Help Sue Morse Complete Her Book
MassWildlife and MassDOT partner on award winning project
MassWildlife and MassDOT received a biennial achievement award this October for their collaborative Linking Landscapes of Massachusetts Wildlife Program. Now in its 10th year, “Linking Landscapes” was established to minimize the impact of the existing road network on rare wildlife while improving highway safety. FROM MASSWILDLIFE <more>
A Field Guide to the Petrochemical and Plastics Industry
The shale gas industry has been trying to build demand for fossil fuels from its fracked oil and gas wells by promoting the construction of a new petrochemical corridor in America’s Rust Belt and expanding the corridor on the Gulf Coast. To help demystify terms like “natural gas liquids” and “cracker plants,” DeSmog has begun building a guide to some of the equipment and terms used in the plastics and petrochemical industries. FROM DESMOG BLOG <more>
Made in the Shade: Erik Hoffner on Agroforestry
Occam’s Razor is a principle that tells us that the simplest solution to a problem tends to be the correct one. Farmers around the world are abiding by this philosophy in droves by practicing agroforesty, an ancient agricultural technique that supports biodiversity while simultaneously sequestering carbon. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn all about agroforestry from Erik Hoffner, an editor at Mongabay. FROM SEA CHANGE RADIO <more>
US Supreme Court allows historic kids’s climate lawsuit to go forward
Case aims to compel the government to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. A landmark climate-change lawsuit brought by young people against the US government can proceed, the Supreme Court said on 2 November. The case, Juliana v. United States, had been scheduled to begin trial on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon, in a federal district court. But those plans were scrapped last month after President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene and dismiss the case. FROM NATURE <more>
A Record Number of Scientists are Running for Congress, and They Get Climate Change
More than a dozen scientists are candidates for U.S. House and Senate seats this year in a wave fueled by the Trump Administration’s anti-science agenda. Joseph Kopser, an aerospace engineer, Army veteran and Austin tech entrepreneur, is spending October on the campaign trail, Texas style. FROM INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS <more>
JOBS BOARD
Help Sue Morse Complete Her Book
So far, our non-profit’s training programs have led to the protection of more than 40,000 acres of land where animals can live, feed and reproduce.
Now we’re on the verge of ramping up that concept– and multiplying its impact a thousand-fold or more. With a book uniquely written to show anyone how to protect habitats for more than 40 species.
Princeton University Press caught wind of the project, quickly signed on to publish it, and — recognizing its potential — is now eager to get the manuscript.
A timely project
Meanwhile, of course, untold acres of important habitat are being lost to the bulldozer every day. High levels of government seem oblivious to or even complicit in the destruction. That’s we’ve given Sue the go-ahead to devote all of time to her final research and writing so this vital book can be published ASAP.
That’s where you come in. Besides the other hats she wears at Keeping Track, Sue has long been our primary source of revenue through the grant income and fees her workshops and presentations generate. Now, with the need for her to focus on research and writing, those revenues are gone – while our expenses continue. Including those being used to complete the book.
Put habitat conservation within every community’s reach
So please, make a donation right now to Keeping Track to keep us and the project afloat while Sue finishes the last part of the book. In the process, you’ll be enabling us to inform and inspire far more would-be wildlife conservationists than ever before with our proven methods.
Together, we can kindle a grassroots revolution in habitat conservation. So please, make your contribution right here. Thank you in advance for your generosity. And for caring so much about wildlife, habitats and biodiversity.
A final note
Sue is contributing all of her royalties from the book to Keeping Track. So your donation will not only advance grassroots conservation work across the continent. It will also help Keeping Track in all of its efforts to harness the power of citizen-science in protecting critical habitat.
MassWildlife and MassDOT partner on award winning project
Linking Landscapes is a long-term and multifaceted volunteer-based monitoring program. The objectives are to: 1) Reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions and improve public safety, 2) Enhance, protect, and restore habitats impacted by roads, 3) Incorporate conservation priorities into transportation planning, and 4) Implement wildlife transportation and research.
Projects implemented through the Linking Landscapes program include black bear research, peregrine falcon nest boxes, turtle research and protection, moose/vehicle collision reduction, proactive wetland restoration, and wildlife passage research and design. “The success of this program is in a large part fueled by data provided by the public and the ability to collaborate with a diverse group of stakeholders,” says David Paulson, MassWildlife’s Linking Landscapes Project Coordinator. “Reports about roadkill and turtle and amphibian crossings can help us better understand the interaction of roads and wildlife on a developing landscape. These reports can identify hot spots, which helps in planning.” Find out how you can report wildlife observations and learn more about the Program.
A Field Guide to the Petrochemical and Plastics Industry
The shale gas industry has been trying to build demand for fossil fuels from its fracked oil and gas wells by promoting the construction of a new petrochemical corridor in America’s Rust Belt and expanding the corridor on the Gulf Coast. To help demystify terms like “natural gas liquids” and “cracker plants,” DeSmog has begun building a guide to some of the equipment and terms used in the plastics and petrochemical industries.
This guide, which will expand over time, is intended to serve as an informal glossary of sorts and an introduction to what happens to fossil fuels that are transformed into chemicals, plastics, vinyl, Styrofoam and a variety of other materials.
Petrochemical Production and the Climate
This field guide is part of Fracking for Plastics, a DeSmog investigation into the proposed petrochemical build-out in the Rust Belt and the major players involved, along with the environmental, health, and socio-economic implications.
These fossil fuels have a significant global warming impact of their own. The methane leaks associated with the natural gas drilling and distribution industry are so pronounced that many experts say burning natural gas for electricity is worse for the climate than burning coal.
While hydrocarbons that are used as raw materials for petrochemical products aren’t burned (and therefore don’t release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere), that leaky infrastructure still results in methane pollution. Methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, capable of warming the climate 86 times as much as an equal amount of carbon dioxide over the first two decades after it’s released to the atmosphere.
Making petrochemicals also requires a huge amount of energy — some of the largest petrochemical plants like crackers may have their own power plants on site — and that energy comes from burning fossil fuels.
Executives from major oil and gas companies, wary of the impacts that carbon dioxide pollution controls might have on their long-term prospects, have told investors that they see petrochemicals as the place where demand for fossil fuels will continue to grow, even if the world takes serious action on climate change.
THE NATURAL GAS LIQUIDS (NGLs)
“WET GAS” FROM THE WELL: Oil and gas aren’t the only things that come out of an oil and gas well. There’s also, for example, wastewater and the natural gas liquids, or “wet” fossil fuels, an array of hydrocarbon molecules that flow up to the surface alongside oil, water, and methane, the main ingredient in the natural gas used to heat homes and generate electricity. These “wet” hydrocarbons can represent a surprisingly high proportion of a shale gas well’s production. For every 1,000 cubic feet of methane, some Marcellus Shale wet gas wells can produce up to roughly 9 gallons of natural gas liquids, according to data reported by the American Oil and Gas Reporter in 2011.
Source: The Energy Information Administration
Ethane: Ethane often represents the biggest cut of NGLs from a shale gas well. At room temperature and pressure, ethane is a colorless and odorless gas. Because of its two carbon atoms, ethane is sometimes referred to by the industry as C2.
Ethane “contributes to climate change in three ways,” DeSmog reported in 2016 after researchers found that ethane pollution from the Bakken shale oil field was so severe that it had raised ethane levels in the atmosphere worldwide, “as a greenhouse gas itself (though it’s extremely short-lived in the atmosphere so these effects are relatively fleeting), by extending the lifespan of the powerful greenhouse gas methane (because it consumes compounds that help break methane down), and because it helps to form smog, which the researchers described as ‘the third-largest contributor to human-caused global warming after carbon dioxide and methane.’”
Some drillers leave their ethane mixed in with the methane they sell as natural gas — but natural gas buyers and pipeline companies often set limits on how much ethane can be left in the mix. Once the right infrastructure is built, the petrochemical industry can take ethane and use it to make ethylene (see below).
Propane: Familiar to many from the backyard BBQ grill, propane is the second most-common NGL. It has been marketed as a “green” fuel because it produces less carbon than gasoline or diesel when burned as a fuel for cars and trucks. In 2016, market research firm IHS foundthat shale drilling was causing U.S. exports of propane to reach record levels. Roughly 6 million homes in the U.S. relied on propane for heating that same year, according to MarketWatch, and the fuel is also widely used in the agricultural industry.
The petrochemical industry can transform propane into propylene (which can then become the plastic polypropylene) as well as ethylene and other petrochemical building blocks. Propane has three carbon atoms per molecule, so it’s sometimes referred to as C3.
Butane: Another colorless, odorless, and flammable gas, butane is the fuel inside cigarette lighters and some camp stoves. Butane burns hot, but it can also be chilled and used as a refrigerant, because it stays in liquid form until temperatures reach 220 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). It’s also often blended into gasoline for cars and trucks. The petrochemical industry can turn butane into ethylene, as well as acetic acid and the building blocks for resins.
Natural Gasoline/Pentanes Plus: Hydrocarbons with five or more carbon atoms per molecule (C5+) are often referred to in the oil industry as natural gasoline. This mix of NGLs tends to reach its boiling point at or around the same range of temperatures and pressures as gasoline and is often blended into vehicle fuels or used to process tar sands. Pentane, or C5, is also used in the manufacturing of Styrofoam.
The Building Blocks
These materials, sometimes called olefins, are half-way to becoming consumer goods like plastics or chemicals. They’re often produced by “cracking” NGLs (see “crackers” below). While many consumers have never heard their names, they’re the ingredients that form many of the plastic and petrochemical products that wind up on store shelves.
Credit: Plastic Pollution: How Humans are Turning the World into Plastic, a video collaboration with UN Environment and their Clean Seas Campaign, by Kerzegesagt, via YouTube
Ethylene: Ethylene is prized by the petrochemical industry, because it can be turned into polyethylene, Styrofoam, PVC, solvents, ingredients used in shampoos and beauty supplies, and a huge array of other products. Over 60 percent of the ethylene made worldwide ends up as polyethylene — and most polyethylene, in turn, is used to make packaging, according to the American Chemistry Council. Plastic packaging has come under fire from environmentalists, who argue that it makes little sense to use something that is so long-lived for a product that’s designed to be almost immediately discarded. Scientific American reports that single-use plastics and plastic packaging can remain in the environment for over 500 years, causing harm to wildlife, getting into the seafood that people eat, and polluting the world’s oceans.
Propylene: In the petrochemical industry, propylene can be used as a fuel — attractive because it burns hotter than propane — or it can be used as a raw material. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s propylene is turned into the plastic polypropylene, 2007 figures show. The remaining third might wind up in acrylic fibers (sometimes called“artificial wool” and used to make socks, carpets, and more), artificial rubber, ABS plastics (the plastics Lego blocks are made from), or flexible foam found in furniture and automobiles.
Methanol: Although methanol is so often made from wood that it’s also known as “wood alcohol” or “wood spirit,” it can also be made from shale gas. One company, U.S. Methanol, is currently working ondismantling methanol plants in Brazil and Slovenia and moving them to West Virginia, where they will be used to make methanol from shale gas. Methanol is used to make formaldehyde and acetic acid, which in turn can become paints, adhesives, resin, and insulation.
Separating NGLs
Separators and Condensate Tanks: A blend of crude oil, natural gas, NGLs, and wastewater flows up to the surface when an oil and gas well comes online. On the well pad, or at processing stations connected to a group of wellheads, gases and liquids can be separated. Inside separators, gases like methane rise to the top as fluids collect below and are stored in tanks. Tanks near a gas well might hold wastewater (sometimes called brine) or they might hold NGLs in liquid form.
This 2016 FLIR video by environmental group Earthworks shows emissions from condensate tanks at a gas well in Payne County, Oklahoma.
Credit: Earthworks, 2016, via YouTube
Processing Plant: Processing plants can separate out the various hydrocarbons from oil and gas wells more thoroughly than can be done on a well pad. The mix of fluids and gases travels through gathering lines, which are less-regulated, generally smaller-bore pipelines, from the wellhead to a centralized processing plant. At a processing plant, water vapor can be removed through a process called glycol dehydration, which uses a desiccant to absorb water vapor. NGLs can be separated out at processing plants using a similar process or by taking advantage of the fact that each hydrocarbon has different boiling and freezing points, so gas streams can be chilled, heated, or put under differing pressures to isolate NGLs. In the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that gas processing capacity grew nearly 10-fold from 2010 to 2016, when it hit 10 billion cubic feet a day.
Cryogenic Plant: Cryogenic separation is a gas processing method that takes advantage of the fact that methane stays gaseous at very low temperatures, so cryogenic separators chill the combined gases, then send them through a small diameter pipe into an expansion chamber. There, the methane continues flowing as a gas, but most NGLs condense into liquid forms and drop down into the bottom of the expansion chamber.
Fractionation: Fractionators finish the job of separating out NGLs and generally consist of de-ethanizers, depropanizers, debutanizers, and deisobutanizers. As the gas stream passes through towers, where they encounter different pressures and temperatures, a single type of NGLis pulled out of the blend. This Shell Oil video from the 1950s uses a mix of animation and live footage to walk viewers through the science behind the process of separating out different types of hydrocarbon:
Credit: How an Oil Refinery Works Shell Oil Historic Film, by PeriscopeFilm, via YouTube.
In the Rust Belt region, fractional capacity is projected to reach 1.1 million barrels (bbl) a day in 2019, up from 41,000 bbl/day, according to the EIA.
Shipping
NGL Pipeline: Building out an NGL-reliant industry requires the construction of a massive array of pipelines, including the gathering lines that connect wells to processing plants (like the Revolution pipeline that exploded in September 2018, seven days after first going into service) and pipes to carry specific NGLs to buyers, like the Mariner East pipeline project (plagued by construction problems) and Shell’s proposed Falcon pipeline, which will feed its $6 billion ethane cracker plant in Potter County, Pennsylvania. NGL pipelines may also carry ethylene, propylene, and chlorine. The American Chemistry Council estimates that roughly 500 miles of new NGL pipelines passing through Pennsylvania over to Kentucky, will be required to support a new Rust Belt petrochemical corridor.
Compressor Station: At pipeline compressor stations, condensate and wastewater can collect as gas is compressed to propel it across long distances. Those higher pressures can cause liquids to separate out. You may see condensate tanks at these compressor stations.
NGL Export Terminal: When raw ethane and propane are exported for processing overseas, specialized shipping terminals are required to load up liquefied NGLs for transportation by sea. The Marcus Hook terminal in Chester County, Pennsylvania, right outside of Philadelphia, connects to the Mariner East 1 pipeline, and Energy Transfer is currently working on connecting two larger bore pipeline systems, the Mariner East 2 and the Mariner East 2X, to the export terminal as well.
Barge: Cracker plants, which are huge petrochemical complexes, are often built on the banks of rivers, not only because finished products, like tiny plastic beads, can be shipped away by barge, but also because the plants themselves often require pieces of equipment that are too large to transport by road or rail. For example, the de-ethanizer and the C2 splitter at Shell’s Potter Township ethane cracker were both massive, clocking in at a respective 200 feet and 187 feet tall and each weighing hundreds of tons. They arrived at the cracker plant by barge on the Ohio River, as it would have been almost impossible to bring them to the site by road. When companies scout out locations where cracker plants can be built, they must often look for river-side acreage for this reason.
The Gas Station
NGL Storage Site: One of the biggest logistical headaches that the natural gas industry faces is that fact that its product often is, as the name suggests, a gas. Gases are difficult to store and supplies must closely match demand or prices can become fickle. With natural gas liquids, storage can be easier — but to accommodate the volumes of NGLs coming from the Marcellus Shale, the industry still must find huge underground salt formations where companies can store NGLs underground under the conditions to keep them liquid. Once these NGL storage sites are built, they can serve as “gas stations” for ethane crackers — the gigantic plants at the heart of the petrochemicals industry. A single NGL storage site can support multiple crackers. One such site, the Mountaineer NGL storage site, is planned for Monroe County, Ohio. DeSmog has previously reported on the ways that state regulators in Ohio, who have never been faced with permitting a site like Mountaineer, were caught unprepared in what Mountaineer officials called “a relatively undefined setting” for regulation.
Mountaineer, which is expected to cost $500 million, is not the only NGL storage site that experts predict will be hitting drawing boards in the region. In June, an “investment banker/equity capital markets expert who requested anonymity” told Kallanish Energy, a trade publication, that he expected $10 billion in funding for new NGLstorage would be available. A $10 billion investment would translate into storage sites with the capacity to store 75 million to 100 million barrels of ethane, ethylene, propane, and propylene, according to the American Chemistry Council.
Transforming Raw Materials
Ethylene Cracker/Ethane Cracker: Cracker plants are huge petrochemical complexes that play a major role in the production of plastics, and they’ve been referred to as the heart of the petrochemical industry. Inside ethylene crackers (which are used to make ethylene), hydrocarbon molecules like ethane or naptha are heated up to temperatures that can reach 1,580 degrees Fahrenheit — as hot as flowing volcanic lava — or higher. At those temperatures, molecular bonds crack apart, and ethylene, propylene, and other byproducts form. These are quickly fed into quenching systems to freeze the cracking process and prevent other unwanted substances from forming. Various contaminants, like tar and coke, must be removed, and propylene and ethylene and other petrochemical building blocks are separated out.
From there, ethylene can be purified, so that sulfur, ammonia, and other impurities are pulled out, and then exposed to a catalyst, causing a chemical reaction that creates polyethylene. That polyethylene can then be shaped into tiny plastic pellets called nurdles (the raw material for producing many plastic products), and hauled away to buyers by truck, rail, or barge.
Often, processing, fractionation, and catalyzation is done on-site at ethane cracker plants. For example, Shell’s ethane cracker under construction in Pennsylvania is designed to accept raw natural gas and transform it into polyethylene all on site.
Historically, many crackers used naphtha, which is derived from crude oil instead of ethane, but with the growth of the shale drilling industry, unwanted ethane supplies have grown, driving prices to historic lows. Crackers that use ethane as a feedstock for ethylene might be referred to as either ethane or ethylene crackers.
“Nine new crackers are expected to come online in the U.S. by 2020 representing 10.7 million tonnes/year of new ethylene capacity,” trade publication Petrochemical Update wrote in October 2018.
Credit: Royal Dutch Shell Ethane Cracker, August 2018, by T. Lynskey, Sr., via YouTube
Propane Dehydrogenation (PDH) Plant: Propane can similarly be turned into propylene, using a process called dehydrogenation. The American Chemistry Council predicts that the Appalachian region can support two new PDH plants, both with the capacity to turn propylene into 490,000 metric tons of polypropylene resin a day.
Downstream Manufacturing Site: Once the building blocks for the petrochemicals industry, like ethylene and propylene, are made, the range of synthetic materials that can be produced from those building blocks becomes enormous. Paints, vinyl, foams, surfactants (or soap-like products), pesticides, and much of the full repertoire of the modern chemicals industry can be formed from the byproducts of the oil and gas industry.
Occam’s Razor is a principle that tells us that the simplest solution to a problem tends to be the correct one. Farmers around the world are abiding by this philosophy in droves by practicing agroforesty, an ancient agricultural technique that supports biodiversity while simultaneously sequestering carbon. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn all about agroforestry from Erik Hoffner, an editor at Mongabay. Hoffner takes a look at examples of agroforestry efforts around the globe, examines recent investments into the sector and shows how it stacks up to large, industrial agricultural systems. As you’ll see, sometimes the best answers are right under our noses the whole time. LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE
US Supreme Court allows historic kids’s climate lawsuit to go forward
Case aims to compel the government to slash greenhouse-gas emissions.
A landmark climate-change lawsuit brought by young people against the US government can proceed, the Supreme Court said on 2 November. The case, Juliana v. United States, had been scheduled to begin trial on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon, in a federal district court. But those plans were scrapped last month after President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene and dismiss the case.
The plaintiffs, who include 21 people ranging in age from 11 to 22, allege that the government has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to prevent dangerous climate change. They are asking the district court to order the federal government to prepare a plan that will ensure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls below 350 parts per million by 2100, down from an average of 405 parts per million in 2017.
By contrast, the US Department of Justice argues that “there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’” — as the Juliana plaintiffs assert.
Although the Supreme Court has now denied the Trump administration’s request to the dismiss the case, the path ahead is unclear. In its 2 November order, the Supreme Court suggested that a federal appeals court should consider the administration’s arguments before any trial starts in the Oregon district court.
Lawyers for the young people said they would push the district court to reschedule the trial next week.
“The youth of our nation won an important decision today from the Supreme Court that shows even the most powerful government in the world must follow the rules and process of litigation in our democracy,” said Julia Olson, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, in a statement reacting to the Supreme Court decision.
A new generation
Although climate change is a global problem, lawyers around the world have brought climate-change-related lawsuits against local and national governments and corporations since the late 1980s. These suits have generally sought to force the sort of aggressive action against climate change that has been tough to achieve through political means.
Many of the cases have failed, but in 2015, a citizen’s group called the Urgenda Foundation won a historic victory against the Dutch government. The judge in that case ordered the Netherlands to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions to at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, citing the possibility of climate-related damages to “current and future generations of Dutch nationals” and the government’s “duty of care … to prevent hazardous climate change”. A Dutch appeals court upheld the verdict last month.
Over the past few years, the Dutch case has emerged as a model for climate lawsuits in other countries, says Gillian Lobo, a lawyer who specializes in climate-change-related cases at ClientEarth in London. More recently, she says, the Juliana lawsuit has inspired its own copycats — some of which have progressed further than Juliana itself. “It is a global phenomenon,” Lobo says.
One case modelled on the Juliana lawsuit has already produced a striking victory. In January, 25 young people sued the Colombian government for their right to a healthy environment, in a case called Demanda Generaciones Futuras v. Minambiente.
The Colombian Supreme Court found in the plaintiffs’ favour in April. Not only did it order the government to take steps to reduce deforestation and climate change, it also ruled that the Colombian Amazon rainforest is “a subject of rights” that is entitled to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration”.
Fuzzy future
The young plaintiffs in the Juliana case allege that they have already suffered harm as a result of climate change. Seventeen-year-old Jaime and her family left their home on the Navajo Nation Reservation in Cameron, Arizona, in 2011 because the natural springs on which they depended for water were drying up. Fifteen-year-old Jayden’s home in Louisiana was severely damaged by flooding in 2016, and 19-year-old Vic’s school in White Plains, New York, closed temporarily in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy hit.
US climate hawks hope that the Juliana plaintiffs will ultimately prevail, but President Donald Trump’s administration is mounting a multipronged defence. The Justice Department denies that the district court in Oregon has jurisdiction over the broad sweep of federal policies at issue, and that the rights to life, liberty and property set out in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution translate into the right to a stable climate.
In any case, the department argues, no meaningful redress is possible, given that drastically reducing emissions in the United States might not move the needle on climate change much if other countries’ greenhouse-gas output grows. This echoes the argument made in 2007 by the Supreme Court’s chief justice, John Roberts, when he dissented from the court’s decision in a pivotal climate case, Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency. The court’s ruling, which Roberts protested, forced the agency to regulate carbon emissions as a pollutant.
Andrea Rodgers, co-counsel for the Juliana plaintiffs, says that the Trump administration hasn’t challenged the fact that humans are changing the climate. “They haven’t presented experts to contest what our scientists are saying about ice melt or sea-level rise or terrestrial impacts or how climate change happens or ocean acidification,” she says.
To win, Rodgers says, “we have to show that the United States government is liable, but also that there is a remedy that the judge can order”. The United States has seen its greenhouse-gas emissions drop in recent years, as the country shifts its energy mix away from coal and towards renewable sources, but as of 2016, it remains the second-largest emitter after China.
James Hansen, a climatologist at Columbia University in New York City and a long-time climate activist, is an expert witness in the case — but he is also a plaintiff, representing “future generations” not yet born. (His 20-year-old granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is also a plaintiff.)
Hansen has been fighting for action on climate change since he first testified on the subject before the US Senate in 1988. He says that if the Juliana plaintiffs lose their case, he will simply try another way. “We need to win as soon as possible,” Hansen says, “but if we lose, we don’t give up — we come back with a stronger case.”
A Record Number of Scientists are Running for Congress, and They Get Climate Change
More than a dozen scientists are candidates for U.S. House and Senate seats this year in a wave fueled by the Trump Administration’s anti-science agenda.
Joseph Kopser, an aerospace engineer, Army veteran and Austin tech entrepreneur, is spending October on the campaign trail, Texas style.
At a barbecue, a block party, even a hayride through Hill Country, he’s making the case for a dramatic change in Texas’ 21st Congressional District and an historic transformation in the U.S. Congress.
Kopser is one of more than a dozen scientists running for Congress this November—a record number that reflects a groundswell of political activism in the scientific community triggered by the anti-science agenda of President Donald Trump‘s administration, especially on climate change.
Kopser is quick to point out that the political attacks on science pre-date Trump. His district is a prime example: He’s running to fill the congressional seat of retiring Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, who spent the past six years using his power as chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to cast doubt on consensus climate and environmental science.
“The problem I saw is we are so entrenched in our camps and party loyalty, no one is willing to think about other ways of doing business right now,” said Kopser, who is a Democrat like many of the scientists running for office. “Trump is just a symptom of the day and age.”
The scientist candidates and their supporters say the political movement has the potential to transform Congress, injecting a critical mass of evidence-based thinkers who could lessen the influence of ideology on decision-making. It could help catalyze real debate on solutions to address climate change and a host of other issues, they say.
Already, the scientists are having an impact, forcing some GOP opponents to attempt to rebrand themselves to appeal to voters who are concerned about the environment. But the collective clout of the engineers, physicians and other scientists running for Congress ultimately will depend on getting elected, and their odds vary widely depending on the political landscape of their states and local districts.
Backlash Against a ‘War on Truth and Fact’
The post-Trump pro-science political movement began to coalesce soon after the 2016 election, as tens of thousands of scientists took to the streets in response to Trump’s anti-science views in the April 2017 March for Science.
At that time, it was unclear whether protest would translate to sustained political action. But science advocates were further galvanized by the Trump administration’s sidelining of federal scientists and advisers and rollback of environmental protections. By the start of this year, hundreds of scientists were seeking office at the local, state, and federal levels, most of them for the first time, according to 314 Action, a non-profit that seeks to recruit and support scientists in politics and has an affiliated political action committee.
“I think the general war on truth and fact that the Trump administration has launched has outraged not just the scientific community, but a lot of average Americans who know that the sun rises in the East,” said 314 Action’s founder and president, Shaughnessy Naughton.
Joseph Kopser, an Army veteran, aerospace engineer and technology entrepreneur, is running for Congress in the seat held for the past three decades by U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith. Smith used his position to spread denial of climate science. Credit: Kopser Campaign
Many of the more than 60 scientist candidates who were running for Congress lost in the primaries, but that hasn’t discouraged Naughton or other supporters.
“I think that’s just a reflection that a lot of scientists are not strong on political skills,” said Rush Holt, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a physicist who himself made the transition from the lab to legislative chamber. Representing New Jersey’s 12th district in the U.S. House of Representatives for 16 years, at a time a handful of scientists served in Congress, Holt said he saw first-hand how their presence could make a difference.
“Almost every issue that comes before a legislature has some science, somewhere,” Holt said. “If there’s not a scientist in the room—and the way things are on Capitol Hill, there usually isn’t—the facets of an issue that could be illuminated by science won’t even be noticed.”
Scientists’ Opponents Rebranding Themselves
Currently, Congress has one physicist, a chemist and a handful of engineers. In contrast, there are 218 lawyers, and seven former radio talk show hosts.
“You arguably have people [in Congress] who know how to get things done, but they too often don’t have the foggiest idea of what needs to be done,” said Sean Casten, an engineer who is running for the House in the suburbs of Chicago.
Sean Casten, an engineer, is running for the U.S. House in the Chicago suburbs. Credit: Casten Campaign
“Electing some meaningful number of people who think facts are facts and are non-negotiable will make it possible, I think, for the organization of Congress to have a better idea of what needs to be done and make sure we’re working on the right problems,” he said.
Casten believes one of those priorities should be climate change.
“The way our political process works, and the way political journalism works, people will say, ‘How does climate change poll?'” he said. “I don’t give a rat’s you-know-what how climate change polls, any more than I care how gravity polls. It’s something that has to be dealt with.”
Casten touts the 17 years he spent in the energy efficiency business—building projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by recycling the waste heat of industrial processes into electricity—a technology known as “combined heat and power.” He believes clean energy can be an economic boon—an idea he’d like to bring Congress: “to make green business the business of America.”
Within two months of Casten’s victory in the Democratic primary, his opponent, GOP incumbent Rep. Peter Roskam, joined the Climate Solutions Caucus, a bipartisan group of lawmakers that has pledged to explore policy to address climate change, but so far has avoided taking a stand on any legislative solutions.
Elaine Luria, a nuclear engineer, is running for the U.S. House in Virginia. Credit: Luria Campaign
Roskam, with a lifetime 3 percent rating on the League of Conservation Voters scorecard, fits the mold of many Republican caucus members: he is running for re-election in a district where his weak environmental voting record could be a liability. “It is incumbent upon each and every one of us to understand the impacts and challenges that come from a changing climate,” Roskam said when he signed up. Casten blasted the move as a “death-bed conversion designed to obscure his horrible record on environmental issues.”
It’s not the only environmental rebranding by GOP members who face scientist opponents this November. Rep. Scott Taylor (R-Va.), another Climate Solutions Caucus member, who has a League of Conservation Voters score of 6 percent, is being challenged by a nuclear engineer, Navy veteran and offshore drilling opponent, Elaine Luria. Taylor previously previously supported oil exploration off the Atlantic coast, but he came out against Trump’s offshore drilling plan earlier this year. (He then voted against an amendment that would have blocked drilling off Virginia’s coast.)
Trying to Hold Politicians Accountable
Naughton said the efforts by GOP incumbents to distance themselves from their environmental voting records shows that scientist candidates already are making a difference.
“Part of what we see as our mission is holding politicians accountable,” she said. “I can confidently say that politicians are in the business of self-preservation, and when they find things don’t work electorally, they’ll stop doing it.”
Naughton, a chemist, founded 314 Action after her own failed run for Congress in a district in the suburbs of Philadelphia in 2016. She wanted to establish a group that could provide training and institutional support for scientist candidates and modeled it after Emily’s List, which seeks to elect more women. (The name 314 comes from the first three digits of the mathematical constant Pi.) The group has raised more than $2 million, some of which it hopes to use on ads this fall in support of the 13 candidates it has endorsed, from an emergency room physician in Arizona to a physicist in Tennessee.
Scientists and their supporters came out in force for the March for Science in April 2017. Credit: Jessica Kourkonis/Getty Images
But not every scientist running for Congress has received 314 Action’s blessing. Biochemist Art Robinson, who is running as a Republican in his fifth bid to unseat Democratic incumbent Rep. Peter DeFazio in Oregon, is known for promoting a petition rejecting the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming.
James Taylor, senior fellow on climate and energy policy at the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has led a years-long campaign to discredit climate science and where Robinson has served on the board of directors, said 314 Action’s rejection of Robinson for its scientist candidate slate shows that its aims are political.
“The SuperPAC 314 Action does not have a mission of getting more scientists elected. It has a mission of getting more leftist activists who can present some minimal scientific credentials to join the “resistance” (yes, that is exactly the word they use – see http://www.314action.org/),” Taylor said in an email.
But 314 Action, which is not technically a super PAC, sees Robinson’s work as advocacy, not science.
“Endorsing someone who is so far out of the mainstream … would be an insult to our network and donors,” the group’s spokesman, Ted Bordelon, said in an email. “Climate change IS real and one of the litmus tests we have for candidates (if you deny it you’re not getting our support). Period.”
Success Hinges on Winning Over Moderates
The odds of victory vary widely for this year’s crop of scientist candidates.
Cook Political Report currently has Illinois’ 6th District leaning Casten’s way, even though the seat has been in Republican hands since 1973. Migration from Chicago has transformed the once rock-solid Republican stronghold. The district also lies between Fermilab, the nation’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory. “This is a pretty educated district,” said Casten. “Being a little nerdy plays well out here politically, I suppose.”
In Texas, Kopser has a different fight for the seat that Smith has held for 33 years. Trump won the district by nearly 10 points in 2016, and the legendary gerrymandering by the state Legislature has made it tough territory for any Democrat. It’s one of six districts with a slice of Austin, the largest U.S. city without its own congressional district. As a result, the blue vote of the city is diluted by the larger rural portion of the district. The first time Smith fell below the 60 percent mark in a re-election bid was in 2016, when his Democratic opponent tried to make climate change a major issue.
Kopser believes that there are enough moderates in the district to give him a chance.
“It’s everyone in the middle—those independents and moderate Republicans who want to know what’s going on with science and the economy, who want to know what the future of jobs look like, and who are willing to listen to someone like myself,” he said. “That’s where we are going to win this vote.”
“The problem I saw is we are so entrenched in our camps and party loyalty, no one is willing to think about other ways of doing business right now,” said aerospace engineer and congressional candidate Joseph Kopser. Credit: National Defense University/CC-BY-NC-2.0
Kopser is a graduate of West Point and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who earned the Combat Action Badge and Bronze Star for his service in Iraq. He later served in the Pentagon on a project to reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels. While fighting traffic on his commute, he began to develop the idea for the business he would start after he left government—an app to assist commuters in ridesharing. The business, Ridescout, was bought by Mercedes in 2016.
Kopser has raised $2.5 million for his campaign, nearly 60 percent more than his opponent, Chip Roy, a former chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). But Roy has the backing from the conservative Super PAC Club for Growth Action, which so far has spent $1.1 million in advertising on his behalf, more than it has spent on any other House candidate.
Kopser doesn’t focus on environmental issues explicitly (health care, he maintains, is the biggest issue his district’s voters care about.) But climate change is always in the background.
“You can’t escape the conversation of Harvey anywhere in Texas right now,” Kopser said. “Every time you have a 500-year storm that happens every couple of years, then something’s going on and it requires people to talk about. When I’m at a VFW… there’s a way to talk about how changing weather patterns are a national security issue. [And] you can’t go very far out into the district in Hill Country and you have discussions about peaches, or water.
“I can have hours-long conversation with people about things that are on the periphery of the subject of climate change, but never have to mention climate change, because the second I do, too many people close their eyes and close their ears and don’t want to talk about it, because they think it’s partisan.”
Kopser said one of his goals in running for Congress is to change the debate on issues like climate change to one where people are not divided into opposing political camps but focused on evidence and the search for solutions.
“I would hope that our scientific training in the deliberate decision-making process … testing your hypothesis and studying the results, learning from the good and the bad without swaying the results for political reasons, well wouldn’t that be a wonderful world to live in?” Kopser asked.
Top photo: 2017 March for Science. Credit: Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images