Environmental Notes, June 17, 2024

Children who live within a mile of an active well are five to seven times more likely to develop lymphoma, a study from University of Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania department of health found. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

From the Guardian:

Rare cancers are occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania. Between 2009 and 2019, six students in one school district were diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, and the region recorded about 30 overall cases of the cancer during that time. “We’re seeing more rare childhood cancers and brain tumors in adults,” said one local mother. Community members are concerned that this uptick in illness is related to fracking. A number of studies have confirmed their concerns, with one finding that Pennsylvania children between the ages of two and seven who lived within 1.2 miles of unconventional wells at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

A firefighter works to extinguish a fire at a gas pipeline damaged by a Russian rocket attack in Kyiv, Ukraine in January. Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

In more Ukraine news, research has found that the climate cost of the first two years of Russia’s war on Ukraine was greater than the annual greenhouse gas emissions generated individually by 175 countries. The Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War (IGGAW) – a research collective partly funded by the German and Swedish governments, and the European Climate Foundation – has calculated that Russia faces a $32bn (£25bn) climate reparations bill from its first 24 months of war.

“The Russian Federation should be made to pay for this, a debt it owes Ukraine and countries in the global south that will suffer most from climate damage,” said Lennard de Klerk, the IGGAW lead author.

A koala in Queensland, Australia. Photograph: Alamy

Koalas on Australia’s east coast are increasingly at risk of disappearing altogether, with the species officially listed as endangered in 2022. Some Australians and private landholders are doing what they can to prevent this by creating wildlife corridors for the marsupials to thrive. One group, Bangalow Koalas, has planted more than 377,000 trees across the region. “We’re not just connecting and creating a koala wildlife corridor, and a fragmented habitat, we’re connecting communities,” said its founder, Linda Sparrow. “Land care groups, Indigenous communities, schools – they come all the time to do planting.”

From Bloomberg Green:

Texas is projected to overtake California this year as the top installer of large-scale solar projects in the US, according to new research from BloombergNEF.

Large-scale solar, also called utility-scale solar, refers to projects with over 1 megawatt of capacity. When it comes to Texas’ installation of such projects, “we’re seeing insane numbers,” says BloombergNEF solar analyst Javier Rico Aristizabal. Texas installed a record 5.8 gigawatts of large-scale solar in 2023, and it’s on track to install even more – 8.1 gigawatts – this year. That would put the state’s total large-scale solar capacity at 29 gigawatts by year’s end.

Source: BloombergNEF

In contrast, California is expected to install 2.7 gigawatts of large solar projects in 2024. That would put California’s grand-total of such installations at 27 gigawatts, explains Aristizabal in an analysis published this week.

“California was the first big solar installer in the US,” and it has been leading the nation in such installations for the past decade, says Aristizabal. “But we’re reaching a point where they have a lot of solar in the grid.” In other words, there’s only so much more of these massive projects that can be brought online there.

While the pace of new project installations have been leveling off in California in recent years, they’ve been ramping up in Texas. There are a couple big reasons why people are flocking to Texas for their large solar projects. For one, “it’s a sunny state,” says Aristizabal. Furthermore, it can be easier for developers to get permits to build there than other states. There’s also high demand from corporations to buy that green power.

More solar is in the pipeline, too. BloombergNEF projects Texas will have installed 62 more gigawatts of utility-scale solar by 2035 compared to today. “So we’re saying Texas is going to have 3 times more [large-scale] solar than what it has installed today,” says Aristizabal.

From the New York Times:

College Corps program volunteers in Garden Grove last year. Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group, via Orange County Register, via Getty Images

In 2023, President Biden announced the American Climate Corps, a program to employ thousands of young people to fight global warming. Many of those jobs, like starting community gardens or installing solar panels, began this summer.

Broadly, the idea of the government putting citizens to work comes from the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program that gave jobs to young men during the Great Depression.

But Biden’s program also takes direct inspiration from California, which in 2020 began the California Climate Action Corps to pay residents to do a year of projects focusing on fire prevention work, planting trees and reducing food waste. Nearly 1,000 people have been through the program so far.

“California, particularly on climate, likes to be a leader, and I think in this case they were indeed a leader,” John Podesta, Biden’s adviser on clean energy who heads the American Climate Corps, told Fox 11 last year. He called the California program a “model for what we’re doing here.”

California Volunteers, a commission on public service, started the California climate corps as part of a suite of service-based initiatives. Before Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, the commission mainly just administered the state’s federal AmeriCorps funding.

The California Service Corps includes the climate jobs program as well as California College Corps, which began in 2022 and offers $10,000 in tuition subsidies to low-income college students in exchange for part-time work on climate change, food insecurity and tutoring programs. And there’s the Youth Job Corps, which employs underserved young people in community service.

These programs, along with California’s longstanding AmeriCorps program, enroll 10,000 service members a year, making it the nation’s largest service force — even bigger than the Peace Corps, said Josh Fryday, the state’s chief service officer and head of California Volunteers.

From the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization:

Rome/San Jose, Costa Rica – World fisheries and aquaculture production has hit a new high, with aquaculture production of aquatic animals surpassing capture fisheries for the first time, according to a new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) released today. 

The 2024 edition of The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) said global fisheries and aquaculture production in 2022 surged to 223.2 million tonnes, a 4.4 percent increase from the year 2020. Production comprised 185.4 million tonnes of aquatic animals and 37.8 million tonnes of algae.

“FAO welcomes the significant achievements thus far, but further transformative and adaptive actions are needed to strengthen the efficiency, inclusiveness, resilience and sustainability of aquatic food systems and consolidate their role in addressing food insecurity, poverty alleviation and sustainable governance,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu.

Aquaculture produces record amount

In 2022 and for the first time in history, aquaculture surpassed capture fisheries as the main producer of aquatic animals. Global aquaculture production reached an unprecedented 130.9 million tonnes, of which 94.4 million tonnes are aquatic animals, 51 percent of the total aquatic animal production.

Global consumption of aquatic foods rises again

Record production of aquatic foods underlines the sector’s potential in tackling food insecurity and malnutrition. Global apparent consumption of aquatic animal foods reached 162.5 million tonnes in 2021. This figure has increased at nearly twice the rate of the world population since 1961, with global per capita annual consumption rising from 9.1 kg in 1961 to 20.7 kg in 2022.

Of total aquatic animal production, 89 percent was used for direct human consumption, underscoring the critical role of fisheries and aquaculture in maintaining global food security. The rest was destined for indirect or non-food uses, mainly fishmeal and fish oil production.

From Reuters Sustainable Switch:

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres had hard words for the fossil fuel industry amid another year of record-breaking temperatures across the world.

Guterres said that countries must confront not just the fossil-fuel industry, but also companies that support efforts to obstruct climate action.

The U.N. chief, a longtime critic of oil and gas companies' role in fueling climate change, called the industry out for spending billions on "distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt" about climate change, while investing just "a measly 2.5%" of its total capital on clean energy alternatives. He went further in a speech at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, criticizing financial institutions as well as media and public relations firms for supporting the industry's advertisements and accepting content sponsorships.