NOAA released a reward poster seeking information about a possible federal crime committed against herds of California sea lions near Hayden Island in April.NOAA
Federal authorities are stillseeking information about the boatercapturedon videorepeatedly aiming a fishing vessel toward large groups of sea lions in the Columbia River in April.
Michael Milstein, public affairs officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said there was “no progress to report as of yet” in the case, which shocked onlookers because of the brazen targeting of the protected sea lions.
“We hope that the public can help by sharing theReward posteras widely as possible,” Milstein said. The agency isoffering up to $20,000for information.
Sea lion populations have increased, leading to tensions between the protected mammals and people who fish…
Joe Biden46th and current president of the United States
On Earth Day last year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at protecting and restoring mature and old-growth forests on federal lands across the country — one that many environmentaliststook as a sign that the administration could move to halt logging of ancient trees that help slow the effects of climate change.
The order acknowledged the “irreplaceable role” forests play in sequestering planet-warming greenhouse gasses and tasked the nation’s two largest federal land managers, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, with inventorying the nation’s remaining carbon-rich forests and then crafting rules to better conserve them in the face of mounting climate change impacts.
“Old-growth” forests, sometimes referred to as primary forests, are typically defined as those at least 150 years old and largely undisturbed by human activity, whereas “mature” forests are decades old but haven’t reached the old-growth stage. Together, these ecosystems form a key natural climate solution.
Early in his tenure, Biden found himself on shakyground with green groups over the administration’s lack of commitment to protect these carbon hotspots. The executive order reinvigorated environmentalists and forest advocates.
But a little more than a year later, some of those same forest experts have soured. They say the Forest Service ― an agency within the Department of Agriculture established in 1905 primarily to ensure a steady supply of timber — isn’t taking the matter seriously enough, leaving the door open for the timber industry to keep chopping down mature and old-growth forests.
Steve Pedery, conservation director at environmental organization Oregon Wild, said Biden’s order was a big deal and challenged the Forest Service to reinvent itself — from an agency that largely prioritizes timber production to one that manages forested lands for carbon storage, wildlife and clean water, with timber as a byproduct. But he says it is clear the Forest Service is dragging its feet on proposing a rule, nevermind one that confronts the ongoing threat of logging to older forests. He compared what the agency has done so far to a child being told to clean their room and instead stuffing all their belongings in a drawer and folding their arms.
“We are trying desperately to make sure the White House stays involved,” he said. “I think if this gets delegated down in a time where it’s perfectly reasonable the administration has its focus on a lot of other things, we’ll see the Forest Service either run out the clock on it or come up with something that says, ‘Logging is the answer. What was the question?’”
It is the latest example of what Pedery and others see as an entrenched, pro-logging mindset within the Forest Service — and the Biden administration’s hesitance to push the agency to abandon its old ways, despite publicly proclaiming its support for protecting mature and old-growth forests. Part of the problem, they argue, is the agency’s position that logging such forests is key to protecting them from wildfires, which are growing increasingly devastating as climate change fuels heat waves and drought.
After decades of intensive logging, few primary forests remain in the continental United States. Those that do are almost exclusively on federal lands, mostly in the West. The recent federal inventory, mandated by Biden’s executive order and released in April, found there are approximately 32.7 million acres of old-growth and 80.1 million acres of mature forest across the federal estate — a combined area slightly larger than California. About 92 million of those are on Forest Service land.
More than 130 scientists, including Mike Dombeck, chief of the Forest Service in Bill Clinton’s administration, have called on Biden to end old-growth logging on public lands.
“Older forests provide the most above-ground carbon storage potential on Earth, with mature forests and larger trees driving most accumulation of forest carbon in the critical next few decades,” they wrote in a letter to Biden the day before he signed the executive order. “Left vulnerable to logging, though, they cannot fulfill these vital functions.”
‘Loath To Mention The Word Logging’
In recent months, BLM and the Forest Service each took a step toward fulfilling the White House directive — actions that green groups widely celebrated as long-overdue moves toward balancing conservation with drilling, mining, logging and other developmenton public lands.
In March, the BLM unveiled a draft rule that seeks to place conservation “on equal footing” with energy development and other traditional uses, including through issuing “conservation leases” to promote land protection and ecosystem restoration. In announcing the agency’s action, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that “for too long, land management planning has been dominated by extractive industries.”
The Forest Service took a more modest action, publishing an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking, or ANPR, in April that seeks public input on how the agency should “adapt current policies to protect, conserve, and manage national forests and grasslands for climate resilience.” An ANPR is a preliminary step before an agency decides whether to move forward with a proposed rule.
That notice stresses the importance of mature and old-growth trees, including their resilience to climate change and their “role in contributing to nature-based climate solutions by storing large amounts of carbon and increasing biodiversity.” It also softly confronts past agency missteps, including “non-climate informed timber harvest” and decades of aggressive fire suppression that left many forests choked with excessive fuels.
But it stopped short of recognizing logging as an ongoing threat to primary forests or proposing to safeguard ancient trees from harvest. Instead, the document focuses on other threats to forest ecosystems, including wildfire and disease outbreaks, and promotes timber harvesting as a tool to “improve stand health and resilience” amid climate effects and other stressors.
“Logging” does not appear once in the agency’s ANPR. Similarly, the only mention of logging in Biden’s executive order is a section on halting deforestation abroad. It also does not specifically call for protecting old trees from being felled at home.
Jim Furnish, a former deputy chief of the Forest Service in the Clinton administration, has closely monitored the agency’s actions in the wake of Biden’s executive order on protecting mature and old-growth forests. He has grown increasingly disappointed with its resistance to change.
“I have found it unsettling but not surprising that the Forest Service has been loath to mention the word ‘logging,’” said Furnish, who has become an outspoken critic of his former agency’s management approach since retiring in 2002. “Forest Service logging is one of the acknowledged threats to mature and old-growth forest on national lands. We’ve challenged them several times about being more forthcoming and candid, and they just brush it off. They just will not do it.”
“The Forest Service has kind of blithely allowed local national forest units to just keep on cutting mature and old-growth forests as if the executive order did not exist,” he added.
There are many actions the Forest Service could have taken in the year since Biden’s executive order to show it was serious about protecting these forests from a threat it has the most control over, Furnish said, from suspending all timber sales that propose harvesting mature and old-growth trees to stipulating that all such projects must be reviewed and approved by Forest Service Chief Randy Moore.
“They’ve done nothing of the kind,” he said.
One exception is the so-called “Flat Country” project, in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, which would have allowed for about 2,000 acres of mature and old-growth Douglas fir and western hemlock to be cut down. In January, the Forest Service withdrew its decision to greenlight the controversial project, noting at the time that “some parts of it may be incongruent with recent directives and climate-related plans concerning conservation of mature and old-growth forests and carbon stewardship.” The withdrawal came on the heels of a pressure campaign from environmental groups that included protesters occupying the forest in an attempt to block the project from moving ahead.
The Biden administration also reversed a Trump-era rule that lifted Clinton-era logging restrictions across 9 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest.
Meanwhile, many other mature and old-growth logging projects and timber sales have moved forward under Biden’s watch.
Some forest ecologists and conservationists view the situation not so much as a disconnect between the White House and the Forest Service, but between the administration and the growing body of science showing old-growth forests’ resistance to fire and their capacity for storing massive amounts of carbon in trees and soil.
“The Forest Service deserves the criticism. Let’s be clear, they don’t have to propose these giant logging projects,” said Chad Hanson, forest ecologist at the John Muir Project’s Earth Island Institute. “But the Biden administration has the ultimate responsibility to tell the Forest Service to shift direction, to shift away from 20th century logging policies and move into a 21st century approach to our national forests, which would emphasize biodiversity, forest carbon storage, recreation and recreation jobs.”
To date, there is no sign that the White House has made that demand.
“That’s the problem,” Hanson said. “Don’t tell me mature and old-growth forests are important and now let’s do a lot more logging in them.”
Furnish agrees the White House must do more to force the Forest Service’s hand.
“Is the White House … going to tell the Forest Service what to do? Or are they simply going to ask the Forest Service what to do?” Furnish said. “Everything I’ve seen to date implies they are simply asking the Forest Service what to do. And given the Forest Service’s track record, particularly during the Trump administration, it is not surprising that they’re kind of continuing as if nothing has changed, until and unless some subsequent action is taken.”
Former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Furnish tours a recent logging project in South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest on July 14, 2021.
Former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Furnish tours a recent logging project in South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest on July 14, 2021.
Furnish still talks to current Forest Service officials, and he told HuffPost that he’s heard directly from Chris Swanston, the Forest Service climate adviser and acting director of the agency’s Office of Sustainability and Climate, that the agency’s leadership is less enthusiastic than the White House about the need for a climate resilience rulemaking — and that there is no guarantee the Forest Service will follow through on proposing one.
The Forest Service did not make Swanston available for an interview. In an email statement, USDA spokesperson Larry Moore said “it is premature to speculate on timing for any potential future regulatory actions” as federal law requires the agency to consider all comments submitted during the rulemaking process.
“The Forest Service is responding to the direction in the executive orders and Secretarial Memo with data-informed tools, strategies, policy recommendations, and systems for accountability for fire and climate resilience, climate adaptation, reforestation, ecosystem and watershed restoration, ecosystem services, mature and old growth forests, and carbon stewardship, as well as related investments in community engagement, partnerships, collaboration and equity,” Moore said.
Asked about Furnish’s account of his conversation with Swanston, Moore said it would be “inappropriate for us to comment on third-party conversations and rumors.”
Earlier this month, the Forest Service extended the public comment period on the ANPR from 60 to 90 days. The deadline is now July 20.
Furnish said there doesn’t appear to be any urgency on the Forest Service’s part to get a rule across the finish line, let alone to do so before the end of Biden’s term in office. Not doing so could sink the prospects of a rule ever being put in place.
“I know enough about politics to know that if the Republicans take the White House, this whole thing is going to be buried immediately,” he said.
The White House told HuffPost that federal agencies “are working swiftly ― guided by public input and science ― to restore and conserve America’s forests, including our mature and old-growth forests, and to meet our ambitious climate goals.”
“The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management recently completed two critical first steps in that work: creating a first-ever nationwide definition of what mature and old growth forests are and completing a nationwide inventory,” a spokesperson for the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality said via email. “The next step is gathering input from the public, Tribal Nations, states, and stakeholders on what policy and management changes should be made to better conserve and restore these forests, including harnessing their potential to help tackle the climate crisis.”
The White House did not comment on whether it has encountered resistance within the Forest Service.
A Model For Change
In the summer of 1991, the Siuslaw National Forest on Oregon’s central coast found itself backed into a corner. For decades, Forest Service managers there had allowed for intensive logging of mature and old-growth trees — vital habitat for the majestic northern spotted owl.
That year, a federal judge in Seattle banned all logging in spotted owl habitat, concluding that the scale of timber harvest under the George H.W. Bush administration threatened to drive the species to extinction. The owl came under federal protection one year earlier when it was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
The court ruling and the Northwest Forest Plan, adopted by the Clinton administration in 1994 to help protect old-growth trees and threatened wildlife across millions of forested acres in the Pacific Northwest, ultimately brought about a seismic shift in the Siuslaw, which at the time was among the most heavily logged forests in the nation. Management that was focused squarely on the economic value of harvesting giant trees was ultimately replaced with restoration forestry and ecosystem-wide stewardship.
It was Furnish who spearheaded that shift as supervisor of the Siuslaw.
“I took the aim of trying to grow mature and old-growth timber seriously, and I felt that one of the big liabilities we had was the past 40 years of clear-cut logging,” Furnish said. “We very ambitiously set out to thin a lot of the old clear-cut units. And we did so. And they’ve been doing that for the last 30-something years.”
Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest is home to old-growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock.
Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest is home to old-growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock.
Furnish was widely ridiculed at the time; however, the benefits proved enormous. The national forest is now richer in mature and old-growth trees. Populations of at-risk species — the northern spotted owl, coho salmon and marbled murrelet — rebounded. And by focusing on thinning unnatural, monoculture tree plantations that were planted after extensive clear-cutting ― a method that involves cutting down all or most of the trees in a selected area — the forest has continued to be a source of timber.
“What we didn’t know at the time is the benefits that would redound to forest carbon and forest sequestration,” Furnish said. “We didn’t think about it, we didn’t talk about it, we didn’t consider it. It was not even in our mind.”
A 2018 report from the Oregon Global Warming Commission found that since the early 1990s, forests in Oregon have transitioned from being a likely net source of carbon to a major sink.
“It’s not surprising that when you stopped the real aggressive clear-cut logging of mature and old-growth forests in the Northwest, they started to grow. They started to grow like crazy and began laying on ton after ton after ton of carbon,” Furnish said. “It served to be a real boon to the climate change issue and illustrative of what forests can do, in a sense, when they are unleashed.”
Forest advocates see the Siuslaw as a model that can and should take hold across the Forest Service.
“Thirty years later, everyone celebrates the Siuslaw as the wonderful win-win — meets its timber quota, doesn’t log old growth, coho salmon are recovering, everyone loves it,” yet the agency has resisted imposing that example on forested land elsewhere, Pedery said.
“It’s still very much ‘we are forest managers, we get out there and engineer the kinds of forests we want.’ And now, all of the money and political direction is to engineer the forests for fire. And that’s what they’re doing,” he said. “This rulemaking, they’re doing it begrudgingly, but definitely there’s a view, I think, from agency leadership that what they’re being asked to do is at odds with that baked-in desire to get out there with some chainsaws and fix some stuff.”
In A Smoky Fog
The White House has repeatedly vowed to do more to combat deforestation and better preserve intact forests as part of its broader climate agenda. Meanwhile, federal agencies are advancing more than 20 logging projects targeting tens of thousands of acres of ancient trees — often under the umbrella of wildfire mitigation and resilience.
Those in the pipeline include the Bitterroot Front Project, in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest, where 55,000 acres of trees, including mature and old growth, are on the chopping block. The project is billed as a “fuels reduction, vegetation management, and forest health improvement” effort.
In Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, the Black Ram project would allow for nearly 4,000 acres of western larch, ponderosa pine and western white pine, including some 500 acres of mature and old-growth trees, to be logged. In its decision to approve the project last year, the Forest Service wrote that harvesting the timber is “the most effective strategy in increasing resilience.”
The Upper Cheat River Project, in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest, targets 3,400 acres of mature forest, including stands that are more than 100 years old.
A stump-covered hillside in the Black Hills National Forest on July 14, 2021. In a report earlier that year, Forest Service scientists concluded that current logging practices in the Black Hills are unsustainable and that the harvest must be cut by 50% or more.
A stump-covered hillside in the Black Hills National Forest on July 14, 2021. In a report earlier that year, Forest Service scientists concluded that current logging practices in the Black Hills are unsustainable and that the harvest must be cut by 50% or more.
Critics charge that one of the main roadblocks to the Forest Service embracing preservation of remaining ancient trees is its narrow focus on combating wildland fire.
In January 2022, Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack and Moore, head of the Forest Service, unveiled a 10-year strategy for confronting America’s wildfire crisis through increased logging, forest “thinning” and prescribed fires to reduce high fuel loads. It calls for “forest health treatments” on an additional 50 million acres of forested land, both public and private, across the nation over the next 10 years — more than double current levels.
More recently, Vilsack and Haaland issued a joint memo to federal agencies outlining goals for managing fire this year. The document highlights several drivers of extreme wildland fire, including climate change, drought, extreme heat and expanding development in areas prone to fire, but makes no mention of fire suppression.
The amount of money spent on fighting fires in the U.S. has exploded in recent decades. And with the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and last year’s Inflation Reduction Act ― Biden’s signature climate law ― Congress injected a combined $5 billion into reducing the risk of wildfire.
With that money now in hand, the Forest Service is under intense pressure to deliver, Furnish said.
“I almost think they are viewing the executive order as a problem that’s getting in the way of their fire response, as opposed to an opportunity to really consider recasting the future of the agency around climate change, carbon storage, mature and old-growth forests and some of those values,” he said. “I sense that the Forest Service sees these goals of fire risk reduction and responding proactively to the executive order as mutually exclusive. I disagree with that premise entirely.”
In response to HuffPost’s inquiry, which included a question about whether the Forest Service views fire as a bigger threat to mature forests than logging, Moore pointed to an NPR story about how the recent fires in California killed nearly one-fifth of remaining giant sequoias.
“The increased risk of carbon loss through natural and human-caused disturbances, such as wildfires and insect epidemics, can jeopardize carbon storage and other ecosystem services,” he said. “For this reason, the USDA Forest Service understands that wildfire and other climate-related stressors are a chief threat to old-growth and mature stands on national forests and grasslands.”
Furnish, Hanson and Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at forest advocacy group Wild Heritage, accuse the agency of cherry-picking science that supports increased logging.
The ANPR “did not go far enough in stating the irreplaceable biodiversity and carbon values of [mature and old growth], did not cite the importance of carbon accumulation rates that increase with tree sizes, nor the outsized role of large tree and older forests as carbon reservoirs that represents best available science,” DellaSala wrote in draft comments to the agency, which he shared with HuffPost.
Hanson highlighted research that shows harvesting mature trees in an effort to save them from fire actuallyemits roughly three times more carbon per acre than wildfire alone and that thinning and other fuel reduction activities can at times increasefire severity by altering a forest’s microclimate.
Pine trees remain blackened in an area of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico after a fire in April 2022.
Pine trees remain blackened in an area of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico after a fire in April 2022.
Furnish acknowledges that wildfire is a complex threat. He doesn’t see the solution as black or white. Thinning of smaller trees, especially when followed by prescribed fire, is widely embraced as a proven tool for reducing fuel loads and preventing severe wildfire. But he said prevailing Forest Service dogma is that they view any prohibition on logging primary forests as a fundamental hurdle to reducing wildfire risk.
“I simply don’t think they see a way through if they don’t have free and ready access to chainsaws cutting down a lot of mature and old-growth trees to reduce the density of a lot of these stands,” he said.
In 2021, Furnish toured an area of the Black Hills where loggers were allowed to conduct “overstory removal” — cutting down nearly every mature tree — across about 3,000 acres that was heavily thinned 15 years ago to mitigate an infestation of mountain pine beetles. Rob Hoelscher, district ranger for the Forest Service’s Hell Canyon District, told the Hill City Prevailer newspaper in South Dakota that harvesting the older trees was necessary to provide younger trees the space and sunshine to thrive.
Furnish called the logging project “deplorable” and condemned the Forest Service’s justification.
“To me it is patently obvious that field managers — from forest supervisors, rangers, foresters on down — they simply don’t get climate change, forest carbon, mature and old growth,” he said. “Any evidence that the Forest Service is taking that seriously on the ground is completely lacking.”
The heat wave scorching much of the U.S., along with dangerously poor air quality from wildfire smoke, is giving Americans a preview of the compound climate disasters that experts fear will become increasingly common as the planet warms.
Why it matters: Extreme heat and hazardous air quality are acute public health threats, and the heat has already proven deadly.
June is likely to be the world’s hottest such month on record by a large margin, leading into July, which tends to be the planet’s hottest month overall.
Zoom in: Since early May, the overall weather pattern across North America has been unusual, with hallmarks of a warming climate.
A large and powerful heat dome has dominated Canada’s atmosphere during that time.
A key driver of Canada’s wildfires has been sinking, drying and warming air; heat and dry weather jump-started the wildfire season in early May, even in areas usually covered in snow at that time of year.
Greg Carbin, a senior NWS meteorologist, said Canada’s weather patterns and the wildfires it has helped stoke, are the most unusual part of North America’s recent conditions.
And the stuck or “blocked” weather pattern over Canada is connected to another heat dome fanning extreme heat in Texas and Mexico, now spreading out across the South and Southwest.
Between the lines: There has been a stubborn area of low pressure aloft across the Northeast, which has pulled wildfire smoke south and eastward via its counterclockwise circulation of air.
And over Mexico and Texas, an unusually powerful heat dome is only just now weakening, after shattering all-time heat records.
For example, San Angelo, Texas broke or tied its all-time high temperature record on five separate occasions from June 19 to June 26, per NWS meteorologist Victor Murphy. The previous record had stood for 120 years.
“Climate change makes U.S. heat waves about 5°F warmer” than they would be in a preindustrial world, Michael Wehner, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory told Axios via email.
The intrigue: The scale and scope of Canada’s wildfires are staggering, and they in turn are likely to worsen climate change by emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases, in what is known as a positive feedback loop.
Mike Flannigan, a veteran wildfire researcher at Thompson Rivers University, said a typical wildfire season in Canada consumes an area about the size of Massachusetts.
This year, however, has seen the most acreage burned in any wildfire season since reliable records began in 1959. That has happened prior to July, typically Canada’s most active wildfire month.
Threat level: Many of Canada’s wildfires are in the boreal forests ringing the Arctic. Peatlands are also are burning, which is worrisome, since they are a major carbon sink that becomes a climate change contributor when burned.
Flannigan said some of the blazes in these ecosystems may last through the winter by smoldering in the soils, only to emerge next spring or summer.
Such “zombie fires,” as they are called, are a hallmark of the new fire regime in the Far North.
He said his own research over the past three decades may have underestimated the pace of change, given what he is seeing this season.
The bottom line: “A warmer world means more fire for Canada,” Flannigan said. This means more smoke is ahead for the U.S., not just this season, but in the near future too.
“Fire is a multi-faceted issue that will need a multipronged approach. There’s no silver bullet. There’s no techno-fix. Drones or artificial intelligence isn’t going to make this problem go away,” Flannigan said.
This is the first analysis of live births since the law, which banned abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, went into effect in September 2021.
A patient looks at her ultrasound before proceeding with a medical abortion at Alamo Women’s Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Aug. 23, 2022. To open the clinic, Dr. Alan Braid and his staff had to obtain new medical licenses and move their families from Texas to New Mexico, as state becoming a refuge for those seeking to end pregnancies.Credit:REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
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Close to 10,000 additional babies were born over a nine-month period after Texas banned most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, a new analysis from Johns Hopkins…
More recently, in a video presentation on YouTube, he acknowledged that wind and solar energy are critical technologies but says he believes geophysical and other limitations on their use mean the world will have to rely on fossil fuels for a long time to come. The limitations go beyond the familiar intermittency issue; they include the lack of adequate sunlight and wind in large parts of the world.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), among others, has ambitious goals for the world to achieve net-zero-carbon energy by mid-century. World solar installations set a record in 2021, but the IEA says they must triple by 2030. Electricity from wind, hydropower and bioenergy needs to double, and geothermal and ocean power must also grow rapidly.
There has been progress. In April, a study of 78 countries found that wind and solar technologies provided 12 percent of the world’s electricity last year, up from 10 percent in 2021. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s electricity comes from sunlight, wind and nuclear power. Without wind and solar growth, carbon dioxide pollution from the world’s power sector would have grown 20 percent last year; instead, growth was only 1.3 percent.
Solar and wind pessimists point to how much land wind and solar systems require. But researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory say that decarbonizing America’s power sector with those options would require only 1 percent of the land in the lower 48 states. That includes as many as 10,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission infrastructure per year — three times today’s capacity.
And as research in the journal Nature Communications points out, “Designing and operating a highly reliable electricity system that is dependent on such large shares of wind and solar generation can be a challenge due to the variable and uncertain nature of solar and wind resources.”
Advanced nuclear power would be one way to back up intermittent wind and solar energy. NREL concludes it might be necessary to decarbonize America’s power production if wind and solar run into siting and land-use barriers. But Zeihan dismisses nuclear power, citing public opposition to the technology and storing its wastes.
And it’s true: Decades of political opposition have kept the U.S. from opening a permanent storage site. As of two years ago, more than 90,000 metric tons of highly radioactive wastes from power and weapons production were sitting in temporary storage facilities around the county, some since the 1940s. Studies reported in Chemical and Engineering News found some underground storage tanks have degraded over time and are leaking.
So, what does all this imply?
Related video: Climate treaty remains elusive as ‘fossil fuel industry floods negotiations with lobbyists’ (France 24)
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First, while wind and solar are the superstars of decarbonization, there are many other options, ranging from green hydrogen to closed-loop bioenergy and ocean waves to produce energy where the superstars can’t. If governments aren’t equally serious about investing in those options, they should be.
Second, pessimism can help identify the barriers to retiring fossil fuels. The work of removing the obstacles and enabling clean energy is as important as the work of improving the technologies themselves.
Third, governments and industry need to recognize the urgency of decarbonization, and work to achieve the full potential of ready-to-go energy efficiency, clean energy technologies and natural carbon sinks.
Fourth, small modular nuclear reactors may have to be an exception to the ready rule. The industry expects them to be much less expensive and easier to build than traditional nuclear power plants while generating less waste, using less cooling water, and distributing power closer to its point of use. (Regulators have approved only one so far; Westinghouse plans to have one running by 2033.)
But nuclear power is a hard pill for many clean energy and environmental advocates to swallow. The U.S. must finally solve the problem of permanent storage for high-level radioactive waste. Settling on a permanent storage site has been a political nightmare for federal and state officials, but we can’t keep solving our energy problems by creating new ones.
Some respected scientists tell us we now must swallow an even bigger pill, the geoengineering technology called “solar dimming” or “solar radiation management.”
Dr. Michael MacCracken, the chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington, D.C, has been a leader in the climate field for 25 years. He says the danger of catastrophic climate change is much closer than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has told us. Global warming is proceeding so rapidly, MacCracken says, that we must begin dimming sunlight by reducing the amount reaching the Earth’s surface. As environmental champion Bill McKibben writes, the world’s failure to meet critical deadlines for reducing CO2 pollution means “conditions may force a reckoning with the idea of solar geoengineering.”
MacCracken favors depositing sulfates in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space. In one scenario, aircraft would fly 4,000 sorties to deposit sulfates in the first year, increasing to 60,000 flights annually after 15 years.
However, there are deep concerns about solar dimming. Unintended consequences could include damage to the ozone layer, an impact on photosynthesis, international disagreements about when, where and how much to use it, and something called “termination shock” — the sudden relapse into a hot world that’s become even hotter by ongoing greenhouse gas emissions while dimming was in effect.
First, if the IPCC has been too conservative in projecting how close we are to irreversible global warming, it should improve its analysis.
Second, working with other nations, NASA and NOAA should map the Earth’s lands and waters to identify those best suited for wind and solar farms, agriculture, wildlife habitat, industry, human settlement and other uses. This could help avoid land-use conflicts and guide clean energy deployment to where it’s most effective.
Third, nations should establish a process for international collaboration on deploying solar dimming and other geoengineering options. This should be on the agenda of the next Conference of the Parties in November.
And fourth, the U.S. Department of Energy should separate the wheat from the chaff as it prioritizes where to invest its funds and expertise. The Department of Energy and the White House should push back against Congress on funding schemes to greenwash fossil fuels, pacify Big Oil, and take bad risks like carbon capture and sequestration at power plants.
There is much not to like about nuclear power and even the simplest forms of geoengineering. But we will like things even less if we continue doing too little. The impacts of global warming are already severe enough to ask why we didn’t get serious about ending our addiction to fossil fuels while we still had the chance.
William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.
As envoys gathered in Bonn in early June to prepare for this year’s annual climate talks in November, average global surface air temperatures were more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for several days, the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.
Though mean temperatures had temporarily breached the 1.5C threshold before, this was the first time they had done so in the northern hemisphere summer that starts on June 1. Sea temperatures also broke April…
Melting Antarctic ice has slowed an important ocean current that helps regulate the Earth’s climate, and scientists are worried about the consequences, including rising sea levels and changing weather patterns.
What’s happening?
A recent study revealed that a deep ocean current called the Southern Ocean overturning circulation has slowed down by about 30% since the 1990s. According to the Guardian, this current is important in regulating the Earth’s climate, including rainfall and warming patterns, along with how much heat and carbon dioxide the oceans store. What’s more, scientists expect a 40% slow down by 2050.
The circulation starts in the frigid and dense waters located deep off of Antarctica’s continental shelf. It spreads to other oceans from there, carrying oxygen to the deep ocean and bringing much-needed nutrients to the surface.
The Guardian reports that researchers say the slowing trend is due to global heating, which is causing Antarctic glacial ice to melt at a faster rate. This, in turn, adds freshwater, making the seas increasingly buoyant.
Why is the slowing ocean current concerning?
The slowing circulation could have cascading negative impacts, including rising sea levels and changing weather patterns, and it could deprive underwater ecosystems of nutrients.
“Changes in the overturning circulation are a big deal,” the study’s co-author, oceanographer Steve Rintoul, told the Guardian. “It’s something that is a concern because it touches on so many aspects of the Earth, including climate, sea level, and marine life.”
Related video: ‘We really need to care for this ocean as if our life depended on it’ (France 24)
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For one thing, it could cause “miserable weather” for places like the United Kingdom and Western Europe, Shenjie Zhou, a physical oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey, told Wired.
It could also accelerate global warming because of the slowing absorption of heat and carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans. Plus, it could impact food security and threaten marine animals.
What can I do?
“Unless we act soon we will commit ourselves to changes that we’d really rather avoid,” Rintoul told the Guardian. “We need to act to reduce emissions, and we need to do everything we can as fast as we can.”
For ordinary citizens, that means taking actions to reduce environmental impact. Simple ways to do this include switching off lights when they’re not in use, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, riding a bike or mass transportation instead of driving, doing full loads of laundry, and maintaining a moderate room temperature.
But that’s not enough. Government policy is an important piece of the climate puzzle, and according to Yale School of the Environment, “Strong public demand increases the likelihood that governments will prioritize climate change action.”
That means it’s time to put pressure on government officials. You can do this by contacting them directly or by joining an environmental organization campaigning for climate policy, such as the Sierra Club.
“With drastic action, we could probably stop that slowdown from being a full collapse,” oceanographer and climate scientist Matthew England told Wired. “But it’s pretty tight.”
On Saturday Russia was thrown into disarray by a failed mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group.
The mutiny, which showed some of the cracks in the edifice of the Russian state that Vladimir Putin has created, triggered some concerns over the status of Russian nuclear weapons.
The idea of combatants in a civil war seizing nuclear weapons is one of the nightmare scenarios for security analysts.
Of course, this is hardly the first attempt at a violent transfer of authority in a nuclear power country; most countries with nuclear weapons have suffered from some kind of extra-legal leadership crisis.
France
On February 13, 1960, France detonated its first atomic device at a remote site deep in the hinterlands of Algeria. The test was politically awkward because Paris was in the throes of a struggle with both the community of French citizens in Algeria (pied noir) and with the Algerian independence movement (FLN). A little over a year later, as the intentions of the De Gaulle government to grant Algeria its independence became apparent, a group of French generals launched a coup intended to forestall the cession by ceasing the French state. The coup failed to trigger a general uprising in either Algeria or metropolitan France and collapsed after several days.
USSR and Russian Federation
Probably the scariest coup in the history of nuclear weapons happened in the autumn of 1991 when a group of Soviet generals made a belated effort to turn back the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The coup plotters took power for about three days, putting President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest and contesting control of Moscow and other parts of the country. U.S. policymakers panicked, but kept their panic as quiet as possible in order to avoid upsetting the development of events. The failure of the coup precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, driving the constituent republics of the USSR into independence. Gorbachev reassumed power but for only long enough to preside over the end of the state that he led.
Related video: Instability in nuclear-armed Russia ‘not a good thing’: EU’s Borrell (Dailymotion)
The Russian Federation inherited most of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and much of its instability. In the autumn of 1993, a constitutional crisis broke out into open fighting in Moscow between partisans of the Russian Duma and President Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin defeated his opponents and maintained control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal throughout the crisis.
China
The People’s Republic of China went nuclear in 1964, on the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In September 1971 the divide between Mao Zedong and one of his chief lieutenants, Lin Biao, had become unbridgeable. Details of the “Lin Biao Incident” remain hazy, but Chinese authorities assert that Lin attempted to seize power from Mao, then tried to flee to the Soviet Union when the attempt went badly. Lin’s plane crashed in Mongolia, killing everyone on board.
Upon the death of Mao Zedong control of the Chinese state briefly seemed up in the air. The “Gang of Four,” including Mao’s widow Jiang Qing, made a play for power in Beijing, establishing control over the city and challenging the broader leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, at this time the power base of the Chinese Communist Party was tied up tightly with regional military control, putting stark limits on the ability of any outsiders to seize control of the state. The Gang of Four was arrested after a month-long contest for influence over the People’s Liberation Army. Access to nuclear weapons was apparently never in question, remaining in the hands of army officials.
Pakistan
One of the major concerns about Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons involved perceptions of its unstable political system. Pakistan suffered many coups and coup attempts before it went nuclear, and perhaps more ominously suffered catastrophic military defeat and dismemberment at the hands of its neighbor.
In October 1995, a group of army officers tried and failed to overthrow President Benazir Bhutto. In 1999 Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a coup precipitated by the latter’s effort to arrest the former. This coup caused considerable consternation in the West, in large part because there was uncertainty about the nature and structure of Pakistan’s systems of command and control. The fact that the state was taken over by the chief of the armed forces offered some solace, however, as the fundamental lines of authority over nuclear weapons remained unchallenged.
United States
On January 6, 2021, presiding U.S. President Donald Trump attempted an autogolpe, an extra-legal effort to remain in power despite losing the 2020 Presidential election. Trump’s effort foundered quickly, although he remained Commander in Chief for another two weeks. The military did not participate in the coup and Congressional certification of the election proceeded with only a small delay. The situation remained tense for the remainder of Trump’s term, but on January 21 authority over nuclear weapons peacefully passed to President Joseph Biden.
What Should We Think?
Nuclear weapons have not granted their owners domestic serenity or immunity from domestic unrest. On more than one occasion, control over nuclear weapons has been at stake during violent efforts to change the government. Only Britain, Israel, North Korea, and India have avoided a violent domestic incident since going nuclear, and in India’s case, the emergency came very close. Fortunately, this disorder has yet to lead to a situation in which nuclear weapons were either up for grabs or ended up on different sides of a civil conflict. However, as the situation in Russia over the past few days has demonstrated, nuclear weapons and domestic instability are two tastes that most definitely do not go well together.
HELENA — Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks says wolf numbers across the state fell slightly in 2022 but remain healthy.
The state estimates there are 1,087 wolves in Montana, 44 fewer than the previous year. The total number of packs in the state is 181 packs, down 10 packs from 2021. FWP says hunters harvested 248 wolves between the spring and fall hunting seasons.
On August 17, the Fish and Wildlife Commission will consider a new 289-wolf quota for the 2023-2024 season, including maintaining the six-wolf quota for the management unit north of Yellowstone National Park. The new region quotas in total are 167 lower than the previous season.
Rutgers Professor Yair Rosenthal, a coauthor on the study, examines deep-sea sediments aboard the Joides Resolution. Credit: Courtesy, Yair Rosenthal, Rutgers University
An analysis of oxygen levels in Earth’s oceans may provide some rare, good news about the health of the seas in a future, globally warmed world.
A Rutgers-led study published inNatureanalyzingocean sedimentshows that ocean oxygen levels in a key area were higher during the Miocenewarm period, some 16 million years ago when the Earth’s temperature was hotter than it is today.
In recent decades, levels of life-sustaining oxygen in the ocean have been decreasing, raising concerns that oxygen-deficient zones in key parts of the world oceans will expand, further harming marine life.
Scientists have attributed the trend toclimate change-induced rising temperatures, which affect the amount of oxygen that can be absorbed from the atmosphere.
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Related video: Climate treaty remains elusive as ‘fossil fuel industry floods negotiations with lobbyists’ (France 24)
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