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An interview with journalist and academic Christina Gerhardt, who maps the shifting geographies of islands in her new book Sea Change.
The scattered Pacific islands of Kiribati are famously at the frontlines of climate change.
Two of the nation’s islands disappeared underwater as early as 1999, and in the years since Kiribati’s residents have had to grapple with the likelihood that more will meet the same fate by mid-century. Already, one in seven moves there are due to the encroaching seas.
In an attempt to provide options, in 2012, the president of Kiribati bought 6,000 acres of land on Fiji, as an alternate home for his people. But Fiji itself — larger, more mountainous, but still vulnerable — also faces the need to relocate its own communities. As the world heats up, islanders have had to reorient their lives around fraught decisions and constant change.
Kiribati is just one of the 49 islands (or collections of islands) that environmental journalist and academic Christina Gerhardt details in her book, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, out this month from University of California Press. Working with cartographer Molly Roy, Gerhardt paints portraits of what is at stake as each island watches the seas creep gradually higher, from decimated coral reefs to inundated farms.
Sea level rise is not just about a slowly moving line on a map, said Gerhardt when we spoke about the book. It is a dynamic phenomenon that changes everything from coastal erosion to storm surge, high winds to flooding.
“A livable life isn't about whether or not one is underwater,” Gerhardt said.
There’s a huge range in the population and political power of the islands highlighted, spanning Singapore to Pine Island in the Antarctic Ocean. But Sea Change is woven together by what each island has in common: A relationship to sea level rise that is more urgent and more nuanced than those of us on the continents often appreciate.
What follows is the rest of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
There's no shortage of scientific data outlining the latest numbers with regard to sea level rise. And while that data is absolutely vital, my approach was to weave the science in with these other components.
What I'm really bringing to the forefront in Sea Change is an atlas that depicts the histories and the cultures, and the languages, and the flora, and the fauna of islands. How people will connect with and appreciate islands and islanders is through their history and cultures. You have to provide something to engage with, and that’s where the work of the environmental humanities is really important.
Every single island has a different cluster of issues. So for every island, I gave our cartographer, Molly Roy, different elements to focus on. For one island, it might be the fact that what’s imperiled by sea level rise is agriculture: If you have too much salt water in soil, the plants can’t take up the water they need to survive. For another, I had her focus on sea turtle nesting grounds, which can be inundated or destroyed by sea level rise.
Ultimately, sea level rise should not be thought of as a line, but rather as a zone of inundation. The Marshall Islands, for example, are on average six and a half feet above sea level, and three feet of sea level rise is expected by the end of the century. You may think “Oh, well, that’s not going to be an issue then.” But a livable life isn't about whether or not one is underwater. It's whether or not that home has been inundated enough that it's soggy and moldy and just not inhabitable anymore.
No, this was a huge challenge when we started. The inequities that frontline communities suffer also play out in the resources that are allocated for mapping.
We started the map of the East and the West Coasts of North America, from Deal Island in the Chesapeake Bay to islands off the western coast of Alaska. We have no problem finding data for these islands.
And then we moved into the Pacific. The islands that we had the easiest time getting data for are ones that have U.S. military bases on them, like Guam or the Marshall Islands. But when we were talking about independent nations that don't have this kind of relationship to the U.S., we had a really hard time finding the data. To track down this data I would contact ministers of environment, and other government agencies, and they often didn't have it themselves.
First of all, I have some issues with the tendency to frame islands as harbingers of what awaits people who are continental land dwellers. I think the situation facing islands should, in and of itself with no other qualifications, be of concern. Full-stop.
That said, we also have to think about the audience and how to cast a wide net and share stories from one geographic region with people who are predominantly of another geographic region, which happens to be the hegemonic one. It was really important to also underscore that this is not a situation that remains relevant only to people who are living on islands. Almost half of the U.S. population, about 40 percent, live in coastal states and cities. That's about 130 million people in the US that are going to be impacted. And so I think this is something that we really need to grapple with.
The question of how to get movement on a global stage is a really important one. One of the successes coming out of the UN meeting last year was the push for the establishment of a loss and damage fund. It basically lays the blame of creating the climate crisis squarely at the feet of nations in the Global North, and asks them to compensate frontline nations in the Global South for the damages that have been created. The details have yet to be worked out, but it took 30 years to get to that point. Tina Stege, who was climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, was one of the tenacious leaders who really worked intensely to get this across the finish lines.
The UN gets criticized all the time because it’s so slow — which is true — and because even if there is an agreement that comes out of the UN, it’s not legally binding — also true. But I think the UN is a really important vehicle because it’s the one forum in which 198 nations get together and nations in the Global North do have to listen to these speeches from members of nations in the Global South. Before the latter weighs in, they typically describe the situation in their home countries. And so if you go to the UN, you have a really visceral sense of what’s going on around the world — last year was the floods in Pakistan, and then it was the drought in the Horn of Africa. That sharing between nations happens every year, but I don’t see coverage of these issues. The papers don’t really seem motivated.
The first kind of island in Sea Change is low-lying islands or atolls — often just a couple of feet high, a couple yards across, a couple of miles long — which are the ones that are most at risk. And then there are the high islands, also known as volcanic islands, which often still have active volcanoes. Obviously, the atolls are the ones that are most at-risk, but I decided to include volcanic islands as well, which initially puzzled my cartographer and editor: “These aren’t going to be underwater,” they said. That’s right, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t at risk. On those islands, most people and infrastructure are clustered around the coastline, so they’re going to be at-risk from sea level rise.
In terms of solutions, I talk a lot about soft engineering, or nature-based solutions. This would include the preservation and restoration of coral and oyster reef, and of mangroves and wetlands. Coral reefs and oyster reefs buffer waves when they come toward the island, which is important because wave action is responsible for eroding the coastline. Mangroves also provide a buffer, as one of the only trees that can deal with that high salinity of soil. They also provide a really important marine habitat, where little tiny fish swim around their roots and big predator fish can’t get in. A lot of these things have been ripped from the coastlines to set up urban environments, like harbors or airports.
There’s also hard-engineering, like the great U they’re putting around the tip of Manhattan, or the sea walls in Venice. These are so expensive, and often by the time they’re in place sea level rise has increased to yet another level where they’re not enough to do the work they were originally intended to do.
When I was teaching at Princeton, my students were often so despondent because of all of the catastrophes and disasters unfolding. And I always said it's important to just pick your area and do what you can. You don’t need to solve every issue, everywhere. Just pick your thing. Some people love working in their communities; some people like working more at the international level; some people really like engaging with some of the sources of the catastrophe (meaning the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who are supportive of subsidies for fossil fuels); some people work on the shift to renewables, and consider becoming electricians. There’s no shortage of action points to pick.
I think the really important message for people who are in the Global North that I would love to see connected to Sea Change is that we are the source of the emissions. So even as we go about our busy lives, there are things we can do large and small to actually tip the scales and have a direct impact on people who are in frontline communities. And those inequities are not just global, they're also within our own nation. But action is better than inaction. And of course systemic change is more important than individual change, but I don't want to discount the latter.
Exactly.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”