High Voltage
China is the largest financial backer of the world’s coal-fired power plants. But that’s all going to change, according to a September announcement by China’s President Xi Jinping. “China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low carbon energy,” he said in a recorded speech to the United Nations General Assembly, “and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad.”
China’s pledge to stop building coal plants abroad represents a big step for phasing out coal globally and will have far-reaching impacts in countries like Bangladesh, Kenya, and Vietnam, where Chinese coal projects have recently been met with resistance from activists looking to move away from the dirty fuel. Already, in response to this growing pressure, China had been retreating from foreign coal investments: In the first six months of 2021, it did not fund any new coal projects as part of its global Belt and Road Initiative. Now, experts estimate that the pledge could cull $50 billion of overseas investments.
“China has been under a lot of pressure,” Jake Schmidt, the senior strategic adviser for international climate issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The New York Times. “If it wants to be a climate leader, it can’t be the leading financier of overseas coal plants.”
However, President Xi’s address failed to mention China’s domestic coal use. Almost half of the coal plants in the world are located in the country, providing it with nearly 60 percent of its electricity, and making it the world’s largest carbon emitter. In 2020, China built more than three times more coal-power capacity than all other countries combined — “more than one large coal plant per week,” according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland. Notwithstanding overseas coal investments, China will have to cut its domestic coal habit dramatically to achieve its 2060 climate goals. Also note: China and India pushed for language in the Glasgow Climate Pact to be changed from “phase out” to “phase down” coal.
Temperature Gauge
The Glasgow climate conference ended on November 13 with a deal that barely gets us anywhere close to holding the temperature increase line at 1.5°C, includes no pledges to phase out coal or reduce fossil fuel subsidies, and doesn’t address poor countries’ concerns about how to pay for the loss and damage the climate crisis has already wreaked on their lives and livelihoods.
This shouldn’t have come as too big of a surprise given the level of access corporate actors with a stake in the continued burning of fossil fuels had at the bargaining table. An analysis of the list of conference attendees by Corporate Accountability, Global Witness, and several other watchdog groups found that at least 503 fossil fuel lobbyists, affiliated with some of the world’s biggest polluting oil and gas giants, were granted access to COP26. The lobbyists represented over 100 fossil fuel companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Gazprom and some 30 trade associations and membership organizations. In fact, had the fossil fuel lobby been a country at COP26, it would have had the largest delegation.
Meanwhile, about two-thirds of civil society organizations that usually send delegates to the annual United Nations climate negotiations did not send representatives to Glasgow due to “vaccine apartheid,” changing travel rules, and prohibitive travel costs. Representatives from environmental, Indigenous, academic, and other such groups that did make it over were largely excluded from negotiating areas and prevented from speaking with the negotiators.
In the face of such dismal news, journalist David Roberts issued an important reminder: “COP agreements are just lists of voluntary national policies. The action is in domestic national politics.”
Frontlines
“Driving while Black.” It’s a well-known phrase referring to the fact that police are far more likely to pull over — and search, and use force against — Black drivers than they are White ones, often as a pretext to search them. Unfortunately, a similar pattern of racial profiling exists for those who are “biking while Black.”
According to new research, between 2017 and 2019, police in Chicago ticketed bikers riding on sidewalks in majority Black neighborhoods at eight times the rate as those riding in White ones. They ticketed riders in Latino neighborhoods at three times the rate as those in White neighborhoods. The study, published in the journal Transportation Research Part D, also found that Black neighborhoods had 50 percent fewer bike lanes than White ones.
“There’s a role for cycling to play in improving our neighborhoods,” Olatunji Oboi Reed, president of the racial equity nonprofit Equiticity, which partnered on the study, told the Chicago Tribune. “And when these types of inequities are in existence, from lack of infrastructure in our neighborhoods to enforcement inequities … they serve as a dampening effect on more Black and Brown people turning to bikes as a form of travel, as a form of recreation, as a form of physical fitness.”
“In neighborhoods where there’s a lot of policing going on, one more excuse to stop people is the fact that they’re riding their bike on the sidewalk where there’s no bike lane,” said Jesus Barajas, the study author and an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.
This unjust pattern of over-policing and under-investing puts Black bikers’ safety at risk. As Grist reports, it also has implications for the environment. If Black bikers are discouraged from riding, cities like Chicago lose out on the benefits of this green mode of transportation, including those to air quality and the climate.
The new research builds on previous analysis by the Chicago Tribune that found that, between 2008 and 2016, the ten neighborhoods with the highest rates of cyclist ticketing in the Windy City were all majority Black or Latino.
As far as solutions to the problem, Barajas can think of at least two: rethinking enforcement of laws that can serve as pretext to search Black and Brown residents and increasing the number of bike lanes.
Call of the Wild
It’s not a thing among humans. Yet. But parthenogenesis — which literally means “virgin birth” in Greek — a rare form of asexual reproduction in which a female egg develops into an embryo without the introduction of male sperm, has been observed in several other species in the animal kingdom, including lizards, honeybees, and scorpions. Now, scientists at the San Diego Zoo, which runs a condor-breeding and conservation program, have discovered that endangered California condors are capable of virgin births too!
In a paper published in October in the Journal of Heredity, the scientists said parthenogenesis has been observed in condors for the first time with two chicks hatched from unfertilized eggs.
Though they have only two documented cases so far, the researchers believe the discovery could have significant demographic implications. In other words, they hope the endangered bird could benefit from this phenomenon in the future.
Findings
Babies put just about everything in their mouths. They chew on toys. They lick rugs. They munch on blankets and onesies and stuffed animals. In today’s world, most of those items are made of plastic and plastic-based fibers. Not to mention that little ones tend to drink from plastic bottles and sippy cups, and eat food from plastic bowls using plastic cutlery. All of which means that infants and toddlers are basically putting plastic in their mouths all day long. And it shows.
Collecting samples from dirty diapers, scientists found that babies have significantly more polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in their poop than do adults, according to new research published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters. Specifically, they have 36,000 nanograms per gram of poop —10 times as much as adults do.
The researchers focused on PET, which is found in plastic baby bottles fabrics used for clothing, toys, sheets, rugs, and more. They didn’t measure polypropylene, the plastic the diapers were made of, in order to ensure that they were counting only plastics that had been ingested by the infants. In total, they assessed the poop of six one-year-olds and compared it to that of ten adults.
“Unfortunately, with the modern lifestyle, babies are exposed to so many different things for which we don’t know what kind of effect they can have later in their life,” Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental health scientist at New York University School of Medicine and coauthor of the new paper, told Wired.
While researchers aren’t yet sure what the impacts of all this plastic exposure are, they suspect it’s problematic. Plastics can contain any of thousands of different chemicals, including endocrine-disrupting ones, which have been tied to metabolic, reproductive, and neurological problems. They can also contain heavy metals.
“I strongly believe that these chemicals do affect early life stages,” says Kannan. “That’s a vulnerable period.”While researchers dig into the potential long-term effects of infant plastic exposure, the best thing concerned parents can do is cut back on plastic use.
Unfortunately, that’s much easier said than done.
Update
Oh California! The state whose actions never quite fully match up to its climate-leadership ambitions. Here it is again, ramping up fossil fuel use, ostensibly to deal with extreme weather caused by excessive fossil fuel use.
In early November, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted unanimously to increase the capacity of the Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility in Los Angeles County. In 2015, a blowout at the facility caused the nation’s largest-ever methane leak that took nearly four months to cap and forced thousands of valley residents to flee their homes.
CPUC has now approved expanding storage at the facility to up to 41.16 billion cubic feet, about 60 percent of its capacity, citing a need “to meet the existing needs and maintain energy reliability.” Concerns about energy reliability intensified after the state faced rolling blackouts when demand surged this past summer, the hottest ever on record in the United States. California faced an estimated 3,500-megawatt shortage during that period, and officials estimate the deficit could grow to 5,000 megawatts in 2022.
However, it doesn’t appear that storage is the real problem here. An independent review commissioned by the California Energy Commission in 2019 found that many of state’s energy-reliability concerns were actually due to poorly maintained pipelines, not a lack of storage. The California Independent Systems Operator, a nonprofit state agency that monitors the region’s energy grid, also found that the drastic increases and fluctuations in customer rates were largely due to pipeline outages and poor maintenance.
The Aliso facility, which is owned by the utility company SoCalGas, has been required to operate at less than half its capacity since the blowout. But CPUC has been allowing the company to increase that limit incrementally over time. In 2020, a Los Angeles Times report found that although Governor Gavin Newsom committed to shutting down the site during his campaign, its use skyrocketed after he took office.
Over the past year, SoCalGas and a group of oil and gas companies, including California Resources Corporation, Chevron, Phillips 66, and Tesoro, have been asking the CPUC to raise the allowable gas inventory in Aliso Canyon. It appears industry pressure worked.
The CPUC move also comes at a time when local citizen groups, environmental advocates, and lawmakers, including Senators Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla, have stepped up calls for the facility to be shut down because of its impact on public health and the climate impact of natural gas, which is mostly methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Tens of thousands of Angelenos continue to suffer from persistent health issues associated with exposure to toxic chemicals released during the blowout, including cancer-causing benzene, odorants called mercaptans, and other sulfur-containing compounds, as well as unrefined crude oil particles. (The facility is built in an abandoned oilfield.)
In October, SoCalGas and its parent company, Sempra Energy, agreed to pay up to $1.8 billion to settle lawsuits by 35,000 people impacted by the leak. The agreement is subject to about 97 percent of plaintiffs accepting the deal.
The company has already paid out a $120 million settlement with the city, county, and state for the blowout and agreed to a separate $4 million settlement with Los Angeles county prosecutors for failing to report the leak to state authorities in a timely manner.
Around the World
As the green energy revolution kicks into high gear in response to the climate crisis, rare earth elements are in demand like never before. They are, after all, essential for electric car motors, batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, military equipment, and electronics due to their catalytic, metallurgical, electrical, and other properties. Annual demand has doubled in the past 15 years and is expected to more than double again by 2030
While electric vehicles and renewable energy hold real promise for reducing Earth-warming emissions, mining rare earths is not really all that green. Globally, the 17 rare earth elements — which include scandium, yttrium, and the 15 lanthanides — are not actually that rare, but they are difficult to extract. Which means carcinogenic substances like sulphates and hydrochloric acid are used to separate them from ore. What’s more, because rare earth elements are often found alongside thorium and uranium, the mining waste tends to be radioactive, posing a risk to both humans and the environment. Some 2,000 tons of toxic waste are produced for every ton of rare earths extracted.
In an effort to reduce these impacts, researchers are looking for new ways to recover and reuse these elements from discarded electronics. In the meantime, however, mining is ramping up. Here are a few of top rare-earth producing countries, as well as those with the biggest reserves.
Sources: Earth.org, Forbes, Frontier Myanmar, Marketplace, Mining.com, Myanmar Now, NS Energy, Reuters, South China Morning Post, The Conversation, The Guardian, Yale360.
1 China
Hands down, China is the biggest producer and processor of rare earth elements in the world. The country began mining the minerals en masse back in the 1980s, and today provides more than half of the global supply, much of it mined and processed in the southeastern reaches of the country. China is also home to the world’s largest rare earth mine, Bayan Obo, which produced an estimated 45 percent of the global supply in 2019.
On top of its own domestic mines, China has obtained exclusive rare-earth mining rights in African nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya in exchange for financing infrastructure projects like highways.
China’s intensive rare earth production comes with an intense environmental footprint, including severe water and soil contamination. In some areas, abandoned mines, leach ponds, and wastewater pools spread across the landscape.
2 Australia
The Land Down Under is among the world’s top producers of rare earth elements. It is also the only country other than China that currently refines the minerals, which it does at a facility located in Malaysia.
Along with several other nations, the Australian government is trying to challenge China’s virtual monopoly of the market and position itself as the country to turn to for help in meeting the rising demand for rare earths. With its the Malaysia facility facing mounting criticism for its toxic environmental footprint, Australia is considering transitioning processing to a domestic plant. It has also signed a deal to build a rare earth refinery in Texas, which will be funded by the Pentagon.
3 United States
In 2020, the United States was the world’s second-largest producer of rare earth elements, though it still relies heavily on imports from China. Geopolitically, that’s not a very comfortable position to be in — China has been known to cut off supplies to other countries in the past.
It hasn’t always been this way. The US was once the world’s top producer of rare earth minerals. But more stringent environmental and human health regulations made the process more costly than in places like China, and much of the manufacturing that requires rare earths has been outsourced to China as well.
Given the country’s climate goals, as well as concerns about national security, the US is looking to ramp up production and processing once again. It is one of several countries hoping to challenge China’s dominance.
4 Russia
Though it produces only a sliver of the global supply, Russia has the fourth-largest rare earth reserves in the world, behind only China, Brazil, and Vietnam. The Russian government hopes to capitalize on those reserves in the near future. Last year, it announced plans to invest $1.5 billion in developing this resource.
5 Myanmar
Though China dominates the rare earth market, it receives a large share of its own heavy rare earth minerals — a subset of rare earths — from Myanmar. Myanmar is also a primary producer of dysprosium, a heavy rare earth mineral used in electric vehicles.
Since the military coup in early 2021, there are reports that illegal rare earth mining is increasing in the country, particularly in the remote Katchin State along the Chinese border. Watchdog groups say that mining is coming at a steep environmental cost, and that it is funding the country’s brutal military junta. As such, they are calling for heavy rare earths to be designated as conflict minerals. Such a designation would require that manufacturers either confirm the minerals are being mined in a way that doesn’t violate human rights, or disclose they were sourced from a conflict zone.
Table Talk
A coalition of small farming, environmental, and consumer groups just scored a big win for the environment. In October, in an ongoing legal dispute involving agro-chemical giants Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, and Corteva (previously Dow and Dupont), the Mexican Supreme Court upheld an injunction prohibiting the planting of genetically modified (GM) corn in Mexico.
The case stretches back to 2013, when advocates came together and submitted a petition to the Mexican government to stop the use of GM corn. Their legal argument was pinned to the constitutional right to a clean environment, and concerns that cross-pollination between native corn varieties and GM corn posed a threat to Mexican culture and the environment. The group obtained a precautionary injunction against the use of GM corn that year. Big Ag companies have lost more than a hundred appeals against the injunction. Now, under the October court ruling, the injunction will remain in place until the coalition’s petition is heard. No date has yet been set for the hearing.
“It’s a remarkable story,” Timothy Wise, a senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy, told VICE World News. “How are these pesky, little, underfunded groups with their inexperienced legal teams taking on these freaking companies?” The “little” groups, for their part, described the win as an important decision for “the collective rights of peasant and Indigenous communities and of the consumers of corn.”
Call of the Wild
According to the animal rights organization, World Animal Protection, there are 3,000 dolphins “currently trapped in cruel captive conditions” in tanks that pale in comparison to the size of their natural habitat — all to “profit the multibillion-dollar dolphin tourism industry.” For years, the group pressured the travel company Expedia to cut its support for dolphin tourism. Finally, Expedia listened.
In November, Expedia Group announced that the company will no longer sell holiday packages that include performances by captive whales or dolphins. The new policy will be implemented in early 2022.
Expedia isn’t the first travel company to distance itself from unethical wildlife attractions. In 2014, Intrepid Travel ceased its elephant-ride services. Last year, the travel association Abta updated its animal-welfare guidelines to exclude attractions that put tourists in close contact with apes, bears, alligators, orcas, sloths, and wildcats.
But according to Katheryn Wise, UK campaigns manager for World Animal Protection, there is still much more to be done to save wildlife from the tourism economy. “Travel companies play a huge role in driving captive dolphin entertainment and as one of the largest travel companies in the world we are delighted that Expedia Group are making a stand,” she told The Guardian. “It’s time for other travel giants … to do the right thing and follow suit.”
Frontlines
In late October, environmental and human rights attorney Steven Donziger began serving a six-month sentence at a minimum-security prison in Connecticut. After serving more than 800 days under home detention, he was found guilty of criminal contempt of court in his legal fight with oil giant Chevron.
Donziger’s prison sentence is the latest development in a long, complex saga. For decades, he argued that Chevron (and Texaco, before Chevron acquired it in 2001) had spilled oil into the Amazonian rainforest and endangered the lives of the Indigenous communities who lived there. In 2011, an Ecuadorean court ruled in favor of Donziger’s clients and awarded the communities a $9.5 billion settlement.
Chevron, however, refused to pay. Instead, the company went after Donziger, and accused him and the plaintiffs of using illegal tactics to make their case. In 2014, a US district court judge — who has been condemned for her lack of objectivity in the case — ruled in Chevron’s favor and canceled the settlement. Then, Chevron filed another case against Donziger, ordering him to turn over his computer and phone, which included private communications with clients in Ecuador.
Donziger’s refusal to comply with the court has now landed him in prison. That, despite an opinion offered by United Nations human rights experts finding his two-year-plus house arrest — more than four times the length of the maximum six-month sentence he ultimately received — violated international human rights law.
A sweep under the rug by Chevron, perhaps, even while the company’s toxic footprint remains in Ecuador’s Amazon basin.
Call of the Wild
Squid live mysterious lives, and they keep upending what little understanding we have of them. For instance, males were known to be flighty fathers who tend to mate and then leave, presumably to find other females to mate with. But now scientists are learning that male squid actually help their mates find a place to lay their eggs. The research, by an international team of scientists, published in the journal Ecology, points to the first evidence of paternal care among squid.
The finding stems from observations first made by biologist Eduardo Sampaio, a PhD student at the University of Lisbon in Portugal and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. On recent dives in the Red Sea, he noticed male bigfin reef squid, a small, glittery species of squid that lives in coral reefs, swimming in and out of a crevice after leaving their mates unattended nearby. Sampaio registered the behavior as odd. “It was something we had never seen before,” he told National Geographic.
Female bigfin reef squid are known to seek out coral crevices when it’s time to lay their fertilized eggs. Sampaio had a feeling that, in this case, the male was taking on that role.
“Location probing,” a behavior in which a male investigates a potential nest before the female lays her eggs, is common in the animal world. But it’s almost unheard of among cephalopods. When Sampaio described his observations to his colleagues, he learned that Samantha Cheng, a scientist with the American Museum of Natural History, had also observed location probing among bigfin reef squid in Indonesia. Their observations together comprise much of the data in the Ecology paper.
Sampaio and Cheng are now working to expand their study, to see if this behavior persists among squid around the world.
Whatever they find, Sampaio can already say that the parenting dynamics of squid are “many-fold more complex than what we had previously thought.” As he told National Geographic: “We have so much more to learn.”
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