Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 153

The Detroit Zoo’s Newest Attraction Could Revolutionize The Way Zoos Get Energy

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CREDIT: flickr/majorbonnet

If seeing lions and tigers and bears isn’t reason enough to visit the zoo, at the Detroit Zoo there will soon be a new spectacle: a biodigester facility turning animal waste into valuable energy.

The Detroit Zoological Society (DZS) and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation launched a campaign this week to take something the zoo has an endless supply of — animal waste — and turn it into something the public has a never-ending demand for — energy. The supporters are looking to raise enough money to process around 400 tons, or 800,000 pounds, of manure annually into methane-rich biogas using a biodigester. The gas will then be used to power the 18,000-square-foot Ruth Roby Glancy Animal Health Complex, thus saving the zoo around $70,000 to $80,000 in energy costs and another $30,000 to $40,000 in waste disposal fees every year. The compost leftover from the anaerobic digestion process will be used in zoo gardens and other grounds.

The Detroit Zoo has a goal of being zero-waste by 2020, and the addition of a biodigester, which would generate around 7 or 8 percent of the zoo’s annual electricity needs, would be a big step closer to that achievement. It would also set a precedent for other animal zoos and sanctuaries to strive towards.

“We’ll be the first zoo in North America to have a dry biodigester on grounds, turning the dry animal waste into electricity,” said DZS COO Gerry VanAker. There’s also a zoo in Munich, Germany that operates a biodigester, and the Toronto Zoo is in the early phases of developing one, VanAker said.

While the new equipment is not cheap, VanAker said the zoo expects a return on its investment in around a decade. As part of the $1.1 million cost, DZS is trying to raise $55,000 by June 15 through a crowdfunding campaign. Michigan State University’s Anaerobic Digestion Research Education Center will help manage the biodigester for the first year before handing it over to zoo employees.

The Detroit Zoo, which welcomes more than 1.3 million visitors annually, wants to reduce its electricity-related greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 2009 levels by the end of 2015. In 2014 the zoo won the Green Award from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Anaerobic digestion, otherwise known as biogas recovery, is a biological process in which organic wastes, such a livestock manure or food waste, produce biogas primarily composed of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). In the controlled environment of a biodigester, the waste is put in an oxygen-free container with various types of bacteria that break down the manure. According to the California Energy Commission, depending on the waste feedstock, “biogas is typically 55 to 75 percent pure methane,” however “state-of-the-art systems report producing biogas that is more than 95 percent pure methane.”

According to the EPA, if half the U.S.’s annual food waste was anaerobically digested, it would create enough electricity to power 2.5 million homes for a year. As of January 2015, there were around 250 anaerobic digester systems operating at large-scale livestock farms across the country.

The post The Detroit Zoo’s Newest Attraction Could Revolutionize The Way Zoos Get Energy appeared first on ThinkProgress.

This Major Zoo Has Plans To Use 800,000 Pounds Of Animal Waste Every Year To Create Energy

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CREDIT: flickr/majorbonnet

If seeing lions and tigers and bears isn’t reason enough to visit the zoo, at the Detroit Zoo there will soon be a new spectacle: a biodigester facility turning animal waste into valuable energy.

The Detroit Zoological Society (DZS) and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation launched a campaign this week to take something the zoo has an endless supply of — animal waste — and turn it into something the public has a never-ending demand for — energy. The supporters are looking to raise enough money to process around 400 tons, or 800,000 pounds, of manure annually into methane-rich biogas using a biodigester. The gas will then be used to power the 18,000-square-foot Ruth Roby Glancy Animal Health Complex, thus saving the zoo around $70,000 to $80,000 in energy costs and another $30,000 to $40,000 in waste disposal fees every year. The compost leftover from the anaerobic digestion process will be used in zoo gardens and other grounds.

The Detroit Zoo has a goal of being zero-waste by 2020, and the addition of a biodigester, which would generate around 7 or 8 percent of the zoo’s annual electricity needs, would be a big step closer to that achievement. It would also set a precedent for other animal zoos and sanctuaries to strive towards.

“We’ll be the first zoo in North America to have a dry biodigester on grounds, turning the dry animal waste into electricity,” said DZS COO Gerry VanAker. There’s also a zoo in Munich, Germany that operates a biodigester, and the Toronto Zoo is in the early phases of developing one, VanAker said.

While the new equipment is not cheap, VanAker said the zoo expects a return on its investment in around a decade. As part of the $1.1 million cost, DZS is trying to raise $55,000 by June 15 through a crowdfunding campaign. Michigan State University’s Anaerobic Digestion Research Education Center will help manage the biodigester for the first year before handing it over to zoo employees.

The Detroit Zoo, which welcomes more than 1.3 million visitors annually, wants to reduce its electricity-related greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 2009 levels by the end of 2015. In 2014 the zoo won the Green Award from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Anaerobic digestion, otherwise known as biogas recovery, is a biological process in which organic wastes, such a livestock manure or food waste, produce biogas primarily composed of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). In the controlled environment of a biodigester, the waste is put in an oxygen-free container with various types of bacteria that break down the manure. According to the California Energy Commission, depending on the waste feedstock, “biogas is typically 55 to 75 percent pure methane,” however “state-of-the-art systems report producing biogas that is more than 95 percent pure methane.”

According to the EPA, if half the U.S.’s annual food waste was anaerobically digested, it would create enough electricity to power 2.5 million homes for a year. As of January 2015, there were around 250 anaerobic digester systems operating at large-scale livestock farms across the country.

The post This Major Zoo Has Plans To Use 800,000 Pounds Of Animal Waste Every Year To Create Energy appeared first on ThinkProgress.

What Meaningful Things Are Actually Happening On Earth Day This Year

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CREDIT: Image by Norman Kuring, NASA GSFC, using data from the VIIRS instrument aboard Suomi NPP

Earth Day, a 45-year old celebration of the Earth and call to protect it, falls annually on April 22. While it functions primarily as a symbolic reminder of the way that humanity and nature must agree to co-exist, it is also an opportunity to highlight and incite action. This year’s Earth Day comes at an especially prominent moment in the global effort to confront climate change, and there are a number of efforts underway to make it a memorable one.

President Obama is spending Earth Day in Florida, the state that currently best encapsulates the political, cultural, economic, and environmental facets of climate change. Florida’s Governor, Rick Scott, has charted an unimpressive course around the issue, mostly by ignoring it. Two major Republican presidential candidates, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is yet to declare officially, and Senator Marco Rubio, hail from the state, which is pretty evenly split between Republican and Democratic voting blocks. Much of Florida’s population lives close to sea level — a sea level that is rising due to climate change. And then there’s the Everglades, one of America’s most treasured environmental assets.

“The Everglades is one of the most special places in our country,” Obama said in his weekly address announcing the trip. “But it’s also one of the most fragile. Rising sea levels are putting a national treasure — and an economic engine for the South Florida tourism industry — at risk. So climate change can no longer be denied, or ignored.”

This latest effort by the Obama Administration to highlight climate change is part of an ongoing push to make the issue a cornerstone of his final years in office, and to build momentum going into the major Paris climate talks at the end of the year. After devoting some time recently to pointing out the impacts of climate change on health and families, his trip to the Everglades is meant to pivot the conversation to protecting local businesses and economies.

“We’ll be spending the week showing exactly what we’re doing to tackle one of our country’s greatest challenges,” said Brian Deese, a senior adviser to Obama on energy and climate issues, in a blog post. This includes showcasing the economic value of National Parks, focusing on conservation and climate resilience, and working with farmers, ranchers, and other land owners to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The developing world has really embraced it.

Since coming into existence at the dawn of the environmental movement in 1970, Earth Day has grown into a global phenomenon that extends in some ways into a full week or month.

“Earth Day just keeps getting bigger,” Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day Network, told ThinkProgress. “The developing world has really embraced it.”

Rogers said what these communities most latch onto is a notion EDN calls “environmental democracy” which involves giving people the skills — through civic action, town hall meetings, letter writing campaign — to engage in ways they couldn’t before.

According to Rogers, the Earth Day movement, which EDN refers to as the world’s largest non-secular celebration, is growing fastest in India and China. She said the movement is partner oriented and this year includes partnerships with boy and girl scouts, the popular video game Angry Birds, high schools, the NAACP, the tech community, and others. She also said it’s a year-round endeavor.

“When you talk about Earth Day you’re talking about mass movements,” she said. “There’s nothing else like it in the environmental community.”

Another new thing about Earth Day this year is it marks the inaugural Climate Education Week, a week of lesson plans and activities for K-12 students designed to help them learn about climate change.

“Having a climate education week seems like a natural extension of Earth Day,” Minda Berbeco of the National Center For Science Education, told ThinkProgress. “What is the biggest environmental challenge we are dealing with right now? Climate change. What is one of the largest challenges relating to climate change right now? Education — especially because students are going to be the ones who have to deal with this in the future.”

There is a really big risk of being too negative.

Berbeco said there are many different ways to educate students on climate change, and this often depends on the facilities available as well as the cultural and political factors present in the community. When parents, administrators, or politicians push back on the teaching of climate change in classrooms, it puts educators in a difficult position, “when all they want to do is teach science, and that’s unfortunate.”

There is also the challenge of making climate change sound too bad, too dire, or too hopeless.

“There is a really big risk of being too negative,” said Berbeco. “This can be avoided by putting a positive spin on how much students can do about it, by empowering them, and by letting them know they have the capacity to learn and do things about climate change.”

On Saturday, April 18, Earth Day Network co-hosted a Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. As part of the event, which drew some 250,000 people and included performances by Usher, No Doubt, and others, Denis Hayes, the organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, spoke of the challenges faced by today’s youth in confronting climate change.

“Climate justice is the issue facing this generation,” he said. “Ruthless, powerful carbon companies are buying votes and lying like the cigarette industry did for so long. So far, they are winning. The main power on the other side is you — you and billions of other people who actually care about tomorrow.”

Matt Roney, a research associate at the Earth Policy Institute, told ThinkProgress that on Earth Day, leaders and politicians need to “acknowledge that the biggest threats to human civilization aren’t armed conflict but the systematic undermining of the natural systems that are the foundation of the global economy.”

Feeding into Obama’s push to tie environmental and economic issues together, he said we can “only overpump, overplow, overfish, deforest, and pollute for so long. We could reach tipping points on any or all of these trends, after which there’s no turning back.”

The post What Meaningful Things Are Actually Happening On Earth Day This Year appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Is Walmart The Key To Making American Farming More Sustainable?

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Are private companies like Wal-Mart the future leaders of food policy?

Every five years or so, Congress passes a revised version of the Farm Bill, a diverse set of laws meant to guide the way that food is grown, sold and consumed in the United States. But a panel of experts at this year’s National Food Policy Conference say there’s a better way to shape U.S. agriculture, and it doesn’t involve Congress at all.

“Given the state of our planet we dont have a moment to lose,” David Festa, head of the Environmental Defense Fund’s West Coast operations, said at the conference. “This is the perfect moment for the private sector to lead.”

Speaking on a panel that was discussing what a national food policy might look like, Festa said that the United States has been too dependent on federal policy to force food policy changes on the ground — a process that can be slow and marred by Congressional gridlock. The USDA has been forced to extend the comment period on its revised dietary guidelines, for instance, because they say that Americans should consume less meat not only because it is unhealthy, but places undue stress on natural resources — a position that has garnered criticism from agriculture groups and legislators.

“Is a top down policy approach the most productive path to environment and food?” Festa asked, arguing that instead of relying on federal policy, consumers should put pressure on private companies to source food in a way that is sustainable. To illustrate that point, Festa turned to Wal-Mart, which is using its position as the country’s largest grocer to exert pressure on its supply chain and give preference to suppliers who use fertilizer more sustainably.

Last fall, Wal-Mart decided to begin tackling agriculture and climate change, introducing their Climate Smart Agriculture Program that focuses on increasing transparency of agricultural yields, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions from their supply chain in the next ten years. As part of the program, Wal-Mart began to take a look at the products that contribute most substantially to greenhouse gas emissions and pollution — and found that grains like soy, corn, and wheat were the primary culprits.

Fertilizer is crucial to agriculture and helps farmers increase their crop yields, but fertilizer that isn’t absorbed into the ground can turn into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, or be swept away by rain into water sources. When excess fertilizer drains into rivers, lakes, bays, and oceans, it encourages algae growth, which in turn sucks oxygen from the water, creating dead zones where marine life can’t survive. It was fertilizer runoff that caused the algae bloom that shutdown Toledo, Ohio’s water supply for days last summer. Festa claims that fertilizer is “the biggest environmental problem of this century.”

Regulatory framework to limit fertilizer pollution has been slow to emerge. Agricultural runoff isn’t touched by the Clean Water Act, and local governments have had little success in regulating how farmers apply fertilizer to their land — most regulations have been voluntary, giving farmers little incentive to cut back on fertilizer use.

To cut down on fertilizer pollution, Wal-Mart asked its top suppliers to submit fertilizer optimization plans, hoping to reduce 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from its supply chain by 2015 — the equivalent of taking 4.2 million cars off the road.

Working with 15 suppliers of commodity grains — representing 30 percent of food and beverages sold in America — Wal-Mart helped give farmers data and tools to make sure they were using the right amount of fertilizer. Things like soil tests can help farmers know how much and what kind of nutrients the soil needs, and helps them be more precise in their application so less fertilizer is wasted.

Wal-Mart launched the pilot program with 15 business this fall, covering 2.5 million acres of land with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2.3 million metric tons. It hopes to eventually expand the program to cover 14 million acres, with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 7 million metric tons.

“This is an area where there’s been no regulatory action,” Elizabeth Sturcken, who heads up the Environmental Defense Fund’s campaign to help Wal-Mart create a more sustainable supply chain, told Bloomberg Business in 2014. “Wal-Mart in effect becomes a new standard in saying that they want fertilizer optimized.”

Wal-Mart isn’t the only private company using the supply chain to exert pressure on the way food is farmed. In late March, Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest agricultural commodity traders, pledged to commit to a strict “no-deforestation” policy in its palm and soy oil supply chain. The move marked the first time that an agribusiness had extended deforestation policies to cover soy, which accounts for a huge amount of forest loss in the Amazon basin.

The palm oil industry, once a leading force of deforestation in Indonesia and Malyasia, now sources 96 percent of global palm oil from sources committed to no-deforestation policies, a change in policy that began when the CEO of the world’s largest producer of palm oil decided to require sustainable practices from his company’s supply chain.

Daniel Glickman, former Secretary of Agriculture who also spoke on the panel at the National Food Policy Conference, agreed with Festa that Congress’ role in driving food policy might be waning. “More and more, farm policy is going to be done by other people,” he said, “by Wal-Marts, retailers, and cooperatives.”

When Glickman was Secretary of Agriculture, he remembered, conversations about farming in the United States were dominated by commodity crops and a singular focus on productivity. Today, he says, that’s beginning to change.

“There are more and more people interested in diversity of food, local food, organic food,” he said. “We’re going to be less dependent on what the national government does every five years.”

The post Is Walmart The Key To Making American Farming More Sustainable? appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Earth Day Should Be Less About Our ‘Precious Planet’ And More About Saving Ourselves

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The earth will be fine. It’s us that need saving.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama said, “Wednesday is Earth Day, a day to appreciate and protect this precious planet we call home. And today, there’s no greater threat to our planet than climate change.”

Obama’s decision to emphasize climate change this week is a sound one, since climate change is certainly the greatest preventable (environmental) threat to the health and well-being of Americans and indeed all of homo sapiens. But the emphasis on protecting this “precious planet” is less sound.

Affection and concern for our “precious planet” is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

That being said, there are two messaging problems with Obama’s pre-Earth Day address. For example: “[O]n Earth Day, I’m going to visit the Florida Everglades to talk about the way that climate change threatens our economy,” he said. “Rising sea levels are putting a national treasure — and an economic engine for the South Florida tourism industry — at risk.”

First, yes, the Everglades are awesome and vitally important — but the threat rising seas pose to the economy isn’t through their indirect impact on South Florida’s tourism industry. It’s through their impact on people.

More specifically, the most immediate threat rising seas pose to our economy is the trillion dollar real estate bubble we are in, led by Florida, detailed here. As Harold Wanless, chair of University of Miami’s geological sciences department, said in 2013, “I cannot envision southeastern Florida having many people at the end of this century.” In 2014, he said, “Miami, as we know it today, is doomed. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”

As Wanless explained to me, we could be facing a rise upwards of 10 feet. And considerably more than that after 2100 — sea level rise exceeding a foot per decade. We’re especially likely to hit the high end of current sea level rise projections if we don’t start we reverse carbon pollution trends ASAP.

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So we are in a major coastal real estate bubble. It is a huge bubble and all of us will pay when it bursts — as Reuters revealed with this sobering chart to the right:

There is nothing wrong with talking about the threat climate change poses to the Everglades — it just seems to me one or two steps removed from the more salient threat to the people of Florida and the whole country.

The second messaging problem is that Obama started his address by talking about the economy. Team Obama knows the economic argument is not the one to lead with — the moral argument is. How do I know they know this? Because team Obama finally figured it out two years ago and leaked it to the world around the time of his in his big June 2013 climate speech (see “Moral Majority: Team Obama Finally Embraces The Winning Argument For Climate Action”).

Indeed, Politico published team Obama’s talking points at the time:

Team Obama’s messaging had finally found the winning message: how climate change will impact future generations. The talking points note that this messaging is backed by extensive polling (more details here).

Again, it’s terrific Obama is focusing on climate change during Earth Day week — and other elements of his remarks clearly discuss human impacts. But the media naturally focus on what Obama focuses on, and they travel where he travels. It is too easy to be distracted by the idea of “Earth Day” into mistakenly focusing on the impacts of carbon pollution on the earth and then trying to make a secondary connection between those and impacts on humans.

Back in 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious.

Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day remains more relevant than ever, as we just saw.

So I’m updating the column once more:

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.

Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days, at least for everyone but the 0.01 percent and the Supreme Court. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.

How about Nature Day or Environment Day? Personally, I am not an environmentalist. I don’t think I’m ever going to see the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wouldn’t drill for oil there. But that’s not out of concern for the caribou but for my daughter and the planet’s next several billion people, who will need to see oil use cut sharply to avoid the worst of climate change.

I used to worry about the polar bear. But then some naturalists told me that once human-caused global warming has mostly eliminated their feeding habitat — the polar ice, probably by the 2020s and maybe sooner — polar bears will just go about the business of coming inland and attacking humans and eating our food and maybe even us. That seems only fair, no?

I am a cat lover, but you can’t really worry about them. Cats are survivors. Remember the movie “Alien”? For better or worse, cats have hitched their future to humans, and while we seem poised to wipe out half the species on the planet, cats will do just fine.

Apparently jellyfish thrive on an acidic environment, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to wipe out all life in the ocean, just most of it. Sure, losing Pacific salmon is going to be a bummer, but I eat Pacific salmon several times a week, so I don’t see how I’m in a position to march on the nation’s capital to protest their extinction. I won’t eat farm-raised salmon, though, since my doctor says I get enough antibiotics from the tap water.

If thousands of inedible species can’t adapt to our monomaniacal quest to return every last bit of fossil carbon back into the atmosphere ASAP, why should we care? Other species will do just fine, like bark beetles, kudzu, cactus, cockroaches, rats and ratsnakes, scorpions, Anopheles mosquitoes and the malaria parasites they harbor — oh and let’s not forget the Dengue virus and brain-eating amoebas. Who are we to pick favorites — especially since those same species must also have all been on Noah’s ark!

I didn’t hear any complaining after the dinosaurs and many other species were wiped out when an asteroid hit the earth and made room for mammals and, eventually, us. If God hadn’t wanted us to dominate all living creatures on the earth, he wouldn’t have sent that asteroid in the first place, and he wouldn’t have turned the dead plants and animals into fossil carbon that could power our Industrial Revolution, destroy the climate, and ultimately kill more plants and animals.

All of these phrases create the misleading perception that the cause so many of us are fighting for — sharp cuts in carbon pollution — is based on the desire to preserve something inhuman or abstract or far away. But I have to say that all the environmentalists I know — and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd — care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans, even if they aren’t so good at articulating that perspective. I’m with them.

The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the polar bears is not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn’t smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? The 100th species we wipe out? The 1,000th? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.

This is where I part company with many environmentalists. With 7 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 3.5°F from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 7°F, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the relatively stable environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet.

So I think the world should be more into conserving the stuff that we can’t live without. In that regard I am a conservative person. Unfortunately, Conservative Day would, I think, draw the wrong crowds.

The problem with Earth Day is it asks us to save too much ground. We need to focus. The two parts of the planet worth fighting to preserve are the soils and the glaciers.

Numerous studies show that nearly a third of the world’s land faces drying from rising greenhouse gases — including two of the world’s greatest agricultural centers, the U.S. Great Plains and a big chunk of southeastern China. On our current emissions path, most of the Southwest ultimately experience twice as much loss of soil moisture as was seen during the Dust Bowl (see “Dust-Bowlification“).

Also, locked away in the frozen soil of the tundra or permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere contains today (see Tundra, Part 1). On our current path, most of the top 10 feet of the permafrost will be lost this century — so much for being “perma” — and that amplifying carbon-cycle feedback will “Will Likely Add Up To 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100,” all but ensuring that today’s worst-case scenarios for global warming become the best-case scenarios. We must save the tundra.

Perhaps it should be small “e” earth Day, which is to say, Soil Day. On the other hand, most of the public enthusiasm in the 1980s for saving the rain forests fizzled, and they are almost as important as the soil, so maybe not Soil Day.

As for glaciers, when they disappear, sea levels rise, perhaps in excess of an inch a year by century’s end (see also here). If we warm even 3°C from pre-industrial levels, we will return the planet to a time when sea levels were ultimately 100 feet higher (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher). The first five feet of sea level rise, which seems increasingly likely to over the next hundred years on our current emissions path, would displace more than 100 million people. That would be the equivalent of 200 Katrinas. Since my brother lost his home in Katrina, I don’t consider this to be an abstract issue.

Equally important, the inland glaciers provide fresh water sources for more than a billion people. But on our current path, virtually all of them will be gone by century’s end.

So where is everyone going to live? Hundreds of millions will flee the new deserts, but they can’t go to the coasts; indeed, hundreds of millions of other people will be moving inland. But many of the world’s great rivers will be drying up at the same time, forcing massive conflict among yet another group of hundreds of millions of people. The word rival, after all, comes from “people who share the same river.” Sure, desalination is possible, but that’s expensive and uses a lot of energy, which means we’ll need even more carbon-free power.

Perhaps Earth Day should be Water Day, since the worst global warming impacts are going to be about water — too much in some places, too little in other places, too acidified in the oceans for most life. But even soil and water are themselves only important because they sustain life. We could do Pro-Life Day, but that term is already taken, and again it would probably draw the wrong crowd.

We could call it Homo sapiens Day. Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Isn’t it great being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the sapiens. And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens,” at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from self-destruction. I’d suggest “Brainless Frog Day” but I just don’t think that would catch on.

What the day — indeed, the whole year — should be about is not creating misery upon misery for our children and their children and their children, and on and on for generations (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“). Ultimately, stopping climate change is not about preserving the earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. Yes, we can’t preserve ourselves if we don’t preserve a livable climate, and we can’t preserve a livable climate if we don’t preserve the earth. But the focus needs to stay on the health and well-being of billions of humans because, ultimately, humans are the ones who will experience the most prolonged suffering. And if enough people come to see it that way, we have a chance of avoiding the worst.

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

The post appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Big Insurance Companies Are Warning The U.S. To Prepare For Climate Change

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In this Oct. 30, 2012 file photo, a parking lot full of yellow cabs in Hoboken, N.J. is flooded as a result of Superstorm Sandy.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles Sykes

A coalition of big insurance companies, consumer groups, and environmental advocates are urging the United States to overhaul its disaster policies in the face of increasingly extreme weather due to human-caused climate change.

According to a report released Tuesday by the SmarterSafer coalition, the U.S. needs to increase how much it spends on pre-disaster mitigation efforts and infrastructure protection. That way, it asserts, the U.S. can stop wasting so much money on cleaning up after a disaster happens.

“Our current natural disaster policy framework focuses heavily on responding to disasters, rather than putting protective measures in place to reduce our vulnerability and limit a disaster’s impact,” the report reads. “This needlessly exposes Americans to greater risks to life and property and results in much higher costs to the federal government.”

The SmarterSafer coalition is made up of more than 30 different groups, including some of the biggest insurance companies in the world: Allianz, Liberty Mutual, SwissRe, and USAA, to name a few. Adequately dealing with the risks of climate change is inherently important to the insurance industry, as failure to prepare can lead to increased costs for insurance companies when storms wipe out basements and take out walls.

Making sure the government is prepared is important for private insurers too. Because if governments don’t fortify their infrastructure, the damage can fall onto the companies. A good example is Farmers Insurance Co., which sued local governments in the Chicago area last year for failing to prepare for climate change (the lawsuits have since been dropped). That lack of preparedness, the lawsuits said, caused sewers to burst into people’s homes and property values to decline — damage that Farmers had to pay for.

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Disaster costs have been increasing as the economy has grown and infrastructure has become more expensive.

CREDIT: smartersafer.org

According to SmarterSafer’s report, states that are hit by disasters like extreme floods and fires rely too easily on monetary assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after said disaster occurs. Under FEMA’s Stafford Act, states can easily apply for disaster assistance. When that assistance is granted, the federal government is accountable for at least 75 percent of the costs.

Because states know federal relief is available and easy to get, the report argues, states are unmotivated to significantly prepare for extreme weather events.

“With the federal government taking on such an enormous share of the financial burden and nearly all recovery responsibility, there is little incentive for disaster-prone states to take action to reduce risk,” the report says. “For example, disaster-prone states like Texas and Louisiana are among those spending the least of their state budget on emergency response and mitigation programs that can reduce disaster costs.”

The report suggested changing FEMA’s payment system so that states that have taken the most mitigation and preparation efforts are rewarded with more federal aid when disasters strike. “[R]ather than simply writing a blank check after every disaster,” it says, “disaster assistance must be provided on a sliding scale so that communities can get a full share of funding only if they have taken significant steps to protect its residents from harm.”

There’s little question that disaster costs have increased in the last several decades. Since the Stafford Act was passed in 1988, the report notes that disaster declaration have steadily escalated — from 16 declarations in 1988 to 242 declarations in 2011.

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Since 1980, the U.S. has increased its yearly spending on disaster relief.

CREDIT: smartersafer.org

The reasons for those increased disaster costs are two-fold, the report says. For one, the economy has grown since 1980, and there’s been more development — meaning there are bigger and more expensive structures to be damaged when extreme events hit. The other reason, it asserts, is climate change, which is increasing the risks that bad storms will occur across the country.

One of the biggest climate risks is sea level rise, which has increased both the frequency and length of minor coastal flooding — also called “nuisance flooding.” Whereas nuisance flooding along the Atlantic, Gulf, and West Coasts only occurred less than once per year at any given location in the 1950s, it now occurs on average about once every three months, the report says.

In addition, periods of very heavy precipitation have increased in every region of the country except Hawaii since 1958, according to the National Climate Assessment. That’s been particularly bad in the Northeast and Midwest, which have seen 71 percent and 37 percent increases in very heavy precipitation, respectively.

While those projections may not be alarming to some, they are certainly red flags for the insurance industry — a business which is based almost solely on credible estimation of risk. And the risks are growing, the report notes — if global action on climate change is not taken, sea level rise is projected to increase anywhere from 8.4 inches to 6.6 feet above 1992 levels, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Risks of heavy precipitation, wildfires, and heat waves are also projected to increase.

“In short, we face a costlier and more unpredictable future,” the report says. “With the risks so apparent, action must be taken now to curb the harshest effects.”

The post Big Insurance Companies Are Warning The U.S. To Prepare For Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

John Kerry’s Mission To Save The Arctic

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, pictured here in a scarf, is set to take control of the Arctic Council on Friday.

CREDIT: AP Photo

John Kerry is heading north.

On Friday, the U.S. Secretary of State will travel to the Canadian Arctic city of Iqualuit, Nunavut, where he will take temporary reins of the Arctic Council, a forum that could ultimately determine the fate of the Arctic. At the biennial Arctic Council ministerial meeting in Iqualuit, Canadian Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq — the current Arctic Council Chair — will turn the chairmanship of the eight-nation body over to Kerry.

While it might be cliché to call this a critical juncture for the Arctic, Kerry is assuming this role at a time of unprecedented uncertainty for this diverse and fast-changing region. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, driving rapid melting of sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets across the region.

These changes are exposing Native Alaska coastal communities to punishing storm surges, erosion, and sea-level rise, and putting some villages on the brink of falling into the sea. Rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers are major drivers of global sea-level rise, leaving coastal and low-lying areas in the United States and around the world vulnerable to flooding. Further, as permafrost thaws, it could release a total of 120 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere by 2100. Scientists warn that worldwide carbon emissions must stay below 1,000 gigatons over the same timeframe to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Chiefly, Kerry has the rare opportunity to lock in a legacy of curbing global warming in the Arctic — a move that could keep communities intact and save species from extinction.

During his two year chairmanship, Kerry has committed to address climate change, strengthen Arctic Ocean stewardship and improve the economic and living conditions of Arctic communities. After the Iqaluit meeting, Arctic nation ministers will not convene again until 2017, after President Obama leaves office. Depending on who next occupies the White House, Kerry may have only limited time to drive real changes from the Arctic Council.

He can remedy this by doing a couple of things. First, he could convene with President Obama an Arctic summit sometime this year. Such an event could elevate public awareness of the consequences of unchecked climate change and build momentum for a strong global climate agreement at the December climate negotiations in Paris.

The United States could also use the summit to secure pledges from Arctic Council nations and observer states to cut black carbon pollution — one of the most dire threats to the Arctic — and to launch a Global Ice Alliance to encourage other countries to also reduce this pollution. The U.S. could also update the U.S. Department of Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) air quality standards for new oil and gas development off the Alaskan coast to specifically limit black carbon pollution.

Scientists say black carbon pollution may be responsible for more than 30 percent of recent warming in the Arctic. Whether it is deposited by local sources or drifts in from lower latitudes black carbon pollution covers ice and snow with a sooty heat-trapping blanket. This accelerates warming by reducing the reflectivity of Arctic snow and ice, and by melting sea ice into the dark ocean waters that absorb more heat.

The United States is responsible for 61 percent of black carbon pollution from Arctic nations. Globally, the U.S. and other Arctic Council members and observer countries — including China, India, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and the United Kingdom — contribute more than 60 percent of black carbon pollution.

U.S. policies, including diesel regulations, are helping to cut black carbon emissions. But these cuts may be undermined by increases in Arctic black carbon pollution from oil and gas exploration, flaring, shipping, and other sources. For example, Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell recently validated 2008 oil leases in Alaska’s Chuckchi Sea, and her agency is reviewing Shell Oil’s application to resume oil exploration there this summer.

Seven Senators recently wrote to Jewell, asking the Department to solicit information on the availability of black carbon pollution control technologies for offshore activity there. And experts acknowledge that black carbon could be reduced without hurting the economy. “We have the technology today to cut black carbon emissions from many of the engines associated with oil and gas exploration and production,” said Joe Kubsh, executive director of the Manufacturers of Emission Controls Association, in a statement.

Hosting an official summit, announcing new black carbon standards in the U.S., and securing black carbon reduction pledges from other countries — these are just some of the things Kerry could do to leave a meaningful climate leadership legacy during his time at the helm of the Arctic Council. Whether he does or not, however, remains to be seen.

Cathleen Kelly is a Senior Fellow at American Progress specializing in international and U.S. climate mitigation and resilience.

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Adidas Wants To Make Shoes And Clothing Using Plastic Garbage From The Ocean

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Adidas has a plan to combat marine plastic waste.

In an effort to bolster its commitment to sustainability, Adidas announced on Monday that it would begin developing materials out of plastic ocean waste to ultimately use in its products.

In a press release, the iconic clothing corporation said it’s team up with the Parley for the Oceans, a group of artists, scientists, musicians, and designers dedicated to cleaning up the world’s oceans. Together, they plan on developing fibers made from plastic ocean waste that can be used in the manufacturing of clothing and potentially in shoes.

In the short term, Adidas also pledged to phase out plastic bags at its 2,900 stores worldwide.

“By partnering with Parley for the Oceans, we’re contributing to a great environmental cause and co-creating new fabrics from ocean plastic waste that we’ll gradually and constantly integrate into our product,” Maria Culp, a spokesperson for Adidas, told ThinkProgress.

According to a recent study in Science, between 5 and 13 million metric tons of plastic waste ended up in oceans just 2010 alone, an amount that’s expected to increase in the coming decades if waste disposal techniques aren’t improved. Another study estimated that the ocean has about 600 pieces of plastic in it per every person living on earth.

Each ocean has its own massive whirlpool of plastic debris, but those patches only account for 1 percent of the plastic thought to be in oceans. No one really knows what happens to the other 99 percent — it might wash back to shore, it might breakdown into very small bits, or it might be eaten by fish and enter into the food chain.

Adidas isn’t the first company to look to marine plastic waste for innovative manufacturing materials. Last year, G-Star Raw denim partnered with producer and musician Pharrell Williams to debut a line of jeans made with fabric spun from recycled ocean debris. Williams is the creative director of Bionic Yarn, which creates fabric primarily using plastic bottles.

Bionic Yarn has also partnered with Parley to create the Vortex Project, whose mission is to retrieve marine plastic and transform it into yarn that can be used in manufacturing garments for the fashion industry.

The partnership is just one part of Adidas’ growing commitment to sustainability, which it outlined in its 2014 Sustainability Progress Report. The company also sourced 30 percent of its cotton from sustainable sources in 2014, exceeding the goal of 25 percent that it had set for itself. Ultimately, Adidas says it wants to source 40 percent of its cotton from sustainable sources by the end of the year, with the goal of transitioning to 100 percent sustainable cotton by 2018.

2014 also marked the opening of Adidas’ first “green” retail store in Nuremberg, Germany. The store is run by an intelligent control system that automatically optimizes the store’s heating, cooling, and ventilation. It’s also completely outfitted with LED lights, and other energy-efficient devices meant to reduce the store’s overall carbon footprint.

As environmental groups like Greenpeace pressure fashion companies to become more sustainable in both sourcing and production, Adidas isn’t the only company to shift its attention toward sustainability. According to Reuters, the Swedish retailer H&M — which is the leading user of organic cotton in the world — has committed to tripling the amount of products made from recycled fibers by the end of 2015. In late March, Eileen Fisher also announced plans to begin sourcing only organic linen and cotton in the hopes of becoming 100 percent sustainable by 2020.

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Carbon Emissions Are Up In The Energy Sector. But There’s A Silver Lining.

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A flock of Geese fly past the smokestacks at the Jeffrey Energy Center coal power plant as the suns sets near Emmett, Kansas.

Carbon emissions from the U.S. energy sector increased in 2014 for the second year in a row, despite a big boost in renewable energy capacity, the Energy Information Association (EIA) reported on Monday.

The energy sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, so an increase in those emissions is certainly not ideal for the purposes of stopping human-caused climate change. What is positive, though, is that the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) increased in 2014 more than carbon emissions from the energy sector did, indicating that America is at least doing a little better at decoupling emissions from economic growth.

Specifically, the EIA reported that energy-related carbon emissions increased 0.7 percent in 2014, while the 2014 GDP grew at a rate of 2.4 percent. That’s significantly better than 2013, when energy-related carbon emissions increased by 2.5 percent while the GDP grew at a rate of 2.2 percent. Past years when energy-related emissions decreased consistently corresponded with a decrease in GDP.

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For the second year in a row, energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States have increased.

CREDIT: EIA.gov

According to the EIA, the numbers represent a signal that the U.S. increasingly needs less energy to produce economic growth. Specifically, the agency reported that the United States required 13 percent less energy per unit of GDP in 2014 than in 2005, the year generally used as a baseline to compare yearly emissions. Similar, energy intensity fell in 2014 by 1.2 percent, the EIA said.

Still, emissions from the energy sector are expected to increase very slightly in 2015 and 2016, at a rate of 0.1% annually, the EIA said. After that, however, energy-related emissions are expected to decrease, and remain below 2005 levels by more than 400 million metric tons in 2040.

That prediction is in line with a recent report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), which predicted that 2015 would be transformative for the “de-carbonization” of the U.S. power sector. That report predicted 2015 to be a record-breaking year not only for the installation of renewable energy like solar and wind, but also for retirement of coal plants, which produce the most carbon emissions of any fuel.

The decoupling of carbon emissions from economic growth is hugely important to the fight against global climate change, as it seems unlikely that developing countries would voluntarily clean up their power sectors if it guaranteed economic decline. The good news is that decoupling is finally starting to happen worldwide — In 2014, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions flatlined while the world economy grew, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). That flatlining of global emissions marked “the first time in 40 years in which there was a halt or reduction in emissions of the greenhouse gas that was not tied to an economic downturn,” the IEA said.

Perhaps the most important thing about global energy-sector emissions finally decoupling from economic growth is not the emissions reductions themselves, but the momentum it could provide to negotiators in charge of brokering an international plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change. The U.N. climate talks, happening at the end of 2015 in Paris, are widely considered the last chance for a global agreement that could feasibly keep the rise in global average temperatures under 2°C.

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The Deepwater Horizon Disaster Was Five Years Ago Today. Here’s What We Still Don’t Know.

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In this Wednesday, April 21, 2010 aerial file photo taken in the Gulf of Mexico more than 50 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana’s tip, an oil slick is seen as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File

It’s officially been five years since BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, a well blowout and subsequent oil spill that caused the deaths of 11 men.

A lot has happened since — a massive cleanup effort, scientific research on impacts, civil and criminal court cases galore. But the answers to many basic questions about the historic tragedy remain either unknown and unclear.

On this five-year anniversary, here are five important things we still don’t know about the largest accidental oil spill in world history.

How much oil actually spilled

When people talk about how much oil was spilled during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there are often two different figures tossed around. Some people use the U.S. government’s figure, which is 4.2 million barrels, or 176 million U.S. gallons. Others use BP’s, which is 3.19 million barrels, or 134 million gallons.

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Oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is seen floating on the surface of the water in Plaquemines Parish, La.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

The truth is, no one can really know how much oil was spilled during the 87 days that crude flowed out of the Macondo well and into the Gulf of Mexico. In a January ruling, the federal judge presiding over the Clean Water Act case against BP wrote about the difficulties in estimating exactly how much oil spilled during the disaster in 2010.

“There is no way to know with precision how much oil discharged into the Gulf of Mexico,” he wrote. “There was no meter counting off each barrel of oil as it exited the well. The experts used a variety of methods to estimate the cumulative discharge. None of these were perfect. Because data from the well is limited, every expert had to make some assumptions while performing his calculations.”

How much BP will have to pay

In that January ruling, federal District Court Judge Carl Barbier found that, legally, BP should be held responsible for spilling 3.19 million barrels, a figure that’s about a million barrels less than the U.S. government’s estimate. That was big news for BP, because it decreased the maximum fine the oil giant would be subject to from $18 billion to $13.7 billion.

Still, we aren’t yet sure exactly how much BP will have to pay in Clean Water Act fines — right now, we just know the maximum. BP challenged Judge Barbier’s ruling in February, but the judge hasn’t yet made a final decision as to how much BP is subject to in fines.

BP says that so far, it’s paid out $5 billion to people in businesses in the Gulf that were affected, a figure that’s separate from the Clean Water Act fines. BP, which has tried and failed to challenge the 2012 settlement in the past, says that it’s paid a total of $28 billion on the spill, a figure that includes response, cleanup, claims payments and some restoration work.

How human health has been affected

Questions still remain over the BP oil spill’s overall impact on public health in the Gulf.

Researchers from the National Institute of Health are still working to try to assess how the spill affected Gulf residents, and are working on a 10-year Gulf Long-term Follow-up Study (GuLF STUDY), which involves monitoring the health of 33,000 oil spill cleanup workers for 10 years.

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Oil cleanup workers in Gulf Shores, Ala., Friday, July 2, 2010.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Dave Martin

According to preliminary results, these workers felt more physical and mental symptoms in the aftermath of the spill than non-cleanup workers did. But research for the study is still ongoing, and since it aims to compile 10 years worth of data, it will be a few years before we know the final results.

NIH research has also found that residents — not just workers — struggled in the aftermath of the spill. The research is ongoing — it’s in its final year — but so far scientists have found that 30 to 40 percent of the residents in Franklin County, Florida and Baldwin County, Alabama experienced mental health issues in the two years after the spill, compared with 10 to 13 percent of who experienced these issues before. Even now, five years later, incidence of mental health issues is still higher than usual for the area.

A lot of the anger, anxiety, and depression reported by the residents was related to income insecurity. According to the research, the spill destroyed livelihoods for fishermen and others who depended on a healthy Gulf.

How the deep sea will fare

Just after publishing a study on the BP oil spill’s impacts this past summer, Penn State biology professor Charles Fisher told ThinkProgress that he was “worried” about the deep sea.

“The ocean is under a lot of pressure, and the shallows have already felt it very seriously … the deep sea is starting to feel it as well,” he said. “We’re continuing to monitor, because we’re really not sure how it’s going to turn out in the end.”

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Marine reef ecologist Scott Porter holds coral samples he removed from an oil rig in waters, Monday, June 7, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico south of Venice, La.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ERIC GAY

Fisher was specifically talking about deep sea corals affected by the spill. He and his team had discovered two new coral reefs near the site of the disaster, and found that the negative impacts to those reefs from the spill were greater than expected. Those reefs were farther away and deeper than the one coral reef that had previously been found to have been impacted by the spill — meaning there’s evidence to show that the oil sank deeper than previously thought.

That’s bad for corals themselves, but Fisher said the discovery was more important because coral health can indicate the health of that whole area of the ocean. The deep ocean is mysterious and hard to study, and Fisher said it would be very difficult to know exactly what the effects of oil reaching the deep sea will be.

“What we still don’t know, and what we need to all keep in mind, is that there’s the potential for sub-acute impact,” he said. “In other words, things that might have happened to the corals’ reproductive system — slower acting cancers, changes in the fitness of the animal. These are very hard to detect and they’ll take a long time for us to see whats going on.”

Whether safety standards can really prevent another disaster

New federal regulations on drilling announced over the last few months aim to reduce the risk of future disasters like Deepwater Horizon. And last week, the Obama administration announced proposed regulations that target the reliability of drilling equipment in offshore drilling operations, requiring oil and gas companies to perform tests and maintenance on their blowout preventers, a key piece of drilling equipment.

But some environmental groups say that these new rules are similar to best practices that the industry already has in place, so they don’t go very far in preventing another spill. They also assert that new technologies cannot always account for human error, which have been the underlying causes of other major spills.

The risk of another spill is particularly troubling in the Arctic, a region which, as it melts, has been targeted for drilling by oil and gas companies. In February, the Interior Department proposed its first regulations for oil and gas development in the Arctic Ocean.

But even with new regulations, many are worried about the risks of spills.

“No safety regulations will fix the fact that only 25 percent of the spilled oil from Deepwater Horizon was recovered, burned, or chemically dispersed, leaving 75 percent unaccounted for,” Friends of the Earth said in a statement in March. “The lesson the Obama administration should have learned from Deepwater Horizon is that that only way to keep oil out of our environment is to keep it in the ground.”

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