Equilibrium/Sustainability — California town drops cougar habitat bid

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Just two weeks after officials in Woodside, Calif., declared their entire town a mountain lion habitat — effectively blocking construction of affordable housing — council members have relented, The New York Times reported.    

Releasing a statement indicating that the Department of Fish and Wildlife “had advised that the entire Town of Woodside cannot be considered habitat,” the council ended the town’s “brief era as a self-declared big cat sanctuary,” according to the Times.    

That temporary declaration had developed as the result of a debate over at bill that would allow developers to build duplexes on single-family lots — helping create affordable housing in a town of multimillion-dollar homes, the Times reported. That decision quickly generated outrage on social media, as well as a threat of legal action from the state attorney general, according to the Times.   

“There is no valid basis to claim that the entire town of Woodside is a habitat for mountain lions,” Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) wrote in a letter to the town.    

Today we’ll delve into President Biden’s warnings that he would sanction a critical gas pipeline if Russia invades Ukraine, and we’ll explore 18 U.S. regions facing a “double hazard” driving up their wildfire risks.   

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@digital-stage.thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@digital-stage.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin.  

Let’s get to it. 

 

Pipeline an ‘odd scenario’ for US, Germany

President Biden, while standing next to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, pledged on Monday to bring an end to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany if the Kremlin decides to launch a military invasion of Ukraine.

First words: Biden said “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2” if Russia invades, while Scholz said that Russia would face “severe” consequences but declined to detail what types of sanctions are on the table.     

Awkward silence: The two leaders were expected to hold private discussions about potential sanctions against Russia, as well as on U.S. views on Nord Stream 2, The Washington Post reported.   

But Monday’s conference “created an odd scenario of an American president threatening to end a German pipeline — and with the German chancellor hesitating to agree publicly,” according to the Post.    

What’s prompting such oddities? Nord Stream 2, which is almost complete, has long been a source of tension between the two countries, with the U.S. expressing fears that the natural gas conduit could give Russia leverage over Germany, the Post reported.  

And because the pipeline runs through the Baltic Sea, rather than on the continent, the U.S. has also shared concerns that it could harm Ukraine by reducing the country’s importance as a transport route for Russian gas, according to the Post.    

Allies, with some caveats: Although Berlin and Washington became allies shortly after World War II, the U.S. continues to question Germany’s commitment to stymying Russian aggression, according to German state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Well (DW).  

Germany has been in hot water both due to its reliance on Russian energy supplies, as well as its refusal to export weapons to Ukraine, DW reported.    

Stefan Meister, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, told DW that Germany might agree to sanctions on Nord Stream 2, but that the country would continue to refuse to sell weapons to Ukraine.  

WEANING EUROPE FROM RUSSIAN GAS COULD TAKE A WHILE

About 40 percent of Europe’s gas imports are from Russia, while approximately 70 percent of gas pipeline sales from Russia’s state-owned company Gazprom go to Western Europe, the Journal reported.   

Germany alone draws about 55 percent of its gas from Russian firms, DW reported.   

This German-Russian energy relationship grew out of a Cold War-era Western German “pipeline diplomacy” policy that “very much still lives on” today, Henning Gloystein of the think tank Eurasia told the Journal.   

New rules may be insufficient: The EU has proposed new rules that could improve gas storage, while officials are speaking to Azerbaijan, Qatar and the U.S. about additional supplies, the Journal reported. The continent’s Green Deal suggests natural gas — controversially — as “transition fuel” as the EU moves toward cleaner energy infrastructure.     

Gazprom, meanwhile, also has stakes in local energy providers in almost all EU states, including in a German underground gas storage facility through its subsidiary Astora, DW reported.    

“You can negotiate as much as you want with a person who has all the leverage in their hand,” Georg Zachmann from the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel told DW.    

What does Russia’s government say? Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Western nations are goading his country into invading Ukraine, while threatening Russia’s security with their military support of Kyiv, according to The Wall Street Journal.    

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Monday that Washington and London invented the threat of Russia attacking Ukraine for the sake of a “heroic fight” that would distract citizens from both their domestic crises and failures in Afghanistan, according to the state-owned TASS Russian News Agency.  

Last words: “The well-known psychedelic phobias by Western media about the ‘Russian aggression against Ukraine’ are under development in the forthcoming composition,” Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel, as reported by TASS.    

“However, time marches on and Russia is not attacking Ukraine,” she added.  

 

Study: 18 regions at wildfire ‘double hazard’ 

More than a dozen regions across the U.S. face rising danger from wildfires, posing a challenge to the Biden administration as it starts a 10-year, multibillion-dollar investment in reducing the country’s wildfire risk, a new study has found. 
 
These fires are spreading across huge swaths of the Western U.S., where zones of particularly vulnerable vegetation meet zones of particular drought, according to the study, published on Monday by Stanford University researchers in Nature Ecology and Evolution.  
 
What regions are most in danger? Many of these areas — which the researchers have described as facing a “double hazard” from the fires — are remote: They include sparsely populated parts of central Wyoming, or the rugged Utah-Nevada border near Dinosaur Valley National Monument.  

One enormous zone at particular risk looks on the map like a man standing in central Nevada; his torso taking up virtually all of eastern Oregon; another juts up from Texas’s Big Bend region east of the New Mexico border. 
 
But others contain large cities: These areas are disproportionately spilling into the vulnerable, fire-prone wildlands around their edges, like those that burned over New Years in Colorado’s most expensive wildfire on record. 
 
One danger zone stretches east from Los Angeles almost to the California border and from Houston into the pine forests of east Texas. Others surround Las Vegas and Reno, Nev.; Denver, Colo.; Albuquerque, N.M. and Medford, Ore.  

Compounding risk: The map shows with new precision the big disparity between how vulnerable different landscapes can be to the same drought. 

“Each plant is different, each species is different and the geography of a place defines how a plant’s moisture level responds to different environmental conditions,” study lead author Krishna Rao, a Stanford PhD student, said in a statement.  
 
That’s intuitive if you’ve ever had houseplants. “You go on vacation, the plants don’t get watered, they’re all experiencing the same drought. But you come back to your office, and they will have responded differently — maybe one is dead, one is brown but alive, one is green,” co-author Noah Diffenbaugh of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment told Equilibrium. 

ASSEMBLING A NEW MAP OF RISK

Mapping the diverse vulnerability across entire ecosystems or regions has traditionally been a difficult, labor intensive process, senior author Alexandra Konings noted in a statement. 

But by using satellite-mounted microwave sensors and machine learning, the scientists were able to map areas of most vulnerable vegetation across the entire Western U.S.  
 
Thirsty air: Researchers compared those vulnerable areas with rise in a metric called vapor pressure deficit, which measures how “thirsty” the air is — or the difference between how much water the air does hold versus how much water it can hold.  
 
By putting these two measures together, the researchers identified the 18 zones impacted by the “double hazards” of drought and vulnerability. In these areas, they found that  the trees and brush were withering faster in  unusually dry, hot and absorbent air, leading to greater risk of fire. 

People, landscapes put each other at risk: That risk grows even higher when people are added to the picture, according to the researchers. The Biden wildfire prevention plan pays particular focus to the zone known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where cities, towns and sprawl merge into forest, grasslands and shrub — and where one in four Californians live. 
 
“The presence of people in the WUI both puts people in harm’s way and promotes ignitions, because the vast majority of ignitions that threaten homes are human caused,” Diffenbaugh told Equilibrium. 

But risk isn’t spread evenly through the WUI: Certain urban-abutting areas have more sensitive vegetation, which corresponds to higher risk of fire.  

It also corresponds to having higher numbers of people move there: the most drought-sensitive ecosystems in the WUI have experienced 50 percent faster population growth than the WUI as a whole. 

Last words: “The areas of WUI that are most sensitive — that have the highest plant water sensitivity, the highest wildfire risk — those areas have grown disproportionately,” Diffenbaugh said.  

 

Trash Tuesday 

A mix of plastic and animal waste news.

Global negotiations to begin on treaty to reduce plastic pollution   

• Negotiators will begin working this month on a treaty to reduce plastic pollution, which could result in global caps on production, as well as impose rules to make recycling and repurposing plastics easier, The Washington Post reported. While talks are thus far preliminary, they have received the support of the Biden administration, amid concerns that only 10 percent of plastic ever made has been recycled, according to the Post. 

Scientists brew strong bonds from old bottles 

• One reason why so little plastic is recycled is that it tends to degrade with re-use — meaning, recycled products are less valuable than virgin ones. But a group of chemists at the University of North Carolina say they have found a way to alter the carbon-hydrogen bonds in plastics so that recycled materials are stronger than their predecessors, according to a statement.   

Dog poop and urine polluting nature reserves: study 

• Belgian researchers calculated that dog urine and feces add 11 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare (about 10 pounds per acre) to nature reserves around the city of Ghent — levels that exceed the legal fertilization limits for farmland, and that counter attempts by park managers to increase biodiversity, according to the British Ecological Society. 

 

Please visit The Hill’s sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you on Wednesday.