Little do you know, night is when the machines come.
Mechanical harvesters taller than the trees themselves rumble through the olive groves, each equipped with floodlights and rows of vibrating teeth. Like a slow-moving beast, the harvesters straddle the trees and throttle them, shaking loose their olives and directing the fruits to powerful vacuums for collection.
Workers unload harvested olives from a truck on a farm in the Alentejo region of Portugal.
Francisco Seco / AP
It's an incredibly efficient way to harvest the olives destined for our cooking oil, martinis, and charcuterie platters. And according to the Olive Oil Times, night harvesting preserves the aromatic qualities of the crop.
But the benefits stop there. Birds like the redwing seem to be "dazzled by the strong lights of the machines," said Vanessa Mata, an ecologist at the Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources in Portugal. During the day, the birds would simply fly away. At night, they become disoriented and can wind up getting sucked into the harvesters, with fatal consequences.
In southern Spain, olive farmers sometimes sell the dead to local restaurants which offer them on menus as "fried birds" — an illegal practice that is "highly pursued by the Ministry of Health," according to a new report by the environmental council of the regional government of Andalusia, in Spain.
Songbirds caught in an olive harvester.
Junta de Andalucia
The problem is not just a local issue of some unfortunate and accidental songbird deaths. According to a letter that Mata recently published in the journal Nature, Portugal's night harvesting machines vacuum up some 96,000 birds each year. It's even worse in Andalusia, where as many as 2.6 million birds disappear annually during nocturnal harvesting. (France and Italy also harvest olives at night, but neither country keeps records of the practice's toll on wildlife.)
All told, we're talking about many millions of migratory birds slain each year by the international olive industry. This is obviously bad news for redwings, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies as near threatened, but plenty of other species are taking a hit too.
According to the Andalusian report, the suctioning kills garden warblers, mistle thrushes, willow warblers, common linnets and yellow wagtails — all species already considered by conservationists to be on the decline. (Eleven other bird species identified in the report have stable or increasing populations.)
Many of these birds are already the victims of illegal hunting. Trappers catch and sell them as food or pets, said Mata, which is a problem across the Mediterranean. BirdLife International reports that the populations of 57 of Europe's most common avian species have been on the decline over the past 30 years. Those birds that inhabit the continent's farmlands appear to have suffered the most severe losses.
But there is some hope. Mata said while the many threats birds face in this part of the world aren't going to disappear overnight, the issue with the olive groves really could. That's because this manner of harvesting olives became popular only over the past decade or so. "Day harvesting is the traditional method," she said. "Night harvesting with machines is a recent practice used in super-intensive olive farms."
A wall is spattered with residue from machines that process olives in the Andalusia region of Spain.
Cristina Quicler / AFP / Getty Images
Olive growers insist that night harvesting provides a better-quality product, but Mata suspects it just comes down to money. The harvest season falls between October and January, but weather and fruit ripeness determine when that season hits its peak. Once it's time, it's time.
Growers who rent expensive harvesting machinery, such as the behemoth seen in this drone footage (with birds in formation flying overhead), want to maximize returns while minimizing rental and operating costs. "By operating the machines day and night, you can harvest the same area using half the machines," said Mata.
Because night harvesting is relatively new, information is scarce about its impact on wildlife and the environment. That's what makes these new reports so eye-opening — they're the first to put numbers on paper. But we're going to need a lot more numbers to understand the true scope of the problem.
Even at the scale indicated by the recent reports, Mata said, the practice is a clear violation of the Birds Directive, the European Union's equivalent of the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Not only is it illegal to kill migratory birds in flight, but it's also against the law to disturb them while they're resting.
If nothing else, olive growers who harvest at night should have to monitor and report the number of birds killed in their machines as other industries do, said Mata.
"I think the important thing for now is for people to take action, press their food suppliers about the origin of their olives and oil, but also [press] their politicians so this practice becomes regulated," said Mata. Her colleague Elli Rivers even started a Change.org petition as one way to get involved.
For now, Mata said the best thing consumers can do for the birds is to raise awareness. Down the road, creating market incentives for daytime harvesting, such as a consumer label noting whether an olive brand is "bird safe" (in the same way that dolphin-safe tuna became an industry standard), could help stem this senseless slaughter.
Reposted with permission from our media associate onEarth.
The report is an annual update of the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent scientific analysis produced by three European research organizations. The CAT is based on policy movements made by governments since the Paris accord.
The report found that even if all governments achieved their Paris agreement commitments, the world will still likely warm 3.0°C.
Even an increase of 2°C—the upper warming limit adopted in Paris—would cause approximately 4 inches of sea level rise, increase the chance of ice-free Arctic summers from once-per-decade to once-per-century, devastate tropical coral reefs and push hundreds of millions of people from climate risk and poverty by 2050, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said.
Alarmingly, the majority of countries that were tracked in the CAT report have not yet fully aligned their policies to actually achieve their Paris commitments.
However, Argentina, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, the European Union, India and Morocco have taken "significant steps in the right direction," the report says.
Meanwhile, the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates were singled out for making insufficient progress or even moving in the wrong direction in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
The report notes that China's coal consumption has risen for a second year in a row, and Brazil "appears to have turned away from its forest protection policies even before its recent change of government."
The authors of the CAT report note that limiting warming to 1.5˚C is "feasible and has substantial economic and sustainable development benefits."
They praised countries such as Norway and Costa Rica for their efforts to deploy renewable energy and plans to decarbonize their transportation sectors. They highlighted Chile's 2050 energy strategy which aims at decarbonizing the energy system, India's National Electricity Plan and South Africa's energy resource strategy that aims to shift away from coal toward renewables and gas.
As for the U.S., despite the Trump administration's efforts to roll back climate policies, the country's emissions are "slowing as coal continues to exit the power market, driven by the declining costs of renewables and storage," the report says
The move would lift an Obama-era rule that required newly built coal-fired plants to use carbon capture and storage… https://t.co/RsSH92oUEz— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1544098930.0
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in October that limiting warming to 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels was possible but would require social and technological change on a scale for which "there is no documented historic precedent," The Washington Post reported.
"We have yet to see this translate into action in terms of what governments are prepared to put on the table," Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, one of the three CAT research groups, told Reuters.
With government #ParisAgreement commitments, global warming in 2100 will be 3.0˚C - twice the agreed 1.5˚C limit. W… https://t.co/f184t0ebRQ— ClimateActionTracker (@ClimateActionTracker)1544524378.0
If those projects are completed, analysts predict the U.S. would flip from one of the world's highest-cost producers of plastics and chemicals to one of the cheapest, using raw materials and energy from fracked gas wells in states like Texas, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Those petrochemical plans could have profound consequences for a planet already showing signs of dangerous warming and a cascade of other impacts from climate change.
The gathering wave of construction comes as the Trump administration works to deregulate American industry and roll back pollution controls, putting the U.S. at odds with the rest of the world's efforts to slow climate change.
Trump announced in June 2017 that the U.S. had halted all implementation of the 2015 Paris agreement and intends to fully withdraw. America is now the world's only state refusing participation in the global agreement to curb climate change (after Syria, the final holdout, signed in November 2017).
This petrochemical industry expansion—much of it funded by foreign investors—makes America's refusal to participate in the Paris agreement all the more significant, because much of this new U.S. infrastructure would be built outside of the greenhouse gas agreement affecting the rest of the globe.
If American policy makers approve this wave of new plastics and petrochemical plants with little regard to curbing climate change and reducing fossil fuel use, environmentalists warn, they'll be greenlighting hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into projects at risk of becoming stranded assets.
From Rust Belt to Plastics Belt
Some of the largest and most expensive petrochemical projects in the U.S. are planned in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, a region that has suffered for decades from the collapse of the domestic steel industry but that has relatively little experience with the kind of petrochemical complexes that are now primarily found on the Gulf Coast.
In November 2017, the China Energy Investment Corp., signed a Memorandum of Understanding with West Virginia that would result in the construction of $83.7 billion in plastics and petrochemicals projects over the next 20 years in that state alone—a huge slice of the $202.4 billion U.S. total. Those plans have run into snags due to trade disputes between the U.S. and China and a corruption probe, though Chinese officials said in late August that investment was moving forward.
The petrochemical industry's interest is spurred by the fact that the region's Marcellus and Utica shales contain significant supplies of so-called "wet gas." This wet gas often is treated as a footnote in discussions of fracking, which tend to focus on the methane gas, called "dry gas" by industry—and not the ethane, propane, butane and other hydrocarbons that also come from those same wells.
Those "wet" fossil fuels and chemical feedstocks are commonly referred to as "natural gas liquids," or NGLs, because they are delivered to customers condensed into a liquid form—like the liquid butane trapped in a Bic lighter, which expands into a stream of flammable gas when you flick that lighter on.
Ethane can represent a surprising amount of the fossil fuel from a fracked shale well, particularly in the Marcellus. For every 6,000 cubic feet of methane (the energy equivalent of the industry's standard 42 gallon barrel of oil), Marcellus wet gas wells can produce up to roughly 35 gallons of ethane, based on data reported by the American Oil and Gas Reporter in 2011.
And U.S. ethane production is projected to grow dramatically. By 2022, the region will produce roughly 800,000 barrels of ethane per day, up from 470,000 barrels a day in 2017, according to energy consultant RBN Energy.
That supply glut is driving down ethane prices in the Rust Belt.
"The lowest price ethane on the planet is here in this region," Brian Anderson, director of the West Virginia University Energy Institute, told the NEP Northeast U.S. Petrochemical Construction conference in Pittsburgh in June.
Chemicals and the Climate
Image projected onto Houston petrochemical plant during the Houston Toxic Tour, 2017.Backbone Campaign, CC BY 2.0
The petrochemical and plastics industries are notoriously polluting, not only when it comes to toxic air pollution and plastic waste, but also because of the industry's significant greenhouse gas footprint—affecting not only the U.S., but the entire world.
"The chemical and petrochemical sector is by far the largest industrial energy user, accounting for roughly 10 percent of total worldwide final energy demand and 7 percent of global [greenhouse gas] emissions," the International Energy Agency reported in 2013. Since then the numbers have crept up, with the IEA finding petrochemicals responsible for an additional percentage point of the world's total energy consumption in 2017.
Carbon emissions from petrochemical and plastics manufacturing are expected to grow 20 percent by 2030 (in other words, in just over a decade), the IEA concluded in a report released Oct. 5. A few days later, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030, the world needs to have reduced its greenhouse gas pollution 45 percent from 2010 levels, in order to achieve the goal of limiting global warming to a less-catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
The petrochemicals industry has so far drawn relatively little attention from oil and gas analysts and policy makers. "Petrochemicals are one of the key blind spots in the global energy debate, especially given the influence they will exert on future energy trends," Dr. Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director, said in a statement this month.
"In fact," he added, "our analysis shows they will have a greater influence on the future of oil demand than cars, trucks and aviation."
The new investments, which will rely on decades of continued fracking in the U.S, offer the oil and gas industry a serious hedge against competition from renewable energy, even in the event that climate policies push fossil fuel energy to the margins.
"Unlike refining, and ultimately unlike oil, which will see a moment when the growth will stop, we actually don't anticipate that with petrochemicals," Andrew Brown, upstream director for Royal Dutch Shell, told the San Antonio Express News in March.
The planned infrastructure could also help bail out the heavily indebted shale drilling industry financially by consuming vast amounts of fossil fuels, both for power and as a raw material.
The American Chemistry Council has linked 333 chemical industry projects, all announced since 2010, to shale gas—that is, gas that is produced using fracking. Forty-one percent of those projects are still in the planning phase as of September, according to the council, and 68 percent of the projects are linked to foreign investment.
State regulators in Texas and Louisiana have already issued permits that would allow a group of 74 petrochemical and liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects along the Gulf Coast to add 134 million tons of greenhouse gases a year to the atmosphere, an Environmental Integrity Project analysis found in September. The group said that was equal to the pollution from running 29 new coal power plants around the clock.
The expansion of plastics manufacturing in America also has environmentalists worried over a plastics pollution crisis. "We could be locking in decades of expanded plastics production at precisely the time the world is realizing we should use far less of it," Carroll Muffett, president of the U.S. Center for International Environmental Law, told The Guardian in December 2017.
This story is part of Fracking for Plastics, a DeSmog investigation into the proposed petrochemical build-out in the Rust Belt and the major players involved.
Petrochemical Paradox
The petrochemical industry transforms ethane and other raw material into a huge range of products, including not only plastic, but also vinyl, fertilizers, Styrofoam, beauty products, chemicals and pesticides.
The petrochemicals industry itself straddles an uncomfortable fence when it comes to renewable energy and climate change. A significant portion of its revenue comes from "clean" technology sectors, as it provides materials used to make batteries and electric cars.
One report last year concluded that roughly 20 percent of the industry's revenue comes from products designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the American Chemistry Council cited the industry's role supplying "materials and technologies that improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions," as it opposed Trump's decision to drop out of the Paris agreement.
But petrochemical manufacturers are also heavily reliant on fossil fuels. They need them to power and supply a dreamed-of "manufacturing renaissance," as the ExxonMobil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute explained as it pushed for Trump to abandon the Paris agreement.
Plans to use American shale gas would also link petrochemicals to the expansion of fracking, which carries its own environmental concerns. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's landmark study on fracking and drinking water concluded in 2016 that fracking has led to water contamination and poses continued risks to American water supplies.
In addition, though conversations about climate change usually focus on carbon emissions, the gas industry has such a bad methane leak problem that using natural gas can be even worse for the climate than burning coal.
Pittsburgh and Paris
Climate implications make a petrochemical build-out risky, not only from an environmental perspective, but also from a fiscal perspective, Mark Dixon, co-founder of NoPetroPA, which opposes fracking-based petrochemicals projects, told DeSmog.
One plant, Shell's $6 billion ethane "cracker" plant currently under construction in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, has permits to pump 2.25 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year into the air near Pittsburgh, roughly equal to the annual carbon pollution from 430,000 cars.
Industry advocates say the region can produce enough ethane to support up to seven more ethane cracker plants like Shell's.
"We're trying to drop our emissions 50 percent by 2030," Dixon said, referring to Pittsburgh's highly touted plans to comply with international climate targets despite the federal government's withdrawal from the Paris agreement. "The Shell cracker alone will decimate that."
A kayaker protests against Shell's cracker project outside the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in June 2018.Mark Dixon, CC BY 2.0
Stranding Assets
International negotiators met in Bangkok in September to hash out details on how the Paris agreement will be implemented. The U.S., which participated in talks despite the Trump administration's intention to withdraw from the accord, faced criticism over working to delay clarity over the agreement's financing (nonetheless, a top UN negotiator praised "good progress" from the talks).
While the Paris agreement is not directly binding, globally there has been discussion of using trade agreements and tariffs to pressure countries that fail to keep up with their carbon-cutting commitments.
In February, the European Union (EU) declared that it will not sign new trade agreements with any country that refuses to get on board with the Paris agreement.
"One of our main demands is that any country who signs a trade agreement with EU should implement the Paris agreement on the ground," France's foreign affairs minister Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne told the French Parliament. "No Paris agreement, no trade agreement."
"They're already shooting across the bow, saying look, you've got to implement the Paris climate agreement," Dixon told DeSmog. "We could very well spend 10 years building an infrastructure to support fracking all over the region, crackers, ethane, plastics, everything, then have Europe say, 'sorry, you can't do that. You have to shut it down.'"
In other words, whether or not the U.S. puts its signature on the climate pact's dotted line, the pressure from trading partners to reduce greenhouse gas pollution—and the underlying concerns about the rapidly warming climate—could remain the same.
That said, while the U.S. is the only country to reject Paris on paper, it is far from the only country on track to miss its targets aimed at warding off catastrophic climate change. Only Morocco and The Gambia are projected to hit "Paris Agreement Compatible" targets, according to the Climate Action Tracker (whose rating tracker includes many major polluters but not all countries worldwide).
The EU itself currently earns a rating of "insufficient" from the group (China is ranked "highly insufficient," while the U.S. and four other nations earned the worst "critically insufficient" grade).
Closing Windows
The next several years will determine the future of petrochemical production for decades to come, crucial years when it comes to the fate of the climate, if industry gets its timing right—particularly in the Rust Belt.
"The window to make this all work is not forever," Charles Schliebs of Stone Pier Capital Advisors told the NEP Northeast U.S. Petrochemical Construction conference in June. "It's maybe two to five years."
That means key decisions may be made while Donald Trump remains in office—though state and local regulators will also face important calls over permits and construction planning.
For some living near the center of the planned petrochemical expansion, the problem is readily apparent.
"We're not going to be able to double down on fossil fuels," Dixon said, "and comply with the Paris climate agreement."
The Link Between Fossil Fuels, Single-Use Plastics and Climate Change https://t.co/dNvbx9e4r9 @PlasticPollutes @GreenNewsDaily— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1525383607.0
Follow the DeSmog investigative series, Fracking for Plastics, and get your questions answered with the Field Guide to the Petrochemical and Plastics Industry.
Reposted with permission from our media associate DeSmogBlog.
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