Why Wind Energy Is Booming in the U.S.

The Motley Fool

Why Wind Energy Is Booming in the U.S.

Falling costs aren’t the driver of wind energy’s resurgence in the U.S. — there are two more important factors driving the installation boom.

Travis Hoium, TMFFlushDraw October 29, 2017

The U.S. wind industry has had a resurgence in the last few years as utilities and companies search for new renewable energy generation. That demand could be filled by solar energy just as easily as wind, but there’s a good reason wind energy is the power plant of choice in the U.S. right now. Capacity factors are up over the past decade, and subsidies favor wind over other renewables.

As companies like Amazon, Alphabet Inc, and renewable energy yieldcos look to expand their generation, we’ll se even more wind power plants built.

Image source: Getty Images.

Where wind energy stands today

The chart below shows just how big wind energy has become in the U.S. Through the end of 2016, 82.1 GW of wind has been installed, and that figure will only grow over the next five years.

Image source: AWEA U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report and Quarterly Market Reports.

Improving technology and subsidies are working together to make wind an attractive energy source for developers today as well.

Technology is getting better fast

What’s interesting about wind power is that turbines aren’t actually getting cheaper on a cost-per-watt basis. The chart below shows the cost of projects since 1982; you can see that the early part of the 21st century saw projects installed for much lower cost than they are today.

Image source: U.S. DOE’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report.

What’s changed is that wind projects have a higher capacity factor, meaning each watt of wind generation installed is generating more electricity per year. Think of it like a new wind turbine spinning more often than it did in the past. From 1998 to 2001, capacity factor was 25.4%, and projects built in 2015 had a capacity factor of 42.6%. Each watt installed generated 67% more electricity.

Image source: U.S. DOE’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report.

On top of the higher capacity factor, wind projects are benefiting from a more advantageous subsidy environment than competing solar projects.

Subsidies play into wind energy’s hands

Wind and solar have both seen their cost of electricity fall over the past decade, but wind has a hidden advantage right now, and it’s because of the subsidy it gets from the federal government. Wind gets a production tax credit, and solar gets an investment tax credit; here’s how that creates an advantage for wind energy.

If a solar system’s cost is $1 per watt, has a 25% capacity factor, a 25-year useful life, and investors required a 7% rate of return, it would have a cost of 3.92 cents per kWh of electricity. A wind project with a cost of $1.80 per watt, a 45% capacity factor and the same life and return profile would have the same electricity cost of 3.92 cents per kWh.

The difference is that the solar subsidy is a 30% investment tax credit, effectively lowering the cost of a project by 30%. The result would be an electricity cost of 2.74 cents per kWh. Wind power is given a 2.4 cent credit for its production, meaning the developer would only need to charge 1.52 cents per kWh to break even.

By virtue of having a production subsidy rather than an investment subsidy, wind has a big advantage over solar in the U.S., even if their underlying unsubsidized costs for electricity are identical.

This subsidy will slowly sunset, starting with projects that began construction in 2017 when an annual 20% reduction in the subsidy begins until it’s gone. But projects that began construction last year can still be built with the full subsidy, which we’ve seen recently at the second-biggest wind farm in the world that won’t be completed until mid-2020.

The companies dominating wind in the U.S.

If wind turbine manufacturers can continue to cut costs and increase capacity factor, the industry will continue to grow. The companies with the most to gain are General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens, who are top three in market share in the U.S.

Image source: U.S. DOE’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report.

With the booming demand for renewable energy and improving technology of wind turbines themselves, I think investors should be bullish on the future of wind energy.

Solar Windows Could Meet Nearly All of America’s Electricity Demand

EcoWatch

By Global Citizen

Transparent panels can be used as windows while they generate electricity. Michigan State University

Solar Windows Could Meet Nearly All of America’s Electricity Demand

By Joe McCarthy October 25, 2017

There’s an estimated 5 to 7 billion square meters of glass surfaces in the U.S. For windows on homes, cars and buildings, these glass surfaces perform a few basic functions—letting light and fresh air in when open, and blocking bugs and keeping the cold out when closed.

Now they could all serve another, altogether revolutionary, purpose—generating electricity.

A new paper in the journal Nature Energy describes how transparent solar panels could be placed over all windows and transparent surfaces in the U.S. to generate energy and decrease reliance on fossil fuels.

If that happens, nearly all the electricity demands of the U.S. could be met in conjunction with rooftop solar panels, and as long as storage capabilities are improved.

“Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications,” said Richard Lunt, leader author of the report at Michigan State University, in a press release. “We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles and mobile electronics.”

Lunt’s team at Michigan State University created a plastic technology called a transparent luminescent solar concentrator. You simply place the plastic over a glass surface—a house or car window or even a cellphone screen—and it begins to convert sunlight into electricity.

The plastic doesn’t obscure visibility because it’s harvesting invisible wavelengths from the sun. This energy is then passed onto strips of photovoltaic solar cells that exist on the outer edges of the sheet.

The technology is currently far less efficient than traditional solar panels—5 percent efficiency versus around 15 percent to 18 percent efficiency—and it isn’t market-ready, but Lunt and his team believe the technology will become just as efficient and ubiquitous as normal panels in the years ahead.

After all, the technology is new and could follow the same rapid arc of efficiency improvement that traditional panels followed.

“Traditional solar applications have been actively researched for over five decades, yet we have only been working on these highly transparent solar cells for about five years,” Lunt said in the press release. “Ultimately, this technology offers a promising route to inexpensive, widespread solar adoption on small and large surfaces that were previously inaccessible.”

In recent years, advances in solar and wind power technology have made renewable energy more competitive as countries around the world strive to uphold the Paris climate agreement.

In the U.S., for instance, the price of solar has dropped by 60 percent in less than a decade and this decrease is expected to continue as China invests enormous amounts of money into research and development of solar technology.

Offshore wind power has recently become a viable investment, and has the potential to provide all of the world’s energy needs, according to a recent study.

According to The Global Wind Energy Council, Denmark gets more than 40 percent of its energy from wind power, and China and the U.S. get around 4 percent to 5 percent, which is closer to the global average. Solar, meanwhile, generates around 1.3 percent of global electricity demands.

Fossil fuels still account for the vast majority of electricity generation—but with advances like transparent solar sheets, that could soon change.

Global Citizen campaigns on the Global Goals, which call for the use of renewable energy. You can take action on this issue here.

Reposted with permission from our media associate Global Citizen.

Northern California may need years to recover from wildfires

Associated Press

Northern California may need years to recover from wildfires

Kathleen Ronayne, Associated Press October 29, 2017

SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) — It will take at least months and likely years to fully recover from devastating wildfires that ripped through Northern California earlier this month, destroying at least 8,900 structures and killing 42 people, Sonoma County officials said Saturday.

“We don’t control these things, and it makes you realize how small you are in the world when something like this happens,” Sheriff Rob Giordano said. “I don’t think we understand the level at which it is going to impact lives, and the community will be different.”

Giordano spoke before hundreds of people gathered at a college in Santa Rosa, one of the hardest-hit cities, for a memorial service to honor the lives lost in the deadliest series of wildfires in California history. The fires sparked Oct. 8, eventually forcing 100,000 people to evacuate.

Before a bell rung 42 times to commemorate the dead, Giordano and other officials praised the ordinary and extraordinary acts of heroism by first responders and community members as the firefight raged on for more than a week. Some firefighters worked days on the front line, refusing to take breaks, while sheriff’s dispatchers continued taking calls even as the fire came close to taking out their building.

“The night of Oct. 8, we were all tested,” Santa Rosa fire Chief Tony Gossner said.

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and five members of Congress spent Saturday attending the memorial, touring the fire ravaged areas and gathering advice from federal, state and local officials on what Congress can do to aid the recovery efforts. In a briefing in Santa Rosa, officials asked them to ease red tape that will make it easier to erect temporary housing and to ensure the Environmental Protection Agency has the resources it needs to clean up any hazardous material before it infiltrates the water supply.

The EPA has assessed 740 properties so far, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency has given out $6 million worth of rental and other assistance to displaced Californians, officials said. Officials estimate the cleanup of debris and other hazardous materials will last into early 2018. The losses are estimated to be at more than $1 billion.

Pelosi and U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, who represents Santa Rosa, said they must make their fellow lawmakers in Washington understand the unprecedented nature of the fires, the deadliest in California history. They drove through a neighborhood near Coffey Park where entire streets are wrecked, with only burned-out cars and charred remains of once-standing houses lining the streets.

“It was just unfathomable the amount of destruction that we saw,” Pelosi said. “My colleagues will have to understand this is different from anything else, many times over.”

But Pelosi said Northern California’s response to the fires can serve as a national model for disaster response if done right. She urged her colleagues in Congress to think beyond the incremental rebuilding needs to consider the big picture of helping the region better prepare for and mitigate damage from future disasters. Obtaining the appropriate amount of relief money will require detailed documentation of homes lost and other destruction, she said.

Santa Rosa alone lost five percent of its housing stock, Pelosi said.

“What would we like to see the result be? Let’s engineer it back from there,” she said of the rebuilding efforts.

Thompson and other members of Congress, meanwhile, were asked to look at ensuring immigrants living in the country illegally are not at risk if they contact the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They were also asked to look into improving the system for alerting people of pending disasters, a more difficult task now that more homes rely on cellphones instead of landlines.

Study By MIT Economist: U.S. Has Regressed To A Third-World Nation For Most Of Its Citizens

The Intellectualist

Study By MIT Economist: U.S. Has Regressed To A Third-World Nation For Most Of Its Citizens

by Yossarian Johnson October 21, 2017

America divided – this concept increasingly graces political discourse in the U.S., pitting left against right, conservative thought against the liberal agenda. But for decades, Americans have been rearranging along another divide, one just as stark if not far more significant – a chasm once bridged

Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, believes the ongoing death of “middle America” has sparked the emergence of two countries within one, the hallmark of developing nations.

In his new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Temin paints a bleak picture where one country has a bounty of resources and power, and the other toils day after day with minimal access to the long-coveted American dream.

In his view, the United States is shifting toward an economic and political makeup more similar to developing nations than the wealthy, economically stable nation it has long been.

Temin applied W. Arthur Lewis’s economic model – designed to understand the workings of developing countries – to the United States in an effort to document how inequality has grown in America.

The parallels are unsettling. As noted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking:

In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check.

Temin describes multiple contributing factors in the nation’s arrival at this place, from exchanging the War on Poverty for the War on Drugs to money in politics and systemic racism. He outlines the ways in which racial prejudice continues to lurk below the surface, allowing politicians to appeal to the age old “desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks”, encouraging white low-wage workers to accept their lesser place in society.

“We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone – including some of the rich people,” he laments.

The antidote, as prescribed by Temin, is likely a tough sell in today’s political climate.

Expanding education, updating infrastructure, forgiving mortgage and student loan debt, and overall working to boost social mobility for all Americans are bound to be seen as too liberal by many policy makers.

Until the course is changed, he warns, the middle class will continue to fade and America will remain unsustainably divided.

A plastics factory in West Virginia has been on fire for 5 days and no one knows the health impacts

ThinkProgress

A plastics factory in West Virginia has been on fire for 5 days and no one knows the health impacts

Governor hopes EPA experts will help West Virginia deal with disaster.

Mark Hand October 26, 2017

A fire burns at the former Ames plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The fire started on October 21, 2017. CREDIT: Creighton Linza/YouTube screenshot

It’s been more than five days since a major industrial fire started at an old warehouse in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and state officials still have not been able to put together a list of the potentially toxic materials that were stored in the 420,000-square-foot facility.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) declared a state of emergency in Wood County, where public schools have been closed all week due to the poor air quality and health concerns from the fire. Local and state officials are struggling to determine the potential long-term impacts from the fire. “We don’t really know all the specifics about as far as the endangerment to our people,” Justice said at a press conference Tuesday.

Air quality tests are not finding significant pollutants in the air coming from the warehouse, known as the Ames plant, officials said. Residents as far as 30 miles away in Wood County, West Virginia, though, have complained about the smell from the fire. Parkersburg, a town of about 31,000 residents located on the Ohio River, is the county seat of Wood County.

The WVU Medicine Camden Clark Medical Center in Parkersburg has treated 50 to 60 patients in its emergency room for fire-related symptoms since Saturday. Patients complained of respiratory issues, headaches, sore throat, eye irritation, coughing, and shortness of breath, according to news reports.

In Texas, after Hurricane Harvey flooded the southeastern part of the state, the owners of a chemical plant allegedly downplayed the health impacts of explosions at the plant. Officials from plant owner Arkema Inc. held press conferences where they repeatedly denied the chemicals were harmful to the public or first responders. As it turned out, more than a dozen first responders fell ill in the middle of the road and were sent to the hospital.

At Tuesday’s press conference, it was noted that some of the firefighters who responded to the warehouse fire in Parkersburg were not wearing gear to protect them from the potentially harmful smoke.

The Parkersburg warehouse, owned by Intercontinental Export-Import Inc., was being used to store recyclable plastics. Intercontinental Export-Import is a subsidiary of SirNaik, a company founded in 1987 for the purpose of purchasing and selling recycled plastics.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued an order on Thursday requiring Intercontinental Export-Import to “immediately provide a detailed inventory of all materials that were burned” at the Parkersburg warehouse. In the order, the DEP said Intercontinental Export-Import operates large warehouses and recycling facilities in and around Parkersburg that “are known to contain several polymer materials in the form of pellets, flake, strand, beads, plop, dust, granules, and resins.”

The Charleston Gazette-Mail reported Wednesday that DEP inspectors visited the warehouse earlier this year and found violations that indicated continued problems at the facility that two local volunteer firefighters had warned nearly a decade before could be at risk of a major fire. The DEP employees inspected the warehouse in February, concluding that the facility’s “general housekeeping” was “unsatisfactory,” according to Gazette-Mail reporter Ken Ward.

Although state and local officials have been unable to identify the products inside the warehouse, a list of products that were potentially inside the plant at the time of the fire were PVC, nylon, titanium dioxide, fibergalass, formaldehyde, teflon, according to the sheriff’s office of Washington County, Ohio, located across the Ohio River from Parkersburg.

The West Virginia governor said he is “enormously” concerned over the potential long-term problems from the fire. He is hoping that experts from the federal Environmental Protection Agency who “may know something that we may miss” will “come and assist us.”

“We have done multiple, multiple, multiple testings of the air and so far, the multiple testings are OK. But there may be some expert that’s out there that knows there’s something that’s not OK,” Justice said.

Earlier this year, Justice joined President Donald Trump at a rally in West Virginia to announce that he was switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Justice has been a strong supporter of Trump since he assumed the presidency.

Under Trump’s proposed 31-percent budget cut for the EPA, the resources to respond to emergencies such as the Parkersburg fire, along with much of the other state-level work performed by the agency, would be eliminated or sharply reduced. EPA staff and scientists at its regional offices across the country regularly respond to emergency calls from city and state officials. Funds to respond to many of those calls, including from West Virginia officials, would no longer be available under Trump’s budget.

Behind West Virginia’s Massive Chemical Spill, A History Of Poverty And Pollution

West Virginia has a long history of industrial and environmental disasters. In early 2014, up to 300,000 residents in the Charleston, West Virginia, area were without access to potable water for several days after a major chemical spill. State environmental officials estimated as much as 7,500 gallons of a chemical used to process coal — crude MCHM — spilled into the Elk River, a tributary of the Kanawha River.

The state is home to the worst industrial accident in U.S. history when 750 workers drilling the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel in the early 1930s died from silicosis. Workers were forced to break through 99.4 percent pure silica in Fayette County, West Virginia, as part of a hydroelectric project. The silica the workers inhaled created extensive and fibrous nodules on the lungs. The workers found it harder to breathe and, ultimately, they suffocated to death.

In Parkersburg, fire officials said they are making progress in fighting the fire but are unable to provide an estimate of when the fire will be out. Once the fire is extinguished, fire marshals will be able to investigate the cause of the blaze and state officials will have a better opportunity to determine what materials were housed in the facility.

More than 100 firefighters from 40 fire stations, including stations in Ohio, have been on the scene since Saturday. Specialized Professional Services Inc., a hazardous materials and environmental emergency company, has been helping with the emergency.

With the fire still burning, officials with the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department issued a statement Thursday recommending that residents “avoid contact with the smoke and remain indoors if possible, with windows and doors closed until the smell is no longer detectable.”

Behind West Virginia’s Massive Chemical Spill, A History Of Poverty And Pollution

ThinkProgress

Behind West Virginia’s Massive Chemical Spill, A History Of Poverty And Pollution

Emily Atkin, Katie Valentine January 22, 2014

The Pond Fork River in Boone County, West Virginia after a 2,500 chemical spill turned it white in September. CREDIT: MARIA GUNNOE

CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA — Maria Gunnoe remembers a time when the rivers in Boone County, West Virginia ran clear.

“In my childhood, I fished these streams, I spent time in these streams,” Gunnoe, who lives in Bob White, a town in Boone County, said. “That’s what we did. Nobody needed a pool; the streams were our playground.”

In September, the stream where she used to fish and play as a child turned white. The culprit was 2,400 gallons of a chemical called DT-50-D, which is used to cover coal and rail cars to cut down on dust. It had leaked into the river from the Eastern Associated Coal prep plant, and to Gunnoe, it was just one more example of how the coal and chemical industries have polluted West Virginia — the second poorest state in the nation — over her lifetime.

This happens all the time. The coal companies are using stuff here that would absolutely eat the skin off of your body.

Industrial pollution, like what turned the Pond Fork River white, is a constant worry for many West Virginians, but Gunnoe said it took a major chemical spill like the one that polluted the water of 300,0000 West Virginians to get the nation to notice.

“This happens all the time. The coal companies are using stuff here that would absolutely eat the skin off of your body,” she said. “This time, it ended up in the water supply, and the world knows about it now. But it happens all the time.”

A Culture Of Poverty And Pollution

In a state where 17.8 percent of the population lives in poverty and 47 percent of children live in low-income families, many West Virginians depend on jobs from the chemical or coal industries — the same industries responsible for polluting the state’s water. Coal mining in West Virginia, a state that in 2011 ranked 49th out of 50 in terms of median household income, supports more than 88,000 jobs, while the chemical industry supports about 12,000. Any attempt to put strict regulation on those industries is therefore met with hostility from those whose families have for generations depended on the jobs to get by, Paula Clendenin, a lifelong West Virginia resident, said shortly after the spill. Without that strict regulation, she said, spills become more likely.

“If you keep people poor, you keep them desperate,” Clendenin said. “It’s a vicious cycle.”

The poorest in West Virginia are those who live in rural counties, which house much of the state’s coal mines and associated jobs. In those counties, like Boone, the poverty rate is 20.4 percent, five points higher than the urban poverty rate. Out of the nine counties affected by last week’s chemical spill, six are considered rural. Four of those rural counties are considered “mostly or entirely” hosts to mountaintop removal activity — a process largely considered to be the most efficient, but also the most destructive method of extracting coal.

“[Poverty] goes hand-in-hand with the fact that it’s the coal industry that’s polluting,” said Laura Merner, who has spent the last five years at the Alliance for Appalachia testing groundwater in West Virginia and surrounding states.

People who have their water running orange year round, you internalize that pollution as something that’s OK because you’ve been in it your entire life.

Merner tests groundwater across southern West Virginia for communities reliant on coal fields. She’s seen faucet water run black year-round, and bathtubs filled orange. She’s measured water with high levels of lead, arsenic and strontium. The media generally focuses on isolated areas of West Virginia when reporting on contamination, she said, but the reality is that one in every five streams she tests have been spoiled.

“People who have their water running orange year round, you internalize that pollution as something that’s OK because you’ve been in it your entire life,” she said.

Lida Shepherd, who runs a youth group for low-income teenagers in Boone county, said many of the kids she works with live “literally right below” mountaintop removal sites. Their communities have significantly higher total poverty rates and child poverty rates every year compared to other counties, according to a recent peer-reviewed study from Michael Hendryx, a professor at West Virginia University. Shepherd’s kids, she said, weren’t surprised to hear of the water ban that was enacted January 9.

“These kids are no strangers to not being able to drink their water,” Shepherd said. “These kids deal with this kind of thing on a pretty regular basis just because they live in very heavily mined areas.”

Because their water is so often contaminated, Shepherd said some of the kids were not taking last week’s ban on potable water very seriously.

“One of my girls, she was saying she was taking a shower in it anyway,” Shepherd said. “And that could be a product of just, ‘Hey, we hear this all the time, and we’re still alive. We haven’t died yet.’”

Christina Rhodes, another one of the girls Shepherd mentors, lives in Seth, in Boone County. Before she moved there, she said, the county used well water. That was until mass injection of coal slurry made the well water there run yellow, orange and black, and water testing revealed concentrations of iron, manganese, lead, aluminum, and arsenic that were sometimes hundreds of times over safe drinking water limits, according to the Sludge Safety Project. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) enacted new regulations on coal slurry injection in 2009, including requiring companies to regularly test water in injection site mines, as well as nearby groundwater, for contamination.

“My family went through the issues with the well water, and found [the chemical spill] situation just as stressful as when we had to stop using the wells,” Rhodes told Climate Progress in an email.

On top of the water pollution from the mountaintop removal sites, Shepherd’s kids — all born into poverty and first-generation college bound — live in the same valley with some of the nation’s largest coal slurry impoundments, which are massive toxic lakes used to dispose of coal waste. West Virginia has more slurry impoundments than any other state, and in 2011, residents of Mingo County settled a seven-year lawsuit with Massey Energy company that alleged that the company had injected 1.4 billion gallons of coal slurry into underground mines, and that the slurry had leached into aquifers, waterways, wells and drinking water.

“We had some faith that if your water was contaminated, that your government would step in and do something,” West Virginian and former miner Brenda McCoy said in 2011. “But they didn’t.”

Treating the Cause

Gunnoe has been a community organizer in West Virginia for 19 years, fighting to get lawmakers to recognize the threat industry poses to citizens’ water and the need for stronger regulations in the state. She said the state of West Virginia has been “held under the thumb” of the coal industry for the last 150 years, and that this month’s chemical spill should be a wake-up call for West Virginia and the world to how dependence on coal is hurting people and the environment.

“The water infrastructure has been polluted, and it’s because of mountaintop removal, underground injection and basically coal production. Period.” she said.

Several of West Virginia’s top politicians have been adamant about denying the recent chemical spill’s link to the coal industry. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in particular asserted last week that the incident was chemical-related, and had nothing to do with coal. “As far as I know, there are no coal mines within miles of this particular incident,” he said. “This was not a coal company.”

The water infrastructure has been polluted, and it’s because of mountaintop removal, underground injection and basically coal production. Period.

To Merner, Tomblin’s statements show a groundwork already in place to prevent real reform to the industries that she has witnessed polluting the state for the last five years. The government needs to protect the coal industry, she said, because every coal mining job brings in more jobs for the transportation and chemical industries.

“There’s not a true separation between coal and chemicals anyway,” she said. “The wall that the media has perpetuated is that there’s some some of separation, but it’s not true.”

Merner and Gunnoe are pushing for more regulation of the coal and chemical industries — something many of the state’s environmental leaders have long said is needed.

“Freedom Industries should be held accountable, but that won’t fix the problem,” Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition in Charleston, wrote in the Charleston Gazette. “That’s because the Elk River spill wasn’t an isolated accident. It was the inevitable consequence of weak regulatory enforcement over many years, made possible by our collective failure to uphold the values we profess.”

Like Gunnoe, Evan Hansen, president of Downstream Strategies in Morgantown, West Virginia, said he hopes the spill will serve as a wake-up call for state and national lawmakers. But he said the first thing that needs to happen for any regulatory changes to be made in West Virginia is for the governor and the DEP to acknowledge the link between clean water and a healthy economy — something he said they have yet to do.

“They have been very clear that their number one priority is protecting jobs and the fossil fuel industry, no matter the environmental consequences,” he said.

Until they decide to acknowledge that link, those who live in the poor areas housing West Virginia’s mountaintop removal communities have little choice but to deal with their white or orange or chemical-laced water. Or, as West Virginia resident James Simon has put it, they could hit the road.

“The environmental protection [agency] won’t help us … the law won’t help us. Nobody on earth wants to help us,” Simon said. “My only solution is to get out of here.”

Koch Network Targets Baldwin With $1.6 Million in Attack Ads

Bloomberg Politics

Koch Network Targets Baldwin With $1.6 Million in Attack Ads

By John McCormick October 26, 2017

Campaign designed to pressure Democrats to support tax plan
New ads follow $4.5 million TV blitz targeting three senators

The billionaire Koch brothers are turning up the heat on vulnerable Senate Democrats in a move to pressure some of them to support the Republican tax-cut plan.

A group backed by billionaires Charles and David Koch is adding $1.6 million to its advertising attacks on Senate Democrats facing challenging 2018 re-election bids. Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce said it plans to start running three week’s worth of television and digital ads against Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin beginning next Monday. She’s one of 10 Senate Democrats facing re-election next year from states won by President Donald Trump.

This latest round of political spending by a Koch-affiliated organization comes as the tax overhaul promised by Trump and GOP congressional leaders has taken center stage in Washington. House Republicans set a goal of releasing a bill on Nov. 1 and getting it passed by the end of the year, provided the House adopts a budget that’s already made its way through the Senate. The budget vote is scheduled for Thursday.

“It seems like the harder we work, the more Washington takes from us,” one of the spots says. “Senators like Tammy Baldwin are the problem.”

A second ad features a Wisconsin construction company president suggesting that if Baldwin “opposes tax reform, it’s proof that she opposes jobs, she opposes higher wages.”

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin said that the ads were “dishonest” and that Baldwin supports tax cuts for working families in the state.

“The dishonest smear attacks continue as out-of-state special interests pour in millions of dollars to take down Tammy Baldwin and replace her with someone willing to sell out Wisconsin families,” said Brad Bainum, Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman for the 2018 Senate race.

The spending follows an Oct. 5 announcement in which another Koch group, Americans for Prosperity, pledged to run $4.5 million in ads over three weeks against Baldwin and two other Democratic senators, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

“Wisconsin deserves a senator who will fight for more jobs, higher wages and greater financial security for all Americans,” Freedom Partners spokesman Bill Riggs said in a statement. “Tammy Baldwin is fighting to protect the rigged system, and Wisconsin is paying the price.”

Baldwin is serving her first term after winning the seat with 51 percent of the vote in 2012, a little more than 1 percentage point less than the statewide share received by then President Barack Obama. Since then, Republican Governor Scott Walker has bolstered his party’s political apparatus in the state. Two Republicans with strong financial backing locally and nationally are among those who have already announced challenges to her next year.

Trump won the state in 2016 by 22,748 votes out of almost 3 million cast.

The Koch network has said it plans to spend between $300 million and $400 million on policy and political campaigns in 2017 and 2018 — up from the roughly $250 million invested in the 2016 campaign season.

Of the three Democratic senators directly targeted so far by Freedom Partners and AFP, Donnelly is the only one who didn’t sign on to a list of conditions issued by 45 Senate Democrats for supporting any tax legislation: that it not add to the federal deficit, that it not increase the burden on the middle class and that it go through the regular order process in Congress. He’s said he needs more details before he can endorse a tax plan.

Human Exposure to Glyphosate Has Skyrocketed 500% Since Introduction of GMO Crops

EcoWatch

Human Exposure to Glyphosate Has Skyrocketed 500% Since Introduction of GMO Crops

Lorraine Chow October 26, 2017

Glyphosate being sprayed in a North Yorkshire field. Chafer Machinery / Flickr

Glyphosate—the most widely applied herbicide worldwide and the controversial main ingredient in Monsanto’s star product Roundup—is not just found on corn and soy fields. This pervasive chemical can be detected in everyday foods such as cookies, crackers, ice cream and even our own urine.

In fact, researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine found that human exposure to glyphosate has increased approximately 500 percent since 1994, when Monsanto introduced its genetically modified (GMO) Roundup Ready crops in the United States.

“Our exposure to these chemicals has increased significantly over the years but most people are unaware that they are consuming them through their diet,” said Paul J. Mills, PhD, UC San Diego School of Medicine professor of Family Medicine and Public Health and director of the Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health.

For the study, published Tuesday in JAMA, the research team analyzed the urine excretion levels of glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) in 100 people from a Southern California community over five clinic visits between 1993 to 1996 and 2014 to 2016. AMPA is one of the primary degradation products of glyphosate.

“The data compares excretion levels of glyphosate and its metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid in the human body over a 23-year time span, starting in 1993, just before the introduction of genetically modified crops into the United States,” Mills explained.

“What we saw was that prior to the introduction of genetically modified foods, very few people had detectable levels of glyphosate. As of 2016, 70 percent of the study cohort had detectable levels.”

Of study participants with detectable levels of these chemicals, the mean level of glyphosate increased from 0.203 micrograms per liter in 1993-1996 to 0.449 micrograms per liter in 2014-2016. For AMPA, the mean level increased from 0.168 micrograms per liter in 1993-1996 to 0.401 micrograms per liter in 2014 to 2016.

The controversy surrounding glyphosate started in 2015 when the World Health Organization’s cancer assessment arm classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” California also listed glyphosate as a carcinogen in July. And just yesterday, the European Parliament, representing 28 countries and more than 500 million people, voted in support of phasing out glyphosate over the next five years and immediately banning its use in households.

Monsanto has adamantly defended the safety of its product and denies it causes cancer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also considers it safe for use. Europe’s food safety authority (EFSA) also concluded that glyphosate does not cause cancer.

The researchers did not study the health outcomes of the participants but Mills and his colleagues are planning several follow-up studies, according to Consumer Reports.

Additionally, Consumer Reports noted that the concentrations that the researchers measured were far below the EPA’s daily exposure limit of 1.75 mg/kg and the European Union’s limit of 0.3 mg/kg.

However, experts are concerned about this increasing glyphosate exposure. As Jennifer Sass, Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Scientist, wrote:

“Unfortunately, it is difficult to know what these levels in our bodies mean for our health risks, since the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to conduct a proper risk assessment for glyphosate that includes the aggregate of all our glyphosate exposures—as required by law—from food, drinking water, and residential uses of the herbicide. Even worse—federal agencies don’t even know how much glyphosate is in our food and drinking water because glyphosate has never been included in the federal pesticide residue testing program. This is completely outrageous given that it is used at approximately 300 billion pounds annually in U.S. agriculture, including on food crops like corn and soybeans. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only recently started to test for residues of glyphosate in common foods, and only after tremendous public pressure.”

Monsanto has also come under heavy scrutiny over reports that EFSA lifted text from the company’s glyphosate renewal application. Documents also suggest Monsanto employees had ghostwritten safety reviews to cover up glyphosate’s health risks. The agri-tech giant is facing more than 250 lawsuits from plaintiffs alleging that they or their loved ones developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma due to exposure to Roundup.

Mills recommended more studies on the human health impact on the increasing exposure to glyphosate from food.

“The public needs to be better informed of the potential risks of the numerous herbicides sprayed onto our food supply so that we can make educated decisions on when we need to reduce or eliminate exposure to potentially harmful compounds,” he said.

India And China Both Struggle With Deadly Pollution — But Only One Fights It

Forbes

India And China Both Struggle With Deadly Pollution — But Only One Fights It

Leeza Mangaldas, Contributor October 25, 2017

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Indian men play cricket amid heavy smog in New Delhi. (Photo credit: DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images)

India tops the world inn pollution-related deaths, accounting for 2.5 million of the total 9 million deaths attributed to pollution worldwide in 2015, according to a recent report by the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health. China was second on the list, with 1.8 million total fatalities due to pollution.

The biggest problem: air pollution

The primary cause is air pollution. In 2015, 1.81 million or 28% of the 6.5 million air-pollution-linked deaths worldwide occurred in India. China saw 1.58 million deaths. The report illustrated that globally, air pollution accounts for twice the number of deaths than those linked to AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and for nearly 15 times as many deaths as war and all forms of violence. The majority of air pollution-linked deaths are due to non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, respiratory tract diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer.

Major contributors to bad air quality include auto emissions due to increasing urban traffic congestion, fossil fuel powered heavy industry, construction, and the burning of agricultural land post harvests.

Indian policemen protect their faces with masks amid heavy smog in New Delhi (Photo credit: MONEY SHARMA/AFP/Getty Images)

Poor children are the most vulnerable

The study found that nearly 92% of pollution-related deaths occur in low and middle-income countries. Children face the highest risks because small exposures to chemicals even during pregnancy and in early childhood can result in lifelong disease, disability, premature death, as well as reduced learning and earning potential.

India and China are among the worst hit

According to the WHO, PM 2.5 levels should not exceed 25 micrograms per cubic meter over a 24-hour period and 10 micrograms per cubic meter on average over a year. But in cities like Delhi and Beijing, there are days when PM 2.5 levels surge to almost 1,000, which is so high that it’s literally off the scales of many pollution monitoring devices.

PM 2.5 refers to fine particulate matter — microscopic particles that are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, minuscule enough to be absorbed right into the lungs and blood. Sustained exposure to high levels of PM 2.5 can cause respiratory diseases like bronchitis, asthma and inflammation of the lungs, and even heart attacks and strokes.

Data: WHO. Graphic by Nick DeSantis, Forbes Staff.

India hasn’t yet seen state efforts of a scale that can revolutionize pollution control (although this Diwali, India’s Supreme Court banned the sale of fireworks in an effort to preserve air quality — despite resistance from Hindu religious groups and citizens alike). China on the other hand, woke up to its pollution problem some years ago. According to analyses of NASA satellite data, the levels of fine particulate matter got worse across India by 13% between 2010 and 2015, while China’s fell by 17%. Delhi’s average annual PM 2.5 concentrations are in the vicinity of 150 μg/m, compared to about 60 μg/m for Beijing. Overall, Delhi’s PM 2.5 tends to about three times the Beijing mean and 15 times the WHO guidelines.

Traffic in India (Photo credit: PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images)

India can learn from China

India should take a lesson out of China’s book. Both are large nations seeking to move their massive populations from poverty to wealth via industrialization. Environmental deterioration has long been the collateral damage of this process, as already experienced by most developed economies, from the United States to Japan.

But, as journalist and author of Choked: Everything You Were Afraid to Know about Pollution Pallavi Aiyar points out, for governments and citizens to begin to care about pollution as much as they do about economic growth usually requires an “inflection point.” In Beijing, she notes that this point was “the 2008 Olympics Games,” when unprecedented international attention “dragged [China’s] dirty air into the headlines, where it has stayed since.”

Pedestrians wear masks to protect themselves from pollution in Beijing on December 19, 2016. Hospital visits spiked, roads were closed and flights cancelled as China choked under a vast cloud of toxic smog. (Photo credit: GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images)

Pollution control initiatives in China over recent years have ranged from setting up city specific targets for air quality progress, and a vast network of air quality monitoring systems, to requiring companies to complete environmental impact assessments and punishing violators with heavy fines. Despite being a major source of energy in China, coal-fired power plants and steel factories have come under the hammer. Restrictions on vehicle ownership and usage have also been implemented, given that auto emissions are a major source of air pollution.

But making environmental protection a priority is often a long and conflicted process.

Pollution control can be profitable

Many developing Asian cities are among the most polluted in the world because of the pervasive but false belief that pollution is an inevitable and profitable part of the development process. In fact, inaction and environmental degradation come with significant costs, while solutions can fuel economic growth.

To illustrate this point, the Lancet report points out that welfare losses due to pollution are estimated at $4.6 trillion per year — 6.2% of global economic output. But in the United States alone investment in pollution control has returned $200 billion each year since 1980 ($6 trillion total). Let’s hope India takes note.

This Year’s Crazy Fires, Freezes, and Floods Cost Farmers At Least $7 Billion

Mother Jones

Time is running out in our fall pledge drive, and we still need to raise about $75,000 to stay on track. Support MoJo‘s journalism before the October 31 deadline.

This Year’s Crazy Fires, Freezes, and Floods Cost Farmers At Least $7 Billion

The climate change predictions are coming true.

Tom Philpott October 20, 2017

A farm in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico, destroyed by September 2017’s Hurricane Maria. Hector Alejandro Santiago/AP Images

So far, the nation’s largest and most productive agriculture regions—the Midwestern Corn Belt—have largely escaped the most cataclysmic events of what has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for climate-related mega-disasters.

That means the price and availability of most foods have been mostly unaffected. But that’s just dumb luck—these regions are by no means immune, as the Central Valley epic, recently-ended drought, and the Midwest’s 2012 drought and 2008 and 2013 floods show.

Meanwhile, several more-minor farming regions have been hit hard this year, racking up billions of dollars in cumulative agriculture losses. Relentless recurrence of such events appears to the shape of things to come. In a 2013 peer-reviewed paper, federal researchers found that the “frequency of billion dollar mega-disasters” like the ones that hit Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and California wine country have shown a “statistically significant increasing trend” of about 5 percent annually over the past several decades.

South Carolina lost 90 percent of its peach crops due to a late freeze, and Georgia lost 90 percent.

Here is my attempt to put a price tag, in terms of agricultural losses, on the biggest climate-related disasters of 2017. The data remain pretty sketchy at this point, as researchers scramble to assess the damage. I’ll update this post as new information emerges.

The Southeast’s Late Freeze

Back in March, the Southeast’s most valuable fruit plants bloomed more than three weeks early, “due to unusually warm temperatures during the preceding weeks,” according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Then came a three-day bout of record-low temperatures. That’s a nightmare scenario for fruit growers because buds are highly vulnerable to freezes. South Carolina lost as much as 90 percent of its peach crop and about 15 percent of strawberries; Georgia surrendered as much as 80 percent of its normal peach haul and up to 80 percent of its blueberries. The NCEI estimates a total hit to the region’s fruit growers of about $1 billion.

The West’s Rangeland Fires…

Starting in June, fires roared through the rangelands of Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, scorching 8.4 million acres, a combined land mass bigger than Maryland. Montana’s iconic cattle ranches took the brunt, with 1 million acres succumbed to flames. The NCEI estimates total fire-related losses to the region of $2 billion, but that figure includes hundreds of destroyed houses. Local and federal sources I spoke to said no ag-related loss estimates have been made yet. But the damage is extensive. The Billings Gazette reported that Montana ranchers had lost nearly 1,400 miles of fencing to the flames.

… And Drought

California’s massive drought officially ended in 2017—just in time for a new one to start a bit to the north and east. “Extreme drought cause[d] extensive impacts to agriculture in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana,” the NCEI reported. “Field crops including wheat were severely damaged and the lack of feed for cattle forced ranchers to sell off livestock.” The drought also “contributed to the increased potential for severe wildfires” (see above.) NCEI reckons total ag-related damages from the drought at $2.5 billion.

Hurricane Harvey

Back in August, Hurricane Harvey roared onto the Texas coast and stayed for days. The storm tapped into the “warm Gulf of Mexico for a seemingly endless supply of water, which it turned into torrents of rain from Corpus Christi to Houston to Beaumont,” as NOAA’s climate.gov site put it. While those densely populated areas took the brunt of the damage, the region’s cotton, rice, and cattle farms were also hammered. State and federal agencies have yet to release ag-related damage figures, but they will likely be high. Gene Hall, communications director of the Texas Farm Bureau, estimates losses to cotton farmers alone at $135 million.

Puerto Rico’s secretary of agriculture estimated that the island had lost 80 percent of its crops to Hurricane Maria.

Hurricane Irma

Just days later, Hurricane Irma lashed Florida, striking the heart of the state’s robust agricultural industry. In a preliminary assessment, released in October, the state’s agriculture department estimated total ag damage at a stunning $2.5 billion, including $760.8 million for citrus, $180.2 million for non-citrus fruits and vegetables, and $624.8 million for greenhouse, nursery, and floriculture crops. Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam added that “We’re likely to see even greater economic losses as we account for loss of future production and the cost to rebuild infrastructure.” Orange juice lovers, take note: The state’s vast orange groves grow mainly for the juice market; and The Washington Post reports that the Irma wiped out up to 70 percent of this year’s harvest, meaning prices will likely rise.

Hurricane Maria

Shortly after Irma subsided, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, a US territory claimed during that colonialist spasm of 1898 known as the Spanish-American War. A former Spanish sugar and coffee colony that has spent more than a century in the shadow of the US ag behemoth, the island never had much of a chance to develop a robust local agriculture economy. Puerto Rico imports more than 80 percent of its food. Back in May, NPR reporter Dan Charles reported on a “new wave of interest in food and farming” there. “People are thronging to new farmers markets,” he added. “Chefs are making a point of finding local sources of food.” Irma obliterated all of that—Puerto Rico residents now struggle to find any food at all. In early October, Puerto Rico’s secretary of agriculture, Carlos Flores Ortega estimated that the island had lost 80 percent of its crops to the storm—an estimated hit of $780 million.

Wine Country fires

As Napa and Sonoma County residents survey the wreckage after California’s deadliest-ever week of wildfires, it’s way too early to tally the damage to the region’s prestigious wineries, vineyards, and orchards. Again, costs are likely to be high. Mother Jones’ Maddie Oatman reports that “In Sonoma County alone, agriculture and livestock, including 30,000 dairy cows and 35,000 sheep and goats, is worth close to $900 million,” while Napa and Sonoma Counties together “produce the majority of the state’s high-end wine grapes and house more than 1,000 wineries.” Here is Fortune’s list of damaged wineries.

So, I have no hard data on the Montana and the wine country fires, and incomplete and/or preliminary data on all the other events. Tally what I do have up, though, and you get about $7 billion in agricultural losses. To put that number in perspective, consider that the severe drought that parched Midwestern corn and soybean country in 2012 exacted damage of at least $30 billion. In a sense, then, we got lucky this year, when it comes to protecting our plates from climate change. That’s a sobering thought, given the storms and droughts that are on the way.

Tom Philpott is the food and ag correspondent for Mother Jones. He can be reached at tphilpott@motherjones.com

Mother Jones is a nonprofit, and stories like this are made possible by readers like you. Donate or subscribe to help fund independent journalism.