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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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Instead of rocket fuel, they’re burning biomass.
Arbor Energy might have the flashiest origin story in cleantech.
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
Take that, all you founders humble-bragging about starting in a dingy garage.
“It’s not new science, per se,” Hartwig told me. The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions. Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
“Arbor is the first to bring forward a technology that can provide clean baseload energy in a very compact form,” Clea Kolster, a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital told me. Lowercarbon is an investor in Arbor, alongside other climate tech-focused venture capital firms including Gigascale Capital and Voyager Ventures, but the company has not yet disclosed how much it’s raised.
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires. Hartwig told me that for every ton of organic waste, Arbor can produce about one megawatt hour of electricity, which is in line with current efficiency standards, plus about 1.8 tons of carbon removal. “We look at being as efficient, if not a little more efficient than a traditional bioenergy power plant that does not have carbon capture on it,” he explained.
The company’s carbon removal price targets are also extremely competitive — in the $50 to $100 per ton range, Hartwig said. Compare that to something like direct air capture, which today exceeds $600 per ton, or enhanced rock weathering, which is usually upwards of $300 per ton. “The power and carbon removal they can offer comes at prices that meet nearly unlimited demand,”Mike Schroepfer, the founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, told me via email. Arbor benefits from the fact that the electricity it produces and sells can help offset the cost of the carbon removal, and vice versa. So if the company succeeds in hitting its cost and efficiency targets, Hartwig said, this “quickly becomes a case for, why wouldn’t you just deploy these everywhere?”
Initial customers will likely be (no surprise here) the Microsofts, Googles and Metas of the world — hyperscalers with growing data center needs and ambitious emissions targets. “What Arbor unlocks is basically the ability for hyperscalers to stop needing to sacrifice their net zero goals for AI,” Kolster told me. And instead of languishing in the interminable grid interconnection queue, Hartwig said that providing power directly to customers could ensure rapid, early deployment. “We see it as being quicker to power behind-the-meter applications, because you don’t have to go through the process of connecting to the grid,” he told me. Long-term though, he said grid connection will be vital, since Arbor can provide baseload power whereas intermittent renewables cannot.
All of this could serve as a much cheaper alternative, to say, re-opening shuttered nuclear facilities, as Microsoft also recently committed to doing at Three Mile Island. “It’s great, we should be doing that,” Kolster said of this nuclear deal, “but there’s actually a limited pool of options to do that, and unfortunately, there is still community pushback.”
Currently, Arbor is working to build out its pilot plant in San Bernardino, California, which Hartwig told me will turn on this December. And by 2030, the company plans to have its first commercial plant operating at scale, generating 100 megawatts of electricity while removing nearly 2 megatons of CO2 every year. “To put it in perspective: In 2023, the U.S. added roughly 9 gigawatts of gas power to the grid, which generates 18 to 23 megatons of CO2 a year,” Schroepfer wrote to me. So having just one Arbor facility removing 2 megatons would make a real dent. The first plant will be located in Louisiana, where Arbor will also be working with an as-yet-unnamed partner to do the carbon storage.
The company’s carbon credits will be verified with the credit certification platform Isometric, which is also backed by Lowercarbon and thought to have the most stringent standards in the industry. Hartwig told me that Arbor worked hand-in-hand with Isometric to develop the protocol for “biogenic carbon capture and storage,” as the company is the first Isometric-approved supplier to use this standard.
But Hartwig also said that government support hasn’t yet caught up to the tech’s potential. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct air capture companies with $180 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, technology such as Arbor’s only qualifies for $85 per ton. It’s not nothing — more than the zero dollars enhanced rock weathering companies such as Lithos or bio-oil sequestration companies such as Charm are getting. “But at the same time, we’re treated the same as if we’re sequestering CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant or a coal plant,” Hartwig told me, as opposed to getting paid for actual CO2 removal.
“I think we are definitely going to need government procurement or involvement to actually hit one, five, 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal,” Hartwig said. Globally, scientists estimate that we’ll need up to 10 gigatons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Even at $100 per ton, 10 gigatons of carbon removal is still a pretty hefty price tag,” Hartwig told me. A $1 trillion price tag, to be exact. “We definitely need more players than just Microsoft.”
New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.