EnviroPolitics Blog

At least 225 dead after a major earthquake rocks Haiti. The toll is likely to grow

Jacqueline Charles, Syra Ortiz-Blanes and David Ovalle, Miami Herald

A major earthquake struck southwestern Haiti early Saturday, collapsing buildings and historical cathedrals in a nation still struggling to recover from a devastating quake that left more than 300,000 dead over a decade ago and was already in chaos after a presidential assassination last month.

At least 225 people have died, according to Haiti’s Office of Civil Protection, which manages the island nation’s disaster relief. But the U.S. Geological Survey, issuing a “red alert” for the disaster, estimated fatalities could stretch into the thousands.

“High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread. Past red alerts have required a national or international response,” the survey said.

The USGS placed the quake at magnitude at 7.2, as did the Puerto Rico Seismic Network, with the epicenter about 75 miles west of the capital of Port-au-Prince. If verified, it would make the seismic event stronger than the 7.0 quake that left much of the city in ruins 2010. Tremors were felt all the way in Jamaica.

There were reports of deaths, injuries, and panic in several cities along the Tiburon, the country’s southwestern peninsula. It’s less densely populated than the capital but images posted on social media underlined that there could be many more casualties. Some showed collapsed homes and the Catholic cathedral turned to rubble in Les Anglais, which is part of Jeremie in the Grand Anse region.

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Pennsylvania crosses into ‘high’ community transmission level for Covid cases

By EUGENE TAUBER
THE MORNING CALL

The Pennsylvania Department of Health reported 2,317 additional coronavirus cases on Saturday, the highest single-day number in more than three months. The seven-day moving average of newly reported cases was 1,848, up 34% from a week ago, and up more than sevenfold over the last 30 days.

To date, there have been 1.25 million infections statewide.

The state has crossed the threshold into “high” community transmission as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pennsylvania has added 101.4 cases over the last seven days for each 100,000 residents.

There are now 24 counties also in the high transmission classification, lead for almost two weeks by Northampton County, with a weekly population-adjusted rate of 158.5. Lehigh, Monroe and Montgomery are also in the highest of the four tiers, while 37 counties are in the “substantial” tier, and 5 are considered “moderate.” Only Sullivan County has a weekly rate under 10 cases per 100,000 residents, putting it in the “low” community transmission tier.

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Haiti’s newest nightmare – a 7.2 earthquake

Buildings and cars were damaged in Les Cayes, Haiti. — *Earthquake damage in Haiti on August 14, 2021*

By Widlore Merancourt and Anthony Faiola, Washington Post

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti — A massive 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on Saturday morning, leveling dwellings in southwest portions of the country and shaking buildings from the Dominican Republic to Jamaica and Cuba.

Officials and witnesses reported heavy damage and fatalities dozens of miles from the epicenter, 7.4 miles northeast of Saint-Louis du Sud, where the temblor struck at 8:29 a.m.

Related:
Earthquake in Haiti felt across the Caribbean, high casualties expected

Ralph Simon, a radio station owner in Jeremie, a city of 30,000 in the Haitian southwest, said many homes and buildings had been leveled or damaged, including a local church. He said he saw two corpses in the rubble. “The impact of this is huge,” he said. “I was still in bed with my children and my wife. My wife had a heart attack, and I had to save her life. … There are damage to house. People are crying.”

Silvera Guillaume, the civil protection coordinator in the coastal city of Les Cayes, said the community’s resources were being overwhelmed.

“It’s a dire situation, people died. There are people right now under the rubble,” said Guillaume. “We deployed first responders to go and remove rubble, but we do not have enough first responders.”

The reported magnitude from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) was greater than the catastrophic, 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit 7 miles west of Port-au-Prince in 2010, resulting in more than 220,000 casualties. The USGS noted that the population in the most heavily hit areas largely resides in dwellings vulnerable to earthquake shaking.

Haiti, a country facing a severe humanitarian crisis, entered a new period of political instability in the aftermath of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July.

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What can EPR programs learn from more than a decade of PaintCare?

As industry-run paint EPR has grown to operate across 10 states, it offers lessons that might apply to state packaging EPR proposals.

Permission granted by Hannah Rosengren

By Leslie Nemo, Contributor, WasteDive

While debates over extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs for packaging have been firing up state legislatures recently, a smaller system for architectural paint has been quietly gaining scale. Lessons from that 20-year effort may not be directly applicable to today’s packaging debates, but they offer a unique case study on navigating producer involvement.

“It has been the standby. It’s always been consistent, there’s always interest. But each year, there’s something new that just far surpasses paint” as a priority for end-of-life product management, said Scott Cassel, the CEO and founder of the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI).

The American Coatings Association (ACA) manages PaintCare with funding from paint manufacturers, who pass the costs on to stores stocking their products. The stores charge customers fees that hover around 75 cents per gallon; those fees essentially reimburse the manufacturers. PaintCare uses the money to collect leftover paint and find businesses to make use of it.

The U.S. generates roughly 75 million gallons of excess architectural paint every year, according to PSI estimates. In 2020, that was about 9% of all architectural paint sold, according to an October 2020 ACA forecast. (While excess industrial paint also requires management, industry experts say it’s less of a concern because usage needs are more closely calculated.) Since the first state law passed in Oregon in 2009, PaintCare has collected 50 million gallons of leftover paint and spent about $240 million.

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Wildfires in Siberia are bigger than all the world’s other blazes combined

The shadow of an aircraft of the Air Forest Protection Service flying over a burned forest in Siberia’s Sakha region on July 27. Russia’s coldest region is experiencing major wildfires for a third straight year. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)

By Robyn Dixon Washington Post

MOSCOW — For Russia, there are two types of fires raging across Siberia: the kind the authorities are fighting and the others they are allowing to burn.

That’s because Siberia is so vast that huge fires can burn without threatening any major settlements, transportation systems, or infrastructure — but are still part of a swath of infernos that together are larger than all the other blazes around the world.

On one level, the Siberian fires are part of an annual cycle. But many climate experts see the staggering scope of this year’s fires as another sign of greater fire risks on a warming planet that is potentially being made even hotter by huge carbon emissions from the blazes.

Siberia’s fires are pumping huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere

Russia is fighting more than 190 forest fires in Siberia that have closed airports and roads, forced widespread evacuations, and sent a pall of smoke across the North Pole. But it has abandoned dozens more fires covering thousands of square miles, with no effort to fight them.

Volunteers pause while working at the scene of a forest fire in the Gorny Ulus area, west of Yakutsk, Russia, on Aug. 7. (Ivan Nikiforov/AP)

As Russia faces one of its worst fire seasons, environmentalists say there is little urgency about an event that officials play down every year.

“For years, officials and opinion leaders have been saying that fires are normal, that the taiga is always burning, and there is no need to make an issue out of this. People are used to it,” said Alexei Yaroshenko, a forestry expert with Greenpeace Russia. The taiga is a belt of coniferous forest around the planet at between 50 and 60 degrees north of the equator.

As Russia increasingly confronts extreme weather associated with climate change, the rapid spread of fires in Yakutia — a vast forested Siberian region around the size of Argentina — came with drought, some of the hottest weather on record, and strong winds.

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Department of Energy group says US mills to profit from greener steel

Steelmakers in the United States are poised to benefit as countries race to meet pledges to reach net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, according to the director of the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL)

By Mark Shenk, Fastmarkets

“As the world grapples with deeper decarbonization… I think there’s an opportunity for US steelmakers to position themselves for a premium product that can make its way into places like Europe that might be ready to pay a premium for a lower-embodied material such as decarbonized steel,” Brian Anderson, lab director at the NETL, told Fastmarkets.

Embodied carbon refers to all the CO2 emitted in producing materials.

US producers should benefit from the wide adoption of electric-arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking, which emits much less CO2 than blast furnaces, according to Anderson. EAFs are responsible for about 70% of US steel production, with the remainder coming from blast furnaces, while the reverse is the case with the global industry.

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And US steel mills are on pace to add more than 13.5 million tons of EAF flat-rolled steelmaking capacity over the next few years. Market participants had speculated that the new steelmaking capacity in North America would reverse the record-high price spike this year, but have since indicated that the additional production will not have much impact until deep into 2022.

Fastmarkets’ daily steel hot-rolled coil index, fob mill US was calculated at $94.06 per hundredweight ($1,881.20 per short ton) on Monday, August 9, up by 0.64% from $93.46 per cwt on Friday, August 6 and an all-time high.

“US steel producers already have a major advantage in CO2 footprint and clean steel, in some cases many times more efficient when it comes to carbon efficiency,” Anderson said. “But right now internationally there is no market driver in terms of clean credits, certifications for the embodied carbon material, steel, plastic, whatever the material we trade internationally.”

The European Commission has proposed a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) on some goods, including steel and aluminum. European steel association Eurofer also last month called for markets for green steel and affordable low-carbon energy, among other policy measures to support decarbonization.

And Democratic lawmakers in Congress likewise have proposed that the US implement its own carbon border tax.

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