The eight counties that comprise California’s San Joaquin Valley Air District form the nation’s most productive farming area. In 2022, it produced citrus, almonds, tomatoes, pistachios, walnuts, alfalfa, corn, winter wheat, rice, livestock, and other agricultural commodities worth $36.5 billion. The district is also home to oil drilling and the nation’s highest levels of fine particulate pollution, something that the Environmental Protection Agency says kills up to 120,000 Americans each year. Strokes, heart attacks, and respiratory ailments, including lung cancer, are the usual culprits.
Fine particulate matter—known scientifically as PM2.5 (2.5 microns or less) and colloquially as soot—comes from industrial smokestacks, wildfires, vehicle tailpipes, and farm work. An American Lung Association study found that in the Western states, 40% of Americans live where particle and ozone levels are at unhealthy levels. Most of those people live in California, Oregon, and Washington.
A dozen years ago, the EPA set a limiting standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3) of particulate matter. The San Joaquin Valley has never met that standard nor the previous standard dating back a quarter century. Last month, the agency cut the standard from 12 µg/m3 to 9 µg/m3, making compliance still harder. Virginia Gewin at Civil Eats writes:
At a recent workshop held by the San Joaquin Valley Air District, a spokesperson for the district described how despite progress lowering PM2.5 levels, “initial modeling completed by CARB [the California Air Resources Board] suggests that attainment of the 2012 standard by 2025 is impracticable.” Instead, the spokesperson said that the district and CARB are revising a plan, and requesting a five-year delay, to reach the now outdated standard by 2030.
Community advocates expressed their continued frustration at the district’s failure to achieve clean air standards. “Back in 2018, we saw the aggregate commitments and weak rules come forward and warned that we would not meet the standard. We said, ‘We need to do more,’ and we were ignored. And here we are today,” said Genevieve Amsalem, research and policy director for the Central California Environmental Justice Network, at the workshop. She calls San Joaquin Valley’s failure to meet air quality standards a civil rights issue: “The people most impacted are more often low-income people of color.”
Immediately after the new standard was announced on Feb. 7, several state governments, led by Kentucky and West Virginia, sued the EPA. Twenty-two other states have now joined them, while Texas, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have filed their own suits. California, which has worst particulate problem spread over the most territory, has not joined any of those suits.
They contrast with filings against the EPA as far back as 2001 to force California state agencies to get tougher on polluting industries. The new soot rule is at least partly a consequence of those lawsuits. In addition, since 1992 the district has adopted 670 rules on air quality, something estimated to have cut 212,000 tons of carbon emissions during that time.
Opponents say the new standard will make the U.S. uncompetitive with Europe, which has a more relaxed limit, and that 30% of U.S. counties would be out of compliance. The EPA says only 59 counties out of the nation’s 3,143 will be affected since all the rest already meet the 9 µg/m3 standard.
“The EPA’s new rule has more to do with advancing President Biden’s radical green agenda than protecting Kentuckians’ health or the environment,” said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who added that it “will drive jobs and investment out of Kentucky and overseas, leaving employers and hardworking families to pay the price,” People, officials or otherwise, who think Biden’s green agenda is radical are stretching the meaning of the word.
Said NAM Chief Legal Officer Linda Kelly, “In pursuing this discretionary reconsideration rule, the EPA should have considered the tremendous costs and burdens of a lower PM2.5 standard. Instead, by plowing ahead with a new standard that is vastly more restrictive than any other national standard, the agency not only departs significantly from the traditional NAAQS process, but also gravely undermines the Biden administration’s manufacturing agenda, stifling manufacturing investment, infrastructure development and job creation in communities across the country. The NAM Legal Center is filing suit to protect manufacturers’ ability to obtain permits, expand facilities and pursue long-term investment plans, and defend our country’s competitive advantage.”
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in announcing the rule that it would create $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, preventing up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. Children will be major beneficiaries as will people in low-income and communities of color adversely harmed by decades of industrial pollution. “We do not have to sacrifice people to have a prosperous and booming economy,″ he said.
Fine particulate pollution in the San Joaquin Valley has decreased over the past decade, largely because of rules that mostly don’t affect agriculture. Burning, soil management, and emissions from soil as well as tractors and other farm equipment are the main ways agriculture generates soot. As of 2018, farms in the valley were calculated to be putting 13 tons of PM2.5 into the air each day.
Getting into compliance with the old or new standard is going to be made that much harder because at least half a million California acres are going to be taken out of production by 2040 to meet the provisions on groundwater laws. That means more fallowed land, which means more dust, which means more PM2.5 in valley residents lungs.
“The most cost-effective way to prevent dust is to maintain [living plant] cover—which is difficult in areas that are desert,” says Andrew Ayres, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and co-author of a report on dust and air quality for the Public Policy Institute of California.
—MB
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WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
The Friends of Big Bear Valley own and operate this eagle nest cam in southern California.
RESOURCES & ACTION
GREEN BRIEFS
Federal funds in biden-pushed legislation give weatherization a boost
In 1976, when Joe Biden was still a rookie senator, the U.S. Department of Energy established one of the most helpful programs for low-income Americans: the Weatherization Assistance Program. Nearly a half-century on, the WAP is still in existence, and thanks to $3.5 billion from the Biden-pushed bipartisan Investment and Infrastructure Jobs Act and additional money from the Inflation Reduction Act, more people will be able to make their homes energy efficient.
WAP has over the years provided this assistance to 7.4 million households. The program supports 8,500 jobs. On a yearly basis, however, chronic underfunding has meant the program only reaches a tiny fraction of those needing it—35,000 of the 30 million eligible households yearly.
Weatherization improves energy efficiency and makes a dwelling more comfortable and cheaper to live in by lowering utility bills and lowering energy consumption, especially when the weather is bad. This is accomplished by improvements in a building’s insulation, air sealing,, and overall energy systems.
The fixes matter a great deal because lower-income families generally live in less efficient housing, pay more per square foot for their energy than more affluent households, and face energy insecurity more often, finding it difficult at times to pay energy bills or to heat and cool their homes adequately. Non-white households also disproportionately experience all types of energy insecurity; 45% of non-white households—15 million households—experience some type of energy insecurity.
With the upgrades, households save an average of $372 a year, according to an independent evaluation of the program. The energy efficiency and research consultancy RMI notes:
According to the Department of Energy (DOE), every home it weatherizes saves its occupants an average of almost $300 annually on energy bills and provides total benefits, including health and safety, of over $13,000. It can also reduce non-financial stressors by improving comfort, and in some cases reducing noise or pests. Low-income residents have higher energy burdens, meaning that they pay a higher percentage of their income on energy costs, than higher-income residents. And the very lowest income bands, which have higher energy burdens, are disproportionately Black. Thus, weatherization through programs like WAP improves racial and income equity. […]
WAP is a good investment because it directly addresses the problem of energy affordability and equity. While Black Americans represent only about 13 percent of the country’s population, 28 percent of the WAP retrofitting projects funded through ARRA in 2010 benefitted Black households. Viewed this way, WAP can be an example of “targeted universalism:” if a goal is to eliminate energy burdens from all US homes, WAP helps ensure that resources go where the need is. This approach stands in contrast to many utility efficiency programs that use funds from all ratepayers to primarily benefit middle-income households.
The additional funding the Biden administration has plugged into the program is welcome news. But there are some lessons to be learned from the $5 billion boost over three years that WAP got under the 2009 Obama era stimulus—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This funded the weatherization of more tban 340,000 low-income homes. Resulting energy savings totaled $1.1 billion, total benefits hit $4.5 billion, 28,000 people were trained for WAP-related jobs, and more than 7 million metric tons of carbon emissions were cut. But when the additional funds dried up, many of the trainees never found permanent jobs and left the sector. As a consequence, it has been difficult for the industry to find qualified workers.
To help prevent a repeat of this outcome and try to match worker supply with demand , a new job resource program—Green Workforce Connect—has been developed by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Developers hope the pilot program initiated recently in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma will eventually go nationwide. Said IREC program director Pagan Poggione, the site is designed to be more than the typical “niche job search board.” There is, he said, “a disconnect between the key players” that Green Workforce Connect is trying to address.” Matching applies to contractors, job seekers, and organizations implementing WAP.
Kari Lydersen at Energy News Network writes:
Larry Zarker, CEO of the Building Performance Institute that certifies weatherization training programs, said he hopes the new federal funding and efforts like Green Workforce Connect will lead to a long-term workforce training pipeline and growing industry.
“Back in the (ARRA) era, a lot of money was thrown out there for training, everyone got certified, the money was spent and then it was gone,” Zarker said, likening a graph of the funding trajectory to an image of a snake that had swallowed a giraffe.
“There was an incredible rise in people trained and there weren’t jobs to sustain it. Now there is money for training and certification, but it’s over a 10-year period” — rather than three years with the ARRA funding. “We can scale this as demand rises, and meet the market needs.”
While critics downplay weatherization jobs as unattractive, they allow people to get involved without a college degree, get free training, and, if they prove themselves, get promoted within the field. John Fleet, director of weatherization and housing for Partners for Community Development, which provides federally funded weatherization in the Sheboygan, Wisconsin, area, said, “I tell my staff, younger people that work for me or prospective employees: the sky is the limit in what you can do with this program. I know people that have no college education, who became very successful as a weatherization installer, then became crew leader, became an energy auditor. Someone could work with us and go start their own business. It’s a very broad industry that intersects with many others. It’s a good nurturing place for someone to get their career started.”
—MB
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U.S. solar up 52% in 2023
Bloomberg New Energy Finance, along with The Business Council for Sustainable Energy, released their Sustainable Energy in America 2024 Factbook late last month. The 71-page report is chock full of information and enough charts to satisfy the nerdiest clean energy advocate. BNEF reported that the United States deployed 35.3 gigawatts of new electricity-generating capacity in 2023, which was a 52% increase over the 23GW installed in 2022. U.S. generating capacity from all sources of energy totals about 1,160 gigawatts. As of the end of 2022, 305 gigawatts of that capacity came from renewables.
Overall, in 2023, the U.S. added a record 42GW of new renewable power generating capacity to the grid. This includes rooftop generation on homes and businesses. Even though both utility-scale and rooftop solar set records for new installations, additions of wind fell to the lowest point in eight years. New builds of other renewable sources—biomass, geothermal, waste-to-energy, and small hydroelectric capacity—were small in 2023, just 35 megawatts of new biomass and waste-to-energy capacity were installed. But all told, wind, solar, biomass, waste-to-energy, geothermal, and hydro grew faster than any other major economic sector. Renewables contributed 972 terawatt-hours of energy, or 23% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2023, the most ever.
Among other bright spots, electric vehicle sales surged 50% from 2022, with 1.46 million vehicles sold. An estimated 7.5 gigawatts of battery storage was added in the U.S. in 2023, a 62% rise over 2022, raising the cumulatively installed capacity to 19.6 gigawatts. That’s an encouraging sign, but it’s estimated that California alone needs 37 gigawatts of storage capacity to avoid using fossil fuel backups like natural gas plants for times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
Meanwhile, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were 1.8% lower in 2023 than in 2022, and “energy productivity” set a new record in 2023 as economic growth outpaced energy consumption, growing 3.8% year-on-year. Over the past decade, while gross domestic product grown by 25.5%, primary energy consumption decreased 4%. This produced a 30.6% increase in productivity.
News on another front wasn’t as encouraging. Natural gas demand rose domestically and the country is now the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. While burning natural gas creates about half the emissions of burning coal, leaks from extraction, transportation, and processing can make natural gas emissions as bad as or worse overall than coal.
—MB
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ
In Los Angeles, Shade Most Often Goes to the Privileged. After the hottest summer on record, officials vow again to make the city’s tree cover more equitable. By Pilar Marrero at Capital & Main. Boyle Heights is one of many Los Angeles communities with a lower-than-average tree canopy, meaning those who live here suffer the most as temperatures continue to rise. The average tree canopy across Los Angeles is 21%, but in neighborhoods such as South Los Angeles and Pacoima it is only 5% to 7%. By contrast, in affluent areas such as Los Feliz and Brentwood, it is as high as 40%. “There’s so much need for greening in areas of the city like South Los Angeles and the northeast San Fernando Valley,” Schulenberg said. For years, studies have concluded that shade equity in Los Angeles runs along economic and racial lines and that the city must prioritize planting more trees in hard-pressed neighborhoods. “If you look at a map of highly vulnerable communities across Los Angeles that are impacted by a variety of factors, and then you look at a tree canopy map, they line up,” said Rachel Malarich, the city’s first chief forest officer. More than just aesthetically pleasing, trees and green space are a vital part of a community’s health and climate resilience
How the EV Transition Is Reshaping the Global Auto Industry by Stefan Nicola and Linda Lew at Bloomberg Green. The biggest transformation of the auto industry in a century is underway, as governments offer massive subsidies to speed up the shift to electric vehicles. In the past year, several surprises have emerged. One is the size of the lead Chinese automakers have opened, and just how difficult it will be for the rest of the field to compete with the lower cost and advanced technology of made-in-China cars. Another is the extent of the country’s dominance of the EV supply chain. And just as automakers have begun scrambling to catch up, the growth in demand for EVs has slowed globally. This combination could mean big losses for Western automakers and endanger ambitious goals for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that come from road transportation. Chinese brands account for about half of all EVs sold globally. […] China’s predominance is most pronounced in batteries, the most expensive part of an EV. More than 80% of EV battery cells are supplied by Chinese producers, backed by a supply chain that is increasingly putting the mining and processing of component minerals such as lithium, cobalt, manganese and rare earth metals in the country’s hands. The cost of batteries in China has dropped to $126 per kilowatt hour on a volume-weighted average basis, while packs are priced 11% higher in the US and 20% higher in Europe, according to BloombergNEF. In the meantime, Chinese manufacturers are already unveiling a new generation of batteries that rely on sodium, which is more abundant than the lithium now used in EV batteries, and less prone to catch fire.
RELATED STORY: How China will drive the energy transition in 2024
The Chinese Auto Conundrum. How can the U.S. hit its factory revitalization and climate goals when BYD and other Chinese automakers can sell for less? By David Dayen at The American Prospect. We have been here before. The United States invented the solar panel and then business leaders moved the production to China, which produced them cheaply. By the time U.S. firms wanted to re-enter the industrial production markets, China had taken over. An investigation revealed illegal dumping of Chinese solar components and violations of trade laws, and the Commerce Department readied countervailing duties. But the domestic solar installers coveted those cheap products, and got the Biden administration to delay the sanctions. Politically, Biden has little choice here, given who he’s running against and the threat to his domestic manufacturing agenda, where he has a good story to tell at the moment. The workers on the front lines of Chinese entry into the auto market live in Midwestern states Biden must win to earn re-election; the heart of the manufacturing renaissance is in red states where Democrats need to gain a foothold. But as Robinson Meyer writes, it feels like a losing battle. There are already 25 percent tariffs on Chinese autos, and both Biden and Donald Trump have talked about raising them more. But you could double or even triple BYD’s tariffs and they might still come in under most domestic EVs. And a Mexican factory would qualify BYD under the North American free-trade agreement to opt out of those tariffs, though I’m sure policymakers are thinking about how to avoid that circumvention.
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The Land Back Movement Is Also About Foodways by at Civil Eats. Native peoples have lost nearly 99 percent of their historical land base in the U.S., according to recent research. With it, they lost access to important hunting and fishing grounds as well as myriad places to gather and prepare food. For Tilsen and other Native thought leaders, the contemporary Land Back movement is about championing Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and economic opportunity while pushing back against long-standing discriminatory policies that continue to cause tribal communities undue hardships, including disproportionate poverty rates, outsized food insecurity, marked health disparities, and lower life expectancies. But it’s also about a powerful yearning to rebuild relationships to actual places—and the countless living things that inhabit them. In Montana, for example, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes now oversee 18,000 acres where bison roam once again. In Nebraska, the Ponca people have been growing their sacred corn on farmland signed back to them in 2018. In New York, the Onondaga Nation is cleaning up the polluted waterways, once abundant with fish, on 1,000 returned acres. In Minnesota, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe recently secured 12,000 acres within Chippewa National Forest, an important area for hunting, fishing, gathering, and harvesting wild rice. And in California, the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council (made up of 10 area tribal nations) is stewarding coho salmon and steelhead trout within a 523-acre property managed in partnership with the Save the Redwoods League.
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The LNG Industry Claims to Be a Climate Solution. Here Is the Reality by Julian Spector at Canary Media. Different interest groups promote wildly divergent ideas about the impacts of LNG at home and abroad. It’s harming American consumers, or it’s not. It’s a wildly destructive “carbon bomb,” or it’s helping the climate by displacing dirtier power plants overseas. Europe gets enough U.S. gas to be secure, or it desperately needs more LNG flowing from the United States. LNG is, at core, a profit-making venture carried out by a handful of large companies and their financiers. These corporations don’t get graded on how well they bolster American allies or obviate the need for new coal plants, yet those outcomes loom large in the rhetorical arguments made on behalf of this young industry. Canary Media recently published a deep dive into the controversies swirling around LNG. Now the Biden administration’s pause, which could last through the upcoming presidential election, has kicked up a whole new flurry of discussion. We scoured the available evidence to stress-test the most prominent claims being made about LNG and clarify what’s credible, what’s contested and what looks dubious.
RELATED STORY: Texas Activists Are Fighting to Stop Construction on One of the Biggest LNG Terminals in the Country
Climate Rules Reach Finish Line, in Weakened Form, as Biden Races Clock by Marianne Lavelle at Inside Climate News. Facing pushback from political allies and vulnerable Senate Democrats, as well as the growing risk of reversal by a future Republican Congress, the Biden administration has abandoned some of the most controversial elements of its climate agenda. Instead, over the coming weeks, federal agencies are set to finalize some long-awaited climate regulations in much weakened form. […] [S]ome climate action advocates are worried the Biden administration, by watering down some of its initiatives, will miss the opportunity to act before the planetary crisis worsens. “I understand the political urgency, and they should be putting things in place in order to try to meet that deadline,” said Nathaniel Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, referring to the Congressional Review Act. “But the climate clock is running out even faster. And I would like to see more urgency, in terms of not just completing the rules by a deadline, but making them aggressive enough to be on track to meet our targets.” […] [L]eading environmental analysts, including the Rhodium Group, Energy Innovation and Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, have concluded that the tax breaks, grants and other incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act alone will not get the United States to its carbon reduction targets under the Paris Agreement. In the view of the Biden administration and many climate action advocates, the economy will need more than carrots, but also sticks—in this case, regulation—to meet those goals.
ECO-QUOTE
“The next 20 years are already locked in with respect to climate. But the 20 years after that will be determined by what we are doing at the moment,” —Anders Levermann, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany
ECOPINION
From throwing soup to suing governments, there’s strategy to climate activism’s seeming chaos − here’s where it’s headed next by Shannon Gibson at The Conversation. Climate activism has been on a wild ride lately, from the shock tactics of young activists throwing soup on famous paintings to a surge in climate lawsuits by savvy plaintiffs. While some people consider disruptive “antics” like attacking museum artwork with food to be confusing and alienating for the public, research into social movements shows there is a method to the seeming madness. By strategically using both radical forms of civil disobedience and more mainstream public actions, such as lobbying and state-sanctioned demonstrations, activists can grab the public’s attention while making less aggressive tactics seem much more acceptable. […] In meetings with global activists in recent weeks, my colleagues and I have noticed a shifting emphasis to local climate battles – in the streets, political arenas and courtrooms. The lines between reformists and radicals, and between global and grassroots mobilizers, are blurring, and a new sense of strategic engagement is taking root.
RELATED COMMENTARY: After 38 attacks on art, climate protesters have fallen into big oil’s trap, it’s time to change tack
Q&A: Robert Bullard Says 2024 Is the Year of Environmental Justice for an Inundated Shiloh, Alabama, an interview conducted by Steve Curwood, host of “Living on Earth” public radio’s environmental news magazine, with Robert Bullard, a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University who is widely regarded as the father of environmental justice. DR. ROBERT BULLARD: I grew up in Elba, Alabama in the ‘50s and went to a segregated elementary, middle and high school. I grew up in a time when our streets weren’t paved. We didn’t have sidewalks, we didn’t have indoor plumbing or sewer lines. I left Alabama in 1968, and hadn’t been back to Alabama for any extended time. I got a call in June of last year from some of the people I had gone to school with saying, “Bullard, you need to come back to Elba,” because there’s a highway in Shiloh, which is outside of the city, in Coffee County, a rural area, that’s now causing flooding in the community. The Alabama Department of Transportation elevated the highway 10, 15 feet high and placed the community in a bowl. And stormwater is now pushing into the community. And I said what? I knew Shiloh was flat, it was farmland. There were no elevated highways or anything like that. And so I told him as soon as I get through what I’m doing, I’ll come. I went in July. And what did I see? It happened to be raining, and that highway was just standing tall over the community. We were there for like 45 minutes and I was up to my ankles in water. I said this is, this is terrible. This had been going on since 2018.
Labor and Climate Must Unite. That’s Easier Said Than Done by Paul Prescod at Jacobin. A review of “Clean Air and Good Jobs: US Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice” by Todd E. Vachon (Temple University Press, 2023). The book does a good job of giving a historical overview of the origins of the labor-climate movement and clarifying the major structural factors that make a pro-labor energy transition so daunting. The numerous featured interviews with labor-climate activists give readers a window into how trade unionists are thinking through these issues and the process of moving the needle in the broader labor movement. However, too often Vachon frames the issue in ways that are unhelpful for building the kind of labor-focused coalition that he promotes, at times repeating unproductive shibboleths that have become dominant in the left-wing environmental movement. Additionally, while Vachon highlights many positive and inspiring examples of labor-climate coalitions, a more detailed analysis of how these successful projects were built and sustained is necessary to help organizers looking to replicate these models in their specific contexts.
How to build the solar workforce to one million strong by 2030 by Will White at Renewable Energy World. The Interstate Renewable Energy Council’s 2022 National Solar Jobs Census reported that 44% of solar industry employers find it “very difficult” to find qualified applicants. Addressing that deficiency will require effort across the value chain to educate, train, and equip workers with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed as solar professionals. Like many a long journey, it starts with a methodical step-by-step approach. As demand for more clean energy workers heats up, the number of jobs in the oil and gas industry is declining. While there has been some recovery in 2022, employment in these industries is down from pre-pandemic levels. Some of that decline is due to layoffs, and some is due to workers leaving the industry to explore opportunities in renewable energy. In a 2021 survey of oil and gas professionals, 56% said they would be interested in pursuing opportunities in the renewables sector, compared to 38.8% who indicated that interest in 2020. […]Expanding the solar workforce quickly will require training to be easily accessible to those transitioning from other industries as well as those just starting out. The training needs to be available both virtually and in person so that workers looking to change careers can take at least some courses without quitting their day jobs. The training must also be accessible nationwide and affordable for all economic levels
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On a disinformation campaign to quash a proposed national monument by Jonathan P. Thompson at the Land Desk. An effort is blossoming to protect a stretch of western Colorado’s Dolores River and its tributaries with a national monument designation. While the proposed boundaries haven’t been nailed down yet, the monument likely would include the river corridor in Montrose and Mesa Counties in Colorado, downstream of a proposed national conservation area that is still working its way through Congress. A designation would withdraw the canyons — many of which have remained relatively pristine despite being in the middle of the Uravan uranium belt — from future mining claims and oil and gas leases, while not affecting existing valid claims or private land. Unfortunately, a mis-informed movement has emerged aimed at nipping the national monument concept in the bud. Last week, someone named Sean Pond started an online petition (and an accompanying Facebook page) aimed at halting “the designation of the Dolores River National Monument.” He claims the petition is “born out of a deeply personal concern for the residents of Gateway, Paradox, Bedrock, Nucla and Naturita,” and claims a monument would “impose severe economic hardships” on those communities by leading “to an immediate cessation of mining activities that many local families depend on for their income.” He goes on to say that hunting and grazing would be outlawed and the freedom to enjoy outdoor activities curtailed. If all that were true, then Pond’s petition might make sense. But it’s not true. Which is to say that the petition is using disinformation to incite fear and build opposition.
Real Climate Solutions Must Include Human Rights by Josephine Ferorelli & Meghan Elizabeth Kallman at Yes! magazine. There are so many ways that the climate crisis is making it riskier, more toxic, and less equitable for people planning families. It’s surprising, then, that these findings haven’t been at the heart of the climate-and-babies conversation. But even more surprising is how thoroughly the public conversation is devoted to the false climate driver, and the false climate solution, of population. In 2014 when we started Conceivable Future, on the rare occasions that climate and reproduction were discussed together, they were always framed the wrong way around: focusing on childbearing’s impact on the climate. As we began talking with people about their reproductive lives in a changing climate, we found that populationist rhetoric was a major obstacle to just having this conversation. In early media coverage we were often wrongly assumed to be populationists. The deeply ingrained population myth has been pervasive in the Global North for so long that it is now largely understood as common sense. Those of us in the United States are living in a dangerous confusion of policies that both push and pull at all our rights to reproductive self-determination. The narrative is not as simple as “have more babies” or “have fewer babies.” Rather, it is: “Your body is not your own.” Today more than ever, beware of population “solutions,” which are at best ineffective, instrumentalizing, and freighted by white supremacy and classism. Whatever problem it names, the population “solution” punches down, enabling powerful players to evade responsibility while continuing to harm.
