By Kathiann M. Kowalski for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

The Port of Cleveland is going electric.

One of the Great Lakes’ largest shipping ports is transforming part of a large warehouse into an “electrification hub” to anchor its emission-cutting efforts in the coming decades.

The project is among the Cleveland-Cuyahoga Port Authority’s first steps toward its goal of net-zero emissions for its own operations by 2050. The target does not include “Scope 3” emissions from the ships, trains, and trucks that come and go from the port, but officials hope the upgrades will support their emissions cuts as well.

“Upgrading the electric feed into the terminal is not the most exciting thing,” said Carly Beck, the port’s senior manager for planning, environment and information systems, but it’s a necessary foundation for all other parts of the port authority’s climate plan. 

Shipping ports are a major source of not only climate emissions but also harmful air pollution for nearby communities. Fossil fuels power most of the cranes, vehicles, and other equipment used to move commodities and consumer goods around the globe. The United Nations estimates that global shipping is responsible for about 3% of emissions worldwide.

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority became the first port on the Great Lakes to announce a net-zero emissions goal when its board unanimously approved its climate action plan last September. In February, the board approved spending $32 million from state and federal transportation grants to modernize the warehouse and make electrification upgrades. 

Cleveland’s downtown port on Lake Erie handles about 13 million tons of cargo each year, from steel and iron ore to wind turbine parts and heavy machinery. Most goes to or comes from parts of Ohio and neighboring states via rail or truck.

“Lake Erie … sits at a very important position geographically as part of the Great Lakes,” said Dana Rodriguez, a senior analyst on global shipping at the Environmental Defense Fund. 

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, like many of its U.S. counterparts, is a public entity that owns and maintains infrastructure at the port. It contracts with a commercial operating company, Logistec, to run day-to-day operations.

The port considered multiple approaches for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, including hydrogen power, before deciding to focus its efforts on electrification, Beck said. All told, the port estimates full electrification will require roughly 5 to 7 megawatts of available power, she said. Design work for modernization and the electrification hub at the port’s Warehouse A is underway. 

The port also is working with Logistec on a grant application for funds under the U.S. EPA’s Clean Ports Program, set up under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Roughly $2.8 billion in competitive grants are available for deploying zero-emission technology, with an additional $150 million for climate and air quality planning. The application is due May 28. 

If successful, the port plans to add 2 megawatts of solar capacity on top of Warehouse A, which will provide a significant chunk of its anticipated electrical needs. Other funds would be used to start acquiring electric equipment for port operations, such as a large forklift.

Over time, the port plans to acquire additional equipment as and when machinery and funds become available, including replacements for a large crane and other material-handling equipment. 

“It’s just a matter now of biting off chunks as we can,” Beck said. Timing for the acquisitions will also depend on when different types of electrical equipment become available, which will involve ongoing review.

Port Authority President and CEO Will Friedman said the electrification push fits with the port’s broader sustainability goals, including reducing water pollution in Lake Erie and managing dredged material more sustainably.

“We’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do. We have a social conscience here,” Friedman said.

The decision also should help the port stay competitive, especially as more companies consider the indirect emissions of their contractors. 

“We think that’s going to be the future if you’re part of the supply chain network,” Friedman said, adding that ignoring greenhouse gas emissions really isn’t an option. “All industries are trying to figure out how they can decarbonize, and maritime shipping is certainly a part of that.” 

The bigger picture

Decarbonization makes sense for Cleveland and Cuyahoga County in the global scheme of things, said Grant Goodrich, executive director for the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University.

“Getting products in and out of Europe and being able to advertise and market that you can do it in a more emissions-friendly manner gives you a competitive advantage,” Goodrich said. The European Union already is pushing for the shipping sector to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and Goodrich expects that will ultimately become important in the American marketplace as well. Cutting greenhouse gases also could help attract more cruise ship business to Cleveland, he added.

The port’s regional nature likely will make some aspects of decarbonization easier. For starters, the port generally does not store fuel for ships on site. Ships typically fill up elsewhere, often from barges, depending on where they believe they can get the best deal, Friedman said. If a ship does need extra fuel while in Cleveland, trucks deliver it.

On the other hand, the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority has less bargaining power than some much larger ports on the East and West coasts. That limits its ability to increase fees, which makes grants and other types of funding particularly important.

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga Port Authority’s focus on Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions is consistent with the goals for a majority of other ports included in a March 2024 report from the Environmental Defense Fund and Arup. However, the report noted, the majority of total port emissions driving human-caused climate change generally are not within ports’ direct control and would fall into Scope 3. 

“Action in the broader zone of user and community and industry influence, where impacts are often far greater and where potential benefits are significant, is lacking,” the EDF report said.

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority’s upgrades include planning to provide power for some of those other indirect emissions.

“We don’t want to forget about Scope 3,” Beck said.

She added that the port anticipates offering incentives to encourage ships and others to reduce their emissions.

An example would be for ships to plug into electrical shore power, known as “cold ironing,” instead of running diesel engines while in port. Besides cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the process can also reduce pollution from particulate matter, nitrous oxides, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. The port also hopes to encourage independent operators to acquire electric tugboats and similar equipment.

“Port decarbonization is just one key piece of the full decarbonization equation,” said Rodriguez at the Environmental Defense Fund. “It is also up to the trucking and shipping sectors to meet the ports halfway and contribute to the decarbonization efforts. In an effort to reach net zero by 2050, all stakeholders must play their part.”


Kathiann M. Kowalski wrote this article for Energy News Network.


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A bill pending in Congress would use federal funds to help farmers in Missouri and elsewhere transition from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, to more climate-friendly production. The idea, according to the bill's backers, is to assist producers who want to move from intensive animal agriculture to pasture-based animal agriculture or specialty crop production.

Tim Gibbons, communications director with the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, said the program could allow family farms to better compete with corporate-owned operations.

"Using those dollars to support the vast majority of livestock producers in Missouri would be beneficial, not only to their family farms, but to their local economies, to the land that they're stewards of, and also allowing them to stay in business," he said.

Missouri conservation groups say CAFOs dominate the state's agricultural industry, mass-producing meat at a minimal cost to outcompete smaller independent farms. Agri-business associations say concentrated operations are needed to provide an affordable food supply for a global population.

Conservationists claim CAFOs produce water and air pollution, use hormones and antibiotics in meat production, and often neglect and abuse farm animals. Gibbons says the Industrial Agriculture Conversion Act would help keep independent operations from being forced out of business.

"Ninety-percent of Missouri hog producers were put out of business in one generation, and that's through industrialization, vertical integration and the corporate takeover. We're working to ensure that independent operations can be viable and farmers can pass the farms down to the next generation," he added.

Gibbons said Missouri Rural Crisis Center was formed in 1985 out of the farm crisis of the 1980's and added that the group advocates for policies that support independent family farm operations.


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By Erik Hoffner for Mongabay.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Maine News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

January brought a pair of rough storms to the northeastern U.S. They hit when the tides were high and pushed higher than normal by rising sea levels, setting numerous high-water records and prompting Maine Governor Janet Mills to request a federal disaster declaration. These events, just three days apart, built on damage suffered during another storm during the December 2023 holidays and another during the previous December.

"Extensive" is the word that Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist for the Maine Geological Survey, chose to describe the most recent damage during an interview with Mongabay. He pointed to an estimate that 60% of Maine's working waterfronts were severely damaged. "We saw numerous seawall failures and erosion of anywhere between 15 to even up to 30 feet [4.5-9 meters] of coastal sand dunes, and massive bluff failures also," Slovinsky said.

The common response to busted docks, condemned houses, shrinking shorelines, disappearing dunes and faltering bluffs has been to bolster the shore with 'hard' infrastructure like concrete jetties and breakwaters of imported boulders. But those interventions are expensive, carbon-intensive, and ultimately ineffective due to continual sea level rise.

Increasingly, agencies like Slovinsky's have been experimenting with a more natural and possibly more effective approach called living shorelines. The U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defines these as "projects that connect the land and water to stabilize shorelines, reduce erosion, and provide valuable habitat that enhances coastal resilience."

Such projects often take the shape of phalanxes of buried Christmas trees that shore up dunes, mesh bags of shells placed to protect mudflats from erosion, and salt-loving grasses and shrubs planted to stabilize nearshore areas.

Development of living shorelines is widely credited to the late Edgar William Garbisch Jr., a chemistry professor turned wetland restorationist who piloted the approach's early methods and philosophy during the early 1970s in Chesapeake Bay. The aim is to protect coastal ecosystems like marshes and beaches with natural assets that create habitat while anchoring the shore. This method has gained increasing traction along much of the U.S. East Coast, from Georgia on north, as communities have begun to confront the impacts of human-caused climate change, including worsening storms and sea level rise, which is set to increase a further 0.6-1.2 m (2-4 feet) by 2100.

While Maine's official experiments with such interventions at places like Popham and Pemaquid beaches have seen varying levels of success among their dunes and marshes, one Belfast area entrepreneur is innovating new ways of leveraging the living shorelines concept to protect another ubiquitous coastal feature: sandy bluffs.

On a recent morning, contractor Paul Bernacki showed a Mongabay reporter around his latest project site on the Blue Hill Peninsula in Midcoast Maine, where a homeowner had hired him to preserve an eroding bluff along 2,000 ft (610 m) of shoreline. His vision for shoring it up differed greatly from others the property's owner initially approached: "The engineers and their contractors wanted to kill all the trees on the shore, move the bank back 10 feet [3 m] at the top, and then pile 200 truckloads of rocks all the way around," he said.

"Their solution to stabilization is to kill nature. Is that technically feasible for the whole coast of Maine?" Bernacki asked.

He said he doesn't think so, and his team has been pairing a fresh take on the living shorelines best management practices with power tools to shore up this crumbling cliff and its line of oak trees and house in danger of tipping into the salt pond below.

The home is perched on one of Maine's many so-called "erodible bluffs." Despite the rocky shore postcard pictures, 40% of the state's coast is classified as this mix of sand, rock and vegetation that's vulnerable to wave action and scouring by wind-driven blocks of ice. Bernacki's team shores up land like this not with imported rocks, but with natural and often local materials.

Among these are logs (sometimes including drift logs) and salt-tolerant plants often germinated from regionally wildcrafted seed stocks, plus imported materials like coconut fiber-based coir landscape fabric shaped into long tubes and filled with a matrix of soil and organics. These tubes, affectionately called "Tootsie Rolls," are positioned behind rows of logs pinned down with rebar to form tiers and planted with salt-loving grasses like northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) or broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus).

Seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens), swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) and white yarrow (Achillea millefolium) are also planted, and on the bluff above these, perennial shrubs like winter berry (Ilex verticillata), Virginia rose (Rosa virginiana) and beach plum (Prunus maritima). Finally, rocks are placed among the logs to break up waves and scouring ice, until the plants' roots get established.

This increasingly popular approach - which looks attractive while creating habitat for birds, bugs and nearshore creatures - often costs less than the imported rock or manufactured cement of seawalls and breakwaters, while being as effective or better. NOAA estimates that living shorelines can cost less than hard shorelines, both in terms of installation and maintenance, with costs ranging from less than $1,000 up to $5,000 per linear foot ($3,300-$16,400/m) of shoreline. Installing hard options, by contrast, typically ranges from $2,000 and up per linear foot ($6,600/m), according to The Maine Monitor. Maintenance of living shorelines costs about $100 per foot ($330/meter) annually, according to NOAA, while repairing hard shorelines costs from $100 to $250 per linear foot ($330-$820/m).

While some say it's a winner on cost, that's also likely in terms of carbon if one considers a life-cycle analysis of living shorelines, which is where Bernacki stresses the big difference lies. "The carbon footprint of our work is minimal for the dollar," he says.

Following the recent storm trio, he reported that his team's current project withstood the elements well, with no damage to the newly established structures or the bluff, which was also helped by the site being more protected than if it were right on the bay. Still, some of the less salt-tolerant plants higher up on the bluff were inundated by the tide, and may need replacing if they don't green up in the spring.

Perhaps because Maine has been slower than other states to enact broad regulations for the various situations that living shorelines could apply to, like erodible bluffs, such private- and contractor-led efforts are getting greater attention from landowners, said coastal geologist Slovinsky. "I've had more people than ever in the last couple of years call and say, 'Hey, my bluff is eroding, but I don't want to build a seawall, what do I do?' So, I point them to our coastal property owner guide that I wrote a couple years ago," he said.

In nearby New Hampshire, which has worked living shorelines into state regulations already, there's a similar level of interest and several projects underway at sites like Cutts Cove in Portsmouth, which also weathered the recent storms well. And, like Bernacki's team, they've made an effort to incorporate naturally available and sometimes free resources found onsite in their construction, like local plants, tree stumps and drift logs.

"The thinking is that over time, as the tree stumps and drift logs decompose, the near vertical riprap sill will slowly shift into a more gradual and natural slope," said Grant McKown, a coastal habitat research associate for the Jackson Estuarine Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, via email. "Additionally, the use of drift logs and trees in the sill construction enhances the physical heterogeneity of the sill, providing additional refuge for nekton (mobile aquatic animals) during high tide and additional surface area for macroalgae (like Fucus and Ascophyllum) to colonize," he wrote.

Is it enough to successfully hold back the rising tides, though?

Back in Maine, results vary. One Freeport-area homeowner reported in January that their $40,000 living shoreline had been washed away. But while Bernacki's current project fared fine, he was philosophical on the question: "Success to me is restoring this habitat - instead of destroying more habitat to protect property," he said. "That, you really can't justify."

So, everything is on the table after the recent spate of storms, including the old standby, Slovinsky said: "One of the things I'm pessimistic about is the response that we're seeing thus far from these storms: more rock," in the form of rapidly rebuilt seawalls and breakwaters.

It's probably going to take advocacy and many more contractors to push his state to roll out a regulatory regime for naturally protecting its iconic shore, both for official and private projects. But momentum is building among Maine's landowners, at least, who are increasingly willing to spend more for waterfront property despite sea level rise: "I'm getting a new call once a week," Bernacki said.

So, like the wetland plants sown by his crew, the number of landowners interested to employ natural solutions, rather than piling up yet more rocks against an ever-rising tide, is also growing.


Erik Hoffner wrote this article for Mongabay.


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Environmental groups have filed a lawsuit to stop the logging of centuries-old trees on the Oregon coast. The Bureau of Land Management is moving forward with the Blue and Gold logging project to cut down rare old growth forests in the state's coastal range.

Grace Brahler, wildlands director with Cascadia Wildlands, says the logging project will wreak havoc on the ecological system and is bad for fire management.

"It's really concerning at a time when we're seeing longer fire seasons, hotter temperatures that the agency is moving forward with actions that are going to move forest stands from low or moderate hazard level into a high hazard level for wildfire moving forward," she contended.

Brahler believes the effects from the project will be felt for decades to come, and noted that the Biden administration has proposed an amendment conserving old growth forests from logging. The BLM has also elevated conservation as a priority alongside other uses on public lands. However, the agency also needs to produce a certain volume of timber on its lands and concluded the Blue and Gold project would have no significant impact on its environmental assessment.

But Brahler pointed out that it also threatens endangered species on the Oregon coast.

"This is just really ideal mature and old growth habitat that a lot of our most imperiled and iconic species like the marbled murrelet, the northern spotted owl, the coastal coho [salmon] - they rely on these forests and these areas," she said.

Brahler added that old growth forests are playing crucial roles as carbon sinks and stores as the climate changes.

"We're in such a critical climate window right now for climate action and we have right in our backyard these incredible forests, these ancient temperate rainforests in the Cascadia bioregion that are the most powerful natural climate solution," she continued.