Nature's Voice Spring 2024

WIN FOR WIND—AND WHALES

A major milestone in the renewable energy revolution also marks a life-saving victory for critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. Thanks to a landmark agreement brokered by NRDC and our allies, the developers of the South Fork Wind farm off Long Island—which recently became the first utility-scale wind project in federal waters to go online—incorporated proven safeguards to protect the whales during the project’s construction and operations, demonstrating that we can dramatically scale up offshore wind while protecting vulnerable ocean wildlife.

TREE HUGGERS UNITE!

The U.S. Forest Service has proposed a plan focused on protecting climate-critical old-growth forests on federal land across the country. The proposal would amend all land management plans governing the National Forest System with new directions for the care and management of old growth within each forest. More than half a million forest champions, including thousands of NRDC Members and online activists, have called on the agency to act, and NRDC will continue to watchdog the agency and push for strong final protections.

MI GOES BIG ON CLEAN ENERGY

A bold package of bills signed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer catapults Michigan to the forefront of states committing to game-changing climate action. The pathbreaking standards for the midwestern industrial heartland will see the state move to 100 percent clean energy by 2040 and put more resources toward energy efficiency. Says Derrell Slaughter, Michigan clean energy advocate at NRDC, “Michigan has seized the opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to combating climate change and ensure a sustainable, just, and prosperous future for our state.”

BATTLE RAGES OVER NEW ARCTIC DRILLING

The fight to stop ConocoPhillips from unleashing a new wave of drilling in the fragile Western Arctic has intensified, with the oil giant now aggressively moving to expand its search for oil beyond the boundaries of the Willow Project. As Nature’s Voice goes to press, NRDC and our allies continue to fight in court to halt that illegally approved project, and we are galvanizing a groundswell of public opposition—including tens of thousands of NRDC Members and online activists— calling on the administration to reject ConocoPhillips’s plan to transform the wildlife-rich Western Arctic into what the company has touted as “the next great Alaska hub” for Arctic oil.

“We always knew Willow was never the endgame for Conoco,” says Bobby McEnaney, director of NRDC’s Dirty Energy Project. “The fact that they’re already champing at the bit to search for more oil—

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before Willow is even fully built—just goes to prove it.” As approved, the Willow Project would be the largest new oil field in Alaska in decades—and would unleash a staggering 260 million metric tons of climate-warming carbon pollution over its lifetime. Yet ConocoPhillips seems intent on tapping into what the company estimates to be as many as three billion barrels of oil to be extracted near Willow, whose emissions would be equivalent to the annual emissions of every form of transportation in the United States combined. Not only would that torpedo the country’s climate targets, but it would forever transform some of the largest intact natural landscapes left on earth, home to a vibrant array of wildlife, from polar bears and caribou to shaggy musk oxen and millions of migratory birds.

“Bringing down the curtain on the era of fossil fuels was never going to be easy,” says McEnaney,

who points out that ConocoPhillips nearly doubled its federal lobbying spending in the run-up to winning approval for the Willow Project. “That’s why we continue to count on the strong support of our Members.”

EPA Aims for Historic Action on Lead Pipes

In a move poised to make a big impact in addressing of one of the longest-running public health crises in the country, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a new rule to require the removal of virtually every lead water pipe in the country, with most expected to be replaced in the next 10 years. The rule is intended to fulfill a campaign pledge by President Biden, made in response to the advocacy of communities—such as Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey—that have faced dire drinking-water emergencies, supported by allies such as NRDC.

“The EPA’s lead rule provides a ray of hope that we are approaching the day when every family can trust that the water from their kitchen tap is safe, regardless of how much money they have or their zip code,” says Erik D. Olson, senior strategic director for health at NRDC. A neurotoxin with no known safe level of exposure, lead has long been linked to neurological damage in children and to certain cancers. Significant evidence also links lead exposure to cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and heart attack. Says Olson, “We’re ready to write the final chapter on the shameful history of lead in drinking water.”

PHOTOS FROM TOP: DANIEL A. LEIFHEIT/GETTY IMAGES; SKYNESHER/GETTY IMAGES

Alaska’s iconic caribou are among the wildlife threatened by drilling in the Western Arctic.

BURNING FORESTS = CLEAN ENERGY? WHY BIOMASS DOESN’T ADD UP

“On the face of it, it seems absurd, right? Because it is!” says NRDC Forest Advocate Rita Vaughan Frost. She’s referring to the mouthful known as the “wood-pellet biomass industry.” While biomass may evoke a hip 21st-century technology brimming with game-changing potential, the fact that the industry depends on wood pellets strikes closer to the truth. Because what we’re talking about, quite simply, is the burning of enormous amounts of wood to generate electricity—wood that all too often has been logged from previously healthy forests. “Humans have been burning wood as fuel for literally hundreds of thousands of years,” Vaughan Frost says. “Yet the biomass industry would have us believe it’s delivering cutting-edge ‘renewable’ energy on par with solar and wind. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Vaughan Frost has seen firsthand the devastation wrought by the industry. A native Texan who came to NRDC from the North Carolina–based advocacy group Dogwood Alliance, she has fought alongside communities in the Southeast to expose the truth behind the industry’s shameless greenwashing. More than a million acres of U.S. forests have already been cut to feed the biomass industry, most of them in the Southeast, which today ranks as the world’s largest exporter of wood pellets. Those acres include clearcuts within the North Atlantic Coastal Plain biodiversity hotspot, one of only two biodiversity hotspots in the United States—and now the industry is setting its sights on the other. Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR) aims to bring a huge expansion of the biomass industry to California, where it wants to build two of the largest wood-pellet processing plants to date on the West Coast, in Lassen and Tuolumne Counties. To churn out up to a million tons of pellets a year, each industrial-scale facility would source wood from a 100-mile radius. Together, these sourcing areas include no fewer than eight

National Forests and wildlife habitat smack-dab within the California Floristic Province, the United States’s other biodiversity hotspot.

Although they account for less than 2.5 percent of the earth’s land surface, global biodiversity hotspots are home to almost half the world’s plant and animal species. An analysis conducted by NRDC and our allies found that the sourcing areas for GSNR’s proposed plants overlap with habitat for dozens of endangered or threatened species. These include California’s fledgling population of gray wolves, which have only recently returned to the state after being hunted to the brink of extinction.

The risk to California’s unique wildlife is but one of a litany of threats posed by the GSNR project, which Vaughan Frost, who now is helping to lead NRDC’s fight to stop the industry’s expansion on the West Coast, enumerates in the swift manner of a seasoned advocate. “Remember, the growth of this entire industry is built on the myth that wood-pellet biomass is carbon-neutral renewable energy,” she says. In fact, power plants that burn wood emit more climate-warming carbon dioxide than do coal-burning plants to generate the same amount of electricity. So how to explain the eagerness with which the United Kingdom and certain European Union countries have turned to biomass to help meet

their climate goals? As with much of the commercial logging industry, wood-pellet producers tout their product as sustainable: After all, they argue, forests grow back.

“That’s a decidedly 20th-century—if not 19thcentury—view of how forests work,” says Debbie Hammel, forests director with NRDC’s Nature Program and a 30-year veteran in sustainable forest management. It ignores the fact that older, intact forests store far more carbon and are far more biodiverse than the so-called forests replanted by the timber industry, which are better described as tree plantations, limited to a single tree species.

The entire industry is built on the myth that wood-pellet biomass is “renewable.”

What is particularly galling about the proposed California project is how GSNR is exploiting the state’s traumatic experience of catastrophic wildfires to sell its plan as a way to “thin” forests to mitigate wildfire risks.

“It’s outrageous that Golden State is trying to capitalize on the pain and fear of local communities who are on the front lines of the climate crisis,” Vaughan Frost says. “What Golden State calls ‘forest resiliency’ is, in fact, very intense timber harvesting; by no stretch could it be called ecological forest management. We should focus instead on working with frontline communities to implement proven strategies to minimize wildfire risk.”

Clockwisefromtopleft: Stanislaus National Forest is among the eight National Forests in California targeted under a plan to bring industrial-scale wood-pellet production to the West Coast; the northern spotted owl and gray wolf (lower left) are among the endangered species that could be impacted; wood-pellet plants across the Southeast have plagued communities with air pollution and other harms.

Rather than being swayed by GSNR’s claims, Californians are increasingly coming out in strong opposition to the project. The industry’s long record of broken promises in the Southeast and its devastation of once flourishing forests there make for a damning counterargument to GSNR’s public relations spin as it looks to expand on the West Coast and ramp up production of its climate-wrecking wood pellets to supply markets in Asia. Instead of economic improvement, wood-pellet production facilities from North Carolina to Louisiana have left communities saddled with toxic air pollution, constant noise, and a degraded forest landscape, perpetuating a cycle of environmental injustice. Pellet mills in the Southeast are 50 percent more likely to be sited in high-poverty communities of color, and a 2018 investigation found that more than half of the 21 pellet production facilities surveyed failed to keep emissions of such harmful air pollutants as particulate matter (soot) and nitrogen oxides below legal limits.

NRDC is now working with California communities that are determined not to allow the biomass industry to establish a beachhead for its West Coast expansion virtually in their own backyards. “At a moment when science demands we dramatically accelerate our transition to 100 percent clean energy, we can’t afford to be distracted by the false promises of the biomass industry,” says Hammel.

New York Moves to Curb Bee-Toxic Neonics

The state of New York has enacted the first limits of their kind in the country aimed at dramatically curbing the proliferation of neonics, the neurotoxic pesticides that are driving the devastating declines of bees and other pollinators. The historic legislation follows an intense showdown between the agrochemical lobby and advocates such as NRDC, culminating in a furious last-minute advocacy drive to prevail on Governor Kathy Hochul to sign the bill before the deadline for her to do so expired.

The hard-won victory means that up to 90 percent of neonics entering New York’s environment stand to be eliminated once the law—which prohibits unnecessary neonic seed coatings on corn, soybeans, and wheat seeds as well as nonagricultural lawn and garden uses— is fully implemented. Arguably the most ecologically destructive pesticides since DDT, neonics have been linked not only to the die-offs of pollinating insects but to mass losses of birds and the collapse of aquatic ecosystems, as well as growing threats to human health. Says Daniel Raichel, director of NRDC’s Pollinator Initiative, “We’ll be campaigning for other states to follow New York’s lead and crack down on these dangerous chemicals.”

Alabama Injustice at Center of EPA Probe

The EPA has launched an investigation into whether Alabama’s environmental regulatory agency illegally withheld resources from communities of color that lack access to adequate sanitation by discriminating in its distribution of funds for wastewater infrastructure. The probe comes in response to a federal civil rights complaint filed against the state agency by NRDC and the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ).

“Sanitation is a basic human right that every person in this country should have equal access to,” says Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of CREEJ and an NRDC trustee. “We are hopeful that the EPA’s investigation

will result in positive change for any Alabama resident currently relying on a failing on-site sanitation system and for all U.S. communities for whom justice is long overdue.”

Many Alabama residents especially in Black communities lack access to a central sewage utility and must rely on expensive individual on-site sanitation systems, which often fail, or makeshift “straight pipes” that discharge raw sewage outdoors. Yet shockingly, Alabama has yet to award a single dollar of cleanwater funds designated for wastewater infrastructure to residents who struggle with on-site sanitation needs.

Each year, more than 650,000 whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals are killed or seriously injured by fishing gear, the number one threat these animals face. U.S. fisheries are required to abide by strict standards to minimize this tragic loss, known as bycatch, and federal law requires any country that wants to export seafood to the lucrative U.S. market to do the same.

However, the National Marine Fisheries Service has repeatedly delayed enforcing these requirements on the vast majority of seafood imports. Now, an alarming report by NRDC and our conservation allies finds that 11 countries that export seafood to the United States, from Canada and Mexico to Norway and South Africa, are failing to meet U.S. bycatch standards in at least some—if not all—of their fisheries.

“American consumers have long demonstrated that they don’t want to purchase products from fisheries that cause marine mammal deaths,” says Zak Smith, director of global biodiversity conservation at NRDC. Smith notes that, as the world’s leading importer of seafood, the United States has the potential to trigger a seismic change in international fishing practices and save countless ocean animals. “It’s time for the Fisheries Service to stop kicking the can down the road and impose an immediate ban on seafood imports from countries that are failing to protect marine mammals.”

Sea lions off the coast of Mexico, one of the countries whose fisheries fail to meet U.S. bycatch standards

Catherine Coleman Flowers, left, and Charlie Mae

Pollinator defenders rally in New York

In a Critical Year for Climate, NRDC Launches Bold New Initiatives

Exhilaration versus exhaustion. Hope versus despair. As the new year dawned, the world seemed to teeter between such extremes in the face of the escalating climate crisis. Barely had scientists confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record when came the good news that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions for the same year had dropped despite economic gains. This on the heels of the most recent international climate conference in Dubai, where the global community committed to triple renewable energy, double the pace of energy-efficiency gains, and phase out fossil fuels.

For the dozens of experts at NRDC working to advance climate solutions in the United States and abroad, there is no vacillating; they’re coming down on the side of optimism. “Look, no one around here is wearing rose-colored glasses; we know daunting challenges lie ahead,” says Kit Kennedy, power sector lead for NRDC’s Climate & Clean Energy Program. “But what the gloom-and-doom headlines don’t often convey is the very real, substantive, on-the-ground progress we’re making.”

The historic federal investments of the Inflation Reduction Act, coupled with bold climate action

in multiple states, are poised to turbocharge the transition to a clean energy economy. But with so much needing to happen so fast, “we’ve got to get it right the first time,” Kennedy says.

To that end, NRDC hit the ground running in 2024 with swing-for-the-fences initiatives that leverage the organization’s unique combination of strengths: science, policy, and technical expertise; effective advocacy; legal prowess; and importantly, the ability to build strong coalitions. These initiatives include Ready for Renewables, aimed at accelerating the build-out of clean-energy infrastructure while centering equity and protecting biodiversity,

and Energize!, which brings together key stakeholders such as labor, industry, and public interest groups to drive forward the successful expansion of the nationwide charging infrastructure for the rapidly dawning age of electric vehicles. Says Max Baumhefner, senior attorney with the Climate & Clean Energy Program and Energize! lead: “You look at our coalition, and you see groups that are often on opposite sides of the table. By getting folks on the same side early on and working together, we’re dramatically increasing our odds of success. And no organization has a track record of building these kinds of bridges like NRDC.”

Tough Legal Battle Looms Over Pebble Mine

By Joel Reynolds, Western Director and Senior Attorney

Time and again, Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy has gone to bat for the Pebble Mine, and his latest trip to the plate was another strikeout. The governor’s zealously pro-mining administration had attempted to fast-track to the Supreme Court its lawsuit challenging the EPA’s veto of the reckless mega-mine a move the justices unanimously rejected.

It was yet another setback for the wildly unpopular project, opposed for decades by strong majorities of Alaskans. Yet in a cycle that has become painfully familiar to those who have been fighting against this wilderness-wrecking mine for a generation now, the short-lived celebration of one milestone victory must swiftly give way to preparing for yet another battle ahead.

The bid to gouge a colossal openpit copper and gold mine out of the headwaters of Bristol Bay, forever threatening the most productive wild salmon runs in the world, is the nightmare project that refuses to die. The Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for it in 2020. That was followed by the EPA’s veto in 2023. Every major mining company that backed the mine has abandoned it, leaving the Canadian corporation Northern Dynasty Minerals as the sole owner.

But with Governor Dunleavy at its side, Northern Dynasty has vowed to fight on. The Supreme Court may have declined to weigh in now, but it appears almost inevitable that the Dunleavy administration and Northern Dynasty will take their

case to federal district court (if they haven’t already by the time you read this). And if they don’t get the ruling they want, they’ll likely appeal, all the way to the Supreme Court and its conservative majority. We’ve faced tough odds before, and to date, the unvarnished greed that fuels the pro-Pebble forces has failed to prevail over the determination of the Tribes of Bristol Bay and their allies, including NRDC, to safeguard an irreplaceable natural treasure.

As the next epic legal battle takes shape, we stand united: No Pebble Mine. Not now, not ever.

Climate activists in Dubai