Billions Lost
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| Etienne Laurent/EPA |
Three billion birds gone since 1970. This is the result from the latest comprehensive review of North American birds. It’s a startling number that suggests that the reduction of habitat and the widespread use of chemical insecticides have a profound impact on the overall bird population. This study actually significantly adds to the alarm that was raised in 2016, when another study concluded that at least one billion birds were missing since 1970.
The US and Canada have lost more than one in four birds – a total of three billion – since 1970, culminating in what scientists who published a new study are calling a “widespread ecological crisis”.Researchers observed a 29% decline in bird populations across diverse groups and habitats – from songbirds such as meadowlarks to long-distance migratory birds such as swallows and backyard birds like sparrows.
“Multiple, independent lines of evidence show a massive reduction in the abundance of birds,” said Ken Rosenberg, the study’s lead author and a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy.
The study, published today in the journal Science, did not analyze the reason for the drop. But around the world, birds are thought to be dying more and having less success breeding largely because their habitats are being damaged and destroyed by agriculture and urbanization.
Anaconda Company — Polluting the World For a Century
Open pit copper mines have a tendency to pop up on EPA Superfund clean-up list quite often. In Nevada there is a fight going on to keep the site out of the EPA’s hands and deal with it through corporate and state agencies. It is hard to imaging Atlantic Richfield or its corporate owner BP (formerly The British Petroleum Company and BP Amoco) doing a competent job with only state level oversight.
By 1978, Anaconda had halted its operations. The mine had changed hands to Atlantic Richfield, known as ARCO, after the Anaconda Copper Company merged with a subsidiary of the oil giant. For ARCO, the consequences of that deal proved long-lasting. It was inked while global copper prices slumped. And to this day, ARCO — now under the auspices of BP, an even larger corporation — is responsible for Anaconda’s pollution across the West.
Before long, ARCO offloaded the copper mine to a Yerington businessman, and by 1989, the site was sold again, eventually falling into the hands of an Arizona-based miner: Arimetco.
Then came another wave of contamination.
Arimetco left Anaconda’s pit — about one-mile long, 800-feet deep and filling with water — largely untouched. Instead it worked on about 250 acres, isolating copper by sending acidic fluid through heaps of ore. Regulators say the liners it used to protect groundwater from toxic drainage were leaky and the acidic solution created some of the most immediate hazards at the mine. When Arimetco went bankrupt, it left about 90 million gallons of acidic fluid. Lacking the proper bonding, it also left Nevada a multimillion-dollar unfunded liability, known as the “orphan share.”
Offshore Wind
Offshore wind power is coming to the East Coast. The seeds are being planted off Block Island, but the big payoff is on the way. The key is convincing all the stakeholders that off-shore turbines will have a minimal impact.
Block Island may be home to the smallest town (New Shoreham) in the country’s smallest state, but big things have happened here. Since December 2016, the seas off this speck of land in the Atlantic Ocean—Block Island is under 10 square miles in area, or less than half the size of the island of Manhattan—have been the proving grounds for the privately funded firm of Deepwater Wind, the primary driving force behind the first and so far only commercial offshore wind farm in North America.
This five-turbine, 30-megawatt endeavor has been effectively acting as a multi-year, real-world experiment in offshore wind power for the United States, paving the way for offshore wind farms on the northeast coast and the mid-Atlantic that could each be as much as 600 times the size of this test site, with hundreds of turbines generating electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes from just one full-scale, industrial-sized wind farm. There are more than a dozen large offshore “wind lease areas” suitable for wind farms currently up for bid from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, stretching from Massachusetts to North Carolina.
Massachusetts alone is soliciting contracts for 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind development (half have now been sold), which is more than 50 times the size of this pilot project off of Block Island. (Because it is the region’s financial powerhouse, and its major cities represent a large market of potential wind power consumers next to the coast, the doings of Massachusetts dominate the conversation of little Rhode Island next-door.) Once it is built and running, the Massachusetts project off Martha’s Vineyard alone will provide enough energy to power at least 230,000 households, or about a third of the state’s residential energy demand. Other states are working on a similar gargantuan scale. All told, there are 28 offshore wind projects in the works on the East Coast, with a total capacity of 24 gigawatts, or 24,000 megawatts. To give a sense of the massive size of the generating power of the wind farms now in the works, the first commercial civilian nuclear reactor in the United States—Massachusetts’ Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station, now decommissioned—generated just 185 megawatts at its peak.
Renewables Don’t Need Subsidies
Renewables are so cheap that subsidies aren’t necessary. Perhaps when people discover that government is subsidizing fossil fuels while renewables are standing one their own, that will be the end of fossil fuel subsidies.
Today, renewable energy is so cheap that the handouts they once needed are disappearing.
On sun-drenched fields across Spain and Italy, developers are building solar farms without subsidies or tax-breaks, betting they can profit without them. In China, the government plans to stop financially supporting new wind farms. And in the U.S., developers are signing shorter sales contracts, opting to depend on competitive markets for revenue once the agreements expire.
“The training wheels are off,” said Joe Osha, an equity analyst at JMP Securities. “Prices have declined enough for both solar and wind that there’s a path toward continued deployment in a post-subsidy world.”
The reason, in short, is the subsidies worked. After decades of quotas, tax breaks and feed-in-tariffs, wind and solar have been deployed widely enough for manufacturers and developers to become increasingly efficient and drive down costs. The cost of wind power has fallen about 50% since 2010. Solar has dropped 85%. That makes them cheaper than new coal and gas plants in two-thirds of the world, according to BloombergNEF.
Do Electric Car Subsidies Make Sense?
It’s not an either/or situation, but doesn’t it make sense to invest in means to get people out of cars at least as heavily as we are willing to invest in electric vehicles. Various alternative transit options – bikes, scooters, public transportation are tools that would substantially reduce the use of cars and reduce congestion in urban areas.
They all want to spend billions, replacing cars with – cars. Meanwhile, a new study from INRIX Research shows that fully 48 percent of trips taken by cars in the USA are less than three miles, a distance that could easily be covered by bike, e-bike or scooter (modes that INRIX calls "micromobility"). Fully 20 percent are less than a mile, which could easily be done on foot.
Meanwhile, while all of transportation Twitter argues about whether to throw billions at electric cars or transit, I repeat the INRIX finding that 48 percent of car trips in the USA are less than three miles. If you got half the people who are now doing these trips in cars, you would be reducing the number of trips taken in the USA by a quarter.
This would not be that hard in much of North America; micromobility lanes (formerly known as bike lanes?) cost a lot less than nuclear power plants or subways. Decent sidewalks that aren't full of cars, electric or otherwise, cost less than a Tesla Gigafactory. They are a lot faster to build, too, and we don't have time or the resources to convert the world's fleet of cars to electric. We have to get people out of cars, and the best place to start is with the shortest trips.
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