Driving the news: The Department of Agriculture has responded by launching an extermination campaign against grasshoppers, the largest since the 1980s. Authorities have started to spray thousands of square miles with pesticide to kill immature grasshopper before they become adults.
But, but, but: Some environmentalists worry the pesticides could kill other insects, including grasshopper predators and struggling species such as monarch butterflies, AP notes.
The USDA said it would spray rangelands in sections to prevent other insect wildlife from being affected by the pesticide.
State of play: The USDA released a grasshopper hazard map that shows some areas have more than 15 grasshoppers per square yard in Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska.
Why it matters: “Left unaddressed, federal officials said the agricultural damage from grasshoppers could become so severe it could drive up beef and crop prices,” AP writes.
What they’re saying: “Drought and grasshoppers go together and they are cleaning us out,” Frank Wiederrick, a farmer in Montana, told AP.
The first time I experienced 110 degrees, I walked out of a strenuously air-conditioned hotel into the blast-furnace heat of a June day in Phoenix. WHAM. It was so hot, so crazy over-the-top hot, that I burst into laughter. You kidding me? That was a couple of decades ago, and now 110 is not unusual in Arizona, which had its hottest year ever in 2020, with 53 days of 110-degree heat and 14 days of 115 degrees or higher. This year might be hotter still — it was 118 degrees in Phoenix last week — as the entire Southwest and California bake in a pitiless megadrought. The Southwest has always been one of my favorite parts of the country; just before the pandemic halted travel in March 2020, I spent a delightful week in a casita tucked into Saguaro National Park south of Tucson. In recent decades, millions of “snowbirds” have permanently fled the upper Midwest and the Northeast for Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. But as the climate changes, will truly oppressive heat, and a dire lack of water, begin to force a reverse migration north?
The term “climate refugee” may summon images of Bangladesh, sub-Saharan Africa, or sinking islands in Micronesia. But in coming years, it could include Californians fleeing apocalyptic wildfires and choking air, and Arizonans and Nevadans facing unbroken months of heat so intense it is dangerous to leave the house much of the day. In this arid region, battles over scarce water will intensify. And the Southwest is not alone in its vulnerability. By 2040, climatologists warn, the Southeast will become noticeably hotter and even more humid. Southern Florida and coastal communities along the Atlantic will be so routinely flooded by rising seas and stronger storms that homeowners may have to retreat inland. Midwestern farmers are likely to see crop yields plunge. While we argue over other things, we might take note of the fact that the climate is already changing, with even more dramatic change to come.
Rising air temperatures remind us that our bodies have real limits.
By Bill McKibben June 23, 2021
Last week, researchers at nasa and noaa found that “the earth is warming faster than expected.”Photograph by Kyle Grillot / Bloomberg / Getty
It’s hard to change the outcome of the climate crisis by individual action: we’re past the point where we can alter the carbon math one electric vehicle at a time, and so activists rightly concentrate on building movements large enough to alter our politics and our economics. But ultimately the climate crisis still affects people as individuals—it comes down, eventually, to bodies. Which is worth remembering. In the end, we’re not collections of constructs or ideas or images or demographics but collections of arteries and organs and muscles, and those are designed to operate within a finite range of temperatures.
I happened to be talking with Dr. Rupa Basu, the chief of air-and-climate epidemiology at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, on Friday, a day after Palm Springs had tied its all-time heat record with a reading of a hundred and twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot—hotter than the human body can really handle. The day before, with temperatures topping a hundred degrees before noon, a hiker in the San Bernardino National Forest had keeled over and died. “We talk a lot about biological adaptability, but as humans we’re not supposed to adapt to temps that high,” Basu said. “If your core body temp reaches a hundred and five, that means death can be imminent. As humans, we can only adapt so much. Once the air temperature is above a hundred and twenty, there’s only so much you can do, except rely on air-conditioning and other mitigation strategies. And that puts a lot of pressure on the power grid, and that could result in brownouts and blackouts. It’s not really a long-term, chronic solution. It’s just living for the moment and hoping it works.”
And often it doesn’t work. Last summer, Basu published a remarkable paper, a “systematic review” of research on pregnant women. The studies she looked at—which collectively examined more than thirty-two million births—found that higher temperatures in the weeks before delivery were linked to stillbirths and low birth weights. “It’s weeks thirty-five and thirty-six that seem to be the trigger,” she told me recently. “What we think is happening is that a lot of the mechanisms from heat-related illness start with dehydration. If there are symptoms of dehydration, those might be overlooked. If someone doesn’t connect it with heat, they might not get to a cooler environment. You see vomiting—and people might say, ‘That’s O.K. Bound to happen when you’re pregnant.’ But it’s because of the dehydration.” Further along in the pregnancy, she said, “your body releases oxytocin, which triggers contractions. And if it happens prematurely—well, heat raises the level of oxytocin faster. If you’re not able to thermoregulate, get the temp down, it can trigger low birth weight or, earlier on, miscarriage or stillbirth.” Past a certain point, the body diverts blood flow to the subcutaneous layer beneath the skin, where the body’s heat can radiate out into the air. That diverts the blood “away from vital organs,” Basu said. “And away from the fetus.”
The brain is an organ, too. For all its metaphysical magnificence, it’s a hunk of cells that comes with operating specs. Again, don’t let its temperature get too high: in 2018, Basu published a study showing the effect of seasonal temperatures on mental health. A ten-degree-Fahrenheit jump in temperature during the warm season was associated with an increase in emergency-room visits for “mental-health disorders, self-injury/suicide, and intentional injury/homicide” of 4.8, 5.8, and 7.9 per cent, respectively. Those are big numbers, and the search for mechanisms that explain them is fascinating. Among other things, certain medications impede the body’s ability to thermoregulate: beta-blockers, for instance, decrease the flow of blood to the skin, and antidepressants can increase sweating, Basu told me. “There’s also some evidence to show that heat affects neurotransmitters themselves—that everything is just a little bit slower.”
Both these effects show up more strongly in this country in Black and Hispanic patients—probably, as Basu explained, because those groups disproportionately live in low-income neighborhoods. “They’re often in areas where there are more fossil-fuel emissions, fewer green spaces, and more blacktop and cement, which really absorbs and retains the heat,” she said. “And also living closer to freeways. That exacerbates air pollution. And, with the heat, that’s a synergistic effect. It’s environmental racism that leads to these differences in exposure.” Some people, she added, bristle at hearing that: “Someone said to me, ‘Oh, so now we’re breathing different air?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right. We can track it down to the Zip Code level.’ ” Call it critical race epidemiology.
Which leads us, of course, back to politics. There’s only so much that doctors can do to help us deal with heat; ultimately, it’s up to the Joe Bidens and the Joe Manchins—and the Xi Jinpings—of the world. “We’re seeing these kinds of extreme temperatures in Palm Springs right now,” Basu said. “If we start to see those in more populated areas, imagine the public-health impact.” That’s obviously what’s coming. Last week, researchers at nasa and noaafound that, according to satellite data, “the earth is warming faster than expected” and that the planet’s energy imbalance—the difference between how much of the sun’s energy the planet absorbs and how much radiates back out to space—has doubled since 2005, an increase equivalent to “every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once.” And the National Weather Service is forecasting a heatwave this week for the Pacific Northwest that could smash regional records.
Amid the endless deal-making—the U.S. last backed off what would have been a G-7 plan to end coal use—the human body is a useful bottom line. “I think what we need to do is prevent the warming,” Basu said, when I asked her for a prescription. “So it doesn’t get that hot.”
Passing the Mic
A 1999 graduate in sustainable design from the University of Virginia, Dana Robbins Schneider led sustainability efforts for many years at the commercial-real-estate giant J.L.L. As the director of sustainability at the Empire State Realty Trust, she oversaw an energy-efficiency retrofit of the iconic Manhattan skyscraper on Thirty-fourth Street, which demonstrated how landlords could save both carbon and money, and which helped pave the way for Local Law 97, the city’s effort to force large buildings to improve their energy performance. (Our interview has been edited.)
How did the Empire State Building retrofit come about? What are the bottom-line before-and-after numbers?
The Empire State Building’s ten-year energy-efficiency retrofit started as an exercise to prove—or disprove—that there could be an investment-and-return business case for deep energy retrofits. Once it was proven, it was implemented to save energy and reduce costs for both the tenants and Empire State Realty Trust. We partnered with the Clinton Climate Initiative, Rocky Mountain Institute, Johnson Controls, and J.L.L. to manage the project. Through the rebuild, we were able to cut emissions from the building by fifty-four per cent and counting, which has saved us upward of four million dollars each year, with a 3.1-year payback. We have attempted to inform policy with local, state, and federal governments to share what we’ve learned to reduce emissions—and to meet E.S.R.T.’s target for the building to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
As a result of the retrofit, the building is in the top twenty per cent in energy efficiency among all measured buildings in the United States. E.S.R.T. is the nation’s largest user of a hundred-per-cent green power in real estate and was named Energy Star Partner of the Year in 2021.
What were the key interventions? And do people working in the building even realize that much has changed?
The biggest lesson we learned was that there is no silver bullet—there is silver buckshot. A combination of measures that interact effectively delivers optimal savings. More than fifty per cent of the energy consumed in an office building is consumed by tenants, so the actions of tenants are critical. Landlord-tenant partnerships are the only way to drive deep energy-and-emissions reductions in the built environment.
The best practice for the lowest-cost implementation of energy-efficiency strategies is to make the right steps in the right order. Start with the envelope, or the exterior, of the building. Each project contributes to the success of other projects, so, when we measure effectiveness and R.O.I., it’s important to look at how each project interacts with another.
We were able to decrease energy use through strategic tactics throughout the building, with an emphasis on the reuse of existing resources. We executed eight major projects, which included:
Renovation of the central chiller plant.
On-site refurbishment of all sixty-five hundred and fourteen of the building’s double-glass windows, for which we reused more than ninety-six per cent of existing materials, to quadruple their performance.
Reflective insulation placed behind each radiator, to reduce energy.
Regenerative braking technology added to each elevator, to store energy instead of heat.
Do you hear from other building owners wondering how to do this? What do you think are the keys to getting it done?
From the earliest announcement, we have shared all our work for free with the public, and we have rolled out best practices from the Empire State Building’s deep energy retrofit to our entire portfolio. E.S.R.T. has a target to achieve carbon neutrality as a commercial portfolio by 2035. With Local Law 97 emissions limits effective in 2024, many building owners are unsure of how to make their buildings compliant. Our chairman, president, and C.E.O. serves on the LL97 Advisory Board and on the LL97 Technical Pathways for Commercial Buildings Working Group to develop and improve policy based on practice, and we are the only commercial landlord to serve on the Implementation Advisory Board.
The Empire State Building has long been a modern marvel, and we intend to keep that reputation as we transparently share our research and best practices in our annual sustainability report. As we prove that it works in the “World’s Most Famous Building,” which this year celebrates its ninetieth anniversary, we prove that it can work anywhere.
Climate School
The searing heat in Arizona and Utah has translated into early-season wildfires. The Pack Creek Fire, in the La Sal Mountains, scorched, among many other things, Ken and Jane Sleight’s Pack Creek Ranch, a literary landmark, where for decades many of the region’s writers have gathered. Some of them have put together a chapbook, “La Sal Mountain Elegies,” which includes Terry Tempest Williams’s account of being at the ranch, in 1989, on the day that Edward Abbey died.
There’s another controversy emerging at the Nature Conservancy.—this time about the use of forests. Last summer, a coalition of environmental groups around the country sent T.N.C. a letter asking it to reëvaluate support for promoting forestry as a “natural climate solution” and, in particular, to come out against burning trees to produce electricity—the so-called biomass energy that scientists now understand to be a major climate threat and that sociologists know to be a prime example of environmental racism. T.N.C. executives replied in a letter, saying that “reasonable people can disagree on approaches.” (I should note that I served for a decade as a board member of the Adirondack chapter of the Conservancy, and last winter I participated in a fund-raiser for it.) T.N.C. gets things done, but one of its strengths—access to lots of high-powered financial players who can bankroll their conservation efforts—can sometimes pose a problem, at least of optics. A board member and investor from Enviva sits on the group’s advisory board for its NatureVest “in-house impact investing program,” and Enviva is building plants across the Southeast to produce wood pellets for burning in European power plants. Danna Smith, of the Dogwood Alliance, which led the coalition that sent the letter last summer, told me, “Unfortunately, T.N.C. seems to be centering the financial interests of large landowners, investors, and corporations in ways that are seriously undermining efforts to protect biodiversity, solve the climate crisis, and advance environmental justice.”(In a statement, T.N.C. noted that it “only supports qualified use of biomass for energy generation produced as a by-product of native forest restoration,” and added that all of its decisions, “including on biomass, are informed by science, and are not influenced by the business relationships of any of our independent advisors. TNC is not engaged with Enviva, and we have no partnerships or plans for partnering with them.”)
Here’s a revealing examination of the weaknesses of carbon offsets: some University of California professors studying the system’s efforts to go carbon-neutral scrutinized the offsets that it was spending millions to purchase—and discovered that it was paying landfills in low-regulation states to burn methane as it was emitted by rotting garbage. This has, at best, a modest effect on greenhouse gases, and seems a very long way from the visionary leadership one would expect from one of the world’s greatest public university systems.
Writing in The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer lays out a useful case for the proposition that renewable-energy costs have become so low that they’re now driving rapid change even in politics and economics. What he calls the “green vortex” demonstrates “how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.”
Anyone who’s lived in upstate New York or Vermont knows, and generally loves, Stewart’s Shops. The chain of convenience stores, based in Saratoga County, is the Wawa of the North. But, because it derives much of its income from selling gasoline, Stewart’s Shops is objecting to legislation passed, in April, by the New York State Senate mandating that only zero-emissions cars be sold by 2035. In an excellent letter to the Albany Times Union, a New Lebanon resident named Elizabeth Poreba chides the chain for embracing “nostalgia as a business plan.” (Maybe the executives figure that, if temperatures continue to rise, sales of its renowned ice cream will, too.)
Meanwhile, climate action from the state legislature in Albany seems to have ground to a halt, as the veteran activist Pete Sikora, of New York Communities for Change, points out. “For another year, legislators slinked out of Albany after failing to take climate action,” he writes. His remedy: more activism. Victories such as New York’s ban on fracking and the divestment of its pension fund from fossil fuels were “not won in dingy backrooms,” he writes, adding that it took “handing out leaflets, holding signs as backdrops for press conferences, blocking entrances to government offices to draw attention to the issues, lobbying and calling representatives to carry the day.” (On Tuesday, Sikora predicted that, if early election returns hold and Eric Adams is New York City’s next mayor, the city’s efforts to force buildings to conserve energy may be derailed.)
Scoreboard
A new report from Clean Energy Canada finds that, if the country pushed hard for a renewable-energy switch, the new jobs created by 2030 would far outnumber those lost as fossil fuels decline.
A United Nations report found that drought has affected 1.5 billion people so far this century. According to Mami Mizutori, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, “this number will grow dramatically unless the world gets better at managing this risk and understanding its root causes and taking action to stop them.” Meanwhile, the U.N.’s eighty-five-billion-dollar pension fund has set out to decarbonize its portfolio: a forty-per-cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 2019 levels by 2025 is the target, with divestment from fossil-fuel stocks a key tool.
Warming Up
I have no idea who the Climate Change Jazz Fighters are—although I’m guessing from the song title “No More Petrol” that they may be European—but their album “Fridays for Future” is breezy listening on a hot summer afternoon.
This man spent last year flushing hundreds of toilets. The new fear as the pandemic wanes: Legionnaires’ disease
Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
LAS VEGAS – Michael Hurtado spent the past year of the pandemic flushing toilets. Once a week. Hundreds of toilets. Thousands of times.
“Every week, we go through the entire property and flush every toilet, run every hand sink, turn on every shower. You start at one end of the floor, and by the time you get back, you can turn them off,” he said.
Hurtado is the lead engineer for the Ahern Hotel, right off the Las Vegas strip. It’s officially been closed during the pandemic, and Hurtado had the job of keeping the building systems safe despite the lack of guests.
“It easily takes 60 hours a week every single week for my team,” he said.
Keeping water moving is necessary to protect shut-down buildings against pathogens that can build up in their miles of pipes.
The one that keeps safety experts up at night is Legionella pneumophila, the bacteria that causes 95% of Legionnaires’ disease cases. It kills at least 1,000 Americans a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s almost certain that we’re going to be at risk for more Legionnaires’ disease cases after the shutdown,” said Michele Swanson, a professor of microbiology at the University of Michigan and an expert on Legionella.
The bacteria occurs naturally in ponds and streams and most often becomes a problem when it sits in stagnant, lukewarm, unchlorinated water and multiplies, said Swanson, a member of a National Academies of Sciences committee that wrote a report in 2020 on the management of Legionella in water systems.
Those are exactly the conditions that can occur in the pipes of a closed building. The hot water cools to prime Legionella growing temperatures. Chlorine from the municipal water treatment system doesn’t last long in stagnant pipes, said Chris Nancrede of Nancrede Engineering, an Indianapolis company that specializes in Legionella control systems and services.
“Without new water flowing through the hot water system to push out the old, it can dissipate rapidly,” he said.
Empty rooms and clean pipes
Water management companies said they’re getting double and triple the usual number of calls as buildings get ready to reopen.
“Calls have been through the roof,” said Brian Waymire, CEO of IWC Innovations in Greenwood, Indiana. His staff has treated hotels, corporate buildings, health care facilities, sports arenas and residential buildings in 45 states.
One of those calls was from the Ahern, which is working with IWC to create a water management plan before the hotel’s planned third-quarter opening.
If there’s been one silver lining of COVID-19, it’s that people are thinking of biosafety in ways they hadn’t, said Keith Wright, the Ahern’s general manager.
“People are coming to Las Vegas to have fun, not to get sick. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said.
Wright, Hurtado and the IWC team spent a day last month taking water samples from taps throughout the hotel, recording temperatures from hot water spigots and tracking the water system in the eight-story, 200-room hotel and conference center.
That included crawling around bedroom-sized air conditioning units, inspecting boilers the size of bathrooms and climbing multistory cooling towers.
What they found impressed them. “This place is so clean, you could eat off the floor,” said Bill Pearson, the company’s chief science officer. Even the stainless steel on the pipes coming out of the cooling units gleamed.
Legionella pneumophila (stained red) can survive and replicate within the lungs’ white blood cells (DNA stained blue and cytoskeletal network stained green) and cause Legionnaires’ disease.
Hard to catch but deadly
Legionnaires’ disease is rare but deadly, and a single case can scar the reputation of a building for years.
The main avenue for infection is breathing in Legionella-contaminated water mist. Symptoms include cough, shortness of breath, muscle aches, headache and fever.
The CDC estimated less than 5% of people are likely to become ill if exposed. The greatest risk is to older people, smokers and those with compromised immune systems.
Of those who fall ill, 10% will die.
To guard against a flare in cases, the CDC issued guidance last year on how to safely reopen buildings after prolonged shutdowns.
Not even the nation’s premier health agency was safe. In August, several Atlanta office buildings where the CDC leased space had to be closed after Legionella was found in water systems.
In San Francisco, the Public Utilities Commission was so worried by the number of large buildings where water consumption was down 50% to 70%, it sent out guidance to 952 of them on how to safely flush pipes when they opened again.
Though water engineers have to worry about Legionnaires’ disease everywhere, the general public shouldn’t, said Richard Miller, a longtime Legionella researcher at the University of Louisville, who runs a consulting business.
Legionnaires’ disease is not contagious, and people can’t get it from drinking water. It can be contracted only by inhaling the bacteria.
“If you drink water that’s got Legionella in it, there’s no disease because your stomach acid kills it off,” Pearson said.
The biggest danger zone is health care facilities, because they have vulnerable populations. The CDC estimated 25% of Legionnaire’s disease cases acquired in health care settings were fatal.
For the general public, hotel showers are where most cases start.
“Taking a bath is not as big an issue. It’s the shower at the hotel,” Miller said. “Office buildings aren’t nearly the same risk because you don’t stay the night.”
Other sources of infection are decorative fountains, hot tubs and cooling towers that are part of large-scale air conditioning systems. In 2015, a single cooling tower in a New York City building was responsible for an outbreak that sickened 138 people and killed 16, some of whom lived blocks away.
Remediation
Well-maintained water systems with properly followed water management plans generally don’t have problems, experts said.
“Basically, keep the hot water hot, the cold water cold and everything moving,” said Mark LeChevallier, who led research programs for 32 years at American Water, a multistate utility.
When things go wrong, the most common remedy is to inject high levels of chlorine into a building’s water system and let it sit for up to 12 hours.
It’s not a simple fix. A building’s entire water system must be shut down, which requires signs posted at every water source and staff to enforce it.
“Then when it’s done, you have to open every tap, turn on every shower and flush every toilet until the chlorine is back down to less than 4 parts per million. You can’t miss anything,” said Pearson, who has overseen hundreds of such cleanings.
The cost is $10,000 to $25,000 for a typical building, he said, but it can go much higher.
“That’s why buildings need to get water management plans; it’s a lot cheaper than having to remediate,” he said.
Eventually, buildings might be engineered to make Legionella impossible, but that’s a long-term goal, Nancrede said.
“The whole field of Legionella detection and control is very young. We’re in a constant state of learning,” he said.
The newest ideas include filters to catch bacteria, ultraviolet light to disinfect the water stream, pipes resistant to biofilm formation and designing buildings so the bacteria can’t grow.
“We’re starting to talk about engineering Legionella out of systems, so no chemicals are needed,” Nancrede said. “But then you need to talk about how many feet per second the water is moving and what size the pipes are, so you have a certain velocity.”
For now, the best offense is a good defense.
“You don’t want to make people sick, and you don’t want to kill people,” Nancrede said. “It’s not a razzle-dazzle thing, you just need to plan.”
Sea level rise due to climate change eyed as contributing factor in Miami-area building collapse
David Knowles, Senior Editor June 25, 2021
As the search for survivors of the collapse of a 12-story beachfront condominium in Surfside, Fla., continued on Friday, building experts began looking at the possibility that sea level rise caused by climate change may have contributed to the disaster that has left at least 4 people dead and 159 missing.
From a geological standpoint, the base of South Florida’s barrier islands is porous limestone. As the oceans encroach on land due to sea level rise and the worsening of so-called king tides, groundwater is pushed up through the limestone, causing flooding. That brackish water, which regularly inundates underground parking garages in South Florida, can potentially lead to the deterioration of building foundations over time.
“Sea level rise does cause potential corrosion and if that was happening, it’s possible it could not handle the weight of the building,” Zhong-Ren Peng, professor and Director of University of Florida’s International Center for Adaptation Planning and Design, told the Palm Beach Post. “I think this could be a wakeup call for coastal developments.”
While it is too early to say whether climate change is to blame for the collapse of the 40-year-old Champlain Towers South, or if it also threatens thousands of similar structures along Florida’s coastline, sea-levels rose by 3.9 inches between 2000 and 2017 in nearby Key West, according to a 2019 report by the Southeast Regional Climate Change Compact.
Search and rescue operations continue at the Champlain Towers South condo building on June 25, 2021 in Surfside, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Future projections are much more dire.
“Just using the U.S. government projections, we could be at 11 to over 13 feet [of sea level rise] by the end of century,” Harold Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and a leading expert on sea level rise, told Yahoo News. “There’s only 3 percent of Miami-Dade County that’s greater than 12 feet above sea level.”
The Champlain Towers South, which had been built on reclaimed wetlands, was found in to have sunk by roughly two millimeters between 1993 and 1999, the Washington Post reported.
“It appears to be something very localized to one building, so I would think the problem was more likely to be related to the building itself,” Shimon Wdowinski, a professor at Florida International University’s department of earth and environment, told the Post.
Though federal and state investigators will attempt to pinpoint the cause of the collapse, rising seas and flooding from king tides will certainly be examined as a possible contributing factor.
But even if climate change is ruled out as significant contributor to this particular instance of structural failure, there is no avoiding the fact that if seas continue to rise, the habitability of much of South Florida will be put in question.
“People have to understand how serious this is going to be quickly, in the next two or three decades,” Wanless said. “We’re just seeing the beginning of this accelerated ice melt.”
What a wonderful thing it is to purchase an ice-cold bottle of water from a major global brand and see these comforting words of guilt-free consumption right there on the label: “100% recyclable.” Makes the drink go down so much easier, doesn’t it?
Too bad it’s not true.
On the contrary, the product Americans use at a rate of 3,400 every second—100 billion a year—is far more likely to end up in rivers, oceans, roadsides, landfills, and incinerators than inside any sort of recycled product.
On June 16, federal lawsuits were filed by the Sierra Club and a group of California consumers against major bottled water manufacturers Coca-Cola, Niagara, and BlueTriton (a subsidiary of global giant Nestlé). The suits allege that these companies’ labeling and marketing claims about the full recyclability of their beverage bottles are not just a little off, but blatantly false and a violation of consumer and environmental protection laws. They accuse the three global beverage titans of unfair business practices, false advertising, consumer fraud, and violations of state environmental marketing claims laws and Federal Trade Commission regulations.
The plaintiffs argue that these companies must be compelled to admit that their claims of recyclability are false and to end them.
Calling the recycling labels “a misinformation campaign,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said, “These major plastic bottle manufacturers have known for decades that their products aren’t truly recyclable, and the public deserves to know the truth.”
That truth, according to the lawsuits and the studies they cite, is that the US recycling system is currently unable to recycle even a quarter of those supposed 100 percent recyclable bottles and lacks the capacity to recycle more than 12 percent of the bottle caps. Even the portion that does get recycled is never “100 percent recyclable”—about 28 percent is lost to processing or contamination and ends up in landfills.
In a final irony, the polypropylene plastic film labels on which the “100 percent recyclable” claims are printed on the bottles are themselves completely unrecyclable.
FTC Green Guide regulations state that a company can claim that a plastic bottle is recyclable only if recycling facilities for that type of plastic are available to at least 60 percent of the consumers or communities where the product is sold. Under 60 percent, and all recycling claims have to be qualified on the label—such as saying, for example, “This product is recyclable only in the few communities that have appropriate recycling facilities.”
“By that standard, these companies’ ‘100% recyclable’ claims are completely false,” said Sierra Club attorney Marie McCrary of San Francisco law firm Gutride Safier LLP. She said the suits are part of a larger campaign to educate consumers and businesses about recycling myths and the true impact of single-use plastic products on the environment. Accurate information stripped of green-washing claims, she says, can create demand for—and incentives to bring to market—truly recyclable and sustainable products and materials.
“As long as there are companies making 100 percent recyclability claims that are false, consumers can’t make an educated decision in the marketplace, and businesses lack an incentive to create an actually recyclable product,” she said.
A Coca-Cola representative said the company did not comment on active litigation, and spokespeople for BlueTriton and Niagara did not respond.
The brands specifically called out in the suits for allegedly deceptive recycling labels include Dasani, Arrowhead, Poland Springs, Ozarka, and Deer Park (in both lawsuits), and Niagara, Costco Kirkland, Save Mart Sunny Select, and Save Mart Market Essentials (in just the consumer class action lawsuit).
Lauren Cullum, Sierra Club California’s Sacramento-based policy advocate, said the suits are part of a broader effort to pick up lost ground after the ambitious California Circular Economy and Plastic Pollution Reduction Act stalled in the legislature in 2020. That act would have reinvented recycling in the state and created a system of producer responsibility, in which manufacturers of wasteful products such as plastic water bottles would have to bear the dollar cost of environmental damage and cleanup—an extension of the “polluter pays” concept in the state that already exists for the oil and gas industry.
Cullum says the costs to California cities to clean up single-use product litter on beaches, parks, and streets is massive: nearly a half billion dollars statewide, according to 2017 data compiled by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Los Angeles alone pays over $36 million a year, equivalent to $9.50 for every man, woman, and child in the city. Long Beach’s per resident cost is $28, and the city of Commerce, with a population of 12,000, pays $890,000 a year for litter cleanup, a whopping $69 for each citizen.
“Government and ratepayers are being swamped,” Cullum said.
Many of the goals of the circular economy and plastic pollution legislation have been resurrected as a citizen voter initiative, which will be on the November 2022 election ballot. Cullum sees the twin lawsuits as a means not only of holding global brands accountable for misinformation about recyclability, but also raising awareness about the need for new laws that rein in plastic pollution and lead to more sustainable products and materials.
“The end goal with all this is to get further and further away from relying on any type of single-use products,” Cullum said. “Any steps in that direction are what we need.”
“People want to make consumer choices that are good for the environment,” says Hoiyin Ip, Sierra Club California zero waste committee co-chair. “If they know the truth, I believe they will change those choices, just as they did with grocery bags. If they are confused or given false information, they end up making choices they might otherwise avoid.”
Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator who now leads the Vermont-based Beyond Plastics project, said the lawsuits pull the curtain back on the “abysmal failure” of plastics recycling and the beverage companies’ attempts to market their way out of taking responsibility for the damage their products cause. She puts the goal of the lawsuits in the bluntest of terms:
Historically, June is the region’s wettest month, with an average of about 1.3 inches of rain per week, according to the National Weather Service in La Crosse.
With one week left in June, Rochester had seen less than an inch of rain all month.
The rain late in the week likely won’t make up for the accumulated deficit of moisture, but it will help, meteorologists said.
The dry spell reaches back to October, when, after the growing season, rain and snow replenishes soil moisture. Since that recharge cycle in October, Rochester has seen 13.77 inches of precipitation, which is 7.32 inches below normal of 21.09 inches through the third week of June, said Jeff Boyne, meteorologist with the NWS in La Crosse.
Boyne writes the drought reports available on the NWS website.
Despite some rain, he said the drought report won’t likely change much. Heavier rain northeast of Rochester into Wabasha County might change the drought status of that small area.
“It was still a good rain,” he said. “It keeps us from deteriorating any more.”
For a region that has gotten wetter on average, this dry pattern is uncommon. This is the first widespread drought in the region since 2012-13, Boyne said.
The early June heat wave has also put stress on plants as their demand for moisture goes up.
Heidi Kass, member of the Backyard Bounty Urban Homesteaders, said she has been watering her gardens more than she has in the past.
The easiest measure gardeners can take to protect plants from the drought would be to use mulch to help keep moisture in the soil. Regular mulch, straw, and grass clippings can help. Kass puts newspaper around her tomatoes to prevent soil from blighting the tomato plants’ leaves. (Soil-borne diseases can blight tomato plant leaves when uncovered soil is splashed onto them by rain or watering.)
She tops the newspaper with straw, which has helped her plants retain moisture through the drought. Using mulch is a good technique regardless of how much or little rain we get.
“Drought is a hard thing to plan for,” Kass said. “You can’t exactly plant your garden in the spring for a drought.”
One useful technique is to use weeds as a sort of mulch. When pulling up weeds, leave them between your plants. They will add nutrients and help retain a bit of moisture, while no longer robbing your plants of moisture and nutrients. Kass calls it “chop and drop.” Some plants are better for this technique than others. Using plants that root easily like creeping Charlie can backfire badly and create bigger problems than dry soil.
Another tip is to let your water run through your hose a bit before watering. Hot water in the hose could hurt your plants. Check your rain barrel if the water is low and it sits in the sun — the water inside could also be too warm to use.
For people sowing seeds this year for landscaping, lawns, rain gardens or prairies, if those seeds have germinated, keep them moist. However, it might have been dry enough that late-spring seeds might still be dormant.
Germinated seeds that weren’t watered might not have made it. Try planting again in the fall to germinate seeds but not let tender seedlings grow to die off in the winter. The timing — and watering — can be tricky to get right.
For now, keep what you have watered and watch the forecast. Boyne said forecast models show dry weather will persist through early July.
John Molseed is a tree-hugging Minnesota transplant making his way through his state parks passport. This column is a space for stories of people doing their part (and more) to keep Minnesota green. Send questions, comments and suggestions to life@postbulletin.com.
The rodents gnawed away at circuitry and ceiling panels in Wellington Correctional Center, and have prompted a ten-day evacuation of 200 staff and 420 inmates to other prisons, Peter Severin, the Corrective Services commissioner, told ABC News.
“The health, safety, and wellbeing of staff and inmates is our number one priority, so it’s important for us to act now to carry out the vital remediation work,” he said.
The prison staff must quickly clear out dead and decaying mice from walls and ceilings or risk a mite infestation afterward, he added.
The state’s prison authority said the center’s operations would be reduced for four months while it is being restored, according to the BBC.
New South Wales, in particular, has suffered from the largest influx of mice in what has been described as a “biblical plague” in eastern Australia.
According to ABC News, millions of mice have poured into farming estates, ravaged grain stocks, invaded schools and homes, and spread disease with excrement and carcasses.
As the Wellington Correctional Center re-stabilizes itself, the prison will look into ways to safeguard its grounds from future mice plagues, said ABC News.
‘Historic Moment’: ‘Ecocide’ Definition Unveiled By International Lawyers
If adopted, the draft law would mean individuals could be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court for causing ‘widespread or long-term damage to the environment’.
By Theodore Whyte
Deforestation in West Kalimantan, Borneo. Credit: David Gilbert / RAN (Creative Commons via Flickr)
A team of international lawyers has unveiled a definition of “ecocide” that, if adopted, would treat environmental destruction on a par with crimes against humanity.
After six months of deliberation, a panel of experts yesterday published the core text of a legal document that would criminalize “ecocide” if taken on by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“This is an historic moment,” said Jojo Mehta, chair of the Stop Ecocide Foundation which commissioned the team of lawyers. “This expert panel came together in direct response to a growing political appetite for real answers to the climate and ecological crisis.”
Balancing Act
In the draft law, the panel of 12 lawyers defined ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”.
If ratified by signatory states, ecocide would become the fifth international crime investigated and prosecuted by the ICC, alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.
During a webinar marking the release of the document, panel co-chair Philippe Sands QC said the proposed definition would “cause us to think about our place in the world differently and it causes us to imagine the possibility that the law could be used to protect the global environment at a time of real challenge”.
“None of our international laws protect the environment as an end in itself and that’s what the crime of ecocide does,” Sands added.
Mehta described the draft law as a “necessary guardrail that could help steer our civilization back into a safe operating space”.
“Without some kind of enforceable legal parameter addressing the root causes of these crises, it’s hard to see how the Paris targets and the UNSDGs [United Nations Sustainable Development Goals] can possibly be reached,” she said.
The panel said that the idea of “unlawful or wanton” acts would allow judges and prosecutors to balance consideration of these elements. This idea of balance could be vital to the law’s success if it is to be agreed to by the states that subscribe to the ICC, according to co-chair Sands, who said it avoids “setting the bar too low and frightening states who we need to adopt the definition, or setting the bar so high that it becomes effectively useless in practice”.
A team of lawyers published its proposed definition of ‘ecocide’ on June 22, 2021. Credit: Stop Ecocide Foundation.
Defining ‘Ecocide’
Mehta acknowledged that ecocide legislation was likely to meet resistance from some richer nations, as it would inevitably force changes in corporate practice, “by making severe and reckless damage to nature illegal, and therefore unlicensable and uninsurable”.
This would close the door on “the old polluting ways”, she said. At the same time, Mehta argued, adopting ecocide legislation may be economically beneficial for stimulating innovation in green industries.
Sands said that oil spills, deforestation, and the authorization of new coal fired power stations could all potentially be considered ecocide under the definition.
However, specific acts such as these were left out of the final document, Mr Sands said, as doing so could run the risk of unintentionally omitting certain practices from the definition.
“This is not about catching every single horror that occurs in relation to the environment, but those horrors that cross a threshold and are of international concern,” he said, adding that it would be up to prosecutors and judges to form a view on whether a particular act is ecocide.
The campaign to criminalise ecocide, a term which was first coined in the 1970s, faces a number of further obstacles, with the entire process expected to take at least four years.
As a next step, any of the ICC’s 123 member states can propose the core text as an amendment to the Rome Statute treaty, before the annual assembly holds a vote on whether it can be considered for future enactment. It will then have to be approved by two thirds of the member states to go ahead, ahead of it being adopted by individual members into national jurisdiction.
Drought intensifies across Minnesota, with 75% of state critically dry
Nick Woltman, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.
Drought conditions have spread to nearly 75 percent of Minnesota, including most of the Twin Cities, according to figures released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Although all of Ramsey County remains characterized as abnormally dry — the lowest level on the NOAA’s five-stage drought scale — the other six metro counties are at least partially a step higher in the moderate drought stage, the NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System reported.
The NIDIS says 74.8 percent of Minnesota is now in moderate or severe drought conditions, an increase over last week’s estimate of 55.7 percent.
The heavy rain that fell across much of the state last weekend — including nearly three-quarters an inch in the Twin Cities — did little to offset the effects of the unusually dry spring we’ve seen this year.
The lack of precipitation has combined with record high temperatures through the first half of June to put most of Minnesota in moderate to very high fire danger, according to the Department of Natural Resources. Most counties north of the Twin Cities have some sort of burning restrictions in place.
The DNR reported last week that more than 1,350 wildland fires have burned about 34,000 acres in the state since March.
Soil moisture is inadequate in about 65 percent of Minnesota, putting stress on the state’s corn and soybean crops, according to NOAA.
Drought conditions have also caused drops in the water levels of the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers. The St. Croix at Stillwater is near its lowest recorded level, which was set in 1988, NOAA said.
NOAA expects temperatures to trend below normal next week and average precipitation levels are expected. The National Weather Service forecasts a 40 percent chance of thunderstorms in the metro Saturday and Sunday.
