On October 5, operators of Japan’s derelict Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant resumed pumping out wastewater held in the facility for the past 12 years. Over the following two-and-a-half weeks, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) plans to release around 7,800 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean.

This is TEPCO’s second round of discharging nuclear plant wastewater, following an initial release in September. Plans call for the process, which was approved by and is being overseen by the Japanese government, to go on intermittently for some 30 years. But the approach has been controversial: Polls suggest that around 40 percent of the Japanese public opposes it, and it has sparked backlash from ecological activists, local fishermen, South Korean citizens, and the Chinese government, who fear that radiation will harm Pacific ecosystems and contaminate seafood.

Globally, some scientists argue there is no cause for concern. “The doses [or radiation] really are incredibly low,” says Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. “It’s less than a dental X-ray, even if you’re consuming seafood from that area.”

Smith vouches for the water release’s safety in an opinion article published on October 5 in the journal Science. The International Atomic Energy Agency has endorsed TEPCO’s process and also vouched for its safety. But experts in other fields have strong reservations about continuing with the pumping.

“There are hundreds of clear examples showing that, where radioactivity levels are high, there are deleterious consequences,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina.

[Related: Nuclear war inspired peacetime ‘gamma gardens’ for growing mutant plants]

After a tsunami struck the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, TEPCO started frantically shunting water into the six reactors to stop them from overheating and causing an even greater catastrophe. They stored the resulting 1.25 million tons of radioactive wastewater in tanks on-site. TEPCO and the Japanese government say that if Fukushima Daiichi is ever to be decommissioned, that water will have to go elsewhere.

In the past decade, TEPCO says it’s been able to treat the wastewater with a series of chemical reactions and cleanse most of the contaminant radioisotopes, including iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137. But much of the current controversy swirls around one isotope the treatment couldn’t remove: tritium.

Tritium is a hydrogen isotope that has two extra neutrons. A byproduct of nuclear fission, it is radioactive with a half-life of around 12 years. Because tritium shares many properties with hydrogen, its atoms can infiltrate water molecules and create a radioactive liquid that looks and behaves almost identically to what we drink.

This makes separating it from nuclear wastewater challenging—in fact, no existing technology can treat tritium in the sheer volume of water contained at Fukushima. Some of the plan’s opponents argue that authorities should postpone any releases until scientists develop a system that could cleanse tritium from large amounts of water.

But TEPCO argues they’re running out of room to keep the wastewater. As a result, they have chosen to heavily dilute it—100 parts “clean” water for every 1 part of tritium water—and pipe it into the Pacific.

“There is no option for Fukushima or TEPCO but to release the water,” says Awadhesh Jha, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Plymouth in the UK. “This is an area which is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t store it—they have to deal with it.”

Smith believes the same properties that allow tritium to hide in water molecules means it doesn’t build up in marine life, citing environmental research by him and his colleagues. For decades, they’ve been studying fish and insects in lakes, pools, and ponds downstream from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. “We haven’t really found significant impacts of radiation on the ecosystem,” Smith says.

[Related: Ultra-powerful X-rays are helping physicists understand Chernobyl]

What’s more, Japanese officials testing seawater during the initial release did not find recordable levels of tritium, which Smith attributes to the wastewater’s dilution.

But the first release barely scratches the surface of Fukushima’s wastewater, and Jha warns that the scientific evidence regarding tritium’s effect in the sea is mixed. There are still a lot of questions about how potent tritium effects are on different biological systems and different parts of the food chain. Some results do suggest that the isotope can damage fish chromosomes as effectively as higher-energy X-rays or gamma rays, leading to negative health outcomes later in life.

Additionally, experts have found tritium can bind to organic matter in various ecosystems and persist there for decades. “These things have not been addressed adequately,” Jha says.

Smith argues that there’s less tritium in this release than in natural sources, like cosmic rays that strike the upper atmosphere and create tritium rain from above. Furthermore, he says that damage to fish DNA does not necessarily correlate to adverse effects for wildlife or people. “We know that radiation, even at low doses, can damage DNA, but that’s not sufficient to damage how the organism reproduces, how it lives, and how it develops,” he says.

“We don’t know that the effects of the water release will be negligible, because we don’t really know for sure how much radioactive material actually will be released in the future,” Mousseau counters. He adds that independent oversight of the process could quell some of the environmental and health concerns.

Smith and other proponents of TEPCO’s plan point out that it’s actually common practice in the nuclear industry. Power plants use water to naturally cool their reactors, leaving them with tons of tritium-laced waste to dispose. Because tritium is, again, close to impossible to remove from large quantities of H₂0 with current technology, power plants (including ones in China) dump it back into bodies of water at concentrations that exceed those in the Fukushima releases.

“That doesn’t justify that we should keep discharging,” Jha says. “We need to do more work on what it does.”

If tritium levels stay as low as TEPCO and Smith assure they will, then the seafood from the region may very well be safe to eat. But plenty of experts like Mousseau and Jha don’t think there is enough scientific evidence to say that with certainty.

The post This nuclear byproduct is fueling debate over Fukushima’s seafood appeared first on Popular Science.

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The natural process of rock weathering could be emitting as much carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the air as the world’s volcanoes. A study published October 4 in the journal Nature finds that natural weathering can also act as a large source of greenhouse gas emissions. Understanding this natural source of the greenhouse gas could have important implications for modeling climate change scenarios.

[Related: The truth about carbon capture technology.]

The idea of storing excess carbon in rocks to combat climate change is hotly debated. While rocks can act like a carbon sink in some scenarios (and there has been some preliminary success with one Icelandic company sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in rocks) it is still not a silver bullet to our carbon woes. 

The Earth’s stones contain a large amount of carbon from the remains of animals and plants that lived millions of years ago. The geological carbon cycle also helps regulate the planet’s temperature. During chemical weathering–when chemicals in rainwater change the minerals in the rock— the stones can suck up carbon dioxide when certain minerals are attacked by the weak acid found in rainwater. Chemical weathering can help counteract the continuous carbon dioxide released by the world’s volcanoes and is part of the Earth’s natural carbon cycle. 

This new study measured an additional natural process of carbon dioxide release from rocks to the atmosphere. The newly analyzed process occurs when rocks that are formed on ancient seafloors are pushed back up to Earth’s surface. This type of event happens when mountains form. The event exposes the organic carbon from the remains of long dead organisms in the rocks to oxygen in the air and water. The carbon can then react with the oxygen and release carbon dioxide. So instead of acting like a carbon sink, weathering rocks could be a source of carbon dioxide. 

To study the weathering of organic carbon in rocks, the team used a tracer element called rhenium. Rhenium is released into water when the organic carbon in rocks reacts with oxygen. 

The team first figured out how much organic carbon is present in rocks near the surface of water and then worked out where rocks were being exposed most rapidly by erosion. 

“The challenge was then how to combine these global maps with the river data, while considering uncertainties. We fed all of our data into a supercomputer at Oxford, simulating the complex interplay of physical, chemical, and hydrological processes,” study co-author and University of Oxford geoscientists Jesse Zondervan said in a statement. “By piecing together this vast planetary jigsaw, we could finally estimate the total carbon dioxide emitted as these rocks weather and exhale their ancient carbon into the air.”

They then compared how much carbon dioxide could be drawn down by natural rock weathering of silicate materials and pinpointed many large areas where weathering was a source of carbon dioxide. These hotspots of carbon dioxide release include mountain rangers with high uplift rates, such as the eastern Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains, and the Andes. The global carbon dioxide release rate from rock organic carbon weathering was found to be 68 megatons of carbon per year, a bit more than the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during heating and cooling buildings in extreme weather in the US in 2022. 

[Related: Ancient rocks hold the story of Earth’s first breath of oxygen.]

“This is about 100 times less than present day human CO₂ emissions by burning fossil fuels, but it is similar to how much CO₂ is released by volcanoes around the world, meaning it is a key player in Earth’s natural carbon cycle,” study co-author and University of Oxford geochemist Robert Hilton said in a statement. 

The authors caution that these events could have fluctuated during the planet’s past, possibly during periods of mountain building when the influx of rocks to the surface could have released enough carbon dioxide to influence global climate. 

The team is now looking into how this natural release of carbon dioxide could increase over the coming century, as human-caused climate changes and erosion could increase a natural leak of carbon. 

“While the carbon dioxide release from rock weathering is small compared to present-day human emissions, the improved understanding of these natural fluxes will help us better predict our carbon budget,” said Zondervan.

The post Rocks may be able to release carbon dioxide as well as store it appeared first on Popular Science.

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We all know the line: For more than 150 million years, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. We imagine bloodthirsty tyrannosaurs ripping into screaming duckbills, gigantic sauropods shaking the ground with their thunderous footfalls, and spiky stegosaurs swinging their tails in a reign of reptiles so magnificent, it took the unexpected strike of a six-mile-wide asteroid to end it. The ensuing catastrophe handed the world to the mammals, our ancestors and relatives, so that 66 million years later we can claim to have taken over what the terrible lizards left behind. It’s a dramatic retelling of history that is fundamentally wrong on several counts. Let’s talk about some of the worst rumors and what really happened in the so-called “Age of Dinosaurs.”

Myth: Dinosaurs dominated the planet from their origin.

Fact: Dinosaurs started as cute pipsqueaks.

The oldest dinosaurs we know about are around 235 million years old, from the middle part of the Triassic Period. Those reptiles didn’t rule anything. From recent finds in Africa, South America, and Europe, we know that they were no bigger than a medium-sized dog and were lanky, omnivorous creatures that munched on leaves and beetles. Ancient relatives of crocodiles, by contrast, were much more abundant and diverse. Among the Triassic crocodile cousins were sharp-toothed carnivores that chased after large prey on two legs, “armadillodiles” covered in bony scutes and spikes, and beaked, almost ostrich-like creatures that gobbled up ferns.

Even as early dinosaurs began to evolve into the main lineages that would thrive during the rest of the Mesozoic, most were small and rare compared to the crocodile cousins. The first big herbivorous dinosaurs, which reached about 27 feet in length, didn’t evolve until near the end of the Triassic, around 214 million years ago. But everything changed at the end of the Triassic. Intense volcanic eruptions in the middle of Pangaea altered the global climate; the gases released into the air caused the world to swing between hot and cold phases. By then, dinosaurs had evolved warm-blooded metabolisms and insulating coats of feathers, leaving them relatively unfazed through the crisis, while many other forms of reptiles perished. Had this mass extinction not transpired, we might have had more of an “Age of Crocodiles”—or at least a very different history with a much broader cast of reptilian characters. The only reason the so-called Age of Dinosaurs came to be is because they got lucky in the face of global extinction.

Myth: Dinosaurs spanned the entire planet.

Fact: Dinosaurs never evolved to live at sea.

Of course, these ecosystems were built on a foundation of plankton. Without disc-shaped algae called coccoliths, the rest of the charismatic swimmers of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous wouldn’t have thrived. It’s the abundant, small forms of life that let charismatic creatures like marine reptiles prosper—a further reminder that the animals that impress us on land or sea wouldn’t exist without various tiny organisms that set the foundations of food webs. What we might see as dominance, in any ecosystem, is really a consequence of many relationships and interactions that often go unnoticed.

Myth: Dinosaurs suppressed the evolution of mammals.

Fact: Mammals thrived throughout the Age of Dinosaurs.

The classic example of dinosaur dominance is a twitchy little mammal chasing an insect through the Cretaceous night. Dinosaurs would gobble up any beast that got too big or was foolish enough to wander out in the daylight, the argument went, so mammals evolved to be small and nocturnal until the asteroid allowed our ancestors and relatives to emerge from the shadows. The small size and insect-hunting adaptations of some Mesozoic mammals were taken as indicators that mammals were constrained by the success of the dinosaurs, preventing them from becoming larger or opening new niches.

In the past 20 years, however, paleontologists have rewritten the classic story to show that mammals and their relatives thrived alongside the dinosaurs. Throughout the Mesozoic there were furry beasts that swam, dug, glided between the trees, and even ate little dinosaurs. Ancient equivalents of squirrels, raccoons, otters, beavers, sugar gliders, aardvarks, and more evolved through the Jurassic and Cretaceous, including early primates that scampered through the trees over the heads of T. rexes. While it’s true that all the Mesozoic mammals we presently know of were small—the largest was about the size of an American badger— researchers have realized that the way our ancient ancestors interacted with each other was much more important to shaping their evolution than the dinosaurs were. In fact, even with the dinosaurs gone, most new mammal species stuck to being small. We get so hung up on size that we’ve missed the real story, closer to the ground.

Myth: Dinosaurs dominated the planet for millions of years.

Fact: No single species can dominate a planet.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

This investigation was co-produced with New Lines Magazine and supported in part by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land. 

Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war. 

Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have carried down from the mountains. A gritty wind stings their chapped cheeks as they load the heavy trucks beside them. In these parts of Achin, nothing else moves in the bleached landscape. For years, locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination.

In April 2017, the U.S. military dropped the most powerful conventional bomb ever used in combat here: the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known unofficially as the “mother of all bombs,” or MOAB. 

Before the airstrike, Qudrat Wali and other residents of Asad Khel followed as Afghan soldiers and U.S. special forces were evacuated from the area. Eight months after the massive explosion, they were finally allowed to return to their homes. Soon after, Wali says, many of the residents began to notice strange ailments and skin rashes.

“All the people living in Asad Khel village became ill after that bomb was dropped,” says Wali, a 27-year-old farmer, pulling up the leg of his shalwar kameez to show me the red bumps stretched across his calves. “I have it all over my body.” He says he got the skin disease from contamination left by the MOAB.

When Wali and his neighbors returned to their village, they found that their land did not produce crops like it had before. It was devastated, he says, by the bomb’s blast radius, that reached as far as the settlement of Shaddle Bazar over a mile and a half away.

“We would get 150 kilograms of wheat from my land before, but now we cannot get half of that,” he says. “We came back because our homes and livelihoods are here, but this land is not safe. The plants are sick, and so are we.” 

The bomb residue plaguing the village is but one example of the war’s toxic environmental legacy. For two decades, Afghans raised children, went to work and gave birth next to America’s vast military bases and burn pits, and the long-term effects of this exposure remain unclear. Dealing with the consequences of the contamination will take generations.

“Devastated by toxic exposures”

America’s 20-year military occupation devastated Afghanistan’s environment in ways that may never be fully investigated or addressed. American and allied military forces, mostly from NATO countries, repeatedly used munitions that can leave a toxic footprint. These weapons introduced known carcinogens, teratogens and genotoxins—toxic substances that can cause congenital defects in a fetus and damage DNA—into the environment without accountability. 

Local residents have long reported U.S. military bases dumping vast quantities of sewage, chemical waste and toxic substances from their bases onto land and into waterways, contaminating farmland and groundwater for entire communities living nearby. They also burned garbage and other waste in open-air burn pits—some reported to be the size of three football fields—inundating villages with noxious clouds of smoke.

Afghanistan has suffered more than 40 years of rarely interrupted war. The evidence is everywhere, some of it static and buried, some of it still very much alive. The chemicals of war poisoned the land in ways that are still not well understood. Before the U.S. military arrived in Afghanistan, Soviet forces had been accused of deploying chemical weapons, including napalm. Their bases were then repurposed by the Americans. Left behind today are layers upon layers of medical, biological and chemical waste that may never be cleaned up.

From its first post-9/11 airstrikes aimed at the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001 through its chaotic withdrawal from the country two decades later, the U.S. military dropped over 85,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Most of these contained an explosive called RDX, which can affect the nervous system and is designated as a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Attributing specific illnesses to contamination in the air, water and soil is often extremely difficult, but villagers who lived in close proximity to major U.S. bases—and the Afghan doctors and public health officials who treated them—say the Pentagon’s unwillingness to employ even minimal environmental protections caused serious kidney, cardiopulmonary, gastrointestinal and skin ailments, congenital anomalies and multiple types of cancer.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden was unequivocal about such causality, but only as it related to U.S. veterans. He described “toxic smoke, thick with poisons, spreading through the air and into the lungs of our troops.” He called on Congress to pass a law to “make sure veterans devastated by toxic exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan finally get the benefits and the comprehensive health care they deserve.”

A few months later, Congress passed a bill known as the Pact Act, adding 23 toxic burn pit and exposure-related health conditions for which veterans could receive benefits, including bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and nine newly eligible types of respiratory cancers, at a cost of more than $270 billion over the next decade. The law represented the largest expansion of veterans’ benefits in generations. 

But neither Biden nor Congress said anything, or promised any assistance, to the Afghans who lived near those U.S. military bases or worked on them and still suffer from many of the same illnesses and cancers. 

Under Section 120 of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, the Department of Defense is required—for U.S. sites on home turf—to take responsibility for all remedial action necessary to protect human health and the environment caused by its activities in the past. However, a DOD regulation prohibits environmental cleanups at overseas military bases that are no longer in use, unless required by a binding international agreement or a cleanup plan negotiated with the host country before the transfer. 

In 2011, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan reached a peak of about 110,000 personnel—NATO forces contributed an additional 20,000—generating roughly 900,000 pounds of waste each day, the bulk of which was burned without any pollution controls, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, a U.S. watchdog agency. Afghan laws forbidding burn pits were not applicable to U.S. and other international forces, and according to soldiers and residents, the U.S. military persisted in its use of burn pits until its withdrawal in August 2021, despite efforts to limit their use that began in 2009 and a 2018 prohibition on burn pits “except in circumstances in which no alternative disposal method is feasible.”

What America left behind 

My father came from Nangarhar, and I have wanted to tell this story for years. Although I was adopted and grew up overseas, when I returned to the country as a journalist, in 2019, I began to understand the true scale of the damage that America’s military inflicted on Afghanistan. Some bases were like small cities, belching round-the-clock smoke that tainted the skyline while processions of waste-filled trucks flooded out of them. 

When I learned about the millions of pounds of hazardous waste that the bases produced, I filed a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to SIGAR to obtain photographs of active burn pits. Using GPS coordinates embedded in the photo’s metadata, I mapped and measured the sizes of the burn pits at bases across the country. I saw the rusting hulks of Soviet-era planes and American military vehicles piled up on the bases. A 2011 photograph of the scrap in Shindand base in the western province of Herat looks exactly the same on satellite today. According to satellite imagery designed to monitor active fires and thermal anomalies, several burn pit locations at Bagram were last active in mid-June of 2021.

In the summer of 2022, I visited the sites of three of the largest former U.S bases in Afghanistan—in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kandahar and Parwan—to document what was left on the ground by America.

A year earlier, I spent months traveling across Iraq to report on the effects of pollution and military contamination on Iraqis and the environment. I knew that the American military’s effect on Afghanistan and its people mirrored problems in Iraq but was far less documented. 

It was only after the Taliban moved back into power, ending the American war in August 2021, that I had the opportunity to dig deeper into the issue. On my fourth journey back to the country since the takeover, I landed on the airstrip at Kabul airport and spotted a stub of cement “T-wall” with “Clean up your fucking trash” graffitied in English, presumably by a member of the international forces during their chaotic evacuation. But the Americans had left more than just garbage: They had filled the air with toxic pollutants and dumped their raw sewage in fields and waterways across Afghanistan.

No longer facing the same threat, the enormous former U.S. bases still hold an array of poisonous detritus and sit silently against the majestic landscape, with one or two Taliban guards lazing in watchtowers on their phones. 

The skies, too, have changed since the Taliban takeover. The burn pits’ noxious black plumes, the surveillance blimps and the buzz of helicopters are all but a memory now. New faces occupied the driver’s seats of the police and military vehicles. And for many, particularly in rural areas of the country, the end of the airstrikes and night raids was long overdue and a welcome relief. There were, however, new problems to contend with under the Taliban government, including an extreme clampdown on women’s rights and a severely weakened economy. 

Over the course of six months, I traveled across the country and spoke with 26 medical practitioners and 52 Afghan residents living near those bases about their health problems, which they believe are a direct result of waste from the bases.

Farmers told me that they witnessed U.S. military contractors dump sewage and waste into their fields. Residents described how, for years, they had bathed in sewage-clogged streams that flowed from inside the base walls and breathed in the billowing clouds of poisonous pollutants from the open-air burn pits. I saw young children making a living scavenging scrap metal from the bases who are now suffering from eye infections and persistent skin diseases, according to the doctors treating them. 

I also spoke with Afghan and American soldiers who believe their health problems and diseases are directly related to their work on the American military bases in Afghanistan. One former Afghan soldier I spoke with, who didn’t give his name for fear of repercussions from the Taliban, trained new recruits at the Kandahar airfield for 13 years. He said he was close to the burn pits for the entirety of his service and had respiratory problems as a result. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Medical professionals with years of experience treating those affected, including military doctors who worked on U.S. bases caring for both Afghan and U.S. soldiers, told me that there was, categorically, no way that the burning and dumping of waste did not affect the health of everyone in the surrounding areas—and still does.

The “mother of all bombs”

In Achin in Nangarhar, Wali hides his rash and leans over the counter in the small shop where he sells snacks and drinks, on a bridge near Momand Dara village. Below him, a stream burbles quietly. 

“I know my skin disease is from the bomb because there were no such diseases before it,” he says pointedly. 

He looks out at the silent Mohmand Valley ahead of him. Fields thick with shrubs and trees fill the valley floor. As it narrows, the hills on either side merge into mountains. In the distance, the magnificent Spin Ghar, or White Mountains, mark the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nearby is the Tora Bora cave complex, built with CIA assistance for the mujahedeen, after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, it became an al-Qaida stronghold. It was also the site of the U.S. government’s failed attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at the start of America’s war in Afghanistan. 

The MOAB was dropped about 550 yards from Wali’s home—a seven-minute walk from his shop, he says, as he hops from stone to stone across a narrow brook leading the way. 

Containing nearly 19,000 pounds of Composition H6, a powerful mix of TNT, RDX, aluminum, and nitrocellulose explosives, the MOAB’s destructive force is roughly equivalent to the smallest of the Cold War-era tactical nuclear devices in the American arsenal. It was pushed from the rear of an MC-130 cargo plane and dropped on a cave complex used by Islamic State militants, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said at the time. President Donald Trump, who had promised during his 2016 campaign to go after the Islamic State and “bomb the shit out of ’em,” called the strike “another very, very successful mission.” Afghan defense officials claimed that 36 Islamic State fighters were killed in the attack.

When Wali returned home months later, the bomb’s destruction was hard to see. There was no obvious massive crater; only some scorched stones and a few burned trees marked the site of the bombing. 

His home still stands, though not all dwellings in Asad Khel survived, the rubble now inhabited by straying goats. Ten families are living in the village in rebuilt homes, Wali says. His neighbors have the same itchy red rash.

“All but two or three people in each home have the skin rash,” he says, “and everyone thinks that their skin diseases are from the bomb.”

His mother, Wali Jana, 60; his wife, Nafisa, 20; and their two children, Mir Hatam, 3, and Qasim, 2, all have the same skin condition. 

“Whatever medicine the doctors are giving us is not making us better,” Wali says. 

The rashes don’t heal. They itch constantly and continue to leak a pus-like liquid, he tells me. After dozens of trips to the doctor and many tests, he has yet to find any relief or explanation for the rash. 

“All we can do is try to take measures to stay away from this disease,” he says. “I wash twice a day and change my clothes daily.”

This was not the first bomb to hit this area, he says. “But this one was different.”

In Nangarhar, “everything is poisoned” 

The Jalalabad airfield sits southeast of the city. For 20 years, it was home to Afghan and U.S. soldiers. Its eastern and southern walls are surrounded by agricultural land and mechanic and scrap metal shops packed with everything from gas masks to tools with the American flag printed on them, medical equipment, treadmills and a framed poster of the film “The Terminator.” Just down the road, there are warehouses with busted Humvees waiting to be dismantled into parts for sale. To the north is the Jalalabad-Torkham highway leading to the Pakistani border. The streams that run out of the base and under the highway flood through a cluster of villages whose residents use the water to drink from and wash in.

“The water was very clean before the Americans came,” says 36-year-old Mohammed Ajmal, pointing to a milky gray stream flowing from a hole in the high wall surrounding the base. Casting a broad shadow over the murky water, he adds, “Some people in this area have kidney problems. Others have breathing problems and skin diseases. I am not sure if these diseases came from the chemicals in the missiles from the base or from the polluted waste they put in the stream.”

“Everything is poisoned,” he says. 

Dr. Mohammad Nasim Shinwari, who has worked from his small clinic near the base for the past 17 years, says that pollution from the base is responsible for the most common health problems he sees. Only a small dried-up field separates his clinic from the burn pits that were blazing at least once a week, he says. “Now imagine breathing that for your whole life.” 

Residents filed complaints that U.S.-hired contractors from the base were unloading the tankers of waste in front of their houses and in their fields, Sadullah Kakar, a former employee of the Ministry of Border and Tribal Affairs, told me weeks earlier. Shinwari says that up until the Americans’ exit from the base, the contractors were dumping waste “secretly” in some locations. “Other times, they were just dumping it in the fields right here, by the base. No one could stop them.”

As patients crouch on the curb outside the two-room clinic, grasping plastic folders of medical documents in their hands, Shinwari scribbles down the location where tanker trucks from the base would dump raw sewage in farmers’ fields. 

Like Ajmal, Shinwari also attributes many of the illnesses he has seen to the chemicals from the bombs, missiles and other munitions that fell on fields and villages. The doctor described how, in his home district of Shinwar and neighboring Achin, few plants have grown on the land in the five years since the MOAB was dropped. 

“People thought that the Americans had sprayed chemicals in the air or added something to the source of water,” Shinwari says. “But it was the MOAB bomb.”

For Ajmal, the polluted waterway flowing from the base is a lingering reminder of America’s longest war. 

“The wells in our homes are also contaminated,” he says, his brow furrowed. “Every week they would bring the sewage tankers from the base and empty them in the stream and in the land around. The water would get very dark and would have a very bad smell. Many people here have kidney problems, and if you look at the trees growing in the river, they are also damaged,” he says, pointing to a row of trees along the bank, half-submerged in the murky water. 

Then there were the missiles and rockets, Ajmal says, pointing toward the heavily fortified concrete walls of the Jalalabad airfield, looming over the low-rise homes. 

“You could smell the chemicals. We were breathing them.” He wipes the tip of his nose at the memory. The U.S. military deployed its High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, and Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, both guided surface-to-surface weapons, in Afghanistan. 

A wide range of rockets and missiles contain propellants with hazardous components, including perchlorate, the main ingredient of rocket and missile fuel, which can affect thyroid function, may cause cancer and persists indefinitely in the environment. U.S. forces have also been accused of using potentially toxic depleted uranium munitions in Afghanistan, as they did in Iraq, although they have denied the claim. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says exposure to DU from friendly fire has had no effect on the kidneys of American soldiers but that there is a possible link to lower bone density. 

One of the weapons misfired and struck a relative’s home next to his, Ajmal tells me, destroying both homes. His wife was pregnant with their son, Mohammed Taha, at the time. The boy, now 10, has been ill since birth and has a rash on his scalp that leaves bald itchy patches. 

Ajmal, his three brothers and their families live just 160 yards from the airfield, in an area called Qala-e-Guljan. Nine members of Ajmal’s extended family have serious health issues. His two sons have suffered from heart problems since birth—medical records show that one has a hole in his heart. His 15-year-old daughter, Soma, also has a chronic skin rash that stretches across her back, chest and thighs. 

Similar accounts of rampant, unusual health issues afflicting entire families are commonplace in the villages around the base. 

Wali Ur Rahman, 26, takes a rest from the sweltering 108 degrees Fahrenheit June heat under a concrete gazebo in the center of his field, which sits next to Ajmal’s home. Rahman and his father, brother, sister-in-law, uncle and nephew, have lived here for the past 22 years. All have kidney problems, according to doctors’ reports that I reviewed, from kidney calcification and kidney stones to renal failure. His son and his nephew also have respiratory problems. 

Doctors told Rahman that without treatment he will need a kidney transplant, which he cannot afford. 

The family eats the food they grow in their field, which is irrigated by the stream—there are no other options. He suspected that the sewage-infested stream by their home was the cause of his family’s health problems, so he dug a well inside their home for drinking water. Now, he thinks the well is supplying dirty water; shortly after his young nieces and nephews began using it, they also became sick.

Groundwater wells are the main source of drinking water in Afghanistan. A report from 2017 in the scientific journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment mapped water quality for half of the country, finding a range of potentially toxic substances, including boron, as well as high levels of arsenic and fluoride in several areas. Although some of these substances can be naturally occurring, they are also associated with industrial use. Other water quality studies conducted at select locations in Afghanistan found nickel, mercury, chromium, uranium and lead—heavy metals that can cause serious harm to the body, from impairing children’s mental and physical development to kidney damage. 

Dumped in Jalalabad’s fields, “Tankers full of American toilet waste”

A few minutes’ drive from Rahman’s field is a wide dirt road that runs parallel to the Jalalabad-Torkham highway. On the other side are open fields. Here, I meet Khan Mohammad as he navigates his way through a carefully landscaped field in District 9 of Jalalabad, about 100 yards from the base. Mohammad stops under the shade of a small almond tree and sits down, folding his legs beneath him. He has been working in these fields for 20 years and remembers how the contractors’ trucks from the base would carry two types of waste and dump them where he was planting crops.

“One was colored green-blue, which would destroy the plants. The other was a white-gray milky substance, which had a very bad smell, like acid. Sometimes they would dump a mix of both,” he tells me. 

A group of six farmers from neighboring fields joined us under the tree. “These were tankers full of American toilet waste. At one time, the tankers were dumping twice a day, in the morning and evening,” says 30-year-old Omar Hiaran, recalling how this continued until the Americans left the base in 2021. “It was white soapy water and had toilet paper in it.” 

Hiaran’s father, also a farmer, has had health problems for the past nine years. 

“After he became ill, he told me to wear gloves when I was working in the field so that I didn’t touch the sewage like he had,” Hiaran says.

While waste from local residents is also dumped into the city’s canals and smaller landfills along the roads, it cannot compete with the sheer amount of hazardous waste that came from the airfield. 

The blue liquid Mohammad saw was a dye used in the portable toilets at the base. The chemicals used in these toilets can be toxic to human health in high doses. According to an article by Matthew Nasuti, a former U.S. Air Force captain who advised on environmental cleanups, the washroom facilities at the American bases generated both gray and black water. The gray wastewater came from sinks and showers, carrying soap residue that contains phosphates and other chemicals. Black water pollution came from the toilets. While the American military has to adhere to strict rules regarding the disposal of toilet waste on home turf, he said that it faced no restrictions in Afghanistan.

When Mohammad and other villagers confronted the contractors driving the tankers, they were told that the sewage would “benefit the crops and would bring a good harvest, and they reminded us that using the sewage was cheaper than buying fertilizer and was good to use as water also,” he says.

A 2021 report by the Sierra Club and Ecology Center found that even the sewage sludge found in American fertilizers can contain a harmful array of chemicals, including dioxins, microplastics, furans, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and alarming levels of toxic PFAS—also known as “forever chemicals”—that can take decades or even centuries to break down naturally. PFAS are also present in several substances that were used by the U.S. military, including foams used to combat petroleum-based fires. 

By mid-2022, the U.S. military had reportedly still not begun cleanups at any of the hundreds of DOD sites across the United States identified as highly contaminated with PFAS.

Studies have linked higher levels of PFAS exposure to an array of health problems, including liver damage, cardiovascular diseases, increased risk of kidney cancer, increased risk of thyroid disease and immune system dysfunction. A federal study published in July established, for the first time, a direct link between PFAS and testicular cancer in thousands of U.S. service members. Pregnant women exposed to PFAS have an increased risk of high blood pressure and diabetes. Babies in the womb and infants are also vulnerable, as studies have found that PFAS can affect placental function and be present in breast milk. PFAS exposure has also been linked to decreased infant birth weight, developmental dysfunction among infants and increased disease risk later in life.

Even if such sewage goes through a treatment process, research has shown that PFAS and other toxic chemicals cannot be removed. 

In 2017, Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency, or NEPA, said that 70 percent of the underground water in Kabul was contaminated with harmful bacteria, microbes and chemicals and was not safe for human consumption. Other major cities, including Jalalabad, faced the same problem, the agency said. 

Afghanistan’s capital had one public facility for sewage treatment, the Makroyan Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processed at least 21,000 gallons of raw sewage each month from portable toilets at the U.S. Embassy and 12,000 gallons from those used by U.S. and coalition troops. All of this was piped into the Kabul River, according to Afghan officials and Malika and Refa Environmental Solutions, the company that serviced the NATO headquarters in Kabul and at Bagram airfield. The plant stopped working in 2018, and the untreated wastewater was dumped into the river before flowing into the city drains, endangering the health of thousands of residents.

The U.S. Geological Survey notes that pollutants found in wastewater include phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, which promote excessive plant growth—something that Mohammad and the other farmers saw in their fields. The sewage dumped in the fields around Jalalabad airfield did not go through treatment processes on the base, according to an Afghan engineer named Faridun (he gave only his first name) who had worked on the base for 12 years. 

“They have infected every part of Afghanistan”

At his home on the edge of the field he farms, Mohammad explains that his two youngest sons are suffering from serious kidney issues. “But we do not know about the exact cause of their diseases, whether it’s pollution or something else,” he says. He suspects the sewage dumping.

His eldest son Farooq, who has issues with his bladder, emerges from the home with a thick stack of papers and folders cradled in his slim arms. Mohammad combs through the mountain of documents—there are 44 doctor reports alone for his 7-year-old son, Umar, who sits crouched at his feet. 

Umar has had kidney problems since he was 1 year old, Mohammad says. I look through the reports: Doctors in Afghanistan and Pakistan had diagnosed him with a pleural effusion (fluid around the lungs), moderate ascites (fluid in the abdomen) and chronic kidney and liver disease. His 5-year-old brother, Ameen, has kidney damage, and his blood tests show he is also anemic. Both boys help their father work the land every day along with Mohammad’s mother, Bibi Haro, 60, who shows me her skin condition, which she has had for eight years. At first, it was red and leaking pus, but it has now settled into a permanent itch. 

Umar has been going to the doctor for four years, his grandmother says. “He is still in pain now. Every day he is suffering. Last year he went to a kidney center hospital in Pakistan. And just a week ago, we returned to the doctor with him,” she says. 

His cousins Bibi Ameena and Hamidullah, who also work the fields by the home, have both had kidney problems for the past five years.

Mohammad looks down at Umar, nestled under his arm. “When he coughs, there is blood,” he says. “The only thing I owned was a tractor, and I sold it for his treatment. Now, the doctors in Peshawar say they need 5 million Pakistani rupees [about $16,000] to replace his kidneys, but I don’t have that much money.”

As tears of anger stream down her face, Bibi Haro tells me how her brother is deaf as a result of an American drone crash in the field by the home. “They would fly low every night and scare us while we slept,” she says. “They bombed Nangarhar for years, and their smoke filled our sky. They have infected every part of Afghanistan.” 

Jalalabad doctors: Diagnosing the contaminants of war 

Doctors at the public hospital in Jalalabad attribute many of the health problems their patients face to water, air and soil pollution from the American base. I meet one of them, Dr. Latif Zeer, in a deserted restaurant in the city center. As soon as we sit down at a long table, the power cuts out. The ornate gold fans above us slow to a stop, letting the hum of the city outside flood into the room.

He explains how heavy metal poisoning in “all the water” may be related to contamination from chemicals used on military installations or chemical residue from weapons and ammunition. In his view, this has led to the hospital’s many cases of kidney problems and gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract including the stomach and intestine, usually caused by viruses, bacteria or other microbes. Gastroenteritis can also be caused by food or water contaminated by chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury or cadmium. “Anywhere they dropped bombs or the airstrikes were conducted, definitely, the water would be contaminated,” he adds. 

Over the years, the DOD has faced a string of lawsuits over contaminated water on its bases at home and abroad, including claims of contamination from jet fuel and depleted uranium. In response to my emailed questions, the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM denied that the U.S. military had dumped wastewater, black or gray, in waterways in Afghanistan, saying that specially designed “lagoons/settling ponds and leach fields” were used instead that “did not directly discharge onto the land.” Wastewater was “gathered and hauled off” by contractors to a host nation’s treatment and disposal facility, it added. 

CENTCOM also said it last operated an open-air burn pit in Afghanistan on December 28, 2020, refuting what dozens of residents told me.

Zeer, who has spent two decades at the hospital in Jalalabad, tells me the gastroenteritis cases he saw were unusual. At one point, the national Ministry of Public Health sent a team from Kabul to observe patients and test the water, he says. The infectious disease specialists could only explain the cause as “chemical substances.” 

Patients usually got better after a few days or with antibiotics, he says, “but we were seeing patients with AGE [acute gastroenteritis] symptoms and respiratory problems [who were] dying, and so I thought this was some kind of chemical poisoning of the water caused by chemicals used in the fighting.” 

But it is difficult to definitively diagnose chemical poisoning as the cause of gastroenteritis, he says. Doctors in Afghanistan lack the resources and equipment to deduce the primary causes of many of the illnesses they see daily. Adding to their woes is a record-keeping system that is largely analog and often does not include basic details, such as home district and age. 

“People don’t know their family medical history, and we often cannot do follow-ups with patients because they are moving due to fighting or they cannot afford to come back,” Shinwari told me. 

In the last four years of the war, Zeer treated a flood of patients from Nangarhar and neighboring Kunar, mostly suffering from acute gastroenteritis. Most of these cases came from districts that had seen prolonged fighting over the years, including Achin, Khogyani and Shirzad in Nangarhar.

The head of the Jalalabad hospital’s pulmonary department for 14 years, Dr. Sabahuddin Saba, cites multiple causes for an array of respiratory illnesses suffered across the region. He says that the air pollution can come from working with materials like silicon or coal, for example: “Some farmers have what we call ‘farmer’s lung’ because they work in the dust.”

But he also notes that Afghanistan has been devastated by bombs and airstrikes that “left chemicals that would spread to the surrounding areas and would be breathed by people all around.”

“We see many patients with chronic coughs, and when we took chest CT scans, we found lung cancer,” Saba says. “Many other patients have bronchial asthma, COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], bronchiolitis and emphysema.” 

He believes that some of these patients were exposed to “irritating or chemical dust”  residue from the bombs. In 2018, patients traveling from Kunar arrived at his hospital in Jalalabad suffering from shortness of breath and coughing up blood. Some died. The hospital had no comprehensive system for managing patients’ records or advanced toxicology equipment that would have enabled doctors to identify what chemicals were responsible for the apparent poisoning; they only had drug test kits provided by the United Nations Population Fund. Other patients, Saba says, arrived at the hospital with mysterious eye infections and nosebleeds, both of which he believes were caused by a chemical substance. 

An Afghan oncologist who has worked in Nangarhar for more than 20 years tells me that he and other doctors in the province see many cancer cases, mostly lung and pancreatic, followed by breast cancer. He says that the majority of patients go to Pakistan and India for treatment because Afghanistan does not have chemotherapy and other medicines readily available. The patients mostly have stage 3 or 4 cancer “because they are not getting regular checkups, we do not catch the cancer sooner. I have treated many soldiers who have lung cancer,” he says.

“If we have good facilities and a good system in place, we would do lots of research but we don’t have technical people here now,” he adds. “This is Afghanistan, if people die from cancer, who will record it? There is no one counting how many have died. This is the first time that someone came here and asked such things.”

In Kandahar, “deadly” burn pits and contaminated water

A badly beaten 300-mile stretch of road links Kabul with Kandahar, passing south through the provinces of Maidan Wardak, Ghazni and Zabul. Post-apocalyptic dust storms blur the pockmarked road ahead. The drive takes 12 hours, and the route is choked with overloaded trucks trudging along with little attempt to avoid the potholes. Strewn along the sides of the highway are bullet-riddled police cars and Humvees, the remnants of the Taliban’s triumphant storm across the country toward the capital in 2021. 

At the regional NEPA office in Kandahar city, staff member Matiullah Zahen describes his struggles with waste burning and sewage dumping by contractors at the giant 3,633-acre Kandahar airfield used by American and Afghan forces. 

“One and a half years ago, we went to the base and told them what they can and can’t burn and where—that it had to be a specific place, not just dumping and burning everywhere,” he says. 

But waste disposal was not high on the list of priorities for the commanders at the base, he says, and nothing changed. 

“The kind of thinking of the base commanders was: ‘It’s the contractor’s job to handle the waste, I don’t care how he does it, just get it out of my face. I got other problems, I’m fighting a war,’” Zahen says. 

Zahen accompanies me to the airfield and we drive out, my letters of permission from several ministries and the governor in hand. We wait for the base commander to show us where one of the burn pits was, behind a now-padlocked gate that leads to the international side of the airfield. Two hours later, we are told to leave. 

After we leave the maze of high blast walls winding out of the base, we turn off the main road into the Khoshab area, just to its west, home to about 15,000 people who earn a living from the surrounding agricultural land. Khoshab is the closest village to the airfield.

Here, I find 22-year-old Laal Mohammed working his land in the shadow of the airfield’s walls. Despite the brutal hazy midday heat, he doesn’t break a sweat. His wheat and vegetable fields are less than 100 yards from the base’s perimeter. 

His family’s home is surrounded by a carefully kept garden with rows of vegetables and a burst of blossoming flowers. Inside is a 60-foot-deep well dug 15 years ago where they get their drinking water. They moved here eight years ago from neighboring Zabul province. 

Five years ago, both he and his sister Nazaka, 21, started having kidney problems. “The doctors found kidney stones many times,” he tells me. “The doctors we went to see told us to stop drinking the water here,” he says, adding that they can’t use their neighbors’ water as they have the same wells. “And we cannot afford to buy bottled water.” 

He takes me to a site across from the base that locals call Qazi Qarez, where he says the tankers used to dump sewage and trash once or twice a week. From 2014 until the Americans left, they would burn the waste in five locations here, he says, pointing to the spots. Today, it’s an open, empty stretch of land, but just a year and a half ago, he says, plumes of thin smoke could be seen trailing upward to the sky.

“Indefensible” burn pits

Although U.S. military waste management guidance from as far back as 1978 specifies that solid waste should not be burned in an open pit if an alternative is available, burn pits persisted in Afghanistan. DOD officials stated that the management of solid waste is not always a high priority during wartime, according to the Government Accountability Office. 

CENTCOM regulations specified that when an installation exceeds 100 U.S. personnel for 90 days, it must develop a plan for installing alternatives to open-air burn pits for waste disposal. CENTCOM officials told SIGAR that “no U.S. installation in Afghanistan has ever complied with the regulations.”

The U.S. military used open-air burn pits almost exclusively to dispose of its solid waste during its first four years in Afghanistan. Only in 2004 did the DOD begin introducing new disposal methods, including landfills and incineration, a year after soldiers returning from deployment complained of shortness of breath and asthma. 

And while CENTCOM attempted to limit the use of burn pits beginning in 2009, reliance on them continued: In April 2010, the Pentagon reported to Congress that open-air burning was the safest, most effective and expedient manner of solid waste reduction during military operations until research and development efforts could produce better alternatives. Shortly afterward, CENTCOM estimated that there were 251 active burn pits in Afghanistan, a 36.4 percent increase from just four months earlier. That same year, health studies raised concerns that the burn pits’ smoke, contaminated with lead, mercury and dioxins, could harm the adrenal glands, lungs, liver and stomach. In 2011, guidance finally stated that burn pits should be placed far away from areas near troops. 

The DOD hired contractors such as KBR Inc., formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, to manage the burn pits. Over the years, KBR has faced numerous lawsuits related to the burn pits and the water treatment plants it operated in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The waste burned in the open-air pits, according to multiple reports, including one in 2010 by Nasuti, the former U.S. Air Force captain, included petroleum and lubricants; paints, asbestos, solvents, grease, cleaning solutions and building materials that contain formaldehyde, copper, arsenic and hydrogen cyanide; hydraulic fluids, aircraft de-icing fluids, antifreeze, munitions and other unexploded ordnance; metal containers, furniture and rubber, Humvee parts and tires; and discarded food, plastics, Styrofoam, wood, lithium-ion batteries, electrical equipment, paint, chemicals, uniforms, pesticides and medical and human waste. Animal and human carcasses, including body parts, were also thrown in. 

Though CENTCOM regulation prohibits a host of materials and hazardous chemicals from being burned, these and other discarded items were set on fire using JP-8 jet fuel, which released benzene, a known carcinogen. Plumes of the burnt waste hovered over the base and seeped into soldiers’ sleeping, working and dining quarters, often less than a mile away. The smoke included heavy metals, dioxins, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, hydrocarbons and hydrochloric acid, among numerous other toxic substances. 

Kandahar airfield generated more than 100 tons of solid waste per day in 2012 and more than 5 million gallons of sewage water from 30,000 portable toilets. The DOD first brought 23 incinerators to Kandahar that year at a cost of almost $82 million, but the machines proved extremely unreliable and costly to operate. One incinerator was delivered two years late and required $1 million of repairs before it could even be turned on. An inspection by SIGAR from 2012 to 2014 found serious mechanical problems and a reliance on burn pits instead. In 2015, SIGAR’s inspector general called the use of open-air burn pits “indefensible.” 

A few weeks before I headed to Kandahar, I spoke with an American official familiar with burn pits who had witnessed all manner of toxic waste being burned in the massive pits on U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

The official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, told me that the trash at the base in Kandahar “was all over the place” and that no one was paying attention to the specifications on what could be burned in the pit and when. The contractors “would just burn everything,” the official said. “I expected to see a big pile of ash, but all you saw was things that were blackened. It didn’t effectively burn everything down to nothing. I was like, why bother?”

They said the enormous burn pits would be dug deep enough to be used many times and “when it got to a level where they couldn’t burn anymore, they would just shovel dirt over it and dig another one in another spot. They smelled horrible.” 

Most of the incinerators did not work properly or at all and wouldn’t be fixed, the official told me. At other times, personnel weren’t trained properly on how to use them, “so what all the bases did was go back to what they did before,” which was to either use burn pits or dump waste. 

The military doctors

Abdul Sami, 32, and Zabiullah Amarkhil, 31, Afghan doctors, know well the damage from the burn pits. The pair studied medicine together before working as trauma surgeons in military hospitals inside bases in Kunduz, Nangarhar, Kabul and Balkh as well as Kandahar, where they still work today. 

“I have seen patients with skin problems and eye infections. Others had kidney problems because of the contaminated water, American soldiers also. We also had patients with acute gastroenteritis,” says Amarkhil as we bundle into the back of a beat-up taxi. I had collected the doctors from the airfield after they finished their shift.

On all the bases, they treated soldiers and civilians with the same array of pulmonary and respiratory problems witnessed by the doctors in Jalalabad. Most of their patients were those who were working close to the burn pit, they say.

In Jalalabad, Sami recalls at one point registering up to 200 patients a day with respiratory isssues, skin diseases and stomach problems. 

“Most of these patients were from the military base,” he says. The military quarters, he adds, were just 650 yards west from one of the pits.

Amarkhil says the waste at Kandahar airfield was dumped and burned both inside and outside the base. He drew a map marking the base’s biggest burn pit, between the American and Afghan sides of the airfield, and another location where trash and other refuse were dumped in a landfill. Up until 2016, he said, “they were doing burn pits once a week, always on Wednesday. The flames were about 4 meters high.”

The burn pit was very close to the military training center that housed new trainee soldiers, who were not used to the heavy air pollution, Amarkhil tells me. In 2016, he would see as many as 10 trainee soldiers a day with respiratory problems. An additional 10 to 15 had skin issues, he says. He adds that waste from Forward Operating Base Gamberi, in Laghman province near Jalalabad, was dumped at the Darunta Dam to the west of the city, where it polluted the water. But in Kandahar everything would go to the burn pits, Amarkhil says, including a specific container used for medical waste and equipment. 

“When it was full, the container would be burnt also,” he says.

Momand Khosti, a military doctor, called the burn pits “deadly.” Khosti worked in senior positions in both the Afghan and American hospitals at Kandahar airfield and five other airfields since 2007, and as the deputy director for health affairs in the Ministry of Defense until the Taliban takeover. 

When we met weeks earlier in Kabul, sitting in the back corner of a restaurant, he marked the location of a Kandahar burn pit on a napkin, about a mile from the hospital on the Afghan side of the base. 

“We also burned medical waste and equipment in a smaller burn pit, 100 meters from the hospital,” he says.

The last time he saw active burn pits was in June 2021, he says.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of the respiratory problems, cancers, skin conditions and kidney problems that patients at Kandahar airfield were suffering, Khosti believes that “many” of the cases were directly linked to military activities and the bases themselves. 

“One night, 30 soldiers came into the hospital with diarrhea and vomiting,” he says. “In the days following, more came in.” Staff members at the hospital then found that the water on the base had been contaminated.

Khosti, who specializes in cancers of the liver, gallbladder and bile duct, described how a soldier with late-stage lung cancer had come to see him just two days earlier. “I asked him about his lifestyle and work background. He told me he worked on the bases or on the battlefield. He was coughing up a black-colored mucus. Because he worked as a soldier for so many years, I believe his cancer is because of the pollution from the burn pits.” 

U.S. service members exposed to burn pit pollution in Afghanistan also coughed up black mucus they called “plume crud” or “black goop,” studies later revealed. They reported suffering from severe chronic respiratory disease, including constrictive bronchiolitis, a rare and often fatal lung disorder for which there is no cure. Other symptoms included unexplained diarrhea, severe headaches, weeping lesions, chronic skin infections and rashes, severe abdominal pain, leukemia, lung cancer, nosebleeds, severe heart conditions, sleep apnea, anemia, ulcers, unexpected weight loss and vomiting.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) insisted until 2021 that there was conflicting and insufficient research to show that long-term health problems have resulted from burn pit exposure, and denied most benefit claims related to toxic exposure. The VA estimates that more than 3.5 million veterans and service members were exposed to the toxic fumes from burn pits during overseas deployments since 1990, according to a 2015 VA report.

The Khoshab clinic

In Kandahar, Afghan doctors allege that toxic substances from the burn pits harmed the development of fetuses. At a small clinic in Khoshab about 100 yards from the Kandahar airfield, Dr. Suhela Muhammadi, 40, bustles through a crowd of mothers and children in the clinic’s small waiting room. She tells me about heart anomalies, genetic disorders and other birth defects in babies whose mothers lived near the base, saying these were not seen at such high levels 20 years ago. 

“I think that most of them were caused by the war, when their mothers were pregnant,” she says.

The number of congenital birth defects in Afghanistan per 1,000 people is more than twice as high as that in the U.S., according to 2017 research published by the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands. The paper also notes that increased maternal exposure to certain chemicals may affect development of the fetus and contribute to congenital anomalies. Increased risk of congenital anomalies was reported in Afghan women working in agriculture sectors and those living near hazardous waste sites. 

While the environmental toxicologist Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani was working at the University of Michigan, she published several studies on Iraq, where birth defects have been better studied than in Afghanistan. She found infants and children had been exposed to potentially toxic metals such as tungsten, titanium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, thorium and uranium that are heavily used in weaponry and military hardware. 

“The most common resulting anomalies are heart defects and neural tube defects,” she told me.

Abdul Wali Abid, the Khoshab clinic’s manager for more than a decade, tells me that in the weeks before the Americans left the base, the staff saw smoke billowing from burn pits every week. An engineer working inside the Kandahar airfield for the past eight years said that right before the U.S. military left the base, they burned a lot of things, “even cars.” There was a river at the back side of the base coming out the wall “where they were dumping sewage until the end.” 

As I leave the clinic, I meet 35-year-old Abdul Raziq, a clinic guard who has lived in the area all his life. He knows the “river” that the engineer had told me about, he says, leading me out of the clinic to show me the three places where the water was coming out of the airfield walls. 

We head out and drive around the southern side of the base, bumping over dry agricultural land. A metal grate covered the outflow to one of the pipes, which emptied into a 26-foot-wide trench carved out in front of it. Not long ago, water would flow out of the base, flooding into smaller streams, which fed nearby agricultural lands, Raziq tells me. 

“It was dirty, soapy water, with rubbish in it,” he says. “But when the Americans left the base, it stopped.” 

Kandahar airfield’s scrap metal collectors

Along the road on the northeast side of the base is a string of makeshift shops stuffed with a random assortment of scrap, from Humvee seats to car engines and ammunition boxes. I had seen the same in Nangarhar, where shop owners had once built a bustling economy on the waste from the base. 

Here, I find Fida Mohammad, 17, and Esanullah, 15, hiding from the midday sun inside their ramshackle hut, surrounded by piles of metal. They are originally from Ghazni province, but after their father died of a heart attack seven years ago, they moved to Kandahar with their mother and three younger brothers, hoping to make a living from scrap metal trading. 

When the U.S. soldiers were still at the base, the boys could earn as much as 15,000 to 20,000 afghanis ($185 to $250) a month from collecting scrap that came from the base, they say. 

“Some things were burned by the people at the base, like TVs, radios, computers, mobile phones and all sorts of electronics, but we would go through it and collect the metal that survived the fire,” Fida Mohammad tells me. 

For the past five years, Esanullah has suffered from breathing problems, and his hands are riddled with a rash that started two years ago. 

“Our younger brother got sick also. He was small, so my mother told me to bring him with us to our work. He was playing with all the things and then he got the same skin problems as Esanullah,” says Fida Mohammad.

Two years ago, Esanullah traveled to Quetta in Pakistan to see a doctor with his mother. “I couldn’t talk properly or stand,” he says. “The real problem was my chest. I was there for two and a half months. But even now, I have problems with my breathing.”

The doctors in Pakistan didn’t give a diagnosis for the cause, but the boys believe that the source of Esanullah’s health problems is the airfield. 

The two would collect everything from plastic bottles to vehicle engines to “the bad things” like live grenades, as well as ammunition and shell casings, says Fida Mohammad. 

He leads me outside and points to these deadly remnants of the American occupation: unexploded artillery shells and a box filled with 40 mm grenades.

Khosti had told me that around Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province, people suffered from eye infections. There were even cases of children, some as young as 6 or 7 years old, developing eye tumors, he said. “They were collecting scrap metal from the base, and areas around where the U.S. military was conducting weapons testing, and sometimes they would take the explosive materials, so I believe their eye tumors were related to this.”

Bagram, “Everyone is sick here” 

Anyone who lives near Bagram airfield knew the burn pits by the smell of the raging barbecue of trash, usually overseen by Afghan employees, few of whom bothered to wear masks to protect themselves from the smoke and ash spewing from the pits.

“When you are doing this kind of work for 10 years, 15 … there is nothing that can keep you safe,” one of the former base employees tells me. 

The enormous U.S. stronghold, about 15 miles north of Kabul, was home to 40,000 military personnel and civilian contractors at its peak, with airplanes and helicopters taking off and landing at all hours of the day and night. There were underground bars, a private airstrip, a Burger King and other fast-food joints, an Oakley sunglasses store and, until 2014, a secret detention facility. A giant diesel generator farm powered the base 24 hours a day, emitting a constant stream of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and sulfur. 

A 13-building waste management complex built in 2014 to house the base’s new incinerators seemingly had little effect on the discharges. Until the U.S. exit in the middle of a July night two years ago, a haze of aerosolized garbage would emerge every week from what the American soldiers called “the shit pit” and mix with the already dust-clogged air in Parwan province, residents told me.

A half-hour drive away from Bagram, southeast of the provincial capital of Charikar, a graveyard of rusting trucks, tanks and helicopter engines used by the Soviet Union lay baking in the summer sun, the vehicles’ corroding residue leaching into the soil and water. Lining the road below were trucks belonging to scrap dealers, waiting to take the debris on to Pakistan. A few weeks later, it was all gone.

While I had permission letters from the relevant Taliban ministries, I needed the authorization of Obaidullah Aminzada, Parwan’s new governor, to visit the sprawling base. As a member of the Taliban, Aminzada had been a prisoner at Bagram for four years while it was under the control of the U.S. military. Now, he was effectively in charge of what had been the Pentagon’s largest military base in Afghanistan. 

“When the blasts started, we knew it was a Friday,” the governor tells me coolly in his office, surrounded by his assistants, in the heart of Charikar. While he was a detainee, he was kept in darkness but knew from the sound “and that smell” that the military was conducting controlled detonations of military equipment and ordnance at Bagram. “We knew what day of week it was by the detonations,” he laughs, turning to one of his assistants, who nods in agreement.

Aminzada invites me to lunch with the governor of Bagram district. I had been promised access to the sprawling base and I’m eager to see inside, post-American control. So I accept the invitation despite my reservations. The lunch involves me, the only woman, sitting alone in one room for an hour and a half, with the men in another, their rollicking laughter floating across the courtyard. Finally, we say our goodbyes and head out to the base. We make it to the gates, but no further. The commander, from whom I need permission, was not at the base, I was told — the same thing that had happened to me at the bases in Nangarhar and Kandahar.

I watch as the gates to the base open to let a Ford Ranger roll in. Children carrying sacks larger than themselves stuffed with an array of scrap try to sneak in, only to get chased away by a Taliban guard perched atop a rundown Humvee decorated with plastic flowers. 

Almost all of the waste “was still going to the burn pit”

The moment is a far cry from the scene that greeted the bioenvironmental engineer and U.S. Air Force Reserves colonel Kyle Blasch when he arrived at Bagram in the summer of 2011. The commander of the security forces at Bagram had contacted his team about researching the base’s burn pit. Blasch’s team conducted the only occupational sampling study on U.S. personnel near the military’s burn pits in Afghanistan. 

At the peak of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, Bagram was burning between 2,300 and 4,000 cubic yards of refuse per day—enough to fill 175 to 300 dump trucks. Smoke from the burn pits, mixed with dust and other pollution, choked the guards as they worked 12-hour shifts at the base’s checkpoints and 10-yard-high guard tower. 

New rules from the DOD had come in prohibiting the burning of specific materials, but it didn’t matter, as the researchers found that 81 percent of waste was still going to the burn pit, including prohibited items such as plastic bags, packaging materials, broken construction materials and aerosol cans.

The purpose of the study was to see what the soldiers were actually breathing. Blasch’s team outfitted members of the security forces with personal sampling monitors. He was able to outfit the study subjects with four monitors each, which included pumps, filters and breathing tubes. Blasch said they were eager to help. 

The results were unequivocal. The levels of airborne pollutants registered by the monitors worn by each soldier exceeded the short-term military exposure guideline level. Those near the burn pit and waste disposal complex exceeded the U.S. EPA’s air quality thresholds by a factor of more than 50. 

“Right now, we have a lot of question marks,” said Blasch, who is now associate regional director for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northwest-Pacific Islands.

In 2011, an Army memo stated that the high concentrations of dust and burned waste present at Bagram airfield were likely to affect veterans’ health for the rest of their lives. The memo noted that the amount of pollutants in Bagram’s air far exceeded the levels permitted under U.S. government guidelines.

 “Everyone breathed the same air” 

The day after I was denied access to Bagram by the Taliban authorities, Noor Mohammad Ahmadi, 41, a village head, leads me down a narrow maze of walkways to his home, just outside the base. 

He lives in the village of Gulai Kali, where streams meander through tightly packed homes and the roads that encircle the base. Driving around the perimeter, I count 16 locations where water flowed into or out of the base from small culverts in the high walls. Families use the doors of shipping containers as gates to their compounds and shops. Above them, the white Taliban flag flutters in the wind. 

The neighborhood is abuzz with activity. A pair of girls carrying their baby sisters walk alongside a stream, deep in chatter. Men stride across nearby wheat fields, hands clasped behind their backs, as children run past, their heads cocked to the pink sky, eyes locked on their kites above.

In 2011, Ahmadi and 17 other village leaders from the area wrote an application to the Parwan governor, Abdul Basir Salangi, saying that the Bagram base was destroying their drinking water, he tells me. 

His ancestors had lived in Gulai Kali for years, but when the Taliban first came to power in the 1990s, the villagers left. “When the new government came in, we came back, so we have been here now for 20 years,” he says.

“We sent two applications to the governor. One was about our property; the Americans took our lands and expanded the base here. And the second was about our water problem,” he says. The base had stopped the Panjshir River from reaching their fields for agriculture, he says. “They were also dumping lavatory water into our waterways and fields.” 

He pulls out a stack of carefully organized papers in plastic sleeves. “I have all the letters.” 

Streams from the Panjshir River enter the base from the north and depart from it in the south and east. The airfield was diverting the water, he says. “Nine hundred families are living here in Gulai Kali village, and they were without water.”

The governor promised to talk to the military and send a team to examine the water. Two weeks later, a team made up of the district’s representative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Water, a representative from the Ministry of Public Health, an Afghan translator and “two international military people from the base” came to the villages and took samples from the wells, Ahmadi says.

“After this, the governor called a big meeting at his office with the international military people, a representative from each village, an Afghan commander named Safiullah Safi and the team who took the samples,” he says. “They told us the water is clean and there were no problems with it, but they did not show us any results in documents or reports.” 

The governor instructed the airfield personnel to dig a well 100 yards deep for the villagers, but it never happened, he says. 

Three men from the village join us in Ahmadi’s home. One man, Ajab Gul, says he has respiratory problems and has had multiple surgeries to remove recurrent kidney stones. “In our area, we do not have clean water,” he says. “Maybe this is the cause.” 

“Everyone is sick here,” Mohammad Salim, a farmer, speaks up. “When the international community came to Afghanistan, my problems started.” He says he has had issues with his lungs for the past 17 years. The base was burning waste at least three times a week, he says, and the winds would blow it over his village and the lands he farms, about 50 yards from the base.

“When we saw the smoke, we took our children inside the home and still had to cover our mouths and noses because of the bad smell,” Salim adds. “It was a big problem for us.”

Salim traveled to see a doctor in Pakistan three times between 2012 and 2019. 

“The doctors took my blood, did a lot of tests and gave me medicine, but I am still not well. If there is any smoke, I can’t breathe again, and I cannot control my coughing. My eyes cry when I cough. I’m coughing a mucus that stings my throat.”

“Lots of farmers from this area are sick,” Salim says. They call it ‘Bagram Lung.’ Just knock on any door and you will find it. … The Americans who were on the base are sick, but so are we. Everyone breathed the same air.” Over the years, the international aid workers, journalists and diplomats stationed in Kabul came up with their own name, “Kabul cough,” to describe the chronic hacking, bronchitis and sinus infections. The symptoms were particularly persistent in the winter months, when the smog from coal and oil burning heaters enveloped the Kabul basin. 

 While the cause of Salim’s problem has not been determined, his description of “Bagram Lung” brought to mind tests performed in the U.S. on soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division. 

While they all tested normal on conventional pulmonary function, a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center performed surgical lung biopsies on more than 50 and found that nearly all of them had constrictive bronchiolitis, a narrowing of the smallest and deepest airways in the lungs—an irreversible and chronic condition. Other medical studies have found a host of other toxic substances, including partially combusted jet fuel, in the lungs of veterans serving near burn pits.

Then there was the sewage dumping. In Gulai Kali, everyone says the water is as dirty as the sky. Every day, American contractors from the base “were bringing seven to 10 tankers carrying the lavatory water and dumping it in the canals [and we still] cannot even wash there,” says Salim, the farmer.

“I have kidney and bladder problems and I feel very weak,” says Zia ul Haq, a villager sitting next to Salim. For days at a time, he was too tired to stand, he says.

He has lived next to Bagram for the past 15 years and has been unwell for seven of them. “I worked inside the base for two years in the big refrigerator where food and energy drinks were stored,” he says. “I have a big pain in my kidneys and I cannot control my bladder. The doctor told me I have not been drinking clean water, but we are using water from our well.”

Every other house outside Bagram’s walls has a water pump well because the river no longer flows to the village. 

“The people don’t drink the canal water now; it’s too dirty,” he says. 

The people in Gulai Kali heard explosions, loud and frequent, coming from the base in June 2021, not realizing that the Americans were getting ready to depart once and for all  and were destroying ordnance, weapons and military vehicles so the Taliban couldn’t make use of them. 

Even Zainul Abiden Abid, head of NEPA, was kept away. “Our staff were not allowed inside the base that month,” but “we could see the clouds of smoke rising,” he told me.

As the Americans in Kabul frantically packed up in late August 2021, an Afghan worker at the U.S. Embassy took a video of a burn pit being used by embassy staffers right in the heart of Kabul. “We were told to take everything out of the office and go to this designated area and throw everything in there where it was set alight,” he told me. “On the top of the burn pit was a picture of John Sopko”—the American inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

Using EPA-approved sampling equipment provided by the U.S.-based Eurofins Environment Testing, the journalist Kern Hendricks and an Afghan scientist specializing in water sampling collected water, soil and blood samples from villages around the Jalalabad, Bagram and Kandahar airfields where the journalist Lynzy Billing conducted interviews and obtained medical records from residents.

The sampling equipment traveled from the United States to Afghanistan via the United Kingdom and Turkey. The coolers containing the samples are now on their way back to Eurofins Environment Testing in the U.S. for lab analysis, via Pakistan.

We plan to test these samples for the presence of PFAS, which were present in materials used by the U.S. military and do not naturally occur in the environment.

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Glaciers are melting faster than ever, and while that might spell disaster for the planet, it has opened up a new field of research called glacial archaeology. Artifacts, bodies, and viruses frozen deep in ice for millions of years are now thawing out and washing to the surface; the warmer climate is also allowing archaeologists to navigate areas that were once too dangerous to excavate.

The 1991 discovery of Ötzi—a prehistoric human who is estimated to have lived in the 4th millennium BCE—in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps currently remains the greatest discovery for glacial archaeology. But it’s not the only noteworthy find we’ve seen in the last two decades.

Treasure trove of arrows

Earlier in September, Pilø and his team were searching through the Jotunheimen mountains in eastern Norway and uncovered a wooden arrow with a quartzite arrowhead and three feathers. Ancient people used feathers to stabilize the arrow and guide it to its target. These accents usually decay over time, but the ice kept them intact. The arrow is estimated to be 3,000 years old and may have belonged to a reindeer hunter from the early Bronze Age. It’s one of several arrows that have been surfaced from Norway’s melting ice in recent years.

In 2014, Pilø and his colleagues uncovered a prehistoric ski in a melting ice patch in Norway. The ski is thought to be 1,300 years old, and had the bindings still intact. In 2021, they came across the second ski, making it one of the most well-preserved prehistoric skis to date. Because the skis were very well-preserved, Pilø says they were able to make replicas and race down slopes with iron-age skis. “That was a lot of fun.”

Prehistoric animals

In August 2010, a partially preserved carcass of a baby wooly mammoth was found in Siberia’s permafrost. Nicknamed Yuka, the frozen animal is estimated to be around 30,000 years old, which puts it back in the last ice age. Based on where the specimen was discovered, it’s likely that the mammoth wandered away from its herd in the grasslands and got stuck in mud. Given that the lower body was well-preserved in ice, it gave researchers an opportunity to analyze the extinct species in-depth and extract its frozen blood.

The melting snow in Antarctica has also led to some interesting evolutionary findings. During a 2016 research expedition, Steven Emslie uncovered the preserved remains of 800-year-old Adelie penguins, along with some less well-preserved remains of the aquatic birds estimated to be around 5,000 years old. According to a study he published in 2020, the penguins were likely moving because of changing sea-ice conditions and were covered up by increasing snowfall, which prevented their remains from decaying.

Organic artifacts

A muddy future

While the warming climate is paving the way to more discoveries of the ancient past, there are some hiccups. Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, says that though it’s easier to access places that were once inhospitable, melting snow can be a poor substrate for research. “Everything is a mudhole,” which makes it much more complicated to look for fossils, he explains.  

There is also the issue of ancient artifacts washing away: Pilø estimates 60 to 80 percent of mountain ice in Norway is in danger of melting by the end of this century. He describes it as a race against time. “If we are not ready to search for these finds, they will get lost, and so will the stories they could have told us.” 

A combination of resources from aerial photography of mountains, digital models of terrain, and satellite imagery has helped glacial archaeologists melting glaciers and any areas where  artifacts may have thawed out. However, their efforts can only go so far as ice around the poles continues to melt at unprecedented speeds. If temperatures continue to rise—July 2023, for example, was the hottest month ever recorded in human history—Pilø warns that 90 percent of mountain ice in Norway might disappear by 2100.

Still, archaeologists like Pilø are taking advantage of this fleeting opportunity to dig through the soft ice while they can. While the chances are tiny, he still holds out hope that the melting glaciers will help him find the next ice mummy.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing guidelines to more clearly define what is considered a truly “zero-emission” building. Unveiled on September 28 at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, the nation’s largest annual gathering for sustainable architecture, the EPA’s new outline is reportedly based on a “three pillar” approach. These pillars include no on-site emissions, the use of 100 percent renewable energy, and adherence to strict energy efficiency guidelines.

The news, first revealed via White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi speaking to The Washington Post on Thursday morning, arrives as the Biden administration attempts to standardize concepts for an industry that generates nearly a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions every year.

“Getting to zero emissions does not need to be a premium product. We know how to do this,” Ali Zaidi said during the interview. “It just has to get to scale, which I think a common definition will facilitate.”

[Related: Power plants may face emission limits for the first time if EPA rules pass.]

A truly “zero-emission” building is actually harder to define than it may first appear. Currently, the global green standard is generally considered Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Developed by the US Green Building Council, an environmental nonprofit, and currently in its fifth iteration, LEED certification provides a comprehensive, tiered rating system for neighborhood developments, homes, and cities. However, it lacks the authority that could be granted by a major US federal department such as the EPA.

Lacking concise federal regulations, the US currently includes countless state and local benchmarks to meet their own ideas of eco-friendly urban planning—from California’s “zero net energy” standard for all new constructions by 2030, to reduced emission targets for 2030 and 2050 in New York. For California, a zero net energy project is defined as an “energy-efficient building where, on a source energy basis, the actual annual consumed energy is less than or equal to the on-site renewable generated energy.” Meanwhile, New York’s Local 97 law from 2019 sets carbon emission caps based on building sizes, along with multiple avenues to offset such emissions.

Although the EPA’s new definitional framework is not legally binding, the standardization could still prove incredibly attractive for real estate developers involved in projects across multiple states seeking a streamlined process.

“​​A workable, usable federal definition of zero-emission buildings can bring some desperately needed uniformity and consistency to a chaotic regulatory landscape,” Duane Desiderio, senior vice president and counsel for the Real Estate Roundtable, explained via WaPo’s rundown of the reveal.

Multiple projects in recent years have attempted to improve upon sustainable building practices in order to meet climate change’s steepest challenges. One such promising avenue is creatively incorporating recycled materials, such as diaper materials, to actually strengthen concrete mixtures for low-cost housing alternatives.

Meanwhile, termite mounds—the world’s tallest biological structures—are beginning to inspire eco-friendly cooling and heating systems, while fungi growth is providing the architectural underpinnings for a new generation of durable and sustainable building materials.

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Lego is abandoning an attempt to make its colorful, iconic building pieces from recycled plastic bottles just two years after first announcing one of the central facets of its ongoing sustainability push. Despite the setback, the Denmark-based company reiterated its commitment to reduce its overall environmental impact, and per the Associated Press, still aims to make Legos from sustainable materials by 2032.

Speaking with CNN on Monday, a Lego spokesperson claimed the company’s extensive testing had revealed that replacement requires additional production steps and investment into new equipment would actually produce more pollution than Lego’s current operations. The PET alternative also reportedly proved not as durable or safe as existing acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) blocks, and didn’t properly match Lego blocks’ trademark “clutch power.”

[Related: ​​Super Glue could make it easier to recycle plastic.]

The popular toymaker first announced a new block prototype based on a recycled plastic bottle compound called polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in 2021—part of a project to transition away from oil-based plastics which began in 2018. Even in the prototype’s reveal, however, the company cautioned it would be “some time” before builders could expect a more eco-friendly recycled brick to appear on store shelves. The formula reportedly required further testing and development before moving into a “pilot production phase” expected to take “at least a year.”

Unfortunately, this pilot phase appears to not only take longer than expected, but ultimately fail to produce a viable replacement for the oil-based bricks. According to AP News, Lego states it is “currently testing and developing Lego bricks made from a range of alternative sustainable materials, including other recycled plastics and plastics made from alternative sources such as e-methanol.” Made from hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide, e-methanol (aka green methanol) employs renewable energy to split water molecules during its energy production.

“We believe that in the long-term this will encourage increased production of more sustainable raw materials, such as recycled oils, and help support our transition to sustainable materials,” the company said via AP.

The backtracking comes barely a week after Lego CEO Niels B. Christiansen issued a statement ahead of the UN General Assembly reaffirming their company’s commitment to climate sustainability. The pledge included an aim to make the company carbon neutral by 2050 alongside a $1.4 billion investment in “sustainability-related activities.” The funding is reportedly earmarked for projects such as carbon neutral buildings, increasing renewable energy production and capacity across Lego stores, offices, and factories, as well as partnering with suppliers to “collectively reduce environmental impact.”

But while Lego’s PET project appears to have hit a significant hurdle, the company confirmed that a sustainable, sugarcane-derived version of polyethylene called bio-polypropylene made from sugarcane will still be used for certain parts of Lego sets, mainly accessory items such as trees and leaves.

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The Pacific Ocean is a juggernaut. It’s the largest ocean on our planet, almost double the size of the Atlantic. Its vast expanse, exposure to trade winds, and range of temperatures makes it incredibly dynamic. All these factors contribute to create the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that affects seasonal precipitation, heat, storms, and more around the world. 

ENSO is made up of three stages: El Niño and La Niña, which can both increase the likelihood of extreme weather from the Philippines to Hawaii to Peru—and the neutral phase that we are typically in. El Niño is currently underway and is predicted to go strong until winter. With it come a slew of weather patterns like exacerbated heat waves in the northern US and Canada, increased risk of flooding in the south and southeast US, delayed rainy seasons, and even droughts in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. And this is for an El Niño period that is predicted to be strong, but not particularly extreme. But as the Pacific warms due to human-driven climate change and temperature gradients across the ocean widen, scientists warn that El Niño and La Niña periods are becoming longer, more extreme, and more frequent.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory]

In one recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews, researchers looked at different climate models to see how ENSO has changed through the past century, and how it may shift in coming years. While El Niño and La Niña ordinarily last nine to 12 months, the vast majority of models predict that we will see them stretch out over multiple years. “In the 20th century you got about one extreme El Niño per 20 years,” says Wenju Cai, chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and lead author of the Nature Reviews paper. “But in the future, and in the 21st century on average, we will get something like one extreme event per 10 years—so it’s doubling.”

Longer and more intense periods of El Niño and La Niña mean that the risks of extreme weather—hurricanes, cyclones, flooding, drought—are heightened for most countries lying in the Pacific or flanking it. For example, El Niño pulls warm water farther east, so if tropical cycles (storms that tend to move westward) develop, they’ll have more time and distance to cover until they reach land. “While they’re traveling in the ocean, these tropical cyclones are energized by the heat and moisture from the ocean,” says Cai. By the time they reach countries to the west like North Korea, South Korea, Japan, or China, they could be more catastrophic than the tropical storms those places experience today.

Since “global warming is already making extreme events more extreme” like intensifying storms and weather patterns, Cai says, it’s a “double whammy.” 

But even the less dramatic effects of ENSO could still amount to damage. The fluctuations in ocean temperatures that ENSO brings, for example, can be dramatic and too quick for marine life like corals to adapt, says John Burns, a marine and data scientist at the University of Hawaii. “All that can exacerbate coral bleaching,” which has already been documented in Hawaiian reefs. 

And because creatures and systems are so intrinsically interconnected, this has resounding implications for a number of species and industries. Burns has created technologies that can reconstruct water habitats, and he’s used those models to study the implications of coral loss. “We’ve actually mathematically connected how these habitats influence the abundance of reef fish,” he says, “which are one of the primary sources of protein for the global economy, especially in Southeast Asia.” So not only will climate change and ENSO harm fish and fisheries, but that could also have ripple effects on tourism, as well as the local and global economies. 

In a recent report in the journal Science, climate researchers from Dartmouth College estimated that extreme El Niño events from 1982 and 1997 alone cost the global economy about $4 trillion to $6 trillion, respectively, in the following years. The authors also estimated that this current El Niño period could rack up $3 trillion in losses over the next five years. The damages aren’t just limited to buildings and infrastructure, Cai says: They include social pillars people may not even consider, like jobs, farmland, food stocks, and individual health. As a result, some countries and organizations are taking a proactive approach against El Niño. Peru, for instance, is dedicating more than $1 billion to prevent and contain the carnage it might bring.

[Related: The Pacific heat blob’s aftereffects are still warping ocean ecosystems]

But there is time to bring ENSO and the Pacific Ocean back into balance, bit by bit. While it can be useful at times to consider these global changes on a large scale, it’s important to “recognize that solutions will be very locally based,” says Burns. Even if we project the overall trends, he explains, understanding how specific habitats will be affected and what solutions are feasible requires local and native wisdom and knowledge. 

“It’s a shame if we get dismayed by these larger-scale changes and come to a conclusion of ‘there’s nothing we can do,’” Burns says. “It’s definitely not that simple … and we need strategies that are place-based to protect these systems.”

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A team of scientists and volunteers from the University of Reading in England recovered and digitized weather data from several ships that were bombed during the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II. This nearly century-old data is offering clues how the war changed daily weather observations at the time.

When the US naval base was attacked on December 7, 1941 by Japanese military forces, over 100 vessels were stationed there. During the initial attack, the USS Arizona and USS Oklahoma sank and the USS Nevada beached after being hit by a torpedo and at least six bombs. Most of the remaining vessels from the fleet eventually returned to service and the crew members resumed recording weather data among their other daily duties.

[Related: The Rise Of The Tank Before World War II.]

The paper published September 18 in the Geoscience Data Journal describes how weather data from WWII was recovered from 19 United States Navy ships. Some earlier research has suggested these years were abnormally warm, and this new dataset of over 630,000 records with more than 3 million individual observations, is helping piece together the mystery referred to as the WWII warm anomaly.

These newly recovered datasets show how wartime created changes in observation practices, including taking more of them during the day rather than at night to avoid being detected by enemy ships. Due to this shift in when the measurements were taken, the team believes that collecting weather data only during daylight hours may have led to the slightly warmer temperatures recorded during the war. Future studies with this newly digitized data will help resolve if the weather truly was warmer during 1941 to 1945 and fill in gaps that will help scientists better understand how the global climate has evolved since the 1940s.

“Disruptions to trade routes in World War II led to a significant reduction in marine weather observations,” University of Reading meteorological research scientist and study co-author Praveen Teleti said in a statement. “Until recently, records from that time were still only available in classified paper documents. The scanning and rescuing of this data provides a window into the past, allowing us to understand how the world’s climate was behaving during a time of tremendous upheaval.“

In the study, the team used recovered logbooks from 19 different vessels, including battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, and cruisers. Many of these ships were present during the attack in December 1941 that killed 2,404 US military servicemembers and civilians, along with 64 Japanese servicemembers. All of the ships in this study saw some combat in the Pacific at some point during the war. The USS Pennsylvania remained in service after being hit during the attack, when one bomb fell on the battleship killing nine servicemembers. The USS Tennessee was bombed twice in December 1941, killing five servicemembers. The 32,300-ton battleship returned to service in February 1942. 

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

Additionally, over 4,000 volunteers transcribed more than 29,000 logbook images from the fleet stationed in Hawaii from 1941 through 1945 to generate the dataset.

“There are two sets of people we need to thank for making this mission a success. We are very grateful to the global team of citizen scientists for transcribing these observations and creating a huge dataset that includes millions of entries about air and sea surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction,” said Teleti. “The greatest respect must go to the brave servicemen who recorded this data. War was all around them, but they still did their jobs with such professionalism. It is thanks to their dedication and determination that we have these observations 80 years on.”

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

For commercial fishers, losing gear is part of doing business. Fishing lines and nets break and wear out over time or have to be cut loose when gear snags on the seafloor. By one estimate, at least 50,000 tonnes of nets, lines, and traps disappear into the water globally each year. In California alone, as many as 14,000 crab traps are lost or discarded each season. Most of this material is plastic, and lots of it is still partially functional, meaning it can go on catching and killing marine life for centuries—a process known as ghost fishing.

For several years, scientists, fishers, and conservations have been eyeing a not-so-novel solution: biodegradable fishing gear. Made of things like microalgae fibers or biodegradable polyesters, this equipment can be broken down by aquatic microorganisms. Yet while these environmentally friendly nets offer benefits, recent field trials conducted largely in Norway and South Korea show that biodegradable nets catch significantly fewer fish than synthetic ones.

Benjamin Drakeford, a marine resource economist at the University of Portsmouth in England, puts it bluntly: “Biodegradable gear right now is not very good.”

In Atlantic cod fisheries, for instance, nylon nets catch as much as 25 percent more fish than biodegradable alternatives. One team of scientists attributed such shortfalls to biodegradable materials’ tendency to be more elastic and stretchy, potentially allowing fish to wiggle free.

But Drakeford and his colleagues wanted to look at the bigger picture: if biodegradable nets and traps reduce fishers’ catches—but they also lessen the environmental damage from lost and discarded gear—is that a financial hit worth taking? After all, fishers have a vested interest in keeping fish populations healthy. The scientists analyzed prior studies of biodegradable fishing gear’s effectiveness, then interviewed 29 fishers, boat owners, and representatives from fishing industry groups in England about their expenses, profits, and other financial details.

In conclusion, Drakeford and his colleagues write in a recent paper, an industry shift to biodegradable nets would not lessen the impacts of ghost fishing enough to offset fishers’ reduced catches. Biodegradable nets would leave more fish in the water and reduce rates of ghost fishing, helping fishers with future catches. But to make up for the reduced landings, fishers would need financial incentives.

But, the scientists say, if biodegradable gear can be improved, the benefits “over traditional fishing gear would grow exponentially.”

One big problem, the scientists reason, is that a certain degree of ghost fishing is currently locked in: the gear is already lost. Even if fishers everywhere replace their gear, the decrease in ghost fishing—and resultant bump in fish stocks—wouldn’t happen for years. So rather than improving their catch by cutting down on ghost fishing, fishers would be trading environmental sustainability for a lower catch without seeing much of an immediate benefit.

Brandon Kuczenski, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wasn’t involved in the work, suggests this lack of cost-effectiveness could be overcome with government subsidies.

Drakeford and his team’s analysis comes amid mounting concern over marine plastic pollution, which is pouring into the world’s oceans at alarming rates and is liable to haunt marine ecosystems essentially forever. Large pieces of plastic can choke and strangle marine life, while tiny micro- and nanoplastics—the inevitable result of plastic breaking down—can have more insidious impacts.

Geoff Shester, a campaign director for the conservation organization Oceana, says that while he endorses efforts to develop biodegradable gear, he thinks it would be easier and faster to implement a penalty and reward system to incentivize fishers to not lose or litter gear in the first place. Such a system, he says, would require registering and tracking all commercial fishing equipment.

“If you put out fishing gear, you should have to demonstrate that you’re getting it back,” he says. Right now, he adds, there is no penalty for fishers who lose their gear other than having to buy new gear. He thinks such a system could be more effective in reducing waste.

There is another option, too: holding net manufacturers financially accountable for plastic gear pollution and the costs to fishers of shifting to biodegradable gear. This concept, known as extended producer responsibility, is briefly discussed in Drakeford’s paper.

For his part, Drakeford believes biodegradable nets’ lower efficiency is a speed bump on the road to widescale adoption. He thinks the gear will follow the path of electric vehicles—getting better and better and better. In just a decade, he points out, the range of electric vehicles has doubled several times.

Drakeford sees some irony in the fact that switching to biodegradable gear is, in concept at least, not so much a leap forward as it is a step back.

“In the past, we used biodegradable materials to make crab pots and fishing nets and such,” he says. “We know the answer to this—we just need to go back to what we used to do.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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The jury may still be out on plant-based meat alternatives’ economic and environmental viability, but experts largely agree that the seafood industry in its current form is untenable. Overfishing presents countless ecological problems, including plastic pollution and the potential for a wholesale collapse of marine biodiversity. Researchers have been experimenting with seafood alternatives for years, but one company is finally ready to bring its offering to market—and it represents a major moment within the industry.

Austrian-based food-tech startup Revo Foods announced this week that its 3D-printed vegan fish filet “inspired by salmon” is heading to European grocery store shelves—a first for 3D-printed food. According to the company’s September 12 press release, the arrival of “The Filet” represents a pivotal moment in sustainable food, with 3D-printed consumables ready to scale at industrial volumes. Revo Foods’ Filet is likely to be just the first of many other such 3D-printed edible products to soon hit the market.

[Related: Scientists cooked up a 3D printed cheesecake.]

“Despite dramatic losses of coral reefs and increasing levels of toxins and micro plastic contaminating fish, consumer demand for seafood has paradoxically skyrocketed in recent decades,” the company announcement explains. “One promising solution to provide consumers with sustainable alternatives that do not contribute to overfishing is vegan seafood. The key to success of these products lies in recreating an authentic taste that appeals to [consumers].”

The Filet relies on mycoprotein made from nutrition-heavy filamentous fungi, and naturally offers a meat-like texture. Only another 12 ingredients compose Revo’s Filet, such as pea proteins, plant oils, and algae extracts. With its high protein and Omega-3 contents, eating a Revo Filet is still very much like eating regular salmon—of course, without all the standard industrial issues. And thanks to its plant-based ingredients, the Filet also boasts a three-week shelf life, a sizable boost from regular salmon products.

“With the milestone of industrial-scale 3D food printing, we are entering a creative food revolution, an era where food is being crafted exactly according to the customer’s needs,” Revo Foods CEO Robin Simsa said via this week’s announcement.

While Revo’s products are currently only available for European markets, the company says it is actively working to expand its availability “across the globe,” with Simsa telling PopSci the company hopes to enter US markets around 2025. Until then, hungry stateside diners will have to settle for the Revo Salmon dancehall theme song… yes, it’s a real thing.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

Marin Hambley was working as a groundskeeper in Chico, California, when the first plumes of what would become the deadliest fire in the state’s history appeared on the horizon. It was Nov. 8, 2018.

Initially, all Hambley could see of the Camp Fire was a “little puff of cloud”—a sight not uncommon in the northeastern reaches of the Sacramento Valley, where summer temperatures routinely surpass 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But by midafternoon, “the sky was totally black and just dropping chunks of ash,” said Hambley. 

Many residents evacuated; Hambley chose to stay. This area had been heavily impacted by the opioid crisis, and Hambley’s experience with harm reduction, a practice centered on minimizing the negative outcomes of drug use, made them acutely aware of the need to help people with substance abuse disorders. Additionally, their perspective as a queer and trans person led them to believe that they could be especially helpful to the marginalized populations that are often overlooked during disasters. 

Since 2006, Butte County, where Paradise and Chico are located, has consistently been among the top three counties in the state for hospitalizations from opioid-related overdoses, with an annual rate between 2.75 and 5 times the state’s average. 

In the hours after the plumes first appeared, Hambley heard about a pop-up encampment in an empty lot wedged between a busy throughway and the local Walmart. Hundreds of mostly low-income people had flocked there, fleeing the fire, and community organizers were distributing food, water and clothing. Meanwhile, those with means stayed in hotel rooms and Airbnbs or left the area entirely. 

At the time, the county lacked official harm reduction infrastructure. Hambley and other organizers had to locate and distribute supplies on their own. Without the required certification, their activities weren’t technically legal, but Hambley said that was a risk they were willing to take. While the group had received a grant for purchasing Narcan—the overdose-preventing nasal spray approved for over-the-counter use last March—they had to obtain syringes, needles, cotton swabs and fentanyl test strips from groups elsewhere in the state. “We were all kind of underground,” Hambley said, noting that they smuggled backpacks stuffed with Narcan into Red Cross-operated shelters, where drug use was prohibited, though widely practiced. 

At the Walmart encampment and other shelters, Hambley witnessed a disturbing rise in overdoses following the colossal Camp Fire, which ultimately killed at least 85 people and devoured nearly 240 square miles. A local paramedic noted that in the weeks following the fire, overdoses went from being a weekly occurrence to a daily one. And with a rate of 17 deaths per 100,000 residents, for the first time the Paradise area experienced a higher rate of opioid-related overdose deaths in 2018 than any other zip code in Butte County. Hambley said that’s because disasters cause both acute stress and chronic uncertainty, which can lead to more reactive and less managed drug use. “The chaos around you often precedes more chaotic (drug) use,” they said.

Across the Western U.S., climate disasters compound the devastation already caused by the deepening addiction crisis. Wildfires and floods breed anxiety, despair and isolation, all of which can exacerbate substance use. “Your house burns down, your community burns down, your school burns down—of course, you look for an escape,” said Sarah Windels, a co-founder of Bridge, a California-based program that promotes access to substance-use disorder treatment.

Beyond that, climate disasters halt addiction treatment programs and derail critical medication supply chains—all factors that heighten the risk of overdose, including for people who legally use opioids. This is especially true in rural areas, where fewer health-care providers are available, and patients often need to travel substantial distances to receive care. After a massive fire or flood, when local pharmacies and clinics may be closed, a person who is prescribed opioids for chronic pain or who is undergoing medication-assisted treatment (MAT) to curb their addiction may be forced to acquire a substitute illegally. If that supply has a higher potency than they are used to or, as is increasingly common, is laced with fentanyl, that individual is at a high risk of overdosing. 

“Your house burns down, your community burns down, your school burns down — of course, you look for an escape.”

The data suggests that the connection between climate-induced disasters and overdoses is neither occasional nor individual, but seasonal and increasingly predictable. For instance, overdose rates are increasing every year across the nation, but in California, at least, they peak at the height of fire season. According to the California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard, emergency department visits for opioid-related overdoses have topped out during the third quarter of every year since 2018. And in 2020, the counties most affected by the vast August Complex Fire saw a surge in overdose deaths while the wildfire burned. 

From the foothills of the California Sierras, to the floodplains of New Mexico, to the high Rockies in Colorado, these events are also forcing harm reduction workers to adapt their approaches to match their specific surroundings. 

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, for example, extreme weather during the summer months accelerates overdose rates, said Ashley Charzuk, the executive director of the New Mexico Harm Reduction Collaborative, although the reasons differ from those in regions affected by wildfires. In Charzuk’s experience, people who use intravenous drugs can find veins more easily when it’s hot, owing to vasodilation, and this can lead to more frequent and potent use. What’s more, those who use stimulants are at greater risk of overamping, which is different from overdosing. “Your body temperature goes up when you’re using methamphetamine,” said Charzuk. When paired with high environmental temperatures, Charzuk said, overamping can lead to heart attack, stroke or other complications.

As heat waves get more extreme, Charzuk and her colleagues prioritize educating people about the risks of drug use when it’s hot out. 

“We remind people … that heat plays into so many different metabolic factors,” said Charzuk. “If you’ve been out in the heat all day and you’ve been sweating, then you are going to be dehydrated, and anything that impacts your body like that is going to give you less of a defense.” 

In 2020, overdose-related emergency room visits in New Mexico peaked in July at 255, and in 2021, they peaked in June at 260.

As someone who uses drugs and has experienced homelessness in the past, Charzuk has “met some of the same challenges that (program) participants meet on a daily basis,” she said. 

Harm reduction workers are also at risk. In the summer of 2021, while handing out water in a local park, Charzuk was overcome by symptoms of heat stroke that kept her out of the field for days. “I feel like I learned a little bit more on how to take care of the people that are on my team as well as myself,” she said. 

For Hambley, such incidents speak to how important it is for harm reduction workers to think about their own physical and mental health during crises, “or else everyone will burn out,” they said. 

That tension came to a head for Arianna Campbell in the summer of 2021, when the Caldor Fire threatened to raze her community in Placerville, California, 90 miles southeast of Chico. As the flames approached, Campbell’s husband, a retired firefighter, suggested Campbell pack a go box. It was the first time he had ever done so. 

“He had some indications that this was going to be a very big one,” said Campbell; in fact, the fire would go on to burn over 200,000 acres and more than 1,000 buildings. 

But Campbell, a physician assistant, knew that she would be needed at the local hospital. Crises like wildfires strain emergency departments, Campbell explained, which are flooded by people with injuries, respiratory problems or other medical issues. This is especially likely for those who lack stable housing or have a substance use disorder. “If you’re someone who uses drugs, you may not necessarily have a lot of options,” Campbell said. 

In Placerville, Campbell helped her hospital become one of the country’s first rural sites to offer buprenorphine, a medication that helps curb opioid addiction. “If someone is being treated on buprenorphine and there is a lapse in treatment, they are at close to three times the risk of dying,” she said, “because it puts them at such high risk of return to use and overdose.”

Maggie Seldeen, who describes herself as a practicing drug user, founded High Rockies Harm Reduction to address the dearth of safe injection supplies in the region surrounding Aspen, Colorado. Overdoses from opioids, most notably fentanyl, have skyrocketed in the state since the start of the pandemic. For Seldeen—who used cocaine and heroin intravenously for years, starting as a freshman in high school, and who has seen numerous friends contract hepatitis—practicing harm reduction through the use of clean needles and fresh syringes is critically important. But more frequent wildfires and landslides affected the area’s already strained supply chain. 

“A lot of people of color, a lot of queer and trans folks, a lot of poor folks already understand the ways the system fails them.” 

That puts the lives of people who use drugs at risk, she said. In 2020, for instance, the Grizzly Creek Fire meant that I-70 in Glenwood Canyon—45 miles north of Aspen, and a critical juncture on the route from Aspen to Denver, more than a three-hour drive away—was closed for two weeks.  

“It gets really scary,” said Seldeen, who spoke about how the anxiety provoked by wildfires can push her and others to use substances as coping mechanisms. 

Now, Seldeen always has a go bag in her car when she is in the field in the summer months. It holds important personal documents, water, Narcan and first aid supplies, in case she encounters people who need help using drugs safely or reversing an overdose during an evacuation. Her hope is to create a network of people in the Rockies who are knowledgeable about—and prepared for—reducing the risks of drug use. Those connections, she says, will become increasingly important in a future that involves more climate events.

Seldeen isn’t alone in seeing the importance of community in facing the dueling crises of addiction and climate change. Back in Chico, Hambley now chairs the Northern Valley Harm Reduction Coalition, which Hambley helped grow in the wake of the Camp Fire, determined to continue the collective approach to harm reduction that came out of that disaster. “This is a community response,” they said. “The networks that we have are strong.” 

The embers of the Camp Fire had barely cooled in March 2020, when the Chico network had to mobilize once again to prevent overdoses during the statewide COVID-19 lockdown.

“This is a marathon,” Hambley said, explaining how their queer identity and personal experience living on the margins have given them the tools to build a community that will rise to the challenge. 

“A lot of people of color, a lot of queer and trans folks, a lot of poor folks already understand the ways the system fails them,” Hambley said. “As a queer trans person, I’ve already learned how to create family and community and networks outside of my home. Those are skills I live with every day, so in moments of crisis, our skill sets actually become incredibly valuable.”   

Robin Buller is a freelance journalist based in Oakland, California. She writes about health, equity and climate. Email her at robinmbuller@gmail.com.

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On August 31, the Air Force announced that a California company called Oklo would design, construct, own, and operate a micro nuclear reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The contract will potentially run for 30 years, with the reactor intended to go online in 2027 and produce energy through the duration of the contract. Should the reactor prove successful, the hope is that it will allow other Air Force bases to rely on modular miniature reactors to augment their existing power supply, lessening reliance on civilian energy grids and increasing the resiliency of air bases.

Located less than two degrees south of the Arctic Circle, Eielson may appear remote on maps centered on the continental United States, but its northern location allows it to loom over the Pacific Ocean. A full operational squadron of F-35A stealth jet fighters are based at Eielson, alongside KC-135 jet tankers that offer air refueling. As the Department of Defense orients towards readiness for any conflict with what it describes as the “pacing challenge” of China, the ability to reliably get aircraft into the sky quickly and reliably extends to ensuring that bases can have electrical power at all times.

“If you look at what installations provide, they deliver sorties. At Eielson Air Force base they deliver sorties for F-35 aircraft that are stationed there,” Ravi I. Chaudhary, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment, tells Popular Science via Zoom. “But if you think about all that goes with that, you’ve got ground equipment that needs powering. You’ve got fuel systems that run on power. You’ve got base operations that run on power. You’ve got maintenance facilities that run on power, and that all increases draw.”

And it’s not just maintenance facilities that need power, Chaudhary points out; the base also houses communities that live there, go to school there, and shop at places like the commissary.

While the commissary may not be the most immediately necessary part of base operations, ensuring that there’s backup power to send the planes into the air, and take care of families while the fighters are away, is an important part of base functioning. 

But in the event that the base needs more power, or an independent backup source, bases often turn to diesel generators. Those are reliable, but come with their own logistical obligations, for supplying and maintaining diesel generators, to say nothing of the carbon impact. As a promotional video for the Eielson micro-reactor project notes, the military is “the nation’s largest single energy consumer,” which understates the outsized role the US military has as a producer of greenhouse gasses and carbon emissions. 

This need is where the idea of a small nuclear reactor comes into play.

“When you have a core micro reactor source that can provide independent clean energy to the installation, that’s a huge force multiplier for you because then you don’t have to rely on more vulnerable commercial grids,” says Chaudhary. These reactors would facilitate a strategy Chaudhary called “islanding,” where “you take that insulation, you sequester it from the local power grid, and you execute operations, get your sorties out of town and deploy.”

The quest for a modular, base-scale nuclear reactor is almost as old as the Air Force itself. In the 1950s, the US Army explored the idea of powering bases with Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, or SL-1. In January 1961, SL-1 tragically and fatally exploded, killing three operators. The Navy, meanwhile, successfully continues to use nuclear reactor power plants on board some of its ships and submarines.

In this case, for its Eielson reactor, the Air Force and Oklo are drawing on decades of innovation, improvement, and refined safety processes since then, to create a liquid-metal cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor that’s designed to be self-cooling when or if it fails.

And importantly, the Air Force is starting small. The announced program is to design just a five megawatt reactor, and then scale up the technology once that works. It’s a far cry from the base’s existing coal and oil power plant, which generates over 33 megawatts. Adding five megawatts to that grid is at present an augmentation of what already exists, but one that could make the islanding strategy possible.

If a base can function as an island, that means attacks on an associated civilian grid can’t prevent the base from operating. This works for attacks with conventional weapons, like bombs and missiles, and it should work too for attempts to sabotage the grid through the internet, like with a cyber attack. Nuclear attack could still disrupt a grid, to say nothing of the resulting concurrent deaths, but Chaudhary sees base resilience as its own kind of further deterrent action against such threats.

“We’ve recognized in our national defense strategy that strong resilient infrastructure can be a critical deterrent,” says Chaudhary. “Our energy is gonna be the margin of victory.”

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Despite ample evidence to the contrary, heat pumps are still considered by some to be inferior to traditional gas and fossil fuel installations. A new study published on September 11 in Joule, however, offers even more credence to adopting the eco-friendly alternative, while also debunking some of the more persistent myths surrounding heat pumps. Even in extreme cold environments, heat pumps perform as much as three times better than fossil fuel options, the latest study found.

To understand how heat pumps work, imagine the opposite of a refrigerator—instead of a fridge sucking up its ambient interior heat and pumping that outside the container via its compressor, a home’s heat pump sucks in warmth for later use. Heat pumps’ sources generally either come from ambient outside air, or underground, such as via geothermal heat. The principle is largely the same as AC units, which operate on the same principles but in reverse. Either way, a team of Oxford University researchers working alongside the independent think tank, Regulatory Assistance Project, have ample evidence that pumps are much more preferable to pollutant-heavy standards.

[Related: Energy-efficient heat pumps will be required for all new homes in Washington.]

As The Guardian explains, the study aggregated data from seven field studies across the US, Canada, China, Germany, Switzerland, the UK. After analyzing the numbers, the team found that heat pumps operated two-to-three times more efficiently than gas and oil heaters at below zero temperatures. According to the findings, this makes heat pumps perfectly suited—if not superior—for homes across the globe, including in Europe and the UK.

Speaking with Canary Media, Duncan Gibb, study co-author and a senior advisor at the Regulatory Assistance Project, argued that the study supports their belief that “there are very few—if any—technical conditions where a heat pump is not suitable based on the climate,” at least in Europe.

That’s not to say that consumers wouldn’t benefit from switching to heat pumps in the US—far from it, actually. According to the team’s field studies, even some of the nation’s coldest regions in Alaska and Maine still offered more efficient heat pump performance than fossil fuel counterparts. Extrapolate that to the country’s generally warmer areas, and heat pumps generate even more bang for their buck.

The new information presents a stark counter to recent dismissals of the technology, which are often financed by those with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry. “Even though heat pump efficiency declines during the extreme cold and back-up heating may be required, air-source heat pumps can still provide significant energy system efficiency benefits on an instantaneous and annual basis compared with alternatives,” the study’s authors argue in the paper’s introduction. And from their new data, they have the numbers to prove it.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In several quiet rooms in a marine lab in southwest France, dozens of Pacific oysters sit in large glass tanks, quietly living their oyster lives. Each morning, the lights come up slowly, carefully mimicking the rising sun, but at night the rooms never fully darken. The dim glow simulates the light pollution that increasingly plagues many marine species—even in natural habitats.

The results of the experiment, which were recently published, found that artificial light at night can disrupt oyster behavior and alter the activity of important genes that keep the animals’ internal clocks ticking.

Damien Tran, a marine scientist at the Paris-based French National Centre for Scientific Research, and one of the study’s authors, was surprised that even the lowest level of nighttime light that they tested—“below the intensity of the full moon,” he says—was enough to throw off the oysters’ circadian rhythm.

It’s especially remarkable, Tran says, when you remember that oysters don’t have eyes.

How oysters see is a bit of a mystery. While related bivalves, such as scallops, have eye-like organs, oysters likely use patches of specialized cells on their skin to detect light, though scientists have yet to identify the cells or figure out exactly how they might work.

In the recent study, Tran and his colleagues put four tanks of oysters in different rooms and exposed each to a different intensity of artificial light at night. The researchers compared the oysters’ responses with the responses of animals in a control tank that experienced complete nighttime darkness.

Tran’s colleague and coauthor, marine scientist Laura Payton, explains that shell movement is really the only oyster behavior that can be observed. The team fitted half of the oysters in each tank with electrodes to determine when the animals opened their shells—something oysters do to feed, breathe, and mate. In the control tank, oysters were most active in the middle of the day but started to close when the lights went out.

But exposure to artificial light at night caused the oysters in the other four tanks to stay open at inappropriate times, with activity peaking in the early evening. And while oysters have certain genes that typically turn “on” during the day and others that turn on at night, exposure to nighttime light eliminated the difference. For example, the oyster equivalent of a mammal gene that helps make melatonin is usually more active at night, but the researchers observed that the gene stayed highly active during the day, eclipsing the natural circadian rhythm.

In human terms, that’s called insomnia. In oysters, as Payton explains, this response could negatively affect their health, possibly making the animals more vulnerable to disease over the long term. Although, she concedes, many of the specific consequences have yet to be studied.

If oyster populations do suffer, so would the ecology and economy of many regions worldwide, where oysters filter water, protect shorelines from storms, and, as a commercially grown species, provide food and jobs to communities.

Emily Fobert, a marine ecologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the research, says the results are compelling. But she critiqued the researchers’ choice to expose just one tank of oysters to each level of artificial light. That means there’s a chance that the study results were caused by something else in the tank, rather than the light alone, she says. Fobert doesn’t question that the changes in oyster behavior and gene expression were due to the artificial light, but having multiple tanks per light level would have made the study more robust, she says.

Nevertheless, artificial light at night is a growing concern for many marine species. Oysters in particular need our help, Payton says, because they can’t run away when their environment is disturbed.

Technologically, Fobert says, it’s completely in our power to improve conditions for the health and well-being of marine species that are affected by light pollution. “We have huge opportunities to get it right.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

About 22 million Americans live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and as the housing crisis continues to worsen in places like Arizona, California, and New York, that number could go up.

But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences—advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.

According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation. 

It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.

“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.” 

A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people.

Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models that relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly. 

“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”

The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.

But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities. 

The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.

“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.” 

Mobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections: older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient, and better functioning than some traditional homes. 

When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California last month, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped, because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning. 

“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren. 

This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.

Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.

In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home. 

A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.

Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach. 

“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”

On the other side of the country, though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York, have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly. 

This first-of-its-kind project is giving owners funding for heat pumps to replace the polluting natural gas or propane furnaces needed to heat mobile homes. The program also provides money to cover the cost of insulation needed to keep the heating and cooling provided by electric appliances in the home and reduce electric bills. 

Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions in upstate New York, says that while their program, which is ongoing, has so far been successful in helping people access funding, they still are limited in their reach. The program would need more money as well as guidance from state and federal authorities to be able to meet the needs of everyone who applied.

Nicholson said that currently, the program is trying to help people transition off of natural gas, which is available cheaply despite its destructive climate impacts. This often puts the onus on consumers to be able to invest in climate-friendly technology, if no additional funding is available.

Cost is a vital aspect of upgrading mobile homes: “It affects how people make decisions,” said Nicholson. “Whether or not they’re going to stay on gas and stick to another cheap gas furnace.” 

Stigma surrounding mobile home parks is a huge reason for issues regarding resource allocation and zoning issues. Additionally, some of the most pressing issues come from a common problem for almost all mobile home residents: They’re just not considered. 

In Ithaca, that means many transmission lines that service mobile home parks are capped at a certain wattage that is far below what it would take to electrify them, which provides challenges for Nicholson. 

“There are no incentives set up by the state or the feds to help to pay a mobile home park owner to upgrade the electrical capacity of his park,” said Nicholson. “We’re way behind schedule for electrification.”

Back in California, in the Eastern Coachella Valley, this means that not only did Tropical Storm Hilary flood mobile home parks but that the roads were closed — further isolating residents. In this case, as in others such as in Texas in 2021, large-scale efforts to avoid the impacts of a disaster such as a hurricane or a cold snap do not consider mobile home residents and owners. 

This is a problem, according to Zachary Lamb, a professor at the college of environmental design at the University of California, Berkeley, because not being considered makes it difficult to be resilient to climate change. 

“Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks,” said Lamb. “So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat. …They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.” 

Despite those vulnerabilities, past research shows that in areas where marginalized communities live, people can and do come together to solve issues collaboratively. This makes one of the most misunderstood forms of housing a good place to invest in, according to Lamb.

“Making investments in climate resilience, that is such a no-brainer,” said Lamb. “In terms of both improving the infrastructure quality, and also in terms of giving residents more agency and more control over their communities.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/solutions/mobile-homes-could-be-a-climate-solution/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Studies increasingly show that changing weather patterns, extreme heat, and unpredictable storms are likely to pop up pretty much everywhere on the globe. According to recent research, it turns out that 98 percent of the world’s population has been exposed to higher-than-normal temperatures made twice more likely by carbon dioxide pollution.

The new findings come from a report from US-based climate research group Climate Central and follow reports that this summer has been the hottest three-month period recorded, and July alone was the hottest month on record. 

The latest report utilizes Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), which reveals how much climate change influences the temperature on any given day on the globe—so a level of 5 would mean this event was five times more likely to occur because of climate change. According to their findings, nearly half of the world’s population experienced at least 30 days between June and August with a CSI of at least 3. This means that the 30 or more days of extreme weather were made three times more likely due to climate change. 

[Related: July 2023 was likely the hottest month in 120,000 years.]

At least 1.5 billion people (or around one in every five people) saw at least this level of climate-change induced heat every single day during this time period. 

“In every country we could [analyze], including the southern hemisphere, where this is the coolest time of year, we saw temperatures that would be difficult—and in some cases nearly impossible—without human-caused climate change,” Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science, told Reuters.

Of course, not all locations saw the same amount of impact—79 countries in particular experienced at least half of their summer days at CSI level 3 or higher. Over half of these were UN-designated least developed (based on income thresholds, health and education indices, as well as economic and environmental vulnerabilities) countries and small island developing states. These countries typically contribute very little to climate change itself, in this case, culminating around 7 percent of total GHG emissions, according to the report. They also are at higher risk of climate-related disasters and still struggle to access funding to take mitigating measures. 

“In every place, if you start to push it beyond the temperatures that people experience on a regular basis, that’s dangerous heat because you’re not prepared for it physiologically. You’re not prepared for it in terms of your infrastructure,” Pershing told Scientific American.

[Related: US climate efforts look promising, but there’s more to do.]

Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise year after year, and major fossil fuel companies and emitters have made minimal progress or backtracked on climate goals. As fossil fuel use continues to rise, so do their climate-warming emissions. 

“Breaking heat records has become the norm in 2023,” Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “Global warming continues because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels. It is that simple.” 

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Climate change is often in the form of extremes in weather like sweltering heat domes, devastating inland flooding or record breaking wildfire seasons, which puts lives and livelihoods at risk for humans. However, the world’s animals who are on the front lines of an ever changing planet experience these changes a little differently. 

[Related: We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.]

“When we see climate change in the news, we often think of big storms or major weather events but animals are vulnerable to the smallest changes,” wildlife filmmaker and host Bertie Gregory tells PopSci. 

In the new series “Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory,” viewers can get a look into these subtleties and changes. In one episode, the team is searching a dive spot in Indonesia for the elusive devil ray, when a swarm of hundreds of jellyfish approaches.

“Avoiding their stingers was like playing a video game! We were told that huge jellyfish plumes like that were becoming a more regular sight in these tropical waters, which is not a good sign,” Gregory says. 

When Gregory checked the dive thermometer, it read 87.8 degrees Fahrenheit, in water that should have been about 82 degrees. A few degrees might not always sound like much, but has an outsized impact on animals.  “Jellyfish are thought to tolerate climate change better than other species, hence their huge numbers on that day. For us, it meant no other signs of life,” says Gregory.

[Related: Maine’s puffins show another year of remarkable resiliency.]

The series spans the planet and uses high-tech drones and cameras that Gregory calls a “game changer” for wildlife filmmaking. The tech allows the filmmakers to catch a glimpse of the outer lives of animals and even some of their more inner workings.

“We also used a military grade thermal imaging camera to film elephants at night in the depth of the jungle in the Central African Republic—it uses heat to “see” in the dark and elephant ears look incredible as you can see all their veins!” says Gregory.

The series also captures just how difficult it is for terrestrial animals like the pumas of Patagonia and marine mammals like Antarctica’s orca whales to get a solid meal and how climate change continues to threaten vital food sources. 

An episode features a group of Antarctic orcas known as the B1s during what Gregory says was the warmest Antarctic trip he has ever experienced. These killer whales are known for a unique strategy to hunt seals resting on the ice that might remind some orca enthusiasts of the hydroplaning killer whales near Argentina’s Valdés peninsula who thrust their 8,000 to 16,000 pound bodies up onto the beach to catch seals. 

Instead of using surf, sand, and rocks like their Argentinian cousins, these Antarctic killer whales work together as a team to create waves that wash the seals into the water. 

“We witnessed and filmed the staggering intelligence and adaptability of a group of killer whales. There are thought to be just 100 of these unique killer whales in existence, and during filming it was clear they were struggling to ‘wave wash’ seals from ice because there wasn’t much ice,” says Gregory.

[Related: Orcas are attacking boats. But is it revenge or trauma?]

The whales had to constantly adapt their strategy just to get a single seal, sometimes risking an escape from their prey in order to teach the younger whales strategies to carry on to the next generation. 

These constant struggles offer up sobering reminders of the macro and micro ways that the planet is changing and making life more difficult for almost every living thing.. Over one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, a rate of loss that is 1,000 times greater than previously expected. The  United Nations agreed upon a biodiversity treaty at the end of 2022 pledging to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030. Currently, only about 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation.

The same location in Indonesia where Gregory and his team encountered the stingy jellyfish swarm is home to the Misool Marine Reserve. Despite climate change’s constant challenges, the area is a conservation success story thanks to community-led initiatives to protect the area from overfishing by implementing specific parts where fishing is allowed.

“Now, Misool is one of the few places on earth where biodiversity is increasing. What they’ve managed to do could be a blueprint for how we can protect oceans around the world and proof that if given the chance, nature can make an amazing comeback,” says Gregory. “It’s good news for wildlife and good news for people.”

“Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory” premieres September 13 on Disney+.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

In 2008, polar bears had the dubious distinction of being the first animal placed on the United States’ endangered species list due to climate threats, specifically the loss of Arctic sea ice. 

But that same year, President George W. Bush’s Interior Department adopted a new policy that prevented federal agencies from considering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on polar bears, despite those emissions being the main driver of the climate threat to the keystone Arctic predators. Every new ton of emissions leads to more melting of the sea ice that the bears live on. 

The policy-setting 2008 memo was written by Dave Bernhardt, a former fossil fuel industry lobbyist then working as solicitor for the Interior Department who would go on to be President Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior. It required that the projected emissions impacts to polar bears from new proposals, like pipelines or drilling permits, be separated from the effects of historical cumulative emissions.

That set what seemed an impossibly high scientific bar at the time because researchers hadn’t yet fully identified the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from specific projects on threatened species. But science has cleared that hurdle, said Steven Amstrup, an adjunct biology professor at the University of Wyoming and co-author of a new peer-reviewed paper in Science that could help “close the loophole” in the Endangered Species Act by showing how emissions from new projects on federal lands result in more days during which polar bears can’t feed because of declining sea ice.

The paper establishes a direct link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and cub survival rates using a methodology that can “parse the impact of emissions by source,” said Amstrup, also the chief science officer for Polar Bears International, a nonprofit conservation organization.

For example, the new paper notes that the hundreds of power plants in the U.S. combined will emit more than 60 gigatons of carbon dioxide over their 30-year lifespans. By calculating the amount of warming that carbon will drive, and the amount of Arctic sea ice that heat will melt, they estimate that those emissions will reduce polar bear cub recruitment in the Southern Beaufort Sea population by about 4 percent. By using that formula, they can measure how greenhouse gas emissions from a new project would affect polar bear populations, a calculation that wasn’t as clear when polar bears were listed as vulnerable. 

And the same type of analysis could be applied to measure the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on habitat and demographic changes for other species listed as endangered, Amstrup said.

Emerging Science Supports Climate Lawsuits

Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said a current legal challenge to the Willow oil and gas drilling project in northern Alaska uses a similar argument. 

“Our view is this,” Burger said. “Science supports drawing a causal connection from emissions from specific sources to climate change impacts in specific places. Studies like this one without question reinforce the argument.”

The specific impacts of greenhouse gas emissions are “particularly evident” when it comes to loss of sea ice and the impact on polar bears, the Sabin Center noted in an amicus brief submitted in support of plaintiffs challenging the Willow project, he said.

In the brief, the Sabin Center alleges that the Bureau of Land Management ignored the effect of greenhouse emissions on endangered and threatened species due to the “misconception” that science could not establish “causal links” between emissions and impacts to at-risk species. But since 2008, when the Interior Department’s memo tried to ban consideration of greenhouse gas impacts on listed species, research has made the causal connections more clear, he added. 

“What’s more, climate models and detection and attribution methods can be used to quantify the relative contributions of specific GHG sources to climate change impacts,” Burger wrote in the brief. In some cases, he said, it’s even possible to isolate the per-ton effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as was the case with a 2016 study showing that each additional metric ton of carbon dioxide results in the sustained loss of about 3 square meters of September sea ice in the Arctic.

A 2021 report from the Sabin Center summarizes the scientific findings about the impacts of climate change on endangered species, and the new study “provides useful new methodologies and evidence,” to describe those effects, said Michael Gerrard, an environmental law expert and co-founder of the Sabin Center.

Scientists and legal scholars have been telling federal agencies for quite some time that the Bernhardt Memo is incorrect, said Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute with the Center for Biological Diversity. There are pending lawsuits that have raised that point, but no rulings yet, and the new paper adds extra scientific support to such cases.

“It is a very big deal,” said Siegel, who wrote the petition for listing polar bears as endangered species in 2004. “It’s the first time scientists have actually done the analysis and published their findings in one of the world’s leading scientific journals.”

Amstrup did the original research for the U.S. government that supported the listing of polar bears, she said. The science was so clear that the George W. Bush administration had no choice but to list the species.

But the lack of any meaningful action to protect polar bears since then has been frustrating to Siegel.

“I’m feeling a lot of grief, and I’m feeling a lot of anger, like a lot of people,” she said. “But what keeps me going is that there is still time to make a difference. There’s nothing more important than the actions taken right now to reduce greenhouse pollution.”

She said the failure of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which implements the Endangered Species Act, to properly analyze the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on polar bears and other listed species is “a form of climate denial. It’s going against the science, and it is breaking the law.” 

“Hopefully the publication of this paper will finally convince the Biden administration to follow the science and the law,” she added.

In 2021, scientists and law professors petitioned the Biden Administration to rescind any rules that prevent agencies from considering the impacts of greenhouse gases. Failing to consider them “leaves the government blindfolded in its effort to protect threatened species,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation scientist at Duke University who signed the petition. 

Shaye Wolfe, climate director for the Center For Biological Diversity,said the polar bear is an example of how rules like Bernhardt’s memo have weakened climate action. Without such policies, which the Trump Administration tried to further enshrine in 2019 when Bernhardt was secretary of the interior, “agencies would have another mechanism to consider and reduce carbon emissions,” Wolf said.

“Greenhouse gases are no different from mercury, pesticides or anything else that accumulates in the land, air or water and harms species,” she added. “It’s simply ridiculous not to take them into account.”

Global Warming Increasing Mass Extinction Risk

Right now, there are 1,497 animals on the U.S. endangered species list and the best available science shows that nearly every one of them faces climate-related threats, as do 1 million other species on the planet. 

The number, distribution and density of species—biodiversity—is declining rapidly in an unfolding mass extinction that could equal dramatic die-offs recorded in fossil records and attributed to planetary system-changing events like ice ages, meteor crashes or intense, massive and persistent volcanic eruptions. 

The current wave of species declines and extinctions could have profound impacts on human societies. Food security will be threatened if pollinators, seed-spreading birds or important food fish disappear. About 4 billion people rely primarily on natural medicines for their health care, while about 70 percent of drugs used to treat cancer are natural or are synthetic products inspired by nature. 

And if global warming changes the reproductive cycles of fundamental organisms like plankton, bacteria and fungi, it would have a huge effect on how much carbon dioxide oceans, fields and forests remove from the atmosphere, potentially driving even faster warming of the climate. 

Some groups of animals have been particularly hard hit, with 40 percent of amphibians and about a third of corals and marine mammals facing possible extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations global biodiversity report, which acknowledged that “Nature is essential for human existence and good quality of life.” 

“Most of nature’s contributions to people are not fully replaceable, and some are irreplaceable,” the report added.

Seen as a global call to action, the report concluded that nature is deteriorating worldwide. “The biosphere, upon which humanity as a whole depends, is being altered to an unparalleled degree across all spatial scales,” the report noted. “Biodiversity—the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems—is declining faster than at any time in human history.”

There are numerous scientific red flags. A 2022 study showed that the current rate of ocean warming could bring the greatest extinction of sea life in 250 million years. And it’s also clear that the loss of biodiversity and the climate crisis must be addressed hand-in-hand, as a 2021 report from the United Nations noted. Global warming is an overarching threat to nearly all species, and if biodiversity collapses, some of the planet’s best natural mechanisms to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and slow atmospheric heating will fail, the report explained.

Every Ton of CO2 Brings New Misery, and Not Just to Polar Bears

Research shows that Human activities are responsible for declining polar bear habitat and most of the damage to the rest of the life-sustaining web of ecosystems and species, and those activities often intensify each other’s effects. Land impacts like urban development and industrialized agriculture strip away carbon-sequestering vegetation and destroy habitat. Greenhouse gas emissions are making parts of the ocean too hot for many fish and melting the snow that sustains wolverines high in the Rocky Mountains of the western United States.

Research like the new study could provide scientific support to get more protection for the few remaining wolverines that depend on a deep mountain snowpack for denning, said Matthew Bishop, the Rocky Mountains office director with the Western Environmental Law Center. 

Climate models and observations show most of those snowfields retreating rapidly, making it crucial to protect any remaining pockets as climate refugia. But despite the models, the federal government claims it doesn’t know enough about how wolverines will respond to the shrinking snow to act on the science, Bishop said. 

“We know they are snow dependent species and that snow is going to be gone,” he said. “That’s enough and the court agrees, but the agencies keep coming back and saying they need to know more.” At some point soon, it’s going to be too late for wolverines and many other climate-sensitive species, he added. 

“When in doubt, any kind of uncertainty should err on the side of protection for the species, and doing what we can to limit all the non-climate stressors,” he said. “Let’s give them a chance to make it. Ultimately, it may not matter. But let’s do everything we can in our power to make sure they stay on the landscape.”

For polar bears, like for wolverines, that means protecting parts of their habitat that might persist for the next 50 or 100 years, even if the outcome beyond that is uncertain. But most of all, as last week’s paper in Science emphasized, it means cutting greenhouse gas emissions immediately and quickly. 

Pairing a biologist and a climatologist for the new paper on how greenhouse gas emissions affect polar bears seemed a logical choice, said co-author Ceclilia Bitz, a scientist at the University of Washington, who studies the connection between climate, sea ice and wildlife habitat.

Focusing on the direct link between greenhouse gas emissions and polar bear habitat makes the paper policy relevant and helps paint a clear picture of the impacts of sea ice decline, she said.

“We’re saying that every additional 23 gigatons of CO2 that we emit as a world causes an additional day that the polar bears have to fast,” she said. “Currently we’re emitting about 50 gigatons per year as a planet.”

That increases the time polar bears go without eating by more than a day each year in each of their populations, she said.

“That’s huge. Imagine if you’re already hungry, going an extra day without eating,” she said. “It’s relentless. As humans, we’re emitting so much CO2 that it’s having these really perceptible and serious consequences.”

Amstrup said the new study gives people one more reference point for understanding the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Polar bears depend on thresholds,” he said. “If they fast for over a certain amount of days, they simply can’t survive.”

The findings again show how closely linked the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are, Siegel added. “They cannot be separated,” she said. “The survival of all life on Earth, including ours, is at stake.”

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Decontaminating water is as vital an endeavor as ever as pollution issues continue to flood the planet. Knowing this, researchers at the University of California San Diego just created the latest mind-bending tool to aid in future clean-up projects: a 3D-printed “engineered living material” made of seaweed polymers and genetically altered bacteria that breaks down organic pollutants in water.

As detailed via a new paper published in Nature Communications, the remarkable creation comes courtesy of a team working within the University of California San Diego’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). According to the project announcement, the team first hydrated a seaweed-derived polymer known as alginate. Meanwhile, the researchers genetically engineered a waterborne, photosynthetic bacteria called cyanobacteria to produce laccase, an enzyme capable of neutralizing organic pollutants like antibiotics, dyes, pharmaceutical drugs, and BPAs. The ingredients were then combined and passed through a 3D printer to produce a grid-like design whose surface area-to-volume ratio allowed the bacteria optimal access to light, gasses, and nutrients.

[Related: The US might finally regulate toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water.]

“This collaboration allowed us to apply our knowledge of the genetics and physiology of cyanobacteria to create a living material,” School of Biological Sciences faculty member Susan Golden said in a statement. “Now we can think creatively about engineering novel functions into cyanobacteria to make more useful products.”

To test their creation, the engineers introduced their decontaminator to water polluted by indigo carmine, a blue dye often used within denim textile manufacturing. The team’s grid-like, living tool managed to safely and effectively decolorize the water solution over the course of multiple days.

However, that still leaves the alginate-cyanobacteria mixture within the water. Replacing one foreign pollutant with foreign, synthesized bacteria doesn’t necessarily solve the larger problem of contamination. To solve this, the UC San Diego team further engineered their version of cyanobacteria to adversely respond to theophylline, a molecule similar to caffeine found in many teas and chocolates. Whenever the decontamination substance comes into contact with the molecule, the bacteria subsequently produces a specific protein to break down and destroy its own cells, thus getting rid of the substance.

“The living material can act on the pollutant of interest, then a small molecule can be added afterwards to kill the [cyanobacteria],” Jon Pokorski, a professor of nanoengineering and research co-lead, said in the announcement. “This way, we can alleviate any concerns about having genetically modified bacteria lingering in the environment.”

As useful as this living filer could already be in decontamination projects, the team hopes to eventually take their substance a step further by designing it to self-destruct without the need for additional outside chemicals.

“Our goal is to make materials that respond to stimuli that are already present in the environment,” Pokorski explained.

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Capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it, also known as carbon sequestration, is one of many methods to mitigate climate change. Carbon dioxide is usually stored in underground geologic formations or biologic forms like forests, soils, or oceans through various methods. In a new research, scientists found that applying basalt dust in croplands can effectively sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide at the gigaton scale.

When silicate rocks like basalt get in contact with rainwater, the chemical process of weathering occurs, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into products that are transported and then stored in the ocean. Natural weathering can be accelerated by grinding silicate rocks into fine particles and applying them to the soil, thereby increasing the surface area and absorbing more carbon dioxide. This process is called enhanced rock weathering (ERW). 

[Related: Blue carbon is a natural climate solution with big potential.]

“These particles undergo chemical reactions with CO2, converting it into bicarbonate ions or stable mineral carbonates,” says Shuang Zhang, assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University. “This process essentially locks away the carbon, effectively removing it from the atmosphere for an extended period.”

According to a study published recently in the journal Earth’s Future, applying 10 tons of basalt dust per hectare on almost a thousand agricultural sites around the globe can sequester 64 gigatons of carbon dioxide over a 75-year period. If this application is extended to all croplands, over 215 gigatons may be sequestered in the same period.

“The numbers point to ERW being a compelling strategy to achieve large-scale carbon sequestration,” says Zhang, who was involved in the study. He adds that it also has “several distinct advantages over alternative carbon capture strategies like afforestation or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).”

Afforestation, or introducing trees in unforested regions, is a greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategy, but it might not be effective in every ecosystem. For instance, the carbon sequestration of afforestation is less effective than grasses in tropical savannas, and it may have limited potential in drylands. 

Meanwhile, the capacity of BECCS—which extracts bioenergy from biomass and stores its carbon dioxide emissions in underground geologic formations to prevent release—may eventually decrease because of the effects of climate change on crop yields and biomass feedstocks.

In comparison, ERW is compatible with existing farmland and is readily scalable by utilizing pre-existing agricultural infrastructure, says Zhang. The method also comes with ecological co-benefits. He adds that ERW can reduce the carbon footprint associated with fertilizer production, mitigate nitrous oxide emissions from the soil, improve soil pH levels and nutrient absorption, and increase crop yields as a result. 

“This twin capacity to ameliorate soil health while capturing carbon provides unique opportunities for agricultural modernization in economically developing nations, thereby extending its transformative potential,” says Zhang. However, some barriers stand in the way of large-scale deployment of ERW.

There are insufficient frameworks for the monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of carbon sequestration activities, says Zhang. For instance, “the impact of ERW byproducts on river systems and the associated carbon leakage has not been fully investigated, a gap that must be addressed to solidify financial incentives for ERW,” he adds. 

[Related: The truth about carbon capture technology.]

The inappropriate handling of finely ground basalt during the application can result in airborne particulate emissions, thus posing a risk to local air quality. There is also potential for nutrient accumulation in water systems as weathered minerals from ERW flow downstream, which could exacerbate issues like eutrophication. Moreover, developing countries often lack the necessary infrastructure for large-scale processing and deployment of basalt, says Zhang. Addressing these issues is crucial before implementing ERW more widely.

Zhang suggests several ways to navigate these barriers. When it comes to research, regulatory standards for MRV can be crafted by the scientific community and ratified by relevant government agencies. Public investment can also focus on upgrading infrastructure and advancing agricultural systems, while the private sector can invest in technologies that enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of ERW.
Overall, exploring the potential of ERW remains worthwhile because its effectiveness as a carbon sequestration method may be resilient to future climatic changes. “Even under high emissions scenarios, the impact on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) rates is minimal, with an approximate increase of only two percent,” says Zhang. “This suggests that ERW would remain an effective strategy for carbon sequestration even as the planet warms.”

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Merkel cell carcinoma, the skin cancer that killed beloved Margaritaville singer Jimmy Buffett on September 1, is rare. But it may become more common in the coming decades. Every year the US diagnoses 3,000 new cases of this disease—a number that is estimated to increase to 3,250 cases by 2025. As the US population ages and global warming influences ultraviolet radiation, dermatologists suspect this caseload will only continue to get higher.

“We know that Merkel cell carcinoma occurs in sun-exposed areas and that UV, in particular, is a risk factor,” says Eva Parker, an assistant professor of dermatology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who has studied climate change’s impact on skin cancer. “I believe we will continue to see increasing rates of both common and less common types of skin cancer.” She pointed to two contributing trends: the delayed period over which skin cancer develops, plus the growing effects of climate change that includes continued pressure humans are placing on the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere.

The relationship between climate change and skin cancer is complex. On one hand, ultraviolet radiation from the sun contributes to skin cancer, because this light can damage our cells’ DNA. And ultraviolet radiation exists regardless of climate change. 

On the other hand, there’s circumstantial evidence that factors related to climate change—stratospheric ozone depletion, heat, and air pollution—are likely contributing to the increasing incidence for melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer. (Fast-growing Merkel cell carcinomas are a subtype of non-melanoma skin cancer.) Research suggests an average global warming of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit is associated with an 11 percent rise in all skin cancers worldwide. The world is already on track to reach this number by 2050. 

[Related: Why doctors almost never say cancer is ‘cured’]

The problem with establishing a direct link to climate change and increasing skin cancer cases is that most of the data is based on animal studies and computer modeling. To definitively say that climate change causes skin cancer, Parker says more epidemiological data on humans is needed. Though she explains how climate change may directly or indirectly contribute to rising skin cancer cases.

One reason is likely because of stratospheric ozone depletion. Think of the ozone layer as a giant hat that covers Earth and blocks out ultraviolet and UVB radiation, which is associated with many forms of skin cancer including Merkel cell carcinoma. In the 1970s, scientists started noticing holes in the ozone layer. Further investigation showed that artificial compounds such as chlorofluorocarbons were destroying ozone. “They’re potent greenhouse gases and incredibly long-lived in the atmosphere,” explains Parker. “The implication is that stratospheric ozone depletion will be ongoing for many decades, even though chlorofluorocarbons have been regulated for some time.” 

With less ozone absorbing UVB radiation, people are more exposed to the radiation’s damaging effects on skin cells, leading to an increasing risk of skin cancer. Fortunately, phasing ozone-depleting chemicals has helped to repair this layer, though the healing process has been slow. Environmental scientists estimate it will take until 2040 for ozone to return to the levels they were in the 1980s. 

[Related: Wind turbines do not cause cancer]

Missing ozone is one climate-related contributor to skin cancer. Heat is another possible culprit, Parker says. Ultraviolet radiation needs heat to activate its tumor-forming ability. Excess heat could indirectly create an ideal environment for cancer to flourish. And, when combined with high humidity, it messes with the body’s way of regulating body temperature. When a body can’t cool itself down through sweating, this could lead to physiological dysfunctions, including issues with gene expression while increasing inflammation and oxidative stress. Lastly, when it’s hot outside, people usually wear less clothing, which heightens their UV exposure and skin cancer risk.

There is one silver lining: While Merkel cell carcinoma is more aggressive than melanoma, it is curable if caught early and treated successfully, says Ling Gao, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of California, Irvine. “For all skin cancers, early diagnosis greatly improves outcomes.”

You’re better off, though, by preventing skin cancer from appearing altogether. The first step is to identify when you’re most exposed to the sun, says David Leffell, a professor of dermatology  at Yale School of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Dermatology. Next, you’ll want to take steps to minimize that exposure. If you often go for a 15-minute walk around the block, stay in the shade and avoid peak hours like noon when the sun is at the highest point in the sky. When you do go outside, shield yourself from ultraviolet rays with SPF 50 sunscreen. What you wear helps, too: A brimmed hat and specialized clothing, such as UPF rated shirts and pants, can block out the sun’s rays. 

If you’re unsure whether you should go outside today, consider downloading an app that rates the UV index. Similar to checking weather forecasts, a UV index will tell you whether it’s safer to stay indoors or to pack some sunscreen before heading out.

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This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how—and where—we live.

Every week between May and October, the Maricopa County Department of Public Health in Arizona releases a heat morbidity report. The most recent report said that 180 people have succumbed to heat-associated illness in the county this year so far. But everyone agrees that number is off.

If previous years are any indication, the true number of heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is much higher: At the end of last summer, the county revised its initial reports upwards by a factor of five, ultimately reporting a sobering 425 heat-related deaths in total.

This lag plagues not just heat-related mortality reporting, but climate-related death data in general. It’s hard to get a full picture of the true number of mortalities connected to a given disaster in real-time. The full death toll often isn’t revealed until weeks, months, even years after the event occurs. And an unknown fraction of deaths often slide by undetected, never making it onto local and federal mortality spreadsheets at all. For example, a recent retrospective study found the number of people who died from exposure to hurricanes and tropical cyclones in the US in the years between 1988 to 2019 was 13 times higher than the federal government’s official estimates. 

That study and others like it indicate that the US is gravely underestimating the health impacts of climate change. “The system of death surveillance wasn’t designed for a climate-changed world,” said Robbie Parks, who coauthored the study on hurricane-related mortalities and works as a researcher at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. 

As temperatures rise and weather extremes worsen, finding better ways to monitor and report climate-related illnesses and deaths will become increasingly urgent. A full understanding of the climate-driven death toll in the US isn’t just good practice, public health officials and researchers told Grist — it’s also essential for preventing future deaths.

But major obstacles stand in the way. The biggest is that properly diagnosing a death as climate-related requires time, training, and resources that many of the nation’s roughly 3,500 health departments don’t have. While Maricopa County carefully combs through every suspected heat-related death that occurs in the county during Arizona’s long summer, it’s an outlier in that respect.

“It’s unrealistic to expect that we’re able to apply that method to every single person who dies,” Parks said. 

A better way to capture the scope of climate-related deaths that occur annually in the U.S. would be to apply a retrospective statistical analysis like the one Parks deployed to conduct his hurricane study. But that route also requires time, resources, and training — investments the federal government would have to make. It’s not clear that documenting these mortalities is a priority for the Biden administration or Congress, which would need to fund the effort. 

Maricopa County’s enhanced heat surveillance system, which essentially counts each heat-related death by hand, is something of a state-level gold standard. Even so, the system only gives the county a concrete lower bound. That’s valuable, Parks said, because the county is able to know at least how many heat-related deaths occurred in a given year. But it’s almost guaranteed to be an underestimate. “The perception that that’s the true number is really rather pervasive,” he said. “It’s a very conservative estimate.” That even a rigorous system like Maricopa County’s cannot provide a full accounting illuminates the challenges of counting climate-related deaths nationwide.  

Nick Staab, a medical epidemiologist for the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, works in the department responsible for compiling the county’s weekly mortality reports. His office is sent cases where the county’s medical examiner or Department of Vital Records, the office that documents deaths, marriages, divorces, and other statistics, has found that heat was a primary or secondary cause of death. Then, he and the other epidemiologists determine what factors contributed to that death. They look at where the death occurred, whether there was air conditioning present, if substance use played a role, and other risk factors that have been added on since their system was first developed in 2006. That information helps the department understand how heat influences public health in Maricopa County and advise the county on steps it can take to protect its 4 million residents. “We collect that data to paint a picture of risk,” said Staab. 

But undercounting could get baked into the system even before Staab and his colleagues begin their painstaking work: Any one individual along that reporting chain, from the doctor declaring the cause of death to the medical examiner writing the death certificate, might overlook heat as a cause of death. 

“It’s imperfect,” Staab said. “It relies on human reporting.” In some cases, a provider will make their best educated guess as to what the cause of death was. If there are comorbidities — heart disease, obesity, mental illness — heat might not make it on the list, and Staab’s office will never see the death certificate.

“When you have something like heat-related kidney disease or heat-related heart attack,” said John Balbus, the acting director of the federal Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, “there’s no reliable way that every doctor is going to think about it in the same way.”

Collecting data on climate-related deaths gets even trickier when you zoom out. Counties with fewer resources, limited know-how, and infrequent exposure to severe weather events are ill-equipped to record data on climate-related illness and morbidities, let alone report them to the federal government. 

“From county to county and state to state, you have different people with different skills in charge of assessing the underlying cause of death in each person,” Parks, the Columbia University researcher, said. “Even if you go to upstate New York compared to New York City, you might have someone who’s elected, someone who’s not elected, someone who’s a medical doctor, someone who’s not a medical doctor.”

The only way the federal government can get health data on a national scale is if states report their data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. That doesn’t happen very often, Balbus said, because reporting health data to the CDC is largely voluntary. The government receives data on direct heat-related deaths, like death by heatstroke, if those deaths are properly classified as such by emergency departments, but the situation gets murkier with other types of disaster-related mortalities. 

“When you start looking at things like hurricanes, or floods, or even wildfires, the sources of those data are really mixed,” Balbus said. “Some of those people will end up in a coroner’s office and get reported to the state,” he said, and others won’t. 

These factors help explain why a nation as wealthy as the U.S. doesn’t have a clear sense of how many people are being sickened and killed by events related to climate change every year.

One promising alternative to relying on cause-of-death reporting is to use a statistical public health technique called excess mortality — the same method Parks and his colleagues used to conduct their study on hurricane deaths. They unearthed previously uncounted mortalities by comparing how many people in the U.S. would statistically be expected to die in a normal year, versus how many died before, during, and after a hurricane or storm hit. Excess mortality essentially asks the question: What would have happened if there had been no hurricane, wildfire, or flood?

“The idea of ‘who would have not died if there had been no event?’ is, for me, the most sensible way of trying to understand the actual direct impact of a climate-related exposure,” Parks said. 

The government could do this nationally. In fact, it already has: Excess deaths were counted in order to ascertain the true toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. But transposing this practice into the realm of climate would require investment, training, and infrastructure. Unlike COVID-19, climate risk manifests in myriad ways, some expected (dying of heatstroke) and others less so (dying from exposure to a waterborne bacteria).

“It should be done at the federal level,” Parks said, “but it requires expert scientists to be implementing it.” 

That’s where sound policy runs into faulty politics. Balbus’s Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, established by President Biden one week into his tenure, still hasn’t been funded by Congress. Biden requested $3 million to fund the office and staff it with eight permanent employees, but the funding has been stripped out of multiple budget bills by lawmakers.

Still, the government is taking other steps to bridge reporting gaps where it can, particularly when it comes to extreme heat: Last month, the federal government unveiled a new national dashboard aimed at improving how public health officials track heat-related illness. The tracker, modeled after an opioid overdose tool deployed by the Biden administration in 2022, seeks to provide more complete data on heat-related illness across the nation using emergency medical services, or EMS. The online dashboard, run by the Department of Health and Human Services in collaboration with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, tracks heat-related EMS activations — i.e. calls to 911. 

“This is another innovative use of data to show where people succumb, as opposed to tracking it from the emergency room,” Balbus said. “It’s a potentially really powerful use of data, especially if we can aggregate it over years and see the specific locations where people fall ill.” 

However, the mortalities documented by the tracker are only the deaths that occur between the moment when the EMS professionals arrive at the scene and when the ambulance gets to the hospital. Still, the tracker is an example of how data can help the government visualize trends across the whole country and deploy resources to the areas where EMS activations are most concentrated. 

“What we’re seeing is this intensity and ferocity of the exposures and stressors to the point where we’re losing the ability to keep up and adapt with the money, resources, and technologies that we have,” Balbus said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/health/why-the-united-states-undercounts-climate-driven-deaths/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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A new report from the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) found that Earth just experienced its hottest series of three months in a row on record. The data from the European Union-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) found that global sea surface temperatures remained at “unprecedented highs” for the third month in a row.

[Related: July 2023 was likely the hottest month in 120,000 years.]

“Our planet has just endured a season of simmering—the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun. Scientists have long warned what our fossil fuel addiction will unleash,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “Surging temperatures demand a surge in action. Leaders must turn up the heat now for climate solutions. We can still avoid the worst of climate chaos – and we don’t have a moment to lose.”

So far, 2023 is the second warmest year on record behind 2016,—a powerful El Niño year. The planet officially began an El Niño pattern in June, which can bring extreme temperatures and flooding worldwide. A report issued in May from the WMO warned that the warming pattern could temporarily heat the planet by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

August 2023 was the hottest month on record and the second hottest month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. As a whole, the month of August is estimated to have been around 2.7 degrees warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900. 

Global monthly average sea surface temperatures were also the highest on record in August at 69.7 degrees. These temperatures exceeded the previous record set in March 2016 for every single day in August.

In Antarctica, sea ice extent (or coverage) is also at a record low level for this time of year, when the continent is experiencing its winter months. It is 12 percent below average, making for  the largest negative anomaly for August since satellite observations began in the late 1970s according to the WMO. This lack of sea ice can have devastating effects on Emperor penguins and other animals who live and breed in the region. 

On the opposite side of the planet in the Arctic, sea ice coverage was 10 percent below average, but still well above the record minimum set in August 2012.

[Related: July’s extreme heat waves ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change.]

“Eight months into 2023, so far we are experiencing the second warmest year to date, only fractionally cooler than 2016, and August was estimated to be around 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels,” Carlo Buontempo, Director of the C3S’s  European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said in a statement. “What we are observing, not only new extremes but the persistence of these record-breaking conditions, and the impacts these have on both people and planet, are a clear consequence of the warming of the climate system.”

Summer 2023 will likely be one for the history books, with massive heat domes breaking temperature records throughout the southern United States, devastating flooding in Vermont and other parts of the Northeast, extreme temperatures fueling hurricanes in the exceedingly warm Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and a record wildfire season in Canada. Europe has also seen record breaking heat waves as the planet continues to see the effects of climate change.

“It is worth noting that this is happening BEFORE we see the full warming impact of the El Niño event, which typically plays out in the second year after it develops,”  WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. 

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An important email appeared in the inboxes of a small group of health care workers north of Boston as this summer started. It warned that local temperatures were rising into the 80s.

An 80-plus-degree day is not sizzling by Phoenix standards. Even in Boston, it wasn’t high enough to trigger an official heat warning for the wider public.

But research has shown that those temperatures, coming so early in June, would likely drive up the number of heat-related hospital visits and deaths across the Boston region.

The targeted email alert the doctors and nurses at Cambridge Health Alliance in Somerville, Massachusetts, got that day is part of a pilot project run by the nonprofit Climate Central and Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, known as C-CHANGE.

Medical clinicians based at 12 community-based clinics in seven states — California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — are receiving these alerts.

At each location, the first email alert of the season was triggered when local temperatures reached the 90th percentile for that community. In a suburb of Portland, Oregon, that happened on May 14 during a springtime heat wave. In Houston, that occurred in early June.

A second email alert went out when forecasts indicated the thermometer would reach the 95th percentile. For Cambridge Health Alliance primary care physician Rebecca Rogers, that second alert arrived on July 6, when the high hit 87 degrees.

The emails remind Rogers and other clinicians to focus on patients who are particularly vulnerable to heat. That includes outdoor workers, older adults, or patients with heart disease, diabetes, or kidney disease.

Other at-risk groups include youth athletes and people who can’t afford air conditioning, or who don’t have stable housing. Heat has been linked to complications during a pregnancy as well.

“Heat can be dangerous to all of us,” said Caleb Dresser, director of health care solutions at C-CHANGE. “But the impacts are incredibly uneven based on who you are, where you live, and what type of resources you have.”

The pilot program aims to remind clinicians to start talking to patients about how to protect themselves on dangerously hot days, which are happening more frequently because of climate change. Heat is already the leading cause of death in the U.S. from weather-related hazards, Dresser said. Letting clinicians know when temperatures pose a particular threat to their patients could save lives.

“What we’re trying to say is, ‘You really need to go into heat mode now,’” said Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central, with a recognition that “it’s going to be more dangerous for folks in your community who are more stressed.”

“This is not your grandmother’s heat,” said Ashley Ward, who directs the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University. “The heat regime that we are seeing now is not what we experienced 10 or 20 years ago. So we have to accept that our environment has changed. This might very well be the coolest summer for the rest of our lives.”

The alerts bumped heat to the forefront of Rogers’ conversations with patients. She made time to ask each person whether they can cool off at home and at work.

That’s how she learned that one of her patients, Luciano Gomes, works in construction.

“If you were getting too hot at work and maybe starting to feel sick, do you know some things to look out for?” Rogers asked Gomes.

“No,” said Gomes slowly, shaking his head.

Rogers told Gomes about early signs of heat exhaustion: dizziness, weakness, or profuse sweating. She handed Gomes tip sheets she’d printed out after receiving them  along with the email alerts.

They included information about how to avoid heat exhaustion and dehydration, as well as specific guidance for patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), dementia, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and mental health concerns.

Rogers pointed out a color chart that ranges from pale yellow to dark gold. It’s a sort of hydration barometer, based on the color of one’s urine.

“So if your pee is dark like this during the day when you’re at work,” she told Gomes, “it probably means you need to drink more water.”

Gomes nodded. “This is more than you were expecting to talk about when you came to the doctor today, I think,” she said with a laugh.

During this visit, an interpreter translated the visit and information into Portuguese for Gomes, who is from Brazil and quite familiar with heat. But he now had questions for Rogers about the best ways to stay hydrated.

“Because here I’ve been addicted to soda,” Gomes told Rogers through the interpreter. “I’m trying to watch out for that and change to sparkling water. But I don’t have much knowledge on how much I can take of it.”

“As long as it doesn’t have sugar, it’s totally good,” Rogers said.

Now Rogers creates heat mitigation plans with each of her high-risk patients. But she still has medical questions that the research doesn’t yet address. For example: If patients take medications that make them urinate more often, could that lead to dehydration when it’s hot? Should she reduce their doses during the warmest weeks or months? And, if so, by how much? Research has yielded no firm answers to those questions.

Deidre Alessio, a nurse practitioner at Cambridge Health Alliance, also has received the email alerts. She has patients who sleep on the streets or in tents and search for places to cool off during the day.

“Getting these alerts makes me realize that I need to do more homework on the cities and towns where my patients live,” she said, “and help them find transportation to a cooling center.”

Most clinics and hospitals don’t have heat alerts built into electronic medical records, don’t filter patients based on heat vulnerability, and don’t have systems in place to send heat warnings to some or all of their patients.

“I would love to see health care institutions get the resources to staff the appropriate outreach,” said Gaurab Basu, a Cambridge Health Alliance physician who co-directs the Center for Health Equity Advocacy and Education at Cambridge Health Alliance. “But hospital systems are still really strained by covid and staffing issues.”

This pilot program is an excellent start and could benefit by including pharmacists, said Kristie Ebi, founding director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

Ebi has studied heat early-warning systems for 25 years. She says one problem is that too many people don’t take heat warnings seriously. In a survey of Americans who experienced heat waves in four cities, only about half of residents took precautions to avoid harm to their health.

“We need more behavioral health research,” she said, “to really understand how to motivate people who don’t perceive themselves to be at risk, to take action.”

For Ebi and other researchers, the call to action is not just to protect individual health, but to address the root cause of rising temperatures: climate change.

“We’ll be dealing with increased exposure to heat for the rest of our lives,” said Dresser. “To address the factors that put people at risk during heat waves, we have to move away from fossil fuels so that climate change doesn’t get as bad as it could.”

This article is from a partnership that includes WBUR, NPR, and KFF Health News.

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This article was originally published on Undark.

In a sloping backyard in Vallejo, California, Nicholas Spada adjusted a piece of equipment that looked like a cross between a tripod, a briefcase, and a weather vane. The sleek machine, now positioned near a weathered gazebo and a clawfoot bathtub filled with sun-bleached wood, is meant for inconspicuous sites like this, where it can gather long-term information about local air quality.

Spada, an aerosol scientist and engineer at the University of California, Davis, originally designed the machine for a project based about 16 miles south, in Richmond. For six months, researchers pointed the equipment—which includes a camera, an air sensor, a weather station, and an artificial intelligence processor—at railroad tracks transporting coal through the city, and trained an AI model to recognize trains and record how they affected air quality. Now Spada is scouting potential locations for the sensors in Vallejo, where he collaborates with residents concerned about what’s in their air.

The project in Richmond was Spada’s first using AI. The corresponding paper, which published in March 2023, arrived amid proliferating interest—and concern—about AI. Technology leaders have expressed concern about AI’s potential to displace human intelligence; critics have questioned the technology’s potential bias and harvest of public data; and numerous studies and articles have pointed to the significant energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with processing data for its algorithms.

But as concern has sharpened, so has scientific interest in AI’s potential uses—including in environmental monitoring. From 2017 to 2021, the number of studies published each year on AI and air pollution jumped from 50 to 505, which an analysis published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health attributed, in part, to an uptick of AI in more scientific fields. And according to researchers like Spada, applying AI tools could empower locals who have long experienced pollution, but had little data to explicitly prove its direct source.

In Richmond, deep learning technology—a type of machine learning—allowed scientists to identify and record trains remotely and around the clock, rather than relying on the traditional method of in-person observations. The team’s data showed that, as they passed, trains full of coal traveling through the city significantly increased ambient PM2.5, a type of particulate matter that has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, along with early death. Even short-term exposure to PM2.5 can harm health.

The paper’s authors were initially unsure how well the technology would suit their work. “I’m not an AI fan,” said Bart Ostro, an environmental epidemiologist at UC Davis and the lead author of the paper. “But this thing worked amazingly well, and we couldn’t have done it without it.”

Ostro said the team’s results could help answer a question few researchers have examined: How do coal facilities, and the trains that travel between them, impact air in urban areas?

That question is particularly relevant in nearby Oakland, which has debated a proposed coal export terminal for nearly a decade. After Oakland passed a resolution to stop the project in 2016, a judge ruled that the city hadn’t adequately proved that shipping coal would significantly endanger public health. Ostro and Spada designed their research in part to provide data relevant to the development.

“Now we have a study that provides us with new evidence,” said Lora Jo Foo, a longtime Bay Area activist and a member of No Coal in Oakland, a grassroots volunteer group organized to oppose the terminal project.

The research techniques could also prove useful far beyond the Bay Area. The AI-based methodology, Foo said, can be adapted by other communities looking to better understand local pollution.

“That’s pretty earth shattering,” she said.

Across the United States, around 70 percent of coal travels by rail, transiting from dozens of mines to power plants and shipping terminals. Last year, the U.S.—which holds the world’s largest supplies of coal—used about 513 million tons of coal and exported about another 85 million tons to countries including India and the Netherlands.

Before coal is burned in the U.S. or shipped overseas, it travels in open-top trains, which can release billowing dust in high winds and as the trains speed along the tracks. In the past, when scientists have researched how much dust these coal trains release, their research has relied on humans to identify train passings, before matching it with data collected by air sensors. About a decade ago, as domestically-produced natural gas put pressure on U.S. coal facilities, fossil fuel and shipping companies proposed a handful of export terminals in Oregon and Washington to ship coal mined in Wyoming and Montana to other countries. Community opposition was swift. Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, set out to determine the implications for air quality.

In two published studies, Jaffe recorded trains in Seattle and the rural Columbia River Gorge with motion sensing cameras, identified coal trains, and matched them with air data. The research suggested that coal dust released from trains increased particulate matter exposure in the gorge, an area that hugs the boundary of Oregon and Washington. The dust, combined with diesel pollution, also affected air quality in urban Seattle. (Ultimately, none of the planned terminals were built. Jaffe said he’d like to think his research played at least some role in those decisions.)

Studies at other export locations, notably in Australia and Canada, also used visual identification and showed increases in particulate matter related to coal trains.

Wherever there are coal facilities, there will be communities nearby organizing to express their concern about the associated pollution, according to James Whelan, a former strategist at Climate Action Network Australia who contributed to research there. “Generally, what follows is some degree of scientific investigation, some mitigation measures,” he said. “But it seems it’s very rarely adequate.”

Some experts say that the AI revolution has the potential to make scientific results significantly more robust. Scientists have long used algorithms and advanced computation for research. But advancements in data processing and computer vision have made AI tools more accessible.

With AI, “all knowledge management becomes immensely more powerful and efficient and effective,” said Luciano Floridi, a philosopher who directs the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University.

The technique used in Richmond could also help monitor other sources of pollution that have historically been difficult to track. Vallejo, a waterfront city about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, has five oil refineries and a shipyard within a 20 mile radius, making it hard to discern a pollutant’s origin. Some residents hope more data may help attract regulatory attention where their own concerns have not.

“We have to have data first, before we can do anything,” said Ken Szutu, a retired computer engineer and a founding member of the Vallejo Citizen Air Monitoring Network, sitting next to Spada at a downtown cafe. “Environmental justice—from my point of view, monitoring is the foundation.”

Air scientists like Spada have relied on residents to assist with that monitoring—opening up backyards for their equipment, suggesting sites that may be effective locations, and, in Richmond, even calling in tips when coal cars sat at the nearby train holding yard.

Spada and Ostro didn’t originally envision using AI in Richmond. They planned their study around ordinary, motion-detecting security cameras with humans—some community volunteers—manually identifying whether recordings showed a train and what cargo they carried, a process that likely would have taken as much time as data collection, Spada said. But the camera system wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up all the trains, and the data they did gather was too voluminous and overloaded their server. After a couple of months, the researchers pivoted. Spada had noticed the AI hype and decided to try it out.

The team planted new cameras and programmed them to take a photo each minute. After months of collecting enough images of the tracks, UC Davis students categorized them into groups—train or no train, day or night—using Playstation controllers. The team created software designed to play like a video game, which sped up the process, Spada said, by allowing the students to filter through more images than if they simply used a mouse or trackpad to click through pictures on a computer. The team used those photos and open-source image classifier files from Google to train the model and the custom camera system to sense and record trains passing. Then the team identified the type of trains in the captured recordings (a task that would have required more complex and expensive computing power if done with AI) and matched the information with live air and weather measurements.

The process was a departure from traditional environmental monitoring. “When I was a student, I would sit on a street corner and count how many trucks went by,” said Spada.

Employing AI was a “game changer” Spada added. The previous three studies on North American coal trains combined gathered data on less than 1,000 trains. The Davis researchers were able to collect data from more than 2,800.

In early July 2023, lawyers for the city of Oakland and the proposed developer of the city’s coal terminal presented opening arguments in a trial regarding the project’s future. Oakland has alleged that the project’s developer missed deadlines, violating the terms of the lease agreement. The developer has said any delays are due to the city throwing up obstructions.

If Oakland prevails, it will have finally defeated the terminal. But if the city loses, it can still pursue other routes to stop the project, including demonstrating that it represents a substantial public health risk. The city cited that risk—particularly related to air pollution—when it passed a 2016 resolution to keep the development from proceeding. But in 2018, a judge said the city hadn’t shown enough evidence to support its conclusion. The ruling said Jaffe’s research didn’t apply to the city because the results were specific to the study location and the composition of the coal being shipped there was unlikely to be the same because Oakland is slated to receive coal from Utah. The judge also said the city ignored the terminal developer’s plans to require companies to use rail car covers to reduce coal dust. (Such covers are rare in the U.S., where companies instead coat coal in a sticky liquid meant to tamp down dust.)

Dhawal Majithia, a former student of Spada’s, helped develop code that runs the equipment used to capture and recognize images of trains while monitoring air quality. The equipment—which includes a camera, a weather station, and an artificial intelligence processor—was tested on a model train set before being deployed in the field. Visual: Courtesy of Bart Ostro/UC Davis

Environmental groups point to research from scientists like Spada and Ostro as evidence that more regulation is needed, and some believe AI techniques could help buttress lawmaking efforts.

Despite its potential for research, AI may also cause its own environmental damage. A 2018 analysis from OpenAI, the company behind the buzzy bot ChatGPT, showed that computations used for deep learning were doubling every 3.4 months, growing by more than 300,000 times since 2012. Processing large quantities of data requires significant energy. In 2019, based on new research from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, headlines warned that training one AI language processing model releases emissions equivalent to the manufacture and use of five gas-powered cars over their entire lifetime.

Researchers are only beginning to weigh an algorithm’s potential benefits with its environmental impacts. Floridi at Yale, who said AI is underutilized, was quick to note that the “amazing technology” can also be overused. “It is a great tool, but it comes with a cost,” he said. “The question becomes, is the tradeoff good enough?”

A team at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and La Trobe University in Australia has devised a way to quantify that tradeoff. Their Green Algorithms project allows researchers to plug in an algorithm’s properties, like run time and location. Loïc Lannelongue, a computational biologist who helped build the tool, told Undark that scientists are trained to avoid wasting limited financial resources in their research, and believes environmental costs could be considered similarly. He proposed requiring environmental disclosures in research papers much like those required for ethics.

In response to a query from Undark, Spada said he did not consider potential environmental downsides to using AI in Richmond, but he thinks the project’s small scale would mean the energy used to run the model, and its associated emissions, would be relatively insignificant.

For residents experiencing pollution, though, the outcome of the work could be consequential. Some activists in the Bay Area are hopeful that the study will serve as a model for the many communities where coal trains travel.

Other communities are already weighing the potential of AI. In Baltimore, Christopher Heaney, an environmental epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, has collaborated with residents in the waterfront neighborhood of Curtis Bay, which is home to numerous industrial facilities including a coal terminal. Heaney worked with residents to install air monitors after a 2021 explosion at a coal silo, and is considering using AI for “high dimensional data reduction and processing” that could help the community attribute pollutants to specific sources.

Szutu’s citizen air monitoring group also began installing air sensors after an acute event; in 2016 an oil spill at a nearby refinery sent fumes wafting towards Vallejo, prompting a shelter-in-place order and sending more than 100 people to the hospital. Szutu said he tried to work with local air regulators to set up monitors, but after the procedures proved slow, decided to reach out to the Air Quality Research Center at UC Davis, where Spada works. The two have been working together since.

On Spada’s recent visit to Vallejo, he and an undergraduate student met Szutu to scout potential monitoring locations. In the backyard, after Spada demonstrated how the equipment worked by aiming it at an adjacent shipyard, the team deconstructed the setup and lugged it back to Spada’s Prius. As Spada opened the trunk, a neighbor, leaning against a car in his driveway, recognized the group.

“How’s the air?” he called out.

Emma Foehringer Merchant is a journalist who covers climate change, energy, and the environment. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Inside Climate News, Greentech Media, Grist, and other outlets.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Making homes more efficient and more electric is critical to combating climate change. But the undertaking can be expensive and beyond the financial reach of many families. 

Help, however, is on the way.

Residential energy use accounts for one-fifth of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. President Biden’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, takes aim at this issue by allocating $8.8 billion to home energy efficiency rebates primarily for at low- and moderate-income households.

“For the federal government, this is the largest investment in history,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “These rebates have the potential to provide tremendous support, particularly for low-income households, in terms of reducing pollution, reducing energy costs, and making homes more comfortable.” 

States will administer the rebate programs under guidance the Department of Energy released in late July. The money could become available to consumers as early as the end of this year, though the bulk is expected throughout 2024. In some cases, the incentives could cover the entire cost of a project. 

Incentives will fall into two buckets, with about half designated for home electrification and the remainder going toward overall reductions in energy use. The funding will be tied to household income. 

States must allocate about 40 percent of the electrification money they receive to low-income single-family households and another 10 percent toward low-income multifamily buildings. The rest of the electrification rebates must go to moderate-income households. These are minimums, said Kresowik, noting that states can, and some likely will, make even more of the rebates need-based.

Income limits are location dependent and set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Low income is defined as 80 percent of area’s median household income, while moderate income is up to 150 percent. What that means can vary widely. In San Francisco, for instance, the low income threshold for a family of four is $148,650, while in Bullock County, Alabama it’s $52,150. 

The rebates also are larger for low-income households. On the electrification front, the guidelines call for up to $8,000 for heat pumps, $840 for induction stoves, and $4,000 to upgrade an electric panel, among other incentives. That said, no single address can receive more than $14,000 over the life of the program. The discounts are largely designed to be available when the items are purchased, which avoids having to paying out of pocket and waiting for a check from the government. 

“These are advanced technologies. Therefore they often cost more, but they save more energy and help save the climate,” said Kara Saul-Rinaldi, president and CEO of the AnnDyl Policy Group, an energy and environment strategy firm. “If we want our low-income communities to invest in something that’s going to benefit everyone, like the climate, we need to provide them with additional resources.”

For the energy-reduction incentives, the type of technology used doesn’t matter as long as households lower their overall energy use. Homeowners could do this by installing more insulation, sealing windows, or upgrading to more efficient heating and cooling systems, among other options. The rebate amounts are a bit more complex to calculate but are based on either modeled or actual energy savings, and increase if you save more energy or are low income. 

Kresowik says efficiency retrofits can cost $25,000 to $30,000 or more. For many people, the Inflation Reduction Act could help put such projects within reach for the first time. While a homeowner cannot claim both an electrification and efficiency rebate for the same improvement, the incentives can be added to other federal weatherization and tax credit initiatives and any offers from utility companies. 

But the latest rebates will be available only after states have set up their respective programs. For that reason, “the families who most need that help will be better served to wait if they can,” said Sage Briscoe, director of federal policy for the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America. Of course, that may not be feasible if, say, an appliance breaks, but doing so could potentially net a low-income household thousands of dollars in savings. 

“The key is to start planning,” Kresowik said of the coming rebates. Talking to a contractor now, he said, can position households to take advantage of the programs as soon as they start accepting claims.

The rebates, though, may not be available everywhere. Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and South Dakota have so far declined to apply for Inflation Reduction Act funds and could reject the home energy rebates as well. That means a sizable number of Americans may not see a boon from these latest rebates, either because they earn too much money or live in a state that refuses to participate in IRA programs. 

Federal tax credits, however, are available now to help anyone pursuing projects such as installing solar panels or heat pump water heaters. The credits reset annually, but because they offset tax liabilities, the ability to fully utilize them often depends on a filer’s tax burden. 

“There are those among us who are privileged enough that they probably can go ahead and start making those investments now,” said Briscoe. Rewiring America is in the process of launching tools to help people plan for, claim, and receive incentives, which can be complicated. But experts say that even this influx in funding won’t ultimately be enough to meet the need nationally.  

“This is just a drop in the bucket,” said Saul-Rinaldi. Kresowik notes that there are 26 million low income households that still use fossil fuels for heating. At $30,000 each, electrifying those homes alone would cost $780 billion.

Saul-Rinaldi also sees a risk that the current program is limited by quirks in the guidance from the Department of Energy that may keep some contractors from participating, such as mandating in-person energy audits, even when utility data would suffice. But, she says, there is still time to smooth out those issues, and she hopes that the programs are “so successful that there is a wide demand across the country for additional funds so that we can continue to upgrade and electrify America’s homes.”

Ideally, Briscoe wants to see high-efficiency appliances and design become the norm, and she thinks incentives can help push the market in that direction. Previous federal rebate efforts, such as a Great Recession stimulus bill included $300 million in appliance efficiency funding, didn’t quite do that. But Briscoe says this latest attempt through the Inflation Reduction Act is not only orders of magnitude more ambitious but also more holistic and works in concert with other programs — such as installer training initiatives — to ensure the rebates aren’t operating in a vacuum.

“There’s some real urgency to making sure that we try to get the fossil fuels out of our homes,” said Briscoe. “The climate isn’t going to wait.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/buildings/electrifying-your-home-is-about-to-get-a-lot-cheaper/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Not only people need to stay cool, especially in a summer of record-breaking heat waves. Many machines, including cellphones, data centers, cars and airplanes, become less efficient and degrade more quickly in extreme heat. Machines generate their own heat, too, which can make hot temperatures around them even hotter.

We are engineering researchers who study how machines manage heat and ways to effectively recover and reuse heat that is otherwise wasted. There are several ways extreme heat affects machines.

No machine is perfectly efficient – all machines face some internal friction during operation. This friction causes machines to dissipate some heat, so the hotter it is outside, the hotter the machine will be.

Cellphones and similar devices with lithium ion batteries stop working as well when operating in climates above 95 degrees Farenheit (35 degrees Celsius) – this is to avoid overheating and increased stress on the electronics.

Cooling designs that use innovative phase-changing fluids can help keep machines cool, but in most cases heat is still ultimately dissipated into the air. So, the hotter the air, the harder it is to keep a machine cool enough to function efficiently.

Plus, the closer together machines are, the more dissipated heat there will be in the surrounding area.

Deforming materials

Higher temperatures, either from the weather or the excess heat radiated from machinery, can cause materials in machinery to deform. To understand this, consider what temperature means at the molecular level.

At the molecular scale, temperature is a measure of how much molecules are vibrating. So the hotter it is, the more the molecules that make up everything from the air to the ground to materials in machinery vibrate.

As the temperature increases and the molecules vibrate more, the average space between them grows, causing most materials to expand as they heat up. Roads are one place to see this – hot concrete expands, gets constricted and eventually cracks. This phenomenon can happen to machinery, too, and thermal stresses are just the beginning of the problem.

Travel delays and safety risks

High temperatures can also change the way oils in your car’s engine behave, leading to potential engine failures. For example, if a heat wave makes it 30 degrees F (16.7 degrees C) hotter than normal, the viscosity – or thickness – of typical car engine oils can change by a factor of three.

Fluids like engine oils become thinner as they heat up, so if it gets too hot, the oil may not be thick enough to properly lubricate and protect engine parts from increased wear and tear.

Additionally, a hot day will cause the air inside your tires to expand and increases the tire pressure, which could increase wear and the risk of skidding.

Airplanes are also not designed to take off at extreme temperatures. As it gets hotter outside, air starts to expand and takes up more space than before, making it thinner or less dense. This reduction in air density decreases the amount of weight the plane can support during flight, which can cause significant travel delays or flight cancellations.

Battery degradation

In general, the electronics contained in devices like cellphones, personal computers and data centers consist of many kinds of materials that all respond differently to temperature changes. These materials are all located next to each other in tight spaces. So as the temperature increases, different kinds of materials deform differently, potentially leading to premature wear and failure.

Lithium ion batteries in cars and general electronics degrade faster at higher operating temperatures. This is because higher temperatures increase the rate of reactions within the battery, including corrosion reactions that deplete the lithium in the battery. This process wears down its storage capacity. Recent research shows that electric vehicles can lose about 20 percent of their range when exposed to sustained 90-degree Farenheit weather.

Data centers, which are buildings full of servers that store data, dissipate significant amounts of heat to keep their components cool. On very hot days, fans must work harder to ensure chips do not overheat. In some cases, powerful fans are not enough to cool the electronics.

To keep the centers cool, incoming dry air from the outside is often first sent through a moist pad. The water from the pad evaporates into the air and absorbs heat, which cools the air. This technique, called evaporative cooling, is usually an economical and effective way to keep chips at a reasonable operating temperature.

However, evaporative cooling can require a significant amount of water. This issue is problematic in regions where water is scarce. Water for cooling can add to the already intense resource footprint associated with data centers.

Struggling air conditioners

Air conditioners struggle to perform effectively as it gets hotter outside – just when they’re needed the most. On hot days, air conditioner compressors have to work harder to send the heat from homes outside, which in turn disproportionally increases electricity consumption and overall electricity demand.

For example, in Texas, every increase of 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) creates a rise of about 4 percent in electricity demand.

Heat leads to a staggering 50 percent increase in electricity demand during the summer in hotter countries, posing serious threats of electricity shortages or blackouts, coupled with higher greenhouse gas emissions.

How to prevent heat damage

Heat waves and warming temperatures around the globe pose significant short- and long-term problems for people and machines alike. Fortunately, there are things you can do to minimize the damage.

First, ensure that your machines are kept in an air-conditioned, well-insulated space or out of direct sunlight.

Second, consider using high-energy devices like air conditioners or charging your electric vehicle during off-peak hours when fewer people are using electricity. This can help avoid local electricity shortages.

Reusing heat

Scientists and engineers are developing ways to use and recycle the vast amounts of heat dissipated from machines. One simple example is using the waste heat from data centers to heat water.

Waste heat could also drive other kinds of air-conditioning systems, such as absorption chillers, which can actually use heat as energy to support coolers through a series of chemical- and heat-transferring processes.

In either case, the energy needed to heat or cool something comes from heat that is otherwise wasted. In fact, waste heat from power plants could hypothetically support 27 percent of residential air-conditioning needs, which would reduce overall energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Extreme heat can affect every aspect of modern life, and heat waves aren’t going away in the coming years. However, there are opportunities to harness extreme heat and make it work for us.

Srinivas Garimella is a professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Matthew T. Hughes is a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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For the second year in a row, the Atlantic puffins living on the rocky islands off Maine’s coast had a rebound year for fledgling chicks, all in the face of record warm waters due to climate change. This second consecutive rebound year is welcome news, after 90 percent of nesting puffins failed to raise a single chick in 2021 while the climate change in New England has put this species, and others like humpback whales and the zooplankton at the base of the Gulfs food web, in jeopardy.

[Related: Cyclones can be fatal for seabirds, but not in the way you think.]

The Gulf of Maine and its bays are among the world’s fastest-warming bodies of water. Since the early 1980s, it has warmed about four degrees Fahrenheit, while the global ocean has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the same period of time. The rising heat has affected the fish stocks in the area that puffins and other species rely on. Haddock used to make up a large portion of puffin diets, but populations have fluctuated in recent years, first increasing in 2017 due to federal management to this year showing signs of a decrease. 

However, a small eel-like fish called the sand lance has been abundant this year. The fish are only about four to eight inches long, but are high in fats and make them a great forage fish for seabirds. A 2020 study found that 72 Atlantic Ocean animal species from whales to bluefish to gannets eat sand lances in the waters from Greenland to North Carolina. 

According to the Maine Monitor, the sand lance were less abundant in the region by mid-July, but the puffins were found feasting on a mixture of haddock, hake, and redfish depending upon where they were. Don Lyons, the director of conservation science at National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute, told the Maine Monitor, “I can’t offhand recall such a seamless transition from one fish to another. It tells you a lot about the resourcefulness of puffins and at the same time, it’s a reminder of how much we still don’t know of when and where food is for seabirds, and how fast that all can change.”

Lyons estimated that there are now as many as 3,000 puffins in Maine, what he calls a stable population. In 2022, about two-thirds of the puffins fledged—or developed wing feathers that are large enough for flight. While they didn’t reach that number this year, they had a better season than the catastrophic 2021 season despite a rainy and hot summer. The Audubon Society’s Project Puffin has been monitoring the population for 50 years and uses decoys, mirrors, and recordings to attract the birds to suitable nesting sites to raise the next generation of birds.

Maine’s puffin population was once as low as 70 pairs on Matinicus Rock 25 miles off the coast. They were hunted for their feathers and meat in the early 20th Century, but by the 1970’s Audubon conservationists worked to grow puffin colonies in the state, by bringing chicks from Canada to Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock. Puffins still call that tiny rock home, in addition to Seal Island and Petit Manan Island. Live cams keep an eye on them and volunteers and scientists monitor their progress every year.

Currently, Maine’s population are the only breeding Atlantic puffins in the United States. The species lives in areas of the North Atlantic from Maine and Canada eastward to Europe. Iceland, a country well known for its puffins, has seen the puffin populations decline by 70 percent in 30 years largely due to lack of food due to warming oceans.

[Related: Emperor penguins suffer ‘unprecedented’ breeding failure as sea ice disappears.]

While this ability to reproduce despite huge environmental changes does speak to their resiliency as a species, puffins are still at risk of long term dangers from marine heat waves, sea level rise threatening nesting sites, and a loss of food.  

“The problem with climate change is these breeding failures and low breeding productivity years are now becoming chronic,” Bill Sydeman, president and chief scientist of the California-based Farallon Institute, told the AP. “There will be fewer young birds in the population that are able to recruit into the breeding population.”

Some of the ways to help Maine puffin population and other coastal birds in the face of this constant uncertainty include Audubon’s adopt-a-puffin program and advocating for your local seabirds by contacting regional elected officials.

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Climate change is worsening wildfires. Increases in drought, air temperature, and lightning cause hotter, drier, and longer fire seasons. By 2100, the number of wildfires is projected to spike worldwide by up to 50 percent. What’s more, fires exacerbate global warming when they burn peatlands, rainforests, and other carbon-rich ecosystems. As a result, huge amounts of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere, creating a fiery feedback loop.

Aside from releasing large quantities of greenhouse gasses, wildfires also emit various climate pollutants. Wildfire smoke often contains particulate matter that can be broadly categorized into black carbon and organic carbon, says Nishit Shetty, postdoctoral associate at the Virginia Tech Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. In a study published recently in Nature Geoscience, Shetty and his co-authors have identified a class of organic carbon that has potent warming effects but is often missing from climate models: dark brown carbon.

“‘Dark brown carbon’ is a term we coined for a subset of brown carbon aerosols we discovered in wildfires across the western US,” says Shetty. “While it absorbs less light than black carbon on a per-particle basis, it is about four times more abundant than black carbon in these plumes, which makes it an important contributor to short-term climate forcing.”

[Related: Clouds of wildfire smoke are toxic to humans and animals alike]

Black carbon, which is formed during high-temperature flaming combustion, is typically responsible for the darker part of wildfire smoke. Meanwhile, organic carbon particles, arising from cooler smoldering, make up lighter plumes. “An easy way to visualize this would be to see how smoke from a flaming campfire is different from that of a smoldering charcoal barbecue,” says Shetty. 

They play different roles in changing the climate. Black carbon absorbs solar radiation at all wavelengths, which means it can warm the atmosphere and even accelerate melting in the Arctic. In contrast, organic carbon “primarily scatters light with little to no visible light absorption,” says Shetty, which is why it’s thought to contribute to global cooling. There’s also a class of organic carbon called brown carbon that absorbs ultraviolet and visible solar radiation. It tends to have a yellowish-brown appearance when collected on quartz-fiber filters, he adds.

Typically, climatologists emphasize black carbon’s warming effect over organic carbon. Sunlight can bleach light-absorbing organic aerosols such as brown carbon, causing it to lose its ability to absorb solar radiation. However, when Shetty and his co-authors sampled ground and airborne smoke from large-scale wildfires in the western United States, they observed strong light absorption from particles in biomass-burning smoke. This wasn’t black carbon, but something similar: they’d discovered dark brown carbon particles.

[Related: Biofuel is a ‘renewable’ resource, but climate change could soon limit its potential]

According to the study, dark brown carbon can absorb strongly across the visible and near-infrared wavelengths, which means it may also have the potential to warm the atmosphere. It also resists the photochemical bleaching that makes light-absorbing organic aerosols lose their ability to absorb solar radiation.

Because these particles do not evaporate easily and have low solubility, previous efforts to measure organic carbon absorption likely missed them, says Shetty. These findings demonstrate that climate models must also consider the warming effect of dark brown carbon in wildfire smoke. Otherwise, the global warming impacts of wildfires may be grossly underestimated, subsequently affecting climate change mitigation efforts around the globe.

As wildfires increase in number around the world due to climate change, it becomes more crucial to understand how to mitigate its environmental impacts. “Increasing temperatures and decreasing humidity due to anthropogenic climate change are creating conditions that lead to increased severity of wildfires,” says Shetty, “so it is becoming increasingly important to know what these smoke plumes are made of to better estimate their effect on our atmosphere.”

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At first glance, the McDermitt Caldera might feel like the edge of the Earth. This oblong maze of rocky vales straddles the arid Nevada-Oregon borderlands, in one of the least densely populated parts of North America. 

But the future of the modern world depends on the future of places like the McDermitt Caldera, which has the potential to be the largest known source of lithium on the planet. Where today’s world runs on hydrocarbons, tomorrow’s may very well rely on the element for an expanding offering of lithium-ion batteries. The flaky silver metal is a necessity for these batteries that we already use, and which we’ll likely use in far greater numbers to support mobile phones, electric cars, and large electric grids.

Which is why it matters a ton where we get our lithium from. A new study, published in the journal Science Advances today, suggests that McDermitt Caldera contains even more lithium than previously thought and outlines how the yet-to-be-discovered stores could be extracted. But these results are unlikely to ease the criticisms about the environmental costs of mining the substance.

[Related: Why solid state batteries are the next frontier for EV makers]

By 2030, the world may require more than a megaton of lithium every year. If previous geological surveys are correct, then the McDermitt Caldera—the remnants of a 16-million-old volcanic supereruption—could contain as many as 100 megatons of the metal. 

“It’s a huge, massive feature that has a lot of lithium in it,” Tom Benson, one of the authors of the new paper and a volcanologist at Columbia University and the Lithium Americas Corporation.

One high-profile project, partly run by Lithium Americas Corporation, proposes a 17,933-acre mine in the Thacker Pass, on the Nevada side of the border at the caldera’s southern edge. The project is contentious: Thacker Pass (or Peehee Mu’huh in Northern Paiute) sits on land that many local Indigenous groups consider sacred. Native American activists are continuing to fight a plan to expand the mine-exploration area in court. 

But not all of the lithium under McDermitt’s rocky sands ranks the same. Most of the desired metal there comes in the form of a mineral called smectite; under certain conditions, smectite can transform into a different mineral called illite that can sometimes also be processed for lithium. Benson and his colleagues studied samples of both smectite and illite drilled from the ground throughout the caldera. “There’s lithium everywhere you drill,” he says. 

Previously, geologists assumed that you could find both smectite and illite in a wide distribution across the caldera, but the authors only found the latter in high concentrations in the caldera’s south, around Thacker Pass. “It’s constrained to this area,” explains Benson.

That’s important. Benson and colleagues think that the caldera’s illite formed when lithium-rich fluid, heated by the underlying volcano, washed over smectite. In the process, the mineral absorbed much of the lithium. Consequently, they project the illite in Thacker Pass holds more than twice as much lithium than the neighboring smectite.

“That’s really helpful to change exploration strategy,” Benson says. “Now we know we have to stick in the Thacker Pass area if we want to find and mine that illite.”

Some of Thacker Pass’s proponents believe that would result in fewer costs and less damage from mining. Anyone who deals with lithium is, on some level, aware of the environmental costs. The recovery process produces pollutants like heavy metals, sucks up water, and emits tons of greenhouse gases. By one estimate, fitting a new electric vehicle with its lithium battery can result in upwards of 70 percent more carbon emissions than building an equivalent petrol-powered car (although the average electric car will more than make up the difference with day-to-day use).

That said, not all extraction is the same. There are two main types of lithium sources: brine recovery and hard-rock mining. Some of the lithium we use comes from super salty pools. Over millions of years, rainwater percolates through lithium-containing rocks, dissolves the metal, and carries it to underground aquifers. Today, humans pump brine to the surface, evaporate the water, add a slurry of hydrated lime to keep out unwanted metals, and extract the lithium that’s left behind. Much of the world’s brine lithium today comes from the “lithium triangle” of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile—one of the world’s driest regions.

Alternatively, we can directly mine lithium ores from the earth and process them as we would with most other metals. Separating lithium from ore typically involves crushing the rock and heating it up to temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Getting to those high temperatures often requires fossil fuels in the first place. This method is less laborious and costly than brine extraction, but also far more carbon-intensive.

[Related: Inside the high-powered process that could recycle rare earth metals]

McDermitt Caldera’s smectite and illite belong to what some lithium watchers see as a new third category of extraction: volcanic sedimentary lithium. When volcanic minerals containing lithium flow into nearby valleys  and react with the loose dirt, they leave behind lithium-rich sediments that require little energy and processing to separate.

With the new alternative, mining proponents claim they can drastically reduce the environmental impact of their current and future activities at Thacker Pass. And the research by Benson’s team seems to suggest that, if lithium companies probe in the right places, they might get rewarded more for their efforts.

But this is likely little comfort to lithium-mining opponents in Oregon and Nevada, whose criticisms will be considered as the Bureau of Land Management maps out drilling in the deposit. Their case parallels those of Indigenous Chileans who oppose lithium extraction near their homes in the Atacama and locals fighting a lithium mining project near Portugal’s northern border. Together, they’re fighting a world that’s growing hungrier for lithium, along with new ways and places to exploit it.

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Hurricane Idalia made landfall this morning near Keaton Beach in northern Florida’s Big Bend region. The Category 3 storm hit with maximum sustained winds of 125 miles per hour with the potential for higher gusts. Idalia is the strongest storm to make landfall in Big Bend, the link between the peninsula and panhandle, in more than 125 years.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]

Idalia was downgraded to a Category 2 storm with maximum sustained winds of 110 MPH, as of the National Hurricane Centers’ 9 AM update. The storm is moving northeast and the National Hurricane Center is warning of “catastrophic impacts” from storm surge. Parts of the Big Bend region could see up to 16 feet of storm surge. Heavy rainfall is expected, with up to six inches of rain expected in the St. Marks/Apalachee Bay area. Flooding began hours before landfall on Treasure Island, a barrier island on the Gulf Coast, where a high tide at 11:30 AM EDT could create even more storm surge and flooding. 

Clearwater Beach is seeing a storm surge between five and six feet while nearby Cedar Key is experiencing between eight and nine feet of storm surge. The water is rising rapidly even during a normal low tide period.

A significant surge between four and five feet into Tampa Bay and it set a new record for water levels in the bay before landfall. At 5:30 AM EDT, water levels were at 3.91 feet over and still rising, even as the tide should be lowering. The previous high water mark was 3.79 feet during Tropical Storm Eta in 2020. The I-275 traffic cams showed abandoned streets and water coming up onto the streets

The hurricane is expected to retain some strength after landfall, as it moves into northern Florida through Wednesday and then into southeastern Georgia by Wednesday afternoon. Damaging winds are also expected beyond the center of the hurricane. 

Overnight, Idalia intensified into an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane with winds of 130 mph. Despite the downgrade to a Category 3, Idalia is still very dangerous. “Radar and Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft data indicate that an eyewall replacement cycle has begun,” the National Hurricane Center wrote. “Idalia’s maximum sustained winds are now estimated near 125 mph (205 km/h) with higher gusts. This change in wind speed does not diminish the threat of catastrophic storm surge and damaging winds.”

[Related: The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them.]

These recent storms have fed on the increasingly warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico that fuel more intense hurricanes, and scientists have been sounding the alarm on the repercussions of this for decades. In September 1995, Popular Science magazine featured a warning of a possible wave of killer hurricanes from hurricane forecaster William Gray from Colorado State University. “We’ve gone 25 years with relatively little activity–a long cycle by historical standards. Inevitably, long stretches of destruction will return. Florida and the East Coast will see hurricane devastation such as they’ve never experienced before,” Gray said. 

As Hurricane Idalia moved over the Gulf of Mexico, the storm was able to feed on the energy from this year’s record warm temperatures, which could only add to its devastation.  “It’s 88, 89 degrees [Fahrenheit] over where the storm’s going to be tracking, so that’s effectively rocket fuel for the storm,” Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach told the AP. “It’s basically all systems go for the storm to intensify.”

Idalia is the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida in the last 12 months. Hurricane Ian slammed the Gulf Coast in September 2022 as a Category 5 storm, killing at least 161 people and causing roughly $113 billion dollars in damage. Only about two months later Hurricane Nicole hit as a late season Category 1 storm.  Hurricanes that begin with the letter “I” are also the most retired names due to their destructive nature and Idalia could be the next storm added to that list. 

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In late 2013, a mass of warm water now known as the Blob appeared in the northeast Pacific—a massive marine heatwave that cooked coastal ecosystems from Alaska to California. Later, bolstered by an El Niño, the vast and potent heatwave wreaked havoc on marine ecosystems: thousands of seabirds died, while blooms of harmful algae poisoned marine mammals and shellfish. The suddenly warmed water also brought an influx of new animals to the northeast Pacific: ocean sunfish appeared in Alaska, while yellow-bellied sea snakes popped up in Southern California.

By 2017, the Blob had waned and many of these more tropical species had retreated. Yet not all. Some of the species that colonized new habitats during the heatwave have stuck around. And now, says Joshua Smith, a marine ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California who documented in new research how the Blob triggered a range of subtle yet persistent shifts in the spread of marine species, “I’m starting to sort of question whether those communities will ever look the way they did.”

Historically, it’s common enough that a handful of individuals from warm-water species will make their way north during warmer years, but there wouldn’t be enough of them to sustain a long-term population, says Jenn Caselle, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor of the new paper. But because the Blob was so intense and lasted so long, sizable populations made the move into these normally cooler habitats—populations that were potentially large enough to establish more permanent footholds.

Señorita fish, for example—a bright-orange wrasse that showed up in huge numbers in central California during the heatwave—are still there, Smith says. Ocean whitefish, while historically common around Southern California’s Channel Islands, are now dominant, Caselle says, while California sheephead, a bulbous red-and-black fish, are now also much more abundant near Santa Barbara.

These changes in coastal communities, Caselle says, can have knock-on effects on how these ecosystems function. Sometimes, when one species is extirpated from a community—like a predatory fish that keeps a population of smaller fish in check or a seaweed species that provides a home for invertebrates—the ecosystem loses some kind of important function. But if that lost species is replaced by a new species that does the same thing, that new species could provide some resilience to the ecosystem, Caselle says, even if the community doesn’t look the same as it always did.

People can also adjust to new ecological realities, she says, pointing to fishers’ recently acquired fondness for the now-abundant ocean whitefish.

The Blob was one of the most intense marine heatwaves in recorded history, so it makes sense that it had a big effect on marine ecosystems. But big marine heatwaves have affected the northeast Pacific every year since 2019, including this year. Meanwhile, the current El Niño is further heating the northeast Pacific, and climate change means marine heatwaves will likely continue to be even more frequent.

As oceans continue to warm and the heatwave hits keep coming, William Cheung, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the new research, says fish populations could be in trouble. In his own research, Cheung previously showed how warming and marine heatwaves will stress fish populations in the northeast Pacific. Usually, he says, fish populations can bounce back after a heatwave. But if heatwaves start occurring more frequently, populations will have less time to replenish themselves.

These changes are unlikely to go unnoticed. “The place where humans interact with the ocean the most is right at the coast. It’s where most of the biodiversity lives, and it’s where a lot of the productivity is,” Caselle says. “As these systems change, it can affect our everyday lives.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

The post The Pacific heat blob’s aftereffects are still warping ocean ecosystems appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News and Ambrook Research.

At Vaqueria El Remanso, a small dairy farm west of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the cows are different—they have a freshly shaven, suave look. Their short hair is the result of a natural mutation known as “slick,” which Rafael López-López, who runs El Remanso, has been breeding into his cows for decades.

“In hot, humid conditions, the slick cows have an advantage,” López-López said on a scorching spring morning, walking among his herd in the shade of the milking barn. The genetic mutation that gives slick cows a shorter coat and more active sweat glands helps them maintain a healthy body temperature—an asset on a heating planet.

Cows are most comfortable in temperatures between 41 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit, which means livestock around the world are struggling to cope with hotter and longer summers. Over the span of just two hot, humid days of June 2022, an estimated 10,000 cows died in Kansas. Experts say it will only get worse.

Decades of breeding dairy cows for increased milk production have made them even more susceptible to heat. 

“How do they produce more milk? They eat more, they metabolize more,” said Peter Hansen, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Florida who studies the slick mutation. “So any cow that’s producing more milk is going to be producing more body heat, which makes it harder to resist heat stress.”

When a dairy cow’s temperature rises above her normal core body temperature range of 101.5 to 102.8 degrees Fahrenheit—which happens when the heat index is greater than 72—she experiences heat stress, meaning the ability to regulate her internal temperature is compromised. She grazes less (eating about 3-5% less per additional degree of ambient temperature) and has greater difficulty getting pregnant. That, in turn, compromises her milk supply. Heat stress also suppresses the immune system, leaving her more susceptible to disease. 

Heat stress costs the U.S. dairy industry as much as $670 million annually and scientists predict it could cause a 6.3% drop in milk production by the end of the century. To cope, farmers spend thousands of dollars running massive fans, sprinkler systems, and even fog machines to keep their cows cool.  

Cows with the slick mutation, however, appear to be coping relatively well. 

The slick mutation has been identified in at least six different cattle breeds around the world, including in Carora cows in Venezuela and Senepol cows on the Caribbean island of Saint Croix. 

“It must be a good mutation or it wouldn’t have been selected for naturally so many times,” said Hansen. In natural selection, individual animals with traits that give them an advantage are more likely to survive and reproduce; the slick mutation appears to offer an advantage for different cow species in hot, humid climates. 

Dairy farmers are paying closest attention to the slick Holstein. Traditional Holsteins are the top milk-producing cow in terms of volume, but the temperate breed that originated in the Netherlands about 2,000 years ago isn’t well-adapted to heat and humidity. However, studies have shown that Holsteins with the slick mutation are able to keep their body temperature about 1 degree Fahrenheit cooler, meaning their milk production and fertility don’t drop as much as non-slick animals during the hottest months. 

“I get 1,800 pounds [more] of milk per lactation from these cows and they reproduce more effectively,” said López-López. 

Research is still in its early days—scientists and farmers say that larger sample sizes will help them better understand how the mutation affects cows in different weather conditions. For example, a 2020 study comparing slick calves in Florida and California showed that the advantages of the mutation were more pronounced in the humid heat of Florida than the dry heat of California.

Still, breeding for the slick cows is widely seen as a promising strategy and is being used by farmers in places like South and Central America, Indonesia, Thailand and Qatar. It was listed among adaptations to heat stress in livestock in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. 

“Hot parts of the world are getting hotter, and parts of the world where heat stress was just an occasional problem are going to find that it’s a more severe problem,” said Hansen. “The more the climate is such that cows are exposed to a lot of heat stress, the more important the [slick] gene is going to be.” 

The slick Holstein likely originated when Holsteins from the U.S. were brought to Puerto Rico in the 1950s to increase milk production on the island. (Puerto Rico produces about 200 million liters of milk each year, making it the island’s top agricultural commodity.) The Holsteins were crossed with Criollo cows, a breed raised for both beef and dairy that’s become heat-tolerant in the centuries since the Spanish colonists introduced them to the island. Scientists suspect that these cows already had the slick mutation and passed it on to the Holsteins. 

Researchers also think slick cows may be better able to produce reproductive hormones because they’re not spending as much energy releasing heat from their bodies. Esbal Jiménez-Cabán, professor of animal sciences at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), pointed out that in both humans and animals, reproduction is among the first biological functions to be compromised in adverse conditions. 

“If a guy is stressed, his sperm count goes down. If women don’t eat well, the menstrual cycle goes crazy,” he said. “A wild-type animal, when it’s fighting the heat in the summer, it will prioritize staying alive.” 

A 2020 study that compared slick and wild-type cows (those without the mutation) on Lopéz-Lopéz’s farm showed that the calving interval of the slick cows was about 1.6 months shorter than those without the mutation. That’s valuable for farmers, Jiménez-Cabán explained. “If you have an animal who is not producing, you are [still] spending a lot of money on that animal — so you want to shorten that time as much as you can.”

In the mainland U.S., only a small number of farmers, mostly in the South, currently breed the slick gene into their herds — but that’s starting to change. In 2019, López-López sold his bull Sinba to a heat tolerance-focused breeder in Texas; from there, more U.S. breeders bought up Sinba’s semen to start breeding their own slick cows.

Jeffrey Bewley, a breeder in Kentucky, began selling slick embryos soon thereafter.

Bewley has spent much of his career focused on cattle housing and cooling technologies. (Most dairy cattle in the U.S. are housed in barns with fans—just 20 percent of lactating cows have “some access” to pasture, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report.)

“Despite all of our efforts to try to cool the cow, there’s still effective heat stress,” Bewley said, noting that cows experience heat stress about 150 days of the year in Kentucky. 

“What really resonated with me was the idea that we might be able to breed for an animal that’s better able to handle the heat instead of just changing their environment,” he said.

Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

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Satyam Tripathi, a 27-year-old seafarer from Uttar Pradesh, India, leans against the railing of the MT Pablo, the oil tanker that has been his home for the past several months. Though the days at sea often blur together, today stands out as vividly as the South China Sea below. Today is his birthday.

Moments later, his mother calls on WhatsApp. How are you? she asks, forgetting her birthday wishes for her usual motherly enquires: are you as happy at sea as I know you to be on land? Tripathi had acclimatized quickly to life in the merchant navy. The oil tanker is a surprisingly social place, and his head is filled with romantic ideas of a life on the ocean. He reassures her: yes, mother, I’m still happy.

That afternoon, on May 1, 2023, the Pablo exploded off the Malaysian coast.

The crew were thrown by the blast. Adrift in the ocean, clinging to charred metal, most of the ship’s 28 crew waited anxiously for nearby ships to scramble to their rescue.

Twenty-five seafarers were saved in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency spent days searching for the rest. But three remain unaccounted for, Tripathi among them.

Footage of the incident spread quickly across the messaging service Telegram, where fellow seafarers prayed for the missing crew. But within hours, rumors began to swirl of what kind of ship the Pablo really was.

As staff at the ship-tracking service Tanker Trackers noted, the Pablo had spent years smuggling Iranian oil. The vessel also featured on a list of ships under investigation for sanctions-busting by the organization United Against Nuclear Iran. It quickly became clear that for as long as Tripathi had been working on the ship, the vessel he’d called home had been smuggling oil for the Iranian regime.

The ship was a member of the so-called shadow fleet, which emerged in 2018 shortly after the United States reimposed a flood of sanctions against Iran. The sanctions had been waived in 2015 as part of an international effort to end Iran’s nuclear program. But in May 2018, then-president Donald Trump reversed course. In response, Iran enlisted a fleet of vintage tankers to secretly transport its oil without US oversight.

These ships are in poor shape. Many, says Samir Madani, cofounder of Tanker Trackers, were on their way to the scrapyard. “But buyers would show up with a slightly better offer, and then keep them operating for a few more years,” he says.

So, too, with the Pablo. Before it was rechristened, the vessel was variously known as the Olympic Spirit II, the Mockingbird, the Helios, the Adisa, and a handful of other names. Already past its prime, the ship was sold to an undisclosed buyer for demolition. But a few days later, the deal quietly fell through, and the vessel began operating in the shadows.

Tripathi’s family only learned he was missing a few days after the explosion. By then, the search for survivors had been called off.

Shubham Tripathi, one of Satyam’s two brothers, received a single phone call from Satyam’s employer: “We were told there had been a disaster, that he was missing, but that no one was looking for him.”

Desperate, Shubham took to Google. “That is when I saw everyone talking about the smuggling.” It was his first time hearing about the shadow fleet, and he was shocked by what he read. But of one thing he was certain: “Satyam did not know.”

His assumption is not simply brotherly protectiveness. Michelle Bockmann, a senior analyst at Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a shipping industry intelligence and analytics firm, says that “to suggest that any of the crew on board a ship like Pablo are somehow aware of the smuggling is a really unfair assumption to make.”

As far as Satyam was aware, he was undertaking a nine-month contract as a deck fitter on board a legal vessel. He’d found the job through SeaSpeed Marine, a certified crew management agency in Mumbai, India. It appeared to be an entirely legitimate and respectable job, and he was praised by his friends back home.

Yet the same clandestine operations that keep the illegal oil flowing also make it all but impossible for the Tripathi family to find closure. The ship’s registered owner, Pablo Union Shipping, is a shell company that cannot be traced. The vessel’s insurance is listed as “withdrawn” on most shipping websites. “We have complained, but what else can we do?” Shubham says. “They do not care for us.”

With no one to claim responsibility for the wreckage, the Pablo now sits abandoned—a hazard to ships off the Malaysian coast.

Working on a decrepit ship is dangerous. But those who did know the Pablo’s true purpose routinely put the crew’s lives in jeopardy.

Before the explosion, Satyam’s Facebook activity showed multiple check-ins in Malaysia, where the shadow fleet conducts risky ship-to-ship transfer operations—passing oil from one tanker to another to disguise its origin. These outlaw tankers conduct their transfers far out at sea, often with their mandatory automatic identification system location trackers disabled. They also overlook standard safety procedures. “These operations happen without tugboats and a boom line to assist,” says Madani.

Against that backdrop, the Pablo’s fate is likely a preview of what’s to come says Sam Chambers, a shipping expert and editor at Splash, a shipping industry trade magazine.

In late 2022, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Union and G7 countries slapped sanctions on seaborne Russian oil. Like Iran, Russia is turning to the shadow fleet, often recruiting the very same tankers—staffed with crews sourced through the same crew management companies—that have experience smuggling Iranian oil.

Chambers says that with Russia joining Iran in seeking out the shadow fleet, there is a growing risk of substandard vessels running into trouble.

Right now, many more people like Satyam are unknowingly engaging in oil smuggling, having their lives put at risk to circumvent international sanctions. It’s likely that many more will suffer for it.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how—and where —we live.

Inflation is finally easing. Americans are paying less for gas than they were a year ago. Furniture, television, and airfare prices have all fallen since last summer. Even the used car market is cooling off after its meteoric rise. But one unsuspecting staple in many American kitchens has become a prominent outlier: olive oil. The price of the already pricey liquid fat has soared to a record high this summer. 

It’s the latest chapter in the annals of heatflation—when scorching temperatures harm crops and push food prices up. A yearlong drought and a spring of extreme heat in Spain, the world’s largest olive oil producer, devastated the country’s olive groves. Spanish olive oil production fell by a half—from an estimated 1.3 million to 610,000 metric tons—over the past year. Now fears are mounting over the very real possibility that the country’s inventory will run out before the next harvest begins, in October. 

“For Spaniards, this is a real crisis,” Bloomberg columnist Javier Bias recently wrote. “We generously coat our food in olive oil.”

It’s also a big deal for the rest of us, given that something like half of the world’s olive oil comes from Spain. As barrels run dry, cooks around the world are paying an almost unheard of premium for the nutty, liquid gold that makes lettuce more palatable and bread more nutritious. Worldwide, olive oil now costs $8,600 per metric ton, more than twice as much as it did a year ago and nearly 14 times more than crude oil. (It would set you back around $720 to fill up the typical car’s 12-gallon tank with olive oil found on Amazon.) 

What’s happening is “not normal at all,” said Kyle Holland, a vegetable oils analyst at Mintec, a food market research firm. “It was just too hot and too dry for too long.”

Olive oil is one of many foods—one of many condiments, even—that are threatened by the severe and unpredictable weather brought on by climate change. As the global temperature ticks up, droughts are occurring more frequently, heat is getting harder for farmers to manage, and wildfires and floods are becoming more menacing to growers around the world. As a result, grocery store shelves aren’t getting stocked and food prices are going up. Ultra-dry conditions in Mexico have withered peppers, leading to a sriracha shortage in the United States. Record warming has decimated Georgia’s famed peaches, which require a few weeks of cool weather each winter to blossom. Ketchup, coffee, and wine all could end up on the chopping block, too.

Olive trees are no strangers to heat, and they don’t need much water compared to other crops, like tomatoes. Humans have been cultivating them in the Mediterranean’s warm climate—and crushing them for oil—for at least 6,000 years. But even hardy olives have their limits. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can impair their ability to convert sunlight into energy, and prolonged dry spells can keep them from producing shoots, buds, flowers, and fruit.  

Growers in the Mediterranean, a region warming 20 percent faster than the rest of the world and the source of 95 percent of olive oil production, are especially vulnerable. Drought caused Tunisia’s grain harvest to decline by 60 percent this year. And dry conditions led to poor yields for wheat and rice farmers last year in Italy, whose produce has helped build the country’s legacy of pizza, pasta, and risotto. This summer, they’ve had to contend with extreme heat, historic floods, and freak hailstorms, according to Davide Cammarano, a professor of agroecology at Aarhus University in Denmark. With such variability in weather, “it becomes very hard to manage a crop in the Mediterranean,” he said.

In a study published last year, Cammarano and his colleagues found that rising temperatures could cut the production of processing tomatoes—the sort used to make tomato sauce and ketchup—by 6 percent in Italy, the U.S., and other countries within the next three decades. 

Perhaps no one this year has had it as bad as olive growers in Spain. Between October and May, the country received 28 percent less rain than usual, with the driest conditions in southern, olive-growing areas. “It’s a catastrophe,” Primitivo Fernandez, head of Spain’s National Association of Edible Oil Bottlers, told Reuters in March. Spain experienced its hottest April on record, with temperatures rising above 100 degrees F. And the heat has only gotten more punishing since, with the country now in the midst of its third heat wave of the year. 

As a result, researchers predict that drought and heat waves associated with climate change will continue to take their toll on olives from the Iberian Peninsula to Lebanon. Hot and dry conditions last year scorched groves not only in Spain but also in Italy and Portugal, two of the world’s top four olive oil producers. 

In the United States, too, severe weather is a concern for olive farmers, although unlike orchards in Spain that rely on rainfall, most in the U.S. are irrigated, which makes them more resistant to drought. Producers in California, the state that churns out the most olives but still contributes less than 3 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S., reportedly harvested one-fifth less than their historic average this season, following years of little rain that made some farmers’ wells go dry. 

Winter and spring storms last spring in California eased the drought, but the cool weather and heavy precipitation slowed flowering and potentially lowered the amount of oil in each olive, according to Jim Lipman, chief operating officer at California Olive Ranch in Chico, the country’s biggest olive oil producer.

In an email to Grist, Lipman said that the high prices in Europe have increased demand for California oil and that California Olive Ranch has a strong crop heading into the upcoming harvest season, which starts in October. That said, early warming followed by frost has resulted in crop disasters in two of the last five seasons.

At Burroughs Family Farm in Denair, California, production has been fairly steady over the past few years, but “this year we are on the lower side” possibly as a result of an “incredible” amount of rain, said Benina Montes, managing partner at the regenerative almond and olive farm in California’s Central Valley. In a good year, the farm’s 10 acres of olives produce up to 40 tons of oil. This year, they yielded about three-quarters of that amount. 

Montes said she hadn’t been following news of the shortage in Europe. But she figures the rise in demand caused by Spain’s low inventory might have helped her business. “No wonder our olive oil has been selling well on Amazon.” 

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/agriculture/climate-change-olive-oil-drought-extreme-heat-europe/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Chemical hazards in fire debris

Residents returning to their burned neighborhoods will likely find themselves surrounded by hazards. Some are obvious, such as broken glass, nails and damaged natural gas containers. Broken power lines and gas lines may be live or leaking.

Less obvious are the chemical hazards that can reach well beyond the fire zone.

Black smoke from a fire is a sign of incomplete combustion that can produce thousands of chemicals when wood and plastics burn.

Chemicals like benzene, lead, asbestos and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, are common in ash, runoff and sometimes water systems after fires.

Exposure to high levels of chemicals can sometimes cause immediate harm, such as nausea, vomiting, dizziness, rashes and respiratory issues. For these reasons it is critical to protect people, especially children and people with health conditions, from exposure.

State health officials recommended that residents wear close-toed shoes, N95 respirators, chemical resistant gloves and other protective equipment while looking through property debris.

When disaster debris is eventually removed by professionals, the contractors will be wearing Tyvek suits and possibly respirators to protect their health.

Buildings that didn’t burn can still have hazards

Even buildings deemed structurally safe may have pollutants that make them unsafe for human health.

Particles and vapors can enter buildings through cracks, doors, windows and other portals. Some of these pollutants settle onto surfaces, while others penetrate fabrics, stick to walls and enter air ducts.

Often buildings must be professionally cleaned or decontaminated by wildfire remediation companies. Cleaning surfaces and ducts, replacing air filters and installing HEPA filters can also help.

Drinking water risks and soil testing

Drinking water is another serious concern after urban fires.

Wildfires can make the plumbing outside or inside the building itself unsafe in a couple of ways. Loss of water pressure can allow pollutants to enter pipes. Maui County cited this risk in issuing its “unsafe water” alert on Aug. 11. When plastic pipes heat up, they can also decompose and then directly leach chemicals into water.

My colleagues and I have documented benzene levels that exceeded hazardous limits for drinking water after several previous fires. PAHs can also be present, as our research has shown.

These and other chemicals pose an immediate health risk to water users, even if the water smells fine. Simple water flushing can fail to remove severe contamination. Proper inspections and testing in buildings and for private wells and larger water systems are important.

Outside, the ground can also become contaminated in a fire. Once the debris is removed, testing is necessary to ensure that the soil where people will replant their gardens, yards and fruit trees is free of hazardous chemicals and safe for humans and pets.

Protecting waterways and aquatic life

During firefighting and clean-up, and when it rains, pollutants can wash into waterways and end up in the ocean.

Lahaina stretches along Maui’s west coast and has long been a popular site for seeing sea turtles and other marine life. That sea life may now be at risk from pollutants from burned coastal buildings and runoff. The fire burned to the shoreline, destroying boats, docks and other vehicles, some of which sank.

Debris and sunken boats will need to be removed from the nearshore waters to protect corals. Similar to wildfires near lakes, rivers and streams, water testing will be necessary.

Communities can avoid more harmful runoff during the cleanup process by placing pollution-control barriers near storm drains, around properties and near waterways. These can help intercept pollutants flowing toward the ocean.

What happens to all the debris?

How to safely dispose of all the debris as the community is cleaned up and recovers is another question.

After the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, where about 1,200 structures were destroyed, the cleanup generated 300,000 tons of waste. In Maui, debris may have to be taken off the island for disposal.

Cleanup and recovery from a disaster of this magnitude takes years. In the process, I recommend residents reach out to public health departments for advice to help them stay healthy and safe.

This article was updated Aug. 12, 2023, with new damage estimates from Maui County officials.

Andrew J. Whelton is a professor of civil, environmental & ecological engineering, director of the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety at Purdue University. Whelton receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, City of Louisville, Paradise Irrigation District, Paradise Rotary Foundation, the Water Research Foundation, and crowdfunding. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Wildfire smoke from Canada’s extreme fire season has left a lot of people thinking about air quality and wondering what to expect in the days ahead.

All air contains gaseous compounds and small particles. But as air quality gets worse, these gases and particles can trigger asthma and exacerbate heart and respiratory problems as they enter the nose, throat and lungs and even circulate in the bloodstream. When wildfire smoke turned New York City’s skies orange in early June 2023, emergency room visits for asthma doubled.

In most cities, it’s easy to find a daily air quality index score that tells you when the air is considered unhealthy or even hazardous. However, predicting air quality in the days ahead isn’t so simple.

I work on air quality forecasting as a professor of civil and environmental engineering. Artificial intelligence has improved these forecasts, but research shows it’s much more useful when paired with traditional techniques. Here’s why:

How scientists predict air quality

To predict air quality in the near future – a few days ahead or longer – scientists generally rely on two main methods: a chemical transport model or a machine-learning model. These two models generate results in totally different ways.

Chemical transport models use lots of known chemical and physical formulas to calculate the presence and production of air pollutants. They use data from emissions inventories reported by local agencies that list pollutants from known sources, such as wildfires, traffic or factories, and data from meteorology that provides atmospheric information, such as wind, precipitation, temperature and solar radiation.

These models simulate the flow and chemical reactions of the air pollutants. However, their simulations involve multiple variables with huge uncertainties. Cloudiness, for example, changes the incoming solar radiation and thus the photochemistry. This can make the results less accurate.

Machine-learning models instead learn patterns over time from historical data to predict future air quality for any given region, and then apply that knowledge to current conditions to predict the future.

The downside of machine-learning models is that they do not consider any chemical and physical mechanisms, as chemical transport models do. Also, the accuracy of machine-learning projections under extreme conditions, such as heat waves or wildfire events, can be off if the models weren’t trained on such data. So, while machine-learning models can show where and when high pollution levels are most likely, such as during rush hour near freeways, they generally cannot deal with more random events, like wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada.

Which is better?

Scientists have determined that neither model is accurate enough on its own, but using the best attributes of both models together can help better predict the quality of the air we breathe.

This combined method, known as the machine-learning – measurement model fusion, or ML-MMF, has the ability to provide science-based predictions with more than 90% accuracy. It is based on known physical and chemical mechanisms and can simulate the whole process, from the air pollution source to your nose. Adding satellite data can help them inform the public on both air quality safety levels and the direction pollutants are traveling with greater accuracy.

We recently compared predictions from all three models with actual pollution measurements. The results were striking: The combined model was 66% more accurate than the chemical transport model and 12% more accurate than the machine-learning model alone.

The chemical transport model is still the most common method used today to predict air quality, but applications with machine-learning models are becoming more popular. The regular forecasting method used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow.gov relies on machine learning. The site also compiles air quality forecast results from state and local agencies, most of which use chemical transport models.

As information sources become more reliable, the combined models will become more accurate ways to forecast hazardous air quality, particularly during unpredictable events like wildfire smoke.

Joshua S. Fu is the Chancellor’s Professor in Engineering, Climate Change and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee. Fu received funding from U. S. EPA for wildfire and human health studies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Gary Flook served in the Air Force for 37 years, as a firefighter at the now-closed Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois and the former Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana, where he regularly trained with aqueous film forming foam, or AFFF—a frothy white fire retardant that is highly effective but now known to be toxic.

Flook volunteered at his local fire department, where he also used the foam, unaware of the health risks it posed. In 2000, at age 45, he received devastating news: He had testicular cancer, which would require an orchiectomy followed by chemotherapy.

Hundreds of lawsuits, including one by Flook, have been filed against companies that make firefighting products and the chemicals used in them.

And multiple studies show that firefighters, both military and civilian, have been diagnosed with testicular cancer at higher rates than people in most other occupations, often pointing to the presence of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in the foam.

But the link between PFAS and testicular cancer among service members was never directly proven — until now.

A new federal study for the first time shows a direct association between PFOS, a PFAS chemical, found in the blood of thousands of military personnel and testicular cancer.

Using banked blood drawn from Air Force servicemen, researchers at the National Cancer Institute and Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences found strong evidence that airmen who were firefighters had elevated levels of PFAS in their bloodstreams and weaker evidence for those who lived on installations with high levels of PFAS in the drinking water. And the airmen with testicular cancer had higher serum levels of PFOS than those who had not been diagnosed with cancer, said study co-author Mark Purdue, a senior investigator at NCI.

“To my knowledge,” Purdue said, “this is the first study to measure PFAS levels in the U.S. military population and to investigate associations with a cancer endpoint in this population, so that brings new evidence to the table.”

In a commentary in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, Kyle Steenland, a professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, said the research “provides a valuable contribution to the literature,” which he described as “rather sparse” in demonstrating a link between PFAS and testicular cancer.

More studies are needed, he said, “as is always the case for environmental chemicals.”

Not ‘Just Soap and Water’

Old stocks of AFFF that contained PFOS were replaced in the past few decades by foam that contains newer-generation PFAS, which now also are known to be toxic. By congressional order, the Department of Defense must stop using all PFAS-containing foams by October 2024, though it can keep buying them until this October. That’s decades after the military first documented the chemicals’ potential health concerns.

A DoD study in 1974 found that PFAS was fatal to fish. By 1983, an Air Force technical report showed its deadly effects on mice.

But given its effectiveness in fighting extremely hot fires, like aircraft crashes and shipboard blazes, the Defense Department still uses it in operations. Rarely, if ever, had the military warned of its dangers, according to Kevin Ferrara, a retired Air Force firefighter, as well as several military firefighters who contacted KFF Health News.

“We were told that it was just soap and water, completely harmless,” Ferrara said. “We were completely slathered in the foam — hands, mouth, eyes. It looked just like if you were going to fill up your sink with dish soap.”

Photos released by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service in 2013 show personnel working in the foam without protective gear. The description calls the “small sea of fire retardant foam” at Travis Air Force Base in California “non-hazardous” and “similar to soap.”

“No people or aircraft were harmed in the incident,” it reads.

There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, invented in the 1940s to ward off stains and prevent sticking in industrial and household goods. Along with foam used for decades by firefighters and the military, the chemicals are in makeup, nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing, rugs, food wrappers, and a myriad of other consumer goods.

Known as “forever chemicals,” they do not break down in the environment and do accumulate in the human body. Researchers estimate that nearly all Americans have PFAS in their blood, exposed primarily by groundwater, drinking water, soil, and foods. A recent U.S. Geological Survey study estimated that at least 45% of U.S. tap water has at least one type of forever chemical from both private wells and public water supplies.

Health and environmental concerns associated with the chemicals have spurred a cascade of lawsuits, plus state and federal legislation that targets the manufacturers and sellers of PFAS-laden products. Gary Flook is suing 3M and associated companies that manufactured PFAS and the firefighting foam, including DuPont and Kidde-Fenwal.

Congress has prodded the Department of Defense to clean up military sites and take related health concerns more seriously, funding site inspections for PFAS and mandating blood testing for military firefighters. Advocates argue those actions are not enough.

“How long has [DoD] spent on this issue without any real results except for putting some filters on drinking water?” said Jared Hayes, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Working Group. “When it comes to cleaning up the problem, we are in the same place we were years ago.”

On a Mission to Get Screening

The Department of Veterans Affairs does not recommend blood testing for PFAS, stating on its website that “blood tests cannot be linked to current or future health conditions or guide medical treatment decisions.”

But that could change soon. Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), co-chair of the congressional PFAS Task Force, in June introduced the Veterans Exposed to Toxic PFAS Act, which would require the VA to treat conditions linked to exposure and provide disability benefits for those affected, including for testicular cancer.

“The last thing [veterans] and their families need to go through is to fight with VA to get access to benefits we promised them when they put that uniform on,” Kildee said.

Evidence is strong that exposure to PFAS is associated with health effects such as decreased response to vaccines, kidney cancer, and low birth weight, according to an expansive, federally funded report published last year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The nonprofit institution recommended blood testing for communities with high exposure to PFAS, followed by health screenings for those above certain levels.

It also said that, based on limited evidence, there is “moderate confidence” of an association between exposure and thyroid dysfunction, preeclampsia in pregnant women, and breast and testicular cancers.

The new study of Air Force servicemen published July 17 goes further, linking PFAS exposure directly to testicular germ cell tumors, which make up roughly 95% of testicular cancer cases.

Testicular cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among young adult men. It is also the type of cancer diagnosed at the highest rate among active military personnel, most of whom are male, ages 18 to 40, and in peak physical condition.

That age distribution and knowing AFFF was a source of PFAS contamination drove Purdue and USUHS researcher Jennifer Rusiecki to investigate a possible connection.

Using samples from the Department of Defense Serum Repository, a biobank of more than 62 million blood serum specimens from service members, the researchers examined samples from 530 troops who later developed testicular cancer and those of 530 members of a control group. The blood had been collected between 1988 and 2017.

A second sampling collected four years after the first samples were taken showed the higher PFOS concentrations positively associated with testicular cancer.

Ferrara does not have testicular cancer, though he does have other health concerns he attributes to PFAS, and he worries for himself and his fellow firefighters. He recalled working at Air Combat Command headquarters at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia in the early 2010s and seeing emails mentioning two types of PFAS chemicals: PFOS and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA.

But employees on the base remained largely unfamiliar with the jumble of acronyms, Ferrara said.

Even as the evidence grew that the chemicals in AFFF were toxic, “we were still led to believe that it’s perfectly safe,” Ferrara said. “They kept putting out vague and cryptic messages, citing environmental concerns.”

When Ferrara was working a desk job at Air Combat Command and no longer fighting fires, his exposure likely continued: Joint Base Langley-Eustis is among the top five most PFAS-contaminated military sites, according to the EWG, with groundwater at the former Langley Air Force Base registering 2.2 million parts per trillion for PFOS and PFOA.

According to the EPA, just 40 parts per trillion would “warrant further attention,” such as testing and amelioration.

The Defense Department did not provide comment on the new study.

Air Force officials told KFF Health News that the service has swapped products and no longer allows uncontrolled discharges of firefighting foam for maintenance, testing, or training.

“The Department of the Air Force has replaced Aqueous Film Forming Foam, which contained PFAS, with a foam that meets Environmental Protection Agency recommendations at all installations,” the Air Force said in a statement provided to KFF Health News.

Both older-generation forever chemicals are no longer made in the U.S. 3M, the main manufacturer of PFOS, agreed to start phasing it out in 2000. In June, the industrial giant announced it would pay at least $10.3 billion to settle a class-action suit.

Alarmed over what it perceived as the Defense Department’s unwillingness to address PFAS contamination or stop using AFFF, Congress in 2019 ordered DoD to offer annual testing for all active-duty military firefighters and banned the use of PFAS foam by 2024.

According to data provided by DoD, among more than 9,000 firefighters who requested the tests in fiscal year 2021, 96% had at least one of two types of PFAS in their blood serum, with PFOS being the most commonly detected at an average level of 3.1 nanograms per milliliter.

Readings between 2 and 20 ng/mL carry concern for adverse effects, according to the national academies. In that range, it recommends people limit additional exposure and screen for high cholesterol, breast cancer, and, if pregnant, high blood pressure.

According to DoD, 707 active and former defense sites are contaminated with PFAS or have had suspected PFAS discharges. The department is in the early stages of a decades-long testing and cleaning process.

More than 3,300 lawsuits have been filed over AFFF and PFAS contamination; beyond 3M’s massive settlement, DuPont and other manufacturers reached a $1.185 billion agreement with water utility companies in June.

Attorneys general from 22 states have urged the court to reject the 3M settlement, saying in a filing July 26 it would not adequately cover the damage caused.

For now, many firefighters, like Ferrara, live with anxiety that their blood PFAS levels may lead to cancer. Flook declined to speak to KFF Health News because he is part of the 3M class-action lawsuit. The cancer wreaked havoc on his marriage, robbing him and his wife, Linda, of “affection, assistance, and conjugal fellowship,” according to the lawsuit.

Congress is again trying to push the Pentagon. This year, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) reintroduced the PFAS Exposure Assessment and Documentation Act, which would require DoD to test all service members — not just firefighters — stationed at installations with known or suspected contamination as part of their annual health checkups as well as family members and veterans.

The tests, which aren’t covered by the military health program or most insurers, typically cost from $400 to $600.

In June, Kildee said veterans have been stymied in getting assistance with exposure-related illnesses that include PFAS.

“For too long, the federal government has been too slow to act to deal with the threat posed by PFAS exposure,” Kildee said. “This situation is completely unacceptable.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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UPDATE 9/18/23 07:40 AM: This story has been updated to reflect a change in the death toll.

Devastating wildfires in Maui have killed at least 97 people and injured dozens, as thousands of residents have been forced to flee. The fires took the island home to more than 160,000 residents by surprise and started spreading widely on Tuesday August 8. 

[Related: Clouds of wildfire smoke are toxic to humans and animals alike.]

According to the United States Drought Monitor, the 735 square mile island of Maui is in  a moderate drought covering over one-third of the island. Some parts of the island are seeing severe drought. In addition to the dry conditions, flames were spread by strong winds from Hurricane Dora. The Category 4 storm is churning more than 800 miles away from the island to the south, which is close enough to fan the flames.

“We don’t know what actually ignited the fires, but we were made aware in advance by the National Weather Service that we were in a red flag situation — so that’s dry conditions for a long time, so the fuel, the trees and everything, was dry,” Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hara, commander general of the Hawaii Army National Guard, said at Wednesday’s briefing, according to CBS News. Those conditions and the low humidity and high winds, “set the conditions for the wildfires,” he said.

Crews battled blazes all over the island on Wednesday. Some adults and children attempted to flee into the ocean to escape, according to the Associated Press. The Coast Guard reported that it rescued 14 people (including two children) who jumped into the water to get away from the smoke and flames.

The flames destroyed the popular tourist destination Lahaina Town which dates to the 1700s. The town was once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii and the area is steeped in Native Hawaiian history and culture. 

“People are worried about their loved ones, their homes, their businesses, their jobs,” David Aiona Chang, a Native Hawaiian and professor of history at the University of Minnesota, told NBC News. “So many of the disasters that hit Hawaii hit Native Hawaiians the hardest. It’s something that we are going to be dealing with for a long time.”

More than 11,000 people have already evacuated Maui. On Wednesday afternoon, local officials on the island urged visitors and residents to leave Lahaina and the island Maui “as soon as possible.” There is an ongoing mass bus evacuation underway, and seats are still available on flights off of the island.

As of Thursday morning, firefighters on Maui have used more than 150,000 gallons of water according to Maj. Gen. Hara. The helicopters used to battle the flames, but high winds of 85 miles per hour hampered these efforts. 

Human-caused climate change has exacerbated the dry and incredibly hot conditions that allow wildfires like the ones on Maui to ignite and spread.  

[Related: How to mask up to protect yourself from wildfire smoke.]

Erica Fleishman, the director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University, told CNN that these wildfires are “unnerving.” While it is difficult to say if climate change can be linked to this specific event without a thorough analysis and review, Fleishman adds, scientists can break down the conditions that made these wildfires possible.  

“We can say there are conditions that are consistent with wildfire, wildfire size and expansion that are changing as climate changes,” Fleishman said. “And some of the things that we’re seeing with this wildfire in Maui are consistent with some of the trends that are known and projected as climate changes.”

Scientists are still trying to fully understand the bigger picture of how the climate crisis is affecting Hawaii, but the current drought is expected to get worse as temperatures increase. Extreme heat dries out vegetation on the island, which then fuels deadly wildfires.

President Joe Biden ordered all available federal resources and assets to help with the response. Former President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, prompted those who want to help with the relief efforts to donate to the Hawai’i Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund on social media. 

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This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Remember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds.

The camera pans slowly across a close-up of crispy, golden McDonald’s fries, standing tall like ears of corn. “We used to think this was the best thing a plant could grow into,” a deep voice proclaims during the commercial. “And then we made this.” Into view emerges a glistening cheeseburger topped with lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles. “Introducing the new McPlant,” the narrator continues, “made with the first plant-based patty worthy of being called a McDonald’s burger.”

The ad, from early 2022, seemed like a sign that plant burgers had made it big. Six years after they arrived on the market, America’s biggest restaurant chain had endorsed them. The news garnered cautious praise from some environmental advocates: Not only could meatless meat patties reduce animal cruelty, but they also promised to ease climate change. They looked, tasted, and bled like beef but had none of the drawbacks — no cows that burp methane, no butchered animals, and barely any cholesterol. 

By most metrics, plant-based meat has been a resounding success. Brands like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Gardein are sold in thousands of grocery stores and restaurants across the country. Dollar sales in the U.S. have tripled over the past decade. Ten years ago, you couldn’t buy fake-blood burgers anywhere. Today, they’re on the grill at Burger King, Carl’s Jr., and other restaurants all over the world. When Beyond Meat went public in 2019, its stock climbed more than 700 percent. The buzz was compared to that of Bitcoin.

Yet a tour of recent headlines suggests that something has gone awry. Last year, Forbes described a “lifeless market for meatless meat.” The Guardian asserted that “plant-based meat’s sizzle fizzled in the U.S.” A Bloomberg headline in January went further, declaring that fake meat was “just another fad.” As for the McPlant, McDonald’s erased it from its menu in the U.S. last August, less than a year after it started a trial run.

The industry had hit its first big stumbling block. In 2022, U.S. plant-based meat sales declined for the first time — 8 percent by volume. Beyond Meat, a behemoth in the sector and the supplier of McPlant patties, saw its stock price plummet 94 percent from its peak in 2020 as sales slid more than 20 percent last year. The company laid off one-fifth of its employees last fall. Impossible Foods — Beyond’s biggest rival — has fared better, but it also ended up laying off roughly 16 percent of its workforce this spring. The layoffs were intended to bring costs “more in line” with revenue and to position the company for “sustainable, balanced growth over the long term,” according to a statement from Impossible. 

“Today, basically, we’re in a little bit of this trough of disillusionment,” said T.K. Pillan, co-founder and chairman of Veggie Grill, one of the country’s biggest plant-based food chains and the first to sell the Beyond Burger. “Expectations and hype got fueled really high.” 

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods said their inventions could do something earlier brands — Tofurky, Boca, Gardenburger — couldn’t. Although the two companies make discrete products with different ingredients and characteristics, they are often talked about in one breath because they share a novel and uncanny resemblance to meat. Impossible’s plant burger could compete with beef even among “uncompromising meat consumers,” Pat Brown, the founder of the company, claimed during a TED Talk in 2015. 

“People around the world love to eat meat. And who can blame them? It’s delicious,” Brown said. “The problem isn’t that people love meat. The problem is how we produce it.” 

As Brown described a “wildlife holocaust” caused by clearing forests around the world for agriculture, a woman behind him flipped an Impossible Burger on a griddle. “Cows aren’t getting any better at turning plants into meat,” Brown said. “And they never will. We’re getting better at it every day. And we’re going to keep getting better.” 

Climate advocates hoped that this new class of faux meat could lure people away from cow meat. Livestock contribute roughly 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and factory-farmed cattle are the worst offenders. “I know it sounds insane to replace a deeply entrenched trillion-dollar-a-year global industry that’s been a part of human culture since the dawn of human civilization,” Brown said in the TED Talk. “But it has to be done.” When he was interviewed by the New Yorker in 2019, Brown said Impossible could help end animal agriculture by 2035. 

Today, that ambitious goal sounds even more ambitious. Plant-based patties haven’t displaced real meat yet — the vast majority of people who buy plant burgers also buy animal protein, and they don’t seem to be buying less of it. According to a survey last year by the consulting firm Deloitte, half of U.S. shoppers have already purchased plant-based meat, but the market has reached a “saturation point.” The report found that people don’t view the food as favorably as they once did. So what happened?

There’s no shortage of theories. For starters, the burgers are made by machines. While they’ve been fine-tuned to include less fat and cholesterol than real beef, early products were full of sodium and used additives for taste and texture, like sugar and carrageenan — an extract from seaweed that’s the subject of health concerns among some scientists and nutritionists. Companies like Beyond and Impossible have tinkered with recipes to get rid of additives and make fake meat more nutritious, but the fact remains that their burgers are lab creatures.

“The big problem with plant-based meats is they fall into the category of ultra-processed,” said Marion Nestle, a longtime food studies professor at New York University. Even though plant-based meat might be healthier than red meat on a nutritional basis, it’s still part of a broader class of processed foods, including cereal and sodas, that have been linked to poor health outcomes. “There’s just tons of evidence that these are the kinds of foods to avoid,” Nestle said. “The ingredient list is lengthy and very impressive, and that has been the basis of attack by the meat industry.” 

Soon after Beyond and Impossible burgers took off, the Center for Consumer Freedom — a corporate-backed advocacy group perhaps best known for defending the tobacco industry — launched a campaign targeting plant-based meats. “Fake meat or dog food?” read a full-page ad the group placed in the Los Angeles Times in 2019. One of the organization’s main tactics has been to highlight that plant burgers come from factories, not farms.

“The meat industry really made a concerted effort to make people think [plant-based meat] is not healthy,” Pillan said. “They do a great job. They’re good marketers. They’re good lobbyists.”

The industry’s push came at a convenient moment: Around the same time, a health movement promoting “clean” foods — meat and vegetables that aren’t processed — entered the mainstream. “The meat alternatives have run up against this other trend,” said Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. Lusk often hears the refrain: “If I wanted plants, I’d just eat plants.” 

Plant-based meat now finds itself in a strange spot, simultaneously seen as healthy and unhealthy, with attitudes starting to tip toward the “junk food” designation. “Healthfulness” was the top reason people bought plant-based meat in 2021, according to an International Food Information Council survey. That same year, a Deloitte survey found that 68 percent of buyers thought the novel burgers were healthier than beef. In 2022, that figure slipped to 60 percent.  

Even more than health perceptions, “Taste and price are the two main reasons people don’t buy” plant patties, said Tessa Hale, director of corporate engagement at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes alternative meats. “They don’t want to try it because they just have this idea that it’s going to taste bad,” Hale said.

Or they simply can’t afford to shell out for a pricier product, made even more expensive by inflation. Plant-based meats often cost two or three times more than their cow-based counterparts at the grocery store. In 2019, the average retail price of meat alternatives was $9.87 per pound, while that of conventional meat was $3.53. Today, Walmart sells Beyond Burgers at $9.68 per pound and beef patties for as little as $3.94 per pound. Some compare the cost gap to that between electric and gas-powered vehicles: Until prices come down, the premium, climate-friendly option won’t be widely adopted. 

For each of the top concerns — price, health, and taste — proponents say there’s reason to be optimistic. They observe that inflation has been worse for real meat than the products that imitate it. As production scales up and new technologies get perfected, the price curve for plant-based foods “is expected to keep on coming down,” said Chris Bryant, an alternative proteins researcher in the United Kingdom. 

Impossible Foods cut sale prices by 20 percent in 2021, and Beyond Meat has said it plans to sell at least one of its products for less than the going price of meat by 2024. In the Netherlands, growing demand and government support for faux meat reportedly have helped fake burgers achieve price parity with real ones. “We seem to be at the tipping point,” Bryant said. 

As for the health question, Pillan acknowledged that plant-based burgers aren’t always the healthiest option — next to, say, a salad or lentils. But he said what matters is that they’re healthier than beef. They have less cholesterol and fat, and some research suggests they lower risk of heart disease compared to red meat. 

A Beyond Meat spokesperson cited a similar case made by the company’s chief executive, Ethan Brown, on an earnings call in February. Brown criticized the “drummed up misperception that our products are overly processed and utilize complex ingredients” and pointed to a study suggesting that eating Beyond’s products instead of animal meat could lead to lower cholesterol levels.

Veggie Grill, for its part, has closed several locations in recent months, but also plans to launch a franchise program. In the company’s early days, “The West Coast was really where we could put multiple Veggie Grills and make the concept work,” Pillan said. “Now we could put multiple Veggie Grills in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami.”

Meanwhile, producers aren’t done fiddling with the recipes for fake meat. Scientists are honing techniques like precision and biomass fermentation to reduce the number of ingredients needed to turn plants into meat. One company, Meati, is marketing steak and chicken products made almost entirely from mushrooms, touting it as being simultaneously low in fats and high in protein, vitamins, and minerals. 

All in all, the industry’s supporters aren’t that worried about the dire tone of the recent media coverage. “I still believe there is a lot of hype,” Hale said. “It’s a very nascent category, all things considered.” There remains a sense among proponents, much as there was 10 years ago, that meat made from plants could one day make a meaningful dent in the market for animal meat, living up to its many promises.

Consider the assurance that Brown, Impossible’s founder, offered to a group of kids four years ago when they toured his startup’s office to learn about his team’s invention: “I promise that by the time you are adults, the meat you eat will not come from dead animals,” Brown told the kids, who had donned white lab coats for the occasion. “You can come find me and beat me up if I’m wrong.”

*This piece has been updated to include a response from Beyond Meat.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/plant-based-meat-beyond-beef-sales-decline-impossible-burger/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Some of the most exotic solutions to climate change are the various forms of geoengineering. Such proposals aim to reduce global warming by shrinking the amount of solar radiation that reaches Earth’s surface—by, say, injecting large amounts of sulfur dioxide or dust into the air to mimic the cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions. Or building catapults to launch lunar dust into orbit around Earth and intercept the sun’s rays in the space near our planet. 

But University of Hawaii cosmologist István Szapudi has an even more far-out idea: place a 372,000-mile-wide sun shade tethered to a captured asteroid between Earth and the sun to reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching our planet by 1.7 percent. His analysis is agnostic to the shade’s shape, though he imagines it could be a circular shade made of triangular segments, able to open or close like flower petals to allow variable amounts of sunlight through. 

“It’s not going to cast a sharp shadow,” Szapudi says. ”Maybe with a telescope you could notice that there is something in front of the sun. But other than that, it would just be that people would notice that the weather is a little bit better.”

He readily admits that this concept would require millions of dollars investment in just preliminary engineering studies to see if it is really possible. “Of course, it’s unrealistic to actually do this, so hopefully, we will slowly give up fossil fuels,” Szapudi says, citing a much more mainstream goal to curb a source of climate change. “But that’s a very long-term process.”

In the meantime, he suggests, maybe the world can consider alternatives to help mitigate the change in climate that occurs from the carbon already in Earth’s atmosphere today. 

Szapudi’s proposal, as described in a paper published on July 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, would place this massive sun shade at the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1, or L1. This is a region of space about 932,000 miles toward the sun from Earth where the gravity of both bodies cancels out, allowing a spacecraft orbiting L1 to maintain a constant position relative to the sun and Earth with minimal maneuvering. The James Webb Space Telescope makes use of the same phenomena at L2, the L1 point’s counterpart 932,000 miles away from Earth in the direction of the outer solar system. 

[Related: How big banks can make real progress against climate change]

Szapudi is not the first to suggest placing a sun shade at L1, but previous proposals ran into problems. Namely, a large sun shade will also act like a solar sail, catching solar radiation that will push the structure out of position at L1. Previous proposals got around this by making the sun shade extremely massive, on the order of 350 million tons, perhaps of metal or asteroid stuff—an utterly unrealistic amount of mass even for a proposal that’s already this far out. 

Szapudi instead proposes connecting it to an asteroid counterweight by tethers up to 1.9 million miles long. Since the sun’s gravity is more potent the further away from L1 and closer to the star you go, the tug of solar gravity on the asteroid will counterbalance the radiation pressure on the sun shade, allowing it to stay in place. 

With such a configuration, Szapudi estimated the shade itself might weigh only 35,000 tons. “That’s something that SpaceX could put up in space” using its current rockets, he says, though it’d take a lot of time and effort. A sun shade could be made even lighter, Szapudi suggests, if made from something like graphene, an extremely light and strong material consisting of atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice pattern. 

Astronomers would have to identify a suitable near-Earth asteroid for the counterweight through something like the University of Hawaii’s Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), Szapudi says. But once they did, the sun shade could be tethered to the asteroid in its existing orbit and used as a solar sail to divert the space rock toward the L1 point. 

Engineering-wise, the whole idea is extremely speculative, Szapudi emphasizes, relying on technology that is not yet developed, such as materials strong and light enough to serve as the tethers. 

[Related on PopSci+: Cloudy with a chance of cooling the planet]

But it’s also not clear if geoengineering of this sort would actually help mitigate the effects of climate change, or do so without introducing other, unpredictable and negative consequences, according to Rutgers University climatologist Alan Robock. Robock leads the Rutgers Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project, which uses climate change models to predict the effects of geoengineering interventions.

“What if you start doing it and you say, ‘OK, we figured out that 90 percent of the world is going to be better off, but 10 percent is going to be worse off,” Robock says. “But we don’t know which 10 percent because of randomness in the climate system.”

And some effects are well understood, likely, and not good, he adds. 

“For example, you’d get drought in Africa and Asia, because the summer monsoon is driven by the temperature difference between the land and the ocean in the summer,” Robock says. “If you block out the sun, the land would cool more than the ocean. And so that temperature difference would go down. In the summer monsoon precipitation would be reduced.” 

And if something went wrong with the sun shield, and it stopped blocking the sun suddenly, Earth would warm back up much more rapidly than humans have ever experienced r. 

“That’s called the termination problem,” Robock says, and it’s something that dogs all geoengineering proposals. 

And then there’s also the very human problem of cooperating on what is essentially a species-wide project: building and tuning a sun shade. How do humans agree on how much sun to block, or as Robock puts it, how does the world agree on where to set the planetary thermostat? “Countries like Canada and Russia wouldn’t mind it being a little bit warmer,” he says. “In fact, we’ve calculated their agriculture would improve, but countries in the tropics would want it cooler because sea levels are going up, they’re already drowning.”

Ultimately Robock sees geoengineering projects as potential distractions from reducing emissions today. The best solution to climate change, Robock says—and Szapudi agrees—is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. 

 But Szapudi sees his proposal as a project to help mitigate the lasting effects of emissions that have already taken place. It could be an insurance policy to help turn off the worst effects of global warming that are already baked into the climate—but it only works if we start such a long term research project now. 

As an insurance policy, though, it’d have one expensive premium. “If technology develops the way I hope it would, maybe this is a trillion-dollar project,” Szapudi says. “You would need at least an army of engineers, probably tens of millions of dollars just to explore the concept to enough detail.”

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Solar power is getting its literal and figurative moment in the sun as much of the world is beset by unprecedented, deadly heat waves—thus requiring reliable energy sources to help keep things cool. According to Reuters on Monday, European countries in particular are experiencing the benefits of the robust, rapidly growing green energy infrastructure.

On July 24, for example, Sicily’s stifling temperatures topped 102 degrees Fahrenheit. The region’s solar grid, however, ensured the cooling demands could be met via providing over half of the excess demand totaling around 1.3 GW, per data from financial and infrastructure data provider, Refinitiv. This reliability was bolstered by the major increase year-to-year in the amount of solar energy comprising Spain’s entire electricity output—up from just 16 percent in 2022 to nearly a quarter of the nation’s energy production this year, reports Reuters.

“Without the additional solar, the system stability impact would have turned out much worse,” said power analyst Nathalie Gerl.

That same day, Greece’s solar photovoltaic infrastructure covered roughly a third of the nation’s 10.35 GW demand. Meanwhile, solar power has handled the entirety of Belgium’s additional energy demands during midday spikes—typically the time when temperatures are at their highest.

[Related: July’s extreme heat waves ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change.]

The US has yet to reach such a solar stride. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent statistics and analysis group, solar generation composed just three percent of all US electricity in 2020. At this pace, the EIA estimates one-fifth of US energy will come from solar infrastructure by midcentury.

The Biden administration has loftier goals. In 2021, the Department of Energy’s Solar Futures Study indicated that solar energy has the potential to support 40 percent of US electricity consumption while employing roughly 1.5 million people, all without raising consumers’ electricity costs. Such aims are vital as dire climatic events become the new norm for vast portions of the globe.

Regardless, solar grids and their accompanying wind energy arrays grew at their fastest rate in US history last year, for a combined total of 13 percent of all the country’s power, according to USA Today. “Ten years ago that would have been unfathomable. Six years ago, people would have been incredulous,” Dan Whitten, vice president for public affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, said at the time.

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In a summer of smashed temperature records and extreme weather events, it’s natural to wonder if anywhere is safe from the wrath of human-made climate change. The answer is probably not, even in the most remote places. A study published August 8 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science found that extreme events, including ocean heatwaves and ice loss, will be more common and more severe in Antarctica. 

[Related: Record-breaking heat is bombarding the North and South poles.]

Drastic action is needed to limit global warming to the target of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit made in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the team on this study are warning that Antarctica’s recent extreme could only be the beginning.  

“Antarctic change has global implications,” study co-author and University of Exeter geoscientist and glaciologist Martin Siegert said in a statement. “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero is our best hope of preserving Antarctica, and this must matter to every country—and individual—on the planet.”

Recently, the ice sheets on Antarctica’s western end and particularly its peninsula have seen dramatic and fast melting that threatens to raise global sea level over the next few centuries. The Thwaites glacier, also called the Doomsday Glacier, on the continent’s western side is melting at an especially rapid pace.

In the study, a team recorded extreme events occurring in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, including weather, ocean temperatures, sea ice, glacier and ice shelf systems, as well as biodiversity on the land and sea. They found that the continent’s fragile environments “may well be subject to considerable stress and damage in future years and decades.” The team calls for urgent policy action to protect it and many countries could be breaching an international treaty by not protecting Antarctica.

“Signatories to the Antarctic Treaty (including the UK, USA, India and China) pledge to preserve the environment of this remote and fragile place,” said Siegert. “Nations must understand that by continuing to explore, extract and burn fossil fuels anywhere in the world, the environment of Antarctica will become ever more affected in ways inconsistent with their pledge.”

The study also considered Antarctica’s vulnerability to a range of extreme events to understand the causes and likely future changes. One of these includes the world’s largest recorded heatwave, which occurred in East Antarctica in 2022. Temperatures were a staggering 70 degrees above average, and winter sea ice formation is currently the lowest on record. 

The high temperatures have also been linked to years with lower krill numbers. Species reliant on krill like fur seals have had breeding failures as a result.

[Related: The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could raise sea levels 16 feet by 2500.]

“Our results show that while extreme events are known to impact the globe through heavy rainfall and flooding, heatwaves and wildfires, such as those seen in Europe this summer, they also impact the remote polar regions,” co-autor and University of Leeds professor of Earth observation Anna Hogg said in a statement. “Antarctic glaciers, sea ice and natural ecosystems are all impacted by extreme events. Therefore, it is essential that international treaties and policy are implemented in order to protect these beautiful but delicate regions.”

The study also calls for careful management of the area to protect vulnerable sites, as the retreat of the Antarctic sea ice sheet will make new areas of the region accessible by ships. Using the European Space Agency and European Commission’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites can provide regular monitoring of the entire Antarctic region and Southern Ocean, and can measure the ice. 

“Antarctic sea ice has been grabbing headlines in recent weeks, and this paper shows how sea ice records—first record highs but, since 2017, record lows—have been tumbling in Antarctica for several years,” study co-author and British Antarctic Survey sea ice expert Caroline Holmes said in a statement. “On top of that, there are deep interconnections between extreme events in different aspects of the Antarctic physical and biological system, almost all of them vulnerable to human influence in some way.”

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It might be time to throw your preconceptions about recycling in the garbage. A decades-long effort to educate people about recycling has mostly backfired, according to new research. 

The study, published last week in Nature Sustainability, found that an overemphasis on recycling has distracted us from better options for preventing waste. In open-ended surveys, Americans overwhelmingly named recycling as the most effective thing they could do to reduce trash in landfills, overlooking more successful strategies—such as generating less waste in the first place.

“Because we have a really hard time imagining what a different, non-disposal-focused system could look like, recycling seems like the best option, right?” said Michaela Barnett, an author of the study and a former civil engineering researcher at the University of Virginia. “And it is better than landfilling, than incinerating, than littering. But people really are defaulting to that over better options, because I think they really don’t see a way out of this system that creates so much trash.”

The study revealed widespread confusion about the relative usefulness of recycling. When asked to rank the Three Rs—“reduce, reuse, recycle”—in order of effectiveness, nearly half of people got the answer wrong. (The phrase is already in the correct order.) They fared better when asked to choose between just two options, waste prevention and recycling, with 80 percent understanding that prevention was more beneficial.

Though Barnett has been “obsessed with trash” her whole life—growing up, she visited recycling centers and made impromptu stops to inspect roadside trash with her mom—she was also once afflicted with “recycling bias,” she says. She attributes the phenomenon to a long-running messaging campaign aimed at getting Americans to take responsibility for their trash. For decades, Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit backed by corporations including Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, has been running anti-litter and pro-recycling advertisements. The campaign had the effect of shifting the blame for trash pollution to individuals, rather than the companies that designed products to be disposable.

“This has been something that’s really been hammered into us by these corporations for 50 years,” Barnett said. “It’s a very convenient out for them to continue producing and for us to continue consuming without a lot of guilt.”

While Barnett’s study showed that people thought recycling was important, they didn’t necessarily know how to do it correctly. Many people placed plastic bags, disposable coffee cups, and light bulbs into virtual recycling bins—all items that can’t be recycled. It’s not really their fault: Recycling rules are confusing and vary based on where you live. Yogurt containers, for example, aren’t accepted by most municipal recycling programs — and even centers that do take them rarely actually recycle them.

Starting in 1989, oil and gas companies lobbied for state laws mandating that the “chasing arrows” symbol appear on all plastic products, despite serious doubts that the widespread recycling of these products would ever be economically viable. Many items adorned with the chasing arrows can’t be recycled at all. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency recommended that the Federal Trade Commission ditch the logo because it was deceiving consumers.

People might slowly be catching on: Barnett’s study found that Americans weren’t confident the system was working. Less than 10 percent of all plastic produced globally gets recycled; survey respondents thought that the number was closer to 25 percent, correctly reasoning that most of what goes into the blue bin eventually ends up in the landfill.

So how should we think about recycling? For Barnett, it’s a useful tool, but its usefulness has been blown out of proportion. “Recycling is not a scam, but also not a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” she said. “We really need to be a lot more intentional with the goods we consume and the actions we take, while also putting that onus back on the producers for whom it really belongs.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/regulation/recycling-bias-study-waste-prevention/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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While most people think of the beach as a place to relax, it has always served a more purposeful role: a buffer against storms. It’s a role that will become even more important as climate change continues to disrupt nature’s delicate balance, inciting sea level rise and stronger, more frequent storms on the coasts.

But those living right along the shore may soon find themselves without as much of a cushion, as coastal erosion diminishes or displaces major beaches. At least 13 miles of beaches have been lost on the Hawaiian islands of Kauai, Oahu, and Maui, and entire beachfront communities are collapsing on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. States like Texas and Alaska have seen their coastlines “retreat” by an average of five to 10 feet per year since 1900. Two-thirds of California beaches could disappear by 2100 all because of sea level rise.

Some forms of soft and hard engineering, like trapping sand with wooden fences, promise to keep erosion at bay, but scientists warn these shouldn’t be considered a permanent fix.

How does coastal erosion work?

When a beach shrinks or even disappears, it’s because coastal erosion removes sand, mud, pebbles, or other sediment along large bodies of water. This could include the saltmarshes in southern Louisiana, sandy strips in the Bay Area of California, and the Great Lakes. 

It’s natural for the beach to be wider in northern summers, when waves are weaker and leave more sediment, and sparser in northern winters, when waves are stronger, according to Jennifer Miselis, who studies the effects of storms and sea level rise on coastal geology for the United States Geological Survey. This is because of many seasonal factors, including increased winds, storms, groundswell, and gravitational pull from the moon in winter.

[Related on PopSci+: Humans and nature will handle rising tides, together]

The problem is when sand is taken from the shoreline and then not replenished, resulting in chronic erosion. In the US, this is usually because the pathways that bring sand from the ocean or river become blocked. For example, an inlet that forms naturally might prevent sediment from flowing alongside the coast. In other countries, especially in the Global South, companies are intentionally eroding beaches through sand mining. Sand, which is a key ingredient in concrete, is the second most used resource in the world after water, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. 

Climate change could also mean less sand on shorelines. Stronger storms mean that more sand will be swept off beaches and into the water. Rising sea levels will cause more areas of beaches to be covered by water. “It’s what I call the bathtub model,” says Stephen Leatherman, a professor at Florida International University who researches beach erosion and sea level rise. “If you bring the water level up, it submerges things, but you’re not having any erosion. Your bathtub’s not falling apart.” However, when coupled with stronger storms, he explains, sea level rise can cause more of the beach to be washed away.

Where do people factor into all this?

Coastlines have always changed over time, says Mark Kulp, a professor of geology at the University of New Orleans. If you study the geologic record, you would find that sea levels have risen about 400 feet over the past 20,000 years or so. But climate change is causing sea levels to rise faster than before, and coastal infrastructure will make it harder for home and business owners to migrate. 

Unlike many millennia ago, humans help drive erosion today. It’s often exacerbated by structures that were built to protect people from flooding, but block off sediment flow from bodies of water as a consequence.

Take Galveston, Texas, where a hurricane killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in 1900, making it the deadliest natural disaster in American history. After that, the city built a 10-mile-long seawall along the coast. The seawall has kept residents and property safe for the past century, but it also decimated what was once a wide beach, causing the city to lose 100 yards of sand a year and hurting local ecosystems and the tourism industry. And in southern Louisiana, which has some of the fastest deteriorating coasts in the country, part of the problem is the levees built to protect communities from flooding, which also prevent sediment from flowing through and replenishing the marshes. 

While people might think development along the coast is responsible for driving coastal erosion, Leatherman says this isn’t true—the reasons for coastal erosion and solutions vary significantly from place to place. But generally, he thinks jetties, which are rock structures built perpendicular to beaches to provide a safe passage for ships into harbors, and then seawalls cause the most erosion out of manmade structures.

What solutions are there?

Renourishment, which could mean dumping trucked-in sand on a beach, designing ways to trap sediment the tide washes in from flowing back into the ocean, or even dredging up sand from the ocean or lake floor to redistribute it on the beach, has been an increasingly popular method of slowing down the effects of erosion around the world. In the northeastern US in particular, “we’re doing a good job by nourishing beaches and keeping them in place,” Miselis says.

But renourishment, especially when it involves transporting new sand, is costly and only a Band-Aid for the problem. “Everybody wants beach nourishment,” Leatherman says. “But people don’t realize, you only set back the erosion clock. In other words, it’s like you’re treating the symptom, not curing the disease. You’re not stopping the sea level from coming up; you’re not stopping coastal storms from coming in.”

Other fixes might employ “soft engineering” techniques to trap sand on the beach, like fashioning wooden fences to build artificial sand dunes, and then planting native plant species to keep the dunes put. And in some cases, like in Louisiana, the levees that keep out flooding could be altered to allow some sediment to flow back into the Mississippi Delta, Kulp says. 

[Related: Pendulums under ocean waves could prevent beach erosion]

But ultimately, people have to accept that some of their favorite beaches will wash away little by little. “If we’re gonna live in coastal environments, we just have to come up with creative and unique solutions to try to limit or reduce some of the erosion,” Kulp says. “But we also need to simultaneously recognize that there may be coastal sections on a global [level] that we can’t necessarily do anything about. We just have to accept that they’re going to disappear and change and that’s part of the process.”

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The use of shared light, low-occupancy vehicles like bicycles and electric scooters (or e-scooters) is growing steadily in the United States and has become an essential part of urban transportation networks. Only 321,000 trips were recorded in 2010, rising to 112 million in 2021. These “micromobility” vehicles are typically designed to travel distances that are too short for driving but too far to walk. Almost 60 percent of all car trips in 2017 were less than six miles, which demonstrates the need for such micromobility solutions.

The rental of dockless e-scooter systems, in particular, emerged that same year and was operating in 65 cities in less than 12 months. Ride-sharing companies like Bird, Lime, and Superpedestrian make fleets of e-scooter available for users to rent for short periods through their respective apps. Because e-scooters have no tailpipe emissions and can replace short car trips, they are often the more eco-friendly mode of transportation. However, e-scooters still have environmental impacts that must be considered.

The sustainability of e-scooters

Giovanni Circella, director of the 3 Revolutions Future Mobility Program at the University of California, Davis, says that the use of e-scooters in US cities “tend to have somewhat positive effects in terms of environmental sustainability” by replacing the use of more polluting modes of transportation such as private cars and ride-hailing vehicles like Uber and Lyft.

In 2018, the Portland Bureau of Transportation launched a four-month pilot program to assess how e-scooters can help the city’s transportation needs. Data revealed that 34 percent of Portland riders and 48 percent of visitors took an e-scooter instead of driving a personal vehicle or taking an Uber, Lyft, or a taxi. 

[Related: Could swappable EV batteries replace charging stations?]

E-scooters can also promote a culture of active travel and “get the critical mass to justify investments in bike lanes and other infrastructure projects that support the use of active travel modes,” says Circella. However, shared e-scooters have mixed impacts, and they can also replace trips that would have otherwise been made by walking, bicycling, or taking public transportation, he adds.

Although the pilot program revealed that a number of users replaced motor vehicle travel with e-scooter sharing, “it also found that scooter-sharing replaced some lower emission active transportation trips,” says Susan Shaheen, co-director of Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Data shows that about 42 percent of Portlanders would have taken lower-emission trips if scooters weren’t an option: 37 percent said they would walk and 5 percent would’ve taken a bicycle. Moreover, the operations of the program—which involves the deployment and retrieval of e-scooters every day—likely added motor vehicle trips to the transportation system, but it is beyond the scope of the study.

It’s important to understand the overall impact of e-scooters beyond the trips they replace and consider other factors like manufacturing and longevity because results can vary based on the assumptions and scenarios modeled, says Shaheen.

A study presented at the 2020 IEEE European Technology and Engineering Management Summit analyzed the environmental impacts of e-scooters under different scenarios, changing different variables like the lifespan, kind of batteries, type of vehicle used to collect them, the average distance per lifetime, and more.

[Related: The pandemic could make cities more bike-friendly—for good.]

In the best case scenario, where e-scooters last 24 months and have a swappable battery that is replaced by riding in electric vans, e-scooter sharing has a lower environmental impact than private cars, electric mopeds, and public transport busses, but is still less sustainable than trams, bicycles, and electric bicycles. However, in the worst-case scenario where the lifespan of e-scooters is only six months, they would have the worst environmental impact out of all. 

A 2019 study published in Environmental Research Letters also reported that ensuring e-scooters are used for two years decreases the average life cycle emissions significantly.

Overall, shared e-scooters are most sustainable when they are replacing personalized individual transport, but it’s possible that they are also catalyzing trips that would not otherwise take place, says Parth Vaishnav, assistant professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. Therefore, local governments should think carefully about encouraging e-scooter use, where to deploy them, and whether there are more effective ways of providing mobility, he adds.

How to make shared e-scooter systems more sustainable

E-scooters are a relatively sustainable mode of transportation, but they can become even greener. Shaheen says the public and private sectors can support e-scooter sharing systems by establishing solar docking stations where practical, using clean or renewable energy sources to charge e-scooters, and using electric vehicles to help with the distribution of scooters would be beneficial.

Switching to electric vehicles for the rebalancing and charging of e-scooters and opting for renewable energy has the potential to reduce the amount of fossil fuel involved in its lifecycle and operations. Most e-scooter companies have yet to explore these options. In 2019, Spin ran a 60-day pilot program and deployed dozens of solar-powered docking stations in Washington D.C. and Ann Arbor, but it’s unclear what the results were.

“The use of pricing and incentives to impact pick-up and drop-off behavior could also help reduce the need to rebalance the scooter network,” says Shaheen. This goes along with the recommendation of the aforementioned 2019 study to reduce collection and distribution distance to minimize the environmental impacts of e-scooters. It also suggests using more efficient vehicles, increasing scooter lifetimes, and charging less frequently. 

[Related: General Motors wants to predict when battery fires might happen.]

Policies may also help reduce the environmental burdens of integrating e-scooters into the transportation system. For instance, allowing e-scooters to remain in public areas overnight can already minimize the trips required to pick up fully charged e-scooters. E-scooter misuse and mistreatment also reduce their lifespans, so implementing policies against these acts would be beneficial. Vaishnav recommends demanding suppliers to produce more durable scooters.

In general, shared dockless e-scooter systems do increase mobility in cities for a number of people and have the potential to reduce emissions in the transportation industry. Concrete steps like ensuring a longer lifespan, switching to renewable energy for charging, and using electric vehicles to pick up and drop off e-scooters would help make them even more sustainable.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

On a sweltering late April day, a flock of middle-aged men strolled in athleisure, practicing their backswings and rifling balls into the azure sky above the Green Springs golf community just outside St. George, a ballooning city of 100,000 in southwestern Utah. Some 2,000 homes, mostly single-family—many with RV garages—orbit the fairway, like rings around Planet Golf, and more are on their way. 

As in so many cities in the desert West, golf in St. George is a thirsty business, with a powerful lobby and a relationship with water painted in green on the landscape. Among its peers, however, St. George is in a league of its own. Few cities in the Southwest use more water per person: nearly 300 gallons a day. And a hefty portion of that, over half, goes to keeping ornamental grass, lawns and golf courses lush in an arid region where water supplies are dwindling every day. Within a decade, and without immediate action to conserve, local officials predict that its water shortage will become a water crisis.

Utah is notorious for granting an unusual degree of grace to this sort of profligate water use. That may be changing, however, at least when it comes to the golf industry: In 2022, the city of Ivins, an exurb of St. George, effectively banned the construction of new golf courses, while early this year, state Rep. Douglas Welton, R, introduced House Bill 188, which could require golf courses to be more transparent about how much water they use.

In a city and at a time where something’s gotta give, will golf be the first to fall?

Minutes down the road from the Green Springs community, at the Dixie Red Hills Golf Course, I joined a group of older players staging behind the first tee. Before we settled on the griddle-hot pleather of our golf carts, Jim Peacock, 80, slapped a top-spinning rocket up and over the rough that his friend Craig Felt, two years his senior, couldn’t help but admire. “Jim’s the athlete of the group,” Felt said. Soon, the chatter moved to water. “When I was in Mexico, there was only enough water for three flushes. That could happen to us if we don’t pay attention,” Felt said. While Tom Smith, 75, indicated that he’d rather give up golf than toilet-flushing, it’s not clear that the rest of the community is so inclined. “This is a place where a lot of people do a lot of golfing,” Greg Milne said, gesturing toward the sprawl of St. George.   

“That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area.” 

This area’s mingling of desert and water has long attracted people. Southern Paiute bands lived near the Virgin River for a millennium or more before Mormon colonists arrived in the late 1850s, intent on making “Utah’s Dixie” bloom with cotton. For the next century, Washington County remained “a sleepy little community off the I-15 that people would pass by on their way to California,” said Colby Cowan, director of golf operations for the city of St. George. Throughout the 1950s, nuclear blasts at Nevada’s Yucca Flats test range blew radioactive dust onto the homes of the city’s 5,000 residents—dust that stubbornly clung to the valley’s reputation.

But in 1965, St. George unveiled the nine-hole Dixie Red Hills course, rebranding the Mormon Downwinder outpost as a putter’s paradise. “That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area,” said Cowan. Since then, golf’s role in the regional recreation economy has burgeoned. The 14 golf courses in Washington County, including four owned by the city of St. George, attract nearly 600,000 visitors a year, generating $130 million dollars annually, according to Cowan. That puts golf on par with mining, quarrying, and oil and gas industries in the area, though still below the half-billion dollars generated annually by Zion National Park.

And, like those other industries, golf has political sway. When golf’s water needs came under fire in Washington County in 2021 and again in the state Legislature this January, the industry flexed its influence. Golf Alliance Utah, the lobbying wing of the Utah Golf Association, pulled strings at the Statehouse in Salt Lake City, killing the bill even after sponsors dropped the annual reporting requirement, arguing that it unfairly targeted the sport. 

Generally, the golf industry tries to burnish its image by touting its economic benefits and highlighting its efforts to decrease water use. “We’re doing our due diligence with water conservation,” Devin Dehlin, the executive director at the Utah Section Professional Golf Association, said in a call with High Country News. “What the sport brings economic-wise is the story we want to tell.” In practice, those changes have come down to encouraging course operators to replace some turf with native plants. Other technologies, like soil-moisture monitoring and artificial grass coloring, which gives turf a deep green appearance with minimal watering, are being adopted, though strictly on a voluntary basis. Dehlin said his organization does not track how widespread these changes are.

Of the ten thirstiest golf courses in Utah, seven are in Washington County, according to an investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune. Some privately owned courses, including Coral Canyon Golf Course and SunRiver Golf Club, actually increased their water use between 2018 and 2022. The mercury tops 100 degrees Fahrenheit here more than 50 days each year, so it takes an exorbitant amount of water to keep the fairways lush year-round: about 177 million gallons annually for each course, or roughly eight times the national average. And if the region continues to grow at its current breakneck rate, existing water supplies—from wells, springs and the Virgin River — will be severely strained. That prospect has some local and state officials backing a proposed pipeline that would carry Colorado River water from the ever-shrinking Lake Powell to this corner of the Utah desert. With or without the pipeline, the region is likely to face severe water rationing, with golf and lawns likely seeing the first cuts. Washington County’s forthcoming drought contingency plan could require cities to cut their water use by up to 30 percent in a worst-case scenario. “And if you look about where they would cut their water usage,” said Washington County Water Conservancy District Manager Zach Renstrom, “it really would come to large grassy areas, such as golf.”

In a bid to avoid future mandated cuts, St. George is scrambling to reduce its water use now. Under Renstrom’s guidance, the city passed sweeping conservation ordinances early this year—the toughest in Utah, but still mild compared to those in Las Vegas. Three of the four city-owned golf courses now use treated wastewater for irrigation rather than potable or “culinary” grade water. Las Vegas shifted to reused water for the majority of its courses by 2008. Cowan said the city-owned courses are beginning to remove ornamental grass from non-play areas. So far this year, the county has removed more than 264,000 square feet of grass. While that may sound like a lot, it’s only about six acres across the entire county, or roughly 4 percent of one local golf course. Even with those measures in place, Renstom says the halcyon days for golf in southwestern Utah need to end: “I’ve had a couple of developers come to me recently and want to talk about golf courses, and I flat-out said, ‘I won’t provide the water.’”

For now, though, the county still has some water to spare. St. George has secured $60 million for a wastewater treatment plant, all while stashing almost two years of reserves in a network of reservoirs. “We have a lot of water stored away,” said Ed Andrechak, water program manager for Conserve Southwest Utah, a sustainability advocacy nonprofit. If the county enforced the strict conservation rules that Las Vegas has, he believes it could grow at the blistering pace it’s projected to over the coming years.

But Andrechak worries that, ultimately, a culture of profligacy will be the barrier to conservation, not money or technical know-how: “We just don’t think water rules apply to us here,” he said. Andrechak cataloged a number of examples: a 1,200-foot lazy river under construction at the Black Desert golf resort in Ivins; the Desert Color community, which built around an artificial lake that Andrechak described as a “giant evapo-pond”; another three man-made lakes for the Southern Shores water-skiing-housing complex in Hurricane, and perhaps most bewildering, a Yogi Bear-themed water park east of St. George. The water park will require 5 million gallons or more of culinary-grade drinking water annually for rides like one nicknamed the “Royal Flush,” a toilet bowl-shaped slide. The Sand Hollow golf course next door gulps up 60 times as much water. “We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it,” Andrechak said. “That’s the culture.”

“We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it.”

This culture is enabled and even nurtured by policy: St. George’s water rates are among the lowest in the West, which results in bigger profits for course operators and more affordable green fees, but also disincentivizes conservation. “The whole idea has been to have low (water) rates to take care of the citizens by making golf affordable,” said Dehlin. “Having affordable water is important for the growth of the game and to keep our facilities in the conditions that we do. And that’s one thing about golf courses in Utah in general: they’re very well-manicured, very well-kept,” Dehlin said. “And yes, well-irrigated.” 

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. Email him at samuel.shaw@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow Samuel on Instagram @youngandforgettable. 

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Dungeness crabs hunt by flicking their chemical-detecting antennae to and fro. Sensing the water—the underwater equivalent of sniffing the air—is a well-trod strategy for homing in on potential prey. But that timeless tactic appears to be at risk, as new research shows that climate change–induced ocean acidification seems to cause Dungeness crabs’ antennae to falter.

Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Ontario put Dungeness crabs in water just slightly more acidic than normal—conditions that are already present in some coastal ecosystems and could be widespread by the year 2100 if humans continue to emit a high level of greenhouse gases. They found that the animals need to be exposed to cadaverine, a food signaling chemical, at a concentration 10 times higher than normal before they register its presence.

And it’s not just Dungeness crabs that appear to be in trouble. Acidification threatens to deprive a variety of marine species of crucial chemical cues. Research into this phenomenon is still limited, but as the field develops, the scope of the potential consequences is growing clearer.

“Almost every chemical that’s in the sea could be affected,” says Jorg Hardege, a chemical ecologist at the University of Hull in England.

Just like on land, where animals smell and taste chemicals to glean vital information, many marine creatures use chemical cues to spot food, locate potential mates, or avoid nearby predators. Chemoreception works because each of these cues is a molecule with a distinct chemical structure and physical shape. But because all of these chemicals are floating around in water, they’re susceptible to a range of chemical reactions. More acidic water, says Hardege, has more positively charged hydrogen ions floating around. Those hydrogen ions can bind to the cue chemicals, changing their shape—and how they’re detected. Hydrogen ions can also bind to the animals’ chemoreceptors, changing how they sense those chemical cues, Hardege says.

If you think of these chemical cues as a language, Hardege says, it’s as if words start sounding different while, at the same time, your ears are changing how they hear sound.

Unsurprisingly, disrupting an animal’s ability to detect key chemical cues can alter its behavior. Take the European green crab, for example. One study, coauthored by Hardege, shows that a slight increase in water’s acidity can change the shape of chemicals that tell the crabs to fan their eggs with water to provide fresh oxygen and remove waste. Crabs in experimentally acidified water were less sensitive to these cues—they needed at least 10 times as much of these chemicals added to the water before they started fanning their eggs more frequently.

Some fish have also demonstrated having trouble picking up on chemical cues in more acidic water. In one study, juvenile pink salmon seemed less attuned to chemical cues and less able to avoid predators. Gilthead seabream—a commonly eaten European fish—have shown the same trend.

Many of these experiments tested levels of ocean acidification that could be widespread by the end of the century if the world hits extreme climate change projections. But with coastal upwelling, a process that can bring acidic deep-ocean water to the surface, some coastal environments already see this level of acidification occasionally. And even if future carbon emissions are reigned in, the whole ocean will still grow more acidic than it is now. Individual species will likely have different thresholds at which the increasing acidity suddenly derails their ability to detect certain chemicals, Hardege says, and scientists don’t yet know where those thresholds might be.

Christina Roggatz, a marine chemical ecologist at the University of Bremen in Germany, notes that acidification does not always reduce animals’ sensitivity to chemicals. For example, one study found that in more acidic water, hermit crabs seem to be even more attracted to a particular chemical cue.

But with some cues growing stronger and others growing weaker, widespread acidification could upend the balance of chemical communication in the ocean, Roggatz says.

This is on top of the other, more overtly threatening, consequences of changing marine chemistry. In a particularly frightening case, Roggatz discovered that a combination of increasing acidity and rising temperatures actually increases the toxicities of saxitoxin, a potent neurotoxin from contaminated shellfish, and tetrodotoxin, produced by pufferfish, blue-ringed octopuses, and other animals.

Research into acidification’s potential to disrupt underwater chemical communication and sensory perception is really just getting started. Last year, Hardege, Roggatz, and others wrote a paper urging researchers, from chemists to ecologists, to unravel what these changes could mean.

It is possible, Hardege says, that wildlife could adapt to the changing chemical environment. The signal of nearby food, for instance, isn’t often one chemical, but an array of chemicals. Even if a species can no longer detect one of those chemicals, it might still be able to detect the others. Or, it might turn to its other senses, like vision.

Of course, it’s best if we don’t put that to the test. The best way to protect marine ecosystems from ocean acidification is to limit acidification, says Roggatz.

“If we can buy time by reducing the carbon dioxide amounts we emit substantially,” Roggatz says, “I think that is the solution.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

The post As oceans become more acidic, creatures could struggle to smell appeared first on Popular Science.

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This story was co-published with Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions.

It was the face that launched a thousand plastic straw bans. 

The video begins with a close up of the turtle’s head, its dark green, pebbled skin out of place against the stark-white boat deck. Robinson’s hands approach, moving the pliers toward the turtle’s nostril. The tool clamps down on the edge of something—A barnacle? A worm?—barely visible within the dark tunnel. The creature squirms and dribbles blood as the pulling begins. A long, thin object begins to emerge, inch by excruciating inch.

It was August 10, 2015, and marine conservation biologist Christine Figgener was collecting data for her Ph.D. a few miles off the coast of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. She and a colleague, Nathan Robinson, were researching olive ridley sea turtles when they noticed a male had something encrusted in its nose. The pair decided to try to extract the object. Robinson flipped open his Swiss army knife’s pliers and Figgener grabbed her phone and began to film. 

“We had no idea what we were frigging looking at,” Figgener said in a newer, annotated version of the video. It wasn’t until one of the researchers cut off a piece of the object that they realized what it was: a four-inch piece of plastic straw.

“We couldn’t believe that such a mundane object that we really use on a daily basis … that we found it in the turtle’s nose,” she said—“that a tiny object caused so much suffering.”

When Figgener uploaded the turtle straw video to her YouTube account eight years ago, it went viral. For a few years, plastic straws were the trendy rallying cry for sustainability. In many ways, the campaign was a success story — one that elevated our awareness of single-use plastics to the point where it resulted in actual policy change. But upon reflection, not all the solutions that spun out of the anti-straw movement actually held water. In recent years, many environmental pundits have focused on the movement’s shortcomings. 

To many environmentalists fighting plastic pollution, anti-straw advocacy now feels passé—out of touch with the broader need to address all forms of single-use plastic. But the movement’s rise and fall still holds lessons for the activists of today. 

From soda bottles to yogurt containers, there is a lot of plastic pollution out there. So how did we end up so obsessed with straws?

The anti-plastic straw movement didn’t actually originate with Figgener’s turtle video. Back in 2011, a 9-year-old named Milo Cress found it odd that the restaurants he would go to with his mom in Burlington, Vermont, would automatically serve drinks with a straw, whether or not their customer wanted one. He approached the owner of Leunig’s Bistro and Café in Burlington, and eventually, Leunig’s became one of the first establishments in the country to ask customers whether they wanted a straw or not.

Eventually, Cress and his mom made some calls to straw manufacturers and estimated that 500 million straws are used and discarded by people in the U.S. every day. The environmental advocacy group Eco-Cycle published Cress’s findings, which in the years since have been cited by nearly every major news media outlet that has covered the plastic straw beat, including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. (The credibility of that figure has since been questioned, with market research firms determining the figure to be between 170 million and 390 million a day.)

But the turtle video added just the right amount of injury to plastic insult. Figgener’s viral footage helped stir single-use plastic outrage into a frenzy. Celebrities called on their followers to #stopsucking, a social media campaign that aimed to “turn the plastic straw into environment enemy number one.” 

Thousands of restaurants joined the pledge and the idea took off, reaching the rare environmental threshold of actual policy change. In 2018, Seattle became the first big city in the United States to ban plastic straws. It was followed shortly by other major municipalities in California, New Jersey, Florida, and other states. That same year, companies including Starbucks and American Airlines jumped on the anti-straw bandwagon, the former announcing it would launch a new “sippy” lid for its cold beverages starting in 2020, allegedly diverting more than 1 billion straws per year.

But for all its success in getting people riled up about plastic pollution, much of that outrage seemed limited to, well, straws, which only make up a small part of the single-use problem. National Geographic calculated that of the 8 million tons of plastic deposited into the world’s oceans each year, only 0.025 percent is comprised of plastic straws. 

Some anti-plastic advocates began denouncing the straw bans as “slacktivism,” a type of activism characterized by a lack of commitment or effort. They said the bans gave people an overblown sense that they were making a difference in combating the plastics crisis. For example, anti-straw pledges didn’t seem as concerned with other types of plastic waste or the fossil fuels associated with every part of their life cycle. Even the anti-straw Starbucks sippy lids were actually made from polypropylene, a type of plastic that has a 3 percent recycling rate in the U.S. (The company claimed it was still an improvement, as the new lids could potentially be recycled. Plastic straws are too lightweight and thin to make it through the mechanical recycling sorting process.)

The anti-plastic straw movement also started getting pushback from disability advocates, who pointed out that some people need flexible straws to be able to drink liquids. Paper straws get soggy and fall apart more quickly, reusable straws made of metal are not easy to bend, and silicone straws are difficult to clean.

For the average consumer, functionality is often more important than sustainability, said Leslie Davenport, a climate psychology educator and consultant. “Our brains favor habits because they conserve energy. So if we are going against the current—a BYO straw for example—it’s hard for most people to do so unless highly motivated.” 

For restaurants that chose to continue to provide disposable straws, there were options beyond paper or plastic. Straws made with natural materials such as sugarcane and wheat are 100 percent biodegradable, but are inflexible and cost more to manufacture. As a result, many businesses looked to straws made from bioplastics — allegedly compostable plastics made from corn, sugarcane, agave, and other nonpetroleum sources. But according to Brandon Leeds, co-founder of SOFi Paper Products, bioplastics require specific disposal and processing methods, many of which aren’t always followed or clearly outlined, in order for them to decompose effectively. 

“Many businesses desire to adopt sustainable practices, and when they encounter these plastic-like alternatives, they may mistakenly believe that they can be environmentally conscious without truly moving away from the plastic aesthetic,” Leeds said. “The absence of stricter governmental regulations allows companies to take advantage of greenwashing tactics, making it difficult to differentiate genuinely sustainable options from those that are not.”

Buying into greenwashing, a term that refers to environmental “solutions” whose appeal is based on appearing environmentally friendly rather than actually being so, “can be an unconscious psychological defense in individuals to shield them from the fear and overwhelming [feeling] of climate change,” Davenport said. “There can be an unexamined story of ‘I’m doing my part’ because it is more soothing than feeling out of control with the harmful and terrifying trajectory we are on with climate change.”

Plastic straw bans are alive and well today, with new proposals still cropping up at the state and city levels. But eliminating plastic straws is no longer the go-to goal of the anti-plastic movement. Part of that is the result of the existing bans’ success: For many consumers, the absence of plastic straws has become normal, even mundane. Now, anti-plastic advocates hope to harness in new ways the outrage they once inspired. 

According to Jackie Nuñez, the Plastic Pollution Coalition’s advocacy and engagement manager and the founder of The Last Plastic Straw, the anti-plastic straw movement helped advance awareness and understanding of other single-use products. California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont have all placed some form of ban on plastic bags. The U.S. Interior Department stated that single-use plastic products will be phased out of national parks and around 480 million acres of federal land by 2032. In 2022, the Canadian federal government implemented a single-use plastics ban that included bags, cutlery, food service ware, and stir sticks.

It’s not really the item, it’s the material that’s the problem, Nuñez said. “All plastic pollution is by design.” 

Some activists have attempted to call attention to the scourge of single-use plastics by staging ‘plastic attacks,’ in which protesters head to the grocery store and proceed to remove the plastic wrapping from the food in their carts and return the waste to the store. Since they began in 2018, the strategy has gone global. Plastic attacks have been reported in places including in Hong Kong, South Korea, Canada, Peru, and the United States. Some of the biggest demonstrations have drawn hundreds of participants.

The anti-plastic straw movement “triggered a lightbulb moment for a lot of people,” Nuñez said. “It ended up becoming a thing I call a gateway issue.”

The post Did plastic straw bans work? Yes, but not in the way you’d think. appeared first on Popular Science.

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This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Remember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds.

Almost a decade ago, Kathryn Kellogg started storing all of her trash—every receipt, sticker, wrapper, and anything else she couldn’t recycle or compost—in a 16-ounce Mason jar. The idea was to save money and avoid generating garbage by adopting zero-waste practices: bringing canvas bags to the grocery store, for example, or making her own beauty products. All of this could be done without putting her infractions on display, of course, but the jar offered Kellogg an extra form of accountability—especially since she decided to share it with her numerous Instagram followers.

“I thought, let’s just try and reduce as much trash as possible and have fun making my own products,” said Kellogg, who runs the blog and Instagram account Going Zero Waste. “Can I make my own crackers? Yes, I can. Can I make my own burger buns? Yes, I can. Cleaning products? Sure can.”

The result was strangely beautiful. Photos of Kellogg’s jar (of which there are several) offered an archeological glimpse into the zero-waste lifestyle. In one image from a year into the experiment, a green twist tie peeks from behind an eco-thrift tag for a $0.25 miscellaneous item; from another view of the melange, a pop of primary color from a balloon fragment or wrapper.

Those types of images, blurring the line between ascetic and aesthetic in a Marie Kondo, minimalist kind of way, caught on, helping to catapult the “trash jar” into a symbol of the zero-waste movement of the 2010s. Trash jars inspired dozens of profiles in outlets like New York Magazine, the Washington Post, and CBS. Entire zero-waste brands sprang up around them, such as Package Free Shop.

But then came the backlash—or, rather, a gradual falling out of favor. A few years in, people who were inspired to adopt zero-waste practices because of the trash-jar trend began renouncing it as exclusionary and unrealistic. They argued that focusing on the jar sapped energy from more systemic actions they could take to address plastic pollution. Some likened it to extreme dieting, calling it the “skinny supermodel of zero waste.”

While the trash jar remains an emblem of the zero-waste movement, it’s lost much of its cultural cachet. Today, in 2023, many sustainability influencers are relieved to have entered into a softer, more forgiving era of the zero-waste movement—one that recognizes the impossibility of “zero” and welcomes a spectrum of waste-reduction efforts. Some have pioneered alternate slogans, like “low-impact,” “low-waste,” and #ZeroWasteIRL.

Sabs Katz, an influencer who runs the Instagram account Sustainable Sabs, identifies much more with those newer slogans. While the trash-jar trend helped introduce many people to the concepts behind zero-waste, she thinks of it as an evolutionary step in our understanding of greener living. Deemphasizing the trash jar feels “less elitist,” she said. “If we want to bring in as many people as possible, then why would we want to build a movement that you have to be perfect to be in?”

Trash jar or no, the zero-waste movement is a response to one of the United States’ signature problems: our reckless consumption of stuff. The average American generates nearly five pounds of waste per day—largely from food, but also from paper, plastics, glass, metal, clothes, and other materials. Only about 30 percent of this gets recycled or composted. Another 12 percent is burned to generate energy. Almost all the rest — about 50 percent of waste generation, or about 132 million metric tons per year—goes to landfills.

“You start to look at your trash and you’re like, ‘How do I have so much? Where’s the trash going?’” said Jhánneu Roberts, a sustainability influencer whose social media accounts use just her first name. 

That mindfulness plays prominently in the story of all the influencers Grist spoke with, although several also described financial reasons for cutting back on their consumption. (Zero-waste is a money-saver!) In general, they were fed up with throwaway culture: knickknacks flying off shelves wrapped in unnecessary packaging, plastic bags and cutlery designed to be used for mere seconds before being discarded. 

The origins of the trash jar are up for debate, but one of the early pioneers of the concept was Bea Johnson, an influencer based in Marin County, California, who’s been called the “mother of the zero-waste lifestyle” and the “priestess of waste-free living.” Under the username Zero Waste Home—also the title of her book—she’s been documenting her family’s trash jar since at least 2014. “Own less + waste less = live more,” read one of her posts from that year, just a few months before she shared a photo of her family’s annual collection of jar trash set against a fluffy white blanket. Her jar made several more appearances over the years, sandwiched between photos of upcycled jewelry, fresh fruits and vegetables, and lots of elegant interior design. 

Another influencer, Lauren Singer of the blog and Instagram account Trash Is for Tossers, went viral around the same time after she delivered a TED Talk featuring her trash jar. In 2016, she told CNN that her four-year experiment had helped her save over 6,000 pounds of trash compared to the average American.

“It wasn’t just this hippy-dippy community,” said Lily Cameron, an influencer and author who runs the Instagram account Wild Minimalist, commenting on the trash jar trend. It was decidedly chic. “You could still have this very beautiful, fulfilling, joyful lifestyle without constantly buying things and creating all this waste in the process.”

Zero Waste Home inspired Cameron to try out her own trash jar. She called it “the status symbol” of being in the zero-waste community. Others described it as “the gold star everyone was looking toward,” or the “absolute best, purest form” of zero-waste.

It probably wasn’t a coincidence that most jar influencers were women, who tend to handle more household tasks, like grocery shopping, than men. Women are also more likely to embrace environmental causes, while men tend to view habits like bringing a reusable bag to the grocery store as gay or emasculating.

Keeping a trash jar, like most domestic work, wasn’t as effortless as it looked. At one point, Kellogg got so caught up in trying to embody the Platonic ideal of zero-waste that she was schlepping heavy glass jars on epic, three-hour-long public transit journeys—involving a ferry, a train, and a subway—just to get to a co-op with a decent bulk section. She’d save those little stickers that you use to mark bulk items’ product codes so she could use them again next time. And she’d forgo foods that weren’t sold in a package-free format. 

“I didn’t eat blueberries for two years,” she said, even though they’re her favorite food. “It was definitely stressful.” In 2017, she finally called it quits. She now uses her old trash jar as a bookend.

Other jar keepers kept getting into situations where they couldn’t control their waste generation. What to do with broken glass, unwanted gifts wrapped in plastic, or trash left behind by visiting friends and family? What about a spouse’s trash? Some people would go for weeks without creating waste, only to find themselves with a single, very large or oddly shaped piece of trash that would certainly not fit into a Mason jar.

Sabs Katz, for example, was doing well with her trash jar until she ordered a new mattress and it arrived wrapped in plastic. (She didn’t feel comfortable buying one secondhand.) “So, that [plastic] was obviously not going to fit in my trash jar,” she said. It became just one of many exceptions that made the trash jar start to seem “really silly.”

“I was trying to do it where I could,” Katz said, “but it felt so unattainable.” Others feared that their trash jar missteps would undermine their credibility as influencers — but so would not keeping a trash jar at all, since they were such an emblem of the movement.

All that pressure occasionally led to irrational behavior. One influencer said she heard about people stocking up on “bulk” tortilla chips from the Whole Foods hot bar—as if they didn’t come out of a plastic bag just minutes before. Others reported widespread “wishcycling,” a practice where people cross their fingers and throw items that probably can’t be recycled into the blue bin—just in case. Cameron said she’s heard other social media personalities talk about burying banana peels in planters at the airport, rather than throw them in the garbage.

“I get that you want to create zero waste,” she said, “but does the airport know that? That’s a little too far for me.”

One criticism of the zero-waste movement in general is that it’s too individualistic: It has tended to hone in on lifestyle changes as opposed to challenging the systemic factors that keep single-use products in play. Bulk foods, for example, may still be shipped to supermarkets in disposable plastic containers, or on pallets wrapped in unnecessary plastic. And even the most diligent zero-wasters are unlikely to make a dent in petrochemical companies’ plans to nearly triple plastic production by 2060—a scenario that would not only cause 44 million metric tons of aquatic pollution every year, but also exacerbate climate change, since plastic is made from fossil fuels.

A trash jar can amplify that personal focus, since keeping one requires such extreme attentiveness to one’s consumption patterns. 

Kellogg says it’s simply not worth putting all your energy into a trash jar if it leaves no bandwidth for chipping away at some of those bigger, system-level problems. Sure, shopping zero-waste might support a reuse-centric grocery store, but obsessing over the plastic zip ties used to cinch a bag of bulk kidney beans? Not so much.

When Kellogg quit her trash jar, she used her extra time and energy to serve on her city’s beautification commission, a group dedicated to reducing trash and litter generation. She generated a little more garbage herself, but she now had the capacity to help organize a citywide trash cleanup event and a dump day, a way for locals to responsibly dispose of bulky items.

“I also tried to work on a Styrofoam ban, but that got nixed,” she said, laughing. “Not everything you do is going to succeed.”

Kellogg is a bit of an outlier; serving in local government isn’t for everyone, and she said it’s certainly not a prerequisite to becoming a good zero-waster. But many share her view that waste reduction can feel empty—even consumeristic—unless it’s paired with something bigger. 

April Dickinson, a zero-waste influencer and longtime trash-jar skeptic, says she’s often been turned off by the array of products meant to facilitate a zero-waste lifestyle. “I engaged with the zero-waste community less when I saw that it was falling into the more capitalistic mindset,” she said. “There’s like 47 brands of bamboo toothbrushes now, and 11 billion metal straws, all different colors and sizes.” 

Instead, she tries to show how zero-waste practices can represent an alternative way of relating with the natural world and with other people. If we treat everyday objects as disposable, she said, by extension, we might also be more likely to treat people as disposable, with less empathy for those who are incarcerated or otherwise marginalized. She often highlights the human impact of waste, which can create air pollution and leach hazardous chemicals into the groundwater of low-income communities and communities of color.

Too few people within the zero-waste movement engage with these issues, she said—in particular some of the “trash-jar people,” who are “just hell-bent on not putting trash into their own jar.”

Over the past several years, a newfound appreciation for imperfection has opened up space for many who might otherwise have felt intimidated by the zero-waste movement. 

In 2018, sustainability influencer Immy Lucas of the blog and Instagram account Sustainably Vegan ditched the “zero-waste” label and instead began advocating for what she called the “low-impact movement” (which is not an exercise routine, although proponents of the phrase do have to vie for airspace with #LowImpact workout posts on Instagram). The philosophy emphasizes waste reduction rather than elimination, as well as sustainable lifestyle choices that go beyond waste—like diet and travel. Since then, a host of influencers have embraced the phrase, including Low-Waste Lucy, Taylor Pfromer, and Sarah Robertson Barnes. 

This trend accelerated during the pandemic, which marked a sort of turning point for many zero-waste influencers. The response to COVID-19 made going waste-free even more difficult: Although later research showed that the coronavirus isn’t transmitted through surface contact or food contamination, supermarkets across the country closed their bulk sections and delayed plastic bag bans. Restaurants stopped accepting reusable mugs and dishes. 

“It was really hard to avoid plastic, or try to be low-waste,” said Cindy Villaseñor, an influencer who runs the Instagram account and blog Cero Waste Cindy (using the Spanish word for “zero”). Villaseñor said she’s never aimed for zero-waste perfection — she never went through a trash-jar phase — but even her more relaxed standards had to be loosened during the COVID lockdowns. As it turns out, that laid-back attitude served her well and has stuck around. She now enjoys a broader selection of produce, for example, and is more forgiving of herself when she can’t get a particular item without packaging.

It’s about “trying the best you can with what you’ve got,” she said.

Dickinson takes a similar approach using the hashtag #ZeroWasteIRL, or zero-waste in real life. Her Instagram account, Zero Waste Dork, describes her as the “sole zero-waster in a family of four” and emphasizes the importance of compromise. One post shows a grocery haul with mostly bulk items like granola, Brussels sprouts, and clementines brought home in reusable cloth bags—but there’s also boxed fusilli pasta, a prepackaged bottle of lotion, and some cheddar wrapped in plastic.

“I offer this transparent view of our routine to show that each #ZeroWaste journey is unique and every experience belongs in the movement,” the caption reads.

For those who want to embark on a similar journey of their own, the consensus from zero-waste experts is to skip the trash jar, start with one low-waste practice, and take baby steps. Dickinson, who was inspired by the trash jar years ago but never adopted one herself, says that first step could be something as simple as getting a smaller trash can. A few years ago, she managed to transition her family to her city’s smallest municipal garbage bin, a big win in her book. 

“Sometimes we don’t even fill that up,” she said. “I think honoring and celebrating that is important for any family.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/influencer-zero-waste-trash-jar-trend-what-happened/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Tick season is not only starting sooner—it’s becoming a year-round event. While April through September are usually the most active months, the pesky eight-legged parasites are biting people and animals much earlier in the year than expected. The increasing tick bites are leading to a rise in a variety of tick-borne diseases, including some that were previously uncommon.

One reason for the hike in tick-transmitted illnesses like alpha-gal, Lyme, and babesiosis is because humans are expanding towns and cities into previously forested areas. Andrew Handel, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Stony Brook Medicine, says cutting down forests creates an edge habitat—when one habitat type meets another—which presents more opportunity for common tick hosts such as deer and mice to interact with humans. 

[Related: A guide to the tick species every American should know]

Climate change is another culprit. Changes in rain and temperature have morphed regions with low rates of tick-borne diseases into a more palatable place for the parasites to live. What’s more, warmer conditions are getting ticks to wake up earlier from their winter sleep and have more time to bite nearby mammals. “As we see more mild winters, we’re absolutely going to see more tick-borne diseases,” says Handel.

The best thing to do is to stay aware of how ticks are circulating in your area. Even if you don’t live in the Northeast, you may be at risk for other tick-borne diseases. Knowing what to watch out for in spring, summer, and even other seasons can help treat and potentially prevent future tick bites—and the diseases that follow.

Alpha-gal syndrome

A bite from the lone star tick can make you allergic to red meat for life. The unusual condition takes root when someone becomes highly sensitive to a sugar molecule called alpha-gal that’s found in most mammals. People who develop the allergy cannot eat red meat (fish and birds are safe to consume) or mammal-based products like dairy and gelatin. They may also be restricted in using certain medication such as heparin, which uses pig intestines. An allergic reaction can range from hives and nausea to more life-threatening reactions like anaphylactic shock.

Alpha-gal syndrome has been a rare but increasing tick-borne condition. In 2009, there were only 24 alpha-gal cases reported in the US. By 2021, the number was estimated to be around 34,000. And even newer surveys estimate that around 450,000 Americans might be living with the diagnosed or undiagnosed condition.

While saliva from the lone star tick seems to trigger the mammalian allergy, deer tick bites are suspected of also causing it. According to the CDC, lone star ticks have concentrated in large numbers across the country. They are found in the southeastern, eastern, and south-central US states extending from Maine to central Texas and Oklahoma. 

There is no cure for alpha-gal syndrome. Instead, people need to learn to avoid certain foods and mammal-based products. Symptoms are managed using antihistamines and corticosteroids.

Babesiosis

Babesiosis is a parasitic infection transmitted by the bite of deer ticks (also known as black-legged ticks). These ticks are about the size of a poppy seed and found on small mammals like the white-footed mice living in the Northeast and upper Midwest. Minnesota and Wisconsin are two Midwestern states with endemic transmission of babesiosis.

Once the Babesia parasite enters the human body, it targets red blood cells. The parasites infect and destroy red blood cells by forcing their cell membrane to break open. A tremendous loss of red blood cells can, over time, cause hemolytic anemia. “It’s actually the same way that malaria works, and is why it’s called ‘the malaria of the Northeast,’” says Handel.

Babesiosis is treatable. Your doctor would prescribe a seven- to 10-day course of antibiotics if you are severely ill. Some people are at a higher risk of complications from anemia—people who are immunocompromised, those without a spleen, and newborn babies—and may need to get blood transfusions or other supportive care.

Lyme disease

Lyme disease is also spread through deer ticks. “These ticks carry and spread multiple diseases,” explains Chad Cross, a researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies parasites and vector-borne diseases. “If you are bitten by one, there’s always the possibility of being infected by more than one disease agent at the same time.”

While the CDC estimate shows 476,000 Lyme disease cases in the US each year, Cross states there are “at least 10 times more cases of Lyme disease than are actually reported” to the department. One reason for the discrepancy is that most cases are asymptomatic. When people do show symptoms, the fatigue and chills they exhibit can be mistaken for another condition. If left untreated, there is a risk of developing neurological problems such as facial paralysis and nerve damage to the limbs. Chronic lyme can lead to a host of persistent issues, too, many of which are still less understood. 

[Related: Biologists successfully hatched gene-edited ticks for the first time]

Most early Lyme disease cases are curable with a two- to four-week regimen of oral antibiotics such as doxycycline and amoxicillin. However, some patients may continue to experience pain, fatigue, and concentration issues six months after treatment. 

Anaplasmosis

Anaplasmosis manifests as a flu-like illness in humans. The bacterium is present in deer ticks in the Northeast and Midwestern US. The Western blacklegged tick, most prevalent around the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington, can also spread the pathogen. There has been an upward trend of anaplasmosis cases from 348 cases in 2000 to 5,655 cases in 2019.

Similar to Lyme disease, people who develop anaplasmosis develop nonspecific symptoms such as fever and muscle aches. If left untreated, it may turn fatal with some developing severe bleeding problems and organ failure. Handel says doxycycline is the most effective treatment option.

Powassan virus infection

Three tick species carry the Powassan virus: the groundhog tick, the squirrel tick, and the deer tick. Of those, the deer tick is the one that often bites and infects humans. Nearly all cases of this rare virus have occurred in the Northeast and Great Lakes region.

The virus causes mild symptoms such as headache, vomiting, and fever. By the time a diagnosis is made, Handel says about half of the patients present some type of neurologic deficit. People may also continue to show neurological problems, such as chronic headaches and memory problems after recovery.

Because there are only about 20 to 30 cases a year, Handel says there’s not a lot of medical research on how to treat it. There is no cure or antivirals to treat Powassan virus. Instead, infected individuals are given fluids, over-the-counter medications, and other supportive care to ease symptoms while the immune system fights off the infection.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever

There are two main ticks responsible for spreading rocky mountain spotted fever: the Rocky Mountain wood tick and the American dog tick. Cross says the American dog tick is very common out East while the Rocky Mountain wood tick is found in the West. Despite its name, Cross says Rocky Mountain spotted fever is being found more in the East and South than in the actual Rocky Mountain region. The less-common brown dog tick has also caused several cases along the US-Mexico border. The disease is part of a larger class of illnesses that strike thousands of people in the states each year.

The most noticeable sign is a rash that looks like red splotches or pinpoint dots in the first three days after getting bit. If treated with either doxycycline or an antibacterial agent within the first one to four days, the symptoms won’t worsen. Otherwise, the disease can be fatal. After a week, Cross says that people can develop swelling in the brain, life-threatening respiratory problems, and a coma-like state. Those who recover from severe illness may be left with permanent disability, such as paralysis or amputation of limbs.

Reduce your chances of tick infections

These days, ticks are a threat across most of the US and in practically every season. Experts warn that cases will only continue to rise as ticks expand to previously uninhabitable areas. 

[Related: Climate change could introduce humans to thousands of new viruses]

Your best bet at avoiding tick-borne diseases is to keep the pests off your body. Rather than staying indoors for the rest of your life, both experts recommend spraying tick and mosquito repellant. “DEET is what we usually recommend at 20 to 30 percent,” says Handel. If you’re going to be hiking or spending a lot of time outside, learn how to handle an insecticide called permethrin. Handel advises leaving your clothes overnight in the solution to kill any insect on contact. The repellency lasts for up to 10 washes. But make sure to only use it on your clothes or gear—it’s not meant to be sprayed directly on human skin.

Remember, you can pick up ticks even if you’re not an avid hiker or camper. Ticks tend to live on tall grass, meaning they might climb on you at the park or even on your own property. Avoid rubbing up on any tall grass and keep to the middle when walking down a path. Wearing long sleeves and tucking your pants inside your socks further prevents any openings for the pests to crawl into if they latch on your clothes. 

Once you get home, immediately wash your clothes in high heat and perform a tick check for any stragglers. If you take your pet outdoors (even if it’s just the yard), you’ll want to check them daily for ticks as well. There are also topical medications that you or a vet can apply to your pet to control for any external parasites. If you or any members of your household are feeling unwell, always let your doctor know that you’ve been in wooded areas or places with high tick circulation.

“These tick-borne diseases have been around for a long time and they’re going to become more common over time,” says Handel. “But by following these steps you can keep yourself safe and still enjoying the outdoors without having to have too much anxiety about catching one of these infections.”

This post has been updated. It was originally published on March 27, 2023.

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Scientists are already calculating that July 2023 will be the hottest month on record—and likely the warmest month that humanity has ever experienced. The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced late last week that this month’s heat was beyond record-smashing. The planet’s temperature, they report, has been temporarily passing over the crucial threshold of limiting global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial temperatures.

[Related: Extreme heat warning extends to more than 100 million people in the US.]

This news comes as no surprise to the millions of people around the world facing extreme heat. Phoenix, Arizona is about to enter its 31st straight day of temperatures above 110 degrees. Parts of northwest China saw a record-breaking 126 degrees earlier this month, while southern Europe is seeing wildfires following an extreme heatwave. These global heat waves would be “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to an early analysis released last week by the World Weather Attribution initiative.

“We can say that the first three weeks of July have been the warmest three week periods ever observed in our record,” Carlo Buentempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said via Zoom and in a statement. “This anomaly is so large with respect to other record-breaking months in our record that we are virtually certain that the month, the month as a whole, will become the warmest July on record, the warmest month on record, in all likelihood.”

Records like these generally track average air temperature across the entire world and are broken by hundredths of a degrees. However, the temperature for July’s first 23 days averaged 62.51 degrees, higher than the 61.93 degrees set in July 2019, according to the UN’s report. The data for these records goes back to 1940, but many scientists believe that it is almost certain that these recent readings are the warmest the Earth has been in 120,000 years, based on the data collected from coral reefs, deep sea sediment cores, and tree rings that paint a picture of past climates. 

Buontempo and other scientists believe that the steamy weather can be attributed to a combination of human-caused climate change and this year’s natural El Niño warming pattern in parts of the central Pacific. This pattern changes weather around the world and follows three straight years of La Niña, a Pacific cooling pattern. Despite multiple La Niña cooling patterns, 2015 to 2022 saw eight of the warmest years on record based on a 173 year long dataset. WMO’s Director of Climate Services Chris Hewitt cited “a clear and dramatic warming decade on decade” since the 1970s. 

[Related: World set to ‘temporarily’ breach major climate threshold in next five years.]

“But now the La Niña has ended” – to be replaced by the sea-warming El Niño effect – waters have begun to heat up in the tropical Pacific, bringing the “almost certain likelihood that one of the next five years will be the warmest on record,” Hewitt said in a statement. 

In May, WMO scientists predicted that the world will likely temporarily exceed the 2.7 degree threshold for at least one of the next five years. 

Temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean have also been skyrocketing since the spring. In mid-May, the global ocean surface temperatures reached “unprecedented levels” for the time of year and the ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida reached 100 degrees in some locations. 

UN Secretary-General António Guterres underscored the need for global action to reduce  emissions, climate adaptations, and climate finance. He warned that “the era of global warming has ended” and “the era of global boiling has arrived.”

“We can still stop the worst,” said Guterres. “But to do so we must turn a year of burning heat into a year of burning ambition.” 

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A group of scientists uncovered a 46,000-year-old soil nematode from Siberian permafrost, and in an Sleeping Beauty-esque experiment woke the microscopic organism up from a millenniums’ long rest. The findings are described in a study published July 27 in the open access journal PLOS Genetics.

[Related: Oyster mushrooms release nerve gas to kill worms before eviscerating them.]

Also called roundworms, nematodes are a very adaptable group of sometimes microscopic animals. In addition to tardigrades and rotifers, some nematodes can survive harsh conditions by entering a dormant state known as cryptobiosis. This process basically shuts down the animals’ metabolic systems until they can be revived when environmental conditions become more favorable. 

After uncovering the animals in Siberia’s northern Kolyma River, the team successfully woke them from this frozen-in-time state. Radiocarbon analysis dated the roundworms to 45,839 to 47,769 years ago, when direwolves and Neanderthals were still on Earth. 

Sequencing the genome revealed that the roundworm is a new species of nematode. Panagrolaimus kolymaensis is a functionally extinct species and joins the ranks of some of Earth’s most ubiquitous organisms that dwell in water, soil, and on the ocean floor. 

“P. kolymaensis‘s highly contiguous genome will make it possible to compare this feature to those of other Panagrolaimus species whose genomes are presently being sequenced by Schiffer’s team and colleagues,” study co-author and Director Emeritus at the DRESDEN-concept Genome Center Eugene Myers said in a statement. 

According to the team, nematodes do not require a lot of coaxing to wake up and wiggle around and make more little roundworms. They have since nurtured more than 100 generations of P. kolymaensis in the lab, where each new generation lasts about 8 to 12 days.

“Basically, you only have to bring the worms into amenable conditions, on a culture (agar) plate with some bacteria, some humidity and room temperature,” study co-author and University of Cologne zoologist Philipp Schiffer explained to Vice. “They just start crawling around then. They also just start reproducing. In this case this is even easier, as it is an all-female (asexual) species. They don‘t need to find males and have sex, they just start making eggs, which develop.”

In addition to the excitement of reviving a species that has been sleeping deep within the earth this long, studying these small spindle-shaped creatures may help scientists better understand how animals can adapt to habitat changes due to global warming and shifting weather patterns at a molecular level. 

[Related from PopSci+: Cave worms could hold the secrets to a better life.]

They found that mild dehydration exposure before freezing helped P. kolymaensis prepare for cryptobiosis and increased survival at -112 degrees Fahrenheit. The nematodes produced a sugar called trehalose when it was mildly dehydrated in the lab, potentially enabling it to endure these freezing and intense dehydration. 

“Our findings are essential for understanding evolutionary processes because generation times can range from days to millennia and because the long-term survival of a species’ individuals can result in the re-emergence of lineages that would otherwise have gone extinct,” study Schiffer said in a statement. 

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For some drivers, electric vehicles sound pretty awesome—until it comes down to charging. Range anxiety is a real thing, and while there are around 32,000 fast chargers across the US that can refill your EV’s battery in half an hour or so, that’s still quite small compared to the more than 100,000 gas stations across the US as of 2017. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates that there needs to be around 182,000 fast chargers across the country by 2030 to support the 30-42 million predicted EVs on the road.

When it comes to EVs and charging them, Tesla normally makes the biggest headlines, but this time other automakers are stepping up in an Avengers-style move. This week, a coalition of seven automotive companies—BMW Group, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz Group, and Stellantis NV—made a commitment to bring 30,000 fast chargers to North America. The first of these should come online by summer 2024, according to their announcement. 

[Related: Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source.]

“To accelerate the shift to electric vehicles, we’re in favor of anything that makes life easier for our customers,” Mercedes-Benz Group CEO Ola Källenius said in the statement. “Charging is an inseparable part of the EV-experience, and this network will be another step to make it as convenient as possible.”

According to Reuters, each fast-charging machine costs somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000, making this endeavor one that could cost billions of dollars. Currently, Tesla has the largest network of fast chargers with 45,000 supercharging locations globally. 

Some of the companies involved with this new undertaking include companies such as GM and Mercedes that have already signed on to start using Tesla’s charging technology, called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), starting in 2025. The others still have product plans using the Combined Charging System (CCS). The new stations, according to the announcement, will offer charging connectors for both systems. 

The announcement stated that the network “intends” to solely run on renewable energy, but a plan for this has not yet been disclosed. The chargers will be concentrated in urban areas and on highways.

“We think this is an important step forward,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told Reuters. President Joe Biden has previously stated goals to bring 500,000 EV chargers online by 2030.

[Related: EV adoption doesn’t lighten energy costs for all American families.]

Currently, the vast majority of EV chargers in the US are “level 2” chargers, which can take anywhere from four to 10 hours to completely charge a vehicle, according to the Washington Post. Owners of EVs frequently have those level-2 chargers installed at their homes. System malfunctions also currently run amok—a recent survey found that one in five EV owners have rolled up to a charger and were then unable to charge due to issues like system malfunctions. 

“We believe that a charging network at scale is vital to protecting freedom of mobility for all, especially as we work to achieve our ambitious carbon neutrality plan,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said in the statement. “A strong charging network should be available for all.”

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Oceans all over the world rely on a delicate balance of different elements to remain stable: Temperature, salinity, pH, and pressure all combine to create the complex bodies of water that maintain conditions for marine life and define the planet. Climate change has altered those conditions though, by warming oceans to record high temperatures and introducing more freshwater through sea-ice and glacier melt. 

Now, new research published on Tuesday warns that a vital Atlantic Ocean system could collapse by 2060, setting off one of the planet’s tipping points, or potential points of no return. That collapse could eventually spell catastrophe for the people who live in countries that border the Atlantic Ocean, leading to increased sea-level rise in the United States, decreased temperatures and altered storm patterns over western Europe, rejiggered climate and agricultural zones, and hotter ocean temperatures in the Caribbean. 

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, contradicts findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, the United Nations’ scientific collaboration that publishes reports on the state of climate change. The group’s latest assessment, released last year, found the collapse of the group of Atlantic Ocean currents to be unlikely given the group only acknowledges weakening of the AMOC starting in 2004. The report states that scientists cannot say when or if a collapse will happen since they state even the decline prior to the 2000s cannot necessarily be attributed to climate change. 

“We absolutely have deep respect for the IPCC report,” Susanne Ditlevsen, a statistician at the University of Copenhagen and co-author of the study, told Grist. “When we first started, we had this idea that we could use this method that’s data-based, to kind of confirm what the IPCC report is saying. So when we actually got our first results, we were very surprised, and we didn’t believe them.” 

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is a thick band of water that travels from the Gulf of Mexico north along the southeastern U.S. before heading up the western edge of Europe, carrying mild temperatures with it, and onward toward Greenland and Iceland. Once there, the current is infused with heavy, cold, and salty water that then sinks, traveling back down the coast of the U.S. This system provides what one expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, called “symmetry” to temperatures in the North and South hemispheres. 

But as carbon dioxide levels rise, temperatures increase, and ice melts in the Arctic, this current is being inundated with freshwater, throwing it out of balance. This has led to a weakening of the AMOC, which recently saw its slowest point in 1,600 years in 2021. 

If the web of Atlantic Ocean currents stopped, it would constitute one of the Earth’s tipping points, which signal a dramatic, potentially irreversible shift in the condition of the planet — and its habitability for humans. A study last year found that the planet has already passed a few tipping points, including tropical coral die off and the beginning of the Greenland ice sheet collapse, at just 1.1 degree Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. 

“We’re talking huge, huge climate changes in a very short time,” said Ditlevsen. “We would have an increase in the tropical areas… If you already have a very high, medium temperature and it rises even higher — and that is on top of global warming. Just imagine; we have 3 billion people living there. That is a huge problem.” 

The AMOC has stopped before, about 12,000 years ago and led to a variation of about 10 to 15 degrees C (18 to 27 degrees F) within a decade. But that was during an ice age, and modern global warming is a vastly different situation. 

The new research finds that this disintegration of the AMOC could occur as soon as 2025, or as far as 2095. While the findings are striking, scientists not involved in the research are approaching them cautiously.

Rong Zhang, an ocean scientist at NOAA, is skeptical of the methods used in the paper. She is particularly cautious about saying that the collapse will happen this century, let alone that it is imminent. The study uses historical records from the last 150 years to demonstrate that the weakening of the Atlantic ocean current is accelerating. But high-quality observations of this system of currents was only established in 2004, which provides a much smaller time-period to draw from.

“We need more direct AMOC observations to give us a real picture and a real early-warning signal,” she said.

Marcos Tedesco, an oceanographer and professor at Columbia University, can see both sides of the argument. 

Climate change necessitates that science can remain nimble and understand its increasing and exponential effects on the earth, but also science’s precision and thorough nature of processes, like peer review, help establish and keep its authority on certain subjects, according to Tedesco. 

Tedesco also notes that all the unknowns of climate change will only continue to complicate how much we can predict and measure all of those changes. 

“The Earth is changing,” said Tedesco. “And it’s changing into a direction where it’s never been before, because it’s never moved so fast into that direction. And this, of course, is because of the CO2 that’s been pushed in the atmosphere in the past 100 years.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/climate/a-vital-atlantic-ocean-system-could-collapse/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Scientists agree that harnessing energy from renewable sources to power our lights, ACs, phones, stoves, and cars will be necessary to slow global warming. But wind farms across the world have increasingly been subject to protest by communities whose land they’ve encroached on. People in small towns across the US have raised concerns at zoning meetings about health issues and depressed property values. An Indigenous group in Norway says a wind farm will affect their ability to herd reindeer, a concern supported by climate activist Greta Thunberg. 

One of the most common concerns raised by protestors worldwide is how these turbines will affect their health. People say wind projects near their homes, different from the off-shore wind farms at sea, have caused a range of harmful effects on their bodies, including migraines, chronic pain, increased blood pressure, and difficulty sleeping. 

The chief concern of the protestors is how the wind farm, proposed by the multinational company Energix, would further entrench Israeli occupation over the Golan. But another main concern is how the turbines will affect their health. In the region, regulations must consider context and the circumstances in which the new site would be built, Druze leaders say.

Noise pollution and shadow flicker

The two primary health concerns with wind farms include the level of noise they emit and the flickering lights they create, called “shadow flicker,” Ollson says. Disruptions are created when the three-pronged turbines spin, emulating a slow, giant fan. Typically, governments don’t allow wind farms to send more than 50 decibels of sound to nearby houses, which is about as loud as the hum from a household refrigerator. 

The noise pollution could prevent those living nearby from sleeping properly. When people can’t rest well for a prolonged period of time, it can reduce their quality of life. They might feel both tired and sick, which could lead to trouble eating and exercising, among other problems, Ollson explains. However, research shows that turbines that hum at less than 45 to 50 decibels don’t have any statistical effect on sleep quality, he adds. 

Ollson points to one 2016 study from Canada that he says is considered the gold standard around the world. The government studied the sleep quality of 720 people who lived between 820 feet to about 7 miles away from a wind farm emitting a range of 20 to 46 decibels of noise. The researchers used actimeters, which are similar to fitbits, to track participants’ sleep quality. The study found no statistical difference between those living near the wind farm and those living a few miles away. “There’s some indication when we go over 55 or 60 decibels that it’s probably too close. But ultimately, we aren’t seeing that in jurisdictions that are [regulated] properly,” Ollson says. 

[Related: The hard truth of building clean solar farms]

It’s unclear exactly how many decibels of sound the Energix wind project would wreak on Majd Al Shams, one of the few remaining Druze towns in the Golan. The farm is expected to be about 3,280 feet away from the neighborhoods, meaning the residents should be safe from noise. But farmers who work near the project would still be exposed—and there are more than 1,800 cottages that people visit regularly on the farming properties a few hundred feet away from the designated site, Wael Tarabieh, a project manager for Al Marsad, says. 

Other major health concerns from living or working around turbines are epileptic seizures, headaches, nausea, and general disturbance from shadow flicker, which occurs when the sun shines through the turbine’s spinning prongs, causing a shadowing effect that can sometimes be seen in homes and buildings. People can simulate shadow flicker by pointing a flashlight at a ceiling or desk fan: The dark shapes created on the wall are similar to what people living near a wind farm might experience, though at a significantly lower rate, given that the fan blades move much faster than a turbine’s does. A near universal standard across the world is limiting shadow flicker to 30 hours per year, Ollson says. This can be done by using computer programs to model conditions and choosing spots for turbines accordingly.

“We can’t find a correlation in these larger epidemiological studies” between shadow flicker and headaches or nausea, Ollson notes. And the turbines move too slowly to cause epileptic seizures, he adds. “What the majority of my colleagues in the field would say, is that shadow flicker isn’t a health concern, but it is an annoyance or nuisance. Imagine you’re sitting in your place tonight, and if I was standing at the wall and turning your lights on and off, in a slow fashion, for 20 minutes at a time. You would not enjoy that.” 

But in the Golan, some residents could experience up to one hour of shadow flicker per day during certain times of the year. This is because of the wind farm’s location and use of larger turbine blades, Israeli doctor Ofer Megged told Al Marsad for their 2018 report on the wind farm. The project has been modified several times since then—it’s unclear how many hours of shadow flicker the latest plan would produce.

All forms of energy have their drawbacks, Ollson adds. Oil refineries and coal plants, the main way the world has generated power for the past century, churn out air pollution, which has been linked to a much wider range of health problems, including increased risk of asthma, cancers, and heart disease. 

Winds of change in the Golan Heights

New construction needs to take native people, their history, and their current situation into context, explains Munir Fakher Eldin, an assistant professor and dean of the faculty of arts at Birzeit University in Palestine who writes about land rights. He calls the new wind farm in the Golan, where he is from, a form of greenwashing.

The Golan is known for its wealth of natural resources, such as water, wind, and potentially petroleum. The area is attractive for renewables because of an estimated wind speed almost double that of Israel’s coastal plane, vast open areas, and low population density, according to the Syria Report. Wind energy is a major component of Israel’s net zero goal, and the country plans for nearly half of it to come from the Golan. 

[Related: What companies really mean when they say they’re ‘net-zero’]

The Golan is already home to two wind farms, which are both near Israeli settlements. (Some settlers have also opposed the turbines, according to Tarabieh.) Israel also has plans to build a dozen more wind projects in the Golan to serve locals, both native and non-native. But the Energix project, first proposed in 2018, has received scrutiny from the Druze and become the subject of both protests and lawsuits for the past five years.

After Israel began to occupy the Golan in 1967, they expelled around 131,000 Syrians, which was about 95 percent of the population in the area, according to Al Marsad. Since then, the 1,800 cottages near the wind farm have served as a place for many to escape. “Our agricultural lands are not simply a place to cultivate the land. Actually, they are a kind of extension to our everyday life,” Tarabieh says. “Most of the people escape from [overcrowding in Majd Al-Shams] to the agricultural lands to spend the time with their family. People sleep in these cottages all the time … That’s why in our case, it’s really very dangerous. It’s not that people are afraid of or imagining something. It’s real, and we are all close to it.”

The new project would also subsume a quarter of agricultural land left to farmers, who were already stripped of most of their land more than 50 years ago. Settlements, military facilities, and national park acquisition put 95 percent of the Golan under Israeli control, according to Tarabieh. The wind farm would also limit how much Majd Al-Shams could grow. Mountains in the north, a ceasefire line in the east, and settlements in the west mean that the agricultural land to the south, where the farm is planned, is the only place the town could expand. A new residential zoning code also allows houses to be built much closer to the turbines, which could increase health risks from the wind farm, Tarabieh says.

Fakher Eldin and Tarabieh also think the development would affect residents’ psychological health. In a complaint echoed by those living near wind farms around the world, the turbines, which stand at about 680 feet tall, would ruin their land’s pastoral beauty. What’s different in the Golan though, they say, is the wind farm could serve as yet another reminder of how little control the native Syrian communities have over their home. “The land is part of people’s identity and sense of security, belonging, and communal safety,” says Fakher Eldin. “Basically we’re defending our right for reasonable existence on our land … The wind farm will feel like a suffocating presence.”

Update (July 28, 2023): The headline of this story has been changed from “Are wind farms low-key harming people’s health.” The article focuses on health concerns in some communities living around turbines, mainly in the Israel-annexed region the Golan Heights. Scientific reports and experts stress that most of the issues, which are far less severe than health effects stemming from oil refineries and coal plants, can be managed through proper siting and safety regulations. The political context in the Golan Heights, however, makes new wind farms more fraught for native residents.

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As the western United States continues to battle extreme temperatures, the waters off southern Florida are also heating up. Ocean temperatures reached unprecedented 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, as a mass bleaching event and die off from these scorching ocean temperatures is spreading across the reefs near Miami and the Florida Keys. 

[Related: Fish poop might help fight coral reef bleaching.]

Coral reefs are vital ecosystems, housing marine life from smaller fish up to turtles and sharks. They also buffer coastlines from increasingly chaotic storms. Climate change is one of the greatest threats currently facing coral ecosystems, as rising temperatures contribute to the scale and frequency of bleaching events and infectious disease outbreaks. When the water gets too warm, coral can become stressed and express algae living in their tissues, thus turning white. Corals are more likely to experience die-offs during these bleaching events. 

Scientists are now on a rescue mission to save the region’s coral species from extinction. Coral experts expect a “complete mortality” of the bleached reefs around the Florida Keys in only a week, and fear that other reefs deeper in the ocean could face this same fate.

“This is akin to all of the trees in the rainforest dying,” Florida Aquarium director and senior scientist Keri O’Neal told CNN. “Where do all of the other animals that rely on the rainforest go to live? This is the underwater version of the trees in the rainforest disappearing. Corals serve that same fundamental role.”

The University of South Florida and Florida Institute of Oceanography’s Keys Marine Laboratory (KML) is currently housing more than 1,500 coral specimens in an effort to save them. The corals were harvested over the past week from offshore nurseries and parent colonies. 

“For years we have been developing the infrastructure capacity to support reef restoration efforts that enable KML to temporarily house corals during emergencies such as this,” said KML director Cynthia Lewis said in a statement. “Typically, water temperatures at this time of year are in the mid 80s, but we are already recording temperatures of 90 degrees. It is very alarming.” 

This summer’s extreme heat and a lack of rainfall in Florida pushed water temperatures around the Sunshine State to some of the highest levels observed around the world. The National Buoy Center recorded a temperature of 101.1 degrees at a depth of five feet on Monday July 24 in Florida Bay. Other stations hit saw temperatures in the mid to upper-90s. While the most significant concentration of Florida coral isn’t located in Florida Bay, the coral around the Florida Keys still experienced temperatures topping 90 degrees.

[Related: To save coral reefs, color the larvae.]

“Climate change is our present reality,” Coral Restoration Foundation CEO R. Scott Winters, said in a statement.  “The impact on our reefs is undeniable. This crisis must serve as a wake-up call, emphasizing the need for globally concerted efforts to combat climate change.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) raised its coral bleaching warning system to their highest level (Alert Level 2) for the Florida Keys. This level means that the average water temperatures have been about 1.8 degrees above normal for at least eight consecutive weeks. The Florida Keys are expected to remain at Alert Level 2 for at least nine to 12 weeks. 

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Extreme heat waves roaring across North America, Europe, and China this month were exacerbated by climate change, according to an early analysis released July 25 by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative. The group,  an international group of volunteer scientists who assess climate change’s role in extreme weather, says that the heat baking parts of the United States and southern Europe would not have occurred without climate change. Additionally, they write that climate change made China’s historic heat wave at least 50 times more likely.

[Related: How ‘underground climate change’ affects life on the Earth’s surface.]

“Had there been no climate change, such an event would almost never have occurred,” study lead author Mariam Zachariah, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London, told the AP.  Zachariah called heat waves in Europe and North America “virtually impossible” without climate-change induced temperature rises. 

Since July began, dangerous heat waves have killed livestock and crops, triggered wildfires, stressed hospitals, and are responsible for multiple deaths across three continents. More than 100 people have died from the heat in Mexico since March, while Death Valley, California hit 128 degrees Fahrenheit  this month. China posted an all-time national temperature record of 126 degrees Fahrenheit earlier this month, while parts of Italy and Spain are moving towards Europe’s all time record of 119.8 degrees. The city of Phoenix, Arizona is expected to experience its 26th consecutive day with temperatures above 110 degrees today, smashing a record of 18 days set in 1974. 

In this new analysis, the WWA team examined weather data and computer model simulations to compare the Earth’s current climate, which has warmed about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, with the climate of the past.  The study found that not only has climate change increased the likelihood of these heat waves happening, but it is making them hotter. Earth’s stagnant atmosphere, warmed by carbon dioxide and other gasses, made Europe’s heatwave 4.5 degrees hotter, China’s 1.8 degrees warmer, and the southern US and Mexico’s heatwave 3.6 degrees hotter. 

Extreme heat waves like these are expected once every 15 years for the US and Mexico, once every 10 years in Southern Europe, and once every five years for China, according to the analysis.  “They are not rare in today’s climate,” WWA co-leader and Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto told The Washington Post. “What surprises me is that people are so surprised. It is exactly what we expected to see.” 

[Related: A cap on ‘luxury’ emissions could make a clean energy transition fairer.]

Otto added that the findings support a growing scientific consensus that the warmer the world gets, crippling heat waves, stronger storms, and climate-fueled disasters will be only more likely. 

While dire, this study should not be interpreted as evidence of “climate collapse” or as a situation we are powerless to stop, according to the team. The report stressed that we still have time to do something about climate change, but society must quickly reduce emissions of planet-heating pollution. They also encouraged countries and cities around the world to adapt sustainable energy systems, urban planning, and public health initiatives to better prepare for the extreme heat to come. 

“We still have time to secure a safe and healthy future, but we urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels and invest in decreasing vulnerability,” Otto told CNN. “If we do not, tens of thousands of people will keep dying from heat-related causes each year.” 

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During the summer, cities can get really hot compared to surrounding rural areas—just look at New Orleans and New York City compared to nearby areas with fewer impermeable surfaces. This urban heat island effect happens because buildings and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes. Daytime temperatures in urban areas may end up being 1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than that in outlying areas.

But it’s not just the surface and air temperatures that can rise—the ground also warms up. Rising air temperature, combined with the effects of human activities and infrastructure, can cause subsurface heat islands under urban areas. This “underground climate change” is also affected by indoor heating and operating appliances in buildings that inject heat into the ground.

[Related: A new climate report finally highlights the importance of our decisions.]

Since soils, rocks, and construction materials can deform when subjected to temperature variations, a recent study published in Communications Engineering sought to assess whether subsurface heat islands can cause ground deformations that would affect the performance of civil infrastructure.

“The results of this study support that the ground deformations caused by underground climate change can be of sufficient magnitude to affect the day-to-day function and long-term durability of civil structures and infrastructures,” says Alessandro Rotta Loria, study author and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University.

Potentially excessive angular distortion, tilting, and/or cracking of structural members may affect the aesthetic and operational requirements of infrastructure. Luckily, these changes don’t necessarily represent an impact on their performance and don’t threaten people’s safety, says Rotta Loria.

How underground climate change affects the soil

Extreme changes in underground temperature under or near infrastructure impose temperature gradients that can promote pore water movement. The drying and wetting of soil is responsible for strains and deformations that can cause damage to structures, says Claudia Zapata, geo-engineer and associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.

“While this is not a new issue that geotechnical engineers have to deal with, longer periods of high temperature can promote more significant changes in moisture content,” says Zapata. “The unsaturated condition will extend to deeper areas, causing larger deformations than those allowable by building codes.” 

The impact is generally related to the soil type and the extent of drying or wetting, among other factors. For instance, sandy materials are not as prone to large deformations under climatic change conditions, unlike clay-heavy soils, says Zapata.

When analyzing the potential impact of structures, Rotta Loria says the distinct features of different cities and their infrastructure should be considered. Older and denser cities may generally experience a more intense underground climate change, which can translate to more significant effects on civil infrastructures.

[Related: Why some climate change adaptations just make things worse.]

“Major cities like New York City, which are densely built and rich in underground structures and heat sources, exhibit a particularly intense underground climate change,” says Rotta Loria. “For this reason, these cities may be particularly prone to structural and infrastructural operational issues in the long-term.”

Ground deformations caused by underground climate change develop slowly, but continuously, therefore it should be mitigated in the coming years to avoid unwanted effects on civil structures and infrastructures, he adds. 

Mitigating underground climate change in a warming world

Underground climate change presents an opportunity for urban planners and policymakers to “enhance the sustainability of urban areas worldwide,” says Rotta Loria.

For example, applying thermal insulation to underground building envelopes and enclosures can minimize the amount of waste heat that would be injected into the ground. Installing shallow geothermal technologies to absorb at least part of the heat from basements, parking garages, and tunnels to reutilize it in buildings and infrastructures for space heating and hot water production is also a major possibility.

[Related: Urban sprawl defines unsustainable cities, but it can be undone.]

A 2022 study published in Nature Communications said that recycling subsurface heat, which accumulates due to climate change and urbanization, is a sustainable alternative to conventional space heating methods for various sites. Subsurface heat recycling makes it possible to capitalize on warming climates while helping society move to a low-carbon economy at the same time.

Rotta Loria says that retrofit interventions aimed at enhancing energy efficiency and geothermal installations to reutilize subsurface waste heat are “two concrete and relatively straightforward mitigation strategies” that would hamper underground climate change and its effects on civil infrastructure in a warming world. With all the impacts that climate change is having, and will soon have, on cities, it’s best to act sooner versus later.

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After years of criticism for its outsize use of plastic, the world’s largest retailer appears to be making progress to reduce its plastic footprint.

Amazon announced in its latest sustainability report on Tuesday that orders shipped from its fulfillment centers used 85,916 metric tons of single-use plastic in 2022—an 11.6 percent decrease from the amount used in 2021.

The company attributed this decline to its expanded use of paper-based packaging, as well as an increased effort to ship items in their original containers—without adding any Amazon-branded packaging. Amazon has also stopped using nonrecyclable bags made of mixed materials, and on Tuesday it said it was “phasing out” padded plastic mailers—those ubiquitous blue and white envelopes studded with the Amazon logo—in favor of “recyclable alternatives.”

Eliminating padded plastic mailers is a “big, big deal,” said Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president for strategic initiatives for the nonprofit Oceana, although he called on the company to set a concrete timeline for doing so. He called Amazon’s sustainability report “good news for the oceans,” since plastic film like the kind used in Amazon’s packaging is one of the most common forms of marine plastic litter and is the deadliest type of plastic to marine animals. 

Plastics have other impacts, too: They’re made of fossil fuels and are a major source of climate pollution, and they cause toxic chemical pollution at every stage of their life cycle. Meanwhile, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics is just 5 percent, meaning the vast majority of plastics are littered, burned, or sent to a landfill.

Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report is the first to include a quantitative estimate of the company’s single-use plastics footprint; previously, the company’s only other estimate came from a blog post last December. Before that, organizations like Oceana had to publish their own estimates and had called for greater transparency—sometimes through investor pressure. Over the past three years, shareholder advocacy groups have repeatedly filed resolutions demanding that Amazon disclose the amount of plastic it uses and reduce it by one-third by 2030. One resolution, co-filed in December 2021 by Green Century Capital Management and As You Sow, was supported by nearly half of Amazon shareholders.

Now, environmental advocates say Amazon appears to be on the right path—in contrast to many other major plastic users. Even companies that have signed onto a prominent pledge to reduce virgin plastic use have moved in the wrong direction: Over the past several years, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mars, and many others have reported an increase in the weight of their virgin plastic packaging.

Still, the 86,000 metric tons of plastic used in Amazon fulfillment centers is a lot, and Douglass Guernsey, a shareholder advocate for Green Century Capital Management, said Amazon must move much faster to replace other types of plastic packaging—like non-padded plastic mailers—with reusable alternatives or packaging made from recycled paper. He called for third-party verification of Amazon’s single-use plastic reductions, and for the company to disclose more information about its plastics use: “What type of plastic is Amazon using?” Guernsey asked. “How much is designed to be recyclable?”

Guernsey also criticized Amazon for failing to make a forward-looking, time-bound commitment to reduce its plastics use. “I would like them to make a statement saying, ‘We’re phasing out single-use plastic. We’re Amazon, we can do that,’” he said. 

Littlejohn said Amazon should ensure that its plastic reductions manifest throughout the company’s supply chains. Although the numbers cited in Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report likely apply to the majority of Amazon orders—those shipped from the company’s fulfillment centers—they don’t cover those that are shipped from third-party sellers’ doorsteps. Amazon doesn’t disclose what fraction of its sales are shipped from third-party sellers.

Amazon declined to respond to a series of questions about its plastic use, but a spokesperson for the company said they “continue to prioritize materials that are recyclable and to find alternatives to plastic.” The spokesperson noted some of Amazon’s previously published progress, including the elimination of single-use plastic air pillows in Europe and Australia. 

Both Guernsey and Littlejohn vowed to keep campaigning for stronger action from Amazon. “Investors care about this,” Guernsey said. “The shareholder process has been incredibly important … and we’re going to continue to use it to pressure the company to reduce its environmental footprint.” 

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/after-years-of-criticism-amazon-appears-to-be-cutting-down-on-plastics/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Incorporating plastic waste into asphalt pavement and other types of infrastructure projects shows some limited promise, according to a new report published Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

But those efforts are hampered by an American recycling system that lacks clear economic and environmental goals and suffers from a dearth of scientific and engineering information, the chairman of the research committee said Monday.

“As we got into this, one question that came up to the committee is, ‘What problem are we trying to solve?,’” said David Dzombak, who chaired a panel of 12 experts tasked by Congress to look into ways to recycle plastic waste into roads, railroad ties, drainage pipes, utility poles and other common types of infrastructure applications. “Are we trying to keep (plastic waste) out of landfills? Or reduce litter or leakage into the environment that ends up in the ocean or along roads and rivers? Are we trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

“Determining exactly which pathways to pursue, however, depends on goals, policy, and economics,” he said. “A coordinated direction for policy and research is key for advancement of plastics recycling in the U.S.”

The committee members included consultants, academic researchers and various state transportation officials. They looked into plastic recycling in infrastructure applications such as asphalt pavement mixes, drainage pipes, railroad ties, bike paths, composite utility poles and highway sound barriers. A range of factors inhibit their adoption, however, such as uncertainties over how to make the infrastructure components with recycled plastic and “unknowns regarding environmental impacts―including the potential release of microplastics―and effects on long-term performance.”

The report comes amid a growing awareness in the United States and throughout the world of a global plastics crisis, and as 175 nations have agreed to find a way by the end of next year to stop future plastic production from choking ocean and land ecosystems and clean up legacy plastic pollution.

The United Nations Environment Program in May reported that the world produces 430 million metric tons of plastics each year, of which over two-thirds are short-lived products that soon become waste. Plastic production is set to triple by 2060 under a “business-as-usual” scenario.

Two years ago, a different committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine found that in 2016, the United States led the world in the generation of plastic waste at 287 pounds per person and needed a comprehensive strategy to curb the waste’s devastating impact on ocean health, marine wildlife and communities.

EPA has said the U.S. recycling rate of plastic is 8 percent; others have estimated it to be even lower.

The lack of national direction, Dzombak said, stems in part from the fact that the United States has no national recycling law. Recycling, according to the committee’s 407-page report, lacks coordination between public and private sectors, with recycling policies varying from state to state. Research and development into the capture, processing and reuse of plastic products and materials is also not very advanced in the United States, the report concluded.

But the report also found that it is in society’s interests to expand and standardize plastics waste collection, increase recycling and explore new applications for plastics waste in infrastructure, even as it outlined potential risks to public health and the environment by doing so.

“There is isolated activity that is very promising that is reusing recycled plastics, so there is reason for optimism here, if we can share more data and information,” said Dzombak, the Hamerschlag University Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

One economic segment the committee examined and found to successfully reuse waste plastic was the manufacturing of drainage pipes. But beyond that, the committee found little success, despite decades of attempts, according to the report.

As a result, he said, “it is unclear how much of a solution” integrating plastic waste into infrastructure  applications will be to help solve the plastic waste problem.

The report found the most promise with the recycling of plastic waste from manufacturing processes, and said those plastics are in high demand. Unlike the mixed plastic waste people dump in recycling bins, post-manufacturing waste is more uniform in its chemical make-up and clean, making it easier to recycle. 

Mixed plastic waste that people toss in their recycling bins consist of many different kinds of plastic, made with many different chemicals, and as a result are harder to recycle. This post-consumer waste can also be contaminated with other kinds of waste products or chemicals.

The report focused mostly on what’s called mechanical methods of recycling of plastic, involving cleaning, sorting and shredding of plastics before they are molded or added into new products. It also noted new industry investment in processes that seek to break down waste plastic into chemical feedstocks, often called “chemical” or “advanced” recycling, including a process called pyrolysis, but said its environmental benefits were “considerably lower than for mechanical recycling and may even be worse than the status quo.”

Turning products like old bottles, bags or yogurt tubs into a material that goes into asphalt has not been tested extensively, for performance or environmental risks, the report found. It may not hold up as well under the wear and tear of cars and trucks, and some research has found it could increase the spread of dangerous microplastics as the road surface breaks down, the report observed.

Judith Enck, founder and president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, said she has her doubts about whether plastics can be effectively recycled into roads or other infrastructure applications.

“While I appreciate work to try to make the best of a bad situation there are a number of serious problems with these attempted solutions to the growing problem of plastic pollution,” Enck said. “Perhaps the most significant is abrasion causing the release of microplastics into the air and water. I don’t see this as a viable solution to the plastics problem.” 

The health and environmental implications of microplastics have become a focus of intense research as scientists have found them throughout the world and inside human bodies. In May, research out of the United Kingdom found that even the process of mechanical recycling can produce a lot of microplastics.

The new national academies report recommended the Department of Transportation conduct field-testing to assess the environmental and health impacts, overall service life and effects of plastics additives on the use and recyclability of asphalt pavements. It further recommended that EPA support research and data collection required to understand and evaluate the potential environmental, human health, economic and performance implications of each new use of recycled plastics.

“Given the limited supplies of recycled plastics having the requisite properties and quality for infrastructure applications, it will be important, from a societal standpoint, to understand the full economic and environmental benefits and costs of candidate applications to make best use of these sup- plies,” the report concluded. “Ideally, this understanding will be informed by assessments made on a life-cycle basis that take into account the stream of benefits and costs associated with the complete product life, including manufacturing, installation, maintenance, service life, and end-of-life management.”

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On August 16, 2022, President Joe Biden signed what many have called the most important climate legislation in the history of the US—the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). After years of slow progress and resistance against policies that support the growth of clean energy and limit greenhouse gas emissions, the IRA finally looked like it could get the US back on track to Paris Climate Agreement goals. While the estimated decrease in emissions is notable, however, we’re still not on track to reach these lofty goals with the IRA alone.  

Eleven months after the enactment of the IRA, the Rhodium Group, an independent research group, published their annual Taking Stock report, this time including projecting the greenhouse gas reductions of the policy for the coming decades. What they’ve found is that the current policies, as of June 2023, put the US on track to decrease emissions 32 to 51 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. By 2030, the US is expected to achieve 29 to 49 percent reductions, which is a “meaningful departure from previous years’ expectations,” the authors write, but still not enough to hit Paris goals. 

[Related: ‘Humanity on thin ice’ says UN, but there is still time to act on climate change.]

The IRA largely takes aim at slashing emissions in the power and transportation sectors, and Rhodium’s analysis shows that these sectors are off to a good start. The report shows that in 2035 an estimated 63 to 87 percent of all US power generation could come from zero or low emitting plants, up from 40 percent in 2022. This, combined with the rapid growth of the electric vehicle industry, is poised to reduce household energy bills by $2,200-$2,400 per year in 2035 from 2022 levels, according to the report.

However, a challenge still lies in the industry sector of emissions reductions, where the law has a negligible impact on fossil fuel use from things like petroleum refining and steel production. “A bunch of these emissions are coming from burning stuff to heat stuff up,” Ben King, an associate director with Rhodium and lead author of the report, told the Washington Post. “We think there’s an opportunity to electrify those processes, but we’re still trying to crack the nut on those solutions.”

On top of that, continuing progress in power reductions would require an addition of 32-92 gigawatts of wind and solar power every year between now and 2035. According to the report, 32 GW of renewables is “roughly equivalent to the best year of renewable installations on record.”

[Related: World set to ‘temporarily’ breach major climate threshold in next five years.]

The report goes to show that federal policies can only take the country so far—reaching Paris Agreement goals is possible with supporting policies at the state level. According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, DC and 24 states (such as California, New York, and Oregon) have all adopted specific emissions reduction targets, but some states (like Texas, Georgia, and Ohio) still lag behind. 

“The IRA is the most substantial federal action the US has ever taken to combat climate change, but it was not intended to solve every decarbonization challenge in one bill,” the authors write. “A sustained stream of federal and state actions is the only way to close the US emissions gap.”

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As recently as 400,000 years ago, parts of Greenland were actually quite green. New analysis of some core samples taken from underneath Greenland’s ice sheet reveal that the island was ice-free at a time in Earth’s history when temperatures were similar to what the Earth is approaching now thanks to human-caused climate change. The findings were published July 20 in the journal Science, and may indicate some disastrous implications of future sea level rise.

[Related: Greenland’s polar bears are learning to get around in a less icy world.]

“We’re discovering the ice sheet is much more sensitive to climate change than we previously thought,” study co-author and Utah State University geoscientist Tammy Rittenour said in a statement. “This is a foreboding wake-up call.”

Greenland’s continental glacier covers about 80 percent of the 836,3000-square-mile land mass, and this new analysis overturns some previous assumptions that the majority of the glacier has been frozen for millions of years. A less icy and greener Greenland indicates that the ice sheet is not necessarily as stable as it appears. 

“We had always assumed the ice sheet has remained about the same for nearly 2.5 million years,” said Rittenour. “But our investigation indicates it melted enough to allow the growth of moss, shrubs and buzzing insects during an interglacial period called Marine Isotope Stage 11, between 424,000 to 374,000 years ago.”

Rittenour added that the melting caused at least five feet of sea level rise worldwide. Some of the models in the study suggest that sea levels could have been up to 30 feet higher than we see today. The Marine Isotope Stage 11 was an unusually long period of warming with slightly elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, today’s CO₂ levels are 1.5 times higher than they were 400,000 years ago and at least 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels. 

These inflated levels of carbon dioxide would remain in place for hundreds, even thousands, of years—even if humans ceased all greenhouse gas emissions, according to Rittenour. Sea levels would rise about 23 feet if Greenland’s entire ice sheet were to melt completely. The measurements also do not take melting in Antarctica into consideration, which is also happening at a rate 20 times faster than scientists previously thought. 

“The deglaciation has implications for the entire globe and is especially sobering for our coastal mega-cities, where so much of the world’s population resides,” said Rittenour.

The study used frozen sediment from an ice core that was collected during a Cold War-era military project in 1966 at a US army base in northwestern Greenland.

[Related: Climate change revealed this U.S. military secret.]

“In 1960, the US Army launched a top-secret effort called Project Iceworm in northwestern Greenland to build a network of mobile nuclear launch sites under the ice sheet,” Rittenour said. “As part of that project, they also invited scientists and engineers to conduct experiments in a highly publicized ‘cover’ project, known as Camp Century, to study the feasibility of working and carrying out military missions under ice and in extreme-cold conditions.”

The 12-foot-long rock and soil sample was retrieved after scientists drilled through more than 4,500 feet of ice from beneath the ice sheet. The core sat untouched in a freezer until 2017 since there weren’t techniques to understand the sediment when the core was unearthed almost 60 years ago. 

Since the samples had remained frozen and relatively unbothered, the team could use luminescence dating to determine the last time they had been exposed to sunlight.

According to the study, the cores and new analysis add a sobering and “upsetting” warning of what our planet could be heading towards. 

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Before the heat of the day set in, dozens of people were already gathered under a large banyan tree at the twice-weekly turmeric market in Ataikula, Bangladesh. The season for harvesting turmeric was quickly coming to an end. Those who had arrived watched from the shade as other farmers brought their haul on motorbikes and auto rickshaws on the dirt road, their harvests to be combined in large piles atop orange and blue tarpaulin mats. Traders would buy however much they wanted in bulk.

Mohammad Abdullah Sheikh wandered around the market helping farmers weigh their sacks and traders make their purchases. Over the last 30 years, he’s become well acquainted with the space, as his turmeric processing business and trading facilities are headquartered next door. He buys most of his turmeric from this market and processes it to sell to larger food manufacturers and wholesalers across the country.

For most of his turmeric trading career, Sheikh engaged in an open secret: While processing raw turmeric to powder, he added a chemical called lead chromate to get the tubers to glow yellow. Sheikh and the locals refer to the compound as peuri — and nearly all the farmers and traders at the market are familiar with it. Lead chromate is a chemical used in paints to, for instance, make school buses yellow, and it can enhance the radiance of turmeric roots, making them more attractive to buyers.

For decades, Sheikh didn’t know the exact harm that peuri could cause. That changed in the fall of 2019, when researchers from the nonprofit International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, or ICDDR,B, traveled to Ataikula and adjacent districts in the northwest to meet with Sheikh and others in the turmeric business. The researchers warned them that consuming lead chromate could lead to kidney and brain damage or cause developmental delays in children. By that point, the spice had made its way out of the country: The problem had already gone global.

That outreach was the culmination of years of work conducted by an international group of researchers, including a research scientist at Stanford University. They worked together with the ICDDR,B and Bangladesh’s Food Safety Authority to protect the country’s food supply from further lead exposure. The impacts of this intervention were significant, and summarized in a study published recently in the science journal Environmental Research. When researchers sampled and tested turmeric across the country before and after the intervention, the level of adulteration in this one study dropped from 47 percent to 0 percent.

The use of peuri in turmeric renders the food fraudulent, as it is done purposefully to alter the commodity for economic gain. Instances of food fraud are notoriously difficult to resolve, said Michael Roberts, expert on the regulation of food fraud, and executive director of the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Often, the economic incentives just aren’t there for authentically made food. Processors are likely to increase their margins if they cheat.

Fighting food fraud isn’t easy, and experts have a range of ideas on how to do it. Some approaches rely heavily on scientific testing while others work through undercover investigations. Regardless of the method, rooting out food fraud requires constant surveillance across long and complex supply chains. In this sense, Bangladesh’s success is noteworthy, said Roberts, who was not involved in the project to eliminate lead chromate from turmeric. “It’s unusual that this kind of campaign takes place, whether in developed or developing countries,” he said, and there are lessons from this case study that could be applied to other commodities.

Native to South Asia, turmeric has been used for thousands of years as both a culinary and a medicinal ingredient. In Bangladesh, it is often planted in the middle of the year, and requires nine to 10 months to mature before it’s harvested. Precipitation during the monsoon season is critical: A generous amount of rain will allow for the root to bloom, shooting off additional roots, known as “fingers,” from the bulb.

Eskandar Molla, a farmer from northwest Bangladesh, has been growing turmeric for over 50 years. He sells his fresh turmeric fingers at nearby Hazir Hat, an open air market. There, he gets paid a market rate for what he sells: In March of this year, it was around 1,400 taka (about $13 USD) for a 88-pound satchel. Middlemen, who have the facilities to boil and dry the root, buy it from him and other farmers.

Getting the moisture out is critical for the root to be pulsed into powder. Traders lay out a single layer of turmeric fingers in vast, sunny, open fields for a month. Workers manually go through and inspect for roots that are either too long, too fat, or too skinny.

Once dried, the turmeric fingers are polished. Here, they are dumped into large “drums,” which are turned by hand or motorized. This continual physical agitation removes the outer skin of the turmeric to reveal the true color of the root. It’s in this step that lead chromate would be used to enhance color. Once polished, the roots are then ground to a fine golden powder.

In the northwest districts around Ataikula, farmers often talk about a large flood in 1988 that damaged the crop and darkened the color of the roots. To cope with a bad turmeric growing season, Bangladeshi businesses began importing the spice from India. Meanwhile, to remain competitive, Bangladeshi processors started using peuri to disguise the color of the water-damaged crop. The practice of adulteration became more common after the flood.

Sheikh, the trader from Ataikula, recalls being enthralled by the golden glow of the turmeric that he saw at a market in the early 1990s. When he asked the traders about it, they told him to go to India to learn to add peuri during processing. Sheikh followed their advice. When he returned home and brought his haul to the market, he earned more when selling turmeric polished with peuri. “Sometimes,” he said, “wholesalers were not willing to buy if there was no chemical in it.”

Over the past decade, turmeric’s popularity has expanded widely, becoming something of a global trend. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow helped boost turmeric’s stardom by popularizing the spice-infused golden latte on Instagram. The supplement industry sells an array of turmeric products used to curb inflammation and purportedly protect against high cholesterol and heart disease. And scientists are studying the plant for chemicals that might help treat cancer and other challenging medical conditions.

But hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide may have unknowingly purchased a contaminated product.

Lead chromate is comprised of two heavy metals, lead and chromium. The risks of lead consumption are well documented. Continual exposure can cause developmental and neurological issues in children, who absorb four to five times as much lead as adults. In adults, repeated lead exposure is linked to high blood pressure, as well as kidney and reproductive issues. Over time, lead can get integrated into bones because the body mistakes it for calcium, owing to similar chemical properties. There is no known safe level of lead consumption.

The chromium in lead chromate poses a health risk, too. It exists in a chemical form that’s known to be cancerous. It can also cause allergic reactions, respiratory issues, and kidney damage.

The use of peuri in turmeric is just one of many examples of food fraud. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, food fraud affects at least 1 percent of the global food industry and costs as much as $40 billion a year. Cheaper oils have been blended into products labeled 100 percent extra virgin olive oil, and some companies have added low-cost cellulose to grated cheese. Sometimes the fraud poses a safety issue. Baby formula and pet food manufacturers have had to recall products containing melamine that caused kidney failure. And spice producers have sold cumin with peanut powder as filler, putting individuals with peanut allergies at risk of anaphylactic shock.

The FDA began sounding the alarm about turmeric around 2011. In April of that year, Archer Farms recalled its turmeric, which was sold nationwide at Target and Top Food stores, for having high levels of lead. In 2013, continued surveillance and testing by food safety inspectors at the New York State Department of Health identified lead in turmeric sold by Pran, a Bangladeshi company. Since then, the FDA has issued more than a dozen alerts for turmeric products from South Asia for high lead content.

These recalls notwithstanding, turmeric purchased in the United States tends to have lower levels of lead, said Paromita Hore, the director of environmental exposure assessment and education in New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She coauthored a study that tested nearly 1,500 samples of spice products. The turmeric purchased abroad — in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Morocco — had the highest lead concentrations, meaning that people all over the world could have been affected. This disparity, the study explained, may have been due to the adulteration of spices in countries with poor regulatory control.

Families in the U.S. were affected, too, through the informal movement of spices that happens when they visit their home countries and bring products back to the U.S. This practice circumvents the regulations in place for commercially imported foods.

Studies conducted in Boston, New York City, North Carolina, Colorado, and Washington have all found a connection between consumption of lead-tainted turmeric (mostly procured from markets overseas) and elevated blood-lead levels. Still, it’s challenging to calculate exactly how much lead in spices is problematic for human consumption.

For years, the only food in which the FDA had established a maximum level of lead was candy: 0.1 parts per million for small children. It took the agency about 16 years to announce another update, outlining guidelines for other foods commonly consumed by babies and young children. Fruits, the agency said, should not exceed 10 parts per billion in lead, and root vegetables and dried cereals should not exceed 20 parts per billion. This guideline did not discuss spices, and no maximum limits for lead are noted for adults.

Many of the lead levels detected in turmeric have ranged from 28 to 146 parts per million, magnitudes more than the FDA’s established acceptable levels for other foods. (The FDA said in a statement that even though it monitors levels of lead in food, and knows about the turmeric recalls owing to high lead levels, it has not yet set a limit for lead in spices.)

Tom Tarantelli, the New York Department of Agriculture and Market’s former senior food chemist, has estimated that children in families that use turmeric regularly could be consuming 10g a day of that spice alone, suggesting that these kids are consuming far more spice than, say, candy. Public health surveys in Colorado have detected blood lead levels of over 24 mcg/dL — equivalent to about 630 grains of sand in a filled bathtub — in children of families who regularly consumed spices high in lead.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services requires that children on Medicaid get tested for lead at ages one and two. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the same for those not on the government program but who are at risk for exposure, but this doesn’t always happen, and turmeric-induced lead poisoning might be under-diagnosed, said Jessica Ivers, a general pediatrician at The Polyclinic in Seattle, Washington. She recently tested a patient who had immigrated to the U.S. in 2019 and was exhibiting developmental delays. “Lo and behold,” the lead level was high, she said. And the culprit? The turmeric powder that the family had brought back to the U.S. from India.

In a period of 18 months, in her small practice of at most 2,000 kids, Ivers said she had three cases of elevated lead, all in families from India and all related to the consumption of spices. “If the prevalence is three in 2,000,” she added, physicians are missing a lot of cases.

Jenna Forsyth knew nothing about the practice of adding lead chromate to turmeric in 2014, when she started her Ph.D. in environment and resources at Stanford University. Excited to continue her masters research on water and sanitation, she sought out working with Stephen Luby, a world expert on the subject. When she arrived, Luby instead pointed Forsyth to a conundrum he was encountering in his work in Bangladesh: In a rural part of the country, pregnant women and children had high levels of lead in their blood. There were none of the usual suspects of lead exposure. There were no nearby battery recycling plants and families didn’t paint their homes. How could this be?

Forsyth and her Bangladeshi colleagues had a slew of hypotheses. Maybe the lead was coming from jewelry or food storage containers. Or perhaps it came from clay, soil, or ash that the mothers were exposed to during pregnancy. Rice was another possibility, as the staple crop could have absorbed lead from the soil. Forsyth and her colleagues sampled and tested all of these. She vividly remembers the first summer of her Ph.D., as she baked and ground rice into a pulp to test for lead in a sweltering laboratory in rural Bangladesh. But there was no obvious red flag.

Forsyth also scoured the literature and eventually discovered a study published in 2014. A team that included researchers from Harvard’s School of Public Health had reported that contaminated turmeric was contributing to elevated lead levels in children in rural Bangladesh. This was intriguing, Forsyth thought, as the families she was working with were growing their own food, but not their own spices. She went back to the homes she had sampled from earlier. Seventeen out of 20 gave her samples of turmeric — and that’s when Forsyth found the culprit.

When she showed Luby her results, he was skeptical and encouraged her to gather more data. So Forsyth and her colleagues used a method called isotopic analysis, which uses chemical clues to definitively determine the source of lead. When they compared the isotopes of lead in the blood to those from other possible contaminants, the isotopes most closely matched that of turmeric.

In 2017, on the heels of this discovery, Forsyth and her Bangladeshi collaborators at the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, met with government officials from Bangladesh’s Department of Agricultural Authority to understand how turmeric was produced and distributed. From these conversations, and from conversations with others in the industry, they identified nine regions of Bangladesh, eight of which contribute almost half of the nation’s turmeric for domestic use and export.

The research team then interviewed turmeric producers and food safety inspectors in each district. They also collected samples of pigments and turmeric — powdered, polished, unpolished, labeled, unlabeled. In 140 turmeric samples collected nationwide, Forsyth and her colleagues found that lead concentrations were highest for polished bulbs and for some turmeric powders, with two samples of powdered turmeric exceeding the country’s limit for lead in turmeric powder, at 8.4 ppm and 26.6 ppm. (At the time of the study, the limit was 2.5 ppm; it has since been raised to 5 ppm.)

They visited mills, and sometimes found sacks of the pigment on-site. They sampled dust from the polishing machine and from the floors of the mill. If there was about one part of lead to chromium, it was a dead giveaway that the adulterant was being used. From interviews, they also understood the motive: Brighter roots led to more profit, and adulterating with a consistently bright paint agent could disguise poorer-quality roots. The findings from this study were published in 2019.

The team held a meeting with the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority. The agency’s chairman at the time, Syeda Sarwar Jahan, was immediately concerned. She decided to spearhead a massive public information campaign.

Local and international news outlets disseminated the findings from Forsyth’s new studies to create public awareness. The researchers met with businesses to make them aware of the risks of lead in turmeric. BFSA posted notices in the nation’s largest wholesale spice market, Shyambazar. The flyers warned people of the dangers of lead and that anyone caught selling turmeric adulterated with lead would be subject to legal action.

Authorities also raided Shyambazar using a machine called an X-ray fluorescence analyzer which can quickly detect lead in spices. Nearly 2,000 pounds of turmeric was seized in the raid and two wholesalers were fined 800,000 taka, more than $9,000 USD.

A few months later, the team went back again to collect samples to see how their intervention had fared. Only about 5 percent of 157 samples were found to be adulterated with lead chromate, down from nearly 50 percent before. When the researchers conducted a sampling spree again in 2021, they found that the use of lead chromate had practically disappeared.

On a rainy Sunday morning in March, Shyambazar was already bustling. Vendors selling eggplant, garlic, onion, greens, and fruits lined the side of the market facing the Buriganga River, which connects the capital city to the rest of the country by an intricate path of waterways. Other vendors were offloading truckloads of pineapple, as rickshaws, motorbikes, and cars drove neck-to-neck, negotiating for space along the road.

Narrow passageways connect the bustling vegetable market to its interior, where dried goods, including spices, are found. The fragrant, sharp scents of chili, cumin, and turmeric travel down the slick, narrow walkways as wholesalers and buyers maneuver about with large burlap sacks atop their heads.

Many of the turmeric wholesalers selling in Shyambazar have been at it for more than 30 years. Law enforcement, they said, had only showed up for the turmeric. No other spices, they noted, have ever come under scrutiny.

In late 2019, as part of the intervention against lead chromate use in turmeric, the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority printed and distributed an estimated 50,000 copies of green flyers, that they shared with traders and plastered around the market. Be skeptical of fingers that appear too bright and yellow, it advised, and if the yellow dusting from turmeric doesn’t come off easily, it’s likely you’ve been played.

Most of those flyers are now gone. One trader, Mohammad Mosharof Khokon, who has been selling turmeric for over 30 years, kept a copy under the glass top of his desk. At the time of the raid, he was compliant, albeit nervous for the researchers to scan his satchels of spice. “The machine could show some error,” he said about the XRF, “and then I would lose my business.” Despite the uncertainty of when authorities could show up again, Khokon said that the enforcement is a good thing: “It ensures the quality and purity of the product.”

Shoraf Ali Biswash was one of the traders who had turmeric from his warehouse seized during the raid and paid a fine of 400,000 taka (approximately $3,700). For him, selling turmeric is a family affair: His brother has a polishing mill near Pabna and for years, used peuri to polish the roots that Biswash then sold. Despite the fine, Biswash believes the increased surveillance is also for the best. “It’s 100 percent good because the chemical was bad for our health,” he said. At home, he was feeding his family turmeric polished with lead chromate and immediately stopped once he learned the health effects.

The crackdown on turmeric in 2019 may, in part, explain why the use of lead chromate in polishing turmeric has since decreased. It was a punishable crime, and although there was only one raid, people now know there’s a risk of getting caught. This spring, Undark collected three samples of polished turmeric fingers from Shyambazar and brought them back to get tested at NVL Labs, a Seattle-based company that tests for environmental contaminants including lead. In this admittedly small sample, none of the turmeric had lead levels of concern.

But government officials and researchers say that enforcement and surveillance must be maintained. “A one-time conviction is not sufficient,” wrote Jahan, who has since moved on from the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority. Follow-up is required as she has “seen such criminals go back to doing what they did even after facing consequences.”

Monzur Morshed Ahmed, a member of BFSA, says that the agency is in the process of procuring handheld X-ray fluorescence analyzers to distribute to districts around Bangladesh so local authorities can continue monitoring the use of lead chromate themselves. And on top of that, he said, BFSA aims to inspect over 7,000 markets and food establishments for violations of food safety, with turmeric being one of the products that will be investigated.

Forsyth is heartened by the impact that she and her colleagues have had in Bangladesh, and she wants to replicate these methods — studying the supply chain, understanding the incentives for adulteration, and creating interventions to dissuade the use of lead chromate — in India and Pakistan.

But reproducing this success is already posing challenges. “It’s easy, obviously, to collect data of spices and analyze them and understand the patterns and where the high levels of lead are. That’s been straightforward,” said Forsyth. Identifying government officials who can advocate for and run an intervention has been harder.

Ending food fraud entirely for any commodity is a huge challenge, said Roberts, the food fraud expert from UCLA. Regulatory agencies in different countries need to set clear standards, enable constant testing and surveillance, and be willing to enforce penalties when someone has committed fraud.

This constant vigilance can be expensive, he continued, and the economic incentive to cheat is going to remain. As such, “it will be interesting to see if this problem pops up again.” Still, many of the interventions used in Bangladesh can be applied to other food communities that have a history of fraud, Roberts added.

“You have to have good science,” said Roberts. “In this case, that turned out to be a blessing for Bangladesh.” And, importantly, he added, “consumers have to care. And in this case, it’s pretty clear that consumers should care because of the health and safety issues.”

In Bangladesh, even those who have committed a crime see this crackdown on lead chromate use as a net good.

Sheikh said he had felt helpless to change direction before the crackdown. Although he didn’t know the precise health impacts of the lead chromate, he said, “it’s common sense that chemicals are harmful.” In fact, he never used peuri-laced turmeric at home.

“I have to answer to Allah that I used it in food,” he recalled. “It hurt me, sometimes, to do that.”

When Shyambazar was raided, Sheikh knew he had to stop. Now, he can rest easy: There’s no economic incentive to adulterate his product.

Outside his polishing mill, Sheikh held up a basket of polished turmeric, ready to be shuttled along to the next set of hands in the supply chain. The roots were a light gold, not as aggressively bright as they used to be. “I’m happy with this color,” he said. “Everyone in Bangladesh is happier with it.”

Wudan Yan is an award-winning independent journalist in Seattle covering science and society.

This story was supported in part by grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the UC Berkeley Food & Farming Fellowship.

Note: Ali Ahsan, a Bangladesh-based producer, translated interviews and coordinated logistics for meetings with farmers and traders.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

The post For decades, turmeric’s ultra-golden glow had a deadly secret appeared first on Popular Science.

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