Equilibrium/Sustainability — Scientists measure moon dust for fusion fuel

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

When China’s Chang’e 5 module returned last year with the first lunar samples gathered since 1976, it brought a tiny piece of potential treasure: a lentil-sized rock of helium-3 — thought to be a potential fuel for fusion energy, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The isotope, which is produced in the fusion reaction that powers the sun and carried in solar winds, is vanishingly rare on Earth, with its blanketing magnetic field. But it’s thought to be common on the Moon — where it might one day power future bases or fund mining concerns, scientists told the Journal.

But it may be premature to start packing our bags for the Moon. 

“There’s no element of the operation that’s been figured out yet. It’s like if someone offered you a suitcase stuffed with $5 million, but it’ll cost $10 million to pick it up,” scientist Joseph Michalski — a deputy director of the University of Hong Kong’s Laboratory for Space Research, who isn’t involved in the helium-3 study — told the Journal.

Today we’re looking at a high-energy disaster here on Earth: the nearly unprecedented tornado swarm that broke over the Midwest and Ohio Valley this weekend. We’ll also examine the notion that officials may be underestimating the presence of toxic “forever chemicals” in America’s food supplies.

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.

Humid winter led to ‘unbelievable’ tornadoes  

A cluster of tornadoes of nearly unprecedented destructive power broke against the towns of the Ohio and Mississippi Valley over the weekend, killing dozens and leaving tens of thousands without power. 

The late-in-the-season storms underscore the rising danger posed by winter tornadoes, particularly to the armies of workers, often not formal employees, laboring to meet Christmas demand.

First words: “One word: remarkable; unbelievable would be another,” Northern Illinois University meteorologist Victor Gensini told The Associated Press, speaking about an eastbound storm that birthed tornadoes across six U.S. states, reducing entire city blocks to mounds of concrete and kindling.

Why was it unbelievable? There was the dramatic physical damage — the lives lost, the train cars picked up and thrown and the debris hurled as high as a cruising airliner, according to The Wall Street Journal.

But there was also the fact that such powerful tornadoes struck so far east so deep into winter — and that they lasted so long.

A quick refresher: what is a tornado? Tornadoes form from particularly violent thunderstorms, which are themselves generally caused when a mass of cold, dry air slides over a mass of warm, humid air.

As the warm air rises through the mass of cool air, vortexes can start to form at ground level and high in the atmosphere, which — if they get spinning fast enough — can join in the middle, creating a tornado.

Usually, tornadoes fall apart in minutes, but this system took hours. A weeks-long stretch of muggy, spring-like heat over the Southeast created an unusually high temperature gradient between the cool and warm air layers — providing the fuel for high winds that kept the tornadoes’ structure intact, the AP reported.

And that warm, muggy air held water — which in the case of a storm means power — which “might have dissipated as rain or snow” had it been colder, as Bill Bunting of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. told the Wall Street Journal.

A STRIKING AND DESTRUCTIVE POWER

Record-breaking punch: The storm raced along at 50 miles an hour, covering a distance of more than 200 miles, and potentially breaking a record set in 1925, according to the AP.

It annihilated “homes, churches and businesses,” The New York Times reported — and wrought its worst damage on two facilitate where workers scrambled to ready gifts for the Christmas season.

Candles and Amazon packages: At Mayfield Consumer Products in Kentucky — a supplier to retail chain Bath & Body Works — workers were still at their stations as the twisters approached, scrambling to make gift candles for the Christmas rush, the AP reported. At least eight people were killed and eight remain missing.

And six were killed when a tornado hit an Amazon delivery depot in Edwardsville, Ill., that was largely staffed with contractors and subcontractors, which complicated efforts to get workers to safety and verify their locations afterward, the Times reported.

Were those deaths preventable? “It’s not lost on me, Lord, that this was an Amazon warehouse, and I, like so many other people in this country, get irritated if I can’t get my Christmas gifts in three days,” Sharon Autenrieth, pastor of a nearby church, said during her Sunday service, as the Times reported.

Is this a result of climate change? The long answer is it’s “complicated” — scientists tend to be extremely reticent to attribute any particular disaster to climate change — particularly ones as infrequent and short-lived as tornadoes, which make for data sets too patchy to draw broad conclusions, The Washington Post reported.

But it likely plays a role. Scientists emphasized that the phenomena that cause tornadoes are growing more common. 

And though the number of severe tornadoes hasn’t changed much since the 1950s, the patterns of tornado activity have changed dramatically, with tornadoes showing up far more often in clusters. Tornado activity moving further into the colder months; and “tornado alley” shifting east from the sparsely populated Great Plains to the denser towns and cities of the Ohio Valley and Mississippi Valley, the Times reported.

Last words: Calling the magnitude of the tornadoes “historic,” FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said that such disasters are “going to be our new normal, and the effects that we’re seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation,” according to The Guardian.

Officials underestimate toxins in US food

The American food supply is likely riddled with far more dangerous toxins than the average consumer would anticipate — and scientists say they lack sufficient, streamlined data about the “forever chemicals” lurking in food packaging and farmlands.  

While state and federal agencies have improved data collection for PFAS — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances — in drinking water, only “anecdotal evidence” exists for other exposure sources, such as the food we eat, the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch, Elsie Sunderland, from Harvard University, told the Subcommittees on Environment and Research and Technology earlier this week.

What are PFAS, again? Thousands of toxic compounds linked to kidney, liver, immunological, developmental and reproductive issues. While most famous for contaminating groundwater via firefighting foam, PFAS are ubiquitous: they are also key ingredients in food packaging and household products like nonstick pans, toys, makeup and waterproof apparel. 

And they’re contaminating compost: Sunderland told Equilibrium how she and a student were running samples from a contaminated groundwater site, when they decided to test the compostable food packaging they had with them. They found that the levels were “higher than all the contaminated groundwater.”  

PFAS-coated packaging also risks injecting the chemicals into the broader food system, according to scientists.

“You’re contaminating your compost, which you then send to these big places to be composted,” Abigail Hendershott, executive director of the Michigan PFAS Action Response Team (MPART), told Equilibrium.

The E.U. has already taken action: Several E.U. countries have banned PFAS in food packaging, Sunderland said in her testimony.

“Europe is just a little bit ahead and they have more of a precautionary approach,” Sunderland told Equilibrium.

The U.S., on the other hand, adheres to a “reactive management strategy” that requires demonstrating “appreciable harm” prior to enacting a regulation, according to Sunderland. 

What kind of progress has there been in the U.S.? The Food and Drug Administration recently undertook a “Total Diet Study” that looked at PFAS content in nationally distributed processed foods, finding that 164 of the 167 foods tested had no detectable levels of PFAS. 

But Sunderland criticized the study’s small sample size and said that if the PFAS detections were multiplied by the amount of food that people eat, the results would not meet the safety levels established by the European Food Safety Authority. 

PFAS problems aren’t limited to packaging: “Michigan has a rich history of manufacturing and farming, and when those two exist together, there’s a concern about the potential for PFAS to enter the food supply,” added Hendershott, from Michigan’s MPART initiative, in her subcommittee testimony.

 MPART was established in 2017 to investigate sources of PFAS in Michigan, including in food chain staples like fish. More federal support is necessary to understand how PFAS enters the food cycle, like when cattle graze on PFAS-contaminated fields, Hendershott told Equilibrium.

 

‘CHEMICAL WHACK-A-MOLE’

Limitations to data availability and analysis are leading to a situation in which officials “are systematically underestimating exposures to these compounds,” Sunderland said in her testimony.  

Sunderland called for the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to standardize methods and laboratory intercomparisons. Doing so, her testimony explained, could help “address the chemical whack-a-mole situation we are now experiencing.”

Republicans disagree: At the subcommittee hearing, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) maintained that “scientific research is determining not all PFAS chemicals entail the same risks.” 

But Sunderland countered that “we don’t need these chemicals in most of the consumer products,” in her conversation with Equilibrium.

Need for standardization, crops studies: Hendershott said she hopes to see more studies on which crops have the least PFAS uptake. But such research, she agreed with Sunderland, requires standardization so that results are comparable among laboratories.

Last words: “There needs to be a lot more study and research on dietary exposure,” Hendershott said. “It is kind of a black box at this point that needs a lot more study.”

To read the full story, please click here.

 

Monday Miscellanies 

Deluge leaves residents stranded in Australia, snowplows may be without their drivers and renewable biofuels in jeopardy.

Extreme climate conditions ravage Australia

• With bush fires burning the Australian continent in 2019 and 2020, followed by record-breaking rains and floods this year, Australia has been enduring “one extreme after another, demanding new levels of resilience and pointing to the rising costs of a warming planet,” The New York Times reported. 
• So extreme are ongoing weather conditions that many residents are now stranded on floodplain islands that are accessible only by helicopter, while meteorologists are forecasting even more flooding for the country’s east coast, according to the Times.

Shortage of snowplow drives threatens soon-to-be-snowy states

• U.S. drivers could find themselves stuck in snow-filled traffic jams this winter, due to a nationwide snowplow driver shortage, The Associated Press reported. States across the country are facing difficulties finding enough individuals willing to take the low-paying jobs that require a Commercial Driver’s License and involve working amid dangerous conditions and at irregular hours, according to the AP. 
• Meanwhile, other sectors like the trucking industry — which is also experiencing a record shortage — are competing for potential employees with that same license, the AP reported. The shortage is therefore leading many states to shift mechanics and other workers who have the commercial license to switch to plow-driving for the winter. 

State biofuel credit regimes a victim of their own success

• U.S. producers of biofuels are lobbying state governments to spend more on markets for “low-carbon fuels,” saying that without such funding, attempts to make commercially successful bio-diesel and renewable natural gas could fail, Reuters reported.
• The existing system has been a victim of its own success, according to Reuters. Regulatory frameworks like California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard have incentivized such a large uptick in renewable fuels that the price for carbon credits is falling — meaning that such production is less likely to continue, Reuters reported.

 

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