news – This is Not Cool

Shadowy Groups Funding Clean Energy Opposition

More evidence for what we already knew. Above, local TV reporting from Iowa.
Below, new reporting from Midwest Energy News.
Shadowy tentacles of the oil/gas industry reaching into local communities to slow the development of solar energy.

Energy News:

An anonymously funded group is spreading misinformation about a rural Ohio solar project, according to project backers and others who reviewed claims made at a recent event.

Knox Smart Development was incorporated last month by Jared Yost, a Mount Vernon resident and opponent of the planned 120 megawatt Frasier Solar project. Three weeks later, on Nov. 30, the group hosted a catered “town hall meeting” at a Mount Vernon theater that included speakers with ties to fossil fuel and climate denial groups.

A company official with the solar developer, Open Road Renewables, was denied entry to the event, which was attended by approximately 500 people and featured complimentary food and drinks following the program.

It’s unclear who funded Knox Smart Development so it could pay for the event.

“There are people with concerns who are helping us, and they’ve all asked to remain anonymous,” Yost said when asked about its funding sources as people left the theater. “So we have local concerned citizens who are helping to fund this, including myself.”

A Dec. 7 filing advised developer Open Road Renewables and others that the Ohio Power Siting Board was ready to start review of the application for the Frasier Solar Project, which was filed in October. The project would be located in Clinton and Miller townships, both in Knox County. Yost and Knox Smart Development filed to participate in the case as parties on Dec. 8.

An early version of Knox Smart Development’s website included the text, “Our mission: Empowering America,” with a hyperlink to a page for an organization called The Empowerment Alliance. Research by the Energy and Policy Institute, an energy and utility watchdog group, has linked the Empowerment Alliance to the natural gas industry.

Dave Anderson, the institute’s policy and communications director, found a National Review Ideas Summit program guide that characterized The Empowerment Alliance as a project of Karen Buchwald Wright and her husband, Tom Rastin. Wright is the board chair of Ariel Corporation, which makes compressors for the natural gas industry. Its headquarters is in Mount Vernon.

The Empowerment Alliance’s highest paid contractor for the past four years, according to Internal Revenue Service filings, has been a group called Majority Strategies. Its chief strategist, Tom Whatman, emceed the Nov. 30 event for Knox Smart Development. Whatman is also the former executive director of the Ohio Republican Party.

US Real Estate May be Overvalued due to Climate Risk

A Staten Island neighborhood, pre and post Hurricane Sandy. First Street Foundation photo

I posted recently about newly identifed “Climate Abandonment” areas, neighborhoods identified in a new peer reviewed study, where residents have moved out due to increasing local climate risk.
The most common risk factor is flooding, and typically, these residents don’t move very far – they want to hold on to family structures, jobs, community – but it means that within some areas, even relatively prosperous areas, there are pockets of at-risk housing that could be, or already has been, devalued – and those residents left behind will find their holdings reduced in value.
A separate study from Environmental Defense Fund, published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change, showed that significant blocks of real estate may be overvalued due to as yet unpriced climate risks.

Environmental Defense Fund:

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Changeexamines the potential cost of unrealized flood risk in the American real estate market, finding that flood zone property prices are overvalued by US$121–US$237 billion. Authored by researchers from Environmental Defense Fund, First Street Foundation, Resources for the Future, the Federal Reserve, and several academic institutions, the study also examined how unpriced flood risk throughout the country could impact communities and local governments, finding low-income households particularly vulnerable to home value deflation.

“Increasing flood risk under climate change is creating a bubble that threatens the stability of the US housing market. As we’ve seen in California in the last few weeks, these aren’t hypotheticals and the risk is more extensive than expected—and that risk carries an enormous cost,” said Dr. Jesse Gourevitch, a postdoctoral fellow at Environmental Defense Fund and lead author of the study. “These risks are largely unaccounted for in property transactions, encouraging development in flood-prone areas. Accurately pricing the costs of flooding in home values can support adaptation to flood risk, but may leave many worse off.”

Currently, more than 14.6 million properties in the United States face at least a 1% annual probability of flooding, with expected annual damages to residential properties exceeding US$32 billion. Increasing frequency and severity of flooding under climate change is predicted to increase the number of properties exposed to flooding by 11% and average annual losses by at least 26% by 2050. The increasing cost of flooding under climate change has led to growing concerns that housing markets are mispricing these risks, thus causing a real estate bubble to develop.

New Research – US Already has 3 Million Climate Migrants

Bloomberg:

Over the last two decades, as San Antonio and surrounding Bexar County, Texas, grew by more than 600,000 people, some 17% of the city’s blocks experienced a decrease in population.

That delta is largely due to flood risk that climate change exacerbates, according to a new report by the First Street Foundation, a data nonprofit with the mission of communicating climate hazards.

Bexar — sitting in a swath of Texas known as Flash Flood Alley — is part of a national trend of hyper-local migration to avoid flooding, which is hollowing out blocks within cities, the report finds. The research is based on a model, published Monday in the journal Nature Communications, that looks at population changes using granular US Census Bureau data and controls for factors besides flooding, such as nearby job opportunities and school quality.

In all, First Street finds, 3.2 million Americans moved away from high-flood-risk areas between 2000 and 2020. The full extent of the migration has been hidden, however, since most people didn’t move far.

“There appear to be clear winners and losers in regard to the impact of flood risk on neighborhood-level population change,” Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at First Street, said in a statement. “The downstream implications of this are massive and impact property values, neighborhood composition and commercial viability, both positively and negatively.”

The analysis also extrapolates these trends 30 years into the future, predicting that vulnerable areas will continue to lose population.

In the US, the frequency of disasters causing at least $1 billion in damages has gone from roughly three a year during the 1980s to an annual average of 17.8 over the period 2018 to 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global warming has knock-on effects that exacerbate flooding in particular, including sea level rise, more ferocious hurricanes and more frequent and extended downpours.

Below, a Detroit area local news report about recent flooding in Southeast Michigan. No mention of the word “climate”, but neighbors talk about floods becoming more frequent, area disaster manager mentions “significant rainfall that we’re not used to seeing.”

Pollution of aquifers from agricultural runoff is a major and growing problem in agricultural areas across the midwest, nowhere more acutely than in Iowa, as Keith Schneider’s deep dive piece shows, below.
If only there was something farmers could do to continue making a good living on their land without having to apply huge amounts of nitrates and pesticides…oh, wait….(see David Mulla and others, above)

Keith Schneider in The New Lede:

Faced with a startlingly high cancer rate in the key US farm state of Iowa, public health leaders are taking the politically precarious step of acknowledging that preventing disease necessitates cutting exposure to potentially cancer-causing chemicals, including those used in agriculture.

–
Iowa now ranks second to Kentucky in cancer incidence in the United States, and from 2015 to 2019 was the only state where the rate of new cancers increased, according to the National Cancer Institute. Rates of oral cancer, leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, melanoma, kidney, colon, and breast cancer are among the nation’s highest, according to Charlton.

The state is expected to see 21,000 new cases of cancer this year alone, more than double the number of new cancers recorded for 1973, the year Iowa began keeping records, according to Charlton. Since 1973, the state population has grown only a little over 10%.

“Some cancers in Iowa are rising and others are not falling as quickly as they are in other states,” said Charlton. “We do know that Iowans have a number of environmental exposures that could contribute to our risk of cancer.”

Exposure to nitrate in drinking water is well-recognized by scientists as a risk factor in many of the same high-incidence cancers seen in Iowa – lymphoma, breast cancer, blood, and colon cancer.

Cancer researchers, including a group from the University of Iowa, have linked various cancers to long-term exposure in air and water to trace levels of insecticides and herbicides, as well as nitrates. And Iowa farmers annually spread more pesticides (nearly 54 million pounds) more commercial fertilizer (2 billion pounds) and more animal manure (50 million tons) than in any other state, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Iowa State University.