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40% Surge: Growing Nitrous Oxide Emissions Trigger Scientific Alarm

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Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Nitrous oxide emissions, largely from agriculture, have increased significantly from 1980 to 2020. Efforts to reduce these emissions are critical as there are no means to remove the gas from the atmosphere, posing risks to climate and environmental health.Over four decades, nitrous oxide emissions have risen sharply, driven mainly by agriculture. Without technologies to remove it, the focus must shift to reducing emissions to meet the Paris Agreement targets.Recent increases in emissions heighten concerns over their impact on global warming and environmental health.Nitrous Oxide EmissionsBetween 1980 and 2020, emissions of nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide or methane—continued unabated, with over 10 million metric tons released into the atmosphere in 2020 alone, predominantly due to farming practices. This finding comes from a new report by the Global Carbon Project. The report, “Global Nitrous Oxide Budget 2024,” led by researchers from Boston College and published today (June 11) in the journal Earth System Science Data, states that agricultural production was responsible for 74 percent of human-driven nitrous oxide emissions in the 2010s. These emissions were mainly due to the use of chemical fertilizers and animal waste on croplands.Like carbon dioxide and methane, the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide plays a significant role in global warming. While naturally occurring, it is also produced primarily by farming activity. Human-driven nitrous oxide emissions flowed unabated between 1980 and 2020, with more than 10-million metric tons released into the atmosphere in 2020, according to a new report led by Boston College researchers for the Global Carbon Project. Credit: Global Carbon ProjectUrgency in Reducing EmissionsIn an era when greenhouse gas emissions must decline to reduce global warming, in 2020 and 2021 nitrous oxide flowed into the atmosphere at a faster rate than at any other time in history, the international team of researchers reported. On Earth, excess nitrogen contributes to soil, water, and air pollution. In the atmosphere, it depletes the ozone layer, and exacerbates climate change.Agricultural emissions reached 8 million metric tons in 2020, a 67 percent increase from the 4.8 million metric tons released in 1980, according to the study, the most comprehensive study of global nitrous oxide emissions and sinks produced by a team of 58 researchers from 55 organizations in 15 countries.Call for Emission Reductions“Nitrous oxide emissions from human activities must decline in order to limit global temperature rise to 2°C as established by the Paris Agreement,” said the report’s lead author, Hanqin Tian, the Schiller Institute Professor of Global Sustainability at Boston College. “Reducing nitrous oxide emissions is the only solution since at this point no technologies exist that can remove nitrous oxide from the atmosphere.”The concentration of atmospheric nitrous oxide reached 336 parts per billion in 2022, a 25 percent increase over pre-industrial levels that far outpaces predictions previously developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Tian, director of the Center for Earth System Science and Global Sustainability at BC’s Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.Accelerating Emissions Amid Climate Goals“This emission increase is taking place when the global greenhouse gasses should be rapidly declining towards net zero emissions if we have any chances to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Tian, who coordinated the research on behalf of the Global Carbon Project.The world’s farmers used 60 million metric tons of commercial nitrogen fertilizers in 1980. By 2020, the sector used 107 million metric tons. That same year, animal manure contributed 101 million metric tons for a combined 2020 usage of 208 million metric tons.The unfettered increase in a greenhouse gas with a global warming potential approximately 300 times larger than carbon dioxide, presents dire consequences for the planet.Drawing on millions of nitrous oxide measurements taken during the past four decades on land and in the atmosphere, freshwater systems, and the ocean, Tian said the researchers have generated the most comprehensive assessment of global nitrous oxide to date.Global Emission InsightsThe researchers examined data collected around the world for all major economic activities that lead to nitrous oxide emissions and reported on 18 anthropogenic and natural sources and three absorbent “sinks” of global nitrous oxide.The top 10 nitrous oxide emission-producing countries are: China, India, the United States, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Australia, Indonesia, Turkey, and Canada, the researchers found.Some countries have seen success implementing policies and practices to reduce nitrous oxide emissions, according to the report. Emissions in China have slowed since the mid 2010s; as have emissions in Europe during the past few decades.In the U.S., agricultural emissions continue to creep up while industrial emissions have declined slightly, leaving overall emissions rather flat. Natural sources of nitrous oxide emissions from soil, fresh- and saltwater have remained stableEstablished in 2001, The Global Carbon Project analyzes the impact of human activity on greenhouse gas emissions and Earth systems, producing global budgets for the three dominant greenhouse gasses – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide – that assess emissions and sinks to inform further research, policy, and international action.Agricultural Practices and Emission ReductionImproved agricultural practices that limit the use of nitrogen fertilizers and animal waste can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution. Tian said there is a need for more frequent assessments so mitigation efforts can target high-emission regions and activities. An improved inventory of sources and sinks will be required if progress is going to be made toward the objectives of the Paris Agreement.“While there have been some successful nitrogen reduction initiatives in different regions, we found an acceleration in the rate of nitrous oxide accumulation in the atmosphere in this decade,” said Global Carbon Project Executive Director Josep Canadell, a research scientist at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. “The growth rates of atmospheric nitrous oxide in 2020 and 2021 were higher than any previous observed year and more than 30 percent higher than the average rate of increase in the previous decade.”Reference: “Global Nitrous Oxide Budget (1980-2020)” 11 June 2024, Earth System Science Data. DOI: 10.5194/essd-2023-401

Over four decades, nitrous oxide emissions have risen sharply, driven mainly by agriculture. Without technologies to remove it, the focus must shift to reducing emissions...

Agriculture Crops Fertile Farm Land

Nitrous oxide emissions, largely from agriculture, have increased significantly from 1980 to 2020. Efforts to reduce these emissions are critical as there are no means to remove the gas from the atmosphere, posing risks to climate and environmental health.

Over four decades, nitrous oxide emissions have risen sharply, driven mainly by agriculture. Without technologies to remove it, the focus must shift to reducing emissions to meet the Paris Agreement targets.

Recent increases in emissions heighten concerns over their impact on global warming and environmental health.

Nitrous Oxide Emissions

Between 1980 and 2020, emissions of nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide or methane—continued unabated, with over 10 million metric tons released into the atmosphere in 2020 alone, predominantly due to farming practices. This finding comes from a new report by the Global Carbon Project.

The report, “Global Nitrous Oxide Budget 2024,” led by researchers from Boston College and published today (June 11) in the journal Earth System Science Data, states that agricultural production was responsible for 74 percent of human-driven nitrous oxide emissions in the 2010s. These emissions were mainly due to the use of chemical fertilizers and animal waste on croplands.

Global Nitrous Oxide Budget

Like carbon dioxide and methane, the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide plays a significant role in global warming. While naturally occurring, it is also produced primarily by farming activity. Human-driven nitrous oxide emissions flowed unabated between 1980 and 2020, with more than 10-million metric tons released into the atmosphere in 2020, according to a new report led by Boston College researchers for the Global Carbon Project. Credit: Global Carbon Project

Urgency in Reducing Emissions

In an era when greenhouse gas emissions must decline to reduce global warming, in 2020 and 2021 nitrous oxide flowed into the atmosphere at a faster rate than at any other time in history, the international team of researchers reported. On Earth, excess nitrogen contributes to soil, water, and air pollution. In the atmosphere, it depletes the ozone layer, and exacerbates climate change.

Agricultural emissions reached 8 million metric tons in 2020, a 67 percent increase from the 4.8 million metric tons released in 1980, according to the study, the most comprehensive study of global nitrous oxide emissions and sinks produced by a team of 58 researchers from 55 organizations in 15 countries.

Call for Emission Reductions

“Nitrous oxide emissions from human activities must decline in order to limit global temperature rise to 2°C as established by the Paris Agreement,” said the report’s lead author, Hanqin Tian, the Schiller Institute Professor of Global Sustainability at Boston College. “Reducing nitrous oxide emissions is the only solution since at this point no technologies exist that can remove nitrous oxide from the atmosphere.”

The concentration of atmospheric nitrous oxide reached 336 parts per billion in 2022, a 25 percent increase over pre-industrial levels that far outpaces predictions previously developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Tian, director of the Center for Earth System Science and Global Sustainability at BC’s Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.

Accelerating Emissions Amid Climate Goals

“This emission increase is taking place when the global greenhouse gasses should be rapidly declining towards net zero emissions if we have any chances to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Tian, who coordinated the research on behalf of the Global Carbon Project.

The world’s farmers used 60 million metric tons of commercial nitrogen fertilizers in 1980. By 2020, the sector used 107 million metric tons. That same year, animal manure contributed 101 million metric tons for a combined 2020 usage of 208 million metric tons.

The unfettered increase in a greenhouse gas with a global warming potential approximately 300 times larger than carbon dioxide, presents dire consequences for the planet.

Drawing on millions of nitrous oxide measurements taken during the past four decades on land and in the atmosphere, freshwater systems, and the ocean, Tian said the researchers have generated the most comprehensive assessment of global nitrous oxide to date.

Global Emission Insights

The researchers examined data collected around the world for all major economic activities that lead to nitrous oxide emissions and reported on 18 anthropogenic and natural sources and three absorbent “sinks” of global nitrous oxide.

The top 10 nitrous oxide emission-producing countries are: China, India, the United States, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Australia, Indonesia, Turkey, and Canada, the researchers found.

Some countries have seen success implementing policies and practices to reduce nitrous oxide emissions, according to the report. Emissions in China have slowed since the mid 2010s; as have emissions in Europe during the past few decades.

In the U.S., agricultural emissions continue to creep up while industrial emissions have declined slightly, leaving overall emissions rather flat. Natural sources of nitrous oxide emissions from soil, fresh- and saltwater have remained stable

Established in 2001, The Global Carbon Project analyzes the impact of human activity on greenhouse gas emissions and Earth systems, producing global budgets for the three dominant greenhouse gasses – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide – that assess emissions and sinks to inform further research, policy, and international action.

Agricultural Practices and Emission Reduction

Improved agricultural practices that limit the use of nitrogen fertilizers and animal waste can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution. Tian said there is a need for more frequent assessments so mitigation efforts can target high-emission regions and activities. An improved inventory of sources and sinks will be required if progress is going to be made toward the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

“While there have been some successful nitrogen reduction initiatives in different regions, we found an acceleration in the rate of nitrous oxide accumulation in the atmosphere in this decade,” said Global Carbon Project Executive Director Josep Canadell, a research scientist at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. “The growth rates of atmospheric nitrous oxide in 2020 and 2021 were higher than any previous observed year and more than 30 percent higher than the average rate of increase in the previous decade.”

Reference: “Global Nitrous Oxide Budget (1980-2020)” 11 June 2024, Earth System Science Data.
DOI: 10.5194/essd-2023-401

Read the full story here.
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Australia has just been handed a map for getting to net zero. Here’s how it will guide us

Emissions pathways act as a map of the future, showing us how to get from where we are to where we want to be.

AustralianCamera/ShutterstockAustralia’s push for net-zero emissions received a welcome boost on Thursday, with the release of an official report showing how Australia can seek to cut domestic emissions across each sector of the economy. The Climate Change Authority prepared the report, which provides vital scaffolding for Australia’s climate ambitions. Hopefully, it will inform the Australian government’s upcoming decarbonisation plans for each sector of the economy, and its updated goal for emissions reduction out to 2035. The pathways laid out by the authority show how emissions cuts can be made in sectors such as land use, resources, transport and energy. Importantly, the report shows what effective climate action looks like – and what Australia can achieve. The roadmap also shows how Australia can do its part to limit global warming to 1.5°C to avoid temperatures climbing dangerously higher. Climate scientists are clear: every fraction of a degree matters. Why are these pathways important? The authority groups Australia’s domestic emissions into six categories: electricity and energy, transport, industry and waste, agriculture and land, built environment, and resources. For each sector of Australia’s economy, getting emissions to net zero poses different challenges and opportunities. Preventing emissions from buildings requires, among other things, getting off gas and making them more efficient. Reducing emissions from transport means encouraging uptake of diverse solutions such as electric vehicles, trains and cycling. The report provides pathways that can guide the decarbonisation of each sector. It shows which technologies could be taken up and phased out, how to attract, enable and time investments, and how to align policy with practical implementation. The authority borrows from the approach of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by showing a range of possible routes to net zero and comparing their work to others. We hope the Australian government continues this approach, to ensure decision-makers understand how different modelling approaches and scenarios combine to create a robust body of knowledge. The land sector has become a carbon sink in recent years. AzureJasper/Shutterstock Pathways show us the way We have spent more than a decade doing work similar to the report just released. Our own sectoral pathways are also designed to support governments, businesses and investors as they look for opportunities to reduce emissions. Decision-makers around the world are calling for such guidance. Why? Because pathways create a signal of how things can change. Laying out the problem, and different approaches to solving it, helps create a common understanding of the opportunities, risks and barriers to effective action. They make it possible for governments to set clear goals and ensure policies match what is needed and are backed by evidence. Rather than just setting out the overarching intention of, say, cutting emissions in half in a decade, pathways show how it can be done. Pathways let investors and companies identify and reduce risks and get ahead in a global economy aiming for net-zero emissions. And they lay out the technologies and processes needed to make the shift: ranging from mature, ready-to-deploy technologies such as renewable energy and storage, to maturing technologies such as green steelmaking. Mining of critical minerals will increase as fossil fuel extraction decreases under the resources sector plan. Pictured: Greenbushes lithium mine in Western Australia. David Steele/Shutterstock Pathways to keep 1.5°C alive Early next year, the Australian government is expected to release its new 2035 emissions target, taking us beyond the current target for 2030. Every signatory to the 2015 Paris Agreement has to publicly set a new target every five years. Other nations are doing the same. In the authority’s plan, Australia would hit net zero by 2040 under the more ambitious pathway aimed at meeting the 1.5°C goal, or 2050 under the 2°C scenario. These net zero dates are broadly consistent with our own analysis. But there are opportunities to move faster still. Boosted ambitions Transport is now Australia’s fastest-growing source of emissions. The authority’s transport pathway envisages passenger vehicles going electric and encouraging public transport and active transport, such as walking, cycling and micromobility such as e-scooters. It aligns with our research, which shows a diverse solutions approach is a better option to reduce transport emissions. This is especially important given recent delays in the shift to zero-emissions vehicles. However, the authority only takes a diverse approach to passenger transport. Our own work shows Australia can diversify its approach to freight transport. The authority focuses on moving trucks from diesel and petrol to battery electric and green hydrogen. But Climateworks’ analysis shows we can also reduce distance travelled through route optimisation and shift freight to rail, where possible. For the built environment – our houses, offices and infrastructure – the report rightly notes most technologies are now technically ready, commercially available, cheaper to run and healthier. They include energy-efficient electrical appliances, roof and wall insulation and window glazing. But there’s an opportunity to go further. The most cost-effective way to green your house depends on which state or territory you live in. Quick fixes – such as switching gas hot water for heat pumps – are included in the authority’s report. But as our recent modelling shows, homes in cooler climates benefit from more comprehensive improvements including double-glazing windows and adding insulation to walls and ceilings, alongside the quick fixes. Heat pump? Solar? Insulation? The most cost-effective way of cutting emissions from houses differs state by state. ThomsonD/Shutterstock What’s next? The pathways laid out by the Climate Change Authority in this report will not just be left on the shelf. They have very real use for business leaders and investors, as well as for policymakers. These pathways will guide Australia’s comprehensive national net-zero plan. They give us a starting point and show us how it can be done. Read more: Can we really reach net zero by 2050? A new report maps out Australia's path in more detail than ever before Climateworks Centre is a part of Monash University. It receives funding from a range of external sources including philanthropy, governments and businesses.Josh Solomonsz works for Climateworks Centre. Climateworks is a part of Monash University and receives funding from a range of external sources including philanthropy, governments and businesses. Josh is a volunteer committee of management member of the Port Phillip EcoCentre, a community environmental sustainability organisation.Matthew Benetti is affiliated with Think Forward, an intergenerational fairness think tank. I am a volunteer board member.

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Factbox-Key Ministers in Ukraine's Cabinet Reshuffle

By Olena HarmashKYIV (Reuters) - Here are some of the key appointees in a Ukrainian cabinet reshuffle completed on Thursday and why their...

KYIV (Reuters) - Here are some of the key appointees in a Ukrainian cabinet reshuffle completed on Thursday and why their portfolios matter:FOREIGN MINISTER: ANDRII SYBIHA, 49Sybiha's appointment reflects the fact that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has taken a leading role in foreign policy since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Sybiha, a career diplomat without a prominent public profile, was named first deputy foreign minister in April 2024. Before that, he was one of several deputy heads of Zelenskiy's presidential office where he oversaw foreign policy and strategic partnerships. He was Ukraine's ambassador to Turkey from 2016 to 2021 and headed a directorate for consular services at the Foreign Ministry before that. DEPUTY PM FOR INFRASTRUCTURE AND REGIONS: OLEKSIY KULEBA, 41This government portfolio is powerful as it confers some control over financial flows for wartime reconstruction. The durability and viability of infrastructure is also vital as Russia targets it to try to get an upper hand in the war.Kuleba served as a deputy head of Zelenskiy's office overseeing regional policies from January 2023. That job involved coordinating ties between regional authorities and the military to build fortifications and support the development of mobile anti-drone groups across Ukraine. In the first year after Russia's invasion, Kuleba served as the regional governor of the Kyiv region that surrounds the capital.   DEPUTY PM FOR EU INTEGRATION AND JUSTICE MINISTER: OLHA STEFANYSHYNA, 38 Stefanyshyna, a lawyer by education, served as the deputy prime minister in charge of Kyiv's accession to the European Union and NATO military alliance from June 2020. She retains that portfolio and gains the functions of the old justice ministry as head of a bigger ministry combining the two.     A key negotiator in Ukraine's efforts to join the EU, she spent most of her professional life working to integrate Ukraine with the West and get rid of its post-Soviet legacy. In the early years of her career, she worked at the justice ministry, laying the legal groundwork for closer EU-Ukraine cooperation.AGRICULTURE MINISTER: VITALIY KOVAL, 43Koval headed the State Property Fund, Ukraine's main privatisation agency from November 2023. Prior to that he was the governor of the Rivne region in western Ukraine. He also worked in the private sector, serving in various senior positions in banking, transport and agriculture.MINISTER FOR STRATEGIC INDUSTRIES: HERMAN SMETANIN, 32Smetanin is the youngest minister in the cabinet and his appointment is more evidence of a rapid rise through the ranks. An engineer by education, he was named head of Ukraine's largest state-owned defence consortium UkrOboronProm in June 2023. During that period, weapons and ammunition production increased. He also spearheaded a corporate governance reform to increase transparency at the state giant.At the start of the invasion, he worked in his native city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, about 30 km from the Russian border, as the director of one of the Ukrainian tank factories.MINISTER FOR VETERANS: NATALIIA KALMYKOVA, 37 Kalmykova, a doctor by education, was a deputy defence minister from September 2023. Prior to that, she headed Ukraine's Veterans Fund and worked in Come Back Alive, one of the largest Ukrainian charity organisations. ENVIRONMENT MINISTER: SVITLANA HRYNCHUK, 38 Hrynchuk was a deputy energy minister from September 2023. She was also a deputy environment minister for several months in 2022. Prior to that, she was an adviser to the finance minister and headed a working group in the ministry of energy on environmental protection and climate change. MINISTER FOR CULTURE AND STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS: MYKOLA TOCHYTSKYI, 56Tochytskyi, a career diplomat, was a deputy head of Zelenskiy's office overseeing foreign policy from April 2024. He earlier served as Ukraine's ambassador in Belgium and Luxembourg and was also Ukraine's representative in the Council of Europe.David Arakhamia, head of Zelenskiy's parliamentary faction, has said Ukraine needs to step up its efforts to combat disinformation and that a person with foreign policy experience was needed for that.(Reporting by Olena Harmash; editing by Tom Balmforth and Philippa Fletcher)Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters.Photos You Should See - July 2024

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Could Liverwurst Take Down Boar’s Head?

Deaths from a listeria outbreak are haunting the mysterious deli-meat empire.

Founded in Brooklyn in 1905, Boar’s Head is the industry standard for the modern miracle-horror of processed deli meat, whereby a whole lot of chicken or turkey or pork is macerated into oblivion, injected with a flavor brine, and reconstituted into a shape that is not found in nature. Meat eaters mostly agree that it is a gross and delicious and easy way to make a sandwich — when the system works. But on July 26, Boar’s Head announced a recall of some 207,000 pounds of product due to potential exposure to Listeria monocytogenes at a plant in Virginia, after the Maryland Department of Health found that a sample of Boar’s Head liverwurst tested positive for the bacteria. Four days later, the recall was expanded to include some 7 million additional pounds from the tainted plant — from hot dogs to bacon to something called “hot butt cappy ham.” By late August, nine people had died and 57 were hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which is investigating what is the largest listeriosis outbreak since 2011. The adage about meat no longer applies to the recalled products of the Boar’s Head Provision Co. After a summer of recalls and deaths from listeria, people really do want to know how their sausages and other processed meats are made. As food-safety lawyers prepare class-action lawsuits, the next few months for Boar’s Head will involve cleaning up its reputation beyond its closed plant in Virginia — and beyond just liverwurst. “I had a customer come in, he was about 75 years old,” said Paul DiSpirito of Lioni Italian Heroes in Bensonhurst. “He has been eating cold cuts every day of his life for 60 years. He told me he hasn’t eaten a cold cut in a month and a half. So my bill is down. We are selling less Boar’s Head.” DiSpirito claims he has skipped several lunch breaks due to the volume of calls about the meat. “I’m sitting here answering phone calls from all these customers asking about this vendor. It’s bad, because Boar’s Head is New York deli.” On August 26, records released by the United States Department of Agriculture food-safety inspectors showed that the Virginia plant linked to the outbreak had 69 violations for “noncompliance” over the past year. Mildew was found near the sinks for workers to wash their hands. A “black mold-like substance” was found in coolers. Puddles of water were sitting so long they had “green algal growth.” Puddles of blood were found in a cooler. In June, an inspector noted “small flying gnat like insects flying” around a room whose walls had “heavy meat buildup.” One food-safety attorney representing the family of an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who died after eating tainted liverwurst told USA Today that it was the “worst set of inspection reports I have ever seen.” “We are deeply sorry,” the company wrote in a statement that underlined that only liverwurst from one plant in Virginia was affected. For years, Boar’s Head has been known as a ruthless competitor, suing similarly named businesses to protect its reputation and pulling its products from stores that dared to push their house brands over its own. The president of Dietz & Watson, a rival, once described the juggernaut as its “mortal enemies.” This was before an incident in Florida in which Boar’s Head trucks reportedly blocked parking spots and blew air horns while customers were attending a fundraiser for breast cancer where Dietz & Watson did taste tests against Boar’s Head meats. Boar’s Head now has a CEO from outside the family, but the descendants of founders Frank Brunckhorst and Bruno Bischoff still own the company. They are locked in a yearslong legal battle in federal court. After Brunckhorst’s daughter Barbara died in 2020, her will stipulated that the lion’s share of her stake in the company go to environmental charities and neuroscience research. Bischoff’s grandson claims that Brunckhorst’s shares are actually his. How much the company actually makes is anyone’s guess. Court records suggest annual revenue is north of $1 billion. Despite the current crisis, the company maintains its fans. A friend who grew up working at a family deli — his winter jacket is a Carhartt with the Boar’s Head branding — sent me a picture of a recent party in Philadelphia. In the photo, cold cuts sat under a custom poster of the Boar’s Head logo, in which the brand’s swine has bloodshot eyes and appears to be foaming at the mouth. “I’d rather get the toxin / than eat Dietz & Watson,” read the caption. For those slightly less obsessed with deli meat — but still concerned about the “toxin” — food-safety expert Amanda Lathrop recommends vigilance in food prep. “Listeria is ubiquitous, so it is found pretty much everywhere,” said Lathrop, a professor at California Polytechnic State University. “It is this incredible organism that’s really hearty, so it can tolerate really cold temperatures, it can tolerate really high salt contents. It can grow at refrigeration temperature.” Another incredible aspect of listeria? “It can infect the human body by transversing the stomach lining, and it kind of moves from cell to cell,” said Lathrop. “It just really can evade the human’s immune system as well as things like antibiotics.” For most people, listeriosis will just cause uncomfortable but short-term symptoms like diarrhea, vomiting, and headaches. “It’s really the elderly folks, people who are immunocompromised, and particularly pregnant women who have the most kind of devastating effects,” said Lathrop. Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Rachel Kushner’s Surprising Swerve

She and her narrators have always relied on swagger—but not this time.

“Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung,” Rachel Kushner writes in The Hard Crowd, her 2021 essay collection. “People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades.” As a girl in San Francisco’s Sunset District, Kushner ran with a group whom she has described as “ratty delinquents”—kids who fought, who set fires, who got high too young and too often, who in some cases wound up incarcerated or addicted or dead. At 16, she headed to UC Berkeley for college, but returned to the city after graduating, working at bars and immersing herself in the motorcycle scene. Almost immersing herself, anyway. Even when she was a 14-year-old sampling strangers’ drugs at rock concerts, some piece of Kushner was an observer as well as a participant, a student of unsung histories.In her fiction, Kushner gravitates toward main characters who occupy that same split psychological place. All of her novels—her latest, Creation Lake, is her fourth—feature a young woman, usually a narrator, who shares her way of viewing the world. Kushner often loans her protagonists her own biker swagger, the hard layer of confidence that helps a woman survive in a very male environment. Preferring to write in the first person, she also gives her central characters her distinctive style: Kushner is alternately warm and caustic, funny and slippery, able to swing from high-literary registers to street slang and back in an instant. Her recurring theme has been the limits that even groups of outsiders impose on women, and yet her female characters, no matter how constrained they find themselves, are roving, curious thinkers, using their keen powers of observation to escape subjugation and victimhood—in their minds, if not in their circumstances.With every book, Kushner has grown more interested in the push-pull between material restriction and psychic freedom. She’s especially intrigued by the effect that gender roles have on her characters’ strategies for navigating that tension. In each of her novels, a woman tries to both resist and exploit conventional ideas about female behavior. One of the main characters in Telex From Cuba, her 2008 debut, is a burlesque dancer named Rachel K (her name is taken from a real historical figure, though of course Kushner is winking in the mirror), whose very literal performance of femininity attracts some of the most powerful men in prerevolutionary Cuba. Her evident goal is to use these men to her own ends, but she winds up getting conscripted into their service instead.Such failures of self-liberation continue through Kushner’s next novel, 2013’s The Flamethrowers, which was a breakout for her. Its protagonist, Reno, is a biker and an emerging artist who covets the independence and aura of influence that seem to come so easily to the men in both the art world and the 1970s Italian radical underground, of which she briefly becomes a part. Unlike Rachel K, Reno’s not a seductress. She’s not interested in seducing the reader, either. What Reno offers in place of charm is commentary so wryly smart and dispassionate that, especially in contrast with the male blowhards she repeatedly encounters, she seems powerful. But over the course of the novel, Kushner builds a skidding sense of perilousness, a feeling that no one, Reno included, is in charge or exempt from the mounting chaos. In the end, as Reno and the reader may have sensed all along, her detachment is just another performance, a cool-girl put-on not so different from Rachel K’s burlesque.[Read: Great sex in the time of war]The irony that the aloof-observer stance turns into yet another trap is not lost on either Kushner or her narrators. Romy, the protagonist of The Mars Room (2018), takes especially bleak stock of her plight, and for good reason. She’s serving two life sentences after killing a stalker who latched on to her at the Market Street strip club where she worked and began menacing her and her child in their private life. For Romy, her flat narration (counterposed with excerpts from the Unabomber’s diary and chapters voiced by a sex-obsessed crooked cop) is a way of walling herself off, creating the mental freedom to imagine escape. Whether flight is a real act of hope, though, remains deliberately ambiguous. It may be an attempt at suicide.Again and again, Kushner scrambles conventional ideas about gender, skewering male bravado while also subverting familiar ideas of femininity. Who and what counts as weak, she wants to know, and why? Stubborn stereotype portrays women as prey to emotion, unable to rein themselves in, yet in book after book, her protagonists’ relentless restraint has stood in stark contrast to the egotistical, violent impulsiveness of the men around them. In Creation Lake, Kushner complicates this dynamic. Her protagonist, Sadie Smith, is another dispassionate observer, but one who appears to have far more independence and agency than her predecessors. She’s a lone wolf, a private intelligence agent who has shucked off her home, her past, and even her name: “Sadie Smith” is an alias.At the novel’s start, she’s en route to the Guyenne, a rural region in southwestern France, where she’s been hired to spy on Pascal Balmy, the leader of Le Moulin, a group of environmental radicals intent on sabotaging Big Agriculture. She has no idea who’s paying her or what their larger agenda might be, and yet she’s convinced that she’s playing her assigned part to perfection. Indeed, she has such faith in her toughness, acuity, and ability to dupe men that she considers herself all but invincible. Her vigilant predecessors Romy and Reno were much warier and wiser than Sadie, who loves bragging that any innocence she displays is just a pose.[Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it]Creation Lake is not a conventional spy novel, but, unlike Kushner’s shaggy earlier books, it often feels as tight as a thriller. Sadie’s “secret bosses” have sent her to the Guyenne not just to embed herself in Pascal’s group, but to undermine it. Gradually, readers understand that her assignment has a deadlier side—a realization that Sadie either suppresses or notices less quickly than she should, perhaps the most glaring giveaway that she’s not quite the clever spy she thinks. She’s sloppy, distractible, as drunk on her perception of her own power as any engine-revving “king of the road,” to use her derisive phrase for the swellheaded bikers among whom she first went undercover.Sadie is also more impressionable—and less happy—than she’s ready to admit, which generates psychological ferment beneath the surface espionage plot. Creation Lake gets some of its suspense from its action, but Kushner mainly builds tension inside her narrator’s head. Sadie spends much of the novel reading Pascal’s correspondence with Bruno Lacombe, an aging philosopher whose opposition to modern civilization inspired Le Moulin at its founding. Living in a cave now, he reveres the collaborative and artistic Neanderthals, “who huddled modestly and dreamed expansively.” Initially, she dismisses Bruno’s ideas as crackpot, but they come to preoccupy her. For years, she’s told herself that she was content to carry out small parts of big, murky plans, duly suppressing her curiosity. Bruno’s emails urge her to take a broader, more inquisitive view: of humanity, of history, of alternative ways she could live. But once Sadie starts asking questions, things inside her start falling apart.Not least, she starts questioning masculinity—or, rather, her ideas about it, which have dictated her espionage strategies and what she considers her success in the field. In the presence of others, Sadie the operative plays up her feminine sexual allure and compliance, but Sadie the narrator treats readers to a distinctly macho version of swagger. More than once, she notes that her breast augmentation is a calculated professional asset; she seems convinced that the same is true of her rootlessness and emotional disengagement. A hard drinker and frat-boy-style slob, she often seems to be trying to outman the men around her in her own mind, even as she must submit to them in reality.Perhaps Sadie’s most traditionally masculine quality is her terror of weakness. But over the course of Creation Lake, as Sadie’s mission within Le Moulin gets riskier, she sees that her constant projection of control is alienating her from her desires, hollowing out her vaunted autonomy, making her easy to manipulate. She’s shattered—doubly so, because falling apart emotionally shocks her. It’s a fate Kushner withheld from her previous, more guarded protagonists. By letting tough-guy Sadie break down, she writes a radical conversion that is also a bold authorial leap: Kushner lets herself ask, for the first time in her career, what happens to a woman unmoored by masculine and feminine categorizing.Putting Sadie under such intense pressure changes Creation Lake’s nature as a story. Once Sadie starts cracking, the novel doesn’t become digressive and loose like its predecessors, but it certainly stops feeling like a thriller. After many chapters that seemed to build to a dramatic act of sabotage, the story shifts register, heading into a very different, more emotional denouement. Relinquishing some swagger, Kushner opens up in her writing to new levels of feeling and possibilities for change.In the process, she shakes up gender stereotypes in new ways. Creation Lake asks what sources of strength might be found in the kind of vulnerability, physical and emotional, that is associated with femininity. Sadie has prided herself on her supremely instrumental view of sex; she’d never get hysterical, never get too attached or lose her reason over a man. Although the strategic romance she’s begun with Lucien, a friend of Pascal’s, physically disgusts her, she boasts about not letting that get in her way. Kushner leans into the irony here: The reader sees well before Sadie does that her employers are exploiting precisely this blind willingness to obey them at real emotional cost to herself.For all that she wants to treat her body as a professional resource, she can’t do it. Kushner’s exploration of sex as a catalyst for Sadie’s emotions breaking free is fascinating. Repelled by Lucien, she risks her job by beginning an affair with a partnered member of Le Moulin that starts out enjoyable but leaves her feeling abject; in its aftermath, Sadie begins nursing bigger doubts about her life. This drama could seem retrograde, but coming from Kushner, a restored connection between female body and mind feels less traditional than transformative.[Read: The book that teaches us to live with our fears]Sex isn’t Sadie’s only route to a softer self. She also follows a more intellectual path to which she is led by Bruno, the cave-dwelling philosopher. Although Bruno has retreated from contemporary society, his reflections are what get Sadie to reconsider her pride in her nomadic self-sufficiency. She has long bridled at the notion that women should do—and enjoy—domestic work, and is emphatic that she will never have a baby. But she’s swayed by Bruno’s devotion to the painted caves and their former inhabitants, and by her own images of Bruno as a father, after she learns that he has grown children. Indeed, she develops a sort of daughterly love for Bruno.By the end of the novel, his meditations bring out the feelings that she has most wanted to suppress: homesickness, nostalgia, loneliness. After reading an email in which Bruno describes his sense of being existentially lost, she says aloud, “I feel that way too.” The sound of her voice “let something into the room,” Sadie goes on, “some kind of feeling. The feeling was mine, even as I observed it, watched myself as if from above.” What Sadie sees is herself crying alone in bed, an image more suited to a teen movie than a Kushner novel. Yet this moment is no performance. In the grip of uncontrollable emotion, Sadie recognizes both her vulnerability and her desire to drastically change her life.For Kushner, too, lowering the barricades against the clichés of femininity has an effect at once jarring and liberating. Her earlier novels veer away from culminating clarity, their explosive yet enigmatic endings reminding readers that her characters are too trapped and disempowered to change in the ways they want to. In Creation Lake, Sadie’s transfigured consciousness is a kind of resolution that might be mistaken for a sentimental promise of sunniness ahead—except that Kushner gives her narrator a new, daunting challenge. At the novel’s close, Sadie has already started experimenting with a life in which she engages fully rather than contorting herself to perform roles that others expect. She’s now armed with an agenda of her own, one that promises to turn her into a woman who couldn’t care less about what anyone thinks woman means. Creation Lake’s radicals aren’t likely to upend society, but Sadie’s swerve suggests that Kushner is ready for big change.This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve.”

Agriculture
Nature

Calling for further study, California lawmakers table ban on toxic herbicide paraquat

Assembly Bill 1963 originally sought to sunset the use of the powerful weedkiller. Instead, it orders state regulators to study the safety of the product.

California lawmakers have approved a bill that could help strengthen regulations around the use of paraquat, a powerful weedkiller associated with Parkinson’s disease and other serious health issues. Assembly Bill 1963 was introduced in January by Assemblymember Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), and originally sought to sunset the use of paraquat in California beginning in January 2026. However, the final legislation has been amended so that it now will require the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to complete a reevaluation of the herbicide by Jan. 1, 2029, and determine whether to retain, cancel or suspend its registration, or to create new restrictions. The bill passed the Senate 23 to 8 and now awaits a signature from Gov. Gavin Newsom. Paraquat is banned in more than 60 countries. Many environmental and advocacy groups had been hoping for an outright ban in California, but said the bill still marks a step forward by fast-tracking its safety review — a process that can sometimes take decades.“We are encouraged by the progress being made in California setting the example for other states to act when it comes to evaluating the safety and toxicity of chemicals with long term neurological and other health implications,” read a statement from Julia Pitcher, director of state government relations for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. “We strongly urge the passage of this legislation and look forward to Governor Newsom signing it into law soon.” Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes paraquat as highly toxic — noting that “one sip can kill” — yet California remains one of the nation’s top users of the chemical. The state sprays millions of pounds annually on crops such as almonds, grapes and cotton. An Environmental Working Group report published earlier this year found that the state’s farmworkers and low-income Latino people, in particular, are disproportionately exposed to paraquat in their communities, with more than 5.3 million pounds sprayed in Kern County alone between 2017 and 2021. The bill faced opposition from a coalition of opponents including pesticide manufacturers, chemical industry trade associations and agriculture trade organizations. By the time it wound its way through the legislature, including the Senate Agriculture Committee, it had lost much of its teeth, said Bill Allayaud, California director of government affairs with EWG.“It’s still a good bill, because without this, DPR probably wouldn’t do anything,” he said. “Hopefully the governor will sign it and agree that this is at the top of the list for things we don’t want people exposed to, especially farmworkers.” Paraquat has been the subject of thousands of lawsuits from people seeking damages related to exposure to the product, including people who say it has given them Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects movement. The bill’s legislative analysis notes that at least 10 epidemiological studies have linked paraquat exposure to Parkinson’s disease, including a 2019 meta-analysis of 13 studies that found exposure to the herbicide was associated with a 1.64-fold increase in the risk of the disease.Other studies have found no clear link, however, and the product’s manufacturers continue to reject any claims of a connection. In a statement, Friedman said AB 1963 will have “very real results.”“I’m happy with where the bill landed,” Friedman said. “We never thought we’d get a full ban through the Legislature. But we had to push as hard as we could.”She noted that the Legislature provided the Department of Pesticide Regulation with additional funding this year with a requirement that the agency do more reevaluations of toxic chemicals.“I have full confidence, that should AB 1963 get signed into law, that DPR will do a thorough reevaluation of paraquat, and either ban it outright, or place greater restrictions on its use,” Friedman said.Advocacy groups remain committed to seeing the chemical controlled. The EWG this week launched a campaign with the Michael J. Fox Foundation urging President Biden and the EPA to ban paraquat nationwide. The federal agency will have until Jan. 17 to make a decision.There is some reason for optimism: The EPA last month issued a rare emergency order to stop the use of another weedkiller, dachthal, that poses a significant risk to fetuses.

Agriculture
Chemicals
Climate

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