The Hill’s Sustainability Report — Tennessee sponsors jabs for cows, but not people

Today is Tuesday.  Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Subscribe here: digital-staging.thehill.com/newsletter-signup. 

Government sponsored vaccination programs are a hit in Tennessee — for cows, that is. 

While its human vaccination rate is among the lowest in the country, the state’s herd health program has kept cattle immunized against respiratory illnesses by reimbursing participating farmers up to $1,500 — amounting to almost $500,000 over two years, according to The Associated Press.

But Gov. Bill Lee (R), a cattle rancher who launched the program in 2019, has refused to provide incentives for people to get the COVID-19 vaccine, the AP reported. “I don’t think that’s the role of government,” he told WBIR-TV at Friday’s Tennessee Cattlemen’s Association conference.

Today we’ll look at the governmental failure that threatens to leave millions of Americans homeless in the middle of the pandemic. Then we’ll look at a technology that scientists hope will one day be capable of pulling our society out of its ongoing dance with climate change.

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@digital-staging.thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@digital-staging.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin. 

Let’s get to it.

Rising home prices build pressure for evictions amid delta spread

More than 3 million Americans could lose their homes as a federal eviction ban expires — even with tens of billions in federal aid available to pay back rent.

After days of outcry from Congressional Democrats — including Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) who has been camping outside the Capitol for days — Biden announced Tuesday he would be extending a “targeted” moratorium by 60 days, according to The Hill.

But that reprieve does little to change the underlying factors that have driven so many to the brink of homelessness.

First steps: The eviction moratorium was recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March 2020 as a crucial step in fighting the pandemic. People out of work, laid off or caring for children in the wake of lockdowns began to fall short on rent. 

It was both a humanitarian measure and a strategy to avoid packing millions of additional people together in the tight quarters of family homes or homeless shelters. Ten thousand Americans died as a result of coronavirus infections spread by or to evicted people in the weeks before the CDC called for the eviction moratorium, according to a study cited in the Financial Times.

The crisis outlasts the program: By June 2021, 3.2 million Americans faced eviction within two weeks if the moratorium was lifted — and landlord groups that wanted to part ways with their tenants argued before the Supreme Court that the measure was costing them $13 billion a month, according to The Hill. 

The pandemic pushed home prices to their highest level in 20 years, according to the Times. 

Property owners are also eager to raise rents on young professionals returning to the cities who can’t afford home ownership, according to The Wall Street Journal.

That has sent stocks in publicly traded apartment companies, like those tracked by the FTSE Nareit Equity Apartments index, up 42 percent since January — more than three times the performance of the S&P 500 in that period. 

But to realize those profits by raising rents, the Journal reported, they have to clear those apartments for higher earners, “as many renters are locked into discounted leases from the softest months of the pandemic.”

A pause to evictions: The Supreme Court ruled that extending the moratorium beyond its July 31 expiration would require additional legislation, The Hill reported. But no such legislation passed, and on Saturday the Biden administration let the moratorium expire, the AP said.

Two days before the ban expired, Biden called on Congress to take action, according to The Hill.

In the month between the ruling and the expiration, the number of Americans at risk for immediate eviction had risen to 3.6 million, according to the Times.

The money is there, but not in most tenants’ (or landlords’) hands: With about 15 million Americans “as much as $20 billion” in arrears to their landlords, the Biden administration had approved $46.5 billion in aid to landlords — of which $25 billion has gone out to state and local authorities, Michael Casey and Philip Marcelo reported Tuesday for the AP.

As of June, only $3 billion of that funding had been distributed, and frustrated landlords were taking tenants to court, where Casey and Marcelo recorded a litany of American despair.

• Rhode Island landlord Gabe Imondi asked of local officials “what they’re doing with that money?” Having failed to receive it, he was attempting to get tenants out of his property.
• Rhode Island landscaper Luis Vertentes, who fell behind on rent while hospitalized, was told to vacate his property. “I’m going to be homeless,” he said, “even though I work and I got a full-time job.”
• Ohio mother and Walmart warehouse worker Chelsea Rivera was “preparing herself mentally to move into a shelter with her children.” “We just need help,” she said.
• And Miami mother Antoinette Eleby has sent her five children to live with relatives. There was $5,000 in federal assistance to cover her back rent — but the landlord wouldn’t take it.

The cities with the most eviction filings were Phoenix (42,000), Houston (37,000), Las Vegas (27,000) and Tampa (15,000), with 80,000 filings in cities in Indiana and Missouri, the AP reported, citing statistics from the Eviction Lab.

Takeaway: The eviction crisis points to a wider sustainability crisis in both housing and government. 

Urban rents are rising beyond what many families can afford — and with the rise of remote work, working-class families are now competing with a surging national housing market dominated by young professionals, rather than a local or regional one.

Scientists tout nuclear fusion as a safe, but futuristic, source to combat climate change

The net-zero energy mix of the future will rely not only on renewable resources like solar and wind, but also on technology that one scientist says will allow researchers to “re-create and control the power source of stars.”

“Climate change is so important that we are going to need to throw the kitchen sink at it,” economist and plasma physicist Arthur Turrell told Equilibrium.

Necessary technical detail: Nuclear fusion is what happens when two atomic nuclei, the dense centers of an atom, merge to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing a lot of energy. And it could provide what renewable energy struggles to supply: a reliable and clean base-load power source that would meld into an existing system without generating radioactive waste or increasing risks of nuclear proliferation, Turrell said. 

Fusion research, which has garnered some $2 billion in private investments over the past five years, could be a critical ingredient in government roadmaps to curb emissions, he argues in his new book, “The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet.”

What’s the difference between fusion and fission? Fusion merges atoms together while fission splits them apart — spewing radioactive detritus that can linger for up to 10,000 years. Fission reactors also risk melting down, and their ingredients are similar to those used to create atomic or hydrogen bombs.

Yet “fission, even for all of that, is still one of the safest power sources on the planet,” Turrell said, noting that the number of deaths per kilowatt-hour generated is the lowest among current power sources.

Fission is getting a reboot in the U.S.: Several U.S. utilities have entered partnerships to construct small modular reactors, in order to support a clean energy transition, according to The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the Senate’s newly introduced bipartisan infrastructure bill would aim to keep nuclear fission reactors in operation, allocating $6 billion to do so between 2022 and 2026, The Hill reported.

“This is money worth spending,” Stephen Wagner, a physics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Equilibrium. “It’s often easier to keep an existing plant running than it is to get a new one approved and built.”

But back to fusion. The key ingredient in Turrell’s ideal energy mix would be nuclear fusion — an energy source that in its current form demands so much energy that Turrell described its upkeep as “a leaky bathtub.”

“If your power source needs more energy than you get out of it, that’s a big problem,” he said. “That’s not an energy source, that’s an energy sink.”

But 100 research teams around the world — 20 of them private — are racing to turn that sink into a source, which could release 10 million times more energy as the same weight of coal and four times as much as the same amount of uranium. 

Who is doing what? Scientists at the California-based National Ignition Facility are exploring using lasers to heat a sphere of fuel to a temperature four times hotter than the center of the sun. While they have only achieved an energy yield equivalent to 3 percent of what they put in, Turrell stressed that the field is developing rapidly.

And the multinational research group ITER is working on magnetic confinement — which needs temperatures over 100 million degrees — in southern France. This team is developing a huge donut-shaped magnetic fusion device, called a “tokamak,” due to be complete by 2025.

So when can we expect to see fusion in our energy mix? Wagner estimated that reactors would begin operating in 2050 and would only come close to making up 100 percent of the energy mix by 2100.

“If in my life, I can boil water for my morning coffee from electricity from a fusion reactor, I will die a happy person because I will know the human race will have a future,” he said.

Click here to read our full article on nuclear fusion.

Tree Tuesday

Trees sold as carbon offsets go up in flame

• Wildfires in Oregon and Washington have burned through forests used by companies such as British Petroleum and Microsoft to offset their carbon emissions, according to the Financial Times.
• While such projects, in which companies pay to plant trees or keep them standing, usually offer “buffers” of extra credits in case of such disasters, the concern is that severe wildfires could wipe those out.
• Groups that sell offsets — such as the Climate Action Reserve and American Carbon Registry — say they’ve accounted for that, and that credits sold will either be replaced or returned. 
• In real terms, if the asset goes up in smoke, the carbon is lost as well — creating both environmental damage and a new frontier in accounting. 

US Forest Service pledges to refocus firefighting tactics after Tamarack fire

• Forest Service head Randy Moore said that the agency would be refocusing its efforts primarily on fires that threaten communities and infrastructure, due to extreme drought and pandemic-related difficulties that have limited the agency’s resources, The Wall Street Journal reported.  
• The agency made this decision after state and local officials criticized it for allowing the Tamarack fire, south of Lake Tahoe, to grow out of control and destroy 14 homes, according to the Journal. 
• That fire started with a lightning strike to a tree on July 4, but the Forest Service did not suppress it over concerns that the terrain was unsafe for its crews. 
• Less than a week later, the fire raged out of control and scorched some 70,000 acres in California and neighboring Nevada — and was still only 82 percent contained as of Monday, the Journal reported.

While we’re on the subject of the flammable weather conditions, we recommend taking a look at how water agencies are putting the “yuck factor” aside to embrace direct potable reuse technologies. Sharon’s piece, reported in the fall, came out in Ensia today — and is all the more relevant as unprecedented temperatures scorch the West. 

Please visit The Hill’s sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you on Wednesday.