Local climate fronts, snow trails, and plant of the week
Super-pollutants down the street, a sub-snow habitat, and a tentative sign of spring
PSA!
Today (3/12) is the first day that Massachusetts residents can sign up to preregister for a COVID vaccine appointment, adding you to an online system that will notify you when you’re eligible for an appointment. I signed up earlier this morning—here’s the form.
One polluting plant at a time
Back in October (time flies) I reflected on how the global climate crisis can have significant local fronts. In that case I was talking about the Weymouth Compressor Station, just across the river from my town of Quincy, which would connect fracking operations in Pennsylvania to natural gas markets in upper New England and southeastern Canada.
The latest update on that story is that Enbridge, the company operating the station, has struggled to even make it operational, with multiple false starts. They now say it has been online since late January. In the meantime, Enbridge is paying the town of Weymouth millions of dollars to stop pursuing appeals against the compressor, a normal thing you do when you’re not causing any harm to anyone. However, new members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission raised questions of the approval process for the compressor station, citing concerns about environmental justice and safety, per WBUR reporter Miriam Wasser. So we’ll see what comes of that.
This week, there’s another example of local manifestations of the climate emergency in Louisville, Ky., brought to us by Phil McKenna and James Bruggers of InsideClimate News. There, a plant called Chemours is putting off enough hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23), a super-pollutant over 12,000 times as effective at warming the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, to outdo the greenhouse gases from every passenger vehicle in Louisville. HFC-23 is a byproduct from making the air conditioning refrigerant hydrochlorofluorocarbon-22 (HCFC-22), an ozone-killing chemical banned by an international agreement last year. The Louisville plant was exempt from the ban because their HCFC-22 is intended for manufacturers of fluoropolymer products such as Teflon.
Chemours says it captures half the HFC-23 it creates and incinerates it (the current best practice for destroying HFC-23.) However, it claims it will take two years to finish completing facilities to capture the other half. That’s despite a promise Chemours made to the Obama administration in 2015 to start voluntarily capturing their HFC-23. Chemours never finished the on-site incinerator they had planned to build.
When McKenna and Bruggers reached out to officials from the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state-level agency said they didn’t know there were any significant HFC-23 emissions from Chemours. Didn’t know! Now, faced with broadening public awareness of the super-pollutant down the street, the Cabinet says they’re investigating.
What that suggests to me, taken together with the Weymouth situation, is that you never know what might finally tip the scale and convince regulators to move on an issue, even if it seems like you’ve been raising the alarm and getting no response for ages.
But wait, there’s more! McKenna also has a cool story on his quest trying and failing to find a climate-friendly refrigerator. To me, it’s a story less about what we should do as consumers (consumer behavior alone can’t move the needle on climate) and more an illustration of the regulatory and economic situation around the continued use of super-pollutants in common appliances. Regulations are only useful if they are enforced. Companies such as GE claim they’re phasing out refrigerators that contain hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), but McKenna found that there is no labeling or advertising to distinguish HFC-containing fridges still on the market from climate-friendly ones. He ended up unknowingly buying an HFC fridge despite an email from customer service that promised GE had stopped using HFCs in all new US fridges a year ago. The state regulations banning HFCs in fridges are relatively new, leading to a confusing transitional period not helped by companies failing to say which fridges have HFCs and which don’t.
I won’t spoil the end of McKenna’s fridge-buying adventure—I’ll just say it’s a classic Home Depot moment.
Tunnels in the snow
Noted science educator Jeanne Gearin, a.k.a. my mom, took some cool photos of tunnels that appeared in melting snow in St. Louis. If it’s warming up near you and the snow is finally subsiding, perhaps you’ve noticed these networks around, too. Even if you missed seeing them in the snow, the grass beneath can show the imprint of animals at work.
The cause is usually voles—mouse-sized rodents that don’t hibernate and are active during the day. Their lifestyle means their always at risk of getting swiped by a raptor working the day shift such as a red-tailed hawk. When there’s at least six inches of snow, voles and other rodents can create tunnels that stay insulated at a temperature a little above freezing, allowing them to forage even when the air above is lethal. This under-snow habitat even has a name: the subnivean zone.
If you’re lucky enough to have a day or two with a well-preserved subnivean zone, there are a few features you might notice, according to Northern Woodlands:
It is easy enough to study this hidden habitat. Look for an air hole in the snow and dig a pit straight down next to it. If you’re lucky, you may discover an intricate system of rooms and hallways. The most elaborate contain a sleeping area, a breakfast nook, a food cache corner, and a latrine. Long, narrow tunnels connect everything. For convenience, most tunnels begin where there is a tree trunk, large rock, or thick bush. These dark surfaces also absorb solar heat, helping to moderate the temperature of the animals, the plants, and the ground itself.
There are plenty of articles out there identifying vole trails, so I’m not adding much to the discussion as far as solving the mystery. I just wanted to point out that there are many ways in which rodents use urban habitats that are not harmful to plants or human structures. They’re just out there, doing their thing, slowly getting picked off by hawks and foxes. The imprints of the trails vanish soon after thaw.
Plant of the week: Witch-hazel
After months of gray, the yellow of witch-hazel (Hamamelis) seems almost unreal. Wild-growing strains of common witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) usually bloom in the fall, but there are some species and domesticated varieties that bloom in late winter or early spring, which is probably what we’re dealing with here. I had kind of forgotten that this is, in general, a fall-flowering plant, because in many neighborhoods there are dozens of planted witch-hazels intended to bring the first splash of color in late winter along with daffodils.
Witch-hazel features prominently in several Native American medicine traditions, notes The Atlantic:
The Osage used witch hazel bark to treat skin ulcers and sores; the Potawatomi steamed twigs over hot rocks in their sweat lodges to soothe sore muscles; the Iroquoi brewed a tea to treat dysentery, colds, and coughs. Since then studies have found active compounds in witch hazel such as flavonoids, tannins (hamamelitannin and proanthocyanidins), and volatile oil that give it astringent action to stop bleeding.
The current thinking about the plant’s quirky English name is that it comes from when Mohegans showed English settlers how to “dowse” with witch-hazel branches to find water sources—the dowser hopes for the branch to bend when it’s near a spring. The words “wycke,” meaning lively, and “wych”, meaning bend, probably gave rise to the “witch” rather than, you know, sorcerers.
In a few weeks, perhaps, we’ll have many witch-hazel bushes in bloom. For now, there was just this plant that was heavily trimmed back last fall, showing just a few flowers. Here they are in context:
Several optimistic flowers on an otherwise pared-back, bare-branched shrub? Looks like we’ve got ourselves a metaphor.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.