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As the Fracking Boom Spreads, One Watershed Draws the Line
As the Fracking Boom Spreads, One Watershed Draws the Line
After spreading across Pennsylvania, fracking for natural gas has run into government bans in the Delaware River watershed. The basins of the Delaware and nearby Susquehanna River offer a sharp contrast between what happens in places that allow fracking and those that do not.
Over the last several years, with the hydraulic fracturing technology in hand to extract natural gas from the tight formations of the Marcellus shale, the industry moved quickly and seemingly inexorably from West Virginia and across the prized geology of Pennsylvania. State maps that designate each well with a colored dot look as if a storm of confetti has blown up from Pennsylvania’s southwest, intensifying as it reaches the state’s rural and heavily forested northeast.
In 2008, the state produced only two percent of the country’s natural gas and the Gulf of Mexico 26 percent. By 2013 the percentages were nearly reversed: Pennsylvania produced 23 percent to the Gulf’s five percent. Now some 8,000 wells in Pennsylvania produce roughly 17 billion cubic feet of gas per day, and the expectation is that within the next decade new infrastructure will double those numbers, as well as add 60,000 miles of pipeline.
Only one area of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus has escaped the fracking storm — the portion that lies within the watershed of the Delaware River, the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi. Four years ago the gas industry was poised to spread into the Delaware River basin, which encompasses 13,000 square miles of land in four states. The industry had signed thousands of leases with watershed landowners. And although many of those landowners’ neighbors looked west at the industry’s growth in the Susquehanna River basin and wanted no part of it, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) was ready to give the go-ahead.
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The Rapid and Startling Decline Of World’s Vast Boreal Forests
The Rapid and Startling Decline Of World’s Vast Boreal Forests
Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about the fate of the huge boreal forest that spans from Scandinavia to northern Canada. Unprecedented warming in the region is jeopardizing the future of a critical ecosystem that makes up nearly a third of the earth’s forest cover.
The boreal forest wraps around the globe at the top of the Northern Hemisphere in North America and Eurasia. Also known as taiga or snow forest, this landscape is characterized by its long, cold and snowy winters. In North America it extends from the Arctic Circle of northern Canada and Alaska down into the very northern tip of the United States in Idaho, Washington, Montana, and Minnesota. It’s the planet’s single largest biome and makes up 30 percent of the globe’s forest cover.
Moose are the largest ungulate in the boreal, adapted with their long legs to wade in its abundant marshes, lakes and rivers eating willows, aspen and other plants. In the southern boreal forest of northern Minnesota, moose were once plentiful, but their population has plummeted. Thirty years ago, in the northwest part of the state, there were some 4,000; they now number about a hundred. In the northeast part, they have dropped from almost 9,000 to 4,300. They’ve fallen so far, so fast that some groups want them listed as endangered in the Midwest.
Moose carcasses deteriorate rapidly before they are found, and so forensics has not been able to determine why they are dying. Some experts surmise it could be that tens of thousands of ticks that mob an animal and weaken it. Others think it’s a parasite called liver flukes, or the fact that winters have gotten so warm the animals can’t regulate their body temperature and die from heat stress.
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A New Global Tinderbox: The World’s Northern Forests
A New Global Tinderbox: The World’s Northern Forests
Rapidly rising temperatures, changes in precipitation, and increased lightning strikes are leading to ever-larger wildfires in the northern forests of Alaska, Canada, and Siberia, with potentially severe ecological consequences.
Ted Schuur has spent the better part of his career making the connection between climate change and wildfires that are burning an increasing amount of land in Alaska and in sub-Arctic and Arctic forests around the world. So the Northern Arizona University scientist wasn’t all that surprised this summer to find his field stations in the interior of Alaska surrounded by fires on three sides. At the time, the state was well on track to recording its second-worst fire season ever.
The surprise came in mid-summer when Schuur took a few days off from his research to attend a meeting in Colorado. He had hoped the trip would give him a break from Alaska’s noxious smoke. The smoke in Boulder, however, was so thick that the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment was advising parents with young children and people with heart disease and respiratory problems to limit their outdoor activities.
As Schuur soon learned, the pall of smoke in Denver had actually drifted down from a large number of forest fires in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this summer,” says Schuur. “It seemed like half the continent was on fire at one time or another.”
Schuur wasn’t exaggerating. In June, as many as 25,000 men and women were fighting thousands of wildfires that were burning out of control in states such as Alaska, Washington, California, and Idaho, and in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.
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Will the Paris Climate Talks Be Too Little and Too Late?
Will the Paris Climate Talks Be Too Little and Too Late?
At the upcoming U.N. climate conference, most of the world’s major nations will pledge to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But serious doubts remain as to whether these promised cuts will be nearly enough to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.
It’s Paris or bust. Climate diplomats are preparing for a United Nations climate conference in the French capital in December that scientists say is probably the last realistic chance for the world to prevent global warming going beyond 2 degrees Celsius. Some kind of a deal will probably be done. But will it be one more diplomatic fudge or a real triumph for the climate?
In the run-up to Paris, governments have been asked to deliver pledges to cut emissions of the greenhouse gases known to cause climate change. The pledges, covering the period between 2020, when the agreement should enter into force, and 2030, are known asIntended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs in the U.N. jargon.
Major nations including the United States, China, the European Union, and Russia have submitted their INDCs. But unlike the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which only set targets for industrialized nations, all countries are expected to make pledges before Paris.
Many of the pledges sound ambitious, but analysis suggest they fall far short of what is likely to be needed to prevent warming beyond 2 degrees C (3.6 F) later this century — a goal set by nations at the Copenhagen climate negotiations in 2009. “It is clear that if the Paris meeting locks in present climate commitments for 2030, holding warming below 2 degrees could essentially become infeasible,” Bill Hare of Climate Analytics, a think tank, said during preliminary negotiations held in Bonn, Germany, this month.
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Rachel Carson’s Critics Keep On, But She Told Truth About DDT
Rachel Carson’s Critics Keep On, But She Told Truth About DDT
More than half a century after scientist Rachel Carson warned of the dangers of overusing the pesticide DDT, conservative groups continue to vilify her and blame her for a resurgence of malaria. But DDT is still used in many countries where malaria now rages.
Any time a writer mentions Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring or the subsequent U.S. ban on DDT, the loonies come out of the woodwork. They blame Carson’s book for ending the use of DDT as a mosquito-killing pesticide. And because mosquitoes transmit malaria, that supposedly makes her culpable for just about every malaria death of the past half century.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, devotes anentire website to the notion that “Rachel was wrong,” asserting that “millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.” Likewise former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has declared that “millions of people, particularly children under five, died because governments bought into Carson’s junk science claims about DDT.” The novelist Michael Crichton even had one of his fictional characters assert that “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.” He put the death toll at 50 million.
It’s worth considering the many errors in this argument both because malaria remains an epidemic problem in much of the developing world and also because groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, backed by corporate interests, have latched onto DDT as a case study for undermining all environmental regulation.
Bitter Wind: A Town Divided Over A Controversial Maine Wind Farm
Bitter Wind: A Town Divided Over A Controversial Maine Wind Farm
Grand Lake Stream area, and objections to their presence set up a conflict that pitted neighbor against neighbor.
In this nine-minute video, winner of the 2015 Yale Environment 360 Video Contest, videographer Roger Smith presents the viewpoints of the local proponents and opponents of the $100 million project. Those in favor see a revenue-generating, job-producing, green-energy boon for the region, with minimal environmental impact. Those opposed — including owners of the fishing, hunting, and tourist camps — see an eyesore that would mar Grand Lake Stream’s scenic vistas and drive away visitors.
Soon enough, class divisions emerge, with some locals who support the project saying that the camp operators and owners of vacation homes were edging out longtime residents. “We’re in a different class from them — they got money and a big camp on the lake,” says Travis Worster. “We’re just the people that used to live here.”
Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly?
Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly?
Is it 150 species a day or 24 a day or far less than that? Prominent scientists cite dramatically different numbers when estimating the rate at which species are going extinct. Why is that?
Most ecologists believe that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. Humanity’s impact on nature, they say, is now comparable to the five previous catastrophic events over the past 600 million years, during which up to 95 percent of the planet’s species disappeared. We may very well be. But recent studies have cited extinction rates that are extremely fuzzy and vary wildly.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which involved more than a thousand experts, estimated an extinction rate that was later calculated at up to 8,700 species a year, or 24 a day. More recently, scientists at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that: “Every day, up to 150 species are lost.” That could be as much as 10 percent a decade.
But nobody knows whether such estimates are anywhere close to reality. They are based on computer modeling, and documented losses are tiny by comparison. Only about 800 extinctions have been documented in the past 400 years, according to data held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Out of some 1.9 million recorded current or recent species on the planet, that represents less than a tenth of one percent.
Nor is there much documented evidence of accelerating loss. In its latest update, released in June, the IUCN reported “no new extinctions,” although last year it reported the loss of an earwig on the island of St Helena and a Malaysian snail. And some species once thought extinct have turned out to be still around, like the Guadalupe fur seal, which “died out” a century ago, but now numbers over 20,000.
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With Climate Change, a Terrifying New Normal for Western Firefighters
With Climate Change, a Terrifying New Normal for Western Firefighters
In the last two decades, officials in Colorado have watched as massive, months-long wildfires have become a regular occurrence in their state. A Yale Environment 360 video goes onto the front lines with Colorado firefighters who describe what it’s like to continuously confront deadly blazes fueled by a hotter, drier climate.
To many people, climate change is a distant, abstract concept. But to the men and women who battle wildfires in Colorado and throughout the American West, evidence of a warming world is something they face on a daily basis. In recent years, these fire crews have fought blazes that are larger, more frequent, faster-moving, longer-lasting, and increasingly unpredictable — the result of rising temperatures, diminishing snowpack, and more frequent droughts.
This e360 video, “Unacceptable Risk: Firefighters on the Front Lines of Climate Change,” produced by The Story Group, focuses on the people battling to save lives and property in a rapidly changing environment.
It tells the story of dedicated professionals struggling to come to grips with a new and frightening breed of fire. Once known as the “asbestos state” because of its low incidence of big wildfires, Colorado is now experiencing huge, record-breaking fires almost every year.
“We’re being asked to battle fires that didn’t exist 20 years ago,” says veteran firefighter Don Whittemore. “We’re seeing a level of fire and an intensity of fire and a risk to firefighters that hasn’t existed in the past. On a day-to-day basis we’re being surprised — and in this business, surprise is what kills people.”
Undamming Rivers: A Chance For New Clean Energy Source
Undamming Rivers: A Chance For New Clean Energy Source
Many hydroelectric dams produce modest amounts of power yet do enormous damage to rivers and fish populations. Why not take down these aging structures, build solar farms in the drained reservoirs, and restore the natural ecology of the rivers?
Hydroelectric power is often touted as clean energy, but this claim is true only in the narrow sense of not causing air pollution. In many places, such as the U.S. East Coast, hydroelectric dams have damaged the ecological integrity of nearly every major river and have decimated runs of migratory fish.
This need not continue. Our rivers can be liberated from their concrete shackles, while also continuing to produce electricity at the site of former hydropower dams. How might that occur? A confluence of factors — the aging of many dams, the advent of industrial-scale alternative energy
sources, and increasing recognition of the failure of traditional engineering approaches to sustain migratory fish populations — raises fresh possibilities for large rivers to continue to help provide power and, simultaneously, to have their biological legacies restored.
The answer may lie in “sharing” our dammed rivers, and the concept is straightforward. Remove aging hydroelectric dams, many of which produce relatively small amounts of electricity and are soon up for relicensing. When waters recede, rivers will occupy only part of the newly exposed reservoir bottoms. Let’s use these as a home for utility-scale solar and wind power installations, and let’s employ the existing power line infrastructure to the dams to connect the new solar and wind power facilities to the grid. This vision both keeps the electricity flowing from these former hydropower sites, while helping to resurrect once-abundant fish runs, as has recently happened in Maine.
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As Ocean Waters Heat Up, A Quest to Create ‘Super Corals’
As Ocean Waters Heat Up, A Quest to Create ‘Super Corals’
With the world’s coral reefs increasingly threatened by warmer and more acidic seas, scientists are selectively breeding corals to create species with the best chance to survive in the coming century and beyond. Are genetically modified corals next?
In Hawaii this summer, as corals engage in their once-a-year courtship ritual of releasing sperm and eggs into the water by moonlight, Ruth Gates will oversee a unique mating: the coming together of “super-corals” in her lab.
Gates and her team at the Institute of Marine Biology in Kaneohe tagged corals in their local waters that thrived through a heinous hot spell last September. A few of those rugged specimens will be picked for arranged marriages this month, hopefully yielding some offspring even better suited
to thriving in the warmer waters of the future. It will be, she thinks, the first selective mating of corals to try to help them thrive in the face of climate change.
Gates and her colleague, Madeleine van Oppen at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, have been awarded $3.9 million from Paul G. Allen’s philanthropic organization Vulcan Inc. for this and other work into the “assisted evolution” of corals — an attempt to intentionally beef up the genetic stock of reefs to survive the onslaught of climate change. “This idea of homing in on super-performers is a no-brainer,” says Gates. “We have been doing it in the food supply for millennia.”
The work can be tricky — corals don’t like to be touched when breeding. And it’s controversial — some find the idea of active intervention in coral ecosystems disconcerting, since it turns a natural environment into a planned one that might be less biodiverse and less resilient to unexpected challenges like disease. The idea of tinkering with coral genetics is even touchier, even if current work focuses on simple selective breeding for the hardiest corals, rather than on the more controversial prospect of producing corals that have been genetically modified.
The Wild Alaskan Lands at Stake If the Pebble Mine Moves Ahead
The Wild Alaskan Lands at Stake If the Pebble Mine Moves Ahead
The proposed Pebble Mine in southwestern Alaska is a project of almost unfathomable scale. The Pebble Limited Partnership intends to excavate a thick layer of ore — nearly a mile deep in places — containing an estimated 81 billion pounds of copper, 5.6 billion pounds of molybdenum, and 107 million ounces of gold. The mine would cover 28 square miles and require the construction of the world’s largest earthen dam — 700 feet high and several miles long — to hold back a 10-square-mile containment pond filled with up to 2.5 billion tons of sulfide-laden mine waste.
All this would be built not only in an active seismic region, but also in one of the most unspoiled and breathtaking places on the planet — the headwaters of Bristol Bay, home to the world’s most productive salmon fishery. Composed of tundra plain, mountain ranges, hundreds of rivers, and thousands of lakes, the greater Bristol Bay region encompasses five national parks and wildlife refuges, and one of the largest state parks in the U.S.
Landscape photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum first came to this region in 1998, and was immediately captivated by its beauty. He is now part of a broad-based campaign — which includes numerous conservation groups, fishermen’s organizations, and corporations such as Orvis, Patagonia, and Tiffany — to halt the Pebble Mine. Despite a highly critical environmental impact assessment from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year and the defection of major investors, Pebble Mine is not dead, its fate currently wending its way through state and federal courts.
Ketchum is hopeful that his photographs — depicting what he describes as “one of the most beautiful places I have ever had the pleasure of spending time” — may help tip the scales against the gargantuan mine project.
Why the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement May Ultimately Win
Why the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement May Ultimately Win
The fossil fuel divestment campaign has so far persuaded only a handful of universities and investment funds to change their policies. But if the movement can help shift public opinion about climate change, its organizers say, it will have achieved its primary goal.
Nestled in Vermont’s bucolic Champlain valley, Middlebury College is a seedbed of environmental activism. Middlebury students started 350.org, the environmental organization that is fighting climate change and coordinating the global campaign for fossil-fuel divestment. Bill McKibben, the writer and environmentalist who is spearheading the campaign, has taught there since 2001. Yet Middlebury has declined to sell the oil, gas, and coal company holdings in its $1 billion endowment.
McKibben’s alma mater, Harvard University — which has a $36 billion endowment, the largest of any university — also has decided not to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies. Indeed, virtually all of the United States’ wealthiest universities, foundations, and public pension funds have resisted pressures to sell their stakes in fossil fuel companies. And while a handful of big institutional investors — Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Stanford University, and AXA, a French insurance company — have pledged to sell some of their coal investments, coal companies account for less than 1 percent of the value of publicly traded stocks and an even smaller sliver of endowments.
Put simply, the divestment movement is not even a blip on the world’s capital markets.
Yet McKibben says the campaign is succeeding “beyond our wildest possible dreams.” By email, he tells Yale Environment 360:
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