New York poised to roll back progressive climate mandates

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, what cancer researchers can learn by sending tumors into orbit. And we meet the musicians composing music for household appliances. Yes.

But first, the rollback of climate protections continues. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced that the state is scaling back its climate policies. Back in 2019, New York introduced a series of policies that would cut its carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. Now a new proposal loosens up that mandate. Joining me to talk about this and other environmental stories of the week is Umair Irfan, Freelance Science Reporter based in Washington, DC. Welcome back, Umair.

UMAIR IRFAN: Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Umair, OK, tell me more about these rollbacks. What’s changing?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, as you noted, New York in 2019 put together a pretty ambitious slate of goals. A lot of states did at the time as well, many of those led by democrats. But in recent years, and particularly over the past year under the Trump administration, we’ve seen a lot of federal climate policies being rolled back, and that’s starting to have some downstream effects on states and affecting their ambitions.

Now on one hand, these federal rollbacks have pushed some states to try to step up their goals and try to make up the shortfall by offering their own incentives. But other states like New York are dealing with budget issues and are finding that they don’t really have the cash right now to be able to meet the ambitious goals they set from a prior time.

IRA FLATOW: So it’s not pressure from the administration. It’s an economics thing.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, that’s right. Since 2019, US electricity prices on average have gone up by 27%. And that has a lot of downstream consequences on industry, on household budgets, and so on.

And we’ve also seen a recent wave of inflation, a rise in energy prices, and of course, the supply and demand with electricity production, this big crunch that we’re now seeing. Lots of states are eager to have a lot of renewable energy, but they’re not so keen on shutting down their existing coal and natural gas-fired power plants. They want all the electricity that they can get, and that means that it’s going to be harder for them to meet the climate change goals that they have previously set.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. So is this a telling sign of a bigger issue?

UMAIR IRFAN: I think so. I think we’re going to be seeing other states responding in similar ways, kind of softening their targets. The new proposal by Governor Hochul will walk the goalpost back to 2040 rather than 2030. And it’s aiming to cut the state’s emissions by about 60% by then. It’s also implementing a new way of calculating its emissions. They’re going to use an average over 100 years rather than 20 years. And this change in calculation brings them already closer to the goalpost by default, and so it means that there’s much less of a gap that they have to close.

IRA FLATOW: You know, this government slowing down on climate action, it comes– like, if you look at what’s going on in weather and climate around the world, it comes in at the worst time, doesn’t it?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah. I mean, I think we are seeing this year that we’re already in a record-breaking year. We’re less than halfway through 2026, but we’ve seen a number of temperature records broken around the world. We saw a heat wave in India last month reach 114 degrees. We’ve seen a fairly warm start to the year through the winter, which means less snowpack in the Western United States in many parts of the world.

And we’re also seeing the conditions being set up for major wildfires this year. Just this week, we saw wildfires ignite in Florida and Georgia. We’ve seen wildfires in Africa and Southeast Asia. So a lot of the dials are being turned up. And this year is likely to be the second warmest year, if not the warmest year, on record.

IRA FLATOW: And not to mention the winter sea ice in the Arctic.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yes, winter sea ice has also reached a record low this year. This is a product of, one, the human-induced climate change, but also due to some of the natural variability, in particular El Niño. El Niño this year has been forecasted to be exceptionally strong. And a strong El Niño pattern in the Pacific Ocean is associated with higher temperatures. So we’re seeing human-induced climate change on top of natural variability, leading to this sort of compounding effect that is going to have more significant effects on extreme weather and climate.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Let’s talk about this other environmental crisis happening literally right under our noses. Actually, I should say toes. We are running out of sand. This is becoming a real issue, right?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, it is. Sand is actually the second most exploited natural resource by humans after water. Sand is really important to a lot of things that we take for granted. You use sand to make glass. You use sand to make semiconductors. We use sand for building materials, for making concrete. And the United Nations Environment Program recently warned that we’re depleting natural stores of sand faster than they can be replenished by natural forces like erosion.

IRA FLATOW: Right. So this is not your generic sand we see in sand dunes, right? This is special, high-quality sand.

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, it could be. The thing is if you’ve been to different beaches, you’ve noticed probably that the sand is a little bit different. In some places it’s coarser, some places it’s finer, it’s different colors. And those traits are actually really important to the kinds of things that you can do with sand.

So for instance, in the Middle East, they actually import a lot of sand, because the kind of sand that they have in sand dunes and in the deserts is not really that good for being used for building materials. And so there are countries that import sand from Australia, and so on. And now we’re actually depleting our on-land sources of sand and increasingly looking at underwater sources of sand. So dredging the sea floor to try to get and meet the actual demand that we have right now.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, because we have more erosion from bigger storms on the coast, and the sand goes away.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, sand also serves an important natural function. It’s a buffer against waves, as you noted, against erosion. It can also protect against things like saltwater intrusion in coastal areas. And as we take away some of these natural buffers, we’re also setting the stage for these other environmental and ecosystem problems.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, I’ve heard about people stealing sand. That just sounds crazy, but let’s move on, Umair, because I know back in 2022 there was an underwater volcano off the coast of Tonga that erupted. What’s new there? Are we learning anything from that now?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, this was the largest volcanic eruption since the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. And the Tonga volcano was really interesting, because it was an underwater volcano. So not only did it inject this huge volume of ash and sulfur and rock particles into the air that we see with a typical volcano, but it also injected a whole lot of water.

And it caused a global perturbation in the climate system that scientists are still learning about. And this week, they reported that there was actually a huge influx of methane from this eruption. It released about 330 gigatons. This is a gas that’s about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. But the study showed that the volcano also sort of cleaned up after itself, that even though it injected all this methane, it kind of degraded it very, very, very quickly.

IRA FLATOW: How? What was the mechanism there?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, the scientists are still trying to suss that out, but they think this combination of water plus ash has something to do with it. What they think is going on here is that seawater has salt in it, sodium chloride, and it reacted with some of the compounds in the ash, forming an iron chloride compound that then reacted with sunlight. When sunlight hits that aerosol, it creates free chlorine, and then that chlorine starts reacting with methane, breaking it down into CO2 and water.

Scientists figured this out by using satellites to track the plume from the volcano, and they found unusually high levels of formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is sort of an intermediary in this chemical reaction, and it degrades very quickly. And so the fact that they saw so much of this means that this reaction was happening on a large scale very quickly. And now they think that this mechanism might be something that we can use potentially to help clear up our own methane waste, some of our own methane emissions from sources like cattle, from agriculture, from natural gas, and so on.

IRA FLATOW: A lesson from a volcano that cleans up after itself. That’s really good. In other good climate news, I just heard– I think it was earlier this week– that the automaker Ford just announced that it will build batteries, but not for cars, but for the power grid.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, that’s right. Ford says that they have a lot of experience in mass production and in industrial processes, and they’re saying that they’re going to leverage this now to make grid-scale batteries. This is a really hot industry. We’ve seen massive growth in the grid-scale battery industry, about five-fold over the past five years. No end in sight. The demand is massive.

So while federal incentives for electric vehicles and electric cars are getting cut back, Ford says that they’ve actually already invested a great deal on the batteries, and now they can leverage those batteries in another market. And this is kind of following in the footsteps of Tesla, another automaker that is also developing grid batteries. But it shows that without federal incentives that there still is a market for clean energy, that these batteries are actually really useful in a lot of ways.

IRA FLATOW: So how does the battery work? I mean, what size is it? Give us a little picture of it.

UMAIR IRFAN: So imagine a 20-foot shipping container, and they’re going to fill that with batteries using a newish chemistry called lithium iron phosphate. This is sort of an evolution from lithium ion. And Ford crucially is saying that they’re going to integrate their supply chain. So they’re not going to buy the batteries or the cells from a supplier, but they want to make it in the US as much as possible, and they want to take control of the entire supply chain here. And they think they can leverage that to lower costs.

And with these containers, you can do a lot of useful things with them. You can use it to stabilize the grid. You can do frequency regulation, which is an important function. You can use it to back up renewable energy and help smooth over power fluctuations. You can use it as emergency backup. And the fact that there’s so many different things that you can do with batteries, that’s really, really valuable.

With the conventional power grid, you pretty much have to use electricity as soon as it’s generated. You have to match supply and demand instantaneously, and that’s really hard. It’s also really expensive. But if you can bank power at scale and save it for later, buy low and sell high or just use it for a rainy day, that saves a lot of headache. And a lot of power companies, a lot of utilities around the country are realizing the benefits of this, and they can’t get batteries fast enough.

IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Umair, your last story– and I don’t know how to segue to this, because it’s impossible. It takes place– I can’t believe I’m saying this– inside a manta ray’s backside. Did I get that right?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yes. We’re going to be testing what we can get away with saying on the radio here, but researchers this week have documented this strange phenomenon with remoras and manta rays. Remoras are these fish that stick to larger fish in the ocean, to whales, to sharks, and so on. They have a sucker on their head. And they have sort of a– scientists have thought a long, sort of a symbiotic relationship. They help clean up parasites on the animal.

But they also have to look out for themselves. And sometimes when they get scared, scientists have found that these remoras will swim up the cloaca of a manta ray. And they’ve documented this. They have filmed this. You can look up the video online after the show. And they will swim into that for protection.

A cloaca is sort of like a multi-purpose orifice. The manta ray uses it to discharge waste, but also uses it for mating. And according to the scientists, the manta ray isn’t very happy about this.

IRA FLATOW: [LAUGHS] I guess not.

UMAIR IRFAN: But it’s really interesting because it kind of changes the equation here of the relationship between these two animals. Scientists long thought that this was something mutual, and it seems like this is drifting into a relationship that is almost parasitic. So it’s kind of interesting to see this behavior and reframe what the boundaries of this relationship might actually be.

IRA FLATOW: I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today, Umair.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, great to be here, Ira. Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Umair Irfan, Freelance Science Reporter based in Washington, DC.

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