Grist’s - Agra Energy

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Dan Zauderer and his in-laws had eaten plenty of pizza one evening in early October, and they still had seven slices left. What to do? “Well, we could just chuck it,” Zauderer thought. Instead, he and his fiancée wrapped the slices in plastic wrap, slapped labels on them with the date, and walked the leftovers a little more than a block down the road to a refrigerator standing along 92nd Avenue in New York City’s Upper East Side.

That fridge is one among many “community fridges” across the country that volunteers stock with free food — prepared meals, leftovers, and you name it. Zauderer had helped set a network up in New York City during the pandemic as a way to reduce waste and fight hunger. The idea came about when he was a middle school teacher looking to provide short-term help to students whose families couldn’t afford food. He stationed the first fridge in the Bronx in September 2020. That one, the Mott Haven Fridge, was hugely popular, and it motivated Zauderer to expand. Since then, he has helped plug in seven more fridges in the Bronx and Manhattan, including the one where he dropped off his leftover pizza.

“It just blossomed into way more than I ever could have expected,” said Zauderer, who now works full-time at Grassroots Grocery, a food-distribution nonprofit he co-founded in New York.

It’s not just Zauderer’s project that has blossomed. Community fridges first cropped up a decade ago in a few isolated spots around the globe, then spread across the United States right after the pandemic started in 2020, when supply chains were crumbling, food prices were rising, and families across the country were struggling to find meals. At the time, the fridges were viewed as a creative response to an urgent need. But when the pandemic subsided, it became clear that the refrigerators — sometimes called freedges, friendly fridges, and love fridges — were more than a fad. Today, nonprofits and mutual aid groups are overseeing hundreds of fridges that bolster access to food in cities from Miami to Anchorage, Alaska.

The fridges also embody a straightforward solution to climate change. Each year, tens of billions of pounds of food, more than a third of what’s produced in the U.S., get tossed into trash bins. Most of those scraps end up in landfills, where they decompose and release methane, a powerful heat-trapping gas. The sheer quantity of the country’s combined waste makes it a major source of climate pollution: Food waste accounts for as much as 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. And more food is being thrown out than ever.

“There’s no solution to our climate problem that doesn’t also address food waste,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

There are many ways to keep food out of landfills and on dinner tables. Companies are developing apps to connect people with donated goods, and food banks have been around for decades. Experts say raising awareness and changing policy around things like expiration dates on food packaging, which can be arbitrary, would help, too. But fridges are especially effective when other solutions fall short. Though food banks are great for storing large amounts of shelf-stable items like canned vegetables, they’re not well-equipped to handle food that doesn’t last as long and turns up in small amounts— a pizza slice here, a sandwich there. Those remnants make up much of the country’s food waste, about 40 percent, and that’s where community fridges excel. “These are just a really elegant solution to that,” Broad Leib said.

The fridges also offer a degree of anonymity for those in need that’s hard to find at more traditional food distribution centers, like food pantries. People don’t have to sign up or prove their eligibility to use them. “The whole point is dignified, anonymous access,” Zauderer said. “We’re not the arbiters of how much to take.”

In Chicago, an artist named Eric Von Haynes co-founded a fridge network called The Love Fridge in 2020. Today, he helps oversee more than 20 love fridges, each decorated with eye-popping colors and phrases like “Free food for all!” According to Von Haynes, the fridges are filled, cleaned, and maintained by hundreds of volunteers. He estimates that thousands of pounds of food move through them each month.

One concern that researchers have with projects that repurpose food is that they require additional resources, like transportation and electricity. “Rescuing [food] still comes at a cost,” said Kathryn Bender, a professor and food waste researcher at the University of Delaware.

But community fridges are about as low-key and energy efficient as solutions get. Zauderer didn’t burn any fossil fuels to walk his pizza to the fridge near his apartment. And the Love Fridge, which acquires only used refrigerators, powers two of them with solar panels — a vision that Von Haynes has for more to come.

Even a fridge that draws electricity from a coal-powered grid uses less energy each day than a single cell phone, said Dawn King, who researches food waste and policy at Brown University. “Is it worth using greenhouse gas emissions to plug in a refrigerator so people can eat food that otherwise would have gotten wasted? Hell yes it is.”

Other challenges include navigating concerns about rotten or unwanted food, making sure fridges are working properly, especially during increasingly hot summers, and keeping them stocked. Ernst Bertone Oehninger, who helped set up what may have been the first “freedge” in the U.S. in 2014 in Davis, California, has learned that some items don’t belong in them.

“Think about a half-eaten burger. That’s a no-go,” said Oehninger. “But this is very rare. Most people bring good leftovers.” Like Zauderer’s pizza.

A fridge in Austin, Texas, once went missing. It had been “borrowed” by someone who wanted to keep beers cold for an event at South by Southwest, according to Kellie Stiewert, an organizer at the ATX Free Fridge project. But such shenanigans are rare. That the fridges can be placed with a property owner’s permission just about anywhere — in front of a taqueria, a person’s home, an office building — is what makes the concept “beautiful,” Stiewert said.

Organizers say keeping the fridges full is one of the toughest tasks. People sometimes gather to pick up items within minutes of a fridge getting stocked. “When I first get volunteers to do food distro with me, I’m always waiting for them to recognize how fast the food goes,” Von Haynes said. “It’s really hard to explain to people.”

As for Zauderer’s pizza slices: “They definitely weren’t there the next day.”

This story was originally published by Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

Go to Source
Author: Max Graham, Grist

This story was originally published by Grist. You can sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

After a year of intense negotiations, the states along the Colorado River have reached a deal to solve one of the most complex water crises in US history. The solution to this byzantine conundrum is deceptive in its simplicity: pay farmers—who collectively use 80 percent of Colorado River deliveries—to give up their water.

Representatives from Arizona, Nevada, and California announced on Monday that they had agreed to reduce their states’ collective water usage by more than 3 million acre-feet over the next three years. That equals around a trillion gallons, or roughly 13 percent of the states’ total water usage. Under the terms of the deal, cities and irrigation districts in these so-called “Lower Basin” states will receive around $1.2 billion from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, in exchange for using less water. Most of the reductions are likely to come from farming operations.

Many had anticipated a more painful resolution to the crisis. Rather than taking mandatory cuts and losing out on billions of dollars from crop sales, irrigators in the southwest will get millions of dollars to reduce their water usage for just three years—and will cut their usage by less than half of what federal officials demanded last year.

This rosy outcome is only possible because of a wet winter that blanketed the river basin with snow and stabilized water levels in its two main reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Thanks to the ample runoff, the states could lower their target enough that the federal government could afford to compensate them for almost all of it.

This deal also resolves a key dispute between Arizona and California, the two largest water users on the river, which have clashed over how to respond to the water shortage. California has argued that Arizona should take the most cuts as the most junior user on the river, while Arizona argued that the cuts should be spread more evenly between all the states. The disagreement caused negotiations to drag out for months, and it’s only thanks to the payout from the federal government that they reached an accord.

These compensated cuts are larger than anything the river states have ever implemented before, but they are temporary, a Band-Aid for a crisis that is not going away any time soon. When the three-year agreement expires in 2026, the states will have to come back to the table again and address the elephant in the room: If water use is growing, and the river’s size is shrinking, some people are going to have to make do with less—not temporarily, but for good.

“This is a step in the right direction but a temporary solution,” said Dave White, a professor at Arizona State University who studies sustainability policy. “This deal does not address the long-term water sustainability challenges in the region.”

The basic blueprint of the deal is not new. Federal and state agencies in the Colorado River basin have tried to pay farmers to use less water before, but they have had difficulty scaling up these compensation measures. That’s in part because many farmers view the measures as an affront to their industry, even when they’re compensated. When a group of states in the river’s Upper Basin relaunched a dormant conservation program earlier this year, offering farmers money to leave their fields unplanted, just 88 water users across four states ended up participating.

The other issue is that conserving water is expensive. In order to convince farmers to plant fewer acres, officials need to give them more money per acre-foot of water than they would have made from selling crops on a given field. In California’s Imperial Valley, the “salad bowl” region that grows almost all the nation’s winter vegetables, irrigation officials have paid growers to invest in technology that makes their farms more efficient. But farmers in the valley have balked at the idea of taking money to leave their fields unplanted, especially as vegetable prices have remained high.

“Water is a valuable asset, and I think people are nervous about parting with it, because it kind of suggests that you don’t really need it after all,” said George Frisvold, an extension specialist at the University of Arizona who studies agricultural policy. “I think there’s real concern that this is voluntary now, but it could come back and bite you.”

The Biden administration has resolved those issues for the moment by offering a very generous price for conservation under the new deal. The compensation arrangement in the new deal works out to about $521 an acre-foot on average—three times the price in the Upper Basin pilot program and almost twice the conservation rate in the Imperial Valley’s program.

Frisvold says these payments will be hard to maintain over the long term.

“We have a bunch of IRA money to pay for this right now,” he told Grist. “But is this going to be an ongoing thing? It’s kind of up in the air.”

Until recently, these experimental conservation programs were just that—experiments. But over the past two years, as a once-in-a-millennium drought has all but emptied out the river’s two main reservoirs, the river states have scrambled to cut their water usage and stop draining the river. It is all but impossible to do that without using less water for agriculture.

The Biden administration kicked off the scramble last summer by delivering an ultimatum to the river states. While testifying before Congress in June, a senior official from the US Bureau of Reclamation ordered the states to cut their water consumption by between 2 and 4 million acre-feet, or as much as a third of the river’s normal annual flow. The administration threatened to impose unilateral water cuts if the states couldn’t reach a deal on their own.

The states tangled for months over who should shoulder the burden of reducing water usage. The so-called Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico pointed the finger at Arizona and California, which together consume the majority of the river’s water. Meanwhile, representatives from California insisted that legal precedent shields the Golden State from taking cuts and that Arizona should bear the pain. (It isn’t clear whether the other four states on the river’s Upper Basin will make any corresponding reductions.)

In the end it was a very wet winter rather than a diplomatic breakthrough that helped ease tension between the states. Thanks to historic snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, it’s likely that water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead will stabilize this summer, even if just for a few months. This plentiful runoff has made the worst-case outcomes for the river much less likely and has given the states some breathing room to negotiate smaller cuts.

The new target was just small enough to make voluntary conservation feasible with the money from the Inflation Reduction Act: In the final hours of the debate over the bill last year, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona negotiated a $4 billion tranche of funding for “drought response.” That money will anchor the deal for the next three years, but it’s unclear whether payments will continue after that.

The big question now is what happens at the end of 2026, when the conservation deal will expire and when states and tribes will gather to negotiate the river’s long-term future. At that point, the river’s water users will once again debate the big questions that this deal has allowed them to punt on: How much water use can a shrinking river support? Who should use less water to account for the river’s decline? How can the government make whole the tribal nations that still don’t have their water?

Even amid the relief surrounding Monday’s deal, some water officials were already looking ahead.

“This proposal protects the system in the short term so we can dedicate our energy and resources to a longer-term solution,” said Brenda Burman, the manager of the Central Arizona Project water authority, which delivers water to Phoenix and Tucson, in a press release. “There’s a lot to do and it’s time to focus.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

Go to Source
Author: Jake Bittle, Grist