Attorney General Josh Kaul at Governor Tony Evers’ first State of the State address in Madison, Wisconsin, at the State Capitol building on Jan. 22, 2019. Photo by Emily Hamer/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit Tuesday to remove Fred Prehn from the Natural Resources Board.
Prehn, a Republican appointee of former Gov. Scott Walker, has refused to vacate his seat as board chair for months — taking advantage of what he says is a quirk in state law that has allowed him to maintain control over the state’s environmental and conservation policies.
“Dr. Prehn’s term is over,” Kaul said in a statement. “His attempt to remain on the Natural Resources Board indefinitely, in defiance of the will of the voters, is fundamentally undemocratic. We’re asking for a clear ruling that Dr. Prehn is no longer a member of the Natural Resources Board.”
Gov. Tony Evers announced Prehn’s replacement, Sandra Naas, on April 30. Prehn’s six-year term was supposed to expire on May 1. Naas taking her seat would give Evers appointees a majority on the board.
Kaul filed the lawsuit after numerous state and national groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, called for the Democratic attorney general to use his authority to boot Prehn from his seat.
Many of the groups asked for Kaul to take action before the board set the quota for this fall’s wolf hunt, a controversial topic after the hunt earlier this year far exceeded the prescribed limit. GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOXSUBSCRIBE
Instead, Kaul filed the lawsuit one week after the quota was set.
“We applaud Attorney General Kaul for stepping up to do what is right for Wisconsin’s citizens, wildlife and natural resources,” Nicholas Arrivo, an attorney for the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement. “As demonstrated by last week’s disastrous decision to force through an excessive wolf hunting quota with total disregard for the recommendation of the state’s own expert biologists, the role of the Natural Resources Board is simply too important for Prehn to be playing politics. Prehn’s refusal to vacate his seat not only violates the law, but also violates the trust of Wisconsinites in what is supposed to be a nonpartisan Natural Resources Board that serves the people.”
In a heated meeting last week, Department of Natural Resources staff suggested the quota for this fall’s wolf hunt be set at 130. Prehn and the other Republicans on the board succeeded in setting the quota at 300 — a number scientists say will have a destabilizing effect on the state’s wolf packs.
“It’s outrageous that by squatting in his expired position for months, Prehn was able to vote for the arbitrary slaughter of 300 more wolves this fall,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We commend Attorney General Kaul for taking action. New leadership is long overdue on the Natural Resources Board, and we hope that Prehn’s removal marks the beginning of a better future for Wisconsin’s wildlife.”
After the wolf quota was set at more than double what state biologists had proposed, state Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee) accused Prehn and Republicans of thwarting the will of Wisconsin voters by refusing to let go of control over policies on issues such as animal management and the regulation of chemicals in the state’s water.
Carpenter called it “an utterly cynical ploy to deny the consent of the governed so that radical right wing Republicans can set the terms for the upcoming wolf hunt and other crucial environmental decisions to be made by the Natural Resources Board.”
A week later than environmental groups would have liked, Kaul’s lawsuit — filed in Dane County Circuit Court — asks for a judge to rule that Prehn doesn’t have the right to remain in his seat or to rule that Gov. Evers has the power to remove him.
The next meeting of the Natural Resources Board is scheduled for Sept. 21.
On Saturday morning I met a friend for breakfast at a local diner. We weren’t sure whether to sit outside because of the surging Delta variant of Covid, or inside because stinging smoke from wildfires consuming northern and western California had spread into the Bay Area.Our Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after TrumpRead more
Our small dilemma is a microcosm of what many Americans are going through or will be soon. The combination of multiplying Covid variants and mounting environmental damage is making the air dangerous to breathe, inside or out.Advertisement
What to do? Clean air is the quintessential public good. It’s supposed to be free, abundant and safe. Few Americans alive today have ever before worried about microscopic particles containing deadly infections or deadly bits of carbon.
And yet largely because we’ve taken it for granted, and therefore as a society didn’t pay enough attention to public health or to the disintegrating environment, the air we breathe is no longer safe. We now need to rely on masks, air filters and other devices to protect our lungs. And it’s far from clear how long this will go on or if and how it will ever end.
It’s not as if we weren’t warned. But it’s been bizarrely difficult for us as a society to focus our attention on this most basic of all needs. I’m tempted to blame Republicans, capitalism, greed, the oligarchy. But these feel like copouts.
Our collective tendency is to wait until big problems become catastrophic before dealing with them. Most of the time we’d rather not pay attention. We have all we can do to make a living, bring up our kids decently, save a bit for retirement, hopefully have a bit of fun along the way. We assume others will take care of the biggest threats.
Or we tell ourselves there’s nothing more we can do. We may try to live modestly, recycle and conserve energy, use masks and get fully vaccinated. We might even write a few emails to politicians advocating for cleaner air and for stronger public health measures. Beyond this, it can feel hopeless.
Hell, I was in a president’s cabinet. I personally know dozens of members of Congress. I have a big megaphone. But when it comes to this simultaneous pandemic and environmental crisis, I sometimes despair too.
Americans speak a lot about “revolution”. We’re a nation born of revolution. What we don’t talk about enough is a revolution in our thinking and behavior – realizing that we are not above and outside the natural world but part of it, that we cannot continue to exploit and plunder for profit, that there is something called the common good that requires personal sacrifice, and that those of us who are better off have a moral duty to sacrifice the most.
Yet I’m old enough to remember when California had smog days when the air was putrid and orange, when older and sicker people dared not venture outside and kids couldn’t play outdoors. I’m also old enough to remember when Britain had noxious air – coal-fired fogs that blanketed cities, burned lungs and sometimes killed thousands.
I don’t recall the last pandemic, but I do remember when polio ripped through the land, spreading fear and paralysis. It put two of my six-year-old friends into iron lungs.
In all these instances, we acted – as a people, as a society. We got smog out of the air. Britain cleaned up too. And we dutifully lined up at school to get polio shots (without the howling of governors or anti-vaxxers). We eradicated polio.
In other words, despite our tendencies to wait until the last moment, to get caught up in our own private needs and wants, and feel overwhelmed in the face of gigantic problems, we sometimes achieve the common good. It’s important to remember this.
My friend and I chose to have our breakfast outside. I’m not sure it was the right choice. Although we reduced our risk of Covid, the smoke stung our eyes and probably did worse to our lungs. But I am sure this is not the only choice ahead.
From: Trap Free Montana Public Lands <info@tfmpl.org>
Because we know how much you care, we wanted to give youafollow-up from the Montana Fish & Wildlife Commission August 20, 2021 hearing on the final for wolves, river otters, and trap setbacks.The latter, as an after thought, showedup for public comment 2 weeks after the wolf and furbearer trapping proposals June 24th public hearing.
In a nutshell, wolves lost.During the hearing, Commissioner Tabor made a motion to the wolf proposals for the 2021 wolf season which: Allows the killing of 450 wolves. Wolves killed exceeding the 450 ”initiates a commission review with potential for rapid-in-season adjustments”, and will be re-engaged at intervals of 50 wolves killed. Quotas per region were set as: Region 1 195 wolves Region 2 116 Region 3 82 Region 4 39 Region 5 11 Region 6 3 Region 7 4 which similarly will initiate a commission…
By Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns
This article was first posted August 22, 2021 on Animals 24-7.
Can a tree be “strategically responsive, and exhibit kinship, or a sense of self? Is a tree intelligent?” – Rebecca Giggs, “The Trees Are Talking,” The Atlantic, July / August 2021.
This intriguing article in The Atlantic recounts modern discoveries of behavioral complexity in plants and the implications of this complexity. Reading it, I was reminded of my conversations with two different people about the possibility of plant consciousness. If plants can be scientifically shown to experience themselves and their surroundings with their own forms of biological consciousness and sensitivity, how does this discovery affect the case for animal rights, based on animal sentience?
My first conversation was with animal rights activist and author, Norm Phelps (1939-2014) who, while believing that the world is informed with a Buddhist-like spirituality, did not believe that plants – trees, bushes, vines, grasses, etc. – possess consciousness or sentience of any kind. Yes, like animals, they have DNA and are organic like animals, but unlike animals they cannot run away from predators and they lack a brain and a central nervous system. As Giggs writes in “The Trees Are Talking,” “The notion that plants ‘do’ anything, outside of surging toward the light and siphoning water, would imply threshold competencies that have long been regarded as mental, or at the very least sensory.”
There’s an understandable concern among animal advocates that if plants can be shown to be conscious, sentient beings, the case for animal rights collapses into a welter of universal pain and pleasure, making it hard to argue that we should not harm and kill other animals since they, like us and unlike plants, have well-developed central nervous systems, pain receptors and pleasure centers. Like us, birds, fish, and our fellow mammals show evidence of fear and wellbeing. Land animals – mammals and birds – cry out in pain; birds, fish, and mammals nurse wounded body parts, and seek to avoid those who have hurt them in the past. Thus, whatever sensory experience plants may or may not have, there is no question about the sensory experience of animals, be they chickens or chimpanzees, underwater dwellers or insects, whose sentience is increasingly recognized.
Vegetarian peace activist and coauthor with her husband Scott of Living the Good Life, Helen Nearing (1904-1995) said that we may assume a degree of sentience in plants and still recognize that there’s “clearly a distinction between a new-born baby lamb and a newly ripened tomato.”
My second conversation, more recently, was with a person who cares about animals, though not about animal “rights” per se. Our conversation began by his saying he looked forward to visiting a friend with a fishing business, and to fishing with his friend. I asked how he felt about hooking a fish painfully in the mouth and yanking the fish out of the water that a fish needs in order to breathe. For the fish, fishing is a mental and physical trauma involving pain, fear, injury, and a slow and terrifying asphyxiation comparable to our being hooked in the mouth and drowned.
He replied that pretty soon plants will probably be shown to feel pain and suffering similar to pain and suffering in animals; if this is so, we will be just as guilty for hurting and killing plants as for hurting and killing animals, including fish.
I said I agree that we should refrain from assuming that plants have no experiential equivalent of what we know in our own lives as feelings. Even if plants don’t experience pain and pleasure in our sense. this does not necessarily exclude experiences particular to plants that involve their sense of themselves and the relevant parts of their environment. “Experience” may comprise more than we know. Surely all organic beings, be they plants or animals, have an experiential component that distinguishes all of us from inanimate objects.
The fishing discussed in our conversation was not “survival” fishing, but rather “recreational” fishing, including “catch and release” fishing, which is profoundly cruel to the victim whose trauma is maximized by being returned to the water with mouth and facial injuries as well as brain damage from the lack of oxygen the fish endured when swung at the end of a pole into the air. Back in the water, the injured fish is no longer fit to defend herself or himself from predators and other dangers, as before. A lingering injury to the body and mind of the fish, inviting infection, may follow. The damaged fish may have an aquatic family that he or she can no longer protect or participate with.
The face of this trapped fish expresses fear. Courtesy of Fish Feel.
The premier advocacy organization for aquatic animals, Fish Feel, cites the following:
In his book Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, world-renowned animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe, PhD, explains how fish are falsely, yet “commonly denied feeling” perhaps because of “their relative lack of facial expression.” He states:
When they are impaled on a hook, fish don’t scream or grimace, though their gaping mouths may evoke a look of shock or horror to the empathetic witness. Using facial expression as a guide for sentience is hardly valid when one considers that some of the most intelligent and highly sentient marine vertebrates – namely the dolphins and whales – also lack facial expression, at least any that most of us can readily detect. However, animals have many other ways of visually signaling their feelings. Crests, dewlaps, pupil dilation and contraction, color changes, and body postures and movements are among the many visual ways fish and other animals convey emotions. Water is also a potent medium for communicating via chemicals and sounds.
The idea that if plants have feelings we may therefore harm and kill animals for our appetites and amusement, since sentience is no longer considered a feature unique to animals, but a trait inherent in life itself, is morally untenable and devoid of empathy for either plants or animals. People who argue against animal rights by invoking the “suffering” of a carrot in being pulled from the ground and eaten tend to be less concerned about plant sensitivity than they are about asserting their right to exploit animals, armed with the notion that if all living things have feelings, then “All is permitted.”
For those of us who truly care about not harming plants needlessly, it helps to remember that when we eat animal products, we consume many more plants indirectly than when we eat plants directly, because farmed animals are fed huge quantities of grasses, grains, and seeds to be converted into meat, milk, and eggs. An animal-free diet causes fewer beings to suffer and die for us.
Surely, we should treat trees and other forms of plant life with respect, and not wantonly, whether or not they are conscious and sentient as we experience these attributes. In “The Trees Are Talking,” we are introduced to “a new vision of tree life. . . . This newfound tree is networked, sensitive, companionate, and communicative; it matters as part of a conjoined whole. . . . Such findings make trees seem capable of so much more than we once imagined.”
Similarly, oysters, clams, and insects are being shown to be capable of much more than we once imagined. Like fishes, they are members of the animal kingdom. As such, they deserve the benefit of the doubt. Their behavior indicates sentience and awareness even if the sources of their feelings are elusive to science, which apparently is not even the case anymore. Neuroscientist Lori Marino points out, for example, that there are “close to one million neurons in an ant or bee brain.” All insects, she writes, “possess a complex central nervous system . . . and many insects show very complex learning capacities. . . . [and] we found that fish and crustaceans feel pain when it was assumed that was just not possible for ‘simple’ organisms.”
We are reminded that there may be ways of feeling being alive in the flesh, even in wooden “flesh,” that we will never fathom. Nor is the perception of pain per se the only proof or sine qua non – an indispensable condition – of sentience. Conscious perception of nonpainful but highly distressing stimuli includes gagging, inability to breathe (dyspnea), smell of blood, apprehension, fear and more. Throughout history, various groups of humans, birds and others have been dismissed as mindless and insentient or “low on the scale of evolution” as was once assumed about ground-nesting birds such as chickens, until the truth showed otherwise.
Thus, even if Buddhism does not regard plants as sentient or possessed of awareness, and therefore in no need of the compassion we owe to animals “not to kill or injure any human, animal, bird, fish, or insect,” we can no longer rely on this assumption, any more than on the Biblical claim in Matthew 6:28 that the lilies of the field “neither toil nor spin.” With our newer insights into plant life and ecology, it appears that in their own evolved ways, this is precisely what “the lilies” do, just like animals, just like us. Taken together, we, the plants and our animal kin are the conjoined family of life on earth.
For more on this topic, see:
Don’t Plants Have Feelings Too? Responding Effectively to 13 Frequently Asked Questions About Food, Fiber, Farm Animals, and the Ethics of Diet
KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal Liberation, Karen is the author of numerous books, essays, articles and campaigns. Her latest book is For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation: Essays on Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domesticated Fowl (Lantern Books).
Government’s plan to use ‘blue’ fossil-fuel hydrogen alongside green version raises concern, say campaigners
A hydrogen-hybrid power plant in Germany. The UK plans to use hydrogen technology to replace fossil gas use in factories, refineries and heating.Photograph: Bernd Settnik/EPA
Opting for hydrogen that is made using fossil fuels rather than renewable electricity could create up to 8m tonnes of carbon emissions every year by 2050, according to an analysis of government data.
The figures show that the use of fossil-fuel hydrogen, or “blue hydrogen”, would create the same carbon emissions each year that more than a million petrol cars would produce, compared with using zero-carbon “green hydrogen”.
Ministers plan to use both blue and greenhydrogento replace fossil gas in factories, refineries and heating, but new figures show that an over-reliance on blue hydrogen would still lead to…
PUBLISHED SUN, AUG 22 20219:00 AM EDTBrian Schwartz@SCHWARTZBCNBCSHAREShare Article via FacebookShare Article via TwitterShare Article via LinkedInShare Article via EmailKEY POINTS
An NBC News poll released on Sunday shows 49% of all adults surveyed say they strongly approve of the job Biden is doing as president while 48% disapprove.
A vast majority of those polled say they disapprove of Biden’s handling of the current situation in Afghanistan, with only 25% noting they approve of the way he’s dealt with the crisis.
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on evacuation efforts and the ongoing situation in Afghanistan as Secretary of State Antony Blinken stands by in the East Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., August 20, 2021.Ken Cedeno | Reuters
President Joe Biden’s job approval ratings have taken a dive as he’s been criticized for his administration’s handling of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and while Covid-19 cases surge across the country.
An NBC News poll released Sunday shows 49% of all adults surveyed say they strongly approve of the job Biden is doing as president while 48% disapprove. The 49% represents a drop of four percentage points compared to a previous NBC News survey done in April. The disapproval number is up by nine percentage points from that same prior poll.
Among the registered voters surveyed, 50% say they approved of Biden’s job performance while 48% noted they disapproved.
The NBC News poll shows they interviewed 1,000 adults and the survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.10%. The survey took place from August 14 through August 17.
A vast majority of those polled say they disapprove of Biden’s handling of the current situation in Afghanistan, with only 25% noting they approve of the way he’s dealt with the crisis.
Biden has been under scrutiny for the way his administration has handled trying to evacuate allies in Afghanistan as American troops pull out of the country and the Taliban retake control of the government there.
While new coronavirus cases continue to go up across the country, Biden’s approval of handling the pandemic has fallen significantly.
Of those surveyed, 53% say they approve of the president’s way of handling the pandemic. That’s a drop of 16 points compared to a poll taken in April. Just over 40% of the poll’s participants say they disapprove of Biden’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Pete’s Fresh Market at 2333 W. Madison St. offers a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and alternatives for meat and dairy. Valentina Pucarelli
It is still unclear whether humans first contracted COVID-19 in a lab or in the wildlife trade market in China.
What we do know is COVID-19 has zoonotic origins, meaning that if we weren’t using animals for research or as food, we might not be where we are today.
This is not only true for COVID-19, but also many other zoonotic diseases — diseases with animal origins — in the world such as Ebola, bird flu, swine flu, salmonella and E. coli, among others.
Dr. Aysha Akhtar isa public health specialist and CEO of the Center for Contemporary Sciences, an independent nonprofit organization that focuses on reducing the use of animals for scientific experimentationby advancing human-specific research and testing methods. Akhtarsaid shepredicted this pandemic in 2014.
“I wasn’t the only one, many other scientists and doctors have been saying for quite some time … that our relationship with other animals is increasing our risk for infectious diseases and will likely be the cause of the next pandemic,” Akhtar said.
A studyconducted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information reviewed workshops conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2014 and 2016, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The studyfound up to 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases came from animals, accounting for 15.8% of all deaths and 43.7% of deaths in low-resource countries. This resulted in about 2.7 million human deaths worldwide each year, the study found.
Akhtar said one of the reasons therisk of infectious diseases is so high among humans is because of how animals are treated in factory farms and the wildlife trade market.
According to Akhtar, animals are beingjammed into very small spaces in extreme temperatures and are put under very stressful conditions for their meat, milk andfur, which weakens their immune systems, leading to diseases that are easily caught and spread.
“How we treat animals comes back to affect us in every way, whether directly or indirectly,” Akhtar said.
Akhtar said one of the most significant changes we can individually make to prevent new diseases is through a vegan lifestyle.
“The only way we’re really going to end factory farming though, is if the demand for meat, eggs and dairy goes down, and that means that each of us has to make a decision about who or what we choose to eat,” Akhtar said.
According to Dr. Michael Klaper, an internationally-recognized doctor and educator,going vegan is alsoone of the most effective decisions we can make to prevent getting seriously ill. He also credited a vegan lifestyle with reducing the risk of getting the vast majority of degenerative and fatal diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart attacks and more that can result from a Western style of eating.
“The vast majority of degenerative diseases that take so many lives and cause so many trillions of dollars around the world, are largely the result of the Western style of eating,” Klaper said. “A whole food plant based diet that has the ability to reverse these diseases.”
A study conducted by the BMJ Nutrition Prevention & Health found that people who follow a plant-based diet have a 73% less chance of experiencing a moderate-to-severe case ofCOVID-19, compared toparticipants who did not follow a plant-based diet.
“In the 21st century, adopting a plant-based diet is the healthiest, most loving, most sane, most compassionate, most sustainable thing that we can do, ” Klaper said.
Some of the biggest misconceptions about being vegan arethat people are not getting enough nutrients and that a plant-based diet is expensive.
I personally have been vegan for seven months for all reasons: the animals, the environment, my genetically high cholesterol, and more recently, because I do not want another pandemic. I have not spent any extra money on food, and am probably saving money as I am cooking more, eating out less and not buying as many processed foods.
On top of that, my stomach is loving it and I overcame my cheese addiction.
According to Klaper, with the exception of vitamin B-12, a whole food, plant-based diet can provide all the necessary nutrients needed.
Foodslike beans, chickpeas, lentils, rice, peanuts, sunflower seeds, pasta, fruits and vegetables that can provide a balanced vegan diet can be found for alow cost at stores like Aldi and Walmart, and local urban farms offering “pay what you can” programs and CSA boxes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has notbeen fun for anyone, so I doubt there is anyone who would want to go through it again. The good thing is, by changing the way we eat, we can actually help reduce the risk of another one, plus improve our individual and public health.
“A lot of the power is really in our hands, so if we choose one plate of food over another, we could significantly reduce our risk for the next pandemic,” Akhtar said.
Here’s a good example of how NOT to photograph grizzly bears out in the wild. This video shows a man who was caught on camera wading into Brooks River in Alaska and getting too close to feeding grizzly bears in order to snap some smartphone selfies and photos.
A common piece of advice in photography is to “zoom with your feet,” or to get closer to your subject instead of relying on a longer focal length (i.e. “zooming in” with your lens). This is especially helpful when shooting with smartphone cameras that don’t offer much in the way of optical zoom.
But the National Park Service in the United States has strict guidelines for how close you can get to wildlife and where you can position yourself.
The man getting too close to grizzly bears for photos. Still frame from video by Explore.org.
Brooks Falls is famous as a popular location for watching salmon leap over the 6-foot-tall (1.8m) falls to reach their spawning grounds at Brooks Lake 1.5 miles (2.4km) upstream. During salmon spawning season between July and September, grizzly bears congregate at the falls to feast on the flying “fast food.”
The feeding frenzy is popular among photographers as a great spot to capture photos of bears snapping at salmon flying through the air.
A grizzly bear catching a salmon at Brooks Falls. Photo licensed from Depositphotos.
However, photographers are restricted to a dedicated platform set up to give visitors a great view while keeping them safe.
The viewing platform at Brooks Falls. Photo by NPS Photo/L. Law.
Upon seeing this man step into the water, viewers of the live cam feed contacted park rangers, who then quickly showed up at the scene and caught the man and two other individuals breaking the law by being in the closed area.
The National Park Service said it would be pressing charges against the three individuals, though it’s unclear whether those charges ever materialized.
“People need to recognize that these are wild brown [AKA grizzly] bears,” said Katmai National Park Superintendent Mark Sturm. “These visitors are lucky that they escaped the situation without injury. The possible consequences for the bears and themselves could have been disastrous.”
NPS guidelines in Katmai require visitors to stay at least 50 yards (46m) away from all bears at all times.
Frackers in America’s largest oil field are letting massive amounts of natural gas spill into the atmosphere. Scientists and activists are trying to find the leaks and get them plugged before they cook the planet further.
By Zachary R. Mider
LISTEN TO ARTICLE22:00
Five hundred miles above the Earth’s surface, the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor, a satellite about the size of a pickup truck, has been circling the planet for four years, taking pictures of the atmosphere below. The satellite’s infrared sensor can see things humans can’t, and in 2019, Yuzhong Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, got a look at some of its first readings.
Zhang was interested in methane, an invisible, odorless gas. Although carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the principal cause of global warming, methane has many times carbon’s warming power and is thought to be responsible for about a quarter of the increase in global temperatures caused by humans. When Zhang laid the satellite readings over a map of the U.S., the biggest concentration of the gas showed up as a red splotch over a 150-mile-wide swath of Texas and New Mexico.
The postdoc loaded the readings into a supercomputer to calculate what it would take to form that pattern. A few days later he had an answer. Beneath the splotch, Zhang discovered, 2.9 million metric tons of methane were pouring into the sky each year. By one measure, that cloud of gas is contributing as much to global warming as Florida—every power plant, motorboat, and minivan in the state.
▲ Gas spewing from an open thief hatch at a tank battery north of Big Spring, Texas, seen through a regular camera (left) and an infrared camera. COURTESY: SHARON WILSON
Zhang, now at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, calls it the “Permian methane anomaly.” The anomaly lies directly atop the Permian Basin, one of the most bountiful oil-producing regions in the world. Wells there churn out less-profitable natural gas alongside petroleum, and natural gas is mostly methane. Zhang’s research demonstrated that a surprising amount of that gas, more than twice what the U.S. government has estimated, is just spilling into the air unburned. Imagine that someone turned all the knobs on a stove without lighting a flame. Now imagine 400,000 stoves scattered across the Southwest, hissing day and night, cooking nothing but the planet itself.
Identifying and plugging these leaks could do more to slow climate change than almost any other single measure. Unlike carbon, methane breaks down relatively quickly in the atmosphere. That means efforts to curtail it can pay off within a generation. According to one recent estimate, almost one-third of the warming expected in the next few decades could be avoided by reducing human-caused methane emissions, without having to invent new technology or cut consumption. Some of that would come from cleaning up other sources, such as landfills and cattle feedlots. (Cow burps are full of methane.) But oil and gas fields are the most obvious places to start, because they offer the biggest potential reductions at the cheapest cost.https://c21a93c923e08bea58a19d366837d761.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Only in the past few years has the urgency of the methane problem come into focus, partly because of new technology and scientific research that’s uncovering leaks from pipelines in Russia to old wells in West Virginia. The latest assessment, published on Aug. 9 by United Nations-backed scientists, says “strong, rapid, and sustained reductions” in these emissions are key to meeting climate goals. In the U.S., regulation hasn’t kept up. In many cases, energy producers and pipeline operators are free to spew methane into the air without running afoul of any law.
In lieu of regulation, nonprofit groups and activists are acting as self-appointed private eyes, running their own Permian monitoring programs and pressuring companies directly. Gas markets are responding, too. Last year a $7 billion contract to send Permian liquefied natural gas to France collapsed over concerns about the greenhouse gas footprint. Lenders and investors are also pushing for action. Now oil companies are launching their own drones, airplanes, and satellites in the service of mostly voluntary efforts to find the spills and stop them.
▲ Sharon Wilson points her infrared camera at a tank battery on the outskirts of Midland, Texas.▲ Burning unwanted gas in Lea County, N.M., in May.▲ Wilson studies a map of sites she plans to visit while on the road near Pecos, Texas.▲ The infrared camera shows gas escaping from a valve at a processing plant in Loving County, Texas.
▲ PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK FELIX/BLOOMBERG
It’s unclear how far private and voluntary actions will go. One obstacle is the sheer size of the Permian, a sparsely populated scrubland where spills from open hatches, equipment malfunctions, and the like can continue for days before anyone notices. Another is the jumble of companies and wells. Even the Sentinel-5P’s powerful sensor has trouble identifying individual leaks. Spills are so large and numerous that, seen from space, they merge into one indistinguishable mass.
Advances in extraction techniques, including horizontal drilling and fracking, had opened up reserves in previously inaccessible shale rock, helping to drive down global energy prices. That set off a hunt for prospects that could be profitable even if oil stayed cheap, and the Permian’s unusual geology stood out. Meanwhile, Congress ended a longtime ban on oil exports, benefiting basins that produce light sweet crude, which foreign refineries are better-equipped to handle. Money poured in from oil majors and private equity funds. More than half the nation’s drill rigs were mobilized. Drilling rights neared $100,000 an acre, and hotels in Midland, Texas, the commercial hub of the oil patch, started charging Manhattan prices.
The landscape was transformed. Clusters of cylindrical oil tanks appeared everywhere, along with rectangular ponds as big as football fields holding the water needed for fracking. Camps for thousands of itinerant workers were laid out with military precision.
A few days after the ban was lifted, on Christmas Eve 2015, drillers broke ground on a new well whose story is a microcosm of the Permian. State Pacific 55-T2-8X17, as the site is known, sits on a stretch of rangeland near the Pecos River in Texas’ Loving County (population 169). Two months later, it was complete: a wellhead and six storage tanks squatting on a rectangle of bare earth.
The money behind State Pacific came from BHP Group, an Australian mining colossus that spent big to drill faster than rivals. State Pacific alone brought forth 166,000 barrels of oil and other hydrocarbon liquids in its first year, as well as 620 million cubic feet of gas.
As companies such as BHP started chasing Permian crude, there wasn’t much of a plan for the gas that came up with it. Gas is difficult to store, and getting it to market requires a complex system of pipelines, compressors, and cryogenic processing plants. In the most lucrative parts of the field, including Loving County, that infrastructure was inadequate or nonexistent. With gas fetching so little that the price sometimes went negative, companies could save money by just burning it off rather than waiting for pipelines to be built. Across the region, hundreds of flares began to light up the sky each night. From space, the desert looked as bright as Albuquerque.
Even when producers could hook up to a pipeline, these lines were often congested and prone to interruptions. At BHP wells such as State Pacific, the problems were compounded by frequent breakdowns of the diesel compressors required to push gas into pipelines at about 1,000 pounds per square inch. The machines tended to fail if the temperature or system pressure rose too high. Since the sites were unmanned, outages would stretch for days. According to readings from a U.S. satellite that can spot individual flares at night, BHP burned gas frequently at State Pacific during its first three years in operation, torching off at least one-fourth of the gas produced.
Theoretically, flaring shouldn’t contribute much to the methane problem, because burning methane converts it to carbon dioxide—still a greenhouse gas, but a far less potent one. Of course, that’s only true if the flare works as intended.
Long before Zhang tallied the scale of the damage in the Permian, Sharon Wilson, an activist from Dallas, was driving across Texas with a $100,000 camera, hunting for leaks. Wilson works for the environmental advocacy group Earthworks, and her hardware makes methane show up inky black in photos.
If a satellite offers a godlike view of the region, Wilson can track individual plumes right to the source. In May, during one of her regular trips to West Texas, she was in the back of a rented GMC Yukon as an Earthworks colleague steered down a highway past freshly plowed cotton fields. In her lap, the camera, a FLIR GF320, was whirring softly, the sound of a cooling mechanism that keeps its guts colder than dry ice.
“Your faucet drips, that’s a leak,” Wilson said, her graying blond hair tucked under a baseball cap. “I hardly ever see a leak out here. I see a garden hose. A fire hose. A volcano.”
After each trip, Wilson uploads the most dramatic pictures to YouTube and emails them to state regulators—methane clouds pouring from broken valves, malfunctioning engines, and open hatches—hoping to pressure companies and government officials to clean things up.▲ Wilson scouts a flare stack releasing unburned methane along U.S. Highway 285 in Reeves County, Texas. PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK FELIX/BLOOMBERG
Wilson, 68, didn’t think much about the environment when she worked for an oil marketing company. That changed, she says, when she lived in the prairie country north of Fort Worth and saw fracking ruin the place. Now she calls company executives “gasholes” on Twitter and enjoys recounting stories of her run-ins with hostile oilfield workers, whom she always nicknames Jethro.
Some of the most common culprits Wilson has found are flare stacks. These are tall pipes crowned with burners designed to torch off unwanted gas. Wilson says they frequently malfunction—the flames go out, allowing a stream of invisible gas to jet into the air. To the naked eye, it’s impossible to tell anything’s amiss.
David Lyon had seen Wilson’s videos of misbehaving flare stacks, but he wasn’t sure what to make of them. Lyon, an Arkansas native, is the lead scientist for a massive Environmental Defense Fund research project in the Permian charting the pollution in unprecedented detail. Do flares really get snuffed out all that often, he wondered? He dispatched a contractor to fly over hundreds of randomly selected flare stacks in a helicopter to find out.
State Pacific was one of the first sites on the list. One sunny February day in 2020, the 20-foot-tall flare stack on the south end of the facility looked inert, with no flame visible. When the contractor pointed at it an infrared camera like the one Wilson uses, he saw a huge plume of black gas spewing from the stack and drifting off into the distance.▲ Natural gas flowing from an unlit flare stack at BP’s State Pacific 55-T2-8X17 well in Loving County, Texas, in February 2020. The images were captured by a helicopter surveyor hired by the Environmental Defense Fund. SOURCE: ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND
State Pacific wasn’t the only one. Lyon found that 5% of stacks with gas flowing through them were unlit, and an additional 6% were only partially burning. If those rates are typical of the entire Permian, Lyon estimates, that alone could explain the origin of 300,000 metric tons of methane a year. “I’ll admit I was skeptical,” he says. “But then we get out there and see, yeah, it actually is that bad.”
Lyon’s work is the latest chapter in EDF’s decade-long effort to unlock the secrets of methane. In 2011, Steven Hamburg, the group’s chief scientist, took note of how cheap, abundant shale gas was reshaping the country’s energy mix, overtaking coal as the workhorse of the electric power industry. Since burning gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal, carbon emissions in the U.S. were dropping for the first time in a generation. That seemed, at first glance, like a lucky break for the environment.
But Hamburg wondered how much of that progress was an illusion. Release a ton of methane today, and over the next two decades it will warm the planet as much as about 80 tons of carbon. Only a small fraction of natural gas would have to spill from wellheads, plants, and pipelines to make it worse for the planet than coal, especially in the short term. Hamburg quizzed industry and government experts: How much was leaking? He concluded that no one really knew and that official U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates were little more than guesses. So in 2012, EDF undertook the biggest research project in its history. If the government wouldn’t figure out how much methane is leaking, Hamburg reasoned, let’s do it for them.
▲ Methane pouring from an unlit flare stack near a well north of Pecos, Texas.
▲ A malfunctioning flare stack along U.S. Highway 285 near Mentone, Texas.▲ COURTESY: SHARON WILSON
Six years, $18 million, and several dozen peer-reviewed papers later, Hamburg had his answer: The U.S. oil and gas industry was losing about 13 million metric tons a year, or 2.3% of gas production—60% more than the EPA was estimating. (The EPA has acknowledged that studies such as EDF’s can reveal flaws in its estimates, but it hasn’t yet adopted the group’s numbers.) That rate erases most of natural gas’s climate advantage over coal, especially in the short term, and highlights the urgency of getting methane under control. The bigger the leak, the bigger the payoff for plugging it.
With Lyon’s Permian Methane Analysis Project, EDF is moving beyond just counting molecules. The goal is to reveal whose equipment is leaking, and how much, and publish the findings to compel companies and regulators to take action. University researchers and contractors do the fieldwork, with sensor-laden vans and airplanes carrying methane detectors and stationary monitors mounted on mobile-phone towers. Think of the project as a thousand Sharon Wilsons, armed with the scientific method and more money.
“I HARDLY EVER SEE A LEAK OUT HERE. I SEE A GARDEN HOSE. A FIRE HOSE. A VOLCANO”
Lyon found his biggest spill last September. An airplane working for EDF picked up a large concentration of methane near a gas compression station south of Midland and circled back for a look. It found a huge cloud of gas jetting from a tank. EDF later calculated the size of the release at 12 tons of methane per hour. That’s about the same climate impact you would create if you started up every car in the state of Maine and left them all idling.
The plant’s owner, Targa Resources Corp., declined to comment to Bloomberg Businessweek, but it told state officials in an email that a wiring problem had caused one of the plant’s compressors to shut down. Pressure built up to dangerous levels, triggering a safety valve to release the gas. The company called it “not a foreseeable or avoidable occurrence” and said such mishaps are not uncommon across the Permian because pipelines are frequently running at capacity.
Given the scale of the Permian, the thousands of wells, tanks, flares, hatches, separators, compressors, and plants in use, unforeseeable and unavoidable things are happening all the time. “Things won’t work like they’re supposed to work on paper,” Lyon says. “It takes sometimes a while for people to realize that. There may even be disincentives for them to work. If they get bonuses based on how much oil they pump, then yeah, they’re incentivized to go as fast as possible and not worry about emissions.”▲ A full picture of methane emissions in Texas and New Mexico (pictured) remains a work in progress. PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK FELIX/BLOOMBERG
The contractor who found Lyon’s unlit flares is a 66-year-old former oilman named David Furry. Years ago, he pioneered the use of infrared cameras to find gas leaks, and he runs a small detection business catering mostly to oil and gas companies. Furry doesn’t consider himself an environmentalist, but he’s realistic about the scale of the pollution he’s documented. He estimates that about 1 in 5 sites he checks has some kind of emission.
One afternoon in May, in his office behind a shuttered gun shop in Early, Texas, Furry tucked a wad of Copenhagen Long Cut tobacco behind his lip and reflected on the future of the Permian. He’d recently gotten a call from a gas exporter wondering how much it would cost to check suppliers’ wells for leaks. That way the exporter could market “low-emissions” gas, akin to a fair-trade label on coffee.
“I was raised out there,” Furry said. “And you know, in the old days, when you had an oil spill, you’d throw a little dirt over it. Cover it up. Nowadays, things are different. But the thing about emissions is people can’t see ’em. They’re not thinking about emissions.” Furry tapped a finger to his temple. “The industry as a whole is going to have to be retrained to think emissions. And some are already starting. But not all.”
BP Plc, the former British Petroleum, has long positioned itself as more climate-conscious than its rivals, and it’s been at pains to improve its image in the U.S. since it caused a gargantuan oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. BP acquired BHP’s assets in the Permian in 2018. When it assumed control the following year, the wells were flaring about 16% of the gas they produced, one of the highest rates in the basin. “We asked ourselves one question,” said David Lawler, the head of BP’s U.S. operations, in a blog post in April. “How can we do this differently?”https://c21a93c923e08bea58a19d366837d761.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Some changes came right away. BP began disclosing its flaring activity at State Pacific to the state and sought permits to flare there and at dozens of other wells—steps that BHP, like many operators in Texas, hadn’t bothered with. BHP said in a statement that it strove to limit flaring and emissions in the Permian and that it “sought appropriate permits.”
At the same time, BP began re-plumbing the operation to eliminate the need to flare. Rather than rely on those touchy machines at each well site, it started building centralized compression stations with more reliable electric motors. BP estimates that the project will cost more than $1 billion and will eventually pay for itself through the sale of gas that would otherwise be wasted. The effort has already reduced its flaring in the basin to less than 2% of production. In his blog post, Lawler said BP would end routine flaring at onshore U.S. operations completely by 2025.
Last October the company began installing devices across its Permian facilities that alert off-site employees if a flare isn’t working properly, according to Megan Baldino, a spokesperson. Such a device went in at State Pacific late last year.
While BP’s efforts in the Permian may be the most high-profile, almost every company of any size is announcing a plan to lower emissions and cut flaring. Some have renounced the practice of bringing wells online before a gas-gathering pipeline is in place and are rolling out costly monitoring programs. After testing eight technologies, Exxon Mobil Corp. said this year that it’s hiring a company that shoots lasers from an airplane to spot methane leaks.
▲ Warning signs in front of a processing plant outside Pecos, Texas. PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK FELIX/BLOOMBERG
In another era, oil producers could have safely ignored environmental critics such as Wilson and Lyon. But just a few months after the French gas deal was canceled, something even more shocking hit executive boardrooms: Exxon’s shareholders voted to replace three board members, handing a victory to critics who said the company wasn’t doing enough to prepare for a low-carbon future. Lyon talks frequently to Wall Street investors. They always ask the same question these days, he says: Who has their emissions under control, and who doesn’t?
Lyon’s answer is usually some version of “it depends.” He says the mess in the Permian can’t be blamed on a few bad actors, and for all the money EDF has spent there, it still doesn’t have a comprehensive picture. But one is coming into focus. A few weeks ago, Lyon dispatched an airplane with even fancier gear, a NASA-designed instrument that can snap pictures of methane plumes over a broad swath of the region with enough precision to identify the source. In 2022, EDF will launch its own $88 million satellite, capable of peering into oil fields around the world with hundreds of times the resolution of the Sentinel-5P.
Regulation is starting to catch up, though unevenly. While Texas hasn’t taken significant action on either flaring or methane, the New Mexico Environment Department, after consultation with EDF, is phasing in limits on both. A federal methane rule, which applied to a limited number of oil facilities, was restored this year after being gutted by the Trump administration. Now the EPA is crafting a rule that would apply to more wells.
Wilson has heard the companies’ promises, and she doesn’t buy them. She met Lyon once, at a congressional hearing in New Mexico in 2019 after he testified about how oil producers could tackle methane with frequent inspections and better equipment. “Incremental changes and all that,” she says. “I was like, ‘David, David. That shit doesn’t work. It does not work.’ ”
“AS LONG AS OIL AND GAS KEEPS EXPANDING, METHANE AND CO2 IS GOING TO GO HIGHER”
Oil companies have been promising to clean up their act for decades, she says, and in that time they just drilled more and polluted more. The only way to clean up the Permian, she says, is to stop drilling. “As long as oil and gas keeps expanding, methane and CO2 is going to go higher.”
Even taking the company pledges at face value, it’s hard to know how long they’ll last. Right now, producers are retrenching after years of frenzied drilling ended in a Covid-fueled slump. In this go-slow environment, it’s not so much of a sacrifice to try to end flaring or cut emissions. The question is what the industry will do when the next boom gets going, in the Permian or somewhere else, and there’s money to be made by moving fast. And while Wall Street is forcing large, publicly traded companies to take action on emissions, many private operators are still doing whatever they please. Some of the majors have found themselves in the curious position of calling for more aggressive regulation so their voluntary pledges don’t put them at a disadvantage.
In May, Lyon’s team published the latest findings from that network of sensors installed on mobile-phone towers throughout the basin. Methane emissions plunged in April 2020 as the pandemic put the world economy on ice. But by the end of last summer, levels were already as high as they were when the year began. The stoves in the desert had switched back on.
The plant-based meat industry is growing rapidly, and companies that have traditionally focused on fattening cows with grass, corn, soy and other crops are now trying to take beef out of the equation.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
As environmentally conscious consumers try to reduce their carbon footprint, some are turning to fake meat as an alternative to methane-producing animals. But unlike, say, fake designer handbags or fake watches, fake meat costs way more than the real thing. Sally Herships and Darian Woods at The Indicator explore how the sausage is made – the fake sausage – to figure out why.
SALLY HERSHIPS, BYLINE: At my local Target here in Brooklyn, two Impossible Burger patties are about $11 a pound. That is about twice as much as real beef. Now, Darian, I know this is supposed to be a story about beef prices. But to understand why fake beef is so much more expensive, we are going to start with a chicken in Singapore.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: I love it.
HERSHIPS: Meet Andre Menezes. One day, he was in Singapore, shopping at his grocery store for chicken.
ANDRE MENEZES: That day specifically, there was this freezer holding huge blocks of ice.
WOODS: At the time, Andre worked for one of the largest poultry exporters in the world. So it wasn’t that unusual that Andre had chicken on his mind. And he did a little price comparison.
MENEZES: A similar weight block of ice was the same price as my chicken.
HERSHIPS: Andre knew that the chicken staring up at him from the freezer had been shipped to Singapore all the way from Brazil. And he thought, how could a bag of ice be the same price as this chicken?
WOODS: You should know that Andre is an engineer, so he is really interested in efficiency. Raising chickens or any kind of livestock for meat can be really, really inefficient.
HERSHIPS: When you grow a chicken or a cow, there’s all this other stuff that consumers don’t want to buy for meat. We don’t want to eat feathers or bones or beaks. So last year, Andre left, and he co-founded his own company, TiNDLE – one that takes chicken out of the equation. Instead of feeding corn and soybeans to chickens and then selling those chickens to people, he figured he’d just skip the chicken step.
WOODS: Andre says there are a few main reasons that fake meat can be so much more expensive than the real thing. One of them is marketing.
MENEZES: No one needs to convince anyone to eat meat and that meat is good because, you know, we were born and raised – our parents are telling us that meat is good all the way.
WOODS: But plant-based meat is this whole new category, and it can be really hard to get consumers to try something new. And on top of that, veggie burgers had a bad reputation for years – like, kind of crunchy and brown, like old socks – which explains another big expense for new plant-based companies – research and development, like making protein from peas taste and look and smell like a burger.
MENEZES: So we mentioned Impossible few times. It bleeds, right? It tastes like beef. It smells like beef. It cooks like beef.
WOODS: Bloomberg says the market for plant-based meat is now exploding, and it could grow as large as $75 billion over the next decade. And if you’re thinking maybe lack of competition is keeping prices high, no. There’s a lengthy shopping list of huge corporations – Nestle, Tyson, Perdue, Smithfield, Hormel – all getting into the fake game. Andre says the big reason for the price difference is economies of scale.
MENEZES: Plant-based meats today in general – they only represent about 1.5% of the overall meat market. And that’s a huge disadvantage.
HERSHIPS: Companies are scaling up. And he says as climate change makes water more scarce and we need more sources of food, he says it’s going to drive the price of meat even higher. So a burger or a chicken nugget with the chicken or the cow taken out of the equation will just become that much cheaper.
