Extreme heat — summertime temperatures and humidity that exceed the historical average — is being made more frequent and intense by climate change. In the first two weeks of June, a late-spring hot spell prompted schools in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes areas to close or send students home early. A heat wave broke temperature records in Puerto Rico — the heat index, a measure of how temperatures feel to the human body, reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit on parts of the island. And extreme heat spurred deadly storms and power outages for hundreds of thousands of customers from Texas to Louisiana.
All that heat is bad for human health and leads to a rise in hospitalizations for cardiovascular, kidney, and respiratory diseases, particularly among the urban poor, who often lack access to air conditioning and green spaces. Those hospitalizations will come with a hefty price tag. A new report from the public policy research group Center for American Progress estimates extreme heat will create $1 billion in healthcare-related costs in the United States this summer. The analysis, provided exclusively to Grist, projects that excessive heat will spur nearly 235,000 emergency department visits and more than 56,000 hospital admissions for conditions related to increased body temperature across the country this summer.
“As the number of heat event days increases, the probability that people are going to get rushed to the emergency room or get hospitalized increases,” said Steven Woolf, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, and a coauthor of the report. “We were interested in trying to quantify how big a risk that is.”
Woolf and a cohort of academics, scientists, and doctors from Virginia Commonwealth University analyzed health insurance claims in Virginia during the 80 extreme heat days that occurred in the state, on average, every summer from 2016 and 2020. The claims were filed for emergency room visits, hospital admissions, and other medical care. They used that data to determine how many Virginians sought a doctor’s help during these heat waves compared to other days. The authors tallied up “heat-related illnesses,” defined as including heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke, as well as “heat-adjacent illness” — dehydration, rapid pulse, dizziness, or fainting.
In Virginia, extreme heat spurred some 400 outpatient care visits for heat-related illness, 4,600 emergency room visits for heat-related or heat-adjacent illness, and 2,000 heat-related hospital admissions each summer. These are likely underestimates, the report’s authors noted, since many patients with higher body weight or organ diseases such as heart disease, for example, experience complications during heat waves that could be classified as heat-adjacent illnesses but are rarely formally diagnosed as such by their physicians. And many victims of extreme heat don’t seek medical care at all, which further obscures the true burden of heat-related illness.
The authors extrapolated from Virginia’s data to reach the conclusion that extreme heat will inflate health care costs across the nation by $1 billion every summer for the foreseeable future, an estimate Woolf said will probably shift as the breadth of research on this topic expands. The authors also found that the burden of extreme heat will be shouldered unequally by Americans. The costs will be felt most acutely in low-income and historically marginalized communities, where access to cooling resources such as air conditioning is patchy and green spaces are scarce. “People who live in nice neighborhoods, who have air-conditioned homes and tree-lined streets with plenty of shade,” Woolf said, “are protected from the heat in a way that doesn’t occur in a different part of town where there’s not much shade and people are less likely to either have air conditioning and fans or to have the resources to pay the electrical bills.”
These inequities point to a slew of possible solutions, starting with a recognition on behalf of local and state governments that neighborhoods need to become more resilient to the effects of extreme heat. Many cities are already adapting to protect people from climate change, Woolf said, including using building and roofing materials that reflect heat, passing laws that subsidize power bills for low-income residents, and planting trees — a relatively low-cost intervention that is surprisingly effective at bringing down street-level temperatures. Local emergency management officials could also do a better job forecasting extreme heat so people have time to prepare, and public health officials could offer clearer communication about the symptoms of heat illness.
Justin S. Mankin, an assistant professor in Dartmouth University’s geography department who was not involved in this report and published a separate study last year on the economic impact of heatwaves in the U.S., acknowledged that the report is part of an essential effort to quantify the health care burden associated with extreme heat. But he said the methods the report’s authors used didn’t paint a complete picture, noting that a more comprehensive assessment of the economic toll of heat would have also accounted for the costs that pile up in the “weeks, months, and even years after an extreme event,” not only whilethe event is happening, as the report does.
“I’d like to see more rigorous estimates of these costs using more sophisticated approaches,” he said. A more complete analysis would have looked at insurance claims from every state, instead of nationally extrapolating from Virginia’s data. The problem is that many states don’t have what’s called an all-claims database, which is a full and public accounting of all of the emergency room visits and hospitalizations that occur in a given year. “If we had that for all 50 states, we could do this analysis for the whole country,” Woolf said.
The report, Woolf noted, also doesn’t take the ways in which heat may affect businesses, infrastructure, schools, and other aspects of American life into account. He called for more research on this topic. “The collective implications of severe weather are really rather intimidating,” he said. “They just strengthen the arguments for us needing to do something about climate change and to be proactive about it.”
Chemical and manufacturing giant 3M and a broad coalition of U.S. cities and towns have reached a landmark, $10.3 billion settlement over the company’s use of so-called “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, long linked to cancer and other major health issues.
If approved by a judge, it will be among the biggest mass tort deals in history.
The settlement comes after thousands of plaintiffs sued 3M for allegedly contaminating municipal drinking water supplies with PFAS — contamination, the parties allege, the company allowed for decades despite knowing as early as the 1970s that the chemicals were harmful to human and environmental health.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are popularly known for their use in firefighting foam and non-stick pans, but they’ve also been found in pizza boxes, seltzer cans, contact lenses, dental floss, mascara, rugs, sofas, and millions of other products Americans use on a daily basis. Studies show that the class of chemicals can weaken immune systems and contribute to long-term illnesses like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer — specifically, testicular, kidney, and prostate cancers.
The case at the heart of the lawsuits was brought by the city of Stuart, on Florida’s Gold Coast, which discovered it had harmful levels of PFAS in its water supply in 2016. Stuart officials traced the contamination to firefighting foam sold to the city by 3M for a decade in the late 1900s. The lawsuit sought to force 3M to pay for the cost of cleaning PFAS out of Stuart’s drinking water supply — but it was also selected to be a “bellwether” case, serving as a litmus test for some 4,000 other plaintiffs with similar claims.
Stuart’s lawsuit was set to begin in the first week of June, but the trial was delayed as both parties worked to reach a settlement agreement. The $10.3 billion settlement, first reported by the New York Times on Thursday, will be paid out to a large portion of the 4,000 plaintiffs over the course of 13 years if it is approved. Mike Roman, chairman and chief executive of 3M, told the Times that the settlement was an “important step forward” for the company and builds on 3M’s plan to exit PFAS manufacturing entirely by 2025.
The settlement follows closely on the heels of a different PFAS settlement for $1.19 billion that three other chemical giants — DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva — agreed to pay out earlier this month. That settlement was also meant to address PFAS contamination in drinking water. Neither deal requires the companies involved to admit liability for the alleged harms caused by their chemicals.
An estimated 1 in 20 Americans have forever chemicals in their drinking water, and some analyses suggest that the price tag on filtering forever chemicals out of the country’s drinking water is more than $3.8 billion per year.The settlements will cover a good portion of the cost of remediating PFAS in drinking water supplies across the nation, an expensive endeavor that can rack up tens of millions of dollars per system.
“It’s good to have that much money on the table,” Carl Tobias, an expert in tort litigation at the University of Richmond School of Law, told Grist. He noted that the settlement does not cover the other types of lawsuits in the massive litigation against 3M — such as personal injury claims from firefighters who were exposed to forever chemicals in the line of duty or people whose properties have been affected by PFAS contamination. “We’ll just have to see how many cases possibly can be settled,” he said.
The settlement also sends a signal to future, would-be plaintiffs: Chemical companies appear willing to settle PFAS-related claims. It also sends a message to the chemical industry: Resolving PFAS complaints is good for business. In the days after DuPont reached its settlement earlier this month, shares of 3M and DuPont stock soared. Preliminary reports suggested 3M stocks rallied further after Thursday’s announcement.
“3M’s shareholders weren’t happy,” Tobias said, “so I think they needed to do this.”
Lawyers for Stuart told Grist they welcomed the settlement, and hinted at more to come. “We are happy to finally take this first step in cleaning up America’s drinking water of these insidiously toxic chemicals,” Ned McWilliams, an attorney at Levin Papantonio Rafferty, one of the firms representing the plaintiffs, said.
Experts say recent extremes are being influenced by a hodgepodge of distinct factors. Climate change is involved, but natural variations in global weather, and an unfortunate dose of serendipity, are also at play.
“Global warming itself hasn’t suddenly accelerated this year,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a live briefing on Monday. “Part of what’s going on is random bad luck.”
Last week, the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration announced that El Niño conditions — above average sea-surface temperatures that spur higher-than-usual warmth in many parts of the world — were officially present in the Pacific Ocean. The swing from La Niña, El Niño’s opposite extreme, to an El Niño means a much warmer year is in store for the entire globe. But the cycle, which is associated with extremes such as drought and severe storms, also has localized impacts. In eastern and southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region, El Niño can spur famine, outbreaks of infectious disease, and heat stress. The natural weather phenomenon may also be having an impact, Swain said, on record-breaking land surface temperatures in Canada that have helped to fuel its devastating fire season so far.
At the same time, scientists have been keeping tabs on a separate phenomenon unfolding in the Atlantic Ocean. Temperatures in the Atlantic hurricane region have been anomalously high for three months now. They are currently 82 degrees Fahrenheit on average — 35 percent higher than a prior record set in 2005.
“There has never been any day in observed history where the entire North Atlantic has been nearly as warm as it is right now,” Swain said. The rest of the Atlantic Basin — the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Seaboard — is also warmer than average, which means an active Atlantic hurricane season may be on tap. Generally, El Niño suppresses hurricane activity in the Atlantic and leads to a more severe typhoon season in the Pacific, but above-average Atlantic Ocean temperatures may negate El Niño’s dampening effects and fuel big Atlantic hurricanes this year.
A third factor, a volcanic eruption that occurred at the beginning of 2022 in the southern Pacific Ocean, is also contributing to above-average global temperatures. Volcanic eruptions typically have a temporary cooling effect on the planet because they shoot soot and other sun-blocking particles into the air. But the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption in the Tongan archipelago wasn’t a typical volcanic eruption. “This was a sub-oceanic, huge, massively explosive eruption that essentially vaporized huge quantities of sea water,” Swain said. The volcano’s plume was so intense that it shot vaporized water into the stratosphere, where the vapor has been having a warming effect on the planet.
All of this means we’re in for a period of accelerated warming due to the convergence of these factors. The good news is that the warming effect that El Niño and the Hunga Tonga eruption are having on the planet is temporary. El Niño lasts between nine and 12 months and the vaporized water in the stratosphere will fade in a few years.
The bad news is that climate change, which experts say contributed to the formation of this year’s El Niño and may be behind the record-breaking ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic, is still churning in the background. It isn’t going away anytime soon.
“The long-term trend is not going to stop,” Swain said. “We are stair-stepping up on our way to much warmer oceans and a much warmer climate.”
David Peters’s nightmare began on a Monday in the spring of 2016, just before the end of the work day. Peters was the assistant public works director for the city of Stuart, a community of 18,000 on southeast Florida’s tranquil Treasure Coast. One of his many duties was to help oversee the municipal drinking water supply, a responsibility he took seriously. That afternoon, Peters was told that an administrative aide for the U.S. representative from Stuart’s district had left a message with the city asking someone to call her back.
“Are you prepared for this?” the aide asked when Peters returned her call. The rest came very quickly. The state had identified a class of chemicals linked to cancer called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals,” in Stuart’s drinking water supply. The chemicals were at dangerously high levels.
Peters, who had never even heard of PFAS before, emailed Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection for more information. The department explained that in 2012, the federal Environmental Protection Agency had added, for the first time, two types of PFAS — pronounced PEA’-fass — to its list of “unregulated contaminants” that public water systems must test for. Stuart had run tests in 2014 and 2015 and found both chemicals, PFOS and PFOA, in its water supply. But the city and the state environmental agency hadn’t thought much of it, since the contamination, at a combined 200 parts per trillion, or ppt, was not thought to be at a level that was harmful to human health.
But in May 2016, days before the legislative aide called Peters, the U.S. EPA issued a new policy: Levels of the two PFAS in drinking water, the agency said in a national health advisory, should not exceed 70 ppt.
What this meant was that Stuart’s public water utility — winner of multiple awards, including a statewide “best-tasting water” competition — had been unintentionally poisoning its constituents. Subsequent testing showed some of the city’s individual wells had levels of PFAS higher than 1,000 ppt. There was no way to turn back the clock. People had been drinking the poisoned water, and no one knew for how long.
Thus began, Peters told lawyers in a 2021 deposition, a “week in hell.”
Aerial view of Stuart, Florida.
Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Peters collected himself and began to devise a plan. By the end of the week, the city had discovered that levels of PFAS in water from all of the city’s municipal wells averaged out to 65 ppt, just 5 ppt below the EPA’s new standard, and had pulled its three most contaminated wells offline. Peters and other officials weren’t satisfied. They had been caught off guard once, and they weren’t willing to let it happen again.
“We weren’t about to take a chance on getting caught with a system that wouldn’t treat down to below detection levels under any circumstance,” Peters said in the deposition. The city’s goal since 2016 has been to get PFAS contamination in its drinking water supply to “non-detect,” or as close to zero ppt as possible.
But achieving non-detect status has proved to be wildly expensive and, ultimately, out of reach for a city of Stuart’s size and means. Conventional water-purification techniques, such as the use of chlorine, don’t work on tiny and persistent forever chemicals. So the city implemented a new water scrubbing system in order to rid its 30 wells of PFAS. The system, which is called an ion-exchange treatment, relies on magnetlike resins to attract PFAS molecules. The resins, once loaded up with contaminants, have to be incinerated to destroy the chemicals. The city has spent roughly $20 million keeping its PFAS levels below 30 ppt — a maximum limit Stuart set for itself — thus far. It estimates that the cost of replacing the resin, which cannot be reused, is approximately $2 million per year. That cost will increase incrementally as the city strives to get its contamination level down to zero.
“We can’t afford to spend that kind of money every year,” Peters said in his deposition. “We’re a small utility, a small municipality.”
Stuart’s efforts to clean up its water are at the heart of a lawsuit of epic proportions that could have wide-ranging financial repercussions for more than 100 million Americans in the years to come. Next week, Stuart’s lawyers plan to argue in federal court that the companies that manufactured and distributed PFAS not only contaminated Stuart’s water supply, but did so knowingly for decades. They will make the case that those companies, not the city or its residents, should cover the cost of cleanup for Stuart — and for any other city with similarly contaminated drinking water.
The question underpinning the case is one that has consumed Peters’s professional life since 2016: Once you know there’s poison in the well, who’s responsible for getting rid of it?
PFAS do not naturally break down in the environment over time. Their resistance to decay is what makes them useful. It’s also what makes them dangerous.
In 1938, a scientist at DuPont De Nemours and Company, commonly known as DuPont, discovered the first PFAS chemical that would be widely used by Americans in the home — Teflon, the patented name for the type of forever chemical that makes certain cookware nonstick. But the multinational chemical conglomerate 3M quickly became the nation’s chief producer of PFAS. The company manufactured the chemicals for use in its own products and sold them to other chemical companies, like DuPont, for their products, too. PFOA, PFOS, and the thousands of other obscurely named acronymic chemicals under the PFAS umbrella were added to millions of products Americans used — and still use — on a regular basis: pizza boxes, seltzer cans, contact lenses, dental floss, mascara, rugs, sofas.
3M started winding down PFAS production in the 2000s under pressure from the EPA. The company recently announced that it will cease production of forever chemicals entirely by 2025. But the hundreds of millions of pounds of the chemicals the company produced for more than half a century still persist, indefinitely, in the environment. They’re also lingering inside of us: in our blood and our excrement, primarily via the foods we eat and the water we drink.
A growing body of research on the health ramifications of years of sustained exposure to PFAS paints a frightening picture: The chemicals have a disturbing affinity for blood. Once they find their way to the bloodstream, they stick to blood cells as they course through every organ in the body. Studies show PFAS can weaken immune systems and contribute to long-term illnesses like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer — specifically, testicular, kidney, and prostate cancers. A recent study linked PFAS in drinking water and household products such as food packaging to startling decreases in fertility in women. Studies on prenatal and childhood exposure to PFAS show adverse developmental effects, including low birth weight and accelerated puberty.
Residents living near a 3M factory have their blood taken to test for the presence of PFAS. Jonas Roosens / BELGA MAG / AFP via Getty Images
Since Stuart’s water crisis in 2016, the body of research illuminating the harmful health effects of PFAS has become more robust, prompting the EPA to take more forceful steps to limit consumer exposure to these chemicals. Earlier this year, the EPA proposed a set of new guidelines for six PFAS, including PFOA and PFOS. Unlike its 2016 health advisory standards, these limits — 4 parts per trillion, down from 70 ppt — are enforceable, meaning that water-supply managers must adhere to them or face fines. It’s the first time the agency has taken such a step, a move that underscores just how poisonous the EPA believes PFAS to be, even in minuscule amounts. The decision to regulate PFAS represents a huge win for public health. That win will come at a cost.
The new standard, once it becomes official later this year, will trigger a nationwide effort to rid drinking water supplies of forever chemicals. The projected costs of eliminating PFAS from the water supply are astronomical, beyond the scope of what cities, utilities, and the average consumer can afford. Preliminary estimates suggest that the price tag on filtering forever chemicals out of America’s drinking water is more than $3.8 billion per year. That cost will get passed on to consumers, unless the companies responsible for creating the contamination in the first place are forced to pay. That’s where Stuart’s lawsuit against 3M comes in.
The product at the center of the lawsuit, which will be heard in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, is called aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, which has been used by the U.S. military and local fire departments, including Stuart’s, across the nation. The foam’s key ingredient — what makes it so effective at putting out fires — is PFAS. Stuart is arguing that 3M and other manufacturers of ingredients used in firefighting foam knowingly pulled off one of the largest mass poisonings in American history and, crucially, that they hid what they knew about PFAS from the government and the general public in order to continue selling their products.
3M and the other defendants in the case maintain that their products can’t be tied to the plaintiff’s PFAS contamination and therefore they are not liable for the cost of cleaning it up. 3M “will vigorously defend its record of environmental stewardship,” the company said in a statement to Grist. “3M will continue to remediate PFAS and address litigation by defending ourselves in court or through negotiated resolutions, all as appropriate.”
3M has settled multiple PFAS-related lawsuits since 2005, including multimillion dollar settlements with Minnesota andMichigan. But the company has never admitted liability for the contamination the lawsuits alleged.
Stuart’s lawsuit is what lawyers call a “bellwether case” — it’s the first of more than 4,000 lawsuits that have been filed by cities, utilities, and individuals against 3M and other manufacturers of AFFF. Lawyers on both sides carefully chose Stuart as the most representative plaintiff out of the thousands of cases after analyzing the city’s water samples, reading through thousands of documents in the legal process known as discovery, and even exploring the city in person. Stuart’s case will serve as a litmus test for the lawsuits in line behind it, determining how lawyers for the other plaintiffs move forward with their respective arguments. If Stuart succeeds, 3M could be on the hook for one of the biggest mass tort payouts in U.S. history. If it fails, everyday Americans could see their water bills balloon in the years to come.
3M’s Cordova chemical plant on the Mississippi River. E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images
“3M is a corporate giant that was built in no small part on the profits of these PFAS chemicals. They contaminated drinking water supplies and people across the United States,” David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental health nonprofit, told Grist. “Holding them accountable is significant, both in terms of direct cost to consumers but … also as a signal to companies that produce industrial chemicals about the long-term costs of some of these chemistry decisions.”
Grist spoke with the plaintiffs’ lawyers and reviewed hundreds of documents filed in court to build a narrative account of the years leading up to Stuart’s discovery in 2016, including details about what 3M knew in the 1970s about the dangers its products posed to the general public. Some of the information in this article, including testimony in which a former 3M toxicologist admits that global PFAS contamination can be linked to 3M, has never been reported before.
“We’re dealing with something that is unprecedented in scope and scale,” Rob Bilott, the environmental attorney whose work investigating the chemical industry’s role in manufacturing forever chemicals was instrumental in bringing public attention to PFAS in the early 2000s, told Grist. Bilott, who initially sued DuPont for poisoning communities in West Virginia, is also involved in this new round of litigation.
“It’s going to be incredibly expensive to deal with this,” Bilott said. “I think it’s important for the public to know how much this company knew about the hazards of these materials.”
The USS Forrestal, the Navy’s first “supercarrier” ship, was gearing up for an attack off the coast of Vietnam on the morning of July 29, 1967, when a rocket accidentally slipped loose from a fighter plane idling on the ship’s huge deck. The rocket fired across the runway and pierced another jet. Hundreds of gallons of fuel flowed from the damaged plane, spreading quickly across a deck that had been stocked with aircraft, artillery, and bombs in preparation for the attack. When the fuel encountered a lingering rocket spark, it started a fire that raged for 24 hours, killing 134 people and injuring 161.
The conflagration was one of the deadliest naval disasters on record since World War II.
Crews work to extinguish a fire sparked by a rocket explosion aboard the USS Forrestal in July 1967. Marka / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The Navy convened two separate panels to investigate what happened aboard the Forrestal. The resulting reports, aimed at improving “warship survivability,” recommended ships carry larger quantities of more effective firefighting foams.
In the 1960s, when the company was best known to the public for its masking tape and abrasive sponges, 3M began working on a new type of firefighting foam in collaboration with the Navy. They called the foam “light water,” but it’s now better known by its technical name, aqueous film-forming foam. The foam worked better than conventional firefighting foams and had a virtually unlimited shelf life.
In short order, light water became the firefighting foam of choice by the American military at home and abroad. By the 1970s, it had become a staple — not just on Navy ships, but also at military bases, commercial airports, and, ultimately, local fire departments across the country.
AFFF’s active ingredient, what makes the foam so good at smothering blazes, is “fluorinated surfactant,” otherwise known as perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, or PFOS. For decades, the foam, which was sprayed on real fires and just as often used by fire departments to conduct firefighting drills, was routinely dumped over the sides of ships and onto bare earth, where it leached into the environment and migrated into local drinking water supplies. 3M started winding down production of AFFF in 2000 as the EPA ramped up pressure on the chemical giant to disclose information about its products. But other companies stepped in to fill the void.
Stuart’s fire department began purchasing drums of AFFF from 3M in 1989, according to its lawyers — a decision that would later haunt the city. Court documents show the fire department often used AFFF to conduct training exercises in the field behind the firehouse. Once the city started analyzing water samples from the city’s 30 interconnected drinking water wells, it didn’t take long to discover that the samples with the highest levels of PFAS were located near the fire house.
On May 31, 2016, days after Peters’s call with the administrative aide, all personnel in Stuart’s fire department received a terse email from the city’s fire chief. AFFF was not to be used anymore except for in emergencies, it said, “effective immediately.” The PFAS firehose had finally been shut off, 27 years after it had been inadvertently turned on.
“At no time during the relevant period did the Defendants warn Stuart Fire Rescue that the ingredients in the AFFF were persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic,” Stuart’s legal complaint reads. 3M, as well as Dynax Corporation, Tyco Fire Products LP, Buckeye Fire Equipment Company, Chemguard, and National Foam Inc. — the other defendants in the case — exposed “thousands of innocent residents to water contaminated with dangerous chemicals,” the complaint alleges.
Though the Pentagon recently began to transition to PFAS-free firefighting foam — leading state and local firefighting agencies to do the same — the chemicals are still where fire departments left them for half a century.
What 3M knew about the effect its products had on human health comprises the main thrust of Stuart’s lawsuit against 3M and the other companies that manufactured and sold AFFF. The city’s lawyers have obtained millions of pages of official and unofficial internal company correspondence via discovery. If the plaintiffs can marshall the evidence contained in those pages to convince the jury that the PFAS industry knew its chemicals were widespread among the general public and suspected they were harmful to humans, the jurors may find the companies that produced these products liable for damages. Stuart’s argument, which will be echoed by the 4,000-plus plaintiffs waiting for their day in court, hinges on a few crucial moments in the late 1970s.
Company records, produced in discovery and filed in court, show that executives at 3M started to have an inkling their products were harmful to human health in 1975. That year, two independent scientists called 3M — the main mass-manufacturer of PFAS at the time — to inform the company that they had found PFAS compounds in their own blood and other blood samples. 3M pleaded ignorance. But actions taken by executives in 3M’s upper ranks in the months and years after the company was contacted by the scientists show that the company didn’t remain ignorant for long. 3M found out that PFAS were not only in its employees’ blood, but circulating widely in the blood of the general population, and that the chemicals were potentially carcinogenic. The company kept that information from the federal government, its factory workers, consumers, and the general public.
Lewis Lehr, then the chief executive of 3M, at the company’s head office in 1985. Ross Anthony Willis / Fairfax Media via Getty Images
In 1976, 3M found forever chemicals in the blood of its factory workers, and internal laboratory tests on monkeys and rats had produced worrying results. In June 1978, 3M’s commercial chemical division sent a confidential letter to 3M’s general counsel and executives in the company’s medical and research departments. The company’s president of U.S. operations, Lewis Lehr, had “specifically requested” that 3M meet with an outside consultant to see whether its products containing PFAS were toxic. 3M hadn’t reported its tests to the EPA, which legally requires chemical companies to test and report the health impacts of their products, particularly if they appear to be harmful to humans. Lehr, the letter said, wanted “an independent opinion as to whether we are correct in our assumption that we do not have a reportable situation.”
A 1978 letter from 3M’s commercial chemical division requesting that 3M meet with an outside consultant to see whether its products containing PFAS were toxic. City of Stuart v. 3M Co., et al
The first outside expert the company spoke to was a renowned toxicologist named Harold C. Hodge. 3M executives flew to San Francisco to meet with Hodge in April 1979. According to the notes that a 3M staffer drafted at that meeting and are included in the cache of lawsuit documents, Hodge recommended that the company reduce its employees’ exposure to forever chemicals. The draft notes also include an addendum Hodge added by phone about a week later, after he had reviewed more study results provided by 3M. The company, he said, should figure out if PFAS were in the general population and, if so, at what levels. “If the levels are high and widespread,” he said, “we could have a serious problem.”
The next day, 3M executives met with another expert, J.R. Mitchell, from the Baylor School of Medicine in Houston. Draft notes from that meeting show that Mitchell told the company that some of the results from its studies on PFAS in animals “are similar to those observed with carcinogens.”
But the official meeting notes from both meetings, disseminated within the company in June 1979, do not include either of those statements by the outside experts. 3M struck them from its official records. Despite accumulating copious evidence that its products were widespread in the general population and posed serious risks to human health, the company neither alerted the EPA nor ceased production of PFAS. In the years that followed, 3M produced approximately 100 million pounds of POSF, the precursor to the chemical used in AFFF. It and other PFAS chemicals brought in $300 million in annual revenue for 3M.
3M’s draft minutes from its meeting with the independent scientist J.R. Mitchell.City of Stuart v. 3M Co., et al
3M’s official meeting minutes from its meeting with Mitchell, with a line on the potentially carcinogenic symptoms observed in animal tests removed. City of Stuart v. 3M Co., et al
3M has never publicly admitted that any of the forever chemicals found in samples from around the world could be linked to its products. But ahead of the trial, and over 3M’s vehement objection, the judge ruled that a deposition given by John Butenhoff, a former toxicologist at 3M who worked at the company for nearly four decades starting in the 1970s, could be considered as evidence in the case.
In a video of that deposition, one of Stuart’s lawyers asks Butenhoff a series of questions about where PFAS have been found. “You’re aware that PFOS has been detected and reported in rivers and streams?” the lawyer asks.
“Yes, I have awareness of that,” Butenhoff replies.
The lawyer lists off other places PFAS have been found: soil, sediment, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, drinking water, human blood, umbilical cord blood, breast milk, shellfish, fish, indoor house dust, outdoor air, and polar bear blood. Butenhoff confirms that the chemicals have been found in all of those places.
“In each and every one of these media all around the world,” the lawyer asks, “the source of PFOS is more likely than not 3M, correct?”
“I think that more likely than not the source is 3M, yes,” Butenhoff replies.
While 3M was raking in billions from its PFAS products, cities like Stuart were unknowingly digging themselves into a pit.
The costs Stuart has had to shoulder, and potential long-term health consequences for the Florida city’s residents, could have been avoided if the defendants were upfront about the dangers of PFAS, Stuart’s lawsuit says. “Had Defendants provided adequate instructions and warnings, the contamination of the groundwater and drinking water supply with toxic and carcinogenic chemicals would have been reduced or eliminated,” it says. “Defendants’ conduct was so reckless or wanting in care that it constituted intentional or grossly negligent conduct.”
Stuart is not alone in its battle against forever chemicals. The prohibitive cost of getting PFAS out of local water supplies is a reality local officials and water providers across the nation are grappling with as the EPA prepares to codify its enforceable standards in the next several months. Once the standards are enacted, utilities will have three years, until 2026, to comply with them.
Boston firefighters covered in firefighting foam work the scene of a four-alarm fire. Mark Garfinkekl / MediaNews Group / Boston Herald via Getty Images
The federal government has directed roughly $10 billion to help the nation address its PFAS contamination problem. That pot of money includes $2 billion worth of grants to help alleviate the cost of cleaning out contaminants from drinking water in small or disadvantaged communities. But experts say even $10 billion is a drop in the bucket; some estimates put the total cost of ridding the entire nation’s water supply of PFAS somewhere between $200 billion and $400 billion. An estimated 1 in 20 Americans have forever chemicals in their drinking water, a figure that could increase as smaller utilities that were not required to test for PFAS between 2013 and 2015 start looking for them.
There is no easy solution to this problem; every path forward includes expensive equipment and laborious treatment processes. If Stuart and other cities aren’t successful in getting 3M to pay for the damage, the costs will be shouldered by tens of millions of utility customers, also known as ratepayers.
“The ratepayer is paying for the capital, they’re paying back a loan … and they’re paying for the personnel, the equipment, the replacement parts, the electricity,” Steve Via, director of federal relations for the American Water Works Association, an international coalition of water suppliers, told Grist. “All of it comes back to the ratepayer.”
The American Water Works Association analyzed the cost of PFAS cleanup for utilities and households in a report published in March. The typical American household located in an area where PFAS cleanup must take place is looking at an average annual cost of between $200 and $350 per year, which would be passed on to ratepayers through their water bills, according to Via. But there are disparities depending on the size of the community. The annual cost of PFAS for households in large communities is much lower than it is in small ones, where fewer ratepayers share the financial burden. In those less populated areas, the annual cost tops $1,000 a year — a significant expense for the average family.
“This is going to be expensive,” Via said. “None of these systems have been saving money in advance for this because they didn’t know they were going to be required to treat to 4 ppt.”
Sara Hughes, a professor of water policy at the University of Michigan, said some communities will be able to bear these costs more comfortably than others. In poorer communities, especially smaller ones where the average cost of PFAS remediation is much higher than the projected national average, the burden will be felt more acutely.
“For households that are already living on the edge, one more thing, one more bill, one more increase in the cost of living, can be pretty significant.”
“Even $20 more a month means very different things to some households than others,” Hughes said. “For households that are already living on the edge, one more thing, one more bill, one more increase in the cost of living, can be pretty significant.”
The upfront financial cost of remediating the contamination these companies knowingly put into the environment is one facet of the long-term burden American families will face. But the larger and ultimately more devastating consequence is the impact PFAS has had, and will continue to have, on health. These chemicals have already been linked to various cancers, diabetes, infertility, childhood developmental delays, and other issues scientists are still uncovering. Many victims of PFAS poisoning don’t even know that their ailments may be linked to these chemicals, but their lives and bank accounts will feel the impacts.
3M headquarters in Minnesota. Karen Bleier / AFP via Getty Images
To this day, 3M’s position on PFAS, according to its website, is that they are “safe and effective for their intended uses.”
Stuart’s lawsuit will probe the strength of this assertion. The more than 4,000 AFFF lawsuits comprise what’s called “multidistrict litigation,” a type of legal proceeding that’s similar to a class-action lawsuit. They fall into multiple categories: The first, spearheaded by Stuart, is made up of water-supply contamination cases. The next bucket of complaints will be personal injury cases — people who claim that exposure to PFAS in firefighting foam led to cancer diagnoses. Many of those plaintiffs are current or former firefighters. Yet more plaintiffs seek restitution for property damage caused by PFAS contamination.
In the months leading up to the bellwether trial, 300 cases per month on average were added to the multidistrict litigation. As of April, the total number of plaintiffs was 4,173.
The costs of dealing with PFAS contamination are “just now beginning to be recognized,” Bilott, the environmental attorney, said. “I think you’re going to see efforts now underway all over the planet to try to make sure that the people who created this global contamination are responsible for the global implications of cleaning it up.”
Spring has sprung unusually early in the eastern United States. From parts of the Gulf Coast all the way up through southern New England, leaves are popping out of shrubs and trees days or even weeks ahead of schedule. Some areas are experiencing their earliest spring on record, which means communities are also enduring an unusually early allergy season. Experts say rising temperatures, among the most visceral consequences of unfettered fossil fuel combustion, play a role in this year’s accelerated spring.
Phenologists — people who study biological life cycles — use two metrics to delineate the change in seasons: First bloom, when plants begin to flower, and first leaf-out, when leaves unfurl. This year, first bloom and first leaf-out started creeping up the East Coast between three and four weeks ahead of schedule. That’s not entirely unusual; natural variation in seasons results in an early spring every few years. But, in some places, spring arrived extremely early — earlier than any time in the past four decades.
Parts of central Texas and the Louisiana coast, southern Arkansas, southern Ohio, the D.C. area, New York City, and the New Jersey coastline all clocked their earliest spring on record, said Theresa Crimmins, director of the National Phenology Network, a group that collects data on seasons and other natural cycles. The organization uses mathematical models that combine historical observations of first leaf and first bloom with temperature and weather data to predict when lilacs and honeysuckles, typically the first plants to turn green each year, will start becoming active. The group then compares that first growth to an average baseline from the three decades between 1991 and 2020. The network’s models show that spring arrived a full 20 days ahead of schedule in spots across the eastern U.S. The trend was particularly vivid in the mid-Atlantic region.
Warmth has everything to do with when trees start budding and leaves begin opening. This year, an especially mild winter in the eastern U.S., plus a string of very warm days in recent weeks, created ideal conditions for an early-onset spring. “That’s really what caused things to get so far ahead of schedule,” Crimmins said.
It’s tough to peg climate change to a particular early leaf-out in any one place, but evidence of anthropogenic warming is obvious in how the timing of seasons in the U.S. has changed in the past several decades. “There is a clear underlying trend over the long term toward progressively earlier starts to the spring season in much of the country, much of the eastern U.S. in particular,” Crimmins said. “That is the result of steadily increasing global average temperatures.”
Earlier springs are associated with a host of problems for human health. Recentresearch shows that the lengthening growing season has led to an allergy season that is 21 percent more intense and 20 days longer, on average, in North America. Shortened winters allow insects that carry disease, such as ticks and mosquitos, to get active earlier and spread pathogens to other animals and humans.
“There’s a good chance that if you’re a sufferer of seasonal allergies and live in the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., you’re already feeling the effects of an early bloom,” Ben Noll, a meteorologist who tracks weather in New York’s Hudson Valley, told Grist.
And early spring is a nightmare for farmers across the country who are already struggling to adapt to rapidly shifting environmental conditions. Mississippi’s blueberry crop was imperiled a couple of weeks ago when a hard frost descended on the state after a spate of abnormally warm days caused blueberry bushes to bloom early. One farmer in the state estimated that the frost wrecked 80 percent of his crop.
“These seasonal changes can make life particularly tough for farmers whose livelihoods depend on the weather and ultimately produce the food that we consume,” Noll said.
Climate change is generating major economic problems in the United States, the Biden administration said in an annual report published this week. The assumptions that higher-income countries like the U.S. would safely weather the risks associated with global warming, and that those risks would be clear cut, have proven to be false, administration economists wrote. A “wide array of risks” are currently impacting the “well-being of American communities,” the White House Council of Economic Advisers wrote in its report, particularly low-income and minority neighborhoods.
Heat, flooding, wildfires, and diseases that spread from animals to humans threaten public health and health care systems, the report warns. Trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure like bridges, roads, and, crucially, homes, are susceptible to flooding, posing massive problems for America’s insurance industry and federal mortgage lenders. And the cost of responding to disasters such as hurricanes and drought, which have totalled hundreds of billions of dollars in some recent years, are putting a strain on local and state governments, as well as the federal government.
Those economic risks, and their unequal toll, require the government to reassess how it spends public money, from the federal to the local level.
The Economic Report of the President isn’t a binding plan, nor does it contain concrete policy proposals. Rather, it points at how the president and his cadre of economists are thinking about the biggest issues of the day. But the report is a significant document nonetheless — it offers clues about the flavor of legislation President Joe Biden is likely to try to push his party toward writing and passing over the course of 2023 and the executive actions the president may take. And it offers yet another stark warning about the dangerous direction in which climate change is taking the nation. The economic report was published on the same day as a major United Nations report that said the world is at risk of seriously overshooting its climate targets and condemning future generations to irreparable harm.
The report “paints a clear-eyed picture of the challenges we face and the actions that the federal government can take if we are to grapple with the impacts of climate change that are already unavoidable,” Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist.
Without intervention, some of the programs that make America’s economy tick run the risk of going bankrupt. For example, the report recommends that the government continue to reform the National Flood Insurance Program, the flood insurance system administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that for far too long subsidized new development in flood zones and obscured the full risks to homeowners who chose to live in those areas. The program, the report said, is “at risk of financial insolvency.” Better flood disclosure laws would help discourage these risky investments, but many states allow sellers to keep buyers in the dark. The report recommends that the federal government push states to increase transparency and climate resilience more generally, particularly as it relates to flooding. Hundreds of billions of dollars have begun flowing to states via the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that Congress passed in 2021. The report suggests making some of that funding, and future federal funds, contingent on states adopting climate resiliency measures and passing flood risk disclosure laws.
Moore, from NRDC, heralded this recommendation as a necessary step in adapting the nation to the worsening effects of climate change, but noted that actually setting the report’s suggestions in motion would require the government to work with a greater sense of urgency. “Now the problem is getting the Federal Emergency Management Administration — and the administration — to fast-track these changes,” he said.
The report also takes aim at rampant inequity in the U.S., illuminated and exacerbated by climate change. Low-income, minority, and tribal populations live on some of the most vulnerable real estate in the country due to racism, redlining, and the forced migration of Native Americans. Changing state and federal laws to account for climate risks and the impacts of climate change on real estate, agriculture, and other sectors will necessarily lead to price hikes across the economy. “This could present challenges for low-income communities, for whom higher prices are particularly burdensome,” the authors write. The report suggests alleviating that burden by creating policies that boost income growth and “increase access to wealth-building opportunities” for those communities, and by sending America’s most vulnerable “lump sum transfers” — cash.
Moore said the window of opportunity for Biden to make these changes is coming to a close. “We’re just past the halfway point of the President’s first term and there’s a real risk of the administration running out of time to complete the changes that everyone knows are needed,” he said.
Editor’s note: Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here. President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the massive Willow oil project earlier this week infuriated climate advocates and environmentalists while drawing praise from Alaska politicians and oil industry figures. As the Biden administration weighed the benefits and drawbacks of the project over the past…
President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the massive Willow oil project earlier this week infuriated climate advocates and environmentalists while drawing praise from Alaska politicians and oil industry figures. As the Biden administration weighed the benefits and drawbacks of the project over the past year, the latter camp argued that the project would help replace Russian oil supplies as well as deliver an economic boon for Alaskans.
The Willow Project’s champions have stressed the need for the U.S. to achieve energy independence in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said last month that Willow could help “reduce our energy imports from some of the worst regimes in the world.” Mary Peltola, a Democratic representative and Alaska Native who was elected to Congress last year, said just last week that the project could “make us all safer in a world that has grown more unpredictable after Russia invaded Ukraine.”
There’s no doubt that the Willow Project, led by ConocoPhillips, represents the largest new Alaskan oil project in decades. At full capacity, it could increase total oil production in the state by more than a third. But experts told Grist that the energy and economic benefits of the project are smaller and less certain than its boosters have suggested. Not only will the Willow Project provide an insufficient substitute for Russian oil, but it will also deliver an ambiguous mix of costs and benefits to Alaska state coffers, which have long relied on fossil fuel revenue that is increasingly hard to come by — even with new drilling in the Arctic.
It’s not clear how much the Willow Project would help replace Russian oil supplies. First there’s the matter of timing: The project will not deliver its first barrels until 2028 or 2029, and it will take even longer for all three well pads that the Biden administration approved to start producing at full capacity. It’s possible the global oil supply picture will look very different by then: Western countries may have access to new sources of oil, like recent offshore projects in places like Guyana, and where crude prices will be is anyone’s guess.
Second, the particular kind of oil that Willow will produce isn’t a perfect substitute for the oil that the U.S. once bought from Russia. The chemistry of petroleum beneath Alaska’s North Slope is different from both light shale oil and the heavier oil that tends to come from places like Russia and Venezuela, so it will need to be blended with other oil in order to enter domestic refineries, which are mostly designed to refine specific types of crude. That’s why the United States kept importing oil even after the fracking boom began, and it’s why much of Willow’s oil wouldn’t replace imports from other countries.
“Alaska remains an important energy state, but it will not make or break the nation’s energy independence in the coming decades,” Phil Wight, an assistant professor of history and northern studies at the University Alaska Fairbanks, told Grist.
Indeed, the federal Bureau of Land Management’s own analysis found that Willow’s effect on the global energy market and American energy independence will be muted. According to the Bureau’s final environmental impact statement, only around half of the oil produced from the project will replace foreign imports from tankers and pipelines, with around 30 percent replacing other oil extracted in the United States.
Furthermore, the project’s position on the North Slope of Alaska will constrain potential demand for the new crude from refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast, since it would need to travel through the Panama Canal to get there. The top domestic markets for the oil will be California, Oregon, and Washington, three states that are all making aggressive attempts to promote electric vehicles and transition away from fossil fuels. Given that some estimates suggest electric vehicles could make up the majority of U.S. passenger car sales by 2030, it’s difficult to gauge how much West Coast demand there will be for Willow’s oil over the coming decades.
Even if ConocoPhillips does find buyers on the West Coast and overseas, Willow’s overall impact on oil prices will likely be small. According to the Bureau’s model, Willow will lower global oil prices by about 20 cents a barrel for as long as it operated at peak capacity. As of late Wednesday, the Brent oil benchmark was trading at around $75 a barrel.
“It’s hard to say that this will make a dent in either prices or supply,” said Chanda Meek, a professor of political science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The project’s economic impact within Alaska isn’t clearcut, either, despite what the state’s politicians say.
Alaska is the third-most oil-reliant state in the nation, behind Wyoming and North Dakota. According to the state’s own estimate, nearly 85 percent of the state budget comes from oil revenues. Taxes on oil have funded the construction of new buildings and hospitals, and oil prices affect how much funding public schools get. Alaskans, who don’t pay an income or sales tax, also get a check every year from a pot of money called the Permanent Fund Dividend, which is funded by oil royalties. (Each check topped more than $3,000 each last year, the highest amount residents have ever received.)
But this picture is changing. In 1988, Alaska’s trans-Alaska pipeline, or TAPS, was pumping a tremendous amount of petroleum from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope to Valdez on the state’s southern coast — approximately 2 million barrels a day. Now, however, depleted reserves within Alaska and the competing fracking boom in the Southwest’s Permian Basin have made the state’s oil less relevant — Alaska is currently pumping less than a quarter of the oil it was moving in the 1980s. Alaskan oil production hit a 40-year low in 2020.
“Willow is finally reapproved, and we can almost literally feel Alaska’s future brightening because of it,” Murkowski said after the Biden administration announced its decision. “We are now on the cusp of creating thousands of new jobs, generating billions of dollars in new revenues, improving quality of life on the North Slope and across our state, and adding vital energy to TAPS to fuel the nation and the world.”
Experts in Alaskan economic policy say those assertions don’t hold up under scrutiny, and the Willow Project is unlikely to bring back the kind of economic security oil provided the state a few decades ago.
Some estimates say Alaska could see $6 billion in revenue from the Willow Project, but that payout is years away. In the short term, the state may actually see a decrease in revenue. Because the project is on federal land, the state can only collect production taxes on the project and can’t collect royalties on the oil produced there. More importantly, ConocoPhillips can use a carveout in the state’s tax law to write off its expenses for this project against the taxes the company pays on its other oil developments in the state. One analysis, conducted by the governor’s office in 2018, forecast that the state wouldn’t see a positive economic impact from the Willow Project until 2026 and that the development would result in up to $1.6 billion in negative revenue through 2025 — a 6 percent decrease to the state’s overall revenue. An analysis from this year, conducted by Alaska’s Department of Revenue, says the project wouldn’t become “cash flow positive” for the state until 2035.
While the state would see negative revenue from the project’s first years of operation, municipalities will admittedly see more immediate positive benefits. Production taxes from the project are earmarked as grant programs for local communities, especially in the North Slope borough. The Department of Revenue’s recent analysis shows the North Slope will get $1.3 billion through 2053, and the cash will start flowing in the coming months. Communities impacted by the project will get an additional $3.7 billion over the next three decades.
Of course, the communities closest to drilling face a complex and sobering set of tradeoffs. The Alaska Native Village of Nuiqsut is going to be virtually surrounded by oil fields as a result of the approval of Willow, which threatens the subsistence hunting and fishing that has long sustained the town’s households. Nuiqsut’s mayor has been vocally opposed to the Willow Project, and local tribal leaders passed a resolution opposing it in 2019.
Zooming out, Wight said, the project signals to Alaskans, oil companies, and the rest of the world that the United States believes there will still be a market for Conoco’s oil three decades from now. At that time, however, the world’s governments should be completing a transition to clean energy. Indeed, President Biden recently signed a law that puts the nation on track to slash emissions 50 percent by 2030. How can that be the same world that needs 600 million new barrels of oil from Willow?
“We have the policy to build a renewable energy future,” Wight told Grist. “It’s much less clear how a managed decline of fossil fuels is going to happen.”
The Environmental Protection Agency released long-awaited proposed standards for cancer-causing “forever chemicals” in drinking water on Tuesday. Once finalized, the standards will force states to begin the arduous and expensive process of cleaning their water supplies of some of the class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. This marks the first time the EPA has proposed enforceable drinking water limits for PFAS, which are commonly known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down over time and can remain in the environment for years on end.
The proposed limits would cap two common types of PFAS contamination — the chemicals PFOA and PFOS — in drinking water at just 4 parts per trillion. That’s a significant reduction from the level the EPA suggested was safe as recently as 2016, when the agency put out a health advisory that suggested 70 parts per trillion as a maximum level for those types of PFAS in drinking water. This week’s announcement signals that federal regulators’ understanding of the health impacts of exposure to these chemicals is rapidly evolving and that the EPA now appears to believe that virtually no quantity of the chemicals is safe for human consumption.
There are more than 12,000 chemicals under the PFAS umbrella, some used more widely than others. In total, the rule would apply to six commonly used types: PFOA, PFOS, PFNA, PFBS, PFHxS, and GenX. Besides limiting PFOA and PFOS to 4 parts per trillion, the remaining four types of chemicals would be restricted based on their combined effects. The agency is now soliciting feedback from the public on the proposed rule and aims to finalize it by the end of the year.
In recent years, as the EPA mulled over how strict to make its PFAS standard, some states — including Alaska, Massachusetts, and Vermont — chose to move forward without the agency and propose or set their own limits on forever chemicals. The federal rule would supersede any state limits that clock in above 4 parts per trillion.
PFAS have been used in firefighting foam, rain jackets, pizza boxes, popcorn bags, nonstick pans, couches, and other industrial and consumer products for decades. While their water-resistant properties are convenient, the chemicals have been linked to adverse health effects in humans, such as compromised immune systems, thyroid disorders, and kidney and testicular cancers, among other issues.
Chemical companies in the United States, which knew in the 1970s that PFAS were building up in Americans’ bloodstreams and that the chemicals could have serious health consequences in humans, manufactured PFAS for decades without alerting the public to the potential consequences. The cost of ridding the nation’s water supplies of PFAS could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Water utilities will have to spend big on new technologies that are sensitive enough to filter out the tiny chemicals.
A number of affected utilities are taking the chemical company 3M, a major manufacturer of PFAS, to court this summer in an effort to force the company to pay for the cost of cleanup. Their lawsuit alleges that 3M and other chemical companies knew about the negative health impacts of forever chemicals decades ago and chose not to tell federal regulators about it in order to continue turning a profit. 3M announced last year that it will stop manufacturing PFAS by 2025, but the company still does not publicly admit that its products have caused or could cause harm to humans.
Advocates celebrated the EPA’s new standards on Tuesday. “It has taken far too long to get to this point, but the scientific facts and truth about the health threat posed by these man-made poisons have finally prevailed over the decades of corporate cover-ups and misinformation campaigns designed to mislead the public and delay action,” Robert Bilott, the attorney who successfully sued DuPont in 1999 for poisoning communities in West Virginia with the forever chemical PFOA, said in a statement provided to Grist. In 2018, he filed a lawsuit against PFAS manufacturers on behalf of everyone in the U.S. with forever chemicals in their blood (that is, virtually all of us). The litigation is ongoing.
“Today’s proposal is a necessary and long overdue step towards addressing the nation’s PFAS crisis,” Earthjustice attorney Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz said in a statement. “EPA must resist efforts to weaken this proposal, move quickly to finalize health-protective limits on these six chemicals, and address the remaining PFAS that continue to poison drinking water supplies and harm communities across the country.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
The 193 countries of the United Nations have agreed on a first-of-its-kind treaty to protect the biodiversity of the world’s oceans — a massive step toward a goal decades in the making. The agreement, which was reached at U.N. headquarters in New York over the weekend, still needs to be formally adopted by the intergovernmental organization and ratified by its individual member countries.
For more than a century, oceans have served as a de facto dumping ground for industrializing nations. Wealthy countries like the United States, which cast their plastic and other trash into the sea, rely on the ocean to suck up vast quantities of carbon emissions while plumbing its depths for seafood and offshore fossil fuels. As a result, oceans have grown progressively warmer, more acidic, and more polluted, which has jeopardized the extensive marine ecosystems that used to thrive below the surface. The U.N. began talks to adopt a legal framework to protect the ocean in 2004, but disagreements over which parts of the ocean should be protected, how wealthy and developing nations share marine resources, and how fossil fuel companies should navigate more stringent marine environmental regulations delayed agreement until now.
“Our ocean has been under pressure for decades,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Wednesday, urging members to come to an agreement. “We can no longer ignore the ocean emergency.”
The “high seas” — a classification that begins 200 nautical miles off of the coast of most nations — are not controlled by any one country. A patchwork of laws and agreements govern those waters, and they are aimed at regulating shipping, fishing, and other human activities. The treaty, if ratified, will establish a new set of rules on the high seas aimed at protecting marine species and the balance of its ecosystems.
The agreement would instate a new group within the U.N. in charge of managing ocean conservation and require detailed environmental impact assessments for all new activities on the high seas, including tourism. The treaty would also create areas within the ocean that are protected from human activity. Establishing marine sanctuaries where ocean species, some of which haven’t even been discovered by humans yet, can flourish undisturbed is key to the U.N.’s pledge last year to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030.
“The high seas are especially vulnerable to climate change,” Doug McCauley, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Grist last March. “They’re impacted by changes in ocean temperature, ocean warming, and ocean acidification. These protected areas could at least create a little bit of breathing room for species in the face of this climate threat.”
The health of the high seas is intrinsically linked to human health and well-being. Roughly half of the oxygen we breathe is made by microscopic plants that live in the ocean. Billions of people around the world rely on the ocean for food. And, more long term, marine species could supply scientists with genetic material that could help treat diseases. (Which countries get to benefit from these yet-undiscovered scientific advancements was one of the issues that held up negotiations in prior efforts to achieve an international agreement on oceans.) The agreement on Saturday marks a historic step toward shielding the ocean, and humans, from climate change, pollution, and other 21st-century threats.
“There’s a load of evidence on how we can restore ocean health,” Will McCallum, head of oceans at the environmental nonprofit Greenpeace U.K., told Grist last year. “The ocean has a remarkable capacity to rebound.”
Joseph Winters contributed reporting to this story.
Editor’s note: Greenpeace is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Two years ago, enormous fires ripped through some 46 million acres of forest in Russia, the country’s worst fire season on record. The scale of tree cover loss in the massive boreal, or northern, forests that blanket Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia that year was staggering — but so was the scale of destruction produced by the Indonesian peatland fires in 2015, the Australian bushfires in 2019, and the wildfires in the western United States in 2020.
Now, researchers have a clearer sense of just how significant the 2021 boreal forest fires were in terms of emissions. The fires produced more planet-heating carbon dioxide than any other extreme fire event that has occurred since the turn of the 21st century, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
Boreal forests, characterized by conifers like spruce and pine, grow in the planet’s high latitudes where it is very cold — below freezing for at least half the year. The trees that live in this type of forest grow slowly and sequester carbon in their trunks and roots for hundreds of years, collectively comprising a massive trove of trapped emissions that researchers call a carbon sink. But the northernmost parts of the planet are warming faster than anywhere else on earth due to human-fueled climate change. Rising temperatures and related drought in these historically cool regions have led to an uptick in extreme wildfire activity and threaten to unleash the carbon stored in the trees that grow there, transforming a carbon sink into a carbon source.
In all, fires in boreal forests, considered to be the world’s largest land biome and a massive carbon sponge, produced nearly half a billion metric tons of carbon in 2021. That’s more carbon than the entire continent of Australia produced the same year, though some of the emissions produced by the fires will be sucked back up as forests regrow.
The study showed that for the past decade or so, boreal forests, especially forests in the uppermost reaches of Alaska, Canada, and Russia, have steadily become drier and hotter as heat waves and drought parched the environment. Fires in boreal forests are a normal part of the life cycle of trees that grow there. But climate change is throwing that cycle out of whack. Just in the past handful of years, forests in northern latitudes reached a tipping point and started to produce far more emissions than usual.
“You get drought, drought, drought, but then you hit a threshold, and all of a sudden, your emissions start to double or triple,” Josep G. Canadell, executive director of a climate research initiative called the Global Carbon Project and coauthor of the study, told Grist.
The researchers obtained the data for their study by tracking concentrations of emissions in the atmosphere using satellites, and then they plugged that information into a computer model to determine where, geographically, those emissions came from. They found that boreal forests, which typically produce about 10 percent of the globe’s annual wildfire emissions, accounted for 23 percent of the world’s wildfire emissions in 2021 — more than twice as much as normal.
James MacCarthy, a research associate at the World Resources Institute who studies wildfires and climate change and was not involved in the new study, told Grist that, while previous analyses have pointed to 2021 as a particularly destructive year for boreal forests, the study is a valuable contribution to the field because it “offers meaningful insights about where fire emissions increased the most within boreal regions and provides potential explanations for why those emissions are increasing.”
Canadell is most concerned about the study’s main takeaway: Boreal forests have served an important and underappreciated role in sequestering carbon emissions, but climate change threatens to unleash that stored carbon. “We need to be very careful with these systems in terms of their future evolution,” he said.
In early February, lawmakers in Minnesota passed a law requiring the state’s power utilities to supply customers with 100 percent clean electricity by 2040 — one of the more ambitious clean energy standards in the United States. Democrats, who clinched control of the state legislature in last year’s midterm elections, were euphoric. But not everyone in the region is enthused about Minnesota’s clean energy future. The state may soon face a legal challenge from its next-door neighbor, North Dakota.
Not long after Minnesota’s governor signed the law, the North Dakota Industrial Commission, the three-member body that oversees North Dakota’s utilities, agreed unanimously to consider a lawsuit challenging the new legislation. The law, North Dakota regulators said, infringes on North Dakota’s rights under the Dormant Commerce Clause in the United States Constitution by stipulating what types of energy it can contribute to Minnesota’s energy market.
“This isn’t about the environment. This is about state sovereignty,” North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, the chair of the Industrial Commission, said. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a longtime proponent of clean energy legislation, was quick to respond. “I trust that this bill is solid,” he told reporters. “I trust that it will stand up because it was written to do exactly that.”
The potential showdown illuminates an underappreciated obstacle to the energy transition: interstate beef. Feuds between neighboring states threaten to make the difficult task of getting regional power grids off fossil fuels even more complicated and expensive.
North Dakota hasn’t filed a lawsuit yet, but the Industrial Commission has requested $3 million from the state legislature for legal fees on top of $1 million the commission has already allocated to the effort from its “Lignite Research Program” — an initiative funded by taxes on fossil fuel revenue that researches and develops new coal projects in the state.
It’s no mystery why North Dakota was so quick to go on the offensive. Most of the state’s power comes from coal, and it sells some 50 percent of the electricity it generates to nearby states. Its biggest customer is Minnesota. Minnesota’s new law stipulates that all electricity sold in the state come from renewable sources on a set timeline — 80 percent carbon-free by 2030, 90 percent by 2035, and 100 percent by 2040. That means that North Dakota’s coal-fired power will be squeezed out of Minnesota’s electricity market.
North Dakota regulators are confident they’ll prevail in a legal dispute, but Burgum said the state is waiting to see whether Minnesota will amend its law before taking the disagreement to court. “This is something where if they make a small change we can avoid the certainty of a lawsuit that’s probably going to have a certain outcome to it,” the governor said in early February. The state successfully sued Minnesota over a 2007 law that sought to ban coal imports to the state from new sources. But outside legal experts aren’t so sure the plaintiffs will be victorious this time.
“Minnesota is under no legal duty to prop up North Dakota power plants,” Michael Gerrard, founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told Grist. The state would find itself in legal trouble if it discriminated between in-state and out-of-state power plants, he said. For example, if Minnesota’s law accepted coal-fired power from plants inside its own borders but banned coal power from North Dakota, that would certainly violate federal interstate commerce law. But that’s not what Minnesota has proposed. The state is requiring clean power across the board, from in-state andoutside sources.
Gerrard pointed to a comparable 2015 case in Colorado. A fossil fuel industry group sued the state over a renewable energy standard it passed in 2004 — the very first clean energy standard passed by popular vote in the U.S. The group argued the standard overstepped Colorado’s authority under the U.S. constitution, a similar argument to the one North Dakota is threatening to make. But a federal court upheld the standard. The decision was written by Neil Gorsuch, who is now one of the more conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We have one of the conservative Supreme Court justices saying that a state clean energy standard is fine,” Gerrard said. “So I think the outlook, if this case gets to the Supreme Court, would be favorable to Minnesota.”
That’s significant, especially from a climate perspective. With Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the chances of new climate legislation passing in this Congress are slim. Looking ahead, Gerrard said, the progress that does take place on combating climate change will likely happen at the state level. “Certainly the moves by some of the blue states to do more on climate change are going to be some of the central elements of climate action for the next two years,” he said. He expects red states and the fossil fuel industry to continue to sue to try to stop clean energy mandates. “Industry will fight back,” he said.
American homes in flood zones are overvalued by hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Low-income homeowners in states controlled by Republicans are especially at risk of seeing their home values deflate as global warming accelerates.
Flooding is a costly and deadly natural hazard across the United States. For decades, the Federal Emergency Management Agency offered flood insurance at discounted rates, incentivizing developers to build houses in flood-prone areas. The agency’s flood maps are also notoriously outdated. That has led to a dangerous situation for homeowners as they grapple with year after year of debilitating floods.
The study, published by a group of academic, nonprofit, and government organizations that include the Environmental Defense Fund and the Federal Reserve, revealed that homes in flood zones are overvalued by as much as $237 billion.
The researchers found that coastal property owners and homeowners in states that have inadequate or nonexistent flood disclosure laws, such as Florida, where there are no disclosure laws and homes are overvalued by $50 billion, were particularly vulnerable to overvaluation. They also found that a large share of overvalued homes are in areas that FEMA says aren’t currently at significant risk of flooding, a signal that flood maps need updating. The study’s authors told Grist that states need to gauge and clearly communicate flood risk to homeowners regardless of whether their home is located in one of the agency’s “special flood hazard areas,” where flood insurance is mandatory for most mortgages.
According to the study, low-income homeowners could see up to 10 percent of their market value disappear in coming years, a blow for those least able to withstand one. “What we find is that lower-income households are more exposed to risk of price deflation in the housing market,” Jesse Gourevitch, a fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund and a co-author of the study, told Grist. “If that bubble were to burst those households could be at risk of losing home equity.”
The fallout from climate-fueled flood risk extends beyond individual homeowners to their larger communities. The study showed that cities in northern New England, eastern Tennessee, central Texas, Wisconsin, Idaho, Montana, and many coastal areas could see their budgets shrink if the true value of homes in flood zones were taken into account and property tax revenues declined as a result.
“Many local governments are heavily dependent on property tax revenue for their overall budget,” Gourevitch said. “In areas with particularly high flood risk and where flood risk isn’t adequately priced into property value, there is this possibility that the assessed value of properties could fall.”
Some states have passed laws that require sellers to disclose flood risk to buyers, which is a good way to hedge against the overvaluation described in the study. This week, the North Carolina Real Estate Commission approved a petition to give homebuyers the right to information about flood risk. But twenty-one states, including Georgia and New York, still keep homebuyers in the dark. Implementing disclosure requirements in those states could help address the future financial risk of flooding.
The study “raises a lot of moral questions for policymakers about who will bear the costs of these climate impacts,” Gourevitch said. State and federal lawmakers may soon have to reckon with whether overvaluation is an individual burden or if it’s on the government to bail people out.
Public health experts around the world are sounding the alarm as cases of a virulent strain of avian influenza called H5N1 rise in mammals. Bird flu has infected humans in the past, mostly people who work directly with diseased poultry, but there has never been widespread human-to-human transmission of the virus. If there were, it could be a catastrophe: The original H5N1 mutation had a 50 to 60 percent mortality rate in humans.
The latest outbreak of H5N1, which began in the U.S. in late 2021, has resulted in the culling of 58 million birds thus far and led to a marked increase in the cost of eggs and poultry at the supermarket. It’s America’s second major surge of H5N1 since the strain was first detected in southern China in the late 1990s — the first significant U.S. wave kicked off in 2014 and was contained mainly to the Midwest.
Since 2021, H5N1 has been found in at least 47 states. It’s circulating among wild birds, cropping up in wild mammals, and, crucially, bouncing between mink. That last development is what really has experts alarmed. More broadly, the H5N1 outbreak fits a pattern scientists have been ringing alarm bells about for years now: Climate change is throwing ecosystems out of whack and spurring the spread of disease, putting wildlife and human health at risk.
Avian flu viruses are adapted to bind to birds’ receptor cells. Humans and other mammals have some avian-like receptors, but they’re typically buried deep in the lungs. Because of this anatomical quirk, it would take an enormous load of H5N1 for one infected mammal to dredge up enough of the virus to infect another mammal. Unless, of course, the virus evolved to bind to mammalian cells in the upper respiratory tract.
That’s what appears to be happening now. Late last year, 50,000 mink on a mink farm in Spain were killed when lab tests showed the animals had contracted H5N1. A study published last month said that the virus had been spreading between the mammals, whose respiratory tracts have physiological similarities to humans’. It’s the first time such an outbreak has been documented.
“It’s something we’ve never seen,” Jean-Pierre Vaillancourt, a professor in the department of clinical sciences at the University of Montreal in Canada, said. “Am I concerned? Hell yes, I’m concerned.”
Recent isolated cases of H5N1 in various wild animal species are adding to experts’ unease. The virus has cropped up in seals, sea lions, dolphins, grizzly bears, foxes, and ferrets, many of which probably got the virus from eating infected birds. Globally, there have been six human H5N1 infections, including one death, in this surge of the virus, none of which was caused by one human giving it to another. But experts are keeping a close eye on H5N1 in case the virus continues to adapt to the point where it can easily infect humans and prompt person-to-person transmission.
“We don’t want an avian H5N1 being adapted to mammals,” Juergen A. Richt, director of the Center of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases, told Grist. “Obviously, the next level would be humans.”
The past few years have seen an uptick in the size and pace of bird flu outbreaks. The virus has moved outside the bounds of its typical seasons, which coincide with birds’ spring and fall migrations. In the past year, H5N1 has been detected in the summer months in Italy, when high temperatures should have extinguished it, and in the depths of winter in Canada, when migrating birds are few and far between. The factors influencing these outbreaks are still largely unknown. The virus may be hanging out in the environment for longer or spreading with greater frequency and ease between birds.
Vaillancourt suspects one overarching explanation. “How come this virus is popping up in the middle of summer in the Mediterranean Sea or when it’s minus 20 or 30 in a commercial farm in Canada?” he asked. “There’s close to 80 countries in the world with this problem, we’ve never seen that before. That’s why we’re seriously looking at climate change.”
Studies have found that changing weather patterns fundamentally affect the way birds behave in ways that could influence the spread of bird flu. Rising temperatures and the seasonal changes they induce force birds to adjust their migratory patterns and converge in new combinations. Rising sea levels also affect where birds make their nests and lay their eggs, prompting species that don’t typically interact to make contact and share disease.
“In the last two to three years, we have seen a drastic change in the pattern of circulation of H5N1 virus in wild bird population, with massive outbreaks and a wider set of species involved,” Marius Gilbert, a spatial epidemiologist at the National Fund for Scientific Research in Brussels, told Grist via email. He said scientists have been able to make links between climate change and bird migration, but figuring out the ways in which climate change may be influencing the spread of avian flu is a far more complicated and difficult task.
Generally, research shows that climate change threatens to fundamentally restructure existing networks of animals, which creates conditions for diseases to find and infect new hosts, a process called “viral spillover.” More opportunities for disease sharing among a wide range of species, not just birds, may lead to more illnesses making the jump from animals into human beings, the way COVID did in 2019.
Implementing wildlife disease surveillance networks — systems local governments can use to find and identify rogue pathogens in the wild before they infect humans — can help keep these illnesses at bay. When an illness such as H5N1 is detected on a farm, nearby public health departments should be able to quickly distribute tests to farmworkers and anyone else who comes in contact with a sick animal, so that people with infections can isolate. Wealthy countries like the U.S. should also be investing heavily in an mRNA vaccine for influenza, which could be rapidly tweaked to match H5N1 if it started to spread among humans and shared with the rest of the globe. (The U.S. has a small stockpile of non-mRNA H5N1 vaccines, but ramping up production would take months.)
“We have many of the tools that are needed, including vaccines,” Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist and an opinion writer for the New York Times, wrote in a recent column about H5N1. “What’s missing is a sense of urgency and immediate action.”
Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota passed an ambitious climate law late Thursday night requiring the state’s power utilities to use 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. The clean electricity legislation was approved on a party-line vote by the state’s Senate. House Democrats passed an identical version of the bill last week, which means it now goes to the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, who intends to sign it.
“Minnesota has a proud tradition of being a national clean energy leader, but we’ve fallen behind other states,” Democratic House Majority Leader Jamie Long, who authored the bill, told Grist in a statement. “Minnesotans are calling on us to act and we are answering the call.”
The legislation establishes two new mandates for electric utilities in the state: a renewable electricity standard and a carbon-free energy standard. The former builds on a law the North Star State passed in 2007, which required power utilities to get at least 25 percent of their energy supply from renewable sources by 2025. They achieved that goal eight years early. The new standard ups the requirement to 55 percent renewable energy by 2035. The second standard instructs electric utilities that operate in the state to get 100 percent of their power from carbon-free sources by 2040, with targets set along the way — 80 percent carbon-free by 2030 and 90 percent by 2035. Utilities can use a mix of solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear, hydrogen power, and biomass — energy obtained from burning wood and trash — to meet the 2040 goal.
Minnesota’s two top power utility companies, Xcel Energy and Minnesota Power, previously promised to reach 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2050. This bill speeds up their timeline by a decade, but it also includes “off-ramps” that utilities can take advantage of if the targets prove too onerous. If Xcel, for example, can make a case before state regulators that the benchmarks set by the legislation prevents it from supplying its customers with reliable power, the state may grant it an extension. Utilities can also buy clean energy tax credits to offset their emissions.
The bill contains provisions that will help streamline the permitting process for new energy projects in the state, set minimum wage requirements for workers hired by the state’s utilities to build large-scale projects, and prevent power from waste incineration plants located in low-income, majority non-White communities from counting toward the 2040 target.
Environmental justice groups in Minnesota fought hard to get that last provision included in the bill — they argued that waste-to-energy facilities, like the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center in Minneapolis, endanger the health of communities that live around them. The groups said the legislation is a good first step but argued that it doesn’t do enough to disincentivize other garbage incineration plants currently operating across the state.
State Republicans opposed the clean energy standard on the grounds that it would make electricity in the state more expensive and less reliable. “This ‘blackout bill’ is going to make energy unreliable, unsafe, and even dangerous,” the Republican House minority leader, Lisa Demuth, said. “Energy needs to be safe. We need it in Minnesota to be reliable, and this is neither.” Multiple analyses of existing state-level clean energy standards show the mandates have actually improved grid reliability and reduced costs for consumers.
Minnesota House Democrats attempted to pass similar legislation before, in 2021, and were shot down by the Republican-controlled state Senate. In 2022, the party narrowly clinched a majority in the chamber, which illuminated a new path forward for climate legislation. Minnesota is the first state to pass a clean energy standard since Democrats in Washington, D.C., passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest federal investment in fighting climate change in U.S. history, last August.
“This is the culmination of a lot of hard work,” Paul Austin, head of Conservation Minnesota, told Grist. “It shows how the federal legislation and the state legislation can work together, and it shows that the states can continue to lead if Congress doesn’t have that window to do major things on climate going forward.”
Diarrhea, both common and preventable, is among the most dangerous threats to young children in the Global South, where clean water and medical care are often scarce. Diarrheal diseases, and the intense dehydration that accompanies them, kill more children under 5 years old than almost anything else — more than half a million children every year — primarily in middle- and low-income countries. Many parts of the globe have made progress against the viruses, bacteria, and parasites that cause diarrhea in recent decades — but climate change is threatening to slow those advancements.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights the relationship between rising temperatures and diarrheal disease in children under 3 years old. The study’s authors found that weather anomalies called “precipitation shocks” are associated with an increased risk of diarrhea in many parts of the world. These unusually wet or dry periods have grown increasingly common as the planet warms and higher-than-normal temperatures contribute to an atmosphere that oscillates between exceedingly moist and extremely dry, depending on the region.
Previous studies have shown a correlation between the changing climate and diarrheal disease, but those analyses took place on a small scale, usually looking at a single village or city. This study is among the first to take a bird’s-eye view of the issue by analyzing that link across dozens of countries.
“We have known for some time now that climate change-related extreme heat and precipitation increases diarrheal diseases,” Amir Sapkota, chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Maryland, told Grist. “What’s different and exciting about this study is that now it’s expanding that into 50-some countries.” Sapkota, who has studied the links between climate change and infectious disease in the past, was not involved in this new research.
The study’s authors collected data from interviews with mothers of young children from all over the world between 2000 and 2019. The interviews, conducted by an international development group, included information about where each child was geographically located and whether they had recently experienced symptoms associated with diarrhea. In total, the researchers obtained nationally representative information about some 600,000 children, about 18 percent of whom had experienced diarrhea in the weeks leading up to the interview. They overlaid that information with precipitation and drought data from the same time period.
“This helped us to find out the associations between droughts, extreme rainfall, and children’s risk of diarrhea,” Anna Dimitrova, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego and the lead author of the study, told Grist.
Dimitrova and her team discovered that children face a heightened risk of diarrhea after extreme weather events in regions of the world where climate change is prompting dry seasons to become drier and wet seasons to become wetter. Zones known as the tropical savanna — Nigeria and Sudan in north-central Africa, for example — which are already prone to bouts of dryness, are becoming even more parched. Areas called the subtropical highlands, including Peru and Bolivia in western South America, experienced the opposite problem — monsoons are dumping even more rain on populations there. In both of these types of regions, the researchers found a strong correlation between these precipitation shocks and diarrhea symptoms in young children.
The association between changing weather and diarrhea risk in low-income countries is yet another example of the disproportionate burden climate change is placing on the Global South — countries that have contributed relatively little to the bank of greenhouse gas emissions causing temperatures to rise. Climate change can influence the spread of pathogens anywhere. It becomes a critical public health risk when extended dry or wet periods occur in communities that lack essential sanitation infrastructure such as plumbing.
That infrastructural inequity helps explain why precipitation shocks can lead to an increase in diarrhea in the regions the researchers identified. In low-income countries, many people lack access to clean municipal water and toilets. Open defecation pits are still the norm in parts of the world that lack the resources to build out sanitation systems. And people get their drinking and washing water from open rivers, streams, and ponds. During extreme flooding events, bacteria from excrement can leach into water sources and infect people. More flooding events and longer wet seasons mean more people are potentially exposed to dangerous pathogens that lead to diarrhea.
An inverse but similarly hazardous pattern occurs during drought: Punishing dry seasons and flash droughts shrink local waterways and drinking water supplies, forcing people to dip into increasingly concentrated pools of water or to get their water from sources they know to be dangerous. A dearth of available water also forces communities to forgo crucial hygiene practices such as handwashing, which help kill bacteria and keep diseases at bay.
“This is a very concerning trend,” Dimitrova said. “It’s not only the lives lost. Children are also losing a lot of school days, it can affect their performance in school, it can affect their growth and development.”
The good news is solutions are low-tech and cost effective. Communities with access to piped water may assume that their water is safe because it comes out of a tap, but that’s not always the case, Dimitrova said. Local governments can monitor water quality and alert residents if bacteria pops up. Educating communities about how to make sure their water is safe, either by boiling, testing, or treating it, is another low-cost intervention. And it’s imperative that governments improve access to vaccinations, especially against the rotavirus, a leading cause of diarrhea in children.
These solutions have already led to a decrease in diarrheal infections since the 1970s and ‘80s, Sapkota said, which means they work. But climate change is limiting that progress. “Although the rate is going down, climate change-driven hazards exacerbate” diarrheal infections, he said. “I think the challenge moving forward is, what are we going to do about it? Climate change is going nowhere, so how do we adapt to this new set of hazards as a society?”
Kevin McCarthy, U.S. representative from California and the leader of the House Republican Conference, has been one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington for more than a decade. But McCarthy spent the first week of the 118th Congress in a severely diminished state.
Early on Saturday morning, McCarthy was elected speaker of the House after a grueling, historic, and humiliating 15 rounds of voting. For five days, a group of Republican hard-liners blocked his bid for House speaker. The Californian made a series of extraordinary concessions to win support from his ultraconservative colleagues. Matt Gaetz, a hard-right Republican from Florida and one of McCarthy’s toughest holdouts, said he finally gave in because “I ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for.”
On Monday night, House Republicans voted 220-213 to enshrine some of the concessions into the chamber’s rules. The measure, which dictates how the 118th Congress operates, includes an addendum that enumerates other concessions that McCarthy agreed to. And House lawmakers told the New York Times they were worried that the speaker had agreed to even more handshake agreements that weren’t reflected in the written package.
The compromises McCarthy made in exchange for the speaker’s gavel could reshape the way the lower chamber operates. Among other concessions, McCarthy agreed to let any member call for a vote to unseat the speaker at any time; to give members of the Freedom Caucus, the most conservative bloc within the House, seats on powerful committees; and to allow lawmakers to propose more amendments on the chamber floor. Some of McCarthy’s compromises may have ramifications, as well, for climate policy.
“Kevin McCarthy has ceded his speakership and control of the House Republican agenda to the most extreme fringe faction of his party,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Third Way, told Grist. “There’s a real chance that Republicans are going to try to gut really important government investment on everything, including clean energy and climate.”
Freed is referring to a plank of the deal McCarthy struck with his hard-right colleagues to put a cap on discretionary spending — money approved by Congress and the president every year through the annual appropriations process. Discretionary spending includes all federal expenditures that aren’t funded by their own law. About 30 percent of the government’s overall spending is discretionary, including funding for many climate and environmental programs. New limits on that funding could affect clean energy research overseen by the Department of Energy, limit the Interior Department’s conservation efforts, and restrict disaster recovery distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Administration, among other projects.
Other elements of the deal, such as putting members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus on the House Rules Committee, which plays a pivotal role in influencing how legislation moves through the House, could have an indirect impact on climate policy by affecting the legislation lawmakers even get to vote on.
Prior to McCarthy’s capitulations to the most extreme wing of his party, there was a slight possibility that Democrats and Republicans could have found common ground on some key measures. McCarthy has his own climate agenda that he’s been honing for a handful of years — a response, in part, to the popularity of progressive Democrats’ Green New Deal. That plan, like other Republican climate policy proposals to date, fails to address the root causes of global warming or to slash emissions in line with scientists’ recommendations. Last summer, McCarthy unveiled a climate strategy that called for increasing domestic production of fossil fuels and exports of natural gas and speeding up the permitting process for big infrastructure projects.
Streamlining permitting is something members of both parties have said they’ve wanted to accomplish for years. In the last Congress, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin tried to move a bipartisan permitting reform bill forward but wasn’t able to garner enough support. Such a bill would have helped realize the full potential of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate spending bill passed by Democrats last year, by making it easier to build transmission lines to carry renewable power to customers.
Permitting reform might have been something that was addressed again this Congress, but Freed said McCarthy’s compromises make that prospect even more remote by ceding middle ground to the hard right. “It puts the possibility of legislating on issues like permitting reform, where there otherwise could have been a bipartisan solution that was conceivable, at extreme risk,” he said.
When it comes to passing climate policy, Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat from Illinois who has a background in clean energy development and just secured his third term in the House (and used to write for this publication), said it’s a foregone conclusion that a Republican House majority equals a lack of action on climate change. What McCarthy promised ultraconservatives doesn’t affect that equation much, in his view. Many Republican members of the House who are in powerful positions or sit on important committees represent fossil fuel producing regions and take hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies.
McCarthy himself hails from Bakersfield, California, a city so steeped in oil that its high-school football team, which McCarthy played on as a teenager, is called “the Drillers.” He received more money from oil and gas interests during the 2022 campaign than any other member of the House — more than $500,000.
“They are, understandably, hostile to anything that would reduce demand for fossil fuels or reduce the price of fossil fuels,” Casten said. “Progress on climate isn’t going to happen with Republicans in the majority.”
Europe broke heat records last year, and 2023 is shaping up to be no different. A winter heat dome descended on the continent right just in time for New Year’s Day, crushing thousands of standing high-temperature records. Eight countries — Belarus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Poland — set new all-time records for warmest January weather on the first of the month. The heat wave caused temperatures to rise up to 36 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) above average for this time of year.
“This is exactly the kind of very abnormal event that is progressively rewriting global climatology,” Nahel Belgherze, a meteorologist in France, said in a tweet. Other experts based in Europe said the heat wave was unprecedented and alarming. Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera told CNN it’s “the most extreme heat wave in European history.”
Climate researchers say the science linking climate change to record-setting heat waves is indisputable. Analyses of more than 100 hot spells over the past decade have shown that modern-day global warming, the majority of which has been brought about by the burning of fossil fuels, made nearly all of them more likely or severe. For example, an unusually hot summer in Texas in 2011 and a summertime European heat wave in 2017 were made 10 and four times more likely by climate change, respectively.
It’ll take time for researchers to parse exactly how much rising global temperatures influenced this particular weather event. Abnormal heat is still moving through Europe as the heat wave mixes with Arctic air edging in from the northeast and dissipates. But it’s already abundantly clear that Europe just experienced a severe departure from the norm.
Poland broke its national temperature record before the sun had even breached the horizon on New Year’s Day when the town of Glucholazy hit 65.7 degrees F, according to the Washington Post. France broke more than 100 heat records that day. A town in western Belarus clocked a maximum temperature of 61.5 degrees F — the norm there in midwinter is 32 degrees F. The warm winter has turned famed European skiing destinations soupy and brown. Parts of the Alps were totally devoid of snow as of January 1; a major skiing competition set to take place in Switzerland next week will depend entirely on artificial flakes.
The extremely warm temperatures aren’t expected to stick around for much longer, but meteorologists say above-average temperatures could plague mainland Europe for at least another week.
The sun is setting in Glacier County, Montana. Souta Calling Last guns her diesel-powered white GMC pickup truck east on Highway 2. The car following her can barely keep up as she hurtles across the dimming prairie, one hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, her eyes scanning the side of the highway. Calling Last, a researcher and an enrolled member of the Blood Tribe — one of the four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy — grew up on the Blackfeet reservation. She knows this landscape by heart.
“There it is,” she says and yanks the steering wheel to the right, sending a plume of dust into the air as she brakes hard on the gravel shoulder. The Two Medicine River, sacred to the Amskapi Pikuni, the Blackfeet, rushes nearby. A couple of minutes later, a gray Toyota slowly pulls in behind the GMC and rolls to a stop. The words “Working Dogs for Conservation” are printed on its side in block letters. A volley of excited yips and whines rings out from the truck bed.
Calling Last has brought Working Dogs for Conservation, or WD4C, a nonprofit that trains dogs to hunt down invasive species and poachers, to the Blackfeet reservation to help her solve a mystery. In recent decades, unusual cancers and thyroid issues have bloomed in clusters across the Nation. Some Blackfeet stopped harvesting wild plants and animals — like mint, huckleberries, and elk — suspecting that traditional sources of sustenance for countless generations had become contaminated and diseased. But so far, there’s been limited empirical research linking the tribe’s public health woes to its environment. Calling Last aims to change that by conducting a comprehensive scientific survey of environmental contaminants in Blackfeet territory. If it works, her experiment will give the community peace of mind and the freedom to harvest wild edibles safely.
Her success relies on two restless dogs waiting in crates in the back of the gray truck.
Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Frost is a rust-and-cream-colored Springer spaniel-pit mix. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Frost is a rust-and-cream-colored Springer spaniel-pit mix, Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt. Sully, who was trained to track down human remains before he came to WD4C, was part of an unplanned litter. Frost was surrendered by his former owners for being too excitable, too energetic, and too obsessed with balls — traits that made him a perfect candidate for professional service.
Freed from the back of the truck, Frost and Sully zigzag from bank to bank, their tails wagging furiously. They’ve been trained to pinpoint mink and otter droppings, or scat, which can contain toxins because of processes called bioaccumulation and biomagnification, when substances move through the food chain and get concentrated in organisms. Insects like mayflies and dragonflies pick up toxins from their environment and accumulate them in their exoskeletons, then they’re consumed in vast numbers by trout and other fish, which in turn get eaten by mink and otters. The mammals leave their scat, infused with whatever toxins were originally in the insects, on the sides of the Two Medicine and other water bodies on the reservation.
All of a sudden, Frost stops running and starts sniffing around a beaver dam. Michele Vasquez, a canine field specialist who is leading the Blackfeet project for WD4C, isn’t sure whether the dog is excited about scat or if he’s trying to rouse an animal hiding in the dam, but she hangs back a few feet to let him work. Seconds later, Frost sits and makes eye contact with Vasquez. “Yeah? You think you’ve got something?” she asks him, and leans forward for a closer look.
Sure enough, a small, jet black dropping is perched precariously on a twig a few inches inside the beaver dam: mink scat. “What a guy!” Vasquez exclaims. She pulls Frost’s reward, a yellow ball on a rope, out of her fanny pack and chucks it into the river. Frost dives after it, ecstatic. Vasquez’s colleague, forensic field specialist Ngaio Richards, walks over and dons a plastic glove before reaching her hand into the dam to collect the sample and put it in a paper bag. Vasquez marks the place where Frost found the scat on her GPS. They’ll send the scat, and all the other samples they collect on this trip, to a lab for testing. When the results come back, Calling Last will share the data with her community. Clean scat means it’s safe to harvest wild edibles from this part of the river; toxic scat means it’s better to harvest somewhere else.
Calling Last has heard stories about contaminants buried on the reservation her whole life: whispers about a web of toxic hotspots, the legacy of decades of illegal dumping of trash, electronics, and other hazards. Rumors that a company paid the tribe a paltry sum to bury a cache of nuclear waste somewhere on the Nation’s rolling plains in the 1960s. Snatches of information about the chemicals companies used for fracking in the Bakken shale formation, which runs beneath part of the reservation and contains billions of barrels of oil and natural gas. The threat of oil extraction still looms today. The tribe is currently fighting to stop an oil company, Solenex, that wants to drill near the Badger and Two Medicine Rivers, which hold some of the tribe’s most sacred and culturally significant sites.
These scattered reports have contributed to a sense of unease among the Nation. “I feel like there’s a lot of fear on the reservation,” Celina Gray, a Little Shell and Blackfeet mother of four and a graduate student at the University of Montana studying wildlife biology, said. She wants to take her kids out hunting and foraging with her, but she doesn’t want to expose them to the environmental health hazards she suspects are lurking in the soil.
Celina Gray is a Little Shell and Blackfeet mother of four and a graduate student at the University of Montana studying wildlife biology. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Rates of cancer are higher on the Blackfeet Nation than elsewhere in Montana. Six in 1,000 Blackfeet were diagnosed with some type of cancer, on average, every year between 2005 and 2014, compared to 5 in 1,000 Montanans per year over the same period. An assessment of health risks among Blackfeet shows cancer was the leading cause of death on the reservation between 2014 and 2015 — 16 percent of overall deaths during that time period. But the tribe lacks the data it needs to get a fuller sense of how the disease is impacting Blackfeet and what could be causing these higher rates.
Calling Last says it’s not just the higher rate of cancer that concerns her, but the way the disease and its warning signs appear, in clusters, that makes her think people may be exposed to unknown health risks from the environment.
Kim Paul, the founder of a public health nonprofit called the Piikani Health Lodge Institute, tried to track down the source of the cancer when she was a graduate student at the University of Montana in the 2010s. Because she’s a member of the community, she knew about a 10-mile-long portion of the reservation, 40 miles north of the Blackfeet headquarters in the town of Browning, where every family but one had developed multiple forms of cancer. She remembered her grandmother’s warnings, when Paul was just a little girl, not to collect bear grass or flowers from that part of the reservation. “There was a lot of death in that stretch of road,” Paul said. At the University of Montana, she started collecting samples from the area to conduct a study, but quickly ran out of money and was forced to abandon the project.
Now, Calling Last is picking up the mantle. She was awarded a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to devise a project that will establish a database of environmental stressors at sites across the reservation that are both important harvesting spots and hold cultural significance to the Nation. Calling Last expects to find trace amounts of uranium and other nuclear energy byproducts, heavy metals that leached from illegal and legal dumpsites, pharmaceutical residue flushed or tossed by members of the tribe, and flame retardants and other pollutants carried into waterways by urban runoff. Then, she’ll add that data to a virtual map she’s making for her community.
A lone pumpjack sits on the plains south of the Blackfeet reservation in northwestern Montana.
AP Photo / Matt Volz
When it’s complete, her map will have more than 30 layers — sites of cultural importance, traditional names for rivers and valleys, toxic dumps, areas where it is dangerous to harvest plants and animals, and more. Each layer will serve a different role in achieving an overarching goal: to help the Blackfeet protect their health, preserve their traditional ways of life, and strengthen their hold on cultural identity and knowledge.
But first, Calling Last needs to find mink and otter scat. Or rather, the dogs do.
Frost and Sully get food and love from their trainers. They affectionately call Frost “melon butt,” because of the dense bunches of muscles at the top of his stocky legs. And in return, WD4C gets access to the dogs’ secret weapons: their noses.
Humans can see well and we have big brains, but we don’t have very many scent receptors in our nostrils — at least, not compared to dogs. All of the scent receptors from a human’s nose, laid side by side, would fit on the surface of a postage stamp. All the scent receptors from a dog’s snout would fill a handkerchief. “Let’s say you walk into a house and you smell spaghetti dinner being cooked,” Hugh Murray, a K-9 handler for the Quapaw Nation of Oklahoma. “You smell the product. They smell the individual ingredients, the flour, the sugar, the tomato. They break things down individually.”
Ngaio Richards collects a scat sample. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Brown paper bags hold mink and otter scat samples located by the working dogs. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
A dog can also pinpoint a single ingredient in a forest of other smells, a “single drop of perfume in an Olympic size pool,” Amanda Ott, a dog trainer for Working Dogs for Conservation, said, which is what makes them so good at working in the field.
Dogs have been trained to sniff out cancer, bed bugs, COVID-19, even stress. But canine fieldwork has drawbacks, and each working dog has its own idiosyncrasies. Ott, who owns and trains the black lab mix Sully, recently lost him for an afternoon when the pup took off after a moose.
And switching dogs from one project to another can confuse them as well. Frost, who had just come back to Montana after three weeks in Wyoming hunting down invasive plant species, would occasionally get sidetracked by a plant that looked like a target from his previous adventure while looking for scat along the Two Medicine River. With gentle coaxing from Vasquez, though, he was able to refocus.
Michele Vasquez points Frost toward an area she wants him to search. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Over the course of nine days of surveying, the two dogs found more than 70 scat samples. On their last day of work on the reservation, a member of the community told Calling Last that someone had illegally dumped barrels of used motor oil into the water upriver from one of her testing sites. Vasquez said the silver lining is that now the researchers will have data from before and after the incident. “So lies the crux of this work,” she said.
Eight years ago, Calling Last would never have imagined designing research around the vagaries of dogs. She was working as a water training facilitator, teaching Indigenous and non-Indigenous water operators how to manage their systems. She infused her trainings with presentations on the cultural importance of water and the original names for rivers and streams. “I tried to implant in them that they are our communities’ modern day water warriors, because they’re cleaning the water,” she said.
But the work wasn’t fulfilling. She quit her job and set about starting her own organization. After a year, she had cashed in her 401(k) and savings accounts, maxed out her credit cards, and succeeded in forming the group she still runs as a one-woman show today: Indigenous Vision. She holds cultural sensitivity trainings for Native and non-Native groups, runs educational programs for Blackfeet youth, and has spent the past several years building out the multi-layered map.
Calling Last laid out the stakes for me as she drove between surveying spots, pausing once in a while to take swigs of an energy drink and sing along to the mid-2000s hits thumping from a playlist on her phone. The license plates on her truck read “MTNBRBI” — “mountain Barbie” — a tribute to the place where she was raised, and where much of her family and many of her friends live. She grew up picking mint, sage, and sweetgrass on the reservation’s prairies. Her relatives hunt for buffalo, deer, and elk in its mountains and plains.
Souta Calling Last, a researcher and an enrolled member of the Blood Tribe, grew up on the Blackfeet reservation. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Hunting and foraging are not only crucial aspects of Blackfeet spiritual and cultural identity, she said, they’re a means of survival for a community that lacks critical resources. Some 36 percent of people on the reservation live below the poverty line, compared to 12.5 percent statewide. More than two-thirds of all Blackfeet are food insecure, meaning they don’t have reliable access to nutritious food. Wild animals and plants are cheaper, healthier, and fresher than the meat and produce available at the grocery store, Celina Gray, the graduate student, said. “The meat we ate all winter long was elk burger,” she said, “I don’t buy hamburger at Costco.”
But Blackfeet will only continue turning to those traditional methods of harvesting as long as they can trust them. Calling Last has watched as, over the years, her friends, family, and wider community developed unusual health problems — and she hasn’t been spared, either.
“Me, a bunch of other people, my mom, all the women in my family, have thyroid issues,” she said. To her, the source of the sickness is clear: “It’s gotta be something from our environment.”
A survey site on the reservation. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
That’s why Calling Last, who has a degree in water management from the University of Montana, has dedicated her life to building this map. “As a scientist, I can read Excel sheets and see data trends just by looking at the numbers,” she said. “But my community can’t. My community doesn’t even know what good or bad exposure limits are to all of these contaminants.”
And there’s a new threat on the horizon, one that further imperils the tribe’s reliance on the environment. The dogs have been brought out to the reservation this year to track down environmental contamination, but next summer, they’ll hunt for traces of an even worse-understood health hazard: chronic wasting disease.
In the winter of 2020, a Blackfeet hunter named Charley Wolf Tail shot and killed a white-tailed deer on his property and, because he had heard warnings about a strange illness percolating in deer in Montana, sent the animal’s lymph nodes to the Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks department for testing. The nodes turned up positive for chronic wasting disease, or CWD, an illness caused not by a virus or a bacteria, but by a baffling phenomenon in the natural world: a misfolded protein, or a “prion.”
One prion can infect the proteins in healthy cells by forcing them to fold, too, creating a chain reaction that produces a series of tiny holes in the brains of the hoofed ruminants that are unlucky enough to come across it. The prions create a mushy, spongy texture in the organ. Outwardly, the animals waste away for no discernable reason. Chronic wasting disease is often referred to as “zombie deer disease” because the creatures afflicted with it end up dazed and haggard, walking in aimless circles until they die. CWD could lead to mass die-offs in deer, elk, and bison populations on the reservation — whose meat Blackfeet depend on for survival. And experts still don’t know if the illness can spread to humans.
The federal government has detected CWD in 30 states. The deer shot by Wolf Tail is the first documented case of CWD on the reservation. If it spreads, it could further upend the Blackfeet way of life. “Because we live so close to the land and because we’re subsistence hunters,” Calling Last said, “if there is a human impact from CWD, it’s going to be to the tribal people.”
U.S. Geological Survey
Once CWD establishes itself in a given area, it’s nearly impossible to eradicate. A bacteria or a virus, like the coronavirus, can survive on a surface for a limited amount of time before it dies. A prion can exist, in theory, forever. “Once it’s in the environment, it’s there sort of indefinitely,” Cory Anderson, a CWD expert at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Grist.
Some studies show that grasses and other plants can absorb prions from animal saliva and feces and, in turn, impart the disease to other animals that eat the plants. “We use plants for our ceremonies, our sweat lodges, our food, and our tea,” Calling Last said. “If those plants have prions in them, what does that mean for us?”
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have determined that dogs can detect CWD prions in deer feces in the lab. But experts have never attempted putting working hounds on the hunt for CWD in the field. Next summer, WD4C plans to conduct an in-the-field canine search for the prions, right here on the Blackfeet reservation.
It’s a new day in Glacier County and the sun is high in the sky as Calling Last turns right on a long, winding dirt road that leads to a ranch-style house in the middle of a large field. She’s taking the Working Dogs for Conservation crew to one last site on the reservation before this year’s research trip is over — a place she calls “ground zero.”
The women clamber out of their trucks and put on shoes they’ve been saving for this site, their “dirty” shoes. So little is known about the misfolded proteins that cause chronic wasting disease, and Calling Last and the Working Dogs team aren’t taking any chances. When they’re done surveying here, they’ll rinse their shoes with bleach and clean the dogs’ paws with disinfecting wipes in order to prevent rogue prions from hitching a ride back to Missoula with them.
Wolf Tail, the hunter who shot the deer, steps out of his house and walks toward the parked cars. He knows why the researchers are here. He’s just as worried about CWD as they are and is glad to help them prepare for next year’s prion surveys. “Hunting is my way of life,” he said, standing in the driveway and holding his dog, a terrier-pug mix named Uno. Herds of deer amble past Wolf Tail’s front porch every day. He scans them religiously now, looking for sick animals. “It’s something that’s definitely been in the back of my mind now, since the testing,” he said.
Charley Wolf Tail holds his dog, Uno. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
There’s no way Calling Last can search the entire reservation for prions. There are too many acres and not enough money or dogs. But she has figured out a way around those obstacles by making an educated guess. The way chronic wasting disease works is still shrouded in mystery; some ruminants get the disease after encountering prions, while others are exposed and walk away unscathed. Calling Last thinks the determining factor is immune system function — how healthy an animal is at the time of exposure. She’ll test that theory by having the dogs search for CWD in the same areas where they hunted for environmental contaminants this year.
“The main point of the project is to see whether there is a correlation between these contamination sites and CWD. Like, do animals have lower immune systems because of contamination, and are these animals more likely to get sick?” Vasquez said. In short, there may be an overlap between environmental contamination and CWD, which would mean that protecting the community from one threat also protects it from the other.
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Charley Wolf Tail’s house. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
A dead bird floats in the river behind Wolf Tail’s house. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
The otter and mink scat that the dogs find today, at ground zero, will help Calling Last test her hypothesis. Vasquez, a GPS tracking device hanging from a lanyard around her neck and a long leash in her hand, walks to the back of her truck and opens the tailgate. The two rescues peer out at her from their crates.
“Let’s bring Frost out for this one,” Ott says, glancing at the Springer spaniel. Frost lets out a frantic bark at the sound of his name.
“OK,” Vasquez says, opening the door to his crate, “You’re up, bud.”
Vasquez puts a collar and a red vest on Frost, who is standing on the truck bed trembling with excitement. “Free,” she says when he’s suited up, and Frost jumps down from the truck. Vasquez walks around the back of Wolf Tail’s house and down to the stream, Frost bounding a few feet ahead of her. A bright, midday sun is shining. Calling Last, Vasquez, Richards, Ott, and the others who have been running alongside the dogs for three days straight are drained and quiet, slightly diminished by the significance of ground zero. The prions could be lurking anywhere, in the tall grass rippling across Wolf Tail’s backyard or the dark mud that lines the river bank. Frost is unfazed. There’s mink and otter scat to be found, and a squeaky reward to receive.
Vasquez makes him heel and sit before she gives him the command that transforms the excited pup into a laser-focused hunting machine: “Go find,” she says.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Reservation Dogs on Dec 14, 2022.
Last week, the federal government announced it will spend a quarter of a billion dollars over four years to clean up what remains of the Salton Sea, a lake in southern California that has been shrinking due to climate change-driven drought.
For decades, communities living near the sea have been afflicted by health problems caused by algae blooms and dust storms spurred by wind kicking up drying sediment from the sea’s ever-widening shores. The government’s new plan aims to help remediate some of those health impacts while simultaneously encouraging farms in the region to reduce their reliance on water from the Colorado River.
The $250 million will come from $4 billion earmarked for drought funding in the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate and energy security bill passed by Democrats and signed by President Joe Biden in August. The new money is meant to complement more than half a billion dollars the state of California has already committed to restoration and dust-suppression projects in the area.
The Salton Sea, a body of water that formed by accident more than a hundred years ago when the Colorado River overtopped an irrigation channel and flooded an empty lake bed, has become a controversial flashpoint in California’s ongoing efforts to conserve its increasingly limited water supply from the Colorado River basin.
For around half a century, the brimming Salton Sea attracted tourists, anglers, and celebrities like the Marx Brothers and the Beach Boys to its shores. But the sea was only directly fed by the Colorado River for a period of two years starting in 1905. Since then, it has been sustained indirectly by agricultural runoff from farms in the Imperial Valley that use water from the Colorado River to irrigate their crops. As water evaporates from the sea’s surface into the atmosphere, the body of water has become more concentrated with pesticides and other farming byproducts, and algae have proliferated in its tepid, shallow waters. The approximately 650,000 people living nearby suffer from headaches, nosebleeds, asthma, and other health issues.
The Department of the Interior, the government agency that is managing the restoration agreement, has made it clear that there are strings attached to the federal funding. The department’s Bureau of Reclamation will provide California with $22 million in new funding between now and the end of next summer to spend on restoration projects around the sea, conduct research on current and future cleanup projects, and hire two representatives from the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Tribe to help implement those projects.
The remaining $228 million is contingent on the state following through on its commitment to conserve 400,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water every year starting in 2023. Specifically, the Imperial Irrigation District, or IID, the public utility that supplies the Imperial Valley and its 500,000 acres of farmland with Colorado River water, will need to take on additional conservation measures in order to help California meet that target. A day after the Interior Department announced its $250 million plan, the IID board voted 3-2 to approve it, signaling that the district agrees, at least for now, to conserve 250,000 acre-feet of river water per year as part of the state’s wider goal.
“This landmark agreement demonstrates much-needed federal commitment to the Salton Sea and IID’s commitment to improving Basin resilience,” Michael Cohen, senior associate at the Pacific Institute, a water conservation think tank, said in a statement.
Conserving all that water comes with tradeoffs for the Salton Sea. An IID projection shows that by 2027, the measures will expose an additional 8,100 acres of dusty shoreline. That’s where the funding for restoration and cleanup from the federal government comes in.
Jenny Binstock, a senior campaign representative at the Sierra Club, told Grist that she considers the new funding a “shot in the arm” for the efforts to fix the sea’s problems, though she said more can be done. Binstock wants federal and state agencies to thoroughly consult surrounding communities before approving new projects and, looking further ahead, figure out a way to pump new water into the sea. “Moving forward it will be essential that federal partners continue to work with the state, water agencies, and local communities to ensure that the Salton Sea remains a major priority as part of the complex water challenges facing the Western U.S.,” she said.
The United States midterm elections will take place on Tuesday. Polls, those imperfect barometers of public opinion, show Democrats and Republicans in a dead heat for control of the Senate. Republicans need to pick up just five seats to take back majority power in the House of Representatives and are favored to win that chamber.
The prospect of new climate policies getting passed in this country largely depends on what happens on Tuesday. If Democrats retain control of Congress, they could pass, or at least try to pass, measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or address the impacts of rising temperatures. There’s a growing appetite among Democratic lawmakers for climate action, as evidenced by their recent landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. If Republicans emerge victorious, the odds of Congress enacting new climate policy are much, much lower, as evidenced by the lack of a single Republican vote for the aforementioned landmark climate bill. Despite vague murmurs in support of free-market climate policies coming from far-flung corners of the GOP in recent years, the party has never produced a comprehensive emissions plan that’s in line with what experts say is necessary to preserve a livable planet.
From a climate perspective, there’s a lot at stake — and not just in Congress. Climate advocates are up for election at the state and local levels, too. With new federal funds earmarked for climate initiatives headed to states, tribes, utilities, and consumers thanks to the $1 trillion infrastructure legislation that passed in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act, those races could shape the next couple of years of climate policy in communities around the country.
“If we are going to keep making the progress we know we need, we must continue to elect leaders at every level of government who will put climate action at the top of their agenda,” Pete Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, said. Here are six of the races across the country that could wind up playing a consequential role in the country’s response to climate change over the next few years.
Luke Warford vs. Wayne Christian, Texas Railroad Commission
Because the Texas Railroad Commission oversees the sprawling oil and gas industry in the Lone Star State (but not, ironically, railroads), the powerful three-member agency plays an outsize role in Texas’ emissions footprint. Luke Warford, a 33-year-old who used to work for the Texas Democratic Party, is trying to capitalize on outrage over last year’s deadly winter power outages to unseat his opponent, Republican incumbent commission chair Wayne Christian. Warford has been traveling across Texas by train educating voters about the effect extreme weather will have on the power grid in coming years. He’s said that his race is “the most important climate race in the country.”
It’ll be a tough fight. A Democrat hasn’t won a statewide office seat in Texas in 28 years. The Railroad Commission has been all-Republican for nearly as long. Christian, the Republican incumbent who has served on the commission since 2016, said Warford is running on a platform that will “put our local oil and gas companies out of business and kill jobs.” But Warford isn’t shying away from messaging around the climate crisis. “In today’s market, there is more demand for low-emissions and renewable energy than ever, and Texas needs to evolve to compete. It’s too important to wait,” he said in a statement.
Catherine Blakespear vs. Matt Gunderson, California 38th state Senate district
Catherine Blakespear, the Democratic current mayor of Encinitas, is making a play for California’s 38th state Senate district. Blakespear’s campaign told the California publication Capital & Main that she is “standing up to Big Oil.” The oil industry, which is taking flak from both sides of the aisle after a devastating oil spill off the coast of Orange County last year, isn’t taking that on the chin.
A political action committee, or PAC, called the Coalition to Restore California’s Middle Class has spent more than $800,000 backing Blakespear’s opponent, Republican Matt Gunderson. The PAC’s top donors are Valero, Chevron, Phillips 66, and the Marathon Petroleum Corporation and its affiliates. The Coalition to Restore California’s Middle Class has also spent nearly a million dollars on opposition research and ad campaigns attacking Blakespear. District 38 has rapidly shifted from Republican to slightly Democratic-leaning in recent years. Blakespear currently holds a narrow lead over Gunderson in the polls, but the race is by no means a done deal. If Gunderson prevails, the oil and gas industry will have successfully wielded its influence over yet another election.
Steve Sisolak vs. Joe Lombardo, Nevada governor
The super-tight gubernatorial race in Nevada is a 2022 test of the strength of a Trump endorsement. Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak is up against Trump-endorsed Republican Joe Lombardo. Sisolak, who became Nevada’s first Democratic governor in 20 years when he was elected in 2019, signed legislation that will increase the proportion of the state’s electricity generated by renewables to 50 percent by 2030, approved a bill funding electric school buses, and appointed Nevada’s first-ever “climate czar.” Sisolak says he will continue to advance his climate and conservation agenda if reelected next week.
His opponent, Lombardo, does not have a climate plan. On his website, he says he aims to protect Nevada’s water resources and protect residents from wildfires, but doesn’t say how he will do that or mention the role climate change plays in exacerbating drought and wildfires in the state. It’s anyone’s guess who will win the governor’s seat on Tuesday. A recent poll shows Sisolak leading Lombardo by 4 percentage points, within the poll’s margin of error.
Ohio Supreme Court
The elections that will fill three open seats on Ohio’s highest court are among the lowest-profile races in the state, but the way these races shake out could have huge implications for the future of Ohio’s energy policies. The state’s Supreme Court has been dominated by Republicans for decades. Democrats have a chance to regain control this cycle, but all three races will be very close. Ohio energy companies have donated thousands to the Republicans in these three races.
And there is good reason for that. After the election, the winners of these Supreme Court races will help resolve several open questions surrounding clean energy deployment in Ohio. The court is expected to decide cases that could determine whether a permit for a wind farm can be overruled by residents and if the Ohio Power Siting Board should take climate change into account when siting new renewable energy projects.
Monica Tranel vs. Ryan Zinke, U.S. Representative from Montana
You remember Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior under former President Donald Trump who resigned from his job because he was the subject of multiple ethics probes? He’s running for Montana’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he previously occupied between 2015 and 2017. The Republican has acknowledged humanity’s role in causing climate change, but that’s about the extent of his climate platform. He called the Inflation Reduction Act a “wish list for the climate change people.”
His Democratic opponent, Monica Tranel, has a different take. She said the bill is “awesome” and has a plan to deal with what her website calls the “climate emergency.” She wants to expand Montana’s clean energy industry and create new jobs in the rapidly-growing state. Tranel spent four years working as an attorney for the Montana’s Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities in the state. She has also represented renewable energy developers in court. Having Tranel in the House would be a big deal for the Democratic caucus, which could use a clean energy expert from Montana in its ranks. Zinke is favored to win, but the race is surprisingly close, in part because of a Libertarian candidate poised to divide the conservative vote in the state.
Mandela Barnes vs. Ron Johnson, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin
In Wisconsin, former businessman and Republican incumbent Senator Ron Johnson is leading Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes — the first Black lieutenant governor of Wisconsin — in recent polls, but not by a lot. And just one of the handful of toss-up Senate races taking place across the country next week could determine which party gets control of the upper chamber. The Barnes vs. Johnson race is a showdown between a clear climate advocate and a climate skeptic.
In an October debate, both candidates were asked about climate change and what they’d like to see done about it. “The climate has always changed,” Johnson, who insists he doesn’t deny the existence of climate change, said. “The question is, can you really do anything about it when China, when India, they’re going to be burning fossil fuels. America’s going to have to burn fossil fuels,” he added.
Barnes, on the other hand, said he wants Wisconsin to be a leader in the transition to clean energy. Barnes is a member of the Wisconsin governor’s Task Force on Climate Change, which has proposed a number of policies since it was established in 2019 and helped create a state Office of Environmental Justice this year. “What we need to do is reduce carbon emissions,” he said in the debate. “What we also need to do is move towards a clean energy economy and make sure Wisconsin is in the driver’s seat.”
Massachusetts has to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, the deadline the United Nations says is consistent with a livable planet, under a sweeping climate law signed by the state’s Republican governor last year. In order to do that, the Bay State plans to pipe in hydroelectric power from Canada. But the project has run into a roadblock: stiff opposition from the nearby state of Maine.
Last year, Maine voters rejected the buildout of a proposed transmission line, which would run through its western flank and carry power from dams in Quebec to customers in Massachusetts. As a result, the clean energy project is stalled, maybe indefinitely — the most recent legal setback occurred last week — and Massachusetts’ effort to wean itself off of fossil fuels has suffered a serious blow.
New England Clean Energy Connect, as the troubled Massachusetts project is called, is representative of a larger issue: Building new infrastructure in this country is a torturously slow process that often gets slowed down further by community opposition and legal challenges. Renewable and clean energy projects are particularly vulnerable to delay. Unlike natural gas pipelines, which are under the authority of an independent federal agency called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, transmission lines are at the mercy of the states they run through.
As more states commit to new climate plans, more interstate transmission lines like the one Massachusetts is fighting to build will have to crisscross the United States. There are precious few other ways to get clean power from renewable sources like wind and solar farms, geothermal plants, and hydroelectric dams, often sited in rural areas, to the dense urban centers that want to plug into it. Congress could speed up transmission construction by becoming the ultimate referee on interstate power lines, but so far lawmakers have declined to step into that role. The issue has taken on new urgency ahead of the midterm elections, which could wrest congressional control away from Democrats and shake up the power dynamics in Washington. If Democrats can’t figure out a way to reform the permitting process before the end of the year, they may not get a chance to revisit it for a long time.
Meanwhile, experts predict that interstate squabbling over where transmission lines can go and who should shoulder their costs will continue to jeopardize new renewable energy projects as the nation scrambles to pump its patchwork of power grids full of renewable energy and make the tardy transition away from fossil fuels. “If you have an interstate transmission line, any state that that line is going through can veto the project,” John Larsen, who leads U.S. energy system and climate policy research for the independent research firm the Rhodium Group, told Grist. “It happens all the time.”
The ease with which a state can nix another state’s transmission line could derail the nation’s green aspirations and even undermine the historic climate change bill Congress passed in August, the Inflation Reduction Act. The Rhodium Group estimates that nearly a quarter of the emissions reductions that are expected to take place by 2030 won’t come to fruition if no new transmission is built in the U.S. Other groups say the climate bill would take an even bigger hit without reforms that shorten the review processes for renewable energy projects and spur the construction of new transmission lines.
Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, proposed a plan in late September that would have made the green transition promised by the Inflation Reduction Act happen faster. He aimed to pass a permitting reform bill, legislation that would have prevented states from squabbling over some long-distance, interstate transmission projects and sped up the permitting process for all types of energy projects. But the bill fell apart in the Senate less than a week later after facing opposition from both Republican and progressive lawmakers.
Some GOP legislators didn’t support it because it was proposed by a Democrat and also because they were loath to hand transmission permitting, something that has long been in states’ remit, over to the federal government. Among progressives, one issue was that Manchin’s bill included a carveout for a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia called the Mountain Valley Pipeline that threatens water resources and communities in Appalachia and would add some 90 million metric tons of emissions to the U.S.’s carbon ledger every year. Another problem was that the bill revised and shortened the process by which federal agencies review the environmental impacts of major and minor infrastructure projects, which environmental justice advocates worried would increase the amount of pollution faced by low-income Black and brown communities.
But experts say that, despite its drawbacks, lawmakers blew a rare opportunity to address the country’s transmission problem by failing to pass Manchin’s bill. “The United States cannot reach its emissions goals, be a climate leader, or ensure that our energy is clean, affordable, reliable, and secure without permitting reform,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Third Way, told Grist.
Some Democratic members of Congress think so, too. “The good outweighed the bad, and there was definitely bad,” Sean Casten, a Democratic U.S. representative from Illinois, told Grist, referring to Manchin’s bill. (Prior to running for office, Casten occasionally wrote blog posts for Grist between 2007 and 2014.) Most Democratic senators — including another Democratic climate hawk, Brian Schatz of Hawaii —appeared prepared to pass the legislation, too.
Members of both political parties have bemoaned the barriers to expeditious permitting, but Congress rarely takes up legislation to reform the process. Larsen, who has been tracking these types of bills for decades now, said that, prior to Manchin’s bill, Congress had only seriously considered permitting reform twice in the past 20 years — first, in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and then again in last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. Both laws tweaked the nation’s permitting rules, but neither resulted in the federal government taking control of the permitting process for transmission lines, which is, in Larsen’s view, the biggest permitting obstacle to the renewable energy transition.
Manchin’s bill, if it had passed, would have allowed FERC to permit some long-distance lines that are “consistent with the public interest,” in addition to simplifying the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and giving FERC jurisdiction over hydrogen pipelines. “The windows of opportunity for this stuff are very infrequent,” Larsen said.
But Manchin’s bill would have also made it easier for all types of energy projects to move forward, something that made progressives queasy. Casten said that that was a tradeoff he was willing to take. “My calculus, for better or for worse, is that if you streamline transmission permitting you will bring on clean energy assets at a rate that will economically neuter the fossil energy assets,” he said. In other words, he was comfortable making the gamble that easing the permitting process for transmission would result in large-scale renewable energy deployment. Eventually, renewables would become so cheap that new fossil fuel infrastructure wouldn’t be necessary.
Manchin pulled his bill from the government spending package it was attached to before senators could vote on it, knowing he didn’t have the Republican votes he needed to make it happen. In the coming weeks, experts anticipate that he could try to hitch a new version of the bill to an existing legislative package and pass it that way before the end of this congressional session. The only two viable candidates are the omnibus spending bill, a big package of appropriations bills, and the National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA, which funds the military through the 2023 fiscal year. Congress will turn to those sometime between the midterm elections and the end of this year, the period known as a “lame-duck session.”
But there are risks to attaching permitting reform to one of these other bills, especially the NDAA, Casten said. Manchin will likely work with Republicans to come up with a new permitting reform bill that has their support, and that version of the bill could gut the National Environmental Policy Act, leading to the approval of infrastructure projects without adequate environmental reviews, or include provisions that allow states to drill for oil and gas on federal land within their state borders with less oversight than is currently in place. Such a bill already exists — it was proposed by Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Manchin’s fellow senator from West Virginia — but it failed to pass after Democrats blocked it. It’ll be much harder for Democrats to nix a new permitting bill if it is attached to the NDAA because voting against military spending is politically unpopular.
“If there is a package that the Senate can accept in the NDAA, it will in all likelihood be worse,” Casten said. “How many Democrats are going to peel off over permitting and shut down military spending? That’s a really politically hard question.”
There’s also a scenario in which Republicans take back one or both houses of Congress next week and permitting reform is revisited under their terms. On Tuesday, Politico reported that House Republicans are planning an energy agenda that centers around much more aggressive permitting reforms that would significantly shorten environmental reviews for all types of energy projects. But they’re unlikely to be successful in the next two years.
“In the scenario where we lose one chamber, I’m not sure you do any of this,” Casten said. “For all the lip service Republicans pay to oil and gas permitting reform and NEPA repeal, they won’t have a White House that will sign off on it.”
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. “We’re 28 years away from 2050,” Larsen, from Rhodium, said. “The longer we wait the less it’ll help.”
Every year for the past seven years, the medical journal the Lancet has published a report summarizing the previous year’s research on how climate change is affecting human health around the globe. In 2020, the journal drew an exceedingly grim conclusion: that climate change threatens to unravel 50 years of public health gains. This year’s report, published Tuesday, is proof that the Lancet’s 2020 report wasn’t warning of a far-off threat — the health impacts of climate change are unfolding now, in real time.
The 2022 report, titled “Health at the Mercy of Fossil Fuels,” says the worsening impacts of climate change “are increasingly affecting the foundations of human health and wellbeing.”
Adults over the age of 65 and children younger than 1 year old experienced a cumulative 3.7 billion more heatwave days in 2021 than those vulnerable populations did on an average year between 1986 and 2005. Heat-related deaths spiked 68 percent between 2017 and 2021 compared to the period between 2000 and 2004. (The COVID-19 pandemic, which stressed hospitals and had a chilling effect on people seeking in-person treatment at emergency rooms and other healthcare facilities, is partially responsible for this massive increase.) Warming temperatures are fueling the rise of pathogens such as Vibrio, a deadly water-borne bacteria, and mosquito-driven illnesses like malaria and dengue.
Health care facilities — hospitals, emergency rooms, and medical clinics — are the first line of defense for people afflicted by the health impacts of climate change, but that blockade has been stretched to a breaking point by the pandemic, leaving millions vulnerable. “Urgent action is therefore needed to strengthen health-system resilience and to prevent a rapidly escalating loss of lives and to prevent suffering in a changing climate,” the report said.
The report’s assessment of the world’s progress on reducing the emissions that cause climate change is even more grim. The global economy is still powered by fossil fuels; renewables comprise just 8.2 percent of global electricity generation. Power demand has grown 59 percent, even though millions of people still don’t have access to reliable power, which adds to their overall health risk. (Case in point: Roughly 60 percent of health care facilities in developing nations don’t have access to the electricity they need in order to provide consistent care to sick people.)
And yet, oil and gas companies are posting record profits while governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels.
“The world is at a critical juncture,” the report said. The lingering pandemic, rising inflation, and Russia’s war in Ukraine have created unstable global conditions that threaten to undo many nations’ climate commitments. If the world backslides now, the health-related costs of doing so will be astronomical.
Though poor countries will bear the brunt of those costs, rich countries will not be immune to them. In the United States, the health impacts of rising temperatures and fossil fuel use, particularly air pollution and extreme heat, are already being felt. A policy brief written by experts from more than 80 U.S. institutions, published as an accompaniment to the Lancet report on Tuesday, illuminates the climate-related death toll in the U.S. The policy brief says that particulate matter air pollution — tiny airborne particles that can get trapped in the lungs and bloodstream — killed 32,000 people in the U.S. in 2020, and approximately 12,000 of those deaths, 37 percent, were directly linked to the burning of fossil fuels.
Extreme heat is also on the rise in the U.S.; 2021 was the sixth-hottest year on record. It’s no surprise, then, that heat-related mortality has jumped 74 percent for people over the age of 65 in the U.S. since the period between 2000 and 2004. But the health impacts of rising temperatures are not distributed equally. The policy brief cites government data showing that the regions of the country that are projected to experience the highest increases in heat-related deaths are 40 percent more likely to be home to Black people. And the people most likely to be exposed to extreme heat are outdoor laborers, people experiencing homelessness, and incarcerated individuals.
“When I’m treating a patient, if something I’m doing to help them isn’t working, I don’t keep doing the same thing,” Renee N. Salas, a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital and the lead author of the policy brief, told reporters. “I do something different. And the same is true for the climate shocks we’re experiencing.”
Not all hope is lost, both the Lancet report and the U.S. policy brief say. Recent policy measures in the U.S. — namely the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which is predicted to reduce domestic emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade — will help reduce air pollution and its associated health impacts.
And much more can be done to limit the damage caused by climate change, according to the U.S. policy brief. In addition to reaching net-zero emissions in its energy sector, the brief says the U.S. should decarbonize its transportation sector, stop approving new fossil fuel developments, phase out subsidies for oil and gas, invest in climate adaptation (particularly in vulnerable communities), and chip in more money to the global pot of green financing for developing countries.
On the international front, the Lancet report said that the heartening news is that some 86 percent of countries’ current climate targets mention health as an important metric of success. And the war in Ukraine and the global energy crisis have prompted many nations to think more carefully about their mix of fossil fuel and renewable energies. The media is doing a better job of connecting the dots between climate change and public health for its audiences — coverage of these interrelated issues increased 27 percent between 2020 and 2021, according to the report. And hundreds of local governments around the world have begun conducting city-level climate change assessments that take public health into account. Many of those cities listed heat waves and bad air quality among their most prominent health threats last year.
“At this critical juncture, an immediate, health-centered response can still secure a future in which world populations can not only survive, but thrive,” the report said. The missing ingredient, as always, is a healthy dose of political will.
The fifth Atlantic hurricane of the year made landfall in Nicaragua as a Category 1 storm on Sunday. Hurricane Julia subsequently moved through Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, dumping torrential rain, unleashing damaging winds, and sparking landslides. By Monday, the system had disintegrated into a tropical depression, but the storm continued to wreak havoc on Central America and parts of Mexico until it dissipated Monday night.
Julia also did damage before it even became a hurricane. The system started gathering strength last week as a tropical storm further east, along Venezuela’s northern coast. The developing system induced days of heavy tropical rain and contributed to a massive mudslide that killed at least 43 people in north-central Venezuela. More than 50 people are missing.
Rescue and recovery efforts are still underway in these countries, which means the death toll could continue to rise in the coming days. Julia knocked out power across large swaths of Central America, which left hundreds of thousands in darkness and could complicate ongoing rescue efforts.
It’s been an uncharacteristically quiet Atlantic hurricane season — no storms formed in August, something that hasn’t happened since 1997. But the storms that have formed and struck land have been devastating.
That’s particularly true in areas that are still recovering from previous seasons, including Central America. In 2020, an above-average season that spawned 14 hurricanes, Hurricanes Eta and Iota landed in Nicaragua a mere two weeks apart. The storms affected 7.5 million Central Americans, forced tens of thousands of people from their homes, and killed some 200 individuals. The people most impacted by the back-to-back storms in 2020 were poor, rural, often Indigenous residents who couldn’t afford to rebuild. Many of them are now feeling the effects of Hurricane Julia.
Studies show that rising global temperatures due to human activity are linked to more intense storms that dump catastrophic quantities of water on land. Rising sea levels, too, contribute to deadly storm surge during these events. Climate-fueled hurricanes have knock-on effects that reverberate for years. Analyses show that in 2020, disasters displaced some 1.5 million people in Central America. The disasters, paired with chronic poverty, food insecurity, and gang violence, have forced many to attempt the fraught journey to the U.S., fueling a rise in border crossings by migrants and asylum seekers.
“Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua are classified as countries at high-risk of facing climate-related threats and, at the same time, are in the group of countries that lack investment to fund preparedness and adaptation measures,” Martha Keays, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ regional director in the Americas, said in a statement. Central American countries and other developing states have also contributed comparatively little to climate change, while rich, developed parts of the world like the U.S. and Europe are responsible for the lion’s share of historical emissions and are better equipped to cope with the adverse outcomes of warming.
The Biden administration has dedicated new funding to international development projects aimed at alleviating food insecurity and poverty in Central America, but international aid groups and the United Nations say wealthy nations need to dedicate far more resources to helping countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala prepare for disasters in a rapidly changing world.
On Monday, leftover tatters of energy from Hurricane Julia churned through the southwestern Gulf of Mexico and, by Tuesday, had coalesced into Tropical Storm Karl. The system could dump up to a foot of rain on parts of Mexico’s east coast this week.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
In the spring of 1905, the Colorado River, bursting with seasonal rain, topped an irrigation canal and flooded the site of a dried lake bed in Southern California. The flooding, which continued for two years before engineers sealed up the busted channel, created an unexpected gem in the middle of the arid California landscape: the Salton Sea. In the decades that followed, vacationers, water skiers, and speed boat enthusiasts flocked to the body of water. The Beach Boys and the Marx Brothers docked their boats at the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, which opened in 1959. At the time, it seemed like the Salton Sea, and the vibrant communities that had sprung up around it, would be there for centuries to come.
But the sea’s heyday was short-lived. Cut off from the life source that created it — the Colorado River — and sustained mainly by limited agricultural runoff from nearby farms, the landlocked waterbody began to evaporate. The water that remained became increasingly salty and toxic. Tourism dried up. The scent of rotten eggs, from high levels of hydrogen sulfide in the sea, filled the air. Fish died in droves from lack of oxygen, their bones washing up on the beach like sand.
Oxygen-starved tilapia float in a shallow Salton Sea bay near Niland, California
AP Photo / Gregory Bull
By the 1980s, the rich, white vacationers had fled. Today, the community is made up of predominantly Latino agricultural workers who labor in nearby fields in Imperial County, among the poorest counties in California, and Indigenous tribes that have called the region home for millennia. They suffer from a unique cocktail of health threats that stem from the Salton Sea.
The waterbody is fed by about 50 agricultural channels, carrying limited amounts of water infused with pesticides, nitrogen, fertilizers, and other agricultural byproducts. As a result, the briny lake’s sediment is laced with toxins like lead, chromium, and DDT. Climate change and the prolonged megadrought gripping the western United States are only compounding these problems. The Salton Sea is projected to lose three quarters of its volume by the end of this decade; declining water levels could expose an additional 100,000 acres of lake bottom. The sea’s surface has already shrunk roughly 38 square miles since 2003.
As the sea dries and more shoreline is exposed, the strong winds that plague this part of California kick up chemical-laced dust and blow it into nearby communities, where roughly 650,000 people live. Residents complain of headaches, nosebleeds, asthma, and other health problems.
“It’s a huge environmental justice issue,” Jenny Binstock, a senior campaign representative at the Sierra Club, told Grist. “It leads to increased asthma attacks, bronchitis, lung disease.” Hospitalization rates for children with asthma in facilities near the sea are nearly double the state average.
Beyond dust, Ryan Sinclair, an environmental microbiologist at the Loma Linda University School of Public Health in California, is concerned about bioaerosols — tiny airborne particles that come from plants and animals — that can develop from algae or bacteria in the sea’s shallow, tepid waters.
An overhead view of marinas that have become landlocked as the Salton Sea evaporates
David McNew / Getty Images
“Algae produce algal toxins and bacteria can produce endotoxins,” he said, “and both of those can aerosolize and blow into nearby communities.” When researchers exposed mice to aerosolized Salton Sea water, the mice developed a “unique type of asthma,” Sinclair noted. He’s currently working with communities around the Salton Sea to measure and document levels of nutrients and algae in the water, something that is not currently being done by state or federal agencies. “Something needs to be done about this,” he said.
But solutions are limited. The dust that gets kicked up can be suppressed, to some extent, with habitat restoration projects. The first-ever large-scale restoration project for the Salton Sea, a network of ponds on 30,000 acres of lake bed, is proposed to start this year. But the project is no substitute for the obvious: The sea is rapidly shrinking and it needs a fresh infusion of water to survive. “A perfect solution for the Salton Sea — in a world where we have an abundance of water and more reliable hydrological cycles — is we would just fill that thing back up,” Binstock, from the Sierra Club, said.
But there’s no water to be had. One proposal is to ship saltwater in from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, 125 miles south, but Binstock isn’t so sure the positives of that plan outweigh the negatives. “The tremendous investments in hard infrastructure, the disturbance of playa, and the public health and environmental impacts, the costs are just … it’s pretty bananas to think about,” she said.
Last week, an independent review panel appointed by the state to assess viable, long-term dust suppression options for the Salton Sea advised against importing water from the Sea of Cortez or any other nearby body of saltwater. Instead, the panel recommended the state build a desalination plant next to the sea to gradually filter out some of the lake’s salinity. It also suggested paying Imperial County farmers not to plant their fields, which would allow more water to reach the sea from the Colorado River instead of getting siphoned off by farmers. Both strategies would slowly replenish the sea with fresh water, revive its aquatic ecosystems, and allow the sea to “return to being a jewel in the Californian desert, and a place others will want to visit and live next to again,” the panel’s summary report said.
Marta Sanchez stands in her home in Mecca, California, in 2015. Sanchez says her bronchitis worsened after the family moved to Mecca in 2010. AP Photo/Gregory Bull
Mariela Loera, a policy advocate at the California-based Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, doesn’t see an adequate, long-term solution to the problem. She has been doing work with communities surrounding the Salton Sea for years. Dust suppression efforts and habitat restoration projects are a useful bandaid, she said, “but ideally, there’s a long-term, clean water solution.”
Meanwhile, the Salton Sea’s copious brine presents an unexpected opportunity: a bonanza of lithium, the highly sought-after metal.
Lithium is the key ingredient in electric vehicles batteries and clean energy storage, but it is also in short supply. Lithium prices shot up some 400 percent this year as the global appetite for EVs rose and companies became increasingly desperate to find new sources of the metal. The state of California estimates that the Salton Sea has enough lithium to supply America’s entire appetite, now and in the future, and 40 percent of the globe’s demand on top of that.
Loera and other local groups recognize the importance of the sea’s lithium stores, but they say communities affected by the region’s toxic dust and algae blooms need justice before extraction can begin. “A lot of residents have questions about potential impacts,” Loera said. Lithium mining requires copious amounts of water. Would that water come from the sea’s own limited supply? And what impacts would mining have on the state’s ongoing habitat restoration and dust suppression efforts? Those questions and others raised by the community haven’t been adequately answered yet. “There’s a lack of community engagement in the decision making process to date,” she said. “We need to have that conversation: How are we going to continue this green transition, but in an environmentally just way?”
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
Peter Hanlon, a 68-year-old farmer from Boston, has been growing cranberries in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for decades. Cranberries are in Hanlon’s blood — his grandfather farmed them on the cape before him. But six weeks ago, Hanlon sold his farm in the town of Sandwich. None of his kids wanted to carry on the tradition, and Hanlon doesn’t blame them: Profit margins are incredibly tight, and increasingly erratic weather patterns in recent years have made cranberries more difficult to grow.
“The last two storms, in ‘15 and ‘17, scared me,” Hanlon said. He recalls seeing an 11-foot surge of ocean water coming into his farm through the woods and inundating his vines, dooming many of them to die from salt exposure.
Cranberry farmers in Massachusetts have had to contend with wildly fluctuating environmental conditions over the past several years. The 2015 and 2017 storms Hanlon referred to killed some coastal Massachusetts cranberry bogs when they flooded them with sea water, extreme temperatures and drought parched vines in 2020, and a deluge of rainfall pickled the state’s cranberry crop last year, leading to a nationwide shortage. Massachusetts is the second-largest producer of cranberries in the nation behind Wisconsin, which also had a bad growing season last year.
This year, another massive drought, fueled by climate change, has farmers like Hanlon weighing their options and making tough decisions.
A cranberry field in Massachusetts. Sanghwan Kim / Getty Images
Massachusetts and much of the rest of the Northeastern United States has been in a state of moderate to extreme drought for the better part of the summer. Dry conditions descended on the region in late spring and didn’t let up for months. Massachusetts dealt with some of the worst drought in the Northeast: As of the end of last month, 10 of its 14 counties were experiencing extreme drought, and the remaining four were experiencing severe drought. “The boom or bust scenario that climate change presents when it comes to precipitation events — the boom being the large precipitation event, the bust being long dry spells — that’s not a good thing,” Zachary Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, told Grist.
The Massachusetts drought has begun to ease in recent weeks, especially after this past week, when a round of soaking storms rolled into the Northeast. But it may take another round or two of wet weather to make up for the months of drought that desiccated farm fields, depleted reservoirs, and sparked wildfires in the Northeast. And this year’s drought is more evidence that farming conditions are getting less predictable.
“Farmers wake up every day and they have to face whatever the weather is going to present to them — that’s farming,” Brian Wick, executive director of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association, told Grist. “But it’s quite clear in talking to many growers over the past several years that this change in climate is very real and it’s really starting to impact how they farm.”
Cranberries are a finicky crop. Too much water, like the state saw last year, can cause fungus to grow on cranberry vines and affect the color and quality of the fruit. But add too little water, and the vines shrivel up and die, or the berries don’t grow to full maturity.
Farmers also need access to ample fresh water in order to protect and harvest their cranberries. Cranberries grow on vines in dry fields much like grapes or any other crop during most of the growing season. But twice a year, farmers flood those dry fields with water and turn them into bogs: In the spring, when a late frost might threaten to kill their budding cranberry vines, the flooding protects the tender shoots and flowers from freezing over. In the fall, farmers turn on their irrigation systems again to harvest their berries. They use machines to shake the plants to release the berries into the bog, where they’re corralled into containers and shipped to destinations across the country.
Cranberry harvest. Abstract Aerial Art / Getty Images
So far, it looks like most cranberry farmers are going to pull through this year, thanks to the recent storms and to irrigation pumps, which farmers switched on throughout the season to pull water from local sources and make up for lost rainfall. But it was a more expensive growing season for that reason — pumps run on gasoline or propane, and fuel costs were astronomical this summer. And the drought isn’t over yet. Wick won’t breathe easy until the berries are off the vines and loaded into trucks. “We’ll see what we get for rainfall over the next few weeks,” he said. “We still have about a month before harvest to get some periodic rains.”
In general, climate change isn’t stopping the state’s cranberry farmers from growing their crop — yet. “Cranberries in Massachusetts will continue to thrive,” Wick said, “but it’s going to be more challenging and difficult, and they’re going to have to adapt. You’re not going to have that nice, consistent growing season, it just seems to be one extreme or another.”
Peter Hanlon, the cranberry farmer who sold his farm, said he’s glad he’s not trying to beat the weather odds this year or in the future. “My son tells me the weather is going to get worse,” he said. But the weather has already been so bad, Hanlon says, it’s hard to imagine an even more erratic season. “I reserve judgment on that,” he said.
America’s electric utilities were aware as early as the 1960s that the burning of fossil fuels was warming the planet, but, two decades later, worked hand in hand with oil and gas companies to “promote doubt around climate change for the sake of continued … profits,” finds a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
But while the role Big Oil played in misleading the public has been widely publicized, utilities’ culpability has largely flown under the radar. So researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara began collecting and analyzing public and private records kept by organizations within the utility industry.
The authors analyzed public reports authored by utility companies or their affiliated groups between 1968 and 2019, as well as collected documents from watchdog groups. They found 188 external and internal documents referencing climate change from utility companies, research groups, trade associations, and other organizations closely linked to the industry. Two of the affiliated groups, the Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute, which authored or distributed most of the documents in the study, are the utility industry’s main trade group and research arm, respectively.
Emily Williams, a postdoctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the lead author of the study, told Grist that the documents provide a sense of when the utility industry’s climate denial began — and how it has evolved over time. The takeaways are stark: Utilities became aware of the dangers of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s and ‘70s, and acknowledged the risks it posed for the industry. “If [climate change turned] out to be of major concern, then fossil fuel combustion will be essentially unacceptable,” an article by the Electric Power Research Institute stated in 1977. But for the next two decades, those same utilities promoted false doubt about humanity’s role in climate change and tried to delay action. An article from the Edison Electric Institute published in 1989 said that, “any plan calling for urgent and extreme action to reduce utility CO2 emissions is premature at best.”
By the 2000s, the industry and its related groups had publicly acknowledged the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for warming the planet, but shifted from a strategy of denial to one of delay. The sector has spent some $500 million over the past two decades lobbying Congress and state legislatures against renewable energy and climate policies.
“Utilities hold partial responsibility for today’s climate crisis, and for the pushback against policies to address it,” Leah Stokes, a professor of climate and energy policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a coauthor of the study, told Grist. “They need to acknowledge their role in spreading disinformation, and choose a different path.”
Williams, who lives in California, said the study is particularly timely now, as her state endures a record-breaking heatwave. “It really just makes me sit and wonder and think about where we’d be if not just for what utilities did, but for what oil companies, the whole climate change countermovement, did,” she said. “Something interesting about this study is we feel like we just scratched the surface, and it’s a matter of time before there’s maybe other documents that come to light.”
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
The Interior Department announced sweeping changes on Tuesday to the way Colorado River water is doled out in the western United States and Mexico in response to the climate change-fueled megadrought that is desiccating freshwater resources in the region.
For the first time ever, federal officials declared a Tier 2a water shortage, which requires Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to reduce the amount of water they draw from Lake Mead starting at the beginning of next year. Arizona will have to reduce its water supply by 21 percent, Nevada by 8 percent, and Mexico by 7 percent; California, the largest water user on the river, avoided taking any cuts.
“The system is approaching a tipping point,” Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said at a press conference. “Without action, we cannot protect the system and the millions of Americans who rely on this critical resource.”
The federal government already issued a first-of-its-kind Tier 1 shortage declaration for Colorado River operations last year. That declaration required Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to cut their water intake from the river in accordance with a drought contingency plan signed back in 2019; Arizona took the greatest cut and had to reduce water deliveries to its cotton and alfalfa farmers. The new Tier 2a declaration imposes further cuts on the same states, and again the cuts fall hardest on Arizona. The state will lose around 80,000 additional acre-feet of water this time, on top of the 500,000 acre-feet it lost in the last round — one-fifth of its total allotment combined. (An acre-foot is equivalent to about 320,000 gallons.)
Nevada and Mexico will also see reductions in this year’s round of cuts, though far fewer. The effects on Nevada will likely be minimal, since the state has conserved an enormous amount of Colorado River water over the last several years in anticipation of a shortage, but the effects on Mexico will likely be more significant, since the country uses river water to sustain agriculture in the Mexicali Valley.
The new water cuts are determined by the latest available water data. Every month, Reclamation releases a report that forecasts water levels in the Colorado River Basin for the next two years. The August report is special; by this time of the year, the snow that accumulated over the previous winter has melted, and the federal government has a clear sense of just how much of that water has made it into the river’s two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. It’s the August water level in Lake Mead that determines what cuts Reclamation imposes on the Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico.
A buoy that reads ‘No Boats’ lays on cracked dry earth. Behind it, people carry a boat to reach the receding shoreline of Lake Mead, Nevada on July 23.
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
While the bulk of the cuts from last year’s Tier 1 shortage fell on Arizona farmers, this newest round of cuts will also impact other water users, including the Gila River Indian Community and the city of Phoenix. The new cuts won’t shut off any taps, but they will deprive these water users of their excess water rights, leaving them with less wiggle room to deal with future shortages, and could lead to lawn-watering restrictions as cities try to adapt to the drought. If water levels in Lake Mead fall 20 feet further, it will trigger a Tier 3 shortage, which would cut California’s massive water allotment for the first time; the Golden State water rights are senior to those of other Lower Basin states, which has allowed it to avoid water cuts in previous rounds.
(Lake Mead’s actual elevation is even lower than Reclamation announced on Tuesday, but the government is pretending for the moment that there’s some extra water in the reservoir, thanks to some creative accounting measures it imposed in June to protect Lake Powell. The true elevation of the reservoir is low enough to trigger an even further round of cuts, the so-called “Tier 2b” shortage, but the government is holding off on those cuts for now.)
Just two decades ago, a shortage of this magnitude on the Colorado River seemed unthinkable. Modern life in the western U.S. is predicated on the assumption that water will always flow in the Colorado – and that the U.S. can always engineer solutions to the occasional drought.
For more than a century, that assumption held. The years between 1980 and 2000, especially, were a time of plenty in the Colorado River Basin. Reliable seasons of rain and snowpack filled Lake Mead and Lake Powell to the brim, supplied the region’s growing populations with water and hydroelectric power, and sustained the wildlife and plants that depend on the Colorado for survival. But then drought descended on the arid West, and water managers in the seven Colorado River Basin states started talking about what would happen if the reservoirs went dry. At first, those conversations were hypothetical, but 23 years of nearly unbroken drought later, both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at critically low levels. The megadrought in the western U.S., fueled by climate change, is officially the worst drought in 1,200 years, according to scientists. It threatens to completely transform the region.
“We are now truly out of time,” Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program director for the National Audubon Society, told Grist. “All of the water managers in this basin are facing this moment when action is necessary.”
Further cuts may be on the horizon, and for the whole basin rather than a select few states. Earlier this summer, Touton told the seven Colorado River states that they would have to conserve between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water in the next year in order to stabilize Lakes Powell and Mead. This would require the states to reduce their water usage by 15 to 30 percent inaddition to the reductions they’ve already made as part of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. If the states didn’t find 2 million acre-feet of savings by mid-August, Touton said at the time, the federal government could “act unilaterally to protect the system,” imposing long-term water restrictions over and beyond the new cuts to the Lower Basin states.
The states blew past Touton’s deadline, but it isn’t clear yet whether the federal government will intervene and force another round of cuts, or which states would absorb those cuts. At Tuesday’s press conference, Reclamation officials only issued vague calls for “basin-wide conservation” beyond the cuts brought about by the Tier 2a declarationbeyond the cut Tier 2 declaration.
Representatives from the Colorado River states met last week in Denver to negotiate potential water cuts, but that the meeting ended without an agreement. Participants from the meeting told the Los Angeles Times that the cuts proposed by the negotiators totaled less than the 2 million acre-feet Touton demanded in June.
The Lower Basin states use the lion’s share of Colorado River water, and they claim they’ve made generous water reduction proposals in recent weeks as the states try to meet Touton’s demands. In a press release on Tuesday, Arizona officials said that they offered to reduce the state’s water withdrawals by 2 million acre-feet next year, but said that the federal government rejected that proposal. It isn’t clear what other conditions Arizona requested as part of this offer, but the rejection appears to indicate that the federal government wanted the Lower Basin states to absorb even further cuts. Two large water districts in Southern California, meanwhile, have mulled reducing their water withdrawals by another half million acre-feet.
“Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the last 62 days produced exactly nothing in terms of meaningful collective action,” said John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, in a letter to the federal government earlier this week.
Meanwhile, the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico — have refused to make any definitive commitments; the states told the federal government in June that “additional efforts to protect critical reservoir elevations must include significant actions focused downstream [in the Lower Basin],” and promised only that the states would consider reviving some dormant water conservation programs.
The negotiations between lower and upper basin states will continue in the coming weeks and months. Pitt, from Audubon, said she was heartened by the Reclamation Bureau’s actions on Tuesday.
“It’s hard to know whether it will be ‘enough,’” she said, “but they indicate they will be taking unprecedented steps, which is what this moment calls for.”
Democratic lawmakers in the United States House of Representatives voted to pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, or IRA, on Friday — the final obstacle in the bill’s path to President Joe Biden’s desk. The IRA’s $369 billion for clean energy and energy security represents the largest federal investment in combating the climate crisis in U.S. history. The legislation is forecast to reduce domestic emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade, provided the private sector and other parts of the economy continue to reduce emissions at a reliable rate. The bill passed 220 to 207. Every House Democrat voted for the bill. Republicans unanimously opposed it.
The IRA isn’t the bill Democrats hoped it would be when Biden first took office. Initial versions of the legislation directed at least $500 billion to fighting climate change and included a policy that would have rewarded electric utilities that transitioned to renewables and penalized companies that lagged behind. More importantly, the IRA isn’t only a climate bill — it’s a tax and health care package that also includes continued support for fossil fuels. Those carve-outs for the oil and gas industry, such as new offshore drilling leases, were included to secure the support of Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia and a critic of earlier versions of the IRA that sought to curtail the fossil fuel industry.
“Any congressional process is going to be a function of compromise,” Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat from Illinois who voted for the IRA on Friday, told Grist. (Editor’s note: Casten is a former contributing writer to Grist.) But Casten said the House’s decision to pass the bill on Friday was something to celebrate, calling it the “most significant, most comprehensive, most complete, most serious climate bill that the Congress has ever passed.”
The IRA allows the U.S. to do what climate scientists said it should have done decades ago: make a serious down payment on decarbonizing the nation’s energy sector and begin to incentivize an economy-wide transition off of fossil fuels. The bill funnels hundreds of billions into tax credits for companies to invest in clean technologies, rebates for consumers who want to get fossil fuels out of their homes and buy electric vehicles, clean energy research and development, and more.
It’s a major step forward for the U.S., which is the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. But a lot of hard work remains. In order to realize the 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gases ascribed to the IRA, the nation needs to more than triple the rate at which it deploys new power transmission infrastructure to support the flow of renewables across the country and expand workforce training to help fill the 1.5 million or so jobs the legislation will create.
And the IRA is just one bill; the nation still has a way to go before it reaches net-zero. The one thing Congress shouldn’t do, Casten said, is pat itself on the back for a job well done and then neglect to pass another piece of climate legislation for a decade or more. “We’re down four touchdowns, it’s the start of the 4th quarter, and we just put one across the line,” he said. “Let’s do an end zone dance and let’s not shoot off fireworks and plan our Super Bowl parade yet.”
Some environmental justice groups aren’t celebrating at all. “The harms of the bill as it is currently written outweigh its benefits,” a coalition of groups called the Climate Justice Alliance said in a statement last week before the Senate passed the bill, citing the IRA’s soft spot for fossil fuel projects and what the alliance said was a lack of emphasis on justice and equity for the communities who have borne the brunt of climate change thus far. “Members of Congress and the Biden administration can help to ensure economic recovery and jobs through increased support of local, community-controlled renewables that truly foster a Just Transition for all communities, especially those most impacted by the climate crisis today,” it said.
The Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 on Sunday, a $433 billion climate, energy, health, and tax bill that will set the United States on course to reduce its cumulative emissions roughly 40 percent, compared to 2005 levels, by 2030. Fifty Democratic senators voted for the bill, including centrists Joe Manchin, from West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, from Arizona. Republican senators unilaterally opposed the legislation. Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote.
In a statement, President Joe Biden said that the bill “makes the largest investment ever in combating the existential crisis of climate change.”
The Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, came out of left field. Democratic leadership had been gunning to pass a climate bill since President Joe Biden’s very first months in office last year. But they immediately ran into roadblocks that seemed insurmountable. Sinema and Manchin wouldn’t support the initial versions of the IRA, which was a problem because Democrats needed all 50 members of their party in the Senate to vote in lockstep. Less than a month ago, Manchin, citing rising inflation, said he was unable to support the previous iteration of the IRA, called the Build Back Better Act. It looked like 18 months of negotiations had proven fruitless, and climate action and several other pillars of Biden’s first-term agenda were on hold until after the midterm elections this November — or possibly for good.
But then, in a surprise twist, Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer came to an agreement at the end of July: $369 billion for climate and energy-related measures, subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, and enough new tax revenue to pay for the new policies and reduce the deficit by some $300 billion. On Thursday, Sinema, the last holdout, signaled her support for the IRA after negotiating changes to the bill, including removing a $14 billion tax hike for hedge fund and private equity managers from the bill and adding in drought relief money for her state. It took Senate Democrats just four days to go from announcing the legislation to passing it.
Independent analyses estimate that the IRA would slash approximately 6.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s emissions ledger over the course of the next decade, prevent up to 3,894 premature deaths per year by 2030, and get the U.S. two-thirds of the way to Biden’s goal of reducing total emissions 50 percent compared to 2005 levels by the end of this decade. Executive actions by Biden and state-level emissions policies could close the gap on the remaining third. Without the IRA or any other new federal efforts to limit climate change, emissions would only decrease 27 percent by 2030.
The IRA now goes to the House of Representatives for a vote. If it clears the House, which it is expected to, it will then go to Biden’s desk for his signature.
Green groups celebrated the Senate’s passage of the IRA over the weekend. “Every ZIP code across America will benefit from the good jobs, lower costs, and reduced pollution from the historic Inflation Reduction Act,” said Collin O’Mara, President and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, in a statement. “Today, Senate Democrats — without a single Republican vote — made a historic investment in the planet, the economy, and the American people,” said Patrick Gaspard, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress. “On its own, the Inflation Reduction Act is one of the most significant pieces of economic and climate legislation in a generation.”
(@DrTELS) 
