Five non-climate reasons why danger of extreme heat is rising



Saul Elbein
Sat, July 15, 2023 

Heat waves are the most deadly climate disaster, killing far more people every year than wildfires, hurricanes and floods combined.

But rising temperatures aren’t the only reason that extreme heat is becoming a bigger risk.

Other important reasons include discriminatory urban planning, the insidious nature of heat illness itself and the decade-long federal tug of war over how to respond to heat waves.

Here are five reasons — aside from climate change — why heat risk is worsening.
The US spent years ‘moving backward’ on heat

In 2013, President Barack Obama issued a sweeping executive order that aimed to make U.S. communities more resilient in the face of the impacts of climate change — from rising seas to rising temperatures.

That order sought to coordinate actions by federal agencies to protect populations from climate risk — and to ensure that infrastructure spending wasn’t inadvertently making the country less safe.

It was specifically intended to begin the process, using science, to ensure cities and infrastructure were strengthened in the face of climate change.

Systems to “pay attention to vulnerable communities in particular” were also a part of the order, said Robert Verchick, who served in the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration and now serves as president of the Center for Progressive Reform.

For communities, Verchick said, “you could do simple things like get more tree cover and put in more awnings. Or if you’re living in Phoenix or Las Vegas, we’ve got issues where people just standing outside waiting for a bus can end up in the emergency room — so some of it is about rebuilding bus stops or making sure that buses run more regularly.”

But that rule won’t be out until late this year at the earliest — about a decade after the original Obama executive order.

Heat is a quiet killer

While heat danger — and deaths — are rising, the public sense of that risk hasn’t kept up with its actual magnitude.

Repeated studies have shown that people’s sense of heat risk — even among those most vulnerable — often doesn’t correspond to its actual risk.

Heat’s tendency to fly under the radar has serious impacts for both individual behavior and public policy.

One reason is that unlike other threats from extreme weather, heat waves don’t create the kind of visually dramatic moments that characterize floods or wildfires.

“Even if there’s record-breaking temperatures, there’s still usually less to see than when something dramatic happens — like the flooding that was happening in New England just a couple of days ago,” said Ladd Keith, who studies heat and urban planning at the University of Arizona.

While heat’s impacts are subtle, its death toll isn’t.

In Arizona’s Maricopa County alone, at least 12 people died from heat this year, compared with a single death in the Vermont floods.

Last year, 425 people died in the county from heat — an increase of 25 percent over the prior year, and nearly five times the number of U.S. residents that died during Hurricane Ida.

But because those populations “tend to fall off the radar” for policymakers, Keith said, the rising toll hasn’t caused much political action.

Housing is getting less affordable

Because access to water and air conditioning largely eliminates the risk of death from heat, those who die from heat tend to be those who struggle to secure shelter — or to keep the power on.

There is no county in the United States where a person working a full-time, minimum-wage job can earn enough for a two-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

And in June, researchers published the results of a survey of thousands of people living without housing in California about how they had lost housing — with most saying that high costs had forced them out.

Due to health crises, rent hikes, layoffs or simple bad luck, “people just ran out of the ability to pay, whether it happened quickly or slowly,” lead author Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco, told National Public Radio.

In Maricopa County, exposure to the elements was the biggest risk factor for dying of heat: 80 percent of those killed in 2022 died of heat injuries they sustained outdoors — and the rise in outdoor deaths was the largest component.

Most of those outdoor deaths — and the largest single cadre of fatalities — were the 178 people experiencing homelessness who died in Maricopa last year.

Energy prices are rising

Even those who have housing may be at risk. Most of those who died indoors in 2022 in the Phoenix area lived in houses with air conditioning — but in nearly 80 percent of those cases, it didn’t work.

Keith of the University of Arizona said that’s another factor of housing prices.

Rents or mortgages “also strain the resources available to upkeep homes,” he added.

When air conditioners break, many don’t have the money to repair or replace them.

According to a report by the Federal Reserve, 37 percent of Americans in 2022 couldn’t have come up with $500 in cash to deal with an emergency. That sum is about ten percent of the price of a new air conditioner, which costs an average of $5,000.

Energy prices also rose 14 percent in 2022, twice as fast as inflation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The main driver behind that rise was “global calamities,” Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen told Utility Dive.

Slocum noted that high electricity prices are disproportionately borne by poorer Americans, who tend to rent their homes. Slocum told Utility Dive that this caused a paradox, because “to cut costs, consumers must improve efficiency. But renters can’t make the investments needed to boost energy efficiency.”

That helps explain the people who died in houses with air conditioning units that were functional but not turned on, Keith said. “If you’re spending more money on housing, less money is available to go towards the utility bill — which may lead you to turn on the air conditioner less.”
Urban fixes don’t target those who need them most

Especially when the air conditioning fails, heat risk tends to be less a function of abstract temperature and more a function of urban design, which can drive up urban heat indexes faster than climate change itself.

The science on how to confront this risk is simple to state, if tough to implement, Keith said. He called for targeting projects so that they prioritize reducing heat risk areas where that risk is most serious.

But in a study of five major cities carrying out pilot projects to reduce heat, Keith and his collaborators found that only Boston had done so.

The others — Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, Seattle and Baltimore — had no discernible relationship between the areas where people were most at risk and the projects they funded.

There is a common blind spot around heat interventions, Keith said: Many cities set generic benchmarks, rather than targeted ones. “You say, ‘You’re going to plant a million trees’ — but you don’t specify where or say that it has to go to the places that need it most.”

The Hill.

‘We are not prepared’: Disasters spread as climate change strikes


Charles Krupa/AP Photo

Zack Colman
Sat, July 15, 2023

The floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme heat sweeping the globe are offering a dose of the climate future that scientists have warned about for decades — and all the ways the world is not ready.

From a nearly depleted federal disaster fund to state insurance markets that are faltering under the weight of multiple catastrophes, extreme weather is testing the ability of even a rich nation like the United States to withstand the warming that has arrived faster than many scientists expected. So are the torrential rains flooding Northeastern states like Vermont, the shriveling Colorado River that has prompted a multistate brawl over dividing the water, the record temperatures that have raised worries about the stability of the electric grid, and the Canadian wildfire smoke that has repeatedly blanketed D.C. and other parts of the U.S. in recent weeks.

Still ahead is the August-through-September peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, at a time when ocean temperatures — a crucial fuel source for the storms — are already at levels that European scientists called “off the charts.”

Even worse threats to life, property and nature are coming, scientists say.

“If you don’t like what you’re seeing today, stick around — it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University.

The Biden administration’s responses to the problem include a $369 billion climate package enacted last year that seeks to slash U.S. climate pollution — though that task will take decades — along with more than $50 billion that the 2021 infrastructure law coping with and limiting damage from climate disasters.

It’s unclear whether those measures will yield results fast enough to avoid the worst of climate change or withstand its growing impacts. And even that agenda faces political attacks from Republicans, who have not offered a unified climate strategy but plan to make repealing his signature climate law a prime part of their 2024 message to voters. But President Joe Biden has vowed to defend his legislative wins as the climate signals blare ever louder.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” the president said this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, calling climate change “the single greatest threat to humanity.”

Meanwhile, milestones keep tumbling.

Last week brought the hottest global temperatures in 143 years of record-keeping, which may well mark the highest since the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago.

That has put the planet on a pace to likely set a new temperature record for the year, some experts say, surpassing a previous peak that’s only seven years old. It also jeopardizes the already slim hopes of meeting the temperature targets that the U.S. and more than 190 other countries agreed to under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

The climate research group Berkeley Earth said Tuesday that global average temperatures in June were 1.47 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, just a shade under a stretch target in the Paris climate agreement to limit warming to 1.5 degrees of warming. Missing that target would spell doom for many small island nations at risk from the rising sea levels, scientists say.

The World Meteorological Organization said there is a 66 percent chance the annual global average temperature rise will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius at least once between now and 2027.

The world has already seen 1.2 degrees of warming since the dawn of the industrial revolution, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Meanwhile, federal scientists say levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher than they’ve been in more than 3 million years.

Even with the U.S. and European climate pollution on a downswing, those cuts are not enough to offset increases in other nations, particularly China and several midsize economies.

“The chances of avoiding 1.5 degrees is nil. It’s too hard to get there,” Oppenheimer said. “We’re not getting our act together fast enough to avoid it at this point.”

The climate disasters unfolding now are largely as predicted: rising temperatures, stronger cyclones, deeper droughts, enduring wildfires. But the speed of their arrival has stunned some experts.

“How quickly the onset has occurred and the pace at which these impacts are accelerating — I think even the most seasoned climate scientists are pretty surprised about that,” said Kathy Jacobs, a University of Arizona climate scientist who ran the National Climate Assessment, a sweeping federal agency review of climate science, during the Obama administration.

No relief from the heat

The heat wave that sent temperatures in Phoenix as high as 111 degrees Fahrenheit are expected to persist in many places in the U.S through next week. The peak reached on July 6 contributed to the global surge that marked the world’s hottest days ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization. With an El Niño weather cycle expected to bring warmer than average waters to the Pacific Ocean, on top of decades of accumulating global warming, it’s likely this year will rank as the hottest of all time.

There's a growing recognition among public officials that heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, posing dangerous health threats, said Morgan Zabow, a NOAA official who works on efforts to map heat. As of Friday, nearly 114 million Americans were under heat alerts, according to Heat.gov.

Zabow noted that heat is the nation’s top weather-related killer.

“It's only going to get worse and worse. And so if people aren't thinking about it, especially regularly, that's when it gets even deadlier,” she said.

That is true across the globe. Researchers concluded in a study published Monday that last summer’s heatwave in Europe killed 61,000 people. Many of those deaths occurred in southern Europe, which the WMO said is now in a drought.

Perhaps more distressing is the heat in the oceans. The Atlantic is experiencing bathtub-like conditions around Florida, and forecasters have readjusted their predictions for the current hurricane season upward. Besides fostering stronger tropical storms and hurricanes, the warmer waters can whiplash West Africa between extreme rains and punishing droughts, said Omar Baddour, head of the WMO’s climate monitoring and policy services division.

Flooding is already hitting parts of the U.S., where torrential rainfall inundated much of the Northeast last weekend deluging hundreds of homes and killing one person. With many rural residents trapped and major roads closed, people waited days for rescues. Republican Vermont Gov. Phil Scott trekked to safety via snowmobile trail to circumnavigate “completely impassable” roads, he wrote in a tweet.

Adding to the problem: The U.S. has long been massively undercounting its flood risk from heavy rains, which are happening more frequently because of climate change, according to recent research by the climate risk modeling firm First Street Foundation. That means that people are continuing to move — and build — in harm’s way, while overly optimistic federal maps of flood risk prompt many homeowners to forgo insurance coverage against deluges.

In Vermont, less than 1 percent of homes statewide had taken out federally backed flood insurance policies. In New York state, less than 2 percent of housing units are covered for flood, according to private flood insurer Neptune Flood Insurance. Those who lost their homes in the recent floods probably face dire financial consequences.

Another danger from a warming planet is smoke from wildfires, like those in Canada that have burned nearly 24 million acres of land this year, according to the country’s interagency fire service. Smoke, which triggers heart- and lung-related illnesses, has plagued parts of the Midwest and East Coast throughout the summer.

Most people have thought of climate change as bringing manageable “incremental effects,” said Jacobs, who is now director for the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona.

But “it's never like a small incremental effect,” she said. “It's a combined effect of heat and drought, or wildfires and air quality and health.”

Other dangers offer a slower burn. The rising ocean temperatures coupled with El Niño threaten to kill aquatic life and diminish fisheries, depleting food supplies, said Michael Sparrow, head of the climate research division at the WMO.

The harm from these extremes is not divided equally — either among or within nations. Many public housing units in the U.S. do not come with air conditioning, nor can many residents afford to add it, Oppenheimer said. Public officials in states like Arizona and Illinois advise those without air conditioning to visit cooling centers during heatwaves, but many are inaccessible to people most vulnerable to heat, such as the elderly, chronically ill or low-income people without reliable transportation, he said.

Some communities are trying to address those shortfalls. Officials in Miami-Dade County in Florida found out which ZIP codes have the highest rates of heat-related hospitalizations and emergency room visits, then launched a public awareness campaign with bus stop advertisements in specific neighborhoods and radio spots on Creole- and Spanish-speaking stations. It is also making those ZIP codes the priority for planting new trees to provide more shade and ensuring county-run public housing has new air conditioning and energy efficiency investments.

“We like our heat in general, but the heat starts to become dangerous with temperatures over 90 degrees,” Miami-Dade Chief Heat Officer Jane Gilbert said.

The rising financial toll

Climate change already inflicts staggering costs on the economy. Without addressing it, the tab will grow.

Heat, for example, costs the U.S. more than $100 billion in lost worker productivity annually, according to the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and modeling firm Vivid Economics. Local health departments get stretched, adding to expenses, or do not know how to properly document heat illness. Many who die from heat also have comorbidities like old age, complicating the role hotter temperatures played in deaths.

Warming temperatures also spell more agony for air travelers because of worsening storms, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said during a POLITICO policy forum this week.

The rapid onset of consistently hot and deadly temperatures is catching people off guard.

“The human brain can’t keep up with the acceleration and the perception of your own risk,” said Kathy Baughman McLeod, senior vice president at the Atlantic Council and director of Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center.

Some impacts are more straightforward. The combination of drought, climate change and rapid development has imposed a clear economic cost in Arizona: Water supplies fell to a point that triggered a rule forbidding some new home construction permits near Phoenix last month. Those guardrails have held even despite the Sun Belt’s propensity to build.

“I always feared when push came to shove that there would be backpedaling — and that may happen,” said Jacobs, who led the team that wrote Arizona’s water use rules in the late 1980s and 1990s. “But essentially, what we're seeing is a water management program that's working. And I'm very excited about that part.”

Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has pivoted from one crisis to the next, draining its coffers.

In addition to coordinating disaster response, FEMA also runs the U.S. federal flood insurance program. And it simply is not ready to juggle the myriad perils that climate change is spitting out, said A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware who focuses on disasters.

“I think as a whole in the United States we are not prepared to deal with the effects of a changing climate,” she said. “We are doing too much in the reaction mode rather than the preparation mode.”

FEMA spokesman Jeremy Edwards said the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2022 had included $7 billion to improve communities' resilience, “resulting in the expansion of FEMA programs like Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, and our Flood Mitigation Assistance, which will ultimately help reduce disaster loss and suffering.”

Zia Weise contributed to this report.

A deadly fungus is creeping toward Canada because of climate change

Pesticide regulation 'obsolete,' protects industry: scientific adviser's resignation

 The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — The co-chair of Canada's scientific advisory committee has resigned his post over concerns about a lack of transparency and scientific oversight in pesticide management.

Dr. Bruce Lanphear, a health sciences professor at Simon Fraser University, stepped down as the co-chair of the Health Canada scientific advisory committee on pest control products on June 27.

In his three-page resignation letter, Lanphear said he worries the committee, and his role as co-chair, "provides a false sense of security" that Health Canada is protecting Canadians from toxic pesticides.

"Based on my experience over the past year, I cannot provide that assurance," he wrote in the letter to the director general of the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, an arm of Health Canada.

The committee gives Health Canada independent scientific advice on the health and environmental risks of pesticides, and does evaluations for new products and reviews.

It launched in July 2022 as part of a reform effort to improve transparency at the regulatory agency and has so far met five times.

Lanphear said the table of scientists had a more limited role and scope of work than the agency's other advisory board, the pest management advisory council, which includes members of the pesticide industry.

Given the wider role of industry advisers, he wrote he had "little or no confidence" the science committee could help the agency "become more transparent or assure that Canadians are protected from toxic pesticides."

In a statement, Health Canada said the Pest Management Regulatory Agency takes its role as a regulator seriously and the pesticide review process "remains fully rooted in science."

The two advisory committees have different roles, the department said. While the science table is expected to give scientific and technical advice to help the agency make evidence-based decisions, the pest management advisory council advises the health minister on policies and issues related to pest management.

"This is a council of people whose interests and concerns are affected by this act and currently include pesticide manufacturers, growers, environmental and health groups, and individuals from academia or with relevant expertise," the department said.

The Pest Management Regulatory Agency takes the advice of both committees into consideration but is responsible for all decisions.

Lanphear said he struggled to get certain data and answers from Health Canada staff about contentious products and how the department monitors exposure to toxic pesticides.

In one example, he said he asked how Health Canada uses biomonitoring studies — which look at human exposure to chemicals — in its decision making, but never received an "adequate answer."

In another, he asked to review the 1970 approval process for the controversial insecticide chlorpyrifos, which is now being phased out in Canada. The goal was to look at the original approval and compare it to data gathered over the following decades.

Concerns about the effects of chlorpyrifos were raised in human studies for decades before it was banned by Health Canada. The insecticide can have several effects on the nervous system, ranging from headaches and blurred vision to comas and death.

"My requests — which were amplified by other scientific advisory committee members — were denied," he wrote. He said legal constraints may have prevented the committee from looking at contentious pesticides, raising questions about transparency.

His parting words were a call for a complete overhaul of the "obsolete" way Canada regulates pesticides in Canada.

The regulatory agency relies mainly on toxicological studies, which are typically done in a lab, over human studies, he said.

"It is convenient to rely on toxicological studies because they conform to existing methods used by (the Pest Management Regulatory Agency) but many regulatory decisions have been upended by human studies," he said.

Situations where approved pesticides are later proven to be toxic have convinced him that Canada "can no longer continue to rely on an obsolete regulatory system that protects the pesticide industry more than it protects Canadians."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 17, 2023.

Laura Osman, The Canadian Press

Gem Hunters Found the Lithium America Needs. Maine Won’t Let Them Dig It Up

Alana Semuels
Mon, July 17, 2023 

Mary and Gary Freeman stand in a pit in Newry, Maine, where they have excavated 700 tons of the lithium-bearing mineral spodumene under an exploratory permit, on June 6. The site, also known as Plumbago North, contains some of the largest specimens of spodumene ever uncovered, with some measuring up to 36 feet in length. The state of Maine currently bars them from further extracting the rock. 

Credit - Garrick Hoffman—The Maine Monitor

This story was published in partnership with The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.

The world’s richest known lithium deposit lies deep in the woods of western Maine, in a yawning, sparkling mouth of white and brown rocks that looks like a landslide carved into the side of Plumbago Mountain.

Mary Freeman and her husband Gary found the deposit five years ago while hunting for tourmaline, a striking, multi-colored gemstone found in the region.

The Freemans make their living selling lab supplies through the Florida-based company they founded 40 years ago, Awareness Technology. But their true love is digging for gemstones, which has brought them for years to Mary’s home state of Maine, the site of some of the best tourmaline hunting in the world.

Since 2003, they’ve been buying up property parcels, studying core samples and old geological maps to determine where to try digging next, then spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on blasting and equipment. The couple has dug more than a mile of tunnels in pursuit of beautiful stones, and many of their finds—like blue elbaite and rich watermelon tourmaline—have wound up on display at the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum in nearby Bethel.

Now, the Freemans want to expand this pit, near the town of Newry, Maine, so they can mine spodumene, crystals that contain the lithium the U.S. needs for the clean energy transition. The timing of their discovery, in what has been named Plumbago North, is remarkable; the Freemans have stumbled across one of the only hard-rock sources of lithium in the U.S. at a time when the material is desperately needed for the clean energy transition. By 2040, the world will need at least 1.1 million metric tons of lithium annually, more than ten times what it currently produces, according to projections by the International Energy Agency. Should the Maine deposit be mined, it could be worth as much as $1.5 billion, a huge windfall for the Freemans and a boon to the Biden Administration’s efforts to jumpstart more domestic mining, processing, and recycling of critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements to reduce the U.S.’ dependence on China. This is one of the few lithium deposits in the U.S. currently found in hard rock, which means it is higher-quality and faster to process than lithium mined from brine.

“I consider myself an environmentalist,” says Mary, who on a recent rainy visit to the test quarry, was wearing jeans, a sweater, and hiking boots, her white hair pulled into a low ponytail. Most of the country’s critical minerals are mined elsewhere and processed in China, she adds. “I think [the U.S.] should try to be a little bit more self-sufficient.”

Read more: Lithium Is Key to the Electric Vehicle Transition. It’s Also in Short Supply

But like just about everywhere in the U.S. where new mines have been proposed, there is strong opposition here. Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres. There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017. As more companies begin prospecting in Maine and searching for sizable nickel, copper, and silver deposits, towns are beginning to pass their own bans on industrial mining.

“This is a story that has been played out in Maine for generations,” says Bill Pluecker, a member of the state’s House of Representatives, whose hometown of Warren—a 45-minute drive from the capital city of Augusta—recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of a temporary ban on industrial metal mining after a Canadian company came looking for minerals near a beloved local pond. “We build industries based on the needs of populations not living here and then the bottom drops out, leaving us struggling again to pick up the pieces.”

A deteriorating tank sits on the site of the Callahan Mine in Brooksville, Maine, on Dec. 21, 2016. The former open pit copper and zinc mine is now a federal Superfund site. Mining companies that once pursued precious metals have abandoned half a million mines across the country and, thanks to decades of lax regulations, left the bill to taxpayers.

Robert F. Bukaty—AP

Mainers often invoke the Callahan Mine in the coastal town of Brooksville as a warning. Tailings from the mine, which operated for several years in the late 1960s, were disposed of in a pile next to a salt marsh and creek. The former mine is now a Superfund site, and a 2013 study by researchers at Dartmouth College found widespread evidence of toxic metals in nearby sediment, water and fish. Cleanup costs, borne by taxpayers, are estimated between $23 million and $45 million.

“Our gold rush mentality regarding oil has fueled the climate crisis,” says State Rep. Margaret O’Neil, who presented a bill last session that would have halted lithium mining for five years while the state worked out rules (the legislation ultimately failed). “As we facilitate our transition away from fossil fuels, we must examine the risks of lithium mining and consider whether the benefits of mining here in Maine justify the harms.”

The Freemans’ point out that they plan to dig for the spodumene, then ship it out of state for processing, so there would be no chemical ponds or tailings piles. They liken the excavation of the minerals to quarrying for granite or limestone, which enjoys a long, rich history in Maine.

Advocates for mining in the U.S. argue that, since the country outsources most of its mining to places with less strict environmental and labor regulations, those harms are currently being born by foreign residents, while putting U.S. manufacturers in the precarious position of depending on faraway sources for the minerals they need. Though there are more than 12,000 active mines in the U.S., the bulk of them are for stone, coal, sand, and gravel.

Mary Freeman holds a spodumene crystal, which contains lithium, found in the test pit she and her husband Gary own in Newry, Maine, on June 6.

Garrick Hoffman—The Maine Monitor

There is only one operational lithium mine in the U.S., in Nevada, and one operational rare earth element mine, in Mountain Pass, Calif., meaning that the U.S. is dependent on other countries for the materials essential for clean energy technologies like batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. Even after they’re mined, those materials currently have to be shipped to China for processing since the U.S. does not have any processing facilities.

“If we’re talking about critical metals and materials, we’re so far behind that it’s crazy,” says Corby Anderson, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. “It’s the dichotomy of the current administration—they have incentives for electric vehicles and all these things, but they need materials like graphite, manganese, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper. The only one we mine and refine in this country is copper.”

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the problems of faraway supply chains; as U.S. consumers shopped online in their homes, the goods they bought, mostly from Asia, experienced lengthy delays at clogged ports. What’s more, diplomatic tensions with China motivated the U.S. government to seek other potential sources for mining, material processing, and recycling.

That’s why, in the pandemic’s aftermath, the Biden Administration launched an initiative to secure a Made in America supply chain for critical minerals. It included billions in funding for companies trying to mine and process critical minerals domestically.

A satellite view of cargo ships waiting to offload at the Ports of Los Angeles on Oct. 10, 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data/Getty Images

The rocks in Plumbago North would seem to help provide a domestic supply chain for critical minerals; they are thought to be among the largest specimens of spodumene ever found, with crystals of such high quality that in addition to batteries, they could be used to make scientific glassware or computer screens, where the lithium metal would help lower the melting temperature.

The Freemans are just two of the hundreds of people prospecting for critical materials across the country as the U.S. tries to strengthen the domestic supply chain. According to an analysis by Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin Director for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit environmental organization, more than 100 companies have staked claims for lithium deposits in the American West. Companies also have applied for permits to mine cobalt in Idaho, nickel and copper in Minnesota, and lithium in North Carolina.

Geologists say there’s also likely a lot more lithium in spodumene deposits across New England. Communities that haven’t had working mines in years may soon find themselves a key source for lithium and other minerals needed for car batteries, solar panels, and many of the objects people will need more of to transition themselves off polluting fossil fuels.

There are good reasons for U.S. communities to have healthy skepticism about mining projects; there is no shortage of examples of a company coming into a community, mining until doing so becomes too expensive, then leaving a polluted site for someone else to clean up. There are more than 50,000 abandoned mines in the western United States alone, 80% of which still need to be remediated. Passage of landmark environmental laws like the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972 hasn’t made mining safe enough, environmentalists say.

Former Hualapai tribal leader Carrie Imus holds a sign as demonstrators walk though the desert during a rally against the Hawkstone Mining Big Sandy Lithium Project in Wikieup, Ariz., on Dec. 4, 2021. Demonstrators believe that the mine poses a threat to the water supply during an ongoing severe drought.

Bridget Bennett—Bloomberg/Getty Images

“All mines pollute in one way or another, and mines are really bad at predicting how much they’re going to pollute,” says Jan Morrill, who studies mining at the environmental group Earthworks, which recently found that 76% of mining companies in the U.S. polluted groundwater after saying they wouldn’t.

One of the most problematic parts of mines is the tailings, or waste, Morrill says: Companies extract the minerals they need, then are left with a giant pile of rock, liquid, and chemicals that they store in ponds or behind dams that sometimes prove unstable. These tailings have caused landslides, excessive dust, and water pollution; more than 300 mine tailing dams have failed worldwide over the last century, according to Christopher Sergeant, a research scientist at the University of Montana.

It is not uncommon for tailings to leak into water, in fact, there is a permit that mine owners can get in case they find their projections were wrong and they need to discharge into U.S. waters.

Even “modern mines” that adhere to the latest U.S. standards—which are among the strictest in the world—still pollute, Earthworks has found. Though there are, theoretically, non-polluting ways to store mine tailings, doing so is much more expensive and mine operators have largely not paid to do so, Morrill says. That’s because, says Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, “laws and markets have not fully incentivized companies to do that.”

Indeed, the Biden initiative to increase domestic mining includes, for example, a $700 million loan for Ioneer, a company planning a lithium mine on Rhyolite Ridge in Nevada, where environmental groups say the mine, as proposed, would cause the extinction of an endangered species called Tiehm’s buckwheat. The Administration is also spending $115 million to help Talon Nickel build a battery minerals processing facility in North Dakota, but the potential mine they would source from, in Minnesota, is opposed by Indigenous groups and environmentalists who fear it could contaminate wells in the area.

Lithium evaporation ponds are seen at Albemarle Lithium production facility in Silver Peak, Nev., on Oct. 6, 2022.

Carlos Barria—Reuters

Still, the U.S. has a more rigorous regulatory environment than many other countries, she says, and there are domestic mines that even some environmentalists support, like the Stillwater Mine in Montana. Community organizations there signed a Good Neighbor Agreement in 2000 with the Sibanye-Stillwater Mining Company allowing the firm to extract platinum and palladium—while also establishing clear and enforceable water standards, restrictions to minimize local traffic, and third-party auditors to ensure the mine adheres to the standards it set out. The mine is now one of the top employers and private-sector income generators in Montana.

But advocates had to force the Agreement; three grassroots organizations sued to stop the construction of the mine, and after a year of negotiations, the mining company and grassroots groups agreed to the contract instead of going to court. With support from elected officials trying to find ways to mine more critical minerals in the U.S., companies may not feel the need to make similar promises to the local community.

Read more: What Would Happen if South America Formed an OPEC for Lithium

Environmental concerns aren’t the only problem with mining, Morrill says. The history of mining in the U.S. is linked to colonialism; Christopher Columbus was looking for gold when he stumbled across North America, and as Europeans expanded into the continent, they took land from Indigenous people to mine for gold, silver, and other metals.

Today, mining in the U.S. often encroaches on Indigenous land. Under mining laws in the U.S. that date to 1872, anyone can stake a claim on federal public lands and apply for permits to start mining if they find “valuable” mineral deposits there. Most lithium, cobalt, and nickel mines are within 35 miles of a Native American reservation, Morrill says, largely because in the aftermath of the 1849 gold rush, the U.S. military removed tribes to reservations not far from mineral deposits in the West. In one particularly controversial project, the mining company Rio Tinto wants to build a copper mine on Oak Flat, Ariz., a desert area adjacent to an Apache reservation that Indigenous groups have used for centuries to conduct cultural ceremonies.

Yet fears about the effects of climate change are escalating the pressure on local communities to get out of the way of mines, says Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College who studies mining and the green energy transition. She and other scholars have questioned whether projections that the world will face lithium shortages by 2025 are accurate; recycling more batteries and transitioning away from private vehicles to more public transportation, for example, could reduce our long-term need for lithium-ion energy storage.

“We should think about what is driving this demand, why does this rush feel so intensive, why is there not a version where we are going to try and do this transition with the least amount of mining possible?” Riofrancos says.

Most environmentalists agree that the 1872 mining law needs to be updated and there are several bills in Congress that would do so. The Clean Energy Minerals Reform Act of 2023, for example, introduced by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) in May, would require more tribal consultation and change how mining is approved on federal lands.

Finding a way to mine in the U.S. could help address a moral quandary, that we consume these materials but ask other countries to bear the brunt of their extraction, says Boulanger, with IRMA.

“There’s an argument to be made that if we’re going to use these materials, and we live in the most consumptive country in the world, we shouldn’t be making other countries be the bank account of our natural resources,” she says.

The Albermarle facility in Kings Mountain, N.C., on Aug. 10, 2022. Albemarle Corp. wants to restart a lithium mine as the building block of the first complete EV battery supply chain in the U.S.

Logan Cyrus—Bloomberg/Getty Images

If lawmakers and regulators can’t agree on how to mine on U.S. soil, it could leave the U.S. susceptible to essentially outsourcing its mining problems to less-regulated countries. For example, last October, the Department of Energy used the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to give a $141.7 million grant to Piedmont Lithium, which is building a plant in Tennessee to expand U.S. supply of lithium hydroxide, used in long-range batteries for electric vehicles. In March, Blue Orca Capital, a hedge fund, said it was “shorting,” or betting against the stock of Piedmont Lithium, alleging that the spodumene the firm plans to refine into lithium at its Tennessee facility was guaranteed by bribes to the son of a high-level politician in Ghana—“because of corruption,” those raw materials are likely to never come to fruition, the hedge fund says. Piedmont denies the allegations and says in a statement provided to TIME that the Minerals Income Investment Fund of Ghana told the company that it has valid licenses and permits for all its current activities.

Most of the proposed critical materials mines in the U.S. are not near a big population center—or economic activity, and some communities are in favor of a mine for the jobs it would create. But the proposed locations could instead lead to situations where sparsely populated communities don’t learn about a planned mine until it’s too late to stop it. “It can feel really fast—all of a sudden an enormous project is being proposed next door to you, it took years for the company to prospect but you didn’t hear about it ‘til now,” says Riofrancos.

The Freemans’ mine is not one of these projects. Though it is five miles from the nearest town, Maine is going through an extensive review process to decide whether to let the couple keep digging. Earlier in 2023, there were seven bills in the legislature regarding the potential of mining lithium in Maine. Lawmakers ultimately settled on legislation that may open the door to extracting the Freemans’ lithium by allowing larger open pit metal mines, so long as developers can prove they won’t pollute groundwater and the local environment. But the new law will require changing the state’s mining regulations, which may mean it could be years before the couple is able to start digging in earnest.

The Freemans say their mine would not pollute the surrounding land and water, as the chemical composition of the crystals and the rocks around them is such that they would not dissolve into dangerous acid when exposed to air and water. Geologists that TIME/Maine Monitor spoke with agree with that assessment. Further, the crystals, says Mary, would be shipped out of state in large chunks for processing, so there would be no chemical ponds or tailings.

Many geologists agree that the Freemans’ proposal would not be as disruptive as other proposed mines across the country. Other metals (like nickel, silver, and zinc) typically occur in bands of rock deep below the surface that contain iron sulfides, which create sulfuric acid when exposed to air and water, polluting waterways for decades, a phenomenon known as acid mine drainage. Some spodumene crystals at Plumbago North, by contrast, have been naturally exposed to air and water for hundreds of millions of years and not broken down.

On a visit to the test quarry this spring, Gary Freeman pointed out one large piece of spodumene lying at the bottom of a nearby brook, the water over it rushing fast and clear, not the rusty orange of an acid-contaminated stream. (The waterway is known, fittingly, as Spodumene Brook.) “The water is so good Poland Spring wants to bottle it and sell it,” says Mary.

Still, Morrill, of Earthworks, says there’s just not enough research about the effects of hard rock spodumene mining to say for sure that the mine wouldn’t harm the environment. Since so many people in Maine depend on recreation and tourism for their livelihoods, she says, it makes the most sense to keep protective regulations in place.

Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection has rejected the Freemans’ request to consider the land a quarry, and is instead classifying spodumene as a metallic mineral. As the law stands, the Freemans will have to apply for permits under Maine’s 2017 Metallic Mineral Mining Act, a costly process (the application processing fee alone is $500,000) that would take years.

Meanwhile, the local community is divided. After all, in Maine it’s not difficult to find people still living with the long-term damage of older mines. On the other hand, many Mainers are pragmatic and understand the state has long, dark winters, and will need battery storage for any renewable energy it generates on sunny or windy days. The alternative is to continue relying on fossil fuels, which would exacerbate climate change.

Read more: Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel Has a Fix for the Battery Problem

Myles Felch, curator at the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum, is one of these practical Mainers. He was raised in Union, where a groundswell of opposition has formed to resist a proposal by Canada-based Exiro Minerals to look for nickel near a beloved local pond. Felch isn’t thrilled with the prospect, but also knows we can’t continue to be so detached from the minerals we use in our daily life.

“I love the place where I grew up and I wouldn’t want anything to ever happen to it,” says Felch. But “you need mineral resources. Most people were probably texting ‘stop the mine’ with a nickel cobalt battery in their phones.”

UK Joins Pacific Trade Deal, Sees ‘Very Low’ Chance of US Pact



Isabel Reynolds and Wei Zhou
Sun, July 16, 2023

(Bloomberg) -- The UK signed a treaty to join a Pacific trade deal on Sunday, becoming the first new member since the framework came into force and shifting attention to a list of other applicants led by China.

Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch defended the deal as meaningful for the UK even though it already had trade agreements with most of the countries involved, and internal projections show a minimal economic impact.

“It will make a significant amount of difference,” she said on Sky News from Auckland. “We have a seat at the table in the fastest growing region.”

Badenoch also said that the chances the UK can ink a trade deal with the US are “very low.” The ability to ink such agreements, particularly with the world’s largest economy, was a major part of the UK’s Brexit campaign.

“The US is not carrying out any free trade agreements with any country,” Badenoch said on Sky. “Lots of countries have been looking to have free trade agreements with the US, including us, but for now they said that’s not something they want to do, and we need to respect that.”

Badenoch signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership in New Zealand, the government said in a statement. New Zealand is chairing a meeting attended by 11 trade ministers and delegations from CPTPP economies.

Formerly known as the TPP, the agreement at one time included the US and was seen as a way of containing China’s growing influence in the Asia Pacific. Former President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the pact in 2017 and China made its application to join in 2021.

CPTPP-owned businesses employ 1% of UK workers, and membership is expected to “turbocharge investment” further, according to the UK government. British whiskey and cars are among 99% of current UK goods exports to CPTPP that’s set to be eligible for zero tariffs, it added.

“The UK’s formal accession to CPTPP marks a significant milestone for UK trade, enabling ambitious British businesses to connect with the world’s most exciting growth markets for start-ups, innovation and technology,” Ian Stuart, chief executive officer at HSBC UK, said in the statement.

China Next

Beijing is next in sequential order to enter negotiations as the CPTPP seeks to expand, followed by Taiwan, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Ukraine. But China’s accession would be divisive given tensions with existing members including Japan, Australia and next year’s chair, Canada.

“There was no specific discussion on any of the individual aspirants,” New Zealand Trade and Export Growth Minister Damien O’Connor said in Auckland at a press conference on Sunday.

The 12 CPTPP members are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the UK and Vietnam. The bloc, which is home to 500 million people, would account for 15% of global GDP with the inclusion of the UK joins, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Critics Slam Lobbying by Tech Giants in Indo-Pacific Talks

While the US last year established a rival pact known as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, it doesn’t include provisions for market access. China is not among the 14 members negotiating that agreement.

--With assistance from Chris Kay.

SEE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/07/uk-formally-signs-up-to-trans-pacific.html

Exclusive-US chip CEOs plan Washington trip to talk China policy - sources



Updated Fri, July 14, 2023 
By Stephen Nellis, Andrea Shalal and Karen Freifeld

(Reuters) - The chief executives of Intel Corp and Qualcomm Inc are planning to visit Washington next week to discuss China policy, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The executives plan to hold meetings with U.S. officials to talk about market conditions, export controls and other matters affecting their businesses, one of the sources said. It was not immediately clear whom the executives would meet.

Intel and Qualcomm declined to comment, and officials at the White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

The sources said other semiconductor CEOs may also be in Washington next week. The sources declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

U.S. officials are considering tightening export rules affecting high-performance computing chips and shipments to Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, sources told Reuters in June. The rules would respectively affect Intel, which is preparing a new artificial intelligence chip that could be shipped to China, and Qualcomm, which has a license to sell chips to Huawei.

The Biden administration last October issued a sweeping set of rules designed to freeze China's semiconductor industry in place while the U.S. pours billions of dollars in subsidies into its own chip industry.

The possible rule tightening would hit Nvidia particularly hard. The company's strong position in the AI chip market helped boost its worth to $1 trillion earlier this year.

The chip industry has been warmly received in Washington in recent years as lawmakers and the White House work to shift more production to the U.S. and its allies, and away from China. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon have met often with government officials.

Next week's meetings, which one of the sources said could include joint sessions between executives and U.S. officials, come as Nvidia Corp and other chip companies fear a permanent loss of sales for an industry with large amounts of business in China while tensions escalate between Washington and Beijing.

One of the sources familiar with the matter said the executives' goals for the meetings would be to ensure that government officials understand the possible impact of any further tightening of rules around what chips can be sold to China.

Many U.S. chip firms get more than one-fifth of their revenue from China, and industry executives have argued that reducing those sales would cut into profits that they reinvest into research and development.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington, Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Karen Freifeld in New York; Editing by Chris Sanders and Edmund Klamann)

Wildlife experts abandoned a washed up whale after bubbling noises heard from its gut caused concerns it would explode

Hannah Getahun
Sat, July 15, 2023 

Young fin whale whale, about 33 feett long on Shingle Street, Hollesley, Suffolk, England.

A dead 60-foot fin whale washed up on a shore in Ireland on Sunday.


Researchers came to collect samples and perform a necropsy on the large animal.


However, the project had to be abandoned out of caution after concerns it could explode.

A decomposing 60-foot fin whale corpse stranded on the Irish coast had to be abandoned by wildlife researchers looking to study it after concern that the dead mammal could explode.

Experts near the dead whale, whose body washed on the beach on Sunday, noted that they heard "bubbling" when trying to cut into the whale to perform an animal autopsy. This led them to believe there was a risk that a build-up of methane gas produced as it decomposed could create enough pressure to send the whale's innards flying, a phenomenon that has been caught on camera before.




The Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, an organization that responds to whale strandings in the country, arrived in County Kerry, Ireland, to collect samples of the animal for research after its body washed on the beach on Sunday, according to the Irish Examiner.

As they collected body parts for the necropsy, Stephanie Levesque, the strandings officer at IWDG, told the Irish Examiner that the team "heard some sounds and was like, 'this is going to explode in my face if I go any deeper.'"

The IWDG later deemed the whale "not suitable for post-mortem examination" and abandoned it, according to a post on their site. According to the release, the Kerry city council intends to let the dead whale remain on site as it decomposes.

"Unfortunately, this individual was too decomposed for a full post-mortem," the IWDG wrote. "Stephanie collected a number of samples useful for biological studies but not able to establish cause of death."

Levesque later told LiveScience that although she had heard "bubbling" noises when collecting samples, the fear that the whale would explode subsided after it was apparent that it would not likely occur. Instead, she told the publication, the fin whale was abandoned out of caution.

Bloated, dead whales aren't uncommon though they can produce an unpleasant smell when they do happen. Towns have tried various methods of removing the corpses of beached whales, the most extreme method being the use of explosives.




A famous example of this occurred in Florence, Oregon, in 1970, when engineers used dynamite to destroy the body of a 45-foot, 8-ton sperm whale. Officials and people gathered to watch the detonation soon discovered that not enough dynamite had been used, resulting in large chunks of whale blubber falling from the sky and covering the town.

Opinion: Haunted by images of July 3 Israeli attack on Palestinian Jenin refugee camp

JENIN IS A CITY

Lee Sease
Sun, July 16, 2023

Where were you on July 3 when Israel raided the Jenin refugee camp? I know where I was ― on the West Bank in Bethlehem, 60 miles south of Jenin, which is at the northern tip of the West Bank. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the area, the West Bank is a Palestinian Arab section walled off by the Israeli government. When I say walled off, I mean there is a wall several stories high built by Israel with the intent of keeping the Palestinians on the other side. It is a harsh looking, intimidating wall with barbed wire and entry points staffed by armed Israeli military personnel.

On the Palestinian side of the wall, there is painted artistic graffiti asking for peace and reconciliation. Israel has nuclear capacity and an extremely well equipped army. This is an army that defeated a half dozen neighboring Arab countries in six days in 1967. At that time Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt. The Palestinians do not have a standing army, navy or air force. The Palestinians have no heavy weaponry. It is unclear why Israel finds it necessary to invade a refugee camp. It is true that the Jenin refugee camp is known for its militancy but militancy in the face of occupation is not uncommon. The Hebrew people had a similar reaction to the Roman occupation some 2,000 years ago.

We were in a restaurant in Bethlehem when the news of the invasion broke. A Palestinian news network provided the coverage on TV. They did not shy away from showing the carnage. I will be haunted for a long time by a picture of a woman lying face down between two parked cars. I assume she was dead. So why must we ponder a conflict between people that results in death?

This probably can be traced back to the Zionist movement that began in Europe. Jewish people in Europe had suffered centuries of persecution at the hands of non-Jewish Europeans. The antisemitism attitudes and practices of Europe naturally migrated to this hemisphere. There was no safe haven for the Jewish people and so the Zionists began to look for a homeland and considered the area where the Hebrew people had once flourished to be a desired site. The problem is that the land they sought was already occupied by the Arab people who were Muslim, Jew and Christian. Today, that problem persists.

Hitler’s persecution of the Jews made the desire for a homeland that much stronger at the conclusion of World War II. The fact that neither Europe nor the United States wished to accommodate those Jews surviving the Nazi concentration camps, made the need to find a homeland even more desirable. So European Jews took it upon themselves to displace a people and claim a region, largely out of self-preservation. Let’s be clear, Judaism defines a religion and a culture. It does not define national boundaries.

We need to abandon the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Muslim-Jewish conflict, for it is not. It is not a Jewish-Arab conflict as many indigenous people who embrace Judaism as a religion and/or culture, will also embrace their Arabic ancestry. These perceptions cloud what is really taking place ― an indigenous population is resistant to being controlled by people who are not indigenous to the area. The situation is not too different from what the Native Americans faced when Europeans decided to settle the Western Hemisphere.

With the exception of a few indigenous people who accepted occupation by an invading population in 1948, the indigenous people of Palestine do not have citizenship. They have no voter rights. While the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, populated by Jews from other countries, primarily the United States, have a voice in the affairs of the Israeli government, the surrounding indigenous Palestinian population does not. The indigenous Palestinians are an occupied population. When an indigenous population is occupied by a non-indigenous population, resistance and radicalization becomes a natural occurrence. That same condition existed in the pre-Constitution days of the United States, which resulted in our founding fathers declaring independence from British rule. That intent was made clear in the Declaration of Independence.

The present day conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people is not a religious conflict nor is it a conflict in culture. It is a conflict that arises from the occupation of an indigenous population by an non-indigenous population. The Hebrew people resisted Rome and the Palestinians are resisting a government of non-indigenous people. It is that simple.

Lee Sease lives in Burnsville, NC

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Israeli raid on Jenin refugee camp is continued aggression on Arabs

French Government Lays Out €4 Billion Spending Cut to Close Gap

AUSTERITY, AUSTERITY AND MORE AUSTERITY

Alan Katz
Sun, July 16, 2023

(Bloomberg) -- The French government sent a 2024 spending plan to parliament that calls for a €4.2 billion ($4.7 billion) cut in outlays as it pushes to reduce the deficit, even as it ramps up allocations for the green transition.

The decline in overall spending is 3.5% in real terms, once inflation is taken into account, a finance ministry official said. The biggest drop is in the amount dedicated to helping shield households and businesses from spiking fuel and energy costs.

France is targeting a budget deficit of 4.4% of gross domestic product for 2024, down from a goal of 4.9% this year. The aim is to bring that below 3%, the limit set under European Union rules, by the end of Emmanuel Macron’s second term as president in 2027.

Still, the government will allocate €7 billion next year to fund the green transition. The money will go toward renovating public office buildings and housing, cutting carbon emissions from industry and agriculture, and supporting railroad infrastructure, among other areas.

The government also will boost spending on security, the justice system, national education, and higher education and research.

At the same time, it plans to crack down on what it deems to be fraud. The budget bill will include a clause allowing the government to go after abuses in transfer pricing by multinationals, said the official, who declined to be cited by name ahead of the public release of the plan. Transfer pricing refers to transactions among units of the same company that are located in different countries.

 Bloomberg Businessweek