Penguin populations are collapsing along the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula but remain abundant on the frozen islands of the east side, according to The New York Times.
The populations of Adélie penguins on the melting west side are “just a complete train wreck,” Heather J. Lynch, a Stony Brook College ecologist, told the Times.
But on the eastern side, “where the climate has not changed as dramatically, the populations have not changed dramatically,” Lynch said.
With about 3.8 million breeding pairs across Antarctica, Adélies are among the continent’s most numerous penguin species that subsist on the tiny krill that thrive in icy water, the Times reported.
As temperatures have risen on the west side, ice and krill have vanished, and western penguins have declined by “as much as 90 percent,” Lynch said.
But in the upcoming decades, the east side, which is located on the shores of the Weddell Sea, will likely remain “cold and icy and exactly the kind of place where these Adélies need to live,” Lynch added.
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Today we’ll look at tensions over whether bargain-savvy India will keep buying Russian oil despite calls to the contrary from the U.S. Then we’ll look at how a pair of mad cow disease cases in Rio de Janeiro last fall threw the world beef market into turmoil and why U.S. exporters are now calling for a Brazilian beef ban.
US to India: Russian energy purchases discouraged
Germany is reconsidering whether to invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi to this June’s Group of Seven (G-7) summit, due to India’s reluctance to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
While G-7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.) have taken the lead in imposing sanctions against Russia, they have been encouraging other countries, like India, to set limits, Bloomberg reported.
But India has said it would continue to buy Russian oil, which the country receives at a heavily discounted rate, according to Bloomberg.
Biden, Modi have ‘candid exchange’: President Biden held a “candid exchange of views” with Modi on Monday, which an official described as “warm and productive,” our colleague Sarakshi Rai reported.
The official suggested that India could cease importing Russian oil with few economic repercussions, noting that India’s energy imports from Russia account for only 1-2 percent of its total energy imports.
Although press secretary Jen Psaki said that payments for Russian energy were not being sanctioned, she said that the U.S. was discouraging India from increasing such purchases, The Hindu reported.
‘Partner of choice’: Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged India and Russia’s longstanding relationship but stressed that the U.S. is “willing to be a partner of choice with India,” Indian broadcaster NDTV reported.
“Every country is differently situated, has different needs, requirements, but we’re looking to allies and partners not to increase their purchases of Russian energy,” Blinken said.
The U.S. has already sanctioned Russian energy, but the EU has thus far only instituted a ban on Russian coal — though it is considering an embargo on oil, Reuters reported.
India boosting exports to Russia: In addition to generating controversy over its energy imports from Russia, India is also planning to increase its exports of goods to Russia by an additional $2 billion, the Times of India reported.
Modi’s administration is talking to Moscow about removing import barriers for Indian-made products, as the countries also define a proposal for trading in rupees and rubles, according to the Times.
Total bilateral trade between the countries stood at $11.8 billion in the 11 months following April 2021 — up 46 percent from the $8.1 billion recorded the previous year, the Times reported.
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SANCTIONS ON RUSSIAN ENERGY COULD POSE CHALLENGE TO JAPAN
As India deepens its trade relationship with Russia, G-7 countries are continuing to seek out ways to toughen sanctions against Moscow and minimize their own subsequent distress.
Japan has agreed to follow the EU and G-7 members in banning imports of Russian coal and is trying to secure alternative sources of energy, according to Bloomberg.
But doing so “will be easier said than done for resource-poor Japan,” Bloomberg reported.
What has Japan sanctioned thus far? Japan has imposed export controls, including on semiconductors, while also sanctioning some oligarchs and barring Russia from issuing bonds in the country, according to Bloomberg.
But Russia supplies Japan with 13 percent of its “thermal coal” used for power generation, 8 percent of coal for steelmaking and 9 percent of its liquefied natural gas, Bloomberg reported.
Rising coal prices, no short-term solutions: With the global market for thermal coal already tight, competition for the product is on the rise — meaning that domestic prices could increase and translate into higher electricity bills, according to Bloomberg.
Although efforts to cut Japan’s reliance on coal could encourage a quicker transition to renewable energy — not to mention the resurrection of the country’s shuttered nuclear power plants — neither of these options offer immediate solutions, Bloomberg reported.
‘Little room for error’: Japan’s energy generation capacity has been “stretched” since the 2011 closure of nuclear plants following the Fukushima disaster, according to Reuters.
The country is seeking out new ways to replace Russian gas, while Japan’s industry ministry has instructed power companies to ensure that they have three weeks of reserves, Reuters reported.
“Japan has little room for error,” a Reuters analysis added.
Brazilian beef imports stoke ‘mad cow’ fears
Major beef industry trade groups are redoubling their calls for a ban on U.S. imports of Brazilian beef, the National Cattleman’s Beef Association (NCBA) announced on Monday.
Calls for a ban started last fall as two cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy — commonly called “mad cow disease” — in Brazil threw the global beef market into turmoil.
But these demands reached new urgency this week against the backdrop of two other beef industry trends revealed by a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That report detailed both the soaring imports of Brazilian ground beef into the U.S. and the rising importance of a disease-conscious East Asian market to beleaguered cattle ranchers.
Spiking Brazilian imports: U.S imports of Brazilian beef surged last year and kept on growing. American meatpackers brought in 100 million pounds in 2022, or more than six times the previous year, according to the USDA.
That flood of “fresh” or refrigerated meat was mostly low-end trimmings that get mixed into the broader U.S. beef supply. But trade groups worry such imports could also bring in mad cow disease.
The trade groups say that doesn’t only endanger individual Americans but thousands of farmers who depend on beef exports.
What is mad cow disease? Bad news. It’s a deadly illness caused by abnormally-folded proteins called prions that lock into and break down nerve tissue in humans and other animals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Economic danger: In addition to the public health threat is the resultant economic danger, as a single outbreak on a single farm can crash an entire country’s beef exports overnight, according to the Wisconsin State Farmer.
For example: After a mad cow disease outbreak killed 117 people and led to the slaughter of 4.4 million cattle in the U.K. in the 1990s, countries around the world instituted bans on British beef — some of which remained in place until 2019, the Farmer reported.
Zero-tolerance: A single sick cow on an Oregon dairy farm in 2003 — sometimes dubbed “the cow that stole Christmas” — led to 57 countries banning the import of U.S. beef, Bill Bullard of trade group R-CALF told the Farmer.
BRAZIL OUTBREAK BOOSTS — AND THREATENS — US BEEF
That brings us to November 2021, when two people in Rio de Janeiro were infected by meat tainted with mad cow disease, according to Reuters.
No risk here: Despite these incidents, Brazilian beef still has a “negligible” risk of containing the disease, and the sick cows never made it into the food system, according to a December report by the World Organization for Animal Health.
Not the first time: The Brazil-U.S beef trade has often been rocked by scandals around Brazilian failures to report cases of mad cow disease reporting including in 2010, 2015, 2019 and 2021 according to the Farmer.
The USDA banned imports of fresh Brazilian beef in 2017, but lifted the ban in February 2020, according to the agency.
The great beef supply shuffle. The USDA didn’t reinstate its embargo after the November 2021 outbreak.
But China was more cautious, blocking Brazilian shipments on arrival and instating a three-month ban, according to Reuters.
Supply disruption: Beijing had been importing more beef to make up for short supplies of pork, which had been ravaged by a fatal outbreak of African Swine Fever that killed about 43 million pigs worldwide, a study in Nature found.
By 2020, 43 percent of China’s meat imports came from Brazil — at a steep environmental cost, according to The Guardian.
The Chinese ban had two major effects: While temporary, China’s temporary gap in supply enabled U.S. suppliers to begin exporting far more beef to East Asia, and importing far more beef from Brazil, according to the USDA.
The rising U.S. sales to South Korea, China and Taiwan — up 38 percent, 114 percent and 78 percent over 2021, respectively — helped cancel out falling exports to Mexico, the USDA said.
The risk to America’s beef exporters is clear: That a single person in the U.S. sickened by a single tainted hamburger made from imported beef could torpedo that entire market share.
That’s not too far-fetched: East Asian nations banned Canadian beef in January over a single case of mad cow disease, according to Bloomberg.
Tuesday Troubles
Exposure to ‘forever chemicals’ may raise diabetes risk in middle-aged women: study
- Exposure to the industrial toxins known as “forever chemicals” may be linked to an increased risk of developing diabetes for middle-aged women, a study in Diabetologia has found. That’s because these compounds could disrupt the regulatory behavior of certain proteins and heighten susceptibility to this disease, as we reported for The Hill.
Fish and farms on arid California-Oregon border to get less water
- Farmers who irrigate their land from the federally administered Upper Klamath Lake on the California-Oregon border will have access to only one-seventh of the amount that they’d receive in a wetter year, the Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, a Native American tribe that relies on the water to protect salmon will only see about half the water they’d get if Klamath had been full, according to the AP.
Climate disruption breaks septic systems, spreads stench
- Increased floods and rising seas are disrupting rural septic systems, causing pipes to break and sewage to back up into unlucky homeowners’ yards, The Washington Post reported.
Please visit The Hill’s Sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you tomorrow.