climate

August 28, 2023

Postcard from California: Roadblocks on the path to phase out gas

By Bill Walker

The October 2015 blowout at Aliso Canyon – a vast network of underground natural gas storage wells in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley – stands as one of the worst environmental disasters in California history.

Before it was capped after 112 days, the leak spewed forth 5 billion cubic feet of methane and other noxious gases, temporarily displacing nearly 10,000 families from the downwind Porter Ranch community. Residents suffered severe headaches, nausea, nosebleeds and other symptoms, and the fear of potential long-term health effects, including cancer. The US’ largest-ever leak of natural gas sprang from a rupture in a well casing from which owner SoCalGas had decades earlier removed, but never replaced, a worn safety valve.

In 2017, then-Gov. Jerry Brown called for closure of Aliso Canyon within 10 years, to protect health and advance the state’s transition from methane gas, a potent driver of climate change, to clean energy. In 2019, Brown’s successor, Gov. Gavin Newsom, vowed to “fast-track” that timeline.

That pledge has yet to materialize: Well into Newsom’s second term, his appointees to the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) not only have failed to set a firm date for closing Aliso Canyon but have twice raised the level for how much gas the wells can store.

Now they are poised to do it again.

This week, the PUC will vote on a petition from SoCalGas to boost the storage limit by two thirds, to more than 68 billion cubic feet – the maximum state geologists say is safe. SoCalGas claims stockpiling more fuel at Aliso Canyon would mean lower utility bills this winter, and the commission’s staff recommends approval of the proposal.

August 14, 2023

Youth win historic climate lawsuit against Montana

By Dana Drugmand

A group of young people who sued Montana officials for failing to adequately address climate change have prevailed in what observers say is a historic legal challenge.

On Monday, Lewis and Clark District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that the plaintiffs in the case, Held v. State of Montana, have a fundamental right to a clean and healthful environment, including a stable climate system, under the Montana constitution. The judge found that the state was contributing to environmental degradation and climate harm in violation of this right.

The case is the first-ever constitutional climate trial in the country, pitting youth inheriting climate problems against the government leaders they blame for the dire legacy. The plaintiffs in the case contended that Montana officials have been turning a blind eye to climate pollution by continuing to issue permits for fossil fuel projects, including expansion of coal mining.

“If this decision is upheld by the Montana Supreme Court it will be a landmark in US climate litigation,” said Patrick Parenteau, Senior Fellow for Climate Policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School. The trial judge’s ruling in itself is “extremely important,” he said, since it represents the first time in the US that a court has recognized a constitutional right to a healthy environment that encompasses climate.

The ruling came after a little more than a month after the conclusion of the trial in the state capital of Helena in which college students and other young people testified about the harm climate changing is having on their lives, including the impacts of wildfires that have been raging through the western US. Climate scientists and other expert witnesses substantiated youth plaintiffs’ testimony at trial, explaining how the climate crisis poses severe threats to children’s physical and mental health.

Judge Seeley acknowledged the plaintiffs’ claims in her ruling, writing that the state’s “[greenhouse gas] emissions and climate change have been proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment and harm and injury to the Youth Plaintiffs.”

July 27, 2023

Aging Americans face deadly risk due to wide temperature swings, study warns

By Dana Drugmand
People over age 65 face a higher risk of dying when exposed to temperatures that swing far outside the seasonal average, findings that underscore an “urgent” need to mitigate climate change, according to new research.

The study, published this month in Environmental Health Perspectives, examined how seasonal variations in temperature impacted mortality rates among older Americans. The authors include researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Emory Rollins School of Public Health.

The study concludes that the modulated temperature variability that is accompanying a changing climate “must be considered as a considerable threat to life” for people over 65 years old.

Specifically, the study determined that for every 1°C increase in temperature variability, the annual death rate increased by 1.54% in the warmer half of the year and by 0.69% in the cooler half, based on an analysis of government data on more than 72 million Medicare recipients from 2000 to 2016.

As the climate crisis grows, the world is observing more extreme temperatures, though they come with “a lot more variability and nuance,” said James Healy, a climate change epidemiologist and a lead author of the study. “That nuance, while not seeming immediately life-threatening, still has these pronounced health effects and is killing older Americans.”

July 26, 2023

Postcard from California: In climate crisis, farmworkers need more protection from heat

It’s been over 20 years since a 24-year-old migrant farmworker named Constantino Cruz collapsed and died following a nine-hour shift picking tomatoes in 107-degree Fahrenheit heat near Bakersfield, California.

Cruz spent four days in the hospital before dying on July 31, 2005. He was the fourth California farmworker to die of heat related illness that month.

Cruz’s death helped spur then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to issue emergency regulations requiring that on hot days agricultural employers must make sure farmworkers get plenty of water, ready access to shade and rest breaks. The emergency measures were later codified into the first US state law mandating heat protections for farmworkers and other outdoor workers.

Arturo Rodriquez, who at that time was president of the United Farm Workers (UFW), told the Los Angeles Times: “It is tragic that so many farmworkers had to die before action was taken.”

But since California’s landmark action, only three states – Colorado, Oregon and Washington – have passed similar heat safety regulations for farmworkers, and there are no federal safety rules for farmworkers or others who must toil under the sun, meaning most US farmworkers lack legal protection from heat.

The problem is not going away. Average temperatures in the San Joaquin Valley in California are projected to rise by as much as 5 degrees by 2050. And in crop-growing counties across the nation, the number of days considered unsafe because of heat is forecast to nearly double by 2050, according to a University of Washington study.

June 22, 2023

In Montana, a landmark legal challenge over climate change

By Dana Drugmand

For 20-year-old college student Olivia Vesovich, climate change is not a future concern. It’s a current and near-daily crisis.

“Climate change has impacted my ability to breathe,” Vesovich testified from the witness stand of a Montana courtroom last week.

The college student, who suffers from asthma, is one of more than a dozen young people who have undertaken a landmark legal challenge against the state of Montana over the state’s support for industries that contribute to harmful climate change and related impacts on human health.

Smoky conditions stemming from wildfires that have been raging through the western US trigger have direct and frightening consequences, Vesovich told a packed courtroom in Helena.

“It feels like it’s suffocating me if I’m outside for too long,” Vesovich said.

Personal stories such as Vesovich’s were spotlighted over the last week in the case of Held v. Montana, which was filed by sixteen children and young adults who contend that Montana officials are turning a blind eye to climate pollution when issuing permits for fossil fuel projects, including expansion of coal mining.

The case is the first-ever constitutional climate trial in the country, pitting youth inheriting climate problems against the government leaders they blame for the dire legacy.

The plaintiffs are seeking a court declaration that the state is violating Montana’s constitution, which explicitly grants the right to a clean and healthful environment. The lawsuit targets two provisions of Montana’s energy policy, one that promotes the use of fossil fuels, and another that prevents state officials from taking into account how different projects contribute to climate change.

June 21, 2023

Wildfire smoke tied to thousands of deaths and billions in economic losses, researchers warn

By Carey Gillam
As hundreds of wildfires continue to rage across Canada, a new study warns that toxic particulates carried in wildfire smoke can lead to more than 4,000 premature deaths in the United States and $36 billion in annual US economic losses.

People living in California, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina could suffer the highest number of premature deaths due to dangerous particulate matter that is distributed by the smoke from wildfires, researchers determined.

The study, “Quantifying the Premature Mortality and Economic Loss From Wildfire-Induced PM2.5 in the Contiguous US,” was published this month in the journal Science of the Total Environment. Researchers from Cornell University, the University of Houston and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, as well as researchers from other institutions, co-authored the work.

The researchers based their findings, in part, on analyses of satellite wildfire emission and air quality data gathered from 2012 to 2014.

The paper is the latest addition to research that underscores how environmental concerns tied to climate change are impacting human health.

April 20, 2023

Postcard from California: A phantom lake rises again

At the start of the California Gold Rush in 1849, Tulare Lake was the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River: In wet years, the shallow inland sea that is fed by four rivers covered 800 square miles or more of the lower San Joaquin Valley.

After white settlers displaced the indigenous Yokuts Indians, ferries and steamships plied Tulare Lake’s ports, and a thriving commercial fishery supplied salmon, sturgeon, and terrapins to the finest restaurants in San Francisco.

Fifty years later, Tulare Lake was dead.

By the turn of the century, farmers had tapped its tributaries for irrigation, cutting the rivers’ flow. In the 1920s, Georgia cotton king J.G. Boswell came west and drained the remaining wetlands to stake out what became the world’s biggest cotton plantation. After the Depression, huge taxpayer-subsidized irrigation projects transformed the valley, including the desiccated lakebed, into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world.

In rainy years, low-lying parts of the Tulare Basin flooded, and old-timers recalled the prediction of a Yokuts elder named Yoimut. Before her death in 1936, Yoimut predicted to an ethnographer that Tulare Lake would return one day. “It will fill up full and everybody living down there will have to go away,“ she said.

This year, her words are again ringing true.

March 24, 2023

Postcard from California: How a local natural gas ban sparked a national culture war

By Bill Walker

Like some other once-fringe environmental ideas, this one began in Berkeley: In 2019, the staunchly progressive university town across the bay from San Francisco became the first US city to ban natural gas hookups in most new buildings, citing the fossil fuel’s contribution to the climate crisis.

From Berkeley, the no-new-gas movement spread steadily, one local jurisdiction at a time. As of last month, more than 70 California cities and counties had adopted ordinances mandating all-electric utilities and appliances in new construction. Nationwide, nearly 100 cities and counties, including New York City, Seattle and Montgomery County, Md., have moved to ban gas in new buildings.

But in January, the issue ignited a national political firestorm.

An official of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said a ban on gas stoves and ovens was “on the table” because emissions of hazardous air pollutants from gas stoves are strongly linked to childhood asthma. Said CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka, Jr.: “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”

A fierce and hysterical backlash erupted, opening overnight a fresh front in the nation’s culture wars, as many on the right framed the idea as one more liberal assault on American freedom.

February 10, 2023

Single-use plastic waste is at record levels, with hefty climate toll, report warns

By Dana Drugmand

From grocery store bags and soda bottles to take-out containers and food packaging, single-use, disposable plastic is a pervasive problem that presents not just waste management problems, but considerable harmful climate impacts as well, according to a new report.

Lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with single-use plastic amounted to roughly 450 million metric tons of CO2 -equivalent in 2021, comparable to the total emissions of the United Kingdom, a new analysis has determined.

The Plastic Waste Makers Index released this week by the Australian-based Minderoo Foundation reports that there is more single-use plastic waste than ever – 139 million metric tons in 2021, an increase of 6 million metric tons from the 2019 amount – and that this fossil fuel-based plastic generated hundreds of millions of metric tons of climate pollution. Conventional recycling can help reduce these emissions, but recycling is not scaling fast enough and is expected to remain marginal, the report finds.

“This is a much needed, if devastating report. It demonstrates more clearly than ever how much single-use plastics blight our environment, and are themselves a key driver of climate change. And also that recycling is far, far behind where it needs to be,” Toby Gardner, senior research fellow at Stockholm Environment Institute and a contributor to the report, said in a statement.

The report updates a previous analysis of single-use plastic waste released by Minderoo Foundation in 2021, which identified for the first time the 20 largest petrochemical companies that are the sources for much of the world’s single-use plastic production. According to the new report, ExxonMobil leads the pack, followed by Chinese petrochemical giant Sinopec, and then Dow.

As the report explains, the majority of the emissions occur upstream during the production process, including fossil fuel extraction and refining of the petrochemical feedstocks that go into plastics.

January 11, 2023

EPA announces $100 million in historic funding for environmental justice

By Shannon Kelleher

The United States is allocating about $100 million in grant funding to aid communities struggling with polluted air, unsafe drinking water, and climate change impacts in a move that marks the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s largest-ever investment in environmental justice.

“For decades, too many communities, particularly low-income communities and communities of color, have borne the burden of climate and environmental pollution,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a press briefing Tuesday. “We also know that too many of these communities have faced barrier after barrier trying to access the federal funds they need and deserve. This administration has committed to putting an end to that injustice.”

The EPA plans include providing funds for state and local governments and tribes to use in collaboration with community organizations to address environmental and/or public health issues at the local level and to develop tools and processes that integrate environmental justice considerations into government programs.

To be considered for funding, applicants must submit proposals by April 10. Regan expects applicants awarded grants to receive their funding by this fall.

“I’m really excited that that amount of money has been allocated,” said Mildred McClain, executive director of The Harambee House nonprofit in Savannah, Georgia, which focuses on improving environmental conditions in African American communities. “It’s a good start. But of course I would say from a community standpoint that we need much, much more.”

Regan acknowledged that the $100 million is only a fraction of the $3 billion allocated for environmental and climate justice block grants authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and said to “stay tuned” for “additional grant opportunities in the months to come.”