No matter how much the world cuts back on carbon emissions, a key and sizable chunk of Antarctica is essentially doomed to an “unavoidable” melt, a new study finds.
Associated Press, by Seth Borenstein, AP video produced by Teresa de Miguel, October 23, 2023
No matter how much the world cuts back on carbon emissions, a key and sizable chunk of Antarctica is essentially doomed to an “unavoidable” melt, a new study found.
Though the full melt will take hundreds of years, slowly adding nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) to sea levels, it will be enough to reshape where and how people live in the future, the study’s lead author said.
Researchers used computer simulations to calculate future melting of protective ice shelves jutting over Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea in western Antarctica. The study in Monday’s journal Nature Climate Change found even if future warming was limited to just a few tenths of a degree more – an international goal that many scientists say is unlikely to be met – it would have “limited power to prevent ocean warming that could lead to the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
“Our main question here was: How much control do we still have over ice shelf melting? How much melting can still be prevented by reducing emissions?” said study lead author Kaitlin Naughten, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey. “Unfortunately, it’s not great news. Our simulations suggest that we are now committed to the rapid increase in the rate of ocean warming and ice shelf melting over the rest of the century.”
While past studies have talked about how dire the situation is, Naughten was the first to use computer simulations to study the key melting component of warm water melting ice from below, and the work looked at four different scenarios for how much carbon dioxide the world pumps into the atmosphere. In each case, ocean warming was just too much for this section of the ice sheet to survive, the study found.
Naughten looked at melting gatekeeper ice shelves, which float over the ocean in this area of Antarctica that is already below sea level. Once these ice shelves melt, there’s nothing to stop the glaciers behind them from flowing into the sea.
Naughten specifically looked at what would happen if somehow future warming was limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over mid-19th century levels — the international goal — and found the runaway melting process anyway. The world has already warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius (nearly 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times and much of this summer temporarily shot past the 1.5 mark.
This undated image provided by British Antarctic Survey, shows the North Cove, in Antarctic. (Michael Shortt/British Antarctic Survey via AP)
Naughten’s study concentrated on the part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is most at risk from melting from below, near the Amundsen Sea. It includes the massive Thwaites ice shelf that is melting so fast it got the nickname “the Doomsday Glacier.” West Antarctica is only one-tenth of the southern continent but is more unstable than the larger eastern side.
That part of Antarctica “is doomed,” said University of California Irvine ice scientist Eric Rignot, who wasn’t part of the study. “The damage has already been done.”
University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who also wasn’t part of the study, said this ice sheet “eventually is going to collapse. It’s not a happy conclusion and it is one that I’m only saying reluctantly.”
Naughten doesn’t like to use the word “doomed,” because she said 100 years from now the world might not just stop but reverse carbon levels in the air and global warming. But she said what’s happening now on the ground is a slow collapse that can’t be stopped, at least not in this century.
“I think it’s unavoidable that some of this area is lost. It’s unavoidable that the problem gets worse,” Naughten told The Associated Press. “It isn’t unavoidable that we lose all of it because sea level rise happens over the very long term. I only looked in this study up to 2100. So after 2100, we probably have some control still.’’
No matter what words are used, Naughten said she and other scientists studying the area in previous research conclude that this part of Antarctica “couldn’t be saved or a lot of it couldn’t be saved.”
Naughten’s study did not calculate how much ice would be lost, how much sea level would rise and at what speed. But she estimated that the amount of ice in the area most at risk if it all melted would raise sea levels by about 1.8 meters (5.9 feet).
This 2020 photo provided by the British Antarctic Survey shows the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. (David Vaughan/British Antarctic Survey via AP)
However, she said, that is a slow process that would play out through the next few hundred years through the 2300s, 2400s and 2500s.
Naughten said that may seem like a long way away, but noted that if the Victorians of the 1800s had done something to drastically change the shape of our world, we would not look well on them.
This type of sea level rise would be “absolutely devastating” if it happened over 200 years, but if it could be stretched out over 2,000 years, humanity could adapt, Naughten said.
“Coastal communities will either have to build around or be abandoned,” Naughten said.
While this part of Antarctica’s ice sheet is destined to be lost, other vulnerable sections of Earth’s environment can still be saved by reducing heat-trapping emissions so there is reason to still cut back on carbon pollution, Naughten said.
Twila Moon, deputy chief scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who wasn’t part of the research, said she worries that most people will see nothing but doom and gloom in the research.
“I don’t see a lot of hope,” Naughten said. “But it’s what the science tells me. So that’s what I have to communicate to the world.”
Naughten quoted former NASA scientist Kate Marvel, saying “when it comes to climate change we need courage and not hope. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.”
Public health officials say it’s not strict enough.
The Valero oil refinery near the Houston Ship Channel, part of the Port of Houston, on March 6, 2019 in Houston, Texas. | Photo by Loren Elliott / AFP via Getty Images.
Without public hearings, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is proposing to adopt its 17-year-old standard that scientists and public health officials say fails to account for cumulative air pollution.
State of Denial: Third in a series about Texas’ environmental regulators.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has quietly proposed maintaining a target cancer risk level for air pollution permits that scientists and public health officials consider inadequate to protect public health, especially for communities like those east of Houston that are exposed simultaneously to many sources of industrial emissions.
The move comes after a state commission on accountability last year found “a concerning degree of general public distrust and confusion focused on TCEQ,” and the Texas Legislature adopted directives this year instructing the TCEQ to transparently review and approve “foundational policy decisions” that had never been publicly approved, including “the acceptable level of health-based risk” used in pollution permitting.
In response, TCEQ proposed, without public hearings or additional study, to formalize its existing target cancer risk level of 1 in 100,000, meaning that only one excess case of cancer among 100,000 similarly exposed people would result from each individual pollutant from each individually permitted site.
The agency has been using that risk level since 2006, said a TCEQ spokesman, Richard Richter. He said TCEQ’s target “is reasonable from a regulatory perspective and is protective of human health.” It “insignificantly contributes to an individual’s lifetime cancer risk,” he said.
But by looking at each site and chemical separately, scientists and public health officials say, the assessment method drastically under-represents the actual risks faced by communities situated near industrial complexes, like the great conglomerations of fuming refineries and chemical plants that dot the Texas coast.
“TCEQ should be proactive and change their cancer risk to protect individuals living in high risk communities,” wroteLatrice Babin, executive director of Harris County Pollution Control Services, in official comments. She asked for a target risk level of one in 1 million.
“TCEQ is scrambling to adopt work from nearly 20 years ago with no analysis,” wrote a coalition of Texas environmental groups led by Air Alliance Houston.
The City of Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city and home to its largest petrochemical complex, has also asked the TCEQto tighten standards. Bill Kelly, Houston’s director of government relations, said TCEQ should “absolutely” lower its target cancer risk level.
Richter did not respond to a request for interviews with TCEQ’s politically appointed leadership, but said that the agency, to satisfy the Legislature’s directives on public participation, sent its proposal for a target risk rate, along with instructions on filing comments, to more than 3,300 email addresses on its toxicology listserv, which goes to subscribers from both industry and the general public. The proposal also appeared Sept. 1 on page 182 of the Texas Register, a weekly journal of state agency rulemaking.
In response, the TCEQ received more than 200 official comments asking the agency to lower its target risk level to one in 1 million. Just one response came in support of its proposed risk level: the Texas Chemical Council, a chemical industry lobbying group, wrote, “the proposed level is protective of public health.”
Target Risk Levels
The target risk level helps determine the volumes of carcinogenic emissions that industrial operators are allowed to release in Texas, seat of the nation’s oil, gas and petrochemical industry.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets the upper limit of cancer risk level from permitted air pollution at 1 in 10,000, and sets a target level at 1 in 1 million. Richter called the TCEQ’s target rate the “logarithmic center” of that range, and said it allows ample space for corrective action before permitted pollution sources exceed the EPA’s upper limit for cancer risk.
He said the agency has used its target risk level since 2006 when it formalized its guidelines for toxicity standards. Those guidelines attribute the figure to standards set by California in 1986. Those guidelines also produced a broad loosening of air pollution health standards in Texas, according to a 2014 investigation by Inside Climate News and the Center for Public Integrity.
Richter pointed to a 2010 survey of state air permitting policy by Michigan’s environmental regulator, which found that 20 U.S. states didn’t evaluate cancer-causing “air toxics” when permitting new pollution sources. Of the 28 that did, 14 states used target risk levels to set limits. Eight used 1 in 1 million, including California. Just one, Louisiana, used the upper end —1 in 10,000.
Two, Texas and Minnesota, used 1 in 100,000. (Georgia and Rhode Island used 1 in 1 million for some toxins and 1 in 100,000 for others.)
Cumulative Impacts of Pollution
That figure doesn’t represent the target cancer risk for entire states. It’s the target cancer risk resulting from each individual pollutant from each individually permitted facility. Where many facilities emit chemicals across vast industrial landscapes, scientists say, all those supposedly insignificant contributions can add up — or even multiply when they interact.
“These numbers often underestimate the true risk,” said Tracey Woodruff, director of the Environmental Research and Translation for Health Center at the University of California San Francisco.
That’s why, scientists say, tighter standards are needed to account for the cumulative impacts of pollution that disproportionately impact underserved and vulnerable populations.
“The old way of doing things is to look at one pollutant at a time, one emissions source at a time, but in reality no one is exposed to one pollutant at a time,” said Jill Johnston, director of the Environmental Justice Research Lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “There’s been a shift in moving towards cumulative risk characterization.”
The science isn’t new, said Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant in Louisiana who studied cumulative impacts of air pollution for the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council in the early 1990s. But it has been difficult to incorporate into air permitting.
“Sometimes you have 20, 30, 40 or more chemicals, some of which have standards and some of which do not, all in the air and crossing the fenceline,” she said. “You can make statements that each of these chemicals are meeting the standard in the air, and you just ignore the cumulative impacts.”
TCEQ guidelines say the agency assesses cumulative risks from pollution in accordance with state and federal law. But outside experts say that’s not always what happens.
“Right now when it comes to air toxics, TCEQ looks at one air contaminant, one site. Each air contaminant is evaluated on its own coming from one site,” said one air permitting consultant who used to work for the TCEQ and requested anonymity to preserve his business relationship with the agency. “If you’re only looking at benzene at just one site, but you’re surrounded by refineries that have a high concentration of benzene liquids being stored, that may not be a comprehensive view.”
The mixture of different pollutants can drastically increase toxicity, according to Dr. Bruce Lanphear, a clinician scientist at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital and a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
The effect has been shown with tobacco, which is relatively easy to study, Lanphear said. Smoking tobacco can increase a person’s risk for lung cancer by a factor of 10, while exposure to arsenic can increase the risk by a factor of two. But the combination of smoking and arsenic exposure has been shown to increase risk by a factor of 25.
“There is a big multiplicative risk because you have two toxic pollutants that magnify the effect of each other,” he said. “That’s got huge implications if you’ve got lots of different chemical plants in a place like Houston.”
A playground at San Jacinto Elementary School, located in Deer Park a few miles from the highly industrialized Houston Ship Channel. On March 31, 2019, air quality inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency recorded extremely high levels of benzene in the air as they drove past the elementary school. Residents were not warned about the pollution present in the community that day. | Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune / Public Health Watch.
With tobacco users, he said, it’s easy to measure individuals’ exposure and compare that with non-smokers. For the plethora of industrial air pollutants, gauging exposure and effects is much more complicated — and studying their combinations is even more so.
“It’s challenging, but the regulatory agencies should be doing it,” he said.
A Tradeoff of Costs
Short of modeling cumulative impacts for every new permit, agencies can lower their target levels to acknowledge that cumulative effects generally raise the overall cancer risk from emissions, scientists say.
The EPA’s risk assessment framework for air toxics permitting calls for “an ample margin of safety to protect public health.”
“I prefer a target risk of 1 in a million,” said David Ozonoff, chair emeritus for environmental health at Boston University.
When the cumulative effects of pollution are poorly understood, Ozonoff said, erring toward caution “is more in line with public health philosophy.” But it comes with an additional financial burden to the businesses that need air pollution permits to operate.
“The cost of more protection might be in terms of profits or jobs while the cost of less protection is in lives and suffering,” Ozonoff said. “The costs and the benefits usually accrue to different groups of people. One group gets the benefits and another group pays the costs.”
In Texas, public health advocates call the costs a reasonable burden to place on big industry, especially with major operators like ExxonMobil, which runs one the nation’s largest pollution sources east of Houston and posted a record $56 billion profit last year.
“I can’t throw trash over my fenceline. Why can industry throw trash over its fenceline?” said Jen Powis, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s gulf regional office in Houston. “Industry has the financing and the dollars to make it less with pollution control equipment.”
In their comments requesting a lower target risk level, the Texas environmental groups said TCEQ had not “provided any evidence that this would be cost prohibitive to applicants across the broad range of air permitting programs.”
The Texas Chemical Council, in its comments, said it “commends the TCEQ for its consideration of risk/benefit tradeoffs in establishing its [target risk levels] which make levels achievable.”
‘A Concerning Degree of General Public Distrust’
The standard is up for discussion in Texas because Texas Sunset Commission, which reviews each state agency every 12 years, found in its 2022 report on TCEQ “a concerning degree of general public distrust and confusion focused on TCEQ and its ability to effectively regulate in the public interest.”
Distrust, the report said, stemmed from a lack of transparency and of opportunities for public input. Many of TCEQ’s core policies, like its target cancer risk level tucked into its 347-page toxicology guidelines, are encoded in lengthy scientific documents that had never been publicly approved.
“This scientific information must ultimately be transformed into regulatory standards,” the report said. “Deciding the acceptable level of exposure and effects on the public… is a policy decision that governs what facilities may be built, what technology they must employ, and what level of safety monitoring must occur.”
It recommended that TCEQ “affirmatively and publicly adopt these policies” and “provide opportunities for the public to make comments before the commission on what those standards should be.” The Legislature adopted the recommendation as a directive this year.
Carolyn Stone, a 62-year-old community advocate who lives nearby Houston’s industrial sector and regularly engages with the TCEQ, didn’t find out about the proposed cancer risk level until late September, when local environmental groups began to spread the word. Her area of Channelview is in the 94th percentile of cancer risk from air pollution nationally according to EPA screening tools.
Stone, a retired office worker who runs a group called Channelview Health and Improvement Coaltion, said, “TCEQ has not sent me a flyer notifying me. And you would think that as a community in that high of a percentile, we would have been some of the very first they’d attempt to notify.”
The omission didn’t surprise her. She has lived in Channelview since 1981 and persistent frustration with environmental regulators finally moved her to start her group in 2019. In public meetings with the TCEQ, Stone has told the regulators that pollution from nearby facilities harms locals’ health, and she’s asked them to require better pollution control technology on applications for new pollution permits in the area.
“Their response is basically that the companies ran their tests and according to their tests, their actions won’t be above the limits,” she said. “I really haven’t had any positive interactions with TCEQ, I’m thoroughly disappointed in them.”
Alejandra Martinez of The Texas Tribune contributed to this report.
The Martinez Refining Company’s manager told the Martinez City Council on Wednesday operators were unaware last Thanksgiving’s release of spent catalyst was affecting the outside community until the next day, and the refinery held off notifying authorities until it could assess whether the release was harmful. NBC Bay Area’s Jodi Hernandez reports. Click the “play” arrow icon to play the video on the page.
The Martinez Refining Company’s manager told the Martinez City Council on Wednesday operators were unaware last Thanksgiving’s release of spent catalyst was affecting the outside community until the next day, and the refinery held off notifying authorities until it could assess whether the release was harmful.
Refinery manager Daniel Ingram apologized and told the council the company has taken numerous corrective actions to make sure the events of last Thanksgiving weekend don’t happen again.
The refinery released an estimated 20 to 24 tons of “spent catalyst” into the surrounding community from about 9:30 p.m. Nov. 24 until the following morning, when residents found their yards and vehicles covered in metallic dust.
The refinery failed to alert the county health department and the community warning system, both of which are legally mandated within 15 minutes of a release.
County health officials didn’t find out about the release until the following Saturday when alerted to social media posts about the dust.
Martinez Refining Company (MRC). | Anda Chu / Bay Area News Group.
Ingram told the council the delay was at least partially because refinery officials were unaware there was a community impact until the next day, when contacted by a community member. Then they were busy trying to ascertain whether the release was harmful.
Ingram said the refinery has since “adjusted our procedures” so it notifies outside authorities as soon as the slightest measure of a release is noted.
“The moment that alarm goes off, we’re making that notification immediately,” Ingram said.
Initial testing of the Thanksgiving release showed the dust contained elevated levels of aluminum, barium, chromium, nickel, vanadium and zinc, all of which can cause respiratory problems.
Ingram said the refinery has taken 11 specific corrective actions: two associated with equipment, six associated with refinery procedures, and three associated with better training.
As an example, the unit in which the Thanksgiving problem occurred was coming back online after being in a “hot standby mode.”
Bringing it back online was a manual task controlled by an individual who was handling multiple control points. Now more of the process is automatic and, if there’s a problem, the process must be stopped sooner.
Ingram also addressed three smaller releases of “coke dust” incidents that have occurred since July. Coke dust is a byproduct of oil refining. The first release, on July 11, lasted less than a minute and created steam with coke dust, which was carried into the community by wind.
The second release was on July 22 and was contained on-site. The third release happened Oct. 6 and was termed by refinery officials as “brief” in a unit that has since been taken offline. Nevertheless, all three incidents are still being investigated. But Ingram pointed out that, under the refinery’s new procedures, the refinery notified the health department and the community immediately.
Ingram said internal investigations have prompted procedural corrections to have been made, as well as started new ‘red tag” safety drills, going through various emergency scenarios to respond better in the future.
“We do sincerely apologize to our neighbors and the community for these incidents. And I know that actions speak louder than words … we are working overtime right now to investigate thoroughly each and every of these incidents and come up with the appropriate corrective actions that address the root causes of these incidents.”
Ingram talked about the refinery’s new “Goal 0” safety policy, which refers to zero safety incidents as a cultural goal of the company. He said everyone at the refinery is dedicated to Goal 0.
“We know we have to earn the right to operate in the community that hosts us, and we are very, very disappointed that we have failed to do that,” he said.
Ingram said the refinery has implemented new mandatory safety training and has expanded its environmental safety staff, hiring new senior environmental engineers and 20 new operators. He also said he will return to give the council regular monthly updates.
The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office is investigating MRC for failing to notify authorities of the Thanksgiving release. The Board of Supervisors put together an oversight committee, including residents from affected areas, to investigate the cause and whether the release increased risk of community health problems. [Emph. added by BenIndy.]
[Note from BenIndy: Both the Biden administration and Big Oil have been touting carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), sometimes called carbon dumping, as a way to address the climate crisis. However, many climate scientists and activists are seriously concerned about CCS’s sudden surge to the forefront of the climate conversation. Why are oil giants like Valero teaming up with BlackRock-funded concerns to build pipelines across America? Could it have anything to do with the billions of dollars in tax breaks on the table? On Friday, November 3, at 12 pm, Scientists Speak Up (a Stanford student group working to combat science misinformation) are hosting a discussion about CCS, how it actually supports oil and gas production as well as the chilling impact Big Oil and the Biden administration’s fixation on CCS could have on exploring more innovative or aggressive tech and mitigation. Finally, the discussion will touch on Big Oil’s disturbing, ever-growing influence in academic research. Click here to learn more about how to attend this important conversation and we will include a link with an event flyer at the end of this post. (The BenIndy was not asked to promote this event and is not affiliated with Scientists Speak Up in any way. We just thought the event looked very interesting and timely given a looming proposal to install a CCS pipeline in Solano County.)]
Carbon capture pipeline nixed after widespread opposition
A sign against a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline outside a home in New Liberty, Iowa, US, on Sunday, June 4, 2023. The Biden administration is all-in on carbon capture and storage. But the pipelines needed to move the greenhouse gas around face stiff local opposition. | Miriam Alarcon Avila for Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Navigator CO₂ says regulatory hurdles are too much to overcome.
A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners.
Navigator CO₂ on Friday said developing its carbon capture and storage (CCS) project called Heartland Greenway had been “challenging” because of the unpredictable nature of regulatory and government processes in South Dakota and Iowa.
Navigator’s decision to scrap its flagship $3.1 billion project—one of the biggest of its kind in the US—is a blow for a fledgling industry that is an important part of President Joe Biden’s climate strategy. CCS projects attempt to lock carbon underground for decades, preventing it from adding to heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere.
It also represents a setback for the carbon-intensive corn ethanol refining industry, a pillar of the rural Midwestern economy which is targeting industry-scale CCS as a way to reduce emissions.
Navigator’s project would have laid pipelines across five US states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois—to collect CO₂ from ethanol and fertilizer plants and pipe the gas to an underground storage site in Illinois.
It was backed by several deep-pocketed investors, including BlackRock, US oil refiner Valero Energy and Poet, a top US biofuel refiner. [Emph. added by BenIndy.]
Matt Vining, Navigator’s chief executive, said: “As good stewards of capital and responsible managers of people, we have made the difficult decision to cancel the Heartland Greenway project.”
Heartland Greenway is part of a wave of CCS projects aiming to tap into billions of dollars in tax breaks available under the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law signed by Biden last year. The incentives aim to help companies build carbon capture infrastructure, which has not yet proven it is commercially viable on a large scale.
You must be logged in to post a comment.