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Plants are marching north. Native gardening will never be the same.
Thirteen miles isn’t very far: roughly the length of Manhattan or the distance you run in a half marathon. On a freeway, it takes less than 15 minutes to drive.
Multiply 13 by 10, though, and it becomes 130 miles — more than the width of the state of Connecticut. Move the U.S. border 130 miles north, and Whistler Blackcomb becomes an American ski resort; move it south, and Tijuana is the new Los Angeles. If you started walking, it would take you 35 straight hours to cover the distance; if you called an Uber, you’d be looking at a $450 ride.
The temperature regions that determine the local viability of different plants, called plant hardiness zones, are believed to be slipping north at a rate of about 13.3 miles per decade — not a number that sounds especially alarming, but one that will, over a century, add up to dramatically reshape the regional flora of the United States. In addition to being yet another depressing climate statistic, though, that number is also generating a lot of headaches in the surprisingly combustible world of native gardening.
It’s been 16 years (or approximately 21 northward miles) since Douglas Tallamy’s warning in his book Bringing Nature Home that “unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” Though we may still be far from achieving his long-term goal of a “homegrown national park,” in which Americans convert half their yard space to native gardens, Tallamy’s teachings remain hugely influential in gardening and conservation circles (42 states have their own specialized native plant societies promoting these goals).
Tallamy insists that “all plants are not created equal, particularly in their ability to support wildlife.” If we’re to sustain the remaining biodiversity in the U.S., it is essential to feed insects — and in turn, the birds that eat those insects — the foods they’ve evolved to eat. If a plant isn’t native to these ecosystems, then it isn’t worth planting or sustaining. Often, says Tallamy, doing so is actively detrimental to biodiversity goals.
But what even is a native plant in this obviously shifting world? Already, New York City is considered subtropical, capable even of supporting certain hardy palms; by 2040, Seattle could be in the same hardiness zone that central Florida, New Orleans, and parts of Texas are in today. Researchers have seen plants native to the South slowly pushing their ranges north.
Native plants are frequently the species under the most stress from the new weather patterns in their historic ranges. The state tree of Washington, the Western hemlock, for example, is especially susceptible to drought and is struggling to survive in a drier Pacific Northwest. “We’ve found a lot of mortality of trees that should be in the prime in their life,” explained Raymond Larson, an associate director and curator at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens and a contributor to Great Plant Picks, a viability resource for Pacific Northwest gardeners.
As a result, many horticulturalists with an eye on the next century are actively exploring — and recommending — plants that are explicitly not native. Axios Seattlerecently published a list of trees that Pete Smith, a program director at the Arbor Day Foundation, believes will be able to tolerate the next 50 to 100 years in the region, and it notably included the Japanese pagoda tree; the pawpaw, a native of the East Coast; and the ginkgo, which is “incredibly tough, very long-lived, and great at tolerating urban stresses” — but an exotic from China that is particularly reviled by Tallamy.
“What honestly most gardeners — many gardeners, anyway — have kind of lost track of is what the word ‘native’ means,” Smith explained to me when I followed up to ask about the globe-spanning range of his recommendations. “It is presumptuous, even, to talk about native plants as if 1492 was some magic date that talks about what is and was native to this continent.”
“Native” doesn’t have a hard and fast definition. In Bringing Nature Home, Tallamy writes that a true native is a plant that interacts “with the community that historically helped shape it,” but he also warns against using too small a timescale when making these determinations: “[A] history measured in centuries is the tiniest drop in the proverbial bucket of evolutionary time.” Native plant purists, Smith added, will argue that “the only quality tree is a tree that was grown from a seed from right underneath the tree that bore that seed. Isn’t that a wonderful ideal? [But] it’s not practical.”
Some native plant proponents have allowed for species that are retreating north (or up) on their own volition since these changes happen slowly and food-chain communities can relocate with them. A number of Southern species in the United States got there in the first place by being pushed down during the last ice age, and have been reclaiming prehistoric ranges as the cold has receded over the last 10,000 years. But ancient forests don’t appear to have migrated as complete ecosystems during these upheavals; it was a race of every-species-for-itself. “There’s a lot more interchangeability among members of an ecosystem than people had thought,” David Jablonski, a paleontologist, told the Smithsonian.
There is also the problem that the climactic zones are moving faster than trees can follow. “The average forest migrates at a rate of roughly 1,640 feet each year,” Wired has written — that is, about three miles in a decade. In order “to outrun climate change,” trees would need to book it north at a rate of “approximately 9,800 to 16,000 feet” a year, or about 10 times as fast. Plenty of foresters aren’t waiting around for that to happen and are seriously exploring the controversial idea of human-assisted migration.
Larson, at the UW Botanic Gardens, meanwhile, said their horticulturalists are looking off-continent for inspiration for the hard years ahead. “We’re experimenting more with plants in Mediterranean climates,” he said, and “also the southern hemisphere: Australia, Chile, New Zealand." Places that have "somewhat similar climates," to the Pacific Northwest, “but tend to get a little bit hotter." And while some of these experiments haven’t panned out as hoped in the past, “we’re going to try them again, because 5 or 10 degrees can make all the difference.”
The conventional wisdom, that introducing or nurturing exotics results in a decline in biodiversity, is also being challenged — often heatedly so. It can seem at times that for every study that expounds on the evils wrought by alien plants, another concludes the exact opposite. The ongoing debate has produced fiery polemics, such as one signed by 19 ecologists and published in Nature in 2011, which announced “it is time … to ditch this preoccupation with the native-alien dichotomy and embrace more dynamic and pragmatic approaches … better suited to our fast-changing planet.” The scientists also swatted down the frequent synonymizing of “nativeness” with “good,” pointing out that “the insect currently suspected to be killing more trees than any other in North America is the native mountain pine beetle.”
(These sorts of back-and-forths are presumably what led former Arnold Arboretum horticulturist Peter Del Tredici, one of the Nature letter’s signatories, to observe, “the use of exotic versus native species … seems to bring out the worst in people, not unlike the debates over gun control and abortion.” Whoever said gardening was boring?)
Arthur Shapiro, a distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California at Davis, is also among those who have challenged the uncompromising emphasis on the superiority of native plants. “There are many nonnative plants grown in gardens that are immensely useful to butterflies and other pollinators,” Shapiro told me. “And there are many native plants that are completely useless. They might as well be made with rubber or wood.” If you were to uproot every exotic plant in urban California, for instance, you’d “essentially do away with the butterfly fauna.”
That’s partially due to a principle known as ecological fitting, which is “what happens when species with totally disparate histories, that evolved in different parts of the world, come into contact — perhaps as a result of commerce, perhaps as a result of gardening — and they fit together,” said Shapiro. “It’s a marriage made in heaven.” Additionally, oft-vilified “novel ecosystems”, sometimes disparagingly dismissed as “trash ecosystems," arise when exotic species are naturalized due to human influence and/or certain native species recede. Increasingly, though, scientists like Shapiro are viewing these emerging anthropocenic systems as environmental success stories. An unmanaged invasive pine plantation in Puerto Rico, for example, was found to have far more biodiversity than a nearby native-only forest of the same age, Nature recounts; the observation, made in 1979, ran so counter to the established beliefs about the sanctity of native plants that “it took almost a decade" for the resulting paper to pass peer review.
The native/non-native dichotomy is undoubtedly clumsy, so much so that one idea has been to dispense with the unhelpful language altogether. “Neonative,” a term proposed by University of Vienna conservation biologist Franz Essl, for example, could be adapted to describe species that have moved beyond their native ranges and established new foothold populations “due to human-induced changes of the biophysical environment, but not as a result of direct movement by human agency.”
Another idea is to take a step back, put our preconceived notions in check, and learn from what we’re seeing. “As climate changes, communities are going to change, mixtures are going to change,” Shapiro said. “Trying to stop it — except for managing things of economic or medical importance, pests, or disease vectors — is equivalent to trying to plow the sea. It’s futile. So we should actually be paying close attention to what’s happening, because we can learn a lot from it, about how communities self-assemble.”
This isn’t your permission to go plant a bunch of English ivy and scotch broom, though. Two things can potentially both be true: certain native plants have essential ecological functions and some non-native plants can play an important role in shaping future ecosystems. In fact, they’re going to have to, if the climate keeps warming and the hardiness zones continue their upward march.
“We would always tell someone: choose native first,” Smith, of the Arbor Day Foundation, concurred. But at the same time, “Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
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What’s a big multinational like Microsoft to do when it wants to build with clean concrete?
Imagine you’re a corporate sustainability exec and your company is planning to build a new data center. You’ve managed to convince the higher-ups to pay extra to use low-carbon building materials, lest the project blow up your brand’s emissions goals. But when you meet with the general contractor hired for the job, they don’t actually know of any low-carbon concrete purveyors in the area. Concrete is a hyper-local industry by necessity — you can’t hold the stuff for more than 90 minutes or so before it hardens and becomes unusable.
So here you are, one of the few people with the power and budget to pay a premium for zero-emissions concrete — a product that must become the standard if we are to stop climate change — and you can’t even get your hands on it.
This is, more or less, the situation Microsoft has found itself in. Last year, the company’s indirect emissions rose 31%, primarily due to the construction of new data centers. Cement, the main ingredient in concrete, is one of the most carbon-intensive materials on the planet, responsible for 6% of global emissions, according to Rhodium Group’s estimate. Low-carbon cement exists and is starting to be manufactured at a small scale, but first movers with deep pockets like Microsoft can’t necessarily access it.
To solve this and help clean cement startups access a bigger pool of buyers, Microsoft is leading the development of a new market for low-carbon cement — what climate finance experts call a “book and claim” market.
The tech giant has signed a memorandum of understanding with Sublime Systems, a Massachusetts-based cement startup, saying that it will buy “environmental attribute certificates” from Sublime’s first commercial cement plants. Microsoft will “book” the environmental attributes — the greenness, for lack of a better word — of Sublime’s cement, and “claim” those attributes in its own emissions accounting.
Let’s get a collective groan out of the way. Yes, once again, the business community is proposing a sort of carbon credit system as the best way — possibly the only way — to scale climate solutions. These certificates, however, have at least one notable difference from the beleaguered carbon offsets you’ve likely heard so much about: They are tied to a physical product. Microsoft won’t be buying one ton of CO2 avoided or removed from the atmosphere and then subtracting that from its overall emissions ledger. It will be buying the rights to say that it used one ton of cement with a carbon intensity of zero (or whatever the carbon intensity of Sublime’s product ends up being). Instead of neutralizing its cement-related emissions by paying someone to plant trees, it’s doing so by enabling Sublime to sell its clean cement to local buyers at a competitive price.
“It tremendously simplifies our logistics,” Leah Ellis, the CEO and founder of Sublime Systems told me, by solving the unavoidable problem that at this early point in the company’s development, it would be impossible to deliver its cement to all the early adopters willing to pay extra for it. “We end up doing death by 1,000 pilots if we have to pilot here, there, everywhere. Being able to use the cement locally and have the carbon attribute be counted against Microsoft's Scope 3 emissions is a really innovative way to unstick this whole problem.”
That’s key. Scope 3 is a category of emissions that encompasses all the carbon that is related to a business but not directly produced by it. When Microsoft builds a data center, it has no direct control over the process used to make the cement that goes into the building. In theory, it does have the ability to say, “We want to use clean stuff, not dirty stuff.” But in reality, companies are struggling to effect change within their supply chains.
“The thing to understand right out the gate is that basically no major consumer-facing company that uses things like steel or aluminum or cement knows where their stuff actually comes from,” Stephen Lezak, a researcher focused on carbon markets at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at Oxford University, told me. He thinks that’s going to change, and hopes that in 15 years we all look back on this fact in horror. But in the meantime, “the urgency of the climate crisis requires using high integrity tools that aren't ideal, but still preserve fundamental integrity from a carbon accounting perspective,” he said.
Microsoft, for its part, told me it sees this transaction as a near-term solution and “prioritizes buying and installing physical product first” i.e., before buying certificates, “where technical, geographical, and supply chain considerations align.”
Sublime is currently building its first commercial plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which will use its unique zero-emissions process to produce 30,000 tons of cement per year. The Department of Energy awarded the company an $87 million grant to fund the project earlier this year. Holcim and CRH, two of the largest building materials companies in the world, have also invested in Sublime and agreed to purchase most of the volume produced by the first plant.
Ellis hopes the deal with Microsoft will help attract additional investment and get the company through its “awkward teenage years.” Sublime needs to show investors that “people want this material, people will pay that green premium so that we can drive up the volume so that that premium goes away,” she said.
As with carbon offsets, there are still ways to game the system. Microsoft recently co-authored a report with the clean energy think tank RMI describing what a larger book and claim market for clean cement might look like and what questions need to be answered to ensure the market is credible. Until clean cement is just as cheap or cheaper than conventional cement, it’s pretty clear this kind of market will help reduce emissions. But should the environmental attributes be tied to cement, or to concrete? How should the carbon intensity be calculated? How will emissions be tracked and traced from the producer to the contractor to the building itself?
Perhaps the most critical question is how to avoid double-counting. If Microsoft is buying the right to say it used clean cement, what can the company that bought the actual cement say? Will it be able to brag that its building is green?
When I posed this question to Ellis, and Ben Skinner, a manager at RMI and one of the authors of the report, each gave me a version of the same answer: Yes and no.
Ellis launched into a passionate monologue about the concrete companies and contractors and structural engineers who should be celebrated for taking the risk of using a new material. “This problem of cement emissions is so intractable,” she said. “We need to make cement more visible. We need to talk about this more. We need more people to care. And so that physical embodiment, having it stamped ‘Sublime cement,’ and having a plaque that shows the public, hey, these are the emissions reduced by this thing you see here, you want to celebrate that physical embodiment.” At the end of all this, she added, “And by no means am I saying that you should double count.”
The suggestion is that it should be possible to separate carbon accounting and green marketing. If Microsoft has booked the green attributes of a delivery of cement, the contractors or building owners who used the physical stuff should not be able to claim they used clean cement on their emissions balance sheets, Skinner said. (What number they should use is a tricky question that will have to be solved.) But perhaps they still deserve some kind of recognition.
What kind of recognition, Lezak told me, is a gray area. “There's a really difficult part of this whole conversation, where you start anchored in material science and climate science and everything is really rigorous,” he said. “And at some point, the train sort of moves on to the political economy track, and it's really tough because you look for the same sort of black and white answers to these questions and they just don't show up.”
The details of the Microsoft deal and who can claim what are still being negotiated. At the same time, RMI and a new nonprofit called the Center for Green Market Activation have started work to stand up a larger book and claim market for cement. Their goal is to develop standards for how these certificates should be created, traded, and used so that companies that do not have the expertise or budget or resources that Microsoft has can access them. “We do think that it's possible to create a really high integrity system,” Skinner, told me.
Whether you like this idea or hate it, get ready to hear a lot more about it. The Center for Green Market Activation, which launched in June, is working to develop book and claim markets across a range of carbon intensive industries, including aviation, trucking, maritime shipping, and chemicals. There is one clear alternative to these paper-trading schemes — regulations that require companies to use more green materials over time. But proponents don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Lezak, though initially skeptical of these markets, has grown to support the idea. “There are people out there arguing that if you want to claim the emissions reduction in green steel, you need to make sure that the green steel actually shows up on your factory floor,” he said. “That's a beautiful idea, but you're talking about potentially pulling out the rug from billions of dollars of high integrity carbon finance.”
On the World Bank’s bad record keeping, Trump’s town hall, and sustainable aviation fuel
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France are flooded after heavy rains • Sydney’s Bondi Beach is closed because lumps of toxic tar are washing ashore • A winter storm warning is in effect for parts of Montana.
Nearly 40% of the climate finance funds that have been distributed by the World Bank over the last seven years are unaccounted for due to poor record keeping, according to a new report from Oxfam International. That’s up to $41 billion that is untraceable. “There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible,” the report said. “It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.”
The World Bank is the largest multilateral provider of climate finance, and has a goal of directing 45% of its total financing toward climate projects by 2025. The report noted that climate finance will be a key issue at the upcoming COP29, where countries will put forward a new global climate finance goal. “The lack of traceable spending could undermine trust in global climate finance efforts at this critical juncture,” Oxfam said.
During a town hall event hosted by Univision last night, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was asked by a veteran construction worker – who had seen first-hand “the devastating impacts of climate change” – if he still believed global warming was a “hoax.” In his response, Trump claimed to be an environmentalist, saying he’d won “many awards over the years” for the way he’d constructed his buildings, “the way I used the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand.” But, he said, “we can’t destroy our country” for the sake of saving the climate. He said the U.S. is competing against China, which “doesn’t spend anything on climate change.” According to the International Energy Agency, last year China alone accounted for one-third of the world’s clean energy investments.
Needless to say, Trump didn’t really answer the question about whether he thought climate change was real, but he did cast doubt on sea level rise and claimed “the real global warming we have to worry about is nuclear.”
I’ll just take this opportunity to remind you that Heatmap’s Jeva Lange put together an exhaustive fact-check on Trump’s climate and weather claims going back to 2001.
The Supreme Court yesterday allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now. The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. Whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
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The Department of Energy yesterday announced its first two loans for sustainable aviation fuel. The roughly $3 billion in funding will go to two companies:
“As the aviation sector aims to meet its decarbonization goals, SAF will become increasingly vital,” the DOE said in a statement. “SAF is the only viable near-term option to decarbonize the airline industry.”
A Canadian court’s ruling on a climate lawsuit today could influence similar cases in Canada and other countries. Seven young people are suing the Ontario government over its emissions targets, which they say are inadequate and violate their human rights. If the case heads to Canada’s Supreme Court, and the plaintiffs win, that would “dramatically open the door to new litigation,” constitutional law expert Emmett Macfarlane toldReuters. “That would be explosive. It would have immediate ramifications for all governments.”
The University of California, San Diego, is the first major public university to require all its undergraduate students to complete a climate change course.
They may not survive a full challenge, though.
The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.
The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA’s new rules, which were finalized in April, would be the government’s first successful effort to regulate climate pollution from the power sector. The electricity industry is the second most-polluting sector in the American economy.
The Obama administration previously tried to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. The Supreme Court blocked those rules from taking effect in 2016, before striking them down completely in 2022.
This time, the agency has written the rules within a framework laid out by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in that ruling. In that now landmark case, the court ruled that the EPA could restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants only by requiring new technology, such as carbon capture equipment, to be installed at the plant itself. The agency couldn’t require utilities to stop burning fossil fuels and build more renewables.
In the near term, whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. During his first term, Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental and climate protections.
Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
“The high court made the right call,” Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Given its rulings in recent years undercutting environmental protections, the refusal of the majority on the Supreme Court to block this vital rule is a victory for common sense.”
Not all the news from the Supreme Court on Wednesday was good for climate advocates, though.
In the same decision that let the new rules stand, the high court’s conservative justices signaled that they might block the rules next year.
“In my view, the applicants have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of their challenges” to the rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a short statement attached to the stay, which was cosigned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But because the rules don’t require utilities to start complying until next June, there was no reason to grant an emergency stay, the two justices added.
Justice Clarence Thomas would have gone further and stepped in to block the rules immediately. Justice Samuel Alito, another reliable conservative vote, did not participate in the deliberations.
That suggests that four justices could be ready to block the rules as soon as next year. They would need only one more vote — from Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to stay the protections from taking effect.
The statement didn’t provide any hints to what Roberts or Barrett are thinking.