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What happens when a climate solution risks your community’s safety?

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Friday, August 9, 2024

Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh is a descendant of her town’s founder, Palmer Elkins. She’s actively protesting a proposed carbon capture and storage facility in St. Rose, Louisiana. ST. ROSE, Louisiana — In the St. Charles Parish neighborhood, only a tall green chain-link fence stands between a block of homes and the future site of a facility that may, among other things, store carbon in efforts to limit planetary heating.  The $4.6 billion project is part of a new slate of federal efforts bolstering carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a controversial technology that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified as an important tool in mitigating climate change. This Louisiana-based plant probably wouldn’t have been possible without the passage of the historic climate change legislation that President Joe Biden signed into law in the summer of 2022. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) dedicated $370 billion toward addressing the climate crisis, by far the largest federal investment in the issue. The IRA further solidified Biden’s commitment for CCS: The law increased tax credits for storing carbon that range from $50 per ton of CO2 to $85 per ton — a whopping 70 percent jump.  Biden’s IRA promises to be a bonanza for the CCS industry — and the stakes are high. If humanity fails to rein in climate change by either swiftly transitioning away from the dirty energy sources emitting greenhouses gasses or figuring out a way to neutralize them, then many parts of the world could become inhospitable by the end of this century.  But this major investment has a potential dark side.  Such carbon storage projects come with local costs — the loss of valuable natural carbon sinks like wetlands, the possibility of dangerous CO2 pipeline ruptures, and an increase in other air pollutants — and it’s unclear how much such developments will even help curb the climate crisis. And compounding these costs is the reality that many CCS projects are planned in communities of color already burdened by industrial pollution, poverty, low-quality housing, and other socioeconomic issues. In Louisiana, an industry-friendly state that produces a lot of crude oil and natural gas, there are now even more incentives for development: At the end of last year, the Biden administration shifted the ability to approve CCS permits from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the less-stringent state regulators. This has helped make Louisiana even more of a CCS hotspot.  That carbon-capture project — an ammonia plant proposed in the historically Black Louisiana community of St. Rose — underscores the social cost that comes with trying to phase out the extractive industries driving the climate crisis. But to understand where and on whom the cost of carbon storage hits hardest, it’s important to grasp why such a project is being proposed here in the first place. Where plantations paved the way for industry St. Rose lies just west of New Orleans, right along the east bank of the Mississippi River. On a quiet, single-lane road, grass covers a levee that defends the riverside communities when the water swells. When I visited this summer, barges and tankers dominated the waterway while western cattle egrets, with their salmon-kissed white feathers, swooped down onto the landscape.  Previously plantation land, St. Rose was founded in 1873 by Palmer Elkins, a free man of color who bought the town’s first three tracts of land for less than $950 (about $25,000 in today’s currency), and named the community for himself: Elkinsville-Freetown. It was one of the scores of “Freedom Towns” or “freedmen’s towns” established by or for a predominantly Black populace during and after the era of slavery in the United States.  According to research gathered by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Michael Levien, Elkins was part of a colony of Black folks recently liberated from slavery who managed their own fields under a US government agency established in 1865 called the Freedmen’s Bureau. Even though the government walked back on its promise and shut the colony down less than two years after its inception, Elkins eventually saved up enough money to establish Elkinsville-Freetown nearly 10 years later. He created the town’s first city streets and invited other freed people to live there, too. Today, many of St. Rose’s current residents are descendants of Elkins and 18 other founding families.  These days, the community of 7,500 is disproportionately harmed by pollution and industry — the sort of environmental racism that affects people across the US and the globe. The problem is especially ugly in Louisiana, where locals experience higher rates of cancer from air pollution exposure in what experts call Cancer Alley, an 85-mile sacrifice zone between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that includes St. Rose. Today, many industrial plants within Cancer Alley — such as a Dow Chemical petrochemical facility and a Shell refining and chemicals plant, to name a few — stand in former plantation tracts where many residents’ ancestors used to toil in the field. In 1922, an oil export terminal replaced the nearby Cedar Grove Plantation. Now owned by North American company International Matex-Tank Terminals (IMTT), the terminal remains one of the town’s most prominent features and still exports crude oil, as well as other liquids like petrochemicals and vegetable oil. In 2022, industry polluters were responsible for releasing nearly 3 million pounds of air toxins like ammonia and the petrochemical n-Hexane within a 10-mile radius of the community, per EPA data. Already, St. Rose residents experiences higher cancer risks and respiratory illness rates from their exposure to air pollution than the national average, according to federal data from the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “As long as I could remember, I smelled the chemicals,” said Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh, who founded her local nonprofit Refined Community Empowerment after she learned about the ammonia plant. “The tank farm on the fence-line of Elkinsville-Freetown St. Rose came [50] years after the free men and women of color settled the community. And when they came, they never left.” The community’s access to the river and the plantation land that eventually made way for the significant infrastructure of the IMTT export terminal makes it a convenient location for the ammonia carbon-capture project partially funded by the IRA’s tax credits.  The project’s developer, St. Charles Clean Fuels, hopes to produce 8,000 metric tons of ammonia a day — a staggering figure that’s far above what most plants produce — that it would then load onto shipping vessels for international export through IMTT’s existing terminal. The production of ammonia, a chemical that’s predominantly developed into fertilizers that enrich soils and help grow food and crops, is responsible for 1.8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. There’s a need to decarbonize ammonia production — and fast: Production is projected to increase by nearly 40 percent by 2050. The market is also expected to triple by 2050 as low-carbon ammonia enters the clean energy market as fuel for ships and power generation.  St. Charles Clean Fuels plans to supply some of that low-carbon ammonia — so-called “blue ammonia” — with its proposed plant. “Blue ammonia” is an industry term, so we’ll use it sparingly throughout this article, but developers use the terminology to distinguish these projects as nearly carbon neutral because the CO2 by-product has been captured and stored. In the case of the St. Rose plant, the company claims the facility will capture and sequester over 99 percent of the carbon dioxide generated during the ammonia production process. A third party would then handle transporting the greenhouse gas in pipelines before finally storing it somewhere underground. “In almost any conceivable scenario for a successful energy transition, chemical fuels will be needed in addition to electricity,” said Stephen Crolius, president and co-founder of Carbon Neutral Consulting, which works with companies developing technologies and plants to decarbonize the economy. “Ammonia will likely be among the most prominent of these carbon-free hydrogen fuels because it lends itself to safe low-cost storage, transport, and distribution, very much along the lines of propane and liquified petroleum gas.” Crolius is also president emeritus of the Ammonia Energy Association, an industry group for which he sits on the board of directors. The promise to capture nearly all of its emissions qualifies the development for an estimated $425 million in federal CCS subsidies. But since this is a new project, it’s not actually reducing the amount of carbon we’re already emitting into the atmosphere; it’s merely attempting to balance its own emissions. Retrofitting existing plants with this tech would actually reduce the ammonia sector’s overall carbon footprint. Creating entirely new plants with CCS added doesn’t decrease the sector’s overall emissions, at least not while the old facilities are still running. That 1 percent of CO2 not captured at the “blue” ammonia plant would still amount to an additional 154,000 tons that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. The community is wary. The facility won’t capture all the polluting byproducts of producing ammonia, either. On a rainy evening at the end of spring, I met Eugene Kyereh, 54, who is also a descendant of the town’s founder, Elkins, at a local restaurant called Boudreaux’s River Road. She comes here often, but her brother Darris Eugene, 61, won’t step foot into Boudreaux’s, which served only white people when they were growing up. “It was off limits to us,” he told me the following morning from the hair salon he inherited from their mother.  The IMTT export terminal sits some 500 feet away from his business, next door to Eugene Kyereh’s home and just down the street from the restaurant. As we ate gumbo and fish, she recalled a troubling memory. “[The smell of the air] was so bad that one day in June,” she told me, “my son and I decided we had to evacuate.” She’s worried that industrial pollution will only get worse if developer St. Charles Clean Fuels builds its multibillion-dollar ammonia plant next door. After all, ammonia is a dangerous air pollutant. “High levels of ammonia are deadly, and even lower levels from normal operations can cause breathing problems,” said Kimberly Terrell, director of community engagement and research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. She’s published several peer-reviewed studies related to Cancer Alley and the health impacts residents face from living so close to industry. In 2023, the IMTT chemical storage terminal emitted about 51 tons per year of VOCs, a mix of toxic chemicals, adjacent to Elkinsville-St. Rose. “An ammonia plant would only worsen the pollution crisis in this community,” Terrell said. Can the blue ammonia plant justify itself?  The ammonia plant is still a maybe — it needs a federal water permit, an air permit, and a coastal use permit from the state approved before construction can begin. So far, the developer hasn’t secured any. Agencies are likely to issue their decisions by the fall. The developer is optimistic about the plant’s future, but local experts are more skeptical because the facility would lie in a floodplain. But if the plant is approved, St. Charles Clean Fuels could break ground within six to eight months and have the ammonia plant running no later than 2028. “The development of St. Charles Clean Fuels represents a significant step toward reducing the carbon footprint of valuable and versatile liquid fuels, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from hard-to-abate energy uses,” said Chandra Stacie​​​​, director of community relations for St. Charles Clean Fuels, in an emailed statement.  But how would any of this work? Well, let’s start with a quick chemistry lesson: To produce ammonia, you need nitrogen and hydrogen.  Since nitrogen makes up 78 percent of the air we breathe, developers can pull nitrogen directly out of the air using an air separation unit. Then, they need to combine it with hydrogen, which is trickier to procure. One source is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In a process called autothermal reforming, reactors use oxygen and steam to separate hydrogen from both the steam and the methane with little combustion, concentrating carbon dioxide to ease its capture.  That’s where CCS comes in. Plants like these are designed to strip the carbon from the process gas with a bespoke adsorbent that’s perfectly shaped to capture CO2 molecules. It’s sort of like a sponge that can soak up the carbon. By altering the pressure, the gas can be released from the block and moved for transport and storage. This creates blue ammonia, but the process isn’t perfect. Methane is still a fossil fuel. And the natural gas it’s pulled from is dirty and full of other substances, too, so the plant has to purify it during the process. In St. Rose, developer St. Charles Clean Fuels estimates the plant will still release the equivalent of what some 780,000 cars would emit in a whole year even after capturing 99 percent of the approximately 5 million tons the facility would release otherwise. Sometimes, emissions wind up higher than estimated. For instance, the Gorgon facility — a $3 billion CCS project in Australia from Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell that began to store carbon dioxide in 2019, three years after starting production — said it would store 80 percent of its carbon emissions from producing liquid natural gas. The Gorgon facility missed that target during its first five years of operation by 50 percent due to technical issues that need to be addressed, according to a 2022 report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Now, the facility is planning to expand despite lacking evidence that it’s properly capturing and storing carbon at all. Another 62 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses could be released annually as a result. Operators received at least $60 million in support from the Australian government.  And that’s what worries many advocates. Taxpayers foot the bill for a technology that may perpetuate fossil fuel polluters — the ones that knowingly created climate change in the first place — and even build a new market for their products given the natural gas feedstock. How does that help wean the world off of fossil fuels?  It would be one thing if only existing polluters were upgrading their facilities with CCS to lower their emissions. We should see some emissions reduction then. Instead, new projects are popping up across the US, creating previously non-existent sources of emissions and pollution. There’s the blue ammonia plant in St. Rose — but it isn’t the only one. According to a tracker from watchdog nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), 10 other blue ammonia plants have been proposed in Louisiana where most are expected to be completed by the end of the decade. However, CCS isn’t exclusive to ammonia; more than 40 other projects have been proposed across the state that mainly involve building hubs for storing carbon. These are the sorts of third-party partners St. Charles Clean Fuels will eventually need to move the carbon it captures from manufacturing ammonia. Across the US, over a hundred more have been announced, according to EIP. “Our concerns with this trend are numerous,” said Courtney Bernhardt, research director at the EIP. “Not only will there be environmental and health impacts, largely in already overburdened areas, but also because government laws and regulations are barely catching up.” Two factors are driving this explosion in investment. There’s the market, which is finally hungry for low-emission energy sources. Customers now exist in European and Asian countries that are trying to replace dirty energy with cleaner alternatives. There’s also the shipping industry. Right now, nasty bunkers and tankers that transport chemicals and fuels contribute to about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but the UN’s International Maritime Organization wants to hit net zero by or around 2050. Net zero involves eliminating emissions at the source where you can and capturing them where you can’t by sequestering carbon naturally in ecosystems or industrially through plants.  Federal subsidies and tax benefits have also bolstered the market. The Biden administration has been investing heavily in hydrogen and CCS. Over the last year alone, over $1 billion in direct funding has been announced.  Blue ammonia and CCS may offer a miniscule amount of decreased emissions. But what about the people who must live by these plants? “This injustice that’s never been corrected” Since the oil export terminal that eventually became IMTT came to the community in 1922, the industrial sector has expanded throughout St. Rose. Most residents can see rows of four-story-tall chemical storage tanks from their backyards. The facility is impossible to miss, and it has become intertwined with many of the lives of the people who live in St. Rose. IMTT sponsors community events, hosts dinners, and has contributed to local schools and charities, but those who live in St. Rose and depend on the company for support or work face an ongoing risk to their own health. The community’s proximity to polluters is a direct legacy of slavery and a symptom of the plantation-to-plant pipeline.  “That’s still a symptom of the plantation economy and also the disregard for Black health, for Black bodies,” said Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit seeking intergenerational healing for Louisiana’s Black riverside communities overwhelmed by environmental harms. “Even the ways that the benefit to our community lies in the labor of it all. It doesn’t matter if the job is killing you in the long run. It doesn’t matter if we’re losing population as a result of these dirty industries.” Levien of Johns Hopkins University is currently in Louisiana to write a book on the social consequences of CCS. “Those free towns wind up becoming frontline communities,” he told me after we ran inside a New Orleans coffee shop to avoid a downpour. “It’s this injustice that’s never been corrected.” In St. Rose, locals have been complaining about odors to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for at least 20 years. In 2023, DEQ received six formal odor complaints from residents attributed to IMTT. This year, there have been four. Recent numbers are likely underestimated, Terrell said; not everyone reports the smells to the state. IMTT has also directed residents to complain directly to the company, which won’t be reflected in the public record. “I don’t think it’s possible to live so close to a facility of the scale of IMTT, knowing how much emissions IMTT reports, and to not be impacted by that,” said Terrell when I met her in her New Orleans office.  During my visit, just about everyone had a story to tell about the ways they or their loved ones have suffered from what they believe is industry’s doing. Rosemary Green, a vivacious 69-year-old woman who wore a purple patterned scarf on her head, has woken up in the middle of the night choking from what she believes are the chemical smells. Her 68-year-old husband, Thoni Green, has lost his sense of smell altogether. They’re trying to grow roses in their yard, but many flowers die. Their home directly borders the proposed site of the ammonia plant. “Look at these leaves,” she said from her front yard, pointing to yellowing leaves. “This was a rose bush from my grandmother’s house. I flew this thing out to NOLA and kept this thing alive. When I first got it, it was beautiful, and then all of a sudden, it started dying.”  In Eugene Kyereh’s family, at least five people have been diagnosed with cancer. Two family members have passed away and two are in remission. One is actively fighting still. Four others have died from complications related to neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, a brain disorder that scientists have begun to link to exposure to particulate matter, a form of air pollution. That’s how Eugene Kyereh lost her mom 10 years ago. The activist herself has suffered two miscarriages over the years; research suggests that air pollution exposure in early pregnancy is linked to miscarriage. Exact causation is hard to determine, but the fear the residents harbor is real. Now, the community must contend with what an ammonia plant may bring.  Terrell is alarmed over the health issues the facility may exacerbate. Exposure to ammonia has been linked to health issues ranging from coughing and nose irritation to respiratory issues and lung damage. Enough ammonia exposure can kill someone. Developers say they plan to build this plant cleaner than conventional ammonia facilities, but CCS tech can’t stop air pollution altogether. According to the draft air permit, St. Charles Clean Fuels anticipates the plant will release nearly 67 tons of nitrogen oxides that are hazardous to public health and 59 tons of ammonia every year. While that amount of ammonia is legal in Louisiana, it would exceed the air standards in Massachusetts, a state that has taken a harder stance against polluters to protect public health.  “The health and well-being of our employees, the operations team at IMTT, and the residents of the surrounding communities are SCCF’s top priority,” said Stacie of St. Charles Clean Fuels. “Our facilities are designed with the utmost regard for safety such that none of our plant workers and no one in the community is ever exposed to concentrated ammonia.” The plant will be outfitted with emergency shutdown systems and safety valves in the case of an emergency, per Stacie.  What keeps Eugene Kyereh up at night, however, is the potential risks from leaky CCS infrastructure. Carbon dioxide isn’t just a pollutant. It’s an asphyxiant. That means people exposed to it essentially can’t breathe. To make matters worse, there are no clinics or hospitals in St. Rose. St. Charles Clean Fuels executives say they will develop plans to integrate monitoring systems and emergency response to prevent a crisis or keep people safe should one occur, Stacie said. In 2020, heavy rains — the same weather patterns common in Louisiana — caused a landslide that strained a CO2 pipeline and caused it to rupture near Satartia, Mississippi. After being exposed to the CO2 leaking from the pipeline, 45 people were hurt. Many victims collapsed, and emergency vehicles couldn’t get in. A historical town facing multiple threats Three years ago, Hurricane Ida’s 110-mile-per-hour winds tore apart roofs and windows in St. Rose. Today, houses all over the neighborhood are still boarded up or covered in blue tarps. Roads remain bumpy with potholes. Some residents are still rebuilding.  This year, on June 1, the official start of hurricane season, Eugene Kyereh organized a health fair to inform her neighbors about the ammonia plant. Thunderstorms had been tormenting the town for days. That gray morning, rain clouds brooded over the Mississippi River, but many community members, activists — and even industry executives from St. Charles Clean Fuels — showed up. After a prayer, some live sax, and a hefty meal of green beans and chicken, industry officials took the stage podium. That day, Eugene Kyereh walked gracefully through the audience wearing a vibrant red blazer, her natural curls bouncing above her shoulders. She seemed to know everyone as she passed the mic from person to person, giving them space to air their grievances directly to the companies. And then she addressed them. The leak in Satartia, Mississippi was “one of the worst things that can happen,” she said to St. Charles Clean Fuels executives. “This is the thing that really alarmed me and one of the reasons why I started Refined Community Empowerment.” “How can we have a blue ammonia plant when we’re already overburdened with chemicals from IMTT?” she asked them. “How is this going to be a help to us?” Hurricane season is back. It’s projected to be among the worst in decades due to record-breaking ocean temperatures from climate change. The season’s first hurricane, Beryl, broke records as the strongest June storm ever recorded. It killed at least 36 people in Houston alone.  CCS may weaken the storms of future generations — maybe it’ll one day save the world if researchers can make it cost-effective and safe — but today, the technology still doesn’t work as intended. In the meantime, companies pursue incentives intended to address the climate crisis, giving them cover for sacrificing the health of Black communities in the name of global progress on CO2 emissions. “The industry is taking over,” said Sharon Lavigne, an activist who has become internationally recognized for blocking a plastics refinery in her community a few parishes away. We spoke as Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” played in the background. “This was a historical town. Why should we roll over and let the industry come in here and destroy our history?” This story was supported by a reporting grant from The Fund for Environmental Journalist of The Society of Environmental Journalists.

ST. ROSE, Louisiana — In the St. Charles Parish neighborhood, only a tall green chain-link fence stands between a block of homes and the future site of a facility that may, among other things, store carbon in efforts to limit planetary heating.  The $4.6 billion project is part of a new slate of federal efforts […]

Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh strikes a defiant pose in front of industrial infrastructure in St. Rose Louisiana.
Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh is a descendant of her town’s founder, Palmer Elkins. She’s actively protesting a proposed carbon capture and storage facility in St. Rose, Louisiana.

ST. ROSE, Louisiana — In the St. Charles Parish neighborhood, only a tall green chain-link fence stands between a block of homes and the future site of a facility that may, among other things, store carbon in efforts to limit planetary heating. 

The $4.6 billion project is part of a new slate of federal efforts bolstering carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a controversial technology that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified as an important tool in mitigating climate change. This Louisiana-based plant probably wouldn’t have been possible without the passage of the historic climate change legislation that President Joe Biden signed into law in the summer of 2022. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) dedicated $370 billion toward addressing the climate crisis, by far the largest federal investment in the issue. The IRA further solidified Biden’s commitment for CCS: The law increased tax credits for storing carbon that range from $50 per ton of CO2 to $85 per ton — a whopping 70 percent jump. 

Biden’s IRA promises to be a bonanza for the CCS industry — and the stakes are high. If humanity fails to rein in climate change by either swiftly transitioning away from the dirty energy sources emitting greenhouses gasses or figuring out a way to neutralize them, then many parts of the world could become inhospitable by the end of this century. 

But this major investment has a potential dark side. 

Such carbon storage projects come with local costs — the loss of valuable natural carbon sinks like wetlands, the possibility of dangerous CO2 pipeline ruptures, and an increase in other air pollutants — and it’s unclear how much such developments will even help curb the climate crisis. And compounding these costs is the reality that many CCS projects are planned in communities of color already burdened by industrial pollution, poverty, low-quality housing, and other socioeconomic issues.

In Louisiana, an industry-friendly state that produces a lot of crude oil and natural gas, there are now even more incentives for development: At the end of last year, the Biden administration shifted the ability to approve CCS permits from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the less-stringent state regulators. This has helped make Louisiana even more of a CCS hotspot. 

That carbon-capture project — an ammonia plant proposed in the historically Black Louisiana community of St. Rose — underscores the social cost that comes with trying to phase out the extractive industries driving the climate crisis.

But to understand where and on whom the cost of carbon storage hits hardest, it’s important to grasp why such a project is being proposed here in the first place.

Where plantations paved the way for industry

St. Rose lies just west of New Orleans, right along the east bank of the Mississippi River. On a quiet, single-lane road, grass covers a levee that defends the riverside communities when the water swells. When I visited this summer, barges and tankers dominated the waterway while western cattle egrets, with their salmon-kissed white feathers, swooped down onto the landscape. 

Previously plantation land, St. Rose was founded in 1873 by Palmer Elkins, a free man of color who bought the town’s first three tracts of land for less than $950 (about $25,000 in today’s currency), and named the community for himself: Elkinsville-Freetown. It was one of the scores of “Freedom Towns” or “freedmen’s towns” established by or for a predominantly Black populace during and after the era of slavery in the United States. 

According to research gathered by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Michael Levien, Elkins was part of a colony of Black folks recently liberated from slavery who managed their own fields under a US government agency established in 1865 called the Freedmen’s Bureau. Even though the government walked back on its promise and shut the colony down less than two years after its inception, Elkins eventually saved up enough money to establish Elkinsville-Freetown nearly 10 years later. He created the town’s first city streets and invited other freed people to live there, too. Today, many of St. Rose’s current residents are descendants of Elkins and 18 other founding families. 

These days, the community of 7,500 is disproportionately harmed by pollution and industry — the sort of environmental racism that affects people across the US and the globe. The problem is especially ugly in Louisiana, where locals experience higher rates of cancer from air pollution exposure in what experts call Cancer Alley, an 85-mile sacrifice zone between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that includes St. Rose.

Today, many industrial plants within Cancer Alley — such as a Dow Chemical petrochemical facility and a Shell refining and chemicals plant, to name a few — stand in former plantation tracts where many residents’ ancestors used to toil in the field. In 1922, an oil export terminal replaced the nearby Cedar Grove Plantation. Now owned by North American company International Matex-Tank Terminals (IMTT), the terminal remains one of the town’s most prominent features and still exports crude oil, as well as other liquids like petrochemicals and vegetable oil. In 2022, industry polluters were responsible for releasing nearly 3 million pounds of air toxins like ammonia and the petrochemical n-Hexane within a 10-mile radius of the community, per EPA data.

Already, St. Rose residents experiences higher cancer risks and respiratory illness rates from their exposure to air pollution than the national average, according to federal data from the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“As long as I could remember, I smelled the chemicals,” said Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh, who founded her local nonprofit Refined Community Empowerment after she learned about the ammonia plant. “The tank farm on the fence-line of Elkinsville-Freetown St. Rose came [50] years after the free men and women of color settled the community. And when they came, they never left.”

The community’s access to the river and the plantation land that eventually made way for the significant infrastructure of the IMTT export terminal makes it a convenient location for the ammonia carbon-capture project partially funded by the IRA’s tax credits. 

The project’s developer, St. Charles Clean Fuels, hopes to produce 8,000 metric tons of ammonia a day — a staggering figure that’s far above what most plants produce — that it would then load onto shipping vessels for international export through IMTT’s existing terminal. The production of ammonia, a chemical that’s predominantly developed into fertilizers that enrich soils and help grow food and crops, is responsible for 1.8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. There’s a need to decarbonize ammonia production — and fast: Production is projected to increase by nearly 40 percent by 2050. The market is also expected to triple by 2050 as low-carbon ammonia enters the clean energy market as fuel for ships and power generation. 

St. Charles Clean Fuels plans to supply some of that low-carbon ammonia — so-called “blue ammonia” — with its proposed plant. “Blue ammonia” is an industry term, so we’ll use it sparingly throughout this article, but developers use the terminology to distinguish these projects as nearly carbon neutral because the CO2 by-product has been captured and stored. In the case of the St. Rose plant, the company claims the facility will capture and sequester over 99 percent of the carbon dioxide generated during the ammonia production process. A third party would then handle transporting the greenhouse gas in pipelines before finally storing it somewhere underground.

“In almost any conceivable scenario for a successful energy transition, chemical fuels will be needed in addition to electricity,” said Stephen Crolius, president and co-founder of Carbon Neutral Consulting, which works with companies developing technologies and plants to decarbonize the economy. “Ammonia will likely be among the most prominent of these carbon-free hydrogen fuels because it lends itself to safe low-cost storage, transport, and distribution, very much along the lines of propane and liquified petroleum gas.” Crolius is also president emeritus of the Ammonia Energy Association, an industry group for which he sits on the board of directors.

Large trucks and industry infrastructure beneath a cloudy sky.

The promise to capture nearly all of its emissions qualifies the development for an estimated $425 million in federal CCS subsidies. But since this is a new project, it’s not actually reducing the amount of carbon we’re already emitting into the atmosphere; it’s merely attempting to balance its own emissions. Retrofitting existing plants with this tech would actually reduce the ammonia sector’s overall carbon footprint. Creating entirely new plants with CCS added doesn’t decrease the sector’s overall emissions, at least not while the old facilities are still running. That 1 percent of CO2 not captured at the “blue” ammonia plant would still amount to an additional 154,000 tons that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.

The community is wary. The facility won’t capture all the polluting byproducts of producing ammonia, either.

On a rainy evening at the end of spring, I met Eugene Kyereh, 54, who is also a descendant of the town’s founder, Elkins, at a local restaurant called Boudreaux’s River Road. She comes here often, but her brother Darris Eugene, 61, won’t step foot into Boudreaux’s, which served only white people when they were growing up. “It was off limits to us,” he told me the following morning from the hair salon he inherited from their mother. 

The IMTT export terminal sits some 500 feet away from his business, next door to Eugene Kyereh’s home and just down the street from the restaurant. As we ate gumbo and fish, she recalled a troubling memory. “[The smell of the air] was so bad that one day in June,” she told me, “my son and I decided we had to evacuate.”

She’s worried that industrial pollution will only get worse if developer St. Charles Clean Fuels builds its multibillion-dollar ammonia plant next door. After all, ammonia is a dangerous air pollutant.

“High levels of ammonia are deadly, and even lower levels from normal operations can cause breathing problems,” said Kimberly Terrell, director of community engagement and research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. She’s published several peer-reviewed studies related to Cancer Alley and the health impacts residents face from living so close to industry. In 2023, the IMTT chemical storage terminal emitted about 51 tons per year of VOCs, a mix of toxic chemicals, adjacent to Elkinsville-St. Rose. “An ammonia plant would only worsen the pollution crisis in this community,” Terrell said.

Can the blue ammonia plant justify itself? 

The ammonia plant is still a maybe — it needs a federal water permit, an air permit, and a coastal use permit from the state approved before construction can begin. So far, the developer hasn’t secured any. Agencies are likely to issue their decisions by the fall. The developer is optimistic about the plant’s future, but local experts are more skeptical because the facility would lie in a floodplain. But if the plant is approved, St. Charles Clean Fuels could break ground within six to eight months and have the ammonia plant running no later than 2028.

“The development of St. Charles Clean Fuels represents a significant step toward reducing the carbon footprint of valuable and versatile liquid fuels, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from hard-to-abate energy uses,” said Chandra Stacie​​​​, director of community relations for St. Charles Clean Fuels, in an emailed statement. 

But how would any of this work? Well, let’s start with a quick chemistry lesson: To produce ammonia, you need nitrogen and hydrogen. 

Since nitrogen makes up 78 percent of the air we breathe, developers can pull nitrogen directly out of the air using an air separation unit. Then, they need to combine it with hydrogen, which is trickier to procure. One source is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In a process called autothermal reforming, reactors use oxygen and steam to separate hydrogen from both the steam and the methane with little combustion, concentrating carbon dioxide to ease its capture. 

That’s where CCS comes in. Plants like these are designed to strip the carbon from the process gas with a bespoke adsorbent that’s perfectly shaped to capture CO2 molecules. It’s sort of like a sponge that can soak up the carbon. By altering the pressure, the gas can be released from the block and moved for transport and storage. 
This creates blue ammonia, but the process isn’t perfect. Methane is still a fossil fuel. And the natural gas it’s pulled from is dirty and full of other substances, too, so the plant has to purify it during the process. In St. Rose, developer St. Charles Clean Fuels estimates the plant will still release the equivalent of what some 780,000 cars would emit in a whole year even after capturing 99 percent of the approximately 5 million tons the facility would release otherwise.

In St. Rose, residents can see the remains of a now-defunct Shell asphalt refinery from their yards.

Sometimes, emissions wind up higher than estimated. For instance, the Gorgon facility — a $3 billion CCS project in Australia from Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell that began to store carbon dioxide in 2019, three years after starting production — said it would store 80 percent of its carbon emissions from producing liquid natural gas. The Gorgon facility missed that target during its first five years of operation by 50 percent due to technical issues that need to be addressed, according to a 2022 report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Now, the facility is planning to expand despite lacking evidence that it’s properly capturing and storing carbon at all. Another 62 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses could be released annually as a result. Operators received at least $60 million in support from the Australian government. 

And that’s what worries many advocates. Taxpayers foot the bill for a technology that may perpetuate fossil fuel polluters — the ones that knowingly created climate change in the first place — and even build a new market for their products given the natural gas feedstock. How does that help wean the world off of fossil fuels? 

It would be one thing if only existing polluters were upgrading their facilities with CCS to lower their emissions. We should see some emissions reduction then. Instead, new projects are popping up across the US, creating previously non-existent sources of emissions and pollution. There’s the blue ammonia plant in St. Rose — but it isn’t the only one.

According to a tracker from watchdog nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), 10 other blue ammonia plants have been proposed in Louisiana where most are expected to be completed by the end of the decade. However, CCS isn’t exclusive to ammonia; more than 40 other projects have been proposed across the state that mainly involve building hubs for storing carbon. These are the sorts of third-party partners St. Charles Clean Fuels will eventually need to move the carbon it captures from manufacturing ammonia. Across the US, over a hundred more have been announced, according to EIP.

A large tanker can be seen in a shipping terminal in St. Rose, Louisiana.

“Our concerns with this trend are numerous,” said Courtney Bernhardt, research director at the EIP. “Not only will there be environmental and health impacts, largely in already overburdened areas, but also because government laws and regulations are barely catching up.”

Two factors are driving this explosion in investment. There’s the market, which is finally hungry for low-emission energy sources. Customers now exist in European and Asian countries that are trying to replace dirty energy with cleaner alternatives. There’s also the shipping industry. Right now, nasty bunkers and tankers that transport chemicals and fuels contribute to about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but the UN’s International Maritime Organization wants to hit net zero by or around 2050. Net zero involves eliminating emissions at the source where you can and capturing them where you can’t by sequestering carbon naturally in ecosystems or industrially through plants. 

Federal subsidies and tax benefits have also bolstered the market. The Biden administration has been investing heavily in hydrogen and CCS. Over the last year alone, over $1 billion in direct funding has been announced. 

Blue ammonia and CCS may offer a miniscule amount of decreased emissions. But what about the people who must live by these plants?

“This injustice that’s never been corrected”

Since the oil export terminal that eventually became IMTT came to the community in 1922, the industrial sector has expanded throughout St. Rose. Most residents can see rows of four-story-tall chemical storage tanks from their backyards. The facility is impossible to miss, and it has become intertwined with many of the lives of the people who live in St. Rose. IMTT sponsors community events, hosts dinners, and has contributed to local schools and charities, but those who live in St. Rose and depend on the company for support or work face an ongoing risk to their own health. The community’s proximity to polluters is a direct legacy of slavery and a symptom of the plantation-to-plant pipeline. 

“That’s still a symptom of the plantation economy and also the disregard for Black health, for Black bodies,” said Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit seeking intergenerational healing for Louisiana’s Black riverside communities overwhelmed by environmental harms. “Even the ways that the benefit to our community lies in the labor of it all. It doesn’t matter if the job is killing you in the long run. It doesn’t matter if we’re losing population as a result of these dirty industries.”

The Holy Rosary Cemetery on the west bank of the Mississippi River sits before the Dow petrochemical plant some seven miles northwest of St. Rose. The facility’s machines churned and flare stacks burned over the rows of tombstones.

Levien of Johns Hopkins University is currently in Louisiana to write a book on the social consequences of CCS. “Those free towns wind up becoming frontline communities,” he told me after we ran inside a New Orleans coffee shop to avoid a downpour. “It’s this injustice that’s never been corrected.”

In St. Rose, locals have been complaining about odors to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for at least 20 years. In 2023, DEQ received six formal odor complaints from residents attributed to IMTT. This year, there have been four. Recent numbers are likely underestimated, Terrell said; not everyone reports the smells to the state. IMTT has also directed residents to complain directly to the company, which won’t be reflected in the public record.

“I don’t think it’s possible to live so close to a facility of the scale of IMTT, knowing how much emissions IMTT reports, and to not be impacted by that,” said Terrell when I met her in her New Orleans office. 

During my visit, just about everyone had a story to tell about the ways they or their loved ones have suffered from what they believe is industry’s doing. Rosemary Green, a vivacious 69-year-old woman who wore a purple patterned scarf on her head, has woken up in the middle of the night choking from what she believes are the chemical smells. Her 68-year-old husband, Thoni Green, has lost his sense of smell altogether. They’re trying to grow roses in their yard, but many flowers die. Their home directly borders the proposed site of the ammonia plant.

“Look at these leaves,” she said from her front yard, pointing to yellowing leaves. “This was a rose bush from my grandmother’s house. I flew this thing out to NOLA and kept this thing alive. When I first got it, it was beautiful, and then all of a sudden, it started dying.” 

In Eugene Kyereh’s family, at least five people have been diagnosed with cancer. Two family members have passed away and two are in remission. One is actively fighting still. Four others have died from complications related to neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, a brain disorder that scientists have begun to link to exposure to particulate matter, a form of air pollution. That’s how Eugene Kyereh lost her mom 10 years ago. The activist herself has suffered two miscarriages over the years; research suggests that air pollution exposure in early pregnancy is linked to miscarriage. Exact causation is hard to determine, but the fear the residents harbor is real.

Now, the community must contend with what an ammonia plant may bring. 

Terrell is alarmed over the health issues the facility may exacerbate. Exposure to ammonia has been linked to health issues ranging from coughing and nose irritation to respiratory issues and lung damage. Enough ammonia exposure can kill someone. Developers say they plan to build this plant cleaner than conventional ammonia facilities, but CCS tech can’t stop air pollution altogether.

According to the draft air permit, St. Charles Clean Fuels anticipates the plant will release nearly 67 tons of nitrogen oxides that are hazardous to public health and 59 tons of ammonia every year. While that amount of ammonia is legal in Louisiana, it would exceed the air standards in Massachusetts, a state that has taken a harder stance against polluters to protect public health. 

“The health and well-being of our employees, the operations team at IMTT, and the residents of the surrounding communities are SCCF’s top priority,” said Stacie of St. Charles Clean Fuels. “Our facilities are designed with the utmost regard for safety such that none of our plant workers and no one in the community is ever exposed to concentrated ammonia.”

The plant will be outfitted with emergency shutdown systems and safety valves in the case of an emergency, per Stacie. 

What keeps Eugene Kyereh up at night, however, is the potential risks from leaky CCS infrastructure. Carbon dioxide isn’t just a pollutant. It’s an asphyxiant. That means people exposed to it essentially can’t breathe. To make matters worse, there are no clinics or hospitals in St. Rose.

St. Charles Clean Fuels executives say they will develop plans to integrate monitoring systems and emergency response to prevent a crisis or keep people safe should one occur, Stacie said.

In 2020, heavy rains — the same weather patterns common in Louisiana — caused a landslide that strained a CO2 pipeline and caused it to rupture near Satartia, Mississippi. After being exposed to the CO2 leaking from the pipeline, 45 people were hurt. Many victims collapsed, and emergency vehicles couldn’t get in.

A historical town facing multiple threats

Three years ago, Hurricane Ida’s 110-mile-per-hour winds tore apart roofs and windows in St. Rose. Today, houses all over the neighborhood are still boarded up or covered in blue tarps. Roads remain bumpy with potholes. Some residents are still rebuilding. 

This year, on June 1, the official start of hurricane season, Eugene Kyereh organized a health fair to inform her neighbors about the ammonia plant. Thunderstorms had been tormenting the town for days. That gray morning, rain clouds brooded over the Mississippi River, but many community members, activists — and even industry executives from St. Charles Clean Fuels — showed up.

After a prayer, some live sax, and a hefty meal of green beans and chicken, industry officials took the stage podium.

That day, Eugene Kyereh walked gracefully through the audience wearing a vibrant red blazer, her natural curls bouncing above her shoulders. She seemed to know everyone as she passed the mic from person to person, giving them space to air their grievances directly to the companies. And then she addressed them. The leak in Satartia, Mississippi was “one of the worst things that can happen,” she said to St. Charles Clean Fuels executives. “This is the thing that really alarmed me and one of the reasons why I started Refined Community Empowerment.”

“How can we have a blue ammonia plant when we’re already overburdened with chemicals from IMTT?” she asked them. “How is this going to be a help to us?”

Hurricane season is back. It’s projected to be among the worst in decades due to record-breaking ocean temperatures from climate change. The season’s first hurricane, Beryl, broke records as the strongest June storm ever recorded. It killed at least 36 people in Houston alone. 

CCS may weaken the storms of future generations — maybe it’ll one day save the world if researchers can make it cost-effective and safe — but today, the technology still doesn’t work as intended. In the meantime, companies pursue incentives intended to address the climate crisis, giving them cover for sacrificing the health of Black communities in the name of global progress on CO2 emissions.

“The industry is taking over,” said Sharon Lavigne, an activist who has become internationally recognized for blocking a plastics refinery in her community a few parishes away. We spoke as Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” played in the background. “This was a historical town. Why should we roll over and let the industry come in here and destroy our history?”

This story was supported by a reporting grant from The Fund for Environmental Journalist of The Society of Environmental Journalists.

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‘It can’t withstand the heat’: fears ‘stable’ Patagonia glacier in irreversible decline

Scientists say Perito Moreno, which for decades defied trend of glacial retreat, now rapidly losing massOne of the few stable glaciers in a warming world, Perito Moreno, in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, is now undergoing a possibly irreversible retreat, scientists say.Over the past seven years, it has lost 1.92 sq km (0.74 sq miles) of ice cover and its thickness is decreasing by up to 8 metres (26 ft) a year. Continue reading...

One of the few stable glaciers in a warming world, Perito Moreno, in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, is now undergoing a possibly irreversible retreat, scientists say.Over the past seven years, it has lost 1.92 sq km (0.74 sq miles) of ice cover and its thickness is decreasing by up to 8 metres (26 ft) a year.For decades, Perito Moreno defied the global trend of glacial retreat, maintaining an exceptional balance between snow accumulation and melting. Its dramatic calving events, when massive blocks of ice crashed into Lago Argentino, became a symbol of natural wonder, drawing millions of visitors to southern Patagonia.Dr Lucas Ruiz, a glaciologist at the Argentine Institute of Nivology, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, said: “The Perito Moreno is a very particular, exceptional glacier. Since records began, it stood out to the first explorers in the late 19th century because it showed no signs of retreat – on the contrary, it was advancing. And it continued to do so until 2018, when we began to see a different behaviour. Since then, its mass loss has become increasingly rapid.”Scientists and local guides warn that the balance is beginning to shift. “The first year the glacier didn’t return to its previous year’s position was 2022. The same happened in 2023, again in 2024, and now in 2025. The truth is, the retreat continues. The glacier keeps thinning, especially along its northern margin,” said Ruiz. This sector is the farthest from tourist walkways and lies above the deepest part of Lago Argentino, the largest freshwater lake in Argentina.Calving events at Perito Moreno, when ice collapses into the lake, are becoming louder, more frequent, and much larger. Photograph: Philipp Rohner/Getty Images/500pxThe summer of 2023-24 recorded a maximum temperature of 11.2C, according to meteorological data collected by Pedro Skvarca, a geophysical engineer and the scientific director of the Glaciarium centre in El Calafate, Patagonia. Over the past 30 years, the average summer temperature rose by 1.2C, a change significant enough to greatly accelerate ice melt.Ice thickness measurements are equally alarming. Between 2018 and 2022, the glacier was thinning at a rate of 4 metres a year. But in the past two years, that has doubled to 8 metres annually.“Perito Moreno’s size no longer matches the current climate; it’s simply too big. It can’t withstand the heat, and the current ice input isn’t enough to compensate,” Ruiz said.Ice that once rested on the lakebed owing to its weight, said Ruiz, had now thinned so much that it was beginning to float, as water pressure overtook the ice’s own.With that anchor lost, the glacier’s front accelerates – not because of increased mass input from the accumulation zone, where snow compacts into ice, but because the front slides and deforms. This movement triggers a feedback loop that further weakens the structure, making the process potentially irreversible.Xabier Blanch Gorriz, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, who studies ice calving at the Perito Moreno glacier front, said: “Describing the change as ‘irreversible’ is complex, because glaciers are dynamic systems. But the truth is that the current rate of retreat points to a clearly negative trend.” He added: “The glacier’s retreat and thinning are evident and have accelerated.”Ruiz confirmed another disturbing trend reported by local guides: calving events are becoming louder, more frequent, and much larger. In April, a guide at Los Glaciares national park described watching a tower of ice the height of a 20-storey building collapse into the lake. “It’s only in the last four to six years that we’ve started seeing icebergs this size,” he told Reuters.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionIn January of this year, Blanch Gorriz and his team installed eight photogrammetric systems that capture images every 30 minutes, enabling the generation of 3D models of about 300 metres of the glacier front. Initial comparisons between December and June already reveal significant ice loss. Satellite images further highlight a striking retreat over just 100 days.Today, nothing seems capable of halting the glacier’s retreat. Only a series of cooler summers and wetter winters might slow the trend, but climate projections point in the opposite direction.“What we expect is that, at some point, Perito Moreno will lose contact with the Magallanes peninsula, which has historically acted as a stabilising buttress and slowed the glacier’s response to climate change. When that happens, we’ll likely see a catastrophic retreat to a new equilibrium position, farther back in the narrow valley,” said Ruiz.Such a shift would represent a “new configuration” of the glacier, raising scientific questions about how this natural wonder would behave in the future. “It will be something never seen before – even farther back than what the first researchers documented in the late 19th century,” Ruiz nadded.How long the glacier might hold that future position remains unknown. But what scientists do know is that the valley, unlike the Magallanes peninsula, would not be able to hold the glacier in place.Perito Moreno – Latin America’s most iconic glacier and part of a Unesco world heritage site since 1981 – now joins a regrettable local trend: its neighbours, the Upsala and Viedma glaciers, have retreated at an astonishing rate over the past two decades. It is also part of a global pattern in which, as Ruiz put it, humanity is “digging the grave” of the world’s glaciers.

Seeing fewer fireflies this year? Here’s why, and how you can help.

Fireflies are vulnerable to climate change and habitat loss. Some simple landscaping tricks and turning off porch lights can make a big difference.

It’s firefly season in the Blue Ridge.  As the sun goes down, they begin to blink and glow along the water, in the trees, and across open fields. Some species twinkle in unison, others off and on. One of nature’s loveliest light shows enchants onlookers of all ages, especially in the Smoky Mountains, which is home to about 20 percent of the 100 or so species found in the United States. But many of those who have long delighted in this essential feature of a humid East Coast summer say something feels different. Casual observers and scientists alike are seeing fewer fireflies, and studies show that habitat loss, rising temperatures, light pollution, and drought threaten these beloved bugs. Some populations are already dwindling, including about 18 species in the U.S. and Canada. “We’ve been hearing anecdotal reports of fireflies’ population declining for years,” said Sarah Lower, a biologist at Bucknell University. “Every time I would go out and give a scientific talk somewhere, somebody would raise their hand and say, ‘You know, I’ve been out in my yard and when I’m with a kid I remember there being fireflies everywhere, now I don’t see them.’” Lower and Darin J. McNeil, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Kentucky, examined  firefly population patterns last summer, using citizen science data collected nationwide to draw connections with environmental conditions.Though their observations don’t specifically confirm a decline, they suggest reasons we might be seeing fewer fireflies in some places. Climate change is already reshaping the Southeast with hotter, drier summers — conditions that could push fireflies past their limits. In some wetter regions, though, they may find new habitat. McNeil said these changing patterns are impacting firefly populations already. “They’re very, very sensitive to temperature and weather and things like that,” McNeil said. “In Southern areas where we expect it to get quite warm — and maybe get outside the comfort zone of fireflies — we might expect the fireflies are going to do poorly.” Read Next A year after Helene, river guides in Appalachia are navigating a new world Katie Myers Fireflies are carnivorous beetles. They don’t live long, and spend two years of their short lives in the soil as larvae, hunting slugs and other moisture-loving critters. “Disrupt that access to the soil, McNeil said, “and fireflies disappear very quickly.” The insects thrive in woodland areas (and, oddly, on farmland, despite herbicides), and habitat loss poses a threat. “We have this effect of fragmentation where people are chopping up the forest into little chunks and then the forest that’s left behind doesn’t get managed in any way,” McNeil said. McNeil would like to see researchers study how forest management, including prescribed burning, impacts fireflies. In the meantime, there’s a lot that ordinary folks can do to help them thrive. In western North Carolina, Brannen Basham and Jill Jacobs have built their lives around native landscapes. Their small business, Spriggly’s Beescaping, teaches people about pollinators — and increasingly, fireflies. The pair have a seemingly endless knowledge of fun facts about lightning bugs.  “One random interesting fact is that these animals never stop glowing,” Jacobs said. “They’re glowing as little eggs, even.” And one of the most common front yard genus, Photuris, use their glow to lure nearby males — then eat them. They take firefly conservation seriously, running regular workshops to teach people how to make their yards more welcoming to fireflies and pollinators, particularly as climate change disrupts growing seasons. “Fireflies might enter into their adult form and find themselves emerging into a world in which their favorite plants have either already bloomed or they haven’t bloomed yet,” Basham said. “By increasing the diversity of native plants in your space, you can help ensure that there’s something in bloom at all times of the growing season.” Basham and Jacobs have a few other tips for helping fireflies thrive. You don’t need to be a scientist to help protect fireflies. In fact, the biggest difference comes from how we care for our own backyards. Here are a few things Basham and Jacobs recommend: Turn off your porch lights. Fireflies are incredibly sensitive to artificial light and it can confuse them. Ditch the manicured lawn and embrace native plants. In addition to being easier to care for, they suit the local environment and conserve water. Leave some leaves behind when you rake in the fall. They’re a great place for fireflies to find food, stay cool, and lay eggs. Plant shrubs, tufting grasses, and other, large plants. These can shelter fireflies during rainstorms and other severe weather.  If you spot fireflies, jot down when and where you saw them and add your observations to citizen science databases like iNaturalist, Firefly Watch or Firefly Atlas to help scientists collect data. Even among those who study fireflies, the thrill of spotting them remains magical. Lower has made many excursions to the southern Appalachian mountains to find the famous, ethereal “blue ghosts.” Rather than flicker, the insects emit a continuous bluish-green glow. “You walk into the pitch black woods and at first you can’t really see anything right because your eyes are getting used to the darkness,” Lower said. “But eventually you start to see all these dim glows.” On other nights, Lower has seen so many fireflies it felt like she was walking among he stars. She’s been lucky enough to witness a phenomenon called spotlighting, in which lightning bugs hover in a circle of light. She’s even used pheromones as a tactic to lure them out of their hiding spots in the dead of winter, feeling elated as the creatures drifted toward her: “You can imagine me dancing and yelling and screaming in the forest.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seeing fewer fireflies this year? Here’s why, and how you can help. on Jul 11, 2025.

Drought is draining water supplies and driving up food costs where you’d least expect

From Mexico City to the Mekong Delta, increasingly severe droughts caused by climate change are laying waste to ecosystems and economies everywhere.

Taking shovels and buckets to a dried-up sandy belt of the Vhombozi River in Zimbabwe last August, groups of Mudzi district villagers gathered to dig with the hope of somehow finding water. The southern African region had entered into a state of severe drought, which had shriveled the Vhombozi, a primary water supply for more than 100,000 people. Before long, a maze of makeshift holes revealed shallow puddles along the otherwise arid riverbed. The frantic digging had worked — there was water. There was just one big problem: It wasn’t blue. It was a muddy brown color, and villagers worried that consuming it would make them ill. But as there were scarcely other options, many took their chances with drinking it and bathing with it.  Almost a year later, the persistent drought has led to a deluge of devastation on the region’s food system. Corn yields dropped 70 percent across the country, causing consumer prices to double. Thousands of cattle were lost to thirst and starvation. A local UNICEF emergency food distribution lost all of the food crops it harvested, which forced the NGO to reduce charitable food provisions from three meals a week to one. Child malnutrition levels in Mudzi doubled, driving up the demand for health care, and causing a quarter of health care clinics to run out of water reserves. Between January and March, about 6 million people in Zimbabwe faced food insecurity. According to a new report by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center, or NDMC, and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, or UNCCD, the combined effects of global warming, drought, and El Niño have triggered similar crises all over the world, from Mexico City to the Mekong Delta. Using impact reports alongside government data, scientific and technical research, and media coverage of major drought events, the authors examined case-by-case how droughts compound poverty, hunger, energy insecurity, and ecosystem collapse in climate hot spots around the world. They measured impacts in 2023 and 2024, when the planet saw some of the most widespread and damaging drought events in recorded history. What they found is a lesson and a warning sign: Increasingly severe droughts caused by climate change are laying waste to ecosystems and economies everywhere.  “This report is a blistering reminder that climate change and punishing drought are already devastating lives, livelihoods, and food access,” said Million Belay of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, who wasn’t involved in the research. “We need to get serious about resilience and real adaptation.” A local farmer carries vegetables near a partially dry canal of a Chinampa, or floating garden, in San Gregorio Atlapulco, on the outskirts of Mexico City, Mexico, on May 23, 2024. Daniel Cardenas / Anadolu via Getty Images Mexico City A focal point in the analysis is Mexico, where prolonged drought conditions provoked a water crisis that has had repercussions for food affordability and access.  The situation began to intensify in 2023, when the country entered into a period of historically low rainfall. By June, the bulk of Mexico’s reservoirs dropped below 50 percent capacity. The rainy winter of 2023 brought some relief, but not enough.  By the next summer, 90 percent of the country was experiencing some level of drought, and Mexico City’s water supply system reached a record low of 39 percent capacity. Abnormally low rainfall and high temperatures, made worse by inefficient water infrastructure and overextraction of the city’s aquifer, would persist into early 2025. These struggles to obtain water have been further exacerbated by distribution needs as mandated by a water-sharing treaty Mexico has long shared with the United States.  A severe lack of water has been found to be closely linked with food insecurity, as water scarcity impacts food access through reductions in agricultural production that can fuel food shortages and higher grocery prices. Roughly 42 percent of Mexico’s population was food-insecure in 2021, according to national statistics, with consumer food inflation rates steadily climbing since then. Price hikes were eventually reflected in grocery stores, causing the costs of produce like cilantro to soar by 400 percent, alongside other climbing price tags for goods like onions, broccoli, and avocados.  “Ripple effects can turn regional droughts into global economic shocks,” said NDMC’s Cody Knutson, who co-authored the report. “No country is immune when critical water-dependent systems start to collapse.”  Locals carry banana produce over the dry Solimoes riverbed in the Pesqueiro community in Northern Brazil, on September 30, 2024. Michael Dantas / AFP via Getty Images Amazon Basin During those same years, the Amazon River Basin became another drought and hunger hot spot. According to the new report, climate change caused waterways to drop to historically low levels in September of 2023. Drinking water became contaminated by mass die-offs of marine life, and local communities weren’t able to eat the fish they rely on.  Supply chain transportation was also greatly affected, as the low water levels made it impossible for boats to travel in and out of certain regions. Brazil’s AirForce would be deployed to distribute food and water to several states where river supply routes were impassable.  Residents in some towns dug wells on their own properties to replace river water they would normally depend on for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, according to the U.N.-backed report. Others were stuck waiting on government aid. Disruptions to drinking water and food supplies due to low river levels continued through late 2024 as the drought persisted. By September, waterways that had previously been navigable were bone-dry.  A 2025 report released by the nonprofit ACAPS found that many communities in the Amazon region were already believed to be suffering malnutrition, making them more vulnerable to the emerging health and food insecurity effects of the drought.  Climate change plays “a critical role in food security,” said FAO economist Jung-eun Sohn, who is unaffiliated with the UNCCD report. He noted that warming not only can impact both availability of and access to food, but that natural hazards are “one of three main risks of food insecurity,” along with conflict and economic risks, in hunger hot spots.  A woman stands in a dried-out banana plantation in Ben Tre Province, Vietnam, in 2016. At the time, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta was experiencing its worst drought in 90 years. Christian Berg / Getty Images Mekong Delta  Though a central contributor to the interconnected water-and-food crisis, climate change isn’t the only factor in many hunger hot spots — failing infrastructure and inefficiencies in water delivery systems have also been flagged as critical contributors to widespread water shortages. The compounding effect of El Niño, or a naturally-occurring weather phenomena that drives above-average global heat and more intense natural disasters in parts of the planet, is another culprit.  “It’s now abundantly clear that industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture, with its high water demands and uniform crops, is deeply vulnerable to drought and intensifying the crisis,” said Belay, the IPES expert.  One study found that saltwater intrusion, much like what persistently plagues the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, also causes a significant reduction in food production. The watershed flows through six Asian countries, and over 20 million people depend on the rice grown in the region, which is Vietnam’s most productive agricultural area. It is also the region of Vietnam that is most vulnerable to hunger, with up to half of its rural households struggling to afford enough food.  A woman looks over her spoiled watermelon field in Ben Tre Province, Vietnam, in 2016. At the time, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta was experiencing its worst drought in 90 years. Christian Berg / Getty Images So when an early heat wave struck the Mekong Delta in 2024, and an abnormally long dry spell followed suit, causing canals to dry up, excessive salinity, heat, and water scarcity killed farmers’ catch in droves, reducing what communities were able to supply and sell, which led to shortages that prompted the local government to intervene and help producers quickly sell their wares. As the drought persisted, communities undertook other desperate measures to mitigate losses; renovating ditches, constructing temporary reservoirs, digging wells, and storing fresh water. Even so, according to the report, up to 110,000 hectares of agricultural resources, including fruit crops, rice fields, and aquaculture, have been impacted in the last year by the drought and excess salinity. The situation contributed to rice shortages, prompting a widespread inflationary effect on market prices. “These instances highlight how interconnected our global economies and food supplies are,” Paula Guastello, NDMC drought impacts researcher and lead author of the report, told Grist. “Drought has widespread implications, especially when it occurs on such a large, intense scale as during the past few years. In today’s global society, it is impossible to ignore the effects of drought occurring in far-off lands.”  All told, the authors argue that without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, rising temperatures will lead to more frequent and severe droughts by continuing to inflate heat, evaporation, and volatile precipitation patterns. All the while, urbanization, land use changes, and population growth are expected to continue to strain water resources and influence which assets and areas are most vulnerable to drought impacts. The world’s resilience to those impacts, the report denotes, ultimately depends on the fortification of ecosystems, the adoption of changes to water management, and the pursuit of equitable resource access.  “Proactive drought management is a matter of climate justice, equitable development, and good governance,” said UNCCD Deputy Executive Secretary Andrea Meza in a statement about the report. Stronger early warning systems and real-time drought impact monitoring, for example, those that assess conditions known to fuel food and water insecurity, are some of the ways countries can better fortify their systems in preparedness for the next big drought event. Others include watershed restoration, the broad revival of traditional cultivation practices, and the implementation of alternative water supply technologies to help make infrastructure more climate-resilient. Adaptation methods, however, must also account for the most vulnerable populations, the authors say, and require global cooperation, particularly along critical food trade routes.  “Drought is not just a weather event,” said report co-author and NDMC assistant director Kelly Helm Smith. “It can be a social, economic, and environmental emergency. The question is not whether this will happen again, but whether we will be better prepared next time.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Drought is draining water supplies and driving up food costs where you’d least expect on Jul 9, 2025.

Provocative new book says we must persuade people to have more babies

The population is set to plummet and we don't know how to stop it, warn Dean Spears and Michael Geruso in their new book, After the Spike

A large population may enable innovation and economies of scalePHILIPPE MONTIGNY/iStockphoto/Get​ty Images After the SpikeDean Spears and Michael Geruso (Bodley Head (UK); Simon & Schuster (US)) Four-Fifths of all the humans who will ever be born may already have been born. The number of children being born worldwide each year peaked at 146 million in 2012 and has been falling overall ever since. This means that the world’s population will peak and start to fall around the 2080s. This fall won’t be gradual. With birth rates already well below replacement levels in many countries including China and India, the world’s population will plummet as fast as it rose. In three centuries, there could be fewer than 2 billion people on Earth, claims a controversial new book. “No future is more likely than that people worldwide choose to have too few children to replace their own generation. Over the long run, this would cause exponential population decline,” write economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso in After the Spike: The risks of global depopulation and the case for people. This, you might think, could be a good thing. Won’t it help solve many environmental issues facing us today? No, say the authors. Take climate change: their argument isn’t that population size doesn’t matter, but that it changes so slowly that other factors such as how fast the world decarbonises matter far more. The window of opportunity for lowering carbon dioxide emissions by reducing population has largely passed, they write. Spears and Geruso also make the case that there are many benefits to having a large population. For instance, there is more innovation, and economies of scale make the manufacture of things like smartphones feasible. “We get to have nice phones only because we have a lot of neighbors on this planet,” they write. So, in their view, our aim should be to stabilise world population rather than letting it plummet. The problem is we don’t know how, even with the right political will. As we grow richer, we are more reluctant to abandon career and leisure opportuntiies to have children While some government policies have had short-term effects, no country has successfully changed long-term population trends, argue the authors. Take China’s one-child policy. It is widely assumed to have helped reduce population growth – but did it? Spears and Geruso show unlabelled graphs of the populations of China and its neighbours before, during and after the policy was in place, and ask the reader which is China. There is no obvious difference. Attempts to boost falling fertility rates have been no more successful, they say. Birth rates jumped after Romania banned abortion in 1966, but they soon started to fall again. Sweden has tried the carrot rather than the stick by heavily subsidising day care. But the fertility rate there has been falling even further below the replacement rate. All attempts to boost fertility by providing financial incentives are likely to fail, Spears and Geruso argue. While people might say they are having fewer children because they cannot afford larger families, the global pattern is, in fact, that as people become richer they have fewer children. Rather than affordability being the issue, it is more about people deciding that they have better things to do, the authors say. As we grow richer, we are more reluctant to abandon career and leisure opportunities to have children. Even technological advances are unlikely to reverse this, they say. On everything other than the difficulty of stabilising the population, this is a relentlessly optimistic book. For instance, say the authors, dire predictions of mass starvation as the world’s population grew have been shown to be completely wrong. The long-term trend of people living longer and healthier lives can continue, they suggest. “Fears of a depleted, overpopulated future are out of date,” they write. Really? Spears and Geruso also stress that the price of food is key to determining how many go hungry, but fail to point out that food prices are now climbing, with climate change an increasing factor. I’m not so sure things are going to keep getting better for most people. This book is also very much a polemic: with Spears and Geruso labouring their main points, it wasn’t an enjoyable read. That said, if you think that the world’s population isn’t going to fall, or that it will be easy to halt its fall, or that a falling population is a good thing, you really should read it. New Scientist book club Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.

‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield

Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve GuentherClimate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed. Continue reading...

Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed.Dr Genevieve Guenther, an American climate communications specialist, is the founding director of End Climate Silence, which studies the representation of global heating in the media and public discourse. Last year, she published The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, which was described by Bill McKibben as “a gift to the world”. In the run-up to the Global Tipping Points conference in July, Guenther talks to the Guardian about the need to discuss catastrophic risks when communicating about the climate crisis.The future of her son and all children motivates Dr Genevieve Guenther to protect the planet from further global heating. Photograph: Laila Annmarie Stevens/The GuardianThe climate crisis is pushing globally important ecosystems – ice sheets, coral reefs, ocean circulation and the Amazon rainforest – towards the point of no return. Why is it important to talk about tipping points? We need to correct a false narrative that the climate threat is under control. These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human and ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation.How have attitudes changed towards these dangers? There was a constructive wave of global climate alarm in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 1.5C in 2018. That was the first time scientists made it clear that the difference between 1.5C and 2C would be catastrophic for millions of people and that in order to halt global heating at a relatively safe level, we would need to start zeroing out our emissions almost immediately. Until then, I don’t think policymakers realised the timeline was that short. This prompted a flurry of activism – Greta Thunberg and Indigenous and youth activists – and a surge of media attention. All of this converged to make almost everybody feel that climate change was a terrifying and pressing problem. This prompted new pledges, new corporate sustainability targets, and new policies being passed by government.This led to a backlash by those in the climate movement who prefer to cultivate optimism. Their preferred solution was to drive capitalist investment into renewable technologies so fossil fuels could be beaten out of the marketplace. This group believed climate fear might drive away investors, so they started to argue it was counterproductive to talk about worst-case scenarios. Some commentators even argued we had averted the direst predictions and were now on a more reassuring trajectory of global warming of a little under 3C by 2100.There is a misconception that wealthier places, such as the UK, Europe (including Italy, pictured) and the US will not be affected by the climate crisis but this is wrong, says Guenther. Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty ImagesBut it is bananas to feel reassured by that because 3C would be a totally catastrophic outcome for humanity. Even at the current level of about 1.5C, the impacts of warming are emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes and there is growing concern of tipping points for the main Atlantic Ocean circulation (Amoc), Antarctic sea ice, corals and rainforests.If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the Amoc collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off. And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we’re still continuing business as usual is mindblowing. I think part of the problem is that people feel distant from the dangers and don’t realise the children we have in our homes today are threatened with a chaotic, disastrous, unliveable future. Talking about the risks of catastrophe is a very useful way to overcome this kind of false distance.In your book, you write that it’s appropriate to be scared and the more you know, the more likely you are to be worried, as is evident from the statements of scientists and the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres. Why? Some people at the centre of the media, policymaking and even research claim that climate change isn’t going to be that bad for those who live in the wealthy developed world – the UK, Europe and the United States. When you hear these messages, you are lulled into a kind of complacency and it seems reasonable to think that we can continue to live as we do now without putting ourselves, our families, our communities under threat within decades. What my book is designed to do is wake people up and raise the salience and support for phasing out fossil fuels.[It] is written for people who are already concerned about the climate crisis and are willing to entertain a level of anxiety. But the discourse of catastrophe would not be something I would recommend for people who are disengaged from the climate problem. I think that talking about catastrophe with those people can actually backfire because it’ll just either overwhelm them or make them entrench their positions. It can be too threatening.The Donnie Creek wildfire burns in British Columbia, Canada, in 2023. Photograph: Noah Berger/APA recent Yale study found that a degree of climate anxiety was not necessarily bad because it could stir people to collective action. Do you agree? It depends. I talk about three different kinds of doomerism. One is the despair that arises from misunderstanding the science and thinking we’re absolutely on the path to collapse within 20 or 30 years, no matter what we do. That is not true.Second, there’s a kind of nihilistic position taken by people who suggest they are the only ones who can look at the harsh truth. I have disdain for that position.Finally, there’s the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down. And that to me is the most reasonable kind of doomerism. To address that kind of doomerism, you need to say: “Yes, this is scary as hell. But we must have courage and turn our fear into action by talking about climate change with others, by calling our elected officials on a regular basis, by demanding our workplaces put their money where their mouth is.”You need to acknowledge people’s feelings, meet them where they are and show how they can assuage their fear by cultivating their bravery and collective action.The most eye-opening part of your book was about the assumptions of the Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus that we’ll probably only face a very low percentage of GDP loss by the end of the century. This surely depends on ignoring tipping points? The only way Nordhaus can get the result that he does is if he fails to price the risk of catastrophe and leaves out a goodly chunk of the costs of global heating. In his models, he does not account for climate damages to labour productivity, buildings, infrastructure, transportation, non-coastal real estate, insurance, communication, government services and other sectors. But the most shocking thing he leaves out of his models is the risk that global heating could set off catastrophes, whether they are physical tipping points or wars from societal responses. That is why the percentage of global damages that he estimates is so ridiculously lowballed.The idea that climate change will just take off only a small margin of economic growth is not founded on anything empirical. It’s just a kind of quasi-religious faith in the power of capitalism to decouple itself from the planet on which it exists. That’s absurd and it’s unscientific.Some economists suggest wealth can provide almost unlimited protection from catastrophe because it is better to be in a steel and concrete building in a storm than it is to be in a wooden shack. How true is that? There’s no evidence that these protections are unlimited, though there are economists who suggest we can always substitute technologies or human-made products for ecosystems or even other planets like Mars for Earth itself. This goes back to an economic growth theorist named Robert Solow, who claims technological innovation can increase human productivity indefinitely. He stressed that it was just a theory, but the economists advising Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s took this as gospel and argued it was possible to ignore environmental externalities – the costs of our economic system, including our greenhouse gas pollution – because you could protect yourself as long as you kept increasing your wealth.Floods due to heavy rains at Porto Alegre airport left a plane stranded on the runway in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, last year. Photograph: Diego Vara/ReutersExcept when it comes to the climate crisis? Yes, the whole spectacle of our planet heating up this quickly should call all of those economic assumptions into question. But because climate change is affecting the poor first and worst, this is used as evidence that poverty is the problem. This is a misrepresentation of reality because the poor are not the only ones who are affected by the climate crisis. This is a slow-moving but accelerating crisis that will root and spread. And it could change for the worst quite dramatically as we hit tipping points.The difference between gradual warming and tipping points is similar to the difference between chronic, manageable ailments and acute, life-threatening diseases, isn’t it? Yes. When people downplay the effects of climate change, they often represent the problem as a case of planetary diabetes – as if it were a kind of illness that you can bumble along with, but still have a relatively good quality of life as long as you use your technologies, your insulin, whatever, to sustain your health. But this is not how climate scientists represent climate change. Dr Joelle Gergis, one of the lead authors on the latest IPCC report, prefers to represent climate change as a cancer – a disease that takes hold and grows and metastasises until the day when it is no longer curable and becomes terminal. You could also think of that as a tipping point.This is a fight for life. And like all fights, you need a tremendous amount of bravery to take it on. Before I started working on climate change, I didn’t think of myself as a fighter, but I became one because I felt I have a responsibility to preserve the world for my son and children everywhere. That kind of fierce protectiveness is part of the way that I love. We can draw on that to have more strength than our enemies because I don’t think they’re motivated by love. I believe love is an infinite resource and the power of it is greater than that of greed or hate. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.Tipping points: on the edge? – a series on our future Composite: Getty/Guardian DesignTipping points – in the Amazon, Antarctic, coral reefs and more – could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with devastating effects. In this series, we ask the experts about the latest science – and how it makes them feel. Tomorrow, David Obura talks about the collapse of coral reefsRead more

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