A slow-motion ecological disaster is unfolding in Porter Ranch, California, an affluent Los Angeles suburb.

A massive natural gas leak at the Southern California Gas Aliso Canyon storage field has led California Governor Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency in the area and hundreds of residents have been forced to evacuate.

The main ingredient of natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than CO2. Since the beginning of the disaster, the leak has released about 77 million kilograms of methane into the atmosphere.

“It is a methane disaster,” says Anthony Ingraffea, a civil and environmental engineer at Cornell University. “When the final count of dollars and lives impacted is assessed, it will be similar to what we had in the Macondo [Deepwater Horizon] disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. ... Luckily, at this point, no one has been killed. So in terms of deaths, it's insignificant compared to Macondo. But in terms of environmental impact on the daily lives of thousands of people and cost, we're talking about many, many, many billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars when all is said and done here.”

The leak resulted from the failure of one of the steel pipes, or casings, that line the well. The rupture allowed gas under very high pressure — roughly 2,700 pounds per inch or more — to escape and to make its way directly into the rock formation surrounding the well, Ingraffea explains.

“It found a path through the rock formation, through cracks, faults and joints and is escaping not from the surface at the well head, but from the surface away from the well head, literally out in a field,” he says.

The amount of methane being released varies according to how it is measured and who is doing the measuring. According to Ingraffea, the leak has so far released about 120,000 total tons of natural gas, or about 1,200 tons of natural gas per day.

“That’s about one-quarter of the state of California's monthly methane emissions from all sources,” he says. “Or, if you want to put it on a national basis, that's about 15 percent of the hourly methane emissions in the entire oil and gas industry in the United States.”

Up to now, efforts by SoCalGas and the experts assisting them have made the situation more precarious than it was when the leak first began, according to some reports. Earlieer this month, California state regulators halted a plan to capture and burn the leaking gas, citing the risk of a “catastrophic” explosion.

The next best method of stopping the leak — drilling a relief well 1.6 miles below ground — will take at least six weeks to complete.

There are hundreds of natural gas storage facilities around the country, many of them aging and in danger of similar problems, Ingraffea says. Each storage facility has tens, sometimes hundreds, of wells of the type now leaking in Aliso Canyon.

Most of these wells are over 60 years old and were never designed to last that long, Ingraffea says. They were designed to produce oil or gas for a few decades and then be plugged and taken out of service. But in the 1970s, many of the wells were repurposed as access wells to a storage reservoir.

“As Paul Simon used to say, ‘Everything put together sooner or later falls apart’ — especially if it’s underground,” Ingraffea says. “I have no doubt, given my professional experience, that the casing that ruptured experienced some corrosion. So, what we're seeing here is what the industry knows: an increasing rate of such problems. So you can call this the proverbial tip of the iceberg, since there are tens of thousands of such wells.”

Ingraffea strongly disagrees with the argument that expanding natural gas production around the world will help address the threat of climate disruption.

“That's an absolutely incorrect, unscientific assessment,” he insists. “All of the latest peer-reviewed scientific literature indicates that if the leakage of methane — natural gas — into the atmosphere worldwide is greater than about three percent of the total production of natural gas in the world, it's the dirtiest of all fossil fuels.”

All the peer-reviewed literature published in the last few years shows that in the US alone, the leak rate is greater than three percent, he points out.

What’s more, since the US leak rate is probably on the low end of the scale, we “can only surmise what the leak rate of methane would be in other countries where there is not such tight regulatory control,” he points out.

“So, no, I do not in any way, means or form, ascribe to, believe or buy into the notion of natural gas being a bridge fuel or a down-ramp to a clean renewable energy future. It's scientific nonsense,” Ingraffea concludes. “People in the industry know it. People in the scientific community know it. Unfortunately, our political leaders have to make decisions based on something other than science.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

Parents in Brazil are nervous.

There's an increase in microcephaly, a condition when babies are born with unusually small heads. And the increase is being linked to a surge in cases of Zika.

But what exactly is Zika?

"It's related, quite distantly, to yellow fever virus," says virus researcher Derek Gatherer at Lancaster University in England. "Zika was also discovered in Uganda in 1947 in the great lakes region. But there we no reports of any serious illness associated with it."

He says the interest in Zika was so low that no case studies had appeared in the tropical medicine literature from 1947 onward to 2008.

Mosquitos spread Zika. And the classic symptoms are a relatively mild fever and muscle aches. "But in all of the classic cases, until the turn of the millennium, it always resolves successfully and no patients had ever died."

That's not the case in Brazil, where at least five people have died from Zika. Gatherer says it's serious, but still not that deadly when you consider there are 1.3 million case of Zika. "It might represent an indication that Zika is becoming more virulent," he says.

But what's caused real concern — and a CDC travel warning — is the disease's possible connection to the birth defect of microcephaly.

And while Gatherer says nothing is absolutely proven, "I think it would be unlikely if it's not proven to be connected, given what we've seen so far."

Brazilian health authorities announced Wednesday that nearly 4,000 babies have been born with microcephaly since they started tracking the problem in October. That’s compared to fewer than 150 cases in all of 2014.

On Thursday, a new danger from Zika surfaced: paralysis. The New York Times disease specialists in Brazil as saying the virus may cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which a person’s immune system attacks part of the nervous system. It is potentially life threatening.

Though Zika outbreaks have occurred elsewhere, the noted association with microcephaly has been new, perhaps because the number of cases during previous outbreaks in places like Micronesia and New Caledonia have been much smaller.

Viruses like dengue fever have been known to pass from pregnant mothers to fetuses, but it’s not yet clear if and how the Zika virus enters the placenta and damages the brains of babies.

The outbreak of Zika and microcephaly is centered in the drought-prone northeastern region of the country, where residents store water in outdoor reservoirs and containers to prepare for periodic water shutoffs. These areas provide ample breeding grounds for the mosquitos that spread Zika.

There is concern, however, that when the rainy season begins in February, the epidemic will spread to the more heavily populated areas around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. 

Currently, Brazilian scientists are trying to better understand virus transmission, speed up the development of a Zika vaccine and come up with a new testing kit.

Public health prevention efforts in Brazil are focused on reducing standing water where mosquitos lay their eggs. 

The army has been called in to Sao Paulo and other states to accompany health workers as they visit homes to identify and remove standing water, and public service announcements are airing on TV and radio. In some areas, mosquito breeding areas are being dosed with insecticides.

In the Brazilian city of Sao Carlos, 18,000 school children are being trained to check homes for mosquito larvae, according to project coordinator Caio Freire.

National authorities are reminding visitors to use insect repellent and long sleeves to avoid mosquito bites.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US last week recommended pregnant women consider postponing travel to Brazil and other countries where Zika transmission is ongoing, including Guatemala, Mexico, Panama and the US territory of Puerto Rico. 

So, what about that ninth planet?

Pluto, you’ll recall, was demoted to a dwarf planet because it's so small. But now a couple of scientists at the California Institute of Technology are on to what they think really IS a companion to Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

CalTech astronomer Mike Brown says he and planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin are on the cusp of a discovery, “What we think we've seen is that the very outer edge of our solar system is being pushed around by something else out there and that something else we think is the real ninth planet, this massive thing that's pushing everything around out there.”

Batygin says it's kind of like hearing a siren somewhere in the distance. You can't tell if it’s an ambulance or a fire truck, and you can't say exactly which street it's coming from. “So it’s kind of the cosmic version of that , we have a very distinct ‘echo’ that we're hearing, we have this gravitational signature of a distant planet but we haven't seen it yet and the hunt is on to detect it astronomically.”

So these planetary scientists haven't actually observed Planet 9 through a telescope. They've found evidence, that "gravitational signature," as Batygin calls it.

The suspect fits this description: “Our computer models suggest that its mass is close to 10X the mass of the earth, so it’s quite a substantial planet, its orbit is exceptionally wide, its closest pass swings in at around 250X the distance between the Earth and the Sun, at its most distant it sits at around 1,000X this distance, so it has an exceptionally elongated, long period, orbit."

Planet 9 appears to be in our solar system because there’s evidence that it’s held in orbit by the Sun's gravitational pull, “It holds it in orbit, so it goes around the sun. ... even though it seems so far away to us, it's well within the solar system. It’s inside the Oort Cloud where comets live, so its far away for us but it's a very typical distance.”

If the researchers are correct, Planet 9 would put its nearest neighbor, Pluto to shame.

Caltech professor Mike Brown and assistant professor Konstanin Batygin.

 

 

Credit:

Lance Hayashida/Caltech

“I mean this is a totally different category of object. This thing is quite literally 5,000 times the mass of Pluto, so Planet 9 feels no insecurity in being compared with Pluto.”

Brown and Batygin have been poring over their data and testing their hypothesis for more than two years. But then something crystalized recently, says Brown, “There was one moment when I looked at the data we had and our computer simulations and calculations and suddenly it went from a kind of fun idea that might be true, to the moment where I actually believed it and at that moment I think my jaw hit the floor.”

So it's potentially an amazing discovery. But some NASA scientists have already said they need more proof before they welcome Planet 9 into the family.

Batygin and Brown actually welcome that scepticism. Batygin says they published their findings in the Astronomical Journal to try and get other astronomers looking up in space to help spot the planet.

“We could have kept quiet and sort of looked for this thing ourselves, and in principal we'd love to find it but it would be better if Planet 9 was discovered sooner than later rather so as a result we decided to go forward with our theoretical prediction and kind of lay out, 'Here’s the prediction of the orbit, this is where you go look in the sky to find Planet 9.'”

He adds that there’s historical precedence for this kind predicted discovery. “Neptune was calculated before it was discovered astronomically, so we feel like we’re in somewhat good company with mathematicians of the 18th century.”

“This is really the start of the search, the amazing moment will come when it’s really found,” says Brown, “but now I think everybody is at the starting line and the gun has gone off and it’s a race to see who can see it for the first time.”

That gives the rest of us the time to try and come up with name that's more original than Planet 9. As Konstantin Batygin put it, "Something as dramatic as a planet should be named by society as a whole, not by a couple of guys in southern California who are sitting around and drinking coffee."

C'mon everybody — start thinking!

Readers, what would you call Planet 9? Let us know in our comments section. Early suggestions on Twitter include David Bowie, John Lennon and William Henry Harrison (the ninth president). We're adding Curie, for Marie Curie, just because.

The Los Angeles River has once again come to life, supercharged with rainwater. Freeways have flooded. And California’s Sierra Nevada mountains — the so-called “snowy mountains” — are living up to their name.

This is all thanks to the huge ocean-atmosphere event Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert is calling a “Godzilla El Niño.”

“There’s a lot of excitement. It’s been pretty sweet,” Patzert says. “This El Niño has been building for more than a year now, and ... it's finally come to fruition here in California where we did see a series of storms almost like a conveyor belt and we had our first really good soaking in almost five years.”

The big question a lot of people are asking is whether or not a “Godzilla El Niño” can solve the massive drought that has been crippling California for the past four years. After all, El Niño is affecting more than California. The entire southern tier of the United States from California to Florida has been blasted with a series of storms, and the northern tier of the US has been getting relatively milder, warmer weather.

“Mudslides in Los Angeles and golfing in Minneapolis,” Patzert jokes. 

Up in the Sierra Nevadas, snow hydrologist Tom Painter has been measuring the snow pack and says more should be on the way.

“We're pretty confident,” Painter says, “Statistically, it should produce the big storms that we're hoping for, that will really make it leap up above average conditions ... usually our peak is around April 1, but this conveyor belt of storms can continue on out through the spring.”

Patzert, however, says that while El Nino is bringing a lot of much-needed water to the West Coast, it’s not going to put an end to the drought. 

“This is what I call the down payment on a drought with a huge mortgage to pay off,” Patzert says. “Big El Niños only happen every 15 to 20 years. So when you look over the long haul, El Niños only supply about seven percent of our water supply, so it will take more than that to get us out of this punishing drought.”

Painter agrees.

“It can be towering amounts of snow and hugely beneficial for recharging the aquifers, for getting the ground water back toward where we need it,” Painter says. “But we've got a long way to go. We need a lot of precipitation to bring us back not only for the groundwater, but also for the the reservoirs and the ecosystems themselves. We've lost an enormous amount of the forests in the Sierra Nevada simply because of this ongoing drought and the intensity of that drought.”

Patzert says that, while the El Niño is exciting for drought-stricken California, people are going to have to get used to the idea that California’s water problems are a long-term issue that are going to take a long time to solve. 

“The population in California has quadrupled in the last half century,” Patzert says, “Agriculture has expanded and a whole series of new industries have developed. So people forget that half of this drought is too many people using too much water in a semi-arid environment. But the good news is we've developed a lot of conservation habits here during this drought and people should not forget that is not temporary. That is the new lifestyle or we’ll be talking about drought forever.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.

I’ve been trying to interview the Environmental Protection Agency's Miguel Del Toral since early July, 2015, when a copy of his interim report on high lead levels in Flint, Michigan's water landed in my inbox.

His report was the first time any official had publicly implied that there could be a serious lead problem in Flint's water. But back then, because the report wasn’t finalized, the EPA wouldn’t talk about it with the media.

Behind the scenes, Del Toral’s boss, EPA’s Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman, apologized about the way the report was leaked to the press. On Jan. 21, Hedman announced she’d submitted her resignation.

“The preliminary draft report should not have been released outside the agency,” Hedman wrote to then-Flint Mayor Dayne Walling after the ACLU’s investigative reporter, Curt Guyette, asked city officials about it. The report was a “preliminary draft” she wrote, adding, “it would be premature to draw any conclusions based on that draft.”

The draft report details hazardous waste levels of lead in Flint resident Lee Anne Walters’ home. In it, Del Toral raises serious red flags about the lack of corrosion control treatment, something that’s required under federal rules.

These days, Del Toral says he hasn’t been keeping up with all the national news headlines about Flint. Since October, he’s been busy working with a water task force to help resolve Flint’s water problems.

Del Toral was first alerted to Flint’s water problems last spring, when Walters called the EPA to complain about high levels of lead in her tap water and warn officials that her child had been diagnosed with lead poisoning.

Del Toral followed up with Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, asking about corrosion control treatment in Flint. Emails show that in February 2015, DEQ staff told Del Toral Flint had a corrosion control program.

But Walters found out from city reports that Flint was not using any corrosion control treatment. This treatment helps prevent lead and other heavy metals from leaching from old pipes into drinking water. Walters called Del Toral right away, and let him know.

“Even though she had told me that, in my head, I was thinking that’s not possible. That’s, you know, I couldn’t believe that was true,” Del Toral says, “I thought there was a misunderstanding here or some kind of miscommunication.”

But Del Toral and Walters had lots of conversations that spring. Walters wanted to get to the bottom of the water problems at her house. She wanted to understand what was going on, Del Toral recalled.

“In getting to know [Walters] and getting to know how quickly she was picking things up and the information she was providing was accurate I thought I better look into this,” he says.

Lee Anne Walters with her son Garrett outside of her home in Flint, Michigan.

Credit:

Sarah Hulett/Michigan Radio

So he started digging for more information, asking the DEQ again what kind of corrosion control treatment Flint was using. DEQ finally acknowledged that there was no treatment in place.

He stopped short of saying the DEQ lied to him about corrosion control.

“I don’t know what anyone’s intention is so I can’t assign intent. But clearly they did not have treatment in place,” he says.

“I was pretty stunned,” he adds.

Del Toral visited Walters' home in April, to help set up a more thorough test of the water.

“I’d received a call that the lead was coming from her plumbing in the house and that she needed to hire a plumber to take care of that,” he says. Older homes can have lead plumbing. But Walters explained to him that she had to replace all the plumbing in the home before her family moved in.

“When I got there I took a look at that and, in fact, it was all plastic. The valves, the pipes, the fittings, the couplings, couple of minor brass connectors, but nothing that would produce the level of lead that we found,” he says.

The levels of lead that Del Toral and Virginia Tech’s Marc Edwards found in Walters home were incredibly high. One test registered more than 13,000 parts per billion; almost three times as much as what the EPA classifies as hazardous waste.

Lead levels at the Walters’ home were the highest Del Toral had ever seen.

“The numbers were pretty staggering. I mean, that just, those numbers just blew my mind. I couldn’t believe them,” he says.

It turns out Walters' water service line was unusually long. Instead of connecting to the water main in front of her home, it stretched down to another street.

But Del Toral noted something I had not known before: That those tests were done about three weeks after the city had shut Walters water off. The city had used garden hoses to connect her home with safer water through her neighbors' home. So Del Toral says the water that had thousands of parts per billions of lead had likely been pooling in that old pipe for a few weeks.

Before Del Toral drafted the interim report that first alerted the media to the EPA’s concerns, he and others within the federal agency, met via conference calls with state environmental regulators. The EPA insisted corrosion control treatment was required. But state officials disagreed, saying they needed time to assess Flint’s new water source first.

“There were no surprises in that memo,” Del Toral says. “Obviously, we had talked about all the issues with [the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality]."

It appears no one told DEQ’s then-spokesman Brad Wurfel. In emails, Wurfel asked staff to tell him about the report.

The next day, Wurfel started our recorded interview this way: “Let me start here – anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax,” Wurfel says back in July.

With word from EPA officials that the interim report should not have been released and was not finalized, Wurfel went on to call Del Toral a “rogue employee.” Wurfel has since resigned from his position.  

“It was pretty shocking to see some of these things” reported in the media, Del Toral says.

“Looking at them in hindsight, people maybe didn’t understand, is the only thing I can think of. Because clearly if you did understand, first of all, it’s just inconceivable that somebody would not require the [corrosion control] treatment in the first place. So that was kind of the biggest shock if you will. Following some of that, the statements, it just, it was really surprising to see a government agency saying the things that they were saying, I guess,” he says.

Del Toral says he did get some pushback within the EPA for releasing the report. But he says the agency’s main concern wasn’t that he gave it to Walters, who requested a copy. The concerns were mainly over erroneous reports that Del Toral had given it directly to the media. In fact, Walters gave it to the ACLU’s Curt Guyette, who eventually forwarded it to Michigan Radio.

In Michigan Radio’s documentary about the Flint water crisis, Guyette praised Del Toral as a hero, who leaked the report over fears that Flint’s residents were unknowingly being exposed to lead in their water.

Having worked on lead regulations since the early 1990s, Del Toral says there was some truth to that.

“I saw what was coming, and I guess the inability to affect that was really stressful,” Del Toral says. He knew DEQ wasn’t going to require Flint to implement proper treatment for some time, if at all. He wanted the report to spur some urgency.

“I thought that [the report] was going out. I [copied] all the state folks to keep them in the loop as well... I had expected that it would go out. It was an interim report that I did expect to be shared,” he says.

But Del Toral doesn’t think he’s a hero.

“If there was a hero it was Lee Anne [Walters],” he says. “This wasn’t affecting her family anymore. They had stopped drinking the water. She could have just sat at home and she didn’t. She kept calling me, asking for information throughout."

This story was originally published by Michigan Radio.

Only a couple of weeks remain before the nation’s first presidential primary election in New Hampshire and Republican candidates are campaigning heavily in a vital effort to sway voters. On the stump, they are fielding questions from voters about climate change and energy policy.

Here are a few of the questions voters are asking — and what a few of the candidates are saying.

First, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush:

QUESTION: Governor, the next president of the United States is going to have to deal with the Paris climate accord. What would you do to implement or push back on that?

BUSH: I don't have the details of what the president committed to. He doesn't have the authority to do it. If he did, he would, once again, create a treaty which would be enforceable. ... Climate change in general is something that I think we all should be concerned about. The climate is changing. The good news is that our carbon footprint has actually been reduced by 10 percent in the last decade, is flat in the last 25 years, even though we have an increasing population. We should be proud of that.

And there are other things we can do as it relates to conservation and continued use of natural gas and things like that that would help in this regard. And ultimately, there will be renewables that will be more dominant than they are today. But to raise prices, to lose jobs, to deindustrialize the country, to create less economic activity, I don't think is the solution. So, where I diverge from the president's approach is most of his approach is going to create higher costs on consumers and higher costs on businesses and I don't think we need to do that.

Ohio Governor John Kasich had this to say at a campaign event:

QUESTION: I read that 75 percent of Americans acknowledge that climate change is real, and I'm just wondering, with the same scientific consensus behind climate change as evolution and gravity, why do you think lots of Republicans deny this basic science?

KASICH: I have an opinion why they do that, but I'm not going to tell you because it's not good. ... I can't tell you how they think, but I can tell you what I think. I think that human beings do affect the climate. And I'm a big supporter of solar and wind and geothermal and efficiency, but I want all of the different sources. I saw Seabrook today ... I'm for nuclear too. I mean, I'm for all of this.

I think there is something to climate change, but I think we have to take our time to have remedies, and the remedies are things like efficiency and solar and wind. And I think the other part of it is, let's not go so fast that we throw this kid out of work or this gentleman out of work. It's got to be a balance between a good environment and economic growth, which we can achieve. If we work at it, you can achieve it. You don't want to worship the environment, but we have an obligation to protect it.

I've had a little battle with my legislature over the issue of renewables. They tend to think it's subsidized, it's a government program and all that. Well, you know what? We have to develop these things. So I just have a little different view of what we should do in that area, and we have to be careful about it.

Senator Marco Rubio was more voluble on the subject:

QUESTION: 80 percent of wind energy in the country is installed in Republican represented districts and it's creating jobs right now for people across the country where the economy is struggling. What will you do to make sure there are more clean energy jobs and more clean energy leaders here in America?

RUBIO: Well, first, I would say to you that I want us to lead the world in everything. Let's be number one in wind, and number one in solar, and number one in biofuels, and number one in renewables, number one in energy efficiency. Let's lead in all of these things. All I'm saying is, there's no way we're not going to do oil and natural gas. God has blessed this nation with these resources. It would be reckless and irresponsible to not fully utilize all of our energy resources.

I'm not going to interfere in the marketplace. The market's going to decide which one of these would do more than others. What we need to do is to make sure everything is fair, and we will. Under my tax plan, every business will be treated the same. All of these carve-outs that some energy sectors have gotten versus others, we'll get rid of all of them. Every company, every single energy company, every firm in America, for example, will have the exact same tax rate, a flat rate of 25 percent, not 35 percent, which is the highest combined corporate tax rate in the world…

Second, you're going to be able to immediately expense every penny you put into that business. You build a wind farm, you're going to be able to get your money back off of your taxes that very year, fully, just like any other business would be able to do.

We are going to create an even playing field, and then the rest is up to the private sector. The rest is up to the American innovator and the American investor and they're going to go out and create this opportunity. They're the ones that are going to go and create these jobs, and I believe if we do that, then we are going to lead the world in all of these energy resources. Because I want us to have a true, all-of-the-above strategy, the most diverse energy portfolio possible. And one does not have to come at the exclusion of another. We can do them all, and we will.

QUESTION: Senator, I'm a lifetime New Hampshire hunter. Do you know our moose population has shrunk dramatically in New Hampshire as our winters have shortened. The Gulf of Maine is warm, the cod population has diminished, and even your home state of Florida is under threat from the rising sea. We need to somehow cut carbon and reduce climate change. Would you help save our moose by working aggressively?

RUBIO: I’m all for saving the moose, but I'm not going to destroy our economy. Our president and others are asking us to pass laws that will do nothing to change any of the things you just mentioned. They admit it. They say, ‘These laws won't change anything, but it's a start.’ Meanwhile, China and India are burning as much coal as they can get their hands on and they're growing their economy rapidly.

Go ask the experts how many degrees of global warming will this bring down. ‘Oh, probably not much,’ [they say]. What will it do to the rising sea if we pass the law you want? ‘Well, nothing at least for 100 years,’ [they answer]. And then I ask the economists, ‘What will this do to our economy?’ ‘Oh, it will do harm.’

Struggling families that are already struggling to make ends meet, their utility bills could go up $50 a month. That may not be a lot of money to a billionaire in California, but to a single mom trying to raise kids, $50 a month is the difference between buying new shoes for them this month or not. It means America becomes a more expensive place in the world to do business.

I think we can deal with these issues without these big government mandates. You know who's going to fix this? The American innovator. The American innovator is already moving us in this direction. The American innovator has already made our air cleaner than it used to be. The American innovator has already made us more energy efficient than we used to be.

Natural gas, by the way, is a clean source of energy. And all of these people were all for it. All these radical environmental groups were all for natural gas until we discovered natural gas in America. Now, they say you can't use it. Nuclear energy is carbon free, zero emission. You can't build a nuclear power plant in America. So, let's get real here about this. We're not going to destroy our economy.

Meanwhile, they cut this deal in Paris. Well, guess what? You, the American taxpayer, are going to have to contribute billions of dollars to help developing economies become cleaner. Do you know who the developing economies are? China and India. When I'm President, we're not sending billions of dollars to help China and India, much less China and India with their energy industry. We're not doing that.

This article is based on a story that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

Campaign season is in full swing, so candidates are running around saying the kinds of things candidates say, including on the topic of climate change. Meanwhile, last year, Congress passed a budget that included important provisions for US energy and climate policy.

As part of the deal, tax credits for renewable power — both wind and solar— were extended for five years. Wind power gets a subsidy for every kilowatt hour of power it produces, while solar will be subsidized as a function of its investment. Both of these energy sectors were facing the expiration of these tax credits, which have been important in accelerating the deployment of these technologies.

Historically, especially for wind energy, when the tax credits expire, investment for new facilities tends to drop off, says Joe Aldy, who teaches energy and environmental policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.

“It's been a big challenge for those who are trying to develop new wind farms, because the development timelines typically are on the order of several years, and when you have the policy on the books only for one to two years at a time, that is very difficult for planning and for financing,” Aldy explains. “Now they have a five-year window that provides much more certainty than they've had really since the 1990s for project planning."

“As a result," Aldy continues, "I think we should see more and more wind deployment and certainly more and more solar deployment, and I think that's going to be a critical part of the US power system, implementing and complying with the Clean Power Plan that President Obama advanced in 2015.”

That plan recently withstood a key legal challenge.

The renewal of tax credits for clean energy was part of a “grand bargain” on Capitol Hill that also permitted oil exports for the first time in 40 years. Given where the negotiations were earlier in 2015, this was a pretty good compromise for the environment and for energy policy, Aldy believes.

“To be honest, I think, in the near term at least, lifting the oil export ban isn't going to have a meaningful impact on the US economy, on production,” Aldy says. “Low oil prices are probably having a negative effect right now on production regardless of whether a domestic oil driller could move that oil into a foreign market.”

In addition, he says, none of the GOP threats to keep the administration from implementing major regulations survived. The EPA budget was kept at its current level. The Department of Energy actually received more funds than in 2014, much of it related to research and development — even for zero carbon technologies like renewables and nuclear.

The budget deal gives Aldy some optimism that the US may be able to meet its obligations under the recent Paris accord and continue to robustly expand the nation’s climate program.

“I think that the actions that the Obama administration has taken in the last few years have really put the US on the right trajectory,” he says. “Whether it's fuel economy standards, the Clean Power Plan or advancing appliance efficiency standards. They’re looking at trying to address methane emissions from oil and gas drilling. I think all this can help move the US on the right trajectory and certainly will get the US to meet its 2020 goal, and it has US in the ballpark to reach its 2025 goal.”

Significant obstacles remain, however, including the need for more investment in innovative technologies.

“I think we'll need more public policies to drive the deployment of those technologies, and that's going to be a key task I think for the next administration,” Aldy says. “I think the framework coming out of Paris is one that, if we can demonstrate that progress and do so in a transparent manner, our major partners in this exercise will do so as well.”

“So I am, I would say, cautiously optimistic,” Aldy concludes. “It's a tough challenge. This is a tough challenge technologically. It's a tough challenge politically, diplomatically. I mean, it is a really tough issue to address. But I think we're making progress now in a way that we haven't really in the past two plus decades of the global effort to try to address climate change.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

2015's heat and drought in Montana forced many black bear families to forage far from their natural habitat. Quite a few of the wandering bears wound up being shot or hit by cars. And that means there were a lot of orphaned black bear cubs this year.

“We’ve been really, really busy with bears, all throughout the state this year,” says Brady Murphy, a game warden in Augusta, Montana. “We’ve handled a lot of different urban wildlife bear complaints.”

While wildlife in the West is often protected by authorities, the animals' presence is not always appreciated residents.

Reporter Clay Scott of Mountain West Voices found himself right in the thick of things when he and a friend spotted a black bear cub while driving down a dirt road on the Montana prairie, miles from suitable black bear habitat.

“At first, as it scurried through the grass, it looked like a black lab puppy. Then it scampered up a power pole,” Scott said.

Scott made a call and game wardens were soon on the way. When they arrived, less than a half hour later, the cub was looking down at them from the top of a 40-foot power pole.

The black bear cub perched atop a telephone pole, just seconds before he lost consciousness from the tranquilizer and fell. (Photo: Sarah Hewitt)

Warden Murphy decided to try to get some Telazol, a tranquilizer, into the bear so they could bring him somewhere to be relocated. He didn't have any tranquilizer darts, so he put out a call for help. Two other wardens responded from other districts and set out for their location.

Game wardens in Montana cover vast territories. Teigan Winters drove 50 miles to the spot; Kqyn Kuka came in from north of Great Falls, an hour-and-a-half drive. Scott asked Murphy why, in the middle of hunting season, three wardens would converge on a power pole in the middle of the prairie to tranquilize a black bear cub.

“You don’t do this job to get rich. You do it because you love the resources and you want to protect them, and you have that strong passion,” Murphy responded.

When the other wardens arrived with a dart pistol and tranquilizers, they realized that, even if they managed to hit the bear cub with a dart, the cub wouldn’t survive the fall. Instead, they devised a plan is to lure the cub down, chase him up a smaller pole and then dart him. Kuka offered her sleeping bag as a kind of net to catch the falling cub.

First, they tried firing a blank cartridge from a shotgun over the bear’s head to frighten him into moving down. But at the explosion, the cub didn't even flinch.

Finally, for reasons known only to the cub, he straddled the pole and started to move down. When he reached the ground, the group gave chase in their pickup truck. As hoped, the cub scurried across the road and up the smaller pole.

One expertly-placed dart shot later, the cub began to wobble on the pole and the wardens rushed into place to catch him.

“Here he comes!” Kuka exclaimed. “Oh, yes! You got him! Unbelievable! We did it!”

They laid the cub carefully in the back of the pick-up. It turned out to be a male, weighing less than 25 pounds. The cub will spend the winter at Montana Wild, the wildlife rehab center in Helena, and will be released next spring.

This article is based on story that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

Frigid temps, lots of snow and a big dig-out.

It's been a rough past few days on America's East Coast. People lost their lives in the storm.

Now, as bad as this latest storm has been; let's just remember that we get hammered with cold weather each winter. So at least we're used to seeing our breath when we walk outside.

Not so for residents of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. They're in the midst of a once-in-a-generation winter.

"Not only am I wearing a coat and boots outside, I'm actually wearing a down jacket and several layers in my home and two pairs of socks and I'm still cold," says Cindy Sui with our partners at the BBC. "Most offices and homes in Taiwan do not have indoor heating because, generally, the island doesn't see this kind of cold."

There's no way to warm up it seems. Some people are getting by with space heaters. But they don't work all that well, and if neglected, can be fire hazards.

Snow, thankfully, isn't that big of an issue. The mountains have seen a couple inches, attracting visitors. They play in it, build snowmen and toss snowballs.

"Taiwan people really haven't seen snow," says Sui.

The cities are mostly clear. And that's where the death tolls are piling up. At least 57 have died due to the cold weather. Sui says the temperatures dropped suddenly, going from 61 degrees to about 40 degrees.

Elderly people had a difficult time coping with it on their own. Sui says it speaks to social change on the island. 

Young people don't stay in rural areas anymore. They left to work in the cities. And even in the cities, says Sui, young people live in their own apartments.

"So we're not seeing this traditional Taiwanese family where you have three generations under one roof. Now, a lot of elderly live by themselves. They're not looked after by family members," she says.

These cold fronts only happen every 44 years or so. And hopefully, Taiwan will be better prepared for the next time it hits.

Until then, it's parkas and wool caps for pajamas.

Whales face many known hazards, from harpoons to fishing nets to boat propellers. But what’s causing the largest mass stranding ever seen of sperm whales in the North Sea? Four sperm whales washed up on two beaches along England's North Sea coast. Twelve others were found dead on beaches off the coast of Netherlands last week. 

“I suppose the quick answer is we don’t know,” says Andrew Brownlow, from the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme. He recently joined a team of veterinary and marine scientists to perform post mortems on some sperm whales that were stranded and died on the Wadden Islands, an archipelago off the coast of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

“The reasons that cetaceans strand is a mystery, and it’s one that we’ve been looking at for decades,” says Brownlow.

Scientists do understand some of the many variables that are hazardous to whales, “It can be exposure to sound, it can be exposure to toxins in the marine environment, it can be because they’re injured in some way, they’ve been hit by something, sometimes it can just be because they’re in the wrong place, their navigation hasn’t worked and they’ve come into an area that has a very high tidal range, or it can be something new.”

Is it sound? "There are valid concerns that we are making the oceans noisier, which makes it harder for whales to navigate," he says. "However, it's likely the increase is because there are more whales, because of the embargo on whaling over the past 30 years."

But then again, with the recent North Sea strandings, it may be the structure of the undersea area of the southern North Sea that's the culprit.

“It’s a really bad place for these animals to be. Fundamentally it’s too shallow, around 150 feet deep, often shallower than that. This is a species that exists off of deep ocean trenches, dives as deep as 6,000 feet down to be able to forage. They navigate, communicate using acoustic clicks and we think in this very shallow environment that’s got very acoustically absorbing material like lots of sand and silt, they can’t navigate or communicate very well.”

Another theory is that sperm whales follow their prey, squid, but then end up in the southern North Sea which Brownlow says functions like a “whale trap. Once they get in there it’s very difficult to extricate themselves and get back out again.”

Brownlow compares their disorientation to humans trying to find our way through a dense forest in thick fog, “You can see the trees that are immediately close to you but you don’t get a feeling for the landscape, and I suspect that played a role here.”

Members of the SMASS team are on their way to give the Dutch scheme a hand with a mass stranding event (MSE)... https://t.co/3tqRNEb59u

— Scottish Strandings (@strandings) January 13, 2016

Brownlow has joined up with scientists from Belgium and the Netherlands to study the latest surge in sperm whale strandings.

”We need to investigate this in detail because it could be a bad news story in the sense that it could be to do with what we as a civilization are doing to the marine environment as a whole and not just to these very charismatic sperm whales.” 

For more than 30 years, Steve Erenberg has collected early scientific and medical instruments. Victorian medical masks, surreal anatomical models, and futuristic test prostheses pack the display cases of his store/museum in Peekskill, New York.

There are giant eyeballs, a life-size paper mache model of a horse and disembodied faces. 

“I mean, there’s nothing sinister in this collection,” Erenberg says. “People look and they say, ‘Oh, what is that? Is that S&M?’ Or, ‘Is that a torture device?’ No. They’re medical devices or they’re life-saving devices.”

Erenberg says he failed some of his early science classes. He collects these things more for their aesthetic value than their scientific worth. 

“A lot of these objects have character, you can sense it. They have an aura about them,” Erenberg says. 

Some items in the collection are obviously quack devices, designed to fool patients into thinking they were receiving a treatment. Erenberg says there’s an easy way to pick out the quackery. 

“If you look at early quack devices, they’re designed to be better looking than their purpose ... the more important it looked, the better people thought it worked and the more money the doctor would get,” Erenberg says.

Still, many of the items that were considered state of the art for their time are now obsolete or even dangerous. It makes Erenberg reflect on which of our state of the art medical devices will be laughed at in future decades. 

“I can't help but think when I see some of these new devices that are being used with new materials that 100 years from now we’ll be looking back at them and laughing and calling them quack devices,” Erenberg says. “But that's what science is. We always think we’re state of the art and we're ahead of our time and it will never get any more modern than that. But it's always changing.”

This article is based on a story that aired on PRI's Science Friday.

If you’re feeling “maxed out,” you’re not alone. Between cell phones, tablets, TVs, and computers, we’re all grappling with a certain amount of information overload. Is there an alternative to never feeling caught up? By working to synthesize what's known about information overload into a week of experiments, one public radio host wants to try.

Oil prices hit 12-year lows this month as coal and natural gas prices remain low as well.       

But seemingly counterintuitively, renewable energy investments were at record highs in 2015, climbing 4 percent to nearly $330 billion worldwide according to a recent report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.  

"People are beginning to appreciate that actually, the renewables revolution will go on even if oil, coal and gas keep on getting cheaper," said Bloomberg New Energy Finance senior analyst Angus McCrone. “I think it certainly marks a change from around the 2007 period, where people equated interest in renewables with high oil prices and saw the two as very much hand-in-glove."

Oil doesn’t compete directly with renewable energy in most places, outside of a small number oil-fired electricity plants in places like the Middle East and Africa.

Natural gas and coal are more direct competitors to solar and wind, but even price drops in those energy sources haven’t slowed growth in the renewable energy sector.    

Renewable energy investments were the highest last year in China, with a 17 percent increase over 2014, followed by the United States.

Increasingly, however, interest in renewable energy is broadening out among developing countries.

“One of the really exciting developments we’ve seen over the last few years has been the spread of wind and solar to more and more emerging markets in the world,” McCrone said.

South Africa, Chile, Turkey, Thailand, Morocco and Uruguay were among the countries that spent more than a billion dollars on renewables in 2015, according to the Bloomberg figures.

In 2016, McCrone is looking at Pakistan, Egypt, Vietnam, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates as contenders to pass that $1 billion investment mark.

Developments in renewable energy technology are driving the cost of solar and wind down, which is a big part of the reason why new projects are increasing. 

McCrone also points to a desire for energy security in the midst of fluctuating oil prices, the need to clean up polluted mega-cities like Beijing and Dehli, and the relative speed of adding new capacity with renewables as reasons why 2015 investment numbers were so high.   

“If you’re a developing country and you want to install some generating capacity quickly to meet increasing electricity demand, then you can build a wind farm or a solar plant much more quickly than you can a coal-fired power station,” McCrone said.

Finally, McCrone said, financing is flowing more freely to renewable projects than fossil-fuel plants.  

“A lot of development banks and also commercial banks are kind of reluctant now to invest in coal-fired power stations,” McCrone said. “It looks bad in terms of their own environmental obligations, and there are risks. If regulations change, will they actually get their money back.”

McCrone said the Paris climate agreement finalized in December probably will not have a big impact on renewable energy investment until after 2016.

Still, he projects renewable energy sources will continue to grow even if fossil fuel prices remain low.

“There’s a strong momentum here,” McCrone said. “Climate change is part of that, but economics is a really strong part of that as well. As the cost of generation for renewables has come down so much over the last five years, and they’re still developing technologies, so those costs will come down even more over the next 10 years.” 

Opponents of the move from fossil fuels to renewable energy frequently cite the cost — financial as well as on jobs — for their opposition. Investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer, who has been on the front lines of this debate for some time, says that's nonsense.

In fact, he contends, the opposite is true.

“The argument that moving to clean energy is a job killer is false,” Steyer says. “Not only does it create net new jobs, it also reduces energy costs across society and raises people's take home pay.”

Steyer points to the state of California, where his environmental non-profit Next Generation is based, as an example of how switching to a clean-energy economy can benefit everyone.

“By the end of this year, we expect there will be up to 500,000 Californians employed in clean energy jobs,” Steyer points out. “In addition, we've just done a study within the last month that shows that nationwide, if we accelerate the move to a clean energy economy, it will produce a net additional million jobs by 2030.”

California has been leading the country in terms of moving to a clean energy economy, while at the same time its economy has been growing faster than the rest of the United States, Steyer says. “So when we think about California’s [carbon pricing] policy and how it has impacted us, we can see that moving to a clean energy economy is actually part of the reason that California's been growing faster and producing jobs faster.”

Steyer expects to see the changes in California spread to other areas of the US as the nation begins to adopt clean energy more widely — despite the political gridlock over the issue in the nation’s capital.

“We are huge believers in democracy, and that means the people of the United States, not just the elected officials of the United States,” Steyer says. “What we've seen [in polls] over the last six months is an incredible move across the board for Americans, regardless of political party, to accept the idea that clean energy is the future and that we should move faster towards it, and the idea that doing so will prevent climate change. ... We’ve seen a 12 percent move by Republicans in the last six months, which is unheard of.”

When American voters tell the people running for office that they insist on moving the country in this direction, it will happen, Steyer says, because people running for office pay a lot of attention to the voters. “We really think this is just a traditional exercise in democracy,” he says. “The people have to speak and the people need to be listened to.”

Outside the United States, in places like India, the transition will be harder because the capital costs of renewable energy are much higher. But Steyer believes this can be overcome, as well.

“As we move forward, public and private entities are going to have to push nations, to reward them for making what are smart decisions, because I know that the capital costs in India are very high compared to what they are in the United States,” Steyer says. “But the same is true for coal plants ... The price of renewable energy is dropping precipitously, and it will continue to drop. ... So, what’s going to happen for India is that this is going to be, by far, the best choice that they can make.”

India and other countries are not going to be asked to sacrifice, Steyer maintains, because they will be making economic decisions that are in their own interests — and which are also going to help them avoid greenhouse gas emissions.

During the transition, however, the international financial community needs to “start checking exactly what their function is and what they are thinking,” Steyer says.

“The fact of the matter is, if you look at the United States of America, a number of banks have withdrawn lending to coal absolutely,” he points out. “So why they would think that would be different in other parts of the world, I'm not sure. If you look forward over the life of a [power] plant, which is at least 30 years, the idea that that could be a good investment, that it’s going to be a safe investment, seems to me to be kind of silly.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

Privacy. Freedom of speech. Safety. What balance of those three things is optimal for you? And how much of a say do you want — or do you think is your right to have — in determining what that balance is?

This may be one of the central questions of this century, certainly for Americans. It goes to our core values. The First Amendment, freedom of speech. The Fourth Amendment — freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, including of our data. But in the face of threats, perceived or real, some people are willing to give up some of those freedoms, or argue that others should. 

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on the stump. “And we have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates, and a lot of different people, who really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘freedom of speech. Freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.’

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has made a not entirely dissimilar point. “You’re going to hear all of the usual complaints, freedom of speech, etc., but if we truly are in a war against terrorism, and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating,” she said.

And President Barack Obama, in June 2013, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scope of the government collection of data of private citizens, said, “You can’t have 100 percent security, and also have 100 percent privacy, and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

Few Americans would argue against a need to make choices as a society. The question is who’s making the choices, with what degree of transparency, and with what level of knowledge and acceptance from American citizens.

And just as politicians on both sides of the aisle have argued that widespread surveillance and data collection is necessary to ensure security, politicians on both sides of the aisle have also cautioned that it’s dangerous to allow concerns about security to erode constitutional rights.

“I believe that in a democratic and constitutional form of government, we can effectively combat terrorism without sacrificing the civil liberties, and the constitutional protections, which make us a free country,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, now a Democratic presidential candidate, in a speech on the Senate floor in 2013.

And Senator Rand Paul, now a Republican presidential candidate, said something similar about the same subject around the same time. “This is a debate over the Bill of Rights,” he said. “This is a debate over the Fourth Amendment. This is a debate over your right to be left alone.”

Your right to be left alone, unless there’s reasonable cause to suspect you’re up to something illegal, criminal, harmful to society.  The vast majority of Americans aren’t, of course. So why the government’s bulk collections of metadata — who calls whom, and for how long and from where, who writes to whom, and when?

Under a section of the Patriot Act, the government has long had the right to collect information on whatever it wants, in its quest to prevent acts of terrorism — from information on what you do online, to what library books you read — and those being ordered to provide that information couldn’t even let you know they’d given it out. When Edward Snowden revealed in mid-2013 how invasive this had all become, the principal author of the Patriot Act, Republican Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin, was himself aghast.

“I can say that, without qualification, Congress never did intend to allow bulk collections when it passed Section 215, and no fair reading of the text would allow for this program,” Sensenbrenner said.

Now, the Obama Administration says it shut down the bulk collection of email data in December 2011, but it can still access data that has traveled outside the US, even if just for a few seconds on Internet servers. And it can still access telephone metadata — it’s just being stored at phone companies now, rather than on government servers.

What has happened over the past couple of years is more heightened awareness and concern from many Americans about the level of surveillance, increased encryption options, and push-back from Internet companies about handing over data, and a desire among some such companies to at least be able to let users know when the government wants their data. 

These are not just issues facing Americans. Each country is setting its own standards for Internet privacy, surveillance and censorship. China’s leaders argue that’s as it should be, that each government should be able to decide, on behalf of its people, what kind of Internet they get, and how much of what they do online can be monitored and used against them. (Video here of Chinese president Xi Jinping's speech, at the Chinese government sponsored World Internet Conference, Dec. 16-18, 2015, in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, China.)

In the midst of all this, Internet rights advocates, are calling for more transparency and accountability from governments around the world, and also from private companies.

One such advocate is Rebecca MacKinnon, the director of the Ranking Digital Rights Project at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. She says her interest in the cross-section of the Internet and human rights began when she was a China correspondent for CNN in the 1990s.

Rebecca MacKinnon, director of New America Foundation's "Ranking Digital Rights" project

Credit:

New America Foundation

“I was in China when the Internet showed up in ’95, so I began to see how it was affecting discourse, how people were using it, and from the get-go, the government’s efforts to control this. And so, I became fascinated in the topic, and the set of issues as a result,” she says. “So that has definitely colored this whole thing, that I’ve been following the global emergence of the Internet ... and thinking about its impact as it relates to governments, power and human rights.”

Rebecca left journalism a dozen years ago and started working full-time on Internet rights and access around the world. She co-founded the website Global Voices, which brings together translations of bloggers from around the world. She wrote a book called  “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.”

Consent of the Networked, a book on internet rights by Rebecca MacKinnon, looks at the challenges of protecting the rights of users and keeping the internet open.

Credit:

Rebecca MacKinnon

“The highest grade was a D, and that was Google,” Rebecca says. “So there’s a lot of room for improvement, all around.”

Among the others ranked were Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter, Vodafone in the UK and Orange in France. China’s Tencent, and Russia’s mail.ru ranked at the bottom.  Some companies did better on some measures than others. No US companies did particularly well on grievance mechanisms, offering redress when users feel their rights have been unfairly infringed upon, but an Indian and a Korean company did. Google did well on reporting what governments are asking them to share, or take down, or block. Yahoo did relatively well on doing human rights impact assessments — thinking about what the impact might be on users’ rights if they take certain actions — this, a lesson learned after landing a Chinese journalist in jail a decade ago, after turning over his data to the Chinese government. 

“Yahoo learned from its mistakes, got together with other companies and made a bunch of commitments,” Rebecca says. “And these are commitments for which there are guidelines. There’s a whole organization built around helping companies put these practices into place, so they don’t just stumble into being complicit with human rights abuses without having thought things through."

That organization is called the Global Network Initiative, which Rebecca helped start. It brings together companies, human rights advocates, academics, for conversations, both public and private, around the issue of digital rights. It also evaluates how companies are doing.

"It’s a pass-fail, so that’s one reason why I wanted to do the ranking,” Rebecca says. "It’s more than a pass-fail. It’s a real grade.”

And a real grade, and a ranking against other companies, can make companies feel a little competitive with each other, prompting them to take steps to look relatively more attractive to potential users.

“There are some companies that want to have conversations with us about why they scored in such and such a way, and want more details around our recommendations, so that’s really, I think, good,” Rebecca says.  “We wanted to do the index, because we wanted to show companies whose polices aren’t very good, that some people over there are doing something you say you can’t do.”

Still, she says, all this is happening in a bigger environment in which there’s “increasing downward pressure” from governments on companies to share user data and to censor.

“Pressure from governments on companies is really going in the wrong direction,” Rebecca says. “And I’m not just saying China and Russia. I’m saying most democracies.”

She cites a recent report from Freedom House, a human rights organization, that showed that Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth straight year, especially due to new laws increasing the scope of what’s considered illegal online activity, and increasing the liability of companies for what their users do. This has led to some overreactions, even in the United States.

“There was this crazy story late last year that large numbers of women named Isis were having their Facebook accounts deleted,” she says. “One particular such woman made such a stink about this on Twitter, and it got attention from journalists, that Facebook reinstated her account.”

Rebecca points to this as an example of what can happen when governments lean on Internet and telecommunications companies to beef up their terms of service enforcement. In the US in particular, the government can’t easily curtail someone’s freedom of speech, but a social media company can set its own terms of service for how a user behaves. 

“The concern is that even if a growing number of companies want to improve, the downward pressure they’re facing from governments is getting worse and worse. Again, not just from China, which very famously is cracking down and putting more pressure on Internet companies to police their users, but in Europe and in the United States,” she says. “There’s all this handwaving from politicians about, ‘oh, you can’t let bad guys do bad things on the Internet, you’re responsible’ and people talking about revisiting laws, to place more responsibility on companies for what their users do, and who their users are. That’s basically forcing companies to carry out censorship and surveillance within a private framework. And that’s very scary.”

In the US, pushback from both citizens and companies after Edward Snowden’s revelations have led to increased encryption, with the government ultimately backing off from demanding to have a "back door" into such products to see what users are doing.  

Still, transparency about what governments are asking to see is sorely lacking, in many countries, Rebecca says. She says new laws in the United Kingdom and other countries make it hard for companies to even disclose what surveillance, censorship or sharing of data governments are asking them to do.

“It’s really hard to understand what the national security justification is. Just really hard,” Rebecca says. “It’s not that you can’t have any surveillance for law enforcement purposes, or national security purposes. It’s not that you can’t have any controls on speech. There’s some reasonable discussions to be had about these things. But if you’re going to have controls on speech, if you’re going to have surveillance, it needs to be done in a context where there’s enough transparency that the public can know if abuses are taking place, and can know who to hold responsible for what’s taking place, so there’s some way of changing it if society forms a consensus they don’t like where that status quo is falling."

“The problem is, if you have growing surveillance and censorship, and increased secrecy around what governments are demanding of companies, and who’s taking what responsibility for what, you’re going to increasingly have the public having no idea what’s being surveilled, by whom, no idea who to hold responsible, no idea what they don’t know, because they don’t know who’s censored it, for what reason, under whose authority, no idea who to vote out of office, or whose stock to sell, or whose product to use or not use, because you just don’t know who’s responsible. And that’s very pernicious, if we want to have open, democratic societies and if we care about human rights.”

Protesters gather at Tahrir Square in Cairo November 23, 2012. The protests were coordinated over social media, which prompted the Egyptian government to crack down on its use across the country.

Credit:

Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters

That’s a particular issue, she says, when fears sparked for specific events, such as the Paris attacks and the San Bernadino shootings, prompt calls to curtail civil rights in favor of "keeping America safe."

“You can say ‘the danger is so acute, we just need to eliminate everyone’s rights.’ But I’m not sure if that’s actually going to solve the problem, or prevent the terrorism. I mean, here we are, five years after the Arab Spring, when everyone was all euphoric about how the Internet was serving as a conduit for people to fight for democracy. If we want any hope of people being able to use the internet to fight for democracy, if the United States, and the UK, and major democracies say ‘companies just need to police everything, and they have to hand everything over to us and they have to let us into everything,’ you think the Egyptian government and the Chinese government and the Ethiopian government and everybody else isn’t going to say, ‘well, this is what we’ve been saying we need to do all along?’”

In some such countries, journalists have gone to jail on charges of ‘terrorism,’ for criticizing the government.  “Terrorism is used as a buzzword in many countries, to basically silence enemies of the state,” Rebecca says. So we have a really slippery slope here. We have to be really careful. ... There are some seriously dangerous illiberal trends all over the world. I gave a talk a couple of years ago where I said, winter is coming. And I’m pretty worried that we have a pretty nasty winter coming before we get to the other side.”

It used to be that there were nine planets in our solar system. Although some people claimed that somewhere, out there, was a mysterious tenth planet called “Planet X.” In 2006, the IAU reclassified Pluto, in a hotly contested move that left the solar system with only eight official planets.

But recently, researchers published an argument that there is in fact another large planet in our solar system that we haven’t yet seen.

“We spent a good year-and-a-half out of the past two years not believing ourselves and actually trying very hard to prove that this idea was wrong and in fact crazy,” says Caltech’s Mike Brown, “But after the initial hints, we have been finding more and more signatures exactly where we predicted. And it's getting to the point where we believe it. We believe it enough where we're willing to write a paper and stand up and say, ‘Yes. For the past century everybody who said there was a Planet X is crazy. And they were all wrong. But we're right.'” 

Mike Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin argue that Planet Nine (which is not the same as Pluto, and also not the same as the old Planet X) should have a mass about 10 times that of Earth, and an orbit about 20 times farther from the sun than that of Neptune.

To put that distance in context, the New Horizon spacecraft just passed Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, which is 4 to 5 billion miles away from the sun. Planet Nine, at its closest approach to the sun, is 20 billion miles away from the sun. And on the farthest point in its elliptical orbit? It’s 100 billion miles away from the sun. 

“Which is why it took us so long to realize it was there,” Brown says. 

"What we have found," Batygin says, "is really a gravitational signature of Planet Nine. And that signature is seen in the most distant orbits of this debris field beyond the orbit of Neptune that we commonly refer to as the Kuiper belt. If you look at the furthest orbits in this debris field, they all kind of swing out the same way. The only reasonable explanation for this confinement, this grouping of the orbits, is that there's a distant Planet Nine which is rather massive keeping them together." 

At this point there are still many unknowns about what Brown and Batygin say is the ninth planet in our solar system. 

“We don't know where it is,” Brown says,  “But what we do know is we know its orbit. And what that means practically is that we know its path across the sky. ... So our best guess is that Planet Nine is in the November sky. If you look up straight overhead at midnight on Thanksgiving Day you're probably looking more or less in the direction of Planet Nine.” 

Batygin and Brown think Planet Nine is composed of similar materials to Uranus and Neptune: predominantly ice and rock with an atmosphere of 10 to 20 percent hydrogen and helium. 

They think they’ll be able to detect the outlying planet sometime in the next two to eight years. 

“Mostly, the reaction has been very positive, especially from our colleagues that have read the paper. They're more or less compelled by the arguments,” Batygin says. “There's been also a bit of skepticism, which we are very happy with. ... Ultimately what we are hoping here is that this theoretical prediction of the orbit will trigger a hunt, an observational hunt for Planet Nine. That's the goal of this paper.”

As far as a name for the newly discovered planet? Batygin says he likes the sound of “Planet George.” 

“It’s a perfectly good name,” Batygin says. 

There have, however, been a flood of emails asking Batygin to name the planet “Bowie.”

“I must be getting coerced,” Batygin says. “Because that's starting to sound like a really good idea. But realistically, you know, this is the kind of question that should be left until this Planet Nine is caught on camera.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.

Mexico City is one of the world’s thirstiest places, with billions of liters consumed by the capital’s growing population of about 9 million, and a metropolitan area that tops 21 million. And this week, millions of the city’s residents got news that they should prepare for water cuts that will leave them without any water for days.

The announcement was released quietly on the city government’s website last weekend, and only spread through the media and word of mouth shortly before the cuts were implemented. Water is expected to be restored by Monday, though the system won't be at full capacity until perhaps as late as next Thursday.

Why is this happening now? The National Water Commision, or Conagua, says maintenance is urgently needed at the Cutzamala system, a complex network of dams and pipelines that fans into neighboring rural provinces and supplies about 30 percent of Mexico City’s water. Many of its pipelines are worn and leaky and at risk of collapse, federal water officials say. At the same time, the system is under increasing pressure to pump more water into the city, as groundwater is increasingly depleted. As a result, Cutzamala is one of the world’s biggest and most crucial systems of its kind.

Expanding the Cutzamala system, by tapping new rivers and streams in the area, also isn’t easy. It can mean clashes with people who live in the area, including indigenous groups who feel under threat by possible water-supply development. Often, they have fought back. 

In 2005, a group of indigenous Mazahuas from the State of Mexico protested in Mexico City against damage caused to their land by dams created to help supply water to the capital. The tensions continue today.

Credit:

REUTERS/Daniel Aguilar DA

But for many in Mexico City, from families living in apartments to storeowners, news of the water cutoff meant checking their cisterns, the water tanks that many buildings have that connect to underground water pipes. If they are running low, it means waiting, hoping, that one of the hundreds of water trucks now being dispatched throughout the city will manage to stop by and fill their tank (and not illegally charge for the service, which is sometimes the case). Those water trucks, called pipas in Spanish, face a major task. The announced cuts will shut off or severely reduce the water supply for 410 neighborhoods — affecting up to 4.5 million residents, or half the city’s population. 

But cutoffs like this have happened before (although rarely so widespread and prolonged), and there is hardly panic. Indeed, for many who live in Mexico City’s poorest areas — where plumbing is old or non-existent — going without a steady water flow is part of life. Some take to harvesting water from the sky. Many simply wait for a truck filled with the liquid to rumble by. This weekend, those trucks will roam a much bigger swath of the city, the latest example of a water supply system at the brink. 

Throughout history, humans have gathered in the dark to marvel at the starry blanket overhead. Nowadays, artificial light pollution obscures the night sky in much of the industrial world — which could lead to unforeseen consequences for the environment and for human health.

Since the invention of electric light in the 19th century, the night has been getting progressively brighter, but things really took off in the 1990s. “It's about ten-times as bright as it was just 20 years ago,” says Paul Bogard, author of the book "The End of Night."

The acceleration has to do with population growth, an increase in nighttime labor, and the widespread belief that more light makes cities safer. Paul Bogard says that light does increase safety, but only up to a point. Too much light at night can actually make cities more dangerous.

“There's so much light in our nights and its glaring lights that make it hard for us to see,” he says. “Too much light tends to create the illusion of safety; we think we can be reckless purely because it's light out, and that's obviously not the case.”

With over-lit gas stations and bright LED streetlights shining skyward, a clear night sky is harder and harder to find. And our eyes, which developed the ability to see in low-light settings, rarely have the occasion to use that skill anymore.

“40 percent of Americans and Western Europeans never or rarely experience night vision,” says Bogard. “We're in the light so much that our eyes never switch.” Even inside it’s hard to avoid the glow of streetlights, and we often glance at brightly lit cellphone screens right up until we fall asleep.

There’s a growing medical consensus that all this artificial light is bad for our health. It interrupts our sleep patterns, confuses our circadian rhythms and inhibits our ability to produce melatonin. “Melatonin is only produced in the dark,” says Bogard, “and what scientists are finding is that a lack of melatonin in our bloodstream is linked to an increased risk for breast and prostate cancer.”

Doctors are not saying that the light in your cellphone will give you cancer, but increasingly they recognize the importance of darkness to our overall wellbeing. “We've evolved in bright days and dark nights, just like all life on Earth,” Bogard says, “and we need both for optimal health.”

Wildlife also depends on darkness. Sea turtles, for example, need a dark sky to navigate. When hatchlings climb out of their nest on the beach, they need to crawl their way to the sea. “They've evolved to swim or scurry to the brightest light on the horizon,” says Bogard, “which for all those hundreds of millions of years has been the stars and the moon reflected on the water, but now it's the hotels and parking lots in the wrong direction.”

Concerned about the impacts of light pollution, a growing movement of people are working to reduce excess lighting in our cities and protect dark skies. This is playing out in the National Park Service, which has created the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division. “They measure how dark the skies are in parks,” says Nate Ament, who works for the National Parks in Moab, Utah. “I think they’ve taken measurements in over 400 locations. So we have this really rich dataset of darkness all over the entire country.”

One metric for darkness is the Bortle Scale, and it rates the sky from 1 to 9. Las Vegas or Times Square would clock in at a 9. Humans have lit up so much of the world that it’s almost impossible to find a Bortle Class 1 anymore, but some of the darkest skies in the country are in the four corners region, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet on the Colorado plateau. 

Canyonlands National Park, just down the road from Moab, has been measured at a Bortle Class 2 and was recently named an International Dark Skies Park — the seventh on the Colorado Plateau. “That’s by far the highest concentration of these parks in the entire world,” says Ament, “there’s only 28 worldwide.”

With so much federally protected land on the plateau, Nate wants to preserve a really large swath of darkness right in the heart of the West. He works with towns like Moab to cut unnecessary lighting and introduce technologies like light shields that reduce sky glow.

Smart lighting is an easy sell when you explain how much money it can save. One town that’s been particularly forward thinking is Flagstaff, Arizona. “There’s one study that estimates if the entire state of Arizona were to take up Flagstaff’s lighting practices, it could save the state $30 million a year,” says Ament. “That gets people attention.”

For years, the National Park Service has worked to protect some the most beautiful views in the country — Sentinel Dome at Yosemite, the old faithful geyser at Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon. Ament’s job is to protect the increasingly rare view of a clear night sky. He says that if we want our children to see the stars, we’re going to have to turn some lights off. 

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's Living on Earth.

Around the country, coal-fired power plants are racing to comply with new EPA rules to keep sulfur dioxide and mercury out of the air.

The Homer City Generating Station is one such facility. It rises like a cathedral out of a valley in Indiana County, an hour east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can see its smokestacks and hourglass shaped cooling towers from miles around.

The construction project to install new pollution controls at Homer City is a huge and expensive project. Total cost is estimated at $750 million. What makes the project so costly?

Construction manager Todd Kollross points to metal air ducts that will handle the exhaust for the new scrubber system. They’re much like the ductwork that carries air in your house, but they differ in one significant way: these air ducts are so big your house actually could fit inside them.

“That guy down there weighs about 325,000 pounds,” pointing to one of the ducts. “That one there weighs about 310,000 pounds.”

These ducts will handle airflow out of the plant’s boilers, which burn coal to create electricity. The boilers are big, too — the size of small office buildings.  

“Take your furnace and put it on steroids,” Kollross says. “You're trying to heat your house; we’re trying to take care of two million homes.”

Two million homes — that’s how many buildings Homer City can power when it’s running at full capacity. Electricity streams out of the plant north to New York and into the mid-Atlantic grid that powers Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Chicago.

The new equipment is needed because of clean air rules the Obama administration imposed on the coal industry. These include the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.

Though the Supreme Court sent the Mercury rule back to the EPA, it’s still the law of the land. And it’s one reason why 200 old coal plants have decided to close.

James Shapiro, a vice president at GE Energy Financial Services, which owns the Homer City plant, says the company faced a tough decision when the rules were first announced. “You didn't have much choice,” he says. “Basically you either put on the pollution controls or you stopped running.” 

So what does it take to keep 100,000 tons of pollution out of the air? Quite a lot.

Sulfur is one of the main pollutants in coal plant exhaust, so the plant has to install a scrubber system called Alstom Novel Integrated Desulfurization technology. Each scrubber unit consists of thousands of air filters.

Todd Kollross points out a room with hundreds of holes in the floor. Long tubes covered with fabric bags will be inserted into each hole. The bags are basically super-sized shop-vac filters.

The way it works is simple high school chemistry: the coal exhaust is acidic, so the plant will spray it with an alkaline powder. The powder will absorb the pollution and particulates in the exhaust and the filters catch the powder.

“There are about 40,000 bags between the two units,” Kollross explains. “All the particulate that we collect from the flue gas comes into these bags.”

The pollution then goes into a landfill, instead of into our lungs. All told, more than 90 percent of the pollution that would have gone into the air will get taken out of the plant’s smokestacks.

Kollross is pleased with his project. “The timetable on this thing was really tight and the teamwork was incredible,” he says. “I had my doubts we were going to make our deadline when we started this project, but it surpassed any expectations and it was quite a joy to work on. Best project I’ve ever worked on.”

The plant is on schedule to meet its final April 2016 deadline.

There’s one small problem though: Those new filters don’t remove carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming. And the EPA plans to limit carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants, too. So just in case, Homer City is applying for permission to switch the plant from coal to natural gas.

But even that may not be the final step. As recent studies have shown, methane leaks that occur throughout the natural gas process are much more widespread than previously thought. And methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than CO2.

If the US is going to meet its obligations to reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants, many more massive projects will require the enthusiasm and expertise of Todd Kollross and others like him.

This article is based on a story by Reid Frazier of The Allegheny Front. The story aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

Once, there was the ordinary incandescent light bulb. It shone brightly, but wasted much of the energy put into it as heat. Then came the compact fluorescent. And as costs have dropped, consumers have increasingly been switching to light-emitting diode (LED) technology for many lighting applications, in an ongoing search for a more efficient bulb.

The old fashioned incandescent light bulb is more wasteful and inefficient than you may have realized. 

But now, in work published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, researchers report that nanophotonic devices may be able to breathe new life into that old technology. Physicist and electrical engineer Marin Soljačić and MIT scientist Ognjen Ilic, two authors of the study, explain how they’ve been able to “recycle” some of the incandescent bulb’s wasted heat and re-emit it as visible light, boosting efficiency.

“When you heat up a filiment in an incandescent light bulb, it starts glowing,” Soljačić explains, “A fairly small portion — only a few percent — goes into visible light. But a majority — like 95 percent goes into infrared light, which I cannot see, and it therefore presents losses.” 

“What we did,” Soljačić explains, “is we implemented a filter, which is placed in front of the filament and lets visible light through, but it reflects infrared light back toward the filament, thereby recycling the light. And there it gets absorbed into the filament and hopefully next time, emitted into visible light. ... It enhances the overall efficiency of the system.”

Soljačić and Ognjen aren’t trying to replace LED technology. They are, however, hoping that their new efficient bulbs can be used for other applications. 

“Applications are really for this concept of recycling light,” says Soljačić. “There are many different ways of converting heat into electricity and this particular one, the way that it works is you get something to a pretty high temperature — let’s say 1200 celsius or so, and it starts glowing, and then you use photovoltaics. It's sort of like a solar cell. ... You place it in front of this hot object, and then it converts this emitted light into electricity. ... This concept of recycling light could be beneficial for energy conversion.”

Using a photovoltaic device would be similar to the way many people use solar cells on their roofs. One difference is that this new device would be placed near a heat source instead of on the roof of your home. Ultimately Soljačić and Ognjen hope their discoveries will lead to important technology that can be used to fight global warming. 

“In order to address this huge challenge [of global warming], we need to have as many tools in our toolbox to handle it. You can think of this recycling of light as one more tool which will then allow us to try to tackle a wide variety of energy conversion problems,” Soljačić says” 

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.