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Brief # 113, Environment

Author: Todd J. Broadman

Title: Will Biden’s Bold Climate Plan See Its Way Through the Political Storms?

May 4. 2021

POLICY

The world is in need of a climate action plan; the U.S. under President Biden is proposing one. At its core, the proposed plan is a set of policies that shift or transition energy from fossil fuels to renewable sources. The glaring challenge to this shift though, is current and future projections for energy demand. Americans are accustomed to the luxury of 24-7 access to energy at the touch of a button. As the Biden plan points to, solar and wind power are the go-to sustainable energy sources. Electricity though, accounts for only a quarter of CO2 emissions – carbon-intensive manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation demands comprise the vast majority. Biden’s plan subscribes to Bill Gates’s “Show me a problem, and I’ll look for technology to fix it,” approach. Others, particularly in Europe, place more emphasis on ‘degrowth’ as the direction the developed world ought to be heading.

Biden recognizes that any plan must be global in scale; he convened global leaders for a climate summit on Earth Day to discuss commitments and targets. Biden committed to what appears to be an ambitious new U.S. target for cutting climate pollution – 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030. Another Biden commitment, global in scope, is his campaign pledge to safeguard tropical forests with a promise of $20 billion to protect the Amazon rainforest.

What has been dubbed the White House “climate all-star team” is a reflection of Biden’s intent to follow up commitment with action. Gina McCarthy, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is the “climate czarina”; Michael Regan, who was a state environment leader, is EPA chief; former Secretary of State John Kerry, one of the original architects of the Paris Agreement, is Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. Biden’s allies in the legislature include Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Andy Levin who have introduced a green procurement that would fund purchases of sustainable American-made products. They, along with the larger Progressive Caucus, introduced the Build Green Act: a $500 billion investment over the next decade to modernize infrastructure and transition the country to electric public vehicles and rail.

This same coalition, which includes Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, introduced the THRIVE Act, a $10 trillion proposal on infrastructure spending. Environmental and citizen stakeholder groups influencing these proposals include the Working Families Party, the Sunrise Movement, the NAACP, and the Sierra Club.

While grassroots environmental activism has helped inform Biden’s climate plan, industry lobbyists, most notably energy conglomerates, agriculture oligopolies, and Wall Street have and will continue to weigh heavily in what actual legislation gets passed. The recent tide of history bears this out: between 2013 and 2019, the most destructive agribusiness companies were backed to the tune of $44 billion by over 300 investment firms, banks, and pension funds across the globe. The question remains: will the Biden administration demand transparency and accountability over how industry behaves? Can he stand up to industry? For his climate plan to gain any traction at all, it cannot rely upon voluntary policies and commitments. As many critics have already pointed to, if Biden can’t get banks and asset managers to stop underwriting fossil-fuel companies and destructive supply chains, he won’t stand a chance.

Another important consideration: should the Democrats lose the House in the 2022 midterms, they may have nothing but the next 18 months to formalize actions. Even if Biden is reelected in 2024, his climate plan will need the cooperation of Congress and the courts. The reality is that both branches have prominent members who are outspoken in not wanting to reduce fossil fuel use or submit to international agreements. Gaining agreements from other industrial nations to scale back their overall energy usage considerably, if the U.S. will not serve as an example, will not transpire.

ANALYSIS

The connection between national carbon targets and actual national emissions is anything but clear. If the Paris agreement is the benchmark, what we have are pledges of escalating targets without the domestic policies needed to reach them. Biden’s voluntary pledge doesn’t necessitate a policy process; there is no penalty for not meeting the target. The same is true for the other signatories. Every five years there is an international “stock take,” wherein countries report their progress. Not a single country today has a loophole-free, legally enforceable, economy-wide, declining cap on carbon. Biden has an opportunity to lead.

Some activists argue that Biden should be establishing a reduction target in the range of 70 percent reduction by 2030 – this, given US’s relative contribution as the world’s largest CO2 emitter. Key to meeting any target is addressing the role played by the American financial sector in fueling deforestation. Keeping forests standing could provide more than one-third of the total CO2 reductions needed to keep global heating below 2°C by 2030. The US’s insatiable consumption of wood and mineral-based commodities drive forest destruction, and that devastation is centered on the critical ecosystems of the Amazon, Congo Basin and Papua New Guinea.

Biden is taking action. At his request, Congress is preparing to overturn Trump’s weakening on methane pollution, reestablishing the states’ ability to have stricter air pollution rules, and reversing Trump’s actions on drilling on public lands. On average, Biden is overturning one rule a day. The president endorsed a $2 trillion green infrastructure plan. His $2.7 trillion American Jobs Plan proposes billions for the transition to electric vehicles and cleaner electricity, along with support for less harmful manufacturing. This Jobs Plan aims to create millions of jobs. As well, Biden’s new budget requests funding for a new Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in HHS, which would “focus on decreasing effects of climate change on vulnerable populations.”

He is leaning in the right direction. Reality on the ground will depend upon a clear, enforceable, well-implemented plan, and one that holds industry accountable – a tall order. And there are glaring gaps in the climate plan. Where is the hard line on fracking? Where is some policy—any policy—to curtail fossil fuel production? Will Biden move to cancel the Dakota Access and Line 3 pipelines? And the looming, cultural quandary: how will American lifestyles be supported in a world without fossil fuels?

Engagement  Resources:

https://www.postcarbon.org/ leading the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world.

https://grist.org/  dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

https://www.sunrisemovement.org  a grassroots movement to stop climate change and create millions of good-paying jobs in the process.

https://greennewdealgroup.org/  will power a renewables revolution, create thousands of green-collar jobs across the economy and rein in the distorting and socially-destructive power of the finance sector while making more low-cost capital available for pressing priorities.

Changing Tides : A new blog post on the marine environment written by U.S. RESIST NEWS Reporter Katherine Cart

 # 5  Fishing Boat Dispatch 

 April 22,2021

Prince William Sound is a quiet place. Storms in the Gulf of Alaska die on the western edges of islands; Montague, Hitchinbrook and Hawkins Islands rise like barbicans about the calm inlets. When one flies low over the Sound, little islands appear as shadows stretched westward: storm waves crush beaches from craggy outcrop. On the leeward side rise unblunted cliffs. At the scooped back of the Sound, one can, in most seasons, drive aluminum skiffs for miles on flat water, jigging for halibut and pulling from 30 fathoms by hand shrimp pots in which an octopus is more likely to be found than shrimp. Treed mountains rise up from the water, are striated by waterfall from glacial seeps, summits. In winter, the bays beneath slush are aquamarine, incredibly clear – the season of rot not yet begun – and the hills are stilled beneath a fathom of snow. The winter nights are long: sun up and down occur near the middle of the working day. In clear dawns and twilights, if one stands in view of the sweep of the Sound, all the snowed islands blaze in alpenglow. On Esther Island, where storms rarely come, the winter sun flits around the periphery of the bay, slinking behind mountain ridge. There is a small cluster of buildings on Esther Island, in which a dozen or so people live and work, hatching and releasing Chum salmon^[1] by the millions each year. In the darkest months, daylight is the blued shadow of the mountain across the bay, and night is, with clear skies and luck, the greenish aurora borealis beyond the humped blocks of snowed peaks. Strong moons reflect silver on frozen waterfalls.

I first arrived to Esther Island in a February snow squall. Nothing moved for months, save the ravens and the flitting Coho the birds picked from our raceways^[2]. April then opened spring in one day: at the western hem of sinking snow fields, in a juniper copse, a small grey spider had hung her web across the ice. The next morning, I heard the first returning gulls, raucous, self-assured; stoneflies swarmed low over the snow. Life and death are in slow riot in the Sound.

If you spend a winter on Esther Island, you’ll mark time by snow melt, sun’s shift, the budding swells of Chum salmon runs^[3]. At the hatchery, we were especially attuned to the return of the anadromous fish; spawning salmon run midsummer, when only the distant Chugach Range still holds snow. After a half decade meandering the Pacific, Chum salmon school en masse in the sheltered bay. Their silvering begins to revert to juvenile colors: mauve, subdued green, sometimes a dull, deep plum. Dorsums of bucks hump up, preparing the endoskeleton for the implausible push up snowmelt, into a fresh water that will, eventually, rot them. Hens fatten, carrying roe like jewels^[4]. Chum salmon are often dubbed dog salmon. If you hold a spawning fish and look her in the bland face, the epithet will be no mystery: once demure teeth now grow to snarls and will rip a palm if one isn’t careful. Their collective return to the fresh flush in which they were once yolked hatchlings to dig their own redds^[5], lay and fertilize eggs is still a profound mystery. Clear bay water goes black with Chum and hazy with decay; spawned out salmon float dead on the tide. Bucks and hens amass in the hatchery brood pond – a cement hollow through which fresh lake water is funneled, simulating a river. Spawning salmon push up contrived cement steps, jumping against surging water. The feat appears desperate, hysterical, incredible.

From the brood pond, up fifty feet coastwise, a river floods from the same lake the brood pond water is pumped. This small river (you can jump the highest rocks at low tide) has long played host to spawning salmon; eons before the hatchery was erected, before humans populated Alaskan coasts, wild salmon returned each year to lay broods in river beds like these. It was from those native fish that the island hatchery first collected spawning returners for manual propagation. In the bay, wild fish are now far outnumbered by hatchery-bred fish. A few salmon make it past the more alluringly powerful, synthesized current to this river. They may be wild fish whose progenitors too spawned freely in riverbed, or they may be of the hatchery stock. No matter which runnel the fish happen upon, none will return to sea. By the hundreds of thousands they push shoreword. Spawning in the lake water in which they were themselves hatched will be their final pilgrimage.

The seasons on Esther are also marked, though by a lesser token, with the arrival of salmon seiners, gillnetters and tenders. The boats’ materialization, like that of the black bears, of the gulls and bald eagles who feed upon the spent carcasses of spawned fish, is contingent upon the salmon’s continuation. When spawning salmon run to fresh water across the world – as in Prince William Sound – many are netted by fishing vessels before reaching either the brood pond or river bed. This can be, like any fishery, a lucrative business subject to the variability of harvesting wild produce. To protect livelihood and broad economy, hatcheries manually spawn commercially viable fish. Salmon fishermen are threads in the Alaskan coastal financial ecosystem pulsing money to interior stretches. Take, for example, one 38-foot purse-seiner, crewed by five people. This boat nets fish (with an absurd amount of skill required by crew and captain; maneuvering skiff, boat and net through shallow, vessel-jammed water necessitates mechanical and physical dexterity and an insensible stamina.) and the hauls the fish to offload at a waiting tender^[6]. Once full, or the opener^[7] closes, the tender transports the fish to processor facilities – canneries, reefer trucks, factories. From there, fish is sent and sold throughout the world, supplying grocers, fish counters, food processors, families. Each of these steps (and all those unmentioned – can producers, truck drivers, marine gear suppliers, etc) boosts a massive economic feedback loop.

The season of spawning is called “egg-take.” From the brood pond Chum are sent by conveyor into the main hatchery building. Ripe hens are cut ventrally, roe scraped by thumb and forefinger from ovaries, collected in five gallon buckets. White milt from five bucks is sprayed by hand into the bucket, simulating somewhat the competitive diversity of stream-spawned fish. Over the long, silent winter, these fertilized eggs are coddled in incubators. In the early spring, fry^[8] are released into the bay to school in nets. Their concept of the world is maximized from a four-by-four-by-one foot aluminum tank to a thirty-by-thirty-by-twenty foot net. Here they are fed a regulated diet of dried feed chucked generally by a bored technician walking in floating circles. In a few months, the snow melts on moss, spiders uncase, birds return and the smolts^[9] are released: their world, very suddenly, becomes the spread of the globe’s oceans. Humpbacks arrive to feed on hatchery fish. Their spouts can be heard across the bay, and the sight of the first is announced on the island with great fanfare. A brief hiatus in bay activity follows. Hatchery workers rest, prepare. And then the next Chum brood returns just ahead of the sea lions, scavenging eagles and the engine thrum of gillnetters and seiners from Cordova and Whittier and Valdez. Egg-take, commercial fishing and summer, begin again.

There are many such hatcheries poised at the world’s littoral edges. They support all manner of fish – though the general commonality is the matter of the fish’s economic import. It’s a sticky situation, providing solutions that raise questions. Hatchery-raised fish (as opposed to those spawning wild in riverbed without the help of human hand), in the Pacific Northwest, make up a mind-boggling 70-80% of coastal fishery stocks. In Prince William Sound, the hatchery system managed by the non-profit I once worked for supported each year $49 million dollars – 90 million pounds – of commercially harvested salmon.

Beyond financial impacts, of course, hatchery fish fill potential gaps caused by overfishing. Overfishing can happen inadvertently and outside prescribed openers; on Bering Sea commercial pollock boats fishing a hundred miles offshore, salmon-takes are of large concern. Salmon cannot legally be kept for sale by offshore vessels, and the catch-limits for Chinook and Coho salmon^[10] are restrictively low (and regulated in a system similar to that of halibut limits, discussed here). Industrial inland practices can impact native salmon runs too, raising cause for hatchery support. On the east coast, numbers of wild Atlantic salmon are dumbfoundingly low. The logging, damming and industrial waste that revert long-stable spawning rivers to inhabitable washes, compounded by early unregulated fishing offshore razed Atlantic salmon populations. Atlantic hatcheries now work to boost runs. As coastal money moves in veins by trade and transport inland, salmon move nutrients in heaps, from benthos to estuary. And from river banks fertilized by spawned-out fish unfold ecosystems. There is merit to hatchery-fish beyond the financial.

There are, regrettably, repercussions to muddling long-held ecological patterns – even for reparations’ sake. Pruning of genetics and unsupportable behavioral traits begins in the Chum-spawned river bed. Most individuals making it into the hatchery brood pond have a fair chance to be manually spawned at the hands of a hatchery tech. Not so in the wild; if the journey upriver to spawning grounds is long (I worked once at a Sockeye hatchery 200 miles inland, to which fish arrived alive, but rotting) a very select few will make the push. Wild alvein^[11] are subjected to major run-off events, predation, disease. Inside the hatchery, alvein in incubators have daily their O2 levels tested, temperature maintained, are protected within four aluminum walls. The imbalance in necessary hardiness between hatchery and wild salmon continues until smolt release. There is a relative lack of predator awareness, hunting capabilities and overall lower socio-behavioral fitness in hatchery-raised fish. Hatchery-raised and wild-spawned fish do eventually mix at sea, and, during fishing openers, are caught in the same gillnets and purse seins. Concern amongst fisheries researchers now grows: in today’s overtaxed oceans, many salmon stocks are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Because hatcheries allow for greater fishing efforts on returning salmon, and because the proportion of hatchery-raised salmon now far outweighs that of the wild-spawned, fishing’s impact on wild-spawned salmon numbers is disproportionately larger than on hatchery-raised. A growing proportion of the less-fit hatchery-raised fish will necessitate more hatchery-fish raised (as the entirety of the salmon population grows, over generations, less-fit). It is a brutal cycle, that at the time of the first hatchery’s development, was unpredictable.

Is there a balance to be found between boosting the volume of native salmon returns and protecting their genetic history? The conundrum lies, as it so often seems to, between hedging industry and the lives supported therein, and sustaining ecological balance. The line between the two, however, grows thinner as one looks further ahead.

Obtusely, yes, hatchery-raised fish boost native populations. It is in the fine-print that the worry niggles: will the less-competitive nature of hatchery fish in turn lessen the subsequent generations of wild fish? A collective appraisal on recent anadromous fish studies can be found here, if you have the interest. Ecosystem evolution is the infinite game. Our practical solutions heretofore have been bandaid-slaps: a child’s answer to the growing sore. Which is not to say that the search for sustainable practices is obsolete. As the bay’s many lives adapt in flux, we too, must evolve regulatory standards when confronted by change and changing perception. Let us reject the notion that holds the sustaining of livelihood and protection of long-term ecological health to be mutually exclusive aims.

^[1] Chum salmon: A relatively abundant commercially harvested salmon. Typically used for low-value products (e.g. dog kibble,supplements). The flesh composition is less refined for serving as fillets than other salmon.

^[2] Raceways: long, deep tanks in which juvenile fish mature.

^[3] Salmon runs: the mass return of a certain year of fish from several years at sea to fresh water in which they will spawn.

^[4] Buck: spawning male salmon; Hen: spawning female salmon.

^[5] Redds: a hollow dug by female salmon at the bottom of a river bed in which she lays eggs. Bucks fertilize with milt.

^[6] Tender: A commercial vessel with large storage capabilities that collects fish from multiple fishing vessels and transports to land en masse.

^[7]  Opener: a state or federally-determined allotment of time and area in which fishing can occur. For salmon seiners and gillnetters, this may be a 12-36 hour window, in which boats fish with graceful hysteria, laying and pursing nets within inches of each other.

^[8] Fry: Newly hatched, impossibly delicate juvenile fish.

^[9] Smolt: Young anadromous fish, recently silvered moving from nears-shore, brackish water to sea for the first time.

^[10] Chinook and Coho Salmon: depending on your preferences, these can be considered some of the tastiest salmon fillets to be had. Commercially, they have a much greater worth, and are much rarer than Chum salmon. (Personally, I prefer Sockeye.)

^[11] Alvein: the youngest stage of fish, directly after hatching, and before fry-stage. Alvein continue to mature in substrate, be it plastic incubator gravel or river bed.