Environment

This week, a jury in North Dakota found Greenpeace liable for more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. It was a monumental verdict that many civil society groups and First Amendment lawyers have warned could chill free speech.

The case stems from the protests that erupted near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2016, when Indigenous activists and environmentalists gathered to oppose construction of the pipeline, which crossed the Missouri River close to the reservation. Standing Rock leaders warned that a spill could contaminate their water supply and that construction would disturb sacred lands, and said they had not been properly consulted.

Some of the protests included acts of vandalism and clashes with pipeline company employees and law enforcement, and Energy Transfer accused Greenpeace of providing financial and other support to the people involved. Greenpeace said it played only a minor role in the protests.

The jury ruled against Greenpeace on numerous counts, however, finding it liable for trespass, conspiracy, defamation and other offenses. The case named three Greenpeace entities as defendants, two in the United States and its international umbrella organization.

KUSNETZ: So $660 million is a lot of money, of course, and I’m wondering if you can put that figure in context for readers and tell us what the verdict means for Greenpeace USA and its operations?

RAMAN: It is a very large amount of money for most organizations and individuals, as you can imagine. It’s a fairly small amount of money for Energy Transfer. And the reality is that this case is not really about the money, even though it’s a very large amount. It’s really about the desire to send a message that a powerful company can silence a large environmental organization, and send a message to other organizations, not just environmental groups, other types of groups that are trying to hold power to account, that we will use these tools, strategic litigation against public participation, or SLAPPs, to intimidate you, or silence you, or perhaps even bankrupt you.

KUSNETZ: To press on this again, is this the kind of figure that could bankrupt Greenpeace if it does have to pay?

RAMAN: Well, we are definitely going to appeal. So we’re not at the stage of having to pay. We are going to appeal this, and we are confident in our case and in the facts. So this is the next chapter in this journey, if you will. Yes, but this is a number that far exceeds our annual budget by many times.

Molly Wickham of the Wet'suwet'en nation will soon be sentenced for blockading a pipeline project

A judge said the RCMP violated her rights when arresting her, but the cops have faced no consequences

https://x.com/DesmondCole/status/1902720992306221349

#indigenous #ClimateAction
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Today, locating the hottest parts of cities with precision is critical for guiding efforts to contend with heat’s dangerous effects. As climate change brings more intense, frequent and longer-lasting heat waves, heat-related illnesses and deaths also climb. High-resolution maps can alert officials to spots facing the greatest risks, so they can plan. It’s especially important when heat risk overlaps with poverty, where communities may have less access to air conditioning and fewer ways to stay cool.

Maps pieced together by the sensors “will help us be able to target, down to the street level, where we can plant more trees to help people better endure the hotter days of summer,” says Brian Beffort, sustainability manager for Washoe County, home to the Reno-Sparks metro area. The maps will also guide where to focus efforts to weatherize buildings so they require less energy to cool.

Campaigns to record temperatures across city neighborhoods and create better heat maps are on the rise. Reno is one of more than 80 U.S. communities that since 2017 have completed a heat mapping project with the aid of citizen scientists, efforts overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA has also supported a few international mapping efforts in cities such as Nairobi, Kenya, and Salvador, Brazil.

Local officials are using the data to plan how to adapt to, and fend off, rising urban temperatures. Some have begun to plant trees, install reflective materials and take other measures to cool the hot spots.

2024 climate trends should be a "wake-up call that we are increasing the risks to our lives, economies and to the planet,” said Celeste Saulo

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18824856

Climate warming is increasing ocean stratification, which in turn should decrease the nutrient flux to the upper ocean. This may slow marine primary productivity, causing cascading effects throughout food webs. However, observing changes in upper ocean nutrients is challenging because surface concentrations are often below detection limits. We show that the nutricline depth, where nutrient concentrations reach well-detected levels, is tied to productivity and upper ocean nutrient availability. Next, we quantify nutricline depths from a global database of observed vertical nitrate and phosphate profiles to assess contemporary trends in global nutrient availability (1972–2022). We find strong evidence that the P-nutricline (phosphacline) is mostly deepening, especially throughout the southern hemisphere, but the N-nutricline (nitracline) remains mostly stable. Earth System Model (ESM) simulations support the hypothesis that reduced iron stress and increased nitrogen fixation buffer the nitracline, but not phosphacline, against increasing stratification. These contemporary trends are expected to continue in the coming decades, leading to increasing phosphorus but not nitrogen stress for marine phytoplankton, with important ramifications for ocean biogeochemistry and food web dynamics.

In early February 2025, bushfires ignited in northwestern Tasmania, where they have continued to burn on the island for more than a week amid windy, warm, and dry conditions.

In February 2025, multiple fires raged along the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains in Patagonia. The fires had burned about 30,000 hectares (115 square miles) of forest in south-central Argentina by February 11, forcing hundreds of people to evacuate their homes, according to news reports.

New York state is one step closer to banning fossil fuels in new buildings.

On Friday, the State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council voted to recommend major updates to the state’s building code, which is updated every five years and sets minimum standards for construction statewide. The draft updates include rules requiring most new buildings to be all electric starting in 2026, as mandated by a law passed two years ago.

The vote came after the code council went missing in action for more than two months, leaving some advocates nervous that the state might be wavering on the gas ban. With the rules now entering the final stage of the approval process, New York remains on track to be the first state to enact such a ban.

The new draft code also tightens a slew of other standards in a bid to make buildings more energy efficient and save residents money over the long term. But it leaves out several key provisions recommended in the state’s climate plan — possibly running afoul of a 2022 law.

A new study finds that even as mariculture expands globally, the industry could actually decrease its current biodiversity impact by 30%—if they get smarter about where they farm. But the same study also cautions that seafood farming in the wrong locations could just as easily ramp up current marine biodiversity impacts by over 400%.

One-fifth of the fish we consume is provided by farmed seafood, and that figure is only projected to rise as global demand for protein grows. The new research, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, calculated that mariculture—the controlled production of shellfish, bivalves, and finfish in coastal areas and in the open ocean—will need to increase by 40.5% from 108,729 hectares to 152,785, to meet this growing demand by 2050.

Under a worst-case future scenario, where mariculture expansion occurred only in biodiversity-rich regions such as these, the effects could be profound: the cumulative biodiversity impact of seafood farming would increase by an average 270% at the country level, and by 420.5% at a global scale, compared to current impacts. Species-wise, the worst affected by mariculture under this extreme scenario would be large marine mammals including whales and seals, because these animals have considerable ranges that would overlap with more open-ocean farms.

But just as there’s a worst-case scenario, the researchers also posit a best-case scenario—one we could achieve, they say, if we take a more strategic approach.

“The best case scenario refers to all mariculture farms in 2050 [being] placed in sea areas with low [impact], including relocating existing farms and the new farms,” says Deqiang Ma, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, and lead author in the new study. The model showed that if farms of the future were almost exclusively sited away from biodiversity hubs, the cumulative effects of mariculture would be on average 27.5% lower at the country level compared to 2020. Taken at the global scale, that equaled an impact reduction of 30.5%. Under this best-case future scenario, almost all marine species considered in the study would experience lower impacts compared to the current-day harms of seafood farms.

Surely this has nothing to do with climate change.

Begun, the water wars have.

The city of Alto Hospicio, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is one of the driest places on Earth. And yet its population of 140,000 continues to balloon, putting mounting pressure on nearby aquifers that haven’t been recharged by rain in 10,000 years. But Alto Hospicio, like so many other coastal cities, is rich in an untapped water resource: fog.

New research finds that by deploying fog collectors — fine mesh stretched between two poles — in the mountains around Alto Hospicio, the city could harvest an average of 2.5 liters of water per square meter of netting each day. Large fog collectors cost between $1,000 and $4,500 and measure 40 square meters, so just one placed near Alto Hospicio could grab 36,500 liters of water a year without using any electricity, according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

By placing the collectors above town — where the altitude is ideal for exploiting the region’s predictable band of fog — water would flow downhill in pipelines by the power of gravity. So that initial investment for collectors would keep paying liquid dividends year after year. “If you’re pumping water from the underground, you will need a lot of energy,” said Virginia Carter Gamberini, a geographer and assistant professor at Chile’s Universidad Mayor and co-lead author of the paper. “From that perspective, it’s a very cheap technology.”

https://archive.ph/GwEyL

By the time President Donald Trump retook office, lawmakers had announced nearly $700 billion in funding for infrastructure- and climate-related projects under two bills passed during Joe Biden’s administration — the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. That money was promised to all sorts of community and local projects, from clean energy initiatives to water system upgrades.

Some of these projects have received their funding. Indeed, some have been completed. But in light of the Trump administration’s freeze on many forms of federal funding, the future of as-yet-undistributed money is unclear.

What kinds of climate and infrastructure projects have been announced in your community and across the country? Which ones may now be at risk? Now you can use your ZIP code to find out.

To understand the stakes of these signature pieces of legislation, Grist developed a tool that combines information across multiple datasets to reveal where more than $300 billion of the funds promised under the two pieces of legislation have been awarded across the United States. Enter a ZIP code, city name, or other location in the search box below to discover projects within any radius of your chosen area.

Electric and gas utilities routinely charge ratepayers for costs related to political advocacy, ads to burnish their brand, and even luxury perks for executives and employees, according to a recent report by the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute, or EPI. Such expenses add up to millions of dollars paid by customers toward utilities’ efforts to raise prices and stall climate progress. While charging customers for lobbying is banned in federal and state laws, consumer advocates say that existing policies are nowhere near rigorous enough to hold utilities accountable.

In some states, that’s starting to change. In 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed the first comprehensive laws to prevent utilities from charging customers for lobbying, advertising, and other political influence activities. Customers in those states have already saved hundreds of thousands of dollars after regulators began enforcing the laws last year.

Consumer advocates say that as the impacts of these policies become clearer — and as utility bills continue to hike — more laws will be on the way. Last year, eight states introduced bills to rein in utility cost recovery. Last month, five more states followed suit, according to EPI.

To deliver gas to millions of homes and businesses in California, gas utilities operate more than 100,000 miles of transmission and distribution pipelines across the state. But maintaining that vast network of pipelines is expensive – $3 million per mile on average in California, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a non-profit advocacy group focused on eliminating fossil fuels from buildings.

Policymakers know California cannot meet its long-term climate targets unless the state's fossil gas dependency is broken. But if customers leave the gas system on a one-off, ad hoc basis by, for example, retrofitting their homes to run only on electric appliances like heat pumps, the customers who remain on the system will have to pick up a larger share of the cost of maintaining the sprawling gas distribution network.

This reality prompted then-state Senator Dave Min (D) to introduce legislation last year that aims to being the process of pruning branches from the gas network. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom (D) in September 2024, SB 1221 authorizes California’s gas utilities to launch up to 30 voluntary pilot projects – so-called "neighborhood decarbonization zones" – and retire aging gas pipeline sections over the next five years.

On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”

That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction. DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.

“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan said. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”

The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison. The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from a family who owned the land generationally. Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker, who owns neighboring land and had considered purchasing it as a hunting ground, told Grist he was supportive. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.