Pristine Lake Tahoe shrouded in smoke from threatening fire
Sam Metz and Brian Melley
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) — Ash rained down on Lake Tahoe on Tuesday and thick yellow smoke blotted out views of the mountains rimming its pristine blue waters as a massive wildfire threatened the alpine vacation spot on the California-Nevada state line.
Tourists ducked into cafes, outdoor gear shops and casinos on Lake Tahoe Boulevard for a respite from hazardous air coming from an erratic blaze less than 20 miles (32 kilometers) away.
The Caldor Fire erupted over the course of a week into the nation’s No. 1 firefighting priority and was “knocking on the door” of Tahoe, said Thom Porter, California’s state fire chief. A major wildfire has not penetrated the Lake Tahoe Basin since 2007.
Tourists typically come to swim and hike, relax along the lake’s calm shores or take their chances gambling, not risk their lives in the face of a potential disaster.
Although there were no evacuations ordered and Porter said he didn’t think the fire would reach the lake, it was impossible to ignore the blanket of haze so thick and vast that it closed schools for a second day in Reno, Nevada, which is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the fire.
Visitors wore masks outdoors — not because the coronavirus pandemic, but because of the toxic air and inescapable stench of fire. The gondola that ferries summer passengers to the summit of the Heavenly Mountain ski area was closed until winter due to the wildfire risk.
Cindy Osterloh, whose husband pushed a relative in a wheelchair beneath the idled cables, said she and family members visiting from San Diego were all on allergy medications to take the sting out of their eyes and keep their noses from running so they can ride out the smoke for the rest of their vacation.
“We got up and it was a lot clearer this morning. We went for a walk and then we came back and now it’s coming in again,” she said of the smoke. “We’re going to go and see a movie and hopefully it clears up enough that we can go do our boat rides.”
An army of firefighters worked to contain the blaze, which has spread explosively in a manner witnessed in the past two years during extreme drought. Climate change has made the West warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make the weather more extreme and wildfires more destructive, according to scientists.
Massive plumes have erupted in flames, burning embers carried by gusts have skipped miles ahead of fire lines, and fires that typically die down at night have made long runs in the dark.
Northern California has seen a series of disastrous blazes that have burned hundreds of homes and many remain uncontained. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden declared that a major disaster exists in California and ordered federal aid made available in four northern counties ravaged by blazes dating back to July 14.
The Caldor Fire had scorched more than 190 square miles (492 square kilometers) and destroyed at least 455 homes since Aug. 14 in the Sierra Nevada southwest of Lake Tahoe. It was 11% contained and threatened more than 17,000 structures.
Nationally, 92 large fires were burning in a dozen states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Although many fires are larger, the Caldor Fire has become the top priority to keep it from sweeping into the Tahoe.
As the fire grew last week, politicians, environmentalists, and policy makers gathered on the shore for the 25th annual Lake Tahoe Summit dedicated to protecting the lake and the pine-covered mountains that surround it.
With the Caldor Fire burning to the southwest and the Dixie Fire, the second-largest in state history with a 500-mile (804-kilometer) perimeter, burning about 65 miles (104 kilometers) to the north, the risk to the lake was top of mind.
“The fires that are raging all around us nearby are screaming this warning: Tahoe could be next,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.
The last major blaze in the area took South Lake Tahoe by surprise after blowing up from an illegal campfire in the summer of 2007. The Angora Fire burned less than 5 square miles (13 square kilometers) but destroyed 254 homes, injured three people and forced 2,000 people to flee.
Scars from the fire can still be seen not far from the commercial strip where South Lake Tahoe meets the Nevada border in Stateline, where tourists go to gamble.
Inside the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, cocktail waitresses in fishnet stockings and leopard-print corsets served customers playing slots and blackjack who said they weren’t overly concerned about the fire.
Sitting at a slot machine near a window looking out at cars driving through the haze on Lake Tahoe Boulevard, Ramona Trejo said she and her husband would stay for their 50th wedding anniversary, as planned.
Trejo, who uses supplemental oxygen due to respiratory problems, said her husband wanted to keep gambling.
“I would want to go now,” she said.
Melley reported from Los Angeles. Sam Metz is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.
Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook
Rebecca Solnit
Photograph: Salvatore Cavalli/AP
Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception. People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around. The very short counterargument is that individual acts of thrift and abstinence won’t get us the huge distance we need to go in this decade. We need to exit the age of fossil fuels, reinvent our energy landscape, rethink how we do almost everything. We need collective action at every scale from local to global – and the good people already at work on all those levels need help in getting a city to commit to clean power or a state to stop fracking or a nation to end fossil-fuel subsidies. The revolution won’t happen by people staying home and being good.
But the oil companies would like you to think that’s how it works. It turns out that the concept of the “carbon footprint”, that popular measure of personal impact, was the brainchild of an advertising firm working for BP. As Mark Kaufman wrote this summer:
British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life – going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling – is largely responsible for heating the globe.
The main reason to defeat the fossil fuel corporations is that their product is destroying the planet, but their insidious propaganda, from spreading climate-change denial to pushing this climate footprint business, makes this goal even more worthwhile.
Carbon footprints caught on, and I routinely see people on social media zooming in on individual consumption habits when climate chaos is under discussion. Bill McKibben made the case against them in 2008:
Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change – call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy.
That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.
Too, the goal of personal virtue is merely not to be part of the problem. It’s not good enough for a bystander to say “I personally am not murdering this person” when someone is being stabbed to death before them (and those of us in the global north have countless ties to systems that are murdering the climate, so we are not exactly bystanders). The goal for those of us with any kind of resources of time, rights and a voice, must be being part of the solution, pushing for system change. To stop the murder.
Underlying this is a conflict in how we imagine ourselves, as consumers or as citizens. Consumers define themselves by what they buy, own, watch – or don’t. Citizens see themselves as part of civil society, as actors in the political system (and by citizen I don’t mean people who hold citizenship status, but those who participate, as noncitizens often do quite powerfully). Too, even personal virtue is made more or less possible by the systems that surround us. If you have solar panels on your roof, it’s because there’s a market and manufacturers for solar and installers and maybe an arrangement with your power company to compensate you for energy you’re putting into the grid.
In my own case, some of what I could tout as personal virtue is only possible because of collective action. I have 100% clean electricity at home because people organized to make that option and the solar and wind power behind it available. I do some of my errands by bicycle because the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition worked for decades to put bicycle paths across the city and otherwise make it safer to get about on two wheels. I can take public transit because there is public transit. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley led the way in making all-electric houses the standard for the future; more than fifty California cities and counties have followed suit. Paired with the clean electricity California has committed to, this mandate matters. Having an all-electric house or driving an electric car fueled by renewables won’t be a virtuous choice in the future; it’ll just be the norm.
But individual and collective action don’t have to be pitted against each other. Individual choices do add up (they just don’t, in McKibben’s terms, multiply). That vegan options are available at a lot of fast-food chains is because enough consumers have created a profitable market for them. We do influence others through our visible choices. Ideas spread, values spread, habits spread; we are social animals and both good and bad behaviors are contagious. (For the bad, just look at the contagiousness of specious anti-vaccination arguments.)
Vegetarian and vegan diets (and low-meat or no-red-meat diets) have become far more common, creating markets for new products and different menus. But they have not made the beef industry go away or reformed its devastating climate impact. Climate chaos demands we recognize how everything is connected. Seeing yourself as a citizen means seeing yourself as connected to social and political systems. As citizens we must go after the climate footprint of the fossil-fuel corporations, the beef industry, the power companies, the transportation system, plastics, and so much more.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence
As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management
Hayley Smith, Alex Wigglesworth
Chad Hanson, ecologist and president of the John Muir Project, examines the burn scar region of the San Jacinto Mountains. (Madeleine Hordinski / Los Angeles Times)
As he stood amid the rubble of the town of Greenville, Gov. Gavin Newsom this month vowed to take proactive steps to protect California’s residents from increasingly devastating wildfires.
“We recognize that we’ve got to do more in active forest management, vegetation management,” Newsom said, noting that the region’s extreme heat and drought are leading to “wildfire challenges the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history.”
Yet despite a universal desire to avoid more destruction, experts aren’t always in agreement about what should be done before a blaze ignites. Forest management has long been touted as essential to fighting wildfires, with one new set of studies led by the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Forest Service concluding that there is strong scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of thinning dense forests and reducing fuels through prescribed burns.
But some ecologists say that logging, thinning and other tactics that may have worked in the past are no longer useful in an era of ever hotter, larger and more frequent wildfires.
“The fact is that forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires,” said Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist and the president of the John Muir Project.
Many of California’s most devastating recent fires — including 2018’s deadly Camp fire and the Dixie fire, now the state’s second largest on record — seared straight through forests that had been treated for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said.
But reimagining well-worn approaches to forest management will require a reckoning with what is and isn’t working amid the state’s shifting landscape. In lieu of focusing funds and resources on fuel treatment, Hanson and other ecologists have said the onus should shift toward home hardening and community protection.
“This is a climate change issue, and you can’t address it with chainsaws and bulldozers or even drip torches,” Hanson said. “The only effective way to protect communities from wildland fire is to focus directly on homes.”
Though fuel reduction has been part of Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service’s practices for decades, former President Trump helped politicize it when he announced in 2018 that California’s devastating wildfires could be thwarted by better “raking” the forest floors.
Yet vegetation removal is only one among a handful of strategies that fall under the umbrella of forest management — not all of which were created equal, said Morgan Tingley, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.
Tingley outlined three basic categories of work: prescribed burns, forest thinning and clear-cutting.
Prescribed burns, also known as controlled fires, are among the better solutions for maintaining forest health, he said. But given the restrictions, planning and logistics required for those types of burns, it’s impossible to utilize them to any real benefit.
The Forest Service this month vowed to stomp out every fire that ignites — a statement of political necessity that left many ecologists grimacing at the implications for the landscape.
Even more controversial than prescribed burning is mechanical thinning, a vegetation reduction process that can involve chainsaws, masticators and other tools to clear out certain types of trees or densities of trees. While some ecologists believe that removing accumulated fuels can help limit the potential for catastrophic fires, others have argued that thinning can in fact make conflagrations worse.
One 2016 study published by the Ecological Society of America and coauthored by Hanson examined three decades of fire data across the western U.S., and found that protected forests — those that had not been thinned — had lower levels of burn severity despite having higher amounts of biomass and fuels.
A 2008 study published by Forest Ecology and Management similarly worked to combat misconceptions. It took a more tempered approach, noting that some forest thinning can be helpful, but also said that removing vegetation to reduce the size and frequency of wildfires is “both futile and counter-productive,” and warned that fuel reduction should not be viewed as a panacea for reducing fire hazards.
“Given the right conditions, wildlands will inevitably burn. It is a misconception to think that treating fuels can ‘fire-proof’ important areas,” the report said.
Among the primary concerns is that thinning a forest not only eliminates much of the forest’s carbon-sucking benefits, but also removes canopies that provide shade and help maintain moisture.
The 2018 Camp fire, which reduced much of the Butte County town of Paradise to ashes, burned in an area of forest that had been logged for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said. When the wind-whipped fire reached the thinned-out, sun-baked forest, it flared up so quickly that it arrived in Paradise hours sooner than it otherwise would have.
The fire ultimately destroyed 19,000 structures and killed 86 people.
“It was going to reach the town no matter what, but it definitely burned more intensely and got there faster because of the logging,” Hanson said. “I think it would have meant the difference between life and death for most of those people.”
And it’s not just the Camp fire: A similar pattern can be seen in several other high profile fires, including the Dixie fire, the Caldor fire and the 413,000-acre Bootleg fire in Oregon, said Bryant Baker, conservation director for the Los Padres ForestWatch.
Maps of those fires fit almost squarely over maps of recently logged and treated forestlands, he said.
“We’ve heard a lot of folks in the Forest Service say that we need a paradigm shift in the way we deal with fire, and almost always, it’s a shift into the same paradigm we’ve been in: Keep suppressing fires, and double down on fuel treatment and cutting vegetation,” Baker said.
“What we’re actually talking about is a real paradigm shift. We really do have to rethink how we live with wildfire.”
One major element of that paradigm shift is home hardening and community defense, Baker said. That includes steps like reducing debris from gutters, retrofitting roofs and windows with ignition-resistant materials, and moving combustible items away from homes’ exteriors.
It also means improving early warning and evacuation systems within communities. If employed effectively, these strategies have been shown to protect more lives and homes during even very intense wildfires.
“It’s the one blanket approach that works,” he said.
Yet even as crews struggle to gain a footing on the massive Dixie fire, Forest Service officials said the blaze is doing what it was intended to do, at least in part.
“From an ecological standpoint, [fuel treatment] is not really supposed to stop fire,” said Ryan Bauer, fuels and prescribed fire program manager for the Plumas National Forest. “The treatments are supposed to make the forest healthy enough to withstand fire.”
He pointed to successful fuel treatments around Meadow Valley, Butterfly Valley and Twain, where he said crews were able to hold the fire off from communities. He also said the Dixie fire has burned through a mix of treated and untreated land, as well as logged areas and burn scars.
“Certain areas of the forest are really well managed, and then other parts have almost no management history in the last several decades,” he said. “When the fire’s this big, it’s a mixed bag. It’s running over everything.”
Although the Forest Service had recently completed a large hazardous-fuels reduction project around Greenville that included prescribed fire, thinning and fuel breaks, Bauer said it simply wasn’t enough to make a difference — particularly once winds picked up and carried spot fires over the ridge and into the town, with a steep drainage right behind the community also contributing to the extreme fire behavior.
Another challenge is that many communities including Greenville are surrounded by a buffer of private land separating them from the national forest, resulting in a patchwork of owners who are sometimes unwilling to participate in treatment projects, he said.
But what happened in Greenville adds to multiple examples in years past of fuel breaks failing to guard towns against wind-driven fires, which can launch embers right over them.
“There’s no way to keep fire out of forests,” Bauer said. “If you do it then the fuels conditions just become worse and worse until you get a really bad fire on a really bad weather day and it burns then. All putting fire out does really is defer the risk to a future fire.”
Managers of the Plumas National Forest have known for several years that there was enough fuel on the landscape for it to be critical during any given summer when conditions are right, and it appears that time has arrived, he said.
“A year like this is the primate example of that, that year that we’ve deferred all of our risk into,” Bauer said. “It’s so dry this year that it doesn’t matter how much fuel is on the landscape. The fuel that’s there is going to burn. And we just have to hope that the trees on those landscapes are resilient enough to survive it.”
One thing most experts agree on is that clear-cutting — or logging all or most of the trees in an area — has almost no benefits to the forests or to their surrounding communities.
That the Forest Service remains in the timber sales business is something that has left some ecologists flummoxed, particularly since the federal agency is still required to meet annual quotas known as timber targets.
“Clear cutting is a purely economic choice,” said Tingley, of UCLA. “It is. There is no forest that is healthier if all the trees are cut down.”
When mechanical thinning or logging are done for profit — or when whoever is doing it gets to use the timber they’re taking out — that instead incentivizes removing the oldest, biggest and strongest trees, which fetch a higher price, and leaves behind the trees that are the least fire-resilient, he said.
In March, more than 300 scientists, stakeholders and community members signed a letter to Newsom asking him to reconsider his wildfire budget allocations for 2021 and 2022, noting that logging and clearance projects have “consistently failed to protect our neighborhoods from wildfire.”
The budget includes more than $1 billion to increase the pace and scale of forest management and fuel reduction projects, the governor’s office said. $100 million has been allocated to building disaster-resilient communities.
Rick Halsey, the California Chaparral Institute director who spearheaded the letter, said he is growing increasingly frustrated by the imbalance.
“There’s essentially nothing we can do on the landscape to stop these fires because the environment is conducive to them, so we have to sort of stare that in the face and acknowledge it,” Halsey said. “What can we do? We can protect communities.”
That means focusing on making homes less permeable to embers, reducing flammable materials within 100 feet of structures and preventing developers from placing neighborhoods in harm’s way, he said.
Hanson echoed the sentiment as he walked through the scar of a wildfire in the San Bernardino National Forest, pointing to dense vegetation and old-growth trees that withstood catching and spreading the flames.
If wildfire management could shift from a forest-focused approach to a homes-focused one, he said, more tragedies like those of Paradise and Greenville could be avoided.
“We don’t need to lose another community — and another community and another community — every fire season,” he said. “Once we start focusing on the right places, it’s going to be incredibly effective.”
U.S. report finds multiple problems with Keystone pipeline
A supply depot servicing the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline lies idle in Oyen.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. government watchdog found multiple problems with the construction, manufacture and design of the Keystone pipeline, validating President Joe Biden’s decision to revoke the permit for a Keystone XL extension, leaders of several House Democratic committees said on Monday.
The lawmakers requested the Government Accountability Office report in November 2019 after more than 11,000 barrels of oil leaked from the pipeline system in two releases in less than two years.
“GAO found that preventable construction issues contributed to the current Keystone pipeline’s spills more frequently than the industry-wide trends,” they said in a statement.
Keystone’s four largest spills were “caused by issues related to the original design, manufacturing of the pipe, or construction of the pipeline,” the GAO report said.
Biden canceled Keystone XL’s permit on his first day in office on Jan. 20, dealing a death blow to a project that would have carried 830,000 barrels per day of heavy oil sands crude from Alberta to Nebraska. [L1N2JX1D8]
“TC Energy’s record among its peers is one of the worst in terms of volume of oil spilled per mile transported,” a statement from the lawmakers said. The lawmakers included Representative Frank Pallone, energy and commerce committee chair.
TC Energy Corp officially canceled the $9 billion Keystone XL in June. It filed a notice of intent in July to begin a legacy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) claim and is seeking more than $15 billion in damages from the U.S. government.
The company did not immediately respond on Monday to a request for comment.
Pipeline opponents want to slow the movement of Canadian oil to the United States. But pipeline supporters say it will be shipped anyway and that oil sent by rail has caused numerous fiery accidents.
Biden “was clearly right to question this operator’s ability to construct a safe and resilient pipeline, and we support his decision to put Americans’ health and environment above industry interests,” the U.S. representatives said.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Barbara Lewis and Dan Grebler)
California hiker dies in Death Valley, heatstroke suspected
In this Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021, photo provided by the National Park Service, an inter-agency search and rescue crew walks past a sign reading” “Stop, Extreme Heat Danger,” with park rangers responding on foot near Red Cathedral along the Golden Canyon Trail in Death Valley National Park, Calif. Authorities say 60-year-old Lawrence Stanback died Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021, while hiking near Red Cathedral along the Golden Canyon Trail. That day temperatures reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit. (National Park Service via AP).
DEATH VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — A San Francisco man died while hiking in Death Valley National Park, where temperatures can be among the hottest on Earth, authorities said Saturday.
Lawrence Stanback, 60, died Wednesday while hiking near Red Cathedral along the Golden Canyon Trail, according to a joint statement from the park and the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office. That day temperatures reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius).
Park rangers received a report of a suspected heatstroke Wednesday afternoon and set out on foot to look for Stanback. He was already dead when the rangers found him, officials said.
A helicopter with the California Highway Patrol tried to fly in to recover the body but strong winds prevented it from landing. Park rangers recovered Stanback’s body during the cooler evening hours, they said.
The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office and Inyo County coroner are investigating the cause of death.
Last month, the National Weather Service said Death Valley recorded a high temperature of 130 F (55 C). Death Valley holds the record for the highest recorded temperature on Earth at 134 F (57 C), set in 1913, although some dispute its accuracy.
Park rangers urged visitors to hike only before 10 a.m. or at high elevations. They also said hikers should stay safe by drinking plenty of water, eating snacks, and staying close to an air-conditioned building or vehicle to cool down when necessary.
Crews rescue residents from heavy flooding in Tennessee
August 21, 2021
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Heavy flooding in several Middle Tennessee counties on Saturday prompted water rescues, road closures, and communications disruptions, with several people reported missing, officials said.
Parts of Hickman County received more than 11.6 inches (29 centimeters) of rain, according to The Tennessean, and flash flood warnings were in effect for parts of Dickson, Houston and Montgomery and Stewart counties on Saturday evening.
National Weather Service meteorologist Krissy Hurley told the newspaper the area had received “about 20-25% of the yearly rainfall total that this area sees in a year” in a single morning.
Cities in Humphreys County like Waverly and McEwen were facing a “dire, catastrophic situation,” she said. “People are trapped in their homes and have no way to get out.”
Waverly couple Cindy Dunn, 48, and her husband Jimmy, 49, were rescued from their attic by a crew who used a bulldozer to reach them.
“Hell. That’s what we had to go through,” Cindy Dunn said.
She told The Tennessean that her husband woke her up Saturday, telling her that floodwaters had pushed her car to their backyard. Eventually the water in their house rose to at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) high, forcing them to the attic. Dunn said the rooftop wasn’t an option.
“My husband is dealing with cancer. He’s going through chemotherapy. And I am an amputee. So there was no going anywhere besides the attic,” Dunn said.
Dunn said their home and neighboring houses “are gone.”
Hickman County Chief Deputy Rob Edwards said in a text message to the newspaper that several people are missing and cellphone service has been disrupted throughout the county.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee tweeted on Saturday, “Tennesseans, please stay cautious of rising floodwaters caused by heavy rainfall in parts of Middle TN. We are actively working with emergency response officials & first responders as they support Tennesseans in flooded areas.”
The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency activated its emergency operations center and said agencies that include the Tennessee National Guard, the state Highway Patrol, and Fire Mutual Aid were responding to the flooding. In a bulletin, TEMA called the situation “dangerous and evolving” and urged people to avoid travel in the affected counties.
Is This Giant Hydroponic Greenhouse in Kentucky the Future of Farming?
Austyn Gaffney
appharvest-lead – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone
When Jonathan Webb arrived at the 500-acre former cattle farm he purchased in 2019, it was essentially an empty green field. He bought an RV and set it up on a hill with the water tower behind him and Daniel Boone National Forest out front. When massive, earth-moving construction started the same year, Webb joked with locals that he was building a giant communication tower to the aliens, helping other intelligent life find Morehead, Kentucky.
But Webb’s real interest was saving Planet Earth.
“We believe that Planet Earth is the hidden gem of the known universe,” Webb tells me during a tour of his AppHarvest facility, the $150 million, 60-acre greenhouse (think 50 football fields) that briefly ranked as the 9th largest building in the world when it opened in October 2020.
“I’m a huge believer that nature is the most technologically advanced thing we have on Planet Earth, and we need to harness it,” says Webb, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of AppHarvest. The corporation went public in February, earning a $1 billion valuation. “Whoever developed nature out there, that’s higher forms of intelligence. Building an iPhone? That’s easy. Go build organic biomatter and have it grow all over the place.”
The Morehead facility is the first of 12 high-tech farms that Webb is planning to build throughout eastern Kentucky. At its core, AppHarvest runs on the agricultural resources that have helped humans feed themselves for over 10,000 years: sun and water. But there’s two caveats: First, AppHarvest doesn’t use soil; its hydroponic system means it is heavily reliant on man-made fertilizers (but without pesticides). Second, the greenhouses use technology like robotics and AI to better predict crop health and yield. Webb, in fact, balks at the term greenhouse, preferring to call his colossal projects “data driven farms.”
“A greenhouse is not a greenhouse in the same way a sports car in 1940 has nothing in common with a 2021 Tesla except for four wheels and a steering wheel,” he says.
Webb’s goal is to lower domestic dependence on pesticide-laden foreign imports, which provide 70 percent of U.S. vine crops at the grocery store (tomatoes, berries, cucumbers, peppers). And Webb, a Kentuckian himself, wants to provide jobs to Appalachia. But his motivation goes beyond that, he says, to the same obsessive anxiety many in his generation are facing: the screeching freight train of climate change.
“I know people don’t really believe me, but every night, including last night, I am personally terrified about the future of human existence,” Webb says. “I mean 2050, it’s coming, and our heads are in the sand, and Rome is burning, and we’re not moving fast enough.”
The 0 million AppHarvest facility in Morehead, Kentucky, with a 60-acre greenhouse. AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb prefers to call it a “data-driven farm.” – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone
Webb’s plan for a new agricultural economy could bolster a region known for landscapes and livelihoods heavily scarred by the coal industry, a primary driver of the greenhouse gas emissions feeding the climate crisis. The reality of this crisis escalates daily: heat waves and unrelenting wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, drought evaporating drinking water in the Southwest, metronomic hurricanes emptying coastal towns, and extreme ice storms and flooding events devastating croplands and communities across the Midwest and the South.
Webb claims AppHarvest’s “controlled-environment agriculture” is the third wave of tech-laden solutions, following renewable energy grids and electric cars, and will help shore up a U.S. food supply amid these unpredictable weather extremes.
But is controlled environment agriculture at AppHarvest’s scale a climate solution, or just another energy-intensive distraction? And are Kentuckians truly going to be the beneficiaries of a company following a corporate playbook, beholden to corporate shareholders? Webb’s is an unapologetically eco-modernist approach, with a full-throttle embrace of capitalism — though, in a strange contortion, he self-identifies as anti-establishment. “I’m anti-Wall Street. This is the first stock I’ve ever owned,” he says, adding that he has since bought into both Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and a few others. “But the reality is, how do we use the private sector for good?”
The ecoleft would say that runaway technology and capitalism got us into this climate mess, and are the last tools we should be reaching for, but Webb is betting big that they are wrong.
“We can use private sector capital to rebuild this world,” says Webb. “We can’t just demonize the systems in place. We need to use them. We’re all pawns. Play the game and win. This generation has got to be the one of action and less talk at this point. There’s nothing to talk about anymore. Just do it.”
At 7 a.m. on a Tuesday in early June, Webb is already bursting with energy, hands shoved in his pockets, rocking back and forth from his heels to his toes. He’s dressed in his typical uniform: grey running shoes, acid-wash jeans, a baseball cap atop shaggy strawberry blond hair, round tortoiseshell glasses and a mustache. His black T-shirt reads “APPH Nasdaq Listed,” a celebration of when AppHarvest went public on February 1st, 2021.
He jumps between topics quickly, pausing to tell me he has attention deficit disorder in the midst of a speech about their pest-management system. Travis Parman, an AppHarvest spokesperson, jokes that their management team is pinged left and right by Webb. “If it’s in his head, it’s in a text,” Parman says.
Beneath Webb’s fast-talking, grand-metaphor-inducing world visions might be a bit of a savior complex, complete with a tidy origin story of the genius striking out on his own, a la the founders of Google in their garage. Except with Webb, it was a small cabin in Pikeville, Kentucky, where he says he showed up with a backpack, his laptop and a dream (he was also given an office at the University of Pikeville). Three years later, he has a management team and board of directors culled from Impossible Foods, ExxonMobil, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Plus Martha Stewart, who joined after a visit from Webb in 2019.
While Webb’s ambitions are grand, he’s no stranger to large-scale, new-economy projects. When he graduated from the University of Kentucky’s business program in 2008, at the height of the recession, he applied to hundreds of jobs before finding his way into a career in Washington, D.C. during the Obama administration, building solar grids on Department of Defense land. There, he watched the solar and wind industries blast off over the same decade that coal irrecoverably collapsed due to competition from natural gas, mechanization, and thinning seams.
At the same time, Webb began hearing about food security. By 2050 the world will need up to 70 percent more food than it currently produces to feed a predicted 9.7 billion people and a rising middle class, according to an oft-cited 2009 report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Webb read about a solution in a 2017 National Geographic article, “How Netherlands Feeds the World,” highlighting enormous Dutch greenhouses that provide huge quantities of food year-round with a smaller square footage than traditional farming. He quit his job and started AppHarvest that same year.
“To get to 50-70 percent more food, as we currently grow it, we would need two Planet Earths,” says Webb. And there are more demands on the planet than just agriculture. Conservation biologists like E.O. Wilson predict we need to preserve half of the world’s land and water to protect 80 percent of the remaining biodiversity on the planet.
“So how do we free up land and water?” Webb asks, spreading out his arms in front of the greenhouse, “You’re looking at it.”
Jonathan Webb, CEO of AppHarvest. “If we do half of what we’re talking about, we will be one of the largest food and agricultural companies in my lifetime,” he says. – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone
At the entrance to the greenhouse’s west side, Webb dons a mad scientist lab coat and we take off on a Power Bee, a tiny yellow vehicle pulling two metal carts. The Bee beeps our way through hundreds of rows of tomatoes, the glass-paneled ceiling towering above us like an airport hangar, with Webb greeting everyone we pass — “Let’s rock and roll” being a preferred salutation.
Annually, up to 45 million pounds of tomatoes (from about 720,000 plants) will be harvested from this single greenhouse. Each tomato plant — red, round beefsteak tomatoes on the east side, and tomatoes-on-the-vine twisting through the west side — is carefully monitored through a control room decked out with standing desks and large screens where the temperature, nutrients, water, and light are watched and tweaked. Soon, other AppHarvest greenhouses will grow things like lettuce and strawberries.
AppHarvest claims to produce up to 30 times the yields of conventional agriculture. “This 60-acre under-glass facility can do the equivalent of 1,500-2,000 [open-field] acres in California or Mexico,” says Webb as he peels past a group of workers, some with wet towels on their heads and others with grey fans that look like large headphones around their necks, provided after workers complained of the heat.
AppHarvest says they’ve also reduced water consumption by 90 percent compared to traditional open-field agriculture by using a closed loop irrigation system that’s 100 percent reliant on rainwater, which makes Kentucky an optimal location — the state has had its wettest decade on record, and in 2020 was the wettest state in the U.S.
“You look at all these tech billionaires looking to leave the planet and go to Mars, but water is the one thing Planet Earth has that nowhere else in the known universe has,” Webb says, talking quickly. “When water becomes the price of oil, that’s that Mad Max post-apocalyptic world that’s on the horizon if we don’t get it straight.”
Kentucky is also optimal because the location cuts down on shipping distances, AppHarvest says. Seventy percent of the U.S. is within a day’s drive of Kentucky, reducing transportation emissions by 80 percent. And, they tout, a 50/50 mix of LED and traditional light bulbs has reduced their electricity consumption by almost 20 percent.
But energy is perhaps the most pressing problem in controlled-environment agriculture, especially in Kentucky, which, as of 2019, still depended on coal for 73 percent of its electricity generation.
“Here in Kentucky, electricity primarily comes from coal, so with an AppHarvest tomato we’re trading fossil fuels for this product,” says Martin Richards, formerly an organic farmer and now executive director of Community Farm Alliance, a Kentucky nonprofit founded by dairy and tobacco growers in 1985.
In controlled-environment agriculture, most of the resources naturally utilized in traditional farming are provided artificially, which can make greenhouses hugely energy intensive.
“You have to construct greenhouse facilities, and then literally build systems that replace what nature would otherwise provide,” says Ricardo Salvador, director and senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ food and environment program. “A good rule of thumb on the thermodynamics of it is the more technology you use, the more energy you use, and the more carbon dioxide equivalents you’re going to generate.”
A 2015 study in Yuma, Arizona comparing hydroponic lettuce with conventional lettuce growth reported that while hydroponics produced over 10 times the conventional yield, growers also used 82 times more energy.
AppHarvest’s baseline carbon footprint has not yet been determined since operations began in October 2020. They say they are waiting to have a year’s worth of data and expect to include it in their 2021 sustainability report.
But Webb is quick to denounce criticisms. When I ask him about the energy problem, he says AppHarvest is an agricultural company, not an energy company: “Tesla, they build electric vehicles that go on the grid. They’re not building solar for every car in the same way we’re not building solar for our fruits and vegetables.”
AppHarvest is, however, trying to lower its fossil fuel use, says Jackie Roberts, the company’s chief sustainability officer. She’s working with Schneider Electric, a sustainable energy specialist, on a request for proposals to add renewables into the grid.
Michael Hurak, an AppHarvest employee, trims the tomato plants, which grow without soil, using hydroponics. AppHarvest also uses robotics and AI to precisely predict crop health and yield. – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone
The long-term goal is “minimal carbon emissions,” she insists, but until then, she says, the benefits of AppHarvest’s net ecological footprint outweigh the adverse effects of its energy consumption, including its ability to conserve water and avoid agricultural runoff from fertilizers and pesticides.
The result, Webb hopes, could be not only a more sustainable system but a model for other greenhouses globally. After AppHarvest went public, he says he began getting calls from foreign dignitaries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. “We’re having the global food security conversation on a farm in freaking Morehead, and the brightest people in the world are going to be part of these conversations,” he says. “I’m a huge fan of underdogs, and you talk about the underdog concept of we’re the first publicly traded company in this sector, and we’re in rural America.”
“If we do half of what we’re talking about,” he adds, “we will be one of the largest food and agricultural companies in my lifetime.”
A few minutes into our tour, Webb suddenly stops the Power Bee in front of a dozen employees huddled together in matching blue T-shirts. (Blue signals they work with tomatoes-on-the-vine; orange T-shirts signal beefsteaks.)
“Hey, my man, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re going to do an all hands on Thursday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. to celebrate our accomplishments,” Webb says to their supervisor, jumping down from the Power Bee. An “all hands,” Webb explains later, is essentially a pep rally to boost employee morale via rock concerts and games of corn hole, and a chance to give back to his community of workers.
Employees at AppHarvest make a “living wage” which drills down to roughly $13/hour for entry level employees (a productivity-guided “piece rate” can earn workers up to $20/hour), along with “whole family” benefit packages including health, dental, vision, and life insurance, with 100 percent of premiums paid for all family members, a 401K match program, shares in the publicly traded company, and monthly CSA boxes. AppHarvest estimates an entry-level worker earns 71 percent of Rowan County’s household median income.
These workers include former coal miners and tobacco growers, according to Parman, the AppHarvest spokesperson, but the company also plans to locate all 12 of its agricultural facilities in Kentucky college and university towns, tapping students for skilled engineering jobs, especially in the robotics and AI sector.
According to Webb, more than 8,000 people applied for positions at AppHarvest in less than a year; over 500 were hired. That number will grow to more than 1,500 employees by the end of 2022 once new farms are up and running, including Berea, a 15-acre leafy-green facility, and Richmond, a 60-acre tomato facility. On June 21st, AppHarvest broke ground at yet two more facilities, a second 10-acre farm for leafy greens adjacent to the Morehead campus, and a 30-acre strawberry farm in Somerset.
“I personally believe the hardest working men and women in the U.S. are in eastern Kentucky, and it’s deplorable how we’ve shut down the coal mines and no one said what’s next,” Webb says.
When he talks about why he started AppHarvest in Kentucky, Webb leans heavily into his ties to Appalachia. His grandmother, he says, was born in eastern Kentucky, and grew up in a home with a dirt floor; her father died in a coal mining accident when she was three years old. Webb’s own father grew up in a children’s home until he was 12, and neither of his parents have college degrees. His sister, who married a man from Pike County, Kentucky’s easternmost point, works as a state social worker. Webb himself is originally from outside Lexington, and he’s vague about where he currently resides (aside from a smattering of RV’s across construction sites). Instead he calls himself “a resident of Kentucky.”
His narrative caught the attention of Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat elected in 2019, who has made ag-tech his top economic development priority. In June 2020, Beshear announced a partnership between Kentucky, the Dutch government, and other organizations, facilitated by AppHarvest, committed to making Kentucky the U.S. Agri-Tech capital.
Webb wants his Morehead facility to become a kind of campus for America’ new ag-tech economy, and to create a pipeline for eastern Kentuckians into jobs in the industry. Out of the first $1 million raised in venture capital funding in 2019, AppHarvest donated a quarter of those funds to education. Before Morehead was under construction, AppHarvest built a container farm at Shelby County High School, and later, at Rowan County Senior High School.
Employees in the pack house of AppHarvest. Entry-level workers make an hour plus benefits like “whole family” health care and shares in the publicly traded company. More than 8,000 people applied for positions at AppHarvest in less than a year; over 500 were hired. – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone.
“We know AppHarvest is the future of farming for Rowan County because we’re all hills and not a lot of flat land,” says Brandy Carver, principal of Rowan County Senior High School. According to Carver, before AppHarvest the main industries were Morehead State University, St. Claire Regional Medical Center, and SRG Global, a plastics factory. “AppHarvest in general has been a great opportunity for the community here, so we do anything we can to help students be more prepared [to work there] because we know it’s a viable job opportunity when they leave high school,” says Carver, adding that on a recent tour of AppHarvest, she saw a half-dozen former students just in one section of the greenhouse.
But not everybody sees a bright shiny future in Webb’s vision. As agri-tech takes hold in Kentucky, it could complicate the prioritization of small, organic farmers caretaking the land, water, soil, and local economies, says Richards of the Community Farm Alliance (CFA). “AppHarvest isn’t farming. It’s industrial food production,” he says. “When you’re farming, it’s about a relationship with a piece of land and good stewardship.”
Richards ran Earth Heart Farm in southern Woodford County for 20 years, transitioning the landscape from tobacco monoculture to organic produce. Unlike energy-intensive indoor agriculture, which emits carbon, small organic farms can cut out pesticides and fertilizers while also sequestering carbon in the soil by limiting bad land-management practices like tilling and overgrazing. Food grown in soil might also be more nutritious, at least according to soil loyalists who are skeptical that food can be as healthy grown in an artificial environment.
“We want to make it clear our competition is not the American farmer,” Webb says, adding that they began with tomatoes to compete with Mexico’s number-one import that relies on chemical pesticides AppHarvest doesn’t use. “The dirty stuff, that’s our competition, and we will ruthlessly go after them. Our goal is to put them into bankruptcy. The food and agriculture companies of today are the cigarette companies that existed in the 1970s.”
While Richards supports taking on dirty agriculture, he’s uneasy about the possible unintended consequences of AppHarvest’s model, and whether the benefits will reach Kentucky farmers. While the original goal was displacing produce from Mexico, Richards says AppHarvest is now displacing local farm products in Kentucky as AppHarvest tomatoes show up in state supermarkets like Kroger, Meijer, and IGA. For nearly a decade, CFA has worked to create “Kentucky Double Dollars,” a food-access program that provides incentives for folks using federal food benefits like SNAP to support Kentucky farmers at retailers. When AppHarvest tomatoes show up at those same retailers, those hard-won benefits are then going to AppHarvest, instead of small farmers.
“It is a bit of a slap in the face for those of us who’ve been doing this work for a long time to see that work ultimately go to this for-profit and their shareholders who aren’t even in Kentucky,” Richards says.
AppHarvest was founded as a public benefit corporation and a certified B-Corp, meaning it’s a for-profit company with a duty to consider stakeholders’ best interests, but those interests must include public-facing goals such as driving environmentalism in agriculture, empowering Appalachians, and improving the lives of their employees and communities.
Salvador, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says while the employment AppHarvest provides for Kentuckians is a social good, “In the end they’re still employees, and the major benefit goes to folks that provide the capital, who live and run businesses in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The money made is going to concentrate in those areas. For real economic development, you really want entrepreneurs and for folks to produce outdoors.”
AppHarvest’s big-business agricultural model could be a generational boon for the region, but it’s not a sure thing. There’s a lot of excitement about ag-tech right now, and venture capital is pouring into the sector, but it’s a new enough frontier that an operation growing at the scale and speed of AppHarvest hasn’t really been proven out yet, at least not in the U.S.
AppHarvest’s 2020 sustainability report predicts investing $1 billion by 2025, but they’ve yet to make a profit. During 2021’s first quarter as a publicly traded company, AppHarvest sold almost 4 million pounds of tomatoes, reaching $2.3 million in net sales — pretty measly for a public company with a $1 billion valuation — and the company is still under a $28.5 million net loss.
That worries Richards, who’s spent decades watching the chokehold of boom and bust economies across Kentucky. When CFA was founded during the 1980s farm crisis, their first act was to set up a suicide hotline for struggling farmers. “I’ve certainly seen this in rural communities in Kentucky that depended on tobacco or coal,” Richards says. “Those things are part of the culture, but the communities have been in crisis. When they lose the resource, they lose their identities, and it creates a lot of fear.”
Webb drives a cart down the main aisle of the west greenhouse. “We have two distinct paths, and there’s no middle,” Webb says of the choices facing civilization. “We’re going into a post-apocalyptic Mad Max world or we’re going into an Avatar-type world where we’re going to use technology and align with nature, but there is no in between.” – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone
According to a 2021 Air, Soil and Water Researcharticle, the two biggest costs in controlled-environment agriculture are energy and labor, which together make up three-quarters of the total. An IDTechEx report cited bankruptcies littering the industry, including PodPonics and FarmedHere, “operators of the largest vertical farms in the world,” which shut down in 2016 “after struggling with spiraling power and labor costs and organizational complexities,” the report stated.
“A lot of indoor farms are struggling,” Eric Stein, a professor at Penn State Great Valley School and executive director of the Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture, tells Rolling Stone. “They’re not making a lot of money and many are losing money. Some are breaking even.”
But, he adds, “Greenhouses [like AppHarvest] are more likely to be profitable than an indoor farm at this point because they have a longer history of implementation and refinement.”
AppHarvest’s glass design uses sunlight and has lower energy costs than typical indoor farms, which rely entirely on lighting in enclosed factories. “The Dutch perfected these things over the years, and AppHarvest has collaborated with Dutch companies for these greenhouses,” Stein says, who himself has bought a couple hundred shares in AppHarvest. “Eventually most tomato greenhouses are profitable, otherwise they wouldn’t be replicated around the world. It’s just going to take a while to recoup the capital costs. They’re not insignificant.”
It’s perhaps no surprise that AppHarvest hasn’t released information on their energy costs yet. According to Stein, getting hard data on energy usage from growers is a challenge. “No one wants to release [that data] because of their investors. The investors want their money back over a certain amount of time, and this is a very touchy subject. One has to be clear that this is not like Silicon Valley. It may use Silicon Valley money and terminology, but these [greenhouses] are not unicorns. These are not things that are going to give you a 500 percent return on your investment. You’d be lucky if you got a 15-20 percent year on profitability.”
But Webb is confident there is nothing but growth in AppHarvest’s future.
“The whole build-it-and-they-will-come thing, that’s happening,” he says, referring to the 1989 movie Field of Dreams. “Our headquarters will be here [in Morehead], but for us at AppHarvest, it’ll be a question of how quickly we want to enter the global stage. We’re not ready today, but we’re well aware that once we have several going [in Kentucky], we’re going to be in one or two continents overseas pretty quickly.”
At the end of my tour through the greenhouse, Webb walks me over to his RV, reducing the choices facing the world into two multi-million-dollar box office dystopias: Mad Max or Avatar.
“We have two distinct paths, and there’s no middle,” Webb says. “We’re going into a post-apocalyptic Mad Max world or we’re going into an Avatar-type world where we’re going to use technology and align with nature, but there is no in between. It’s one or the other.”
Webb, and his mission, can come across as evangelical. He grew up in church, and he describes his parents as devout Christians. When he pitches his founder’s story, when he talks about the climate crisis, when he pivots toward capitalism as a solution, he’s proselytizing.
“Who’s your maker? Where are you going? Who do you have to answer to? Whether it’s nature, or the universe, or whatever god you pray to, having morals and ethics in what you consume, and the way you work, and where you choose to work, and how you choose to work matters,” Webb says. “We have to make an ethical choice.”
Tomatoes on vines in the west greenhouse at AppHarvest, and lettuce plants in the AppHarvest container farm at Rowan County Senior High School. – Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone
Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone
Outside his RV, he gets agitated, quickly tossing a football between his hands and pacing between a picnic table and his fire pit.
“We’re literally trapped here on Planet Earth unless you’re the billionaire that’s going to spend $28 million to go fly with Jeff Bezos. Like, are you fucking kidding me? The rest of us, and I would put myself in that camp, although things are changing financially every day, I’m not flying off Planet Earth.”
Webb punts the football he’s been spinning, and it arcs toward AppHarvest and the hills behind it.
“Help!” he shouts, looking at me, and then up to the sky. “Help Planet Earth survive so we can stay here.”
He looks frazzled, and he looks like he means it. In Kentucky, Webb isn’t short on disciples. The picnic table could be a pulpit. The gleaming glass of AppHarvest could be his congregation. The tomato could be an apple; the apple could be capitalism; capitalism could be the original sin. The original sin could be the pathway to a better future, or it could just be another LED-lit mirage.
Wildfires are burning up trees meant to fight climate change: ‘It’s definitely not working’
Janet Wilson and Christal Hayes, USA Today
The Monument Fire burns in northern California on August 2, 2021, near forests set aside to offset industrial carbon pollution. Healthy forests store carbon naturally, but when they burn, the carbon literally goes up in smoke, adding to global climate change instead of helping to slow it.
LOS ANGELES – Thousands of acres of forests have been set aside in the West to help curb climate change. But increasingly, wildfires are burning them up.
The bitter irony was highlighted Wednesday in comments by California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Chief Thom Porter, who said the blazes in the West were taking out years of work combating climate change.
Some of the blazes are raging in areas that are “a huge part of California’s climate initiative,” Porter said. “We are seeing generational destruction of forests because of what these fires are doing. This is going to take a long time to come back from.”
Porter was talking about forests dedicated to carbon offset programs, which have been billed as a tool to fight climate change. The underlying goal of such programs is to ensure large swaths of trees continue growing. As they grow, the trees suck carbon out of the air and store it.
“When trees grow, as they get bigger, they pull carbon out of the atmosphere and they store it in their trunks, the branches, the leaves, every part of the tree, and that’s good,” said Danny Cullenward, policy director of Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that researches climate policy.
But there’s an increasing problem: The plan works only “as long as the tree is alive and hasn’t burned to the ground.”
If the trees burn, they not only stop capturing carbon – they also release massive amounts of it into the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas that has been piled sky high into the atmosphere, and according to a landmark United Nations report this month, is causing increasingly catastrophic climate change, with fiercer lightning storms and hotter, drier conditions in forests across the planet.
The monster Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which burned for about six weeks until it was contained in mid-August, wiped out an estimated 24% of a huge carbon offset project used by Microsoft and others, according to Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that has a live map updating the overlap of the fires and forest projects. In eastern Washington on tribal lands, five blazes have burned about 12% of the huge Colville forest project.
“This summer and the past few years have made it incredibly clear that forest offsets face substantial risks from climate change, including major wildfires,” said University of Utah ecologist William Anderegg. “A major forest offset project burned in 2020, and there are currently at least four offset projects burning in 2021.”
And in California and Montana, several fires now burning have overlapped with projects or are within a few miles of them.
Some trees involved in the projects were always expected to burn. A system called “buffer pools” was set up to ensure that trees that go up in smoke or otherwise are lost would be factored into the planning of carbon offset programs, much like an insurance policy. But researchers say the pool is not keeping up with the rate with which wildfires are destroying trees.
“We haven’t set up a real insurance program, and all of these climate claims are going up in smoke,” Cullenward said. “If you’ve got a forest offset project on fire, it’s definitely not working.”
The programs are often used by major companies like Microsoft and BP and were built on a long-standing recognition of trees’ powerful ability to trap carbon dioxide, converting it into beneficial organic matter for a century or longer.
“Using forests as natural climate solutions must not distract from rapid reductions in emissions,” it said.
The problem playing out in the West is far from unique. Heat waves and historic droughts tied to climate change have contributed to more intense wildfires around the globe.
Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, said hotter climates may have different consequences across the globe. In some areas, climate-change-induced droughts will fuel wildfires. In other areas, more rainfall could increase tree growth, allowing some regions to absorb more carbon and help slow climate change.
But hope that trees alone will make a significant impact has been fading in recent years. Notably, a study published last month said parts of the Amazon rainforest are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb.
Increases in fires combined with persistent droughts in the West might signal an adjustment is needed in plans to use trees in the West to fight climate change, especially because forests going up in flames can be a huge source of carbon emissions.
Different trees and the climate they are grown in can alter how much carbon they hold. A massive redwood, for instance, can hold as much as 250 tons of carbon over its lifetime. Other trees can absorb about 50 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a year. But when they burn, those carbon gases are emitted into the atmosphere, compounding the problem.
California’s historic 2020 fire season, which included five of the largest blazes in state history, released about 107 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere – the equivalent of more than 23 million cars driven for one year.
“We really are in a pinch to do everything we can possibly do in the next 30 years or so to try to keep climate change from kind of spiraling out of control,” Searchinger said.
Multiple people missing amid ‘catastrophic’ flooding in Tennessee, North Carolina
Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY
Multiple people are missing across Tennessee and North Carolina amid heavy rainfall that brought on severe flooding. North Carolina was recently battered by the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred, causing at least four deaths in Haywood County.
Rainfall in middle Tennessee has shattered records for water levels on the Piney River, according to the National Weather Service. More than 11 inches of rain was dumped on parts of Hickman County early Saturday morning. A state of emergency is in effect through Saturday afternoon in Dickson, Hickman, Houston and Humphreys counties.
McEwan, Tennessee, saw 14.5 inches of rain, the Tennessee Valley Authority said. A flash flood emergency is also in effect in Waverly, McEwen and Tennessee Ridge through Saturday evening.
The situation was “life-threatening,” the Nashville National Weather Service said in a tweet Saturday.
“People are trapped in their homes and have no way to get out,” NWS Nashville meteorologist Krissy Hurley told The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. “Water is up to their necks. It is catastrophic, the worst kind of situation.”
Several people are missing in the region, according to Hickman County Chief Deputy Rob Edwards.
An additional 1 to 2 inches of rain is possible in areas that already received between 8 and 12 inches Saturday morning, the National Weather Service said.
In North Carolina, four people have been confirmed dead in the flooding brought on by Fred this week, after two bodies were recovered Saturday. Their identities have not been made public. Franklin McKenzie, 67, and Frank Mungo, 86, were previously identified among the dead.
Seven people are still missing in Haywood County, including Judy Ann Mason, who has been missing since around 3 p.m. Tuesday from Laurel Bank Campground in Canton, a family friend told The Asheville Citizen Times.
Mason’s daughter, Naomi Haney, said the last text she got from her mother was, “Anything can happen to anyone any time.”
Day three of search and rescue was underway Saturday in Haywood, with teams from the other side of the state assisting in the search of miles of riverbank and rugged terrain.
Cruso, North Carolina, is a small town that received some of the worst damage in the storm.
“It’s gone. There’s nothing there,” Sherrie McArthur, who owns Laurel Bank Campground in the area, told the Citizen Times. “I had 100 sites, and they’re all gone. I had campers in there — most all of them are gone, except maybe 10. What is still left is squashed, crushed. Some of them went totally down the river — I don’t know where they’ll be.”
Emergency officials with cadaver dogs were on site Thursday, McArthur said.
Contributing: Brinley Hineman and Rachel Wegner, Nashville Tennessean; John Boyle and Joel Burgess, Asheville Citizen Times
The fight over water in Florida has had some surprising winners
Stephanie Hanes
Burt Eno peers down through the surface of the Rainbow River, examining the sea grasses below. Even though the water has changed over the past mile from cobalt blue to deep green, it is still transparent enough to see the brown algae coating the waving foliage.
He shakes his head.
“It’s covered,” he says of the underwater grass. “It shouldn’t be like this.”
The others on the pontoon boat nod in grim agreement. As volunteers with Rainbow River Conservation, an environmental group focused on protecting this unique waterway, they know how to spot trouble hiding in what looks, at first glance, to be a picture-perfect image of central Florida.
Alongside the kayakers and families on inner tubes – and the anhinga drying its spread wings on a Spanish-moss-draped branch – the conservation volunteers recognize the impact of some of Florida’s biggest environmental challenges: nitrate pollution, water shortages, and over-development. The spring that feeds the Rainbow River, where fresh water from the Floridian aquifer bubbles to the surface in swirls of blue, is releasing fewer gallons of flow each year – a sign of the severe pressures on the state’s underground water system.
But the volunteers see something else happening here as well.
In a state where business interests regularly trump environmental concerns, the Rainbow River is a site where grassroots conservationists have fought against development – and won. Environmentalists here have joined forces with others who care about the unique springs ecosystems, and now the Florida Springs Council sends a lobbyist to Tallahassee. Longtime environmental activists say they are noticing a growing public recognition of the urgency to protect Florida’s water, spurred, perhaps, by a new documentary on state public television about threats to Florida’s aquifer.
“We’re seeing exponential growth in the number of people paying attention,” says Ryan Smart, the director of the Florida Springs Council, a nonprofit coalition formed in 2014 that coordinates advocacy efforts among more than 50 local conservation groups. “I don’t want to say that things are improving on the ground yet – we’re still a long way from that. But we have had successes.”
Some of this new focus has been sparked by recent environmental traumas, says Justin Bloom, founder of the Suncoast Waterkeeper conservation group.
“I do think that there is a growing awareness and concern,” Mr. Bloom says. “Unfortunately, it seems that it is born of crisis.”
Development at the expense of water
Earlier this year, the operators of Piney Point, an abandoned phosphate plant in Manatee County, dumped more than 170 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into Tampa Bay to relieve pressure on the walls of a 77-acre holding pond that officials worried was about to break and flood surrounding neighborhoods. Over the past month, a red tide algae bloom has inundated the bay, killing aquatic life and leaving swaths of St. Petersburg reeking of dead fish. In June, Florida wildlife managers reported that 750 manatees had died so far this year, the most deaths ever recorded in a five-month period. Many of the animals, officials said, starved to death because the sea grass they eat has been dying off.
For Florida conservationists, this spate of environmental disasters is unsurprising, yet still devastating. For a decade, many environmentalists claim, Florida officials have supported developers and other business interests at the expense of the state’s ecosystem – particularly its hydrology.
Although Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has called protecting Florida’s “vital water resources … one of the most pressing issues facing our state,” and has proposed using some $625 million for restoration projects in the Everglades and elsewhere, critics say these are scant efforts in the face of policies that systematically create water and environmental problems.
This is particularly apparent in Florida’s springs and connected waterways, like Rainbow River, says Bob Knight, founder of the Florida Springs Institute, an education and advocacy nonprofit. The state’s springs ecosystems – the glass-clear, 72-degree water and the unique aquatic life that lives in it – are a product of Florida’s geology.
Not terribly long ago, in geologic time, Florida was itself underwater. Today, much of the peninsula is limestone, formed from the remains of ancient sea creatures. As sea levels retreated, scientists say, acidic rain bored holes in the rock, creating a formation regularly described as akin to Swiss cheese. Rainwater seeping into the ground filled up these pockets; as more rain came, some of the water was forced back to the surface and created springs. The springs then fed rivers, which, in turn, watered the state and supported other freshwater ecosystems, such as the Everglades.
When Dr. Knight first saw these springs as a child in the 1950s, he was awed. The sites hadn’t changed much from the descriptions he’d read of them from a century earlier, he says: crystal clear, blue water surrounded by lush forests. All of the springs produced voluminous amounts of fresh water, with hundreds of millions of gallons bubbling up from the aquifer.
Before Disney World opened in 1971, the more than 1,000 springs in north-central Florida were among the top tourist draws in the state. As early as the Civil War, visitors flocked to Silver Springs, taking glass-bottom boats across the aquifer-fed pool; later, movie makers used the springs for scenery in films such as Tarzan.
But once air conditioners became accessible to everyday homeowners, Florida’s population boomed. Between 1960 and 2010, the state’s population grew from about 5 million to 19 million. Now, nearly 1,000 people move to Florida every day, according to state officials. The most recent census data puts Florida as one of the country’s fastest growing states by population – about 15 percent since 2010. Many of the fastest growing cities in the country are located in Florida – including Ocala, in the center of the state, near Rainbow River. And all of these new residents, of course, use water – not only to drink, but for landscaping.
“Florida has been very heavily developed,” Dr. Knight says. “And in the process, millions of wells have been put in the ground. … It’s like putting needles in a balloon or air mattress. The pressure in the aquifer fell.”
When the aquifer is tapped in too many places, he and others explain, the flow of nearby springs decreases. That not only means less water, but less flushing of pollution, such as runoff from lawns and agriculture, and that can result in algae and other contamination. Some springs in the state have dried up completely.
“They do die,” says Mr. Smart, director of the Florida Springs Council. “They can die because the flow stops, or because they become so choked with algae.”
Jayantha Obeysekera, director of the Sea Level Solutions Center at Florida International University, notes that as the aquifer pressure decreases, not only does the spring flow lessen, but there is less resistance in the ground to what is called “saltwater intrusion,” ocean water pushing into the aquifer. Already, numerous wells in coastal areas have been made useless by seawater.
All of this has created water shortages in the state, and residents are regularly reminded to conserve water. But homeowners are not the only ones tapping the aquifer.
Agriculture draws thousands of millions of gallons from Florida’s aquifer every day; so do the mining industry and other industrial sectors. And while the state’s water-permitting process is supposed to protect river flow, environmentalists have long complained that local officials almost always approve water-use permits for developers and other businesses. Last year, for instance, a state water agency gave Mosaic, a large phosphate company, authority to pump 70 million gallons of water a day for the next 20 years out of a region whose residents have been under water restrictions. Earlier this year, community members protested a request by the company Nestlé to pump a million gallons of water each day from Ginnie Springs for its bottled water business. The state water board ended up approving the company’s plans.
The fight at Rainbow River
So when the Rainbow River Conservation volunteers heard that Jim Gissy, a senior executive with Westgate Resorts, had plans to develop a large swath of land he owned on the banks of Rainbow River into an eco-destination, they panicked, knowing that developers tend to get what they want in Florida.
Along with others, Dr. Eno, president of the Rainbow River Conservation Board of Directors, decided to fight. Gretchen Martin, whose home is on the river, knocked on every door in Dunnellon, talking to residents about what the added traffic and pollution from the resort might mean for the water, not to mention the draw on the aquifer.
“We didn’t believe that most people in our community knew what was going to happen,” she says. “And really, 98 percent of people either didn’t know about it or didn’t want it.”
More than a hundred protesters packed a city council meeting – a rare occurrence for a municipality with a population hovering around 2,000 people. The volunteers distributed yard signs and took to social media, working with the Florida Springs Council to spread the word about the development to environmentalists outside the area. Thousands of people signed a Change.org petition opposing Mr. Gissy’s plans.
Late last summer, the developer withdrew his proposal. He has told media outlets that he had been assured by the city council that the potential for jobs would make the project popular, and that he was frustrated by the opposition. But he also told residents that if they didn’t want the resort, he wouldn’t build it.
Instead, he said, he would attempt to sell the land into conservation.
At the next election, in the fall of 2020, Dunnellon voters ousted two of the council members who had supported the development. The mayor, Dale Burns, also lost his reelection campaign.
“That whole episode probably has changed a number of minds,” Dr. Eno says. “People are more aware than they were. I think we changed the tide in some respects.”
He looks out over the water and sighs. “There is a lot more to do,” he says.
