As the civil war in Syria has escalated, American, Saudi Arabian, and Russian interests have played increasingly larger roles. The Obama Administration adopted the stance, shared by the majority of the U.N., that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was guilty of human rights violations and must be removed from power. Russia, on the other hand, has long been an ally of Syria, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has supported Assad throughout the conflict. This has led to what is in part a proxy war, with Syrian rebels that have been trained and armed by Saudi and American militaries fighting against Assad’s forces, which are armed with Russian weapons and drive Russian tanks. Amid this turmoil has been the growing power of ISIS, opposed in different ways by both the United States and Russia.

As the war has carried on, it has grown increasingly bloody. By the end of 2015, the war had claimed a staggering 470,000 Syrian lives, representing a loss of 11.5 percent of the nation’s population. Even among the survivors, the damage to Syrian national security has been extreme; over half of the nation’s population has been displaced by the war. The Syrian conflict is vast and extremely complicated and both Russia and the U.S. have numerous reasons for their involvement.

However, it’s imperative to analyze one important but under-emphasized element of the war: the role of energy. Both the U.S. and Russia stand to influence the future of the global energy market if their side comes out dominant in this conflict. If the Assad regime maintains control of Syria, it will likely push ahead with current plans to build a natural gas pipeline running from Iran through Syria. The pipeline would be built by the Iranian government in collaboration with Russia’s major gas corporations, and would allow both countries to profit off of the largest gas reserve on earth. On the other hand, the United States and Saudi Arabia have an active interest in preventing this from happening to protect its share in the energy market, as well as the strength of the petrodollar, against Russian and Iranian competition.

President Trump has long denounced America’s anti-Assad position and previously discussed working with Russia, and possibly Assad, against the common enemy of ISIS. However, following the Syrian Air force’s chemical attack in the Idlib Province, Trump at least temporarily reversed his public position on Assad and Russia. Simultaneously, the Trump Administration has grown increasingly closer to Saudi Arabia. Future negotiations will tell whether there is still a possibility for Russia and the U.S. to work together in Syria, and Trump’s ultimate stance on the Assad regime will heavily influence whether the Iranian pipeline is built. We are currently at a critical moment in the future of the Syrian conflict, and for the roles of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States in the global energy market. Read on to see what each side stands to gain and lose as we move forward.

Syria: The Energy Crossroads

The conflict in Syria is fueled by numerous religious and geopolitical divisions within the Middle Eastern Region and energy is far from the only relevant factor in American or Russian involvement. However, the importance of energy within the Middle East and its ever-present role in regional conflict is hard to overstate. Control of the global energy market means being able to exert huge influence on the international economy, and the Middle East’s vast fossil fuel reserves have always attracted the interest of international superpowers. The last two decades of constant regional conflict have been a consistently perilous struggle for power and market control, especially between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two largest economies in the Middle East.

Syria has attracted international interest because its central location in the Middle East makes it a potential energy crossroads for pipelines that could transport natural gas across the region from the South Pars/North Dome gas field. Because of Syria’s critical position, the results of the war will likely determine who gains access to the gas field, and thus will greatly impact the future of energy sovereignty within the region. The oil and gas trade is very directly related to the strength of the American dollar and both the U.S. and longstanding ally Saudi Arabia are worried that Syria could become the construction site of a pipeline. A new major pipeline could upset the balance of the energy market, and subsequently the power of the dollar and the Saudi Riyal, which is pegged to the dollar.

Saudi Arabia, home to 16 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and the leader of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, has long used whatever means are necessary to ensure that its business never shrinks. Recently, as foreign dependence on petroleum in the last few years lessened due to a boost in gas production abroad, the Saudis chose to ignore their 2014 promise to reduce output and actually increased their production up until 2016. This caused international petroleum prices to drop, keeping Middle East petroleum competitive, despite the fact that the price gouge also sent many of the poorer OPEC countries near collapse.

In order to maintain its status as the largest energy producer in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has also spent the last two decades attempting to block energy infrastructure proposals designed to access the South Pars/North Dome gas field. The South Pars/North Dome Gas Field lies beneath the Persian Gulf, with the northern end of the field in Iranian territory and the Southern edge in Qatari territory. It is the single largest gas reserve on earth, and a pipeline that allowed cross-regional transport of its resources could dramatically change the future of the energy market. The first pipeline was proposed in 2009 and would have carried gas from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, although both the late King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia and Assad in Syria rejected its construction in 2009. It is sometimes falsely claimed that Saudi Arabia supported this pipeline, but the Saudis also opposed its development because a pipeline would have given the E.U. direct access to cheap gas. Saudi Arabia’s relationship with its then ally Qatar had at the time also grown unstable, and the Saudis were skeptical about a large scale business collaboration.

However, in place of the Qatari project, an alternative pipeline was proposed, which would be built avoiding Saudi land and would replace Qatar with Iran as the central supplier of natural gas. Saudi Arabia views Shiite Iran as its primary enemy within the Middle East and is determined to keep it from growing in power in the energy market. However, Assad publicly supported this pipeline, which would give Russian and Iranian business interests primary access to the gas field’s massive resources. Saudi Arabia lacked the veto power it held with the first pipeline, which forced Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan to reach directly out to Putin, promising to ensure that the gas reserve would not be utilized in competition with Russia’s business if Putin abandoned his support of Assad’s regime. Putin refused and Saudi Arabia pushed forward with regime change in Syria by militarizing rebel Sunni groups, including the Free Syrian Army, the Al Nursa Front, and the organization that would become ISIS.

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia

The U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia is a tense and complicated one. Saudi Arabia has come under international criticism for its human rights record and the Saudis have continuously funded extremist Sunni groups that threaten the Western world. However, the economies of the two nations are tied together through the petrodollar. Petroleum is the most commonly traded substance on earth by volume, and globally, petroleum has been traded almost exclusively in American dollars for the last 40 years. If a country wants to buy oil, it must first purchase U.S. dollars, which increases demand for the dollar and dollar denominated assets. Because of this, the success of the oil industry and cooperation with Saudi Arabia very directly affects our domestic economy. The United States and Saudi Arabia have worked together in coordination for almost three-quarters of a century to influence Middle Eastern geopolitics, from the establishment of the petrodollar system to the Persian Gulf War to both Yemen Civil Wars and the battle against Al Qaeda.

Saudi Arabia has also been a central customer of the U.S. defense industry for decades, although Obama ordered a weapons sales freeze following large-scale civilian casualties from Saudi airstrikes in Yemen. Some have accused this freeze of being largely political theater, since overall the Obama Administration sold over $46 billion in weapons to the Saudis, more than any president in the 71-year alliance. The State Department also went on to grant a pre-planned $3.51 billion initiative to arm and train the Saudi army to defend the Saudi-Yemen border, claiming none of this money would go the actual war it supposedly condemned. While the Obama Administration has been critical of Saudi Arabia, it also continued to support the country and many of its conflicts throughout Obama’s presidency.

While Assad is certainly guilty of human rights violations, the U.S. also has a critical interest in coordinated regime change because the current pipeline proposal would give unfriendly Iran dominant control of the largest source of energy in the Middle East. Furthermore, Russia’s three largest gas companies will play a large part in the development of the pipeline, meaning Russian interests stand to profit directly off the reserve. Russia and Iran are two of the few countries worldwide that refuse to use the petrodollar, so not only does control of the gas field give them a huge business advantage, the greater their share in the market the weaker the U.S. dollar and Saudi Riyal will become. While the United States and Saudi Arabia disagree on many things, the two nations are united geopolitically in their desire to prevent Russia and Iran from gaining greater regional power and control over the energy market through a coordinated business venture.

In 2014, following a meeting between John Kerry and King Abdullah of Jordan, the United States agreed to work with Saudi Arabia on a military offensive in Syria through Operation Timber Sycamore, with Saudi Arabia funding and arming the Free Syrian Army and the CIA training them in preparation for the war. While the stated purpose of U.S. involvement was to counter ISIS, the choice to fund the rebel group looking to overthrow the ruling Baath party reflects the Obama Administration’s consistent desire for regime change.

“Obama/Saudi Ties” courtesy of Tribes of the World; License: (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Russian Involvement

Currently, Syria is Russia’s oldest and strongest ally in the Middle East, although Iran and Russia have grown increasingly closer throughout the last decade. Aside from representing Russia’s foothold in the region, Syria is also the location of Russia’s only Mediterranean naval base. In exchange for this critical regional access, Syria has the support of one of the world’s largest superpowers. The long-standing connection between these countries makes it no surprise that Russia is willing to give political and military support to Assad.

However, Russia also stands to gain significantly moving forward if Assad can suppress the rebel forces. As long as the Assad regime maintains control of Syria, then construction of the Iranian pipeline should move forward as planned. Russia is the second largest producer of fossil fuels globally and recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s top crude oil producer. Together oil and gas exports account for 70 percent of Russia’s $550 billion annual exports. European natural gas imports from Russia dramatically increased from 48 percent in 2010 to 64 percent in 2014, and Putin’s long-term plan is to become an even larger energy superpower, spiking production and exports by 2020 by increasing sales in Europe and expanding into the Asia-Pacific region. It is no secret that the E.U. dreads increasing its dependence upon Russia’s major gas giants. Because of heavy resistance to the Russian energy business in the West, Putin has been continuously looking for new projects in the East, notably in China and the Middle East. Iran has long been looking for international investors in its shale business, and in 2013, the Russian state-controlled gas corporation Gazprom signed a deal with the Iranian government to cooperate in ongoing energy infrastructure development. The infrastructure agreement makes Gazprom the third major Russian corporation to be heavily invested in Iranian energy, following Lukoil and Zarubezneft. The construction of the Iranian pipeline would give these corporations new ability to profit off of huge quantities of natural gas. By ensuring that the field is developed and utilized first by friendly Iran, along with Russian gas corporations, Putin can avoid dangerous new competition in the European energy market as was planned in the original Qatari pipeline, thus maintaining Russia’s position of market dominance.

Fear of Saudi Arabia and increased U.S. support for the Syrian insurgency pushed Assad to request greater assistance from Putin, which resulted in Russia joining the conflict in September 2015, mounting a series of airstrikes both against the Free Syrian Army and ISIS. What followed became an increasingly serious proxy war between the Syrian rebels, backed by the United States, and the Syrian military, backed by Russia. The bloodiest of these conflicts has centered around the City of Aleppo, where over 400,000 have died thus far. The FSA has suffered both massive causalities and the loss of members who have defected to join the more radicalized Al-Nursa Front and Jaysh Army. The Syrian Air Force’s chemical attack on Idlib came shockingly during negotiations that were expected to come out in Assad’s favor. President Trump sided initially with the majority of the Western world and voted in favor of a U.N. resolution to launch an investigation into the attack. The resolution was blocked by Russia and we are currently in a pause, waiting to find out how the conflict will move forward.

“Aleppo, Syria” courtesy of yeowatzup;  License: (CC BY 2.0)

Conclusion: What does the Future Look Like?

While Trump has criticized Saudi Arabia in the past for its own role in funding radical Islam, he seems to have recently made a complete reversal on this stance and has even sided with Saudi Arabia in its dispute with U.S. ally Qatar. The Trump Administration and Saudi Arabia have also recently entered into a $110 billion dollar weapons deal, the largest in U.S.-Saudi history. Following the attack on Idlib, it seemed possible that Trump might decide to align with the anti-Assad stances held by the Obama Administration and the Saudi government. However, since the U.S. airstrike and the failed U.N. Security Resolution, the Trump Administration has not publicly emphasized Assad’s removal.

Currently, it’s uncertain whether Trump will side with reestablished ally Saudi Arabia or if his administration still plans to find a way to work together with Russia in Syria. The U.S. warned the Russians prior to the airstrike on the Shayrat base, allowing them to evacuate without casualty. There have also been accusations that the airstrike was essentially political theater to dispel the notion that Trump is compromised by Russian interests, given the fact that Russia chose not to deploy its anti-missile systems, effectively allowing an attack it knew was coming to take place.

While the future of the South Pars/North Dome gas reserve isn’t certain, at this point Assad has successfully dominated the majority of rebel forces in Syria. As long as the Assad regime is still in place, any major cross-regional energy infrastructure utilizing Syrian land will most likely be to the advantage of Assad and his ally Putin. If the Iranian pipeline does end up being built, the reverberations will be felt throughout the global energy market. Saudi Arabia may lose the upper hand in several markets where it competes with Iran and Russia, especially in East Asia where Saudi Arabia has struggled to maintain active business in the face of Russian competition. Furthermore, it is very unlikely that Europe will ever be able to utilize the gas field as a cheap alternative to lessen its dependence on Russia.

If Iran and Russia become larger figures in the energy market, the petrodollar will weaken as less U.S. dollars are needed for oil transactions, which would affect the economies of both America and Saudi Arabia. How dramatic these effects will be is impossible to say. Saudi Arabia still has massive hydrocarbon reserves and is in no danger of being pushed out of the global fossil fuel trade. While the petrodollar has played a large part in the strength of the American dollar since the end of the Gold Standard, it is only one of many factors that contribute to and decide the strength and stability of the U.S. economy. We will have to wait and see what direction the Trump Administration takes American foreign policy in the Middle East to learn the answers to these questions.

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post A Tale of Two Pipelines: The Influence of the Energy War in the Middle East appeared first on Law Street.

One of Donald Trump’s first moves as president was announcing his plan for the imminent repeal of 75 percent of federal regulations. In a previous article, we went over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the ways in which federal environmental regulations affected business growth, outsourcing, and public health costs. Reviews of environmental regulations show that they have saved trillions of dollars in public heath costs while having a modest effect on American business, which has continued to grow and thrive since the creation of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Removing environmental regulations will likely not be the deciding factor that enables manufacturing to return to America but it could seriously endanger our water and air, especially for poor and at-risk communities.

But the question of what effect regulations have on the energy market itself has been a hot topic of debate lately. Conservative interests have argued for some time that environmental regulations place serious handicaps on fossil fuels and unfairly favor renewables, and the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan has come under a storm of criticism for strengthening this dynamic. Read on to learn about federal energy policy and environmental regulations to see how they have historically impacted different energy industries and examine what the Clean Power Plan would have done in contrast to what Trump’s proposed policies will likely do.

Regulations and the Energy Market: Renewables vs. Fossil Fuels

A central objection to environmental regulations is that they unfairly skew the energy market. They place countless handicaps on fossil fuel companies and allow renewables full freedom to prosper, unfairly impacting business throughout the country. It is very true that the energy market is subject to unfair business handicaps, but those that are in place overwhelmingly favor fossil fuel companies rather than hinder their success. Much of this dates back to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which determined subsidies for different energy sources. The law allocated $5.6 billion in incentives for the gas, oil, and coal industries, $4.5 billion for renewable and alternative energy sources and $3 billion in electricity incentives that largely addressed nuclear power (another $1.3 billion went to energy efficiency and conservation research and development, which mostly applied to fossil fuel production). This $4.5 billion may seem substantial and it did, in fact, bring forth the creation of critical incentives, such as solar tax credits. However, a review of the 2007 budget shows that more than two-thirds of all these renewable subsidies went to ethanol and biofuels. Only a little over a billion dollars went directly into America’s three dominant clean energy sources: solar, wind, and hydropower.

While direct funding and incentives are slanted toward fossil fuels, the real imbalance comes in the form of large-scale post-tax subsidies for fossil fuels that involve the costs of the externalities they create in the form of environmental damage and public health effects. Globally, the subsidy imbalance is extremely dramatic: worldwide about $120 billion in pre-tax subsidies goes to renewables and $523 billion goes to fossil fuels. But when you add post-tax subsidies, the IMF calculates that the fossil fuel industry received a staggering $4.2 trillion in subsidies in 2011. The United States is the world’s top producer of gas and petroleum and it’s a stretch of the imagination to claim that those industries are getting marginalized or cut an unfair deal.

The first part of this series explained the regulations that were placed on power plants for emissions and dumping, which represented a relatively small industry cost (especially compared to the massive public health savings generated by those regulations) and did nothing to stop the growth of the fossil fuel industry. For the most part, renewable energy systems don’t deal with regulations that affect emissions and toxic dumping because they don’t create waste streams through energy production. However, this doesn’t mean that renewables are given a free ride to prosper in the energy market; they are subject to extensive regulatory processes as well despite the fact that they do not have the same adverse impact on public health. The installation of a wind turbine, for instance, requires permits from a vast number of different regulatory authorities, and if even one of the required organizations doesn’t grant a permit then a project can be killed.

A great deal of attention has been called to the potential damage renewables can inflict on wildlife (the most common narrative is that wind turbines kill birds), despite the fact that fossil fuels do much greater damage to wildlife, and protected species regulations are often used to oppose renewable projects. Renewable energy systems can and have been repeatedly shut down mid-project for causing even minor habitat damage. The $2.2 billion BrightSource Solar Farm in the Mojave Desert, the largest solar facility ever to be built in the United States, was almost completely abandoned because of the death of a single endangered desert tortoise.

Fossil fuel companies must deal with some land and water regulations as well, but they also have access to a variety of unique legislative loopholes that allow them to dodge critical regulations and benefit from the tax code–in effect, giving them permission to pollute so that their business may thrive. The most dramatic example of this is the “Halliburton loophole,” which gives hydraulic fracturing companies special permission to inject hazardous chemicals underground, in what would normally be a direct violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. These benefits extend to the basic permitting processes that different energy companies must go through as well: fossil fuel companies generally have a streamlined permitting process, are given the cheapest land leasing rates, and must provide no strategy or evaluation of environmental safety.

In California, for instance, a solar farm project can require a three-year permitting process that requires millions of dollars. Comparatively, a fossil fuel company needs only a one-page declaration of intent and can begin construction almost immediately. Furthermore, the Bureau of Land Management values the land it leases to oil and gas companies at a rate set almost a century ago, meaning these companies pay incredibly low prices when utilizing federal land (costing $30 billion in federal revenue over the last 30 years for undervalued land) while the BLM requires renewables to pay modern land leasing rates. The idea that the fossil fuel industry is unfairly suppressed by regulation is a myth; the fossil fuel industry already has access to numerous regulatory loopholes and subsidy benefits. The environmental regulations that are in place aren’t suffocating growth, they’re providing critical protection for our public health against industries with high pollution potential.

Regulations and the Energy Market: The Coal Industry

The fossil fuel source that does face serious decline is coal, which the Clean Power Plan specifically targeted as the most dangerous energy source in use, both for climate change and for public health. One of Trump’s favorite mantras during his campaign was that regulations have destroyed the coal industry and taken away countless jobs from Americans in the process. Historically, no such pattern has been observable; the coal industry prospered under environmental regulations for decades and has suffered so much in recent years largely because of competition with the massive spike in domestic natural gas production and usage. This makes President Trump’s claim that he will boost both coal and gas production–which are two directly competing industries–particularly confusing. Critics of environmental regulations generally point to the implementation of the Mining Safety and Health Administration’s 2014 Respirable Coal Mine Dust Rule, which decreased acceptable concentrations of coal dust per cubic meter from 2 grams to 1.5 grams and required regular air samplings to be taken. This legislation has been a hot topic among the anti-regulation community and coal advocates have complained that maintaining such low levels are unfairly difficult at existing output levels.

Image courtesy of Greg Goebel; License: (CC BY-SA 2.0).

However, it’s worth noting that the rule was put in place in 2014, long after American business made the decision to favor natural gas and long after the initial downturn of the coal industry. It’s also true that the rule addresses very legitimate health concerns and when evaluating the efficacy of a regulation it is important to compare the health benefits to the cost savings that would disappear if the rule were rescinded. A staggering 76,000 miners have died from black lung over the last 50 years. Over the same time frame, the government has had to pay out $45 billion in federal compensation to affected workers and their families. The law is also directly targeted at mining crews with Part 90 miners–workers who have already been diagnosed with a respiratory illness. The rule sought to protect the most at-risk population of workers and if the coal industry is to have a productive workforce then it has a responsibility to ensure the health and survival of that workforce. Estimated annualized compliance costs were about $28.1 million at a 7 percent discount rate, with the majority of compliance costs coming from tech purchases for the newly required Continuous Personal Dust Monitors. This number may seem huge but it only represents about 0.13 percent of the coal industry’s annual earnings of $20.2 billion and less than a third of the $1 billion our nation pays out each year in federal compensation to sick and dying miners.

As an energy source, natural gas simply provides more energy for a lower cost, making it unlikely that coal will experience a serious resurgence in the United States. The coal industry survived and grew under the Clean Air Act, and the industry was on its way out long before the Respirable Coal Mine Dust Rule came into effect. While it’s highly likely that the Clean Power Plan would deal a deathblow to the industry, increasing funds to gas as Trump plans will accomplish the same thing only just at a slower rate.

Repealing pollution regulations like safeguards and filter requirements and removing coal mine dust restrictions wouldn’t make the changes necessary to revive the weakening business, not as long as gas is abundant and comparatively cheap. Removing these regulations would, however, make the coal production and disposal process more dangerous for the environment and miners would be the first group to experience the health consequences.

Obama vs. Trump

The Clean Power Plan issued new carbon emissions reductions standards for each state and would have required the states to independently create a plan to meet their target goals. The result would have been a huge increase in clean, renewable energy production. Coal would have been hit the hardest by this as the worst polluter, although the natural gas industry would more easily be able to improve efficiency rates and meet the new standards. The CPP actually encourages the increased use of gas, as long as it’s primarily a replacement for coal.

The nature of this policy aligns with public opinion as well. About 65 percent of the population favors stricter emissions regulations, about 70 to 75 percent of Americans want to see increased renewable energy, and only about 30 percent want to see more coal. However, the coal industry represents 174,000 jobs, including extraction, transportation, and production and it is unfair to cut off employment without generating new opportunities, even if those lost jobs had high health risks.

However, the Clean Power Plan has a strong focus on creating jobs in renewable energy and pollution control industries. The traditional conservative narrative claims that fossil fuels create employment and clean energy policies stifle it, but the reality is actually the reverse; renewables can be a vital catalyst for job growth and actually create more jobs than fossil fuels. One powerful example of the over-inflated projections of fossil fuel employment opportunities is happening right now, with President Trump advancing the Dakota Access Pipeline and Keystone XL Pipeline. The Keystone Pipeline, in particular, has come under a media firestorm after it was revealed that the project would only create 35 permanent jobs. Like most construction projects, the vast majority of jobs related to the pipeline will be temporary positions, including some that will only last for a few months or “spillover jobs” that take place in another industry.

The entire clean energy sector employed 8.1 million workers as of 2015 and growth in the sector has also moved at a rate 12 times faster than overall job growth. In 2014 there were 7.7 million clean energy jobs worldwide and by the end of 2015, that number had grown to about 8.1 million. The related job creation is also remarkable when compared to fossil fuels–a million dollars of spending on renewable energy and energy efficiency will create 13 jobs. That same million dollars only creates 6 jobs within the fossil fuel industry. These are good jobs for middle-class Americans as well, paying on average 13 percent higher than median wages. Many of the jobs that are created by renewable energy involve manufacturing, which would align with President Trump’s vow to revitalize the American manufacturing industry. However, unlike fossil fuels, positions in the renewable energy industry don’t endanger the health of the workers who support them. Hillary Clinton’s ambitious Clean Power Challenge would have expanded upon Obama’s CPP and would have increased renewables through competitive grants, tax incentives, and market-based incentives and created a flux of new jobs in the process. Such efforts would have also meant opening up the industry of offshore wind, a massive and untapped source of domestic energy and employment.

“Keystone XL Pipeline Protest at White House” courtesy of Tar Sand Action; License: (CC BY 2.0)

Critics of the Clean Power Plan claimed that it unfairly supported renewables and made it impossible for fossil fuels to thrive. It’s more accurate to say that it would have leveled the playing field, not skewed it in favor of renewables. Fossil fuels would still be disproportionately subsidized and would still play a huge role in American energy. What the CPP would have done is act as a major catalyst for an increase in clean energy use that America needs to combat climate change, establish energy independence, protect our public health and national lands, while creating new jobs for Americans.

Conclusion

It’s a political myth that the fossil fuel industry is unfairly regulated in the United States. America produces more gas and petroleum than any country on earth, subsidizes the fossil fuel industry with billions more than goes to renewables, and gives oil and gas companies fast-track access to land at the cheapest possible rates. The Clean Power Plan was a chance to increase clean, domestic renewable energy across the nation. Without the plan, the state renewable energy goals will be rendered non-binding and the progress of renewables will move at a much slower rate. Over the next four years, America will continue to be dependent on fossil fuels as the Trump Administration works to open up federal lands for drilling and fracking and peel back regulations allowing the oil and gas industry to freely pollute.

Will a Donald Trump presidency destroy the renewable energy industry? No, because the president doesn’t truly have control over the free market. Trump can seriously slow down renewable progress, but even if the Clean Power Plan is reversed, 29 states still have Renewable Target Portfolios established and another eight have created non-binding goals for themselves. The renewable energy industry has grown dramatically and will continue to receive bipartisan support in the places where it is cost efficient and useful. Red states such as Idaho, the Dakotas, and Texas have all made serious commitments to renewables because they have high renewable energy potential and investing in solar and wind simply makes economic sense. Technological improvements, especially within the field of energy storage, are increasingly raising the value of renewable energy systems and boosting growth within the private sector. In terms of coal, it will be difficult, and maybe even impossible, to bring the coal industry back to its previous rates of production as long as natural gas thrives in the United States.

However, climate change worsens every year and we don’t really have the luxury of waiting for things to move slowly. With Trump in power not only will much of Obama’s work be undone, we will also lose out on one of our last chances as a nation to try and combat climate change.

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Impact of Environmental Regulations on the Energy Market appeared first on Law Street.

President Donald Trump has long promised to remove as many environmental regulations as possible in order to allow American businesses room to grow and prosper and now seems ready to follow through on his pledge. Conservatives and libertarians have spoken out in widespread support of reducing regulations and its ability to stimulate growth. However, many of the regulations that Republicans believe hamper business productivity are in fact key provisions in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts that form the legal cornerstone for American public health.

More broadly, this narrative that environmental regulations (or really any sort of environmental policy) are damaging to business in American is a timeless conservative stance. But is it really true? Have environmental regulations really dampened the ability of business to succeed in America? Can regulations really be blamed for more and more industries outsourcing to countries that have less stringent rules? Could Trump’s infrastructure plan fix our water contamination in areas like Flint? What is the real, quantified benefit of regulations on American public health and why is it never discussed in these conversations? This is one of the oldest arguments against environmental policy measures and it deserves to be analyzed in depth. Read on to learn about the history and impact of environmental regulations on business, public health, and America as a whole.

The Birth of the EPA and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts

The advent of environmental regulations in America really begins with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Prior to the 70s, environmental rules were up to each state to determine independently; regulations were generally loose and chemical dumping was a common, widespread industrial practice. It should come as no surprise that America also had significantly worse water and air quality than it does currently. Only about a third of U.S. fresh water was safe to drink from and watersheds across the nation contained dangerous quantities of unsafe pathogens and hazardous chemicals. With the creation of the EPA came the passage of two critical laws, the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Clean Air Act of 1972.

Using the Clean Water Act, the EPA permanently barred individuals from dumping their waste in navigable waterways and established a dumping permit system for industrial and municipal facilities. These permits could be revoked if any company exceeded the wastewater standards set by the agency, and the removal of a permit resulted in an operational shutdown. The Clean Air Act of 1972 gave the EPA the power to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards for six major pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, lead, and carbon monoxide. The impact of these acts has been huge. Beyond their immediate environmental benefits, these laws set a legacy of top-down, federal environmental regulation ensuring that America has some of the cleanest water and safest air in the world.

“Smog” courtesy of Isengardt; License: (CC BY 2.0)

Costs and Benefits on the National Scale

The technological changes required by these laws have been significant. Power plants throughout the nation were required to update their systems and install filters on their smokestacks. The transportation sector has perhaps experienced the greatest changes out of all the affected industries as the EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) required massive modifications to engine efficiency and emission filtration systems. Congress created the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in 1975, which required certain fuel efficiency rates for different fleets of vehicles. The combined effects of the NAAQS and CAFE standards have dramatically increased the fuel efficiency of our transportation sector and subsequently reduced petroleum use and its pollutant emissions.

And did we gain anything? Actually, yes. Thanks to the Clean Water Act and its subsequent amendments, the percentage of drinkable fresh water in the United States rose from about 30 percent to well over 60 percent. The six major air pollutants in our atmosphere dropped by over 69 percent between 1972 and 2014. One of the reasons analyzing regulatory costs and benefits is complicated is because the losses are felt by private businesses, but the gains are felt in a completely different area: public health. In 2010 alone, Clean Air Act regulations led to the avoidance of an estimated 160,000 premature deaths from respiratory-related illnesses, 130,000 heart attacks, and millions of cases of acute bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma. By 2020 the effects of the act are projected to prevent over 230,000 premature adult deaths annually.

These benefits don’t just lengthen lives, they also increase productivity throughout a lifetime. In 2010, over 13 million lost workdays and 3.2 million lost school days were avoided. All this has a direct benefit to the productivity of our workforce and the academic success of our students, which eventually aids American businesses by creating educated workers. Furthermore, employers provide health insurance for 59 percent of U.S. citizens, meaning that businesses will often end up directly shouldering the burden of increased health care costs when their workers get sick. In 1990, the Clean Air Act was amended to create a regular review of its costs and savings, the conclusion of which was that the benefits of these programs exceeded their compliance costs by a factor of over 43 to 1, based on the average of the estimated range of savings. In the 20 years since the annual review was first conducted, estimates suggest that the Clean Air Act has generated a staggering $22.2 trillion in savings for the United States compared to only $0.5 trillion in compliance costs for the businesses forced to adapt to new regulations.

But did it stifle the overall growth of American business? No, not really. Between 1970 and 2011, U.S. GDP increased by 212 percent and private sector jobs increased by 88 percent. Even the fossil fuel sector, the industry that stood to lose the most from new regulations, grew dramatically. Oil refineries experienced a sharp uptake in refinery productivity and coal production has increased by 70 percent since 1970.

What About Outsourcing?

It is sometimes incorrectly claimed that environmental regulations are one of the central causes for the significant trend in outsourcing that has swept through American businesses. President Trump certainly seems confident that removing regulations will help to bring back manufacturing to the U.S. But pollution abatement spending by American manufacturing is under 1 percent of the value of their total shipped goods. The primary driver in outsourcing is and has always been a desire to reduce labor costs. It would require much more than just dropping environmental regulations to actually induce companies to return to America (it would also most likely require slashing the minimum wage and dropping most workers’ rights) and the impacts of allowing large industries to pollute freely in this country would be significant.

One only needs to look at the difference in a citizen’s life expectancy and the staggering public health costs in industrialized nations without regulations compared to countries like our own. The World Bank has an exhaustive report on the available data. To do away with regulations will cause a dramatic drop in human health in the United States and would lead to an explosion in public health costs.

It is also overlooked that environmental regulations do encourage growth, as new regulatory mechanisms have consistently led to an increased demand for private tech providers, which are needed to create newly required technology. The American environmental technology sector is actually huge, generating around $300 billion in annual revenues, consisting of 119,000 companies, and providing more than 2.6 million jobs to American citizens. Air pollution control equipment alone generated $18 billion in revenue in 2008. Currently, the United States has the largest Environmental Technology industry in the world, making up about a third of the global market.

Pollution control industries create jobs for engineers, scientists, project managers, construction workers, etc., meaning there are employment opportunities for people of all educational levels. The growth of the pollution control sector also benefits some of the industries it was ironically, and incorrectly, predicted to disrupt–such as steel and plastics manufacturing–which are required to provide the materials for newly developed technology.

Business v. Environmentalism: Flint, Michigan

Much of Trump’s campaign was focused on revitalizing the rust belt through manufacturing and Flint can act as a viable case study for how Trump will impact public health and manufacturing. Flint, Michigan attracted national attention when elevated lead levels were found in many citizens’ blood from drinking contaminated water. Governor Rick Snyder appointed an Emergency Manager to Flint, Darnell Earley, who took control of the city’s budget and switched water sources from the drinkable Lake Huron to the toxic Flint River. The citizens took their complaints to the state Health Department and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality but both agencies largely ignored their concerns. It took nearly a year before the EPA heard about the problems with Flint’s water and the agency has been strongly criticized for not mobilizing rapidly and effectively enough to address the situation after it knew about it. Flint is a very serious story of how poor communication and utilization of federal resources failed a community in a serious way. What it is not is a story that indicates the EPA should be defunded and environmental regulations should be pulled.

The willful flouting of environmental regulations and requirements was what created the crisis in Flint to begin with. While untreated lead pipes used to be the norm in the United States, numerous laws have been passed over the years to protect American communities from lead poisoning. The Safe Drinking Water Act, amended in 1986, prohibited new pipe installations from using lead and the 1991 Lead and Copper Rule (originally devised under Ronald Raegan and put into action by George H.W. Bush) required all lead pipes in America to either be replaced or be used in tandem with additional water treatment. While replacing existing pipes by using less dangerous alternatives, such as PVC, was heavily encouraged, many municipalities, especially in poorer areas, chose to go the cheaper route and use corrosion inhibitors. The Flint City Water Treatment Plant ignored these federal regulations and made the decision not to use anti-corrosion chemicals for their water system during a time when chemical costs were spiking. Skipping corrosion control saved Flint $140 a day, which pales in comparison to the costs of addressing the damage. Automotive factories witnessing their approaching collapse due to foreign competition chose to ignore federal water protection rules. Years and years of dumping toxic waste made the water in the Flint River particularly corrosive. These sorts of things are exactly what the preventative measures the EPA has set in place are there to prevent, and generally, those measures have been successful. Only one-third of American water was safe to drink before the Clean Water Act whereas that number has doubled because industrial dumping has been cracked down upon.

Addressing Environmental Problems 

The most important service the EPA provides is preventative, in the form of regulations protecting people and the environment from pollution. However, a major part of the agency is also focused on pollution restoration through the superfund program. Defunding the EPA will both remove these preventative measures and take away the safety net in place to fix things when pollution does happen. The EPA superfund program was created in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter in order to restore polluted areas, although it has faced legitimate criticism for not accomplishing enough and not addressing many of the sites that have applied for superfund assistance. The superfund program works on a “polluter pays” principle that requires the industry responsible for the contamination to fund a large part of the project. In areas like the Rust Belt, where many of the industries responsible for pollution went bankrupt, there is often no one to hold accountable and restoration projects are severely underfunded. However, this is not to say that the program is worthless; since its conception, the EPA has restored over 1,100 sites from severe pollution to healthy and livable communities and created circumstances for businesses to grow and thrive within those areas.  Superfund is one of Americans most critical programs for protecting marginalized and endangered American communities and it needs not to be abandoned but to have improved efficiency, administration, and a more reliable funding system for when industries can’t be held accountable for pollution.

President Trump’s proposed solution would be to allocate $1 trillion toward American infrastructure at what he claims would be no cost to taxpayers–by giving $160 billion in tax credits to companies that get involved with new projects. However, Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, the advisers behind his plan, admit that the plan can’t actually be self-financing. The private sector will require tens of millions of collective tolls and fees for the infrastructure projects taken from the communities in which the work is done. This means that while wealthy investors stand to make a profit through the infrastructure credits, the poorest and most in-need communities like Flint likely won’t benefit because such projects would not yield the profits necessary for private investors. Infrastructure improvements also won’t replace the direct medical benefits that the EPA has been supplying to the community in the form of lead absorption food packages and chemical treatments to restore the waterways. Now that they have a majority in Congress, Republicans have already started to chip away at environmental regulations, blocking the stream protection rule that controlled coal mining and dumping near waterways. The party’s deregulatory efforts will likely continue over the coming years.

Conclusion

Trump and his team of fossil fuel friendly advisers can do plenty to change the balance of environmental regulation and public health over the next several years. Opening up protected land to drilling, mining, and fracking while also removing environmental regulations places our water and air in harm’s way. Undoing regulations will not, in any sense, be the deciding factor that brings back outsourced manufacturing jobs to the United States, not as long as we have basic labor rights and mandated benefits that prevent companies from putting their staff in sweatshops and paying them a dollar a day.

Undoing regulations will, however, damage the growth of the pollution control industry. Extensive deregulation could even cause a notable increase in health care costs and result in a dramatic increase in cases of respiratory illnesses and eventually increased rates of premature deaths. Allowing manufacturers to dump freely poses a huge danger to American citizens’ drinking water and replacing the superfund program with incentive based infrastructure programs will do little to address environmental concerns in poor areas.

Safe water and air are privileges unique to the developed world and benefits that we’ve had for so long that they may be easy to overlook. However, they are critical to the health of our population and undoing the regulations that enable us to drink clean water and breathe clean air would be a disaster for our nation’s public health.

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Impact of Environmental Regulations on Business appeared first on Law Street.

In the first part of Law Street’s look at the presidential candidates’ environmental policies, we evaluated Donald Trump’s plan to deregulate the energy industry and peel back many of the existing efforts to address climate change. His plans largely focus on undoing as many regulations as possible to allow greater operational freedom to American businesses and using his executive powers to undo previous president’s attempts to protect certain areas of land from fracking and mining.

In the second part, we will review Hillary Clinton’s environmental record and policy proposals. Since Donald Trump’s plans focus more toward energy production rather than protecting the environment and combating climate change, it is not surprising that Hillary Clinton’s positions do more from an environmental perspective. She has committed to some extremely ambitious goals with regards to renewable energy implementation. At the same time, she has chosen to forgo several of the traditionally recommended policy tools used to combat climate change, such as the carbon tax. Are her plans really attainable or are they just empty claims used to attract alienated far left voters to her side? Is she even likely to follow through on her promises based on her political track record? Read on to find out.

Read Part One: Where Does Donald Trump Stand on Environmental Policy?

Hillary Clinton the Environmentalist?

In stark contrast to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton believes in climate change, believes it’s man made, and believes it’s an urgent threat. She has publicly spoken on the importance of combating climate change since the early 2000s; however, her legislative track record on major issues doesn’t always indicate that she’s driven by environmental interests. When asked her position on current issues related to the environment, such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, she has often avoided taking a stance. Clinton chose not to take a final position on the Keystone XL Pipeline for over a year, even stating that she wished to declare a position after the election ended. But in September 2015, she announced her formal opposition to the pipeline.

Whether you interpret this as anti-environment is up for debate; Clinton has maintained that her lack of a stance on the issue stemmed largely from the fact that the analysis of whether the pipeline was beneficial to national interest was incomplete. If you see her lack of a choice as her withholding a stance until all the facts were clear, then her decision is understandable. However, many environmental activists, including her primary challenger Bernie Sanders, saw the issue as much more simple: the pipeline endangers U.S. waterways and sets the United States on a track toward dependence on oil instead of investing and committing to renewables. Your interpretation of her stance largely depends on how hard-line of an environmentalist you are.

“Secretary Clinton Speaks at a Press Conference” courtesy of United States Mission Geneva; License: (CC BY-ND 2.0)

As Secretary of State, she openly supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which critics claim would prevent individual countries from being able to establish environmental trade regulations. Critics also argue that the TPP openly supports anti-environmental practices such as over-fishing and deforestation. As the Trans-Pacific Partnership evolved it has been modified to include wildlife protection mechanisms to promote the sustainable management of forested zones and fisheries. However, most of these efforts are considered to be small in scale, without any monitoring system in place and the long lasting negative impacts of the TPP are projected to outweigh any potential benefits.

Read More: Growing Holes in Our Ocean’s Fisheries

As a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton has reversed her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership as well–recently coming out against the final deal, while having supported the effort during her term as Secretary of State. It bears noting that Donald Trump has historically opposed the TPP on the grounds that it will damage American manufacturing. If Clinton hadn’t doubled back on her original stance, this would make the deal one of few issues where Trump is effectively taking a more  environmentally progressive position.

Voting Record

Clinton’s voting record also tells a confusing story. While serving as a Senator she voted for a variety of small-scale bills supported by environmental groups and co-sponsored a number of unsuccessful bills to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. But she’s also given her support to several policies that have had seriously detrimental effects on the environment. Possibly the most notable example of this is Clinton supporting the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the legendary bill that gave hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel companies and allocated only a fraction of this money to renewables. The bill also contained Dick Cheney’s infamous Halliburton Loophole, which gave fracking companies special permission to inject toxic chemicals underground and essentially opened the doors for hydrofracking within the United States.

Hillary Clinton has also taken flack over the years for taking donations from fossil fuel interests. According to the most recent analysis by Open Secrets, Clinton has raised a total of $2,203,018 from energy employees, with $2,167,333 of this going to the campaign and the remaining $35,685 going to associated Super PACs. While there’s no way to connect the money she’s taken directly with particular policy decisions, some have claimed that this represents a conflict of interest in terms of her claims of being an environmentalist. Given her confusing voting record, recent shifts on controversial issues and her willingness to take fossil fuel funds, many accuse Clinton of green-washing her public persona for the election, especially in order to compete with Bernie Sanders’ pull with the environmentally-minded millennial generation. Objectively speaking, Hillary Clinton has supported environmentalism out loud but has generally done little to help the movement and on several occasions has directly supported policies that will hurt the environment.

Hillary Clinton’s Plan

Of the two front-runners, Hillary Clinton is the only one with an environmental policy at all, unless you call dismantling E.P.A. regulations an environmental policy. She has publicly committed to supporting and building upon President Obama’s Clean Power Plan as well as ensuring that the United States lives up to its COP 21 Paris Agreement commitments. Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta have both stated that while she would like to see a carbon tax imposed, given the current makeup of Congress such a law would be highly unlikely to pass. In its place, Clinton is committing to more achievable goals, which include increasing funding for renewables, research and development, and energy efficiency, all in the context of increasing American jobs. Even though she has voted for large subsidies for fossil fuel companies in the past, she currently advocates for cutting back funding for oil and gas interests and she has proposed getting rid of tax expenditures for the fossil fuel industry.

With regard to renewable energy, Hillary Clinton has an incredibly aggressive plan to increase proliferation of renewables throughout the country. The plan has two main parts, the first being the goal of installing half of a billion solar panels across the nation during Clinton’s first term. The second is to generate enough renewable energy to power every U.S. home within a decade. To do this she wants to expand upon the Clean Power Plan with a Clean Power Challenge, which would utilize competitive grants, tax incentives, and other market-based incentives to encourage and enable states to independently work toward renewable proliferation. The challenge also places a huge emphasis on updating the grid, improving its infrastructure, and thus also the reliability and efficiency with which it transmits energy. The challenge would include the creation of a fund or a prize that would help enable low-income families and communities to install rooftop solar panels. In addition to increasing renewable energy implementation in American communities, Clinton has championed utilizing public land in the West for solar arrays and wind farms as well as opening up offshore wind farming.

If these goals sound incredibly lofty and ambitious it’s because they are. In fact, they are more ambitious than really anything proposed by anyone before, with the possible exception of Clinton’s primary challenger Bernie Sanders. Many critics have projected that it would be literally impossible to make such a policy work without a carbon tax to make renewables competitive with America’s incredibly cheap natural gas supply. The fact that Clinton has chosen to not pursue a carbon tax and instead attempt to pass smaller scale measures through Congress have made many skeptical that she’s not going to be able to actually do enough to turn her plan into reality.

Realistically, she’s almost certainly right that a carbon tax wouldn’t make it through Congress, but it’s pretty unclear if her alternative plan would be any more welcome. The Clean Power Challenge would cost $60 billion, and its main selling point to Republicans would be that it is designed to create new job opportunities. However, this doesn’t change the fact that the challenge’s commitment to renewable energy flies against what the majority of Republicans are interested in supporting. To bypass Congressional gridlock, Clinton’s plan places a strong focus on using executive power to make these things happen. While it’s not Clinton’s fault, there’s only so much she’ll be able to accomplish solely through executive action; large chunks of her plan will certainly require Congressional approval.

So What Can Actually be Accomplished?

There have been numerous claims over the years that if X or Y region was properly utilized, it could provide enough energy to power the entire United States. While it is technically possible to power this country completely with renewable energy, these claims are often touted by people who don’t understand the engineering behind energy systems or by people with a zealous and innocent belief in what policymakers are capable of or willing to do. Currently, one of the most comprehensive plans for how the United States could run on 100 percent renewable energy has been created by renewable research heavyweight Mark Z. Jacobson and the Standford Precourt Center for Energy. Even this highly ambitious plan projects that if the necessary massive social and economic change were to happen in order to make such policies possible, and it was followed to the letter, the United States still wouldn’t be able to convert fully until 2050. One of the biggest impediments to such a nationwide conversion to renewable energy is that it would require every fuel source to be changed, including the liquid fuel we use to power our cars, trucks, boats, and planes. To completely transform the American transportation sector is a borderline impossible goal because while a solar panel or a wind turbine can feasibly connect to and power any home, most of our cars still run on gas. Electric cars just don’t have the mass circulation that would make such a change possible and to completely eliminate gas-powered cars would go against fair business laws.

What’s truly interesting about Clinton’s renewable plan is that she’s one of the first major politicians to call for opening up the use of offshore wind farming. There’s a good reason why the coastal regions of the United States have been called the “Saudi Arabia of Wind.” There is a massive amount of unused energy lying along our coasts that has been incredibly difficult to tap into thus far due to the extremely high cost of launching such projects, combined with the many public interests that bitterly oppose the industry. It is nearly impossible for Hillary Clinton to live up to her goal of powering the United States on 100 percent renewable energy. However, if she aggressively pursues spreading renewable energy throughout American communities, on public lands and offshore, she could still have a gigantic impact on our renewable energy makeup. The real question is whether she’d actually be able to make any of that happen or if her efforts will be completely blocked off by Congress. Unfortunately, we will simply have to wait and see what happens if she’s elected.

One of the more original and intriguing elements of Clinton’s plan is her proposal to create a Western Water Partnership with the goal of coordinating water use between the West Coast states and the different agencies that control water use within the region. Furthermore, she has proposed creating a Water Innovation Lab dedicated to utilizing and recycling water more efficiently. This proposal is one of the first of its kind in terms of addressing water scarcity in the West on a large scale and could be part of a much-needed solution to help alleviate the burden of the California drought. Clinton has also called for significant revisions to water infrastructure in the United States, including dams, sewage, and waste water systems. This is actually one of few ideas that she and Trump might actually agree on; Trump has stated that he believes water to be a vital issue and that it’s crucial that we update our water infrastructure. However, unlike Clinton, he has given no details on how to do this and has stated that he wants to remove restrictions on drilling near waterways, which would ultimately worsen the American water crisis. Clinton has also promised to protect public lands and prioritize wildlife conservation, in stark contrast to Trump’s announcement that he would open up all federally protected land to oil and gas companies.

Conclusion

Neither candidate has a sterling history of environmentalism, but only one candidate has actually made a commitment to combat climate change. If Trump were to become president, it would be possible for him to hinder progressive environmental policy by replacing the EPA leadership with climate deniers while fighting to remove environmental regulations. If his preferred candidates to lead the EPA were to get approval from Congress, then it would be feasible for him to undo a lot of the progress that has been made thus far with American environmentalism.

Clinton has a spotty record when it comes to the environment and has made dubious choices about many important issues in the past, such as the Energy Policy Act, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Keystone XL Pipeline. However, her current environmental platform has made her commitment to the environment clear and she has doubled back on all of her previous controversial positions (at least with regard to the environment). Whether her current stance is due to green-washing for the 2016 election, or due to Obama’s legacy of the Clean Power Plan influencing her opinions, or due to Bernie Sanders forcing her to move further to the left in the primaries, the end result is that she’s pursuing an aggressively progressive environmental policy. Whether her methods to make that policy a reality will be effective remains to be seen, but when it comes to environmental policy, Hillary Clinton is the superior candidate.

Resources

The Atlantic: How Green is Hillary Clinton?

Business Insider: Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Stand on Climate Change

Democracy Now: How Much Money has Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Taken from Fossil Fuel Companies?

Environmental Protection Agency: Summary of the Energy Policy Act of 2005

Fact Check: Clinton’s Fossil Fuel Money Revisited

Grist: Who’s Really in Charge on E.P.A. Rules? A Chat With Legal Scholar Lisa Heinzerling

High Country News: Are Hillary Clinton’s Clean Energy Goals Achievable?

Hillary Clinton Fact Sheets: Renewable Energy Vision

National Geographic: 4 Ways Green Groups say Trans-Pacific Partnership will Hurt the Environment

New York Times: Clinton’s Ambitious Clean Power Plan Would Avoid Carbon Tax

NPR: Fact Check: More on Hillary Clinton and Fossil Fuel Industry Contributions

Open Secrets: Hillary Clinton

Politico: Clinton Says her Keystone XL Position Isn’t a Flip Flop

Politico: Hacked emails from John Podesta: Clinton Disses Environmentalists in Private Meetings with Unions

Politico: The Politico Wrong-o-Meter: Fact Checking the 2016 Presidential Debate

Think Progress: Environmentalists: The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a Disaster for Climate Change

Scientific American: Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Combat Climate Change

Sierra Club: Trans Pacific Partnership

The Washington Post: Campaign Finance 2016

The Washington Post: Bernie Sanders Thumps Hillary Clinton for Keeping Mum on the Keystone XL Pipeline

The Washington Post: Energy Bill Raises Fear about Pollution, Fraud

The Washington Post: Fact Checking the Campaigns for and against the TPP Trade Deal

The White House: What Environmental and Conservation Advocates are Saying about the TPP’s Environmental Chapter

Vote Smart: Hillary Clinton’s Voting Records

Vox: Here’s What it Would take for the U.S. to Run on 100% Renewable Energy

Time: Lobbyists Celebrate Democratic Party’s New Embrace at Convention

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Where Does Hillary Clinton Stand on Environmental Policy? appeared first on Law Street.

After a year of intense debates, drama, and scandals, election day is now less than a week away. The results of the 2016 election will have a major influence on the next four years in politics with regard to a variety of issues, including gun rights, immigration, and tax reform. While environmentalism has not been a highlight of this election cycle, each president has a dramatically different approach to the issue, and the winner will have a serious impact on the future of environmentalism in the United States.

In this two-part series, we will unpack each candidate’s stance on environmentalism and their plans for the future, as well as outline exactly what is within their power to do. This first part will focus on the Republican side of the issue and analyze Donald Trump’s environmental policy. How exactly would Trump’s plan to loosen environmental regulations influence global warming as well as air and water quality? What exactly is Hilary Clinton’s renewable energy proposal and how effective would it really be? These are pressing questions that have gotten little attention throughout the campaign season.

Read Part Two: Where Does Hillary Clinton Stand on Environmental Policy?

The G.O.P. Debates: The Case of the Missing Environmentalist

First a little context. While the 17 original Republican candidates fought bitterly on a variety of issues, they were almost all united in their belief that climate change is a hoax. There were a few exceptions to this rule; Jeb Bush and John Kasich admitted that climate change was real, but not that it was caused by humans, while Carly Fiorina both admitted that climate change was real and caused by human activity. Chris Christie and Rand Paul have both publicly admitted to climate change being real and human-caused (Rand Paul even signed onto a bill agreeing to this) but both later went back on their statements, claiming that the science is still unclear.

Republican runner-up Ted Cruz briefly drew public attention with a clever scientific misinterpretation when he claimed that there has been no warming over the past 18 years, at least if you go by satellite data. His timeline of 18 years would take us all back to the uniquely hot 1997-1998 El Nino. It is true that if you only look at a short period of time and begin with a hot year, it doesn’t appear that much warming has taken place. But if you look at global temperatures over any kind of longer period, they are very clearly going nowhere but up. The methodology behind his assessment also flies in the face of the scientific community, which creates climate change models based on satellite atmospheric data combined with surface measurements, because satellite data can easily be subject to flaws due to confounding variables.

Current Republican nominee Donald Trump has had an even more outlandish position–that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese in order to render American manufacturing less competitive. He has since both claimed that this was a joke and that he never said any such statement, although it still exists on his Twitter account and in videotaped interviews.

“Donald Trump” courtesy of Gage Skidmore; License: (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Where the Party Stands

The Republican party is often viewed as being anti-environmentalist and generally for good reason. Currently, 182 members, or 34 percent, in Congress do not believe in climate change. While this list of climate deniers includes both Republicans and Democrats, Republicans make up the vast majority of this demographic. In fact, only eight out of 278 Republican members of Congress have taken open stances that they believe climate change is real. However, it wasn’t always the case that Republican presidential candidates also soundly rejected the existence of global warming. Both George W. Bush and John McCain did have environmental proposals when they ran for president and made public speeches about their intentions to aid the environment (although Bush’s environmental legacy was far from positive).

It is not exactly unique that environmental protection isn’t high up on the list of Republican priorities, but is unique that climate change and environmentalism were hardly even touched upon in the Republican presidential debates. The closest these topics came to being debated was within the context of which energy sources the candidates supported, which were universally oil, gas, or coal. Several of the candidates offered support for renewable proliferation to increase domestic energy security, but not at the expense of the economy or energy producers.

The internationally acclaimed COP 21 agreements came to pass without so much as a mention during the G.O.P. debates; the California drought was similarly ignored. This may be reflective of the voting base Republican politicians appeal to, which also has a high percentage of climate deniers. Interestingly enough, this is beginning to shift with time as well; where 24 percent of Republican voters believed in climate change in 2014, now 47 percent embrace the science. If the Republican party shifts enough in its position on environmentalism, it will be interesting to see if Republican politicians will also be forced to change their stances.

Donald J. Trump: Get Rid of All Regulations

Republican nominee Donald Trump does seem to have a consistent view on whether climate change is real (unless you count being confused as to whether or not he blames the Chinese for it). Historically, he has always claimed that climate change is a hoax. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, publicly stated that, while Trump acknowledges that temperatures are rising globally, he doesn’t believe that human activity has had any influence over this. Trump’s running mate Mike Pence, however, spoke on CNN a day after the first debate to say that climate change was definitely real and man-made–although he reiterated Trump’s general stance that no environmental policies should be put into place that would hurt businesses or cost jobs.

Trump’s environmental policy logically follows his general denial of climate change as relevant or real. Trump’s original plan was to entirely abolish the Environmental Protection Agency–the government body that designs new environmental rules and regulations (working together with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an umbrella department within the Office of Management and Budget). While it is not within his power to do so unilaterally, one of the most important ways a President can influence energy policy is by choosing a new administration for the EPA. Each new President can appoint a new Administrator, who must be approved by Congress. If the president’s recommendation is approved, that further gives him or her the power to reshape both the upper positions of the EPA and the direction the agency will take.

Trump’s proposed selection to lead the EPA transition team is none other than Myron Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group that uses bogus science to question “global warming alarmism.” Ebell is a famous climate denier and believes that Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which will dramatically shift the future of energy production in the United States, is not only a huge waste of government funds but also illegal because of the undue burden the regulations place on American businesses. At this time it’s unclear if Trump’s intention is to attempt to make Ebell the new EPA Administrator, but his current position as leader of the team puts him at the top of the suspected list. Alongside Ebell, the EPA transition team includes Republican energy lobbyist Mike Mckenna and former Bush Administration Interior Department solicitor David Bernhardt.

In the event that Trump is able to get his EPA transition team approved by Congress (and they will almost certainly face some opposition), they would be well equipped to try to dismantle the Clean Power Plan and remove many environmental regulations. Which brings us to the simple cornerstone of Trump’s environmental policy: remove as many regulations as possible. Trump has said that he will fight to do away with all regulations he believes are unnecessary in order to allow American businesses more operational freedom and greater room to grow.

In terms of Republican politicians, this position is in no way unique, but few presidential candidates have taken such a hard line stance against previously established environmental regulations (runner-up Ted Cruz would be fighting a very similar battle right now). Trump’s plan includes freeing up protected federal land, both on and offshore, for oil and gas drilling. Interestingly, designating an area as federally protected government land under the Antiquities Act is one of the few ways a president can directly use their executive authority to protect the environment. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are both known for designating huge areas of land as federally protected, Clinton doing so several times specifically to prevent oil and gas companies from drilling in certain areas. For Trump to attempt to use executive power to remove these designations is a little like one president fighting directly with the legacy of a previous president.

More Fossil Fuels

Trump has said he would open up these swaths of federal land for coal mining leases and remove some of the rules that protect waterways throughout the nation from drilling, which is of concern if you’re an environmentalist or if you drink water. Trump is, in fact, one of few politicians still talking about the fantasy power source of “clean coal” in 2016. The general concept behind clean coal is to burn coal as efficiently as possible and then capture the emissions afterward, making it as “clean” as possible. While it’s true that we have made coal cleaner, it’s impossible to burn coal without some pollution. Clean coal has proven much more expensive and difficult to scale than its early proponents thought, making it far from a viable method to reduce carbon emissions. This is particularly true when less expensive and more efficient alternatives exist.

Trump’s focus on coal in particular is interesting, because coal as an energy source has dropped significantly in popularity and coal-fired power plants are rarely built these days (President Obama, coming from coal-heavy Illinois, also once preached the benefits of the mythical Clean Coal, although he’s since done an 180 on the issue and one of the key focuses of his Clean Power Plan is to regulate and reduce coal emissions by as much as possible).

Trump has made public that he views regulations on pollution as an obstacle to the success of business and jobs in America, although research indicates that over the past few decades the negative impacts of regulation on business have been modest and the demand for cleaner technology has in the past repeatedly stimulated innovation and growth in the private tech industry. If his EPA team was driven by the goal to free up businesses from all regulation, this would also involve dismantling key provisions of the Clean Water act and Clean Air Act. While a president can’t literally change the provisions of these acts, the administration he or she puts in place can reinterpret them and Trump could effectively remove the enforcement mechanisms that enable these acts to have their nationwide impact. Trump has, in fact, publicly stated that he would review the EPA endangerment findings, which are used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. To strip away the EPA’s ability to regulate air and waterborne pollution would dramatically increase the United States’ role as a global polluter and worsen public health throughout the United States.

Conclusion

It’s important to look at our current political context to see if Trump really could do any of what he proposes. His selection of an EPA transition team of climate deniers is a little ridiculous and simply unrealistic considering that any new administrator could be blocked by Democrats in the Senate. A figure as divisive as Myron Ebell, or any of the other members of the team, will simply not make it through Congress. If Trump does become president he will most likely have to consider a more neutral person to take the EPA Administrator role.

The fact that Congress is largely deadlocked between the two parties on environmental issues has been and will be a huge obstacle for any president trying to accomplish anything (a problem that extends far beyond the environment). Because of this gridlock, nearly all political efforts to combat climate change have had to come through executive action, a pattern that can be easily seen throughout Obama’s two terms. Trump’s commitment to reversing Obama’s executive actions would potentially mean undoing much of the last eight years of environmental policy efforts, worsening air and water quality and giving fossil fuel companies greater access to federal land for fracking and drilling. By specifically using executive power to accomplish this, it would be within Trump’s hands to dramatically peel back the progress that the environmental movement has made in the United States. His plans should be taken seriously by American voters as a threat to the future of our public health and energy security and to the ever worsening global problem of climate change.

Resources

The Blaze: Mike Pence Breaks From Trump, Says Humans Have a Hand in Climate Change

Business Insider: Where Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump Stand on Climate Change

CBS News: Where the 2016 Republican Candidates Stand on Climate Change

CNN: Campaign Manager: Trump Does Not Believe Climate Change is Man Made

Competitive Enterprise Institute: Myron Ebell

The Economist: Green Tape: Environmental Regulations May Not Cost as Much as Governments or Businesses Fear

Fortune: How Donald Trump’s Energy Policies Are All About Removing Regulations

Grist: How Obama Went from Being Coal’s Top Cheerleader to its No. 1 Enemy

Governing: Economic Engines: Do Environmental Regulations Hurt the Economy?

Grist: Who’s Really in Charge on EPA Rules? A Chat With Legal Scholar Lisa Heinzerling

Grist: Why is Trump so Fixated on Abolishing the EPA?

The Hill: Top Climate Skeptic to Lead Trump’s EPA Transition Team

Politico: The Politico Wrong-o-Meter: Fact Checking the 2016 Presidential Debate

Think Progress: The Anti-Science Climate Denier Caucus

Think Progress: Christie Says He’s Not ‘Relying on any Scientists’ to Inform Climate Change Views

Think Progress: The Environmental Implications of a Trump Presidency

Scientific American: Many More Republicans Now Believe in Climate Change

Scientific American: Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA Transition Team

The Washington Post: Ted Cruz Keeps Saying that Satellites Don’t Show Global Warming: Here’s the Problem

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Where Does Donald Trump Stand on Environmental Policy? appeared first on Law Street.

Environmental studies classes are offered in most colleges in a variety of different forms, including the scientific, engineering, political, and economic dimensions of the environment. However, environmental studies are very rarely offered before college, in elementary, middle, or high schools. There’s a growing population that argues that this should not be the case.

Incorporating environmental education into our public school system would provide an important opportunity to educate our population on an issue that’s shrouded in confusing and debated science–at least in the United States where more Americans than ever believe in climate change but 91 percent still don’t view it as a threat. Beyond this, it would help students to understand the fundamental systems of the world around them, including where and how they get clean water, electricity, and food. Environmental education is also often presented as an opportunity to explore alternative teaching methods, including hands-on, experiential forms of learning.

Of course, even as support for this idea grows, there are just as many people who oppose it vehemently, and the issue is handled differently state to state and region to region. Read on to learn about the way environmental education is handled as well as its proven benefits and disadvantages.

Environmental Education: The Door to New Potential Career Paths

Those who oppose environmental education often do so on the grounds that its purpose is simply to indoctrinate a generation with the idea that climate change as a scientific fact. However, the environmental sector is also a multifaceted job market and early exposure to the field can open up new pathways to potential jobs for American students.

While there’s plenty of disagreement on whether climate change is real, most people would likely agree that it’s good that we have a clean and regular water supply. However, most people don’t even know how a watershed (the geographical space that feeds rainwater into an area’s water source) functions, let alone that there are jobs that they could seek to positively impact watershed management. Likewise, environmental jobs include seismologists who predict earthquakes, climatologists who study the weather, agricultural scientists who plan sustainable permacultures to ensure long-lasting food supplies, and urban planners who figure out how different areas can be built to ensure affordability, sustainability, and security against disaster.

“View Across the Garden Bed Area” courtesy of Billie Greenwood via Flickr

While many see environmental studies as a largely humanities-based discipline and to an extent that’s true–there are many careers within environmental policy, business, journalism, etc.–there are also plenty of opportunities for scientific education. Environmental science and engineering are huge fields that could be taught to American students in ways that would align with our increased desire for STEM studies and careers. These are not “hard” sciences such as chemistry, biology, and physics but rather applied sciences, which directly pertain to certain aspects of natural life. Education in these disciplines can lead students to jobs like those listed above, which have a clear and concrete benefit to our society as a whole. Regardless of your position on climate change, the environment around us is a functional system that requires maintenance and oversight from experts, and education in these fields will create a generation of people equipped and motivated to do these jobs.

Alternative Teaching Pathways

One of the central reasons so many people have decided to join the environmental education wave is that it allows for new and alternative teaching methods. Our current lecture-based, rote memorization system of public school education often leaves many students feeling bored or uninterested. Hands-on education has been explored as a way to lift this boredom while still imparting important information to American students. Because environmental education largely ties into the world surrounding us, lessons can be effectively taught in ways that allow students to directly work with nature. Environmental education provides a valuable opportunity to integrate a variety of academic disciplines into this hands-on style of education. This both allows students to process information in new and novel ways and connects their lessons to a real-world context.

How better to understand water quality than to actually go to a water source and do the testing? How better to gain an understanding of geological processes than to use the actual geographical area where you live as an experimental site? One of the most interesting avenues for environmental education is the use of school gardens, a movement that has been steadily growing in popularity. Most American youth (and to a larger extent American adults as well) only connect to their food via a grocery store and have little to no understanding of where and how that food is grown. School gardens bridge this psychological gap both by helping students understand the fundamental processes of agriculture while also providing a source of healthy and nutritious food within American schools, which have had difficulty providing effective diets to combat obesity. This kind of hands-on connection to agriculture and the presence of a local source of food are increasingly important when huge areas of earth known for producing food are experiencing severe water scarcity (in America, see: California).

While this may sound largely like hippie preaching, the numbers also agree with the advantages of experiential learning. Students who take part in hands-on learning often achieve higher overall test scores in other disciplines, including STEM classes, than those who learn through traditional lecture systems. This suggests that the addition of environmental education to a learning curriculum doesn’t take away from important time spent studying other subjects but enhances overall performance by exposing students to novel and exciting learning methods.

Educational Reform Policy

Increasingly, more people are starting to realize these benefits of environmental education and lawmakers have started to respond. This has led many states to begin implementing environmental education requirements into their educational policies. The initial push behind this came from the No Child Left Inside Act. Initially introduced in Congress in 2007, the effort passed in the House in 2008 but was not voted on in the Senate. The bill has been reintroduced in several sessions of Congress but has yet to become a law. The act sought to provide incentives for states to implement environmental education in elementary and secondary public school levels. States that participate would be eligible for grants to upgrade their curriculum, with the only requirements being a strong focus on environmental STEM studies and the use of outdoor field work. In this way, the act supports both the inclusion of environmental based learning and effectively opens the door for new experiential learning methods.

Although the No Child Left Inside Act failed to gain traction in Congress, the final version of the 2015 Every Child Succeeds Act contained some important aspects of the No Child Left Inside Act to encourage states to expand environmental education. The Every Child Succeeds Act was created to reform a Bush Administration law known as No Child Left Behind. It requires each state to make accountability plans for both short and long term goals to improve a series of different indicators of success, including test scores, English proficiency, and indicators the states pick for themselves. Special attention in the act is also given to low-performing schools, which are required to work together with state and district departments to increase test scores and graduation rates.

The Every Child Succeeds Act also amounts to a significant effort to expand states’ use of environmental education. It makes environmental education programs eligible to receive grants from a $1.6 billion fund for well-rounded education programs. It also makes environmental literacy programs eligible for grants from the $1 billion fund for Community Learning Centers. Finally, the law prioritizes outdoors and hands-on field work being incorporated into STEM education, which provides a unique opportunity for environmental education to flourish.

Going Forward

There’s little benefit to adding environmental education to our public schools if it detracts from other subjects that we’ve already agreed are important, and herein lies the challenge of educational reform. Incorporating environmental education into a standard curriculum can be tricky, especially because No Child Left Behind tightened up academic schedules throughout the nations and put an increased emphasis on boosting test scores. In the 15 years since the No Child Left Behind Act, our test scores haven’t seen any real improvement and interest in STEM has steadily dwindled. The Every Child Succeeds Act is a response to this current academic stagnation; a chance to restructure our curricula in order to boost our test scores by diversifying our educational tactics.

It’s important to note that the act does not make environmental education mandatory, and it’s up to each state to decide whether to use the funds made available by the act for that particular purpose. The states that do will have to carefully create Environmental Literacy Plans, the central goal of which is to figure out how to incorporate new forms of environmental information into students’ schedules in a way that does not detract from their other studies and instead enhances their overall performance. This is a very serious challenge, but the result of a successful ELP will be a generation that’s more aware and informed of the world around them. These plans will educate students on the environment’s most important issues and ensure that they are both motivated and equipped to make a positive difference.

Conclusion

The issue of environmental education for many people largely comes down to whether or not you believe it’s relevant for students to spend their time studying and learning about environmental concerns. Many simply don’t see any advantage of adding an entirely new field of learning to the schedules of overloaded students. In a sense, this is an ideological question about whether parents think the environment is of real relevance to their children’s lives, and many, many (millions) of people already have their minds made up on this issue. However, many do see the advantages of environmental education as a tool both to impart new and important information but also to open new doors to careers and improve our education system with novel teaching styles.

As time passes and more concrete results come out of states that have implemented environmental education, it will become possible to see benefits of educational reforms. While some states simply don’t have the right mix of lawmakers to ever approve adding environmental learning to the curriculum, others may shift toward approving it as they see higher test scores and happier students with a greater variety of job options.

Resources

Environmental Science: Environmental Science Careers

Campaign for Environmental Literacy: National Overview: State Level EE Legislation/Policy

Tampa Bay School Gardening Network: Benefits of School Gardening

Julie Ernst & Martha Monroe: The Effects of Environment-Based Education on Students’ Critical Thinking Skills and Disposition towards Critical Thinking

Monmouth University: Public Says Climate Change is Real

National Environmental Education Foundation: Benefits of Environmental Education

National Wildlife Federation: Green STEM: How Environmental Based Education Boosts Student Engagement and Academic Achievement in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

No Child Left Inside Coalition: No Child Left Inside Act

United Nations: Water Scarcity

World Resources Institute: World’s 36 Most Water-Stressed Countries

YouGov: Global Survey: Britain Among Least Concerned in the World About Climate Change

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Importance of Environmental Education in America appeared first on Law Street.

The infrastructure that moves energy throughout the United States is called the macrogrid, a colossal system that provides power from 7,200 power plants to 120 million homes and businesses over 300,000 miles of transmission lines. While these numbers may be impressive, the macrogrid is actually one of the most outdated and inefficient pieces of critical infrastructure in the United States. Energy is lost through moving energy over long distances using aging power lines as well as when it is converted from AC to DC for electronic devices. The macrogrid is also particularly vulnerable to severe weather events, which caused 679 blackouts between 2003 and 2010 and cost between $18 to $33 billion annually in grid maintenance. The macrogrid has a huge job but its massive size and America’s complete dependence on it have created vulnerabilities in the nation’s energy system. Its interconnectedness means that if one part of the grid is damaged, everyone will suffer.

Microgrids: The Solution?

Enter the newly popular phenomenon of Microgrids. Microgrids are small energy distribution centers that are localized to a specific area, like a certain number of homes or businesses. Microgrids are normally attached to the macrogrid, but in the case of damage to the larger grid, a microgrid can separate and function independently, continuing to provide power to the buildings connected to it. Because of this ability, microgrids can offer a much higher level of energy security to Americans.

As a novel infrastructure design, microgrids also have the potential to benefit the environment in several ways. The first of these ways is by improved efficiency; power plants waste huge amounts of energy during production and additional power is lost during electrical conversion and movement through power lines. Because microgrids are localized to the areas they power, they simply need to transport their power over much shorter distances, which also allows them to skip over electrical conversions. Furthermore, microgrids provide opportunities for small-scale renewable implementation. Building large renewable projects–like wind farms or solar fields–can be incredibly expensive and often face opposition from a range of groups while requiring complex permitting processes. However, the compact and localized nature of microgrids drastically reduces these challenges, providing a new opportunity for increased clean energy distribution.

Hurricane Sandy: An Important Wake-up Call

The real impetus for microgrid policy started with Hurricane Sandy, an event so devastating that it required lawmakers to rethink the idea of energy security. Superstorm Sandy left 8.5 million people huddled without power for days, effectively immobilizing one of the world’s largest cities. Not only was energy shut off for homes and business, but critical structures such as hospitals and police stations were also cut off, meaning some of the most necessary community services were stripped of their functionality.

The metaphoric light in the dark came in the form of two microgrids in New York and New Jersey. The NYU microgrid kept power flowing to 22 buildings and heat to 37 buildings and the Princeton University Microgrid managed to provide power to a shocking 4,000 apartments, 35 high rise buildings, three shopping centers, and two schools for three days. The terrible damage caused by Sandy highlighted the serious vulnerability of our energy infrastructure and provided a powerful example of how microgrids can be useful.

“Hurricane Sandy power outage in Lower Manhattan, New York” courtesy of Lisa Bettany via Flickr

Different Models of Development

The majority of attention and investment in microgrids is happening in six states: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, California, and Massachusetts. It’s no coincidence that, with the exception of California, most of the states that have taken an interest in microgrids are in the Northeast–a particularly storm-vulnerable region of the United States. California actually stands out from these other states because it chose to commit primarily to renewable energy in its microgrid projects. In 2014, California state legislature dedicated $26.5 million to the construction of microgrids that heavily integrate renewables, with $6 million going directly to microgrids that could power electric cars. A large part of this policy decision was made in order to meet California’s aggressive statewide renewable energy target of 50 percent by 2020, and it stands out as one of the first states to see the technology’s potential for clean energy.

Unfortunately, California is unique in its environmental approach to microgrids, while the majority of states are dedicating the bulk of their research toward natural gas and diesel generators rather than solar, hydro, or wind. The primary concern of most states is reliability before clean energy production, which makes sense considering the fact that California doesn’t face the same threats to its energy security as the other areas. However, this does not mean that these microgrids won’t make an impact; by design, microgrids are more energy efficient than the traditional macrogrid and use energy in a more environmentally friendly manner.

Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York provide interesting examples of different policies for microgrid development. Connecticut was the first state to put serious money into the movement, holding a competition for the best microgrid designs and awarding $18 million in 2013 to nine different communities for the construction of microgrids. Connecticut followed this initial investment with a $15 million competition and currently leads the United States in terms of overall installed capacity. Connecticut’s competition funding method is a novel approach because the technology is so young and there’s very little research on the best possible ways to use it. By allowing different communities to design independent projects, the state acknowledged that the varying needs and geographic characteristics of different regions will require different microgrids. This also gives it an opportunity to see different approaches to the technology in action and get a sense of what the best possible approaches may be.

New Jersey, alternatively, decided to take a top-down approach to microgrid development and have the state Department of Energy decide where the funding should go, what models should be developed, and where they should go. The New Jersey transit system is the third largest in the world and provides the only public link between New York and New Jersey. Hurricane Sandy devastated the New Jersey transit system and, accordingly, it became the primary focus for microgrid development in the state. Governor Chris Christie dedicated $1 million for a project conducted by the New Jersey Public Utilities Board working together with the U.S. Department of Energy to construct a microgrid that could sustain the transit system. Since then, New Jersey has dedicated a staggering $200 million to their Energy Resilience Bank for the development of microgrids throughout the state.

In some ways, the Connecticut and Jersey models run parallel to one another. Connecticut (with a comparatively small amount of funds) allowed communities to do the research, design, and construction for their projects, requiring only that they build community service microgrids rather than single service projects. New Jersey, on the other hand, decided to let state departments perform all the work themselves and focused on one particular model: the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model.

“Army Engineer Spur Development of Tactical Microgrids” courtesy of U.S. Army RDECOM via Flikr

In New York, following the devastation from Hurricane Sandy, Governor Cuomo and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) began a massive effort to create the Reforming the Energy Vision, which was finally released in 2016. REV detailed plans to change the future of New York’s energy infrastructure and launched the New York Prize Microgrid Competition to promote the development of microgrids throughout the state.

New York based its plan on the Connecticut model of competition; however, New York stands out from other states because it made the unique decision to separate the competition into three stages. The very first stage awarded $100,000 to communities throughout the state to begin the design for their project. Feasibility studies are generally high-cost and high-risk projects because negative returns mean the initial investment was a waste. By removing the economic barrier of conducting the initial feasibility studies, New York allowed 83 communities (in contrast to Connecticut’s nine communities) to participate in this first stage competition, thereby creating an opportunity for many more microgrids to be built. The second stage awards $1 million for the design of the project and the final stage awards $10 million for the construction. While many of the communities that enter the first stage won’t progress to the second and third, NYSERDA predicts that once feasibility studies have already been designed, many communities that don’t pass on to the final stages will still be able to attract outside investors and complete their projects independently.

Potential Environmental Impacts

Do microgrids have promise as a pro-environment technology? Definitely, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Renewables have several major problems: they don’t produce a lot of energy, they don’t produce regular, reliable energy and they’re expensive. Wind only provides energy while the wind is blowing and solar only produces energy during the daytime. Hydropower provides more regular energy but has a nightmarish permitting process and is generally avoided for microgrid projects (only one of the 83 communities in the New York Prize Microgrid Competition tried to utilize hydro). While more and more battery systems are constantly being developed, current energy storage technology is just not advanced enough to make solar and wind storage effective to provide large amounts of power.

As a side note of interest, there are many engineers out there who believe that the next major energy revolution will come in the form of effective batteries, which would change the way we produce and utilize energy while making renewable energy endlessly more powerful. Unfortunately, we really aren’t at this point yet, which means that it’s very difficult for renewable technologies to be the sole energy provider for a microgrid, especially in the case of a serious outage. The reliability-first model of microgrid design means that the most important function of that model is its ability to support homes and businesses without fail in case of damage to the grid.

The cost of renewables is also a serious obstacle, but in a very different way than when constructing a large-scale solar or wind operation. The price per kilowatt of most renewables has actually dropped significantly, making them legitimately competitive technologies. However, microgrids are an inherently expensive project and most large utilities can already provide relatively low fossil fuel prices, at least for natural gas. In order to make a microgrid a cost effective project, a community must use technologies that will have power production and efficiency rates that are high enough that it makes economic sense not to buy energy from the macrogrid.

The technology that has taken the central role in microgrid development is cogeneration, also known as Combined Heat and Power. Normally up to 65 percent of energy is burned off as heat and wasted during production, which is a large part of the reason power plants are so inefficient. Cogeneration, however, traps this heat waste and uses it to provide thermal power to the areas it services. Energy from the grid–after production waste, conversion waste, and transmission waste–is typically between 20 to 25 percent preserved. Any given cogeneration unit can’t produce enough energy at the scale that a power plant can, making them inefficient for providing power to huge numbers of customers. However, cogeneration’s waste-heat recovery can produce energy with at rates up to 60 to 80 percent efficiency, making it the ideal technology to support a small, localized system. Cogeneration utilizes natural gas, but in a substantially more effective manner than the traditional macrogrid does. Natural gas fuel cells have also gotten attention for their high efficiency, although currently, it’s difficult to make them cost effective.

All of this doesn’t mean that renewables have no place in the microgrid movement. While California is the only state to dedicate their projects completely to renewable power, every state has a Renewable Energy Target and microgrids provide a great way to reach that target without large scale projects. New York, for instance, required each of its 83 communities designing microgrids to incorporate renewables in some way into their plans.

Renewables also combine well with other technologies. Solar generation can provide a significant source of energy during the day, but may not be able to meet peak electricity demand in the early evening. Because of this, solar and cogeneration can be combined to work well together. Cogeneration provides the “base load”–or the minimal amount of energy that will always be used consistently throughout the day–and solar can offset or even become a substitute during the day. In this way, natural gas provides stability while solar energy reduces emissions whenever possible.

Conclusion

While research and investment in microgrids are expanding, the movement is still developing and the technologies continue to evolve. It’s difficult to say exactly how the microgrid movement will progress and if it will spread to regions outside of the Northeast and California. It’s also difficult to predict whether policymakers will choose to stick with the popular bottom-up style of microgrid development or if they will go to the New Jersey route and choose to mandate certain models and patterns of development. There’s also the potential for large energy businesses like the fossil fuel industry to start to lobby against decentralized power and seriously impede progress.

However, the benefits of microgrids are very real. Americans depend on the outdated macrogrid for our daily lives and as the infrastructure grows older and storms become more frequent and more severe, we only become increasingly vulnerable. Microgrids provide a real opportunity to improve energy security throughout the United States and to produce energy in a more environmentally friendly way, both by increasing the efficiency of our energy sources and increasing the implementation of renewables.

Resources

Boeing: Introduction to Microgrids

Center for Climate and Energy Solutions: Cogeneration

E & E Publishing: LLC: Microgrids Become Reality as Superstorm Sandy’s Anniversary Nears

GreenTech Media: California Governor Jerry Brown Calls for 50 Percent Renewables by 2030

GreenTech Media: California Ready to Fund the Next Wave of Microgrids Paired With Renewables and Storage

GreenTech Media: New Jersey Launches $200 million Energy Resilience Bank for Microgrids and Distributed Energy

Greenbiz: New Jersey Becomes Latest State to Invest in Microgrids

Inside Energy: Lost in Transmission: How Much Electricity Disappears Between a Power Plant and Your Plug?

Solar Schools: Advantages and Disadvantages of Renewables

Microgrid Knowledge: States Leading on Microgrids…California, Connecticut, Maryland (Part 1)

NYSERDA: NY Prize Microgrid Competition

Princeton University: Two Years After Hurricane Sandy, Recognition of Princeton’s Microgrid Still Surges

U.S. Energy Information Administration: Energy in Brief

Editor’s Note: This post has been corrected to clarify the way in which solar electricity can be with electricity from natural gas as well as the way energy is lost through transmission and conversion.

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Microgrids: The Future of Smarter Grid Design and Energy Stability appeared first on Law Street.

We buy products, use them, and then dispose of them. After we’re done with our stuff, we throw it in the trash and someone comes to take it away–out of sight, out of mind. But trash doesn’t really disappear; it takes up a larger and larger physical presence on our planet each year. In 2012, the world produced 2.6 trillion pounds of waste, all of which had to be disposed of. About 46 percent of that was organic waste, 17 percent paper, 10 percent plastic, 5 percent glass, 4 percent metal, and another 18 percent comprised of miscellaneous other materials.

Handled incorrectly, this 2.6 trillion pound mess can cause serious problems for the environment, from polluting freshwater to suffocating unsuspecting animals looking for a meal. Some of our trash gets buried underground, some of it gets burned, and some is thrown into the ocean. There are solutions that would allow trash to be made useful again, including composting and recycling. Organic waste, which makes up the majority of worldwide waste, can be turned into fertilizer and certain materials can be recycled to build new products. Read on to learn how different waste disposal methods work and what their exact impacts are on our planet.

Landfills

The vast majority of trash worldwide goes into landfills, which basically means that it’s buried in a huge hole in the ground. Generally, the bottom is covered with a liner, made out of clay or synthetic materials, that acts as a barrier preventing the trash from leaking into the surrounding environment. The waste is collected in different cells and as the cells fill up, they are covered and a new layer, or “lift,” is started above them. Over time, landfills produce a liquid called leachate that consists of dissolved and suspended trash materials. Because of this, landfills must also have a drainage system that collects the highly polluting leachate and stores it on site or at a wastewater plant for treatment. If leachate breaks through the liner, it can pollute ecosystems and ruin groundwater aquifers, making groundwater monitoring around landfills extremely important.

As the trash degrades, it releases carbon dioxide and methane, which inevitably rise up into the atmosphere. Often, the water soluble carbon dioxide will leave the landfill with the leachate, but methane release poses a serious problem to the environment. To control emissions, methane must be captured and contained in storage wells, where it is either burned off and turned into the less potent carbon dioxide or used as a power source. Because landfills create methane on their own and save the trouble of drilling for it, some companies have started to use landfill gas-to-energy systems, using the methane to generate power for the surrounding areas.

As a disposal method, landfills are far from perfect. Maintaining one is a constant struggle to control the polluting leachate released below and the heat-trapping greenhouse gasses that escape above. Furthermore, landfills are intended for waste containment, not waste elimination. The trash doesn’t go anywhere, it simply sits in the cells and piles up to greater and greater heights as the population increases and waste streams continue to grow larger. In this sense, landfills can be thought of as one of the most permanent things modern humans have created, giant holes filled with trash that will still be on earth long after the pyramids crumble.

“Landfill” courtesy of Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources via Flickr

However, landfilling waste is still preferable to, for instance, doing nothing with it. Some waste simply can’t be recycled or composted, and this stuff still needs a place to go. If we don’t contain our trash it enters the world and its ecosystems as litter and can cause great damage to the areas it inhabits. Possibly the most famous example of this is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast area of floating litter that extends between North America’s Western Coast and Japan. The trash is caught in a series of underwater currents called the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which carries it in a perpetual vortex. The trash is comprised of countless non-biodegradable items, such as clothes, machinery, and a giant soup of microplastics. Furthermore, the majority (about 70 percent) of marine debris sinks, which means that below the surface of the garbage patch, beyond where we can see, there may be an ocean floor covered with the denser trash that’s been dumped in the water.

Much of the debris in the ocean was dumped by cargo ships and commercial fishing vessels, but plenty of it was simply cast off from different countries. We do need a place to put all this stuff and landfills provide an important service in this sense. However, one of the big problems with landfills is that much of what’s inside of them doesn’t need to be there; if we were to remove the recyclables and organic waste from landfills it would cause them to take up significantly less space.

Can Recycling be an Effective Solution?

Some materials, paper, plastic, glass, and various metals can be recycled and used again to create new products (a lesser known recyclable material is actually cooking oil, which can be converted into biofuel for use as an energy source). Recycling is one of the most sustainable alternative methods of waste disposal out there. However, not everything can be recycled and even then, most recycling processes generally have low levels of efficiency.

Plastics, for instance, have a huge presence in ecosystems around the globe. Currently, we’re heading toward having more pounds of plastic in the ocean than living creatures. Plastic can suffocate animals that accidentally consume it and can also release harmful phthalates into the surrounding environment. Recycling is absolutely necessary if we want to save marine and land ecosystems from plastic litter. However, only one major type of plastic called thermoplastics, which can be softened by heat, are able to be recycled. The other major category, thermosets, cannot be remolded with heat. Because they can’t be recycled, it’s crucially important that they are still sent to a landfill because they can cause environmental harm if stored improperly.

Thermoplastics don’t undergo chemical changes when they’re exposed to heat and can be melted down and reformed into new products, making them work well as recyclables. While recycling a piece of plastic is never 100 percent efficient (and usually far from it), reusing plastics still has a powerful impact on the industry. About 60 percent of energy is saved when creating a plastic product out of recyclables instead of raw materials, and every piece of plastic that is recycled represents a piece that isn’t in a landfill, or worse, an ocean.

Paper, like plastic, has a fairly low level of efficiency when recycled. Pieces of paper must be shredded down before they can be reused, which continuously makes the fibers shorter and shorter. After five to seven times through the system, fibers become frayed to uselessness. In fact, aluminum, copper, and glass are the only materials that can be recycled endlessly. While they all go through different processes, each essentially amounts to exposing the material to extreme heat and breaking it down to be rebuilt in a new form. However, due to the high cost of reprocessing glass, many businesses don’t actually accept glass waste, or will merely throw it out when they receive it.

While electronic waste is made out of several recyclable metals, it also contains a number of rare earth metals, which can be dangerous when released into the environment or exposed to humans. Because of this, e-waste must be disposed of and recycled in a very particular way. Check out this previous Law Street article for an in-depth breakdown of global e-waste disposal.

“Landfill” courtesy of “Aaron ‘tango’ Tang via Flickr“

Composting

Organic waste makes up a staggering 46 percent of waste worldwide. Despite this, proper food waste disposal methods are rarely talked about. About two-thirds of the average household waste can be recycled; if citizens everywhere adopted the practice it would make a huge difference in the global waste problem. Adding compost to a garden can dramatically increase the health of the soil by neutralizing ph and binding soil particles together, enabling them to better retain water and nutrients.

One problem with composting is that most people don’t see any value to it. Unless you’re interested in personally growing something, compost won’t be useful to you. If you live in an urban setting, it most likely won’t be useful to anyone near you either. Some cities have programs that collect compostable waste in neighborhoods to supply nearby farms. This gives the people in the area reason to adopt the practice and provides a free source of fertilizer for farmers; it can also have the added benefit of educating people on problems of organic waste that they may have been unaware of.

The Role of Incineration

Incineration is one of the more controversial methods of waste disposal out there and it’s been growing rapidly in recent years, especially in Scandinavian countries. This process either burns (or melts down and then burns) all waste that enters a waste plant to convert it into energy. Many love incineration and its proponents say that it makes trash disappear, leaving no physical burden behind while also providing the useful service of generating energy. The temperatures inside incinerators are often so high that they also destroy harmful chemicals and pathogens, making them ideal for the disposal of hazardous waste. While incineration is practiced widely throughout Scandinavia, Norway is currently the world’s leader in turning trash into energy. Norway, in fact, imports trash from other European countries, earning it a profit and a free source of power.

Incineration does offer a way to change the way trash is looked at from a burden to a commodity. It’s nothing new for countries, states, and territories to export their waste for another area to deal with, but generally the importer only gains profit, and still has to deal with the burden itself. In the United States, for instance, about 17 percent of municipal waste crosses a state boundary and the trash trade was a $4 billion dollar industry in 2005. However, the trash market inevitably creates waste havens in states that decide to commit to the industry and build mega-landfills. Pennsylvania, for instance, is the trash capital of the country, importing 10 million tons of waste each year. This can benefit local economies, but is widely hated by the people who live in them. Many argue that incineration could make a significant difference in the way trash importing and exporting is handled. If waste is looked upon as a useful source of energy instead of something to be buried in the ground, then a state like Pennsylvania could use its position in the market to generate domestic energy instead of increasing the size of its dumps.

However, incineration is not without serious drawbacks. The trash burning process creates toxic emissions, although particulate matter, ash, and, toxins are collected in mandatory filters. As the ash builds up, it must be stored carefully on-site, and there’s currently no real way to treat or remove it. It’s also been argued that very small particles of ash and dioxins can still make their way through filters, which could be very dangerous to the health of those living near an incinerator. Furthermore, incinerators have an adverse effect on climate change, producing more carbon dioxide and mercury even than coal-fired power plants. They also release nitrous oxide, and ammonia, and organic carbon. Valuable recyclable materials such as glass, metal, and plastic, are completely destroyed during incineration, which is a huge waste of resources that could otherwise be recycled. The EPA concluded in a 2009 study that if the United States were to adopt large-scale recycling and composting, this could mitigate up to 42 percent of our national emissions. Incineration, on the other hand, destroys recyclables and produces emissions, further exacerbating the problem of global warming.

Conclusion

The world produces a lot of trash and we’re only going to produce more as time goes on. The worst possible option is to do nothing with all this trash and simply leave it to cover our forests and oceans. Landfilling is an effective alternative to this, making sure that all the trash is contained and, ideally monitored and controlled so it won’t hurt the environment. However, the landfills fill up and we keep making more trash. Responsible waste management requires us to keep sustainability in mind when we think about the way we dispose of our waste and what we send to the landfill.

Many governments advocate for waste to energy incineration, but ultimately this will only release more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and destroy valuable resources. Widespread composting, alternatively, could eliminate just about half of all the world’s waste, an absolutely enormous difference. While not every material can be recycled and not every recycling process is perfectly efficient, reusing our products can still have a huge impact by reducing the need to mine for more resources and the energy needed to process new products. If we want to make our trash more sustainable, then recycling and composting need to be the cornerstones of global waste disposal.

References

Aljazeera: Dirty Power: Sweden Wants Your Garbage for Energy

Apartment Therapy: What Really Happens to all that Stuff You Recycle

The Atlantic: 2.6 Trillion Pounds of Garbage: Where Does the World’s Trash Go?

Eco Ants: Waste Incineration

Bright Hub Engineering: Pros and Cons of Incineration for Landfill Relief

Earth 911: The Benefits of Using Compost in Your Garden

Environmental Protection Agency: Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Materials and Land Management Practices

The Guardian: Full Scale of Plastic in the World’s Oceans Revealed for the First Time

The Guardian: Trash to Cash: Norway Leads the Way in Turning Waste into Energy

Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives: Incinerators: Myths vs. Facts about “Waste to Energy”

International Panel on Climate Change: Emissions in Waste Incineration 

MRC Polymers: Recycling Facts

National Geographic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Leachate Expert Website: What is Leachate?

Less is More: What Happens to Trash

Philadelphia: Is Pennsylvania America’s Dumping Ground?

The Trash Blog: Trash Trade in the U.S.

Republic Services: Landfill Science

SF Gate: How Many Times can Something be Recycled?

The Wall Street Journal: High Costs Put Cracks in Glass Recycling Programs

The Warren: Resistant Materials: Plastics

Washington Post: By 2050, There Will be More Plastic than Fish in the World’s Oceans, Study Says

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post What Really Happens to Your Trash? appeared first on Law Street.

Seafood is the primary source of protein and nutrition for about three billion people worldwide, especially in small island states and poor coastal areas. Fishing is also an important source of income for about 200 million people, with 97 percent of fishers in the developing world. However, as the global population has risen dramatically over the past century, the quantity of fish caught every year has increased as well. Due to the sheer size of the demand for seafood, and the fact that the market generally revolves around a few select kinds of fish, the growth in fishing has caused considerable damage to ocean fisheries.

Many populations of fish have become threatened, and in some areas, they have died off completely. As fish die out, ocean biodiversity suffers and the fishers’ ability to sustain their livelihood is threatened. There are several varying models of exactly how threatened the fish industry is, and there’s often disagreement between conservationist scientists and market experts. Read on to find out more about what exactly is happening with our fisheries and the different possible solutions.

So How Bad is it Exactly?

It is widely accepted that ocean fisheries are over-exploited, although there’s plenty of disagreement on exactly what that means for the future. One of the first major examples of fish stocks losing their stability happened in the Gulf of Maine, where a massive restriction on cod fishing was placed all along the gulf, from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia. The cod stock in the area had dropped to such low levels due to intensive fishing practices that the federal government was forced to scale back the industry in order to save the species. Unfortunately, this also meant that fishers, in order to leave the cod undisturbed, had to reduce their catch of several other species, including pollock, haddock, and hake, because they share the same feeding ground on the ocean floor. This move caused an uproar within coastal communities, many of which depended on fishing as a major source of employment and income for their citizens. Fishing reductions both cut off a local food supply and disrupt a way of life.

The same problem is happening in countless fisheries across the planet, and if a fishery shuts down, similar consequences will be felt in its surrounding areas. This can be particularly disastrous in coastal or island communities in the developing world where fish provide the central or only source of food and employment.

The first major analysis of global fisheries was conducted in 2006 by the marine research ecologist Boris Worm and a team of Stanford researchers. Worm and his team analyzed 48 different marine protected areas and then combined their findings with global catch data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. As a result, they were able to track the biodiversity of 12 coastal areas over 1,000 years. They found that biodiversity had dropped off rapidly over the last millennium and that the collapse of any given species is likely to disrupt the entire ecosystem, increasing the threat to other species. That pattern has caused the loss of biodiversity to move at a rapid and increasing rate throughout history as we approach the modern day. They predicted that without a massive change in the way we fish and a concerted effort to create more restoration areas for threatened species, all global fisheries would collapse by 2050.

This estimate was almost immediately attacked by fishery scientist Ray Hilborn, who claimed that the projections were widely inaccurate and sensationalist. Two movements, ecologists (who are generally conservationist minded) and fishery scientists (who are generally economically or market-minded) butted heads on their projections for years until remarkably, they decided to work together. Boris Worm, Ray Hilborn, and their teams combined their data sets and evaluation tools to publish a paper together in 2009. The results from their combined efforts show, with some optimism, that several of earth’s ecosystems that were thought to be dying out have been steadily recovering. However, they also calculated that 63 percent of global fish stocks need to be rebuilt, requiring a dramatic reduction in global catch. They advised catch restrictions, modifications, closed off restoration areas, and a reassessment of the fishing methods used by international commercial fleets.

Destructive Fishing Methods

A major reason for our current situation is the way in which we actually fish. As the demand for fish increased over time, innovations in hunting methods progressed rapidly as well. Unfortunately, this led to the widespread use of several highly destructive fishing techniques, such as bottom trawling, purse seining, longline fishing, gillnetting, and a variety of other less commonly used methods.

Longlining involves stringing down weighted lines below fishing ships. Each of these lines is covered with hooks running vertically down the line, which allows for fish to be caught at each point on the line where a hook is attached. These lines can be up to 50 miles long and present the risk of hooking sea turtles, sharks, and aquatic birds because much of the bait is close to the surface. Because of this, experts say that longlines should be sunk at deeper levels to reduce this problem. However, longlining is still in many ways one of the least invasive forms of hunting used by commercial fisheries, whereas the other three methods all make use of giant nets in different ways. Purse seining drags a vertically weighted net in a circle to entrap fish in the center. The circle is eventually drawn smaller and smaller until the fish are trapped. Gillnetting suspends nets underwater with weights on the bottom and buoyed floaters on the top. The nets are made of very thin mesh and are almost invisible, causing many fish to try to swim right through them and get caught. Trawling drags a weighted net along the ocean floor, scooping up anything that it passes over.

The primary problem with these three methods is that they result in high rates of bycatch, which is the catching of fish that are considered to have no commercial value. Fish that are caught but can’t be sold die, which causes huge amounts of unnecessary damage to populations of fish outside of what we actually consume and attempt to hunt for. Trawling, in particular, has come under public scrutiny because the method is uniquely invasive. As the net drags along the ocean floor, not only does it generate huge quantities of bycatch, it also indiscriminately destroys the ecosystem that covers the ocean’s bottom, including ancient animal habitats and coral reefs that have existed for centuries. Trawling is also not to be confused with trolling, a method of fishing with which boats cast lines behind them and tow them forward. This technique primarily attracts a few species of fish–such as salmon, tuna, and mahi-mahi–and follows fast moving targets, resulting in one of the lowest rates of bycatch.

Market Limitations

Problems with bycatch are further compounded by the fact that there are only a few species of fish that are generally hunted and eaten. Actually, as Paul Greenberg notes in his critically acclaimed book, “Four Fish,” the fish market revolves around just four types of fish: salmon, tuna, bass, and cod. (The book also points out that the modern livestock industry has decreased in biodiversity over time and now only revolves around a few major animals as well. The same problem can be seen in agriculture with the increasing prevalence of monocultures that have led many species of vegetables and grains to die out).

Our love of these specific kinds of fish makes them the only species considered commercially viable, and therefore, they are the focus of most fishing. This presents two major problems, the first being that we are exclusively targeting only a few primary species, which is inevitably going to threaten their populations. The second major problem is that countless other fish, which are completely edible but not considered popular, become bycatch during industrial fishing expeditions. As a result, a large amount of marketable fish become waste and their populations can be severely damaged.

This problem is particularly difficult when it comes to animals that are already considered to be threatened are caught in nets, such as certain species of dolphins, sharks, and turtles. There is no specific reason for the exclusive popularity of cod, tuna, salmon, and bass, as plenty of other fish have similar tastes and nutritional values. If humans were to expand their diets and the market responded accordingly, then it would be hypothetically possible to reduce our targeted hunting of threatened species and expand to other, more stable fish stocks.

“Untitled” courtesy of Proscilas Moscas via Flickr

Eating seafood lower down on the food chain, such as clams, anchovies, sardines, and oysters, would generally be a more sustainable method of consumption. Smaller aquatic animals are in much greater numbers and are capable of reproducing at much higher rates than larger fish. This would also lessen the amount of Persistent Organic Pollutants that enter human bodies through fish consumption. POPs, such as methylmercury and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, often used with electrical equipment) enter the ocean ecosystem through pollution and are stored in the fatty tissues of fish. POPs bioaccumulate, meaning that when larger organisms in the ocean eat smaller organisms, they retain all the toxins from their prey. As a result, the largest fish are often the most toxic. POPs can cause serious damage to a person’s organs and nervous system over time. The lower down on the ocean food chain you eat, the more sustainable it is for the biodiversity of the ocean and the lower your risk is of consuming high levels of toxic pollutants.

Aquaculture vs. Open Hunting

Aquaculture has been proposed by many as a solution to some of the current problems with open fishing. Aquaculture is the process of “farming fish” by keeping them in a controlled environment and supplying their diet for them. Currently, aquaculture supplies about 50 percent of the world’s fish and allows fishing companies to both create a high yield of certain stocks and to avoid problems with bycatch. There are a variety of ways to raise fish, both indoors and outdoors, and it’s possible to do so in a way that’s sustainable for the population.

If you raise fish on a vegetarian diet, the cost of input is fairly low. However, in order to gain desirable tastes and the healthy omega-3 fatty acids that customers want out of fish, aquaculture generally raises its animals on a carnivorous diet. This requires fishing for all the food needed to raise these animals to a size large enough to sell. In worst case scenarios, this means that industrial fishing methods are still widely used for aquaculture, but only to collect the food for other fish (although this results in less bycatch and waste since smaller fish are mainly what bigger fish want to eat). Currently, 37 percent of all global seafood isn’t eaten by humans, but is ground into protein feed and fed back to fish or to livestock farm animals.

“Fishing for Tonight’s Dinner..” courtesy of Mark Guadalupe via Flickr

Furthermore, aquaculture often results in the destruction of the ecosystems it is conducted in. The most serious problem with this is the destruction of the mangrove forest, which is a shoreline habitat for many threatened species. Often times, especially in East Asia, mangrove forests will be razed to make way for the construction of an aquaculture farm, causing many threatened species to lose their habitat as a result. These farms also release harmful chemicals into the surrounding environment, including pesticides, veterinary drugs, and untreated waste water.

These problems are at their worst in the areas where aquaculture is the most practiced, such as China, which has environmental regulations that are very lenient. All this is not to say that aquaculture is bad; in fact, aquaculture has great potential to increase the sustainability of the way we utilize our fisheries. However, fish farms have to be created without destroying precious ecosystems, and they have to be run in a way that takes into account the damage that they can inflict on the surrounding areas if their operators aren’t careful.

Conclusion

Fish are not a limitless resource and there are countless things that need to change in the way we fish if humans want to maintain our way of life. Our industrial fishing practices are destructive and cause the large-scale death of fish that we never even eat. Humans are only willing to eat a few select species, and this causes those populations to be severely threatened. The way we currently fish destroys ecosystems and wastes incredible amounts of edible fish as bycatch. We won’t be able to do this forever. After working together, Boris Worm and Ray Hilborn agreed that it’s possible for global fish stocks to survive past 2050–but doing so will require serious changes around the world.

Resources

BBC:  How the World’s Oceans Could be Running out of Fish

CNN: A Fishing Way of Life is Threatened

Encyclopedia Britannica: The Pros and Cons of Fish Farming

Environmental Protection Agency: Persistent Organic Pollutants: A Global Issue, A Global Response

Marine Conservation Institute: Destructive Fishing

Mercury News: Lean Year for New England Cod Ahead, Shutdown Looms

Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch: Fishing and Farming Methods

Nereus Program: Predicting Future Oceans

New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries: Fishing Methods

The New York Times: Study Finds Hope in Saving Saltwater Fish

The New York Times: Where Have all the Cod Gone?

Salem State University: Benefits of Aquaculture

Science Mag: Rebuilding Global Fisheries

Stanford News: Study Predicts Collapse of All Seafood Fisheries by 2050

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization: General Situation of World’s Fish Stocks

WDC: Whaling

Paul Greenberg: Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

Wild Aid: Shark Fin Soup

World Watch Institute: Eating Sustainable Seafood – Three Tips to Steer Clear of Fisheries Collapse

World Wildlife Fund: Infinite Depths: Protecting Oceans and a Global Seafood Pipeline

World Wildlife Fund: Unsustainable Fishing

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Growing Holes in Our Ocean Fisheries appeared first on Law Street.

Globally, we eat more meat now than ever before. Cultures that traditionally held vegetarian diets have become steadily more meat-oriented. In many areas, meat is seen not only as a delicacy but also as a luxury expense and a symbol of status. As the production of meat has gone up in recent decades and the cost has steadily dropped, meat is now much more affordable than ever before. This has led to what is referred to as a “global meatification of our diets.”

However, this new trend carries with it a series of environmental burdens. The livestock industry creates enormous amounts of waste, generates pollution, and also releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

Waste

Vegetarian farming methods generally require large-scale irrigation and sometimes pesticides and fertilizers as well. Livestock farming, alternatively, requires keeping animals alive, which requires land, food, and water for the animals. Because of this, animal farms are also dependent on grain farms to create a food source for their animals. This food could be eaten by humans directly, but instead is used over a long period of time (in combination with a variety of animal growth hormones) to get an animal to an edible size. In fact, more than two-thirds of all agricultural land worldwide is dedicating to feeding livestock. In contrast, only eight percent of agricultural land produces food exclusively for humans. The land used for animal grazing, as well as the land that goes to specialized crop production for livestock animal diets, often causes mass scale deforestation: in the last 40 years, an estimated 40 percent of the Amazon trees were taken down with the vast majority of this land going to livestock feed production. Freshwater is also a finite resource that’s being used in mass quantities for irrigating animal feed and nourishing the animals.

“Pink.”courtesy of Rosalba Tarazona via Flickr

Every bite of meat that is eaten represents all the various inputs that went into raising that animal to adulthood. NPR published a report showing that a single quarter-pound of beef requires 6.7 pounds of grain, 52.5 gallons of water (for the cow’s personal needs and also for watering the crops it ate), 74.5 square feet of land for grazing, and 1,036 BTUs (British Thermal Units) of fossil fuel energy for food production and transport. If you calculate the amount of water required to sustain an American citizen, the average meat eater requires no less than 4,800 gallons whereas a vegan only needs 300. But when the average consumer eats a burger, all they will see is the finished product while the hidden costs remain unnoticed. Herein lies part of the problem with the meat industry: all of its worst elements aren’t ever visible to consumers who decide what kinds of food they want to spend their money on.

Fossil Fuels

First, fossil fuels are used to make the pesticides and fertilizers that keep grain crops growing rapidly and protected from insects. These inputs are essential to many of the traditional commercial vegetable farms throughout the world, which is a serious problem for the environment on its own. However, specialized grain or corn crops are created specifically to sustain livestock, which adds an unnecessary burden that wouldn’t exist without the meat industry. Carbon dioxide emissions also necessarily come with the large-scale transport of meat to grocery stores and restaurants throughout the world. Some of the largest meat-producing nations–such as the United States, Brazil, and the Netherlands–also export meat products to other countries, sometimes halfway around the world.

However, transportation actually only accounts for about six percent of livestock emissions. Ten percent comes from manure storage and disposal, 39 percent comes from food processing and production, and 44 percent comes from enteric fermentation. Enteric fermentation is the process by which a cow’s stomach digests its food and releases greenhouse gasses as a result. Interestingly, while the typically unnatural corn-based diets (in concert with a constant stream of growth hormones and medications) dramatically worsen the health of cows, grass-fed cows actually release far more greenhouse gasses than corn-fed cows. This is because the roughage eaten by grass fed cows is high in cellulose, which is then broken down into methane during anaerobic digestion. In contrast, commercial farm cows generally subsist off of foods that are low in cellulose and high in simple sugars. Because of this, grass fed cows can release up to two to four times as much methane as commercial cows.

As a greenhouse gas, methane has as much as 86 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Methane only stays in the atmosphere for about 12 years while carbon dioxide can remain for hundreds; however, in terms of a greenhouse gas’s ability to rapidly impact global warming, methane is considered to be far more dangerous.

Methane emissions from a single dairy cow amount to the equivalent of up to 1.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. Globally this adds up to the equivalent of  2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) calculated that cows contribute 53 percent of the world’s human-related nitrous oxide and 44 percent of its methane. There has been some debate over exactly how much the livestock industry contributes to climate change. The FAO claims that the livestock industry releases 14.5 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gasses.

However, the FAO’s analysis has been criticized for being conducted exclusively by livestock specialists, not environmental specialists, and for understating the extent of livestock’s impact on climate change by overlooking and undercounting related emissions sources. The FAO has also been criticized for having a partnership with the International Meat Secretariat and the International Dairy Federation. Current and former World Bank environmental specialists conducted their own study and argue that livestock actually accounts for 51 percent of the world’s anthropogenic greenhouse gasses–much more than the 14.5 percent estimated by the UN.

Livestock as a Public Health Issue

In some areas, the growth in meat consumption has had a positive impact on the diets of the local people. This is particularly true in food insecure regions such as some areas in Sub-Saharan Africa where meat is an important source of protein. However, the livestock industry has also posed a danger to public health in several facets of life. The first is simply through pollution. Fertilizers and pesticides used to grow feed crops are washed away in runoff and taken to streams and rivers. On farms, animal manure is swept away by that same runoff and taken to water sources where it can contaminate drinking water with fecal bacteria.

A red meat-based diet can also be unhealthy. Regular consumption of meat can raise cholesterol and lead to cardiovascular disease and cancer down the road. Furthermore, the unnatural diets and regimen of growth hormone that we administer to livestock essentially keeps them sick, which also requires constant medication. Almost 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in America are used for livestock and not for people.

“Vasikkakasvattamo” courtesy of Oikeutta eläimille via Flickr

The diets we force upon animals can also potentially impact our own health when we consume them. For instance, many of the pathogens and bacteria that develop in cows stomachs can be easily killed by our stomach acids. However, as we continue to modify their diets we’ve caused cow stomachs to become increasingly more acidic as well. In the worst case scenario, this could lead to dangerous pathogens, such as E.Coli, adapting to live in a more acidic environment and potentially being able to survive in our stomachs as well.

Conclusion

Despite many problems in the livestock industry, the popularity of meat is only projected to continue increasing. Some anticipate meat demand to double expected to double by 2020. Although some organizations dispute the validity of this projection, most agree that meat consumption will continue to increase in the coming years. If humans don’t manage to reduce our global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, then the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 2°C will be extremely difficult to accomplish. Without dramatic changes to the livestock industry, these reductions will never be able to happen.

A traditional meat-based diet simply isn’t sustainable for the entire planet. However, the majority of the current problems with the industry are far out of consumers’ sights. As long as meat continues to get cheaper and people enjoy how it tastes, its popularity will continue to grow as well. Greater transparency on the issues might change public perception of the industry and shift consumer attitudes. Another possible solution could be an increased emphasis on alternative lifestyles, whether they be vegetarian based or just focused on eating from small, more sustainable livestock farms. The FAO actually suggests that we intensify the commercial livestock industry in order to reduce and eliminate the greater degree of emissions that comes from grass fed cows as opposed to commercial farm cows. Whatever the method may be, it’s clear the world can’t continue to consume meat at such alarming rates.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated to clarify the debate over livestock’s effect on climate change and its share of human-related emissions. Additional information has also been added about the implications for grass-fed cows on methane emissions and the environmental effect of commercial farms has been clarified. Additionally, methane is now thought to have 86 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide, not 25 times as scientists previously believed. The post has been updated to reflect that change. Updates also add context the debate over the projected growth in meat demand by 2020.

References

Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations: The Role of Livestock in Climate Change

Food and Agricultural Organization of the Unite Nations: Key Facts and Findings

New York Times Opinion: FAO Yields to Meat Industry Pressure on Climate Change

Reuters: Grass-Fed Beef Packs a Punch to the Environment

John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Health & Environmental Implications of U.S. Meat Consumption and Production

New Harvest: the World’s Leading Driver of Climate Change: Animal Agriculture

NPR: A Nation of Meat Eaters: See How it All Adds Up

Policy Mic: Farm Bill 2013: Small Farmers Can’t Make Money from Farming Anymore

Politifact: Rep. Louise Slaughter says 80 Percent of Antibiotics are Fed to Livestock

Salon: What Nobody Told Me About Small Farming: I Can’t Make a Living

Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: Consequences of Increased Global Meat Consumption on the Environment – Trade in Virtual Water, Energy & Nutrients

United Nations News Centre: Rearing Cattle Produces more Greenhouse Gases than Driving Cars, New Report Warns

US Environmental Protection Agency: Overview of Greenhouse Gases: Methane

World Watch: Livestock and Climate Change

World Watch Institute: Is Meat Sustainable?

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post How Does the Livestock Industry Impact the Environment? appeared first on Law Street.

In the past 20 years, fuel has been the fastest growing export in the world, both in terms of volume and value. Oil makes up a huge portion of these fuel exports and is also the primary energy source for transportation throughout the world. Currently, the only alternatives to oil for the transportation sector are electric and hydrogen cell powered cars. Both of these are comparatively very small industries and only act as energy alternatives to on-road vehicles, while the transportation sector also includes all the world’s ships, planes, and military vehicles, which are all heavily dependent upon petroleum. As of now, oil is here to stay on planet earth, whatever its consequences may be.

Oil production in the United States has changed a lot in recent years. Following the discovery of the Bakken Shale formation in North Dakota and Montana, the United States increased its domestic production dramatically. The Bakken formation combined with the Eagle Ford and Permian Basins located in Texas allowed the U.S. to produce 66 percent of its oil domestically in 2014. The discovery of the Bakken Shale was hailed by some as an incredible discovery that will allow the United States newfound energy independence. But an equal number of people have objected furiously to our exploitation of the shale patch, claiming that it only further solidifies the United States on a path toward fossil fuel dependence. Our domestic production has decreased somewhat in the last two years as oil prices have dropped abroad, but overall our production rates are higher than they have been in a very long time and there is a considerable push to continue strengthening the industry domestically.

Now that a greater quantity of oil is being produced on the U.S. mainland than before, the amount of oil being shipped via tanker to the United States has dropped dramatically, which means that globally the risk of ocean oil spills has decreased as well. However, transporting oil domestically poses its own environmental problems and even imported oil often needs to be shipped to different parts of the country by land transport. If oil spills on the mainland, it can destroy ecosystems and watersheds and render communities unstable. If oil catches fire, it can lead to gigantic explosions, a few of which have historically had terrible consequences for American towns. Read on to learn about the pros and cons of different methods of oil transportation and the policy fights involved.

Rail

Currently, the most common method of oil transport is by railway. Truck transport of oil now only accounts for 4 percent of all petroleum moved because of its high level of inefficiency and risk. While pipelines can often be more efficient modes of transport, their construction can lead to political battles. The advantage of rail transport is that the infrastructure is already in place and already spans across America–all it needs is to be re-utilized.

Many railroads owners are willing to sign contracts with crude oil companies that allow for their railways to be used for transporting oil. Often these contracts are short term and many railway owners reserve the ability to withdraw from the business relationship later down the road. The railway transport business has grown exponentially along with the upward spike in oil extraction. Only 9,500 carloads of oil were moved on freight lines in 2008; by 2013 435,560 carloads of oil were moved, equivalent to 300 million barrels of oil.

“Crude Oil Storage on Stilts” courtesy of Anthony via Flickr

However, this increase in railway transport has led to an increase in the risk of oil-related disasters. When a train transporting oil (also known as a “bomb train”) runs into a problem, it generally causes the oil to ignite, which results in an explosion. These explosions can be gigantic in size and result in large scale destruction. While railway movement is considerably safer than trucks in terms of land transportation, a single incident can have disastrous effects. This is further compounded by some evidence suggesting that Bakken shale produces a more flammable crude oil because of its specific mineral content. Because of North Dakota’s location in the very center of America, these bomb trains have to span incredible distances to move oil to the coasts of the country, which increases the risk that something may go wrong. Between 2013 and 2015 more than 10 major explosions took place in America.

The explosions can have devastating immediate effects, but oil leakage also poses its own risk. In 2013 alone more than 1.15 million gallons of oil were spilled. Oil leaks can take a considerable amount of time to clean up and the damage can happen very quickly. Oil is mostly made up of a combination of thousands of different hydrocarbons and is generally toxic to almost every living creature. Crude oil, in particular, is oil in its least processed form and poses a greater risk than refined petroleum to an area it enters and contaminates. Because of this, an oil spill can cause tremendous damage to an ecosystem. Furthermore, an oil spill in the ocean will eventually go away, partially through evaporation and partially through breaking down and falling to the ocean floor as an inert tar. However, if oil enters freshwater it can permanently render it undrinkable, which can be particularly serious in areas where humans live nearby and rely on freshwater for drinking water.

Pipeline Alternatives and the Keystone XL Expansion

Right now Canada is the largest U.S. supplier of foreign oil, which offers a certain level of ease of transport because the two countries are on the same landmass. Currently, 70 percent of petroleum products in Canada and the United States are shipped via pipeline. A certain amount of crude oil can be moved over the border on the Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian National Railway, but there’s been a huge push to connect the two countries via new and larger pipelines. Pipelines would dramatically expedite the process of oil movement by making it both quicker and cheaper, and many argue that it would make the process dramatically safer for Canadian and American communities.

“Trans Canada Keystone Oil Pipeline” courtesy of shannonpatrick17 via Flickr

Much of the argument around pipeline transport has focused on the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline expansion, a gigantic pipe system that would in theory run 1,661 miles between Alberta, Canada and Illinois. The oil giant TransCanada proposed Keystone XL in September 2008 and estimated that it would cost about $7 billion to create. Most of the labor force that would go into its  design would be from the United States, creating up to 20,000 new jobs. It would also generate about $585 million in taxes for the states it ran through and over $5.2 billion in property taxes over the course of its functional lifetime. Many saw the pipeline as an incredible chance to increase energy security and to generate new job opportunities. An equal number of people opposed the movement, saying it only put the United States at greater risk of leaks.

There are others who support the pipeline from an environmental/human health perspective. It’s important to remember that while one can object to oil as an energy source in theory, we still very much need it to live our normal lives. Oil transportation will happen one way or another, and pipelines are generally thought as being safer than trains and therefore the lesser of two evils. However, the distinction really depends on how you measure safety. If you use damage to human life and property as your metric, then trains are the far more dangerous method of transportation because they can generate large explosions. When something goes wrong on a train, the damage is immediate and severe. However, a leak from a pipeline can last indefinitely and may even go unnoticed, pouring a continuous stream of oil into the surrounding areas. Because of this, pipelines cause a much greater level of oil spillage overall than trains and may have a much more severe impact on the environment.

Keystone Pipeline Debate

There was a lot of opposition to the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from environmentalists as well as worried community members who felt that their areas would be endangered by potential spills. A large portion of the public opposition to the pipeline has come from Native American communities that live in the states the pipe would run through. Several Native American groups in Nebraska especially have argued that the location of the pipeline directly endangers the Ogallala Aquifer, which sustains huge numbers of people and a thriving agricultural business. The sheer length of the pipeline is also alarming to many; while it ends in Illinois, the crude oil will then be processed in-state and shipped south via existing pipelines all the way to the Texas coast. This means that gigantic streams of crude oil would constantly be moving across the center band of the United States.

“pipeline” courtesy of Ripperda via Flickr

TransCanada argued that the pipeline would be built with state-of-the-art safety equipment, including over 16,000 smart sensors along its body, to allow for the quick relay of any problems and relevant information to repair teams. These sensors deliver information to satellites, which then dispatch emergency response crews that are located along the pipeline in each state. This level of security is particularly important because the Keystone XL would transport pre-processed crude oil to refineries. Crude oil is so thick that it has to be continuously heated in order to flow properly, which increases its volatility in the event of a spill.

Four years after it was initially proposed, President Obama rejected the Keystone XL expansion presidential permit in 2012. Not to be deterred, TransCanada began to explore alternative methods of building the pipeline and working closely with Nebraska, which led to the submission of another presidential permit less than half a year after the original rejection. The Obama Administration spent several years refusing to make a final decision on the expansion, saying that while it supports the pipeline’s ability to spur business and create jobs, it wouldn’t make a decision that will cause an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

In November 2015, President Obama made the final decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, claiming that the benefit it would have for the economy in the long term wouldn’t outweigh the damage it would do to U.S. energy security and the country’s role as a progressive energy leader. TransCanada responded by asking for a delay on the review of the Nebraska route, which most likely would have pushed the final decision back for another indefinite period of time. This most likely would have placed the power of approving or rejecting Keystone XL in the hands of the winner of the 2016 Presidential race. However, the Obama Administration rejected this as well, ending the battle over the Keystone XL once and for all.

Conservatives were mostly furious and environmentalists were generally overjoyed. However, from a public health perspective, it isn’t completely clear what impact this decision will have. The risk of oil pollution will decrease but railway oil transportation and its dangers will remain prevalent instead. Furthermore, a large part of the argument from pipeline supporters is centered around energy security; increasing oil imports from Canada is viewed as a much safer business deal than increasing them from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, for instance. With the pipeline abandoned, it’s possible that the next energy argument will center around increasing oil extraction from U.S. reserves back to their 2014 levels and beyond, which would increase energy independence but also cause greater damage to the U.S. ecosystems and communities.

Conclusion

No method of oil transportation is completely safe, and different methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. Boats are generally the safest method for moving oil but have the greatest possible impact on the environment when they do actually spill. Oil movement on land is a completely different issue because it involves areas where humans live. While oil spills from trains result in higher levels of human death and property destruction, oil spills from pipelines are more common and often more severe, with longer lasting effects on the environment.

The extreme position is to fight against all forms of oil transportation under the argument that every resource dedicated towards oil industry infrastructure takes away from resources that could go to more progressive transportation technologies, such as electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells. Currently, the world is nowhere near ready to wean itself completely off oil, but competitor transportation technologies have steadily grown larger and larger in the past decades.

It’s important to remember that none of these alternatives are perfect and completely environmentally friendly–electric cars require large-scale mining operations to access the lithium iron for their batteries, for instance. However, overall a shift toward non-fossil fuel based transportation alternatives would still dramatically reduce global emissions. The world may not be technologically prepared to survive without oil, but as long as we depend on it, oil transportation and its risks and dangers will always be a factor in our lives and communities.

References

Americans for Tax Reform: A Brief History of the Keystone XL Pipeline

Aljazeera America: A History of Keystone

Desta: The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the World Trade Organization, and Regional Trade Agreements

Forbes: Pick Your Poison for Crude: Pipeline, Rail, Truck or Boat

The Hill: Obama Rejects Keystone Pipeline

Institute for 21st Century Energy: Background of Keystone XL

Oil 150: Early Oil Transportation: A Brief Transportation

RiverKeeper: Crude Oil Transportation: A Timeline of Failure

RT: What’s the Hold Up?  Still no Decision on Keystone XL Nearly 7 Years Later

Scientific American: The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S. Water Source

Sightline Institute: Oil Train Explosions: A Timeline in Pictures

U.S. Rail Transportation of Crude Oil: Background and Issues for Congress

The Des Moines Register: Corps: We’re Not For or Against the Bakken Pipeline

World Trade Organization: International Trade Statistics: World Export for Commercial Services

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post What’s the Best Way to Transport Crude Oil? appeared first on Law Street.

In some ways, the more urbanized an area is the greater potential it has to be sustainable. Public transport becomes readily available, reducing the need for individually owned cars, and the closer together things are the easier it is to walk from place to place. However, while grocery stores and restaurants may be close by to customers, more often than not the food that sustains them comes from outside of the community, sometimes from hundreds of miles away.

When calculating the carbon footprint of a suburb or a city, it’s important to keep in mind that the distance food delivery trucks travel to keep an area well-fed can be a serious obstacle to any community’s sustainability. This problem gave birth to the locavore movement, which has been steadily growing in popularity throughout America. Locavores attempt to get their food as close as possible to where they live, which has the benefit of reducing CO2 emissions, supporting local farmers, and ensuring that one’s food hasn’t been treated with pesticides or raised with hormones.

One result of locavorism is the urban agriculture movement, which strives to utilize local property for small scale farming. Urban agriculture can manifest in a variety of ways in both suburban and city environments but it has been vehemently opposed in many areas throughout the country. However, the movement has serious potential to help increase sustainability in communities around the country.

“Roof allotment III” courtesy of David Barrie via Flickr

Suburban Lawn Farms

The modern American suburban home typically has a small front lawn, which is kept mowed and watered for aesthetic purposes. However, added up throughout the nation, these lawns make up a huge amount of underutilized, farmable land. Homeowners in states all over the country are starting to realize the potential of this land, and are growing edible gardens in their front yards. The average suburban property won’t generate a yield that’ll provide for an entire family’s calorie requirements, however, they can dramatically contribute to a household’s vegetable needs. This has the environmental benefit of reducing a family’s dependence on produce that comes through long supply chains and also encourages a healthy diet.

Edible gardens actually require about half as much water to maintain as a traditional lawn and prevent the exhaust fumes from lawnmowers, which are exceptionally polluting machines due to their unregulated and highly hazardous fuel contents. Furthermore, if you cultivate your edible garden without pesticides and fertilizers (which would generally be unnecessary in small scale agriculture) then you prevent a host of chemicals from being picked up by rainwater and delivered into local water sources. Depending on the amount of space in your lawn, it may also be possible to raise smaller livestock animals, such as chickens and rabbits, which generally don’t require very much space to take care of. If an entire community bands together and adopts this model of living, it can dramatically reduce the area’s carbon footprint, conserve water, and strengthen community bonds.

Urban Agriculture: Rooftops, Windows, and Empty Lots

In an urban setting, there’s no such potential for lawns to be directly repurposed into gardens, so city dwellers have to pursue more creative pathways. While the average person who lives in an apartment doesn’t own that property, anyone with a window facing steady sunlight can grow small scale produce hanging out of their windows. This is the premise behind the idea of vertical gardening, which seeks to make use of all the surface area we have built vertically as a source of nutrition and as a sink for carbon.

Theoretically, high-rise apartment buildings have created an abundance of additional land by building walls that take up more surface area than the original width and length of the plot of land they were built upon. This increases the potential for food development, although produce that requires high sun exposure can only be grown near windows and may require heavy watering. However, it’s just as possible to grow produce on vertically stacked beds in any apartment and in any house, though it may require additional light to grow healthily if plants can’t be exposed to a natural light source. Growing mushrooms may also be a good choice for indoor gardening because they require little to no light and provide strong sources of protein.

Rooftop gardens are another way to produce a significant agricultural yield since the area of a building’s roof is generally the same as the land taken away on the ground by its construction. While you can easily cover a roof with potted plants, it’s also possible to actually build a garden directly on a rooftop, equipped with soil layers, and drainage and irrigation systems. One of the major obstacles to these “intensive” rooftop gardens is that architecturally, there are limits to what a roof can hold. Soil, especially when saturated with water, can be extremely heavy and can be a serious burden on what a building can hold. When designing a rooftop garden it’s important to take into account the exact weight that your building can handle and not to exceed that. Other concerns include the potential safety risks involved in rooftop gardening.

The top of urban buildings are almost always built of impervious surfaces that cause rainwater to rapidly pour off, which can also lead to flooding and may carry contaminants into water sources. When rainwater encounters vegetation, it dramatically decreases the speed of runoff and risk of flooding, and may even filter water as it moves downward. Rooftop gardens also have the benefit of blocking roofs from sun exposure. Black asphalt absorbs heat, creating the Urban Heat Island Effect, which causes cities to reach uncomfortably warm temperatures, especially in the top floors of apartments. The canopy offered by rooftop gardens has a cooling effect that can both increase comfort and decrease air conditioning expenses.

Empty lots also provide ample space with which to grow gardens and to aesthetically improve an area. Empty lots have the unique feature of being non-exclusive gardens, unlike window or rooftop agriculture. A local community can cooperatively participate in a lot garden, which can strengthen community bonds as well as provide local produce.

“Urban Agriculture at Erdos Eco-City” courtesy of SuSanA Secretariat via Flickr

Victory Gardens

While the concept of edible gardens may sound strange and novel, it’s not a completely new concept. In World War II the lack of labor and transportation difficulties severely cut off food supply chains, so the government proposed the idea of “Victory Gardens.” Victory gardens encouraged citizens to raise as much produce and livestock as they could as part of their patriotic duty as Americans. Backyards and empty lots were converted into small farms and even city rooftops were covered with whatever could be grown on them. A huge number of Americans banded together and an estimated 20 million victory gardens were created. Altogether these gardens produced between 9 to 10 million tons of produce, equivalent to the amount of commercially produced vegetables at the time. This impressive yield serves as a powerful example of the impact the same practices could have today. So what’s stopping America from achieving the same results again?

Obstacles to Urban Agriculture

Many states have laws against owning livestock such as chickens, goats, and beehives on private property. Suburban communities across America also have made objections to edible gardens, claiming that they hurt the aesthetics of a neighborhood. Farmland can be considered unclean and a symbol of lower class status. Many believe that suburban gardening will decrease the property value of surrounding houses. States like Iowa, Florida, and Louisiana have written laws banning backyard gardening and require lawns to be regularly maintained; countless city and town governments have made similar mandates.

Apartment building owners may have objections to vertical gardening for similar aesthetic reasons. Rooftop gardens are one of the most significant ways to impact urban agriculture, but their existence also largely depends on the wishes of the building owners. Rooftop gardens are highly complex and require large amounts of maintenance. Many people may not want to invest the time and resources into actualizing their existence. There’s also an ongoing debate on whether rooftop space would be better utilized with solar panels since the tops of tall buildings provide some of the best access to solar energy. As for empty lot gardens, it’s often the case that just because an area is abandoned, that doesn’t mean it’s publicly accessible. Many open city lots may be boarded or fenced up to prevent people from interfering with the area. In some places this has led to movement of “guerilla gardening,” that is, throwing projectiles made of seeds wrapped in clay over fences. These vegetable “bombs” protect the seed long enough for it to sprout and draw nutrients, encouraging vegetation growth in otherwise inaccessible areas.

Beyond community opposition and technical difficulties, it’s also just true that only a small percentage of people are interested in urban agriculture. America is a very different place now than it was during World War II and we have nowhere near the food insecurity we previously did. The ethos of patriotism that inspired American citizens to grow food for the sake of the country’s stability is no longer in effect, and many people simply don’t see the benefits of urban agriculture. Ideally, Americans could regain the desire to grow their own food now in the interest of environmentalism. However, as large as our grocery stores are fully stocked, it is fairly unlikely that the urban agriculture movement will truly grow huge.

“New crops” courtesy of Linda N. via Flickr

Resources

About News: Origin of the Word Locavore

Chicago Department of Environment: A Guide to Rooftop Gardening

EarthEasy: Lawn Care Chemicals: How Toxic Are They?

Guardian Liberty Voice: Personal Gardening and Farming are Becoming Illegal

Hofstra University: Transport and Sustainability

Living History: Farming in the 1940s

Mother Earth News: Grow Your Own Mushrooms

Oregon Public Broadcasting: Rethinking Your Front Yard: Cities Make Room for Urban Farms

People Powered Machines: Cleaner Air: Gas Mower Pollution Facts

Resilience: Why Our Food is so Dependent on Oil

Seattle Urban Farm Company: Suburban Front Yard Farm

TakePart: Leave Your Lawn for Life on the Urban Farm

Urban Gardens Web: Growing Free Food and Community in Front Yard Farms

The Washington Post: “Guerilla Gardeners” Spread Seeds of Social Change

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Promise of Urban Agriculture appeared first on Law Street.

As climate change worsens, melting ice from earth’s glacier sheet combined with the expansion of warming sea water has caused the world’s oceans to rise dramatically. There are a number of organizations dedicated to recording the rise in sea levels, including the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services–a part of the NOAA that collects data on changing sea levels with numerous tide stations–and NASA, which use satellites to gather the same data from a different perspective. Currently, there are about 150 years of data gathered on changes in the Mean Sea Level (MSL) over time and the current scientific consensus is that sea levels have been rising at a rate of 3.42 mm annually over the last 20 years, which will lead to a total rise of between 1-2 meters by 2100.

Rising sea levels pose a very serious threat to many populous cities throughout the world, particularly those that have developed as coastal trade centers. As sea levels continue to rise, many of these coastal cities will become increasingly vulnerable to flooding, especially in the geographically low-lying areas of the earth. Flooding is a unique consequence of climate change in that it affects people both from the richest and the poorest parts of the world, and while everywhere has their own local approach to flood mitigation, there are generally two major ways to address the issue politically. The first and most popular approach is to develop coastal protection systems to prevent rising tides from impacting coastal zones. The second technique is to commit to renewable energy in order to directly address the problem of global warming and rising sea levels. The larger the country, the greater its personal commitment to fossil fuel divestment matters. Unfortunately, many of the largest countries which have the greatest carbon footprint generally make very low levels commitments to renewables, which makes the commitments of many of the smallest, most flood-vulnerable countries less significant.

Read on to learn more about how the different areas of earth are dealing with rising sea levels.

“Flood” courtesy of ddqhu via Flickr

The United States

The United States is an interesting case of flood politics because it’s one of the world’s wealthiest countries and thus most capable of handling flooding. However, there’s very little political consensus on the scientific validity of climate change in Congress and rising sea levels are rarely if ever mentioned in policy debates at the federal level. The government provides disaster relief funds for the areas that have been most severely affected by rising sea levels, but actual policy changes generally must happen at the individual, state, or even city level. Several areas throughout the United States face a high risk of flood inundation, including New York City; Newark, New Jersey; Boston; Miami; New Orleans; and the entire state of Hawaii.

Hawaii 

Hawaii is relatively low-lying compared to the rest of the U.S. mainland and a sea level rise of 1-2 meters would absolutely devastate the state. Furthermore, each island is so small that there’s very little inland area, meaning that few people would be safe from flooding. It’s no coincidence that Hawaii leads the United States in addressing climate change and is the very first state to commit to getting 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources. This also makes sense from a business perspective because it’s very expensive to ship oil and gas to Hawaii and the state is geographically blessed with ample renewable resources. However, the decision to commit to renewables was made largely out of necessity, as Hawaii’s community, as well as its primary source of revenue, the tourism industry, would suffer immensely from the effects of flooding. Of course, Hawaii’s commitment is a drop in the bucket compared to all U.S. emissions. However, its decision allows the state to lead policy by example and proves that 100 percent renewables are an attainable goal. For a real impact to take place, the other states must follow suit, along with many of the world’s countries.

Cities: New Orleans, New York, and Miami 

None of the other states are as universally vulnerable to flooding as the state of Hawaii, but several have been forced to take measures to protect their largest population centers. Cities like New Orleans and New York City are at particularly high risk not only because they are located on high-risk coasts but also because they’re located in areas that are extremely vulnerable to severe weather events, as seen with hurricanes Sandy and Katrina. New York has made its own commitment to 50 percent renewables by 2030 and has also tried to take more immediate action to prevent Sandy-level flooding from happening again. The current plan is to allocate $100 million of Sandy’s relief funds to the construction of a wall to protect the city as well as apply for an additional $500 million dollars of Federal Housing and Urban Development Funds. The project will be very expensive and require a huge amount of resources, but without flood protection, New York’s electric grid and underground subway system could be completely dismantled, crippling an economic center of the nation and costing billions of dollars in restoration funds.

“Coastal Flooding in Washington DC” courtesy of Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño via Flickr

New Orleans suffered an even greater extent of damage from Hurricane Katrina than New York did from Hurricane Sandy and has also bounced back at a considerably slower rate. Unlike New York, New Orleans is a relatively poor city and was largely at the mercy of how the federal government decided to handle the situation. Congress allocated a massive $14.5 billion relief package to construct an upgraded levy system designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The new and improved system will be much better equipped to protect against flooding, but the upgrade has met some serious criticism. Even the Army Corps of Engineers has warned that there’s a limit to what it can do based on New Orleans’ geography. The area is uniquely low-lying and most of the natural marshes that have historically acted as flood barriers have disappeared over the years, stripping the city of its natural protection.

The political context of different vulnerable areas also heavily influences the way decisions are made. Miami, for instance, is also only 4 to 5 feet above sea level and the entire beach may disappear within the century if sea levels continue to rise. While the state has sunk hundreds of millions into flood prevention, Florida has almost no renewable power at all and has made few steps towards achieving its Renewable Portfolio Standard of 20 percent by 2020. The difference between New Orleans, Miami, and New York’s approaches to their vulnerability represents how wealth, political nature, and geographical position strongly influence what is and what can be done to address the risks of flooding. While commitments to renewable energy address the larger problem of global warming and sea level rise, they do little to directly impact an area’s vulnerability to flooding. This generally means that if renewables aren’t cost effective and receive political opposition, then they will rarely be considered as a valid policy option.

The European Union

The areas of Europe that face the highest risk of flooding are the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Northern Germany because of their flat geography and proximity to the rapidly melting Greenland Ice Sheet. Flood prevention has become a serious issue in the European Union, not only because these areas are at high risk from sea level rise but also because Central and Eastern Europe have experienced rising levels of river flooding from severe weather events. In response to these changes, the European Union made one of the European Regional Development Fund’s duties to establish structural funds for flood mitigation and adaptation. Furthermore, every member of the European Union has their own Renewable Energy Target, which varies widely depending on the location.

However, in a parallel that runs somewhat similar to how only a select set of vulnerable U.S. states address flood risk aggressively, only a handful of European states have serious flood policies. While the overarching body of the E.U. provides structural adaptation funds in the same way the U.S. provides federal disaster relief funds, flood control is only a highly salient issue in the northernmost parts of the continent. The most dramatic example of this is the Netherlands, which is an incredibly low-lying nation that also has an extensive canal system that runs a high risk of flooding. The sea surrounding the Netherlands was originally projected to rise about 1.05 meters within the century, but newer models project a 26 percent chance that the sea will actually rise to 1.8 meters, making it the most vulnerable European nation. England is not far behind, with a renewed projection that there’s a 27 percent chance of sea level in the surrounding areas by 1.75 meters. Both countries have extensive coastal protection policies in the form of barriers, dikes and sluice gates, but many scientists fear that this will not be enough to protect them from flash floods in the future.

The World’s Most Vulnerable Areas

As with many serious environmental issues, the developing world faces some of the greatest risks from these problems but has the least resources dedicated to addressing them. While the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is generally (and accurately) characterized as being an incredibly dry and hot region, the coastal areas between the two continents face serious risks from flooding. If sea levels rise between 0.1 and 0.3 meters by 2050 as predicted, the coastal regions of Libya, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Kuwait could be exposed to severe flooding. A temperature rise of 1 to 3 degrees would exacerbate sea level rise to the point where it would critically endanger urban coastal areas, and could expose six to 25 million people in Northern Africa to flooding.

Many of these areas, including Algeria, Morocco, Djibouti, Lebanon, and Yemen have designed Disaster Risk Management Plans to increase resilience in their cities in preparation for oncoming natural disasters. However, many of the MENA countries are actively involved in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) whose economies are heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry. The leaders of OPEC generally admit that climate change is real but are quick to dismiss efforts to regulate fossil fuels. They view the push against oil in international negotiations as an unfair handicap against their industries and generally fight against any attempt to regulate or shrink the fossil fuel market. Despite the fact that MENA will suffer some of the worst effects of climate change (taking into account desertification as well as flooding), it seems unlikely that the area will diverge from fossil fuels at any point in the foreseeable future.

Many parts of South America, including Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil along with almost every country in Southeast Asia, are also at some of the highest risks of flooding in the world. Unlike the MENA region, few of these countries fight with the same vigor to support the fossil fuel industry, with the exception of Venezuela, the only non-MENA member of OPEC. However, many will still fight for their personal rights to use fossil fuel projects in the name of internal development since the majority of the burden of climate change was caused by the developed world. The issue of flooding is further exacerbated by the fact that several of the countries in these regions have resource extraction economies that rely on deforestation, which steadily shrinks their natural riparian protection from rising sea levels.

Perhaps the worst example of a disenfranchised flood-vulnerable country is the Maldives, both one of the poorest and the lowest lying island nations in the world. As sea levels continue to rise, the Maldives will be one of the first countries to become completely inundated, despite the fact that as a developing country it has contributed a very small percentage of the emissions that have contributed to climate change. The Maldives’ first ever democratically elected leader, Mohamed Nasheed, committed his country to achieving 100 percent renewable energy and made the Maldives the very first country to sign onto the Kyoto Protocol. He encouraged a massive reforestation program along the beaches to prevent soil erosion and act as a riparian barrier from flooding. He also initiated litter cleanup programs and special protection for the coastal reefs that protect the nation’s boundaries.

The actions of a small country like the Maldives will help give it better protection but will do little to fight climate change without the commitment of larger nations in North America and the European Union to reduce emissions. While the Maldives’ commitment to clean energy would have had a small impact on global emissions, they stood as an important symbol of forward progress, especially to other vulnerable island states. However, in January, Mohammed Nasheed was overthrown and imprisoned after allegedly ordering the arrest of a judge. The brother of the previous dictator rose to power and has undone all of Nasheed’s efforts, promising to tear up every tree he had planted. The Maldives’ high level of vulnerability combined with its new lack of a flood adaptation policies places it at extreme risk from sea level rise and within 100 years the island is projected to be uninhabitable.

Conclusion

Rising sea levels are a problem that will affect countless areas, both in the developing and the developed world. The exact decisions that governments will make heavily depend upon their political affiliation, what is geographically possible, and how much funding they can reasonably allocate to combating flooding. Much of this means that the poorest areas of the world are disproportionately affected because they neither have the resources nor the political organization needed to address these problems. Furthermore, they may have economies based on resource extraction industries, which further exacerbate their vulnerability.

Globally, considerable resources have been dedicated to flood prevention, but little commitment has been made to abating fossil fuels in the name of halting sea level rise. This is largely because it’s extremely difficult to establish federal and international policy on climate change, so often policy changes happen on a more local level. Because these decisions are made by smaller, more vulnerable entities instead of larger international organizations, these areas will often settle for mitigation policy instead of prevention based, emissions reductions policy. However, as long as climate change continues, then the root of the problem will continue to exist and sea levels will continue to rise. At the current rate, several areas around the world, including the Maldives, will inevitably become uninhabitable and unless large-scale changes in global emissions are made, more and more countries will suffer the same fate.

Resources

The Atlantic: Is Miami Beach Doomed?

BBC: Former President Mohammed Nasheed Allowed Foreign Trip

BBC: Maldives: Paradise Soon to be Lost

Climate Central: New Analysis Shows Global Exposure to Sea Level Rise

Daily News: New York will fund $100M Flood Protection Project to Shield Lower Manhattan from Major Storms

Energy Information Administration: Florida Profile Overview

European Commission: Flood Risk in Europe: Analysis of Exposure in 13 Countries

Floodlist: Thousands Displaced by Flooding Rivers in Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina

Florida State University: Florida’s Renewable Energy Future Depends on Incentives for Renewables

Green Biz: New York’s Plan to Reach 50 percent Renewable Energy

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: European Flood Risk Could Double by 2050

Karen and Clark Company: Most Vulnerable Cities to Storm Surge Flooding

The Lens: New Orleans Flood Protection System: Stronger than Ever, Weaker than it was Supposed to be

Live Science: The 20 Cities Most Vulnerable to Flooding

Nation of Change: Hawaii Enacts Nation’s First 100 Percent Renewable Energy Standard

NASA: Global Climate Change: Sea Level Rise

Nature World News: Climate Change and Sea Level: England, Europe at Risk of Major Sea Level Rise

NCBI: Floods in Southeast Asia: A Health Priority 

The New Yorker: The Siege of Miami

Niels Bohr Institute: Risk of Major Sea Level Rise in Northern Europe

NOLA: Upgraded Metro New Orleans Levees will Greatly Reduce Flooding, Even in 500-Year Storms

NOAA: Tides and Currents

Renewable Energy Action Coalition of Hawaii: Planning Hawaii’s 100 percent Renewable Energy Future

Tech Insider: Hawaii is Harnessing 100 percent Renewable Energy 0 with Active Volcanoes

Time: Why New York City will Be Flooded More Often

USA Today: One Year After Sandy, 9 Devastating Facts

World Bank: Adaptation to Climate Change in the Middle East and North Africa Region

World Bank: Water in the Arab World: From Droughts to floods: Building Resilience Against Extremes

Yale Environment 360: A Plague of Deforestation Sweeps Across Southeast Asia

ZME Science: New Study Highlights Vulnerability of Low Lying Hawaiian Islands

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Rising Tide of Flood Prevention Politics appeared first on Law Street.

Human life has become incredibly dependent on electronic technology. The rate of citizens in the developed world who own cell phones, laptops, and other devices have gone sharply up since 2000 and the electronics industry is currently valued at $2.4 trillion worldwide, second in value only to the oil industry. While the proliferation of electronics in our lives have provided new sources of entertainment, increased information access, and made communication easier, the industry also takes an incredible toll on the planet.

Electronics must be built from resources that are generally found underground, which requires high-intensity mining operations. During production, mechanical devices are treated with a variety of toxic chemicals and at the end of their lifetime, electronics are often shipped to developing countries where they become dangerous sources of hazardous waste. However, much of this happens out of sight of the consumer, making the environmental costs of the electronic industry largely invisible to many parts of the world.

Image courtesy of baselactionnetwork via Flickr

An Overview of the Market

Currently, China is the fastest growing player in the electronics industry, because of a combination of its incredibly low labor manufacturing costs and its lack of domestic environmental regulations. Many Asian exporters, Japan and Hong Kong in particular, have steadily shifted large sections of their electronics markets to China as they find themselves unable to compete with China’s low manufacturing costs (labor costs are about 10 percent lower in China than in Hong Kong and overall production cost savings can range between 35 percent to 75 percent depending on the product). Over the years, China has also instituted several supply embargoes on countries that don’t actively participate in trade with Chinese electronic products. The electronics industry continues to grow  stronger and stronger in China as the country makes it a more central part of its economy.

Furthermore, the production of electronics is reliant upon 17 rare earth metals (REMs) and access to these metals strongly impacts a country’s ability to grow within the industry. China currently controls between 90 and 95 percent  of the planet’s rare earth metals, giving it a huge advantage within the market. Some may misinterpret China’s control over the industry to mean that 90 percent of rare earth metals are found in Chinese land. However, only about one-third of the world’s REMs, most notably dysprosium and neodymium, can actually be mined in mainland China, although the level of mining in China is still incredibly high. What is actually true is that China is responsible for the production of 95 percent of the rare earth metals worldwide; a large portion of Chinese mining and processing happens in the developing world, most notably in Central Africa, which has a number of REMs that can’t be found anywhere else.

Before we delve into the mining process, it should also be noted that while China controls a huge section of the rare earth industry, other countries do have large reserves on their mainlands. This prevents China from having a complete monopoly on the industry and from shouldering all the responsibility when it comes to global pollution. Australia, for instance, controls the vast majority of tantalum, which is crucial for almost every single electronic device.

The Environmental Impacts of Mining

Without rare earth minerals, electronics cannot be produced. However, REMs are buried underground and require high-intensity mining operations for extraction. Mining inevitably creates a huge burden on the local environment, both in terms of groundwater and air pollution. The mineral extraction process generates an incredible amount of waste–80 tons of waste is produced from just one ounce of gold–and much of this waste, including toxic metals, cyanide, and various acids, ends up in the earth and the groundwater of the surrounding area. This can completely contaminate the aquifers where mining takes place, both causing large-scale biodiversity loss and devastating effects on local communities that lose their source of drinking water. The same processes release large amounts of dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere and cause staggeringly high rates of respiratory illness in miners.

Air Pollution from mining isn’t just localized to the immediate area; gold mining, for instance, is a leading source of airborne mercury in the United States after coal-fired power plants. These problems are further compounded by the fact that most mining happens in developing countries where environmental regulations are minimal and poor communities are unlikely to receive government protection.

Rare earth mineral mining is also uniquely hazardous to the environment because it has a more complex extraction process than common minerals do. REMs must be physically removed from the earth, then crushed and milled into dust form. They then undergo a flotation stage to separate the material bastnaesite from the rubble mixture. The isolated mineral bastnaesite is then treated with acids, oxides, and a variety of other solvents to corrode away the common minerals. What is left is the rare earth minerals in their crude form, which must be further purified and then combined into alloys to reach commercial standards.

This 10-day process can be contrasted to gold, which only requires a one-step separation process, to illustrate how complex the process of extraction and production is for rare earth minerals. Due to this added complexity and the nature of the acids used in the refinement, there is a much higher potential for chemical pollution to surrounding areas with REMs as compared to other mineral extractions.

The Social Impacts of Mining

The effects of the mining industry on the environment are significant, but the social influence of the industry has also been highly disruptive. While the majority of Rare Earth Mineral production happens in China, Africa has the largest or second largest reserves of several crucial REMs and other common metals, including bauxite, cobalt, industrial diamonds, manganese, phosphate rock, soda ash, vermiculite, zirconium and several platinum metal groups.

South Africa and Zimbabwe together make up the majority of the world’s platinum metal group deposits and South Africa possesses every single rare earth metal except Bauxite and crude oil, which makes it work well as a trading partner with the Bauxite rich nation of China. However, African countries domestically control a very small share of the profits of these reserves, and the entire continent on average only receives about 15 percent of global exploration, expenditure, and mining investment. The bulk of the industry’s profits goes to foreign mining companies, which have played a role on the continent in some way, shape, or form since the 1800s, although their share has steadily decreased somewhat in the past 20 years. Furthermore, government corruption in many of the mineral-rich African nations has funneled large percentages of the funds from the mining industry away from domestic development, depriving many areas of the supposed benefits of this trade relationship.

In the worst case scenario, the mining industry has helped to fuel conflict in some of the least stable countries in Central Africa. The most serious case of this is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where copper, cobalt, and tantalum reserves are controlled and leased to China by a variety of different militia groups. The funds from these mining operations are used by both the government and the rebel forces to finance the weapons and supplies used in the D.R.C.’s ongoing Civil War, which has taken over 5 million lives. While the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation strongly dissuaded many mining companies from dealing in “conflict minerals” and financing the warfare, rare earth trade continues to move in and out of the area, especially with China.

Disposal and its Consequences

After extraction, rare earth metals are manufactured into complete products and must be moved over extensive supply chains and across national borders to reach consumers (this has its own burden of CO2 emissions, as does any product involved in international trade). On the other side of extraction is disposal, when the technology is finally thrown away. This happens faster than would be necessary because of product obsolescence, which often involves designing products that break within a few years so a new one must be purchased, and perceived obsolescence, which is a marketing device used to make consumers believe they need newer, better products.

The average life cycle of a cell phone, for instance, is only 18 months. Both product obsolescence and perceived obsolescence are used to fuel the electronics business by ensuring that consumers buy new products regularly, but they cause large shares of electronics to be thrown away every year that could be designed and marketed to have much longer lifetimes.

While all waste comes with an environmental burden, electronic waste, or e-waste, is particularly dangerous to the environment because of its unique components. Rare earth metals themselves can be to the environment, but electronics are also produced with a number of chemicals that are considered extremely hazardous, such as arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium and polybrominated flame retardants. More than 20 million tons of e-waste are generated each year, with 3.4 million tons coming from the United States alone. Many electronics are difficult to recycle by nature of their design and the chemicals that compose them, which means that more than 60 percent of electronic products have to be disposed of by traditional methods.

E-waste that isn’t recycled and stays in the country where it was purchased, often ending up in landfills where chemicals can leach into local groundwater. Alternatively, e-waste may be burned in incinerators, despite the fact that this releases dioxin, which is one of the most toxic known substances in the world. E-waste that is recycled, however, isn’t generally recycled but rather shipped to developing countries, which will often allow the import of old electronics. Some degree of this is actually recycled and repaired, but huge quantities become pure waste, accumulating in piles that are even less contained than landfills in the developed world. This leads to hazardous chemicals leaching out rapidly and polluting the ground and waterways of the areas they’re dumped in.

The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and Their Disposal was held in 1989 and entered into force in 1992. The primary purpose of the convention to address the mass dumping of waste from the developed to the developing world. The convention declared that any waste that could be categorized as flammable, explosive, poisonous, toxic, ecotoxic, corrosive of infectious must be disposed of as close as possible to where it was used and in the most environmentally friendly manner. In 1995, an amendment was added that banned the shipment of e-waste and other hazardous waste to the developing world for final disposal. However, the amendment did not ban the same shipment as long as the developing country was in agreement and the purpose of the shipment was recycling and not just disposal. Of course, in reality this leaves room for difference of interpretation and many developing countries willingly accept e-waste; what happens after it is dumped is generally difficult for the Basel Convention to track or regulate with any certainty.

Proponents of exporting e-waste to the developing world argue that it’s a beneficial arrangement in that it gives poorer nations access to repairable technology and metal materials. The recycling industry abroad also provides jobs and income for residents, who often live in the poorest parts of the Africa and Asia and depend on the industry for their livelihoods. Foreign exports also provide access to markets for recycled materials that simply don’t exist in developed countries, arguably ensuring that as little e-waste as possible is actually wasted.

However, it’s also true that the recycling processes abroad are incredibly unsafe for the humans who conduct them, which is why developed countries rarely allow such processes to take place domestically.  The disposal methods are often crude and dangerous and can involve burning circuit boards to isolate the lead material, burning the plastic off wires in order to access copper, and dissolving heavy metals in acids over fresh water. These operations often take place in residential areas and are performed with little to no safety equipment.

Image courtesy of baselactionnetwork via Flickr

Conclusion

The electronics industry has a significant impact on the environment at several important steps in its life cycle. Resource extraction through mining places a considerable burden on groundwater and the atmosphere, especially because most areas where REM mining takes place have very little environmental regulatory oversight. Furthermore, the mining industry can have negative social impacts on unstable countries where government corruption and internal conflict is high. The problem is compounded by the relevance of the mining industry to the economies of many African countries, which both need the revenue and have the ambition of furthering their national resource control to become key players in the electronics industry themselves.

At the end of the life of an electronic device, its disposal poses yet another danger to the environment because of the number of dangerous chemicals that go into each product. Historically, the bulk of the burden of e-waste is felt in the developing world where the waste is dumped. Dangerous chemicals enter the surrounding environment and the workers charged with disposal expose themselves to terrible health risks. While the Basel Convention has had an important influence on fighting international dumping, it’s still practiced widely and e-waste is still a huge problem globally.

Unfortunately, both the problems of extraction and disposal are largely outside of the view of the consumer, giving the issue little salience among most participants in the electronics industry. As the second most valuable industry on earth, the electronics market is certainly not going to slow down anytime in the near future, until perhaps REMs become a truly scarce resource. Since the environmental burdens of electronics are necessary to increase industry profits and the vast majority of the consumer base does not know or care about these burdens, it’s difficult to say whether or not effective solutions to these will eventually be produced.

Resources

African Compass International: Rare Earth Elements 101

Australian Atlas of Mineral Resources, Mines & Processing Centres: Tantalum

The Economist: Planet of the Phones

Electronics Take Back: Responsible Recycling vs. Global Dumping

Electronics Take Back: Where’s the Harm – From Material Extraction?

Eugene Becker, USEF: Mining and Exploitation of Rare Earth Elements in Africa as an Engagement Strategy in US Africa Command

Forbes: China’s Rare Earth Monopoly Needn’t put a Electronics Stranglehold on America

Forbes: What 60 Minutes got Wrong about Rare Earths and China

Geology News and Information: REE – Rare Earth Metals and their Uses

IISD: A Brief Introduction to the Basel Convention

I Fix It: The Problem With E-Waste

The National Geographic: Conflict Minerals

Pew Research Center: Mobile Fact Sheet

Pew Research Center: Device Ownership Over Time

Rare Element Resources: Rare Earth Elements

Statista: Leading Countries in the Electronics Industry in 2012, Based on Market Size (in Billion Euros)

World Health Organization: Electronic Waste

World’s Top Exports: World’s Top Export Products

WTEC: China’s Electronics Industry

World’s Richest Countries: Top Electronics Producers

Yahoo Finance: Consumer Electronics to Reach $289 billion by 2014

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Invisible Burden of Electronics appeared first on Law Street.

When discussing the clean energy revolution, the southern American states are rarely mentioned as progressive leaders. Texas in particular has a longstanding reputation for supporting the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Texas politicians fiercely deny the scientific validity of climate change and the state is home to the headquarters of some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, such as Exxon Mobile and ConocoPhillips.

However, the Lone Star State actually has a greater Installed Wind Capacity than any other state in the United States. How did this paradox occur?

The Wind Capital of the United States

The proliferation of wind energy in Texas is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 2001, Texas received only 1 percent of its energy from wind. Only 15 years later, wind provides almost 10 percent of the state’s energy and powers over 3.6 million homes. Throughout the state there are 17,713 MW of installed wind capacity; to demonstrate the significance of this number, the second place state, Idaho, only has 6,212 MW and the 3rd place state, California, only has 6,108 MW. The irony behind these numbers is that areas such as California and the North Eastern states have all made political commitments to pursue renewable energy installations, yet they trail far behind one of the most fossil fuel friendly states in the nation when it comes to wind energy. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, and both of its senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, all deny climate change, along with 16 of the state’s 36 congressional representatives. The state has also historically been heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry; in 2014 Texas was the leading producer of crude oil and natural gas.

The Evolution of Renewables in Texas

The policy shift in Texas toward wind can be traced back to 1999 when the state legislature narrowly passed the first Renewable Electricity Standard. To the surprise of many, wind energy turned out to be a reliable and affordable source of electricity in the areas where it was first implemented. Following the success of their first law, the legislature updated it in 2005 to dramatically increase renewables throughout the state. The 2005 Renewable Electricity Standard forced the Public Utility Commission to create Competition Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ), which designated areas in the wind heavy, rural north of Texas for wind farms to be built. The CREZ also created a fund to build gigantic transmission lines connecting these wind farms to the highly populated urban areas of lower Eastern Texas.

To better understand the success of wind, it may be helpful to look at why other renewables, such as solar and hydro, haven’t gained anywhere near as much traction. One of the biggest problems with renewable energy is that it has difficulties matching energy demand. Hydroelectricity will provide fairly consistent power day and night, but solar can only generate electricity during the day, meaning solar panels stop being able to provide energy when the sun goes down. The ideal solution to this may come from advances in energy storage systems, but as of now most battery systems are underdeveloped and simply not capable of handling the amount of energy that would need to be stored for a highly populated area.

The power output of a wind turbine depends completely on the strength of the wind as it blows throughout the day–although its highest output is generally at night–which can be a serious problem in regions with lower wind potential and more fluctuating wind patterns. However, the geographically even terrain of rural Texas (along with the entire vertical band in the center of the United States) has some of the highest wind potential in the entire nation, making wind farms a highly effective technology for the state. While the northeastern states and California have all made political commitments to renewables and are all actively interested in wind energy, their placement on the more mountainous edges of the country means that they have dramatically less access to wind potential.

Interestingly enough, if you look just beyond the U.S. coasts there’s incredibly high potential for offshore wind energy. There has in fact been a growing interest in offshore wind in recent years, especially in the coastal northeastern states, but as of yet there hasn’t been a single offshore wind farm successfully implemented in the United States. This is due to offshore wind’s exceptionally high costs and difficult permitting process, along with high levels of community opposition, especially from beachfront property owners and fisherman.

An unfortunate fact of renewable technology is that its performance is largely dependent on where you want to install its source. While other states may be committed to the environment, (or at least to domestically available energy and protection from future CO2 regulations) it will generally be more cost effective to install wind turbines in the geographical center of the United States than on the outskirts. The 1999 and 2005 Renewable Electricity Standards have been opposed a number of times over the years by fossil fuel interests. A notable example is the Heartland Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2013 Electricity Freedom Act, a model bill circulated among state legislators seeking to scale back renewable energy standards in every state. However, a majority of Texas state legislators have voted against these attacks for 16 years, arguing that the wind has created a reliable domestic source of energy, lowered utility rates, and created jobs throughout the state.

“Iowa Wind Turbines” courtesy of Theodore Scott via Flickr

Regulatory Barriers to Renewables

It’s also important to understand that implementing renewable energy is rarely as easy as being a pro-clean energy state. Texas is in a unique situation when it comes to its energy infrastructure and, as a result, it faces fewer technical barriers than the rest of the U.S. when it comes to renewables. The U.S. energy grid is split into three different sections: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. The Eastern and Western Interconnections each cover about half of the country as divided by the Rocky Mountains, and each connects the states on its respective side with transmission cables that span entire regions. However, the Texas Interconnection was built completely isolated from the rest of the country. The vast majority of the state has its own grid, called the Energy Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, while the upper panhandle and El Paso have their own, smaller grid operators.

The independent nature of the Texas Interconnection is part of a long-standing battle to achieve independence from federal regulations. The 1935 Federal Power Act gave the Federal Power Commission regulatory oversight over all interstate electricity sales, so Texas avoided these regulations by designing its grid so that none of the power lines crossed state boundaries. While Texas does currently have two connections to the Eastern Grid and three connections to the Mexican grid, ERCOT has to this day managed to remain outside of Federal regulation.

This has a significant impact on the development and growth of energy within the state. Because the other 47 mainland states all exist on larger interconnections, each must undergo highly complex permitting systems if they desire to build a wind farm. A project will need to obtain permits from their municipal and state governments, but also from a number of outside entities. Those entities include its region’s Independent System Operator, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Forest Service, the Interstate Highway System, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration–which is concerned with any structure over 200 feet tall that might obstruct planes–and many, many more. There are countless additional permits that any given project may also need to obtain based on its proximity to a wetland, the protected environment of a certain species, a national park or other form of federally owned land, or if the turbines could in some way interfere with the migratory patterns of birds.

Because the Texan grid is independent of the rest of the country, developers can avoid many of these national regulatory obstacles. Furthermore, even within the state, the permitting process is extremely streamlined. State environmental organizations, such as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, do not have oversight on wind farm projects that they would in other states. State, county, and local governments also have no regulatory power when it comes to wind siting; only the landowner and the developer are allowed to make a decision about where a wind farm is built. Texas’s incredibly deregulated electrical market makes it much easier to build a wind farm within the state than anywhere else in the country.

“All Texas” courtesy of Kevin Dooley via Flickr

The Current Political Context

In April 2015, the Texas senate voted 21 to 20 on Senate Bill 931 to end the state’s Renewable Energy Portfolio, both removing the state’s target Renewable Energy Goal and ending the Competitive Energy Zone initiative. The bill is currently pending in the state House of Representatives where a final decision will be made on Texas’ Renewable Energy Portfolio. While many environmentalists see the vote as a major loss to the clean energy movement, Texas is already firmly set on its path toward increasing wind energy. The 1999 and 2005 Renewable Electricity Standards have allowed the industry to grow so dramatically that Texas has far surpassed its original renewable energy goal of 500 MW by 2025 and all of the transmission lines connecting cities to wind farms have already been constructed, making the Senate Bill 931 a largely symbolic victory for fossil fuel companies.

On December 20, 2015, wind turbines generated a record high of 40 percent of Texas’s energy for 17 hours of the day during a low-pressure wind front. This milestone not only indicates the extreme potential of wind within the region but also proves that the newly built transmission lines are capable of handling almost an entire day’s worth of wind energy without malfunction, contrary to the arguments of many fossil fuel advocates.

If Senate Bill 931 becomes law then it may have some impact on future state support of the wind industry; it also comes at an inconvenient time when Texas may have to further reduce its CO2 emissions under Obama’s Clean Power Plan. However, renewables are currently projected to continue to grow in Texas regardless of state support. Currently, wind energy projects constitute 70 percent of all new energy capacity in the state and ERCOT projects that wind will generate another 8600 MW by 2024. As of now, it looks like Texas will continue to remain a major player in the wind energy industry.

Conclusion

Texas has managed to become the nation’s leader in wind energy for two main reasons. The first of these reasons is that the center of America has incredibly high wind potential and Texas reaps the benefits of this in the northern section of the state. The second major reason is that there are fewer regulatory obstacles to building a wind farm in Texas than in the rest of the country, both because Texas exists on its own grid and because the state’s public agencies have very little control over private development. Despite the fact that Texas is led by many politicians who publicly oppose climate change and the fact that the state contributes a huge share of U.S. fossil fuel production, renewable energy still prospers in Texas because it is available, cheap, and easy to implement. While the proliferation of renewables in Texas is certainly positive, the fact that this success is reliant on an unorthodox combination of factors also puts into focus how difficult it is for the rest of the U.S., even for openly pro-environmental states, to achieve the same degree of success.

References

American Wind Energy Association: U.S. Wind Energy State Facts

CNN: Billionaire Brothers Give Cruz Super Pac $15 million

The Desert Sun: In Texas, Different Ideas on Fossil Fuels, Renewables

George Washington Journal of Energy & Environmental Law: Why is Texas the Leading State for Wind Power?

Houston Chronicle: Renewable Energy v. Fossil Fuel

The Atlantic: How Green Energy Won Out over Fossil Fuels in a Red State

National Energy Renewable Laboratory: Wind Maps

Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability: Learn More about Interconnections

Oil and Gas: Texas Oil and Gas Companies

The State of Texas; Texas Wide Open for Business: The Texas Renewable Energy Industry

Texas Tribune: Senate Votes to end Renewable Energy Programs

Texas Tribune: Why Does Texas Have its Own Power Grid?

Think Progress: How Texas Politicians are Ignoring the Climate Change that Could Hurt their State’s Economy

Scientific American: Wind Provided 40 percent of Texas’s Electricity for 17 Hours One Windy Day in December

State Energy Conservation Office: Texas Renewable Energy Resource Assesment 2008: Wind Energy

Windustry: Permitting Basics

Wind Energy Transmission Texas, LLC: Our History

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Mystery of Wind Energy in Texas appeared first on Law Street.

The United States for the first time in history promised to cut its carbon dioxide emissions when it joined the Paris Agreement. In order to meet those targets, the Obama Administration created the Clean Power Plan to reduce emissions and move American states toward cleaner energy sources. However, the Clean Power Plan is currently being challenged in the Supreme Court and it’s unclear whether or not the U.S. government will be able to make its promises a reality. Read on to learn more about the past, present, and potential future of federal pollution regulation in the United States.

The Current Political Context

Currently, the United States has the second highest rate of carbon dioxide emissions in the world, surpassed only by China. The United States has also historically avoided participating in international climate negotiations and is one of  a small number of developed nations that chose not to ratify the Kyoto Convention. While both industrialized and developing countries around the world have joined onto the convention over the past two decades and made pledges to reduce their emissions, the United States has struggled to make national commitments to reduce its own emissions. This is, in part, because American fossil fuel companies have been able to exert a great deal of influence on political decisions through lobbying and because Congress is divided on whether or not climate change is even scientifically valid.

COP21, the 21st Conference of Parties for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, marked the first time that the United States made a national pledge to reduce its emissions. However, while the COP21 was hailed as an international victory, it remains unclear if America can actually follow through on its commitments. U.S. policymakers remain divided on the issue of climate change and many believe that the government’s attempts to regulate fossil fuel usage directly interfere with the economy. As of February, the Clean Power Plan, with which the EPA began strictly regulating CO2 emissions from power plants, has been stayed by the Supreme Court and risks being ruled unconstitutional. The United States may have made an international commitment to reduce emissions, but on a domestic level, is it ready for such a change to take place?

A Brief history of Climate Change Negotiations

The first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also known as the Kyoto Protocol, was held on December 11, 1997. The convention entered into force on February 16, 2005–90 days after it was ratified by 55 nations emitting at least 55 percent of the CO2 emissions in 1990. The protocol required industrialized countries to make pledges to reduce their emissions by 5 percent before 2012.

Developing nations weren’t required to make pledges in the first incarnation of the Kyoto Protocol, although many did pledge to use aid from the U.N. and World Bank to invest in renewable energy sources. This was decided by the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” meaning that since industrialized countries did the most damage to the environment, they should bear the heaviest burden of fixing it. Likewise, since dramatically reducing emissions would handicap growth in developing nations, it’s viewed as unfair to expect them to make the same level of commitment.

The United States did sign onto the Kyoto Protocol but it did not ratify the convention, meaning essentially that it gave its public support but refused to individually reduce its emissions. Decisions not to make emissions pledges from some major nations such as the United States, Canada, and Russia–although Russia did eventually agree to ratify the convention in 2004–are often cited by smaller countries as justification to not participate as well.

“High-level ministerial roundtable under the Kyoto Protocol” courtesy of UNclimatechange via Flickr

In 2012, following the end of the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period, another conference was held to establish new international pledges. The second conference produced the Doha Amendment, which gathered binding emissions reduction commitments from much of the industrialized world, including the entirety of the European Union and 37 other developed countries. Many developing countries ratified the amendment and made their own commitments, but their participation was on a non-binding basis.

In December 2015, COP21 was held in Paris and attended by representatives from 188 different countries, making it one of the largest international conferences in history. Rather than set specific reduction targets, COP21 let each participating country decide its own emission reduction plan with the ultimate goal of keeping global warming from raising the earth’s temperature by more than 2 degrees Celsius. COP21 was successful in bringing together almost every country on earth to participate in the conference, including a wide range of developing countries and many of the world’s top polluters, such as China, India, Indonesia, and the United States. The United States pledged to reduce its emissions between 26 and 28 percent by 2025, focusing primarily on carbon dioxide but also on methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, and nitrogen trifluoride.

The Clean Air Act and the EPA’s Role in Emissions Regulations

While COP21 marks the first time that the United States made an international commitment to reduce its emissions, the U.S. government has exercised power internally to regulate emissions since Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1973. The Clean Air Act gave the EPA the power to create National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for six hazardous air pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead. Each state was required to design a State Implementation Plan (SIP) to upgrade and regulate industrial air polluters in order to meet these NAAQS. The act was amended in 1977 and in 1990, both of which were made to redesign the NAAQS and extend the deadlines for states that failed to reach their goals. The 1990 amendment also set new standards for technology upgrades for large-scale, stationary polluters.

The Clean Air Act addressed both stationary and mobile sources of pollution: power plants were forced to upgrade their technology and install filters on smokestacks and the auto industry was forced to redesign its engines and cars to reduce effects of harmful chemicals released into the atmosphere as well as meet average miles-per-gallon efficiency standards. The act has made a significant impact on air quality in the United States, reducing smog by more than 25 percent since 1990, lead pollution by 92 percent, sulfur dioxide by 71 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 46 percent, and ending the production and distribution of many chemicals that adversely affect the ozone layer.

However, while the Clean Air Act has existed for 43 years, its use to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a recent development. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled  in Massachusetts v. the EPA that if it could be scientifically proven that greenhouse gas emissions were dangerous to human health, then it would be the EPA’s responsibility to regulate them. Only two years later, in 2009, scientific evidence proved both that GHGs were harmful to the human respiratory system and that an increase in heat waves due to global warming could be dangerous, especially for the elderly and infirm.

“Smokestack” courtesy of Dean Hochman via Flickr

The Clean Power Plan Explained

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Massachusetts v. the EPA gave the EPA the power to use the Clean Air Act as a viable policy tool to combat climate change and paved the way for the creation of the Clean Power Plan. The United States’ greenhouse gas emissions can be broken down into five major categories: 31 percent comes from electricity generation (also referred to as the power sector), 27 percent from transportation, 21 percent from industry, 12 percent from commercial and residential sources, and 9 percent from agriculture.

If the United States is to successfully reduce emissions by its target of 26 to 28 percent, a substantial amount of those reductions will have to come from the power sector, which contributes the largest share of greenhouse gasses and is also likely where the government can exert the most regulatory control. This has been the guiding logic behind the creation of the Obama Administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan.

The Clean Power Plan mandates that power plants across the United States reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 32 percent by 2030. The plan works differently on a state-by-state basis according to the energy mix used in each state, how efficient and environmentally friendly the current power plants are, and how effective a variety of traditional emission reduction tools can be in the context of the first two factors. The different emissions reductions targets vary widely because of these variables. For example, Montana is required to reduce its emissions by 47 percent while a few states aren’t required to make any changes because they don’t have power plants that the plan applies to. The EPA’s job is only to set these reduction targets; each state is allowed to design its own plan to meet its target. The only condition is that the plans must be submitted by September 1, or the EPA will impose a federal plan on states that failed to create their own.

Each state may choose to pursue the emissions reductions either through rate-based methods, which focus on reducing the amount of carbon emitted per unit of energy; or through mass-based methods, which focus on reducing the overall number of tons of carbon emitted. Regardless of their method of choice, the EPA offers four basic building blocks to aid the construction of each state’s plans: making existing coal plants more efficient; using existing gas plants more efficiently; increasing renewables and nuclear and increasing end-use energy efficiency. These four principles are not binding constraints but rather general guidelines; each state is expected to create a unique plan.

Legal Challenges

Since the release of the Clean Power Plan, 29 states have attempted to sue the EPA but the majority of these cases were quickly dismissed. But in January, one case, West Virginia v. the EPA, may be on its way to the Supreme Court. While the D.C. circuit court initially plans to review the case in June, on February 9 the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to issue a stay to stop the Clean Power Plan’s implementation prior to undergoing judicial review. That stay stops the EPA’s regulations until after a court ruling has determined whether they are within the agency’s authority. A ruling against the EPA could effectively cripple the plan’s intended purpose of combating climate change.

Image courtesy of Phil Richards via Flickr

However, on February 24, less than two weeks after the Supreme Court issued the stay, Justice Antonin Scalia passed away. Justice Scalia led the decision to overturn the Clean Power Plan and his death significantly complicates the plan’s legal future. The Supreme Court now seems to be divided 4 to 4 on the issue, but there has been no mention of changing the decision to stay the case. The issue is also further complicated by the GOP’s refusal to hold hearings on the President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.

The looming question now is whether or not the Supreme Court will wait to hear the case until after the 2016 Presidential election and/or the confirmation of a ninth justice. The D.C. Circuit Court is currently scheduled to hear the states’ lawsuit this upcoming summer after which point the Supreme Court will decide whether or not it wants to take up the case. If the court refuses to take up the case or issues a 4-4 split ruling, then the circuit court’s decision will stand. However, legal experts note that the court could delay the case until a new justice joins the bench, which would likely lead to a 5-4 decision based on the ideological leaning of the ninth justice.

So What will Happen in the Meantime?

The Clean Power Plan is critical to the United States’ ability to fulfill its COP21 commitments. However, the fact that the plan is currently pending a court ruling does not mean that it failed. Last year, the Clean Power Plan already exerted considerable influence on the American energy systems as states have begun to redesign their energy systems for the future and many power plant operators have already begun retrofitting their plants and designing compliance plans. The primary focus of the Clean Power Plan is to dramatically reduce the use of coal in American energy and that may very well be happening. The implementation of the plan also coincides with a time when we have new access to domestic reserves of natural gas and energy investors have already started to move away from coal toward less expensive forms of energy.

Coal stocks plummeted in 2015 and many plants across America declared bankruptcy. However, this isn’t to say that the Supreme Court decision isn’t important. If the Clean Power Plan is overturned, then a new series of political barriers to regulating emissions may be created.  The decision also sets a dangerous legal precedent, marking the first time the Supreme Court has stayed federal regulations before hearing the case. The EPA’s legal authority to address airborne pollution is the major weapon that gives the United States a real chance to reduce its emissions. If that power is called into question then that may dramatically impede the EPA’s ability to make progress on climate change.

Conclusion

The Clean Power Plan’s emphasis on increasing renewable energy in America is a large part of what makes it an effective weapon against climate change. Coal may still die out on its own, but without the plan in place, it seems likely that energy investors will shift to the more cost efficient natural gas rather than renewable energy. Natural gas releases less CO2 than coal but is still very much a greenhouse gas and a national dependence on methane as an energy source would still result in high levels of GHG emissions.

As long as the Clean Power Plan is in legal limbo it’s difficult to predict what direction American energy will take. Currently, it seems likely that there won’t be a final hearing on the case until after the 2016 election is decided and a new justice is confirmed by the Senate. Whether that new justice ends up being liberal or conservative will most likely make or break the plan and will strongly influence the United States’ ability to meet its Cop21 goals. The next president will also have control over executive branch policy, meaning that he or she could peel back a significant portion of existing regulation or continue President Obama’s efforts and reduce greenhouse gas emissions further.

Resources

The Atlantic: A Legal Win for the E.P.A.

The Atlantic: Will a Reconfigured Supreme Court help Obama’s Clean Power Plan Survive?

The Atlantic: Did the Supreme Court Doom the Paris Climate Change Deal?

The Atlantic: The Supreme Court’s Devastating Decision on Climate Change

CNN: Kyoto Protocol Fast Facts

CNN: Obama: Climate Agreement ‘Best Chance we have to Save the Environment‘

Earth Institute, Columbia University: What is the U.S. Commitment in Paris? 

Environment and Energy Publishing, LLC: Clean Power Plan: A Summary

The EPA.: The Clean Air Act Requirements and History

The EPA: The Clean Power Plan for Existing Power Plants

The EPA: Summary of the Clean Air Act

The Guardian: The Kyoto Protocol is Not Quite Dead

The Hill: Supreme Court Overturns Landmark EPA Air Pollution Law

Inside Climate News: For U.S. and China, World’s Biggest Climate Polluters, It’s Still Business as Usual

Moyers & Company: Here are the 56% of Republicans who Deny Climate Change

NRDC: NRDC Summary of EPA’s Clean Power Plan

United Nations Conference on Climate Change: 188 Countries have Committed to Reducing their Carbon Emissions

United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention: Status of Ratification of the Kyoto Protocol

Union of Concerned Scientists: The Clean Air Act

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Will the United States be Able to Keep its Paris Agreement Commitments? appeared first on Law Street.

The United States is viewed both domestically and internationally as one of the most water secure nations in the world. The 2011 California drought represents one of the first developments to challenge this notion in many years. California’s four-year rain shortage has brought the realization that a community can’t survive without a water source to the attention of many Americans and that the United States isn’t immune to water scarcity. This year’s El Niño finally brought rain to California, but seemingly just as the drought was temporarily broken on the West Coast, media attention fell onto another water-related crisis: Flint, Michigan.

Flint and Beyond

Three years ago Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed Darnell Earley as the Emergency Manager of Flint, giving him complete control over the city’s budget and charged him with saving the city from bankruptcy. In 2014, in a move calculated to save the city millions of dollars, Earley made the executive decision to relocate the city’s drinking source from the distant Lake Huron to the much closer Flint River. While the Flint River may have been more economically convenient, the water was not properly treated with an anti-corrosion chemical to prevent erosion of lead pipes. The water was understood to be toxic from years of being used as a chemical dumping ground by Flint’s now extinct automobile industry, which also made it significantly more corrosive than most sources.

The water looked and smelled unpleasant, and while it wasn’t fully understood at the time the switch was made, water in Flint contained dangerous quantities of lead residue from local pipelines. After the switch, Flint residents experienced hair loss and fell seriously ill, leading them to quickly contact city officials. Earley, the Governor’s office, and the State Health Department were all contacted but largely ignored complaints. It took two entire years before a team of researchers from Virginia Tech did an official study that proved the water was highly toxic. The health consequences of those two years will last a lifetime for the people of Flint, and has rendered the entire community unstable.

Flint serves as a chilling example of how dependent an area and its people are on their water source and marks a shift in national attention toward the idea of water instability in America. The story of the Flint water crisis went viral and has been covered widely since the revelations. In January 2016, Time Magazine published an article on Flint titled, “The Poisoning of an American City,” which was featured on its cover.

Flint became one of just a few nationally-circulated stories of a community experiencing water pollution since before the Clean Water Act was passed and in the months following the Flint crisis, similar stories have been popping up all over the country. On January 23, attention turned to St. Joseph, Louisiana, where the drinking water runs brown from aging and malfunctioning pipelines. Then on February 21, CNN covered a story on Crystal City, Texas where the faucets and showerheads dispense sludge due to sediment buildup in their storage tanks.

A History of Water Legislation in the United States

Many will argue that America is currently experiencing its most water-secure period in history. Prior to the 70s, the United States had essentially no regulation for pollution and chemical dumping was widely practiced by the industrial sector. In the late 60s only about one-third of U.S. waters were considered safe to swim in and fish from. According to a 1970 report from Bureau of Water Hygiene, a sample of American tap water supplies found that 36 percent exceeded the limits of established drinking water standards. It required several major tragedies to change the political attitude toward water as a public health issue, including toxic spills and oil leaks. Perhaps the most memorable of these events happened in 1969 in Cleveland when the Cuyahoga River lit on fire due to its high quantity of flammable waste. The image of a burning river emblazoned Time Magazine and led to a national outcry.

America’s first water-related piece of legislation was the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, which was followed by five additional bills written between 1956 and 1970. In 1972, in response to major pollution disasters, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was revised and expanded in order to give it a much larger scope of control. The newly dubbed Clean Water Act of 1972 was passed with bipartisan support and in spite of a veto from President Nixon, representing the most influential piece of water-related legislation in American history.

While previous water quality bills ultimately held the states responsible for interpretation and enforcement, the Clean Water Act marked a departure from this line of thinking–giving the federal government direct authority to regulate water quality. The act gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to set industrial wastewater standards, made it illegal for individuals to dump waste in navigable waters, and forced industrial and municipal facilities to obtain permits to discharge their waste. These permits could also be revoked–effectively shutting down a business if the discharges were found to exceed EPA standards. Industries across America were forced to upgrade their technology in order to generate smaller waste streams and use a secondary treatment on the waste that they did create. The Clean Water Act targeted the largest sources of pollution–toxic waste dumping, oil spills, and large sewage leaks–using better technology as the primary solution.

The Clean Water Act was amended three times during the 70s and 80s to strengthen its ability to regulate waste. The EPA’s power was further increased by the Ocean Dumping Act in 1972 and the Safe Drinking Act in 1974. These efforts had a huge influence on reducing large scale pollution and has successfully increased the percentage of swimmable and fishable waters in the United States from one-third to almost 60 percent, as well as dramatically decreasing the load of contaminants in drinking water across the nation.

So Where Are We Now?

While considerable progress has been made, the Clean Water Act was written with the goal of making the United States’ waters swimmable and fishable by 1983. However, in 2016 the EPA has admitted that over 40 percent of U.S. waterways don’t meet national standards. While regulations have significantly improved, they’ve failed to protect many communities from pollution. Flint, Crystal City, and St. Joseph are extreme examples of water sources gone wrong, but they’re far from unique. Citizens across the country are regularly exposed to dangerous chemicals through the drinking water. The Natural Resource Defense Council studied major cities all across the United States and found that many of them had tap water that contained a number of contaminants. The most common and deadly of these contaminants were lead, pathogens, arsenic, radon, and perchlorate rocket fuel.

The D.C.-based Environmental Working Group conducted a similar study that took place over the course of five years, testing for 316 different contaminants in water supplied to 48,000 communities throughout the country. They found the same trend of pollutants appeared regularly in drinking water throughout the country, especially in concentrated urban areas. They ranked different communities on the percentage of chemicals found in the water, the number of different chemicals present, and the level of danger of each individual community.

Both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group found that some of the most severely polluted areas in the U.S. were major cities, including San Diego, Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Albuquerque, Houston, and Denver, all of which had a number of dangerous contaminants in their drinking water exceeding the EPA’s safe limits. Across the nation, cities have been using inaccurate water testing practices, withholding information from their citizens, and completely bypassing EPA guidelines.

“Sewage Contaminated Water” courtesy of Tony Webster via Flickr

Obstacles to Keeping Water Clean

Regulating the discharges of America’s entire industrial and municipal sectors is a task of momentous proportions and many dangerous chemicals don’t specifically have regulations attached to them. As such, many companies can get away with dumping illegally. If an industry is particularly critical to the economy of an area, it may have a blind eye turned to its actions, at least from local governments. Furthermore, there are also cases like Flint where much of the damage had already been done. The auto industry responsible for the majority of the dumping in the Flint River, with the exception of Flint Motors, died out long ago. All the companies that could now be fined or forced to pay for the cleanup have gone bankrupt.

There are also several legal loopholes that certain industries can use to legally pollute groundwater. Perhaps the most significant of these is the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which allocated federal subsidies to different energy sources with the majority of the funds going to the fossil fuel industry. However, beyond covering subsidies, the act also gave hydraulic fracturing companies the privilege to legally inject water based pumps into the ground without publicly releasing the chemicals used in the underground pumping process. This became known as the Halliburton Loophole, due to the fact that the Energy Policy Act was designed by a team directed by Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of Halliburton.

A large part of the problem is also that the Clean Water Act regulates pollution that comes from point sources, or identifiable and quantifiable streams of pollution, such as oil leaks or sewage streams. However, up to 50 percent of America’s pollution is estimated to come from non-point sources, which are widespread and difficult to track or control. Pollution can often enter water sources simply by getting carried along with rainwater. Non-point sources include animal feces, particularly from livestock and pets (whose feces contain different, more harmful bacteria and pathogens as a result of their unique diets); nitrogen and phosphorus from lawn fertilizers; and agricultural pesticides, dirt, general sediments, and rock salt; the leaking residue of aging septic tanks; and numerous other examples. Aging and deteriorating piping systems can also transport contaminants directly to your home as water moves through them.

The problem is not just with water pollution but also with excessive over-withdrawal from water sources. A body of drinking water is restored naturally with rainfall that runs–both as surface water and groundwater–into lakes, ponds, and reservoirs. However, if a community continuously withdraws water at a faster rate than the watershed can restore it, the level of accessible drinking water will lower and lower until the body of water is completely undrinkable. This problem is seen at its worst in highly populated urban areas and tourist destinations where large water withdrawals are necessary to sustain the community.

Major American waterways such as the Colorado River and Lake Mead, both of which provide water to tens of millions of people, are at risk of drying up within the next few decades. Long-term water use is often not taken into account by city planners; for instance, Los Angeles and Las Vegas are currently America’s two fastest growing cities and both are built on literal deserts. El Niño’s unorthodox rain patterns have brought temporary relief to these areas, but the pattern of dry, arid weather will eventually resume and the California drought shows every sign of resurfacing. These problems are also not limited to the West–40 out of 50 states are currently predicted to have one or more regions that will experience water shortage within the decade.

Recent Policy Developments

The most relevant recent water-related policy development happened in 2014 when the Obama Administration passed the Waters of the United States Rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule. The purpose of the rule was both to give more regulatory oversight to the Environmental Protection Agency and to expand the definition of protected waters beyond lakes and rivers to also include smaller waterways such as streams and tributaries, which ultimately flow into lakes and rivers and thus impact the health of our drinking water.

Republican members of Congress have objected to the Clean Water Rule on the grounds that it unfairly increases federal power where the government has no right to assert control over businesses, farmers, and private landowners. The rule’s opponents have attempted to overturn it using the Congressional Review Act, and on January 13, the House of Representatives effectively voted to overturn the rule. Only six days later, on January 19, President Obama responded by vetoing the overturn. Without the necessary two-thirds majority required to override his veto, the Clean Water Rule will continue to be U.S. law.

Conclusion

With the rate and severity of droughts increasing, so does our understanding of the sheer volume of polluted water sources throughout the nation, and it’s more important than ever to take water instability seriously. Despite some progress in the past few years, the same dangers are just as alive today as they were in the pre-seventies era. This is illustrated well by the fact that in 1969 the burning Cuyahoga River made the cover of Time magazine and 57 years later we see yet another polluted waterway–this time the Flint River–back on the magazine’s cover. If there’s a positive side to the recent surge in media attention toward these events it’s the idea of a water crisis as a tangible, possible thing that could happen in America may now be present in the minds of American citizens and voters.

There is no silver bullet to water instability; any approach to making American watersheds sustainable must involve a number of different methods. Some cities in America have banned the use of chemical rock salt for roads and others have banned the use of phosphorous and nitrogen-based fertilizers. In response to the drought, California set strict laws regulating the amount of water each citizen was allowed to use and that each establishment was allowed to offer. As the population continues to grow, especially in urban centers, more and more areas may have to regulate water withdrawal with an eye to the future. Perhaps one of the most needed changes is for more and more areas to regularly test their water for contaminants to determine its safety and create a baseline measure to determine changes. The most important element of water sustainability is to act now and plan for the future, understanding that the health of a community directly correlates to the health and security of its water source.

Resources

ATTN: U.S. Cities are Underreporting Heavy Metals in their Water Supply

Daily Finance: 10 American Cities with the Worst Drinking Water

Encyclopedia.com: Clean Water Act of 1977

EPA: Summary of the Clean Water Act

EPA: What the Clean Water Rule Does

The Guardian: Flint Water Crisis: Congressman says EPA guilty of ‘Flat-out Incompetence’

NRDC: Study Finds Safety of U.S. Drinking Water at Risk

The New York Times: A Question of Environmental Racism in Flint

The New York Times: Events that Lead to Flint’s Water Crisis

The New York Times: Unsafe Levels of Lead in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

Salon: It’s Not Just a Flint Problem: Other U.S. Cities are Suffering from Toxic Water

Salon: America’s Water Crisis is so Much Bigger than California

Water Encyclopedia: Clean Water Act

The Water Project: Water Scarcity in U.S.

Earth Works Action: The Halliburton Loophole

CNN: Water Runs Black in Texas Town Already Wracked by Corruption Arrests

Environmental Protection Agency: Natural Gas Extraction – Hydraulic Fracturing

The Hill: House Votes to Overturn Obama Water Rule

Time: The Burning River that Sparked a Revolution

USA Today: Obama Vetoes Attempt to Kill Clean Water Rule

The News-Star: Water Woes Plague St. Joseph

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Water Instability in the United States: Can Anything be Done? appeared first on Law Street.