Rick Bass is an American author of more than thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction, on a wide range of topics. An environmental activist, he is also an artist drawn to the beauty of the natural world. The winner of numerous awards, his most recent essay collection, With Every Great Breath, was released this February by Counterpoint Press and includes three new essays along with a selection of eighteen written over nearly three decades.

^{Counterpoint Press}

Bass is based in the Yaak Valley in Montana. “It’s a land of extremes and superlatives,” he says. Through the Yaak Valley Forest Council, Bass and a group of locals work to preserve the valley from logging, and are also trying to convince the U.S. Forest Service to reroute the Pacific Northwest Trail away from grizzly bear habitat, of which there are only 25 remaining in the Yaak. He’s also involved in a campaign to make the Yaak a climate refuge. The following are excerpts from a conversation with him from his home in Montana, as he was making a chili dinner.

What makes the Yaak Valley special? 

Its uniqueness, its singularity, is its duality, essentially a paradox. It’s two things – the major ecosystem driver is rocks, and yet because we’re at the edge of the Rocky Mountains, a major landscape driver is also fire. There is an extraordinary amount of biological diversity here. Twenty-five percent of the state of Montana’s list of sensitive species are found in this one national forest a long way up in the northwest corner. It’s the wettest place in Montana, it’s the lowest elevation, it’s the northernmost. 

Why should the Yaak Valley be considered a climate refuge? (Bass recently wrote about this here.) 

It’s a place to preserve this incredible habitat and diversity to buy some time and try to slow the rate of climate change. That’s where the advocacy for the old forests comes in. Historically, the Yaak was as much as 50 percent old growth, and now there’s only about 10 percent old growth. Old growth is an incredible mechanism for storing carbon for long-term safe keeping. The climate refuge would be an experiment in what that would look like – how would you go about returning the landscape to its historic range of variability of old and mature forest. 

^{The Yaak Valley from Garver Mountain, Kootenai National Forest, on July 9, 2012. U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region}

Where does that campaign stand right now? 

All campaigns take a long time, but we’re proceeding at the local, state and national level. Everybody we talk to is enthused about the idea, but you know, government takes a good while to enact it. There’s about a hundred million acres of old and mature forests on public land around the U.S., so our quarter-million acre proposal is pretty small. 

How do you look at activism now, not only for you but for others, as opposed to 20, 30, 40 years ago? 

With the passage of time, as populations grow and resource pressures accrue, it gets harder and harder to feel that one person can make a difference, or that even a group of people can make a difference. As an activist and as an artist, it’s really important for me to try to find means and mechanisms for which people can feel engaged. There’s a lot of donor fatigue out there. It might take more creativity to become a successful advocate now than in the past. That’s my experience, anyways. 

The title piece is about the past and the future of pollutants and activism. (The essay discusses the devastating health impact of the mining of vermiculite from Montana.) Where are we headed? Are pollutants getting worse, are the problems getting worse? 

When I started working on that, it was hyper-specific and intensely local. One of the least populated parts of western Montana, one of the largest geographic areas and counties in the state of Montana. Again, I guess a common theme was out of sight from the public eye. The elimination of truth that reporting can bring to any issue. Anybody who’s got their head out of the sand and is looking around at the world is, I think, aware of the good and evil battle between the two major political parties in this country, trying to determine whether those things be regulated and accounted and monitored, or not, and it is, along with climate change, the battle of our time. 

You write in a new essay, “Who knows how we come to things?” Would you say that you come to things by looking out the window? 

When I’m writing, I am looking out the window, but when I’m writing I am engaging with my experience with the five senses, the physical world and my experience in it. I’m really fortunate to live here in such a singular landscape, where a lot of those experiences are singular, so it’s a great place to be a thinker as well as an activist. 

You worked as an oil and gas geologist in Mississippi before moving west. When you first moved from those areas to Montana, were you struck by that part of the world? 

I did not move to Montana intending to tell people what Montana was like. I moved to Montana because I missed the west. After that first year in the valley in 1987, I realized what was being lost, and the rate it was being lost, and the violence with which it was being lost. And I thought, I’ll stop writing fiction for a little while and I’ll spend some time writing about what’s going on out here. It’s been 37 years. 

You’ve written about dogs, caribou, rhinos. What about animals appeals to you as a writer and a person living in the world? 

What impresses me about animals, whether domesticated or undomesticated, is the degree of their fittedness to the world. They’ve been here a lot longer than our own species, and they have learned to accommodate with power and grace, the world. And we are still working at it. I am never around them without experiencing amazement, admiration, respect. We have a long way to go. We just got here. 

What about the Anthropocene? What is your thought on that? 

We have just arrived here. Rather than learning to fit the world and integrate gracefully and with connection to all of the rest of the world, we seem to have skated past that step in development, and are simply attempting to shape it to our desires without the deep engagement of knowledge. And the consequences are writ large in the script of misery. 

What do you think the final extraction might look like? When the final drop of oil, or the final piece of coal is taken out of the ground? What would that moment be like? 

There’s a line that comes to mind from Peter Matthiessen in his first book of his trilogy, about a poacher in the Everglades. A client was asking where he could procure some rare feather… The poacher studied on it and answered with some regret, Well, I believe all of those pretty little birds have done flown away. I think that would be the response to the last barrel of oil or last turn of coal taken. I believe it’s all gone away. You know, with absolute lack of ownership in the leave-taking. 

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced $1.2-billion to finance two direct air capture projects to be built in Texas and Louisiana. These two sites, when fully operational, aim to pull about two million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air, or the equivalent of the annual emissions of 70 airplanes, 450,000 gas cars or 220,000 homes. This money is cut out from the overall Regional Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hubs program, for which $3.5-billion overall has been allocated. The DOE has lofty goals for these hubs, as the air capture facilities are just one part of a larger community filled with small minority-owned businesses, a science center and other things.

But what is direct air capture? DAC is a nascent and very expensive technology that essentially uses fans to draw the air into a facility, where chemicals and heat processing remove the carbon dioxide. The CO2 is then either used to create other products, like concrete, or is sequestered underground. Urgent questions still remain about whether this tech is worth the cost, and whether or not it will meaningfully reduce the amount of CO2 in the air, or whether sequestration has the potential to be an environmental disaster on its own. 

DAC sites are already in operation around the world. In 2021, the Orca plant in Iceland became the first independently audited facility to store carbon underground for paying customers. Orca aims to pull out 4,000 tons of CO2 from the air each year. There will soon be another, even bigger facility in Iceland which will be able to pull 36,000 tonnes of carbon from the air. It is currently the largest operating plant in the world. Operated by Climeworks, the plants in Iceland build on the technology from the first DAC site that was opened in Switzerland in 2017. 

Another small facility in Denver is operational, but has nowhere to store the CO2 that it cleans. As reported in April of this year, it is simply releasing the gas as a proof of concept. 

Announced with much fanfare, Project Bison in Wyoming intends to remove five million metric tons of CO2 every year. But the project has run into obstacles that might plague other DAC facilities, including a delay on getting a permit to store the carbon underground, which is being held up by the state Department of Environmental Quality. They have also run into delays with powering the plant, with the company now wanting to power the facility with renewable energy.

There are plenty of other plants in the planning stages in addition to the ones in Texas and Louisiana. And companies like Microsoft are purchasing carbon offset credits from these facilities. Microsoft has struck a deal with Project Bison to purchase carbon removal credits from CarbonCapture, the company running the plant, as part of its overall goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. CleanTechnica found that in the Texas area of Corpus Christi where the DAC hub will be built, there are plenty of polluters that might be interested in purchasing carbon credits from the hub to offset their emissions. 

But many are asking if direct air capture — and other carbon capture technologies – is worth all the effort and expense. For example, a company called 1PointFive says that part of its carbon capture technology will be used to force out oil from deep underground. This aligns with a study from September of 2022 by the Researchers for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), which found that “captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery” and that nearly three quarters of CO2 that is captured is injected back into the ground to push more oil to the surface. 

There is also the long-term question of the underground storage of the CO2. The report notes that “the trapped CO2 underground needs monitoring for centuries to ensure it does not come back to the atmosphere. Leakages and fugitive emissions in the long term are serious risks. It is impossible to guarantee that the stored CO2 will stay underground and not leak into the atmosphere” and the authors found that “the history of carbon capture technology is full of failed or underperformed projects.”

On top of these findings, there is the question of environmental justice. E&E News has reported on the risks to minority communities that underground storage poses. In February 2020, a Denbury Gulf Coast carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured and sent 40 people to the hospital in the small town of Satartia, Mississippi. It’s one example of the risks of CO2 storage, and in the case of direct air capture, companies do plan to store the gas far underground. 

The Center for International Environmental Law has posted that “the ability of CCS to provide meaningful emissions reductions in the next decade is extremely low, while its cost would be extremely high.” And a letter from CIEL in 2021 directed to U.S. government leaders, signed by hundreds of signatories, summarized that “we don’t need to fix fossil fuels, we need to ditch them. To avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to deploy resources to replace the fossil fuel industry, not prop it up.”

So why are companies putting all this effort in direct air capture, and other forms of carbon capture? The CEO of Occidental Petroleum Vicki Hollub threw some cold water on the environmental benefits of DAC, when she said, at an energy conference in 2023, “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.” 

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Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation recently released a 920-page blueprint to drastically eliminate, or outright reverse, many of the climate change policies and laws put in place by the Biden administration, if a Republican wins the White House in 2024. 

Titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the document is a sprawling, aggressive work that sets the tone all across the government to deconstruct and remake the federal government, starting with the White House and spreading to all executive departments. While radical policy shifts like these have been common in history, what makes this one different is that, coming out so far ahead of the 2024 election, its goal is for a new Republican administration to hit the ground running from day one. 

And when it comes to climate and energy, the proposals are alarming. In essence, the document – spearheaded by Paul Dans and Spencer Chretien, both veterans of the Trump administration – wraps the reversal of many of the current climate agenda goals of the Biden administration (and further back, to the remnants of policy from the Obama administration) in a cloak of energy security, resiliency, and fear.

“Ideologically driven government policies have thrust the United States into a new energy crisis” says the introduction to the section on the Department of Energy and Commissions. This chapter was written by Bernard L. McNamee, once the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) during the Trump administration. One of McNamee’s most notable controversies was being caught on video stating that there was an “organized propaganda war” being waged by leftists against fossil fuels, and prior to that, backing efforts to bail out the coal and nuclear industries when he was with the Department of Energy, an effort that failed. 

“The new energy crisis is caused not by a lack of resources, but by extreme ‘green’ policies,” he writes, citing that taxpayer dollars are going towards “favored interests” like an electric grid, saying that, in a play straight out of Fear Politics, “government control of energy is control of people and the economy.”

As just one example, Project 2025 proposes to eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, stating that “taxpayer dollars should not be used to subsidize preferred businesses and energy resources, thereby distorting the market and undermining energy reliability.” If this office cannot be eliminated, then the blueprint suggests reorienting it to focus on things like “fundamental energy research, consistent with law” and further goes on to say that, for example, when it comes to energy efficiency standards for appliances, government should “limit regulatory overreach and protect against excessively stringent standards.” 

Another example has to do with the grid, where the proposal states that renewables should not be expanded for the grid and improving the grid nationwide should focus on reliability and expansion. As for clean energy and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration, which is an office dedicated to transitioning to a decarbonized energy system, the writers propose that “The next Administration should work with Congress to eliminate all DOE energy demonstration programs, including those in OCED. Taxpayer dollars should not be used to subsidize preferred businesses and energy resources, thereby distorting the market and undermining energy reliability.”

And what about the Inflation Reduction Act? Gut it, says Project 2025. Despite estimates from Climate Power, an environmental advocacy group, that more than 170,000 jobs have been created directly as a result of the IRA, Project 2025 says the only solution is to “support repeal” of the IRA, as well as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, laws passed that, according to McNamee, “are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special interests.” He also calls for the end of government interference in “energy decisions,” ending the “war on oil and natural gas,” and to refocus FERC, where he was once director, to “ensuring that customers have affordable and reliable electricity, natural gas, and oil, and no longer allow it to favor special interests and progressive causes.”

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise concludes with a piece written by Edwin J. Feulner, once the president of The Heritage Foundation, and one of the leaders of conservative thought in the U.S. Feulner writes that after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, “the Administration had implemented 64 percent of its policy recommendations” which had been spelled out in its Mandate for Leadership that was developed before that election. These included tax cuts and cutting regulations, among other things. If a Republican wins the presidency in 2024 and begins to implement the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, one of its first acts would be to “rein in the Environmental Protection Agency.”

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The Battery Data Genome (BDG) project aims to compile as much technical data about renewable batteries as possible. Similar to the Human Genome Project (HGP), the BDG is led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne and Idaho Laboratories as well as researchers in Europe. The process would capture data about batteries from battery makers and analyze the data using AI, to allow for faster and more efficient breakthroughs in the renewable battery space, as the global energy sector moves towards a more battery-centric future. 

This call-to-action, as Argonne distinguished fellow and Joint Center for Energy Storage Research Director George Crabtree described on the Argonne website, will collect and house data from every step of the battery lifecycle, from discovery to development to manufacturing and all manner of deployments. The goals are scientific breakthroughs, usable by both the private and public sectors, to make batteries — from small to large scale — more efficient and longer lasting. 

We interviewed Sue Babinec, one of the co-authors of the call-to-action, and a battery scientist and electrochemist at Argonne.

How does the Battery Data Genome compare to the Human Genome Project? 

It is a transformational idea. If you look at the HGP, when you go back twenty years, people said we’re going to decode the body and share this information and it will unleash capabilities to change the world. It’s large, it’s audacious, it’s aspirational, and it’s very difficult to do. In that regard, it’s the same. The HGP started out as different combinations of public and private information, but ended up public. Even though the data is very useful, it spawned many many industries, and so the value that was generated from it is massive compared to the amount of money put into it. 

For batteries, the analogy is that it is a data-intensive activity. The DNA is essentially, what is the battery, and how does it behave when you use it? That is the transformational data. When you have that data, you can better go ahead and predict — if I have a battery with a certain design and I use it in a certain way, this is how it will perform and this is how long it will last. So a product development cycle that normally takes 15 years will take six months to a year. 

The Human Genome is such an important example because when it started, whoever would have guessed that you could take something that cost so much money, and was so precious, and so scientifically superior, and give it away, and still make a ton of money on it? That is an example that shows open sourcing of data leads to creation of tremendous wealth. A lot of people got really rich, but people who had diseases were solved, and crimes were solved, etc. So you have both public good and creation of wealth. 

How difficult is it to get the data? 

To do data science, you have to have a lot of data. We just need to have, let’s say, 10 to 15 percent of the folks who are using these devices, to share that data with others and then we can do data science. You don’t need all the data. Since releasing the paper, we’re actually finding there’s a lot of people who want to share it. 

What is the advantage for companies to share their data with the BDG?

If you’re a for-profit corporation, you want to see people doing research in academia or the national labs in order to do pre-competitive research on your problem, so you would want to release a certain amount of your data to have your problem solved. They can get others to work on their data, too. Also, when the data is old and no longer proprietary, they can share old data. Old data is very very useful, as useful as new data. 

Giving your data to the community does not mean that anybody understands that it came from you. Because data will go through the national labs, it will be anonymized, polluted, there will be aggregation and disaggregation, so you can take proprietary data, give it to us, we can sanitize it, and nobody will know that you contributed. 

Is the BDG a public service project?

It is, in the end, a profit-making and technology-catalyzing paradigm, and it is funded by the Department of Energy out the door, but then it has to be funded by others. 

What is the information you’re looking at? 

A problem that we referred to in the paper is the life of the battery, how many times you can charge it and discharge it. A lot of that work is the current voltage versus time in that battery as it’s charged and discharged hundreds and thousands of times. That’s like the data that we use here at Argonne, a team of electrochemists and data scientists, and we took that data and used machine learning. Without machine learning and AI and data science, if you want to know if a battery will last 2,000 times, you have to cycle it 2,000 times. We can predict out the data to 2,000 cycles with one cycle. 

There’s also data science for when you’re designing materials that go into those batteries. The same principles apply — if you’re trying to design new cathode solid active materials, you would look at density, particle structure, etc. 

Are you also looking at how the raw materials for batteries are sourced? 

The world already knows what the general options are — sodium, potassium — we know what they are, because it’s basic scientific principles. But data science can help you to do a better job of saying, how am I going to get that sodium out of the solution, how am I going to get lithium out of this brine? The data sciences that we’re talking about in the BDG are related to the fact that I have a raw material and I’m going to build a battery, and what’s the best way to do it? It’s not about, how did I get the lithium out of the Earth? 

How many companies have given you data so far?

It’s in the tens. I think a really important distinction is that when we wrote this paper, we were not advocating for people to give up data that they needed to hold secret. So if you have a security job or work for defense, if you need to be secure, we’re not trying to persuade you to give up your data. We’re just saying if you can share your data, let’s make a path forward. 

The BDG is a paradigm. It is not yet a funded operational organization. We have a gap between the writing of this and forming an organization that says, this is the standard we will use. 

How long away is this? 

I wish I knew. What we have right now is a call to action: this is why it’s important, this is what you need to do, this is how you go forward. 

Where will funding come from? 

It will be a private-public partnership. We have a vision for what it looks like. The call to action paper was carefully written by academics and scientists. We have colleagues who are the commercial end and we said, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t be on this paper because that will tarnish the idea. 

Batteries are ubiquitous. They help with climate change, they help to have electric vehicles, they help to get renewable energy, they help us to decarbonize industry. In that respect, batteries touch all parts of everybody’s lives. This is driven by scientists who have a broad view of how to make things better. It really is born out of scientists being good statespersons, frankly.

The post Battery Data Genome: A Path to a Brighter Renewable Battery Future appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) sent a letter on February 13, signed by almost 400 experts including climate scientists and economists, supporting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) draft issuance to more than triple the so-called social cost of carbon emissions.

The social cost of carbon is a dollar figure representing the approximate economic damages of emitting one metric ton of carbon dioxide. The cost takes into account four components — socioeconomics and emissions, climate, damages, and discounting — described in detail in the EPA draft proposal, Report on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases: Estimates Incorporating Recent Scientific Advances. The EPA estimate relies on information from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) and other independent researchers. 

‘True Cost’

“What’s new for the EPA is the central estimate that is cost,” Brenda Ekwurzel, UCS senior climate scientist and director of climate science, told EcoWatch. “We have much better understanding of the true cost of climate change, based on, unfortunately, the damages that are happening. Leading economics say the former rate was so out of touch.” 

Previously, the dollar figure had been $51/ton. With this new proposal, that figure almost triples to $190/ton, reflecting the current science. 

“It brings it to the fore for the American public, the true cost for every emission of a heat-trapping gas for the United States and the world,” Ekwurzel said. 

As the historical leading emitter of fossil fuel emissions, it is vital that the EPA continues to study their figures, as it is required to do an economic analysis of any regulation they have on the books periodically. The letter from the 400 concludes with: 

We commend the EPA for making important updates to the SC-GHGs and look forward to seeing them quickly finalized and used by federal agencies and others. Such efforts are critical to ensuring our nation’s policies and investments in climate solutions are appropriately robust and responsive to the scale and urgency of the actions needed to limit the worst impacts of climate change.

“As a scientist who has signed this letter and joining many other scientists and experts who understand the social cost of carbon and what it means, we believe the EPA is heading in the right direction with this new draft proposal to increase the rate,” Ekwurzel told EcoWatch. 

The impact of this increased figure might be felt at the legislative level. 

“When you have this one number, any regulation that deals with greenhouse gases, such as trying to honor the Paris agreement, the EPA can send information to Congress and the public to say, how much do we save from public health outcomes that are adverse – such as major extreme damages from extreme event, sea level rise, extreme heat, loss of lives of outdoor workers, lost labor hours,” Ekwurzel explained.

Still, even in the draft EPA proposal, the EPA acknowledges that the calculated figure of $190/metric ton might not be high enough. As the report emphasizes: 

The modeling implemented in this report reflects conservative methodological choices, and, given both these choices and the numerous categories of damages that are not currently quantified and other model limitations, the resulting SC-GHG estimates likely underestimate the marginal damages from GHG pollution. 

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