Plastic waste on beach in Panama, Central America

>>> From an Article by Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch.com, January 18, 2022

PHOTO ~ Plastic pollution in Panama, an example of the conditions around the Earth.

Humanity is currently releasing more chemical and plastic pollution into the environment than Earth can support.

That’s the conclusion of a first-of-its-kind study published in Environmental Science and Technology on Tuesday, January 18, which argues that the planetary boundary for novel entities has been exceeded by human activity. The researchers defined “novel entities” as manufactured chemicals that do not appear naturally in large quantities and have the potential to disrupt Earth’s systems.

“There has been a 50-fold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950. This is projected to triple again by 2050,” study co-author Patricia Villarubia-Gómez from the Stockholm Resilience Centre(SRC) at Stockholm University said in a press release emailed to EcoWatch. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals and other novel entities into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”

In 2009, a team of researchers identified nine planetary boundaries that have led to a stable Earth for the last 10,000 years. These include greenhouse gas emissions, the ozone layer, forests, freshwater and biodiversity. The new research builds on this foundation by quantifying the planetary boundary for novel entities.

The researchers concluded that the boundary had been breached because production and release of plastics and other chemicals now surpasses the ability of governments to assess and monitor these pollutants.

“For a long time, people have known that chemical pollution is a bad thing,” study co-author Dr. Sarah Cornell of the SRC told The Guardian. “But they haven’t been thinking about it at the global level. This work brings chemical pollution, especially plastics, into the story of how people are changing the planet.”

Scientists have previously concluded that humanity has exceeded the planetary boundaries for global heating, biodiversity loss, habitat loss and nitrogen and phosphorous pollution. The researchers noted that there are around 350,000 different types of manufactured chemicals on the global market, with almost 70,000 introduced in the last decade. Among them are plastics, pesticides, industrial chemicals and pharmaceutical products.

Plastics are especially concerning, the study authors said. They now weigh more than double the mass of living animals and around 80 percent of all the plastics ever produced persist in the environment instead of being properly recycled. Further, plastics are made up of more than 10,000 other chemicals that can enter the environment in new combinations when they degrade.

In order to address the risk posed by plastics and other chemical pollutants, the study authors argued that it is important to curb their production and release into the environment.

“We need to be working towards implementing a fixed cap on chemical production and release,” study co-author Bethanie Carney Almroth from the University of Gothenburg said in the press release.

They also supported calls for a circular economy. “That means changing materials and products so they can be reused not wasted, designing chemicals and products for recycling, and much better screening of chemicals for their safety and sustainability along their whole impact pathway in the Earth system,” Villarubia Gómez said in the press release.

Coal combustion releases more carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels, as well as high levels of other pollutants called sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and solid particles. Will greater usage of natural gas slow down global warming and reduce the impacts of energy use on the environment?  The effects of natural gas on climate change have been difficult to characterize and recent studies have come to conflicting conclusions. There is uncertainty about the extent of methane leakage from old and new wells, and from processing and pipelining.

A new study by Tom Wigley, National Center for Atmospheric Research, takes a comprehensive look at the issue by incorporating the cooling effects of sulfur particles associated with coal burning and by analyzing the complex climatic influences of methane, which affects other atmospheric gases such as ozone and water vapor. Computer simulations have found that a 50 percent reduction in coal and a corresponding increase in natural gas use would lead to a slight increase in worldwide warming for the next 40 years of about 0.1 degree Fahrenheit (less than 0.1 degree Celsius). The reliance on natural gas could then gradually reduce the rate of global warming, but temperatures would drop by only a small amount compared to the 5.4 degrees F (3 degrees C) of warming projected by 2100 under current energy trends.

If the rate of methane leaks from natural gas could be held to around 2 percent, for example, the study indicates that warming would be reduced by less than 0.2 degrees F (about 0.1 degree C) by 2100. The reduction in warming would be more pronounced with zero leakage, which would result in a reduction of warming by 2100 of about 0.2-0.3 degrees F (0.1-0.2 degrees C).  However, a high leak rate of 10 percent would mean that global warming would not be reduced until 2140.

Whatever the methane leakage rate, you can’t get away from the additional warming that will occur initially because, by not burning coal, you’re not having the cooling effect of sulfates and other particles. This particle effect is a double-edged sword because reducing them is a good thing in terms of lessening air pollution and acid rain. But the paradox is when we clean up these particles, it slows down efforts to reduce global warming.

In summary, the results show that the substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades — out to the mid 22nd century for the 10% leakage case.