By Janie Ekere for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for Kentucky News Connection for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

A new report from Invest Appalachia, a self-described social investment fund, looks at ways to bring economic development to Central Appalachia as climate change increasingly determines where Americans live.

The report released in May analyzed emerging climate data from Appalachia. According to its findings, Central Appalachian states like Kentucky and North Carolina will likely see a population increase due to climate change-related migration. Mild temperatures, high elevation, and abundant rainfall make the region well-suited geographically to accommodate this population influx. 

“Some of the data we included in the report shows that the region actually compares really favorably to the Great Lakes region, parts of New England in terms of actual anticipated weather impacts and status as a climate haven,” Andrew Crosson, CEO of Invest Appalachia and co-author of the report, said in a phone interview. Crosson co-wrote the report with Invest Appalachia’s director of community impact Baylen Campbell and the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies’ outreach and engagement specialist Nicholas Shanahan.

The report included a map that identified counties with “climate receiving” geographies based on a set of nine different climate risk factors. As more people are expected to leave states like California and Texas in the coming years, the map projected the Great Lakes and Appalachia as likely “climate receiver” regions (marked in blue). 

Most of the available climate receiving data that Invest Appalachia’s researchers reviewed has focused on states like Michigan and Wisconsin. These states possess robust urban infrastructure in addition to geographic advantages similar to those of Appalachia. Like these states, Appalachia’s population has grown in response to both the pandemic and climate change, the report found. But little climate research has focused on the region, especially rural parts of the region, up until now. 

“We basically call for more study of that topic, both of understanding the factors that will be driving climate migration into the Appalachian region, but also situating Appalachia within the national dialogue as a region that is going to be critical along with some other rural parts of the country. It’s gonna be critical to national-scale climate resilience as a population-absorbing region.”

There are still significant challenges to climate change adaptation in rural Appalachia, according to the report. Available climate data for the region has focused on historical records and has not been adequately updated to reflect emerging climate patterns. Though its geography provides better overall protection against climate catastrophes, Central Appalachia is still seeing increased temperatures and flooding due to climate change. A record-breaking flood in July 2022 in East Kentucky, for example, killed 45 people and displaced thousands more. The region is also still recovering from the effects of the fossil fuel-based economy.

“Landscapes have been altered by extractive industries in ways that it has now been proven exacerbates flooding,” Crosson said. “Surface mining, strip mining, lack of proper remediation/reclamation work means that there’s less absorptive capacity, that streams are disrupted from their normal flows. All of that exacerbated the effects of the massive rainfall events in eastern Kentucky that led to the [recent] flooding.”

The report also found that not all Central Appalachian communities can handle the potential population increase equally. The influx of higher-income inhabitants from other states could lead to rising rent and housing prices as demand outstrips supply. Marginalized people in rural areas may face the risk of homelessness or may be forced to move to areas with fewer protections from climate change as a result of gentrification, according to the report.

“Once you have compounding climate impacts, and then you have climate migration on top of that, the people who are going to suffer the most…are the same as the people who are going to suffer from climate-driven rural gentrification,” Crosson said.

While the report called for further research of the region to develop strategies for climate adaptation, it proposed measures that can be taken now toward this goal. Rural Appalachia has faced a long-term lack of government and private sector investment in basic infrastructure and community services which leaves little funding for climate adaptive measures. Reversing that underinvestment is a critical first step in building lasting climate resilience, the report found. 

“When you have a chronically disinvested region, the perception of risk — the perception of not being investible — is something that has to be overcome,” Crosson said. “We’re trying to…show outside funders and investors in particular that this is the region of innovation. A region where people have a vision and they need the resources to execute on that vision.”


Janie Ekerey wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


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By Jennifer Oldham for Sierra.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Pumps hissed, a camera oscillated, and wind whistled through oil and gas wells at the Methane Emissions Technology Evaluation Center at Colorado State University. The mechanical symphony could be the soundtrack to a revolution in our ability to detect and measure methane, the invisible, odorless "super pollutant" responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The United States is the world's largest producer of oil and gas and its biggest emitter of methane-much of it leaks from oil and gas operations. A raft of new federal and state laws require energy companies to monitor and fix emission leaks. That's why companies are lining up to test methane-detection devices at the Fort Collins facility.

"Things are moving quickly-people have realized legislators aren't messing around," said Ryan Brouwer, facility manager at the testing center. "We have 12 different companies testing now. I am booked until the fall, and we have a waiting list."

Brouwer showed off high-pressure tanks that feed gas into wells, other tanks, and separators. Their valves, pipe joints, and other fittings leak the methane-the main component of "natural gas"-into the air. Then finely tuned handheld sensors, softball-size devices mounted on hefty tripods, and equipment attached to drones and aircraft go to work. These sensors report their readings of the rate, location, and duration of leaks to center scientists, who then compare them with data on the known releases.

Why all the fuss? Because methane is an enormously powerful greenhouse gas, 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat. As an article from the Rocky Mountain Institute put it, "If CO2 pollution wraps one blanket around the earth, methane pollution is like wrapping the earth in over 80 blankets." Studies show that eliminating these emissions would lead to immediate benefits for the climate and public health.

The concentration of methane in the atmosphere today is two-and-a-half times preindustrial levels, and accelerating. Agriculture is the largest anthropogenic source (all those belching cows, mostly), followed by oil, coal, gas, and bioenergy, which account for 46 percent of emissions. Rotting organic material in landfills is another major contributor.

Of these offenders, the emissions from fossil fuels are perhaps the easiest to deal with, as it's largely a matter of plugging leaks. According to the International Energy Agency, methane emissions from fossil fuels must drop by three-quarters this decade to meet the Paris Agreement climate goals. Hence the race at the Colorado State center to develop and improve methane-detecting sensors on the ground and in the air. As these technologies improve, scientific studies are finding that earlier calculations widely underestimated the actual amount of the gas in the atmosphere.

"We saw so much variability in methane emissions across the regions," said Evan Sherwin, who led research at Stanford University for a paper published in Nature in March. "If we compare our numbers to the Environmental Protection Agency's numbers, ours were three times higher."

Sherwin worked with a team from Stanford, Kairos Aerospace (now Insight M), and other labs to conduct aerial surveys over six hydrocarbon-producing regions, taking a million measurements over Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. They estimated that the operations emitted 6.2 million tons of methane a year-equivalent to all the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use in Mexico.

"We found [that] as low as .05 percent of oil and gas production facilities are responsible for half or more of emissions," said Sherwin, who is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "We really do now have the tools to find the bulk of the emissions that matter pretty rapidly."

In addition to worsening the climate crisis, methane emissions represent an annual loss of $1 billion to the gas companies. The prospect of recovering that leaking gas is incentivizing energy companies worldwide to fix methane leaks discovered by satellites. Six years ago, energy companies in the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative invested in the satellite company GHGSat; they've used the satellites to help detect and quantify leaks in Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, and Kazakhstan. After the results were confirmed with on-the-ground testing, local operators fixed the leaks, said Bjørn Otto Sverdrup, chair of OGCI's executive committee.

"Three problems we discovered were approximately equal to a million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent," he said. "It's like taking away close to 250,000 cars." Methane detection and measurement, he concluded, "is now at a point where we may be able to start moving the needle at scale." Indeed, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that the methane increase in the atmosphere in 2023 slowed from the record growth earlier this decade. Even so, the year marked the fifth-highest increase since 2007.

More than a dozen satellites now orbit the planet scanning for methane plumes. Some are privately owned; others are operated by governments and nonprofits. Data from select satellites are available on the International Methane Emissions Observatory's online data portal.

Mark Brownstein is a senior vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund, which developed its own methane-detecting satellite, MethaneSat. "This is data that will provide the most comprehensive amount of emissions and the rate at which they are being emitted," he said. "We see this data as being incredibly important to hold countries and companies accountable to commitments they've made."

Satellites have limitations though. They can't see past cloud cover or over water, and they have time constraints on how much data they can collect from any one location. Consequently, said Dan Zimmerle, the director of Colorado State's methane center, all types of sensors are needed to make progress in fixing leaky oil and gas equipment and spotting flares that fail to fully combust all the gas being vented.

Zimmerle's operation is set to receive $25 million from the Department of Energy and industry partners to modernize equipment, standardize testing solutions, and support field trials of methane-sensing satellites. The team is searching for locations to test how the satellites are performing.

"We will put up a test release," Zimmerle said. "They will task on it, we will get a report from them that says what they saw, and we will compare it to the real thing."


Jennifer Oldham wrote this article for Sierra.


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As Coloradans deal with record-breaking heat, wildfires, and prolonged drought - linked to a changing climate - a new report shows how American taxpayers are subsidizing disinformation about climate change.

Co-author Chuck Collins is co-founder of the Climate Accountability Research Project. He said people with ties to the fossil fuel industry are bankrolling groups trying to block action on climate change through tax-deductible donations.

"There are 137 organizations that are actively involved in promoting climate disinformation," said Collins, "challenging the science, sowing doubt, blocking alternatives. Their goal is to run out the clock and keep extracting their profits."

Between 2020 and 2022, people gave these organizations nearly $6 billion in tax-deductible donations - which is entirely legal under the U.S. tax code.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that financial contributions deserve the same First Amendment protections as speech, at least in political campaigns.

Collins argued that because wealthy donors are essentially pushing the burden of building and maintaining roads, schools, and other essential services, onto other taxpayers - the public deserves to know who they are.

"They're opting out of paying their taxes," said Collins. "So, the rest of us do have a public interest in knowing how that money is being used. And whether it's being used in a way that influences Congress, and influences public policy, and takes us down a road that we may not want to go down."

Many donors are now listed online at ClimateCriminals.org, which also features a countdown to a deadline set in Paris to cut fossil fuel emissions in order to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.

Collins noted many more donors remain anonymous by contributing through groups, including donor-advised funds. He believes increasing transparency is important in removing barriers to serious climate action.

"We should know who is blocking our ability to respond in a timely way to climate change," said Collins. "And we should hold those people accountable."




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Washington state has launched a new website that lets people and organizations know about ways they can fund going green.

With resources for clean energy and efficiency projects at an all-time high, the state has created the portal FundHubWA to help navigate funding opportunities.

That includes tax incentives, rebates, and state and federal grants.

Amy Wheeless is the federal policy and program alignment manager with the Washington State Department of Commerce, which is running the site.

She said hub is an apt name for it and walks through how it works.

"You say 'I'm an individual,' or 'I'm a farmer,' or 'I'm a business,' and 'I'm looking for funding opportunities for energy efficiency or for electric vehicles,'" said Wheeless, "and then it will present a variety of federal and state opportunities that are available."

FundHubWA offers resources from federal laws passed in recent years, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS for America, the Inflation Reduction Act - and from Washington state's Climate Commitment Act.

The website is available for individuals and a wide range of organizations, including public agencies, tribal governments and nonprofits.

Carol Albert is the senior advisor for federal funding in Gov. Jay Inslee's office. She said these funding sources are important for combating climate change.

"There's never been a better time," said Albert, "to get projects going in communities, that are contributing to cleaner and healthier and more prosperous areas of Washington, to really move away from fossil fuels."

Albert said FundHubWA could prove especially useful for local governments in rural communities.

People in these areas often do more than one job, which can make it overwhelming to track all the available opportunities.

"There are just not enough hours in the day," said Albert. "So the portal is a way for them to get to this information quickly and then assess if they or their communities would qualify for it."

The website is supported with funding from the Climate Commitment Act, which could be repealed in November if Initiative 2117 passes.

Albert said regardless of the outcome of the election, the future of FundHubWA will be up to state lawmakers.




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