GREEN OUTSOURCING

New $1 billion Lego factory in Vietnam planned to be 100% powered by solar energy


Ryan General
Thu, December 9, 2021

Lego is responding to growing demands in Asia by investing $1 billion to build a toy factory in Vietnam.

Second site in Asia: In a recent press release, the Danish toy company revealed that it is erecting a new 44-hectare (109-acre) facility in Binh Duong Province, which is about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Ho Chi Minh City.

The site, which will cater to consumers in the Southeast Asian region, will be the company’s sixth factory, in addition to the one in China, the one in Mexico and the three in Europe.

Construction is set to start in the latter half of 2022 with a 2024 target for the first toy production. Once built, the site is expected to generate up to 4,000 jobs over the following decade and a half.

“This investment will help us to bring the power of Lego play to future generations of children,” Lego’s Chief Operations Officer Carsten Rasmussen was quoted as saying. “We want to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow, and it is critical that we do so by acting in the most sustainable way possible.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Rasmussen said the company sees growth opportunities in Southeast Asia “above all” other regions.

“Our strategy is to have our manufacturing locally and adapt to changes in demand locally,” he noted. “It has really helped our resilience this year.”

Lego opened its largest Southeast Asian store at 3,165 square feet near the Universal Studios Globe in Sentosa, Singapore this year. It also opened Southeast Asia’s first Lego “retailtainment” in Jakarta.

Carbon neutral factory: The project, which is made possible through a Memorandum of Understanding between the Lego Group and Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park Joint Venture Company Limited (VSIP), is aiming for a facility that will “be the Lego Group’s first carbon neutral run factory.”

The two parties have committed to replacing the vegetation removed due to construction by planting 50,000 trees in Vietnam.

In addition to the planned solar panels on the new factory’s roof, VSIP will build a solar project near the plant to produce 100% of its power needs.

The compound will also “accommodate electric vehicles and be outfitted with energy efficient production equipment.”

POLITICAL ECOLOGY; ENDEMIC ZOONOSES

Bird Flu Is Raging, Adding to the Risks for Food Inflation

Megan Durisin and Jasmine Ng, Bloomberg News

BC-Bird-Flu-Is-Raging-Adding-to-the-Risks-for-Food-Inflation , Megan Durisin and Jasmine Ng

(Bloomberg) -- The world’s poultry farmers are battling another grim spell of bird-flu cases, risking higher chicken prices and fewer free-range eggs.

More than 40 countries across Europe, Asia and Africa have seen outbreaks since May, according to World Organisation for Animal Health data. It’s threatening to drive food prices, which are near record levels, even higher and boost costs for households that are already suffering from surging prices for other commodities.   

Millions of birds were culled in Europe last winter due to the virus, whose highly pathogenic varieties can be deadly to poultry. Cases this year are rising earlier than usual, forcing countries like the U.K. to order birds indoors to shield them from the disease. The new wave of bird-flu risks making poultry even pricier, with European chicken output already hampered by labor shortages and high feed and energy costs, Rabobank’s Nan-Dirk Mulder said.

“It’s an additional factor that will impact food-price inflation,” said Mulder, a global poultry specialist. “It looks again like it’s a really high-pressure year for avian influenza in Europe and globally.”

A United Nations gauge of world meat prices has climbed 16% this year, and is at the highest seasonal level since 2014. Poultry production is largely adequate to meet global demand, but shipping hurdles and flu outbreaks in Europe and Asia are adding to supply challenges, the UN’s food agency said last month.

Farmers are now in a critical phase as cases of the virus typically peak from October to April. This year’s spread is showing “unprecedented genetic variability,” with a wide range of subtypes circulating in wild birds and on farms, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health. 

Bird Culling 

Poland, the continent’s largest chicken producer, has culled more than a million birds since early November. Danish turkeys and German geese have also been hit, and France recently reported an outbreak in egg-laying hens, after a massive outbreak on duck farms in early 2021. 

The number of birds affected remains a fraction of overall poultry production. But the risks could weigh on farmer sentiment and discourage expansion, Mulder said. Producers raising free-range hens may also be forced to sell eggs as lower-value barn-raised supply, if the birds are forced indoors for an extended period. 

The disease also disrupts trade flows, and the U.S. and Brazil -- which top the EU in chicken exports -- may grab further market share.

Europe has “tight supply and high prices,” Mulder said. “Taking into account that avian influenza is spreading now so fast over Europe, my view is that this will depress production further.”

UN chief: Climate change aggravates conflict and terrorism

EDITH M. LEDERER
Thu, December 9, 2021,

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Climate change is “an aggravating factor” for instability, conflict and terrorism, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday.

The U.N. chief said the regions that are most vulnerable to climate change “also suffer from insecurity, poverty, weak governance and the scourge of terrorism.”

Guterres told a U.N. Security Council meeting on the link between climate change, conflict and terrorism that when climate disruptions hinder the ability of government institutions to provide public services, “it fuels grievances and mistrust towards authorities.”


And when the impact of climate change leads to people losing livelihoods, “the promises of protection, income and justice -- behind which terrorists sometimes hide their truce designs -- become more attractive,” he said.

In Africa’s Lake Chad basin region, Guterres said, the extremist group Boko Haram has been able to gain new recruits, “particularly from local communities disillusioned by a lack of economic opportunities and access to essential resources.”

“In central Mali, terrorist groups have exploited the growing tensions between herders and farmers to recruit new members from pastoralist communities, who often feel excluded and stigmatized,” the secretary-general said.

In Iraq and Syria, Islamic State extremists have “exploited water shortages and taken control of water infrastructure to impose its will on communities” he said, while in Somalia charcoal production has been a source of income for the al-Shabab extremist group.

Guterres said that “climate impacts compound conflicts and exacerbate fragility,” adding that U.N. peacekeeping or political missions are in eight of the 15 countries most exposed to climate risks. He did not name the countries.

The U.N. chief urged collective action to address the root causes of insecurity, stressing that “conflicts and terrorism do not take place in a vacuum.”

He urged increased investment to help developing countries adapt to the impact of climate change, saying developed countries must keep their promise to provide at least $100 billion a year to developing countries for climate action. He said these costs are expected to reach up to $300 billion a year by 2030.

Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum, whose country holds the Security Council presidency this month and chaired the meeting, said in Africa’s Sahel region, where his country is located, a key challenge is fighting terrorists whose “hateful acts on a daily basis are shaking the foundation of democratic states.”

“Among these challenges we also have climate change which by reducing access to resources is increasing poverty and all the scourges that go with that,” he said.

Bazoum expressed hope the Security Council would adopt a resolution that Niger and Ireland are co-sponsoring. It would recognize a link between ensuring international peace and security, which is the council's mandate, and the fight against terrorism and the effects of climate change.

He said the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin illustrate the interaction between the effects of climate change and peace and security.

“The consequences of this phenomenon -- and we still don’t know how widespread it is -- has led to the disintegration of the social fabric and the well-being of the populations forced into unbridled competition for access to resources” which are becoming rarer, Bazoum said.

The result is often inter-community conflicts and increased migration, and “even more worrying, this situation has contributed to feeding violent extremism and large-scale crime, leading some young people to join organized criminal and terrorist networks who previously enjoyed the riches and biodiversity of their regions.”

Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason said the Security Council has a responsibility “to break this vicious and self-reinforcing cycle.”

She urged support for what she called the “critical resolution,” saying: “This council must recognize and accept its role in the fight against climate change.”

“We need to integrate climate-related security risks into our conflict resolution, prevention and mediation efforts,” Byrne Nason said. “Doing so will help maintain international peace and security. Failure to do so is unconscionable.”

But Russia’s ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, whose country has veto power in the council, said: “For us, the connection between terrorism and climate change is not clear.”

He said the potential for work on this issue should be carried out in other U.N. bodies like the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council or the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. He said the Security Council should focus on “overcoming potential conflicts and future ones.”

House Democrats Reintroduce Bill To Ban Fracking, Oil Exports


Editor OilPrice.com
Fri, December 10, 2021

Two House Democrats reintroduced this week a bill targeting a ban on fracking, halting new fossil fuel power plants, and ending U.S. oil and gas exports, just as a group of Republicans introduced a bill aimed at protecting America’s energy security.

Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a Senior Chief Deputy Whip and Chair of the Energy and Commerce Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee, and Congresswoman Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-CA) reintroduced this week their so-called Future Generations Protection Act of 2021, which, they say, “would help ensure a rapid shift away from fossil fuel to clean renewable energy.”

“The Future Generations Protection Act is a critical step in our transition to clean energy and reaching the United States target to reduce emissions by 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030,” Congresswoman Schakowsky said in a statement.

“As we continue to #CombatClimateChange the U.S. must transition away from dirty fossil fuels toward clean energy!” Schakowsky tweeted this week.

The bill is endorsed by a number of environmental organizations, including Food & Water Watch, Sierra Club, Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth, Center for Biological Diversity, Zero Hour, Progressive Democrats of America, Earthworks, and Climate Hawks Vote.

“This bill is the most comprehensive approach to achieving that necessary goal – by stopping fracking, putting a halt to new fossil fuel power plants, and ending the oil and gas exports that deepen global dependence on dirty forms of energy,” said Food & Water Watch Policy Director Mitch Jones.

The bill is reintroduced just as a group of Republican lawmakers introduced another bill that would protect the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserves and shore up U.S. energy security.

“The SPR is not supposed to be tapped as a bailout for the President’s anti-fossil fuel agenda, which has led to the highest gas prices in seven years.” Republican Leader Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said.

The bill would prevent the Secretary from “executing the first drawdown of petroleum products in the Reserve” except when there is a “severe energy supply interruption”, the text reads—even in the form of SPR loans—until the Secretary develops a plan to increase the percentage of federal lands leased for oil and gas production by the same percentage of oil set to be released from the SPR.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

Tropical forests can recover surprisingly quickly on deforested lands – and letting them regrow naturally is an effective and low-cost way to slow climate change


Robin Chazdon, Professor Emerita of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Catarina Conte Jakovac, Associate professor of Plant Science, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Lourens Poorter, Professor of Functional Ecology, Wageningen University, and Bruno Hérault, Tropical Forest Scientist, Forests & Societies Research Unit, Cirad
Thu, December 9, 2021, 12:03 PM·6 min read

A 32-year-old forest on former pastureland in northeastern Costa Rica. Robin Chazdon, CC BY-ND

Tropical forests are among the world’s best tools for fighting climate change and the loss of wild species. They store huge quantities of carbon, shelter thousands of plants and animals and are home to Indigenous peoples who sustain them. That’s why more than 100 world leaders pledged to halt deforestation by 2030 at the recent United Nations conference on climate change in Glasgow.

Many organizations and communities are working to restore native forests by reclaiming unproductive or abandoned land and carrying out costly tree-planting efforts. These efforts are designed to encourage the return of native plants and animals and to recover the ecological functions and goods that those forests once provided. But in many cases forests can recover naturally, with little or no human assistance.

We are forest ecologists and members of a collaborative research network that studies secondary forests – those that regrow naturally after an area has been cleared and cultivated or grazed. In a newly published study in the journal Science, our group pioneers an approach to forest recovery that provides insights from over 2,200 forest plots in naturally regrowing tropical forests across the American and West African tropics.

Our research shows that tropical forests recover surprisingly quickly: They can regrow on abandoned lands and recover many of their old-growth features, such as soil health, tree attributes and ecosystem functions, in as little as 10 to 20 years. However, to support effective forest restoration and planning, it is important to understand how quickly different forest functions and attributes recover.

Cattle graze in pasture filled with tree stumps
Forests come back

Most forests around the world today have regrown after human and natural disturbances, including fires, floods, logging and clearance for agriculture. For example, forests recovered in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries and in the eastern U.S. from the early to mid-20th century. Today the northeastern U.S. has more forest cover than it did 100 to 200 years ago.

Now, across the world’s tropical regions, forests are regrowing on approximately 3 million square miles (8 million square kilometers) of former farm and ranch land. Scientists and policymakers widely agree that it is critical to protect these regrowing forests and prevent more destruction and conversion of old-growth forests.

Tropical forests are more than just trees – they are complex, dynamic networks of plants, animals and microbes. Forest recovery takes time and often has unpredictable outcomes and variable pathways. Recovery patterns differ between wet and dry tropical forests.

To date, this active research area emphasizes studies that examined how specific features of forests, such as the number of species they contain or tree biomass, change over time and space. We believe it is important to understand forest recovery as an integrated process that is shaped by local, landscape and historical conditions.

A multidimensional view of tropical forest recovery

Our study focused on 12 attributes that are essential components of healthy forests. They include:


Soil: How much organic carbon and nitrogen does it contain, and how compacted is it? Soil that is too densely compacted – for example, by the hooves of grazing cattle – is hard for plant roots to penetrate and doesn’t absorb water well, which can lead to erosion.


Ecosystem functioning: How does the abundance and size of trees change as the forest regrows? What is the role in forest regrowth of trees that have root associations with nitrogen-fixing bacteria? How does regrowth affect the average density of wood and the durability of leaf tissues?


Forest structure: How do maximum tree size, variation in tree size, and total biomass – the quantity of plant matter above ground in tree trunks, branches and leaves – change as forests regrow?


Diversity and composition of tree species: How do the numbers of tree species present and the diversity and abundance patterns of species change and become more similar to nearby old-growth forests?

To assess long-term recovery rates, we compared attributes across forests growing on farmlands that had been abandoned at different times and compared regrowing forests with neighboring old-growth forests. We developed a new modeling approach to estimate how quickly each attribute recovered.

Many of these attributes depend on one another. For example, if trees regrow quickly they may produce a lot of leaf litter, which will restore levels of organic carbon in the soil when it decomposes. We analyzed these connections by comparing how strongly forest attributes were associated with one another.

The forests we studied were in areas of low- to moderate-intensity land use, meaning that soils were not exhausted or eroded and quickly supported regrowing native vegetation. For example, in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest region, 10,425 square miles (2.7 million hectares) of forest regrew naturally from 1996 to 2015. There is much less potential for tropical forests to recover in areas where soils are heavily overworked and no neighboring forests remain.

Graphic showing how regrowing forests regain functions over time.

All of the forest attributes that we examined recovered within 120 years of regrowth. Some recovered 100% of their old-growth values in the first 20 years of regrowth.

For example, the soil attributes that we analyzed reached 90% of old-growth values within 10 years and 98% to 100% within 20 years. In other words, after 20 years of regrowth, soils in the forests contained virtually as much organic carbon and had similar bulk density as soils in old-growth forests.

This quick recovery reflects the fact that the soils at our study sites had not been heavily degraded when forest regrowth started. Ecosystem function attributes also bounced back quickly, with 82% to 100% recovery within 20 years.

Forest structure attributes, such as maximum tree diameter, recovered more slowly. On average they reached 96% of old-growth values after 80 years of regrowth. Tree species composition and above-ground biomass recovered after 120 years.

[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]

We identified a set of three attributes – maximum tree size, overall variation in tree size and the number of tree species in a forest – that, viewed together, provide a reliable snapshot of how well a forest is recovering. These three indicators are relatively easy to measure, and managers can use them to monitor forest restoration. It is now possible to monitor tree size and forest structure over large areas and time scales using data collected by satellites and drones.

The importance of natural regrowth

Our findings show that tropical forest regrowth is an effective and low-cost, nature-based strategy for promoting sustainable development, restoring ecosystems, slowing climate change and protecting biodiversity. And since regrown forests in areas where the land has not been heavily damaged quickly recover many of their key attributes, forest recovery doesn’t always require planting trees.

In our view, a range of suitable reforestation methods can be implemented, depending on local site conditions and local people’s needs. We recommend relying on natural regrowth wherever and whenever possible, and using active restoration planting when needed.

Masha van der Sande at Wageningen University and Dylan Craven at the Universidad Mayor in Chile contributed to the data compilation and analyses for this study.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Robin Chazdon, University of Connecticut; Bruno Hérault, Cirad; Catarina Conte Jakovac, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, and Lourens Poorter, Wag.

Read more:

Organized crime is a top driver of global deforestation – along with beef, soy, palm oil and wood products

To conserve tropical forests and wildlife, protect the rights of people who rely on them

Robin Chazdon consults to the World Resources Institute's Global Restoration Initiative. She received funding from the US National Science Foundation, NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program, the University of Connecticut, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Blue Moon Foundation to support field research on forest regeneration in Costa Rica that produced data included in this study. She is a co-author of this publication in Science and other 2ndFOR Network publications that use data from her projects.

Bruno Hérault receives funding from FFEM the French Fund for Global Environment (Terri4Sol project), from DeSIRA the European programme for Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture (Cocoa4Future project) and from FCIAD the Ivorian Competitive Fund for Sustainable Agricultural Innovation (ForestInnov project).

Catarina Conte Jakovac receives funding from funding from Cnpq within the SinBiose program for Synthesis on Biodiversity and Ecosystem services. She is is part of the coordination team of the 2ndFOR network on secondary forests and is a member of the civil society organization Alliance for Restoration in the Amazon.

Lourens Poorter receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant 834775 and from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO-ALW.OP24). He is one of the coordinators of the 2ndFOR research network on secondary forests.

Plants are working harder to combat air pollution, study finds. But is it enough?



Alison Cutler
Fri, December 10, 2021

Plants could be the world’s universal currency to buy time against climate change, but will it be enough? A recent study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California found that plants are working harder to offset growing carbon emissions across the globe through high levels of photosynthesis.

It’s a good sign, researchers said in a news release about the study, since it helps understand ways to mitigate carbon emissions, but it’s not powerful enough to halt climate change.

The observational study, which was published in Nature on Dec. 8, used “terrestrial biosphere models” and estimates of the natural carbon cycle to evaluate the response of photosynthesis to carbon through history. Then, researchers used previous separate reports on the relationship between carbon and photosynthesis to decipher changes.

According to the researchers, plants are photosynthesizing, where they “suck carbon dioxide from the air and produce their own food,” at a rate 12% higher than they were between 1982 and 2020. During that time period, global carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere swelled by about 17%, the study indicated.

“This is a very large increase in photosynthesis, but it’s nowhere close to removing the amount of carbon dioxide we’re putting into the atmosphere,” Berkeley Lab scientist Trevor Keenan, lead author of the study, said in the release. “It’s not stopping climate change by any means, but it is helping us slow it down.”

There are certain challenges that come with measuring photosynthesis across the globe, the study pointed out, including weighing the photosynthesis rates of brush land versus large forests, and relying on specific methods of observation, including satellite observations or proxies, to determine an outcome.

While satellite images can tell researchers how much green is covering a mass of land and estimate the amount of leaves and plants that are contributing to the photosynthesis process, it might not account for the heightened photosynthesis process caused by carbon emissions, according to the release.

By using previous reports and determining which observations used overly-sensitive and under-sensitive estimates of carbon emissions on photosynthesis, the team was able to come up with a number.

“Our estimate of a 12% increase comes right in the middle of the other estimates,” Keenan said in the release. “And in the process of generating our estimate, it allowed us to re-examine the other estimates and understand why they were overly large or small. That gave us confidence in our results.”

The team used previous reports from the Global Carbon Project to flesh out the history of carbon emissions and its impact on photosynthesis.

According to recent data from the project, the world saw a record drop in carbon emissions during 2020, falling by 5.4%. In 2021, however, the use of coal and gas outgrew it’s drop from the year prior, and carbon emissions are set to rebound to 4.9%, the Global Carbon Project predicts.

Given that carbon dioxide lingers in the air for longer periods of time than other greenhouse gases, researchers from Berkeley Lab said it was critical to examine how it would be possible to offset the consequences of rising air pollution rates.

Keenan also added that researchers weren’t sure how long the higher production of photosynthesis in relation to growing carbon emission rates would last. At some point, Keenan said in a release, it could saturate.

“We don’t know what the future will hold as far as how plants will continue to respond to increasing carbon dioxide,” Keenan said.

California goes to war with food waste. Composting is its next climate crusade


James Rainey
Thu, December 9, 2021

Sharbel Eid, general manager, grabs a sample of finished compost at the Recology Blossom Valley Organics facility in Lamont, Calif. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Trash never dies. Sometimes it’s not even trash.

That’s the notion behind a state law that on Jan. 1 will require Californians to separate organic material from their other garbage. It's a landmark reform that aims to transform the state's throwaway culture — not just to ease pressure on landfills but to reduce the climate-warming fallout of our trashy norm.

Senate Bill 1383 mandates that Californians toss unused food, coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels and other leftovers into bins they use for other “green” waste, such as garden trimmings, lawn clippings and leaves.


Waste haulers will divert the organic material away from traditional landfills to facilities that will turn the biological mishmash into products such as compost, mulch and natural gas.

In future years, individuals and businesses that don’t adequately separate their green waste can face fines of up to $500 daily. Cities that don't comply could be forced to pay as much as $10,000 a day per violation.

The state Legislature and then-Gov. Jerry Brown passed the law in 2016, seeking many benefits: reducing the flow of refuse to overburdened landfills and returning organics to the land, thereby improving soil quality, enhancing drought resistance, bolstering crops and, especially, reducing climate-warming gases.

A trailer dumps raw materials to be turned into compost at Recology Blossom Valley Organics last week. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

The age-old practice of dumping backyard detritus and kitchen waste into landfills produces methane, a super-pollutant as much as 80 times more toxic than carbon dioxide and a potent — though not long-lasting — greenhouse gas. Its rapid dispersal into the atmosphere makes it particularly harmful, and it runs counter to the state's ambitions for tamping down global warming.

The new regimen represents the most dramatic shift in California's solid waste policy since the introduction of curbside recycling in the 1990s. The new law also requires supermarkets and other big food providers to divert as much as a quarter of edible food now destined for dumps to food banks to feed the needy. And it mandates that cities buy products such as mulch and compost, thereby creating new markets for the byproducts made from organic waste.

“What we are really talking about is not the waste stream, but the recycled stream,” said agronomist Bob Shaffer, a composting authority and advisor to organic farmers. “We are pleading with the public, ‘We need recycled food, to help with greening the land around us, to work on our atmospheric challenges, to provide a natural solution for soil health.’ ”

More fundamental change could be coming to the state's waste stream next year, when voters will consider a ballot measure that would require plastic manufacturers to ensure their products are recyclable or reusable. The hope is to sharply reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in landfills or nature, particularly the ocean.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Still, more than half of the trash produced by Californians is organic material, especially kitchen scraps and garden waste, according to CalRecyle, the state agency spearheading the transition. The goal of the new state law is to reprocess 75% of the green waste by 2025. That means redirecting 17.7 million tons of organic material away from disposal, equivalent to the weight of more than 9.5 million cars.

The massive shift of green waste will require dozens of major public works improvements and the reeducation of residents and business people, to understand that most of what was once considered trash can be put to secondary uses.

Not all of the organics will be trucked away. Some food will be washed down garbage disposals and into the sewer system, where it will turn into methane and, in turn, potentially be recaptured and burned as fuel. A small fraction will be composted by homeowners or at community composting centers for reuse closer to the source. (Many environmentalists prefer this option because it doesn't require the use of pollution-spewing trucks to deliver green refuse to distant composting facilities.)

But most Californians probably will be too busy or distracted to reprocess their own green waste. They’ll depend on garbage companies to haul the leftovers away. And those haulers will need places to deposit the material, requiring the construction of anywhere from 50 to 150 large compost or anaerobic digestion centers, said Neil Edgar, executive director of the California Compost Coalition, a trade group that includes waste hauling companies.

Anaerobic digestion is a process that uses bacteria to break down the organic matter. When completed in sealed containers, the resulting gas can be harvested for fuel. Los Angeles County alone projects it could need a dozen anaerobic digestion plants, costing $840 million, to process 1.9 million tons of food waste a year.

“The work that’s needed is very deep and very wide,” Edgar said. “It’s monumental in scope.”

A tractor loads compost for a customer at Recology Blossom Valley Organics. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

The new normal will mean more composting centers such as Blossom Valley Organics South, a 485-acre facility at the south end of the Central Valley, operated by the waste company Recology.

As many as 600 semi trucks will one day travel as far as 100 miles, sometimes more, from Los Angeles and other locales to dump as much as 3,750 tons of discarded food and yard waste daily at the composting center, not far from where State Route 99 and Interstate 5 split.

Massive conveyor belts and spinners shake the organics into continually smaller pieces, sifting out as much plastic, paper, branches and other contaminants as possible. The biodegradables then go into giant mounds, as much as 400 yards long and a dozen feet high.

It takes up to four months for microorganisms to break down the waste. Giant tilling machines turn the “windrows” to keep them oxygenated, as the 135-degree piles release clouds of steam. Gypsum, rice hulls, redwood dust and other amendments can be added to transform the heaps into finished compost.

Scientists have found that this kind of reconditioning of biological matter produces far less Earth-warming methane and carbon dioxide than landfilling. The atmospheric benefit is compounded when farmers put the compost onto their fields, often to feed “cover crops” such as mustard that help sink carbon back into the Earth.

“It’s like a no-brainer,” said Kate M. Scow, a soil scientist at UC Davis, who has measured how compost helps remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. “You can’t build carbon in the soil unless you feed carbon in. ... It’s a way of closing the loop.”

Whendee L. Silver, an ecosystem ecologist at UC Berkeley, has estimated that applying an inch of compost to just 5% of California’s rangelands would suck enough carbon out of the atmosphere to equal pulling 6 million cars off the road.

Silver emphasizes the importance of regular citizens participating, alleviating the helplessness many have felt in trying to confront the climate threat. “I want people to know that simple changes in their everyday activities (such as putting food, paper, and green waste in a green compost bin instead of a landfill bin) can contribute to slowing climate change,” Silver told a UC publication.

Some cities have been recycling their green waste for years. San Francisco blazed the trail in 1996 when it turned excess food from the city’s wholesale produce market into compost. By 2009, the city required all residents and businesses to place their food scraps in curbside green bins.

Then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom places a compostable pizza box on a collection bin before signing a mandatory recycling and composting ordinance at the Ferry Building in June 2009. (Eric Risberg / Associated Press )

The city now urges residents to compost just about anything from their kitchens: tea bags, vegetable peels, stale bread, nut shells, fruit pits and all manner of leftovers: steak bones, crab and oyster shells, salad dressings, pasta, vegetable oil, jam and cooked meats.

San Franciscans have become inveterate composters, with trucks now shipping up to 550 tons a day of yard and kitchen extras to a compost center near the Central Valley city of Tracy. San Francisco also recycles nearly that tonnage in cans, bottles and plastic, meaning the city now reprocesses nearly twice as much material as the 600 tons of trash that it landfills daily.

“When we put our banana peels, egg shells, and coffee grounds in a kitchen compost pail in San Francisco, it ends up in a vineyard or a farm that then becomes a carbon sink,” said Robert Reed, a Recology spokesman with an evangelical fervor for recycling.

The city has ambitious plans to go even further, with Mayor London Breed announcing Wednesday that it plans to cut landfill dumping an additional 50% (from 2015 levels) by 2030. That will require deeper behavioral changes, such as less wasteful buying of food and the reuse of wood and other building materials.

Most cities, particularly in Southern California, lag considerably behind San Francisco. SB 1383 requires them to pass ordinances by the end of the year adopting the state’s alternative waste goals. That, in turn, will require renegotiating contracts with private waste-hauling contractors and sometimes force the purchase of new bins and trucks for green waste.

Facilitating the collection of food scraps, Los Angeles and other cities have begun pilot programs to provide customers with kitchen pails.

“In some places, they have a back order to get the containers the organic waste goes into,” said Joanna Gin, a lawyer with Best Best & Krieger, who is helping cities navigate the new rules. “Some of them don’t anticipate getting the containers before the Jan. 1 deadline.”

CalRecyle suggests that many cities and counties will be able to put organic recycling in place with waste collection fee increases of 5% or less. In a survey, most cities said they expect to raise rates between 1% and 20%, with about one-fifth of cities predicting rates will jump even more.

The complications don’t stop there. Some cities fret, in particular, over the requirement that they buy back organic waste byproducts. A formula based on population dictates, for instance, that a city of 100,000 purchase 8,000 tons of mulch a year, or the equivalent in compost or reclaimed natural gas, said Gin.

Oceanside is already giving away compost to 1,000 residents, but that only gets the city one-third of the way to the amount of the reclaimed products it will be ordered to buy each year. "At the end of the day, there is only so much compost you can put on the ground," said Colleen Foster, the city's environmental officer. "We're going to have to find a place to store the rest."

CalRecyle notes that local governments have other procurement options, such as using biofuel to power buses or clean energy to heat public buildings.

Cities scrambling to meet all of the law’s requirements — and facing fines of up to $10,000 a day for failing to do so — raised an outcry. That led the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom to approve a stop-gap measure earlier this year, allowing cities to take until 2023 to come into compliance, if they file an action plan by March.

CalRecycle has signaled that it wants to promote voluntary cooperation and avoid fines, though it will have the power to go after laggards on Jan. 1. Those cities, in turn, can fine residents who fail to separate their green waste from their other trash, starting on Jan. 1, 2024. That will mean waste haulers or code enforcement officers peeping into trash bins to make sure green waste, recyclables and trash are kept separate. If they're not, the penalties can range from $50 to $100 for a first offense and increase up to $500 for third and subsequent failures.

Californians will pay a price if they confuse trash you can use with trash you should lose.

San Diego trash cans lined up for pickup. A councilmember wants voters to consider repealing the People's Ordinance that makes trash pickup a city responsibility. (Andrew Kleske / San Diego-Union-Tribune)

"We are at this very pivotal point in waste management, for a couple reasons," said Nick Lapis, advocacy director for the environmental group Californians Against Waste. "One is that for the first time we are tackling organic waste. And that happens just as public awareness and attention to plastic pollution is peaking. So these two massive shifts in how we think about waste are happening at the same time."

Times staff writer Jaclyn Cosgrove contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

RACIST CAPITALI$M

Jackson's water system marked by a century of struggles



Keisha Rowe and Lee O. Sanderlin, Mississippi Clarion Ledger
Fri, December 10, 2021, 8:44 AM·8 min read

Nearly a hundred years ago, Jackson's leaders were just as concerned about its water infrastructure as they are today, but for different reasons.

"Jackson's Great Growth Develops New Problem," read a Clarion Ledger headline on May 17, 1922.

J.H. Fewell, then superintendent of the city's water plant, said the population was growing and more lines and upgrades at the treatment facility were needed to accommodate. Other city leaders agreed.

The coming neglect of the system and the eventual exodus of Jackson's white and middle-class residents couldn't have been on their minds.

Failure to do regular maintenance by several city administrations has left the system more like a sieve. Boil-water notices are alarmingly regular, with at least 25 issued in the city since February.

In 1988, a study by the Mississippi Public Service Commission found that many of the 1,400 water systems that existed in the state at the time — especially those smaller and privately-run — hadn’t been built with longevity in mind.

“A lot of these systems were put in with the cheapest materials available,” Commissioner Lynn Havens told the Clarion Ledger at the time. “After 20 or 30 years, there’s nothing left under the ground.”

Jackson, which has acquired several smaller systems over the years, is by all appearances in similar shape more than 30 years later.

A rate increase on the horizon, but still a long way to go

Meanwhile, the city's residents are left with water technically safe to drink according to standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency, but the damage is evident. Two-thirds of the 1,352 water samples taken since 2015 contain lead — 90 of them actionable by EPA standards — thanks to deteriorating connectors on the city's oldest lines. Outlines on how to fix the problems sit in the city's public works offices, but mean little when water revenue coffers sit practically empty.

Chief City Engineer Charles Williams said in November it would take more than a decade to fix everything wrong with Jackson's water and sewer systems, and that's only if the city acquires the money needed to make it happen.

City officials are currently mulling at 20% increase in water and sewer rates — the first potential increase since 2013. Even with the raise in rates, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said earlier this month the city's water utility would operate in the red for months, if not years, until it sees a change.

It could also backfire politically. Before he died in June, former Mayor Dale Danks told the Mississippi Free Press raising rates in the late 1980s was necessary during his administration to address fixes and shortfalls.

“Frankly,” he told the outlet in April, “it’s what beat me when I ran for reelection.”
Once straining from growth, Jackson's population loss leaves system crippled and struggling

For decades, city leaders have contended with a network of water lines prone to breaks, a result of previous administrations deferring maintenance due to costs, inaction or both.

Originally built in 1888, the city of Jackson purchased its initial water system from a private company in 1908. Jackson's population grew at a steady rate in the years that followed, prompting the construction of the J.H. Fewell Water Treatment Facility in 1914 to help improve water quality and distribution.

The plant originally had the capacity to produce up to 37 million gallons per day for Jackson’s residents. At the time, the city sent water across 500 miles of water lines, just a third of the size of the system today.

As Jackson’s population continued to grow, the water system itself was strained, forcing the city to make rapid expansions or acquire water works from surrounding municipalities. Many of the city’s oldest pipes are small and made from cast iron which is known to be durable, but easily susceptible to corrosion and breaking with age, experts said.

Since the system's inception, not many of the pipes snaking under the city have changed. As early as 1948, Jackson’s mayors and city councilmen have called for infrastructure improvements, especially where water is concerned. Former Mayor Allen C. Thompson made replacing sewer lines a primary focus in his reelection campaign in 1953.

The Environmental Protection Agency warned Jackson's leaders in 1978 that significant improvement were already needed to improve water quality — the precursor to warnings and consent decrees the city faces today. In 1979, the Jackson City Council and Danks, the former mayor, called for investigations and investments after a report from the state Board of Health criticized the years of neglect.

Things came to a head when a major winter storm tore through the state just days before Christmas in 1989. Hundreds of breaks across the city forced water shortages and outages that lasted for days.

"We're still getting water to most parts of the system, but the pressure has fallen off greatly," former Mayor Kane Ditto said at the time. "There may be areas that don't have water now."

A little more than 30 years after that, current Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba uttered eerily similar words after another massive ice storm crippled the system again, this time for a month.

"We do not have a definitive timeline on when the water will be restored to the tanks," Lumumba said during a Feb. 18 news conference. "We are continuing to pump into the tanks. We are continuing to try to recover."

One of the major plans city leadership undertook to begin addressing the issues was the creation of the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Facility at the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Ridgeland, which now processes most of the city’s water.

Completed in the early 1990s and able to process up to 50 million gallons per day, the plant was originally constructed to eventually replace the J.H. Fewell facility in its entirety when it was proposed in 1987. To date, J.H. Fewell remains in operation despite O.B. Curtis' processing capacity being upgraded to 75 million gallons per day in 1997.

The increased output does little to help when many of the pipes water has to travel to in order to reach customers are in severe disrepair. Surveys commissioned by city leaders over the years show as much as 40% of water processed by the city is lost due to broken and inefficient service lines.

To make matters worse, many of those pipes have lead connectors which have begun to leach into water as it travels through the system. Records from the Mississippi State Department of Health show that roughly two-thirds of samples taken of Jackson's water over the past six years have at least a trace amount of lead.
'One bite at a time'

Funding troubles started early in Jackson.

Millions in water bonds, grants and loans have gone into Jackson's water system since the mid-20th century, but it hasn't been enough. Even in the early 1960s, before Jackson began to see its population decline, broken water mains were common as the pipes below the streets gave out.

A 1987 study conducted on the city's system determined significant increases to water and sewer rates in Jackson were needed to address an unexpected water revenue deficit. According to the findings, without the increase, the city would have faced a shortfall of more than $3 million by 1992 thanks to slowed city growth and increased water usage.

Former Jackson Mayor Harvey Johnson, who served two nonconsecutive terms, said the problems seemed daunting during his tenure. The 1997 master plan commissioned during his first administration was aimed at addressing the problems slowly, but methodically.

“Even if we had $1 billion (today), it would be impossible to spend $1 billion. It would take us 20 years to spend that amount of money,” Johnson said. “It’s important to keep that master plan in mind and fix it one bite at a time.”

An ill-fated water contract with Siemens Inc. would make matters worse. Originally billed as a way to streamline billing and save money for the city over time, faulty meters sent erroneous bills to customers, if a bill was generated at all.

To protect consumers, city leaders over the years have instituted payment moratoriums as the city worked to find a way to fix the system. As a result, the city's water revenue coffers dried up to the point that money from the general fund was pulled to make spot repairs over the years.

The saga only came to an end last year after the city reached an $89 million settlement, but little was left to have an impact on the physical system after attorney fees and the city repaying itself to refill its dry water revenue coffers.

Due to February's citywide outage being declared a disaster, the city has gotten millions in federal disaster aid. Millions more has come in thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act. Even more is on the from federal infrastructure package passed in November.

It remains to be seen if every dollar will be more than a drop in a bucket that leaks more by the day.

This report was produced in partnership with the Community Foundation for Mississippi’s local news collaborative, which is independently funded in part by Microsoft Corp. The collaborative includes the Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Advocate, Jackson State University, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Mississippi Today.

Contact Keisha Rowe at nrowe@gannett.com, on Twitter 

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Jackson's dilapidated water system troubled by years of neglect

FARM NEWS

Rupert Murdoch Rustles Up $200 Million Montana Ranch

Wendy Bowman
Fri, December 10, 2021


Billionaire media honcho Rupert Murdoch and his wife Jerry have quietly picked up a roughly 345,000-acre working cattle ranch in southwest Montana from the Koch family, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Situated south of the city of Dillon, near Yellowstone National Park, the off-market transaction netted the Koch Industries subsidiary Matador Cattle Co. a jaw-dropping $200 million in what is reportedly the priciest and largest land deal in the state’s history — dwarfing the sale earlier this year of the approximately 80,000-acre Climbing Arrow Ranch near Bozeman, which went under contract for around $136.5 million after a bidding war.

“This is a profound responsibility,” Murdoch told The Journal via a spokesperson regarding the purchase of Beaverhead Ranch. The couple, who have been seeking to buy a ranch for about a year, said they plan to spend time on the premises, and to continue enhancing Beaverhead’s commercial cattle business and conservation efforts.

Originally acquired more than 70 years ago by Fred Koch, founder of the crude-oil gathering business that later became Koch Industries, the property houses the Matador Cattle Ranch, a division of Koch Industries, currently led by Fred’s son Charles Koch. About one-third of the land’s acres are deeded, and there are grazing rights on about 226,000 leased acres. The ranch houses nearly 7,000 cow/calf pairs, along with diverse wildlife population, including about 4,000 elk, 800 antelope and 1,500 mule deer. There’s also a 28-mile-long trout pond and 25 homes, mostly for employees.

In 2002, Beaverhead became the first U.S. ranch to receive Wildlife at Work certification from the Wildlife Habitat Council for outstanding natural resource management initiatives.

Murdoch, 90, serves as executive chairman of News Corp. — owner of Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London — and has an estimated net worth of $21.6 billion, per Forbes. The couple also maintain a 13-acre, $28.8 million estate and winery known as Moraga Vineyards in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air, plus a roughly 25,000-acre sheep and cattle farm in Murdoch’s native home of Australia.

As for the Koch family and their related entities: In March, they sold Spring Creek Ranch, a roughly 11,000-acre ranch in Kansas originally listed for around $23.2 million; and they listed their 131,000-acre Matador Ranch in West Texas several months ago for $124.45 million. One of the nation’s richest families, Forbes places the Kochs net worth at around $100 billion.

Chance Bernall of Beaverhead Home & Ranch Real Estate repped the seller with Joel Leadbetter of Hall and Hall. The Murdochs were repped by Tim Murphy of Hall and Hall.

Renewable energy company moves ahead with massive solar farm on Bill Gates-owned land

Mark Williams, The Columbus Dispatch
Fri, December 10, 2021

This tree-lined driveway, off of State Route 38, is part of the Madison County farmland owned by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates that might become part of a solar farm. The actual owner of the farm is a company called Midwest Farms, owner of about 6,300 acres of farmland in Union, Deer Creek, Monroe and Somerford townships.

A renewable energy company is moving ahead with plans to develop one of the largest solar farms in the U.S. in Madison County that includes land owned by Bill Gates.

The 10,000-acre solar farm would be built north of London near Plumwood and would cost at least $1 billion to build.

The project, called Oak Run, is in its initial stages, and Kansas City-based Savion says it likely will be next summer before it submits an application to the Ohio Power Siting Board, the state agency that approves construction of new sources of electricity. If all goes well and the project is approved, construction likely wouldn't begin until 2024 or 2025, the company said.

The Dispatch reported in June that Savion had an option to buy the 6,300-acre Gates farm in Madison County. Other surrounding property owners have signed on, swelling the size of the project.

“We look forward to developing a project that generates emission-free energy while providing financial stability for landowners and wide-ranging benefits for Madison County,” Sarah Moser, development director for Savion, said in a statement.

The project, expected to have an operating life of 35 years, could generate up to 1,600 megawatts of electricity at any one time, enough to power about 342,000 Ohio households, according to Savion. That's on par with some of the state's biggest power plants.

Property records don't directly link Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft, to the 6,300 acres. County records show Midwest Farms LLC of Monterey, Louisiana, is the actual owner of the farmland in Union, Deer Creek, Monroe and Somerford townships that belongs to Gates. Midwest Farms bought more than 5,000 acres for $27.1 million in 2009, the Dispatch reported at the time. Additional land was acquired in 2018 for more than $2 million.

Other documents and media accounts do make the connection, and Madison County officials have said it's common knowledge that Gates is the owner.

The announcement of Oak Run marks another step in the surge of solar farms in Ohio with more than 40 farms in some stage of development. Amazon alone is behind 16 of the projects.

But Oak Run would be by far the biggest in Ohio should it be built and one of the largest in the country.

Another huge solar project in northwest Indiana called Mammoth Solar will take up 13,000 acres. Ground was broken on the first phase of that project in October.

The Oak Run site is about 4.5 miles south of the Madison Fields solar project that Savion also is developing. Construction of that project is expected to start in August.

Savion says the ultimate size and design of Oak Run will depend on several factors, including how many landowners agree to participate, community feedback, regulatory requirements and efforts to minimize the impact of the project on the community.

Savion says the project would generate between $242 million and $504 million in tax revenue over its lifespan.

mawilliams@dispatch.com

@BizMarkWilliams

ESG: The majority of climate risk repricing 'is yet to occur,' strategist says

Grace O'Donnell

·Assistant Editor

Thu, December 9, 2021

Climate change has been called a consequence of the world's largest market failure. 

But as flows into ESG assets accelerate, it has led some to question whether or not sustainable investors are merely buying into a cycle of hype.

According to a new note from BlackRock that draws on a survey of 175 clients in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, analysts “see no evidence of a sustainability 'bubble'” and that sustainable assets have room to run as markets reprice climate risks.

Repricing assets to include climate risks “is a phenomenon that markets have woken up to in the last couple of years,” Vivek Paul, BlackRock Investment Institute UK chief investment strategist, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “We believe though, crucially, that the majority of that repricing is yet to occur.”

Paul also added that “while there will always be the odd company that might be overvalued, systematically, we believe we're far from any sort of notion of bubble territory.”

Climate-driven repricing relative to the dot-com bubble. Photo: BlackRock

The 'tectonic shift' in climate repricing

Paul previously predicted that as climate repricing evolves, there will be a "tectonic shift" in capital being allocated to combat climate change. 

“Fast forward to today and we believe that there is strong evidence that the dynamic is real and is affecting prices right now,” Paul said in the BlackRock note. “The cost of capital for securities perceived to be greener is falling, and vice versa. Yet, although this effect is now statistically significant, most of the repricing is still to come.”

This dynamic appears to be playing out in uncertainties over the green energy transition. For instance, Stephen Schork, principal adviser at the Schork Group, previously told Yahoo Finance that oil prices will fundamentally shift higher because “capital goes where it's welcome, stays where it is well-treated, and clearly, capital is not welcome in the fossil fuel industry.”

At the same time. while pressures are ratcheting up to address climate change with financial firms joining net-zero pledges, many large banks like J.P. Morgan continue to underwrite fossil fuel projects.

A surfer rides a wave at the Huntington Beach pier with an oil rig and Catalina Island in the background in Huntington Beach, CA on Friday, October 5, 2018. (Photo by Paul Bersebach/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

“In our view, the ESG journey is continuous," Ursula Marchioni, head of BlackRock Portfolio Analysis and Solutions, EMEA, stated in the BlackRock note. 

Marchioni explained that while some investors are "future-proofing" portfolios through specialized products to achieve specific aims, others are embedding sustainability more broadly into all aspects of their investment process.

“We expect that this latter approach — in which sustainability is seen as a core part of strategic asset allocation design — will emerge as the more prevalent one over the next 12-24 months,” Marchioni wrote.

When it comes to constructing climate-aligned portfolios, though, two major challenges have emerged: measuring sustainability profiles and measuring the impact of sustainability on risk and return.

That doesn't seem to be slowing down the demand for sustainable assets, however.

“We believe leaning into greener assets, all else equal, is likely to be [a returns] enhancer over the period of the transition that we're going to see,” Paul said.

Grace is an assistant editor for Yahoo Finance.