Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 106

Hottest July On Record Keeps 2015 On Track To Crush 2014 For Hottest Year

NASA reports this was the hottest July on record. So we are now in “bet the mortgage” territory that 2015 will be the hottest year in NASA’s 125-year temperature record.

In fact, 2015 is likely to crush the previous record — 2014 — probably by a wide margin, especially since one of the strongest El Niños in 50 years is adding to the strong underlying global warming trend.

Climate expert Dr. John Abraham updated this NASA chart to show how the first seven months of 2015 compares to the annual temperatures of previous years:

[image error]

The gap between 2015 and all other years in that chart will grow since NOAA and many others project the current El Niño will keep growing stronger for many months. The soaring ocean temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, which are characteristic of an El Niño, just keep climbing.

As the journal Nature reports, this El Niño “could be [the] strongest on record.” It is projected to peak in the winter and last into the spring of 2016.

If the 2015-2016 El Niño does rival the 1997-1998 super El Niño, then just as 1998 crushed 1997 temperatures, we may see 2016 beat all the records set in 2015.

Bottom Line: the warming trend that made 2014 the hottest calendar year on record is continuing. We appear to be in the midst of of the long-awaited jump in global temperatures.

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Climate ChangeNOAATemperature

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Bacteria Levels In Boston’s Charles River Spur Health Warnings From City Officials

Just when it seemed like Boston’s chronically-polluted Charles River had made a miraculous turnaround, an algae bloom is forcing residents to avoid the river once again.

On Thursday, health officials announced that an algae bloom had sprouted in the Lower Charles River Basin, causing concentrations of bacteria in the river twice the recommended limit, according to the Boston Globe.

The algae is known as cyanobacteria — a type of aquatic bacteria that gets its energy from photosynthesis — and is common in United States’ lakes and rivers during the summer months, when warm temperatures and lots of sun help it proliferate. Unlike the algae bloom in Lake Erie that shut down Toledo’s water supply for days last summer, Boston’s algae bloom doesn’t appear to be toxic, according to the director of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Environmental Toxicology Program.

“You’d have to consume an appreciable amount of that water to get ill,” Marc Nascarella told the Boston Globe.

The Charles River didn’t always used to be safe for swimming — for years, the river was so polluted that public swimming was actually banned. Used as a power source for New England’s manufacturing industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the industrial mills, dams, and settlements all dumped their waste into the Charles. For much of the 20th century, the river was also polluted by old pipes that carried sewage and rainwater at the same time. When water levels were low, this wasn’t a problem — but during a storm or heavy rain, the outdated infrastructure couldn’t handle the increase in volume, and flushed both sewage and storm water out into the Charles River. Beginning in the late 1980s, extensive sewer system renovations helped reduce the amount of sewage that flowed into the river with rainwater.

But even with marked progress in the health of the river — it passed the EPA’s bacterial water quality standards last year 65 percent of the time for swimming and 91 percent of the time for boating — Thursday’s news is a reminder that even with improvement, the river’s health can fluctuate day to day.

“With the Charles, it can change in a day,” Julie Woods, project director for the Charles River Watershed Association, told the Boston Globe. “Let’s clean it up, so it is made to swim all the time.”

This particular bloom, Nascarella told the Boston Globe, probably has more to do with climate change than the health of the Charles. Massachusetts has issued 150 advisories for algae blooms since 2009, and 11 of them have involved the Charles River.

Algae blooms are becoming increasingly common in bodies of water around the globe, as warmer temperatures and increased nutrient runoff (largely from agriculture) fuel their growth. And they’re expected to get worse with climate change, as more frequent heavy storms wash fertilizer into bodies of water and overwhelm pipes that carry both storm water and sewage.

A recent report conducted by scientists from Oregon State University and the University of North Carolina found that blooms of toxic cyanobacteria pose an increasingly pressing threat to the United States’ drinking water. Not all cyanobacteria produce toxins — but those that do, especially when found in high concentration, can cause skin irritation, gastrointestinal illness, and liver damage, as well as fatalities in pets, wildlife, and, in rare cases, humans.

“The biggest health concern with cyanobacteria in sources of drinking water is that there’s very little regulatory oversight, and it remains unclear what level of monitoring is being voluntarily conducted by drinking water utilities,” Tim Otten, a postdoctoral scholar in Oregon State University’s Department of Microbiology, said in a press release.

Boston health officials stressed that the bloom currently present in the Charles doesn’t appear to be toxic, but cautioned against drinking water directly from the river and to rinse off directly after contact with the water. Nascarella told the Boston Globe that most algae advisories last about two weeks.

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Pollution Is Killing Thousands Of People In China Every Day

A new study shows that 17 percent of all deaths in China are related to the high levels of pollution there.

Berkeley Earth’s “Air Pollution Overview,” which will be published this month in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLOS ONE, found that a third of the population of China breathes air that is “unhealthy” by U.S. standards. Air pollution has dramatic health effects, the study says, killing 1.6 million people a year.

“Air pollution is the greatest environmental disaster in the world today,” Richard Muller, scientific director of Berkeley Earth, said in a statement.

The scientists analyzed four months’ worth of hourly measurements at 1,500 points across China, specifically looking at particulate matter 2.5 microns or smaller (PM2.5), which have been associated with heart attacks, stroke, lung cancer, and asthma. Air pollution has already been found to be one of the greatest indirect health effects of global warming.

The study found that the sources of PM2.5 match those of sulfur, suggesting most of the pollution is from coal. Coal is primarily burned for electricity generation and is a leading emitter of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides.

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A heat map shows concentrations of air pollutants in China.

The world’s largest burner of coal, China’s coal consumption has grown dramatically over the past 15 years — driving 80 percent of the industry’s growth. But new efforts to reduce pollution in the country suggest that coal consumption may have peaked. China has pledged to cap coal use by 2020.

The country is well aware of its air pollution problems. Beijing and Shanghai are regularly exposed to dangerously poor air quality days. In December 2013, PM2.5 in Shanghai was almost off the charts, and officials were forced to warn people to stay inside.

“When I was last in Beijing, pollution was at the hazardous level; every hour of exposure reduced my life expectancy by 20 minutes. It’s as if every man, women, and child smoked 1.5 cigarettes each hour,” Muller said in the statement.

Another study released this week found that pollution from China is traveling to the United States. In the United States, coal accounts for a third of our electricity generation but 70 percent of the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“Exposure to air pollution has been directly linked to worsening respiratory disease, and not just in asthmatics,” Jeffrey Demain, director of the Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Center of Alaska, said in June. “Pollution has a direct impact, there is no question. We’re seeing a rise in childhood asthma and adult onset asthma too, and increases in COPD, which is becoming a tremendous problem in this country. People are developing it who never smoked, or never had family members who smoked.”

Pollution is traveling within China as well, the Berkeley Earth study noted. Beijing, for instance, is only a moderate source of emissions, but it is a heavily polluted area. This will make it more difficult to ensure air quality improvements before the city hosts the Olympics again in 2022, the authors said.

This is Berkeley Earth’s first published scientific study.

Muller, a co-author, is perhaps best known as a former climate skeptic. A Berkeley professor, Muller ran a Koch-funded study released in 2012 that came to the surprising conclusion — previously reached by many, many other scientists — that climate change is real and human caused.

“Call me a converted skeptic,” Muller wrote at the time. “Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

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How A Century-Old Technology Could Save The World

In the basement garage of a high-end apartment building in the middle of New York City, a few electricians are quietly installing a century-old product that is now poised to revolutionize an industry — and maybe lead the United States into a carbon-neutral future.

Taking up about two parking spaces is a wall of boxes. They are simple lead-acid batteries, similar to what keeps the lights on in your car. But these batteries are linked together, connected to the building’s electricity system, and monitored in real time by a Washington-state based company, Demand Energy. Demand’s installation at the Paramount Building in midtown Manhattan is going to lower the building electricity bills and reduce its carbon footprint, even while it doesn’t reduce a single watt of use.

Every night, the batteries charge up. Every day, they run down, providing a small portion of the building’s energy and reducing the amount of power it takes off the grid. This cycle of charging during low-use times and discharging during high use times helps level out the Paramount’s electricity use.

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It’s important to note that not all electricity is created equally. Renewable sources, such as wind and solar, don’t emit any greenhouse gases during power generation. Coal-burning and other fossil-fuel plants do, but even those plants emit different amounts of carbon dioxide depending on how they are used. Just like going 55 mph in a car is more efficient than going 100 mph, the more consistently we all use electricity, the less emissions we produce.

“The electricity grid as it’s designed today is a perfect just-in-time energy system,” Doug Staker, president of Demand Energy, told ThinkProgress. This means that for every computer turned on in the morning, the grid has to supply that amount of power. But it also creates opportunities. “At night, when all the demand goes away, there is a potential to have oversupply,” Staker said. That oversupply goes into batteries. It all comes back to flattening the demand curve — driving demand down during the day and up at night.

“Peak usage in the city is a critical issue.”

Apartment buildings like Paramount are perfect examples of demand. During the day, lights, elevators, and air conditioning are running. And for the past few years, on hot summer days, the local utility, ConEd, has asked building managers to dim the lobby lights, shut down some elevators, and kill air-conditioning in non-critical areas.

“Peak usage in the city is a critical issue,” Joshua London, vice president of Paramount’s management company, Glenwood Management, told ThinkProgress.

“We would get a notification that it is a critical time and we would have to draw down certain systems,” London said. “That, in our opinion, really kind of got maxed out, because the calls to do so were so frequent, and of longer duration.”

Last summer, some 800 city buildings participated in the so-called demand response program, which offers payments for participating in the program and bonuses for energy savings on those days. But those payments are small compared to what London’s building will save by installing batteries.

Follow the money

A quick word on electricity bills: American home bills usually have a flat rate for the amount of electricity the resident uses. No matter when it’s used, or how quickly power is drawn, the rate is the same amount per kilowatt hour. Flat rates are like an odometer saying how many miles were drive — or, in this case, how many kilowatt hours (kWh) have been used. But for commercial and industrial properties, including residential apartment buildings, the electricity bill also has a demand charge. The demand charge acts like a speedometer: Not only is a business charged for the total amount of electricity it uses, it is also charged for how quickly power is taken. A business will receive a higher bill for using 10 kWh in an hour than for using the same 10 kWh over, say 10 hours. In New York, demand charges make up, on average, half of commercial and industrial customers’ bills.

Electricity rates are designed like this because utilities don’t like peaks in demand. Peaking plants are expensive, wasteful, and dirty. But from the utility’s perspective, putting a lot of electricity on the grid is also bad news. The higher the peak demand, the more infrastructure — wires, generators — has to be built. And transmission congestion means a less efficient system. (Line loss, a phenomenon in which not all the electricity gets from point A to point B, is greater when the transmission system is overloaded). Not to mention the risks of brownouts and blackouts that increase with too much strain on the grid.

The regulator that oversees ConEd, New York State’s Department of Public Service, has undertaken a massive program to level out electricity use. ConEd, specifically, has been asked to reduce its peak demands by 100 megawatts (MW), according to engineer Robin Gray. One of the tools for reducing demand — or “peak shaving” — is battery storage.

“It’s good for our system to remove demand off the system.” Gray told ThinkProgress. “What they are doing on a building level, we are doing on a system level.”

A storage boom

This summer, ConEd even expanded its incentive program for storage, and it is also adding its own storage. At a substation in Brooklyn, ConEd is installing a 1 megawatt (MW) battery that will discharge over the 12-hour peak in the neighborhood. For the utility, it’s cheaper and easier to put in a battery than to build out more infrastructure, especially in the crowded city.

“This opens many doors to us in terms of how we control our systems.”

“Traditionally, we would build new substations… which are very expensive. Space is difficult,” Gray said. “This opens many doors to us in terms of how we control our systems.”

In fact, ConEd is looking into putting battery storage, paired with solar panels, at points along the electricity lines, similar to a New Jersey project by utility PJ&E. The potential uses of batteries, it seems, are limitless.

This is good not only for utilities and management companies. Batteries can play a significant role in lowering our collective carbon emissions. These days, nearly a third of all U.S. carbon emissions come from the electricity sector. As the United States phases out coal plants — which are responsible for 70 percent of that carbon — and turn to renewable sources, it will be critical to incorporate battery storage. In fact, on a larger scale, stored hydropower has already been providing this service.

“There will always be some ups and downs in the grid,” Matt Roberts, director of the Energy Storage Association, told ThinkProgress. “System-wide efficiency is really the moniker that energy storage will use moving forward.”

He said the Department of Energy has identified 15 different services that energy storage provides. (Energy storage includes flywheels and pumped hydro. Batteries are a more modern utilization) “Energy storage can respond in a sub-milisecond,” Roberts said. “It’s good for the grid. It’s efficient, because you don’t overproduce. You give it the exact amount of energy you need.”

Those benefits are why some regulators are requiring their utilities to install storage. In 2013, the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) introduced an energy storage target of 1,325 megawatts by 2020. Unsurprisingly, California’s three utilities — PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — have more installed storage capacity than any other state.

Overall, the industry is on the upswing. Electric car company Tesla might have garnered the most headlines for batteries — building a “gigafactory” in Arizona and launching a new residential battery product — but there are literally dozens of companies jumping into the game. According to data from GTM Research and the U.S. Energy Storage Association, 5.8 MW of energy storage were installed in the United States in the first three months of this year, up 16 percent from the same time last year. Even more impressively, behind-the-meter energy storage — that is, batteries on homes and businesses — had its largest first quarter in history, up 132 percent from the year before.

As Roberts said: “We’re beyond the early adopters phase.”

The changing grid

For a long time, the only options for peak shaving have been in the field of efficiency. In fact, energy efficiency programs have been responsible for huge declines in carbon emissions in the United States, as our air-conditioners, driers, and even light bulbs suck up less power. But it is still critical to change the generation mix. Solar has been a success story in recent years, reducing emissions by as much as 23.5 million metric tons annually — the equivalent of shuttering six coal-fired plants, according to industry data.

Solar and storage are symbiotic. Solar panels start producing when the sun rises and continue through the hot, high-demand part of the day. That is perfect for shaving the top off the demand curve. But then people go home and turn on televisions, air conditioners, and lights. The actual electricity demand usually peaks between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. During that time, the sun sets, cutting off supply to solar panels.

The electricity load chart below is known as the Duck Graph. (The duck’s belly is created by the dip in the load during the day, and the steep line that makes the neck represents the need to quickly ramp up generation as load increases at the same time the sun sets in the evening). Based on California’s demand, the chart predicts a time when California’s solar use will be so high it will destabilize the grid. Even while lowering overall demand (which, under the one-to-one model, is critical for lowering infrastructure needs), the rapid drop in electricity production creates a spike in demand from other sources.

[image error]

CREDIT: Courtesy CalISO

Really, what we’re looking for is a shallow, flattish curve of demand. A turtle curve.

Now look at this chart from Demand Energy’s monitoring system. Demand is flattened on both sides — shaving the peaks and increasing demand during low times. In other words, the technology reacts in real time, evening out the building’s electricity use.

[image error]

System data from another Demand Energy system shows how batteries even out a building’s electricity demand.

Not only does this save the building money, it’s part of a larger effort to make the city’s grid stable.

“[Batteries are] one way the utility might possibly move forward and not face the ultimate extinction of their infrastructure due to age and overuse,” London said bluntly. “This operation of the storage system will help us stabilize the neighborhood.”

First energy storage stabilizes the Upper East Side. Next up, the world?

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Batteriesbattery storageDemand EnergyElectricityEnergy StorageNew York CityParamount BuildingpowerSolarstorageUtilities

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The Outdated Law That Helped Lead To The Massive Mine Spill In Colorado

This week, a river running through Colorado turned orange after Environmental Protection Agency workers accidentally broke through a dam at an abandoned mine site, spilling 3 million gallons of lead and arsenic-laden mine waste into the Animas River.

The spill was a major disaster — it caused lead levels in the river to spike to nearly 12,000 times higher than the EPA-accepted safe mark, and arsenic levels to rise to 26 times higher than the EPA recommends. The spill prompted New Mexico’s governor to issue a state of emergency, and the Navajo Nation, which depends heavily on the river, is considering suing the EPA.

The EPA has taken full responsibility for the spill, but some groups are hoping the spill brings attention to an over-a-century-old law that has helped contribute to the large number of abandoned mines that still need cleaning up today. As Al Jazeera reports, there are about 2,700 abandoned hard rock mines in the United States that still need cleaning up.

New laws have mandated that new mines get cleaned up, but these old mines are regulated under the General Mining Law of 1872, which allows mining companies to avoid paying royalties for the minerals they mine and doesn’t contain provisions for environmental protections. These abandoned mines have polluted water before — both through drainage of contaminants and through major spills like the one that affected the Animas River.

“This is a problem everyone has known about and we all predicted there would be a catastrophic failure at some point,” Mark Williams, a fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder, told CBS News.

Some environmental groups say that it’s this law that needs addressing if another spill like this one is to be avoided.

“While EPA triggered the disaster, the true culprit is lax federal laws that allow mining companies to pollute public waterways with impunity. The antiquated 1872 mining law must be reformed to protect surface and groundwater quality,” New York-based Waterkeeper Alliance said in an emailed statement. “It is long past due for Congress to update the 1872 Mining Law so that our water resources are better protected, mining companies are held accountable, and we don’t have more toxic tragedies like the one that is flowing down the Animas River today.”

Claire Moser, research and advocacy associate with the public lands team at the Center for American Progress, agreed.

“Under this outdated law, mining companies are able to extract billions of dollars of minerals on America’s public lands essentially for free, often with no liability for environmental cleanup,” she said in an email. “The Animas spill disaster highlights the broader need for reform of this 143-year-old law to ensure that taxpayers receive a fair share of publicly-owned resources and that mining companies are responsible for cleanup.”

Legislation aimed at updating the law has been introduced — as environmental group Earthworks wrote in an op-ed, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) introduced a bill that would generate $200 million in mining industry fees that would go towards abandoned mine restoration.

Meanwhile, the EPA and other groups are working to quantify the damage caused to the river by the spill. Agency testing Wednesday showed that the water in the river had returned to pre-spill quality — meaning those levels of contaminants had come down — and there have been no reports of fish or insect die-offs in the river.

“We’re seeing survival of major species of insects including some very sensitive species so that’s good news,” said Aaron Kimple, program director at Mountain Studies Institute in Colorado, which conducted tests of the river before the plume came through and is continuing to test the river now.

Kimple said he was waiting on the results of the water tests to see what the levels of contaminants looked like. But he said his bigger concern, since he hadn’t seen any fish or insect die-off, was whether the contaminants could settle into the bottom of the river. If that happens, major rain or snow runoff could stir the contaminants back up.

Kimple said he’s not panicked about the spill — he notes that several abandoned mines in the area have been slowly leaching contaminants into surrounding bodies of water for years, but that leakage hasn’t caused the river to fail water quality tests. But he did say the disaster pointed to the need for more monitoring, both of the river and of these other abandoned mines.

“This could happen again in mines upriver, and we need to be thinking into the future about how we approach our remediation efforts,” he said.

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Climate Change Linked To Devastating Texas Floods

A new study directly links human-caused global warming to the catastrophic flooding in Texas and Oklahoma this spring.

In May, more than 35 trillion gallons of water fell on Texas — enough to cover the entire state in eight inches of water. More than two dozen people were killed, and it was the wettest single month on record in both Texas and Oklahoma.

A new peer-reviewed study from Utah State and Taiwanese researchers concluded, “There was a detectable effect of anthropogenic [manmade] global warming in the physical processes that caused the persistent precipitation in May of 2015″ over the southern Great Plains.”

We’ve known for a long time that global warming puts more moisture in the atmosphere, which in turn makes deluges more intense. And the 2014 U.S. National Climate Assessment found that Texas and Oklahoma — and indeed most parts of the country — have already seen an measurable increase in the most intense rain storms.

But the Geophysical Research Letters study found a much deeper link between human-caused climate change and the Texas floods. I asked the study’s lead author, Simon Wang of the Utah Climate Center, to explain the findings:

Basically, we linked the weather conditions that caused the consecutive and high amounts of rainfall to two main climate sources: (1) El Niño and its enhanced teleconnection owing to the warming Pacific temperature and (2) middle latitude circulation that is becoming increasingly “wavy,” causing the trough (or any ridge for that regard) to stick around for a long time.

The second conclusion — that climate change is causing weather patterns to stall — joins a growing body of research tying the recent jump in extreme weather to a warming-driven weakening of the jet stream and “more frequent high-amplitude (wavy) jet-stream configurations that favor persistent weather patterns,” as a January 2015 study put it.

The study explains some of the science underlying the first point about the link between global warming, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in more detail:

A developing El Niño has a tendency to increase spring precipitation over the southern Great Plains and this effect was found to have intensified since 1980; this intensification was concomitant with a warmer atmosphere due to anthropogenic GHG. Specifically, the intensified ENSO teleconnection appears to be triggered by enhanced latent heating in the equatorial central Pacific, and is associated with broad SST warming in the tropics. In essence, there was a detectable effect of anthropogenic global warming on the teleconnection and moisture transport leading to May 2015’s high precipitation.

Wang emphasized the importance of the new research in improving climate forecasting: “Identifying (1) and (2) is crucial because this event (very wet May in TX-OK) was forecast 3 months earlier by operational climate forecast models.” But, Wang notes, “What wasn’t forecast is the extreme magnitude. It is an important progress by climate forecasting community! Knowing that El Niño impact will increase can potentially help (climate) forecasters better anticipate extreme events.”

The bottom line is that many different types of weather events — heat waves, droughts, and deluges — are getting more extreme and global warming is the primary reason.

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Almost Half Of Firefighters In California Are Inmates, Being Paid $1 An Hour On The Line

Northern California is burning: the Rocky Fire has charred nearly 70,000 acres west of Clearlake, while the Jerusalem Fire has grown to more than 14,000 acres, forcing the evacuation of 150 homes near Napa. The two fires are emblematic of a season that has been marked by a seemingly endless succession of fires, stoked by an unprecedented drought that has turned the California countryside into a tinder box of dry and dying vegetation.

But the fires are also emblematic of something else: the state’s dependence on inmates to help battle wildfires wherever they occur. Since the 1940s, California has depended on the cheap labor of volunteer inmates to help control wildfires — it boasts the largest inmate firefighting program in the country, with around 4,000 inmate firefighters. But just as climate change is threatening longer, more extreme fire seasons, the state is looking at ways to cut back its unconstitutionally overcrowded prison populations. That leaves state officials in a peculiar position — will prison reforms drain the state of its cheap fire fighting labor, just when climate change means it’ll need it most?

“It’s true that over time, in theory, the inmates who are eligible to volunteer, that population should be reducing in state prison,” Bill Cessa, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told ThinkProgress. “But we currently have a sufficient number of inmates so the fire protection is not compromised.”

Fire protection in California is hugely dependent on the inmate firefighter program, run jointly by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). In total, the state has about 10,000 firefighters on the ground combating wildfire — which means that almost half of the firefighters in California are inmate firefighters. Unlike civilian volunteer firefighters with Cal Fire, who make minimum wage for their work ($9 an hour in California), inmates are paid $1 an hour when they are on the lines fighting fires. When they’re not actually battling fires, but are working in camp or training, the prisoners make anywhere from $1.45 to $3.90 a day. That’s paltry pay by civilian standards, but Cessa told ThinkProgress that “it’s good money for prison standards.”

If the tax dollars had to support this program, it would be a lot more costly with [civilian] firefighters

But it’s an especially good deal for the state, which saves a considerable amount of money by capitalizing on cheap prison labor instead of employing more civilian fighters at minimum wage. Over a 24-hour period, paying a crew of 12 to 15 civilian fighters would cost Cal Fire between $2,592 and $3,240. Inmate firefighters, on the other hand, cost $288 and $360. That’s a savings of anywhere from $2,304 to $2,880 per crew — and with 196 inmate crews spread across the state, the program saves Cal Fire at least almost half a million dollars each year. Total savings to the state — and taxpayer — are hard to pin down, Cessa told ThinkProgress, but he said that a lot of people have put the number somewhere around $100 million. According to the state-run program website, the savings to the California taxpayer are $80 million annually. According to an in-depth feature on the program published last year by BuzzFeed, the savings to the state top $1 billion.

Any way you cut it, officials from Cal Fire told ThinkProgress, the state and taxpayers benefit from the inmates’ cheap labor.

“If the tax dollars had to support this program, it would be a lot more costly with [civilian] firefighters,” Janet Upton, deputy director of communications at Cal Fire, told ThinkProgress.

It’s an advantage that the state isn’t keen on losing — especially as climate change makes drought and extended fire seasons increasingly common in California. In November of 2014, lawyers for the state filed court documents arguing that a proposed expansion of parole programs would drastically undercut the appeal of the state’s fire program, which incentivizes paricipation by offering inmates twice as many credits toward early release as they would earn inside prison walls. The program, known as 2-1 credits, was ordered to be expanded by a federal court in February of 2014. But attorneys for the state argued that such an expansion would “severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.” California Attorney General Kamala Harris swiftly distanced herself from that stance, telling ThinkProgress days after the documents became public that it “evokes images of chain gangs.”

The connection between cheap prison labor and slavery is teased out explicitly in the Buzzfeed feature, where reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis follows inmate Demetrius Barr through a year of working at the Holton Conservation Camp north of Los Angeles.

“Pshh, this might be beyond slavery, whatever this is,” Barr told Lewis at one point during the piece. “They don’t have a whip. That’s the difference.”

When you’re actually in a fire — this is not a small grass fire, these are fires with flames 100 feet tall

State officials — perhaps predictably — see it differently. Both Upton and Cessa highlighted the positive aspects of the program, noting that it offered inmates a chance to amass a larger monetary nest egg for when they’re released than any other prison job, and that it allows them a greater — though still severely limited — amount of freedom, because the camps are relatively open compared to the walls of a prison.

Still, Cessa doesn’t hide the fact that it’s very dangerous work. “When the inmates volunteer, we don’t try to hide that fact,” he said. “When you’re actually in a fire — this is not a small grass fire, these are fires with flames 100 feet tall.”

And the work that is required of the inmates is incredibly arduous — often, inmates are tasked with cutting fire lines in steep areas that inaccessible by bulldozer and covered in very thick brush. Cutting fire lines involves stripping away brush and vegetation to expose a wide path of soil that won’t burn — it’s work that civilian firefighters also take on sometimes, but for inmate firefighters, it’s pretty much all they’re allowed to do. Without the work of inmate crews cutting fire lines, Cal Fire’s other fire suppression tools — from fire engines to airtankers — would be far less effective.

“They’re an important resource just as all our resources are,” Upton said. “The strength of each of those resources is their ability to work together. An airtanker by itself is not effective — it has to be followed up by boots on the ground work.”

Historically, the program has pulled inmates exclusively from state prisons. Inmates are required to fit certain criteria: no arsonists, no violent offenders, no inmates serving a life sentence, and no imates with behavior problems in high-security institutions. But as state reforms have shifted more inmates from state prisons to county jails — and the need for inmate firefighters has only increased — the program has begun looking to county jails to fill the program.

“We are always concerned, but we have contingency plans,” Cessa said. “There were predictions a few years ago that the population would drop dramatically, and fortunately those predictions did not come true, but anticipating that they might the state negotiated contracts with counties to provide jail inmates if we need them. Out of the 3,800 that we currently have out there, only about 200 or so are actually from counties.”

Upton also said that Cal Fire is beginning to look beyond the inmate program — potentially to places like the California Conservation Corps, or the National Guard — to bolster its firefighting needs.

“I don’t envision a time when we’re going to lose all our inmate crews,” Upton said. “That said, the numbers are certainly something jointly, with our partners, that we’re paying attention to.”

At the same time, she’s also paying attention to the marked increase in wildfires within the state over the past few years.

“We’ve been tracking, in California, large fires by acreage. Of the 20 largest fires in recorded history, which goes back to 1932 or so, over half have occurred since 2002,” she said. “That’s concerning.”

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Happy Earth Overshoot Day! We’ve Now Used All Our Resources For The Year.

On this day in August 2015, humans have used an entire year’s worth of the Earth’s natural resources, according to the Global Footprint Network.

Calling it Earth Overshoot Day, the group celebrates — or, rather, notes — the day by which people have used more natural resources, such as fish stocks, timber, and even carbon emissions, than the Earth can regenerate in a single year. It’s basically a balance sheet for global accounting.

“We can overuse nature quite easily,” Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network, told ThinkProgress. “When you start to spend more than you earn, it does not become immediately apparent. But, eventually, you go bankrupt.”

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CREDIT: Courtesy the Global Footprint Network

It’s a simple idea, really.

“If a sea lion eats a fish, that fish is not available for me to eat,” Wackernagel said. But this philosophy works for carbon, as well. (And it’s usually people using up the natural resources, not sea lions).

The balance sheet helps show that our carbon footprint is linked to other natural resources, such as cropland and forest. Land can be used as forest, which absorbs carbon, or pavement, which does not. If we want to continue to emit carbon, we need to have areas that absorb it more quickly.

“It’s all a question of priorities, in some ways,” Wackernagel said.

And while our deficit spending of natural resources has improved on many fronts, the group found, carbon emissions are getting worse. These findings are consistent with data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which announced in May that Earth surpassed the 400 parts per million (ppm) mark for the average concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide for the first time since record-keeping began.

Wagernackel’s group hopes this idea of a balance sheet could help encourage countries to take their commitments to curbing carbon emissions more seriously, especially in the lead up to the United Nations climate change summit in Paris in December. Many countries have already submitted pledges to reduce carbon emissions, but there is still a long way to go, especially in order to avoid warming of 2°C, widely recognized as the threshold to prevent some of the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Amazingly, even if humanity were to achieve the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recommended 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, we would still be in a yearly deficit, according to the group.

Many leaders of wealthy nations — including American politicians — have argued that taking steps to curb climate change is futile, because other developing nations, such as India and China, might not follow. Wackernagel says this method of accounting makes the self-interest of the problem more obvious.

“By putting carbon in the larger context of resources, the self-interest becomes more apparent,” Wackernagel said. “Really, your country is more like a farm. Are you sure you can maintain your metabolism if the resources are not available?”

The United States is an outsized user of natural resources, using about 1.9 times the amount of natural resources its section of the Earth regenerates. Japan, with its small area, uses 5.5 times the amount it regenerates.

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CREDIT: Courtesy Global Footprint Network

Wackernagel hopes that some of the wealthier nations will realize that they can’t simply wait for other countries to act. As he put it, “If you have a hole in your boat, why would you wait for everyone else to fix their boat first?”

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Meet The People Raising $4 Million To Preserve Hawaii’s Coast

HONOLULU, HI — On an oppressively hot and humid Saturday, Ursula Retherford and Levani Lipton are out in the unrelenting sun handing out fliers. The two are talking to hikers — tourists and locals alike — at the base of Oahu’s popular Makapu’u lighthouse trail, part of a stretch of protected coastal land just to the east of Honolulu known as the Ka Iwi State Scenic Shoreline.

Retherford and Lipton, both Hawaii residents, are stumping on behalf of a community conservation movement called “Save Ka Iwi Coast Coalition,” which is working alongside the Trust for Public Lands. The last privately-owned parcel of land along the popular coast is up for sale. Unless the group raises the necessary funds to buy it, it will most likely be developed, spoiling the uninterrupted swath of protected land.

These are the last two parcels that are privately-owned…if they get developed, it will change the feeling of the whole coast

The Ka Iwi Coast is “unlike any other” on the island of Oahu. The scenic drive, barely 20 minutes out of Honolulu, is highly popular with tourists, while for locals, “it’s our release valve” from the city of Honolulu, Retherton said. It includes Koko Head Distric Park, an extinct volcanic tuff cone, and steep lava cliffs dropping to the sea, where breaking waves cause eruptions of foam. The land is crossed with hiking trails, and passes two of Oahu’s best body-surfing beaches. On a sunny day, its scenic overlooks are clogged with cars.

“Everyone knows when you do the drive from the eastern shore, when you come around the corner from the town of Waimanalo and Makapu’u, it’s just this beautiful panorama of the ocean and the mountain…it’s one of the wonderful things about our islands, the natural resources and the rustic beauty that we have,” said Lipton.

However, the scenic surroundings and close proximity to Honolulu also make the land highly attractive real estate. Many developers have aspired to build on the land throughout the years, with proposals spanning from luxury hotels to vacation cabins to a golf academy. Community activism has managed to rebuff these attempts and turn it, piece by piece, into protected state parkland.

“We’re trying to keep it the way it is now, in its natural state,” said Retherford. “These are the last two parcels that are privately-owned. But they sort of hold the key…if they get developed, it will change the feeling of the whole coast.”

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Ka Iwi State Scenic Shoreland

CREDIT: Laurel Raymond

Save Ka Iwi Coast Coalition is trying to preserve two parcels comprising 182 acres immediately inland of the Makapu’u lighthouse trail. The land is slated to be sold at a bankruptcy court in Utah at the end of the month.

“It’s the last thing they have to sell. And they want to close the case, and they have another buyer,” said Retherford.

Although Retherford said they don’t know who the other buyer is, they have been told the buyer is prepared to purchase the land outright. The community has until August 30th to raise $4 million — the going price for the land.

“They did not accept our offer until two months ago. So that gave us really 10 weeks to raise the money,” Rutherford said. “The state gave us $1 million. The city gave us $2.5 million. And so, we have to raise $500,000 in 10 weeks. And so, that is why we are out here. We are hustling.”

To raise the remaining $500,000, Lipton said, “People have gone online, people have come out to participate, people have been sign-waving…it’s a community effort.” As of publishing time, the group is only $146,760 short.

The current fundraising effort is just the latest attempt to conserve land in Hawaii. Island groups have been pushing to conserve tracts of land for the past 40 years — and largely succeeding. One of the first parcels of lands preserved on the coastline was Sandy Beach Park, a popular body-surfing spot and a of President Obama since childhood. The community collected 40,000 signatures in 10 weeks to get a ballot initiative preserving the land, preventing a luxury condo from building on the beach.

“What we have now in the way of open space is really the result of the public working for it,” said Retherford, who’s been involved with the conservation push since the beginning.

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The Ka Iwi Scenic Coastline , including some of the threatened land

CREDIT: Laurel Raymond

The debate over public lands rages in both Hawaii and the mainland. In July, President Obama announced that he would add three new national monuments — and more than one million acres of public lands — to the 16 he’s already designated while president. Meanwhile, proposals to seize and sell off national public lands have been introduced by conservative lawmakers in both the House and the Senate. And while the Obama administration has set aside more public lands than any other, the administration has also kept thousands of acres of public land open to coal mining, which is the largest source of U.S. carbon emissions.

“Hawaii is a microcosm. People are having this debate all over the world. It’s development and technology and money versus open space and the environment,” Levani said.

According to Save Ka Iwi Coast Coalition’s website, if the funds are raised in time the land will be held by a local nonprofit and the Trust for Public Land as a “community-owned and stewarded cultural landscape.” The city of Honolulu will also ensure that the lands remain undeveloped by holding a conservation easement over the properties. In addition social and environmental concerns, the conservation movement says that the parcel of the Ka Iwi Coast that’s up for sale contains many unstudied ancient Hawaiian cultural sites.

“If the public donates, then the public owns it” said Levani. “It’s about residents, visitors, and people who are living today but also about future generations. And so, we want to set that precedent for them.”

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Prominent Muslim Leaders To Issue Sweeping Call To Act On Climate

Prominent Muslim leaders are putting the final touches on a new statement on climate change, hoping to issue a sweeping call to protect the planet and insist that followers of Islam have a religious duty to help the environment.

The declaration is set to be unveiled at the end of a two-day climate change-themed symposium being held next week in Istanbul, Turkey. Participants include Islamic scholars, policy makers, academics, and Muslim activists as well as representatives from the United Nations — all organized by Islamic Relief Worldwide, the Islamic Forum for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and GreenFaith.

“Islam teaches us: ‘Man is simply a steward holding whatever is on Earth in trust,’” said Sheikh Shaban Ramadhan Mubaje, Uganda’s grand mufti, according to email about the conference from the Climate Action Network (CAN). “Therefore man should ensure that we do everything possible to protect for this and future generations in order to leave this world a better place than we found it.”

The final document, scheduled for release next Tuesday, will ask leaders at madrasas and mosques to articulate the Islamic impetus for helping curb the effects of global warming. It will also challenge wealthy countries to “drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as well as to support vulnerable communities, both in addressing the impacts of climate change and in harnessing renewable energy,” according to an email from CAN.

Muslims have called for action on climate change several times in the past, as Islamic organizations focused on environmental issues have existed for some time. In 2009, about 200 Muslim scholars and religious leaders — including the Mufti of Egypt — endorsed the “Muslim 7 Year Action Plan on Climate Change.” That document included plans to develop a “Green Hajj,” or Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, and establish “two to three Muslim cities as ‘green cities,’” among other strategic goals.

But the new declaration is likely to attract more attention than past statements, largely because it comes roughly two months after Pope Francis unveiled a 180-plus page papal encyclical on the environment, which also made a faith-based case for taking action to curb the effects of our changing climate. The encyclical, addressed to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, refuted conservative religious arguments against aiding the planet, and insisted that people of faith have a moral obligation to advocate for polices that can help reduce carbon emissions.

The pope has since thrust the Vatican into the center of environmental advocacy world, speaking regularly on the topic and convening a star-studded group of mayors from around the world to discuss how to address climate concerns. His activism has energized people of faith who have long advocated for the environment: Since June, the World Council of Churches, Unitarian Universalists, Union Seminary, and the Episcopal Church have all divested from fossil fuels, as have several smaller groups such as the the Oregon Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Shalom Center. In April, the Church in England divested $19 million from tar sands.

Leaders from across the theological spectrum have also become more vocal in their support for the environment this year, taking out ads in newspapers calling for climate action and issuing formal statements backing the pope’s encyclical. Most of these statements note that the effects of climate change disproportionately impact the world’s poor and impoverished, making the issue an inherently moral one.

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