On his trip to the Southwest to tout the impacts of hard-won legislation that is at the core of “Bidenomics,” President Biden on Tuesday dropped in at historic Red Butte Airfield near tiny Williams, Arizona, which calls itself the “Gateway to the Grand Canyon.” There he announced a new national monument, his fifth, to preserve areas around the existing Grand Canyon National Park and permanently bar uranium mining there. This will protect the area from further mining damage caused to aquifers and ancestral cultural sites sacred to the Indigenous peoples of the region.
The designation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni—Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument fulfills an abiding dream of tribal nations and environmental advocates alike. Baaj Nwavjo means “where tribes roam” in Havasupai, and I’tah Kukveni means “our ancestral footprints” in Hopi. Like Bears Ears National Monument, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni will be co-managed by the tribes. Unlike Bears Ears, however, which Utah politicians and right-wing descendants of the Sagebrush Rebels of the 1970s and ‘80s ferociously opposed, polls show the monument has deep and broad support across the political spectrum in Arizona.
Although the Havasupai and Hopi and several other tribes have sought the monument for decades, the proposal only started getting official attention in 2007 from Democratic Congressman Raúl Grijalva of Arizona. The 13-tribe Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition gave impetus to the proposal, a show of tribal unity that is not always so easy to come by. The White House has highlighted numerous tribal leaders’ responses to the designation of the monument.
It approximates the 20-year withdrawal of land from mining that President Barack Obama adopted in 2012. Congress, however, refused to support legsilation making that withdrawal permanent. Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni will shield 917,000 acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon from development, prohibiting new mining claims and giving new protections to thousands of Indigenous cultural sites in the area.
Uqualla, a Havasupai tribal leader in full regalia, talks with the media after President Biden’s announcement designating the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni—Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument.
Biden’s announcement marks a fitting conclusion to a struggle that dates back more than a century. Having failed to spur Congress to act directly to protect various lands, President Teddy Roosevelt did manage to get the Antiquities Act passed in 1906. It gives the president broad authority to set aside public land as national monuments, protecting historic or ecologically significant sites without congressional approval from mining, drilling, and grazing.
Roosevelt wasn’t stingy with this new authority, designating 18 sites as monuments before leaving office. The 11th of those was the Grand Canyon National Monument, 800,000 acres designated 115 years ago. A decade later, it was made a National Park. In his speech naming the monument, Roosevelt declared, “Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”
Of the Biden announcement, Brooke Larsen & Alastair Lee Bitsóí write at High Country News:
At Sierra magazine, Lindsay Botts writes:
At Red Butte, a sacred mountain known as Wii’i Gdwiisa by the Havasupai and Tsé zhin Ii’ahi by the Diné, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, said, “This land is sacred to the many tribal nations who have long advocated for its protection, and establishing a national monument demonstrates the importance of recognizing the original stewards of our public lands,”
Not that many years ago, climate science rejectors ridiculed warnings about global warming by focusing on a single NASA study showing that Antarctica was registering a net gain of ice rather than a loss. Most scientists didn’t buy this challenge to previous studies showing otherwise.
Penguins swim near South Georgia Island.
Antarctica today is clearly not gaining ice faster than it is losing it. There is just no sugarcoating it. The news on this front has steadily worsened, making the need for drastic action greater with each passing day. In the past few months, however, several studies seem to be showing that our circumstances are no longer steadily getting worse, they’re leapfrogging ahead of what even some of the most pessimistic scientific forecasts were predicting would happen in so short a time.
Very much so in Antarctica. You can check out a few recent DK posts on Antarctic happenings by Pakalolo here and here, and by me here and here. The most recent study—Antarctic extreme events, published August 8 in Frontiers of Environmental Science—has found the Antarctic, just like other parts of the planet, is being subjected to extreme environmental events. These include ocean heatwaves and astonishing levels of ice loss. These events, the scientists found, are going to become more common and more intense unless the world sticks to the rise of 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) in global temperatures as agreed to aspirationally in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
What do those extreme events look like?
Every year, the winter sea ice around Antarctica that helps stabilize the ice sheet on land grows to an average of 7 million square miles by mid-September. (The contiguous U.S. is 3.1 million square miles.) This past Antarctic winter, sea ice on June 27 was 1 million sq. miles below that 1981-2010 average, and 618,000 sq. miles below the all-time record low for peak ice on the frozen continent. Such an extreme event, scientists concluded, would only happen once in 7.5 million years, a blink in Earth’s geologic time. Not the same for humans.
In March 2022, at the beginning of autumn in the southern hemisphere, there occurred the world’s largest recorded heatwave registering 38.5 C° (69° F) above normal. This was a byproduct of a strong flow of warm air from Australia piercing the polar vortex that normally keeps this breach from happening. When it occurred, at the center of East Antarctica the temperature should have been around -50 C (-58 F) but was instead about -10° C (14° F). If this had occurred in the summer, it might have melted the surface of the ice sheet up to the summit, something that hasn’t happened for hundreds of thousands of years, according to the scientists. They see it not as a fluke but an omen.
The scientists write, "Although it was so extreme, a formal attribution of the March 2022 event to human factors has not yet been conducted. However, an attribution analysis of an earlier record-breaking heatwave that affected the Antarctic Peninsula in February 2020 and led to the highest recorded temperature in the Antarctic mainland (18.3°C at Esperanza Station), concluded a likely significant contribution from fossil-fuel burning." They add that although it is still a “scientific question as to the level some of these [extreme] events can be attributed to fossil-fuel burning, in the vast majority of cases it is virtually certain that continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increases in the size and frequency of events, even if the causes to date cannot be attributed to it.”
Glaciologist Martin Siegert in Antarctica
In an article prefacing the study, lead author Martin Siegert, a glaciologist and professor of geoscience at the University of Exeter (Cornwall), stresses the absolute necessity for urgent action to zero out greenhouse emissions from burning fossil fuels. He writes:
In other words, what happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica.
Forty-seven countries—the United States included—are party to the Antarctic Treaty, a pact that obliges signatories to protect the continent from "considerable stress and damage." Said Siegert Tuesday, "Nations must understand that by continuing to explore, extract, and burn fossil fuels anywhere in the world, the environment of Antarctica will become ever more affected in ways inconsistent with their pledge."
Siegert thus adds another voice to the millions worldwide—of scientists and other people—who are tired or terrified of the relentless foot-dragging in the face of regional and global impacts that have become an escalating daily reality. It’s not yet doomsday. But keep delaying the needed action long enough and it will be. Tick, tick, tick.
As the Climate Crisis Escalates, Here Are 18 Food and Ag Solutions by Civil Eats Editors. Climate change is here, and the news is dire. We share our recent stories of the many food system innovators finding ways to mitigate damage, increase resilience, and adapt to our ever-changing realities.
EPA posts databases of pesticide harm to people, pets and wildlife for first time in agency history. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency posted searchable databases of pesticide harm for the first time in agency history July 27. The databases, which include reports of harm to people, pets, wildlife and the environment, include information from pesticide companies, state regulators, direct complaints to the EPA and reports to the National Pesticide Information Center and the American Association of Poison Control Centers.
Is it cheaper to refuel your EV battery or gas tank? We did the math in all 50 states. Michael Coren at The New York Times drove varied trips in an EV and a gas-powered car. He found the answer to the question of which is cheaper to be less straightforward than it might seem. Even calculating the cost of gasoline vs. electricity doesn’t provide a good answer, he wrote. That is because prices vary by charger and state. Not only does every operator charge differently, road taxes, rebates, and battery efficiency all affect the final calculation.
My Dates Need to Realize I’m Tired of Trying to Be Chill by Erica Berry at The New York Times. My mother used to tell me that relationships succeed not because you like holding hands but because you like looking in the same direction. She and my father had married while facing a horizon of stability. As middle-class white Americans, they saw a future of homeownership, health care and retirement funds. If relationships depend on a shared fantasy of the future, then global warming does more than unsettle our environment; it creates uncertainty in our interpersonal ones. In the past year, I’ve started dating again. This time, I am swallowing my fear of sounding too anxious and am talking about climate change early on. After all, it is hard to fall in love with a person if we are not also falling in love with the future we want to create together. I don’t approach these conversations with an agenda or as a quiz. But I’ve found that talking about how global warming affects our lives, however casually, becomes a sort of canary in the coal mine for learning about people’s broader beliefs and behaviors. How black-and-white they see the world, how they view their role in the community, how they engage with science and systemic inequality.
A Nigerian miner holds a chunk of lithium.
Africa’s Critical Minerals Could Power America’s Green Energy Transition by Witney Schneidman and Vera Songwe at Foreign Policy. Few U.S. presidents have done as much as Joe Biden to strengthen ties with African nations. Last December, the president hosted nearly 50 African leaders for a three-day summit in Washington. During the meeting, the administration committed to invest at least $55 billion in Africa over the next three years, including private sector initiatives of more than $15 billion. Since then, various senior U.S. officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have visited the continent. Biden has also pledged to visit before the year is out. But when it comes to one of the most important issues on the administration’s agenda—climate change and the transition to a green economy—Africa is missing. As a result, the United States is forgoing an opportunity to deepen commercial ties with the continent, partner with African nations to strengthen supply and production chains, and diversify away from its reliance on China for more than 50% of 26 critical minerals. Witney Schneidman is the CEO of Schneidman & Associates International, and Vera Songwe is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Behind All the Talk, This Is What Big Oil Is Actually Doing by Jason Bordoff at The New York Times. If you’ve been listening to the world’s major energy companies over the past few years, you probably think the clean energy transition is well on its way. But with fossil fuel use and emissions still rising, it is not moving nearly fast enough to address the climate crisis. In June, Shell became the latest of the big oil companies to curb plans to cut oil output, announcing that it will no longer reduce annual oil and gas production through the end of the decade. The company also raised its dividend, diverting money that could be used to develop clean energy. BP’s share prices surged this year when the company walked back its plan to reduce oil and gas output. The industry can point to efforts to reduce emissions and pursue green energy technologies. But those efforts pale in comparison with what they are doing to maintain and enhance oil and gas production. As the International Energy Agency put it, investment by the industry in clean fuels “is picking up” but “remains well short of where it needs to be.” Overall, oil and gas companies are projected to spend more than $500 billion this year on identifying, extracting and producing new oil and gas supplies and even more on dividends to return record profits to shareholders, according to the IEA The industry has spent less than 5% of its production and exploration investments on low-emission energy sources in recent years, according to the IEA.
An example of China's Three-North Shelterbelt Program, which has raised forest coverage in China to 13.57% of the nation’s total.
Abandon the idea of ‘great green walls’ by Matthew Turner, Diana Davis, Emily Yeh, and Pierre Hiernaux at Knowable Magazine. For more than a century, people around the world have tried to stop “encroaching deserts” by planting “green walls” of trees, sometimes thousands of kilometers long. These efforts have failed. Tree survival rates are often less than 30%, biodiversity has decreased, water tables have dropped, local livelihoods have been disrupted, and already-poor people have been further marginalized. Despite this problematic history, the vision of a green wall of trees to hold back the desert remains very popular, with billions of dollars pledged and spent in China on the Three Norths Shelterbelt Program, and in Africa on the Great Green Wall Initiative. As ecologists and geographers who have worked in the drylands of Africa and Asia for decades, we argue that the idea of “green walls” is not only misguided but dangerous. Bound to fail for both social and ecological reasons, the green wall idea reinforces false assumptions about the nature of environmental change in the world’s drylands—lending powerful support to misguided notions that top-down, technocentric interventions are the best. We should abandon the idea to make room for more realistic, evidence-based and effective interventions.
Chaz Teplin
What's the deal with interconnection queues? An interview conducted by David Roberts at his Volts substack with Chaz Teplin of the Rocky Mountain Institute. By now, you’ve probably heard that tons of new renewable energy projects are “stuck in the interconnection queues,” unable to connect to the grid and produce electricity until grid operators get around to approving them, which can take up to five years in some areas. And you might have heard that FERC recently implemented some reforms of the interconnection queue process in hopes of speeding it up. It all seems like a pretty big deal. But as I think about it, it occurs to me that I don’t really know what an interconnection queue is or why they work the way they do. Teplin gives us the skinny.
The Progressive Way to Save Cities From Superstorms by Geoff Dembicki at The New Republic. So far, America’s plan seems to consist of walling off wealthy neighborhoods with hulking gray fortifications and leaving lower-income areas out to dry. It doesn’t have to be like this. It’s a pattern repeating itself across a country that is still shockingly unwilling to confront climate catastrophe. A superstorm making landfall in Norfolk, Virginia, over the coming decades could inundate all but a slender sliver of the low-lying city. White people make up less than half the population, but their neighborhoods would receive significantly better protection than Norfolk’s lower-income Black residents under an Army Corps proposal. Likewise, an Army Corps strategy proposed for Charleston, South Carolina, a city in which more than 80 percent of homes and businesses could be underwater during the next major coastal storm surge, would barely protect a historic Black neighborhood at all. These aren’t outliers, either. A 2021 report from the NAACP concluded that Black communities across the United States “are under-protected by existing Army Corps flood infrastructure and struggle to obtain new protective infrastructure.”
Beachfront Roulette: After Hurricane Ian, Southwest Florida takes its chances on the climate crisis and builds back right up to the water’s edge by Gabrielle Gurley at The American Prospect. Florida’s climate perils are well documented. Southwest Florida is on target for one foot of sea level rise by 2050, within the lifetime of a 30-year home mortgage. Hurricanes are stronger and intensifying faster, and extreme heat complicates everything. But the money sloshing around in the housing sector means the ecosystem is alive and well. Real estate developers prioritize home construction and sales, lenders profit on interest and closing costs, and investors cash in on mortgage-backed securities. Cities and towns need that system to run, surviving on the associated fees and taxes that are even more of a priority to recoup after large taxable property losses. For 2023, Fort Myers Beach saw a 40% decrease in taxable property values and Sanibel had a 33% drop, equivalent to $2 billion in losses in each municipality. As long as the federal government provides disaster assistance, flood insurance, and new fortifications to protect property that survived the last storm, there is little incentive to break these cycles. Long-term options, such as inland alternatives to living on coastal fringes, are set aside. Those elements, combined with a White House–seeking Republican governor who rambles on about “the politicization of the weather,” have virtually guaranteed that there’s no post-Ian discussion in Florida about strategic relocation.
Frackers can use dangerous chemicals without disclosure due to “Halliburton loophole” by John Hurdle at Inside Climate News. The so-called Halliburton Loophole, named after the oil and gas services company once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, means that the industry can use fracking fluid containing chemicals linked to negative health effects including kidney and liver disease, fertility impairment, and reduced sperm counts without being subject to regulation under the act. While environmentalists and public-health campaigners have long called for closing the loophole, they haven’t known how many of the regulated chemicals are used by the industry, how often the industry reports their use in its fracking disclosures, what quantities of the chemicals are used and how often the industry chooses not to identify its chemicals on the grounds that they are proprietary. Now, some of that data is publicly available in a study by researchers at Northeastern University and three other colleges. The paper, published in its final form in February, reports that the industry uses 28 chemicals regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act and discloses them in up to 73% of its reports of fracking activities to FracFocus, an industry-sponsored database.
Falani Spivey at the Urban Incubator Farm.
Congress Puts Federal Support for Urban Farming on the Chopping Block by Lisa Held at Civil Eats. Falani Spivey leaned on a shovel as she pointed to several rows of malagueta and Carolina reaper peppers and described the salad greens she planned to plant for fall harvesting. As a former “nomadic gardener” growing food on tiny plots in multiple locations, Spivey was most excited about the five varieties of watermelon plants already in the ground. “Last year, I wasn’t able to grow much because I didn’t have the space,” she said. “And watermelons need so much space!” Spivey operates one of 10 different farm businesses at the Urban Farm Incubator at Watkins Regional Park in Prince George’s County, Maryland, located just outside of Washington, D.C., and home to nearly 1 million people. Created by Eco City Farms and several partner organizations, the incubator is meant to provide a stepping stone for early career farmers who want to grow more food in densely populated areas but struggle to access land and other resources. It’s one of dozens of diverse projects funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production. Although the larger agency has historically focused on serving large-scale farmers in rural areas, it has granted more than $50 million since 2020 to build school and community gardens in Hawaii, expand residential composting in Fort Worth, Texas, and add hydroponic production to an urban farm in Dubuque, Iowa, among dozens of other projects. The office also oversees a federal advisory committee and is working to improve technical assistance and resources for urban farmers, with the establishment of 17 urban service centers announced just last week. However, the USDA’s work has been stymied by a lack of funding, and now the urban agriculture office could disappear entirely.
New York Needs to Triple Its Renewable Energy Capacity to Meet 2030 Goals, Report Finds by Paige Bennett at EcoWatch. A new report from the New York state comptroller says the state needs to boost its renewable energy capacity by 20 gigawatts by 2030 to meet its goal of 70% electricity clean sources by 2030. New York has targeted 70% electricity generation via clean energy sources by then as part of the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The report showed that as of 2022, about 29% of state electricity was sourced from clean energy, of which about 75% was sourced from hydroelectric generation and about 25% was mostly split between wind energy and solar power. To meet the 2030 goal, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli estimated the state will need to more than triple the renewable energy capacity of about 6.5 gigawatts installed in 2022. But in the past 20 years, the state has added just 12.9 gigawatts, as Utility Dive reported. In a statement, DiNapoli said, “New York State has rightly pursued an aggressive campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit the most dangerous impacts of climate change. New York’s energy goals are attainable, but require careful attention and management to address challenges, meet ambitious deadlines and avoid future pitfalls.”
New York Activists Descend on the Hamptons to Protest the Super Rich Fueling the Climate Crisis by Keerti Gopal at Inside Climate News. Sophie Shepherd has always described herself as a “rule follower,” but days before her 22nd birthday, she chose to face arrest in the middle of a Long Island driveway. Under a blazing hot July sun, two police officers sawed through the PVC pipes that connected her arms to the 13 other protesters blocking the entrance to a private airport.
“What I love about direct action is you’re actually getting in people’s faces and disrupting their way of life,” Shepherd said. “That push is what’s necessary to change the temperature in the room.” Last month, Shepherd and around 40 other climate activists from New York City and Long Island descended on the East Hampton Town Airport to heat up the conversation on how the super rich drive global warming. As police separated and arrested the demonstrators blocking the driveway, other activists in the group surrounded them carrying plastic pitchforks and posters that read “tax the rich.” Their bright red t-shirts read, “billionaires, what are you saving up for, hell?” above a graphic of cash burning. A 5-year-old holding a pitchfork and a homemade poster started a chant: “stop private jets, stop funding oil!” Behind them, in the distance, sat a few rows of private planes and helicopters.
Rebecca Burns
Campaign Cash For Climate Denial by Rebecca Burns at The Lever. As climate change unleashed blistering heat, toxic air quality, and deadly floods on millions of Americans this year, congressional Republicans’ two super PACs raked in nearly $4 million from fossil fuel donors, according to new federal election filings reviewed by The Lever. As the donations poured in, Republican lawmakers began adding fine print to congressional spending bills that would hobble the federal government’s efforts to combat climate change. The Congressional Leadership Fund, which backs GOP House candidates, reported receiving more than $950,000 from oil and gas firms and executives during the first half of the year. The donors included top executives at the firms Energy Transfer Partners, United Refining, and Midland Energy, whose CEO, Syed Javaid Anwar, contributed $125,000. In total, the Congressional Leadership Fund has hauled in more than $19 million so far this year. The group’s communications director boasted this month that the combined haul with its dark money arm, the American Action Network, is significantly outpacing GOP fundraising at this point in the last election cycle. For fossil fuel interests, recent GOP donations proved to be money well spent. As ecological tipping points approach, and some two-thirds of Americans now worry about what climate change will mean for them personally, congressional Republicans are continuing a campaign of outright climate denial.
One Person Stopped California’s Divestment From Fossil Fuels — Again • After helping prevent extinctions for 50 years, the Endangered Species Act itself may be in peril • Solving The Climate Crisis May Mean Thinking Outside The Earth • Alberta Halts New Renewables Because They Were Too Successful • Humans Emitting Carbon Dioxide 200 Times Faster Than Supervolcanic Eruptions That Caused Earth’s Most Severe Mass Extinctions • Global Sea Surface Temperatures Reached New Record High in July • Electrician Shortage Hampering Transition To Renewables • Water quality research helps bring healing and sovereignty to the Apsáalooke • Racism at heart of US failure to tackle deadly heatwaves, expert warns • A New Climate Rule Could Change the Face of America’s Railways • Thinking of buying an electric car in Colorado? You could soon get $26,500 in discounts • Could artificially dimming the sun prevent ice melt?
The designation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni—Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument fulfills an abiding dream of tribal nations and environmental advocates alike. Baaj Nwavjo means “where tribes roam” in Havasupai, and I’tah Kukveni means “our ancestral footprints” in Hopi. Like Bears Ears National Monument, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni will be co-managed by the tribes. Unlike Bears Ears, however, which Utah politicians and right-wing descendants of the Sagebrush Rebels of the 1970s and ‘80s ferociously opposed, polls show the monument has deep and broad support across the political spectrum in Arizona.
Although the Havasupai and Hopi and several other tribes have sought the monument for decades, the proposal only started getting official attention in 2007 from Democratic Congressman Raúl Grijalva of Arizona. The 13-tribe Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition gave impetus to the proposal, a show of tribal unity that is not always so easy to come by. The White House has highlighted numerous tribal leaders’ responses to the designation of the monument.
It approximates the 20-year withdrawal of land from mining that President Barack Obama adopted in 2012. Congress, however, refused to support legsilation making that withdrawal permanent. Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni will shield 917,000 acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon from development, prohibiting new mining claims and giving new protections to thousands of Indigenous cultural sites in the area.
Uqualla, a Havasupai tribal leader in full regalia, talks with the media after President Biden’s announcement designating the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni—Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument.
Biden’s announcement marks a fitting conclusion to a struggle that dates back more than a century. Having failed to spur Congress to act directly to protect various lands, President Teddy Roosevelt did manage to get the Antiquities Act passed in 1906. It gives the president broad authority to set aside public land as national monuments, protecting historic or ecologically significant sites without congressional approval from mining, drilling, and grazing.
Roosevelt wasn’t stingy with this new authority, designating 18 sites as monuments before leaving office. The 11th of those was the Grand Canyon National Monument, 800,000 acres designated 115 years ago. A decade later, it was made a National Park. In his speech naming the monument, Roosevelt declared, “Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”
Of the Biden announcement, Brooke Larsen & Alastair Lee Bitsóí write at High Country News:
At Sierra magazine, Lindsay Botts writes:
At Red Butte, a sacred mountain known as Wii’i Gdwiisa by the Havasupai and Tsé zhin Ii’ahi by the Diné, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, said, “This land is sacred to the many tribal nations who have long advocated for its protection, and establishing a national monument demonstrates the importance of recognizing the original stewards of our public lands,”
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
YouTube VideoGREEN BRIEF
Not that many years ago, climate science rejectors ridiculed warnings about global warming by focusing on a single NASA study showing that Antarctica was registering a net gain of ice rather than a loss. Most scientists didn’t buy this challenge to previous studies showing otherwise.
Penguins swim near South Georgia Island.
Antarctica today is clearly not gaining ice faster than it is losing it. There is just no sugarcoating it. The news on this front has steadily worsened, making the need for drastic action greater with each passing day. In the past few months, however, several studies seem to be showing that our circumstances are no longer steadily getting worse, they’re leapfrogging ahead of what even some of the most pessimistic scientific forecasts were predicting would happen in so short a time.
Very much so in Antarctica. You can check out a few recent DK posts on Antarctic happenings by Pakalolo here and here, and by me here and here. The most recent study—Antarctic extreme events, published August 8 in Frontiers of Environmental Science—has found the Antarctic, just like other parts of the planet, is being subjected to extreme environmental events. These include ocean heatwaves and astonishing levels of ice loss. These events, the scientists found, are going to become more common and more intense unless the world sticks to the rise of 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) in global temperatures as agreed to aspirationally in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
What do those extreme events look like?
Every year, the winter sea ice around Antarctica that helps stabilize the ice sheet on land grows to an average of 7 million square miles by mid-September. (The contiguous U.S. is 3.1 million square miles.) This past Antarctic winter, sea ice on June 27 was 1 million sq. miles below that 1981-2010 average, and 618,000 sq. miles below the all-time record low for peak ice on the frozen continent. Such an extreme event, scientists concluded, would only happen once in 7.5 million years, a blink in Earth’s geologic time. Not the same for humans.
In March 2022, at the beginning of autumn in the southern hemisphere, there occurred the world’s largest recorded heatwave registering 38.5 C° (69° F) above normal. This was a byproduct of a strong flow of warm air from Australia piercing the polar vortex that normally keeps this breach from happening. When it occurred, at the center of East Antarctica the temperature should have been around -50 C (-58 F) but was instead about -10° C (14° F). If this had occurred in the summer, it might have melted the surface of the ice sheet up to the summit, something that hasn’t happened for hundreds of thousands of years, according to the scientists. They see it not as a fluke but an omen.
The scientists write, "Although it was so extreme, a formal attribution of the March 2022 event to human factors has not yet been conducted. However, an attribution analysis of an earlier record-breaking heatwave that affected the Antarctic Peninsula in February 2020 and led to the highest recorded temperature in the Antarctic mainland (18.3°C at Esperanza Station), concluded a likely significant contribution from fossil-fuel burning." They add that although it is still a “scientific question as to the level some of these [extreme] events can be attributed to fossil-fuel burning, in the vast majority of cases it is virtually certain that continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increases in the size and frequency of events, even if the causes to date cannot be attributed to it.”
Glaciologist Martin Siegert in Antarctica
In an article prefacing the study, lead author Martin Siegert, a glaciologist and professor of geoscience at the University of Exeter (Cornwall), stresses the absolute necessity for urgent action to zero out greenhouse emissions from burning fossil fuels. He writes:
In other words, what happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica.
Forty-seven countries—the United States included—are party to the Antarctic Treaty, a pact that obliges signatories to protect the continent from "considerable stress and damage." Said Siegert Tuesday, "Nations must understand that by continuing to explore, extract, and burn fossil fuels anywhere in the world, the environment of Antarctica will become ever more affected in ways inconsistent with their pledge."
Siegert thus adds another voice to the millions worldwide—of scientists and other people—who are tired or terrified of the relentless foot-dragging in the face of regional and global impacts that have become an escalating daily reality. It’s not yet doomsday. But keep delaying the needed action long enough and it will be. Tick, tick, tick.
RESOURCES & ACTION
As the Climate Crisis Escalates, Here Are 18 Food and Ag Solutions by Civil Eats Editors. Climate change is here, and the news is dire. We share our recent stories of the many food system innovators finding ways to mitigate damage, increase resilience, and adapt to our ever-changing realities.
EPA posts databases of pesticide harm to people, pets and wildlife for first time in agency history. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency posted searchable databases of pesticide harm for the first time in agency history July 27. The databases, which include reports of harm to people, pets, wildlife and the environment, include information from pesticide companies, state regulators, direct complaints to the EPA and reports to the National Pesticide Information Center and the American Association of Poison Control Centers.
Is it cheaper to refuel your EV battery or gas tank? We did the math in all 50 states. Michael Coren at The New York Times drove varied trips in an EV and a gas-powered car. He found the answer to the question of which is cheaper to be less straightforward than it might seem. Even calculating the cost of gasoline vs. electricity doesn’t provide a good answer, he wrote. That is because prices vary by charger and state. Not only does every operator charge differently, road taxes, rebates, and battery efficiency all affect the final calculation.
ECOPINION
My Dates Need to Realize I’m Tired of Trying to Be Chill by Erica Berry at The New York Times. My mother used to tell me that relationships succeed not because you like holding hands but because you like looking in the same direction. She and my father had married while facing a horizon of stability. As middle-class white Americans, they saw a future of homeownership, health care and retirement funds. If relationships depend on a shared fantasy of the future, then global warming does more than unsettle our environment; it creates uncertainty in our interpersonal ones. In the past year, I’ve started dating again. This time, I am swallowing my fear of sounding too anxious and am talking about climate change early on. After all, it is hard to fall in love with a person if we are not also falling in love with the future we want to create together. I don’t approach these conversations with an agenda or as a quiz. But I’ve found that talking about how global warming affects our lives, however casually, becomes a sort of canary in the coal mine for learning about people’s broader beliefs and behaviors. How black-and-white they see the world, how they view their role in the community, how they engage with science and systemic inequality.
A Nigerian miner holds a chunk of lithium.
Africa’s Critical Minerals Could Power America’s Green Energy Transition by Witney Schneidman and Vera Songwe at Foreign Policy. Few U.S. presidents have done as much as Joe Biden to strengthen ties with African nations. Last December, the president hosted nearly 50 African leaders for a three-day summit in Washington. During the meeting, the administration committed to invest at least $55 billion in Africa over the next three years, including private sector initiatives of more than $15 billion. Since then, various senior U.S. officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have visited the continent. Biden has also pledged to visit before the year is out. But when it comes to one of the most important issues on the administration’s agenda—climate change and the transition to a green economy—Africa is missing. As a result, the United States is forgoing an opportunity to deepen commercial ties with the continent, partner with African nations to strengthen supply and production chains, and diversify away from its reliance on China for more than 50% of 26 critical minerals. Witney Schneidman is the CEO of Schneidman & Associates International, and Vera Songwe is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Behind All the Talk, This Is What Big Oil Is Actually Doing by Jason Bordoff at The New York Times. If you’ve been listening to the world’s major energy companies over the past few years, you probably think the clean energy transition is well on its way. But with fossil fuel use and emissions still rising, it is not moving nearly fast enough to address the climate crisis. In June, Shell became the latest of the big oil companies to curb plans to cut oil output, announcing that it will no longer reduce annual oil and gas production through the end of the decade. The company also raised its dividend, diverting money that could be used to develop clean energy. BP’s share prices surged this year when the company walked back its plan to reduce oil and gas output. The industry can point to efforts to reduce emissions and pursue green energy technologies. But those efforts pale in comparison with what they are doing to maintain and enhance oil and gas production. As the International Energy Agency put it, investment by the industry in clean fuels “is picking up” but “remains well short of where it needs to be.” Overall, oil and gas companies are projected to spend more than $500 billion this year on identifying, extracting and producing new oil and gas supplies and even more on dividends to return record profits to shareholders, according to the IEA The industry has spent less than 5% of its production and exploration investments on low-emission energy sources in recent years, according to the IEA.
An example of China's Three-North Shelterbelt Program, which has raised forest coverage in China to 13.57% of the nation’s total.
Abandon the idea of ‘great green walls’ by Matthew Turner, Diana Davis, Emily Yeh, and Pierre Hiernaux at Knowable Magazine. For more than a century, people around the world have tried to stop “encroaching deserts” by planting “green walls” of trees, sometimes thousands of kilometers long. These efforts have failed. Tree survival rates are often less than 30%, biodiversity has decreased, water tables have dropped, local livelihoods have been disrupted, and already-poor people have been further marginalized. Despite this problematic history, the vision of a green wall of trees to hold back the desert remains very popular, with billions of dollars pledged and spent in China on the Three Norths Shelterbelt Program, and in Africa on the Great Green Wall Initiative. As ecologists and geographers who have worked in the drylands of Africa and Asia for decades, we argue that the idea of “green walls” is not only misguided but dangerous. Bound to fail for both social and ecological reasons, the green wall idea reinforces false assumptions about the nature of environmental change in the world’s drylands—lending powerful support to misguided notions that top-down, technocentric interventions are the best. We should abandon the idea to make room for more realistic, evidence-based and effective interventions.
Chaz Teplin
What's the deal with interconnection queues? An interview conducted by David Roberts at his Volts substack with Chaz Teplin of the Rocky Mountain Institute. By now, you’ve probably heard that tons of new renewable energy projects are “stuck in the interconnection queues,” unable to connect to the grid and produce electricity until grid operators get around to approving them, which can take up to five years in some areas. And you might have heard that FERC recently implemented some reforms of the interconnection queue process in hopes of speeding it up. It all seems like a pretty big deal. But as I think about it, it occurs to me that I don’t really know what an interconnection queue is or why they work the way they do. Teplin gives us the skinny.
The Progressive Way to Save Cities From Superstorms by Geoff Dembicki at The New Republic. So far, America’s plan seems to consist of walling off wealthy neighborhoods with hulking gray fortifications and leaving lower-income areas out to dry. It doesn’t have to be like this. It’s a pattern repeating itself across a country that is still shockingly unwilling to confront climate catastrophe. A superstorm making landfall in Norfolk, Virginia, over the coming decades could inundate all but a slender sliver of the low-lying city. White people make up less than half the population, but their neighborhoods would receive significantly better protection than Norfolk’s lower-income Black residents under an Army Corps proposal. Likewise, an Army Corps strategy proposed for Charleston, South Carolina, a city in which more than 80 percent of homes and businesses could be underwater during the next major coastal storm surge, would barely protect a historic Black neighborhood at all. These aren’t outliers, either. A 2021 report from the NAACP concluded that Black communities across the United States “are under-protected by existing Army Corps flood infrastructure and struggle to obtain new protective infrastructure.”
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HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ
Beachfront Roulette: After Hurricane Ian, Southwest Florida takes its chances on the climate crisis and builds back right up to the water’s edge by Gabrielle Gurley at The American Prospect. Florida’s climate perils are well documented. Southwest Florida is on target for one foot of sea level rise by 2050, within the lifetime of a 30-year home mortgage. Hurricanes are stronger and intensifying faster, and extreme heat complicates everything. But the money sloshing around in the housing sector means the ecosystem is alive and well. Real estate developers prioritize home construction and sales, lenders profit on interest and closing costs, and investors cash in on mortgage-backed securities. Cities and towns need that system to run, surviving on the associated fees and taxes that are even more of a priority to recoup after large taxable property losses. For 2023, Fort Myers Beach saw a 40% decrease in taxable property values and Sanibel had a 33% drop, equivalent to $2 billion in losses in each municipality. As long as the federal government provides disaster assistance, flood insurance, and new fortifications to protect property that survived the last storm, there is little incentive to break these cycles. Long-term options, such as inland alternatives to living on coastal fringes, are set aside. Those elements, combined with a White House–seeking Republican governor who rambles on about “the politicization of the weather,” have virtually guaranteed that there’s no post-Ian discussion in Florida about strategic relocation.
Frackers can use dangerous chemicals without disclosure due to “Halliburton loophole” by John Hurdle at Inside Climate News. The so-called Halliburton Loophole, named after the oil and gas services company once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, means that the industry can use fracking fluid containing chemicals linked to negative health effects including kidney and liver disease, fertility impairment, and reduced sperm counts without being subject to regulation under the act. While environmentalists and public-health campaigners have long called for closing the loophole, they haven’t known how many of the regulated chemicals are used by the industry, how often the industry reports their use in its fracking disclosures, what quantities of the chemicals are used and how often the industry chooses not to identify its chemicals on the grounds that they are proprietary. Now, some of that data is publicly available in a study by researchers at Northeastern University and three other colleges. The paper, published in its final form in February, reports that the industry uses 28 chemicals regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act and discloses them in up to 73% of its reports of fracking activities to FracFocus, an industry-sponsored database.
Falani Spivey at the Urban Incubator Farm.
Congress Puts Federal Support for Urban Farming on the Chopping Block by Lisa Held at Civil Eats. Falani Spivey leaned on a shovel as she pointed to several rows of malagueta and Carolina reaper peppers and described the salad greens she planned to plant for fall harvesting. As a former “nomadic gardener” growing food on tiny plots in multiple locations, Spivey was most excited about the five varieties of watermelon plants already in the ground. “Last year, I wasn’t able to grow much because I didn’t have the space,” she said. “And watermelons need so much space!” Spivey operates one of 10 different farm businesses at the Urban Farm Incubator at Watkins Regional Park in Prince George’s County, Maryland, located just outside of Washington, D.C., and home to nearly 1 million people. Created by Eco City Farms and several partner organizations, the incubator is meant to provide a stepping stone for early career farmers who want to grow more food in densely populated areas but struggle to access land and other resources. It’s one of dozens of diverse projects funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production. Although the larger agency has historically focused on serving large-scale farmers in rural areas, it has granted more than $50 million since 2020 to build school and community gardens in Hawaii, expand residential composting in Fort Worth, Texas, and add hydroponic production to an urban farm in Dubuque, Iowa, among dozens of other projects. The office also oversees a federal advisory committee and is working to improve technical assistance and resources for urban farmers, with the establishment of 17 urban service centers announced just last week. However, the USDA’s work has been stymied by a lack of funding, and now the urban agriculture office could disappear entirely.
New York Needs to Triple Its Renewable Energy Capacity to Meet 2030 Goals, Report Finds by Paige Bennett at EcoWatch. A new report from the New York state comptroller says the state needs to boost its renewable energy capacity by 20 gigawatts by 2030 to meet its goal of 70% electricity clean sources by 2030. New York has targeted 70% electricity generation via clean energy sources by then as part of the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The report showed that as of 2022, about 29% of state electricity was sourced from clean energy, of which about 75% was sourced from hydroelectric generation and about 25% was mostly split between wind energy and solar power. To meet the 2030 goal, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli estimated the state will need to more than triple the renewable energy capacity of about 6.5 gigawatts installed in 2022. But in the past 20 years, the state has added just 12.9 gigawatts, as Utility Dive reported. In a statement, DiNapoli said, “New York State has rightly pursued an aggressive campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit the most dangerous impacts of climate change. New York’s energy goals are attainable, but require careful attention and management to address challenges, meet ambitious deadlines and avoid future pitfalls.”
New York Activists Descend on the Hamptons to Protest the Super Rich Fueling the Climate Crisis by Keerti Gopal at Inside Climate News. Sophie Shepherd has always described herself as a “rule follower,” but days before her 22nd birthday, she chose to face arrest in the middle of a Long Island driveway. Under a blazing hot July sun, two police officers sawed through the PVC pipes that connected her arms to the 13 other protesters blocking the entrance to a private airport.
“What I love about direct action is you’re actually getting in people’s faces and disrupting their way of life,” Shepherd said. “That push is what’s necessary to change the temperature in the room.” Last month, Shepherd and around 40 other climate activists from New York City and Long Island descended on the East Hampton Town Airport to heat up the conversation on how the super rich drive global warming. As police separated and arrested the demonstrators blocking the driveway, other activists in the group surrounded them carrying plastic pitchforks and posters that read “tax the rich.” Their bright red t-shirts read, “billionaires, what are you saving up for, hell?” above a graphic of cash burning. A 5-year-old holding a pitchfork and a homemade poster started a chant: “stop private jets, stop funding oil!” Behind them, in the distance, sat a few rows of private planes and helicopters.
Rebecca Burns
Campaign Cash For Climate Denial by Rebecca Burns at The Lever. As climate change unleashed blistering heat, toxic air quality, and deadly floods on millions of Americans this year, congressional Republicans’ two super PACs raked in nearly $4 million from fossil fuel donors, according to new federal election filings reviewed by The Lever. As the donations poured in, Republican lawmakers began adding fine print to congressional spending bills that would hobble the federal government’s efforts to combat climate change. The Congressional Leadership Fund, which backs GOP House candidates, reported receiving more than $950,000 from oil and gas firms and executives during the first half of the year. The donors included top executives at the firms Energy Transfer Partners, United Refining, and Midland Energy, whose CEO, Syed Javaid Anwar, contributed $125,000. In total, the Congressional Leadership Fund has hauled in more than $19 million so far this year. The group’s communications director boasted this month that the combined haul with its dark money arm, the American Action Network, is significantly outpacing GOP fundraising at this point in the last election cycle. For fossil fuel interests, recent GOP donations proved to be money well spent. As ecological tipping points approach, and some two-thirds of Americans now worry about what climate change will mean for them personally, congressional Republicans are continuing a campaign of outright climate denial.
GREEN LINKS
One Person Stopped California’s Divestment From Fossil Fuels — Again • After helping prevent extinctions for 50 years, the Endangered Species Act itself may be in peril • Solving The Climate Crisis May Mean Thinking Outside The Earth • Alberta Halts New Renewables Because They Were Too Successful • Humans Emitting Carbon Dioxide 200 Times Faster Than Supervolcanic Eruptions That Caused Earth’s Most Severe Mass Extinctions • Global Sea Surface Temperatures Reached New Record High in July • Electrician Shortage Hampering Transition To Renewables • Water quality research helps bring healing and sovereignty to the Apsáalooke • Racism at heart of US failure to tackle deadly heatwaves, expert warns • A New Climate Rule Could Change the Face of America’s Railways • Thinking of buying an electric car in Colorado? You could soon get $26,500 in discounts • Could artificially dimming the sun prevent ice melt?