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Tag: Air pollution

  • US to climate summit: American big steps won’t be repealed

    US to climate summit: American big steps won’t be repealed

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    SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — U.S. President Joe Biden is coming to international climate talks in Egypt this week with a message that historic American action to fight climate change won’t shift into reverse, as happened twice before when Democrats lost power.

    Current and former Biden top climate officials said the vast majority of the summer’s incentive-laden $375 billion climate-and-health spending package — by far the biggest law passed by Congress to fight global warming — was crafted in a way that will make it hard and unpalatable for future Republican Congresses or presidents to reverse it.

    Outside experts agree, but say other parts of the Biden climate agenda can be stalled by a Republican Congress and courts.

    Twice in the 30-year history of climate negotiations, Democratic administrations helped forged an international agreement, but when they lost the White House, their Republican successors pulled out of those pacts.

    And after decades of American promises at past climate summits but little congressional action, the United States for the first time has actual legislation to point to. The climate and health law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, was approved without a single Republican vote, prompting some advocates to worry it may not withstand GOP attacks if Republicans gain control of the House or Senate.

    Then Tuesday’s election happened, with a razor-thin contest for control of Congress.

    Results are still not quite known, but Democrats showed surprising strength. Sierra Club President Ramon Cruz at the climate summit Wednesday claimed a victory of sorts, saying, “We see in a way that people in the U.S. actually do understand and do support climate action.”

    If Republicans grab control of Congress, they won’t have a veto-proof majority, and even if a Republican takes over the White House in the next few years the tax credits will be in place and spur industry, said Samantha Gross, head of climate and energy studies at the centrist Brookings Institution.

    “It’s a lot of tax credits and goodies that make it hard to repeal,” Gross said.

    At the climate negotiations in Egypt, where Biden arrives Friday, his special climate envoy John Kerry said, “Most of what we’re doing cannot be changed by anyone else who comes to Washington because most of what we do is in the private sector. The marketplace has made its decision to do what we need to do.”

    It’s all by design, said Gina McCarthy, who until recently was Biden’s domestic climate czar.

    “About 70% of the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act are about (tax) credits that directly benefit” industries, McCarthy said in an interview with The Associated Press at the climate negotiations.

    She said it will be difficult for Republicans to “change the dynamic” to significantly undermine the act. “It is passed, is beneficial. We have Republicans all throughout the country actually doing ribbon cuttings.”

    Studies show most of the money, new jobs, are going into Republican states, said climate policy analyst Alden Meyer of the E3G think-tank. McCarthy and Kerry are “largely correct” in claiming the law can’t be rolled back, he said, and Gross agreed.

    Several analyses, inside and outside the government, said the law would cut U.S. emissions by 40% by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, which is not quite the official U.S. goal of 50% to 52% cuts by that time.

    But McCarthy is saying, wait, there’s more. She said that upcoming but not yet announced carbon pollution regulations and advances by private industries, states and cities will allow the United States to achieve and even exceed that goal, something outside experts are far more skeptical about.

    Republicans are likely to push for a sharp increase in oversight of Biden administration policies, including incentives for electric vehicles and loans for clean energy projects such as battery manufacturers, wind and solar farms and production of “clean” hydrogen.

    “Republicans are looking for the next Solyndra,’’ said Joseph Brazauskas, a former Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency official, referring to a California solar company that failed soon after receiving more than $500 million in federal aid under the Obama administration.

    “Certainly, congressional oversight is likely to ramp up considerably’’ under a GOP-led House or Senate, said Brazauskas, who led the Trump EPA’s congressional relations office and now is a principal with the Bracewell LLP law firm.

    Republicans support many of the tax credits approved under the climate law. But they complain Biden is moving too fast to replace gas-engine cars with electric vehicles and say he hasn’t done enough to counter China’s influence in the renewable energy supply chain.

    Republicans also are likely to probe EPA actions on climate change, air quality and wetlands, citing a Supreme Court ruling last summer that curbed the EPA’s authority to address climate change, Brazauskas said. The decision, known as West Virginia v. EPA, “has really opened a window for regulatory scrutiny at the agency,” he said.

    Democrats say they learned important lessons from the Solyndra episode and don’t intend to repeat past mistakes. The loan program that helped Solyndra turned a profit and generates an estimated $500 million in interest income for the federal government every year.

    Even with a Democratic Congress, the Biden Administration couldn’t dramatically increase climate aid to poor nations. The rich countries of the world in 2009 promised $100 billion a year to help poorer nations switch to green energy sources and adapt to a warmer world. T hey haven’t fulfilled that promise, with the United States donating far less than Europe.

    That money doesn’t include the hottest topic at the Egyptian climate talks: Loss and damage, meaning reparations for climate-related disasters. The United States is historically the No. 1 carbon polluter, while poorer nations with small carbon emissions bear the brunt of climate disasters, like Pakistan, where devastating flooding submerged a third of the nation and displaced millions of people.

    Dozens of protesters called for reparations at a demonstration on Wednesday.

    “I think the regulatory agenda is tougher and the international climate finance landscape will be very, very bleak,” Meyer said.

    The U.S. government also released a new draft report about what climate change is doing to America, determining that over the past 50 years, the United States has warmed 68% faster than the planet as a whole. Since 1970, the continental U.S. has experienced 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, well above the average for the planet, according to a draft of the National Climate Assessment, which is the U.S. government’s definitive report on the effects of climate change and represents a range of federal agencies.

    The changes in the U.S. reflect a broader global pattern in which land areas and higher latitudes warm faster than the ocean and lower latitudes, the report says.

    The effects of human-caused climate change on the United States “are already far-reaching and worsening,’’ the draft report says, but every added amount of warming that can be avoided or delayed will reduce harmful impacts.

    The congressionally mandated assessment was last issued under the Trump administration in 2018 and the Biden administration put out a draft of the newer version this week, seeking public comment and peer review. The final report is expected next year.

    Risks from accelerating temperatures and precipitation, sea-level rise, climate-fueled extreme weather and other impacts increase as the planet warms, the report says.

    “The things Americans value most are at risk,’’ the report says.

    ———

    Daly reported from Washington.

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  • UN experts urge stringent rules to stop net zero greenwash

    UN experts urge stringent rules to stop net zero greenwash

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    SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Companies pledging to get their emissions down to net zero better make sure they’ve got a credible plan and aren’t just making false promises, U.N. experts said in a report Tuesday urging tough standards on emissions cutting vows.

    Released at the the U.N.’s flagship climate conference in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the group of experts set out a number of strict recommendations for businesses, banks, and local governments making net zero pledges to ensure that their promises amount to meaningful action instead of “bogus” assurances. Countries are not included in the group’s scope as their emissions-cutting commitments are set out in the 2015 Paris deal.

    The group called the report a roadmap to prevent net zero from being “undermined by false claims, ambiguity and “greenwash.”

    United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres appointed the group exactly a year ago at last year’s U.N. climate summit to draw up principles and recommendations aimed at clarifying the confusion around the growing number of net zero claims made by businesses and organizations. There’s been little transparency or uniform standards when it comes to net zero pledges, resulting in a boom in the number of hard to verify claims, the U.N. experts and environmental groups say.

    “Using bogus ‘net zero’ pledges to cover up massive fossil fuel expansion is reprehensible. It is rank deception,” Guterres said at the COP27 summit. “This toxic cover-up could push our world over the climate cliff. The sham must end.”

    Since the Paris Agreement in 2015 set a global target of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) there’s been a groundswell of support for the concept of “net zero” — drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions and canceling out the rest — as the main way to meet that goal.

    So-called non-state actors include corporations, investors, and local and regional governments, which aren’t covered by the Paris Agreement’s requirements. Their voluntary carbon cutting pledges must be “ambitious, have integrity and transparency, be credible and fair,” the experts said.

    Among its 10 specific recommendations, businesses can’t claim to be net zero if they continue to invest or build new fossil fuel supplies, deforestation or other environmentally destructive projects. They can’t buy cheap carbon offset credits “that often lack integrity instead of immediately cutting their own emissions.”

    Guterres said he was deeply concerned about lack of “standards, regulations and rigor” in the market for voluntary carbon credits. Climate experts say offsets can be problematic because there’s no guarantee they’ll deliver on reducing emissions.

    Lobbying to undermine ambitious government climate policies is a no-no, the experts said. And companies can’t focus only on emissions they generate directly from, say, manufacturing but have to include all the carbon dioxide spewed along the way in their sourcing supply chains for parts and raw materials.

    “I think these are kind of no-nonsense, practical things that a regular person would expect,” Catherine McKenna, who heads up the group of 17 high-level experts that authored the report, told the Associated Press.

    The guidelines would help consumers who “want to choose products that are good for the environment and mean that the company is tackling climate action” and young people looking for jobs who “don’t want to work for climate laggards,” McKenna said.

    Business, environmental and corporate watchdog groups generally supported the proposals.

    “This surge of interest from the corporate sector to zero out emissions is truly inspiring,” said Ani Dasgupta, CEO of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, cautioning that “any corporate net-zero targets with loopholes or weak guardrails would put our planet and billions of people in peril.”

    In order to keep the Earth from warming less than 1.5 degrees, the U.N. says carbon dioxide emissions must peak by 2025, fall by nearly half by 2030, and to reach net zero by the middle of the century.

    The only way to do that now is to reduce the amount of heat trapping greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere and balance out the remaining emissions by permanently removing them, through planting trees, or through technologies yet untested at scale such as capturing carbon emissions at sources such as factory smokestacks and storing them underground.

    Along the way, net zero has become a corporate buzzword for companies and groups seeking to burnish their green credentials, though environmental activists worry it’s becoming greenwash.

    McDonald’s has opened net zero restaurants in the United States and United Kingdom powered by solar panels and wind turbines. Airline group IATA set a long term goal for the aviation industry to reach net zero by 2050. Even oil companies have jumped on the bandwagon. Chevron touts its “net zero aspiration” and Shell flaunts its “drive for net zero emissions.”

    Private equity firm Carlyle Group was an early adopter of net zero commitment, but did not include its largest oil and gas investment in a recent financial risk report on greenhouse gas emissions.

    Organizers of this year’s soccer world cup hosted by Qatar say the massive building spree of stadiums, highways and subway system for the event was all carbon neutral — a claim experts have cast doubt on.

    ———

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Equipment that’s designed to cut methane emission is failing

    Equipment that’s designed to cut methane emission is failing

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    As Sharon Wilson pulled up to the BP site in Texas last June, production tanks towered above the windblown grass roughly 60 miles southeast of San Antonio. Cows and pumpjacks lined the roadsides.

    All looked placid. But when Wilson flipped on a high-tech video camera, a disquieting image became visible: A long black plume poured from a flare pipe. Her camera, designed to detect hydrocarbons, had revealed what appeared to be a stream of methane — a potent climate-warming gas, gushing from the very equipment that is supposed to prevent such emissions.

    “It’s very discouraging and depressing, but mostly it’s infuriating,” said Wilson, a field advocate for Earthworks, which promotes alternatives to fossil fuels. “Our government is not taking the action that needs to be taken.”

    Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas. Measured over a 20-year period, scientists say, it packs about 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide. And according to the International Energy Agency, methane is to blame for roughly 30% of the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Aerial surveys have documented huge amounts of methane wafting from oil and gas fields in the United States and beyond.

    It’s a problem the Biden administration has sought to attack in its recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. One of the law’s provisions threatens fines of up to $1,500 per ton of methane released, to be imposed against the worst polluters. Perhaps most crucially, the law provides $1.55 billion in funding for companies to upgrade equipment to more effectively contain emissions — equipment that could, in theory, help the operators avoid fines.

    Yet some of the best equipment for reducing emissions is already installed on oil and gas infrastructure, including at the BP site that Wilson filmed. And critics say such equipment is failing to capture much of the methane and casting doubt on whether the Biden plan would go far to correct the problem.

    What Wilson saw at the BP site was an unlit flare. It’s among the types of equipment the EPA recommends companies consider installing to reduce methane emissions. Resembling a tall pipe, a flare is supposed to burn off methane before it can escape. Flames typically burn from the top of the flares.

    But in this case, the flame had gone out, so methane was pouring from the pipe. The flare’s mechanisms are supposed to alert the operator if it stopped working. That didn’t happen in this case, according to a report by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

    “Energy companies have made pledges, but I’ve got to tell you, I haven’t seen anything from a practical standpoint that makes me believe there’s any reality to reductions on the ground,” said Tim Doty, an environmental scientist and former air quality inspector for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. “Maybe they’re making progress, but are they making enough progress to slow down climate change? I don’t think so.”

    The spewing methane that Wilson detected was among more than a dozen such scenes she documented over three days in the Eagle Ford Shale, an oil and gas field in south Texas. The methane poured from unlit or broken flares, storage tanks, vapor recovery units and compressors. She found it escaping at sites owned by companies including BP and Marathon Oil, both of which have pledged to reduce methane emissions.

    “They have the technology, but for some reason, whether they don’t maintain it, whether the technology doesn’t work, I don’t know, but if find it not working,” Wilson said.

    BP did not respond to questions about the methane leaks Wilson documented. The company says it plans to eliminate routine flaring in U.S. onshore operations by 2025 and is advocating for policies to reduce methane emissions.

    Marathon Oil disputed that it violated any regulations. A spokeswoman said the company recognizes the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the global climate and prioritizes concern for the environment.

    Sometimes, methane escapes because the equipment designed to contain it hasn’t been properly calibrated or maintained. Emissions aren’t immediately stopped once new equipment is installed. Companies must still invest in properly designing the system and continuously monitoring and maintaining the equipment. This requires money and staff, which experts say many companies neglect.

    The Biden administration hasn’t yet specified which types of equipment it recommends. But the EPA, which is working with the administration on the law’s methane reduction program, has recommended technologies for reducing methane emissions. Whether that equipment actually succeeds in capping emissions is an open question.

    “There’s lots of technologies, but the reality in the field is it just doesn’t work,” Doty said.

    That’s frequently also the case with another type of equipment the EPA recommends: vapor recovery units. These are systems of pipes and seals that are supposed to capture methane before it can escape from tanks. In Doty’s field work, which spans decades, he estimates that he’s seen vapor recovery units leaking some amount of methane or other hydrocarbons 75% to 85% of the time.

    And hydrocarbons like methane, because they are corrosive, inevitably degrade the tanks, pipes and equipment that are supposed to contain them.

    “All this stuff is going to be prone to leak — that’s just the way it is,” said Coyne Gibson, who spent about two decades as an engineer inspecting oil and gas equipment. “That’s mechanics. And there’s there’s not really any way to avoid it.”

    One reason it’s hard for the industry to control methane emissions is that many leaks come from the nation’s vast gas distribution network. Millions of miles of pipelines are next to impossible to completely monitor. What’s more, Gibson said, pipelines are often buried, making leaks harder to detect.

    That gas distribution network, which includes pipelines and compressor stations, is responsible for most methane emissions in the energy industry, said Antoine Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros, an energy analytics company. Using satellite data, Kayrros identified one compressor station — which adjusts the pressure of gas to move it through pipelines — that emitted methane continuously for eight days.

    “It’s way too common,” Halff said.

    Some large companies have invested in infrared cameras, like Wilson’s, that can detect methane leaks at facilities. They use them on the ground, or on drones or aircraft.

    The process can help operators find and fix leaks. But it’s typically done only periodically, with cameras that don’t run continuously. Every few months, some companies will send a team with an infrared camera to check for leaks from the ground or a helicopter.

    Much of the time, though, there is no such surveillance. Leaks or even planned methane releases can occur during these periods, as when companies open a stretch of pipeline to release methane before doing repairs. The staffing it would take to continuously survey the nation’s 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines would likely be prohibitively expensive.

    Malfunctioning flares like the one Wilson found are also a major contributor to methane pollution. Flaring is supposed to burn off 98% of the methane that would otherwise shoot directly into the atmosphere. But whether because of malfunctions or poor design, flares are releasing five times that amount of methane into the atmosphere, according to a study by the University of Michigan.

    “Flares often go out,” said David Lyon, senior scientist with Environmental Defense Fund. “They’ll be unlit and venting all the gas. Or they’ll just not be burning the gas properly. So that’s that’s a really big source of methane. And often I think the operators are not aware that the flare’s out.”

    The Environmental Protection Agency is writing rules on methane reduction that will further detail what would be required of companies starting in 2024 under the Inflation Reduction Act.

    The American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying group for the oil and gas industry, says methane emissions intensity declined by nearly 60 percent across the nation’s major producing regions from 2011 to 2020. But companies base their reported methane emissions on estimates, not actual measurements, another custom that the Inflation Reduction Act seeks to change.

    Climate scientists have shown, using satellite data, that methane emissions are often two or three times above what companies reported. Under the new law, companies would have to actually measure and report their methane emissions. But it’s still unclear how such a measurement program would work.

    “Us and many others in this field, over and over again, have shown the huge gap between reporting by countries and companies and what can actually be detected,” Halff said.

    Even so, he thinks there’s reason to hope that the methane provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act will make some difference.

    “Emissions keep going up,” he said. “We’re moving in the wrong direction…but the potential, the conditions, to change course seem to be here.”

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  • Centre’s pollution watchdog lifts GRAP stage IV restrictions in Delhi-NCR amid improved AQI

    Centre’s pollution watchdog lifts GRAP stage IV restrictions in Delhi-NCR amid improved AQI

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    Amid worsening air quality in Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR) area, the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) on Sunday revived the restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) stage IV. CAQM, in its latest order, said that ban on plying of non-BS VI diesel-run light motor vehicles in Delhi-NCR, entry of trucks into national capital is now revoked.

    CAQM order reads: “In wake of the Delhi AQI nearing the ‘Severe +’ Category (AQI >450), the GRAP Stage-IV actions were invoked on 03.11.2022 based on the AQI forecasts. The forecasts also indicated a significant improvement around 5th – 6th November, 2022, therefore, the sub-Committee while invoking Stage-IV of the GRAP, decided for a review of the situation on 6th November, 2022.”

    The CAQM sub-Committee had decided to revoke the order, issued on November 3, 2022, for actions under GRAP Stage-IV with immediate effect. It further added that actions under GRAP Stages-I to Stage-III will still remain in action and be implemented, monitored and reviewed by all agencies concerned in the NCR area. This is to ensure that the AQI levels do not slip further to the ‘Severe’/ ‘Severe +’ category.

    The GRAP is a set of anti-air pollution measures followed in Delhi. It classifies the air quality in the Delhi-NCR under four stages: Stage I – ‘Poor’ (AQI 201-300); Stage II – ‘Very Poor’ (AQI 301-400); Stage III – ‘Severe’ (AQI 401-450); and Stage IV – ‘Severe Plus’ (AQI >450).

    The GRAP Stage IV’s primary focus is on vehicle restrictions, including entry of commercial trucks into Delhi, diesel commercial vehicles for intra-Delhi movements, non-BS VI passenger vans, and LMVs (Light Motor Vehicles) in Delhi.

    Here are the measures prescribed under GRAP stage IV, which are now no longer in effect:

    • Stop entry of truck traffic into Delhi (except for trucks carrying essential commodities/ providing essential services and all CNG / electric trucks).
    • Ban on plying of Delhi registered diesel operated Medium Goods Vehicles (MGV) and Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGV) in Delhi, except those carrying essential commodities/ providing essential services.
    • Ban on plying of 4-wheeler diesel LMVs in NCT of Delhi and Districts of NCR bordering Delhi, except BS-VI vehicles and vehicles used for essential / emergency services.
    • Close down all industries in NCR, even in areas that don’t have PNG infrastructure and supply but still running on fuels, other than the fuels as per the Standard list of approved fuels for NCR.
    • Ban C&D activities in linear public projects such as highways, roads, flyovers, over bridges, power transmission, pipelines, etc.
    • NCR State Governments / GNCTD to decide on allowing the public, municipal and private offices to work on 50 per cent strength and the rest to work from home.
    • Central Government may decide on permitting work from home for central government offices.
    • State Governments may consider additional emergency measures like the closure of schools/ colleges/ educational institutions, closure of non-emergency commercial activities and plying of vehicles on an odd-even basis etc.

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  • As countries convene at climate summit in Egypt, reports show the world is wildly off track. Here’s what to watch at COP27 | CNN

    As countries convene at climate summit in Egypt, reports show the world is wildly off track. Here’s what to watch at COP27 | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    As global leaders converge in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the UN’s annual climate summit, researchers, advocates and the United Nations itself are warning the world is still wildly off-track on its goal to halt global warming and prevent the worst consequences of the climate crisis.

    Over the next two weeks, negotiators from nearly 200 countries will prod each other at COP27 to raise their clean energy ambitions, as average global temperature has already climbed 1.2 degrees Celsius since the industrial revolution.

    They will haggle over ending the use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, which has seen a resurgence in some countries amid the war in Ukraine, and try to come up with a system to funnel money to help the world’s poorest nations recover from devastating climate disasters.

    But a flood of recent reports have made clear leaders are running out of time to implement the vast energy overhaul needed to keep the temperature from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists have warned the planet must stay under.

    Reports from the United Nations and the World Meteorological Association show carbon and methane emissions hit record levels in 2021, and the plans countries have submitted to slash those emissions are beyond insufficient. Given countries’ current promises, Earth’s temperature will climb to between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100.

    Ultimately, the world needs to cut its fossil fuel emissions nearly in half by 2030 to avoid 1.5 degrees, a daunting prospect for economies still very much beholden to oil, natural gas and coal.

    “No country has a right to be delinquent,” US Climate Envoy John Kerry told reporters in October. “The scientists tell us that what is happening now – the increased extreme heat, extreme weather, the fires, the floods, the warming of the ocean, the melting of the ice, the extraordinary way in which life is being affected badly by the climate crisis – is going to get worse unless we address this crisis in a unified, forward-leaning way.”

    Here are the top issues to follow at COP27 in Egypt.

    Developing and developed countries have for years tussled over the concept of a “loss and damage” fund; the idea which suggests countries causing the most harm with their outrageous planet-warming emissions should pay poorer countries, which have suffered from the resulting climate disasters.

    It has been a thorny issue because the richest countries, including the US, don’t want to appear culpable or legally liable to other nations for harm. Kerry, for instance, has tiptoed around the issue, saying the US supports formal talks, but he has not given any indication of what solution the country would sign on to.

    Meanwhile, small island nations and others in the Global South are shouldering the impact of the climate crisis, as devastating floods, intensifying storms and record-breaking heat waves wreak havoc.

    The deadly flooding in Pakistan this summer, which killed more than 1,500 people, will surely be an example the countries’ negotiators point to. And since September, more than two million people in Nigeria have been affected by the worst flooding there in a decade. At this very moment, Nigerians are drinking, cooking with and bathing in dirty flood water amid serious concerns over waterborne diseases.

    It is likely loss and damage will have space on the official COP27 agenda this year. But beyond countries committing to meet and talk about what a potential loss and damage fund would look like, or whether one should even exist, it is unclear what action will come out of this year’s summit.

    “Do we expect that we’ll have a fund by the end of the two weeks? I hope, I would love to – but we’ll see how parties deliver on that,” Egypt’s chief climate negotiator Ambassador Mohamed Nasr recently told reporters.

    Former White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy told CNN she thinks loss and damage will be the top issue at the UN climate summit this year, and said nations including the US will face some tough questions about their plans to help developing nations already being hit hard by climate disasters.

    “It just keeps getting pushed out,” McCarthy said. “There’s need for some real accountability and some specific commitments in the short-term.”

    Xi Jinping, President of the People's Republic of China, left, and John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate.

    People will be watching to see if the US and China can repair a broken relationship at the summit, a year after the two countries surprised the world by announcing they would work together on climate change.

    The newfound cooperation came crashing down this summer when China announced it was suspending climate talks with the US as part of broader retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

    Kerry recently said the climate talks between the two countries are still suspended and will likely remain so until China’s president Xi Jinping gives the green light. Kerry and others are watching to see whether China fulfills the promise it made last year to submit a plan to bring down its methane emissions or updates its emissions pledge.

    The US and China are the world’s two largest emitters and their cooperation matters, particularly because it can spur other countries to act, too.

    Separate from a potential loss and damage fund, there is the overarching issue of so-called global climate finance; a fund rich countries promised to push money into to help the developing world transition to clean energy rather than grow their economies with fossil fuels.

    The promise made in 2009 was $100 billion per year, but the world has yet to meet the pledge. Some of the richest countries, including the US, UK, Canada and others, have consistently fallen short of their allocation.

    President Joe Biden promised the US would contribute $11 billion by 2024 toward the effort. But Biden’s request is ultimately up to Congress to approve, and will likely go nowhere if Republicans win control of Congress in the midterm elections.

    The US is working on separate deals with countries including Vietnam, South Africa and Indonesia to get them to move away from coal and toward renewables. And US officials often stress they want to also unlock private investments to help countries transition to renewables and deal with climate effects.

    Ships carry coal outside a coal-fired power plant in November 2021 in Hanchuan, Hubei province, China.

    COP27 is intended to hold countries’ feet to the fire on fossil fuel emissions and gin up new ambition on the climate crisis. Yet reports show we are still off-track to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    A UN report which surveyed countries’ latest pledges found the planet will warm between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius. Average global temperature has already risen around 1.2 degrees since the industrial revolution.

    Records were set last year for all three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

    There is a spot of encouraging news: the adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles is surging and helping to offset the rise in fossil fuel emissions, according to a recent International Energy Agency report.

    But the overall picture from the reports shows there is a need for much more clean energy, deployed swiftly. Every fraction of a degree in global temperature rise will have stark consequences, said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program.

    “The energy transition is entirely doable, but we’re not on that pathway, and we have procrastinated and wasted time,” Andersen told CNN. “Every digit will matter. Let’s not say ‘we missed 1.5 so let’s settle for 2.’ No. We must understand that every digit that goes up will make our life and the life of our children and grandchildren much more impacted.”

    The clock is ticking in another way: Next year’s COP28 in Dubai will be the year nations must do an official stocktake to determine if the world is on track to meet the goals set out in the landmark Paris Agreement.

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  • UN chief warns planet is heading toward `climate chaos’

    UN chief warns planet is heading toward `climate chaos’

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    UNITED NATIONS — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Thursday that the planet is heading toward irreversible “climate chaos” and urged global leaders at the upcoming climate summit in Egypt to put the world back on track to cut emissions, keep promises on climate financing and help developing countries speed their transition to renewable energy.

    The U.N. chief said the 27th annual Conference of the 198 Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change — better known as COP27 — “must be the place to rebuild trust and re-establish the ambition needed to avoid driving our planet over the climate cliff.”

    He said the most important outcome of COP27, which begins Nov. 6 in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, is to have “a clear political will to reduce emissions faster.”

    That requires a historical pact between richer developed countries and emerging economies, Guterres said. “And if that pact doesn’t take place, we will be doomed.”

    In the pact, the secretary-general said, wealthier countries must provide financial and technical assistance – along with support from multilateral development banks and technology companies – to help emerging economies speed their renewable energy transition.

    Guterres said that in the last few weeks, reports have painted “a clear and bleak picture” of global-warming greenhouse gas emissions still growing at record levels instead of going down 45% by 2030 as scientists say must happen.

    The landmark Paris agreement adopted in 2015 to address climate change called for global temperatures to rise a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times, and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

    Guterres said greenhouse gas emissions are now on course to rise by 10%, and temperatures are on course to rise by as much as 2.8 degrees Celsius under present policies by the end of the century.

    “And that means our planet is on course for reaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible and forever bake in catastrophic temperature rise,” the secretary-general warned.

    He said the 1.5 degree goal “is in intensive care” and “in high danger,” but it’s still possible to meet it. “And my objective in Egypt is to make sure that we gather enough political will to make this possibility really moving forward,” the U.N. chief said.

    “COP27 must be the place to close the ambition gap, the credibility gap and the solidarity gap,” Guterres said. “It must put us back on track to cutting emissions, boosting climate resilience and adaptation, keeping the promise on climate finance and addressing loss and damage from climate change.”

    Rich countries, especially the United States, have emitted far more than their share of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, data shows. Poor nations like Pakistan, where recent floods left a third of the country under water, have been hurt far more than their share of global carbon emissions.

    Loss and damage has been talked about for years, but richer nations have often balked at negotiating details about paying for past climate disasters, like Pakistan’s flooding this summer.

    “Loss and damage have been the always-postponed issue,” Guterres said. “There is no more time to postpone it. We must recognize loss and damage and we must create an institutional framework to deal with it.”

    The secretary-general said Thursday that “getting concrete results on loss and damage is the litmus test of the commitment of the governments to close all of these gaps.”

    “COP27 must lay the foundations for much faster, bolder climate action now and in this crucial decade, when the global climate fight will be won or lost,” Guterres said.

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  • ‘Shut schools, safety of children a matter of concern’: NCPCR writes to Delhi govt as air quality plunges

    ‘Shut schools, safety of children a matter of concern’: NCPCR writes to Delhi govt as air quality plunges

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    The air quality of Delhi and in the parts of the national capital region (NCR) is close to breaching the 500-mark and remained in the severe category throughout Thursday, revealed the Central Pollution Control Board data. Once the air quality index reaches above the 500-mark it will be in the ‘hazardous’ category.

    According to the experience in the previous few years, the two weeks between November 1 and November 15 are usually the most polluted air days in Delhi NCR. This suggests that the pollution levels will likely rise in the next few days.

    Amid concerns from many residents, especially parents of school-going children, several schools have taken several measures to protect children and have suspended outdoor activities along with introducing breathing exercises in classes.

    Anshu Mital, Principal of MRG School, Rohini said they are planning to distribute a manual or written guide to teach students what types of foods, drinks and behaviour they should adopt to ameliorate the situation we are living in.

    Sangeeta Hajela, Principal of DPS Indirapuram, said air pollution has become very rampant, especially during this season. “We have administered many steps to safeguard students. Teachers encourage students to have a balanced diet with nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables to increase the stability and viability of the lungs and liver,” Hajela added.

    “Anti-pollution masks are being distributed to students. Air purifiers have been placed at strategic locations to purify the environment. These steps will surely ensure good attendance and safeguard the health of our students,” she said.

    According to Alka Kapur, Principal of Modern Public school, Shalimar Bagh, the school has restricted outdoor activities. “Given the severity of the surge in hazardous pollution, we have temporarily restricted outdoor activities such as sporting events, cultural events, and assemblies,” Kapur added.

    “Likewise, we will place a greater emphasis on indoor activities such as indoor assemblies, cultural events, and extracurricular activities,” she said.

    The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) had also asked the Delhi government to shut schools till air quality in the capital improves.
    Many schools have already ruled out a shutdown, saying it will disturb the pace of academic learning.

    Priyank Kanoongo, Chairperson of NCPCR, in a tweet, has urged the Delhi government to consider shutting schools in the interest of children.

    He tweeted, “The safety of school children is a matter of concern due to the dangerous level of pollution in Delhi, so far no decision has been taken by the state government of Delhi. Children are in the wrath of toxic air on their way to school, in playgrounds. This negligence is wrong, @NCPCR_ is issuing notice on it.”

    Even the Delhi BJP has demanded the closing of schools for physical classes and conducting online teaching to protect children from air pollution.
    Delhi BJP chief Adesh Gupta, in a letter to Delhi Lt Governor VK Saxena, raised the demand for the closing of schools.

    In addition to this, the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) had also suggested that “state governments may consider additional emergency measures like closure of schools/ colleges/ educational institutions, closure of non-emergency commercial activities and plying of vehicles on odd-even basis etc.”

    However, the Delhi government still hasn’t asked to close schools and colleges but is expected to close schools and colleges as the AQI level rises.

    The CAQM also said that the next comprehensive review is to be held on November 6, 2022, and further appropriate decisions on GRAP measures are to be taken based on the air quality forecast and other meteorological parameters.

    GRAP is a set of anti-air pollution measures followed in Delhi. It classifies the air quality in the Delhi-NCR under four stages: Stage I – ‘Poor’ (AQI 201-300); Stage II – ‘Very Poor’ (AQI 301-400); Stage III – ‘Severe’ (AQI 401-450); and Stage IV – ‘Severe Plus’ (AQI >450).

    The Air Quality Index (AQI) in Delhi on Thursday stood at 408 (‘Severe’) at 7 am and 364 (in the ‘Very Poor’ category) at 8 am, as per ANI. Usually, closure of the school is mandated when the AQI reaches the ‘Severe Plus’ category.

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  • Air pollution: 24 industrial units issued closure orders for violating GRAP guidelines

    Air pollution: 24 industrial units issued closure orders for violating GRAP guidelines

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    The centre panel on air quality has issued closure orders to 24 industrial units in the NCR for grossly violating the air pollution-related statutes and guidelines since invoking the first stage of its Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP).

    The measures were enforced in the National Capital Region (NCR) on October 5 by The Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) on October 6.

    Since then, a total of 472 incognito inspections have been carried out by the commission in industrial areas and construction projects across NCR and 52 grossly violating units and projects have been issued closure orders, CAQM said in a statement on Friday.

    “Closure orders have been issued to 24 grossly violating industrial units. Of these, 05 industrial units were still found using coal and other unapproved polluting fuels,” the CAQM said.

    “Unfavourable climatic and meteorological conditions that generally prevail in the NCR during winters and farm fires have begun to adversely impact the air quality in the region,” it added.

    Predicting the air quality to deteriorate by the weekend, the CAQM had on Wednesday directed authorities to enact ‘Stage II’ of the Graded Response Action Plan — a set of anti-air pollution measures followed in the national capital and its vicinity as per the severity of the situation.

    The second stage plan includes banning the use of coal and firewood in hotels, restaurants and open eateries. The use of diesel generators, except for essential services, is also banned.

    GRAP is classified under four stages, depending on the air quality in Delhi. Stage I is implemented in case of ‘poor’ air quality (AQI 201-300); Stage II for ‘very poor’ (AQI 301-400); Stage III for ‘severe’ (AQI 401-450) and Stage IV for ‘severe plus’ (AQI >450).

    If the situation turns ‘severe’, authorities will have to enforce a ban on construction and demolition activities in NCR, except on essential projects (such as railways, metros, airports, ISBTs, national security/defence-related projects of national importance) and non-polluting activities such as plumbing, carpentry, interior decoration and electrical works.

    Brick kilns, hot mix plants and stone crushers not operating on clean fuels and mining and associated activities in NCR will also be banned.

    The state governments in Delhi-NCR may also impose restrictions on Bharat Stage (BS)-III petrol and BS-IV diesel light motor vehicles (four-wheelers).

    The measures in the ‘severe plus’ category or Stage IV include a ban on the entry of trucks into Delhi and the plying of Delhi-registered diesel-run medium goods vehicles and heavy goods vehicles in the national capital, except those carrying essential commodities.

    Four-wheeled diesel light motor vehicles, except BS-VI and those engaged in essential services, will also be banned in Delhi and bordering districts of NCR.

    Stage IV will also trigger a ban on industries running on dirty fuels and construction and demolition activities in linear public projects such as highways, roads, flyovers, over bridges, power transmission and pipelines.
     

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  • ‘We have a deal’: EU bans new gas-fueled cars starting in 2035

    ‘We have a deal’: EU bans new gas-fueled cars starting in 2035

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    The European Union reached a deal Thursday to effectively ban new gas-powered cars beginning in 2035.

    It’s a move seen as a key part of a broader plan to reduce carbon emissions across economic sectors — and a major policy achievement to carry into high-profile United Nations climate-change talks in Egypt early next month.

    Speculation about a deal, which had been heavily debated, was reported earlier this week and confirmed Thursday via a tweet from the spokesperson for the rotating presidency of the bloc, currently held by the Czech Republic.

    Broadly, the agreement is part of a plan that requires a 55% cut in emissions across transportation, buildings, power generation and other sources this decade. That halfway mark is seen as a major milestone as the EU aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

    The announcement comes as the U.N. climate arm has released a series of updated reports this week. One chastised the “highly inadequate” steps to date by rich nations to cut emissions of Earth-warming greenhouse gases, such as those from burning fossil fuels. The window to act is closing but is not quite shut yet, according to the Emissions Gap report from the U.N. Environment Programme. “Global and national climate commitments are falling pitifully short,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday. “We are headed for a global catastrophe.”

    The EU is the world’s largest trade bloc, and its moves could push other major economies to also set firm cutoff dates for gasoline
    RB00,
    -0.52%
    and diesel engines. Volkswagen AG
    VOW,
    +0.88%
    and Daimler Truck Holding AG
    DTG,
    +2.67%
    are already moving deeper into electric vehicles. Volkswagen this week said it would stop selling internal-combustion-engine cars in Europe between 2033 and 2035.

    Other major economies, including the U.S., have set similar goals, but the U.S. has not set any federal-level restrictions on vehicle manufacturing. Some individual automakers, including General Motors
    GM,
    +0.79%    ,
    have set their own timelines. And California approved plans in August to mandate a gradual phasing out of vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines, with only zero-emission cars and a small portion of plug-in gas/electric hybrids to be allowed by 2035.

    As the world’s fifth-largest economy, California can create ripple effects with its moves. At least 15 other states have signed on to California’s existing zero-emission vehicle program or have shown interest in and are working toward codifying the change. Among them, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Vermont are expected to adopt California’s ban on new gasoline-fueled vehicles.

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  • More kids to ride in ‘clean’ school buses, mostly electric

    More kids to ride in ‘clean’ school buses, mostly electric

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 400 school districts spanning all 50 states and Washington, D.C., along with several tribes and U.S. territories, are receiving roughly $1 billion in grants to purchase about 2,500 “clean” school buses under a new federal program.

    The Biden administration is making the grants available as part of a wider effort to accelerate the transition to zero-emission vehicles and reduce air pollution near schools and communities.

    Vice President Kamala Harris and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan announced the grant awards Wednesday in Seattle. The new, mostly electric school buses will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save money and better protect children’s health, they said.

    As many as 25 million children ride yellow buses each school day, and they will have a healthier future with a cleaner fleet, Harris said.

    “We are witnessing around our country and around the world the effects of extreme climate,” she said. “What we’re announcing today is a step forward in our nation’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gases, to invest in our economy … to invest in building the skills of America’s workforce. All with the goal of not only saving our children, but for them, saving our planet.″

    Only about 1% of the nation’s 480,000 school buses were electric as of last year, but the push to abandon traditional diesel buses has gained momentum in recent years. Money for the new purchases is available under the federal Clean School Bus Program, which includes $5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed last year.

    The clean bus program “is accelerating our nation’s transition to electric and low-emission school buses while ensuring a brighter, healthier future for our children,” Regan said.

    The EPA initially made $500 million available for clean buses in May but increased that to $965 million last month, responding to what officials called overwhelming demand for electric buses. An additional $1 billion is set to be awarded in the budget year that began Oct. 1.

    The EPA said it received about 2,000 applications requesting nearly $4 billion for more than 12,000 buses, mostly electric. Some 389 applications worth $913 million were accepted to support purchase of 2,463 buses, 95% of which will be electric, the EPA said. The remaining buses will run on compressed natural gas or propane.

    School districts identified as priority areas serving low-income, rural or tribal students make up 99% of the projects that were selected, the White House said. More applications are under review, and the EPA plans to select more winners to reach the full $965 million in coming weeks.

    Districts set to receive money range from Wrangell, Alaska, to Anniston, Alabama, and Teton County, Wyoming, to Wirt County, West Virginia. Besides the District of Columbia, big cities that won grants for clean school buses include New York, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

    White House adviser Mitch Landrieu said he expects many buses to be delivered by the start of the next school year, with the remainder likely to be in service by the end of 2023. The billion dollars being spent this year — along with an additional $4 billon expected over the next four years — should “supercharge” a domestic manufacturing boom for electric school buses, said Landrieu, a former New Orleans mayor tapped by Biden to oversee spending in the massive infrastructure law.

    “These buses will be made in America — real jobs with real wages,″ Landrieu said in an interview. “We are going to ramp up manufacturing in this country.″

    Environmental and public health groups hailed the announcement, which comes after years of advocacy to replace diesel-powered buses with cleaner alternatives.

    “It doesn’t make sense to send our kids to school on buses that create brain-harming, lung-harming, cancer-causing, climate-harming pollution,″ said Molly Rauch, public health policy director for Moms Clean Air Force, an environmental group. “Our kids, our bus drivers and our communities deserve better.″

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  • California carbon emissions fell 9% in pandemic’s 1st year

    California carbon emissions fell 9% in pandemic’s 1st year

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s planet-warming emissions dropped nearly 9% in 2020 compared to the year before as pandemic restrictions kept people at home, out of their cars and away from the workplace for much of the year.

    The data released Wednesday marks California’s largest single-year emissions drop and tracks with a similar reduction nationwide. An official cautioned that the data can’t be used as a marker for future trends because the pandemic caused unprecedented yet temporary economic changes.

    “This year will be looked at as an outlier,” Steven Cliff, executive officer for the California Air Resources Board, told reporters ahead of the data’s release.

    Indeed, data from the Global Carbon Project pointed to a rebound in global emissions 2021 once pandemic restrictions across the world began to ease.

    Much of the drop came from fewer people driving in the first months of the pandemic, when schools and office buildings shut down and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered people to stay home. Emissions from passenger cars, delivery trucks and other forms of transportation are by far California’s largest source and the most stubborn to crack. But they fell by 16% in 2020, according to the air board.

    Miles driven in light-duty passenger cars dropped a steep 44% in April 2020 compared to the same month the year before, said Nicole Dolney, head of the air board’s emissions inventory branch.

    Elsewhere, industrial emissions fell 9% as demand for oil and gas production and refining fell. Residential and commercial emissions fell 4%, likely because warmer weather meant homes and businesses turned their heaters on less, she said.

    California is at the forefront in many areas of U.S. climate policy, adopting some of the earliest and most aggressive targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change. By 2045, the state has committed to carbon neutrality, to be achieved by drastically lowering emissions from vehicles, buildings and other sources, and relying on technology to suck the remaining carbon out of the air.

    At Newsom’s direction, the air board recently passed a policy to end the sale of most new gas-powered cars in the state by 2045.

    Altogether, California has some of the lowest per capita emissions among states. In 2020, the state accounted for about 6% of total U.S. emissions, based on comparisons to EPA data. But the state, with roughly 39 million people, is home to 12% of the country’s population.

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  • EPA awarding nearly $1 billion to schools for electric buses

    EPA awarding nearly $1 billion to schools for electric buses

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    WASHINGTON — Nearly 400 school districts spanning all 50 states and Washington, D.C., along with several tribes and U.S. territories, are receiving roughly $1 billion in grants to purchase about 2,500 “clean” school buses under a new federal program.

    The Biden administration is making the grants available as part of a wider effort to accelerate the transition to zero-emission vehicles and reduce air pollution near schools and communities.

    Vice President Kamala Harris and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan are set to announce the grant awards Wednesday in Seattle. The new, mostly electric school buses will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save money and better protect children’s health, the White House said.

    As many as 25 million children ride familiar yellow school buses each school day and will have a “healthier future” with a cleaner fleet, Regan said. “This is just the beginning of our work to … reduce climate pollution and ensure the clean, breathable air that all our children deserve,” he said.

    Only about 1% of the nation’s 480,000 school buses were electric as of last year, but the push to abandon traditional diesel buses has gained momentum in recent years. Money for the new purchases is available under the federal Clean School Bus Program, which includes $5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed last year.

    The clean bus program “is accelerating our nation’s transition to electric and low-emission school buses while ensuring a brighter, healthier future for our children,” Regan said in a statement.

    The EPA initially made $500 million available for clean buses in May but increased that to $965 million last month, responding to what officials called overwhelming demand for electric buses across the country. An additional $1 billion is set to be awarded in the budget year that began Oct. 1.

    The EPA said it received about 2,000 applications requesting nearly $4 billion for more than 12,000 buses, mostly electric. A total of 389 applications worth $913 million were accepted to support purchase of 2,463 buses, 95% of which will be electric, the EPA said. The remaining buses will run on compressed natural gas or propane.

    School districts identified as priority areas serving low-income, rural or tribal students make up 99% of the projects that were selected, the White House said. More applications are under review, and the EPA plans to select more winners to reach the full $965 million in coming weeks.

    Districts set to receive money range from Wrangell, Alaska, to Anniston, Alabama; and Teton County, Wyoming, to Wirt County, West Virginia. Besides Washington, major cities that won grants for clean school buses include New York, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Seattle.

    Environmental and public health groups hailed the announcement, which comes after years of advocacy to replace diesel-powered buses with cleaner alternatives.

    “It doesn’t make sense to send our kids to school on buses that create brain-harming, lung-harming, cancer-causing, climate-harming pollution,” said Molly Rauch, public health policy director for Moms Clean Air Force, an environmental group. “Our kids, our bus drivers and our communities deserve better.”

    Harris and Regan are expected to announce the awards at an event in Seattle with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Gov. Jay Inslee. Murray is running for reelection against Republican Tiffany Smiley.

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  • Renters face charging dilemma as U.S. cities move toward EVs

    Renters face charging dilemma as U.S. cities move toward EVs

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    PORTLAND, Ore. — Stephanie Terrell bought a used Nissan Leaf this fall and was excited to join the wave of drivers adopting electric vehicles to save on gas money and reduce her carbon footprint.

    But Terrell quickly encountered a bump in the road on her journey to clean driving: As a renter, she doesn’t have a private garage where she can power up overnight, and the public charging stations near her are often in use, with long wait times. On a recent day, the 23-year-old nearly ran out of power on the freeway because a public charging station she was counting on was busy.

    “It was really scary and I was really worried I wasn’t going to make it, but luckily I made it here. Now I have to wait a couple hours to even use it because I can’t go any further,” she said while waiting at another station where a half-dozen EV drivers circled the parking lot, waiting their turn. “I feel better about it than buying gas, but there are problems I didn’t really anticipate.”

    The great transition to electric vehicles is underway for single-family homeowners who can charge their cars at home, but for millions of renters like Terrell, access to charging remains a significant barrier. People who rent are also more likely to buy used EVs that have a lower range than the latest models, making reliable public charging even more critical for them.

    Now, cities from Portland to Los Angeles to New York City are trying to come up with innovative public charging solutions as drivers string power cords across sidewalks, stand up their own private charging stations on city right-of-ways and line up at public facilities.

    The Biden administration last month approved plans from all 50 states to roll out a network of high-speed chargers along interstate highways coast-to-coast using $5 billion in federal funding over the next five years. But states must wait to apply for an additional $2.5 billion in local grants to fill in charging gaps, including in low- and moderate-income areas of cities and in neighborhoods with limited private parking.

    “We have a really large challenge right now with making it easy for people to charge who live in apartments,” said Jeff Allen, executive director of Forth, a nonprofit that advocates for equity in electric vehicle ownership and charging access.

    “There’s a mental shift that cities have to make to understand that promoting electric cars is also part of their sustainable transportation strategy. Once they make that mental shift, there’s a whole bunch of very tangible things they can — and should — be doing.”

    The quickest place to charge is a fast charger, also known as DC Fast. Those charge a car in 20 to 45 minutes. But slower chargers which take several hours, known as Level 2, still outnumber DC fast chargers by nearly four to one, although their numbers are growing. Charging an electric vehicle on a standard residential outlet, or Level 1 charger, isn’t practical unless you drive little or can leave the car plugged in overnight, as many homeowners can.

    Nationwide, there are about 120,000 public charging ports featuring Level 2 charging or above, and nearly 1.5 million electric vehicles registered in the U.S. — a ratio of just over one charger per 12 cars nationally, according to the latest U.S. Department of Transportation data from December 2021. But those chargers are not spread out evenly: In Arizona, for example, the ratio of electric vehicles to charging ports is 18 to one and in California, which has about 39% of the nation’s EVs, there are 16 zero-emissions vehicles for every charging port.

    A briefing prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy last year by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory forecasts a total of just under 19 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030, with a projected need for an extra 9.6 million charging stations to meet that demand.

    In Los Angeles, for example, nearly one-quarter of all new vehicles registered in July were plug-in electric vehicles. The city estimates in the next 20 years, it will have to expand its distribution capacity anywhere from 25% to 50%, with roughly two-thirds of the new power demand coming from electric vehicles, said Yamen Nanne, manager of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s transportation electrification program.

    Amid the boom, dense city neighborhoods are rapidly becoming pressure points in the patchy transition to electrification.

    In Los Angeles, the city has installed over 500 electric vehicle chargers — 450 on street lights and about 50 of them on power poles — to meet the demand and has a goal of adding 200 EV pole chargers per year, Nanne said. The chargers are strategically installed in areas where there are apartment complexes or near amenities, he said.

    The city currently has 18,000 commercial chargers — ones not in private homes — but only about 3,000 are publicly accessible and just 400 of those are DC Fast chargers, Nanne said. Demand is so high that “when we put a charger out there that’s publicly accessible, we don’t even have to advertise. People just see it and start using it,” he said.

    “We’re doing really good in terms of chargers that are going into workplaces but the publicly accessible ones is where there’s a lot of room to make up. Every city is struggling with that.”

    Similar initiatives to install pole-mounted chargers are in place or being considered in cities from New York City to Charlotte, N.C. to Kansas City, Missouri. The utility Seattle City Light is also in the early stages of a pilot project to install chargers in neighborhoods where people can’t charge at home.

    Mark Long, who lives in a floating home on Seattle’s Portage Bay, has leased or owned an EV since 2015 and charges at public stations — and sometimes charges on an outdoor outlet at a nearby office and pays them back for the cost.

    “We have a small loading area but we all just park on the street,” said Long, who hopes to get one of the utility’s chargers installed for his floating community. “I’ve certainly been in a few situations where I’m down to 15, 14, 12 miles and … whatever I had planned, I’m just suddenly focused on getting a charge.”

    Other cities, like Portland, are working to amend building codes for new construction to require electrified parking spaces for new apartment complexes and mixed-use development. A proposal being developed currently would require 50% of parking spaces in most new multi-family dwellings to have an electric conduit that could support future charging stations. In complexes with six spaces or fewer, all parking spaces would need to be pre-wired for EV charging.

    Policies that provide equal access to charging are critical because with tax incentives and the emergence of a robust used-EV market, zero-emissions cars are finally within financial reach for lower-income drivers, said Ingrid Fish, who is in charge of Portland’s transportation decarbonization program.

    “We’re hoping if we do our job right, these vehicles are going to become more and more accessible and affordable for people, especially those that have been pushed out of the central city” by rising rents and don’t have easy access to public transportation, Fish said.

    The initiatives mimic those that have already been deployed in other nations that are much further along in EV adoption.

    Worldwide, by 2030, more than 6 million public chargers will be needed to support EV adoption at a rate that keeps international emissions goals within reach, according to a recent study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. As of this year, the Netherlands and Norway have already installed enough public charging to satisfy 45% and 38% of that demand, respectively, while the U.S. has less than 10% of it in place currently, according to the study, which looked at electrification in 17 nations and government entities that account for more than half of the world’s car sales.

    Some European cities are far ahead of even the most electric-savvy U.S. cities. London, for example, has 4,000 public chargers on street lights. That’s much cheaper — just a third the cost of wiring a charging station into the sidewalk, said Vishant Kothari, manager of the electric mobility team at the World Resources Institute.

    But London and Los Angeles have an advantage over many U.S. cities: Their street lights operate on 240 volts, better for EV charging. Most American city street lights operate on 120 volts, which takes hours to charge a vehicle, said Kothari, who co-authored a study on the potential for pole-mounted charging in U.S. cities.

    That means cities considering pole-mounted charging must also come up with other solutions, from zoning changes to making charging accessible in apartment complex parking lots to policies that encourage workplace fast-charging.

    There also “needs to be a will from the city, the utilities — the policies need to be in place for curbside accessibility,” he said. “So there is quite a bit of complication.”

    Changes can’t come fast enough for renters who already own electric vehicles and are struggling to charge them.

    Rebecca DeWhitt rents a house but isn’t allowed to use the garage. For several years, she and her partner strung a standard extension cord 40 feet (12 meters) from an outlet near the home’s front door, across their lawn, down a grassy knoll and across a public sidewalk to reach their Nissan Leaf on the street.

    They upgraded to a thicker extension cord and began parking in the driveway — also a violation of their rental contract — when their first cord charred under the EV load. They’re still using their home outlet and it takes up to two days to fully charge their new Hyundai Kona. As of now, their best alternative for a full charge is a nearby grocery store which can mean a long wait for one of two fast-charging stations to open up.

    “It’s inconvenient,” she said. “And if we didn’t value having an electric vehicle so much, we wouldn’t put up with the pain of it.”

    ————

    Associated Press Climate Data Reporter Camille Fassett in Denver, AP Video Journalists Eugene Garcia in Los Angeles and Haven Daley in San Francisco and AP Business Editor Courtney Bonnell in London contributed to this report.

    ———

    Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter: @gflaccus

    Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

    ———

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Delhi wakes up to ‘very poor’ air quality after Diwali; AQI hits 326

    Delhi wakes up to ‘very poor’ air quality after Diwali; AQI hits 326

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    Delhiites woke up to ‘very poor’ air quality as Delhi’s air quality index (AQI) stood at 326 as of 8 am on Tuesday, a day after Diwali. Areas in Delhi such as Narela, Delhi University, Anand Vihar, India Gate and Dwarka reported very poor air quality. Neighbouring cities of Ghaziabad, Noida, Greater Noida, Gurugram and Faridabad had an AQI of 285, 320, 294, 315 and 310 respectively. Poor air quality was reported from areas like Cyber Hub and Najafgarh.

    Delhi recorded an AQI of 382 on Diwali last year, 414 in 2020, 337 in 2019, 281 in 2018, 319 in 2017 and 431 in 2016, as per Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) data. An AQI between 0-50 is considered good, 51-100 satisfactory, 101-200 moderate, 201-300 poor, 301-400 very poor and 401-500 severe. 

    Though Delhiites burnt firecrackers despite a ban, the intensity was slightly less compared to the last two years. The Delhi government led by Aam Aadmi Party had imposed a ban on production, sale and use of all types of firecrackers till January 1, 2023, including on Diwali. 

    Credit: DIU
    Credit: DIU

    Besides firecrackers, farm fires or stubble burning has also contributed to Delhi’s PM2.5 pollution around Diwali. The share of emissions from farm fires and firecrackers is lesser compared to previous years due to reduced firecracker bursting and moderately warm and windier conditions slowing down accumulation of pollutants. 

    Gufran Beig, founder project director of SAFAR, a forecasting agency under the Union Ministry of Earth Science, told news agency PTI, “The share of PM2.5 in Delhi’s air has increased which is indicative of contribution from firecrackers and stubble burning.”

    Beig added, “Though the active fire counts have doubled, the wind direction is north westernly and the wind speed is moderate (not very favourable for the transport of smoke from farm fires). Hence, the contribution of stubble burning is not very significant.” He further noted that stubble burning is likely to contribute 12 to 15 per cent of Delhi’s PM2.5 solution on Tuesday.

    (With PTI, India Today inputs)

    Also read: ‘Beautiful’: Apple CEO praises Diwali photo shot on iPhone; see pic 

    Also read: Diwali Muhurat Trading 2022 Highlights: Sensex surges 525 points, Nifty settles above 17,700; ICICI Bank, Nestle among top gainers

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  • France enters ‘white gold’ rush as top producer aims to supply Europe with lithium

    France enters ‘white gold’ rush as top producer aims to supply Europe with lithium

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    A Lithium-ion battery photographed at a Volkswagen facility in Germany. The EU is looking to increase the number of electric vehicles on its roads in the coming years.

    Ronny Hartmann | AFP | Getty Images

    Paris-headquartered minerals giant Imerys plans to develop a lithium extraction project that it’s hoped will help meet demand and secure supply for Europe’s emerging electric vehicle market.

    In a statement Monday, Imerys said its Emili Project would be located at a site in the center of France, with the company targeting 34,000 metric tons of lithium hydroxide production each year from 2028.

    According to the business, this level of production would be enough to “equip approximately 700,000 electrical vehicles per year.”

    Alongside its use in cell phones, computers, tablets and a host of other gadgets synonymous with modern life, lithium — which some have dubbed “white gold” — is crucial to the batteries that power electric vehicles.

    The project being planned by Imerys is taking shape at a time when major economies like the EU are looking to ramp up the number of electric vehicles on their roads.

    The EU plans to stop the sale of new diesel and gasoline cars and vans from 2035. The U.K., which left the EU on Jan. 31, 2020, is pursuing similar targets.

    With demand for lithium rising, the European Union — of which France is a member — is attempting to shore up its own supplies and reduce dependency on other parts of the world.   

    In a translation of her State of the Union speech last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said “lithium and rare earths will soon be more important than oil and gas.”

    As well as addressing security of supply, von der Leyen, who switched between several languages during her speech, also stressed the importance of processing.

    “Today, China controls the global processing industry,” she said. “Almost 90% … of rare earth[s] and 60% of lithium are processed in China.”

    “So we will identify strategic projects all along the supply chain, from extracting to refining, from processing to recycling,” she added. “And we will build up strategic reserves where supply is at risk.”

    Read more about electric vehicles from CNBC Pro

    Back in France, Imerys said it was finalizing what it described as a “technical scoping study” in order to “explore various operational options and refine geological and industrial aspects relating to the lithium extraction and processing method.”

    The site selected for the project has, since the end of the 19th century, been used to produce a type of clay called kaolin for use in the ceramics industry.

    The construction capital expenditure of the proposed lithium project is estimated to be around 1 billion euros (roughly $980 million), Imerys added.

    “Upon successful completion, the project would contribute to the French and European Union’s energy transition ambitions,” the company said. “It would also increase Europe’s industrial sovereignty at a time when car and battery manufacturers are heavily dependent on imported lithium, which is a key element in the energy transition.”

    In recent years, a range of factors has created pressure points when it comes to the supply of the materials crucial for EVs, an issue the International Energy Agency highlighted earlier this year in its Global EV Outlook.

    “The rapid increase in EV sales during the pandemic has tested the resilience of battery supply chains, and Russia’s war in Ukraine has further exacerbated the challenge,” the IEA’s report noted, adding that prices of materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel have soared.

    “In May 2022, lithium prices were over seven times higher than at the start of 2021,” it added. “Unprecedented battery demand and a lack of structural investment in new supply capacity are key factors.”

    Read more about energy from CNBC Pro

    In a recent interview with CNBC, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz sketched out the current state of play, as he saw it when it came to the raw materials required for EVs and their batteries.

    “Raw material prices have been quite volatile in the last 12 to 18 months — some have spiked and actually some have come back down again,” Ola Kallenius said.

    “But it is true as we become electric, all-electric and more and more automakers go into the electric space, there is a need to increase mining capacities and refining capacities for lithium, nickel, and some of those raw materials that are needed to produce electric cars.”

    “We have everything that we need now, but we need to look into the mid to long-term and work with the mining industry here to increase capacities.”

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  • COP27’s Coke sponsorship leaves bad taste with green groups

    COP27’s Coke sponsorship leaves bad taste with green groups

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    LONDON — This year’s United Nations climate summit is brought to you by Coke.

    Soft drink giant Coca-Cola Co.’s sponsorship of the flagship U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, sparked an online backlash and highlighted broader concerns about corporate lobbying and influence.

    The COP27 negotiations aimed at limiting global temperature increases are set to kick off next month in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. The Egyptian organizers cited Coca-Cola’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and key focus on climate when they announced the sponsorship deal in September, which triggered immediate outrage on social media.

    Activists slammed the company for its outsized role contributing to plastic pollution and pointed to the deal as an example of corporate “greenwash” — exaggerating climate credentials to mask polluting behaviors. An online petition calling for Coke to be removed as a sponsor has garnered more than 228,000 signatures, while hundreds of civil society groups signed an open letter demanding polluting companies be banned from bankrolling or being involved in climate talks.

    Coca-Cola said its participation underscores its ambitious plans to cut its emissions and clean up plastic ocean trash.

    Critics say corporate involvement goes against the spirit of the meetings, where tens of thousands of delegates from around the world gather to hammer out global agreements on combating climate change to stop the earth from warming to dangerous levels. This year, the focus is on how to implement promises made at previous conferences, according to the Egyptian presidency.

    At COP meetings, “the corporate presence is huge, of course, and it’s a slick marketing campaign for them,” said Bobby Banerjee, a management professor at City University of London’s Bayes Business School, who has attended three times since 2011.

    Over the years, the meetings have evolved to resemble trade fairs, with big corporations, startups and industry groups setting up stalls and pavilions on the sidelines to lobby and schmooze — underscoring how a growing number of companies want to engage with the event, sensing commercial opportunities as climate change becomes a bigger global priority.

    IBM, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group and Vodafone also have signed up as sponsors or partners but have drawn less flak for their participation than Coca-Cola.

    The United Nations Climate Change press office referred media inquiries to the organizers, saying it was a matter between Egypt and the company. The Egyptian presidency didn’t respond to email requests for comment. U.N. Climate Change’s website says it “seeks to engage in mutually beneficial partnerships with non-Party stakeholders.”

    Georgia Elliott-Smith, a sustainability consultant and environmental activist who set up the online petition, said she’s calling on the U.N. “to stop accepting corporate sponsorship for these events, which simply isn’t necessary, and stop enabling these major polluters to greenwash their brands, piggybacking on these really critical climate talks.”

    Environmental groups slammed the decision to let Coca-Cola be a sponsor, saying it’s one of the world’s biggest plastic producers and top polluters. They say manufacturing plastic with petroleum emits carbon dioxide and many of the single-use bottles are sold in countries with low recycling rates, where they either end up littering oceans or are incinerated, adding more carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

    In a statement, Coca-Cola said it shares “the goal of eliminating waste from the ocean” and appreciates “efforts to raise awareness about this challenge.” Packaging accounts for about a third of Coke’s carbon footprint, and the company said it has “ambitious goals,” including helping collect a bottle or can for every one it sells, regardless of maker, by 2030.

    Coca-Cola said it will partner with other businesses, civil society organizations and governments “to support cooperative action” on plastic waste and noted that it signed joint statements in 2020 and 2022 urging U.N. member states to adopt a global treaty to tackle the problem “through a holistic, circular economy approach.”

    “Our support for COP27 is in line with our science-based target to reduce absolute carbon emissions 25% by 2030, and our ambition for net zero carbon emissions by 2050,” the company said by email.

    Experts say sponsorships overshadow a bigger problem behind the scenes: fossil fuel companies lobbying and influencing the talks in backroom negotiations.

    “The real deals are handled indoors, you know, in closed rooms,” said Banerjee, the management professor. At the first one he attended — COP17 in Durban, South Africa, in 2011 — he tried to get into a session on carbon emissions in the mining industry, a topic he was researching.

    “But guess what? They turned me away, and who walks into the room to discuss, to develop global climate policy? CEOs of Rio Tinto, Shell, BP, followed by the ministers,” Banerjee said, adding that a Greenpeace member behind him was also blocked. “This group of people — mining companies and politicians — are deciding on carbon emissions.”

    Elliott-Smith, the environmental activist, attended last year’s COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, as a legal observer to the negotiations. While she’s not naive about corporate-political lobbying, she was “really shocked at the amount of corporates attending the conference, (and) of the open participation between CEOs and climate negotiating delegations in these conversations.”

    In Glasgow, retailers, tech companies and consumer goods brands were signed up as partners, but fossil fuel companies were reportedly banned by the British organizers. Still, more than 500 lobbyists linked to the industry attended, according to researchers from a group of NGOs who combed through the official accreditation list.

    This year, oil and gas companies might feel more welcome because Egypt is expected to spotlight the region and attract a big contingent from Middle Eastern and North African countries, whose economies and government revenue depend on pumping oil and gas.

    Egypt historically sided with developing countries resisting pressure to cut emissions further, which say they shouldn’t have to pay the price for rich countries’ historical carbon dioxide emissions.

    Ahead of the meeting, U.N. human rights experts and international rights groups criticized the Egyptian government’s human rights track record, accusing authorities of covering up a decade of violations, including a clampdown on dissent, mass incarcerations and rollback of personal freedoms, in an attempt to burnish its international image. The country’s foreign minister told The Associated Press earlier this year that there would be space for protests.

    Against this backdrop, “it will be that much easier to censor, prohibit or silence attempts by civil society seeking to hold the process accountable to delivering the needed outcomes,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy at watchdog group Corporate Accountability. “It will also make the polluter PR and greenwashing surrounding the talks that much more effective.”

    ———

    Follow all AP stories on climate change at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

    ———

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Advanced recycling: Plastic crisis solution or distraction?

    Advanced recycling: Plastic crisis solution or distraction?

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    PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The plastics industry says there is a way to help solve the crisis of plastic waste plaguing the planet’s oceans, beaches and lands— recycle it, chemically.

    Chemical recycling typically uses heat or chemical solvents to break down plastics into liquid and gas to produce an oil-like mixture or basic chemicals. Industry leaders say that mixture can be made back into plastic pellets to make new products.

    “What we are trying to do is really create a circular economy for plastics because we think it is the most viable option for keeping plastic out of the environment,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade association for American chemical companies.

    ExxonMobil, New Hope Energy, Nexus Circular, Eastman, Encina and other companies are planning to build large plastics recycling plants. Seven smaller facilities across the United States already recycle plastic into new plastic, according to the ACC. A handful of others convert hard-to-recycle used plastics into alternative transportation fuels for aviation, marine and auto uses.

    But environmental groups say advanced recycling is a distraction from real solutions like producing and using less plastic. They suspect the idea of recyclable plastics will enable the steep ramp up in plastic production to continue. And while the amount produced globally grows, recycling rates for plastic waste are abysmally low, especially in the United States.

    Plastic packaging, multi-layered films, bags, polystyrene foam and other hard-to-recycle plastic products are piling up in landfills and in the environment, or going to incinerators.

    Judith Enck, the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, says plastics recycling doesn’t work and never will. Chemical additives and colorants used to give plastic different properties mean that there are thousands of types, she said. That’s why they can’t be mixed together and recycled in the conventional, mechanical way. Nor is there much of a market for recycled plastic, because virgin plastic is cheap, she said.

    So what is more likely to happen than actual recycling, said Enck, a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is the industry will shift to burning plastics as waste or as fuel.

    Lee Bell, a policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, thinks chemical recycling is a public relations exercise by the petrochemical industry. The purpose is to dissuade regulators from capping plastics production. Making plastic could become even more important to the fossil fuel industry as climate change puts pressure on their transportation fuels, Bell said.

    The industry has made roughly 11 billion metric tons of plastic since 1950, with half of that produced since 2006, according to industrial ecologist Roland Geyer. Global plastic production is expected to more than quadruple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Programme and GRID-Arendal in Norway.

    The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says the share of plastic waste that is successfully recycled is projected to rise to 17% in 2060 from 9% in 2019 if no additional policies are enacted to restrain plastic demand and enhance recycling, but that wouldn’t begin to keep up with the projected growth in plastic waste. With more ambitious policies, the amount of plastic waste that is recycled could rise to 40% to 60%, according to OECD.

    Two groups working to reduce plastic pollution, the Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics, estimated that the U.S. rate for recycling plastic waste in 2021 was even lower — 5% to 6%, after China stopped accepting other countries’ waste in 2018.

    The U.S. national recycling strategy says no option, including chemical recycling, should be ruled out. The way to think of these new plants, the industry says, is as manufacturing plants. They should be legally defined that way, and not as waste management. About 20 states have adopted laws in the past five years consistent with that wish. Opponents say it’s a way to skirt the more stringent environmental regulations that apply to waste management facilities.

    EXISTING PLANTS

    The U.S. facilities currently recycling plastic into new plastic are small — the largest is a 60-ton-per-day plant in Akron, Ohio, Alterra Energy, according to the ACC.

    Alterra Energy says it takes in the hard-to-recycle plastics, like flexible pouches, multi-layered films and rigid plastics from automobiles — everything except plastic water bottles since those are recycled mechanically, or plastics marked with a “3” since they contain polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.

    “Our mission is to solve plastic pollution,” said Jeremy DeBenedictis, company president. “That is not just a tag line. We all truly want to solve plastic pollution.”

    The Ohio facility typically takes in 40 tons to 50 tons per day, heating and liquifying the plastic to turn it back into an oil or hydrocarbon liquid, about 10,000 gallons to 12,000 gallons daily. About 75% of what comes into the facility can be liquified like that. Another 15% is turned into a synthetic natural gas to heat the process, while the remainder — paper, metals, dyes, inks and colorants — exit the reactor as a byproduct, or carbon char, DeBenedictis said. The char is disposed of as nonhazardous waste, though in the future some hope to sell it to the asphalt industry.

    The process doesn’t involve oxygen so there’s no combustion or incineration of plastics, DeBenedictis said, and their product is trucked as a synthetic oil to petrochemical companies, essentially the “building blocks on a molecular level for new plastic production.”

    The materials they take in, that haven’t been able to be recycled until now, should not be sent to landfills, dumped in the ocean or incinerated, DeBenedictis said.

    “That next level has to be a new technology, what you call chemical recycling or advanced recycling. That’s the next frontier,” he said.

    “Let’s not kid ourselves here. This is the right time to do it,” added company CEO Fred Schmuck. “There is absolutely no way we can meet our climate goals without addressing plastic waste.”

    DeBenedictis said he’s licensing the technology to try to grow the industry because that’s the “best way to make the quickest impact to the world.” A Finnish oil and gas company, Neste, is currently working to commercialize Alterra’s technology in Europe.

    The main chemical recycling technologies use pyrolysis, gasification or depolymerization. Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, is skeptical. He says he has been hearing that pyrolysis is going to change everything since the 1990s, but it hasn’t happened. Instead, plastic production keeps climbing.

    GAIA views chemical recycling as a false solution that will facilitate greater production of virgin plastic — a high-energy process with high-carbon emissions that releases hazardous air pollutants, Tangri said. Instead, GAIA wants plastic production to be dramatically scaled back and only recyclable plastics to be produced.

    “Nobody needs more plastic,” Tangri said. “We keep trying to solve these production problems with recycling when really we need to change how much we make and what we make. That’s where the solution lies.”

    EQUITY ISSUES IN SITING PLANTS

    In Rhode Island, state lawmakers considered a bill this year to exempt such facilities from solid waste licensing requirements. It was vigorously opposed by environmental activists and residents near the port of Providence who feared it would lead to a new plant in their neighborhood. State environmental officials sided with them.

    Monica Huertas, executive director of The People’s Port Authority, helped lead the opposition. The neighborhood is already overburdened by industry, she said, so much so that she sometimes has asthma attacks after walking around.

    Dwayne Keys said it’s unfair that he and his neighbors always have to be on guard for proposals like these, unlike residents in some of the state’s wealthy, white neighborhoods. The port area has enough environmental hazards that residents don’t benefit from economically, he added. Keys calls it environmental racism.

    “The assessment is, we’re the path of least resistance,” he said. “Not that there’s no resistance, but the least. We’re a coalition of individuals volunteering our time. We don’t have wealth or access to resources or the legal means, as opposed to our white counterparts in higher income, higher net worth communities.”

    The chemistry council’s Baca said the facilities operate at the highest standards, the industry believes everyone deserves clear air and water, and he would invite any detractors to one of the facilities so they can see that firsthand.

    U.S. plastics producers have said they will recycle or recover all plastic packaging used in the United States by 2040, and have already announced more than $7 billion in investments in both mechanical and chemical recycling.

    “I think we are on the cusp of a sustainability revolution where circularity will be the centerpiece of that,” Baca said. “And innovative technologies like advanced recycling will be what makes this possible.”

    Kate O’Neill wrote the book on waste, called “Waste.” A professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, she has thought a lot about whether chemical recycling should be part of the solution to the plastic crisis. She said she has concluded yes, even though she knows saying so would “piss off the environmentalists.”

    “With some of these big problems,” she said, “we can’t rule anything out.”

    ———

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Advanced recycling: Plastic crisis solution or distraction?

    Advanced recycling: Plastic crisis solution or distraction?

    [ad_1]

    PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The plastics industry says there is a way to help solve the crisis of plastic waste plaguing the planet’s oceans, beaches and lands— recycle it, chemically.

    Chemical recycling typically uses heat or chemical solvents to break down plastics into liquid and gas to produce an oil-like mixture or basic chemicals. Industry leaders say that mixture can be made back into plastic pellets to make new products.

    “What we are trying to do is really create a circular economy for plastics because we think it is the most viable option for keeping plastic out of the environment,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade association for American chemical companies.

    ExxonMobil, New Hope Energy, Nexus Circular, Eastman, Encina and other companies are planning to build large plastics recycling plants. Seven smaller facilities across the United States already recycle plastic into new plastic, according to the ACC. A handful of others convert hard-to-recycle used plastics into alternative transportation fuels for aviation, marine and auto uses.

    But environmental groups say advanced recycling is a distraction from real solutions like producing and using less plastic. They suspect the idea of recyclable plastics will enable the steep ramp up in plastic production to continue. And while the amount produced globally grows, recycling rates for plastic waste are abysmally low, especially in the United States.

    Plastic packaging, multi-layered films, bags, polystyrene foam and other hard-to-recycle plastic products are piling up in landfills and in the environment, or going to incinerators.

    Judith Enck, the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, says plastics recycling doesn’t work and never will. Chemical additives and colorants used to give plastic different properties mean that there are thousands of types, she said. That’s why they can’t be mixed together and recycled in the conventional, mechanical way. Nor is there much of a market for recycled plastic, because virgin plastic is cheap, she said.

    So what is more likely to happen than actual recycling, said Enck, a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is the industry will shift to burning plastics as waste or as fuel.

    Lee Bell, a policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, thinks chemical recycling is a public relations exercise by the petrochemical industry. The purpose is to dissuade regulators from capping plastics production. Making plastic could become even more important to the fossil fuel industry as climate change puts pressure on their transportation fuels, Bell said.

    The industry has made roughly 11 billion metric tons of plastic since 1950, with half of that produced since 2006, according to industrial ecologist Roland Geyer. Global plastic production is expected to more than quadruple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Programme and GRID-Arendal in Norway.

    The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says the share of plastic waste that is successfully recycled is projected to rise to 17% in 2060 from 9% in 2019 if no additional policies are enacted to restrain plastic demand and enhance recycling, but that wouldn’t begin to keep up with the projected growth in plastic waste. With more ambitious policies, the amount of plastic waste that is recycled could rise to 40% to 60%, according to OECD.

    Two groups working to reduce plastic pollution, the Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics, estimated that the U.S. rate for recycling plastic waste in 2021 was even lower — 5% to 6%, after China stopped accepting other countries’ waste in 2018.

    The U.S. national recycling strategy says no option, including chemical recycling, should be ruled out. The way to think of these new plants, the industry says, is as manufacturing plants. They should be legally defined that way, and not as waste management. About 20 states have adopted laws in the past five years consistent with that wish. Opponents say it’s a way to skirt the more stringent environmental regulations that apply to waste management facilities.

    EXISTING PLANTS

    The U.S. facilities currently recycling plastic into new plastic are small — the largest is a 60-ton-per-day plant in Akron, Ohio, Alterra Energy, according to the ACC.

    Alterra Energy says it takes in the hard-to-recycle plastics, like flexible pouches, multi-layered films and rigid plastics from automobiles — everything except plastic water bottles since those are recycled mechanically, or plastics marked with a “3” since they contain polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.

    “Our mission is to solve plastic pollution,” said Jeremy DeBenedictis, company president. “That is not just a tag line. We all truly want to solve plastic pollution.”

    The Ohio facility typically takes in 40 tons to 50 tons per day, heating and liquifying the plastic to turn it back into an oil or hydrocarbon liquid, about 10,000 gallons to 12,000 gallons daily. About 75% of what comes into the facility can be liquified like that. Another 15% is turned into a synthetic natural gas to heat the process, while the remainder — paper, metals, dyes, inks and colorants — exit the reactor as a byproduct, or carbon char, DeBenedictis said. The char is disposed of as nonhazardous waste, though in the future some hope to sell it to the asphalt industry.

    The process doesn’t involve oxygen so there’s no combustion or incineration of plastics, DeBenedictis said, and their product is trucked as a synthetic oil to petrochemical companies, essentially the “building blocks on a molecular level for new plastic production.”

    The materials they take in, that haven’t been able to be recycled until now, should not be sent to landfills, dumped in the ocean or incinerated, DeBenedictis said.

    “That next level has to be a new technology, what you call chemical recycling or advanced recycling. That’s the next frontier,” he said.

    “Let’s not kid ourselves here. This is the right time to do it,” added company CEO Fred Schmuck. “There is absolutely no way we can meet our climate goals without addressing plastic waste.”

    DeBenedictis said he’s licensing the technology to try to grow the industry because that’s the “best way to make the quickest impact to the world.” A Finnish oil and gas company, Neste, is currently working to commercialize Alterra’s technology in Europe.

    The main chemical recycling technologies use pyrolysis, gasification or depolymerization. Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, is skeptical. He says he has been hearing that pyrolysis is going to change everything since the 1990s, but it hasn’t happened. Instead, plastic production keeps climbing.

    GAIA views chemical recycling as a false solution that will facilitate greater production of virgin plastic — a high-energy process with high-carbon emissions that releases hazardous air pollutants, Tangri said. Instead, GAIA wants plastic production to be dramatically scaled back and only recyclable plastics to be produced.

    “Nobody needs more plastic,” Tangri said. “We keep trying to solve these production problems with recycling when really we need to change how much we make and what we make. That’s where the solution lies.”

    EQUITY ISSUES IN CITING PLANTS

    In Rhode Island, state lawmakers considered a bill this year to exempt such facilities from solid waste licensing requirements. It was vigorously opposed by environmental activists and residents near the port of Providence who feared it would lead to a new plant in their neighborhood. State environmental officials sided with them.

    Monica Huertas, executive director of The People’s Port Authority, helped lead the opposition. The neighborhood is already overburdened by industry, she said, so much so that she sometimes has asthma attacks after walking around.

    Dwayne Keys said it’s unfair that he and his neighbors always have to be on guard for proposals like these, unlike residents in some of the state’s wealthy, white neighborhoods. The port area has enough environmental hazards that residents don’t benefit from economically, he added. Keys calls it environmental racism.

    “The assessment is, we’re the path of least resistance,” he said. “Not that there’s no resistance, but the least. We’re a coalition of individuals volunteering our time. We don’t have wealth or access to resources or the legal means, as opposed to our white counterparts in higher income, higher net worth communities.”

    The chemistry council’s Baca said the facilities operate at the highest standards, the industry believes everyone deserves clear air and water, and he would invite any detractors to one of the facilities so they can see that firsthand.

    U.S. plastics producers have said they will recycle or recover all plastic packaging used in the United States by 2040, and have already announced more than $7 billion in investments in both mechanical and chemical recycling.

    “I think we are on the cusp of a sustainability revolution where circularity will be the centerpiece of that,” Baca said. “And innovative technologies like advanced recycling will be what makes this possible.”

    Kate O’Neill wrote the book on waste, called “Waste.” A professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, she has thought a lot about whether chemical recycling should be part of the solution to the plastic crisis. She said she has concluded yes, even though she knows saying so would “piss off the environmentalists.”

    “With some of these big problems,” she said, “we can’t rule anything out.”

    ———

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Study: Cancer-causing gas leaking from CA stoves, pipes

    Study: Cancer-causing gas leaking from CA stoves, pipes

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    Gas stoves in California homes are leaking cancer-causing benzene, researchers found in a new study published on Thursday, though they say more research is needed to understand how many homes have leaks.

    In the study, published in Environmental Science and Technology on Thursday, researchers also estimated that over 4 tons of benzene per year are being leaked into the atmosphere from outdoor pipes that deliver the gas to buildings around California — the equivalent to the benzene emissions from nearly 60,000 vehicles. And those emissions are unaccounted for by the state.

    The researchers collected samples of gas from 159 homes in different regions of California and measured to see what types of gases were being emitted into homes when stoves were off. They found that all of the samples they tested had hazardous air pollutants, like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene (BTEX), all of which can have adverse health effects in humans with chronic exposure or acute exposure in larger amounts.

    Of most concern to the researchers was benzene, a known carcinogen that can lead to leukemia and other cancers and blood disorders, according to the National Cancer Institute.

    The finding could have major implications for indoor and outdoor air quality in California, which has the second highest level of residential natural gas use in the United States.

    “What our science shows is that people in California are exposed to potentially hazardous levels of benzene from the gas that is piped into their homes,” said Drew Michanowicz, a study co-author and senior scientist at PSE Healthy Energy, an energy research and policy institute. “We hope that policymakers will consider this data when they are making policy to ensure current and future policies are health-protective in light of this new research.”

    Homes in almost every region in the study — Greater Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and Fresno — had benzene levels that far exceed the limit determined to be safe by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazards Assessment. But the region with the highest benzene levels by far was the North San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys.

    This finding in particular didn’t surprise residents and health care workers in the region who spoke to The Associated Press about the study. That’s because many of them experienced the largest-known natural gas leak in the nation in Aliso Canyon in 2015.

    Back then, 100,000 tons of methane and other gases, including benzene, leaked from a failed well operated by Southern California Gas Co. It took nearly four months to get the leak under control and resulted in headaches, nausea and nose bleeds.

    Dr. Jeffrey Nordella was a physician at an urgent care in the region during this time and remembers being puzzled by the variety of symptoms patients were experiencing. “I didn’t have much to offer them,” except to help them try to detox from the exposures, he said.

    That was an acute exposure of a large amount of benzene, which is different from chronic exposure to smaller amounts, but “remember what the World Health Organization said: there’s no safe level of benzene,” he said.

    Kyoko Hibino was one of the residents exposed to toxic air pollution as a result of the Aliso Canyon gas leak. After the leak, she started having a persistent cough and nosebleeds and eventually was diagnosed with breast cancer, which has also been linked to benzene exposure. Her cats also started having nosebleeds and one recently passed away from leukemia.

    “I’d say let’s take this study really seriously and understand how bad (benzene exposure) is,” she said.

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    Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.

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    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • New Zealand farmers hit streets to protest cow-burp tax plan

    New Zealand farmers hit streets to protest cow-burp tax plan

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    WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Farmers across New Zealand took to the streets on their tractors Thursday to protest government plans to tax cow burps and other greenhouse gas emissions, although the rallies were smaller than many had expected.

    Lobby group Groundswell New Zealand helped organize more than 50 protests in towns and cities across the country, the biggest involving a few dozen vehicles.

    Last week, the government proposed a new farm levy as part of a plan to tackle climate change. The government said it would be a world first, and that farmers should be able to recoup the cost by charging more for climate-friendly products.

    Because farming is so big in New Zealand — there are 10 million beef and dairy cattle and 26 million sheep, compared to just 5 million people — about half of all greenhouse gas emissions come from farms. Methane from burping cattle makes a particularly big contribution.

    But some farmers argue the proposed tax would actually increase global greenhouse gas emissions by shifting farming to countries less efficient at making food.

    At the protest in Wellington, farmer Dave McCurdy said he was disappointed in the small turnout, but said most farmers were working hard on their farms during a spell of good spring weather at a particularly busy time of year.

    He said farmers were good environmental stewards.

    “It’s our life, our family’s lives,” he said. “We’re not out there to wreck it, we wouldn’t make any money. We love our farms. That’s what annoys us. We’re painted at these bad guys, but a lot of farmers have spent generations looking after that land.”

    He said the proposed tax didn’t take proper account of all the trees and brush he and other farmers had planted, which helped trap carbon and offset emissions. He said if the proposed tax and herd reductions went ahead, it would be ruinous to many farmers.

    “I’m out,” he said. “Waste of time.”

    Farming remains vital to New Zealand’s economy. Dairy products, including those used to make infant formula in China, are the nation’s largest export earner.

    McCurdy said farmers had almost singlehandedly kept the economy afloat during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and now that the threat had passed and a recession was looming, the government was coming after them.

    New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has pledged the nation will become carbon neutral by 2050. Part of that plan includes reducing methane emissions from farm animals by 10% by 2030 and by up to 47% by 2050.

    The government had worked with farmers and other groups to try to come up with an emissions plan they could all live with. But many farmers have been incensed by the government’s final proposal, while environmentalists have said it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

    Farmer Matt Swansson said he’d “had a gutsful” of the government and would consider refusing to pay the new tax.

    He said on beautiful evenings on his farm, he thinks he has the best job in the world.

    “But when it’s rain, drizzle, and you get home and listen to the news,” Swansson said. “Why do you bother?”

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