How nuclear fusion works, and why it’s a big deal for green energy that scientists made a ‘breakthrough’
Paola Rosa-Aquino – December 12, 2022
Engineers work at the National Ignition Facility in California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.David Butow / Contributor
Scientists produced a nuclear fusion reaction that created a net energy gain, preliminary results suggest.
The Department of Energy is expected to make an official announcement about the finding on Tuesday.
Fusion energy advocates say it’s a step forward in clean, cheap, and almost limitless electricity.
Scientists have reportedly made a “breakthrough” in their quest to harness nuclear fusion.
The US Department of Energy is expected to make an official announcement regarding the milestone in fusion energy research on Tuesday, the the Financial Times reported.
For the first time, researchers created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than they put into it, FT and the Washington Post reported.
The experiment, conducted within the last two weeks at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, generated 2.5 megajoules of energy, 120% more than the 2.1 megajoules put into creating it, FT reported, citing preliminary data.
“Scientifically, this is the first time that they showed that this is possible,” Gianluca Sarri, a physicist at Queen’s University Belfast, told New Scientist. “From theory, they knew that it should happen, but it was never seen in real life experimentally.”
What is fusion energy and why is it a big deal?
This illustration shows how lasers heat a target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur.Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Nuclear fusion works by forcing together two atoms — most often hydrogen — to make a heavier one — like helium.
This explosive process releases massive amounts of energy, the Department of Energy explains. Fusion is the opposite of fission, the reaction that powers nuclear reactors used commercially today.
Fusion occurs naturally in the heart of the sun and the stars, providing these cosmic objects with fuel.
Since the 1950s, scientists have been trying to replicate it on Earth in order to tap into what nuclear energy advocates suggest is clean, cheap, and almost limitless electricity.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, fusion generates four times more energy per kilogram than the fission used to power nuclear plants, and nearly 4 million times more energy than burning oil or coal.
What’s more, unlike fossil fuels, fusion doesn’t release carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas that’s the main driver of climate change — into the atmosphere. And unlike nuclear fission, fusion doesn’t create long-lived radioactive waste, according to the Department of Energy.
A view of Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, in Leningrad, Russia on September 14, 2022.Sezgin Pancar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
But so far, nuclear fusion hasn’t solved our energy problems on a grand scale.
What Tuesday’s ‘breakthrough’ announcement means for the future
Tuesday’s announcement is likely a huge step forward in nuclear fusion energy, but applying the technology at commercial scale is likely still years away.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist, pointed out that the process the Department of Energy uses requires tritium, a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen.
“It may yet yield important information that is ultimately transformative. We don’t know yet,” Prescod-Weinstein tweeted on Monday. “Being able to do this once a day with a laser does not at all mean that this mechanism will scale!”
What is nuclear fusion, and could it power our future?
Haley Ott – December 12, 2022
What is nuclear fusion, and could it power our future?
Scientists, governments, and companies from around the world have been increasingly investing in a potential source of energy that could provide unlimited, clean power to everyone on Earth: nuclear fusion. Fusion is the process that powers the sun and the stars. It’s the opposite of nuclear fission, the process used in today’s nuclear power plants, which splits atoms apart.
U.S. Department of Energy was expected to announce in mid-December a major breakthrough in the quest to harness the power of nuclear fusion. The Financial Times reported that scientists at the government-run Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California had managed for the first time ever to create more energy in a fusion reactor than was required to drive the process — a “net energy gain.”
U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, said if confirmed it “could be a game changer for the world” in the bid to create sustainable electricity.
The interior of the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak in the United Kingdom is shown with a superimposed plasma. / Credit: EUROfusion
In fusion, two atomic nuclei are combined to create a heavier nucleus, and the process releases energy. The reaction takes place in a state of matter called plasma, which is distinct from liquids, solids or gasses.
In the sun, nuclei collide at hot enough temperatures to overcome the electric repulsion that would normally keep them apart. When they are very close together, the attractive nuclear force between them becomes stronger than the electric repulsion, and they are able to fuse. The gravity of the sun ensures that nuclei are kept close enough together to increase their chances of colliding.
If humans can harness the power of fusion on an industrial scale, it could help create a virtually limitless source of clean energy on earth, with the power to generate four million times more energy than burning coal or oil, according to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
Scientists believe fusion plants would be much safer than today’s nuclear fission plants — if the process can be mastered.
Parts of the ITER tokamak are prepared for assembly, August 3, 2022. / Credit: Haley Ott/CBS News
“It can’t run away. It’s a very difficult reaction to sustain; it needs to be driven. Whereas fission can run on a chain reaction, and it has to be controlled,” Tim Luce, the head of science at ITER, told CBS News.
Fusion also creates much less radioactive byproduct than fission, and what it does leave behind is “not water soluble — they won’t get into the food supply, the water supply,” Luce said.
Some concepts for fusion reactors being developed today will use two types of hydrogen atoms, deuterium and tritium, for fuel.
Deuterium can be easily and cheaply extracted from sea water. Tritium, which does not exist abundantly in nature, could potentially be produced by a reaction between fusion-generated neutrons and lithium. It is also a byproduct of the nuclear fission process used in power plants around the world today.
Scientists have already managed to produce fusion reactions, but not without using more energy to trigger the process than they were able to produce through it.
Assuming scientists are able to achieve “net energy” — producing more energy than they use to create the fusion reaction — other things will still need to fall in place for fusion to become a secure, viable energy source for the world.
“We must also prepare the path broadly for fusion commercialization, going well beyond R&D,” Dr. Scott C. Hsu, lead fusion coordinator in the Office of the Undersecretary for Science and Innovation at the U.S. Department of Energy, said in a Senate hearing last month.
“This includes public engagement and energy justice, diverse workforce development, a regulatory framework that engenders public trust and supports timely deployment, market identification, attracting investment and commercialization partners, export controls, nuclear nonproliferation, cybersecurity, international coordination, building critical supply chains and manufacturing capabilities, and waste disposition,” Hsu said.
Amy Baefsky, who had to sell 10 percent of her and her husband’s hundreds of cow-calf pairs after a lack of rain and brutal winds left little grass for feeding; on her way to feed cattle at Fort Union ranch in Watrous, N.M., Nov. 29, 2022. (Ramsay de Give/The New York Times)
Rock Ulibarri had a vision for his ancestral homestead nestled in a canyon in the mountains of northeast New Mexico: Open it up to tourists, who would pay for pit-smoked pork, mountain bike tours of the craggy terrain and works by local artisans.
He wanted to build the sort of business that could raise local income levels and help rural residents stay on their land, rather than sell to outsiders. That aligned with the state’s plans, too: The governor had created a division in her economic development department to promote outdoor recreation.
So Ulibarri started building campsites and a small guesthouse, even retrofitting the one-room cabin where his father was born. Early this year, he was ready to book a summer of visits.
Then, on an April day with blistering winds following months of only trace rainfall, the mountain went up in flames.
Ulibarri and his partner, Becky Schaller, held out as long as they could, even as the electricity failed and smoke clouded the sky. When the winds turned in their direction and they saw the blaze creeping over the mountain, they loaded up their goats, dogs, horses and parrots into a big trailer and drove slowly down to safety.
Surveying the damage later, they saw their buildings had been spared, but the trees on the ridges were gone — along with the fences they needed to confine their animals, and the trails in the surrounding forest they were counting on for bikers and hikers. Also, the river was running inky black with ash. A year’s worth of food in their freezer had perished. And the business plan was on ice.
By the end of the season, they were able to host one group, and they plan to try again next year. But Ulibarri wonders whether the business model he’d hoped his neighbors could emulate is viable. Even before the fires, he noticed less snow on the mountains and fewer fish in dwindling streams. For years, fire managers had suppressed natural blazes, so there’s still plenty of timber left to burn again.
“Climate change does scare me, a lot, because we really don’t know what it’s going to look like, you know?” he said. “Just what I’ve seen so far in my lifetime, the changes are incredible.”
The changes are indeed incredible. So are the costs.
The study of how climate change affects economies is still relatively nascent, but evolving fast. Economists are grappling with bigger shocks than even scientists had anticipated, in the form of catastrophic events like hurricanes and wildfires, as well as the slow, creeping influence of drought, extreme heat and rising sea levels.
Unlike its neighbors to the east and west, New Mexico is tackling the economic challenge head-on, passing legislation and funding programs to mitigate the effects of climate change. Complicating that effort: The state’s primary taxpayer, the oil and gas industry, is also the main source of the disruption.
For that reason, New Mexico faces what economists call “physical risk” and “transition risk”: the financial damages of extreme weather and shifting temperatures, and the damage caused by doing something about it. To offset those risks, the state is working to diversify into other industries. The problem is, some of those that offer the most potential are vulnerable to climate change themselves.
“In looking for alternatives to extraction as ways to fuel New Mexico’s economy, the two that always jump out most immediately are tourism or outdoor recreation and agriculture,” said Kelly O’Donnell, an economic consultant. “And obviously those are two of the industries that very likely will suffer extreme damage from fires, floods and drought.”
Getting ‘Hit Over and Over’
The days before the fire carried a sense of foreboding — different, Phoebe Suina remembers, from years past. She had dealt with the aftermath of many blazes before, as an environmental engineer who helps communities respond to natural disaster. This time, it had barely rained in the northern part of the state in months, the snowpack was already gone, humidity was minimal and the winds were so intense that it was hard to walk outside.
“This April, I remember having that sinking feeling — how I can explain it in English is, all the elements of a major imbalance were occurring,” Suina said. “And it wasn’t going to be a one-time thing. We have to figure out how we’re going to survive.”
The Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon fires started in April, after the U.S. Forest Service conducted what was supposed to have been a controlled burn to thin the dense undergrowth. High winds whipped both fires into a megacomplex that ultimately torched 342,000 acres across three counties, and wasn’t fully controlled until mid-August.
Then came the flooding. With no trees to hold back the mountains, monsoon season sent rivers of sediment coursing through the gullies, spilling over roads and onto the homes below. Irrigation channels have been filled with dirt and rocks, but there’s no point in dredging them until the deluges stop.
Michael Maes’ home in Mora, an Edenic valley town a few canyons away from Ulibarri’s place, stands right in the path of this water. At one point, it rose to his waist, and even after clearing out all the mud, he had to scramble repeatedly to channel fresh flooding around the structure instead of through it. Water pressure has remained low, so he’s had to carry buckets around just to flush toilets.
“We just get hit over and over,” Maes said. All of that work kept him from his day job, cutting hair about 40 minutes down the valley, and drained his savings. Every time the sky darkens, he keeps in touch with friends on a text chain, dreading the wreckage that follows. “There’s a cloud that rolls over, all of a sudden,” he said, and the question is: “Who’s going to get it today?”
Because the U.S. Forest Service took responsibility for the fire, it is footing the bill for reconstruction and compensating those who suffered financial losses with an aid package worth $2.5 billion. Eventually, if people are able to prove their claims — a complicated endeavor in a place where property ownership often isn’t fully documented — they should be made whole. Meanwhile, the White House is asking for $2.9 billion more, as part of a $37 billion package for victims of the year’s natural disasters across the country.
In New Mexico, the physical risk from climate change comes in two forms. One is the creeping loss of prosperity brought on by prolonged drought, which in the Mora area had already completely dried up the system of ditches that had irrigated crops and watered cattle for generations. Catastrophic fire exemplifies the other kind: a destructive event that vaporizes assets all at once.
Mora County, population 4,200, has seen both. Long sustained by small-scale agriculture and logging, local nonprofits had been working to develop a tourism economy. They were building up a social media presence, and one group even talked to film studios drawn by the sweeping views and ranches that seem right out of the Old West.
The vision is to become something more like Colorado, where the Commerce Department reported that outdoor recreation generated $6.1 billion in salaries in 2021; New Mexico brought in only $1.2 billion.
This year, rather than promote economic development, Mora officials tried to just keep people alive and restore what they had lost. Airbnbs burned alongside primary residences, the few hotels filled up with reconstruction workers and the landscape was left so scarred that film studios would have to rewrite their scripts.
In Taos, Awaiting Disaster
On the other side of the mountain from Mora, Taos has been watching closely.
Although the fires never reached the posh ski town or its magnificent surroundings, Sanjay Poovadan, a real estate broker and landlord, saw the fires’ effect immediately in bookings of his rental properties. “People said, ‘We hear there’s a fire in the Hermit’s Peak area, and it’s near Taos, so we’re canceling; we don’t want to be breathing that air,’” Poovadan recalled. “And, of course, why do you come to northern New Mexico? Because you get clean air.”
That kind of hit is particularly hard for the outdoor economy, given its seasonality — a forest that’s closed for one month can wipe out one-third of a business’ profits.
A direct hit from a wildfire would multiply that effect many times over. And although there’s more forest-thinning activity around Taos than there had been around Mora — in part because of a billion-dollar effort led by the Nature Conservancy — the task is so vast that a major fire seems inevitable.
In an explicit acknowledgment of the risk, the city has devoted $10,000 of the revenue from its lodgers tax — which by statute has to fund tourism promotion — for forest restoration. “We’re making the argument that if the fire had come over to our side of the mountain, we would’ve had no tourism at all,” Mayor Pascualito Maestas said.
The Taos Ski Valley, a resort that’s been operating since the 1950s, is at a relatively high elevation and says it has more snow than other increasingly desperate ski areas across the West. But it hasn’t been unscathed: Last year, a freak windstorm took out a huge swath of mature trees, as if mowing the lawn.
Regardless of whether another fire erupts, climate change has already made living in Taos more difficult, and more expensive. Air conditioning is now needed to stay comfortable in the summer, and home insurance premiums are skyrocketing, given the likelihood of having to rebuild a burned home. Meanwhile, Taos’ relative isolation and lack of other disasters like hurricanes has attracted a new influx of high-income, part-time residents who have created a housing crunch for locals.
Poovadan sees both sides of that squeeze. He worries that when a big fire does come, the most harmed will be those with no other place to go.
“The folks who can afford to leave will leave,” Poovadan said. “And the people here will be picking up the pieces.”
From Drought to Flood
The extremes that increasingly characterize New Mexico’s climate are even harder to deal with when you don’t know when they’ll arrive. That especially applies to water: There’s not enough, except for when there’s too much.
Consider Nick Baefsky and Amy Wright, who have more food than they need for the number of mouths they have to feed. Six months ago, they had the opposite problem.
The couple, who manage cattle on a 96,000-acre ranch on a vast plain beneath the mountains that burned over the summer, had to sell 10% of their hundreds of cow-calf pairs in the spring. Rains hadn’t arrived to green up the fields, and brutal winds sheared off the grass left standing, so there wasn’t enough for them to eat.
“It felt like it was the worst it could be,” said Wright, relaxing after a long day fixing fences. They kept checking the weather forecasts but couldn’t see a safe path through to the rainy season.
The other snag: Despite investing in pipes and troughs to supplement natural watering holes, some of the 40 wells that the ranch has to keep the cows hydrated are producing less water, as the aquifers beneath them dry up. “Even if there was good grass, if you can’t water them, you can’t run them,” Baefsky said.
Then, at the end of June, it started raining. And raining. At that point, they could easily have supported the extra cattle. But buying them back is expensive.
Not everyone is so much at the mercy of rain. Some farmers of high-value cash crops have more control over their water supply, through deep aquifers and rights to divert from the state’s major rivers. They have figured out ways to maintain their yields.
Expansive pecan groves, whose owners drilled deep wells in the 1950s and which produce more of the nuts than any state save Georgia, would pay any price to avoid having to rip out their trees. Farmers of New Mexico’s iconic chiles, under pressure from drought, have invested in technology to get more from less acreage.
There are limits to even that degree of control, however.
Mike Hamman, the state engineer, is in charge of maximizing the water supply when nearly all of it is spoken for and the total pool is shrinking. After years of increasing efficiency, returns are diminishing.
“I would say we’ve squeezed that sponge out pretty good by now,” Hamman said.
What Climate Change Costs
The fires in the spring are just a snapshot of climate change’s economic impact in one year, in one corner of the state. To add it all up beyond that is a daunting task, but there have been attempts.
In 2009, Ernie Niemi, an environmental and economic development consultant, worked up a forecast for how climate change would affect New Mexico’s economy at various points in the future. It was part of a project housed at the University of Oregon that aimed to show state legislators, wary of hurting their economies by easing off fossil fuels, the cost of doing nothing.
He found the cost would be about $1.7 billion by 2020 — including $488 million for wildfire costs, $421 million for health-related expenses and $286 million for lost recreation opportunities. He imagined the figure would be much larger, in ways they couldn’t calculate. The list includes costs from more frequent and intense storms — and items like regulations for protecting additional endangered species.
In an update for the state of Oregon in 2018, Niemi found that costs had significantly escalated, and the same was likely true for New Mexico.
Now, estimates are piling up for how climate change will affect the national and even global economy — moving beyond the cost of an individual hurricane or fire, and ballparking the economic drag from rising temperatures. The World Meteorological Organization, for example, has calculated that the U.S. economy has lost $1.4 trillion to climate-related weather events over the past 50 years, while Deloitte says it stands to lose an additional $14.5 trillion over the next 50, if further warming isn’t averted. For the first time, this year the draft U.S. National Climate Assessment includes a chapter on economic effects.
But the economic damage of climate change isn’t always measurable by traditional methods, because the full value of nature isn’t computed in gross domestic product. A forest doesn’t have statistical worth until it’s cut down — even though it cleans the air and sequesters carbon in a way that blunts the damage to human civilization down the line.
That’s why the federal government is developing “natural capital accounts,” a standardized way of valuing healthy ecosystems. A state can figure out what it’s worth to keep forests thinned so they’re less likely to erupt in flames and more likely to stay in place to keep mountaintops from washing into valleys.
That’s the kind of math Joshua Sloan is doing. The associate vice president at New Mexico Highlands University, he has tried to convince the state legislature that it’s worth spending $68 million on a reforestation center. If built, it could supply seedlings to burned acreage across the western United States, generating both revenue and the forests on which communities depend.
So far, lawmakers haven’t agreed.
“Typically direct costs are much more immediately felt than those more diffuse social and ecological benefits,” Sloan said.
Predicting the Future
Two and a half billion dollars: That’s the budget surplus New Mexico ended up with for fiscal year 2024, most of it from higher gas prices that increased royalties from oil and gas extraction in the Permian Basin, the nation’s most productive oil field. All in all, the industry supplied about 40% of the state’s general fund revenues in 2022.
That money is a huge windfall for a historically poor state that has few other major industries. But it also represents “transition risk”: the collateral damage incurred by decline in the use of fossil fuels.
That dynamic was on display in October in Santa Fe, in the stately round building that houses New Mexico’s all-volunteer Legislature. Oil and gas revenues pay for lots of things, including addressing what emissions can lead to: For fiscal year 2023, out of an $8.4 billion budget, the Legislature appropriated $36.7 million for climate change resilience, mostly in drought mitigation; $42 million for energy-efficiency initiatives; and $105.8 million in water infrastructure and wildfire prevention. In the halls of the Capitol, agriculture lobbyists and environmental advocates were asking for hundreds of millions more.
Despite the riches the industry pumps into state coffers, legislators are uneasy.
“I support oil and gas, but I am concerned that they have an inordinate place in our revenue structure,” said state Sen. Patty Lundstrom, who heads the powerful Appropriations Committee.
Lundstrom is from Gallup, in the northwest part of the state. The region is facing the retirement of two coal plants required by the Energy Transition Act of 2019, which committed the state to meeting aggressive renewable energy targets for its own utilities. The state is pursuing federal funding to potentially convert some of that infrastructure to produce hydrogen. The resulting fuel emits zero carbon, but it would likely require lots of natural gas — and water — to run. For that reason, the state’s environmentalists have been dead set against the idea, which Lundstrom finds confounding.
“Because we’re looking at reducing carbon emissions, we need to embrace things like hydrogen so we can get to that point,” she said. “If we don’t, we’ve lost everything. We’ve lost not only those industrial jobs, but the opportunity for industrial jobs.”
Rather than a complicated, energy-intensive project like hydrogen, environmentalists say the state should focus on conserving land for outdoor recreation, investing in more sustainable agriculture methods such as those practiced by Native communities, and pursuing the billions of dollars unlocked by the Inflation Reduction Act for wind and solar energy.
While in-state energy needs are mostly met, demand across the West could support thousands more megawatts per year. New Mexico has the land, wind and sun for it. It also has an untapped resource: a relatively high share of people who aren’t working, which means thousands of people who could be deployed to build things.
However, even if wind and solar installations were erected as rapidly as possible, when the construction phase is over, the industry couldn’t employ everyone who might want to leave jobs in oil and gas.
“If we expect renewables to replace oil and gas 1-to-1, we will never be satisfied,” said Rikki Seguin, the executive director of Interwest Energy Alliance, a trade group of wind and solar developers.
Dealing with physical risk and transition risk at the same time is a dizzying task. One way to tackle both at once is employing people to fix the problems caused by climate change, whether it’s planting seedlings or developing drought-tolerant crops.
Getting that started is expensive, but there’s probably no better time to do it. With billions of dollars filtering down from the federal government, New Mexico has the potential to develop whole new industries devoted to restoring fire-scarred lands and adapting to survive with ever-shrinking supplies of water. Other regions face similar challenges. Such expertise could even become an export itself — partially replacing the revenues that oil and gas now supplies in abundance.
Nathan Small, a state representative from the Las Cruces area, has been among those trying to smooth New Mexico’s transition to an economy that’s viable. Its best chance to get there, he thinks, goes beyond resilience inside the state. It’s marketing techniques for how to live on a hotter planet. It is, in his view, a growth industry.
“We have to reckon with the challenge that in 10, 15, 30 years, that these might be considered pretty good years,” he said.
Finding safe haven in the climate change future: Alaska and Hawaii
David Knowles, Senior Editor – December 10, 2022
This Yahoo News series analyzes different regions around the country in terms of climate change risks that they face now and will experience in the years to come. For other entries in the series, click here.
As the negative consequences of rising global temperatures due to mankind’s relentless burning of fossil fuels become more and more apparent in communities across the United States, anxiety over finding a place to live safe from the ravages of climate change has also been on the rise.
“Millions and likely tens of millions of Americans” will move for climate reasons through the end of the century, Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of real estate in Tulane University’s School of Architecture, told Yahoo News.“People move because of school districts, affordability, job opportunities. There are a lot of drivers, and I think it’s probably best to think about this as ‘climate is now one of those drivers.’”
Melting ice water flows past visitors on a guided tour July 10 on the Matanuska Glacier, which feeds water into the Matanuska River, near Palmer, Alaska. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
To be sure, calculating climate risk depends on a dizzying number of factors, including luck, latitude, elevation, the upkeep of infrastructure, long-term climate patterns, the predictable behavior of the jet stream and how warming ocean waters will impact the frequency of El Niño/La Niña cycles.
“No place is immune from climate change impacts, certainly in the continental United States, and throughout the U.S. those impacts will be quite severe,” Keenan said. “They will be more severe in some places and less severe in other places. Certain places will be more moderate in terms of temperature and some places will be more extreme, but we all share the risk of the increase of extreme events.”
In this installment, we look at the two U.S. states separated from the lower 48, neither of which was included in the rankings of counties compiled by the ProPublica and the New York Times that formed the backbone of this series.
Alaska
Chunks of sea ice float off Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, Alaska, in July 2018. (Yereth Rosen/Reuters)
The coldest U.S. state in terms of annual mean temperature, Alaska is also America’s fastest-warming one.Since 1970, the average temperature in Alaska has risen a disconcerting 4.22°F, unleashing an array of hazards that have upended daily life.
On Monday, the northernmost city in Alaska, Utqiagvik, smashed its all-time winter high temperature record by an astonishing 6°F, when it hit 40°F, despite the fact that it lies 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
“Every new day brings with it new evidence of climate change in Alaskan communities — warmer, record-breaking temperatures have resulted in thawing permafrost, thinning sea ice, and increasing wildfires,” the Alaska Department of Commerce states on its website. “These changes have resulted in a reduction of subsistence harvests, an increase in flooding and erosion, concerns about water and food safety and major impacts to infrastructure: including damage to buildings, roads and airports.”
The upper third of Alaska is located inside the Arctic Circle, a place where temperatures this month have so far been observed at an average of 11.5°F above normal, according to data provided by the University of Maine.
The Kvitbjorn (Polar Bear, in Norwegian), a hybrid boat with a diesel motor and electric batteries, makes its way on May 3 through sea ice in the Borebukta Bay, near Isfjorden, in Svalbard Archipelago, northern Norway. (Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images)
Until recently, the portion of Alaska inside the Arctic Circle rarely, if ever, experienced wildfires. A 2020 study by researchers at the University of Alaska, however, found that climate change has made wildfires in the state much more common, because higher temperatures dry out vegetation more rapidly and shorten the amount of time that snow covers the ground.
The snowpack in Alaska now accumulates a week later, on average, than in the 1990s, and melts away two weeks earlier. Large fires have been starting earlier and lasting longer. Fire season in the state now lasts a month longer than it did 30 years ago.
That has resulted in a steady uptick in the number of acres burned.
Also on the rise are so-called “zombie fires” that feast not just on the trees of the boreal forest but also duff, an organic layer of dead, dried-out plants that covers much of the ground and helps insulate the permafrost. Zombie fires are fires believed to have been extinguished that keep burning throughout the harsh Alaskan winter, even under snow cover. “From 2005 to 2017, fire managers in Alaska and in Canada’s Northwest Territories reported 48 zombie, or holdover, fires that survived the long winter,” Scientific American reported in 2021.
Smoke rises from a hot spot in the Swan Lake Fire scar at Alaska’s Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in June 2020. (Dan White/AlaskaHandout via Reuters)
Higher temperatures have dramatically increased evaporation rates, so that even relatively short periods with scant precipitation have the effect of transforming Alaska’s flora into the equivalent of ready-to-burn kindling. That gives zombie fires the opportunity to reemerge, making the state much more vulnerable in general to wildfire risk.
“The frequency of these big seasons has doubled from what it was in the second half of the 20th century,” Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Center, told the PBS News Hour. “And there’s no reason to think that’s not going to continue.”
While sea level rise in Alaska is not, for the moment, as great a problem as in other coastal areas, due to the fact that plate tectonics is pushing land higher at a rate outpacing the rising ocean, steadily dwindling sea ice has left thousands of residents, not to mention polar bears, at risk of storms, which have become more intense due to rising temperatures.
“With climate change and a warming climate, sea ice is being impacted. A lack of sea ice is going to mean that there’s no longer any protection from the fall/winter storms that come in,” Jason Geck, a glaciologist at Alaska Pacific University, told the Associated Press in October. “Instead, we’re having major storm events that are happening more frequently, and we’re having major storm events that are causing a lot more coastal erosion.”
The glacier face of the LeConte Glacier, a tidal glacier in LeConte Bay, in Tongass National Forest, Southeast Alaska. (Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Winter storms are not caused by climate change, but recent studies have concluded that the disappearance of sea ice and the continued warming of the ocean will continue to supercharge storms in Alaska by the end of the century.
“Alaska can expect three times as many storms, and those storms will be more intense,” Andreas Prein, a scientist with the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and the author of the 2021 studies on sea ice, said in a statement. “It will be a very different regime of rainfall.”
“Arctic residents, communities, and their infrastructure continue to be affected by permafrost thaw, coastal and river erosion, increasing wildfire, and glacier melt,” the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit states on its website. “As temperatures continue increasing, individuals and even whole communities will need to decide how and where to live.”
In October, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that it was, for the first time ever, canceling the snow crab fishing season due to the collapse and disappearance of 90% of the crab population. In a letter to Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo seeking a declaration of a fishery disaster for both Bristol Bay and the Bering Sea, Alaska’s Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy laid out the climate change connection.
Gina Raimondo, U.S. secretary of commerce, at a news conference in College Park, Md., on Dec. 5. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Available information indicates the decline for … crab stocks resulted from natural causes linked to warming ocean temperatures,” Dunleavy wrote.
As rising global temperatures cause sea ice to melt earlier and reform later, the oceans it used to cover warm even faster. This phenomenon amplifies a feedback loop known as the albedo effect, which the Climate Resilience Toolkit describes as “the decline in cover of sea ice, glaciers, and snow cover replaces a white reflective surface with a darker, more absorptive surface of land or water. This increases the absorption of heat by the surface and thus increases the rate of Arctic warming.”
On land, another feedback loop has scientists on edge. It concerns the permafrost that lies beneath the duff. When permafrost melts — and recent studies have found a growing number of places in Alaska where that is now happening — it releases methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term. If the Arctic transforms into a net emitter of greenhouse gases, that could cause global temperatures to rise even further, which would result in more permafrost melt.
Methane gas released from seep holes at the bottom of Esieh Lake ripples the surface. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Alaska residents have long known that climate change had the potential to negatively impact their way of life. Back in 2007, then-Gov. Sarah Palin signed an administrative order establishing the first Alaska Climate Change Sub-Cabinet, which went on to release a 2010 report that found that rising temperatures had “already begun to render ground and building foundations unstable, disrupt transportation routes, and trigger phenomena placing coastal communities in imminent danger from flooding and erosion.”
State agencies later produced documents such as the Alaska Department of Fish & Game Climate Change Strategy, and in 2017, the state’s Gov. Bill Walker established a task force to propose a climate change adaptation plan “that will safeguard Alaska now and for future generations.”
Sunset at Makena Beach and cove on Maui. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
In 2021, Hawaii became the first U.S. state to pass a resolution to declare a climate emergency. While State Senate Concurrent Resolution 44 is symbolic and nonbinding, it acknowledged “an existential climate emergency threatens humanity and the natural world, declares a climate emergency, and requests statewide collaboration toward an immediate just transition and emergency mobilization effort to restore a safe climate.”
Like island nations that climate change threatens to wipe off the map, the threats facing the seven Hawaiian islands where people live start with sea level rise. Given that nearly half of the state’s land area is within 5 miles of the ocean, exacerbated by the fact that much of the land there is sinking, rising seas should factor highly in any decision about selecting a place to live to be safe from global warming.
“The sea level around Hilo Bay [on the Big Island] has risen by 10 inches in 1950, and now, it’s rising faster, at about 1 inch every 4 years,” the state says on its climate change portal. “This increases the frequency and reach of coastal floods, which affect our communities. 2017 was arecord flood year for Honolulu (37 flood days, when historically, the average has been around 4 days). These floods were fully attributed to climate change/sea level rise. Today, Hawai’i has 66,000 people regularly at risk from coastal flooding. In Kailua for example, 50% of the population is locked in below expected flood zones.”
A man walks next to a home damaged by flooding on the Big Island after Hurricane Lane, on Aug. 25, 2018, in Hilo, Hawaii. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Hawaii found that 34% of the state’s shorelines are already vulnerable to waves and storms made more intense by climate change. To date, coastal erosion has eaten away 13 miles of beaches in the state, and has left 70% of the existing beaches in a precarious state, according to Hawaii’s climate change portal.
For any tourist who has visited Waikiki Beach more than once over several years, the reality of sea level rise is impossible to miss. Water levels now regularly lap against concrete barriers that shield the iconic strip of beachfront hotels, and the uninterrupted expanse of sand that made the beach famous exists only in memory. By 2100, projections are that Hawaii will see another 1 to 4 feet of sea level rise, possibly as much as 8 feet, potentially spelling the end of the Waikiki coastline as we know it.
But it’s not just beaches that are at risk. Coastal flooding in the state has risen sharply since the 1960s. By 2100, should sea levels rise by 3.2 feet, a 2017 report by the Hawaii Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission projected that 25,800 acres of land will become unusable and “6,500 structures located near the shoreline would be compromised or lost.”
Bodyboarders wait to enter the ocean near the remains of trees destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Lane at Honoli’i Beach Park on Aug. 26, 2018, in Hilo, Hawaii. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The primary cause of global sea level rise in Hawaii is the warmer temperatures melting polar ice caps and glaciers. While temperatures are rising fastest in the Arctic, they have also gone up in Honolulu by 2.6°F since 1950, with the bulk of this warming in the past decade, according to data from NOAA. In the years to come, if greenhouse gas emissions are not slashed, Hawaii will become much warmer still. “Average temperatures could increase by as much as 5-7.5° F by the end of the century,” state officials warn.
The world’s oceans have absorbed 90% of the warming in recent decades caused by the burning of fossil fuels, according to NASA. In Hawaii, as elsewhere, higher ocean temperatures threaten another local treasure: coral reefs. The Environmental Protection Agency has predicted that if warming continues at its current pace, 40% of Hawaii’s coral reefs could be lost by the end of this century.
Climate change is also changing rainfall patterns in the state.
“Hawai‘i is getting drier. Rainfall has declined significantly over the past 30 years, with widely varying rainfall patterns on each island,” the state says on its climate change portal. “This means some areas are flooding and others are too dry. Since 2008, overall, the islands have been drier, and when it does finally rain, it rains a lot.”
A Big Island firefighter puts out a blaze near Waimea, Hawaii, in August 2021, after the area was scorched by the state’s largest ever wildfire. (Caleb JonesAP Photo)
In April 2018, epic rainfall hit the island of Kauai. An all-time-U.S.-record 50 inches of rain fell in a 24-hour period, damaging or destroying 532 homes, wrecking roads and racking up damages of almost $180 million.
Climate scientists noted the Clausius-Clapeyron effect, which established that for every degree Celsius of temperature rise, 7% more moisture is added to the atmosphere. In short, when conditions are right, rain is abundant, including in the place that already receives the most annual rainfall on Earth.
Such overwhelming downpours will become an increasingly common feature of life on Hawaii going forward, research shows, forcing officials to prepare.
“We need to get used to climate events like this,” Honolulu’s mayor, Rick Blangiardi, told the Associated Press. “A tremendous concentration of rain in a small amount of time in focused areas is going to result in flooding anywhere. If we have situations like that, then we need to really approach and attack.”
On the bright side, a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and published in the journal Global Environmental Change found that, thanks to rising temperatures, Hawaii can expect about 5% more days with a rainbow in the next 80 years.
Attacks on Pacific north-west power stations raise fears for US electric grid
Dani Anguiano in Los Angeles – December 10, 2022
Photograph: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Reuters
A string of attacks on power facilities in Oregon and Washington has caused alarm and highlighted the vulnerabilities of the US electric grid.
The attacks in the Pacific north-west come just days after a similar assault on North Carolina power stations that cut electricity to 40,000 people.
As first reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting and KUOW Public Radio, there have been at least six attacks, some of which involved firearms and caused residents to lose power. Two of the attacks shared similarities with the incident in Moore county, North Carolina, where two stations were hit by gunfire. Authorities have not yet revealed a motive for the North Carolina attack.
The four Pacific north-west utilities whose equipment was attacked have said they are cooperating with the FBI. The agency has not yet confirmed if it is investigating the incidents.
It’s unknown who is behind the attacks but experts have long warned of discussion among extremists of disrupting the nation’s power grid.
Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) said in a statement on Thursday that it was seeking tips about “trespassing, vandalism and malicious damage of equipment” at a substation in Clackamas county on 24 November that caused damage and required cleanup costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Someone clearly wanted to damage equipment and, possibly, cause a power outage,” said John Lahti, the utility’s transmission vice-president of field services. “We were fortunate to avoid any power supply disruption, which would have jeopardized public safety, increased financial damages and presented challenges to the community on a holiday.”
Any attack on electric infrastructure “potentially puts the safety of the public and our workers at risk”, said BPA, which delivers hydropower across the Pacific north-west .
Portland General Electric, a public utility that provides electricity to nearly half of the state’s population, said it had begun repairs after suffering “a deliberate physical attack on one of our substations” that also occurred in the Clackamas area in late November 2022. It said it was “actively cooperating” with the FBI.
Puget Sound Energy, an energy utility in Washington, reported two cases of vandalism at two substations in late November to the FBI and peer utilities, but said the incidents appeared to be unrelated to other recent attacks.
“There is no indication that these vandalism attempts indicate a greater risk to our operations and we have extensive measures to monitor, protect and minimize the risk to our equipment and infrastructure,” the company said in a statement.
Duke Energy workers repair an electrical substation that they said was hit by gunfire, near Pinehurst, North Carolina, on Tuesday. Photograph: Drone Base/Reuters
Experts and intelligence analysts have long warned of both the vulnerability of the US power grid and talk among extremists about attacking the crucial infrastructure.
“It’s very vulnerable,” said Keith Taylor, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who has worked with energy utilities. “[These attacks] are a real threat.”
The physical risks to the power grid have been known for decades, Granger Morgan, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told CBS. “We’ve made a bit of progress, but the system is still quite vulnerable,” he said.
A US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report released in January warned that domestic extremists have been developing “credible, specific plans” to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020.
The DHS has cited a document shared on a Telegram channel used by extremists that included a white supremacist guide to attacking an electric grid with firearms, CNN reported.
“These fringe groups have been talking about this for a long time,” Taylor said. “I’m not at all surprised this happened – I’m surprised it’s taken this long.”
Three men who law enforcement identified as members of the Boogaloo movement allegedly planned to attack a substation in Nevada in 2020 to distract police and attempt to incite a riot.
In 2013, still unknown assailants cut fiber-optic phone lines and used a sniper to fire shots at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation near San Jose in what appeared to be a carefully planned attack that caused millions of dollars in damage. The attack prompted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc) to order grid operators to increase security.
“They knew what they were doing. They had a specific objective. They wanted to knock out the substation,” Jon Wellinghoff, the then chair of Ferc, told 60 Minutes, adding that the attack could have “brought down all of Silicon Valley”.
After the 2013 attack in California, a Ferc analysis found that attackers could cause a blackout coast-to-coast if they took out only nine of the 55,000 substations in the US.
The US electrical grid is vast and sprawling with 450,000 miles of transmission lines, 55,000 substations and 6,400 power plants. Power plants and substations are dispersed in every corner of the country, connected by transmission lines that transport electricity through farmland, forests and swamps. Attackers do not necessarily have to get close to cause significant damage.
“In a centralized system, if I [want] to take out one coal-fired plant, I don’t even have to take out the plant, I just have to take out the transmission line,” said Taylor. “You can cause a ripple effect where one outage can cause an entire seaboard to go down.”
This editorial is the fifth in a series, “The Danger Within,” urging readers to understand the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions. Read more about the series in a note from Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times Opinion editor.
A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.
The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.
The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.
These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.
The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.
Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.
The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.
In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.
This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”
As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.
A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.
The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”
This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.
In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.
“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”
The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.
A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.
All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.”
The Danger Within
It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence.
Institutions and individuals — prominent politicians, for instance, and responsible gun owners — could do far more to insist that assault weapons have no place in public spaces, even if they are permitted in many states, where the open carry of firearms is legal. Public condemnation of such displays is a good place to start.
Republicans should also show more courage in condemning extremists in their own ranks. When Representative Massie posted his Christmas photo, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois responded on Twitter: “I’m pro second amendment, but this isn’t supporting right to keep and bear arms, this is a gun fetish.” There’s a difference between celebrating Christmas secure in the knowledge that you have a weapon to defend your home and family and sending out a photo of your arsenal days after a school shooting.
Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.
This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.
States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.
Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.
Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.
But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.
Thanks in part to climate change, vegetable prices have soared in the U.S.
David Knowles, Senior Editor – December 9, 2022
Tomatoes for processing damaged by heat and drought hang on vines in a field belonging to farmer Aaron Barcellos in Los Banos, Calif., in September. (Nathan Frandino/Reuters)
Vegetable prices in the United States were up nearly 40% in November over the previous month, according to new figures from the Labor Department, and climate change is one of the reasons why.
Thanks to a significantly diminished snowpack in 2022, following the driest January and February in recorded history in the state, California’s Central Valley has also struggled to produce its usual output of fruits and vegetables.
Making matters even worse, and more expensive for consumers, lettuce production in the Salinas Valley has fallen further, thanks to an outbreak of the impatiens necrotic spot virus, which spreads from plant to plant and can decimate entire greenhouses.
“In October, most of the nation’s lettuce comes from the Salinas Valley, and they are having very low production because the virus affected their crop,” Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist at the University of California Riverside, told NBC Bay Area. “A case of romaine is $75 now, and last January, it was $25, so that’s almost a tripling of prices at the wholesale level.”
Oranges lie on the ground in a grove in Arcadia, Fla., in October after Hurricane Ian. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The long-term climate change trend in California, however, is causing the state’s government to take action. In August, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an $8 billion plan aimed at increasing the state’s water supply and “adapting to a hotter, drier future.”
“We are experiencing extreme, sustained drought conditions in California and across the American West caused by hotter, drier weather,” a policy outline released by the governor’s office stated. “Our warming climate means that a greater share of the rain and snow fall we receive will be absorbed by dry soils, consumed by thirsty plants, and evaporated into the air. This leaves less water to meet our needs.”
The negative farming impacts in California from climate change are much the same story in Arizona, which provides more than 9% of the country’s leafy greens during the winter months, Bloomberg reported. The combination of the drought and Colorado River water cuts have severely affected the growing season, and more cuts are coming in the new year. In August, the federal government announced that water deliveries to Arizona would be reduced by another 20%, starting in January of next year.
“Prolonged drought is one of the most profound issues facing the U.S. today,” Tommy Beaudreau, assistant secretary of the interior, said in announcing the cuts.
Which Billionaire Owns The Most Land In The U.S.? Hint, It’s Not Bill Gates
AJ Fabino – December 7, 2022
Earlier this year, in May, claims were made that Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates owned the majority of America’s farmland.
While that is false, with the billionaire amassing nearly 270,000 acres of farmland across the country, compared to 900 million total farm acres, a different billionaire privately owns 2.2 million acres, making him the largest landowner in the U.S.
John Malone, the former CEO of Tele-Communications Inc., which AT&T Inc. purchased for more than $50 billion in 1999, has a variety of ranching and real estate businesses, primarily in Maine, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.
Worth $9.6 billion, Malone, a media veteran, said he purchased the land because “they are not making it anymore.” He also owns three hotels in Dublin, Ireland, and a fourth in Limerick.
The current Liberty Media Corp chairman made the decision to put his billions of dollars in wealth into land after spending a summer working on a family farm in Pennsylvania.
Bell Ranch in New Mexico, a 290,100-acre plain dotted with mesas, rimrock canyons, meadows, and a distinctive bell-shaped mountain, was one of his first significant acquisitions. In addition, Florida’s Bridlewood Farms is a noteworthy asset.
He now holds the title of the largest landlord in the US, surpassing Ted Turner, with a total of 2.2 million acres of crops, ranch property, and woodland.
Malone noted in a CNBC interview that preservation was his primary motivation for purchasing land, and he intends to purchase more. He said that his properties serve as a reliable source of income and a solid hedge against inflation.
“The conservation of lands is important,” the billionaire said. “That was a virus that I got from Ted Turner.”
He continued, “the forestry part of it in the Northeast is a pretty good business, with very low return on capital, but very stable and leverageable,” Malone said. “And we think it will provide good inflation protection in the long run. That’s basically the motivation there. It just seemed like a good thing to do.”
If There Is a ‘Male Malaise’ With Work, Could One Answer Be at Sea?
Talmon Joseph Smith – December 6, 2022
A crew member of the tugboat Millennium Falcon boards the tank barge Dale Frank Jr. in Seattle’s Elliott Bay, Oct. 5, 2022. (Lindsey Wasson/The New York Times)
SEATTLE — Before dawn on a recent day in the port of Seattle, dense autumn fog hugged Puget Sound and ship-to-shore container cranes hovered over the docks like industrial sentinels. Under the dim glimmer of orange floodlights, the crew of the tugboat Millennium Falcon fired up the engines for a long day of towing oil barges and refueling a variety of large vessels, like container ships.
The first thing to know about barges is that they don’t move themselves. They are propelled and guided by tugs like the Falcon, which is owned by Centerline Logistics, one of the largest U.S. transporters of marine petroleum. Such companies may not be household names, but the nation’s energy supply chain would have broken under the pandemic’s pressure without the steady presence of their fleets — and their crews.
“We’re a floating gas station,” said Bowman Harvey, a director of operations at Centerline, as he stood aboard the Falcon, his neck tattoo of the Statue of Liberty pivoting from the base of his flannel whenever he gestured at a machine or busy colleague nearby. Demand is solid, he said, and the enterprise is profitable. The company’s client list, which includes Exxon Mobil and Maersk, the global shipping giant, is robust. But manning the fleet has become a struggle.
Multiyear charter contracts for key lines of business — refueling ships, transporting fuel for refineries and general towing jobs — are locked in across all three coasts, plus Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico, Harvey said. Yet as pandemic-related staffing shortages have eased in other industries, Centerline is still short on staff.
“Hands down,” Harvey said, “our biggest challenge right now is finding crew.”
Safely moving, loading and unloading oil at sea requires both simple and highly skilled jobs that cannot be automated. And the labor supply issues in merchant marine transportation are emblematic of the conundrum seen in a variety of decently paying, male-heavy jobs in the trades.
Over the past 50 years, male labor force participation, the share of men working or actively looking for work, has steadily fallen as female participation has climbed.
Some scholars have a grim explanation for the trend. Nicholas Eberstadt, the conservative-leaning author of “Men Without Work,” argues that there has been a swell in men who are “inert, written off or discounted by society and, perhaps, all too often, even by themselves.” Others, like Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard V. Reeves, put less emphasis on potential social pathologies but say a “male malaise” is hampering households and the economy.
Centerline employees are among about 75,000 categorized by the Department of Labor as water transportation workers, a group in which men outnumber women 5-to-1.
Though the gender split in the industry is more even for onshore office roles, workers and applicants for jobs on the water are predominantly male. Centerline says it has roughly 220 offshore crew members and about 35 openings.
Captains and company managers agree that changing attitudes toward work among young men play a part in the labor shortage. But the strongest consensus opinion is that structural demographic shifts are against them.
“We’re seeing a gray wave of retirement,” Harvey, 38, said.
Even though replacements are needed and, on the whole, lacking, there are new young recruits who are thriving, such as Noah Herrera Johnson, 19, who has joined Centerline as a cadet deckhand, an entry-level role.
On a Thursday morning out in the harbor, Herrera Johnson deftly unknotted, flipped and refastened a series of sailing knots as the crew unmoored from a sister boat that was aiding the refueling of a Norwegian Cruise Line ship. A small crowd of curious cruise passengers peeked down as he bopped through the sequences and the sun’s glare began to pierce the fog, bouncing off the undulating waves.
“I enjoy it a lot,” Herrera Johnson said of his work as he sliced some meat in the galley later on. (Some kitchen work and cleaning are part of the gig and the fraternal ritual of paying dues.)
“I get along with everyone — everyone has stories to tell,” he said. “And I was never good at school.”
Herrera Johnson, who is Mexican American and whose mother is from Seattle, spent most of his life in Cabo San Lucas, in Baja California, until he moved back to the United States shortly after turning 18.
Though entry-level roles aboard don’t require college credentials, new regulations have made at least briefly attending a vocational maritime academy a necessity for those who want to rise quickly up the crew ladder.
Because he is interested in becoming a captain by his late 20s, he began a two-year program at the nearby Pacific Maritime Institute in March, and he earns course credits for work at Centerline between classes.
He got his “first tug” in May: an escapade from New Orleans through the Panama Canal to San Francisco, patched with some bad weather.
“Two months, two long months. It was fun,” he said. “We had a few things going on. We lost steering a few times. But it was cool.”
In short, the industry needs far more Noahs. Many Centerline employees have informally become part-time recruiters — handing out cards, encouraging seemingly capable young men who may be between jobs, undecided about college or disillusioned with the standard 9-to-5 existence to consider being a mariner instead.
“When I’m trying to get friends or family members to come into the business,” Harvey said, “I make sure to remind them: Don’t think of this as a job, think of it as a lifestyle.”
Internet connections aboard are common these days, and there is plenty of downtime for movies, TV, reading, cooking and joking around with sea mates. (On slow days, captains will sometimes do doughnuts in the water like victorious race car drivers, turning the whole vessel into a Tilt-a-Whirl ride for the crew: Sea legs required.)
Of course, those leisurely moments punctuate days and nights of heaving lines, tying knots, making repairs, executing multiple refueling jobs and helping to navigate the tugboat: rain or shine, heat or heavy seas.
It’s “an adventurous life,” Harvey said, one that he and others acknowledge has its pros and cons. Mariners in this sector — whether they are entry-level deckhands, midtier mates and engineers, or crew-leading tankermen and captains — are usually on duty at sea in tight quarters and bunk beds for a month or more.
On the bright side, however, because of an “equal time” policy, full-time crew members are given roughly just as much time off for the same annual pay.
“When I go home, you know, I’m taking essentially 35 days off,” said Capt. Ryan Buckhalter, 48, who’s been a mariner for 20 years. For many, it’s a refreshing work-life balance, he said: none of the nettlesome emails or nagging office politics in between shifts often faced by the average modern office worker trying to get ahead.
Still, Buckhalter, who has a wife and a young daughter, echoed other crew members when he admitted that the setup could also be “tough at times” for families, including his own.
Crew members say they value knowing that their work, unlike more abstract service jobs, is essential to world trade. Average starting salaries for deckhand jobs are $55,000 a year (or about $26 an hour) and as high as $75,000 in places like the San Francisco area, with higher living costs.
The company also offers low-cost health, vision and dental care for employees, and a 401(k) plan with a company match. So CEO Matt Godden said in an interview that he didn’t think wages or benefits were a central reason that his company and competitors with similar offerings had struggled to hire.
“Right now a lot of companies are really hurting,” Buckhalter said. “You kind of got a little gap here with the younger generation not really showing up.”
If the labor market, like any other, operates by supply and demand, managers in the maritime industry say the supply side of the nation’s education and training system is also at fault: It has given priority to the digital over the physical economy, putting what are often called “the jobs of the future” over those society still needs.
Harvey adds that his industry is also grappling with increased Coast Guard licensing requirements for skilled roles, like boat engineers and tankermen, who lead the loading and discharging of oil barges. The regulations help ensure physical and environmental safety standards, Harvey said, but reduce the already limited pool of adequately credentialed candidates.
Women remain a rare sight aboard. Some captains make the case that this stems from hesitance toward a life of bunking and sharing a bathroom with a crop of guys at sea — a self-reinforcing dynamic that company officials say they are working to alleviate.
“We actually do have women that work on the vessels!” said Kimberly Cartagena, senior manager for marketing and public relations at Centerline. “Definitely not as much as men, but we do have a handful.”
Several economists and industry analysts suggested in interviews that another way for companies like Centerline to add crew members would be to expand their digital presence and do social media outreach. Godden said he remained wary.
“If you did something very simple, like you set up a TikTok account, and you sent somebody out every day to create varied little snippets, and you get viral videos of strong men pulling lines and big waves and big pieces of machinery,” Godden said, then a company would risk introducing an inefficient churn of young recruits who would “like the idea of being on a boat” but not be a fan of the unsexy “calluses” that come with the job.
But in the long term, he said, there is reason for optimism. He pointed to the recent establishment of the Maritime High School, which opened a year ago just south of the Seattle-Tacoma airport with its first ninth grade class.
“I think their first class is looking to graduate a hundred people, and then they got goals of getting up to 300, 400 graduates a year,” Godden said. He has been meeting with the school’s leaders this fall and is convinced they will help create the next pipeline in the profession.
“Yes, labor shortages may increase or decrease depending upon how the market works, but I always have this sense that there’s always going to be this sort of built-in group of folks who cannot — just cannot — stand seeing themselves sitting at a desk for 30, 40, 50 years,” Godden said.
“It’s this hands-on business almost like, you know, when you’re a kid and you’re playing with trucks or toys, and then you get to do it in the life-size version.”
270,000 homebuyers who bought in 2022 are underwater on their mortgage
Gabriella Cruz Martinez, Personal finance writer – December 6, 2022
About 270,000 homebuyers who bought during the red-hot housing market this year already owe more than their house is worth, a new analysis found.
Among the 450,000 underwater borrowers in the third quarter, nearly 60% had mortgages originated in the first nine months of 2022, Black Knight found. That’s about 1 in 12 homes purchased in 2022 with a mortgage, or 8%. Nearly 40% of homes bought this year have less than 10% of equity left to tap.
The figures reflect yet another fallout from rapidly rising mortgage rates this year, which have put pressure on housing values as home price growth cools at a record pace month over month.
“Though the home price correction has slowed, it has still exposed a meaningful pocket of equity risk,” Ben Graboske, president of Black Knight data and analytics, said in a news statement. “Make no mistake: negative equity rates continue to run far below historical averages, but a clear bifurcation of risk has emerged between mortgaged homes purchased relatively recently versus those bought early in or before the pandemic.”
(Credit: Black Knight)
Lower-income households hurt the most
Borrowers with purchase loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or Veterans Affairs (VA) were most likely to have slipped underwater, the report found. These are more popular among first-time and lower-income buyers.
Those with FHA loans faced the largest equity challenges, Black Knight found, with more than 25% of folks with FHA loans falling underwater. Additionally, some 80% had less than a 10% equity stake in their homes.
Early-payment defaults (EDP) — loans delinquent within six months of origination — were also rising across product types in recent months with the largest increases among FHA borrowers over the past year. As of October, EDP rates for FHA loans were 150% above 2013-2018 levels, and 25% above their early 2000 averages, the report found.
By contrast, early-payment default among those with conforming loans were more than 70% below early 2000 levels, and VA loans were less than half that same threshold.
“Such loans [FHA] rely on rising home values and principal pay-downs over time to gradually improve their equity position,” Graboske said. “This is … unfortunately, potentially vulnerable cohort that we will continue to keep a close eye on in the months ahead.”
A ‘Just Sold’ sign hangs in front of a home in Miami, Florida. (Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Recent buyers at greater risk
Most of the folks at risk of having their loans slip underwater were those who purchased when home prices were at their highest, Black Knight found. At least 10% of June purchase originations – when home prices peaked at $438,000 – were underwater, with more than 30% having less than 10% equity.
Although homeprices have cooled for the last seven months, with prices now 3.2% down from June’s high, the pricing adjustment hasn’t been enough to ease homebuyers’ affordability concerns.
“In a world of interest rates 6.5% and higher, affordability remains perilously close to a 35-year low,” Graboske said. “Risk among earlier purchases is essentially nonexistent given the large equity cushions these mortgage holders are sitting on. More recent homebuyers don’t fare as well.”
Higher mortgage rates may also be limiting the pace of price corrections, Graboske said, due to its damping effect on inventory inflow and subsequent gridlock on home sales activity. The volume of new homes for sale was 19% below the 2017-2019 average, the largest deficit in six years with the exception of March and April 2020 during pandemic-induced lockdowns.
According to the report, the current market is short by more than a half-million listings of what is considered normal by historical measures.
“Add in the effects of typical seasonality and one might expect a far steeper correction in prices than we have endured so far,” Graboske said. “But the never-ending inventory shortage has served to counterbalance these other factors.”
