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The volcano that shrouded the Earth and gave birth to a monster.
Three years of darkness and cold spawned crime, poverty, and a literary masterpiece.
IDEAS CLIMATE
The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster
Three years of darkness and cold spawned crime, poverty, and a literary masterpiece.
BY GILLEN D'ARCY WOOD
ILLUSTRATIONS BY WESLEY ALLSBROOK
OCTOBER 5, 2017
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Two hundred years ago, the greatest eruption in Earth’s recorded history took place. Mount Tambora—located on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies—blew itself up with apocalyptic force in April 1815.
After perhaps 1,000 years’ dormancy, the devastating evacuation and collapse required only a few days. It was the concentrated energy of this event that was to have the greatest human impact. By shooting its contents into the stratosphere with biblical force, Tambora ensured its volcanic gases reached sufficient height to disable the seasonal rhythms of the global climate system, throwing human communities worldwide into chaos. The sun-dimming stratospheric aerosols produced by Tambora’s eruption in 1815 spawned the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years.
Within weeks, Tambora’s stratospheric ash cloud circled the planet at the equator, from where it embarked on a slow-moving sabotage of the global climate system at all latitudes. Five months after the eruption, in September 1815, meteorological enthusiast Thomas Forster observed strange, spectacular sunsets over Tunbridge Wells near London. “Fair dry day,” he wrote in his weather diary—but “at sunset a fine red blush marked by diverging red and blue bars.”
RAIN OF ASH: This map shows the density of ash fall issuing from Tambora’s eruption.
The thickness of the ash is shown in centimeters. Prevailing trade winds drove the ash clouds north and west as far as Celebes (Sulawesu) and Borneo, 1,300 kilometers away. The volcanic eruptions could be heard twice as far away.Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Artists across Europe took note of the changed atmosphere. William Turner drew vivid red skyscapes that, in their coloristic abstraction, seem like an advertisement for the future of art. Meanwhile, from his studio on Greifswald Harbor in Germany, Caspar David Friedrich painted a sky with a chromic density that—one scientific study has found—corresponds to the “optical aerosol depth” of the colossal volcanic eruption that year.
For three years following Tambora’s explosion, to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed the “Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” Germans called 1817 the “Year of the Beggar.” Across the globe, harvests perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains. Villagers in Vermont survived on porcupine and boiled nettles, while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march.
ALSO IN CLIMATE
The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster
By Gillen D'Arcy Wood
Two hundred years ago, the greatest eruption in Earth’s recorded history took place. Mount Tambora—located on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies—blew itself up with apocalyptic force in April 1815.
After perhaps 1,000 years’ dormancy, the devastating evacuation and...READ MORE
One such group of English tourists, at their lakeside villa near Geneva, passed the cold, crop-killing days by the fire exchanging ghost stories. Mary Shelley’s storm-lashed novel Frankenstein bears the imprint of the Tambora summer of 1816, and her literary coterie—which included the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron—serve as tour guides through the suffering worldscape of 1815–18.
Considered on a geological timescale, Tambora stands almost insistently near to us. The Tambora climate emergency of 1815–18 offers us a rare, clear window onto a world convulsed by weather extremes, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts in temperatures and rainfall, and a flow-on tsunami of famine, disease, dislocation, and unrest. It is a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems.
On Sumbawa Island, the beginning of the dry season in April 1815 meant a busy time for the local farmers. In a few weeks the rice would be ready, and the raja of Sanggar, a small kingdom on the northeast coast of the island, would send his people into the fields to harvest. Until then, the men of his village, called Koreh, continued to work in the surrounding forests, chop- ping down the sandalwood trees vital to shipbuilders in the busy sea lanes of the Dutch East Indies.
On the evening of April 5, 1815, at about the time his servants would have been clearing the dinner dishes, the raja heard an enormous thunderclap. Perhaps his first panicked thought was that the beach lookout had fallen asleep and allowed a pirate ship to creep in to shore and fire its cannon. But everyone was instead staring up at Mount Tambora. A jet of flame burst skyward from the summit, lighting up the darkness and rocking the earth beneath their feet. The noise was incredible, painful.
Huge plumes of flame issued from the mountain for three hours, until the dark mist of ash became confused with the natural darkness, seeming to announce the end of the world. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the column of fire collapsed, the earth stopped shaking, and the bone-jarring roars faded. Over the next few days, Tambora continued to bellow occasionally, while ash drifted down from the sky.
THE BIG CHILL: This diagram shows the penetration of volcanic matter into the stratosphere. As volcanic sulfur dioxide is chemically transformed into sulfuric acid, an aerosol layer forms, reducing incoming radiation from the sun and cooling the surface, even as the stratosphere itself is warmed.Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Meanwhile to the southeast in the capital Bima, colonial administrators were sufficiently alarmed by the events of April 5 to send an official, named Israel, to investigate the emergency situation at the volcano, on the Sanggar Peninsula. By April 10, the man’s bureaucratic zeal had led him to the very slopes of Tambora. There, in the dense tropical forest, at about 7 p.m., he became one of the first victims of the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history.
Within hours, the village of Koreh, along with all other villages on the Sanggar Peninsula, ceased to exist entirely, a victim of Tambora’s spasm of self-destruction. This time three distinct columns of fire burst in a cacophonous roar from the summit to the west, blanketing the stars and uniting in a ball of swirling flame at a height greater than the eruption of five days before. The mountain itself began to glow as streams of boiling liquefied rock coursed down its slopes. At 8 p.m., the terrifying conditions across Sanggar grew worse still, as a hail of pumice stones descended, mixed with a downpour of hot rain and ash.
On the northern and western slopes of the volcano, whole villages, totaling perhaps 10,000 people, had already been consumed within a vortical hell of flames, ash, boiling magma, and hurricane-strength winds. In 2004, an archaeological team from the University of Rhode Island uncovered the first remains of a village buried by the eruption: a single house under three meters of volcanic pumice and ash. Inside the walled remains, they found two carbonized bodies, perhaps a married couple. The woman, her bones turned to charcoal by the heat, lay on her back, arms extended, holding a long knife. Her sarong, also carbonized, still hung across her shoulder.
The Tambora climate emergency offers us a rare, clear window onto a world convulsed by weather extremes. It is a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems.
Back on the mountain’s eastern flank, the rain of volcanic rocks gave way to ashfall, but there was to be no relief for the surviving villagers. The spectacular, jet-like “plinian” eruption (named for Pliny the Younger, who left a famous account of Vesuvius’s vertical column of fire) continued unabated, while glowing, fast-moving currents of rock and magma, called “pyroclastic streams,” generated enormous phoenix clouds of choking dust. As these burning magmatic rivers poured into the cool sea, secondary explosions redoubled the aerial ash cloud created by the original plinian jet. An enormous curtain of steam and ash clouds rose and encircled the peninsula, creating, for those trapped inside it, a short-term microclimate of pure horror.
First, a “violent whirlwind” struck Koreh, blowing away roofs. As it gained in strength, the volcanic hurricane uprooted large trees and launched them like burning javelins into the sea. Horses, cattle, and people alike flew upward in the fiery wind. What survivors remained then faced another deadly element: giant waves from the sea. The crew of a British ship cruising offshore in the Flores strait, coated with ash and bombarded by volcanic rocks, watched stupefied as a 12-foot-high tsunami washed away the rice fields and huts along the Sanggar coast. Then, as if the combined cataclysms of air and sea weren’t enough, the land itself began to sink as the collapse of Tambora’s cone produced waves of subsidence across the plain.
On the sunless days following the cataclysm, corpses lay unburied all along the roads on the inhabited eastern side of the island between Dompu and Bima. Villages stood deserted, their surviving inhabitants having scattered in search of food. With forests and rice paddies destroyed, and the island’s wells poisoned by volcanic ash, some 40,000 islanders would perish from sickness and starvation in the ensuing weeks, bringing the estimated death toll from the eruption to over 100,000, the largest in history.
While the skyward eruptions lasted only about three hours each, the boiling cascade of pyroclastic streams down Tambora’s slopes continued a full day. Hot magma gushed from Tambora’s collapsing chamber down to the peninsula, while columns of ash, gas, and rock rose and fell, feeding the flow. The fiery flood that consumed the Sanggar Peninsula, traveling up to 19 miles at great speeds, ultimately extended over a 216-square-mile area, one of the greatest pyroclastic events in the historical record. Within a few short hours, it buried human civilization in northeast Sumbawa under a smoking meter-high layer of ignimbrite.
WORST OF TIMES: Charles Dickens, whose grim weatherscapes and portraits of poverty are definitive representations of Victorian London, grew up under the ever-cloudy, bone-chilling atmosphere created by the Tambora eruption.British Library
Tambora’s cacophony of explosions on April 10, 1815, could be heard hundreds of miles away. All across the region, government ships put to sea in search of imaginary pirates and invading navies. In the seas to the north off Macassar, the captain of the East India Company vessel Benares gave a vivid account of conditions in the region on April 11:
The ashes now began to fall in showers, and the appearance altogether was truly awful and alarming. By noon, the light that had remained in the eastern part of the horizon disappeared, and complete darkness had covered the face of day ... The darkness was so profound throughout the remainder of the day, that I never saw anything equal to it in the darkest night; it was impossible to see your hand when held up close to the eye.
Across a 600-kilometer radius, darkness descended for two days, while Tambora’s ash cloud expanded to cover a region nearly the size of the continental United States. The entire Southeast Asian region was blanketed in volcanic debris for a week. Day after dark day, British officials conducted business by candlelight, as the death toll mounted.
Months after the eruption, the atmosphere remained heavy with dust—the sun a blur. Drinking water contaminated by fluorine-rich ash spread disease and with 95 percent of the rice crop in the field at the time of the eruption, the threat of starvation was immediate and universal. In their desperation for food, islanders were reduced to eating dry leaves and their much-valued horseflesh. By the time the acute starvation crisis was over, Sumbawa had lost half its population to famine and disease, while most of the rest had fled to other islands.
Tambora’s violent impact on global weather patterns was due, in part, to the already unstable conditions prevailing at the time of its eruption. A major tropical volcano had blown up six years prior, in 1809. This cooling event, hugely amplified by the sublime Tambora eruption in 1815, ensured extreme volcanic weather across the entire decade.
A flurry of research since the discovery of the 1809 eruption has resulted in the identification of the 1810–19 decade as a whole as the coldest in the historical record—a gloomy distinction. A 2008 modeling study concluded Tambora’s eruption to have had by far the largest impact on global mean surface air temperatures among volcanic events since 1610, while the 1809 volcano ranked second over that same period, measuring just over half Tambora’s decline. Two papers published the following year confirmed the status of the 1810s as “probably the coldest during the past 500 years or longer,” a fact directly attributable to the proximity of the two major tropical eruptions.
The spectacular eruption increased that cooling to a truly dire extent, contributing to an overall decline of global average temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius across the decade. One-and-a-half degrees might seem a small number, but as a sustained decline characterized by a sharp rise in extreme weather events—floods, droughts, storms, and summer frosts—the chilled global climate system of the 1810s had devastating impacts on human agriculture, food supply, and disease ecologies.
The Scottish meteorologist George Mackenzie kept meticulous records of cloudy skies between 1803 and 1821 over various parts of the British Isles. Where lovely clear summer days in the earlier period (1803–10) averaged over 20, in the volcanic decade (1811–20) that figure dropped to barely five. For 1816, the Year Without a Summer, Mackenzie recorded no clear days at all.
On the eve of the summer of 1816, 18-year-old Mary Godwin took flight with her lover, Percy Shelley, and their baby for Switzerland, escaping the chilly atmosphere of her father’s house in London. Mary’s young stepsister, Claire Clairmont, accompanied them, eager to reunite with her own poet-lover, Lord Byron, who had left England for Geneva a week earlier. Mary’s other sister, the ever dispensable Fanny, was left behind.
The dismal, often terrifying weather of the summer of 1816 is a touchstone of the ensuing correspondence between the sisters. In a letter to Fanny, written on her arrival in Geneva, Mary describes their ascent of the Alps “amidst a violent storm of wind and rain.” The cold was “excessive” and the villagers complained of the lateness of the spring. On their alpine descent days later, a snowstorm ruined their view of Geneva and its famous lake. In her return letter, Fanny expresses sympathy for Mary’s bad luck, reporting that it was “dreadfully dreary and rainy” in London too, and very cold.
Stormy nor’easters are standard features of Genevan weather in summertime, careening from the mountains to whip the waters of the lake into a sirocco of foam. Beginning in June 1816, these annual storms attained a manic intensity not witnessed before or since. “An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house,” Mary wrote to Fanny on the first of June from Maison Chappuis, their rented house on the shores of Lake Geneva: “One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up—the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.” A diarist in nearby Montreux compared the bodily impact of these deafening thunderclaps to a heart attack.
In fact, the year 1816 remains the coldest, wettest Geneva summer since records began in 1753. That unforgettable year, 130 days of rain between April and September swelled the waters of Lake Geneva, flooding the city. Up in the mountains the snow refused to melt. Clouds hung heavy, while the winds blew bitingly cold. In some parts of the inundated city, transport was only possible by boat. A cold northwest wind from the Jura mountains—called le joran by locals—swept relentlessly across the lake. The Montreux diarist called the persistent snows and le joran “the twin evil genies of 1816.” Tourists complained they couldn’t recognize the famously picturesque landscape because of the constant wind and avalanches, which drove snow across vast areas of the plains.
On the night of June 13, 1816, the Shelleys’ splendidly domiciled neighbor, Lord Byron, stood out on the balcony of the lakeside Villa Diodati to witness “the mightiest of the storms” that he—well-traveled aristocrat that he was—had ever seen. He memorialized that tumultuous night in his wildly popular poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”:
The sky is changed—and such a change! Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong ...
And now again ’tis black,—and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,
As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s birth.
In Byron’s imagination, the Tamboran storms of 1816 achieve volcanic dimensions—like an “earthquake’s birth”—and take delight in their destructive power.
GHOST STORY: One night in1816, in a villa on Lake Geneva, in the dark, dismal atmosphere created by Tambora’s eruption, poets (at left) Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and writer Mary Shelley, told ghost stories that gave birth to Frankenstein’s monster and the Byronic Dracula.Wikipedia
What caused the terrible weather conditions over Britain and western Europe in 1816–18? The relation between volcanism and climate depends on eruptive scale. Volcanic ejecta and gases must penetrate skyward high enough to reach the stratosphere where, in its cold lower reaches, sulfate aerosols form. These then enter the meridional currents of the global climate system, disrupting normal patterns of temperature and precipitation across the hemispheres. Tambora’s April 1815 eruption launched enormous volumes of long-suppressed volcanic rock and gases more than 25 miles into the stratosphere. This volcanic plume—consisting of as much as 12 cubic miles of total matter—eventually spread across 386,000 square miles of the Earth’s atmosphere, an aerosol umbrella six times the size of the cloud produced by the massive 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.
In the first weeks after Tambora’s eruption, a vast volume of coarser ash particles—volcanic “dust”—cascaded back to Earth mixed with rain. But ejecta of smaller size—water vapor, molecules of sulfur and fluorine gases, and fine ash particles—remained suspended in the stratosphere, where a sequence of chemical reactions resulted in the formation of a 60-mega- ton sulfate aerosol layer. Over the following months, this dynamic, streamer-like cloud of aerosols—much smaller in size than the original volcanic matter—expanded by degrees to form a molecular screen of planetary scale, spread aloft by the winds and meridional currents of the world. In the course of an 18-month journey, it passed across both south and north poles, leaving a telltale sulfate imprint on the ice for paleo-climatologists to discover more than a century and a half later.
Once settled in the dry firmament of the stratosphere, Tambora’s global veil circulated above the weather dynamics of the atmosphere, comfortably distanced from the rain clouds that might have dispersed it. From there, its planet-girdling aerosol film continued to scatter shortwave solar radiation back into space until early 1818, while allowing much of the longwave radiant heat from the earth to escape. The resultant three-year cooling regime, unevenly distributed by the currents of the world’s major weather systems, barely affected some places on the globe (Russia, for instance, and the trans-Appalachian United States) but precipitated a drastic 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit seasonal decline in other regions, including Europe.
The first extreme impact of a major tropical eruption is felt in raw temperature. But in western Europe, biblical-style inundation during the 1816 summer growing season wrought the greatest havoc. Because of the tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun and the different heat absorption rates of land and sea, solar insolation of the planet is irregular. Uneven heating in turn creates an air pressure gradient across the latitudes of the globe. Wind is the weatherly expression of these temperature and pressure differentials, transporting heat from the tropics to the poles, moderating temperature extremes, and carrying evaporated water from the oceans over the land to support plant and animal life. The major meridional circulation patterns, measuring thousands of miles in breadth, transport energy and moisture horizontally across the globe, creating continental-scale weather patterns. Meanwhile, at smaller scales, the redistribution of heat and moisture through the vertical column of the atmosphere produces localized weather phenomena, such as thunderstorms.
Tambora’s influence on human history does not derive from extreme weather events considered in isolation but in the myriad environmental impacts of a climate system gone haywire.
In the summer after Tambora’s eruption, however, the aerosol loading of the stratosphere heated the upper layer, which bore down upon the atmosphere. The “tropopause” that marks the ceiling of the Earth’s atmosphere dropped lower, cooling air temperatures and displacing the jet streams, storm tracks, and meridional circulation patterns from their usual course. By early 1816, Tambora’s chilling envelope had created a radiation deficit across the North Atlantic, altering the dynamics of the vital Arctic Oscillation. Slower-churning warm waters north of the Azores pumped over-loads of moisture into the atmosphere, saturating the skies while enhancing the temperature gradient that fuels wind dynamics. Meanwhile, air pressure at sea level plummeted across the mid-latitudes of the North Atlantic, dragging cyclonic storm tracks southward. Pioneering British climate historian Hubert Lamb has calculated that the influential Icelandic low-pressure system shifted several degrees latitude to the south during the cold summers of the 1810s compared to 20th-century norms, settling in the unfamiliar domain of the British Isles, and thus ensuring colder, wetter conditions for all of western Europe.
Both computer models and historical data draw a dramatic picture of Tambora-driven storms hammering Britain and western Europe. A recent computer simulation conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado showed fierce westerly winds in the North Atlantic in the aftermath of a major tropical eruption, while a parallel study based on multiproxy reconstructions of volcanic impacts on European climate since 1500 concluded that volcanic weather drives the increased “advection of maritime air from the North Atlantic,” meaning “stronger westerlies” and “anomalously wet conditions over Northern Europe.”
Back at the ground level of observed weather phenomena, an archival study of Scottish weather has found that, in the 1816–18 period, gale-force winds battered Edinburgh at a rate and intensity unmatched in over 200 years of record keeping. In January 1818, a particularly violent storm nearly destroyed the beloved St. John’s Chapel in the heart of the city. The slowing of oceanic currents in response to the overall deficit of solar radiation post-Tambora had left unusual volumes of heated water churning through the critical area between Iceland and the Azores, sapping air pressure, energizing westerly winds, and giving shape to titanic storms.
It was in this literally electric atmosphere that the Shelley party in Geneva, with Byron attached, conceived the idea of a ghost story contest, to entertain themselves indoors during this cold, wild summer. On the night of June 18, 1816, while another volcanic summer thunderstorm raged around them, Mary and Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Byron, and Byron’s doctor-companion John Polidori recited the poet Coleridge’s recent volume of gothic verse to each other in the candlelit dimness at the Villa Diodati. In his 1986 movie about the Shelley circle that summer, British film director Ken Russell imagines Shelley gulping tincture of opium while Claire Clairmont performs fellatio on Byron, recumbent in a chair. Group sex in the drawing room might be implausible, even for the Shelley circle, but drug taking is very likely, inspired by Coleridge, the poet-addict supreme. How else to explain Shelley’s running screaming from the room at Byron’s recitation of the psychosexual “Christabel,” tormented by his vision of a bare-chested Mary Shelley with eyes instead of nipples?
From such antics, Byron conceived the outline of a modern vampire tale, which the bitter Polidori would later appropriate and publish under Byron’s name as a satire on his employer’s cruel aristocratic hauteur and sexual voracity. For Mary, the lurid events of this stormy night gave literary body to her own distracted musings on the ghost story competition, instituted two nights earlier. She would write a horror story of her own, about a doomed monster brought unwittingly to life during a storm. As Percy Shelley later wrote, the novel itself seemed generated by “the magnificent energy and swiftness of a tempest.” Thus it was that the unique creative synergies of this remarkable group of college-age tourists—in the course of a few weeks’ biblical weather—gave birth to two singular icons of modern popular culture: Frankenstein’s monster and the Byronic Dracula.
YELLOW EYE: An illustration from an 1831 edition of Frankenstein features this indelible line from the novel: “By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull, yellow eye of the creature open.”British Library
A week after the memorable night of June 18, Byron and Shelley almost came to grief sailing on Lake Geneva, caught unawares as another violent storm swept in from the east. “The wind gradually increased in violence,” Shelley recalled, “until it blew tremendously; and, as it came from the remotest extremity of the lake, produced waves of a frightful height, and covered the whole surface with a chaos of foam.” By some miracle they found a sheltered port, where even the storm-hardened locals exchanged “looks of wonder.” Onshore, trees had blown down or been shattered by lightning.
The pyrotechnical lightning displays of June 1816 ignited the literary imagination of Mary Shelley. In Frankenstein, she uses the experience of a violent thunderstorm as the scene of fateful inspiration for her young, doomed scientist:
When I was about fifteen years old ... we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump.
Frankenstein’s life is changed in this moment; he devotes himself, with maniacal energy, to the study of electricity and galvanism. In the fierce smithy of that Tamboran storm, Frankenstein is born as the anti-superhero of modernity—the “Modern Prometheus”—stealer of the gods’ fire.
Tambura’s influence on human history does not derive from extreme weather events considered in isolation but in the myriad environmental impacts of a climate system gone haywire. As a result of the prolonged poor weather, crop yields across the British Isles and western Europe plummeted by 75 percent and more in 1816–17. In the first summer of Tambora’s cold, wet, and windy regime, the European harvest languished miserably. Farmers left their crops in the field as long as they dared, hoping some fraction might mature in late-coming sunshine. But the longed-for warm spell never arrived and at last, in October, they surrendered. Potato crops were left to rot, while entire fields of barley and oats lay blanketed in snow until the following spring.
In Germany, the descent from bad weather to crop failure to mass starvation conditions took a frighteningly rapid course. Carl von Clausewitz, the military tactician, witnessed “heartrending” scenes on his horseback travels through the Rhine country in the spring of 1817: “I saw decimated people, barely human, prowling the fields for half-rotten potatoes.” In the winter of 1817, in Augsburg, Memmingen, and other German towns, riots erupted over the rumored export of corn to starving Switzerland, while the locals were reduced to eating horse and dog flesh.
Meanwhile, back in England, riots broke out in the East Anglian counties as early as May 1816. Armed laborers bearing flags with the slogan “Bread or Blood” marched on the cathedral town of Ely, held its magistrates hostage, and fought a pitched battle against the militia.
In his magisterial account of the social and economic upheaval in Europe during the Tambora period, historian John Post has shown the scale of human suffering to be worst in Switzerland, home to Shelley and her circle in 1816. Even in normal times, a Swiss family devoted at least half its income to buying bread. Already by August 1816, bread was scarce, and in December, bakers in Montreux threatened to cease production unless they could be allowed to raise prices. With imminent famine came the threat of “soulèvements”: violent uprisings. Bakers were set upon by starving mobs in the market towns and their shops destroyed. The English ambassador to Switzerland, Stratford Canning, wrote to his prime minister that an army of peasants, unemployed and starving, was assembling to march on Lausanne.
Most shocking of all was the fate of some desperate mothers. In horrific circumstances repeated around the world in the Tambora period, some Swiss families abandoned their offspring in the crisis, while others chose killing their children as the more humane course. For this crime, some starving women were apprehended and decapitated. Thousands of Swiss with more means and resilience emigrated east to prosperous Russia, while others set off along the Rhine to Holland and sailed from there to North America, which witnessed its first significant wave of refugee European migration in the 19th century. The numbers of European immigrants arriving at U.S. ports in 1817 more than doubled the number of any previous year.
Devastated by famine and disease in the Tambora period, the poor of Europe hurriedly buried their dead before resuming the bitter fight for their own survival. In the worst cases, children were abandoned by their families and died alone in the fields or by the roadside. The well-born members of the Shelley circle were never reduced to such abysmal circumstances. They did not experience the food crises that afflicted millions among the rural populations of western Europe in the Tambora period. Yet the Shelleys’ celebrated writings were enmeshed within the web of ecological breakdown following the Tambora eruption.
Byron and Percy Shelley were companions on a weeklong walking tour of Alpine Switzerland in June 1816, during which they debated poetry, metaphysics, and the future of mankind but also found time to remark on the village children they encountered, who “appeared in an extraordinary way deformed and diseased. Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged throats.” In Frankenstein, the Doctor’s benighted creation assumes a similar grotesque shape: a barely human creature, deformed, crooked, and enlarged. Like the hordes of refugees on the roads of Europe seeking aid in 1816–18, the Creature, when he ventures into the towns, is met with fear and hostility, horror and abomination. As the indigent Creature himself puts it, he suffered first “from the inclemency of the season” but “still more from the barbarity of man.”
As remarkable a feat of literary imagination as Frankenstein is, Mary Shelley was not wanting for real-world inspiration for her horror story, namely the deteriorating rural populations of Europe, in the climatic upheaval of Mount Tambora.
Gillen D’Arcy Wood is the author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World. He is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities.
Excerpted from Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World by Gillen D’Arcy Wood. Copyright @ 2014 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
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Cold food, hot air.
EPA helps supermarkets switch to refrigerants that save money and lessen global warming.
EPA helps supermarkets switch to refrigerants that save money and lessen global warming
By John Fialka, ClimateWire on August 18, 2017
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Credit: Yun Huang Yon Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
When newly graduated environmental lawyer Keilly Witman joined U.S. EPA in 2007, she was handed one of its toughest jobs. She had to convince supermarkets that their leaky air conditioning and refrigeration systems needed to be fixed or they would substantially warm the Earth's atmosphere.
When it comes to making refrigeration more efficient and less harmful to the climate, U.S. supermarkets have been a long-slumbering giant. There are at least 38,000 of them. They spend 50 to 60 percent, on average, of their energy bills on cooling people and food, which puts them among the biggest commercial building electricity users.
According to a recent study by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the average supermarket uses about 2.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, the equivalent of about 213 American homes. Sixty to 70 percent of their electricity for air conditioning and refrigeration is spent pushing refrigerants through miles of pipes and running big compressors and condensers to keep things cool.
The rest is spent to run display cases, cooler fans, evaporator defrosting and small heaters used to prevent condensate from forming on glass doors and display cases, so people can see the food. Supermarkets can afford to pay those big electricity bills. They have an annual sales volume of almost $770 billion, according to the Food Marketing Institute (FMI).
But Witman's job was to remind them that their leaking refrigerants had already been blamed for destroying the Earth's ozone layer, which protects people from harmful solar radiation. She was also there to alert them that many newer ozone-saving refrigerants are chemicals with thousands of times the global warming potency of carbon dioxide.
People in EPA's Stratospheric Protection Division warned Witman that the leaky pipe problem had festered for years and they needed a creative way to solve it. She saw her job as a rare opportunity. "The EPA is not used to having to convince people to do things," Witman explained. She set up a voluntary program called the GreenChill Partnership; it was meant to find companies that had innovative ways of preventing refrigerant leaks, so they might help other supermarket chains.
GreenChill was the beginning of EPA's good-cop, bad-cop approach to the problem. A few chains, such as Whole Foods, Hannaford Bros. and Harris Teeter, were interested right away, but others took years of convincing.
Air conditioning was invented in the United States, and the technology hasn't changed much until recently. There is a new family of refrigerants in Europe and Asia that were gaining attention. In her sales pitch, Witman—who was once the entire staff of GreenChill—would point out that stores in Europe had been able to cut the cost of their leaks by using a much cheaper chemical—carbon dioxide—as a refrigerant.
That took more explaining, because CO2 has been thoroughly villainized for causing global warming. Man-made emissions from burning fossil fuels, beginning with coal, are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. But popular refrigerants, such as a fluorinated chemical called HFC-404A, are 3,922 times more potent than CO2 as global warmers.
Witman's biggest selling point was that reducing refrigerant leaks would help supermarkets make money. According to EPA, the average U.S. supermarket leaks 1,000 pounds of refrigerant a year, which, at a cost of $10 to $20 per pound, is expensive. Preventing leaks also would eliminate emergency service calls that were seen as a fact of life in the supermarket industry.
"When people realized you could actually save money, we had people joining the partnership who really didn't care about the environment. They just wanted to save the money," Witman said. "That was no problem for me, because the whole time they were saving money, they were helping the environment."
Still, about two-thirds of U.S. supermarkets didn't respond to GreenChill.
Using CO2 and reducing it
Meanwhile, commercial refrigeration systems that used CO2 as a refrigerant were spreading around the world. Food chains in Europe were preparing 1,500 stores to use it, and companies were developing and selling what are called "transcritical CO2 booster systems" in China, Japan, Canada and Australia.
The United States, according to a study by DOE, has had a "slow uptake of the technology," caused by "a lack of retailer awareness"; skeptical buyers who hadn't seen it tested; and a limited number of vendors, system designers and engineers who are familiar with it.
Finally, in 2013, the Hannaford Bros. supermarket chain opened the first U.S. CO2-refrigerated store in Turner, Maine, using a refrigeration system imported from Canada. The DOE study compared it with another New England Hannaford store using an HFC-404A refrigerant and found that, while the CO2 system's cost was 40 percent greater because it required a higher pressure, the store's operating expenses were lower because annual refrigerant losses were cut by 75 percent.
What most impressed EPA was that the Turner store's climate footprint was reduced by 15 percent. So GreenChill gave Hannaford its "Best of the Best" award for its pioneering efforts. And DOE predicted in its study that the future potential for CO2 systems in U.S. supermarkets would be "large."
Witman, who left EPA in 2013 to form a refrigeration consulting company, found that the U.S. supermarket industry remained leery of the new systems.
She would go to supermarket industry conferences and find executives complaining about the hurdles that needed to be overcome before they would consider using the technology. The conclusion at the conferences was that "somebody has to do something about these hurdles."
In 2015, Witman began rounding up interested companies from supermarket chains, refrigeration equipment manufacturers and supermarket refrigeration contractors to form an environmental nonprofit called the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council (NASRC). They were willing to support it. The members formed teams to encourage utilities to develop incentives for the use of natural refrigerants, to train service technicians, to help establish the necessary building codes and engineering standards, and to help overcome the cost barrier that is characteristic of many new technologies.
Meanwhile, EPA, driven by the Obama administration's interest in promoting global warming solutions, had begun to propose tougher rules on managing refrigerants and to phase out the use of super-warming chemicals using its powers under the Clean Air Act.
Several of its rules were opposed by the Food Marketing Institute, the main trade association for the supermarket industry, as being "unduly burdensome." On its website, FMI still claims it's a "myth" that "grocery stores have been slow to adopt energy efficient models and [that] refrigerant emissions remain high."
FMI says: "Food retailers are consistently working on ways to reduce refrigerant emissions and the impact on the environment. Through partnerships like GreenChill, retailers work closely with the Environmental Protection Agency to install transition to environmental friendlier refrigerants, lower refrigerant charge sizes and eliminate leaks."
Uh oh, Costco, Safeway and Trader Joe's
John Wallace, director of retail solutions at Emerson Climate Technologies Inc., an Ohio-based company that has a global business in fixing leaking refrigeration and air conditioning systems, has a different view. In the supermarket business, Wallace said, leaky refrigeration pipes are "often thought of as a cost of doing business." Their "far-reaching impacts are largely underestimated," he said.
Although there are new automated leak detection systems, he noted the traditional service call is to recharge the leaking system with new refrigerant and not bother about finding and fixing the leaks, "which means you'll be back a few months from now to do the same thing."
Some big supermarket chains, he estimated, were reluctant to pay the upfront costs of fixing the leaks, so they were losing as much as $500,000 a year. "That's one of the challenges the industry has," he said. "I don't think that most people would knowledgeably throw away that much money."
However, EPA and lawyers for the Justice Department found ways to raise the costs of business as usual.
In September 2013, the United States reached a settlement with Safeway, the second-largest grocery chain in North America. The agreement affected 659 stores and required Safeway to pay a $600,000 civil penalty and to develop an estimated $4.1 million plan to monitor and reduce its corporatewide refrigeration emissions. Safeway was given three years to reduce its emissions leak rate from 25 percent to 18 percent.
I don't think that most people would knowledgeably throw away that much money.
John Wallace, director of retail solutions, Emerson Climate Technologies
A year later, EPA extracted $335,000 in penalties from Costco in a settlement requiring a better refrigeration management plan covering 274 stores over three years. Its estimated cost was $2 million. The agreement stated that Costco "failed to make timely repairs to leaks on refrigeration equipment and to maintain proper records." Under the settlement, Costco agreed to develop a chain of command for monitoring leaks that extends from an individual warehouse to officials at Costco's headquarters in Issaquah, Wash.
In June 2016, EPA and DOJ made a bargain with Trader Joe's, a settlement covering 453 of its stores. The supermarket chain agreed to pay a $500,000 civil penalty; to cut its leak rate to 12.1 percent; and to use advanced refrigerants, such as carbon dioxide, in some of its stores. According to EPA, Trader Joe's—renowned for its varieties of crunchy granola and recycling of paper bags—was using refrigerants that were up to 4,700 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than CO2.
EPA said the total settlement would reduce global warming gases equivalent to removing 6,500 passenger vehicles from the roads for one year.
GreenChill statistics show that the problem of leaking refrigeration pipes creates slightly more global warming emissions than the indirect impacts of supermarkets' gargantuan energy needs.
Whole Foods, one of Witman's pioneering supporters and a leader in NASRC, uses a measure called total equivalent warming impact, which suggests that direct emissions from refrigerants and indirect emissions from energy use should be weighed together when it comes to measuring a store's global warming impact.
While some in the industry hope for high-tech fixes, an EPA study called "Transitioning to Low Global Warming Alternatives" rattles off a long list of low-tech leak-fixing solutions that store owners might use to help the climate and save their shareholders money.
The problems those would solve include "poor design and improper installation, servicing, and/or maintenance practices, including poor brazing techniques, improperly tightened fittings, missing valve caps and seals, use of incompatible materials, improper support of copper tubing, and inadequate leak diagnosis and repair."
Wallace of Emerson Climate Technologies said he thinks EPA's most effective approach has been its voluntary GreenChill program, but noted that the Trump administration's proposed budget plans to eliminate it.
"That's kind of up in the air right now," he said.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E; News. E&E; provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.
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Greenland needs money. Is a uranium mine the answer?
While the world focuses on the potentially disastrous effects of Greenland’s melting ice cap, Greenlanders themselves are struggling to solve a very different problem: how to tap their wealth of natural resources without inviting the environmental and political problems that have devastated other developing nations.
Greenland needs money.
Is a uranium mine
the answer?
Story by Michael Oneal
Photos by Sirio Magnabosco
Published on February 10, 2017
NARSAQ, Greenland
As principal of the primary school in this once-prosperous fishing town near the southern tip of Greenland, Ivalo Motzfeldt has a clear view of what unemployment and shrinking opportunity can do to families: Children arriving at school hungry and traumatized by domestic violence. Recurrent waves of suicides. Flagging motivation and stubbornly low rates of academic advancement.
Motzfeldt knows that breaking this pattern is critical to Narsaq’s future and to Greenland’s. But she passionately opposes the government’s proposed solution: an open-pit mine for rare-earth minerals and uranium near town financed by a pair of Australian and Chinese mining companies. She fears that the mine will poison South Greenland’s pristine environment with radioactive waste and open the tiny nation of 56,000 to foreign meddling. “We need money, but we can’t sacrifice the land for money,” she said.
While the world focuses on the potentially disastrous effects of Greenland’s melting ice cap, Greenlanders themselves are struggling to solve a very different problem: how to tap their wealth of natural resources without inviting the environmental and political problems that have devastated other developing nations.
With a territory larger than Mexico and a population that could fit inside a football stadium, Greenland badly needs new sources of income to provide jobs and combat chronic social ills. Its economy leans heavily on one major export — shrimp — and is propped up by an annual block grant of more than $500 million from Denmark.The question is what to do about it. Many in Greenland, including Prime Minister Kim Kielsen, view resource development as the nation’s best chance for self-sufficiency. The issue is tightly intertwined with Greenland’s fervent movement to win independence from Denmark, which began colonizing the sprawling territory almost 300 years ago. Greenland negotiated the right to self-rule in 1979 and has since built the institutions of a modern democratic society.
Kvanefjeld mine proposal
The South Greenland mine for uranium and rare-earth elements could be one of the biggest sources of such ores in the world.
1 mile
Greenland
(DEN.)
Narsaq
Residues of uranium,
thorium and silicate
minerals would be
stored here
MINING AREA
1
The pit, which is open to the air, is where the digging takes place.
2
The dump is where waste rock is piled.
2
1
PROCESSING RESIDUES
Lake
Taseq
The flotation tailings storage facility receives 92 percent of the solid residues after processing.
3
3
4
4
The chemical residue storage facility receives the remaining 8 percent of refinery residue.
Source: Greenland Minerals and Energy LTD
SAMUEL GRANADOS / THE WASHINGTON POST
The next step, pro-development interests think, is to launch large-scale mining projects to jump-start a diversification of the economy. Opponents counter that courting foreign mining interests amounts to swapping one form of dependency for another, with the added risk of environmental degradation.The policy debate is playing out in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, but the struggle is more palpable in Narsaq, where mining companies propose digging into a treeless mountain called Kvanefjeld that rises imposingly just outside of town. The mine would produce 3 million tons of ore per year when at full production. It would be the world’s second-largest rare-earth mine; its overall footprint, including disposal areas and housing for workers, would be close to five square miles.
From the top of Kvanefjeld, it’s easy to see what’s at stake. The view is spectacular — a patchwork of rugged mountains and aquamarine fjords studded with ice floes in various shades of white and blue.
But the surrounding region is in steady decline. Although it thrived for generations on fishing, that changed in 2010, when Royal Greenland, the state-owned fishing company, closed the local shrimp-processing plant, eliminating more than 100 jobs. Narsaq’s population has dropped 13 percent since 2006 as young people have moved elsewhere. Those who remain are left wondering how they can carve out a new future in an Arctic region that is changing rapidly and dramatically.
“This is a golden opportunity to do it correctly. Greenland is standing at the starting block just waiting for the gun to go off.”
— Ib Laursen, local manager of Greenland Minerals and Energy
The operations manager
Ib Laursen, the local manager of the Australian mining company Greenland Minerals and Energy (GME), spends much of his time trying to convince his neighbors that uranium concerns are overblown. Unless GME and its Chinese partner, Shenghe Resources Holding Co., demonstrate that they can develop and operate the proposed mine safely, he said, there’s no way Greenland’s government will allow the companies to proceed.
At 61, Laursen is still tall and toned, a former fitness specialist in the Danish army who moved to Greenland to be a hunting outfitter 31 years ago. He and his wife have raised two children here, and he claims as much stake as anyone else in making sure the mine doesn’t contaminate his adopted home. Greenland isn’t Angola or the Congo, he said, nations where Chinese mining interests have run roughshod.
“We have the institutions. We have the transparency,” he insisted. “Greenland needs to have one good experience and develop from there.”
So far, GME has spent $65 million studying the mine’s feasibility and will soon submit final environmental- and social-impact studies. To help defray costs, it brought in Shenghe as a 12.5 percent partner in September. The agreement included the possibility of increasing that stake to 60 percent in the future, a detail that has raised concern among mining opponents.
Standing on a hill near the mine site made barren by naturally occurring high levels of toxic fluorine in the soil, Laursen explained that Kvanefjeld was formed when liquid magma forced its way into the Earth’s crust eons ago, then slowly cooled in place instead of spilling over as a volcano. The cooling produced one of the world’s richest deposits of rare-earth oxides, which are used in the manufacture of consumer electronics and alternative energy technologies. (China controls the rare-earth market with a near monopoly on production.)
Uranium, Laursen is quick to point out, makes up only about 9 percent of the total value of the deposit. But there’s no way of getting at the more lucrative minerals without generating radioactive waste, dramatically increasing the project’s environmental risk.
GME’s mitigation plan is elaborate. The company proposes building a two-mile pipeline over the mountain to channel a slurry of radioactive “tailings” from the mine into a lake perched high above the fjord. The miners will then build a complex dam that blocks the lake’s outlet stream but allows snowmelt to pass through so the lake basin doesn’t overflow. Then there’s the radioactive dust: The miners will have to deploy a host of measures to keep it from contaminating the town and nearby sheep pastures.
Not surprisingly, the complexity of this plan gives many locals pause. They also balk at plans to establish a village for more than 700 mostly foreign workers and transform Narsaq’s pristine harbor into a transpolar shipping facility. But Laursen argues that all of this is manageable.
“This is a golden opportunity to do it correctly,” he said. “Greenland is standing at the starting block just waiting for the gun to go off.”
“If you Google ‘open-pit mine,’ all you see is destruction. It would be like killing the spirit of South Greenland.”
— Paninnguag Lind Jensen, who returned to Narsaq last year after 10 years in Denmark
The tattoo artist
Tattoo artist Paninnguag Lind Jensen isn’t buying it. She fears that the environmental degradation and health risks posed by an open-pit mine will inevitably outweigh the benefits. “If you Google ‘open-pit mine,’ all you see is destruction,” she said. “It would be like killing the spirit of South Greenland.”
But Jensen has also seen Narsaq’s decline firsthand. While growing up here in the 1990s, most of the adults she knew had jobs, and her neighborhood was filled with children playing in the streets, the older ones looking after the younger. Jensen left Narsaq at 16 to finish her education in Denmark, and when she returned last year at 26, the town was diminished: The fish plant was closed, whole apartment buildings were boarded up and unemployment had become a major problem.
“It’s like people lost all hope about Narsaq,” she said.
Hope can be fragile in Greenland, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Of the 30 children in Jensen’s primary school class, five have taken their own lives over the years, she said. With the rise in joblessness, social problems in general have spread. Yet to help rein in public spending, the government has consolidated many health and counseling services in the larger town of Qaqortoq, an hour by boat up the fjord.
Jensen suffered from depression while she was in Denmark but was able to find help there relatively easily. “Here,” she said, “you have to be close to death before you can get help.”
She’d like to think these problems would go away if the mine added jobs and improved local health services, but she’s convinced it’s not that easy. “That’s a really romantic picture,” she said, “but I don’t believe it.”
“[Young people taking jobs there] won’t be employed even for a generation. Then they’ll just throw them back into unemployment.”
— Jorgen Olesen, who spent most of his working life at sea
The shrimper
Until he died in December from a sudden illness at 58, Jorgen Olesen had spent most of his life at sea. He and his brothers owned a small fleet of shrimp boats, and he was fond of telling stories about the days not so long ago when hauling 16 tons of prawns in a three-day run was commonplace.
“The town had a flow to it then,” Olesen had said, when interviewed in September. “People were happy. They went to work every day and got paid every two weeks.” Narsaq’s local processing plant ran 24 hours a day in three shifts, peeling, freezing and packing shrimp for a global market.
While climate change seems to be benefiting Greenland’s overall fishing industry, coastal shrimping near Narsaq has fallen victim to several factors. Because shrimp thrive in the cold, they have moved to deeper water and farther north as temperatures rise. Royal Greenland’s large, modern factory ships are better suited to chasing moving species and can process them more efficiently onboard.
To preserve some jobs, the government mandates that 25 percent of the catch be delivered to onshore plants, but Narsaq’s was not one of them. Left without a place to land their catch, small boats such as Olesen’s eventually stopped operating.
With less pressure on their numbers, some shrimp are returning to the fjord, raising hopes that the processing plant may reopen one day. Halibut fishing is also better and mackerel are on the rise. But few think Narsaq will see renewed fishing employment anytime soon. Olesen said he had counseled his son to find another career — but not in the mine, which he opposed.
Even if you thought it made sense to take the environmental risk, Olesen said, mining is unsustainable. The project is expected to run its course in 30 to 40 years, a shorter span than he spent at sea. Young people taking jobs there “won’t be employed even for a generation,” Olesen said. “Then they’ll just throw them back into unemployment.”
Thanks in part to global warming, agriculture thrives in southern areas of Greenland, with many farms and luxuriant expanses of vegetables, in contrast to the barren ice world that covers much of the rest of the country. Aviaja Lennert and Klaus Frederiksen are shown on their sheep farm in South Greenland.
The farmers
All that Klaus Frederiksen and Aviaja Lennert have to do to remember why they oppose the mine is to walk out their front door. Sixty-six acres of sheep pasture stretch toward a blue fjord choked with giant ice floes that have calved from the nearby glacier — a southern tributary of Greenland’s massive ice cap. Frederiksen’s family has farmed this land for three generations, since the days when South Greenland and North Greenland were separate Danish colonies. (They merged in 1950.) The area has supported agriculture off and on for a millennium: Eric the Red established Greenland’s first Norse settlement there after he was banished from Iceland for murder in 982.
Frederiksen has firsthand experience with uranium. He apprenticed on a Norwegian sheep farm in 1993 that was still finding radiation in animals seven years after the Soviet Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. He knows the mine is not Chernobyl, but still worries that if radioactive dust drifts northward from Narsaq on Greenland’s strong wind currents, it could taint the pastures where he grazes his 600 sheep.
GME says there is no threat of such contamination, but farmers fear that even the suggestion of such exposure could turn consumers off the meat from South Greenland and discourage tourism. Like many of their neighbors, Frederiksen and Lennert have developed a nice side income by renting their outbuildings to ecotourists.
Lennert thinks a rapidly warming climate will create opportunities to develop new forms of sustainable agriculture. But climate change is also unpredictable. Warming has produced an extended drought in the region that has forced sheep farmers to import fresh hay from Denmark via barge, an enormously expensive undertaking. The government provides some subsidies, but the increase in costs is still painful.
Frederiksen said a family used to be able to make a living from 300 sheep but now must own 500 to get by. Even so, Lennert wouldn’t trade her life for anyone else’s. “I feel like I’m rich,” she said.
“Today the technology is much better. I’m okay with it.”
— Sebu Kaspersen, who is confident that uranium can be mined safely
The seal hunter
Standing on a bloody dock next to six small boats filled with slabs of whale meat, Sebu Kaspersen, 31, said he, too, is also feeling the effects of climate change. For years, he has hunted adult seals that sun themselves on the sea ice that floats down from East Greenland each spring. But a lack of ice last year meant seals were scarce.
Whale hunting has also changed. The 26-foot minke whale that Kaspersen and his hunting partners were selling on the dock filled the area’s annual quota of two whales. But that would have happened several months earlier in past years, Kaspersen said, because whales used to arrive in late spring.
Whale and seal hunting hardly endears Greenlanders to the rest of the world, but it is a proud Inuit tradition and an important source of food and jobs. As friends and neighbors crowded around the boats to fill bags with meat and blubber, Kaspersen said he considers himself part of an essential circle of life that has sustained both the Inuit and the Arctic environment for thousands of years. Kaspersen grew up on his father’s boat and got his professional hunting license at 18. The work isn’t easy, but the idea of trading his life for a job in the mine, he said, is unthinkable.
Still, Kaspersen is in favor of the Kvanefjeld project. Having watched Narsaq decline after the shrimp plant closed, he thinks the town needs a new source of jobs. Several of his friends have gone to school to earn mining certificates and are eager to work for GME. Although Kaspersen said he would keep a wary eye on the local environment, he’s confident uranium can be mined safely. “Today the technology is much better,” he said. “I’m okay with it.”
“Everything has a price, including our freedom. It’s a question of how willing the people are to be free.”
— Vittus Qujaukitsoq, Greenland’s minister of industry, labor and trade
The politician
For Vittus Qujaukitsoq, Greenland’s minister of industry, labor and trade, the question is not whether a uranium mine makes sense for Narsaq but whether the town has any choice.
“Is it an option for people to be unemployed and supported by subsidies?” he asked. “No.”
Qujaukitsoq, who is also Greenland’s foreign minister, is a blunt, hard-nosed leader of the Siumut party that has controlled Greenland’s government since 2013. Wide-shouldered and solid, he has the pugnacious air of a big-city mayor and is not afraid to pick a fight. He recently demanded that Denmark either clean up nuclear waste generated by a shuttered U.S. missile base or get the United States to do it.
After November’s election, he welcomed the Trump administration, reasoning that its pro-development agenda would benefit Greenland. When asked whether Greenland has the administrative clout to defend itself against foreign money interests, Qujaukitsoq didn’t hesitate. “We’re not afraid of being overrun by the Chinese,” he said.
Qujaukitsoq and his Siumut colleagues successfully petitioned Denmark for the right to mine and export uranium, with a critical ruling in Denmark last June. That seemed to clear the way for the Kvanefjeld mine. But amid growing opposition to the project organized by the anti-uranium Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) party, Siumut shook up its governing coalition and joined with IA in a pro-independence coalition government. Both sides agreed to put aside the uranium issue for now while they concentrate on areas of agreement.
The issue will come to a head when GME and Shenghe Resources submit their impact statements, putting Siumut’s political clout to the test. IA is not anti-mining, but uranium will be a sticking point. For Qujaukitsoq, however, the stakes are bigger: Is Greenland ready to carve out a larger place for itself in the world? Qujaukitsoq insisted there is no reason to think the laws and frameworks in place will not protect Greenland’s interests — environmental, cultural and political.
“Is our small size a concern?” he said. “No. We have to become more than we are. . . . Everything has a price, including our freedom. It’s a question of how willing the people are to be free.”
“I’m worried about my own family now.”
— Hans Knudsen, who fears that toxic dust from the mine will be blown into the town
The shopkeeper
Hans Knudsen did not expect to be back here. He had gone away after primary school and eventually studied IT support and multimedia Web design in Denmark. He thought he was headed for a job in the new economy.
But when the shrimp plant shut down, his father’s variety store began to falter. Fishermen and plant workers — customers for cigarettes, laundry detergent and much else — once were a steady clientele, but now their patronage was gone. Knudsen’s father called him home to help out.
He complied. And like his father, Knudsen, 33, was initially a big supporter of the mine proposal. The town needed jobs, and a mine could provide them. But then he began a relationship with a local woman, and they had a child. The mine opponents’ warnings about toxic dust floating over the town began to resonate.
“I’m worried about my own family now,” he said. But he’s also concerned about keeping the family business afloat. He’s stuck on the fence, not sure what to think and full of anxiety about the future.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not saying no and I’m not saying yes.”
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New climate-friendlier coolant has a catch: it's flammable.
Dr. Rajiv Singh, a scientist at Honeywell's lab in Buffalo, began running computer models of tens of thousands of molecular combinations. He was seeking a better refrigerant, one of the most vexing chemicals for the environment.
New Climate-Friendlier Coolant Has a Catch: It’s Flammable
By DANNY HAKIMOCT. 22, 2016
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Photo
Tubes used for testing at Honeywell’s lab in Buffalo. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times
LONDON — Rajiv Singh started thinking about how to do his part to fight global warming 15 years ago.
Dr. Singh, a scientist at Honeywell’s lab in Buffalo, began running computer models of tens of thousands of molecular combinations. He was seeking a better refrigerant, one of the most vexing chemicals for the environment.
Refrigerants cool homes, cars and buildings but also warm the planet at a far higher rate than carbon dioxide. Dr. Singh was searching for one stable enough to be useful but that degraded quickly so it did not linger to trap heat in the atmosphere.
“You have to hit the chemistry books,†he said in a recent interview.
As product names go, HFO-1234yf, the refrigerant he played a crucial role in developing, does not roll off the tongue. But it is one of the most important alternatives to hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which have long been used in air-conditioners and refrigerators and which contribute greatly to climate change. On Oct. 15, in Kigali, Rwanda, more than 170 countries reached an agreement as part of the Montreal Protocol to curb the use of HFCs.
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But Dr. Singh’s new coolant is also controversial, with critics questioning its safety and viewing it as the latest attempt by large chemical companies to play the regulatory system to their advantage. HFO-1234yf is already becoming standard in many new cars sold in the European Union and the United States by all the major automakers, in large part because its developers, Honeywell and Chemours, have automakers over a barrel. Their refrigerant is one of the few options that automakers have to comply with new regulations and the Kigali agreement.
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It has its detractors. The new refrigerant is at least 10 times as costly as the one it replaces.
A number of rival manufacturers have filed suits to challenge the patent. Officials in India, which has a fast-growing car market, are deliberating over whether to grant patent protection.
And then there is the safety issue.
Daimler began raising red flags in 2012. A video the company made public was stark. It showed a Mercedes-Benz hatchback catching fire under the hood after 1234yf refrigerant leaked during a company simulation.
Daimler eventually relented and went along with the rest of the industry, installing 1234yf in many of its new cars. But the company has developed an alternative using carbon dioxide that is being introduced in its S-class cars and some E-class models, with an eye toward further expansion.
In a statement, Sandra Gödde, a spokeswoman for Daimler, said 1234yf had “different flammability properties†than the HFC coolant it was replacing, which is considered to be nonflammable. The company has developed “specific measures in order to guarantee our high safety standards,†she added, including “a specially developed protective system.â€
Photo
Rajiv Singh helped develop HFO-1234yf, a coolant that is less harmful to the climate than hydrofluorocarbons. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times
Some engineers and environmentalists, however, say 1234yf is not a good option.
“None of the people in the car industry I know want to use it,†said Axel Friedrich, the former head of the transportation and noise division at the Umweltbundesamt, the German equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. He added that he opposed having another “product in the front of the car which is flammable.â€
Dr. Friedrich, an engineer and a chemist, is also a member of the scientific advisory council of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the group that commissioned the tests that exposed Volkswagen’s cheating on diesel emissions. He collaborated on tests of 1234yf with Deutsche Umwelthilfe, a German environmental group, which also raised fire concerns. While cars, obviously, contain other flammable materials, he was specifically worried that at high temperatures 1234yf emitted hydrogen fluoride, which is dangerous if inhaled or touched.
“I wouldn’t like to use it as a car owner, because it gives me a higher risk and higher cost,†Dr. Friedrich said. “It’s a really unfair solution by the car industry. This is not what government and society should have accepted.â€
Honeywell and Chemours (which until last year was a unit of DuPont) have been adamant that the product is safe, and they are not alone. After the Daimler issue emerged, SAE International, an engineering consortium that includes all of the major automakers, said 1234yf was “highly unlikely to ignite,†though the issue led to a brief split with German automakers. The Joint Research Center of the European Union has also said there was “no evidence of a serious risk.†It is being used across the auto industry and has gained approval from regulators in the United States and Europe.
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“Daimler was the only manufacturer that cited an issue,†said Ken Gayer, vice president and general manager of Honeywell Fluorine Products.
“All other car manufacturers at the time had incorporated 1234yf, which is mildly flammable, into their designs, with modest design changes, and proven to themselves conclusively that they could safely use the product,†he said.
Daimler’s concerns led to a reassessment. “The entire industry stepped back and said, ‘Could we possibly have missed something?’†Mr. Gayer said. “We reviewed all the work we did, and we also ran new tests to try to understand better what Daimler’s issue was.â€
At the end of that process, automakers and regulators “proved to themselves conclusively once again that 1234yf was safe for use in cars, and then finally in 2015 Daimler announced publicly that they would use the product,†Mr. Gayer said.
Chemours said in a statement that the additional testing proved any “concerns to be unfounded.†It added, “Today, all major global automakers around the world are using HFO-1234yf.â€
One thing is not in dispute. The new coolant is superior to the HFC it is replacing in its impact on global warming. Hydrofluorocarbons have roughly 1,400 times the impact of carbon dioxide, the baseline used to measure such chemicals. By contrast, 1234yf has only four times the impact.
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Axel Friedrich, a chemist, opposes the new coolant because it is flammable. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
Because of that, perhaps no single chemical is better positioned to take advantage of the Kigali agreement. While Honeywell and Chemours, when it was part of DuPont, lobbied to weaken and stall HFC regulations in the past, this time they were poised to profit from a product that had fresh patent protection, and they largely embraced the agreement.
Though Honeywell would not give specific profit or revenue figures for 1234yf, sales of its HFC alternatives have helped the company raise annual revenue from its wider fluorine business by double-digit percentages in the last few years to more than $1 billion.
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The companies, which sell products under different brand names, have “almost a monopoly,†said Stephen O. Andersen, a former E.P.A. official who has been a representative to the Montreal Protocol and works for the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, an advocacy group.
“The price of the product is very high, about $80 a kilogram, and so that adds up to about $50 to $75 per car, which is a lot of money compared to the HFC they were using,†which he said was about $4 to $6 a car. “So it’s a big shock, and it’s been a lot of controversy.â€
David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, “The safety concern is bogus.â€
“The main concern is its high price,†Mr. Doniger said. “While a small part of the price of a car, this could be concerning when repairs are needed.†He said the price would decline after the patents expired, though that will take years.
The conundrums and controversies highlight the complexities of refrigerants and the trade-offs inherent in the fight to curb global warming. In the 1980s, the Montreal Protocol led to the ban on chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, because of hazards to the ozone layer. They were replaced by HFCs, which are being curbed because of their effects on the climate.
Will 1234yf be an equally transitory fix? “Nothing lasts forever,†Dr. Singh, the Honeywell chemist, said. “At least a couple generations.â€
Dorothee Saar, head of the transport and clean air team at Deutsche Umwelthilfe, the environmental group, said the new refrigerant presented considerable safety risks. She has her own solution. Ms. Saar, who lives in Berlin, has an old Volkswagen Golf without air-conditioning.
“I can always open a window,†she sa
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How the chemical industry joined the fight against climate change.
Companies like Honeywell and DuPont have worked to stay ahead of environmental regulations, creating less harmful products for their air-conditioning and refrigeration businesses.
By HIROKO TABUCHI and DANNY HAKIMOCT. 16, 2016
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Workers assembling air-conditioners at a Daikin plant in India in 2014. The company also produces HFC32, a refrigerant. Credit Adnan Abidi/Reuters
It might seem surprising to find the world’s chemical companies on the front lines of preventing climate change, fighting to disrupt their own industries.
But in a sweeping accord reached on Saturday in Kigali, Rwanda, companies including Honeywell and DuPont were among the most active backers of a move away from a profitable chemical that has long been the foundation for the fast-growing air-conditioning and refrigeration business.
The companies were driven less by idealism than by intense competition, and a bet that they could create more environmentally friendly alternatives.
Still, some environmentalists say the aggressive move away from hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, provides a template for other industries to follow.
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“They learned that without a rule change, their new products couldn’t compete,” said David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in Washington, D.C. “They woke up and said, ‘The science is real.’”
“We wanted them restricted for purely environmental reasons. The companies wanted them restricted for many other reasons,” including profit, Mr. Doniger said. “But the point is that they had a certain common interest with the international community.”
The chemical industry’s response stands in stark contrast to the foot-dragging, and in many cases the outright obstruction of climate regulations, by the big oil companies.
Exxon Mobil, Chevron and others have been criticized for lobbying against rules to curb greenhouse gases for decades, even though their own researchers have warned of the risks of climate change.
Some environmentalists contend that the chemical companies were allowed to have too much input into the Kigali deal. They also say the deal could have been more ambitious in timing and scope.
And there are concerns that many producers in countries will not profit as quickly, consolidating the power of the world’s biggest companies. Much of the resistance to the agreement came from China and India, which feared that some of their chemical manufacturers would be shut out, or that their consumers would face higher prices.
“Although we welcome the outcome and there is progress, it’s being dictated by the industry,” said Paula Tejón Carbajal, the global business strategist for Greenpeace in Amsterdam.
The Kigali deal is the latest chapter in what has been at times an environmentally disastrous role played by the air-conditioning and refrigeration industry.
For decades, a class of chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, were used widely in air-conditioners and refrigerators, as well as in aerosol sprays and cleaning products. But scientists warned that CFCs deplete the ozone layer, which protects the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Chemical companies first resisted, saying that alternatives were not economically viable. “They were awful, just like the coal industry,” Mr. Doniger said.
But consumer concern about the chemicals led to slumping sales, and a handful of countries banned CFCs. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol agreement was created to completely phase out those chemicals.
The alternatives available at the time, HFCs, were greenhouse gases with 1,000 times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide. Concerns over those chemicals spurred campaigns by environmentalists to phase out HFCs as well.
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Air-conditioners on a summer day in Midtown Manhattan. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
This time, chemical producers raced to get ahead of any new round of regulations. Even as the switch to HFCs was taking hold in the early 2000s, Honeywell and several other companies began research and development programs to study alternatives with far lower warming potential.
Europe tightened its regulations in 2011, with stricter laws aimed at phasing out HFCs in car air-conditioners. Regulators in the United States gave credits to domestic automakers for switching to HFC alternatives.
In 2012, Honeywell set up a production base just north of Shanghai to make a more environmentally friendly HFC alternative known as HFO-1234yf. The company followed with a second plant north of Tokyo, and is set to open its largest production base in Geismar, La., early next year. It has spent $900 million on its alternative coolant program.
Since then, Honeywell has publicly voiced its support for stricter regulations, and in 2014, was one of a group of companies to partner with the Obama administration in its bid to make amending the Montreal Protocol a priority.
With the world phasing out HFCs, the company is set to reap the benefits of its investment. Though Honeywell does not break out specific figures for its chemicals business, it has said that sales of its HFC alternatives are rising fast, helping the company grow its annual revenues from its wider fluorine business by double digits to over $1 billion.
“This is an area where we are aligned with the environmental benefits,” Kenneth Gayer, vice president of fluorine products at Honeywell, said in an interview. “We anticipated the need for these regulations before people were even talking about global warming. Now, the world is going to use alternatives in a big way.”
Other options are now available, including systems that use propane or ammonia, and companies throughout the supply chain are racing to adopt them. Coca-Cola, for example, has put more than 1.8 million refrigerated vending machines and other HFC-free equipment into service.
Still, some environmentalists caution against what they see as excessive influence by the corporate sector in shaping the way forward for cooling technologies.
Daikin makes a low-cost HFC alternative called HFC32 that has a relatively small global warming impact, and is seen as useful for markets like India. Daikin, based in Osaka, Japan, makes both air-conditioning hardware and chemicals. It has been putting some of its patents in the public domain to encourage local manufacturers to use its chemicals.
Ms. Carbajal, of Greenpeace, saw the aggressive promotion of HFC32 as problematic. The industry, she said, decides “what is low and what is high, and that’s why we are very concerned.”
Ms. Carbajal said that while there was a range of better alternatives to HFCs, those were not the ones being adopted in some countries. “The problem is that the ambition has not been as high as we expected,” she said.
Damian Thong, who heads Asia technology research at Macquarie, said Daikin had backed HFC32 in an attempt to balance warming potential and higher energy efficiency.
Emissions from air-conditioners also come from generating the electricity they consume, Mr. Thong said. “The issue being glossed over is that focusing on global warming potential alone may be bad for the environment still,” he said.
Despite the remaining issues, the Kigali deal was an example of an emerging dynamic, where companies pre-empt environmental policy changes by developing more planet-friendly products, then push for regulation that grows that market, environmental experts say.
“More and more companies are looking further and further down the timeline to see what changes they can expect, and what they need to phase out of their products,” said Baskut Tuncak, a lawyer at the United Nations specializing in toxic chemicals.
“It shows regulations do drive innovation,” Mr. Tuncak said. “The more we have a global approach, the better it is, even for businesses.”
Javier C. Hernández contributed reporting.
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Scientists say Amazon biodiversity could help fuel Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The Amazon’s rich diversity of life and the knowledge of its indigenous peoples could be paired with recent advances in biological, digital, and material science technologies to further fuel the Fourth Industrial Revolution currently underway.
Scientists say that the Amazon’s rich diversity of life and the knowledge of its indigenous peoples could be paired with recent advances in biological, digital, and material science technologies to further fuel the Fourth Industrial Revolution currently underway.
A team of researchers led by climatologist Carlos Nobre of Brazil’s National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters published an article today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) arguing for “a new development paradigm” in which we “research, develop, and scale a high-tech innovation approach that sees the Amazon as a global public good of biological assets that can enable the creation of innovative high-value products, services, and platforms.”
Nobre and his co-authors hope to supplant the dominant economic paradigm of today, which seeks to balance conservation priorities with environmentally destructive economic development activities such as agriculture, cattle ranching, and hydropower projects. Because these activities require intensive use of the Amazon’s natural resources, they have led to “significant basin-wide environmental alterations” over the past half-century, the team writes.
“The loss of biodiversity and continued deforestation will lead to high risks of irreversible change of [the Amazon’s] tropical forests,” the researchers add, noting that studies have shown the Amazon may have two tipping points: an average temperature increase of 4 degrees Celsius or deforestation exceeding 40 percent of the forest area.
If we allow present trends to continue, the Amazon could experience large-scale “savannization” due to high rates of deforestation, increased frequency of fires, and long periods of drought and extreme weather, according to the authors. The region has already warmed about one degree Celsius over the last 60 years, and total deforestation is close to 20 percent of the Amazon’s forested area. If we don’t halt deforestation and rising global temperatures, the team predicts that half of the Amazon’s tropical forest areas may be replaced by degraded tropical savannah or seasonal forests, especially in the southern and eastern Amazon, by 2050.
But Nobre and team say that the significant reductions in Amazon deforestation made over the past decade opens up the possibility of ushering in a new, sustainable economic development paradigm.
“We hope to start a revolution,” Nobre said in a statement. He is leading a multidisciplinary group comprised of science and technology experts who aim to set up public-private partnerships among key actors in Brazil and other Amazonian countries in order to bring together research and development centers, universities, and businesses to make economic use of the Amazon’s diversity of living plants, animals, and insects.
Nobre also said that the knowledge of indigenous and traditional communities about biomolecules and the forms and processes of ecosystems, accumulated through countless generations, should be an integral part of this new economic paradigm: “Respect for this knowledge and for inclusive development must serve as the foundation for innovation models for the future of the forest.”
The Amazon and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
According to the World Economic Forum: “The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”
By coupling the Amazon’s biological assets with the breakthrough technologies driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution — from artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computing to the Internet of Things, genomics, and 3D printing — we could “develop revolutionary innovations in multiple fields,” Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio, a biochemical engineer from Cambridge University and one of the PNAS article’s co-authors, said in a statement.
“For example, a long-lasting foam produced by a species of frog has inspired the creation of new technologies for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” Castilla-Rubio added.
Other examples cited in the article include the alkaloid spilanthol, found in the flowers, leaves, and stems of jambu (Acmella oleracea), a common Amazonian plant, which numbs the tongue when ingested and is already being put to use in anesthetics, antiseptics, anti-wrinkle preparations, toothpaste, gynecological medicines, and anti-inflammatories. There’s also copaiba oil, distilled from the gum resin tapped from the copaiba tree in Brazil and used as an alternative source of fluorine-xylo for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
The researchers also argue that we could use the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to learn from and imitate the forest’s natural forms, processes, and ecosystems — what’s known as “biomimicry.”
“We are rapidly coming to understand how things are created in nature, and how organisms sense their environment using sophisticated sensors, how they interpret that information, how they move about in their environment using biomechanical and kinetic principles, processes that have taken millions of years to develop, behave and function,” Castilla-Rubio said, arguing that delving deeper into these natural innovations could lead to a number of technological breakthroughs.
The forest itself often reproduces complex biological systems and biomimetic solutions to problems on a nano-molecular scale, Castilla-Rubio noted, which could help inspire technologies to prevent and remedy pollution, lead to new insights in designing bio-textiles, and inform advanced applications of robotic behavior and cognition.
None of these advances are likely to be made quickly, however, which is why the team has created an initiative to leverage the capabilities and resources of technology startups, corporations, academia, governments, and philanthropists in ushering in the new Amazonian economic paradigm they envision.
“We have an important choice to make,” Castilla-Rubio said. “The future of the Amazon, and its impact on the planet, lies so clearly in the balance. Time is not on our side, but we can still choose the ‘third way.’”
CITATION
Nobre, C.A., Sampaio, G., Borma, L.S., Castilla-Rubio, J.C., Silva, J.S.O., & Cardoso, M. (2016). The Fate of the Amazon Forests: Land-use and climate change risks and the need of a novel sustainable development paradigm. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201605516. doi:10.1073/pnas.1605516113
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California restricts pollutants from cow flatulence to diesel emissions.
California on Monday moved to restrict air pollutants from sources as diverse as diesel trucks and cow flatulence, the latest of several efforts in the most populous U.S. state to reduce emissions leading to climate change.
By Sharon Bernstein
California on Monday moved to restrict air pollutants from sources as diverse as diesel trucks and cow flatulence, the latest of several efforts in the most populous U.S. state to reduce emissions leading to climate change.
Under a bill signed Monday by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, the state will cut emissions of methane from dairy cows and other animals by 40 percent and black carbon from diesel trucks and other sources by 50 percent. The bill also mandates the state to reduce emissions of fluorinated gases, or hydrofluorocarbons used in refrigeration.
The measure comes on the heels of several climate-change bills signed in recent weeks by Brown, including one that by 2030 will mandate an overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below the level released in 1990.
"We're protecting people's lungs, their health by cutting out a poisonous chemical that comes out of diesel trucks," Brown said at a signing ceremony in the Los Angeles suburb of Long Beach, where trucks at the nation's largest port complex spew particulate matter, including black carbon, along clogged freeways, contributing to high rates of asthma and other conditions in some of the region's poorest areas.
"It goes from some machine, into the air and into your lungs," Brown said.
The pollutants targeted in the bill signed Monday differ from carbon dioxide and other pollutants associated with global warming in that they remain in the atmosphere a relatively short time. However, these emissions have heat-trapping effects, so reducing their presence can help fight climate change, Brown said.
In addition to black carbon, which comes from trucks as well as the burning of organic material and other sources, the bill also requires reductions in hydrofluorocarbons, used in refrigeration and to power aerosol products.
It would also require the state's dairy industry, which produces 20 percent of the country's milk, to find a way to reduce methane produced by cow flatulence and manure.
One technology for doing that is known as a methane digester, which turns the gas into usable fuel. Such equipment is expensive, however, which worries the state's dairy farmers.
"This mandated 40 percent reduction in methane and 50 percent reduction in anthropogenic black carbon gas represents a direct assault on California’s dairy industry and will hurt manufacturing," a small-business group, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, said in a news release.
But Brown said the mandates will lead the state to develop better technology and boost the economy.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein)
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