“It’s May 4th. The student protests are nationwide, and ours has been ongoing for several days now. Students everywhere are exasperated by this expansion in the war, new bombings, more innocents killed and merely considered expendable byproducts of this conflict.
“The National Guard is on my campus to dispatch with the student protesters, and our governor has vowed that school will not be suspended or terminated.
“But anger and confusion are everywhere. Politicians are calling the students un-American, but students see themselves simply as voices for the voiceless… those people thousands of miles away caught up in a war, not of their making — both soldiers and civilians. Police in riot gear, barking dogs, and national guardsmen, all to quell the right to protest what is seen as injustice and an unjust war.”
As the old adage goes, unless we learn from our history, we will be destined to repeat it.
All this could have been copied from yesterday’s evening news or the pages of The Denver Post, but no, that was May 4, 1970, and my school was Kent State University. The day and the place for which Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young authored the song, Four Dead in Ohio. Today is another May 4th. What tragedies will May 4, 2024 belie or foretell? What have we learned?
Bob Priddy, Westminster
What to do about XCEL’s monopoly
Re: “Time for a new electric utility paradigm,” April 27 commentary
I have followed Xcel’s Public Utilities Commission proposals for several years. To be fair, Xcel has pursued adding renewable energy projects, as required by the PUC. But Xcel also continues to propose massive and costly capital construction projects such as big methane (natural gas) plants and carbon capture and storage (CCS).
CCS projects are very expensive and very unproven, but if built, they will result in huge profits for Xcel. As Glustrom points out, the PUC pushing Xcel and other utilities to adopt smaller microgrids would improve resilience in the face of our changing climate.
Gov. Jared Polis should support newer efforts such as Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) that allow local entities to “shop around” for their electrical provider. Polis continues to support monopolies, such as Xcel, instead of CCA.
Marc Alston, Denver
Leslie Glustrom, a probably very well-trained and experienced biochemist who has spent most of the last 20 years working with the Public Utility Commission trying to decarbonize our electric system, now wants to allow communities to “go shopping” for the best rates. Doesn’t everyone want the lowest rates for whatever they purchase? She also joins in the chorus of Xcel baiters.
So a community goes “shopping” and finds a generator that sells at lower rates than Xcel. How does that electricity get from that generator to that community? Most likely over existing Xcel transmission lines and then along existing Xcel distribution lines or they decide to build a parallel system. Isn’t Xcel entitled to some kind of fee for their use of Xcel’s property? Either way, there are added costs to that lower “shopped” electricity. There is also a matter of scale.
Yes, we desperately need to cut down on the use of fossil fuels by increasing the use of renewable sources or we sink. However, reading recent articles in the Denver Post and other sources, there are new and rapidly growing demands for electricity: electric vehicles. “Bitcoin mining” is a new demand center actually vacuuming up electricity, on and on. Where is the extra electricity for charging coming from?
For a few years, unfortunately we are going to have to rely on gas-fired generation to cope with thesis demand spikes.
So, work with Xcel to open up areas for solar farms, which take up huge segments of usually arable land, wind farms which leave the land usable, (lots of people to feed), maybe some mini-hydro facilities but also help facilitate routing of transmission facilities to get the new power to market. NIMBY is a strong reaction.
It’s only the beginning of the cicada eruption. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Trillions of these noisy insects are set to take to the skies in the first double brood event in 221 years.
For the first time in 221 years, this spring will seebillions, if not trillions, of cicadas take to the skies in a rare synchronized event that will transform our ecosystems for years to come.
In forests across the United States, two groups, or “broods,” of these noisy insects will crawl out from their underground dwellings to sprout wings, mate, lay eggs, and eventually die. In the Midwest, there’s Brood XIX, which pops up every 13 years, and Brood XIII, which emerges every 17 years and is concentrated in the Southeast.
The mass eruption, scientists believe, is strategic, but many mysteries about cicadas remain: Why do their alarm clocks use prime numbers? For that matter, how do they keep time? We’ll explain everything we know about this spectacular double brood event here. Follow along.
The commentary by Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, offends me. While his comments may reflect those who are followers of Focus on the Family and its religious perspective, they do not reflect the viewpoint of many Christians who support the legislation passed and signed by Gov. Jared Polis.
To lump all Christians into one viewpoint is patently wrong. There are many Christians who view the narrow perspective of the far-right religious community as antithetical to the teachings of Christ and who support the LGBTQ+ community as well as reproductive rights and myriad other perspectives that Daly and his followers do not. I call on Daly to stop using the word “Christian” as a generic term that ignores all the perspectives of Christianity.
Sue Bodis, Westcliffe
I want to assure Jim Daly that foster parents who are Christian are not discriminated against, and in fact, I believe that the majority of certified foster parents are Christian. There are also Hispanic, Jewish, deaf, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, those in wheelchairs, Black, multi-ethnic, LBGT?, agnostic, blind, Asian, Danish, paraplegic, senior, 21-year-old and Buddhist foster parents.
The primary determination for a certification worker is: Are these parents able to provide a safe living environment for traumatized children? If the parents seeking certification are rigid in their belief systems, it is likely that they will also feel called to parent these children in the “right” way. Experience has shown that they do not follow the advice of therapists, case workers, and other professionals who understand the needs of traumatized children.
I believe the “Christians” who feel they are victims of discrimination actually discriminate against anyone whom they view as “different”. This includes other Christians.
Linda Trantow, Highlands Ranch
The bill Jim Daly complains about is not religiously discriminatory but is drafted to protect children as they grow older and learn more about themselves. Daly appears to believe Christian foster parents have the final say over how they raise and what beliefs they can impose on the children they foster. He also apparently believes Christianity is the only way to go.
That is far from the truth, as children in foster care remain in the custody and guardianship of the county in which they reside. Moreover, foster children come from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds. It is not the foster parents’ job to choose Christianity (or any other religion or other personal determination, for that matter) for the child. An adult volunteers to foster a child only for the benefit of the child. It is the foster parents’ job to give the child unconditional love, a safe place to live, clean clothes to wear, food when they are hungry, a warm bed to sleep in, something to drink when they are thirsty, a warm hug when they are sad or frightened, and a helping hand when the child has a question about school work, how to plant a flower or take care of a pet.
No Christian, or anyone else for that matter, can mold a child into something they are not — especially an abused child. Please, Daly, keep your religion to yourself. Don’t push your religion on children who already have enough to deal with and whom you have no authority over.
Michèle Stark Hailpern, Denver
“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them,’ unless they are trans…” (Matt. 19:14 revised). As a fellow Christian, the column by Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, broke my heart. Children in foster care have been through enough trauma already and need nothing but unconditional love and acceptance.
To deny them gender-affirming terminology and care are sufficient grounds to disqualify potential foster parents. Similarly, the state is well within its rights to deny foster parenting opportunities to Christian Scientists who would deny almost all medical care based on their strongly held religious convictions. These are not cases of religious persecution but rather looking after the best interests of the foster child. When my fellow Christians ask why America is turning away from our faith, I will reference this column as a strong explanation.
Joe Lothringer, Centennial
Coloradans debate the right of gun ownership vs. the right to regulate
As a subscriber to your paper, I find it odd that no author was attached to your editorial supporting the pending assault weapons ban. As a psychiatric nurse practitioner, we need to spend our time and resources on addressing the root cause of violence and not pushing through legislation that criminalizes citizens like myself. I have used for years what would be classified as an “assault weapon” for hunting and lawful recreational uses. When news outlets cherry-pick data, as this article does, it hurts efforts to address violence and serves to divide the community further.
Joe Drew, Eagle
I was disappointed to see The Denver Post’s support for House Bill 1292. Some thoughts about the law and editorial:
• Most glaringly, the bill explicitly exempts police officers. If these are truly “weapons of war” with no place in the community, why should “peace officers” be exempted at all?
• The Supreme Court case Castle Rock vs. Gonzalez established that the police have no duty to protect individuals by enforcing a restraining order. This bill restricts the ability of Coloradans to protect themselves and their property, even when the police will not. Ida B Wells, a legendary journalist and a founder of the NAACP, recognized this fact long ago: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
• The bill is likely to be found unconstitutional, a view shared by Gov. Jared Polis. We need to pursue effective gun control, such as universal background checks and safe storage laws, not blanket attempts to ban specific guns.
• The editorial rightly states that no rights are absolute but fails to mention relevant Supreme Court cases establishing these limits or legislative limits, such as the National Firearms Act. Many “reasonable” limitations to civilian gun ownership, as outlined in the NFA, already exist, such as establishing a permitting system for short-barreled rifles, shotguns, suppressors, and machine guns.
I believe this bill infringes on the rights of all Coloradans and should not be enacted.
Ethan Myers, Arvada
The Editorial Board missed an opportunity to elevate the conversation about firearm-related deaths above fear-driven tribalism. While shockingly eager to constrain enumerated rights, particularly the right to bear arms, the Editorial Board doesn’t give much consideration to where firearms fall among instruments of death.
Take alcohol, for example. This newspaper recently ran a four-part series: “Colorado’s Quiet Killer” which notes that “alcohol killed 1,547 people statewide in 2022.” Yet in 2022, the Editorial Board was a cheerleader for Propositions 124, 125, and 126, which greatly expanded Coloradans’ access to alcohol. For that same year, Colorado Ceasefire, a gun-violence prevention organization, recorded 1,033 firearm-related deaths in Colorado, 414 of which were homicides.
On such charged topics, readers could benefit from more incisive analysis, including honest data accounting and discussions about tradeoffs.
Travis Reed, Denver
Re: “What is the rationale for owning an assault weapon?” April 28 letter to the editor
I, too, am a gun owner and a defender of the Second Amendment, but, unlike one of last Sunday’s letter writers, I don’t cut up the amendment. The first clause, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” justifies the second clause, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
All of us are militia; otherwise, only the National Guard would be allowed to possess weapons. The key words in the amendment are “well regulated.” Without regulation, gun ownership is just lawlessness.
Congress recognized the constitutional duty for regulation in 1934 and 1986 by banning machine guns. We can debate which guns should be legal, but the question of whether the government can regulate guns was settled in 1791. The constitutional right to bear arms is dependent on the constitutional requirement for reasonable regulation.
Ray Harlan, Denver
Sunday’s Perspective section had two ironically contrasting pieces that were just too juicy to pass up. In the Open Forum section, a reader writes in support of gun ownership, “Yes, even modern semi-automatic weapons,” citing only the last part of the Second Amendment (the part that gun supporters always seem to selectively gravitate to) as support for his position.
Then, immediately to the left of that letter is The Denver Post Editorial, which cites the complete wording of the Second Amendment. The whole premise of the Second Amendment, as envisioned by the Founders, was to allow American citizens access to arms for local militia groups to repel any foreign invasion or attempted overthrow of the government (January 6, anyone?). Also, at the time the amendment was written, the most lethal armaments available to citizens were single-shot, smooth-bore muskets and pistols firing round lead balls. While often lethal, they did not explode a human body like a high-powered AR-15 or other similar weapon of today. So, where exactly do those automatic and semi-automatic weapons fall within the militia premise of the Second Amendment? I think the Founders would be truly shocked at the current perversion of their original intent.
A Brood X cicada molts in Washington, DC. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
How to summon a cicada.
In the coming weeks, billions of periodical cicadas will rise up from the ground across the midwestern and southeastern United States. As they do, they’ll sprout wings, mate, and die within a few weeks.
If you live in an area where Brood XIII and Brood XIX cicadas are expected, you will not mistake their arrival. In addition to littering the ground with exoskeletons, in their frenzied quest for mates, cicadas make a ton of noise.
That loud buzzing sound is produced by a chorus of males, who sing together from the trees to attract females. Interested females respond with a quick flip of their wings, which produces more subtle clicking sounds. The males will then change their tunes and try to home in on the clicking females in order to mate.
It turns out thathumans can summon — and dare I say, seduce — a male cicada by imitating those female cicada clicks. Why might you want to do this? Perhaps it could be helpful in collecting cicadas for a protein-packedmeal. Up to you!
Esteemed nature documentarian and activist Sir David Attenborough demonstrates how to summon one. “I can imitate the female’s wing flip with a snap of my fingers,” Attenborough says in his unmistakably husky voice in this clip from a 2005 BBC program below.
By snapping his fingers, Attenborough draws the cicada toward him, closer and closer. And then the cicada jumps toward Attenborough, to continue the courtship in a more intimate matter.
“The noise is awful,” Attenborough says as the cicada hums sweet nothings into his ear.
Update, May 6, 12 pm ET: This piece, originally published in 2016, has been updated for 2024 with details about Brood XIII and XIX.
Periodical cicadas in Takoma Park, Maryland, that emerged in 2021 as part of Brood X. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The arrival of Brood XIX and Brood XIII will send shockwaves through forest food webs.
This spring is a very good time to be a bird.
In forests across the Midwest and Southeast, the ground is about to erupt with billions of loud, protein-packed cicadas. They’ll buzz about for a few weeks as they search for mates, providing snacks for pretty much every living creature in the forest, from songbirds and swans to frogs and even fish.
This is an especially big year for these red-eyed bugs: Brood XIX and Brood XIII — which pop up every 13 years and 17 years, respectively — are emerging at once. The last time such an event happened was the spring of 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president. It will be hundreds of years before it happens again.
While the insect explosion will be brief, it will shape forests for years to come. The binge-fest that birds enjoy during these periods supersize their families and, in turn, shift the eating and hunting patterns of many other species. These effects send ripples throughout the ecosystem. As one recent study put it, pulses of periodical cicadas can “rewire” entire forest food webs. Call it the butterfly cicada effect.
Why billions of cicadas erupt all at once
For most of their lives — either 13 or 17 years, depending on the brood — periodical cicadas live several inches underground, slurping up sap from plant roots with their straw-like mouths. Then, when the soil temperature hits about 64 degrees Fahrenheit, they emerge, typically after sunset. Cicadas in more southern states, like Alabama, usually emerge in April or early May, whereas those in colder states like Illinois tend to appear later in the spring.
The teenage insects then march up plants, trees, and fences, where they metamorphose into winged adults. That’s when giant groups of males start singing loudly to attract females (you know, lady bugs). During these events, a single acre of land can have more than 1 million cicadas on it. That’s roughly 2,700 pounds of bugs.
Sean Rayford/Getty ImagesA Brood XIX cicada sheds its exoskeleton on a tree in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on May 1.
Sean Rayford/Getty ImagesHere, two adult cicadas from this year’s Brood XIX are preparing to find mates.
This mass eruption, scientists believe, is strategic. “They effectively satiate their predators,” Louie Yang, an entomologist at the University of California Davis, told me a few years ago, when the famous Brood X emerged.
The cicada defense strategy is to flood the forests so that predators become so full they literally can’t stomach another bite. That leaves plenty of insects left to mate and lay eggs that will become the next generation of cicadas.
This approach seems to work for cicadas, and it’s an absolute delight for birds.
Birds lose their minds during cicada outbreaks
Birds can be fussy about their food. Some prefer plants, like the trumpeter swan, while others specialize in seeds or small insects, like chickadees.
Those preferences get tossed out during cicada explosions. The birds stop what they’re doing and go to town on the bug buffet. During the Brood X emergence in 2021, researchers documented more than 80 different avian species feeding on cicadas, including small birds that couldn’t fit them in their mouths.
Dan GrunerA grackle eating a cicada.
“We saw chickadees — tiny, tiny little birds — grab the cicada and drag it to the ground with their body weight and then peck it apart,” said Zoe Getman-Pickering, an ecologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the research.
She also saw purple martins, which typically catch small insects like winged ants and flies from the air, go after loads of cicadas. “There was one family of purple martins that got 23 cicadas into their nest in three hours or so,” Getman-Pickering said.
This feeding frenzy can seriously benefit some birds. Simply put, more food can lead to more babies.
“Following emergences, you do tend to get an increase in a lot of the apparent avian predator populations,” Walt Koenig, an ornithologist at Cornell University and research zoologist emeritus at UC Berkeley, told me in 2021.
One analysis he co-authored, based on 37 years of data, linked cicada eruptions to a population bump in a number of species including red-headed woodpeckers and common grackles.
Remarkably, many of these knock-on effects lasted for years, Koenig said. The number of blue jays, for example, was significantly higher even three years after the cicada eruptions.
“These results indicate that, at least in some species, the effects of cicada emergences are detectable years after the event itself,” Koenig and his co-authors wrote.
Fat caterpillars, rejoice
It’s not just birds that are benefitting. During big emergences, avian predators are eating so many cicadas that they eat much less of everything else — including caterpillars. That means caterpillars get a rare reprieve from the constant threat of attack, at least from birds.
Researchers have actually measured this. In the years surrounding Brood X, Getman-Pickering and her collaborators filled forests in Maryland with fake caterpillars made of clay. They then measured how many of them had signs of bird strikes — beak marks indicating that birds tried to eat them.
Martha WeissA caterpillar made of clay with signs of bird strikes.
In May, when Brood X was emerging, the portion of caterpillars with strike marks fell dramatically, from about 30 percent in a typical year to below 10 percent during the emergence, according to her study, published in 2023.
She also looked at real caterpillars. Remarkably, the number of them roughly doubled in the forests she studied during the emergence, relative to the two following years. “It was pretty staggering how many caterpillars that we saw,” Getman-Pickering said.
A lot of them were extra plump, too, like the spiny larvae of the dagger moth. When there are few cicadas, the juiciest caterpillars are often picked off first; they’re much easier for birds to spot. But during cicada eruptions, caterpillars are free to eat and grow at their leisure.
“The biggest, most visible caterpillars benefited immensely from the release from predation,” she said.
John LillA plump caterpillar in the genus Acronicta that the research team found in the forest.
Trees might prefer life without cicadas
A surge in caterpillars, meanwhile, has effects of its own. These animals famously eat leaves. So when birds eat fewer of them, the caterpillars chew their way through more of the forest canopy.
Getman-Pickering’s recent study measured this too: In the summer of 2021, after Brood X debuted, oak trees experienced “a spike in cumulative leaf damage,” the paper states. A doubling of the number of caterpillars meant a doubling of the damage, she said.
It’s not clear what that ultimately means for forest health. Previous studies have shown that cicadas themselves, however, can harm trees. After breeding, females carve slits into branches and lay eggs, which often damages the wood.
Research by Koenig, of Cornell, found that oak trees produced fewer acorns in a year with a cicada emergence, and in the following year. Older studies have also shown that emergences can slow the rate of tree growth.
The long-term picture is hazier. Unpublished data from Karin Berghardt and Kelsey McGurrin, researchers at the University of Maryland, shows that trees seem to bounce back from the harm caused by egg-laying. There’s also some research suggesting that cicada carcasses could actually fertilize the forest floor.
Ultimately, what all of these studies show is that cicadas can transform entire ecosystems in just a few short weeks. Think about that the next time you walk through the woods: The birds, the butterflies, the trees themselves are all shaped, in some way, by one very weird bug.
The UN reports that over a trillion dollars worth of food gets thrown out every year worldwide. | Mykola Miakshykov/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Think twice before throwing out your leftovers.
A billion meals are wasted every single day, according to a recent report from the United Nations. And that’s a conservative estimate.
It’s not just food down the drain, but money, too. The 2024 UN Food Waste Index report — which measured food waste at the consumer and retail level across more than 100 countries — found that over a trillion dollars worth of food gets thrown out every year, from households to grocery stores to farms, all across the globe.
Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food — the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution that goes with it — is horribly intensive on the planet. Food waste squanders those efforts, and then makes it worse: as it rots in landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Food waste alone is responsible for an estimated 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report. To put that into perspective, if food waste were a country, it would be third in emissions produced, behind only the United States and China.
Food waste reduction is “an opportunity to reduce costs and to tackle some of the biggest environmental and social issues of our time: fighting climate change and addressing food insecurity,” the authors of the report write.
Food waste might seem like an easy problem to solve — just stop wasting food. But in order to snuff food waste out, individuals, businesses, and policymakers alike will need to make some serious changes — and those changes will look different for each country. Global food waste is not just a consumer-level problem, but also a nasty side effect of inefficient food systems that have environmental and social implications.
The UN has the goal of slashing food waste in half by 2030. For that to happen, the authors of the Food Waste Index say there’s one crucial step all countries need to do: data collection. You can’t stop wasting food until you know how much food you’re wasting.
How do you measure food waste?
According to the report — which was spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and co-authored by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a UK-based climate organization — households contributed to 60 percent of all food waste generated globally in 2022, compared to nearly 28 percent for food service and a little under 13 percent for retailers. However, it’s important to note that there was a lot more usable data for food waste in households than there was for food service or retail — and that’s especially true for low-income and middle-income countries.
The report uses a three-level methodology with each level increasing in accuracy and utility. The first level is an estimate using preexisting food waste data from countries. For countries that haven’t yet started collecting data on food waste, UNEP took data from other nearby countries that had similar income levels and then extrapolated that information to create estimates. These figures are a helpful start to understanding the scale at which food waste may exist in a country, but the report emphasizes that most of the Level 1 estimates are not accurate enough to use beyond that.
To clarify which estimates can be used for understanding the scale of a problem and which can be used beyond that, the report also assigned a “confidence” rating to each Level 1 estimate — high, medium, low, very low, or no rating. Only 11 countries were assigned a high confidence rating for household food waste estimates. Of these, Saudi Arabia had the highest amount of household food waste per person annually, at a little over 231 pounds per person. Bhutan had the lowest, at just under 42 pounds per person.
The next two levels of the methodology lay out a framework in which countries can track their food waste generation. Level 2 is the recommended, baseline approach for countries and requires an actual measurement, rather than just an estimate, of food waste that is suitable for tracking food waste at a national level. Level 3 goes beyond that and gives guidances for how countries can include additional helpful data, like where wasted food goes, how much of food waste is edible, and food loss from manufacturing.
While some organizations and institutions define food waste as edible food mass, the report includes both the edible and inedible parts of food. That may make it seem as if the estimations are inflated, but what’s considered edible and inedible can differ from culture to culture — think peels of fruits, or certain parts of animal meat. They also acknowledge that it’s difficult to measure edible food waste without also measuring the inedible parts, and most countries haven’t done so.
Notably, the report only includes what gets thrown out at the household, retail, and food service level. That means that the Food Waste Index does not measure “food loss,” which is what gets lost in the production part of the process at farms and factories, as well as in transportation. According to the FAO, an estimated 13 percent of the world’s food is lost in the supply chain prior to hitting shelves.
Why does food get wasted?
The report also found that on average, household food waste in high-income, upper-middle income, and lower-income countries didn’t differ too much, but the reasons why waste happens will differ across these groups. Variables like access to electricity and refrigeration, dietary habits and behaviors, food distribution infrastructure, country temperature and so forth can all contribute to a country’s food waste levels.
While there didn’t seem to be a relationship between a country’s income grouping and household food waste levels, a household’s income within that country — along with other factors — could play a part in their food waste habits.
“Just as we expect the reasons for waste to vary between countries, we expect it to vary between households within the same country,” said Hamish Forbes, a senior analyst at WRAP and one of the authors of the 2024 Food Waste Index, via email. “Factors such as kitchen infrastructure, cooking skills/knowledge, cultural norms, time availability, disposable income and so on are all likely to play a role.”
In the United States, the Food Waste Index found that food waste is happening mostly at the household and food service level. If we want to get those numbers down, it’s going to take every participant in our food system — from consumers all the way to big businesses and retailers.
How can we stop wasting food?
It would be reductive to leave the burden of solving food waste and loss to everyday people, when the problem requires solutions across industries, food sectors, governance, and consumers. “The problem is everywhere and requires solutions everywhere,” the report authors write.
As of 2022, only 21 countries had made commitments to reducing food waste or food loss as a part of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the goals to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change as a part of the Paris Agreement. But out of those 21, only two countries had submitted NDCs to tackle both food waste and food loss, according to a report by WRAP. Those two countries were Jordan and Namibia, according to Forbes.
Commitments are a great first step, but what comes next? “There’s a well-known saying that ‘what gets measured gets managed’ and this is very evident in the food loss and waste space,” said Forbes. He added that measurement can show the true scale of our food wastage across different sectors, and in turn, it can also help policymakers identify solutions and where to implement them.
“Beyond just measuring the total amount of food waste, measurements in countries, cities or even businesses can identify ‘hotspots’,” Forbes told me. “For example, if I measure food waste in my restaurant and see from that data that most diners are leaving some of their potato fries, then I’m probably serving too much and I can reduce that wastage.”
One country that’s made progress is the United Kingdom. In 2005, the UK established the Courtauld Commitment, a series of voluntary agreements between the governments, organizations, and businesses within the UK to reduce food waste and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as improve water management. The food waste reduction policies from these agreements work on all parts of the food system: supporting waste management on farms, giving guidance to food service and retail sectors on food redistribution, implementing consumer campaigns, and more. As a result, the UK has reduced per capita food waste by 23 percent in total from 2007 to 2018.
Dana Gunders, the executive director of the US-based food waste reduction nonprofit ReFED, told me that in the US, there are a few ways our government can change the consumer environment so that people waste less food.
One solution is passing the Food Date Labeling Act. You’ve probably found yourself squinting at a carton of eggs that’s been in your fridge for an unknown amount of time, scouring for the “sell by,” “use by,” or “best by” date and debating how safe it is to consume. As of now, the US doesn’t have a standardized labeling process for food, which has translated into consumer confusion around food quality that leads to throwing out meals that are perfectly safe to eat. Creating a standardized label system with clearer phrasing could help consumers make better choices around food usage.
Then there’s Gunder’s big legislative wish: a ban on sending food to landfills, a policy that’s in the jurisdiction of states. According to ReFED, some states and municipalities have enacted policies around limiting, diverting, or banning organic material like food from entering landfills.
Gunders also wants to see food service sectors and retailers like grocery stores track their food waste — again, better collection of data helps craft better solutions. She also thinks grocery stores could improve their food donation system. There are some up-and-coming intermediaries, like Too Good To Go, which connects donations from grocery stores and restaurants with consumers. But having a more robust policy that isn’t opt-in can help redistribute perfectly edible food and make sure it doesn’t go to waste.
“All companies should have a solid donation policy that is across all of their locations, across all product types,” Gunders said. “Sometimes you have grocers who are great at donating bread, but they really don’t donate milk or dairy or meat or seafood. And so there are ways to do that, and some of the grocers who are best at donating are doing that.”
Of course, consumers themselves play a role. Planning meals and being more careful around purchasing food, preserving food in freezers, finding ways to take leftover ingredients and making them into a meal — all are ways individuals can personally reduce their food waste.
As for food waste and hunger, the report states that “reducing food waste can increase food availability for those who need it.” Forbes told me that how food loss and waste relates to hunger will depend on the sector we’re focusing on. It’ll take a lot more than simply slashing food waste to fix hunger — which is ultimately a symptom of poverty — but reducing food waste by diverting perfectly edible foods to those who need it can certainly help.
Little by little, Colorado lawmakers are reining in out-of-control metro districts and homeowner associations. But much more needs to be done.
We are dumbfounded that a state law is necessary to prevent these quasi-governmental boards from abusing their power of fines, fees, interest and attorney fees to take people’s homes through a lien and foreclosure process. The districts and associations exist to serve the homeowners, and yet a few bad apples have found ways to use the districts to line their own pockets and the pockets of their friends.
Colorado House Bill 1267 will prevent some of these insidious practices starting next year. Getting even the narrow language of HB 1267 through the General Assembly is an impressive feat because the lobby to protect the interests of the developers and management companies that run these HOAs and metro districts is shockingly strong and includes the Metro District Education Coalition, which was created in response to Denver Post editorials and investigations uncovering unethical practices.
The bill, authored by state Representatives Iman Jodeh and Jennifer Bacon and Senators Tony Exum and James Coleman, will prevent metropolitan districts, which are often completely controlled by developers, from using fines to retake the homes they just built and sold.
Under the law, metro districts can still file liens on a property to attempt to recoup unpaid fees or fines. But, the bill strips metro district boards from using foreclosures. Critically, the legislation also limits the interest and attorney fees that can be tacked onto a lien.
Unfortunately, a similar law regulating homeowner associations, which operate under a different part of the law from metro districts, was killed in the Colorado House by a combination of Democrats and Republicans. We cannot fathom why poorly regulated HOAs should be trusted with foreclosure powers that give them similar status as the holder of a primary mortgageor the government for unpaid taxes.
The death of House Bill 1158 underpins the power of a lobby that is also opposed to a bill that would create regulation of management companies, which has stalled in the Colorado House and hasn’t had a vote in a month.
One sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Naquetta Ricks, an Aurora Democrat, told The Denver Post that the bill would have passed in the House had four other Democrats not been absent for the vote.
Fortunately, a different bill, House Bill 1337 is headed to Polis’ desk, and we urge him to sign it. The legislation doesn’t go as far as House Bill 1158 but it does put helpful restrictions on how much in attorneys fees can be tacked onto a lien. Also, it at least requires that an HOA initiate a legal proceeding before it can sell someone’s house out from under them using the foreclosure process. Before taking someone’s home for unpaid fees or fines, an HOA must offer the resident a payment plan. This will mean no one loses their home because they don’t have cash and people will no longer be forced to take out high-interest loans or use credit cards to pay fines.
Ricks called the current process used by HOAs to foreclose “equity theft.” We agree and at least if House Bill 1337 becomes law, the theft won’t be quite as easy.
Lawmakers made important strides this year in regulating HOAs and metro districts but much more needs to be done. Most Coloradans now live in an HOA or metro district and nothing has increased the cost of living in this state as much as the excessive taxes imposed by developers through metro districts, which often come in addition to HOA fees.
Regulating these groups is essential to building a state where everyone can afford housing, and where no one loses their home over the accumulation of fines, interest, attorney fees, and the inability to pay a lump sum.
Artificial Intelligence not possible without wealth of human knowledge
There is no artificial intelligence without the vast trove of human knowledge.
Today’s generative AI applications were built on a foundation of such information, drawn from across the internet and from various databases totaling, according to at least one estimate, somewhere around 300 billion words.
That’s a lot of intellectual property, much of it produced by generations of professional writers, honed and polished by editors and sent out into the world by publishers in newspapers, magazines, books and more.
Hard to put an exact price on such a thing or even to measure the collective value of such an incredible library.
It definitely should not be free.
But that’s the assumption made by OpenAI when it claims that its use of all this data, much of which it acknowledges was subject to various copyrights, is fair use and did not require compensation to the original creators and owners of that knowledge and information.
If you walked into a bookstore and stole not just some of the books, but all of the books, that would be a crime, right?
That’s why newspapers, including this one, as well as authors and an array of digital publishers have filed lawsuits seeking to force OpenAI to pay for its exploitation of their work.
Regular people aren’t allowed to make copies of a recent best-seller and resell it with a different cover, nor can a studio stream a competitor’s series just because it’s on the Internet. They might be able to license that material, if the owner allows it, and they can certainly buy copies, but even buying a copy doesn’t give the purchaser the right to reproduce and redistribute such works.
There’s a fundamental issue of ownership in play here.
For decades, newspapers have been independent entities. They have written the obituaries of local luminaries, chronicled crimes committed, and followed fights over public works. In almost every U.S. city, they’ve accumulated a great storehouse of knowledge, day by day.
The theft of that journalism to create new products clearly intended to supplant news publishers further undermines the economy for news at a time when fair and balanced reporting and a shared set of facts is more critical than ever.
Weakening news publishers also has a collateral effect on democracy as it not only siphons off publisher revenue, but damages publishers’ reputations by attributing bogus information to credible publications.
AI “hallucinations” occur when an AI app provides false information in response to a user’s question.
The rise of artificial intelligence may be inevitable but that does not mean that the originators of the content should not expect adequate compensation.
OpenAI and its primary backer, Microsoft, pay their engineers to write their code and certainly recognize the value of that code. In fact, a recent valuation for OpenAI was $90 billion.
Surely all the knowledge and information required to train their apps – to develop the code, as it were – has value.
That value must be recognized and these companies must be held accountable.
This piece was written and edited by editors from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing.
Farmer protests in Nîmes, France, in March. According to reports, large tires were set on fire during the blockade. | Luc Auffret/Anadolu via Getty Images
Road-clogging, manure-dumping farmers reveal the paradox at the heart of EU agriculture.
In February 2021, in the midst of the deadly second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grégory Doucet, mayor of Lyon, France, temporarily took red meat off the menus of the city’s school cafeterias. While the change was environmentally friendly, the decision was driven by social distancing protocols: Preparing one hot meal that could be served to meat-eaters, vegetarians, and those with religious restrictions rather than serving multiple options was safer and more efficient.
The response from the French agricultural establishment was hysterical. “We need to stop putting ideology on our children’s plates!,” then-Minister of Agriculture Julien Denormandie tweeted. Livestock farmers clogged Lyon’s downtown with tractors and paraded cows in front of city hall, brandishing banners declaring, “Stopping meat is a guarantee of weakness against future viruses.” An impromptu coalition of livestock producers, politicians, and parents unsuccessfully petitioned the city’s court to overturn the change.
It may have seemed a tempest in a teacup — a quintessentially French squabble. But it was a microcosm of European agricultural politics, reflecting the great paradox of European Union (EU) farmers’ relationship to the state.
On one hand, farmers are wards of the welfare state, dependent on national governments and the European Union for the generous subsidies and suite of protectionist trade policies that keep them in business. On the other, they are business people who balk at regulations, restrictions, and perceived government overreach. The tension between these positions regularly erupts into farmer revolts when governments attempt to regulate food or farming in the public interest as it might any other industry. EU politicians, meanwhile, often feel the need to kowtow to agribusiness because of its ability to mobilize protesters and voters alike.
This year, it has become clear these protests have the power to transform Europe’s future.
This past February, three years almost to the day after Doucet’s school lunch announcement, roads around Lyon were again blocked by farmers raging against the French government and the EU. It was one surge in the wave of protests that has swept through Europe in recent months, set off by a litany of demands, including continued subsidies and no new environmental regulations. In short, all the benefits of government with none of the governance.
The protests have come as the EU seeks to pass a slate of laws as part of its Green Deal, a sweeping climate plan that includes checking the worst harms of industrial agriculture, which takes up more than a third of the continent’s landmass and contributes disproportionately to its ecological footprint. That agenda is colliding with Europe’s longtime paradigm of few-strings-attached welfare for agribusiness.
Agribusiness interests have been working to foil the Farm to Fork strategy, the crown jewel of the Green Deal meant to overhaul Europe’s food system, since its inception in 2020. This year, with the specter of right-wing populism looming over upcoming European Parliament elections (part of the EU’s legislative branch), farmers’ protests across the continent have succeeded at not only stalling new sustainability reforms, but also undermining existing environmental regulations. Now, plans to make Europe a global leader in sustainable agriculture appear to be dead on arrival.
Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty ImagesFarmers dump manure on streets in the EU quarter of Brussels in March.
How European agriculture got this way
Despite its centrality to European politics and policy, agriculture is a very small industry within the bloc’s economy, making up about 1.4 percent of the EU’s GDP and no more than 5 percent of GDP in any of the Union’s 27 countries. The sector is also one of the biggest recipients of EU funds, with subsidies to farmers and investment in rural development consuming about a quarter of the EU’s budget, on top of often generous national subsidies.
Meanwhile, European agriculture’s environmental footprint is vastly disproportionate to its economic contribution. It uses a third of all water on the increasingly arid continent. It’s responsible for 10 percent of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, including much of its methane and nitrous oxide, both highly potent greenhouse gases primarily released by animal agriculture. It accounts for about a quarter of global pesticide use, which has been linked to soil and water contamination, biodiversity loss, and a slew of impacts on human health.
Of course, we need to eat, and food needs to be produced. But Europe’s monocrop- and livestock-intensive agriculture system is anything but sustainable.
Yet the EU continues to pour massive amounts of money into subsidizing an economically negligible sector that is responsible for many of the continent’s environmental problems and that, off the back of those subsidies, organizes to prevent environmental regulations or even conditions on those very subsidies.
Many countries around the world generously subsidize food production — including, famously, the United States, where agriculture makes up less than 1 percent of GDP and punches far above its weight politically. But much of the US ag sector’s billions in annual federal payouts comes in indirect forms like subsidized crop insurance, including more than a third of the $24 billion it received in 2021 — and these subsidies make up a much smaller share of the industry’s contribution to GDP relative to agriculture subsidies in the EU. In Europe, decades of government policy have integrated food production into an extensive state welfare framework where, on paper, the good of farmers is equated with the public good.
That system emerged from the ruins of World War II, when shoring up farming and food security became an existential policy imperative on the devastated and often starved continent.
Post-war policies were designed to secure the food supply, provide farming families with a stable income, and stimulate rural economies in the interest of the public good. European agriculture policy became its own welfare system defined by subsidies and protection from foreign competition.
It worked. By 1950, agricultural production in Western Europe had recovered to pre-war levels. When the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the EU, formed in 1957, agriculture was central to the discussions, as economic integration would require dealing with the problem of highly subsidized and protected farming in member states.
The answer was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), launched in 1962, a centerpiece of EEC and later EU policy. An extension of national-level agricultural welfare policies, the goal of the CAP was “to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, in particular by increasing the individual earnings of persons engaged in agriculture.”
In other words, rather than using policy to build agriculture into a viable competitive business, the goal was to protect agriculture from the market and commit to a long-term policy of keeping farmers in business. CAP was “from the outset a public policy reflecting highly subjective political ‘preferences,’ not rational commercial interests,” economic historian Ann-Christina Knudsen argues in her bookFarmers on Welfare: The Making of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy.
For decades, CAP has been the EU’s biggest budget line. As recently as the 1980s, it made up about two-thirds of the Union’s budget. While bouts of trade liberalization and the rise of other priorities have steadily reduced its relative size, about a third of the EU’s 2021-2027 budget was earmarked for CAP. Over 70 percent of this money is distributed as direct payments to farmers.
Since payments are primarily based on farm size, the biggest farms get the lion’s share of that money. Over half of the EU’s 9 million farms produce less than 4,000 euros of products per year and make up a combined 2 percent of Europe’s farm production, while the top 1 percent of farms — those that bring in over 500,000 euros — control 19 percent of all farmland and are responsible for over 40 percent of output. The top 0.5 percent of farms receive over 16 percent of all CAP payments.
Lavish subsidies have helped make Europe a net exporter of agricultural products, with early concerns about food security long since displaced by a global thirst for Irish whiskey and Dutch beer and hunger for Irish butter and French cheese.
Coupled with decades of government policy incentivizing industrial production methods that favor big operations, such as factory farming and large-scale monocropping, CAP has served to push Europe’s farmers to get big or get out. Between 2005 and 2020, the EU lost over 5 million farms, virtually all of them small operations sold by retiring farmers or those simply unable to compete with their larger neighbors.
Large farmers, in turn, have organized into powerful political interest groups that aim to dictate agricultural policy to their governments. Farmers and their political allies pack the EU’s agriculture committee. Lobby organizations like Copa-Cogeca, which represents large farmers’ unions across the EU, and CropLife Europe, a pesticide trade group, pressure governments to entrench the status quo, including maintaining CAP as an ever-open spigot gushing taxpayer money.
And where governments are seen as truant in delivering on their promises, cities and nations can be brought to a standstill by blockades of tractors, helping galvanize public opinion and push politicians into acquiescence.
Europe’s turn toward environmental protections is clashing with farming interests
Today, the growing importance of environmental goals in EU politics has driven a wedge into the sometimes contentious but mostly cozy relationship between farming interests and governments.
While EU subsidies do come with some environmental strings attached, such as requirements to protect wetlands or engage in soil-friendly crop rotation, these are often poorly enforced and noncompliance is common. In Europe, much like in the US, agriculture is governed with a lighter touch compared to other industries, a paradigm often known as agricultural exceptionalism.
In the Netherlands, for instance, farms have for decades been granted a derogation on nitrogen emissions, allowed to emit more than any other industry. This meant that, over the years, dairy farms and heavily fertilized crop fields leached nitrogen into the soil and water, poisoning rivers and wetlands.
In 2019, the Dutch government sought to close the loophole and buy out livestock farmers unable to comply with the restriction. Farmers launched a series of protests marked by the now-ubiquitous use of tractors to block roads and public spaces in a show of force against government bureaucrats. Many felt aggrieved that government, by pushing the resource-intensive industrial farming that had made the Netherlands into an agricultural powerhouse, had helped create the very environmental problems now being blamed on farmers.
Peter Boer/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesA two-week old calf on a dairy farm in Hazerswoude, Netherlands. Livestock farmers have been protesting the Dutch government’s efforts to limit polluting nitrogen emissions from farms.
Cities across the country ground to a halt, and the protesters formed a new political party, the far-right-aligned BoerBurgerBeweging (the Farmer-Citizen Movement, or BBB). Last year, it won the country’s provincial elections in a landslide on the back of rural votes as well as broader anti-government and anti-EU sentiment, controlling 20 percent of seats in the Dutch senate.
It was a portent of things to come.
2019 was also the year the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, proposed the Green Deal, which aims to achieve net zero emissions across the EU by 2050 through emissions reduction across all industries, renewable energy and electric vehicle adoption, and reforestation programs. Farm to Fork, the food system component of the plan, calls for dramatically reducing pesticide use and food waste, and promoting more sustainable dietary choices through product labeling and school lunches; independent modeling suggested it could cut agricultural emissions by up to 20 percent and halve biodiversity destruction.
Environmental policies are broadly popular with the European electorate, and that plan was arrived at through the EU’s highly bureaucratic — but nonetheless democratically deliberative — process. But because it originated with the European Commission, whose members are unelected, it was seen by some as being mandated by unaccountable functionaries. Farmers bristled at the idea of being told to devote some of their land to biodiversity and nature restoration. Growers of monocrop products like grains and grapes for wine balked at drastic pesticide reductions. The pesticide industry and its lobby saw its profits threatened.
But most impacted would be livestock, the sector least able to meet stringent environmental or animal welfare standards. Animal agriculture makes up 40 percent of European agricultural production, releases more than 80 percent of the continent’s emissions from agriculture, and receives more than 80 percent of CAP subsidies, according to a recent study using data from 2013.
By the end of 2023, before most of Farm to Fork had even been implemented, many of its core initiatives were already watered down or abandoned, including pesticide reduction mandates and farm animal welfare improvements. Also declawed was the nature restoration law, which would require EU member states to restore 20 percent of degraded habitats to preserve biodiversity, by calling on farmers to plant tree and flower strips along the edges of fields, for example. Industrial beef and dairy operations were also granted an exemption from industrial emissions targets despite being among the food system’s biggest emitters, responsible for most agricultural methane emissions.
Throughout, political allies of agricultural lobbies like the right-wing European People’s Party have celebrated these wins over the specter of “NGO environmental dictatorship.”
Farming interests are blocking the development of sustainable alternatives
The same groups pushing against environmental regulation in the name of keeping the government out of business have few compunctions about turning to governments to thwart their competition. Meat producers in particular are threatened not only by environmental regulations that would affect them most, as the food system’s biggest emitters, but also by meat alternatives that have the potential to cut into their market share.
Cell-cultivated meat, a novel technology that can harvest animal tissue from stem cells rather than slaughtered animals, has not yet received regulatory approval for sale in the EU and remains largely theoretical. That did not stop politicians in Italy, under pressure from agricultural lobby groups, from passing legislation last November banning not just the sale of cellular agriculture products, but also scientific research into the technology.
Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, a member of the country’s far-right ruling party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), declared cultivated meat a threat to Italian culture and civilization. Soon thereafter, members of the Italian delegation to the EU, joined by representatives from 11 other countries, called on the Council of Europe to “ensure that artificially lab-grown products must never be promoted as or confused for authentic foods,” ostensibly in the public interest.
Farming lends itself to populism, which often acts as a cover for cold business calculations. The cultivated meat ban reveals that agricultural lobby group demands are generally about realpolitik rather than a principled position about state intervention — no different from any business that aims to protect its bottom line. Political scientist Leah Stokes, in her book Short Circuiting Policy, has described such policy fights as “organized combat” between interest groups, which tends to favor powerful incumbents over new constituencies aiming to build political support for social or economic change. In Italy, an entrenched and politically well-connected agricultural lobby had the power to write its preferences into policy while proponents of cellular agriculture did not, allowing them to nip potential competition in the bud.
Something similar is at work in the unraveling of the EU’s green agenda. Proponents of environmental legislation, while technically having science and public support on their side, were either unprepared or lacked the heart for a fight with the battle-tested farming lobby.
All that took place before Europe became engulfed by protests. Then came the tractors.
Last December, a proposed cut to diesel subsidies (used to power tractors and other farm machinery) in Germany, which had more to do with the country’s budgetary crisis than with environmental regulations, sent aggrieved farmers into the streets. Dozens of other protests erupted around Europe stemming from particular national issues. But as they grew, they coalesced into a generalized grievance about the failure of government and the EU to sufficiently support farmers, with new environmental policies offering a particularly easy target for ire.
Alan Matthews, an Irish economist and preeminent expert on the CAP, recently argued that part of the problem is the changing social capital of farmers: “Instead of being seen as heroic producers of a vital commodity, they are increasingly described as environmental villains and climate destroyers. … Instead of taking responsibility for these problems, farmers often adopt a defensive position of denial.”
The protests have brought farmers of all stripes to the streets, big and small, organic and conventional. Despite their differences and the historic exclusion of small farmers from EU policymaking, most of Europe’s farmers share a common interest in maintaining subsidies and reducing regulation.
They also raise some valid points about the contradictions in EU policy, such as in their calls for more protection from foreign competitors that produce with lower standards than in Europe, including livestock produced in jurisdictions with no animal welfare protections or raised using growth stimulants banned in Europe. But this argument is undermined by farmers’ calls to weaken those very standards.
By late February, when a massive protest by farmers from across the continent ran amok through the EU quarter of Brussels, politicians across the continent were buckling to farmers’ demand. At the EU, even the watered-down version of the nature restoration law that had passed a vote in EU Parliament despite protests was stalled — perhaps indefinitely — as states including Belgium and Italy withdrew their support.
These decisions may have also been motivated by upcoming EU elections. Many Europeans support the farmers’ cause, and as the Dutch case showed, the protests have the potential to galvanize voters to support parties seen as “pro-farmer.” With widespread concern about large gains for right and far-right parties in the EU Parliamentary elections next month, even ostensibly pro-Green Deal politicians, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have been forced to act appropriately deferential to the protesters.
Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty ImagesEuropean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks at the European Parliament on February 6, the same day that she recommended shelving a plan to cut pesticide use as a concession to protesting farmers.
Sooner or later, climate change will force a reckoning with farming practices
The latest progress report on the EU’s quest for carbon neutrality, released by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change amid the protests in January, showed little improvement, especially in agriculture. It called for reductions in production of meat and dairy, higher consumer prices of highly emitting foods, more incentives for farmers to embrace green practices, and, as a political hint, more ambitious policy plans. In short: the opposite of the situation on the ground.
Arriving at a viable agricultural policy that marries support for farmers, green goals, and liberal trade policies is a difficult balancing act with few clear-cut solutions. It is unlikely that these could be achieved without continued state and EU involvement in shaping how food is produced in Europe through some mix of protectionism, policy nudges, and regulation. CAP, in one form or another, isn’t going anywhere.
But to the extent that it remains primarily a subsidy program, there is no reason why conditions on meeting strict climate and environmental targets should not be massively strengthened, rather than weakened, and enforcement ramped up. And there is no reason not to use policy to steer production away from highly polluting industries like meat and dairy toward less harmful ones.
To be in favor of more sustainable farming is not to be against farmers; it is to be against unsustainable farming practices. To allow these two to be conflated is to lose the fight, as the EU is currently doing. After all, to the extent farmers see themselves as businessmen, a sign of business acumen is making a profit within regulatory and market constraints.
One thing is certain: Bowing to the demands of special interests whose only interest is maintaining agricultural exceptionalism only precipitates a sooner reckoning with environmental crises, which will force farming to change whether farmers want to or not. The EU, however, seems to be taking marching orders from a parasite of its own creation, abandoning the very notions of public good that led to the creation of its agricultural policies in the first place.
Heat waves have begun to take hold in Asia as El Nino begins to wane. | Kazi Salahuddin Razu/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Climate change and the outgoing El Niño will likely ignite more weather extremes.
The Pacific Ocean — Earth’s largest body of water — is an engine for weather around the planet, and it’s about to shift gears this year.
The warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, known as El Niño, is now winding down and is poised to move into its counterphase, La Niña. During an El Niño year, warm water starts to spread eastward across the surface of the equatorial Pacific. That warm water evaporates readily, adding moisture to the atmosphere and triggering a cascade that alters rainfall, heat waves, and drought patterns across the world.
“The last year has been an amazing year in terms of records set around the world for extreme heat,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The periodic swings between El Niño and La Niña, collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), is a natural phenomenon cycling every three to seven years. Over the past year, the El Niño also synced with other natural patterns like the warm phase of the Atlantic Ocean’s temperature cycle, driving thermometers up further. But humanity’s relentless injection of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere is pushing these changes to greater extremes.
Forecasters now expect that warm water across the Pacific to begin retreating westward, heralding a shift to La Niña. McPhaden said one of the most common definitions of La Niña is when surface water temperatures over a large area of the Pacific drop by at least 0.5 degrees Celsius below the historical average for three months or more. El Niño is typically defined when the same region is a half-degree Celsius hotter.
NOAA projects an 85 percent chance that the ENSO cycle will shift to its neutral phase between April and June 2024, and then a 60 percent chance a La Niña will develop between June and August 2024.
Historically, strong El Niños are followed by short neutral phases, about three to five months, before switching to La Niña. “The handwriting is on the wall with regard to this La Niña,” McPhaden said. “The question is exactly when will it come and how strong will it be?”
It also takes several months between when ENSO changes and when it starts to influence weather. So the warming impact of the outgoing El Niño is likely to persist and could raise global temperatures this year even higher than they were last year if the rising La Niña is weak or moderate. Heat waves are currently baking Southeast Asia, triggering school closures and health warnings.
When La Niña does set in, it will slow and reverse some of the intense weather patterns the world experienced over the past year. But it will also set the stage for more hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.
To make this all even more complicated, this is all occurring in a world that’s warmed to the highest levels humans have ever experienced, so it’s not clear yet how far some of these extremes will go.
How La Niña will likely play out in different parts of the world
Though they are on opposite sides of a cycle, the effects of El Niño and La Niña are not quite mirror images of each other. “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” said Pamela Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia Extension.
The specific types of weather impacts also vary by region, but looming shifts in the cycle can help forecasters calculate what kinds of heat, rain, and drought conditions are in store in the coming months. For instance, ENSO makes it easier to predict climate variability in the southeastern US, particularly in cooler months. “We have a pretty strong signal here compared to the central plains,” Knox said.
During a La Niña, the cooler waters in the equatorial Pacific soak up heat energy from the atmosphere while air currents deflect the jet stream — a narrow, high-altitude band of fast-moving air — pushing it northward.
NOAALa Niña tends to push the jet stream northward, leading to cooler weather to its north and drier conditions to the south.
That air current then tends to box in cold weather to its north in places like Canada and Alaska while trapping moisture in regions like the Pacific Northwest. States like Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina tend to be warmer and drier during La Niña winters, while the Midwest tends to be cloudier, cooler, and wetter. (NOAA has published maps of the globe showing how these patterns typically play out around the world).
Mickey Glantz, director of the Consortium for Capacity Building at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies the impacts of ENSO, noted that La Niña doesn’t just shift weather — it can also intensify existing rain and heat patterns in some regions. “La Niña, to me, is ‘extreme normal,’” Glantz said. “You have a wet season, it’s going to be really wet. If you have a dry season, the probability is it’s going to be really dry.”
La Niña may bring about a more severe hurricane season
One of the biggest consequences of a shift to La Niña is the higher likelihood of major hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes are built from several ingredients, but two parameters are especially important when it comes to ENSO: water temperature and air stability.
The ocean needs to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter to form a hurricane, and the air above it needs to hold steady. El Niño years tend to heat up the Atlantic Ocean, but they also induce wind shear, where air rapidly changes speed and direction in the atmosphere, disrupting tropical storms before they can form. Still, the Atlantic was so abnormally hot last year that it fueled an above-average hurricane season.
The Atlantic Ocean is still startlingly hot, but now the looming La Niña is likely to stabilize the air above the sea — creating a foundation for more hurricanes.
The Weather Company and Atmospheric G2 projected that the 2024 hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, would see 24 named storms compared to an average of 14. They projected six hurricanes will reach above Category 3 strength, compared to just three in a typical year.
The added difficulty in predicting how La Niña will play out is that people have heated up the planet. A “cool” La Niña year is now hotter than an El Niño year from 20 years ago. “It’s not the same climate regime that we forecasted the earlier [ENSO cycles] so it’s getting a bit harder to forecast,” Glantz said.
Anna Eshelman/NOAAClimate change is likely to amplify the swings in the ENSO cycle.
The swings between the cool and warm phases of the ENSO are likely to get stronger if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current pace. So many of the most densely populated parts of the world, like the Andean region in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, are going to experience a more aggressive whiplash between wet and dry years, between calm and stormy summers, and between warmer and cooler winters.
For scientists, the rest of 2024 is going to be an important case study in the impacts of climate change and natural variability, sorting out where they diverge, where they intersect, and where they lead to more disasters. The world will be a real-world laboratory, showcasing severe weather that could become more typical as average temperatures continue to rise.
“It’s going to be a very interesting year,” McPhaden said. “We’ll have to wait and see and be ready for more extremes.”
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