Op-ed: Coronavirus pandemic—the consequences of sidelining science
A naturally occurring crisis is morphing into a human-made disaster in the United States because of the Trump administration's sidelining of science and scientists.
Having paved over the science on pandemics, the Trump administration puts up parking lots. Literally.
It wasn't enough that President Trump's Rose Garden declaration of a national coronavirus emergency on Friday disintegrated into a self-congratulatory monologue.
It wasn't enough that he trashed reporters who dared ask him if he bore any responsibility for one of the worst responses to a pandemic by a wealthy country in modern times, driving the United States toward a double collapse of human and economic health and the indefinite shutdown of normal life and movements.
The finishing touch was that Trump was flanked not by a wall of dedicated infectious disease experts, epidemiologists, triage managers, and heads of public university research labs but rather mostly by Fortune 500 CEOs whose hands he shook as they paraded to the podium—violating a primary public health directive to blunt the spread of infection.
The heads of Walmart, Walgreens, Target, and CVS, with a combined 2019 net income of $20 billion, stepped forward to proclaim that they would each do their part in this emergency.
But their pledges were glaringly short of vital particulars such as how they planned to protect their workers or what kind of extended sick leave they might offer. Rather, they said they will reserve parts of parking lots for drive-in virus testing.
Dimming the laboratory lights
To be clear, glossing over the fact that access to COVID-19 tests remains woefully limited in the United States, the idea of drive-in testing itself is good.
But it was hard to watch some of the wealthiest companies in the country boast on national television as though they were suddenly carrying the torch of Florence Nightingale, such as when Walgreens' president, Richard Ashworth, said, "When we have natural disasters, our stores are a beacon in the community."
It is a key part of the Trump administration agenda to be the lighthouse keeper for these corporate beacons, as it dims the laboratory lights of federally funded climate, pollution, food, and health science. Fifty years ago, Joni Mitchell sang about the madness of paving over the environment.
In 2020, we have a White House that has disbanded or paved over scientific advisory panels, disregarded and disparaged its own scientists, and shuttered the pandemic office in the National Security Council.
The administration's appointments of industry lobbyists and political ideologues to top-level positions has driven out thousands of career scientists across several agencies. As recently reported, the administration held classified meetings on the coronavirus during which they essentially cut out input from experts who could have helped shape a more orderly response.
Brusque and heartless answers
Beyond the dearth of hard science and the corporate glad handing, Trump's brusque, heartless answers to reporters were once again on full display. To one of them he refused to take any responsibility for the precious time lost to protect citizens from botched testing.
The debacle has been marked by the still-mysterious reluctance of the United States to be among the 60 nations to adopt test kits from the World Health Organization, the defective early test kits distributed by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, and lack of flexible thinking to greenlight test kit production at university and state medical centers and private labs. For all that, Trump blamed, "rules, regulations and specifications from a different time."
When Yamiche Alcindor of PBS brought up the elimination of the pandemic office and whether the administration lost valuable time because of that, Trump snapped that she had asked a "nasty question."
Trump's nastiness to Alcindor was flagrant on two levels. One is that Trump once more attempted to humiliate a black female journalist as he has done previously by calling their questions nasty, stupid, or—almost laughably—racist. The other is that he knew that the question cut to the core of his administration's inexcusable dismissal of science.
Alcindor was the only reporter to directly interrogate the president on the White House's 2018 disbanding of the National Security Council pandemic preparedness office. By extension, the question brought into stark relief the administration's relentless dismantling of our overall federal public health science infrastructure.
Trump knew if he owned up to that even his most fervent followers would recognize that his White House was responsible for hampering preparedness and enabling the spread of the lethal virus in the United States. In an answer to Alcindor that was either a lie or a bald admission of ignorance and incompetence, Trump told her, "I don't know anything about it."
In this life-and-death crisis where we need not just a commander-in-chief, but also a compassionate national consoler, it is noteworthy that Trump did not utter a single sentence of condolence to the families of any of the people who have died so far, nor offer a single best wish or prayer for recovery for the ill as the number of confirmed cases continues to climb.
Exaggerated claims
In a Washington Post guest column that ran the same day of the Rose Garden fiasco, Beth Cameron, a former director of the disbanded pandemic preparedness panel—the White House's National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense—wrote that its purpose was to "rally the government at the highest levels" to avoid a six-alarm blaze of viruses that know no borders. She wrote that the absence of the panel now "is all too evident."
Without scientific evidence to rally the American people, the White House was reduced to showcasing corporate cheerleaders. And there was far less substance to this show of Fortune 500 generosity than even what President Trump proclaimed.
He said Google had 1,700 engineers working on a website to direct Americans to the drive-in testing sites. Claiming that the engineers have "made tremendous progress," Trump promised Americans that the website will be "very quickly done."
Coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx held up a poster showing how the site would work to bring quality testing "to the American people at unprecedented speed."
Google itself quickly squashed that promise, saying that a subsidiary with only 1,000 employees was merely working on a pilot website for the San Francisco Bay Area, with no timetable for launch. And, so far, none of the companies have yet offered any concrete information on when, where, or how drive-in testing will be done.
Richard Ashworth of Walgreens told those assembled at the Rose Garden event, "These are extraordinary times that call for extraordinary measures."
He's right on that to be sure. But it will surely take more than pledges of corporate parking lots as a naturally occurring crisis is morphing into a human-made disaster in the United States because of the Trump administration's sidelining of science and scientists.
To borrow again from Joni Mitchell, you don't know what you've got until the pandemic panel is gone.
“The number of stress-activated health conditions people reported was quite staggering."
PITTSBURGH — Engaging in public participation during permitting for oil and gas pipelines often harms mental health and creates distrust in government, according to a new study.
Numerous studies have examined physical health effects associated with living near oil and gas pipelines, but there’s little research on the mental health impacts associated with these projects.
The study, published in Energy Research & Social Science, was conducted through surveys and interviews with more than 1,000 people living near proposed natural gas pipelines in Virginia, West Virginia, Oregon and Pennsylvania. It documented a long list of mental health symptoms associated with living near pipeline routes, including anxiety, depression, Complex post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and suicidality.
“I live in Blacksburg, Virginia, which is one of the places the Mountain Valley Pipeline goes through,” Shannon Bell, a professor of sociology at Virginia Tech and lead author of the study, told Environmental Health News (EHN). “In conversations with community members who are affected by the pipeline, it became very clear there were some pretty significant traumas going on.”
By using screening tools to measure the severity of mental health symptoms, the researchers also determined that the more people engaged with public participation processes related to the pipelines, the worse their mental health impacts were.
“Having a pipeline built through your land is incredibly stressful for many people, but we were surprised to learn that the people who were the most engaged in public participation processes related to the pipeline had significantly greater mental health impacts than people who didn’t engage at all, regardless of whether the pipeline was actually being constructed through their land,” Bell said.
Karen Feridun, an activist who lives in eastern Pennsylvania, has fought two pipeline projects, the PennEast and Commonwealth pipelines, both of which were canceled following community resistance. She’s proud of those wins, but they were difficult for her and the community.
“The PennEast fight went on for seven years,” Feridun told EHN. “People were so dedicated. It was like they made fighting the pipeline their second full time job. Many people expressed how stressed this made them feel, the pain of seeing their property devalued and their beautiful community disrupted, and how unending it all was. It was a lot to endure.” stories like that.”
When the Commonwealth and PennEast pipelines were canceled, Feridun said, there was a lot of relief. “The state of everybody’s mental health improved to the extent that this was over and they could move on with their lives,” she said. However, many of the Pennsylvanians involved in those fights were soon faced with additional oil and gas-related projects in their communities, like fracking wells or related infrastructure, pulling many of them right back into fight mode.
“There’s this constant pressure and feeling of powerlessness that comes with not knowing what’s about to happen,” Feridun said. “For some people it just starts to feel like a never-ending nightmare.”
Bell’s study found that pipeline development and related public participation processes were associated with a long list of physical symptoms including insomnia, high blood pressure, heart problems, teeth grinding, headaches, tremors, irregular heartbeat, shingles, heart problems, chest pain, strokes and brain hemorrhages. At least one person said they were so physically sickened by the stress they felt about the pipeline and the public participation process that they had to move.
“The number of stress-activated health conditions people reported was quite staggering,” Bell said. “It was devastating to read some of the things people had gone through.”
Feridun shared a story about a community member who protested a FERC meeting and had a stroke afterwards. “The family’s feeling was that the pressure she was under contributed to her having a stroke at a very young age,” she said. “There were lots of stories like that.”
Performative public participation creates harm
Bell researched the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), passed in 1969, which heightened the public involvement requirements for federal agencies' decision-making on actions that could significantly affect the environment.
She found previous research that suggested NEPA’s public participation requirements are only intended to diffuse public outrage since government agencies don’t have standardized ways to incorporate public input into decision-making or permitting.
She also learned that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the agency responsible for regulating pipelines, approved 99% of eminent domain cases between 1999 and 2020, allowing pipelines to be built through privately owned land despite widespread public opposition to many of these projects.
"Many people expressed how stressed this made them feel, the pain of seeing their property devalued and their beautiful community disrupted, and how unending it all was. It was a lot to endure.” - Karen Feridun, an activist who lives in eastern Pennsylvania
Other researchers had highlighted the flaws in NEPA’s public participation requirements and FERC’s apparent bias against landowners, but no one had measured how participating in performative public participation processes impacts residents’ mental health.
Bell and colleagues found that people who participated in these processes felt their input was dismissed, that their concerns were not addressed and did not have any impact on decision-making about the pipelines.These feelings created disillusionment and distrust. The more people participated in public feedback processes, the stronger their feelings of disillusionment were.
“Many people talked about feeling betrayed by their government,” Bell said. “A number of our respondents stated that up until this point, they had believed government agencies existed to protect residents. But after spending tremendous amounts of time engaging in public input opportunities, many of our respondents came to believe that these government agencies were actually just there to facilitate the construction of pipelines.”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved 99% of eminent domain cases between 1999 and 2020.
Credit: Karen Feridun
“The PennEast fight went on for seven years. It was like they made fighting the pipeline their second full time job," said Karen Feridun.
Credit: Tara Zrinksi
Feridun has seen this firsthand.
“In all my years fighting pipelines and fracking,” she said, “I’ve heard so many people say: ‘I thought the government was here to protect me,’ and it comes as this terrible blow to learn they’re actually representing someone else’s best interest, not yours.”
Bell’s research focused on natural gas pipelines, but she said these findings are relevant to any scenario where government agencies invite public participation during the permitting process for industrial projects. For example, permitting for fracking wells and petrochemical plants are often contentious and generally overseen by state regulatory agencies that may invite public input but also typically lack any ways to incorporate it into permitting decisions.
“People aren’t stupid — they realize when their comments aren’t making a bit of difference,” Bell said. “It’s incredibly disempowering when people spend hours and days writing public comments and attending public meetings, just to be ignored.”
“I don’t want to beat up on regulators because this is an institutional problem,” she added, “but wasting people's time and energy by asking for public input without providing a mechanism to act on most of their concerns not only brings substantial harm to these individuals' mental and physical health, but it also violates core aspects of environmental justice."
Feridun said that although she tells people joining pipeline fights that public participation is “just theater and a box regulators have to check,” there are important reasons to participate anyway.
The first is that pipeline route often travel through rural areas where impacted landowners feel isolated and alone in their discomfort about the pipeline, and joining with others who are in the same situation creates strong community bonds and fosters empowerment. During the PennEast fight, for example, municipalities all along the proposed pipeline route passed resolutions stating their opposition to the pipeline. Those could be ignored by FERC, but they made it clear in writing that many communities along the pipeline route were prepared to fight the project in court if needed.
The second reason Feridun encourages people to participate in the permitting process is that even if FERC won’t do anything with public comments, it’s critical to put them in the public record so that a judge can consider them in subsequent lawsuits, which can be a powerful tool in winning pipeline fights.
“That’s part of how we won against PennEast,” she said. “People put so many comments on that docket, they were relentless … and gave lots of ammunition to judges who might one day have to consider those lawsuits.”
No environmental justice without real public input
Under guidance from the Biden presidential administration, federal and state governmental agencies are working to improve environmental justice.
Many states, including Pennsylvania, are developing new environmental justice plans that include additional community input related to permitting for polluting industries, but Bell said few of these plans create ways for environmental justice communities to influence permitting decisions (though there are some indications that this is beginning to shift).
Traditionally, governmental environmental justice efforts in the U.S. tend to focus on “distributive justice” — ensuring equity in the allocation of burdens and benefits. But the principles of environmental justice also include recognition justice, which entails valuing the perspectives of historically marginalized groups; procedural justice, which involves providing these communities with equitable access and opportunities to influence decision-making; and reparative justice, which requires acknowledging past harms against these communities and working to repair them.
Environmental justice communities can’t achieve procedural justice or restorative justice until they’re actually empowered to decide whether new pipelines or polluting facilities should be built in their neighborhoods, according to Bell.
“Environmental justice is not possible if public participation is performative,” Bell said. “If we’re serious about environmental justice, there need to be consistent [ways] for public input to be incorporated into agencies' decision-making processes. It needs to be possible for public input to actually influence agency decisions."
CAMERON PARISH, La. — Late into the night, John Allaire watches the facility next to his home shoot 300-foot flares from stacks.
He lives within eyesight of southwest Louisiana’s salty shores, where, for decades, he’s witnessed nearly 200 feet of land between it and his property line disappear into the sea. Two-thirds of the land was rebuilt to aid the oil and gas industry’s LNG expansion. LNG — shorthand for liquified natural gas – is natural gas that's cooled to liquid form for easier storage or transport; it equates to 1/600th the volume of natural gas in a gaseous state. It’s used to generate electricity, or fuel stove tops and home heaters, and in industrial processes like manufacturing fertilizer.
In the U.S., at least 30 new LNG terminal facilities have been constructed or proposed since 2016, according to the
Oil and Gas Watch project. Louisiana and Texas’ Gulf Coast, where five facilities are already operating, will host roughly two-thirds of the new LNG terminals – meaning at least 22 Gulf Coast LNG facilities are currently under construction, were recently approved to break ground or are under further regulatory review.
Although the U.S. didn’t ship LNG until 2016, when a freight tanker left, a few miles from where Cameron Parish’s LNG plants are today, last year the country became the global leader in LNG production and export volume, leapfrogging exporters like Qatar and Australia. The
EIA’s most recent annual outlook estimated that between the current year and 2050, U.S. LNG exports will increase by 152%.
Allaire, 68, watches how saltwater collects where rainwater once fed the area’s diminishing coastal wetlands. “We still come down here with the kids and set out the fishing rods. It's not as nice as it used to be,” he told
Environmental Health News (EHN).
That intimacy with nature drew Allaire to the area when he purchased 311 acres in 1998. An environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran, he helped lead environmental assessments and manage clean-ups, and although retired, he still works part-time as an environmental consultant with major petroleum companies. With a lifetime of oil and gas industry expertise, he’s watched the industry's footprint spread across Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico’s fragile shores and beyond. Now that the footprints are at the edge of his backyard, Allaire is among a cohort of organizers, residents and fisher-folk in the region mobilizing to stop LNG facility construction. For him, the industry’s expansion usurps the right-or-wrong ethics he carried across his consulting career. For anglers, oil and gas infrastructure has destroyed fishing grounds and prevented smaller vessels from accessing the seafood-rich waters of the Calcasieu River.
From the view of Allaire’s white pickup truck as he drives across his property to the ocean’s shore, he points to where a new LNG facility will replace marshlands. Commonwealth LNG intends to clear the land of trees and then backfill the remaining low-lying field.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.”
Community bands together
John Allaire, left, purchased 311 acres in Cameron Parish in 1998, and has watched the oil and gas industry's footprint spread to his property.
Credit: John Allaire
During an Earth Day rally in April, community members gathered in the urban center of Lake Charles to demand local oil and gas industries help deliver a safer, healthier future for all. In between live acts by artists performing south Louisiana’s quintessential zydeco musical style, speakers like James Hiatt, a Calcasieu Parish native with ties to Cameron Parish and a Healthy Gulf organizer, and RISE St. James organizer Sharon Lavigne, who’s fighting against LNG development in rural Plaquemines Parish near the city of New Orleans, asked the nearly 100 in attendance to imagine a day in which the skyline isn’t dotted by oil and gas infrastructure.
Not long ago, it was hard to imagine an Earth Day rally in southwest Louisiana at all. For decades, the area has been decorated with fossil fuel infrastructure. Sunsets on some days are highlighted by the chemicals in the air; at night, thousands of facilities’ lights dot the dark sky.
“It takes a lot of balls for people to start speaking up,” Shreyas Vasudevan, a campaign researcher with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told EHN in the days after the rally. In a region with its history and economy intertwined with oil and gas production, “you can get a lot of social criticism – or ostracization, as well – even threats to your life.”
Many are involved in local, regional and national advocacy groups, including the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Healthy Gulf, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Turtle Island Restoration Network, the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Audubon Society.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.” - John Allaire, environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran
But environmental organizers are fighting a multi-billion-dollar industry with federal and state winds at its back. And LNG’s federal support is coupled with existing state initiatives.
Under outgoing Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a term-limited Democrat — the state pledged a goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050. Natural gas, which the LNG industry markets as a cleaner-burning alternative, is cited as one of the state’s solutions. Louisiana is the only state that produces a majority of its carbon emissions through fossil fuels refining industries, like LNG, rather than energy production or transportation. Governor Edwards’ office did not return EHN’s request for comment.
This accommodating attitude towards oil and gas industries has resulted in a workforce that’s trained to work in LNG refining facilities across much of the rural Gulf region, said Steven Miles, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP and a fellow at the Baker Institute’s Center on Energy Studies. Simultaneously, anti-industrialization pushback is lacking. It’s good news for industries like LNG.
“The bad news,” Miles added. “[LNG facilities] are all being jammed in the same areas.”
One rallying cry for opponents is local health. The Environmental Integrity Project found that LNG export terminals emit chemicals like carbon monoxide –potentially deadly– and sulfur dioxide, of which the American Lung Association says long-term exposure can lead to heart disease, cancer, and damage to internal or female reproductive organs.
An analysis of emissions monitoring reports by the advocacy group the Louisiana Bucket Brigade found that Venture Global’s existing Calcasieu Pass facility had more than 2,000 permit violations.That includes exceeding the permit’s authorized air emissions limit to release nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds 286 out of its first 343 days of operation.
The Marvel Crane, the first liquid natural gas carrier to transport natural gas from the Southwest Louisiana LNG facility, transits a channel in Hackberry, Louisiana, May 28, 2019.
“This is just one facility,” at a time when three more facilities have been proposed in the region and state, Vasudevan said. Venture Global’s operational LNG facility — also known as Calcasieu Pass — “is much smaller than the other facility they’ve proposed.”
In an area that experienced 18 feet of storm surge during Hurricane Laura in 2020 — and just weeks later, struck by Hurricane Delta — Venture Global is planning to build a second export terminal Known as “CP2,” it’s the largest of the roughly two dozen proposed Gulf LNG export terminals, and a key focal point for the region’s local organizing effort.
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” Hiatt told EHN of locals’ nostalgia for a community before storms like Rita in 2005 brought up to 15 feet of storm surge, only for Laura to repeat the damage in 2020. Throughout that time, the parish’s population dipped from roughly 10,000 to 5,000. “But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG. Folks in Cameron think that's going to bring back community, bring back the schools, bring back this time before we had all these storms — when Cameron was pretty prosperous.”
“Clearly,” for the oil and gas industry, “the idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports,” Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana, told EHN.
Helping fishers’ impacted by LNG is about “actual survival of this unique culture,” Cooke said.
In a measure of organizers’ success, she pointed to a recent permit hearing for Venture Global’s CP2 proposal. Regionally, it’s the only project that’s received an environmental permit, but not its export permit, which remains under federal review. At the meeting, some spoke on the company’s behalf. As an organizer, it was a moment of clarity, Cooke explained. Venture Global officials “had obviously done a lot of coaching and organizing and getting people together in Cameron to speak out on their behalf,” Cooke said. “So, in a way, that was bad. But in another way, it shows that we really had an impact.”
“It also shows that we have a lot to do,” Cooke added.
Environmental organizers like Alyssa Portaro describe a sense of fortitude among activists — she and her husband to the region’s nearby town of Vinton near the Texas-Louisiana border. Since the families’ relocation to their farm, Portaro has worked with Cameron Parish fisher-folk.
“I’ve not witnessed ‘community’ anywhere like there is in Louisiana,” Portaro told EHN. But a New Jersey native, she understands the toll environmental pollution has on low-income communities. “This environment, it’s so at risk — and it’s currently getting sacrificed to big industries.”
“People don’t know what we’d do without oil and gas. It comes at a big price,” she added.
Southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish is one of the state’s most rural localities. Marine economies were the area’s economic drivers until natural disasters and LNG facilities began pushing locals out, commercial fishers claim.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” James Hiatt , a Healthy Gulf organizer, told EHN. "But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG."
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
For the most part, Cameron Parish’s life and economy has historically taken place at sea. As new LNG facilities are operational or in planning locally, locals claim the community they once knew is nearly unrecognizable.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
A disappearing parish
The stakes are seemingly higher for a region like southwest Louisiana, which is the epicenter of climate change impacts.
In nearly a century, the state has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of land to coastal erosion. In part driving the state’s erosion crisis is the compounding impacts of Mississippi River infrastructure and oil and gas industry activity, such as dredging canals for shipping purposes, according to a March study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said Cameron Parish could lose more land than other coastal parishes over the next 50 years. A recent Climate Central report says the parish will be underwater within that time frame.
On top of erosion and sea level rise impacts, in August, 2023, marshland across southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish burned. The fires were among at least 600 across the Bayou State this year. Statewide, roughly 60,000 acres burned — a more than six-fold increase of the state’s average acres burned per year in the past decade alone.
But while the blaze avoided coastal Louisiana communities like Cameron Parish, the fires represented a warning coming from a growing chorus of locals across the region — one that’s echoes by the local commercial fishing population, who claimed to have experienced unusually low yields during the same time, according to a statement from a local environmental group. At the site of the Cameron Parish fires are locations for two proposed LNG expansion projects.
"The idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports.” - Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana
It was an unusual occurrence for an area that’s more often itself underwater this time of year due to a storm surge from powerful storms. For LNG expansion’s local opposition, it was a red flag.
As the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has noted prior, the confluence of climate change’s raising of sea levels and the construction of LNG export terminals — some are proposed at the size of nearly 700 football fields — are wiping away the marshland folks like Allaire watched wither. Among their fears is that the future facilities won’t be able to withstand the power of another storm like Laura and its storm surge, which wiped away entire communities in 2020.
Amidst these regional climate impacts, LNG infrastructure has shown potential to exacerbate the accumulation of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. For the most part, LNG is made up of methane — a greenhouse gas that’s more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Among the 22 current LNG facility proposals, the advocacy group Sierra Club described a combined climate pollution output that would roughly equal to that of about 440 coal plants.
The climate impacts prompt some of the LNG industry’s uncertainty going forward. It isn’t clear if Asian countries, key importers of U.S. LNG, will “embrace these energy transition issues,” said David Dismuke, an energy consultant and the former executive director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies. Likewise, European nations remain skeptical of embracing LNG as a future staple fuel source.
“They really don't want to have to pull the trigger,” Dismukes added, referring to Europe’s hesitation to commit more resources to exporting LNG from the American market. “They don't want to go down that road.”
While there will be a tapering down of natural gas supply, Miles explained, “we’re going to need natural gas for a long time,” as larger battery storage for renewables is still unavailable.
“I'm not one of these futurists that can tell you where we're going to be, but I just don't see everything being extreme,” Dismukes said. “I don't see what we've already built getting stranded and going away, either.”
For now, LNG seems here to stay. From 2012 to 2022,U.S. natural gas demand — the sum of both domestic consumption and gross exports — rose by a whopping 43%, reported the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA. Meanwhile, in oil and gas hotbeds like Louisiana and Texas, natural gas demand grew by 116%.
Throughout 25 years, Allaire has witnessed southwest Louisiana’s land slowly fade, in part driven by the same industrial spread regionally. Near where the front door of his travel trailer sits underneath the aluminum awning, he points to a chenier ridge located near the end of the property. It’s disappearing, he said.
“See the sand washing over, in here?” Allaire says, as he points towards the stretches of his property. “This pond used to go down for a half mile. This is all that's left of it on this side.”
The new Environmental Protection Agency rule aims to significantly cut carbon emissions from vehicles by 2055, avoiding up to 2,500 premature deaths annually.
Despite a slight slowdown in EV sales, 2023 saw a record 1.2 million EVs sold in the U.S., signaling strong market growth.
The regulation faces opposition from Republican states and the fossil fuel industry, while automakers receive more time to meet EV sales targets.
Key quote:
"Our final rule delivers the same — if not more — pollution reduction than we set out at proposal."
In a recent report the World Meteorological Organization highlights an alarming acceleration of climate change indicators, issuing a "red alert" due to unprecedented increases in greenhouse gases, temperatures, and ice melts.
Last year saw record-breaking increases in global temperatures and ice melts, pushing the world closer to exceeding the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C warming limit.
Over 90% of the world's oceans experienced heatwave conditions in 2023, and renewable energy capacity saw significant growth, offering a glimmer of hope.
The U.N. Secretary-General describes the current state as a planet on the brink, with climate chaos escalating due to fossil fuel pollution.
Key quote:
"Never have we been so close – albeit on a temporary basis at the moment – to the 1.5° C lower limit of the Paris agreement on climate change."
— Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization
The United Nations High Seas Treaty aims to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030, focusing on areas beyond national jurisdiction, yet its effectiveness is debated.
A recent study highlights the severe health and economic impacts of flaring and venting at industrial plants, including premature deaths and exacerbated asthma cases.
Flaring and venting activities at industrial plants are causing significant health issues, including asthma exacerbations in children and about 710 premature deaths annually.
The study, involving researchers from Boston University and others, found that these practices cost the U.S. approximately $7.4 billion each year in health damages.
Texas, Pennsylvania, and Colorado are the top states affected by these emissions, impacting nearly half a million Americans living close to oil and gas facilities.
Key quote:
“We know that PM 2.5 is bad for health, we know that ozone is bad for health, but to see the amount of asthma exacerbations that were attributed to nitrogen dioxide, I think that was surprising to us.”
— Erin Polka, a doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University’s School of Public Health
The mushroom industry explores the potential of spent substrate, a byproduct of mushroom cultivation, for various environmental and agricultural applications.
Spent substrate, the leftover material from mushroom farming, holds potential for compost, soil decontamination, biofuel, and further mushroom cultivation.
Small and large mushroom farms alike face the challenge of managing the increasing amounts of spent substrate, seeking innovative solutions for its disposal and reuse.
The Central Texas Mycological Society has created a community network for free spent substrate pickup, supporting local farms and environmental projects.
Key quote:
"If you're gonna do it, awesome, but account for this waste stream you're producing and how you're gonna get it off of your property."
— Amanda Janney, founder of KM Mushrooms
Why this matters:
Incorporating spent substrate into farming practices supports the principles of circular economy by recycling waste products into valuable resources. This not only reduces waste but also minimizes the environmental impact of farming by decreasing the reliance on synthetic inputs.
The way we eat and grow food has to dramatically change if we're going to feed the world's increasing population by 2050 and protect the planet, according to a major report released in 2019 from the EAT-Lancet Commission.
Public data from a network of state air monitors around the Houston Ship Channel is hard to interpret and is often inadequate, leaving Latino-majority neighborhoods like Cloverleaf unaware of whether the air they breathe is safe.
Los datos públicos de una red de monitores estatales del aire alrededor del Canal de Navegación de Houston son difíciles de interpretar y a menudo son insuficientes, dejando a vecindarios de mayoría latina, como Cloverleaf, sin saber si el aire que respiran es seguro.
While industry claims it could be part of a circular plastics economy, experts say that chemical recycling is extremely damaging to the environment and provides no real benefits.
Algoma Steel continues to exceed Canada’s standard air pollution limits for cancer-causing compounds and struggles with spills as it pushes toward a “green” makeover.