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Bye bye, community compost program budget. Hello, delays in curbside organic waste collection.
For the past 30 years, New York City has funded community-based programs that spread the gospel of compost. What started as a few education and outreach sites at the city’s botanical gardens has grown into a vast network of more than 200 neighborhood food scrap drop-off locations where devoted New Yorkers enthusiastically deliver bags of rotting waste each week. Today, the programs employ 115 people and divert more than 8.3 million pounds of organic waste from landfills each year.
Now, with the stroke of Mayor Eric Adams’s pen, they will likely have to shut down.
Adams eliminated all funding for community composting, totalling $15 million over the next four years, in a round of budget cuts announced last week that are meant to offset the rising cost of aid to migrant asylum seekers. This comes in spite of the fact that the city’s publicly run — and much more expensive — curbside composting program is still not fully functional more than a decade in.
“It feels very dire right now,” Christine Datz-Romero, the co-founder and executive director of one of the oldest community compost groups, the Lower East Side Ecology Center, told me.
Adams’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Few services have escaped the strain caused by the flood of asylum-seekers fleeing poverty, violence, authoritarian governments, and climate change. In September, Adams asked all city agencies to prepare to cut their annual budgets by at least 5% to address a projected $7 billion fiscal shortfall. The plan released last week shows the Department of Education losing about $1 billion over the next two years, which threatens the city’s free preschool program and will eliminate hundreds of non-classroom positions. Cuts to library budgets will force many locations to reduce their hours.
Community composting organizations knew budget cuts were coming. They were already bracing for a decline in funding because of the city’s plans to scale up the Department of Sanitation’s curbside organic waste collection program, which picks up food scraps right at people’s doorsteps, similar to recycling.
“We built all the support for it,” Justin Green, the executive director of Big Reuse, told me. “Now that the city is rolling out curbside, to be cut without warning is pretty galling.” Even that rollout is no longer assured — a planned expansion to Staten Island and the Bronx will now be delayed until next October. Originally budgeted for around $24 million a year, the curbside program saw its budget slashed by $4.8 million between now and 2025.
Curbside composting has been a holy grail for New York mayors since Michael Bloomberg, but has long remained mired in the bureaucratic swamps. Former Mayor Bill DeBlasio managed to get a voluntary program off the ground in 2013, but it was criticized for poor management and only serving wealthier neighborhoods, and participation was notoriously low. In 2020, the service fell victim to the pandemic.
On the campaign trail in 2021, Adams vowed to bring curbside collection back as a way to cut emissions and solve the city’s rat problem, and in February announced plans to relaunch voluntary curbside pickup in every borough. (For now it’s available in Brooklyn and Queens, plus parts of Manhattan and the Bronx.) The city council then went a step further, passing an ambitious zero-waste package in June that will make food waste separation mandatory as curbside collection grows.
Organic waste is the city’s third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after buildings and transportation, producing about 20% of New York’s total climate pollution. Composting doesn’t fully eliminate food waste emissions, but it has the potential to reduce them by up to 84%, according to a recent study.
It’s unclear how much real composting the curbside program will do. Currently, most of the organics picked up by the sanitation department go to wastewater treatment facilities in New Jersey and Brooklyn, where the scraps are mixed with sewage and put through an anaerobic digester. The process breaks down the solid material and separates out methane gas, which is then injected into gas pipelines and carried into people’s homes. Or at least, that’s the idea — a few weeks ago, Gothamist reported that the system was undergoing maintenance and the gas was being burned off on site.
Datz-Romero hopes the city will eventually invest in real utility-scale composting facilities. It’s a chicken and egg problem — the wastewater treatment facility is already there and has capacity to manage the waste, and the city can’t justify spending millions on its own site until there’s robust public participation in food waste separation.
“What do you create first, the infrastructure or the need for infrastructure?” Datz-Romero said. During the DeBlasio administration, the city was shipping organic waste to private processing facilities. It did build one large composting facility on Staten Island, but that has limited capacity.
Low participation is one reason community composters say they still have a crucial outreach role to play, even as curbside pickup expands. They are in communities every day talking to people about food waste, teaching them about composting, and bringing tangible benefits like soil restoration to their parks and street trees.
“People can actually engage with that, and they can also understand on a whole other level why separating food scraps out is so important,” said Datz-Romero. “Even if composting is mandatory tomorrow, people are not going to wake up and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I always wanted to do — separate my banana peels.’”
Green and Datz-Romero said they will have to lay off the staff that run their food scrap pick-up sites and outreach and education programs. Though they do get some funding from foundations, Green said that without the support of the city, those other sources could dry up.
The coalition of community composting groups started a petition urging the mayor and city council to reverse the decision. At time of publishing, it had more than 20,000 signatures.
Community composting might not be making a significant dent in carbon emissions, Green told me. But it has helped people feel empowered to do something about climate change.
“People are hungry for things that they can do together as a community. This is one step that they could do to be like, ‘Okay, I’m taking my compost to the farmers market, and I can volunteer to apply the compost to street trees in my neighborhood.’ I think that was valuable. When people are feeling so much hopelessness around climate, it gives them something active to do.”
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In the closing minutes of the first presidential debate tonight, Donald Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris took an odd, highly specific, and highly Teutonic turn. It might not have made sense to many viewers, but it fit into the overall debate’s unusually substantive focus on energy policy.
“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” he said, addressing Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel. We’re not gonna do — things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.”
“Germany tried that and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” he continued. “We’re not ready for it.”
What is he talking about? Let’s start by stipulating that Harris has renounced her previous support for banning fracking. During the debate, she bragged that the United States has hit an all-time high for oil and gas production during her vice presidency.
But why bring Germany into it? At the risk of sane-washing the former president, Trump appears to be referencing what German politicians call the Energiewiende, or energy turnaround. Since 2010, Germany has sought to transition from its largest historic energy sources, including coal and nuclear energy, to renewables and hydropower.
The Energiewiende is often discussed inside and outside of Germany as a climate policy, and it has helped achieve global climate goals by, say, helping to push down the global price of solar panels. But as an observant reader might have already noticed, its goals are not entirely emissions-related: Its leaders have also hoped to use the Energiewiende to phase out nuclear power, which is unpopular in Germany but which does not produce carbon emissions.
The transition has accomplished some of its goals: The country says that it is on target to meet its 2030 climate targets. But it ran into trouble after Russia invaded Ukraine, because Germany obtained more than half of its natural gas, and much of its oil and coal besides, from Russia. Germany turned back on some of its nuclear plants — it has since shut them off again — and increased its coal consumption. It also began importing fossil fuels from other countries.
In order to shore up its energy supply, Germany is also planning to build 10 gigawatts of new natural gas plants by 2030, although it says that these facilities will be “hydrogen ready,” meaning that they could theoretically run on the zero-carbon fuel hydrogen. German automakers, who have lagged at building electric vehicles, have also pushed for policies that support “e-fuels,” or low-carbon liquid fuels. These fuels would — again, theoretically — allow German firms to keep building internal combustion engines.
So perhaps that’s not exactly what Trump said, to put it mildly — but it is true that to cope with the Ukraine war and the loss of nuclear power, Germany has had to fall back on fossil fuels. Of course, at the same time, more than 30% of German electricity now comes from wind and solar energy. In other words, in Germany, renewables are just another kind of “normal energy plant.”
Hunter Biden also made an appearance in Trump’s answer to the debate’s one climate question.
Well, it happened — over an hour into the debate, but it happened: the presidential candidates were asked directly about climate change. ABC News anchor Linsey Davis put the question to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and their respective answers were both surprising and totally not.
Harris responded to the question by laying out the successes of Biden’s energy policy and in particular, the Inflation Reduction Act (though she didn’tmention it by name). “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy,” Harris noted.
The vice president immediately followed this up, however, by pointing out that gas production has also increased to “historic levels,” under the Biden-Harris administration. This framing, highlighting an all-of-the-above approach to energy, is consistent with Harris’s comments earlier in the debate, whenshe claimed to support fracking and investing in “diverse sources of energy.” Harris went on to reiterate the biggest wins of the Inflation Reduction Act, namely, “800,000 new manufacturing jobs,” and shouted out her endorsement from the United Auto Workers and its President Shawn Fain.
Trump, who earlier in the debate called himself “a big fan of solar” before questioning the amount of land it takes up, started off his response by once again claiming that the Biden-Harris administration is building Chinese-owned EV plants in Mexico (they are not). Then Trump veered completely off topic and rounded out his answer by ranting about Biden (both Joe and Hunter). “You know, Biden doesn’t go after people because, supposedly, China paid him millions of dollars,” Trump noted. “He’s afraid to do it between him and his son, they get all this money from Ukraine.”
Trump’s answer included no reference to climate or clean energy — but it did include a shout out to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” so there’s that.
Is that a problem? Let’s do the math.
Former President Donald Trump has been warming up to the idea of electric vehicles in recent months, and he used the debate podium on Tuesday night to announce that “I’m a big fan of solar.” But don’t get too excited: He apparently can’t name three of their albums.
During a heated back-and-forth over Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on fracking, Trump started to get worked up about what will happen if Democrats win the election. “They’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead,” he warned. “We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant?”
Trump went on: “By the way, I’m a big fan of solar, but they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil.”
Trump has a history of exaggeration, but this is neither particularly hyperbolic nor as concerning as Trump would have you believe. About 34,000 acres of public land are currently devoted to solar energy, and a common estimate is that the U.S. would need to expand solar to an additional 700,000 acres to meet 2035 renewable energy goals. That’s about 1,100 square miles, or 1,555 Trump-sized solar farms (or 0.031115% of the entire United States, per Clean Technica).
And while it’s true that most utility-scale solar photovoltaic facilities are only a handful of acres, it only takes about five to seven acres to generate a megawatt — so a project of Trump’s reckoning would generate about 65 megawatts, which, as Mads Rønne Almassalkhi, an associate professor of electrical and biomedical engineering at the University of Vermont, pointed out, isn’t all that shabby:
The U.S. government also recently determined that some 31 million acres of public land in just 11 states are not on “protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitat” and are close to transmission lines or “previously disturbed lands,” and therefore hypothetically suitable for solar development. To put it in simpler terms, solar takes up a fair bit of land but: Desert big.
To be sure, there are absolutely valid concerns and debates to be had over siting and the environmental impact of solar farms in America, regardless of how small their ultimate relative footprint will be. And Trump could have raised those arguments. But from what he showed us on Tuesday, he doesn’t make a very convincing fan.