Sand mining in Vietnam's Mekong Delta sinks homes, livelihoods

Tran Thi Minh Ha with Alice Philipson in Hanoi
Tue, 21 November 2023 

A vessel dredges sand on a branch of the Hau river in southern Vietnam, where shore erosion is growing worse (Nhac NGUYEN)

One summer morning, Le Thi Hong Mai's home collapsed into a river in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, where shoreline erosion caused by sand mining and hydropower dams threatens hundreds of thousands of people.

Sand -- needed to produce concrete -- is the world's second most exploited natural resource after water, and its use has tripled in the last two decades, according to the UN environment programme.

Vietnam's "rice bowl" delta region, where the Mekong empties into the South China Sea, is predicted to run out of sand in just over a decade.

But losses to the riverbed are already devastating lives and harming the local economy.

Mai told AFP she "lost everything", including the small restaurant business attached to her house in the suburbs of Can Tho City.

"I heard a bang, I rushed out and everything was gone," recalled the 46-year-old, who was sleeping close by. "I have nothing left".

Over the past two decades, hydropower dams upstream on the Mekong have restricted the flow of sand to the delta.

And sand mining to feed Vietnam's construction boom is also fast depleting resources, according to a major WWF report published earlier this year.

By 2040, the amount of sediment could be reduced by up to 97 percent, a 2018 Mekong River Commission study said, with serious consequences for people living and working on the shores of the river.

With less sand, river flows become lighter and faster and hit the banks at greater speed, accelerating erosion.

Between 2016 and August this year, at least 750 kilometres (466 miles) of riverbank and nearly 2,000 houses in the Mekong Delta region have sunk into rivers, government figures show.

- 'Last grain of sand' -

Along the Mekong, diggers and boats work around the clock, dredging sand from the riverbed.

According to Vietnam's ministry of transport, the Delta region needs 54 million cubic metres of sand for six major national highways before 2025.

The river system can provide less than half, the ministry says.

Important projects have already been delayed while authorities debate alternatives, including sea sand or imports from neighbouring Cambodia.

In Can Tho, cows sit next to unmanned excavators, and sections of a road that will eventually run to Ca Mau province are still underwater -- awaiting sand to cover them.

"We haven't had enough sand since the beginning of the year, so we don't have much to do," one worker, who declined to give his name, told AFP.

Vietnam banned exports of sand in all forms in 2017.

But given high domestic demand, the amount dredged still exceeds what comes downstream, Mekong expert Nguyen Huu Thien explained.

At the current extraction rate of 35-55 million cubic metres a year, there will be no more sand by 2035, according to the WWF-led study.

"These are the last grains of sand we are dredging," Thien warned.

- 'Nowhere else to go' -

In Hau Giang province, 60 kilometres from where Mai lost her home, Diep Thi Lua awoke in the middle of the night to see her front garden disappear into the water.

"We all jumped out of bed after hearing a big noise," the 49-year-old told AFP.

"We could feel the ground was shaking. We were so, so scared."

She said the river had widened over the decades by dozens of metres.

Since 2016, Vietnam's government has spent over $470 million on 190 projects to prevent erosion in the Mekong Delta, according to state media.

But "many of these expensive structures have collapsed into the river", Thien said.

A single $4.7 million embankment built in 2016 was washed away three times between 2020 and 2022, state media reported.

Half the delta could be gone by the end of the century, Thein warned.

"After that, the delta will disappear altogether and we will have to redraw our map and rewrite our geography books."

Around 20,000 households need to be resettled because of the risks, according to the General Department of Natural Disaster Prevention and Control.

The WWF puts the figure much higher, saying half a million could lose their homes.

But resettlement "requires lots of money, which our government will never have", said an official from Hau Giang province who did not want to be named.

"We know that they could lose their lives, living in those high-risk areas, but we have no solutions," he said.

Residents like Mai and Lua are left gripped by fear.

"I have not slept well since the erosion. We have nowhere else to go. We just have to accept it," Mai told AFP.

Three dead and three missing after landslide smashes into Alaska homes

Sky News
Updated Wed, 22 November 2023


Three people have been killed and three are missing after a deadly landslide barrelled down a rain-soaked mountainside and smashed into homes in Alaska.

The slide - estimated to be 450ft (137m) wide - happened at around 9pm on Monday during a storm near Wrangell, an island community of 2,000 people.

The landslide left a scar of barren earth from near the top of the mountain down to the ocean. A wide swath of evergreen trees was ripped out of the ground and a road was buried by debris, cutting off access and power to dozens of homes.


Rescue crews found the body of a girl in an initial search and the bodies of two adults were later found by a drone operator.

Two children and one adult remained unaccounted for after the disaster, with searchers on land using a sniffer dog while coastguard and other vessels looked along the shoreline.

"Our community is resilient," Wrangell interim borough manager Mason Villarma said.

"And it always comes together for tragedies like this. We're broken, but resilient and determined to find everybody that's missing."

Alaska state governor Mike Dunleavy issued a disaster declaration for Wrangell, saying he and his wife were heartbroken and praying for all those affected.

Another storm system is expected in the Wrangell area late on Wednesday into Thursday.

India scrambles fighter jets to investigate UFO sighting as airport halts flights


Maroosha Muzaffar
Tue, November 21, 2023 

India’s air force scrambled two fighter jets on Sunday to investigate the sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) near an airport.

An alert was issued by security forces after the UFO sighting was reported from the northeastern state of Manipur at about 2.30pm local time.

The Indian Air Force (IAF) also halted flight operations at state capital Imphal’s Bir Tikendrajit International Airport for several hours.

The object “was visible with bare eyes”, an unnamed official from one of India’s federal police agencies reportedly said.

“IAF activated its Air Defence response mechanism based on visual inputs from Imphal airport,” said a post on X by the IAF. “The small object was not seen thereafter.”

Indian authorities have not revealed specific details of their investigation of the UFO sighting.

A video on social media showed a small white dot on the skyline near the airport. The Independent could not verify the authenticity of the video.



Rafale fighter jets were dispatched to investigate the object from the Hashimara airbase in the eastern state of West Bengal.

“Soon after information about the UFO near the Imphal airport was received, a Rafale fighter aircraft from a nearby airbase was scrambled to go and search for the UFO,” a defence official was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

The jet returned and another one was later sent to investigate.

Reports said the second fighter jet also returned without finding any evidence of a UFO.

The fighter jets were equipped with advanced sensors and carried out low-level flying over the suspected area near the airport, but didn’t find anything suspicious.

“The UFO was visible with bare eyes moving westwards of the airfield [at the Imphal airport] till 4 pm,” an official from India’s Central Industrial Security Force was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.

Investigation operations took several hours and flights at the Imphal airport resumed operations only after 5.30pm on Sunday, after authorities received clearance from the IAF.

Two flights were diverted from the airport and three departing flights were delayed before operations were allowed to resume.

CALIFORNIA
Column: This water project is expensive, wasteful and ecologically damaging. Why is it being fast-tracked?

Michael Hiltzik
Tue, November 21, 2023 

Cattle graze peacefully in the Sites Valley, the location of what could be California's last surface reservoir. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

Noah Cross, the sinister plutocrat of the movie "Chinatown," remarked that "politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

He might have added public works projects to that list: If they get talked about long enough, sometimes they acquire the image of inevitability. That seems to be the case with the Sites Reservoir, a water project in the western Sacramento Valley that originated during the Eisenhower administration.

The project's long sojourn on the drawing board should have been taken as a signal of its manifest flaws, which include its immense cost and its uncertain ability to contribute to the state's water supplies — a contribution that has only become more dubious with the intensification of global warming.

This is probably the last gasp of the concept of California surface reservoirs.
Peter Gleick, Pacific Institute

Instead, the project just received a priceless endorsement from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who on Nov. 6 certified it for fast-tracking under a new law that allows him to short-circuit court challenges to designated projects. Courts have only 270 days, or nine months, to decide legal challenges to those projects.

That might have been the only way to get the Sites project, which is estimated to cost $4.5 billion, up and running. Newsom's action will clear the way for as much as $875.4 million in state funding to flow from the Proposition 1 state water bond that voters approved in 2014. The rest of the funding would come from the federal government and payments by the reservoir's users.

The irony there is that the bond's allocations for water storage are to go to environmentally beneficial storage projects. It's doubtful that Sites would qualify under any honest assessment of its environmental impacts.

"This is miles from a project that would benefit the environment," says Barry Nelson, a Berkeley water policy consultant. "It could be the nail in the coffin of the Bay-Delta ecosystem."

Sites' promoters paint the project's putative environmental benefits with a broad brush. For example, they say it will provide "environmental water in drier periods for native fish and Pacific Flyway habitat for migratory birds and other native species."

Is that right? The California Department of Fish and Wildlife didn't think so in 2018, when it prepared an assessment of the project's ecological impacts, especially as they applied to the salmon that spawn in the Northern California rivers. The agency said it had "low confidence in the magnitude of the ecosystem improvement" claimed by the promoters.

Read more: Column: Humans have driven 21 more species to extinction. Here's why we should care

The agency was skeptical of claims that Sites would help to reduce water temperatures on the Feather and American rivers, where higher temperatures have been lethal for salmon spawn.

The promoters' calculations showed temperature reductions of less than 1 degree Fahrenheit, a "relatively small change" that could not be shown to benefit the salmon population, the agency said. Indeed, under some circumstances and during some seasons, the project might even increase water temperatures.

The project has been somewhat scaled back since 2018 to ameliorate some of its environmental impacts, but its estimated cost hasn't come down significantly.

The changes "moved it from a project that was catastrophic to one that is bad for the environment," Nelson says, "but it sure isn't a beneficial project." Nevertheless, as currently designed, Sites would consume the largest share of the $2.7-billion that state voters approved for surface water storage projects in 2014.

Newsom and other Sites advocates have tried to justify the project with flagrantly misleading statistics. As Newsom said when announcing his certification, the reservoir would hold "up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water, enough for 3 million households’ yearly usage."

That claim may have been accepted by some people who should know better, but it's fakery, pure and simple. First, suggesting that the reservoir's storage would serve "3 million households" is deceptive. As much as 80% of the water would be stored for the benefit of Central Valley growers, not urban residents.

Moreover, while 1.5 million acre-feet of water (about 488 billion gallons) may be equivalent to the consumption of about 3 million households, it's not as if the entire capacity of Sites Reservoir would be available to serve the needs of all those families every year. The project managers say that annual deliveries would average only about 243,000 acre-feet a year, the equivalent of the usage of 490,000 households — if all the water were going to residential users.

Read more: Column: This zombie dam project underscores California's dilemma over water

Even if a full reservoir were drained to the last drop, recharging it to full capacity would take five to seven years, or as many as 10, to fill up again.

That brings us to the details of where and how Sites would be built.

Located on a 14,000-acre swath of grassland in Glenn and Colusa counties about 80 miles northwest of Sacramento, the reservoir is designed as off-stream storage — that is, it wouldn't involve placing another dam directly on its source, the Sacramento River. Instead, it would involve a network of pumps, pipelines and dam to divert water from the river to the storage basin.

The diversions would only happen in wet years, when water in the Sacramento River is especially abundant — theoretically during surplus flows.

There lies another rub: Global warming is likely to mean longer drought spells between wet years in the Sacramento Valley.

"It's only going to fill when there are really wet years and extra flow, and I don't know how many really wet years we're going to be getting in the future," says Peter Gleick, an environmental scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank. "History will have to show whether there will ever be enough water to make it worth the money that we'll be putting into it."

In the context of global warming, Sites Reservoir must be seen as an anachronism. California has essentially gotten out of the business of building surface reservoirs through damming — "this is probably the last gasp of the concept of California surface reservoirs," Gleick told me.

Read more: Column: A farewell to James G. Watt, environmental vandal and proto-Trumpian

The last major on-stream reservoir project in the state was New Melones Lake, which came online in 1978 with the damming of the Stanislaus River. That was followed by the construction of Diamond Valley Lake, an off-stream reservoir completed by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in 1999.

That brought to a close a dam-building era in California that had been launched in 1923 by the construction of O'Shaughnessy Dam, which flooded the picturesque Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide drinking water for San Francisco. In the interim, Californians built more than 800 dams.

By the end of that period, the outsized cost of building dams and the ecological damage they do was becoming recognized, as were options that are far more cost-effective, efficient and ecologically sound. Indeed, America as a whole has shifted to tearing dams down — more than 1,100 have been removed in recent years, in an effort to return the ecosystems that they spoiled to their pre-construction conditions.

The most effective programs to improve water supplies don't require dams. "The smartest thing we can do is improve conservation and efficiency," says Gleick, "to expand wastewater treatment and re-use, which we're doing, and especially to figure out how to capture more stormwater not in surface reservoirs, but in groundwater. There needs to be a lot more of that. Those are the smartest, cheapest, fastest things we can do."

The Sites promoters haven't gotten the message that nature is trying to deliver. Their position is that climate change, which will increase the uncertainties of their water supply estimates, only underscores the wisdom of building Sites today.

"There is no time to waste and doing nothing while we wait for other actions to be completed is a sure way to continue the challenges we face today for decades into the future," the project management says. They call it a "smart, 21st century tool to help California manage through droughts, climate change, and the stresses these conditions create for our natural and developed systems."

It's anything but. The smart, 21st century approach would be to leave Sites on the drawing board and turn to truly 21st century approaches, rather than trying to prop an outdated 70-year-old concept up on its shaky feet.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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ARCHAEOLOGY

‘Sutton Hoo king’s lost temple’ discovered in Suffolk
Sarah Knapton
Wed, November 22, 2023 

Treasure from the Sutton Hoo site on display at the British Museum - David Ro

A lost 1,400-year-old temple, said to have been built by the English king buried at Sutton Hoo, may have been discovered in Suffolk.

The Venerable Bede, a monk and historian, wrote that King Redwald, who died in AD 625, built a temple housing altars to both Christ and pagan gods.

The monarch, thought to have been the person buried in a ship at Sutton Hoo, was the first East Anglian king to convert to Christianity but also kept links to other religions.


The temple’s location was believed to have been lost in time, but archaeological teams have uncovered the remains of a building in Rendlesham, close to King Redwald’s burial place, which may be the site mentioned by Bede.

Volunteers from Rendlesham Revealed, a community archaeology project, made the discovery, along with that of a number of other buildings, during a dig earlier this summer, Suffolk County Council has revealed.

Excavations at Rendlesham, Suffolk - Jim Pullen/Suffolk County Council

“Its distinctive and substantial foundations indicate that one of the buildings, 10 metres long and five metres wide, was unusually high and robustly built for its size, so perhaps it was constructed for a special purpose,” said Prof Christopher Scull, of Cardiff University and University College London.

“It is most similar to buildings elsewhere in England that are seen as temples or cult houses, and therefore it may have been used for pre-Christian worship by the early kings of the East Angles. The results of excavations at Rendlesham speak vividly of the power and wealth of the East Anglian kings, and the sophistication of the society they ruled.”

King Redwald reigned from around 599 to his death, and was referred to in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a bretwalda – an Old English term meaning “Britain-ruler” or “wide-ruler”.

He is thought to be the most likely occupant of the Sutton Hoo ship burial. A second ship burial site was found nearby in 1998, which was thought to contain Regenhere, his son.

A dig in the same area last year by members of Rendlesham Revealed found evidence of a huge royal compound, including a large timber hall. The site was surrounded by a ditch of nearly one mile long that enclosed an area the size of 20 football pitches.

Volunteers excavating the remains of the ditch that enclosed the royal compound in Rendlesham - Suffolk County Council

Along with the temple, the new excavations this summer also uncovered evidence of fine metalworking associated with royal occupation, including a mould used for casting a decorative horse harness similar to that found at Sutton Hoo.

The archaeological discoveries show that Rendlesham has been a location for human settlement and activity for 6,000 years from the fourth millennium BC to the present day.

The council said the area was “most important” when it was a royal centre from the 6th to 8th centuries AD.

The latest dig also uncovered a Second World War searchlight emplacement, which was part of a searchlight battery recorded by US Force aerial photography in December 1943.

A schoolboy digging potatoes in Scotland found an ancient Egyptian statue. Nobody knows how it got there.

Mia Jankowicz
Tue, November 21, 2023 

A series of wild coincidences led to the discovery of ancient Egyptian artifacts buried in Scotland.

A student at a Scottish school unearthed the first ancient treasure in 1952.

Researchers are still figuring out how they got there.

Historians are piecing together the wild story behind a series of highly improbable finds of ancient Egyptian treasure — dug up thousands of miles away in Scotland.

It starts in 1952, when a schoolboy was digging up potatoes as a punishment for bad behavior at his school near the tiny village of Monimail, in Fife.

He struck something that he thought was a potato at first — but it turned out to be the head of an ancient Egyptian statue.

Historians discovered that the sandstone statue dated back to the mid-12th Dynasty, or about 1922 to 1855 BC.

More finds would follow.

Fourteen years later, the same boy — identified by historians as Mr McNie — was teaching at the school. He was running an exercise class when one of his pupils landed awkwardly on something sticking out of the ground.

Digging further, he unearthed an Egyptian bronze statuette of a bull, which historians dated to between 664 and 332 BC.

Then, in 1984, schoolboys who had explored the same site with a metal detector alerted a curator, Elizabeth Goring, to another find — an Egyptian bronze figurine.


Leaded ancient Egyptian bronze figurine of a priest dating to about 1069-656 BC, found at a school in Scotland.

National Museums Scotland

These discoveries — and the mystery of how they ended up in a Scottish schoolyard — are detailed in a new paper by Goring and fellow curator Margaret Maitland.

"When I saw the little bronze figurine of a man in 1984, it was obvious the three objects must be connected," Goring wrote.

Goring got one of the boys with the metal detector to show her where they found the figurine, so she could excavate further.

"We found nothing," she wrote.

But just as they were about to give up, one of the geologists wandered into a different area — and spotted another figurine lying on the ground. It was a "shabti," a small, mummy-shaped sculpture.


This ancient Egyptian faience shabti dates to about 664-332 BC and was found at a school in Scotland.

National Museums Scotland

That led to a whole trove of Egyptian objects being unearthed, which are now in the collection of National Museums Scotland.

Some of the finds turned out to be 19th-century copies, but many were genuine ancient relics.

But there was still the mystery of how they got there.

There's no documentation of anyone who owned the property, in its long history, having amassed a collection of Egyptian objects.

Before Melville House was a school, it had belonged to David Leslie-Melville, the 7th Earl of Melville.

Volunteers excavate the site at Melville House in 1984

National Museums Scotland

The most likely scenario, the researchers now say, is that the objects belonged to Melville's son, Viscount Balgonie, who visited Egypt sometime in 1856 to help with health issues.

His sisters, who were there with him, could have brought vendors selling artifacts to his sick bed while he was there, the researchers said.

Balgonie died a year later, back in Scotland, at the tender age of 24.

The researchers theorize that the objects were then consigned to an outbuilding, and forgotten. The outbuilding was later demolished, and the objects buried with the remnants.

Another theory suggests that they were kept away from the main house because of superstition.

"Pharoah's curse" rumors were just beginning to emerge at this time, the researchers said.

Archaeologists Think They Might Have Found the Real Noah’s Ark
Tim Newcomb
Updated Wed, November 22, 2023 

Scientists Claim They May Have Found Noah’s Arkgaiamoments - Getty Images


"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

Archaeologists believe they may have discovered the final location of Noah’s Ark on Turkey’s Mount Ararat.


Soil samples from atop the highest peaks in Turkey reveal human activity and marine materials.


Dating of the rock and soil from the location match with Biblical timing of Noah’s Ark.

Researchers from a trio of universities in Turkey and the United States have spent roughly a year analyzing the rock and soil in the famous Durupinar formation on Mount Ararat, the highest mountain in Turkey. They believe that the boat-shaped site may hold the ruins of the legendary Noah’s Ark.

The Biblical account of Noah tells of God instructing Noah to build a giant ark to spare his family and pairs of animals from an impending flood meant to destroy the evil and wickedness running rampant on Earth. Noah’s Ark is said to have come to rest on the mountains of Ararat following a 150-day flood about 5,000 years ago.

Researchers now believe they’ve found evidence of human activity near the boat-shaped formation in the mountains from between 5500 and 3000 BC.

Faruk Kaya, AICU vice rector professor, says that analyzing rocks and soil from the uniquely shaped area on the mountain shows human activity in the region, timed to the years following the flood in the legend of Noah’s Ark. “In terms of dating, it is stated that there was life in this region as well,” Kaya says, according to The Daily Mail. “This was revealed in the laboratory results.”

Human activity, however, does not a Biblical account prove. The Durupinar formation has been put forth as a potential ark resting place for many years, and has received extensive attention from those hoping to find Noah’s Ark. Despite the hype, archaeologists have consistently reaffirmed over the years that the formation is natural, not the result of a petrified shipwreck, and that there is no geologic record of a global flood like the one described in religious texts. Some believe that a more local flood may have been possible, but that is also debated.

The team says it isn’t currently possible to say that Noah’s Ark itself was at the Durupinar site.

“With the dating, it is not possible to say that the ship is here,” Faruk Kaya, one of the researchers on the project, said according to Turkish news publication Hurriyet. “We need to work for a long time to reveal this. In the next period, we agreed to carry out a joint study under the leadership of ITU, Andrew University and AICU. Three universities will continue their work in this field in the future.”

For now, the scientists point to the evidence in the soil of “clayey materials, marine materials, and seafood,” according to Hurriyet, within the geological formation as evidence.


The team of researchers placed a renewed focus on the region in 2021 by exploring varying geological areas—including the Durupinar formation, which is made of limonite that bears resemblance to a ship like Noah’s Ark. Further exploration led the team to take the rock and soil samples from the country’s highest peaks for laboratory analysis.

The story of God, Noah, his family, the animals in his care, and Noah’s Ark has caused much debate for centuries. The search for proof of this event will likely continue for some time, and only that time will tell if it is there to be found.

GOOD NEWS COMRADES

China’s CO2 emissions may be falling already, in a watershed moment for the world

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Tue, November 21, 2023

Xi Jinping has made a giant strategic and economic bet on clean-tech dominance, aiming to corner the world’s renewable market - CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS


China’s carbon emissions have either peaked already or will do this winter, seven years ahead of schedule. They may plateau for a year or two but will then go into exponential decline for mechanical and unstoppable reasons.

The country’s target of net zero by 2060 is likely to be achieved a decade earlier than previously assumed, and perhaps earlier than in Europe.

This is a remarkable turn of events. Xi Jinping has made a giant strategic and economic bet on clean-tech dominance, aiming to corner the world’s renewable market and to break dependency on sea-borne energy supplies running through the US 7th Fleet.

The International Energy Agency says China accounts for 60pc of all new solar and wind power being installed across the world this year and next. This roll-out has combined with a drastic slowdown in China’s rate of economic trend growth and the exhaustion of its Ponzi style property model.

Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, says China has reached a structural tipping point where the roll-out of renewables is outpacing the rise in electricity demand.

“A drop in power-sector emissions in 2024 is essentially locked in. We’re likely to see a fall in total CO2 emitted in the first half of next year,” he said.

China is building a gargantuan network of ‘clean energy bases’ in the Gobi, Ordos, and Tengger deserts, and further across the arid wastelands of the northwest. Solar and wind parks run along an arc from Inner Mongolia to Qinghai on the Tibetan plateau.

The electricity will reach the cities of industrial China through ultra-high voltage cables, which cut transition losses to 3.5pc per 1000 kilometres.

The scale is staggering. The Golmud Solar Park in Qinghai is already the world’s largest solar project with 2.8 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity, drawing on seven million panels stretching across the sands. The plan is to enlarge it six-fold within five years.

The regime is approving two new coal plants a week. It does not mean what many in the West think it means. China is adding one GW of coal power on average as back-up for every six GW of new renewable power. The two go hand in hand.

“The more renewable energy used, the more the need for coal peaking capacity. A large number of coal power units will be idle,” says Chinese coal expert Li Ting.

The coal plants will be used to buttress wind and solar rather than as baseload, and to avert a repeat of blackouts that traumatised the Chinese elites in 2021-2022.

Coal companies will be paid a subsidy under a capacity price mechanism unveiled earlier this month to keep reserve power. S&P Global says the capacity usage rate will fall to 25pc over the next two decades.

The coal that is burned will increasingly come with carbon capture. The mining province of Shanxi has a project underway to turn CO2 into ‘gold’ by making carbon nanotubes, which boost the power of lithium-ion batteries in EVs.

Mr Myllyvirta said the spike in Chinese emissions over the last two years is an anomaly caused by hydropower cuts following droughts. La Niña is now refilling the reservoirs of the Great Snowy Mountains and Tibet.

Putin’s war in Ukraine also led to a surge in coal use after liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices went through the roof. That episode is fading. China’s LNG imports were up 30pc in October from a year ago.

At the risk of overtaxing the reader’s appetite for figures, it is worth spelling out the enormity of what China is doing. The China Electricity Council says the country will add 210 GW of solar this year, twice the entire solar capacity installed in the US to date.

It is not going to stop there. Carbon Brief says China’s output of solar panels was 310 GW in 2022; it will be 500 GW in 2023; and 1000 GW in 2025 – four times the total installation of new solar worldwide last year.

China is undoubtedly getting over its skis. The grid cannot yet absorb so much renewable power. Curtailment is a chronic problem. But it is equally obvious that China will not let that stand in the way. The grid will catch up.

The ramp up of battery capacity is even steeper: 550 GWh in 2022; 800 GWh in 2023, and 3,000 in 2025. That will alleviate the shorter end of intermittency.

The point to remember about Xi is that he was green long before it became fashionable. He wrote a weekly column twenty years ago as Zhejiang party chief warning that China’s “energy-intensive and high-polluting” economic model was unsustainable.

He defied the orthodoxy of break-neck industrialisation and GDP worship, launching a radical ‘Green GDP’ programme in Zhejiang in 2004. It called on local governments to subtract ecological damage from the raw GDP figures.

He was defeated by vested interests, one reason why he has been careful not to force a showdown too soon with China’s powerful coal lobby. He is circumventing them instead by giving renewable companies priority access to cheap credit from the state-controlled banks.

The brains behind the Green GDP movement was Xie Zhenhua, today China’s climate negotiator and the man who paved the way for the Paris climate accord.

He helped Xi overcome entrenched opposition from China’s old guard by using a Kuznets Curve to show that a country’s CO2 emissions peak and decline naturally as it develops, and therefore that climate ‘concessions’ would not restrain China’s development.

This led to Xi’s Yingtai evening chat with Barack Obama, and the deal that made Paris possible.

Xie Zhenhua and US negotiator John Kerry have replicated the formula this month in advance of COP28 in Dubai, calling for a tripling of renewable energy by 2030, as well as carbon capture. It will not be easy for the carbon cartel to sabotage COP28 by turning it into a fight between the West and the rest.

The concept of ‘concessions’ is in any case jejune. China itself is at the sharp end of a ‘two degree’ world. The water towers of Tibet are heating twice as fast as global mean temperatures. Melting glaciers are causing spring floods followed by droughts. The aquifers of the North China plain are drying up.

Xi seeks global supremacy. He was never going to let climate worries alone hold back China’s rise. But today the two are in perfect alignment. Clean-tech has become the spearhead of China’s global economic conquest, and this changes the thrust of Beijing’s climate diplomacy.

It is no longer possible for foot-draggers to hide behind China. As Chinese emissions roll over and go into free-fall, Xi will become an even bigger problem for them than Western preachers.

As for those in Europe who think that a carbon border tax can protect the car industry against imports of cheap Chinese EVs, they delude themselves.

China’s battery king CATL will be making lithium-ion batteries at a zero-carbon gigafactory in Sichuan before Germany is anywhere close. The shoe could be on the other foot.

Whatever way you look at it, peak CO2 emissions in China is a watershed moment for global geopolitics, and for humanity.

Ørsted, Eversource install New York’s first offshore wind turbine

Diana DiGangi
Tue, November 21, 2023

The 130-MW South Fork Wind wind farm offshore New York has installed its first turbine, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office announced Monday.

The turbine is the first installed in the state, and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority said in a release that it anticipates South Fork Wind’s construction timeline is on track to make it the first completed utility-scale wind farm in the federal waters of the U.S.

“Hundreds of U.S. workers and three Northeast ports have supported South Fork Wind’s construction, helping to stand up the foundations of a new domestic supply chain that’s creating local union jobs across the Northeast,” said NYSERDA. “All 12 turbines are expected to be installed by the end of 2023 or early 2024.”

South Fork Wind’s turbines are sourced from wind engineering company Siemens Gamesa, according to the release. The farm is owned by Ørsted and is being developed by the company in an equal partnership with Eversource. Construction began in February 2022.

The farm is located 35 miles off Montauk and will bring power to Long Island, which the state hopes will “address a growing reliability challenge for Long Island’s electrical grid,” said NYSERDA.

New York has a mandatory goal to develop 9 GW of offshore wind by 2035. South Fork Wind is one of five projects in progress, and is the smallest of that group.

The other projects are the 1,230-MW Beacon Wind, the 816-MW Empire Wind 1, the 1,260-MW Empire Wind 2, and the 924-MW Sunrise Wind.

Hochul recently drew criticism from offshore wind groups after vetoing an offshore wind transmission planning bill due to a provision for the takeover of parkland in Long Beach to build transmission for Empire Wind 2.

The American Clean Power Association warned that the veto had the state coming “dangerously close to serving a death knell” for the financially troubled offshore wind industry. Just days later, Ørsted canceled two planned wind farms off the coast of New Jersey due to financial turmoil.

Hochul followed the veto by announcing solicitation awards for three new offshore wind projects on Oct. 25, and said the state was advancing the development of two offshore wind blade and nacelle manufacturing facilities – the first in the U.S.

On Monday, Hochul said that the South Fork Wind milestone “marks a momentous step forward” for the industry.

This story was originally published on Utility Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Utility Dive newsletter.

New wind turbine design with ‘surprising twist’ could revolutionize energy production: ‘The world needs them yesterday’

Ben Raker
Wed, November 22, 2023 

A radical new wind turbine design due to test soon in Norway has the potential to turn offshore wind energy production upside down — or at least sideways, with an unusual twist.

If successful, the “counter-rotating vertical-axis turbines” from Norwegian startup World Wide Wind (WWW) could, according to the company, reduce costs and double wind energy generation at sea by allowing builders to supersize floating wind turbines.

More broadly, wind power technology improvements like this can help reduce dependence on dirty energy sources that create heat-trapping gases that overheat the Earth.

At the heart of the new design are three key concepts.

One is that the design is floating, meaning it doesn’t have a structure built into the seafloor and is instead tethered to it. This in itself isn’t revolutionary, but it’s useful. Several huge wind farms are being built with floating technology. These can be sited in deeper-water areas, allowing access to more wind resources and making them less controversial for interrupting views.

A second part of the new design is that the blades turn on a vertical axis rather than a horizontal one. This ditches the usual “pinwheel” look of wind turbines in favor of an orientation like an upside-down stand mixer’s. It’s unusual, though at least one other company is exploring vertical-axis floating wind.

The third innovation makes the design truly stand out: adding another counter-rotating (aka contra-rotating) turbine and blades on the same axis but rotating in the opposite direction.

Photo Credit: New Atlas

The WWW design addresses several problems. Per New Atlas, it puts heavy, high-maintenance hardware near the base or underwater, which a top-heavy horizontal-axis turbine can’t do. This should allow the device to be taller and the blades larger (in wind energy, bigger is better).

With the design’s tilting vertical axis and blade configuration, it can capture wind from more directions and reduce turbulence in its wake (another issue with horizontal-axis turbines). This allows devices to be packed closer together in a wind farm, the company told New Atlas.

Last but not least, because of the opposite rotations of the turbines, the torque on the system (a vertical-axis issue) is neutralized, while the relative rotation is essentially doubled.

“Whichever way the wind‘s blowing, the floating double [vertical-axis wind turbine] passively tilts to an optimal angle, and the two turbines begin turning in opposite directions, effectively doubling the speed at which the ‘rotor’ is turning in the ‘stator,’” Loz Blain of New Atlas explained.

“You can think of that as a way to double your power generation, or as a way to reduce your generator cost by half,” Trond Lutdal, former CEO of WWW, told New Atlas in 2022. “So it‘s lower cost, it‘s much more scalable, and any maintenance happens at the bottom and not hundreds of feet up in the air.”

The test prototype, which WWW is partnering on with builder AF Gruppen, is 62 feet tall and has a 30-kilowatt production capacity. However, New Atlas said the company envisions scaling to 1,312 feet tall and 40 megawatts of capacity, or “nearly twice” what today’s largest wind turbines do.

New Atlas reported that a larger 1.5-megawatt prototype is scheduled for testing in 2025, with hopes of a 24-megawatt version — bigger than any current offshore turbine — being commercially available by 2030.

“Bring it on!” the outlet concludes. “If these massive machines do what they say on the tin, the world needs them yesterday.”

SCI-FI-TEK

Carbon removal is the latest way to fight climate change — but will it take off in time to save the planet?

Ben Adler
·Senior Editor
Wed, November 22, 2023

A handful of companies have begun to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store it underground in an effort to fight climate change. But challenges remain in ramping up the technology to a large enough scale that will make it affordable and effective enough to start to halt the rise of global temperatures.
How carbon removal works

Like giant stationary vacuum cleaners, machines suck CO2 from the air.


At the Orca plant operated by Climeworks in Iceland, the gas is then mixed with water and added to porous rocks underground, where it transforms into carbonate minerals.


At the new Heirloom plant in California, calcium oxide powder is combined with the extracted carbon dioxide to make limestone.

Offsets vs. carbon capture vs. carbon removal

Carbon offsets, like those people buy to mitigate carbon-intensive activities like air travel, claim to reduce CO2 through measures such as protecting forests or planting trees, but many have been exposed for inflating claims of averted emissions.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, refers to capturing CO2 emitted from smokestacks.

Carbon removal, known as “direct air capture” or DAC, isn’t tied to an emissions source and can be built anywhere. Unlike offsets, it provides a precise, easily measurable carbon reduction.

“I buy the gold standard of funding Climeworks to do direct air capture that far exceeds my family’s carbon footprint,” Bill Gates said when asked about his private jet use in February.

A direct air capture and storage facility operated by the Iceland-based Climeworks company. (Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg via Getty Images) (Bloomberg via Getty Images)
How to purchase carbon removal

Climeworks sells a range of monthly subscriptions, the cheapest of which costs $28 per month and removes as much carbon every month as roughly 11 grown average trees (20 kg of CO2), and they can create customized plans.


“We wanted to make our technology available to everyone,” Anna Ahn, a spokesperson for Climeworks, told Yahoo News.


The Orca plant removes roughly 4,000 tons of CO2 annually and the service is so popular it is sold out. If you buy a credit from Climeworks, you are prepaying for carbon removal that will occur when a new plant opens next year that will remove 30,000 tons of CO2 per year.


In 2021, the U.S. emitted 6.34 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents.


Heirloom is selling custom plans, mainly to companies. Both companies also have major corporate customers, including Microsoft.


“Carbon removal can be a lot more expensive than offsets, but what you’re paying for in terms of climate impact is radically different,” Brian Marrs, Microsoft’s senior director of energy and carbon, told the New York Times.

Recommended reading

Reuters: Climate tech company Heirloom opens U.S. commercial carbon capture plant

Independent: Carbon capture startup Climeworks removes CO2 from open air in ‘industry first’

Yahoo News: What Iceland's landmark carbon removal project means for the fight against climate change

Two samples of stones, one without CO2 injection (lower) and one with CO2 injection (upper), from a pilot project lead by ETH Zurich at a power plant near Reykjavik, Iceland. (Anthony Anex/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) (ANTHONY ANEX/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
But will it solve climate change?

Heirloom’s plant removes just 1,000 tons of CO2 per year, about 200 cars’ worth.

Heirloom says it wants to grow to millions of tons annually, and Climeworks says its goal is a gigaton per year by 2050.

Worldwide, scientists project the need for 10 billion gigatons of carbon removal per year by 2050.

Last week, Climeworks announced a partnership with Canadian firm DeepSky to build plants in Canada capable of removing up to 1 million tons per year of CO2, with the first to open before 2030.


The Biden administration has earmarked $3.5 billion for developing direct air capture hubs around the country, with the first grant recipients — a Texas project led by Occidental Petroleum and a Louisiana project from a technology contractor — announced in August.

A flux chamber, used to give a reading of how fast carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere, at the laboratory at Heirloom Carbon in Brisbane, Calif. (Loren Elliott/AFP via Getty Images) (AFP via Getty Images)

Canada is looking at a package of carbon removal subsidies worth $20 billion over five years.

Carbon removal may be impractical because of its high costs: Experts estimate that DAC costs more than $600 per ton of CO2 today and needs to drop below $200/ton by mid-century to adequately address climate change.

Heavy energy demands reduce environmental benefits, unless the electricity used to power carbon removal is all renewable (as it is in Iceland and at the Heirloom plant in California)

Fossil fuel companies could try to remove the carbon they produce to stay in business. ExxonMobil is investing in carbon removal.

Climeworks predicts that the cost will come down as the industry achieves economies of scale, just like the costs of solar energy and battery storage have dropped dramatically.

“There's a big, big scale-up that lies ahead of us,” Ahn said. “And with the scale-up, the costs will also reduce due to economies of scale, due to technology development.”

Why carbon capture is no easy climate solution

Reuters Videos
Wed, November 22, 2023

STORY: As the world tries to avoid a climate catastrophe, technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions have become central to many countries' climate strategies.

“...need to pursue the new technologies whether it's hydrogen or ammonia, or direct carbon capture...”

“We're working on decarbonisation... we're interested in carbon capture...”

“...essential that in the meantime we deploy the latest carbon capture, use and storage technology...”

So, what’s the state of the carbon capture industry now, and what are the challenges it faces?

The most common form of carbon capture collects the gas from a point source, such as a power plant.

The CO2 can then be moved to permanent underground storage.

Or, more commonly, it’s used for another industrial purpose first.

Currently, most of the CO2 captured this way is injected into oil wells to free trapped oil.

Drillers say this "enhanced oil recovery" method can make petroleum more climate-friendly, but environmentalists say it's counter-productive.

Industry data shows there are over 40 commercial point-source-capture projects operating around the world, with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

That’s about 0.13% of the world’s annual energy- and industry-related CO2 emissions.

Another form of the technology is “direct air capture”.

With some companies trying more creative solutions, like this one using ballooning to capture the gas in high altitudes.

Data from the International Energy Agency shows that only 27 direct air capture hubs have been commissioned globally, capturing just 10,000 metric tons of CO2 a year.

But some 130 facilities are planned around the world, with the U.S. announcing in August, $1.2 billion in grants for two, in Texas and Louisiana.

One key challenge is the tech’s high cost.

The price tag for point-source-capture projects range from $15 to $120 per metric ton of captured carbon.

With direct air capture, it can cost up to $1,000 per metric ton.

Some countries are trying to use public subsidies to get the projects going.

Such as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, that offers tax credits for every ton captured.

The cost is a tough sell when there’s little proof to show the technology is ready to be deployed at scale.

But developers of the tech say funding is crucial to push it further.

Here’s Shashank Samala, CEO of one of the firms that just won a federal grant for a capture hub in Louisiana.

“Two years ago, we were at a petri dish where we were removing grams of CO2 from the air. In two years, we went from grams to kilograms to hundreds of kilograms to tons, to soon hundreds of tons."

Where captured carbon can be stored is limited by geology.

And getting the carbon to storage sites could require extensive pipeline networks, or even shipping fleets, posing potential new obstacles.

Here’s U.S. climate envoy John Kerry summing up the concerns over carbon capture:

"'The jury's out on whether or not you're going to be able to capture enough emissions and contain them, and get the permissions you need to deploy the infrastructure and all the other things. Will it be competitive? Will it come online in time?"

But as countries gather for the 28th United Nations climate change conference, where they will look to hammer out ways to cut carbon emissions, many say it’s important to try every means possible.

Explainer-Why carbon capture is no easy solution to climate change

Wed, November 22, 2023 





: View of a model of carbon capture and storage designed by Santos Ltd, at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference in Brisbane


By Leah Douglas

(Reuters) - Technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions to keep them from the atmosphere are central to the climate strategies of many world governments as they seek to follow through on international commitments to decarbonize by mid-century.

They are also expensive, unproven at scale, and can be hard to sell to a nervous public.

As nations gather for the 28th United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates at the end of November, the question of carbon capture’s future role in a climate-friendly world will be in focus. Here are some details about the state of the industry now, and the obstacles in the way of widespread deployment:

FORMS OF CARBON CAPTURE

The most common form of carbon capture technology involves capturing the gas from a point source like an industrial smokestack. From there, the carbon can either be moved directly to permanent underground storage or it can be used in another industrial purpose first, variations that are respectively called carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS).

There are currently 42 operational commercial CCS and CCUS projects across the world with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks the industry. That is about 0.13% of the world’s roughly 37 billion metric tons of annual energy and industry-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Some 30 of those projects, accounting for 78% of all captured carbon from the group, use the carbon for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), in which carbon is injected into oil wells to free trapped oil. Drillers say EOR can make petroleum more climate-friendly, but environmentalists say the practice is counter-productive.

The other 12 projects, which permanently store carbon in underground formations without using them to boost oil output, are in the U.S., Norway, Iceland, China, Canada, Qatar, and Australia, according to the Global CCS Institute.

Another form of carbon capture is direct air capture (DAC), in which carbon emissions are captured from the air.

About 130 DAC facilities are being planned around the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), though just 27 have been commissioned and they capture just 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

The U.S. in August announced $1.2 billion in grants for two DAC hubs in Texas and Louisiana that promise to capture 2 million metric tons of carbon per year, though a final investment decision on the projects has not been made.

HIGH COSTS

One stumbling block to rapid deployment of carbon capture technology is cost.

CCS costs range from $15 to $120 per metric ton of captured carbon depending on the emissions source, and DAC projects are even more expensive, between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton, because of the amount of energy needed to capture carbon from the atmosphere, according to the IEA.

Some CCS projects in countries like Norway and Canada have been paused for financial reasons.

Countries including the U.S. have rolled out public subsidies for carbon capture projects. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, offers a $50 tax credit per metric ton of carbon captured for CCUS and $85 per metric ton captured for CCS, and $180 per metric ton captured through DAC.

Though those are meaningful incentives, companies may still need to take on some added costs to move CCS and DAC projects ahead, said Benjamin Longstreth, global director of carbon capture at the Clean Air Task Force.

Some CCS projects have also failed to prove out the technology's readiness. A $1 billion project to harness carbon dioxide emissions from a Texas coal plant, for example, had chronic mechanical problems and routinely missed its targets before it was shut down in 2020, according to a report submitted by the project’s owners to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Petra Nova project restarted in September.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Where captured carbon can be stored is limited by geology, a reality that would become more pronounced if and when carbon capture is deployed at the kind of massive scale that would be needed to make a difference to the climate. The best storage sites for carbon are in portions of North America, East Africa, and the North Sea, according to the Global CCS Institute.

That means getting captured carbon to storage sites could require extensive pipeline networks or even shipping fleets – posing potential new obstacles.

In October, for example, a $3 billion CCS pipeline project proposed by Navigator CO2 Ventures in the U.S. Midwest - meant to move carbon from heartland ethanol plants to good storage sites - was canceled amid concerns from residents about potential leaks and construction damage.

Companies investing in carbon removal need to take seriously community concerns about new infrastructure projects, said Simone Stewart, industrial policy specialist at the National Wildlife Federation.

"Not all technologies are going to be possible in all locations," Stewart said.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Fossil fuel industry keys in on unproven recycling methods to prop up plastics

Saul Elbein
Wed, November 22, 2023 

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has urged recycling as an alternative to bans or cuts in the single-use plastic filling world landfills and oceans.

Now, with the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28) just around the corner, the industry is making that pitch on a global scale — and using it to water down efforts to cut the use of fossil fuels.

That strategy was evident last week at the third Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting (INC-3) in Nairobi, Kenya — part of a process legally bound to secure an international agreement on plastics by 2024.

It began with high hopes and soaring rhetoric, with President William Ruto of Kenya — a country that has banned a wide array of single-use plastics — calling on negotiators to be “the first domino” in the “inevitable” change toward a world of greatly reduced plastic use.

Instead, negotiations ended in deadlock and confusion, as countries including Saudi Arabia and China joined trade groups such as the American Chemistry Council to fight the idea of in any way limiting the production of plastics.

More than 140 registered fossil fuel and plastics lobbyists attended, many attached to six national delegations — making them by far the largest bloc at the conference.

The army of fossil fuel and petrochemical representatives also outnumbered independent scientists 4 to 1 and outnumbered the collective delegations of the 70 smallest countries put together.

They entered a conference that had on its agenda the possible “phaseout” of particularly damaging and replaceable plastics — and proceeded to argue that no such thing was necessary. Instead, the petrochemical groups are holding out the hope of a “circular economy” in which waste plastic is indefinitely reused to form new plastic products.

Their weapons in this campaign: innocuous-sounding phrases like “national priorities,” “national circumstances,” the push for “a bottom-up approach” and a plea for “technological innovation.”

All of this, anti-plastics campaigners argued, sought to water down the original goal of the treaty, which was a binding and solid agreement that would meaningfully reduce the amount of plastics entering the environment.

That number is staggering: the equivalent of 2,000 dump trucks per day poured into the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans. One landmark 2017 study in Science found that 8.3 million tons of plastics had been produced to date, virtually all of which was still in landfills or the environment — and which was still dwarfed by the 12 million tons of plastic that study authors said would be in landfills or the environment by 2050 if nothing changed.

That profusion of plastic is an issue “of deep concern,” wrote a confederation of 60 U.N. member states calling itself the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution.

The alliance of countries, led by Norway and Rwanda, favored expanded recycling and new-model plastics that were easier to break down and remake into other products. But this took a distant back seat to their call for binding measures for countries to produce less plastic.

In particular, they pushed the chair to “eliminate and restrict unnecessary, avoidable, or problematic plastics,” starting with those most damaging to human health and the environment.

In addition to waste management — which one activist compared to mopping the floor from an overflowing bathtub — “we must also turn off the tap,” a representative from the coalition of small Pacific nations wrote.

For this group, “there is no difference between plastic and plastic pollution — plastic is pollution,” as Rafael Eudes of Brazil’s Aliança Residuo Cero, or Zero Waste Alliance, said in a statement.

This coalition urged the INC-3 chair to take decisive action to turn the hodgepodge of mutually contradictory suggestions that made up the prior session’s “Zero Draft” into a streamlined and condensed First Draft that would be ready for the next session.

But none of that is what happened. Negotiations ended with a Zero Draft that had massively expanded with both pro- and anti-plastics proposals — a draft that members, in another blow to momentum, were forbidden to work on before they meet again in April in Ottawa, Canada.

With only two meetings remaining before time runs out on the treaty process, that raises the real prospect of failure — a possibility that the plastic-reduction hawks argued was the aim of the far-smaller coalition of attending states and lobbyists that depend heavily on the profits from fossil fuels.

This coalition of about a half-dozen countries — including China, Russia and Iran — sought to convince members that production caps were unnecessary even for the most damaging and dangerous plastics — and that the solution was better “waste management” of the floods of plastic it still plans to produce.

“Primary plastics have become a cornerstone of modern society,” the Saudi delegation wrote before the meeting, referring to new “virgin” plastics pulled directly from fossil fuels.

“Phasing out their supply and demand would not only stifle technological innovations but also risk economic growth and stability,” the Saudi team wrote.

They were joined in this push by China, a major plastics producer whose negotiators wrote before the conference that “limiting the production of plastic polymers is not a straight solution to plastic pollution” and called to cut any such bans from the ultimate treaty.

While the U.S. didn’t formally join this bloc, its negotiators in Nairobi sought “to replace concrete global commitments with catchy buzzwords and unenforceable promises,” according to a summary from the Center for International Environmental Law.

The Biden administration’s own proposed plan for plastic waste also makes no mention of binding measures to cut plastic production. Instead, the administration is relying on an embrace of “voluntary” measures to reduce single-use plastic, new purchasing guidelines that steer government agencies away from single-use products and expanded recycling — measures roughly in line with those urged by the petrochemical industry.

This pro-plastic coalition’s principal talking point was summarized by Matthew Kastner of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a leading petrochemical lobby group that counts fossil fuel giants Exxon and plastics manufacturers Dow and DuPont among its members.

Kastner told Reuters last week that “the plastics agreement should be focused on ending plastic pollution, not plastic production.”

That depends on the idea that the plastic waste stream — more than 80 percent of which goes into landfills and the environment, and of which half of the remainder is simply burned — can be reconfigured into a closed “circular” loop.

As a groundbreaking 2020 report by NPR and Frontline found, that is a pitch that the industry has been making for decades — while knowing it was not able to deliver on it.

“There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech, NPR and Frontline found.

But recycling, a plastic trade group leader told them, did have one major attribute: It extended the public acceptance of plastics, or what is now called their “social license.”

“If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of what is now the Plastics Industry Association, told NPR.

The keystone of the modern version of this pitch is “chemical recycling,” which seeks to replace the grueling sorting-by-hand of soggy and smelly plastic waste into distinct recycling streams with a streamlined, automated process.

According to the industry pitch, this could allow for the creation of new plastics from the building blocks of the old. Kastner of ACC pointed The Hill to a list of 79 chemical recycling facilities globally that are “planned, operational or under construction.”

“Chemical recycling is a proven technology happening at commercial scale across the globe,” Kastner told The Hill.

He pointed to the “many products on the global marketplace using plastics remade from chemical recycling,” including a Dow initiative to use ground-up plastic to replace some of the asphalt in road tar and an ExxonMobil project to turn discarded fishing lines into shipping crates.

But these projects are tiny compared with the plastic waste stream: Against the 22 million tons of plastic that enters the environment annually, the Dow and Exxon projects have reused around 1,000 tons each — about one part in 22,000.

The amount the industry invests in advanced recycling — $8.7 billion according to the ACC — is also dwarfed by the $164 billion it put into the pipeline for new factories to produce virgin plastics in the U.S. alone.

In other words, the petrochemical industry has spent nearly 20 times as much on new plastics as on advanced recycling, which it says is key to the industry — and which it says is the reason that such new production need not be limited.

A report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) found that of the 37 “chemical recycling” facilities proposed since 2000, only three were still functioning as of 2020. The remaining three facilities were “plastics to fuel,” in which a mixed stream of plastics is broken down under heat provided by fossil fuels into a chemical slurry that can be added to fuels or burned for energy.

As reporting from ProPublica has found, this can be massively carcinogenic: One Chevron boat fuel additive derived from melted-down plastics was a million times more toxic than most new chemicals approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

EPA scientists found that anyone exposed to the fuel over a lifetime would get cancer — six times worse odds than the lung cancer risk of lifetime smokers. The agency ultimately decided to permit the fuel anyway.

And then there is the climate cost. The energy needed to create a kilogram of recycled polyethylene plastic from reused materials takes seven times as much energy as required to make a kilogram of similar plastics from fresh fossil fuels, Taylor Uekert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told The Guardian.

Uekert and other researchers at the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado found that the principal technologies that make most plastics-to-fuels — pyrolysis and gasification — were so environmentally damaging and energy-intensive that they could not reasonably be considered circular. The EPA no longer considers this to be recycling, according to the National Recycling Plan.

“You’re extracting fossil fuels that take a brief vacation as a piece of plastic — before they’re turned back into a fossil fuel and burned, using fossil fuels to power the process,” Claire Arkin of GAIA told The Hill.

Arkin described the push for chemical recycling and “circularity” as a reason to avoid production caps as akin to “a Pied Piper situation” and part of the same 50-year-long trajectory that “has put us in the dire situation that necessitated a plastics treaty in the first place.”

She added that “any time and money put into waste management one might as well throw down the drain if it’s not paired with reduction measures. Otherwise, we’ll be cleaning up forever as the world drowns in plastic.”

At the Nairobi conference, plastics spokespeople argued that plastics — which are still almost entirely produced from chemicals and energy derived from fossil fuels — were, in fact, a climate solution.

“Plastic products have tremendous value and benefits — they’re more affordable and versatile than alternatives, have lower [greenhouse gas] emissions profiles, and require less water and raw materials to make,” wrote the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) in a release aimed at Nairobi.

The AFPM added that American corporations were pushing for more recycling and the opportunity to use more recycled materials — but said that bans or caps on plastics production would scare them off.