ReportWire

Tag: Climate and environment

  • Valentine flower imports increase at Miami airport, despite tariffs, officials say

    [ad_1]

    MIAMI — Winged babies shooting heart-shaped arrows might get most of the credit on Valentine’s Day, but the real magic behind millions of romantic bouquets happens in a cargo warehouse at a South Florida airport.

    Agricultural specialists at Miami International Airport will process about 990 million stems of cut flowers in the weeks before Feb. 14, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Around 90% of the fresh cut flowers being sold for Valentine’s Day in the United States come through Miami, while the other 10% pass through Los Angeles.

    Roses, carnations, pompons, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums and gypsophila arrive on hundreds of flights, mostly from Colombia and Ecuador, to Miami on their journey to florists and supermarkets across the U.S. and Canada.

    Miami’s largest flower importer is Avianca Cargo, based in Medellín, Colombia. In preparation for Valentine’s Day, the company is transporting about 19,000 tons of flowers on 320 full cargo flights, CEO Diogo Elias said Friday in Miami. They’re running more than twice as many flights compared to normal.

    “We fly flowers for the whole year, but Valentine’s is special,” Elias said. “Much more concentrated on roses, red roses especially. More than 50-60% are red roses at this time.”

    Customers buying flowers will likely see an increase in price this year. Christine Boldt, executive vice president for the Association of Floral Importers of America, said the cause is largely related to tariffs placed last year on imports from Colombia and Ecuador, along with a new minimum wage enacted this year in Colombia.

    “This adds significant dollars to the bouquets that are coming in,” Boldt said. “Every consumer is gonna have to face additional costs.”

    Despite higher prices, Flowers continue to make up one of MIA’s largest imports, airport director Ralph Cutié said. The airport received almost 3.5 million tons of cargo last year, with flowers accounting for about 400,000 tons. More than a quarter of those flowers are shipped before Valentine’s Day, marking a 6% increase over last year.

    “The mother, the wife, the girlfriend in Omaha, Nebraska, that gets their flowers for either Valentine’s or Mother’s Day, chances are those flowers passed through our airport,” Cutié said. “And that’s something we take a lot of pride in.”

    CBP agriculture specialists check the bundles of flowers for potentially harmful plant, pest and foreign animal diseases from entering the country, CBP senior official Daniel Alonso said. Inspectors on average find about 40-50 plant pests a day, the most common being moths. Pests are turned over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which determines the potential threat.

    “Our rigorous process is vital to safeguarding the floral and agricultural industries, ensuring that our imported flowers are not introducing any pests or harmful diseases,” Alonso said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • ‘I can’t afford cooking gas,’ shutdown of Kenya’s Koko biofuel firm wipes out clean cooking options

    [ad_1]

    NAIROBI, Kenya — It was designed to be as simple as buying airtime: a quick tap on the dispenser, a few shillings and a cooking canister refilled. Now, more than 3,000 Koko fuel supply points across Kenya sit idle, with no fuel and no clear answers for the households that relied on them.

    For more than a decade, Koko Networks helped shift over 1.5 million Kenyan homes without access to public gas systems away from smoky charcoal stoves to bioethanol, marketed as a cleaner, modern way to cook. The steady blue flame became a symbol of Kenya’s push toward cleaner household energy.

    That promise has dimmed.

    After failing to win government letter of authorization that would allow them to sell carbon credits — permits that allow holders to emit certain amount of greenhouse gases — Koko abruptly shut down its fuel distribution network, bringing to a halt a model once hailed as a poster child of Africa’s green transition.

    In Kibera, Nairobi’s largest informal settlement, most Koko Networks outlets have closed, and some have removed the bioethanol dispensers altogether. Since 2014, Koko had imported bioethanol products. That ended abruptly in 2023 when the government withheld its import permit, forcing Koko to use local sources that were erratic and more expensive.

    That reality is setting in for Fredrick Onchenge. He used to serve up to 50 Koko customers a day. Now his machines are silent.

    “Initially, I was confused,” Onchenge said. “Then it dawned on me what had just happened. My livelihood was gone. I tried calling the salesperson, but their phone was switched off.”

    For many customers, their access ended with a text message announcing the shutdown. Kitchens that once cooked meals without smoke now have idle double-burner stoves — reminders of a system that stopped overnight.

    Grace Kathambi is weighing her options.

    “This was a life changer for me,” Kathambi said. “I could not afford the $8 needed to refill a gas cylinder, and Koko was my best alternative. With about 30 U.S. cents, I could buy enough Koko fuel to cook.”

    With the bioethanol supply cut off, households like hers must now choose between returning to charcoal or finding money for more expensive liquefied petroleum gas.

    “I cannot afford to use gas,” said Margaret Auma. “Koko made life very easy for those of us who earn little from casual jobs. We feel abandoned, yet it’s not our fault.”

    For weeks, Koko and the Kenyan government haggled over a crucial letter authorizing carbon credits and import permits for bioethanol made from molasses, a sugarcane by-product. The company needed those approvals to unlock millions of dollars in international financing that helped keep fuel prices low. Kenyan authorities held back, citing broader concerns about the credibility of carbon credits.

    Koko — which counted the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, and South Africa’s Rand Merchant Bank as its investors, announced on Jan. 30 that without the approvals its business model was financially unsustainable and it was shutting down.

    “Koko’s case is uniquely multidimensional,” said David Ndii, Kenya’s presidential advisor on economic affairs. Ndii cited issues including the Paris Agreement framework, questions around the credibility of cookstove carbon credits, Kenya’s climate policies, carbon market regulations, the transparency of Koko’s business model and diplomatic considerations.

    He dismissed the prospect of state intervention, saying, “Even good doctors lose patients.”

    Kenya’s energy and treasury officials have declined to comment on the closure, which energy analysts say exposes weaknesses in how clean cooking is financed across Africa.

    “The clean cooking situation in Kenya, and across Africa is a serious crisis,” said Amos Wemanya, a senior analyst on renewable energy at Power Shift Africa. “This is not just about emissions or climate targets. It is about development, health, dignity and household survival.”

    Wemanya said models heavily reliant on carbon credits risk prioritizing markets over people.

    “We are not going to solve the clean cooking challenge through carbon math or carbon credit spreadsheets,” he said. “Carbon markets allow polluters to continue emitting while households, who are supposed to be the beneficiaries, still pay for the stoves and bear the risks when projects fail.”

    When such systems collapse, he added, it is households that suffer most.

    “They are the ones forced to revert to harmful alternatives like charcoal and paraffin,” Wemanya said.

    He said the Koko episode shows the priority should shift toward affordable electricity, especially in rural areas.

    “Clean cooking will not be solved through carbon credits,” he said. “The reality is that gas-based solutions were never a long-term climate solution. They simply shift households from firewood to imported fossil fuels. So, the bigger lesson here is that we need to move toward systems that truly work, primarily electricity powered by renewable energy.”

    For now, households like Auma’s must now choose between returning to charcoal or finding money for more expensive LPG.

    “What are we supposed to do? Go back to using charcoal in our one-room houses?” Auma asked. “That is the smoke and sickness we were trying to escape.”

    ____

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Giant snails and tiny insects threaten the South’s rice and crawfish farms

    [ad_1]

    KAPLAN, La. — Josh Courville has harvested crawfish his whole life, but these days, he’s finding a less welcome catch in some of the fields he manages in southern Louisiana.

    Snails. Big ones.

    For every crawfish Courville dumps out of a trap, three or four snails clang onto the boat’s metal sorting table. About the size of a baseball when fully grown, apple snails stubbornly survive all kinds of weather in fields, pipes and drainage ditches and can lay thousands of bubblegum-colored eggs every month.

    “It’s very disheartening,” Courville said. “The most discouraging part, actually, is not having much control over it.”

    Apple snails are just one example of how invasive species can quickly become a nightmare for farmers.

    In Louisiana, where rice and crawfish are often grown together in the same fields, there’s now a second threat: tiny insects called delphacids that can deal catastrophic damage to rice plants. Much about these snails and insects is still a mystery, and researchers are trying to learn more about what’s fueling their spread, from farming methods and pesticides to global shipping and extreme weather.

    Experts aren’t sure what role climate change may play, but they say a warming world generally makes it easier for pests to spread to other parts of the country if they gain a foothold in the temperate South.

    “We are going to have more bugs that are happier to live here if it stays warmer here longer,” said Hannah Burrack, professor and chair of the entomology department at Michigan State University.

    It’s an urgent problem because in a tough market for rice, farmers who rotate the rice and crawfish crops together need successful harvests of both to make ends meet. And losses to pests could mean higher rice prices for U.S. consumers, said Steve Linscombe, director of The Rice Foundation, which does research and education outreach for the U.S. rice industry.

    Courville manages fields for Christian Richard, a sixth-generation rice farmer in Louisiana. Both started noticing apple snails after a bad flood in 2016. Then the population ballooned.

    In spring, at rice planting time, the hungry snails found a feast.

    “It was like this science fiction movie,” Richard said, describing how each snail made its own little whirlpool as it popped out of the wet ground. “They would start on those tender rice plants, and they destroyed a 100-acre field.”

    Louisiana State University scientists estimate that about 78 square miles (202 square kilometers) in the state are now regularly seeing snails.

    To keep the rice from becoming a snail buffet, Richard’s team and many other rice and crawfish farmers dealing with the pests start with a dry field to give the rice plants the chance to grow a few inches and get stronger, then flood the field after.

    It’s a planting method they’d already used on some fields, even before the snails arrived. But now, with the snails, that’s essentially their only option, and it’s the most expensive one.

    They also can’t get rid of the snails entirely. Many of the pesticides that might work on snails can also hurt crustaceans. People directly eat both rice and crawfish, unlike crops grown for animal feed, so there are fewer chemicals farmers can use on them. One option some farmers are testing, copper sulfate, can easily add thousands of dollars to an operation’s costs, Courville said.

    It all means “lower production, decreased revenue from that, and increased cost with the extra labor,” Richard said.

    Cecilia Gallegos, who has worked as a crawfish harvester for the past three years, said the snails have made her job more difficult in the past year.

    “You give up more time,” she said of having to separate the crawfish from the snails, or occasionally plucking them out of sacks if they roll in by mistake. Work that already stretched as late as 3 a.m. in the busy springtime season can now take even longer.

    The snails separated from the crawfish get destroyed later.

    To look for pests much smaller than the apple snails, entomologists whip around heavy-duty butterfly nets and deploy Ghostbusters-style specimen-collecting vacuums. Since last year, they’ve been sampling for rice delphacids, tiny insects that pierce the rice plants, suck out their sap and transmit a rice virus that worsens the damage.

    It’s worrying for Louisiana because they’ve seen how bad it can get next door in Texas, where delphacids surged last year. Yields dropped by up to 50% in what’s called the ratoon crop, the second rice crop of the year, said The Rice Foundation’s Linscombe. Texas farmers are projected to grow rice on only half the acres they did last year, and some are worried they won’t be able to get bank loans, said Tyler Musgrove, a rice extension specialist at the Louisiana State University AgCenter.

    Musgrove said entomologists believe almost all rice fields in Louisiana had delphacids by September and October of last year. By then, most of the rice had already been harvested, so they’re waiting to see what happens this year.

    “The rice delphacid this past year was probably one of the most significant entomological events to occur in U.S. rice since the ‘50s when it first appeared,” Musgrove said. Delphacids had eventually disappeared after that outbreak until now. It’s been identified in four of the six rice-producing states — Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi — but it’s not clear yet whether it’s made a permanent winter home in the U.S.

    Scientists are still in the early stages of advising farmers on what to do about the resurgence of the destructive bugs without adding costly or crawfish-harming pesticides. And they’re also starting to study whether rice and crawfish grown together will see different impacts than rice grown by itself.

    “I think everyone agrees, it’s not going to be a silver bullet approach. Like, oh, we can just breed for it or we could just spray our way out of it,” said Adam Famoso, director of Louisiana State University’s Rice Research Station.

    Burrack, of Michigan State, said that climate change is making it harder for modeling that has helped predict how big populations of invasive pests will get and when they may affect certain crops. And that makes it harder for farmers to plan around them.

    “From an agricultural standpoint, that’s generally what happens when you get one of these intractable pests,” Burrack said. “People are no longer able to produce the thing that they want to produce in the place that they’re producing it.”

    ___

    Follow Melina Walling on X @MelinaWalling and Bluesky @melinawalling.bsky.social. Follow Joshua A. Bickel on Instagram, Bluesky and X @joshuabickel.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Cortina is abuzz for the Winter Olympics. Co-host Milan not so much

    [ad_1]

    MILAN — In Cortina d’Ampezzo you can’t escape the fact the mountain town is gearing up for its second Winter Olympics.

    In Milan you could easily miss that the Games are about to start.

    The vibe in the two main hubs for the 2026 Milan Cortina Games could not be more different.

    Cortina, surrounded by the jagged peaks of the Dolomites, has seen snow falling much of the week, adding to the idyllic feel of being in a luxury mountain resort town. Blue-and-white flags that say Cortina 1956 2026 — recalling the previous time Cortina hosted the Games — hang on wooden homes and other buildings and the Olympic cauldron is near the church in the center of town.

    In Milan, it’s not snow that’s fallen but rain. Italy’s bustling fashion and financial center has a lot going on that’s unrelated to the Games, so step outside the center of the city and there’s barely an inkling of the Olympic rings.

    “I don’t think it’s their (Milan’s) fault. I just think it’s the structure of the Games and trying to be economic by spreading it out to different regions,” said Sam Durante, who travelled from Calgary with his wife Melissa to cheer on their daughter — the goalkeeper for the Italian ice hockey team. “It makes sense, but it creates a bit of a disjointed Games.”

    The Durantes went to the Calgary Games in 1988 in their hometown and they admit in terms of Olympic atmosphere Milan is a bit of a letdown.

    “It was electric because all of the events were close by,” said Sam Durante. “I think it’s a little disjointed here.

    “I think Milan is starting to embrace the Olympic spirit, but it’s not to the same extent that we had in Calgary.”

    The Durantes were looking at Milan Cortina merchandise in the megastore that is in Milan’s main square, in front of the city’s imposing cathedral.

    The countdown clock is on one side of the square, while one of the nearby streets is festooned with strings of lights, with each one depicting a different Olympic sport.

    The piazza is at the heart of the Olympic boulevard that runs from the main train station to the fan zone and cauldron.

    There’s little sign of the Olympics in the rest of Milan, especially with the venues for ice hockey, speed skating and figure skating on the outskirts of the city and far from each other.

    “It’s lacking a bit of atmosphere,” said Faizan Mohammad, a 31-year-old insurer from Milan. “I don’t really feel at the moment that the Olympics is happening, I see it more as an inconvenience at the moment because of the various road closures.

    “I think when it starts it will get better. I can’t wait, because of that. Because at the moment I see more inconveniences. Then I hope to also see a bit of sport and competition, a bit of happiness.”

    While the umbrellas were up in Milan against the rain on a gray Wednesday afternoon, they were up in Cortina against the heavy snow — with that adding to the picturesque, wintry scene with the town’s main church at the backdrop. During quiet moments, birds are easy to hear in the pine trees on the edge of the village bustling with last-minute preparations for the fans.

    Matthew Greiner, an American luger, said the atmosphere in Cortina is “electric.” Italian luger Leon Felderer said there are “always good vibes” in Cortina, “everybody’s happy.” He said he feels much more at home in the mountains than he would in a big city.

    “I’m very glad that we got the track here in Cortina,” he said Thursday at the Cortina Olympic and Paralympic Village.

    Francesca Alberte works at the Golden Goose boutique. On a break Wednesday, she walked through downtown, looking up at the national flags that hung across the street for the Olympics.

    She said there’s an air of excitement in Cortina for the Olympics, though also some trepidation. Construction at the venues was not finished even as athletes and fans were arriving.

    “All the people are so excited and so emotional for this big event,” she said. “We are a little bit afraid for a lot of things that are not ready, but we’re happy and excited for this event.”

    Alberte said locals love Cortina because of the views of the Dolomites and because it’s a small town that has everything.

    American alpine ski racer Jackie Wiles said she loves Cortina, too.

    “Whatever happens in the race, you just love being in the Dolomites. Walking through town, everyone has fur coats on,” she said. “So I feel like it’s just a cool place to be.”

    Indeed, Cortina’s main street is lined with shops selling cashmere and designer clothes, as well as high-end ski gear. In a shop window, a long, green women’s snow jacket retailed for 750 euros ($885 U.S. dollars). A men’s ski outfit retailed for 700 euros ($826 U.S. dollars).

    Peter Kristen, a tourist from Slovakia, purchased Olympics souvenirs while visiting Cortina for the first time on a ski trip. He said Cortina is posh and he noticed “a lot of construction.”

    James Reed, a former bobsledder who is now a photographer for the U.S. bobsledding team, described Cortina as a “ritzy mountain town” similar to Vail or Aspen in Colorado, as he walked past the shops.

    “The beautiful skiing, beautiful mountains, lots of great hotels and restaurants and shops,” he said. “It’s a really great place to come to.”

    Holding an umbrella to keep the snow off her gray fur coat, Milan resident Mariella Mariani walked around Cortina with her husband to see the setup for the Olympics.

    She said that while the Olympic hosts are nothing alike, the Games will benefit both locations.

    “It’s an important event for our country,” she said.

    ___

    McDermott reported from Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

    ___

    AP Winter Olympics coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • IOC open to earlier dates for future Winter Olympics and Paralympics because of warmer temperatures

    [ad_1]

    MILAN — Staging future Winter Games as early as January and the Paralympic Winter Games in February is a possibility because of the effects of warmer temperatures, the International Olympic Committee said Wednesday.

    Every Winter Games medal was won in February since the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics opened Jan. 29, and moving to January would likely disrupt scheduling of storied World Cup races and events. It also would more directly clash with NFL and NBA schedules.

    The IOC is now reviewing Olympic Games issues in the first year of Kirsty Coventry’s presidency and changing the winter edition dates is an option.

    “Maybe we are also discussing to bring the Winter Olympics a little bit earlier,” the IOC member overseeing the sports program review, Karl Stoss, told reporters. “To do it in January because it has an implication for the Paralympics as well.”

    The Milan Cortina Paralympic Winter Games will be held March 6-15.

    The IOC has long acknowledged under Coventry’s predecessor Thomas Bach that changing climate is a challenge for finding future hosts and organizing competitions.

    “(March) is very late because the sun is strong enough to melt the snow,” said Stoss, whose home country Austria is a traditional power in Alpine skiing and ski jumping.

    “Maybe the Paralympics will be in February and the other edition will be in January. That would also be a part of our discussion,” he said on the sidelines of the IOC’s eve-of-Olympics meeting in Milan.

    The 100-plus IOC members should meet again in June to make decisions about the Olympic reviews, in a program called “Fit For The Future,” and whether to add new sports and events to the 2030 French Alps Winter Games.

    The French Alps edition is currently expected to run Feb. 1-17 and the 2034 Utah Winter Games from Feb. 10–26.

    ___

    AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Kenya unveils tax breaks for EV parts and charging stations

    [ad_1]

    NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya plans to roll out new tax incentives to speed up adoption of electric vehicles, betting that lower costs for vehicle parts and charging stations will attract investors and accelerate a shift away from fossil fuels.

    Transport Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir said the measures are part of a newly launched National Electric Mobility Policy, which now aligns the transport sector with Kenya’s climate commitments.

    “Electric mobility is crucial to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, decreasing reliance on imported fossil fuels, and fostering economic growth through local manufacturing and job creation,” Chirchir said.

    Kenya has in recent years introduced targeted incentives, including a zero value added tax on electric buses, bicycles, motorcycles and lithium-ion batteries, and lower excise duties on selected EVs. The new incentives include exemptions for value-added taxes and excise duties beginning in July. The stamp tax for charging stations will be reduced in 2027.

    The government has a target for 3,000 EVs for its ministries by the end of next year.

    Kenya has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 32% by 2030 under the Paris Agreement treaty on climate change, with electric mobility identified as vital since transport is a major contributor to carbon emissions.

    The market is growing quickly, with the number of registered EVs rising to 24,754 in 2025 from 796 in 2022, largely driven by increased use of electric motorcycles, buses and fleet vehicles in urban areas.

    Sales of electric vehicles, including motorcycles, buses and private cars, are forecast to match those of gas and diesel-fueled vehicles by 2042, marking a structural shift in Kenya’s transport system.

    “We have now laid the foundation for a cleaner, more efficient, and more sustainable transport system that fully aligns with our climate commitments,” said Mohammed Daghar, principal secretary for transport. “With transport a major contributor to emissions, accelerating electric mobility is essential to achieving our target.”

    Electric mobility policies in most African countries are still evolving, with interest growing in use of electrics for public and private transport. Rwanda and Egypt have introduced a mix of fiscal and non-fiscal incentives to encourage use of EVs. Companies involved in EV manufacturing and assembly also benefit from corporate income tax relief and tax holidays.

    Still, for many countries the focus is on electric buses and two-wheelers. Policies include tax exemptions on EV imports and investments in charging infrastructure, and pilot projects for electric public transport.

    The transition carries risks. Kenya relies heavily on fuel taxes to fund road maintenance and other transport-related services. The policy estimates that as electrics displace gas and diesel engines, there will be a $693 million shortfall in fuel tax collections by 2043, up from a $16.9 million gap in 2025.

    Chirchir said the government is studying alternatives, including road-use charges and possible electricity-based levies linked to charging stations to offset the decline.

    ___

    Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • When forever chemicals contaminate drinking water, private well owners may be the last to know

    [ad_1]

    STELLA, Wis. — Kristen Hanneman made a small decision in 2022 that would upend life for her entire town.

    State scientists were checking private drinking water wells across Wisconsin for a widely used family of harmful chemicals called PFAS. They mailed an offer to test the well outside her tidy farmhouse surrounded by potato farms cut out of dense forest. Without much thought, she accepted.

    Months later, Hanneman found herself on the phone with a state toxicologist who told her to stop drinking the water — now. The well her three kids grew up on had levels thousands of times higher than federal drinking water limits for what are commonly known as forever chemicals.

    Hanneman’s well was hardly the only one with a problem. And the chemicals were everywhere. Pristine lakes and superb hunting made Stella a sportsman’s dream. Now officials say the fish and deer should be eaten sparingly or not at all.

    Many residents here have known their neighbors for decades. If they want to move away from all this, it’s hard to sell their property – who, after all, would want to buy?

    “Had I just thrown that survey in the garbage,” Hanneman said, “would any of this be where it is today?”

    Stella is far from the only community near industrial sites and military bases nationwide where enormous amounts of PFAS have contaminated the landscape, posing a particular threat to nearby well owners.

    Forever chemicals get their name because they resist breaking down, whether in well water or the environment. In the human body, they accumulate in the liver, kidneys and blood. Research has linked them to an increased risk of certain cancers and developmental delays in children.

    Government estimates suggest as much as half of U.S. households have some level of PFAS in their water — whether it comes from a private well or a tap. But while federal officials have put strict limits on water provided by utilities, those rules don’t apply to the roughly 40 million people in the United States who rely on private drinking water wells.

    Short of a random test, as in Stella, few may learn their water is tainted with the odorless, colorless chemicals.

    At least 20 states do not test private wells for PFAS outside of areas where problems are already suspected, according to a survey of state agencies by The Associated Press. Even in states that do, residents often wait years for help and receive far fewer resources than people tied into municipal tap water.

    PFAS are so common because they are so useful. Uniquely able to repel moisture and withstand extreme temperatures, the chemicals have been critical to making waterproof shoes, nonstick cookware and foam that could extinguish the hottest fires.

    When the chemicals reach soil or water, as they have near factories and waste sites, they are extremely difficult to remove. North Carolina saw an early example, with well owners downstream from a PFAS manufacturing plant still dealing with tainted water years later. In rural northwest Georgia, communities are reckoning with widespread contamination from PFAS that major carpet manufacturers applied for stain resistance.

    Robert Bilott, an environmental attorney who pursued one of the first major lawsuits against a PFAS manufacturer in the late 1990s, said many states don’t have the money to help.

    “The well owners — the victims of the contamination — shouldn’t have to be paying,” he said. “But where’s this money going to come from?”

    The alarming results from Hanneman’s well triggered a rush of testing, beginning with the wells of nearby neighbors and later expanding miles away.

    How the chemicals infiltrated water beneath Stella’s sandy soil was initially a mystery. State officials eventually suspected the paper mill in the small city of Rhinelander, a 10-mile (16-kilometer) drive from town. The mill had specialized in making paper for microwave popcorn bags — a product that was greaseproof thanks in part to PFAS.

    The mill’s manufacturing process also produced a waste sludge which could be used as a fertilizer. By 1996, and for decades after with state approval, the mill spread millions of pounds on farm fields in and around Stella. Wisconsin officials now believe the PFAS it contained seeped into the subterranean reserves of groundwater that feed lakes, streams and many residential wells.

    In September, the state sent initial letters assigning cleanup and investigation responsibilities to current and former owners of the mill. These companies point out that the state permitted their sludge spreading, starting long before the dangers of PFAS were widely understood.

    The problem in Stella remained hidden because well owners don’t have a utility testing their water.

    Rhinelander’s water utility first tested for PFAS in 2013 to comply with federal rules. By 2019, the city shut down two utility-owned public wells to protect customers. In Stella, meanwhile, some well owners found out only last year that their water is unsafe.

    The Hanneman family moved into their home when their oldest son was nearly two. He’s 19 now. His parents worry about all those years of exposure, and have joined an effort to sue the paper mill’s owners and PFAS manufacturers.

    Several plaintiffs in the growing lawsuit allege property damage and that their cholesterol, thyroid and kidney diseases are linked to contaminated groundwater. The companies have denied responsibility.

    Very tiny amounts of PFAS consumed regularly over years can be dangerous. As scientists better understood those risks, federal advice for water utilities slowly followed and tightened. The current limit is just 4 parts per trillion, or less than a drop diluted in an Olympic-size swimming pool.

    The Environmental Protection Agency recommends private wells be tested for bacteria and a limited number of commonly found chemicals, but not PFAS unless it is a known local problem. Experts say testing mandates would be deeply unpopular. Many well owners value their freedom from government oversight and a monthly bill, and take pride in the taste of their water.

    PFAS has turned some of those freedoms into liabilities. The chemicals can only be removed from water with costly filters that must be regularly monitored and replaced. Some well owners opt instead to drill deeper or even connect to city water pipes. Facing expensive and uncertain options, many resort to bottled water.

    In Stella, residents are grappling with the chemicals’ unpredictable underground path. Though Tom LaDue’s backyard extends to the edge of a highly contaminated lake, testing found barely any PFAS in his family’s well.

    Somehow, a neighbor farther back from the lake found 1,500 parts per trillion of PFAS in her shallower well — magnitudes above the federal limits for tap water. The mother of three in that house says she is regularly tired, which she blames on thyroid issues, wondering if the water is to blame.

    In one picture from a few years ago, LaDue is baiting a hook as his grandson dangles a fishing pole over the side of their boat. The sun shines bright.

    “It’s a nice lake and we fished in here,” he said. “Now they tell us we can’t eat the fish anymore.”

    While utilities can rely on centralized treatment facilities, restoring safe water for well owners must be done household by household. Some well owners get left out as regulators, lawyers and companies strike deals over who gets help.

    The treatment of residents in the lakeside town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, depends on the street where they live.

    The town faced a crisis nearly a decade ago when PFAS were detected in wells downstream from a fire technology plant owned by Tyco and parent company Johnson Controls, which manufactured firefighting foam. Wisconsin officials said the company was responsible for cleaning up the plant and must sample wells in a broad area to see where the pollution spread. Johnson Controls told state regulators it studied the area’s hydrology and geology and concluded it would pay for tests and drill new wells in a smaller section of town for which it maintains it is responsible.

    Kayla Furton, a high school teacher who grew up in Peshtigo, lives in a home inside this area.

    Had she lived two houses away, Furton would have had to pay out of pocket to treat the PFAS in her water.

    Furton’s worries over what would happen to her neighbors beyond that line, including her sister, motivated her to run for the town’s board. During her time in office, Peshtigo leadership split over which fixes to pursue, and some well owners are still waiting on a long-term solution.

    “Groundwater does not follow lines drawn on a map,” Furton said. “There’s nothing to say that, OK, the PFAS stops there.”

    In a statement, Johnson Controls said it has taken full responsibility for the area it contaminated. The company said it has restored more than 300 million gallons of clean water to the environment and installed 139 new wells.

    The state of Wisconsin says the company has not fully investigated the extent of the contamination, and filed a lawsuit in 2022. Johnson Controls said in December the parties were close to reaching an agreement; the Wisconsin Department of Justice said it does not comment on pending litigation.

    Residents along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina have seen just how far forever chemicals can spread. In 2017, the Wilmington StarNews revealed that PFAS from a Chemours chemical plant in Fayetteville were washing into the river and contaminating the water supply. After being sued, the billion-dollar company agreed to test nearby wells and treat those with polluted water. It did not admit to any wrongdoing.

    As in Stella, the company tested in a slowly expanding radius that grew by quarter-mile segments from its plant. Chemours agreed to keep testing wells until it reached the edge of the polluted area — a process it expected to take 18 months.

    Seven years and some 23,000 wells later, testing is ongoing, with the contamination stretching far beyond what state regulators first imagined. Forever chemicals have been found in drinking water along nearly 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the river, from inland Fayetteville to the Atlantic coast.

    According to an AP analysis of data submitted to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, Chemours discovered high levels of PFAS in more than 150 new wells in 2025.

    Many well owners “thought they were fine,” said Emily Donovan, an organizer and cofounder of the group Clean Cape Fear. “And now they’re finding out so late that they were also contaminated.”

    In a statement, Chemours said its timeline for testing wells depends on factors outside its control, including whether residents allow it, and that of the roughly 1,250 wells it sampled last year, 12% had PFAS. Chemours said it continues to contact eligible homes, and that a sample is typically taken within a week of residents’ responding.

    In the absence of federal rules, responsibility falls to the states. But many states don’t look for contamination in private wells — and when those that do find it, many struggle to fund a fix.

    One proactive state is Michigan, where millions rely on private wells. Officials there have tested groundwater and offered free tests to well owners near PFAS hot spots which, at hundreds of dollars per test, many owners are reluctant or unable to buy. The state provided more than $29 million in grants to clean up forever chemicals in its 2022 fiscal year, including hooking up nearly a thousand well owners to public water.

    One of the biggest challenges is helping well owners understand why they should take the threat seriously.

    “We are very lucky to get 50% of the people to say, ‘Yes, come test my well for free,’ let alone willing to put on a filter,” said Abigail Hendershott, executive director of Michigan’s multiagency team that responds to PFAS contamination.

    New Hampshire, which dealt with an early PFAS crisis in Merrimack, has tested over 15,000 wells, more than half of which had levels exceeding federal standards. It provides generous rebates for homeowners to access clean water.

    Elsewhere, millions of households are left on their own.

    In northwest Georgia, some of the world’s largest carpet companies began applying PFAS for stain resistance in the 1970s. The companies continued using the chemicals, which entered the environment through manufacturing wastewater, for years, even after scientific studies and regulators warned of their accumulation in human blood and possible health effects, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Associated Press, The Post and Courier and AL.com. The companies say that they followed all required regulations and that they stopped using PFAS on carpets in 2019.

    The chemicals have tainted much of the landscape, including the drinking water in cities and the waterways that crisscross the Conasauga River watershed, home to tens of thousands of people. But only well owners near the small city of Calhoun have been offered free tests, and then only under a court agreement. The contaminated river flows into Alabama, where state officials do not typically test private wells for PFAS.

    Financial limitations are an oft-cited reason why states aren’t doing more.

    Wisconsin, which relied on federal funds for its initial survey of wells, has scraped together resources to investigate PFAS in Stella. The state’s environmental agency has no budget for sampling or treatment and is pulling money and staff time from other programs, according to the head of the drinking and groundwater program. Supplying bottled water to impacted homes — once a rare expense — now requires the state to set aside $900,000 annually.

    Meanwhile, enormous amounts of money that could help have been stuck in a bank account, collecting interest. Though state lawmakers voted in 2023 to provide $125 million for PFAS cleanup, the funding has been mired by a separate debate over whether to shield certain property owners from liability. In January, key legislators said they were getting closer to a deal that would release the money.

    The EPA has allocated billions to states for PFAS treatment and testing, but much of that money goes to public utilities.

    Federal officials are evaluating Stella for inclusion in the Superfund program, a large-scale decontamination process that would take years. They also partnered with Wisconsin officials to expand well sampling in July.

    At an October public meeting in Stella, several residents asked if they should be worried about their well water.

    There is a risk, state employees said, but they could not offer unlimited free tests to rule it out. Those who wanted one immediately would have to pay for it.

    “We’re doing the best that we can with the funding that we have available,” said Mark Pauli, a drinking and groundwater supervisor.

    In a statement, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said it had offered cost-free PFAS sampling for well owners within three miles of Stella and to many beyond that distance. The state said it provides owners of contaminated wells with guidance on treating their water and accessing financial help.

    Nobody is accepting blame in Stella and finger pointing is circular. While the state is investigating, the current and former mill owners point to the state’s permit as exonerating and say they followed all state rules.

    Ahlstrom, the Finnish company that has owned the mill since 2018, said in a statement it hasn’t used two of the most common types of PFAS found in Stella wells in its manufacturing process, and that it phased out all other types of PFAS in 2023. In late January, the company announced its own free bottled water program for residents.

    Former owner Wausau Paper and its parent company Essity said they were cooperating with state officials and that the waste sludge they spread was tested for various contaminants, but not PFAS because it wasn’t required.

    Wisconsin officials say the threat of PFAS in the sludge wasn’t well understood when they approved its use as fertilizer, and that the state will continue to require those who caused contamination to address its impacts.

    That leaves residents, who did not contaminate their own wells, stuck hiring lawyers who argue these companies and PFAS manufacturers knew — or should have known — the risks.

    The crisis in Stella sparked by the test of her own well drove Kristen Hanneman to run for a town leadership role.

    She spent months learning about the dangers of PFAS, then relaying that knowledge. It’s a town so small that she said talking to a few of the right people would spread word to just about everyone.

    It’s been more than three years since Hanneman learned her well had PFAS levels near 11,500 parts per trillion. Federal limits are in the single digits. Her water supply is just as contaminated now as it was then. The family currently drinks and cooks with bottled water provided by the state.

    Though some Stella residents have been able to access grant funding to drill deeper wells to reach clean water, the help was limited by household income, with some families disqualified if they made more than $65,000. Typically, the most a family could receive was $16,000 — about half of what it may cost for a replacement well.

    Stories circulate in Stella about people who paid for a new well only for their water still to be contaminated. Wisconsin state officials confirmed that at least three households faced this dilemma.

    “Do we spend $20,000 to $40,000 on a new well for it to still be a problem?” Hanneman said.

    One couple said replacing their well cleaned out much of their savings. Many are concerned about how much their home values have dropped.

    A grant did help Cindy Deere, who worries about how 25 years of drinking the water in Stella may affect her health. She replaced her well and a test confirmed the new one was PFAS-free. Still, she has a hard time trusting the water.

    “It’s a constant worry,” she said. “Is it going to turn bad?”

    The paper mill is still permitted to spread sludge in the county that includes Stella. Its PFAS levels have recently tested well within new state guidelines.

    Experts said sludge from industry and manufacturers is most likely to contain PFAS. Wisconsin developed testing guidelines for those sources for that reason, officials said.

    But the state doesn’t require another type of sludge — treated waste from septic systems, which capture household sewage — to be tested for PFAS. A local septic company has been spreading it in Stella — in 2024 alone, it applied hundreds of thousands of gallons to farms and elsewhere, state records show. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

    Dianne Kopec, who has researched PFAS in wastewater at the University of Maine, said that without testing, officials can’t know if the practice recycles the chemicals back onto the soil in Stella.

    “Given what we know today, continuing to spread sludge on agricultural fields is ludicrous,” Kopec said. “When you find yourself in a hole, it is best to stop digging.”

    ___

    Associated Press writers Todd Richmond in Madison, Wis., Jason Dearen in Los Angeles and M.K. Wildeman in Hartford, Conn., contributed. Dylan Jackson and Justin Price of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution contributed from Atlanta.

    ___

    This story is part of an investigative collaboration with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Post and Courier and AL.com. It is supported through AP’s Local Investigative Reporting Program.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of the AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Collar cams offer a bear’s eye view into the lives of grizzlies on Alaska’s desolate North Slope

    [ad_1]

    ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The life of one of the most remote grizzly bear populations in the world is being documented by the animals themselves, with collar cameras that provide a rare glimpse of how they survive on Alaska’s rugged and desolate North Slope.

    Twelve of the 200 or so grizzlies that roam the frigid, treeless terrain near the Arctic Ocean have been outfitted with the cameras as part of a research project by Washington State University and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

    The videos they record — many partially obscured by the undersides of whiskery muzzles — show the bears playing or fighting with companions, gnawing on a caribou, snarfing up berries, napping on a beach, and swimming in a pond looking for fish.

    The bears hibernate about eight months of the year.

    “They really have a really short window to obtain enough food resources to pack on enough fat to survive that period,” said Washington State doctoral student Ellery Vincent, who is leading the project with state wildlife biologist Jordan Pruszenski.

    “We’re interested in looking at kind of a broad scale of how they’re obtaining the food that allows them to survive through the year and what exactly they’re choosing to eat,” Vincent said.

    Among other things, the state is interested in learning to what extent the bears hunt musk oxen. There are about 300 of the shaggy ice-age survivors on the North Slope, according to Pruszenski, but the population is not flourishing.

    Videos from the first year of the project show that after emerging from hibernation, the bears eat the carcasses of caribou or musk ox that have died over the winter. Then they attack caribou calves. As soon as the tundra greens up, the bears shift their menu toward vegetation, especially blueberries and soapberries, also called buffaloberries.

    They don’t fatten up the way salmon-eating bears do. Those bears can reach up to 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms). These Arctic grizzlies are small in comparison, reaching up to 350 pounds (159 kilograms), Vincent said.

    To initially fit the bears with the collar cams, the researchers tracked them through the snow by helicopter last May. Pruszenski fired tranquilizer darts from the air, with Vincent keeping track of injection times and helping determine when the bear was safe to approach on the ground.

    They placed the collars on the bears, keeping them loose enough that the bears could grow into them as they put on weight, but not so loose that they would fall off as the bears go about their rough-and-tumble lives.

    “It is not difficult, but there is a lot of thought that goes into making sure the collar is adjusted properly,” Vincent said.

    The researchers darted the bears again in August to replace the collars and in September to download data. The researchers also measured the bears’ weight gain and body fat.

    When those collars came off, the state wildlife department replaced them with GPS collars.

    That data could determine how oil-field development is impacting bears and help identify where they den during the winter, areas that oil companies must avoid when they build winter roads between drill sites.

    The cameras can record up to 17 hours of video. In the spring and summer, they took a short video clip — four to six seconds — every 10 minutes. In the fall, due to the encroaching darkness, they recorded clips every five minutes during daylight.

    Despite their brevity, the clips provide a rare perspective of how the bears thrive on the desolate North Slope, an area that covers about 94,000 square miles (243,459 square kilometers) but is home to only about 11,000 people. Nearly half of the residents live in Utqiagvik, the nation’s most northern community, formerly known as Barrow.

    “One thing that’s really nice about these bears is that when they’re foraging on a particular food they tend to do that one thing for a long period of time, so these bears will spend pretty much their entire day eating, so the chances of us actually seeing what they’re doing are pretty high,” Vincent said.

    The cameras also caught an encounter between a bear and pack of wolves.

    It occurred after the bear had emerged from hibernation in May. He was not eating yet, so there was no adverse interaction with the wolves over food, she said. There were no wolves visible in the next clip, indicating it was a peaceful exchange.

    “I think they both decided that it wasn’t worth it, so they just looked at each other, then moved on,” Vincent said.

    The study will continue for another two years, with plans to add collars to 24 more bears.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Liberia’s largest gold miner repeatedly spilled dangerous chemicals, records show

    [ad_1]

    JIKANDOR, Liberia — For generations, families in Jikandor village fished and drank from the river that runs through Liberia ’s dense rain forest. Now toxic pollution is making them leave.

    They blame the largest gold miner in Liberia, Bea Mountain Mining Corporation. When dead fish float to the surface, they said, they know to tell authorities. But for years there has been little response.

    “If we don’t move, we will die,” village chief Mustapha Pabai said.

    Over several years, cyanide, arsenic and copper repeatedly leaked from Bea Mountain’s substandard facilities at levels that Liberia’s Environmental Protection Agency described as above legal limits. That’s according to EPA reports that were taken down from its site but later retrieved, as well as interviews with government officials, experts and former company employees.

    They provide the most comprehensive accounting yet of the spills. The EPA documents also show that Bea Mountain failed to alert regulators promptly after a spill in 2022 and previously blocked government inspectors as they tried to access the company’s laboratory and view results of testing.

    ___

    This story was reported in collaboration with The Gecko Project, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on environmental issues. The reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters, and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    ___

    The incidents point to failures in corporate responsibility that “can only be described as sustained negligence,” said Mandy Olsgard, a Canadian toxicologist who reviewed the EPA reports obtained in an investigation by The Associated Press and The Gecko Project.

    The reports also expose the Liberian government’s failures to hold the company to account. The government holds a 5% stake in the mining operations. Under Liberian law, the state can suspend or terminate licenses if a miner doesn’t fulfill its obligations. But weak enforcement is common, with the World Bank citing limited government capacity.

    In response to the investigation, the country’s recently dismissed minister of mines, Wilmot Paye, said he was “appalled by the harm being done to our country” and that the government was reviewing all concession agreements. The outspoken minister was dismissed in October.

    The gold that Bea Mountain mines is sold to Swiss refiner MKS PAMP, which is in the supply chains of some of the world’s largest companies including Nvidia and Apple. The investigation could not confirm what companies ultimately used the gold.

    MKS PAMP said it had commissioned an independent assessment of the New Liberty mine, the largest of five mines that Bea Mountain operates in Liberia, in early 2025, and said it found no basis to cut ties but identified areas for improvement related to health and safety. A follow-up visit is planned for 2026.

    MKS PAMP declined to share the assessment’s findings, citing confidentiality. It said it would end the relationship if Bea Mountain doesn’t improve.

    Between July 2021 and December 2022, the most recent period for which figures could be obtained, Bea Mountain exported more than $576 million worth of gold from Liberia. It contributed $37.8 million to government coffers during that time.

    Bea Mountain is controlled by Murathan Günal through Avesoro Resources. Murathan is the son of Turkish billionaire Mehmet Nazif Günal, whose business interests include the Mapa Group. Avesoro Resources and Mapa Group did not respond to requests for comment.

    Extracting gold from ore often involves cyanide, a chemical that at high levels can cause severe neurological damage and can be fatal if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Cyanide must be treated before it enters and when it leaves a tailings dam, a storage site for mining waste.

    Other toxic substances, including arsenic, often found in gold mining also pose serious health risks if not properly controlled.

    The Günals took over Bea Mountain in 2016, acquiring it from Aureus Mining, a UK-listed gold producer, after years of warnings.

    In 2012, Canadian consultancy Golder Associates found a risk of contamination of local rivers from the New Liberty mine’s tailings dam and warned that seepage would breach Liberia’s drinking water standards. Two years later, the Digby Wells consultancy flagged cyanide and arsenic as key risks and suggested measures to prevent contamination.

    In 2015, a year before production began, a third consultancy, SRK, warned that arsenic could exceed World Health Organization standards for drinking water if not properly managed.

    Before production began, the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, paid $19.2 million for an equity stake in Bea Mountain’s parent company to develop the New Liberty mine. But the U.S. representative on the IFC board abstained, warning in a 2014 letter that the project lacked basic safeguards and raising concerns about the tailings dam and gaps in the environmental assessment.

    It was not clear whether the IFC still holds a stake, and it didn’t respond to questions.

    Bea Mountain had pledged to follow strict water management rules and adopt the Cyanide Management Code, a global standard recommending pollution limits and requiring independent audits.

    The first spill documented by the EPA came in the first month of full production. In March 2016, just before the Günals’ purchase of Bea Mountain, cyanide and arsenic leaked from the New Liberty mine. Dead fish floated downstream. Residents reported skin rashes.

    The company paused operations but publicly downplayed the spill, saying “there has been no adverse impact on any human settlement.”

    It was the first of four EPA-confirmed cases at the mine in which Bea Mountain exceeded government pollution limits.

    In June 2020, EPA inspectors found Bea Mountain operating an unapproved wastewater system, and detected water contaminated with high levels of copper and iron. When inspectors tried to look at the company’s water testing data, Bea Mountain refused.

    “Physical access to the laboratory was also not approved,” the EPA said in one report.

    That month, Bea Mountain withdrew from the Cyanide Management Code without ever undergoing an audit, said Eric Schwamberger, a senior official at the International Cyanide Management Institute that oversees the code. He called such withdrawals uncommon.

    In May 2022, dead fish drifted down Marvoe Creek, which flows past Jikandor village and into the Mafa River that runs to the Atlantic. The EPA reported that a spill from Bea Mountain’s tailings dam had suffocated the fish “due to exposure to higher than permissible limits” of cyanide.

    The company knew about the pollution but failed to notify the community and the EPA “until downstream communities first started observing dead fish species,” the EPA report said. Companies are required to report such spills within 72 hours.

    More than 10 miles (16 kilometers) downstream in Wangekor village, residents said they hauled in dead fish before any warning reached them. They believed the bounty was “a gift from God,” said Philip Zodua, a representative of communities along the river.

    Six residents of villages downstream of the Bea Mountain mine asserted that they and their families fell ill after eating fish from the river in June 2022.

    One villager, Korto Tokpa, said she saw children collecting dead and dying fish. “They all were sick, vomiting, throwing up and going to the toilet the whole night” after consuming them, she said.

    However, no tests were carried out on the villagers. Independent environmental scientists and toxicology experts said there is insufficient evidence to identify pollution as the cause of the reported illnesses.

    “Without proper testing and transparent data, the true risks cannot be understood, and communities are left carrying all the uncertainty,” said Olsgard, the toxicologist. “It is the company’s responsibility to fill these gaps urgently.”

    When EPA inspectors arrived at the mine to test the water days after the spill, they found arsenic and cyanide levels well above legal limits.

    Schwamberger said the cyanide concentrations reported by the EPA, from water flowing out of the tailings dam, were more than 10 times the concentration “that would typically be considered to be lethal to fish.”

    In February 2023, another spill occurred. The EPA documented “a huge quantity of raw copper sulfate” leaking into the environment. Six of nine water samples breached legal limits for cyanide and copper.

    An EPA official involved in the May 2022 investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said the mine’s tailings dam had been originally built too small, a design flaw that later caused it to overflow.

    While EPA inspectors repeatedly recommended fines after the spills, only one penalty was issued by the regulator, a $99,999 fine in 2018 that was later reduced to $25,000. It was not clear why.

    In a written response to questions from the AP and The Gecko Project, the EPA acknowledged three “pollution incidents” between 2016 and 2023 in which laboratory tests found “higher than permissible levels” of cyanide. It also confirmed fish deaths were caused by cyanide, copper sulfate and arsenic leaking from the mine’s tailings dam. It was not clear why the EPA did not acknowledge the fourth spill.

    The EPA said the spills it documented occurred before the agency’s current leadership took office in 2024. It said it had ordered Bea Mountain to hire an EPA-certified consultant and reinforce the tailings dam, and that the measures were implemented. It did not say when that occurred.

    “No entity is above the law,” the agency said.

    Following an EPA recommendation, a legally binding agreement was reached in May 2025 for Bea Mountain to relocate and compensate Jikandor village, the community closest to the mine.

    Bea Mountain is now exploring new gold reserves elsewhere in Liberia.

    ___

    Aviram reported from London.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • It’s one storm after another for much of the US, but the next one’s path is uncertain

    [ad_1]

    HOUSTON — HOUSTON (AP) — Winter’s brutal grip on the U.S. East is not letting up, with coming days bringing subfreezing temperatures that will plunge deep into what had been a toasty Florida peninsula and a powerful blizzard forecast that may strike the Atlantic coast.

    Deep cold is forecast to stick around at least into the first week of February. Meteorologists are also watching what could become a “ bomb cyclone ” — a quickly intensifying storm that’s a winter version of a hurricane — forming off the Carolinas Friday night into Saturday.

    “A major winter storm appears to be coming to the Carolinas,” said meteorologist Peter Mullinax of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center.

    That storm could dump snow — at least 6 inches (15 centimeters) with white-out conditions — in the Carolinas, northern Georgia and southern Virginia. After that, it could turn and plow through the Interstate 95 corridor late Saturday into Sunday to dump loads more snow from Washington to Boston, further paralyzing much of the country. Or it could deliver a glancing blow, mostly striking places like Cape Cod.

    Alternatively, it could just veer off harmlessly to sea. Meteorologists and forecast models aren’t yet settling on a single outcome.

    “The confidence is much higher that in the coastal Carolinas and Virginia that there will be significant snowfall this weekend,” said James Belanger, vice president for meteorology at the Weather Channel and its parent company. “The real question is going to be the trajectory it takes” from there.

    Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, said for the mid-Atlantic and north it’s a “boom or bust” situation. “If it happens (to go along the coast) it’s going to be a big-time event.”

    On Tuesday forecast models were all over the place, from out to sea to inward toward Philadelphia. By Wednesday morning they started to agree that “we’re likely to see some form of a powerful coastal storm somewhere east of North Carolina, off the Delmarva coast, but they still disagree as to where,” Mullinax said.

    Chances of the storm veering away from the East Coast entirely had diminished Wednesday morning, but hadn’t disappeared altogether, Mullinax said.

    Of all the options, “from D.C. up to New York is probably the most unclear,” Mullinax said. He said a mere 50-mile (80-kilometer) difference in the storm’s center will be critical. AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Dan Pydynowski said it may be hard for the southern mid-Atlantic to avoid some kind of snow, whether a little or a lot.

    This weekend’s storm will differ from the previous storm, which started with moist air from the Pacific that combined with a deep plunge of Arctic air from an elongated polar vortex supplemented by more moisture from the south and east, meteorologists said. The last storm had little wind. This one will generate high winds, even if the snow misses the Washington area, generating gusts that could still reach 40 mph (65 kph), plunging wind chills near subzero Fahrenheit (minus 18 Celsius), Mullinax said.

    “It looks like a pretty strong and explosive storm so everybody is going to have some gusty winds,” Pydynowski said, even inland places that won’t come close to getting snow like Pittsburgh. Strong winds may take daytime temperatures in the teens there down to feeling like they are below zero, he said.

    “This is what we’d consider more of a classic nor’easter,” Belanger said, describing a storm forming around the U.S. Gulf Coast crossing into the Atlantic and going up that coast.

    In this case, one key is warmer-than-normal water in the Gulf of Mexico — partly from human-caused climate change — and the always toasty Atlantic Gulf Stream, said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist for the nonprofit Climate Central.

    When that happens the storm “pulls in more moisture and it gives it more strength,” she said.

    Once the core of the storm nears the Carolinas its pressure will drop tremendously, enough to qualify for what meteorologists call “bombogenesis” or “a bomb cyclone,” That will give it the effect of a moderate-strength hurricane, including huge winds, but in the winter, Maue and Belanger said.

    If the storm does come ashore, those winds and extra snow could cause massive snow drifts big enough to bury cars, Maue said.

    What is more certain is that the Arctic chill in the Midwest and East will continue through mid-February, with only slight warmups that would still be below normal, meteorologists said.

    And this new weekend storm “is going to take that cold and it’s going to spill right down the heart of the Florida peninsula,” Pydynowski said. Orlando is forecast to go well below freezing and only have a high of 48 F (9 C), smashing temperature records, while even Miami and Key West will flirt with record cold Sunday and Monday, meteorologists said.

    The outlook for Florida was cold enough to raise concerns about damage to the state’s citrus and strawberries.

    “We’re going into a brutally cold period,” Maue said.

    After this weekend storm, long-range models see another one at the end of the first week of February, Maue said. Meteorologists see the East stuck in a pattern of bitter cold and snowstorms because of the plunging Arctic air and warm water.

    East Coast snowstorms don’t happen too often, but “when it happens, it happens in bunches,” said former National Weather Service director Louis Uccellini, who has written meteorology textbooks on winter snowstorms.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Why freezing rain has millions at risk of losing power — and heat

    [ad_1]

    ATLANTA — Every morning this week, Newberry Electric Cooperative CEO Keith Avery walks into his office and turns on The Weather Channel. Then he starts making calls, lining up crews and equipment to respond to outages if a forecasted ice storm cripples power across South Carolina.

    Avery has dealt with disasters before. Nearly every one of his 14,000 customers lost power when the remnants of Hurricane Helene tore through in 2024.

    But the approaching ice storm has him even more worried because ice-coated trees and power lines can keep falling long after the storm itself has passed.

    “I hate ice storms,” Avery said. “They are worse than hurricanes.”

    Officials across the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. have been sounding the alarm about the potential for freezing rain to wreak havoc on power systems. In the South, especially, losing electricity doesn’t just mean the lights going out. It means losing heat.

    That’s because a majority of homes are heated by electricity in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

    Ice storms, Avery said, are especially punishing because of what happens after they move out: Crews struggle to reach damaged lines on ice-covered roads; cold, wet weather takes a toll on workers; and problems can linger for days as ice-laden branches continue to snap.

    “You get a power line back up and energized, and just as you leave, you hear a loud crack and boom, there’s a tree limb crashing through what you just repaired,” Avery said.

    Texas experienced the worst-case scenario in 2021, when Winter Storm Uri’s freezing temperatures crippled the state’s power grid for five days and led to 246 storm-related deaths, according to the Texas Department of Health Services.

    But experts say Uri’s damage stemmed largely from poorly weatherized power plants and natural gas systems, not downed power lines.

    “The main lesson was to enforce requirements for utilities to be ready for cold weather,” said Georg Rute, CEO of Gridraven, a Texas-based firm that analyzes power system risks for grid operators.

    Rute said utilities have applied lessons from Uri, and while he does not expect a repeat of that kind of grid collapse, he warned that other vulnerabilities remain, including transmission lines tripping during extreme cold.

    Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday gave assurances to Texans about the state’s power grid. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has said grid conditions are expected to be normal during this weekend’s storm.

    “The ERCOT grid has never been stronger, never been more prepared, and is fully capable of handling this winter storm,” Abbott said.

    The governor added, though, that residents could lose power as ice weighs down power lines and trees fall onto them. But, he said, energy providers are prepositioned to fix any outages, and there’s been an effort to clear trees and branches near power lines in recent years.

    Winter Storm Uri also exposed disparities in how outages affected communities, said Jennifer Laird, a sociology professor at the City University of New York’s Lehman College who studies energy insecurity. Researchers have found that residents in predominantly Hispanic areas experienced more outages, while Black residents were more likely to face outages lasting a day or more.

    Laird said outages expose vulnerabilities people don’t anticipate, from medical equipment that requires electricity to families with infants who rely on refrigeration for breast milk. Younger households and those with lower levels of education, in particular, are less likely to have contingency plans in place, she said.

    “There are lots of ways that we’re dependent on energy that we don’t realize until a crisis hits — and then it really exposes those vulnerabilities,” Laird said.

    Even if this weekend’s storm does not produce significant outages, the financial burden on families could linger for months. About 1 in 6 U.S. households are already behind on their energy bills, and with millions expected to turn up their heaters during the cold snap, that number could rise, Laird said.

    “A month or two after the storm hits, suddenly the bill hits,” she said. “We could see a rise in disconnection notices and disconnections.”

    Utilities in the Southeast have also warned customers to prepare for possible outages. Duke Energy, which serves more than 4.6 million customers in North and South Carolina, urged residents to be ready for multiple days without power. The utility said more than 18,000 workers would be ready to respond once conditions are safe.

    The Tennessee Valley Authority, which serves more than 10 million people across seven states, said it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in weatherization since a 2022 winter storm and has built-in redundancies to reroute power if a line goes down.

    “It takes a lot of snow and ice to down one of those big lines,” TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said.

    ___

    Collins reported from Columbia, South Carolina. Associated Press writers Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee; Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina; and Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed to this report.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • When big snow and ice blow in, most people reach for salt. There are ways to reduce its harms

    [ad_1]

    Winter has its fans, but even those who enjoy playing in the snow probably dislike the chore of clearing up after a big storm that dumps several inches or even feet of snow and ice.

    It’s easy to dash to the closest hardware store to grab a bag of salt, but experts say there are a lot of environmental and other factors to consider when tackling all that ice and snow.

    Here’s what to know.

    Rock salt, also known as sodium chloride, is the cheapest and most commonly used product. But it’s not great for the environment and it’s not the most effective option out there.

    “There’s a chart we reference that’s chemical effectiveness at certain temperatures. And really, when you get to about 15 degrees or colder, you can keep applying more and more rock salt and it’s not going to do any more than it already does,” said Martin Tirado, CEO of the Snow and Ice Management Association, a trade group for industry professionals.

    In those conditions, other products — calcium chloride, magnesium chloride — release heat that helps the salt work better, Tirado said.

    The different formulations vary in other ways, too, including how quickly they work, their corrosiveness and how they interact with moisture. Calcium chloride and magnesium chloride can cost at least twice as much as rock salt.

    But all contain chlorides that can pollute fresh water, damage shrubs, trees and grass and crumble concrete sidewalks, stoops and driveways.

    Blends and coatings can reduce the corrosive nature and environmental hazards of these salts, experts say.

    Calcium manganese acetate is one of the tamest de-icing products out there, developed specifically to replace rock salt and be more environmentally friendly. It is biodegradable, a corrosion inhibitor, and typically used as a liquid. But it is much more expensive and can still create issues with dissolved oxygen on bodies of water.

    Pamela Bennett, a horticulture professor at Ohio State, said rock salt is the worst for plants. It gets them in two ways: through the roots and through the air.

    Salt percolates through the soil. When plants start to draw in salty water in the spring, that dries roots, leading to dry leaves. Brown tips on leaves indicate the soil might have gotten too salty.

    Salt can also reach plant foliage — in the winter, that’s evergreens — directly when it’s carried by mist and spray. That’s an issue that’s worse on major roads as a lot of traffic moves quickly.

    “When you have a lot of road salt on the highways, cars are splashing and wind blows it. That salt turns into what looks like a burn,” Bennett says.

    Most people walking their dog in snowy places have seen what happens when they walk across a heavy salt treatment — stopping suddenly and lifting a paw as if in pain.

    “Their paw pads get dry or they get little cuts because those crystals are sharp, and then they’re chewing them because that’s the only way they know to make it feel better,” said Alison Manchester, an assistant clinical sciences professor at Cornell University. If they swallow enough salt, it can lead to vomiting, too.

    For some people, animal safety is a strong reason to look to a nonsalt option against ice and snow.

    Abrasives such as gravel and sand can help with grip, so pedestrians and tires are less likely to slip. But they also come with their own problems.

    Sand that runs off into freshwater bodies — lakes, streams and rivers — can kill natural growth, Tirado said.

    Sand can also accumulate in your soil, eventually becoming a problem for plant growth. It can even make a type of concrete when it mixes in clay-heavy soils, experts say.

    Unconventional solutions are out there. You can buy a de-icer that wraps its chlorides in beet juice or beet extract that coats the granules for a variety of benefits, including melting ice faster, working in colder temperatures and staying where it’s put. And a Korean company, Star’s Tech, is working with material taken from invasive starfish to produce a de-icer that it says more slowly releases chloride material and thus avoids some of the corrosion and environmental problems of salt.

    Experts say preparation and strategy can make clearing ice easier. That starts with watching forecasts to see how much snow is expected.

    “People wait until after the storm to start shoveling,” Tirado said. “That’s fine if you’re having 1 to 2 inches. If you start getting 3, 4 or more inches than that, you can’t wait … you need to go out multiple times. That way it keeps the paved surface more clear in a productive and proactive manner.”

    Ground temperature matters. If it’s warmer, you may be able to use less than you think you need. Colder ground temperatures might require more.

    Proper application of whatever you put on your sidewalk or driveway is important, too.

    “The key here is to not use too much and scatter it too much,” said David Orr, director of the Local Roads Program at Cornell. “We also do probably need to get into the habit that it may not be perfectly bare and that can be OK.”

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Rising coal demand overshadows Southeast Asia’s transition to renewable energy

    [ad_1]

    HANOI, Vietnam — Southeast Asia’s demand for coal is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, undermining efforts to lower carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

    Regional coal demand will rise by more than 4% a year through the end of the decade, driven by rising needs for electricity as economies grow across the region of more than 600 million, according to a recent International Energy Agency report. Indonesia, a nation of about 285 million people, will account for more than half of that, followed by Vietnam.

    The trends raise questions over the $15.5 billion-dollar deals both countries signed in 2022 in Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETP, to help fund their renewable energy transitions. Moves under U.S. President Donald Trump to reverse policies meant to address climate change add to the challenges.

    This is a decisive decade for Southeast Asia as the region bears much of the burden of extreme weather and other impacts from climate change.

    “We’re standing on two opposite grounds — wanting to build clean energy, but not letting go entirely of coal,” said Katherine Hasan, an analyst with the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finland-registered think tank.

    Coal emits more planet heating emissions than other fossil fuels like oil and gas when it is burned. Pollution from coal also adds to toxic haze that often blankets many Southeast Asian cities.

    Coal supplies just over a third of Southeast Asia’s electricity, the IEA says, making it the third-largest coal-consuming region in the world after India and China.

    Global coal demand is expected to plateau as alternatives expand and major coal buyers like South Korea cut back.

    But Southeast Asia is headed in the opposite direction. The two main factors driving that trend are cost and energy security.

    “Nobody burns coal for fun,” said Paul Baruya of FutureCoal, a group backed by the fossil fuel industry, formerly known as the World Coal Association.

    “Coal still underpins a level of energy security that the region needs,” he said, noting that coal cutbacks would mean writing off billions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuel-related infrastructure including power plants and mines.

    A recent regional survey by Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute found a growing public preference for delaying giving up coal until 2030 or even 2040, as concerns over adequate power supplies and costs counter worries about climate change.

    Governments across the region are echoing that logic.

    “What is important is that our government is firm in its stance that there will be no phase-out of fossil fuels,” said Hashim Djojohadikusumo, brother to Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and the country’s special climate envoy, last month.

    “We’ve rejected that; we’re sticking with a phase-down,” he said. “Indonesia’s economy, especially its industry and electricity sector, will continue to rely on fossil fuels.”

    Indonesia is the world’s largest coal exporter and Southeast Asia’s biggest carbon emitter making it vital for the region ’s energy transition.

    “If Indonesia cannot transition away from coal, then why would other developing countries?” said Dinita Setyawati, with the United Kingdom-registered think tank Ember. “For Indonesia, it’s not so much a fear of the unknown, but a reluctance to change and the inertia of change.”

    A years-long effort to retire a coal plant in West Java fell through last month, highlighting Indonesia’s struggle to move beyond coal.

    Indonesia’s updated climate pledge, which dropped a promise to phase out coal by 2040, was rated “critically insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker, which said the country’s aims don’t align with the Paris Climate Agreement.

    Currently, Indonesia is considering re-opening the door for future construction of new coal plants.

    This is despite mounting costs from climate change. Last year more than 700 people were killed in deadly floods and landslides associated with extreme weather worsened by climate change.

    Continued coal use will also likely worsen Indonesia’s air pollution, especially in cities like Jakarta.

    Vietnam has stood out in fossil fuel-dependent Southeast Asia, expanding its solar generating capacity from 4 megawatts in 2015 to 16 gigawatts a decade later. It has plans to grow that to as much as 73.4 gigawatts by 2030 and up to 295 gigawatts by 2050.

    Yet coal use is still rising.

    Vietnam hit a record-high in 2025 with the import of more than 65 million metric tonnes of coal, which was up 2.6% by volume from a year earlier, according to the latest data from Vietnam’s customs department.

    That partly reflects caution over generating capacity following power shortages in 2023, when a drought sapped hydropower output, causing about $1.4 billion in losses, according to the World Bank.

    In order to sustain GDP growth of around 10% a year through 2030, Vietnam aims to increase electricity sales to the point that they are equivalent to Germany’s current annual energy consumption.

    It has allowed large companies like Danish toymaker LEGO and South Korean manufacturer Samsung, to buy electricity directly from Vietnamese wind and solar power producers to meet their climate targets. This could potentially double Vietnam’s renewable energy share from about 19% to 42%, Ember says.

    However, Vietnam’s power grid is already under strain from the rapid, uneven rollout of renewables and years of underinvestment in transmission equipment. The government estimates it needs about $18 billion by 2030 to upgrade the system. But progress has been slow, and funding committed so far covers only a fraction of the need.

    The momentum for JETP-backed projects in Indonesia and Vietnam is unlikely to pick up this year, according to Putra Adhiguna, with the Jakarta-based think tank, the Energy Shift Institute.

    Indonesia’s cancellation of the early retirement of the West Java coal plant, and the 2025 U.S. withdrawal from JETP under the Trump administration, has shaken faith in the rollout of tangible projects in 2026.

    Expectations for the billion-dollar JETP deals were set too high, Adhiguna said.

    “JETP was basically a brute force attempt to do a transition,” he said. “Governments were trying to bulldoze through … But fundamentally there are things that take a bit of time and political commitment to happen.”

    ___

    Delgado reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writer Edna Tarigan in Jakarta contributed to this report.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Meteorologists blame a stretched polar vortex, moisture, lack of sea ice for dangerous winter blast

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON — Warm Arctic waters and cold continental land are combining to stretch the dreaded polar vortex in a way that will send much of the United States a devastating dose of winter later this week with swaths of painful subzero temperatures, heavy snow and powerline-toppling ice.

    Meteorologists said the eastern two-thirds of the nation is threatened with a winter storm that could rival the damage of a major hurricane and has some origins in an Arctic that is warming from climate change. They warn that the frigid weather is likely to stick around through the rest of January and into early February, meaning the snow and ice that accumulates will take a long time to melt.

    Wednesday’s forecast has the storm stretching from New Mexico to New England, threatening at least 250 million people.

    “I think people are underestimating just how bad it’s going to be,” said former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist Ryan Maue, now a private meteorologist.

    The polar vortex, a patch of bitter cold air that often stays penned up in northern Canada and Alaska, is being elongated by a wave in the upper atmosphere that goes back to a relatively ice-free part of the Arctic and snow-buried Siberia. As the bone-chilling temperatures sweep through the U.S., they’ll meet with moisture from off California and the Gulf of Mexico to set up crippling ice and snow in many areas.

    The origins of the system begin in the Arctic, where relatively warmer temperatures add energy to the polar vortex and help push its cold air south.

    “The atmosphere is aligned perfectly that the pattern is locked into this warm Arctic, cold continent,” Maue said. “And it’s not just here for us in North America, but the landmass of Eastern Europe to Siberia is also exceptionally cold. The whole hemisphere has gone into the deep freeze.”

    As far back as October 2025, changes in the Arctic and low sea ice were setting up conditions for the kind of stretched polar vortex that brings severe winter weather to the U.S., said winter weather expert Judah Cohen, an MIT research scientist. Heavy Siberian snowfall added to the push-and-pull of weather that warps the shape of the normally mostly circular air pattern. Those conditions “kind of loaded the dice a bit” for a stretching of the polar vortex, he said.

    Cohen co-authored a July 2025 study that found more stretched polar vortex events linked to severe winter weather bursts in the central and eastern U.S. over the past decade. Cohen said part of the reason is that dramatically low sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas in the Arctic helps set up a pattern of waves that end up causing U.S. cold bursts. A warmer Arctic is causing sea ice in that region to shrink faster than other places, studies have found.

    Arctic sea ice is at a record low extent for this time of year, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

    The center of the stretched polar vortex will be somewhere above Duluth, Minnesota, by Friday morning, ushering in “long-lasting brutal cold,” Maue said. Temperatures in the North and Midwest will get about as cold as possible, even down to minus 25 or 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 32 to minus 34 degrees Celsius), Maue said. The average low temperature for the Lower 48 states will dance around 11 or 12 degrees (minus 12 to minus 11 degrees Celsius) on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, Maue said.

    Two Great Lakes — Erie and Ontario — may freeze up, which would at least reduce the famed lake-effect snow a bit, Maue said.

    National Weather Service meteorologist Zack Taylor of the national Weather Prediction Center said most areas east of the Rockies will be impacted by the bitter cold, snow or ice. Treacherous freezing rain could stretch from the southern plains through the mid-South and into the Carolinas, he said.

    “We’re looking at the potential for impactful ice accumulation. So the kind of ice accumulation that could cause significant or widespread power outages or potentially significant tree damage,” he said.

    And if you don’t get ice, you could get “another significant swath of heavy snow,” Taylor said. He said it was too early to predict how many inches will fall, but “significant snowfall accumulations” could hit “the Ozarks region, Tennessee and Ohio valleys, the central Appalachians, and then into the mid-Atlantic, and perhaps into the portions of the northeast.”

    Maue said in the mid-Atlantic around the nation’s capital, there’s a possibility that “you can get two blizzards on top of each other in the next 14 days.”

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Philippines discovers new gas deposit near disputed South China Sea

    [ad_1]

    MANILA, Philippines — Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced Monday the discovery of a new natural gas deposit near the disputed South China Sea, which could shield his country from a potential power crisis.

    The “significant discovery” northwest off Palawan province, close to an existing gas field in waters adjacent to the critical waterway, could eventually supply power to more than 5.7 million households or nearly 200,000 schools for a year, Marcos said, adding further tests and another drilling in the area would be done “to pursue more potential gas resources.”

    The undersea reservoir is estimated to contain about 98 billion cubic feet (2.7 billion cubic meters) of gas. Initial tests showed 60 million cubic feet (1.6 million cubic meters) of gas could be extracted daily from the well, Marcos said, without providing further details, including when commercial production could start.

    “This helps Malampaya’s contribution and strengthens our domestic gas supply for many years to come,” Marcos said. “Aside from the natural gas, the discovery also includes condensate, which is a high-value liquid fuel.”

    The new gas deposit, called Malampaya East 1, was discovered by a consortium about 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) east of the main Malampaya gas field, where commercial gas production started more than two decades ago and was projected to considerably decline in a few years.

    “We’re proud that Filipinos led this drilling and, more importantly, they completed it without any accident or environmental incidents,” Marcos said.

    The Malampaya gas-to-power facility has generated more than 20% of Luzon’s electricity, the most populous northern Philippine island region. In 2023, Marcos extended an exploration contract in Malampaya by 15 years.

    Experts have predicted Malampaya could run out of gas in a few years, sparking fears of a potential power crisis in Luzon, where the bustling capital and main financial and business district is located.

    The offshore gas field lies within the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines, a 200-nautical-mile (370-kilometer) stretch of water from a country’s coastline where it has exclusive rights to explore and harness resources under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

    Philippine efforts to explore for oil and gas in another offshore region, the Reed Bank, have been stalled for years because of opposition from Beijing, which claims sovereignty over the area along with most of the South China Sea. The Reed Bank also lies in the fringes of the South China Sea west of the Philippine island province of Palawan.

    China has opposed Vietnam’s oil and gas exploration in the disputed region. Beijing claims virtually the entire South China Sea and has reinforced its presence, including coast guard and naval patrols in the disputed waterway in recent years.

    Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have also been involved in the region’s long-simmering territorial standoffs.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Climate activist predicts high electricity prices and Trump’s attacks on green energy will hurt GOP

    [ad_1]

    RIPTON, Vermont — At a time when the Trump administration rolled back numerous environmental regulations while global temperatures and U.S. carbon pollution spiked, longtime climate activist Bill McKibben finds hope in something that didn’t seem that strong on a recent single-digit-temperature day: the sun.

    That sun has provided him cheap power for 25 years, and this month he installed his fourth iteration of solar panels on his Vermont home. In an interview after he set up the new system, he said President Donald Trump’s stance against solar and other cheap green energy will hurt the GOP in this year’s elections as electricity bills rise.

    After the Biden and Obama administrations subsidized and championed solar, wind and other green power as answers to fight climate change, Trump has tried to dampen those and turn to older and dirtier fossil fuels. The Trump administration froze five big offshore wind projects last month but judges this week allowed three of the projects to resume. Federal clean energy tax incentives expired on Dec. 31 that include installing home solar panels.

    Meanwhile, electricity prices are rising in the United States, and McKibben is counting on that to trigger political change.

    “I think you’re starting to see that have a big political impact in the U.S. right now. My prediction would be that electric prices are going to be to the 2026 election what egg prices were to the 2024 election,” said McKibben, an author and founder of multiple environmental and activist groups. Everyday inflation hurt Democrats in the last presidential race, analysts said.

    The Trump administration and a bipartisan group of governors on Friday tried to step up pressure on the operator of the nation’s largest electric grid to take urgent steps to boost power supplies in the mid-Atlantic and keep electricity bills from rising even higher.

    “Ensuring the American people have reliable and affordable electricity is one of President Trump’s top priorities,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers.

    Globally, the price of wind and solar power is plummeting to the point that they are cheaper than fossil fuels, the United Nations found. And China leads the world in renewable energy technology, with one of its electric car companies passing Tesla in annual sales.

    “We can’t economically compete in a world where China gets a lot of cheap energy and we have to pay for really expensive energy,” McKibben told The Associated Press, just after he installed a new type of solar panels that can hang on balconies with little fuss.

    When Trump took office in January 2025, the national average electricity cost was 15.94 cents per kilowatt-hour. By September it was up to 18.07 cents and then down slightly to 17.98 cents in October, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

    That’s a 12.8% increase in 10 months. It rose more in 10 months than the previous two years. People in Maryland, New Jersey and Maine have seen electricity prices rise at a rate three times higher than the national average since October 2024.

    At 900 kilowatt-hours per month, that means the average monthly electricity bill is about $18 more than in January 2025.

    This week, Democrats on Capitol Hill blamed rising electric bills on Trump and his dislike of renewable energy.

    “From his first day in office, he’s made it his mission to limit American’s access to cheap energy, all in the name of increasing profits for his friends in the fossil fuel industry. As a result, energy bills across the country have skyrocketed,” Illinois Rep. Sean Casten said at a Wednesday news conference.

    “Donald Trump is the first president to intentionally raise the price of something that we all need,” Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, also a Democrat, said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “Nobody should be enthused about paying more for electricity, and this national solar ban is making everybody pay more. Clean is cheap and cheap is clean.”

    McKibben has been sending excess electricity from his solar panels to the Vermont grid for years. Now he’s sending more.

    As his dog, Birke, stood watch, McKibben, who refers to his home nestled in the Green Mountains of Vermont as a “museum of solar technology” got his new panels up and running in about 10 minutes. This type of panel from the California-based firm Bright Saver is often referred to as plug-in solar. Though it’s not yet widely available in the U.S., McKibben pointed to the style’s popularity in Europe and Australia.

    “Americans spend three or four times as much money as Australians or Europeans to put solar panels on the roof. We have an absurdly overcomplicated permitting system that’s unlike anything else on the rest of the planet,” McKibben said.

    McKibben said Australians can obtain three hours of free electricity each day through a government program because the country has built so many solar panels.

    “And I’m almost certain that that’s an argument that every single person in America would understand,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t say: ‘I’d like three free hours of electricity.’”

    __

    Swinhart reported from Vermont. Borenstein reported from Washington. Matthew Daly contributed to this report from Washington.

    __

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • In a warming world, freshwater production is moving deep beneath the sea

    [ad_1]

    CARLSBAD, Calif. — Some four miles off the Southern California coast, a company is betting it can solve one of desalination’s biggest problems by moving the technology deep below the ocean’s surface.

    OceanWell’s planned Water Farm 1 would use natural ocean pressure to power reverse osmosis — a process that forces seawater through membranes to filter out salt and impurities — and produce up to 60 million gallons (nearly 225 million liters) of freshwater daily. Desalination is energy intensive, with plants worldwide producing between 500 and 850 million tons of carbon emissions annually — approaching the roughly 880 million tons emitted by the entire global aviation industry.

    OceanWell claims its deep sea approach — 1,300 feet (400 meters) below the water’s surface — would cut energy use by about 40% compared to conventional plants while also tackling the other major environmental problems plaguing traditional desalination: the highly concentrated brine discharged back into the ocean, where it can harm seafloor habitats, including coral reefs, and the intake systems that trap and kill fish larvae, plankton and other organisms at the base of the marine food web.

    “The freshwater future of the world is going to come from the ocean,” said OceanWell CEO Robert Bergstrom. “And we’re not going to ask the ocean to pay for it.”

    It’s an ambitious promise at a time when the world desperately needs alternatives. As climate change intensifies droughts, disrupts rainfall patterns and fuels wildfires, more regions are turning to the sea for drinking water. For many countries, particularly in the arid Middle East, parts of Africa and Pacific island nations, desalination isn’t optional — there simply isn’t enough freshwater to meet demand. More than 20,000 plants now operate worldwide, and the industry has been expanding at about 7% annually since 2010.

    “With aridity and climate change issues increasing, desalination will become more and more prevalent as a key technology globally,” said Peiying Hong, a professor of environmental science and engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

    But scientists warn that as desalination scales, the cumulative damage to coastal ecosystems — many already under pressure from warming waters and pollution — could intensify.

    Some companies are powering plants with renewable energy, while others are developing more efficient membrane technology to reduce energy consumption. Still others are moving the technology underwater entirely. Norway-based Flocean and Netherlands-based Waterise have tested subsea desalination systems and are working toward commercial deployment. Beyond southern California, OceanWell has signed an agreement to test its system in Nice, France — another region facing intensifying droughts and wildfires — beginning this year.

    For now, its technology remains in development. A single prototype operates in the Las Virgenes Reservoir where the local water district has partnered with the company in hopes of diversifying its water supply. If successful, the reverse osmosis pods would eventually float above the sea floor in the Santa Monica Bay, anchored with minimal concrete footprint, while an underwater pipeline would transport freshwater to shore. The system would use screens designed to keep out even microscopic plankton and would produce less concentrated brine discharge.

    Gregory Pierce, director of UCLA’s Water Resources Group, said deep sea desalination appears promising from an environmental and technical standpoint, but the real test will be cost.

    “It’s almost always much higher than you project” with new technologies, he said. “So that, I think, will be the make or break for the technology.”

    Las Virgenes Reservoir serves about 70,000 residents in western Los Angeles County. Nearly all the water originates in the northern Sierra Nevada and is pumped some 400 miles (640 kilometers) over the Tehachapi Mountains — a journey that requires massive amounts of energy. During years of low rainfall and snowpack in the Sierra, the reservoir and communities it serves suffer.

    About 100 miles (160 kilometers) down the coast, the Carlsbad Desalination Plant has become a focal point in the state’s debate over desalination’s environmental tradeoffs.

    The plant came online in 2015 as the largest seawater desalination facility in North America. Capable of producing up to 54 million gallons (204 million liters) of drinking water daily, it supplies about 10% of San Diego County’s water — enough for roughly 400,000 households.

    In Southern California, intensifying droughts and wildfires have exposed the region’s precarious water supply. Agricultural expansion and population growth have depleted local groundwater reserves, leaving cities dependent on imported water. San Diego imports roughly 90% of its supply from the Colorado River and Northern California — sources that are becoming increasingly strained by climate change. Desalination was pitched as a solution: a local, drought-proof source of drinking water drawn from the Pacific Ocean.

    But environmental groups have argued the plant’s seawater intake and brine discharge pose risks to marine life, while its high energy demands drive up water bills and worsen climate change. Before the plant came online, environmental organizations filed more than a dozen legal challenges and regulatory disputes. Most were dismissed but some resulted in changes to the project’s design and permits.

    “It sucks in a tremendous amount of water, and with that, sea life,” said Patrick McDonough, a senior attorney with San Diego Coastkeeper, which has participated in multiple legal challenges to the project. “We’re not just talking fish, turtles, birds, but larvae and spores — entire ecosystems.”

    A 2009 Regional Water Quality Control Board order estimated the plant would entrap some 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of fish daily and required offsetting those impacts by restoring wetlands elsewhere. Seventeen years later, that restoration remains incomplete. And a 2019 study found the plant’s brine discharge raises offshore salinity above permitted levels, though it detected no significant biological changes — likely because the site had already been heavily altered by decades of industrial activity from a neighboring power plant.

    Those impacts are especially acute in California, where roughly 95% of coastal wetlands have been lost largely to development, leaving the remaining lagoons as vital habitats for fish and migratory birds.

    “When we start messing with these very critical and unfortunately sparse coastal lagoons and wetlands, it can have tremendous impacts in the ocean,” McDonough said.

    Michelle Peters, chief executive officer of Channelside Water Resources, which owns the plant, said the facility uses large organism exclusion devices and one-millimeter screens to minimize marine life uptake, though she acknowledged some smaller species can still pass through.

    The plant dilutes its brine discharge with additional seawater before releasing it back into the ocean, and years of monitoring have shown no measurable impacts to surrounding marine life, she said.

    Peters said the Carlsbad plant has significantly cut its energy consumption through efficiency improvements and operates under a plan aimed at making the facility carbon net-neutral.

    Many experts say water recycling and conservation should come first, noting wastewater purification typically uses far less energy than seawater desalination and can substantially reduce impacts on marine life. Las Virgenes is pursuing a wastewater reuse project alongside its desalination partnership.

    “What we are looking for is a water supply that we can count on when Mother Nature does not deliver,” Las Virgenes’ Pedersen said. “Developing new sources of local water is really a critical measure to be more drought and climate ready.”

    ___

    Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • As global warming melts glaciers, a novel sanctuary in Antarctica is opening to preserve ice samples

    [ad_1]

    ROME — Scientists on Wednesday inaugurated the first global repository of mountain ice cores, preserving the history of the Earth’s atmosphere in an Antarctic vault for future generations to study as global warming melts glaciers around the world.

    An ice core is something of a time capsule, containing the history of the Earth’s past atmosphere in a frozen climate archive. With global glaciers melting at an unprecedented rate, scientists have raced to preserve ice cores for future study before they disappear altogether.

    The first two samples of Alpine mountain ice core, drilled out of Mont Blanc in France and Grand Combin in Switzerland, are now being stored in a snow cave at the Concordia station in the Antarctic Plateau at a constant temperature of around -52°C/-61°F.

    The Ice Memory Foundation, a consortium of European research institutes, inaugurated the frozen sanctuary on Wednesday, after boxes containing 1.7 tons of ice arrived via icebreaker on a 50-day refrigerated journey from Trieste, Italy.

    “By safeguarding physical samples of atmospheric gases, aerosols, pollutants and dust trapped in ice layers, the Ice Memory Foundation ensures that future generations of researchers will be able to study past climate conditions using technologies that may not yet exist,” said Carlo Barbante, vice chair of the Ice Memory Foundation and a professor at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.

    The Ice Memory project was launched in 2015 by a consortium of research institutes: From France, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) and the University of Grenoble-Alpes; from Italy the National Council of Research (CNR) and the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, and Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute.

    Scientists have already identified and drilled ice cores at 10 glacier sites worldwide and plan to transport them to the cave sanctuary for safekeeping in the coming years. The aim over the coming decade is to craft an international convention to preserve and safeguard the samples for future generations to study.

    As temperatures globally rise, glaciers are disappearing at a rapid clip, and with them critical information about the atmosphere: Since 2000, glaciers have lost between 2% and 39% of their ice regionally and about 5% globally, the foundation said.

    “These ice cores are not relics … they are reference points,” said Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the U.N. World Meteorological Organisation. “They allow scientists now and in the future to understand what changed, how fast and why.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • California wants to mix hydrogen with gas to cut climate pollution. Critics say that poses risks

    [ad_1]

    Alma Figueroa began to worry when she learned that her gas provider wanted to test a controversial solution to curb global warming: blend hydrogen with natural gas to power her stove and other appliances. Figueroa, who has asthma and recently learned her lung cancer is back, worries about health risks.

    “I don’t want to be anyone’s experiment,” said Figueroa, 60, a resident of Orange Cove in California’s Central Valley.

    The Southern California Gas Co. wants to blend and inject hydrogen into the town’s gas infrastructure, after the state agency that regulates utilities directed them and other companies to launch pilot projects. Proponents see it as key to helping California reduce planet-warming pollution by curbing reliance on gas while integrating cleaner energy into existing infrastructure. It’s part of a statewide effort to create safety rules for hydrogen blending. But opponents say it poses unnecessary risks, and Orange Cove’s mostly Latino and low-income residents say processes are happening without transparency or their input. Projects in states such as Colorado and Oregon have also raised concerns.

    Interest in deploying hydrogen boomed during the Biden administration but has been hard hit with the Trump administration’s cancellation of billions of dollars for hydrogen technology and other clean energy projects, including $1.2 billion for a hydrogen hub in California.

    The Orange Cove project is one of five proposed in California to test how gas pipelines and the appliances they fuel hold up with different amounts of hydrogen. Hawaii has been blending for decades.

    Natural gas is mostly methane, a potent planet-warming gas that’s supercharging extreme weather worldwide, which often impacts low-income and communities of color the most.

    Supporters see green hydrogen as one way to cut emissions. It’s made with renewable energy sources such as solar or wind to power an electrolyzer, which splits water into oxygen and hydrogen, a carbon-free gas that can be used to generate electricity and complement intermittent renewable energy. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has touted it “an essential aspect of how we’ll power our future and cut pollution.”

    Some see the 18-month proposed project in Orange Cove as one step in that direction. A solar farm would power the technology and direct the mixture, up to 5% hydrogen, to businesses and the town’s roughly 10,000 residents. The estimated $64.3 million project would be paid for with ratepayer money.

    A Minneapolis utility company estimated a blend of up to 5% green hydrogen would reduce carbon pollution by about 1,200 tons annually, the equivalent of removing 254 gas-powered cars.

    Janice Lin of the Green Hydrogen Coalition said it’s important to test blending. The U.S. has a vast network of gas pipelines — about 3 million miles, according to the Department of Energy — which can be used to move clean hydrogen while reducing reliance on gas, she said. If scaled, it could be cost-competitive and help industries that can’t fully electrify pollute less.

    “The way to move us away and really clean our air and minimize our reliance on fossil fuels is by having a viable alternative,” she said.

    California needs to demonstrate that it can blend like other countries but there are still unknowns, said Alejandra Hormaza, who teaches renewable energy at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The consensus is that up to 20% hydrogen by volume is safe, she said, but “we need more experimental work that uses real natural gas infrastructure to fully understand the impacts of hydrogen.”

    In 2022, several gas companies filed a joint application to pursue hydrogen blending. The California Public Utilities Commission is expected to make a decision this year.

    SoCalGas first proposed testing hydrogen blending in facilities at the University of California, Irvine, in an affluent community. But it scaled back and revised its proposal following protests. When Orange Cove leaders expressed interest, the gas company identified the city an ideal candidate — it has various pipeline materials, including steel and polyethylene, a type of plastic, and only one gas feed coming in, allowing them ample control of the blend.

    Orange Cove city leaders voted unanimously in support. They did not respond to multiple calls and emails seeking comment. But in an August public hearing, Mayor Diana Guerra Silva said the project would provide workforce opportunities for youth and boost business from visitors, according to a transcript.

    At the hearing, resident Angelica Martinez said the town could become a “pioneer” in hydrogen blending and “deserves the national recognition and attention for its willingness to implement such an innovative project.”

    Orange Cove is a citrus farming town home to mostly Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants, with 39% of the total population living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It’s an area with much pollution and the highest rate of asthma in Fresno County.

    Figueroa said the community historically hasn’t gotten involved in city politics, though they have launched a petition against the project and voiced concerns at public meetings. “I think the only reason they are wanting Orange Cove is because they don’t think there’s going to be pushback,” she said. Some residents said they’ve asked city officials to host a town hall about the pilot, but it has yet to happen.

    Research shows that burning hydrogen-blended gas into older appliances not designed for it can increase emissions of nitrogen oxides, pollutants that worsen asthma and are linked to other respiratory issues. It can deteriorate certain materials and leak more easily, increasing the risk of explosions because hydrogen is more flammable.

    Ryan Sinclair, an environmental microbiologist at Loma Linda University, said homes with older appliances are more vulnerable to these risks — in older infrastructure, a 5% mix can bump nitrogen oxides emissions an average of 8%. Residents can’t opt out unless they replace their gas appliances with electric ones, and Sinclair worries Orange Cove’s low-income residents don’t have the means to replace or maintain older ones. He said more health risk assessments are needed before starting hydrogen blending.

    Cal Poly’s Hormaza, who’s researched hydrogen leakage from gas systems for the last decade, said there’s insufficient research on whether hydrogen can increase leaks.

    There are also concerns about hydrogen’s potential to increase Earth’s warming. Research shows hydrogen can indirectly heat the planet by interacting with other gases.

    Environmental groups say hydrogen should only be used in high-energy industries such as aviation, cement or steel-making, which can’t easily be electrified. Others say that electrifying appliances, for example, are more efficient ways to reduce emissions.

    “To me, it’s just an absurd project. It’s (a) boondoggle” that exposes residents to unnecessary risks, said Michael Claiborne, directing attorney with Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, an advocacy group representing residents.

    If the projects are approved, SoCalGas has said it will employ safety measures before, during and after the project, including with leak surveys and detection technology, backflow prevention to keep hydrogen within the controlled area, and developing emergency responses.

    Orange Cove resident Francisco Gonzalez has friends with asthma and siblings with respiratory issues, so he worries about the health risks. His community is not against change or clean energy, he said, “but we are against being left out of the conversation.”

    ___

    Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott contributed to this report from Providence, Rhode Island.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Greenland’s harsh environment and lack of infrastructure have prevented rare earth mining

    [ad_1]

    Greenland’s harsh environment, lack of key infrastructure and difficult geology have so far prevented anyone from building a mine to extract the sought-after rare earth elements that many high-tech products require. Even if President Donald Trump prevails in his effort to take control of the arctic island, those challenges won’t go away.

    Trump has prioritized breaking China’s stranglehold on the global supply of rare earths ever since the world’s number two economy sharply restricted who could buy them after the United States imposed widespread tariffs last spring. The Trump administration has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and even taken stakes in several companies. Now the president is again pitching the idea that wresting control of Greenland away from Denmark could solve the problem.

    “We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” Trump said Friday.

    But Greenland may not be able to produce rare earths for years — if ever. Some companies are trying anyway, but their efforts to unearth some of the 1.5 million tons of rare earths encased in rock in Greenland generally haven’t advanced beyond the exploratory stage. Trump’s fascination with the island nation may be more about countering Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic than securing any of the hard-to-pronounce elements like neodymium and terbium that are used to produce the high-powered magnets needed in electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots and fighter jets among other products.

    “The fixation on Greenland has always been more about geopolitical posturing — a military-strategic interest and stock-promotion narrative — than a realistic supply solution for the tech sector,” said Tracy Hughes, founder and executive director of the Critical Minerals Institute. “The hype far outstrips the hard science and economics behind these critical minerals.”

    Trump confirmed those geopolitical concerns at the White House Friday.

    “We don’t want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don’t take Greenland, you can have Russia or China as your next door neighbor. That’s not going to happen,” Trump said

    The main challenge to mine in Greenland is, “of course, the remoteness. Even in the south where it’s populated, there are few roads and no railways, so any mining venture would have to create these accessibilities,” said Diogo Rosa, an economic geology researcher at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Power would also have to be generated locally, and expert manpower would have to be brought in.

    Another concern is the prospect of mining rare earths in the fragile Arctic environment just as Greenland tries to build a thriving tourism industry, said Patrick Schröder, a senior fellow in the Environment and Society program at the Chatham House think-tank in London.

    “Toxic chemicals needed to separate the minerals out from the rock, so that can be highly polluting and further downstream as well, the processing,” Shröder said. Plus, rare earths are often found alongside radioactive uranium.

    Besides the unforgiving climate that encases much of Greenland under layers of ice and freezes the northern fjords for much of the year, the rare earths found there tend to be encased in a complex type of rock called eudialyte, and no one has ever developed a profitable process to extract rare earths from that type of rock. Elsewhere, these elements are normally found in different rock formation called carbonatites, and there are proven methods to work with that.

    “If we’re in a race for resources — for critical minerals — then we should be focusing on the resources that are most easily able to get to market,” said David Abraham, a rare earths expert who has followed the industry for decades and wrote the book “The Elements of Power.”

    This week, Critical Metals’ stock price more than doubled after it said it plans to build a pilot plant in Greenland this year. But that company and more than a dozen others exploring deposits on the island remain far away from actually building a mine and would still need to raise at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Even the most promising projects can struggle to turn a profit, particularly when China resorts to dumping extra materials onto the market to depress prices and drive competitors out of business as it has done many times in the past. And currently most critical minerals have to be processed in China.

    The U.S. is scrambling to expand the supply of rare earths outside of China during the one-year reprieve from even tougher restrictions that Trump said Xi Jinping agreed to in October. A number of companies around the world are already producing rare earths or magnets and can deliver more quickly than anything in Greenland, which Trump has threatened to seize with military power if Denmark doesn’t agree to sell it.

    “Everybody’s just been running to get to this endpoint. And if you go to Greenland, it’s like you’re going back to the beginning,” said Ian Lange, an economics professor who focuses on rare earths at the Colorado School of Mines.

    Many in the industry, too, think America should focus on helping proven companies instead of trying to build new rare earth mines in Greenland, Ukraine, Africa or elsewhere. A number of other mining projects in the U.S. and friendly nations like Australia are farther along and in much more accessible locations.

    The U.S. government has invested directly in the company that runs the only rare earths mine in the U.S., MP Materials, and a lithium miner and a company that recycles batteries and other products with rare earths.

    Scott Dunn, CEO of Noveon Magnetics, said those investments should do more to reduce China’s leverage, but it’s hard to change the math quickly when more than 90% of the world’s rare earths come from China.

    “There are very few folks that can rely on a track record for delivering anything in each of these instances, and that obviously should be where we start, and especially in my view if you’re the U.S. government,” said Dunn, whose company is already producing more than 2,000 metric tons of magnets each year at a plant in Texas from elements it gets outside of China.

    ___

    Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska, and Naishadham reported from Madrid.

    [ad_2]

    Source link