nitrogen and nox
TEDxSydney
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction.
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off.
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off
Jane Dalton @IndyVoices Sunday 8 October 2017 00:00 BST
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The Independent Online
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“Chip is much more popular than me everywhere we go,” Chris Darwin says, jovially co-operating by posing for photos with the toy bald eagle he carries on his shoulder. “I nicked him from my children’s bedroom and he gets lots of attention.”
To meet Mr Darwin, laidback, cheerful and ultra-friendly, you would never guess he tried to commit suicide 26 years ago. He’s perfectly open about it, as much as he is passionate about his new work that sprang from the famous surname.
Mr Darwin’s great, great grandfather, Charles, may have developed the theory of the origin of species but today his descendant has picked up the evolutionary science baton to defend mass extinctions of species.
“We all have crucibles,” he says of the dark period when, aged 30, he tried to end his life by cycling over a cliff (he was saved by a random tree branch). “Critical moments when something normally bad happens that changes the rest of your life, and mine was this suicide event. Slowly I came to the concept that I needed purpose in life.”
Darwin the younger looked at all the world’s big problems – starvation, polluted water, disease – and settled on the crisis of mass extinctions as one he felt he wanted to help tackle. “So in 1991 I set off down that road.”
Bird man: Chris Darwin is making it his mission to halt wildlife decline (Jane Dalton)
When asked to what extent he was influenced by his legendary ancestor’s work in identifying the origins of man, he bursts into a roar of laughter. “It was entirely independent,” he insists in a voice heavy with irony.
Chris Darwin, 56, had come to London from his home in Australia for a groundbreaking conference attempting to tackle the growing crisis of the world’s rapidly diminishing wildlife, and one of the key causes of that loss – worldwide demand for meat.
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More than 50 of the best minds in the fields of ecology, agriculture, public health, biology, oceanography, eco-investment and food retailing joined forces over two days to brainstorm ideas on how to stem the rapid shrinkage of the natural world caused by damaging agricultural practices.
The Extinction and Livestock Conference, with at least 500 delegates, was the world’s first ever conference examining how modern meat production affects life on Earth, and, put simply, it was designed to find ways to revolutionise the world’s food and farming systems to prevent mass species extinctions.
“We have to stop this,” says Mr Darwin, and he recalls how his great, great grandfather regretted on his death not having done more for other animals – a sentiment that shaped his decision to turn around his “self-indulgent, selfish” life, which involved working in advertising, and do something for the planet.
Wildlife under attack
The fact that the food on our plates is a major cause of shocking declines in wildlife – ranging from elephants and jaguar to barn owls, water vole and bumble bees – may come as a surprise to many. But for the experts gathered for the conference the link was clear. What was less easy to see was how to force practical global change.
Nobody can be in any doubt about the alarming rate at which animals, reptiles and birds are becoming extinct. The journal Science says we are wiping out species at 1,000 times their natural rate.
In the past 40 years alone half the world’s wildlife species have been lost, with conservation giant the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) predicting Earth is on course to lose two-thirds of its species within the next three years.
Marco Lambertini, director-general of WWF International, could not have put it more starkly: “Lose biodiversity, and the natural world – including the life-support systems as we know them – will collapse.”
Changing our spots: if we don't change our diets then animals, such as jaguar, face extinction (AFP/Getty)
The depth of the crisis was underlined earlier this year when scientists announced we were already living through an era of the world’s sixth mass extinction – caused by human activity. What was happening was so urgent, they warned, it should be termed not “mass extinction” but “biological annihilation”.
The researchers revealed, in the journal Nature, their findings that tens of thousands of species – including a quarter of all mammals and 13 per cent of birds – are now threatened with extinction. The researchers, who studied 27,600 species, said: “Dwindling population sizes and range-shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilisation.”
And it’s not just land mammals that are disappearing. Last year a study in the journal Science suggested sharks, whales and sea turtles were dying in disproportionately greater numbers than smaller animals – the reverse of earlier extinctions.
The link with food
Climate change and hunting are usually blamed for declines in the natural world but at Extinction Conference 17, WWF revealed fresh research showing 60 per cent of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets.
Its report, Appetite for Destruction, laid bare how the vast scale of cereals and soya grown specifically to feed animals farmed for meat is soaking up great tracts of land, taking huge quantities of fresh water and eliminating wild species.
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What’s more, the study says, the world is consuming more animal protein than it needs: the average UK consumption of protein is between 64g and 88g, compared with guidelines of 45g-55g. Poultry such as chicken and duck are the biggest users of crop feed worldwide, with pigs second.
One study found that 60 per cent of EU cereal production (and 67 per cent in the US) is used as animal feed – yet for every 100 calories fed to animals as crops, we receive on average just 17-30 calories in the form of meat and milk.
It's a jungle out there: deforestation for food production is a massive problem (AFP/Getty)
According to the charity Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), the destructive practices were set in train after the Second World War, when intensive farming techniques spread from the US to Europe. Vast landscapes were replaced by “monoculture” – a single crop – in fields liberally treated with pesticides and fertilisers. They killed the insects, bees and butterflies at the bottom of the food chain and wiped away bird habitats, while active deforestation for food production is leaving ever smaller landscapes for mammals, from jaguar and elephants to polar bears and rhinos.
It’s happening in exotic locations – such as Indonesia, where the palm oil industry wrecks habitats and leads to elephants, porcupine and wild pigs being poisoned – and closer to home, where decades of use of nitrogen and other chemicals on farms has led to dire warnings about Britain’s soil having fewer than 100 harvests left.
But worldwide, the overwhelming problem, experts say, is the highly inefficient use of land to grow soya and cereals that are then fed to chickens, pigs and cattle slaughtered for meat.
According to The Economist, although livestock provides just 17 per cent of global calories consumed, it requires twice that proportion of the Earth’s fresh water, feed and farmland because of the crops required. And this makes it the greatest user of land in the world.
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Philip Lymbery, chief executive of CiWF, which organised the conference, set out the causal links between modern intensive farming practices and the destruction of the natural world in his book Dead Zone, which explains how intensive rearing of animals in Britain and abroad to produce meat cheaply involves destroying forests half the size of the UK for farmland each year.
In South America, rainforests have been replaced by swathes of soya crops to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. Some 13 million hectares there – about the size of Greece – are used for soya imported by the EU, nearly all for industrial feed, according to WWF.
The system is so inefficient, says Lymbery, that “worldwide, if grain-fed animals were restored to pasture and the cereals and soya went to people instead, there would be enough for an extra four billion people”. Feeding animals on crops that are fit for humans is “the biggest single area of food waste on the planet”.
Sting in the tail: use of pesticides in fields is one of the factors leading to a decline in bees (CiWF)
“Many people claim factory farming is the answer to feeding a burgeoning population but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says.
Intensively grazed landscapes, with fertilisers and pesticides and the demise of stubble, have led to steep declines in barn owls and other farmland birds and small mammals, while chemical run-off from fields is seen as a key cause of bee decline.
CiWF is not the only voice linking extinctions with our diets. The UN has stated that “intensive livestock production is probably the largest sector-specific source of water pollution”. The Soil Association says the UK’s food system accounts for 30 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of industrialised processes.
And WWF has warned: “We could witness a two-thirds decline in the half-century from 1970 to 2020, unless we act now to reform our food and energy systems and meet global commitments on addressing climate change, protecting biodiversity and supporting sustainable development.”
Solutions
Seven years ago, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drew up a strategic plan, signed by 196 countries, of detailed targets for 2020 to slow wildlife decline. Since then scientists have repeatedly warned not just that the targets would be missed but also that biodiversity loss was worsening. The lack of action was one factor behind the Extinction Conference.
Lymbery said it should be the start of a “global conversation” on transforming food and farming worldwide, and called for a fresh UN convention. “To safeguard the future, we need some kind of global agreement to replace factory farming with a regenerative food system. But that’s not all. We all have the power, three times a day, to save wildlife and end an awful lot of farm animal cruelty.”
Mucking in: We have it in our power to prevent factory farming – by changing our behaviour (AFP/Getty)
Duncan Williamson, of WWF, proposed feeding farm animals on specially cultivated insects and algae, to dramatically reduce deforestation and water use needed as animal feed.
Food producers, meanwhile, showcased a new vegan burger that “sizzles and bleeds like meat”, endorsed by Joanna Lumley, the star of Absolutely Fabulous.
Less meat
Time and again, the solutions by conference experts led to a need to end industrial animal farming – which meant animal campaigners were suddenly no longer the only ones urging people to scale back drastically the amount of chicken, pork, beef, salmon, dairy and eggs consumed.
Chris Darwin, who spent six weeks on a container ship travelling to Britain to avoid flying, said: “Verifiable evidence indicates meat consumption globally will double in the next 35 years, and if that occurs so much forest will have to be cut down around the world that we’re going to cause a mass extinction of species within the next hundred years. And we cannot let that happen.”
He explained passionately how a typical diet uses “two-and-a-half planets” in terms of resources but cutting out wasteful animal produce uses “a quarter of the planet”.
Cut it out: Rainforests are being chopped down and replaced by soya crops (AFP/Getty Images)
He is using modern technology that would have astounded his great, great grandfather to fight back against the seemingly relentless decline of the natural world – in the form of an iPhone app helping people to switch to a more plant-based diet.
By tapping in what they eat, people can receive feedback over time on how many animals, carbon emissions and how much land and water they have saved, as well as days of lifespan added, and their placing on a leaderboard.
“What is the single silver bullet to solve this problem?” he says. “We need behavioural change to solve this problem – and that is to eat less meat.”
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Chesapeake acidification could compound issues already facing the bay, researchers find.
As oceans around the world absorb carbon dioxide and acidify, the changes are likely to come faster to the nation’s largest estuary.
For ten days across recent summers, researchers aboard the University of Delaware research vessel Hugh R. Sharp collected water samples from the mouth of the Susquehanna River to Solomons Island in a first-of-its-kind investigation. They wanted to know when and where the waters of the Chesapeake Bay were turning most acidic.
One finding: As oceans around the world absorb carbon dioxide and acidify, the changes are likely to come faster to the nation’s largest estuary.
Scientists have long studied the slow and steady acidification of the open oceans — and its negative effects. Acidifying waters can kill coral, disrupt oyster reproduction, dissolve snail shells like nails in a can of bubbly Coke.
But researchers are just beginning to investigate the consequences for the Chesapeake. And they’re finding that acidification could compound the ecological challenges already wracking the bay.
Not all effects are immediately negative on all species. Experiments are showing that blue crabs, marsh grasses and algae could theoretically thrive in the conditions expected to develop over the next century. But the acidification is a threat to other keystone bay species, such as oysters — a key source of food for crabs. Scientists say acidification could dramatically and unpredictably alter the delicate balances that stabilize the bay ecosystem.
With so many variables expected to affect bay creatures — including rising acidity, warming waters and continued nutrient pollution — research is complex.
“When you have three things changing at once, that’s where our challenges really increase,” said Jeff Cornwell, a research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge. “All these things are intertwined.”
Water, as they teach in middle school chemistry, has a neutral pH of 7. But over the past 300 million years or so, ocean water has registered as basic, with an average pH of 8.2.
As carbon dioxide has multiplied in the atmosphere over the past century, it has also dissolved into the oceans, producing carbonic acid. That has dropped ocean pH to 8.1. The shift might seem slight, but it actually represents a 30 percent increase in acidity, because the pH scale is logarithmic.
The consequences, coupled with the impacts of rising ocean temperatures, could eventually be severe. Research suggests that the acidity that could develop by 2100 could make it harder for oysters, clams, sea urchins and corals to build their protective shells, and could even dissolve the shell of the pea-sized creature at the base of the food web known as a sea butterfly.
But that’s just in the open ocean. Most research focuses on that massive habitat, because its chemistry is largely consistent from one spot to another. In environments close to land, where ecology is more complex and active, biological processes like photosynthesis and respiration drive more volatile swings in acidity and other chemistry.
Whitman Miller is a research scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater.
If an acidifying ocean is like a bottle of carbonated seltzer water, he said, estuaries like the Chesapeake are similar to a beer.
“Because it’s so uniform, in some ways, we know much more about the open ocean at the global scale than we do these local scales we’re tangling with in estuaries,” he said.
Researchers around Maryland and across the country are working to bridge that knowledge gap.
Research published last month in the journal Nature Communications showed that acidification is already apparent in the bay. The team that measured acidity across the bay, led by the University of Delaware marine science professor Wei-Jun Cai, found a zone of increasing acidity at depths of about 30 to 50 feet across the Chesapeake. While surface waters hover around the pH norm of 8.2, the deeper waters registered almost one point lower — nearly ten times more acidic.
The researchers, who included Cornwell and colleagues from UMCES, believe it’s not only the global effects of carbon dioxide emissions, but also the dead zones of low or no oxygen that have plagued the bay for decades. The zones are created when nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from farms, lawns and sewage fertilize large algae blooms. Microbes strip oxygen from the water to decompose the blooms when they die, and release more carbon dioxide in the process.
The problem is worsened when organic matter is decomposed in water that is already stripped of oxygen — the bacteria use up other compounds in the water that produce an acidic chemical, hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is what makes the muck around the bay smell like rotten eggs.
Cai said the processes suggest that the bay, and other waterways struggling to reduce nutrient loads, are especially vulnerable as the pH of waters around the globe decline.
“You have something we call a synergistic effect, where one plus one gives you something more than two,” he said. “There’s a very strong acidification effect.”
Miller and colleagues at the Smithsonian are exploring the consequences in a meadow of marsh in that looks like so many others around the Chesapeake — except this one is dotted with metal heat lamps and plexiglass chambers that are helping to simulate the environment of the future. They call it the Global Change Research Wetland.
Scientists are conducting experiments to study the effects of increasing carbon dioxide, nutrients and temperature on the growth of sedge grasses and invasive plants, and the ability of the Rhode River marsh to grow upward to match sea level rise.
One study has been running for 30 years. Pat Megonigal, a biogeochemist and lead investigator of the research wetland, says it should be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest-running climate change experiment.
Along the creek that flows into the marsh, researchers from the Smithsonian Institute have built a gateway through which they are measuring the carbon content of water as it flows in and out twice a day with the tides. Some of it is carbon dioxide, but a portion is the compounds carbonate and bicarbonate — elements that may actually help counteract acidification in the estuary.
They hope the data will help explain not only what changes acidification could bring, but also what role natural ecological processes could play in limiting them.
“It tells us something about the influence of the marsh on the chemistry of the water,” Megonigal said. “We think the net effect of water leaving the marsh is to buffer the acidity of the estuary.”
Other researchers are eagerly testing what those changes could mean for the bay’s crabs and oysters.
For her recently completed dissertation, UMCES doctoral candidate Hillary Glandon exposed blue crabs to both warmer and more acidic waters and watched their response. She found that acidification alone didn’t affect them, but when it was coupled with warmer waters, crabs grew faster, molting old shells more frequently, and they also ate more food.
Previous research has already shown that oysters, mussels and similar shellfish could struggle in acidifying waters. They build their shells out of a compound in the water known as calcium carbonate, and scientists have found there will be less of those building blocks available as ocean carbon dioxide levels rise.
So Glandon’s colleagues Cornwell and Jeremy Testa are investigating what that could mean for restoration of the Chesapeake Bay’s oysters. They’re getting input from researchers in Oregon, where acidification has already challenged aquaculture efforts by killing oyster larvae. Though they don’t expect the exact same conditions in the bay, they are watching pH levels closely in places such as Harris Creek, one of three Choptank River tributaries where millions of dollars have been spent on building and seeding new reefs.
Any changes could throw off a complex food web. While crabs could be thriving in warmer and more acidic bay waters in the future, the oysters and mussels they eat could be struggling.
“Crabs don’t exist in a vacuum,” Glandon said. “If food they’re going to be eating is less abundant, there may be negative effects.”
Tom Miller, director of UMCES’ Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, said the stakes demand that more resources be put into measuring and understanding acidification. In the same way state and federal officials have tried to limit pollution to protect crabs, oysters, marshes and underwater grasses, he said, acidification should be getting more attention in bay policy discussions.
“It has the potential to fundamentally change the pattern, the seasonality and the location of fishing in a way that the grandfathers of today’s watermen wouldn’t recognize,” he said. “We should be having those discussions now — not in 20 years or so, when it becomes, I wouldn’t say too late, but when it becomes much more contentious.”
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Airman Magazine
EPA's climate rule withdrawal will include big changes to cost calculations.
In nixing the Clean Power Plan, EPA will suggest changing the benefits it counts, which would bolster its arguments that the rule’s economic burdens would outweigh its gains from cleaner air, reduced illnesses and greater energy efficiency.
The Trump administration will consider fundamentally limiting the way the federal government counts benefits from curbing climate change and air pollution in an upcoming proposal to rescind former President Barack Obama’s signature climate regulation, according to multiple sources familiar with recent drafts.
In nixing the Clean Power Plan, EPA will suggest changing the benefits it counts, which would bolster its arguments that the rule’s economic burdens would outweigh its gains from cleaner air, reduced illnesses and greater energy efficiency.
President Donald Trump has long vowed to erase Obama’s restrictions on coal plants, and then announced he was pulling out of the Paris climate accord, so it's no surprise he plans to eliminate the rule. But the fine print will have big implications for the inevitable yearslong legal fights to come. It could anger environmental advocates while satisfying some industries and conservative states.
“It may seem like inside baseball, but this is going to set the tone,” said John Larsen, a director at the analysis firm Rhodium Group. “We haven’t seen the details of any sort of regulatory plan from this administration yet on climate.”
EPA could release its withdrawal proposal in the coming days, while leaving the door open to eventually replace the rule with one that would pose minimal costs but provide few climate benefits, as POLITICO reported last month.
Among other changes, Trump’s EPA will drastically alter how it uses the social cost of carbon, a metric for assigning a monetary value to curbing emissions. The agency will decline to consider any social or economic benefits the rule creates outside the United States — unlike the Obama administration, which included worldwide impacts in its calculations.
And it will count far fewer of the health benefits that might have come from reducing air pollutants that cause premature deaths, heart attacks and asthma hospitalizations.
Taken together, the sources say, the recalculations eliminate tens of billions of dollars of the rule’s benefits, which Obama’s EPA had contended would outweigh the costs of enforcing a faster shift away from coal-fired power. The new numbers could be meant to aid EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s legal case for scrapping the rule.
The rule’s supporters are already accusing Trump and Pruitt of promoting fake math. They say the administration is ignoring the reality that power companies are making the transition to green energy even faster than Obama anticipated.
“Like so many things, they seem to be completely ignoring what’s happening in the real world,” Janet McCabe, who led EPA’s air office under Obama, said of Trump’s team. “Every other story is about how costs are coming down, about how emissions are reducing, about how power companies are making choices to close their coal plants or run them less because they’re so expensive.”
David Doniger, climate director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that “the courts are going to look very, very hard at this kind of cooking of the books.”
“There are two kinds of ways to get the law wrong, to play fast and loose with science and facts or with the economics, and you can lose for either or both reasons,” he said.
But EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said that if anyone's numbers were questionable, it was Obama's.
“While it appears you are writing a piece based on rumors about CPP, the facts are that the Obama administration’s estimates and analysis of costs and benefits was, in multiple areas, highly uncertain and/or controversial," she said in an email Thursday night.
The businesses and states that opposed Obama’s regulation say it’s about time EPA reconsidered the costs. For example, it’s reasonable to count only the rule's U.S. benefits since Americans would be paying the costs, said Jeff Holmstead, an industry lawyer who was EPA’s air administrator under former President George W. Bush.
The math surrounding the rule has long been a political lightning rod.
The Obama-era EPA said the rule would be a net gain for society because shifting to cleaner energy sources would slow climate change and reduce pollution-related illnesses, among other benefits. In contrast, studies financed by conservative groups estimated that the regulation would cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars during the same time frame.
The rule sought to cut the U.S. power industry’s carbon pollution 32 percent by 2030, compared with 2005 levels — and as of two years ago, the country was more than halfway there. The regulation was the centerpiece of Obama’s pledge that the U.S. would fulfill its part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Trump has since announced he’s pulling the United States out of Paris, unless he can “negotiate” a more favorable deal, and he’s ordered EPA to undo a host of Obama-era regulations, chief among them the Clean Power Plan.
He has also directed his agencies to recalculate Obama’s math on the social and economic impacts of climate change.
In a March executive order, Trump disbanded an interagency team that had been working on revising the social cost of carbon.
He also told his agencies to revert to White House guidance from 2003, which directed regulators performing cost-benefit analyses to “focus on benefits and costs that accrue to citizens and residents of the United States.” Any look at international implications should go into a separate report, the George W. Bush-era guidance said.
That “America First” approach to regulation is a big departure from Obama’s methods, which considered the worldwide effects of reducing U.S. carbon pollution, but it will help Trump’s EPA justify repealing the rule.
In the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration had estimated that each metric ton of carbon dioxide imposes about $40 of costs on society. That means the plan would yield about $30 billion in global climate benefits by 2030 — but only $2 billion to $7 billion in domestic gains, less than the rule’s estimated cost, according to the think tank Brookings.
Experts who support the international strategy say going back is misguided. Michael Greenstone, the chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, told lawmakers in March that using a social cost of carbon that incorporates only U.S. benefits is "essentially asking the rest of the world to ramp up their emissions."
Noah Kaufman, an economist for World Resources Institute’s climate program, said that “because climate change is a global problem, it requires a global solution.”
“If countries try to solve it only for themselves, not taking into account how U.S. emissions affect the global community, and the global community doesn’t consider how it affects us … you’re just never going to solve the problem,” Kaufman said.
EPA will also refuse to count many of the health benefits that the Obama administration estimated would arise as side effects of reducing carbon emissions, the sources said. Specifically, Obama’s regulators accounted for the fact that levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter — pollutants already regulated by other EPA rules — would decline along with the greenhouse gases.
In contrast, Trump’s EPA won’t count those ancillary reductions if the pollutants were already below levels that the agency has deemed safe in other standards.
Environmental advocates say that logic is wrong, because further curbing those pollutants means people will be even healthier. But Holmstead said that while it’s legitimate for EPA to look at the other pollutant reductions the rule might achieve, the agency shouldn’t count them to offset costs.
The changes to the cost-benefit analysis will come in a regulatory impact analysis that aims to highlight a wide range of cost estimates for the rule. The analysis will accompany EPA’s proposed rule for rescinding the Clean Power Plan and its advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on options to replace the regulation.
Obama's critics estimate the rule would force consumers to pay $200 billion more by 2030 and saddle electricity customers with double-digit price hikes in many states, according to a study contracted by the conservative American Energy Alliance’s Institute for Energy Research.
The Obama-era EPA and many academic institutions and think tanks have argued that the rule would cost far less, between $5 billion and $8 billion in 2030 by the agency’s previous calculations. Plus, they have said, the social benefits of reducing carbon levels, slowing climate change and ratcheting down illness-causing air pollution would far offset the costs, achieving $26 billion to $45 billion in net benefits by 2030.
Advocates say costs are already proving to be even lower than expected as power companies move away from coal on their own.
The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law this week released a paper compiling multiple studies that have found that Clean Power Plan compliance costs have fallen dramatically since the rule came out in 2015. That included an analysis from the American Petroleum Institute that estimated lower costs than EPA’s original expectations.
“The takeaway from this should be, if we’re going to do anything with the Clean Power Plan right now, given these trends we should be strengthening the goals,” said Jack Lienke, an author of that paper and regulatory policy director for the institute. “Emissions can be reduced much more cheaply. That’s a reason to set more aggressive targets, not to weaken targets or repeal them altogether.”
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The Trump administration doesn't care about our air.
An asthmatic child struggling to breathe on a hot summer day in Baltimore could be the victim of a coal plant in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or another upwind state.
An asthmatic child struggling to breathe on a hot summer day in Baltimore could be the victim of a coal plant in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or another upwind state.
About 70 percent of Baltimore’s ground-level ozone (air pollution) problem is the result of emissions from power plants and vehicles in upwind states, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).
What is difficult to believe is that 19 power plants in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, could be choosing profits over the health of Baltimore residents. These plants already have pollution controls installed, but they don’t fully turn on those controls during hot summer months. As a result, the plants’ owners saved $24 million in one recent summer while their plants’ emissions drifted to Maryland, according to MDE.
Most astonishing of all, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is allowing this to happen, in violation of the Clean Air Act’s “good neighbor” provision, which requires states to ensure that pollution not damage air quality in down-wind states.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) along with other environmental and human health partners, including Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and Physicians for Social Responsibility, have gone to court to prod EPA into action. The State of Maryland recently filed a similar suit.
Forcing the 19 plants to run their pollution controls effectively throughout the summer would not only benefit our family members. It would benefit the Chesapeake Bay. Here’s why.
Emissions from a coal-fired utility plant form a toxic cloud containing carbon dioxide, mercury, soot, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. This cloud can drift for hundreds of miles.
Nitrogen oxides, or NOx for short, turn to ozone in the hot summer. On 14 days this past summer ozone levels were so high a Code Orange Air Quality Alert was issued for the Baltimore area, meaning the air was unhealthy for seniors, children and others with sensitivities.
NOx also is a major and particularly damaging source of nitrogen pollution in the bay. Excess nitrogen fuels algal blooms that result in underwater dead zones where aquatic life can’t breathe.
Emissions from coal plants as far away as the Ohio River Valley to the west and North Carolina to the south can drift to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, and cause harm. The bay is vulnerable to NOx traveling from a massive 570,000 square-mile area called the Chesapeake Bay airshed. Nearly one-third of the nitrogen entering the bay arrives from the airshed.
By not running their controls effectively through the “ozone season” of the summer, the 19 plants sent 39,000 tons of additional NOx to Maryland, according to MDE. All of that adds to the distress of our vulnerable residents and the bay’s marine life.
Maryland petitioned the EPA last year to respond to this problem. And what have we heard? Not a word from the highest environmental agency of the land. So, we have sued to get a response.
It’s important to note that the air we breathe in Maryland is a lot cleaner than it used to be just a decade ago. The level of ozone-causing pollution in Maryland has dropped significantly since then. We can thank the Clean Air Act, and Maryland and federal actions that required stricter emission controls on power plants, vehicles and other sources. Even many utility plants upwind of Maryland have reduced their emissions
But the job is not done. The 19 plants in the five states now must be made to comply with the “good neighbor” provision of the Clean Air Act. They need to run their pollution controls throughout the summer.
The trouble is the current federal administration. Cleaning the air and water is just not a priority. The Trump administration, in fact, has promised to roll back or prevent the implementation of clean-air rules that have been responsible for improvements in human and environmental health in Maryland.
CBF and our local and national environmental partners join Maryland in court on this issue, hoping a federal judge will see what the Trump administration, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, refuses to: Government should side with children and fish who can’t breathe, not utility owners looking to pad their bottom line.
Alison Prost is the Maryland Executive Director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. She can be reached at aprost@cbf.org.
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Eating grass-fed beef isn’t as climate-friendly as you may think.
With the global population climbing, researchers wanted to know whether grazing could help rein in climate change. This is what they learned.
Of the many terms attached to our burgers and steaks, "sustainable" and "grass-fed" often sit next to each other. But a new study finds that raising livestock on grassy pastures is far from sustainable and doesn't have the climate benefits proponents have claimed.
"Can we eat our way out of the climate problem by eating more grass-fed beef?" Tara Garnett, of the Food Climate Research Network at Oxford University in the UK, and her colleagues asked. The answer, they found, is no.
Eating grass-fed beef doesn't get climate-conscious carnivores off the hook.
Cattle and other ruminants have long been considered a major source of greenhouse gases, largely because of the methane they emit through belching and the carbon dioxide released when forests are cleared for grazing or growing feed.
But in recent years, researchers have found that cattle raised on pastures, munching on grasses and treading the ground underneath them, have the potential to sequester carbon in the soil. Some have made the argument that certain kinds of managed grazing practices not only provide the key to feeding calorie-dense beef and dairy products to a growing global population—predicted to hit 9.8 billion by 2050—but are critical to controlling greenhouse gas emissions because of their ability to store carbon in the soil and potentially offset their emissions
Not everyone is convinced.
"This is an area of contestation," Garnett said. "We wanted to look at the evidence."
The Argument for Grass-Fed Beef
With the world's population climbing and as more countries, notably China, develop the wealth and appetite for animal products, food and agricultural researchers have puzzled over how to feed everyone.
Some proponents of grass-fed beef have argued that managed grazing on pasture provides not just more protein for a meat-hungry planet, but an essential climate benefit.
Here's how that argument goes:
Plants grow, they take carbon out of the atmosphere, then they die. Their roots and aboveground biomass contain carbon. If that carbon is left undisturbed, then the carbon stays in the ground in a stable form. If animals nibble away at plants, that stimulates growth, causing plants to put down deep roots that contain carbon. At the same time, animals eat the plants and excrete manure, which contains carbon and nitrogen—a process that returns carbon and nitrogen to the soil and fosters more plant growth, sequestering more carbon.
So, the argument goes, it's better to eat grass-fed, carbon-sequestering ruminants than "monogastric" creatures like pigs and chickens whose diets will require more grain and more carbon-storing forests cleared to grow those grains as demand for meat grows.
Problems with the Grass-Fed Beef Equation
"But," Garnett said, "there are a lot of buts."
Conditions—weather, rainfall, soil consistency, soil nutrients, plant species, stocking rates (the number of cattle per acre)—all need to be just right. They seldom are, the study says, which means that research emphasizing the possible climate benefits of pasture-fed ruminants has likely been overstated.
Garnett and her colleagues found that the carbon-sequestering potential of pasture-raised ruminants is quite limited.
Ruminants, they point out in a report published Monday, contribute 80 percent of total livestock emissions. But, they find, even under "very generous assumptions," grazing management could only offset up to 60 percent of average annual emission from the grass-fed sector, and only up to 1.6 percent of total human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
To meet the growing demand for protein from grass-fed animals, the report said, "we would have to massively expand grazing land into forest and intensify existing grassland through the use of nutrient inputs, which among other things, would cause devastating CO2 releases and increases in methane and nitrous oxide emissions," both potent climate-warming gases.
The report finds that if projections for animal product consumption stay unchanged, livestock would take up one-third of the total emissions budget under the Paris climate agreement's 2-degree warming limit.
"Increasing grass-fed ruminant numbers is, therefore, a self-defeating climate strategy," the report concluded. The report, called Grazed and Confused, didn't determine whether grass-fed beef is better or worse than feed-lot beef; instead it looked at the ability of grass-fed production systems to sequester carbon and what that would mean for the future.
No Silver Bullet for Beef-Based Diets
The report's authors say the planet's consumers need to cut their intake of all animal products, no matter how they were produced.
"We can't escape the fact that if we're going to have a hope in hell of cutting our climate emissions, then we need to stop our consumption of animal products," Garnett said. "The high consumers of meat and dairy need to be cutting back their consumption. And that holds, whatever the animal type and whatever the system in which it's been produced."
Jonathan Kaplan, the food and agriculture program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which has looked at the issue extensively but was not involved in the Grazed and Confused report, said there's research demonstrating that pasture-raised livestock sequester carbon, "but the case for arguing that it's a silver bullet to take care of beef's impact is not there."
NRDC has concluded that, pound-for-pound, beef releases about 34 times more greenhouse gases than legumes, including lentils and black beans. The group also recently found that a decline in U.S. beef consumption contributed to a 9 percent decline in greenhouse gas emissions.
"Our take is that grass-fed is better than conventional," Kaplan added, noting other benefits unrelated to greenhouse gas emissions, including better animal welfare and less water pollution. "But plants are better than either."
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Grass-fed cows won’t save the climate, report finds.
Letting livestock graze doesn’t dramatically reduce greenhouse emissions.
By Jacquelyn TurnerOct. 2, 2017 , 9:00 PM
If you thought eating only “grass-fed” hamburgers could absolve you from climate change guilt, think again. There’s a lack of evidence that livestock (such as cattle, sheep, and goats) dining on grassland has a lower carbon footprint than that fed on grains, as some environmentalists and “pro-pastoralists” claim, according to a new report by the Food Climate Research Network, a group of independent scientists based at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
“Switching to grass-fed beef and dairy does not solve the climate problem—only a reduction in consumption of livestock products will do that,” says one of the report’s authors, Pete Smith of the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom.
Livestock is responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions, researchers estimate. The animals emit gases such as nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane in amounts that have significantly changed our atmosphere. And the impact is growing. As more people worldwide are lifted out of poverty, many more can afford to eat meat regularly; global demand for animal products, now 14 grams per person per day, is expected to more than double by 2050.
Most modern-day cattle are raised on “landless systems,” also known as feedlots, where the cattle have little space, no access to pastures, and are fed a grain-based diet. Proponents of this system argue that it is an efficient way to produce meat that helps prevent conversion of forests and other ecosystems to pasture. But feedlot systems are notorious for producing hydrogen sulfide and polluting waterways with animal waste, ammonia, pathogens, and antibiotics. Moreover, some experts say, because ruminant stomachs evolved to eat grass, feeding them soy or corn results in more greenhouse gas emissions.
Letting ruminants graze is a better system, some argue. Plants take up CO2 through their leaves and, when they die, leave part of it in their roots, where it remains and is converted to other forms of life; that makes soil a giant carbon sink. But human activities such as deforestation and plowing have released much of the stored carbon, and “pro-pastoralists” suggest that grazing cattle can help restore grasslands and soil, sequestering massive amounts of CO2 in the process. The cows’ manure would also recycle nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous to the soil, encouraging the growth of new vegetation and sequestering even more carbon.
But the 127-page FCRN report released today, Grazed and Confused, says there is no evidence that grass-grazing cattle will make a difference. Grass-fed cattle do contribute to CO2 sequestration, the international group concluded after sifting through more than 100 papers—but only under ideal conditions. When too many animals roam a field, they will trample plants and soil and impede carbon storage; when it’s too wet, carbon uptake is impeded as well. And even under the best of conditions, carbon sequestration is not at levels high enough to counteract the ruminants’ own emissions, the report says.
The findings don't sway advocates of grazing. Richard Young of the Sustainable Food Trust in Bristol, U.K., says the report is too quick to dismiss the importance of grazing in some regions. “For me it’s very simple,” he says. “In countries like the U.K. and Ireland, and on rangelands where rainfall is too unreliable for much crop production, we should continue to encourage and make possible ruminant production.” Legislation and policy can help prevent overstocking, he says.
“Farming becomes sustainable when it looks like an ecosystem,” adds Richard Manning, the Helena, Montana–based author of Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie. “It works when we mimic natural systems. And we have to include animals, because that’s what’s found in nature.” Manning says the report also ignores other services grasslands provide, such as absorbing flood water and filtering runoff. And as the report acknowledges, conventionally raised beef has other environmental issues, Manning points out, such as increasing the demand for grains, and therefore cropland.
In the end, the real solution is reducing global meat consumption, says Tim Benton, who studies sustainable agro-ecological systems at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. “Our ever-increasing demand for meat is driving the planet in an unsustainable direction,” Benton says. “No one farming system will fix it.”
Posted in: ClimatePlants & Animals
doi:10.1126/science.aaq1116
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German region appeals diesel ban court ruling.
The German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said it would appeal against a court ruling obliging it to ban diesel cars from the streets of its capital Stuttgart, meaning the ban will not come into force at the start of 2018 as planned.
BERLIN (Reuters) - The German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said it would appeal against a court ruling obliging it to ban diesel cars from the streets of its capital Stuttgart, meaning the ban will not come into force at the start of 2018 as planned.
The government of the southwestern region, home to Mercedes-builder Daimler, said on Monday it would appeal, after a court said a ban was the only way to meet European Union nitrogen oxide (NOx) and dust particle emissions standards.
Baden-Wuerttemberg, governed by a coalition of conservatives and environmentalist Greens, had already said it would study the court ruling before deciding if and when it would impose the ban, sought by environmental group DUH, in January 2018.
Since Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) (VW) admitted in September 2015 to cheating emissions tests, diesel cars have been scrutinized for NOx emissions blamed for causing respiratory disease.
DUH went to court two months after the VW scandal broke seeking to force the city of Stuttgart, which is also home to Porsche and auto suppliers Bosch and Mahle, to drastically improve its air quality by banning diesel cars.
The appeal to the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig means the lower court’s ruling does not need to be implemented pending an appeal judgment.
The city has since said it would bar diesel cars that do not conform to the latest emissions standards on days when pollution is heavy.
Reporting By Thomas Escritt and Victoria Bryan; Editing by Catherine Evans
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