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Robbi Mecus, Who Helped Foster L.G.B.T.Q. Climbing Community, Dies at 52

Ms. Mecus, a New York State forest ranger who worked in the Adirondacks, died after falling about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska.

Robbi Mecus, a New York State forest ranger who led search-and-rescue missions and became a prominent voice within the L.G.B.T.Q. climbing community, died after falling about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska on Thursday. She was 52.Her death was confirmed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where she worked for 25 years.Ms. Mecus, who worked mostly in the Adirondacks, searched for and rescued lost and injured climbers facing hypothermia and other threats in the wilderness. This month, she helped rescue a frostbitten hiker who was lost in the Adirondack Mountains overnight.At age 44, she came out as transgender, she said in a 2019 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History project. She then worked to foster a supportive community for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning climbers in the North Country of New York.“I want people to see that trans people can do amazing things,” she said in an interview for a climbing website, goEast, in 2022. “I think it helps when young trans people see other trans people accomplishing things. I think it lets them know that their life doesn’t have to be full of negativity and it can actually be really rad.”Basil Seggos, former commissioner of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, called Ms. Mecus a “pillar of strength” and a tremendous leader for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, noting she was “always there” for the most difficult rescues and crises.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Forests
Conservation
Mountains

Chemicals, forever: how do you fix a problem like PFAS?

In Australia, the taxpayer has footed the bill for the forever chemical clean-up so far. But this will have to change.

EdBelkin/ShutterstockA landmark legal settlement has once again focused our attention on the dangers of “forever chemicals”. This class of chemicals, technically known as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are widely used to make nonstick or waterproof products. The problem is, the chemicals move easily around the environment, pollute groundwater and rivers, are often carcinogenic – and they don’t degrade. This month, one of the largest makers of these chemicals, 3M, had its offer of A$16 billion to clean up PFAS-contaminated waterways approved by a US court. It’s just the latest in a series of PFAS lawsuits across the United States. While increased attention is welcome, there’s no guarantee of success. Removing and destroying PFAS from wastewater streams across a single US state, Minnesota, would cost a minimum of $21 billion over 20 years. Globally, a recent report by the chemical safety nonprofit ChemSec found the costs of PFAS remediation alone amount to around $26 trillion per year – not including rising healthcare costs from exposure to PFAS, or damage to the environment. The 3M settlement is just the tip of the iceberg. The problem now is how to actually clean up these chemicals – and prevent further pollution. Remediation is expensive – and uncertain In Australia, contamination is worst in firefighter training grounds and on defence force bases, due to the long-term use of firefighting foams full of PFAS. The discovery of this contamination triggered a wave of lawsuits. The Department of Defence has since paid out more than $366 million in class action lawsuits. Defence has also assumed responsibility for managing, remediating and monitoring PFAS contamination on and around its bases. In 2021, the department began to actively set about remediation. Read more: Removing PFAS from public water systems will cost billions and take time – here are ways you can filter out harmful 'forever chemicals' at home That sounds promising – find the pollution and fix the problem. But the reality is much more complicated. A 2022 parliamentary inquiry described PFAS remediation as an emerging and experimental industry. This is correct. There’s a great deal of basic scientific research we have to do. This is not a simple problem. These chemicals seep into the soil and groundwater – and stay there. It’s hard to get them out. As a result, most remediation work at defence bases to date has been part of research and development, rather than a wide-scale permanent cleanup. To help, the defence department has brought in three major industry partners, including Emerging Compounds Treatment Technologies. We don’t know how they are doing the cleanup or if their methods work, as this information is not publicly accessible. The three companies have sought intellectual property protection to support their technological advantage in the growing PFAS remediation market. One of the companies, Venetia, told the parliamentary inquiry: [there] are still significant gaps in knowledge in keys areas such as human health toxicology, PFAS behaviour in the environment and remediation of PFAS in soil and water PFAS is a much bigger problem Significant PFAS contamination has now been reported in: – Melbourne’s West Gate Tunnel construction site. Soil contamination at the most polluted site is hundreds of times worse than a threshold set by the state’s environmental protection agency – Western Australian mines – WA waste management facilities – Southeast Queensland water reclamation plants – Perth’s public and private airports – Operating and closed landfills. The full extent of PFAS contamination in Australia is still emerging. Recent research has found Australia is one of several toxic hotspots for PFAS, relative to the rest of the world. Getting forever chemicals out of groundwater is going to be hard – but necessary. Mumemories/Shutterstock Worse, current monitoring practices are likely to be underestimating how much PFAS is lingering in the environment, given we usually only track a handful of these chemicals – out of more than 16,000. Experts have called for: improved understanding of the range of PFAS embodied in consumer and industrial products […] to assess the environmental burden and develop mitigation measures The more we look, the more alarming the picture appears. Emerging research has found PFAS in consumer products such as cosmetics, packaging, waterproofing, inks, pesticides, medical articles, polishes and paints, metal plating, pipes and cables, mechanical components, electronics, solar cells, textiles and carpets. The size and complexity of PFAS contamination suggests we are in for a very long and expensive process to begin cleaning it up – especially given we are still making and using these chemicals. Read more: Controversial ‘forever chemicals’ could be phased out in Australia under new restrictions. Here’s what you need to know How should we respond? To start addressing the problem, here are three important steps. 1. Introduce a “polluter pays” principle. The introduction of this concept is what forced 3M to pay up in the US. Australia has yet to follow suit, which is why the public has been footing the bill. If we introduce this legal principle, manufacturers will have to take responsibility. This would make it much less attractive for companies to make polluting products – and shift the burden from taxpayers to the companies responsible. Australia’s government is considering pursuing similar legal action against 3M. 2. Set PFAS contamination standards in line with other OECD countries, or better. Earlier this month, the US implemented the first legally enforceable national drinking water standards for five PFAS compounds and two PFAS mixtures. Australia’s current acceptable drinking water guidelines allow up to 140 times more PFAS in our water than these strict new US standards. In the US, these new standards are drawing new investment in remediation. 3. Take it seriously. For years, many of us thought all you had to do to avoid PFAS was not to buy nonstick pans. But these chemicals are now everywhere. They’re highly persistent and don’t leave our bodies easily. Every single person on the planet is now likely to have detectable levels of PFAS in their blood. Reducing this dangerous chemical load is going to take a lot of work to clean up existing hotspots, stop further production, and prevent recirculation of PFAS in recycled products or in our food. The 3M settlement is a good start. But it’s only a start. Tackling this problem is going to be hard, but necessary. Read more: PFAS: how research is uncovering damaging effects of 'forever chemicals' Rachael Wakefield-Rann receives research funding from various government and non-government organisations. She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would financially benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic appointment.Sarah Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Chemicals
Food
Health

Defying Climate Change: Yellowstone’s Lake Ice Isn’t Melting Like Others

According to recent research led by scientists from the University of Wyoming, the duration for which Yellowstone Lake remains ice-covered each year has remained constant...

Yellowstone Lake, North America’s largest high-elevation lake, freezes over completely in late December or early January and usually thaws in late May or early June. The period of ice cover has not changed in the last century, despite warming temperatures in the region. Credit: Lusha TronstadAccording to recent research led by scientists from the University of Wyoming, the duration for which Yellowstone Lake remains ice-covered each year has remained constant over the past century, even amidst rising regional temperatures.That is an unexpected finding, as most lakes around the world are experiencing shorter durations of ice cover, the scientists note in a new paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.“We show that contrary to expectation, the ice phenology of Yellowstone Lake has been uniquely resistant to climate change,” wrote the scientists, led by Lusha Tronstad, lead invertebrate zoologist with UW’s Wyoming Natural Diversity Database and Department of Zoology and Physiology, and Isabella Oleksy, a former UW postdoctoral researcher now on the University of Colorado-Boulder faculty. “The unchanging ice phenology of Yellowstone Lake stands in stark contrast to similar lakes in the Northern Hemisphere.” Other researchers involved in the study are from Utah State University, Colorado State University, and Colorado Mesa University.Geographic and Environmental ContextSituated at 7,733 feet above sea level in the heart of Yellowstone National Park, Yellowstone Lake is North America’s largest high-elevation lake, roughly 20 miles long and 14 miles wide with a surface area of 132 square miles. It freezes over completely in late December or early January and usually thaws in late May or early June.Records for the lake’s ice-off date have been recorded each year by Lake Village Ranger Station staff since 1927, and the ice-on date has been recorded since 1931. In addition to studying those records, the scientists analyzed climate data for the same period, 1927-2022, including air temperatures and precipitation. They also compared Yellowstone Lake’s data with seven similar lakes in northern Europe.The lack of long-term change in the duration of Yellowstone Lake’s ice cover was unexpected because the Yellowstone region has seen a warming climate, the researchers say. Since 1950, annual temperatures have increased by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. The changes are particularly pronounced at the high elevation of Yellowstone Lake, where air temperatures increased by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit between 1980-2018.“Using local weather data, we found some evidence for increased summer, fall, and spring temperatures, primarily in the last three decades,” the scientists wrote about air temperatures at Yellowstone Lake. “Given the key role of air temperatures in driving ice formation and break-up, it is noteworthy that we did not find evidence for corresponding shifts in ice phenology.”The Role of Snow in Ice PhenologyWhy the apparent discrepancy?While it is possible that fall minimum temperatures — which are important in predicting ice formation — are not rising as quickly as overall temperature trends in the region, a more likely explanation is that increased snowfall at Yellowstone Lake has served as a buffer against warmer weather, the scientists say.Snow cover, particularly in spring, can delay ice break-up. Cumulative spring snow, which was strongly correlated with delayed ice-off dates, has nearly doubled over the last century at Yellowstone Lake, the research showed. In general, precipitation has increased in spring and fall there.That differs from the Upper Green River Basin to the south, where snowfall has declined or been relatively stable at high elevations.“Shifts in local precipitation, especially increases in fall and spring snow, appear to be buffering (Yellowstone Lake) ice phenology against warming temperatures,” the researchers wrote.But, the scientists are not sure how long this phenomenon will last, noting projections of continued warming and shifting precipitation regimes in the high Rocky Mountains.“Our results, paired with recent analyses of climate projections, suggest a ‘tipping point’ may be coming when ice phenology abruptly changes for Yellowstone Lake,” they wrote. “This tipping point will largely stem from the ongoing shift from snow- to rain-dominated precipitation regimes in the fall and spring.“… Increased spring rainfall has not yet caused a detectable long-term trend toward earlier ice break-up, potentially because of the counteracting effects of increased spring snow. As temperatures warm further, and fall and spring snowfall decreases, ice phenology may rapidly change on Yellowstone Lake.”If that happens, “there may be wide-ranging consequences for nutrient cycling, lake productivity, fisheries, and recreation,” the scientists concluded.Reference: “Despite a century of warming, increased snowfall has buffered the ice phenology of North America’s largest high-elevation lake against climate change” by Lusha Tronstad, Isabella Oleksy, Justin P. F. Pomeranz, Daniel Preston, Gordon Gianniny, Katrina Cook, Ana Holley, Phil Farnes, Todd Koel and Scott Hotaling, 8 April 2024, Environmental Research Letters.DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ad3bd1

Climate
Mountains

A decade later, Flint’s water crisis continues

The past 10 years revealed how government failures at every level could effectively kill a city, turning it into a "ghost town."

This story was originally published by Capital B. At the edge of Saginaw Street, a hand-painted sign is etched into a deserted storefront. “Please help, God. Clean-up Flint.” Behind it, the block tells the story of a city 10 years removed from the start of one of the nation’s largest environmental crises.  Empty lot. Charred two-story home. Empty lot. Abandoned house with the message “All Copper GONE,” across boarded-up windows.  John Ishmael Taylor, 44, was born in this ZIP code, 48503, and he’s seen firsthand the neglect of the place he loves, one he hopes will be reborn for his young children.  “The water crisis, no more jobs, the violence,” Taylor said, has left Flint like a “ghost town — a ghost town with a whole bunch of people still here.”  Over the past decade, Flint’s water crisis has revealed how government failures at every level could effectively kill a city while opening the country’s eyes to how an environmental crisis could wreak havoc on all facets of life, make people sick, destroy a public school system, and kill jobs.  Four years after Flint residents reached the largest civil settlement agreement in Michigan history, Taylor and tens of thousands of other victims still haven’t received a penny from the $626.25 million pot. The only money doled out has gone to lawyers involved in the case, not those who’ve been haunted by the crisis’s true impacts. Still, even when residents ultimately receive the funding, most expressed doubts that the payouts will have any true benefits for their life. As Claire McClinton, a retired auto worker, explained, Flint’s water crisis, and America’s, has long-lasting impacts that won’t be solved by merely replacing lead water service lines. Adam Mahoney / Capital B In many ways, Taylor’s life shows the violent and widespread nature of America’s water crisis. After being born in Flint, he’d spent his preteen years living outside Jackson, Mississippi, where brown water has flowed through Black homes for decades.  Taylor, a single father, moved back to Flint permanently in January 2014. Within a year, lead levels in the drinking water of three of every four homes in his ZIP code were well above federal standards. His youngest son, Jalen, was born 52 days before the start of the water crisis, which is recognized as April 25, 2014, the day the city infamously switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River.  The rashes started immediately for baby Jalen, speckling the inside of his legs with coarse, red blotches. Within a few years, he was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and a form of autism spectrum disorder; both ailments are associated with lead poisoning.  Taylor says he has battled with anxiety in the aftermath as 20 percent of the city’s residents and hundreds of businesses packed up and left. Flint’s unemployment rate is now 1.5 times higher than the national average as 70 percent of children grow up in poverty.  He wonders what that means for his children.  “I always wonder how they’re gonna do because this is a long-term effect — we’re talking about lead poisoning. This is going to be with them for most of their life. It’s depressing,” he said, and he’s felt no restitution. He believes it has led to a citywide mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 out of 5 Flint residents reported having poor mental health, which is nearly 40 percent higher than the U.S. average.  Nayyirah Shariff holds a document from the Michigan Department of Environment that shows her home’s lead level in water as three to four times the federal limits. Adam Mahoney / Capital B Angela Welch, who has lived in Flint for four decades, understands the health implications intimately.  She recently tested for lead levels in her blood at 6.5 micrograms per deciliter. Anything above 5 micrograms is considered extremely dangerous for your health.  Since the start of the crisis, Welch has developed chronic skin and cardiac issues, had multiple surgeries, and lost part of her leg to amputation. Her brother Mac showed Capital B the scars along his body from water-induced rashes. Welch questions what repair looks like for her family. “We gotta be dead to get our money? They want us dead to receive anything from the crisis.”  The federal Environmental Protection Agency and officials with Flint’s mayor’s and city attorney’s offices did not respond to multiple requests from Capital B for comment. Residents argue that even though they’ve brought the country’s water woes to the forefront, they’re in a worse position today despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment — and they want you to know that your city can be next.  Read Next A water crisis in Mississippi turns into a fight against privatization Lylla Younes “We’re seeing it happen to Jackson,” said Nayyirah Shariff, a community activist, whose water is still testing for lead at levels three times higher than federal limits.  “It’s like they have the same playbook to decimate a city.” What Flint tells us about the nation’s water crises  Flint opened the nation’s eyes to a brewing water affordability and infrastructure crisis, ultimately leading to billions of dollars invested in cleaning the country’s drinking water, improving water plants and roads, and building climate resilience.  There are roughly 9 million lead pipes in service across the U.S., and they’re everywhere, from the oldest cities across Massachusetts to Florida, which leads the country in lead pipes but where infrastructure and the average home is among the nation’s youngest. In November, the Biden administration outlined a plan to replace all 9 million within the next decade, making 50 percent of the $30 billion price tag available from the federal government.   Flint residents are fighting to hang on amid the city’s water crisis. The unemployment rate is now 1.5 times higher than the national average, while 70 percent of children grow up in poverty. Adam Mahoney / Capital B Yet Flint residents and experts told Capital B that the main flaws of the federal government’s plan have been realized in the city over the past decade: It is complicated, time-consuming, and costly to identify and replace water lines. Not to mention, as Shariff explained, replacing lead water lines is not the “magical silver bullet” to eradicate the issue. The lead service line in her home was replaced in 2017, yet her water is still filled with more lead than federal limits allow.  As officials have claimed that the use of water filters and replacement of lead water lines has solved the crisis, including an infamous declaration by former President Barack Obama in 2016, some residents in Flint have felt confused about the true safety of their water.  When approached by Capital B in April, James Johnson explained how a state-conducted test for lead in his drinking water in 2023 returned a clean bill of health. However, public records show Johnson’s property’s lead results were actually 19 parts per billion. The federal limit is 15. “I don’t know what to think [about the water,]” Johnson said after Capital B explained the results. “We just use filters. We have been since ’14, but they said it’s all clean.” Flint officials did not respond to Capital B’s request for data related to the status of its water line identification and replacement work. This month, a federal judge found the city in contempt of court for missing deadlines for lead water line replacement and related work in the aftermath of the water crisis. In addition, as the nation focuses on drinking water, lead lines have created another crisis that rarely gets attention: how lead contamination has torn through kitchens and bathrooms. Flint residents told Capital B that since the crisis began, they’ve had corroded toilets fall through floors, and their shower heads turn black from buildup every few months.  “Dirty water doesn’t just impact service lives,” explained Claire McClinton, a Flint resident and former autoworker. “It’s very naive to think that was the only thing that was impacted, and people do not have the money or support to fix these things.”  All the while, Flint has had amongst the most expensive water bills in the country. A 2016 analysis revealed that the average household was paying more than $850 annually for water services, making it the most expensive average bill in the country. Today, the average bill is $1,200 annually. McClinton is afraid that as the country chugs on with its focus on drinking water, Black communities will be harmed by efforts to cut costs, or worse, boxed out of their access to publicly run water systems. More than 20 percent of Americans now rely on private companies for drinking water, a substantial increase compared to 2019, according to the National Association of Water Companies. On average, private water utilities charge families 59 percent more on their water bills than public utilities.  “We don’t want corporations to benefit from all this spending — we should want to keep our water public,” McClinton said.  Still, public water systems have their challenges supporting Black communities as well. Failing public water systems are 40 percent more likely to serve people of color, and they take longer than systems in white communities to come back into compliance. Funding to reach these communities remains faulty despite the Biden administration’s goal of spending 40 percent of funds on “disadvantaged communities.”  A Capital B analysis found that 27 percent of drinking water funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law went to “disadvantaged communities” in 2022, and the two states that received the most funds characterized for “disadvantaged communities” were Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where less than 10 percent of residents are Black.  McClinton said it’s bittersweet to watch Flint purportedly influence the nation for the better while things remain “broken” for Black communities.   “The system has failed us. We did all the things you’re supposed to do; we participated in water studies, and our water is still dirty, and our health is still bad,” she said. “There’s this thing where they say every generation lives better than the next generation, but all of that is turned upside down right now, and the water crisis is just a manifestation of it.”  ‘The start of the second civil war’ In a stream of whiteness, Confederate flags, and Make America Great Again signs, the 60 miles between Detroit and Flint tell the story of Black life in Michigan, Welch said. “Because we are a majority here and have conquered [Flint and Detroit], they want to get back at us,” she said.  From left: Hatcher Welch, Angela Welch, and Mac Welch all expressed disgust over the continued handling of Flint’s water, arguing that there is little that could be done to repair harm. Adam Mahoney / Capital B Over the past decade, as Detroit’s financial crisis peaked and Flint’s water crisis began, far-right white-led groups have surged and a white-led militia plotted to abduct the state’s governor. “It feels like the start of the second civil war,” Welch said, all while Flint is “left behind.”   It’s seeing this shift intensify that has led some residents to see deeper racial undertones in not only Flint’s battle over water affordability and rights, but also the nation’s. “The power structure is coalescing over water,” McClinton said.  Flint’s issues began primarily because of a plan that was concocted to save the city money during its water-delivery process. Similar situations are happening outside of Chicago in a majority Black and Latino town, and in Baltimore.  Read Next California communities are fighting the last battery recycling plant in the West — and its toxic legacy Molly Peterson Not to mention the glaring similarities between Jackson and Flint, both majority-Black cities where local Black leadership was overridden by white leaders at the federal and state levels. In Jackson, after an EPA lawsuit against the city allowed the federal government to take control of the water, residents are still fighting to be included in the process.  The attack on Black life has also widened the racial gap within the city, Shariff said.  In a commemorative event headlined by a public health researcher from Michigan State University and attended by roughly 50 people the week before the 10-year-anniversary, just five attendees were Black. It’s events like these, Shariff says, that highlight the disconnect between local leaders, academic researchers, and those directly impacted by the crisis. “All this money these places are spending feels like for nothing,” she said. “People marching in the streets weren’t asking for book talks or community health assessments. We asked for reparations and resources for Black self-determination.” The crisis is a chronic illness For some residents, like Taylor, there is still hope that the settlement checks will hit their bank accounts and improve their lives. Children affected by the water crisis are expected to receive 80 percent of the record settlement. Community activist Nayyirah Shariff said the attack on Black life in Flint has widened the racial gap in the city. Adam Mahoney / Capital B As Flint schools have crumbled in the aftermath of the crises, in addition to experiencing an 8 percent increase in the number of students with special needs, especially among school-age boys, Taylor hopes to use the money to better their educational opportunities and put them through college. However, for others, including Welch and Shariff, the expected payout of $2,000 to $3,000 for adults feels like a slap in the face. There is also a lot of confusion around the settlement process, with two residents telling Capital B they thought the money was already gone, which stopped them from attempting to be a part of the process.  In a lot of ways, although harder to find, opportunities have reached the city in recent years, including through a guaranteed income program for every pregnant person and infant in the city. The new program “prescribes” a one-time $1,500 payment after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and $500 a month during the infant’s first year.  Yet, it still remains challenging to remain confident in change.  “With all the experiences we’ve had over the 10 years, our hopes have been dashed,” explained McClinton, who every April 25 helps to organize a day of commemoration for Flint residents.  As Capital B has reported, the water issues afflicting Black communities are violent in many ways, and it trickles down into increasing situations of despair around housing, mental and physical health, and communal violence. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic widened the racial death gap in Flint, Black residents’ death rate climbed at a rate that was more than twice the city’s death rate between 2014 and 2019, according to Capital B’s analysis of state data. Capital B Several Flint residents explained how the mental health strain caused by the water crisis created a cycle of “disunity” and the inability to trust not just the government or the water flowing out of their pipes, but also the people around them.  “Everyone is just on edge,” Taylor said, “and that has everything to do with the water.”  In the city’s Black areas, it’s hard to find a block without an abandoned home or grassy field full of trash and plastic water bottles. Taylor said it’s depressing to drive through your neighborhood to see your former schools empty, graffitied, and boarded up, or parks closed and desolate. As job opportunities have become harder to find, so has housing. Nearly all of the dozen residents Capital B spoke to for this story said they experienced housing insecurity at times over the past decade.  Capital B Due to a lack of affordable housing options, the average stay at the city’s housing shelter has increased from less than two months to over five. The public housing waitlist has ballooned to two years, even as some public housing buildings still have high levels of lead in the water, including the Richert Manor homes where Welch lived for many years at the height of the water situation.  In the meantime, as race, namely being Black in America, stands as the biggest risk factor for lead poisoning, more so than even poverty or poor housing, Flint residents say their home serves as a warning to other Black communities.  Nationwide, Black children have the highest blood lead levels. As such, even as billions are pumped into fixing the issues, the next generation of Black Americans will remain altered by the impacts of lead poisoning.  As Shariff said: “The water crisis is like having a chronic illness — I mean, it gave me a chronic illness — but it is basically like you’re dealing with it, and it never goes away.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A decade later, Flint’s water crisis continues on Apr 28, 2024.

Crisis
Government
Water

Finding space for wind farms might be easier than we thought

Read more

Towering wind turbines dot landscapes across the country, stretching hundreds of feet into the sky. But the huge structures topped with massive rotating blades only take up five percent of the land where they’ve been built, new research shows.The rest of the space can be used for other purposes, such as agriculture, according to a study published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology.This means developers could fit turbines in places that are often perceived as unsuitable for a wind farm.To meet the Biden administration’s goal of weaning the electric grid off fossil fuels by 2035, the United States needs to add more wind farms. But finding places to put turbines has emerged as a major hurdle, due in part to the perception that wind farms require large amounts of land.The new study highlights that turbines and existing human development, such as agriculture, cannot only share the same area, but also that building wind farms where there are already roads and other infrastructure could help reduce impacts on the land.“Clever siting, use of existing infrastructure, multiple use of landscapes — all these things … can really contribute to solutions in areas where wind power is acceptable to the local people,” said Sarah Jordaan, the study’s principal investigator.Finding the right site for a wind farmHistorically, planning studies for wind farms have often assumed that turbines would disturb all the land at the site and leave the area unusable for anything else, said Jordaan, an associate professor in the department of civil engineering at McGill University. The study’s findings provide a more accurate accounting of how much land is needed for wind farms, she added.The researchers analyzed roughly 300 wind farms with more than 15,000 turbines in total that feed a grid that provides electricity to 80 million people across 14 U.S. states and parts of Canada and Mexico. They found that a lot of the time wind farms share the landscape with farming.Wind farms that piggybacked on existing infrastructure, such as roads, disrupted less land and were about seven times more efficient than projects constructed from the ground up, according to the study. “Our results should provide stakeholders with a greater evidence base for a more informed understanding of the impacts of energy developments,” she said.Ben Hoen, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab, who was not involved in the research, said the findings emphasize the potential benefits of building turbines on shared land. One major concern about renewable energy projects, he said, has been that they could displace or disrupt farming, hurting the local economy.“This study might allow folks to take a fresh look at the ability to retain some of that economic benefit that agriculture has while still co-developing or developing wind energy at those locations,” Hoen said.Other barriers for wind energyBut experts said it remains a question whether this new data will spur greater acceptance of wind projects, which can face opposition in communities for other reasons the study didn’t take into account, such as noise.“On the ground, the trade-offs related to energy development are complex,” Jordaan said. “For wind, it includes issues like visual impacts, noise, and bird and bat mortality. How people evaluate these trade-offs is complex.”Much of the public though appears to be supportive of renewable energy projects, including wind turbines. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted last year reported that large and bipartisan majorities of Americans said they wouldn’t mind fields of solar panels and wind turbines being built in their communities.The new study comes as the country is undergoing an energy transition toward more renewable sources. In January, the Energy Information Administration forecast that wind and solar energy will lead growth in U.S. power generation for the next two years.“There’s no denying that wind and solar deployment is going to take up land,” Hoen said. “But I do think that understanding the actual impacts and taking into account some of these co-use opportunities — whether it’s roads or agriculture — are extremely important.”

Agriculture
Energy
Science

Chuckwalla National Monument would protect swath of California desert and preserve a sacred land

Indigenous Californians want President Biden to establish a national monument in a stretch of desert that is both an ecological wonder and a window into their cultures.

Thomas Tortez Jr. leads a group across a gravelly wash in Painted Canyon, at the spot where his Cahuilla tribal ancestors once lived in a village. The solar eclipse is underway. Suddenly, a strange yelp echoes from a ridge of craggy outcroppings. Perhaps the yelp comes from a hiker who’s been struck with awe while climbing ladders into terraced slot canyons that seem to funnel echoes to the heavens. Stones direct hikers to a trailhead inside Painted Canyon near Mecca, Calif. (Tyrone Beason / Los Angeles Times) Maybe it’s a coyote crying out as the moon passes partway in front of the sun, briefly cooling the dry desert wind and bathing bands of red, sandstone and iron green rocks in an otherworldly light.Or might it be Mukat, the exiled Cahuilla creator god who roamed among the ironwoods, smoke trees, palo verdes and ghost flowers?Tortez, tribal council chairman of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, spikes the sand with the desiccated yucca stalk that he’s repurposed as a walking stick. He seems at ease with the mystery of the sound and the mystique of this section of the Mecca Hills Wilderness. Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science. His people have cherished and watched over this canyon in the eastern Coachella Valley for thousands of years. Now they are among the Indigenous Californians, conservationists and other nature lovers who want President Biden to designate 627,855 acres of desert where the canyon sits as the Chuckwalla National Monument.Rep. Raul Ruiz, a Democrat who represents the desert communities in eastern Riverside and Imperial counties that border the proposed land mass, joined with California Sens. Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler in introducing legislation to support the creation of the monument and to expand Joshua Tree National Park by 17,915 acres.Chuckwalla sits at the heart of a burgeoning ecological and economic zone — a short drive from the city of Indio and the date farms of Mecca, and near the vast mineral flats and off-grid settlements of the Salton Sea and the towering Santa Rosa Mountains. It would become the fifth-largest land-based national monument in the continental U.S.In announcing the legislation on the steps of the U.S. Capitol this month, Padilla said he was especially gratified that a coalition came together to craft the monument proposal — Indigenous leaders, community members, environmental groups, recreationists, renewable energy companies and local businesses. Thomas Tortez hikes up a terraced canyon inside the proposed Chuckwalla National Monument. (Tyrone Beason / Los Angeles Times) Speaking later by phone, Ruiz touted the monument as important for helping California meet its conservation and climate change goals without encroaching on public lands already designated for other uses, such as green energy projects. Ruiz says his congressional district produces the most renewable energy on federal land in the U.S. Evidence of these intersecting interests is clear in Chuckwalla, where power lines channeling electricity from solar farms farther east cut across the land.Ruiz says the design of the monument proposal is distinct in that it gives Indigenous tribes the power to co-manage Chuckwalla alongside the federal Bureau of Land Management.“In Congress, I really have seen a movement toward incorporating tribal, Indigenous knowledge in land stewardship,” Ruiz says.Co-existence doesn’t come without tension. In another section of desert south of the Salton Sea, construction has started on a $1.85-billion lithium mine and geothermal power plant, prompting some pushback from residents there who argue that developers haven’t adequately weighed the impacts on the environment and public health.Tortez says pushing for Chuckwalla’s monument designation is hugely important to tribes, given that so many are vying for a stake in the region’s future. Thomas Tortez, council chairman of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Tribe. (Tyrone Beason / Los Angeles Times) Members of the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mojave, Quechan and Serrano nations who call the California desert home worked together to call for Biden to establish the monument using the authority granted to presidents under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which was enacted to safeguard threatened cultures as well as precious lands. The Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe wants Biden to use the same authority to establish 390,000 acres of their ancestral land in Imperial County as the Kw’tsán National Monument.Tortez says the Antiquities Act was written for places like these. He notes how bands of rock swirl and stack on top of each other and jut skyward at gravity-defying angles. It’s all the result of millions of years of sediment flows, soil erosion and the endless clash of the San Andreas Fault’s two plates.“It’s like a timepiece — chapters in history,” he says of the open-faced geology of this canyon.This place holds the ancestral memory of tribal members too. Newsletter Our oceans. Our public lands. Our future. Get Boiling Point, our new newsletter exploring climate change and the environment, and become part of the conversation — and the solution. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. The landscape may look desolate and unforgiving to an outsider — a setting where Chuckwalla lizards, cactus wrens and western tanagers thrive — but for the Cahuilla it is a paradise.According to the Cahuilla creation story, Tortez says, the people of this desert were born from a bolt of lightning that lit up the sky and flooded the empty land with life.“Even the darkness is alive,” he says. “There’s a spirit there.”Tortez says that his Cahuilla elders on the Torres Martinez reservation, which is a short drive down the hill, acclimated themselves to the arid conditions and 100-degree-plus summer temperatures. They would trek great distances between hidden streams and through slots as narrow as alleyways in order to build up their resistance to extreme thirst.“You would think of it as odd now, but they would practice not drinking water,” says Tortez, 62. “My mom was born on the reservation — there were no hospitals back then. She remembers running around in the desert barefoot on dirt roads. Imagine doing that now.”The Cahuilla learned to live in harmony with all aspects of the ecosystem. They gathered plants and seeds for food and medicine, cut grass to weave baskets and built steps leading to wells to retrieve groundwater. They cremated their dead on wood funeral pyres for three days, to purify the bodies of the deceased and transition their souls back into the Earth.The Cahuilla also charted trade corridors reaching from the Colorado River to the shores of the Pacific, where coastal tribes traded shell jewelry for obsidian tools and animal skins from the interior.The ancient trails still exist, Tortez says. Southern Californians know them as State Route 74, which runs west from Palm Desert to the ocean, and Interstate 10, which skirts Chuckwalla’s northern edge.Tortez’s ancestors didn’t need paved roads or signs. As a young man, he was amazed to learn from older relatives of how ancestors could travel from one hill to the next, through disorienting expanses of sand and rock, yet never lose their bearings.“If you can imagine, they can remember when their grandparents were able to run up to the mountains with a message and come back down with another message, like it was nothing, like going to Wal-Mart,” Tortez says with a chuckle. As Tortez contemplates Chuckwalla’s richness, another member of the hiking group, Stephanie Dashiell, an environmental consultant who is manager of the national monument campaign, spots a thorny ocotillo growing high on a cliff.The canyon is even more awash in colors than usual because of the frequent winter rains: blueish lupines, indigo bushes, pinkish-purple sand verbena, golden desert poppies, powdery desert lavender, mallow blossoms in creamy orange, lemon-yellow brittlebush.Dashiell, 43, steps in close to enjoy a creosote bush’s telltale aroma of black tar and sand after a storm. With seeds that look like tiny cotton balls, the plant can produce clones of itself for hundreds or even thousands of years. Environmental and outdoor consultant Stephanie Dashiell takes in the heady smell of smoke and rain given off by a creosote bush in the proposed Chuckwalla National Monument. (Tyrone Beason / Los Angeles Times) The flora seen in Chuckwalla are true survivors.“The plants here have so much grit,” Dashiell says. “There’s not that much left in the Coachella Valley that’s natural like this, where you just have the native species and it hasn’t been transformed into agriculture or golf courses. The desert is really important.”Even the desert soil has properties which could prove beneficial as the state plans to transform millions of acres into landscapes that absorb more carbon than they release, as part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s goal to make California carbon-neutral by 2045.“Plants themselves sequester carbon but in the desert soils there’s this caliche layer,” Dashiell says. “It’s this compact, hard, almost cementlike layer. A lot of carbon is stored in that.” Joining the hike are local residents Camila Bautista of Audubon California, which has championed the monument designation, and Brenda Ortiz, a youth ambassador for the Chuckwalla campaign.Ortiz, 21, has lived in the Eastern Coachella Valley her whole life.She says the monument designation is important for other reasons. The valley is exploding not just with industry but with walled-off housing subdivisions, as well as a race track and other attractions. Lupines bloom after a winter of rainstorms in a wash that cuts through Painted Canyon in the eastern Coachella Valley. (Tyrone Beason / Los Angeles Times) It can be hard for locals in California’s desert, many of whom are Latinos working low-wage farm jobs, to feel as if the change they see around them takes their priorities into account, Ortiz says. “We’re always asking for more affordable housing, for more resources for low-income communities, and yet we’re met with these developments that are only meant for a few exclusive members from outside,” Ortiz says. “Some are only a few miles away from trailer home parks.”A desire to make public lands more accessible to people of color and economically distressed communities drives an effort closer to Los Angeles, where a different coalition wants Biden to expand the San Gabriel National Monument by adding 109,000 acres of wilderness adjacent to the city. Ortiz says Chuckwalla would be a place where those who don’t normally picture themselves in the outdoors can relax, get exercise and simply be at one with nature.“I just feel like it’s a project that’s really for everybody,” she says. Tortez nods. The Indigenous people of the desert have maintained bonds with each other despite forced displacement and the fact that their reservations are carved up to resemble squares on a checkerboard, interspersed with parcels that are not under tribal control.Chuckwalla will help strengthen their sense of common cause, he says.Tortez is proud to show a first-time visitor a side of this landscape that some outsiders might miss. He thinks again about his people’s creation story and the plight of Mukat.Given his awesome yet unpredictable powers, many Cahuilla felt it wasn’t safe for him to live among mere mortals, Tortez says. So Mukat went to live out his days here.Villagers communicated with Mukat by sending coyotes into the hills to bring back his messages of wisdom and warning.Once he died and was cremated, it was said that his ashes gave rise to the same medicinal and culinary plants that Dashiell spots during the tour.“His remains are within this area,” Tortez says. “Everything here spurred from the remains of that creator.” Tortez stops to gaze at a cliff face that is so red it resembles dried blood and so hulking that humans look tiny by comparison.The Cahuilla believe that red rocks are evidence of the shaman’s eternal sorrow.“It’s a sign of his heart bleeding,” Tortez says.As Tortez speaks, a strong, cold gust suddenly blows down through the canyon, drowning out his voice but filling him with delight.“He heard!” Tortez yells over the force of the wind. “He can’t be seen, but he’s speaking now.” Clouds float above part of the proposed 627,000-acre Chuckwalla National Monument, between Joshua Tree National Park and the Arizona border. (Tyrone Beason / Los Angeles Times)

Culture
Indigenous
Animals

UAW’s Latest Labor Victory Is a Huge Climate Win, Too

Angel Gomez, a second-shift underbody mechanic at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was on the line when United Auto Workers won the factory union election. “I heard hollering,” said Gomez, as the news broke through the shop floor on Thursday, April 18. “There were people who’d been trying to do this for fourteen years, they’ve been putting in the work through all these failed elections, and finally they got it. It was a good feeling.”Renee Berry, 58 years old and a veteran of those two failed elections, was even more ecstatic. Apologizing over and over again on the phone for being so emotional, she told me the ballot count was agonizingly slow: Yes, no, no, yes, yes. “I almost had an anxiety attack,” she said. “We put our blood sweat and tears in this plant.”The Volkswagen plant had become a litmus test for the South. After UAW’s union campaigns at the plant were defeated in 2014 and 2019, the popular adage was that labor just couldn’t win here. The country’s media outlets of record united to declare the south a resource pit, a place where labor goes to die. And it’s true that states here are right-to-work, where the power of unions is severely curtailed by legal barriers to organizing and wages overall are far lower than the national average. But as this election shows, the South is home to an energetic homegrown labor movement that’s patient and insistent in the face of a hostile political climate. That, combined with an injection of federal investment in renewable energy industry, is pushing the region towards a very different trajectory than the one imagined by conservative politicians who have opposed these developments.Corporations, and the incredibly wealthy people who run them, have become Republicans’ biggest donors, swaying even more moderate politicians into virulent anti-unionism. That’s trickled down to local politics in places like Chattanooga, where many people lacked unionized family members or much context for the what union membership might mean. “It was just a lot of people who are ambivalent, and just seemed like, I’m not sure, a lot of these guys, you really just needed to give them just a little bit of information, like a little bit of like, Hey, this is what could be possible,” said Zach Costello, a worker who was on the organizing committee. It was often easier to convince people like Berry, whose dad was a union steelworker: she knew it meant healthcare, a pension, higher wages, and job security. They and Gomez fanned the embers, despite Southern politicians over the past few decades doing their best to stamp the spark of the labor movement out.The Volkswagen plant is the first new auto industry union in the South in eighty years, and the only union plant owned by a foreign automaker. “In the nineties, governors began trying to entice foreign auto plants to come to the south,” said Stephen Silvia, a labor economist at American University. “They told auto producers that wages are lower, taxes are lower, land is cheaper, and we cultivate a nonunion environment.”It all began when Tennessee offered Nissan generous incentives to establish a plant in the community of Smyrna. Nissan became the first foothold in a wave of industry relocation to the South, and amongst the state’s owning class, a sign of incoming prosperity. “We’re all gonna be rich!” exclaimed the mayor of Smyrna at the time, according to an account in the Journal of Southern History. In 1989, UAW’s attempts to organize the Nissan plant lost by a two-one margin. The companies’ union-busting playbook—frightening ads that threatened the plant’s closure, captive audience meetings, rhetoric about losing jobs, and offers of competitive pay should the union lose—became the playbook for anti-union campaigns across the region ever since. As unions lost, the auto industry’s landscape tilted southwards, meaning that about half of auto workers now work in nonunion plants, which are mostly located in the Southeast. Before that time, nearly all autoworkers belonged to a union. Auto manufacturers located themselves in rural areas, often establishing racist hiring practices to keep solidarity out of the shop floor. Other industries trickled into the region, too—aviation, tech, chemical manufacturing, and paper products, just to name a few. All made their homes in various states where business came cheap and easy.Climate regulations and the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous incentives are now stimulating electric vehicle manufacturing. Despite the Biden administration’s pro-labor economic agenda, IRA funding—and thus billions of dollars in public and private investment—has largely gone to areas with low union density, spurring worries among auto workers that the EV shift could create a second tier of lower-paid, nonunion workers spearheading the transition to electric vehicles, working in dangerous conditions with flammable elements like lithium.In 2022, Volkswagen broke ground on EV production and assembly; the same year, the Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—UAW’s next battle, organizers tell me—began manufacturing an electric SUV. In the most recent union contract between UAW and the Big Three automakers, General Motors and Stellantis agreed to allow joint-venture EV manufacturing plants under the union umbrella, and now, Tennessee may be the next step.Since the beginning conversations about reducing dependence on fossil fuels—a necessary transition that nonetheless could have deleterious impacts on workers across steel, coal, oil, auto, and building trades industries—workers have demanded a “just transition”: an energy transition that prevents as much of the workforce as possible from being dislocated, allows for training and opportunity, and provides jobs equal to or better than the ones that came before. Environmental organizations have taken up the demand, too, seeing that a united front for labor rights and environmental justice is more powerful than keeping the two at loggerheads, as right-wing politicians might prefer. A just transition is what workers in the South are demanding as the IRA funds flood in.“We’re seeing a bunch of EV manufacturers come here,” said Michael Adriaanse, “and they should be union.” Adriaanse organizes with the Blue Oval Good Neighbors Committee. In rural, working class Black communities in west Tennessee, this labor and community coalition is mobilizing to bargain with Blue Oval City, a Ford joint venture electric vehicle plant that’s the recipient of the largest public investment the state of Tennessee has ever made, with an added $9.2 billion in funding from the Department of Energy. The VW victory has given workers hope for their efforts to negotiate good jobs and community benefits with the EV industry, he added. But it’s going to be hard won.“Anti-union sentiment across the country is virulent, and laws across the country don’t support unionization,” said Vonda McDaniel, who serves as a part of the Blue Oval coalition and is president of the Middle Tennessee Central Labor Council. Lawmakers in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama passed bills just this year and last year barring state incentives to companies that voluntarily recognize unions. In 2022, Tennessee enshrined right-to-work into its constitution. The prospect of this election had Southern governors running scared, so much so that the governors of Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia wrote a joint public condemnation of the union drive. In Alabama, which boasts the seventh highest poverty rate in the country, Governor Kay Ivey lambasted UAW, saying that “the Alabama model for economic success is under attack.” Research has shown that any economic growth in right-to-work states tends to benefit the already wealthy. In its previous attempts to organize Volkswagen, the UAW attempted a top-down strategy, where they tried to simply persuade Volkswagen to recognize the union. The UAW employed a different strategy this time, a bottom-up strategy that truly involved deep organizing in the plant. “This has to be personal, person to person, door to door,” McDaniel said.The simple power of conversations worked for Zach Costello, who found that once people started talking about their conditions, they started flipping themselves more than he really flipped them, often across partisan lines. “You really saw a lot of people you would expect, because of their political leanings, to not really be pro-union,” he said. “But people are ready to throw out culture war crap, when they’re talking about real things that affect them.”McDaniel now hopes national unions—many of which have been wary of investing resources in the region—see the success of this strategy. Currently, state-level politics in the South mean many unions tend to write it off, refusing to engage their resources in what they have seen as a losing battle.Outside the automotive industry, other regional rank-and-file workers and labor organizers see these victories reinvigorating their own long-term struggles for economic and racial justice. While Tennessee is still ranked thirteenth lowest state for union representation, its union membership is the fastest-growing in the country, across all job sectors. UAW’s changing strategy and priorities certainly made the win possible, but so, too, did the genuine exuberance and support of the statewide and Southern labor movement, which has been chipping away at poor working conditions, workplace inequality, and depressed wages for two hundred years—through the end of slavery, through miners’ rebellions and textile strikes, through Black sharecroppers’ uprisings, and the Memphis garbage collectors’ strike that saw Martin Luther King’s final speech. Workers in Tennessee say they’ve been working for this kind of breakthrough.“Something feels different in Tennessee,” said Bobbi Lyn Negrón, a public school teacher and member of the Metropolitan Nashville Educators Association, which won a fight against school privatization only this week. “But we still have workers across the South that have been resisting.” Negrón listed a few fights off the top of her head: Memphis fragrance factory workers who’ve been on strike; an active campus workers’ union in the eastern part of the state that’s won repeated graduate stipend raises. Amid a dispiritingly anti-labor state political climate, this feels like a moment of true possibility. “We have a saying in Spanish, ‘like candela’,” Negrón said, “meaning the fire in us is going to ignite.”

Angel Gomez, a second-shift underbody mechanic at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was on the line when United Auto Workers won the factory union election. “I heard hollering,” said Gomez, as the news broke through the shop floor on Thursday, April 18. “There were people who’d been trying to do this for fourteen years, they’ve been putting in the work through all these failed elections, and finally they got it. It was a good feeling.”Renee Berry, 58 years old and a veteran of those two failed elections, was even more ecstatic. Apologizing over and over again on the phone for being so emotional, she told me the ballot count was agonizingly slow: Yes, no, no, yes, yes. “I almost had an anxiety attack,” she said. “We put our blood sweat and tears in this plant.”The Volkswagen plant had become a litmus test for the South. After UAW’s union campaigns at the plant were defeated in 2014 and 2019, the popular adage was that labor just couldn’t win here. The country’s media outlets of record united to declare the south a resource pit, a place where labor goes to die. And it’s true that states here are right-to-work, where the power of unions is severely curtailed by legal barriers to organizing and wages overall are far lower than the national average. But as this election shows, the South is home to an energetic homegrown labor movement that’s patient and insistent in the face of a hostile political climate. That, combined with an injection of federal investment in renewable energy industry, is pushing the region towards a very different trajectory than the one imagined by conservative politicians who have opposed these developments.Corporations, and the incredibly wealthy people who run them, have become Republicans’ biggest donors, swaying even more moderate politicians into virulent anti-unionism. That’s trickled down to local politics in places like Chattanooga, where many people lacked unionized family members or much context for the what union membership might mean. “It was just a lot of people who are ambivalent, and just seemed like, I’m not sure, a lot of these guys, you really just needed to give them just a little bit of information, like a little bit of like, Hey, this is what could be possible,” said Zach Costello, a worker who was on the organizing committee. It was often easier to convince people like Berry, whose dad was a union steelworker: she knew it meant healthcare, a pension, higher wages, and job security. They and Gomez fanned the embers, despite Southern politicians over the past few decades doing their best to stamp the spark of the labor movement out.The Volkswagen plant is the first new auto industry union in the South in eighty years, and the only union plant owned by a foreign automaker. “In the nineties, governors began trying to entice foreign auto plants to come to the south,” said Stephen Silvia, a labor economist at American University. “They told auto producers that wages are lower, taxes are lower, land is cheaper, and we cultivate a nonunion environment.”It all began when Tennessee offered Nissan generous incentives to establish a plant in the community of Smyrna. Nissan became the first foothold in a wave of industry relocation to the South, and amongst the state’s owning class, a sign of incoming prosperity. “We’re all gonna be rich!” exclaimed the mayor of Smyrna at the time, according to an account in the Journal of Southern History. In 1989, UAW’s attempts to organize the Nissan plant lost by a two-one margin. The companies’ union-busting playbook—frightening ads that threatened the plant’s closure, captive audience meetings, rhetoric about losing jobs, and offers of competitive pay should the union lose—became the playbook for anti-union campaigns across the region ever since. As unions lost, the auto industry’s landscape tilted southwards, meaning that about half of auto workers now work in nonunion plants, which are mostly located in the Southeast. Before that time, nearly all autoworkers belonged to a union. Auto manufacturers located themselves in rural areas, often establishing racist hiring practices to keep solidarity out of the shop floor. Other industries trickled into the region, too—aviation, tech, chemical manufacturing, and paper products, just to name a few. All made their homes in various states where business came cheap and easy.Climate regulations and the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous incentives are now stimulating electric vehicle manufacturing. Despite the Biden administration’s pro-labor economic agenda, IRA funding—and thus billions of dollars in public and private investment—has largely gone to areas with low union density, spurring worries among auto workers that the EV shift could create a second tier of lower-paid, nonunion workers spearheading the transition to electric vehicles, working in dangerous conditions with flammable elements like lithium.In 2022, Volkswagen broke ground on EV production and assembly; the same year, the Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—UAW’s next battle, organizers tell me—began manufacturing an electric SUV. In the most recent union contract between UAW and the Big Three automakers, General Motors and Stellantis agreed to allow joint-venture EV manufacturing plants under the union umbrella, and now, Tennessee may be the next step.Since the beginning conversations about reducing dependence on fossil fuels—a necessary transition that nonetheless could have deleterious impacts on workers across steel, coal, oil, auto, and building trades industries—workers have demanded a “just transition”: an energy transition that prevents as much of the workforce as possible from being dislocated, allows for training and opportunity, and provides jobs equal to or better than the ones that came before. Environmental organizations have taken up the demand, too, seeing that a united front for labor rights and environmental justice is more powerful than keeping the two at loggerheads, as right-wing politicians might prefer. A just transition is what workers in the South are demanding as the IRA funds flood in.“We’re seeing a bunch of EV manufacturers come here,” said Michael Adriaanse, “and they should be union.” Adriaanse organizes with the Blue Oval Good Neighbors Committee. In rural, working class Black communities in west Tennessee, this labor and community coalition is mobilizing to bargain with Blue Oval City, a Ford joint venture electric vehicle plant that’s the recipient of the largest public investment the state of Tennessee has ever made, with an added $9.2 billion in funding from the Department of Energy. The VW victory has given workers hope for their efforts to negotiate good jobs and community benefits with the EV industry, he added. But it’s going to be hard won.“Anti-union sentiment across the country is virulent, and laws across the country don’t support unionization,” said Vonda McDaniel, who serves as a part of the Blue Oval coalition and is president of the Middle Tennessee Central Labor Council. Lawmakers in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama passed bills just this year and last year barring state incentives to companies that voluntarily recognize unions. In 2022, Tennessee enshrined right-to-work into its constitution. The prospect of this election had Southern governors running scared, so much so that the governors of Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia wrote a joint public condemnation of the union drive. In Alabama, which boasts the seventh highest poverty rate in the country, Governor Kay Ivey lambasted UAW, saying that “the Alabama model for economic success is under attack.” Research has shown that any economic growth in right-to-work states tends to benefit the already wealthy. In its previous attempts to organize Volkswagen, the UAW attempted a top-down strategy, where they tried to simply persuade Volkswagen to recognize the union. The UAW employed a different strategy this time, a bottom-up strategy that truly involved deep organizing in the plant. “This has to be personal, person to person, door to door,” McDaniel said.The simple power of conversations worked for Zach Costello, who found that once people started talking about their conditions, they started flipping themselves more than he really flipped them, often across partisan lines. “You really saw a lot of people you would expect, because of their political leanings, to not really be pro-union,” he said. “But people are ready to throw out culture war crap, when they’re talking about real things that affect them.”McDaniel now hopes national unions—many of which have been wary of investing resources in the region—see the success of this strategy. Currently, state-level politics in the South mean many unions tend to write it off, refusing to engage their resources in what they have seen as a losing battle.Outside the automotive industry, other regional rank-and-file workers and labor organizers see these victories reinvigorating their own long-term struggles for economic and racial justice. While Tennessee is still ranked thirteenth lowest state for union representation, its union membership is the fastest-growing in the country, across all job sectors. UAW’s changing strategy and priorities certainly made the win possible, but so, too, did the genuine exuberance and support of the statewide and Southern labor movement, which has been chipping away at poor working conditions, workplace inequality, and depressed wages for two hundred years—through the end of slavery, through miners’ rebellions and textile strikes, through Black sharecroppers’ uprisings, and the Memphis garbage collectors’ strike that saw Martin Luther King’s final speech. Workers in Tennessee say they’ve been working for this kind of breakthrough.“Something feels different in Tennessee,” said Bobbi Lyn Negrón, a public school teacher and member of the Metropolitan Nashville Educators Association, which won a fight against school privatization only this week. “But we still have workers across the South that have been resisting.” Negrón listed a few fights off the top of her head: Memphis fragrance factory workers who’ve been on strike; an active campus workers’ union in the eastern part of the state that’s won repeated graduate stipend raises. Amid a dispiritingly anti-labor state political climate, this feels like a moment of true possibility. “We have a saying in Spanish, ‘like candela’,” Negrón said, “meaning the fire in us is going to ignite.”

Climate
Business
Culture

Biden crackdown on power plants expected to speed shift away from coal

The Biden administration's crackdown on power plants' planet-warming emissions will accelerate a shift away from coal, and potentially speed the U.S.'s adoption of renewable energy sources. The administration this past week announced a new rule that will require coal plants and new gas plants to install carbon capture technology to mitigate 90 percent of their emissions — or...

The Biden administration's crackdown on power plants' planet-warming emissions will accelerate a shift away from coal, and potentially speed the U.S.'s adoption of renewable energy sources. The administration this past week announced a new rule that will require coal plants and new gas plants to install carbon capture technology to mitigate 90 percent of their emissions — or find another way to achieve the equivalent climate protections.  But experts say that rather than try to meet these requirements, more coal plants may just retire — and some power companies may opt to invest in renewables over keeping existing coal plants or putting costly carbon capture on new gas ones.  “What we've seen, even without these rules, is that coal generation is falling,” said Christopher Knittel, a professor of applied economics at MIT, noting that "the writing's kind of on the wall" because of fracking driving down natural gas prices. "But," Knittel added, "these new rules will certainly push to speed that transition up." The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) analysis shows that the rule could increase the amount of coal power that comes offline between 2028 and 2035 by nearly 25 percent. It projects that without the rule, 84 gigawatts of coal power would have retired during that period. But under the rule, that number is expected to jump to 104 gigawatts of power.  Research firm BloombergNEF reached similar findings for this decade.  Julia Attwood, an industrial decarbonization specialist with the firm, estimated that around 44 gigawatts of coal power was due to retire by the end of 2030 anyway, but the rule will cause an additional 30 to 40 gigawatts to go offline during that period. Attwood said BloombergNEF models an average coal plant as being equivalent to about 0.65 gigawatts, so this would amount to around 46 to 62 additional plant closures during that period.  “A lot of coal plants are just going to be pushed to retirement because of the expense of using [carbon capture and storage],” she said. The new rule received significant pushback from coal advocates, including workers, industry and Republicans.  Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America union, said in a written statement that it “looks to set the funeral date for thermal coal mining in America for 2032” — the date by which coal plants will now be required to cut their emissions. Roberts added that the rule will “threaten the livelihoods of our members” and said that the administration has been unsuccessful at replacing the jobs lost by miners in the energy transition thus far. “I am not aware of a single dislocated coal miner who has been hired as a result of legislation or other initiatives put in place over the last several years,” he said.  Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), meanwhile, said she would introduce legislation to rule.  “The administration has chosen to press ahead with its unrealistic climate agenda that threatens access to affordable, reliable energy for households and employers across the country,” Capito, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a written statement.  “I will be introducing a Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval to overturn the EPA’s job-killing regulations announced today,” she added. In addition to driving the country further away from coal, the rule may also speed up an ongoing shift toward renewable energy. The EPA projects the rule will boost the amount of the country's power that is supplied by renewable energy by an additional 4 percent in 2030. Its impact will taper off over the years, however, as renewables would also be expected to grow under previous policies: In 2040, it is expected to result in just 1 percent more renewable energy. Attwood of BloombergNEF said she believes the rule is good for renewables because it will “free up some needed capacity on the grid that renewables can fill.” Mark Thurber, associate director at Stanford University’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, said that renewables’ reliance on weather conditions means they may not be able to sub in for coal in many cases. “It's kind of an apples and oranges comparison between renewables and then on the other side, gas and coal because of the intermittency of those renewables," Thurber said. But Attwood noted that the rule’s exclusion of existing gas plants from the new requirements could keep some such plants online — mitigating concerns about renewables not working when there’s no sun or wind. Knittel from MIT also believes the rule will “delay the closure of existing gas plants” because maintaining such plants will be cheaper than building new gas ones with carbon capture. The Biden administration initially proposed restricting emissions from some existing gas plants under the rule, but ultimately dropped those provisions, saying it would pursue a separate rule for existing gas. It may not have time to do so if Biden isn’t reelected in November, however — and if former President Trump returns to the White House, he is not expected to increase climate regulations on power plants.  “The big uncertainty that really remains here is what happens with existing gas plants,” Attwood said. “If it's the same administration, then the EPA will probably go back to those gas plants and try to figure out a way to put emissions restraints on them as well,” she added.

Energy
Technology
Sustainable

Congress Ponders Competing Bills to Aid Tribes and Wildlife

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nine years ago, Glenn Olson joined a panel whose members, in ordinary circumstances, would rarely appear in the same room together—let alone work as a collaborative team. Olson, chair of bird conservation and public policy at the National Audubon […]

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nine years ago, Glenn Olson joined a panel whose members, in ordinary circumstances, would rarely appear in the same room together—let alone work as a collaborative team. Olson, chair of bird conservation and public policy at the National Audubon Society, sat with executives from Shell Oil, Toyota Motors, and the National Rifle Association, as well as with sportsmen, scientists and former government officials. The panel’s stated goal was to design a new system of funding conservation, one that would ensure the long-term flourishing of the nation’s wildlife. State and territorial wildlife agencies currently receive most of their funding from hunting and fishing fees and equipment purchases. This revenue is prioritized for game species, while non-game species have to rely on the approximately $60 million agencies receive from the federal budget every year—an amount that, once divided among more than 50 agencies, forces many state and tribal wildlife managers to pick and choose which species to protect. If annual funding was increased to $1.3 billion, Olson’s panel reported, those agencies could reach thousands more “species in greatest conservation need,” restoring some populations before they become endangered. The America’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act includes $300 million for local wildlife agencies and $20 million for tribes every year for five years. The panel laid the groundwork for what is now known as the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. If passed, RAWA would secure an annual $1.3 billion for wildlife agencies and $97.5 million for conservation work by tribal nations. Since it was first introduced in 2021, RAWA has been backed not only by environmental groups but by corporations hoping to avoid the costs associated with federal endangered species regulations. In a polarized Congress, the bill has earned unusually broad bipartisan support. “We got to the point where we just got more and more co-sponsors,” Olson said. “Everybody came together and said, ‘This looks like a durable solution.’” This year, RAWA is poised for another vote on the Senate floor. The bill continues to gain co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle, but lawmakers have yet to settle on a funding source. Now, a new conservation bill may compete for supporters, particularly among Republicans. Last week, the America’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act (AWHCA) cleared the House Committee on Natural Resources with a 21-17 vote along party lines. The new bill seeks $300 million for local wildlife agencies and $20 million for tribes every year for five years. These funds would be “subject to appropriation” by Congress, however, meaning the full amount may not be granted each year. And to offset this spending, the bill would rescind $700 million of the federal funding appropriated to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through the Inflation Reduction Act. (NOAA plans to use most of its funding from the federal investment for coastal resilience and conservation projects.) The $320 million was the amount the bill’s authors felt comfortable offsetting, said an aide to the House Committee on Natural Resources. Regarding the rescission, the aide said that the committee looked at departments that had received funding from the Inflation Reduction Act but had yet to spend it. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR), chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, would also amend the Endangered Species Act, enabling states to submit their own recovery plans for threatened species to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In some cases, the agency would be required to establish “objective, incremental goals” for recovery, with regulations becoming less stringent as those goals are met. The bill would also limit the agency’s ability to designate critical habitat on private lands and remove the requirement that federal agencies update their land-management plans every time a new species is listed or new critical habitat is designated. Supporters of Westerman’s bill say the proposed funding mechanism appeals to fiscally conservative Republicans, and they argue that the amendments to the Endangered Species Act would encourage private landowners and government agencies to collaborate on species recovery. Environmental advocates, however, say the bill is riddled with dealbreakers. RAWA supporters contend that the five-year sunset provision would limit what agencies can accomplish and even who they can hire. In contrast, RAWA would provide the baseline funding necessary for long-term environmental projects, such as forest restoration. Many supporters also worry that the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act will weaken species conservation plans. As the new bill left the committee, Rep. Jared Huffman, (D-CA), lamented the loss of the “gold standard” embodied in RAWA.  “We still need base funding for tribes, and RAWA has been the most promising avenue for that.” When it comes to tribal-led conservation, RAWA offers multiple benefits that are not reflected in the new bill. For one, it would provide almost five times the amount of funding—a critical difference, since that money would be distributed across more than 574 federally recognized tribes and over 100 million acres of land. For another, RAWA drops any matching requirement for tribes, relieving them of the obligation to constantly reapply for more grants. Tribes are already undertaking significant conservation work, said Julie Thorstenson, executive director of the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, citing historical and ongoing contributions to the recovery of bison, salmon and the black-footed ferret. The amount of annual funding proposed by RAWA would allow them to expand the scope of their work and take on a more active role in national conversations, rather than dividing their budget between conferences with partners and action on the ground. “We still need base funding for tribes, and RAWA has been the most promising avenue for that,” Thorstenson said. Mike Leahy, senior director of wildlife, hunting and fishing policy at the National Wildlife Federation, said that the annual funding requested by RAWA is the minimum—not an inflated estimate—of what is needed to protect over 12,000 at-risk species nationwide. While acknowledging Rep. Westerman’s intentions, Leahy pointed out the bill has a major “political problem,” given that most Democrats firmly oppose rescinding any money from the Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, RAWA faces its own challenges: Its sponsors still have yet to agree on a source of funds for the billion-dollar plan, though many ideas have been proposed. Previous iterations of the bill sought funding from oil and gas leases, taxes on cryptocurrency and fees paid by polluters. Like Leahy, Olson applauded the new bill’s willingness to dramatically increase funding for conservation.  But it lacks the widespread support that has fueled RAWA for nearly a decade, and, as Olson pointed out, “In order to be durable, it almost has to be bipartisan.”

Climate
Conservation
Government

These Popular Recreational Activities Could Be Increasing Your Risk of a Deadly Neurological Disease

Activities could be modifiable risk factors for the disease. A study from Michigan Medicine suggests that participating in recreational activities — including golfing, gardening or...

A study by Michigan Medicine links recreational activities like golfing, gardening, and woodworking with an increased risk of ALS, particularly in men, suggesting that environmental exposures may play a significant role in ALS risk.Activities could be modifiable risk factors for the disease.A study from Michigan Medicine suggests that participating in recreational activities — including golfing, gardening or yard work, woodworking, and hunting — may be associated with an increase in a person’s risk for developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.While many activities were associated with increased ALS risk, several were sex-specific. The results are published in the Journal of the Neurological Sciences.“We know that occupational risk factors, like working in manufacturing and trade industries, are linked to an increased risk for ALS, and this adds to a growing literature that recreational activities may also represent important and possibly modifiable risk factors for this disease,” said first author Stephen Goutman, M.D., M.S., director of the Pranger ALS Clinic and associate director of the ALS Center of Excellence at the University of Michigan. “Future studies should include these activities to pinpoint how they can be understood in the context of ALS prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.”Study Findings and Gender-Specific RisksInvestigators surveyed 400 people living with ALS and nearly 300 without the condition to assess their hobbies and non-work related activities.They found that golf was associated with a three times greater risk of developing ALS among men. Participation in gardening or yard work, as well as woodworking and hunting, was also linked with a heightened risk for men.When broken down by sex, no recreational activities had significant associations with ALS for females. None of the hobbies were linked to earlier onset of, or death from, ALS for either sex.“It is surprising that the risk factors we identified appear to be specific to males,” Goutman said.“While these activities may also increase ALS risk in females, the number of females in our study was too small for us to come to that conclusion.”Environmental Factors and ALS RiskThe findings join the growing body of evidence suggesting that environmental exposures affect a person’s risk for getting and dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Researchers call this lifetime accumulation of exposures the ALS exposome.Hobbies such as golfing and gardening or yardwork, Goutman says, may confer risk due to the use of pesticides. A past study connected occupations in golf and garden maintenance to increased ALS risk.Extensive studies of woodworking lead researchers to believe that formaldehyde exposure during the hobby could be attributed to higher risk.“Our goal is to understand what occupations and hobbies increase ALS risk because identifying these activities provides the first step towards ALS prevention,” said senior author Eva Feldman, M.D., Ph.D., director of the ALS Center of Excellence at U-M and James W. Albers Distinguished University Professor at U-M.“For a disease like Alzheimer’s, we know that a list of factors — including smoking, obesity, and high lipids — can increase risk by 40%. Our goal is to establish a similar list for ALS to create a roadmap to decrease risk. With apologies to Robert Frost, it is currently the ‘road not taken’, and we want to change that.”Prospective studies are underway to examine individuals who work in production, manufacturing, and jobs that involve the use of metals, and for persons with a family history of ALS.Both Goutman and Feldman say it is too early for clinicians to advise that patients stop doing any of these activities.Reference: “Avocational exposure associations with ALS risk, survival, and phenotype: A Michigan-based case-control study” by Stephen A. Goutman, Jonathan Boss, Dae Gyu Jang, Caroline Piecuch, Hasan Farid, Madeleine Batra, Bhramar Mukherjee, Eva L. Feldman and Stuart A. Batterman, 23 January 2024, Journal of the Neurological Sciences.DOI: 10.1016/j.jns.2024.122899Funding: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ALS Association, NeuroNetwork for Emerging Therapies, Robert and Katherine Jacobs Environmental Health Initiative, NeuroNetwork Therapeutic Discovery Fund, Peter R. Clark Fund for ALS Research, Sinai Medical Staff Foundation, Scott L. Pranger, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)

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