By Aman Azhar for Inside Climate News.
Broadcast version by Will Walkey for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

A severe algae bloom clogged equipment at one of the treatment facilities providing drinking water in the Washington region, forcing officials to declare a boil-water advisory on the night of July 3-as thousands of visitors arrived to celebrate Independence Day.

The advisory was lifted the morning of July 4. But the incident was an ominous sign of how warming water temperatures caused by climate change can disrupt essential civic services.

The algal blooms caused a drop in water supply at the Dalecarlia Water Treatment Plant on the Maryland-D.C. border. All water treatment operations were switched to the McMillan Treatment Plant in Northwest D.C. to ensure adequate supply of water, the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water) said in its July 3 advisory.

The disruption in water supplies affected the entire District of Columbia and parts of Arlington, Virginia, including the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery and Reagan National Airport. Among the blooms' impact: increased turbidity, a measure of cloudiness in water.

The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) operates the treatment plants located in D.C. and supplied by the Washington Aqueduct, which collects, treats and pumps drinking water for nearly 1 million customers in Washington, Arlington County and other areas in northern Virginia.

The algae intruded at a time when demand for water was particularly high due to the influx of visitors and possible firefighting activities related to the annual fireworks display on the National Mall.

"DC Water issued a precautionary boil water advisory to protect public health and safety due to a sharp reduction in the volume of water being supplied by the Army Corps of Engineers' Washington Aqueduct and due to the Aqueduct expressing concerns that they might be unable to comply with strict U.S. EPA water quality standards while simultaneously attempting to increase water supply volumes to levels adequate to meet DC Water's customer demands," said Sherri Lewis, senior manager of communications at DC Water, in emailed remarks. "The combined output of treated water from both of the Aqueduct's plants was insufficient to meet DC Water's water consumption demands."

Lewis said the week of the July 4th holiday has historically been one of DC Water's highest water demand days of the year.

Affected customers scrambled to stock up on bottled water supplies after the advisory was announced, quickly emptying out aisles in supermarkets and local stores.

"We had floating algae mats along the top of our sedimentation basin at our Dalecarlia Treatment Plant, which then washed into the filter building, clogging filters in the process," said Cynthia Mitchell, a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The sedimentation portion of the water filtration process removes suspended particulates in water. In emailed comments to Inside Climate News, Mitchell said the situation at Dalecarlia led to a decrease in supply, while the McMillan Treatment Plant continued to operate under normal conditions.

"Our recent algae bloom was not a cyanobacterial harmful algae bloom-we had green algae which does not pose a risk to human health," Mitchell added.

The Environmental Protection Agency warns that "blooms of red tides, blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria can result in severe impacts on water quality, human health, aquatic ecosystems, and the economy."

In the case of the July 3 event, it was the sheer amount of algae that caused problems. The region's record-high temperatures are driving growth, and climate change is expected to worsen the situation, Mitchell said.

"Washington Aqueduct staff that have served for decades, including General Manager Rudy Chow with 40 years of experience in the water utility industry, agree the severity of algae blooms this summer is unprecedented," Mitchell said.

DC Water's Lewis said several other utilities that use the Potomac River as one of their water supply sources, such as Fairfax Water in Virginia and the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission in Maryland, encountered and successfully treated these same algal blooms.

Nitrogen, key fuel for algae, flows into water bodies from sewage overflows and runoff. Bill Dennison, a professor and vice president at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said the Potomac River has historically had high levels of pollution from sewage but now agriculture and stormwater runoff is the biggest source of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

"Generally, both cyanobacteria and green algae form in the Potomac River," Dennison said. "Fortunately, green algae don't tend to be as toxic as cyanobacteria. But they're not a pleasant addition to the environment and can clog the waterways ... and produce bad taste in drinking water."

Climate change contributes a one-two punch. More rain instead of snow in the winter leads to extra pollution runoff earlier in the season, Dennison said. And warming temperatures allow algae to bloom earlier in the summer than before.

DC Water officials said they are reviewing their actions and communications to the public about the July 3 event to determine what can be improved.

Lewis said that unlike the majority of other public water utilities, DC Water does not have a second source of water and is fully dependent on the Aqueduct to supply its needs. "It is also extremely unusual for a water utility serving a large metropolitan city not to also have direct responsibility for water supply and water treatment. DC Water will be reviewing the Aqueduct's actions to determine if any changes are necessary to ensure proper notification steps are taken in a timely manner," she said.

While greater D.C. avoided major calamity with this algae bloom, other cities haven't been as lucky. In 2014, the water supply of Toledo, Ohio, had to be shut down because of a harmful algal bloom in Lake Erie, and the toxin associated with that algae could not be destroyed by boiling. Half a million people could not use water supplies for days. Agricultural runoff was later declared the cause of the ordeal.


Aman Azhar wrote this article for Inside Climate News.


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New federal legislation would make polluters pay for the costs of climate change mitigation.

On Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., introduced the "Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act of 2024," which would create a $1 trillion, paid out by the biggest fossil-fuel companies over 10 years.

Funds would be used to rebuild and upgrade infrastructure, clean up the impacts of pollution in communities, and provide climate-related disaster assistance.

Van Hollen said seeking a portion of the fossil fuel industry's profits would not raise costs for consumers.

"It should have virtually no impact on energy costs," Van Hollen contended. "For a couple reasons: It doesn't add to the marginal cost of production, number one, and it only hits the biggest fossil-fuel companies, leaving many other companies in the market to compete with on price."

The legislation is sponsored in the House by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif. The fee would be levied against companies responsible for at least $1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions between 2000 and 2022.

Other climate superfund bills have been introduced in state legislatures in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and California. Vermont became the first state to pass such a bill this spring.

The federal legislation would not preempt state laws or lawsuits seeking redress from fossil-fuel companies. It would also provide $15 billion to FEMA for climate-related disaster response.

Quentin Scott, federal policy director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund is often unable to keep up.

"FEMA always runs out of money before the end of the fiscal year, because climate change has exacerbated extreme weather events, so they just don't have enough money," Scott explained. "This $15 billion is trying to bridge that gap."

FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund was exhausted in August for the second year in a row, and the 10th time since 2001. Last year, the U.S. saw a record 28 separate weather and climate disasters costing at least $1 billion each.

By Audrey Henderson for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Illinois News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

As low-income households face the dual burden of weather extremes and high energy costs, energy efficiency is an increasingly important strategy for both climate mitigation and lower utility bills.

Passive House standards — which create a building envelope so tight that central heating and cooling systems may not be needed at all — promise to dramatically slash energy costs, and are starting to appear in “stretch codes” for buildings, including in Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington and New York.

And while some builders are balking at the initial up-front cost, other developers are embracing passive house metrics as a solution for affordable multifamily housing.

“We’re trying to make zero energy, high performing buildings that are healthy and low energy mainstream everywhere,” said Katrin Klingenberg, co-founder and executive director of Passive House Institute-U.S., or Phius. 

Klingenberg says the additional work needed to meet an aggressive efficiency standard, is, in the long run, not that expensive. Constructing a building to passive standards is initially only about 3%-5% more expensive than building a conventional single family home, or 0%-3% more for multifamily construction, according to Phius.

“This is not rocket science… We’re just beefing up the envelope. We’re doing all the good building science, we’re doing all the healthy stuff. We’re downsizing the [heating and cooling] system, and now we need someone to optimize that process,” Klingenberg said. 

Phius in practice and action

A Phius-certified building does not employ a conventional central heating and cooling system. Instead, it depends on an air-tight building envelope, highly efficient ventilation and strategically positioned, high-performance windows to exploit solar gain during both winter and summer and maximize indoor comfort. 

The tight envelope for Phius buildings regulates indoor air temperature, which can be a literal lifesaver when power outages occur during extreme heat waves or cold snaps, said Doug Farr, founder and principal of architecture firm Farr Associates.

Farr pointed to the example of the Academy for Global Citizenship in Chicago, which was built to Phius standards. 

“There was a really cold snap in January. Somehow the power went out [and the building] was without electricity for two or three days. And the internal temperature in the building dropped two degrees over three days.”

Farr said that example shows a clear benefit to high efficiency that justifies the cost.

“You talk about the ultimate resilience where you’re not going to die in a power outage either in the summer or the winter. You know, that’s pretty valuable.” 

There is also a business case to be made for implementing Phius and other sustainability metrics into residential construction, such as lowered bills that can appeal to market-rate buyers and renters, and reduced long-term maintenance costs for building owners. 

AJ Patton, founder and CEO of 548 Enterprise in Chicago, says in response to questions about how to convince developers to consider factors beyond the bottom line, simply, “they shouldn’t.”

Instead, he touts lower operating costs for energy-efficiency metrics rather than climate mitigation when he pitches his projects to his colleagues. 

“I can’t sell people on climate change anymore,” he said. “If you don’t believe by now, the good Lord will catch you when He catch you.

“But if I can sell you on lowering your operating expenses, if I can sell you on the marketability, on the fact that your tenants will have 30%, 40% lower individual expenses, that’s a marketing angle from a developer owner, that’s what I push on my contemporaries,” Patton said. “And then that’s when they say, ‘if you’re telling the truth, and if your construction costs are not more significant than mine, then I’m sold.’”

Phius principles can require specialized materials and building practices, Klingenberg said. But practitioners are working toward finding ways to manage costs by sourcing domestically available materials rather than relying on imports.

“The more experienced an architect [or developer] gets, they understand that they can replace these specialized components with more generic materials and you can get the same effect,” Klingenberg said.

Patton is presently incorporating Phius principles as the lead developer for 3831 W Chicago Avenue, a mixed use development located on Chicago’s West Side. The project, billed as the largest passive house design project in the city to date, will cover an entire city block, incorporating approximately 60 mixed-income residential units and 9,000 sq ft of commercial and community space.

Another project, Sendero Verde, located in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City, is the largest certified passive-house building in the United States with 709 units. Completed in April, Sendero Verde is designed to provide cool conditions in the summer and warmth during the winter — a vast improvement for the low-income and formerly unhoused individuals and families who live there.

Barriers and potential solutions

Even without large upfront building cost premiums and with the increased impact of economies of scale, improved technology and materials, many developers still feel constrained to cut costs, Farr said.

“There’s entire segments of the development spectrum in housing, even in multifamily housing in Chicago, where if you’re a developer of rental housing time and again … they feel like they have no choice but to keep things as the construction as cheap as possible because their competitors all do. And then, some architecture firms only work with those ‘powerless’ developers and they get code-compliant buildings.”

But subsidies, such as federal low income housing credits, IRS tax breaks and resources from the Department of Energy also provide a means for developers to square the circle, especially for projects aimed toward very low-income residents. 

Nonetheless, making the numbers work often requires taking a long-term view of development, according to Brian Nowak, principal at Sweetgrass Design Studio in Minnesota. Nowak was the designer for Hillcrest Village, an affordable housing development in Northfield that does not utilize Phius building metrics, but does incorporate net-zero energy usage standards.

“It’s an investment over time, to build resilient, energy-efficient housing,” he told the Energy News Network in June 2023.

“That should be everyone’s goal. And if we don’t, for example, it affects our school system. It affects the employers at Northfield having people that are readily available to come in and fill the jobs that are needed.

“That’s a significant long-term benefit of a project like this. And that is not just your monthly rents on the building; it’s the cost of the utilities as well. When those utilities include your electricity and your heating and cooling that’s a really big deal.”

Developers like Patton are determined to incorporate sustainability metrics into affordable housing and commercial developments both because it’s good business and because it’s the right thing to do.

“I’m not going to solve every issue. I’m going to focus on clean air, clean water, and lowering people’s utility bills. That’s my focus. I’m not going to design the greatest architectural building. I’m not even interested in hiring those type of architects. 

“I had a lived experience of having my heat cut off in the middle of winter. I don’t want that to ever happen to anybody I know ever again,” Patton said. “So if I can lower somebody’s cost of living, that’s my sole focus. And there’s been a boatload of buy-in from that, because those are historically [not] things [present] in the communities I invest in.”


Audrey Henderson wrote this article for Energy News Network.


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By Syris Valentine for Grist.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Grist-Public News Service Collaboration

When the sharing economy took off in the 2010s and upended entire industries, the firmest proponents of the model heralded it as an economic revolution that would help slash emissions. Of all the ideas that emerged and dissolved over the years, shareable electric scooters seemed to possess the most promise for climate. Almost anyone with a smartphone and a credit card could grab one and ride it down the block or across town, eschewing automobiles.

Yet, as the industry matures and Lime - which, with operations in 280 cities worldwide, is the biggest player - moves further into its eighth year, researchers have shown that the eco-friendly dreams of shared micromobility have not materialized without problems. The true climate benefits of these fleets depends upon how companies deploy and manage them, and safety remains a concern as injuries climb. But industry leaders appear intent on ensuring their scooters are as sustainable and safe as possible.

"It's really important as a company that has set a net-zero target by 2030," said Andrew Savage, Lime's head of sustainability, "that we walk the walk, and that we do everything we can to inspire the industries around us to decarbonize as well."

The sustainability of shared micromobility is an active area of research in a fast-changing industry. Ultimately, researchers see two factors that determine the overall climate impact of e-scooters: how users ride them, and how operators manage them from manufacturing to disposal.

A recent survey of the latest research questioned whether the sharing economy is inherently sustainable, including a particular look at e-scooters. The survey found many researchers were repeatedly concerned with the question: "If riders hadn't rented a scooter, how would they have gotten to their destination?" If someone would have walked instead of ridden, that person increased the emissions associated with that trip. But several studies, including one by the Portland Bureau of Transportation and another, funded by Lime, by a German research institute, have found that though anywhere from a third to well over half of scooter users would have walked instead, enough other trips that would have been taken by car were not. Shared scooters, on the whole, help reduce overall transportation emissions - often preventing 20 grams of CO2 emissions per mile ridden on a scooter.

The picture in urban landscapes, however, can get slightly more complicated when researchers consider how those providing the scooters retrieve them to charge, repair, or redistribute them to where people are likely to use them. Colin Murphy, director of research and consulting at the Shared Use Mobility Center, said that when operators use big cargo vans to manage their fleets, they can negate some of the emissions savings from users.

To address this, Savage said the company is improving its fleet logistics to reduce overall emissions. Lime's scooters and bikes are now equipped with larger, swappable battery packs, which means they need to be charged less often, and when they do, fleet workers can drive around with a trunk full of battery packs rather than taking the scooter back to a warehouse, effectively cutting logistics emissions in half while ensuring scooters are available more often. Savage said the company has also bought over 140 electric vans to support those operations. Though that's 10 times the number Lime had a few years ago, it's still only one van for every two cities it operates in.

Savage said Lime is also working to reduce its impacts in other ways. For instance, in North America, "once vehicles arrive at port," Savage said, "we are now using emissions-free trucking to get those to our distribution centers." Beyond that, the company has designed a modular bike that makes it easier to swap out damaged parts, and parts that are beyond repair are often sent for recycling. And it has worked with one company, Gomi, to salvage cells from partially damaged batteries for use in what it says are zero-waste Bluetooth speakers.

But perhaps the most concerning hurdle the industry faces is also the one over which it has, in reality, the least direct control: rider safety. One study, released earlier this year by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that from 2017 to 2020 serious injuries for scooter riders rose threefold, just as revenues for the scooter-sharing industry shot from $10 million to nearly $450 million. This trend only continued into 2021 and 2022, with micromobility injuries increasing an average of 23 percent every year. And these weren't just scrapes and bruises. The UCLA-led study found that scooter users were, compared to cyclists, more likely to end up with a broken arm or leg, require surgery, or even end up paralyzed. The researchers suspect that may be due, among other things, to riders often lacking safety gear.

Lime insists that it places safety first. But with most American cities designed to promote cars over all other forms of transit, the health of scooter users is, like those of pedestrians and cyclists, at risk once wheels hit pavement. Perhaps it should be no surprise that of the 30 people killed in 2018 while riding an e-scooter, 80 percent were struck by a car. This is why, if society wants to move away from cars as the default, Kailai Wang, who studies urban mobility at the University of Houston, believes urban areas need to invest in upgraded infrastructure like protected bike lanes that can make roads safer for non-automotive transport.

Of course, cars aren't the only dangers e-scooter users, like cyclists, face. Poor road and sidewalk conditions can lead to serious injuries. And sometimes riders are their own enemy. According to some studies, first-time riders and late-night riders face elevated risks. Murphy, said that these are two areas where scooter-sharing platforms and local policymakers can step in.

For instance, he said that operators could artificially limit the max speed of a scooter during a user's first few rides as they grow accustomed to the vehicle. In other cases, many cities prohibit e-scooter rides in the wee hours to prevent misuse. But "to the degree that these vehicles provide a real kind of transportation lifeline for some people," Murphy said, "that's almost when they're at their most important." For someone who ends a late shift after bus services end, an e-scooter might actually be their best, or only, means of getting home. This reality led the Chicago City Council, for example, to consider revising its own late-night prohibition.

As long as people have access to one of these vehicles when they need one, and a safe lane in which to ride it, shared micromobility can help cities move away from car-dependent transportation, slashing emissions in the process, by shifting transit from something material and energy-intensive to something low-impact and electric.


Syris Valentine wrote this article for Grist.


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