Sierra Club
By Michael Marx
Last Friday, the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General confirmed that it will investigate evidence that the agency violated ethics guidelines when it hired an oil industry consultant to draft the Keystone XL environmental impact statement. This evidence adds to the growing criticism that the State Department’s conclusion, which minimizes the Keystone XL’s profound impact on U.S. carbon pollution, is based on a faulty and biased review. In fact, the tar sands pipeline is a climate disaster waiting to happen.
In April and again in July, the Sierra Club and partner groups presented evidence of ethics violations by State and their consultant, Environmental Resources Management (ERM). We requested that the Office of the Inspector General investigate how and why the State Department hired ERM despite the company’s close ties to TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline proposal, and to the American Petroleum Institute, the industry lobbying group that is leading PR efforts to promote the pipeline and an organization of which ERM is a dues-paying member.
ERM was legally obliged to disclose both its connection to Big Oil as well as any way in which it might financially benefit from completion of Keystone XL. But ERM failed to disclose its conflicts of interest, and the State Department failed to verify ERM’s assertions that it had no interest in the outcome of the pipeline decision. When these conflicts first appeared in documents that demonstrated the connections between ERM employees and oil companies that would benefit from the Keystone XL, the State Department redacted these biographies on its website in an attempt to conceal the connections from the public.
This situation is, sadly, a repeat of the State Department’s hiring of Cardno-Entrix, another “conflicted” oil industry consultant, which the department hired to draft the 2011 environmental review of Keystone XL. An Inspector General investigation of that process concluded in 2012 that the consultant was biased and went on to recommend that the State Department redesign its process to ensure that consultants who might profit from a decision are not in charge of the environmental review for that decision. The State Department clearly ignored that recommendation that the fox should not guard the henhouse.
So it’s not surprising, with ERM as the primary author, that this past spring, the State Department put forward yet another distorted draft environmental review that dismissed the critical climate, human health and environmental threats posed by the proposed pipeline. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency saw straight through the rouse when it issued a failing grade to the review for “insufficient information” on greenhouse gas emissions, pipeline safety and community and environmental justice effects. Each of these are important factors in the review of a project that promises to deliver massive amounts of carbon pollution and air and water pollution for communities near refineries and along the pipeline route.
In the 2013 draft environmental review, the State Department and ERM dismiss some of the project’s most significant environmental concerns, such as its climate impacts, asserting that the development of Alberta tar sands is inevitable and that Keystone XL won’t have a direct bearing on climate pollution. They also ignore concerns about air and water pollution, human health and safety, wildlife and the rights of landowners. There is no shortage of evidence that the report’s assumptions are wrong. The Sierra Club and our partners presented a long list of the problems with the pipeline and with the review process both in our April 2013 comments and in a recent request for a new review based on new information from government, oil industry and Wall Street sources that undermine the State Department’s conclusions. We also filed a lawsuit to make sure that the public has access to all of the information about Keystone XL and the hiring of ERM before the State Department reaches its decision.
The real question here is how did the State Department get it so wrong? The answer, simply, is that the State Department once again hired the oil industry to evaluate itself—and, not surprisingly, the industry gave itself a passing grade. But we’ve come a long way since this pipeline was first proposed in 2008. We’ve built opposition to this dirty and dangerous pipeline into a national movement. Americans recognize a bad deal when they see one, and now that they are getting a better look at this one, it’s looking less like some kind of favor from our friends to the north and more like a house of cards.
The State Department needs to go back to the drawing board. It needs to listen to the Office of the Inspector General this time and stop hiring consultants with deep oil-industry ties. It needs to look at the facts about this pipeline and the threat it poses to the climate and to the American people. Even the pro-pipeline consultants drafting this tainted review couldn’t hide the fact that the pumps that would be used to move tar sands across the U.S. alone would create as much carbon pollution each year as is produced by 626,000 cars. That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the harm that the Keystone XL pipeline would bring, but that’s all you need to know to see that the pipeline will “significantly exacerbate” climate pollution.
It doesn’t really matter which card you pull when you want to bring down a house of cards. The Keystone XL proposal is teetering with false assumptions, biased information and a shaky conclusion that won’t withstand even the slightest breeze of scrutiny. Secretary Kerry and President Obama have everything they need right now to conclude that this pipeline fails the “national interest” test. It’s time for the State Department to get the oil industry out of the business of reviewing its own projects on behalf of the American people. And it’s time to reject this dirty, dangerous pipeline once and for all.
Visit EcoWatch’s KEYSTONE XL page for more related news on this topic.
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Consumers may be happy, but climate change is making coffee farmers bitter. Diseases and pests are becoming more common and severe as temperatures rise. The fungal infection known as coffee leaf rust has devastated plantations in Central and South America. And while robusta crops tend to be more resistant, they need plenty of rain – a tall order as droughts proliferate.
The future for coffee farming looks difficult, if not bleak. But one of the more promising solutions involves developing new, more resilient coffee crops. Not only will these new coffees have to tolerate higher temperatures and less predictable rainfall, they'll also have to continue satisfying consumer expectations for taste and smell.
Finding this perfect combination of traits in a new species seemed remote. But in newly published research, my colleagues and I have revealed a little-known wild coffee species that could be the best candidate yet.
Coffee Farming in a Warming World
Coffea stenophylla was first described as a new species from Sierra Leone in 1834. It was farmed across the wetter parts of upper west Africa until the early 20th century, when it was replaced by the newly discovered and more productive robusta, and largely forgotten by the coffee industry. It continued to grow wild in the humid forests of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, where it became threatened by deforestation.
At the end of 2018, we found stenophylla in Sierra Leone after searching for several years, but failed to find any trees in fruit until mid-2020, when a 10g sample was recovered for tasting.
Field botanists of the 19th century had long proclaimed the superior taste of stenophylla coffee, and also recorded its resistance to coffee leaf rust and drought. Those early tasters were often inexperienced though, and our expectations were low before the first tasting in the summer of 2020. That all changed once I'd sampled the first cup on a panel with five other coffee experts. Those first sips were revelatory: it was like expecting vinegar and getting champagne.
This initial tasting in London was followed by a thorough evaluation of the coffee's flavour in southern France, led by my research colleague Delpine Mieulet. Mieulet assembled 18 coffee connoisseurs for a blind taste test and they reported a complex profile for stenophylla coffee, with natural sweetness, medium-high acidity, fruitiness, and good body, as one would expect from high-quality arabica.
C. stenophylla growing in the wild, Ivory Coast. E. Couturon / IRD, Author provided
In fact, the coffee seemed very similar to arabica. At the London tasting, the Sierra Leone sample was compared to arabica from Rwanda. In the blind French tasting, most of the judges (81%) said stenophylla tasted like arabica, compared to 98% and 44% for the two arabica control samples, and 7% for a robusta sample.
The coffee tasting experts picked up on notes of peach, blackcurrant, mandarin, honey, light black tea, jasmine, chocolate, caramel and elderflower syrup. In essence, stenophylla coffee is delicious. And despite scoring highly for its similarity to arabica, the stenophylla coffee sample was identified as something entirely unique by 47% of the judges. That means there may be a new market niche for this rediscovered coffee to fill.
The taste testers approved of stenophylla's sweet and fruity flavour. CIRAD, Author provided
Breaking New Grounds
Until now, no other wild coffee species has come close to arabica for its superior taste. Scientifically, the results are compelling because we would simply not expect stenophylla to taste like arabica. These two species are not closely related, they originated on opposite sides of the African continent and the climates in which they grow are very different. They also look nothing alike: stenophylla has black fruit and more complex flowers while arabica cherries are red.
It was always assumed that high-quality coffee was the preserve of arabica – originally from the forests of Ethiopia and South Sudan – and particularly when grown at elevations above 1,500 metres, where the climate is cooler and the light is better.
Stenophylla coffee breaks these rules. Endemic to Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, stenophylla grows in hot conditions at low elevations. Specifically it grows at a mean annual temperature of 24.9°C – 1.9°C higher than robusta, and up to 6.8°C higher than arabica. Stenophylla also appears more tolerant of droughts, potentially capable of growing with less rainfall than arabica.
Robusta coffee can grow in similar conditions to stenophylla, but the price paid to farmers is roughly half that of arabica. Stenophylla coffee makes it possible to grow a superior tasting coffee in much warmer climates. And while stenophylla trees tend to produce less fruit than arabica, they still yield enough to be commercially viable.
The stenophylla harvest on Reunion Island. IRD / CIRAD, Author provided
To breed the coffee crop plants of the future, we need species with great flavour and high heat tolerance. Crossbreeding stenophylla with arabica or robusta could make both more resilient to climate change, and even improve their taste, particularly in the latter.
With stenophylla's rediscovery, the future of coffee just got a little brighter.
Aaron P Davis: Senior Research Leader, Plant Resources, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Disclosure statement: Aaron P Davis receives funding from Darwin Initiative (UK).
Reposted with permission from The Conversation.