Flash flooding inundated much of Southeastern Kentucky in July 2022, including Breathitt County, above. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

Researchers at public universities in Kentucky and West Virginia are planning to collaborate alongside local residents on a four-year project to better understand, predict and prepare for flash flooding in Appalachia and climate change’s impacts on it.?

Surface coal mining worsened deadly Eastern Kentucky floods in July 2022, study shows

A nearly $1.1 million award from the U.S. National Science Foundation will bring together civil engineers and scientists from environmental and social fields to study a range of topics, including soil moisture’s impact on flash flooding. Researchers also will gauge monitors installed in waterways to help tailor flooding solutions “to community goals, serving as a model for resilience planning in vulnerable communities across the U.S.,” according to the project’s description.?

Researchers will analyze decades of precipitation and streamflow data from the University of Kentucky’s Robinson Forest in Breathitt County and install soil moisture sensors throughout the research forest to better understand flooding in headwater streams.?

Christopher Barton, a University of Kentucky professor of forest hydrology and watershed management and principal investigator for the project, in a statement said researchers want to do everything they can “to build up the infrastructure to understand, predict and prepare for flash floods in this region.”?

“To best help, we also must understand how climate change and landscape alterations affect flash floods,” Barton said.?

The “novel collaboration” is also funding researchers from the University of Louisville, Eastern Kentucky University, West Virginia University and Marshall University. A main goal of the collaboration is developing improved early warning systems to alert communities when flash floods are worsening.

Eastern Kentucky University will also be using the funding to aid high school and middle school teachers develop science education programming and plant trees as a part of reforestation efforts to mitigate flash floods.

Rivian Electric Delivery Vehicles (EDV) are seen connected to electric chargers during a launch event between Amazon and Rivian at an Amazon facility on July 21, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Mustafa Hussain/Getty Images)

This is one in a series of States Newsroom reports on the major policy issues in the presidential race.

Highlighted in Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign as one of the major crises facing the country, climate change has received much less attention in the 2024 race for the presidency.

The candidates, Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, share the twin goals of lowering energy costs and increasing U.S. jobs in the sector, but diverge widely in their plans to get there.

On the campaign trail, each has spent relatively little time detailing their own plans, instead criticizing the other as extreme.

Harris favors an expansion of renewable energy, which supplies power without the carbon emissions that are the primary driver of climate change.

She has touted her tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the broad domestic policy law Democrats pushed through along party lines that includes hundreds of millions in clean-energy tax credits.

Trump supports fossil fuel production, blaming policies to support renewable energy for rising energy prices. He has called for removing prohibitions on new oil and gas exploration to increase the supply of cheap fuel and reduce costs.

Promise: Promote fossil fuels

Both candidates promise to lower the cost of energy.

For Trump, that has involved hammering the Biden-Harris administration for encouraging renewable energy production.

Inflation was caused by “stupid spending for the Green New Deal, which was a green new scam, it turned out,” Trump said at a Sept. 26 press conference. “Do you notice that they never mention anything about environment anymore? What happened to the environment?”

The former president said at a Sept. 25 campaign stop he would “cut your energy (costs) in half,” by reducing regulations and cutting taxes.

He has not produced a detailed plan to achieve that goal.

Implicit in Trump’s argument is that the Biden administration’s focus on renewable energy has hampered oil and gas production, limiting supply and driving up prices.

But Harris has presented her support for renewable energy modes as part of a broader portfolio that includes fossil fuels.

Harris has highlighted the Inflation Reduction Act opened up new leases for oil and gas production while providing incentives for wind and solar power.

“I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” she said at a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Trump.

A report this month from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed that U.S. fossil fuel production reached an all-time high in 2023.

Promise: Promote renewables

Harris has also pointed to provisions of the IRA that provide consumers with tax benefits for green technology, such as home heat pumps, as a way to bring down costs.

“Thanks to tax credits on home energy technologies in the Inflation Reduction Act, more than 3.4 million American families saved $8.4 billion in 2023,” her campaign’s 82-page economic plan reads.

Trump also says he supports some climate-conscious technology, including megadonor Elon Musk’s Tesla brand of electric vehicles, but that Democrats have overinvested in non-fossil fuels.

He has called elements of the Inflation Reduction Act “giveaways,” and has singled out spending on electric vehicle charging infrastructure as wasteful.

Promise: Restore jobs

Biden has long talked about a transition away from fossil fuels as a benefit to U.S. workers, positioning them on the cutting edge of a growing industry.

Harris has similarly framed the issue in economic terms, saying the Inflation Reduction Act and other climate policies have created jobs.

“We have created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs while I have been vice president,” she said at the Sept. 10 debate. “We have invested in clean energy to the point that we are opening up factories around the world.”

At a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this month, Harris said Trump’s focus on fossil fuels would hamper job growth, saying he would “send thousands of good-paying clean energy jobs overseas.”

Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, have said Democrats’ focus on renewable energy sources has limited existing energy jobs.

“We’ve got great energy workers in Ohio and all across our country,” Vance said at an August campaign stop in his home state. “They want to earn a reasonable wage and they want to power the American economy. Why don’t we have a president that lets them do exactly that?

“Unleash American energy,” he said. “Drill, baby, drill and let’s turn the page on this craziness.”

Promise: Repeal Democrats’ climate law

Trump has had harsh words for Democrats’ climate law, blaming its spending for rising inflation.

“To further defeat inflation, my plan will terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam. Greatest scam in history, probably,” he told the Economic Club of New York in a Sept. 5 speech.

He said as president he would redirect any unspent funds in the law.

Trump has sought to distance himself from the policy blueprint Project 2025, written by the Heritage Institute.

But there is some overlap between what the conservative think tank has laid out and what Trump said he plans to do in a second term in the White House.

Project 2025 calls for repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, describing it as a subsidy to special interests.

Harris often mentions her tie-breaking vote for the law and has described her plans as president to expand on the law’s objectives.

Harris’ policy plan said she “proudly cast” the tie-breaking vote for the climate bill and that, as president, she would “continue to invest in a thriving clean energy economy.”

She added she would seek to improve that spending by cutting regulations “so that clean energy projects are completed quickly and efficiently in a manner that protects our environment and public health.”

Record rainfall — at times more than 4 inches in an hour — in late July 2022 produced widespread flash floods in southeastern Kentucky, killing 45 people. Command Sergeant Major Tim Lewis of the Kentucky National Guard secures Candace Spencer, 24, while she holds her son Wyatt Spencer, 1, after being airlifted on July 30, 2022 from South Fork in Breathitt County. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

Lauren Cagle wants to make something clear. Despite popular assumptions about Kentuckians’ priorities and politics, they do care about climate change.

Cagle, a University of Kentucky professor of writing, rhetoric and digital studies, told the Lantern despite narratives that “red states have a certain point of view on climate change,” the reality of what’s happening in communities across the state is much different.?

“There’s so much work happening around climate, and when we put all those people in a room together, that becomes visible in a way that’s undeniable,” Cagle said.?

An event at the University of Kentucky later this month will do that by bringing together Kentuckians from a wide range of fields including researchers, grassroots organizers and government employees and leaders to share insights and spark collaboration on dealing with the increasing threat of climate change.?

Speakers at the Kentucky Climate Symposium on Sept. 26 will include nonprofit housing developers in Eastern Kentucky, a representative from the Kentucky Division for Air Quality, and former Kentucky Poet Laureate Silas House, who will be one of those giving opening remarks at the event.?

Cagle also leads the Kentucky Climate Consortium, a network of higher education researchers that organized the day-long event. She hopes sessions and speakers on disaster preparedness and public health can build a broader network of Kentuckians focused on climate change.?

“There are so many ways that we can partner with people that we don’t see eye to eye with on every issue and still make progress heading in a direction that we all like,” Cagle said. “That is an approach to climate solutions that we have seen be successful in other places, and it can be successful here in Kentucky.”?

Speakers come from a variety of backgrounds including:

• ?Michael Borchers, the hydrology and hydraulics section chief at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Louisville District.
• Scott McReynolds, the executive director of the Housing Development Alliance in Eastern Kentucky.
• Jerry Brotzge, the Kentucky state climatologist at Western Kentucky University.
• Misty Skaggs, a co-founder of EKY Mutual Aid, a network of volunteers providing financial assistance and other support to Eastern Kentuckians.?
• Steve Velasco III, the Kentucky state veterinarian
• Eboni Cochran, co-director of Rubbertown Emergency ACTion (REACT), a grassroots organization trying to protect Louisville residents from air pollution coming from Rubbertown, the name for a collection of industrial and chemical plants along the Ohio River.?

Cochran, the co-director of REACT, told the Lantern she wants to make sure the discussion goes beyond conversations about reducing greenhouse gas emissions to also look at climate change? through an environmental justice lens and how it directly impacts Kentucky.

In Louisville’s Rubbertown, she said, more storms, flooding and higher risks of tornadoes from climate change could expose residents to chemical leaks from nearby chemical and other industrial plants.

“How do chemical facilities fortify their facilities to make sure that when their power goes out, or if there’s flooding, that we don’t have adverse impacts in our neighborhoods where we either have to evacuate, or we just have to shelter in place or we just have to breathe it in — all of that,” Cochran said.?

Cochran said she’s looking forward to dialogue at the symposium between government leaders and grassroots organizers and hearing about each other’s work. How to fortify people living in impacted neighborhoods is a critical part of that conversation for her.?

Cagle believes finding common ground on solutions for climate change in Kentucky is possible, despite sometimes conflicting stances among the expected attendees. For example, she said nonprofit electric utility East Kentucky Power Cooperative is sending representatives to the symposium. The utility has welcomed major federal funding to add renewable energy while also fighting federal regulations seeking to curb greenhouse gas emissions from its fossil fuel-fired power plants. An East Kentucky Power spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment asking about their attendance.?

The only baseline attendees should have in the room, Cagle said, is that “everyone agrees climate change is happening.”?

According to December 2023 estimates from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 62% of Kentuckians think global warming is happening, below the national average of 72%. Among Kentuckians, 48% think global warming is caused mostly by human activity, below the national average of 58%.?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body of the world’s leading climate scientists, in its latest synthesis report found human activities primarily from greenhouse gas emissions have “unequivocally” caused global warming with impacts to ecosystems on land and water, increases in extreme heat events and sea level rises likely attributed to climate change.?

“Obviously, we’re going to have disagreements. That’s healthy,” Cagle said. “We need to create spaces where we can have those conversations and where we can get out of the trap of just constantly talking about, ‘is it happening or not.’”?

Children play football in the Delafield area of Bowling Green on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024. The neighborhood is in line for 350 new trees. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

It began with the smell. Joyce Tann, 75, had lived in her Bowling Green neighborhood of Delafield for close to a decade when she started conversations on her front porch with women from a local nonprofit trying to solve neighborhood problems:

The loud truck traffic rumbling past. Landlords who have let properties become “rundown.” And the “horrible” smells wafting over from the city’s wastewater treatment plant.?

Delafield, a historically blue collar and diverse neighborhood across the railroad tracks from downtown Bowling Green and Western Kentucky University, had been “neglected” in the past, Tann said, compared to other parts of the college town.?

“We’re working on things, you know, to make it a lot better.”

Tann now leads the Delafield Neighborhood Group which aims to build bonds among neighbors and tackle challenges facing the community; already, changes made at the treatment plant in response to the neighbors’ complaints and advocacy have provided a lot of relief from the odor. She’s worked alongside the nonprofit that had first approached her, Hotel Inc., which also launched a neighborhood grocery co-op in 2022 to fill the gap from a local grocery closing about a decade ago.?

Tann is excited about the next improvement coming to Delafield: hundreds of new trees.

Grants will promote greener communities

Through a nearly $150,000 grant, local nonprofits will be planting about 350 trees in Delafield and nearby areas including 30 trees at Parker-Bennett-Curry Elementary, a neighborhood school, starting as early as October.

It’s? part of federal funding coming to 16 communities across Kentucky to plant trees, launch education programs and promote greener communities. It’s part of a federal push to increase communities’ resilience to climate change impacts. Increased tree canopy, for example, provides cooling? and respite from extreme heat.?

“They are a protection, really, from the wind. They’re so colorful, and they’re nice — the shade that they give you,” Tann said. “We want people to be able to come over in this area and enjoy being over here.”?

Tann said along with sizable Black and Latino populations, Delafield is also home to immigrants. The International Center of Kentucky in Bowling Green has resettled families from all across the world. At Parker-Bennett-Curry Elementary, 68% of students are multilingual with 21 different home languages spoken, according to a local school district spokesperson.?

Melanie Lawrence, the executive director of Operation PRIDE, the nonprofit seeking to beautify Bowling Green that received the federal grant, said the trees will be planted in tandem with efforts to build sidewalks in the neighborhood and extend a greenway into the area.?

The trees could cleanse the air of odors from the treatment plant and nearby industry, provide shade and cooler temperatures along the streets and improve the wellbeing of local residents. University of Louisville research recently found the planting of thousands of trees and greenery across a Louisville neighborhood equated to “medicine,” improving inflammation biomarkers for local residents.?

“We thought this would be complementary because walking down a sidewalk with no trees gets pretty warm,” Lawrence said. “I have everybody on board. We’re ready to hit the ground running.”

Volunteers from another nonprofit Re-Tree BG, seeking to expand tree canopy in Bowling Green, will also be launching a tree education program at Parker-Bennett-Curry Elementary for students.?

The Bowling Green project is one of more than a dozen funded by grants through a partnership between the Kentucky Division of Forestry and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Urban and Community Forestry Program. The funding, made possible through the? federal Inflation Reduction Act, is going towards tree planting efforts ranging from schools in Lexington to replacing trees lost to tornadoes in Western Kentucky.?

Succeeding lost giants in Ludlow

The Ohio River-bound city of Ludlow in Northern Kentucky is using almost $79,000 to conduct a survey of existing tree canopy, establish a tree ordinance regulating and protecting tree canopy, along with planting an additional 80 trees.?

Shane Hamant, the public works director for Ludlow, pointed to the riverfront city park where the tree canopy is “sparse.” “Just the beautification of the city itself, it reduces heat,” Hamant said, mentioning the city has lost “huge” oak and maple trees at the park in recent years.?

According to a release from state officials, the projects will plant 3,338 trees, create 34 tree wells or soil cells which protect trees especially in cityscapes, remove 50 declining or hazardous trees, create nine urban forestry or greenspace plans covering over 2,302 acres, launch hundreds of educational and community events and create or support 55 jobs.?

For Lawrence, the Operation PRIDE director in Bowling Green, the tree planting effort in the Delafield area is a part of a larger goal to give neighborhoods that have been ignored in the past proper attention and care.?

“The railroad tracks divided this town as it has many other towns,” Lawrence said. “We have a strong belief that everybody deserves beauty and respect.”?

Kentucky’s 2024 Urban and Community Forestry Assistance Grants

(Getty Images)

Entrepreneurs in Appalachia have ideas for renewable energy projects, but finding funding in rural and low-income areas can be challenging. A new initiative, the Green Bank for Rural America, could help channel funds to small, rural, nonprofit lenders to support projects like community solar arrays, apprenticeships in renewable energy fields and electrified public transit, just to name a few.

The green banking movement began as a way to finance small green energy projects. Banks loan money to businesses all the time, but loan processes can be difficult for business owners in low-income or rural communities. Community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, play a crucial role in supporting projects that otherwise might not get financed.

“CDFIs kind of serve as the on ramp for communities and banks on the highway,” Donna Gambrell, president of Appalachian Community Capital (ACC), said. The firm works to leverage resources toward low-income Appalachian communities through CDFIs. These small, community-based lenders are often better positioned to help businesses and people in under-invested areas.

New federal funding will help ACC provide more assistance to their small lender network. The steering committee for the Green Bank includes multiple CDFIs from across the Appalachian Region, including CommunityWorks Carolina, Grow America, Coalfield Development, Inc. and others.

The Environmental Protection Agency awarded ACC $500 million in seed funding to start a Green Bank for Rural America. The bank will prioritize the Appalachian region’s 582 counties, while also serving other communities across rural America, particularly low-income communities, communities of color, and communities in transition from fossil fuels. Gambrell said the bank will leverage private capital to create thousands of jobs in renewable energy.?

“We wanted to make sure that these were high impact projects, green projects, renewable energy projects that were in low wealth rural communities,” Gambrell said. “The projects themselves would help create jobs that stay in hard hit communities.”

The funds are part of the EPA’S $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created explicitly to support nonprofit lenders with a history of deep community relationships and investment in local projects. They are also intended to leverage further private investment, which ACC predicts could amount to $1.6 billion for the Appalachian region in total.?

The Green Bank is intended to raise the capacity for community lenders and allow for increased investment in all phases of energy transition and climate resilience, including workforce training, renewable energy storage, electric transit, home energy efficiency and disaster relief.

The money will support work that’s been going on in communities for a long time, Robin Gabbard, the president of Eastern Kentucky’s CDFI, the Mountain Association, said.??

In Eastern Kentucky, the Mountain Association supports rural community centers, groceries, small businesses, charities and homeowners by financing solar panels and energy retrofits that have saved them thousands.?

Gwen Christon runs an IGA grocery store in Isom, a town in Eastern Kentucky that already struggles with exorbitantly high power bills and a lack of grocery options. Climate change is worsening both problems. When her store was devastated by a flood, Christon had to start over, turning her town into a food desert as she searched for ways to reopen, Gabbard said. The Mountain Association helped Christon get funds for improved coolers, heating and air.?

“They’re reaping the benefits of reduced energy costs, so that they can reinvest back into their businesses and continue to grow their workforce, provide lower cost groceries,” Gabbard said.

Western North Carolina is served by five members of Appalachian Community Capital: Carolina Small Business Fund, Carolina Community Impact, Mountain BizWorks, Institute Capital and Piedmont Business Capital.The institutions are preparing to be ready to go when the new funding becomes available in 2025.

This story is republished from Blue Ridge Public Radio and is made possible ?through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

Utilities install and repair utility poles in tornado-struck Hopkins County in May 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)

President Joe Biden has declared a major disaster declaration for Kentucky counties hit by a deadly tornado outbreak and other severe weather in May, opening up applications for individual Kentuckians to apply for federal aid.?

A release Wednesday from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says that federal funding, including money for temporary housing and home repairs and low-cost loans for uninsured property losses, is available to individuals in Butler, Caldwell, Calloway, Christian, Clay, Greenup, Hopkins, Knox, Logan, Muhlenberg, Simpson, Todd, Trigg, Warren and Whitley counties.

Business owners and residents in disaster-impacted areas can apply for federal assistance through FEMA’s website, through FEMA’s mobile app or by calling 1-800-621-3362.?

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and local officials in Western Kentucky had pushed disaster survivors to document their damage to increase the chances of FEMA granting individual disaster relief, which isn’t guaranteed after a natural disaster. The May tornado outbreak included one EF-3 tornado that tore a similar path to an EF-4 tornado that devastated Western Kentucky communities in December 2021, destroying some homes that were newly rebuilt after the first tornado.?

“We are once again thankful to President Biden and his administration for approving this funding. This support will be a big help for our families as they recover and rebuild from yet another terrible storm,” Beshear said in a statement. “As always, we saw our first responders and everyday Kentuckians rally to help each other in those toughest of moments, and that is why I am so proud to be Governor of this great commonwealth.”

FEMA also stated local governments and some nonprofits in 55 counties across the state are eligible for assistance to repair damaged facilities.?

Sights like this barge loaded with coal on the Ohio Rive near Cairo, Illinois, would become more rare under a Biden administration rule that seeks to curb heat-trapping emissions by drastically reducing the burning of coal and gas to produce electricity. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — A litigator for the Kentucky attorney general disputed the role of carbon dioxide emissions in warming the world’s climate, despite near-total agreement among scientists that the clear gas is a major contributor to warming.

Speaking Thursday to state lawmakers, Vic Maddox, counsel on special litigation for Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman, cited the work of two physicists — William Happer and Richard Lindzen — who insist there is no climate emergency and have long disputed or questioned the scientific consensus on climate change. Maddox pointed to two recent publications — an eight-page article from June, published in an open-access archive maintained by Cornell University, and a two-page document from July.

According to Maddox, Happer and Lindzen contend that carbon dioxide has become a “weak greenhouse gas” because of the “saturation effect,” and that the more carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere the “less of a warming effect it has.”

Maddox was among several witnesses appearing before the legislature’s Interim Joint Natural Resources and Energy Committee which was discussing the implications of new federal rules requiring coal-fired power plants and new natural gas-fired power plants to capture 90% of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions by 2032 if the plants intend to run beyond 2039.?

As of earlier this year, Kentucky generated more than 70% of its electricity from burning coal according to federal data, an outlier in the country as utilities have transitioned to cheaper alternatives such as natural gas or renewables. Coal is considered to be the “dirtiest” fossil fuel in terms of carbon dioxide emissions from burning it for electricity.

Coleman, along with other Republican state attorneys general and investor-owned utilities in Kentucky, is challenging the rule which he calls a “radical green agenda that would only leave Kentucky in the dark.”

Maddox, in explaining the AG’s legal efforts to block the Biden administration rule, said the EPA should consider the physicists’ conclusions about the role of carbon dioxide emissions.

“We think the EPA should consider it, and we think that as these cases go forward, there may be an opportunity to present this sort of material to the court for consideration,” Maddox said. “The question here is …is carbon dioxide really an important greenhouse gas at this point? Is it causing the problem that the EPA wants to solve, and will its elimination or reduction actually result in the result that it seeks?”?

Scientists have come to a near universal consensus that the Earth’s climate is getting warmer mostly because of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels that releases carbon dioxide emissions, those being a primary driver of global warming. Scientists have also refuted the theory, which dates back more than a century, that the atmosphere will warm at a much slower rate because it is already “saturated” with carbon dioxide.?

A climate scientist from the University of Washington, who reviewed the eight-page June document from Happer and Lindzen that Maddox cited, criticized the methodology of the document and the small number and quality of references in that document. He also said the document, which he characterized as “shoddy work,” wasn’t a peer-reviewed publication nor had it appeared in a scientific journal.

“The Cornell archive simply provides people with a place to self-publish, rather similar to some websites,” said Thomas Ackerman, a professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences. “There is a grain of truth to the absorption saturation argument, but the application here is wrong. It would take a lot of radiative transfer physics to explain that in detail, but, if that argument were true, a lot of us scientists would have figured that out a long time ago.”

“If this were a meaningful paper, it would be peer-reviewed and published,” Ackerman said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body at the United Nations of the world’s leading climate scientists, in its latest synthesis report found greenhouse gas emissions including carbon dioxide have “unequivocally” caused global warming with impacts to ecosystems on land and water, increases in extreme heat events and sea level rises likely attributed to climate change.?

When asked by the Lantern about Happer’s and Lindzen’s skepticism about climate change, Maddox didn’t directly address the question and claimed that models predicting climate change by the IPCC were inaccurate and “so inadequate that they can’t predict what has already happened.”?

Maddox referenced a book from Steven Koonin, another physicist who worked in the U.S. Department of Energy under President Barack Obama, in his criticisms of the IPCC. That book has been criticized as misleading, using strawman arguments to attack climate science or falsely asserting that climate science isn’t settled.

In a 2021 article in National Review, the physicists Lindzen and Happer criticized the Biden?administration for signing onto the Paris climate accord and “joining in the crusade against a supposed ‘climate emergency.’ We use the word ‘crusade’ advisedly, since the frenzy over climate resembles the medieval crusades against foreign infidels and home-grown heretics. There is even a children’s climate crusade.”

The two physicists in that article insisted there is no climate emergency: “Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.”

Last year was the warmest since global records began in 1850 at 1.18 degrees Celsius (2.12 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average of 13.9 degrees Celsius? (57.0 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The global annual temperature increased at an average rate of 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since 1850 and more than three times that rate since 1982, NOAA reports.

Rep. Jim Gooch, R-Providence, a co-chair of the interim committee who has previously denied the science of climate change, asked in response to Maddox’s presentation if government leaders were willing to subject citizens to electricity rate increases “because of the so-called existential threat of climate change.”?

“The leaders in this country are really trying to force us to fuel switch, which would decrease the amount of coal,” Gooch said, mentioning that coal-fired power plants were being built abroad while the United States government is “rejecting” them. “It’s a real problem.”?

This story was updated with comments from a University of Washington climate scientist.

Gov. Andy Beshear, right, surveys storm damage from storms in May. (Gov. Andy Beshear)

Gov. Andy Beshear gave updates on how Kentuckians affected by recent severe weather can receive assistance and how damages are being assessed.?

In his weekly press conference, Beshear said Louisville Metro Emergency Services is working with local government officials and first responders to assess damage and assist victims of an EF-1 tornado that hit Jefferson County on July 4.. Beshear visited the site along with Kentucky Emergency Management (KEM) officials on Friday.?

Beshear said another tornado touched down in Union County Tuesday night as Kentucky experienced storms that were remnants of Hurricane Beryl. Beshear said KEM is monitoring the situation and is offering assistance to county officials as requested.?

“As the National Weather Service begins to conduct surveys, we expect other tornadoes will be confirmed,” Beshear said. “The damage mostly impacted agricultural areas, and one home has reported damage.?

Assistance for previous weather events

Beshear gave updates on assistance for survivors of a few severe weather events in recent months.?

The governor said that the Small Business Administration is offering disaster assistance for businesses, homeowners, renters and nonprofit organizations affected by severe storms and tornadoes on March 14 and 15. Kentucky counties Trimble, Carroll, Henry and Oldham were affected at the time.?

Businesses and private nonprofit organizations may borrow up to $2 million to repair or replace real estate, machinery, inventory and other business assets damaged or destroyed during the storms. Homeowners may qualify for loans up to $500,000 to repair or replace real estate damaged or destroyed in the storms or up to $100,000 to replace damaged or destroyed personal property.?

The deadline to apply for physical property damage applications is Aug. 26 for the March storms. To apply, visit sba.gov/disaster, call 800-659-2955 or email [email protected].?

For early April severe storms that affected 11 Kentucky counties, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has distributed more than $1.3 million in individual assistance to 902 survivors, Beshear said.?

President Joe Biden issued a major disaster declaration for the storms in May. The counties affected were Boyd, Carter, Fayette, Greenup, Henry, Jefferson, Jessamine, Mason, Oldham, Union and Whitley.?

“Remember, it’s tough to apply for individual assistance,” Beshear said. “We met it for this set of storms because so many people submitted their damage. Even if they didn’t need individual assistance, they were helping us account for the damage so those who needed it could get it.”?

To apply for FEMA assistance, visit www.DisasterAssistance.gov, call 800-621-FEMA (3362) or by use the FEMA app.?

Beshear said Kentucky has not received a federal disaster declaration for severe weather damage during late May events, but KEM is working with FEMA to assess damage and direct survivors toward assistance. The governor said those impacted by damage should contact their local emergency manager.?

An Amazon Web Services data center under construction in Stone Ridge, Virginia, on March 27, 2024. Amazon plans to spend almost $150 billion in the coming 15 years on data centers, giving the cloud-computing giant the capacity to handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications and other digital services. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

LOUISVILLE — The boom in artificial intelligence is fueling a proliferation of new data centers? — the computer clusters that power the internet — in “places that maybe we hadn’t thought of before,” an industry spokesman told utility regulators gathered in Louisville last month.

Kentucky could be one of those places in the not-so-distant future.

The state’s largest utility and the legislature have taken steps to attract the investments — potentially billions of dollars — that come when companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon develop data centers. The data center boom is also fueling surging demand for power at a time when climate change has upped the pressure to reduce heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels.

In an earnings call in May, the CEO of the parent company of Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities said it is “actively working with several large data centers” in Kentucky. PPL Corp. CEO Vince Sorgi said the prospective centers would each need 300 megawatts to 500 megawatts of electricity.

For comparison, one prospective data center could consume the entire power generation of one of LG&E and KU’s coal-fired units. E.W. Brown Generating Station, the utility’s coal-fired power plant in Mercer County, has a net power capacity of 457 megawatts.?

Kentucky lawmakers are among those who see economic potential in these large-scale computer hubs. The GOP-dominated state legislature earlier this year sweetened the enticements for data centers to locate specifically in Jefferson County through House Bill 8, a broad tax policy law passed over the veto of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.?

HB 8 gives sales tax breaks on data center equipment if a data center owner or operator makes a capital investment of at least $450 million or a “project organizer” invests at least $150 million. Those tax breaks would need approval from the state’s incentives board, the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority.

The Kentucky Lantern requested an interview with Rep. Jason Petrie, R-Elkton, the chair of the Kentucky House Appropriations and Revenue Committee and the leading sponsor of HB 8. In response, Petrie in a statement said the incentives in HB 8 were “consistent with our ongoing efforts to make sure Kentucky remains competitive as we continue to explore potential economic investments.”

WDRB reported in April that Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said he was excited about a “transformative” economic development project involving a data center that could locate in the southwestern part of the city but declined to discuss additional details about the project.

?The prospect of attracting data centers to Kentucky, however, also raises concerns among advocates for the environment who follow utility policy: Would Kentucky consumers be forced to shoulder the financial burden of building new transmission lines and power plants to supply data centers with power? Does the state have enough clean energy to attract data center companies that want access to it?

Randy Strobo, a Louisville attorney focusing on environmental issues and litigation, said state and federal governments ultimately have the responsibility to analyze how new data centers would impact Kentucky’s regional electric grid and local communities “from all different perspectives.”?

“There’s going to be other impacts other than just energy,” Strobo said, mentioning how some data centers use large amounts of water to cool computers. “They really need to weigh all the different costs and benefits and try to balance it out in a way that helps more people than hurts them.’

What are data centers — and what can they bring?

In addition to the highly publicized boom in AI services, other factors are also driving the surge in new computer hubs, including the demand for “cloud” storage space and computation power along with a slew of data-driven enterprises across the globe.?

Josh Levi, the industry spokesperson and president of the Data Center Coalition who addressed the Louisville conference, put growing data usage in simpler terms: Sending emails. Using search engines. Streaming video. Credit card transactions. Sending high-definition medical records to help make diagnoses in health care.

“We’re doing it in more places: our home, our office, our home office, the plane, the train. We’re doing it all hours in a day,” Levi told the Louisville audience. “It seems like we’re fairly ubiquitous in our command to generate data, and our companies are very much responding to that.”?

The payoff, at least in terms of capital investment and potential tax revenue, can be significant for communities and states that have the power, internet connection and workforce.?

Communities in Northern Virginia — a nucleus of data center development? — could reap tens of millions of dollars from local taxes on the operations. Critics, however, say that Virginia’s state tax breaks for data centers generally cancel out any new revenue brought in by local governments.?

States outside the data center hubs of Virginia and Atlanta have already benefited from the boom. In Mississippi, Amazon is spending about $10 billion to build two data center campuses. In Southern Indiana across the Ohio River from Louisville, Facebook’s parent company Meta is investing $800 million in a data center.?

Levi in a statement to the Lantern also asserted data centers have a job multiplier effect beyond their direct employment, pointing to a Data Center Coalition-commissioned report by consulting group PricewaterhouseCoopers that found that nationally each data center job supports six jobs elsewhere in the broader economy.?

“By prioritizing investments in local communities, data centers also boost supply chain and service ecosystems, creating jobs for thousands of construction professionals during the building phase and providing quality, high-wage jobs for ongoing operations,” Levi said in his statement. “Further, every data center comes with years of reliable support for local economies by promoting job creation at restaurants, hotels, rental car agencies, fiber and HVAC installers, steel fabricators, and many other businesses.”

What do data centers need — and at what cost?

Levi said data center developers are looking for fiber internet connections, a workforce to build and run the centers and places less at risk for natural disasters.

They also need power, and lots of it.

According to a January 2024 report from consulting firm McKinsey and Co., electricity demand by data centers in the United States is expected to go from 17 gigawatts in 2022 to 35 gigawatts in 2030. For comparison, Kentucky’s net summer capacity — the maximum amount of electricity produced in the state during peak summer electricity demand — in 2022 was 17.6 gigawatts, according to federal data.

“Reliable power is incredibly important to the data center industry,” Levi said at the conference. “This is an industry who is relied upon to provide non-stop access to the data.”?

But in weighing potential investments and jobs, some environmental advocates in Kentucky worry about who would pay for new transmission lines and power plants if they’re needed to run data centers.?

“As these new data centers are coming online, how are we going to pay for them?” said Strobo, the environmental attorney. He questions whether states should offer “huge incentives” to data centers given the possibility that the costs to accommodate them could fall on electricity ratepayers.?

Two utilities, including American Electric Power, the parent company of Kentucky Power, are protesting before a federal regulator an agreement between Amazon and an independent power producer to use electricity from a Pennsylvania nuclear plant because of concerns that up to $140 million in electricity transmission costs for the agreement could be shifted onto ratepayers. Talen Energy, the independent power producer, is pushing back against AEP’s protest.

Some environmental advocates also worry about heat-trapping carbon emissions connected to new data centers, particularly that demand from new data centers could be keeping older coal-fired power plants online when they could be retired. In Georgia, the state’s largest utility is building new natural gas-fired or oil-fired generators along with some solar battery facilities in part to meet the future power demands of data centers.

Levi told the Lantern that access to clean energy is a consideration for where data centers locate. For example, Amazon is helping pay a local utility in Mississippi to build solar farms to pair with its new data center campuses but will also power the data centers with a new natural gas-fired turbine.?

Kentucky currently has very little in the way of renewable energy, notwithstanding hydroelectric power, with about 70% of electricity generated in the state coming from burning coal, the “dirtiest” fossil fuel in terms of heat-trapping carbon emissions, as of February 2024 according to federal data.?

Lane Boldman, the executive director for the environmental advocacy group Kentucky Conservation Committee, says Kentucky must build more renewable energy to compete for new industries, including data centers and an aluminum smelter, which prioritize climate-friendly technology.?

“We just haven’t taken the time to build out the power. But we have the potential to build up the power. We certainly have the right mix of ingredients to do that. I mean, that’s just simply a political problem to work through,” Boldman said.?

The unique circumstances of data centers

John Bevington, senior director of business and development at LG&E and KU, says manufacturing companies looking to locate in Kentucky usually ask about the availability of land and nearby railroads or highways.?

Not so with data centers.?

“They’re so energy intensive, they tend to start asking questions of utilities first,” Bevington told the Lantern. “They really need proximity to power lines and power lines that have capacity.”?

It’s unclear at this point whether LG&E and KU would seek to build more power generation, fossil fuel-fired or renewables, to meet the demands of prospective data centers coming into the state.?

Chris Whelan, a spokesperson for LG&E and KU, told the Lantern that the potential power demands of data centers will be analyzed in the utility’s future energy planning documents to be filed later this year with the Kentucky Public Service Commission, the state’s utility regulator.?

Bevington with LG&E and KU said the higher energy demands of prospective data centers coincide with the overall higher energy demands of new economic development projects in Kentucky, including battery plants being built by Ford. For the time being, Bevington said, the number of existing data centers in LG&E and KU’s territory is “pretty minimal.”

Strobo, the environmental lawyer, says tech companies like Google appear to be a safer economic development bet than cryptocurrency mining operations that are similarly energy-intensive. The PSC last year in multiple? cases denied or approved electricity cost discounts sought by utilities to serve Bitcoin mining operations across Kentucky.

“It seems like Google and Microsoft and all of them are being intentional about trying to do it in a way that tries to minimize impacts, although, of course, there’s still going to be some pretty major ones from all of it,” Strobo said. “We all know they’re coming. Everybody wants them to come for the most part.”

Bloomberg News recently reported the parent company of Google, which has seen its heat-trapping carbon emissions rise due to its investment in AI, is no longer claiming its operations are carbon neutral, and the company plans to be carbon neutral by 2030. Google also recently announced an investment into solar power in Taiwan among other renewable energy endeavors.

While data centers may not create a large number of jobs, Bevington of LG&E and KU said, the tax revenue brought in could be a boost to communities.?

“Whether that’s a data center or a new automotive supplier or an electric vehicle battery manufacturer or a new bourbon distillery, I think we really tend to look at all of it as, ‘What can we do to enable growth in our communities?’” Bevington said. “We sort of look at data centers as, you know, another very competitive project.”?

Synchronous fireflies in a meadow at the 2021 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival. (Peggy Butler)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.?

Every year in late June, Peggy Butler and her husband, Ken, welcome visitors to rural northwestern Pennsylvania for the chance to glimpse the rare and beguiling Photinus carolinus. This firefly species flashes synchronously, creating dazzling spectacles of light. The abundance of fireflies on their property in Forest County — there are at least 17 species in addition to the synchronous firefly — led the Butlers to found the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival.?

Launched in 2013, the annual event has become so popular that the Butlers had to institute a lottery system to protect the fireflies that visitors so desperately wanted to see. This year, 2,500 people applied for just 130 spots.?

The intense interest in the festival highlights how much Americans love fireflies. Summer nights spent watching fireflies (and debating whether or not they should be called lightning bugs) are a cherished tradition across the country. But this tradition could be threatened by climate change, according to a new study.?

Researchers found that climate change is among the most serious threats to firefly populations in the United States. To understand what determines firefly abundance, researchers analyzed more than 24,000 surveys conducted by citizen scientists from 2008 to 2016 using the program Firefly Watch.?

Other studies have established that short-term weather affects fireflies, which makes sense because their life cycles last between one to two years, with most of that time spent as larvae living in the soil, where they are particularly vulnerable.?

“What we were really surprised to find is it’s also long-term weather patterns, like averages and things that are expected to change with climate change, that are actually the number one drivers of firefly populations,” said Darin McNeil, the study’s lead investigator and an assistant professor of wildlife ecology and management at the University of Kentucky. Increasing temperatures have a negative impact on fireflies, McNeil said, and as some places become hotter and drier, their firefly populations could disappear.?

Like the giant panda, fireflies are a charismatic ambassador for their less iconic brethren, shining light on the plight of declining insect populations worldwide. “There are a lot of insect species that are in dire need of conservation work and scientific study,” McNeil said. “But it’s sometimes hard to get people excited about dung beetles, for example.”?

Recent research has shown that insect populations fell by 45 percent in the last 40 years, a collapse so extreme that scientists have branded it “the insect apocalypse.” Anecdotal evidence suggests firefly populations are also in decline, and 14 species of fireflies in North America have been assessed as threatened. The Bethany Beach firefly, found only in coastal Delaware and Maryland, is critically endangered.?

For many people, even those who are afraid of other insects, fireflies evoke wonder, magic and nostalgia, a symbol of fairy tales and childhood. “They’re friendly little bugs. They don’t bite. They don’t sting,” Peggy Butler said. “That light really attracts people to ask, ‘How do they do that?’ And it sparks their curiosity.” She paused, laughing. “Sorry for all the puns.”?

Catching fireflies and marveling at their light is a shared experience across time and geography. “They’ve been written about and sung about for centuries,” said Sarah Lower, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of biology at Bucknell University. “I mean, how fascinating is it that an insect produces its own light?”

Conservationists hope that by learning more about and educating people about what hurts fireflies, they will also help other insects who are harmed by the same things. Other than climate change, fireflies are threatened by pesticides, light pollution and unrestricted development.

The Allegheny National Forest, where the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival is held, is largely sheltered from some of these scourges of modern life. “It’s very wild here. We have half a million acres of national forest where we live,” Butler said. “Fireflies prefer very dark places. There has to be a lot of moisture and undisturbed soils.”?

The Butlers avoid pesticides, rarely mow and limit the use of outdoor lighting during the summer. Fireflies flash to attract mates, and light pollution interferes with their signaling.

At the festival each year, guides lead small groups of attendees into the forest to witness the synchronized flashing of Photinus carolinus. It is often a powerful and emotional experience, especially for people who have never seen a firefly before. “When we take them back into the forest, into the pitch darkness, and they see that synchronous activity, they’re wowed,” Butler said. “You can hear the murmurs. You can hear the ‘Wow, oh my gosh. Look at that.’”

Photinus carolinus was previously thought only to live farther south, in the Great Smoky Mountains. In the Smokies, these insects’ mating displays are a “big phenomenon,” Lower said, making the region a beacon for firefly tourists. It is not known if Photinus carolinus exists elsewhere in northern Appalachia, though Lower theorizes that it’s possible, and they have been found in other parts of Pennsylvania.?

Lower was a member of the team that first confirmed the presence of Photinus carolinus in the Allegheny National Forest in 2012, and she is now on the board for the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, advising the organization about how to keep the event sustainable.

A map of firefly abundance and ideal climate conditions generated for the recent study shows hot spots in Pennsylvania, and McNeil called Pennsylvania “the heart of firefly country.” This is perhaps why the firefly is the state insect. But what climate change will mean for Pennsylvania’s beloved fireflies in the long-term is still unclear.?

Because of climate change, Pennsylvania is becoming hotter and wetter,with increased rainfall and more intense storms. Butler has seen how flooding can affect the fireflies on her property. “In 2015, we had a big flash flood in our area, and it wiped out the undergrowth about two weeks before the festival in the forest right behind us,” she said. “That year, and for two to three years after that, we didn’t see the synchronous fireflies in those areas at all.”?

Lower said it’s too soon to predict what will happen to fireflies in specific places because of climate change, and outcomes will be different for each species and will depend on their habitat requirements. “The thing I’m most concerned about is if it changes really rapidly,” she said. “We actually don’t have a very great idea of how far fireflies can travel.”

McNeil said firefly populations may appear stable to people in Pennsylvania as climate change accelerates, even though what is actually happening is a “turnover in species.” There are more than 100 species of fireflies in the United States, and some of those species, like the common Big Dipper firefly, named for its J-shaped flight trajectory, may thrive, even as other, less adaptable species are lost.?

Lower and McNeil encourage people to manage their properties in ways that benefit fireflies, by leaving leaf litter on lawns over the winter, for example, and to participate in community science around fireflies. The efforts of residents across the United States made this study possible and could make others possible in the many areas of firefly research that are understudied. Collecting data about fireflies in your own backyard “can go a long way toward their conservation,” McNeil said. “And if you bring your kids out to count fireflies, those are future conservationists.”?

Fireflies may be small but their presence—and diverse abundance—is important. “We could probably lose all of our fireflies, and it would not impact your day to day much, aside from the summer nights being a bit less magical,” McNeil said. “But fireflies serve as what we would call a bioindicator, telling us something about the broader health of our ecosystem.” Their disappearance is a warning, not only for insect populations but for us. “The question is,” McNeil said, “how many species can we lose before we see huge consequences to human society?”?

This map from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission shows planned locations for CP2, a a giant liquefied natural gas export terminal on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and an associated pipeline. FERC issued crucial approvals for the projects Thursday. (Photo courtesy of FERC)

A massive and contentious liquefied natural gas export project in coastal Louisiana and an associated pipeline got a key approval from federal regulators Thursday.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order granting permission for Venture Global to build and operate the CP2 terminal in Cameron Parish along the Gulf Coast and construct and operate the CP Express Pipeline connecting the terminal to the gas pipeline network in east Texas and southwest Louisiana. Earthjustice, an environmental law group, said the terminal would “export more liquefied methane gas than any U.S. terminal ever approved.”

Commissioner Allison Clements, who was taking part in her last meeting on the commission after she opted not to seek another term, was the lone dissent. Clements has consistently urged the commission to more fully vet greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas projects.

“The commission has not adequately addressed the project’s environmental and socioeconomic impacts, including adverse impacts on environmental justice communities,” Clements said.

“These projects will have enormous emissions of greenhouse gasses equivalent to putting more than 1.8 million new gas fueled cars on the road each year. The order does not meaningfully assess those emissions.”

The project will still need an air permit from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and other permits, and it cannot begin exporting gas to countries lacking free-trade agreements (which constitute about 90% of the global liquified natural gas market) without authorization from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Sierra Club noted.

President Joe Biden’s administration implemented a pause on LNG export approvals in January in order to allow the DOE to update its authorization analyses.

“Today, we have an evolving understanding of the market need for LNG, the long-term supply of LNG, and the perilous impacts of methane on our planet,” the White House said at the time. “We also must adequately guard against risks to the health of our communities, especially frontline communities in the United States who disproportionately shoulder the burden of pollution from new export facilities.”

In April, 25 Republican governors called on the administration to end the freeze.

“It creates instability and threatens future energy security throughout the world at a time when our allies need us the most. It sends a message that the U.S. is not a reliable energy partner,” they said in a statement released by the Republican Governors Association.

In a statement reported by an industry publication, Venture Global’s CEO applauded “the commission and FERC staff for their independent and thorough review and approval of CP2 LNG.”

Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, called the CP2 terminal a “carbon bomb” and the Sierra Club said CP2 is a “disastrous project that puts polluters over people.”

The terminal is planned next to the existing Venture Global Calcasieu Pass LNG facility that has already racked up air pollution violations and about two miles from the proposed Commonwealth LNG facility. The Sierra Club noted that the area “has more low-income residents than 88% of the country.”

In a news conference after the FERC meeting, Chairman Willie Phillips, who voted to approve the project, said he’s made environmental justice, which aims to protect low income and minority communities from polluting infrastructure projects, a priority.

“I believe we have a duty to those communities. We also have a duty to abide by the law,” Phillips said, adding that FERC’s evaluation of environmental impact goes “above and beyond” what’s required by the National Environmental Policy Act. The order, he said, has “over 130 conditions regarding public safety, engineering and environmental impacts.”

The Sierra Club said that while FERC has acknowledged the need to do more to protect overburdened communities from environmental injustices, “it will take more than lip service, and this approval is a clear step in the wrong direction.”

A collection of plastic pellets known as nurdles that washed up on a beach in Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo by Andrew Wunderley/Charleston Waterkeeper)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The plastic pellets washing up on beaches and in marshes around Charleston, South Carolina, became very obvious about five years ago.

Called nurdles, these pebble-sized particles that are the raw material for many plastic products floated, too, in the aquamarine waters of the harbor, many carried at high tide to Sullivan’s Island, known for its white sand and million-dollar homes, where they caused alarm.

“We had been working to enact single-use plastic bans and then we started to see this nurdle problem,” recalled Andrew Wunderley, the executive director of Charleston Waterkeeper, part of the national Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental organization. “Now we had industrial-like plastic pollution.”

So Charleston Waterkeeper joined with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit law firm, and the Charleston-based Coastal Conservation League, to identify what they believed to be the source of the nurdles and then to take that company, Frontier Logistics, L.P., to federal court, in March 2020. A year later, the environmental advocates and Frontier reached a settlement that included $1 million to improve water quality in the Charleston Harbor watershed.

From South Carolina to California, nearly 60 lawsuits have been filed since 2015, mostly by citizens or environmental groups, targeting the plastics industry. The litigation comes amid a rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge detailing how burgeoning plastics production damages the planet and threatens public health.

Most recently, attorneys general in Connecticut, Minnesota and New York have raised the stakes with their own plastics lawsuits, bringing with them considerable legal firepower.

And, in California, a two-year-old investigation by Attorney General Rob Bonta into the plastics industry and its claims about recycling shows signs of concluding, potentially resulting in a case pitting the largest state in the nation against one of the largest plastic makers in the world, ExxonMobil, and powerful industry trade associations such as the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the Plastics Industry Association (PIA).

In late May, the ACC and the PIA filed their own lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., objecting to Bonta’s effort to obtain through subpoenas certain internal documents from the associations, including some involving the controversial practice of “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, while claiming California was infringing on their first amendment rights to advocate for their preferred public policy.

Bonta’s media office declined to comment on the status of the California investigation. Still, in April, the attorney general told a Reuters reporter that a decision on whether to proceed with the plastics litigation could be made “within weeks.”

Typically, these plastics lawsuits attempt to hold the companies that use plastic packaging or stores that use plastic bags accountable for alleged deceptive marketing claims about the environment or recycling.

Most are still working their way through the courts, though some have been dismissed, and environmental advocates count a few victories, such as the nurdle case in South Carolina.

“There has been zero action at the state or federal level to stop pollution from the plastics industry,” Wunderley said, four years after the South Carolina settlement. “It’s left to the citizens to pick up the slack. When the state and federal government won’t act or haven’t acted, we can step in and hold these polluters accountable.”

Plastics lawsuits follow climate lawsuits

Plastic pollution has found its way to the highest mountains and deepest parts of the ocean, into the bellies of marine mammals, the placentas of new mothers and human blood. Made of more than 16,000 chemicals, there’s a growing field of medical research that links plastics to obesity, infertility, an increased risk of miscarriage, cardiovascular disease and cancers.

Plastic production continues to soar, with petrochemical companies producing 460 million metric tons of plastic in 2019, an amount that could triple by 2060, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Across the globe, less than 10 percent gets recycled.

The plastics litigation follows an explosion of similar lawsuits responding to the global climate crisis. A report, compiled by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) and Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change, last year identified 2,180 “climate change” cases between 2020 and 2022 alone.

The climate cases are typically aimed at holding governments accountable to their climate commitments, challenging governmental action or inaction about emissions or adaptation to climate change—or attempting to establish liability primarily of fossil fuel companies for harm caused by the effects of climate change, such as extreme weather events.

The UNEP report found that the litigation had influenced policy in some European countries, but many cases in the United States have faced lengthy procedural delays and climate litigation has not yet translated into systemic shifts in climate governance.

The New York University School of Law launched a plastics litigation tracker in 2022 and has observed a variety of plastics-related lawsuits in federal and state courts. Plaintiffs have included individuals as well as environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club and Earth Island Institute. Some cases, like the South Carolina lawsuit, cite provisions of the federal Clean Water Act. But others take on the industry on grounds that the plastic waste is a public nuisance, or that companies are making false claims about their business practices or products.

In one such early case, filed in Superior Court in California in 2018, a resident of Lafayette, a San Francisco suburb, targeted Keurig Green Mountain, Inc., now Keurig Dr. Pepper, and the recyclability claims for its individual serving plastic coffee pods, called K-Cups, in what became a class action case.

The lawsuit alleged that most recycling facilities were not properly equipped to capture items as small as K-Cups and, even in rare cases where they could, they ended up in landfills because there was no recycling market for them.

Without admitting any wrongdoing, the company agreed in February 2022 to a $10 million settlement and to add a qualifying statement to its recyclability claims that it still uses: “Check Locally — Not Recycled in Many Communities.”

“From a false labeling standpoint, Keurig was almost as good as it gets,” said retired California attorney Howard Hirsch, the lead lawyer on that case and several other plastics lawsuits. “When we started that case, they had emblazoned in large letters on the box, ‘Have your cup and recycle it, too.’” The plastic pods had become controversial, he said, “and clearly, they were responding to the backlash over the environmental impacts of their packaging.”

A Keurig spokeswoman, Katie Gilroy, said the company is working with communities and recyclers to more widely recycle its coffee pods, and later this year, Keurig will offer a mail-back recycling program. The company is also testing pods of ground coffee pressed and wrapped in a compostable plant-based coating, she said.

Hirsch has also represented the California nonprofit environmental group The Last Beach Cleanup, which over the last five years has filed three lawsuits related to recyclability claims, settling two of them with the third still making its way through the courts.

The main connection he sees between plastics litigation and climate litigation is the source of the issue—the petrochemical industry—since nearly all plastics are made from fossil fuels, the same primary contributor to global warming.

“It’s really all part of the same story, with the petrochemical industry sort of shifting the blame for its operations and trying to make American consumers feel as though they are the ones that need to take responsibility for these companies,” Hirsch said.

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, part of the American Chemistry Council lobby group, called the rise in plastics litigation “disappointing.” In a written statement, Eisenberg said that “legal action has diverted attention away from the importance of recycling. Regardless, we remain steadfast in our mission to advocate for effective policy, collaborate with communities, and invest in new technologies that help to increase plastics recycling for a cleaner, more sustainable future.”

Minnesota, Connecticut challenge Hefty bag maker

Beyond private civil lawsuits including class actions, state attorneys general are now filing lawsuits, raising the stakes, said Bethany Noll Davis, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, which manages the litigation tracker with the Guarini Center for Environmental, Energy & Land Use Law, both of which are housed at the NYU School of Law.

Significant recent filings, she said, came in Connecticut and Minnesota, where the attorneys general have sued the manufacturers of Hefty bags, Reynolds Consumer Products.

In the Minnesota case, filed in June 2023, in state court, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison claims the bags are marketed for collecting waste plastic to be recycled. But, according to the complaint, “the otherwise recyclable items placed into the bags do not get recycled, and that the bags themselves are not recyclable anywhere … when contaminated by waste residue.”

The Connecticut lawsuit, filed in January 2023 in state court in Hartford, claims that any Hefty bags containing waste plastic are in practice “diverted to landfills or incinerators.”

Reynolds Consumer Products did not respond to requests for comment on the lawsuits.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed suit in November against PepsiCo Inc., claiming the food and beverage giant had harmed the public and the environment with its single-use plastic packaging.

“PepsiCo has long known of the harms caused by its single-use plastic packaging, acknowledging on its website that there is a ‘plastic pollution crisis’ and that its own packaging has ‘potential environmental impacts,’” the lawsuit claims. “By its continued manufacturing, production, marketing, distribution, and sale of vast quantities of single-use plastic packaging, PepsiCo has significantly contributed to, and continues to contribute to, the existence of a public nuisance that injures the community living in the city of Buffalo and surrounding area,” according to the lawsuit.

A PepsiCo representative responded in a written statement: “Packaging waste is a serious issue that requires collaboration from many stakeholders. PepsiCo is focused on being part of the solution and is pursuing goals to improve and enhance recycling programs.”

A dearth of federal policy on recycling complicates matters and invites litigation, said Steven Cook, an attorney with the law and government relations firm Bracewell, with clients that include fossil fuel and other energy companies. He worked three years as a deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management with the Environmental Protection Agency, and more than two decades as a lead counsel at LyondellBasell, one of the world’s largest plastic, chemical and refining companies.

But plastics remain essential to society, he said. “Our modern society doesn’t run without (plastics). You can’t run a hospital without plastics. You can’t get to zero emissions from cars without plastics. Consumers … wanted packaging that does certain things.”

Companies, he said, are attempting to address the problem of plastic waste, “but Congress will make a policy choice at some point. Until they do then you go to the courts.”

Plastic makers’ liability questioned

Greenwashing cases against companies that use plastic packaging are scattered across the country, with their outcomes uncertain, said Alyssa Johl, vice president and general counsel at the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental group seeking to hold fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters accountable for the damages they have caused.

In the future, plastics litigation appears headed toward the petrochemical companies that make plastic that gets turned into packaging or bags, she said.

The Center for Climate Integrity published a report in February that concluded “petrochemical companies, independently and through industry trade associations and front groups, have deceived consumers, policymakers, and regulators into believing that they could address the plastic waste crisis through a series of false solutions,” such as recycling.

When Bonta, California’s attorney general, announced his investigation two years ago, his office said it had issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil, seeking information relating to the company’s role in deceiving the public.

ExxonMobil responded with a denial.

“We reject the allegations made by the Attorney General’s office in its press release,” the company said at the time. “We share society’s concerns and are collaborating with governments, including the State of California, communities, and other industries to support projects around the world to improve waste management and circularity.”

That investigation has been kept tightly under wraps, but there are indications that Bonta could be investigating claims around both mechanical recycling, where waste plastic is sorted, cleaned, melted and molded into new plastic products, as well as what the industry now dubs “advanced recycling,” a term used to describe a variety of chemical-based, industrial processes, that seek to turn plastic waste back into basic plastics building blocks.

But so far such technologies remain unproven, and environmentalists say most of them are polluting, energy-intensive and ineffective, turning the waste into new, dirty synthetic gases or oils.

Meanwhile, legal experts expect to see a new genre of plastics lawsuits emerge dealing with how plastics may be making people sick as plastic breaks down into micro- and even more tiny nano-plastics, carrying toxic chemicals into the body.

With scientists raising alarms about plastics and health, it’s only a matter of time before the lawyers weigh in, said Davis, the executive director of the NYU Law School’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. “And the minute we find more out about that, I think we could see a new frontier of lawsuits,” she said.

Lawsuit outcome ‘extraordinarily positive’

In South Carolina, Wunderley, the Waterkeeper, describes plastic as “Charleston’s dirty little secret,” affecting salt marshes, oyster beds and beaches. “We do cleanups and it’s almost all?plastic and almost all single-use plastic,” he said.

The company, without admitting any fault or wrongdoing, moved its nurdle-handling operations away from a pier in Charleston Harbor, according to the settlement agreement, and consented to prevent the pellets from its new facility from escaping into the environment and allowed for an independent audit of its control measures.

Wunderley said he still finds some nurdles when he patrols the harbor and tries to identify the source. But he considers the outcome of the 2020 lawsuit a success. The new $1 million Healthy Harbors fund has helped some low-income families near Charleston better maintain their septic systems, thereby reducing sewage overflows, and funded an urban gardening program. It has also helped keep the Charleston Waterkeeper program on the water and looking for sources of pollution.

It’s part of an ongoing effort, Wunderley said, to take a bite out of Charleston’s “little sliver of this global plastic pollution crisis.”

A man pulls a boat through a flooded neighborhood in Barataria, La., in August 2021 after Hurricane Ida hit the area, one of several storms that have battered Louisiana in recent years. Amid billions in losses, many insurance companies have left the state or increased premiums. As climate change intensifies natural disasters, policymakers across the country are trying to convince insurers to stick around. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

In the coming years, climate change could force Americans from their homes, not just by raising sea levels, worsening wildfires and causing floods — but also by putting insurance coverage out of reach.

In places including California, Florida and Louisiana, some homeowners are finding it nearly impossible to find an insurance company that will cover their property. Others have seen their premiums climb so high that they can no longer pay. Experts say the trend is spreading throughout the country as natural disasters increase.

Most mortgage lenders require homeowners to maintain insurance. Without access to coverage, millions of Americans could find themselves forced to reconsider where they live. Consumer advocates say long-overdue conversations about development in areas prone to natural disasters are being driven by property insurers, not governments.

“Insurance companies have basically become our land-use officials,” said Doug Heller, director of insurance with the Consumer Federation of America, a research and advocacy nonprofit. “In 2023, the industry suddenly seemed to wake up and say, ‘There’s climate change, forget all those times we’ve nodded our head yes and told you that you can live there.’”

As the crisis escalates, state leaders are desperately trying to convince insurance companies to stick around. States are offering them more flexibility to raise premiums or drop certain homes from coverage, fast-tracking rate revisions and making it harder for residents to sue their insurance company.

Meanwhile, a flood of new policyholders are joining state-backed insurance “plans of last resort,” leaving states to assume more of the risk on behalf of residents who can’t find coverage in the private sector.

“Insurers are the climate change canary in the coal mine.” – Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative, University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment ? ?

Industry leaders note that insurance companies have been hammered by heavy payouts — last year, 28 separate U.S. natural disasters caused at least $1 billion each in damage, according to federal figures — and say they simply can’t afford to provide coverage in the areas that face the highest risk.

Disaster costs are soaring. In the last five years, there have been 102 disaster events in the United States that caused at least $1 billion in damage. In the entire decade of the 1990s, there were 57 billion-dollar events (adjusted for inflation), and in the 1980s there were 33.

Natural disasters are increasing at the same time risk-prone areas are becoming ever more populated, and as property values are climbing. The price of repairs and replacement have skyrocketed due to inflation, workforce and supply chain issues. Insurers say costs also have been driven by an uptick in litigation and fraud.

“We’re experiencing record-breaking losses as it relates to natural disasters,” said Adam Shores, senior vice president for state government relations with the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, an industry group. “We want to be there, but when the math doesn’t work for a company, they have to make those decisions.”

While the insurance crisis is most acute in certain coastal states, climate experts say every region will face similar challenges, especially as severe storms batter the middle of the country. While some states have made marginal gains in stabilizing the insurance market, some experts say that progress may be short-lived.

“Insurers are the climate change canary in the coal mine,” said Dave Jones, the former insurance commissioner in California and director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment. “While these policy and regulatory interventions might help in the short run, they’re likely to be overwhelmed by the increasing risk and loss.”

‘The perfect storm’

In some hard-hit states, policymakers have focused on giving insurance companies more flexibility to adjust their rates and coverage options.

Four hurricanes walloped Louisiana in 2020 and 2021, causing $23 billion in insured losses. Twelve insurance companies became insolvent and dozens left the state. Residents in southern Louisiana especially have struggled to find coverage, and some have moved elsewhere because they couldn’t afford their premiums.

“It’s the perfect storm,” said Louisiana state Rep. Gabe Firment, a Republican. “We just do not have companies willing to write business in Louisiana right now, and you can’t blame them.”

Firment sponsored a measure, enacted this year, repealing a state rule that had blocked companies from dropping long-standing customers. Those dropped can join a state-run plan. Lawmakers hope that — given the ability to cancel the highest-risk policies — insurance companies will remain in the state and avoid massive rate hikes on their remaining customers.

Legislators passed a suite of other laws aimed at the crisis, speeding up the process for insurers to adjust their rates, extending a grant program to help residents fortify their homes and giving companies more time to pay out claims. Firment said the changes are designed to attract more companies back to the state, “but if we get two or three hurricanes this year, all bets are off.”

In California, many major insurers have canceled policies or stopped accepting new applications due to wildfire risk. Regulators there have proposed a rule that would allow companies to incorporate climate change projections into the models they use to set their rates.

“Insurers are not going to continue to write in every market if they can’t price accurately,” said Mark Friedlander, director of corporate communications with the Insurance Information Institute, an industry-backed research group.

Meanwhile, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has put forth a measure that would speed up regulators’ approval of the rate revisions proposed by insurance companies. While seeking to give insurers more flexibility on rates, California leaders also have sought to protect residents by establishing a one-year moratorium on policy cancellations in disaster areas following a wildfire.

Officials at the state Department of Insurance did not respond to Stateline interview requests.

Homeowners’ insurance rates in Texas spiked 23% last year, twice the national average. The state has endured a myriad of disasters in recent years, but consumer advocates fear insurers are weaponizing climate change to jack up rates and demand looser regulations.

“[Insurance companies] are putting a gun to our heads, telling us, ‘Do it our way or we’ll pull up stakes,’” said Ware Wendell, executive director of Texas Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group. “They’re going to cherry-pick the country and only insure parts of the country that have less climate risk.”

The Texas Department of Insurance did not grant a Stateline interview request.

‘Last resort’

Kentucky AG gets funding to fight Biden administration on climate, air and water pollution rules

In several states, homeowners who can’t find private coverage are joining state-run plans. Originally intended to be a last-ditch option, because they generally offer limited coverage, these plans are seeing more and more residents signing up.

Florida has seen more than 1 million residents join the plan offered by the state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. The plan, which is meant to be a “last resort” option, now stands as the largest in the state.

Insurance rates in Florida have climbed to four times the national average, following hurricanes Ian and Nicole in 2022. The state also has seen an uptick in claims lawsuits that insurance companies characterize as legal abuse.

Legislators changed state law in 2022 to disincentivize such lawsuits, ending homeowners’ ability to collect attorneys fees from insurers in claims disputes. State regulators say insurance rates have stabilized in 2024, and new companies are joining the market. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation did not grant an interview request.

But some lawmakers say state leaders are eager to help insurance companies while ignoring the underlying issue of climate change.

“Stabilization is important, but [premiums] have stabilized at high rates,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat. “Floridians can’t afford Florida anymore, and if we’re not taking climate change seriously, then we’re missing the point.”

Eskamani called for leaders to change land-use policies to limit development in high-risk areas.

Even as some Florida homeowners are now shifting from the state-run plan back to the private market, industry experts say the nationwide surge in state-backed policies is troubling. If such plans exhaust their reserves, states impose an assessment on either all insurance companies or all individual policyholders — known in Florida as the “hurricane tax.”

Jones, the former California insurance commissioner, noted that insurers there are worried that growing wildfire risk could force them to bail out the state plan. Nearly 400,000 Californians rely on the state plan for insurance, and state officials have warned that a catastrophic event could wipe out its reserves.

While Californians struggle to find insurance on the private market, Jones called out the insurers that are dropping policies even as they retain financial ties to fossil fuel companies.

“Why are insurers investing in and writing insurance for the very industry that’s making it increasingly challenging for them to write insurance in certain parts of the country?” he said.

In Colorado, lawmakers voted last year to create a state-backed insurance plan like those in more than 30 other states. State Sen. Dylan Roberts, the Democrat who sponsored the bill, said he heard from constituents who were getting dropped by their insurers following the Marshall Fire that swept through Boulder County in 2021.

Lawmakers hope to use this emerging climate science to charge oil companies for disasters

“We’re going to have more and more Coloradoans every year who are unable to find insurance for their property on the private market,” he said. “To have an insurer of last resort is something we hope isn’t used widely, but it’s something we need to have.”

Some consumer advocates believe states will have to get more involved. Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a nonprofit that advocates for insurance customers, said governments face the same difficult risk calculations as private companies but are tax-exempt and don’t face the same pressures to return high profit margins to shareholders.

“Publicly supported insurance programs are here to stay,” she said. “It behooves us to build them as smart as we can.”

In Washington state, regulators say they have only a few hundred policies on the state-backed plan, a sign that residents can still access coverage on the private market. David Forte, senior property and casualty policy adviser with the Office of the Insurance Commissioner, said the agency has added actuarial staff to speed up insurers’ rate revision approvals.

He also credited the work of state leaders who have invested millions to reduce wildfire risk. But he cited a 2022 wildfire that nearly swept through the town of Index, before shifting winds changed its direction.

“If that had happened, I think our property market would be different,” he said. “Are we just one bad event away? Probably.”

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

A tornado destroyed out buildings and damaged the roof and windows of Tabatha Adams' home in Hopkins County. (Courtesy of Tabatha Adams)

Sitting on her front porch surrounded by tornado damage, Tabatha Adams never imagined being on the other side of disaster recovery.?

As the former president of her local Rotary Club, she helped her neighbors when Dawson Springs grappled with the devastating aftermath of an EF-4 tornado in December 2021. The Western Kentucky city of about 2,400 lost 75% of its housing while 19 residents lost their lives in the severe weather outbreak that killed 74 Kentuckians.?

Adams organized disaster grants, totaling $180,000 in 2022 she said, to help her neighbors rebuild and spearheaded the construction of a memorial remembering those killed from Dawson Springs.

But now, it’s her own family that is receiving help from neighbors she had previously aided. Kentucky faced the brunt of another tornado outbreak Sunday with a particularly strong tornado — one that spurred the National Weather Service to issue a rare “tornado emergency” — tearing a track just north of Dawson Springs city limits through the unincorporated communities of Charleston and Barnsley.

A survey by the National Weather Service found the tornado to be of EF-3 strength with peak wind speeds of 160 mph and a peak width of 700 yards or nearly a half-mile. The Sunday tornado’s track was north of the path taken by the 2021 tornado and through a less densely populated area.

Gov. Andy Beshear said five people across the state were killed in the storms, including a 48-year-old woman from Hopkins County. Fatalities also were reported in Caldwell, Hardin and Mercer counties and in Louisville. At least 14 counties have declared states of emergency, and tens of thousands still were without power across the state as of Tuesday afternoon.?

About 40 homes across Hopkins County have been significantly damaged or are complete losses from the Sunday tornado, according to Kevin Cotton, the mayor of the Hopkins County seat of Madisonville. That included Adams’ home along Daylight Road, considered an epicenter of damage from the twister: her two-car garage and barn were both toppled, shingles torn off her roof and windows broken throughout her house.?

But she’s grateful her family, dog and cats are safe. She’s also not having to rebuild a second time; some homes hit by the Sunday storms were damaged or destroyed in the 2021 tornado. Adams said the 2021 tornado had missed her home by less than a mile.?

“We’re talking not even three years ago these people were picking up their lives and rebuilding,” Adams said. “Here they are again. It is unimaginable and unthinkable, and it just really makes you wonder why.”?

In recent decades, more tornado outbreaks have shifted geographically to the mid-South including Western Kentucky, which scientists say is connected to the impacts of climate change. More warm, moist air is coming from the Gulf of Mexico to collide with colder air from the Western U.S., fueling potential tornadoes across the South, scientists say.

In Hopkins County, recovery efforts at least have a head start because of the existing recovery infrastructure and knowledge on how to respond, said Heath Duncan, the co-chair of the Hopkins County Long Term Recovery Committee.?

Duncan, who’s also the executive director of the regional Habitat for Humanity organization, said a surge of hundreds of volunteers since Sunday has arrived to help clear debris and check on survivors. But the financial costs of recovery, especially what costs will ultimately be borne by local communities and residents, is still being realized.?

Duncan said the 2021 tornado destroyed not only homes but also city infrastructure from water lines to sidewalks. Rebuilding to better withstand future storms can be an “incredibly expensive endeavor,” he added. He said financial support moving forward will still likely rely on generosity of local donors and state and federal governments.?

“The process of long term recovery work has been difficult the last two years, and for me personally, the hardest thing that I’ve had to do in life,” Duncan said, mentioning he feels frustrated on the verge of anger at times over his community’s situation. “A lot of us are just tired from the 2021 tornado, and so now every time a storm blows through we’re like, ‘Please, we can’t handle anything else.’”?

Gov. Andy Beshear in a press conference with emergency management officials Monday said he believed the storm damage from across numerous counties, particularly in Western Kentucky, would qualify the disaster for FEMA’s public assistance program, which provides grants to restore infrastructure.?

But individual survivors being able to apply to FEMA for disaster aid is not guaranteed; Beshear said it would take every Kentuckian impacted to document their damage and report it for FEMA to open up aid to individuals. That’s especially crucial, he said, for those impacted who are uninsured.?

“Your willingness to track your damage and to turn it in is what could help a neighbor or someone you don’t even know from another county get that help,” Beshear said.?

While state officials wait to hear if and what federal disaster assistance Kentuckians will receive, local Hopkins County residents are still working long hours in the immediate aftermath to help their neighbors.?

Meredith and David Hyde only moved back into a newly constructed home in Dawson Springs less than two years ago after their original home was made unlivable after the 2021 tornado. On Tuesday afternoon, they drove around damaged areas in Charleston dropping off monetary donations made possible by the local Rotary Club to survivors.?

Meredith Hyde, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, said she’s been mindful to provide survivors with mental health resources when they need it, some of them still processing the shock of the disaster. David and she don’t have many memories from the first couple of weeks after the 2021 tornado, she said, and “neither one of us I don’t think could have made it without the other one.”?

She mentioned one woman they were visiting provided them $500 worth of kitchen supplies after the 2021 tornado.?

“This community just takes care of each other,” Hyde said. “This is not about having to do it. This is about wanting to do it.”

Some of the coal mined in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming comes from surface mines like this one. (Photo courtesy of Wyoming BLM via Flickr | CC-BY-SA 2.0)

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Thursday released plans to end future leasing of its managed coal resources in the Powder River Basin in eastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming in a move that has angered Montana’s Republican political leaders but is being cheered by environmental groups who fought for changes to leasing plans over the past decade.

The BLM issued final supplemental environmental impact statements and amendments to its land use plans for the Miles City Field Office in Montana and the Buffalo Field Office in Wyoming, both of which recommend an end to future federal coal leasing in the regions despite the bureau considering alternatives that would allow for some future leasing.

The official plans will be published in the Federal Register on Friday, which opens up a 30-day window for people to file protests. After the window closes and the protests are resolved by the director of the BLM, which does not have a specific timeframe but in recent years has taken about nine months, the final Record of Decision and Resource Management Plan will be published and take effect.

The decisions by the BLM are key because the Powder River Basin in the two states accounts for 85% of federal coal production and about 40% of U.S. annual coal production, but the bureau says coal production in the Miles City Field Office region has declined over the past decade as more utilities move toward other energy sources for power.

The environmental groups that pushed for the end to new coal leasing called the decision a “sea change” in federal efforts to move toward cleaner energy sources.

“This decision opens new doors to a future where our public lands are not sacrificed for fossil fuel profits and, instead, can prove a bulwark of ecological and community resilience in the face of global warming,” Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, said in a statement.

The plan for Montana would close about 1.2 million acres to new coal leasing but would allow current coal production at the Spring Creek Mine, owned by the Navajo Transitional Energy Company, to continue through 2035. It would allow production at the Rosebud Mine, owned by Westmoreland, through 2060 under their current leases, the BLM said in the notice in the Federal Register. The Absaloka Mine lost its final customer in April, the Billings Gazette reported.

Existing mines in Wyoming would be able to produce coal until 2041. The current period for the new plans runs through 2038.

The new environmental impact statement and land use plan amendments come eight years after the Western Organization of Resource Councils first challenged the 2015 Record of Decision for future leasing operations, alleging it violated the National Environmental Policy Act. In 2018, a judge found the BLM had violated NEPA, which led to another coal screening for the plans and a new NEPA analysis released in 2019 under the Trump administration.

But the Miles City plan was challenged again by the same group in 2020. In August 2022, a U.S. District Court of Montana judge also found the BLM had violated NEPA by failing to address public health and environmental effects from the mining. He ordered another new coal screening and NEPA analysis that this time considered no-leasing and limited-leasing alternatives as well as impacts to public health from burning fossil fuels in the area.

“Coal has powered our nation for many decades, but technology, economics and markets are changing radically,” Western Organization of Resource Councils Board Chair Paula Antoine said Thursday in response to the decisions. “BLM’s announcement recognizes that coal’s era is ending, and it’s time to focus on supporting our communities through the transition away from coal, investing in workers, and moving to heal our lands, water and climate as we enter a bright clean energy future.”

The BLM said in its announcement that the Spring Creek and Rosebud mines produced a combined 18.5 million short tons (37 million pounds) of coal in 2022, which was down from 28 million short tons (56 million pounds) in 2007, “as older coal-fired electric power plants have closed and generation has shifted to natural gas and renewable energy sources.”

“Both U.S. total coal production and Powder River Basin coal production peaked in 2008 and have since declined steeply, according to the Energy Information Administration,” BLM spokesperson Mark Jacobsen said in the bureau’s announcement.

Montana Republicans unhappy with another Biden energy move; Tester reviewing

Montana’s Republican governor and three GOP members of the state’s federal delegation, who have for years been saying the Biden administration’s efforts to move the U.S toward more renewable and clean energy and away from using fossil fuels for power, sent out a joint news release decrying the BLM’s decision and blaming the “far left” for the proposed plans.

Gov. Greg Gianforte in August wrote to BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning that accepting few or no future leases would harm the state’s coal trust, Colstrip and the economy.

The group of Republicans expressed similar sentiments recently regarding the EPA’s singling-out the coal-fired plants at Colstrip with new emissions standards and believe that efforts to move away from coal and oil and gas to power the state will hurt the state’s power grid and cost workers jobs.

“Every action taken by the Biden administration is driving up the cost of affordable energy and threatening the reliability of our electrical grid. Affordable power generated by coal keeps the lights on in Montana and fuels manufacturing across the country and world,” Gianforte said in a statement. “Today’s announcement is nothing more than a gift to China and our adversaries and a slap in the face to hardworking Montanans.”

U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale, who represents eastern Montana, blamed the decision on appeasing “climate extremists” and said the plans would jeopardize Montanans’ way of life.

“BLM either does not understand or does not care that their unreliable green new deal energy sources are not feasible in places like Montana and pose real threats to our economy and national security,” Rosendale said.

A spokesperson for Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, said Tester was reviewing the proposal and calling on Montanans to submit comments during the 30-day protest window.

“Senator Tester will always stand up to President Biden’s energy policies when they don’t make sense for Montana,” spokesperson Eli Cousin said in a statement.

The new proposal comes on the heels of the BLM publishing a final rule that will allow two new types of leases on federal public lands: restoration and mitigation leases, which put those uses on the same footing as extraction. The rules have already been criticized by the same group of Montana Republican leaders who say the changes will also harm Montana’s energy industry.

The different alternatives BLM considered

But the parameters of the court-ordered review meant that three out of four of the proposed alternatives the BLM considered for the Miles City Field Office would have closed off significant acreage to new leasing.

The first alternative was to take no action and keep the 2019 plans in place, which would have made 1.2 million acres available for possible leasing.

But the three other options applied screens, multiple-use considerations, and climate change scenarios that greatly reduced the available acreage. Alternative B would have left about 69,000 acres available for possible leasing, while Alternative C would have made about 810 acres available.

But the alternative the BLM decided to pick makes no coal available for leasing. The Miles City planning area encompasses 2.7 million acres of BLM land and 11.7 million acres of federal coal mineral estate over 17 counties in eastern Montana.

The environmental impact analysis says the alternative the BLM chose would mean no new impacts to air quality caused by new or pending coal leases. The report forecasts Spring Creek and Rosebud would continue to support about 620 jobs through 2035 resulting in nearly $50 million in average annual income.

Utilizing Alternative D would also mean the Spring Creek Mine would run out of coal reserves about 53 years earlier than under Alternatives A and B, which would eventually lead to a loss of economic revenue and programs funded by federal coal production, the report says.

But Montana environmental groups that have fought for the changes say the new plans are a step forward in moving away from coal and cutting down on pollution.

Mark Fix, a Miles City rancher who is a member of the Northern Plains Resource Council, said the new plans reflect reality in 2024.

“Coal companies in this region already have decades of coal locked up in leasing, and it’s hard to imagine they’ll find buyers that far into the future given the competition from more affordable energy sources,” Fix said. “This plan protects taxpayers from wasting publicly owned resources on lowball leases to subsidize an industry in decline. It’s time we take a clear-eyed look at the future and start investing in a transition away from coal.”

The story is republished from the Daily Montanan, a sister publication of the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

Cattle crowd inside a feedlot operated by JBS Five Rivers Colorado Beef on August 22, 2012 in Wiley, Colorado. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.?

About five miles south of Broken Bow, in the heart of central Nebraska, thousands of cattle stand in feedlots at Adams Land & Cattle Co., a supplier of beef to the meat giant Tyson Foods.

From the air, the feedlots look dusty brown and packed with cows — not a vision of happy animals grazing on open pastureland, enriching the soil with carbon. But when the animals are slaughtered, processed and sent onward to consumers, labels on the final product can claim that they were raised in a “climate friendly” way.??

In late 2022, Tyson — one of the country’s “big four” meat packers — applied to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), seeking a “climate friendly” label for its Brazen Beef brand. The production of Brazen Beef, the label claims, achieves a “10 percent greenhouse gas reduction.” Soon after, the USDA approved the label.

Happy cows, good food, more profits for farmers

Immediately, environmental groups questioned the claim and petitioned the agency to stop using it, citing livestock’s significant greenhouse gas emissions and the growing pile of research that documents them. These groups and journalism outlets, including Inside Climate News, have asked the agency for the data it used to support its rubber-stamping of Tyson’s label but have essentially gotten nowhere.

“There are lots of misleading claims on food, but it’s hard to imagine a claim that’s more misleading than ‘climate friendly’ beef,” said Scott Faber, a senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “It’s like putting a cancer-free label on a cigarette. There’s no worse food choice for the climate than beef.”

The USDA has since confirmed it is currently considering and has approved similar labels for more livestock companies, but would not say which ones.

Last week, the EWG, a longtime watchdog of the USDA, published a new analysis, outlining its efforts over the last year to push the agency for more transparency, including asking it to provide the specific rationale for allowing Brazen Beef to carry the “climate friendly” label. Last year, the group filed a Freedom of Information Act request, seeking the data that Tyson supplied to the agency in support of its application, but received only a heavily redacted response. EWG also petitioned the agency to not allow climate friendly or low carbon claims on beef.

The Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, appropriated nearly $20 billion for agricultural practices deemed to have benefits for the climate. Another $3.1 billion is available through a Biden-era program called the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities.?

To earn the “climate friendly” label, Tyson requires ranchers to meet the criteria of its internal “Climate-Smart Beef” program, but EWG notes that the company fails to provide information about the practices that farmers are required to adopt or about which farmers participate in the program. The only farm it has publicly identified is the Adams company in Nebraska.

A USDA spokesperson told Inside Climate News it can only rely on a third-party verification company to substantiate a label claim and could not provide the data Tyson submitted for its review.??

“Because Congress did not provide USDA with on-farm oversight authority that would enable it to verify these types of labeling claims, companies must use third-party certifying organizations to substantiate these claims,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, directing Inside Climate News to the third-party verifier or Tyson for more information.?

The third-party verification company, Where Food Comes From, did not respond to emailed questions from Inside Climate News, and Tyson did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The USDA said it is reviewing EWG’s petitions and announced in June 2023 that it’s working on strengthening the “substantiation of animal-raising claims, which includes the type of claim affixed to the Brazen Beef product.”

The agency said other livestock companies were seeking similar labels and that the agency has approved them, but would not identify those companies, saying Inside Climate News would have to seek the information through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“They’re being incredibly obstinate about sharing anything right now,” said Matthew Hayek, a researcher with New York University who studies the environmental and climate impacts of the food system. “Speaking as a scientist, it’s not transparent and it’s a scandal in its own right that the government can’t provide this information.”

This lack of transparency from the agency worries environmental and legal advocacy groups, especially now that billions of dollars in taxpayer funds are available for agricultural practices deemed to have benefits for the climate. The Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, appropriated nearly $20 billion for these practices; another $3.1 billion is available through a Biden-era program called the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities.

“This is an important test case for USDA,” Faber said. “If they can’t say no to a clearly misleading climate claim like ‘climate friendly’ beef, why should they be trusted to say no to other misleading climate claims? There’s a lot of money at stake.”

Tyson is the primary recipient of about $60 million in funding from the Climate-Smart Commodities program that will help the company “expand climate-smart markets and increase carbon sequestration and reduce emissions in the production of beef and row crops for livestock feed,” according to the USDA.??

Other recipients of that grant include McDonald’s, the biggest buyer of beef in the United States, and Where Food Comes From.

The funds for the Climate-Smart Commodities program come from the agency’s Commodity Credit Corporation and are not subject to congressional approval or oversight.?

Last year, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the USDA, asking for details about funding to support “low carbon” beef. The agency’s response was heavily redacted and the Center is now appealing.

“The industry continues to make big claims about sequestering carbon, with no science or scale to back it up, and uses very fuzzy accounting for their methane emissions, even though cattle are the main agricultural source of domestic methane emissions,” explained Jennifer Molidor, a senior campaigner for the group, in an email to Inside Climate News. “Brazen Beef has used a third party auditor, but it’s not clear what baseline and metrics they are using either.”

“If the USDA wants climate-smart agriculture, propping up the beef industry isn’t the smartest way to go about it,” Molidor added.

On its website, Tyson claims to reach its 10 percent greenhouse gas reduction through improved grazing methods and practices that reduce emissions from growing feed. But it does not publish the data and it says farmers can “customize their practices depending on their unique geographic location and circumstances.”

The company also says it worked with two environmental advocacy groups, the Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy, to develop its carbon accounting methodology.?

Katie Anderson, a senior director with the Environmental Defense Fund, said the organization’s role in Tyson’s Climate Smart Beef program was limited to sharing its method for measuring nitrogen, the major component of fertilizer used to grow livestock feed. When nitrogen-based fertilizer is applied to farm fields, much of it is lost to the air as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

The organization’s method calculates nitrous oxide emissions across watersheds or “entire sourcing regions,” making it less cumbersome for individual farms to calculate.

“The models make it easier and more accurate for food and agriculture companies to report progress toward the nitrogen-related parts of their climate and water quality goals for their direct operations and supply chains,” Anderson said.???

Tyson did not pay the group for its contribution.

The Nature Conservancy, which has received funding from Tyson for some of its conservation projects in the company’s home state of Arkansas, was paid to share some of its expertise on sustainable agriculture and translating data from farmers.

“We only shared knowledge and advice, which Tyson took into consideration when working on the model,” said Nancy Labbe, the co-director of TNC’s Regenerative Grazing Lands program, who noted that the data on Tyson’s accounting methodology would have to come from the company itself.?

Both the Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy have received funding from the USDA via the Climate-Smart Commodities program.

Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa and outspoken critic of U.S. agricultural policy, said the environmental groups, universities and corporations taking money from the USDA for climate-focused efforts should all be subject to the same rules.

“USDA should have a transparent methodology that’s applicable to everyone—the outsourcing, the monitoring, the verification—for all these groups that have incentives to make things look better than they are,” Secchi said. “There’s no transparency. How are they actually going to verify that farmers are reducing nitrogen? Are they getting GPS coordinates for tractors every day of the year? I think it’s complete bulls- – – t. They’re only looking at select indicators, not the whole system.”

Already, the agency has expanded its definition of “climate smart” to practices critics say are not climate smart and may actually lead to more greenhouse gas emissions.

Though it has long worked to downplay its climate impact, the livestock industry has become increasingly sensitive to growing consumer awareness of livestock’s huge carbon footprint. It has spent millions lobbying against climate action and courting academic specialists to minimize the greenhouse gas emissions of livestock.?

“There’s no transparency. How are they actually going to verify that farmers are reducing nitrogen?”

Last month the American Farm Bureau Federation, the country’s most powerful farm lobbying group, which had long denied the science behind human-caused climate change, celebrated a drop in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions reported by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“America’s farmers and ranchers are leading the way in greenhouse gas emission reduction through voluntary conservation efforts and market-based incentives,” the Farm Bureau said, noting that agricultural emissions fell by 2 percent from 2021 to 2022, “ the largest decrease of any economic sector.”

But Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, noted that the drop was not the result of voluntary farm practices. High fertilizer prices, in part caused by the war in Ukraine, resulted in less fertilizer use as farmers switched to planting soybeans rather than corn, which is especially nitrogen intensive. Less corn and less fertilizer led to lower nitrous oxide emissions. Over roughly the same period, a multi-year drought killed thousands of cattle, resulting in lower methane emissions from cattle. (Cattle are the biggest source of agricultural methane, largely from their belches and from the way their manure is stored.)

“Those are the two drivers that reduced emissions,” Lilliston said. “It wasn’t anything the industry did or anything farmers did.”

“When we do reduce the number of cattle, we reduce emissions, and when we do plant other crops besides corn — crops that aren’t as fertilizer intensive — emissions go down,” Lilliston added. “This is the pathway to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

The downplaying of livestock’s carbon impact isn’t just the work of the American farm and livestock lobbies. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations last year came under fire as reporters revealed that researchers had been pressured to downplay livestock’s climate impact in a landmark report.?

Last month, Hayek, of NYU, accused the FAO of misusing his data in a subsequent report that he and others say downplayed the importance of reducing beef and dairy consumption to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which research has demonstrated is critical, especially in developing countries.?

The food system, from farm to consumer, accounts for about one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, with livestock production accounting for about two-thirds of that. It is now widely understood that emissions from the food system alone will push temperatures past the 1.5 degree Celsius target set in the Paris Agreement. Assuming the world continues to eat meat and dairy the way it does now, most of the warming projected to come from the food system will come from livestock, recent research has found.

Industry efforts to pursue “low carbon” and “climate friendly” labeling are another step toward minimizing its climate and broader environmental impacts — and they further mislead consumers, critics say. “It implies there’s a beef choice that’s good for the climate,” Faber said.

The debate over low carbon beef claims could, in theory, end up facing legal challenges.

In February, the New York Attorney General’s office sued the world’s largest beef company, Brazil-based JBS, for misleading consumers by promising to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2040, even though the company clearly has a growth strategy that relies on ramping up beef production.?

“It would be difficult to achieve if not impossible,” said Peter Lehner, an attorney for Earthjustice whose work focuses on agriculture. “The measures JBS are taking are not enough and that would overlap with Tyson.”

“You can’t claim to be climate friendly or net zero because beef production ineluctably uses an enormous amount of land and emits an enormous amount of methane and nitrous oxide,” he added. “You can reduce that, but you’re still not close to a climate friendly food.”

Southwest Power Pool runs a portion of the American electric grid that runs from the Canadian border to Texas and includes all or part of 17 central and western states. The organization has successfully integrated thousands of megawatts of variable wind power into its system. (Courtesy of Southwest Power Pool)

A little more than two years ago, a clean energy record was broken. For the first time, a regional transmission organization met more than 90% of its electric demand, called load, with renewable power.

But if you don’t follow the electric industry closely, you might be surprised where it happened.

On March 29, 2022, Southwest Power Pool, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the grid operator for a red-state heavy portion of the central U.S., hit a renewable penetration level of 90.2%, almost all of it from wind power.

“In a decade’s time, our region has gone from thinking of 25% renewable-penetration levels as nearly unreachable to a point where we regularly exceed 75% without reliability concerns,” said Bruce Rew, SPP’s vice president of operations, in a news release.

Growing electric demand, major coal plant closures and more wind and solar power have been seen by some policymakers, regulators and clean power critics as harbingers of a coming electric reliability crisis.

During a campaign event last year in Iowa – which got more than 64% of its electricity from wind turbines in 2022 – former President Donald Trump criticized intermittent power and mused about a couple unable to watch TV because the wind wasn’t blowing. The Project 2025 plan organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a future GOP administration said? President Joe Biden’s carbon reduction targets, as well as corporate and state clean power goals, “have thrust the United States into a new energy crisis,” including a less reliable grid.

However, in parts of the country that are home to tens of millions of people, grid operators every day are finding that a cleaner electric grid isn’t necessarily a less reliable one, though it does come with new problems to solve.

“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” said Ric O’Connell, executive director of GridLab, a nonprofit that provides technical assistance to renewable power advocates and regulators on electric grid issues.

‘Some kind of magic amount’

Nationwide, wind and solar accounted for a little more than 14% of utility-scale electric generation in 2023, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. But in Texas, California and the states that make up SPP, among other areas, the amount of renewable power on the grid at any given time is often much larger.

California has seen wind, solar and hydropower production exceeding 100% of demand in some cases for hours at a time in the area managed by the California Independent System Operator.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs most of the Texas electric grid, has also been setting new renewable penetration records.? At 2:13 p.m. on March 29, nearly 76% of the generation on the system was renewable, mostly wind and solar.

‘I think it’s really important to recognize that we get to these points in time on the grid that we get to these extremely high levels of renewables and the lights are not going out,” said Elise Caplan, vice president of regulatory affairs at the American Council on Renewable Energy, a nonprofit representing renewable developers, investors, manufacturers, utilities, corporate power buyers and other firms.

However, it’s important to note that those records being set are snapshots at certain times. As some experts have pointed out, traditional power plants still need to run even when renewables are surging to balance that variability. And, of course, the wind isn’t always blowing and the sun isn’t always shining. For perspective:? Averaged out over the year, wind was about 37% of the Southwest Power Pool’s generation mix in 2023, with natural gas and coal power plants accounting for about 54% and hydropower and nuclear making up the rest.

But the numbers do show that grid operators are successfully integrating renewable power at thresholds that were thought unworkable not so long ago.

Michael Milligan, an independent power consultant who spent more than two decades focusing on wind and solar integration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, where he was the lab’s principal researcher before retiring, said utility engineers in years past routinely assumed there were limits on how much intermittent power the grid could handle, usually a “single digit percent.”

“There was kind of a sense that once we get beyond some kind of magic amount it’s going to get too difficult,” he said. “Actual experience is really valuable.”

Fifteen years ago, “nobody thought we’d have the amount of penetration we have today,” said Howard Gugel, vice president of regulatory oversight for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which develops and enforces standards for the power system. But the growth in wind, solar and batteries – also known as inverter-based resources because they convert electricity from direct current to alternating current to send the power onto the grid – has posed new reliability concerns.

Inverter-based resources lack the heavy rotating generators at traditional power plants, which are generally synchronized to the grid frequency of 60 Hz, said Greg Brinkman, an engineer in the grid operations planning group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The natural inertia those synchronous generators provide can help them through grid disturbances without incident, whereas inverter-based resources need software and programming to do so.

Gugel said NERC has reviewed several incidents in which grid “perturbations” caused several inverter-based plants, generally solar, to trip off at the same time. “That began to give us some concerns,” he said.

Last year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission directed NERC to come up with reliability standards for inverter-based resources, which the organization is currently developing.

“We have a lot of clean energy and renewable energy resources that are being connected to the grid and this new rule is a great step to address what we see as reliability concerns regarding this transition,” FERC Chairman Willie Phillips said in October. “When appropriately programmed, IBRs can provide operational flexibility and the ability of IBRs to perform with precision, speed and control could mitigate disturbances on the bulk power system.”

Transmission as ‘a great enabler’

Rew, the senior vice president at Southwest Power Pool, which has members in 14 states and about 18 million people living in its footprint, said in an interview that production tax credits helped incentivize a surge of wind power development, which also pushed technological advances that increased the operating capabilities of the turbines, including increased “cut-out” speeds, the wind speed at which the turbine needs to shut down to avoid damage.

A major regional transmission planning and expansion process the organization embarked on in the late 2000s helped knit together what had been a collection of systems individually built for numerous individual utilities and positioned the organization to accommodate large amounts of wind generation.

“These regional projects really opened up transmission constraints and allowed us to operate as a single unit a lot better.That provided us the opportunity to really dispatch throughout the system and allowed us to get additional renewables transferring all around the system,” Rew said.

It was a forward-looking approach that is still paying dividends, he added.

“I think in a lot of ways we were visionary in recognizing what transmission could do as a great enabler,” Rew said. “It enables us not only to have greater reliability because we don’t have the transmission constraints and limitations that we did before but also greater economics and just? greater use of all the generation in the footprint.”

Of course, having large amounts of variable power also comes with challenges. SPP has about 33,000 megawatts of “nameplate” wind capacity, meaning the maximum amount those turbines can generate at optimal conditions. Even though Rew said the SPP region has some of the best wind resources in the world, it runs below that maximum output as a result of outages, differing wind speeds and other factors. That means wind and weather forecasting becomes even more critical to managing the grid. A drop in wind speeds, or an icing event, can mean losing thousands of megawatts of generation quickly. That’s a problem because supply and demand on electric grids need to be balanced in real time to avoid issues that can lead to blackouts or other calamities.

“We’re able to look out 10 days and project what the wind’s going to be, project what the load is going to be and be able to prepare our system to be able to operate with those changes,” Rew said. “There’s a lot that goes into making it successful every day.”

SPP’s electric markets also play a crucial role, since traditional power plants like gas and coal need incentives to be available when needed even though they might be running less often or at reduced output.

“That’s what we’re looking at for our market in terms of how we price the services that are necessary to maintain a reliable system and making sure that, one, we have market products that reflect what we’re using for grid operations,” Rew said. “And, two, that we have a pricing mechanism that appropriately compensates them for those services.”

The grid of the future

For the parts of the country that are lagging in renewable power, adding transmission is seen by clean energy advocates as a major piece of the puzzle.

“There is no perfect resource,” said Caplan, the vice president of regulatory affairs at the American Council on Renewable Energy. The most recent high-profile power grid crises were the result of fossil fuel power plants, mostly gas powered, failing to perform in cold weather, either because of inadequate weatherization or fuel shortages. Wind and solar are weather dependent, but the increasing surge in battery power helps smooth out those variances, storing juice when it’s needed. And transmission lines can create a grid bigger than the weather.

“We recognize that those resources are not always available but through this growth of storage and especially through the growth of transmission you can access renewables across a broader geographic area,” Caplan said.

That’s why a lot of eyes will be on a long-awaited rule from FERC expected to come next week that is intended to address thorny debates over regional transmission planning and how costs for new lines are allocated. Rew, the SPP executive, noted that with SPP’s high quality wind resources, developers outside the footprint might have to build twice as many turbines to get the same power output. Does it make sense to do that to meet, for example, a state renewable energy goal? Or is it better to build where the wind is stronger and use long transmission lines to get the power to where it’s needed?

“It doesn’t make sense for our ratepayers to pay for that in SPP, to export wind out for somebody else to get the benefit,” he said “So how do we do that from a national perspective?”

Groups like ACORE want a national planning rule that recognizes that? “an expansion of the nation’s grid is necessary to reliably and affordably accommodate new generation and improve reliability in the face of increasing severe weather events and wildfires.” They want broader accounting of the full benefits of transmission, “a mechanism to determine a cost allocation method when the states are unable to agree”? and other pro-renewable provisions. However, conservatives, including FERC Commissioner Mark Christie, a former Virginia utility regulator, have chafed at what they characterize as an attempt to force others to pay for the policy decisions of states that are pushing renewable power.

“It would be grossly unfair for FERC to force consumers in other states to pay for projects implementing the policies of politicians they never got the chance to vote for, when their own states’ policy-makers have not agreed to pay for those projects,” Christie wrote in response to a letter from four New York congressmen. “Such an imposition is contrary to American principles of democracy, a core principle of which is that the people have the right to elect the policy-makers who impose costs on them, so the people can hold them accountable.”

The Kentucky Senate, Feb. 27, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Arden Barnes)

FRANKFORT — A bill that open government advocates warn would introduce loopholes into Kentucky’s open records law could make its way to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s desk when lawmakers return to Frankfort later this week.?

The final two days of the 60-day regular session — Friday and Monday — are set aside to consider gubernatorial vetoes of bills that both chambers have passed. The Republican supermajority can easily reach the simple majority of votes needed to override ?vetoes.

Legislation that has yet to make it through both chambers also could come up in the final two days, including a bill to end the certificate of need requirement for freestanding birth centers and a maternal health bill that ran aground in the Senate after a late amendment was added in committee.

The Senate is expected to consider confirming Robbie Fletcher as the state education commissioner, along with appointments to other positions. Thanks to a law enacted last year, it will be the first time the education commissioner has required Senate confirmation.

Any bill that lawmakers pass would be subject to a successful veto by Beshear because the legislature would have no chance to override it.

‘Bad actors’

Beshear has voiced support for the controversial changes to the open records law proposed in House Bill 509. During his weekly news conference last week he said he needs to see the bill’s final form before deciding what action to take on the bill. “We’ll review it when it gets to me.”

The House passed the bill, but the Senate did not give it a floor vote ahead of the veto period. The Senate could give final passage to the bill when both chambers reconvene Friday and Monday.

HB 509 would require state and local government agencies to provide email accounts to public officials on which to conduct official business. However, the bill doesn’t address what happens to public records created on private devices.?

Beshear told reporters he thinks the bill would be more effective than current law in deterring officials from conducting public business on their personal devices or email accounts. He traced the controversy to the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR), which has waged a so far unsuccessful court fight to block release of commissioners’ text messages. The challenge is now before the state Supreme Court.

“Fish and Wildlife hadn’t issued state email addresses to their commissioners and they insisted on texting each other on their own devices,” Beshear said. “That’s wrong. So, right now, what the law says is if you do that, that is an open record. But all we can do in terms of enforcement is ask that person ‘would you please look through your phone and take snapshots of anything that we’re asking for and send them to us now?’ Do you think a bad actor who’s trying to get around the open records request is going to do that and send them to you?”

HB 509 would destroy Kentucky’s long tradition of openness. And Beshear knows it.

Beshear said HB 509’s mandate that official business be conducted on government email accounts could aid transparency by making government agencies responsible for the records. “What it does is take whether you get a record away from a potential bad actor and put it with the agency that can secure those records.”

Agencies could discipline employees who violate HB 509’s mandates — by using a personal cell phone or email account for official communications, for example — but it’s unclear if and how those records could be publicly disclosed. The bill includes no penalties for violations by elected officials. The bill also does not require agencies to search for public records on personal devices.?

When asked if he thought Beshear would veto the bill, Republican Senate President Robert Stivers told reporters as the veto period began: “You’d have to ask the governor on that. I do not know. I don’t know what he would do.”?

The open records challenge against the KDFWR was spurred by a former member of the KDFWR’s governing board requesting text messages among Fish and Wildlife officials and lawmakers. The governor and Republican legislature have also clashed over the Kentucky Senate not confirming gubernatorial appointments to the KDFWR’s governing board. Five appointments are? awaiting confirmation this session.?

Here’s a look at where some other high-profile legislation stands:?

Momnibus?

After picking up some controversial baggage in the last leg of the legislative session, the maternal health bill called “Momnibus” failed to get final passage.?

The bill would incentivize Kentuckians to get prenatal care by adding pregnancy to the list of qualifying life events for health insurance coverage, among other things. It had bipartisan support.

But a late amendment borrowed language from a bill filed by an anti-abortion lawmaker that requires hospitals and midwives to refer patients who have nonviable pregnancies or whose fetuses have been diagnosed with fatal conditions to perinatal palliative care services. Abortion rights advocates say the requirement could become coercive.

The bill awaits Senate passage and Beshear’s action.?

Meanwhile, Democrats in the Senate have filed amendments

Democrats in the Senate have filed amendments to loosen the state’s near-total ban on abortion by adding exceptions for rape, incest and lethal fetal anomalies ?and changing the word “baby” to “fetus.”?

It could still pass in the final two days but would have to be a version that meets Beshear’s approval because lawmakers would be unable to override a veto.??

Freestanding birth centers?

A bill to remove the certificate of need requirement for freestanding birth centers that meet a set of criteria was approved by the House. It has had two readings in the Senate but still needs to pass a Senate committee.?

A Senate Resolution to reestablish a task force to study certificate of need in Kentucky has also not passed.?

Crime bill awaits action by Beshear

A sweeping crime bill backed by Jefferson County House Republicans has been awaiting action by the governor for about a week. House Bill 5 has been hotly debated, with House Democrats futilely arguing on the last day before the veto period against the measure.??

The bill includes new or increased criminal penalties, bans street camping and imposes a three strikes rule on violent offenders. It requires prisoners convicted of violent offenses to serve 85% of their sentences instead of the current 20% before becoming eligible for parole, and classifies more crimes as violent.

HB 5 has gained opposition from across the political spectrum, as both progressive and conservative groups have argued that a more in-depth fiscal analysis is needed before implementing the legislation. However, the Kentucky Fraternal Order of Police and some families of deceased crime victims have expressed support for the bill.?

Beshear told reporters Thursday that he was still reviewing the bill and was supportive of parts of it but concerned about other sections. He added that he supported the carjacking provision but had reservations about provisions that could criminalize homelessness by creating the crime of illegal street camping.?

He said a part of the bill that would “allow for the destruction of a weapon used in a murder” is close to him a year after the Old National Bank shooting in Louisville. The bill would allow someone to purchase such a weapon at auction and ask Kentucky State Police to destroy it. The funds are used for local government and law enforcement grants.?

Local officials highlighted the issue of the auctions after the shooting last year. One of the victims, Tommy Elliot, was a close friend of Beshear’s.?

“Thankfully, the ATF seized that weapon, and it was destroyed,” Beshear said of the weapon used in the bank shooting. “Otherwise, I was going to have to watch a weapon that murdered my friend be auctioned to the highest bidder.”?

Beshear also added that he wished legislation like this would be broken up into separate bills. He can only issue line-item vetoes on budget bills.?

Changes to horse racing and gambling oversight

Beshear can also take action on another bill that was passed by the General Assembly just before the veto period began that would dissolve the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission and Department of Charitable Gaming.?

Senate Bill 299 would form a new government corporation to oversee the duties of the commission and department. Both of those are currently under the Public Protection Cabinet. The House and Senate have both given approval on the measure.

The bill has been backed by the legislature’s Republican leadership. In a joint meeting of the Senate and House economic development committees, Senate Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer and House Speaker David Osborne presented the bill.?

Beshear told reporters that it does not impact gubernatorial appointment powers but would create an independent corporation that could “take regulatory action and punish different groups,” such as trainers. That raises a question about the constitutionality of the bill, he said, as an executive branch officer will not be over the corporation.

“So, how are you independent but have full regulatory and enforcement authority? I think that’s the thing to work through there,” Beshear said. “We’ve never seen it before. We don’t know of another group that acts that way, so a little complex legally.”?

New hurdles for fossil fuel-fired power plant retirements

Beshear has yet to act on Senate Bill 349, a Senate president-backed bill that would add new bureaucratic hurdles to slow the retirement of fossil fuel-fired power plants. Before utilities could retire a fossil fuel-fired plant, they would have to notify a newly created board, whose membership would be dominated by fossil fuel industries.

Investor-owned utilities and environmental advocacy groups have decried the bill, saying it could keep aging, uneconomical coal-fired power plants on the grid and burden ratepayers with the costs of their maintenance. Advocates for the bill, including coal industry interests, have argued SB 349 is needed to ensure the reliability of the state’s energy grid, an assertion rebuffed by the leader of Kentucky’s largest utility.

Beshear last month criticized the bill, saying it was going to “take authority” from the state’s utility regulator, the Kentucky Public Service Commission, which makes decisions on power plant retirement requests. He said he’s been in the “same place” as some of the people who have pushed for SB 349, but that the proposed board is “not the way” to address the issue.

Limiting power of Louisville’s air pollution regulator

Beshear on Monday vetoed House Bill 136, sponsored by Rep. Jared Bauman, R-Louisville. The bill would prevent the Louisville Air Pollution Control District from issuing fines against industries that self-disclose violations of federal pollution regulations. Critics, including the environmental law group Kentucky Resources Council, say it could give industry in Jefferson County a “free pass” from penalties when a self-disclosure of a violation happens by ending the air pollution regulator’s ability to issue penalties in such cases.

Bauman and other Republicans have argued HB 136 is needed to align air pollution regulations in Jefferson County with the rest of the state. Most Democrats have opposed the bill, worried the bill could create less accountability over air pollution in Jefferson County.?

Criminalizing documentation of meatpacking plants, ag operations without consent?

Senate Bill 16, sponsored by Sen. John Schickel, R-Union and backed by Tyson Foods and Kentucky’s poultry industry, would criminalize using recording equipment or drones at concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and commercial food processing and manufacturing plants without the permission of the operation’s owner or manager. It would also criminalize distributing the footage.

Group alleges ‘hidden-camera’ video reveals ‘cruelty’ in chicken production in Kentucky?

Critics, including animal welfare groups, have said the bill is a so-called “ag gag” bill meant to hide from the public and prevent whistleblowers from exposing the conduct and practices of large-scale, corporate agricultural operations. An animal protection advocacy group released a video from a “hidden-camera” investigation of alleged “cruelty” within Kentucky poultry production, an investigation the group argues would be criminalized under SB 16.?

Schickel and other SB 16 supporters have said the bill is needed to prevent harassment of employees and agricultural operations that provide jobs to Kentucky communities. The bill passed through the legislature largely on party lines.?

Bills that are in the legislative graveyard or near

Anti-DEI bills: Republican efforts to limit or end diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public universities and colleges died when the Senate declined to consider changes made in its bill by the House. Any effort to revive anti-DEI legislation would almost certain be vetoed by Beshear.

Drag bill: After several edits to soften the legislation, a bill to place restrictions on adult-oriented businesses with “sexually explicit” performances sputtered on the House side despite passing a committee.??

Vaccine bill: A bill to bar employers and educational institutions from requiring the COVID-19 vaccination for treatment, employment or school, passed in the Senate but failed to advance on the House side.?

Though it could still pass in the final days of the session, Beshear, an outspoken supporter of the vaccines, would likely veto it.?

Abortion bills: None of the bills seeking to loosen Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban were assigned committees, making them effectively dead on arrival.?Those include:?

• A Republican bill to add rape and incest exceptions and clarify doctors can treat ectopic pregnancies?
• A Democratic bill to add rape and incest exceptions.?
• A Democratic bill to roll back all abortion restrictions.?

Loosening state child labor law: A bill that would allow some teenagers to work longer and later hours, voted down and then revived by a Senate committee, still needs final passage through the Senate to get to Beshear’s desk.?

Lawmakers wouldn’t have the chance to override a veto of House Bill 255 from Beshear, who in past comments panned the legislation saying child labor protections are there “for a reason.”?

Education and Labor Cabinet officials have said HB 255 also deletes language in state law that mirrors federal prohibitions on employing 14- and 15-year olds in hazardous occupations, such as jobs involving railroad cars and conveyors, loading and unloading goods from motor vehicles and requiring the use of ladders. State labor officials said they wouldn’t be able to enforce those hazardous occupation standards even if still federally prohibited.?

Bill sponsor Rep. Phillip Pratt, R-Georgetown, who owns a lawn and landscaping company, said his legislation would help minors “gain valuable experience in the workplace.”

Weakening a mine safety protection: House Bill 85, sponsored by Rep. Bill Wesley, R-Ravenna, would weaken a key workplace protection for coal miners, according to a long-time coal miner safety advocate. Wesley has argued HB 85 is needed to help smaller coal mines continue operating.?The bill would need approval from the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee and three required readings before being sent to the governor, who could veto it without the legislature overriding it.?

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegeig said the rule would provide a “clear and consistent framework to track carbon pollution” and provide states “flexibility to set their own climate targets.”?(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

A federal judge has sided with Kentucky’s Republican attorney general in ruling that the Biden administration overstepped by requiring states to set goals for reducing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from vehicle tailpipes and other sources on federal highways.?

U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton, of Kentucky’s Western District, in a Monday order said the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) lacked legal authority to issue the “arbitrary and capricious” rule. Reuters reported the judge stopped short of enjoining the regulation’s enforcement or vacating it, noting a federal judge in Texas had already struck it down nationwide before Beaton could finish considering the case.

Beaton was appointed by then-President Donald Trump in 2020.

The FHWA’s rule would require state transportation departments to establish two-year and four-year emissions reduction targets beginning in 2024. The rule granted states “flexibility” to set goals that “are appropriate for their communities and that work for their respective climate change and other policy priorities.”?

At the time the rule was finalized, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegeig said? in a statement that it would provide a “clear and consistent framework to track carbon pollution” and provide states “flexibility to set their own climate targets.”?

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, transportation contributed 29% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2021, fueling the increasing effects of human-driven climate change.?

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman along with 20 other Republican attorneys general sued the Biden administration to stop the rule from going into effect.?

Coleman in a statement said Biden’s “radical environmental agenda” is costing “Kentucky families, farmers and workers.”?

?“Like all Americans, Kentuckians love our trucks, cars and vans. With this victory in court, we’re slamming the brakes on the Biden Administration’s politics that make no sense in the Commonwealth,” Coleman said.?

A FHWA spokesperson said in an email the agency was reviewing the court decision and remained committed to the administration’s goal of “cutting carbon pollution in half by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.”?

Lawmakers questioned a Kentucky Transportation Cabinet official about the FHWA rule and the lawsuit during a February legislative committee meeting.

Mike Hancock, deputy secretary for the cabinet, told lawmakers the cabinet had a “great relationship” with the FHWA and that the cabinet was “in the habit of meeting federal requirements” to not endanger hundreds of millions of dollars in federal transportation funding given to the state.?

Residences stand in front of a Venture Global LNG storage tank in Cameron, Louisiana. (Getty Images)

Members of a U.S. House panel on climate and energy issues split along party lines Tuesday about the Biden administration’s recent move to pause new approvals of liquified natural gas exports.

Republicans called a hearing to challenge the Energy Department’s announcement last month that it would indefinitely bar new LNG permits to non-free-trade partners as it studies the impacts, including on climate change, of LNG use.

Republicans on the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, Climate and Grid Security blasted the move Tuesday, saying it undercut the economic and environmental benefits of natural gas and hurt the United States on the world stage.

Democrats countered that it was an appropriate time to review an industry that has tripled its export capacity in five years.

‘A handout to adversaries’

As global demand for LNG grows, the move from President Joe Biden’s administration would slow U.S. exports and allow the market to be filled with energy products from hostile nations like Russia and Iran, subcommittee Chair Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina Republican, said.

“The Biden administration’s energy policy has been a handout to our adversaries,” he said.

Full Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington Republican, said the industry employed hundreds of thousands and was responsible for billions of dollars in economic activity.

“President Biden’s LNG export ban will end these benefits for local economies, kill American jobs and increase energy prices,” she said.

Toby Z. Rice, the president and CEO of natural gas producer EQT Corp., told the panel he viewed the move as a ban, not a short-term pause. The policy would slow the industry, he said.

“I think this is a signal that will chill investments,” he said.

Eric Cormier, a senior vice president at the business coalition Southwest Louisiana Chamber Economic Development Alliance, said a slowdown in the industry would harm other businesses, especially in the leading region for LNG exports.

“When the administration announced its decision, my cell phone rang quite a bit,” he said. “Small business owners were panicking.”

Cormier said his group “adamantly disagrees” with the pause.

LNG advocates also say the product is cleaner than coal and other fossil fuels it can replace.

And U.S. natural gas is 40% cleaner than what Russia produces, Rodgers said.

Time to ‘take a hard look’

Democrats argued it was prudent to study the climate impacts of LNG and described the pause as a relatively modest step that would provide a better analysis of the tradeoffs of natural gas production.

The Energy Department’s analysis for LNG authorizations was last updated in 2018, when the U.S. industry exported one-third of natural gas it has capacity for today, subcommittee ranking Democrat Diana DeGette of Colorado said.

The pause does not affect projects already constructed or projects that have gained Energy Department approval. It wouldn’t change a projection that LNG production would again double in the next 10 years, DeGette said.

“The fact that our nation’s production has ramped up so quickly must be considered, especially since the U.S. currently has enough approved capacity to fulfill the world’s energy needs in the short and medium terms,” she said. “Continuously increasing LNG exports without updating guidelines to account for new information is a fundamentally unserious proposal.”

The pause would allow the department to gain a wider view of all the potential benefits and drawbacks of new proposals and better assess what projects “are actually in the public interest,” DeGette said.

“Looking out to the future, as the estimates are that the exports could double, it is an appropriate time for the administration to take a hard look on what the impacts are going to be,” Florida Democrat Kathy Castor said.

Gillian Giannetti, a senior attorney with the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, called the pause “a moderate but important” step. She said it was consistent with the requirement in federal law that new natural gas export approvals are only permitted if they are found to be in the public interest.

Russia debate

Duncan and Rodgers said the pause would help Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country is a leading producer of natural gas.

If the U.S. share of global supply declines, Russian natural gas could fill the gap, they said.

Even if Russia’s market share doesn’t grow, the global price impact of reduced U.S. supply could make Russian exports more valuable, allowing Putin to pump more money into a war effort against Ukraine, Kentucky Republican Brett Guthrie said.

Brigham McCown, the director of the Initiative on American Security at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, agreed with that premise.

“The world is going to get its LNG from somewhere,” McCown said. “And if not from us, it’s going to be from other, less stable, less reliable partners like Russia.”

But Democrats questioned Republicans’ commitment to taking Ukraine’s side in its war with Russia.

Most of the Republicans on the panel opposed a Ukraine aid package when it came up for a vote, the full committee ranking Democrat, Frank Pallone of New Jersey, said.

DeGette noted Republicans were set to vote Tuesday afternoon on an aid package that did not include funding for Ukraine.

Energy state Democrats more skeptical

While leading Energy and Commerce Democrats praised the pause Tuesday, it has not won universal acclaim from all members of the party.

Pennsylvania’s U.S. Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman, both Democrats, declared in a statement last week that Pennsylvania was “an energy state” and said they were concerned about the effects of the pause.

“While the immediate impacts on Pennsylvania remain to be seen, we have concerns about the long-term impacts that this pause will have on the thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry,” they said. “If this decision puts Pennsylvania energy jobs at risk, we will push the Biden Administration to reverse this decision.”

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III, a longtime supporter of fossil fuels who is reportedly considering a third-party presidential campaign on a centrist platform, strongly criticized the measure and scheduled a hearing later this week to examine the issue.

Wanting more reliable access to backup fuel, utilities in the U.S. are planning to add liquified natural gas storage tanks at their existing plants. Such storage is already being done in the UK and Germany. Here are storage tanks at the Dragon Liquefied Natural Gas plant in Wales. (Photo by Polly Thomas/Getty Images)

As the U.S. electric power system has become more reliant on natural gas plants, it’s also become more vulnerable to gas system failures.

During Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, about 18% of the anticipated power supply in the portion of the grid that serves the entire eastern half of the United States, called the Eastern Interconnection, was offline. Of the power plants that failed to perform, 47% were natural-gas fired, according to a joint inquiry by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

Natural gas fuel problems accounted for 20% of all generation outages, the report noted.

However, in an era when building new gas pipelines, along with other infrastructure, has proven increasingly fraught, some utilities see a solution to gas shortages: adding liquified natural gas storage onsite.

Virginia utility giant Dominion Energy is proposing to add liquefied natural gas storage to serve two large power plants it operates near Emporia in southern Virginia. And in South Dakota, Otter Tail Power Company is planning to add gas storage at its Astoria combustion turbine plant in Deuel County. A spokesman for Duke Energy, a large North Carolina-based utility company which was forced to cut power to customers during Elliott last year, said it is “exploring all on-site storage options, including LNG and other alternative fuel storage technologies for future use.” A 2021 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that storing gas onsite could also yield benefits for electric customers in New England, where gas supply is tight.

Some pro-renewable energy analysts, though, are wary about the costs and impacts of adding new gas infrastructure at a time when cutting emissions to mitigate climate change is becoming ever more pressing. There are also safety and environmental concerns.?

?‘Ensuring access to fuel’?

Having backup fuel on site is common at many natural gas power plants, though the go-to option is typically a distillate fuel oil (like diesel), said Michael Caravaggio, director of research and development at the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent nonprofit research organization. The main advantage is ease of storage and management over a long period of time, whereas liquefied natural gas needs to be kept at extremely low temperatures, (about -260 degrees Fahrenheit). That means that adding LNG storage involves either liquefying pipeline gas onsite or transporting LNG in for storage in specialized tanks.

“That’s a lot of infrastructure for backup fuel,” Caravaggio said. “The vast majority of the U.S. would likely pencil out with diesel and distillate oil as the onsite backup and that’s what we see currently.”

But Bill Swanson, manager of supply operations and planning for Otter Tail Power Company, which has about 133,000 customers in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, said adding LNG at the company’s 245-megawatt Astoria plant made the most economic sense. Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which sent gas production plummeting, and Elliott last year prompted the company to pursue LNG backup fuel.

“During Winter Storm Elliott we had a situation where we couldn’t get gas out of the pipeline,” he said.

The company explored fuel oil but found it would require modifications to the gas turbine. Burning the oil, he added, also reduces the output of the plant more than 10% and increases emissions.

“On an evaluated cost basis, LNG was lower cost,” Swanson said, though when asked he said the total cost of the gas storage project is not public. If Otter Tail had to liquefy the gas onsite instead of trucking it in from a nearby facility, “economics might flow back to fuel oil,” he added.

Jeremy Slayton, a spokesman for Richmond-headquartered Dominion Energy, said Elliott, Uri, and the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack in 2021 all underscored the need for backup fuel.

The company is proposing to add a 25 million gallon LNG storage facility that will enable its two large combined cycle plants at Brunswick and Greensville to run at full bore for up to four days each. Those plants alone generate enough electricity to power 700,000 of its 2.6 million Virginia customers’ homes.

A cost estimate for the project was not available, Slayton said.

“We are in the process of finalizing the project design, specifications and cost estimates,” he said.

Whether other electric ratepayers elsewhere across the country will be asked to pick up the tab for natural gas storage is unclear. Scott Fiedler, a spokesman for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is the largest public power company in the U.S. and operates 17 natural gas power plant sites across its footprint, is not considering adding onsite liquefied natural gas storage at current or future plants. Fiedler cited cost, supply chain issues, regulatory and permitting challenges and safety as considerations.

Since 2011, LNG plant operators have reported 39 incidents to the U.S. Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, an agency spokesperson told States Newsroom. Eight of those “indicate the released commodity ignited,” the spokesperson said. A 2022 fire and explosion at the Freeport LNG import and export facility on Quintana Island, Texas, was attributed to testing and operating procedure failures, human error and fatigue, Reuters reported. In North Carolina, where Dominion is building another large LNG storage facility designed to serve gas customers, the facility is expected to emit 65,579 tons of greenhouse gasses a year, among other pollutants. Similar storage projects intended to serve gas customers have been built or are being developed in New Mexico and Wisconsin.

Sarah Durdaller, a spokeswoman for the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for investor-owned utilities, said the organization does not track individual projects but added that gas storage is valuable.

“Natural gas is a partner to reliability and clean energy. It’s helping accelerate the clean energy transition by allowing our member companies to integrate more renewables into the energy grid while ensuring resilience and reliability,” she said. “Storage, both onsite at power plants and regional hubs, along with other redundancies ensure natural gas is available when customers and the energy grid need it most.”

Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, which represents competitive power producers, said their membership is “constantly evaluating the options available to ensure reliable operation of their assets, including ensuring access to fuel.”

‘Not the answer’?

Yet, at a time when urgent action is needed to mitigate the effects of climate change, investing more money in natural gas infrastructure doesn’t make sense, said Mark Specht and Paul Arbaje, energy analysts at the Union of Concerned Scientists who authored a report released Jan. 9 on the failures of gas power plants during five severe winter storms over the past 13 years.

“More gas infrastructure is not the answer. Utilities should be instead focused on diversifying and reducing their reliance on gas,” Arbaje said in an interview with States Newsroom, noting that the U.S. Energy Information Administration is predicting that battery storage installations will nearly double in 2024.

Specht noted that about 70% of gas plant failures in the storms they studied were caused by freezing equipment and other problems unrelated to fuel availability.

“That picture would not change if you have onsite gas storage,” he said. “One of the conclusions from our report is they really should have someone regulating the reliability of the gas system. That might be a more sensible solution.”

Kimberly Sapp-Allen's home is one of 376 flood-damaged properties purchased by local government in Kentucky through FEMA's buyout program. (Kentucky Emergency Management)

When floodwaters rushed through the town of McRoberts in July 2022, Kimberly Sapp-Allen and her husband packed what they could in their vehicles, left their home that sat along the rising creek and headed for higher ground.

The floods scoured several counties across Eastern Kentucky, including Letcher County — where Sapp-Allen lives. In the end, 45 people died and thousands of homes were destroyed.

“It was the darkest dark I have ever seen in my life,” Sapp-Allen, 59, said. As they waited out the storm, flashes of lightning revealed their cars were surrounded by black water and floating debris.

They returned the next day to a home severely damaged by floodwater, but still standing.

And that’s where they’ve lived since — despite the mold and the constant worry with every rain that the nearby creek would flood again.

But this month she sold the place to the Letcher County government through FEMA’s property acquisition program. This will get Sapp-Allen out of her damaged house and, hopefully, into a new home out of the floodplain.

The federal buyout program is one part of FEMA’s hazard mitigation strategy. The idea: get people and homes out of the floodplain so there will be less risk and costs associated with future disasters. FEMA provides most of the funding for local governments to purchase homes at fair market value. The properties are then demolished and county governments are prohibited from building anything on the land that could flood again.

A previous Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting analysis of FEMA’s hazard mitigation grants found the resources have been distributed unevenly throughout the state. Communities most at risk and struggling to overcome recent disasters have received fewer hazard mitigation dollars than other, more affluent areas.

The housing buyout program suffers from many of the same barriers. Usually, the program is slow and cumbersome, which prevents many rural, under-resourced communities from getting funds and frustrates survivors who can’t afford to wait years before moving on with their lives.

“It will allow us to turn our life around. It’s been such a blessing.”

– Kimberly Sapp-Allen

But in Kentucky, state officials and FEMA implemented a new, expedited buyout process after the Eastern Kentucky floods — and the changes seem to be working.

Sapp-Allen’s is one of 376 properties in Eastern Kentucky purchased through FEMA’s buyout program, a total cost of $63.8 million, according to Kentucky Emergency Management spokesperson Jessica Elbouab. She said the Eastern Kentucky buyouts have been “the fastest in the program’s history.”

The buyout process that once took years to complete ended up taking just months, Elbouab said. Officials closed the deal on the first 13 properties in Perry County — next to Letcher County — just 93 days after the flood.

Kentucky has also taken advantage of other buyout programs like one administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Letcher County is seeking final approval for 118 buyouts through the NRCS, separate from the FEMA program.

Sapp-Allen said she’s been pleasantly surprised by the speed and relative painlessness of the buyout process. She thanks government officials who took action to help people, like her, who were in need.

“It will allow us to turn our life around,” Sapp-Allen said. “It’s been such a blessing.”

FEMA’s buyout program

A September 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office found FEMA’s property acquisition program can be hugely beneficial. It removes flood risks, lowers the cost of disasters and reduces strain on the federal flood insurance program, the GAO analysts concluded.

But the GAO also found the process took three to five years to complete — too long. That deterred many eligible people from applying, or caused others to back out.

The analysts also found that local governments struggle to keep up with the administrative and financial burden that comes with the program.

As a result, resources for disaster management have been distributed unevenly across the country, says Jim Elliott, a professor of sociology at Rice University who studies social inequality and the environment.

“You can imagine some cities and areas have quite a few resources. So they’re able to have the personnel who have the technical expertise to be able to submit these applications upstream to FEMA and then receive the funds,” Elliott said. “In other areas, not so much.”

Normally, county governments are responsible for packaging applications and completing the complex cost-benefit analysis required to unlock FEMA funding. But after the floods in Eastern Kentucky, FEMA officials allowed Kentucky Emergency Management teams to do most of the paperwork, said Scott Alexander, the Perry County judge executive. This, he said, cut out a middleman and allowed under-resourced counties, like his, to apply.

And he’s to credit, in part, for the change.

Shortly after the flooding, Alexander said he asked FEMA officials to help Eastern Kentucky make the most of the buyouts. After that conversation, FEMA made the changes to the program that Alexander said have helped make it a viable option for people in Perry County.

Oftentimes, FEMA’s disaster assistance grants fail to cover the cost of repairing or buying a new home, Alexander said. So for many people in Eastern Kentucky, the buyout program is the best option to get their lives back on track.

“It’s the only thing that actually gives you back at least the worth of the property,” Alexander said. “It allows people to actually move on, otherwise they are just staying in their situation and fighting and scratching to get out of it.”

Where to go next

The first question most people will face if they are considering fleeing a floodplain, Elliott said, is where to go next.

Elliott’s research tracked the outcomes of nearly 10,000 property buyouts across the country. He found that people are more likely to take a buyout if they have a clear place to go that is close to their former home and maintains or improves their current lifestyle and community ties.

But in areas like Eastern Kentucky, affordable housing was already in short supply before the floods.

A report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition determined that 8,950 homes were damaged in the flood. This, coupled with the report’s finding that an average of 600 people have left eastern Kentucky each year since 1984, make displacement and population loss a real concern.

That’s why Elliott says disaster planning needs to coordinate relocation programs like FEMA’s housing buyout program with other planning efforts such as building affordable, resilient housing.

Kentucky has announced plans to build seven new “high ground” communities using money from the Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund to help meet the region’s housing needs, but more housing is a top priority for local and state officials.

Sapp-Allen has 45 days to leave the home she recently sold to the county through the buyout program. She’s not sure where she’ll go next, but knows it has to be close to Letcher County.

Her husband needs to stay local to make regular dialysis appointments while he waits for a kidney transplant. Sapp-Allen plans to stay in Eastern Kentucky until that transplant comes. Then, she said she can retire and the two of them can move down to Tennessee where she has a pair of rental properties that she let her sister and family friend use after their homes were destroyed in the floods.

It’s something to look forward to, but still, the idea of giving up the home she’s lived in for over 15 years was difficult.

”You know, it’s like, you work and you work and you work, and it’s the American dream. You obey the law and you vote and you’re good to your neighbors,” Sapp-Allen said. “And then you’re almost 60 years old, and here you have to start all over.”

This story is republished from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and Louisville Public Media.?

An electric car charging station. (Getty Images)

Republicans on a U.S. House panel argued Wednesday against aggressive moves to meet carbon reduction goals, saying U.S. fossil fuel companies are working to make their products cleaner.

Democrats on the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Environment, Manufacturing and Critical Minerals countered that to achieve further reductions, federal policies should be continued to encourage the development of renewable energy and consumer products such as electric vehicles.

Coming the day before the 28th annual United Nations climate conference was set to begin, members of the panel battled over the U.S. role in curbing emissions. The conference is often a venue for world leaders to discuss global solutions to climate change. President Joe Biden is not scheduled to attend this year’s conference.

Republicans argued that the United States was not as problematic for emissions as countries like China and should be allowed to continue developing cleaner uses of oil and gas, downplaying the need to transition away from those fuels.

U.S. fossil fuel companies have produced more energy in recent years while cutting emissions, several Republicans on the panel said.

Subcommittee Chairman Bill Johnson, an Ohio Republican, criticized Biden and congressional Democrats for demanding “a radical reordering of American society and a reduced standard of living” to meet climate goals.

“Becoming more prosperous and secure as a nation is possible while also decreasing emissions,” Johnson said. “We’ve proven it. We’ve done it. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

But Democrats said that progress on environmental goals, including air pollution, was achieved because of federal policies.

Subcommittee ranking Democrat Paul Tonko of New York said U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations and other federal policies drove major reductions in automotive emissions, and particulate matter, ozone and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Innovation is often not possible without a mix of carrots and sticks,” he said. “There are countless examples of EPA rules playing a driving factor in emissions reductions.”

Standards and goals

Karl Hausker, a senior fellow with the World Resources Institute, an international environmental nonprofit, said the government’s role in developing a regulatory framework for industry was helpful in pushing the private sector to meet high standards.

“When we collectively decide to attack an environmental problem and reduce it, we set standards, we set performance goals and then the incredible scientific and engineering talent of the United States comes into play,” Hausker said.

Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat who is the ranking member of the full committee, said Republicans promoted a “polluters-over-people agenda,” and sought to undermine climate programs in recent infrastructure and climate laws and by opposing regulations.

Democrats also rejected the idea that fossil-fuel primacy was responsible for a growing economy. Federal spending and tax breaks to encourage renewable energy production, as envisioned in Democrats’ climate and policy law last year, would have several positive impacts on the economy, Pallone said.

“These policies are already creating new jobs, cutting costs for working families and advancing homegrown clean energy — all while tackling the climate crisis,” he said.

Ceding to China

Members of each party disagreed about how best to counter Chinese influence on energy production.

Republicans argued that transitioning to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar would benefit China, which produces many of the parts needed for renewable energy products.

“This forced transition will leave our economy dangerously dependent upon supply chains from China and make energy less affordable, less reliable for Americans,” committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington Republican, said.

China has poor environmental and labor standards and “does not share our concerns about climate change risks, nor our value of environmental stewardship,” Rodgers said.

“Moving to 100%, wind, solar and battery-powered energy, as some have proposed will cede our energy future to China, and could have perverse effects on increasing emissions,” she added. “We should instead be working to build on our remarkable legacy.”

China emits more greenhouse gases than the rest of the developed world, and its emissions increased this year, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican, said. She criticized Biden administration policies that she said would promote Chinese industry.

“It’s problematic that the Biden administration is continually turning to the Chinese Communist Party to produce energy components,” she said.

Democrats countered that the world would be well served by a U.S. leadership role on climate.

“We need to demonstrate our nation’s commitment to standing with our allies in the fight against climate change,” Pallone said. “We’re out of time for denialism and obstruction. The science on climate change is indisputable.”

The agreement the U.S. and China reached this year on reduction targets for greenhouse gases was the first time China committed to reducing its emissions, Pallone added.

Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, said the U.S. was in danger of falling behind developing economies, such as China’s, if it cedes leadership in industries like electric vehicle and clean energy manufacturing.

“If we sit back and do nothing, what is the danger of letting countries like China lead?” asked Dingell, adding she would “never let them.”

Flash flooding inundated much of Southeastern Kentucky in July 2022, including Breathitt County, above. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

A new index measuring 184 categories of public data across more than 70,000 census tracts in the country shows Kentucky communities, particularly Eastern Kentucky, among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.?

The U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index, created in collaboration by researchers at Texas A&M University and the nonprofit advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund, aims to show which communities have existing challenges with health outcomes, environmental pollution and infrastructure coupled with the risks communites face from climate change impacts such as increased flooding, heatwaves and more.?

Environmental Defense Fund Senior Health Scientist Grace Tee Lewis in a statement said with the recent “historic” influx of federal funding to state and local governments, the “right investments need to flow to the right places for the biggest impact.”?

“The CVI equips and enables communities, policymakers and organizations to proactively address vulnerabilities and enhance resilience in the face of a changing climate,” Lewis said.?

According to the index, Whitley, Knox and Floyd counties in Eastern Kentucky are among the top ten counties most vulnerable to climate change impacts. Large swaths of Eastern Kentucky and some parts of Central and West Kentucky making up 28 counties are in the top 10% of vulnerability.?

Specific addresses can be searched to see the vulnerabilities of communities to climate change across the state, narrowed down to specific census tracts.?

Among the strongest drivers of vulnerability in Kentucky include:

• Chronic disease, defined as the number of adults diagnosed with long-term health conditions.
• Disaster-related deaths, defined as how “climate disasters” could increase deaths in a community.
• House Composition and Disability, defined as the quality and accessibility of housing in a community.

In past years, another data analysis by the nonprofit First Street Foundation showed much of Kentucky susceptible to increased flooding risk due to climate change impacts, particularly in lower-income communities.

Nancy Herald, whose home was damaged in both the March 2021 and July 2022 flood, poses for a photo in her place of work, Gorgeous Grooms, in Jackson, Kentucky on December 19, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

More than a year after four feet of water flooded her house, Nancy Herald still doesn’t know when – or if – she’ll return to the home that’s been in her family for nearly five decades.?

Driving past the homeplace, even, is too painful. Sometimes she goes inside; sometimes she just passes quietly.

And sometimes, she said, she cries.?

Herald was one of many in Eastern Kentucky who had to evacuate when heavy rain and flash flooding hit Appalachian communities.?

The water destroyed homes, displaced thousands of Kentuckians and killed at least 44 people. From July 26-30, 2022, up to 16 inches of rain fell, flooding creeks and rivers, according to the National Weather Service.??

Breathitt County, where Herald lives, was among the worst-hit areas. Many who suffered damage in 2022 were also victims of the February 2021 floods, meaning many had to rebuild their entire lives twice.?

Doing it a third time is unthinkable.?

“I still am not comfortable with … going back just because I’m afraid it’ll flood again,” Herald said of her homeplace. “And … I just don’t want to have to go through that again.”?

Herald isn’t alone in that worry.?

Dana Fugate, who lives in Jackson and serves as the secretary of the Long Term Recovery Team in Breathitt County, said “people are at different stages in recovery.”?

How far they’ve come depends on if they had flood insurance, among other factors.?

Some are back home after a year of rebuilding, Fugate said. “But then you still have people who are in limbo,” like the person who recently started rebuilding after a full year.?

“Resources are drying up, as they do,” Fuagte added. “Out of sight out of mind. And people don’t really understand that there’s still a great need.”?

Volunteer skilled labor is in high demand, she said. Breathitt Countians need plumbers and electricians and people to help remove debris.

“Some are just needing some finishing touches, some are needing major repair still,” Fugate said.?

One major change the federal government should address is making sure that recipients of disaster relief money get access to financial literacy education, according to Jamie Mullins-Smith, the co-chair of Breathitt County’s Long Term Recovery Team.?

That’s because not everyone knows how to manage thousands of dollars and how to invest it in a way that will aid their long term recovery, Mullins-Smith said. And once the money has been spent, it’s too late.?

“There needs to be some financial literacy and some accountability on the federal government with that. When they hand these individuals this funding, it’s very hard for them to understand exactly what that’s for,” she said.?

Sometimes that comes down to a recipient just not understanding the instructions.?

“We at a local level are kind of left to deal with that,” Mullins-Smith said. Case managers can help guide survivors and make sure they don’t get duplicate services. There are a little fewer than 400 people in Breathitt County still under case management, she said.?

The biggest issue, several told the Lantern, is housing, which is a “major problem” that persists.

Breathitt County Circuit Clerk James Elliot Turner estimates about 500 people have left his county – many because of the “housing crisis.”

They’re going to nearby areas that have homes, like Perry County, he said.?“Population is dropping every day in this county until we get good housing – affordable housing,” he said.

Breathitt County was already poor before back-to-back floods, he said.

But the water meant “the?poor got poorer.”?

“The folks that have lost loved ones … don’t ever recover from that loss,” he said. But also: “People have lost their homes for a second time in less than a year, buddy, it’s just devastating.”?

Emotional toll tarries?

A year to a year and a half after a disaster, many people experience high levels of hopelessness and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to The Center for Disaster Philanthropy.?

People working on the ground say some people in Eastern Kentucky have more depression, anxiety and general stress. When it rains, people worry.?

“The barrier is getting our survivors to understand that there is some value to addressing your mental health,” said Mullins-Smith. “We (are) promising you that if you will at least reach out that there (are) resources for you. There’s therapists, there’s coping skills that we can teach you.”?

Some don’t reach out because of the general stigma surrounding mental health, she said. Others just want to get back to the way things were.?

Many have an “overwhelming desire to want to find some normalcy,” she said. “So they prioritize their recovery over their mental health, which only exacerbates it.”?

Outside of therapy, there are coping skills that can help reduce and manage stress day-to-day that Mullins-Smith shares with people.?

They include:

• Yoga?
• Music
• Relaxation?
• Listening to a sound machine (but not rain)?
• Journaling?
• Setting realistic goals. You can’t rebuild a house in one day, but you maybe can paint a wall.?
• Take a deep breath?
• Walk away from what you’re doing and do a positive activity?
• Close your eyes
• Schedule time for yourself?
• Get a stress ball?

Higher Ground?

There is a continued need for affordable housing, especially in the form of apartment complexes, in this area of Eastern Kentucky, locals said. ?

“There was a housing issue before the flood,” Fugate said. “And … afterwards, it’s just … 10 times worse.”?

Some intended to move to higher ground or away, Fugate said, but were not able to do so. Instead they returned to the floodplain, knowing they could lose everything again.?

“Hopefully, we’ve had our 1,000-year flood and it won’t happen again for quite some time,” she said.?

The state is working on “higher ground communities” to get people out of the Eastern Kentucky flood plains. Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration has announced four so far in Knott, Perry and Floyd counties.?

He’s said that “we can’t just rebuild, we also need to revitalize” Eastern Kentucky, which includes building in a way that is resilient in the face of possible future floods.?

Meanwhile, Herald can’t bring herself to sell her homeplace.?

She’s lucky, she said, to have found a new house outside the floodplain, on higher ground.?

She just watches as the seasons pass, studying the weather and what it does to houses that, like her old one, are in the floodplain.?

“Emotionally, psychologically, I’m not ready to let go of the old house yet,” Herald said. “There’s still a real strong emotional attachment there because it was my home for so long.”

Coming Friday: The high costs of flood insurance

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is funding projects to create new markets and revenue streams for “climate-smart” practices in farming, including beef production. In this photo, cattle graze in a field outside of North English, Iowa, on Sept. 13, 2017. (USDA photo by Preston Keres)

President Joe Biden speaks during an event on extreme heat July 27, 2023, in Washington, D.C. During the event Biden announced additional actions to protect communities from the effects of extreme heat. On the monitor in the background is Mayor Kate Gallego of Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A 'Buy Bitcoin Here' sign is posted at a convenience store in Los Angeles, on Nov. 10, 2021, when the price of the cryptocurrency hit a new record high of $69,000. It was valued at around $25,000 earlier this month. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Union County in Western Kentucky has been the state’s top coal-producer for years, mining more than 10 million tons in 2022.

Something else is being mined in Union County: Bitcoin.

In both cases, the mining is done by Alliance Resource Partners (ARP) headed by Joseph Craft III, whose wife Kelly Craft, just lost an expensive race to become the Republican nominee for governor.

Mining cryptocurrency requires enormous amounts of electricity to power high-capacity computers that perform complicated mathematical calculations, securing online transactions of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin. These mining operations are rewarded for solving the calculations with Bitcoin itself, valued at more than $25,000 a coin as of early June.?

A dispute before the Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC), the state’s utility regulator, will determine whether electrical utilities should have given Alliance and two Bitcoin miners in Eastern Kentucky hefty price discounts on the electricity powering their computers.?

Utilities give the discounts, known as economic development riders, as incentives to businesses to locate in their service territories.

A group of environmental and renewable energy advocacy organizations asked the PSC last year to investigate the discounts.

They cite multiple reasons for closer scrutiny, including the strain these operations and their huge demand for power places on the grid, in exchange for relatively few jobs.

The cryptocurrency industry is expanding as climate experts call for the world’s power generation to rapidly decarbonize amid climate change’s increasing impacts. Utilities in Kentucky are trying to transition to lower-carbon-emission energy sources such as natural gas and renewables.

Another concern: The industry’s volatility, as already evidenced in Kentucky. Core Scientific, which has had a crypto mining operation in West Kentucky since 2019, declared bankruptcy in December. Another mining operation that set up shop in downtown Paducah moved out abruptly due to “a business decision dealing with the energy market.”?

The groups asking for more scrutiny — including Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Kentucky Solar Energy Society and the Kentucky Resources Council — question whether the jobs created by crypto mining justify the discounts and whether the discounts shouldn’t be saved for industries that would employ more Kentuckians.?

Alliance was promised more than $4 million in discounts while promising to create five jobs, although the utility doesn’t have a process in place to make sure those employees weren’t being double-counted from another part of Alliance’s business, according to one utility employee.

“This idea of utilities providing a discount to what, by appearances, looks to be a real possibility of boom, bust — or potentially bust, and then no further boom — is very concerning,” said Josh Bills, a commercial energy specialist with the Mountain Association, a Berea-based economic development nonprofit and one of the interveners in the PSC case.

As he helps small businesses become more energy efficient and incorporate renewable energy, Bills also sees them struggle to pay electricity bils, so it troubles him when a “boom, bust” industry receives significant electricity discounts.?

He said the cases before the PSC, including Alliance’s Bitcoin mine, will set precedents and that it’s important to get concerns about subsidies for crypto on the record.

On the other hand, an advocate for the cryptocurrency mining industry says such companies are being unfairly singled out for taking advantage of economic development incentives for which they qualify, while the utility that offered discounts to the Union County mine asserts it wasn’t in error for doing so.?

Tom Mapes, the director of energy policy for the cryptocurrency mining lobbying group Digital Chamber of Commerce, said if a cryptocurrency mining company and a utility are operating within the parameters of the laws set out for the economic development incentives, they should be able to utilize those incentives. “If we’re working within the parameters of what is written out within state law or national law, why would we be judged differently?” he said.?

Mining Bitcoin on a coal mine

Because cryptocurrency mines use a lot of power, the operators are looking for the cheapest rates possible.

“Obviously, they’re going to go to where the most bang for your buck you can get in these regions, you know, the best purchasing power you have for energy or land,” Mapes said. “We’re running computers pretty much.”

Coal mining also uses a lot of electricity, and Alliance’s site in Union County had some ready-made advantages, including electricity infrastructure and meters on the former coal mine site that the company planned to transfer over to use for the Bitcoin mining operation, according to emails and reports provided by Kentucky’s largest utility, LG&E and KU, to the state utility regulator.?

An LG&E/KU representative who visited the Bitcoin mining site in October 2022 said the initial understanding was that Alliance would put its high-powered computers in “underground mine space” but that it was “too damp and didn’t have enough ventilation.”?

Kentucky Utilities, a subsidiary of LG&E and KU, offered more than $4 million in discounts over several years to Alliance’s Bitcoin mining operation, a subsidiary called Bitiki-KY. Alliance promised to create five jobs and invest $25 million into the company.?

Bitiki-KY has been running high-powered machines on a former coal mine site near Waverly in Union County since last year to mine the cryptocurrency using a constant stream of 10 megawatts of electricity, enough to power thousands of homes over the course of a year.?

Whether Alliance actually needed those electricity discounts as an incentive to locate at the Union County site it already owned became a central topic at a PSC hearing on May 31. Alliance did not respond to an interview request for comment about its Bitcoin mining subsidiary Bitiki-KY, which changed its legal name from Bitiki Blockchain last year.?

Thom Cmar, a senior attorney for Earthjustice representing the environmental and renewable energy groups in the PSC case, said there normally is evidence that without such incentives, a company proposing a new facility will move elsewhere.

“There’s no evidence here that they even looked anywhere outside of Kentucky Utilities territory,” Cmar said in an interview with the Lantern. “They were taking an existing site that they already owned, or that an affiliated company already owned, and just transferring it over.”?

In that late May hearing, Cmar asked John Bevington, director of business and economic development for LG&E and KU: Was there specific evidence that the electricity discounts were necessary to make sure Bitiki-KY didn’t locate elsewhere?

Bevington said that he wasn’t aware of evidence the coal company considered potential sites outside KU’s territory and that the need to offer the discounts came over time as the utility talked with Alliance.

“Our goal is to try to get customers to grow and locate here without providing any incentive. But you know, occasionally it becomes a competitive environment, and the cost considerations are necessary as they were in this case,” Bevington said.

He told Cmar that Alliance’s previous history with the site and the existing infrastructure “was definitely attractive” to the coal company.?

Also during that hearing, Cmar honed in on the jobs Alliance said it would create, asking: Did the utility have evidence those five jobs were actually created??

Bevington, who previously worked in the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, responded Bitiki-KY had “committed” to creating five jobs in its application for the incentives, but the utility didn’t have a process in place to make sure those employees weren’t being double-counted from another part of Alliance’s business.?

In written testimony, Bevington added that it’s “impossible” for the utility to know exactly how many jobs a company would create through electricity discounts. He said the utility also relies on cues from state officials, such as if a company receives state tax breaks, on whether to give discounts. Bitiki-KY in March 2022 received from the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) $250,000 in tax benefits through the Kentucky Enterprise Initiative Act.?

Instead of jobs being at play with these electricity discounts, Bevington said, the Bitcoin mine’s electricity usage hinges on the incentives; Bitiki-KY would likely not increase its power usage from 10 MW to 13 MW without the discounts.?

“[I]t is both facially plausible and consistent with my experience in economic development that an entity proposing to deploy $25 million of capital and create 13 MW of load might also create five jobs,” Bevington said in written testimony.?

An LG&E and KU spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions emailed by the Lantern about how and whether the utility verifies economic development created from electricity discounts.?

Does crypto benefit the community?

For Cmar, the Earthjustice attorney, Alliance’s Bitcoin mining site is a microcosm of what cryptocurrency mining companies are bringing to Kentucky.

“There’s a real concern when the company comes in and says things like, ‘Well, we’re going to be creating five jobs.’ But there’s no evidence that has been presented that any significant amount of jobs have been created,” Cmar told the Lantern.. “Why should a company like this get a discount? Shouldn’t the economic development discounts be saved for other types of industries that are bringing real meaningful economic development to the area?”

Alliance’s Bitcoin mining operation isn’t the only operation moving into Kentucky and receiving electricity discounts. Two of the other PSC investigations into cryptocurrency mining involve discounts provided by Kentucky Power to operations in Pike County and Lawrence County, the latter of which would build what would likely be the state’s largest such facility and have the capacity to use up to 250 megawatts of electricity. The PSC will hold hearings regarding both of those operations in July.?

Cmar said those operations cumulatively are soaking up “all this extra electricity.”?

“At a time when we are working to try to transition our electric sector to cleaner forms of energy and address the imperative need to try to avoid the worst impacts of climate change by reducing emissions wherever possible, having these energy intensive — energy wasteful, really — operations coming in … has put an incredible strain on the grid.”?

Mapes, the cryptocurrency mining lobbyist, said crypto mining operations such as in Union County still provide much needed jobs to rural communities. He also said crypto mining’s need for power will spur development of solar and wind generation to meet the demand.

Paul Monsour, treasurer of the Union County Chamber of Commerce and a city council member in Morganfield, the county seat,? recognizes that the five jobs created by Alliance will have a small impact compared to the company’s coal mining in the county.

?“It’s five more jobs than we had,” Monsour said. “But I would think the county would support mostly everything Alliance would want.”?

Barren acres like this one, photographed in March in Crawford County, are being carved out of Hoosier National Forest in southern Indiana. The Forest Service says the logging is needed to make way for young oak trees. (Photo by Robbie Heinrich)

PAOLI, Indiana—When Jesse Laws rides her seven-year-old palomino, Roscoe, in Hoosier National Forest, she often steers him toward the tall pines. Needles carpet the trails, muting the clop of his shoes and shifting the feel of the air.

“The ground stays moist there, so it’s cooler and so quiet,” says Laws, whose great grandparents founded a saddle club in these woods about 30 miles north of the Kentucky border. “There is nothing more peaceful than listening to the breeze in a pine stand from the back of a good horse.”

But the tranquil evergreens Laws loves soon could disappear.

In two of the largest projects the U.S. Forest Service has ever undertaken in the historic Hoosier, the agency plans to log more than 9,000 acres, conduct prescribed burns on another 28,000 and build more than 27 miles of roads.?

The “Houston South” and “Buffalo Springs” proposals have engendered fierce local opposition, not only from horse riders and hikers but chambers of commerce, and elected officials, Republicans and Democrats alike.?

When added to the impact of two similar restoration projects already underway in adjacent counties, the “Oriole” and “German Ridge” projects, the Forest Service’s plans would transform about 18 percent of the Hoosier.

The contest taking shape in southern Indiana is part of a larger battle now being waged over the future of the national forests, the nation’s greatest reservoirs of forest carbon, in a changing climate. President Joe Biden has sought to protect mature and old-growth forests, but clearly his Forest Service is resisting the concept of preserving older forests as a strategic reserve of carbon, which some climate scientists have advocated.?

Last month, the Biden administration announced a plan for new regulations to enhance “climate resilience” in those forests. It was a follow-up to a first-of-its-kind inventory ordered by Biden that showed mature and old-growth forests make up 60 percent, or 112 million acres, of the forests managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.?

But the Forest Service has more than 20 projects underway like the Hoosier plans that include logging or burning in 370,000 acres of those mature and old-growth forests, according to the Climate Forests Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups.?

The Forest Service, which is taking public comments through June 20 on what its new climate rules should look like, argues “restoration” and “vegetation management” activities, like the Buffalo Springs and Houston South projects proposed in Indiana, may be better in the long run from a climate change perspective.

“With predicted changes in climate, especially hotter, drier summers in the Midwest, Hoosier National Forest (is) more likely to experience wildfire and we must plan appropriately to have a fire-resilient forest in place,” the Forest Service said in written responses to Inside Climate News.

More than half of the stands in the Hoosier are 80 years old or older, and there has been a sharp decline in establishment of new ones, the Forest Service said in its assessment of the carbon impact of the Buffalo Springs portion of its Hoosier proposal.?

“If the Forest continues on this aging trajectory, more stands will reach a slower growth stage in coming years, potentially causing the rate (of) carbon accumulation to decline,” the assessment said.?

The plan is to make way for new oak habitat by clear-cutting 1,100 acres and otherwise culling mature trees the Forest Service says are less resilient and beneficial to the ecosystem, including maple, beech and pine.

But Richard Birdsey, who spent 40 years with the Forest Service before his retirement as a distinguished scientist in 2016, says, in effect, that the agency’s climate science in this instance is wrong. Such a fall-off in carbon absorption can take hundreds of years to unfold as trees die and decay. Middle-aged forests of the eastern United States would continue to absorb and store carbon over the next two crucial decades for staving off the climate crisis — if they are allowed to stand, he said.

“If you look back at what these forests were once like, presettlement, those areas had on the order of twice as much carbon stock as they do now,” said Birdsey, now a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “It’s not like, all of a sudden these 100-year-old forests are going to start losing carbon. If left alone, they’ll grow in most cases to twice their age.”

Recent scientific papers Birdsey has co-authored show how protection of large-diameter older trees can help further biodiversity and other forest resilience goals, and how more robust forest conservation policy could help mitigate climate change. “If you harvest an older forest, it creates what’s called a carbon debt,” Birdsey said. “You’ve removed a lot of stored carbon, and in order to replenish that we’re looking at decades, if not centuries.”

Having worked in the eastern U.S. for the Forest Service, Birdsey is familiar with oak restoration like the agency proposes in the Hoosier. He said the agency may have reason to pursue such projects, but should not try to justify them on the basis of climate protection.

“There might be other reasons — let’s say for wildlife — for removing some of the trees and allowing some different species to grow,” Birdsey said. “But that has nothing to do with climate. And in a case like that, you just have to accept that it is not going to be good for climate.”

The case for cutting the Hoosier

The Forest Service’s Land and Resource Management Plan for the Hoosier, the guiding document for its current projects, was completed in 2006 — before the most recent science on older trees and carbon sequestration. It was also before rules changes under President Barack Obama that put more emphasis on community input and managing National Forests for recreation and other uses besides timber harvest.

Although the law governing the 154 national forests says management plans should be updated at least every 15 years, the average plan age is 22, with some dating back to 1983. (Congress now includes language in annual appropriations bills exempting the Forest Service from the 15-year requirement as long as it is acting in good faith.)?

The 2006 Hoosier plan stresses one tree above all others: the mighty oak, which dominates the landscape but is not regenerating young trees — a phenomenon recognized for decades in forests of the East. The hickory tree, oak’s partner in the deciduous ecosystem since the American chestnut was wiped out by blight in the 20th century, also is declining. The Forest Service says restoration of the oak-hickory ecosystem in the Hoosier is crucial to wildlife that rely on tree fruits, or mast, like acorns and nuts.?

Oak’s economic value clearly is a consideration for the Forest Service, which describes thinning and prescribed fire as methods of “timber stand improvement.” “The stumpage price for oak consistently ranks near or at the top among all commercial hardwood species,” said a 2014 Forest Service synthesis of studies on oak regeneration that also detailed its uses — for fine furniture, flooring, whiskey barrels, pallets and railroad ties.

The Forest Service, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, refers to the nation’s forests as “Lands of Many Uses,” but chief among them is harvesting timber. It sets targets each year for wood production and acreage cut, and employees are evaluated on meeting such goals. Although the amount of timber harvested from national forests has fallen from its peak in the late 1980s, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore has told Congress the agency is working toward increasing output by more than one third to 4 billion board feet per year — harvest levels last seen during President Bill Clinton’s administration.?

To meet those goals, Congress has given the agency authority to enter into “stewardship agreements” with outside groups that stand to earn revenue from timber sales and other management activities and are strong advocates for harvests. Regarding its plans for the Hoosier, the Forest Service said, “projects such as this are strongly supported by many conservation-focused groups and communities.”?

One of those supporters is the hunting group, the Ruffed Grouse Society, which entered into a 10-year contract with the Forest Service in 2019 to provide timber sale and forest management services throughout the eastern United States. It is one of many such wildlife groups pushing to increase habitat for game birds and other species through “young forest creation,” primarily by cutting older forest.

Due to the forest age and overcrowding in the Hoosier, the Forest Service says trees will have a harder time weathering climate change. Oak wilt, a fungal disease that is deadly to the trees, has been identified in small portions of the forest over the past six years, and an unprecedented insect outbreak occurred in 2020 — signs that the Hoosier is under stress, the agency says.

“The consequences of inaction will be ecologically dire,” the Forest Service said in written responses to questions from Inside Climate News.

And a key action that the agency is planning — covering more acres than logging — is prescribed fire.

“I could give you probably a six-foot high pile of scientific papers showing the strong relationship between fire and oak,” said Michael Saunders, professor in Purdue University’s School of Forestry and Natural Resources, author of some of the studies.

The Forest Service has partnered with academics, held symposia and compiled meta-reports on the fire prescription for oaks.?

“Oak needs canopy openings and needs fire and needs other things to be able to regenerate successfully and replace itself,” Saunders said.

Both Native Americans and early white settlers provided plenty of disturbance. They burned the forest repeatedly, usually to clear the land for agriculture. The territory that became Indiana, which was 90 percent forest-covered prior to the start of the 19th century, had only 4% forest cover left by 1900, according to a 2018 report by the Purdue-led Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment. Thick-barked oaks survived the fires, and thrived in the open spaces — even on north-facing slopes with less direct sunlight.

“We got a lot more oak back than probably we would have naturally gotten without that cut-over,? just because oak was the only thing that could handle all the disturbance we threw at it,” Saunders said.

Indiana’s forests now cover about 20 percent of the state, but most of that woodland remains in private hands. The Forest Service began buying abandoned land here and in other Eastern states during the Great Depression. Only after the lifting of a restriction requiring tracts purchased by the Forest Service to be 20 percent contiguous could the 200,000-acre Hoosier National Forest be established.

The Hoosier is now filled with stands of non-native pines planted 50 to 90 years ago through federally funded efforts like the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps to stop rampant erosion on bare, abandoned farmland. But the Forest Service says the pine plantations are less suitable habitat for wildlife and biodiversity than oak, and should be removed.

Also targeted are shade-tolerant species like American beech and sugar maple that have been regenerating instead of oaks and hickories.

Prescribed fire — in most cases, preceded by logging mature trees — reduces forest density and removes the competition. The projects will “improve the sustainability of the oak-hickory ecosystem” and “move the landscape toward historic conditions,” the Forest Service said in its statement of need for the Buffalo Springs project.

The Forest Service said it is looking to mimic Native American settlements in Indiana that date back to 12,000 BC. “Evidence suggests extensive use of fire by Native peoples for centuries and people have been on this landscape since nearly the last ice age, therefore our native plant and animal life evolved with fire and are adapted or tolerant of it at low intensities, which is what our prescribed fires are,” the Forest Service said. “Recent projects propose actions to improve the health and diversity of the forest to increase its adaptability and resilience to the predicted changes to climate, among other ecological objectives. We take a long-term view and plan for 100 years or more ahead.”

The Indiana Society of American Foresters, representing professional forest managers,? supports the Forest Service’s plan for the Hoosier. “Timber harvesting needs to be implemented at a scale large enough to address the myriad of current threats facing overstocking public forests,” said Edward Oehlman, the group’s vice chair, at a public meeting in April. It’s an “appropriate implementation” of the Forest Service’s 2006 Land Management Plan, which calls for increasing the amount of young forest to as much as 12 percent of the Hoosier. In the areas the Forest Service wants to log, less than 1 percent of the forest is less than 20 years old.?

The case against cutting the Hoosier

The power of Indiana’s only National Forest to bring the state’s residents together from across the political spectrum is demonstrated by this unlikely pair of opponents of the current plans for the Hoosier: J.C. Tucker, a member of one of Indiana’s most prominent Republican families, and Andy Mahler, longtime forest advocate, songwriter and food co-op operator.?

“People who live here love the county, and Andy and I both think it’s the most beautiful place in the world,” said Tucker, brother of former second lady Marilyn Quayle and father-in-law of one of Indiana’s two Republican U.S. Senators, Todd Young. “We want to make sure it sustains for generations.”

Tucker, longtime county attorney for Orange County, where most of the Buffalo Springs project would take place, says the plan should be “re-evaluated.”

“They need to reduce the emphasis on clear-cutting and logging, and have more emphasis on preserving the natural state of it,” he said. “If burning has to happen, it should be limited. What they’re planning is extreme.”

Mahler is more blunt in criticism of the Forest Service. “They are trying to convert the forest into a tree plantation essentially to promote the most commercially valuable species,” said Mahler, who, with his wife and songwriting partner, Linda Lee, lives in a cabin surrounded on all sides by the Hoosier. “Of course, they won’t talk about the commercial value. They talk about the wildlife and the mast and the birds and everything, but it’s really, really all about the money.”

Established in 1951, the Hoosier is among the smallest, youngest and most fragmented of the national forests. And yet the trees on this well-used land inspire passionate defenders who have shaped the course of U.S. forest policy.

In 1940, when a lumber company purchased a long-untouched family tract of hardwood trees in southern Indiana, local civic groups raised money to buy the land in one of the first community-led campaigns in the nation to preserve old-growth forest. Those 88 acres, called Pioneer Mothers Memorial Forest, are now part of the Hoosier and a National Natural Landmark, with trees nearly 300 years old and five feet in diameter — one of the few sites of its kind in the eastern United States.

In the 1970s, when unregulated off-road motorcycles were tearing up hiking trails and the fragile forest floor in the Hoosier, a career Forest Service employee, A. Claude Ferguson, turned against his own agency and joined environmentalists in a lawsuit to halt the damage. The case exposed agency officials’ diversion of Forest Service funds and efforts to silence Ferguson, and was an impetus for what became the federal Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. In 2005, after years of debate, the Forest Service adopted rules to manage off-road vehicle use throughout the national forest system.

Now, with impacts of climate change already evident, critics say the Forest Service is seeking to recreate an era that was anything but a healthy one for Indiana’s forests. “They’re trying to restore the forest back to the most degraded baseline that ever existed there,” said Jeff Stant, executive director of the Indiana Forest Alliance. “They always use the word ‘historic,’ so that the public will think they’re trying to go back to the way nature really was. But much of the dominance of oak-hickory forest in southern Indiana is an artifact of heavy rural settlement in the 1800s.”

The Native Americans whom the Forest Service says it seeks to emulate didn’t use herbicides like glyphosate — better known as Roundup — which the agency plans to apply on 2,700 acres in the two Hoosier project areas. And project opponents ask why the Forest Service isn’t protecting the mature trees of all species, since many will be lost to severe weather and other climate impacts in the years ahead.

“The tornadoes in December 2021 that flew in all the way from Arkansas created more (forest openings)] than the most ambitious silviculturist could imagine,” Mahler said. “We do not need to create more disturbance. We need to hope that our forests will be free from disturbance,? because I guarantee you in a time of radically altering weather patterns and extremes, Mother Nature will create plenty of disturbances across the landscape, including in our forests. We need to make sure we have as much standing as possible for future generations.”

A forest protecting troubled waters

At an April public meeting in Orange County, where dozens of residents spoke up in opposition to the logging and burning, a local tree farmer voiced support for the Forest Service’s plan.

“We have a golden goose in Indiana that’s putting out $10 billion dollars a year in economic activity, and a lot of that is because of oak,” he said. “We have a lot of oaks that are big and not many that are smaller. … Our oak trees are going to be gone in our lifetime.”

“We’ve got to feed the goose and we need to get more oaks on the ground,” he said, “and fire and management is a tool to do that.”

But today in Indiana, tourism generates more revenue than timber — about $13 billion a year, according to state officials — and local leaders see the Hoosier as integral to that business, and the reason has a lot to do with water.

The Forest Service touts its role as a national water protector and agency officials quote its first chief, Gifford Pinchot, as saying the connection between forests and rivers is “like father and son.” Since his time in the early 1900s, science has learned even more about how forests help regulate the water cycle and reduce the impacts of intensive storms — a particularly important function in an era of climate change.

Last fall, Forest Service scientists calculated 125.5 million people in the continental United States, close to 40 percent of the population, derive part of their drinking water from National Forest lands. Communities around the Hoosier are among the most dependent, on par with many areas of the West.?

That’s due to two water impoundments dug out by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — Lake Monroe, in 1965, and Patoka Lake, in 1978 — mainly to control flooding in the Wabash River basin. They are Indiana’s two largest reservoirs, together providing drinking water to 200,000 people and pumping tens of millions of recreation dollars annually into local economies.

The Houston South (pronounced “How-ston”) and Buffalo Springs projects would take place in the watersheds of the two lakes, which clearly are under stress from both pollution and climate change. At Lake Monroe, officials have issued recreational advisories every year since 2011 because of blue-green algae blooms. Caused by agricultural and other runoff and worsened by warming, the blooms can sicken people and animals. The Hoosier, which covers the steep eastern side of Lake Monroe, has been a critical buffer and filter of pollution.

“The trees themselves are holding moisture in the forest and creating an environment in which water is released slowly, rather than letting it run off quickly,” says Sherry Mitchell-Bruker, a retired Forest Service hydrologist who now is pitted against her former agency over its plan for logging and prescribed burning in the watershed.

Mitchell-Bruker, who worked in the Everglades and in the Sierra Nevada mountains before returning to her native Indiana to retire, started kayaking in Lake Monroe and quickly learned of its problems. She founded the nonprofit, Friends of Lake Monroe, seven years ago, and worked with local communities on a watershed protection plan finalized last year. But some of the partners in the project feared their work would be for naught if the Hoosier became a new source of runoff.?

Monroe County led a lawsuit against the Houston South project, and on March 29 won a federal court injunction blocking the Forest Service from the prescribed burning set to begin days later.

A year earlier, U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, chief judge for the southern district of Indiana, ruled mainly in favor of allowing the Houston South project to go forward, with one exception: she said the Forest Service had failed to fully analyze the potential impact on Lake Monroe as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

In response, the Forest Service put out a 40-page “supplemental information report” in December to “clarify relevant portions of the existing project record.” But such brief reports, only acceptable for addressing new information or changed circumstances, couldn’t be used to avoid doing the kind of detailed analysis and consideration of alternatives that NEPA required, Pratt ruled.

The Forest Service has since withdrawn the report and is evaluating the decision. The agency would not comment on a possible timeline for Houston South while the matter is in litigation.

But the Forest Service has maintained that its low-intensity prescribed burns would be a “significant distance” from Lake Monroe and would not harm the reservoir. Silt fences, log landings and other best management practices would be in place to prevent erosion. Overall, the Houston South project “will restore a mosaic of healthy forest that will support diverse populations of wildlife and provide resilience to climate change,” the agency had said in its report. The Forest Service said it had more controls in place to protect the lake than Monroe County, which exempts agriculture from zoning ordinances meant to combat sedimentation.

Mitchell-Bruker — who provided expert testimony in the case — does not dispute that farm pollution contributes to Lake Monroe’s problems, or that local governments need to do more.? But she argues that the Forest Service has a major role to play.

“If you talk to a farmer, they’ll say, it’s the boats in the lake, and the people in the forest will say, it’s the farmers,” Mitchell-Bruker said. “The message we have been working very hard to convey is that it’s everyone, everyone in the watershed. All the small contributions along the way add up to a big contribution. And the Forest Service, with a huge amount of land, can have the most impact — the most potential for harm and the most potential for good.”

Monroe County, the home of Indiana University, is led by Democratic elected officials. But sentiment about Forest Service logging and burning is much the same in Republican-led Orange County, where the Buffalo Springs project would reach close to the banks of Patoka Lake, not only a drinking water source but a recreational center.?

“We have concerns about water quality, we have concerns about the fact that so many people use our forests and trail riding and hiking and all those different things that lend to commerce in Orange County,” said Richard Dixon, president of the county board of commissioners.

“We need every resource we can to draw people in and keep our county solvent,” Dixon said. “It’s just something that’s very, very important to our county to have those drawing cards, and we’re going to lose one if we just go in and, in my words, ravage that forest.”

With a draft decision on the Buffalo Springs project expected by this fall, the Orange and Crawford boards of commissioners, along with local chambers of commerce? and economic development partnerships and the local Farm Bureau joined in a March letter outlining their concerns to the Forest Service, raising questions about the legality of the plan under NEPA.

Republican U.S. Sen. Michael Braun, who knows the region well as a native of nearby Jasper, Indiana, has sought to play a mediating role between his constituents and the Forest Service. Braun, who announced in December he is running for governor in 2024, organized an unusual meeting in April in Paoli, Indiana, for local residents to air their concerns directly with Homer Wilkes, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who oversees the Forest Service.?

“Treating forest in a respectful way, it gives back in so many different ways,” Braun said at the start of the meeting. With a nod to the Great Smoky Mountains, 300 miles to the south, he said the hardwood forest of Indiana also was a unique ecosystem with much opportunity for recreation, education and conservation.

“I think you’ve got to look at the total value of a unique property like this, and listen carefully to the people that live around it and use it most,” Braun said.

Shade above, history below

Nearly 300 residents crowded the Orange County Community Center for the April meeting, many of them clad in bright orange t-shirts that read “Save Hoosier Forest,” and “Stop the BS Project.” Among them was Jesse Laws, whose great grandparents started the Orange County Saddle Club.

Laws can cover a lot of ground in the Hoosier on a horse, including in the neighboring counties of Crawford and Perry, where the Forest Service has been executing logging and burning projects similar to the plan for the Buffalo Springs area. Trails have been converted to gravel logging roads, and the clear-cuts are barren and hot.

“It’s really disheartening because you go from this beautiful, shady woods, and then you come out to a clearing and there’s nothing but stumps, or the tops of trees, left behind on the ground because they aren’t worth anything,” she said. “They leave a big mess.”

The Forest Service says that such sites eventually will be restored. “Regenerating the upland oak-hickory community is a multi-decade long, multi-step process,” the Forest Service said in written answers to InsideClimate News. “We have several sites that we believe with high confidence are developing as expected for the stage of treatment they are in.” The agency pointed to a recent study by a Purdue University graduate student that showed a 94 percent survival rate for oak seedlings at one research site in Perry County after a “shelterwood harvest” — the logging of most mature trees — followed by a prescribed burn. The site showed the planned shift away from moisture-loving species like the maple to the oak, and increased richness, diversity and cover of understory plants than it had before the treatments.

But it will be decades until such sites return to mature forest. To Laws, the Hoosier forest is already full of new growth and life.

“I’ve been riding on those trails my entire life and without fail, almost every time you ride through the big mature pines, you scare up deer or wild turkey,” she said. “As pines age and die, when they fall it creates a sunlight opening. Hardwood trees are growing up in these openings. There are many hardwood species growing in the pine stands.”

Robbie Heinrich has seen the same happening — native species replacing the non-native pines — in the portion of the Hoosier forest that borders his family’s 92-acre property in Orange County.?

“Those pine trees, they did their job,” Heinrich said. “Now they are at the end of their life and are not regenerating, and there’s about as many hardwoods as pines. Where pines have fallen, it is naturally being replaced with hardwood forest. It is returning to the condition it was in before there were white people here.”

Heinrich’s ancestors were among the settlers who first altered the Indiana Territory’s forests. The family property was purchased by his 10th great grandfather, Joseph Farlow, in 1811 — five years before Indiana’s statehood. The family still has Farlow’s sheepskin deed signed by President James Madison and received a Hoosier Homestead Award in 2016 for holding one of the longest continuously owned properties in Indiana.?

Heinrich, an engineer who works on electric vehicle projects in the auto industry, used a drone to photograph the agency’s oak restoration projects in neighboring Crawford and Perry counties.?

“It is horrific, what we’re doing today in Hoosier National Forest,” Heinrich said.? “When I drive through the clear-cuts and think, ‘Oh my God, this is what will happen to the public property next to my property that I love and where my wife and I want to retire,’ it makes me want to vomit.

“I hope it doesn’t come to this, but I will chain my happy ass to the top of a tree to stop this if I have to,” Heinrich said, noting that he finds common ground with the activists who stopped the logging of spotted owl habitat during the timber wars of the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. “I’ve been a self-proclaimed redneck all my life, and now have turned into a grassroots preservationist, because I am so upset that they won’t listen to us.”

Heinrich’s ancestors were among a group of Quakers who traveled and settled in the Indiana Territory alongside 11 Black families who were free citizens, but faced increasingly harsh treatment in the 1800s in the South.

A cemetery and a few stone remnants in the Hoosier forest mark the Lick Creek Settlement, which thrived for 50 years before Black families abruptly abandoned it after the start of the Civil War.

When 78-year-old Diana Daniels, a descendent of the Lick Creek settlers, first visited the site in the Hoosier forest with her family in May 2022, she cried.?

A teacher and education activist in Indianapolis, Daniels has researched the struggles of her ancestors — who had come to America as indentured servants, not slaves.

When Daniels recounted the story behind each of the stone tablets standing in the underbrush to younger members of her family — ”That’s your sixth great grandfather, that’s your fourth great grandfather” — she recalled the African American ceremony of “libations,” pouring liquid onto the ground while calling out the names of the dead.?

“I began to feel ??that spiritual connection, and it was like the graves were saying to me, ‘Thank you! Welcome back! Glad to see you!’” Daniels recalls. “I just broke down and started crying. It was just so much.”

The Lick Creek area is marked for prescribed burning in the Buffalo Springs restoration plan. The agency says it will establish at least a 30-meter (about 100-foot) buffer zone around cemeteries and burial grounds and take other precautions. Crews will cease work and call in a heritage resource specialist if they discover cultural materials or human remains, the Forest Service says in its plans. In addition to the 2,500 discovered sites like Lick Creek containing evidence of prior human occupation that have been recorded in the Hoosier, the Forest Service estimated there are probably 2,500 more sites that have yet to be identified. Most of the Buffalo Springs area has not been surveyed for historical sites.

After learning of the Buffalo Springs project and the surrounding controversy, Daniels called the Forest Service, which forwarded her the plan and more than 700 pages of analysis.

She said she understands the need to cut and replace dying trees — she’s done that on her own property — but her brothers were alarmed after reading the materials from the Forest Service.

“They said, ‘This is terrible. We shouldn’t go along with this,’” Daniels said. “But I said wait until we get down there and see what they’re talking about before we hop on any bandwagons.”

The family plans to visit the gravesites again this summer, and she hopes to learn more. She would like to see a true memorial established in the Hoosier that tells the stories of the settlers and the struggles they faced, where children can learn a nearly lost but important part of history.

“The people that can help us do that are Orange County, and the Forest Service,” Daniels said. “If we all could come to the same table over that same vision, boy, it would be a powerful team.”

In the footsteps of the buffalo

But at the moment, there’s mostly strife and division over the future of Hoosier National Forest.

At the public meeting in April, Heartwood founder Andy Mahler crumpled a poster-sized copy of the Buffalo Springs plan in front of Senator Braun and USDA Undersecretary Wilkes. “If I could burn this, I would, but burning pollutes the air and warms the planet,” Mahler said. “You are not going to destroy the forest of Orange County, the last best forest in the Midwest … the best forest remaining in the state of Indiana.

“We need this forest for recreation, for water quality and for historic and cultural preservation,” Mahler said. “We need it for biodiversity and we need it for carbon sequestration. The Hoosier National Forest is going to be protected. It’s either going to be protected by the Forest Service, or it is going to be protected from the Forest Service.”

The Forest Service, which sent no representative to the April meeting, maintains that the projects it is planning are the best hope of maintaining a healthy, resilient Hoosier Forest for the long term.

“We understand that some feel that no forest management is the best path forward,” the Forest Service said in written responses to Inside Climate News. “However, the science tells us that on the fragmented forested landscape of the Hoosier National Forest, this strategy is counter-productive to the broader goals of building and maintaining healthy forests that we all share.”

But at its core, the dispute over the future of the Hoosier isn’t over that science, but over whether there is time to execute such an extensive overhaul of the forest. “The problem is the idea that you can sacrifice the short-term for the long-term in this day and age, with climate change and all the ecological crises we’re seeing right now,” said Mitchell-Bruker, the former Forest Service hydrologist who has studied the climate impacts on Lake Monroe. “We have to ask, ‘What is the impact going to be in ten years?’”

At the end of the April meeting, opponents of the Forest Service project sang an original ode to forest preservation. “The Song of the Buffalo Springs” lamented the “long-gone” chestnut tree and the buffalo that once roamed here by the thousands.?

It was the trampling of these American bison as they migrated for thousands of years that created one of the area’s beloved historical features: the Buffalo Trace, a trail as wide as 20 feet that was followed by early pioneers. Hundreds of loaded wagons could pass through what is now Orange County in a single day. The route brought Daniels’ ancestors to the area along with other Black settlers of Lick Creek and the Quaker ancestors of Heinrich.

But now, homes, farms and other development covers most of Buffalo Trace. Indiana State Highway 56 was built over part of the route. “Today, the Buffalo Trace is fading into obscurity,” says the Forest Service website, and a sign at a Hoosier trailhead calls it “Indiana’s Forgotten Highway.” Indeed, the only remaining portions that can be seen are within the Hoosier National Forest, in an area now marked for prescribed burning and logging.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Two loons swim with their chick on Clear Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in an area rich with copper and cobalt deposits. (Photo by Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer)

The decarbonized, electrified future envisioned by the Biden administration, state governments, automakers, utility companies and corporate sustainability goals depends to a huge degree on minerals and metals.

Lots more lithium will be needed for car and truck batteries, as well as the big banks of batteries that are increasingly popping onto the electric grid to balance the intermittency of wind and solar power. Those batteries, as well as wind turbines and solar panels, also need copper, cobalt,, nickel, zinc and “rare earth” elements used in electric car motors and other clean technologies, among other materials.

The problem is that not enough of those materials are mined in the United States or other friendly countries to meet the projected demands of a decarbonizing nation. At present, China dominates the market for most battery raw materials, for example, which “presents geopolitical and environmental risks,” per a presentation on May 10 by S&P Global on challenges facing the global battery sector.

”This is part of what the legislative environment is gearing up to help us counter,” said Graham Evans, an S&P Global research director focused on auto supply chain and technology. “We don’t want to be too heavily reliant on any one country.”

But even as new federal legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law created big incentives for renewable power, electric vehicles and production tax credits for critical minerals, mining operations under development in Nevada, North Carolina, Minnesota and Arizona, among other locations, haven’t exactly been met with open arms.

And mining organizations and renewable trade groups say the long permitting timelines and litigation delays for mining projects are incompatible with the urgent demand for materials needed to decarbonize the economy.

‘You need the natural resources’?

That dynamic has in part led to some clean energy groups joining with traditional industry, fossil fuel interests and their allies in Congress in a push for permitting reform. In the wake of a controversial federal court decision involving an Arizona copper mine project, there’s also separate bipartisan legislation in the Senate to clarify rules around where mining-support activities like waste or processing can take place on federal land.

“You need the supply chains, you need the natural resources. … We don’t do that unless we do more domestic production,” said Harrison Godfrey, managing director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy trade group.

“We need permitting reform if we’re going to undertake this mining. We think you can maintain reasonable environmental regulations and move forward around this. … Our permitting regime has been misused to try and stop anything and everything really in excess of what’s reasonable to protect the environment and communities.”

Numerous environmental groups, though, have blasted the debt ceiling deal, which includes provisions intended to get the contentious Mountain Valley Pipeline — a natural gas project through West Virginia and Virginia that has been plagued by environmental violations and seen numerous critical permits tossed out by federal courts — over the finish line.

They also assailed attempts to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in order to speed projects up.

‘Benign neglect’?

Mark Compton, executive director the American Exploration and Mining Association, a trade group, said there’s been a long history of “benign neglect” of the American mining industry that has resulted in a dependence on foreign sources, a problem that’s been underscored by the fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global pandemic.

“To decarbonize our economy is causing a demand increase in minerals that really is staggering,” he said. “The supply chain issues have really come to the forefront.”

Compton said new American mining projects average seven to 10 years to make it through the permitting stages, compared to two to three years in Canada and Australia, which have comparable environmental protections.

“We’re not talking about needing to lower environmental standards,” he said. “The environmental standards, the regulations that are in place, that’s not the problem. It’s really an inefficient and often duplicative permitting process through NEPA that simply takes longer than it has to.”

The permitting process is only part of the picture, he added. Most hard-rock mining, Compton said, happens on federal lands in the western U.S. About half of it is currently off limits to mining.

“Minerals are located where they are and we can’t move them,” he said, noting that economically viable pockets are rare. “We have to have access to federal lands to be able to develop and explore for minerals.”

Allowing mining on public lands, however, can be extremely fraught, as in the case of the long-contested Twin Metals project in the Superior National Forest in Minnesota. “Copper for wind power and broadband networks. Nickel for electric cars and medical devices,” the company website says. “Cobalt for smart phones and batteries. The world demands more and more metals every day. The minerals we have in Minnesota can help supply this demand.”

But environmental groups have warned the deposits lie too close for comfort to the Boundary Waters area, which the state tourism office calls “one of America’s most beautiful and remote places.” The Sierra Club says on its website that “there is currently no sulfide mine in existence that is not polluting the groundwater.” And in January, the Biden administration imposed a 20-year mining ban on 225,000 acres of federal land near the wilderness area.

Twin Metals said it was “stunned.”

“This region sits on top of one of the world’s largest deposits of critical minerals that are vital in meeting our nation’s goals to transition to a clean energy future, to create American jobs, to strengthen our national security and to bolster domestic supply chains,” the company said in a statement.

There are also major concerns over irreversible impacts to Native American sites, as in the case of the Lithium Americas project in Thacker Pass, Nevada, where the project has divided tribal communities and sparked protests and litigation, and the Resolution copper mine project in Arizona. According to Morgan Stanley Capital International, 97% of nickel, 89% of copper, 79% of lithium and 68% of cobalt reserves and resources in the U.S. are located within 35 miles of Native American reservations.

Compton acknowledged that past practices have created a reputation problem for the mining industry.

“It is true that mining projects meet a lot of resistance. I think that stems from a long history of mining in this country before we as a nation even thought about environmental laws or regulations,” he said, though he added that today’s industry is highly regulated and the most “environmentally responsible in the world.”

How much to mine??

However, even modern mining, of course, is inherently destructive. Open pit mining opens vast holes in the ground, creates huge quantities of waste rock that must be managed and potential water contamination problems from processing, seepage from tailings, which consist of the rock, chemicals and other waste products remaining after extraction, and acid rock drainage. There is also loss of wildlife habitat. Although there are efforts to produce, for example, lithium in new and more sustainable ways, the race for crucial minerals and metals has prompted some to question the eagerness for more extraction.

“Large-scale mining entails social and environmental harm, in many cases irreversibly damaging landscapes without the consent of affected communities,” says a January report from the University of California-Davis’ Climate and Community Project, which recommends achieving zero emissions and minimizing new mining by reducing car dependence, shrinking battery sizes and maximizing recycling.

“As societies undertake the urgent and transformative task of building new, zero-emissions energy systems, some level of mining is necessary,” the report says. “But the volume of extraction is not a given. Neither is where mining takes place, who bears the social and environmental burdens, or how mining is governed.”

Others see ensuring that a robust recycling and reuse chain comes with the new clean energy economy as key to reducing the impact of mining minerals. CNBC reported last month that a growing number of start up businesses are getting to work on solar, wind and battery recycling operations. (Read about University of Kentucky student Lucas Bertucci who has researched recycling batteries, solar panels and other electronic waste at the Center for Applied Energy Research.)

“Over the medium-to-long-term, the development of domestic recycling and reuse sectors will not only help to mitigate the need for new critical mineral production but will also help reduce our reliance on geostrategic competitors for these resources and technologies,” Advanced Energy Economy says in a policy paper.

Max Wilbert, an environmental activist who had helped organize a protest camp at the Thacker Pass site in Nevada, favors what many consider a radical “degrowth” solution to climate change, pollution and ecological collapse rather than trying to maintain current lifestyles with new sources of power that come with their own environmental problems.

“Some people might say that’s a dream,” he said. “I think the real dream is trying to maintain the status quo with a new energy source.”?

Susan Elkington president, TMMK, Tuesday Feb. 4, 2020 in Georgetown. (Photo by Mark Mahan)

In what Gov. Andy Beshear called an “enormous” economic development announcement for Kentucky, Toyota plans to establish its first electric car manufacturing facility in the United States at its plant in Scott County.?

The Georgetown factory, which has manufactured millions of cars since 1988, plans to retain nearly 9,000 employees to manufacture electric SUVs as a part of $591 million in investments at the facility.

“We know that that plant will be part of our automotive landscape here in Kentucky and the United States, in the world for decades to come,” Beshear said during a Wednesday press conference. “We love every jobs announcement, but one that we know secures a plant this size for the decades to come is a truly exciting one.”?

The Georgetown plant is the Japanese automaker’s largest production facility in the world. The plant will source car batteries from another Toyota plant in North Carolina.

In a statement, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky President Susan Elkington said the company is “leading the charge” with electric vehicles.

“Our incredible team of Kentuckians is excited to take on this new challenge while delivering the same great quality and reliability that our customers expect,” Elkington said.?

Ted Ogawa, president and chief executive officer of Toyota Motor North America, said: “We are committed to reducing carbon emissions as much as possible and as soon as possible.?To achieve this goal, customers must have access to a portfolio of options that meet their needs now and in the future. It is exciting to see our largest U.S. plant, Toyota Kentucky, and our newest plant, Toyota North Carolina, drive us into the future together with BEV and battery production for our expanding electrified lineup.”

In 2021, Ford announced it was investing $5.8 billion to build an electric car battery manufacturing plant in Hardin County, and other companies plan to build factories in Western Kentucky that manufacture key parts for electric vehicles.

Cutline: A coal-fired power plant in Romeoville, Illinois. The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a new rule to regulate fossil fuel power plant carbon dioxide. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan — intended to cut carbon emissions from power plants — was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Trump administration’s much-criticized replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy rule, derided as a “tortured series of misreadings” of the U.S. Clean Air Act, was also tossed by a federal court.

But the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is back at bat with a new proposed rule to regulate fossil fuel power plant carbon dioxide, which is responsible for about a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

EPA says its new rule, released Thursday, is based on “cost-effective and available control technologies,” and will avoid as much as 617 million metric tons of CO2 emissions through 2042, the equivalent of reducing the annual emissions of 137 million passenger vehicles. The agency claims it will also prevent hundreds of premature deaths and hospital visits, thousands of asthma attacks and relieve the burden of environmental justice communities disproportionately afflicted by power plant pollution. In 2022 alone, the electric power sector accounted for about 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions.

The rule strengthens standards for new fossil-fuel plants, (mostly natural gas) and establishes emissions guidelines for states to follow in limiting carbon pollution from existing fossil fuel plants, which can be coal, gas or oil-fired.

“EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already underway in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people — cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health and driving American innovation.”

However, some power plant operators warn it could imperil electric reliability by accelerating power plant closures before enough cleaner resources are ready. And some environmentalists say technologies the rule cites — carbon capture and storage and co-firing natural gas plants with clean burning hydrogen — are far from proven at the scale that will be required.

Others say the rule could be improved by setting lower thresholds for applicability (as proposed it only applies to the largest and most frequently used gas plants.

Reliability and sustainability

The Electric Power Supply Association, a trade group that represents competitive power generators, warned that the rule could intensify potential future electric reliability challenges. Indeed, some regulators fear that the increasing pace of power plant retirements, combined with increasing electrification in transportation and other sectors and the difficulty of getting new, primarily renewable resources sited and connected to the grid, could create shortfalls in electric supply in the near future.

“Once again, aspirational policy is getting ahead of operational reality,” EPSA President and CEO Todd Snitchler said in a statement. ”If finalized, these aggressive rules will undoubtedly drive up energy costs and lead to a substantial number of power plant retirements when experts have warned that we are already facing a reliability crisis due to accelerated retirements of dispatchable resources.”

The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned electric utilities that provide electric service to more than 235 million people in all 50 states, was more measured.

“Just as we do with any rulemaking, we will assess EPA’s proposed new regulations through the lens of whether they align with our priorities and support our ability to provide customers with the reliable clean energy they need at an affordable cost,” Edison CEO Tom Kuhn said. Kuhn said carbon emissions from the power sector are as low as they were in 1984 despite electric use climbing 73% over the past four decades.

Priorities for electric companies in the final rule, expected to go into effect sometime next year, are for compliance deadlines to align with “existing transition plans” and “recognition of the critical role existing and new natural gas generation plays,” Kuhn said. The utility industry also wants “a range of compliance flexibilities” that include hydrogen and carbon capture and storage “when they are commercially available at scale and cost.”

Several environmental and renewable energy industry groups celebrated the proposed rule.

“Power plants have been allowed to pump deadly carbon dioxide pollution into the air we breathe, threatening our communities and our future, with nearly no federal limits – until now. Today’s proposal marks a significant step forward, and we’re pleased to see the Biden administration continue to address climate pollution in a serious way,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club.

The American Council on Renewable Energy called it “an important step forward” that comes as the threat posed by climate change becomes increasingly severe.

“It is clear that we need a regulatory framework for reducing carbon emissions to complement the helpful incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act if we are to achieve our climate targets,” ACORE said.

‘Putting forward their very best foot’

But can the rule survive another expected legal challenge?

Patrick Morrisey, the Republican attorney general of West Virginia who sued the EPA over the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, was quick to challenge the legitimacy of the new proposed rule.

“Based upon what we currently know about this proposal, it is not going to be upheld, and it just seems designed to scare more coal-fired power plants into retirement — the goal of the Biden administration,” Morrisey said in a statement Thursday. “That tactic is unacceptable, and this rule appears to utterly fly in the face of the rule of law. The U.S. Supreme Court has placed significant limits on what the EPA can do — we plan on ensuring that those limits are upheld, and we expect that we would once again prevail in court against this out-of-control agency.”

Julie McNamara, a deputy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the legal issue has never been whether EPA has the authority to regulate carbon emissions but rather how that power is exercised. With the Clean Power Plan, the Supreme Court ruled the agency overreached, finding that it could not direct power plants to shift from fossil fuels to cleaner sources like wind and solar. Rather, it held the EPA could set emissions limits by determining the “best system of emission reduction” for existing sources at that facility, not force a change in generation source.

The new rule, she said, is more narrowly focused and tailored to the confines of the Supreme Court ruling.

“EPA has been incredibly thoughtful about this and are putting forward their very best foot to try to have a defensible rule,” McNamara said. “It’s a certainty these will go to the courts but it’s not a certainty that the courts will take it up.”

McNamara said that when the rule becomes finalized next year, it will be up to states to submit plans for compliance.

“It’s up to the states to say what is the most cost effective and forward looking approach to achieving these emissions reductions,” she said.

Brian Murray, director of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, said the rule builds on the array of clean energy incentives in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.

“Putting a regulation on top of that means that the regulation itself is more economically achievable because of the subsidies,” he said. “The IRA is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the reductions that are being sought by the administration.”

Joining with many states’, utilities’ and corporations’ own decarbonization goals, the rule adds a lot of momentum that might be tough to derail.

“You take all these together and everything is walking in the same direction,” Murray said.

Carbon capture questions

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit focused on environmental activism, called carbon capture “a fossil fuel industry propaganda scheme” that’s wasted billions of dollars and produced “a series of spectacular failures.”

An October report from the Congressional Research Service said the U.S. Department of Energy has funded carbon capture research and development since “at least 1997” and that Congress has provided $9.2 billion since 2010 in annual appropriations for the DOEs’ Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment program.

The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law included billions more for carbon capture facilities. Most existing carbon capture projects use the CO2 to enhance oil production in aging oil wells. The first and only U.S. power plant capturing carbon in large quantities was the Petra Nova project in Texas, though carbon capture was suspended in 2020, the report says.

“There is broad agreement that costs for constructing and operating (carbon capture and storage) would need to decrease before the technologies could be widely deployed. In the view of many proponents, greater CCS deployment is fundamental to reduce CO2 emissions,” the report says. “In contrast, some stakeholders do not support CCS as a mitigation option, citing concerns with continued fossil fuel combustion and the uncertainties of long-term underground CO2 storage.”

Andres Restrepo, a senior attorney with the Sierra Club, said the expansion of fossil fuel plants is “incompatible with a livable future” but noted that because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the West Virginia v. EPA case, blending natural gas with hydrogen for power production and carbon capture “form the basis for the strongest possible standards that the EPA can legally propose.”

The EPA’s own projections show that many more power plants are likely to retire rather than install carbon capture, he added.

“We also believe the standards are likely to help deter some of the expected build-out of new gas plants in the first place,” Restrepo said. “Therefore, these standards are much more likely to reduce climate emissions and improve public health than simply maintaining the status quo.”

Don and Malissa Young stand on their property, in the location their living room was before debris contractors took their home without permission. (Photo by Justin Hicks/Louisville Public Media)

This article is republished from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.

On a steamy day in August, Don Young dug through the rubble that used to be his home. He was desperately trying to salvage the most precious possessions representing the life he’d made in the Letcher County community of McRoberts.

Floods last July ravaged Young’s community and much of Eastern Kentucky. But the wreckage that surrounded him that day was not caused by the storm.

How KyCIR analyzed Eastern Kentucky flood debris data

Instead, it was caused by companies hired to pick up debris in the months after the flood.

Without any notice, cleanup crews ripped apart the home that Young shared with his wife, Malissa, for nearly 30 years. The mobile home had been lifted off the foundation, but was still intact.

For weeks the Youngs had been working to pack up what they could from the inside: Baby photos, home videos, memorabilia from Don’s time spent as a state police officer.

“Stuff like that, you can’t replace it,” he said. “You wouldn’t have took millions for it. And they just came and destroyed it like it was nothing.”

Malissa Young, a Letcher County public school teacher, grew up on this plot of land. Looking over the dirt lot where her home once stood, she said she’ll never move back.

“It’s like a death. You go through it once with the house and it being flooded,” she said before trailing off.

“…and then they come in and tear down everything that you did save and haul it off,” Don said, finishing her thought.

A Kentucky Transportation Cabinet official overseeing the cleanup process called Don personally and afterwards told him to file a negligence claim with the state Board of Claims. They filed a claim seeking $400,000 to pay for the house and their belongings.

Instead, the state formally denied any liability in a response to the Youngs’ claim. An attorney for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet argued the couple’s house was taken by an unnamed third party. In fact, the response said the Youngs “may themselves have been negligent in failing to remove or secure their personal property.”

Don Young said he couldn’t do any heavy lifting to remove their belongings because of an old back injury. Plus, the couple said their vehicles were destroyed and they had nowhere to put their property after the flood.

It was all they could do to survive, they said, and make periodic trips to check on the property before the unannounced demolition.

The Youngs said cleanup workers claimed to have knocked on the door before tearing down the house. No one answered, and workers made no other attempts to call or locate the property owners. John Moore, a project manager with the Transportation Cabinet, said crews were advised to make contact with residents before starting work on their property, but that was not always possible due to the urgency of the task.

The Board of Claims is yet to decide on the Youngs case.

An investigation by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting found that the Youngs’ story was an early failure among many in the state and federal government’s attempt to clean up debris and dangerous materials left by the flood.

In daily reports, advisors from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regularly expressed concerns about crews taking trees or other materials that did not fit federal criteria for debris removal after a disaster. KyCIR heard from residents on multiple occasions that contractors removed debris such as valuable trees from private property without permission or cut half-mile long access routes through forests. It left them feeling overtaken and ignored by the very people charged with helping them.

Meanwhile, interviews with residents, as well as progress reports and data from the Transportation Cabinet show that there’s still plenty of debris left in Eastern Kentucky even though the state officially ended the cleanup mission in December.

People living in the area contacted state and county leadership and even organized a work stoppage to sound alarms about the danger posed by lingering debris. But state officials said the cleanup process was held back by federal agencies negotiating jurisdiction over removing debris from streams.

More cleanup projects are underway to address those concerns, but time is not on Eastern Kentucky’s side. When heavy rains descendedon the region again in February, leftover debris clogged drains and exacerbated flooding. The way some locals see it, the debris removal process that was supposed to help them recover instead made them more vulnerable.

A looming danger

Between July 26 and 30, 2022, a historic round of thunderstorms came through Southeastern Kentucky, dropping more than a foot of rain. Streams turned into creeks, creeks into rivers, rivers into destructive torrents.

When all was said and done, the flood caused damage across more than a dozen rural Appalachian counties and killed 45 people.

According to the National Weather Service, more than 600 helicopter rescues were needed to evacuate people trapped by quickly rising floodwaters. The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky reported 1,722 homes were totally destroyed and 3,986 homes were partial losses.

Early estimates from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the July floods created nearly 2 million cubic yards of debris in the waterways alone. That’s enough to fill the Churchill Downs racetrack and infield 23-feet high, according to a KyCIR analysis.

Debris included vehicles, campers, doublewide trailers, uprooted trees and storage buildings, according to an early Corps assessment report.

Experts say this debris poses a threat unique to mountainous Eastern Kentucky. Whatever is left in the streams that scour the valleys will eventually clog the flow of water. Water with no place else to go will end up over the banks and flood nearby property.

Blockages were already starting to form, according to a Corps report from August.

“The affected streams are beginning to reroute themselves,” the report stated. “If more precipitation causes these streams to top their banks, these debris jams will result in even more county wide flooding.”

Justin Branham was one of the Corps staffers who wrote those estimate reports. He grew up in Letcher County, less than half a mile from the Youngs’ home. He said the same creek that flooded the Youngs’ property ruined his parents’ garage, destroying vehicles, tools and other valuables.

Most of eastern Kentucky was in danger of flooding again because of debris piles blocking waterways, according to Branham.

“You’re living in a valley that’s 100 yards wide, and you’ve got a house, a creek, a road and a railroad,” Branham said. “And you’re going to cause flooding to it if you don’t get that stuff out.”

All that debris needed to get cleaned up, and quickly. Procurement documents show that, within a week after the flood, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet signed a contract with Florida-based Ashbritt Inc. to lead the cleanup process. Since August 2022, the state has paid the company $157 million according to procurement records.

Ashbritt Founder and Chairman Randal Perkins and other executives did not respond to a detailed list of findings and requests for interviews.

While announcing the contract on Aug. 4, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said debris would be removed “at a rapid pace.” But more than eight months after the mission began, material still clogs streams and litters hollers across eastern Kentucky.

‘Too many coaches, not enough players’

From the beginning, the debris removal process hit snags. And it was dangerous.

In an email obtained through an open records request, Kentucky Division of Emergency Management officials said that when workers were scoping out debris on Aug. 19, a man came out of his house with a gun and flak jacket “demanding to know what they were doing.”

The encounter prompted one emergency manager consultant to express “great concern regarding the safety of the contractors,” according to the email addressed to Jeremy Slinker, director of the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management. Perry County Emergency Management Director Jerry Stacy warned crews that “there had to be some precautions taken.”

In a daily report compiled by several staffers, an Army Corps of Engineers advisor wrote that even trying to get an accurate assessment of the amount of debris was hindered by “too many coaches, not enough players.”

“The efficacy and efficiency of the mission is suffering from miscommunication and lack of coordination,” said another Corps report.

George Minges, chief of emergency operations for the Corps’ Louisville district, said the agency did an “adequate” job supporting the state and FEMA during the cleanup process.

“I think we had outstanding communication with those partners,” he said.

But local officials still didn’t have an accurate picture of where debris was located and which areas were hardest hit, according to the report. Scouting crews would show up at a site only to find no debris. Other crews would bounce from one county to another before finishing the job.

A Corps report from a few days later shows small cleanup contractors were zooming around the counties, picking up debris from roads and waterways with little to no coordination or supervision.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will reimburse local governments for debris removal when that debris threatens health, safety or property. To make sure cleanup is done by the book, FEMA requires governments to hire monitors who watch over cleanup crews.

In reports, the Corps expressed concerns over the supervision provided by Thompson Monitoring, the company hired by Kentucky to serve this role. Corps advisors found monitors resting in their cars or positioned where they couldn’t actually see the work.

When emailed for comment on the debris removal mission, Thompson Monitoring declined to be interviewed and instead forwarded the request to the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.

According to interviews with state officials and people involved in the cleanup process, the Transportation Cabinet decided to organize the project into two distinct sections: One mission focused on roads, another focused on clearing out the waterways.

The waterway mission would prove the most difficult part of the cleanup process, in part because creeks often run through private property. This created tension between cleanup workers and residents who were already going through a terrible ordeal.

People like Laverne Fields said they watched as crews cleaned up some debris, but left other material behind, seemingly without any explanation.

The flood left Fields’ house straddling a creek in Letcher County with bags of debris piled out front. She said debris contractors wouldn’t touch the bags of garbage. Instead they tore the house down before she could recover a safe containing vital documents she would need to get help from FEMA down the road.

“They ripped our bedroom off, that’s where [the] safe was at,” Fields said. Fields said she was never able to find the safe.

“I don’t know who they worked for,” Fields said. “They didn’t even ask me…They yelled at me over it.”

They didn’t have to ask.

Contractors and monitors interpret FEMA’s debris removal policies to determine what is debris and whether it needs to be removed, without input from property owners.

‘You picked the wrong house’

Don and Malissa Young said they spent the night of the flood watching the torrential downpour and worrying.

A neighbor’s house crashed into theirs. They jumped into the rushing water, which pulled them down the flooded street. Don, who can’t swim, said he survived by holding onto a neighbor’s porch. Malissa said she clung to a tree branch with their two small dogs tucked under her arm until the water receded enough for a rescue.

Their doublewide trailer was lifted off the foundation. Don Young said he knew it was waterlogged, but many of their belongings inside were still salvageable.

The Youngs took refuge with a relative in Virginia, just across the state border with Kentucky.

They returned every few days to check on their property when they could borrow a vehicle, since theirs were destroyed. The Youngs said that, over the next few weeks, they salvaged what they could in plastic bins until they could return with a larger vehicle and someone to help move heavy items.

The work was slow and emotionally grueling.

Then on Aug. 22, the Youngs said they got an alarming call from their neighbor: A cleanup crew was tearing down the house. If they wanted to save anything left behind, they needed to get there quickly.

They raced back to McRoberts to find their house half demolished, the scoop of an excavator poised above the rest as the workers took a break for dinner.

Don Young confronted the cleanup workers. He wanted to know who authorized the crew to take his home without so much as a warning. Young said a field supervisor from Thompson Monitoring Services introduced herself and told him to take his complaints up with Gov. Andy Beshear.

“She said the governor told them to tear down anything that they thought was in danger of causing a flood if it rained,” Don said. “I said, ‘Well, you picked the wrong house.’”

The Corps report about the incident said everyone on the site that day had concerns “regarding the notification process for owners of trailers, homes, or storage buildings being removed.” It ended with a plea: “Better messaging is needed by state and local officials.”

Justin Branham was the Corps staffer who wrote that report and knows the Youngs personally. He said when things went wrong during the cleanup process, contractors would point the finger at him and the Corps. Since he was from the area, Branham became the face of the project to many of his neighbors. It didn’t sit well with him.

“You’re pitting people against people they don’t need to be pitted against, they should be working as a team,” Branham said. “And I should be able to go out into my community and say I’m doing the best I can to help these people.”

Later that week, Don Young called Beshear’s office, upset and wanting to talk “man to man,” according to an email from the governor’s office summarizing the call. Don said a constituent services representative said he couldn’t speak with the governor, but that they would pass his concerns along to the appropriate agency.

Emails show the governor’s staff reached out to the Transportation Cabinet and emergency management team for an explanation.

Jim Garrett, head of volunteer programs for Kentucky Emergency Management, wrote back that work crews needed to be given “better messaging on what they are doing.” Garrett said he was concerned about “any state employee starting a conversation with upset constituents with ‘Governor Beshear said…’”

John Moore, with the Transportation Cabinet, responded to the governor’s team, saying that at this point in the cleanup process, “there was a great sense of urgency to gather the debris expeditiously to avoid additional flooding.” Moore said he would reach out to the Youngs directly.

Moore called Don Young, who explained the situation as he saw it: The home was not in danger of falling into the creek and causing additional flooding, Don said, and he sent pictures showing the exact location of the house.

After the conversation ended, Moore emailed the Youngs instructions on how to file a negligence claim with the state Board of Claims. After the Youngs filed their claim in November, the Transportation Cabinet responded that the couple’s home was demolished by an unnamed third party. The Kentucky Board of Claims is yet to decide on the Youngs negligence claim, pending a hearing that has not yet been scheduled. The Youngs now have a lawyer and are exploring other avenues for legal action.

Cleanup crews were paid by the ton for debris removed.

Don Young alleged that fact explains why crews were in such a hurry to demolish his house.

“Somebody saw a dollar sign there and just tore it down, I think,” he said.

Just two days after crews demolished the Youngs’ home, the state bestowed anyone working on debris cleanup with the legal right to enter private property through a memorandum of understanding between the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet and the Transportation Cabinet. The environment cabinet has the authority to enter private property in emergencies that threaten public health. The cabinet extended that authority to crews clearing flood debris through this memorandum of understanding.

“The debris can not only impede stream flow but also may threaten the release of hazardous substances,” the memorandum of understanding explained.

To clean up debris, the Transportation Cabinet and its contractors were allowed to “enter into private property to, among other things, characterize and remove flood debris.”

Kentucky environmental attorney Randy Strobo said Kentucky law seems to justify that authority. But he said that power should be used carefully and communicated clearly.

“I think that needs to be limited. It’s not like you can do whatever you want,” Strobo said.

John Moore, with the Transportation Cabinet, said in an interview that cleanup crews were instructed to make attempts to contact property owners before starting the work.

“We advised them to work ahead to the greatest extent possible to knock on doors…but due to the urgency of the waterway, [we needed] to clear out the bridges and waterways to prevent additional flooding,” Moore said. “That was not always possible. The urgency of the mission was paramount.”

Even before the incident with the Youngs, Corps reports suggested that “law enforcement be available” if homeowners attempted to prevent the removal of structures.

Nearly a month later, the same work crew that demolished the Young’s home was confronted with threats and resistance when they tried to cut down live trees they considered to be a hazard to future flooding. This time they tried the law enforcement approach. A young, untrained police officer arrived on the scene to tase and arrest the homeowner.

The homeowners had no prior notice or information about what was happening and the mission debris workers were on. Like the Youngs, they’re also investigating legal remedies.

‘Those hanging on by a thread will be left with nothing’

Despite this broad authority to enter private property, many residents began to feel the cleanup crews were not being sufficiently thorough. Records show nearly 300 calls to a debris hotline managed by the Transportation Cabinet. Some residents called multiple times over the course of months.

A series of complaints from the Calhoun family in Knott County show four calls from October to January complaining about debris blocking the creek near their home. During a call on Jan. 3 Victor Calhoun reported that the creek was still blocked with trees, garbage and siding.

On Nov. 18, a Letcher County resident who lives near Rockhouse Creek told a hotline operator that FEMA “has cleaned the creek but it has been done incorrectly.” Two weeks later, he called again to report that FEMA’s work had changed the path of the creek and it was “eating out 4-5 feet sections at a time of his land.”

Communication between various work crews and government agencies removing debris from waterways deteriorated as the mission dragged on.

That’s largely because another federal agency had stepped into the complex mix: the National Resources Conservation Service, a subdivision from the United States Department of Agriculture.

FEMA and NRCS both allow crews to pick up stream-clogging debris, but they follow different timelines. FEMA’s work starts immediately while the NRCS is more focused on long-term stabilization. There’s some overlap in those tasks, and FEMA guidelines stipulate that the agency won’t pay for any work the NRCS takes on, even if the NRCS doesn’t have the funding needed at the time. Moore with the Transportation Cabinet said that created an “impasse” that held up progress.

“At the very early stage in order for FEMA to get moving, they had to draw a line in the sand,” Moore said.

“The amount of sediment still sitting in these choked channels is incredible and the mission mostly funded by FEMA to remove it is being squandered and ran amuck. There are people hanging on by a thin thread up here and if another decent rain hits, those hanging on by a thread will be left with nothing.”

– Justin Branham in an email to state officials in September

Many of the debris workers weren’t privy to that line in the sand. They were constantly told by monitors to leave behind massive piles of debris. Not only did it mean they were passing up a chance to make more money, they felt like they were leaving dangerous garbage in communities they were supposed to be helping.

“They were changing guidelines every single day,” said John Collins, a local business owner who worked as a subcontracted debris hauler under Ashbritt, the company hired by Kentucky to manage the debris project. “They wouldn’t let us get any sediment. They wouldn’t let us get anything out of the creek. All you could get was a few dead trees and some garbage.”

Others noticed the problem including Corps staffer Branham, who wrote a scathing email to state officials in late September. Branham was writing as a concerned citizen, and in interviews with KyCIR has been clear he does not speak on behalf of the Corps.

“The amount of sediment still sitting in these choked channels is incredible and the mission mostly funded by FEMA to remove it is being squandered and ran amuck,” Branham wrote. “There are people hanging on by a thin thread up here and if another decent rain hits, those hanging on by a thread will be left with nothing.”

Some work crews even went on a temporary strike in October, unhappy with how they were being directed to leave behind areas of waterways full of debris. Neither the strike nor Branham’s warnings resulted in meaningful changes.

Unlike FEMA, the NRCS needs to apply for funding on a project-by-project basis. This means much of the stream work left to do in eastern Kentucky will need to wait until the agency secures funding and lines up agreements with local governments.

NRCS engineers and public information officers will not release information about when and where their work in Eastern Kentucky will take place. However, KyCIR found data on an online map last updated in September 2022, showing nearly 450 locations in Eastern Kentucky marked as “Approved NRCS Sites.” NRCS employees confirmed this data was accurate at that time, but has now changed.

Also in October, Gov. Beshear made an appearance at the University of Kentucky’s Blue and White basketball game, a pre-season scrimmage in Pikeville. Beshear said in a pre-game interview that workers were making great progress towards removing debris from eastern Kentucky.

“We are close, which is amazing three months out, to take that chaos and ship it out of town, out of county and out of state,” Beshear said.

But records show there was still plenty of work left to do.

In late November, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wrote a memo to state officials estimating the scope of work left to do. In ?Letcher County, they expected another six to eight weeks.

But Ashbritt told crews to wrap up work by Dec. 22, just five weeks later.

Calvin Waddles, a district magistrate in Knott County, reached out to the Transportation Cabinet in early August to complain about a complete blockage of the Beaver Creek near the border with Floyd County, according to a daily report from the Corps. He asked that the blockage be given priority status because rain could cause “a second round of flooding in the area.”

Waddles said the Beaver Creek blockage was still not cleared as of March 6.

“They still need to come back, this needs to be cleaned up,” Waddles said in a phone call. “There’s debris, basically, from mountainside to mountainside.”

An analysis from Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting found that as of Dec. 22, only 59% of the debris initially estimated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to be on ground following the flood had been picked up.

State officials said those estimates included categories of debris that FEMA wouldn’t pay to clean up, and as such were not the focus of the initial cleanup project.

When presented with KyCIR’s findings multiple times, a legislative representative for FEMA said “state and locals are responsible for debris removal” and that they are “supposed to have contracts in place” before a disaster. Kentucky did not. The representative was unsure if it would affect FEMA’s reimbursement. Despite promising more information, they never contacted us again.

Regardless of who pays, debris left behind is more than an eyesore. It can make future flooding worse.

‘Band-Aids on bullet wounds’

Nearly seven months after what survivors have labeled the “big July flood” Tonya Boggs walked up to the podium at a monthly meeting of county officials. She was visibly frustrated. Her mother, Teresa Burke, stood beside her for support.

“It’s hard when you’re trying to rebuild what was destroyed, and then here this happens, and the water came right back in my house,” Boggs told county officials, politely trying to contain her anger.

The weekend before, a heavy rainstorm prompted the governor to declare another state of emergency for 22 counties due to flooding and landslides. Nearly a dozen of those counties were still trying to recover from July’s floods.

Boggs and Burke told officials that, even before the rain, debris clogged brand new culverts that were installed by cleanup crews. Then during the February storm, an embankment upstream gave way and washed down the creek, further clogging the culverts until they dislodged. That led to another flood in the house she’s frantically been trying to restore since July.

“Those culverts are halfway…and some of them are more than halfway full of just pure mud and sand and dirt and rocks,” Boggs said.

Many county officials were upset, too. Letcher County Judge Executive Terry Adams said he knows the culverts are “inadequate.” But he said that’s the only thing FEMA or the state will pay for. He said the temporary work often isn’t appropriate for the stream.

”The state and FEMA would not do that,” Adams said. “They wouldn’t put a bridge back in [where one had been before].”

Some of the local contractors who worked on the waterways were at the meeting too. They said they predicted this would happen long before Boggs’ house flooded again. Their warnings went unheeded, however, and they were constantly told to leave debris behind without much of an explanation.

“Every time we get a lot of rain this is what’s going to happen,” local debris contractor Wade Adams said. “It’s not our fault. I know everyone is mad at the contractors, but we can only do what we were told to. You can’t just clean out a part of the creek. ”

Most in eastern Kentucky say this is a familiar story. Government officials make TV appearances, but don’t listen to locals. They make promises they can’t deliver.

Candice Fields, disaster coordinator for the Kentucky River Area Development District, said the help that does come is akin to a “band aid on a bullet wound.”

“Andy Beshear gets on [the TV] and says, ‘Oh, things have changed,’” said Angela Collins, a Letcher County resident who is married to contractor John Collins. “Well, get your high horse down here and see how much it changed. Because they left garbage! Do we deserve garbage all over our land? No, we don’t. We’re not a bunch of you know, nutsy hillbillies. We’re human beings just like everybody else.”

To make things more dire, Collins said everyone knows spring is the wettest season in eastern Kentucky. Now, everyone is bracing for the worst.

In this aerial view of Dawson Springs on Dec. 13, 2021, homes are heavily damaged from a tornado three days prior. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — Kentucky officials are opening up applications this summer for almost $124 million in federal funding to help rebuild housing and infrastructure primarily in tornado-impacted Western Kentucky, which Gov. Andy Beshear said could help rebuild around 600 homes.?

The federal funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will go to rebuilding homes, rehabilitating and rebuilding rental properties and reinforcing electric and water infrastructure for potential future disasters. The funding is also directed to help some Eastern Kentucky communities that were hit hard by flooding in 2021, separate from flooding that devastated the region in the summer of 2022.

Beshear at a Wednesday news conference encouraged those impacted by tornadoes or flooding in 2021 and still in need of stable housing to reach out to local nonprofits or housing authorities about the new funding.?

“We’re taking a big step forward in helping our neighbors who are impacted by the tornadoes of 2021 and the floods of 2021. Many lost their homes, some lost everything that they own,” Beshear said. “We’re going to spread the wealth to those who need it the most.”

Eighty percent of this funding will be directed to Graves, Hopkins, Warren and Breathitt counties, while the remaining monies will go to 36 other counties.?

The Kentucky Department of Local Government (DLG) plans to open applications for local governments, nonprofits, private companies and other groups to apply for housing funding on May 1. Applications to reinforce and repair infrastructure will open on June 1.?

Beshear said he expects a separate tranche of HUD funding to be made available to the state to address the homes and infrastructure lost in the 2022 summer floods in Eastern Kentucky, something that Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell has said will be near $300 million.?

Community leaders on the front lines of tornado recovery in Western Kentucky were enthusiastic about the federal funding but also made clear it would likely not solve the entirety of an ongoing affordable housing shortage.?

Mayfield-Graves County Long-Term Recovery Group Executive Director Ryan Drane said there was a “housing shortage crisis” on both ends of the state before tornadoes impacted Western Kentucky in 2021 and floods impacted Eastern Kentucky.

“We feel like this is going to be a great opportunity for many of the communities to, you know, on the road for recovery,” Drane said. “Is it going to make the entire region whole? I would say not. But we weren’t ‘whole’ before the disaster hit.”?

The DLG consulted last year with local housing authorities, federal officials and more to create an analysis of what unmet needs remained for housing and infrastructure in Western Kentucky following the tornadoes. That initial analysis found, even with the funding, there was more than $110 million in unmet needs to address housing.

“The discrepancies between the need and the funding are the result of the increased need for affordable housing,” the initial state plan stated.?

HUD announced tens of millions of dollars in additional recovery funds for Kentucky in January to reach the total of nearly $124 million the state is receiving, but even then the DLG’s latest plan states the “calculated unmet housing need will still not be met.”?

Adrienne Bush, the executive director of the housing advocacy group Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky, said once the flow of federal funding into Kentucky ends, state lawmakers need to reassess what else needs to be done to address housing needs.?

“We’re going to spend a lot of time this interim talking about the remaining unmet housing needs in the context of the 2024 budget and what the state will need to put up in order to finish the job,” Bush said.?

Bush credited the GOP-controlled state legislature for passing a law this year to establish a rural housing trust fund supplemented with $20 million already set aside for disaster recovery by the state. A coalition of nonprofits this year had unsuccessfully asked the legislature for $300 million over two years for affordable housing construction.?

Kentucky suffered a shortage of almost 79,000 affordable housing units before tornadoes and floods destroyed and damaged thousands of homes, according to an analysis of data from the American Community Survey for 2016 to 2020.?

Local leaders from Western Kentucky who joined Beshear on Wednesday remained optimistic the funding would move their communities forward, including in the small city of Dawson Springs, hometown to the governor’s father, former Gov. Steve Beshear.?

“We’re seeing that rebuilding all in Dawson Springs, but there’s so many that can’t get there from where they are right now,” said Hopkins County Judge-Executive Jack Whitfield. “This funding is going to take care and help those so much who may not be able to otherwise afford a new house.”

Lewis Ritchie pulls a kayak through floodwater after delivering groceries to his father-in-law on July 28, 2022 outside Jackson in Breathitt County. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

Kentucky’s state government will be unable to compete for $4.6 billion from the federal government to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gasses because it is one of only four states that did not apply for up to $3 million to create a climate action plan through a new grant program.?

A spokesperson for Kentucky’s environmental agency said the Beshear administration is leaving the decision whether to apply for the climate-planning money up to the state’s largest cities.

An environmental advocate called the decision disappointing, given that Kentucky has suffered “major climate disasters” in the form of floods and tornadoes.?

The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants Program, established through the Democrat-backed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and housed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, aims to give grant funding to states, local governments, tribes and others to develop and implement plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the wake of increasing climate change-driven extreme weather and disasters.

The grant program is doling out up to $250 million to states and local governments to create plans to reduce emissions, including to fund community outreach and engagement in creating the plans and paying for staff and research to target emissions. Those who apply for the planning grants will then be eligible for a much larger round of grants, up to $4.6 billion, to implement the newly-created plans.?

“The promise is clean, affordable energy, safe, breathable air free of toxics for all Americans, well-paying jobs sustained by the new energy economy,” said Jennifer Macedonia, an U.S. EPA administrator speaking at a February webinar. “The Climate Pollution Reduction Grant Program, in concert with other federal funding streams, represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in our future and realize transformative, lasting change.”?

The program was presumptively giving states up to $3 million in planning funds and the country’s largest metro areas, including Louisivlle, up to $1 million in funds. Yet Kentucky was one of four states — along with Florida, South Dakota, and Iowa — that declined to apply for the money by a deadline of March 31. According to federal guidance, states that do not apply for a planning grant cannot apply for any of the $4.6 billion to implement the plans.?

Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet spokesperson John Mura in a statement earlier this month said local governments are “best situated to apply for and administer” the grant funding.?

“The Beshear administration is actively applying for and receiving a number of federal grants to help boost efforts to build a better Kentucky for all our people,” Mura said.?

Because the state declined the up to $3 million in planning funds, Kentucky’s three largest metro areas — Louisville, Lexington and Bowling Green — are eligible to receive the state’s share of grant funding if they apply by April 28. Officials in Louisville and Lexington have indicated they are applying, while the grants coordinator for Bowling Green said the city is “currently looking” into the program.?

Kentucky Conservation Committee Executive Director Lane Boldman, whose organization represents conservation and renewable energy groups, said earlier this month she was disappointed Kentucky didn’t apply for the program because the state needs to be “using all the tools that the federal government is offering to us.”?

“Particularly in a state that has dealt with two major climate disasters — whether they want to call them that or not — with excessive flooding and the tornadoes, we need to be beefing up our capacity for those situations to continue,” Boldman said.?

According to federal guidance, at least three metro areas in Kentucky need to apply for the state’s declined share of the planning funding or the money could go to a metro area in another state. However, local governments that don’t don’t apply for a planning grant could still receive some of the billions of dollars in implementation grants as long as a local government’s proposal is a part of an existing climate emissions reduction plan.?

Jada Griggs, the city of Lexington’s senior program manager for sustainability, said the program will allow the city to collaborate with surrounding counties on creating goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, some of which may have a “significant cost” that grant funding could help with.?

“There is work that has to be done, and I believe the support is there,” Griggs said. “It’s important to me to not just set the targets but have a game plan so that when I’m retired, the city can still meet those, or know what to do to make the adjustments to make those come to fruition.”?

Leading climate researchers with the United Nations last month issued increasingly urgent warnings to countries to slash almost two-thirds of carbon emissions by 2035 in an effort to still meet climate warming targets set by the Paris climate agreement and limit the detrimental impacts of climate change.

Inside Climate News recently reported that Kentucky is dead last among the states in energy production from solar and wind, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Natural gas flare from offshore oil drilling rig in Cook Inlet in Alaska on a summer evening.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Natural gas has long been subject to a war of words. Once it was a “bridge fuel” that would straddle the gap from fossil energy to renewable sources. More recently, climate activists have sought to highlight that gas pollutes, too, by stripping “natural” from its name and calling it fossil- or methane gas.

The industry is pushing back, and gas executives displayed their latest linguistic counteroffensive at an industry conference this month in Houston.

“It’s time for us to stop tiptoeing about the value of natural gas,” said Octávio Sim?es, chief executive of Tellurian, which is struggling to finance its multi-billion dollar plan to export liquified natural gas, or LNG. “It’s time for us to say it is an incredible fuel, and we’re not afraid to burn it in our kitchens,” he added, drawing cheers from the otherwise subdued crowd.

Gas’s fortunes have fallen over the last decade as emerging science revealed that its production and transport releases large volumes of methane, the fuel’s primary component and a potent greenhouse gas.?

Some estimates indicate these leaks have wiped away much or even most of the gains the United States appeared to make in cutting climate pollution by replacing coal with gas as a fuel for power plants.?

When burned, gas releases about half as much carbon dioxide as coal, but methane traps about 85 times more heat than CO2 over a 20-year period. Other science has shown that gas stoves emit harmful chemicalsthat can collect in people’s homes.

“We lost the narrative on the value of natural gas,” Sim?es said during the panel, held in a windowless hotel ballroom with soaring ceilings and seating for hundreds that was only about half-full.

Toby Rice, who leads EQT, the country’s largest gas producer, was sitting next to Sim?es and has been at the forefront of an effort to win back that narrative. During the panel, Rice called his company’s product the “cleanest energy in the world,” despite the fact that gas emits 20 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Fossil fuel executives were broadcasting the same message as Rice and Sim?es throughout the conference, CERAWeek by S&P Global, one of the energy industry’s largest annual gatherings.?

Ryan Lance, chief executive of ConocoPhillips, said in a separate panel that “the whole taxonomy around gas is changing” as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent energy prices soaring and European countries scrambling for new sources of fuel. “Gas is something that’s going to be more than just a bridge fuel,” Lance said. “It’s going to be around for a long time.”

Environmental groups and many scientists have warned that this outcome would be a disaster for the climate.?

“Neither fossil gas nor liquefied natural gas (LNG) is clean, nor are they particularly low” in climate pollution, the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a report last year. The report argued that a planned LNG export expansion threatened to place global climate goals out of reach, and that the Biden administration should instead support development of wind and solar energy, which are increasingly cost-competitive with gas, as a replacement for coal overseas.

CERAWeek draws government officials, too, and one day, executives with the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other fossil fuel industry groups met with representatives of G7 nations to press the “unique and vital role of natural gas in meeting shared energy security and climate objectives.”?

During the meeting, the executives urged the G7 nations to “affirm the crucial contributions of natural gas” when they hold their annual summit in May, according to an open letter from the industry groups.?

Fossil fuel companies have been gearing up for this battle for years. Among those who cheered Sim?es’ defense of gas was former Sen. Mary Landrieu, who was sitting toward the back of the room with former Rep. Tim Ryan. The two Democrats have been hired by a group called Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, launched by EQT and several other gas companies and labor unions to promote the fuel to Democrats.

“That’s what me and Mary are really focused on,” Ryan said in an interview after the panel, “how to get Democrats kind of in line.”

Internal documents obtained by the Guardian revealed that the group ran a multi-million dollar advertising campaign in advance of the 2020 election trying to “redefine the role of natural gas in fighting climate change and protect the social license to operate.” One document said that “success for the natural gas industry will be rooted in whether we can message to the left and the Democratic base of Black and Latino and age 18-34 voters as effectively as we have messaged to the right.”

EQT launched a separate group in October, along with pipeline developers Williams and TC Energy, called the Partnership to Address Global Emissions, or PAGE Coalition, to promote LNG exports as a tool for cutting climate pollution. That group has also enlisted center-left political groups including the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Progressive Policy Institute and labor unions.

The PAGE Coalition has sponsored content and events with Politico and Axios, and spent $850,000 last year lobbying Congress and the Biden administration. EQT’s Rice traveled last year to the United Nations climate summit in Egypt, known as COP 27, where the PAGE coalition held a side-event. An EQT tweet shows Rice talking about “the greatest green initiative on the planet.”

Russia’s weaponization of its gas last year presented American companies with a new opportunity to promote their own exports.

“You’re not going to wake up one day and have some petro-dictator say, ‘you know what, we’re shutting down your energy,” Rice said during the CERAWeek panel in Houston. “It’s backed by the U.S. military, and it’s bullet-proof.”

The industry argues that using American gas overseas can be a win for the climate, too. Some research has indicated that methane emissions are lower in the United States gas sector than in Russia. And if the gas is used to replace coal in power generation, which is still widespread in many Asian countries, companies have said expanded gas exports can be part of an effort to lower carbon dioxide emissions.

In a January report, Paul Bledsoe, a strategic advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute and advisory council member of the PAGE Coalition, made this case to argue for doubling gas exports and expanding production by 10 percent. The report argued that the United States needed to limit gas leaks throughout the supply chain, pointing to new regulations from the Biden administration as a first step, but also called for speeding approval of new pipelines and gas export terminals.

“The reason we have to produce more is we’ve got to nudge Russia out of the market as best we can, on the basis of lower emissions,” Bledsoe said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. “I think this will happen over the next five years if we do it right.”

Bledsoe said he has not been paid directly by the gas industry. Tommy Kaelin, a spokesman for the Progressive Policy Institute, did not answer whether the organization has received industry funding, saying that “no funding source influences our research.” Previous reporting has revealed the group has taken donations from ExxonMobil and the American Gas Association.

EQT and many other gas companies say they are working to reduce leaks to a minimum—reporting to the EPA suggests EQT has one of the lowest rates of methane emissions among top producers.

But Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said there isn’t enough data to know exactly how much methane is leaking from pipelines and other equipment. “The statements about ‘our emissions are low,’” he said, “they’re not based on transparent, empirical data.”

Even if methane leaks fell to near zero, gas still emits carbon dioxide when it is burned. Globally, the fuel has been a growing source of climate pollution, though emissions dipped slightly last year after Russia shut exports to Europe.

The arguments from Bledsoe and the PAGE coalition also ignore science saying that meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius requires rapidly phasing out all fossil fuels, including gas.?

A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency, for example, said that no new natural gas fields were compatible with the 1.5 degree target, nor were “many” of the LNG plants then in the construction or planning phases.?

That same year, a UN report found that gas use needed to begin its decline immediately. (Limiting warming to 2 degrees, a less ambitious goal associated with more dangerous extreme weather and sea level rise, would allow for more gas use, with a peak around 2030, the report said.)

Bledsoe and others have argued that carbon capture and storage could one day begin to limit the emissions from burning gas. During one panel at the CERAWeek conference, John Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate, also alluded to the emissions-cutting technology, saying, “Gas is part of the transition, folks, absolutely. But if you get to 2030 and?you’re not abating those emissions, you’re then contributing to the problem.”

To date, there are no commercial-scale gas power plants fitted with carbon capture technology, which has failed to catch on despite decades of investment and research.

In some ways, gas companies are winning their battle. Last year saw the highest domestic gas use ever, though consumption dipped globally after Russia cut shipments to Europe.

“I truly think it’s the golden age right now for natural gas,” said Alan Armstrong, who was sitting on stage with Rice and Sim?es and is the chief executive of Williams, which pipes about one-third of the nation’s gas.

But the executives’ comments could also be read more as a last-ditch defense than a confident attack. Their panel was framed by a question: Not whether renewable energy growth would erode demand for natural gas, but “how quickly” that will occur.

Economists and policy experts project that the Inflation Reduction Act, with its subsidies for clean energy, could quickly send gas demand falling. An increasing number of cities and states are also adopting policies to phase out gas for use in heating and cooking in buildings, pinching another source of demand. In that light, expanded exports become a necessity for the industry’s future.

Executives have said that they could have trouble realizing their goal of increasing exports unless they can build new pipelines quickly. Permitting reform, then, is the policy target of the industry’s linguistic spear.

“We really need to raise our voices as the American public and demand that we get permitting reform,” said Armstrong, the Williams executive, and demand that it speeds approval of fossil fuel projects, not just clean energy.

“That’s the issue,” said Ryan, the former congressman now working with the industry group Natural Allies. “And the fact that we have, you know, the industry, a lot of labor unions now moving in and joining Natural Allies, it’s a pretty strong coalition on the Democratic side, plus the renewable folks want transmission lines.”

Days earlier, John Podesta, the senior White House climate advisor, had told the conference that the Biden administration’s clean energy goals depended on passing permitting reforms through Congress, and he asked the oil and gas industry for help.

Throughout the conference, there was an optimism that the industry could secure legislation that would assist its export plans.

“I think they’re going to get done,” Ryan said.

A bill that would make it harder for Kentucky’s utility regulator to allow utilities to retire coal plants on the state’s electricity grid became law Friday without Gov. Andy Beshear’s signature.?

Senate Bill 4, primarily sponsored by Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, would create a series of prerequisites on the Kentucky Public Service Commission before it could approve a regulated utility’s request to retire a fossil fuel-fired power plant.?

The Democratic governor did not veto the legislation during the ten day period he had to consider the bill after it passed the Kentucky legislature, instead allowing it to become law without his signature. The Republican-backed bill has an emergency declaration, meaning it goes into effect immediately.?

Republican supermajorities in the legislature pointed to concerns over the reliability of the electric grid as reasoning for SB 4 following rolling blackouts that some utilities implemented amid arctic temperatures last winter. Mills and other Republicans referenced past and planned retirements of coal-fired power plants that they say could hinder electricity reliability in the future.?

During a legislative hearing earlier this year about the rolling blackouts, utility leaders instead pointed to key components of a natural gas pipeline that froze as a cause behind the rolling blackouts.?

According to a recent report from the think tank Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, it was gas and coal power plants that largely failed to perform as expected during the arctic blast. PJM Interconnection, the regional electric grid operator that includes Kentucky, saw coal and gas power plants account for 87% of the PJM’s forced outages on Dec. 24 when energy demand was peaking.

The bill was opposed by almost all Democratic lawmakers, a handful of Republican lawmakers and Kentucky’s investor-owned utilities and manufacturers, saying that such legislation could increase electricity rates for consumers and businesses and could hinder utilities from being able to retire uneconomical, aging coal-fired power plants at the appropriate time.?

Only Democratic lawmakers mentioned the implications on climate change the bill could have as it moved through the legislature. Researchers with the United Nations issued a stark warning last week in its latest report on climate change, urging countries across the globe to slash two-thirds of its carbon dioxide emissions by 2035 to limit the catastrophic effects of rising global temperatures. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last week that humanity was on “thin ice” and that the world needed climate action “on all fronts.”

According to the Associated Press, Guterres specifically called on rich countries to stop using coal by 2030 and have zero-emission electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, including no gas-fired power plants.?

In Kentucky, Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities and the Tennessee Valley Authority are both retiring coal-fired power plants and replacing such electricity generation in part with gas-fired power plants.?

According to the International Energy Agency, coal is the largest global source of electricity generation and largest global source of carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change.

Rep. Jim Gooch, R-Providence, presents Senate Bill 4 to the House. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)

FRANKFORT — A bill backed by Kentucky’s coal industry that would make it harder for utilities to retire fossil fuel-fired power plants received final passage Thursday in the Kentucky House of Representatives, sending the legislation for Gov. Andy Beshear’s consideration.?

Senate Bill 4, primarily sponsored by Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, would impose a series of prerequisites on the Kentucky Public Service Commission, the state regulator of utilities, before the commission could approve a utility’s request to retire a fossil fuel-fired power plant.?

The bill sparked strong debate over the role coal-fired power will play in the future of the state, where coal currently generates the large majority of electricity for Kentuckians. Most Republicans touted their support for coal, asserting that past and planned retirements of coal-fired power plants in Kentucky and across the country threaten the reliability of the state’s electric grid.?

“When it comes to renewable energy, I have no problem. But the wind won’t always blow and the sun won’t always shine. But coal always keeps the lights on,” said Rep. Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester on the House floor.?

Mills, the primary bill sponsor, and other Republicans point to rolling blackouts implemented by some Kentucky utilities due to arctic temperatures as a recent example as to why the legislation is needed. During a legislative hearing earlier this year about the rolling blackouts, utility leaders instead pointed to key components of a natural gas pipeline that froze as a cause behind the rolling blackouts.?

According to a recent report from the think tank Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, gas and coal power plants largely failed to perform as expected during the arctic blast. PJM Interconnection, the regional electric grid operator that includes Kentucky, saw coal and gas power plants account for 87% of the PJM’s forced outages on Dec. 24 when energy demand was peaking.

Investor-owned utilities including Duke Energy Kentucky and Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities have opposed the bill throughout its movement, saying the proposal could force the utilities to maintain uneconomical coal plants past their reasonable lifespan and burden consumers with the costs of maintaining the plants.?

In a statement, a coalition representing investor-owned utilities said SB4 “jeopardizes” the safety, reliability and affordability of electricity in Kentucky and that the state’s sources of electricity need to be diversified.?

“SB 4 is a fundamental departure from this proven method of regulation that will only increase rates higher than necessary to achieve safe, reliable service,” said a spokesperson for the utilities coalition calling itself Kentuckians for Affordable and Reliable Energy. “This change risks Kentucky’s current competitive advantage to attract and retain the manufacturing industries essential to our economy.”

The spokesperson for the utilities said the PSC already considers “principles of least-cost” to determine electricity rates. Utilities are required every three years to present a plan to the PSC regarding how to provide “adequate and reliable” electricity service into the future at the “lowest possible cost.”

The Kentucky Association of Manufacturers was also opposed to the bill. Association President Frank Jemley in a statement said the group remained “convinced this is bad policy that will produce higher energy costs.”

The bill passed the House 66-28 mostly on party lines, with nine Republicans joining the Democratic minority in opposition. At least one Republican cited the concerns of LG&E and KU in voting against the bill.?

“They just had some concerns about it and shared it, and I was just responding to that,” said Russell Webber, R-Sheperdsville. “Time will tell. We’ll see what happens. But I was just exercising caution on it for my folks. We do have some of the lowest utility rates in the state, and I want to keep them that way.”

Almost all Democrats in the House voted against SB 4, in which Rep. Daniel Grossberg, D-Louisville, argued that the legislature was missing opportunities to embrace newer, greener energy sources.

“Coal is not coming back,” says Louisville lawmaker

“I’m going to say a very uncomfortable truth that my colleagues might not want to hear today. But someday, their children and their grandchildren will see that it’s proven true. Coal is not coming back,” Grossberg said. “Coal plants are not economical. They are not environmentally friendly. They are not reliable, and they are not the future.”

A report in January from the nonpartisan research group Energy Innovation Policy and Technology LLC found that 99% of all coal-fired power plants across the country, including all operating plants in Kentucky, were more expensive to operate than new solar or wind installations.?

LG&E and KU is requesting to retire some of its coal plants to be replaced by natural gas and solar, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which isn’t regulated by the state PSC, plans to retire the entirety of its coal-fired power plants by 2035 to be replaced in part by burning natural gas.?

Rep. Lindsey Burke, D-Lexington, in speaking on SB4 said the reason why Kentucky was experiencing “monumental storms” was because of effects of climate change.?

“I know it’s not a popular topic here, but it’s real,” Burke said. “We can do better because we know better.”?

Burning coal releases the most carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change compared to any other electricity source, and leading researchers with the United Nations have warned the global power system needs to be rapidly decarbonized to limit catastrophic impacts of rising climate temperatures.?

When LG&E and KU requested before the PSC to retire some of its coal-fired power generation, the Kentucky Coal Association intervened in the case to “protect Kentucky coal generation” and “ensure Kentucky makes the right energy investment decisions.” The Kentucky Coal Association has backed SB 4 and is urging Beshear to sign what they consider to be a “common-sense bill.”?

Mills, who received an award last year from the Kentucky Coal Association for his legislative work, said he believed even with the passage of SB 4 that the topic of energy reliability could come up next year.?

“Hopefully, this will bring some stability to our electrical grid over the next several years,” Mills said. “I’m just still very concerned about the next 10 to 15 years, as we’re making these changes over to new sources of electricity.”

Timm Martin points out areas that are part of the Jellico Vegetation Management proposal to clear cut and log on 10.000 acres inside the Daniel Boone National Forest. (Photo by Jared Hamilton)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. ?The story is part of Deforestation Inc., a global investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

WILLIAMSBURG — Brandon Bowlin learned of the U.S. government’s plan for clear-cutting in the southernmost mountains of Daniel Boone National Forest only a few weeks after the hard summer rains of 2022, when the earth slid off a mountain beneath a slope he had once logged.

Since age 14 — when Bowlin first held a chainsaw — he has harvested timber in these woods. But they’ve also been his hunting grounds and refuge. It’s a place where he has come across oaks so wide that three men couldn’t join hands around the trunk, trees that witnessed history before the United States existed and could live well into the future.

Bowlin, 37, and his wife, Charity, bought a home nestled beside this forest last year, hoping the land and lush mountains would be a legacy for their teenage children. Now, they could inherit a front row seat to one of the largest and longest-term logging projects ever proposed in the Daniel Boone.

The U.S. Forest Service’s plan, unveiled in October, is for logging, much of it clear-cutting, and the use of herbicides in nearly 10,000 acres over the next 40 years — a project that would spread over roughly half of Jellico Mountain and surrounding peaks on the Tennessee border.

Bowlin is now one of hundreds of residents of Kentucky’s Whitley and McCreary counties begging the Forest Service to abandon the idea. Their pleas bring up the tragedy that looms over the Jellico logging conflict — last summer’s floods and mudslides that killed 44 people in neighboring counties of the Appalachian Mountain range — a disaster residents view as inextricably linked to wanton extraction of both coal and timber.

“The slides all have one thing in common and that’s at some point in the past 10 years and even less in some cases, the mountains above them [have] been clear-cut!” Bowlin wrote to the Forest Service of last year’s deadly landslides and other earthen collapses he has witnessed in woods near the proposed Jellico logging site.

The Forest Service says it will study landslide risk along with other impacts in the environmental assessment of its so-called “Jellico Vegetation Management” proposal that’s due in June. But if officials follow past practice, that analysis will not make more than a passing reference to the most profound environmental issue raised by the Jellico project — the loss of forest protection from the ravages of climate change.

A growing body of scientific evidence makes clear that forests have been a critical buffer against global warming, with mature and old-growth forests storing an outsized amount of carbon dioxide. President Joe Biden acknowledged the “irreplaceable role” of forests in reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in an April 2022 executive order. He directed the Forest Service to conduct its first ever inventory of mature and old-growth stands in National Forests, with an eye to creating new policy protecting them.

“If you compare the map of North America in 1620…with America today, you’ll see how much we’ve devastated our forests,” Biden said at the time.??“From the Atlantic Coast almost to the Mississippi River was heavy forests, and we took it all down over those years.”

And yet, even while the Forest Service proceeds with its mature and old-growth census — due in April — the agency has more than 20 logging projects planned or underway on 370,000 acres of older forest around the country, according to a tally by the Climate Forests Project, a large coalition of environmental groups. In a slew of those projects—particularly in the eastern United States—the Forest Service is seeking explicitly to reduce the amount of mature forest on its lands—including in Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky.

Finding meaning in a forest

Bowlin admits that his longing to protect the Jellicos may seem, in his words, “bipolar,” since he has worked in the private land surrounding the forest all his life to cut trees down. “I love logging,” he said. “It’s in my blood, but I have a lot of conservationist in me.”

When Bowlin was growing up, he always thought he’d be a coal miner like his father and grandfather. But his grandfather introduced him to a neighbor who was cutting trees near the mines.

Trees could cause problems, especially at the mouth of the mines. Bowlin’s first job was to preemptively cut the trees around a mine so that endangered bats that migrated to the area in spring would not nest where they’d put themselves in jeopardy and get the mining operations in trouble with regulators.

Working in the woods suited Bowlin. “When you’re a kid, as a deer hunter, the first time your dad or your pap turns you loose and says, ‘Okay, you can go on your own today,’ it’s like a rite of passage…,” he said.

These days, his wife teases him because he comes home from hunts with photos and video more often than with deer. For example, there’s “Patches,” a doe he has named because of the scars on her right shoulder and hip, where she must have been once grazed by a crossbow. He has seen her come back year after year with new fawns. He talks to her, feeds her corn and swears that she recognizes the sound of his truck.

“A real true hunter has also got to be a conservationist because if you go out and kill everything, you have nothing for the next year and the year after that,” Bowlin said.

Although the Forest Service never built trails in the Jellico mountains, Bowlin often hikes, hunts and fishes in the woods beside the national forest. The landowner, Timm Martin, has built 17 miles of trails over the past 25 years and Bowlin helps Martin steward his acreage. Timm’s wife, Theresa, calls him “part of our family on the land.”

The Martins came to love the Jellico mountains from a completely different perspective than Bowlin. Timm was a tech entrepreneur and Theresa was an investment banker living in northern Kentucky near the Ohio border when they decided to seek out a more peaceful life. They crossed the country in an RV, looking at sites out West that were expensive, hot and dry, but Theresa saw a plot for sale back East in a landscape they knew and loved—the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky.

It’s plenty moist. Timm marvels at the moss that seems to grow on every stone of their farm on Little Wolf Creek—part of more than 2,700 acres of riparian corridor the Forest Service estimated to cross the Jellico mountains. Two rare freshwater ray-finned fish, the Cumberland Darterand the Blackside Dace, found nowhere outside these streams in the Cumberland River system, are on the federal endangered species list. More than 55 inches of precipitation has fallen in six of the past 12 yearsat the closest station in the Mesonet, Kentucky’s extensive local weather monitoring system. By one criterion, that would be enough water to make the Martin’s woods a temperate rainforest if the summers weren’t so hot.

Meeting with the Forest Service

The November consultation with the Forest Service started with a prayer, which isn’t common for public meetings run by federal agencies. But this session was organized by community members.

The Martins had met with the local Daniel Boone National Forest officials as soon as they learned about the plan to log the Jellico area, and asked them to explain the project at a public session.

One of the Martins’ neighbors on Little Wolf Creek offered the blessing: “…Have everyone listen and gather all the knowledge that is needed, Lord,” she said. And Theresa, who ran the meeting, offered her own plea: “I want you to join with me in the faith that this democratic process that we are all a part of is going to matter.”

Tim Reed, the district ranger, explained that the “treatment” plan came from an evaluation of the forest’s current condition compared to the desired condition set out in the Forest Plan for the Daniel Boone, which was last updated in 2004. That plan does set goals for developing a network of old-growth areas in the forest, but stresses achieving a balance of age classes.

“We don’t want it all mature. We don’t want it all young,” Reed said. “We want to balance so you have some diversity out there.”

Jim Scheff, staff ecologist for Kentucky Heartwood, argues that the plan will fail to achieve the Forest Service’s stated goal of diversity, in part because it treats all trees it considers mature—trees that are more than 80 years old—as the same. Scherr’s own graduate research, carried out in Kentucky national forests, showed profound differences between stands of 80-year-old trees and those that are 140-years-old or older, which truly begin to show old-growth characteristics—the structural diversity that is key to old growth forests’ biological diversity.

The Jellico plan calls for logging in stands where Kentucky Heartwood’s expert has identified trees more than 250 years old.

On a recent walk through the area proposed for logging, Scheff pointed out forest management work that should be done there. Some stands are overrun with a rapidly growing invasive species, Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), which secretes chemicals toxic to surrounding plants and can quickly dominate native species.

Kentucky Heartwood said the invasive species apparently became established in Daniel Boone National Forest after past logging, and managers of the Jellico plan clearly are concerned the problem could worsen. The Forest Service’s own research indicates that logging is a major driver of Tree of Heaven spread, with one study suggesting managers should wait six years before logging after efforts to eradicate the persistent weed tree.

At the November meeting, some residents said they would not oppose selective logging at some Jellico sites. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it,” said Johnnie Baird, whose late father was a forester. “He select-cut 300 acres over a 20-year period and you couldn’t tell the difference at the end from when he started.” He pointed to the wall map with the Forest Service’s “proposed treatments” for the Jellicos. Yellow splotches meant clear-cutting; pink indicated harvesting that would leave as little as 10 percent of the forest behind to be cut later; and orange marked areas where 20 percent would be left for later logging.

“You will never see a mature tree back in here again,” Baird said. “I guarantee it.”

Despite the different colors, Bowlin said 70 percent of the project was technically clear-cutting, with small temporary reserves of trees left behind.

Pat White, who has been judge executive of Whitley County, its highest elected office, since 2008, comes from a logging family, and said he knows residents are concerned. He learned forest management from his father, who learned it from his own father’s management of the woodlands surrounding his farm.? “He cut timber from it three times in his lifetime, because he select-cut every 20 or 25 years, taking prime trees and making room for others to grow,” White said. “If you clear-cut, then it’s 80 or 100 years or longer before you can get anything else from the property. I don’t think there’s any wisdom in that. My dad would describe that as robbing the next generation.”

But the decision appears to be an economic one for the Forest Service. “They get the biggest bang for the buck,” said Furnish, the retired Forest Service deputy chief.? “It requires the least amount of investment for them to prepare the sales, and it’s the easiest thing for the logger.”

Forest Service research conducted in the 1980s in the Appalachian Mountains showed that because of the higher costs to extract timber, “treatments” that left 75 percent of trees standing did not provide sufficient revenue to be commercially viable. The volatile timber market has had many ups and downs since then, but the Forest Service still calculates that clear-cutting generates more timber with less labor.

At the public meeting, John Hull, a forest management specialist at Daniel Boone, explained that the agency also planned “intermediate treatments,” such as non-commercial thinning, removal of dead trees and other clean-up in the Jellico mountains. But he said, “The harvest is the main thing. It helps pay for all these other treatments.”

Loss of trees leaves slopes vulnerable to extreme weather

People who live in the valleys below the steep Jellico mountains are worried about different climate impacts than the ones that are the focus of many scientists. Their concerns are not about how many metric tons of carbon storage could be removed, but the loss of shelter from storms.

“It looked like a war zone,” said Jonah Neal, 21,? who with his church, Christ the King, in McCreary County, organized a haul of donations to last summer’s flood victims. Even though theirs is one of the state’s poorest counties, they ended up with four truckloads of contributions to fellow Kentuckians who had borne the brunt of the flooding, landslides and mudslides last July and August. The National Weather Service said 14 to 16 inches of rain had fallen in a four-day period, an amount “historically unheard of.”

Everything looked normal during the hour and a half drive to the flood zone, until they exited the Interstate, said Neal, a student of ministry and political science at nearby University of the Cumberlands.

“As you went into the valley, you could literally smell it,” he said. “You couldn’t see it, but you could smell it. And as you came on into town, then you saw the massive piles of people’s stuff, dead fish, ruined everything.”

The area around the Jellico mountains was spared the worst of the storms, but a microburst pummeled a corner of Whitley County near the Martins’ farm. Theresa was stranded away from home for three days. Six inches of rain fell in two hours before their rain gauges overflowed. The creeks raged and soil slid down the mountainside. “The rain washed so much sediment into Jackson Creek that places that used to be waist deep are now ankle deep,” Bowlin said. Water rushed with enough force to push over a nearby mobile home and dislodge a culvert from beneath a main county roadway, which collapsed.

White, the county judge executive, said the total storm damages amounted to about $1 million, and Whitley County has been working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make the roads more resilient.

But Bowlin and other opponents of the logging project believe such efforts will be for naught if the trees are clear-cut from the surrounding mountains. The landslide that caused the most damage was directly across a valley from the Jellico project site. Although he cannot prove it, Bowlin said he believes the landslide resulted from the clear-cutting he and other loggers did in private forests higher up the slope eight years earlier.

They had followed the same Best Management Practices that the Forest Service now says it will use, and they received state officials’ approval for the silt fences they erected and trenches they dug to divert water and prevent erosion.

“But any time you disturb ground, you’re taking a chance for water to create a slide,” he said. “There’s adverse effects to logging, no matter how good you do it.”

Residents, steeped in the region’s history of logging and mining, raised technical questions for the Forest Service.

At the public meeting in November, the Forest Service soil scientist and hydrologist said they had not set a “threshold,” a limit on how much erosion would be deemed acceptable, since they had not yet determined how much erosion the project could cause.

“The top of my head just about came off,” said Debbie Moses, 64, a neighbor of the Martins who owns forest surrounded on three sides by the Daniel Boone, who had asked the scientists how they would determine an acceptable load of sediment from the logging. “That’s not the right answer. You can’t run the models and then decide what the threshold is going to be. That’s like the tail wagging the dog.”

Moses knows something about such calculations. She was among the first women to graduate from the University of Kentucky with a degree in mining engineering and received the school’s distinguished alumni award in 2017.

She often did environmental analyses both before and after mining operations in and around her native Whitley County, and she had a beef with the logging operations often operating nearby. A Congressionalexemption granted in 1977 let them discharge dredged or fill material into waterways without obtaining the permit under federal Clean Water Act that coal mining operations were required to have.

Moses said there already is a landslide on her woods—possibly from the rains last summer—and she fears the impact of the extensive logging the Forest Service has planned. “All that sediment, the tree branches, whatever—they’re going to end up in the creek, which is going to stop up with extra sediment load,” she said. ”My property will be a floodplain.”

Moses and her husband, Archie, used to walk in their forest, which had originally been his family’s land, almost every day.? “He used to say that it was his Prozac,” Moses recalled.

They had apple, walnut and cherry trees, and one year they picked 22 gallons of blackberries. “You could actually live off of that land if you had to,” Moses said. The couple considered raising freshwater shrimp or rice in the old mining ponds on the land but never got around to it. “We had big plans for up there,” she said. “The only thing we didn’t really plan on was him dying.”

Archie died 20 years ago at the age of 56, from a skin cancer that had been diagnosed too late.

Since then, she has refused numerous offers from timber companies that would like to log her land, she said, and her son feels the same way. “That property will be preserved,” she said.

The biggest threat to that vision is Daniel Boone National Forest’s plan for logging Jellico Mountain, right up to the boundary of her land.

Claudia Cotton, soil scientist for the Daniel Boone, told residents at last fall’s meeting that officials took the erosion concerns seriously. “We go to every single one of these units, looking for sensitive areas, areas that have slid, as well as all kinds of areas to protect,” she said. “We’re not taking this lightly at all because we understand how important these resources are to all of us.”

Yet Forest Service officials are moving forward with another large logging project where concerns had been raised about the landslide risk on steep slopes in the Daniel Boone about 50 miles northeast of the Jellicos. Documents obtained by Kentucky Heartwood through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that the Daniel Boone’s retired soil scientist, George Chalfant, detailed the risks of landslides in the area for Cotton and other current Forest Service officials.

In a November 12, 2020 email with the subject line “Coal Seams and Tree Roots,” he said he had inventoried more than 20 landslides in areas that had occurred in clear-cut stands of the Red Bird district of the Daniel Boone, where new logging was planned. All but three of them were associated with a coal seam. Such seams, which also run through the Jellico project area, create inherent weaknesses, which worsen when trees are removed.

“A live root network of a healthy timber stand increases soil strength substantially,” Chalfant wrote. “Slope stability problems often develop after timber harvest on steeper slopes where much of the soil strength is provided by tree roots. As roots decay after harvest, in particular clear-cutting, their value diminishes rapidly.” He said half the tensile strength of roots is lost two years after harvest, with 90 percent lost within five to 9 years.

But Cotton and her colleagues, after inspecting one of the landslides themselves, concluded it was an anomaly, caused in part by an unusual amount of rain. “Precipitation was higher in 2018 and 2019 in this area compared to the preceding eight years,” they wrote in the project’s soil analysis.

Annual precipitation at the weather station that report cited has been above average in each of the three years since then. Since 2011, total annual precipitation in Kentucky has averaged 7.4 inches above the average from 1895 to 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s environmental information center.

But the Forest Service never asked whether the abnormal weather pattern could be part of a trend. Climate change was “not carried forward for detailed analysis,” the Forest Service said in its environmental assessment paving the way for more than 3,800 acres of logging, including removal of up to 90 percent of trees in some plots, in the south Red Bird district of the Daniel Boone. That project was approved on January 19, 2021, President Trump’s last day in office.

The Forest Service told Inside Climate News that in the upcoming Jellico project environmental assessment, climate change and carbon storage impacts will be analyzed in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. In January, the Biden administration reinstated guidance for agencies to incorporate greenhouse gas emissions into such reviews—a directive that had been suspended under Trump.

But the Red Bird project is moving forward, at least for now. Kentucky Heartwood and other environmental groups have filed suit to block the logging, and proceedings are pending in federal court.

Wildlife groups join with industry to push for “young forests”

An audience member who remained silent at the community meeting over the Jellico logging plan later filed one of the only letters in supportof the Forest Service’s proposal out of more than 300 public comments submitted to the agency at the end of last year. His organization is also managing the timber sale in the Red Bird district for the Forest Service, and he applauded the plan for a similar project in the Jellicos.

Nick Biemiller, forest conservation director in the Southern Appalachians for the Ruffed Grouse Society, wrote that his organization “commends the Forest Service on their efforts to restore young forest habitat at biologically significant scales.” Biemiller even suggested additions to the project, including clear-cutting stands of eastern white pine and tulip poplar.

The Ruffed Grouse Society is more than a hunters’ organization dedicated to the small crested North American game bird with intricate, brown and white plumage. It has been a leader in an interconnected network of nonprofit groups and public agencies that have been advancing logging projects on public and private lands in the eastern United States in the name of creating “young forest.” The timber industry is seldom at the forefront of these efforts, but is helping to fund the drive, and reaping the benefits.

Advocates of the Ruffed Grouse—not endangered, but less common than it once was—are pushing to cut some mature forests down. The effort is buttressed by a large body of science showing that the grouse, the American woodcock and a number of other birds require forest less than 20 years old.

“Overall, what we’re lacking is forest diversity,” said Benjamin Jones, Ruffed Grouse Society president, in an interview. “Just like if you have a community of people that’s all one age, all one generation, that’s not a healthy population. And that’s the case with a lot of our forests, especially east of the Mississippi River.”

In the Jellico mountains of the Daniel Boone National Forest, only 3 percent of the forest is less than 20 years old, which is typical of many eastern forests, Jones said. He argues that not only does this make the forest more vulnerable to disease and pests that attack older trees, but it is the main reason for a recent rapid decline in ruffed grouse numbers.

The bird is listed as a “species of concern” by wildlife agencies in 19 states and is considered an endangered species in Indiana. A 2020 report by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies said the bird’s population has declined 71 percent since 1989 in the southern Appalachians. (It is notable that state wildlife agencies are funded by hunting and fishing license fees, and from a federal excise tax on guns and ammunition, with extra federal funding available for their efforts on behalf of “species of concern.”)

The big picture regarding the ruffed grouse is complex. It has an enormous range—from the Appalachian Mountains through most northern U.S. states and all of Canada. The International Union for Conservation of Nature reports that there were 18 million ruffed grouse in 2021, making it a species of “least concern.” The National Audubon Society, however, says the ruffed grouse is at risk of becoming threatened “without substantial intervention,” wrote Marshall Johnson, chief conservation officer at the nonprofit, in an email to Inside Climate News.

“Homogeneity of forest age and structure across the landscape threatens certain species that need a mosaic of habitats to thrive,” Johnson wrote.

But climate change is also a major threat to the ruffed grouse, Jones, at the Ruffed Grouse Society, agreed, and there is a need for more old-growth forest to draw down the greenhouse gases driving it. But he argues that at the same time, global warming makes creating young forest habitat just as important, to help species that rely on open woodland be more resilient to disease and adapt to change.

“The humbling thing of being in forest wildlife management is you need to think hundreds of? years ahead for things that clearly you’ll never see,” Jones said. “Yes, today’s 80-year-old forests, 300 years from now, will be 380 years old. We need to make sure that’s provided for on the landscape. At the same time, we need to make sure that same landscape has some young forest and some middle-age forest. This really is the art and science of forest management.”

The Ruffed Grouse Society is part of a larger coalition called the Young Forest Project, launched by the nonprofit Wildlife Management Institute (WMI) in 2012. WMI is funded in part by the nonprofit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which counts among its many corporate partnersInternational Paper and Sierra Pacific Industries, another forest products company.

The academic researchers led by Kellett, of RESTORE, traced the history of the Young Forest Project and found a key development was when WMI got help with young forest messaging from the Indiana-based public relations and marketing firm, DJ Case & Associates, which focuses on natural resource issues.

The firm’s survey analysis showed that significant segments of landowners and the general public wanted to ban clear-cutting and valued beauty, benefits to water, air and biodiversity. So the PR professionals suggested two messages seemingly in concert with those values: A diversity of wildlife requires a diversity of habitats. And decreasing young forests have brought about declines in dozens of wildlife species that depend on it.

Those are now the key messages of the “Young Forest Project,” which includes the Forest Service and state agencies as well as timber companies like Weyerhaeuser, MeadWestvaco Corporation, Lyme Timber and J.D. Irving, along with wildlife groups like the Ruffed Grouse Society and Wild Turkey Federation. The Ruffed Grouse Society also has a young forest-focused partnership with Domtar, in which it reaches out to private forest owners on the benefits of habitat creation on their land. The Ruffed Grouse Society then helps connect those who are interested with forestry consultants and ultimately, with Domtar.

Domtar said it began entering into such partnerships because so many private forests were left in poor condition by previous harvests, and had become ineffective at either growing timber or storing carbon. “Our goal with RGS, Audubon [Mid-Atlantic] and other conservation groups is to provide landowners, whose stands that have been compromised, a market and incentive to be able to go back into those properties and conduct remediation work,” wrote Lucas Dillinger, Domtar’s certification manager, in an email to Inside Climate News. “For Domtar, it opens an opportunity to gain access to fiber on lands closer to our mills that might otherwise not be harvested again.”

The Ruffed Grouse Society also has benefited financially from its young forest partnerships.

According to its tax returns, the organization’s revenue nearly doubled in five years, reaching $6.6 million in 2021. It ended that year with a $2.6 million surplus, a turnaround from the $500,000 deficit it posted in 2016. Jones said that the growth in the organization’s budget allows it to pursue even more of the habitat creation that is its mission.

“Anything we ‘make’—quote, unquote—we’re just turning back into more conservation work,” Jones said.

Some of that work has advanced logging projects in national forests throughout the East.

In Vermont, the Ruffed Grouse Society raised $80,000 for a consultant to conduct the environmental assessment that paved the way for a 15,000-acre logging project in Green Mountain National Forest in March 2022. In Indiana, the Ruffed Grouse Society joined in a friend of the court brief in support of the Forest Service, which was being sued by local county officials who fear the area’s drinking water supply will be threatened by a 4,400-acre logging project in Hoosier National Forest; the brief was signed by a lawyer for the American Forest Resources Council, a timber industry group. And in Kentucky, the Forest Service signed a stewardship contract with the Ruffed Grouse Society to manage the 3,825-acre Red Bird timber sale in Daniel Boone National Forest.

There’s an incentive for Forest Service district rangers to enter into such stewardship arrangements with outside groups. Under the 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration law—an initiative of President George W. Bush—all money raised from such timber sales stays local to be used for other stewardship projects, instead of going off to Washington. Timber sales are not a big money-maker for the Forest Service overall—in the 2022 fiscal year they brought in $186 million—less than 2 percent of the agency’s $10.9 billion budget. But they can provide important local support at a time when the Forest Service has had to divert more of its budget to fighting wildfire in the West— 53 percent in 2021, compared to just 16 percent in 1995.

The Forest Service said it has made no decision on whether the Jellico project in Kentucky will be managed through a stewardship partnership, but the Ruffed Grouse Society is pursuing more collaboration with the Forest Service in the region. In his 2021 report on the society’s work in southern Appalachia, Biemiller said his team “has robustly engaged all eight? national forests” in the South and “is currently drafting several agreements with the [Forest Service] to increase the pace and scale of forest restoration and wildlife habitat improvement.”

Environmental advocates and scientists who oppose the logging projects in eastern national forests do not dispute the benefits of young forests for ruffed grouse and some other species. But some, including Kellett in his group’s research paper, argue that the population of the birds was unnaturally inflated 50 years ago, ballooning with deforestation of the eastern United States. Forest preservationists also argue that the young forest advocates, including the Forest Service, are missing the larger picture—the eastern United States already is a highly developed mosaic of landscapes: urban, suburban, rural, roadway and farmland.

Although trees and wildlife habitat have been lost in much of that landscape, 81 percent of the remaining forest in the East—341 million acres—is on private land and has no logging restrictions. The Jellico mountains abruptly become private land in Tennessee, with large areas owned by timber and mining interests.

“If you want to see young forest, just go down the interstate,” said Bowlin, who has been logging the area recently.

Currently, only 4 percent of U.S. timber is harvested from national forests, despite the pressure to cut more. Climate advocates argue that logging could be restricted in mature and old-growth areas of national forests without damage to the timber industry, since there is so much wood available on private land.

“What is largely lacking and truly rare is the more mature and particularly old-growth component of the forest,” Furnish said. “And this, I would argue, is the great crying need of the eastern national forest—to just restore the mature old-growth character of much of that Appalachian and New England hardwood landscape that disappeared with the onslaught of logging and other land use.”

But the large expanses of mature trees that make eastern national forests potential reserves of old-growth carbon also make it a prime target of the timber industry. Jeffrey Stringer, chairman of the University of Kentucky’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, says that in some locales national forests contain significant forest resources that local markets need. For example, national forests hold only 10 to 15 percent of the supply of white oak, a species in demand for bourbon whiskey barrels, but it is better quality and provides more volume per acre than what can be found on private land.

Stringer said the national forests also have a role in setting a high standard for environmental practices, which tend to transfer to private forest timber operations nearby, his department’s studies have shown.

“On federal lands,” Stringer said, “you have the opportunity of certainly protecting and preserving areas that need to be untouched, and you can define those. But you also have the opportunity to have areas where you can truly be managing for multiple uses, and you have the ability to showcase what good management is.”

An alternative to turning a forest into a crop

Timm Martin said he asked a former Forest Service official how the agency could undertake such a large logging project on the Jellico mountains and still live up to its “multiple use” mandate of balancing recreation and preservation with the use of the forest for timber.

The forester replied that the Red River Gorge, a popular rock climbing area in the national forest about 90 miles north, was the area for recreation. The Jellico area was managed for timber.

And suddenly, it became clear why there were no hiking trails, camp areas or any other amenities on the map of the Jellico mountains.

“They think of it as a crop,” Theresa Martin said. “A long-lived crop.”

Her husband? began to work on an alternative. “Jellico mountains deserve something better,” he said. He mapped out the area, including the private forest land like his and Theresa’s adjacent to the Daniel Boone. He talked to neighbors, gathered photos and wrote up a set of principles. He created a website around the idea showing Jellico’s greenery with the words “What if…?”

The “Jellico Mountains National Recreation Area,” he envisioned would preserve the forest but provide opportunities for hiking, hunting, rock climbing, horse-riding and foraging of mushrooms, berries and herbs. The forest would still be open and free to enter. But it would be managed for jobs and tourism “to transform Whitley and McCreary counties into an outdoor recreation destination that will be the envy of rural America.”

Currently, there are 40 National Recreation Areas across the United States managed either by the Forest Service or Department of Interior agencies. Typically, the areas allow more activities than National Parks do, but there is less extraction of resources than on National Forests.

“This idea may be a bipartisan political unicorn,” Martin said, because of its appeal to hunters, fishers, economic development advocates as well as environmentalists.

The Martins, the Bowlins, Neal and others working to promote the National Recreation Area idea hope to establish a basis for the community and the Forest Service to work together toward a better future for the Jellicos.

“We believe they genuinely care about the forests they manage,” Martin said of the Forest Service. “We’d like to come to some sort of collaborative, middle ground.”

Bowlin understands the need for compromises.

Once on a job, he was given the order to cut down a red oak that was more than four feet wide. He didn’t want to do it, but he did.

“We cut a slab off the butt of it, and sanded it and polished it, so that we could count all the rings,” Bowlin said. It was 340 years old.

“That thing has seen the Civil War, the Trail of Tears,” he said. “It could probably have lived another 300 years.”

Bowlin knows that he has changed the landscape around him, while other changes—like increasing severe weather in Kentucky—are beyond anyone’s control. But preserving the forest around Jellico Mountain could be a buffer against the changes, like climate change, that are transforming their world.

“There needs to be an area…that is protected and undisturbed,” Bowlin said. “If they start this logging project, my grandkids will never see what I’ve seen, and their grandkids will never see what I’ve seen.”

This article is part of “Deforestation Inc.,” a global investigation organized and led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in collaboration with 39 media partners. At climate talks in 2021, world leaders pledged to halt forest loss and degradation by 2030. During a nine-month investigation, 140 journalists from 27 countries delved into why and how nations are falling short of meeting that goal.