Air pollution from plants is getting worse (and we should do universal healthcare about it)

If I had to pick my top two topics of the last year, they would probably be air pollution, and covering our cities with plants. With that as context, please understand that todays post is difficult for me, because it’s time I came clean about something. It’s not just us – plants also cause air pollution. The reality is that this little biosphere of ours is a messy place, and was messy well before we started getting clever with things like fire and pressure. I think it’s pretty clear that air pollution from traffic and industry is a bigger problem than air pollution from plants, but that doesn’t mean that plants are just nature’s perfect air filtering machines. It’s not just pollen either – plants emit all sorts of interesting stuff:

All plants produce chemicals called biogenic volatile organic compounds, or BVOCs. “The smell of a just-mowed lawn, or the sweetness of a ripe strawberry, those are BVOCs. Plants are constantly emitting them,” Gomez said.

On their own, BVOCs are benign. However, once they react with oxygen, they produce organic aerosols. As they’re inhaled, these aerosols can cause infant mortality and childhood asthma, as well as heart disease and lung cancer in adults.

Put in stark terms like that, it can be pretty alarming, and as I said, I absolutely think that we should be accounting for this stuff. It also doesn’t remove the various benefits to having plants around that I’ve discussed in the past, it just complicates the story a little. Unfortunately, as with the air pollution we humans make, air pollution from plants is getting worse, not just from the rising temperature, but also from the rising CO2 levels:

There are two reasons plants increase BVOC production: increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and increases in temperatures. Both of these factors are projected to continue increasing.

To be clear, growing plants is a net positive for the environment. They reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which helps control global warming. BVOCs from small gardens will not harm people.

“Your lawn, for example, won’t produce enough BVOCs to make you sick,” Gomez explained. “It’s the large-scale increase in carbon dioxide that contributes to the biosphere increasing BVOCs, and then organic aerosols.”

See, increasing plant life as we decrease our own pollution will not only make our lives better, it will also create something of a feedback loop. By reducing CO2 levels, we will also be reducing both of the things causing air pollution from plants to get worse. Even so, the temperature’s going to keep rising for a while to come, so it’s good to be aware of this aspect of that problem.

The other thing this paper mentions is dust. I talked the other day about the danger of toxic dust from the drying Great Salt Lake, but these researchers were taking more of a global perspective, and at that scale, it’s the Sahara that has them worried:

The second-largest contributor to future air pollution is likely to be dust from the Saharan desert. “In our models, an increase in winds is projected to loft more dust into the atmosphere,” said Robert Allen, associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UCR and co-author of the study.

As the climate warms, increased Saharan dust is likely to get blown around the globe, with higher levels of dust in Africa, the eastern U.S., and the Caribbean. Dust over Northern Africa, including the Sahel and the Sahara, is likely to increase due to more intense West African monsoons.

Both organic aerosols and dust, as well as sea salt, black carbon, and sulfate, fall into a category of airborne pollutants known as PM2.5, because they have a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less. The increase in naturally sourced PM2.5 pollution increased, in this study, in direct proportion to CO2 levels.

“The more we increase CO2, the more PM2.5 we see being put into the atmosphere, and the inverse is also true. The more we reduce, the better the air quality gets,” Gomez said.

For example, if the climate warms only 2 degrees Celsius, the study found only a 7% increase in PM2.5. All of these results only apply to changes found in air quality over land, as the study is focused on human health impacts.

The researchers hope the potential to improve air quality will inspire swift and decisive action to decrease CO2 emissions. Without it, temperatures may increase 4 degrees C by the end of this century, though it’s possible for the increase to happen sooner.

Gomez warns that CO2 emissions will have to decrease sharply to have a positive effect on future air quality.

“The results of this experiment may even be a bit conservative because we did not include climate-dependent changes in wildfire emissions as a factor,” Gomez said. “In the future, make sure you get an air purifier.”

 Though be careful about what kind of purifier you get, since the good ol’ profit motive has done anything but clear the air on what makes for a good product.

I think I should mention – the particles we’re discussing here are not just the ultrafine particles I’ve discussed in the past. A lot of them are much bigger, which means that masks are going to be much more effective than they would be for freeway and airport pollution. That said, none of us are getting out of this life alive, and air pollution has played a role in that throughout our species’ existence.

That’s why it’s so important to have universal healthcare as part of our response to global warming.

The grim reality is that as temperatures continue to rise, the world will become more dangerous in a number of ways, and under a private healthcare system (or a public one that has been deliberately under-funded to discredit it), that will inevitably translate to shorter lives, with more suffering and disease. As much as I enjoy cyberpunk as a genre, I’m not thrilled about the part of it where all of us cyberserfs are constantly ill because of pollution and poverty. Kinda seems like the workers of the world oughta unite…

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!

Millions threatened by toxic dust from drying Great Salt Lake

Fresh water is a resource that’s likely to become increasingly scarce in the coming years, even without corporations buying up water supplies. The Great Salt Lake of Utah was already on track to dry up before global warming really got going, simply because of how much water is taken from the rivers that feed into the lake. Add in warmer temperatures, and you have a body of water that’s evaporating much faster than it’s being replenished.

The big danger here is not that people will run out of water, though. It’s worse than that. See, the reason the Great Salt Lake is so salty is that, unlike the Great Lakes further east, it doesn’t drain into the sea. That means that all the minerals carried into it by its tributary rivers just stay there, concentrating as water evaporates, and new minerals arrive. The problem is that sodium chloride isn’t the only mineral that’s been concentrating there over the last 16,000 years or so. There’s also arsenic in the mix, and other toxic chemicals.

In the areas where the lake has already dried, the lakebed is protected from the wind by a crusty layer of salt, but that layer is pretty thin, and once it’s gone, northern Utah starts getting toxic dust storms.

The terror comes from toxins laced in the vast exposed lake bed, such as arsenic, mercury and lead, being picked up by the wind to form poisonous clouds of dust that would swamp the lungs of people in nearby Salt Lake City, where air pollution is often already worse than that of Los Angeles, potentially provoking a myriad of respiratory and cancer-related problems.

This looming scenario, according to Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University, risks “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, surpassing the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979 and acting like a sort of “perpetual Deepwater Horizon blowout”.

Salt Lakers are set to be assailed by a “thick fog of this stuff that’s blowing through, it would be gritty. It would dim the light, it would literally go from day to night and it could absolutely be regular all summer,” said Abbott, who headed a sobering recent study with several dozen other scientists on the “unprecedented danger” posed by lake’s disintegration.

“We could expect to see thousands of excess deaths annually from the increase in air pollution and the collapse of the largest wetland oasis in the intermountain west,” he added.

There is evidence that plumes of toxic dust are already stirring as the exposed salt crust on the lake, which has lost three-quarters of its water and has shriveled by nearly two-thirds in size since the Mormon wagon train first arrived here in the mid-19th century, breaks apart from erosion. Abbott now regularly fields fretful phone calls from people asking if Salt Lake City is safe to live in still, or if their offspring should steer clear of the University of Utah.

“People have seen and realized it’s not hypothetical and that there is a real threat to our entire way of life,” Abbott said. “We are seeing this freight train coming as the lake shrinks. We’re just seeing the front end of it now.” About 2.4 million people, or about 80% of Utah’s population, lives “within a stone’s throw of the lake”, Abbott said. “I mean, they are directly down wind from this. As some people have said, it’s an environmental nuclear bomb.”

I feel like we need metaphors other than nuclear disaster for this sort of thing. I get that radioactive fallout is the go-to way to describe this kind of long-lasting damage to the environment, but I think it’s a bad comparison. The long-term health effects might be similar, but this isn’t an event with lasting effects – it’s just… lasting effects. This is also a problem that is both foreseeable (obviously), and preventable, at least in the short term. Water conservation and finding a water source other than the rivers feeding the lake would allow it to start growing again, and water seems to be an effective “seal” on the nasty stuff. This is a make-or-break moment when it comes to ecosystem services – the water draining into that lake is literally protecting people from taking in poison with every breath.

The Great Salt Lake’s predicament is often compared to that of the dried-up Owens Lake in California, one of the worst sources of dust pollution in the US since the water feeding it was rerouted to Los Angeles more than a century ago. But the sheer heft of the Great Salt Lake, sometimes called ‘America’s Dead Sea’ but in fact four times larger than its counterpart that straddles Israel and Jordan, presages a loss on the scale of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake but strangled to death by Soviet irrigation projects.

The demise of the Aral Sea was dumfounding to many Soviets, who thought it virtually impossible to doom a lake so large just by watering some nearby cotton. “But these systems are actually very, very delicate,” said Abbott, and they can quickly spiral away. The Great Salt Lake, its equilibrium upended by the voracious diversion of water to nourish crops, flush toilets and water lawns and zapped by global heating, could vanish in just five years, a timeline Abbott admits seems “absurd”.

“History won’t have to judge us, not even our kids will have to judge us – we will judge ourselves in short order,” said Erin Mendenhall, the mayor of Salt Lake City, who is now regularly bombarded with questions about the toxic dust cloud from mayors of other cities. “The prognosis isn’t good unless there’s massive action. But we have to start within one year, we have have to take the action now.”

With the climate warming, I have to say I’m worried that letting the rivers flow might not be enough, but there’s no question that it should be done. That, in turn, should be part of a national conversation about water policy. It may be that areas with an over-abundance of water can help to supply those with less (though not for a profit), or it may be that places like Salt Lake City need to be abandoned altogether. Climate change is just one part of it, but we’re rapidly approaching a point where places we’re used to inhabiting will no longer support human life, and I don’t think we’re doing enough to prepare for that.

Rail Workers United: Nationalize the rail industry!

Devotees of capitalism often cite “competition” as the force that both keeps anyone from gaining too much power, and that drives innovation. I have my disagreements with that perspective, but even if I were to accept it as fact, it wouldn’t apply to railroads. I’m not the first to point this out, but competition doesn’t work for railroads. It’s a natural monopoly. This means that the corporations who have taken ownership of the rail industry have a huge amount of power (especially with the government taking away their workers’ right to strike), which they’ve mostly used to maximize profits and avoid regulations and responsibility.

The solution is to nationalize the rail industry. Ideally that would be part of a larger investment in rail infrastructure for both passengers and freight, but even without that, the rails should be operated as a public utility, subject to democratic control, not by corporations who’re happy to kill people for money. I’m not alone in thinking this, and it’s not an opinion that’s limited to literary softies like me – Rail Workers United has called for nationalization in the wake of the recent Norfolk Southern train derailment:

Dear Friends and Fellow Workers:

In face of the degeneration of the rail system in the last decade, and after more than
a decade of discussion and debate on the question, Railroad Workers United (RWU)
has taken a position in support of public ownership of the rail system in the United
States. (see Resolution attached). We ask you to consider doing the same, and
announce your organization’s support for rail public ownership.

While the rail industry has been incapable of expansion in the last generation and has
become more and more fixated on the Operating Ratio to the detriment of all other
metrics of success, Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) has escalated this
irresponsible trajectory to the detriment of shippers, passengers, commuters,
trackside communities, and workers. On-time performance is suffering, and shipper
complaints are at all-time highs. Passenger trains are chronically late, commuter
services are threatened, and the rail industry is hostile to practically any passenger
train expansion. The workforce has been decimated, as jobs have been eliminated,
consolidated, and contracted out, ushering in a new previously unheard-of era where
workers can neither be recruited nor retained. Locomotive, rail car, and infrastructure
maintenance has been cut back. Health and safety has been put at risk. Morale is at
an all-time low. The debacle in national contract bargaining last Fall saw the carriers –
after decades of record profits and record low Operating Ratios – refusing to make
even the slightest concessions to the workers who have made them their riches.

Since the North American private rail industry has shown itself incapable of doing the
job, it is time for this invaluable transportation infrastructure – like the other transport
modes – to be brought under public ownership. During WWI, the railroads in the U.S.
were in fact temporarily placed under public ownership and control. All rail workers of
all crafts and unions supported (unsuccessfully) keeping them in public hands once
the war ended, and voted overwhelmingly to keep them in public hands. Perhaps it is
time once again to put an end to the profiteering, pillaging, and irresponsibility of the
Class One carriers. Railroad workers are in a historic position to take the lead and
push for a new fresh beginning for a vibrant and expanding, innovative and creative
national rail industry to properly handle the nation’s freight and passengers.

Please join us in this historic endeavor. See the adjoining RWU Resolution in Support
of Public Ownership of the Railroads, along with a sample Statement from the United
Electrical (UE). If your organization would like to take a stand for public ownership of
the nation’s rail system, please fill out the attached form and email it in to RWU. We
will add your organization to the list. Finally, please forward this letter to others who
may be interested in doing the same. Thank you!

In solidarity,

The RWU Committee on Public Ownership
[email protected]
202-798-3327

Damned straight. This is far from the first time that the corporate leaders of an industry have proven themselves incapable of handling the responsibilities given them, and while I don’t favor nationalization for everything, public ownership is the clear option for the rails. The resolution itself is the most whereas-laden document I’ve read in a while, but it also paints a somewhat tragic history of past efforts to claw this public good from the clutches of capitalists:

Whereas rail infrastructure the world over is held publicly, as are the roads,
bridges, canals, harbors, airports, and other transportation infrastructure; and

Whereas numerous examples of rail infrastructure held publicly have operated
successfully across North America for decades, usually in the form of local/
regional commuter operations and state-owned freight trackage; and

Whereas, due to their inability to effectively move the nation’s freight and
passengers during WWI, the U.S. government effectively nationalized the
private rail infrastructure in the U.S. for 26 months; and

Whereas, at that time it was agreed by shippers, passengers, and rail workers
that the railroads were operated far more effectively and efficiently during that
time span; and

Whereas every rail union at that time supported continued public ownership
(the “Plumb Plan”) once the war had ended; and

Whereas, specifically, when the rank & file rail workers were polled by their
unions in December 1918, the combined totals were 306,720 in favor of
continued nationalization with just 1,466 in favor of a return to private
ownership; and

Whereas the entire labor movement at that time was in favor of basic industry
being removed from private hands, with the delegates to the 1920 AFL
Convention voting 29,159 to 8,349 in favor, overruling the officialdom of the
AFL and its conservative position; and

And then they go into the current situation, including the way rail companies fight against improvements of all sorts. It feels like brake systems designed in the 1860s are less the exception than they are the rule. Looking at the world today, I think it’s arguable that we never really left the age of the robber barons – they just got better at obscuring who they are and what they do.

I support nationalizing the rails, and more than that, I think we should immediately invest a huge amount of money in upgrading and expanding rail infrastructure in the United States. I know that the current urban/suburban sprawl of some regions make some people think that rail can’t work in that country, but I think that creating a real, reliable rail network would encourage communities and businesses to congregate around stations and hubs. Hell, we could even invest in helping people move, and reclaim a lot of that sprawl for rewilding

I don’t know how likely this effort is to succeed, but I think that its best chance of success is for there to be a public movement in support of nationalization that extends far beyond rail workers. Solidarity means building all of our collective power, and pushing forward on all fronts where we find ourselves able to do so. The people, united, are a slime mold.

Thank you for reading! If you found this post useful, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!

Researchers see good results from lower mowing intensity, and fewer pesticides

My posts about agriculture tend to lean one of two ways. The first is to advocate for a dramatic, rapid increase in indoor food production. That includes the various forms of indoor farming, as well as efforts to cultivate edible bacteria and microalgae. The second is that for the land that’s currently being used for farm, we shift to a form of ecosystem management much closer to what Native Americans did prior to the European invasion. Land Back should be part of that, of course, but the basic idea is to cultivate an ecosystem that’s full of useful and edible organisms, and to treat it as a community resource, owned in common by everyone, for everyone’s benefit. As always, the exact specifics of this approach will vary depending on regional and local conditions.

I get that just swapping over would feel like a big change to most people. We’re very used to what “farming” looks like, and it can be hard to trust that something like bacterial flour or rows of plants under LEDs would be able to feed humanity in our billions. Fortunately, while I’m more interested rapid, radical change, my philosophy for making the world better is one where every step along the way should come with its own improvements. My favorite example is probably the use of plant life to mitigate air pollution. There’s ample evidence that being around greenery improves both our mental and our physical health (not that those are really separate things). We’d get pretty immediate benefits from adding plants to the urban landscape. Those improvements to our health and wellbeing give us more power, through better health and saved money, to fight for the next step up.

That’s why, while the vision in my head may be some sort of solarpunk permaculture utopia, there are actually much smaller steps that we could take, which would have measurable benefits, both in terms of dealing with climate change directly, and in terms of improving ecosystem health. For example, this study lays out what seems to be a sort of intermediary step, designed to capture carbon, improve ecosystem health, and reduce dependence on pesticides and herbicides, with relatively little effort:

The researchers conducted two independent experiments at the University’s research facilities at the Ruissalo Botanical Gardens in Turku. In the greenhouse and common garden studies, the research team showed that the intensity of mowing has a great impact on pastures. By reducing the intensity of the mowing and cutting the plant higher, the overall yield of the pasture increased and the plants developed bigger roots. This indicates a higher atmospheric carbon sequestration into belowground storage.

What was surprising, Fuchs emphasises, is that the researchers found a detrimental effect of herbicide residues in soil on root growth regardless of the intensity of the yield harvest.

“This demonstrates a tremendous limitation to the potential carbon binding and storage belowground when soils are polluted by pesticide. Considering the vast amount of pesticides applied to agricultural fields yearly, we can conclude that the impact on soil quality is a major driver of limited root growth, carbon sequestration, and consequently plant resilience and productivity,” Dr Fuchs says.

The authors propose additional field studies to extrapolate their findings onto a field scale. Both studies conclude that climate change mitigation via optimising carbon sequestration and storage in soil can be achieved by reducing pesticides, which will facilitate root growth and improve plant resilience.

All over the world, cultivated grasslands are used as grazing pasture as well as for growing fodder that is turned into hay and silage. They cover large parts of the world’s agricultural land and have a tremendous potential for climate change mitigation through carbon storage. The plants use carbon dioxide as they grow, and some of this atmospheric carbon becomes bound in the soils.

“Consequently, understanding how pesticide pollution in soil and intensive management limit plant productivity is the key to optimising intensive grassland-based agriculture in a sustainable and climate-friendly way,” Fuchs concludes.

Oh yeah, it means better crops, too. Did I bury the lede? Maybe a little. They don’t really talk about ecosystem health, but I think it’s pretty easy to see how less intensive mowing, and less pesticide use would both have a “side effect” of improving the general health of the area.

I think we should be ending most of our animal agriculture, which would eliminate much of the need for grasslands as fodder, but we’re not going to get there overnight, and anything we can do to improve things now will make our lives just a little bit easier down the line. Of course, that only matters if this research actually leads to a change in practice. It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? There’s something we could try to make the world better, but nobody in the aristocracy seems to feel like investing in it. That’s why I keep coming back to collective power and political change.

As I said at the beginning, the steps we take now can be both immediately beneficial to us, and beneficial to our ability to get bigger changes down the road. We’re not capitalists here at Oceanoxia, so don’t think in terms of “political capital”. The kind of power we on the left want to build isn’t something that’s lost when used. Each victory brings more people and power to the cause, and sets us up for an even bigger victory.

I think many of us are accustomed to witnessing a political and economic “ratchet” effect, in which Republicans use their power to damage things like the social safety net, and Democrats stabilize things, but don’t actually reverse the damage, or guard against further damage. I mean, the Dems do plenty of damage themselves, but we’re talking generalities. While we’ve made great advances in terms of civil rights (hence the current reactionary backlash), 9/11 ushered in a new era of authoritarian government power in the United States, coupled with a dramatic increase in the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the ruling class. It’s discouraging, and often horrifying to watch.

The one bit of hope I’m offering today is that we can, by working together, create our own ratchet effect, whereby we can increase our own power and happiness, and lay the foundations of a much better future than what currently looms on the horizon.

Thank you for reading! If you found this post useful, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!

Greenpeace occupies Shell oil rig

I’ve long been troubled by the unequal power dynamic that allows a wealthy person to poison thousands of poor people, without having to fear those poor people acting in self-defense to end that attack. Instead, the victims must play a game of papers and rhetoric with rules written by and for the wealthy. If they rise up, well, that’s violence you see, unlike the chromium in their water, or mercury in their air. If they rise up, they just have to be crushed for the public good!

It’s not an easy thing, figuring out how to get systemic change in a system designed to prevent just that. At what point does the law, in protecting the rich and powerful, lose its legitimacy? The answer to that is going to be different for everyone, and it’s worth remembering that, because we are all vulnerable to propaganda, there’s an ongoing effort to influence how we think about it.

The problem is, while we are trying to figure out what we can do to change course, the whole system continues barreling onwards, crushing countless lives, and carrying us towards climate catastrophe. Our future – the future of all humanity, is being burned before our eyes, and yet we must keep paying rent, and keep paying the arsonists for the privilege of getting to live in the present, and to read by the light of that fire.

I suppose in a lot of ways I’m one of the people who’s “still deciding”. I certainly haven’t done much beyond my effort to make this blog a viable source of income, which is why I’m glad for people like the Atlanta forest defenders, and Greenpeace. Say what you will about that organization, but it does me good to see them occupying another oil rig:

In an effort to call attention to the company’s planet-wrecking drilling projects, several Greenpeace International campaigners on Tuesday boarded and occupied a Shell-contracted platform in the Atlantic Ocean as it headed toward a major oil and gas field in the U.K. North Sea.

Greenpeace said in a press release that the platform is “a key piece of production equipment that will enable Shell to unlock eight new wells in the Penguins North Sea oil and gas field,” an extraction effort that the climate group has attempted to block in court.

Four Greenpeace activists—Carlos Marcelo Bariggi Amara from Argentina, Yakup Çetinkaya from Turkey Imogen Michel from the U.K., and Usnea Granger from the U.S.—managed to board the Shell vessel using ropes after reaching the platform in three boats deployed from Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise ship.

Greenpeace Southeast Asia executive director Yeb Saño, who tried and failed to board the platform, said in a statement that Shell “must stop drilling and start paying.”

“We’re taking action today because when Shell extracts fossil fuels, it causes a ripple of death, destruction, and displacement around the world, having the worst impact on people who are least to blame for the climate crisis,” said Saño, the former lead climate negotiator for the Philippines.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. The CEO of Shell is the guy who told John Stewart that maybe a goal of 1.5 degrees by 2100 means we pass that by 2050, and then spend the second half of the century cleaning up. I’ve written before about how this attitude is not only reckless, but also a horrifically callous dismissal of those people whose lives are already being destroyed or disrupted by the climate change that is lining that fucker’s pockets.

Excuse my Anglo-Saxon, it’s just infuriating to see a rich scumbag like that just sort of politely writing off countless lives. Personally, I think the temporary occupation of a drilling platform is the gentlest of responses. As far as I know, Greenpeace doesn’t even do any damage to the equipment when they do this stuff. They’re just making a statement, but even that is too much for the sensitive souls at Shell:

A Shell spokesperson claimed in a statement that the Greenpeace campaigners’ demonstration is “causing real safety concerns, with a number of people boarding a moving vessel in rough conditions.”

But the spokesperson signaled that the company has no intention of altering its development plans in the North Sea, despite warnings from the scientific community that continued drilling will usher in catastrophic climate outcomes.

“Shell and the wider fossil fuel industry are bringing the climate crisis into our homes, our families, our landscapes, and oceans,” Saño said Tuesday. “So we will take them on at sea, at shareholder meetings, in the courtroom, online, and at their headquarters. We won’t stop until we get climate justice. We will make polluters pay.”

Greenpeace’s latest direct action came days before Shell’s earnings report, which will follow the banner profit announcements of competing oil and gas giants such as Chevon and ExxonMobil.

On Tuesday, Exxon said it raked in a record $56 billion in profits in 2022.

Yes I’m sure Shell really cares about safety.

The reality is that these corporations have no more right to plunder the world than did the colonial empires that built their foundations. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve never had legitimacy, and I don’t see how one can look at their history and conclude otherwise. I fully support this occupation, and I hope to see many more like it in the future.

 

Filtration Friday: Kelp farms reduce water pollution

I’m not certain, but it’s likely that my favorite climate solution is covering everything in plants. In additional to mental health, they can improve our health in various ways, help guard against the harms of air pollution, and help mitigate that pollution. This isn’t just because I spent a good chunk of my childhood in the woods, either. I honestly love living in cities, I just want that life to be healthier and more pleasant for everyone.

Given all of that, I think it makes perfect sense that similar benefits would apply to plant life in the oceans. Water is, after all, another sort of “atmosphere”, for the organisms that inhabit it, and we’ve been polluting that as well. Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have been studying kelp, and have found that depending on the species used, kelp farms could make a big difference in coastal pollution:

The paper, published in the January issue of Aquaculture Journal, analyzed carbon and nitrogen levels at two mixed-species kelp farms in southcentral and southeast Alaska during the 2020-21 growing season. Tissue and seawater samples showed that seaweed species may have different capabilities to remove nutrients from their surroundings.

“Some seaweeds are literally like sponges — they suck and suck and never saturate,” said Schery Umanzor, an assistant professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and the lead author of the study.

“Although carbon and carbon sequestration by kelp received most of the attention, kelp is actually much better at mitigating excessive amounts of nitrogen than carbon,” Umanzor said. “I think that’s a story that’s really underlooked.”

Nitrogen pollution is caused in coastal areas by factors such as urban sewage, domestic water runoff or fisheries waste disposal. It can lead to a variety of potential threats in marine environments, including toxic algae blooms, higher bacterial activity and depleted oxygen levels. Kelp grown in polluted waters shouldn’t be used for food but could still be a promising tool for cleaning such areas.

Kelp farming is an emerging industry in Alaska, touted to improve food security and create new job opportunities. It’s also been considered as a global-scale method for storing carbon, which could be a way to reduce levels of atmospheric carbon that contribute to climate change.

Analysis of kelp tissue samples from the farms determined that ribbon kelp was more effective than sugar kelp at absorbing both nitrogen and carbon, although that difference was somewhat offset by the higher density of farmed sugar kelp forests.

Umanzor cautioned that the study was limited to two sites during a single growing season. She is currently processing a larger collection of samples collected from six Alaska kelp farms for the subsequent season.

“Maybe it’s a function of species, maybe it’s the site, maybe it’s the type of carbon and nitrogen out there,” Umanzor said. “There’s a lot to know in a follow-up study.”

Personally, I’d want to know more about what else the kelp is absorbing, before I commit to it as a food source, but I’m in favor of using kelp farming and things like it to mitigate water pollution, whether or not it helps feed people. I do wonder to what degree it’ll turn out that efforts to reduce water pollution upstream will end up leaving kelp nitrogen-starved the way reductions in air pollution have led farmers to use more sulfur fertilizers. I also wonder how these results would compare to similar studies for species on the Atlantic side of the continent, since we wouldn’t want to just introduce a new species. After all, it wouldn’t do to create a new invasive species problem in the name of fighting pollution.

I look forward to hearing about future research on this subject, but I kinda feel like I’ve heard enough – every offshore turbine should have a seaweed farm built into it, for starters. I think we should largely leave the sea floor alone, pending a better understanding of how to help that ecosystem recover, but floating structures seem to be a different matter, to me. I’ll admit I know far less about oceanic ecosystem dynamics than terrestrial ones, but I’m excited to see where this goes.

 

Let There Be Elephants.

The science is in, and we need more ginormous critters. Well, ok, not exactly, but this research does remind me a bit of the ecosystem benefits of whales that I’ve mentioned before. The idea that elephants are good for the ecosystems in which they live is not at all new. When it comes to the forest elephants, it has long been clear that, as with whales, the ecosystem seems likely to collapse if they go extinct. With that as context, it makes sense that the presence or absence of elephants can have pretty big implications for the global climate:

In findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Saint Louis University researchers and colleagues report that elephants play a key role in creating forests which store more atmospheric carbon and maintaining the biodiversity of forests in Africa. If the already critically endangered elephants become extinct, rainforest of central and west Africa, the second largest rainforest on earth, would gradually lose between six and nine percent of their ability to capture atmospheric carbon, amplifying planetary warming.[…]

An elephant looks into the camera as it moves through the rainforest. Photo by Stephen Blake, Ph.D. The elephant’s face forms a gray, wrinkled wall in the background of the picture. Out-of focus leaves in the foreground give a sense of depth. The elephant’s eye is visible just above the middle of the right half of the picture. It’s facing to the right, and you can see that the eye is turned forward, off-camera. The iris looks to be a light gold or yellow with a dark ring around it, and the eye’s white has a tinge of pink to it. The trunk is off-screen to the right, and you can see its ear extending off screen to the left.

“Elephants have been hunted by humans for millennia,” Blake said. “As a result, African forest elephants are critically endangered. The argument that everybody loves elephants hasn’t raised sufficient support to stop the killing. Shifting the argument for elephant conservation toward the role forest elephants play in maintaining the biodiversity of the forest, that losing elephants would mean losing forest biodiversity, hasn’t worked either, as numbers continue to fall. We can now add the robust conclusion that if we lose forest elephants, we will be doing a global disservice to climate change mitigation. The importance of forest elephants for climate mitigation must be taken seriously by policy makers to generate the support needed for elephant conservation. The role of forest elephants in our global environment is too important to ignore.”

Elephants play multiple roles in protecting the global environment. Within the forest, some trees have light wood (low carbon density trees) while others make heavy wood (high carbon density trees). Low carbon density trees grow quickly, rising above other plants and trees to get to the sunlight. Meanwhile, high carbon density trees grow slowly, needing less sunlight and able to grow in shade. Elephants and other megaherbivores affect the abundance of these trees by feeding more heavily on the low carbon density trees, which are more palatable and nutritious than the high carbon density species. This “thins” the forest, much like a forester would do to promote growth of their preferred species. This thinning reduces competition among trees and provides more light, space and soil nutrients to help the high carbon trees to flourish.

“Elephants eat lots of leaves from lots of trees, and they do a lot of damage when they eat,” Blake said. “They’ll strip leaves from trees, rip off a whole branch or uproot a sapling when eating, and our data shows most of this damage occurs to low carbon density trees. If there are a lot of high carbon density trees around, that’s one less competitor, eliminated by the elephants.”

Elephants are also excellent dispersers of the seeds of high carbon density trees. These trees often produce large nutritious fruits which elephants eat. Those seeds pass through the elephants’ gut undamaged and when released through dung, they are primed to germinate and grow into some of the largest trees in the forest.

“Elephants are the gardeners of the forest,” Blake said. “They plant the forest with high carbon density trees and they get rid of the ‘weeds,’ which are the low carbon density trees. They do a tremendous amount of work maintaining the diversity of the forest.”

This kind of thinking is part of the ecosystem management that I think we should be doing. This doesn’t mean that we should try to introduce elephants (or mastodons, or wooly mammoths) to areas that haven’t had them in recent centuries, but it does mean that our conservation efforts, even those focused on getting plants to absorb carbon, need to include the various big mammals that we’ve pushed to the brink of extinction. Once again, this isn’t particularly new information. In addition to what we already knew about elephants, there’s also plenty of evidence that restoring bison herds also dramatically helps prairie ecosystems, and moose play a big role farther north.

This is also why I like the notion of local organizing with global networking and a global perspective. Different regions will have different needs, from a social perspective, from an engineering perspective, and from an ecological perspective. Folks on the left talk about the intersection between social dynamics like race, sex, gender, class, and so on, and bringing environmental justice into that has brought us to the point where it’s pretty clear that the social, engineering, and ecological perspectives aren’t really different things at all. They’re just different parts of the same big, complex system. The bad news, as always, is that we’re headed in the wrong direction. The good news, as always, is that we’ve got a pretty good map showing us where we need to go.

Solidarity with the Movement to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest

Defend The Atlanta Forest is circulating this statement of solidarity, and asking people to sign on. I’ve already done so, and I’d encourage you to read the statement, and do so yourself:

We call on all people of good conscience to stand in solidarity with the movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta.

On January 18, in the course of their latest militarized raid on the forest, police in Atlanta shot and killed a person. This is only the most recent of a series of violent police retaliations against the movement. The official narrative is that Cop City is necessary to make Atlanta “safe,” but this brutal killing reveals what they mean when they use that word.

Forests are the lungs of planet Earth. The destruction of forests affects all of us. So do the gentrification and police violence that the bulldozing of Weelaunee Forest would facilitate. What is happening in Atlanta is not a local issue.

Politicians who support Cop City have attempted to discredit forest defenders as “outside agitators.” This smear has a disgraceful history in the South, where authorities have used it against abolitionists, labor organizers, and the Civil Rights Movement, among others. The goal of those who spread this narrative is to discourage solidarity and isolate communities from each other while offering a pretext to bring in state and federal forces, who are the actual “outside agitators.” The consequence of that strategy is on full display in the tragedy of January 18.

Replacing a forest with a police training center will only create a more violently policed society, in which taxpayer resources enrich police and weapons companies rather than addressing social needs. Mass incarceration and police militarization have failed to bring down crime or improve conditions for poor and working-class communities.

In Atlanta and across the US, investment in police budgets comes at the expense of access to food, education, childcare, and healthcare, of affordable and stable housing, of parks and public spaces, of transit and the free movement of people, of economic stability for the many. Concentrating resources in the hands of police serves to defend the extreme accumulation of wealth and power by corporations and the very rich.

What do cops do with their increased budgets and their carte blanche from politicians? They kill people, every single day. They incarcerate and traumatize schoolchildren, parents, loved ones who are simply struggling to survive. We must not settle for a society organized recklessly upon the values of violence, racism, greed, and careless indifference to life.

The struggle that is playing out in Atlanta is a contest for the future. As the catastrophic effects of climate change hammer our communities with hurricanes, heat waves, and forest fires, the stakes of this contest are clearer than ever. It will determine whether those who come after us inherit an inhabitable Earth or a police state nightmare. It is up to us to create a peaceful society that does not treat human life as expendable.

The forest defenders are trying to create a better world for all of us. We owe it to the people of Atlanta and to future generations everywhere to support them.

Here are some ways to support the defense of the forest in Atlanta:

  • Donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to support legal costs for arrested protestors and ongoing legal action.
  • Call on investors in the project to divest from Cop City (list of APF investors). Call on builders of the project to drop their construction contracts.
  • Organize political solidarity bail funds, forest defense funds, and forest defense committees where you live.
  • Organize or participate in local solidarity actions.
  • Endorse and circulate this statement of solidarity.

Head over to their page to sign on, and to see the long list of people and organizations who have already done so. You can also find more information about what’s going on there, as well as by following It’s Going Down. I’ve also written one or three posts relating to the subject, if that interests you.

And if you have a platform, as stated above, consider circulating the statement of solidarity.

Mud Wizard Monday: Serving corporate interests leaves German police stuck in the muck

So you probably haven’t heard about this, but it turns out that the climate is warming because of human activity. There are a number of factors, but the biggest one is carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas. Given that this temperature increase is already causing problems worldwide, and it’s expected to cause exponentially more problems as the warming continues, humanity needs to stop burning coal, oil, and gas, and use other sources of energy like solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, and so on. I felt the need to spell that out, because judging by the behavior of most of the world’s governments, it’s not clear that the people in charge are aware.

The U.S. is where I tend to focus, of course, but China is increasing its use of coal, and Germany, despite committing to end coal use within the next eight years, is now fighting to demolish a village to expand a coal mine:

Activists have for the past two years attempted to protect the village from being bulldozed to make way for the opencast lignite mine, in a standoff that highlights the tensions around Germany’s climate policy.

Environmentalists say bulldozing Luetzerath would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, but the government and RWE say coal is needed to ensure Germany’s energy security.

It always comes down to some form of “security”, doesn’t it? I understand the concerns folks in Europe have about nuclear power, especially if we’re focused on older reactor models, but I don’t know that coal is any better. Certainly, the potential risks from disaster and war are less, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good option, especially given that fully “exploiting” the expansion would take until 2045, 15 years after Germany will supposedly have phased out coal power. I should be clear – it has apparently been a couple years since the town has had residents who are not there specifically to obstruct coal mine expansion. That said, while evicting people from their homes for this would certainly add incentive to stop it, the fact remains that we cannot afford to keep extracting and burning coal like this, given that climate change is already killing and displacing people.

It’s good that wealthy nations are making any progress at all, I suppose, but it’s nowhere near enough.

And so people are using the one thing that people reliably have – they’re putting their bodies between the ruling class and the object of their destructive greed. It seems unlikely, to me, that these protesters will get their way, but as with so many other things, I hope to be wrong about that. It’s encouraging to see thousands of people showing up to stand against the German police for all our sakes.

“I’m really afraid today,” Petra Mueller, a 53-year-old local who had been at the site for several days, said from a top-floor window of one of the few remaining houses. Mueller said she still held out hope of preserving what is left of Luetzerath “until nothing is left standing; hope dies last”.

Environmentalists say bulldozing the village to expand the nearby Garzweiler coal mine would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. The government and utility company RWE argue that coal is needed to ensure Germany’s energy security.

However, a study by the German Institute for Economic Research calls into question the government’s stance. Its authors found other existing coal fields could be used instead, though the cost to RWE would be greater.

Another alternative would be for Germany to increase the production of renewable power, cut demand through energy efficiency measures, or import more coal or gas from abroad, the study found.

This is the point that climate activists have been making for decades. It has long been obvious that when it comes to “energy security”, and issues of war and politics in general, climate change is a “threat multiplier”. It creates resource scarcity, causes mass movement of people, and damages or disrupts infrastructure, all of which can lead to political instability. The advantage of carbon-neutral power has always been that its use doesn’t contribute to the climate problem. The advantage of things like solar and wind power is that they’re generally more resilient to climate chaos than power generation that depends on burning fuel to boil water to run a steam turbine. Dependence on oil and gas has long driven war all around the globe, and it’s a bit much for the German government to plead “security” now after decades of delayed action. To be sure, they’ve done more than the U.S., but that’s a low bar to step over, and not a standard I’m willing to accept.

If there was a genuine concern about security, rather than profits, they would have put far more work into renewable energy and next-gen nuclear power, rather than spending all these resources trying to expand a coal mine that, supposedly, won’t even be halfway to fully exploited when Germany supposedly will stop using coal. Or, just a thought, they’re not serious about meeting the 2030 mark.

Maybe they are, but I think it’s entirely reasonable for the protesters to doubt them.

I give full support to these protesters, and I’ve been delighted to see some of the footage that has come from this effort to oust them. See, while I’ll spare you any (further) porcine comparisons, it has been a treat to watch the armed and uniformed enforcers of fossil fuel interests rolling around in the muck while being mocked by a prancing mud wizard:

The image shows The Mud Wizard, dressed in a monastic habit, casting down the police who thought they would withstand the power of muck.

At risk of sounding too serious, I think there is validity to things that make cops look ridiculous, especially while they’re trying to use force to further business interests. I also want to underscore that while this video is very funny, the activists have also been setting themselves up in treehouses and wooden tripods, along with welded i-beam barricades and other bits of construction designed to make it as costly and difficult as possible for the corporations and cops to get what they want. The Garzweiler mine has equipment on hand that can make quick work of all of that stuff, but unless they want to commit mass murder, they can’t use any of it before removing the protesters.

And to remove protesters, they’re relying on the police.

I think that the act of using force to enable more coal mining, in the early stages of a global climate crisis (remember, it will get much, much worse without a change of course), is both evil, and inherently absurd. I’m sure the cops think they’re doing the right thing by just following orders, but I feel like we’ve had a lesson or two in why that’s not a great way to tell right from wrong. With a little luck, hopefully the powers that be will decide to accept a different world, rather than trying to escalate the violence to get their way, but in the meantime, we have mud wizards and Yakety Sax (It seems I can no longer embed Tweets properly, but I posted it below in case it starts working again. Thanks, Musk).

 

If you want something to do this weekend, Atlanta forest defenders are asking for solidarity

I meant to write about this a couple days ago, but I just completely forgot about it until I sat down to go through my open tabs today. Still, better late than never, I guess? Last month I wrote about Atlanta forest defenders being arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism”, for the heinous act of sitting in trees that the cops wanted to cut down. The people working to stop the destruction of the Atlanta Forest for a massive, militarized police training facility are calling for demonstrations of solidarity around the country:

It’s Going Down has the following list of events being planned for this weekend, as of a day or two ago:

Roundup Of Solidarity Events

January 14th, Savannah, GA

Solidarity rally to defend the Atlanta Forest & Stop Cop City! Saturday, Jan 14 – 2pm – Wright Square. Atlanta is known to many as the “City in the Forest” for its extensive tree cover, which protects the city’s residents from flooding and extreme heat. Despite calls from residents to defund, demilitarize, and even abolish the police following the 2020 police killing of Rayshard Brooks, the Atlanta Police Foundation, Deklab County officials, and Blackhall (Shadowbox) Studios are attempting to bulldoze the city’s largest urban forest to build a militarized police training facility and Hollywood soundstage in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Brasfield & Gorrie LLC, the progect’s general contractor, has a construction site near Wright Square right here in Savannah. Amidst growing concerns of police violence and climate catastrophe, thousands of Atlanta residents have organized to protect the forest and stall construction of the facility for over a year! An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. Let’s show our solidarity with ATL forest defenders and demand that Brasfield and Gorrie drop the contract! Savannah DSA

January 14th, Brooklyn, NYC

January 15th, New Haven, CT

January 15th, Atlanta, GA

January 16th, Decatur, GA

January 28th, NYC

As you’ll note, some of these things are not happening this weekend. While having a lot of actions happening on the same day is a tactic to get more attention on the issue, demonstrations and other events happening spontaneously over time and across the country can also serve that purpose. This is a long-term fight, not just because the backers of Cop City are still intending to build it, but also because even if we do win this fight, there will be new ones for as long as we’re dealing with a system like the one we’re fighting to change. If we ever want to have real democracy and freedom, it will require this kind of sustained effort both to create, and to maintain the world we want.

On that note, I also think you should check out this interview that the Youtuber F.D. Signifier did with commentator and activist Kamau Franklin about the issue:

As Franklin describes, “Cop City” is intended to have, among other facilities, 11 firing ranges, and a mock city for police to train in crowd control. As he says, this seems far more about general control of the populace and of any movements for change, than it is about any concern for public safety. It sure seems as though the police and ruling class looked at the BLM movement, and decided that they had to be able to just outright crush anything like that. It wouldn’t shock me to learn, down the road, that some of this is about the increasing popularity of left-wing thought and political tactics in the U.S.. Bolstering this interpretation is the fact that U.S. police often train with the enforcers of Israeli apartheid, working to develop tactics for controlling the population through force. With worsening inequality, rising fascism, and a warming climate, this should worry you, as should the ever-increasing U.S. military budget.

The movement towards authoritarianism is not unique to the Republican Party. The Democrats have been on board every step of the way, from pouring cash into the Pentagon, to developing the humanitarian nightmare that is the U.S. carceral system. It is Democratic mayor Eric Adams that wants to declare houseless people insane and lock them up. I don’t think the Dems are full-on fascist like the current GOP, but they do very clearly value capitalism more than democracy or freedom. They have been on board through the bloody history of U.S. interference with left-wing governments and movements around the globe. They have been on board with supporting the genocide being waged in Yemen, and the ethnic cleansing in Palestine. This is why we need organizing that’s separate from political parties and the electoral system. This is why we need direct action like the work of land and water defenders – because both parties in power serve the ruling class, and actively work to suppress working class power. It’s evident in Democratic policy over the years, in the people from whom they seek advice, and in the many corporations supporting the development of this facility, to the tune of $60 million of the $90 million budget.

And white supremacy is absolutely a part of that, both within the United States, and in its actions around the world.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but the communities in which this monstrosity is being built are majority black, and have not been consulted on this project that will destroy a forest for the sake of building what amounts to a military training facility for the same cops who have been brutalizing and murdering black people in Atlanta and around the country. Kamau Franklin and F.D. Signifier have a much better discussion of the racial issues here than I’m able to summarize, so I recommend you watch the video. It provides a good overview of the problem from a systemic perspective. If you want to help out, Franklin pointed people to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, Community Movement Builders, and Stop Cop City, and even if you can’t do anything this weekend (sorry again for dropping the ball on this!), it still helps to get “stop cop city” in front of people, be it signs, bumper stickers, or you could even organize your own demonstrations just to get attention.