From scientific journals to mainstream newspapers, headlines like “People of Color Breathe More Hazardous Air, The Sources Are Everywhere” or “PM2.5 polluters disproportionately and systemically affect people of color in the United States” were almost never seen a decade or so ago. Now they are so common that I suspect many people just pass them by, thinking, “I know that already.” But the bad news keeps getting worse, as Darryl Fears at The Washington Post reported Wednesday. And it cries out for remedies. The Post headline was familiar, but it topped the story of a more intensive and granular measuring method: “Block-by-block data shows pollution’s stark toll on people of color.”
As you can explore here, data from that technique employed by tech company Aclima showed that communities of color in the San Francisco Bay Area are exposed to 55% more smog-contributing nitrogen dioxide than mostly white communities. The entire Bay Area has higher levels of tiny airborne particulates than World Health Organization guidelines recommend. Known as PM2.5 or soot, when inhaled these tiny bits can lead to or worsen respiratory diseases such as asthma.
As noted in the May 19 Earth Matters piece, scientists reported in GeoHealth recently that eliminating emissions of PM2.5 would save more than 50,000 lives a year. The Aclima team, which measured each neighborhood in its study at least 20 times—a technique it calls “hyperlocal”—found that stationary pollution monitors that government agencies depend on to determine pollution loads do not provide the nuance roving monitors can. And what those monitors found is what Black, Asian, Latino, and American Indian communities have said all along: Pollution is worse for them than for white communities. And the stationary monitors aren’t picking up on that as much as the Aclima study has done.
The team also found that poor people of all ethnicities experience a 30% higher exposure to nitrogen dioxide compared to wealthier residents. So we have yet another negative intersection of race and class.
The very fact that people of color are concentrated in high-pollution areas is not some coincidence, some accident. In the 1930s, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) literally colored in red the maps of areas it considered unworthy of loans because of the “infiltration of foreign-born, Negro, or lower grade population.” HOLC also gave letter grades: A for solidly white areas and D for largely non-white areas. This made it harder for Black, Latino, and Asian would-be home buyers to obtain mortgages. While the practice was outlawed a half-century ago, the impacts are very much with us, as the Aclima study illustrates.
Given that so much of the Bay Area’s air pollution comes from vehicle tailpipes, which is true of many other big cities as well, we obviously can’t electrify transportation soon enough. But that will take a generation. The first order of business ought to be for agencies to recognize that we can’t depend on stationary monitors to protect people adequately and change their measuring methodology. The second thing is to discuss what’s to be done to ameliorate the situation beyond the tightening of PM2.5 limits that the Biden administration is pondering.
ECOTWeet
(You can read about the other 2022 Goldman Prize winners here.)
GREEN BRIEFS
The Deloitte Center for Sustainable Progress released its Global Turning Point Report this week during the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. Its key finding? Unless serious action is soon taken, impacts of the climate crisis could cost $178 trillion over the next half century. That would amount to a 7.6% reduction in global gross domestic product 2070 alone. On the other hand, as Kate Yoder writes at the online environmental publication Grist:
For perspective, roughly $500 trillion of wealth exists on Earth today. On the other hand, swift action to zero out global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 could add $43 trillion to the global economy over the same period and, according to the analysis, plant the seeds for a green Industrial Revolution.
The Deloitte report is based on an average global temperature increase over preindustrial times of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit). If the world’s nations fulfill the greenhouse gas reduction pledges they have made as part of the Paris Agreement, scientists calculate the rise would be 2.4 degrees C. But those pledges aren’t being met now, and that puts us on a trajectory to 2.7 degrees C by 2100.
Said Deloitte Global CEO Punit Renjen, “The time for debate is over. We need swift, bold and widespread action now—across all sectors. Will this require a significant investment from the global business community, from governments, from the non-profit sector? Yes. But inaction is a far costlier choice. The data bears that out. What we have before us is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to re-orient the global economy and create more sustainable, resilient, and equitable long-term growth. In my mind the question is not why we should make this investment, it’s how can we not?”
How significant of an investment? A May report from McKinsey estimates that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could be cut 45% by 2030 with $650 billion in private and public investment each year in targeted climate solutions between now and 2026. That’s a lot of moolah, but still less than what the United States spends on the military each year.
For more than a decade, Deb and Fulton Allen have coordinated the Ocean Isle Beach Sea Turtle Protection Organization, a volunteer operation licensed by the North Carolina Wildlife Commission to handle sea turtles, as an agreement under the Endangered Species Act requires. Volunteers found their first nest of the 2022 season last Friday. In addition to protecting the nests and their eggs, volunteers trained by the Wildlife Commission transport cold-stunned, sick, or injured sea turtles to the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center in Surf City.
[Deb] Allen said Ocean Isle Beach has mostly identified loggerhead turtles, but Kemp’s ridleys, greens and leatherbacks nest along the North Carolina coast.
There were 44 nests with a total of 4,950 eggs on Ocean Isle Beach in summer 2021, but 161 were lost to predators or were submerged. Of those, 3,531 hatched and 287 did not make it. One nest last year was entirely submerged and another nest with 121 hatchlings was killed by foxes.
When nests are found that will be submerged at high tide, volunteers carefully dig a new nest above the tide line, delicately remove the eggs from the old nest, and replace them in safer ground. When the tiny hatchlings arrive and instinctually head for the ocean guided by moonlight and starlight, volunteers do what they can to stop them from mistakenly choosing to go for the lights of nearby houses. Some lights are so bright that even baby turtles that have made it to the ocean see them, get confused, and turn around. Turtles can wind up on roads and even in swimming pools, where chlorine will kill them. In the nesting season, volunteers try to get residents to shield their lights from the beach as part of the organization’s “Lights Out Sea Turtles Dig the Dark” initiative. One solution: amber lights. Turtles focus on white lights, but they can’t see amber.
Elective vehicles (EVs) make up a tiny fraction of worldwide total vehicle sales, but purchases have soared in the 2020s, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. Global EV sales doubled in 2021, and the number of EVs on the road has tripled since 2018, the 221-page report states. Camille Bond at Energy Wire notes:
China and Europe accounted for more than 85 percent of global EV sales in 2021, according to the report, with the U.S. market making up another 10 percent of sales. After two years of decline, EV sales in the U.S. more than doubled from 2020 levels, reaching 630,000 vehicle sales in 2021. ...
The growth of battery electric vehicles, relative to plug-in hybrids, “is a positive sign in terms of environmental and oil consumption benefits,” said Leonardo Paoli, an energy analyst at IEA and one of the authors of the report.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
ECOPINION
(Inclusion in Ecopinion and Half a Dozen Other Things to Read does not necessarily mean my agreement but is intended to promote discussion.)
Russia’s war is no excuse for G7 ministers to duck their climate responsibilities by Claire Fyson at Climate Home News. “We are already aware that some member states are working against a statement that would commit them to the kind of action necessary. An initial draft from G7 ministers, leaked to media in Japan at end of April, proposed a commitment to phase out coal by 2030. However the German chancellor’s spokesperson has already distanced his government from this commitment, citing gas supply uncertainty. In its newly released REpowerEU strategy, the EU has said it may see the prolonged use of existing coal capacity. Japan, with its heavy reliance on coal generation since the Fukushima disaster, has also apparently pushed back on the idea. But the science is not flexible. 1.5C scenarios see advanced economies phase out coal power generation by 2030. Gas use in power generation should peak and start to rapidly decline in the 2020s, to be effectively phased out by 2035.”
Roe v. Wade draft bodes ill for air, wetlands and the EPA by Derrick Z. Jackson at Environmental Health News. “Justice Alito’s longstanding consistency in wanting to restrict EPA authority makes it transparent where he wants the court to go. ‘Justice Alito wrote that Roe v. Wade should be struck down because the constitution ‘makes no reference to abortion.’ With all the subtlety of a jackhammer, he asserted, ‘Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None.’ ... Given that the importance of science, let alone law guided by science, is barely mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, and then only in reference to patents and copyrights of inventions, it bodes especially ill for environmental law, climate-related law, and for science itself. Environmental laws could easily be overturned if Justice Alito were to employ a similarly fossilized premise that ‘until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right.’”
A scientist’s inconvenient truths about decarbonizing the economy by Charles Lane at The Washington Post. “Some 3.1 billion people, including nearly all of those living in sub-Saharan Africa — consumed no more energy, per capita, in 2020 than the people of France and Germany did in 1860. Smil estimates that providing them ‘a dignified standard of living’ would require doubling that rate. Consequently, Smil argues, there is little or no chance of meeting the United Nations target of ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 — just 28 years from now. Despite a 50-fold increase in the supply of new renewable energy since 2000, he notes, fossil fuels still provide 85 percent of global primary energy, down from 87 percent. Smil’s sobering assessment would probably still apply even if Congress were to adopt President Biden’s climate agenda or something like it.”
Revealed: How Car and Airline Advertising ‘Misleads’ the Public and Threatens Climate Action by Rachel Sherrington. “Industries make green claims while lobbying against climate targets and promoting high-carbon travel. The analysis found that car companies – Peugeot, Renault, Citroën, Fiat and Jeep – are touting ‘green’ products and initiatives in the majority of their advertising while simultaneously using ads to push highly polluting vehicles such as SUVs.
The car firms promoted battery-powered cars and hybrids in over two thirds of their adverts. This low-carbon image is out of step with the reality of fleet production figures—both current and projected – which reveal a business model wedded to sales of fossil-fuel powered vehicles. Despite green pledges, all the companies analyzed—both cars and airlines—have lobbied against measures to reduce emissions, either directly or through industry groups.”
Ecofascism: Where the Far Left and Far Right Kiss by Amy Westervelt at Hot Take Podcast. “In the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto, not only does he identify as an ecofascist and an environmentalist, he also declares himself against corporate control, then launches into rants about overpopulation that are frankly pretty similar to what I see some climate people say on Twitter (remember that Michael Moore movie anyone?) This thin veil of leftism covering fascist tendencies is nothing new, of course. As we mentioned on the podcast this week, ecofascism is relatively old. Most of the modern ecofascists point to the Nazis as their forefathers, but that’s more of a stylistic choice than a historically accurate one. The Nazi party did have a ’green wing,’ and they embraced the ‘blood and soil’ idea, where preserving the purity of bloodlines was connected to preserving pristine nature. But those ideas trace back hundreds of years in German history, with multiple waves of public intellectuals who combined a love of nature with a hatred of immigrants and race mixing, and used science both to understand nature and to categorize and ‘other’ humans.”
Don’t Call It “Eco-Fascism.” It’s Just Plain Hate by Ruxandra Guidi at Sierra. “There is no ideology and there are no manifestos either. It’s difficult to see how racist terrorists ... exhibit any political or social ideologies. For that matter, their writings shouldn’t be identified as ‘manifestos’ either: They are dangerous rants without a clear motive or intention other than to spread hate (and inspire future terrorist attacks). Both the El Paso and Buffalo terrorists cited the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand in March 2019 and the far-right conspiracy known as replacement theory as inspirations for their attacks. ... In adopting and adapting this racist conspiracy theory for a U.S. context, the El Paso and Buffalo terrorists chose to target Latino and Black populations. So if there is no real concern for the environment, no ideology, no manifesto, then what do we call this trend? It helps to frame it as an opportunistic, racist, desperate attempt to gain followers and appeal to Americans’ fears of a foreign invasion, of ‘the other.’”
ECO-QUOTE
“So to hope to be able to have peace, to be able to have justice and environmental balance, are consequences of our behavior, not just our intentions.” —Godfrey Reggio
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (or listen to)
Pakistan hits 120°F as climate trends drive spring heatwave by Scott Johnson at Ars Technica. “Rapid analysis shows situation would be unlikely without global warming. The study was limited to daily temperature data coverage from 1979 on for this area, stretching back to 1951 within India—less than ideal for picking out trends. But to estimate the effect of climate change, the researchers pulled from their usual large collection of climate models, including simulations with and without human-caused greenhouse gas (and sunlight-reflecting aerosol) emissions. The analysis revolves around the statistics of an event’s rarity. From the historical data, this March–April heat is estimated at a 1 percent annual probability—what is commonly referred to as a ‘100-year event.’ But in the model simulations of a 1.2°C cooler pre-industrial climate, heat this extreme would be about a 3,000-year event. In other words, climate change made this heatwave about 30 times more likely. Environmental justice is a factor in this because people like vendors and farmers are forced by economic necessity to work outdoors.”
The race against radon by Chris Baraniuk at Knowable Magazine. “Scientists are working to map out the risks of the permafrost thaw, which could expose millions of people to the invisible cancer-causing gas. Some 3.3 million people live on permafrost that will have completely melted away by 2050, according to estimates in a 2021 study. Not all of these people live in areas prone to radon but many do: For example, in parts of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia. And the link between radon exposure and lung cancer is well-established, as is the fact that smoking further increases one’s risk, says Stacy Stanifer, oncology clinical nurse specialist at the University of Kentucky’s College of Nursing. She points to studies suggesting that radon could be behind up to 1 in 10 lung cancer deaths, of which there are 1 million in total worldwide every year.”
How to Install Heat Pumps in Millions of European Apartments by Todd Woody at Bloomberg. “Heat pumps are emerging as a key technology for securing Europe’s energy independence from Russian natural gas.The highly efficient electrical devices extract warmth from air, liquids or other sources to heat and cool homes and provide hot water, producing more energy than they consume. The war in Ukraine is accelerating the European Union’s efforts to replace fossil fuel heating with heat pumps to meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions at least 55% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. In March, the European Commission unveiled its REPowerEU initiative that calls for doubling the deployment of heat pumps over the next five years as part of a plan to eliminate dependence on Russian gas. The EU imports 90% of its natural gas, 40% of which comes from Russia. ‘Europe sleep-walked into a situation where we were increasingly reliant on Russian gas over the decades and we just have to break the habit,’ says Richard Lowes, a heat pump expert and senior associate at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a multinational organization that works on energy decarbonization policy.”
Extinction Rebellion inspires Shell safety consultant to jump ship by Joe Lo at Climate Home News. “After seeing Extinction Rebellion protest at Shell headquarters, Caroline Dennett decided to end her 11-year working relationship with the oil major. In an email to over 1,000 Shell employees and directors, Caroline Dennett said she could no longer have Shell as a client because it ‘is not winding down oil and gas, but planning to explore and extract much more.’ In an email to Politico, Dennett wrote, ‘Shell is operating beyond the design limits of our planetary systems ... Shell is not implementing steps to mitigate the known risks. Shell is not putting environmental safety before production.’ Her resignation came the day before Shell’s annual general meeting, where the oil major is resisting calls by a shareholder activist group to align its activities with the targets of the Paris Agreement. If adopted, the resolution would result in ‘unrealistic interim targets,’ company directors argued.”
Montana lentil farmers go against the grain to build thriving organic business by Ken Roseboro at The Organic and Non-GMO Report. “David Oien doesn’t seem like a renegade. He’s a friendly, down-to-earth, third-generation Montana farmer. But David and his fellow farmers at Timeless Seeds are renegades. In Montana, a state dominated by conventional wheat, David and Timeless Seeds went against the grain by growing organic lentils and other specialty crops in a region where they had never been grown before. And they’ve been successful doing it while building healthy soils on thousands of acres in Montana and helping to revive rural communities.”
Climate Migrants Lack a Clear Path to Asylum in the US, by Aydali Campa at Inside Climate News. “People displaced by climate change must show they face violence or persecution in their home countries to enter the U.S. legally. Advocates say it’s time to recognize climate as cause enough. Under current law, people impacted by climate may apply for asylum or refugee status in the U.S. only if they can show that the central reason they are fleeing their home country is that they faced or have reason to fear future persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. ‘The ideal solution is a complementary system of protection in addition to refugee and asylum law enacted through Congress that would guarantee a path to citizenship for people impacted by climate disasters,’ said Julia Neusner, associate attorney of refugee protection at Human Rights First, a non-profit policy center based in New York City and Washington.”
ECOBITS
• Greenhouse gas pollution trapped 49% more heat in 2021 than in 1990, NOAA finds • How Mia Madison, the Executive Director of environmental organization—Memphis Tilth—came into her role as an environmental justice leader • Humans Must Focus on More Than Carbon Dioxide to Meet Paris Agreement Targets, Study Warns • EPA plan to protect salmon fishery deals potentially fatal blow to proposed gold, copper mine in Alaska • Germany to Bring Back Coal Power Plants If Russia Cuts Gas • US/Environmental Advocates Say Public Comment Is Taking a Back Seat in Biden’s Push to Export More LNG • These Animals Are Thriving Under Climate Change • Forgotten history • Seven White House climate staffers to watch