low dose
China's northern cities face soot-free winter with gas revolution.
Yao Guanghui and his family are among millions of people across northern China preparing for their first winter to be heated by gas - part of a government effort to wean the nation off dirty coal and improve the nation’s notoriously bad air.
XIAOZHANGWAN, China (Reuters) - As freezing winds whip across northern China this winter, Yao Guanghui is happy he’ll have one less chore to do: feeding the coal furnace that has long heated his small house on the outskirts of Beijing.
Traipsing outside on freezing nights to haul coal for the two big burners in his kitchen was his least favorite household job.
But next month, the 60-year-old will turn on the heating with a flick of a switch on the gas-powered boiler that sits in a sooty alcove that once housed his coal furnaces.
“My face and nostrils would be covered with coal dust by the time I got into the kitchen,” he said on Thursday, recalling his efforts to carry coal into his two-room house during the long winter. “We hope this winter will be much cleaner and warmer.”
Yao and his family are among millions of people across northern China preparing for their first winter to be heated by gas - part of a government effort to wean the nation off dirty coal and improve the nation’s notoriously bad air.
The massive effort involves almost 4 million homes in 28 cities. The government is plowing tens of billions of yuan into the project to install equipment, build thousands of kilometers of pipes and subsidize the higher costs of gas.
(Graphic for China planning to connect more than 4 million homes in 28 cities with gas this winter, click reut.rs/2yRDVdt)
Beijing has been under increasing pressure to deal with chronic air pollution amid concerns about the damage it is causing to people’s health. Smog gets worse during the colder months when homes in the north of the country crank up heat that is overwhelmingly fired by coal.
The air quality index for the area around the village on Thursday morning was just 4, a low level anywhere in the world. But when smog shrouds the capital during the winter, the index often rockets into the hundreds to hazardous levels.
Air pollution caused by coal-fired winter heating has slashed life expectancy in the north by more than three years compared with the south, according to a recent study by the University of Chicago (EPIC).
Among other measures, China has pledged to impose tough industrial and traffic curbs this winter and is also in the process of shutting thousands of coal-fired industrial boilers.
(Graphic for China's changing energy mix targets more gas, less coal, click reut.rs/2yR8rUS)
For the global gas market, the potential impact of gasifying the world’s second-largest economy is enormous, with Russia and the United States poised to benefit from China’s growing need for foreign supplies.
Wood Mackenzie reckons the effort will add 10 billion cubic meters of gas demand this winter. That’s about 5 percent of China’s consumption last year or the equivalent of Vietnam’s total annual use. The project will also need heavy investment in infrastructure such as pipelines and storage tanks.
STAGGERING
The pace and scale of the project over the past six months has been staggering, even for a place like China, where high-rise tower blocks and shopping malls go up with blistering speed.
A Reuters analysis of data released by the Ministry of Environmental Protection shows that two-thirds of the cities under the program have surpassed the target set by the government to switch at least 50,000 homes to clean fuel by November.
That target would have meant 1.4 million homes, but two cities, Baoding and Langfang in Hebei, account for most of that together.
Beijing Gas, which is overseeing the plan in the capital, must lay over 3,000 kilometers of pipelines and build 400 gas stations. It has connected 300,000 residents so far.
(Graphic for China's plan to use more gas will require a substantial increase in gas-handling infrastructure, click reut.rs/2yjjhGg)
Slideshow (8 Images)
“Some of these projects are more complicated than we expected,” said an official from Beijing Gas who declined to be named as he is not authorized to speak to the media. He said the project involved building pipelines that went under the Great Wall and crossed environmentally sensitive areas.
PILES OF BOILERS
On a recent visit to Yao’s village of Xiaozhangwan, a few kilometers from the outskirts of Beijing, old boilers were stacked along dusty narrow alleyways ready for scrapping.
Government engineers were rushing to install new radiators in 300 homes before the onset of winter.
In many houses, the radiators will replace systems that have been used for centuries in rural villages in northern China - burning coal to heat large beds where whole families gather during the winter.
Workmen were digging up the main street to lay the feeder pipeline that is connected to one of three pipelines that run for thousands of kilometers from Shaanxi province to China’s northeast.
(Graphic for China's energy mix since 2000, click reut.rs/2yRZUkF)
Some villagers are skeptical that gas will be as powerful and resilient as coal and have insulated the walls of their homes and sealed windows to make them more efficient.
As they embark into the unknown, many residents also worry about higher bills. Gas costs almost double that of coal.
The government will supply about 2,000 cubic meters of gas worth almost 5,000 yuan ($748.95) at a discount to current residential gas prices, but Yao is unsure if that would see him through a particularly cold winter.
“I don’t know if that would be enough for heating and cooking for the family,” said Yao. “We will need to pay extra cost if we use more than that.”
Reporting by Meng Meng and Josephine Mason; Editing by Philip McClellan
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Boom and busted.
In trying to untangle a mysterious herring collapse from the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, scientists in Prince William Sound are revealing just how resilient—and unpredictable—marine ecosystems can be.
On a cold day in June, Scott Pegau leans toward the passenger window of a Cessna floatplane and peers out at the teal waters of Prince William Sound. The glacier-rimmed pocket of seawater on the southern coast of Alaska is protected from the open ocean by a string of rugged islands. It is both moody and alluring. Clouds dally on the snowy peaks and fray against the forested hillsides. The sea is flat and frigid, except for a single row of waves lapping at the rocky shore.
Pegau aims his gaze at the shallow waters behind the breakers. After a few minutes of searching, above a deep bay on one of the outer islands, he finally spots what he’s looking for: a school of juvenile herring. Pegau can distinguish them from other schooling species by the unique way they sparkle—an effect produced by sunlight playing off their silver flanks as the fish bank and roll. Try as I might, I can’t make out any twinkling, just the inky splotch of a few tons of small fish swarming below the surface.
“Small H1,” Pegau says into the headset microphone, tucked snugly under his thick, grey mustache. That’s code for a small school of one-year-old herring. He enters the location on his computer; huddled in the back seat, I make a tick mark on the backup tally. It’s the first of dozens of schools we’ll see on our flight.
Pegau conducts these surveys every year in hopes of understanding what’s in store for the herring population in Prince William Sound. The fish mature and begin to join the spawning stock at the age of three, so the counts give scientists and managers a clue about how many adults may be coming up the pipeline. Researchers and fishers alike always hope the answer will be many. But every year for the past quarter century, they have been disappointed.
The herring population in Prince William Sound crashed in 1993, just 4 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill released 11 million gallons of crude into these waters. The collapse put an end to an $8-million-dollar-a-year fishery, and left a hole in the middle of the marine food web. Scientists have spent years trying to understand if and how the spill played a role in the herring’s demise here, and the results have been hotly contested. All of the legal proceedings finally closed in 2015, with herring listed as an impacted species but with most herring fishers feeling poorly compensated.
Even more concerning is the fact that, unlike most species hit by the spill, the herring haven’t bounced back over the decades since. Populations of forage fish are known to boom and bust, so most scientists thought it was only a matter of time before they rebounded. But 25 years later, there’s still no sign of recovery on the horizon.
“There’s definitely a possibility that the ecosystem went through a tipping point,” says Pegau, who coordinates the herring program at the Prince William Sound Science Center, an independent research institute whose work is funded in part by money from the spill settlement. A host of factors, which scientists are still trying to untangle, could be to blame, from hungry whales to virulent disease. “There’s no one thing that’s keeping them down,” Pegau says. “I think pretty much everyone is convinced of that.”
The herring mystery is a maddeningly concrete example of the often-abstract interconnectedness of nature, which frequently gives ecosystems their resilience, but can sometimes make them rebellious. If jolted a particular way—for instance, by a human-caused disaster or an environmental shift—an ecosystem may not revert to its original state. Instead it may settle into a new normal, leaving both the organisms and economies that rely on it reeling.
But the herring in Prince William Sound may also hold clues to long-standing questions about why ecosystems change, and how they cause fish populations to flourish or founder. After 25 years of research, scientists have collected reams of data on the herring, and half a dozen hypotheses to explain their plight. The data have yet to reveal satisfying answers, but what researchers learn about ecological resilience—and the true value of a species—could have ramifications well beyond Alaska’s shores.
After a few hours of surveying, the floatplane splashes down in Eyak Lake, which fills the Y-shaped valley separating Cordova from the looming peaks of the Chugach Mountains. “We survived another one,” jokes the pilot, as we taxi to a floating dock and unload. Pegau makes plans to fly again the next day, and we climb into the well-worn seats of his white F-250 for the short drive back to town.
Cordova is a no-frills community on the far eastern edge of Prince William Sound that has weathered its share of ups and downs. It was established in 1906 as the seaport from which to ship vast quantities of copper mined in Kennecott, 200 miles inland. When the mine closed in 1938, Cordova fell back on its reputation as the self-proclaimed razor clam capital of the world. But that industry went belly up on March 27, 1964—Good Friday—after a magnitude 9.2 earthquake heaved the clam beds 2 meters (6 feet) above sea level.
That left fishing and canning as the main games in town. Both revolved around salmon and herring. While the much smaller herring rarely exceed 25 centimeters (10 inches) in length, they are prized for their roe, as well as for food and bait.
But in 1989, again on Good Friday, the Exxon Valdez oil spill cast the town’s future into question once again. Many residents considered it the worst blow yet. “There’s a natural disaster, and there’s a manmade disaster,” says Sylvia Lange, a Cordova native and longtime fisher who now runs a local hotel. She has experienced both kinds of catastrophes in her life, and the two, she says, feel completely different.
The ecological impacts of the spill, by now, are legend. Despite the efforts of thousands of response workers, wildlife including sea birds and otters perished in droves. The financial impacts followed swiftly too. The cleanup effort provided some business, but tourism lagged and managers closed fisheries until they knew how the spill had affected fish populations. Meanwhile, for unrelated reasons, the price of pink salmon tanked. “Cordova was in a deep, deep depression,” Lange says, “not only psychologically but economically.”
At first, it seemed like the herring made it out unscathed. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reopened the fishery in 1990, and in the two years that followed, herring fishers had some of their best seasons on record. But when the spring of 1993 rolled around, the herring all but disappeared. The population dropped from more than 100,000 metric tons (110,000 U.S. tons) to less than 30,000 (33,000 U.S. tons).
The crash devastated a community still coping with disaster. John Renner, a long-time Cordova fisher and chairman of the herring division at Cordova District Fishermen United, says the spring herring roe harvest was a staple of Cordova’s economy. “The whole town depended on it for the first shot of revenue of the season,” Renner says “People paid their taxes, got out of debt, that type of stuff.” For many, it was a big part of their livelihood; Renner once made a quarter of his annual income off of herring roe, and just talking about the collapse still makes him angry. A draft report commissioned by the science center estimates that, in total, losing the herring has cost Cordova almost $200 million and the region nearly $1 billion.
The passage of time has done little to settle questions about what caused the herring crash. Initially, many scientists doubted whether the oil spill could have caused a decline four years later. Some early studies also suggested the impact of the oil was minimal, including those by Walt Pearson, then a fisheries biologist with Battelle Marine Sciences Laboratory whose work was funded by Exxon. Pearson’s research found that adult herring could only have been exposed to low levels of oil for a short window of time, and that there had been little overlap between oiled beaches and herring spawning grounds. “The effects were quite localized,” Pearson says. He concluded that the biggest factor contributing to the crash was that there were too many herring and not enough food, due to a natural shift in ocean conditions.
Many fishers didn’t buy that. “Anyone with half a brain would figure out it was oil,” says Jerry McCune, president of Cordova District Fishermen United, a union-turned-non-profit advocacy organization. The herring spawn occurred just weeks after the spill, and McCune, Renner, and others think that the oil devastated the cohort of herring born in 1989. They say the failure of those fish to show up in 1993 accounted for the collapse.
But survey data collected during the crash suggest that it affected fish of all ages, says Pegau, not just the young ones. And a recent statistical analysis found little evidence for any direct impacts of the spill. Instead, Pegau and others think that if the oil did play a role in the collapse, it probably did so by weakening the herring, or the food sources upon which they depend, making it easier for something else to do them in.
The prime suspect, in Pegau’s estimation, is a disease called viral hemorrhagic septicemia (VHS). While there was no official monitoring program then, fishers and scientists saw signs of VHS in 1993. “It can take a population down in a real big hurry,” Pegau says. As the name implies, fish with VHS hemorrhage and can die from organ failure. The disease spreads quickly through herring’s dense schools or when fishers corral them into an enclosure to harvest their spawn, as local fishers were doing around the time of the spill. Some researchers think that this practice, called pounding, combined with the high herring numbers before the crash, contributed to a deadly outbreak of VHS.
But the risk of an outbreak could have been exacerbated by the spill, too. Fish embryos that don’t die when exposed to oil may carry genetic scars, particularly in something called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor gene. “It turns out that that gene gets completely knocked out among survivors,” says Paul Hershberger, a disease ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. And compromising that gene may weaken the immune system in fish, potentially making them more susceptible to disease. Hershberger’s colleagues have demonstrated this effect in Atlantic killifish, and now, his team is testing it in herring.
Exposing herring embryos to oil may also cause them to develop heart defects that put them at a general disadvantage. They can’t swim as fast or as long, which makes them more likely to get eaten, says John Incardona, a toxicologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of a study on this subject published in 2015. In lab experiments, Incardona has found that developmental effects occur even when herring embryos encounter levels of pollution far below what is generally considered harmful. “We think all of us are way underestimating what the initial injury was to herring,” he says.
Richard Thorne, a fisheries scientist who recently retired from the Prince William Sound Science Center, takes issue with the idea of a delayed collapse altogether. Evidence that the herring population remained high until the 1993 crash came from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s population estimates, which are based on the stock assessment models the state uses to manage its fisheries responsibly and set sustainable harvests. But in 1993, Thorne started conducting acoustic surveys of the herring population, and realized his numbers lined up best with a different set of data collected by Fish and Game: observations of how many miles of shoreline were covered in herring spawn. Looking back at this pre-crash spawning record, Thorne came up with an alternative population history, which suggested that herring numbers started falling immediately after the spill. He thinks the fish died from ingesting oil and that the collapse, if there was one, resulted from allowing fishers to harvest a herring stock in the early '90s that managers didn’t yet realize was already declining.
Pegau, for one, doesn’t think scientists will ever know what actually transpired. “We’ll never be able to say one way or the other because no one was collecting data when it happened,” Pegau says. And frankly, he doesn’t really care what caused the initial collapse. The more pressing question, Pegau says, is why the herring haven’t come back.
I meet John Platt on a floating dock in the old harbor, and the first thing he says as he shakes my hand is, “Why are we still talking about herring 25 years later?” Platt is a third-generation Cordova fisher with a leathery face and the gnarled physique of a former wrestler. And he’s being coy; we both know the answer to his question.
Platt used to fish for herring, collecting them using a type of net called a purse seine to harvest roe. He gamely drives me out to see the net, which he stores 10 minutes outside of town and which is—as far as I can tell—the only piece of herring gear left in all of Cordova. “I always thought they would come back,” he says. We pull up to a rusted white pickup truck overgrown by weeds and Platt gestures toward the sorry sight before us. “This basically sums up the herring fishery.” He gets out and starts to unwrap a battered blue tarp covering a lumpy mass on the truck’s flatbed, He finally tugs free a loop of black mesh for me to see. The net—which cost about $20,000 new—still looks good decades later. After all, it’s hardly been used.
Like many, Platt was nearly destroyed by the herring collapse. Commercial fishing permits in Alaska are traded like stocks; the state issues a limited number, and fishers buy and sell them at prices that generally reflect the value of the fishery. And the seine fishery was a high-stakes gamble. Herring roe was a hot commodity and fishers like Platt jockeyed for position near schools of herring so they could scoop them up when the fishery opened, sometimes only for an adrenaline-filled 15-minute window. Before the crash, when Platt bought his seine permit, the going price was nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Today, the same permit is worth just $31,000.
Some note that’s remarkably high, given that the roe market has deflated and there have only been two modest herring harvests in Prince William Sound since the crash, in 1997 and 1998, when managers thought the fish might be making a comeback. But the permit’s unsinkable value is of little use to people like Platt, who purchased his permit with a loan from the state, and struggled to make the payments—and pay taxes—without any fish to catch. In total, those who held permits for herring in Prince William Sound took a $50 to $60 million-dollar hit in lost permit values, according to a recent economic analysis.
Platt got paid by Exxon for working on the cleanup effort immediately after the spill, but that money went straight into paying off boats and gear. To settle his permit debt, Platt ultimately had to sell off his salmon boat and turn over the payout from a class-action lawsuit against the company, which, after going before the Supreme Court in 2008, came in at a fraction of the original award. For many, though, it was too little, too late; the loss of the herring had already taken its toll. “It caused divorces, ruin, a few people killed themselves,” Platt says.
Like many, Platt thought the failure of the herring to recover might be grounds for reopening the 1991 settlement between the government and Exxon, (now ExxonMobil), which closed before the herring crashed. The settlement included $900 million in payments, in addition to criminal fines, and a clause that would make an additional $100 million dollars available for long-term impacts that weren’t considered in the original agreement. “This is textbook what it was for,” Platt says.
In 2006, government lawyers did launch an effort to file a claim under the reopener, but it was later aborted. Moreover, the claim made no mention of herring. “It’s maddening,” Platt says. But Pegau thinks there was a simple reason: Linking the fish’s poor recovery to the spill would have been a hard case to make.
Traces of oil still remain in Prince William Sound, buried a few feet in the sediment among beach pebbles and sand, but most scientists say it has little ecological impact on herring today. Indeed, if the spill had any role in the fish’s demise, it was by helping to knock the population off a cliff in the first place. Other forces have now taken over and seem to be holding the herring down. And they don’t seem to be letting up. In 2015, after what seemed like a few promising years, the herring population dropped again to around 8,000 metric tons (8,800 U.S. tons)—less than half of what it was after the crash in 1993.
“I think the system reset itself,” says Ron Heintz, a nutritional ecologist in Juneau with NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “We ended up in a new state that apparently doesn’t include herring.”
One factor at play is predation. Forage fish, by definition, get eaten, and herring are no exception. “It’s a critical food resource,” says Mary Anne Bishop, an ecologist at the Prince William Sound Science Center. She describes the spring spawn as a frenzied feast when the herring turn coastal waters white with eggs—each female releases about 20,000 of them each year. “It’s the whales, it’s the sea lions, the harbor seals, all the birds coming in,” she says. Predation doesn’t stop as herring age, either; dozens of species consume them throughout their life cycle.
While there may have been enough herring to fill bellies and nets when the fish were plentiful, they may now be trapped in what scientists call a “predator pit.” After everyone has had their fill, there simply aren’t enough fish left for the herring population to climb out of the hole. More young adults join the spawning stock each year, but not enough to outweigh the number being eaten.
There’s debate about which animals are doing the most damage, but humpback whales are a possible culprit. Their numbers have quintupled in Prince William Sound in recent decades as the gentle giants have recovered from whaling. Scientists say the whales here have learned to specialize in herring, sometimes banding together to trap the fish in “bubble nets” before taking turns gulping them down en masse. Studies suggest humpbacks may consume 20 to 75 percent of the spawning herring population each year—the equivalent of the fishers’ historic share and then some.
Other scientists, including Pearson, have suggested that salmon hatcheries may bear much of the blame. Starting in the late 1970s, managers began releasing hatchery-raised pink salmon into the sound, and in the 1980s, they began to ramp up the numbers. Researchers have hypothesized that young salmon may eat or compete with juvenile herring for food, while older salmon returning from the sea may eat herring of all ages.
It also appears that the herring in Prince William Sound continue to see diseases like VHS more than their neighbors. Hershberger developed a test to detect whether fish have recently encountered disease, and found consistently higher levels of exposure in Prince William Sound than in Sitka, 450 miles to the southeast. Some wonder whether, as Platt puts it, the herring here are “wimpy” because of some lingering epigenetic effect of the spill that has been passed down from generation to generation. Hershberger says no one has tested that yet. “At this point, all we can do is speculate.”
Factors like predation, competition, and disease can limit populations from the top down. But that’s only half of the story: There has also been a low supply of young herring. Researchers call this poor recruitment, and they suspect it’s the result of environmental factors limiting the population from the bottom up.
For the herring to recover, they need a few big years in close succession to overwhelm the demands of predation and escape the threat of disease. But that hasn’t happened in a long time, Pegau says. “It’s been 25 years of bad luck.” He points to sweeping natural changes in the North Pacific in 1989—the same year as the spill—as a potential turning point. The exact nature of the shift was complicated, with some parts of the ocean warming and others cooling, but the impact on marine organisms was pronounced. Across the Gulf of Alaska, animals toward the bottom of the food web, like shrimp, crab, and herring have fared poorly since, while larger fish like halibut and cod have multiplied. This apparent contradiction continues to stump Pegau. “I have yet to figure out what in the world supports them,” he says of the thriving predators.
Much of the science center’s research looks at how oceanographic conditions affect herring in hopes of understanding why the tide has turned against them in recent decades. Among other things, that involves tracking where currents carry larvae, determining which environments young fish inhabit, and studying what controls the quantity and quality of food available to them as they store up energy to survive the harsh winter.
New research also suggests that herring recruitment may be linked to the amount of freshwater that pours into the Gulf of Alaska. High discharge years correlate with recruitment failures, says Eric Ward, a statistician at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center who led the study, published earlier this year. The mechanism, though still unclear, may have to do with how freshwater from rainfall and melting ice affects the strength and timing of the spring plankton bloom—the flurry of photosynthesis that kickstarts the entire ecosystem every year. In recent decades, there have been fewer years with extremely low runoff, which correlate with upticks in herring recruitment—what Ward calls “herring baby booms.” And as climate change melts glaciers and messes with rainfall patterns, the trend may continue.
These oceanographic factors may help explain why herring recruitment has also been weak in other parts of Alaska since the early 1990s. The reason places like Sitka still have a healthy herring fishery despite these changes, Pegau says, may simply be that the population there never crashed in the first place.
Scientists hope that figuring out what’s going on with herring will shed light on bigger questions about what fish need for successful recruitment—a problem that has stumped researchers for decades. Trevor Branch, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington who studies the herring, says it’s possible that a whole host of things have to line up for successful recruitment: the right water temperatures, the right salinity, and abundant food, among them.
If scientists are to have any shot at figuring out how these fit together, they need lots of data collected over many years. And the research sparked by the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the subsequent herring crash have furnished just that. “If ever we were able to pinpoint something, it would be with Prince William Sound herring,” Branch says.
The day of my second flight with Pegau, the weather is sublime. We head across Prince William Sound to survey its far southwestern corner. A cruise ship glides beneath us, then a cluster of salmon seiners. The small skiffs that accompany them trace lazy circles on the surface, like ripples from giant raindrops, as they loop their nets around unsuspecting fish.
We officially begin the survey in a milky, ice-flecked fjord with a reclusive glacier tucked away at its head, and follow the coastline in and out of emerald bays. In the narrow passages between Evans, Elrington, and Latouche Islands, we spot school after school of herring, clustered along the rugged shoreline. In the afternoon light, I finally see them sparkle.
Nearly a hundred years ago, these were prime fishing grounds for an earlier incarnation of the herring fishery. Fishers caught huge quantities of herring, which were reduced for oil. For five consecutive years, they brought in in an average of 40,000 tons a year, Pegau says, marveling at the scale. Catch records show that those big hauls likely drove the herring to collapse, but remarkably, they appear to have recovered in the span of just 3 or 4 years. Pegau takes this as evidence that the herring in Prince William Sound have rallied back from the brink before, like others around the world.
John Trochta, one of Trevor Branch’s graduate students at the University of Washington, has analyzed more than 50 historical herring populations across the globe, most of which have collapsed at some point. He found that the majority rebounded within a decade, but there were a few exceptions where herring numbers remained low for at least twenty years after a crash. One is in Prince William Sound; another is off the coast of Japan and southeastern Russia. There, fishers once harvested nearly a million metric tons of fish per year from the legendary Hokkaido-Sakhalin stock. But by the 1930s, perhaps due to intense fishing pressure and oceanographic changes, the stock began to decline sharply, until, by 1955, there were hardly any fish left. It’s the only herring stock yet to come back after more than 60 years. No one knows whether the same fate awaits the herring in Prince William Sound.
On my final day in Cordova, I stop by Pegau’s office at the science center—a converted icehouse perched on stilts just inside the entrance to Cordova’s harbor. From Pegau’s second-story window, he has a clear view of the bustling docks and the mountains that stand guard over town. With this year’s survey nearly complete, I ask him how it looks. “This is probably the best year we’ve seen,” he admits. He saw a lot of schools, and the schools held a lot of fish. Still, he’s reluctant to wager whether that bodes well for herring. “I’ve felt optimistic in the past; now I’m a lot more reserved.”
There’s nothing Pegau can do to help the herring. There’s no fishery to manage or acute environmental stress to relieve. That’s not the way he sees his job anyway. His goal is to understand the vulnerability and value of the fish so that other scientists and managers around the world can be better equipped to do the same. Increasingly, he and others think that the answer lies in studying an ecosystem as a whole, and how an individual species like the herring fits in. And in that regard, he is more hopeful than ever. “It’s a great puzzle,” Pegau says, his dark eyes twinkling with excitement. “One of the real joys is to see how all those pieces fit together.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julia Rosen is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. She writes about science and the environment for publications including Science, Nature, Orion, and High Country News, as well as many others. Follow her on Twitter @sciencejulia, and find more of her writing at www.julia-rosen.com.
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Escape from hurricane Irma was not an option for most of us in the Caribbean.
‘Climate change’ does not adequately capture the chaos brought to these islands by the extreme weather. Poverty will make the recovery even more difficult.
The winds and rain came first, usual for this time of year. Crops drown in the sodden earth, the price of vegetables and fruits in the market rises and, as the rain and wind beat down on the tin roofs and wooden frames of many of our homes, communities bear down for more. Torrential storms, gushing flood waters and devastated infrastructure come next, and lives are lost in their wake. Evacuation is not an option for most citizens of the Caribbean. Instead of escape, survival is a matter of endurance.
What were predictable changes to the wet or dry months in the Caribbean are now increasingly irregular weather patterns, bringing serious weather events that demand more resources and attention to mitigate escalating damage, including loss of life. There is widespread agreement in the region, based on meteorological data as well as lived experience, that Caribbean seasons, noteworthy for shifts in temperature and precipitation, are changing. As residents in the region, sometimes we wonder if “change” is a powerful enough word to represent the realities of rising seas and battering rains, coastal erosion and habitat loss, new agricultural stresses and higher food import bills, as well as the loss of human life.
Despite broad consensus, we must be clear that climate change is not the only villain. Regional underdevelopment and global economic polarisation exacerbate the effects of disasters.
The colossal convergence of clouds formed by the churning of warm waters in the Atlantic basin has generated three fully formed hurricanes since tropical storm Harvey passed through the eastern Caribbean in mid-August: hurricanes Irma, Jose and Katia. The Atlantic basin has not seen activity of this nature since 2010 when category three hurricanes Igor and Karl joined category four Julia to bring disastrous impacts to Caribbean islands.
None of these previous hurricanes, however, were nearly as devastating as Irma’s category five assault, which has resulted in 28 confirmed deaths across the Caribbean so far – and thousands will be displaced. Those whose lives have been washed away, leaving them without shelter, include street dwellers, homeless people, squatters and others living precariously in rural, hillside, and coastal areas, which are prone to landslides, collapse and flooding.
Also vulnerable are elderly people, children and people who are mobility-impaired or sick and may more quickly succumb to the health effects of mould, poor nutrition and lack of clean drinking water, exacerbated by constraints in accessing medical help. In addition to flood losses in residential, agricultural, and commercial areas, winds destabilise transport and communication infrastructure, while storm surges dismantle much needed economic, social, and environmental assets on coastlines.
Disasters, as we know them, are a function of magnitude, exposure, and vulnerability. On its own, Irma has characteristics that could make it one of the Caribbean’s most damaging hurricanes on record, due in part to the low levels of economic development that hamper the region’s ability to cope with natural hazards. Irma’s path of destruction has affected more than 10 Caribbean countries, a significantly higher number of islands than those affected by hurricanes Igor, Julia, and Karl combined. While Igor, Julia, and Karl directly affected islands including Bermuda and Cape Verde, Irma made landfall on Antigua, Barbuda, Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the US Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, St Kitts, Nevis, and Guadeloupe among others. Bermuda and Cape Verde have substantially higher GDPs and GDP per capita than Barbuda and Anguilla, which strongly correlate to higher resilience and much better coping mechanisms.
For example, in Barbuda Irma destroyed more than 90% of the housing stock and telecommunications infrastructure; large and extended families, including one group of seven, were reliant on rooftop rescues by emergency responders. Similar incidents have been reported from Anguilla and other islands. By comparison, although serious damage was reported in Bermuda and Cape Verde, nothing nearly as devastating as this occurred. These two islands can expect to return to normal life much more quickly than the islands with fewer economic resources. Clearly, the impacts of such storms and the course of the subsequent recovery are determined by a country’s preparedness and capacity to respond. At both the national and community levels, development provides protective armour.
Mismanagement of resources and failure to protect the environment pose a grave threat to small-island developing states
As we look to the future, we must heed the lessons taught by these hurricanes. While it is not possible to modify the hazard of a hurricane such as Irma in itself, there are ways to reduce the disastrous effects, and increase coping capacities and resilience of those affected. With dwindling funding for disaster risk reduction in the Caribbean, there is a growing need to encourage self-protective resilience. Education and communication are crucial tools, and we must develop new techniques to identify the most vulnerable communities, groups and households.
The climate chaos represented by the increased magnitude and heightened form of storm activity in the Atlantic basin is becoming the norm for the Caribbean. The regional realities of this chaos have been masked by the discourse of “climate change”, which suggests a more manageable and gradual process. In June and July tropical storms Bret and Don also passed through the Caribbean as far south as Trinidad, an island that had previously seen a total of only four tropical storms since records began in 1851.
The mismanagement of natural resources and failure to protect the environment pose a grave threat to many of us living in small-island developing states and less economically developed countries. Ultimately, just as the health of the oceans and atmosphere are related to one another, so the current plight of countries on the periphery is the best indicator of the future of the core.
• Dr Gabrielle Thongs specialises in disaster planning and spatial modelling at the University of the West Indies.
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Boiling frogs again.
Climate change is here to stay no matter what is the cause — and for south Asia it is a purely academic argument anyway as the region reels under catastrophic monsoon floods.
THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE > OPINION > EDITORIAL
Boiling frogs again
By Editorial Published: September 5, 2017
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Study makes startling revelations about impact of climate change on South Asia by 2100. PHOTO: AFP
It is not as if there was no warning. For more than a decade Pakistan has been tagged as in the top 10 — and often the top 5 — nations to be affected by global warming. It has always been a hot country outside the mountainous north; and even there rising temperatures are giving us glacial melt and retreat. Now there is a warning that parts of South Asia may become uninhabitable by the year 2100, a mere 82 years away. This is a tiny sliver of time when seen in the context of the life of planet Earth and it is approaching fast. At Sibi in Balochistan this summer the mercury hit 52.4°C, fortunately with very low levels of humidity. Were humidity high then life would have perhaps become unsustainable at that temperature.
Climate change is here to stay no matter what is the cause — and for south Asia it is a purely academic argument anyway as the region reels under catastrophic monsoon floods. There is a limit to what humans can tolerate temperature wise if they do not have protection, and if the ‘2100’ prediction is true then 30 per cent of the population across the region are going to be exposed to extreme temperatures with little or, as in the case of powerless Balochistan — no protection because for most of the population there is no electricity.
Unfortunately for Pakistan the boiling frog analogy is not far from the mark. The dreadful heat of the last year was endured then forgotten as the dreadful heat of the current year supersedes it — and so on ad infinitum. The water supplies are drying up, cities like Karachi are already in a potable water crisis, and the demographic is on a kamikaze-like dive into chaos. Coupled with a poverty of ideas as to how to mitigate the worst effect of the warming we see around us it is a bleak — and hot — future.
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Coast Guard News
Tropical Storm Harvey causes disruptions, emissions, and explosions in Houston area.
Chemical companies begin to survey storm’s aftermath.
As flood waters continue to rise, Storage facilities holding highly flammable organic peroxides at an Arkema plant in Crosby, Texas, began to explode early this morning, sending black smoke into the air. The facility and area around it had been evacuated and no serious injuries were reported. However, several first responders were treated for symptoms of respiratory irritation.
The explosion was another setback for the storm-ravaged region of the Texas Gulf coast. By Aug. 30, Houston residents finally caught a glimpse of sunlight after nearly five days of record-breaking rain from Tropical Storm Harvey. But dangers still lurk in areas that remain underwater, as the Crosby explosion shows.
Tens of millions of people in the Houston area have moved from their flooded homes to shelters. As the water recedes, state and federal officials, as well as refinery and chemical plant managers, will assess the damage.
Many refineries and petrochemical facilities closed in advance of the storm, with workers following procedures for unplanned shutdowns. However, Arkema executives reported an imminent threat of explosions and fires from degraded organic peroxides starting on Aug. 29. The facility was plagued with heavy flooding and power outages after it was shut down.
The Arkema site manufactures polymer additives for plastic resins, polystyrene, polyethylene, polypropylene, and acrylic resins. The company has not specified what chemicals are stored at the site, or the amounts.
Arkema evacuated its employees from the plant. About 300 residents living within a 2.5 km radius of the site, which is in a rural area, voluntarily evacuated. The company is working with public officials, who have determined that “the best course of action is to let the fire burn itself out,” according to an Arkema statement.
Safe storage of the organic peroxides requires refrigeration. At Arkema they are normally kept in cold-storage warehouses, but after electric service and backup generators both failed, the chemicals were transferred to refrigerated trailers with diesel generators. An undisclosed number of those trailers have also lost power and some cannot be remotely monitored, according to Rich Rowe. chief executive officer of Arkema’s North American operation.
In a call on Aug. 30 prior to the explosion, Rowe said flood waters at the plant site reached 1.8 meters above the ground and were still rising. He added it could take three to six days for the water to subside.
Harvey first made landfall near Corpus Christi as a category 4 hurricane late on Aug. 25 before moving east, soaking the Houston area with as much as 132 cm of rain. Five days later it picked up more water from the Gulf of Mexico and headed to Louisiana.
The Gulf Coast is home to 25% of U.S. refinery capacity and more than half the country’s production of a number of downstream chemicals. Many of those plants were taken off-line due to the storm. The two largest refineries in the country – Saudi Aramco in Port Arthur and Exxon Mobil in Baytown were shut down. Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Valero Energy, Citgo Petroleum, and Flint Hills Resources also shut refineries, including some with on-site chemical units.
Closures affected a wide swath of the Gulf’s basic and intermediate chemical plants from Corpus Christi to the Louisiana border. Dow Chemical, Ineos, Invista, Ascend Performance Materials, Oxychem, and Formosa Plastics were among those reporting site shutdowns. LyondellBasell and Huntsman each shut down six sites. As the week wore on, Covestro, Linde, and TPC group also reported taking plants off-line.
“Our primary concern at this time is for the safety and well-being of our employees, their families and our plant communities,” said Anne M. Knisely, Huntsman’s director of communications.
As Harvey’s rains move in on Louisiana, the number of outages could grow, says Kevin W. McCarthy, analyst at Vertical Research Partners, an equities research firm. But already, “the combination of Harvey’s path, duration and rainfall total is wreaking havoc with the supply side of the U.S. chemicals industry on an unprecedented scale,” he says.
While shutting down a refinery or chemical plant is a safe move in the face of a massive storm, it is not without side effects. Even when plant operators receive a few days warning, unplanned shutdowns lead facilities to emit volatile chemicals in amounts that far exceed air pollution permit levels. During unplanned shut down activities, emissions control equipment is not fully functional. In some cases, flaring is used to reduce the amount of hazardous chemicals that go into the air.
Filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) show massive, but temporary, emissions of such hazardous chemicals as benzene, butadiene, nitrogen oxides, and miscellaneous volatile organic compounds. At the giant Exxon Mobil complex in Baytown, an estimated 100,000 kg of sulfur dioxide was released over the course of five days.
Exxon Mobil also reported additional air releases at its Baytown and Beaumont complexes due to damage to outdoor storage tanks, as did Shell Oil at its Deer Park facility.
“The contaminants each pose acute health threats as well as more chronic health effects,” says Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a senior scientist for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. “The expectation is that there will be bursts of emissions. How long, intense, and frequent they will be is hard to predict.”
The priority is to secure facilities to prevent explosions and major releases, Rotkin-Ellman says. But residents who took shelter near the plants could experience respiratory or neurological effects. Most vulnerable are people who have lung conditions like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, she points out. In particular, sulfur-containing emissions can cause respiratory irritation at very low levels.
It may be difficult to track the amount and types of air emissions after Aug. 28. At the behest of TCEQ, Governor Greg Abbot (R) lifted requirements for facilities to report emissions beyond permit levels if those releases are a result of disaster response efforts.
“It’s just a big mess right now,” says Andrew Keese, spokesperson for TCEQ. He says 24 state-operated air quality monitors in the Houston area were taken off line before the storm to prevent damage and won’t be turned back on until conditions are safe.
Also before the storm, TCEQ worked with EPA officials to secure a number of Superfund sites in the Houston area by removing hazardous waste-containing drums and shutting down systems.
Water pollution remains a significant concern. The Texas agency has received numerous wastewater overflow notices from petrochemical plants and sewage-treatment plants.
The storm’s impact on local residents will be long lasting. In contrast, the chemical industry’s recovery is likely to be faster, according to Vertical’s McCarthy. It will be some weeks before plants come back online, but he does not anticipate that shortages will significantly impact the supply chain.
In the short-term, McCarthy estimate that over half of the U.S. ethylene and polyethylene capacity has been shut down and along with 40% of chlor-alkali and polyvinyl chloride. Supply interruptions could cause short term price spikes, he predicts. In addition, industrial gas and catalyst suppliers will see weakened demand until their customers’ operations pick up again.
“This too shall pass – don’t mess with Texas!” McCarthy wrote in a note to investors. “As disruptive as it is, even Hurricane Harvey will prove to be a transitory event as it relates to chemical stocks.”
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Poor air quality is the true cost of coal.
Smoky Sydney skies this week are a reminder of the cost air pollution is having on our community. While toxic emissions from coal-fired power stations go into the air we breathe, they also fly largely under the radar.
Smoky Sydney skies this week are a reminder of the cost air pollution is having on our community. While toxic emissions from coal-fired power stations go into the air we breathe, they also fly largely under the radar.
We assume the regulators – the EPAs and state environment agencies – wouldn't allow pollution at levels that would harm us. Maybe we also assume the power station owners themselves – a mix of huge multinational corporations, state-owned entities and household-name Australian companies – would not emit at levels that would harm their workers and the surrounding communities.
A report released this week by Environmental Justice Australia demonstrates otherwise. Australia has 17 commercially operating coal-fired power stations, located in NSW, Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.
Australia's fleet of power stations is among the oldest and most inefficient in the world, with 89 per cent of our power stations classed as "subcritical" – the oldest type. Half of Australia's power stations are at least 30 years old. The oldest, Liddell in NSW, is 45-years-old. These power stations release more than a million tonnes of toxic pollution into the air each year.
A conservative estimate puts the health costs from power station emission at $2.6 billion a year. Toxic pollution travels great distances, so the pollution from Australia's power stations is breathed in by millions of Australians, particularly those in Sydney who end up with a large chunk of the Hunter Valley's pollution. Much of the sulphur dioxide and fine particle pollution in Sydney's air comes from coal-fired power stations in the Hunter Valley and the central coast.
Power stations are the largest source of sulfur dioxide (SO₂), oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Australia – three toxic pollutants that cause death and disease in humans and harm the environment. Most people I talk to are extremely surprised when they hear the emissions limits imposed on Australian power stations are, for the most part, far less stringent than those in the United States, the European Union and China.
The most shocking we found was mercury limits for some NSW power stations are 666 times higher than those in the US. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Because our emissions limits are so lax, power stations have not had to install pollution reduction technologies that are commonly used overseas to reduce SO₂ and NOx pollution.
As a result, communities are exposed to excessive and preventable levels of toxic pollutants that cause and make worse a range of health impacts, such as lung cancer, heart attack, stroke, asthma and respiratory disease.
Building new power stations is not the answer to Australia's energy issues – or to our toxic pollution woes.
"Ultra-super critical" power stations may boast newer technology than the existing old facilities, but they would barely reduce the level of toxic emissions and would still pour out more than a million tonnes of toxic pollution into our air, water and land.
Our research shows the current fleet of power stations should be regulated much more strictly, with stricter emissions standards applied, meaning power stations would have to install modern pollution reduction technologies and improve their operating practices. Strong regulation is critical to reducing the toxic burden power station pollution places on the community.
Communities, especially communities living in the shadow of power stations, have little control over the air they breathe. They rely on strong regulation to protect their health.
The International Energy Agency recently noted that in those countries where air pollution is being controlled, it is primarily because of strong government regulation.
There is no "safe" level of air pollution – health impacts are found even at low levels of pollution.
Ultimately the only way to avoid death and disease from power station pollution is to move to renewable energy generation, which produces no toxic pollution.
Even the highly conservative International Energy Agency notes in its recent report on energy and air pollution, "Policies and measures that lead to an avoidance of air pollution emissions tend to be associated with the broader transformation of the energy sector into one that is more efficient and less reliant on fossil fuels: over the longer term, the simplest way to tackle air pollution is not to produce the pollutants in the first place."
Nicola Rivers is a lawyer and director of advocacy and research at Environmental Justice Australia.
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Multiple violations found at Washington State's nuclear power plant.
The Washington State Department of Health (DOH) last month suspended indefinitely the shipment of radioactive waste from the state’s sole nuclear power plant.
Multiple violations found at state's nuclear power plant
The state's only nuclear power plant is in trouble for mistakes with shipping radioactive waste.
Susannah Frame, KING 9:21 PM. PDT August 10, 2017
(Photo: KING)
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The Washington State Department of Health (DOH) last month suspended indefinitely the shipment of radioactive waste from the state’s sole nuclear power plant.
Internal documents obtained by the KING 5 Investigators reveal that the Columbia Generating Station, operated by the publicly owned Energy Northwest, made repeated errors in its shipping of radioactive waste, in violation of state and federal regulations, dating back to 2014.
“There have been multiple deficiencies with the shipments of radioactive waste which has resulted in noncompliance with Federal, US Ecology, and State of Washington requirements,” wrote Robby Peek, Energy Northwest Quality Services supervisor in a July 26 interoffice memo.
Peek characterized the problems as “significant” and wrote the pattern of errors has led to a “loss of regulatory confidence.”
“Additionally, incorrect details within the shipping manifest can increase risk to the health and safety of the public,” wrote Peek.
The most recent event caused the DOH to revoke the plant’s shipping rights for the third time in the last three years.
A July 26 letter from the DOH to Energy Northwest outlines what led to the temporary ban. Inspectors at the state’s low level radioactive waste dump found a July 20 shipment of waste was far more radioactive than what was listed on the shipping manifest.
“Inspections of your shipment revealed (violations) of the US Ecology Radioactive Materials license…and the Washington Administrative Code,” wrote Kristen Schwab, DOH Office of Radiation Protection waste management supervisor. “Because of the nature of the violations found in this shipment, authorization to use the commercial low-level radioactive waste disposal site by Energy Northwest has been suspended indefinitely.”
The Columbia Generating Station (CGS) is located approximately 10 miles outside of Richland on land leased at the Hanford Site. Although located on the same reservation as the former defense nuclear weapons factory, the power plant is not affiliated with Hanford. CGS has been producing electricity utilized throughout the Northwest since 1984.
Energy Northwest’s chief communication officer, Mike Paoli, downplayed the July 20 incident. He described it as a paperwork mix-up.
“The driver was given the wrong manifest,” said Paoli. “First and foremost, there is no public health or safety issue now.”
The interoffice memo authored by Peek called for an immediate “Stop Work Order,” meaning all shipping of radioactive materials off site must cease until certain corrective actions are taken. The Stop Work is in addition to the state’s action and is a highly unusual step for the company to take. Peek described 12 separate shipping deficiencies from October 2014 to July 2017.
“Corrective actions taken to date have been ineffective at preventing recurrence,” wrote Peek.
The most serious violation occurred in November 2016 when federal regulators from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a “Notice of Violation” after contaminated filters arrived at the state’s dump measuring a radiation level seven times greater than what was listed on the shipping manifest. The dump is also located on the Hanford Site. That violation set off a series of inspections and additional NRC oversight. It also made the CGS one of only 14 plants out of 99 across the country on the NRC watch list.
“You would think they would have learned their lesson and made corrections considering they just were cited by the NRC and spent several months fighting the NRC over additional oversight over this very same issue,” said Chuck Johnson, director of the Joint Task Force on Nuclear Power at Physicians for Social Responsibility. Physicians for Social Responsibility is a long-time critic of nuclear power.
Nuclear policy expert Robert McCullough reviewed documents related to the shipping errors for KING 5. McCullough has advised Congress and the Department of Justice on energy issues for many years. He said the July 20 incident by itself doesn’t appear to pose any risk but the totality of problems dating back to 2014 is of concern.
“The good news is, as far as I’ve seen, none of these things are immediately dangerous but the bad news is we’re getting quite a list of them, and it’s time to take a good hard look at what we are doing there,” said McCullough. “We’re reaching that point where we’re seeing enough of these problems we’ve begun to worry if the plant is being sufficiently maintained.”
It’s no secret the CGS has been under pressure to cut costs. McCullough said understaffing is most likely to blame for the pattern of errors.
“My experience with the nuclear plant is the staff is very competent. However, they’re in cost reduction mode so this would indicate to me that this particular department has lost staff and the remaining staff are unable to keep up with the administrative load,” said McCullough.
A veteran Energy Northwest employee who did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation said the problems can be traced to the company’s top officials.
“This is a leadership issue because it is a repeat problem,” said the employee. “Stop work orders are very rare and very serious. It means something that is important is going very wrong. That should show that this is a systemic issue that leadership can’t fix for whatever reason.”
Even seemingly small errors take on new meaning at nuclear power plants because the stakes are so high. The worst-case scenario is a Fukushima-like event when an earthquake and tsunami led to a nuclear power plant meltdown, explosions, and the spewing of radioactive material in 2011.
“Now we don’t think that’s going to happen. We think we run plants well. We think we have lots of precautions but what we’re seeing here is the beginning of a flag that we don’t have enough precautions,” said McCullough.
Energy Northwest’s Paoli underscored how safe the CGS is. He said the nuclear industry has the best track record of any other energy producer, such as coal and hydropower.
“The nuclear industry has the safest record environmentally and with regard to industrial safety than any energy industry in the United States or in the world. There’s a reason we’re the safest industry – because we take these things seriously,” said Paoli. “We’re not shipping toys down the road. This is serious business for us.”
The DOH said the suspension of shipping rights could last approximately 45 days.
“If you wish to reestablish (dump) site use privileges, you must allow a point-of-origin inspection conducted by the state of Washington, with all expenses paid by Energy Northwest,” wrote Schwab. “The department is also requiring you to participate in a management meeting…after receipt of your root cause investigation and description of corrective actions….If no response is received within 90 days, your site use permit will be terminated.”
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