Development is not sustainable if it fails to create and support food and nutrition secure and self-supporting neighborhoods. Development impacts many aspects of the food system, including where food is grown, how far food must travel before it is consumed, where distributors and retailers of food are placed, and who has access to fresh and nutritious food.
The novel term intersectional environmentalism may not be familiar for those of us in the environmental field, but the concept is not new. Leah Thomas’s new book The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression and Protect People + Planet reminds us that the origins of the environmental movement can be found in many different areas, including feminism, labor rights, and civil rights. Thomas’s book crystallizes these movements, and in so doing, her book has popularized the idea of intersectional environmentalism. Thomas herself coined the term intersectional environmentalism and now the term and her book have become popular among both environmentalists and the broader public. Her work is designed to reach a non-specialist audience, and specifically examines the connections among racism, privilege, and the environment.
Designed as a primer for a new generation of activists, this how-to guide has excerpts of interviews, quotes, histories, and resource guides, which are extremely useful as an introduction to the topic, but the book is also pitched at a level that can inform even the most experienced environmental lawyer. This book is a window into the perspectives of the next generation of environmentalists, who see environmental protection as a mechanism for systemic social change. But Thomas uses her own experiences and perspectives to explain how she arrived at intersectional environmentalism, and so provides a personable entry point to the intersectional environmentalist’s world.
Leah Thomas—often known on social media as “Green Girl Leah”—is an environmental activist and eco-communicator based in Southern California. She uses Twitter and other outlets to popularize the relationship between social justice and environmentalism. Her recent article in Vogue was titled “Why Every Environmentalist Should Be Anti-Racist.” She writes there, “Environmentalists tend to be well-meaning, forward-thinking people who believe in preserving the planet for generations to come. They will buy reusable cups, wear ethically made clothing, and advocate for endangered species; however, many are hesitant to do the same for endangered Black lives, and might be unclear on why they should.”
This statement goes to the heart of the motivation for Thomas’s book. Her experience working in environmental science led to her own internal struggle, where she felt caught between fighting against racial oppression, and the struggle for environmental protection. Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager from Missouri, was murdered by a police officer just before Thomas left Missouri to attend university in California. As a Black student in STEM, Thomas found she had to go beyond the classroom to learn about the contributions of people of color to sustainability, and to explore the racial, class, and gender fault lines within the environmental movement. Black feminist theories and intersectional feminist theories she learned outside of the classroom helped her resolve the cognitive dissonance she experienced in her program. She wrote this book in order to counter the lack of representation of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, low-income, LGBTQ+, disabled and other marginalized voices in the mainstream environmental movement.
Thomas’s book is a refreshing reminder of how the struggles of marginalized populations have informed and built the environmental movement. The work covers the feminist movement, and the groundbreaking work of Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw on intersectionalism. Thomas’s work reminds us that intersectionalism, as a tool, was developed by Black women to help Black women feel seen and heard and to validate their everyday existence. Intersectionalism reflects the experience of grappling with two marginalized identities, which lead to double, interlocking oppressions. The theory was developed as a result of research into three court cases which were informed by sexism and racism simultaneously. In Crenshaw’s paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” the professor argues that the lack of consideration, by the law, of the intersections between race and sex left Black women vulnerable and unprotected by the courts. Black, queer feminist Moya Bailey built on this theory to develop “misogynoir”—the theory of how race interacts with and compounds the impact of sexism and misogyny. Intersectional environmentalism builds on these theories (and others such as eco-feminism) to develop an inclusive approach to environmentalism that advocates for the protection of both people and the planet. It argues that social and environmental justice are fundamentally intertwined, seeks to amplify historically excluded voices, and approaches environmental education, advocacy, policy, and activism with equity, inclusion, and restoration in mind.
Thomas employs the intersectional approach in this book, assessing the missteps of the feminist movement by focusing on its unsung heroes in order to improve the prospects for future movements. Excerpts in the book unpack the feminist movement from varying lenses, including the Chicana identity and eco-feminism, and it includes portions of interviews, including one on advice for young Black girls who want to be in the climate space. There is also the Intersectional Environmentalist Pledge, as well as discussion questions reflecting on why solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities is so important.
The book then looks at the history of the environmental justice movement, highlighting the work of Hazel M. Johnson and Dr. Robert Bullard. Thomas makes her points about the intersectionality within the environmental justice movement through an examination of the personal histories that brought both Johnson and Bullard to become leaders of the EJ movement. Thomas takes us beyond the traditional starting point of the EJ movement of Warren County, North Carolina, in the early 1980s, back to the civil rights movement and the 1968 strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. She articulates how the environmental justice movement was born from lived experiences of public health and discriminatory treatment, and connects this movement back to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s protests and his solidarity with sanitation workers. The following chapter extends this analysis by unpacking privilege, drawing from the work of W.E.B. DuBois’s research on the “psychological wage” or unearned social advantages and disadvantages tied to race. The chapter includes some helpful data which bring these points home, including on the gender wage gap, upward mobility, and criminal justice, illustrating how privilege and environmentalism intersect with one another. The chapter covers food apartheid, issues of accessibility and disability, as well as advice for the next generation of LGBTQ+ environmentalists.
The next chapter examines the reality of climate and environmental circumstances on BIPOC communities, with excerpts from interviews with Indigenous, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), and Latinx advocates and environmental leaders, including from the global South. This chapter illustrates why an intersectional environmentalist approach is so important to systemic crises, which disproportionately affect BIPOC communities. This chapter charts both the historical (from colonization, genocide, slavery, Jim Crow laws, World War II, immigration, and Covid-19) and social determinants (including health, education, and employment conditions) of environmental outcomes for Black, Latinx, AAPI, and Indigenous populations in the United States. This chapter also focuses on specific issues facing these communities, as well as in the global South, such as waste disposal and sea-level rise.
The final chapter covers consumption-based issues, looking at topics such as ethical fashion and veganism. It provides some useful data around veganism and illustrates that the representation of people of color on social media around veganism is sparse. Veganism is portrayed as a white, wealthy, global North phenomenon—despite the fact that 8 percent of the Black population, for example, identifies as vegan or vegetarian in the United States, and globally countries such as India, Mexico, and Brazil have some of the highest percentages of vegetarians per capita. This chapter assesses the human rights, civil rights, and labor rights issues involved in consumption choices. Finally, this section assesses green energy choices and their implications, including lithium mining, biomass, and wind farms sited near Indigenous land in Mexico.
The book ends with a useful intersectional environmentalism tool kit. It includes interviews with advocates and intersectional environmental leaders, advice on how students can get involved, and resources related to digital activism, BIPOC communities reclaiming nature, and other helpful information.
Thomas’s book is a much-needed, accessible, and engaging account of why an intersectional approach to environmentalism is so important. This perspective is one that the next generation of environmental leaders has adopted—and the traditional environmental movement has much to learn from this approach. Thomas’s book looks back, giving appropriate deference to the leaders of feminist, civil rights, and environmental justice movements, but also looks ahead, giving us insight into the perspectives of young people on environmentalism. As Thomas concludes, the future can and will be intersectional.
Lisa Benjamin is an associate professor of law at Lewis & Clark Law School.
Looks at Multiple Systems of Oppression.
Land use climate bubbles are popping up throughout the nation at an alarming rate, creating an economic crisis that will be more damaging than that of the housing bubble of 2008. The costs to ecosystems and low- and moderate-income households are equally severe.
No one will miss 2020, but two books deserve mention as we bid farewell to that annus horribilis. The Yale Environmental Dialogue, under the leadership of professor Daniel C. Esty, pulled together a cavalcade of experts from every discipline and field imaginable, and from varied political perspectives, to produce a comprehensive collection of essays on every conceivable topic relating to sustainability — ecology, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, land protection, agriculture, economics, urban policy and, very prominently, climate change, all with an emphasis on actionable recommendations.
Edited by Professor Esty, A Better Planet: 40 Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future features contributions by such luminaries as Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus; Jane Lubchenco, former director of NOAA; Thomas Lovejoy, the “father of biodiversity”; and Susan Biniaz, the former lead climate lawyer for the State Department, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement. Your reviewer was honored to contribute an essay on water reuse (“Found Water: Reuse and the Deconstruction of ‘Wastewater’”).
Indy Burke, Dean of Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, has described the urgent need for seeking common ground amidst current “political division and deep disagreements over core principles” in order to meet contemporary environmental challenges. Says Dean Burke, “We have to do the hard work of bridging these divides.” That is the rationale behind Esty’s Yale Environmental Dialogue and the publication of A Better Planet.
While the Yale project is exciting, forward-looking, and innovative, William and Rosemarie Alley seek to document the historic successes of and current challenges to EPA, the world’s premier environmental agency. In The War on the EPA: America’s Endangered Environmental Protections, the authors write that “in point of fact, never in the EPA’s history has there been a time when anything was simple.” In other words, EPA has always been engulfed in controversy and, given the nature of its role as regulator, caught in a perpetual cross-fire between environmentalists and various regulated sectors in an endless round of regulation, litigation, re-regulation, and legislative interventions. “Virtually everything that the EPA has accomplished has come out of the crucible of intense controversy,” observe the authors. “Even in the best of times, it’s remarkable that anything gets done.”
The Alleys have written a well-researched, articulate, and wide-ranging survey of environmental issues spanning the entire history of the agency. They combine William’s scientific expertise (he was chief of the Office of Groundwater for the U.S. Geological Survey) with Rosemarie’s professional writing skills to offer the reader a very fine and fluid narrative through technically and legally dense subject matter. It would be great supplemental material for an environmental policy or law course. Lawyers looking for a broader perspective, beyond their specialty, and a brief history of environmental regulations and the battles over same, would also benefit.
The Alleys manage to say something interesting on a long list of topics: wastewater and drinking water issues, Superfund and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, clean air issues and New Source Review, Waters of the United States, unregulated agricultural nonpoint-source pollution (“a wicked problem”), toxic chemicals, the Clean Power Plan, “secret science,” you name it. Their overview of the complex interaction between geology, groundwater, and toxic chemicals in the environment — along with a succinct description of the evolution from “pump and treat,” ad infinitum, to remediate contaminated groundwater to a more effective bioremediation and in situ treatment — is informed yet intelligible to the non-specialist reader.
It is no criticism to say that they have also written a polemic targeting, in order, President Trump, his former EPA administrators Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler, and several Republican presidents and members of Congress, including but not limited to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. They do not entertain substantive counter-arguments to EPA’s positions or take them seriously. There are good guys and bad guys, period. Still, one may not agree with the polemic but recognize its power and efficacy in making a policy or political point. Cicero and Augustine would approve. But the reader should be forewarned.
The authors lament that science, EPA, and environmental regulation are embroiled in controversy and even disfavored in many quarters. They note the budgetary pressures the agency has experienced over many years, especially the lack of support in the Trump administration. (Congress declined the more extreme cuts.) They want to re-invigorate EPA’s regulatory agenda and deal with a variety of issues: toxic chemicals, “forever chemicals,” climate change, and a moribund Superfund program.
“The long arduous course of scientific study requires considerable time and patience. . . . For Superfund (and other EPA programs) to be effective, the agency not only needs good scientists and lawyers, but also good communicators, listeners, and decisionmakers with high ethical standards,” claim the Alleys. “To accomplish all this, the bottom line is that EPA needs adequate funding and a favorable work environment to attract a capable and committed work force.”
The authors of The War on the EPA describe a daunting set of circumstances having as much to do with the American public’s current skepticism about the federal government as much as the agency. According to the Pew Research Center, “During the . . . George W. Bush administration and the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the share of Americans who say they trust the [federal] government just about always or most of the time has been below 30 percent. Today, 20 percent say they trust the government.” Additionally, “While the share of Republicans who trust the government has increased during Trump’s time as president, only 28 percent say they trust the government, compared with 12 percent of Democrats.”
Different constituencies distrust the feds for different reasons. But this is in stark contrast to 1958, the first year Pew enquired on the matter, and 73 percent expressed trust in the federal government. This is a fundamental shift in the American psyche, and EPA is collateral damage.
This distrust is aggravated by political polarization. As reported by Max Rust and Randy Yeip in The Wall Street Journal (“How Politics Has Pulled the Country in Different Directions,” November 10, 2020), “If it feels like Republicans and Democrats are living in different worlds, it’s because they are.” Rust and Yeip say, “There are few places left in America where one tribe of voters is likely to encounter the other.”
What, if anything, can be done about this state of affairs, at least as it relates to environmental policy? Returning to A Better Planet, Daniel Esty’s essay “Red Lights to Green Lights: Toward an Innovation-Oriented Sustainability Strategy” may be helpful. While recognizing the undoubted success of the command-and-control regulatory strategies of the 1970s and 1980s — red lights for polluters — that “framework has proven to be incomplete. It has failed to offer signals as to what society needs businesses to do, including what problems to solve, what research and development to undertake, and what investments to make.”
Moreover, the original paradigm came at a price. It was slow and inefficient “insofar as the government does almost all of the environmental work.” Indeed, “This over-reliance on government as the central (and often sole) actor also leads to high costs, avoidable inefficiencies, constant litigation over standards, and disincentives for innovation,” argues Esty.
The old approach did not spur transformative change or engage the business community and financial markets as problem solvers. The red-light model does not drive entrepreneurial zeal.
What is needed to address contemporary challenges is “a systematically designed structure of incentives to encourage innovation and problem solving. In short, we need to complement our system of red lights with an expanded set of green lights,” writes Esty. This entails adoption of the polluter-pays principle and the “end to externalities,” i.e., “those who inflict environmental harms on society must pay for them.” Polluters need to be charged for their emissions or other negative impacts. Such “harm charges” would send price signals for the need to remake products or production processes.
Just as those generating negative externalities should pay, those generating positive externalities, or benefits to society, should be compensated, e.g., private landowners whose property provides habitat for endangered species.
Esty’s idea is not new, but it needs to be recalled and taken to heart by policymakers.
With a new administration taking over the executive branch, will Congress be able to come to grips with an environmental statutory regime almost a half century old and provide EPA and other agencies with the tools they need to turn red lights into green? We hope for the best.
An Insightful History, 40 Valuable Prescriptions.
Our cities and communities face an uncertain and daunting future. Diverse challenges, including an increasingly warmer and erratic climate, losses of biodiversity, disparities in economic equality, and state and federal hostility to local action, test the survival of many communities.
When it comes to major risks to public health and safety, the tort system has appropriately been the venue for standard-setting and compensation in areas where legislatures are slow to act. This has been true with pollution, auto safety, cigarettes, and product safety, among others. Eventually, lawmakers and regulators catch up with the judiciary, often to codify common law standards and approaches birthed in the courtroom.
Climate risk is proving no different. Liability is looming for public and private entities as well as design and construction professionals when their risk management does not take into account climate risks that are eminently ascertainable and predictable. And the judicial development of standards in this area is not confined to the common law but extends to any statutory interpretation wherever law or regulation includes a duty of care with regard to risks that climate may exacerbate.
Whether you are a bridge engineer, a coastal building architect, or a municipality, you are on notice that good practice requires reasonable measures to reduce climate-related risks, and prudence in turn demands private insurance for errors and omissions that increase risk of climate-related damage or diminish climate readiness.
The creaky old tort system may be uneven and inefficient, at best, in compensation. But it can be quite effective in bringing about loss prevention. Social insurance, on the other hand, tends to be stingy albeit even on compensation but miserable for loss reduction. If your focus is on reducing climate losses as well as providing compensation, you hold a special place in the pantheon of bad policy ideas for proposals for social insurance of climate risk.
Such insurance would create moral hazard, the tendency for individuals to make riskier choices because the cost of their risk-taking is borne in whole or in part by others, at an unprecedented and epic scale. The moral hazard begins at the policy and political level — what better way to induce complacency in the electorate about the need for mitigation and adaptation than the assurance that, in the event of climate catastrophe, “you’re covered.”
And the moral hazard filters down to every level of government and to every individual home or business owner. By socializing climate risk, you remove or dampen the incentive of those in the best position to devise cost-effective climate risk reduction strategies, from towns choosing between adaptation and other demands on the public fisc, to developers choosing where and how to build, to architects and property owners deciding whether to incur additional expense at the margins for design, elevation, and landscaping to reduce loss of life or property damage attributable to climate impacts.
In theory, the moral hazard problem can be tempered by actuarial rates and high deductibles that reward risk reduction, thereby allowing the pooling of risk without (or without as much) diminution in incentives to take cost-justified adaptation or resilience measures. But loss prevention incentives are always an afterthought in social insurance, and their influence is dwarfed by the power of subsidized premiums.
These limitations to social insurance of climate risk are demonstrable. The United States already has social insurance for climate risks, albeit partial and inadvertent, and it is failing at every level.
We have socialized the costs of climate risk in part through the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides subsidized (social) insurance for homeowners and (importantly) mortgage lenders who build or finance construction in floodplains and on coasts.
The NFIP enables construction in the riskiest places in terms of climate risk. Loss prevention measures are modest, focused primarily on repetitive-loss properties, and have little force compared to the inducement that subsidized rates provide for riskier behavior and practices. The NFIP reauthorization bill now pending in Congress reinforces the policy of keeping rates artificially low relative to risk, even for repetitive-loss properties.
Elected officials have proven incapable of rationalizing the NFIP so that it provides both compensation and meaningful loss reduction incentives. And after the NFIP’s short-lived dalliance with market rates, this is unlikely to change.
This stubborn fact is also plain in Congress’s even larger, yet again partial and inadvertent, social insurance program for increased risk due to climate change: the reflexive provision of off-budget, debt-enlarging disaster relief with every climate-influenced catastrophe. This de facto program has no incentives for risk reduction, and is 100 percent subsidized — by future generations of taxpayers saddled with the national debt.
Bradley M. Campbell is president and CEO of the Conservation Law Foundation. He served as commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and EPA regional Administrator.
Costly natural disasters are likely to occur more frequently with climate change. Flood-prone areas along the nation’s rivers could increase by about 45 percent and coastal flood-prone areas by about 55 percent by 2100.
Our federal investment to address disasters has primarily focused on response and recovery after an event. However, with increasingly numerous and costly storms and wildfires, significant investments need to be made in pre-disaster mitigation. Expanding efforts to move more people out of harm’s way through expanded voluntary property buyout programs and strategically protecting and restoring critical natural infrastructure, such as floodplains and coastal wetlands, can improve safety and save money over the long-term.
In anticipation of the next event, hazard mitigation attempts to break the cycle of disaster, reconstruction, and repeated damage. Since 1988, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has provided more than $15 billion in grants to help communities rebuild and improve resilience. This investment has repeatedly been shown to be cost effective. According to a 2017 study conducted by the National Institute of Building Sciences, the impacts of federal mitigation grants resulted “in a national benefit of $6 for every $1 invested.”
Perhaps the most effective mitigation strategy is getting people out of disaster-prone areas. Over the past 30 years, FEMA has funded the public acquisition of more than 55,000 properties from willing landowners. Property buyouts permanently remove people and property from hazardous areas (deed restrictions required for acquired properties prevent future development on the land), thus reducing or eliminating future damage and emergency response costs. A 2008 study of 12 communities in Iowa concluded that buyouts yielded a 219 percent return on investment. The NIBS study reported that flood mitigation activities — specifically buyouts — had a benefit of $7 for every $1 invested.
Because acquired land must be permanently dedicated to open space, recreational, or wetland-management uses, buyouts also provide an opportunity for communities to create public assets while restoring the ecological integrity of the floodplain, which can further strengthen the community’s resilience. Planning that sets strategic priorities for future acquisitions can allow a community to target limited acquisition resources to areas that will maximize risk reduction while also providing habitat and fulfilling other community objectives.
Recently, planners have placed increased emphasis on the restoration or protection of natural (or green) infrastructure as cost-effective alternative hazard-mitigation solutions. This includes the restoration of natural habitat. In 2015, FEMA announced the eligibility of new activities for mitigation funding, including floodplain and stream restoration. These methods are eligible and available to be used to mitigate any hazard; however, very few of these projects have been funded.
Coastal wetlands are one of the natural features that provide valuable protection from catastrophic storms. Hurricane Sandy provides a clear illustration of the value of such wetlands as mitigation. According to one study, existing wetlands prevented $625 million in property damage. The authors state, “In this study, we show a clear correlation between wetland cover and avoided property damages: the greater the extent of the wetland, the more protection it provides. Even relatively degraded wetlands in highly urban areas like New York City provided hundreds of millions of dollars in flood protection.”
More funding should be directed toward identifying, protecting, and restoring wetlands and floodplains that can help to provide long-term resilience. Ongoing priority setting assessments and methods (such as New York’s PlaNYC) could be leveraged to provide financial resources. ELI’s report “Developing Wetland Restoration Priorities for Climate Risk Reduction and Resilience in the MARCO Region” outlines recommendations for policy and process improvements that could improve the ability of states to develop wetland restoration priorities for climate risk reduction and resilience.
Much of the needed investment in hazard mitigation could be accomplished by leveraging and integrating existing institutions and programs. A significant increase in FEMA’s Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program funding could pay for the targeted acquisition of properties from willing sellers in some of the country’s most vulnerable areas before the next disaster hits. The new omnibus spending package includes a record $249 million for the PDM program, a good step forward.
This investment, combined with programs that incentivize voluntary participation in buyouts; help relocate buyout participants within their communities; and increase funding for the restoration and protection of critical natural infrastructure like wetlands and natural floodplains could improve outcomes and reduce costs from the next disaster.
Rebecca Kihslinger is a science and policy analyst at the Environmental Law Institute.
There are 7.6 billion people on the planet today. By 2050, there are projected to be 9.7 billion — or put another way, in just thirty years we will add the equivalent population of seven United States. The world’s most credible energy forecasting entities predict a global increase over that time not only in demand for energy, but demand for fossil energy. Even with steady increases in energy efficiency and a massive increase in renewables, consumption of fossil fuels will grow. That means carbon dioxide emissions won’t be reduced significantly without some technology to do so.
The only technology to deeply reduce CO2 emissions from fossil fuels is carbon capture and storage. CCS can control and sequester nearly all greenhouse gas emissions from an industrial facility.
Is this vision realizable? Indeed: the United States has more than 700 years’ worth of capacity in deep saline formations and similar geologic strata to store the carbon dioxide we generate.
Importantly, capturing carbon dioxide costs money, and people would rather get value for the CO2 they capture than put it in the ground for nothing. To the rescue comes CO2-EOR. About 4 percent of total U.S. oil production today comes from enhanced oil recovery via CO2 injected into oil formations. We have over 100 years’ worth of storage capacity in oil formations alone, and the more we look, the more we find. We are by far the world leader in this technique. The United States has been producing oil with CO2 for 45 years, and the injected gas is proven to stay trapped underground.
Other countries have coal and oil deposits located near one another, where coal can be used to produce electricity and the CO2 can be captured and easily shipped by pipeline for production of oil.
The above facts have more to do with whether the world meets climate targets than does increasing efficiency and use of renewables.
There are people around the world pushing divestment from fossil fuels because of climate concerns. To serve their goal, they instead ought to be pushing for investment to improve clean fossil fuel technology. However, policies today all over the world favor renewables as the preferred energy source. The International Energy Agency found that in the decade from 2004-13, world governments provided nearly $2 trillion in renewables subsidies, while investing barely 1 percent of that to developing CCS technologies.
In the United States renewables have received government support in the form of mandatory purchases (through the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act), set asides (through state renewable portfolio standards), tax credits, loan guarantees, grants, and other programs. CCS has similar climate benefits, but despite its importance is not on an equal footing.
Investment in renewables has borne results. Costs have come down and market penetration has gone up. The same is expected for CCS. That is the aim of the Department of Energy’s research and development programs: to bring the costs down for CCS, and to “mature” the technology across a variety of applications and circumstances.
Last year, the first full-scale CCS project on a power plant in the United States began operation — the PetraNova project at the W.A. Parish plant in Texas. The technology by all reports is working very well. It is the second power plant in the world to deploy full-scale CCS, the other being SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit 3 in Saskatchewan, Canada. Both first-of-a-kind projects offer lessons and efficiencies for next-of-a-kind projects.
To add a final acronym, both also are CCUS projects — carbon capture, utilization, and storage. At both facilities, the CO2 is being used to produce crude at nearby oil fields. Think of CCUS petroleum as “low carbon oil.”
It may be surprising to know that there are parts of the world today that would love to store CO2 because of its potential for oil production, if only they could get the gas. We have too little captured carbon dioxide because of a gap between the cost of capture and what drillers will pay for it. In the United States, Congress is considering increasing current tax credits to close that gap. Another factor to change the economic equation is research: finding ways to get more oil per molecule of CO2 injected. So is development: recent lab results are promising.
CCS is a win-win, with perhaps additional wins appended. It has climate benefits, energy benefits, U.S. technology benefits, and potentially geopolitical benefits if the United States can help allies better control their own energy futures.
I went to the North Pole in April, the favored month for travel in the High Arctic. That was 16 years ago. According to the 2017 National Climate Assessment, the region’s warming began accelerating around the time of my visit. It is no longer the same frozen ecology and economy I had seen.
The assessment included a report titled “Arctic Shows No Sign of Returning to Reliably Frozen Region of Recent Past Decades.” Worse, “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic — it affects the rest of the planet,” acting NOAA Administrator Timothy Gallaudet said on release of the climate study. In the text, NOAA coins a term: “New Arctic.” Barry Lopez, the great chronicler of the ancient boreal geography and traditional culture, would be having nightmares.
An ice-free Arctic Ocean is likely within a few decades. That will make a huge difference for the climate system, as jet streams are diverted, ocean currents disrupted, and weather extremes increase. Because water absorbs heat that ice reflects, and frozen greenhouse methane in permafrost is released to the atmosphere as the soil warms, the planetary temperature will also be affected by these positive feedback loops. There is no going back from an ice-free Arctic.
In April, the region has emerged from its darkness, and there is light for most of the day, but the winter ice still defines the region. That makes it ideal for landing a small plane at the Pole. We stayed in a guest house in Qaanaaq, Greenland, while waiting for clear weather. It had an opening in the outer wall where a small tractor placed cubes of blue freshwater ice that come down from the glacier into Baffin Bay.
Qaanaaq lies in a strip of land between the Greenland icecap and this arm of the Arctic Ocean. That land used to be greener, hence the Norse name for the island. The change is the result of a cycle of ice ages spread over millennia. Now we have pumped up the global average temperature by almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the last half century, and the rate of Arctic warming is twice that.
While we waited, I became fascinated with a solitary, commanding inukshuk visible on the lip of the glacier, high above the village. The Inuit have long piled rocks into the size and shape of a man. The cairns have several meanings, one of which is, “The People have been here.” They are trail markers from one generation to another.
One night around 10 p.m. I could not go to sleep. I decided to go for a walk. The sun was down but frozen sea and land were bathed in a peach-like twilight. So I climbed the steep scree bordering the town and reached the inukshuk that lords over Qaanaaq the way the statue of Christ the Redeemer dominates Rio de Janeiro. When I came up to the ancient sculpture, I was on the border of the icecap and was able to gaze inland. There I saw a trail of inukshuks heading over the ice.
The ice was sculpted by the wind into rolling hillocks, giving a short horizon. As a result, although I could no longer see Qaanaaq, I was always in sight of an inukshuk. I continued ever higher on the glacier, with another rock totem always visible on attaining the one I was aiming for. I was struck by the labor involved in trucking tons of stone inland and upland without machine or even draught animal, a clear sign of significant purpose in the long-ago endeavor.
I went from cairn to cairn, and I dreamed about the reasons for this ancient transportation infrastructure — and its future. For the Greenland icecap that supports the inukshuks is an endangered species, as is the marine icecap that surrounds the northern shoulders of the island and provides an ecosystem for polar bears, narwhals, wolves, and seals, plus a related subsistence economy for the indigenous humans.
As the Greenland terrestrial icecap retreats from the sea, it will undermine the ancient rock-men. As the Arctic Ocean icecap retreats, it will undermine the functioning of a traditional society. Gone will be the hunting ground for the population. A census shows today huskies outnumber humans in Qaanaaq. In the future, dog sleds will give way to pickup trucks, and the citizens will have to find some other way of obtaining drinking water instead of the glacier ice cubes that freely float their way today.
As I walked, there was always a horizon a few hundred yards away and always another inukshuk, but nothing else in a world where ground and sky reflected each other in a pale vermillion glow. After close to a half dozen stone markers, I woke from my Arctic dream and realized I might become lost. But I had no trouble following the trail of inukshuks back to the house, since the ancient constructors knew what they were doing in laying out the trail — although I never did discover where it led.
I arrived home around 2 a.m., only to find everyone awake, worried about me. With the ancient man-like dolmens as my companions, however, I had always had a friend on the lonely frozen plain. For how much longer till the melting ice topples them, that remains to be seen.
Notice & Comment is written by the editor and represents his views. Send your comments to forum@eli.org.
Arctic dreams among the Inukshuks on melting Greenland’s endangered icecap.
Study finds legal means for protecting California’s coast.
