August 2023 Networker:
The Rippling Effect—Climate Change and Our Water Cycle |
| Volume 28 (7), August 2023 |
| “Mní wičhóni” or “water is life” became a familiar call of protest during the struggle to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the grave risks it posed to rivers. Rachel Carson said the same in the parlance of western science: “Water must be thought of in terms of the chains of life it supports.” But industry, with regulatory approval, continues to disrupt and pollute waterways, and climate change is wreaking havoc on the water cycle. Places we not long ago thought of as green and lush are now dry and burning, while a tropical storm bore down on the southern California desert, a first in nearly a century.
Though SEHN staff members live dispersed around the country, in recent weeks, several of us again experienced very poor air quality from near or distant fires. Our hearts broke for the residents of Lahaina. I watched Weather.com around the clock last week to see how Hurricane Halliburton (as I renamed Hurricane Hilary) might affect my daughter in Los Angeles. She got away with just a leak in her roof and a work-at-home day (flash flood warnings were in effect and driving was discouraged).
You’re no doubt hearing this from many voices lately, and likely seeing it with your own eyes: the climate crisis is unfolding around us, on the land, in the sea, in the atmosphere, no matter where we live.
Given SEHN's history of leadership on climate, it can seem unreal sometimes that we have had to pivot to fighting something promoted as a climate solution, but is not one: carbon capture and storage (CCS). (See resources here on why not.) As our readers and supporters know, SEHN is absolutely committed to a clear-eyed struggle to confront the climate crisis. As you probably also know from these pages in the past year, we hit the ground running, joining with allies as the reality became clear to us: the federal government had linked hands with industry (including handing out potentially billions of dollars, through the Inflation Reduction Act and other programs) to prop up and roll out CCS experiments. We can’t know exactly how much these misguided efforts have displaced real climate action, but the effect of these CSS distractions has already been significant.
SEHN is educating the public and policymakers, supporting frontline communities in proximity to proposed or in-construction CCS facilities and pipelines, and developing national strategies to address the near-complete absence of sound policy on CCS.
In this edition of the Networker we update you on two of the national strategies we’re working on. I provide a short update on our campaign with allies to cut off at the pass an unconscionable proposed amendment to a United States Forest Service regulation that would allow the injection and “permanent” storage of waste carbon dioxide on its lands. In a more detailed piece, executive director Carolyn Raffensperger explains the reasons we need to understand and stay focused on two federal agencies, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers, with regard to the proposed tens of thousands of miles of carbon dioxide pipelines.
Brace yourself for senior scientist Sandra Steingraber’s column this month, “The Dying Sea Around Us.” She takes us on a journey with Rachel Carson from her 1951 book, The Sea Around Us, on to its second edition in 1960, in which Carson carefully corrected herself about the oceans’ imperviousness to human activity, based on new evidence. “Writing darkly about the practice of dumping radioactive waste into the world’s oceans, she urged her readers to relinquish old beliefs and embrace an emerging truth: |
| ‘… there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man’s ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve.’” |
| Sandra also locates the seeds of Carson’s nascent grasp, as early as the 1960s, of the workings of anthropogenic climate change. As the water cycle shifts with dramatic impacts and communities try to get their bearings, I continue to observe how many of our allies in the climate movement are including resilience-building and mutual aid in their daily commitments. We multi-task as we can and must. Thank you for your support of our work. Stay safe and resilient!
Carmi Orenstein, MPH CHPNY Program Director, SEHN |
Carbon Dioxide Waste Injection In … Our Forests? |
| By Carmi Orenstein, Editor |
| The federal government—continuing to crowd out the real climate solutions we so urgently need—has another wasteful and risky carbon capture and storage (CCS) plan in the works. The United States Forest Service (USFS) quietly announced that, for the first time, it could allow “exclusive or perpetual right of use or occupancy” for the injection of industrial carbon waste into National Forest System lands.
Paradoxically, the proposed policy change would bulldoze naturally carbon-sequestering forest areas in order to “store” waste carbon in those same areas—with unproven, risky technologies. The puzzling logic is unfortunately characteristic of our era. The federal government is going to great lengths to support “solutions” that ignore the urgent imperative to phase out fossil fuels. |
| The ecological disruption caused by logging and building access roads, pipelines, injection wells and well pads in forests is well established. Disruption of natural areas by, for example, the fracking industry, is already known to impede recreation, harm waterways, and introduce invasive species. This USFS plan would likely lead to the release of large quantities of carbon stored in the forest ecosystems and reduce future tree growth. The whole idea defies common sense climate action.
Further, the threat specifically posed by transport and storage of CO2 puts all natural systems and human communities in its path at profound risk. In the event of a rupture or release, compressed carbon dioxide, a deadly asphyxiant, threatens any living thing that is exposed. Emergency services may not be equipped to respond—especially in remote areas, which include many national forest lands. Continue Reading |
Who Must Protect The Rivers, Streams And Wetlands From CO2 Pipelines? |
| By Carolyn Raffensperger, SEHN Executive Director |
| SEHN intervened in the Iowa permit hearings for the Dakota Access pipeline on behalf of future generations. Unfortunately, that permit was granted in Iowa, just as it was in North Dakota. When we lost our case and the pipeline was built, a good friend of mine told me we had to stay strong because there would always be another pipeline. I didn’t believe him. But he was right. Yes, also as I write this, we are poised to begin hearings in Iowa for another multi-state pipeline. This one, for Summit Carbon Solutions, seeks to build a carbon dioxide (CO2) sewer system across five states. If I learned anything during the Dakota Access fight, I learned that pipelines cross rivers, streams, and wetlands, posing unique hazards to our waterways particularly during pipeline construction and in the event of a rupture or leak. Continue Reading |
The RePercussion Section: The Dying Sea Around Us |
| By Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist |
| When marine biologist and author Rachel Carson released her popular account of oceanography, The Sea Around Us, in 1951, almost none of her readers had seen visual images of the living realm beneath the surface of the ocean’s waves. Fiber optics and low-light cameras would eventually bring moving pictures of this underwater world into our living rooms, but in the mid-20th century, these tools did not yet exist. The bathyscaphe christened Trieste would not descend into the Mariana Trench until 1960, and the research submersible named Alvin would not begin operations until 1964. And yet, piqued by developments in radar, echolocation, and submarine operations during World War II, public interest in deep sea life was high. What did it look like under the surface of the sea? The Sea Around Us attempted to fill a curiosity void. Carson turned data into wondrous imagery that created a kind of underwater documentary with words that transported readers into oceanic depths. And the book became a runaway bestseller. The Sea Around Us won the National Book Award, was serialized in The New Yorker, and provided its author with enough financial independence that she could resign her day job as an editor of government brochures.
In Carson’s narrative, biblical in tone and metrical patterns, the ocean was not the setting of an epic story but its main character. Indifferent, indomitable, magisterial, ruthless. The creator and sustainer of life on the planet—and final repository of its constituent parts. Both cradle and grave for us all. Impervious to desecration. The ocean, she wrote, is “too big and too vast and its forces…too mighty to be affected by human activity.” Less than a decade later, Carson issued a correction. To the second edition of The Sea Around Us, Carson added new material about leaking barrels of radioactive waste in deep-sea basins, plankton siphoning radioactivity up the marine food chain, and patterns of global fallout from aboveground atomic bomb testing. Continue Reading |
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