America’s recycling industry is in the dumps.

A crash in the global market for recyclables is forcing communities to make hard choices about whether they can afford to keep recycling or should simply send all those bottles, cans and plastic containers to the landfill.

 

Mountains of paper have piled up at sorting centers, worthless. Cities and towns that once made money on recyclables are instead paying high fees to processing plants to take them. Some financially strapped recycling processors have shut down entirely, leaving municipalities with no choice but to dump or incinerate their recyclables.

 

“There’s no market. We’re paying to get rid of it,” says Ben Harvey, president of EL Harvey & Sons, which handles recyclables from about 30 communities at its sorting facility in Westborough, Massachusetts. “Seventy-five percent of what goes through our plant is worth nothing to negative numbers now.”

 

It all stems from a policy shift by China, long the world’s leading recyclables buyer. At the beginning of the year it enacted an anti-pollution program that closed its doors to loads of waste paper, metals or plastic unless they’re 99.5 percent pure. That’s an unattainable standard at U.S. single-stream recycling processing plants designed to churn out bales of paper or plastic that are, at best, 97 percent free of contaminants such as foam cups and food waste.

 

The resulting glut of recyclables has caused prices to plummet from levels already depressed by other economic forces, including lower prices for oil, a key ingredient in plastics.

 

The three largest publicly traded residential waste-hauling and recycling companies in North America — Waste Management, Republic Services and Waste Connections — reported steep drops in recycling revenues in their second-quarter financial results. Houston-based Waste Management reported its average price for recyclables was down 43 percent from the previous year.

 

“A year ago, a bale of mixed paper was worth about $100 per ton; today we have to pay about $15 to get rid of it,” says Richard Coupland, vice president for municipal sales at Phoenix-based Republic, which handles 75 million tons of municipal solid waste and 8 million tons of recyclables nationwide annually. “Smaller recycling companies aren’t able to stay in business and are shutting down.”

 

Kirkwood, Missouri, announced plans this summer to end curbside recycling after a St. Louis-area processing facility shut down. Officials in Rock Hill, South Carolina, were surprised to learn that recyclables collected at curbside were being dumped because of a lack of markets. Lack of markets led officials to suspend recycling programs in Gouldsboro, Maine; DeBary, Florida; Franklin, New Hampshire; and Adrian Township, Michigan. Programs have been scaled back in Flagstaff, Arizona; La Crosse, Wisconsin; and Kankakee, Illinois.

 

Other communities are maintaining recycling programs but taking a financial hit as regional processors have raised rates to offset losses. Richland, Washington, is now paying $122 a ton for Waste Management to take its recycling; last year, the city was paid $16 a ton for the materials. Stamford, Connecticut, received $95,000 for recyclables last year; the city’s new contract requires it to pay $700,000.

 

A big part of the problem, besides lower commodity prices overall, is sloppy recycling.

 

In the early days of recycling, people had to wash bottles and cans, and sort paper, plastic, glass and metal into separate bins. Now there’s single-stream recycling, which allows all recyclables to be tossed into one bin. While single-stream has benefited efficiency, and customers like it, it’s been a challenge on the contamination side.

 

A tour of Republic’s facility in Beacon, about an hour’s drive north of New York City, makes the challenges clear. A third of the material dumped by collection trucks is non-recyclable “contaminants” such as garden hoses, picnic coolers and broken lawnmowers. Workers have to pull that out and truck it to a landfill, adding to overall costs. Plastic bags contaminate bales of other materials and tangle machinery. Spilled ketchup and greasy pizza boxes turn otherwise marketable material into garbage.

 

“The death of recycling was completely avoidable and incredibly easily fixed,” says Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, which advocates standardized labeling on recycling bins so people understand what goes in and what doesn’t.

 

A range of initiatives have been launched to get people to recycle right. Chicago is putting “oops” tags on curbside recycling bins with improper contents and leaving them uncollected. Rhode Island is airing “Let’s Recycle Right” ads.

 

While some recyclables have been diverted to other Asian markets since China’s closure, there are also signs of market improvement in the U.S. to offset the lost business, said David Biderman, CEO and executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America. He noted Chinese paper manufacturers that had relied on recyclables imported into their country have recently purchased shuttered mills in Kentucky, Maine and Wisconsin.

 

Meanwhile, recyclable materials processors are re-negotiating contracts with municipalities to reflect the fact that prices paid for recyclables no longer offset the cost of collecting and sorting them.

 

“What we’re advocating is to step back and re-look at recycling,” Republic’s Coupland said. “This is the new normal. The model no longer funds itself.”

 
…

Nearly 77 years after repeated torpedo strikes tore into the USS Oklahoma, killing hundreds of sailors and Marines, Carrie Brown leaned over the remains of a serviceman laid out on a table in her lab and was surprised the bones still smelled of burning oil from that horrific day at Pearl Harbor.

It was a visceral reminder of the catastrophic attack that pulled the United States into World War II, and it added an intimacy to the painstaking work Brown and hundreds of others are now doing to greatly increase the number of lost American servicemen who have been identified.

 

It’s a monumental mission that combines science, history and intuition, and it’s one Brown and her colleagues have recently been completing at ramped-up speed, with identifications expected to reach 200 annually, more than triple the figures from recent years.

 

“There are families still carrying the torch,” said Brown, a forensic anthropologist with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s lab near Omaha, Nebraska. “It’s just as important now as it was 77 years ago.”

 

Officials believe remains of nearly half of the 83,000 unidentified service members killed in World War II and more recent wars could be identified and returned to relatives. The modern effort to identify remains started in 1973 and was primarily based in Hawaii until a second lab was opened in 2012 at Offutt Air Force Base in the Omaha suburb of Bellevue.

 

With an intensified push, the identifications climbed from 59 in 2013 to 183 last year and at least 200 and possibly a few more this year.

 

The increase has led to a surge of long-delayed memorial services and burials across the country as families and entire communities turn out to honor those killed.

 

Joani McGinnis, of Shenandoah, Iowa, said her family is planning a service Friday at the national cemetery in Omaha now that they have finally learned what happened to her uncle, Sgt. Melvin. C. Anderson.

 

Piecing together bits of history and DNA, the Omaha lab confirmed that remains found in 1946 in Germany were Anderson’s and that he died when his tank was hit in the rugged Hurtgen Forest during a battle that lasted for months and left tens of thousands of Americans killed and wounded.

 

Besides returning the remains, McGinnis said the agency gave her a thick file with details about how he died and how researchers unraveled the mystery.

 

“I wish my mom and my grandma were here to know all this information,” said McGinnis, who recalled a framed picture of Anderson that hung in her grandmother’s home in Omaha. “My grandmother was very sad about it. She just wanted to know what happened, and she never knew.”

 

In Kentucky, thousands of people lined roads for miles on a steamy August day to see a hearse carrying the remains of Army Pfc. Joe Stanton Elmore from the Nashville, Tennessee, airport to the small city of Albany.

 

Elmore was reported missing in action in December 1950 after an intense battle at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea and as deceased in 1953, but his great-niece April Speck said even decades later, her family would tell stories of “Joe going off to war and never coming home.” Speck said she knew her family would feel a sense of relief that his remains were finally returned, but she didn’t realize what it would mean to her community.

 

“There were people standing out with their signs and there were retired soldiers in their uniforms saluting, and then we get into Albany and it like was a sea of people with all the American flags,” she recalled. “The county did an awesome job of showing respect.”

 

The soaring number of identifications followed years of complaints about a cumbersome process, typically resulting in about 60 completed cases annually. Congress responded by setting a goal of 200 identifications annually, and it supported a reorganization and increased funding that saw spending climb from $80.8 million in the 2010 fiscal year to $143.9 million in 2018.

 

The effort now employs about 600 people.

 

Officials have streamlined the work of determining which remains should be disinterred. Historians focus on where clusters of servicemen died, and examine troop movements and conduct interviews with local residents.

 

“This work is very different from what most historians do,” said Ian Spurgeon, an agency historian in Washington. “This is detective history.”

 

Spurgeon’s focus is on battles in Europe and the Mediterranean, with a goal of disinterring 50 service members annually, up from fewer than five.

 

At Offutt, inside a lab built in a former World War II bomber factory, bones are arranged by type on black-topped tables. In another room, buttons, fabrics, coins and other items found alongside remains are studied for hints about a service member’s role or hometown.

 

DNA is key to identifications, but it can’t be extracted from all bones, and without a match from potential relatives, it has little value.

 

In some cases, lab workers refer to standard chest X-rays of World War II servicemen taken when they enlisted, focusing on the traits of the collarbones shown. An algorithm developed by the University of Nebraska-Omaha helps workers make comparisons of remains in minutes.

 

For Patricia Duran, the result has been finally learning what happened to her uncle, Army Air Forces Sgt. Alfonso O. Duran, who died in 1944 when his B-24H Liberator bomber was shot down. His remains were disinterred from a grave in Slovenia and identified this spring.

 

Duran had for years sought information about her uncle’s remains, and she said she clutched her cousin’s hand while watching him be buried Aug. 22 at Santa Fe National Cemetery, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from his childhood home in the small mountain community of El Rito, New Mexico.

 

“We felt such a sense of closure about it because the whole family heard the stories” about him. “We felt we knew Alfonso,” she said. “We felt he’d come home.”

 
…

Mental health disorders are on the rise in every country in the world and could cost the global economy up to $16 trillion between 2010 and 2030 if a collective failure to respond is not addressed, according to an expert report released Tuesday.

The Lancet Commission report by 28 global specialists in psychiatry, public health and neuroscience, as well as mental health patients and advocacy groups, said the growing crisis could cause lasting harm to people, communities and economies worldwide.

While some of the costs will be the direct costs of health care and medicines or other therapies, most are indirect — in the form of loss of productivity, and spending on social welfare, education and law and order, the report’s co-lead author, Vikram Patel, said.

The wide-ranging report did not give the breakdown of the potential $16 trillion economic impact it estimated by 2030.

“The situation is extremely bleak,” Patel, a professor at Harvard Medical School in the United States, told reporters.

Lack of investment

He said the burden of mental illness had risen “dramatically” worldwide in the past 25 years, partly because societies are aging and more children are surviving into adolescence, yet “no country is investing enough” to tackle the problem.

“No other health condition in humankind has been neglected as much as mental health has,” Patel said.

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million people worldwide have depression and 50 million have dementia. Schizophrenia is estimated to affect 23 million people, and bipolar disorder around 60 million.

The Lancet report found that in many countries, people with common mental disorders such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia routinely suffer gross human rights violations — including shackling, torture and imprisonment.

Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the medical journal The Lancet, which commissioned the report, said it highlighted the “shameful and shocking treatment of people with mental ill health around the world.”

It called for a human rights-based approach to ensure that people with mental health conditions are not denied fundamental human rights, including access to employment, education and other core life experiences.

It also recommended a wholesale shift to community-based care for mental health patients, with psychosocial treatments such as talking therapies being offered not just by medical professionals but also by community health workers, peers, teachers and the clergy.

The report was published ahead of a first global ministerial mental health summit in London this week.
…

U.S. President Donald Trump says he hasn’t read an ominous report by a U.N. panel that warned of a dire future for the planet if global warming is not kept to a minimum.

But he said he will.

“It was given to me and I want to look who drew it, you know — which groups drew it, because I can give you reports that are fabulous and I can give you reports that aren’t so good,” he said Tuesday at the White House. “But I will be reading it, absolutely.”

The comments were his first regarding the report released Monday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report lists how Earth’s weather, health and ecosystems would be better off if world leaders could figure out how to limit future human-caused warming to 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) between 2030 and 2052, instead of the globally agreed upon goal of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

In June 2017, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, which sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. His administration has also dismantled emissions reduction policies domestically.

According to the U.N. report, some of the benefits of limiting global warming to the lower goal would include:

• Half as many people would suffer from lack of water.

• There would be fewer deaths and illnesses from heat, smog and infectious diseases.

• The West Antarctic ice sheet might not kick into irreversible melting.

• It could be enough to save most of the world’s coral reefs from dying.

The panel met in South Korea recently to finalize the report.

The world’s governments asked for the report in 2015, when a global pact to tackle climate change was agreed upon.

German biologist Hans-Otto Portner, one of the panel members, said some of the panelists were engaged in “wishful thinking” if they thought the gloomy report would encourage governments and people to act quickly and forcefully to counteract the report’s predictions.

Portner warned, however, “If action is not taken, it will take the planet into an unprecedented climate future.”
…

It was during her first year of high school in rural western Kenya that Mary Kuket says she was “sacrificed to tradition” and her dreams of becoming a doctor shattered forever.

With no explanation, the 15-year-old was given away to another family, who forced her to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), then married her off to their middle-aged son.

“I kept asking my parents why I was being taken and begged them not to send me away, but my father pushed me away, saying that soon I would understand,” Kuket, now 46, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Baringo county. “They never told me I was going to be cut. They never told me I was going to be married to a 45-year-old man. They never told me that I would not go back to school.”

From the fear of being ostracized or killed to the prestige associated with entering womanhood, girls in Kenya are under a barrage of societal pressures to undergo FGM, often with a devastating impact on their education, say campaigners.

A study by the charity ActionAid Kenya published Monday said despite the fact that FGM is illegal in the east African nation, deep-rooted myths supporting the ancient ritual persist.

Violence ‘normalized’

The survey, based on interviews with almost 400 girls and women in eight Kenyan counties, found that FGM affected not only their health but also their schooling.

“Despite efforts to curb FGM, this type of violence against women and girls is so normalized in some communities. Girls are socialized into believing they must undergo the procedure,” said Agnes Kola, women’s rights coordinator for ActionAid Kenya. “But it is stifling their ability to participate in society, as once they undergo FGM, their schooling is impacted and many never complete their education and progress in life.”

Girls missed school to recover after the procedure and suffered medical complications and trauma that affected their class attendance and performance, the report said.

Seen as a rite of passage in many communities, FGM also acted as a trigger for girls as young as 11 to become sexually active and married off as they were perceived as women — often ending with child pregnancy.

As a result, fewer girls than boys in Kenya’s FGM-prevalent counties were finishing their primary education, and even fewer were transitioning to high school, the study said.

While national figures show secondary enrollment of boys and girls in year one to be almost equal, in some FGM-prevalent counties, enrollment of girls in the same group is less than half that of boys, according to government data.

‘Ticket for marriage’

An estimated 200 million girls and women worldwide have undergone FGM, which usually involves the partial or total removal of the genitalia, the United Nations says.

Despite being internationally condemned, it is practiced in at least 27 African countries and parts of Asia and the Middle East, and is usually carried out by traditional cutters, often with unsterilized blades or knives.

In some cases, girls can bleed to death or die from infections. FGM can also cause lifelong painful conditions such as fistula as well as fatal childbirth complications.

Kenya outlawed the practice in 2011, but it continues as communities believe it is necessary for social acceptance and increasing their daughters’ marriage prospects.

One in five females aged 15 to 49 in Kenya has undergone FGM, according to U.N. data.

The study in eight counties found fear of being rejected for marriage, ostracized by the community or even killed was pushing girls to undergo FGM.

In the eastern county of Garissa, Muslim communities were cited as saying anyone who was not circumcised was not permitted to worship and could easily be killed.

“Religiously, we are told that circumcision makes girls to be clean before God, and it is only after undergoing this practice that the girls can be allowed to read the Quran or to worship,” said a woman from Garissa, cited in the report.

Elsewhere, girls and women said they were expected to undergo FGM to comply with cultural expectations of marriage.

“FGM is considered as the community-given ticket for marriage, thus it results in automatic suitors or bidders, which is absolutely the parent’s choice,” said the report. “Young men will ensure their wives get circumcised at the time of marriage.”

Progress hindered

Soon after being cut, the girls, who are drawn from communities in which up to 98 percent of women and girls have undergone FGM, said they struggled to continue with school.

They were absent for weeks to heal and also suffered infections and trauma, according to the report.

The practice also provides social sanction for girls to be married off or have sex, often resulting in pregnancy.

Tony Mwebia of the Men End FGM campaign said visits to primary schools show that even as early as age 10, there are far fewer girls than boys. “Sometimes it’s just one or two girls compared to a whole lot of boys,” he said.

Campaigners said government and civil society had neglected remote, insecure regions where FGM was most prevalent. They called for specific budgets to be allocated to these areas, using positive messaging to engage with communities, and for better coordination between charities.

For Kuket, however, all is not lost.

After 20 years of marriage and seven children, she went back to school, finished her secondary education and has enrolled to work toward a degree in community development.

She is also a prominent human rights activist in her community in western Tangulbei, where she rescues girls who are being forced to undergo FGM and pushed into child marriage.

“I don’t want any other girl to go through what I did,” she said. “FGM is a barrier to a girl’s progress in life — it ruins their lives.”
…

The head of the U.S. space agency said Tuesday he’s sure that investigators will determine the cause of a mysterious hole that appeared on the International Space Station, which his Russian counterpart has said was deliberately drilled.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine also said collaboration with Russia’s Roscosmos remains important, despite recent comments by agency head Dmitry Rogozin that Russia wouldn’t accept a “second-tier role” in a NASA-led plan to build an outpost near the moon.

The hole that appeared in a Russian Soyuz capsule docked to the ISS caused a brief loss of air pressure in August before being patched. The incident sparked wide speculation and consternation.

“I strongly believe we’re going to get the right answer to what caused the hole on the International Space Station and that together we’ll be able to continue our strong collaboration,” Bridenstine said. “What we’ve got to do is we’ve got to very dispassionately allow the investigation to go forward without speculation, without rumor, without innuendo, without conspiracy.”

Although the U.S. is working toward commercial launches to the ISS, Russia shouldn’t regard itself as sidelined, he said.

“There is coming a day when we’re going to have our own access to the International Space Station through a commercial crew. I want to be really clear — that is not a replacement for the Russian Soyuz capabilities. We see it as redundancy and we want to make sure that even when a commercial crew is up and running we are still going to be launching American astronauts on Soyuz rockets and we would love to have Russian cosmonauts launching on commercial crew rockets in the United States,” Bridenstine said.

Regarding the NASA-led Gateway project to build an orbiting moon outpost, Rogozin said recently that Russia couldn’t afford to participate in other countries’ projects in a secondary role. But Bridenstine said international involvement in the project was key.

“We’re going to build an architecture between the earth and the moon where we can go back and forth a lot with robots and landers and rovers and humans … the entire architecture between the Earth and the moon requires reusability. It requires international partners,” he said.

Bridenstine met with Rogozin in Moscow on Tuesday and both will attend the Thursday launch of a manned capsule to the space station from Russia’s space complex in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
…

Despite its middle income status, Indonesia is dealing with what experts say are unexpectedly high rates of childhood stunting.  Now, its government – starting with the the president – is declaring war on the issue and committing to boost its response to the challenge following a World Bank publication that says 37 percent of Indonesia’s children were stunted in 2013, a rate on par with some far more impoverished nations of Sub-Saharan Africa.   

Stunting is the medical condition that the World Health Organization defines as “impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation.”

While Indonesia’s health ministry and other agencies have been battling to address the problem for years, the administration of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has now elevated the issue to be a national priority, making it a point to include it in last year’s Independence Day address.

“Before he mentioned it in the speech, I doubt it has ever been mentioned by a president in Indonesia,” said Claudia Rokx, a lead health specialist at the World Bank and one of the authors of the landmark book released last month.

First 1,000 days

Health experts emphasize that the first 1,000 days of a child’s life are vital for preventing stunting, requiring adequate breastfeeding and nutrition, stimulation and activity, clean water and sanitation, and timely treatment of conditions like diarrhea and malaria.

With more than one in three Indonesian children being stunted, this means around 9 million children in Southeast Asia’s most populous country are suffering from developmental limitations.

Nusa Tenggara Timur, an impoverished province of eastern Indonesia, has the highest rate of stunting in Indonesia at 52 percent. Fifi Sumanti is a midwife on Komodo Island, known for its famous dragons and home to just 2,000 people. It is arid and most food must be brought in from other islands.

“Mothers here aren’t used to giving their children enough vegetables and fruit. They’re happier to give instant food to the children,” Sumanti told VOA.  Hygiene awareness and access to clean water are also major problems, she said.

While the poorest parts of Indonesia suffer the highest rates of stunting, even among the richest proportion of Indonesians stunting is as high as 29 percent.

Dr. Brian Sriprahastuti, a senior advisor to the office of the President of Indonesia on the issue of stunting, said the reasons for Indonesia’s stunting problem today go beyond the traditional factors of poverty and limited access to public services.  “Now we have another hypothesis that behavior is the main problem of this stunting issue,” Sriprahastuti said.

Sumanti, the midwife, agrees.

“We need to speak with [mothers] more about what stunting is and give greater care from the time mothers are first pregnant until they give birth, until the time the child is three years old,” she said.

International donors are taking notice and urgent efforts are under way to address the issue.

“If you’re malnourished during that first thousand days, the likelihood is that you would have suffered from irreversible brain damage,” said Simon Flint, a donor with the Asian Philanthropy Circle, a Singapore-based charity.  “Any intervention or expenditure on education,” Flint said, “could be so much more effective later on in a person’s life.” 

The group plans to launch a $10 million 1000 Days Fund by this March to support anti-stunting programs in Indonesia.

A new commitment

In the forward to the World Bank publication, the Indonesian president called current stunting rates “unacceptable” and pledged to prevent two million children from being stunted by 2021. “Eliminating stunting is therefore a main priority for our Government,” he wrote. “The Government is fully committed to do whatever it may take to achieve this goal.

Jim Tong Kim, President of the World Bank Group, said the government is investing in what he said are “evidence-based interventions” across 100 districts, to be expanded to the country’s 541 districts by 2021.  “This initiative marks a decisive step up in the ambitions of the world’s fourth-most populous nation to tackle stunting as part of its commitment to sustained, inclusive economic growth,” he wrote.

According to Flint, Indonesia’s “reasonably high average income conceals a fair amount of underlying inequality. Just for example, according to government figures, in 2016 around 30 million Indonesians were still living on less than a dollar a day. There’s obviously a huge problem of inequality and lack of access among the poorest people.”

Sriprahastuti of the President’s Office said that the government was adopting a human rights-based approach. “For all pregnant women in Indonesia, everywhere, for all children under two, everywhere, we have to support them.”

“They know they have a huge problem, they’ve recognized it now. They are ready to do something about it. They’ve thrown a lot of money into it. They have the highest-level commitment, and they know it can be done in Indonesia as well,” said Rokx.

“Everything is in place for them to do it well, they just have to coordinate better, be persistent and make sure that these kids get the best start in life they can get.”
…

Last-ditch efforts to hold climate change to the most ambitious target set by governments will likely require using every available technique rather than picking and choosing the most attractive ones, climate scientists said on Monday.

Dramatically reducing the use of coal, planting huge swaths of land with carbon-absorbing forest or powering most transport with electricity are no longer sufficient to bring about the swift transition needed, they said, with warming expected to pass the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) mark in as little as 12 years.

“We can make choices about how much of each option to choose, but the idea you can leave anything out is impossible,” said Jim Skea, who jointly led a major scientific report analyzing the feasibility of holding global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, the most ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, requested by governments, was issued ahead of a U.N. conference in December in Poland that will consider how to increase country ambitions to cut emissions and manage climate risks better.

Current government commitments to curb climate change under the Paris pact, even if fully met, would still leave the world on track for about 3 degrees of warming, scientists said.

To have a chance of meeting the 1.5 degrees goal, climate-changing emissions would have to plunge 45 percent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels, the report said.

As that would be an “unprecedented” rate of decline, it is more likely the world will overshoot the target, then try to return to it by sucking carbon from the air, scientists said.

Such “carbon removal” might happen by developing better technology to take out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – now an extremely expensive process – or by planting many more forests that could be harvested and burned for energy, with emissions pumped into underground storage.

“We have not identified any pathways that get to 1.5 degrees Celsius without some kind of carbon dioxide removal,” Skea said.

But turning over much more land for energy production “could have implications for food security, ecosystems and biodiversity,” the British scientist warned, as competition for land grows.

All on board

Swiftly reducing emissions – even with carbon removal – will also require unprecedented levels of international cooperation, a particular challenge as some national governments, like that in the United States, look increasingly inward.

Making the needed emissions changes “is within the scope of what humans can achieve”, said Hans-Otto Portner, a German climate scientist and IPCC report co-chair.

But success “depends on political leadership,” he added.

Henri Waisman, a senior researcher at Paris-based think tank IDDRI and one of 91 report authors, said the report’s aim was to set out the types of transformation required as clearly as possible to inform discussions at U.N. climate talks and beyond.

Delaying action on climate change “is something that is explicitly contradicted in the report,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

If governments fail to ramp up their ambition to reduce heat-trapping emissions over the next two years, they will have consciously abandoned the 1.5 degree goal, he added.

Action in cities – which consume more than two-thirds of energy globally and account for about three-quarters of carbon emissions – are pivotal to meeting the target, said report author William Solecki, a professor at Hunter College-City University of New York.

That’s particularly true because most population growth in coming years “is going to be in urban areas – a lot of it particularly in small and medium-sized cities … in the global south,” he said.

Those cities will need more support to develop cleanly, prevent disasters and adapt to climate shifts, he added.

The scientists said the report was intended to guide more than just governments, however, and that action by everyone – including individuals and businesses – would be required to hold the line on climate change.

“There’s a lot we can do individually or within our communities,” said Debora Ley, a report author who works on adaptation and renewable energy in Latin America.

Personal changes might include everything from eating less meat to using energy-efficient appliances and reducing air travel, said Patricia Pinho, a Brazilian climate scientist and report author.

Individuals and civic groups have a big role to play in pushing governments to tackle climate threats, and are stepping up pressure as recognition of the danger grows, she said.

“We have to live our lives in a way that makes a difference. “Our life on this planet, our kids are at risk,” she said.
…

Advocates of taxing fossil fuels believe their position is stronger now because of an alarming new report on climate change and a Nobel Prize awarded to by two American economists, but neither development is likely to break down political resistance to a carbon tax.

Previous alarms about global warming met with resistance from Congress and the White House. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change last year.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a panel of scientists brought together by the United Nations, warned in a report Monday that droughts, wildfires, coral reef destruction and other climate and environmental disasters could grow worse as soon as 2040, even with a smaller increase in temperatures than used to set the Paris targets.

A few hours later, the Nobel Prize in economics went to two Americans, including William Nordhaus of Yale University, who argues that carbon taxes would be the best way to address problems created by greenhouse-gas emissions.

A carbon tax is a charge imposed on the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, which produce carbon dioxide. The tax is designed to make users of those fuels pay for the environmental damage they cause. The ultimate goal of some tax backers is to price fossil fuels out of the market and replace them with sources of energy that produce little or no heat-trapping emissions.

Coal and oil and gas companies could pass the tax cost along to consumers, which would presumably give a price advantage to energy that is not taxed. That, advocates say, would help renewables such as solar and wind grow more quickly from their current single-digit share of the U.S. electricity market.

There is, of course, stark disagreement over the economic effect of a carbon tax.

Researchers at Columbia University estimate that a tax of $50 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions would increase average U.S. consumer electricity bills 22 percent by 2030, with amounts varying by region. A Tufts University authority estimates that it would add 45 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline. Both think the impact can be mitigated by distributing the money raised through taxes to households, and that many low- and medium-income families would come out ahead.

Opponents argue that a carbon tax would kill manufacturing jobs and hurt family income.

A 2014 report by the Heritage Foundation said that a tax of $37 a ton would cut economic output more than $2.5 trillion, or $21,000 per family, by 2030. This year, two dozen conservative groups endorsed an estimate that a carbon tax would cost more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs by 2030.

Noah Kaufman, an energy-policy researcher at Columbia and a proponent of carbon taxes, said the terrifying prognosis in Monday’s report should highlight the central role of a carbon tax in addressing climate change. But, he acknowledged, such warnings are not new, and political opposition to a tax remains strong.

“There are really high political barriers that continue to stand in our way,” he said. “By far the biggest obstacle in the United States right now is the leadership of the Republican party, which is dead-set against any strong climate-change policy.”

In July, the GOP-controlled House voted for a resolution rejecting carbon taxes as detrimental to the U.S. economy. Almost all Republicans, joined by a few Democrats, voted for the symbolic measure.

Prominent opponents of the carbon tax also believe that urgency over addressing climate change is exaggerated. They point out that U.S. carbon emissions have fallen in recent years as abundant natural gas has risen to rival coal in electric generation. Meanwhile, China’s emissions grow rapidly, making it the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

The scientists who prepared the UN-backed report “are trying to convince us all that there is an imminent crisis when in fact there is a potential long-term problem,” said Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who worked on the Trump transition. Carbon taxes, he added, “are political poison once people figure out how much their energy bills are going to go up.”

​There are signs that the political ground could shift.

A group of former Republican officials and big corporations plan to lobby for a tax of $40 per ton of carbon dioxide produced and to give the money to U.S. taxpayers. Oil giants Exxon Mobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell support the plan, which also would protect them from lawsuits blaming them for climate change.
A Republican congressman, Carlos Curbelo of Florida, bucked party leadership this summer by proposing a carbon tax.
Voters in Washington state will decide next month whether to adopt a carbon fee.

“I am optimistic that the (U.N.-backed) report will make a difference, but I just think we’re going to have to get a little distance from where we are right now in the politics,” said Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University and author of an upcoming book advocating a carbon tax. “It’s going to take a longer time, a few years.”

Nordhaus, the freshly minted Nobel winner, was also looking beyond the current political leadership in Washington, D.C. He said that outside the United States there is wide acceptance of the science and economics of climate change.

“This administration won’t last forever,” Nordhaus said at a news conference. “All I can do is hope that we will get through this without too much damage.”

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, another group that lobbied against carbon taxes, said Nordhaus ignored science and history in advocating a carbon tax.

“He should look at the history of the last 20 years and see that the United States has been reducing carbon emissions without a carbon tax,” Norquist said.
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