EU Must Speed Green Deal to Shut Out Russian Gas, CEOs Say
John Ainger – May 10, 2022
(Bloomberg) — More than 100 companies from Microsoft Corp. to Unilever Plc want the European Union to intensify its focus on renewable energy as the bloc races to end its dependency on Russian fossil fuels.
“At the core of the current energy security and price crises sits an overdependence on volatile, imported fossil gas, oil and coal,” chief executives and other business leaders said in a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “This is the time to be bold and double down on delivering the Green Deal,” the EU’s push for carbon neutrality by mid-century.
The EU can accelerate its shift by scaling up investments in renewable energy, improving building insulation and encouraging businesses to choose low-carbon technologies, according to the letter seen by Bloomberg. Tax cuts and income-support measures could help spur the change, said the companies, which include Iberdrola SA and retailer H&M.
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February exacerbated an energy-supply crunch already under way in Europe, sending commodity prices soaring to record levels. Now the continent is facing potential fuel disruptions as Russia — the EU’s biggest gas provider — threatens to cut supplies if buyers don’t pay in rubles.
Next week the EU is set to launch its plan to slash the use of Russian gas by two-thirds this year. It’s set to include measures that will speed the permitting process for wind and solar farms, while also creating incentives for consumers to use less energy.
Also See: EU Seeks to Boost Solar Energy to Cut Russian Gas, Draft Shows
Before the war, Russia was responsible for around 40% of the EU’s gas imports, a figure the bloc wants to bring down to zero this decade. While the EU is burning more coal and seeking energy from alternative sources that could temporarily raise emissions, it wants to accelerate the transition in the longer term.
The CEOs called for a strengthening of key pillars of the Green Deal by increasing ambition in areas like the EU’s carbon market, albeit with more support for domestic industry. They’re also seeking to increase the specialized workforce needed for the transition to cleaner energy.
‘Forever chemicals’ may have polluted 20m acres of US cropland, study says
Tom Perkins – May 8, 2022
Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA
About 20m acres of cropland in the United States may be contaminated from PFAS-tainted sewage sludge that has been used as fertilizer, a new report estimates.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds used to make products heat-, water- or stain-resistant. Known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down, they have been linked to cancer, thyroid disruption, liver problems, birth defects, immunosuppression and more.
Dozens of industries use PFAS in thousands of consumer products, and often discharge the chemicals into the nation’s sewer system.
The analysis, conducted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), is an attempt to understand the scope of cropland contamination stemming from sewage sludge, or biosolids. Regulators don’t require sludge to be tested for PFAS or closely track where its spread, and public health advocates warn the practice is poisoning the nation’s food supply.
“We don’t know the full scope of the contamination problem created by PFAS in sludge, and we may never know, because EPA has not made it a priority for states and local governments to track, test and report on,” said Scott Faber, EWG’s legislative policy director.
All sewage sludge is thought to contain the dangerous chemicals, and the compounds have recently been found to be contaminating crops, cattle, water and humans on farms where biosolids were spread.
Sludge is a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process that’s a mix of human excrement and industrial waste, like PFAS, that’s discharged from industry’s pipes. Sludge disposal can be expensive so the waste management industry is increasingly repackaging it as fertilizer because excrement is rich in plant nutrients.
EWG found Ohio keeps the most precise records of any state, and sludge has been applied to 5% of its farmland since 2011. Extrapolating that across the rest of the country would mean about 20m acres are contaminated with at least some level of PFAS. Faber called the estimate “conservative”.
EPA records show over 19bn pounds of sludge has been used as fertilizer since 2016 in the 41 states where the agency tracks the amount of sludge that’s spread, but not the location. It’s estimated that 60% of the nation’s sludge is spread on cropland or other fields annually.
The consequences are evident in the only two states to consistently check sludge and farms for PFAS contamination. In Maine, PFAS-tainted fields have already forced several farms to shut down. The chemicals end up in crops and cattle, and the public health toll exacted by contaminated food in Maine is unknown. Meanwhile, the state is investigating about 700 more fields for PFAS pollution.
“There’s no easy way to shop around this problem,” Faber said. “We shouldn’t be using PFAS-contaminated sludge to grow food and feed for animals.”
The health cost of using sludge outweighs the benefits, advocates say. Many have questioned the sense in spending billions of dollars to pull sludge out of water only to inject the substance into the nation’s food supply, and calls for a ban on the practice are growing louder.
“The EPA could today require treatment plants to test sludge for PFAS and warn farmers that they may be contaminating fields, but it has refused to do so,” Faber said.
The Ocean’s Biggest Garbage Pile Is Full of Floating Life
Annie Roth – May 6, 2022
Scientists aboard a ship supporting Ben Lecomte’s swim through the garbage patch sampled the water along the way, finding high concentrations of neuston, or organisms living at the water’s surface. (Ben Lecomte via The New York Times)
In 2019, French swimmer Benoit Lecomte swam more than 300 nautical miles through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to raise awareness about marine plastic pollution.
As he swam, he was often surprised to find that he was not alone.
“Every time I saw plastic debris floating, there was life all around it,” Lecomte said.
The patch was less a garbage island than a garbage soup of plastic bottles, fishing nets, tires and toothbrushes. And floating at its surface were blue dragon nudibranchs, Portuguese man-o-wars and other small surface-dwelling animals, which are collectively known as neuston.
Scientists aboard the ship supporting Lecomte’s swim systematically sampled the patch’s surface waters. The team found that there were much higher concentrations of neuston within the patch than outside it. In some parts of the patch, there were nearly as many neuston as pieces of plastic.
“I had this hypothesis that gyres concentrate life and plastic in similar ways, but it was still really surprising to see just how much we found out there,” said Rebecca Helm, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and co-author of the study. “The density was really staggering. To see them in that concentration was like, wow.”
The findings were posted last month on bioRxiv and have not yet been subjected to peer review. But if they hold up, Helm and other scientists say, it may complicate efforts by conservationists to remove the immense and ever-growing amount of plastic in the patch.
The world’s oceans contain five gyres, large systems of circular currents powered by global wind patterns and forces created by Earth’s rotation. They act like enormous whirlpools, so anything floating within one will eventually be pulled into its center. For nearly a century, floating plastic waste has been pouring into the gyres, creating an assortment of garbage patches. The largest, the Great Pacific Patch, is halfway between Hawaii and California and contains at least 79,000 tons of plastic, according to the Ocean Cleanup Foundation. All that trash turns out to be a great foothold for living things.
Helm and her colleagues pulled many individual creatures out of the sea with their nets: by-the-wind sailors, free-floating hydrozoans that travel on ocean breezes; blue buttons, quarter-sized cousins of the jellyfish; and violet sea-snails, which build “rafts” to stay afloat by trapping air bubbles in a soaplike mucus they secrete from a gland in their foot. They also found potential evidence that these creatures may be reproducing within the patch.
“I wasn’t surprised,” said Andre Boustany, a researcher with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. “We know this place is an aggregation area for drifting plastics, so why would it not be an aggregation area for these drifting animals as well?”
Little is known about neuston, especially those found far from land in the heart of ocean gyres.
“They are very difficult to study because they occur in the open ocean and you cannot collect them unless you go on marine expeditions, which cost a lot of money,” said Lanna Cheng, a research scientist at the University of California, San Diego.
Because so little is known about the life history and ecology of these creatures, this study, though severely limited in size and scope, offers valuable insights to scientists.
But Helm said there is another implication of the study: Organizations working to remove plastic waste from the patch may also need to consider what the study means for their efforts.
There are several nonprofit organizations working to remove floating plastic from the Great Pacific Patch. The largest, the Ocean Cleanup Foundation in the Netherlands, developed a net specifically to collect and concentrate marine debris as it is pulled across the sea’s surface by winds and currents. Once the net is full, a ship takes its contents to land for proper disposal.
Helm and other scientists warn that such nets threaten sea life, including neuston. Although adjustments to the net’s design have been made to reduce bycatch, Helm believes any large-scale removal of plastic from the patch could pose a threat to its neuston inhabitants.
“When it comes to figuring out what to do about the plastic that’s already in the ocean, I think we need to be really careful,” she said. The results of her study “really emphasize the need to study the open ocean before we try to manipulate it, modify it, clean it up or extract minerals from it.”
Laurent Lebreton, an oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, disagreed with Helm.
“It’s too early to reach any conclusions on how we should react to that study,” he said. “You have to take into account the effects of plastic pollution on other species. We are collecting several tons of plastic every week with our system — plastic that is affecting the environment.”
Plastic in the ocean poses a threat to marine life, killing more than 1 million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals, according to UNESCO. Everything from fish to whales can become entangled, and animals often mistake it for food and end up starving to death with stomachs full of plastic.
Ocean plastics that do not end up asphyxiating an albatross or entangling an elephant seal eventually break down into microplastics, which penetrate every branch of the food web and are nearly impossible to remove from the environment.
One thing everyone agrees on is that we need to stop the flow of plastic into the ocean.
Climate change is why New Mexico’s wildfire season started early this year
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – May 4, 2022
SANTA FE, N.M. — The smoke emerges, like a white veil draped across the sky, on the drive up from Albuquerque to this picturesque city of 84,000.
Historically, New Mexico’s wildfire season begins in May or June, but this year, wildfires sprung up in the drought-parched New Mexican desert in April. By April 23, more than 20 wildfires were burning in 16 of the state’s 33 counties. Last week, two of them merged into one megafire, the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. By Sunday, the New York Times reported, it had burned nearly 104,000 acres — more than 160 square miles — and smoke from it and another wildfire had blanketed most of northern New Mexico.
A satellite image shows a color-infrared view of the Hermits Peak wildfire, east of Santa Fe, N.M., on Sunday. (Maxar Technologies/Handout via Reuters)
About 6,000 people from 32 communities in the area have been ordered to evacuate, and 1,100 firefighters have been working to contain the blaze.
Scientists say that this is not just a freak occurrence but rather the new normal caused by climate change.
“We’re really seeing an increase in these fires outside the normal summer season, the normal warm season, really across the West,” Kaitlyn Weber, a data analyst at the research organization Climate Central, told Yahoo News.
The McBride Fire burns in the heart of the village in Ruidoso, N.M., on April 12. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre/USA Today Network via Reuters)
Warmer temperatures, which cause more evaporation, dry out the landscape and create the conditions for wildfires to break out. In addition, climate change causes more extreme weather, such as unseasonably warm days in winter, and may even be causing stronger winds — another risk factor for fire — due to jet-stream disruption.
“We had the big Marshall Fire in December in Colorado, we had the Big Sur fires here in California in January. [Fires] have just been happening throughout the year,” Weber said.
“Our risk season is incredibly and dangerously early,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said on April 23, by which time 200 structures in her state had already burned.
An aircraft dumps fire retardant near the Hermit Peak Fire and homes in Las Vegas, N.M., on Tuesday. (Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal via ZUMA Press Wire)
In August 2021, Climate Central released a report showing that the number of “fire weather days” — hot, dry, windy days that are ripe for wildfires — has increased dramatically over the last few decades. Analyzing data from 225 weather stations in 17 states across the West since 1973, Climate Central found that these days have become much more common, especially in New Mexico.
“Parts of New Mexico, Texas, and Southern California have experienced some of the largest increases in fire weather days each year,” the report’s summary stated. “Areas of New Mexico are now seeing two more months of fire weather than was the case nearly a half century ago.”
A Las Vegas, N.M., resident prepares horses to evacuate as authorities battle the nearby Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon wildfires on Monday. (Adria Malcolm/Reuters)
“As climate change continues to warm our Earth, it increases temperatures across the landscape,” Weber said. “It causes this drying trend that’s really happening throughout the Southwest. So we’re seeing warm temperatures, drier days and, if the winds pick up, really dangerous conditions.”
The drying out of New Mexico — a February study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the last 20 years were the driest two decades in at least 1,200 years — is largely responsible.
“As it gets warmer, then it increases evaporation, things gets drier, plants get drier, basically setting up fuels for these big fires. So when they happen, they burn longer, more severely,” Weber said.
Smoke rises from the nearby Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon wildfires on Monday. (Adria Malcolm/Reuters)
Along New Mexico State Road 518, part of which runs along the scenic route known as the High Road to Taos, one can see the pale, dead grasses and pine trees, sitting like kindling along the roadside. Some stretches of intersecting roads are blocked, to keep traffic from getting too close to the ongoing blazes.
Living near nature, with the desert in sight, is central to the charm that has drawn tourists and new residents to the state. As a result, Climate Central estimates that more than 1.4 million people in New Mexico, approximately 70% of its population, lives in an area at-risk from wildfires, the so-called “wildland-urban interface.”
Right now, smoke comes and goes in Santa Fe and other nearby towns, depending on the winds. At best, the sky overhead is clear and the smoke to the west creates a startlingly magenta sunset. At worst, the smoke settles in around you, creating a fog-like haze, and it can be smelled and tasted in the air. On those days, the Air Quality Index (AQI) — the Environmental Protection Agency’s measure of air pollution — spikes well into the “unhealthy” range. Taos experienced those conditions on Sunday, and Santa Fe did on Monday.
Smoke is seen at sunset in Sante Fe, N.M., on April 30. (Ben Adler/Yahoo News)
“This morning, I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t see the mountains when I left my house. I couldn’t see any of the vistas or any of the landscapes, so there was no point in going hiking today,” Whitney Joiner, a resident of Taos, N.M., told Yahoo News on Sunday. “Not only could you not breathe, it hurt to breathe and people were wearing masks. And then a friend of mine who I go hiking with, she has asthma and she said she was inside with the air purifier and she was still coughing.”
“The Air Quality Index was 159, and when I looked up ‘Should I go outside at 159?’ it was like, ‘No,’” Joiner added. “I don’t really know anything about AQI, but that’s a new way of looking at my life.”
Climate change has also made it harder to perform routine forest maintenance — in which overgrown areas are deliberately burned with controlled fires — to reduce the risk of wildfires that can spin out of control and threaten communities.
David Lopez hoses down his property as the authorities battle the wildfires nearby on Monday. (Adria Malcolm/Reuters)
“One of these fires was actually a prescribed burn fire that actually burned out of control when the winds picked up,” Weber noted. “As we see more of these fire weather days, we’re going to see a decrease in the number of days where you can do prescribed burns, which is really helpful, but you need the right conditions to do that.”
Other states throughout the West have also experienced megafires in recent years. A 2016 study from Climate Central found that “across the Western U.S., the average annual number of large fires (larger than 1,000 acres) burning each year has more than tripled between the 1970s and the 2010s.” Last summer, wildfires ravaged Washington state, Oregon and British Columbia, Canada.
An American flag blows in the wind along State Road 22 in New Mexico as the Cerro Pelado Fire burns in the Jemez Mountains in the distance in April. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal via ZUMA Press Wire)
In February, a United Nations report declared a “global wildfire crisis” is developing due to climate change, pointing to recent extreme fire outbreaks in countries such as Australia and even in Russian towns north of the Arctic Circle.
“As long as we keep emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we can expect that we are going to keep seeing this warming trend, we are going to keep seeing this drying trend — at least out here in the Southwest and the West, and so we’re going to see more of these fire weather days per year,” Weber said.
As climate-change-fueled drought worsens, California issues water restrictions for millions of residents
David Knowles, Senior Editor – April 28, 2022
Officials in California, now in its third year of drought that scientists have linked to climate change, have issued unprecedented water restrictions for millions of residents.
In the southern part of the state, where the start of 2022 was the driest in recorded history and average temperatures continue to rise at a faster pace than other parts of the country, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) has issued restrictions on roughly 6 million customers. The cutback, which begins on June 1, prohibits residents from watering lawns and plants more than one day per week.
“We are seeing conditions unlike anything we have seen before,” Adel Hagekhalil, the district’s general manager, told the Los Angeles Times. “We need serious demand reductions.”
The MWD sources its water from the State Water Project, which funnels water from rivers in the northern part of the state southward to 27 million residents, and from the Colorado River. Approximately 40 million people in the Southwest rely on the Colorado for water, and with extreme drought worsened by climate change showing no signs of easing, supplies from the river have been stretched thin.
Earlier this month, the federal government declared a water shortage at Lake Mead, one of the Colorado’s biggest reservoirs, that triggered water supply cuts. In March, California’s State Water Project announced that after a promising start to the state’s rainy season, the bone-dry first few months of 2022 meant it would limit its anticipated allocation of water to just 5% of normal.
Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, is shown at 30% capacity on Jan. 11. (George Rose/Getty Images)
“We are experiencing climate change whiplash in real time, with extreme swings between wet and dry conditions,” Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said in a written statement.
Water restrictions are also being issued in the northern part of the state, which typically supplies water to Southern California. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the East Bay Municipal Utility District board voted Wednesday to immediately begin water restrictions for 1.4 million residents, following its declaration of a Stage 2 Drought Emergency. Homeowners in the district, which includes Oakland, Berkeley and many other areas east of San Francisco, will now be prohibited from watering lawns between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. and can report others who are not adhering to the new rules. The overall goal, EBMUD said, is to cut water use by 10% in the district.
Late-season snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada in recent days have boosted what little had remained of the snowpack, giving ski resorts a welcome reprieve, but an annual April 1 survey conducted by the Department of Water Resources found that snow levels were just 38% of the annual average.
Sprinklers spray water onto grass as a jogger runs through a city park in San Diego. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
Numerous scientific studies have established the connection between drought and climate change, with warmer temperatures speeding up evaporation, drying out soils and plant life.
“Drought — a year with a below-average water supply — is a natural part of the climate cycle, but as Earth’s atmosphere continues to warm due to climate change, droughts are becoming more frequent, severe, and pervasive,” NASA says on its website. “The past 20 years have been some of the driest conditions in the American West on record.”
Warmer temperatures and extreme heat waves are also exacerbating drought in places like Somalia, India and Pakistan, threatening crops and posing health risks for residents.
State of the Air 2022, based on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2018 to 2020 also revealed which cities had the best and worst air quality.
The rankings are based on three categories: ozone pollution, year-round particle pollution and short-term exposure particle pollution over 24 hours.
The report, released Thursday, listed climate-change-driven wildfires as one of the biggest contributors for the rise in air particle pollution, a factor reflected in the rankings. Western cities have been plagued by historic wildfires in recent years.
Most of the cities with the cleanest air quality were on the East Coast.
Here are are the best and worst cities for air quality, according to the American Lung Association:
Los Angeles ranked poorly in multiple categories in this year’s State of the Air report.
It isn’t West Coast best coast when it comes to air.
California dominated the worst-air rankings, with three of the state’s cities topping each of the categories for worst air. The Los Angeles-Long Beach area had the worst air by ozone, Bakersfield had the worst year-round particle pollution, and the Fresno-Madera-Hanford area had the worst air by short-term particle pollution.
The top 10 cities in each of the three categories were in Western states; the most eastern city was Houston. Here are the worst air cities:
Worst air by ozone:
Los Angeles-Long Beach, California
Bakersfield, California
Visalia, California
Fresno-Madera-Hanford, California
Phoenix-Mesa, Arizona
San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, California
Denver-Aurora, Colorado
Houston-The Woodlands, Texas
Sacramento-Roseville, California
Salt Lake City-Provo-Orem, Utah
Worst year-round particle pollution:
Bakersfield, California
Fresno-Madera-Hanford, California
Visalia, California
San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, California
Los Angeles-Long Beach, California
Medford-Grants Pass, Oregon
Fairbanks, Alaska
Phoenix-Mesa, Arizona
Chico, California
El Centro, California
Short-term particle pollution:
Fresno-Madera-Hanford, California
Bakersfield, California
Fairbanks, Alaska
San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, California
Redding-Red Bluff, California
Chico, California
Sacramento-Roseville, California
Los Angeles-Long Beach, California
Yakima, Washington and Visalia, California
Best air in the United States
While the Pacific states had the worst air, the East Coast and some Midwest cities are breathing better.
But Cheyenne, Wyoming, is an outlier from the West. The Wyoming capital ranked first in cleanest cities for year-round particle pollution, despite being roughly 95 miles away from Denver, which had the seventh-worst ozone air pollution. Casper, Wyoming, also made the top 10.
Another exclusion from the Pacific is Hawaii. Two areas – Honolulu and the Kahului-Wailuku-Lahaina region – were in the top five.
Best cities in year-round particle pollution:
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Wilmington, North Carolina
Urban Honolulu, Hawaii
Kahului-Wailuku-Lahaina, Hawaii
Bangor, Maine
Casper, Wyoming
Bellingham, Washington
Bismarck, North Dakota, Elmira-Corning, New York, Sioux Falls, South Dakota and St. George, Utah
Numerous cities were tied for first in ozone air (64) and short-term particle pollution (80). Here are some of the biggest cities in each category:
Climate change: ‘We are not backing down,’ White House climate advisor says
Akiko Fujita,Anchor/Reporter – April 22, 2022
White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy defended the Biden administration’s policies to ease record energy prices, even as the president struggles to balance the immediate threat of inflation with long-term challenges posed by climate change.
Speaking to Yahoo Finance Live, McCarthy said the president’s commitment to halve U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels remains “absolute.”
“We’re not backing down,” McCarthy said. “Nor are we giving up on our targets. They are aggressive. But we are on target domestically to do what we need to do.”
McCarthy’s comments come amid growing unease among environmentalists that the White House is backing off of ambitious climate pledges set one year ago in the face of public frustration over rising energy costs.
President Biden addresses a press conference at the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow on November 2, 2021. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP)
The president rejoined the Paris Agreement on his first day in office, and vowed to lead global leaders in putting countries on path to carbon neutrality by 2050.
At the White House’s first Leaders Summit on Climate last year, Biden announced the U.S. would nearly double its commitment to reducing emissions, while aiming to eliminate fossil fuels from the country’s electric grids by 2035.
However, higher energy prices brought on by pandemic-related supply shortages and the Russia-Ukraine War have threatened to derail those policies. Gas prices have climbed nearly 20% between February and March, though they have moderated in recent weeks.
Under pressure to act, the president has publicly accused oil companies of holding back production to keep prices high. In March, Biden announced a record release of 1 million barrels of oil a day by tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. He followed that by issuing an emergency waiver to allow for the year long sale of fuel with higher ethanol content, typically banned during the summer because of higher smog levels.
Last week, the Interior Department announced it would resume selling leases to drill in 145,000 acres of federal land across nine states, reversing his campaign pledge.
White House Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy speaks at a news conference about the American Jobs Plan on April 22, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“The problem is that we have a Putin war that has actually created an emergency, which the president is making sure he takes control of,” McCarthy said. “We believe we can still get [to the climate targets] but we need Congress to help.”
Biden’s key climate and social spending bill, Build Back Better (BBB), remains stalled in Congress amid opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a crucial swing vote. McCarthy said lawmakers are looking to break up the $500 billion in climate initiatives tied up in BBB to ensure passage of policies that are critical to keeping the administration’s policies on track.
Manchin has held informal talks with the administration, and told staff that the legislation must be voted on before the August recess, according to the Washington Post.
“We know that Congress is interested in moving,” McCarthy said. “What we want to make sure we do is have enough conversations with Senator Manchin that we can be assured that we can move this forward in reconciliation.”
McCarthy has faced speculation about her own future within the administration as the climate agenda she helped craft sputters. Earlier this week, she released a statement amid reports she was planning to step down next month. McCarthy, who previously led the National Resources Defense Council, said she had no plans to return to the private sector just yet.
“I’m sticking around because there’s still so much more work to do,” she said. “I wouldn’t be staying around if I didn’t think that work was available to us.”
Akiko Fujita is an anchor and reporter for Yahoo Finance.
Experts predict lasting environmental damage from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Julia Jacobo – April 20, 2022
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, environmental experts and activists are warning of a ripple effect of problems, including long-lasting damage to the war-ravaged country’s urban, agricultural and industrial areas.
Nearly two months into its invasion, Russia has begun its long-feared offensive in eastern Ukraine along the 300-mile front near Donbas, a region with a 200-year history of coal mining and heavy industry.
The past seven weeks have been mired by death, displacement and the demolition of a country’s landscape that will take years to repair, experts told ABC News. In addition to the direct impact on Ukrainians, consequences of the war will be felt socially, economically and environmentally.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raises a host of unique and potentially profound environmental concerns for not only the people of Ukraine, but the wider region, including much of Europe,” Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, told ABC News. “Those human impacts of the war take on a lot of forms and a lot of dimensions, and many of them last long after long after the hostilities have ceased.”
While there were catastrophic environmental consequences during World War I and II, conflicts during recent history provide a more detailed blueprint for the sheer amount of greenhouse gases emitted during modern wars.
PHOTO: A rocket sits in a field near grazing cows on April 10, 2022 in Lukashivka village, Ukraine. (Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images)
As a result of the global War on Terror that began in 2001, 1.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases were released, the equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million passenger cars — more than twice the current number of cars on the road in the U.S., according to a 2019 report released by Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and sulfur dioxide emitted from military vehicles, and other heavy machinery, heavy deforestation occurred in Afghanistan as a result of illegal logging, especially by warlords, which then destroyed wildlife habitat, according to the report.
“We now understand the environmental dimensions of war in ways that we didn’t decades ago,” Muffett said. “This is a particularly egregious situation, because the entire world is calling for Russia to end its its invasion right now.”
Once the conflict is over, the environment in Ukraine is going to be the local government’s “No. 1 priority,” Doug Weir, research and policy director of The Conflict and Environment Observatory, told ABC News.
These are the areas of most environmental concern, according to experts:
Industrial regions
Ukraine is a heavily industrialized country, especially in its eastern regions. It contains a large number of mines and refineries of chemical plants that produce substances such as ammonia and urea, Muffett said.
Assessing the damage from attacks on industrial sites and new nuclear facilities will be among the Ukrainian government’s priorities, Weir said.
In addition, there are “serious concerns” about the forced closure of several coal mines, which are now flooding with acid mine drainage without the proper methods to pump out the water, Weir said. Those toxins are then seeping into the groundwater aquifers
“We’ve already seen hints at how those could play out,” she said, adding that multiple refineries in Ukraine have already been hit. “One of the things that the lessons of the the invasion of Kuwait and the Iraq war is teach us is that strikes against facilities of these kinds pose profound risks for massive releases and really long-term damage.”
PHOTO: Firefighters work to put out a blaze at the Lysychansk Oil Refinery after if was hit by a missile, April 16, 2022, in Lysychansk, Luhansk region, Ukraine. (Marko Djurica/Reuters)
Agricultural fields
Researchers are estimating that millions of people could suffer from malnutrition in the years following the invasion as a result of lack of arable land.
Initial assessments show large swaths of agriculture areas affected by heavy shelling an unexploded ordinances, Weir said.
Olha Boiko, a Ukrainian climate activist and coordinator for the Climate Action Network for Eastern Europe and East Asia, said she and her fellow activists still in Ukraine are worried about the state of the agricultural fields and their suitability to grow wheat after the war, which is one of the country’s largest exports, she said.
PHOTO: Goats eat grass next to unexploded shell of multiple rocket launch system, in the village of Teterivka, in Kyiv region, Ukraine, April 14, 2022. (Vladyslav Musiienko/Reuters)
Wildlife and natural ecosystems
The plethora of military vehicles trampling over the Ukrainian border are creating an unforgiving landscape, experts said.
In an effort to defend their country, Ukrainian military laid landmines over at least one beach near Odesa, according to the Conflict and Environment Observatory.
Boiko also alleged that Russian forces have blown up oil exporting equipment, polluted the Black Sea and filled fields with landmines, which were found as Russian forces retreated the regions surrounding Kyiv.
Fighting close to Kherson, near the southern coast of Ukraine, resulted in fires in the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve that were so large they were detectable from space and likely destroyed trees and unique habitats for birds, according to the observatory.
“There have been risks to wildlife and biodiversity we’ve seen that play out in Ukraine, with active battles in in insignificant wetlands,” Muffett said.
PHOTO: A sign warns beach-goers of potential land mines, in Odessa, Ukraine, April 4, 2022. (Igor Tkachenko/Reuters)
Urban areas
One of Russia’s military strategies has been to besieging cities by firing weapons indiscriminately into them, Weir said.
When Russian troops retreated the areas on the outskirts Kyiv after failing to take the capital, the devastation left in cities such as Bucha, Borodyanka and Irpin was immediately apparent.
Buildings were burned or completely destroyed. Burned-out cars littered the roadways. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble.
The rebuilding phase is going to be a “huge task,” Weir said.
“From an environmental point of view, there’s going to be a huge amount of work needed to properly assess these sites, locate potentially hazardous sites,” Weir said, adding that environmental remediation process for the potentially hazardous sites can be complex and expensive.
PHOTO: An armored vehicle of pro-Russian troops drives along a street during fighting near an iron and steel plant in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, April 12, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
Nuclear facilities
Soon after the conflict began, Russian troops took hold of the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl power plant, raising concerns that an errant explosive could create another radioactive event at the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986.
The destroyed reactor was sealed in 2019 under a $2 billion stadium-sized metal structure, but the other three untouched reactors remain fully exposed. Within them sits a pool of 5 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel, as well as dangerous isotopes, such as uranium and plutonium. If hit, the storage facility has the potential to cause an even larger disaster than in 1986 and could prompt widespread evacuations all over Europe, Muffett said.
“The conduct of active military operations in a country with four nuclear facilities and 15 active nuclear reactors poses extraordinary risks,” Muffett said, admonishing Russia for immediately targeting Chernobyl despite “no legitimate military objectives associated with that site.”
Russian troops have cut off power to Chernobyl in ways the site was not “sustained for,” and untrained Russian servicemen disturbed radioactive soil and raised dust as they moved through the area, Muffett said.
“We’ve seen missile strikes actually put a nuclear facility on fire,” she said. “And, in the immediate hours after the fire began, firefighters were unable to reach the blaze, because they were in a live fire situation. These are these are really extraordinary risks.”
PHOTO: A member of a bomb disposal squad works in a mine field near Brovary, northeast of Kyiv, Ukraine, April 14, 2022. (Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images)
The role Russian oil plays in the conflict
The conflict in Ukraine is the latest demonstration of the “deep linkages between fossil fuels and conflict,” Muffett said. Boiko, who left Kyiv on Feb. 24, said the connection that fossil fuels play in the current war are “obvious,” because Russia is using the funds from its oil industry to fund the conflict.
“We’ve seen Putin’s regime look to weaponize its own natural gas and oil resources as a way to intimidate countries in Europe and beyond from coming to Ukraine to aid,” Muffett said. “And so, this is a fossil fueled conflict in every conceivable way.”
The environmental activists who remain in Ukraine, those who aren’t helping with the immediate humanitarian relief, are bringing attention to the fact that the E.U. and U.S. have been “very dependent” on Russia’s fossil fuels for years, Boiko said.
While the U.S. has imposed sanctions on all Russian oil and other energy sources, the European Union’s embargo only extends to coal, and not to oil and gas. About 40% of the EU’s gas comes from Russia, according to the observatory.
“This is exactly the leverage that has been used by Russia that is pressuring, basically, other countries to not impose sanctions to not do anything about this war to not help Ukraine,” Boiko said.
But Boiko said the conflict and the aftermath could eventually lead to positive steps in the fight against climate change, because the sanctions imposed on Russia lead to less less fossil fuel consumption. She said the phasing out of fossil fuels could happen more quickly, now that a major world player in oil exports has essentially been eliminated.
“The fact that this conflict is accelerating conversations within Europe about how they free themselves from reliance on fossil oil and fossil gas is also a big step forward,” Muffett said.
Pandemic, war, and inflation has spurred some people to a life of ‘homesteading’ and ‘prepping.’ Here’s how these practitioners live off the land and plan for disaster.
Gabrielle Bienasz – April 16, 2022
The Green Gardens Homestead in Washington.
Homesteading is living off the land, but social media influencers have added a modern spin.
After the pandemic, war, and inflation, it’s grown even more attractive.
Prepping, another survivalist-style niche, has overlap with homesteading and has seen an uptick, too.
Looking to stay up to date on the news? Get our daily newsletter delivered to your inbox.Email addressBy clicking ‘Sign up’, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider as well as other partner offers and accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Five years ago, Nivek Anderson-Brown and her husband moved to Virginia, where they now raise chickens, grow crops, sell at farmer’s markets, and broadcasts content on TikTok as the Leaf and Bean Farm — all part of the life of a 21st century, live-off-the-land homesteader.
“People were like, ‘Are you crazy?’ when we first did it. And then, when the pandemic happened, they were like, ‘Tell us what you did!'” Brown said.
Greens of Brown’s homestead.
In a time of chaotic supply chains, rising food prices, inflation, and war anxiety, being able to provide for yourself has a new glow, whether it’s through “homesteading” or its close cousin, “prepping,” 10 of the communities’ online members told Insider.
The homesteading life
“Any small amount of trying to grow your own food or preserving. That’s homesteading,” says Ciearra Evans, of The Thrifted Planer homestead.
But the lifestyle tends to build upon itself, Brown said. For example, she started out growing and drying herbs, then realized she had enough land to forage.
Once she did, she found a patch of the mint-like plant horehound — which led to her making homemade cough drops.
“It was just like one thing rolling into another,” she said. “It takes on a life of its own.”
Preserving at Brown’s homestead.
The term “homesteading” has been co-opted throughout history, from 1970s hippie communes to formerly enslaved Black Americans seeking land in Kansas to fundamentalist Christians raising children off the grid, said Brian Cannon, professor of history at Brigham Young University and author of a book about post-World War II homesteading.
“I think we have, in the US, dating clear back to Thomas Jefferson, the conviction that rural life is wholesome,” he added.
Chickens at Brown’s homestead.
Homesteading also can be a form of political or social dissent, according to a 2016 dissertation Jordan Travis Radke on modern homesteaders, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It’s a way to “opt out” of systems that feel entrenched, from the government to climate change, she wrote.
Many homesteaders tend to be white, Cannon said, which is no surprise, considering land is a key (but not essential) element of homesteading, and many Black Americans have lost land throughout US history.
It’s something on the minds of Evans and Brown, who try to garden and create content as well as give voices to Black homesteaders online.
“There aren’t a lot of people that look like me that do this,” Brown said.
Homesteader’s cousin
For some, homesteading can eventually or immediately evolve into “prepping,” a term coined for another survivalist-type niche that focuses on preparing for a harder or possibly more dystopian future, the perception of which has come to pass for some.
More preserved food at Brown’s homestead.
In particular, prepping has seen heightened interest as inflation has grown worse and amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine-driven anxiety about food shortages, prepper-influencers told Insider.
Tiffany Holloway, an apartment-style prepper on TikTok, said her following grew by about tens of thousands in March amid increasing inflation.
Holloway herself got into prepping after the 2021 ice storms in Texas. One of her neighbors ran out of baby formula. “I ended up having to nurse her baby for her,” via pumping, Holloway said. “This whole experience taught me that you have to prepare.”
Holloway now teaches prepping on TikTok for people with small spaces and lower budgets, as well as focusing on prepping for potential domestic violence as a DV survivor herself – i.e., having a bag with a burner phone, money, and financial and identifying documents.
However, there can be a darker side to the prepper community, as far as folks who lean too far into extreme anxiety or paranoia.
Holloway said she finds some of the content on TikTok fear-monger-y, though she said that’s not her niche.
“I try to keep it pretty positive on my page,” she said.
Most preppers isolate and stay silent about their stores, something known as the “gray man” trope.
“People will become desperate. Ninety-five percent of people don’t have food at their house,” said Cam Hardy of The Casual Preppers Podcast.
If they know you have food, “they’ll know exactly where to go,” he said
Florida might lose its fourth insurance company in as many months as lawmakers are polled on special
Jake Stofan – April 15, 2022
Florida has lost three property insurance companies in as many months and could be on the verge of losing another after FedNat insurance was downgraded Friday.
The four losses combined would leave as many as 400,000 policyholders without coverage.
Homeowners in Northeast Florida are now beginning to see the double-digit year-over-year rate hike that was once reserved for places like Miami.
Some state lawmakers are arguing that without a special session, things are just going to keep getting worse.
Ronnie Rohn is 78.
He lives on Social Security and works here and there to make ends meet.
So, when he was told he’d be seeing his homeowner’s insurance increase by $600 this year, it hurt.
“Half our Social Security goes toward medicine and stuff and the extra $600 would help,” said Rohn.
Rohn is far from alone in his financial struggles.
Rising rates in Northeast Florida are driving more and more Duval residents to the state’s insurer of last resort.
Citizens Insurance has seen its number of Duval policies double over the last year.
“What started out as being a south Florida issue has started to work its way throughout the state,” said Citizens spokesperson Michael Peltier.
State Senator Jeff Brandes (R-St. Petersburg) told us the state’s private insurance market is on life support.
He has initiated a call for a special session to help stop the bleeding.
“And the Legislature’s either going to get our arms around this or the whole market is going to start shutting down,” said Brandes.
The Secretary of State sent out an official poll of lawmakers Thursday.
Two-thirds of lawmakers from both chambers will have to agree by Monday for a special session to be called.
Brandes said that even with a special session, any reforms will take between 18 and 24 months to affect rates, but he argues waiting is no longer an option.
“Let’s make this the primary focus of everything we’re dealing on. This is quickly becoming the number one issue and the number one challenge facing the State of Florida,” said Brandes.
We’ll have a first look at the number of those who have voted yes sometime Friday evening.
