Journalists have always faced risks of violence when carrying out their work. For war correspondents, the perils are obvious, with many of those who are killed covering a conflict as a result of being collateral damage. Embedded in regular armies or among rebel cadres, journalists who brave bullets and bombs to get a story don’t always live to tell it. But usually journalists aren’t specifically targeted in war, and when accusations arise that they have been, the outcry is sometimes as loud as the denials.
But sometimes journalists are outright murdered for their work. And getting justice for them is uncommon. In its latest annual report published last October, the Committee to Protect Journalists has tallied 261 journalists who have been so murdered since 2013. Nearly 80% of these killings, more than 200 of them, have gone unsolved, unpunished.
Haiti now ranks as the world’s third-worst impunity offender, behind Syria and Somalia respectively. Somalia, along with Iraq, Mexico, the Philippines, Pakistan, and India, have been on the index every year since its inception. Syria, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Brazil also have been there for years – a sobering reminder of the persistent and pernicious nature of impunity.
The reasons for these countries’ failure to prosecute journalists’ killers range from conflict to corruption, insurgency to inadequate law enforcement, and lack of political interest in punishing those willing to kill independent journalists. These states include democracies and autocracies, nations in turmoil and those with stable governments. Some are emerging from years of war, but a slowdown of hostilities has not ended their persecution of journalists. And as impunity becomes entrenched, it signals an indifference likely to embolden future killers and shrink independent reporting as alarmed journalists either flee their countries, dial back on their reporting, or leave the profession entirely.
As the climate and biodiversity crises become worse, environmental reporters are facing greater risks of violence, including murder. Reporters Without Borders (RSF is the French acronym) has counted several dozen murders of environmental journalists in the past 10 years, with the worst records being in Asia and Latin America. In India 13 out of 28 murdered journalists since 2013 were covering environmental issues entangled with government corruption and organized crime when they were killed.
RSF reports:
The latest journalist to be murdered for covering an environmental story was also in Asia. It was Cresenciano Bunduquin, a Philippine radio journalist known by his listeners as “Cris.” He was gunned down as he left his home on 31 May 2023 after reporting in one of his latest radio shows that the operating permit of an old tanker responsible for a recent oil spill had been forged.
On the other side of the Pacific, in South America, journalists covering the crucial challenges of deforestation in the Amazon are also constantly subjected to threats and harassment that prevent them from working freely. The scale of the problem was highlighted in 2022 by the double murder of Dom Phillips, a British reporter specialising in environmental issues, and Bruno Araújo Pereira, a Brazilian who defended the Amazon’s Indigenous communities.
The International Press Institute published a report in February based on interviews with nearly 40 environmental and climate journalists in 21 countries. Nour Ghantous at Sierra magazine reported:
It reveals a disturbing rise in attacks against those covering environmental issues, and pinpoints that covering illegal mining, deforestation, and pollution is especially dangerous. Such journalism often challenges powerful economic interests linked to organized crime or corrupt state officials.
The risk is most acute for local journalists, who lack the protective shield of large international media organizations, and freelancers. The latter constitute a significant portion of environmental reporters, but often lack adequate resources or institutional backing to navigate these threats safely.
“Advocacy can take many forms,” Jeje Mohamed, senior manager for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, told Sierra. “We [journalists] have a macho attitude of being thick-skinned, but we must acknowledge the harm … Newsrooms need a culture shift, workshops, and mental health support.”
When it comes to the environment, it’s not just journalists in the crosshairs. In the decade beginning in 2012, state forces, security guards, or hired assassins in Honduras murdered at least 131 environmental defenders. The one Honduran activist many Americans might know is Berta Cáceres. She was gunned down eight years ago, just a year after receiving a Goldman Environmental Prize for her success at organizing her community against a hydroelectric dam that would have ended her Indigenous Lenca community’s access to a sacred and essential water source. At least in her case, there have been arrests, which is not often the course of things.
Ghantous writes, “Honduras may be the deadliest nation in the world for environmental activists, but this is a global crisis and especially perilous for journalists.” As the crisis worsens, it seems inevitable that journalists who dare to cover it and expose the machinations of those who oppose environmental protections will face heightened levels of violence.
—MB
ECO-VIDEO
RESOURCES & ACTION
GREEN BRIEFS
The largest animals on Earth are Antarctic blue whales, which can grow up to 100 feet long and weigh 200 tons. In the early 1900s, the sub-species population was estimated at 125,000. By 1966, industrial whaling had nearly extirpated these whales and devastated other whale species as well. This prompted the International Whaling Commission to ban hunting blue whales that year, and to place a moratorium on commercial whaling of all species starting in 1985. Antarctic blue whales are now categorized as “critically endangered,” with just a few thousand extant. But good data on their abundance is 25 years out of date.
Now, a new study published in Frontiers in Marine Science indicates that, like a few other whales, the Antarctic sub-species might be making a recovery. The researchers’ conclusion derives from installing sonobuoys and monitoring thousands of hours of recorded audio to listen to the giant creatures’ songs. This effort began nearly 20 years ago.
Blue whales can dive up to 1,500 feet in the ocean. At those depths, sunlight doesn’t penetrate, so whales and their cousin cetaceans, the dolphins, depend on sound to see, feel, navigate, and understand their world. To accomplish this, when these one-time land animals returned to the sea they underwent massive evolutionary changes, including the development of a sophisticated acoustic anatomy. Blue whales can “sing” as high as 180 decibels, louder than a jet engine. One advantage, their songs, their communication, travels four times faster in water than does sound in the air, and this can be detected hundreds of miles away.
In the circumpolar Antarctic, the researchers focused on three types of blue whale calls, finding that the “proportion of sonobuoys with presence of these three call types was predominantly higher in more recent surveys.” Lead author Brian Miller told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “Maybe they’re getting louder, or maybe they’re calling more frequently. Maybe this population is increasing and that’s why we’re hearing them more often. It’s going to take a bit more work for us to be able to answer that conclusively.” The research team proposed several approaches to come up with that answer.
You can listen to an Antarctic blue whale call here. And another here.
—MB
Forty-three years after I left the federal Solar Energy Research Institute, it’s still not uncommon for critics of renewable energy to sneer as they did back then, “whacha gonna do when the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow?” Energy storage has always been the answer.
California and Texas are proving that in a big way, tucking electricity into battery facilities when renewables are generating more power than is needed during the day and releasing it in the evening when renewables production plummets just as people are arriving home and putting heavy demands on the grid. This has both saved and made money for generators and as well as smoothed out the peaks and troughs of electricity production.
Thus, renewably generated power isn’t “wasted.” When there’s too much of it, solar and wind farms are curtailed from generation. With ample batteries, that curtailed production has a place to go and can then be used just when it is needed most instead of requiring the firing up of natural gas peaker plants, adding to carbon emissions. But California nevertheless still uses natural gas plants for 36% of its electricity output. In Texas, it’s 46%. California gets 44% of its electricity from renewables or geothermal. Texas gets 31% from renewables.
The first pumped-storage hydroelectric facility was built in 1907 at Mont-Louis, France, by the Société des Forces Motrices du Simplon. This pumped water from the Rhône River to an artificial lake at a higher elevation when electricity demand was low, and released it through turbines to generate electricity when demand was high.
Pumped storage only started gaining serious attention in the 1960s and ‘70s, with considerable growth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Currently, it’s estimated there are around 300 pumped-storage facilities globally, with 40 in the United States. The country currently has a rapidly expanding 24,000 megawatts of rated power capacity via energy storage. Of those, 23,000 megawatt are pumped storage. Bath County Pumped Storage Station located in Virginia has rated power capacity of 3,300 megawatts. It was the biggest such facility in the world until the Fengning Pumped Storage Power Station in China’s Hebei Province came fully on line in 2021 at 3,600 megawatts. In effect, they’re two big batteries. Almost all that remaining 1,000 megawatts of U.S. power capacity via storage is handled by lithium-ion batteries.
A key advantage of pumped storage is its ability to replace conventional power sources for 12 hours or more. Lithium-ion batteries, on the other hand, which make up more than 95% of batteries being used to fill the gap when renewables aren’t generating, are typically limited to two- to four-hour releases, then must be recharged. To add longer duration capacity requires more batteries. But at some point, diminishing returns makes further additions uneconomical.
A recent International Energy Agency report—“Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions”—says global energy storage must be increased sixfold by 2030 if climate and energy targets are going to be met. That has to raise eyebrows of the folks who are tasked with make this a reality. The current mix of pumped and battery storage, the IEA states, will be reversed, with 90% of new facilities operating off lithium-ion batteries.
In the longer term, cheaper and safer sodium-ion batteries may ultimately replace lithium-ion batteries for energy storage. The IEA forecasts sodium-ion batteries will make up less than 10% of electric vehicle batteries in 2030, but will make up an ever-growing share of stationary storage batteries. Flow batteries, compressed-air batteries, sand batteries, ice batteries, underground water batteries will be only small players for the immediate future.
California is the leader in deploying battery storage. In 2019, it had just 770 megawatts of capacity. As of last month, it had 10,379 megawatts, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours. That’s phenomenal growth, and it’s far cheaper than it would have been not long ago. Battery prices having fallen about 90% in the past 15 years. But officials calculate the state will need 52,000 megawatts of rated power capacity via storage plus 57,500 megawatts of solar generating capacity to meet its 2045 goal of 100% clean energy.
As of mid-April, California had installed 154,155 total energy storage systems. Around 98% are residential systems totaling 1,076 megawatts of capacity. The remaining 2,777 are commercial systems, with 175 utility-scale facilities connected directly to the grid.
Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich at The New York Times report:
Those batteries play a pivotal role in California’s electric grid, partially replacing fossil fuels in the evening. Between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on April 30, for example, batteries supplied more than one-fifth of California’s electricity and, for a few minutes, pumped out 7,046 megawatts of electricity, akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors. [...]
“What’s happening in California is a glimpse of what could happen to other grids in the future,” said Helen Kou, head of U.S. power analysis at BloombergNEF, a research firm. “Batteries are quickly moving from these niche applications to shifting large amounts of renewable energy toward peak demand periods.”
We still obviously have a long way to go to get to 100% clean energy. But the notion that we can’t get there because of the intermittency of renewable sources was long ago theoretically demolished, and we’re on a trajectory to do so practically as well.
—MB
RELATED:
HALF A DOZEN THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
How human activities are impacting one of the world's most remote whale species by Alison Auld. Even in the deepest and most remote parts of the ocean, beaked whales cannot escape the harmful effects of human activity. From military sonar, targeted hunting and ship strikes to climate change, plastic pollution and oil spills, researchers have found that the reclusive, deep-sea dwelling species is exposed to 14 human-made threats despite being found in habitats far from cities, ports and other populous areas. Dr. Laura Feyrer, a marine biologist and adjunct faculty member at Dalhousie, reviewed existing literature on the human threats to beaked whales—a group that includes northern bottlenose, Cuvier's, Sowerby's and True's whales in Canadian waters and is characterized by deep dives, remote habitats and cryptic biology. Her findings, published recently in Royal Society Open Science, illustrate how one of the least encountered mammals on the planet cannot avoid human pressures.
The energy transition's 5 supervillains and 5 superheroes, an interview conducted by David Roberts at his Voltz substack. Michael Liebreich is one of those people who, at least in the clean energy space, needs no introduction. But I’m going to introduce him anyway. Way back in the early 2000s, when he was working as a consultant and a venture capitalist, Liebreich noticed that alternative energy seemed to be on the verge of becoming a real thing, yet no one in the financial world was taking it particularly seriously. So he founded New Energy Finance to provide the industry with high-quality data and insights. From its scrappy beginnings, Liebreich built the company into a market leader with a staff of hundreds. In 2009, Bloomberg came calling and the company became BloombergNEF, which remains today the premier source of clean energy data, modeling, and projection. [...] Liebreich recently penned a pair of posts about the forces that are standing in the way of the net-zero transition (the supervillains) and the forces that are accelerating it (the superheroes). Those posts seemed like a good excuse to finally get him on the pod so we can talk about the state of the energy transition and the right balance of optimism and pessimism.
U.S. Saw Drop in Wind Power Last Year, Despite New Turbines from the Yale 360 Digest.For the first time since the 1990s, U.S. wind generation dropped last year, according to government figures. The slump is the result of weak winds, and it comes despite the continued buildout of wind turbines nationally. In 2023, the total amount of power U.S. turbines could theoretically produce reached a record high, according to an analysis from the Energy Information Administration. But wind plants generally run well below their maximum, and last year that was especially true. Facing doldrums, wind turbines operated at 33.5 percent of their capacity, down from an all-time high of 35.9 percent the year prior. The result was a small drop in the total amount of power produced. Experts say the drop is due to El Niño, the warmer phase of the Pacific Ocean, which weakened wind speeds across much of the country, but particularly in the Midwest, where turbines are abundant. Wind speeds are expected to pick up again this year as the cooler La Niña phase sets in.
ECOPINION
How the Myth that ‘100 Companies’ Are Responsible for Climate Change Hides the True Impact of Automobility by Kea Wilson at Streetsblog. The latest edition of the influential Carbon Majors Report recently declared that just 57 corporations are the ones “responsible for the lethal heat, extreme weather, and air pollution that is threatening lives and wreaking havoc” on global communities by emitting a shocking 80% of global CO2 since the 2016 Paris agreements. Of course, the companies themselves didn’t do most of the emitting — you and I did. But that’s not what you’d think judging from the way people talk about this study. Since it was first released in 2013, the Carbon Majors Report has raised front-page alarm bells about the dangers of “direct production-linked operational emissions” from the entities that pump our oil and manufacture our cement. This year, they’ve devoted multiple, painstaking pages to analyzing the climate impact of “flaring” at natural gas production facilities and “fugitive methane emissions” from coal plants, which some media outlets seem to have taken to mean that it’s the industrial byproducts of fossil fuel production that are actually cooking our planet. Buried 10 pages into the report, though, is a quiet side note clarifying that “nearly 90 percent” of total pollution tracked by the database actually came from “Scope 3 Category 11 emissions, corresponding to use of sold products.” That is an extraordinarily opaque way of saying that people who buy fossil fuels are overwhelmingly the ones “responsible” for burning them — even if the “57 companies” were the ones who sold them.
Domestic Uranium Enrichment Will Secure America's Energy Future by Patrick White and Erik Cothron at The National Interest. s the world grapples with energy security challenges and the urgent need to transition to cleaner energy sources, advanced nuclear energy stands out as a reliable, clean, and affordable solution. However, the “core” of this promising energy solution—the reliable supply of uranium fuel for nuclear reactors—is dependent on a global supply chain dominated by a small number of foreign state-supported and state-controlled entities. The United States must fortify its energy security by catalyzing a robust, domestic commercial uranium fuel supply chain to support current and future nuclear reactors. The United States and its allies currently rely on a small number of companies involved in the nuclear fuel supply chain to meet their uranium fuel needs. Key companies supplying international commercial uranium enrichment and conversion services include Orano (majority controlled by the French government), Urenco (majority controlled by the UK and Dutch governments), Cameco (a publicly traded Canadian company), and TENEX (a Russian state-owned enterprise). The United States currently relies on TENEX to supply the enriched uranium for about 25 percent of U.S. reactors. Still, Russia’s recent use of other energy exports as weapons of war and international coercion creates a significant vulnerability for both the United States and its allies. Additionally, TENEX is the only commercial supplier of High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU), which is a more highly enriched type of uranium that is needed to fuel many advanced nuclear reactor designs. Without domestic or allied HALEU production, the future of nuclear innovation and many advanced reactors in the U.S. is subject to geopolitical uncertainty.
Solar tariffs are in the spotlight again. Our current approach isn’t the answer by Dan Whitten at Utility Dive. Chinese and American negotiators are going to need to resolve this issue at the highest level, because the current tit for tat solar trade war won’t work, certainly not if we want to meet our climate ambitions. At the same time, U.S. solar companies cannot mount full-throated opposition to tariffs, given cratering solar equipment prices, market over-saturation from imports and the prevailing antipathy toward China among American manufacturers, labor groups, policymakers and others. And, despite the justifiable praise for the Inflation Reduction Act, there are serious limits to how much of the solar supply chain the U.S. can capture. The Biden administration has tried very hard to balance environmental objectives, U.S. manufacturing growth, national security, American economic prosperity and U.S. labor standards. But it’s a balance built on a shaky foundation. Provisions in the IRA combined with aggressive tariff policy will cause solar prices to skyrocket and you can’t drive up the cost for something that you need deployed at a massive scale to solve the climate crisis.
Ed Lyman, director Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists
Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors by Ed Lyman at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Even casual followers of energy and climate issues have probably heard about the alleged wonders of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). This is due in no small part to the “nuclear bros”: an active and seemingly tireless group of nuclear power advocates who dominate social media discussions on energy by promoting SMRs and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis. But as I showed in my 2013 and 2021 reports, the hype surrounding SMRs is way overblown, and my conclusions remain valid today. Unfortunately, much of this SMR happy talk is rooted in misinformation, which always brings me back to the same question: If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much? Here are five facts about SMRs that the nuclear industry doesn’t want you to know 1. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors. [...] 2. MRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors. [...] 3. SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste. [...] 4. SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production. [...] 5. SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
RELATED: Q&A: What’s the Deal with Bill Gates’s Wyoming Nuclear Plant?
Fracking equipment in Culberson County, Texas.
Natural Gas Is a Climate Scam — and Consumers Are Paying for It by Mike Ludwig at Truthout. Despite the fracking boom that made the United States the world’s top fossil fuel producer, the price households pay for natural gas skyrocketed by 52 percent between 2016 and 2023. The increase in energy bills was fueled in part by a surge in liquified natural gas (LNG) exports to foreign markets that is enriching the domestic fossil fuel industry, according to a new report released by the watchdog group Public Citizen this week. [...] The report, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, shows how the cost of natural gas shapes the economy by impacting the price of everything from fertilizer to the cost of electricity, for example, which in turn makes food production more expensive and lifts prices at the grocery store. The price of fertilizer is closely tied to the price of natural gas — the petrochemical industry depends on fossil fuels — and the cost to North American farmers ballooned by 400 percent between 2016 and 2023 due to increased exports and a volatile global market. [...] Even consumers in states where the fossil fuel industry is entrenched are paying more for energy, despite living in the shadow of the pollution that comes with extracting, transporting, refining and burning natural gas. Residents of Texas and Pennsylvania, the top two gas-producing states, saw their natural gas bills increase by 50 and 51 percent between 2016 and 2023, respectively. In Ohio, where fracking waste disposal threatens drinking water, residential households pay an average of $148 for natural gas each month, making Ohio second only to Alaska for the nation’s highest gas bills.
RELATED: Academics and Lawmakers Slam an Industry-Funded Report by a Former Energy Secretary Promoting Natural Gas and LNG
Jonah Vu
Wider Highways Don’t Solve Congestion. So Why Are We Still Knocking Down Homes to Build Them? By Jonah Vu at the Frontier Group. Highway expansions that induce more driving are especially problematic given transportation’s role in global warming. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., with 83% of transportation emissions coming from burning gasoline and diesel fuel in cars and trucks. Projects such as the I-405 expansion stand in direct opposition to California’s ambitious climate commitments. Reducing vehicle travel is a key part of the California Air Resources Board’s overall plan to reach state carbon neutrality goals, but that hasn’t stopped state or local transportation authorities from continuing to pursue highway expansion projects that threaten to intensify emissions, as well as create additional noise, traffic and air pollution. Pollution levels near freeways are three to four times higher than neighborhoods farther away. The pollution from highways is proven to affect nearby communities, who are at increased risk of respiratory, cardiovascular and reproductive health problems.
How the Myth that ‘100 Companies’ Are Responsible for Climate Change Hides the True Impact of Automobility by Kea Wilson at Streetsblog. The latest edition of the influential Carbon Majors Report recently declared that just 57 corporations are the ones “responsible for the lethal heat, extreme weather, and air pollution that is threatening lives and wreaking havoc” on global communities by emitting a shocking 80% of global CO2 since the 2016 Paris agreements. Of course, the companies themselves didn’t do most of the emitting — you and I did. But that’s not what you’d think judging from the way people talk about this study. Since it was first released in 2013, the Carbon Majors Report has raised front-page alarm bells about the dangers of “direct production-linked operational emissions” from the entities that pump our oil and manufacture our cement. This year, they’ve devoted multiple, painstaking pages to analyzing the climate impact of “flaring” at natural gas production facilities and “fugitive methane emissions” from coal plants, which some media outlets seem to have taken to mean that it’s the industrial byproducts of fossil fuel production that are actually cooking our planet. Buried 10 pages into the report, though, is a quiet side note clarifying that “nearly 90 percent” of total pollution tracked by the database actually came from “Scope 3 Category 11 emissions, corresponding to use of sold products.” That is an extraordinarily opaque way of saying that people who buy fossil fuels are overwhelmingly the ones “responsible” for burning them — even if the “57 companies” were the ones who sold them.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
DDT pollutants found in deep sea fish off LA coast raise questions about the pesticide's continuing threat to wildlife • Calif. state Sen. Blakespear says coastal railroad is at a climate crossroads • A rare burst of billions of cicadas will rewire our ecosystems for years to come • Congress passes Russian uranium import ban, unlocking $2.7B to expand US nuclear fuel production • In Millions of Homes, High Fluoride in Tap Water May Be a Concern • Every breath you take: Study models the journey of inhaled plastic particle pollution • Despite ban, EPA grants ’emergency’ approval for bee-killing insecticide for 10th straight year • In Brazil, half a century of salt mining sinks a city, displacing thousands • How ancient Amazonians transformed a toxic crop into a diet staple