The Hill’s Sustainability Report: Battle for ozone layer bought time for climate

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

A 1987 ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — volatile compounds that were common in aerosol propellants and refrigerants — not only served to protect a rapidly vanishing ozone layer but also slowed the pace of global warming, a new study in Nature has found. 

Thirty-four years ago, the nations of the world came together to sign the Montreal Protocol despite staunch industry opposition. In doing so, they eliminated an environmental threat that was thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

That decision also had an unexpected benefit: Scientists are now projecting that the elimination of CFCs will decelerate the speed of global warming by about 2.5 degrees Celsius in the century that followed the signing, according to Nature. 

“The world acted and responded to that warning [over the ozone layer] and avoided a world that would have been pretty devastatingly awful,” lead author Paul Young told the Financial Times. “The hope is we can do something similar with climate. It just won’t be that easy.”

Today, we’ll look at one such case study as to why that’s so hard: The Biden administration’s recent, ill-fated decision to defend a massive Trump-era oil development in Alaska’s North Slope. And we’ll examine a new study that suggests fracking may be even worse for water supplies than previously believed.

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.

Judge cancels Alaska oil project that Biden defended

An Alaska federal judge has canceled the permit for a 160,000-barrel-a-day oil project on Alaska’s remote North Slope — because the Trump administration failed to consider the effects on climate change in its permitting decision, according to The Associated Press (AP).

It’s a stinging defeat for a Biden administration that had chosen to fight for the Trump approval — and a sign of the wider accounting taking place across federal lands over the effects of coal, natural gas and oil. 

First steps: The Alaskan venture, called the Willow Project, was a proposal by ConocoPhillips to pull almost 600 million barrels of oil over 30 years from the federally owned National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. 

Why was Biden backing a Trump-era project? The project was a serious dilemma for the Biden administration: Though broadly popular in Alaska, it stood in stark opposition to President Biden’s “pledge to pivot the country away from fossil fuels,” Lisa Friedman reported for The New York Times in May.

The project was backed by Alaska officials and its centrist Republican senators, Friedman noted, adding the proposal was marked by “a paradox worthy of Kafka.” Warming from burning fossil fuels is melting the permafrost that would house the drilling equipment — forcing ConocoPhillips to install “chillers” to refreeze the permafrost, Bloomberg Law reported.

There was another paradox: The Biden Bureau of Land Management chose to defend the lease just more than a week after the International Energy Agency, the world’s leading energy watchdog, called for an immediate end to new fossil fuel developments if the world was to stay below the critical threshold of 2 degrees Celsius of warming, Rachel Frazin reported for The Hill.

CLIMATE HAWKS IN THE JUDICIARY

So why did the judge axe the permit? District Judge Sharon Gleason found that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) “didn’t fully account for the greenhouse gases” from burning the oil Willow would produce, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Those sorts of indirect supply chain emissions (what the EPA calls Scope 3 emissions, as we previously reported) are precisely the sort that oil companies have sought to avoid factoring in.

For example, when ExxonMobil floated the proposal of going net-zero by 2050, as Zack Budryk reported for The Hill, it only meant net-zero in terms of the emissions it directly generated — though ExxonMobil does disclose its Scope 3 emissions separately.

Is that legit? It’s complicated. As CNBC reported, there are some good arguments for doing the accounting that way, and plenty of “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to reducing the direct emissions of oil and gas extraction — what the EPA calls Scope 1 and 2 emissions. 

But that calculus looks different for an existing development than it does for a brand-new one — and so it’s striking that the federal court was more hawkish on this question than the federal government. 

“The errors found by the Court  — they are serious,” Judge Gleason wrote in her decision.

How did that decision land? Alaska Republicans were angry about the decision. Gov. Mike Dunleavy echoed a common oil industry line when he said that “today’s ruling from a federal judge trying to shelve a major oil project on American soil does one thing: outsources,” according to the Journal.

That dispute is widening. The Biden administration is fighting its own Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) over BOEM’s decisions to start issuing offshore oil and gas leases again, according to Reuters. And the administration is also refereeing a grinding legal battle over the future of coal mining on public lands, which is temporarily paused but still poised for a recovery, according to the AP. 

Takeaway: Dunleavy’s comment indicates the larger stakes in this battle: A broader fight over the future of fossil fuels on U.S. public lands that pits different parts of the broader government against itself.

Fracking linked to surface water quality for first time in new study

The effects of fracking on nearby water sources may be even worse than previously thought. A new study has found that hydraulic fracturing can alter the composition of surface water — and not just groundwater, as was previously believed.

The study, published Thursday in Science, is the first to link fracking to small increases in salt concentrations in surface water, particularly during the early stages of drilling. 

“Our work provides the first large-scale sample evidence showing that hydraulic fracturing is related to the quality of nearby surface waters for several U.S. shales,” Christian Leuz, co-author of the study and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, said in a news release. 

Wait, is this dangerous?: Not immediately. The highest salt levels were well below what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers harmful.

But it is alarming. Researchers found a robust association between the presence of new wells and declines in nearby water quality. That triggers broader public health concerns.

A small, but consistent increase in salts: The authors analyzed almost 61,000 surface water measurements that had been taken near about 46,000 hydraulic fracturing wells across 408 watersheds between 2006 and 2016. 

They looked at levels of bromide, chloride, strontium and barium, the ions most common in high concentrations in fracking “flowback” — the fluid that returns to the surface following fracking operations. Their findings indicated a small but consistent increase in barium, chloride and strontium, though not in bromide.

Those concentrations might not be alarming at face value, Leuz acknowledged. But he warned that measurements taken in rivers are often quite diluted. And water quality monitors are sometimes situated a couple miles downstream from a fracking site, meaning that pollution levels from a specific site can vary across entire watersheds — which can be almost as big as a county, he added. 

By averaging data from all the wells throughout such expansive spaces — some of which showed effects and others of which did not — the researchers ended up with these smaller, but still statistically significant, salt concentrations, according to Leuz. 

When these salts do appear at higher concentrations, what can happen? Higher concentrations of barium in drinking water can lead to increases in blood pressure, while chloride can increase water conductivity — the ability of water to conduct electricity — and lead to unpleasant tasting water, as well as potential threats to aquatic life, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Elevated strontium levels can have adverse effects on bone development. 

“They’re not innocuous either,” Leuz told Equilibrium.

NEXT STEPS

What can be done next? Co-author and fellow economist Pietro Bonetti, from the University of Navarra in Spain, emphasized the need for more frequent water samples to fully understand the surface water impact. A third co-author and economist — Giovanna Michelon from the University of Bristol in England — called on policymakers to “consider more targeted water measurements.”

How did three economists end up in Science? The authors became interested in the effects of hydraulic fracturing on water quality while investigating the ramifications of mandatory chemical disclosure rules passed by several states — like Wyoming, Pennsylvania and New York — for hydraulic fracturing operators in 2010. 

But they first needed to establish a relationship between fracking and surface water quality, which was not yet available. So they implemented their own statistical analysis.

The researchers will conclude a follow-up study on the effects of disclosure rules in about another month, but Leuz said “the current results suggest that practices became cleaner and had less impact” after the 2010 legislation.

“We could do this for any substance”: The authors expressed optimism that their approach could apply to other more dangerous fracking components. For example, recently unearthed documents indicated that the EPA approved the use of fluids that contain toxic forever chemicals.

“We could do this for any substance,” Leuz said. “You give me any relevant chemical, and we could apply this approach.”

Click here to read the full story.

Thursday Threats

North Dakota drought raises cost of California crops

• North Dakota’s summer drought is threatening the winter pollination of California almonds, according to Reuters.
• That’s because the drought has withered the “sweet clover and gumweed” that usually provide nectar to the state’s honey bees, driving production down by 25 to 40 percent this year.
• That also has knock-on effects on the West Coast, where North Dakota farmers truck their bees in winter to fertilize almonds and fruit trees.
• That means higher costs for California farmers already fretting about their own availability of water.

Hundreds of workers have died from heat in past decade: report

• At least 384 workers have died from environmental heat exposure in the U.S. over the past decade, according to an investigation conducted by NPR, Columbia Journalism Investigations and the nonprofit Public Health Watch.
• The count includes workers “in essential yet often invisible jobs” across 37 states, such as farm laborers in California, trash collectors in Texas and tree trimmers in North Carolina and Virginia.
• The three-year average of such heat death has doubled since the early 1990s, the investigation reported, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is responsible for protecting workers from hazards, the agency has failed to establish “a national heat standard to safeguard workers against rapidly rising temperatures,” the report said.

Dixie Fire is the first-ever to clear Sierra Nevada

• The Dixie Fire that has been raging in Northern California for more than a month is the first-ever fire “to burn from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada across the mountains to the eastern valley floor,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported.
• By Wednesday evening, the fire had grown to 662,647 acres, expanding by about 36,000 acres in 24 hours and only 35 percent contained at that point, according to the Chronicle.
• “Everybody is going to be sucking smoke for a long time,” Cal Fire Director Thom Porter said at a press briefing, cited by the Chronicle. “This is not going to end anytime soon.”

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

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