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Biden Demands Immediate Temporary Gaza Ceasefire; Rescue Efforts Ongoing after Quake Kills at Least 10; Testimony Sheds Light on chaotic Afghanistan Evacuations; Close Call Between Plane, Control Tower Under Investigation; U.S. Treasury Secretary in China for Talks Amid Trade Tensions; Study: Landfills Emit More Methan Than Thought. Aired 12-12:45a ET

Aired April 05, 2024 - 00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Michael Holmes. Appreciate your company.

[00:00:34]

Coming up here on CNN NEWSROOM, Israel moves to allow increased aid into Gaza after a stark warning from U.S. President Joe Biden to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Daring rescues in Taiwan. Crews bring some of the hundreds of people left stranded by that deadly earthquake to safety, but others are still missing.

And a CNN exclusive. Transcripts show the State Department had to come up with a withdrawal plan from Afghanistan on the fly in the last days of the U.S. presence there.

ANNOUNCER: Live from Atlanta, this is CNN NEWSROOM with Michael Holmes.

HOLMES: We begin this hour with what could be a significant step towards getting more critical humanitarian aid into Gaza. An Israeli official telling CNN the Erez border crossing between Israel and Northern Gaza will be reopened to allow aid shipments through that access point.

The source says the Israeli security cabinet approved the decision and also agreed to the Israeli port of Ashdod being used to help transfer more aid. The move comes after a phone call between U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The White House says Mr. Biden demanded specific, concrete and measurable steps to protect civilians and aid workers in Gaza and facilitate more aid getting in, or the U.S. would reconsider its own policies.

The White House says President Biden was shaken by Israeli military strikes that killed seven members of the humanitarian group World Central Kitchen earlier this week.

More now on the Biden administration's evolving policy from CNN senior White House correspondent Kayla Tausche.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANTONY BLINKEN, U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT: If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.

KAYLA TAUSCHE, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Tonight, a marked shift in the Biden administration's policy on Israel, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warning Israel must protect civilians in Gaza or face a change in U.S. policy.

BLINKEN: This week's horrific attack on the World Central Kitchen was not the first such incident. It must be the last.

President Biden in a 30-minute phone call with Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, demanding an immediate ceasefire, making clear his administration's frustrations are mounting alongside the civilian death toll.

JOHN KIRBY, SPOKESMAN, NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL: And he urged the prime minister to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay.

TAUSCHE (voice-over): The two leaders speaking for the first time since Biden expressed public outrage over the deadly strike on a World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza.

Netanyahu has said it happens in war. The White House says Biden and Netanyahu didn't discuss the strikes in great detail, but Biden told him the darkening humanitarian picture was unacceptable and Israel needed to take concrete and measurable steps or the U.S. could reconsider its position.

KIRBY: That we want to see more crossings opened up. We want to see more trucks getting in the mitigation of civilian harm, particularly to humanitarian aid workers, but obviously, all civilians.

TAUSCHE (voice-over): National security spokesman John Kirby said, the U.S. needs to see results soon or pursue a policy change, though without providing specifics.

KIRBY: If we don't see changes from their side, there'll have to be changes from our side. We would hope to see some announcements of changes here in the coming hours and days.

TAUSCHE (voice-over): Longtime Biden ally Senator Chris Coons, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says this strike is different, and that Biden's Democratic support in Congress is starting to wane over Israel.

SEN. CHRIS COONS (D-DE): This particular targeted killing, which is hard to explain or understand, I would vote to condition aid to Israel.

TAUSCHE (voice-over): Joining a faction of lawmakers calling for Biden to take a tougher line on the Mideast ally, even as CNN learns the White House is still greenlighting new arms sales.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): We cannot approve the sale of arms to a country that is in violation of our own laws.

TAUSCHE (voice-over): Israel now on guard for retaliation from Iran, days after striking an Iranian government building in Syria, killing top IRGC officials.

KIRBY: They did talk about a very public and very viable real threat by Iran.

TAUSCHE (voice-over): And despite its outrage and in the face of those continued threats, the Biden administration making clear it stands with its closest Mideast ally.

[00:05:09]

BLINKEN: President Biden reaffirmed the United States' strong support for Israel in the face of these threats and our commitment to Israel's security.

TAUSCHE: In the hours following that call, President Biden held a public event here at the White House. Reporters shouted questions about his message to Netanyahu, but Biden didn't answer them.

Kayla Tausche, CNN, the White House.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: Now also in their phone call, the White House says Netanyahu did admit directly to Mr. Biden that Israeli Defense Forces were responsible for the deaths of those seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza on Monday.

The prime minister said Israel is improving how it tracks humanitarian workers in Gaza and in the coming hours, the Israeli military is expected to release the findings of its initial investigation into those deadly strikes.

The IDF says the relative parties are being briefed right now.

The Polish president, meanwhile, has a message for Israel. One of the aid workers killed in the attack, Damian Sobol, was from a town in Southeastern Poland. And now President Andrzej Duda says Israel owes Sobol's family, whether his death was an accident or not.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDRZEJ DUDA, POLISH PRESIDENT (through translator): I have no doubts that Israel should pay compensation to the family of our citizen killed in Gaza. The compensation should be appropriate, and I hope that such compensation will be paid in an honest and fair way, because it's what is owed to the family, regardless of the cause of this event, whether it was an accident or any other situation.

(END VIDEO CLIP) HOMLES: Meanwhile, at least four Palestinians, including a paramedic, are dead in Northeastern Gaza after Israeli forces targeted an area near a school sheltering displaced civilians.

That's according to paramedics at Kamal Adwan Hospital. A witness says they were in a field looking for food, anything do eat, when they were hit by Israeli artillery fire.

As civilians and paramedics rushed to help. They were hit by more artillery rounds. CNN has reached out to the IDF for comment. Nothing yet.

And in central Gaza Palestinian health officials say at least two people were killed when an Israeli air strike hit a residential block. This happened in the the al-Maghazi refugee camp.

When CNN asked for comment, Israeli forces did not directly address the reason for the attack.

Joining me now from Athens, Greece, Dr. Konstantina Ilia Karydi is a member of the International Rescue Committee and medical aid for Palestinians team.

Thanks so much for being with us. I know you've been there. You have seen things.

We know about the horrendous death toll in Gaza, more than 33,000, but often under-reported is the toll of wounded Palestinians, well over 70,000. What sorts of wounds did you say?

DR. KONSTANTINA ILIA KARYDI, INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE: Thank you for having me. What sorts of wounds did I see? They were all trauma wounds, were related. A lot of blast injuries, fractures and really horrific open wounds from the blast injurie. Shrapnel injuries from drone attacks, gunshots, eye injuries. I'm talking about eye loss.

HOLMES: Just horrific, horrific things that --

KARYDI: Yes.

HOLMES: -- women, children. Pretty much no Gaza hospitals are running effectively. Most of them are out of action altogether. How is that impacting level of care, the ability of doctors like you to treat the wounded?

KARYDI: Well, I think that it's very hard. I was working at the European Gaza hospital, who had the capacity before the word of 220 patients.

And when I was there, they had that on 1,000 patients. So we're talking about four times the hospital's capacity. And as more hospitals are getting destroyed, as we all hear these days. The few remaining hospitals will have obviously more patients. So it will be even harder than when I was there.

HOLMES: Yes, Rescue.org. They put out a statement. And I just want to read part of it. They said this: "Surgeons had completed successful complex vascular and orthopedic surgeries on patients. But some of the patients later died due to infections in the hospital and the inability to provide postoperative care."

How -- how heartbreaking is it to do successful surgeries in conditions like that in Gaza. And then the patient dies from infection.

[00:10:05]

KARYDI: I think it's very hard to describe the feeling, like the feeling that comes with these (ph), as well, because it's not only about surgery. We would do our best in theaters, but this -- this depends on the functioning of the whole healthcare system.

And it's -- it's -- it's a tragedy. It's -- yes.

HOLMES: It must be awful to -- to do your best, you know, life-saving work and then people die because of things like -- like infections.

And I guess the other thing, too, when it -- when it comes to the wounded is long-term care amputees, other injuries that will need extensive ongoing treatment, even when the bombs stop. What resources will be left in Gaza for that treatment rehabilitation, and so on.

KARYDI: Thank you for bringing this up, because this is very important.

First -- first of all, they will have many more disabled people because like this horrific open wound, so it will get infected. Like, we would try to save the limb, but if it gets infected, that means amputation and more disability.

I don't think they have physiotherapy right now. You were talking about rehabilitation. We are talking about a whole generation of new people that will be disabled. They were already depending on international aid before the war. Now there will be just more dependence.

HOLMES: Yes, I was -- It's more than that. I was reading today Gaza municipality were warning that diseases are spreading because of waste pile-up, sewage overflow as a result of damage done by it Israels bombardment.

When you were there, how did you see those sorts of things impacting people? What -- what -- what -- what -- what feelings did you leave with?

KARYDI: So first, the overcrowding in the hospital where we were staying, as well, they had 22,000 internally displaced people. So the overcrowding itself and the lack of infrastructure to support all those people caused -- can cause infectious diseases (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

Then at Atfar (ph), for example, I didn't go to the North. It is a city that was -- had 250,000 population and now it has 1,500 meals. It's impossible that they have the infrastructure support from my (UNINTELLIGIBLE) point of view. You would see, for example, the labs piling up when I was there, and that was -- I came out four weeks ago.

Yes.

HOLMES: Just -- just horrific, and thank you for the work that you and other doctors are doing when you do go in. This is going to be far- reaching consequences.

Dr. Konstantina Ilia Karydi in Athens. Thanks so much.

KARYDI: Thank you for the time.

HOLMES: Authorities in Taiwan say 25 people remain missing more than two days after the island was hit by its strongest earthquake in decades. Dozens of people have been rescued from toppled buildings in remote areas cut off by a landslide.

Officials say four foreign nationals are among those thought to be missing in the mountains. The national fire agency raising the death toll to ten on Thursday.

CNN's Ivan Watson reports now for us on the rescue efforts from the quake zone.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

IVAN WATSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A daring mountain rescue one day after Taiwan is pummeled by a powerful earthquake, emergency workers struggle climbing over treacherous landslides trying to bring victims home.

Among those initially stranded dozens of miners in two remote quarries. On Thursday, authorities announced their successful rescue, some choppered to safety.

There were too many rocks falling like bullets from above. This miner says, "We didn't know where to run."

The aftermath of some landslides visible from a moving train. Many paved roads to the disaster zone are still blocked, but on Thursday, the railways resumed service.

WATSON: It has only been a day since this powerful, deadly earthquake rocked Taiwan, and already, this train to the epicenter is running on time.

WATSON (voice-over): In the small city of Hualien, residents still coming to grips with the earthquake's damage, though there are some scenes of real destruction.

It also feels like this earthquake-prone community is quickly bouncing back. The city government set up this temporary shelter in an elementary school.

[00:15:07]

WATSON: This is your home? UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Living room.

WATSON: There's a -- there's a hole in the wall.

WATSON (voice-over): Wang Mei-Fen (ph) is camping out here with her husband and mother.

WATSON: Do you feel safe staying in Hualien?

WANG MEI-FEN (ph), HUALEIN RESIDENT: I'm not afraid. I was born here.

WATSON (voice-over): Among those here, the mayor of Hualien, who was injured in the quake.

WATSON: What happened?

"A cabinet fell on me," he says. He attributes the relatively low death toll in his city to advanced preparation.

WEI CHIA-YAN, MAYOR OF HUALIEN, TAIWAN (through translator): Here in Hualien, we grew up with earthquakes. Our teachers and relatives always taught us how to react when earthquake strike. So we've known about this since we were kids.

WATSON: This ruined building is a terrifying example of the power of Wednesday morning's 7.4 magnitude earthquake. But look down the road here, and you see that most of Hualien is not damaged. It is lit up, intact, and very active.

WATSON (voice-over): Amid these scars, an impressive display of community resilience.

Ivan Watson, CNN, Hualien, Taiwan.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: And we're learning more about the chaotic U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan in August 2021. The U.S. scrambled to evacuate tens of thousands of civilians after the capital, Kabul, fell to the Taliban.

CNN has exclusively obtained congressional testimony that shows there was no clear plan on the table.

CNN's Kylie Atwood reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): New transcripts exclusively obtained by CNN show the chaos on the ground as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan mirror the chaos behind the scenes at the State Department.

The department had no working emergency evacuation plan. That is the stark testimony from three State Department officials to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

And those three officials were rushed into Kabul in the days surrounding the Taliban takeover, with virtually no time to prepare.

REP. MIKE MCCAUL (R-TX): The Biden administration's failure to plan for their withdrawal threatened the safety and security of U.S. personnel in country.

ATWOOD (voice-over): The interviews are part of an ongoing investigation led by the committee's Republican chairman, Mike McCaul, into the chaotic evacuation that resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in a terrorist attack outside of the Kabul airport.

One official testifying, quote, "We had to create from scratch tactical operations that would get our priority people into the airport."

He added, "We were roughly as effective as we could be under the circumstances."

Another saying he was never briefed on an established evacuation plan, because, quote, "We were already in the midst of executing an evacuation that substantially exceeded the scope and scale of what had been contemplated."

The top U.S. military generals suggested that the damage could have been mitigated if the State Department had called for an earlier noncombatant evacuation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is my assessment that that decision came too late.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We struggled to gain access to that plan and work with them over the month of July until we finally got a decision to execute.

ATWOOD (voice-over): Those accusations have been disputed by the State Department.

VEDANT PATEL, DEPUTY SPOKESPERSON, U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT: The U.S. did not want to publicly announce planning for, or the start of a NEO, so as to not weaken the position of the then-Afghan government, potentially signaling a potential lack of faith.

ATWOOD (voice-over): Another state official testified to the setbacks on the ground due to a bleak reality: the Taliban were largely in control.

Quote, "It was, what will the Taliban allow? Will they let people move through? And how will they do it? And as someone who's worked in Afghanistan for 19 years, it's a little bit wild to tell people that you can trust the Taliban. Hold up your American passport, but it did kind of work."

Those descriptions a far cry from what the department said at the time.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My understanding is that things are moving quite efficiently at this hour at the airport -- at the airport now. ATWOOD: Now, the committee investigators say that their goal is to get

a report done on all of the interviews that they have conducted by the end of the year.

And as important as the voices of these State Department officials are, Biden administration officials are highly cognizant of the fact that there is a political motive here.

This investigation, of course, is run by the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And it's clear that Republicans want this to become an issue, front and center, around the time of the November elections. So that when folks are heading to the polls, they remember what it was like, this catastrophic, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that occurred during the Biden administration.

Kylie Atwood, CNN, the State Department.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: Coming up here on the program, major losses for Donald Trump as two judges reject the former president's efforts to have legal cases against him dropped. We'll have details after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[00:22:13]

HOLMES: Some legal setbacks for Donald Trump. A federal judge declining to dismiss the charges against him in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

The former president is charged with illegally keeping classified documents at his Florida residence after leaving the White House. The judge said Trump attorneys did not meet the legal standards to dismiss the charges.

Trump claims he had the authority to keep the documents under the Presidential Records Act. While Judge Aileen Cannon did not reference that act in her ruling, she left open the possibility by doing so that Trump could use the argument at trial, all contrary to prosecutors' wishes.

Also Thursday, an Atlanta judge upheld the criminal indictment against Trump in the Georgia election interference case.

Judge Scott McAfee rejected the argument that Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election were protected by the First Amendment, saying the then-president's language threatened to, quote, "deceive and harm the government," unquote.

President Biden will meet Friday with families of the six construction workers who died in the Baltimore bridge collapse.

The White House previously announced he would be viewing the wreckage of the bridge, which collapsed last week after a massive cargo ship hit one of its support pillars. White House aide Tom Perez visited with the some of the victims' families last week, saying their deaths are a gut punch, both for the president and the families.

Another close call in the air in the U.S. The Federal Aviation Administration investigating a Southwest flight that apparently flew too close to the air traffic control tower at New York's LaGuardia Airport during a landing attempt last month.

CNN's Pete Muntean with those details.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The bottom line here is this could have been so much worse. The Southwest Airlines Flight 7307 coming in to land on March 23, a Saturday, at LaGuardia Airport.

MUNTEAN (voice-over): The issue here was the weather was pretty poor, the visibility only down to about three quarters of a mile, according to air traffic control audio.

This flight went around once.

MUNTEAN: Aborted its landing there on Runway 4 at LaGuardia. The pilots said they had a bit of a tailwind and were too fast and too high.

They came back around for something called the ILS, the instrument landing system. That's a radio beam that beams out of the runway, gets the airplane on the glide path and lined up with the center of the runway.

And the flight got down to about 300 feet above the ground, according to data from flight Radar 24.

And this is the alarm that came across the radio from air traffic controllers. Listen.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Go around, go around! Fly runway heading maintain 2,000. Climb and maintain 2,000, 2,000.

Continue climbing Southwest 147 and when able, state a reason why you were not on the approach.

MUNTEAN: The air traffic controllers went on to tell this flight, Southwest Flight 1407, that it was not lined up with the approach, that it was actually a little bit more East of the approach.

[00:25:09]

MUNTEAN (voice-over): And you can see the track here from Flight Radar 24, the line there pretty close to the control tower. Flight Radar 24 tells us this plane was horizontally separated from the control tower by about 250 feet.

But that only factors into position of the antenna on the center of the airplane.

MUNTEAN: When you factor in the wingspan, the tip of the wing may have been only about 65 feet away from the control tower. The FAA says it's investigating, looking into whether or not this plane truly did come that close to the control tower.

The National Transportation Safety Board says it is gathering information. Ultimately, this flight that was inbound from Nashville diverted to BWI in Baltimore.

Pete Muntean, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: The U.S. treasury secretary is in China for high-level talks, and we're told Janet Yellen is prepared to have some frank conversations about trade.

A live report with our Kristie Lu Stout from Hong Kong. Next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HOLMES: The U.S. treasury secretary is set to hold talks with the Chinese vice premier in the coming hours. Janet Yellen meeting with business leaders earlier in Guangzhou during her second visit to China with the Biden administration.

The U.S. looking to press Beijing on what it calls unfair trade practices while working to improve relations between the world's two largest economies.

CNN's Kristie Lu Stout is live from Hong Kong, joins me now. Good to see you, Kristie. So she's back there in China. She has a clear agenda. What is she seeking?

KRISTIE LU STOUT, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR/CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Michael, the U.S. treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, is back in China, and she is pressing Chinese leaders on the threat posed by overcapacity.

She says that China is over producing exports like EV's, batteries, and solar panels, which distorts global markets and harms workers.

Now, China, especially through state-run media, dismisses this notion.

Yellen is making two stops on this visit, Guangzhou and Beijing. Today, she's in Guangzhou. She is meeting with members of the business community, as well as Chinese leaders, including the Chinese vice premier, He Lifeng.

And this visit comes right after that phone call. U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President xi Jinping on Tuesday, they had that call, their first direct talks since November at the APEC Summit.

And in that call, Xi criticized Biden's moves to, quote, "suppress China's trade and tech development." Now, China's trade and tech development is in focus in Guangzhou. In

fact, ahead of a meeting with the governor of Guangdong, we heard from Janet Yellen. Take a listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JANET YELLEN, U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY: Building a healthy economic relationship requires a level playing field for American workers and firms. This includes the issue of China's industrial overcapacity, which the United States and other countries are concerned can cause global spillovers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STOUT: That's the key emerging word, overcapacity. Now, the Biden administration is concerned that Chinese subsidies -- subsidies designed to revive its weak economy -- they will spark a glut, a flood of low-priced Chinese exports.

Chinese state-run media, including Xinhua, has dismissed such concern, calling it hype. But it's important to note that the Chinese premier acknowledged that overcapacity is a problem when he delivered -- I'm talking about Li Qiang -- when he delivered his March 5 work report at the National People's Congress last month.

This is what he said. Let's bring it up for you. He said, "The foundation for China's sustained economic recovery and growth is not solid enough, as evidenced by a lack of effective demand over capacity in some industries. We will strengthen coordination, planning, and investment guidance for key sectors to prevent overcapacity and poor- quality redundant development," unquote.

Now Yellen's current trip is a follow-up to the meeting she had last year in July when she had those direct and productive talks with Chinese leadership. In a speech she recently made in December, she emphasized a need to, quote, "responsibly manage this critical relationship" -- Michael.

HOLMES: Good to have you there covering it for us, Kristie. We'll check in with you next hour. Kristie Lu Stout there in Hong Kong.

STOUT: Absolutely.

HOLMES: Well, a preseason forecast predicts more hurricanes and named storms for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf Coast, and the islands of the Caribbean.

The lead forecaster warns that, quote, "This is the most active April forecast" that they have ever issued.

Meteorologist Chad Myers breaks it down for us.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Well, indeed our water temperatures here in the Atlantic are three to five degrees warmer than they should be at this time of year, indicative of really late April, not early April. And so our hurricane season will likely start earlier than usual. A more active season, changing to La Nina. And I'll tell you what that means in a second.

And obviously, the warm ocean temperatures. rom the record-breaking year of 2023 globally. So Colorado state, 23, 11 and five, those are the numbers for storms with names, hurricanes and majors.

Now, last year, they had 13, six, and two and it turned out to be 27 and three. So they're not overestimating in April, just in case.

What they see is what they get here in the warm temperatures with an early start and maybe a late end. That's how we get to these numbers here.

Landfall anywhere across the U.S. is never a certainty. And even this year, with all of them so storms in the water, we're still only about 63 percent on average right now compared to what we should be in the 40s for any landfall at hurricane for any given season.

Of course, across the Gulf Coast here, too, a 42 percent chance of something in the Gulf getting to major category that doesn't mean that storms aren't going to landfall it just means those major storms making landfall there.

So what does La Nina do? Kind of the opposite of what El Nino did last year. El Nino made a lot of disturbances here, a lot of what we call shear in the atmosphere.

Well, now the Jet Stream is going to be farther to the North. And that means that there's going to be less shear. Less shear down here means the storms aren't going to be torn apart.

If you have storms that aren't torn apart, you're going to get more storms to continue. And so therefore, more storms forming and more storms moving up toward the West.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: Chad Myers there, breaking that down for us.

All right. A quick break here. When we come back, we know oil and gas are big contributors to greenhouse gases, those fossil fuels. But what about our landfills, our garbage dumps? Well, a new study shows us the real cost of our garbage and why it matters for the planet.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[00:36:17]

HOLMES: Piles of garbage aren't just an eyesore. It turns out they're also a disaster for our climate.

A new study in the journal "Science" on methane pollution from 200 landfills and garbage dumps in 18 U.S. states shows emissions of the planet-warming gas to be higher than previously thought. Scientists say the study is the largest measurement-based survey of

landfills in the U.S.

Now these sites produce methane when things like food waste start decomposing with no oxygen around and release a bacteria that produces the gas.

The study shows that average methane emissions were almost one-and-a- half times higher than what is reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Joining me now, Dr. Daniel Cusworth, the lead author on that study, and the director of science at Carbon Mapper.

Good to see you, Doctor. I think we -- we knew methane from landfills was a thing, but this study suggests it was much worse than previously thought. How much worse?

DANIEL CUSWORTH, DIRECTOR OF SCIENCE, CARBON MAPPER: It's a really good point. And thanks for having me.

Solid waste emissions are thought to constitute about 20 percent of all human-made or anthropogenic methane emissions, both in the United States and globally.

But the current methods to track that at the landfill level -- level or at the national scale is really based on assumption and not based on empirical measurement.

So we conducted a survey of hundreds of landfills in the United States using direct measurement with NASA technology called imaging spectroscopy to understand the complex dynamics of landfill emissions.

And what we found was that over 50 percent of the landfills we surveyed had very large, outsized emission sources that can be localized to certain areas on the face of the landfills.

HOLMES: Wow.

CUSWORTH: So you might call these point sources, and, in some cases, these would constitute super-emitters.

these are important because they're outsized in the total contribution that they make against that landfill sector. And they're just very hard to understand and characterize in absence of direct measurement. And they're really ripe for mitigation activity or -- or progress, because they can be local.

HOLMES: Right. I saw you quoted in "Scientific American." And -- and I'll just read it for people. You said, quote, "You will sometimes see a massive billowing plume three kilometers long."

What's it like when that happens as a scientist? Is that a gut punch to see something like that?

CUSWORTH: You know, absolutely. When our team sees this type of imagery, it's really a moment of discovery, I think, for all of us. And that's what really drives us to try to get this data out transparently and publicly, so that the public can look at it and act on it and use it to inform mitigation technology.

It's also really important to have the right technology to do this, to make what's invisible, like methane, visible using this types of technology.

HOLMES: How -- just basically, for the rest of us here, how dangerous is methane, particularly in the climate context?

CUSWORTH: Yes, in the climate context, methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. It, in addition to carbon dioxide, are the main greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Methane is very different than carbon dioxide in that it's more powerful but shorter-lived in the atmosphere. So anytime methane is emitted, we live with that impulse for about 15 years, compared to carbon dioxide, which can linger for centuries.

So that means that there's actually real short-term gains that we can realize if we go after methane emissions, because it gets removed from the atmosphere so much quicker. So it's more powerful greenhouse gas. But because it lives for less time in the atmosphere, if we prioritize and find the big sources of methane, we can really realize some great climate progress.

[00:40:06]

HOLMES: Yes, there -- there are methane policies in the U.S., for example, which target the oil and gas industries. But do such policies exist for landfills? And should they?

CUSWORTH: So policies do exist in the United States for landfills with respect to monitoring. What -- what is instituted are walking surveys and so a person will walk along the face of the landfill with a handheld gas analyzer to try and detect hotspots.

Now there's no relation of this monitoring back to emissions. We can't quantify, if someone sees a hotspot, how large the emissions are, but they're also really hard to do.

So you can imagine landfills are really complex in terms of topography or terrain. They can be quite dangerous in some parts. You've got these big trucks dumping luck lots of waste. It's just hard to measure from the ground. And so oftentimes these emissions can be missed with -- with walking surveys. So -- go ahead.

HOLMES: Yes, no, I was just going to tell say, are there technologies on the horizon which give you hope at managing or mitigating landfill methane,

CUSWORTH: Yes, absolutely. There's technologies that exist. I think the airborne technology we demonstrated in this study can certainly be used. There's exciting drone technology that can also be used to monitor landfills.

But ultimately, a systematic approach, we think, really involves satellites. Because you can look not just at the U.S. but globally across the full landscape of landfills and dumpsites and do it systematically and routinely to understand where the super-emitters are at the landfills and also how much they make up in terms of global emissions.

HOLMES: Yes. And hopefully do -- do something about it. It has a major impact on climate.

And I've got to leave it there, unfortunately. Thank you, Daniel Cusworth. Dr. Daniel Cusworth. And thanks for the work you're doing there at Carbon Mapper.

CUSWORTH: Thank you so much for having me.

HOLMES: And now to a tiny Italian island with no hotels, no roads, but lots of goats.

Alicudi, which is near Sicily, is home to only about 100 people, but has been overrun by some 600 goats. They invade homes. They try to climb walls that fall over, then. And munch on, well, whatever they can find.

The mayor has had enough and wants to fix the issue with an adopt-a- goat program. Anyone interested can take up to 50 goats. The catch: you have to be able to catch them.

Applicants have 15 days to then get there, but goats and get them off the island. To do whatever you want with.

Thanks for watching, everyone, for spending part of your day with me. I'm Michael Holmes. I will have more news at the top of the hour. Meanwhile, WORLD SPORT coming your way next.

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