12 Trump Attacks on the Environment Since the Election

In its final days, the administration is rushing to cement its destructive legacy with attacks on clean air, wildlife and public lands that could be difficult to undo.

In the aftermath of the Nov. 3 election, President Donald Trump has tried every trick in the book to avoid facing the reality of his loss. A barrage of lawsuits accompanied by disinformation campaigns has attempted to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election.

But a close look at regulatory actions and executive moves shows that, even as Trump makes a show of refusing to concede or transition power to the incoming Biden administration, his team is pushing through a slew of last-minute rules and regulations.

Many of these changes will harm the environment and public health.

It isn’t surprising that an administration that has attempted to roll back more than 100 environmental protections in the past four years would step up its assault in its waning months. But that doesn’t make the continued attacks any less important. Here’s some of what’s at risk:

1. Tribal Lands

Tribes and environmental groups have fought for decades against a proposed copper mine in an area of Arizona known as Oak Flat, which is a sacred site for a dozen tribes, including the San Carlos Apache.

Now the Trump administration is pushing to fast-track a deal that would transfer ownership of the land, which is in the Tonto National Forest, to Resolution Copper, a firm owned by mining companies Rio Tinto and Billiton BHP.

“Last month tribes discovered that the date for the completion of a crucial environmental review process has suddenly been moved forward by a full year, to December 2020, even as the tribes are struggling with a COVID outbreak that has stifled their ability to respond,” an investigation by The Guardian found. “If the environmental review is completed before Trump leaves office, the tribes may be unable to stop the mine.”

2. FERC Shakeup

Just days after the election, Trump switched up the leadership of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has a hand in regulating hydroelectric projects, as well as interstate transmission of electricity, oil and natural gas.

Chairman Neil Chatterjee was replaced by fellow Republican James Danly, who has a more conservative view on federal energy policy. Chatterjee, once known as a “coal guy,” had recently advocated for policies supporting distributed energy and for regional grid operators to embrace carbon pricing as a market-based solution for addressing climate change.

3. Hamstringing LWCF

The Great American Outdoors Act, a major conservation bill signed into law in August, allocated $9.5 billion to help fix national park infrastructure and permanently fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

But despite (falsely) hailing himself as a conservation hero at the law’s signing, Trump has already begun undermining the legislation’s effectiveness. An order signed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Nov. 9 allows state and local governments to veto any land or water acquisitions made through the fund.

Chris D’Angelo at HuffPost called the move a “parting gift to the anti-federal land movement.” Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who advocated for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, wrote a letter to Bernhardt urging him to rescind the order. “This undercuts what a landowner can do with their own private property, and creates unnecessary, additional levels of bureaucracy that will hamstring future land acquisition through the Land and Water Conservation Fund,” he wrote.

Tester standing at podium — Senator Jon Tester at a press conference to discuss the Land and Water Conservation Fund in 2018. Photo: Public domain

In another blow, officials and conservation groups in New Mexico were surprised to learn that none of their projects proposed to receive funding through the Land and Water Conservation Fund were selected by the Department of the Interior. Some believe the move is political retribution for being critical of the Trump administration and its policies.

4. Dam Raising

On Nov. 20 the Trump administration finalized a plan to raise the height of Northern California’s 600-foot Shasta Dam by 18.5 feet, which would allow for more water storage. The reservoir feeds the federally run Central Valley Project, which funnels water hundreds of miles south to cities and farms. That includes the politically connected Westlands Water District in the San Joaquin Valley, which formerly employed Interior Secretary David Bernhardt as a lawyer and lobbyist.

The state of California has strongly opposed the effort to raise the dam’s height because it would flood the McCloud River, protected as wild and scenic. Conservation groups also say the plan would threaten endangered species such as Chinook salmon, delta smelt and Shasta salamanders.

California Rep. Jared Huffman called it the “QAnon of water projects, meaning it’s laughably infeasible and just not real.”

The staunchest opposition has come from the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, which lost 90% of its sacred sites with the construction of the dam and faces the loss of its remaining sites and burial grounds if the reservoir is expanded.

5. Pesticide Changes

The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Nov. 20 it was taking away a tool states can use to control how pesticides are deployed. The action could further endanger farmworkers and wildlife.

A Section 24 provision of the Federal, Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act lets states set stricter restrictions on federally regulated pesticides in response to local needs and conditions. But after numerous states sought to limit the use of the weed killer dicamba, the agency will now no longer allow states to set more protective rules for any pesticides.

6. Migratory Birds

A gutting of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 took a big step forward at the end of November, clearing the way for the administration to finalize the rule change by the end of Trump’s term.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released its Final Environmental Impact Statement to redefine the scope of the law to no longer penalize the energy industry or developers for “incidentally” killing migratory birds.

oil covered bird in water — Pied-billed grebe on an oil-covered evaporation pond at a commercial oilfield wastewater disposal facility. Photo: Pedro Ramirez Jr. / USFWS

The agency’s own analysis found that the rule change would “likely result in increased bird mortality” because — without penalties — companies wouldn’t take additional precautions to help make sure birds aren’t killed by their operations.

That’s already proving true. “Since the administration began pursuing its looser interpretation of the law in April 2018, hundreds of birds have perished without penalty, according to documents compiled by conservation groups this year,” The Washington Post reported.

7. ANWR Auction

The Bureau of Land Management announced on Dec. 3 that oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would go on sale on Jan. 6, following a shortened time frame for the nomination and evaluation of potential tracts to be drilled.

“Once the sale is held, the bureau has to review and approve the leases, a process that typically takes months,” The New York Times reported. “But holding the sale on Jan. 6 potentially gives the bureau opportunity to finalize the leases before Inauguration Day. That would make it more difficult for the Biden administration to undo them.”

Despite the fact that the Trump administration is intent on opening the door to drilling in the 1.6 million-acre coastal plain — one of the wildest places left in the United States — it’s still unclear how interested the oil industry will be. Or how readily they’ll be able to finance their operations. All the major U.S. banks have said they’ll no longer fund new oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.

8. Dirty Air

One week into December, the administration finalized its decision declining to enact stricter standards for regulating industrial soot emissions.

This came despite the fact that the administration’s own scientists found that maintaining the current limits on tiny particles, known as PM 2.5, results in tens of thousands of early deaths each year. And despite the fact Harvard researchers found that those who have lived for decades with high levels of PM 2.5 pollution are at a greater risk of dying from COVID-19.

9. Border Wall

The incoming Biden administration has vowed to not build another foot of the border wall, but the borderlands ecosystem remains under threat as the Trump administration is continuing to push ahead.

In some cases wall builders are even attempting to speed up the work.

“That’s happening from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to Arizona’s stunning Coronado National Memorial and Guadalupe Canyon, a wildlife corridor for Mexican gray wolves and endangered jaguars,” NPR reported. “At $41 million a mile, the Arizona sections are the most expensive projects of the entire border wall.”

In Arizona they’re needlessly razing vegetation and blasting mountains for roads in remote areas to help enable construction that likely won’t even take place.

10. Harming Whales and Dolphins

Trump may be leaving office, but marine mammals won’t be able to rest easy. NOAA Fisheries issued a rule on Dec. 9 allowing the oil and gas industry to harm Atlantic spotted dolphins, pygmy whales, dwarf sperm whales, Bryde’s whales and other marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico while using seismic and acoustic mapping, including air guns, to gather data on resources on or below the ocean floor.

In an effort to further efforts for oil and gas drilling, nearly 200,000 beaked whales and more than 600,000 bottlenose dolphins could be “disturbed.” And “pygmy and dwarf sperm whales are expected to be harassed to the point of potential injury, with a mean of 308 whales potentially harmed per year, according to the final rule,” E&E News reported.

Dolphins jumping out of the water — Dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo: Carey Akin, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

11. More Lease Sales

The Arctic isn’t the only place where the rush is on to exploit public lands. On Dec. 9 the Bureau of Land Management updated an environmental assessment for a 2013 plan for leases to extract climate- and water-polluting tar sands on 2,100 acres in northeastern Utah. But then just days late it hit the pause button on the effort.

While that one may be on hold, the administration did kick off the sale of leases for oil drilling on 4,100 acres of federal land in California’s Kern County on Dec. 10. The first such sale in the state in eight years could be canceled by the Biden administration and if not, would face legal challenges from environmental groups.

12. Cost-benefit Rule

One of the administration’s biggest parting gifts to industry — the “cost-benefit” rule — was finalized on Dec. 9. It would require the EPA to weigh the economic costs of air pollution regulations but not many of the health benefits that would arise from better protections.

“In other words, if reducing emissions from power plants also saves tens of thousands of lives each year by cutting soot, those ‘co-benefits’ should be not be counted,” in the EPA’s new analysis, the Washington Post explained.

The rule would be a big blow to efforts to improve public health and curb pollution.

“The only purpose in making this a regulation seems to be to provide a basis for future lawsuits to slow down or prevent future administrations from regulating,” Roy Gamse, an economist and former EPA deputy assistant administrator for planning and evaluation, told Reuters.

Slowing down the Biden administration will continue to be a big part of Trump’s last month in office — along with the finalization of more rule changes to add insult to injury.

Legal experts have begun mapping which rollbacks will be quick and easy to undo and those that will take sustained effort. But one thing is certain: There’s a long road ahead to reverse dangerous regulations, restore scientific integrity and make up for lost ground on climate change, extinction and other cascading crises.

Gray Wolf Recovery and Survival Require Immediate Action by the Biden Administration

Three key measures will go a long way toward ensuring that gray wolves survive and thrive in the lower 48 states.

President-elect Joe Biden will soon step into a tangled web of critical foreign and domestic issues affecting Americans. As his administration begins work to address these complex challenges, issues that affect other species on Earth must not be lost in the shuffle.

One species whose fate once again hangs in the balance is the gray wolf, which the Trump administration this October removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act in most of its range.

This delisting affects more than wolves: Numerous species and ecosystems depend on wolves for their long-term health. The most recent example of this comes from preliminary research results in the Yellowstone ecosystem indicating wolves exert a “predator cleansing effect” that may delay and decrease the size and spread of the devastating chronic wasting disease in native ungulates.

But the Trump administration did not listen to the science, starting in 2019, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a rule to remove gray wolves in the lower 48 states from the endangered species list.

The proposal, which would put wolf management in the hands of the states instead of the federal government, produced immediate outrage. A historic 1.8 million public comments opposed the delisting, and 86 members of Congress (in both House and Senate), plus 100 scientists, 230 businesses and 367 veterinary professionals, submitted letters of opposition. Even the scientific peer reviews commissioned by the Service itself found the proposal had inadequate scientific support.

Despite this overwhelming opposition and flawed science, the Service went ahead and stripped gray wolves of protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. In the process it also ignored the fact that gray wolves are still functionally extinct in the majority of places they once inhabited.

Why States Can’t Protect Wolves

Prior to this year’s comprehensive delisting, gray wolves living in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Utah and California were already being managed by state wildlife agencies. In most of these states, this so-called “management” has been a debacle, as the agencies are often staffed and directed by hunters interested in “harvesting” wildlife for personal gain or, in the case of trophy hunting, ego gratification. If wolves are eating deer and elk in order to survive, these hunters view the predators as unacceptable competition.

For many of these state decision-makers, the attitude toward wolves is at best reluctant tolerance — far from what it should be: a desire for full recovery of the species and compassionate co-existence.

Idaho provides the worst example of wolf mismanagement at the state level. Over the 12-month period ending June 30, 2020, the state allowed the killing of at least 570 of the 1,000 wolves estimated to exist there. The only thing that prevented it from authorizing even more killings was a provision that would have returned management to the federal government if population levels fell below an established threshold. This is completely unacceptable. Until state-agency staffing is more balanced, representing both the interests of hunters and those who appreciate wildlife alive, the agencies have no business making management decisions about wolves.

The bottom line is wolves need continued federal protection if they’re to survive and fully recover.

How to Restore Federal Protections

The Biden administration could begin ensuring protection of wolves through three initial actions.

First it should reverse the recent decision to delist gray wolves. The incoming secretary of the Interior could easily and immediately withdraw the rule in order to settle the inevitable lawsuit(s) that will challenge the legality of the delisting.

Second it should put all gray wolves in the lower 48 states under Endangered Species Act protection once again. The entire history of federal wolf protection has been piecemeal and fractured. Defining numerous different “distinct population” segments and pursuing delisting on a region-by-region or state-by-state manner does not facilitate full wolf recovery throughout their historic range; it only results in significant numbers of wolves being shot and trapped, and repeated challenges in court.

Third, once all gray wolves are again under the full protection of the Act, the administration should have the Fish and Wildlife Service finally develop a comprehensive nationwide gray wolf recovery plan. This plan is required under the Act but has never been made. The gray wolf was first protected way back in 1974; the Service has had more than 40 years to complete such a plan. It is long overdue. Once the recovery plan is completed, the Biden administration should have the Service implement it and monitor the results of the implementation. These actions will go a long way toward ensuring the recovery and long-term survival of gray wolves in the lower 48 states.

As one of North America’s most iconic and ecologically important species, gray wolves can and should represent the very best of our conservation efforts and science. This will benefit not just wolves, but all other threatened species in the United States. President-elect Joe Biden has the power to make that a reality.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Changing the Fabric of Our Clothes to Cut Climate Emissions

The textile industry has a significant carbon footprint. But changing what our clothes are made of can make a big difference in cutting climate pollution.

Finding solutions to address the climate emergency means tackling the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions — those coming from the transportation, food and energy sectors. We’re learning to make more climate-friendly decisions about what we eat, how we power our homes and how we get around.

We don’t often look at what we’re wearing, though. And we should.

The textile industry pumps between 1.22 and 2.93 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. The result is that, by some estimates, the life cycle of textiles (including laundering) accounts for 6.7% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the equivalent of every person on the planet taking a 2,500-mile flight every year.

And the problem is poised to get worse, as both textile production and consumption are increasing drastically.

Since 1975 the global production of textile fibers has almost tripled: 107 million metric tons were produced in 2018, a figure that’s expected to reach 145 million tons by 2030.

And the “churn” of fast fashion gets quicker each year. Some labels now release as many as 24 collections in a 12-month period, and clothes are often sold at pocket-money prices. Outsourcing labor to countries where wages are pitifully low yields cheap finished products.

This has triggered huge consumption. In the United States consumers make at least one purchase every week, which means they’re buying five times more clothing than they did in 1980. The United States has the highest demand for textiles, followed closely by Europe and then China.

The vast majority of textiles consumed in Europe and the United States are also imported. That makes clothing a key component of “carbon leakage,” in which the benefit of emissions-reductions in one country is offset by the tendency to burn hydrocarbons in another. In China 43% of greenhouse gas emissions from apparel production are induced by foreign final demand. Similarly, supplying overseas clothing markets accounts for 44% of India’s cotton-related emissions. We’re importing pollution when we purchase so many clothes.

sweatshirts on clothes rack — Clothes for sale. Photo: byronv2 (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Materials Matter

The quantity of textile production isn’t the only problem. What clothes are made out of matters, too.

Unfortunately the use of unsustainable fabrics is on the rise.

The quantity of polyester in our garments has doubled since 2000, and now over half of all global fiber production is made from petroleum. It takes around 342 million barrels of oil every year to meet demand for plastic-based fibers. When those clothes are laundered or tossed, it results in even more pollution. The disintegration of synthetic fibers like polyester, nylon and acrylic is responsible for between 20% and 35% of all microplastics in the marine environment.

Another increasingly common fiber is viscose, which is derived from wood pulp. But that too is problematic: 150 million trees are cleared annually to produce the wood pulp required to manufacture viscose. With 138 million acres of forest lost in the last two decades, a fiber based on felling trees hardly seems sustainable.

Natural fibers, biodegradable as they are, would seem a better option. Hemp, jute and flax (linen) are all an improvement and have important environmental advantages. But they make much less versatile fabrics. Hemp is considered “scratchy” by many consumers, and jute is mainly used only for twines, packaging and carpets. There’s also a problem of scaling up those fibers to make any difference. Hemp, for example, currently accounts for a tiny 0.06% of global fiber production.

The best option may in fact be the one that’s right in front of us: cotton. Although it too has problems.

About three-quarters of cotton is now genetically modified and farmed using industrial quantities of pesticides and fertilizers. Cotton accounts for only around 2.3% of the world’s arable land, but it uses over 16% of global insecticides and relies on a higher percentage than any other agricultural crop of what the World Health Organization considers “highly hazardous pesticides.”

Between pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, the global cotton crop uses 8.2 million metric tons of chemicals. Those inputs impoverish the soil, pollute waterways, decimate biodiversity and often poison people, too. They also mean that the carbon footprint of cotton is extraordinarily high. Globally cotton cultivation accounts for 220 million metric tons of CO₂ per year. It’s also a fiber that’s notoriously thirsty. The global water footprint of cotton is around 8.2 trillion cubic feet a year, the same as 238 bathtubs of water per person annually.

ships in sand — Cotton farming has helped shrink the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan 90% in 50 years. Photo: Anton Ruiter (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Go Organic

There is, however, a way of cultivating cotton which drastically reduces its environmental harm. Compared to conventionally cultivated cotton, organic cotton has 40% less “global warming potential” and offers a 91% reduction in freshwater withdrawal from lakes, rivers and aquifers. The yields of organic cotton tend to be marginally smaller, but because the input costs are far lower, profit margins are actually greater — between 4% and 30%.

This form of cultivation has repeatedly been shown to promote gender equality, community bonds, biodiversity, improved soils and human health. Rather than becoming individually indebted to corporations for seeds and chemicals, organic farmers form cooperatives and “buying clubs.” The long and opaque supply chains of conventional cotton become short and transparent, with cutthroat practices replaced by a sense of common purpose.

Organic cotton cultivation makes cotton farmers resilient rather than vulnerable. There’s safety in relationships that are based on reputation, trust and longevity. The practice of crop rotation and diversification offers insulation against fluctuating cotton prices. Farmers’ soils, too, are more resilient in the face of the climate crisis — not immune to drought, but far better placed to survive it because healthy soils retain water and nutrients.

These advantages explain why organic cotton is rapidly growing. Production increased by 56% in the 2017-18 growing season, and by 31% — to 239,787 metric tons of fiber — in 2018-19. Globally there are now a million acres of land dedicated to organic cotton, with another 138,000 acres in conversion. The two major certification bodies for organic textiles — the Organic Contents Standard and the Global Organic Textile Standard — increased their number of recognized organic facilities by 48% and 35% respectively between 2018 and 2019. Farmers, retailers and consumers are all realizing that, in an industry marked by environmental degradation, organic cotton is the moral fiber.

But even that ethical choice is insufficient, by itself, to make a significant dent in the greenhouse gas emissions related to textiles. Cotton now has only a 24.4% share the global fiber market. Most of us are wearing clothes made from trees and, predominantly, petrol. Those clothes are invariably produced in factories, and transported thousands of miles by sea and air, using fossil fuels.

Buying products made with organic cotton is part of the solution, but as consumers we can do more by choosing quality, throwing away less, repairing more and buying secondhand.

But it’s not just about consumer choices; the industry needs to do better, too.

We can pressure retailers to become signatories to the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action and demand to know what progress they are making toward net-zero emissions. The retailers themselves should read the writing on the wall and begin ridding their shelves and supply chains of polluting, carbon-intensive goods and practices.

Because until there’s a radical shift in how we clothe ourselves, we’ll keep on stripping the planet bare.

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Biden Can Restore the EPA, But It Will Require Steadfast Effort

The Biden administration must focus on science and enforcement, reverse Trump deregulation efforts and reenergize EPA employment.

There is ample evidence that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suffered a clear loss of focus, a sharp drop in morale among its career staff, and disastrous policy reversals during the Trump administration. Remedying these setbacks will take sustained and persistent effort — more akin to priming a pump than flipping a light switch. Nonetheless, if the Biden administration persistently pursues several steps, it can go a long way toward restoring the effective EPA Americans need and deserve.

First, the agency’s full-time equivalent workforce is overdue for a significant increase — well beyond reversing the reductions enacted under Trump. Ideally, any staff augmentation will be phased in prudently to allow ample time for recruiting and training new employees, and to account for all new EPA obligations that may arise with respect to curbing climate change.

A restored EPA will also need to rebuild its foundation of scientific expertise. A new administration will do well to restore the agency’s prior emphasis on mitigation of and adaptation to the climate crisis. The EPA must also be part of an administration-wide push for comprehensive legislation to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. And the Trump administration’s attempts to censor sound science — by falsely purporting to improve transparency in order to unreasonably limit the application of legitimate scientific findings — must be promptly reversed.

EPA rally — American Federation of Government Employees rally outside of EPA headquarters. Photo: Chelsea Bland (CC BY 2.0)

In a deliberate and legally sound way, a revived EPA also needs to reverse specific Trump administration actions and policies that have weakened critical protections of public health and the environment, such as its attempt to narrow the reach of the Clean Water Act by narrowly defining the statutory term “waters of the United States,” and its drastic weakening of automobile emission standards. In fact, there are potentially hundreds of Trump era regulatory changes that need to be reversed, so this won’t be an easy task. The new administration should assign a team of agency scientists to survey the prior administration’s regulatory changes at EPA to promptly and identify Trump-era regulations that do the most environmental harm. That set of regulations should receive priority attention for “rolling back the rollbacks.”

Finally the EPA’s new leadership must give high priority to restoring its traditional emphasis on a deterrent approach to enforcement. As I wrote earlier this year, EPA enforcement fell to a 20-year low under the Trump administration. It is crucial that EPA’s new leadership announce and continually reiterate its unwavering support — both publicly and internally — for a vigorous enforcement effort.

And in keeping with one of my previous recommendations, the EPA’s enforcement programs greatly need an influx of skilled new personnel — particularly criminal investigators, lawyers and engineers. Those new employees may be used to increase the number of plant inspections completed by the agency and the overall number of criminal, civil and administrative enforcement cases it pursues.

It should also foster deterrence by extensively publicizing its enforcement work, which it can accomplish by routinely distributing public announcements regarding specific enforcement case initiations and resolutions. These will serve as warnings to other companies while increasing public confidence in the agency’s efforts.

The road back from the EPA’s decline under Trump may be slow and arduous. Nonetheless, with persistent effort, strong encouragement from a new cohort of agency leaders, and unwavering support from the White House, it can be restored as a diligent protector of the nation’s health and environment.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Want to Fight Climate Change? Start by Protecting These Endangered Species

Giant forest elephants and blue whales play an enormous role in climate sequestration. Can putting a financial value on that role help conserve them — and us?

Despite their massive size, African forest elephants remains an elusive species, poorly studied because of their habitat in the dense tropical forests of West Africa and the Congo.

But the more we learn about them, the more we know that forest elephants are in trouble. Like their slightly larger and better-known cousins, the bush or savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana), forest elephants (L. cyclotis) face rampant poaching for their majestic ivory tusks and the growing bush meat trade. More than 80% of the population has been killed off in central Africa since 2002.

Today fewer than 100,000 forest elephants occupy their dwindling habitat. Conservationists worry they could soon head toward extinction if nothing is done.

Foresst elephants — Photo: Richard Ruggiero/USFWS (public domain)

And now a new threat has emerged: A study published this September found that climate change has resulted in an 81% decline in fruit production in one forest elephant habitat in Gabon. That’s caused the elephants there to experience an 11% decline in body condition since 2008.

But other research, also published in September, suggests a possible solution to both these crises.

Elephants and Carbon

It all boils down to carbon dioxide.

Forest elephants play a huge role in supporting the carbon sequestration power of their tropical habitats. Hungry pachyderms act as mega-gardeners as they roam across the landscape searching for bits of leaves, tree bark and fruit; stomping on small trees and bushes; and spreading seeds in their dung. This promotes the growth of larger carbon-absorbing trees, allowing forests to sequester more carbon from the air.

A July 2019 study by ecologist Fabio Berzaghi, a researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in France, estimated that if forest elephants disappeared African forests would lose 7% of their biomass — a stunning 3 billion-ton loss of carbon.

And they’re not unique in this oversized role, although the closest equivalent lives in an entirely different type of habitat.

Last year a team of researchers led by Ralph Chami, an economist and assistant director at the International Monetary Fund, published a groundbreaking report on the monetary value of great whales, the 13 large species that include blue and humpback whales. The study accounted for whales’ enormous carbon-capturing functions, from fertilizing oxygen-producing phytoplankton to storing enormous amounts of carbon in their bodies when they die and sink to the seafloor. After also including tourism values, Chami’s study estimated each whale was worth $2 million, amounting to a staggering $1 trillion for the entire global population of whales.

Humpback whale — Photo: Kaitlin Thoreson, National Park Service (public domain)

“It’s a win-win for everyone,” Chami says of his economic models, which place a monetary value on the “natural capital” of wildlife, including the carbon sequestration activities of whales and elephants. “By allowing nature to regenerate, [elephants and whales] are far more valuable to us than if we extract them. If nature thrives, you thrive.”

Soon after the publication of Chami’s whale study, Berzaghi called and asked if the economist could run the numbers on forest elephants too. Chami agreed, and this September they published the results. The elephants, they calculated, are worth about $1.75 million each due to their forest carbon sequestration value alone.

Even more importantly, they found that if forest elephants were allowed to rebound to their former populations, their carbon-capturing value would jump to more than $150 billion.

And as climate change worsens, Chami says forest elephants will become even more valuable in terms of their carbon sequestration role — and as individuals. “The loss of their habitats has the impact of causing them more stress and to have fewer babies,” he says.

Turning Numbers Into Action

Despite these stunning, if theoretical, numbers, the researchers knew they needed a financial plan that could be implemented and sustained in the real world.

That starts with keeping elephants alive.

Poachers receive pennies on the dollar for elephant tusks that, once they finally reach consumers, can fetch prices of up to $40,000 on the illegal ivory market.

Chami says that pales in comparison to the $1.75 million an elephant could be worth for its carbon sequestration services, an amount that works out to roughly $80 a day over an elephant’s 60-year average lifetime.

But how do you deliver that value to the people who live near elephants, including people who perhaps currently poach the animals? Chami turned to worldwide carbon markets, which encourage countries or companies to offset their greenhouse gases by investing in restorative measures in other parts of the world.

To activate that proposed value, Chami brought together a group of conservation, business technology and economic experts to develop a pilot project that could promote the protection of forest elephants in Africa. Together, they aim to create a legal framework and a secure financial distribution system that would use of carbon markets to pay local communities to protect forest elephants. Individual elephants would be tracked using satellite technology to ensure their safety. As long as the elephants remain alive, communities could receive regular payments from a carbon market funded by corporations, individuals and governments to offset their pollution. Elephants could become “living assets” for countries that protect them.

Those assets could add up. Chami says the population of 1,500 elephants in Gabon’s Loango National Forest would provide $2.4 million in annual revenue.

“We need to build a market around living elephants,” Chami says. “The poachers can become the caretakers.”

That’s an exciting concept to wildlife experts, who have already had some success empowering communities through tourism. But for elephants that live in remote areas of African forests, tourism is less of an option. A market that places a value on elephants for their global carbon sequestration and climate contributions opens a new opportunity for support.

“It potentially changes how people think of the value of elephants,” said Ian Redmond, a renowned African conservationist who’s working with Chami and others to fund forest elephant protection efforts.

Redmond says he’s thrilled about this new plan because it incentivizes locals to protect their natural resources, not exploit them.

“It’s a gamechanger, not just for its ecological benefits, but for poverty reduction,” he says. “It’s a mechanism of change for people in the forest for people who before now only get money if they kill something. Now there’s an economic incentive to protect the elephants and their carbon-rich habitat so everyone benefits, locally and globally.”

The trick, the experts say, is getting money dispersed fairly and securely to local communities. Chami’s team says the revolution in new secure financial networks such as blockchain, the building block of digital monetary systems like Bitcoin, can help establish a monetary system that can be more efficient and transparent than traditional banking systems. Africa’s ahead of the curve when it comes to dealing in these new digital monetary technologies, which, though not perfect, can be a positive anti-corruption tool in the murky world of international carbon markets and debt swaps sometimes linked to fraud and influence peddling.

Walid Al Saqqaf, a startup founder and technology expert who produces the weekly podcast Insureblocks, is working closely with Chami and conservationists like Redmond to tap into global carbon exchange markets and create a framework for local funding efforts. Al Saqqaf says the secure nature of blockchain technology can attract international governmental agencies as well as private sector banks and insurance companies who will increasingly want to offset carbon footprints by investing in carbon-sequestering natural resources. “We take a toxic asset such as carbon and transform it into carbon for social good,” Al Saqqaf says.

The group is setting up technology, legal and science working groups to develop a cohesive plan that could go into effect next year, although the conservation team says it’s too early to announce specifics of the pilot program. They say they are in early discussions with African governments hoping to protect their elephants as well as private enterprises interested in offsetting carbon emissions.

A Ticking Clock, But Forward Motion

Meanwhile the threats from both climate change and poaching continue. A study published this June found that, despite efforts to reduce the ivory trade, elephant poaching rates remain “near their peak and have changed little since 2011.”

The rapidly growing risks of extinctions, fueled in part by climate change, have pushed the team to quickly get their ground-breaking plan up and running. “We are in a race against time,” Al Saqqaf says.

While the work on elephants remains on the drawing board, Chami’s earlier study on the economic value of whales has already started generating real-world action. A G20 working group recommended this year that member countries take whales into account for their climate mitigation and ecosystem values. In Chile a national initiative is using Chami’s economic model to help design a project called the Blue Boat Initiative, a sophisticated satellite and sea-based plan supported by the Chilean government to protect whales from ship collisions.

“The valuation of ecosystem services is very relevant because it allows us to show the oceans are not only a raw material,” says Patricia Morales, general manager of Fundacion Cortes Solari, a private foundation that supports the Blue Boat Initiative and other climate and environmental issues. “We need to move from the current paradigm to the blue economy.”

Chami says the positive global response to their work is rewarding, but it’s far from complete. His team — which plans to apply this methodology to other species — knows the dire state of the natural world, and the challenges of creating new international funding and conservation models are huge. But Chami and his colleagues say that by “translating science into dollars,” researchers can build a powerful market-based mechanism that can reverse society’s incentive to destroy the natural world.

“We need to learn to live in balance with nature,” Chami says. “Our sustainability depends on protecting our ecosystems.”

How Biden Can Do More Than Just Restore Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks

Undoing Trump’s damage won’t be enough. Here’s where Biden can push forward public lands, climate and energy policy.

In early 2017, not long after President Donald J. Trump moved into the White House, his chief advisor, Steve Bannon, said that the administration’s aim was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” A charitable listener might have heard a run-of-the-mill libertarian goal, to downsize the bloated government in order to make room for personal liberties.

It has since become clear that Trump cared more about freedom for government and corporations — and for that matter, COVID-19 — to run rampant.

Perhaps nowhere was Trump’s approach more thorough than when it came to the Earth. He removed limits on mercury and methane emissions, incapacitated the Clean Water Act and gutted protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, to name just a few of nearly 100 rollbacks. All purportedly to help the economy, achieve “energy dominance” on public lands and make him look good — energy-efficient light bulbs, he said, “make you look orange.”

President-elect Joseph R. Biden has indicated that he’ll quickly roll back the rollbacks as soon as he’s inaugurated. Yet a reset is not enough. In fact, many of the rules didn’t cut it under President Obama, and though Obama tried to fix many of them, his efforts often fell short.

Here are a few examples of policies and rules that Trump obliterated and that Biden — hopefully with Congress’s help — could now rebuild, making them better and stronger than before.

Clean Power Plan: President Obama’s plan mandated a cut in power sector carbon emissions by 32% from 2005 levels by 2030, which essentially would have forced coal out of the energy mix while leaving room for natural gas.

Before it went into effect, Trump gutted the plan, though it was hardly necessary: Economics forced coal-plant retirements after Trump’s election, coal-mining jobs continued to wane, and emissions dropped even more than the Obama plan would have required. The plan was obsolete before it was finalized.

Biden’s plan must include more ambitious emissions cuts and, equally as important, provide for a just transition for workers and communities that will be abandoned by the fossil fuel industries.

Oil and gas development: Trump rolled over the environment by rolling back rules for fracking, stocking the Department of the Interior with industry insiders, ramming through approvals of pipelines built by his multimillion-dollar donors, and by slashing royalties paid by oil companies.

Yet Obama’s policies were equally friendly to energy development. His administration leased out 2 million more acres of public land to oil and gas companies during his first term than Trump and oversaw a drilling boom of unprecedented magnitude.

BLM sign and wells — Oil and gas development on public lands. Photo: WildEarth Guardians, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Biden needs not only to roll back the rollbacks, but also to overhaul the leasing process to shift power away from corporate boardrooms and back into public hands and increase oil and gas royalty payments across the board to give American taxpayers a fair shake.

Bears Ears National Monument: In 2015, the Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute, Hopi and Zuni tribes asked Obama to designate as a national monument 1.9 million acres of public land in southeastern Utah, with tribal representatives having a major management role. When Obama established the monument, it was 600,000 acres smaller than the proposal, and the tribal role was reduced to an advisory one. Trump slashed the monument by 85% and rammed through a shoddy management plan for what remained, further diminishing the tribal role.

Biden should restore the monument, giving the tribal nations an equal role in determining new boundaries and creating a strong management plan.

That’s only the beginning.

Biden will also have to restore another 80 or more regulations, redirect agencies that have been steered off-course, invalidate the lease sale for the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, bring science back into policymaking, stop the building of the border wall, and clean the house of Trump appointees who are trying to destroy the so-called administrative state from within.

That includes William Perry Pendley — Twitter handle @Sagebrush_Rebel — whom Trump installed as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management in 2019. This September a judge ruled that Pendley — never approved by Congress — had served unlawfully, and ordered him out of his role.

Pendley changed his title and refused to leave, insisting that the law and the court’s order “has no impact” on him.

With Trump now taking a similar stance, Biden may be forced to drag two people out of office come January.

Reprinted from Writers on the Range, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Editor’s note: This contributed article is not covered by The Revelator’s usual Creative Commons reprint policy.

Twisted Logic: Why Washington State Should Reject a Dangerous New Climate Theory

Claims that a massive new methanol refinery fed with fracked gas is actually good for the climate need to be firmly rejected — before they enable similar pushes in other states.

Washington state is on the cusp of making its biggest climate pollution decision in years. The state has the power to stop the world’s largest fracked gas-to-methanol refinery, proposed along the Columbia River’s shores in Kalama. But a dangerous new climate theory stands in the way: the displacement theory.

If built this single refinery would use more fracked gas than all the power plants in Washington combined and increase the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by between 4.17 and 5.41 million metric tons a year.

Yet project-backer Northwest Innovation Works suggests that building this new methanol refinery is somehow good for our climate.

How is that possible? The company’s rationale is based on the “displacement theory,” which posits that global emissions will increase more slowly if Washington approves the Kalama methanol refinery because the company would ship the methanol to China to make plastics or to burn as fuel. And if Washington-produced methanol doesn’t exist, China will produce methanol using coal-fired power instead of fracked gas.

This twisted logic isn’t just the company’s rhetoric; it’s been repeated in a new draft study by consultants hired by the Washington Department of Ecology, which is now weighing whether to permit the refinery.

The department’s analysis rests on the assumptions that no cleaner methanol or substitutes will attempt to enter the market in the next 40 years and neither the United States nor China will enact new regulations to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. This presents a dim view of humanity’s history of innovation and commitment to tackling the climate crisis.

Any fossil fuel developer can fabricate worse alternatives. And it’s been tried before.

Backers of the Millennium coal-export terminal in Longview, Washington, claimed their coal would displace dirtier coal in Asia. Tesoro claimed its “lower-carbon Bakken crude” would displace dirtier oil when it proposed the nation’s largest oil-by-rail terminal along the Columbia River.

Washington leaders didn’t take the bait on those proposals because displacement is speculative and unenforceable. And, most importantly, our climate can’t afford to lock in fossil fuel infrastructure for the next 50 years. If Washington — or any other state — adopts the displacement theory, it would create a precedent that invites new fossil fuel projects — and more fracking.

The project, however, was dealt a significant blow Nov. 23 when a court sided with Columbia Riverkeeper and our allies (including the Center for Biological Diversity, publishers of The Revelator) by overturning federal permits for the refinery’s dock. The court held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cannot reissue the permits without first completing a full “environmental impact statement” to consider the proposal’s life-cycle greenhouse gas pollution and other issues.

While this is good news, we don’t need to wait for a federal agency’s environmental review and decision. Washington can stop this climate disaster in its tracks before the end of 2020.

activists holding sign — Hundreds of people from Cowlitz County and neighboring areas rallied before a 2018 hearing to call on Gov. Inslee and Ecology to deny the proposed fracked-gas-to-methanol refinery in Kalama, WA. Photo: Columbia Riverkeeper

The first step: Washington — a state with a mandate to achieve 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045 — should reject the displacement theory’s bleak and dangerous reasoning.

Research has shown that using hydraulically fracturing to produce shale gas has led to a global spike in methane emissions — a potent greenhouse gas — as well as other environmental harms and health concerns.

In fact, in spring 2019 Gov. Jay Inslee said, “I cannot in good conscience support … a methanol production facility in Kalama.”

If that’s the case, why would Washington adopt the displacement theory, which would ramp up fracking and climate emissions?

The Department of Ecology’s analysis also presents a false choice: Is fuel better if it’s derived from gas or coal? The real comparison isn’t coal versus gas, but fracked gas versus clean energy.

Many climate experts tout vehicle electrification as a necessary step toward a truly low-carbon future, but an abundance of cheap fossil fuels — like Northwest Innovation Works’ methanol — could disrupt the adoption of electric vehicle technology.

The displacement theory is antithetical to everything our state is working to accomplish.

Washington, like many states, is innovating new technologies and fighting for new policies. We’re creating positive change, not passively accepting a dark future.

The Department of Ecology’s initial willingness to accept Northwest Innovation Works’ speculative, self-serving and defeatist climate rationalizations jeopardizes Gov. Inslee’s credibility and accomplishments as a climate leader.

But the story is not over.

The department still has time to abandon the displacement theory. It will issue a final environmental review any day, and based on that review will approve or deny a key permit before the end of the year. If Ecology denies the permit, Northwest Innovation Works can’t build the refinery.

With the climate crisis bearing down on us, we demand Gov. Inslee and the Department of Ecology reject the fossil fuel industry’s false choice and embrace a clean energy future.

The answer is clear: Deny the world’s largest fracked gas-to-methanol refinery. In doing so, Washington will set important precedent that other states threatened by fossil fuel infrastructure can look to when making similar decisions.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Is it Too Late to Save ‘America’s Amazon’?

Alabama’s Mobile River basin has the most aquatic biodiversity in the country. But we’re in danger of losing it before we even know what’s there.

When longtime environmental journalist Ben Raines started writing a book about the biodiversity in Alabama, the state had 354 fish species known to science. When he finished writing 10 years later, that number had jumped to 450 thanks to a bounty of new discoveries. Crawfish species leaped from 84 to 97 during the same time.

It’s indicative of a larger trend: Alabama is one of the most biodiverse states in the country, but few people know it. And even scientists are still discovering the rich diversity of life that exists there, particularly in the Mobile River basin.

All this newly discovered biodiversity is also gravely at risk from centuries of exploitation, which is what prompted Raines to write his new book, Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System.

The Revelator talked with Raines about why this region is so biodiverse, why it’s been overlooked, and what efforts are being made to protect it.

What makes Alabama, and particularly the Mobile River system, so biodiverse?

The past kind of defines the present in Alabama.

During the ice ages, when much of the nation was frozen under these giant glaciers, Alabama wasn’t. The glaciers petered out by the time they hit Tennessee. It was much colder but things here didn’t die.

Everything that had evolved in Alabama over successive ice ages is still here. We have a salamander, the Red Hills salamander, that branched off from all other salamander trees 50 million years ago. So this is an ancient salamander, but it’s still here because it never died out.

The other thing you have here, in addition to not freezing, is that it’s really warm. Where I am in Mobile, we’re on the same latitude as Cairo. So the same sun that bakes the Sahara Desert is baking here.

But we also have the rainiest climate in the United States along Alabama’s coast. It actually rains about 70 inches a year here. By comparison, Seattle gets about 55 inches. It makes for a sort of greenhouse effect where we have this intense sun and then plenty of water. Alabama has more miles of rivers and streams than any other state.

Things just grow here.

The pitcher plant bogs of Alabama, for example, are literally among the most diverse places on the planet. In the 1960s a scientist went out and counted every species of flowering plant in an Alabama pitcher plant bog. He came up with 63. That was the highest total found on Earth in a square meter for a decade or more.

For a long time the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was thought to be the center of oak tree diversity in the world because they have about 15 species of oaks in the confines of the park. Well, two years ago scientists working in this area called the Red Hills along the Alabama River found 20 species of oak trees on a single hillside. It’s just staggering.

Why is Alabama’s rich biodiversity not well known or studied?

The state was never known for being a biodiverse place until the early 2000s, when NatureServe came out with this big survey of all the states. It surprised everyone because it showed Alabama leading in aquatic diversity in all the categories — more species of fish, turtles, salamanders, mussels, snails.

This blew everybody away because Alabama in everybody’s mind is the civil rights protests of the 1960s, the KKK, steel mills and cotton fields. But that’s not what’s in Alabama, that’s what we’ve done to Alabama since we’ve been here.

I think part of it also has to do with being a long way from Harvard and Yale and Stanford and the great research institutions that were sending biologists all over the world. Alabama just wasn’t really studied or explored.

Again and again, the story in Alabama is that nobody has ever looked.

That’s one of E.O. Wilson’s big messages about Alabama. He is our most famous living scientist, I would say, or certainly biologist. He grew up here, and now in his twilight years his big mission has become trying to save Alabama. And he describes it as less explored than Borneo and says we have no idea what miracle cures and things we may find in the Mobile River system, which is what I call “America’s Amazon.”

flowering iris — Iris bloom play a significant role in the swamp ecosystem helping to hold the mud in place. Photo: © Ben Raines

As you write about in your book, all this newly discovered biodiversity is at risk. What’s happening?

Alabama is in a very precarious situation. We have the worst environmental laws in the country and the state environmental agency has been the lowest funded of any state going back decades. So there’s very little enforcement. Maybe that’s because nobody realized how rich this place was in terms of diversity, so there was no move to protect it.

But Alabama’s early history, from the discovery of coal, which happened in the 1800s, has been one of exploitation. Massive amounts of forests were taken down in the 1800s for cotton fields. This state produced more cotton than any other back then, and that took a huge natural toll. And typically it’s people from other places, or even other countries, coming here to harvest the natural resources.

When I was born in Alabama in 1970, there were 15 steel mills in Birmingham going full blast. The air and water pollution from the steel mills and the coal mines were on a scale that’s almost unbelievable.

So even when we talk about the biodiversity we have now, we can’t even imagine what we’ve already lost. And this history of exploitation is still going on today. The largest factory built in the United States in the last 25 years was built in Alabama.

Alabama is inviting industry — and industry is coming because you can get a permit here in 30 to 60 days from the state environmental agency. That same permit in California would probably take 10 to 20 years to secure.

One example is the way Alabama does water permits: There’s no limit on how much water industries can take, no matter what environmental havoc may occur.

A couple of years ago we had droughts so bad we actually saw some of the state’s major rivers run dry. The Cahaba River is 150 miles long and it has 120 fish species — more than in the entire state of California.

And during this drought, the industries and golf courses were allowed to suck so much water out of the river it went dry. It only started flowing again downstream from a sewage plant. The entire flow of one of the most diverse rivers in America was the outfall from a sewage plant. It’s the kind of thing you can’t imagine happening in the United States, but it happened here and there were no laws to stop it.

Are there forces pushing back against this, and are people beginning to see the value of Alabama’s biodiversity?

Environmental groups here are having an amazing growth spurt. Twenty years ago our Baykeeper group, which is part of the Riverkeeper alliance, was a one-woman show.

Now it has about a dozen employees and a huge membership. There are many other environmental groups now that have appeared and are doing good work all over the state.

That’s a big change.

As ecotourism is spreading across the country, it’s starting to happen here, too. The state is quickly catching up. There was great outrage among the populace when I wrote a story about the rivers running dry and now there’s an effort at the state level to make a water plan and to actually limit how much water industry can take.

It sounds like there’s still a long way to go for Alabama to catch up with environmental regulations — what else would you like to see happen?

I write a lot in the book about wetlands because so much of our diversity is in these edges where water and land meet. I would like to see the edges protected, but of course the problem is that’s where people want to be. They want to live on the river, on the bay, on the beach. When you couple that with rising sea levels, there’s a collision that’s coming between people and the edges.

Red-wing blackbird on iris — A red-wing blackbird atop the stalk of a lotus blossom. Photo: © Ben Raines

We have to protect that intertidal habitat now and then buy the uplands behind it to get ready for sea-level rise because otherwise our coastal habitats will have nowhere to go.

I would also really like to see Alabama adopt the pollution standards that you see in the surrounding states. For reasons that escape me, the levels of PCBs in fish we allow people to consume before we issue a warning is 10 times higher than any other state. There’s no scientific reason why we would be so far out of step with our neighboring states.

And then there’s the extinction issue. The rate of extinctions in Alabama is roughly double that seen anywhere else in the continental United States. It has more extinctions than Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee put together.

We’re going to go from being the king of diversity to the king of extinctions. And that’ll be a terrible thing not just for Alabama, but for what we know about nature. Alabama has more than twice as many species per square mile as any other state. And if we start losing that diversity, we’re going to have no idea what we’ve lost.

What do you hope people do after reading your book?

I would hope they come to Alabama to see some of these things, because that’s what will make the powers that be care — when ecotourism becomes an industry that can rival industrial manufacturing, then ecotourism will carry as much weight among the lawmakers.

I’ve been here about 20 years, much of that time as the environment reporter for the state’s three biggest newspapers. Those papers were the environment’s best friend. But they’ve been basically destroyed. The papers are just too anemic. In Mobile, we had a newsroom with 90 people in it, and now they have three reporters. The last thing you’re going to see is an in-depth environmental story anymore.

So the book is a love letter and it’s a call to arms, and it’s saying, “love this place, but help.”

I guess at the end of the day, the story in Alabama about the natural world has been a story of taking and never giving back or appreciating what was here in the first place. That’s what has to change. Because if you just keep taking, you know how it will end. There’ll be nothing left.

Biden-Harris Climate Plan: ‘Not Trump’ Is Not Enough

The Biden presidency will re-energize international climate action. But there’s no time to bask in victory.

Joe Biden’s election is a huge positive in a year that has been extremely difficult across the globe. I speak for a vast number of people who watched anxiously from outside the United States when I heartily thank those who mobilized, campaigned and voted to make it happen. Your hard work affects us all.

But we’re not at the end of the line. Far from it.

Biden shows promise, but there can be no backsliding and or watering down. In fact, the ambition needs to grow. Now is the time for truly bold vision, leadership and action. For instance, Biden has said repeatedly that he will not ban fracking, a destructive and polluting practice that uses high-pressure injections of water, chemicals and sand to suck yet more fossil fuels from the ground. Instead he turns to carbon capture to offset these emissions, a plan that relies on untested technology and does nothing to deal with fracking’s methane release, water pollution and health issues.

He can and must do better. And there are two key areas where he can focus to help push transformative climate action: jobs and justice.

Jobs

The fact that Biden ran and won with a proposal to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 highlights one key aspect he got right: A transformation to sustainability means innovation, new livelihoods, revitalization and importantly, jobs.

The green economy in the United States already employs 10 times as many people as the fossil fuel industry, and Biden’s plan specifically focuses on the economic opportunities that tackling climate change will bring.

But climate action is not a flail that we must use to flog ourselves in penitence, seeking absolution for past sins. Action for our planet creates untold opportunities for us. It will provide different ways of living that will reimagine and reinvigorate our relationship with the natural world, making us happier and healthier.

It will give us livelihoods that are truly sustainable, not based on the myth of infinite growth on a finite planet.

Biden’s plan for net zero in energy production by 2035 is a good example of how a climate-smart jobs boom could work. At present 62% of energy in the United States comes from fossil fuels. Wind, hydroelectric and solar power are all growing industries, and renewable energy is expected to be the biggest global energy source by 2025. Shifting U.S. energy production to net zero will create solid, reliable and well-paid jobs across the nation as renewable energy truly takes off. Funding training to enable workers to shift from fossil fuels will be a key part of that transition.

Sunflower signs at a march — An environmental justice march in Detroit. Photo: Marcus Johnstone, (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Justice

Biden has also referenced the need for equality in climate action, setting a goal for disadvantaged communities to receive 40% of all the clean energy and infrastructure benefits his plan would generate.

While this goal is a relatively small step for a big problem, the recognition is important. Ninety-nine percent of all deaths from weather-related disasters occur in the world’s 50 least developed countries — countries that have contributed less than 1% of global carbon emissions.

In every nation around the world, including the United States, this is played out again on a smaller scale. We can’t continue to allow the poorer, marginalized and more vulnerable communities to bear the brunt of a crisis they did not cause.

The U.S. government is uniquely placed to drive forward international progress on climate.

Biden’s climate plan explicitly includes environmental justice as a key target. Within the United States this encompasses standing up to polluters who disproportionately harm marginalized communities.

The United States must reduce its own emissions and maintain strong diplomacy with its international partners. This leadership will allow the Biden-Harris administration to champion environmental justice around the world.

The swift congratulations on Biden’s victory offered by Frank Bainimarama, the Fijian prime minister, show what can now be achieved. The United States being back in a leading role on global climate action means that small island nations, responsible for minimal emissions but suffering outsized, unjust climate impacts, may have a chance of survival. Tens of millions of people have already been displaced by climate breakdown, a grave global environmental injustice. The new administration has a chance to reverse this.

As a major developed economy and one of the worst emitters, action from the United States would put pressure on others — such as China — to do more. Meaningful progress within the United States and European Union, and strong, progressive voices from both parties at the negotiation table could be the change we need.

The votes for this election have been counted, but now the real work begins. We will all be needed — both in and outside the United States — to show again and again that we are watching and we will fight for our future, and our planet, with everything we have.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Seagrass: Another Vital Carbon-Sequestering Ecosystem Threatened by Climate Change

Underwater meadows have rapidly disappeared around the world, but new research suggests they may be the easiest coastal habitat to restore.

Two decades ago scientists and volunteers along the Virginia coast started tossing seagrass seeds into barren seaside lagoons. Disease and an intense hurricane had wiped out the plants in the 1930s, and no nearby meadows could serve as a naturally dispersing source of seeds to bring them back.

The seeding effort eventually delivered more than 70 million seeds — and it paid off, creating some 9,000 acres of the underwater plants.

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Please share this important new video because we must make EVERYONE aware that seagrass captures harmful CO2 up to 35x faster than tropical rainforests, so these guys are doing important work! Grass forests also serve as nurseries for TONS of marine species, literally breathing life into the ocean. Thanks to this underwater restoration effort, Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay is thriving and playing a key role towards slowing down climate change! Share this post and tag people who need to see it too as we MUST all support hardworking organizations and crucial environmental initiatives for our planet and oceans like this too! GREAT Video by @vainstituteofmarinescience @get.waste.ed #seagrass #climatechange #karmagawa #savethereef

A post shared by SaveTheReef (@savethereef) on Nov 1, 2020 at 8:01pm PST

Now monitoring of these restored meadows reveals multiple benefits to their restoration, including substantial increases in fish and invertebrate abundance, improved water clarity, and significant trapping of carbon and nitrogen.

“Planting adult seagrass is very labor intensive, but we started looking at using seeds in the lab and found it was quite easy,” says biologist Robert “JJ” Orth, lead author on a new paper about the project. “These areas have good water quality, are shallow and are near the ocean so they get bathed in cooler water — perfect conditions. It was a surprise how quickly it happened.”

Seagrass scallops — Restored seagrass beds in Virginia now provide habitat for hundreds of thousands of scallops. Photo: Bob Orth, Virginia Institute of Marine Science (CC BY 2.0)

The paper is part of a growing trend of evidence suggesting seagrass meadows can be easier to restore than other coastal habitats.

Successful seagrass-restoration methods include transplanting shoots, mechanized planting and, more recently, biodegradable mats. Removing threats, proximity to donor seagrass beds, planting techniques, project size and site selection all play roles in a restoration effort’s success.

Human assistance isn’t always necessary, though. In areas where some beds remain, seagrass can even recover on its own when stressors are reduced or removed. For example, seagrass began to recover when Tampa Bay improved its water quality by reducing nitrogen loads from runoff by roughly 90%.

But more and more, seagrass meadows struggle to hang on.

The marine flowering plants have declined globally since the 1930s and currently disappear at a rate equivalent to a football field every 30 minutes, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. And research published in 2018 found the rate of decline is accelerating in many regions.

The causes of decline vary and overlap, depending on the region. They include thermal stress from climate change; human activities such as dredging, anchoring and coastal infrastructure; and intentional removal in tourist areas. In addition, increased runoff from land carries sediment that clouds the water, blocking sunlight the plants need for photosynthesis. Runoff can also carry contaminants and nutrients from fertilizer that disrupt habitats and cause algal blooms.

All that damage comes with a cost.

The Value of Seagrass

As with ecosystems like rainforests and mangroves, loss of seagrass increases carbon dioxide emissions. And that spells trouble not just for certain habitats but for the whole planet.

Although seagrass covers at most 0.2% of the seabed, it accounts for 10% of the ocean’s capacity to store carbon in soils, and these meadows store carbon dioxide an estimated 30 times faster than most terrestrial forests. Slow decomposition rates in seagrass sediments contribute to their high carbon burial rates. In Australia, according to research by scientists at Edith Cowan University, loss of seagrass meadows since the 1950s has increased carbon dioxide emissions by an amount equivalent to 5 million cars a year. The United Nations Environment Programme reports that a 29% decline in seagrass in Chesapeake Bay between 1991 and 2006 resulted in an estimated loss of up to 1.8 million tons of carbon.

Seagrasses also protect costal habitats. A healthy meadow slows wave energy, reduces erosion and lowers the risk of flooding. In Morro Bay, California, a 90% decline in the seagrass species known as eelgrass caused extensive erosion, according to a paper from researchers at California Polytechnic State University.

“Right away, we noticed big patterns in sediment loss or erosion,” says lead author Ryan Walter. “Many studies have shown this on individual eelgrass beds, but very few studies looked at it on a systemwide scale.”

In the tropics, seagrass’s natural protection can reduce the need for expensive and often-environmentally unfriendly beach nourishments regularly conducted in tourism areas.

Seagrass ecosystems improve water quality and clarity, filtering particles out of the water column and preventing resuspension of sediment. This role could be even more important in the future. By producing oxygen through photosynthesis, meadows could help offset decreased oxygen levels caused by warmer water temperatures (oxygen is less soluble in warm than in cold water).

The meadows also provide vital habitat for a wide variety of marine life, including fish, sea turtles, birds, marine mammals such as manatees, invertebrates and algae. They provide nursery habitat for roughly 20% of the world’s largest fisheries — an estimated 70% of fish habitats in Florida alone.

Conversely, their disappearance can contribute to die-offs of marine life. The loss of more than 20 square miles of seagrass in Florida’s Biscayne Bay may have helped set the stage for a widespread fish kill in summer 2020. Lack of grasses to produce oxygen left the basin more vulnerable when temperatures rose and oxygen levels dropped as a result, says Florida International University professor Piero Gardinali.

Damaged Systems, a Changing Climate

Governments and conservationists around the world have already put a lot of effort into coastal restoration efforts. And that’s helped some seagrass populations.

Where stressors remain, though, restoration grows more complicated. Research published this September found that only 37% of seagrass restorations have survived. Newly restored meadows remain vulnerable to the original stressors that depleted them, as well as to storms — and climate change.

In Chesapeake Bay a cold-water species of seagrass is currently hitting its heat limit, especially in summer, according to Alexander Challen Hyman of University of Florida’s School of Natural Resources and Environment. As waters continue to warm due to climate change, the species likely will disappear there.

Climate-driven sea-level rise complicates the problem as well. Seagrasses thrive at specific depths — too shallow and they dry out or are eaten, too deep and there isn’t enough light for photosynthesis.

But There’s Good News, Too

Luckily, left to its own devices, a seagrass meadow can flourish for hundreds of years, according to a paper published last year by Hyman and other researchers from the University of Florida. The researchers arrived at their conclusion by looking at shells of living mollusks and fossil shells to estimate the ages of meadows in Florida’s Big Bend region on the Gulf Coast.

That area has extensive, relatively pristine seagrass meadows. “Our motivation was to understand the past history of these systems, and shells store a lot of history,” says co-author Michal Kowalewski.

A high degree of similarity between living and dead shells indicates a stable area, while a mismatch suggests an area shifted from seagrass to barren sand. The researchers found that long-term accumulations of shells resembled living ones, suggesting that the seagrass habitats have been stable over time.

That stability allows biodiversity to thrive, creating conditions where specialist species can survive and flourish, according to Hyman.

Discovering the long-term stability of seagrass meadows has implications for choosing restoration sites, Kowalewski notes.

“There must be reasons they thrive in one place, while a mile away they don’t and fossil data says they probably never did,” he says. “If we remove a seagrass patch, we cannot hope to plant it somewhere else. It’s not just the seagrass that is special. The location at which it’s found is special, too.”

A better approach is conserving these habitats in the first place, but we’re not doing enough of that right now. The UN reports that marine protected areas safeguard just 26% of recorded seagrass meadows, compared with 40% of coral reefs and 43% of mangroves.

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The roughtail stingray, Dasyatis centroura, is the largest of the whiptail stingrays, growing to over 7 feet wide. Here, you can see one cruising over the seagrass in the Canary Islands 🌱 🎥: @especies_de_canarias

A post shared by Project Seagrass (@projectseagrass) on Oct 29, 2020 at 12:41pm PDT

In the meantime, small actions can make a big difference — such as fertilizer ordinances, for example, Gardinali suggests.

“Nitrogen and phosphorus are the problem,” he says. “It’s an easy first step. We can change the way we do small things, one at a time.”

Everything we do at this point will help, not only seagrass but everything that depends on it.

“These habitats are so vital,” Hyman says. “Putting aside erosion control and all these benefits people might not find as important, they harbor juvenile stages of all these marine species we like to eat — blue crabs, for example. From that standpoint alone, seagrass provides countless benefits to the economy.”

Those benefits have mostly gone ignored in favor of more visible, charismatic land-based habitats. That needs to change, the experts say.

“What the trees in the Amazon rainforest provide for that system is what eelgrass provides in estuarine systems,” says Walter. “So many ecosystem services, beyond just being a beautiful grass.”

One that, if we let it, will provide those services for hundreds of years.