News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #40
Controlling solar geoengineering, Biden's new historic investments in cleaning up industry, restoring coral reefs, new ways petrochemicals are making us sick and much more.
WHO GETS TO RUN PLANETARY EXPERIMENTS? Right now, experts say it’s way too easy for anyone to do it. (E&E News)
Solar geoengineering, the idea that we could spray aerosols of one kind or another into the atmosphere to slow or prevent warming, has usually been discussed at the margins, but some kind of experiment seems like it could actually happen, despite some recent backlash.
Right now, in the U.S., it’s really easy to experiment in geoengineering: “Currently, a U.S. company or citizen with plans to inject aerosols into the atmosphere is required to fill out a one-page form with the Commerce Department 10 days before they do so.” That’s all they have to do! The government can’t stop them!
David Bookbinder, advisor at the Niskanen Center and former chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club, told E&E News: “I am more concerned about this than anything else.”
Climate solutions “are not going to get deployed in time, which is only going to create more of a demand for something like this….There’s no governance on the international level, national governance, there’s no state governance, there’s nothing.”
DEEP-SEA MINING SHOULD NOT BE RUSHED: But the international body governing sea-bed mining is being careless with our common treasures. (Nature)
Stop me if I’ve said this before…but I’ve said it before and I’m going to say it anyway! And now the world’s most important scientific journal is saying it too…deep sea mining is too risky to begin without fully understanding its consequences. And yet, the International Seabed Authority, which is meant to be developing regulations for mining under the auspices of the United Nations, seems to be rushing irresponsibly towards allowing commercial mining, possibly setting the planet up for irreversible disaster.
“Researchers have told Nature that the text is nowhere near ready, and that important due diligence is being circumvented. Outstanding issues need to be resolved, such as what is considered an acceptable level of environmental harm and how much contractors should pay the ISA for the right to extract minerals.” Changes to draft regulations which would weaken environmental protections and favor commercial interests had been made without attribution or acknowledgement of earlier agreements.
“The deep seas are the least explored parts of the planet; we should not allow for their loss before we even understand their complexities.”
GETTING THE CARBON OUT OF INDUSTRY: Biden administration announces funding to cut stubborn sources of greenhouse gas emissions. (Washington Post)
Using money from the bipartisan infrastructure act and the climate and clean energy act (what I want to call the Inflation Reduction Act), the Biden administration announced $6 billion in funding to get emissions out of the industrial sector — things like making steel, cement, glass and other products (although if you’ve read any of the articles about this, you’ll notice they all just talk about Kraft Mac and cheese, which is getting a grant too).
This is the single biggest investment in trying to reduce carbon emissions from the industrial sector, which accounts for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Administration officials are also trying to get the funding secured and authorized in case there is a change of administration.
But the effects will span beyond the U.S.’s borders. Said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, “The solutions that we are funding are replicable and they’re scalable, meaning they’re going to set a new gold standard for clean manufacturing in the United States and around the world.”
WE KEEP FINDING OUT JUST HOW BAD PETROCHEMICALS REALLY ARE: This time, when it comes to human health and a proliferation of horrible diseases and outcomes. (Inside Climate News)
A review published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine decisively links chronic and deadly health conditions to the chemicals in petrochemicals, specifically plastics.
About 350,000 chemicals are used in the production of petrochemicals, but only 5 percent have undergone rigorous safety testing, even as the links between exposure to these chemicals and disease continue to rise. The main problems arise from the presence of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which have been linked to “abnormal neurodevelopment (for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and lower IQ), fertility problems (poor sperm quality and impaired ovarian development), cancer (breast, prostate and kidney), early puberty and metabolic diseases (early-onset diabetes, obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease), among other serious ills.”
This review adds new urgency to upcoming negotiations in April for the global plastics treaty (which I wrote about in the Washington Post (and here) last fall), and advocates are encouraging negotiators to craft a treaty that protects both environmental and human health (which, believe it or not, often go together!)
IS THE WOOD WIDE WEB REAL? Some scientists dispute the very appealing idea at the heart of the ‘Mother Tree’ theory (Nature)
This is a deep dive, if ever there was one, into the contentious back and forth of whether or not trees communicate via common mycorrhizal networks, but it raised interesting questions for me about how science, even by well-meaning and interested journalists/members of the public, gets distorted when it’s translated outside of the bounds of scientific literature. The original theory has been seized upon by popular media because it’s just so appealing — trees help each other out of the goodness of their hearts roots and take care of each other and it’s this network of mutual care that allows the forest to thrive — but it hasn’t yet been completely borne out by the science. Anyway, I liked reading it — as a humbling moment for myself (don’t get carried away by a good story! be skeptical!), as a reminder that science is always changing based on what we can learn and observe from experiments and that there can be consequences (for individuals and for our understanding of the world around us) of both research and its translation to the public.
CONGESTION PRICING IS, THEORETICALLY, A GO IN NEW YORK: Legal challenges still remain (New York Times)
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted 11-1 to approve congestion pricing in New York, which would be the first of its kind in the nation, reduce traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, and raise $1 billion each year for public transportation by charging most vehicles to drive in Manhattan below 60th Street.
The Federal Highway Administration is expected to approve the measure (which would exempt some vehicles like ambulances, school buses, and garbage trucks), but it still faces at least 5 lawsuits, including one from the State of New Jersey, citing the cost of the program to drivers and arguing that it will just transfer pollution out of Manhattan and to other parts of the city and surrounding area, as drivers avoid mid/downtown.
INJECTING CARBON DIOXIDE INTO THE GROUND COULD BE A WAY TO SEQUESTER EMISSIONS: But will the gas stay put? (Inside Climate News)
In Louisiana, there are about 120,000 abandoned oil and gas wells that sit on top of “geological zones” that could store carbon dioxide. And, with money pouring in from the Climate and Clean Energy Act (IRA to you) “energy companies and others are planning to capture millions of tons of industrial carbon dioxide emissions and then pipe the climate pollutant for underground storage, part of an effort to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution.”
But critics argue that injecting wastewater into the ground could cause leaks, sending high salt levels as well as heavy metals, hydrocarbons and radioactive elements, into groundwater supplies, or cause earthquakes, as has happened in West Texas.
“Plugged wells do leak. These wells were plugged a long time ago, and now we’re going to store supercritical CO2 under very high pressure and hope that these things somehow last thousands of years,” said Dominic DiGiulio, a former EPA geoscientist and co-author of a new report. “It’s a problem.”
REEFS JUST NEEDED A LITTLE STARDUST: In the span of 4 years, a new tool and a restoration effort in Indonesia are helping bring back some damaged reefs. (Grist)
In Indonesia, dynamite fishing (it is what it sounds like — fishers drop explosives into the water to concuss the fish and then scoop them up) has destroyed coral reefs in the Coral Triangle, which, along with the country as a whole, is home to the largest concentration of coral habitats and reefs in the world. Even if conditions (ocean temperature and acidity) were right, these reefs couldn’t really grow back because “loose rubble” tumbling in the currents could crush new coral animals.
But, in just 4 years, the reefs are making a comeback, due to a restoration effort and a new tool, a “reef star:” “a six-legged steel spider coated in sand, to which coral fragments harvested from nearby healthy reefs or found rolling with the tides are strapped. Restoration workers, often members of local communities, deploy them across dozens of sites. These webs provide the protection and stability the transplants need to grow, while also settling the debris created by blast fishing. Without such help, researchers believe that corals – those strange yet essential sea creatures – might never have returned to the damaged areas.” Pretty cool!
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Tatiana