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Tag: Pollution

  • The Yanomami people lived in harmony with nature. Invaders turned their lives into a fight for survival. | CNN

    The Yanomami people lived in harmony with nature. Invaders turned their lives into a fight for survival. | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Shaman Davi Kopenawa Yanomami furrowed his brow as he stared out at the skyscrapers and buildings looming through the window of his oak-panelled hotel room in New York City. “I’m here, in the city of stone, and mirrors and glass… but in my heart, I’m in mourning,” he told CNN.

    Davi has campaigned for Brazil’s Yanomami people, one of the largest relatively isolated indigenous groups in South America, for nearly 40 years – braving threats on his life for his activism. Last week, he was invited to Manhattan for the opening of a group exhibition of Yanomami artists and Brazilian photographer Claudia Andujar at cultural center The Shed, which counted among its guests United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

    Despite the glamour of the surroundings, Davi’s mind was more than 2,000 miles away, deep in the forests of Brazil, where a health crisis has gripped his people. “I’m in mourning…for my people, who I’ve lost,” he said, referring to recent images that emerged from the territory showing emaciated Yanomami adults and children, some with swollen bellies from hunger.

    Disease and malnutrition have torn through Yanomami villages over the last four years – a crisis that experts lay at the feet of the scores of illegal miners who have set up camp in their sprawling territory, spurred by the high price of gold.

    Yanomami children are dying at a disproportionate rate from preventable diseases, like malaria and malnutrition. At least 570 Yanomami children have died from preventable causes since 2018, Brazil’s health ministry told CNN.

    Fiona Watson, research and advocacy director at indigenous human rights group Survival International, said high malaria rates – spread by miners – have left many Yanomami adults too unwell to hunt or fish, as they rely entirely off the forest and rivers for food. “That means the food’s not coming in, hence you get so much malnutrition (that) has led to this terrible catastrophe,” she said.

    Their predicament is exacerbated by water pollution and environmental destruction from the mines, and sometimes violent encounters with the intruders. In January, Ariel Castro Alves, Lula’s National Secretary for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, said a federal government delegation were told in January that at least 30 Yanomami girls and teenagers had been abused and impregnated by miners.

    Government health workers, who might have mitigated the crisis, have been intimidated and even driven out of the area by miners who took over health facilities and airstrips, Junior Hekurari Yanomami, president of the Urihi Yanomami Association, told CNN.

    A nurse talks to a Yanomami mother, whose son is treated for malnutrition in Boa Vista.

    The emergency is the latest test for Brazil’s newly inaugurated President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has made environmental protection a priority for his term in office. In January, he launched a crackdown on illegal mines in Yanomami territory, and the country’s military, environmental agencies and police forces are currently sweeping through the area to clear it of miners.

    Lula’s administration has brought hope, says Davi, especially through his appointment of the country’s first minister for indigenous people, Sonia Guajajara.

    “But he’s going to need a lot of support,” the activist said of Brazil’s bitterly polarized political landscape.

    Yanomami territory, which spans the Brazilian states of Roraima and Amazonas, is supposed to be a protected reservation where mining is illegal. But miners have flooded the area over the last several years as gold prices boomed, stripping the natural environment and in some cases driving away vital health workers.

    While it is hard to get an accurate number of mines in the sprawling territory, which equals the size of Portugal, a report by Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), based on satellite imaging, found that mines on Yanomami land had risen from four in 2015 to 1,556 by the end of 2021.

    Speaking from Boa Vista in late January, Lula pledged to eliminate illegal mining, saying he was

    As hunter-agriculturalists, the Yanomami maintain a symbiotic relationship with their environment. Some 30,400 Yanomami live in the territory, and as they are largely isolated from the outside world, they are more vulnerable to common viruses. Exploitation and encroachment in the forest by extractive industries has proven to be fatal for the indigenous group and their traditional way of life.

    The building of the Trans Amazonian highway, started in the 1970s by the Brazilian military dictatorship who were keen to develop the Amazon basin, introduced measles, malaria and the flu that decimated Yanomami communities, said Watson.

    A goldrush in 1986 later saw an estimated 20% of the Yanomami community die in a seven-year period, according to Watson. Many of those miners were driven out in 1992, when the area was demarcated by the government of then-President Fernando Collor de Mello.

    Food is airdropped from a military transport aircraft to the Surucucu military base on January 26, which will be delivered to the Yanomami.

    Davi says he noticed a shift when former President Jair Bolsonaro was in power. Miners felt emboldened to enter the territory armed “with a lot of heavy equipment, the mechanised dredgers, and they were using petrol, mercury, and then they… used planes and small landing strips and helicopters,” Davi said.

    The arrival of new miners brought misery, said Davi, including reported threats and attacks against Yanomami communities. In May 2021, a half-hour shootout with miners left four dead, including two Yanomami children – a video of the incident showed women and children running for cover as a boat passed the riverbanks of their village.

    “It’s his fault. He let the illness of mining in,” Davi says of Bolsonaro.

    An illegal mining area is seen in Yanomami indigenous territory, Roraima state, Brazil, on February 3, 2023.

    Bolsonaro has called accusations that he turned a blind eye to the Yanomami plight a “left-wing farce” on his official Telegram channel on January 21. Having visited the region before, he shared pictures of him with indigenous people on his Telegram account as well as government press releases from his presidency, including one saying the World Health Organization praised the vaccination rate of Brazil’s indigenous people under his government in 2021.

    During his term from 2019 to 2022, Bolsonaro signed an environmental protection decree to raise fines for illegal logging, fishing, burning, hunting, and deforestation. His administration also saw Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) – a government agency that oversees policies related to indigenous communities – invest $16 million in surveillance of indigenous lands to combat illegal activities there.

    However, the far-right leader also supported legislation to open indigenous protected areas to mining, reduced funding or dismantled agencies tasked with monitoring and enforcing environmental regulations, and repeatedly claimed that indigenous territories are “too big” – all of which emboldened trespassers, experts say.

    Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered an investigation to determine whether the actions of the Bolsonaro government amounted to “genocide” of the Yanomami. Ahead of Lula’s meeting with President Joe Biden on Friday, he reiterated to CNN that Bolsonaro could be “punished” by courts for “the genocide against the Yanomami indigenous people.”

    On January 30, Brazil’s Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship (MDHC) also released a report on alleging that its previous administration disregarded numerous alerts made about the Yanomami’s deteriorating situation.

    CNN has reached out to Damares Alves, who led MDHC at the time. When asked about the claims by a Brazilian reporter on February 1, Alves responded: “The Yanomami have been living in a calamitous situation for decades. It’s time for the people (the Senate) to change the union’s budget so that we can take better care of the Yanomami Indians. As for the accusations, I will only speak when cited by a court”.

    There has been momentum since Lula’s intervention in the territory. Speaking from Boa Vista in late January, Lula pledged to eliminate illegal mining, saying he was “shocked” by the Yanomami’s poor health.

    More than 1,000 unwell indigenous people have been evacuated from the Yanomami territory, and the Justice Ministry announced a major offensive against the miners, and closed the territory’s airspace as it tackles their supply routes.

    On Monday, Brazilian security forces began their enforcement operation to expel the miners, many of whom may have already left the area. Videos have emerged on social media of miners fleeing from the territory or imploring the government to help them leave the area. Last week, Justice Minister Flavio Dino said he expected 80% of the illegal miners to have left the first week of February.

    A miner, who was seen leaving the area, told Reuters that the Yanomami were desperate for food parcels dropped by Air Force planes. “The day the parcels arrived, they were gone,” Joao Batista Costa, 65, told Reuters, while holding up a food parcel.

    But resolving the crisis will be a long road, and Lula is likely to face resistance among parts of the sizeable number of Brazilians who support Bolsonaro’s policies. Nor are all politicians on a regional level as enthused about indigenous protections; Roraima state governor Antonio Denarium, a Bolsonaro ally, for example, appeared to downplay the Yanomami crisis in an interview to Folha de S. Paulo newspaper in January, saying it was time for them to adapt to urban living and “leave the bush.”

    In a later statement to CNN, Denarium’s office said the quotes were “taken out of context,” adding that “the desire for people’s lives to improve is the desire of anyone who values the dignity of indigenous or non-indigenous people.”

    For Davi, there has been little evidence that authorities valued Yanomami dignity in recent years.

    “We indigenous peoples are badly treated, as are our rivers, the animals – but it’s not just indigenous peoples who are dying, the city people are suffering as well,” Davi said from his hotel room. “These two worlds really need to come together in a big embrace and not let our world be ruined.”

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  • Ohio train continues burning days after derailment as officials say air, water quality remain safe for now | CNN

    Ohio train continues burning days after derailment as officials say air, water quality remain safe for now | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Officials continued on Sunday to monitor the environmental impact caused by a derailed train carrying hazardous materials late Friday in East Palestine, Ohio, a crash that led to a large inferno that continues to burn, evacuations, a shelter-in-place order and concerns about air quality.

    Trent Conaway, the mayor of East Palestine, assured residents the air and drinking water remain safe after the Norfolk Southern train crash. He said classes at East Palestine schools would be canceled Monday, as would city meetings.

    The train derailed in East Palestine, about 15 miles south of Youngstown, Friday evening, according to earlier comments by officials. Of the more than 100 cars, about 20 were carrying hazardous materials, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident.

    Ten of those cars derailed, including five that were carrying vinyl chloride, the NTSB said in a statement Saturday. The agency said so far it had “not confirmed vinyl chloride has been released other than from the pressure release devices.”

    While air and water quality remained stable Sunday, and officials have yet to see abnormal levels in screenings, “things can change at any moment,” said James Justice, an on-scene coordinator with the EPA’s Emergency Response.

    Authorities continue to monitor for a “long list” of chemicals, he said – not only those provided to authorities in a list from Norfolk Southern, but also those that can result from combustion.

    Officials issued a shelter-in-place order for the entire town of roughly 5,000 people, and an evacuation order was issued for the area within a mile radius of the train crash near James Street.

    Both restrictions remained in place Sunday, Conaway said at a news conference. Fire Chief Keith Drabkick told reporters at the news conference the scene remained volatile, preventing authorities from conducting on-scene operations. Crews will not be able to determine the full list of chemicals involved until the fires stops burning, Drabkick said.

    Officials urged residents to follow the shelter-in-place orders. On Saturday evening, one person was arrested for misconduct after approaching the scene and getting too close to the train, the mayor said.

    “Please stay home. I can’t reiterate it enough,” Conaway said. “Do not come to our town.”

    The Ohio EPA is monitoring water quality in local streams, which eventually feed into the Ohio River, a spokesperson said, but the agency does not anticipate contamination to East Palestine’s public water system, which draws from other sources.

    The agency installed containment dams in area streams and set up three aeration locations using high volume pumps to treat water and remove dissolved contaminants.

    In an email to CNN Sunday morning, a spokesperson for Norfolk Southern deferred all questions to the NTSB.

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  • Study reveals salps play outsize role in damping global warming

    Study reveals salps play outsize role in damping global warming

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    Newswise — Humans continue to amplify global warming by emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. A new study reveals that a distant human relative plays an outsize role in damping the impacts of this greenhouse gas by pumping large amounts of carbon from the ocean surface to the deep sea, where it contributes nothing to current warming.

    The study, led by Dr. Deborah Steinberg of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, appeared in the latest issue of Global Biogeochemical Cycles. It reports on research conducted as part of EXPORTS, a 4-year, multi-institutional field program funded by NASA. Co-authors hail from marine institutes in Maine, Bermuda, California, Newfoundland, British Columbia, and Alaska.

    The goal of EXPORTS, for EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing, is to combine shipboard and satellite observations to more accurately quantify the global impact of the “biological pump.” This is a suite of biological processes that transport carbon and other organic matter from sunlit surface waters to the deep sea, effectively removing carbon dioxide from the surface ocean and atmosphere. Tiny drifting animals called zooplankton play a key role in the pump by eating phytoplankton, which incorporate carbon from carbon dioxide into their tissues during photosynthesis, then exporting that carbon to depth.

    During a month-long EXPORTS expedition to the northeast Pacific Ocean in 2018, Steinberg and colleagues chanced upon a large bloom of a poorly studied player in the biological pump: a species of gelatinous zooplankton named Salpa aspera. Like other salps, these “jelly barrels” begin life with a notochord—the structure that develops into the spinal cord in humans and other vertebrates—and as adults drift through the world’s oceans like tiny transparent whales, filtering microscopic plants afloat in the water. 

    Three features keyed the team’s interest in salps, and S. aspera in particular. One is that these organisms can reproduce asexually, rapidly cloning into immense blooms under the right conditions. Second is that S. aspera is bigger and filters more water than most other zooplankton, thus producing larger, heavier fecal pellets. Third is that it migrates up and down through the water each day, rising to feed on phytoplankton during the cover of night and jetting to the perpetual darkness of the deep sea during sunlit hours to avoid its own predators, which include sea turtles, marine birds, and fishes.

    Together, these features had led researchers to suspect that salps might play an important role in the biological pump, as large blooms of these relatively bulky zooplankton could effectively transport carbon to depth through their heavy, fast-sinking fecal pellets; vertical migrations that give those pellets a head start on their journey to depth; and the sinking of countless salp carcasses during a bloom (individual salps live only a few weeks).

    But the proof is in the pudding, and the ephemeral life cycle and uneven distribution of salps has long challenged efforts to study their role in carbon export and deep-sea food webs. “Salps follow a ‘bloom or bust’ life cycle,” says Steinberg, “with populations that are inherently patchy in space and time. That makes it hard to observe or model their contribution to the export of carbon to the deep sea.”

    During the 2018 EXPORTS expedition to the Pacific, Steinberg and colleagues were able to overcome these challenges by deploying a wide range of ocean-observation tools, from traditional plankton nets and sediment traps to underwater video recorders and sonar-based computer models. Moreover, by using two research vessels—the 277-ft Roger Revelleand the 238-ft Sally Ride—the scientists were able to observe conditions not only inside the salp bloom but in surrounding waters, providing a broader geographic context for their study.

    The results of the team’s unprecedented field campaign were clear. “High salp abundances, combined with unique features of their ecology and physiology, lead to an outsized role in the biological pump,” says Steinberg. 

    To put things in perspective, the observed salp bloom covered more than 4,000 square miles (~11,000 km2), about the size of Connecticut. With onboard experiments showing salps capable of exporting a daily average of 9 milligrams of carbon through each square meter at 100 meters below the bloom, the amount of carbon exported to the deep sea was about 100 metric tons per day. For comparison, a typical passenger car emits 4.6 metric tons per year. Comparing these values shows the carbon removed from the climate system each day of the bloom is equal to taking 7,500 cars off the road. Adjusting these values using the team’s highest measured rate of salp-mediated export (34 mg of C per day) increases the carbon offset to more than 28,000 vehicles.

    Moving forward, the team calls for increased recognition of the key role that salps play in global carbon export. “Blooms like the one we observed often go undetected,” says Steinberg, “and their contributions to the biological pump are rarely quantified, even in some of the best-studied regions of the world’s oceans.” Incorporation of salp dynamics into a recent carbon-cycle model illustrates the potential of salp-mediated export. In this global model, salps and other tunicates exported 700 million metric tons of carbon to the deep sea each year, equal to emissions from more than 150 million cars. 

    “Greater use of new technologies, such as adding video imaging systems to autonomous floats, would help detect these salp blooms,” says Steinberg. “Our study serves as a ‘call to arms’ to better detect and quantify these processes, using technology and sampling schemes that enable their inclusion in measurements and models of the biological carbon pump.”

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    Virginia Institute of Marine Science

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  • Abandoning wood cook stoves would be great for Africa, if families could afford it

    Abandoning wood cook stoves would be great for Africa, if families could afford it

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    Newswise — DURHAM, N.C. — Replacing traditional biomass-burning cookstoves across sub-Saharan Africa could save more than 463,000 lives and US $66 billion in health costs annually, according to a new analysis of the most socially optimal cooking technologies in Africa.

    But the promise of those outcomes alone may not be enough to hasten the adoption of cleaner alternatives, the researchers warn.

    The study, published in the open source journal Nature Sustainability, used a geospatial model to determine the best cooking options by location across the continent, weighing factors such as availability and cost of fuel, time spent gathering fuels and preparing meals, and impacts on health and the environment. In the model, everyone using a traditional cookstove – around 83 percent of households in sub-Saharan Africa, comprising nearly 1 billion people – would switch to stoves that delivered more benefits to both households and society.

    “From both a social perspective and a private perspective, it would be optimal for most of these households to use cleaner technologies,” says Marc Jeuland, Ph.D., an associate professor of global health and public policy at Duke who led the research. “And so that’s telling you that these polluting technologies are extremely damaging.”

    Traditional stoves typically burn wood or other solid fuels, generating indoor air pollution and climate-altering emissions. Cooking regularly on such stoves can cause respiratory disease, as well as contribute to global warming and deforestation. Stoves fueled by electricity or even liquid petroleum gas (LPG) mitigate those risks while also offering efficiencies in time and labor. Many African households using traditional stoves spend more than an hour a day gathering fuel to prepare meals, Jeuland notes.

    Despite those advantages, adoption of cleaner alternatives has been sluggish in Africa, which has lagged other regions in the transition away from polluting cooking technologies. In fact, according to the World Bank’s 2022 Energy Progress Report, the number of people using biomass-burning cookstoves actually increased by 50 percent between 2000 and 2020, as population growth outpaced conversion.

    Jeuland and colleagues describe the situation as a “severe market failure” that calls for new policies and incentives to stimulate growth of cleaner technologies.

    “Just because something may be beneficial from a social or private perspective doesn’t necessarily mean it’s affordable,” Jeuland says. The up-front cost of purchasing a new stove and ongoing fuel costs “are going to continue to be a barrier for many households in sub-Saharan Africa unless you really reduce those costs through subsidies of some form.”

    Jeuland favors subsidies that would reduce the cost of conversion for most families to “close to zero.” He also believes wealthy nations should help foot the bill, since a wide-scale shift to cleaner cooking technologies would lessen a climate problem that those countries bear the most responsibility for creating.

    “If rural Africans continue to harvest firewood for cooking, the contribution to climate change is pretty minimal. But because those damages are accumulating, the rich world should be paying to avoid them,” Jeuland says.

    But affordability is not the only obstacle. Many parts of Africa do not have reliable electricity or infrastructure to deliver gas for LPG stoves, Jeuland says. The researchers’ model, designed by a team of energy systems engineers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, accounted for regional infrastructure differences, picking the technology best suited for each location’s unique circumstances.

    In the model selecting for the highest net benefits, about two-thirds of households across sub-Saharan Africa would be best off using LPG stoves, with another 30 percent, mostly in urban areas where grid power is available, using electric. Smaller populations in the poorest and most remote locations would use biogas or improved biomass stoves, which burn more cleanly than traditional cookstoves. Even when factoring only benefits to the household, the model suggests eight in ten people in sub-Saharan Africa should switch to cleaner technologies.

    The results can help governments and nonprofits target their efforts to encourage conversion, Jeuland says. Doing more to inform people about the potential benefits of switching and developing technologies that are well-suited to local cultures and customs will also be critical, he adds.

    But one other area Jeuland would like to explore is how to influence who is at the table when household cooking preferences are discussed. In traditional societies where women and children are exerting most of the cooking labor, men still often make most of the financial decisions.

    “Women tend to not have as much bargaining power, and their preferences are down-weighted in these households,” Jeuland says. “And so we need to be thinking about how to empower women in these decisions.”

    This research was partially supported by the Clean Cooking Alliance and The Royal Institute of Technology

    CITATION: “A Geospatial Approach to Understanding Clean Cooking Challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Babak Khavari, Camilo Ramirez, Merc Jeuland, Francesco Fuso Nerini. Nature Sustainability, Jan. 12, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41893-022-01039-8

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    Duke University

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  • Decades-old crustaceans coaxed from lake mud give up genetic secrets revealing evolution in action

    Decades-old crustaceans coaxed from lake mud give up genetic secrets revealing evolution in action

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    Newswise — Human actions are changing the environment at an unprecedented rate. Plant and animal populations must try to keep up with these human-accelerated changes, often by trying to rapidly evolve tolerance to changing conditions.

    University of Oklahoma researchers Lawrence Weider, professor of biology, and Matthew Wersebe, a biology doctoral candidate, demonstrated rapid evolution in action by sequencing the genomes of a population of Daphnia pulicaria, an aquatic crustacean, from a polluted lake.  

    The research, which was conducted as part of Wersebe’s doctoral dissertation, was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Wersebe and Weider revived decades-old Daphnia resting eggs from lake sediments, a method known as resurrection ecology, which has been refined in Weider’s lab over the past several decades. They then sequenced the entire genomes of 54 different Daphnia individuals from different points-in-time, allowing them to study the genetics and evolution of the population.

    The Daphnia were collected from Tanners Lake, located in Oakdale, Minnesota. Tanners Lake has suffered significant salt pollution, stemming from the widespread use of road deicing salts in its watershed.  

    Daphnia, also known as water fleas, play critical roles in environmental monitoring. For example, they have served as important test organisms in laboratories around the world for over a century because of their sensitivity to many environmental stressors such as chemicals. In nature, Daphnia act as a keystone species in freshwater food webs globally, where they feed on algae to help keep lake and reservoir water clean and serve as a food item for recreational and commercially important fish species.

    Wersebe’s and Weider’s results indicate that rapid adaptation to salt pollution may allow lake Daphnia to persist in the face of anthropogenic salinization, maintaining the food webs and ecosystem services that Daphnia support. However, the ability of these populations to adapt will depend on the speed at which these changes are occurring and the underlying genetic makeup of the impacted populations. 

    Over the past several years, many researchers have published results defining the scope and scale of lake salinization and recent research has highlighted the ecological impacts. However, to date, the evolutionary implications are not well known. Through their study, Wersebe and Weider reported signatures of natural selection throughout the genome near genes related to osmoregulation and ion regulation, key processes for dealing with high salt. Characterizing clones for salinity tolerance revealed evidence that genetic changes may underlie rapid evolution.  

    “Work like this is the first step in designing future studies incorporating recent technological advances, such as CRISPR gene editing, allowing the creation of comprehensive genotype-to-phenotype maps and predicting the role that genetic variation plays in creating diverse forms and functions,” Wersebe said. “In fact, we found a promising gene that appears not to work properly in the older Daphnia, but a functional copy of the gene is increasing in frequency – true evolution in action.”

    Future research using these advanced technologies for cutting and pasting the non-functional gene into Daphnia would be one way to better probe the effects that mutations have on complex phenotypic traits like salinity tolerance.  

    The work was funded by the OU Department of Biology Adams Summer Scholarship, Robberson OU Graduate College Grant, Hill Fund for Research in Biology, OU Graduate Student Senate Research Grant, American Museum of Natural History Theodore Roosevelt Grant and the National Science Foundation Biogeography of Behavior student seed grant awarded to Wersebe in support of graduate research. The study was facilitated by material and technical assistance from the University of Oklahoma Biological Station in Kingston, Oklahoma, and the St. Croix Watershed Research Station in Marine-on-St. Croix, Minnesota.  

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    University of Oklahoma

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  • Biden administration takes another step toward advancing a controversial oil drilling project in Alaska | CNN Politics

    Biden administration takes another step toward advancing a controversial oil drilling project in Alaska | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday advanced the controversial Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, releasing the final environmental impact statement before the project can be approved.

    The ConocoPhillips proposed Willow drilling plan is a massive and decadeslong project that the state’s bipartisan Congressional delegation says will create much-needed jobs for Alaskans and boost domestic energy production in the US.

    But environmental groups fear the impact of the planet-warming carbon pollution from the hundreds of millions of barrels of oil it would produce – and say it will deal a significant blow to President Joe Biden’s ambitious climate agenda.

    The final environmental report from the Bureau of Land Management recommends a slightly smaller version of what ConocoPhillips originally proposed, putting the number of drilling sites at three instead of five. The Department of Interior is also recommending other measures to try to lower the pollution of the project, and recommending a smaller footprint of gravel roads and pipelines.

    In a statement, the Interior Department said it “has substantial concerns about the Willow project and the preferred alternative as presented in the final SEIS, including direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and impacts to wildlife and Alaska Native subsistence.”

    The Biden administration now has 30 days to issue a final decision on the project, after which drilling could begin. In its statement, Interior said it could select a different alternative on the project, including taking no action or further reducing the number of drill sites.

    ConocoPhillips and members of the Alaska Congressional delegation have been pushing the administration to finalize the project by the end of February to take advantage of cold and icy conditions needed to drill in the Arctic. If the company misses that window, it could push the project’s start date to next year.

    Erec Isaacson, president of ConocoPhillips Alaska, said in a statement that nearly five years of regulatory review should conclude “without delay.” Isaacson added the project is “ready to begin construction immediately” after Interior’s final decision is issued.

    According to the Interior Department’s own estimation, the project would produce 629 million barrels of oil over the course of 30 years and would release around 278 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon emissions. Climate groups say that’s equivalent to what 76 coal-fired power plants produce every year.

    “The world and the country can’t afford to develop that oil,” said Jeremy Lieb, a senior attorney for environmental law firm Earthjustice. Lieb and other advocates are concerned that Willow may be the start of a future drilling boom in the area.

    “Willow is just the start based on what industry has planned,” Lieb said. “The total estimate for the amount of oil that could be accessible in the region around Willow is 7 or 8 billion barrels.”

    For the Willow project, ConocoPhillips is proposing five drilling sites on federal land in Alaska’s North Slope, and the project would include a processing facility, pipelines to transport oil, gravel roads, at least one airstrip and a gravel mine site.

    The project – and the public comment process leading up to it – has also received heavy criticism from the nearby Alaska Native village of Nuiqsut, which some villagers evacuated last year during a gas leak in a ConocoPhillips project in the area. Nuiqsut officials recently released a letter calling the Bureau of Land Management’s public input process “disappointing and inadequate,” criticizing both the Trump and Biden administration’s timeline.

    The bureau’s “engagement with us is consistently focused on how to allow projects to go forward; how to permit the continuous expansion and concentration of oil and gas activity on our traditional lands,” Nuiqsut officials wrote in their letter.

    Alaska’s entire Congressional delegation – including newly elected Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat – have urged the White House and Interior to approve the project, saying it would be a huge boost to state’s economy.

    Sen. Lisa Murkowski, in particular, has been urging the White House and Biden personally to greenlight Willow, she told CNN.

    “I’ve been pretty persistent on this,” she told CNN in an interview this summer. “Let’s just say, any conversation I’ve ever had with the White House, anyone close to the White House, I’ve brought up the subject of Willow.”

    As gas prices spiked last summer, Murkowski, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, and other Senate Republicans tightened the pressure on Biden to approve a major domestic oil drilling project. Environmental advocates, meanwhile, argued the project will not bring US gas prices down any time soon, as the infrastructure will take years to build.

    “When you think about those things that should be teed up and ready to go, this is one where in my view there’s really no excuse for why we should see further delay,” Murkowski said. “This is something that’s been in the works that’s gone through so much process, across multiple administrations.”

    This story has been updated with more information.

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  • Scientists Use SDSC’s Expanse to Advance Green Chemistry

    Scientists Use SDSC’s Expanse to Advance Green Chemistry

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    Newswise — More than 30 years ago, the phrase “green chemistry” emerged with the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990. At that time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency implemented programs focused on treatment and disposal; from these efforts emerged the term “green chemistry.” It continues to be a goal for scientists working to reduce or eliminate hazardous materials. One such project was recently carried out by the Heather Kulik Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) using the Expanse supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.

    Kulik, an associate professor of chemical engineering, recently worked with Gianmarco Terrones, MIT chemical engineering graduate student, on simulations of high performance iridium phosphors – luminescent substances. Kulik and Terrones used Expanse to conduct the study which was recently published in Chemical Science.

    The study, titled “Low-cost machine learning prediction of excited state properties of iridium-centered phosphors,” demonstrated the development of fast, accurate models that assess phosphor properties such as color and duration of light emission. The research represents one of the first applications of machine learning to the specific chemistry of iridium-centered complexes and revealed design rules for the synthesis of iridium phosphors with desired properties , such as emission lifetime.

    What exactly are iridium phosphors?

    Iridium phosphors are a type of chemical in which chemical building blocks called ligands are bonded to a central iridium atom. These chemicals are useful for a variety of applications such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and photocatalysis. Choosing the best chemical building blocks to use for a phosphor is a challenging problem experimentally, since chemists are limited in the number of experiments they can run. To help with this, simulations on high-performance supercomputers such as Expanse can identify promising building blocks before any synthesis takes place.

    “Our research focuses on the use of data-driven computer models (i.e., machine learning), which have a speed advantage over the usual ab initio first principles computer modeling approach – the data-driven models can be trained directly on experimental data as well, and can thus bypass certain accuracy limitations of ab initio models,” Terrones said. “These data-driven models can be used to identify good phosphors and bad phosphors, and answer questions like, does this type of ligand make a phosphor brighter or dimmer (leading to design rules).”

    According to Kulick and Terrones, thanks to the Expanse calculations, other chemists will have an easier time synthesizing high-performing phosphors by using the developed artificial neural networks (ANNs), or the data-driven computer models, to quickly screen thousands of complexes and identify promising ones. In other words, they can now see what an ANN model thinks of a proposed new phosphor, and either proceed with synthesis or not – depending on the model verdict.

    “Our work allows fellow chemists to efficiently search an infinite chemical design space by only considering phosphors that are likely to be high-performing,” Terrones said. “As chemists go on to synthesize new phosphors, computational researchers like us can use the new phosphors as examples to feed to computer models, which then learn more and become capable of making better predictions. As a result, there is a feedback cycle between model and experiment that helps both advance further than either could alone.”

    How did using Expanse make a difference?

    Data-driven models on Expanse, like those created by Kulik and Terrones, have the power to accelerate chemical discovery, and the researchers say that their application to iridium phosphors will lead to faster discovery of efficient photocatalysts for green chemistry and optimal iridium phosphors for efficient, vibrant OLED technology and bioimaging.

    “Access to Expanse allowed for time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) calculations of dozens of iridium phosphors and enabled the benchmarking of data-driven computer models with TDDFT, the latter of which is commonly used to study iridium phosphors,” Terrones said. “Expanse was also used for the training of ANNs. The application of our models to thousands of hypothetical iridium complexes derived from the Cambridge Structural Database in a matter of seconds was very satisfying as it highlighted the usefulness of the models for chemical discovery.”

    The lab’s next step is to apply the developed models to an active learning workflow in order to identify additional promising phosphors. In this approach, the goal is to attain edge-of-distribution combinations of emission energy and lifetime by retraining the models on ab initio data of phosphors identified as optimal by their Expanse models.

    Additional scientists working on the study were MIT researchers Chenru Duan and Aditya Nandy. The Office of Naval Research (grant no. N00014-18-1-2434 and grant no. N00014-20-1-2150) provided primary support for this work. Support for machine learning feature development was provided by DARPA (grant no. D18AP00039). Computational work on SDSC resources was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (grant no. ACI-1548562). Additional support was received from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (grant no. G-2020-14067) and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (grant no. 1122374).

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  • Faucets in McCarthy’s district are running dry after years of drought. Constituents want him to do more | CNN Politics

    Faucets in McCarthy’s district are running dry after years of drought. Constituents want him to do more | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Shortly after Benjamin Cuevas and his family moved into their new home three years ago in Tooleville, California, he realized something was horribly wrong.

    In the middle of the day, the water pressure would drop completely. Cranking up both hot and cold could only coax a little drip out of the faucet.

    Then there was the water itself, contaminated with chemicals from agriculture runoff and treated with so much chlorine that it turned his family’s black clothing gray in the wash. His daughter and her baby live in the house, and Cuevas’s wife only bathes her granddaughter in the bottled water they receive from the county for drinking.

    Cuevas is not alone; the entire town of under 300 people faces the same water crisis. In many rural parts of the state, faucets and community wells are running dry after years of drought and heavy agriculture use pulls more water from the same groundwater residents use.

    One local nonprofit told CNN that about 8,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley need thousands of gallons of hauled water just to keep their taps flowing – and that number is growing.

    Benjamin Cuevas stands next to a town water tank in Tooleville.

    Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has represented Tooleville for the past decade – though the small town is just outside his newly redrawn congressional district. The Republican lawmaker has long represented Kern and Tulare counties, and his redrawn seat adds portions of Fresno County.

    Throughout his tenure, this region of California has spent more time than any other part of the country in exceptional drought – the US Drought Monitor’s most severe category – a drought scientists say has been made more intense by human-caused climate change. Recent rainfall has put a dent in the region’s surface drought, though experts have told CNN it will do little to solve the ongoing groundwater shortage.

    Tulare, Kern and Fresno counties have endured more than 200 weeks in exceptional drought over the past decade, according to Drought Monitor data.

    Multiple people CNN spoke to for this story said McCarthy and his office don’t often engage on this issue in the district, especially compared with neighboring members of Congress. And they wish he would do more with his power in Washington – especially now that he holds the speaker’s gavel.

    McCarthy proposed an amendment this past summer to set up a grant program to help connect small towns like Tooleville with larger cities that have better water systems. The measure passed the House but died in the Senate. But as more and more wells go dry, McCarthy has made a point to vote against other bills addressing climate change and drought, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.

    “In my experience, he has never engaged with us on any of these kinds of emergencies,” said Jessi Snyder, the director of community development at local nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises, who focuses on getting hauled water to entire communities that have gone dry.

    Cuevas moved to Tooleville three years ago.

    In a statement to CNN, McCarthy’s office said he has been “a staunch advocate on water issues in the Central Valley and California” since he was first elected to the House. McCarthy has joined his colleagues to “introduce broad legislative solutions every Congress related to this topic since our water situation continues to worsen,” his spokesperson Brittany Martinez said.

    But McCarthy does not mention climate change when talking about his district’s drought, and his office did not respond to questions from CNN about whether he believes climate change is playing a role. Instead, he often blames the drought on state mismanagement of water and has called for new and larger dams and reservoirs to be built to capture rainwater during wet years.

    Water experts in California say that’s missing the new reality.

    “Part of what’s happening now is the reality that there is no more new water,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow of California-based water nonprofit Pacific Institute. “The knee-jerk response of politicians has always been build another dam; find more water. There is no new reservoir that’s going to magically solve these problems. It’s now a question of managing demand.”

    When a call comes in from yet another community whose well has run dry, it’s a race against time for the staff at Self-Help Enterprises.

    The Visalia, California-based nonprofit has a self-imposed deadline of just 24 hours to drive out to the impacted community with emergency tanks to keep water flowing for showers, laundry and cleaning, as well as with five-gallon jugs of higher-quality water for drinking.

    “The team goes all hands-on deck,” Tami McVay, Self-Help’s director of emergency services, told CNN. “Everybody knows what their role is, and they just go get it done. And we move forward to the next one.”

    A tanker truck makes a water delivery in Tooleville.

    Rick Jackpot Fernandez of Kyle Koontz Water Hauling hooks up a hose to one of the town's water storage tanks.

    These days, there’s always a next one. Snyder said the summer of 2022 marked “a new level of crisis” as entire small communities of 80 to 100 homes started running out of water, in addition to individual homes.

    “It’s been a real struggle because it’s hard to provide a backup source of water to a whole community instead of one household,” she said.

    More than 1,400 wells were reported dry last year, according to the state of California, a 40% increase over the same period in 2021. Self-Help staff see this in person on the ground. New families are flowing into their hauled water program, but none are leaving. During the dry, warm-weather months, McVay estimates her nonprofit fields around 100 calls a day, dropping down to about 30 per week in the winter months.

    The punishing multi-year drought is what Brad Rippey, a meteorologist at the US Department of Agriculture, calls California’s “latest misery.” California has spent eight of the last 11 years in drought, with the last three years being the driest such period on record, state officials said in October. Human-caused climate change – which is raising global temperatures and making much-needed rain and snow less frequent in the West – is contributing to the severity, Rippey said.

    “The impacts are multiplying. You have these droughts piling on top of droughts with cumulative impacts,” including wildfires, he added.

    To supplement the dwindling groundwater supply in Tooleville, officials in Tulare County and nonprofits like Self-Help deliver five-gallon water jugs to the residents for drinking and 16,000 gallons of hauled water into tanks for washing their clothes, doing dishes and taking showers.

    Six five-gallon jugs of water are delivered to a resident's home in Tooleville.

    There’s so much demand in the warm months for the hauled water that a 16,000-gallon delivery lasted some communities just a few hours before needing to be refilled, Snyder said.

    “We literally cannot pump the water out of the tanker trucks fast enough to fill the storage tanks,” she added. “We can’t ever get ahead of it; physics is against us. It’s nuts and really stressful.”

    California’s extreme heat wave this summer pushed water usage even higher as residents watered grass and farms pumped more for crops. In Tooleville, Cuevas watched as the orange and lemon trees in his yard withered and died. Outdoor watering restrictions meant he couldn’t save his trees, even as some of his neighbors flouted the restrictions with noticeably green lawns.

    “Everything just perished,” Cuevas said. “It’s not a good feeling to see other people enjoying [the water], while you’re doing your part.”

    Seeing the nearby Friant-Kern Canal every day – which carries melted snowpack water from Northern California to Central Valley farms – is a nagging reminder of what his family doesn’t have.

    “It’s terrible,” Cuevas told CNN. “Just joking, I’d say I’ll go out there and put a hose [in it] running right back to my house.”

    Tooleville resident Maria Olivera has lived in town since 1974.

    Olivera cooks with bottled water.

    As Cuevas’s own trees died, commercial farms in the area were still producing – although their future is also uncertain. Farms are also having to drill deeper wells to irrigate orange groves and acres of thirsty pecan and pistachio trees.

    With this rush on groundwater, shallow residential wells don’t stand a chance. In West Goshen, a small town that sits outside McCarthy’s district in Tulare County, resident Jesus Benitez told CNN he burned through three well pumps – costing $1,200 a piece – during the warmer months when his neighbor, a farmer who grows alfalfa and corn, started irrigating his crops.

    “They’ve got the money to go every time deeper and deeper in the ground; we don’t have that luxury,” Benitez said.

    Two town wells in nearby Seville nearly ran dry this summer, said Linda Gutierrez, a lifelong resident who sits on the town’s water board. Across the street from the town’s wells is a pistachio farm, and when they start irrigating, the groundwater level plummets, she said.

    But she doesn’t blame the farmers. Like many who live in the area, her husband is a farm worker. There’s a lot of pride in the region’s far-reaching agriculture, and many feel it should be sustained.

    “You can’t not have farmers because you need food, but we have to have water in order to survive,” Gutierrez said. “There’s a very tricky balance to establish. Right now, if they don’t irrigate, we have water, but also a year from now we have no food.”

    A water usage notice is posted on a fence surrounding the Yettem-Seville water storage tanks.

    As big of a societal problem as drought and water shortages are, they are also intensely personal. Self-Help’s McVay gets emotional when talking about school children in the area getting beat up because they don’t have clean clothes or ready access to a shower.

    “They don’t have water in their homes to take baths, or brush their teeth, or have clean laundry, and they’re getting bullied,” she said. “Being made fun of because they’re taking baths at the local gas station bathroom. It’s not fair – the stress that it causes the parents because [they] start to feel like they’re failing as a parent.”

    Multiple local and state elected officials and leaders of nonprofits focusing on water delivery in the San Joaquin Valley said McCarthy isn’t engaged enough on what they consider one of his district’s most dire crises.

    McVay said outreach from McCarthy’s office on dry residential wells is “slim to none, and I am not saying that to discredit them at all.”

    “I have had more conversations, more engagement and just more wanting to know how they can assist from Congressman Valadao and his office than probably any other on the federal side,” McVay added.

    Snyder said Rep. David Valadao, a Republican representing neighboring Kings County as well as portions of Tulare and Kern, and his staff “will show up in a community at the time of a crisis” and are actively engaged on how they can support efforts to get people water.

    Other members of Congress, including Democratic Rep. Jim Costa and Republican Connie Conway, who left office earlier this month, have also been more accessible and engaged on the issue, Snyder said.

    “Kevin McCarthy, no,” Snyder added.

    A sign reading

    Oranges grown on trees in a grove in Tulare County.

    While McCarthy is popular in his district and influential among California and Central Valley Republicans, California state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat who represents parts of the San Joaquin Valley plagued by drought, told CNN there are concerns that McCarthy’s ambition for House speaker has superseded his district’s needs.

    “He’s focused on that leadership position instead of actually working on issues to address the impacts of his district,” Hurtado told CNN. “Quietly, the word out there is it’s been a while that he’s actually delivered something for the region, given his focus on the leadership position. Maybe that’s part of his greater vision for helping this region out.”

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to questions about how he’ll use his position as House speaker to address climate change-fueled droughts in California and around the nation. Nor did it respond to the critiques about his lack of engagement.

    “The Leader has consistently worked in a bipartisan, bicameral fashion to deliver this life-giving resource for the families, agriculture producers and workers, and communities in the Central Valley and throughout California, and our Republican congressional delegation heavily relies on his steadfast leadership and decades of expertise when crafting their own pieces of water legislation,” McCarthy’s spokesperson Martinez told CNN in a statement. “When Democrats have held the majority, they time and time again blocked the progress and innovation of their House GOP colleagues.”

    McCarthy delivers remarks to supporters alongside Ronna Romney McDaniel, Republican National Committee chair, and Rep. Tom Emmer on November 9.

    In July, McCarthy spoke on the House floor about Tooleville’s plight, seeking to set up a federal grant program to help connect it and other small towns to larger cities’ water supply.

    “In our district, the community of Tooleville has run out of water as the groundwater table drops and aging infrastructure fails or becomes obsolete,” McCarthy said at the time. “Tulare County advises me that if California’s droughts continue, more small and rural communities in our district with older infrastructure could meet the exact same fate.”

    McCarthy’s measure authorized a grant program but didn’t contain any funding. And even though the bill passed the House, it died in the Senate, and it’s unclear whether it will come up again in the new Congress.

    Connecting Tooleville’s water infrastructure with that of nearby Exeter has been a decadeslong pursuit that is finally close to happening thanks to a state mandate and funding. The project will mean more reliable and cleaner water for residents like Cuevas. But it’s expected to take eight years for the two systems to fully merge.

    The Friant-Kern Canal carries melted snowpack water from Northern California to Central Valley farms.

    McCarthy is also co-sponsoring a bill with Valadao that would enlarge certain reservoirs and kickstart construction on a new reservoir in the Sacramento Valley. But some nonprofit leaders and local officials say these solutions would prioritize agriculture over residents.

    “We need more solutions beyond storage and dams,” said Susana De Anda, executive director of the San Joaquin Valley-based environmental justice nonprofit Community Water Center. “[McCarthy] lacks understanding of the real critical problems we’re experiencing around the drought and our communities.”

    Seeking to attract younger voters concerned about climate change to the Republican Party, McCarthy last year convened a Climate, Energy and Conservation Task Force to develop the party’s messaging and policies around the issue. And House Republican delegations have attended the last two United Nations climate summits.

    Cars drive past a sign on the outskirts of Tooleville.

    But all indications suggest that addressing human-caused climate change is not going to be a focal point of McCarthy’s now that he has the speaker’s gavel. McCarthy and House Republicans have shown they don’t want to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels, and few in the party are willing to connect global temperature rise to worsening droughts and extreme weather.

    McCarthy dissolved Democrats’ Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and he has vowed to investigate Department of Energy grants for electric vehicle components, as well as alleged “collusion” between environmental groups and China and Russia to “hurt American Energy,” according to a recent statement.

    “Our representatives don’t talk about climate change; it’s a real problem,” De Anda said. “Climate change is real. Our communities are the canaries in the coal mine. We get hit first.”

    It’s part of the reason Cuevas is hoping to move away in a couple years. He’s hopeful the water situation will improve by connecting Tooleville to a larger town’s water system; otherwise, he’s afraid he won’t be able to entice another buyer due to the water issues.

    “I’m happy I had a chance to buy it, but we are planning to move,” Cuevas told CNN. “Right now, if I try, I ain’t going to get nothing, not even what I paid for the home.”

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  • Sections of Balkan river have become a floating garbage dump

    Sections of Balkan river have become a floating garbage dump

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    Tons of waste dumped in poorly regulated riverside landfills or directly into the waterways that flow across three countries end up accumulating behind a trash barrier in the Drina River in eastern Bosnia during the wet weather of winter and early spring.

    This week, the barrier once again became the outer edge of a massive floating waste dump crammed with plastic bottles, rusty barrels, used tires, household appliances, driftwood and other garbage picked up by the river from its tributaries.

    The river fencing installed by a Bosnian hydroelectric plant, a few kilometers upstream from its dam near Visegrad, has turned the city into an unwilling regional waste site, local environmental activists complain.

    Heavy rain and unseasonably warm weather over the past week have caused many rivers and streams in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro to overflow, flooding the surrounding areas and forcing scores of people from their homes. Temperatures dropped in many areas on Friday as rain turned into snow.

    Bosnia River Pollution
    Aerial view of waste floating in the Drina river near Visegrad, Bosnia, Friday, Jan. 20, 2023. Tons of waste dumped in poorly regulated riverside landfills or directly into the rivers across three Western Balkan countries end up accumulating during high water season in winter and spring, behind a trash barrier in the Drina River in eastern Bosnia.

    Armin Durgut / AP


    “We had a lot of rainfall and torrential floods in recent days and a huge inflow of water from (the Drina’s tributaries in) Montenegro which is now, fortunately, subsiding,” said Dejan Furtula of the environmental group Eko Centar Visegrad.

    “Unfortunately, the huge inflow of garbage has not ceased,” he added.

    The Drina River runs 346 kilometers (215 miles) from the mountains of northwestern Montenegro through Serbia and Bosnia. and some of its tributaries are known for their emerald color and breathtaking scenery. A section along the border between Bosnia and Serbia is popular with river rafters when it’s not “garbage season.”

    Some 10,000 cubic meters (more than 353,000 cubic feet) of waste are estimated to have amassed behind the Drina River trash barrier in recent days, Furtula said. The same amount was pulled in recent years from that area of the river.

    Removing the garbage takes up to six months, on average. It ends up at the municipal landfill in Visegrad, which Furtula said “does not even have sufficient capacity to handle (the city’s) municipal waste.”

    “The fires on the (municipal) landfill site are always burning,” he said, calling the conditions there “not just a huge environmental and health hazard, but also a big embarrassment for all of us.”

    Decades after the devastating 1990s wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkans lag behind the rest of Europe both economically and with regard to environmental protection.

    The countries of the region have made little progress in building effective, environmentally sound trash disposal systems despite seeking membership in the European Union and adopting some of the EU’s laws and regulations.

    Unauthorized waste dumps dot hills and valleys throughout the region, while trash litters roads and plastic bags hang from the trees.

    In addition to river pollution, many countries in the western Balkans have other environmental woes. One of the most pressing is the extremely high level of air pollution affecting a number of cities in the region.

    “People need to wake up to problems like this,” Visegrad resident Rados Brekalovic said.

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  • Sections of Balkan river become floating garbage dump

    Sections of Balkan river become floating garbage dump

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    VISEGRAD, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Tons of waste dumped in poorly regulated riverside landfills or directly into the waterways that flow across three countries end up accumulating behind a trash barrier in the Drina River in eastern Bosnia during the wet weather of winter and early spring.

    This week, the barrier once again became the outer edge of a massive floating waste dump crammed with plastic bottles, rusty barrels, used tires, household appliances, driftwood and other garbage picked up by the river from its tributaries.

    The river fencing installed by a Bosnian hydroelectric plant, a few kilometers upstream from its dam near Visegrad, has turned the city into an unwilling regional waste site, local environmental activists complain.

    Heavy rain and unseasonably warm weather over the past week have caused many rivers and streams in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro to overflow, flooding the surrounding areas and forcing scores of people from their homes. Temperatures dropped in many areas on Friday as rain turned into snow.

    “We had a lot of rainfall and torrential floods in recent days and a huge inflow of water from (the Drina’s tributaries in) Montenegro which is now, fortunately, subsiding,” said Dejan Furtula of the environmental group Eko Centar Visegrad

    “Unfortunately, the huge inflow of garbage has not ceased,” he added.

    The Drina River runs 346 kilometers (215 miles) from the mountains of northwestern Montenegro through Serbia and Bosnia. and some of its tributaries are known for their emerald color and breathtaking scenery. A section along the border between Bosnia and Serbia is popular with river rafters when it’s not “garbage season.”

    Some 10,000 cubic meters (more than 353,000 cubic feet) of waste are estimated to have amassed behind the Drina River trash barrier in recent days, Furtula said. The same amount was pulled in recent years from that area of the river.

    Removing the garbage takes up to six months, on average. It ends up at the municipal landfill in Visegrad, which Furtula said “does not even have sufficient capacity to handle (the city’s) municipal waste.”

    “The fires on the (municipal) landfill site are always burning,” he said, calling the conditions there “not just a huge environmental and health hazard, but also a big embarrassment for all of us.”

    Decades after the devastating 1990s wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkans lag behind the rest of Europe both economically and with regard to environmental protection.

    The countries of the region have made little progress in building effective, environmentally sound trash disposal systems despite seeking membership in the European Union and adopting some of the EU’s laws and regulations.

    Unauthorized waste dumps dot hills and valleys throughout the region, while trash litters roads and plastic bags hang from the trees.

    In addition to river pollution, many countries in the western Balkans have other environmental woes. One of the most pressing is the extremely high level of air pollution affecting a number of cities in the region.

    “People need to wake up to problems like this,” Visegrad resident Rados Brekalovic said.

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  • Va. Senate Democrats kill effort to repeal electric car rule

    Va. Senate Democrats kill effort to repeal electric car rule

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    RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia Senate Democrats on Tuesday defeated several Republican efforts to repeal a so-called “clean cars” law that aims to reduce carbon pollution through the adoption of California’s stringent rules for vehicle emissions.

    The committee vote marked a critical juncture in the GOP repeal effort — one of this session’s highest-profile environmental debates. While there are still similar measures expected to advance through the Republican-controlled House, they would eventually land before the same Senate committee for a vote.

    Environmental groups, who say the adoption of the standards was one of the biggest steps Virginia has taken to address climate change, cheered Tuesday’s outcome.

    “The vote today shows that (Gov. Glenn) Youngkin-led attacks on Virginia’s bedrock climate laws are a dead end and that he should get on the side of making pollution progress and not stand against it,” said Walton Shepherd, Virginia policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

    Republicans sought unsuccessfully last year to repeal the 2021 law, and Youngkin pledged to try again after California in August set itself on a path to require all new cars, pickup trucks and SUVs be electric or hydrogen by 2035. Under California’s standards, drivers can keep their existing gas-powered cars or buy used ones.

    Opponents of following California say its goals are unattainable and that the electric vehicles that will be required — and their batteries — are too expensive for many families. Speakers on Tuesday also raised concerns about whether the power grid would be able to handle the additional demand.

    Some Republican senators asked their colleagues to consider at least delaying implementation of the standards.

    “I hope that at least there’s a way we can amend this. Do something so that reasonable judgment can guide the day here,” Sen. Richard Stuart said.

    The Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee ultimately rolled several similar repeal bills together before voting the consolidated bunch down on an 8-7 party-line vote vote.

    The “clean cars” law was initially adopted two years ago, at a time when the state government was under full Democratic control. The measure that then-Gov. Ralph Northam signed into law was a top priority for environmental advocates at the time. It will require that starting in 2024 a certain percentage of new passenger vehicles sold by manufacturers be electric or hybrid electric.

    The mechanism for reaching the mandated vehicle sales threshold — which would start at roughly 8% in 2024 and then increase each year — involves adopting California’s vehicle emissions standards. California has had the authority to set its own rules for decades under a waiver from the federal Clean Air Act.

    The program applies to manufacturers, not car dealers. Manufacturers who aren’t in compliance can buy credits from others who have surpassed the target.

    Advocates of the change argued that some automakers prioritize sending their electric vehicles, or EVs, to states that use California’s standards. They said that has meant supply in Virginia isn’t meeting demand, especially outside of the Washington suburbs.

    The hope was that the law will make it easier and more likely that Virginians will choose cleaner cars and in turn help reduce pollution from the transportation sector, which federal data shows is Virginia’s single largest source of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

    Opponents argued when the Virginia law was adopted that the commonwealth shouldn’t be tying its future to California.

    In August, after the California’s Air Resources Board further tightened its standards, state officials confirmed the change would apply to Virginia. Youngkin vowed to press for a repeal, saying he would work to “prevent this ridiculous edict from being forced on Virginians.”

    “As the governor stated, Democrats in Virginia outsourced the decision-making on energy policy to unelected bureaucrats in California,” Youngkin’s spokeswoman, Macaulay Porter, said in a statement.

    The governor has said he generally applauds efforts to move toward cleaner energy sources but thinks the methods adopted under previous years of Democratic control are too rigid.

    A representative for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents most automakers, said during the committee hearing that it was neutral on the bill. But the representative, Josh Fisher, raised concerns that Virginia had not enacted policies since 2021 to help support hitting the thresholds of the mandate.

    “I’m here to advocate for consumer purchase rebates, enhanced EV charging infrastructure build-out, updating your state building codes. These are all policies that you need to adopt if you’re going to move forward with this policy,” Fisher said.

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  • The rich should pay higher fares to clean up aviation, says Heathrow boss | CNN Business

    The rich should pay higher fares to clean up aviation, says Heathrow boss | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Rich travelers will have to pay more to fly if the aviation industry is to transition to greener fuels, the boss of one of the world’s biggest airports said Tuesday.

    Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos hosted by CNN’s Richard Quest, Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said that wealthy individuals and companies should pay extra to fly with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in order to bring the costs down for everyone else, particularly people in developing countries.

    He said that financiers and energy suppliers should invest in SAF production, including in emerging markets.

    “But as individuals and companies we need to be paying the premium for sustainable aviation fuels so that we can get the cost of it down so that the mass market and developing countries don’t have to pay for the energy transition. The wealthy people in this room and wealthy nations should be funding the energy transition in aviation to help support developing countries,” he added.

    Holland-Kaye said the solution to sustainable aviation was not to fly less, which was not necessarily an option outside Northern Europe, but to use cleaner sources of energy to travel.

    SAF is viewed as critical to reducing aviation’s carbon emissions but its green credentials come at a hefty price. Some airlines allow passengers to offset their CO2 emissions by paying more for their tickets to cover the extra cost of using SAF, but very few travelers currently make use of this option.

    Holland-Kaye said that companies can play a major role accelerating the adoption of SAF because business travel accounts for about 30% of fuel used in aviation. He cited the example of Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , which has an internal carbon tax for travel that requires each business unit to pay a fee based on its carbon emissions.

    Produced mainly from recycled food and agricultural waste, such as used cooking oil, SAF is a type of biofuel that cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 80% compared to conventional jet fuel.

    It also costs between two and eight times more than its fossil-fuel based alternative, which is why in 2019 it accounted for just 0.1% of jet fuel used in commercial aviation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey.

    In 2021, the industry pledged to replaced 10% of global jet fuel supply with SAF by 2030. This year, Virgin Atlantic plans to fly a Boeing 787 from London to New York powered solely by SAF in what has been billed as the world’s first net-zero transatlantic flight.

    Clean energy investments need a major boost if the world is to meet its climate goals, according to Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a surge in investment in renewables as countries race to secure alternative energy supplies, but much more needs to be done, he said.

    Speaking on another Davos panel hosted by CNN’s Julia Chatterley earlier on Tuesday, Birol said that for every dollar invested in fossil fuels, the world is now investing $1.50 in clean energy. That needs to increase to $9 to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, he added.

    — Anna Cooban contributed reporting.

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  • Unbelievable facts

    Unbelievable facts

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  • Opinion: Miami is one step closer to the implosion of its crypto dreams | CNN

    Opinion: Miami is one step closer to the implosion of its crypto dreams | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Jake Cline is a writer and editor in Miami whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic and other national outlets. He was a member of the team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s coverage of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Thanks in large part to bitcoin evangelism by top officials in Miami, the city has spent the past couple of years in full-blown cryptomania.

    In the vision of Mayor Francis Suarez – the city’s chief cheerleader for digital currency – Miami will one day become the national capital for cryptocurrency.

    Two years ago, Miami published its “Bitcoin White Paper” – a blueprint for its transformation into a 21st century city. Around the same time, prominent crypto figures began relocating to the city, and Miami began hawking its own digital currency, MiamiCoin.

    As the fever quickened, cryptocurrency exchanges began advertising on Miami billboards. Bitcoin ATMs were installed at neighborhood gas stations and convenience stores.

    And perhaps the most visible symbol allowing Miami to flex its crypto bragging rights was the announcement in March of 2021 by Miami-Dade County that it had sold naming rights for its main sports arena – home of the beloved Miami Heat NBA franchise – to FTX, the now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange founded by disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried.

    That partnership, which is not even two years old, came to an unhappy end last week. On Wednesday, the beleaguered company and Miami’s local government finalized an agreement to terminate the deal and remove the now tarnished FTX logo from the sports venue.

    Over the past few months, as the scale of Bankman-Fried’s alleged fraud became clear, some city elders and the business community scrambled to unwind what many of us had suspected from the start was a simply terrible business deal. Bankman-Fried, who has maintained his innocence, pleaded not guilty to federal fraud charges during a court appearance in New York earlier this month.

    We now know just what a fiasco Miami’s love affair with crypto has been. The financial costs of last year’s crypto crash have been enormous for the many thousands of investors who invested – and then lost funds they could ill afford to forgo.

    But my own reservations were not rooted in certain knowledge that crypto would crumble, although its collapse was far swifter and more spectacular than even most skeptics anticipated.

    My opposition to crypto is based on its deleterious effects on the environment. The fact that Miami, considered “the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world,” would go all in for a currency created by a climate-wrecking technology always seemed to me to be a particular kind of madness.

    Many people don’t understand how a currency that exists largely in the digital space can have real-life destructive impacts on our environment. Bitcoin mining uses vast amounts of resources. As the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in an April 2021 article, “bitcoin-mining operations worldwide now use … about the annual electricity consumption of the entire nation of Sweden.”

    Citing data scientist Alex de Vries’ Digiconomist website, Kolbert reported that “a single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month.” Similar reporting could be found at The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.

    Bitcoin mining hardware has ramped up as the cryptocurrency’s popularity has increased. Between January 1, 2016, and June 30, 2018, the mining operations for four major cryptocurrencies released an estimated three to 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to a study in the research journal Nature Sustainability.

    Even China, the world’s largest polluter, banned bitcoin mining in 2021, citing its high carbon emissions. Now we are in what has been called “crypto winter” after enthusiasm has plummeted for cryptocurrencies worldwide. Nevertheless, the carbon footprint of bitcoin, still the world’s most valuable digital currency, continues to be enormous.

    This past September, a report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy found that crypto mining in the United States emits as much greenhouse gas as the nation’s railroads and cautioned that “depending on the energy intensity of the technology used, crypto-assets could hinder broader efforts to achieve net-zero carbon pollution consistent with U.S. climate commitments and goals.”

    But despite all that data, Suarez remains convinced that it’s possible to produce bitcoin in an environmentally friendly way.

    “I’d love to sort of dispel some of the, I think, myths — I call them myths — of [crypto] mining as a not-environmentally-friendly activity,” the mayor said during his Crypto Conference, a live-streamed event held in June 2021.

    And because there are renewable-energy sources in South Florida, his argument goes, crypto miners could eventually be incentivized to stop contributing to the destruction of our planet. He has argued, in effect, that because renewable energy sources exist, miners might just in the future opt to use them. It’s an extraordinarily weak argument. It would be a wonderful outcome, if only we could interest bitcoin miners in abandoning their pursuit of cheap and dirty energy sources.

    But he’s not wrong – it is entirely possible to mine bitcoin responsibly, as bitcoin’s leading competitor, ethereum, proved last year. A decentralized global network used for verifying billions of dollars of cryptocurrency transactions, ethereum in September completed a system-wide transformation known as the Merge.

    Essentially, ethereum moved to a mining process, known as proof of stake, that requires significantly less computing power than bitcoiners’ preferred process, proof of work. In doing so, ethereum appears to have reduced its worldwide energy consumption by more than 99%.

    While some bitcoin miners say they want their industry to go green, the majority resist calls to adopt the proof of stake system over fears it would eat into their profits. Meanwhile, residents of Miami seem torn on environmental matters. According to a survey conducted by Yale University, as well as George Mason University, they believe that local officials, and state officials, including the governor “should do more to address global warming.”

    But Miami voters helped to propel a “red wave” that installed Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida legislature — a body that under GOP control allows fossil-fuel companies to write its bills.

    Residents of Miami-Dade County this past November also voted to reelect Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has said that while he doesn’t consider himself a “climate change denier” he hopes never to be mistaken for a “climate change believer.”

    And despite everything that has happened with the digital currency’s plummeting value, Suarez, who is also president of the United States Conference of Mayors, remains a bitcoin believer.

    Miami-Dade County will once again play host later this year to Bitcoin 2023, the next installment of the annual conference. And Suarez told a Miami TV station that he continues to receive his government salary in bitcoin, as he has since November 2021.

    Some dreams, it would seem, die hard.

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  • AI improves detail, estimate of urban air pollution

    AI improves detail, estimate of urban air pollution

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    Newswise — ITHACA, N.Y. – Using artificial intelligence, Cornell University engineers have simplified and reinforced models that accurately calculate the fine particulate matter (PM2.5) – the soot, dust and exhaust emitted by trucks and cars that get into human lungs – contained in urban air pollution. 

    Now, city planners and government health officials can obtain a more precise accounting about the well-being of urban dwellers and the air they breathe, from new research published December 2022 in the journal Transportation Research Part D.

    “Infrastructure determines our living environment, our exposure,” said senior author Oliver Gao, the Howard Simpson Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering at Cornell University. “Air pollution impact due to transportation – put out as exhaust from the cars and trucks that drive on our streets – is very complicated. Our infrastructure, transportation and energy policies are going to impact air pollution and hence public health.”

    Previous methods to gauge air pollution were cumbersome and reliant on extraordinary amounts of data points. “Older models to calculate particulate matter were computationally and mechanically consuming and complex,” said Gao, a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. “But if you develop an easily accessible data model, with the help of artificial intelligence filling in some of the blanks, you can have an accurate model at a local scale.”

    Lead author Salil Desai and visiting scientist Mohammad Tayarani, together with Gao, published “Developing Machine Learning Models for Hyperlocal Traffic Related Particulate Matter Concentration Mapping,” to offer a leaner, less data-intensive method for making accurate models.

    Ambient air pollution is a leading cause of premature death around the world. Globally, more than 4.2 million annual fatalities – in the form of cardiovascular disease, ischemic heart disease, stroke and lung cancer – were attributed to air pollution in 2015, according to a Lancet study cited in the Cornell research.

    In this work, the group developed four machine learning models for traffic-related particulate matter concentrations in data gathered in New York City’s five boroughs, which have a combined population of 8.2 million people and a daily-vehicle miles traveled of 55 million miles.

    The equations use few inputs such as traffic data, topology and meteorology in an AI algorithm to learn simulations for a wide range of traffic-related, air-pollution concentration scenarios.

    Their best performing model was the Convolutional Long Short-term Memory, or ConvLSTM, which trained the algorithm to predict many spatially correlated observations.

    “Our data-driven approach – mainly based on vehicle emission data – requires considerably fewer modeling steps,” Desai said. Instead of focusing on stationary locations, the method provides a high-resolution estimation of the city street pollution surface. Higher resolution can help transportation and epidemiology studies assess health, environmental justice and air quality impacts.

    Funding for this research came from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Centers Program and Cornell Atkinson.

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  • Trade partners see red over Europe’s green agenda

    Trade partners see red over Europe’s green agenda

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    Voiced by artificial intelligence.

    The EU’s green ambitions are, for its trading partners, turning into a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

    Developing nations, especially, worry that Brussels is throwing up trade barriers in its pursuit of climate neutrality and sustainable food production. To them, it looks like all the EU can export is rules that will hold back their own economic progress.

    Indonesia, for example, has warned the EU should not attempt to dictate its green standards to countries in Southeast Asia. “There must be no coercion, no more parties who always dictate and assume that my standards are better than yours,” Indonesian President Joko Widodo told European leaders at the EU-ASEAN summit last month.

    In another striking example of the anger provoked by the EU’s green agenda, Malaysia has threatened to stop exports of palm oil to the bloc over new rules aimed at fighting deforestation.

    The EU’s ambitions to become climate neutral by 2050 — its so-called Green Deal — herald a huge economic transformation for the world’s largest trading bloc. 

    Now that the Green Deal is being translated into actual legislation, developing nations are waking up with a hangover of its effects. 

    One diplomat from a third country said Brussels is mishandling the power of the EU’s single market instead of respecting the sovereignty of its trading partners.

    “We see a regulatory imperialism by the EU whereby Brussels sees itself as an exporter of rules to third countries — as the legislators of the world,” said Philippe De Baere, managing partner at law firm Van Bael & Bellis.

    The Green Deal goes beyond the so-called Brussels effect, in which multinational companies use EU rules as global standards. De Baere said Brussels had gotten “drunk on its success” and started exporting environmental objectives to developing nations, “which are unable to comply economically, or if they comply, it is with an enormous economic cost.”

    Imposing new taxes 

    The EU’s carbon border levy is the latest, and most symbolic, measure to upset the EU’s trade partners. The idea is that producers importing carbon-intensive products into the bloc will have to buy permits to account for the difference between their domestic carbon price and the price paid by EU producers.

    “There must be no coercion, no more parties who always dictate and assume that my standards are better than yours,” Indonesian President Joko Widodo told European leaders | Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images

    The goal of the levy, called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), was to level the playing field for EU producers and avoid companies moving their production over lower climate standards — so-called carbon leakage. For Brussels, the sense of climate urgency is too high to wait for others to follow suit, or to reach a deal at the multilateral or global level. 

    But there is a difference between the intent and real-word outcomes, said Milan Elkerbout of the Centre for European Policy Studies: “If you’re not in the internal logic of the European debate, this will just look like the perfect example of the EU having a protectionist intent.”

    Brazil, South Africa, India and China have jointly expressed their “grave concern regarding the proposal for introducing trade barriers, such as unilateral carbon border adjustment, that are discriminatory.” The measure is likely to be challenged at the World Trade Organization.

    Mohammed Chahim, a Dutch MEP who helped craft the CBAM, said the measure should be offset by the delivery of tens of billions in annual public financing promised for climate projects in the developing world.

    “I think they are absolutely right in their complaints about the EU (and other developed countries) not fulfilling their pledges,” he said of these emerging economies. But it would be impossible for the EU to end protections for heavy industry at home while granting exemptions to other countries.

    Even for the poorest countries, Chahim said, an exemption “would be the wrong signal, they also have to decarbonize their industry to make it futureproof.” But under the newly minted regulation, those countries were eligible for support to comply, he added.

    Making imports harder 

    The carbon border levy is far from the only measure to make exporting to the world’s biggest trading bloc harder. 

    Brussels’ Farm to Fork strategy seeks to prioritize sustainability in agriculture by slashing pesticide risk and use in half by 2030. A plan announced last September to ban imports of products containing residues of harmful neonicotinoid insecticides from 2026 has drawn “unprecedented” criticism from other countries, according to a senior European Commission official. 

    As the Green Deal tightens rules on pesticide use in the EU, new trade barriers are going up, said Koen Dekeyser of the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM). “Certain farmers can make those investments. Other, more small-scale farmers are likely to seek other markets, for example in Asia,” said Dekeyser.

    The EU’s effort to stop deforestation is likely to have similar results. 

    Under new rules, it will be illegal to sell or export certain commodities if they’ve been produced on deforested land. 

    Brussels’ Farm to Fork strategy seeks to prioritize sustainability in agriculture by slashing pesticide risk and use in half by 2030 | Jean-François Monier/AFP via Getty Images

    One third-country diplomat said it was easy for the EU to take a stand on deforestation in the developing world, having already deforested its own land in the past.

    Countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia have lobbied hard against the proposal, calling it “discriminatory and punitive in nature” and arguing in a letter to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that it will result in “trade distortion and diplomatic tensions, without benefits to the environment.” 

    In technology, where the 27-country bloc has passed a series of rules to promote its standards on privacy, online competition and social media to the wider world, other countries, too, have chafed at what they see as overly bureaucratic rules that favor well-resourced regulators within the EU. These can be difficult to implement in developing countries with less expertise and money at their disposal.

    More far-reaching legislation is still underway. The EU is also preparing a sustainable production law for companies to police their supply chains against forced labor and environmental damage. Brussels wants to hold companies responsible for abuses throughout their supply chains. 

    Same goal, different roads 

    In their deforestation letter, the group of developing countries touch on a sensitive point. While they agree with the EU’s climate goals, they regret that Brussels is imposing its own measures instead of forging an international deal.

    The Paris climate agreement is based on the logic of common, but differentiated, responsibilities. At least, that allows countries to move at their own speed and determine their policies toward the same goal.

    “Now, not only is the EU telling them what to do, but a lot of developing countries also feel they are now prohibited to do what Western countries have done for decades: industrialize without thinking about pollution and subsidizing infant industries,” said Ferdi De Ville, a professor in European political economy at the University of Ghent.

    The unilateral character of a lot of these measures is creating resentment, argues De Ville, especially given the bloc’s huge market power.

    “In Brussels, everyone looks at these measures separately,” said another diplomat from a third country. “But who looks at it together and thinks about what it means to us? CBAM, deforestation, the Farm to Fork strategy. These are all unilateral measures which are making things harder for our exporters.” 

    European officials stress, however, that Brussels is not inflicting its Green Deal on the rest of the world.

    But Brussels is also being pushed by NGOs to lead by example. “Europe is one of the major contributors to the current crises related to climate, biodiversity, energy and human rights violations around the world. Therefore we consider it the responsibility of the European Union and other countries in the Global North to urgently start tackling these crises through lawmaking,” said Jill McArdle from the NGO Friends of the Earth.

    Agreeing on new rules on the multilateral front remains the EU’s first best option. But, in the absence of a well-functioning World Trade Organization, Brussels has little choice but to go at it alone, EU officials and diplomats argue. “If we want to achieve the Paris targets, there is no time to wait,” one EU official said.

    Mark Scott contributed reporting. This story has been updated.

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    Karl Mathiesen and Barbara Moens

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  • Pollution-fighting superpowers of a common roadside weed

    Pollution-fighting superpowers of a common roadside weed

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    Newswise — Plants are famous for their ability to store carbon, but that’s far from their only superpower when it comes to cleaning up the environment. Scientists have increasingly turned towards plants to help detoxify soils in areas rife with chemical contaminants. Some plants can even suck up heavy metals like lead and mercury and transfer them to their leaves, which are easy to harvest and dispose of safely. 

    This plant-based cleanup strategy, called phytoremediation, relies on finding plants that can grow quickly and easily and also have the ability to extract specific pollutants from the soil. Patrick Wright and Janet Steven, plant biologists at Christopher Newport University, recently identified horseweed as a potential candidate for the phytoremediation of heavy metals. Wright will present their research findings at the January 2023 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

    Horseweed is a common sight on roadsides and parking lots, and yet Wright never thought much about it until he was out surveying Superfund sites, which are areas contaminated with hazardous waste. “We just kind of stumbled upon this plant,” he says. 

    During the surveys, Wright carried a special handheld device that uses X-rays to measure the presence and concentrations of heavy metals. After pointing the X-ray device at the leaves of various plants, he noticed that the horseweed growing in Superfund sites had extremely high concentrations of heavy metals. 

    Based on this observation, Wright suspected that horseweed might have the metal-accumulation ability needed for phytoremediation. To test this ability, he grew horseweed plants in the lab, giving some of them clean water and others water contaminated with high concentrations of either lead, barium, zinc, copper, or chromium. Then he measured the plants’ growth and the amount of each metal that the plants accumulated in their leaves.

    Wright found that the horseweed plants were able to efficiently extract and store each of the five heavy metals. The plants grown in zinc-laden water had the most impressive results. “I saw that they accumulate a lot,” says Wright, “almost 1000 times the normal level of zinc.”

    And while plants that were watered with heavy metal solutions did grow less over the eight-week experiment than those with unpolluted water, they still grew substantially.

    The combination of its rapid growth, stress tolerance, and ability to accumulate a range of heavy metals makes horseweed an ideal candidate for phytoremediation. And Wright also points out that since horseweed is native to most of North and Central America, it can be grown throughout the region without fear of spreading a potentially invasive species. 

    Wright hopes that by sharing these findings, he will encourage more research into phytoremediation and more widespread use of this method for cleaning up pollution. “I want to continue pushing for phytoremediation,” he says, “but make sure we’re doing it in a very logical way.”

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  • South Asian Black carbon aerosols accelerate loss of glacial mass over the Tibetan plateau

    South Asian Black carbon aerosols accelerate loss of glacial mass over the Tibetan plateau

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    Newswise — Black carbon aerosols are produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, and are characterized by strong light absorption. Black carbon deposition in snow/ice reduces the albedo of snow/ice surfaces, which may accelerate the melting of glaciers and snow cover, thus changing the hydrological process and water resources in the region.

    The South Asia region adjacent to the Tibetan Plateau has among the highest levels of black carbon emission in the world. Many studies have emphasized black carbon aerosols from South Asia can be transported across the Himalayan Mountains to the inland region of the Tibetan Plateau.

    Recently, a joint research team led by Prof. KANG Shichang from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Prof. CHEN Deliang from the University of Gothenburg, and Prof. Robert Gillies from Utah State University analyzed the influence of black carbon aerosols on regional precipitation and glaciers over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

    Their findings were published in Nature Communications on Nov. 30.

    The researchers found that since the 21st century, South Asian black carbon aerosols have indirectly affected the mass gain of the Tibetan Plateau glaciers by changing long-range water vapor transport from the South Asian monsoon region.

    “Black carbon aerosols in South Asia heat up the middle and upper atmosphere, thus increasing the North­–South temperature gradient,” said Prof. KANG. “Accordingly, the convective activity in South Asia is enhanced, which causes convergence of water vapor in South Asia. Meanwhile, black carbon also increases the number of cloud condensation nuclei in the atmosphere.”

    These changes in meteorological conditions caused by black carbon aerosols make more water vapor form precipitation in South Asia, and the northward transport to the Tibetan Plateau was weakened. As a result, precipitation in the central and the southern Tibetan Plateau decreases during the monsoon, especially in the southern Tibetan Plateau.

    The decrease in precipitation further leads to a decrease of mass gain of glaciers. From 2007 to 2016, the reduced mass gain by precipitation decrease accounted for 11.0% of the average glacier mass loss on the Tibetan Plateau and 22.1% in the Himalayas.

    “The transboundary transport and deposition of black carbon aerosols from South Asia accelerate glacier ablation over the Tibetan Plateau. Meanwhile, the reduction of summer precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau will reduce the mass gain of plateau glaciers, which will increase the amount of glacier mass deficit,” said Prof. KANG.

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  • The 5 Best (and Worst) Cities to Live Without a Car in 2023

    The 5 Best (and Worst) Cities to Live Without a Car in 2023

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    With car ownership more expensive than ever and gas prices averaging $3 a gallon, many city dwellers are ditching their wheels for their heels. This may be good for their wallets and their health.

    “Car-free days inherently reduce environmental impacts such as energy consumption and vehicle emissions, as well as health impacts such as driver stress and resident exposure to pollution,” said J. Patrick Abulencia, Associate Professor, Chemical Engineering at Manhattan College.

    Related: Buying a Car in 2022? Here Are 5 Ways To Get the Best Deal.

    With that in mind, LawnStarter recently ranked the best cities to live without a car in 2023, measuring them on 19 indicators of car-free-friendliness, including walkability, transit ridership, climate, pedestrian safety, and weather.

    Some of the results were expected, but others were surprising.

    Big cities ranked high

    Densely populated cities like San Francisco and New York ranked high on the list. Why? The more packed a city, the less distance to travel and the more transportation options available. In big suburbs or sprawling cities, commuters often have to own cars to get around.

    LawnStarter ranked San Francisco as the number 1 city to live without a car. The city got high marks for walking, biking, and public transportation.

    Here are the top 5 cities on the list:

    1. San Francisco, CA
    2. Boston, MA
    3. Washington, DC
    4. New York, NY
    5. Seattle, WA

    Some surprises

    Minneapolis ranked number 8 — the same city that, just last week during an arctic blizzard, was a crisp minus-6 degrees Fahrenheit. But Minneapolis workers don’t have to brave the cold. Downtown is connected through a system of glass-enclosed footbridges called Skyways, allowing people to move warmly through the city without going outside. When temps warm up, Minneapolis is a “cyclist’s paradise.” The city has the 16th best access to bike rentals, the eighth highest share of bike commuters, and way fewer pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 residents than in 177 other cities.

    On the other side of the car-free spectrum is Memphis, which was ranked the fifth-worst city to go without wheels.

    LawnStarter gave the city low marks for biking, safety, and walking. So much for Walking in Memphis.

    Memphis’s weather also isn’t favorable for a carless existence.

    “Although Memphis ranked a decent 56 in air quality, its relatively punishing climate (No. 181) makes it uncomfortable to be outdoors,” according to the survey.

    Most of the worst cities to live without a car were in the South. Why? Bad weather and bad public transportation. Also, the cities down South are mostly built for cars. The exception was Alexandria, Virginia, at #31 — if you can call that the South.

    Here are the worst cities to live without a car:

    • Memphis, TN
    • Shreveport, LA
    • Little Rock, AR
    • Clarksville, TN
    • Mobile, AL

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    Jonathan Small

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  • EPA investigating Colorado for discriminatory air pollution

    EPA investigating Colorado for discriminatory air pollution

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    DENVER — The Environmental Protection Agency is investigating whether Colorado’s regulation of air pollution from industrial facilities discriminates against Hispanic residents and other racial minorities, according to a letter released Wednesday.

    That’s a level of scrutiny long sought by Lucy Molina whose daughter goes to school near Colorado’s only petroleum refinery. Three years ago Molina had just stepped outdoors when she noticed a coating of ash on her Nissan Altima that wiped off on her fingers. Then she received a message that her daughter’s school was locked down and panicked. She later learned the refinery had malfunctioned, spewing a clay-like material into the air. She’d heard of lockdowns for shootings, but never for pollution.

    Since then she’s pushed for community air monitoring and stronger protections, but says it all feels too late. She’s lived here for 30 years, and her kids are already young adults.

    “If we would have known” years ago, she said. “We would have moved.”

    Advocates say the Suncor refinery too often malfunctions, spiking emissions. They say Colorado rarely denies permits to polluters, even in areas where harmful ozone already exceeds federal standards.

    Federal investigators said in the letter they will scrutinize the state’s oversight of Colorado’s biggest polluters including the Suncor oil refinery in North Denver where Molina lives, and whether the effect of that pollution on residents is discriminatory.

    Suncor did not respond to a request for comment.

    But it is already harder for oil and gas companies to get their air permits in Colorado than in some other energy-producing states, said John Jacus, chair of the Colorado Chamber of Commerce board of directors and an environmental compliance attorney. He said recent allegations that the state’s permit review process was faulty had the effect of slowing air permitting, a blow to business.

    “It would be really good for air quality to shut everything down, but that’s not good for society,” Jacus said, adding there needed to be a balance between environmental protection and economic activity.

    The EPA launched its investigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It has been going on since March but went little noticed until Wednesday’s letter, which explains its scope. The Act allows the EPA to negotiate agreements with states to promote equity. The Biden administration has stepped up its enforcement of environmental discrimination.

    Colorado officials said they welcome the EPA review, more community participation and are reviewing their permitting policies to ensure they are focused on environmental justice.

    “We’ve always prioritized the health and wellbeing of every Coloradan no matter their zip code, but we know we have even more to do,” said Trisha Oeth, our Director of Environmental Health and Protection in a statement.

    But the EPA has found those priorities lacking at times.

    The agency scrutinized the state’s handling of Suncor. Colorado’s only oil refinery is roughly 90 years old and is a major emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the state.

    In March, the EPA objected to a key air permit for the facility that state regulators were still reviewing 10 years after its original expiration date. The agency raised “significant environmental justice concerns” and said that the public wasn’t given enough opportunity to weigh in. The EPA didn’t object when the state issued a revised permit.

    In July, the agency also said the state had issued permits for a mine, oil and gas wells and other small polluters even though they could contribute to violations of federal air quality standards. Colorado said it would improve its reviews, but balked at revisiting its permitting decisions.

    There are some signs the agency chose Colorado because it could prove a willing partner.

    “Colorado has been one of the states that has been a leader in addressing environmental justice in the legislature,” said KC Becker, the head of the EPA region that includes Colorado and a former state legislative leader.

    Colorado has strengthened air monitoring requirements. It increased funding for air permit reviews. The state’s greenhouse gas reduction plan aims to reduce pollution in overburdened areas. It also worked with the EPA to ensure inspections target the most polluted areas and when companies reach settlements for wrongdoing, they pay for projects that benefit communities.

    The EPA may have an easier time convincing Colorado to change than it would, say, Texas, said Jeremy Nichols, head of climate and energy programs at WildEarth Guardians.

    Colorado’s changes have “given EPA an opening to say, ‘well, if that is what you are committed to then let’s really test this out, let’s see you prove your mettle here,’” said Nichols.

    Nichols said Colorado is too deferential to industry. He wants to see the state deny permits much more often.

    Ian Coghill, an attorney with Earthjustice that is challenging the Suncor permit, says the push and pull between the EPA and state hasn’t yielded major improvements. Revisions to Suncor’s permit, he said “didn’t change a lot.”

    He is hopeful the civil rights investigation will force the state to make changes and detail the cumulative effect of pollution from industry on residents of North Denver.

    “I’m definitely optimistic,” he said.

    —————

    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

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