“In the first place there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels […] There are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered [...] Rainfall might get heavier in some regions and other places might turn to desert [...] [Several countries] would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed [...] Man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical [...] Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” —Exxon senior scientist James F. Black, 1978
In the summer of 2001, Ben Saunders, then just 23 years old, tried together with a friend to reach the North Pole. It was rough going over the ice, and they eventually turned back. But in 2003, Saunders made it to the Pole on his own. And in the spring of 2004, the freelance adventurer attempted a solo trip across the Pole from Cape Artichevsky in Siberia to Canada. Seventy-two days after starting out, he had to be rescued about 30 miles from Canada because open water blocked his way. He had trekked 599 miles, often without mittens or hat, logging temperatures as high as 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 degrees Celsius) compared with 2001 when they had averaged 33 F. (0.5 C). “The weather this year was the warmest since they began keeping records,” he told a reporter at the Ottawa Citizen before flying back to his U.K. home.
The warmest since they began keeping records. That, of course, has become the refrain of our age. This week the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the Siberian Arctic saw an unprecedented 100.4 F in June 2020 (38 C). In its annual Arctic Report Card released Monday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center told us the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Monthly temperatures in January-June this year in Siberia were as high as 18.5 F (10 C) above average.
This 2004 report was sneeringly blasted by climate change deniers and ignored by most top political leaders.
While Saunders skied over the ice on his 2004 trip marveling at the changes from three years before, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program was putting the finishing touches on its Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), Impacts of a Warming Arctic. The 300 scientists who researched and wrote it concluded that Arctic temperatures had been rising abnormally since 1980. Negative effects of rising temperatures, they said, could include a vast reduction in sun-reflecting sea ice, further retreating of glaciers, globally rising seas, coastal erosion, permafrost thawing causing infrastructure damage, possible extinction of ice-dependent species like polar bears and some seals, and a shifting of vegetation onto the tundra that could mean trouble for caribou and reindeer, all of which could mean nutritional and cultural difficulties for Indigenous people. Impacts in the Arctic wouldn’t stay in the Arctic, the scientists declared. But they couldn’t yet say definitely that humans were causing the effects they were witnessing. Only more study would determine that.
Even so, the climate science deniers came out in full force. For years afterward, some of them went so far as to claim that more summer Arctic ice was being added each year and polar bears were doing just fine.
This, of course, was all part of the war that fossil fuel companies and their puppets in government and reckless media had been waging since 1989 when Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute, automotive companies, and other energy companies formed the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition. Its mission: Recruit scientists to create doubt in the public mind about climate change. Given that 139 elected Republicans in the House and Senate today reject climate science—and we still haven’t passed even a modest federal plan to address the crisis—you have to concede the creation of doubt has been mighty successful, even if, as seems likely, some of public doubters are only fake deniers who know the climate crisis is real but want to keep getting the fossil fuel campaign money that denying garners them.
This is so even as each annual Arctic Report Card for the past 15 years, backed by hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, has confirmed the suspicions of those scientists in 2004 about climate change being caused by humans. No longer probably. Definitely. As Raymond Zhong at The New York Times writes about this year’s report card:
As the quotation at the top of this essay demonstrates, Exxon leadership knew from its own scientists more than four decades ago that human-caused climate change was real, and opposition to fixes could only be created by lying. So it paid millions to rent some liars. It wasn’t alone, of course. The Koch brothers did more than their share, funding bogus “institutes” and front groups just as Big Tobacco had done to create doubt that cigarettes cause cancer. In their seminal 2010 book, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway created a name for the fossil fuel shills and their paymasters: Merchants of Doubt.
The liars who in 2004 ridiculed the ACIA report on the Arctic have disappeared or retooled their arguments away from outright denial. But as climatologist Michael Mann writes in his new book, The Fight to Take Back Our Planet: The New Climate War:
These days, the merged ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other fossil fuel giants pay for advertisements pretending the environment is their No. 1 priority while they lobby behind the scenes to kill or dilute public policy proposals and build new infrastructure to keep the oil (and big profits) flowing. Unfortunately, there’s slim to nil chance that there will ever be a reckoning for these companies’ lies, which have helped steer the rest of us toward a reckoning with climate impacts we might otherwise have avoided. But there are still many we can avoid if only we can get more of our elected representatives to stop listening to and enabling these climate desperados.
Here’s a quick video summary of the Arctic Report Card:
YouTube Video
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee proposes legislative package with big state EV rebate: Last spring, the governor won a major victory in his long battle to make the climate crisis a top priority when the state legislature passed the Climate Commitment Act to reduce Washington State’s greenhouse gas emissions. On Monday, Inslee announced his proposed $626 million package for the 2022 legislative session that would provide $100 million in rebates for electric vehicle (EV) purchases, invest $450 million in cleaner fuel ferries, implement a statewide EV charging infrastructure, explore clean bus technology, and make improvements to transit, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure. The package proposes paying to build two 144-car hybrid-electric ferries from scratch and also convert an existing conventionally powered ferry to hybrid-electric.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee
The vehicle rebates can be expected to spark the most debate. The idea is to drive down costs until EV vehicles are priced the same as those with internal combustion engines (ICE) to accelerate the transportation transformation that eventually will send ICE machines to the scrapyard. Under the governor’s plan, buyers of a new EV would receive a $7,500 rebate, $5,000 for a used EV, and $1,000 for an e-bike. The program would be capped at $55,000 for electric car purchases and $80,000 for electric trucks, SUVs, or van purchases. “These basic rebates will be available to people who earn under $250,000 per year as a single-tax filer, or under $500,000 per year for joint-filer households,” according to the governor’s policy brief. Low-income residents would get extra:
Money for all this will come partly from the Climate Commitment Act and partly from the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The whole package will draw right-wing ire and resistance, of course. But there’s criticism from environmental advocates as well, particularly the meager $40 million proposed for public transit. As Doug Trumm points out, many state agencies plan on buying electric buses to replace their existing fleets, but funding is difficult to come by. For example, King County Metro, which provides public transit for Seattle and its surroundings, has a plan to electrify, but the 40 electric buses it just bought cost $50 million. Accomplishing all it wants to do in expanding and decarbonizing its operations will cost billions.
If Inslee’s proposal survives legislative sausage-making and the federal Build Back Better Act gets passed next year with the full amount of its own proposed EV rebate included—both dicey prospects—a low-income Washington State resident could get $20,000 knocked off the price of a U.S-made, union-made EV.
GM CEO Mary Barra is full of malarkey: It’s quite encouraging to see legacy automakers here and elsewhere finally deciding to make the manufacture of electric vehicles their prime business a decade or two down the road. But some CEOs—like Herbert Diess at VW and Jim Farley at Ford—know that road is a long one with giant potholes. And they admit they have a lot of catching up to do, specifically with Tesla. In her interview last month with Aaron Sorkin, however, Barra actually dared say, “Well, we have said, just like we’re the [EV] leader today, if you set aside you know with the distortion that’s happening with the semi shortage, we have been the leader in the United States.”
Perhaps she actually believes the embarrassingly off-the-mark flattery she got from President Joe Biden on Nov. 17: “Mary, I remember talking to you way back in January about the need for America to lead in electric vehicles. I can remember your dramatic announcement that by 2035, GM would be 100% electric. You changed the whole story, Mary. You did, Mary. You electrified the entire automotive industry. I’m serious. You led, and it matters.” All the way back in January, Barra was talking about the need to electrify vehicles? Oooooooooooh, what prescience. </p>
Back in the 1990s, a decade and a half before Barra took over, GM could have made that claim with its EV1, the first modern, mass-produced EVs, which the company ultimately crushed or donated to museums and universities. It’s one thing to cheerlead your company with a bit of exaggeration, it’s another to engage in outright fantasy. In October, before Barra began claiming GM was already the EV leader, she said the company would be selling more EVs than Tesla by 2025. She also said GM would be making 1 million EVs by 2025. Quite the disconnect from reality. </p>
By the time 2021 ends in two weeks, Tesla will have sold at least 850,000 EVs this year. Independent analyst Wedbush predicts it will sell 1.3 million in 2022, although other analysts forecast 1.5 million or more. And in 2025? Five million new Teslas aren’t out of the question. One doesn’t have to be an Elon Musk fan (and I am not one) to be encouraged by the growing investment in EVs by dozens of companies, both startups and vehicle makers with a century in the biz. <p> But despite Barra’s assertions to the contrary, Tesla and the Chinese BYD are the world leaders in EV manufacture right now. Over the next few years, GM may manage to solve its battery problems and work out all the other software and hardware kinks involved in producing EVs. If it does, that would be a big plus in our ongoing transformation of transportation. But getting there will require GM’s CEO to stop telling fairy tales.
A federal drought relief program left southern Oregon parched: Twenty years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) started paying farmers in the Klamath Basin of Oregon to pump groundwater for irrigation purposes when drought reduced the amount of surface water in streams, lakes, and rivers that traditionally has been used to grow crops in the region. The USBR program was meant to be a temporary fix, with groundwater replenished during wet years and pumped in the dry ones. But somehow it became permanent. Consequently, the water level in both agricultural and household wells in the basin have fallen, often quite steeply. In her deeply researched piece on the subject, Jessica Fu quotes Jim McCarthy, southern Oregon program director for Oregon WaterWatch, an advocate for sustainable management of water resources, “The prevailing policy for the last 20 years has been to just try to shift surface water users temporarily, inexpensively to groundwater. The consequences of this policy have borne some pretty bitter fruit.” Like most water stories, this is a complex one with various stakeholders at odds with one another. Attempts at regionwide cooperative water conservation have met with opposition from basin farmers. Ultimately, as McCarthy says, it all boils down to one thing, “Every time you pump more from your well in a basin where the groundwater and surface water are connected … you're making the next drought worse. So you're digging yourself into a bigger and bigger hole.”
Study: Halting the burning of fossil fuels would save 1 million-plus lives a year: A new study by the Health Effects Institute (HEI) of Boston found that airborne soot from burning coal, oil, and natural gas kills more than 1 million people globally each year. Known technically as PM2.5 because it is made up of particles no bigger than 2.5 microns—1/30th the diameter of a human hair—soot causes harm because it penetrates deeply into the lungs and can even reach the bloodstream. These make up 27.3% of the world’s 4 million annual deaths from soot. About 800,000 of these occur in South Asia or East Asia. In addition, soot from burning biofuels, such as wood for indoor heating and cooking, kills an additional 740,000 people each year in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. While fossil fuels are the source of many of these fatalities elsewhere, windblown dust takes a big toll in Africa. In Bangladesh, the study found, windblown dust caused 1.5% of deaths from outdoor soot exposure, while in Nigeria, the toll was 71%. Erin McDuffie, a Washington University in St. Louis atmospheric scientist who was one of the study team’s leaders along with Randall Martin, said in a news release that their key goal “was to identify major sources of PM2.5 pollution and to understand how these sources change around the world. In some countries, our results are some of the first pieces of information they have on the major sources in their region.” The Environmental Protection Agency is currently scrutinizing whether its existing ambient air quality standards for the pollutant are adequate. The HEI report calculated 47,000 U.S. annual deaths are caused by all sources of soot.
Wyoming wild horse roundup sparks opposition: Two months ago, the Bureau of Land Management began the largest wild horse roundup in U.S. history. By the time it’s completed in February 2022, the bureau hopes to have captured 4,397 wild horses, 3,555 of which will be permanently kept penned in two locations except for those adopted by individuals. Under the 50-year-old Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the government pays an adopter $1,000, with a four-horse maximum per person. Since the program began, about 250,000 wild horses and burros have been adopted. The law requires that herd management plans “maintain a thriving natural ecological balance among wild horse populations, wildlife, livestock, and vegetation and to protect the range from the deterioration associated with overpopulation.” The bureau estimates there are about 95,000 wild horses on public land, three times what it considers balanced.
Foes have gathered 70,000 names objecting to the roundup. They note that 16 wild horses have been killed so far in the roundup, which includes breakneck chases by helicopter. At the Cloud Foundation, which is one of the more prominent foes, board member Lisa Friday told the digital Cowboy State Daily, “Wild horses and burros are restricted to just 11% of public lands compared to livestock, which is permitted on more than 60% of public lands. Even in congressionally designated Wild Horse and Burro Herd Areas, livestock is given more than 80% of the forage compared to the 20% allocated to wild horses and burros. Wild horses are the poster child for this corporate greed and mismanagement of our public lands.” In August, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis wrote to Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, who oversees the Bureau of Land Management, to stop wild horse roundups.
Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic: In the ocean and in soil, microbes are altering their digestion, offering the potential for cleaning up at least some of the growing plague of plastic pollution, which can be found from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench nearly seven miles down from the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Researchers scanned genes in microbial DNA samples and found 30,000 different enzymes capable of breaking down 10 kinds of plastic. One in four scanned microbes carried a plastic-eating enzyme. Nearly 60% of these enzymes did not fit into any known enzyme classes. Prof. Aleksej Zelezniak at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden told The Guardian, “The next step would be to test the most promising enzyme candidates in the lab to closely investigate their properties and the rate of plastic degradation they can achieve. From there you could engineer microbial communities with targeted degrading functions for specific polymer types.”
EV Charging Infrastructure Mapping Tools: Georgetown Climate Center and M.J. Bradley & Associates have developed mapping and analysis tools to inform discussions between policymakers, local communities, and other stakeholders in considering priority locations for electric vehicle fast- charging infrastructure. The location data for existing EV fast-charging stations is updated regularly to reflect the installation of new stations.
A HALF DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ
In the summer of 2001, Ben Saunders, then just 23 years old, tried together with a friend to reach the North Pole. It was rough going over the ice, and they eventually turned back. But in 2003, Saunders made it to the Pole on his own. And in the spring of 2004, the freelance adventurer attempted a solo trip across the Pole from Cape Artichevsky in Siberia to Canada. Seventy-two days after starting out, he had to be rescued about 30 miles from Canada because open water blocked his way. He had trekked 599 miles, often without mittens or hat, logging temperatures as high as 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 degrees Celsius) compared with 2001 when they had averaged 33 F. (0.5 C). “The weather this year was the warmest since they began keeping records,” he told a reporter at the Ottawa Citizen before flying back to his U.K. home.
The warmest since they began keeping records. That, of course, has become the refrain of our age. This week the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the Siberian Arctic saw an unprecedented 100.4 F in June 2020 (38 C). In its annual Arctic Report Card released Monday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center told us the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Monthly temperatures in January-June this year in Siberia were as high as 18.5 F (10 C) above average.
This 2004 report was sneeringly blasted by climate change deniers and ignored by most top political leaders.
While Saunders skied over the ice on his 2004 trip marveling at the changes from three years before, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program was putting the finishing touches on its Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), Impacts of a Warming Arctic. The 300 scientists who researched and wrote it concluded that Arctic temperatures had been rising abnormally since 1980. Negative effects of rising temperatures, they said, could include a vast reduction in sun-reflecting sea ice, further retreating of glaciers, globally rising seas, coastal erosion, permafrost thawing causing infrastructure damage, possible extinction of ice-dependent species like polar bears and some seals, and a shifting of vegetation onto the tundra that could mean trouble for caribou and reindeer, all of which could mean nutritional and cultural difficulties for Indigenous people. Impacts in the Arctic wouldn’t stay in the Arctic, the scientists declared. But they couldn’t yet say definitely that humans were causing the effects they were witnessing. Only more study would determine that.
Even so, the climate science deniers came out in full force. For years afterward, some of them went so far as to claim that more summer Arctic ice was being added each year and polar bears were doing just fine.
This, of course, was all part of the war that fossil fuel companies and their puppets in government and reckless media had been waging since 1989 when Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute, automotive companies, and other energy companies formed the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition. Its mission: Recruit scientists to create doubt in the public mind about climate change. Given that 139 elected Republicans in the House and Senate today reject climate science—and we still haven’t passed even a modest federal plan to address the crisis—you have to concede the creation of doubt has been mighty successful, even if, as seems likely, some of public doubters are only fake deniers who know the climate crisis is real but want to keep getting the fossil fuel campaign money that denying garners them.
This is so even as each annual Arctic Report Card for the past 15 years, backed by hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, has confirmed the suspicions of those scientists in 2004 about climate change being caused by humans. No longer probably. Definitely. As Raymond Zhong at The New York Times writes about this year’s report card:
As the quotation at the top of this essay demonstrates, Exxon leadership knew from its own scientists more than four decades ago that human-caused climate change was real, and opposition to fixes could only be created by lying. So it paid millions to rent some liars. It wasn’t alone, of course. The Koch brothers did more than their share, funding bogus “institutes” and front groups just as Big Tobacco had done to create doubt that cigarettes cause cancer. In their seminal 2010 book, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway created a name for the fossil fuel shills and their paymasters: Merchants of Doubt.
The liars who in 2004 ridiculed the ACIA report on the Arctic have disappeared or retooled their arguments away from outright denial. But as climatologist Michael Mann writes in his new book, The Fight to Take Back Our Planet: The New Climate War:
These days, the merged ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other fossil fuel giants pay for advertisements pretending the environment is their No. 1 priority while they lobby behind the scenes to kill or dilute public policy proposals and build new infrastructure to keep the oil (and big profits) flowing. Unfortunately, there’s slim to nil chance that there will ever be a reckoning for these companies’ lies, which have helped steer the rest of us toward a reckoning with climate impacts we might otherwise have avoided. But there are still many we can avoid if only we can get more of our elected representatives to stop listening to and enabling these climate desperados.
Here’s a quick video summary of the Arctic Report Card:
YouTube Video
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee proposes legislative package with big state EV rebate: Last spring, the governor won a major victory in his long battle to make the climate crisis a top priority when the state legislature passed the Climate Commitment Act to reduce Washington State’s greenhouse gas emissions. On Monday, Inslee announced his proposed $626 million package for the 2022 legislative session that would provide $100 million in rebates for electric vehicle (EV) purchases, invest $450 million in cleaner fuel ferries, implement a statewide EV charging infrastructure, explore clean bus technology, and make improvements to transit, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure. The package proposes paying to build two 144-car hybrid-electric ferries from scratch and also convert an existing conventionally powered ferry to hybrid-electric.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee
The vehicle rebates can be expected to spark the most debate. The idea is to drive down costs until EV vehicles are priced the same as those with internal combustion engines (ICE) to accelerate the transportation transformation that eventually will send ICE machines to the scrapyard. Under the governor’s plan, buyers of a new EV would receive a $7,500 rebate, $5,000 for a used EV, and $1,000 for an e-bike. The program would be capped at $55,000 for electric car purchases and $80,000 for electric trucks, SUVs, or van purchases. “These basic rebates will be available to people who earn under $250,000 per year as a single-tax filer, or under $500,000 per year for joint-filer households,” according to the governor’s policy brief. Low-income residents would get extra:
Money for all this will come partly from the Climate Commitment Act and partly from the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The whole package will draw right-wing ire and resistance, of course. But there’s criticism from environmental advocates as well, particularly the meager $40 million proposed for public transit. As Doug Trumm points out, many state agencies plan on buying electric buses to replace their existing fleets, but funding is difficult to come by. For example, King County Metro, which provides public transit for Seattle and its surroundings, has a plan to electrify, but the 40 electric buses it just bought cost $50 million. Accomplishing all it wants to do in expanding and decarbonizing its operations will cost billions.
If Inslee’s proposal survives legislative sausage-making and the federal Build Back Better Act gets passed next year with the full amount of its own proposed EV rebate included—both dicey prospects—a low-income Washington State resident could get $20,000 knocked off the price of a U.S-made, union-made EV.
GM CEO Mary Barra is full of malarkey: It’s quite encouraging to see legacy automakers here and elsewhere finally deciding to make the manufacture of electric vehicles their prime business a decade or two down the road. But some CEOs—like Herbert Diess at VW and Jim Farley at Ford—know that road is a long one with giant potholes. And they admit they have a lot of catching up to do, specifically with Tesla. In her interview last month with Aaron Sorkin, however, Barra actually dared say, “Well, we have said, just like we’re the [EV] leader today, if you set aside you know with the distortion that’s happening with the semi shortage, we have been the leader in the United States.”
Perhaps she actually believes the embarrassingly off-the-mark flattery she got from President Joe Biden on Nov. 17: “Mary, I remember talking to you way back in January about the need for America to lead in electric vehicles. I can remember your dramatic announcement that by 2035, GM would be 100% electric. You changed the whole story, Mary. You did, Mary. You electrified the entire automotive industry. I’m serious. You led, and it matters.” All the way back in January, Barra was talking about the need to electrify vehicles? Oooooooooooh, what prescience. </p>
Back in the 1990s, a decade and a half before Barra took over, GM could have made that claim with its EV1, the first modern, mass-produced EVs, which the company ultimately crushed or donated to museums and universities. It’s one thing to cheerlead your company with a bit of exaggeration, it’s another to engage in outright fantasy. In October, before Barra began claiming GM was already the EV leader, she said the company would be selling more EVs than Tesla by 2025. She also said GM would be making 1 million EVs by 2025. Quite the disconnect from reality. </p>
By the time 2021 ends in two weeks, Tesla will have sold at least 850,000 EVs this year. Independent analyst Wedbush predicts it will sell 1.3 million in 2022, although other analysts forecast 1.5 million or more. And in 2025? Five million new Teslas aren’t out of the question. One doesn’t have to be an Elon Musk fan (and I am not one) to be encouraged by the growing investment in EVs by dozens of companies, both startups and vehicle makers with a century in the biz. <p> But despite Barra’s assertions to the contrary, Tesla and the Chinese BYD are the world leaders in EV manufacture right now. Over the next few years, GM may manage to solve its battery problems and work out all the other software and hardware kinks involved in producing EVs. If it does, that would be a big plus in our ongoing transformation of transportation. But getting there will require GM’s CEO to stop telling fairy tales.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
YouTube VideoSHORT TAKES
A federal drought relief program left southern Oregon parched: Twenty years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) started paying farmers in the Klamath Basin of Oregon to pump groundwater for irrigation purposes when drought reduced the amount of surface water in streams, lakes, and rivers that traditionally has been used to grow crops in the region. The USBR program was meant to be a temporary fix, with groundwater replenished during wet years and pumped in the dry ones. But somehow it became permanent. Consequently, the water level in both agricultural and household wells in the basin have fallen, often quite steeply. In her deeply researched piece on the subject, Jessica Fu quotes Jim McCarthy, southern Oregon program director for Oregon WaterWatch, an advocate for sustainable management of water resources, “The prevailing policy for the last 20 years has been to just try to shift surface water users temporarily, inexpensively to groundwater. The consequences of this policy have borne some pretty bitter fruit.” Like most water stories, this is a complex one with various stakeholders at odds with one another. Attempts at regionwide cooperative water conservation have met with opposition from basin farmers. Ultimately, as McCarthy says, it all boils down to one thing, “Every time you pump more from your well in a basin where the groundwater and surface water are connected … you're making the next drought worse. So you're digging yourself into a bigger and bigger hole.”
Study: Halting the burning of fossil fuels would save 1 million-plus lives a year: A new study by the Health Effects Institute (HEI) of Boston found that airborne soot from burning coal, oil, and natural gas kills more than 1 million people globally each year. Known technically as PM2.5 because it is made up of particles no bigger than 2.5 microns—1/30th the diameter of a human hair—soot causes harm because it penetrates deeply into the lungs and can even reach the bloodstream. These make up 27.3% of the world’s 4 million annual deaths from soot. About 800,000 of these occur in South Asia or East Asia. In addition, soot from burning biofuels, such as wood for indoor heating and cooking, kills an additional 740,000 people each year in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. While fossil fuels are the source of many of these fatalities elsewhere, windblown dust takes a big toll in Africa. In Bangladesh, the study found, windblown dust caused 1.5% of deaths from outdoor soot exposure, while in Nigeria, the toll was 71%. Erin McDuffie, a Washington University in St. Louis atmospheric scientist who was one of the study team’s leaders along with Randall Martin, said in a news release that their key goal “was to identify major sources of PM2.5 pollution and to understand how these sources change around the world. In some countries, our results are some of the first pieces of information they have on the major sources in their region.” The Environmental Protection Agency is currently scrutinizing whether its existing ambient air quality standards for the pollutant are adequate. The HEI report calculated 47,000 U.S. annual deaths are caused by all sources of soot.
Wyoming wild horse roundup sparks opposition: Two months ago, the Bureau of Land Management began the largest wild horse roundup in U.S. history. By the time it’s completed in February 2022, the bureau hopes to have captured 4,397 wild horses, 3,555 of which will be permanently kept penned in two locations except for those adopted by individuals. Under the 50-year-old Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the government pays an adopter $1,000, with a four-horse maximum per person. Since the program began, about 250,000 wild horses and burros have been adopted. The law requires that herd management plans “maintain a thriving natural ecological balance among wild horse populations, wildlife, livestock, and vegetation and to protect the range from the deterioration associated with overpopulation.” The bureau estimates there are about 95,000 wild horses on public land, three times what it considers balanced.
Foes have gathered 70,000 names objecting to the roundup. They note that 16 wild horses have been killed so far in the roundup, which includes breakneck chases by helicopter. At the Cloud Foundation, which is one of the more prominent foes, board member Lisa Friday told the digital Cowboy State Daily, “Wild horses and burros are restricted to just 11% of public lands compared to livestock, which is permitted on more than 60% of public lands. Even in congressionally designated Wild Horse and Burro Herd Areas, livestock is given more than 80% of the forage compared to the 20% allocated to wild horses and burros. Wild horses are the poster child for this corporate greed and mismanagement of our public lands.” In August, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis wrote to Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, who oversees the Bureau of Land Management, to stop wild horse roundups.
Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic: In the ocean and in soil, microbes are altering their digestion, offering the potential for cleaning up at least some of the growing plague of plastic pollution, which can be found from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench nearly seven miles down from the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Researchers scanned genes in microbial DNA samples and found 30,000 different enzymes capable of breaking down 10 kinds of plastic. One in four scanned microbes carried a plastic-eating enzyme. Nearly 60% of these enzymes did not fit into any known enzyme classes. Prof. Aleksej Zelezniak at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden told The Guardian, “The next step would be to test the most promising enzyme candidates in the lab to closely investigate their properties and the rate of plastic degradation they can achieve. From there you could engineer microbial communities with targeted degrading functions for specific polymer types.”
Environmental Resources
EV Charging Infrastructure Mapping Tools: Georgetown Climate Center and M.J. Bradley & Associates have developed mapping and analysis tools to inform discussions between policymakers, local communities, and other stakeholders in considering priority locations for electric vehicle fast- charging infrastructure. The location data for existing EV fast-charging stations is updated regularly to reflect the installation of new stations.
ECO-TWEET
A HALF DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ
- Kentucky’s largest solar project to be built on former coal mine. The 200-megawatt, $231 milllion Martin County Solar Project will be constructed on 1,200 acres of the former Martiki coal mine site. Construction, operation, and maintenance are set to employ displaced coal workers, by Tim Sylvia
- A New Estimate of the ‘Most Effective’ Way to Fight Climate Change. Climate-concerned donors should focus on helping to pass climate policy, not offset their emissions, an advisory group says, by Robinson Meyer
- The Planet Is Failing. What Does That Look Like in Every Single Country? Cities swallowed by dust. Human history drowned by the sea. Economics devastated, lives ruined. Here are stories from 193 countries showing the reality of climate change. “Postcards from a World on Fire” were gathered by The New York Times
- Geoengineering — First It Was About Messing With The Atmosphere. Now It’s About Hacking The Ocean. A new report urges research into geoengineering the oceans, not because it’s a good idea but because it may save us from making some big mistakes, by Steve Hanley
- How Big Oil Rigs the System to Keep Winning. Take this brief tour of the industry’s history, and then ask yourself: Is there any doubt that these companies are now plotting to keep the profits rolling in, even as mega-hurricanes and roaring wildfires scream the dangers of the climate emergency? by Naomi Oreskes and Jeff Nesbit
The Biden administration said its drilling-lease spree in the Gulf was court-ordered. It wasn’t. Leases that could lead to 600 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions didn't have to happen, by Adam Mahoney