How to Win the Fight Against Plastic

The Story of Stuff Project’s Stiv Wilson talks about an upcoming film that traces the life cycle of plastic and the people leading the fight against it.

When you throw things away, do you wonder where “away” is? An upcoming film, to be released this fall by the nonprofit The Story of Stuff Project, traces the journey of our plastic products. It covers not just where our plastic goes but also where it comes from.

It’s a lesson we need.

We’re at a reckoning point with plastic waste. Many countries that once accepted our discards are now turning it away. Islands of plastic are growing in the ocean, and it’s being eaten by animals living in the farthest reaches of the planet. The current rate of plastic production is “incongruent to planet Earth,” says Stiv Wilson, director of campaigns for The Story of Stuff Project. And yet industry is planning to ramp up production fueled by the availability of cheap natural gas.

So what to do? According to Wilson, we need to lift up the voices of those who live in the most affected places. They already know what solutions work best.

Bringing those voices to the front is at the heart of The Story of Stuff’s new film, he says. But to find those people, they had to travel far and wide. The journey took them to the oilfields of Karnes County, Texas; a pipeline route through western Pennsylvania; the ship channel of Houston; the ghost towns in China that are turning away plastic waste; Jakarta, where plastic pollution is dozens of feet deep; and India, where plastic-burning incinerators spew toxic chemicals into the air.

We talked with Wilson about the upcoming movie and his journey to produce it.

The Story of Stuff Project’s Stiv Wilson has traveled the world looking for solutions to our plastic crisis.

What are you hoping this film will accomplish?

For a long time, I think, the plastic pollution issue has been framed as an ocean issue, and what we haven’t really talked about enough is what the whole system of plastic looks like. Plastic pollutes at every stage of its life cycle.

I don’t think most people know that if you want it to stop plastic from going into the ocean in Indonesia you need to ban fracking in the Ohio River valley. The U.S. is the largest exporter of oil and gas as feedstocks for plastic — we feed China, we feed Europe — because of the fracking boom here.

So our intention with the film is to show the entire system of plastic and that includes every stage and also that upstream the human health concerns are way more significant than eating fish that’s eaten plastic — living next to a refinery for plastics is going to be far more dangerous.

But all along the life cycle of plastics there’s people fighting back. These are people whose stories you don’t often hear and they are the people who actually have the solutions to the problem.

Were there places that really impacted you personally?

The hardest thing I witnessed on this whole trip was outside of Delhi. There was an open dump, which was bigger than the pyramids at Giza — you can see it 20 miles away. And at the base of that is an urban dairy farm. Then right adjacent to it is an incinerator where the toxic bottom and fly ash is going straight into the dump. Then it rains and that goes into water that cows are drinking. There was this one scene where I saw a baby cow drinking from its mother at the base of this dump with the incinerator in the background. And I’m talking to people who work on this urban dairy farm and they’re saying that you die 30 years earlier if you live here, but they have no other choice — this is their livelihood.

You go down the Ci Liwung River in Jakarta, Indonesia and you see the stratification of plastic bags 15-30 feet deep in the soil. Sadly, plastic is part of the geological record at this point.

It’s one thing to witness this as just an everyday citizen, but when you come at it from an activist perspective like myself, you’re looking at the whole system that created this. How many bad decisions in a row got us to this point, and how entrenched it is? And how do you stop this?

What’s the balance between cleanup and prevention at this point?

Every year we have this feel-good day in September for international coastal cleanup. And every year we realize that more and more plastic is on the beach. And it feels like a dog chasing its tail. But now with the Break Free From Plastic movement, which is 1,400 NGOs globally that are all operating from the same strategy, vision and principles, we’ve instituted a kind of hack to those cleanups to start reporting brand data. And that flips the narrative of who’s responsible for the stuff. It’s no longer that just everyday people are the problem — it’s the companies that produce this stuff.

I don’t believe that any cleanup efforts are going to work if we don’t prevent the problem in the first place. Industry will say it’s a management problem, but this is unmanageable. There’s way too much plastic in the system.

So the first message is, you have to stop this massive petrochemical buildout that’s looking to put 40 percent more plastic into commerce by 2025. Because we just can’t deal with that as a global society.

Plastic waste burning — Plastic waste in Surabaya, Indonesia is openly burned or used as fuel for furnaces to boil water for tofu factories, with no environmental controls. (Photo by Stiv Wilson)

With fewer and fewer countries willing to accept our plastic, is recycling in jeopardy?

There’s so much plastic in the system that it doesn’t have much value for recycling any more. If the supply far exceeds the demand and it’s exponentially growing, you’re never going to solve the problem. You’re never going to make the economics of recycling really work. China closed its doors and now, on the West Coast of the United States, we’re stockpiling plastic. There’s nowhere for it to go, so it’s being landfilled.

We need to build circularity into our economy — stop waste exports, do domestic recycling and ban problematic products.

There’s this idea that recycling will save us. It’s wrong. It’s a good thing to recycle if you have good environmental controls and good protocols for human rights, but you don’t have that in the developing world. You don’t have either of those things because the margins are so small on recycling that you have to cut corners, and those corners that are cut affect both people and planet.

What did you find that was hopeful?

When you look at the people fighting back in the system, I think if we can elevate those voices, we can win. I see the unsung leaders from developing nations getting to the world stage and talking about real solutions.

For instance, we saw a decentralized waste-management program in the Philippines that provides basic collection and source segregation for materials. It was a very poor neighborhood that was filled with so much plastic you couldn’t see the ground, and now it’s absolutely immaculate. Waste pickers have been turned into civil servants.

It’s a very simple system that’s scalable and economic. It’s also 85 percent cheaper because all organics are composted and all materials that have markets for recycling are recycled. So you’re down to 10 to 20 percent residual waste, which means you’re sending one to two trucks to the landfill instead of 10, which saves a tremendous amount of money. You can see how this can be scaled at the country level and would work for other countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam.

Elsewhere there are also some really progressive policies that are starting to mandate that you put recycled content into new packaging applications so that you don’t need the feedstocks — you don’t need all the fracking.

At every part of the system you have people with really genius interventions, and it’s all about scaling this up through stories in media, popularizing those and then just implementing them because the solutions are there. It’s right in front of our face.

I’m also heartened by the Break Free From Plastic movement that’s building a lot of solidarity and power. It’s very intersectional. We’re finally talking about the entire system of plastic, and we’re crafting policy to address the entire system.

What makes me hopeful is that the scale of the movement responding to the problem is starting to match the scale of the problem itself. For many years we’ve been under-resourced and under-powered and that has changed. The movement is growing and it’s gaining in power.

The good news is that the solution is right in front us. The bad news is the current system is very entrenched, and there’s a lot of money behind it. So it’s a big fight.

Declaring a Climate Change Emergency: Would It Be Legal? Would It Be Useful?

Environmental and constitutional law scholar Dan Farber explains what a climate change emergency declaration could achieve.

The possibility of declaring a national emergency to address climate change will probably remain under discussion for the next couple of years, particularly if the courts uphold President Trump’s wall “emergency.” As a legal scholar, I want to explain how a climate emergency declaration would work and what it could and couldn’t do. But first I want to emphasize three key points:

Declaring a climate emergency should be off the table if the Supreme Court rules against Trump.
An emergency declaration is not a magic wand that gives presidents a blank check. A declaration would allow some constructive steps to be taken, but within limits.
The ultimate goal has to be congressional action, and an emergency declaration should only be considered as part of a larger legislative and administrative agenda.

Even if the Supreme Court upholds Trump, using this precedent to fight climate change will require some real soul-searching. Trump has violated a longstanding norm of presidential restraint in using emergency powers to address domestic policy. Whether to disavow or exploit that change in norms is a hard question. And declaring a climate emergency might help mobilize public opinion in support of legislative action, or it might cause a backlash that would make new legislation harder. But if the Supreme Court rules for Trump, the idea of a climate change emergency declaration has to be taken seriously.

Something of a compromise position might be to declare that the resilience of the electrical grid is a national emergency, not climate change itself. That would still allow some important actions that would help reduce carbon emissions. Basically, many of the steps that are needed to decarbonize the grid would also increase its ability to resist and bounce back from disruptions due to national disasters or cyberattacks on the energy system.

With all that in mind, here’s what you need to know about the issues.

Transmission lines — Electric transmission lines. (Photo by Tonyglen14, CC BY 2.0)

Would Climate Change Qualify as a National Emergency?

Trump has declared a national emergency so he can build his wall. But if illegal border crossings are a national emergency, then there’s a strong case for viewing climate change in similar terms. That point has been made by observers ranging from Marco Rubio to a Legal Planet post by Jonathan Zasloff.

I agree, but I want to dig deeper because it’s such an important point. In order to uphold Trump’s emergency declaration, the Supreme Court will have to either rule that the definition of emergency is exceedingly broad or that courts have little or no power to scrutinize a presidential declaration. There is a genuine legal basis for calling climate change a national emergency, as opposed to Trump’s ridiculous border-security declaration.

If it upholds Trump’s declaration, it would be extremely hard for the Supreme Court to overturn a climate change declaration. One reason is that some attributes of climate change and immigration are similar. Both issues involve the country’s relations with the outside world, an area where presidential powers are strong. But it isn’t as if we suddenly found out about border crossings or climate change. Given these similarities, it would be very difficult for the conservative majority to explain why it was deferring to the president in one case but not the other.

The only major difference actually cuts strongly in favor of an emergency declaration for climate change: The U.S. government has already classified climate change as a serious threat to national security, and it is a threat that is getting stronger daily. Recent science indicates that climate action is even more urgent than we thought.

Trump’s stated justification in his proclamation is that “the problem of large-scale unlawful migration through the southern border is longstanding, and despite the executive branch’s exercise of existing statutory authorities, the situation has worsened in certain respects in recent years.” Climate change, too, is a “longstanding problem,” and it certainly has gotten worse despite the effort of the executive branch (Obama) to address the problem. Federal agencies, as well as Congress, have made it clear that climate is a serious threat to our nation.

Other parts of the government have weighed in as well.

The Environmental Protection Agency has made a formal finding, based on an exhaustive review of the scientific evidence, that greenhouse gases endanger human life and welfare both within the United States and globally. That finding was upheld by the D.C. Circuit. The Supreme Court reviewed other aspects of the D.C. Circuit’s decision but pointedly turned down requests that it review this EPA finding. The scientific evidence is ironclad. If a foreign power had somehow invented a weather-control technique to impose these harms on the United States, no one would doubt that this was a very serious national security problem. Trump is now trying to defuse this argument by convening a presidential commission, but the makeup of the commission will deprive it of any credibility.

National security agencies have also consistently viewed climate change as a serious threat. In written testimony to Congress about threats to national security, the Trump administration’s own Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats discussed the serious threat of climate change. “The past 115 years have been the warmest period in the history of modern civilization, and the past few years have been the warmest years on record,” he said. “Extreme weather events in a warmer world have the potential for greater impacts and can compound with other drivers to raise the risk of humanitarian disasters, conflict, water and food shortages, population migration, labor shortfalls, price shocks and power outages. Research has not identified indicators of tipping points in climate-linked earth systems, suggesting a possibility of abrupt climate change.”

The military has already taken a proactive stance on climate change. Former Secretary James Mattis was clear about the impact of climate change on national security: “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today. . . It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning,” he said.

Retired U.S. Navy Captain Joe Bouchard, former commander of Naval Station Norfolk, which is threatened by sea-level rise. (Photo by Chesapeakeclimate, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Congress, too, has recognized climate change as a threat to national security and more specifically to military infrastructure and activities. The most significant action was the passage of the Defense Authorization Act of 2017, H.R. 1810. The Act was a funding statute for the Pentagon. Section 335 of the Act states that “climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and is impacting stability in areas of the world both where the United States Armed Forces are operating today, and where strategic implications for future conflict exist.” In a crucial House vote, 46 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote against an effort to take out the climate provision. President Trump signed the bill.

Given all of this, if the Supreme Court does uphold Trump’s order, it will be very difficult to overturn a presidential declaration that climate change is a national emergency.

What Legal Authority Would an Emergency Climate Declaration Give the President?

What government powers would be unlocked by declaring a climate change emergency? One immediate possibility would be to use the same power that Trump is considering in order to divert military construction funds to other uses — in this case, perhaps building wind or solar farms or new transmission lines. But what else could President X do?

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law has compiled a helpful list of almost 150 statutes giving the president special powers during emergencies. The list doesn’t map the outer perimeter of presidential powers — there are other laws that give presidents powers to take action on the basis of national security, and the president also has some ill-defined, though not unlimited, powers to take action without explicit congressional authorization. But the list provides a good start, and here are just a few of the possibilities:

Oil leases are required to have clauses allowing them to be suspended during national emergencies. (43 USC 1341) If climate change is a national emergency caused by fossil fuels, then suspension seems like a logical response.
The president has emergency powers to respond to industrial shortfalls in national emergencies. (50 USC 4533). This could be used to support expansion of battery or electrical vehicle production. Another provision allows the president to extend loan guarantees to critical industries during national emergencies. (50 USC 4531). This could be used to support renewable energy more generally.
The secretary of Transportation has broad power to “coordinate transportation” during national emergencies. (49 U.S.C 114). This might allow various restrictions on automobile and truck use to decrease emissions of greenhouse gases.
The president may invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to deal with “any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” (50 USC 1701-1707). That description certainly applies to climate change. According to the Brennan Center, this Act “confers broad authority to regulate financial and other commercial transactions involving designated entities, including the power to impose sanctions on individuals and countries.” Conceivably, these powers could be deployed against companies or countries trafficking in fossil fuels.

Those are just some from the Brennan Center list. Moreover, as I said above, the president has other powers relating to national security, statutory and otherwise, that aren’t keyed to a declaration of national emergency — for instance, the kinds of tariffs Trump has imposed on foreign goods (say those relating to oil and gas drilling, or to oil imports).

The Houston ship channel. (Photo by Roy Luck, CC BY 2.0)

You might well respond that using these various powers to deal with climate change is stretching them far beyond any reasonable understanding of congressional intent. But if the courts upholds Trump’s action, that will be a sign that they’re not willing to apply any meaningful oversight to presidential actions.

What Would Be the Possible Benefits of an Emergency Declaration?

Declaring a climate emergency could have benefits even apart from any concrete follow-up. It would be a strong signal that the United States recognizes the urgent need to cut carbon emissions — a signal to the international community as well as courts and agencies within the country. That would be a plus by itself.

Beyond that, I would favor tying emergency actions (at least at the start) to recognized issues that impact our society’s security. One is grid resilience. Renewables and storage would make a particular contribution to resilience in areas where they have the least penetration, meaning the Southeast, but also in many other states. Microgrids combined with distributed solar could also be useful in the wake of natural disasters like the hurricanes endemic to the Gulf Coast. We need to jump-start the carbon transition in those parts of the country to pave the way for more comprehensive measures. We also need to upgrade the grid elsewhere. Doing so would allow much bigger cuts in emissions from the electricity sector.

Another security-related issue involves military installations. The military has already taken steps to increase use of renewables and to harden sites against sea level rise. But a lot more could be done, particularly in the way of much greater electrical storage capacity (which might include use of electric vehicle batteries). Military funds could be redirected for these purposes, and the military could also be involved in increasing grid resilience in areas surrounding military bases and for critical infrastructure more generally. This could be especially helpful in starting the ball rolling in the Southeast, which remains the most backward area in terms of renewable energy.

A third option would be to take America out of the business of encouraging the use of coal in other countries. Emergency and national security powers give the president considerable leverage over exports and financing of foreign projects. We should not be devoting our resources or production to encouraging countries like India to build more coal plants.

It would take a lot more work to turn these ideas into actionable proposals. We’d need to know the effect of these measures, the available resources and just what statutory provisions would support them. Closer study could also turn up additional possibilities. It would probably take a sustained effort, maybe by a small team, to work through the issues in-depth.

If the Supreme Court overturns Trump’s order, declaring a climate emergency seems far less appealing. But who knows if that will happen? And of course, we have no way of knowing just when we might have a president who actually wants to do something about climate change. That’s definitely not something we should take for granted. But if and when it does happen, he or she should have access to a full analysis of the policy options.

As much as I care about climate change, I am hoping that the courts reject Trump’s emergency declaration, which would make these questions moot. Even putting aside my feelings about the wall itself, I think it’s an undesirable expansion of presidential power. But there’s no guarantee the courts will stop Trump. If his action is upheld, the door will be open for declaring a climate emergency, if we choose to go down that path.

A version of this story first appeared on Legal Planet.

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.

Legume Gone: The Shocking Reasons for a Tree’s Extinction in India

It appears to have been wiped out by pollution, development and illegal mining by “sand mafias.” Will other plants soon follow?

Sand is big business — and a dangerous one.

Around the world illegal sand mining — often run by vicious “sand mafias” — has been linked to black markets, violence and even murder. It’s the shadier side of a multibillion-dollar industry with a voracious appetite for minerals used in everything from construction to electronics to toothpaste.

This criminal activity has already caused massive ecological problems wherever it occurs, and now the sand mafias appear to have contributed to something new: the extinction of a rare tree in coastal India.

According to a paper published in March in the journal Phytotaxa, an exhaustive search along the coasts of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, has failed to find any evidence of a rare legume tree known as Vachellia bolei. Researchers have declared the species is “possibly extinct.”

The paper itself blames “habitat destruction and other anthropogenic factors” for the possible extinction. That’s fairly general, but an email from the research team gets more specific.

“We strongly believe that sand mining, illegal felling of trees and conversion of coastal sand dunes for cultivation might be the major reasons for the possible extinction of Vachellia bolei,” write the authors, K. Sampath Kumar, K. Kathiresan and S. Arumugam.

The researchers conducted more than 100 surveys between 2012 and 2017 looking for Vachellia bolei and other local plants. As they write, it wasn’t always the easiest work. Illegal mining has eliminated many coastal sand dunes, causing severe coastal erosion, and “it is not even possible to survey some of the areas that are under the ‘control’ of these mafias,” they say. (They add that they never felt as though they were in danger, although they were blocked from exploring mining areas by workers who thought they were investigative journalists.)

The mafias aren’t alone in bearing the blame for damaging the local ecosystem. A number of other factors also threaten coastal plant species in Tamil Nadu, most notably “continuous and severe” pollution from a growing human population and rapid levels of development. “Mindless waste disposal all along the coastal habitats and into or near watercourses is rampant,” the researchers say. “We must remember that whatever pollution happening in the plains and the nearby hills ultimately reaches the estuaries and the sea. This also creates tremendous pressure on the fragile ecosystems.”

The North Chennai Thermal Power Station has a history of pollution. Photo: Prateek Rungta (CC BY 2.0)

Other risk factors include coral mining — which has resulted in the shrinking or submergence of several nearby islands — illegal logging for firewood and other uses, dwindling freshwater flow into estuaries, climate change and possibly invasive species.

As a result of all of these threats, Vachellia bolei is not the only plant at risk in Tamil Nadu.

“This is just tip of the iceberg, as there are many more species vanished or vanishing,” the researchers write. They estimate that about 30 percent of the estimated 2,000 plant species along the coast have now become locally threatened. In particular, they point out, the number of mangrove species known to grow in the area has fallen from 30 to just 13.

The ecological cost of losing Vachellia bolei is hard to estimate. The species was only scientifically collected three times, and although its role in the ecosystem was never studied it was probably significant. The researchers note that other legume species from the Acacia genus serve to enrich the soil, sequester carbon, stabilize dunes and provide habitat to a variety of birds and pollinator insects. The plants’ nutritious pods are eaten by humans and cattle, while the bark, flowers and other parts have been tapped for their medicinal uses.

Could Vachellia bolei still exist? The paper indicates the tree would have been hard to miss during surveys due to its large size, “prominently nerved” leaves and spines with sharp tips. Still, the researchers tell me, there’s a “most remote” change that it still clings to life in the region’s sacred groves, which have a long tradition of protecting local botanical species. The groves were not covered in this study because they’re typically located away from the coast.

Whether illegal sand mining caused, or just contributed to, this extinction, the announcement is a reminder of what else we have to lose. The authors say they hope this research will serve as an “eye-opener” to bring attention to the problems in Tamil Nadu and lead to “prioritizing and conserving many other wild threatened coastal plants of the region — and thereby preserve the diversity of dependent insects, animals and microbes — in the near future.” More broadly, conservation groups have long warned that sand mining around the world threatens biodiversity and endangered species, and without action Vachellia bolei may not be the last to disappear.

“I’m not surprised” by this extinction, says Kiran Pereira, founder of SandStories, an initiative that talks about the need to better manage the world’s consumption of sand. “I am saddened, but I would like to remain hopeful that we can turn the tide at least for the other species that depend on sand.”

Plastic Pollution: Could We Have Solved the Problem Nearly 50 Years Ago?

What if we’d listened to the researchers who first warned us about plastic pollution in the 1970s?

There’s plastic in seabirds, in the middle of the remote Pacific Ocean, even in people. It’s a challenge to turn to the news these days without reading or hearing the latest horror story about plastic pollution. These updates seem new and striking and scary, but in reality much of the fundamental information contained in these stories is actually far from fresh.

“In the last five years there has been more published research on plastics than in the previous 50 years,” says Marcus Eriksen, 5 Gyres Institute cofounder and research director, who’s a well-known contemporary documentarian of microplastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other parts of the oceans. “In the past the public did not get adequate information, or the right information, early enough to act.”

The Revelator took a deep dive into reams of historic plastic pollution research and uncovered that much of what’s considered “new” today has actually been known by scientists for decades but was not well publicized in the popular media until recently.

That delay in spreading the news about the threats of plastic came with a major cost. In the time since scientific research on plastic pollution was first published in the early 1970s, billions of metric tons of plastic waste has been tossed in landfills and accumulated in terrestrial and marine ecosystems — and in the bodies of countless people and animals.

That scientists knew plastic pollution was a growing problem back in the Seventies begs two essential questions: What would the world be like if we had listened to early researchers much earlier? And what prevented us from listening?

Initial Findings

The earliest peer-reviewed research on plastic pollution in the oceans was based in observation of how the materials were behaving in the environment.

One paper, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies in 1972, identified the phenomenon of plastic consumer packaging washing up on isolated shorelines as an ecological concern. Written by University of Aston chemist Gerald Scott, the paper discussed the problematically slow biodegradation speed of plastic in the marine environment and outlined a “need for the acceleration of this process” to prevent further ecological harm.

That same year a scientist named Edward J. Carpenter, who now works as a professor at San Francisco State University, became the first to publish warnings about what would eventually be known as “microplastics.” While posted as a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Carpenter published two landmark 1972 papers describing “plastic particles” in the Sargasso Sea and plastic spheres used for plastic production (called nurdles) that had absorbed PCBs in waters off Southern New England and were found inside several fish caught there.

The decades following Carpenter’s initial work saw the publication of just a few dozen papers on marine plastic pollution. In fact, from the time Carpenter announced finding small plastic particles in the oceans, it took more than three decades for the scientific term “microplastic” to be published in major international publications. Today publication of these papers is much more frequent. A search of Google Scholar found 771 papers containing the words “microplastic” or “microplastics” published in 2018 alone.

Although plastic pollution wasn’t making news headlines decades ago, the research did continue, with several important early findings made. This includes the 1973 discovery of small plastic particles accumulating in the bodies of seabirds (today we know more than 90 percent of all seabirds have eaten plastic at some point in their lives) and the identification of large quantities of plastic floating on the Pacific Ocean between California and Japan (where we now know the Great Pacific Garbage Patch lies).

Plastic bird stomach — Plastic found in one dead seabird’s stomach. Photo: Carol Meteyer, USGS

Early research suggests that scientists knew from the start that the biggest issue with plastic is that it never decomposes. It only breaks up into tiny pieces that can be ingested by marine wildlife and humans, with unclear — but almost certainly negative — consequences.

One major concern is toxins, which plastic can both absorb and leach out. While this issue has gotten significant amounts of media coverage in the past few years, some of the earliest plastic pollution researchers supposed that if ingested in small amounts, “consumed particles of plastic could release sufficient amounts of PCB’s to affect seabirds,” as Stephen I. Rothstein wrote in a 1973 paper on marine plastic pollution.

It took more than a decade after publication of the papers by Carpenter and other early researchers before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States’ main ocean science agency, convened the world’s top marine scientists to discuss plastic pollution. In 1984 the agency hosted the First International Conference on Marine Debris. As former NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center deputy director Jim Coe later recalled, the goal of the conference was to discuss whether or not marine debris, specifically lost and abandoned fishing gear, “was a problem worth people’s attention.”

They quickly agreed that it was. Scientists at the conference concluded that plastic was accumulating in the natural environment and called for more research to better understand what seemed to be a growing problem. They also made the earliest call for legal action to prevent pollution from ships, which prompted Congress to fund an early version of NOAA’s Marine Debris Program called the Marine Entanglement and Research Program — which had a responsibility of facilitating research, publicizing data and minimizing the problem.

Plastic Industry Influence

During the early 1980s, plastic manufacturers continued to sell consumers on the utility of their products, specifically plastic bags, without publicly acknowledging that the materials were harming the environment. In fact, they tried to show the opposite by pushing ideas about plastic’s abilities to be reused and recycled.

“Plastic bags can be reused in more than 17 different ways, including as a wrap for frozen foods, a jogger’s wind breaker or a beach bag,” the industry-backed Plastic Grocery Sack Council told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. A New York Times story published a few years prior lightly debates whether or not consumers would prefer using plastic bags to paper, given the industry’s push to get them into grocery stores around the world — without mentioning any of the environmental consequences.

But the real push for plastic started even earlier. Plastics-history expert Rebecca Altman recalls how a 1950s packaging magazine editor told industry insiders that “The future of plastics is in the trash can.” Altman, who has deeply explored the human connection to plastic, says that the world had to be conditioned to carelessly consume. Prior to that time, “it was not in the culture to use something once and throw it away.” Today the items most commonly found in nature are so-called “single-use” plastics.

Promoting public narratives about litter to focus on recycling as a solution has, for a long time, “been a way to deflect attention and responsibility for product design away from industry, and has been very effective,” says Eriksen.

Despite this focus on recycling, recent research finds just 9 percent of plastics ever made have been recycled, and the large majority has either ended up in landfills or the natural environment.

A Plastic Cover-up?

Though contemporary plastic pollution scientists say they are aware of these past studies and their significance, they claim the public is not — due to insufficient news coverage of the issue and industry campaigns designed to keep them in the dark.

“Industry has aggressively defended themselves, manipulating public perception, and attacking scientists perceived as a threat,” Eriksen says.

“For both papers in Science the Society of the Plastics Industry sent a representative (twice) to Woods Hole, basically to intimidate me,” claims Carpenter, the early plastics researcher. “I was not given tenure at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and I think the plastic papers hurt my career there.”

That trade group is now known as the Plastics Industry Association. When reached for comment, it refused to confirm or deny Carpenter’s claims.

But it’s well known that certain industries have covered up the link between tobacco use and cancer, and fossil fuel use and climate change. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists’ “Disinformation Playbook,” corporations have followed a specific pattern when attempting to block legislation and minimize their liability for problems created by their products. The plastics industry appears to have followed the same predictable plays as other deceptive businesses: blitzing scientists who speak out with “inconvenient” results or views, diverting attention from scientific recommendations (to cut plastic use), and making strong attempts to block unfavorable policies (banning or restricting plastic use), among other strategies.

Besides industry silencing of research and shaping consumers’ mindsets around waste, Altman suggests the media also played a part in the issue of global plastic pollution first being overlooked and then finally coming to the fore of global consciousness. It’s a combination of plastic pollution worsening and the nature of media changing over time, Altman says. Today social platforms have the ability for anyone, anywhere, to share what has been ignored long enough to become an enormous and visually compelling story. Just think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and all the media attention that’s gotten in the past decade, she says.

“Culturally we focus on environmental problems of a spectacular nature, the kind of havoc that happens in a bewildering instant,” she says. “It’s hard to see the slow-moving disasters or tragedies that happen over time — the drip, drip, drip — until it’s of a disastrous proportion.”

Carpenter agrees, emphasizing the gap between the scientific discovery of plastic pollution in the oceans and publicity about the problem. “I believe that the Captain Moore TED Talk on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plus Marcus Eriksen of 5 Gyres, plus a video on dying albatrosses at Midway Island, plus the graphic video of the sea turtle with the plastic straw up its nose began to finally wake up the public,” he says.

What’s the Solution?

Nonprofits like 5 Gyres are now pushing an agenda toward public awareness, corporate responsibility and the idea of a circular economy — an economy that focuses on keeping waste to a minimum while maximizing materials’ use. NGOs’ activism has also kick-started a spurt of municipal and national policies aimed at reducing use of plastic items worldwide in a bid to cut pollution. If people won’t stop using plastic items on their own accord, recent research suggests rules limiting their use of plastic items by charging a fee for its use or banning it outright is the best way to get them to stop.

The plastics industry has actively fought such legislation, and despite the publication of research calling for a reduction in plastic use it continues to sell its products while pushing recycling as the best method to reduce waste and litter. In one recent example, major beverage corporations led by the Coca-Cola Company sent a letter of opposition last year to the European Commission following the EU’s proposal to require that plastic bottles have tethered caps. Traditional bottle caps are commonly lost in the marine environment because they so easily separate from bottles. In the letter the corporations cite the efficacy of deposit return schemes and recycling in reducing plastic litter. They proposed increased efforts to “reinforce and incentivize [the] right consumer behaviors” in lieu of changing their product designs. Coca-Cola recently revealed that it produces 3 million metric tons of plastic packaging every year.

When asked about the issue of plastic pollution and how to best address it, the Plastics Industry Association sent a statement to The Revelator saying the association “believes uncollected plastics do not belong in the natural environment and that is why we partner with other associations, non-governmental organizations and intergovernmental authorities to coordinate efforts to strengthen recovery systems around the globe to prevent the loss of any plastics into the environment. Our members understand that our industry needs to be a part of the solution. We encourage education and call for the enhancement of our recycling infrastructure in order to encourage new end markets for plastics.”

But experts say product redesigns and infrastructure don’t solve the problem. “Ocean plastics are a symptom of poor upstream waste management, poor product design, as well as consumer littering behavior,” Eriksen says. “It’s a perpetuation of old narratives, where pollution is caused by consumers. Regulation of products and packaging must be fought for intensively.”

The quick solution to the problem: Use less plastic.

As Carpenter pointed out nearly five decades ago, the more plastic we make and use, the more will end up in the natural environment. As he wrote in 1972: “Increasing production of plastics, combined with present waste-disposal practices, will undoubtedly lead to increases in the concentration of these particles.”

That’s a message we should have listened to decades ago, which still needs to be heard today.

“The public did not get adequate information, or the right information, early enough to act,” says Eriksen. “Industry has been very effective at controlling the public narrative, but today they cannot control things the way they did in the past. Social media and mass communications have allowed people to organize.” And that’s starting to make a difference.

The Coal Industry Isn’t Going Anywhere — Yet

Surprisingly, the climate-threatening industry is still in a growth mode in some parts of the world. Will that change fast enough to save the planet?

What does the future look like for coal?

If you listen to coal insiders, the next few years will still burn bright for the notoriously polluting industry. According to data analytics company GlobalData, coal production will “grow exponentially to 2022,” with more than 300 potential new coal projects launching over the next four years. GlobalData predicts annual production increases in India, Indonesia and Australia at a staggering 10.9 percent, 3.9 percent and 2.3 percent.

Although GlobalData also predicts that 100 projects will close worldwide, the company anticipates a total annual coal production increase of 1.3 percent over the next four years, which follows a modest growth of 2.8 percent in 2017 and 0.1 percent in 2018.

But other experts offer a different picture, one that paints the coal industry with a far less certain brush. They point to climate change, failing economics, bank divestment, polluting technology, legal and social challenges, the rise of cheap natural gas (another potent source of greenhouse emissions) and vast improvements in renewable energy technologies. Combined, these factors suggest the coal industry may struggle to stay viable in the coming years.

For now, though, the question seems to be: Will the coal industry fade quickly enough to make a difference for the climate — or will it keep chugging along at current levels?

“Are we on a long flat plateau, which would still mean a disaster for the planet, or are we on an escalating downward path, a path toward actually saving the planet?” asks Justin Guay, director of global climate strategy at the Sunrise Foundation, which advocates for closing coal plants and shifting financing out of fossil fuels.

Demand, Not Supply

One major problem with GlobalData’s numbers is that coal production may be rising, but coal consumption hit its apex five years ago.

“Global coal consumption peaked in 2014 and has declined marginally since then,” says Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Opening up new supply won’t increase demand, unless it results in an oversupply that forces the market price of coal down, so there is a price-driven increase in demand.”

That seems unlikely, since the price of coal has actually gone up over the past few years, Guay points out.

“That’s partially because we’re finally forcing the coal industry to pay for its externalities — mostly for air pollution, but also for water pollution and other things that they do to degrade the environment,” he says. “Once you slap these new technologies on a coal plant, their competitiveness against the newer, cleaner, cheaper stuff gets worse and worse and worse.”

Instead of looking at production, Buckley develops his own projections by looking at electricity demand, which partially drives the demand for coal. “China, India and Southeast Asia are all seeing electricity demand grow, whereas in America, Japan, Europe and Australia electricity demand has been flat at best for a decade,” he says.

Globally electricity demand increased by 27.5 percent between 2007 and 2017, according to IEEFA calculations. During that period, China’s energy demand nearly doubled, while India’s increased by 88 percent. Conversely, energy demand in the U.S. actually fell 3.4 percent during the same decade.

The reason coal has had such a growth curve in Southeast Asia is that renewable energy levels started so low in the region that countries turned to coal to keep up with demand. That’s about to change, Buckley says, as renewables have made enough inroads to the markets and are now growing at a pace that should cover all further increases in electricity demand.

“In India, in the 11 months to February 2019 net new thermal coal power additions were 20 megawatts whereas net new renewable energy installs were 6.7 gigawatts,” he says. “This is straight from the Central Electricity Authority reports — facts, not a forecast. Peak thermal coal in India is within sight. Other countries reliant on more expensive imported coal — think Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, Philippines, Malaysia — will see renewable energy tariffs fall below import coal-fired power plant tariffs over the coming five years. At that point thermal coal goes into a slow, inevitable, technology- and finance-driven terminal decline trajectory.”

Profits in the Wind

Speaking of renewable energy, the growth and improved efficiency of wind and solar power continue to chip away at coal’s market.

This comes in combination with the coal industry’s increasingly bad economic outlook.

A new report, issued March 25 by the policy group Energy Innovation, finds that 74 percent of existing coal plants in the United States actually cost more to operate in 2018 than it would cost to replace them with new wind and solar plants — often as much as 25 percent more.

According to the report, coal is at a “cost crossover” point in the United States, where the expense of operating a coal plant puts them financially at risk, compared to building new wild or solar projects.

This is a new dataset, but the trend has been clear for some time.

“If you look at the global model published by Carbon Tracker, 42 percent of existing coal units around the world are cash-flow negative today, which means essentially they’re bleeding money and not sustainable,” says Guay. “By 2030, 56 percent of all units around the world — China, India, everywhere — will be cash-flow negative. It’s pretty hard to maintain market share or let alone grow if you’re more expensive than your competitors. And that has been something that has been building for several decades as wind and solar costs have declined.”

Money Talks

As for cash, it’s becoming harder and harder for coal companies to get their hands on it.

Around the world banks and other financial institutions are pulling their money out of the coal industry. Recent research authored by IEEFA’s Buckley finds that more than 100 major financial institutions have restricted coal funding since 2013.

The pace is accelerating. At least 34 of these divestments occurred just since the start of 2018. It’s not enough to compensate for the estimated $1.9 trillion that banks have invested in fossil fuels since the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, according to a new report from the Rainforest Action Network, but it’s a sign that coal financing is quickly becoming not worth the risk.

The limited access to investment capital is already making a difference when combined with the growth in renewables, Buckley reports.

“I was on a CoalTrans India panel debate with Tata Power, the largest private company in India a couple of weeks back. The opening comment from Tata was that they will never again build another coal-fired power plant in India. Why? Bank finance is not available, and renewable energy is now materially lower cost than a domestic thermal power plant in India… There goes the biggest growth market for coal globally — puff, gone.”

Buckley expects similar shifts in China in the next two years.

“It is very telling that this month the biggest Chinese holding investment company, SDIC, announced it had completed its exit from the coal industry now, two years ahead of schedule,” he says. “Coal was the single biggest profit contributor to SDIC over the last decade. This is a first for China, and it’s unlikely to be a lone event.”

Meanwhile, Buckley says he feels that lack of finance is already delaying previously announced projects, pointing to a laundry list of announced projects that have missed their expected start dates. “I would suggest new thermal coal mine developments are being delayed because global capital is rapidly reassessing the long term viability, and Chinese, Japanese and South Korean equity is far less available than it was five years ago,” he says.

The Social License

One of the reasons banks are pulling out is, of course, the risk to the planet — which may explain why public sentiment also has something to do with it.

“The social license for the industry has completely eroded,” adds Guay from the Sunrise Foundation. “Coal is now viewed as a toxic substance. It’s whispered in the same breath as tobacco or asbestos. Nobody wants to be associated with this industry. And when that happens, it’s pretty hard to then turn around to political benefactors ask for help. So that’s been a pretty big deal.”

As that social license dissolves, announcements of new coal projects around the world are being met with outcry, protests and lawsuits.

“People are joining together to dismantle the power of the fossil-fuel industry, cut their funding, and stop fossil-fuel projects in their tracks,” says Hoda Baraka, global communications director for the activist group 350.org.

Coal’s Last Gasp — and Ours?

But even with all of these threats to the industry, the industry still presents itself as healthy.

Once again that’s nothing new, says Guay, who points out a history of industry reports projecting dramatic growth over the past few years — most of which never materialized.

In many ways, though, the coal industry really is growing, at least for now. China, for example, just approved four massive new mines in an effort to grow its economy.

“We’ll see growth in places like India, Indonesia and Southeast Asia writ large,” says Guay. “But those growth centers can’t make up for the absolute declines we’re seeing, particularly in the U.S. but also in Europe, Australia and other countries where electricity demand is flat.”

Still, that worldwide growth, the experts tell us, puts the planet in peril.

“We cannot afford to build any more coal-fired power stations,” says Baraka. “Every ton of coal burned makes an immediate contribution to the quantity of CO₂ in the atmosphere, causing long-term and irreversible climate change. We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground now to ensure that we stay below 1.5 degrees in order to avoid catastrophic environmental breakdown.”

Everyone we interviewed for this article highlighted the absolute need to accelerate efforts to get rid of coal and disrupt this growth cycle.

“Of all the ways we generate energy, coal has just got to be the worst from start to finish, from extraction to burning and beyond,” says Guay. “It’s polluting along that entire chain. And frankly, even if climate change were not the existential threat I think it is, it would still merit disappearing from our lives based purely on air pollution concerns, water pollution concerns, and any of the other number of toxic elements that the industry spews every day. So yeah, to me it couldn’t be gone from our lives fast enough.”

How to Keep Conservation Policies From Backfiring in a Globally Connected World

There are specific things we can do to make sure good intentions don’t just transfer environmental harms from one place to another.

For many years environmentalists have urged the public to “think globally, act locally” – meaning, consider the health of the planet, then take action in your own community.

But this approach can have unintended consequences. In a recent study, I worked with colleagues from academia, government and the nonprofit world to gather examples of fishery, forestry, agriculture and biofuel policies that appeared successful locally, but on closer inspection actually created environmental problems elsewhere, or in some cases made them worse.

For example, in my field of fisheries ecology and management, one strategy for managing the problem of bycatch — when fishermen accidentally catch non-target species, such as sharks, sea turtles and dolphins — is to reduce local catch limits. But when the United States curtailed Pacific swordfish catch between April 2001 and March 2004 to protect sea turtles, U.S. wholesalers imported more swordfish from other countries’ fleets operating in the Western and Central Pacific.

These fleets subsequently caught more swordfish to meet continued U.S. market demand. In the process, the number of sea turtles unintentionally hooked by fishermen increased by nearly 3,000 compared to before the closure.

My colleagues and I see this pattern, which scholars often call leakage or slippage, as vast and growing. To help address it, we identified ways to avoid taking actions that just displace environmental harms from one place to another rather than reducing them.

Transferring Environmental Harm

Once environmental problems are addressed locally, people often assume that they have been solved. But if demand for whatever they are trying to conserve — land, wildlife, energy resources — stays high, people will obtain them from other sources. In the process, they cause environmental damage in locations or economic sectors that are less strictly regulated.

These scenarios often shift impacts from developed nations to emerging economies. For example, a study based on data from 2001 indicated that 31 percent of timber harvest reductions in the United States were shifted to less developed nations, including tropical forest countries in South and Central America, southeast Asia, and west and central Africa as well as boreal forest countries like Russia. Companies sought timber from these countries to satisfy demand in the United States and other parts of the world created by reduced U.S. exports.

Such effects are common in forestry. One study estimates that 42 to 95 percent of logging reductions in specific countries or regions are shifted elsewhere, offsetting environmental gains. Less wealthy countries that get the additional business often benefit economically, but in many cases they have not yet developed policies to help ensure that they use their natural resources sustainably.

Slippage can also occur within countries. Seeking to promote sustainable forest management, Peru adopted long-term logging concessions starting in 2002. By 2005, however, deforestation and forest disturbance increased three- to four-fold in surrounding nonconcession areas

Similarly, in 2003 Mexico enacted a federal conservation program that compensated landowners for forest protection. Deforestation significantly increased in neighboring, non-enrolled forest tracts.

The U.S. Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to take environmentally sensitive land out of production and plant it with species that will improve its health, may also cause such effects. One study found that between 1982 and 1992, Midwest farmers retired 17.6 million acres under the Conservation Reserve Program, but simultaneously brought at least 3.7 million acres into production — possibly because cropland retirements drove up crop prices. This offset 9 percent of water and 14 percent of wind erosion reduction benefits from retiring the original croplands.

A Path Forward

In a world where markets are becoming ever more globalized, it is urgent to limit negative environmental impacts of resource use, rather than just displace them from one region or nation to another. There are a number of ways to do this.

To assess whether a policy will cause environmental harm elsewhere, it is important for natural resource managers and policymakers to understand the relationship between demand for a product and its supply. For example, when prices of hardwood species are high, more environmentally conscious consumers or those on a budget are likely to use bamboo or other materials for flooring instead.

However, some varieties have unique features or connote social status. Examples include rosewood, which is highly prized for uses that include musical instruments, and shark fin soup, a dish viewed by many Asians as a symbol of wealth and prestige. Because these materials often are rare, possessing them becomes a sign of social status, which can stimulate wealthy consumers to purchase more. Conserving them may require other actions, such as special legal protection for source species.

Governments and environmental groups can also use marketing campaigns to reduce demand for scarce resources, educate consumers about the consequences of their purchasing decisions and encourage producers to be transparent about the environmental impacts of their products. Examples of such efforts include eco labels, traceability programs and consumer guides, which have been widely implemented for forestry, fisheries and agricultural products.

Seafood watch guide — Excerpt from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch consumer guide (California version), encouraging users to choose fish from sustainably managed fisheries. Monterey Bay Aquarium, CC BY-ND

Studies show that such tools can produce real environmental benefits, such as increases in fish stocks and in support for creating protected areas. Most of these improvements appear to be made by industries that must make significant changes before they can join these programs. For example, fishermen may need to shift away from traditional but destructive fishing practices before their catch can be certified as sustainably caught. These programs often are more successful in developed countries that can finance such steps than in emerging economies.

Avoiding Conservation Illusions

Natural resource conservation policies are a fundamental tool for using Earth’s resources responsibly and sustainably. In a world where consumers can purchase products made on the opposite side of the planet, these policies must look beyond their own jurisdictions. If not, well-intentioned conservation efforts may only create the illusion of protection.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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.

Fight Climate Change — by Loving Carbon?

The new book Burn says we need to rethink our relationship with carbon and embrace one of its solid forms — biochar.

Albert Bates and Kathleen Draper have done the unthinkable: They’ve written a love story to carbon. At a time when much of the world is working on strategies to rid ourselves of carbon to combat the climate crisis, they posit in a new book that we should be embracing it. Or at least some of it.

“Right now carbon is getting a bad rap. Carbon creates dirty energy. Carbon creates grit, grime and gunk,” they write in Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth. “Carbon should be global-warming enemy number one. But in truth, carbon is something we should all love and cherish. Carbon is life. In the right balance, carbon gives life.”

Their book focuses on the merits of one particular form of carbon, known as biochar, which a charcoal-like substance. It’s formed by taking biomass, which can come from sources such as wood, plants, crop waste, manure or solid waste, which is then heated (but not completely combusted) in a furnace with little to no oxygen — a process known as pyrolysis. The result is a stable structure that locks away carbon before it would have been emitted as those materials decay or are completely burned.

While charcoal is used mainly as a fuel, biochar instead has myriad other applications, the authors say. It’s most well-known in agricultural circles as an additive to improve soil. It’s been used for thousands of years in small-scale farming, but only more recently has it been touted to help combat climate change by sequestering carbon in that very same soil.

Sequestration of carbon is crucial in helping to address the dangers of the climate crisis, where scientists say we have to not only reduce our current greenhouse gas emissions but also create “negative emissions” by removing carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases from the atmosphere. How we do that with appropriate technology is a hotly debated topic.

Bates and Draper say that biochar could play a role in reducing our carbon footprint, but they stop short of selling biochar as a silver bullet to fix the climate crisis. It’s presented as just one tool in the toolbox. Most research on biochar’s potential to aid in climate mitigation has looked at its use to sequester carbon in soil: Add it to soil, and it won’t break down for years, preventing the carbon from returning to the atmosphere. The authors say biochar can lock away carbon for hundreds or thousands of years, which is true under certain conditions. But not everyone is convinced: Studies have found that period can range from less than 10 years to hundreds or thousands of years, depending on soil type, the biomass used, the temperature at which the biochar was produced and other environmental conditions. And scientists have cautioned that not enough field research has been done to understand all those variables.

While there’s debate over how effective biochar will be at sequestering carbon in soil, Burn looks in great detail at other applications for biochar, whether on its own or blended with other products — a field with a lot of possibilities but also a lot of unknowns.

Both Bates and Draper have been studying biochar for years. Bates, a lawyer, scientist and teacher, has written previous books including The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook and The Biochar Solution. Draper is the editor of The Biochar Journal and is a board member of the International Biochar Initiative.

Other experts have expressed ample concern that the amount of land needed to scale up biochar production will cause more environmental problems than it solves and potentially result in land grabs. Bates and Draper though don’t recommend that we plant forests or fields for use in biochar production the way corn is grown for biofuels. Instead, they say, we should mine our existing waste streams and make use of things we don’t want — wood chips, coffee residue, hazelnut shells, poultry waste, rice husks… the list goes on. Turning waste into a resource is undoubtedly something we need to do more of and seems like it could work at a regional level, but it’s unclear how scalable the biochar industry would be relying on diffuse sources of biomass. Although Bates and Draper also describe their vision as a “buckshot” strategy where numerous projects of varying sizes could end up with cumulative impacts.

There’s also the added complexity that biochar, which can come from many sources, isn’t one exact thing with an industry standard that’s universally accepted. Different kinds of biomass will result in different kinds of biochar. Some may be useful for one application but not another. You don’t want to use a biochar made from a waste stream in agricultural soils, but maybe it’s better suited in toxic remediation.

While the book focuses on the climate potential of biochar, Bates and Draper spend much of their pages touting some other benefits that could result from various applications, although some don’t seem to be proven at the commercial level yet.

They write that biochar can help treat water through carbon filtration and can be used in wastewater plants or along roadsides to neutralize road salts and prevent chemicals from flowing into waterways.

Biochar has also been studied as a replacement for up to 30 percent of the sand, gravel and other aggregates used in cement production, which could help alleviate some of the environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emissions from mining those resources. Tests have also shown that bricks produced with certain kinds of biochar provide better thermal insulation, potentially helping to save on heating and cooling costs, they write.

Another area of possibility is in the paper industry. The authors write that biochar can be used to filter effluent at paper mills and then be added to paper packaging, where it would provide better insulation, protect electronic products from electro-magnetic fluxes, and absorb odor and condensation. It can even slow produce from ripening and reduce food waste, they explain.

Research is even underway to determine if biochar can help replace petroleum-based composite materials that are widely used in the manufacturing of thousands of products — everything from helicopter blades to fishing rods.

The authors describe one experiment they conducted that yielded a new composite material:

By melting extruded polystyrene foam packing peanuts and clamshell containers (C8H8) in an acetone bath — (CH3)2CO — and adding powdered biochar (C) until it stiffened, we produced a light, structural, fracture-resistant, char-tile that can be molded to any shape. It could be kitchen tiles, surfboards, iPhones, tennis rackets, boats or biodomes.

But wait: There’s more, they say. Biochar can also help clean up some of our messes, like aiding reclamation work at mine sites.

“If you put your biochar in concrete, asphalt, composites or electronics, you can then use carbonized municipal wastes and industrial wastes, which greatly expands both the available biomass supply and the available land area,” they write. “Carbon cascades convert problems into opportunities.”

How much of this is theoretical? So far, not many large-scale, commercially successful opportunities have taken off. Making biochar cost-competitive in the industries it can disrupt is still an uphill climb.

The authors say that biochar ventures are good candidates for climate funds and investment opportunities that are in search of “shovel-ready” projects. But skepticism remains among some in the scientific community.

Bates and Draper’s overall view that we need to rethink our relationship with carbon, though, isn’t bad advice.

“We have to go from spending carbon to banking it,” the authors write. “We have to reverse the way carbon is going, change direction and send it in exactly the opposite direction; down, not up. We have to flip the carbon cycle and run it backward.”

But is biochar the best way to do that? The book makes a good case for opportunities beyond sequestration in soil, but it seems we may be decades before it’s proven a robust climate solution — and by then we may all be charcoal.

The Surprising Clue to Reducing Human-Elephant Conflict: Minerals

Asking why elephants travel to specific areas can help us to better understand and reduce human-elephant conflict.

The increasing human population and global intensification of agriculture have had a major impact on the world’s natural ecosystems. This, as we’ve seen, has had devastating effects for populations of mega-herbivores such as African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana).

Elephants and other animals with vast home ranges have found themselves forced into increasingly smaller geographical areas, often restricted by fencing or other human activities. These smaller areas are then, in turn, under huge pressures to meet the animals’ nutritional needs. This can cause animals to alter their movement patterns and search for new sources of food, potentially causing human-elephant conflict.

Due to their vast food consumption — as much as 600 pounds a day for an adult bull — and sometimes destructive behavior, African savanna elephants can rapidly cause significant damage to crops and vegetation and pose a risk to human life and infrastructure. When elephants and humans come into conflict like this, people may feel the need to retaliate. All too often in these conflicts, the elephant ultimately loses. Human-elephant conflict will only worsen in the coming years due to continued increase in the global human population to 9.7 billion by 2050, the associated growth of agriculture, and a predicted reduction of 200–300 million hectares of wildlife habitat worldwide.

To understand more about these conflicts — and how to prevent them — my colleagues and I conducted a review of existing research to understand how nutritional needs dictate the movements and migrations of elephants and other large species. Our paper was published recently in Peer J.

Our review highlights that the African savanna elephants (and other herbivores) consider nutritional drivers as a factor in their movement choices. Animals make decisions about their daily, seasonal and annual movements based on several factors, including availability of water, presence of human activity, social behavior and topography, which all play a role alongside nutrient availability.

We found there are many examples of elephants moving to purposefully consume certain minerals, including calcium, iodine, iron and zinc. These minerals are available to elephants from plants, water and soil and all contribute to meeting their yet-undetermined nutritional needs.

As we write in our paper, exploring this relationship further could yield new tools for predicting future animal movements and reducing conflict.

There’s a lot left to learn about this — field reports have shown African savanna elephants and other animals making travel choices based on what appear to be regional deficiencies in key minerals, but that requires more research. We also need to learn more about the nutritional requirements of elephants and how those needs differ between males and females, as well as between species.

But based on what we do know, research shows that correlating patterns of movement and availability of nutritional minerals could aid conservation managers to make informed decisions about elephant movement and thus help to mitigate human-elephant conflict. For example, national parks and fenced reserves often occupy marginalized land of poorer quality, so supplementing elephant diets could help to keep the animals from gravitating to more nutritious, mineral-heavy crops and human settlements.

Tools like that, along with better understanding of what elephants need in their daily and seasonal movements, can help to keep more elephants — and people — alive and out of trouble.

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.

Environment Remains Under Siege Two Years Into the Trump Administration

President Trump promised massive deregulation — and although he’s lost some cases in court, his successes still threaten people’s health and the climate.

Two years into his presidency, Donald Trump has racked up some high-profile policy failures. There’s no wall spanning the length of our southern border, no denuclearization underway in North Korea, and ethics scandals have swamped his administration.

But when it comes to environmental policy changes, the administration’s record of success has been remarkable.

The Trump team has effectively stalled or reversed at least 78 major environmental rules, including broad national policies aimed at stemming and monitoring air and water pollution, curbing toxic substances in the environment, protecting wildlife, and conserving public lands.

The administration has taken particular aim at stopping or slowing Obama-era directives and regulations aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas pollution that’s altering the climate. Trump lifted the previous administration’s coal-mining moratorium on federal lands, rolled back its curbs on both smog-causing and climate-heating pollution from oil and gas operations, power plants, and other industrial operations, and threw into doubt standards that would improve the fuel efficiency of cars, pickup trucks and SUVs.

Trump squeeze — Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour

The administration has also moved to rescind California’s right to set its own, stricter tailpipe standards under the Clean Air Act.

“Fossil fuel producers are kind of at the heart of all this,” says Jessica Wentz, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change. The attacked regulations all have different goals, she says, but overall their effect would be to reduce fossil fuel consumption. “Producers do not want that.”

These environmental rollbacks have put the public’s health in danger, says former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, both by fulfilling the anti-regulatory wish lists of polluters and by largely cutting environmental and public health advocates out of the rulemaking process.

“I find that it’s more responsive to industry than I think is healthy for us,” says Whitman.

“Industry has a right to be heard, but that’s not the only advice or input you take. You take it from the other side as well,” she says, referring to environmental and public-health nonprofits. “I never met with anyone from industry when we had an active ongoing regulatory process that particularly affected their industry,” Whitman adds.

That stands in sharp contrast to current EPA head Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, who according to CNN has “maintained the custom of his predecessor Scott Pruitt” in meeting extensively with representatives of firms or industries regulated by the agency — while at the same time ducking nonprofits. Between April and August of 2018, CNN reported recently, Wheeler met more than 50 times with industry figures and just three times with environmental groups.

Meanwhile, at the Department of the Interior, Acting Secretary David Bernhardt is presiding over several top appointees who have used their government positions to aid the industries they are tasked with regulating, as well as former colleagues and employers at ultra-conservative lobby groups that include the National Rifle Association. Their signature effort may be an attack on the Endangered Species Act that could permanently cripple the keystone environmental law.

Bernhardt is himself a longtime agriculture and fossil fuel lobbyist who was Interior’s senior lawyer during the Bush administration. After rejoining the agency under Trump in 2017, he helped tear up Obama’s multi-stakeholder deal to protect the increasingly rare greater sage grouse, a bird whose habitat overlaps with millions of acres of fossil-fuel-rich western federal lands.

Wentz says she anticipated Trump’s attacks on “big picture” Obama-era climate regulations, such as withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate pact and weakening regulations on power plants. But the “all-out attack on every component of federal climate regulation and policy and guidance” surprised her.

“A good example would be this proposed repeal of the regulation that extended light bulb efficiency standards to a broader class of light bulbs, what were considered sort of unusual or specialized light bulbs,” says Wentz. The rule would cut energy use by an estimated 80 billion kilowatt hours annually (enough energy to power around 770,000 U.S. homes, according to advocates), save ratepayers a collective $12 billion in energy costs, and significantly reduce air pollutants that cause asthma as well as climate change.

But according to the industry publication EHS Daily Advisor, a 325-member trade group called the National Electrical Manufacturers Association intensively lobbied the Department of Energy to roll back the standards, and the agency formally proposed to do so in early February.

A Bumpy Road to the Future

Environmental groups and others have taken many of these moves to court — and made a few notable wins.

But even if the rules themselves are saved, it could still be years before the federal government regains momentum on grappling realistically with climate change, says Wentz, who runs the Climate Deregulation Tracker at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. As of Feb. 14 she has catalogued 113 anti-climate rollback actions by the administration since Trump took office.

That delay will be costly, Wentz says, because time has almost run out to avert catastrophic climate change.

“Every report we see from the IPCC and the United States’ own global climate research program [finds] that it is necessary for us to take urgent, immediate action,” says Wentz, “You have to have a very significant and rapid emissions reduction. And so the more we delay, the bigger the problem gets, and the harder it is to solve it, and the more we’re passing all of these costs to our kids and to future generations.”

It’s too soon to tell whether the new wave of hearings by House Democrats will weaken the pace of Trump rollbacks, or the administration’s attempts to give them a veneer of scientific validity. As I’ve covered in my newsletter, (de)regulation nation, the White House recently scored some legal victories of its own, including a federal court ruling in February that the government can waive dozens of environmental laws to build barriers along the Mexican border. A longtime climate change skeptic, Prof. John Christy of the University of Alabama, was recently named to a top EPA science panel. Meanwhile Wheeler, the EPA’s new administrator, is an experienced lobbyist who will likely avoid the sorts of ethics violations that brought down his former boss, Scott Pruitt, and craft rollbacks more carefully to survive court challenges.

Still, Trump’s zeal for environmental rollbacks played a part in 2018’s “blue wave” of Democratic electoral victories, notes Whitman, and will likely factor into 2020’s presidential and Senate elections for Republicans as well as Democrats.

“He controls the levers of power right now within the party, so I think it’s going to be very hard,” she says. “We’ll have to wait it out and then we’ll have to get to a point where [voters] realize that they can make the changes, and that this is something they want to do.”

How to Inspire a Renaissance in Natural History and the Science of Conservation

Citizen scientists can use simple tools to study the DNA of plants and animals in their communities and help contribute to our understanding of the world.

Naturalists are quintessential parts of the countryside. With interests ranging from fossils to fungi, birds to buttercups, they’re the custodians of the living world. If a threatened plant declines or an invasive insect appears, more often than not it’s a humble naturalist who’s the first to sound a warning. In many ways they’re the front line in our battle to protect the natural world.

So what would happen if the naturalists themselves became an endangered species?

Sadly it’s already happening. In today’s world a large percentage of elderly naturalists are retiring and quickly vanishing from our wild places. Many academic biologists have lamented the decline of naturalists and taxonomists, with warnings from as far back as 20 years about the need to encourage future naturalists to enter the profession.

Their heirs apparent are a younger generation, many of whom are becoming increasingly disconnected from the natural world. A striking study in the journal Science found that school-age children could identify 80 percent of the Pokémon shown to them, while they only recognized 50 percent of local wildlife species.

It’s clear that a change is needed — a renaissance. But to bring about this rebirth of natural history, we must first understand how it’s undertaken today and how it might be revitalized in the future.

Natural history is a science based largely on observation. Although most naturalists know a great deal about many plants and animals, most favor a particular group over others. They spend time observing them and in doing so build a more complete picture of the lives these species lead and the roles they play in our ecosystems.

The unfortunate fact is that this sort of study is very time-consuming. Many naturalists spend countless years learning to recognize the tiny differences among particular species, and even more time sitting in the field observing them once they know how to tell them apart.

This is where the danger lies. As the number of known species goes up and the number of naturalists goes down, we inevitable end up with a natural history deficit — a shortfall wherein we know that a lot of species exist, but not much else about them.

Technology is helping to solve this problem. Since the start of the 21st century, DNA technology has become increasingly ubiquitous and correspondingly inexpensive. Biologists have used the technology for a range of purposes, but perhaps none is more vital to natural history than the practice of species barcoding.

Each organism has its own genome, made up of genes that are in turn made of DNA; this genome is essentially the “recipe book” used to build that species. However, some genes have more utility than simply constructing a species. Based on the speed at which these genes mutate over successive generation, they can also help tell us how distinct species are from each other. A number of these genes are what are called barcoding genes. Much like the unique barcode you find on a product in your local supermarket, these genes have a particular order that identifies the individual species to which they belong. So rather than sequencing the whole genome of a species, which is prohibitively expensive, we can examine these short sections of the barcoding genes to delineate and recognize species. Species barcoding allows biologists simply to screen the DNA of mystery organisms and quickly determine their identity, without having to spend years learning the subtle physical differences traditionally used to distinguish organisms.

Up until recently the technology required to undertake species barcoding has been too expensive for private citizens to own. In the past few years this has changed, as the equipment required has decreased in price and size. Now the average naturalist can assemble their own portable DNA barcoding lab for the price of a second-hand car. With this they can extract DNA, sequence it to get those precious species barcodes, and then compare them to the vast libraries of barcodes available online in global repositories like GenBank.

Species barcoding by citizen scientists could help spark the natural history renaissance we so desperately need, but what sorts of questions and issues could naturalists answer with the technology?

For one, the scats of cryptic or hard-to-catch species can be analyzed to yield their DNA, while smaller or less mobile organisms like plants and invertebrates can be analyzed whole to give their unique species barcodes. Through this a naturalist can determine the number of species in a given area simply by analyzing DNA in a back room or in the field. Going one step further, they can use these species barcodes to match the various life stages of animals like dragonflies, which start their lives as aquatic naiads in ponds and lakes before emerging as the adults we’re so familiar with. This can allow naturalists to study the lives of any species from beginning to end.

The diets of animals are notoriously difficult to study and require either long-term observations of feeding, detailed examination of the meagre remains in their scats, or a combination of the two. Observing feeding behavior is difficult because it’s often hard to identify all the different foods consumed by animals. Try stepping outside and trying to identify, at a distance, and to the species level, the invertebrates the little birds in your garden are preying on. It’s impossible. Identifying the contents of scats is equally challenging, and even the most accomplished naturalist cannot readily determine the contents to the level of species. Fortunately, with species barcoding it’s possible to identify, to species level, the contents of scats, and through this, the diets of those animals that produced them. This can reduce years of laborious field observation and scat examination down to a few weeks of collecting droppings, sequencing them and then matching those new sequences to known species.

Apart from diet, parasites are incredibly important to study when trying to understand an animal or plant. They are key to nutrient cycling and the regulation of some host populations. On top of this, each free-living host supports numerous parasite species that add a significant swath to Earth’s biodiversity. Naturalists trying to understand the diversity and ecology of parasites have often had a difficult time of it, owing to the great number of species, the difficulty with which they can be identified, and the often-complex nature of their life cycles. With species barcoding naturalists can begin to answer previously difficult questions like, which hosts do particular parasites live in, why are some threatened parasite species declining, and which parasites can move between domestic animals and wildlife. By examining these questions naturalists will not only help us better understand the functioning of our ecosystems but also the health of our wildlife.

Citizen scientists already contribute heavily to modern species understanding through programs such as iNaturalist, which allows users to upload photos and locations of any plants or animals they encounter. This work, which might start as a hobby and become more of a lifestyle, is becoming increasingly useful to academic scientists, as the data sets generated grow ever larger.

At this point in time we are on the edge of the democratization of DNA barcoding technology. Small devices like the iPhone-sized MinION DNA sequencer produced by Oxford Nanopore Technologies to read and record DNA sequences are already on the market for close to the same price as the latest smartphones. The first step toward the widespread use of DNA barcoding tech will likely come from community organizations and natural history societies that can leverage finds from members to set up small DNA barcoding tool kits for the collective use of members. Though increasingly cost is falling, as speed and efficiency rise we’ll see such tech spread to biology classrooms and private individuals soon enough.

Just as iNaturalist helps us determine where species live, species barcoding promises to revolutionaries the way we practice natural history. It’s cheap, accurate, and can help the next generation of naturalists answer some of the most complex questions of the living world. All that remains now is for us to start barcoding and lead the world into a natural history renaissance.

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.