Anybody who has looked at a 1930s or 1950s copy of Popular Mechanics devoted to showing us what the world would be like 25 or 50 years into the future knows how far off the mark such speculation can be. This is now true more than ever. We’re definitely on the cusp of a great transformation, but how it turns out is as unknowable as what Congress is going to look like come January.
At my age (born the same year as Bill Clinton and George Bush), I am actuarially unlikely to be around for the really big changes that are coming—whatever they may be. If I could fast-forward 25 and 50 years and hang out for a month or so in each era looking around, that would be cool. And maybe 100 years, too. Any further than that—say 500 years to check and see if humans (and other species) survive or invent warp drive out of dark energy—would probably be pointless since languages by then likely would be transformed into none I can understand. And, honestly, I can barely understand the computers we have now.
Time travel, of course, is fantasy. Reality is that the great transformation already underway is political, economic, agricultural, hydrological, social, technological, and environmental. Reality is that we cannot build a truly sustainable (and just and accessible) clean energy system in the absence of a sustainable civilization as a whole. And building that, as President Biden might say, is a BFD, filled with trade-offs and pitfalls.
The drive to electrify has so much to recommend it. Done right, the process can be democratizing and empowering, just as using every peaceful means to block fossil fuel projects like pipelines has been. But doing it right is complicated by the fact that mining raw materials is an inherently damaging process even though it’s much better now than it was back when the tens of thousands of long-abandoned mines we have in the country today were being dug. Mining impacts are nonetheless inevitable despite new technology. But you cannot have the transformation without mining. Electrification requires batteries and, so far at least, all of them require minerals requiring extraction. Without them, no EVs, no home electricity storage.
Because of the lethal mess that so many mining companies have left in their wake, many old mines are now toxic Superfund sites, and that’s just the worst of them. Thus, these days new projects tend to draw vigorous opposition if an operation is planned for ecologically important lands or Indigenous sacred sites. In the past, mining companies rode roughshod over the tribes and local opposition. So hallelujah! for modern activism.
But supplying the energy transformation with raw materials has to be done. Who gets to decide how it’s done? Who gets a veto over any particular project? And what about the rights of nature?
The oceans have been horribly abused in the industrial age. We use it to dump radioactive waste, titanic amounts of plastic, poisonous agricultural run-off, and every time it rains too hard in many supposedly developed-world cities, raw sewage. We’ve also been dumping it more full of CO2, which is a threat to numerous species up and down the food chain, including the ones we’re overfishing.
Deep, deep down in the Pacific, from Mexico to Hawai’i in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), are creatures so alien they make scientists’ drop their jaws. These creatures cling or crawl or swim or let the current drift them along. Miles down In one part this abyssal plain, half of all creatures scientists have seen clung to fist-sized chunks of rock encrusted with cobalt, nickel, manganese. Called polymetallic nodules, they’re just what batteries ordered (for now).
As Benji Jones writes at Vox in his excellent exploration of what’s at risk with sea-bed mining:
Those metals — particularly cobalt — are currently mined from the ground, and have been linked to environmental destruction and human rights abuses. That’s why proponents of deep-sea mining see harvesting nodules as a good thing; they claim it can be less harmful than stripping metals from the Earth.
But by mining the ocean floor, the industry could just be swapping one form of environmental destruction for another.
Scientists still don’t know much about the impacts of deep-sea mining, and what they do know suggests that it could be incredibly destructive, underscoring a core tension in the race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: Some technologies come at the expense of biodiversity and it’s often not clear how to weigh the trade-offs.
What scientists do know is that they’ve barely begun to study these diverse creatures, a big portion of which were previously unknown. What’s also known is that humanoid robots aren’t going to collect these nodules one at a time like turnip pickers. Instead, big harvesters will scrape the sea floor and gobble the nodules like draglines, destroying fragile habitat of marine species. As in the visualization below:
Craig Smith, a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, who has been studying fauna in the CCZ for more than three decades. told Jones:
“The CCZ has the highest biodiversity of any abyssal area that’s been sampled in the ocean. [...] That’s significant because abyssal habitats cover more than half of the solid surface area of the Earth.”
“If we want to apply the precautionary principle, we have to assume that most of the species are not very broadly distributed and are potentially susceptible to extinction from large-scale disturbances,” said Smith, “It’s reasonable to say that if all the mining license areas are mined there would be a pretty high risk of species extinctions for a number of species.”
Climate change damages the environment, too, and the world will need a lot more batteries to fight it. But experts point out that there are other ways to develop clean technologies that don’t involve harvesting the seabed, such as cobalt-free batteries, which some major EV manufacturers have started to embrace.
More than 650 marine science and policy experts from 44 countries have now signed a letter calling for a pause on deep-sea mining until there’s more science to back up the case for it.
Share articleHow much mining is needed to save the planet?
WEEKLY Environmental VIDEO
ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES
• A collection of links to recent peer-reviewed climate science studies has been compiled in narrative form at Bloomberg’s Green magazine.
• Leaders & Laggards: Tracking implementation of the COP26 commitment to end international public finance for fossil fuels by the end of 2022. At COP26 in Glasgow, 34 countries and five institutions pledged to end direct international public finance for unabated fossil fuels by the end of 2022 and prioritize their public finance fully for the clean energy transition. This was the first international political commitment that focused on ending public finance for oil and gas in addition to coal. If countries and institutions follow through on their commitment, this will directly shift $28 billion a year out of fossil fuels and into clean energy, which would help shift even larger sums of public and private money.This briefing, which will be updated regularly in the lead up to and throughout COP27, tracks implementation efforts and assesses whether countries are on track to keep their COP26 promise.
• Progress Continues for US Residential Solar: Reviewing the Latest Numbers. Berkeley Lab’s annual Tracking the Sun report describes trends among grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States. The latest edition of the report focuses on systems installed through year-end 2021, and is based on data from roughly 2.5 million systems. New to the report this year is an expanded coverage of paired PV-plus-storage systems, including details on system design and pricing trends.
One finding is that the efficiency of PV modules keep climbing. Median values for modules in residential systems rose from 13.6% for systems installed in 2002 to 20.1% in 2021—that’s a 48% increase, much of it in the last decade. Non-residential systems showed similar increases. Part of that progress is due to the increasing dominance of more-efficient mono-crystalline technologies (the ones with smooth-looking single-crystal cells). For residential systems, their share rose from 41% in 2016 to 98% in 2021.
A second takeaway is that impressive price drops have continued for the systems included in LBNL’s analysis. For residential systems, they found that median prices per watt fell 63% from 2007 to 2021. And for small and large non-residential systems, the price drops were even more pronounced: 72% and 77%, respectively.
GREEN TAKES
Except for Senate candidate Herschel Walker, just about everyone loves the idea of planting more trees as a means to sequester some of the carbon dioxide we’re pouring into the atmosphere, and reduce other impacts of the climate crisis by, among other things, cooling urban heat islands and shielding coastlines with mangroves in the face of rising seas. Massive tree-planting campaigns have resulted. But as Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360 writes, “the very unanimity of support for tree planting may reduce the impetus for detailed audits or critical analysis of what is actually achieved at each project. The paucity of follow-up thus far has resulted in a great deal of wasted effort—and money.”
For example, 10 years ago teams of local volunteers in the Philippines planted more than a million mangrove seedlings in the coastal mud of Camarines Sur Province in just an hour. The effort even garnered a Guinness World Records award and praise from the provincial governor. Those mangroves should now be reaching maturity but a 2020 study found that fewer than 2% had survived, the rest having died or been washed away.
Lalisa Duguma of World Agroforestry, an international research agency in Nairobi, Kenya, says “there are few success stories” with such massive plantings. Planting the wrong trees in the wrong places and leaving them untended are part of the problem. But such efforts are typically measured by the rate of planting and not by survival rates. Even when initially present, oversight of the projects is typically short-term, three years or less. Result: “phantom forests.”
Another study, published last year by the nonprofit World Resources Institute (WRI) in Mexico, called into question the benefits from a billion-dollar government-funded environmental recovery program. Sembrando Vida pays farmers to plant trees across the country to help Mexico meet its climate targets under the Paris Agreement. But WRI found the program has no effective audit of outcomes, and that rates of forest loss were currently greater in states implementing the plan than in others. It concluded that the program “could have had a negative impact on forest cover and compliance with the country’s carbon mitigation goals.”
Duguma says that all too often such tree planting is “greenwashing” public relations efforts to show government or corporations are environmentally friendly. Tiina Vahanen, deputy director of forestry at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, noted recently that many projects end up being little more than “promotional events, with no follow-up action.”
Among the more than 40 climate-related bills California Gov. Gavin Newscom signed early in September was state senate bill 1137. It banned the drilling of new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, and some other places where people can be harmed by the operations.
The statute, which covers millions of Californians, tightens rules governing everything from from light polluton to the emission of toxic gases from wells and storage tanks. restrictions on everything from disruptive noise and light to the release of toxic gases from wells and storage tanks. It also mandates companies to provide state regulators with analyses of chemicals in wastewater transported from existing drilling sites and creation of plans to detect and fix leaks of the toxic releases as well as the methane. Over the past 10 years, researchers have discovered methane is leaking from oil and gas facilities all around the country at vastly higher levels than self-reporting operators have claimed.
Getting these requirements turned into law has taken a long time. And even when grassroots activists managed to persuade enough lawmakers in the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature to draft a bill on the issue, not enough support could be mustered in 2020 and 2021. Now, Nielsen Merksamer, a firm that lobbies on behalf of several major oil and gas companies, has filed a referendum to reverse the law on behalf of Jerome Reedy, a board member for the California Independent Petroleum Association, another industry lobby group. Advocates have until December 15 to gather the 623,212 signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot for 2024. If they succeed, implementation will be delayed until the voters have their say.
Kobi Naseck, coalition coordinator for VISIÓN (Voices in Solidarity Against Oil in Neighborhoods) at the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, an environmental justice nonprofit outfit told Liza Gross at Inside Climate News, “Even if laws are passed fair and square in the legislative process, when big industry and big companies don’t like the outcome, they choose to try to play by their own rules.”
The Environmental Protection Agency has sent a sizzling “letter of concern” to Louisiana environmental and health departments stating that the agencies have discriminated against Black residents for decades. Kelsey Brugger at Green Wire writes:
“Based on the data EPA has reviewed thus far, Black residents of the Industrial Corridor Parishes continue to bear disproportionate elevated risks of developing cancer from exposure to current levels of toxic air pollution,” wrote Lilian Dorka, EPA's head of external civil rights. [...]
The first-of-its-kind letter of concern regards the residents of a densely industrial area known as “Cancer Alley” made up of unincorporated towns that were created when slavery ended and groups of free Black people were able to buy strips of land at the edges of plantations — where polluting facilities were then built over the course of the 20th century.
The letter is part of an ongoing EPA external civil rights investigation stemming from complaints filed in January by Earthjustice on behalf St. John the Baptist Parish residents and others.
The groups claimed that the state environmental department had failed to monitor air pollution and the health department had neglected to inform St. John residents about cancer-causing hazards spewing from a nearby chemical plant
If this is just the first of a new approach by the EPA, it’s a welcome one.
ECO-TWEET
Be sure to check out this week’s series from Canary Media: Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots.
ECOPINION
Connecting the Dots Between Climate Devastation and Fossil Fuel Profits. By Sonali Kolhatkar at Independent Media Institute. As Pakistan drowns, as Puerto Rico is cast into darkness, and as Jacksonians remain thirsty, it’s past time for a climate tax on fossil fuel companies. Over and over, the same pattern has emerged on a planet experiencing catastrophic climate change. Setting aside the fact that we are still spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the world burns and floods, the impacts of a warming climate are disproportionately borne by poor communities of color as evidenced in Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Jackson, and elsewhere. The UN head, Guterres is doing what he can in using his position to lay blame precisely on the culprits, saying in his opening remarks to the UN General Assembly in New York recently, “It is high time to put fossil fuel producers, investors, and enablers on notice. Polluters must pay.” Guterres specifically touted the importance of taxing fossil fuel companies to cover the damage they are causing in places like Pakistan. According to the Associated Press, “Oil companies in July reported unprecedented profits of billions of dollars per month. ExxonMobil posted three months profits of $17.85 billion, Chevron of $11.62 billion, and Shell of $11.5 billion.”
The U.S. needs better, more accessible home weatherization programs. Rebecca Mann and Jenny Schuetz at Brookings. Homes and neighborhoods across the U.S. are ill-prepared for the increasing stresses of climate change, including extreme heat, wildfires, wind and flooding from intense storms, sea level rise, and water shortages. Newly built homes must adhere to stricter building codes, but the vast majority of Americans—especially low- and moderate-income households—live in older homes that were not designed for today’s climate. Energy bills are also a substantial burden for low-income households. Additionally, residential energy use accounts for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., which further exacerbates these climate challenges. Developing a strategy to weatherize homes to protect residents’ safety, health, and financial well-being—as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions—must be an essential part of the nation’s overall climate strategy. Two of the Biden administration’s signature legislative successes—the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—include substantial new funding to reduce energy use in existing homes and shift them toward cleaner sources of power. As these programs go into effect, policymakers can benefit from looking at the successes and limitations of existing weatherization policies, especially the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP).
Will the Uinta Basin Railway derail U.S. climate change efforts? By Sammy Herdman at Mongabay. The Uinta Basin is home to a diverse set of creatures from endangered black-footed ferrets to plants that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. But the basin also sits atop pockets of crude oil and natural gas, which are being extracted: to transport these fossil fuels to the Gulf Coast, local governments and oil companies are planning to invest up to $4.5 billion to construct a new railway through it. The railway is projected to quadruple the region’s oil extraction from 85,000 up to 350,000 barrels of oil per day—resulting in an increase in air pollution, noise pollution, habitat degradation and a greater risk of water pollution, train derailments and wildfires. By quadrupling fossil fuel extraction in the Uinta Basin, construction of the railway is projected to increase U.S. carbon emissions by 1%. Although the project has been approved, construction hasn’t begun and it’s not too late for U.S. President Biden to keep his climate pledges and stop the new railway.
Florida and the Insurance Industry Weren’t Built to Withstand a Flooded World. By Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. The full extent of the damage caused by Hurricane Ian is still being tallied. The death toll—which now stands at 120—rises by the day. As those living in the storm’s path attempt to rebuild, they may now also have to deal with the downstream effects of a crisis in pristine, far-off boardrooms. According to a new analysis by Stonybrook Capital, Ian may be the single biggest insured loss ever, totaling an estimated $75 billion. The company warns that the effect on the insurance market could be “profound and widespread.” For years, the insurance industry has devised increasingly complex ways to maintain a steady stream of profits. But as climate-fueled disasters keep mounting, that creativity may be reaching its limits. Policymakers too are running up against limits on their longtime strategy of passing the buck for climate recovery and resilience to a sector that was never meant to provide them.
A Little Bit Less. The right moment for remembering conservation. By Bill McKibben at his The Crucial Years substack. The Department of Energy calculates that for every eight hours you turn the thermostat down a degree, you burn one percent less fuel. If you turn it down 7 degrees at night, you can save ten percent. Across a nation or a continent, that’s a lot—since oil is the classic example of marginal pricing, it’s probably enough to keep the cost of gas affordable for those who haven’t yet been able to switch to an EV. And how much of a hardship is it? It means a sweater, an extra blanket. It means a little more cuddling with your significant other. (Dogs count). Were I president (not a good idea), I’d say: “The Saudis are not our friends, and they’ve done us wrong again. But we can show them. If we save a little energy this winter, that’s money out of their pocket and Putin’s—which means it’s a straightforward way to show some solidarity with people in Ukraine. We’ve been sending them weapons and they’ve been using them well; they’re going to have a hard winter and we can send them another gift by conserving some energy. Vladimir Putin wants your house overheated; Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy would be grateful if you showered together.”
Wall Street Lobbyists Admit Big Banks Don’t Plan to Honor Their Climate Pledges. By Sam Knight at Truthout. A trade association that lobbies on behalf of the largest banks in the United States told regulators that their members’ pledges to reduce investments in carbon-emitting industries are “aspirational,” implying that they shouldn’t be taken seriously by authorities. The Bank Policy Institute made the remarks in public comments on guidelines proposed earlier this year by federal bank regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), on climate-related risk management. Specifically, the lobbying group rejected the notion floated by the agencies that regulations should ensure banks’ greenhouse gas commitments to the public “are consistent with their internal strategies and risk appetite statements.”
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet. It had carbs. By Diana Kwon at Knowable magazine. There is no one prehistoric meal plan. A modern hunter-gatherer group known as the Hadza has taught researchers surprising things about the highly variable menu consumed by humans past. What did people eat for dinner tens of thousands of years ago? Many advocates of the so-called Paleo diet will tell you that our ancestors’ plates were heavy on meat and low on carbohydrates — and that, as a result, we have evolved to thrive on this type of nutritional regimen. The diet is named after the Paleolithic era, a period dating from about 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago when early humans were hunting and gathering, rather than farming. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and author of Burn, a book about the science of metabolism, says it’s a myth that everyone of this time subsisted on meat-heavy diets. Studies show that rather than a single diet, prehistoric people’s eating habits were remarkably variable and were influenced by a number of factors, such as climate, location and season.
California tribes will manage, protect state coastal areas. By Sophie Austin at the Associated Press. Five California tribes will reclaim the right to manage coastal land significant to their history under a first-in-the-nation program backed with $3.6 million in state money. The tribes will rely on traditional knowledge to protect more than 200 miles of coastline, as climate change and human activity have impacted the area. Some of the tribes’ work will include monitoring salmon after the removal of a century-old defunct dam in the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz mountains and testing for toxins in shellfish, while also educating future generations on traditional practices. The partnership comes three years after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom apologized for the state’s previous violence and mistreatment against Indigenous peoples, which included a genocide that killed thousands of Native peoples from 1850-1874. Much of that slaughter was spurred with a $5 governor-imposed bounty on every scalp hacked from an Native man, woman, or child. Newsom said in 2019 the state should allow for more co-management of tribes’ ancestral lands.
Scientists Can No Longer Ignore Ancient Flooding Tales. Indigenous stories from the end of the last Ice Age could be more than myth. By Chris Baranuiuk at The Atlantic. The geographer Patrick Nunn and the historian Margaret Cook at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia have proposed in a recent paper that indigenous legends of rising sea levels in Europe millieniums ago weren’t ridiculous as writers from the 17th-19th century had claimed. In their work, the pair describe colorful legends from northern Europe and Australia that depict rising waters, peninsulas becoming islands, and receding coastlines during that period of deglaciation thousands of years ago. Some of these stories, the researchers say, capture historical sea-level rise that actually happened—often several thousand years ago. For scholars of oral history, that makes them geomyths. “The first time I read an Aboriginal story from Australia that seemed to recall the rise of sea levels after the last ice age, I thought, No, I don’t think this is correct,” Nunn says. “But then I read another story that recalled the same thing.” Nunn has since gathered 32 groups of stories from Indigenous communities around the coast of Australia that seem to refer to geological changes along shorelines.
The new hurricane resiliency: being off the grid. By Niada Boodhoo at Axios. More than 4 million Floridians lost power after Hurricane Ian. But not communities like Babcock Ranch, a Southwest Florida development that bills itself as America’s “first solar-powered town.” The development includes an 870-acre solar farm, along with solar “trees” along its streets, all of which survived Ian unscathed — which may be a key to future climate resiliency. “It was remarkable because of the way this town was built, all the utilities are underground. We never lost power. We never lost internet. We have our own water system and so we never lost water, and we don't have a boil order the way most of the Fort Myers area does,” said resident Nancy Chorpenning. New developments like Babcock, which are just a few years old, are built to Florida’s building code — the strongest in the country when it comes to hurricanes.
Climate change and deforestation may drive tree-dwelling primates to the ground, large-scale study shows from Phys Org. A large-scale study of 47 species of monkeys and lemurs has found that climate change and deforestation are driving these tree-dwelling animals to the ground, where they are at higher risk due to lack of preferred food and shelter, and may experience more negative interaction with humans and domestic animals. The study was led by Timothy Eppley, Ph.D., a postdoctoral associate at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and examined more than 150,000 hours of observation data on 15 lemur species and 32 monkey species at 68 sites in the Americas and Madagascar. "It's possible that spending more time on the ground may cushion some primates from the effects of forest degradation and climate change; however, for the less-adaptable species, fast and effective conservation strategies will be necessary to ensure their survival," Eppley said.
The most annoying barrier to getting your home off fossil fuels. So you want a heat pump. But can you find anyone to install it? By Rebecca Leber at Vox. The cost of changing existing infrastructure, especially inside the home, is a difficult thing to surmount. Democrats this summer approved billions of dollars in federal funding as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to bring down that cost, by including incentives for all of the electric appliances and accessories needed, like heat pumps, insulation, wiring, circuit breakers, and induction cooktops. The economics are finally all aligning to propel electrification forward. The biggest hurdle yet is the people problem. The IRA’s investments won’t be successful unless the people who will be closest to carrying out its ambitions — the electricians, plumbers, and other kinds of HVAC specialists — are on board with the clean energy transition, too.
ECO-LINKS
• New Zealand proposes taxing cow burps, angering farmers • With renewables, Native communities chart a path to energy sovereignty • Biden’s methane reduction plan relies on historically weak enforcement • Nuclear fusion: Why Silicon Valley is betting on man-made star power • Deb Haaland: Historic Sand Creek massacre site in Colorado set to expand • U.S. Steel Corporation site to be powered by 312-megawatt Arkansas solar project • Why the Pentagon Is the World’s Biggest Single Greenhouse Gas Emitter • A California city’s water supply is expected to run out in two months • These spectacular deep-sea creatures live in a potential mining hot spot