As pastor of the New Northside Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis, the Rev. Rodrick Burton has championed many causes for his church members. These include fighting violent crime to helping people struggling to pay their bills. But one cause stands out for the north St. Louis pastor: promoting clean and affordable renewable energy. Low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately harmed by air pollution from burning fossil fuels and by the health risks of climate change.

As someone with family members who suffer from asthma, Rev. Burton long considered the advantages of solar energy, which does not produce air pollution or greenhouse gases. Six years ago, he took advantage of a state subsidy program that allowed him to install solar panels on his church and community center, which he says saves his congregation $3,000 a year in utility bills. That’s when Rev. Burton really got religion about solar energy.

“Let me be clear — climate change is a civil rights issue,” Rev. Burton wrote in an op-ed at the time. “ Low-income communities and communities of color — like the one I serve — are disproportionately harmed by the air pollution from coal-fired power plants, as well as by the heat and health risks due to climate change.”

He joined with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club that wanted to help share his message with a national audience, and he traveled to energy conferences around the country. In 2019, he hosted a summit in St. Louis along with other leaders from the Green the Churchmovement, a national organization of church leaders focused on environmental justice concerns. Groups like Washington University’s sustainability program helped support the conference. Rev. Burton began thinking up even bigger projects, ones that could provide jobs for his congregants and potentially transform abandoned areas of the city.

While solar installations in disadvantaged urban areas of St. Louis are still rare, across the Mississippi River in Illinois, solar is booming thanks to more supportive energy policies, according to solar installers. Last year, the EPA reached a consent decree in a major Superfund case in East St. Louis that included the construction of solar panels on contaminated property.

“St. Louis has many vacant properties,” Rev. Burton says. “We could make whole areas into solar farms. … Who wants to live next to an abandoned building? We could repurpose the land to create more sustainability projects.”

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Despite their massive size, African forest elephants remains an elusive species, poorly studied because of their habitat in the dense tropical forests of West Africa and the Congo.

But the more we learn about them, the more we know that forest elephants are in trouble. Like their slightly larger and better-known cousins, the bush or savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana), forest elephants (L. cyclotis) face rampant poaching for their majestic ivory tusks and the growing bush meat trade. More than 80% of the population has been killed off in central Africa since 2002.

Today fewer than 100,000 forest elephants occupy their dwindling habitat. Conservationists worry they could soon head toward extinction if nothing is done.

And now a new threat has emerged: A study published this September found that climate change has resulted in an 81% decline in fruit production in one forest elephant habitat in Gabon. That’s caused the elephants there to experience an 11% decline in body condition since 2008.

But other research, also published in September, suggests a possible solution to both these crises.

Elephants and Carbon

It all boils down to carbon dioxide.

Forest elephants play a huge role in supporting the carbon sequestration power of their tropical habitats. Hungry pachyderms act as mega-gardeners as they roam across the landscape searching for bits of leaves, tree bark and fruit; stomping on small trees and bushes; and spreading seeds in their dung. This promotes the growth of larger carbon-absorbing trees, allowing forests to sequester more carbon from the air.

And they’re not unique in this oversized role, although the closest equivalent lives in an entirely different type of habitat.

Last year a team of researchers led by Ralph Chami, an economist and assistant director at the International Monetary Fund, published a groundbreaking report on the monetary value of great whales, the 13 large species that include blue and humpback whales. The study accounted for whales’ enormous carbon-capturing functions, from fertilizing oxygen-producing phytoplankton to storing enormous amounts of carbon in their bodies when they die and sink to the seafloor. After also including tourism values, Chami’s study estimated each whale was worth $2 million, amounting to a staggering $1 trillion for the entire global population of whales.

“It’s a win-win for everyone,” Chami says of his economic models, which place a monetary value on the “natural capital” of wildlife, including the carbon sequestration activities of whales and elephants. “By allowing nature to regenerate, [elephants and whales] are far more valuable to us than if we extract them. If nature thrives, you thrive.”

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https://therevelator.org/climate-change-forest-elephants/

Barataria Bay is a marshy jewel in the heart of the vast Louisiana bayou. Its unparalleled natural ecosystem was once a hideout for smugglers and malcontents like Jean Lafitte, who ruled the labyrinth of marshlands and estuaries. By the early 20th century, oil and gas had taken over the marshlands, and levees reined in the mighty Mississippi River and redirected it toward the Gulf of Mexico.  

Now, pipelines and canals crisscross the bayou, but the 15-mile Barataria Bay that runs along the Mississippi River remains one of America’s richest fishing grounds, with an abundant assortment of shrimp, crab, oysters and commercial seafood that’s a big part of the state’s $2.4 billion fishing industry today.

As the fisheries expanded, Mississippi River levees constructed in the early 1900s stemmed the flow of natural land-building river sediment into the bay. The levees, along with oil development and sea-level rise due to climate change, contribute to one of the greatest land-loss rates on the planet: Land in Barataria Bay is disappearing under the rising tides at the rate of a football field every 100 minutes.

Barataria Bay is also at the center of one of the biggest natural construction projects in history — a $50 billion plan to reverse this land loss that has pitted powerful state agencies and national environmental organizations against commercial fishing groups and independent marine mammal scientists worried about impacts on fisheries and wildlife. 

Stuck in the middle of this fight are two major populations of northern Gulf bottlenose dolphins.

The dolphins long flourished in the brackish waters of Barataria Bay and the Mississippi Sound. But the changing climate, pollution, and a flood of diverted Mississippi River water, which reduces salinity and increases nutrients, now imperil them. Last year, a record-setting torrent of river water led to a toxic algal bloom that left ocean waters in Mississippi off-limits for months last summer and were linked to painful, often deadly skin lesions on the dolphins. 

This week, federal officials closed their investigation of the more than 330 dolphin deaths last year, connecting the animals’ demise to low salinity levels caused by record flooding that poured trillions of gallons of nutrient-rich fresh river water into the Mississippi Sound and other coastal regions. Scientists say it’s likely to be a recurring nightmare as climate change increases rainfall and flooding along the Mississippi River and in the upper Midwest.  

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Rick DuFour has worked the most dangerous oil cleanup jobs in the Gulf of Mexico. He was there when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded 40 miles off southeastern Louisiana 10 years ago, killing 11 men and spewing more than 200 million gallons of Louisiana crude out of its well a mile below the sea. Much of it poured onto the shores of four states; DuFour was one of the first in line to clean it up. 

Over three years, DuFour estimates he worked for 18 different companies, cleaning up a toxic mix of oil and chemical dispersants stuck like peanut butter to the bottoms and bows of ships, picking up oily tar balls on beaches and scraping tar mats as long as football fields from areas they sank just offshore. 

There wasn’t a cleanup job he didn’t sign up for, working for weeks on end in the blistering 100-degree heat and humidity, sucking in the noxious fumes that permeated the salt air. He saw hundreds of dolphins wash up dead on the barrier islands where he worked, many of them just babies. 

“It was a horrible thing,” he says, squirming uncomfortably in a tattered chair among piles of paper, soda bottles and food wrappers in the battered trailer home that he shares with his stroke-stricken 86-year-old father in Moss Point, Mississippi.

But DuFour, 61, says the worst of all was working at the Ingalls shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi, during the summer of 2010. DuFour’s job was to use high-powered hoses that spewed hot water and cleaning agents to wash off the oiled ships and equipment each day. Workers had to suit up in bulky masks and hazmat suits, covering every inch of flesh possible. Sometimes the men had to limit their work to just five minutes out of every hour to avoid heat exhaustion and chemical exposure as the sweat poured off them in buckets. 

One day, a company chemist approached the workers with a new compound called Chemical 7248, a special degreaser the Coast Guard now warns should be disposed of as hazardous waste. DuFour says the chemist explained the compound had been “Frankensteined” to clean up the specific type of oil gushing from BP’s well.

He remembers the chief safety officer told the men if they didn’t use the chemical, they could try a hammer and chisel to clean off the toxic gunk, a task no one wanted in the stifling heat.

Soon after spraying the chemical, DuFour says one of the workers started screaming and had to be taken to the hospital. DuFour says the skin on his legs blistered with a “thousand ant bites … it looked like cherry-colored lipstick went around my eyes and went around my nose and it just burned so bad.” DuFour says he soldiered on, determined to finish the job even as people fell sick around him.

But oil and chemicals finally took a toxic toll. After three years of working oil cleanup jobs across four states, exposed to countless cleaning compounds, oil dispersants and fumes, DuFour collapsed at home one morning in April 2013. He was rushed to the hospital in Ocean Springs, where he remained in recovery for nearly a year.

He was initially diagnosed with a condition similar to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, and he lay mostly paralyzed in a hospital setting during his recovery. He describes the pain coursing through his body like “snakes were crawling up” his legs, torturing him as he was unable to move. 

DuFour eventually made it back to his trailer, but the pain never went away. He still can’t move well, and he can barely eat or grasp drinks with partially paralyzed hands. His eyes still burn, too, “like there’s tabasco” in them. A decade after the spill, DuFour is broke, nearly paralyzed and mostly homebound. DuFour ultimately received about $7,700 for the acute medical claim he filed in 2011, one of about 37,000 claims filed against BP in this category.

But his suit to pay for his chronic illness is not expected to go to trial in federal court until later this year. He hopes it will allow him to get enough money to get extensive physical therapy, something he estimates could cost over $1 million a year.  

DuFour’s dream is to get enough money to get his dad “squared away” with a new home and better care, and maybe try his hand at gold prospecting in nearby Alabama. “There are so many things that I haven’t done that I still want to do.” 

His lawyer, Craig Downs, represents about 3,000 individuals across the Gulf who have filed medical cases against BP. He says DuFour’s case is one of the worst he has seen. Nearly all of the thousands of chronic medical cases filed across the Gulf have yet to go to trial due to a complicated oil spill legal structure that focused on paying financial claims first. The chronic medical cases are slowly winding their way through the judicial system, but experts say there’s no guarantee they’ll turn out well for plaintiffs like DuFour who have racked up expensive medical bills.

“It’s a tragic story,” Downs says. “The oil industry as a whole doesn’t want people to know how dangerous oil spills are. They don’t just kill animals. And we’re just starting to see a rise in cancers now.” 

Click the link to read the whole story on HuffPost.

As a child growing up in Lebanon, Ralph Chami would stare out at the ocean, mesmerized by the Mediterranean and the mysteries of the sea. He wanted to be an oceanographer, but there were no marine science careers to pursue in his country. Eventually he and his family fled war-torn Beirut, and he earned his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, ending up as an economist at the International Monetary Fund. But the seas continued to draw Chami, beckoning him like a starfish to coral.

Three years ago, Chami volunteered on a whaling research mission in Baja California, Mexico, with his friends Michael Fishbach and Heather Watrous of the Great Whale Conservancy, a small nonprofit. While having dinner, their conversation turned to the important role that whales play in balancing Earth’s natural carbon and oxygen cycles, scientific phenomena that Chami had never heard of. After that, he says, “Life was never the same again.”

Whales, it turns out, dump critical amounts of nutrients and minerals from their waste streams as they dive and surface during their global migrations. Their iron- and nitrogen-rich poop sustain vast blooms of phytoplankton, the microscopic plant-based building blocks of the sea that supply at least 50 percent of the world’s atmospheric oxygen, while consuming 40 percent of all carbon dioxide produced. Then, when whales die, they sink to the sea floor, sequestering their huge stores of carbon far from the atmosphere, where it no longer contributes to climate change. This carbon-oxygen marine cycle is known as the “whale pump.” Given its importance, Chami began to wonder: What exactly is the value of a whale to global carbon markets?

Click on the link below to read the rest of this article on Undark magazine’s website.

Every Breath You Take: The Economic Case for Marine Life

Posted to AAAS website September 16, 2019

CLIMATE AND HEALTH

Located on the shores of Lake Superior, Marquette is a thriving city and county facing dramatic environmental changes that will impact the health of local residents.

A warming climate and variable lake levels are contributing to flooding, pollution runoff and infectious diseases that officials say will present increasing challenges to the community. Over the past five years, Marquette officials have worked closely with scientists from federal and state agencies as well as local stakeholders to develop a series of climate and health guidebooks that will allow them to better prepare for the future.

With its stunning natural beauty by the shores of Lake Superior, low cost of living and proximity to good medical facilities and a state university, Marquette, Michigan has made several lists of top U.S. cities in which to retire. Local officials and residents agree. Clean air and water and the towering forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula make Marquette a healthy place to live.

But local, state and federal officials say health threats are not far off. Scientists reporthigher temperatures, greater flooding and increased water- and vector-borne illnesses will pose rising threats to residents in Michigan and the Great Lakes area. The Great Lakes and the Midwest could attract more people as southern and western regions of the U.S. are impacted by climate change. That could put even more stress on local resources. “Marquette has a large hospital and a university and has amenities that people are looking for,” says Brad Neumann, a Michigan State extension service expert who is working with the city and county to plan for climate change impacts. “A big part of the conversation is how this place can be more resilient, so we don’t diminish our resources [as more people move here].”

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As the Great Lakes Warm, Marquette Plans for a Healthier Future

Posted to AAAS September 16, 2019

EROSION AND RELOCATION

Alaska is facing some of the most imminent threats from climate change in the United States, with fast-rising temperatures, thawing permafrost and massive storms.

The small Inuit village of Napakiak is under immediate threat of flooding from the rising Kuskokwim River, and community leaders are consulting with engineers and scientists to determine how and where to move. Homer, a fishing and tourist center of more than 5,000, adopted one of the state’s first climate action plans and is continuing to try to adapt to a world with more dangerous storms and threatened fisheries.

Each spring and fall, Napakiak City Council member and Alaska Native Walter Nelson watches the Kuskokwim River move closer to his town.

A warming climate has altered the flow of Alaskan rivers, as ice melt speeds up and they are not frozen as long as they once were. Violent storms, also fueled by a warming climate, add to the changing characteristics of the Kuskokwim River as it flows by the tiny Alaskan village of Napakiak before emptying into the Bering Sea. Every year, a rising torrent chews out bigger swaths of riverbank, encroaching upon this small community of about 360 people, mostly of Inuit descent, driving the town into what experts call a “managed retreat.”

In 2019, strong spring storms took out the town boat landing, threatening the only school in town and forcing the community to move its city garage and fire station further away from the river. The town cemetery has already been flooded and relocated, Nelson says, and residents are now investing in metal caskets so they can be moved more easily in the future.

“Every year we have to move some buildings,” Nelson says. “The erosion rate is accelerating, and the funding is hard to get to do anything about it. But we can’t just let the buildings fall into the river.”

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Alaskan Communities Adapt to Dramatic Climate Change

Ship Island Excursions has survived hurricanes, global recessions, a world war and a host of economic challenges since the ferry company began taking passengers to the barrier islands that dot coastal Mississippi in the 1920s. But this year, a new threat has emerged: an explosion of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, that has shut down virtually all of Mississippi’s beaches since July 4.

No one knows when the algae will disappear, and many wonder how many businesses that operate in the region will survive the hit.

“Beach vendors have been wiped out,” said Louis Skrmetta, operations manager for Ship Island Excursions. “I’ve never seen something so dramatic. It’s very similar to the BP oil spill. … People are frightened to just walk in the sand.”

Read more on The Huffington Post.

As fishermen deep in the Louisiana bayou, Kindra Arnesen and her family have faced their share of life-altering challenges in recent years. 

First came Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 monster storm that devastated her small fishing community in Plaquemines Parish before roaring up the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 people and destroying $125 billion in property. Five years later, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded 40 miles offshore, spewing nearly 200 million gallons of crude. The fisheries have not fully recovered more than nine years later, nor has her family.

But this year may be worse. A historic slow-moving flood of polluted Mississippi River water loaded with chemicals, pesticides and human waste from 31 states and two Canadian provinces is draining straight into the marshes and bayous of the Gulf of Mexico — the nurseries of Arnesen’s fishing grounds — upsetting the delicate balance of salinity and destroying the fragile ecosystem in the process. As the Gulf waters warm this summer, algae feed on the freshwater brew, smothering oxygen-starved marine life. 

And as of Wednesday, an advancing storm looks likely to turn into a tropical storm or hurricane by the weekend, with the potential to bring torrential downpours and more freshwater flooding.

Read more on The Huffington Post.