AFTER HELENE CAME TRUMP

A Trump Win Would Threaten Historic Climate Progress in North Carolina

Antonia Juhasz
Wed 23 October 2024


In 1999, Hurricane Floyd roared through North Carolina as one of the state’s deadliest and most harmful hurricanes. It was the second major storm that month and the third in as many years to ravage the state. Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, was raised in the small Black community of Kinston, but “the neighborhood I grew up in no longer exists,” she tells me. It was rendered uninhabitable by the storm.

Twenty-five years later, on September 26, Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina, breaking all of the state’s past records for death and destruction, as it carved a path of ruin across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia. Patrick Hunter, a managing attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, lives in Asheville, whole sections of which were wiped away along with entire towns across western North Carolina.

“It’s really hard to put into words what the devastation looks like,” he tells me of his beloved mountain community, the sound of shock thick in his voice. “It’s hard to describe the sense of loss.”


Hurricane Helene is one of the worst storms in U.S. history, causing over $250 billion in economic damage. At least 224 people have died, almost half in North Carolina, where another 26 people are still missing, likely drowned in torrential waters or buried by mud. The death toll will rise in the years to come. The average hurricane in the U.S. ultimately causes the deaths of as many 11,000 people, with the most disadvantaged prior to the storm suffering the worst consequences in its wake.

An increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is the hallmark and long-predicted outcome of the burning of fossil fuels causing a worsening climate crisis.

“Climate change is here and we’re going to experience more of these types of events if we can’t address it,” Hunter says, exasperation finally entering his voice. “When we’re not taking the steps we need to take to reduce the effects of climate change… there are very real consequences.”

For Taylor-Sawyer and Hunter, that means righting environmental injustice, protecting public health and the environment, and transforming the region away from fossil fuel — the primary cause of the climate crisis — to renewable energy. They’re working with allies across the state to significantly deepen these efforts by tapping into billions of dollars in funding from the Biden-Harris administration.

Less than two weeks before Hurricane Helene struck, I’d been visiting communities across North Carolina to see how the Biden-Harris money is contributing to their organizing, what the investments look like on the ground, and the threats and opportunities presented by the looming November election.

As a key swing state, North Carolina could single-handedly determine the outcome of the Presidential election (some polls give Trump the lead). There’s also an extremely consequential gubernatorial race pitting Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.

While Donald Trump has used Hurricane Helene as an opportunity to deny the reality of climate change and spread lies and conspiracy theories, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “are harnessing every agency and every authority to respond to Helene’s destruction and devastation,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi says in a statement to Rolling Stone. “At the same time, we keep accelerating our efforts to build long-term resilience to extreme-climate disasters and attack the root cause of climate change itself.”

Historic levels of federal funding for climate action, the energy transition, and environmental justice are included throughout the over $2 trillion in the administration’s “Investing in America Agenda,” which includes the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, American Rescue Plan, and CHIPS and Science Act.

With its Justice40 Initiative, the Biden-Harris administration stipulated within days of taking office that at least 40 percent of federal climate and environmental funds, across 19 federal agencies and totaling some $613 billion, must target disadvantaged environmental justice communities. These are Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other people of color and low-income communities who have been overburdened by pollution and the climate crisis, and underserved by government. An official with the Environmental Protection Agency tells me the agency has exceeded that bar, with over 60 percent of the funds serving those most in need.

It amounts to the nation’s largest-ever financial commitment to environmental and climate justice. “It’s unprecedented. I don’t think there’s any other time in history that there has been such a targeted plan to invest in disinvested communities,” Taylor-Sawyer says. “Just the EPA’s $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice program is 80 times more than any federal investment in environmental justice in history.”


Chandra Taylor-Sawyer.

Since 2022, the EPA alone has awarded North Carolina over $1.3 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, according to new figures provided by the agency to Rolling Stone. These and other “Investing in America” funds are credited with directing over $19 billion in federal and private clean energy investments to North Carolina, resulting in the third-highest overall net growth in clean energy jobs in the nation.

I met dozens of people across North Carolina who have received or are applying for Justice40 and related federal funds, including the heads of environmental justice networks, small rural Black community groups tackling coal companies and hog farms, the mayor of Durham, Native American activists taking on oil pipelines and methane gas plants, and Southern Environmental Law Center lawyers battling just about everyone.

The funding is supporting air and water quality monitoring, zero-emission buses, protection of tree canopies and tree planting, flood mitigation, rooftop and community solar — including local “resilience hubs,” renewable energy and energy efficiency tax credits, and community education and organizing, among other efforts. The administration is also trying to do something that the federal government has rarely achieved before: directly engaging and funding frontline communities.

But they’re in a race against time. Harris plans to continue and expand upon these policies. But the funding and the climate and equity agenda it supports are under direct assault from Donald Trump, who calls the money Washington’s “green new scam.” Project 2025, the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation and authored by at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration, would eliminate all of the funding and the legislation that backs it. Congressional Republicans have also attacked the programs, accusing the administration of “funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to radical, far-left organizations whose mission is to protest, disrupt, and undercut United States energy production and leadership, while also freeing up funds to support their extreme activist agendas.”

“There’s a huge urgency,” explains Sherri White-Williamson, director of North Carolina’s Environmental Justice Community Action Network. “If things change on November 4, we know that money is not going to be there.” And critical work that’s just getting started, “just wouldn’t get done,” she says.
Spidey Sense-r

It was raining and early in the morning when I met Chris Hawn, a co-director at the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, in downtown Durham’s Central Park. But Hawn looked fantastic, dressed in stylish brown leather loafers, burgundy slacks, and a ‘50’s-inspired colorful geometric sweater. They directed me to a gnarly spider web, home to a funnel weaver spider (not to be confused with the more popular but far less useful, orb-weaver spider). While the latter spin Halloween style webs, the funnel weaver is all-functionality. This web had probably been there for about a year, and it was filthy. But that’s exactly why Hawn, a Ph.D. in zoology, liked it. Piled in amidst the soot, leaves, and trash, the web was also collecting polluting metals like arsenic, aluminum, and cadmium that can destroy human health.

In less than 15 minutes, and with little more than a straw, a stick, purple tape, and a phone app, Hawn taught me how to measure the pollution in the air in downtown Durham using the spider’s web. Hawn calls it “Spidey Sense-r.”

Measuring the pollution where we live is the first and most basic step to protect public health. But getting expensive air monitors into communities is stymied by the polluters who hate them, governments that don’t want to pay for them, racism, classism, and communities that can’t afford them. Spidey Sense-r, by comparison, can be made available to anyone with the skills to spot a spider’s web.


Chris Hawn collects a web.

Hawn specializes in community centered participatory research, with those most impacted by harm in the lead. The North Carolina Environmental Justice Network is a grassroots, people of color-led coalition of community organizations and their supporters who work with low-income communities and people of color on issues of climate, environmental, racial, and social injustice. It has already received federal funding to participate in a larger hub of organizations working to aid local and smaller frontline groups apply for and win Justice40 money. The network has also applied for funds to support their broader educational work, including to develop a curriculum and pay for the testing of web samples to bring Spidey Sense-r to K-12 schools, community colleges, seniors, and local organizations across the state.

“It’s a once in a generation opportunity,” Hawn says of Justice40. “I see a massive potential to increase environmental justice competency and conversations, and also support the movement.”
Airkeepers

While Spidey Sense-r awaits its support, the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act are funding a first-of-its kind community air quality monitoring network in locations across the country based on the same principles of local empowerment and advocacy.

Christian Felipe is the newly hired project coordinator at the Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN) in Clinton, a small rural city in Sampson County in Eastern North Carolina where hogs outnumber people 35 to 1. Sampson is one of the most economically distressed counties in the state. It is home to the state’s largest landfill and a multitude of industrial hog farms primarily located in low-income Black and Latinx communities. Felipe is 30-years-old and a sincere, unassuming minister in his mother’s nearby church. He was hired as part of a $500,000 grant from the EPA to oversee the area’s first community air quality monitoring project.

“We call them ‘airkeepers,’” Felipe tells me, describing the thirty or so local residents who have volunteered to place the free small air monitors outside of their homes.

“Sampson County has never had any kind of federal attention around air quality,” he adds. “We’ve had a lot of issues for many, many years, but our closest federally regulated air monitor is about an hour away.”

With Felipe’s hire, EJCAN’s staff now totals five (including two others recently hired with federal funds). The office is located just down the street and at times downwind from the Smithfield Packing Company where up to 11,000 hogs a day are slaughtered, cut, and packaged into pork products. The smell is a pungent and sickening cocktail of hog feces, urine, and flesh that regularly wafts over Clinton. But it’s more than just a bad aroma. The cumulative impact of the different polluters here releases a myriad of dangerous and toxic pollutants into the air harming public health. Until now, the only information about which, how much, where, and when pollutants are being released was provided by the companies themselves.

“Like so many other environmental justice communities, there’s very little data that’s available, and especially true for rural areas,” EJCAN’s founder and director, Sherri White-Williamson explains. Collecting that data is how “we can tell the story of what’s happening in places like this.”

Alice Brunson.

Around the corner from Smithfield’s and down the street from the Southern Style Barbecue and Fried Chicken restaurant, airkeeper Alice Brunson welcomes me into her home. “I was probably one of the first ones that signed up,” Brunson tells me. “I think the air we breathe is really important… and it should be a right to have clean air so, I just jumped on the wagon and said, ‘Let’s go for it.’” She enthusiastically presents the air monitor perched on her front lawn.

Brunson and her fellow airkeepers attend regular meetings to discuss their goals for the work, learn how to use the monitors, about the pollutants they are measuring and the associated health harms, what the data means, and how it can be used.

Since 2021, the EPA increased clean air and pollution standards estimated to have saved more than 200,000 lives. The federal funding is enabling a ground-up model of self-regulation, allowing residents to directly police industry and determine how well they’re abiding by the law.

As I left EJCAN’s office, two young women who are lawyers with the Southern Environmental Law Center arrived to talk about legal proceedings against the landfill.

“It’s how we start to create action and bring about change,” White-Williamson says.
Durham’s Justice40 Benefits: Trees, Clean Buses, Flood Protection, Solar

Seated at his desk at city hall, Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams beams with excitement, ready to share his city’s success stories. He credits the Biden-Haris administration with a new approach to providing much-needed support. “For the first time, I felt like the federal government worked with us locally on the ground,” he tells me. “We [usually] have to jockey around with the state on determining what’s a priority,” with those communities most in need the last to be served, he says. “But the federal government, this administration, stepped up and said, ‘We see you. We’re going to help you.’”

In other words, the Biden-Harris administration leap-frogged the ultra-conservative North Carolina Republican General Assembly and went straight to the municipalities, allowing spending that would otherwise never have taken place here.

A zero-emissions bus in downtown Durham.

Durham has been awarded nearly $60 million in federal Justice40 grants. The evidence of this money is apparent walking around the city. I see trees planted to reduce heat stress in the historic Black communities of Braggtown and Merrick-Moore, among thousands of trees planted and existing canopy maintained with funds for urban and community forestry.

In downtown, the new fleet of zero-emissions buses pass by without the familiar choking cloud of black polluting smoke from fossil fueled buses, part of the Infrastructure Law’s $5 billion Clean Bus Program. Researchers at Harvard have estimated that roughly 17,000 to 20,000 people die each year in the U.S. from fossil fuel transportation air pollution, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

A day earlier, I sat in on a meeting at the Durham Armory organized by the Southern Environmental Law Center where about 100 local elected officials, non-governmental organizations, and community organizers gathered to discuss strategies, including tapping into federal funding, to make Durham and the state less focused and reliant on automobiles, ensuring accessible and equitable provision of public transit, housing, zero-emissions vehicles, and more walkable and bikeable cities, with the goal of reducing driving miles overall.

Durham also received funds to restore watersheds, part of some $472 million in EPA funding across the state to upgrade water systems, improve water quality, and reduce flooding.

“Getting the Solar in and the Fossil Fuels Out”

After meeting Mayor Williams, I am greeted by an eager group of local city officials from the Parks & Rec and related departments on Fayetteville Street at the W.D. Hill Recreation Center. W.D. Hill is on the other side of the train tracks and the freeway from downtown Durham. That’s by design, explains Summer Alston, special projects manager for the City of Durham.

Alston grew up in a small rural community about an hour outside of Durham in Warren County, the birthplace of the U.S. environmental justice movement. In 1982, residents blocked roads to halt the dumping of toxic waste just down the road from the Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church, where much of their organizing took place.

Seated on the historic church’s pews, associate minister, Reverend Bill Kearney, tells me how the EPA had okayed the dumping based on the assumption that the Black community was “poor, politically impotent, and this was an easy thing to do.” But then, Kearney says, Black and white residents joined together, and “everyday people, many of them who were descendants of enslaved people who had been fighting and wishing for social justice, found themselves having to fight and resist because of environmental injustice. So, the two merged here” and the term “environmental justice” was born.

This legacy influences and permeates the work of those who have followed in their footsteps, Alston explains. She is not alone in expressing a healthy dose of skepticism about relying on the federal government or its money. Trained as an urban planner, Alston is now working full-time to ensure that the new federal funds service the needs of North Carolina’s most hard-hit communities.

W.D. Hill sits in the heart of the historic Black community of Hayti where residents face a host of challenges that are exacerbated by the worsening climate crisis. “There is a historic trend here of poor and Black folks getting less quality land and being in those areas that are more prone to flooding historically having infrastructure that is not up to standard,” Alston says. “Now with climate change, historical wrongs are just being amplified, generation after generation after generation.”

To address some of these risks, W.D. Hill is about to become Durham’s first “resilience hub.” The city received a $297,000 grant from the $550 million Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant designed to assist states, local governments, and Tribes to reduce energy use, fossil fuel emissions, and improve energy efficiency. W.D. Hill will be installing solar panels and backup battery storage which will allow it to retain power even when the centralized fossil fuel system fails.

Summer Alston, André White, and Neisha Reynolds at W.D. Hill Recreation Center in Hayti.

The community already relies on the facility not only for recreation, but also as a cooling center and place of refuge during frequent bouts of extreme heat and storms. Now W.D. Hill will be energy-self-reliant. The federal funding also inspired a community-led months-long discussion about what “resilience” means for the whole district. The city applied for a $12 million Justice40 grant to support the resulting, “Hayti Reborn” initiative.

In a Hart Research poll for the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters Foundation, registered voters of all affiliations in North Carolina overwhelmingly support solar and wind over fossil fuels and want to rapidly transition off fossil fuels. They identify the urgency of the climate crisis, with Black voters expressing the greatest concern. In a Quinnipiac University poll, North Carolina Democrats place the climate crisis above abortion, health care, and crime, and rank addressing racial inequality second (after preserving democracy) on their most pressing issues facing the nation.

Central Park and Fayetteville Street flooded as a result of Hurricane Helene. To the west, Asheville was without power for weeks, and many areas are still waiting for electricity. Without electricity, water and sewage cannot flow. Across the state, over one million households went without power, including parts of Durham.

Durham, like the rest of the state, primarily depends on electricity powered by highly centralized fossil fuel energy plants that rely on coal and methane gas, followed by nuclear power. A leading cause of electricity outages in extreme weather events is downed or damaged lines and towers carrying power from centralized plants to faraway users. The shorter the distance energy travels the more resilient the system, and the less energy is used. This is why localized distributed renewable energy systems — such as solar panels on the roof — are a solution to a host of fossil-fueled problems.

City officials share a vision of bringing solar panels and community-level microgrids across Durham, building off of a grant from the American Rescue Plan. The state government has received $156 million from the Infrastructure Law’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for a Solar For All program to fund rooftop and community solar projects in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Across the state, some 90,000 North Carolina households claimed more than $100 million in residential renewable energy credits and $60 million in energy efficiency credits under the IRA in just one year, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

Bobby Jones outside a Duke Energy facility in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Federal subsidies will help overcome obstacles imposed by Duke Energy, the state’s monopoly power-provider. In what advocates describe as its decade-long battle against solar, among other policies, Duke has made solar more expensive to use by rejecting net-metering.

Bobby Jones, founder and President of Down East Coal Ash Environmental and Social Justice Coalition, wants a 100 percent renewable energy transition in his small city of Goldsboro. Duke’s Goldsboro power plant burned coal from 1951 to 2012, and has continued to store and utilize coal ash waste after it switched to methane gas. Jones has watched loved-ones die from cancers and other illnesses that he attributes to pollution from the plant. He’s working to not only hold Duke accountable, but also halt Duke’s plans to further expand methane gas operations.

“Solar could be such a blessing to my community in a whole lot of ways,” Jones says. “Not only would it put clean energy in our community, [but also] get them fossil fuels out.”

“It’s an all-boats-float situation,” Alston says of the Biden-Harris funding. “Making scarcity less of a thing means” there’s more money to go around to service the entire state.

“When we can deliver on funding, this once in a lifetime funding, we’re able to execute on promises that we’ve made, not promises we’ve made today, promises we made for the past 20 years,” says Neisha Reynolds, Durham’s grant writer. “Then you know that we’ll re-instill people’s faith in the system that’s supposed to be designed to serve them.”

But if the money falls through and they’re unable to deliver, people will disengage even further. “I don’t know how many more hits they will take,” Alston confides.
“We’ve Never Been Asked Before. We’ve Always Been Told.”

Crystal Cavalier-Keck is a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. Her family and her Tribe have resided in North Carolina for generations. She lives in the home built by her grandfather in Mebane just North of Durham and surrounded by relatives.

She has repeatedly put her body on the line in protest to protect her land and her people, including showing up outside of the White House in 2022 to shut down roads and block traffic in opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act. Passage of the law required a side deal with Senator Joe Manchin that greenlit the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, which would pass within miles of her home and which she has led opposition to for years. “It was a deal with the devil,” she says.

Crystal Cavalier-Keck and husband Jason Crazy Bear Keck.

Cavalier-Keck founded 7 Directions of Service to “mobilize impacted communities and our allies to protect sacred places and phase out fossil fuels.” She has continued to fight not only against the pipeline, but also the many other faults in the law which include tax breaks for the largest fossil fuel companies to conduct carbon capture and storage, support for destructive extractive projects, and other federal policies that are expanding fossil fuel production. But this has not stopped her from also working to ensure that tribal communities secure benefits.

As a part of a Justice40 hub which includes North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and Southern Environmental Law Center, 7 Directions has already helped seven tribal communities submit their own proposals for support.

Cavalier-Keck describes an entirely unique and empowering process. “Whenever somebody used to come into our community, they would say, ‘This is what’s good for you, this is what will be done.’ We’ve never been asked before. We’ve always been told.”

If Trump takes back the White House, not only will these benefits likely stop flowing, she explains, but she and her allies will instead be forced to confront a rollback of hard-fought victories. She expressed similar fears for the outcome of the state’s gubernatorial race if Mark Robinson were to win.

“Our community would really be at a loss,” Cavalier-Keck says. “Even low-income white communities too. I don’t think these Trump administration people understand what they are proposing, or they do understand, and they just don’t care that it would affect those people too.”

A Trump Win Would Threaten Historic Climate Progress in North Carolina
The Attack

Donald Trump plans to renew his “American Energy Dominance” agenda via a fossil fuel free-for-all on behalf of Big Oil. He will gut solar, wind, and federal regulations that protect our air, water, and climate. He tried to kill the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law while it was being negotiated, and said that he will repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and rescind any “unspent” funds, having asserted that he should have the power to refuse to spend any federal money he considers wasteful. He has threatened to deploy the U.S. military against the “radical left;”congressional Republicans have described many Justice40 recipient organizations, including the Southern Environmental Law Center, in remarkably similar terms.

Project 2025, the conservative policy handbook for a second Trump term, would undo what it calls the “woke” and “racist ‘equity’ agenda of the Biden administration.” Stephen Moore, co-author of those words, also co-wrote Fueling Freedom, which calls fossil fuels the “Master Resource” and details how white men and the federal government can fully unleash them.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and rescind all funds not already spent by these programs. If the IRA withstands the assault, Project 2025 would end direct funding for nonprofits or community organizations under the law. It would eliminate Justice40, the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, gut the EPA, end climate action, and halt “extreme ‘green’ policies,” including subsidies for renewable energy and green energy jobs.

An analysis by Energy Innovation found that, in contrast to current policies, Project 2025 would increase annual energy costs by nearly $200 per household for North Carolinians in 2030 and more than $360 in 2035. It would also emit an excess of over 21 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in the state in 2035 — equivalent to the emissions from five coal-fired power plants.

“There’s so much on the line” with this election, says Williams, the Durham mayor. Vice President Kamala Harris’ policies are “the solutions that we’re looking for on the ground.”

The alternative, he adds, is just “impossible to imagine.”

Rolling Stone

Türkiye: Plans for Harmful Coal Expansion

Toxic Air Affects Health in Surrounding Community


Click to expand Image
Entrance to Çoğulhan village, located 500 meters from Afşin Elbistan, a coal power plant, Afşin, Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye. © 2024 Katharina Rall/Human Rights Watch

(Istanbul) – Türkiye’s Environment Ministry should not approve the planned addition of two more units at Afşin-Elbistan coal power plant A in the southeastern Kahramanmaraş province in view of the serious harm the plant has caused the surrounding community, Human Rights Watch said today.

Human Rights Watch research found that air pollution levels near plant A – and the later built plant B located two kilometers away – are dangerously high and that residents are experiencing health conditions that academic studies have attributed to toxic air. Despite an early government warning that a cancer explosion was expected in Afşin-Elbistan, the government has failed to monitor and reduce the harm with more stringent regulations and enforcement.

“Toxic air from coal power plants is killing thousands of people every year in Türkiye while authorities do little to prevent the problem or even to warn people of the harm to their health,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Instead of authorizing the expansion of polluting coal power plants, the Turkish government should strengthen and enforce air quality standards and enable a just transition from coal to renewables by 2030.”

The government is continuing to expand coal plants notwithstanding significant progress in Türkiye’s renewable energy sources that research has shown would enable Türkiye to exit coal by 2030. Renewable energy sources currently make up 54 percent of Türkiye’s installed electricity capacity, significantly above the global average of about 30 percent, and the International Energy Agency projects renewable energy use to increase 50 percent between 2021 and 2026.

In May 2024, Human Rights Watch interviewed 28 residents about their experiences of air pollution in Afşin-Elbistan, including 11 women and 4 older people; 2 elected village headmen from nearby villages; the mayor of the nearby town of Elbistan, 2 academics, 5 health professionals working in the region, 2 lawyers, 1 public official, and 6 local activists. Human Rights Watch also reviewed and analyzed recent air quality data from the closest governmental monitoring station whose data is publicly available, satellite data of air pollution from the EU Copernicus program, and official government documents.

Human Rights Watch wrote letters to the relevant seven divisions at the Health Ministry and that the parent company of the firm operating coal plant, which had applied for the additional units; to the state-owned electricity generation company; and to local government authorities. It also wrote to the Turkish Statistical Institute requesting health data related to Afşin and Elbistan districts. None have responded.

Residents living near the coal plants said that friends, family, and neighbors had died from cancer and cardiovascular or respiratory ailments they believe were attributable to or exacerbated by the pollution from the nearby plants.

A 57-year-old man in a village about 500 meters from coal plant A has had respiratory illness for the past 13 years: “I have asthma, and my doctor says I need clean air. But there is no clean air. We are all ill here.”

Health care workers interviewed said they had seen increased rates of respiratory problems in areas surrounding the plants.

The coal mine feeding the power plants in Afşin-Elbistan is a so-called carbon bomb, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel production projects with a coal extraction capacity of 4.09 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Expanding the coal plant threatens Türkiye’s energy transition and jeopardizes Türkiye’s obligations under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Despite substantial investment in renewable energy sources, including solar and wind energy, Türkiye’s 2022 National Energy Plan makes no mention of a planned phaseout from coal-based electricity generation.

The country became Europe’s largest coal-fired electricity producer in early 2024 and accounts for 73 percent of planned but not-yet-constructed coal projects within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the EU that are actively seeking necessary approvals and financing. Based on the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, more than 35,000 people died from air pollution in 2019 in Türkiye.

Türkiye should address air pollution as part of its constitutional and international legal obligations to realize the human rights to health, life, and a healthy environment and stop the expansion of coal plants in line with the duty to prevent exposure to toxic substances. The government should tackle the root causes of air pollution by drastically reducing the release of harmful pollutants, including with concrete actions to phase out coal by 2030 and refraining from expanding existing operations.

It should also take concrete steps to better monitor air quality and make the results easy to access and understandable by everyone, and by improving and applying rigorous air quality standards in line with WHO recommendations, especially in areas affected by coal plant emissions. The government should promptly introduce limits for PM2.5 – polluting particulate matter – concentrations in line with current EU regulations, and further strive to update its air quality standards to comply with proposed new EU standards expected to be adopted later in 2024. Data of emissions from large combustion plants should be made public.

“People in Afşin-Elbistan have been paying the price of coal-based electricity generation for decades,” Willamson said. “Instead of expanding a coal plant in an area where people have been exposed to high levels of pollution, the governments should urgently protect their lives and realize their right to a healthy environment.”

For additional details about air pollution and the situation in Türkiye, please see below.

Scientific research has found that exposure to air pollutants from coal power plants is associated with a risk of mortality more than double that of exposure from other sources and that canceling new coal plants would reduce air pollution related mortality globally.

The use of coal for electricity generation, alongside the domestic residential use of coal and wood for heating, creates heavy air pollution in Türkiye’s coal regions. Türkiye produces electricity by burning lignite, a low-quality polluting type of coal found in abundance throughout the country, in outdated coal plants.

Over four decades, successive Turkish governments have built and expanded two of the country’s biggest coal power plants, plants A and B, in Afşin-Elbistan. Emissions from plant A, which lacked technology to reduce emissions from its inception in 1984 through its temporary closure in 2023, are of particular concern, Human Rights Watch said. Plant A is 2.5 kilometers from plant B, which was built in 2004 using newer technologies.

Despite this, the Turkish authorities are due to be presented with an environmental impact assessment that gives the go-ahead for the construction of two additional units at power plant A, with an additional capacity of 688 MW and an investment cost of 37.5 billion Turkish Lira (at the time approximately 1.1. billion USD). A 2022 study commissioned by Greenpeace Mediterranean estimates that the planned expansion of the plant will lead to about 1,900 premature deaths over its 30-year economic lifespan.

Human Rights Watch analysis of air quality data from January 2021 to June 2024 found dangerously high levels of air pollution in the area surrounding the Afşin-Elbistan coal plants. Analysis of satellite data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P mission shows that the average concentration of sulfur dioxide (SO2) was significantly higher over the plants and in the surrounding villages than over Elbistan, the location of the closest air quality monitoring station whose data is published. Residents living in villages close to the coal plants said they have not received any information about the risks from the plants in the region or how to help protect themselves.


Click to expand Image
Map of the village of Çoğulhan, between the two Afşin-Elbistan coal plants. © Image © 2024 Airbus. Google Earth. Graphic © Human Rights Watch

Türkiye’s air quality standards are less strict than those recommended by WHO and do not include a limit for the harmful PM2.5 pollutant, responsible for the most deaths worldwide of any pollutant, leaving a major regulatory gap.


Click to expand Image
© 2024

Coal, Health, and Climate Change

Globally, coal plants are responsible for over 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: more than any other single source contributing to the climate crisis. Burning coal, and in particular lignite, releases significant pollutants including particulate matter and sulphur dioxide (SO2), each of which can significantly harm health.

The impact of particulate matter of less than 10 micrometers (PM10) and of less than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) on human health is substantial. PM2.5 can reach deep into the lower respiratory tract, leading to serious respiratory and cardiovascular problems, and can easily enter the bloodstream and penetrate the lungs. Another pollutant of concern is SO2 which can cause harmful effects to the lungs, damage the cardiovascular and nervous systems and contribute to type 2 diabetes and even death.

Although Türkiye’s updated 2023 Nationally Determined Contributions, its climate action plan under the Paris Agreement, aims to increase the share of renewable energy sources in electricity generation, the country has not set a date for a coal exit. Allowing the addition of two new units with a total capacity of 688 MW to the existing 1.355 MW at the coal power plant Afşin-Elbistan A could undermine efforts to phase out coal.

Despite these advances, government data indicates that 36 percent of the electricity produced in Türkiye in 2022 was generated by coal plants. Türkiye’s operating coal fleet grew by 34 percent between 2015 and 2023.In the first quarter of 2024, the total installed capacity of coal plants was 20.2 GW, with an additional 2 GW capacity expected by 2035.

Coal Feeding Toxic Air

According to 2019 Turkish Health Ministry data air pollution is among the most important factors affecting life expectancy in Turkey. A 2001 scientific study found that communities near coal plants in the western province of Kütahya are more likely to experience health problems such as respiratory problems and reduced lung function, conditions commonly linked to air pollution.

Another study, first published in 2010, found that the impact of air pollution on people in villages near the Bursa Orhaneli coal plant in northwest Türkiye was dependent on their proximity to the coal plant as a predictor of various respiratory diseases. Children living in Türkiye’s coal-mining areas are also at higher risk of exposure to dangerous heavy metals.

Türkiye has f 380 air quality monitoring stations across the country; the closest to Afşin-Elbistan coal plant A with publicly available data is in Elbistan, 22 kilometers away. Other stations are within 3 kilometers of the plant produce no publicly available data.


Click to expand Image
Data © OpenStreetMap

Human Rights Watch analysis of SO2 concentrations recorded at the Elbistan ground monitoring station between 2019 and June 2024 shows that pollution levels started to decrease when operations of plant A temporarily ceased between February and May 2020 because the government said it had failed to comply with regulatory requirements.

Pollution levels decreased even more significantly when operations of plants A and B ceased for most of 2023 after the two earthquakes of February 6, 2023, affecting the entire region and slightly damaging the plant. The Right to Clean Air Platform (CAP), a national network of environmental groups and health professionals, similarly found that Afşin-Elbistan was a pollution hotspot in 2019.


Click to expand Image
The graph above represents the daily average of SO2 concentration between January 2019 and June 2024 measured at Elbistan air quality monitoring station. Pollution levels started to decrease when operations temporarily ceased between February and May 2020. Pollution levels decreased more significantly when operations also ceased for most of 2023 after the two earthquakes of February 6, 2023. For comparison, the graph above includes the daily WHO recommended SO2 concentration limit of 45 µg/m³, the proposed EU 2030 standards limit of 50 µg/m³ limit, and the 2019 Turkish standards limit of 125 µg/m³. © 2024 Human Rights Watch

The SO2 values recorded at the government ground level monitoring station in Elbistan are very likely to be much lower than at the levels at locations closer to the plant. The average SO2 vertical column density at ground level from January 1, 2019, to June 1, 2024, over the village of Çoğulhan, directly adjacent to the plant, was almost three times higher than the average density recorded over the monitoring station in Elbistan during that period.


Click to expand Image
Map of the average SO2 concentration from January 1, 2019, to June 1, 2024, around the Afşin-Elbistan coal power plant A showing significantly higher levels in the immediate vicinity of the plant than over the closest monitoring station, 22km away in the town of Elbistan. Data © Copernicus Sentinel-5P processed with Google Earth Engine. Analysis and graphic © Human Rights Watch.

The Afsin-Elbistan A plant had been allowed to operate without filters required by environmental regulations for many years. Despite repeated legal challenges and campaigning that resulted in its closure on January 1, 2020 for failure to comply with environmental regulations, the government permitted the plant to reopen in May 2020 and to continue operating until the earthquakes, which damaged the plants. As of December 26, 2023, only one of four A plant units, for the first time fitted with a desulfurization filter, had been permitted to restart.

While the best available technology for desulfurization can drastically lower SO2 emissions, it is unclear whether this technology is used at the unit that has been permitted to restart. There are also concerns that air pollutant filters lose performance efficiency over time. As is acknowledged in the environmental impact assessment, if new units are added to the existing coal plant, SO2 pollution levels in the area will rise. In addition, while the best available desulphurization technology can significantly limit exposure to SO2, it cannot undo the health harm caused by prior exposure.

In November 2018, Çelikler Holding, a private company, took over Afsin-Elbistan A plant, from the state company (EÜAŞ), which previously operated it. Human Rights Watch does not know the terms of the agreement between the state company and Çelikler Holding and key details of the agreement should be made public.

Çelikler Holding says on their website that they “aim to prevent negative impacts on the environment and society and to take appropriate measures [to reduce such impacts] where they cannot be prevented.” The company did not respond to questions about the measures taken to minimize the release of harmful air pollutants and requested projections once filtration is fully installed at the plant.

Human Rights Watch analysis of PM2.5 levels recorded at the government monitoring station in Elbistan from January 2021 to June 2024 found that the average PM2.5 concentration was more than five times the annual WHO recommended level and almost three times the proposed 2030 EU standard. Türkiye has not established PM2.5 limits under its pollution control laws/standards aligned with the EU limits.


Click to expand Image
The graph above represents the daily average PM2.5 concentration between January 2021 and June 2024 measured at Elbistan air quality monitoring station. For comparison, the WHO recommendation (daily average no higher than 45 µg/m³) and proposed EU 2030 standard (daily average no higher than 25 µg/m³) are also displayed. © 2024 Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch analysis of PM10 concentrations at the Elbistan air quality monitoring station between January 2021 and June 2024 also shows that pollution levels have remained high in recent years, with an average PM10 concentration more than four times the annual WHO recommended level and 1.75 times the 2019 Turkish standard.


Click to expand Image
The graph above represents the daily average of PM 10 concentration between January 2021 and June 2024 measured at Elbistan air quality monitoring station. For comparison, the 2019 Turkish daily standard (50 µg/m³), the WHO recommendation and the proposed EU 2030 daily standard (45 µg/m³) are also displayed. © 2024 Human Rights Watch

Health Impacts of Toxic Air Fed by Coal in Afsin-Elbistan

The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has told governments that to protect and fulfil the right to health governments are required to implement policies to reduce and eliminate air pollution.

People living in the vicinity of the coal plants in Afşin-Elbistan described health problems that they believe could be related to the toxic air they are breathing.

Hacıkız Savran, 70, who lives less than 500 meters from the power plant and can see the plant’s chimney belching out smoke from her living room, said she has had severe asthma for more than 7 years: “[My] doctor was surprised to hear that I had never smoked in my life. He said, ‘Why did you become [this sick] if you never smoked?’”

Fatma (real name withheld for her own protection) 55, lives in Çoğulhan, has had asthma for 4 years and lost her son to lung cancer which she believes was linked to pollution from the plant. She worries about the impact of air pollution on women: “There is a lot of asthma and a lot of chest and lung conditions among women in the village.… Men can go off in their cars to other places but we as women are always at home. We have to suffer the dirt of the plant.”

Children from Çoğulhan and six neighboring villages attend schools close to the plant. A health professional in Elbistan told Human Rights Watch that they had observed a high incidence of respiratory diseases, particularly among children.


Click to expand Image
Map of the location of the schools in Çoğulhan, highlighting their proximity with the plant and the area for the additional two units. Image © 2024 Airbus. Google Earth. © Graphic © Human Rights Watch

People with certain health conditions, such as asthma or cardiovascular problems, children, older people, pregnant women, workers, those living in poverty, and members of other socially and economically marginalized groups are among those most at risk of exposure and adverse effects of air pollution.

Scientific research drawing on data from 83 countries suggests that the more a country relies on coal power plants to generate energy, the greater the lung cancer risk. While research specific to the health impacts of air pollution for people in surrounding areas of the Afşin-Elbistan coal plant is scarce, a 2009 PhD thesis found that nonsmokers in nearby villages were more likely to experience genotoxic damage than those further away from the plant, which may increase the risk of cancer.

Similarly, a 2007 academic study found nonsmoking workers employed in the transportation of fly ash at Afşin-Elbistan A power plant to be more likely to experience cytogenetic damage (changes in their chromosomes which can lead to cancer).

Several people interviewed expressed concern about high numbers of cancer cases in their families.In 2002, the head of the Health Ministry’s Cancer Control Department stated that a cancer explosion was expected in Afşin-Elbistan, in the ensuing five years. The official noted that a coal power plant had been built there 30 years earlier and that the coal plant poses a serious danger to the people of the region.

A 2017 report by the same ministry identified Elbistan as a priority region for establishing an oncology service, a recommendation that has not been followed. The Health Ministry did not respond to questions regarding cancer prevalence in Afşin and Elbistan districts and whether further studies had been carried out.

Lack of Sufficient Monitoring of Air Quality

In 2019, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment published a report focused on the right to breathe clean air as one of the components of a right to a healthy environment. He outlined key steps governments to take in fulfilling the right to a healthy environment by ensuring clean air, the first of which is to monitor air quality and its impact on health.

Over the years, Türkiye has invested in developing its air quality monitoring systems, supported by EU accession funds. Yet the number of stations remain insufficient and data from areas at high risk of pollution is not available to the public.

While the Turkish government air quality monitoring website provides measurements from ground level monitoring stations across the country, the historic data is at times incomplete and pollution hotspots like Afşin-Elbistan are not closely monitored. According to analysis of 2016-2019 data, conditions in at least 21 of 81 provinces could not be adequately assessed because data was available for fewer than 75 percent of days, a criterion of the European Environment Agency.

Residents of Çoğulhan said that a monitoring station in the village was no longer operational, and no data from the station is publicly available. Human Rights Watch wrote in May 2024 to government and to the state-run electricity production company (EÜAŞ) seeking any data from the station, but received no reply.

These shortcomings prevent the Turkish government from reliably monitoring the impact of coal plants on air quality.

Lack of Information, Consultation about Power Plant Expansion

Another key step for governments to take to fulfill their human rights obligations is to share information in a timely, accessible way, educating the public about health risks and issuing health advisories.

Yet there is a dearth of information about the real extent of air pollution in the region and related health risks. In addition to the lack of effective monitoring of ground level air pollution, the emissions from large combustion plants, including coal plants, are not publicly available in Türkiye. Even when courts have ordered the government to provide emissions data of coal plants publicly, the authorities have not revealed the data.

Residents in Çoğulhan, Berçenek, and Altunelma, said they have not received any information about the extent of environmental problems in the region, possible health effects, or how to participate in decisions around the coal plant that would enable them to address prevent health risks and seek remediation for health harms suffered.

The Environment Ministry provides some health advice on a website, such as suggesting that members of sensitive groups limit outdoor activities when air pollution levels are high, but it does not provide detailed practical advice for at risk groups.

Residents also raised concerns about their lack of information about the planned expansion of the coal power plant. “They don’t ever tell us anything,” said Savran, the 70-year-old resident. “Everything is decided in Ankara.”

The newly elected mayor of Elbistan said that even municipal authorities were not consulted during the expansion approval process, an apparent violation of Turkish regulations governing the process.

Human Rights Obligations and Air Pollution

Human rights obligations to respect, protect, and fulfil rights including those to life, to bodily integrity, to health, to information and to a healthy environment require governments to take action to prevent air pollution and strive to ensure clean air. The UN Human Rights Committee, in its comment on obligations on the right to life noted that implementation of the obligation to respect the right to life, depends, among other things, on governments taking measures to protect the environment against pollution caused by public and private actors.

The UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment has set out how states must not only not violate the right to breathe clean air through their own actions but also protect the right from being violated by third parties, especially businesses. To do so, governments must establish, implement and enforce laws, policies and programs to fulfil the right. They also have duties to promote education and public awareness; provide access to information; facilitate public participation in the assessment of proposed projects, policies and environmental decisions; and ensure affordable, timely access to remedies.

The European Court of Human Rights has found in several cases that severe environmental pollution affecting individuals’ well-being violated their rights to privacy and family life. In finding violations of human rights, the court has taken into account the proximity of homes to the source of pollution.

In its case-law, the court has established that governments have a positive obligation to undertake due diligence with respect to pollution hazards, weigh the impact they have on personal and family lives against any competing interests, and take effective measures to protect people’s lives and health, including by preventing or reducing the harmful impacts and providing adequate information to people.

'Concrete cancer' ruining pools for hundreds of Central Texans

Claire Osborn, Austin American-Statesman
Mon, August 5, 2024 

Neeley Ramey first noticed the cracks in her then-4-year-old pool in 2021 and thought they were a result of the deadly freeze that winter in Central Texas. But the fissures kept spreading for months.

Now she knows what hundreds of other swimming pool owners in Central Texas counties have unfortunately discovered: Her pool has "concrete cancer" and has to be demolished because of a defect in its building materials.

"Now I get quoted $150,000 to $170,000 just to rip the concrete out," said Ramey, who lives in Southwest Austin and paid $60,000 for her pool. She said her pool builder told her he couldn't help her because the problem caused him to go broke.

"I'm just sick over it," Ramey said.

She is now part of a multidistrict litigation lawsuit originally filed in 2021 in Travis County that includes more than 120 plaintiffs, she said. Multidistrict litigation combines multiple civil cases involving one or more common questions but pending in different districts.

Sachin Patel examines cracks in the family's concrete pool in Leander as his daughters, Rayna, 7, and Zara, 5, play nearby. Patel found out the pool has a defect called "concrete cancer," otherwise known as an alkali-silica reaction. He said his family is swimming in the pool until the cracks make it unusable.

These cases point to concrete being the issue with failing pools.

Concrete is made by mixing sand, cement and water. Concrete cancer, formally known as alkali-silica reaction, or ASR, causes concrete to swell internally and to crack when it comes in contact with water. It happens when there's a chemical reaction between alkalis in the cement and certain types of silica in the aggregates, or sand.

The problem has affected Central Texas property owners who had pools installed between 2017 and 2022, according to law firms and pool builders.

The way to prevent ASR is to add fly ash, a byproduct of burning coal, to the mix before the concrete is poured, officials said.

There has been a shortage of fly ash in recent years, people involved in the pool industry said. John Ford, who owns his own pool company, Front2back Custom, and other builders blamed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations for reducing the number of coal-burning plants, and said the problem was made worse during the COVID-19 pandemic when demand for pools boomed.

Austin attorney Michael Lovins said he is representing about 18 pool owners from Travis, Hays and Williamson counties in the multidistrict litigation lawsuit. It was not clear from the litigation whether pool owners from other Central Texas counties are included in the lawsuit.

"I'm not ready to say why it's a Central Texas problem because I'm still trying to figure it out," Lovins said. "The basic theory of the case is that the standard of care, meaning what a responsible company does that supplies aggregates, is to test the pH balance and that tells you if you need to add fly ash. I think at every step in the supply chain, the people in charge chose not to do a batch test of the pH balance."

Lovins said he has sued pool builders and cement providers for his clients.

"I have a few pools where I know the company is still in business but quite a few pools where the pool builder is out of business," he said. "I believe that ASR is a major factor for pool builders going out of business."

Mike Church, the president of Cody Pools, said pool builders at the time didn't know there was no fly ash in the concrete they received.

"None of us knew it was being cut," he said.

Cody Pools is not one of the defendants in the multidistrict litigation lawsuit.

Neeley Ramey sits beside the defective swimming pool at her Southwest Austin home. "I'm just sick over it," she says of the cracks in the pool.

Church said his theory, based on research by engineers, is that three to four quarries in the Bastrop area provided the sand and rocks that reacted with cement to cause ASR. He said the issue also involved three providers of shotcrete, which is concrete that is sprayed at a high velocity through a hose. A small number of Cody Pools were affected by ASR and the company has set up a response team to support affected customers and canceled contracts with the shotcrete providers involved in the cancer concrete issue, Church said.

The defendants in the multidistrict litigation that provided materials include Bastrop Sand Supply, Easy Mix Concrete Services, Travis Materials Group and Texas Lehigh Cement Co. None of their representatives or lawyers replied to a request for comment.

Easy Mix said in a court document that it was not responsible for any defects in pools because it purchased all its materials from Travis Materials and Texas Lehigh Cement Co.

Travis Materials and Texas Lehigh Cement Co. both said in cross-claims filed against Easy Mix that the material they provided to the concrete company was not defective.

"If any defect exists in the concrete formulated and manufactured by Easy Mix, the defect resulted from Easy Mix's faulty design and manufacture of the concrete," their claims said.

Part of the problem, Ford said, is that Texas pool builders are not required to be licensed. "It's the wild, wild West out there," he said. "Anyone can be a pool builder."

"Now I get quoted $150,000 to $170,000 just to rip the concrete out," says Neely Ramey, who paid $60,000 for her pool that is now cracking from "concrete cancer."

He said the only way to diagnose if a pool has ASR is to drill a core sample from the pool and take that to a lab to be analyzed. He said he has been providing the service for three years for $4,500.

There is no fix for ASR, and pools have to be demolished, Ford said.

"A lot of people want to put a Band-Aid on the outside of the pool, but what they don't understand is the pool isn't cracking from the outside in," he said. "ASR is forming capillaries on the inside, and those capillaries start deteriorating on the inside of the pool."

Lakeway resident AJ Miller said he started a Facebook page for pool owners with ASR after his pool was ruined by the problem. "My backyard went from my oasis to my hellhole," he said.

Miller said he estimates, based on responses to his Facebook page, that there are at least 1,000 Central Texas pool owners whose pools have ASR.

His advice to people who think they have ASR problems is to contact their pool builder, find out who the concrete maker was and what date the concrete was poured, Miller said. People interested in building pools should make sure their builders understand what ASR is, he said. Potential pool owners should ask to see a report of what is in the concrete mix, called the batch report, before the concrete is poured, Miller said.

Leander resident Sachin Patel said that when he first noticed cracks on the surface of his pool in early 2021, he wasn't concerned but started to worry later in the year when cracks appeared on the outside of the aboveground structure.

Sachin Patel holds a chunk of concrete that came off the side of his concrete pool. Patel said he probably cannot get his money back from the builder or the concrete maker because both are bankrupt.

His pool builder "kind of acknowledged" the pool had ASR in 2022, but the builder's insurance company said it didn't cover it, Patel said. He said he learned about ASR from Miller's Facebook page. Patel said his lawyers recently told him that he probably couldn't recover any money for his pool because the builder and the concrete supplier have gone bankrupt.

"I spent $73,000 in 2020 to build the pool and it has a spa," said Patel. "I think the same pool will cost $125,000 to $130,000 because of inflation."

He said he and his children are trying to make it through the summer by still using the pool that is leaking about half an inch of water per day.

Former Cedar Park Mayor Corbin Van Arsdale filed a lawsuit in July against pool builder Precision Watershapes and Easy Mix claiming that his pool was ruined by defects including ASR. Van Arsdale did not respond to a request for comment.

Precision Watershapes has not yet filed a response to Van Arsdale's lawsuit.

The company also was sued by several people in the multidistrict litigation lawsuit. Precision Watershapes said in response to one of those lawsuits that it was not responsible for the defects in the pool, according to a third-party petition. The defects were due to negligence by a concrete subcontractor, the petition said.

ASR is a huge financial stress for pool owners, said Lovins, the attorney.

Pool owners paid an average of $125,000 for a pool during the pandemic, but the cost to demolish it and rebuild is now about 2½ times more, he said.

"That's a ton of money unless you are Elon Musk," Lovins said. "People built these because it was sort of an escape and an oasis for family and kids, and now instead of having a place to laugh and play and have a good time, they have an empty hole in the ground they have to put a yellow fence around."

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman:

Scientist Defends an Audacious Plan to Block Sunlight and Cool the Earth

David Gelles
Updated Sun, 4 August 2024 
NY Times

David Keith believes that by intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, it would be possible to lower temperatures worldwide, blunting global warming.

CHICAGO  David Keith was a graduate student in 1991 when a volcano erupted in the Philippines, sending a cloud of ash toward the edge of space.

Seventeen million tons of sulfur dioxide released from Mount Pinatubo spread across the stratosphere, reflecting some of the sun’s energy away from Earth. The result was a drop in average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by roughly one degree Fahrenheit in the year that followed.

Today, Keith cites that event as validation of an idea that has become his life’s work: He believes that by intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, it would be possible to lower temperatures worldwide, blunting global warming.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

Such radical interventions are increasingly being taken seriously as the effects of climate change grow more intense. Global temperatures have hit record highs for 13 months in a row, unleashing violent weather, deadly heat waves and raising sea levels. Scientists expect the heat to keep climbing for decades. The main driver of the warming, the burning of fossil fuels, continues more or less unabated.

Against this backdrop, there is growing interest in efforts to intentionally alter the Earth’s climate, a field known as geoengineering.

Already, major corporations are operating enormous facilities to vacuum up the carbon dioxide that’s heating up the atmosphere and bury it underground. Some scientists are performing experiments designed to brighten clouds, another way to bounce some solar radiation back to space. Others are working on efforts to make oceans and plants absorb more carbon dioxide.

But of all these ideas, it is stratospheric solar geoengineering that elicits the greatest hope and the greatest fear.

Proponents see it as a relatively cheap and fast way to reduce temperatures well before the world has stopped burning fossil fuels. Harvard University has a solar geoengineering program that has received grants from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It’s being studied by the Environmental Defense Fund along with the World Climate Research Program, an international scientific effort. The European Union last year called for a thorough analysis of the risks of geoengineering and said countries should discuss how to regulate an eventual deployment of the technology.

But many scientists and environmentalists fear that it could result in unpredictable calamities.

Because it would be used in the stratosphere and not limited to a particular area, solar geoengineering could affect the whole world, possibly scrambling natural systems, like creating rain in one arid region while drying out the monsoon season elsewhere. Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels. They object to intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that would eventually move from the stratosphere to ground level, where it can irritate the skin, eyes, nose and throat and can cause respiratory problems. And they fear that once begun, a solar geoengineering program would be difficult to stop.

“The whole notion of spraying sulfur compounds to reflect sunlight is arrogant and simplistic,” Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki said. “There are unintended consequences of powerful technologies like these, and we have no idea what they will be.”

Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oxford, said he considered solar geoengineering a grave threat to human civilization.

“It’s not only a bad idea in terms of something that would never be safe to deploy,” he said. “But even doing research on it is not just a waste of money, but actively dangerous.”

Shuchi Talati, founder of a nonprofit organization called the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, called the technology “a double-edged sword.”

“It could be a way to limit human suffering,” she said. “At the same time, I think it can also exacerbate suffering if used in a bad way.”

In a series of interviews, Keith, a professor in the University of Chicago’s department of geophysical sciences, countered that the risks posed by solar geoengineering are well understood, not as severe as portrayed by critics and dwarfed by the potential benefits.

If the technique slowed the warming of the planet by even just one degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, over the next century, Keith said, it could help prevent millions of heat-related deaths each decade.

A planet transformed by solar geoengineering would not be noticeably dimmer during the daytime, according to his calculations. But it could produce a different kind of twilight, one with an orange hue.

He agrees that nations should stop burning coal, oil and gas, period. But Keith believes in going further.

Lean and athletic at 60, with glacier-blue eyes, Keith has spent his life outside the lab rock climbing, sea kayaking and skiing in the Arctic. He is deeply troubled by the myriad ways climate change is disrupting the natural world.

By lowering global temperatures, solar geoengineering could help restore the planet to its preindustrial state, re-creating conditions that existed before enormous amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere and began to cook the Earth, he said.

If there were a global referendum tomorrow on whether to begin solar geoengineering, he said he would vote in favor.

“There certainly are risks, and there certainly are uncertainties,” he said. “But there’s really a lot of evidence that the risks are quantitatively small compared to the benefits, and the uncertainties just aren’t that big.”

The only thing more dangerous than his solution, he suggested, might be not using it at all.

—

To understand just how contentious Keith’s work can be, consider what happened when he tried to perform an initial test in preparation for a solar geoengineering experiment known as Scopex.

Then a professor at Harvard, Keith wanted to release a few pounds of mineral dust at an altitude of roughly 20 kilometers and track how the dust behaved as it floated across the sky.

A test was planned in 2018, possibly over Arizona, but Keith couldn’t find a partner to launch a high-altitude balloon. When details of that plan became public, a group of Indigenous people objected and issued a manifesto against geoengineering.

Three years later, Harvard hired the Swedish space corporation to launch a balloon that would carry the equipment for the test. But before it took place, local groups once again rose up in protest.

The Saami Council, an organization representing Indigenous peoples, said it viewed solar geoengineering “to be the direct opposite of the respect we as Indigenous Peoples are taught to treat nature with.”

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, joined the chorus. “Nature is doing everything it can,” she said. “It’s screaming at us to back off, to stop — and we are doing the exact opposite.”

Within months, the experiment was called off.

“A lesson I’ve learned from this is that if we do this again, we won’t be open in the same way,” Keith said.

Behind the scenes, the Harvard team and its advisory committee became mired in finger pointing over who was to blame for the collapse of the project. Talati, a member of the Scopex advisory board, said it was “the moment of peak chaos.”

It didn’t help that there were personality conflicts. Several committee members said Keith could be ornery and headstrong, correcting colleagues in casual conversation and belittling those with whom he disagreed.

“I can be abrasive and difficult,” Keith acknowledged. “I am sometimes inappropriately forceful in making my point. I’m intense.”

—

Opponents of solar geoengineering cite several main risks.

They say it could create a “moral hazard,” mistakenly giving people the impression that it is not necessary to rapidly reduce fossil fuel emissions.

“The fundamental problem is that we think we’re so smart that we don’t have to pay attention to nature’s boundaries,” Suzuki said. “But we haven’t dealt with the root cause of the problem, which is us.”

The second main concern has to do with unintended consequences.

“This is a really dangerous path to go down,” said Beatrice Rindevall, the chair of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, which opposed the experiment. “It could shock the climate system, could alter hydrological cycles and could exacerbate extreme weather and climate instability.”

And once solar geoengineering began to cool the planet, stopping the effort abruptly could result in a sudden rise in temperatures, a phenomenon known as “termination shock.” The planet could experience “potentially massive temperature rise in an unprepared world over a matter of five to 10 years, hitting the Earth’s climate with something that it probably hasn’t seen since the dinosaur-killing impactor,” Pierrehumbert said.

On top of all this, there are fears about rogue actors using solar geoengineering and concerns that the technology could be weaponized. Not to mention the fact that sulfur dioxide can harm human health.

Keith is adamant that those fears are overblown. And while there would be some additional air pollution, he claims the risk is negligible compared to the benefits.

“There’s plenty of uncertainty about climate responses,” he said. “But it’s pretty hard to imagine if you do a limited amount of hemispherically balanced solar geo that you don’t reduce temperatures everywhere.”

Last year, after the failure to launch the Scopex experiment in Sweden, Keith made a move that stunned his colleagues. He announced he was closing the door on 13 years at Harvard and taking his ambitions to the University of Chicago, where he would build a new program around climate interventions, including solar geoengineering.

“I don’t know whether that stuff will ever get used,” said Gates, a major investor in climate technology. “I do believe that doing the research and understanding it makes sense.”

—

Keith’s career can be traced to his father, Tony Keith, a wildlife biologist who attended the first global gathering to address threats to nature, the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.

Dyslexia prevented him from learning to read until late in 4th grade, but when he was finally able to make sense of written words, he became a voracious reader. He also loved camping and, at 17, hiked a stretch of the Appalachian Trail solo.

After graduating from the University of Toronto, he spent months rock climbing. Looking for a way to get paid to live in the wilderness, he got a job studying walruses in the Canadian Arctic.

Keith eventually enrolled in a doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study experimental physics.

In 1992, he published an academic paper, “A Serious Look at Geoengineering,” that raised the questions that would shape his career: Who should authorize the use of these technologies? Who is liable if something goes wrong?

His academic career took him from Carnegie Mellon University to the University of Calgary, where he began investigating ways to capture and store carbon dioxide. The next stop was Harvard, where he got serious about solar geoengineering.

In 2006, a mutual acquaintance introduced Keith to Gates, who wanted to learn more about technologies that might help fight global warming. The two men discussed climate and technology in a series of meetings over the next 10 years.

Then in 2009, Keith founded Carbon Engineering, a company that developed a process for pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Investors included Gates, Chevron and N. Murray Edwards, who made billions pumping oil from the Canadian oil sands.

Last year Carbon Engineering was acquired by Occidental Petroleum, a major oil and gas producer based in Texas, for $1.1 billion. Keith owned about 4% of the company at the time of the sale, delivering him a personal windfall of about $72 million.

Occidental is now building a series of enormous carbon capture plants. It plans to sell carbon credits to big companies like Amazon and AT&T that want to offset their emissions. Critics say that will only delay the phaseout of fossil fuels while allowing an oil company to profit.

“Of course I’m uncomfortable about it being sold to an oil company, no question,” Keith said, adding that he plans to give away most of his profits from the sale of Carbon Engineering, perhaps to a conservation group.

—

On a summer Monday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard campus was mostly quiet. But inside one classroom, a standing-room-only crowd listened as experts discussed the merits and risks of solar geoengineering.

Among those featured was Frank Keutsch, Keith’s former collaborator on the Scopex experiment.

Keutsch is less sanguine than Keith when considering its potential risks.

“I compare stratospheric solar geoengineering with opiates,” he said on the panel. “They only treat the symptom and not the actual cause. You can get addicted to it if you don’t actually address the cause. In addition, like any painkiller, you’re going to have side effects. And then there are withdrawal symptoms, and that’s termination shock.”

Keutsch is now investigating whether calcium carbonate or diamond dust might be a better material than sulfur, and pondering issues around how a deployment might one day be governed. There are no current plans for a field experiment.

Academic energy in the field has followed Keith to the University of Chicago, which is allowing him to hire 10 full-time faculty members and build a new program focused on various types of geoengineering. The total cost could reach as much as $100 million.

The move has puzzled some. Pierrehumbert, who recently departed the University of Chicago for Oxford, said he was “flabbergasted” and contended that those research dollars could be better spent investigating ways to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

To celebrate his 60th birthday in October, Keith went hiking in the Canadian Rockies and came across a glacier that had shrunk dramatically in recent years. It was a visual reminder that global warming is upending the natural world, and it confirmed his central, controversial belief: Humans have already altered the planet, heating the climate with greenhouse gases. To repair the climate and return it to a more pristine state, we may need to take even more drastic action and engineer the stratosphere.

“I’m more motivated even now to push on solar geo because the rationalist case for it is looking stronger,” Keith said. “While there are still lots of strong individual voices of opposition, there are a lot of people in serious policy positions that are taking it seriously, and that’s really exciting.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company