Though not quite a silver bullet in the fight against methane emissions, MethaneSAT was something more like an effective and well-placed spy. But just over a year into its five-year mission, the satellite stopped working.

On June 20, the boxy, solar-powered device passed over the North Pole and made a link with the High Arctic ground station in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The communication was normal and there were no signs of trouble. But less than an hour later, after travelling half the circumference of the world at 27,000 kilometres per hour, it had gone silent as it hurtled over the South Pole.

EDF has not made contact with the methane-tracking satellite since it mysteriously stopped communicating that day. Subsequent photos taken from space show that the satellite is intact and its trajectory has not changed. EDF has commissioned an anomaly review board to figure out what happened, but the results have not been published.

A new height of ambition

For many, MethaneSAT was a preeminent symbol of human ingenuity in the face of the overwhelming challenge of shifting our entire energy system away from fossil fuels. The project has been lionized in the media and awarded generous philanthropic funding to cover the US$88-million cost to build and launch it into space, including from the Bezos Earth Fund.

Methane, which is responsible for about 30% of global warming, traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. But it also has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere, so lowering its emissions is considered a low-hanging fruit for effective climate action – especially because natural gas consists almost entirely of methane, so the industry is theoretically incentivized to avoid bleeding it off into the atmosphere from leaky operations.

“Despite the scale of the problem, solving it is largely cost-effective,” Dominic Watson, a senior manager on the energy transition team at EDF, has said. Plugging leaks also isn’t overly complicated: “It’s plumbing, it’s not rocket science.”

MethaneSAT’s wasn’t the only satellite tracking methane emissions from space, but it was the only one built specifically for this task, and it could measure methane “over large areas but with enough precision to identify specific facilities and oil wells,” The New York Times has reported. The satellite’s high-precision spectrometer could detect tiny differences in the concentration of methane molecules – as little as two to three parts per billion – from 580 kilometres in the sky.

But providing a critical new vantage on worldwide methane emissions wasn’t the only thing that made MethaneSAT special. It also demonstrated that complex and expensive ventures to combat climate change could be realized outside the framework of government or private industry. The satellite represented, both figuratively and literally, a new height of ambition for environmental non-profits.

Coming in the midst of a dramatic reversal on climate policy by the U.S. administration, MethaneSAT’s untimely ending was a most unwelcome development for the climate movement. The announcement that the satellite had gone dark was met with an online outpouring of sadness and disappointment.

But in New Zealand, which contributed NZ$32 million to the overall project, the response among some scientists has been different. They aren’t sad. They’re mad about it.

A troubled relationship

“We were played like a fiddle by these guys,” says Richard Easther, an astrophysicist who was consulted by the New Zealand government about the project, speaking via video call from his office at the University of Auckland, where he teaches in the physics department.

Easther views his government’s sizable investment in MethaneSAT as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have a huge technical leap in a globally significant area.” New Zealand joined the project in an effort to boost its aerospace sector. Instead, the country “settled for what was always going to be a participation trophy at best,” he argues.

The satellite stopped working just days before students and faculty at the Te Pūnaha Ātea Space Institute at the University of Auckland were scheduled to assume control of the mission, following several months of delays. The failure to transition control to the university at the original deadline in March prompted mounting public frustration and calls for transparency.

Easther is leading the criticism and has called for a no-blame review to understand “how New Zealand blew past so many red flags about MethaneSAT’s operation.” He alleges that the mission operators “kept pumping out upbeat comms even after it became apparent that the spacecraft had major problems.”

Methane trackers pick up the slack as U.S. regulatory pressure evaporates

Easther’s ire is directed mainly at his own government, for spending so much money on a space project without soliciting bids for other projects. “It’s not the result of a competitive call for proposals or a pre-existing need,” he says.

New Zealand does contribute to the world’s methane problem, but its emissions come from livestock – those famous cow and sheep burps – not oil and gas. “If we wanted to understand agricultural methane . . . there’s dozens of other things we could have done and they may have been more effective,” Easther claims.

‘Typical teething issues’

The story behind New Zealand’s involvement with MethaneSAT begins with Peter Beck, who holds the title of “the world’s newest space billionaire.” He is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, the upstart competitor to SpaceX whose shares have gone interstellar in the past year.

Rocket Lab puts satellites into space and has made New Zealand the third-most-frequent country to launch rockets to orbit after the United States and China – a feat that Beck achieved without the benefit of a university degree. New Zealanders are proud of him the way Americans used to be proud of Elon Musk. So when Beck said he wanted to get involved with MethaneSAT, people paid attention.

Rocket Lab’s stunning success in launching satellites was a prime factor that brought the Environmental Defense Fund into partnership with the New Zealand government in 2018. In the end, MethaneSAT grew too big for Rocket Lab, which specializes in smaller launches, and SpaceX won the contract. “If we’d known right from the beginning that Rocket Lab wouldn’t launch it, I am sure the conversation would not have happened,” Easther says.

MethaneSAT’s utility for tracking agricultural methane emissions was also misrepresented, according to reporting by Eloise Gibson, a climate change correspondent for New Zealand’s public broadcaster RNZ. When EDF approached the New Zealand Space Agency at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment about the idea for the partnership, staff saw it as an opportunity to position New Zealand as a serious player in both space science and climate change, she reported.

Gibson obtained communications by space agency staff at the time. They wrote that “the satellite will be able to detect emissions from agriculture” and “importantly . . . should be able to provide data that would enable more precise measurement of methane emissions in New Zealand and help inform policy related to agricultural emissions.”

They were wrong. New Zealand scientists told the space agency the mission was “hopelessly oversold” for livestock gas tracking and “would not add much to New Zealand’s understanding of its greenhouse gas profile from farming,” Gibson reported. The agency ultimately realized the error, but the rationale persisted in underpinning the nation’s involvement in the project.

Jon Coifman, a spokesperson for MethaneSAT, wrote in an email that the purpose of New Zealand’s research investment was to “gain deeper insight and understanding into the usefulness of high precision methane measurements in understanding agricultural methane emissions” – that is, to study the satellite’s applicability for this task.

Once the satellite was in space, it suffered ongoing technical issues that delayed its scheduled handover to the control station at the University of Auckland. One of its three thrusters repeatedly malfunctioned, and increased solar activity caused it to go into “safe mode” multiple times. Rather than being handed off to New Zealand scientists, control was transferred back to its manufacturer, Blue Canyon Technologies in Colorado.

Craig Rodger, a professor of physics at New Zealand’s University of Otago, has questioned whether solar activity should have been so disruptive: “There have been moments when it’s been interesting in the last year and a bit, but there have not been extreme conditions in the space environment,” he wrote in published comments. “We’re talking about normal, slightly active conditions . . . Typically, people build their equipment to handle that.”

Coifman describes these difficulties as “typical teething issues.” Solar activity has not been attributed as a reason for MethaneSAT’s cessation on June 20.

A report by the New Zealand space agency published on November 7 found that the satellite’s technical failure “occurred in components outside of New Zealand’s control and within the bounds of accepted risk in space missions.” MethaneSAT’s sensor “performed exceptionally well and delivered meaningful science data which New Zealand researchers are using,” the report states.

A different model for satellite development

Easther and others have questioned whether MethaneSAT made the best decisions in the satellite’s development. In a post on LinkedIn, Leigh Foster, former director of space systems at Rocket Lab, accused the project of having failed “to select the right spacecraft manufacturer, and a failure to focus on the right level of technical rigor pre-launch and during [optical alignment, integration and testing].”

Responding to these criticisms, Coifman wrote that the project sought to prove that a non-profit could build and launch a “game-changing instrument using as much off-the-shelf tech as possible,” rather than relying on slow-moving government-run space missions or commercial providers that keep the data private. “MethaneSAT is about transparency,” he wrote. “The data is meant to be open source . . . because we believe that’s the fastest way to turn data into action to protect the climate. The urgency of that purpose means we couldn’t afford the time or money involved in those other approaches.”

Methane emissions are vastly underreported, but they could be slashed quickly

If it had been a conventional NASA-type mission, MethaneSAT would have had “back-ups for the back-ups,” Coifman wrote. But adding those layers of redundancy “would have made it much slower and much more expensive – and totally beyond our reach.”

Even so, MethaneSAT was fully tested before launch according to best practices and protocols, Coifman says.

“The teams at MethaneSAT and Environmental Defense Fund worked with some of the most seasoned professionals in the commercial and government aerospace sectors. We had no reason to doubt their judgement,” Andrew Johnson, deputy head of the New Zealand Space Agency, wrote in a statement to Corporate Knights.

Not a failure

In a blog post earlier this month, Easther excoriated EDF for failing to disclose any results from its investigation into what went wrong with the satellite, writing, “Whatever was learnt has not been shared, a situation that comes as no surprise to those of us who watched this saga play out.”

He’s not alone in seeking clarity. “Even though it appears that New Zealand was not likely involved in the chain of events leading to the underperformance of MethaneSat, we as investors in the project are entitled to an explanation,” Nicholas Rattenbury, another physicist at the University of Auckland, has written in a collection of expert reactions on MethaneSAT’s breakdown for New Zealand’s Science Media Centre.

For its part, EDF rejects the idea that its MethaneSAT project was a failure. “We didn’t accomplish all the things we wanted to, but we’re proud of what we did accomplish,” says Steven Hamburg, EDF’s chief scientist and the project lead for MethaneSAT. The project exceeded expectations in terms of data quality, he says. “We really did push ahead a long way from where others were.”

The high-precision data that MethaneSAT collected in its one year of operation showed what many suspected: that emissions from oil and gas operations are higher than previously estimated or that the industry reports.

The data is also starting to serve its purpose in steering the fossil fuel industry toward methane emission reductions, at least by validating successful regulations. In September, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham revealed that her state’s methane intensity – a measure of escaped gas – is only 1.2% compared to Texas’s 3.1%, despite much steeper increases in production, and that the captured methane was worth US$125 million in additional natural gas production and $27 million in tax and royalty revenue. The difference is attributed to New Mexico’s stronger methane rules enacted in 2021.

Jon Goldstein, associate vice president for energy transition at EDF, said in a statement that the data obtained by the satellite proves “that cutting methane pollution and waste delivers economic benefits while protecting air quality and our climate.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

The post Requiem for a methane hunter appeared first on Corporate Knights.

An hour later, the Washington, D.C.–based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) chimed in: “We sued Donald Trump 163 times during his first term, and we’re ready to do it again.” 

“Despair is not an option,” said San Francisco–based Earthjustice. “Last time around, Earthjustice filed more than 200 cases in response to the Trump administration’s policies. We won 85% of the decisions – and we’ll do it again.”

Becoming an environmental advocate is very much motivated by idealism. You certainly don’t get rich doing climate work.

– Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for nature, Natural Resources Defense Council

Earthjustice urged worried Americans to support Biden-era emissions regulations and challenge Republican efforts to reopen public lands to drilling. The non-profit also vowed to up its state-level litigation: it’s fighting to electrify school bus fleets in New York and Washington, decarbonize homes in California and Maryland, and halt plans for gas plants in nine states and Puerto Rico.

Lawyers make unlikely heroes. In a 2015 American Bar Association survey of the public, 69% said that “lawyers are more interested in making money than in serving clients.” In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 16% rated lawyers’ ethics as “high” or “very high.”

NRDC’s Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for nature, shuns the “hero” mantle: “In a judicial setting, anyone can be heard – even in the face of a powerful government.” Still, he agrees that environmental lawyers are a breed apart. “Becoming an environmental advocate is very much motivated by idealism,” he says. “You certainly don’t get rich doing climate work.”

RELATED

How a group of Swiss seniors won a landmark climate case in international court

Canada’s new greenwashing ban rattles fossil fuel industry

Do ‘act of God’ clauses still work in the era of climate change?

Canada’s climate lawyers have also earned a shout-out. Vancouver-based Ecojustice is Canada’s largest environmental law charity, with 35 lawyers. Among its cases, it’s fighting for Indigenous Peoples’ right of consultation on major projects and  the rights of youth (Mathur et al) opposing Ontario’s rollback of carbon targets, a challenge that produced the first judicial ruling that climate inaction may violate Canadians’ Charter rights. 

Ecojustice executive director Tracy London says that Canada’s environmental lawyers share their U.S. colleagues’ “ferocity.” But rather than count wins and losses, she says that Ecojustice measures its success “in being thought leaders, ensuring that environmental law remains a thoughtful, vigorous way to hold governments accountable.” 

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also a senior editor at Corporate Knights.

The post Heroes: Environmental lawyers are stepping up to the challenge of Trump’s second term appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Over the last year, many other car manufacturers have come forward with their own sparkling promises to pour money into the production of electric cars in Canada. But a recent report by the environmental organization Environmental Defence says these pledges are merely a “smokescreen” used by car manufacturers to distract from the fact that they are still selling millions of gas-powered vehicles. Keith Brooks, programs director at Environmental Defence, said in a press release that Canadians should take these commitments with a massive grain of salt. 

“The car companies make these promises over and over again, but they routinely fail to deliver, at least on scale. Meanwhile, they evade regulations and push ever more polluting SUVs on Canadians, all to pad the companies’ bottom line,” said Brooks. 

Environmental Defence takes issue with the fact that while car companies have promised to invest in manufacturing EVs, they’re still spending more on selling and promoting gas-powered vehicles that could hinder Canada’s emissions reduction goals. In recent years, a growing number of those vehicles have been gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks. 

In the first half of 2020, just 3.5% of cars sold in Canada were EVs, a percentage that will need to rise quickly if the federal government stands a chance of achieving its net-zero goal by 2050. In 2019, transportation accounted for 25% of Canada’s emissions, which was just behind the oil and gas sector at 26%. In order to get more EVs on Canadian roads in the near future, Environmental Defence has called on the federal government to do more to restrict the sale of gas-powered cars and to encourage consumers to buy electric ones. The report argues for new federal taxes on the sale of SUVs and pickups that would pay for EV incentives “to make EVs more affordable for everyone.” The Toronto-based organization also wants the government to introduce new tailpipe emissions regulations and to implement a nationwide zero-emission vehicle standard that requires car manufacturers to sell an increasing percentage of electric cars in Canada.

“The car companies make these promises over and over again, but they routinely fail to deliver, at least on scale. Meanwhile, they evade regulations and push ever more polluting SUVs on Canadians, all to pad the companies’ bottom line.”
– Keith Brooks, Environmental Defence

China, the European Union and a number of states, such as California, have adopted zero-emission vehicle standards. Provincial governments in Quebec and British Columbia have also already implemented their own such standards, but advocates say a national standard is necessary to ensure the even distribution of electric cars in Canada. 

Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson recently announced that the federal government will follow suit on GM’s accelerated EV timeline, moving up its prohibition on selling gas-powered cars to 2035. It’s unclear at this point whether the federal government will adopt a national zero-emission vehicle standard or new tailpipe regulations, as it waits to see what the U.S.’s automotive emissions policies evolve into. Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order that set a target that half of all vehicles sold in 2030 would be electric, but it wasn’t a legally binding requirement. Biden also announced that the U.S. would strengthen its tailpipe standards.

Canadian environmental groups welcomed Biden’s announcement as a step in the right direction for both countries but said the Canadian government needs to take more immediate action to reach its goals. “Canada cannot wait on Washington to realize its EV future. We’ll need to take that wheel ourselves,” said Joanna Kyriazis, senior policy advisor at Clean Energy Canada, in a statement.

The dire message from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent report expressed that urgency. The report noted that many of the effects of climate change are already irreversible – including shrinking ice caps and rising sea levels – and that it could take 20 to 30 years to stabilize global temperatures with “strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the report “must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet.”

Unless the federal government here in Canada decides to take more immediate action, car companies will continue to promote and sell gas-powered cars that could be on Canadian roads for decades to come. 

Alex Robinson is the associate editor of Corporate Knights and an Ottawa-based journalist. 

The post Report: Automakers need to walk the talk on EVs appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Toxic blooms are often caused by overloads of synthetic fertilizers that were intended to nourish crops but end up being carried into waterways. Those farm inputs may have been considered suitable in an environment that’s constant but the shifting climate (including heavier rainfall and warming waters) may be making algae blooms worse.

“We don’t have a lot of data on when different parts of the ecosystem are affected at the same time, let alone models that can predict that,” says Paul Van den Brink, a professor who studies chemicals in the environment at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Van den Brink notes that algae blooms in the Netherlands’ iconic dikes and drainage ditches may have also been exacerbated by last summer’s record-breaking heatwave.

In a paper published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Van den Brink and a group of European chemists raised concerns about what new ecological impacts will mean for chemical regulators.

Substance regulation in Europe, Canada and the U.S. often looks at one substance and impact at a time. That neglects possible synergetic effects between the two that could be greater than their sum, says Van den Brink.

The scientific community needs a lot more data on how substances behave in the environment to create a regulatory framework that accounts for those synergetic effects, according to the paper entitled Toward Sustainable Environmental Quality: Priority Research Questions for Europe.

For one, while climate change is global, in-depth data on concentrations of contaminants is currently limited to North America, Europe and in a smaller way China. More global initiatives are needed to identify pollution hot spots and focus mitigation efforts, the authors said.

Pollution hot spots

One of those authors, University of York professor Alistair Boxall, is currently leading an international study that’s collecting samples of drug traces found in river systems around the world. The mega-study covers 61 pharmaceuticals and 165 rivers in 72 countries from New Zealand to South Africa to Mexico.

After entering our bodies, fractions of the drugs that are not metabolized are excreted into wastewater. Roughly 80% of pharmaceuticals in the environment enter waterways in this way, with the remainder entering via manufacturer discharges and consumers flushing unwanted or expired drugs.

Early data from Nigeria has shown that the concentration of pharmaceuticals in Lagos, an ultra-dense city with poor sewer treatment, was one hundred times higher than that of York, U.K., Boxall said.

Concerns over antibacterial resistance led Boxall and his team to survey 14 different antibiotics as well as more complex substances like antimalarial compounds.

“That will be very interesting to see how antibiotic exposure in the environment varies,” Boxall said. “There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that resistance and the presence of antibiotics in the environments is affecting [mortality] globally.”

Once additional data is compiled, Boxall and the other scientists behind the paper agreed that a new way of monitoring chemicals needs to be developed. Physical and chemical monitoring needs to be combined with emerging technology such as water-borne robots, remote sensing and genomic sequencing to enable faster and more efficient collection of data across longer time frames and wider spaces.

Global response

Some governments are taking steps to avoid the increased risks from chemicals undergoing synergistic effects in the environment. Switzerland invested US$1 billion to upgrade 100 wastewater treatment plants and adopted a federal sewage tax of US$9 per person per year to help cover maintenance costs. The country requires pharmaceutical companies to test their wastewater for biodegradability and to pre-treat water that does not meet requirements.

In the Netherlands, a chain approach that brings together various ministries, regional authorities and stakeholders including pharma companies, doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and water utilities, has begun implementing measures to raise awareness, improve water quality and produce safe drinking water.

Some pharmaceutical companies are trying to minimize the risk by building safe disposal practices at their production facilities. To determine the impact on the environment around its plants, for example, Astra-Zeneca has been looking at species that are higher on the food chain, such as fish-gulping otters.

Researchers from the University of Exeter and Astra-Zeneca found that the harmful impact of Clotrimazole, an endocrine-disrupting anti-fungal chemical, on zebrafish was amplified when the experiment was conducted in the warmer water temperatures predicted for the year 2100.

The future of chemicals

The most important long-term steps include reforming how governments approve products and improving post-approval monitoring, an immense undertaking given the fact that roughly 2,000 new chemical substances are introduced annually.

Environmental Defence Canada toxic program manager Muhannad Malas said that Canada’s federal regulators are lagging behind in adopting research that should be used during substance approvals, especially when it comes to chemicals that can affect the human endocrine system.

“When our law was written, we were dealing with industrial pollution,” says Malas. “We didn’t know much about hormone-disrupting chemicals that can impact people at low levels, especially pregnant women, babies in the womb and infants.”

The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, the federal legislation that outlines how chemicals are approved for use, should be updated to reflect that new science, he says.

Canada’s federal government has ruled out final changes to the act until after the fall election.

The post Climate crisis may force us to rethink how we regulate and approve chemicals appeared first on Corporate Knights.