Firefighters are leaving the U.S. Forest Service for better pay and benefits



Alicia Victoria Lozano
Updated Sun, July 16, 2023

LOS ANGELES — Thousands of federal wildland firefighters could walk off the job if Congress fails to pass a permanent pay increase, officials and advocates warned amid an already scorching summer that could lead to an explosion of wildfires later in the year.

From 30% to 50% of the roughly 11,000 firefighters who combat wildfires across millions of acres of land managed by the U.S. Forest Service could resign in coming seasons without a longterm solution to persistently low wages and poor benefits, according to the National Federation of Federal Employees.

“This is an absolute crisis,” said Max Alonzo, an organizer with the federation. “The majority of people I know already have their applications out for other jobs and they’re just waiting.”

The situation has grown so dire that the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California saw 42 resignations in 48 hours in May, officials said.

Many of those firefighters left for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, which is viewed as a prime gig thanks to its generous salaries, robust benefits and manageable work schedule that was recently negotiated down to a 66-hour work week from 72 hours.

“Soon there won’t be anybody left,” said Steve Gutierrez, a former hotshot who recently left the Forest Service after 15 years to advocate on behalf of firefighters through the federation. “We train them and Cal Fire takes them.”

Aaron Foye, who resigned from the San Bernardino National Forest last September for a job as an engineer with Cal Fire, estimated staff shortages were so high when he left that only one out of four fire engine crews was staffed seven days a week.

“I felt like I was being selfish working at the Forest Service because I wasn’t really providing enough for my family,” Foye said. “All of our best talent with the Forest Service has bled out in the last two years."

Lawmakers have introduced bills this year in the House and the Senate that would codify an existing pay increase under President Joe's Biden's infrastructure bill, which temporarily bumped salaries for wildland firefighters by up to $20,000.

Without a permanent fix, that increase is set to expire at the end of September and roll back salaries for thousands of federal firefighters.

“We absolutely need Congress to take action and put in place a permanent pay fix,” said Forest Service Deputy Chief Jaelith Hall-Rivera. “If we’re not able to do that and we’re not able to give them that certainty going into the future, they are going to need to look elsewhere for a position that does provide that certainty.”

Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of six senators introduced the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act, which would keep the current pay raise and help to ensure the federal government can recruit and retain a sufficient firefighting workforce for years to come.

In May, a bipartisan bill was reintroduced in the House that would similarly increase pay and address firefighters' mental and physical health, housing, retirement and tuition assistance benefits. It was referred to the forestry subcommittee in June.

Federal wildland firefighters have long warned that without a permanent pay raise, their ranks would dwindle even as wildfires continue to increase in both intensity and frequency across the country and beyond.

The expertise of federal firefighters is unrivaled when compared with the experience of those who work for municipal and state agencies, which might not include hiking through rugged and dangerous terrain or dropping from helicopters into the middle of a forest. Federal firefighters are also able to traverse state and international borders, including joining Canadian forces this year to battle historic blazes north of the United States.

Still, the Forest Service has struggled in recent years to fill vacancies amid rising inflation and severe drought, officials said. In 2021, during one of the most destructive fire seasons in history, the agency also faced shrinking water, food and communications supplies in addition to low staffing levels.

This year, the Forest Service has 11,150 wildland firefighters onboard nationwide, or 99% of its goal of 11,300, the agency said.

For many men and women on the front lines of fighting fires, the high cost of living means more stress for them and their families, and they begin looking for some relief.

At Cal Fire, the state added 37 fire crews to its staff in 2022 after adding 16 in 2021. An additional $671.4 million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year will pay for 1,265 new positions and expand fire crews, air attack operations and additional staff relief, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom's office.

A recent report by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy organization, found that federal firefighters were paid on average 32.51% below their state counterparts. In California, the disparity is just above 56%.

"I wish I had done it sooner," Foye said of joining Cal Fire. "Best decision I ever made."

Still, when asked if he would return to the federal agency should conditions improve, he said: “I would return in a heartbeat.”

As federal firefighters wait for Congress to act, their families say they are held hostage to the whims of lawmakers.

Janelle Valentine feels nothing but admiration and pride for her husband, who is a federal firefighter in the Gila National Forest.

She gave up her own career in early childhood education to move from Arizona to New Mexico when her husband was placed there, and now lives an hour away from the nearest grocery store while her husband spends nearly half the year fighting fires.

She said the sacrifice was worth it because they are both passionate about the Forest Service's mission, but she wonders how much longer they can hold on.

"We’ve been hanging on by the skin of our teeth and wanting it to work out, but we can’t afford it at this point," she said.

Valentine said they were forced to buy a trailer home for her husband to live in while on assignment because the government housing that was offered was dilapidated and moldy. They are barely able to cover the trailer's cost and their mortgage while Valentine works on earning a master's degree in social work.

"It’s such a low cost of living here, and we’re still drowning," she said. "At what point do you just jump ship with something you love?"

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

U$A
Chemical giant 3M agrees to pay $12.5 billion after allegedly letting toxic ‘forever chemicals’ seep into our drinking water



Sara Klimek
Fri, July 14, 2023 

3M, a conglomerate allegedly responsible for releasing harmful chemicals into drinking water, recently agreed to a settlement of at least $10.3 billion and up to $12.5 billion paid over 13 years. The funds would be appropriated for testing water for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and abating the chemicals in affected water.

“This settlement with 3M is a significant step forward in what has been many years of work to make sure that those responsible for the contamination of our nation’s drinking water supply with PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ pay for the damage — not the victims of the contamination,” Rob Bilott, a member of the plaintiff’s court-appointed advisory council, said.

Despite the payout, some folks are concerned that the settlement money will not cover the injuries and damages perpetuated by 3M.

“The agreement does not resolve hundreds of cases that seek compensation for personal injuries and property damage,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias commented.

PFAS are a class of chemicals deemed “forever chemicals” because they do not easily break down in the environment. Because the chemicals hold up well to oil, water, and heat, they have been used to manufacture consumer items like raincoats and non-stick cookware.

Scientific research has revealed that the impacts of PFAS on the human body are troubling and include kidney disease, decreased fertility, and congenital disabilities.

The cases against 3M allege that the company knew that the two classes of PFAS — PFOA and PFOS — threatened human and environmental health, yet chose to manufacture them, reports The New Lede.

A statement from 3M chairman and CEO Mike Roman claimed that the company has invested in “state-of-the-art water filtration technology” in its chemical manufacturing process in the past few years and plans to cease all PFAS manufacturing by 2025.

The settlement is a victory in the fight against companies like 3M and may suggest a turning point for other corporate cases.

“This settlement will go a long way toward cleaning up drinking water for millions of Americans, but the costs to our health and our environment are likely far larger,” Emily Scarr, director of the Maryland Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), said, per Environment America. “We need to keep holding polluting industries accountable so taxpayers don’t have to foot the bill.”

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Costly Deep Tunnel flooding project can’t handle Chicago area’s severe storms fueled by climate change






Costly Deep Tunnel flooding project can’t handle Chicago area’s severe storms fueled by climate change
E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/TNS

Michael Hawthorne, Adriana Pérez, Chicago Tribune
Sun, July 16, 2023 

Hours before heavy rains swamped Chicago and Cook County suburbs on July 2, the region’s $3.8 billion flood-control project appeared ready as can be to bottle up storm runoff.

The Deep Tunnel’s massive sewers, capable of holding 2.3 billion gallons, were almost empty, according to Metropolitan Water Reclamation District records.

At the end of tunnels hundreds of feet below the Chicago River, Des Plaines River and North Shore Channel, the McCook Reservoir — more than 20 times larger than Soldier Field — was just 17% full of raw sewage and runoff being stored until it could be safely treated.

But the first sign of trouble came before 8:30 a.m., when runoff mixed with human and industrial waste began pouring into the Des Plaines from an overflow pipe at 40th Street in southwest suburban Lyons, district records show.

Two hours later, the same thing happened at a pump station in north suburban Wilmette and another, much larger facility off Lawrence Avenue in Chicago, where fetid gunk flowed into the North Branch of the Chicago River for nearly a day. Waste and runoff would end up pouring out of 19 other overflow pipes across the county, from Evanston to Westchester, many for hours at a time.

“When you have a slow-moving storm that’s dumping a large amount of rainfall, it doesn’t take much to cause problems,” said Zachary Yack, a National Weather Service meteorologist who noted that up to 8 inches of rain fell in the western suburbs during the day. “That’s a lot of water to contend with in a very short period of time.”

Sewage overflows are an indicator that basements are flooding, effectively turning scores of homes into mini stormwater reservoirs.

By 2:27 p.m., local sewers and the Deep Tunnel were so saturated that district officials turned to their outlets of last resort. First they opened a sluice gate separating the North Shore Channel from Lake Michigan in Wilmette, and then they opened locks near Navy Pier, relieving pressure on the system by allowing more than 1.1 billion gallons of murky, bacteria-laden waste to flow into the region’s chief source of drinking water.

Suburban leaders fielding complaints about standing water and basement backups attempted to pin the blame on district officials for not opening the gate and locks earlier. Several reminded their constituents that the Deep Tunnel, one of the nation’s most expensive public works projects, was designed to prevent flooding and reduce the amount of stomach-churning sewage and runoff gushing into basements and local waterways.

“They’ve been talking about the Deep Tunnel, and that it’s not ready. And that even when it is completed, it still won’t be enough,” said Shapearl Wells, who watched water in her west suburban Cicero basement reach waist high within an hour. “It is still not going to be sufficient to prevent this type of catastrophic disaster in the future — even if they finished it all today.”

When construction of the Deep Tunnel began in 1975, leaders of what then was called the Metropolitan Sanitary District vowed their subterranean labyrinth of tunnels alone would keep pollution out of the Chicago River, and in particular, Lake Michigan.

Our changing climate is scrambling weather patterns, though. Recent storms suggest rain can now fall so quickly that stormwater tunnels can’t move runoff to the reservoir fast enough to prevent sewage overflows and basement backups in the 252 square miles of Chicago and County served by the main part of the system.

“Mother Nature continues to be in the driver’s seat and the main issue is the rain: too much, too intense and too frequent,” said Marcelo Garcia, a University of Illinois hydrological engineer who studies the Deep Tunnel.

Scientists are finding the world is warmer than it has been in thousands of years. All of that hot air sucks moisture out of plants and soil, fueling droughts and wildfires. More moisture in the atmosphere also increases the amount of rain (or snow) that can fall during a particular storm.

“Essentially we find that every storm is now being affected by climate change,” said Don Wuebbles, an emeritus professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois who was a science adviser to former President Barack Obama.

In 2010, Wuebbles and other scientists hired by former Mayor Richard M. Daley concluded that rains of more than 2.5 inches a day, the amount that can trigger sewage dumping into Lake Michigan, were expected to increase by 50% by 2039. By the end of the century, the number of big storms could jump by a whopping 160%.

Several monsoon-like storms in recent years highlight how challenging it is to manage stormwater in Chicago and the Cook County suburbs. Since 2008, district records show, nearly 40 billion gallons of runoff and waste have been released into the lake — three times more than during the previous two decades.

Officials at the Water Reclamation District, a taxpayer-financed agency that operates separately from City Hall and Cook County government, declined to speak with the Chicago Tribune about how the Deep Tunnel performed during the most recent storms.

They’ve previously said the region’s flooding would be far worse without the project, technically known as the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan or TARP.

“TARP continues to operate as designed,” the district said Thursday in a statement noting the system was holding more than 8 billion gallons that otherwise would be in basements, waterways and Lake Michigan. By then sewage and runoff was spilling out of only one spot: a pump station off Racine Avenue in McKinley Park that handles waste and runoff from a wide swath of Chicago’s South and West sides.

In another statement, district officials said it would have been too dangerous to open the Wilmette sluice gate and Navy Pier locks any earlier on July 2. They waited until the North Shore Channel and Chicago River were higher than the lake, the statement explained, because otherwise a torrent of lake water would have overwhelmed the system.

Under a legal settlement with environmental groups, the district is obligated to expand the McCook Reservoir. A neighboring hard-rock quarry will be added to the existing retention basin by 2029, increasing storage to 10 billion gallons, up from 3.5 billion gallons today.

Just before noon on July 2 there still was room to spare in the reservoir, according to a screenshot the Tribune took from the district’s livestream. At the same time, Chicago’s 311 system had already logged hundreds of calls reporting basement backups and the district’s own records show sewage and runoff had been pouring into local waterways for hours.

Kathryn Taylor was getting ready to meet her sister visiting from New York when she noticed a puddle in her North Lawndale basement apartment, where she lives with her two sons, 32 and 20, her daughter, 24, and her daughter’s 3-year-old.

She decided she could mop up the water later. But soon after she left one of Taylor’s sons called to tell her the miasma was 3 feet high and rising.

Taylor returned to find food from the refrigerator floating in sewer water. Furniture, beds and clothes were irreparably damaged. Since the water receded the family has been constantly bleaching and washing their walls and floors.

“I basically lost everything,” said Taylor, the family’s sole provider. “It’s just exhausting.”

Flood losses in the city and suburbs cost taxpayers $1.8 billion in subsidized grants, loans and insurance payments between 2004 and 2014, according to a 2019 report from the National Academy of Sciences. Only hurricane-ravaged areas of coastal Louisiana, New York and Texas received more federal flood aid during the decade.

Scientists who study flooding say the costs likely were significantly higher.

Computer models developed by the city can track down to the block level which neighborhoods are most at risk. Like so many other societal ills, the consequences hit the poorest Chicagoans the hardest. After a major storm in 2013, city officials determined the damages were concentrated in low- and middle-income census tracts on the West and South sides, similar to where many 311 calls originated after the more recent storms.

The region’s struggle with chronic flooding begins with its location. Chicago and many of its suburbs were built on swamps, and storm runoff has become more difficult to manage as the region has been paved over.

To make matters worse, sewers in Chicago and older suburbs were designed to handle runoff as well as waste from homes and factories. The combined sewers are quickly overwhelmed when rainfall exceeds two-thirds of an inch, according to modeling by the Chicago Department of Water Management.

To supplement the Deep Tunnel, the Water Reclamation District has partnered with several flood-prone suburbs to build smaller retention basins, including some on land where frequently soaked property owners have sold their homes to make room for storm deluges.

Environmental groups have been calling for more “green infrastructure” solutions for years, including during the 1970s when district officials struggled to persuade Congress to bankroll a massive public works project.

Other cities, including Milwaukee and Philadelphia, are moving away from big construction projects and embracing smaller, neighborhood-scale improvements such as installing permeable pavement in parking lanes, creating rain gardens around gutters to slow runoff and disconnecting household downspouts from sewers.

Some of those smaller measures are underway in the Chicago area, just not at the pace necessary to reduce flooding.

“The devastation around the neighborhood — it was just unbelievable,” said Wells, the Cicero resident who on July 2 lost furniture, appliances and, most painfully, basketball trophies and other belongings of her son, Courtney Copeland, who was shot and killed in 2016 while on his way to visit a friend on the Northwest Side of Chicago.

“People were actually on boats. Elderly people,” Wells said about the recent storm. “Until we have investment in (green) infrastructure, this is going to continue to happen and we’re going to continue to get flooded out.”

mhawthorne@chicagotribune.com

adperez@chicagotribune.com

Opinion
For proof of the U.S. immigration system’s dysfunction, look to Canada

The Ambassador Bridge, which connects Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit

(Tara Walton for The Washington Post)

By Youyou Zhou

Graphics reporter
The Washington Post

July 14, 2023 


To attract talented tech workers, Canada will soon offer 10,000 work permits to foreigners who are now in the United States on H-1B visas. This might be the first time any country has created an immigration program that hinges entirely on another country’s system.

This suggests that the Canadian government holds two opinions of U.S. H-1B visas: That they are good at attracting the world’s most talented immigrants. And that the ultimate value proposition to prospective immigrants is so weak long-term, that, given the option, many H-1B visa holders will head north to Canada.

The H-1B visa’s weakness lies in the way it is tied to employment. When jobs disappear, the workers have no path toward permanent residency. If they cannot find another H-1B job within 60 days, they have to leave the country.

Finding a job that can sponsor an H-1B visa within 60 days is not easy, even under normal circumstances. When U.S. companies laid off more than 310,000 workers in 2022 and 2023, it became harder still, especially for tech workers. Last November, Meta alone laid off 11,000 workers. More than 15 percent of Meta’s workers have H-1B visas.

About 50,000 people had their H-1B visas revoked due to loss of employment between October 2022 and April 2023, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and, among them, about 12,500 did not transfer their visas to some other legal status. In other words, they either left the United States or remained without documents.

This is a population of immigrants that the United States should want to keep. Most work in computer-related jobs. Others work in jobs that require specialized skills, such as doctors, professors, accountants and managers.

A bachelor’s degree or its equivalent is required to get an H-1B visa, making visa workers more educated than the U.S. population in general.

The exodus of H-1B workers did not start with the recent layoffs. Living as an H-1B worker has long been unstable and risky, especially for those born in India, who make up more than 70 percent of H-1B visa recipients every year. Because of America’s country-based green card quota system, Indians on H-1B visas have almost no path to permanent residency even after years of studying and working in the United States. A change of president, an economic slowdown, or sudden layoffs can push them to abandon lives they have been building for years.

Both U.S. political parties have tried and failed to remove the country-based green card quota. As a short-term fix, many lawmakers and industry advocates have urged the USCIS to extend the 60-day grace period after loss of employment to 120 days. But the agency says it would take more than a year to go through the required rulemaking process — too long to benefit immigrants who are already at risk of losing their legal status.

The Canadian government has been able to act faster. Indeed, it is already benefiting from U.S. visa restrictions. Since 2020, Vancouver and Toronto have seen the largest high-tech job growth in North America, outpacing Austin, Seattle and every other U.S. city. H-1B holders who move to Canada will receive open work permits for three years, allowing adequate time to find jobs without deportation worries. And rather than wait decades for a U.S. green card, skilled workers can get permanent residency in Canada in less than a year. Canada will also issue open work permits to spouses of H-1B workers; in the United States, only spouses of those who have an approved green card application are allowed to work.

The Biden administration launched a directive last year aimed at attracting immigrants trained in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But the H-1B system is holding the United States back. The loss of H-1B workers to Canada this year might not hurt the U.S. economy too much on its own, but if the immigration system for skilled workers is not fixed, the damage will accumulate and set back U.S. innovation for years to come.

The submersible that first took humans to the Titanic wreck has made more than 5,000 dives. A researcher who has been on the Alvin 53 times says it's nothing like the Titan.

Erin Snodgrass
Sat, July 15, 2023 

The Alvin is a three-person sub owned by the Navy and operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

QAI Publishing/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Alvin is one of the oldest deep-sea submersibles and is responsible for many scientific discoveries.


Lisa Levin, an oceanographer, told Insider that Alvin missions are different from underwater tourism expeditions.


"It would be like comparing a commercial airline to somebody who built their own airplane," she said.

The presumed implosion of the Titan has prompted a sudden societal interest in the science behind submersibles as the trials and tribulations of the Titan sub's operation are unearthed in the aftermath of the tragedy.

But not all underwater vessels are created equally, one veteran oceanographer told Insider.

Lisa Levin, a marine ecologist at the University of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has taken dozens of deep-water dives on various submersibles throughout her scientific career.

There's one sub that stands above the rest: Alvin.

"Alvin is better than most of them in terms of being very reliable, safe, and getting a lot of work done," Levin said. "It's probably contributed more to deep sea science than any other submarine out there."

The three-person sub is one of the oldest deep-ocean submersibles, commissioned in 1964. The famous vessel is perhaps best known for taking the first humans to the Titanic shipwreck in 1986 when oceanographer Robert Ballard led a research expedition to the wreckage just one year after it was discovered approximately 12,500 feet deep off the coast of Newfoundland.

The spherical sub boasts seven reversible thrusters and two robotic arms, and it can reach four miles beneath the surface, giving researchers access to 99% of the ocean floor, according to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the nonprofit research facility that operates the Navy-owned sub.

Alvin has been on more than 5,000 dives and is the vessel responsible for several advancements in scientific research and discovery, including the 1966 recovery of a hydrogen bomb that was dropped nearly 3,000 feet deep in the Mediterranean Sea after an Air Force B-52 collided with a tanker aircraft over Spain; the 1974 close-up photography of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is part of the longest mountain range in the world; and the 1977 discovery of diverse wildlife in the warm water vents of the Galapagos Islands

But for all its achievements, safety is Alvin's top priority, Woods Hole representatives have said.

"There's two things you don't sacrifice in innovation and that's quality and safety," J. Carl Hartsfield, a retired Navy Captain who runs an oceanographic systems lab at Woods Hole and also consulted on the search for the missing Titan last month, told NBC News.

Alvin was first commissioned in 1964 and is one of the oldest deep-sea submersibles.

Alvin is taken apart, inspected, and reassembled every five years and then goes for recertification by the Navy, a representative with Woods Hole told The San Diego Union-Tribune. The most recent set of upgrades was completed in 2021 and included improved visibility, new lighting and imaging systems, improved sensors, and a state-of-the-art command and control system.

Engineers at Woods Hole pressure test every piece of equipment on board Alvin, no matter how small, NBC News reported. Approximately 60% of the sub is Navy-certified, including critical safety components like life support and flotation foam, Bruce Strickrott, an Alvin pilot, told The Tribune-Union.

"The sub is built around the idea that we have to come home," Strickrott said to NBC News.

The strenuous precautions in place are reassuring for Levin, who has taken 53 dives on Alvin and said she has never once felt unsafe, even as temperatures turn frigid and lights wane hundreds of meters beneath the surface on her hours-long trips below.

OceanGate, the company that created and operated the doomed Titan sub, has been accused in the aftermath of the vessel's likely implosion of prioritizing innovation over safety. Several industry experts warned OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush about the potential dangers of the Titan's irregular construction and the sub was party to a series of troublesome past expedition perils. OceanGate's website and social media accounts were removed on Friday.

A representative from TrailRunner International who has previously responded to media requests for OceanGate did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The exploratory vessel most likely imploded last month while on a dive to the Titanic shipwreck with five passengers on board, according to coast guard officials.

From its carbon-fiber hull to its larger pill shape, the Titan diverged from industry standards.

"There's a reason Alvin has been a titanium sphere all of its existence," Levin told Insider.

"When you push it, it wants to stay that shape," Strickrott told NBC News of Alvin.

The Titan operation and other tourist exploration expeditions like it are so different from the research dives Levin and other researchers undertake that she said the two are practically incomparable, despite both taking place on submersibles.

"It would be like comparing a commercial airline to somebody who built their own airplane and flew it and had an accident," she said.

Alvin and Levin's next mission is focused on methane seeps and the chemosynthesis ecosystems they fuel off the coast of San Diego. That expedition later this month will only take Levin and her colleagues down to 1,020 meters, relatively shallow compared to her past experiences on Alvin, she said. But next spring, Levin will ride Alvin deeper than she ever has before off Kodiak Island to examine seeps at 5,500 meters.

She isn't worried.

"For me, I don't think the risk is particularly much more than getting in a car on a freeway," she said.

Mining crystals locked in the deep-sea could help fight climate change. It may also destroy Earth's last untouched ecosystem.


Kiley Price

LIVE SCIENCE
Sat, July 15, 2023 

closeup of the center of a brittle star from Clarion Clipperton Zone

To prevent a climate catastrophe, the world must dramatically slash its carbon emissions. But creating enough batteries to power the electric vehicles (EVs) needed for a carbon-free future will require a massive scale-up in our supply of minerals such as copper, cobalt and manganese.

Countries are scrambling to mine these precious materials from the earth, digging everywhere from the rainforests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Indonesia. However, these efforts have been plagued by environmental problems and human rights issues.

So some companies have turned their eyes elsewhere: the seafloor.

Miles below the ocean's surface, billions of rocky lumps laden with manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper and other precious minerals line the seafloor. In some areas, cobalt is also concentrated in thick metallic crusts flanking underwater mountains.

Related: What is renewable energy?

Several companies and countries are gearing up to harvest these so-called deep-sea polymetallic nodules and extract the treasures within them. Currently, seabed mining in international waters is legally murky, and companies have not yet begun commercial exploitation operations. But delegate nations of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) — a U.N.-backed intergovernmental body — are currently meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, for the next two weeks (July 10 to July 28) to develop regulations that could pave the way for such mining.

This practice may have serious consequences for the world's oceans, experts told Live Science. So how bad are those environmental impacts? And is it possible for us to meet our climate goals without mining the deep sea?

Rocky lumps on the seafloor
Deep-sea devastation

Emerging evidence suggests deep-sea mining could damage seafloor ecosystems.

One key area targeted by mining companies is a stretch of ocean from Hawaii to Mexico. Despite its frigid temperatures and low food availability, this deep-sea habitat, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), harbors a staggering number of species, ranging from glowing sea cucumbers to toothy anglerfish. Scientists recently cataloged more than 5,500 deep-sea species in the CCZ, roughly 90% of which were unknown to science.

A moving gif of a floating orange sea cucumber spotted southeast of Honolulu

Most seabed mining will require large machines to collect nodules, bring them to the surface and then discharge the unnecessary sediment back into the ocean. This method could have catastrophic consequences for the animals living there, researchers wrote in a letter to the journal Nature Geoscience in 2017.

"They effectively have to excavate and grind up the seafloor in order to get their minerals," Douglas McCauley, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Live Science. "So anything that's living in that habitat will be destroyed." This includes animals that attach to and live on the nodules themselves, such as sea sponges and black corals.

Because the practice has not yet begun at an industrial scale, marine scientists have mostly relied on computer models and small-scale trials to predict the impacts of deep-sea mining. However, in 1989, a team of scientists attempted to mimic the effects of seabed mining by plowing an area of the seafloor in Peru measuring roughly 3.9 square miles (10.1 square kilometers) at around 2.6 miles (4.2 kilometers) deep. Many of the species in this area had still not returned more than 25 years later, and tracks from the plow were still visible, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Related: 10 bizarre deep sea creatures found in 2022

Negative impacts likely won't be isolated to the original mining site; machinery can cause noise pollution that stretches for hundreds of miles across the ocean, computer models suggest. This noise could disrupt animals' ability to navigate, locate prey or find a mate.

But perhaps one of the most destructive byproducts of seabed mining is the plumes of sediment the undersea vehicles leave in their wake, which could act "like undersea dust storms that could smother life out there," McCauley said. These sediment plumes could harm tuna habitats, which are changing as ocean temperatures warm and will increasingly overlap with areas in the mineral-rich CCZ, according to a study co-authored by McCauley and published July 11 in the journal npj Ocean Sustainability.

A few companies are working on technology to shrink these plumes. For example, Norway-based minerals company Loke recently acquired UK Seabed Resources Ltd., a deep-sea mining firm with two exploration contracts that allow the company to start searching for minerals in the CCZ, though not yet commercially mine them. Loke aims to start deep-sea mining operations by 2030, Walter Sognnes, the company's CEO, told Live Science.

"What we are trying to do is minimize the impact and maximize the understanding of that impact," Sognnes said.

Loke is developing mining vehicles that will generate plumes only when moving across the seafloor, and not from dumping excess sediment into the ocean after retrieving the nodules, Sognnes said. However, the technology is still theoretical.

Illustration of a boat with instrument developed by Loke used to mine seafloor deep below

Some researchers are skeptical that there is a "sustainable" way to mine the deep sea.

"I think there's no way to do this without having locally major environmental damage causing huge damage on scales of tens of thousands of square kilometers," Craig Smith, a deep-sea ecologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Live Science. "It's just not possible."

Can we meet EV mineral demand without deep-sea mining?

A terraced, open-pit copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo

If we are to meet the climate goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries must increase their mineral output for EVs 30-fold by 2040, according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

This urgent need for materials raises a question: If we don't harvest the seafloor, can we get minerals used in EVs elsewhere? The answer is most likely yes, but accessing those land-based mineral reserves in a sustainable way may be tough.

In 2022, Earth had roughly 25 million tons (23 million metric tons) of terrestrial cobalt resources, which meets demand through 2040, assuming all land-based reserves are exploited, research shows. There is also roughly 300 million tons (272 million metric tons) of nickel in the world's resources, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, enough to support the ramping up of EV production, CNBC reported. However, these resources, often hidden deep within dense forests, are not always easily reachable or economically viable to mine. Operations to create new mines drive massive amounts of deforestation, which can reduce biodiversity and release climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere.

"You could get all the minerals you need for all the world's electric vehicles or whatever from land-based deposits, but the lowest-environmental-impact way to do it could actually be to use some deep-sea deposits in a responsible way with good regulation," Seaver Wang, co-director of climate and energy at The Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental research center, told Live Science. However, he added that firmer regulations and guidelines from the ISA should be in place before any deep-sea mining operations begin.

Emerging battery technologies could help reduce pressure on the minerals market, experts say. Currently, the most widely used batteries in EVs are called NMC (which use lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt), but car manufacturers are hungry for cheaper technology that doesn't require as many of these minerals. Those may include sodium-ion batteries or LFP batteries made with lithium, as well as iron (ferrous) and phosphate — materials that are more widely available and accessible than cobalt and manganese. In May, Ford announced plans for a new factory in Michigan that is set to begin producing LFP batteries by 2026. However, these batteries currently have lower energy densities, which could limit the range of an electric vehicle, according to the IEA.

"A substantial transition to EVs can be done without deep sea mining," Kenneth Gillingham, an energy economist at Yale University who studies EVs, told Live Science, though he added that seabed mining could potentially "take off some of the pressure" on the critical metals market.

Aerial view of lithium mines in dry salt lake beds in California

Related: Wind and solar power overtake coal for the first time ever in the US

Despite the abundance of critical mineral resources that deep-sea mining could provide, some car manufacturers — including BMW, Volvo and Renault — and nearly 20 countries have publicly supported a moratorium on the practice so scientists have more time to research its potential environmental impacts. Additionally, more than 750 scientists and policy experts have signed an official statement calling for a hold on deep-sea mining activities.

Though the rules surrounding deep-sea mining are not yet finalized, as of July 9, the ISA is required to receive seabed mining applications due to an obscure provision in the current treaty.

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This doesn't necessarily mean deep-sea mining will occur anytime soon, because the ISA is under no obligation to approve those applications and the law is still murky. A growing number of experts say the key to determining whether to mine the deep sea is more time — to research, to create new technologies and to weigh the positives of seabed mining alongside its pitfalls.

"Understanding of benefits and costs of deep-sea mining requires an extremely thoughtful assessment that involves many uncertainties that are not resolved at this point," Sergey Paltsev, an energy economist at MIT, told Live Science in an email.

UPDATE ON NATURE REBEL

An otter in California that keeps bullying people off of their surfboards has been too quick for wildlife officials to catch

Kenneth Niemeyer
Sat, July 15, 2023

Sea Otter Kevin Schafer/Getty Images

An otter in California forcing people off their surfboards has so far evaded the grasp of wildlife officials.

Divers tried to capture the otter last week with a bait surfboard but it was too quick for them.


The otter's mother is also known to wildlife officials for approaching boats and kayaks.

People have recently filmed otters aggressively attacking people on surfboards in California.

In one video, an otter — named Otter 841 by wildlife officials — can be seen climbing onto and then gnawing on a surfboard near Sant Cruz.

"This is a dangerous sea otter, avoid it if at all possible!" the caption reads.


A team from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Monterey Bay Aquarium were dispatched to the scene on Wednesday. They tracked and then attempted to catch the otter with a bait surfboard.

Mark Woodward, a wildlife photographer who posted the video to Twitter, told a local FOX News affiliate that he saw a team of five divers attempting to lure the otter onto the board so they could capture it.


The otter jumped onto the board briefly, but escaped before the divers were able to grab it with a net, the outlet reported.

"They can't throw a net over it because it will get tangled and drown," Woodward said. "That's also why they can't tranquilize it."

Kevin Connor, a spokesperson for Monterey Bay Aquarium, said Otter 841 is considered a danger to the public because it is ignoring its natural survival instincts, ABC reported.

"When we see this type of behavior exhibited by otters, it is a sign that they no longer have that healthy fear of human beings that allows them to stay safe in the wild away from us," Conner said.

Conner told the outlet that the otter's mother, Otter 723, was released from the aquarium in 2017 and that there were some reports of her approaching boats and kayaks but "nothing to the extent that we've seen with Otter 841."

Still, the incidents caused the US Fish and Wildlife Service to deem Otter 723 "unreleasable," so she was recaptured and discovered to be pregnant with 841, Conner said, according to ABC.

Conner said there are now no plans to euthanize either otter. Once Otter 841 is captured, Conner said it would be evaluated by veterinarians and then will likely spend the rest of its life in captivity in either a zoo or an aquarium.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service did not immediately return Insider's request for comment Saturday.

American boat patrols waters around new offshore wind farms to protect jobs


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Aaron Smith, President and CEO of the Offshore Marine Service Association, center, peers through binoculars at ships installing the South Fork Wind project, as Capt. Rick Spaid, left, pilots the vessel Jones Act Enforcer, Tuesday, July 11, 2023, off the coast of Rhode Island. The trade association that represents the offshore service industry is going to great lengths to make sure that jobs go to Americans as the U.S. offshore wind industry ramps up.

 (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

JENNIFER McDERMOTT
Updated Sat, July 15, 2023 

NEW BEDFORD, Massachusetts (AP) — One early morning this week in ocean waters off the coasts of Rhode Island and New York, signs of the nascent wind industry were all around. Giant upright steel tubes poked from the water, waiting for ships to hoist up turbines that will make electricity driven by wind.

A battleship-gray vessel was on the prowl. In this ramp-up for U.S. offshore wind, American marine companies and mariners fear they’ll be left behind.

So Aaron Smith, president of the Offshore Marine Service Association, was looking through binoculars to see whether ships servicing the new wind farms were using foreign-flagged vessels instead of U.S.-made ships with American crews.

“It really makes me upset when I think about the men and women I know who can do this work. American citizens, fully capable, sitting at home while foreign nationals go to work in U.S. waters,” Smith said. “It’s unfair."

The ship is named the Jones Act Enforcer, after the century-old law that says the transport of merchandise between U.S. points is reserved for U.S.-built, owned and documented vessels. The motto: “We’ll be watching.” Smith was documenting operations to show to federal law enforcement officials and members of Congress.

The Offshore Marine Service Association says it strongly supports the offshore wind industry. Many of its member companies are already working in it. Smith said this effort is about securing their future — decades of jobs and investments. The U.S. could need roughly 2,000 of the most powerful turbines to meet its goals to ramp up offshore wind to dramatically cut its use of fossil fuels to protect the atmosphere and reduce climate change.

The Enforcer made several trips to where Danish energy company Ørsted is developing the South Fork Wind project with the utility Eversource. This will likely be the first U.S. commercial-scale wind farm to open.

Approaching the site Tuesday, Smith saw a large crane ship sailing under the Cyprus flag, smaller Belgian-flagged vessels, and U.S. fishing and offshore supply vessels near the turbine bases. The Associated Press was the only media outlet aboard.

The U.S. fleet doesn’t yet have massive ships specialized for offshore wind to install foundations and turbines. But some of the foreign-flagged vessels working in wind development areas along the East Coast are tugs and smaller supply ships. U.S. ship operators told the AP they have similar vessels that can do this work.

Ørsted responded that 75% of the vessels supporting South Fork Wind’s offshore construction are U.S.-flagged, including barges, tugs, crew transport vessels and fishing vessels that monitor for safety and marine mammals. But the larger U.S.-flagged offshore wind vessels aren't built yet. Even so, the installation vessels for South Fork Wind have American union workers on board, the company told the AP.

“While the U.S. industry continues to mature, we’re designing our projects to tap as many American workers, contractors, suppliers and vessels as possible. We’re proud that South Fork Wind is putting hundreds of American mariners and union workers to work at sea in a wide range of roles,” Bryan Stockton, head of regulatory affairs for Ørsted, said in a statement Thursday.

Ørsted’s offshore work is complying with Jones Act provisions, Stockton added.

On this day, Smith said he could see no clear violations of the Jones Act, no “smoking gun.” In order to make a Jones Act case to Customs and Border Protection, the association would need to see several stages of activity, observing a ship for weeks if not months. It would need to show loading merchandise onto a ship in port, transporting it to an offshore site and returning empty.

In the past, the association has also checked oil and gas sites for foreign vessels. It first chartered the Enforcer from Harvey Gulf International Marine in late 2021.

Both wind and oil and gas companies can seek waivers to the Jones Act, citing national defense and unavailability of U.S. vessels, or get a ruling from Customs that a specific transaction is permitted using a foreign vessel.

But Smith said he feels that offshore wind developers are violating the spirit of the act. He said he worries investors won’t finance the building of offshore ships if they're going to compete against foreign vessels with cheaper day rates, largely because foreign crews can be paid less. That would create a cycle where developers keep using foreign vessels because no U.S. vessels are available.

The association wants to break that cycle as the industry takes off, Smith said. Federal officials expect to review at least 16 construction and operations plans for commercial, offshore wind energy facilities by 2025.

“That’s a ton of work we could be doing,” Smith said, “and a ton of good-paying jobs.”

Randy Adams owns Sea Support Ventures in Cut Off, Louisiana. His vessels do geological surveys for oil and gas. He wants to do the same for the clean energy transition, but hasn’t yet.

“I’m just concerned that our industry is going to miss the boat on the wind farm work,” he said. “I can’t say we’re being shut out of it, but we’re sure not on the top of the totem pole.”

As for the Jones Act Enforcer, Smith plans to keep it berthed at the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts into August, visiting the two commercial-scale wind farm sites. Ørsted is installing 12 turbines. The other developer, Vineyard Wind, is building a 62-turbine wind farm 15 miles (24 kilometers) off the Massachusetts coast.

Vineyard Wind said in a statement Thursday that its project complies with all U.S. laws, including the Jones Act, and it fully supports the American maritime and shipbuilding industry.

Before arriving in Massachusetts, the Enforcer was off the coast of Virginia where Dominion Energy plans an offshore wind farm. Smith was seeing if foreign vessels were surveying the area for unexploded ordnance, and he said they were, despite at least four of his member companies bidding on the job.

Dominion told the AP those vessels are not transporting merchandise between U.S. points, so they're compliant. The company said U.S. vessels got the work surveying, scouting, hauling equipment and transporting technicians.

In Texas, Dominion is also currently building the Charybdis, the first Jones Act-compliant offshore wind-installation vessel and says it strongly supports the Act. Ørsted will charter that ship.

Ørsted is also investing in the Eco Edison, the first American-made offshore wind service operations vessel, now under construction in Louisiana, and in five more crew transfer vessels being built in Rhode Island.

Sam Giberga is executive vice president and general counsel at Hornbeck Offshore Services in Covington, Louisiana. Its supply vessels and multi-purpose support ships are primarily used by the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico. He said at first they were excited by the promise of offshore wind because it's clean energy that will create jobs and business. But for him, it’s starting to feel like a broken promise. The company recently lost a bid to a foreign vessel.

“We are a maritime nation. Always have been. This is the next great maritime frontier and we’re not going to get to do it,” Giberga asked. “Why would we allow that?” ___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

27,000-year-old pendants crafted from the skin of extinct giant sloths could help rewrite the human history of the Americas


Alia Shoaib
Sat, July 15, 2023 

The artifacts.

Thais Rabito Pansani/AP

Researchers found what appeared to be pendants made from the now-extinct giant sloth.


The artifacts are believed to date from around 25,000 to 27,000 years ago.


It suggests humans lived in South America thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Pendants made of bony material from giant sloths suggest humans lived in South America thousands of years earlier than previously thought, researchers say.

Scientists believe the artifacts date to around 25,000 to 27,000 years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Royal Society's main biological research journal.

While it was long thought that humans migrated to the Americas by crossing a land bridge from Siberia into Alaska around 13,000 years ago, recent research has challenged that view.

"We now have good evidence — together with other sites from South and North America — that we have to rethink our ideas about the migration of humans to the Americas," Mirian Liza Alves Forancelli Pacheco, study co-author and archaeologist at the Federal University of Sao Carlos in Brazil, told The Associated Press.

The remains of the now-extinct giant sloth were discovered at the Santa Elina rock shelter in Brazil, and they included thousands of osteoderms — hard bony deposits that form within the skin of certain animals.

Other giant ground sloth skeletons have been found in places like Florida.

Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

According to the study, three of the osteoderms appeared to have been polished and had holes drilled into them, suggesting humans had modified them into what was likely "personal ornaments," researchers said. They added that the holes were not caused by natural abrasion, The AP reported.

The scientists said that the pendants were made within days or a few years of the animal dying, the report adds.

Findings across such sites also challenge the idea that humans arrived in the Americas in one wave of migration over the Bering land bridge, according to Briana Pobiner, a co-author and paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

"It's very likely that multiple waves of people came to Americas," she said, according to The AP.

Giant ground sloths could reach 13 feet long, weighed more than a thousand pounds and were equivalent in size to an Indian elephant. It walked on all fours and was one of the largest creatures in South America, per the report.

Oil worker says he was fired for saving a moose calf from being eaten by a black bear, report says

Alia Shoaib
Sun, July 16, 2023

michaelschober/Getty Images

A Canadian man claims he was fired from his job after saving a moose calf from a bear.


The man put the calf, who he named Misty, in the passenger seat of his truck and took her to safety.


His employer said that his actions breached company protocols around interactions with wildlife.

A Canadian man claims he was fired from his job after saving a moose calf from a black bear.

Mark Skage, who worked as a fuel supplier for AFD Petroleum Inc., said in a Facebook post that he was on his way back from a job when he saw the calf alone on the highway in British Columbia.

He said he spotted a black bear waiting for the moose about 50 yards away and made the decision to put the animal, who he named Misty, into the passenger seat of his truck.





"I made a decision at the time after she kept trying to climb into the work truck that I couldn't just leave her there," he wrote.

He said he communicated with his supervisor and the Conservation Officer Service and managed to get the moose to safety.

The animal is now at a wildlife rehabilitation rehab center, where she will remain until she is ready to be released back into the wild.

But that was not the end of the story, according to Skage.

He said that his employer felt that his behavior was "in grievous conflict with their wildlife policies" and decided to fire him.

"The lesson I learned was AFD is ok spilling fuel on the ground but not helping wildlife," he wrote.

Skage said that he was compelled to help the moose because he said they are often preyed on by bears.

"I just couldn't do it, in my heart. People can say all they want. I know as outdoorsmen, we talk about predator control. Black bears are the number one predator for those calves. So I just thought, 'Well, I can't take care of the predator, but I guess maybe I can try and help out this little calf,'" he told CBC News.

"It wasn't just one moose calf that God saved. It was a whole bunch. She's gonna grow up and have lots of babies, and her babies will have babies. I think it's a positive. I believe that in my heart," he added.

Black bears are the biggest predators of moose calves in northern areas where grizzly bears are uncommon, with the animals killing about 40% of all moose calves that were born, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

AFD Petroleum Inc. defended its decision to let Skage go and said in a statement that his actions breached the company's protocols.

"Instead of reporting the situation to a conservation officer and allowing the authorities to handle the rescue and relocation of the moose, the individual made the independent decision to transport an uninjured moose calf, a wild animal, in the front seat of his company vehicle for many hours," AFD Petroleum president Dale Reimer said in a statement to CBC.

"This not only puts the employee and other road users at risk but also potentially caused distress and harm to the moose," said Reimer.