GoGreenNation news

Can OffShore Wind Blow Out California's Fires?

Christine Heinrichs

News Feed

Thursday, September 30, 2021

Floating wind projects take advantage of steady winds that blow offshore. Those faster, steadier winds can produce more energy. Wind power increases with the cube of wind speed. Bigger turbines with longer blades capture more wind and are more aerodynamically efficient. How they overcome obstacles such as interference with fisheries, environmental damage, and high cost will influence how many, and which ones, get built.

California jump-started the offshore wind industry when Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB525 on September 23, https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/09/23/governor-newsom-signs-climate-action-bills-outlines-historic-15-billion-package-to-tackle-the-climate-crisis-and-protect-vulnerable-communities/ . Now the state and industry are grappling with the implications for wildlife, the environment and energy demands as they weigh the costs and benefits. Possibilities were reviewed at a conference held in Scotland September 15-16 with dozens of international players attending virtually.

In late May the Biden administration opened two areas off the California coast to floating wind projects: a 399-square-mile area off Morro Bay in the Central Coast and another off the North Coast’s Humboldt County. The permitting process may take a decade or longer before either is constructed.

Eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them with renewables to reduce greenhouse gases are imperative to mitigate the climate crisis. However, floating wind farms will impact local wildlife and local economies. All the impacts need to be evaluated and weighed before choosing the renewable path forward. Energy systems and policy, migratory birds and mammals, and other marine life need to be studied to estimate the effects of floating offshore wind energy production. The amount of energy anticipated from floating wind farms and how it fits into the country’s energy portfolio have to be weighed along with its effects on people and wildlife.

The bill requires that the state’s energy supply be 100 percent zero carbon by 2045. Offshore wind will be needed to make up the 145 Gigawatts of new energy from renewables needed to meet that goal.

“This means great things for offshore wind, after four years of stagnation,” said Jim Lanard, CEO of Magellan Wind, https://mieibc.org/company/magellan-wind/, at an industry conference in Aberdeen, Scotland September 15-16.

‍

Politics

National programs are leading the way. The Covid stimulus, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, helped by extending the investment tax credit to 2025, reducing expenses. The Biden administration’s Build Back Better package and the Green Jobs Plan also contain economic incentives to develop offshore wind that “have energized lawmakers,” said Jamie McDonald, director of operations for Xodus, https://www.xodusgroup.com/, now at the Boston office.

The political climate is changing. Climate change is becoming a bipartisan issue, with red and blue state governors competing for the jobs, development and supply chain for renewable energy projects, Lanard said.

“The consensus is that climate change is an existential threat,” he said from his office in Houston. “The words I’m hearing out of California are, ‘Doing nothing is doing harm’.”

‍

California site issues

California is the focus, but Oregon and Washington coasts are also in the sights for floating wind farm locations. Floating offshore wind farms are proposed for California, 30 miles off Morro Bay on the Central Coast, and off the northern coast near the Oregon state line. Construction on the up to 200-turbine Central Coast wind farm could begin in 2025-2027, pending environmental review and regulatory permitting.

The military uses the airspace over the Central Coast for training. That snarled consideration temporarily in 2020, but discussions have resolved the conflict.

“The area has important military uses, but we know we can be compatible,” Lanard, a veteran of the Obama administration, said. “Now we are working together cooperatively. There are a lot of Obama alums in the Department of the Interior and the Department of Defense, directly advising president.”

‍

Business

Business leaders are looking for certainty to commit investments, McDonald said. The permitting and regulatory process requires the lease areas to be defined, so that environmental assessments can be done preparatory to the lease auction and sale with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, https://www.boem.gov/. Baseline environmental surveys will be required, taking 18 months to two years to complete, on which to write an environmental statement. A federal permit as well as approval of state agencies such as the Department of Fish & Wildlife and the California Public Utility Commission (PUC) could push construction four to six years past that 2025 construction date.

Cost is a significant factor, but these industry leaders expect it to decrease significantly as projects advance. Onshore wind costs have declined, and solar costs declined by 90 percent as the technology improved.

Jonah Margulis, senior vice president of US Operations for Aker Offshore Wind, https://akeroffshorewind.com/, expects the Levelized Cost of Energy, the standard measure of cost of energy production, for floating wind to decline from $110 to $60 by 2032.

Transmission is another factor influencing the success of floating wind. Central California has facilities in place that could serve that function. The Morro Bay Power Plant has been vacant for several years. A 600 MW lithium-ion battery storage project is proposed for part of the site. It would be the largest in the US. Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant will be closed, one reactor in 2024 and the second in 2025, opening that site for electrical transmission.

The north coast site lacks that advantage, but Humboldt State University, slated to become the state’s next polytechnic university, is studying prospective transmission solutions.

“The future is floating on the west coast,” Margulis said. “The US is back on track for a booming era on east and west coasts.”

‍

Fishing conflicts

Morro Bay is home to active commercial fishing. The Morro Bay Commercial Fishermen’s Organization and the Port San Luis Commercial Fishermen’s Association have signed a Mutual Benefit Agreement with Castle Wind, https://castlewind.com/, the company actively pursuing development of the site. The agreement provides for a fund to assist the associations with support for members.

Such financial arrangements are made for good relationships, but are not legally required, Adam Payne, Senior Offshore Consenter, Flotation Energy https://www.flotationenergy.com/what-we-do, said. Funds can be directed to projects that benefit the community, such as the Thanet Fishermen’s Association Fuel Depot in the UK, which provides round-the-clock fuel support to fishermen.

Each site requires detailed knowledge of that fishery to develop a unique solution.

“Floating is going to be a more difficult discussion,” said Payne. “Certain gear is not compatible with floating wind equipment.”

Commercial fishing can coexist with floating wind, said Signe Nielsen, senior products management development at RWE, https://www.rwe.com/en. The industry’s experience with fixed wind projects in Europe will help floating wind projects adapt to the fishermen’s needs by siting the projects with their concerns about potential overlap with fisheries, navigation and site design in mind, she said.

“There will be lessons to be learned along the way,” she said, citing cooperation, building communication and transparency as factors to resolve conflicts.

Local opposition can doom a project. Shell encountered opposition to a natural gas pipeline that caused local turmoil and tension, eventually resulting in local activists being jailed. The experience is recounted in the documentary The Pipe, available online, https://guidedoc.tv/documentary/the-pipe-documentary-film/ ‍

‍

Environmental protection

California’s coastline is subject to various levels of protection. The Central Coast site is just outside the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The corridor is known as the Blue Serengeti, for the many large marine mammals that migrate through the area, several kinds of seals and whales, including Blue Whales. Seabirds also fly through the area. The turbines could be over 700 feet tall. Species that live far at sea are not studied well with respect to disturbance by floating wind turbines. That research remains to be done.

In the respect of environmental disruption, floating wind turbines compare favorably with fixed wind turbines onshore, Nielsen said. Installation is less noisy than pounding pilings into the seabed, and less seabed is disturbed by the floating platform moorings than fixed bottom turbines. The moorings, giant chain cables, are too big for marine mammals to become entangled, but they might snag ghost fishing gear that would endanger seals and whales. Marine mammals might not be diving to the 3,000-foot depths, which remains to be established by research.

The floating platforms could act as fish aggregators and fish nurseries, she said, although it’s unclear whether the fish taking refuge under the platforms represent an increase in fish or relocation of fish from other places.

The platforms could act as artificial reefs to increase biodiversity, Monica Fundingsland, sustainability advisor at Equinor, https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/wind.html, said. Three studies are underway at Hywind in Scotland.

A study of the effect of operational noise on seabirds at Hywind in Scotland is expected by the end of 2021. Whether operational noise could be a barrier to marine mammals is not known.

Hywind Scotland is the pilot project, producing electric power since 2017. Its five 830-foot turbines, with rotors 500 feet in diameter, produce enough power to serve the equivalent of 36,000 homes, from about 19 miles offshore in water 300 to over 400 feet deep. The site off the California coast is about 3,000 feet deep.

Centralizing the research could help streamline the process by making information more easily available to all stakeholders, and addressing information gaps. Studies buried in industry information silos may conceal data already collected and result in duplicated effort.

‍

Port

The port where the turbines will be either manufactured or assembled needs to be able to accommodate the huge equipment. Ports also need to be free of obstructions such as bridges and electrical wires to allow the equipment to be brought in.

Morro Bay is not deep enough, so other facilities will have to be developed to assemble the turbines, which will then be towed out to the site. Morro Bay harbor will then become a staging area for maintenance and operations.

Another restriction is the Jones Act, which requires port-to-port cargo movement on ships that are U.S.-owned, U.S.-crewed, U.S.-registered, and U.S.-built. One Jones Act-compliant vessel is now being built, but the industry plans to bring vessels over from Europe and then transfer the unassembled pieces to feeder vessels that comply with the Jones Act sent out to collect them. That raises a point of risk to the equipment, which could be damaged in the transition from one ship to another.

‍

Great Lakes

The industry is also evaluating the Great Lakes as floating wind farm sites. A major difference is that the states that border the lakes own the lake bed, so they have more flexibility in leasing them.

The fresh water lakes form ice during the cold months. Floating turbines can be adapted to floating ice, but the pressure of ice on the foundations is another challenge. The Great Lakes Wind Assessment is due in draft form by the end of 2021

‍

Building an industry

“It’s challenging to build an industry, but we’ve got to start somewhere,” said Aker’s Margulis. “The ambitions we’ve all had for a number of years are being released.”

RenewableUK, https://events.renewableuk.com/fow21, with 25 industry sponsors and partners, hosted the Floating Offshore Wind conference in Aberdeen Scotland September 15-16, 2021. Over 500 attended, in person and virtually. Twenty-eight exhibitors pitched their products and 56 speakers presented information and took questions. Hopefully together they can work out the issues of concern and successfully create new renewable energy options for California and the nation.

Read the full story here.

Photos courtesy of

Christine Heinrichs

Christine Heinrichs writes from her home on California’s Central Coast. She keeps a backyard flock of about a dozen hens. She follows coastal issues, writing a regular column on the Piedras Blancas elephant seal rookery for the San Luis Obispo Tribune. Her narrative on the Central Coast condor flock will appear in Ten Spurs 2021 edition.

Her book, How to Raise Chickens, was first published in 2007, just as the local food movement was starting to focus attention on the industrial food system. Backyard chickens became the mascot of local food. The third edition of How to Raise Chickens was published in January 2019. The Backyard Field Guide to Chickens was published in 2016. Look for them in Tractor Supply stores and online.

She has a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Oregon and belongs to several professional journalism and poultry organizations.

Related News

Portland would plant 660,000 trees, reduce cost of tree care for residents under new plan

Portland wants to plant 660,000 trees over the next 40 years and launch a citywide and city-managed street tree maintenance program.

Portland wants to plant 660,000 trees over the next 40 years and launch a citywide and city-managed street tree maintenance program that will take the financial burden off residents. A draft of the new Urban Forest Plan says the decline of the city’s tree canopy in recent years, an imbalance of tree cover across the city and the increased frequency of extreme weather events are driving the need to protect, restore and expand the city’s trees and vegetation. The draft plan calls for expanding tree cover to 45% citywide by 2065. That will require 10,700 more acres of canopy or 660,000 trees – nearly one tree for every Portlander. Portland currently has 4.2 million trees covering 27,600 acres, or about a third of Portland’s land area. Trees are key for livability, providing access to nature and shade during heat waves as well as cleaning the air and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, city officials said. The plan, developed by the city with public input and released for comment this week, is an update of a 2004 plan and would be funded by more than $100 million from Portland’s Clean Energy Fund as well funding from other sources. It calls for every neighborhood to have at least 25% tree canopy cover. Today, slightly less than half of the city’s neighborhoods have reached that mark. The areas with the least tree cover include downtown and land adjoining the Columbia and Willamette rivers. The biggest push, however, will be on planting more trees in the city’s residential neighborhoods, especially on the far east side of Portland, where lower income and many people of color live. The outer east side’s tree canopy stands at 27% and the goal is to get it to 50%. On the inner east side, trees cover about 26% of the neighborhoods and the goal is to get that canopy to 45%. The city prioritizes “tree planting in communities noted for having low canopy and a greater portion of people with lower incomes. This helps us to increase equitable access to the benefits trees provide,” said Portland Parks & Recreation spokesperson Mark Ross. The west side – which includes Forest Park – has a canopy of 66% and the city does not plan on expanding it. Portland Parks & RecreationThe city also plans on taking over street tree maintenance and planting. Street trees are those planted along streets, sidewalks and spaces between the curbs. Residents now are responsible for caring for those trees next to their property, which discourages street tree planting because it’s costly, time-consuming and a financial burden, especially for lower-income Portlanders, city officials said.Last year, Portland Parks & Recreation received $65 million from the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund, a climate fund seeded by a 1% tax on large retailers in the city, to start a street maintenance program.Bureau officials estimated it will take five years to develop and launch a pilot program. It will seek to place each of the city’s 240,000 street trees into a five- to 10-year management cycle of inspection, pruning, hazard abatement, removal and replacement if needed. The money also will enable the planting of tens of thousands of new street trees and will, over time, replace an estimated 76,000 trees undersized for their location. According to the draft plan, Portland will aim to increase street tree canopy to at least 35% in the next 20 years from the current 24%.The Clean Energy Fund, which has been flush with surplus revenue in recent years, will also fund much of the city’s tree planting efforts. To that end, the fund has allocated $40 million over five years to Parks & Recreation to plant and establish at least 15,000 trees on public and private property. In addition to planting, the program will track tree health and offer tree care resources to residents. The Parks Bureau received another $5 million over five years from the fund for low-income property owners to access money for maintenance of existing private property trees. It also received $35 million for existing arborists, tree inspectors and staff responsible for tree care in parks and public spaces as well as to reduce the cost of tree management by reducing or eliminating tree permit application and inspection fees and funding some private property tree care. And it got more than $2 million for workforce and contractor development for tree planting and maintenance.The Portland Bureau of Transportation also received $5 million for the 82nd Avenue street tree expansion program, which will create space to plant medium and large trees along 2,500 feet of sidewalk along 82nd Ave. The city also will use money from the general fund, Portland parks levy and the Title 11 Tree Planting & Preservation Fund to carry out the recommendations in the Urban Forest Plan, Ross said.The city has steadily increased planting since 2019 in priority neighborhoods via direct planting at parks, schools, restoration sites and natural areas, by planting free street trees and giving away trees that residents can plant in their own yards. During the 2024 planting season, the city and its partners planted or gave away 11,000 trees. The number was nearly 8,000 trees in 2023 and over 10,000 trees in 2022.Residents can share feedback on the draft plan until April 13. — Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.

Climate

CO2

Energy

Eight Labor ‘climate champions’ to get election help from party’s grassroots environment action group

Exclusive: Ged Kearney, Kate Thwaites, Josh Burns, Jerome Laxale, Sally Sitou, Alicia Payne, Josh Wilson and Renee Coffey will get extra door-knocking, phone banking and push adsGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastLabor’s grassroots environmental action network is mobilising behind pro-nature MPs it wants in federal parliament to push the party to adopt a more ambitious green agenda.Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) will support a select group of eight Labor “climate and environmental champions” at the federal election, actively promoting their green credentials to voters and helping with door-knocking and other grassroots campaigning.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Labor’s grassroots environmental action network is mobilising behind pro-nature MPs it wants in federal parliament to push the party to adopt a more ambitious green agenda.Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) will support a select group of eight Labor “climate and environmental champions” at the federal election, actively promoting their green credentials to voters and helping with door-knocking and other grassroots campaigning.The list of MPs includes Ged Kearney, Kate Thwaites and Josh Burns in Victoria, Jerome Laxale and Sally Sitou in New South Wales, Alicia Payne in the ACT and Josh Wilson in Western Australia.The group will also support Renee Coffey, who is contesting the Greens-held seat of Griffith in Queensland.LEAN is the largest member-based group inside Labor, with roughly 5,000 supporters nationwide, making it a formidable campaigning force if it can be fully harnessed.The unusual decision to publicly endorse select candidates comes after LEAN was left devastated when the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, twice intervened to mothball legislation to create a federal environmental protection agency.The federal EPA was a 2022 Labor election promise, a commitment born from LEAN’s years-long internal campaign for a national nature watchdog.After Albanese spiked a potential deal in November amid lobbying from miners and the WA premier, Roger Cook, the network’s national co-convener, Felicity Wade, said “vested interests won”.The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, and Labor backbenchers attempted to revive the proposal over summer before the prime minister intervened again, pushing it off the agenda until after the election.The future of the federal EPA and Labor’s broader nature positive plan to overhaul federal environmental protection laws was unclear.Wade said the pro-nature MPs were needed inside Labor caucus to push the case for change.See how Australia's new voting maps mean entire electorates are disappearing – video“Quite simply, the parliament needs these people,” Wade said. “Minor parties and independents have an important role in creating change. They can shift the goalposts on debates and improve legislation.“But it’s the major parties, those who form governments, that define the agenda. Everyone has their role, but it is essential, in the context of a busy government agenda, that we have strong voices in the Labor caucus – and these guys are it.”skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Breaking News AustraliaGet the most important news as it breaksPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionLEAN members will conduct door-knocking, phone banking and push ads on social media to promote the chosen “champions”.The group will raise funds from supporters to back the effort but won’t directly donate to the candidates.The on-the-ground campaigning is expected to focus on Laxale’s seat of Bennelong, Payne’s seat of Canberra and Coffey’s bid for Griffith.The reinforcements from LEAN could be crucial for Laxale in particular, whose north Sydney is now nominally Liberal (0.04% margin) after a boundary redistribution.The redrawn seat also now takes in suburbs such as Lane Cove and Greenwich, which swung heavily behind the climate-focused independent Kylea Tink at the 2022 election.Asked if he would push Labor to revive the nature positive plan if re-elected, Laxale told Guardian Australian: “This is Labor policy. I want to make sure that a Labor government enacts Labor policy.“We’ve got a 2035 (emissions reduction target) that we need to set. We’ve got the rest of the EPBC reforms that we need to settle on.“And I want to be one of the many MPs in there who are passionate about this stuff and make them as good as they can be.”The Greens will highlight Labor’s failure to deliver its promised environmental laws in an attempt to turn nature into a battleground election issue.

Climate

Nature

Hurricane-proof skyscrapers vulnerable to less powerful windstorms, study finds

Tall buildings fare poorly in derechos, say experts, raising questions over their resilience as climate crisis worsensSkyscrapers built to withstand major hurricanes fare much more poorly in less powerful windstorms known as derechos, researchers have found, raising questions for cities worldwide over the resilience of tall buildings as the climate emergency worsens.A team from Florida International University’s (FIU) civil and environmental engineering department studied the unexpectedly severe damage caused to buildings in Houston, a city with 50 skyscrapers of 492ft (150 metres) or more, during the 16 May 2024 derecho. Continue reading...

Skyscrapers built to withstand major hurricanes fare much more poorly in less powerful windstorms known as derechos, researchers have found, raising questions for cities worldwide over the resilience of tall buildings as the climate emergency worsens.A team from Florida International University’s (FIU) civil and environmental engineering department studied the unexpectedly severe damage caused to buildings in Houston, a city with 50 skyscrapers of 492ft (150 metres) or more, during the 16 May 2024 derecho.They found that the storm’s long line of fast-moving thunderstorms spawned “downburst” winds peaking at 90mph that bounced off the buildings and inflicted considerable damage, especially to the facades of structures designed to withstand stronger, category 4 hurricane-force wind speeds of up to 156mph.The same buildings, by contrast, were virtually unscathed during category 1 Hurricane Beryl in July, when sustained wind speeds were similar to those of the earlier derecho, but without their more erratic, up and down nature, or explosive bursts at or near ground level.The results were published on Friday by the peer-reviewed science website Frontiers in Built Environment. The FIU study focused on five of Houston’s tallest and most iconic buildings but, the researchers say, it could have profound implications for cities elsewhere as the climate crisis and soaring ocean temperatures fuel stronger and more frequent severe weather events, including hurricanes, fires and floods.They stress that the wind speeds in a derecho, which can vary from far below major hurricane strength to match or exceed it, is not as consequential as how that wind is dispersed. A “unique characteristic” of a downburst, they say, is how the wind blows outwards in all directions when it reaches the ground.“When strong winds move through a city, they can bounce due to interference between tall buildings. This increases pressure on walls and windows, making damage more severe than if the buildings were isolated,” said Omar Metwally, an FIU doctoral student and the report’s co-author.“On top of this, downbursts create intense, localized forces which can exceed typical design values for hurricanes, especially on the lower floors of tall buildings.”Metwally called it a “one-two punch effect” that the FIU team predicts will become an even worse problem for states around the Gulf of Mexico, where a 0.34F rise per decade over the last half-century is twice the rate of oceans globally.Amal Elawady, professor of structural and wind engineering at FIU, and the team’s leader, said the research would also have relevance in other countries, where regulations for building design and wind loads are often calculated primarily with hurricane categories in mind.“It’s not only a US issue. Downbursts are also very common and very frequent in Europe and worldwide,” she said.“How a building responds to a thunderstorm is different from the way they respond to hurricanes, so it’s something that needs to be considered, not just for the buildings, but also for the components, like the cladding, the envelope of the building.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMetwally said he hoped the research would lead to a reevaluation of regulations and design of future tall buildings, as well as urban planning, as officials became more aware of the complexity and potential negative outcomes of downburst events.The FIU analysis focused on Houston’s Chevron Building Auditorium, CenterPoint Energy Plaza, El Paso Energy Building, RRI Energy Plaza, and Wedge International Tower, all built between 1962 and 2003 and between 518ft and 742ft tall. Construction standards require them to withstand winds up to 67 metres per second, or category 4 hurricane strength.During last year’s derecho, facade panels were dislodged and cladding damaged, especially on corners and lower floors. Broken glass and other hazardous debris fell onto downtown streets and the aftermath brought significant socio-economic impacts including traffic disruptions, businesses temporarily closing, and a huge bill for clean-up and repairs.The FIU team ran simulations of the downbursts and hurricanes on modeled replicas at the university’s Wall of Wind experimental facility in Miami, funded by the National Science Foundation. Suction on the sides of buildings was substantially more evident during downburst events, explaining the ripping away of cladding and broken windows that did not occur during the hurricane.“It’s not likely that a tall building will fail under wind, either hurricane or downburst,” Elawady said.“But it causes damage, debris and water intrusion, and once you have a broken window you have a change in the internal pressure in the building and then the total force on the building is different,” she said.Ongoing and future FIU research will look at the effects of downbursts on transmission lines, lighting poles, telecommunication towers and low rise buildings as well as more studies on skyscrapers.“It’s a very complex problem that needs to be thoroughly studied, and we’re trying our best to better understand it,” Elawady said.

Climate

Crisis

Energy

Opinion: America, this is what environmental justice is — and what we all stand to lose

Editor’s note: A version of this op-ed was originally published on Matthew Tejada’s LinkedIn profile.There is a lot of misinformation out there, much of it quite intentional, about what environmental justice, or EJ, is.As a result, billions of dollars in funding and technical assistance that flows directly to communities and their partners has been jeopardized and the EPA EJ staff who oversee the use of these funds have largely been put on leave. The work of making our government more just —– work that has been pursued for decades —– has essentially been wiped from our federal government in a matter of weeks. The staff who’ve been put on leave were responsible for listening to the concerns of people across the U.S., supporting tribes and states and local governments in solving some of our most complex health problems, responding to emergencies to make sure the most vulnerable communities receive the help they need, and working to make sure the federal government serves everyone in our country.Critical tools such as EJScreen that were used for everything from transportation planning to disaster response have been taken offline. Powerful forums for the American public to engage their government, such as the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) and National EJ Town Halls, have all been put on ice. For almost 11 years, I had the honor of running EPA’s environmental justice program. It pains me to see the dismantling of this flagship program for advancing equity and justice in our society. If folks could understand exactly what EJ is within our government from the perspective of someone who led the work, I believe they would understand what we all stand to lose. In the United States, we still have communities that do not have access to safe and reliable drinking water or access to sewer systems that are forced to pipe their waste into yards, ditches, or a nearby stream. There are communities across our country where, regardless of national air quality standards, people are breathing in things that cause cancers, asthma, cardiovascular issues, and pulmonary disease, among many other afflictions. There are communities in our country, in rural and farming areas out west and in Alaska and in our oldest cities, that face pollution levels many of us would refuse to live next to and certainly wouldn’t want to raise our children around. Yet people do. Every single day. Oftentimes, these are the only places they can afford to live or where they feel safe and have community and history. All people, no matter their ZIP code or bankroll, should be protected from pollution. This is as true for working class white communities as it is for migrant farmworker communities and residents in centuries-old Indigenous villages and historic African American neighborhoods. Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash Helping these communities become safe to raise a child in, to clean up pollution, to develop economically and build their capacity, to come together to have a hopeful vision of their future: this is the mission of environmental justice in our government.The challenges facing these communities are the toughest to crack — they are complex, entrenched, and long-lived beyond most folks’ imagination. Many communities don’t have sewer service because they are in rural areas where poverty has persisted for generations, neighbors are spread out over square miles, government agencies are not used to working with one another, and the very geology under the community makes digging a trench or situating a traditional septic tank cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. Sources of air pollution wound up in many places because they’re close to ports, railroads, highways, raw materials, and labor. Pollution made these places cheap, so low-income communities moved in and schools were built. More new pollution sources also came to these communities because they didn’t have the political power to say no, and our government institutions had neither the will nor an interest in protecting them. As a result, the U.S. has sacrificed whole communities — Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income white — by allowing multiple dangerous sources of pollution to build up in already contaminated places and starving them of government resources without giving a second thought to the fact that we shouldn’t have families living and growing in those same places.Solutions to these problems must come from the bottom up, and they involve every person and every entity that has a stake in the problems and the solutions — community leaders and organizations, government at every level, philanthropy, academia, nonprofits, and the private sector. At EPA, the EJ program brings together all of these actors in pursuit of community-driven solutions to the problems standing between the community and their vision for their future. The EJ program supports communities that have never been involved in forming broad, complex collaborations, especially when so many of the necessary partners have typically been in opposition to them. The tough truth is many communities in our country have not been served well by our government, its systems, and its structures. They do not serve well those communities that have limited capacity to fight for a cleaner environment and future, those that aren’t near our centers of power, or those that have been targeted, forgotten, and marginalized throughout our history because of their skin color, their language, or how much they earn. The way we clean up the environment has been baked in over 50 years. Changing a policy, bringing in new and different data, challenging stale legal interpretations, and getting bureaucrats out of their cubicles and out into other spaces where they can take in the realities of how different people live in different communities is the work of environmental justice in our government. Photo by UUSC on FlickrIt is a difficult job confronting some of the toughest challenges in our society. EJ staff are often the ones who get the call to be the first government face in a room full of people who are beyond angry because they just found out that generations of their children have been playing on land full of lead. Or they learned that their drinking water is full of arsenic. Or they heard that yet another incinerator or metal shredder is moving in across the street. Or that they yet again are not going to get the funding to fix their sewers. EJ staff lift up their voices and realities when they go back to their colleagues at EPA, or a state capitol, or city hall, or a Tribal office and tell them what’s going on and ask them to do something differently, something new, something maybe a bit hard. As you’d expect, that is 99 times out of 100 a really tough sell. But that’s the job of the EJ professional, and they are damn good at it. Few bureaucrats have both the bravery and stamina to go into those hot rooms time and time again to face really angry human beings and absorb enough of their fire until folks get to a place of having a constructive conversation. Few bureaucrats’ jobs are to try to change the way everyone around them does their job so that it benefits more and more people in our country. Few people would take on a lifetime commitment knowing they will rack up way more losses than they ever do wins and come back again and again with a smile to try once more. Few bureaucrats regularly have their work — their passion — mischaracterized and abused as something nefarious or threatening when all they are trying to do is make our country work, and work well, for everyone. That is what we — our government, our country, our society — stand to lose if we lose environmental justice from EPA. We will lose the vanguard of courageous, talented, committed civil servants who work every single day to make our country better for everyone. We will lose the ones who are willing to represent our government in its toughest moments. We will lose the ones whose faces are often the first that communities across our country encounter that make them feel heard and understood by their government instead of ignored and pushed aside. The ones who make every person in this country feel that their government might actually treat them with the respect and dignity we all deserve. The ones who also work to make their government actually treat everyone with that respect and dignity. That is not just a loss for the communities that depend on our government to do better for them. That is a loss for all of us. It is a lost opportunity for our society to be better. It is a lost opportunity for our democracy to be better. It is a lost opportunity for our country to finally be one of equality and fairness. It is a loss we cannot afford to accept.

Climate

Government

Health

Climate Groups Sue Over Trump’s Orders to Expand Offshore Drilling

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Green advocacy groups filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration on Wednesday, marking the first environmental legal challenges against the president’s second administration. Both focus on the Trump administration’s moves to open up more of US waters to oil and gas drilling, which the plaintiffs say are illegal. “The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts.” “Offshore oil drilling is destructive from start to finish,” said Kristen Monsell, the oceans legal director at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity. “Opening up more public waters to the oil industry for short-term gain and political points is a reprehensible and irresponsible way to manage our precious ocean ecosystems.” In the first lawsuit, local and national organizations including the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, and the Northern Alaska Environmental Center took aim at the president’s revocation of Joe Biden-era protections for 265 million acres of federal waters from future fossil fuel leasing. Trump signed an order withdrawing the protections just hours into his second term. Another related challenge, filed by many of the same groups, calls for a court to reinstate a 2021 decision affirming protections from nearly 130 million acres in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. “The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts,” said Sierra Weaver, a senior attorney at the organization Defenders of Wildlife, which is a plaintiff in the case. “Though these coastlines have been protected, the administration is showing no restraint in seeking to hand off some of our most fragile and pristine landscapes for the oil industry’s profit.” The lawsuits will probably be the first of hundreds of environmental lawsuits filed by green groups against the Trump administration. During his first weeks in office, Trump has already rolled back a swath of Biden-era environmental protections while freezing green spending programs—part of his pledge to boost the fossil fuel industry. Trump says the US must boost fossil fuels—which are responsible for the vast majority of global warming—to meet demand and ensure that the United States remains a global energy leader. The US is currently producing more oil and gas than any other country in history. The Guardian has contacted the White House for comment about the litigation.

Climate

Water

Energy

Suggested Viewing

Reboot

Humans have exploited Earth to the point where it is no longer possible to live on it. Their only option is to relocate to Mars. When the last group of people has boarded the spaceship for the red planet, the Earth can finally breathe easy. Like an expressionist painting, Reboot depicts a world in which the absence of our species is the only chance nature has to recover its lushness and flourish once more.

Animation

Crisis

Cosmos

Uncovering the Permian Climate Bomb

The fossil fuel industry is building a global threat in the oil fields of West Texas. Miguel Escoto, who has lived close to this region his whole life, witnesses the industry’s villainy for the first time by viewing oil and gas site emissions through optical gas imaging cameras, becoming a stand-in for a world that has yet to grasp the gravity of the Permian Climate Bomb.

Pollution

Activism

Climate

Voices of Transition

Voices of Transition is an enthusiastic documentary on farmer- and community-led responses to food insecurity in a scenario of climate change, peak oil, and economic crisis. Concrete examples from Cuba, France, and the United Kingdom tell of a future society where our monoculture deserts will be restored to living soil, where fields will be introduced into our cities, and where independence from oil will help us live a richer, more fulfilling life.

Agriculture

Food

Climate

THE SPRAYER

In the land occupied with the sprayers army, no one has the right to grow any kind of plants either in public or private. So many of the people and soldiers do not even know how a plant grows or looks like, until one day one of the soldiers finds a seed buried deep down in the dust and his curiosity is just the beginning of something extraordinary, something big, something revolutionary.

Plants

CO2

Animation

Sustainable Living with Patrick Lang

A day in the life of Patrick Lang living a sustainable life in Malibu… filmed before his home and community were consumed by fire in the fall of 2018.

Sustainable

Land Use

Solutions

Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

GoGreenNation news

Can OffShore Wind Blow Out California's Fires?

Related News

Portland would plant 660,000 trees, reduce cost of tree care for residents under new plan

Eight Labor ‘climate champions’ to get election help from party’s grassroots environment action group

Hurricane-proof skyscrapers vulnerable to less powerful windstorms, study finds

Opinion: America, this is what environmental justice is — and what we all stand to lose

Climate Groups Sue Over Trump’s Orders to Expand Offshore Drilling

Suggested Viewing

Reboot

Uncovering the Permian Climate Bomb

Voices of Transition

THE SPRAYER

Sustainable Living with Patrick Lang

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

Can OffShore Wind Blow Out California's Fires?

Related News

Portland would plant 660,000 trees, reduce cost of tree care for residents under new plan

Eight Labor ‘climate champions’ to get election help from party’s grassroots environment action group

Hurricane-proof skyscrapers vulnerable to less powerful windstorms, study finds

Opinion: America, this is what environmental justice is — and what we all stand to lose

Climate Groups Sue Over Trump’s Orders to Expand Offshore Drilling

Suggested Viewing

Reboot

Uncovering the Permian Climate Bomb

Voices of Transition

THE SPRAYER

Sustainable Living with Patrick Lang

Join us to forgea sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Join us to forge
a sustainable future