Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 104

Why A Former ‘President’ Was Protesting An Offshore Lease Sale In New Orleans This Week

Joined by a Teddy Roosevelt impersonator in New Orleans earlier this week, a group of conservationists called on the White House to postpone oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico until Congress takes action to save what conservation groups call America’s best parks program.

The Land and Water Conservation (LWCF) is a 50-year-old program intended to offset impacts of offshore drilling by investing in federal, state and local conservation projects funded entirely through fees from oil and gas companies. However, inaction from Congress has put “America’s Best Parks Program” at risk of expiring next month.

“Royalties from offshore drilling are supposed to fund parks and trails, but for too long Congress has diverted these funds and now may even let the whole program expire,” said Luke Metzger, the Gulf of Mexico Coordinator for Environment America. “Until the promise to our parks is restored, there should be no new sale of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas companies.”

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CREDIT: Environment America

Representatives from Environment America, Care2.com, the Gulf Restoration Network, and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade were joined on Monday by the “Conservation President” Teddy Roosevelt, to deliver a petition signed by more than 65,000 Americans calling on the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to “encourage Congress to take their responsibility for our nation’s natural heritage seriously.”

In addition to helping support many of the country’s most iconic national parks like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, LWCF has helped conserve millions of acres of land and create state and local outdoor projects in every state.

“By rescheduling the August lease sale, Secretary Jewell and the administration can save a program that is indispensable to the future of American parks and carry forward one of this country’s most celebrated conservation legacies,” a Center for American Progress column cited in the petition concluded.

Despite the program’s popularity and calls from both Republicans and Democrats to fully fund and permanently reauthorize LWCF, it is unlikely Congress will act before the program expires on September 30. Led by House Natural Resources Chair Rob Bishop (R-UT), a few members of Congress are advocating to alter the program, including redirecting and placing restrictions on LWCF funds.

Recognizing that time to reauthorize LWCF is running out, 21 Democratic senators led by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) sent a letter to Senate energy leadership last month linking LWCF to another program in need of long term funding, the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT). PILT, which provides federal assistance to rural communities with public lands within their borders, is popular with many of the western members of Congress delaying action on LWCF. “Given the importance of these programs, we would oppose efforts to extend funding and reauthorization of PILT without taking similar action to reauthorize and fully fund LWCF,” the letter reads.

As Fuel Fix reported last week, although a provision reauthorizing LWCF was included in the broad Senate Energy bill released last month, “it is unclear whether that energy legislation will be fully debated, much less pass the Senate before the LWCF expires,” and that the chances of the House picking up the legislation are “slim.”

The national trade association representing the offshore industry, NOIA, responded to the calls to delay to the lease sale, calling the organizations “extremists” and “out of touch with energy reality” in a statement. “This is just another misguided and desperate attempt to shut down oil and natural gas production at all costs, and ignores projections showing that U.S. consumers will rely largely upon traditional fuels well into the future,” said NOIA President Randall Luthi.

Despite calls for delays, Wednesday’s lease sale of more than 21 million acres off the coast of Texas continued as planned.

“All the bids are in, and the winner is the oil industry while our parks have drawn the short end of the stick,” said Environment America’s Metzger in an email.

The auction attracted the lowest interest from oil companies since 1986, with five companies bidding $22.7 million in sales.

The Department of the Interior has stepped up efforts in recent weeks to highlight the importance of LWCF and encourage Congress to act.

Last week, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced new LWCF funding to all 50 states, urging Congress to permanently reauthorize and fully fund the program. “A half century ago, Congress established a landmark law to use some revenues from offshore oil and gas development to help states and communities across America set aside green spaces, build boat docks and ball fields, and undertake other recreation projects,” said Secretary Jewell. “Today, Congress has the opportunity to continue this great legacy by permanently reauthorizing and fully funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund.”

Congress will have less than 25 days to act when it returns from recess in September.

Claire Moser is the Research and Advocacy Associate with the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress. You can follow her on Twitter at @Claire_Moser.

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DrillingGulf CoastPublic Lands

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How Much Of California’s Drought Was Caused By Climate Change? Scientists Now Have The Answer.

Over the last few years, as California’s historic, four-year drought has intensified, scientists have found clues linking the extreme weather event to human-caused climate change. Now, a new study is the first to estimate just how much climate change contributed to the drought.

The study, published Thursday in Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate change can be blamed for between 8 to 27 percent of the drought conditions between 2012 and 2014 and between 5 to 18 percent in 2014. Though these relative contributions of climate change differ between the two periods of time, due to differences in severity of the drought from year to year, the study said climate change’s absolute contribution was “virtually identical” between the two periods — meaning climate change has contributed a fairly steady amount to California’s drought over the last three years.

To figure out how much anthropogenic warming contributed to California’s drought, the researchers looked at soil moisture data in various parts of the state for every month from 1901 through 2014. With the help of that data, “we know what the climate’s like in every month since 1901,” said Park Williams, assistant research professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and lead author of the study. “We are fairly certain as to how much precipitation fell in a given month in given location.”

Every year, the bully — or atmosphere — is demanding more resources — or water — than ever before

The researchers used that data to calculate how much water evaporated from the soil each month. When the researchers compared the data to climate models in California, Williams said, they were able to determine how much of the current drought could be blamed on climate change — an amount that, according to Williams, is likely closer to 20 percent than to 8 percent. Steadily rising temperatures due to climate change, along with natural weather variability in California, led to more and more water evaporating from the soil.

The researchers used four different methods to estimate global warming trends, and, for every month and every California location studied, calculated 432 possible soil moistures. That rich supply of data helped give the researchers a reliable range of climate change’s contribution to the drought, but the data was too complex to glean one single percentage from it.

“There is no one correct way to do this,” Williams said. “We can’t just ask the Earth exactly what’s been human-induced and what’s natural.”

The study does make it a little easier to illustrate how climate change and natural variability interact in a drought situation, however. Natural weather variability means temperatures, precipitation levels, and humidity are constantly changing — but they’re changing while the undercurrent of climate change steadily brings temperatures up. Climate change, Williams said, “is like a bully that demands part of your money every year, and every year it demands more of your money than the year before. Every year, the bully — or atmosphere — is demanding more resources — or water — than ever before.”

The bully, he said, “is breaking a record every single year and in a predictable way. We know in 2030 that the bully will be asking way more than it is right now. knowing that, we can be preparing more wisely in managing water resources to ensure that we can pay bully every year.”

California’s drought has hit the state hard over the last four years, threatening its lucrative agriculture industry and leading to its first-ever mandatory restrictions of water use. The drought has broken record after record — in April, the state’s previous low-snowpack record was, in the words of California’s chief of snow surveys, “obliterated,” and temperature records have been broken multiple times already in 2015. It’s led to job losses in the agriculture industry, and according to one study will likely cost the state $2.74 billion this year — an increase over the $2.2 billion it cost last year.

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California’s drought, as of August 11.

CREDIT: US Drought Monitor

Studies besides Thursday’s have assessed the drought’s severity and linked it to climate change. A study from 2014 found that California’s drought was the most severe the state has had in the last 1,200 years. And a Stanford study from this March concluded that the region of high atmospheric pressure — dubbed the “ridiculously resilient ridge” — above the Pacific Ocean that’s been blocking storms from making their way to California was more likely to form under today’s climate change conditions than it would have been if global warming hadn’t been occurring.

Thursday’s study “supports the previous work showing that temperature makes it harder for drought to break, and increases the long-term risk,” climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh, who led the Stanford research, said in a statement.

That finding from the study — that droughts like the one in California are becoming increasingly likely in many areas because of climate change — is one of the study’s most important conclusions, Williams said. According to the study, higher levels of evaporation — driven by higher temperatures — will overtake any increases in rain that California is expected to have over the next few decades.

“Severe drought years in California should occur 7 percent of time in warming-free scenario,” he said. “We now find that under the current amount of warming, the probability of a severe drought year has approximately doubled. So even though it may be argued that the human-induced part of the drought sounds small at 20 percent, it seems worse when you consider the probability of extreme drought has increased by 100 percent.”

Historically, it’s been difficult to tie a particular weather event to climate change. But Williams said he thinks it’s getting easier, as new and improved climate datasets continue to come out and as computational abilities improve. And he says it’s important to keep doing studies like this that aim to figure out just how much climate change influenced a major event. He said he’s heard claims, both from researchers and from the media, of two extremes regarding California’s drought: one, that it was caused entirely by climate change, and two, that it was caused solely by natural weather variability. Both those claims, Williams said, are “equally dangerous.”

“If all Californians believe that this drought is caused purely by natural variability, then they’re very unlikely to want to prepare for a trend towards increasing drought variability in the future,” he said. “If all Californians think this drought is caused purely by global warming, then when natural climate variability causes California to get wet in a few years, they’re going to be very surprised, and possibly prone to thinking that climate change is bogus. Knowing the true answer can allow for more educated decisions about how to prepare.”

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The U.S. Geological Survey’s Investigation Of A Widely-Used Pesticide Produced Some Stunning Results

The results from the first national-scale investigation looking at the environmental prevalence of a controversial and widely used pesticide are in, and they’re pretty stunning: a little more than half of the streams sampled by the United States Geological Survey contained neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides that has been closely examined for its potential impact on key pollinators like honeybees.

The study tested for six different types of neonicotinoids in 24 states, as well as Puerto Rico, between 2011 and 2014. Samples were collected from both urban streams and agricultural streams.

“In the study, neonicotinoids occurred throughout the year in urban streams while pulses of neonicotinoids were typical in agricultural streams during crop planting season,” USGS research chemist Michelle Hladik, the report’s lead author, said in a press statement.

The prevalence of neonicotinoids varied among types — one type of neonicotinoid was found in 63 percent of samples, while another was not detected in any samples. In all cases, the levels were low — below thresholds mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency’s aquatic life criteria.

Still, researchers said that the results would serve as an important baseline for future research.

“The occurrence of low levels in streams throughout the year supports the need for future research on the potential impacts of neonicotinoids on aquatic life and terrestrial animals that rely on aquatic life,” USGS scientist Kathryn Kuivila, the research team leader, said in a press statement. “These results will serve as an important baseline for that future work.”

Neonicotinoids — derived from nicotine — are a relatively new kind of pesticide that impact an insect’s nervous system, causing paralysis and death. They’ve become especially popular in recent years because they’re generally considered less toxic to humans and mammals than older insecticides — neonicotinoids target a specific pathway in the nervous system that’s a lot more common in insects than in warm-blooded mammals. Neonicotinoids are also water soluble, meaning they can be applied to soil — or to seeds before planting — and readily taken up through roots into plant leaves.

Neonicotinoids were first developed in the 1990s, but became especially prevalent starting in the mid-2000s, driven largely by an increase in neonicotinoid-treated seeds (mostly corn and soy). The rise of neonicotinoids has stoked fears that their prevalence could be contributing to colony collapse disorder (CCD), a syndrome of bee colony collapse that was first noticed in 2006. No studies have found a definitive link between neonicotinoids and colony collapse disorder (though one widely criticized 2014 study did name neonicotinoids as the main cause of CCD).

None of this is to say that neonics, or pesticides in general, have been given a complete pass when it comes to bee deaths. Some studies have suggested that neonicotinoid pesticides can make bees forget the scent of food, hindering their ability to pollinate crops. Others have suggested that pesticides, including neonicotinoids, likely do make bees more susceptible to infection. Another study found persistent levels of neonicotinoids in beehives for most of the year, suggesting that the pesticide is pervasive among bee colonies. Whether neonicotinoids are the leading cause of bee deaths is complicated and still being studied, but a growing body of science seems to suggest that they are at least one factor in the decline of pollinator populations around the world.

Still, the lack of a definitive link between neonicotinoids and CCD hasn’t stopped a wave of opposition to the pesticides from both businesses and government. In October of 2014, 60 members of Congress wrote a letter to the EPA urging them to issue a ban or restriction on the use of neonicotinoids, citing their adverse effect on pollinators and wildlife. In January, a coalition of more than 100 businesses — including many food companies — also penned a letter to the EPA and the White House, calling for a ban on neonicotinoids. In May, the White House announced a national strategy aimed at combating pollinator loss; the strategy calls for more studies aimed at understanding the link between neonicotinoids and pollinator health.

USGS researchers see their study as a useful addition to the White House’s official strategy.

“This research will support the overall goals of the Strategy, by helping to understand whether these water-borne pesticides, particularly at the low levels shown in this study, pose a risk for pollinators,” Mike Focazio, program coordinator for the USGS Toxic Substances Hydrology Program, said in a press statement.

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Why Republicans Could Have Trouble Winning The Latino Vote, In One Poll

A new poll released Tuesday suggests Republicans could have a tough time winning over a key voting bloc next year if they don’t start taking environmental issues seriously.

Nearly three-quarters of voting Latinos — one of the fastest-growing demographics in America — think it is “important” that the United States acts on climate change, according to the poll, released by Earthjustice and GreenLatinos. More Latinos think it is important to reduce smog and to increase water conservation than to fix immigration policies, the poll of registered Latino voters found. The poll also found that 90 percent of Latinos want to strengthen the Clean Water Act, and 85 percent want to reduce smog and air pollution.

“For Latinos, our strong positions on questions pertaining to the importance of stewardship of our natural environment and conservation of resources reflect long-held cultural tenets taught to us not as environmentalism, but based more on common sense, economic necessity, and good citizenry,” Mark Magaña, president and founder of GreenLatinos, said in a statement.

American Latinos are three times more likely to die from asthma than other racial or ethnic groups, and about half the country’s Latino population lives in regions that frequently violate clean air rules, according to the National Hispanic Medical Association. This discrepancy is even more dramatic for low-income Latinos. Almost a quarter of low-income Hispanic and Puerto Rican children in the United States have been diagnosed with asthma, in comparison to one in 13 middle-class or wealthy white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Latinos are very concerned about climate change” and, more specifically, air and water pollution, Gary Segura, co-founder of Latino Decisions, told ThinkProgress. “They see pollution as directly affecting their families.”

And as the climate warms, that vulnerability will only worsen: the increase in ozone levels associated with rising temperatures is predicted to drive up asthma-related U.S. hospital admissions.

In addition, many American Latinos are one or two generations away from their country of origin, Segura said, which means many have strong ties to developing nations — which are also more at risk from the effects of climate change.

“They also see climate change affecting their countries of origin,” Segura said.

Most Latinos believe climate change is human-caused, the poll found. The findings are consistent with earlier polling. A 2014 poll by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that nine out of 10 Latinos in the United States — including 68 percent of Republican Latinos — want the country to take action against climate change.

This is bad news for prospective Republican candidates.

Most of the 16 Republican candidates don’t accept the scientific consensus on climate change — and those who do often say it either isn’t a problem or isn’t human-caused.

Policies that seek to address pollution and climate change, such as the Waters of the United States rule, the Clean Power Plan, and mercury regulations, have been rejected by many Republicans, who often argue that environmental regulations are job-killers.

This argument doesn’t hold water with Latinos. “Our polls show that Latinos don’t buy that,” Segura said. “Less than one in five believed in the jobs-environment trade-off.”

He said the results were particularly interesting considering that a large portion of the community is working class. And, in fact, the poll showed that economic recovery was the number one most important issue to the group. Only 18 percent of respondents said stronger environmental laws would reduce economic growth and cost jobs, while 59 percent said that stronger environmental laws would actually help the economy. (The remainder said didn’t know or thought they would have no affect.)

“That can’t help but help the Democrats,” Segura said.

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Why President Trump Would Likely Honor A Paris Climate Deal And The EPA’s Clean Power Plan

The establishment has now accepted the reality that Donald Trump could win the GOP nomination — and could even possibly … become the next president of the United States. [Memo To Self: Adjust meds.]

Yet while narcissistic showman Trump has a long history of saying nonsensical things about climate change and clean energy, narcissistic President Trump is exceedingly unlikely to blow up any global climate agreement that comes out of Paris for two big reasons.

First, the Paris accord is almost certain to be a very good deal for us (as I discussed here), and Trump sees himself as a great deal-maker above all else. Second, Trump understands the value of “brand” — and nothing would ruin his brand (or this country’s) more permanently than to be the guy (or country) who killed the world’s best (and maybe only) chance of getting onto a path that could avoid catastrophic warming and centuries of misery for billions of people.

If, as Trump said Sunday, he won’t torch the Iranian nuclear deal, then he isn’t going to burn any Paris accord — and that means he’d have to honor the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, since that is essential to the U.S. side of the deal.

Trump Is For Real

Let’s take all of these points in order. First, the establishment spoke through one of its major mouthpieces — Bloomberg Politics Managing Editor Mark Halperin, and author of best-selling campaign books like Game Change:

We’ve reached a turning point with Trump, the major establishment campaigns of both parties now think Trump could win Iowa, and most of them think he could win the nomination, and a significant number think he could win the White House.

Yes, seriously. Here is the segment from “Morning Joe” on MSNBC Monday:

Trump Spouts Nonsense on Climate and Clean Energy

Second, based strictly on what’s he’s said, a President Trump would not be good for the climate. Trump’s comments have been indistinguishable from other high-profile conservative candidates who deny climate science, and oppose clean energy — as ClimateProgress has detailed in many posts over the years, most recently “It Snowed Once And Other Things Donald Trump Thinks Prove Global Warming Is A Hoax.”

As someone who has been highly critical of Trump’s nonsense for a long time, I am not making any excuses for the anti-scientific, pro-pollution ideas he has been spreading. But it remains the case that conservative candidates for higher office say a lot of nonsensical things — the difference with Trump, at least right now, is that he knows this and even admits that much of what he’s said is bluster.

For instance, we and others (rightly) criticize Trump for the bizarre conspiracy theory he tweeted in 2012:

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Seriously? Actually, no. When CNN’s Jake Tapper read this tweet to Trump in a late June interview, Trump admitted he was serious (mostly):

TRUMP: Well of course I’m being sarcastic you know…

TAPPER: That’s not to be taken seriously?

TRUMP: No it’s a little bit serious, there’s a little bit of seriousness there. Look, we are restricting our factories much more than China, I go to China. They have factories that are much more competitive, I’m not saying friendly, but they’re certainly not environmentally friendly. I’m a huge believer in clean air, I’m not a huge believer in the global warming phenomenon.

In short, he’s admitting the tweet was pure B.S., which is quite a concession from a guy who never retracts or apologizes for anything. So what happens when Tapper presses him on the scientific reality of global warming?

TAPPER: But the overwhelming majority of scientists say it’s real and it’s manmade and things are happening-

TRUMP: Oh there could be some manmade to- I’m not saying that there’s zero- but not nearly to the extent- when Obama gets up said it’s the number one problem in our country, and if it is, why is that we have to do our and clean up our factories now and China doesn’t have to do it for another 30 or 35 years in their wonderful agreement, you know our wonderful negotiators.

They have much smarter, much better negotiators than we do, it’s really as simple as that. We don’t have- and that’s part of the reason I’m doing this.

TAPPER: Because you’re the man who wrote “The Art of The Deal”

TRUMP: I did write “The Art of the Deal” in all fairness.

That’s an interesting pivot from a guy who has called the whole thing a hoax. Trump (correctly) understands that most of what politicians say on the issues does not matter to voters (see below). This allows him to focus on being as entertaining and provocative as possible for the public, but then retreating to pragmatism — his supposedly superior deal-making skills — whenever pressed on the facts by the media.

[image error]

CREDIT: Wikipedia

For the record, Trump has his facts dead wrong about the China deal, or he may even know this is B.S. as well. Either way, the Chinese “wonderful agreement” to peak CO2 emissions by 2030, leads directly to their pledge to peak in coal consumption by 2020. Moreover, in that agreement, the U.S. got the Chinese to make clear they were going to beat the 2030 target — and as we reported last month, it’s now a widely held view in the Beijing climate community that China will peak its CO2 emissions around 2025.

Further, China may well have peaked/plateaued in coal already, and it is beating all of their already world-beating renewable energy targets. None of this is because they are better negotiators — but because they understand that the reality of climate change means clean energy is going to be the biggest set of job creating industries this century.

None of this excuses Trump’s endless stream of nonsensical statements. It’s only to say that they don’t tell you what he would do as president because even he knows a lot of it is nonsense.

Trump is ALL About the Deal

Trump is selling himself as a dealmaker — one who understands that the policy positions candidates put out now are largely irrelevant to what they would do as president.

The Washington Post’s political weblog, “The Fix,” spelled that out in a Sunday column, “Donald Trump’s surprisingly savvy analysis of American politics.” The piece analyzed Trump’s response to one Iowa reporter who said to him, “a lot of voters are saying that they really want to see your policies now.”

Trump explained policy statements are over-rated in the real world:

“You know, when you put out policy, like a 14-point plan? A lot of times in the first hour of negotiation, that 14-point plan goes astray, but you may end up with a better deal. That’s the way it works. That’s the way really life works. When I do a deal, I don’t say, ‘Oh, here’s 14 points.’ I got out and do it. I don’t sit down and talk about 14 points.”

He ends by saying, “I know the press wants it. I don’t think the people care. I think they trust me. I think they know I’m going to make good deals for them.” The Washington Post then explains why, “There’s an enormous amount of insight in that statement, about both Trump and about politics.”

Trump isn’t leading the GOP field on the basis of policy statements, political experience, or carefully crafted, poll-tested lines. Obviously.

Trump is running on the exact opposite, his success as a billionaire dealmaker who uses bluster, showmanship, and negotiating skills to get what he wants. He’s made clear that even on matters of serious ideological purity for conservatives such as the Iran nuclear deal, he is still going to be a flexible deal-maker.

Trump told Meet The Press Sunday: “I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘We’re going to rip up the deal.’ It’s very tough to do when you say, ‘Rip up a deal’.” He notes Iran would have already gotten much of what it wanted — tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets released.

“I buy contracts where people screwed up and they have bad contracts. But I’m really good at looking at a contract and finding things within a contract that, even if they’re bad, I would police that contract so tough that they don’t have a chance. As bad as the contract is, I will be so tough on that contract.”

That actually makes sense — certainly more sense than what the other “serious” GOP candidates have been saying. Indeed, as HuffPost notes, all of them but Jeb have said they would torch the Iran deal on becoming President.

Trump Would Honor Paris Climate Deal And EPA’s Clean Power Plan

If Trump won’t rip up the Iranian deal, he certainly isn’t going to rip up any deal to come out of Paris. First, as the independent analytical team at Climate Action Tracker (CAT) put it, “The U.S. climate plans are at the least ambitious end of what would be a fair contribution.”

But the U.S. commitment was enough to get the “wonderful deal” with China that, despite Trump’s blinkered sarcasm, was a true game-changer. That deal broke the long-standing logjam in international negotiations between developed and developing nations — resulting in a flood of commitments from other countries.

If there is a breakthrough climate deal in Paris in December, it will be in no small measure because of the U.S.-China deal. Paris won’t “solve” the climate crisis — by historical design, it can’t put us directly on the path to 2°C. But it will enable subsequent agreements to do so and avoid some of the most catastrophic impacts.

If there were a Paris deal and the United States simply torched it, however, then President Trump and the United States will be blamed for whatever catastrophic climate change subsequently occurs. We would be the ones who ripped the tourniquet off that had stanched the bleeding.

A brand-obsessed deal-maker is not going to invite permanent brand destruction and historical notoriety of the kind enjoyed by leaders like Neville Chamberlain and Herbert Hoover — all to destroy a global deal that requires minimal effort to fulfill.

Just as Obama’s CO2 pledge for Paris is the least the United States can do, the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which enables the pledge to be met, is also the minimum the United States can do.

By the time anyone becomes president in 2017, it will be even more obvious that climate change is a dire problem, and also more obvious that meeting the CPP’s state targets is pretty straightforward.

I’m not saying Trump would be a good president for climate change or clean energy. There is no evidence of that in any of his buffoonish words (though he may well be the most progressive of GOP candidates). And anyway, after a quarter century of dawdling, we need a Churchill right now, not a P.T. Barnum.

But whatever else one can say about Trump, he doesn’t blow up good deals, especially ones critical to maintaining his personal brand.

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Clean Power PlanClimate ChangeDonald TrumpParis 2015

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Selling Ugly Fruits And Vegetables Could Be Key To Solving America’s Food Waste Problem

Every year, 40 percent of the food grown in the United States ends up in the garbage. A lot of that waste happens at the consumer level — according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), about 25 percent of the food that Americans buy is thrown away. But a lot of that waste also happens between the farm and the grocery store, where strict and sometimes arbitrary cosmetic standards mean that a perfectly nutritious carrot can end up as waste simply because it grew a little imperfectly.

To Jordan Figueiredo, that particular sort of food waste — the kind that comes from fresh, nutritious vegetables that end up in the trash because of how they look — seemed especially easy to avoid. And so, about six months ago, he launched @UglyFruitAndVeg, a one-man, social-media-fueled effort to make Americans fall in love with ugly fruits and vegetables.

That campaign, aided by whimsical pictures of misshapen produce accompanied by humorous captions and hashtags, took off — in six months, Figueiredo has amassed over 18,000 followers, claiming names like Jamie Oliver, Alice Waters, and Michael Pollan as fans. Now, Figueiredo has a bolder vision — convince Walmart and Whole Foods, two of the United States’ most visible retailers, to sell ugly fruits and vegetables.

“People are so sick of us wasting food,” Figueiredo told ThinkProgress. “This is such a low hanging fruit solution to food waste.”

For nearly four and a half years, Figueiredo has worked as a solid waste specialist for the Castro Valley Sanitary District in California, working on reducing waste throughout the small community. About three years before that, he had been working as an environmental technician for the city of Dublin, a suburban town in California’s East Bay. He was charged with overseeing a laundry list of environmental tasks, from clean water inspections to greenhouse gas emissions inventories, when he read learned about zero waste, a philosophy that encourages the reuse of all discarded products so that none of them end up going to landfills or dumps.

But as Figueiredo learned more and more about zero waste, he kept tripping over something he found especially difficult to stomach: food waste.

“Before I got involved, I didn’t know much about it. Once you dig into it more, you really start to talk to people, you realize how big of a problem it is,” Figueiredo said. “It really blew my mind that we could be wasting almost half of all food while at the same time having one in six food insecure in the U.S. and not a ton was being done about it.”

The Flying Ugly Tangelo Monster! #UgliesInTheSkyWithLemons Pic by @backyardbountysbc on IG pic.twitter.com/M2FvsxDXKP

— @UglyFruitAndVeg (@UglyFruitAndVeg) August 17, 2015

When it comes to food, Americans have never been more wasteful than they are today. In the 1960s, Americans threw out 12.2 million tons of food — by 2012, that number had ballooned to 35 million tons. In just half a century, Americans had almost tripled the amount of food that filled our landfills. Over the same period of time, the number of food insecure Americans also increased, from one in 20 in 1968 to one in six in by 2014. America is producing — and throwing away — more food than ever, at the same time that more and more Americans aren’t able to count on having their next meal.

But it isn’t just food insecure Americans that are suffering from the nation’s growing addiction to food waste — the environment is also on the losing end of the equation. In 2013, after recycling and composting was taken into account, food was the most wasted material in the country, surpassing paper, plastics, and yard trimmings. In total, food waste accounted for just over 20 percent of U.S. trash. When food waste makes its way to landfills, it decomposes, releasing methane — a potent greenhouse gas. Worldwide, food waste is a primary source of greenhouse gas emissions. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, global emissions from food waste in 2007 were estimated at 3.3 gigatons of CO2 equivalent. That is more than twice the emissions from all U.S. transportation in 2010. If food waste was a nation, it would rank only behind China and the United States in terms of global emissions.

OOH LA LA DAIKON. #LegsForDays #WorkItVeg! Pic from http://t.co/KEOZP24uJl pic.twitter.com/J7ZVXYkTVh

— @UglyFruitAndVeg (@UglyFruitAndVeg) July 8, 2015

Still, the problem has largely gone unnoticed for years. Globally, the subject of food waste suffers from a lack of data, as estimates vary widely on the extent of the problem. Prior to the NRDC’s 2012 publication of a supply-chain analysis of food waste, the most extensive report about food loss in the United States was conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1997, and only looked at losses on the retailer and consumer level, not losses on the farm level or from farm to retailer.

“I think it’s one of those things that has slipped through the cracks here for so long,” Figueiredo said. “There hasn’t been someone raising a stink about this publicly. I know there’s NGOs that work with people behind the scenes, but that can only get you so far.”

So, in October of 2014, Figueiredo decided to publicly raise a stink. Partnering with the NRDC, he developed the Zero Food Waste Forum, a gathering of food waste activists that culminated in feeding 5,000 people from food that would have otherwise ended up in landfills in the middle of Oakland.

But that wasn’t all Figueiredo did. He had also seen the success of a campaign launched in the spring of 2014 by Intermarché, the third-largest supermarket chain in France. Dubbed “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables,” the campaign sought to glorify ugly fruits and vegetables — those that would otherwise be thrown away for not meeting industry aesthetic standards — and sell the imperfect produce at a reduced cost to customers. The campaign kicked off with a massive PR push, with kooky videos and pictures extolling the “grotesque” apple, the “hideous” orange, the “failed” lemon, the “ridiculous” potato, the “disfigured” eggplant, and the “ugly” carrot.

Figueiredo was instantly struck by the campaign’s visual, humorous tactics. “I thought that maybe if we could do a social media campaign like this every single day, maybe we could get people thinking about this issue,” he said.

And so he launched @UglyFruitAndVeg in December of 2014. The account started slowly at first, but picked up considerable traction in January, when celebrity chef Jamie Oliver retweeted a few of Figueiredo’s images. Each day, Figeuiredo tweets out images of misshapen produce — intertwined “loving” carrots or dimpled peaches — alongside facts about food waste. Initially, he was pulling pictures from a supermarket in Switzerland that had held an ugly produce contest a few years ago — a wealth of images that helped Figueiredo get started. But these days, the photos are mostly a mix of Figeuriedo’s own finds (he spends considerably more time at farmer’s markets now than when he started this project, he said) and images that fans send in. The account has become so interactive, he said, that he gets between 10 and 20 images per day.

“I wanted to show these images and break down people’s misconception that produce that doesn’t look good is bad,” he said. “For the most part, people have no idea that produce can look different than it does in the store.”

America’s supermarkets are brimming with fresh produce that all looks exactly the same — perfectly round, red tomatoes, stick-straight carrots and cucumbers, and plump little diamond strawberries. But that’s not the way that produce always turns out. For a number of natural reasons — from weather changes to gene mutations — produce can grow to look a little wonky. Slight cosmetic differences — irregular shape, abnormal color, or healed scars — don’t affect the safety of a product, Marita Cantwell, post-harvest specialist with the University of California, Davis, told ThinkProgress. But these cosmetic irregularities are often the focus of U.S. grading standards.

The USDA’s quality standards for produce offer farmers and retailers little specific help when deciding which produce to throw away post-harvest — as a 2014 Bon Appétit investigation points out, the USDA’s voluntary standards are vague, outdated, and open to interpretation. And many retailers can have quality standards that surpass those required by the USDA — both Walmart and Whole Foods told ThinkProgress that their standards go above and beyond those required by the USDA, encouraging farmers to not even send misshapen produce to those retailers to begin with.

THEY SAY I'M UGLY! HOLD ME!!!! #UglyVegComfort #DoYouCarrotForAHug? Pic by http://t.co/3PZF1VWRBd pic.twitter.com/GLcNETvhz7

— @UglyFruitAndVeg (@UglyFruitAndVeg) July 9, 2015

Exactly how much food waste those stringent standards cause is unknown — the USDA doesn’t keep track of numbers, and most statistics are anecdotal. An NPR piece on food waste found that one potato farmer throws away — or culls, as its known in the industry — nearly a third of his potatoes post-harvest because of aesthetic anomalies. An NRDC investigation into post-harvest culling in California found amounts ranging from just one percent of harvest (in head lettuce) to around 30 percent (in plums and pears).

“The story is more of a what we don’t know than what we do know,” JoAnne Burkenkamp, senior advocate for the NRDC’s Food and Agriculture Program, told ThinkProgress. “There is no source currently for nationwide data about on farm food losses.” Through her own research, however, she estimates that an average of 20 to 30 percent of post-harvest produce is rejected by farmers due to cosmetic standards.

Now, Figueiredo is hoping to encourage two of the nation’s biggest grocers — Walmart and Whole Foods — to come to terms with ugly produce. Alongside Stefanie Sacks, a culinary nutritionist, Figueiredo recently launched a petition calling for the two chains to sell ugly produce at a discounted rate, similar to the campaigns at Intermarché and elsewhere. Currently, the petition has over 83,000 signatures, gaining support from food celebrities like Mario Batali.

“I would make it so that grocers cannot reject that produce — that they have to figure out a way to sell it or work with it,” Figueiredo said.

Both Whole Foods and Walmart say that they are actively looking for ways to reduce their contribution to food waste, from better packaging to educating consumers about what produce looks like at different stages of maturity. At Whole Foods, any cosmetically unappealing produce that makes it to the store is turned into prepared food and juice, or donated to local food rescue organizations, Whole Foods spokeswoman Liz Burkhart told ThinkProgress. And Walmart is keeping a close eye on Asda — a British grocery chain that the company acquired in 1999 — to see how its pilot program for selling unappealing produce fares. But while the company might adopt a similar scheme at some point, it hasn’t made any motion to do so in the near future.

Still, Figueiredo wants more. He points to a number of campaigns around the globe — from Intermarché in France to Loblaws in Canada — that show that consumers can and will purchase misshapen produce, especially when it’s offered at a discounted rate. In the United States, two campaigns in California are using a similar idea at a smaller level — Imperfect Produce delivers misshapen fruits and vegetables at a discounted rate to customers across the Bay Area, while the small grocery chain Raley’s is piloting a discounted “ugly” produce program at ten of its locations this summer.

But beyond seeing knobby carrots and bulbous oranges line the produce aisles of Whole Foods and Walmart, Figueiredo really wants Americans — in government, in business, and in private — to recognize the food waste problem.

“I think there’s definitely going to be a cultural shift,” he said. “I think it’s already starting.”

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Climate ChangeFood Waste

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Electric Vehicle Users In The U.K. Could Soon Be Able To Charge Their Cars While They Drive

One of the electric car’s biggest criticisms is its lack of range and the need to frequently recharge the battery at designated supercharge stations. But the British government has a possible solution that could make electric cars mainstream — adding charge lanes to highways so electric and hybrid cars can “refuel” as they drive.

Britain’s Highways England recently announced an 18-month trial using wireless magnetic induction technology, which is installed in the cars and underneath the asphalt surface. The test, which will start this year, won’t be immediately carried out on public roads, but the facility will simulate common highway conditions. The British government has committed £500 million(about $783 million) to fund the project over five years.

“Vehicle technologies are advancing at an ever increasing pace and we’re committed to supporting the growth of ultra-low emissions vehicles,” said Mike Wilson, Highways England’s chief engineer, in a news release. “The off road trials of wireless power technology will help to create a more sustainable road network for England and open up new opportunities for businesses that transport goods across the country.”

Britain has been aggressively taking on emissions-free transportation projects. Last year, London launched two trials, one for hybrid buses that recharge at each stop, and another that tested new battery-powered subway cars. Britain also approved the world’s largest offshore wind farm in 2014, which would produce 1,200 megawatts off England’s Suffolk Coast.

And Europe as a whole has been a leader in finding new ways to use roads — the Netherlands is home to the world’s first solar road, and could also soon be the first to use recycled plastic as road-building material.

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Carbon EmissionsElectric Car

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Methane Is Leaking From Natural Gas Processing Plants At Much Higher Rates Than Reported

Natural gas gathering and processing plants leak much more methane than producers have reported, and even more than the Environmental Protection Agency has estimated, according to a study released Tuesday.

Researchers at Colorado State University found that U.S. gathering and processing facilities — where natural gas from nearby wells is consolidated for distribution through pipelines — leak 2,421,000 metric tons of methane each year. The facilities emit 100 billion cubic feet of natural gas every year, roughly eight times the amount previously estimated by the EPA.

Gathering facilities “could be responsible for something like 30 percent of emissions for all natural gas production,” the study’s lead researcher, Anthony Marchese, said on a press call Tuesday.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 86 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame. It is the primary ingredient in natural gas.

The amount of emissions tracked in the study has roughly the same 20-year climate impact as 37 coal-fired power plants, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) said. The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, is part of a series of studies organized by EDF that will compose the largest inventory of methane leaks in the U.S. natural gas industry to date. An earlier report in the series found that oil and gas operations on federal and tribal lands leaked $360 million worth of fuel in 2013.

Controlling methane emissions, especially as the United States increasingly extracts and uses natural gas, plays an important role in the effort to curtail climate change. On Tuesday, the Obama Administration proposed a new rule that seeks to regulate methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

This study could help show producers and regulators where methane emissions are coming from.

“The gathering and processing sector, a piece of the supply chain that most people don’t even know exists, may be the biggest single fraction of emissions coming from natural gas,” Mark Brownstein, who leads EDF’s work on methane emissions, told the New York Times.

The study looked at 16 processing plants and 114 gathering facilities. On average, gathering facilities leak .47 percent of the gas they process, and at least one facility was leaking 9 percent of its gas. Marchese pointed out that 20 percent of gathering facilities had leaking storage tanks — and those facilities had three times the emissions as facilities without leaking tanks.

Processing plants were more efficient, leaking less than .01 percent, on average, the study found. Marchese speculated this difference could be because processing plants are larger and better regulated.

The discrepancy between the documented emissions rates for gathering facilities and the self-reported rate is striking: The industry reported that 500 metric tons were lost at gathering facilities. The study estimates that 1,875,000 were lost.

“Not all processing plants report,” Marchese said. In fact, only about 10 percent of facilities report emissions, and they only report combustion emissions, not leaks, he said.

Marchese pointed out that the loss rates were much higher than the industry would want.

“They want to get it down around .01 percent,” he said.

The amount of gas wasted each year in the gathering and processing phase is worth about $300 million, according to EDF.

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Climate ChangeColorado StateEDFFrackinggathering and processingMethaneNatural GasResearchStudy

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How The EPA Plans To Cut Methane Emissions From Oil And Gas Wells

Regulating carbon dioxide, by far the most common greenhouse gas, is critical to halt the emissions that cause climate change. But methane is a very close second, and for the first time, the federal government is moving to significantly rein in methane pollution.

The Obama administration released a proposed rule Tuesday to regulate methane emissions from new and modified oil and gas wells across the country. How much? It’s complicated.

In January, the administration announced the goal of cutting methane emissions from the oil and gas sector between 40 and 45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025. This proposal would help get the United States to that goal, but would not do it on its own.

Tuesday’s proposed action focuses on new hydraulically fracked oil and gas wells. It would “require methane and VOC [volatile organic compound] reductions from hydraulically fractured oil wells, some of which can contain a large amount of gas along with oil, and would complement the agency’s 2012 standards addressing emissions from this industry,” according to an EPA factsheet. Specifically, it updates the 2012 New Source Performance Standards to set these methane and VOC guidelines for new and modified wells.

EPA’s acting assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, Janet McCabe, clarified on a call with reporters that contrary to initial reports, the methane proposal would not seek to reduce methane emissions by 40 to 45 percent on its own. That target, she said, would be achieved by a set of other rule updates and initiatives which include Tuesday’s proposed rule. Pressed on how exactly the rest of that target would be met, McCabe did not point to any specific initiative the administration had identified to do that.

The EPA expects the standards to prevent the emission of 340,000 to 400,000 short tons of methane in 2025. This is the same as cutting 7.7 to 9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Tuesday’s proposal could represent 20 to 30 percent of the total national methane emissions reductions, and a significant amount of the 40 to 45 percent target, according to McCabe.

It would also extend the requirements farther downstream from the oil and gas extraction sites, meaning that leaks along the transmission infrastructure would be reduced. Operators would be required to find and repair leaks under the proposal.

The action would also supply draft guidelines for cutting VOC emissions in ozone nonattainment areas, mostly places in the Northeast with higher-than-allowed ozone levels. VOCs are mixed in the ground with methane and when they are emitted, they help create ground-level ozone, or smog. Apart from the ozone nonattainment areas in the Northeast, the proposal largely does not apply to existing or abandoned wells, though if transmission lines are repaired to prevent leaks, existing wells could see some emissions reductions.

Methane, which is the primary ingredient in natural gas, is also an extremely potent greenhouse gas on its own. This means that it is 86 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is. It is invisible and odorless (the smell of a gas-fired stove comes from the sulfur compounds added to commercial natural gas to allow for leak detection), and thus very hard to detect leaks. Natural gas wells are the main offenders, but methane leaks also happen when oil wells are not equipped to handle the methane that often comes along with or is dissolved inside oil deposits.

Recent studies have suggested that as much as 10 percent of methane pulled out of the ground is leaked into the atmosphere.

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CREDIT: EPA

According to the EPA, 29 percent of U.S. methane emissions come from the oil and gas sector. Next is the agriculture sector at 26 percent: livestock emits methane through normal digestive processes. Landfills come in third place with 18 percent of the pie.

The new rule comes days after the EPA announced a proposal to tackle methane emissions from your local dump. On Friday, the administration proposed new updated regulations on landfills to cut methane emissions caused by decaying organic matter in landfills by almost a third.

Environmental groups supported the proposed rule, but also noted the need to address emissions from existing and abandoned wells.

“We applaud the Obama administration for taking an important step toward addressing this significant contributor to climate disruption,” said Friends of the Earth’s Kate DeAngelis in a statement. “We have a serious problem with existing and abandoned wells, and the final rule needs to address them.”

Mark Brownstein of the Environmental Defense Fund said a 45 percent emissions cut is “not hard” and would not require the industry to “fundamentally rethink how it does business.”

“It’s very clear we are going to need regulation for existing sources in order to achieve the 40 percent to 45 percent reduction,” Brownstein said on a Monday call with reporters.

An EDF study from last year found that in 2018, almost 90 percent of the methane emissions from the oil and gas sector will come from infrastructure built before 2011.

The oil and gas industry opposes new mandatory methane curbs, insisting that voluntary standards suffice. Methane is valuable, and rather than let it float off into the sky, the industry would rather capture it and sell it. Most of it is then used in industrial applications or burned for heat or power. Burning methane emits carbon dioxide and other pollutants, but less so than coal does.

So it is unsurprising a whole industry has cropped up to try to capture methane from fossil fuel infrastructure. This industry is not just focused on leaks: some companies use technology and practices to prevent the need for venting or flaring gas. Environmentalists, unions, and industry can all agree that leaking methane at least wastes potential profit and also pollutes the atmosphere. That said, the participation rate in the EPA’s existing voluntary standards is extremely low.

Methane emissions have dropped from the oil and gas sector since 2005, but the EPA says emissions will rise 25 percent over the next decade without additional action. Tuesday’s proposed rule is the first big step the administration is planning in order to take the required action to cut methane emissions significantly.

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Environmental Protection AgencyJanet McCabeMethaneMethane LeaksNatural GasOil

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Clinton Says She Opposes Arctic Drilling One Day After Obama Approves Arctic Drilling

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is making a firm commitment to oppose offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, her campaign confirmed to ThinkProgress on Tuesday.

Her announcement comes just one day after the Obama administration gave final approval to oil company Royal Dutch Shell to begin exploratory drilling off the coast of Alaska, a decision environmentalists have sharply criticized. The Arctic’s environment is too fragile and remote to justify the high risk of an oil spill there, activists say.

Clinton seemed to resonate with those concerns on Tuesday. On Twitter, she called the Arctic a “unique treasure,” and said offshore drilling would pose an unacceptable risk.

The Arctic is a unique treasure. Given what we know, it's not worth the risk of drilling. -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 18, 2015

Clinton’s announcement will likely improve her standing with environmentalists, who have so far been lukewarm about her candidacy. Compared to other Democratic presidential candidates, Clinton has the least aggressive environmental agenda. That’s saying something, considering Clinton has a detailed plan to fight climate change and boost renewable energy production.

Still, Clinton has refrained from making commitments on key environmental issues like the Keystone XL pipeline, fracking, and — until Tuesday — offshore Arctic drilling. Her silence on those issues may have cost her at least one national environmental group’s endorsement, as Friends of the Earth endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) earlier this month.

Prior to her Tuesday announcement, Clinton had indicated she might oppose offshore drilling, saying she was “skeptical” about the Obama administration’s approval of Shell’s leases in the Chukchi Sea.

According to an analysis from the Department of Interior, there is a 75 percent chance of a spill greater than 1,000 barrels should an oil company like Shell discover and fully produce oil in the Chukchi leases. In addition, some studies have asserted that all oil and gas from the Arctic must remain in the ground if global temperature rise is to be kept under 2 degrees Celsius.

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Arctic DrillingHillary ClintonOffshore Drilling

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