Category: Environment
In West Alabama, Life Is Hard. Warmer Weather Forecasts Worse Problems. How Bad Could It Get and What Can Be Done?
The Black Belt already has more than its own share of problems, and warming temperatures aren’t making things easier for the residents.
Disease-causing organisms thrive in standing water during warmer weather, and in the Black Belt there’s plenty of that. The area’s soil doesn’t drain well because of the heavy clay, and the region has been beset with more extreme weather, flooding and sewer system overflows.
Scientists now are even predicting that the weather in the Black Belt, and in much of the state, will be too hot for the state bird — the Northern Flicker, or yellowhammer — to continue living here during the hottest months of the year.
The wood pellet factory trend is coming to the Black Belt, with promises of supplying much-needed jobs and helping to stabilize emissions of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide, but there are questions about whether either of those benefits will come to pass.
Farmers are taking many steps to make their operations consume fewer resources and create fewer environmental problems, but even many of them fear their efforts are too little too late.
BirminghamWatch recently probed problems caused in the Black Belt by the warming weather patterns and efforts to work on those problems. Read the full series:
— In West Alabama, Life Is Hard. Warmer Weather Forecasts Worse Problems
— Audubon Study Finds Warming Climate May Be Inhospitable to Alabama State Bird
— Wood Pellet Plants in Job-Hungry Southern Towns Prompt Environmentalists’ Warnings
— Cattle, Catfish and Cover Crops: Alabama Farms Play Role in Slowing Climate Change
Despite Pledges, Birmingham Barely Out of Gate on Energy Efficiency, Renewables, Sustainability
This story was written as part of a collaboration among InsideClimate News and nine media outlets in the Southeast.
Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin promised in December to pivot toward prioritizing sustainability during the remaining two years of his term in office, moving toward fulfilling a pledge he made during his 2017 campaign.
“We’ve got a whole lot more environmental justice and sustainability issues to address within the next two years,” he said, “but we’ve laid the groundwork and foundation to address these environmental issues in our city.”
But for some, Woodfin’s administration — and Birmingham’s municipal government as a whole — has been frustratingly inert when it comes to environmental issues.
“The bottom line is, the city doesn’t have a strategy for addressing sustainability or environmental justice or climate change or anything related to those issues,” said Michael Hansen, executive director of Gasp, a Birmingham-based nonprofit focused on environmental justice advocacy. “The mayor campaigned on all of those issues, and several of the councilors talk about them from the daïs, but they don’t ever actually do anything about them.”
Birmingham’s lack of a clear sustainability plan has placed the city at a disadvantage compared to other cities nationwide. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy’s 2019 city clean energy scorecard, for instance, ranked Birmingham as 72nd among 75 major cities in terms of sustainability efforts, saying the city “has substantial room to improve across the board” and should push toward codifying goals for clean and renewable energy “to jump-start its efforts.” Read more.
Caught Off Guard: The American Southeast Struggles With Climate Change
InsideClimate News
Reporters from Southeastern newsrooms hold leaders in their communities accountable for reducing carbon emissions and preparing for climate change-related emergencies. Read more.
Environmental Groups Protest New Waters of the US Rule
Environmental groups in Alabama and elsewhere say they will fight to delay or stop a new federal rule that would remove the 1972 Clean Water Act’s oversight of half the nation’s wetlands and many small streams. The new rule greatly narrows the Obama-era definition of what constitutes waters of the U.S., commonly called WOTUS.
The rule — called the Navigable Waters Protection Rule — was announced today by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler at a homebuilders meeting in Las Vegas. Real estate and farm interests have been major proponents of replacing WOTUS, which the Trump Administration repealed last fall. The new rule is scheduled to be implemented in 60 days, following publication in the Federal Register. Read more.
Cattle, Catfish and Cover Crops: Alabama Farms Play Role in Slowing Climate Change
This is the last in a series of four stories about how changing weather patterns are and will affect the Black Belt.
Once a swath of tall-grass prairie of unparalleled fertility and diversity, the Alabama Black Belt’s rich land was depleted by the practice of farming one or two crops, initially cotton and later corn and soybeans, on a large scale.
But more beneficial farming and ranching practices are taking hold in Alabama, and some in the state’s western Black Belt region are taking leadership roles.
A family in Pickens County uses no-till row farming, combined with regular rotation of crops and use of cover crops, to help rebuild once-rich prairie soil. A farm in Perry County enhances those practices by using primarily compost and organic fertilizers and by rotating different animal species through its pastures.
Progressive agricultural practices already are helping feed the planet’s increasing population. Now new ways of treating the land are seen as an important piece of a complex effort to slow the impact of accelerating climate change, as described in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on Climate Change and the Land.
Most climate change emphasis has been on displacing fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy. But emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases continue to rise in the face of pledges from the Paris and Spain climate summits, according to other United Nations reports. It’s become increasingly evident that strategy will take too long to avoid major consequences of higher temperatures responsible for more severe storms, intense rainfall and flooding, as well as longer periods of drought.
2019 was the second-warmest year since the temperatures began to be recorded, in 1850, according to the research group Berkeley Earth.
Technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere have not fully emerged, and it’s not clear they can be scaled up enough to make a difference, either. Read more.
More stories in the series:
Sunday: In West Alabama, Life Is Hard. Warmer Weather Forecasts Worse Problems
Monday:Audubon Study Finds Warming Climate May Be Inhospitable to Alabama State Bird
Tuesday:Wood Pellet Plants in Job-Hungry Southern Towns Prompt Environmentalists’ Warnings
Wood Pellet Plants in Job-Hungry Southern Towns Prompt Environmentalists’ Warnings
The tiny West Alabama town of Epes, population 172, is set to play a role in the international climate-change battle. The initiative that has reached Epes is spreading across the state and much of the South and is prompting debate about whether it is progress or problem.
Maryland-based Enviva is building a $175 million facility at Epes to produce wood pellets from forests, sawmills and other sources and to load them on barges at the nearby port on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway bound for the United Kingdom, Europe and potentially Asia.
The pellets will be burned for electric power in plants formerly fueled by coal.
In 2009, the European Commission directed its member countries to use renewable sources of power for at least 20% of its electricity production in order to reduce carbon emissions and meet climate change goals. The commission categorized wood as a carbon-neutral alternative to coal on the belief trees would be replaced one-to-one with seedlings that eventually would grow and absorb the carbon dioxide released in creating power.
Wood instead of coal – a good thing for the world, right?
Not so fast. Most environmental and clean-energy advocates, including the Southern Environmental Law Center, say the carbon-neutral assessments are based on faulty initial assumptions, are not the clean power source as touted by industry, and shouldn’t be grouped with solar, wind and nuclear power as ways to replace fossil fuels and drastically reduce the world’s carbon emissions.
It’s much better, they say, to keep carbon sequestered in trees than to burn them for fuel. Read more.
More stories in the series:
Sunday: In West Alabama, Life Is Hard. Warmer Weather Forecasts Worse Problems
Monday:Audubon Study Finds Warming Climate May Be Inhospitable to Alabama State Bird
Thursday: Cattle, Catfish, and Cover Crops. Alabama Farms Play Role in Slowing Climate Change
Audubon Study Finds Warming Climate May Be Inhospitable to Alabama State Bird
This is the first in a series of four stories about how changing weather patterns are and will affect the Black Belt.
Let us travel to the West Alabama Black Belt and consider our state bird.
We like to call it the yellowhammer. It is part of the “Rammer Jammer” song that University of Alabama fans sing after a Tide victory.
This bird’s more formal name is the Northern Flicker, and like all woodpeckers we see here, it is a striking combination of colors. The male is brown, with a bunch of dots on its underbelly, a black “whisker” extending from the base of its bill, a black bib just below its neck, a white rump, yellow shafts on its tail and flight feathers, and a red streak looping around the back of its neck.
These days, you can spot the yellowhammer year ‘round in The Heart of Dixie. But not long from now, it could be too hot for the official state bird to live here in the summertime, especially in areas such as the Black Belt, known for the intensity of the heat in July, August and September.
That’s one of the findings reported in Survival By Degrees, a recently released Aububon Society study on the impact of warming global temperatures on various species of birds.
“It’s hard to imagine our state bird being just a winter bird,” said Alabama Audubon Executive Director Ansel Payne. Read more.
More stories in the series:
Sunday: In West Alabama, Life Is Hard. Warmer Weather Forecasts Worse Problems
Tuesday: Wood Pellet Plants in Job-Hungry Southern Towns Prompt Environmentalists’ Warnings
Wednesday: Cattle, Catfish, and Cover Crops. Alabama Farms Play Role in Slowing Climate Change
In West Alabama, Life Is Hard. Warmer Weather Forecasts Worse Problems
This is the first in a series of four stories about how changing weather patterns are and will affect the Black Belt.
Much of West Alabama’s rural Black Belt is beset with long-standing poverty, poor health, deteriorating infrastructure, suspect water quality and the mental and physical stresses that accompany those conditions.
Climate change is making those problems worse – or at least harder to overcome – and that effect is projected to increase in the coming decades. Increasingly higher temperatures year-round are bringing more extreme and violent storms, heavier rainfall and extended periods of drought.
The threats are clear, scientists almost universally agree. Disease-causing organisms thrive in warmer weather. Increased flooding causes already inadequate sewage treatment systems to fail as well as damaging streams and rivers with greater sediment and fertilizer run-off. Stronger tornadoes tear up the landscape and homes and terrorize the population.
What made the Black Belt different?
Almost two centuries ago, plows overturned the rich earth of the diverse, tall-grass prairies in the Alabama Black Belt to create the plantation culture based on a single crop, cotton. The act, together with the import of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, transformed the region into an economic powerhouse for the next 150 years – until the soil was depleted and eroded. Since then the land in many cases has been given over to pine trees, cattle ranches, catfish ponds and a patchwork quilt of soy and corn fields. Read more.
‘Bird Nerd’ Wraps up Study of Bird Deaths From Flying Into Windows
As the sun rises on a workday in downtown Birmingham, the human population in the city’s center typically includes a small group: first responders, cooks, cleaners, security guards, the homeless and those seeking to get some quiet time in the office before their colleagues arrive.
During the past two years, that early morning population also frequently has included a woman walking slowly and looking closely at the sidewalks, plazas and lawns outside glass-fronted buildings. Sometimes — as much as 20 times on the morning of Oct. 13 — she would pause, kneel, remove a small brown paper sack from her shoulder bag and carefully place inside it the carcass of a dead bird, usually one that had been migrating through town.
Her name is Jessie Griswold. She is the lead animal care professional at the Birmingham Zoo’s Animal Health Center. She also is an unabashed “bird nerd.” She recently concluded work on a research grant — the only type of its kind recently done in the state — to bring to local light a problem that has afflicted Birmingham and other metropolitan areas around the country.
The problem? Bird deaths from window collisions. Read more.
Public Hearings Set on Use of By-Products Such as Sludge, Discharges from Gaston Steam Plant and a Toll Bridge Over Lay Lake
Birmingham City Council Settles Suit With One Self-Storage Developer, Extends Moratorium
The council voted unanimously to extend the city’s moratorium on new self-storage developments by 90 days. But it also voted to settle a lawsuit from one developer, paying out up to $125,000 and allowing construction on a self-storage facility near Vulcan Park to continue. Read more.
