ORCHARD CITY, Colo. — On New Year’s Day in 2018, Paul Kehmeier and his father drove up Grand Mesa until they got to the county line, 10,000 feet above sea level. Instead of the three to five feet of snow that should have been on the ground, there wasn’t enough of a dusting to even cover the grass.
The men marveled at the sight, and Kehmeier snapped a photo of his dad, “standing on the bare pavement, next to bare ground.”
Here, on Colorado’s Western Slope, no snow means no snowpack. And no snowpack means no water in an area that’s so dry it’s lucky to get 10 inches of rain a year. A few months after taking the photo, Kehmeier stared across the land his family had tilled for four generations and made a harsh calculation: He could make more money selling his ranch’s water than working his land.
Water from Colorado’s snowpack is distributed across the region through a complex network of dams, pipelines and irrigation canals.
A 20-year drought is stealing the water that sustains this region, and climate change is making it worse.
“In all my years of farming in the area, going back to about 1950, 2018 was the toughest, driest year I can remember,” said Paul’s father, Norman, who still does a fair share of the farm’s tractor work at 94.
TRENTON, N.J. – We learned that New Jersey’s rate of coronavirus transmission has fallen to .98 on Monday, crossing a key threshold which the Murphy Administration repeatedly cites as key to reopening shuttered businesses.
So it’s “good” news. Or so we were led to believe? – Also on Monday, Governor Murphy took to Twitter to […]
My big blue recycling bin was feeling neglected and unpopular. It sat out on the street day in and day out hoping to get picked up by a big, strong, handsome sanitation worker. Day after day, no one paid any attention whatsoever. When the sanitation workers of our dreams came by and picked up the trash, I had to finally accept that there was just too much darned competition on our block alone, not to mention the rest of the city, for them to get to our “recycling,” which mostly ends up in the incinerator.
How about thinking more of those workers? Who would want to pick up the piles of soggy cardboard with Amazon swooshes or bulging bags with used plastic takeout containers, forks, and cups splayed all over the sidewalks, gutters, and streets? My recycling bin and I are eager for that pickup day to come, but in the meantime are trying to minimize the trash adding to those piles. And never order from Amazon.
Emissions controls worked perfectly at Chinese plants, until a foreign subsidy dried up.
The Henan Shenma Nylon Chemical Company in China. Credit: United Nations Clean Development Mechanism
BY Phil McKenna, Lili Pike, Katrina Northrop, Inside Climate News
In December 2007, Charles Perilloux, an American chemical engineer, traveled to China to help install inexpensive and game-changing technology at a Chinese chemical plant that was spewing a climate “super-pollutant” into the atmosphere. The emissions quickly fell to near zero.
The state-owned Henan Shenma Nylon Chemical Company manufactures adipic acid, a key ingredient in nylon and polyurethane, which is used in everything from car parts to running shoes. While producing adipic acid, the factory emitted thousands of tons of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.
Shenma’s emission reductions had a greenhouse gas impact equivalent to taking one million cars off the road, records from the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) show. Through the program, Shenma reduced its emissions in exchange for lucrative carbon credits.
The plant’s abatement technology produced a financial windfall. Shenma, and another, larger, state-owned adipic acid plant that also reduced its emissions, sold carbon credits over a five-year period that were worth as much as $1.3 billion, records from the U.N. and carbon markets show.
Then, in 2012, funding for the U.N. program dried up.
What has happened since at the two plants, and at nine others across China that now manufacture nearly half of the world’s adipic acid, has been a mystery.
Zhao Duo, a general manager with Shenma, told InsideClimate News that his company continues to abate its nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, but he would not say to what extent.
Satellite imaging and stationary air monitors can’t discern nitrous oxide emissions from chemical plants versus N2O emissions from other sources. Plant operators and government officials in China are hesitant to talk at this critical moment, when China is finalizing a wide ranging plan for economic development and emission reduction targets that will guide the country for the next five years.
However, an InsideClimate News investigation, based on dozens of interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of documents from the Chinese government, the United Nations, and Chinese state media, strongly suggests that when funding for the U.N. program ended, so too did nearly all of the emissions reductions. This likely occurred despite the availability of proven, low-cost abatement technology.
If the vast majority of the plants’ emissions are released, unabated into the atmosphere, their collective emissions would exceed the yearly greenhouse gas emissions from all passenger vehicles in California, the most populous state in America, as well as the emissions from all cars in Beijing and Shanghai, China’s two largest megacities.
If this is true, it’s a climate tragedy of epic proportions.
