As we gradually work our way out of the pandemic with the development and distribution of vaccines, what does our evolving success tell us about the possibilities of resolving the climate change crisis?
Has this crisis been a warm-up on what to do—and not do—in the face of a global climate emergency? The answer is both yes and no.
Yes, because humans have many tools at their disposal to solve complex tests. But no, because the challenges and the menu of solutions are quite different between these two existential challenges.
It even might be dangerous to boost this tempting analogy. Equating the two, given what we know now about defeating COVID-19, might encourage the idea of easy technological solutions. If we go down that path, we diminish our chances of realistically grappling with climate's complexity. Belief in technological fixes, particularly silver bullets, might dissipate the energy we need to get to work and avoids the breadth of the challenge ahead.
As dramatic and devastating as it is, COVID-19 involves one virus (now mutating) that is causing illness and death. The solution is the vaccine. Fortunately, researchers were exploring vaccine methods in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic that proved fruitful for COVID-19.
The analogue to the almost two decades of work including pre-clinical animal testing that laid the foundation for the vaccine in record time is that we've known for a long time what is needed to stop the discharge of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and how to adapt.
There have been multiple fully coherent plans to decarbonize the economy. Significant research has been underway for decades identifying and, to some extent, implementing a wide variety of technologies, some as substitutes for fossil fuels, and others that reduce our reliance on energy or make it go farther. We've gathered experience with a variety of regulatory programs including regional systems of emissions trading and the various painfully developed regulations that would nudge and guide society toward more efficient cars, appliances, and power-generation. Despite attacks on these by the Trump Administration, they remain achievable options and the launching point for more.
There is also a broad base of support for acting on this threat from important actors in society who have come to understand how climate change destabilizes their work. Multiple corporations have expressed support for decarbonization. Military leaders have accepted climate change as a threat multiplier that makes their jobs much more difficult.
And there is no lack of planning for the inevitable damage from the changes already taking place. Cities and states have been busy for some time thinking about water level rise and weather-related disaster preparation.
In some ways, all this work is similarly off-the-shelf as was the virus research into the spike protein. It puts residents of planet Earth ready to move forward toward making their existence here safer.
But the better analogy, and warning sign, if there is one, is not to the development of the vaccine but to its delivery. Delivery of a vaccine requires infrastructure, commitment, funding of multiple actors and coordination at many levels of society. It requires a federal government committed to action, not just wishful thinking. The early hitches in delivery laid bare many of the inequities that allow well-to-do people with access to computers, the internet, and other resources to be vaccinated while poorer people have difficulty even getting into line.
If we look at addressing the climate challenge as an all-of-government job; if we commit the funding and the political will; if we don't kid ourselves with delusions of quick fixes, and if business walks the walk, and doesn't just talk, we have a chance.
There is no way to make up lost time; the four years of Trump denial built dangerously on the period before that where Congress never acted. The Arctic is melting and the Antarctic is in danger – just one example but a very big one for current and future weather, and, in turn, for our ability to provide for ourselves. Even if we were completely to stop using fossil fuels today, the loading process in the atmosphere makes it very unlikely we can reverse warming trends very soon.
The COVID-19 experience is a guide, a useful one, but not a template. Just because answers are available, indeed well-known and vetted, doesn't mean they are easily adopted or applied. The test for the Biden Administration, as it is for COVID-19, is finding the commitments among winners and unhappy losers to put the stuff on the shelf to work.
Ruth Greenspan Bell is a Public Policy Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a founder of The Environmental Protection Network.
Banner photo: Staff from a long-term care facility in New Jersey receive a COVID-19 vaccine. (Credit: Phil Murphy/flickr)
A coalition of labor, environmental, and healthcare organizations is urging FEMA to classify extreme heat and wildfire smoke as major disasters, aiming to unlock federal funds for community protection and worker safety.
More than 60 groups filed a petition for FEMA to classify extreme heat and wildfire smoke as major disasters.
The move is supported by major labor unions aiming to protect outdoor workers and those without air-conditioning during heat waves.
Previous attempts to classify heat waves as disasters were denied, but petitioners cite the precedent of COVID-19's disaster declaration to bolster their case.
Key quote:
“We are never going to be able to address the changing climate or threats to the future under the existing system.”
— Brock Long, FEMA administrator during the Trump administration
Why this matters:
Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. annually than hurricanes and floods combined. Recognizing heat as a major disaster would improve public health protections and infrastructure resilience. Read more: We are undercounting heat-related deaths in the US.
CAMERON PARISH, La. — Late into the night, John Allaire watches the facility next to his home shoot 300-foot flares from stacks.
He lives within eyesight of southwest Louisiana’s salty shores, where, for decades, he’s witnessed nearly 200 feet of land between it and his property line disappear into the sea. Two-thirds of the land was rebuilt to aid the oil and gas industry’s LNG expansion. LNG — shorthand for liquified natural gas – is natural gas that's cooled to liquid form for easier storage or transport; it equates to 1/600th the volume of natural gas in a gaseous state. It’s used to generate electricity, or fuel stove tops and home heaters, and in industrial processes like manufacturing fertilizer.
In the U.S., at least 30 new LNG terminal facilities have been constructed or proposed since 2016, according to the
Oil and Gas Watch project. Louisiana and Texas’ Gulf Coast, where five facilities are already operating, will host roughly two-thirds of the new LNG terminals – meaning at least 22 Gulf Coast LNG facilities are currently under construction, were recently approved to break ground or are under further regulatory review.
Although the U.S. didn’t ship LNG until 2016, when a freight tanker left, a few miles from where Cameron Parish’s LNG plants are today, last year the country became the global leader in LNG production and export volume, leapfrogging exporters like Qatar and Australia. The
EIA’s most recent annual outlook estimated that between the current year and 2050, U.S. LNG exports will increase by 152%.
Allaire, 68, watches how saltwater collects where rainwater once fed the area’s diminishing coastal wetlands. “We still come down here with the kids and set out the fishing rods. It's not as nice as it used to be,” he told
Environmental Health News (EHN).
That intimacy with nature drew Allaire to the area when he purchased 311 acres in 1998. An environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran, he helped lead environmental assessments and manage clean-ups, and although retired, he still works part-time as an environmental consultant with major petroleum companies. With a lifetime of oil and gas industry expertise, he’s watched the industry's footprint spread across Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico’s fragile shores and beyond. Now that the footprints are at the edge of his backyard, Allaire is among a cohort of organizers, residents and fisher-folk in the region mobilizing to stop LNG facility construction. For him, the industry’s expansion usurps the right-or-wrong ethics he carried across his consulting career. For anglers, oil and gas infrastructure has destroyed fishing grounds and prevented smaller vessels from accessing the seafood-rich waters of the Calcasieu River.
From the view of Allaire’s white pickup truck as he drives across his property to the ocean’s shore, he points to where a new LNG facility will replace marshlands. Commonwealth LNG intends to clear the land of trees and then backfill the remaining low-lying field.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.”
Community bands together
John Allaire, left, purchased 311 acres in Cameron Parish in 1998, and has watched the oil and gas industry's footprint spread to his property.
Credit: John Allaire
During an Earth Day rally in April, community members gathered in the urban center of Lake Charles to demand local oil and gas industries help deliver a safer, healthier future for all. In between live acts by artists performing south Louisiana’s quintessential zydeco musical style, speakers like James Hiatt, a Calcasieu Parish native with ties to Cameron Parish and a Healthy Gulf organizer, and RISE St. James organizer Sharon Lavigne, who’s fighting against LNG development in rural Plaquemines Parish near the city of New Orleans, asked the nearly 100 in attendance to imagine a day in which the skyline isn’t dotted by oil and gas infrastructure.
Not long ago, it was hard to imagine an Earth Day rally in southwest Louisiana at all. For decades, the area has been decorated with fossil fuel infrastructure. Sunsets on some days are highlighted by the chemicals in the air; at night, thousands of facilities’ lights dot the dark sky.
“It takes a lot of balls for people to start speaking up,” Shreyas Vasudevan, a campaign researcher with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told EHN in the days after the rally. In a region with its history and economy intertwined with oil and gas production, “you can get a lot of social criticism – or ostracization, as well – even threats to your life.”
Many are involved in local, regional and national advocacy groups, including the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Healthy Gulf, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Turtle Island Restoration Network, the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Audubon Society.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.” - John Allaire, environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran
But environmental organizers are fighting a multi-billion-dollar industry with federal and state winds at its back. And LNG’s federal support is coupled with existing state initiatives.
Under outgoing Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a term-limited Democrat — the state pledged a goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050. Natural gas, which the LNG industry markets as a cleaner-burning alternative, is cited as one of the state’s solutions. Louisiana is the only state that produces a majority of its carbon emissions through fossil fuels refining industries, like LNG, rather than energy production or transportation. Governor Edwards’ office did not return EHN’s request for comment.
This accommodating attitude towards oil and gas industries has resulted in a workforce that’s trained to work in LNG refining facilities across much of the rural Gulf region, said Steven Miles, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP and a fellow at the Baker Institute’s Center on Energy Studies. Simultaneously, anti-industrialization pushback is lacking. It’s good news for industries like LNG.
“The bad news,” Miles added. “[LNG facilities] are all being jammed in the same areas.”
One rallying cry for opponents is local health. The Environmental Integrity Project found that LNG export terminals emit chemicals like carbon monoxide –potentially deadly– and sulfur dioxide, of which the American Lung Association says long-term exposure can lead to heart disease, cancer, and damage to internal or female reproductive organs.
An analysis of emissions monitoring reports by the advocacy group the Louisiana Bucket Brigade found that Venture Global’s existing Calcasieu Pass facility had more than 2,000 permit violations.That includes exceeding the permit’s authorized air emissions limit to release nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds 286 out of its first 343 days of operation.
The Marvel Crane, the first liquid natural gas carrier to transport natural gas from the Southwest Louisiana LNG facility, transits a channel in Hackberry, Louisiana, May 28, 2019.
“This is just one facility,” at a time when three more facilities have been proposed in the region and state, Vasudevan said. Venture Global’s operational LNG facility — also known as Calcasieu Pass — “is much smaller than the other facility they’ve proposed.”
In an area that experienced 18 feet of storm surge during Hurricane Laura in 2020 — and just weeks later, struck by Hurricane Delta — Venture Global is planning to build a second export terminal Known as “CP2,” it’s the largest of the roughly two dozen proposed Gulf LNG export terminals, and a key focal point for the region’s local organizing effort.
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” Hiatt told EHN of locals’ nostalgia for a community before storms like Rita in 2005 brought up to 15 feet of storm surge, only for Laura to repeat the damage in 2020. Throughout that time, the parish’s population dipped from roughly 10,000 to 5,000. “But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG. Folks in Cameron think that's going to bring back community, bring back the schools, bring back this time before we had all these storms — when Cameron was pretty prosperous.”
“Clearly,” for the oil and gas industry, “the idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports,” Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana, told EHN.
Helping fishers’ impacted by LNG is about “actual survival of this unique culture,” Cooke said.
In a measure of organizers’ success, she pointed to a recent permit hearing for Venture Global’s CP2 proposal. Regionally, it’s the only project that’s received an environmental permit, but not its export permit, which remains under federal review. At the meeting, some spoke on the company’s behalf. As an organizer, it was a moment of clarity, Cooke explained. Venture Global officials “had obviously done a lot of coaching and organizing and getting people together in Cameron to speak out on their behalf,” Cooke said. “So, in a way, that was bad. But in another way, it shows that we really had an impact.”
“It also shows that we have a lot to do,” Cooke added.
Environmental organizers like Alyssa Portaro describe a sense of fortitude among activists — she and her husband to the region’s nearby town of Vinton near the Texas-Louisiana border. Since the families’ relocation to their farm, Portaro has worked with Cameron Parish fisher-folk.
“I’ve not witnessed ‘community’ anywhere like there is in Louisiana,” Portaro told EHN. But a New Jersey native, she understands the toll environmental pollution has on low-income communities. “This environment, it’s so at risk — and it’s currently getting sacrificed to big industries.”
“People don’t know what we’d do without oil and gas. It comes at a big price,” she added.
Southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish is one of the state’s most rural localities. Marine economies were the area’s economic drivers until natural disasters and LNG facilities began pushing locals out, commercial fishers claim.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” James Hiatt , a Healthy Gulf organizer, told EHN. "But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG."
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
For the most part, Cameron Parish’s life and economy has historically taken place at sea. As new LNG facilities are operational or in planning locally, locals claim the community they once knew is nearly unrecognizable.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
A disappearing parish
The stakes are seemingly higher for a region like southwest Louisiana, which is the epicenter of climate change impacts.
In nearly a century, the state has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of land to coastal erosion. In part driving the state’s erosion crisis is the compounding impacts of Mississippi River infrastructure and oil and gas industry activity, such as dredging canals for shipping purposes, according to a March study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said Cameron Parish could lose more land than other coastal parishes over the next 50 years. A recent Climate Central report says the parish will be underwater within that time frame.
On top of erosion and sea level rise impacts, in August, 2023, marshland across southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish burned. The fires were among at least 600 across the Bayou State this year. Statewide, roughly 60,000 acres burned — a more than six-fold increase of the state’s average acres burned per year in the past decade alone.
But while the blaze avoided coastal Louisiana communities like Cameron Parish, the fires represented a warning coming from a growing chorus of locals across the region — one that’s echoes by the local commercial fishing population, who claimed to have experienced unusually low yields during the same time, according to a statement from a local environmental group. At the site of the Cameron Parish fires are locations for two proposed LNG expansion projects.
"The idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports.” - Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana
It was an unusual occurrence for an area that’s more often itself underwater this time of year due to a storm surge from powerful storms. For LNG expansion’s local opposition, it was a red flag.
As the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has noted prior, the confluence of climate change’s raising of sea levels and the construction of LNG export terminals — some are proposed at the size of nearly 700 football fields — are wiping away the marshland folks like Allaire watched wither. Among their fears is that the future facilities won’t be able to withstand the power of another storm like Laura and its storm surge, which wiped away entire communities in 2020.
Amidst these regional climate impacts, LNG infrastructure has shown potential to exacerbate the accumulation of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. For the most part, LNG is made up of methane — a greenhouse gas that’s more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Among the 22 current LNG facility proposals, the advocacy group Sierra Club described a combined climate pollution output that would roughly equal to that of about 440 coal plants.
The climate impacts prompt some of the LNG industry’s uncertainty going forward. It isn’t clear if Asian countries, key importers of U.S. LNG, will “embrace these energy transition issues,” said David Dismuke, an energy consultant and the former executive director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies. Likewise, European nations remain skeptical of embracing LNG as a future staple fuel source.
“They really don't want to have to pull the trigger,” Dismukes added, referring to Europe’s hesitation to commit more resources to exporting LNG from the American market. “They don't want to go down that road.”
While there will be a tapering down of natural gas supply, Miles explained, “we’re going to need natural gas for a long time,” as larger battery storage for renewables is still unavailable.
“I'm not one of these futurists that can tell you where we're going to be, but I just don't see everything being extreme,” Dismukes said. “I don't see what we've already built getting stranded and going away, either.”
For now, LNG seems here to stay. From 2012 to 2022,U.S. natural gas demand — the sum of both domestic consumption and gross exports — rose by a whopping 43%, reported the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA. Meanwhile, in oil and gas hotbeds like Louisiana and Texas, natural gas demand grew by 116%.
Throughout 25 years, Allaire has witnessed southwest Louisiana’s land slowly fade, in part driven by the same industrial spread regionally. Near where the front door of his travel trailer sits underneath the aluminum awning, he points to a chenier ridge located near the end of the property. It’s disappearing, he said.
“See the sand washing over, in here?” Allaire says, as he points towards the stretches of his property. “This pond used to go down for a half mile. This is all that's left of it on this side.”
Bill C-226 mandates a national strategy to tackle environmental racism in consultation with Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities.
The bill is the result of years of advocacy by Ingrid Waldron, who highlights the disproportionate environmental harms these communities face.
The strategy will include mapping environmental impacts, collecting disaggregated data, and raising awareness about environmental racism.
Key quote:
"We’re giving them an opportunity to co-create the strategy with us. It’s not just about sharing their grief. I’m sure they’re tired of doing that. It’s about them saying, ‘And this is what I think this national strategy should include.’"
The Mountain Valley Pipeline, now operational, was recently condemned at a "rights of nature" tribunal for infringing on environmental and Indigenous rights.
The U.S. Supreme Court's upcoming decision on the Chevron doctrine could significantly affect environmental regulations, including those on pollution and climate change.
The Chevron doctrine allows federal agencies to interpret ambiguous statutes reasonably.
Overturning Chevron may limit agencies' flexibility to adapt regulations to new scientific findings.
The decision could shift more policy-making power to the judiciary, leading to increased litigation and regulatory instability.
Key quote:
"Overturning or enfeebling Chevron would have negative consequences."
— Jody Freeman, Harvard Law School
Why this matters:
Removing the Chevron doctrine could reduce agencies' ability to address evolving environmental challenges effectively. This shift might undermine regulatory stability, impacting public health and environmental protection.
Spain's wind and solar energy capacity has significantly increased, making it the EU's second-largest renewable energy producer.
Despite economic growth, electricity consumption has dropped, causing periods of excess supply and fluctuating prices.
Experts suggest accelerating electrification and improving energy storage to balance supply and demand.
Key quote:
"We need to engage more people and more industries in demand-side management."
— Sara Pizzinato, a renewable energy expert at Greenpeace Spain
Why this matters:
Renewable energy has been a cornerstone of Spain's environmental strategy, aiming to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. However, the influx of renewable power has outpaced the development of infrastructure needed to store and distribute it effectively. Without sufficient storage solutions, such as advanced batteries or pumped hydro storage, excess electricity often goes to waste or forces the grid to curtail production.
“Of all the levels of radium in produced water or brine around the world that I’ve looked at, I have encountered none that are consistently as high as what comes out of the Marcellus Shale.”
