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Many toxic substances harm people slowly, causing serious illnesses years after repeated exposure.

But methylene chloride’s fumes are so dangerous, the chemical can kill you in a matter of minutes.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned consumer sales of paint strippers with this ingredient in 2019 after an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity into a decades-long string of methylene chloride deaths — and a sustained campaign by relatives of its victims and safety advocates to press the EPA to act.

The coalition pushed for more: Workers weren’t protected by the narrow restrictions, they said. The vast majority of deaths Public Integrity traced to methylene chloride exposure happened on the job. And paint strippers were far from the only product you could find it in.

Now the EPA is proposing to ban most uses of methylene chloride — still with some on-the-job exceptions, but far fewer.

“I’m sort of stunned, you know?” said Brian Wynne, whose 31-year-old brother, Drew, died in 2017 while removing paint from his business’ walk-in freezer. Wynne had thought the EPA’s 2019 action on paint stripper “would be as far as we possibly could get — that we ran into a brick wall of funded lobbyists and councils that are paid to keep people like us away and ensure that their bottom line is prioritized ahead of safety.”

The proposed rule would prohibit methylene chloride in all consumer products and “most industrial and commercial uses,” the agency said in its announcement last week. 

The EPA said it hopes the rule will take effect in August 2024. Federal rules must go through a set process to give the public a chance to influence the final outcome. 

The chemical, also known as dichloromethane, can be found in products on retail shelves such as aerosol degreasers and brush cleaners for paints and coatings. Adhesives and sealants sold for commercial purposes use it. Manufacturers tap it to make other chemicals.

At least 85 people have died from methylene chloride’s quick-acting harms since 1980, including workers who had safety training and protective equipment, the agency said. 

That figure comes from a 2021 study by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the University of California, San Francisco, that quantified the ongoing fatalities, building on Public Integrity’s earlier tally. The number is almost certainly an undercount because one of the ways methylene chloride kills is by triggering a heart attack, which can look to observers like death from natural causes unless someone thinks to do a toxicology test.

The chemical has also caused “severe and long-lasting health impacts” such as cancer in people whose exposure didn’t rise to immediately lethal levels, the EPA said.

“Methylene chloride’s hazards,” the agency wrote in its proposed rule, “are well established.”

So well established, in fact, that experts say the federal government should have acted long before.

Public Integrity’s 2015 investigation turned up multiple missed opportunities for intervention since the 1970s that could have saved lives. Yet more deaths occurred amid delays after the EPA first proposed a rule at the end of the Obama administration in January 2017 — the Trump administration shelved the proposal until pressured to act.

‘Protect as many people as possible’

Liz Hitchcock, director of Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, the federal policy program of Toxic-Free Future, is among the people working for years to stop methylene chloride’s killing spree. She hailed the proposed-ban announcement as “a big day.” 

“Again, people have died using these chemicals,” she said. “People have gotten sick being nearby when people are using these chemicals, people have gotten chronic illnesses from the use of these chemicals. We want to make sure we protect as many people as possible.”

But she wasn’t happy to hear that the EPA believes the rule won’t be finalized for 15 more months. 

And Lauren Atkins, whose 31-year-old son Joshua died in 2018 while using paint stripper to refinish his BMX bike, worries about the impact of the uses that won’t be banned. Seeing those loopholes in the announcement hit her hard.

“I about jumped out of my shoes until I actually read the whole thing, and then I was pretty sad,” said Atkins, whose driving goal since her son’s death has been to get methylene chloride off the market so it can’t kill anyone else. “I lost my son, but my son lost everything.”

The chemical’s use in pharmaceutical manufacturing isn’t covered by the Toxic Substances Control Act, so that isn’t prohibited in the proposed rule, the EPA said. Workers who continue to use methylene chloride in other activities the proposal would allow, the agency said, would be covered by a new “workplace chemical protection program with strict exposure limits.” Methylene chloride kills when its fumes build up in enclosed spaces.

Some higher-volume uses would remain in those exceptions, which include “mission-critical” or “safety-critical” work by the military, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and their contractors; use in laboratories; and companies using it as a reactant or manufacturing it for the allowed purposes, the EPA said. 

But some of those exceptions would end after 10 years.

And most uses would be prohibited. 

There would be no more methylene chloride in paint strippers beyond the federal-agency exceptions. The product was a common cause of reported deaths, frequently among workers refinishing old bathtubs in homes and apartments. 

“I lost my son, but my son lost everything.”

Lauren Atkins, whose son Joshua died in 2018 while using paint stripper on his bike

And methylene chloride would no longer be allowed in commercial and industrial vapor degreasing, adhesive removal, finishing products for textiles, liquid lubricants, hobby glue and a long list of other applications. 

“Currently, an estimated 845,000 individuals are exposed to methylene chloride in the workplace,” the EPA said in a statement. “Under EPA’s proposal, less than 10,000 workers, protected from unreasonable risk via a required workplace chemical protection program, are expected to continue to use methylene chloride.”

Dr. Robert Harrison, a clinical professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has focused on methylene chloride for roughly a decade. He said the EPA is walking a line with the proposal, trying to balance safety with economic and national-security considerations, and he finds the extent of the ban heartening.

“I think that this is a win. It’s a win for workers,” said Harrison, who worked on the 2021 study about fatalities caused by the chemical. “This sets a really great precedent for making decisions based on clear-cut science and establishing the principle … that we should move away from these toxic chemicals to safer substitutes where the harm clearly outweighs the benefits.”

62,000 chemicals

You might think a chemical can’t be sold on the market unless it’s deemed safe. But that’s not how the U.S. system works.

Concerns about chemical safety prompted Congress to pass the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, setting some requirements for chemicals. But those were widely seen as weak, giving the EPA no authority to broadly assess safety. A federal inventory published in 1982 counted roughly 62,000 chemicals, a number that’s continued to grow. 

In 2016, Congress amended TSCA and mandated chemical risk evaluations by the EPA. Methylene chloride was the very first that the agency tackled.

“This is what we worked so hard to reform TSCA to do,” said Hitchcock, who shared the Public Integrity investigation with congressional offices during that period as a potent example of deadly inaction.

The next step for the proposed methylene chloride ban is a 60-day public comment period. People will be able to weigh in on the EPA’s docket — and safety advocates are organizing around that.

“This is a big step forward for public health, but it’s not without its flaws,” Hitchcock said. She’s hoping to see comments that “urge EPA to enact the strongest rule possible.”

Harrison used to say that chemical regulation in the U.S. moved at a glacial speed — until glaciers started outpacing it. But he does see improvement since the 2016 TSCA amendments. The new regulatory action on methylene chloride makes him hopeful.

“There are many other chemicals that can follow the decision that the USA has made about methylene chloride,” he said.

The post The EPA wants to broaden a ban on a deadly chemical on store shelves appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

California and Arizona are currently fighting each other over water from the Colorado River. But this isn’t new — it’s actually been going on for over 100 years. At one point, the states literally went to war about it. The problem comes down to some really bad math from 1922.

To some extent, the crisis can be blamed on climate change. The West is in the middle of a once-in-a-millennium drought. As temperatures rise, the snow pack that feeds the river has gotten much thinner, and the river’s main reservoirs have all but dried up.

But that’s only part of the story: The United States has also been overusing the Colorado for more than a century thanks to a byzantine set of flawed laws and lawsuits known as the “Law of the River.” This legal tangle not only has been over-allocating the river, it also has been driving conflict in the region, especially between the two biggest users, California and Arizona, which are both trying to secure as much water as they can. And now, as a massive drought grips the region, the law of the river has reached a breaking point.

The Colorado River begins in the Rocky Mountains and winds its way southwest, twisting through the Grand Canyon and entering the Pacific at Baja California. In the late 19th century, as white settlers arrived in the West, they started diverting water from the mighty river to irrigate their crops, funneling it through dirt canals. For a little while, this worked really well. The canals made an industrial farming mecca out of desert that early colonial settlers viewed as “worthless.”

Even back then, the biggest water users were Arizona and California, which took so much water that they started to drain the river farther upstream, literally drying it out. According to American legal precedent, whoever uses a body of water first usually has the strongest rights to it. But other states soon cried foul: California was growing much faster than they were, and they believed it wasn’t fair that the Golden State should suck up all the water before they got a chance to develop.

In 1922, the states came to a solution — kind of. At the suggestion of a newly appointed cabinet secretary named Herbert Hoover, the states agreed to split the river into two sections, drawing an arbitrary line halfway along its length at a spot called Lee Ferry. The states on the “upper” part of the river — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — agreed to send the states on the “lower” end of the river — Arizona, California, and Nevada — what they thought was half the river’s overall flow, 7.5 million acre-feet of water each year. (An acre-foot is enough to cover an acre of land in a foot of water, about enough to supply two homes for a year.)

This agreement was supposed to prevent any one state from drying up the river before the other states could use it. The Upper Basin states got half and the Lower Basin states got half. Simple.

But there were some serious flaws to this plan.

First, the Law of the River overestimated how much water flowed through the river in the first place. The states’ numbers were based on primitive data from stream gauges placed at arbitrary points on the waterway, and they took samples during an unusually wet decade, leading to a very optimistic estimate of the river’s size. The river would only average about 14 million acre-feet annually, but the agreement handed out 15 million to the seven states.

While the states weren’t able to immediately use all this water, it set in motion the underlying problem today: The states have the legal right to use more water than actually exists in the river.

And you’ll notice that the Colorado River doesn’t end in the U.S. — It ends in Mexico. Initially, the Law of the River just straight-up ignored that fact. Decades later, Mexico was squeezed into the agreement and promised 1.5 million acre-feet, further straining the already over-allocated river.

On top of all of this, Indigenous tribes that had depended on the river for centuries were now forced to compete with states for their share of water, leading to these drawn-out lawsuits that took decades to resolve.

But in the short-term, Arizona and California struck it rich — they were promised the largest share of Colorado River water and should have been primed for growth. For Arizona, though, there was a catch: The state couldn’t put their water to use.

The state’s biggest population centers in Phoenix and Tucson were hundreds of miles away from the river itself, and it would take a 300-mile canal to bring the water across the desert — something the state couldn’t afford to build on its own. Larger and wealthier California was able to build all the canals and pumps it needed to divert river water to farms and cities. This allowed it to gulp up both its share and the extra Lower Basin water that Arizona couldn’t access. California’s powerful congressional delegation lobbied to stop Congress from approving Arizona’s canal project, as the state wanted to keep the Colorado River to itself.

Arizona was furious. And so, in 1934, Arizona and California went to war — literally. Arizona tried to block California from building new dams to take more water from the river, using “military” force when necessary.

Arizona sent troops from its National Guard to stop California from building the Parker Dam. It delayed construction, but not for very long because their boat got tangled up in some electrical wire and had to be rescued.

For the next 30 years, Arizona and California fought about whether Arizona should be able to build that canal. They also sued each other before the Supreme Court no fewer than 10 times, including one 1963 case that set the record for the longest oral arguments in the history of the modern court, taking 16 hours over four days and involving 106 witnesses.

That 1963 case also made some pretty big assumptions: Even though the states now knew that the initial estimates were too high, the court-appointed expert said he was “morally certain that neither in my lifetime, nor in your lifetime, nor the lifetime of your children and great-grandchildren will there be an inadequate supply of water” from the river for California’s cities.

A few years after that court case, in 1968, Arizona finally struck a fateful bargain to ensure it could claim its share of the river. California gave up its anti-canal campaign and the federal government agreed to pay for the construction of the 300-mile project that would bring Colorado River water across the desert to Phoenix. This move helped save Arizona’s cotton-farming industry and enabled Phoenix to eventually grow into the fifth-largest city in the country. It seemed like a success — Arizona was flourishing!

But in exchange for the canal, the state made a fateful concession: If the reservoirs at Lake Powell and Lake Mead were to run low, Arizona, and not California, would be the first state to make cuts. It was a decision the state’s leaders would come to regret.

In the early 2000s, as a massive drought gripped the Southwest, water levels in the river’s two key reservoirs dropped. Now that both Arizona and California were fully using their shares of the river, combined with the other states’ usage, there suddenly wasn’t enough melting snow to fill the reservoirs back up. A shrinking Colorado River couldn’t keep up with a century of rising demand.

Today, more than 20 years into the drought, Arizona has had to bear the biggest burden. Thanks to its earlier compromise decades earlier, the state had “junior water rights,” meaning it took the first cuts as part of the drought plan. In 2021, those cuts officially went into effect, drying out cotton and alfalfa fields across the central part of the state until much of the landscape turned brown. Still, those cuts haven’t been enough.

This century, the river is only averaging around 12.4 million acre-feet. The Upper Basin states technically have the rights to 7.5 million acre-feet, but they only use about half of that. In the Lower Basin, meanwhile, Arizona and California are gobbling up around three and four million acre-feet respectively. In total, this overdraft has caused reservoir levels to fall. It’s going to take a lot more than a few rainy seasons to fix this problem.

So, for the first time since the Law of the River was written, the federal government has had to step in, ordering the states to reduce total water usage on the river, this time by nearly a third. That’s a jaw-dropping demand!

These new cuts will extend to Arizona, California, and beyond, drying up thousands more acres of farmland, not to mention cities around Phoenix and Los Angeles that rely on the Colorado River. These new restrictions will also put increased pressure on the many tribes that have used the Colorado River for centuries: Tribes that have water rights will be pressured to sell or lease them to other water users, and tribes without recognized water rights will face increased opposition as they try to secure their share.

And Arizona and California are still fighting over who should bear the biggest burden of these new cuts. California has insisted that the Law of the River requires Arizona to shoulder the pain, and from a legal standpoint they may be right. But Arizona says further cuts would be disastrous for the state’s economy, and the other five river states are taking its side.

Either way, the painful cuts have to come from somewhere, because the Law of the River was built on math that doesn’t add up.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The very bad math behind the Colorado River crisis on Apr 26, 2023.

This article was produced with ProPublica as part of its Local Reporting Network initiative. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Whenever a hard rain fell on Harlan County, Kentucky, the mud, rocks and debris from the Foresters No. 25 mine pounded down the hillside into the community of Wallins Creek.

Local residents repeatedly complained about washed-out culverts and mud in their yards. Time after time, county work crews came out after a heavy rain to repair Camp Creek Road, a water line that runs alongside it and a local bridge. The strip mine’s owner, Blackjewel, fixed some problems, but when the rains came again, so did the muddy flooding.

Amber Combs, who lived down the hill from Foresters, recalled a day in August 2017 when “the water was rushing down and the yard was a muddy slush pond. It was literally like a river around my house.” Combs complained to Kentucky regulators, who fined Blackjewel $1,300, which it never paid. Overall, under Blackjewel’s ownership, Foresters would run up 17 violations and more than $600,000 in unpaid fines.  

Runoff from Blackjewel’s Foresters No. 25 mine damaged a road in Wallins Creek, Kentucky, in 2020. (Silas Walker/Lexington Herald-Leader)

Founded in 2008 by West Virginia native Jeff Hoops, Blackjewel grew in just a decade to become the sixth-largest coal producer in the U.S., partly by accumulating mines like Foresters that had gone bankrupt. By 2018, it boasted more than 500 mining permits in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Then, in July 2019, Blackjewel stunned the industry by declaring bankruptcy, with claims against it later estimated at $7.5 billion. 

That December, environmental groups where Blackjewel operated warned the bankruptcy judge that, while he was focusing on what they called the company’s “significant financial mismanagement,” he should also be aware of “severe environmental mismanagement problems.”

“Reclamation work, water treatment, and other expenses related to environmental compliance should be approved and prioritized” in the bankruptcy case, the environmental advocates wrote. 

Kentucky regulators agreed. But, citing longstanding case law, the judge rejected their request. Instead, bankruptcy trustees began divvying up the company’s assets among preferred creditors such as banks and hedge funds. Problems at Foresters and other Blackjewel sites persisted. By mid-2020, there were more than 600 outstanding violations of state mining and reclamation standards at the company’s mines in Kentucky, including 450 since the bankruptcy filing. On top of that, regulators had cited Blackjewel mines for more than 13,000 violations of Kentucky water quality rules, mostly for failing to monitor pollution discharges.          

The Blackjewel case, still unresolved and nearing its fourth anniversary this July, highlights the environmental toll of what has become a central feature of the coal industry’s business strategy: bankruptcy. Over the past decade, Blackjewel and other coal companies have found two ways to use bankruptcy to their advantage. First, they expanded their holdings by acquiring other companies’ bankrupt mines, which they hoped would turn a temporary profit during upticks in coal prices and production within the industry’s long-term decline.

Then they declared bankruptcy themselves, entering an arena where they didn’t have to pay all of their debts, and where environmental liabilities took a back seat to banks and other financial creditors. As more coal companies busted, hundreds of mines cycled through repeated bankruptcies. Some, like Foresters, are no longer producing coal, yet they continue to pollute their communities.  

A first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight has documented that mines that have gone through multiple bankruptcies also tend to create more environmental damage. By combining data from federal bankruptcy court filings and state regulatory records, we identified mining permits that have been through more than one bankruptcy and compared the number of environmental violations they’d accrued to violations for mines that had not been through bankruptcy. We found that the median number of environmental violations for surface and underground mines that had been through multiple bankruptcies between 2012 and 2022 in Kentucky was almost twice the median number for mines that had not, and 40% higher in West Virginia. Blackjewel mines in Kentucky that have gone through multiple bankruptcies had more than twice as many violations as the state median for nonbankrupt mines. Our analysis could not determine if bankruptcy caused the environmental violations or was simply associated with them. Read about our methodology here.

The analysis suggests that the bankruptcy system is “keeping mines alive that are not viable and that are struggling to remain in compliance with environmental laws,” said University of Chicago law professor Josh Macey, co-author of a 2019 study on coal bankruptcies.

Blackjewel’s founder, Hoops, epitomizes how the story of the coal industry and its barons has become inseparable from bankruptcy. He built his empire on bankrupt mines. Then, as Blackjewel’s liabilities mounted, he began seeking new vistas. In the months before Blackjewel’s bankruptcy, according to court records, he transferred tens of millions of dollars into another company that is building a resort in his native West Virginia, part of a broader effort he has described as a noncoal empire he can leave to his children.  

Hoops, who declined requests for an in-person or phone interview, said in emailed answers to questions that he didn’t intend for Blackjewel to go bankrupt and that creditors forced him into it. “The model was never to bankrupt the company,” he wrote. “In no way have I benefited from the system.” He added, “I will not recover a cent of my valid claims.” Hoops said that Blackjewel complied with environmental laws and that when violations were issued, it took steps to address them.  

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Before his bankrupt company left a legacy of mud-shrouded roads and polluted streams, Jeff Hoops was a local hero. He rose from a dysfunctional family and a menial job in the West Virginia coalfields to create a regional economic engine and become a philanthropic pillar of his community. 

He and his wife, Patricia Hoops, were all smiles on the front page of the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia, in April 2014 when the newspaper named him its “Citizen of the Year.” The article recounted Hoops’ charity work close to home — a residence hall at Appalachian Bible College in Mount Hope, an indoor football practice facility at the University of Pikeville in Kentucky — and halfway around the world: distributing Bibles in Russia, financing construction of an orphanage in India, running a hotel for missionaries in the Dominican Republic. The children’s hospital in Huntington was named for him, thanks to a $3 million gift. So was a local soccer facility, after what the paper called a “generous donation.”

Despite his wealth and success, Hoops remained the modest and deeply religious man that his friends and neighbors had always known. As a major donor to Marshall University’s Thundering Herd athletic program, he would rate a perch in a luxury box at the stadium. But he said he prefers to sit in the stands, where he can feel the crowd’s energy and be closer to the action.

“I’ve invited him into the box but he says, ‘No, I’m okay,’” said John Sutherland, executive director of Marshall’s Big Green Scholarship Foundation.     

When Sutherland wants to talk Marshall sports with Hoops, they meet at Shonet’s Country Cafe, a family diner in Milton, West Virginia, for scrambled eggs and sausage, and sometimes a slice of pie.    

Born in 1956, Hoops grew up in Bluefield, deep in southern West Virginia along the Virginia border. Bluefield then had 20,000 residents; it counts less than half that many today. Historically, it was a financial hub and railroad center for the coal industry. Now, it promotes itself as “Nature’s Air-Conditioned City” (elevation 2,611), and the local chamber of commerce gives away cold lemonade whenever a summer day hits 90 degrees.

Hoops was the second oldest of five children of Roy Hoops, who worked as a clerk for the Norfolk & Southern Railroad, and Lucy Walker. Roy’s drinking, infidelity and physical abuse of Lucy strained the family, according to court records. Lucy filed for protective orders and divorce several times. When Roy promised to change his behavior, they reconciled.

“Certainly my childhood had its challenges, as my father’s life was controlled by alcohol,” Hoops said.

Hoops was a striver. He sang in the youth chorus at church and made the Bluefield High basketball team as a sophomore despite standing 5-feet-1-inch tall. He sprouted to what he called “a towering 5-8” by 1974, when he graduated from Bluefield and married his high school sweetheart, Patricia Johnson, a week later. He wanted to work right away, but he was only 17, and the minimum age in the coal industry was 18. So he altered his birth certificate and found a job running parts in an underground mine, he said.  

In 1975, Hoops joined the engineering department of a mining company, doing surveying and designing ventilation plans. He began going to college at night, eventually earning associate’s and master’s degrees and an executive MBA. Within a decade of high school, he became a top corporate engineer and then vice president of operations for United Coal, which became part of Arch Coal. After leaving Arch in the late 1990s, Hoops established and sold a series of coal companies. A former associate described Hoops as a workaholic driven by a competitive streak. “The joy of his life is coming out on top of a business deal,” the former associate said.

Hoops’ parents divorced in 1985, remarried in 1986 and divorced again in 1991. Roy retired from the railroad and owned an Exxon gas station from 1983 to 2002. On his deathbed in 2014, he called his son to apologize. “I forgave him, told him I loved him, and told him the most important thing was for him to make peace with God,” Jeff Hoops recalled. 

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When Hoops was growing up, coal was the most powerful business and political player in places like southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. But then, buffeted by skyrocketing natural gas production, cheaper renewable energy prices and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the industry began to founder. 

Makers of everything from asbestos to opioids have used bankruptcy to avoid paying for damage they caused, but the sheer volume of coal bankruptcies outpaced any other sector. At least 60 coal companies went bankrupt between 2012 and 2022, including some of the biggest in the country. The environmental group Appalachian Voices warned in July 2021 that a wave of bankruptcies could leave 633,000 acres of coal mines in the eastern U.S. in need of cleanup, eroding the ability of communities to rebuild economically.  

In theory, bankruptcy doesn’t exempt a company from its responsibility to preserve the environment. The 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act requires coal companies to clean up damage as they mine. When mining is over, the land must be put back to “a condition capable of supporting the uses which it was capable of supporting prior to any mining.” 

That’s not how it generally works in practice. Coal companies often fall behind on so-called mine reclamation and, with obligations also mounting for worker pensions and health benefits, file for bankruptcy protection. They lay off employees at mines that are no longer productive or profitable, ditch pension and health care liabilities and avoid paying for environmental damages.

For example, coal giants Peabody Energy and Arch Coal created a third company, Patriot Coal, and spun off their mines with environmental problems and pension obligations into it. All three companies eventually went bankrupt, ducking a combined $2.6 billion in liabilities, according to Macey, the University of Chicago law professor. Many of these mines have changed hands since then but still have not been reclaimed.

“Bankrupt coal companies dump their mine cleanup obligations onto communities and taxpayers who simply don’t have the money to pick up the tab,” said Peter Morgan, a Sierra Club lawyer who has tracked coal bankruptcies around the country.

The purpose of bankruptcy is to give desperate people and companies time and relief from creditors so they can get back on their feet. But not all creditors are treated equally. Bankruptcy law gives secured creditors such as banks, law firms, the Internal Revenue Service and equipment suppliers — but not environmental costs or fines — priority for payment. 

“Bankruptcy courts are not doing enough to stop conduct that allows coal companies to get out of their environmental responsibilities,” Macey said.

There’s a potential backstop to pay for environmental cleanup: reclamation bonds. Federal law requires coal companies to post these bonds to receive mining permits, as a sort of insurance. The amount that companies are required to put up varies from state to state; in West Virginia, it can be as much as $5,000 per acre of the permit. To secure the bonds, companies pay a surety firm a one-time fee — typically 20% to 50% of the face value, according to Hoops. If a mining company goes belly up, state regulators can revoke its permits and use the bond money to clean up whatever mess is left. Money from forfeited bonds, sometimes along with other revenue such as environmental penalties or coal production fees, goes into state reclamation funds to restore abandoned mine sites.

But the required bond amounts often aren’t enough to cover all potential costs. Cleanup costs have soared, partly due to larger surface mines that blew up or chopped off entire mountaintops, and partly because modern studies have increasingly identified water pollutants requiring lengthy and expensive treatment. According to a 2021 legislative audit, West Virginia’s reclamation bonds have covered only one-tenth of cleanup costs. Separately, the Appalachian Voices analysis projected cleanup costs in West Virginia alone as high as $3.5 billion.  

As a result, state officials are reluctant to revoke permits and take on the financial responsibility for cleanup. What often ensues instead is a game of musical mines. Knowing that they won’t end up on the hook for reclamation, other coal companies buy mines out of bankruptcy — and then often go bankrupt themselves. 

The ProPublica analysis identified 2,030 mines in Kentucky and West Virginia that have been through bankruptcy since 2012 — more than a third of all coal mines in those states. Of the bankrupt mines, 491, or 24%, have gone through more than one bankruptcy.  

Of the 210 bankrupt Blackjewel mines in our database, including 197 in Kentucky and 13 in West Virginia, almost half have gone through at least one other bankruptcy. The vast majority of those — 101 of 103 — are in Kentucky and had a median of 16 environmental violations, more than twice the median for nonbankrupt mines in that state. 

Since Blackjewel went bust in 2019, more than 100 of its Kentucky permits have been sold out of bankruptcy — many for the second time, according to court filings. Lawyers jokingly call the second round of bankruptcy “Chapter 22,” or Chapter 11 twice over. 

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In 1999, Hoops went out on his own with just one mine, the Hunts Branch Mine in Phelps, Kentucky. In 2008, he founded Revelation Energy. It grew, and Hoops changed the name to Blackjewel in 2017 as part of what he called “a strategic restructuring.” The plan was to shift away from providing steam coal for power plants and toward producing more metallurgical coal for steel mills, a market where prices were increasing.

Blackjewel assembled mines from the bankruptcies of James River Coal, Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and others. Alpha paid Hoops $200 million in cash and more than $100 million in installments to take about 250 of its mining permits. Every acquisition “was based on a detailed economic model that demonstrated the mines could make money even in a down market,” Hoops said. 

The strategy, Hoops said, was working. Blackjewel expanded from central Appalachia to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. It employed 1,700 miners and boasted 1.2 billion tons of coal available for mining, enough to keep going for many decades.

But in April 2019, two bankruptcy experts questioned whether Hoops would be able to honor his companies’ environmental obligations.

“Rather, his businesses have begun to exhibit a pattern,” Macey and Jackson Salovaara wrote in “Bankruptcy as Bailout,” an article in the Stanford Law Review. “Hoops takes over abandoned mines, receives cash from the company that wants to get rid of them, and then fails to actually remediate the environmental problems.” 

Three months later, Blackjewel declared bankruptcy. It cited a roof collapse at a Virginia mine, a spike in workers’ compensation costs and flooding that prevented railroads from moving coal out of Wyoming. It also blamed adverse market conditions, including the rise of cheap natural gas, greater use of renewable energy and increased regulatory pressures.

Energy industry researcher Clark Williams-Derry pointed instead to questionable business decisions, such as Blackjewel locking in prices for steel-making coal just before prices increased sharply. “The signs of financial distress have been evident to anyone who cared to look,” he wrote in a blog post titled, “Seven Bombshells in the Blackjewel Bankruptcy.” Hoops said that lenders forced the timing of the price locks on Blackjewel, costing the company millions of dollars. 

Hoops said that key lenders — United Bank and the investment firm Riverstone Holdings — cut off credit for Blackjewel, forcing the firm into Chapter 11. “They had managed to get my funds put on hold before and during the bankruptcy, as I would have never allowed the company to file but for their actions,” Hoops said. United and Riverstone declined comment.

In a press release, Hoops portrayed the bankruptcy as part of an effort to “position the company for long-term success.” But it didn’t feel that way to many Blackjewel miners. Some mines closed, sending workers home without any notice, and without their most recent paychecks. A mine in Wyoming was on fire, and Blackjewel was scrambling to pay employees to put it out.

Joseph Fox, who worked at a Blackjewel coal preparation plant in Virginia, had just taken his family on vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Then, his paycheck bounced. Fox, his wife and their son and two daughters cut their beach trip short.

“They’re kids. All they wanted was a vacation,” Fox recalled. “They didn’t understand, and you don’t want to be telling them your paycheck bounced.”

In Kentucky, a group of miners who missed paychecks blocked a Blackjewel coal train in Harlan County. Hoops said that all of the miners have been paid. Still, they filed claims and lawsuits alleging that they were laid off without due notice. 

The bankruptcy trustee settled the lawsuits with a promise that miners would be bumped up in the ranking of creditors. But court documents suggest there will be little money to go around, maybe only enough to pay the lawyers, accountants and consultants managing the liquidation, lawyers monitoring the case said.

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By the time of the bankruptcy, Hoops was already preparing for a future outside coal. He set up a family holding company, Clearwater Investments, with his three sons as trustees. Its purpose was to “leave a financial dynasty to Jeff and Patricia’s heirs by investing in several businesses as well as by collecting royalties on various investment properties,” said an internal “executive overview” filed in the bankruptcy case.

Some of the listed holdings retain a connection to coal, including a trucking firm and a mining equipment sales service. Others don’t, like a wheelchair and brace sales firm with sales in 2018 of $8.7 million.

In January 2019, Hoops sent the Clearwater overview to his sons, Jeffrey Jr., Jeremy and Joshua. “I hope by the end of this year to have a nice package together that shows everything we own as it is a vast company now,” he wrote. “Love you guys …. Dad.”

It didn’t take long for Clearwater to surface in the Blackjewel case.

Creditors discovered that in the six months prior to Blackjewel’s bankruptcy filing, as the company was becoming increasingly insolvent, Hoops had transferred at least $34 million from Blackjewel to Clearwater. 

Hoops said that these transfers were appropriate because they represented partial repayment of $51.5 million in loans that he and his family had made to Blackjewel since January 2019 via a revolving line of credit. But this explanation didn’t satisfy creditors, who accused him of violating bankruptcy rules by putting himself at the head of the line.  

It was a “sweetheart deal,” then-bankruptcy trustee David Bissett told the judge during a July 2019 hearing. Hoops was “protecting his own self-interest” rather than Blackjewel’s employees or creditors, Bissett said.

Lenders were so outraged at Hoops’ money transfer that, as a condition for providing Blackjewel with emergency financing, they forced Hoops to step down as an officer of the company. They also blocked any Hoops family members from taking a management role. 

In a farewell email to employees, Hoops defended himself. “No one is hurting more than me over what has occurred,” he wrote. “There has not been one cent taken out of the mining company, the exact opposite I have loaned more money to try to get this company through these difficult times.”

The email continued: “I accept responsibility for being unable to lead this company through these difficult times.” Hoops wrote, “I know in my heart how hard I fought for each of you and this company and to have people threaten me and say I took money out of this company for other projects hurts more than words can express.” 

The liquidation trustee sued Hoops and seven family companies, including Clearwater, over the money he shifted from Blackjewel to them in the months before the bankruptcy. 

Last August, the trustee settled these cases. Few details were made public, except that as part of the deal Hoops dropped a $2.6 million claim for money he argued Blackjewel owed him. 

Hoops said only that the lawsuit was “resolved amicably.” The liquidation trustee declined comment. 

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Another bankruptcy court fight focused on the Foresters mine.

This wasn’t the mine’s first brush with bankruptcy. U.S. Coal, its original owner, went bankrupt in June 2014. By the time Hoops took over the permit in 2016, the mine was down to fewer than 20 workers, and production was a third of its 2013 peak of 550,000 tons. In 2018, it stopped producing coal altogether, and had only three employees, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

A year into Blackjewel’s bankruptcy, a flood from Foresters eroded part of a local road and damaged a drinking water line. The rest of Blackjewel’s now-idled operations across Kentucky were also polluting their surroundings. Alarmed by the worsening conditions, the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet sought the court’s help. In June 2020, the environmental regulator asked the judge to order Blackjewel’s trustee to bring all of the company’s permits into compliance with mining standards and pollution rules. 

In a court filing, agency officials warned that Blackjewel sites not only weren’t being restored to pre-mining conditions but weren’t even being maintained to prevent contaminated water from pouring downstream into water supplies. The agency warned of flooded holding ponds being at high risk of “discharging metals and suspended solids into adjacent rivers and streams” and of landslides “that could endanger the lives and the property of residences below.” 

In September 2020, a week after state inspectors again cited Foresters for erosion and drainage, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Benjamin A. Kahn held a hearing on the regulators’ complaints. But the concerns about environmental fallout ran smack into a wall of decades-old law. While noting that crews were already responding at Foresters and other sites, the bankruptcy trustee argued that legal precedent gave the judge little scope to intervene. The judge agreed. Citing U.S. Supreme Court and federal appeals court decisions, Kahn instructed the trustee to clean up only “imminent” threats to public safety, not “speculative” threats.

Some problems at Foresters met this standard, and Kahn ordered them fixed. Still, violations for muddy runoff and sediment from holding ponds have persisted there.

Kahn deferred action at dozens of other Blackjewel sites with hundreds of environmental violations that he deemed less severe. Kahn’s analysis didn’t address the risk that if bankrupt mining companies can avoid routine maintenance and reclamation, speculative threats can turn imminent in a hurry. Once the judge’s criteria are met, “it’s too late,” said Lena Seward, lawyer for the Kentucky state regulatory agency. “The road is washed out.”

Kentucky also tried to forfeit bonds for some Blackjewel mines so that the state could begin cleanup. But that’s tied up in a legal challenge by the surety company, which contends that it has the right to restore the sites itself instead of losing the bond money. For other mines, the state and the bond company are still working out terms for cleanup. 

Meanwhile, the companies that bought most of the mines haven’t gotten very far with cleanup, sometimes because the state blocked final approval of the purchases due to unresolved violations at mines they already owned. Kentucky regulators acknowledged in an email that they “would like to have seen a faster transfer applications/reclamation process.”

As it acquired mines, Blackjewel posted a total of more than $500 million in reclamation bonds in four states. But that sum may not be enough. State regulators warned the bankruptcy judge in late 2020 that, for the 32 Blackjewel mines without buyers, conditions had deteriorated so much that cleanup costs were estimated at $20 million more than the bonds would cover.    

Hoops disputed that the bond amounts were inadequate. The regulators were “wrong,” he said, but he did not elaborate.

In February 2021, the Kentucky cabinet went back to the judge. A Blackjewel mine was showing severe erosion, with sediment ponds so full that they posed what an inspector called “an immediate danger to the public and environment downstream.”

Kahn ruled against the regulator again.

“The violations just continue to mount,” said Kentucky attorney Mary Varson Cromer, who represents coalfield residents in the Blackjewel case. “The whole system is not functioning, and it ends up costing more to reclaim, and it’s the residents and the community that are at risk.”

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The game of musical mines is slowing down. Across Appalachia, coal production is forecast to drop more than 20% over the next decade. In a market where coal production and prices continue to drop, there’s little demand for Blackjewel’s coal. Almost all its mines in Kentucky, including Foresters, have been sitting idle for four years. 

Blackjewel’s case has also bogged down in paperwork, or the lack of it. “The books and records inherited by the trust were woefully incomplete (and largely nonexistent in some instances),” the trustee complained in March 2023, explaining yet another delay. 

With Blackjewel behind him, Hoops is looking to the future. Clearwater is building a resort in Milton, where Hoops lives. The project is meant to invoke the splendor of ancient Rome. Hoops named it the Grand Patrician Resort. Patrician has a double meaning: It refers to the ruling class of ancient Rome and also honors Hoops’ wife, Patricia.

Hoops wept as he announced the resort project, which is located on the site of a former children’s hospital. His aunt and his brother-in-law had both been patients there, he told a local newspaper. “I get emotional,” he said. “To see God take something that was used to treat kids that were hurting, a lot of them crippled for life, he always takes something bad and turns it for good.”

The resort’s golf course had a soft opening last August. Construction of a luxury hotel continues. Local press accounts say the site will include a 400-seat steakhouse, a wedding chapel and ballroom and two indoor pools. A second phase is expected to feature another hotel, equestrian trails and a 3,500-seat outdoor arena modeled on the Roman Colosseum. This month, Hoops hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new hiking trail at the resort.

Even though Hoops left Blackjewel four years ago, one of his family-run businesses is still connected to its mines. The insurance company holding the reclamation bonds for the Blackjewel mines that weren’t bought out of bankruptcy has hired Lexington Coal to reclaim them. Its manager is one of Hoops’ sons. Lexington Coal “has not benefited in any way economically” from the reclamation contract, Hoops said. 

Joel Jacobs and John Templon contributed data reporting.

In the game of musical mines, environmental damage takes a back seat appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

Two of the new environmental justice centers in the Pacific Northwest seek to amplify the voices of tribes and other communities particularly vulnerable to the impact of climate change. They will get part of a recent $177 million award from the Environmental Protection Agency shared between 17 groups.

In January, with the almond bloom in California’s orchards a month away, beekeepers across the country were fretting over their hives. A lot of their bees were dead, or sick. Beekeepers reported losing as much as half their hives over the winter.  Jack Brumley, a California beekeeper, said he’d heard of people losing 80 percent of their bees. Denise Qualls, a bee broker who connects keepers with growers, said she was seeing “a lot more panic occurring earlier.”

Rumors swirled of a potential shortage; almond growers scrambled to ensure they had enough bees to pollinate their valuable crop, reaching out to beekeepers as far away as Florida, striking deals with mom-and-pop operations that kept no more than a few hundred bees. NPR’s All Things Considered aired a segment on the looming crisis in the almond groves.

By May, it was clear that California’s almond growers — who supply 80 percent of the world’s almonds — had successfully negotiated the threat of a bee shortage, and were expected to produce a record crop of 2.5 billion pounds, up 10 percent from last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But the panic, it turns out, was justified. The results of this year’s annual Bee Informed Partnership survey, a collaboration of leading research labs, released Wednesday, found that winter losses were nearly 38 percent, the highest rate since the survey began 13 years ago and almost 9-percent higher than the average loss.  

The panic underscored a fundamental problem with the relationship between almonds and bees: Every year the almond industry expands, while the population of honeybees, beset by a host of afflictions, struggles to keep pace.

“We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster,” Jeff Pettis, an entomologist who at the time was head of research at the USDA’s Bee Research Laboratory, said in 2012. And while the disaster Pettis warned of hasn’t struck yet, its likelihood grows each year.

There would be no almond industry without the honeybee, which so far is the only commercially-managed pollinator available in sufficient numbers  to work California’s almond fields. The industry is in the midst of a boom, as Americans eat more almonds than ever. We consume more than two pounds per person each year in our granola bars, cereals, milks, and regular old nuts, fueling an $11-billion market.

It’s not clear that boom is sustainable. Though concern about a bee shortage seemed acute this year, the pollination market for almonds has been tightening for more than a decade. In 2005, fear of a pollinator shortage was so great that the government allowed wholesale importation of honeybees for the first time since 1922.

California’s almond industry spreads over 1.4 million acres of the Central Valley. During bloom, which typically unfolds over three weeks in February, these orchards require the services of some 80 percent of all the honeybees in the country.

Honeybee colonies, on the other hand, have been dying at high rates. Historically, colonies died mostly during the winter. So when the Bee Informed Partnership started tracking colonies in 2007, it only looked at winter losses, which have ranged from 22 percent to this year’s nearly 38 percent. Along the way, researchers realized that beekeepers had started losing a surprising number of bees in the summer, too, a season when all should be going well for bees. They started tracking annual losses in 2013, which have ranged between 33 percent and 45 percent. The loss for the year ending March 31 was 41 percent.

The threat to the bees is multifaceted and existential. The varroa mite, an invasive species of external parasite that arrived in Florida in the 1980s, literally sucks the life out of bees and their brood. Herbicides and habitat loss have destroyed the bees’ forage. An array of pesticides, including dicamba and clothianidin, have been found to damage the bees’ health in a variety of ways, weakening their immune systems, for instance, and slowing their reproductive rate.

The process of getting the bees to the almonds adds another stressor. Each January, the sluggish bees are prodded into action much earlier than what would be their normal routine. They are fed substitutes for their natural foods of pollen and nectar so they will quickly repopulate the hive to be ready for almonds. They are then loaded onto trucks and shipped across the country, plopped in an empty field and fed more substitute food while they wait for almonds to bloom.

“We’ve had to bend the natural behavior of honeybees around almonds,” said Charley Nye, who runs the bee research operation at the University of California, Davis.

One reason beekeepers are less inclined to talk about this distortion of nature is that almond pollination has become their biggest single money-maker of the year, accounting for about one-third of their annual income in 2016. No other crop pays as well as almonds, so if a beekeeper misses almond pollination, it could cripple his business.

“They’re not dead, but if they don’t make it to almonds, then from an economic standpoint, they’re as good as dead,” said Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper, back in January when the panic was in full bloom.

In 2018, California had 1.1 million acres of almond trees bearing nuts and another 300,000 acres of trees still too young to need pollination. Each acre of mature trees is supposed to be pollinated by two honeybee colonies. There are between 10,000 and 15,000 bees in a colony when they arrive in the almond fields, and for the last four years, the U.S. has averaged 2.67 million colonies right before almond bloom.

You can do the math, but like Nye says: “As the almond acres grow, the demand for colonies seems to be outpacing the number of colonies that exist.”  

The tight market has forced growers and brokers to expand their search for bees. “It used to be that we only dealt with operations that managed at least a thousand to 3,000 hives,” said Pettis, the former USDA entomologist. “Now people are pulling bees from smaller and smaller operators. They’re pulling bees literally out of people’s backyards and putting them on trucks to pollinate almonds. And while we used to only move bees from west of the Mississippi River, now we go all the way to Florida and New York state.”

Growers are also hedging their bets by securing more bees than they actually need, a strategy that only exacerbates the tight market.

The intel used to gauge the number  of bees in the country is surprisingly imprecise. The bee count offers just a small snapshot in time and relies on beekeepers’ responses to a poll. The numbers are approximate, with undercounts more likely than overcounts. Yet the trend lines are clear: Unless something changes, at some point in the near future we won’t have enough bees.

Limiting colony losses is one way to change the trend. The honeybees’ biggest threat is the varroa mite. The USDA, Project Apis m., and both beekeepers and bee producers are currently conducting trials of a varroa-resistant bee that will work for commercial beekeepers. Also, researchers have been working for years on a backup to the honeybees for early-season crops like almonds. This bee, the blue orchard bee, is in the early stages of commercial production, and it will be years before it could make significant inroads in replacing some of the honeybees.

Meanwhile, there are signs that almond growers are becoming more amenable to bee-friendly practices such as modifying pesticide use and planting flowers in their orchards that would provide alternate forage for the bees while they wait for the almond bloom. Nye said some growers are getting “a little more sensitive to the job the honeybees are doing; they seem to be investing more in pollinators.”

Ultimately, a big part of the solution may be to reevaluate the number of colonies deployed per acre. “Those standards were set many, many, many years ago,” said Bob Curtis, a pollination consultant with the Almond Board of California, and a lot has changed since then.

For the last 12 years, almond groves have produced one-third more nuts than they did in the dozen years before that. Some orchard management practices have changed in that time, but growers also began requesting, and paying a premium for, stronger hives that contain more bees. Today, most of the colonies that go to almond groves contain twice as many bees as they did in decades past. Whether the higher production rate of the almond trees is due to more bees per colony, different management practices, or some combination of factors is hard to say.

Curtis said the Almond Board is undertaking new studies to determine if the stocking rate could be adjusted, which would ease the pressure on embattled beekeepers to keep up with the surging almonds.

A lower stocking rate would also ease the stress on the bees themselves, but it wouldn’t stop them from dying in excessive numbers. Reversing that trend will require dramatically different approaches to everything from how we farm to how we use our land — things not likely to change anytime soon. The disaster Pettis warned of remains a very real possibility. Honeybees continue to be in a fight for their lives.

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

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At 39 years old, Dawa Sherpa has many roles to juggle.

She’s an entrepreneur running a guest house for international and domestic trekkers making their way up Mount Everest in Namche, Nepal. While her husband owns a separate business in Kathmandu, their son and daughter are busy with their studies. Dawa is so preoccupied with managing the household that she barely has time to work in their small plot where she used to grow potatoes and other green vegetables. With the changing climate in the Himalayas, her problems continue to exacerbate. “While the mountains used to be snow-white 10-15 years ago, we now see increasing black spots in the mountains. In the last two years, potatoes were heavily destroyed due to the burial of mud in excessive snow”, said Sherpa.

“While the mountains used to be snow-white 10-15 years ago, we now see increasing black spots in the mountains. In the last two years, potatoes were heavily destroyed due to the burial of mud in excessive snow.”
— Dawa Sherpa, entrepreneur, mother, wife

A lot of publicly available climate research about the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region is carried out by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a regional intergovernmental knowledge and learning center based in Kathmandu, Nepal. The results are not encouraging: In 2019, they projected that the Himalayan mountains would warm an additional 0.3-0.7°C compared to the global average, even if we reach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to preindustrial levels. The same year, a systematic review in their Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment Report finds that going by a “business-as-usual” scenario, two-thirds of the HKH’s glaciers will be lost by 2100. A 2020 ICIMOD inventory report further stated that 21 glacial lakes in the Nepal Himalayas are at high risk. In the Khumbu region, there is growing evidence of a rapidly warming atmosphere and the resultant impact in the development of large lakes, the replacement of glacial ice by ponds, boulders, and sand, and the upward movement of the snowline. The impact of climate change, hence, is real.

Nonetheless, the impact is uneven along the lines of class, caste, gender, and ethnicity. Studies around how the inequitable distribution of assets, resources, and power; unequal access to land rights, technology, knowledge, and mobility; coupled with repressive cultural norms and rules that put women at a greater risk of the climate crisis have been well-documented. The story of women like Dawa Sherpa brings to the fore the growing impact of climate change and increasing livelihood challenges in the Himalayas and its disproportionate harm to women.

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While the Sherpa tribe is well-known for their extraordinary physiology and daring (and often dangerous) mountaineering exploits, the migration of men for off-farm activities from Nepal and the Indian Himalayas has put additional pressure on women to manage agricultural labor, including other rural livelihood activities. In the Khumbu region, the mobility of male members has put a heavier burden on women who have to take care of dwellings and manage natural resources around the homestead.

Mingma Chamji Sherpa (not related to Dawa), a 12th-grade commerce student studying at Lukla, Khumbu, shares her observations and experiences of the impact of changing climate on the agro-pastoral tradition of Sherpa in general and on women in particular. The practice of animal husbandry, common in the past, has been abandoned today. “We used to have 20 oxen and two cows, but these days we have a single cow as we have no time to look after it. On the one hand, there is a shortage of human resources to manage household chores as the male members in almost every household in the region have left the village amid shifting business priorities. On the other hand, unfavorable weather patterns and unprecedented disasters like landslides have resulted in declining interest in the pastoral tradition although such practice is highly valued in Sherpa culture as it brings prosperity to the family and community,” said Sherpa.

“We used to have 20 oxen and two cows, but these days we have a single cow as we have no time to look after it.”
— Mingma Chamji Sherpa, student

Despite the rich knowledge that women possess owing to their lived experiences and roles as cooks, caregivers, and water and firewood collectors that put them in a position to contribute towards climate adaptation and the development of a green and resilient economy, existing policy provisions don’t recognize women as contributors and agents of change in responding to the climate crisis. For instance, the Nepal Climate Change Policy published in 2019 embraces the need to integrate Gender and Social Inclusion (GESI) into climate adaptation and mitigation but considers women only as passive beneficiaries. Dr. Pasang Dolma Sherpa is the Director of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Research and Development (CIPRED) and a Co-chair of the Facilitative Working Group (FWG) of Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples’ Platform (LCIP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). She said, “Women are at the center of climate impacts: as educators in the communities, as nurturers providers, and as first responders. But existing policies, on the one hand, don’t have an intersectional approach, and on the other, posits women only as vulnerable and marginalized groups”.

The lead authors of the 2019 ICIMOD HKH Assessment Report “In the Shadows of the Himalayan Mountains: Persistent Gender and Social Exclusion in Development” chapter concur with Dr. Sherpa’s Characterization:

“The attempts to ‘gender mainstream’ in climate policies, strategies, and interventions remain plagued by simplistic, apolitical interpretations of gender: ‘gender as women’, the paradoxical positioning of homogenous categories of ‘mountain women’ as being both ‘vulnerable victims’ of climate change as well as ‘formidable champions’ of climate adaptation, and the idea that engaging women on projects is taking care of women’s needs and empowering women…

The largest reason for concern is that gender mainstreaming appears to have been achieved in environmental governance by adopting a very narrow and simplified concept of ‘gender’. The term is essentially used as a synonym for ‘poor rural women’.”

International policy provisions have finally accorded priority to mainstreaming gender agendas in climate action: As of July 2021, 94% of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by developing countries towards the Paris Agreement have recognized gender inequality as a climate-related risk. However, there remains a lot of work to do to take concrete implementation steps and quantify the potential impact of such measures in improving the capabilities and resilience of women.

“…gender-responsive implementation and means of implementation of climate policy and action can enable Parties to raise ambition, as well as enhance gender equality, and just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities.”
— Article 9, Enhanced Lima work programme on gender and its gender action plan (Decision 3/CP.25)

Realizing the need to address the growing gender-differentiated impacts of climate change, two years ago, COP26 in Glasgow approved a decision text calling for the parties to “strengthen their implementation” of the already-agreed-upon Gender Action Plan (GAP) into practice. The text further invites countries to furnish reports on the disproportionate gendered impact and underscores the need for an improved support mechanism for women to build resilience as part of climate action. Last year’s COP27 in Egypt referenced the technical paper “Just transition: An essential pathway to achieving gender equality and social justice” prepared by the International Labour Organization during the intermediate review of the implementation of the GAP.

“…just transition and the promotion of gender equality are intrinsically linked and mutually reinforcing.”
— International Labour Organization, “Just transition: An essential pathway to achieving gender equality and social justice”

Effective climate action demands a well-thought plan and strategies to promote synergies between gender equality, women’s empowerment, and climate goals. Identifying the needs and priorities of women and adopting gender-responsive data and information in generating climate solutions will be the key to integrating gender dynamics in climate change.

But now, women in the Nepal high Himalayas and below wait in bated breath to see how these plans, if and when put into action, help them help themselves fight against climate change.

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