By Peter Dykstra for
Environmental Health News
The eight years of the
Obama presidency didn’t lack for environmental (or anti-environmental) gaffes
and scams. But those years also gave us plenty of advances and signs of hope.
Here are a quick twenty-five.
1) We'll always have
Paris (maybe)
After conspicuously
failing in Copenhagen in 2009, the world’s nations finally agreed to take
concrete steps to reduce CO2 emissions at Paris in
late 2015. Concerns abound that Donald Trump will seek to ignore or undermine
the agreement.
2) Environmental
justice is a thing again
Sometimes, what people
do changes history. Sometimes, it’s what people do to other people.
Environmental justice – or its less-noble-sounding alternate name,
environmental racism – was re-ignited as an issue after years of benign good
intentions or simple indifference. The struggling, mostly-minority city of
Flint, Michigan, got a new, toxic water
supply as a money-saving effort. City, state and federal
officials concealed the dangers from Flint residents for more than a year.
And in North Dakota,
Native Americans spearheaded a protest that blocked, for now, construction of
the Dakota Access
Pipeline, braving rubber bullets, pepper spray, attack dogs and
water cannons.
Flint residents
responded, and the DAPL protesters stood their ground, with great dignity. Like
civil rights protesters in the South more than a half-century ago, their ordeals
can serve as powerful symbols for many struggles to come.
Reporters have written
much about the demise of traditional journalism. Well, at least the ones who
still have jobs have written much. But with newspapers slashing employees and
TV news slashing IQ points, journalism websites have filled at least some of
the void. Quality environment reporting lives on at nonprofits like the Center
for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News (see “Pulitzers,” below), and their
for-profit counterparts like Mashable and Vox.com.
And not all old media
have thrown in the green towel: The Washington Post and the Associated Press
have boosted their reporting resources.
4) Climate deniers
lose face-time (except for Congress and the White House)
Mainstream media
finally noticed embarrassing disclosures about climate denial and its funding
sources. With the unsurprising exception of Fox News, media appearances by the
small circle of scientists and political operatives like Dr. Richard Lindzen
and Marc Morano seem to be in steep decline. In 2013, the Los Angeles
Times instituted a ban on publishing fact-free Letters to the
Editor that promoted climate denial.
5) Eyes on the
prize(s)
Not everyone pays
attention to environmental reporting, but the Pulitzer Prize committee does. The
beat has averaged better than a Pulitzer per year in the Obama Era – national
or investigative reporting, public service, and nonfiction.
Topics included
analysis of avalanches, a lethal mudslide, wildfires, the poisoning of a town,
and fossil fuel scams.
6) Eyes in the skies
Too much planet, too
little law enforcement. But satellites, drones, Google Earth and more are
helping to monitor oil spills, illegal logging, mining, fishing, and more. A
tiny nonprofit, SkyTruth,
has been a pioneer, partnering with Google and environmental NGO’s to
cyber-patrol the oceans in search of pirate fishing boats.
7) Chesapeake comeback
(sort of)
Four decades of
concerted effort to save America’s largest estuary are finally beginning to pay
off. Industrial pollution and farm runoff had nearly killed off the Chesapeake
Bay, but 2015 saw a slight drop in farm pollution and a rise in two iconic species,
blue crabs and rockfish (striped bass).
The Chesapeake Bay
Foundation’s report card gave the Bay its highest-ever grade, a
C minus. At long last, the Bay stands a chance of getting accepted at a
second-tier state college.
8) Turn your head and
cough less often
The Centers for
Disease Control reported a sharp drop in
cigarette smoking from 2005 to 2015 – from 45.1 million
Americans to 36.5 million. Accounting for the drop? A lot of smokers quit; a
lot died prematurely. The American Cancer Society reported a 25 percent drop in
overall cancer fatalities since 1991.
9) An outbreak of
saltwater Yellowstones
More than a century
ago, the U.S. went on a binge of protecting wild, scenic lands from commercial
onslaught – Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and many more. The world’s
nations have reprised this at sea in recent years, with giant swaths of ocean
set off limits for most types of commercial activity – fishing, minerals
exploration and more. Smaller protected areas popped up along coastlines, and
even in the Great Lakes. And 2016 saw a crown jewel established – a
multinational protected area in Antarctica’s Ross Sea.
10) Cities take on
sustainability….
It makes sense when
you hear that a metropolis like Boston or San Francisco is pursuing
sustainability plans. But Vegas, baby, Vegas. Well, the Las Vegas City
Government, at least. The city announced that a new solar deal
enables everything from government buildings, streetlights, and all municipal
functions to be 100 percent powered by renewables. The fountains and bright
lights of the Strip still remain powered largely by natural gas and unthinkable
amounts of hype. But what happened in Las Vegas City Hall won’t stay in Las
Vegas City Hall.
11) ….And so do
corporations, sort of
If Las Vegas is an
easy target due to its own excesses and stereotypes, its corporate counterpart
may be Wal-Mart. Rob Walton, ex-chair and current heir, says the retail giant
has saved more than
a billion dollars in energy costs by going in whole-hog on
solar panels on its mega-stores’ roofs. But wait!! There’s more!! The Solar
Energy Industries Association announced a few months ago that Wal-Mart is no
longer the US business with the biggest installed solar capacity. They’ve been
leapfrogged by archrival Target.
12) Solar, wind begin
to plummet to low-low prices
Since at least the
1960’s, we’ve heard sunny predictions that renewable energy was “just around
the corner.” In the Obama Era, we finally made it to the corner.
Projections by
Bloomberg New Energy Finance have worldwide costs
for solar dipping beneath coal in 10 years. And a report in the
journal Nature Energy says windpower is not
far behind, dropping by 41 percent by the year 2050.
13) A sunny windfall
of new jobs
The nonprofit Solar
Foundation estimated that solar energy
employed 209,000 Americans in 2015. That total is expected to
exceed a quarter million when the numbers for 2016 are in.
The American Wind
Energy Association says there were 88,000 windpower
jobs in the U.S. in 2016. As oil and gas prices slumped due to
oversupply, that industry shed
142,000 of its 538,000 jobs from October 2014 to May 2016,
according to the US Energy Information Administration.
14) Coal collapse
Buffeted by criticism
over climate change, worker safety, and environmental damage, the domestic coal
industry was in freefall. Those critics may be far less responsible for the
decline than mechanization, and coal’s inability to compete with low natural gas
prices. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics listed 178,300 coal industry jobs in 1985, and
56,600 jobs in 2016.
15) Flatlining Earth
theory
For three straight
years starting in 2014, world greenhouse
gas emissions stayed almost flat. A report released at
November’s United Nations climate negotiations in Marrakesh cited declines in
coal consumption in China and U.S. as major factors.
16) China wakes up on
pollution
China’s booming
economy has come largely at the cost of choking smog, tainted rivers, mounds of
e-waste, and other nightmares. The world has grown accustomed to headlines
about chewable air in Beijing or Shanghai – the cities where international
reporters tend to be based.
But when China’s Environment Ministry issued a list
of the 10 smoggiest
cities a few years ago, neither Beijing or Shanghai made the cut.
China is combatting its smog plague with crackdowns on dirty factories and
vehicles and investing hundreds of billions in renewable energy. Last week,
state-run media reported the creation of a special pollution police force in
Beijing.
17) China wakes up on
extinction
That booming economy
accelerated demand for traditional Chinese wildlife products like shark fin
soup, rhino horn, and ivory. Pro basketball legend and national hero Yao Ming
fronted a wildly successful campaign to reject finning sharks for soup, and in
late December, China announced it would phase out
all elephant ivory processing and trade.
18) Manufacturers
seeing green in green chemistry
The concept of green chemistry is
a quarter century old, but industry insiders say its time has come. If it’s not
enough that ridding society of things like useless antibacterials and toxic
flame retardants and endocrine disruptors like BPA is an environmental health
sacred cow, it’s poised to become a cash cow as well. An industry study sees
the green chemistry market growing from $15 billion worldwide in 2015 to $100
billion in 2020.
19) Fossil fuel
divestment exceeds expectations
They’re starting to
use the “T” word when it comes to the campaign to persuade investors to ditch
fossil fuel holdings. What started as a Campus Crusade for Climate in 2011 now
claims nearly 800 universities, pension and investment funds, banks, insurers,
and religious organizations. “Investors controlling more than $5 trillion in
assets have committed to dropping some or all fossil fuel
stocks from their portfolios,” reported the New York Times in December.
20) EVs grow
If you went to last
week’s influential 2017 North American International Auto Show in Detroit,
chances are most of the leggy models you saw there were draped over electric
vehicles. All-time EV sales have topped 500,000, with more than a
quarter of that number happening in the final months of 2016, and industry
observers say EV sales are poised to explode.
21) Fossil felons?
In March 2016, Attorneys
General for 20 states launched a probe of ExxonMobil’s apparent
efforts to stifle climate science, including that of its own scientists. Exxon
launched a fierce counterattack, abetted by House Science Committee chair Lamar Smith.
And former Massey
Energy boss Don Blankenship became
the first coal CEO to be convicted for mine safety violations in the deaths of
29 West Virginia miners in a 2010 accident.
22. National Monuments
With a week left to go
in his presidency, Obama designated five more national monuments. His 35
national monument designations make Obama the most prolific user of the 1906
Antiquities Act. Some honored human rights, but others preserved
breathtaking wilderness areas, including the Bears Ears National Monument in
southern Utah. ”There is no
place like it,” opined the Washington Post,
inviting Obama’s critics to take a deep breath.
23) Oil drilling ban
in Arctic, Atlantic
On his way out the
door, President Obama locked in a multi-year ban
on oil and gas drilling off the Arctic and Atlantic coasts.
Legal experts say the Trump Administration would have a hard time undoing the
ban. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau followed suit with a freeze on new
leases in the Canadian Arctic.
After years of
threats, derision, harassment, and allegations that somehow being a climate scientist
is the road to Big Bucks, they’re starting to fight back. Andrew Weaver won damages in a
defamation case against Canada’s National Post in 2015.
U.S. scientist Michael
Mann’s high-stakes
defamation suit continues to slog through the courts.
25) Endangered no more
More species or
subspecies were removed from the
Endangered list during the Obama years than all other
administrations combined. The Steller sea lion, Virginia northern flying
squirrel, and local populations of humpback whales, brown pelicans, and gray
wolves headline the list.
And to end this upbeat
list on a downer, a possible addition to the endangered species list in coming
years is the Endangered Species Act.
For questions or
feedback about this piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.