CALL OF THE WILD
For years, lead poisoning — caused by ingestion of spent lead ammunition — has been the stealth killer of California condors, responsible for over two-thirds of all deaths within the species’ free flying population. But as of this summer things may be looking up for the endangered birds: On July 1, after a multiyear phase-in period, California became the first US state to enact a full ban on the use of lead ammunition in hunting. The state legislature initially passed the ban back in 2013.
What makes lead ammunition so dangerous to condors and other wildlife? Upon impact, it fragments into tiny pieces that lodge throughout a felled animal’s body. So when condors and other scavenging animals feed on the carcasses of these animals, they ingest the poisonous metal. For the California condor, with a total living population of about 500, more than half of them in the wild, the impact of lead bullets has been especially dire — an estimated 76 condors have died of lead poisoning over the past quarter-century, even as California has implemented an ambitious condor recovery effort.
“When the condor is eating its meal, we think they accidentally then ingest a little bit of these lead fragments,” environmental toxicologist Myra Finkelstein told KQED. “Even fragments as small as a couple of grains of sand have enough lead to potentially kill a condor. It doesn’t take very much.”
In 2012, Finkelstein was among several scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz who found that despite previous legislative attempts to limit exposure, wild Californian condors showed no reduction in lead levels in their blood, and that 20 percent of the population had lead levels necessitating clinical intervention. Using isotopic analysis to study the lead, they were able to confirm their longstanding suspicion that ammunition was the primary source of exposure.
“Lead is the number one mortality factor for free-flying juvenile and adult California condors, and work that we have done has shown that lead poisoning is preventing their recovery,” Finkelstein said. “So it is the major threat that’s impeding their ability to recover in the wild.”
Unsurprisingly, the hunting and gun lobbies aren’t fans of the ban, and have argued that nontoxic ammunitions are prohibitively expensive. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife counters that these claims are exaggerated, but has staggered implementation of ban over four years, beginning in 2015, to facilitate industry adaptation.
While it’s the condor that will likely be most helped by the ban, advocates are hopeful that all Californians — particularly other wildlife and those who consume hunted game — will reap the benefits as well.
Overheard
Picture this: A mix of Hollywood elites, tech industry billionaires, and political insiders head to a seaside resort in Sicily. They arrive on more than 100 private jets, a handful of luxury yachts and helicopters, and a train of sports cars and limousines. They gather outside with cocktails in the evenings and stay in opulent rooms starting at $900 a night. The whole gathering is focused on tackling perhaps the most pressing issue of our time: climate change. Cue the face-palms.
The irony of a gaggle of guests, many of the them non-experts — invitees reportedly included Katy Perry, Harry Stiles, and Prince Harry, along with President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Leonardo DiCaprio — burning massive amounts of fossil fuels to hang by the ocean and chat about the climate crisis is almost too tone-deaf to believe. But reportedly, that’s exactly what happened at Google’s three-night July Climate Camp, rumored to cost some $20 million.
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The Twitterverse had plenty to say about the event.
“Is there anything more hypocritical than a bunch of rich people flying their private jets across the world to sit on yachts and discuss the future of our planet?” said Twitter user @asilia1981.
Or as Irish journalist Eleanore Hutch put it: “We’re all lugging around KeepCups and recycling properly while these entitled fools are taking 114 private jets to a CLIMATE CHANGE conference.”
This is the seventh year Google has hosted a summer “camp” for the rich and famous. Each year, attendees discuss a different global issue. As Forbes reports, mornings at the conference are dedicated to discussion, and afternoons are for relaxing, adventuring, eating, and drinking.
Perhaps all the negative attention around this year’s shindig will convince Google to rethink the model. Or at the very least, maybe next year a few of the hobnobbing guests will opt to fly commercial.
FINDINGS
Airplane contrails have probably gotten more than their fair share of attention over the years. In particular, they’ve provided consistent fodder for conspiracy theorists convinced that condensation trails are actually “chemtrails” resulting from secret government chemical spraying programs.
The evidence behind the chemtrail theory is lacking, to say the least. But that doesn’t mean contrails are quite as innocuous as they appear — they make a fairly significant contribution to human-caused climate change. And according to a recent study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, this climate impact is expected to triple by 2050 as air travel increases.
“When you look at the sky and see those thin stripes, you don’t think that contrails can have an impact,” study co-author Ulrike Burkhardt told Vice. “But they do.”
Contrails are simply condensed water and soot released by the burning of jet fuel. At high altitude, this water freezes into ice clouds, forming “trails” behind planes that trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere. These cloud trails can last for hours, sometimes merging with other clouds and spreading over thousands of square miles. In the short term, contrails have a greater climate impact than the greenhouse gas emissions associated with burning jet fuel.
The researchers used cloud modeling to calculate the warming impact of contrails as air travel increases, and to explore how this impact might change in relation to other variables, such as improved fuel efficiency, soot pollution reduction, and changing flight paths. Overall, they found that reducing soot has the greatest potential to decrease the warming impact of contrails, though even a 90 percent reduction in soot emissions likely wouldn’t be enough to compensate for the four-fold increase in air travel expected over the next three decades.
The knowledge gap around exactly how contrails contribute to climate change has so far delayed efforts to address the issue. And there’s still certainly a lot to learn on the subject. The scientists hope, however, that given what we do know, as the aviation industry begins to tackle its climate footprint, contrails will feature more heavily in discussions and policy updates. As Burkhardt says, “We have to mitigate this, even if we don’t do it perfectly.”
UPDATE
France is doubling-down on its fight against waste. In what’s been described as a world first, the European nation has announced that stores will no longer be allowed to trash unsold consumer goods like clothing, electronics, and hygiene products. They must instead turn them over for recycling or donation.
The new requirement, expected to go into effect by 2023, will apply to online stores like Amazon along with brick-and-mortar retailers. The legislation builds upon a 2016 law banning the disposal of unspoiled food from French grocery stores.
According to the French government, retailers currently destroy some $900 million worth of non-food products every year in France. “It is a waste that shocks, that is shocking to common sense,” Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said when announcing the ban in Paris. “It’s a scandal.”
The new waste rules are expected to include certain exemptions, including for luxury retailers worried about maintaining exclusivity, and for products with use-by dates. Still, France seems to be on track to make a real dent in its trash. When will other countries follow suit?
FINDINGS
In July, the scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum), a unique creature that pulls iron from oceanwater to coat its shell and plates on its foot, officially became the first animal listed as endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List due to the threat posed by deep-sea mining. The snail is only known to live at three hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, a total area comparable to about two football fields. As Nature reports, mining companies currently hold exploration licenses for two of these three vents.
FINDINGS
Not 40 days and 40 nights, just a few hours was all it took to put our nation’s capital out of commission. A downpour that blew up records drenched Washington, DC during the Monday morning rush hour on July 8, turning streets into rivers tumbling with trash and recycling bins, stranding commuters, creating waterfalls in the city’s subway system, and even leaking water into the White House basement.
The “swamp,” in other words, overflowed. And then some.
The deluge, which lasted about five hours, dumped almost a month’s worth of rain for the region — 3.3 inches — in just one hour, triggering the city’s first-ever flash-flood emergency declaration from the National Weather Service. The service classified the storm as a once-in-100-year event, i.e., a storm with a less than 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. But that projection no longer holds true. Weather experts now predict that given climate weirding, a 100-year storm will be a 25-year storm by mid-century. In other words, big destructive storms will be four times as likely.
The way things have been going, that’s not hard to imagine. The last 12 months have been the wettest in US history, with spring flooding drowning large parts of the Midwest, turning farms into inland seas, pushing past levees in the nation’s heartland, and causing billions of dollars in infrastructure and crop damage.
Meanwhile, that very same July day, even as the “flash flood emergency” was still in effect in Capitol, our climate-denier-in-chief, surrounded by a bevy of supportive Cabinet members, gave a chest-thumping speech about how much his administration does for the environment.
CALL OF THE WILD
It has been a mixed year for the Southern Resident killer whales, a small, extremely endangered group of orcas that live around the Puget Sound and the Salish Sea. After several years of unsuccessful births, the orcas have had two new babies since January. But, in the meantime, three adult orcas have gone missing and are presumed dead, keeping the total population down at a mere 73 — the lowest it has been since the live-capture era ended in the 1970s.
In May, researchers were delighted when they discovered a new baby in the population’s J pod, especially since it followed the January birth of another baby in the population’s L pod (whose gender is still not known). The May baby, designated J56, is a female and her mother is J31, a 24-year-old. Researchers report that the baby seems to be healthy and doing well.
But then in early August, the Center for Whale Research, an organization dedicated to the study and conservation of these whales, reported that three adult orcas — J17, K25, and L84 — were likely dead. J17, incidentally, is the 42-two-year-old matriarch and mother of Tahlequah (J35), the orca who captured the world’s attention last year when she refused to let go of her dead calf’s body for an unprecedented 17 days in what biologists said was a clear display of grieving.
The Southern Resident killer whales are made of three pods: J pod, K pod, and L pod. This resident group is endangered because of ocean pollution, climate change, and a severe population decrease in Chinook salmon, which make up about 80 percent of their diet. Due to food scarcity, these orcas now rarely visits core waters of its habitat in the Puget Sound, Georgia Strait, and the inland reach of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Scientists estimate it takes about 723 Chinook to feed the entire population of Southern Residents every single day, depending on the age, body size, and condition of the whales and the fish. A recovered population of killer whales would need even more fish, perhaps as much as 75 percent more.
“I predicted we would be in this fix,” Ken Balcomb, founding director of the Center for Whale Research told The Seattle Times. “Until we solve this food issue, we will keep going through this trauma, getting all excited when there is a baby and all upset when there is a death. We have to take care of the food problem.”
AROUND THE WORLD
Plastic pollution is a worldwide problem, one that impacts virtually every nook and cranny on Earth. Plastic waste can be found in the deepest waters of the ocean, on the most remote islands in the Pacific, and atop the highest peaks in the Himalayas. It’s breaking down into smaller and smaller microplastics, being consumed by marine animals, and even impacting human health. It’s such a big problem, in fact, that the United Nations has identified plastic pollution as one of the world’s biggest environmental challenges.
Thankfully, local, state, and national governments have begun tackling the issue — so far, more than 60 countries have introduced some sort of ban or tax on single use plastic items like bags, straws, and takeout containers. Here are a handful of the countries and regions that have taken a strong stand against runaway plastic use.
1 Rwanda
Rwanda was one of the first countries in the world to enact a plastic bag ban back in 2008. Implementation of the ban, however, has faced some road bumps, including a thriving black market for plastic bags. The ban comes with stiff, and controversial, penalties — violators caught smuggling bags can face steep fines and even prison sentences. Several other African countries, including Zimbabwe and Kenya, have enacted plastic bag bans more recently. Kenya’s has been described as “the most severe” in the world — violations can carry fines of up to $38,000 and jail terms of up to four years.
2 Malaysia
In 2018, Malaysia became the first country in Southeast Asia to announce a “road map” to phase out single-use plastics. The country — which is the eighth biggest plastic polluter globally — hopes to attain zero plastic use by 2030. Initial steps will include a charge on plastic bags and policies that require plastic straws to be given out to customers only upon request. The roadmap will also suggest alterative products that plastic manufacturers might transition to.
3 Canada
In June, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada expects to ban single-use plastics by 2021. Plastic bags, straws, cutlery, plates, and stir sticks are likely to be among the targeted products. The North American nation also plans to implement some type of polluter pays scheme for companies using plastic packaging or manufacturing plastic products, though the details are yet to be established.
4 European Union
The European Union voted in March to ban the ten most common single-use plastic items that make up about 70 percent of litter found on European beaches. The ban will be implemented by 2021. Targeted items include: Single-use plastic cutlery, plates, plastic straws, cotton swabs with plastic sticks, plastic balloon sticks, food containers, and expanded polystyrene cups.
The law also touches upon plastics manufacturing, requiring that plastic bottles be made with 30 percent recycled material by 2030, and adopts a polluter pays principle. For example, fishing gear manufacturers will have to pay for the removal of fishing nets from the ocean.
5 India
Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India would try to eliminate all single-use plastics by 2022. This is no small undertaking — some 550,000 tons of plastic waste from the South Asian nation currently end up in the ocean each year. The announcement builds on the efforts of nearly 30 state governments that have already enacted legislation to reduce plastic use, like the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, which banned plastic bags a decade ago. Additional efforts are expected to tackle plastic imports and manufacturing.
6 Panama
In 2019, Panama became the first Central American nation to enact a ban on plastic bags. The ban went into effect for supermarkets, pharmacies, and retailers this summer, but wholesalers have until 2020 to comply.
Compiled by Arrieanna towner
HIGH VOLTAGE
Looks like two New York billionaires are all set to duke it out over coal.
In June, while the Trump EPA officially retreated from the Obama administration’s signature Clean Power Plan (aimed at cutting emissions from coal-fired power plants) and announced a watered-down replacement rule tailored to please the fossil fuel industry, Michael Bloomberg, the nation’s sixth-richest person and former three-term NYC mayor, announced a $500 million investment in a new “Beyond Carbon” campaign aimed at closing all coal plants in the US by 2030 and decarbonizing the economy.
Beyond Carbon builds on the “Beyond Coal” campaign, which Bloomberg helped launch with Sierra Club in 2011. The earlier campaign helped bring about the planned closures of 289 of the country’s 530 coal-fired power plants. This new one aims to close all remaining coal plants by 2030 and prevent the construction of new gas-fired power plants.
Trump’s new “Affordable Clean Energy Rule,” which is already being challenged in court, empowers states to decide how much they want to reduce their emissions, or if they want to reduce them at all. The Beyond Carbon campaign will also target states. It will work with state and local organizations to pass climate and clean energy policies, expand low-carbon transit, speed up the deployment of electric vehicles, reduce carbon emissions from buildings, and promote low-carbon manufacturing.
“We’re in a race against time with climate change, and yet there is virtually no hope of bold federal action on this issue for at least another two years,” Bloomberg said in his commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on June 7, where he announced the campaign. “Mother Nature is not waiting on our political calendar, and neither can we.”
Bloomberg, of course, has made no bones about his disapproval of Trump, whom he has called a “con” and “a threat to the nation,” but in an op-ed in the eponymous Bloomberg News, he wrote that the climate crisis was too urgent to be bogged down by political feuding. Still, whatever you want to call it, a feud of some sort is clearly in the works.
FINDINGS
Back in the good old days, when someone said “stream” or “cloud” or “tweet” it was pretty safe to assume they were talking about running water, the weather, and adorable singing birds. Today, not so much. According to a recent linguistics study, the implied meaning of these nature-related words has completely changed in just one generation. We now live in a world where “stream” refers to playing videos, “cloud” refers to data storage, and “tweet,” of course, refers to posts on the social media platform Twitter.
The study, conducted for the British charity the National Trust, found that the meaning of “tweet” has changed most dramatically. By analyzing datasets of informal conversations, the researchers determined that in the 1990s, when people managed to work “tweet” into a conversation, they were almost certainly referring to birdsong. By the 2010s, about 99 out of 100 references referred to social media posts. The word “web” too, has morphed in meaning. In the 1990s, some 70 percent of “web” mentions referred to a spider’s silky construction. Now, more than 90 percent of mentions refer to the World Wide Web.
“Language represents what’s important to a culture or society,” Robbie Love, a linguistics fellow at the University of Leeds and author of the study, told The Guardian. “Nature language being replaced or used less frequently suggests nature potentially becoming less important or being replaced by other things.”
But it’s not too late yet to reclaim the nature-focused meanings of these words, and to renew our connection with nature. It could be as simple as ditching our hand-held tweeting devices from time-to-time to take a stroll along a stream, gaze up at the clouds, or admire a spider’s web.
UPWELL
In a major win for whales and other marine mammals, this summer the Canadian Parliament passed the “Ending the Captivity of Whales and Dolphins Act.” The law, dubbed the “Free Willy” bill in the press, bans the capture, trade, captivity, possession, and breeding of cetaceans for people’s entertainment. It was first introduced in 2015 by Senator Wilfred Moore but it took three long years for the Senate to finally approve it in 2018, and another year for the House of Commons to do so. If all goes to plan, the bill will receive royal assent and become law.
“Nothing fantastic ever happens in a hurry,” Humane Canada, the country’s coalition of SPCAs and humane societies, tweeted in response to the news. “But today we celebrate that we have ended the captivity and breeding of whales and dolphins. This is news to splash a fin at.”
The law, however, does not apply to dolphins, whales, and porpoises already in captivity. It also provides an exception for injured animals receiving care at a rehabilitation facility. As the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports, the ban most directly impacts Marineland, a Niagara Falls amusement park considered to be the last Canadian facility “committed to keeping cetaceans in captivity.” The park currently holds 55 beluga whales, five bottlenose dolphins, and an orca.
With whales and dolphins still stuck in small tanks around the world, other nations would do well to follow Canada’s lead.
FINDINGS
Can planting trees save the world? A new study, published this July in Science, argues they can, at least theoretically.
Adding nearly one billion hectares of forest — an area the size of United States — could remove two-thirds of the roughly 300 gigatons of carbon humans have added to the atmosphere since the 1800s, say researchers at the Crowther Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which investigates nature-based solutions to climate change. And better still, they say, Earth could support this additional new forestland without impinging on existing urban or agricultural lands.
The researchers analyzed nearly 80,000 satellite photographs for current forest coverage, categorized the planet according to 10 soil and climate characteristics, identified areas that were appropriate for different types of forest, and then calculated how much of the planet had space for new trees. Their estimate — 0.9 billion hectares. These additional trees, once mature, could sequester some 205 gigatons of carbon in the coming decades, they say.
“We all knew that restoring forests could play a part in tackling climate change, but we didn’t really know how big the impact would be,” Thomas Crowther, coauthor of the study and founder of the Crowther Lab, told the science news website, Futurity.
They, however, stressed the need to act quickly on the restoration process. Otherwise, assuming current warming trends continue, almost a third of that potential forest area will no longer be viable for tree-planting by 2050, and most losses will occur in the tropics, a region especially valuable for restoration.
Ethiopia seems to have gotten the reforestation memo. According to government reports, the African nation recently broke the world record for the number of trees planted in a single day, with 350 million seedlings.
Undermining the researchers’ optimism, however, are some practical concerns. For one, deforestation rates are still increasing in critical places like the Amazon. And while most experts agree that forest restoration is essential to fighting climate change, critics stress that a focus on quantity over quality of trees planted leads to its own set of environmental issues. For example, Germany’s Bonn Challenge, which invites countries to commit to restoring millions of hectares of forested land, has sparked positive change. But some countries striving to increase forest cover have focused on plantations rather than natural forests, leading to significantly less long-term carbon storage, according to a separate study published in Nature this year.
In addition, the Science study didn’t consider either cost or political difficulties associated with tree-planting, and some climate scientists are concerned that the triumphalism with which the paper was reported in the press provides an excuse to downplay the importance of alternative solutions — in particular, reducing emissions themselves.
TEMPERATURE GAUGE
It took nearly ten years, but South Africa’s carbon tax finally went into effect on June 1, making it the first African nation to employ a carbon pricing mechanism in a bid to reduce its emissions. The tax, a rare step for an emerging economy, will be levied on industries that emit greenhouse gases. The question now is if the levy is stringent enough to actually make a difference.
According to the World Bank’s 2019 Carbon Pricing report, in order to achieve Paris Agreement goals, carbon should be priced at between $40 to $80 per ton by 2020, with further increases over the following decade. In the first phase of South Africa’s tax, which runs until December 2022, the tax rate is set at about $8 per ton. And that’s before you take into account the numerous exceptions and breaks added to the law in response to outcry from polluters, including the country’s powerful coal industry. These tax breaks reduce the effective rate to roughly between $3 and 50 cents per ton of CO2, though the rate is supposed to gradually increase each year.
South Africa’s reliance on coal is the primary driver of its carbon emissions, which are the highest in Africa. In 2008, 85 percent of its emissions came from coal, according to data provided by the US Department of Energy. The main player in the country’s energy sector is Eskom, a public utility that provides about 90 percent of its power and whose extensive debt and instability is now threatening the South African economy as a whole. The utility’s opposition to carbon pricing was a significant factor in the delay to implement the tax, which was postponed at least three times.
Climate Action Tracker currently lists South Africa’s emission reductions commitments as “highly insufficient” relative to Paris Agreement goals. Although the full impact of the carbon tax remains to be seen, it seems clear that addressing the country’s environmental issues will require a more aggressive stance.
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