Opinion

November 4, 2024

Postcard from California: Climate change is fueling faster-spreading, more extreme wildfires

By Bill Walker

This summer, the Park Fire burned more than 425,000 acres near Chico, Calif. – the fourth-largest wildfire in the state’s history. It started when an arsonist pushed a flaming car into a grassy, brush-strewn gully, sparking California’s largest-ever deliberately set wildfire. But what set the Park Fire apart from the 7,194 wildfires that have burned more than 1 million acres in California this year was how fast it grew.

After first igniting on July 24, it spread an estimated 5,000 acres an hour – about one football field a second. In 24 hours it burned 150,000 acres, and in 72 hours incinerated an area larger than San Francisco. Fire experts said it was among the fastest-growing wildfires in history.

As it burned, Zeke Lunder, director of Deer Creek Resources, a wildfire management consulting firm in Chico, told The Washington Post that in 25 years of mapping large fires throughout the Western US, he couldn’t recall another blaze that spread so far so fast. He said the Park Fire “was moving in ways we aren’t used to seeing.”

It’s settled science that the climate crisis is increasing the number and frequency of wildfires. A 2016 study estimated that from 1984 to 2015, human-caused climate change contributed to the burning of almost twice the acreage in 11 Western states than might have burned in its absence.

Now, new research confirms that Western wildfires are also spreading faster.

In a study published Oct. 24 in the journal Science, a team of researchers analyzed images from NASA satellites to track the day-by-day spread of more than 60,000 fires in the continental US from 2001 to 2020.

They found that in that period, the average peak daily growth rate of wildfires in the West more than doubled. In California, wildfires spread almost four times as fast in 2020 as in 2001. They cited other research predicting that if global warming continues at its current pace, the frequency of the fastest-spreading fires in the West could double in 30 years.

“The modern era of megafires is often defined based on wildfire size, but it should be defined based on how fast fires grow,” the researchers wrote. “Speed fundamentally dictates the deadly and destructive impact of megafires… [F]ire speed matters more for infrastructure risk and evacuation planning.”

October 6, 2024

Opinion: Revealing the toxic lobbying power of Bayer

By Hans van Scharen

Big fossil-fuel companies like Shell, Exxon, BP or Total are not your trusted source to go to for solid advice on how to urgently prevent the climate from changing ever faster. But for halting the spread of cancer and all kinds of degenerative diseases, helping farmers out of their collective socioeconomic nightmares, combating hunger or how to avoid a further collapse of biodiversity, policymakers find it completely normal to engage with powerful agrochemical companies like Bayer and BASF.

Yet these companies produce many chemical products that are bad for our health, for the environment and increasingly for democracy itself, as shown by Corporate Europe Observatory’s new report Bayer’s Toxic Trails.

Whether it’s over glyphosate, GMOs, or global warming, we show how it attempts to capture public policy to pursue its private interests.

Bayer tries to legitimize this expensive lobby by being more or less transparent about it and calling it “political advocacy“. In fact, it is thanks to it’s deep pockets and economic clout capable of changing laws and regulations which should serve the general interest. Bayer simply wants to maintain monopolistic control of the seed and pesticides markets, fights off regulatory challenges to its toxic products, tries to limit legal liability, and exercises political influence.

First there is the element of global market power and ever increasing concentration, making them an essential part of a small club of global Food Barons. Just four of these multinationals – Bayer, BASF, Corteva and Syngenta – control over 65% of global trade in pesticides and at least half of the world’s seed trade. That represents a multi billion euro market, co-control over the world’s production of food, and very much related, loads of deep political influence on agricultural and environmental policies.

Just for the record: the successful lobby campaign to take down the Farm2Fork Strategy, a crucial part of the EU Green Deal, was the work of these companies, their consultancies and trade associations like Croplife (with a little help from their political friends, of course).

Bayer and allies were also spearheading the campaign to prolong the EU authorization for glyphosate with another 10 years, despite a wealth of scientific indications that show the product is a disaster for health, biodiversity, soil and water.

October 1, 2024

Postcard from California: State sues ExxonMobil for plastics recycling fraud

By Bill Walker

Last year, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a monumental lawsuit against five of the world’s largest petrochemical companies for an alleged “decades-long campaign of deception” about fossil fuels’ harm to the climate and the climate crisis’ devastating impacts on the state. The complaint built on similar fraud and liability suits against Big Oil by US cities, counties and states, and “rolled them all into a super-case” backed by the legal resources of the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Now Bonta has filed another sweeping lawsuit against ExxonMobil, also named in last year’s suit, alleging that for more than 50 years it has deceived the public by fraudulently promoting recycling as the solution to the ever-growing global plastic waste crisis.

Plastics are made from polymers – synthetic chemical substances derived from oil and gas – and ExxonMobil is the world’s largest producer of polymers used to manufacture single-use plastics. The suit claims that ExxonMobil’s advertising, marketing and lobbying campaigns have peddled the false promise of plastics recycling, even while knowing recycling “will never be able to process more than a tiny fraction of the plastic waste it produces.”

Americans discarded more than 50 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, but despite the deceptive chasing-arrows symbol on most plastic items, only about 5% was recycled into new plastic goods. The vast majority of plastic waste is dumped in landfills, eventually fouling oceans and rivers, littering the landscape, endangering wildlife and building up in our bodies. Curbing the crisis will require slashing plastic production, but the plastics industry keeps making more. Worldwide production is projected to reach 590 million metric tons by 2050, an increase of 30%.

“For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Bonta said in a news release. “ExxonMobil lied to further its record-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health. Today’s lawsuit shows the fullest picture to date of ExxonMobil’s decades-long deception.”

September 6, 2024

Postcard from California: Rising death toll from extreme heat demands action

By Bill Walker

On July 7, six German motorcyclists were touring California’s Death Valley National Park as the thermometer hit 129 degrees Fahrenheit – one degree shy of the hottest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth.

As they neared what is known as “Badwater Basin”, the cyclists were overcome by heat and couldn’t go on. Park rangers declared one man dead at the scene. Another was unconscious but recovered after an ambulance rushed him to a Nevada hospital.

Because of the extreme heat, the tragically ironic location and the victim’s nationality, the death received global news coverage. But It was far from the only heat-related death in California or the US that month as dozens of cities from coast to coast set all-time record high temperatures.

New research finds that heat-related deaths in the US have more than doubled in the last 25 years – a deadly toll that researchers say is a significant undercount, as many fatalities tied to high temperatures are not recorded as such.

More than 21,518 Americans have died from heat-related causes since 1999, according to a study published Aug. 26 in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association. That’s an increase of 117%, with a sharp spike in the last seven years. The study found that last year, Earth’s warmest on record, more than 2,325 Americans died of heat-related causes.

Researchers analyzed local authorities’ death certificates filed with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) listing “exposure to excessive natural heat,” “effects of heat and light,” or “environmental hyperthermia of a newborn” as either the cause or contributing cause of death. But they noted that death certificates may fail to list heat as an underlying cause of heart attacks, strokes, and other fatal conditions.

The study’s lead author was Jeffrey T. Howard, associate professor of public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In an email to The New Lede, he said almost half of heat deaths in the study period were in just four states: Arizona (4,242), Texas (2,484), California (1,905), and Nevada (1,606).

“Given that climate change will continue the current warming trend, it is imperative that our society, including local, state and federal agencies, as well as clinicians and individuals, take actions to mitigate the risk and reduce these deaths,” Howard said.

August 6, 2024

Postcard from California: Big Oil is not dead yet

By Bill Walker

As California advances toward its goal of virtually eliminating the use of fossil fuels in 20 years, the state has dealt the oil and gas industry a barrage of body blows.

Four years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars and trucks starting in 2036, while diesel-powered freight trucks will be outlawed by 2042. A 2022 law banned new oil and gas drilling near homes, schools and hospitals, and Newsom has directed regulators to end to all drilling in the state by 2045.

Last year, California also established a watchdog agency to monitor the state’s petroleum industry for alleged price-gouging at the pump, among other consumer protection provisions. And State Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a sweeping lawsuit against five of the world’s biggest oil companies for their decades-long coverup of the climate impact of burning fossil fuels.

The industry whines that the Newsom administration wants to put it out of business, and headlines declare that it faces the “end of the road” in California.

But Big Oil is not dead yet.

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July 25, 2024

The perils of plastics extend to our pets

By Aidan Charron

By now, you’d practically have to be living on Mars not to have heard about the health risks associated with plastics and the toxic chemical cocktail used to produce them.

Almost all plastics are derived from fossil fuels and have been found to contain over 16,000 chemicals, many of which are considered hazardous. Shockingly, despite evidence of harm, the US regulates only six percent of chemicals used to produce plastic, leaving potential health risks from most of the chemicals unchecked.

As plastics break down, they don’t disappear – they degrade into smaller pieces known as microplastics. When we eat, drink, or inhale microplastics, they leach plastic chemicals directly into our bodies.

To bring attention to these dangers, EARTHDAY.ORG released a report last November, Babies VS. Plastics, highlighting infants’ heightened plastics exposure and vulnerability to health risks. It makes for grim reading: microplastics and their additive chemicals are linked to interruptions in maternal-fetal communication, damaged DNA, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, early onset puberty, and some forms of cancers.

Writing that report, I discovered that crawling on the floor puts babies at increased risk of inhaling microplastics in household dust. And since babies chew on everything, they are also more likely to ingest microplastics. The report made me wonder about my own plastics exposure, and about my two rescue dogs, Buzz and Sally. Since dogs and cats crawl on the floor and chew on everything their whole life span, are pets, like babies, especially vulnerable to microplastics?

July 11, 2024

Congress should follow science and reject Bayer push to block lawsuits

By Nathan Donley

Millions of American users of glyphosate-based Roundup have likely assumed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would never have approved the pesticide unless it was safe.

But the science-based truth has never been as cut and dried as the EPA and Bayer, which bought Roundup maker Monsanto in 2018, have made it sound. In a series of trials across the country, juries – and the public – have learned that despite the safety claims by Bayer and the EPA, hundreds of studies by independent scientists link glyphosate herbicides to serious health harms, including cancer.

Even though Bayer maintains that its glyphosate products are safe and not carcinogenic, the company has thus far agreed to pay out more than $10 billion in settlement costs to tens of thousands of glyphosate users suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), and thousands of lawsuits remain.

In an effort to block further litigation, the chemical giant has turned its focus to getting federal and state legislation passed to block Roundup users from suing the company for damages. According to a recent Washington Post article, Bayer helped draft language for a legislative measure that would limit the types of lawsuits brought by the Roundup users. That measure is included in the US House of Representatives version of the 2024 Farm Bill, which is slated to be finalized later this year. The company has also been pushing lawmakers in several states to pass similar measures.

Key to Bayer’s messaging to legislators is that, because glyphosate is EPA-approved, research showing its harms should be rejected. But the process by which the EPA approved glyphosate decades ago has never been reassuring to independent scientists such as myself.

June 20, 2024

Postcard from California: The human cost of living with wildfires

By Bill Walker

The toll of wildfire in California is staggering: In the last 10 years, wildfires have burned more than 13.6 million acres of the state and taken the lives of 144 people, including 15 firefighters. The state estimates property damages from the more than 93,000 wildfires in those years at nearly $250 billion.

But sobering as those statistics are, they don’t measure the full cost to Californians from living with increasingly deadly and destructive wildfires.

A new study, led by researchers from the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), calculated that from 52,480 to 57,710 Californians died prematurely from exposure to wildfire smoke between 2008 and 2018. The study, published June 7 in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, estimated the economic impact of those lost lives at between $432 billion and $456 billion.

“Climate change, forest mismanagement and an expansion of the wildland-urban interface have led to worsening wildfires across California, and with those fires come smoke pollution and increasing health impacts from air pollution exposure,” Rachael Connolly, a staff researcher at the UCLA Fielding School and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “This is the first research exploring how that chronic, long-term smoke exposure affects people across the state.”

The wildland-urban interface refers to zones where people live near forests or other undeveloped areas at greater risk of wildfire. The high cost and scarcity of housing in coastal cities is pushing more and more Californians to move inland, swelling the population in areas more likely to burn.

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May 29, 2024

Postcard from California: Are corporate “climate offsets” just greenwashing?

By Bill Walker

Apple touts the newest model of the Apple Watch as its first “carbon neutral” product – made with “100% clean energy” and “recycled and renewable materials” and shipped by “lower-carbon modes” instead of by air. But a close look at the watch’s environmental specs shows that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in its manufacturing and supply chain only goes so far.

More than one-fifth of the claimed savings in emissions are attributed to Apple’s purchase of so-called climate offsets, including shares in a project to plant eucalyptus timber plantations in eastern Paraguay, far from its Silicon Valley headquarters or its factories in China.

The project’s backers say the climate offsets it is buying reflect a reduction in eastern Paraguay’s emissions from cattle ranching, a leading source of planet-heating methane. But human rights groups say the scheme is driving peasant farmers from their land for little actual climate gain as most of the newly planted trees will be harvested quickly for consumer products.

Apple is but one of many corporate giants that has pledged to cut its company-wide emissions to “net zero” by 2030, joined by Google, Disney, Netflix and many more brands.

Even ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron – the multinational oil companies that are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the last decade – say they will be net zero by 2050.

According to the nonprofit Net Zero Tracker, more than 1,000 of the world’s largest companies have publicly declared goals of net zero by midcentury or before.

To get there, most plan to claim their purchases of climate offsets, also known as carbon credits, as emissions reductions. Through exchanges called verifiers or certifiers, companies buy, sell and trade shares in schemes that promise to reduce emissions, supposedly offsetting the climate pollution the companies can’t, or won’t, eliminate from their own operations.

May 13, 2024

Corrupt politics, not science, power the US EPA

By Evaggelos Vallianatos

When I started my job in the Office of Pesticide Programs at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1979, many things quickly surprised and disappointed me – a pattern that persisted through my 25-year career there.

The first thing that astonished me was the scandal that came to light with the giant Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories (IBT). People would whisper in the corridors about fake lab studies. They would wonder aloud about the safety of our food. IBT was the country’s largest testing lab for drugs and pesticides, conducting toxicology studies for companies such as Monsanto until investigators discovered widespread fraudulent manipulation of test data. The US Department of Justice successfully prosecuted multiple IBT officials for fraud, and has caught others who similarly engaged in fraud to ensure approvals for risky products.

I learned the IBT story from Adrian Gross, a colleague in the EPA Office of Pesticide Programs. (Gross died in 1992.) We spent hours talking about the science and political corruption that often accompany the regulation of pesticides. Gross would speak of “cut-and-paste” science, in which studies the EPA relied on included passages simply copied from materials developed by the companies seeking approval to sell their risky products.

Over the time I worked at the EPA, I became convinced that the agency was serving industry much more than the public. My attempts to discuss concerns with supervisors made no difference, save for intensifying hostility toward me.