only possible because Aldi and Epho have built a strong partnership over the years,” he said.
For its wind energy, the company teed up two power purchase agreements in the first half of 2020, including a 10-year deal with Ratch Australia to buy just under 20 per cent of the power generated by its 227MW Collector wind farm in the New South Wales Southern Tablelands.
The second PPA, secured in April 2020, was a 10-year deal with Tilt Renewables to buy around 6 per cent of the output of its massive 336MW Dundonnell wind farm in Victoria.
At the time they were made, the wind farm deals – both of which were scheduled to kick in in January of this year – were expected to generate more than 180,000MWh of electricity to go towards powering Aldi Australia.
On top of this, the supermarket chain had invested in more efficient systems to reduce energy usage and carbon emissions, including LED lighting, energy-efficient chillers, and upgrading to natural refrigerants.
Any shortfall in renewable supply from the solar and wind is being covered through the purchase of renewable energy certificates.
“Our customers care about ensuring they purchase with purpose and every time someone walks through our doors they can feel confident their weekly shop isn’t costing the earth,” said Daunt.
“We’re already known for our high quality products at incredibly low prices and as a responsible Australian business, we’re thrilled to be maintaining this great value without compromising the environment.”
Greenpeace Australia Pacific CEO David Ritter welcomed the milestone as an example of genuine corporate climate leadership in action.
“Renewable energy is the cheapest form of new energy, and capable of powering Australia’s biggest businesses. Aldi’s leadership in the race to power all Aussie supermarkets with renewables is a landmark day,” Ritter said.
“Aldi’s deals with two new wind farms in Victoria and New South Wales are contributing to regional economic activity and new, future-proof job creation in clean energy at a time when we need it most,” he added.
Sophie Vorrath is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
Insurance Giants Under Fire from First Nations for Backing Trans Mountain Tar Sands Pipeline
Dozens of events on four continents hope to turn up the pressure on the insurance industry that underwrites Canada’s Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline.
By Nick Cunningham
Indigenous peoples in Canada and a coalition of environmental groups launched a “Global Week of Action” for June 14-21, aimed at pressuring an array of insurance companies to cut ties with a long-distance tar sands pipeline under construction in Canada.
On Wednesday, the Braided Warriors, an Indigenous youth group in British Columbia, held a rally in front of Chubb Insurance Canada in Vancouver, B.C. On Friday, activists in London are set to protest outside Lloyd’s of London — one of the world’s largest insurers of fossil fuels. Other acts of solidarity are planned as far away as the Pacific Islands and Sierra Leone.
The Indigenous and environmental groups are targeting the handful of global insurance companies that provide coverage for the Trans Mountain pipeline system, a long-distance pipeline running from Alberta’s tar sands to the Pacific Coast near Vancouver.
The original pipeline has been operating for decades, but Canada is building what has been termed a “twin” pipeline that would nearly triple the capacity of the existing system to 890,000 barrels of oil per day. For years the Trans Mountain Expansion struggled to get off the ground. It met intense resistance from multiple First Nations in British Columbia, and as it became ensnared in legal limbo, it grew into a financial boondoggle.
The former owner Kinder Morgan sought to bail on the project, and instead of letting it die, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau bought the system in 2018 for C$4.5 billion, effectively nationalizing it to keep it alive and push it forward.
Since then, the Trans Mountain Expansion has broken ground, felling trees and digging trenches along part of its 700-mile route. At the start of 2021, the project was roughly 22 percent completed, and despite the ballooning cost, is scheduled to come online at the end of 2022.
“The Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker project is an existential threat to Tsleil-Waututh Nation. It also fuels the climate crisis, which is a threat to us all. This is why Tsleil-Waututh Nation does not grant our Free, Prior, Informed Consent, and why we are calling on all insurance companies to drop Trans Mountain and recognize the violation of Indigenous rights as a material risk,” Charlene Aleck of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation Sacred Trust Initiative, said in a statement.
The Tsleil-Waututh Nation has lived on the Burrard Inlet in what is now Vancouver for millennia. The expanded pipeline system is estimated to result in a sevenfold increase in oil tanker traffic in the inlet. That would boost the number of tankers navigating the island-studded waters leading to the pipeline’s terminal from 60 per year currently to over 400 per year. A technical assessment conducted by the Tsleil-Waututh Nation found that there is a 79 to 87 percent likelihood of an oil spill in the inlet over a 50-year period.
Turning up the Pressure
But completion is not inevitable, and First Nations and environmental groups opposed to the project see the insurance industry as a key point of leverage. Without insurance, the pipeline cannot proceed.
DeSmog previously reported on the effort by First Nations and environmental groups to pressure global insurance companies to sever their ties with Trans Mountain, among other acts of resistance.
The campaign has proven to be partially successful thus far. In early June, Argo Group said it would stop insuring the pipeline when its policy expires at the end of August. “This type of project is not currently within Argo’s risk appetite,” Argo said in a statement to Insurance Journal.
Last year, other insurance giants — Zurich Insurance, Talanx, and Munich Re — also backed out. At least 14 major insurance companies have ruled out insuring the pipeline, according to Stand.earth, an environmental group pressuring the industry.
The shrinking pool of insurance is also part of a larger story. Greater scrutiny over the oil industry in general, and Canada’s tar sands in particular — some of the dirtiest forms of oil production — has led to a growing number of insurance companies restricting coverage to the sector.
“They’re standing on the wrong side of history. They should know and understand that the fossil fuel industry is in a state of demise. They shouldn’t be investing their funding into a dying industry that has proven itself to be incredibly destructive to the environment,” Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, told DeSmog, referring to the insurance companies backing the project.
Joe Seeger, an expert in insurance for oil projects, told the CBC that the number of large insurance companies providing coverage to Canadian tar sands has fallen roughly in half over the past decade. “It really is a supply and demand situation where we always go to our clients and have the bad news of [explaining there] are fewer insurers and we have to try to figure out new ways to do the business,” Seeger told the CBC in May.
The insurers that remain have tightened up their offerings. The major insurers in London have restricted the amount of coverage for tar sands operations to just $200 million, according to Willis Towers Watson, an international insurance broker. As recently as 18 months ago, those companies would offer $500 million in coverage.
The pressure from activists and First Nations apparently had enough of an impact on the project that Trans Mountain appealed to the Canada Energy Regulator in February to allow them to keep the names of its insurers secret.
In its application, Trans Mountain said that “insurance companies have faced negative pressure for insuring the Trans Mountain Pipeline” and that Trans Mountain “experienced a significant reduction in available insurance capacity” in 2020. If the growing pressure from activists continues, the pipeline operator said, it would “likely result in material loss to Trans Mountain.”
The federal regulator agreed and allowed the insurers to remain confidential. “It’s a troubling example of Trans Mountain’s culture of secrecy and attempts to evade transparency and accountability to its owners, which are the Canadian taxpayers,” Elana Sulakshana, an energy finance campaigner with Rainforest Action Network, told DeSmog.
DeSmog reached out to eight insurers that are thought to be the remaining companies backing the Trans Mountain system — AIG, Chubb, Energy Insurance Limited, Liberty Mutual, Lloyd’s, Starr, Stewart Specialty Risk Underwriting, and W.R. Berkley. AIG declined to comment and the rest did not respond.
Trans Mountain did not respond to a request for comment.
“The key companies that were insuring the project last year have yet to cut ties and for the most part have not commented publicly on their support for the project. And that’s why we’re having this week of action, to ramp up the pressure and keep the public scrutiny on them so that they are forced to respond,” Sulakshana said.
A ‘paradigm shift‘
Even as the Trans Mountain Expansion is proceeding without the consent of some First Nations, there is something of a reckoning unfolding at the moment in Canada surrounding its relationship with Indigenous communities.
Both British Columbia and the Canadian parliament are moving legislation forward that would align provincial and federal law with the principles laid out in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), an attempt at some form of reconciliation. On June 16, the Canadian Senate passed the bill.
The practical impact is unclear as of yet, but the legislation is a “paradigm shift,” according to Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, potentially shifting more power to First Nations when it comes to resource extraction on Indigenous lands.
“We have a federal bill and a provincial bill that seeks to send a strong message to governments at all levels, to industry, business — that it’s a new day,” he said.
But he doesn’t expect the legislation to defuse simmering tension in British Columbia. “We’re expecting to hear the usual racist backlash from industry,” Phillip said. He pointed to the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), concerns about radicalized violence, and also the recent revelation that the remains of 215 children were found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, one of many schools that forcibly sought to assimilate Indigenous children and which operated until the late 1970s. The discovery made national, and indeed, internationalheadlines.
“It’s a very, very volatile situation here in British Columbia,” Phillip said. And the construction of the Trans Mountain Expansion “could be a flashpoint, no doubt about it.”
But opposition to the pipeline continues. “This resistance has been consistent and unrelenting,” Phillip said. “We intend to continue to vigorously oppose TMX [Trans Mountain Expansion] until it’s dead.”
‘Potentially the worst drought in 1,200 years’: scientists on the scorching US heatwave
Maanvi Singh
The heatwave gripping the US west is simultaneously breaking hundreds of temperature records, exacerbating a historic drought and priming the landscape for a summer and fall of extreme wildfire.
Salt Lake City hit a record-breaking 107F (42C), while in Texas and California, power grid operators are asking residents to conserve energy to avoid rolling blackouts and outages. And all this before we’ve even reached the hottest part of the summer.
Among the 40 million Americans enduring the triple-digit temperatures are scientists who study droughts and the climate. They’d long forewarned of this crisis, and now they’re living through it. The Guardian spoke with researchers across the west about how they’re coping.
The paleoclimatologist: ‘Potentially the worst drought in 1,200 years’
Kathleen Johnson, California Associate professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine
I feel a little bit lucky because I’m in Orange county, relatively close to the coast – so the temperatures are not as severe here as they are in other parts of California and the west. I’m worried about this summer – this doesn’t bode well, in terms of what we can expect with wildfire and the worsening drought. This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years. And the reason is linked directly to human caused climate change.
As a paleoclimatologist my main point, always, is that we are able to look into the past. By looking at tree rings and other paleoclimate records, we’re able to gain really important perspectives about how climate has varied and changed in the past. And having done that, it’s clear that what we’re experiencing now is not natural. This is undoubtedly being caused by human activities, by greenhouse gas emissions.
The more we see these extreme events, piled on top of each other, and not just in the western US but globally, the more I think the reality of climate change becomes inescapable. And it feels absolutely overwhelming and sad. We are going to have less water, increased wildfires and more extreme heatwaves. But it’s also motivating. We need to continue to push for urgent action on climate change
The climate scientist: ‘The most distressing part? This was predictable’
Daniel Swain, Colorado Climate scientist, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability,University of California, Los Angeles
This is really, really bad. Here on the eastern side of the Rockies, here in Boulder, we’re seeing record high temperatures. That’s the case in other parts of the state and in other states. And we’re seeing smoke plumes – not from local fires but from fires in Arizona and Utah. I think for a lot of people, it’s traumatic. The fires we saw in the last couple of years were really awful, and this year it seems like we’re on that same trajectory. It kind of feels like deja vu.
It does get rough sometime – talking about these things year after year. I live in the west, and all my family, pretty much, lives in the west. Most of my friends live in the west. It’s where I grew up, and seeing the landscape-scale transformations that are happening here, and seeing how it’s affecting people is overwhelming sometimes. But actually to me, the most distressing part is that this is very much in line with predictions. Climate scientists have been repeating essentially the same messages and warnings since before I was born.
Climate change is a major contributor to, if not the dominant factor, in a lot of the changes that we’re seeing out west and elsewhere. And it just is going to keep getting worse unless we do something about it. And so far, you know, we have yet to do the kinds of things, on a large enough scale, that are actually going to make a meaningful difference.
The atmospheric scientist: ‘It’s surreal to see your models become real life’
Katharine Hayhoe, Texas Climate scientist and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy
The extreme heat and the wildfires aren’t surprising. But it is just surreal to see what you only ever saw before in your research studies and models, actually happening in real life. And you’re almost dumbfounded by the speed at which your projections have become reality.
Climate change is loading the weather dice against us. We always have a chance of rolling a double six naturally, and getting an intense record breaking summer heatwave. But decade by decade as the world warms, it’s as if climate change is sneaking in and taking one of those numbers on the dice and turning it into another six, and then another six. And maybe even a seven. So we are seeing that heatwaves are coming earlier in the year, they are longer, they are stronger.
Still, public opinion data shows that there’s a disconnect, where even though about 72% of people in the US say global warming is happening, only 40% say that they think that it will affect them directly. But we actually did a recent study, looking at climate and weather extremes – and we found that really hot, dry conditions are the only thing that most people in the US directly connect to climate change. So right now is a really important time for scientists to communicate with the public that climate change is here, and climate action matters.
The meteorologist: ‘The ground is burning like a hotplate’
Simon Wang, Utah Professor of climate dynamics at Utah State University
Yesterday, when Salt Lake City hit record temperatures, we went to one of our grad students’ back yards to barbecue some burgers and do some work. But it was so hot – oh my gosh, 107F (42C). So hot that, actually three out of five students’ computers overheated and broke. I was the first to throw in the white flag and ask to go home – I really hurting.
As a meteorologist, of course this isn’t a surprise. The warming climate is making these dry, hot periods even drier and hotter. Since we’re in a drought, we don’t really have much moisture in the soil. And without that moisture, the sun really heats up the ground and the air much faster. So, really what we’re seeing in the south-west is, the ground is burning like a hotplate. And we’re standing on it.
But you know, I actually feel kind of optimistic. In the restaurants and beer houses right now, everybody is talking about the weather, and how hot it is. And a few of them will even comment, “This is the new normal.” And I mean – we’re in Utah! Whatever people believe in, they know it’s really hot, and the climate is changing – and they don’t like that. These compounding extreme weather events are really bad – but they’re going to keep happening, no matter what. Maybe if there’s some good to come out of it, it’s that people are becoming more aware. And the sooner the general public starts to become aware of this issue, the sooner, hopefully, they’ll push for changes to address the crisis. So actually, if you saw me walking around outside this week, I probably had a smile on my face as I listened to some of these conversations.
In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril
Jonathan Weisman
WASHINGTON — Sen. Christopher S. Murphy concedes that political rhetoric in the nation’s capital can sometimes stray into hysteria, but when it comes to the precarious state of American democracy, he insisted he was not exaggerating the nation’s tilt toward authoritarianism.
“Democrats are always at risk of being hyperbolic,” said Murphy, D-Conn. “I don’t think there’s a risk when it comes to the current state of democratic norms.”
After the norm-shattering presidency of Donald Trump, the violence-inducing bombast over a stolen election, the pressuring of state vote counters, the Capitol riot and the flood of voter curtailment laws rapidly being enacted in Republican-run states, Washington has found itself in an anguished state.
Almost daily, Democrats warn that Republicans are pursuing racist, Jim Crow-inspired voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise tens of millions of citizens, mainly people of color, in a cynical effort to grab power. Metal detectors sit outside the House chamber to prevent lawmakers — particularly Republicans who have boasted of their intention to carry guns everywhere — from bringing weaponry to the floor. Democrats regard their Republican colleagues with suspicion, believing that some of them collaborated with the rioters on Jan. 6.
Republican lawmakers have systematically downplayed or dismissed the dangers, with some breezing over the attack on the Capitol as a largely peaceful protest, and many saying the state voting law changes are to restore “integrity” to the process, even as they give credence to Trump’s false claims of rampant fraud in the 2020 election.
They shrug off Democrats’ warnings of grave danger as the overheated language of politics as usual.
“I haven’t understood for four or five years why we are so quick to spin into a place where part of the country is sure that we no longer have the strength to move forward, as we always have in the past,” said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of Republican leadership, noting that the passions of Republican voters today match those of Democratic voters after Trump’s triumph. “Four years ago, there were people in the so-called resistance showing up in all of my offices every week, some of whom were chaining themselves to the door.”
For Democrats, the evidence of looming catastrophe mounts daily. Fourteen states, including politically competitive ones like Florida and Georgia, have enacted 22 laws to curtail early and mail-in ballots, limit polling places and empower partisans to police polling, then oversee the vote tally. Others are likely to follow, including Texas, with its huge share of House seats and electoral votes.
Because Republicans control the legislatures of many states where the 2020 census will force redistricting, the party is already in a strong position to erase the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the House. Even moderate voting-law changes could bolster Republicans’ chances for the net gain of one vote they need to take back the Senate.
And in the nightmare outcome promulgated by some academics, Republicans have put themselves in a position to dictate the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if the voting is close in swing states.
“Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations,” 188 scholars said in a statement expressing concern about the erosion of democracy.
Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who lectured on American politics at Bowdoin College before going to the Senate, put the moment in historical context. He called American democracy “a 240-year experiment that runs against the tide of human history,” and that tide usually leads from and back to authoritarianism.
He said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the troubling curtailments of the franchise.
“This is an incredibly dangerous moment, and I don’t think it’s being sufficiently realized as such,” he said.
Republicans contend that much of this is overblown, though some concede the charges sting. Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., said Democrats were playing a hateful race card to promote voting-rights legislation that is so extreme it would cement Democratic control of Congress for decades.
“I hope that damage isn’t being done,” he added, “but it is always very dangerous to falsely play the race card and let’s face it, that’s what’s being done here.”
Toomey, who voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial, said he understood why, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, states sharply liberalized voting rules in 2020, extending mail-in voting, allowing mailed ballots to be counted days after Election Day and setting up ballot drop boxes, curbside polls and weeks of early voting.
But he added that Democrats should understand why state election officials wanted to course correct now that the coronavirus was ebbing.
“Every state needs to strike a balance between two competing values: making it as easy as possible to cast legitimate votes, but also the other, which is equally important: having everybody confident about the authenticity of the votes,” Toomey said.
Trump’s lies about a stolen election, he added, “were more likely to resonate because you had this system that went so far the other way.”
Some other Republicans embrace the notion that they are trying to use their prerogatives as a minority party to safeguard their own power. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said the endeavor was the essence of America’s system of representative democracy, distinguishing it from direct democracy, where the majority rules and is free to trample the rights of the minority unimpeded.
“The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” Paul said. “The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.”
Democrats and their allies push back hard on those arguments. King said the only reason voters lacked confidence in the voting system was that Republicans — especially Trump — told them for months that it was rigged, despite all evidence to the contrary, and now continued to insist that there were abuses in the process that must be fixed.
“That’s like pleading for mercy as an orphan after you killed both your parents,” he said.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said in no way could some of the new state voting laws be seen as a necessary course correction. “Not being able to serve somebody water who’s waiting in line? I mean, come on,” he said. “There are elements that are in most of these proposals where you look at it and you say, ‘That violates the common-sense test.’”
Missteps by Democrats have fortified Republicans’ attempts to downplay the dangers. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have mischaracterized Georgia’s voting law, handing Republicans ammunition to say that Democrats were willfully distorting what was happening at the state level.
The state’s 98-page voting law, passed after the narrow victories for Biden and two Democratic candidates for Senate, would make absentee voting harder and create restrictions and complications for millions of voters, many of them people of color.
But Biden falsely claimed that the law — which he labeled “un-American” and “sick” — had slapped new restrictions on early voting to bar people from voting after 5 p.m. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said the Georgia law had ended early voting on Sunday. It didn’t.
And the sweep — critics say overreach — of the Democrats’ answer to Republican voter laws, the For the People Act, has undermined Democratic claims that the fate of the republic relies on its passage. Even some Democrats are uncomfortable with the act’s breadth, including an advancement of statehood for the District of Columbia with its assurance of two more senators, almost certainly Democratic; its public financing of elections; its nullification of most voter identification laws; and its mandatory prescriptions for early and mail-in voting.
“They want to put a thumb on the scale of future elections,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Wednesday. “They want to take power away from the voters and the states, and give themselves every partisan advantage that they can.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who could conceivably be a partner in Democratic efforts to expand voting rights, called the legislation a “fundamentally unserious” bill.
Republican leaders have sought to take the current argument from the lofty heights of history to the nitty-gritty of legislation. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, pointed to the success of bipartisan efforts such as passage of a bill to combat hate crimes against Asian Americans, approval of a broad China competition measure and current talks to forge compromises on infrastructure and criminal justice as proof that Democratic catastrophizing over the state of American governance was overblown.
But Democrats are not assuaged.
“Not to diminish the importance of the work we’ve done here, but democracy itself is what we’re talking about,” said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. “And to point at other bills that don’t have to do with the fair administration of elections is just an attempt to distract while all these state legislatures move systematically toward disenfranchising voters who have historically leaned Democrat.”
King said he had had serious conversations with Republican colleagues about the precarious state of American democracy. Authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Adolf Hitler have come to power by election, and stayed in power by warping or obliterating democratic norms.
But, he acknowledged, he has yet to get serious engagement, largely because his colleagues fear the wrath of Trump and his supporters.
“I get the feeling they hope this whole thing will go away,” he said. “They make arguments, but you have the feeling their hearts aren’t in it.”
Electric heat pumps use much less energy than furnaces, and can cool houses too – here’s how they work
Robert Brecha, Professor of Sustainability, University of Dayton
To help curb climate change, President Biden has set a goal of lowering U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 50%-52% below 2005 levels by 2030. Meeting this target will require rapidly converting as many fossil fuel-powered activities to electricity as possible, and then generating that electricity from low-carbon and carbon-free sources such as wind, solar, hydropower and nuclear energy.
The buildings that people live and work in consume substantial amounts of energy. In 2019, commercial and residential buildings accounted for more than one-seventh of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. New heating and cooling strategies are an important piece of the puzzle.
Fortunately, there’s an existing technology that can do this: electric heat pumps that are three to four times more efficient than furnaces. These devices heat homes in winter and cool them in summer by moving heat in and out of buildings, rather than by burning fossil fuel.
Most heating systems in the U.S. use forced-air furnaces that run on natural gas or electricity, or in some cases heating oil. To heat the building, the systems burn fuel or use electricity to heat up air, and then blow the warm air through ducts into individual rooms.
A heat pump works more like a refrigerator, which extracts energy from the air inside the fridge and dumps that energy into the room, leaving the inside cooler. To heat a building, a heat pump extracts energy from outdoor air or from the ground and converts it to heat for the house.
Here’s how it works: Extremely cold fluid circulates through coils of tubing in the heat pump’s outdoor unit. That fluid absorbs energy in the form of heat from the surrounding air, which is warmer than the fluid. The fluid vaporizes and then circulates into a compressor. Compressing any gas heats it up, so this process generates heat. Then the vapor moves through coils of tubing in the indoor unit of the heat pump, heating the building.
In summer, the heat pump runs in reverse and takes energy from the room and moves that heat outdoors, even though it’s hotter outside – basically, functioning like a bigger version of a refrigerator.
More efficient than furnaces
Heat pumps require some electricity to run, but it’s a relatively small amount. Modern heat pump systems can transfer three or four times more thermal energy in the form of heat than they consume in electrical energy to do this work – and that the homeowner pays for.
In contrast, converting energy from one form to another, as conventional heating systems do, always wastes some of it. That’s true for burning oil or gas to heat air in a furnace, or using electric heaters to heat air – although in that case, the waste occurs when the electricity is generated. About two-thirds of the energy used to produce electricity at a power plant is lost in the process.
Retrofitting residences and commercial buildings with heat pumps increases heating efficiency. When combined with a switch from fossil fuels to renewables, it further lowers energy use and carbon emissions.
In warmer areas with relatively low heating demands, heat pumps are cheaper to run than furnaces. Tax credits, utility rebates or other subsidies may also provide incentives to help with up-front costs, including federal incentives reinstated by the Biden administration.
In extremely cold climates, these systems have an extra internal heater to help out. This unit is not as efficient, and can significantly run up electric bills. People who live in cold locations may want to consider geothermal heat pumps as an alternative.
These systems leverage the fact that ground temperature is warmer than the air in winter. Geothermal systems collect warmth from the earth and use the same fluid and compressor technology as air source heat pumps to transfer heat into buildings. They cost more, since installing them involves excavation to bury tubing below ground, but they also reduce electricity use.
New, smaller “mini-split” heat pump systems work well in all but the coldest climates. Instead of requiring ducts to move air through buildings, these systems connect to wall-mounted units that heat or cool individual rooms. They are easy to install and can be selectively used in individual apartments, which makes retrofitting large buildings easier.
Even with the best heating and cooling systems, installing proper insulation and sealing building leaks are key to reducing energy use. You can also experiment with your thermostat to see how little you can heat or cool your home while keeping everyone in it comfortable.
For help figuring out whether a heat pump can work for you, one good source of information is your electricity provider. Many utilities offer home energy audits that can identify cost-effective ways to make your home more energy-efficient. Other good sources include the U.S. Department of Energy and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. As the push to electrify society gains speed, heat pumps are ready to play a central role.
Robert Brecha does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.