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.”
Americans take a lot of factors into consideration before buying a new home: Is it in a good school district, how many bathrooms does it have, does it have good bones? New research shows people should also be asking about their home’s flood history, because the wrong answer could be costly.
A new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, shows that people who buy homes with a history of flooding in three U.S. states — North Carolina, New Jersey, and New York — can expect to pay tens of thousands more dollars in flood damages over the course of their mortgage than the average homeowner.
The solution for prospective homebuyers appears to be straightforward: Make sure you take a look at the property’s flood history before signing your name on the dotted line. But in most U.S. states, including North Carolina and New Jersey, state laws don’t require sellers to disclose whether a home has flooded in the past. In New York, such a requirement exists, but sellers can bypass it by paying a $500 fee.
Millions of Americans are likely making what is typically the biggest and most important purchase of their lives without the relevant information they need to make an informed decision. “It can be financially ruinous,” Joel Scata, an attorney at NRDC, told Grist.
The premise that a home that has flooded in the past could flood again and cost a homeowner money down the line isn’t particularly novel, Scata pointed out. But the report, conducted by the consulting firm Millman, highlights just how much money, on average, flood-prone homes cost Americans. The study looked at those costs as they stand right now and what they’ll look like in the future as the planet continues to warm and the impacts of climate change worsen.
Millman analyzed all the homes sold in North Carolina, New Jersey, and New York in 2021 and found that 6.6 percent of them, 28,826 homes, had been previously flooded. Millman used Federal Emergency Management Agency data and independent flood risk models to determine past and future flooding for these properties. The report found that, if the climate were to stay exactly the same as it is today, the average individual homeowner of a previously flooded home would expect to pay roughly $18,000 in flood-related damages over the course of a 15-year mortgage in North Carolina, $25,000 in New Jersey, and $47,000 in New York.
In total, the average total annual cost of damages for all of the flood-prone properties in the three states surveyed by Millman works out to $16 million in North Carolina, $18 million in New Jersey, and $23 million in New York. And that’s just under current climate conditions.
The report found that the costs of flooding rise significantly under a medium-emissions climate change scenario — one in which the world limits its emissions to some extent instead of continuing on business as usual. The average holder of a 15-year mortgage can expect to incur roughly $22,000 in flood damages in North Carolina, $32,000 in New Jersey, and $60,000 in New York over the course of their mortgage. Those numbers double over the course of a 30-year mortgage.
“What was really surprising about the report was just the amount of money that a homeowner could pay out of pocket over the course of their mortgage because of the high risk of those properties to floods,” Scata said. “Especially when you factor in the impacts of climate change.” Although mortgage holders for some properties are required to purchase flood insurance, the requirements are based on outdated flood maps that omit many vulnerable areas. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, just 30 percent of homes in the nation’s highest-risk areas are covered by flood insurance.
Twenty-one states have no laws in place requiring sellers to disclose whether the property they are selling has flooded or sustained water damage before, and if it is likely to flood again. The Biden administration recently proposed establishing a national flood disclosure law that would require sellers in all U.S. states to disclose a property’s flood history to potential buyers, but that reform would have to be approved by Congress, and there’s no guarantee that that’ll happen anytime soon.
“Having a nationwide uniform disclosure law would ensure that there would be a baseline that all states have to meet in terms of the information they require sellers to provide to homebuyers,” Scata said. “Seeing that move forward would be really helpful.”
Last week, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the upper chamber’s main swing vote, dashed President Joe Biden’s hopes of passing a climate bill before midterm elections that could undo Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Getting inflation under control, Manchin argued, is more important than climate action. For the time being, the president has one avenue left for tackling the biggest issue of our time: the powers of the executive branch.
On Wednesday, during a heat wave that’s affecting 200 million Americans, the president unveiled a series of executive actions related to tackling the climate crisis and said that more are on the way. “I come here today with a message,” Biden said at the site of a former coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, in front of an audience that included several members of Congress. “As president I will use my executive powers to combat the climate crisis in the absence of congressional action.”
Biden noted three steps he’s taking to address climate change. The first is dedicating $2.3 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, an initiative aimed at making communities more capable of withstanding the impacts of climate change, such as heat and flooding. The funding, the White House said, is double what the program administered to communities last year.
The second initiative that Biden highlighted is a new guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services that will help states and tribes figure out how to expand access to air conditioners, electric heat pumps, and cooling centers using existing money from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed by Congress last year.
The third prong of Biden’s announcement is a new effort by the Department of the Interior to expand offshore wind power in two sites in the Gulf of Mexico — one off the coast of Texas and the other off of Louisiana. Those two sites, the White House said, could eventually produce enough energy to power 3 million homes. Biden also said he also directed his administration to look at potential new sites for offshore wind and other renewable energy development off the coasts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
Biden called these steps “historic” in his speech on Wednesday, but they don’t represent a robust new effort to mitigate the emissions causing climate change. They’re certainly a far cry from the $555 billion the president originally hoped Congress would spend on climate action. Biden noted that the more than $2 billion the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program is getting this year is the most money a president has ever directed to the initiative, but the program has only been distributing funding since 2020. The guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services pertains to just $385 million in existing funding. And the Biden administration was already considering opening up new areas in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore wind development.
Climate activists were quick to blast Biden for not doing enough. “President Biden’s announcements, while welcome, don’t even scratch the surface of what’s needed and what communities suffering most are demanding,” Collin Rees, U.S. program manager at the climate group Oil Change International, said in a statement.
Rees and other climate advocates think the president should have gone further on Wednesday and declared a “climate emergency,” similar to the presidential decree former president Donald Trump issued in order to speed up construction of a border wall with Mexico in 2019. Declaring a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act would allow Biden to free up funding for climate-related measures without Congress’ approval and limit oil and gas production and exports. The Biden administration was reportedly considering issuing such a declaration in the days leading up to his visit to Massachusetts but ultimately decided against it for the time being.
During his speech on Wednesday, Biden hinted that declaring a climate emergency isn’t entirely off the table. At the very least, we can expect the president to make more climate-related announcements soon. “Let me be clear,” he said. “Climate change is an emergency. In the coming weeks I’m going to use the power I have as president to turn these words into formal, official government actions through the appropriate proclamations, executive orders, and regulatory powers the president possesses. I will not take no for an answer.”
Joshua Studholme was finishing his doctoral program in physics and math at Lomonosov Moscow State University when his thesis advisor told him a story about Queen Victoria, the monarch who ruled the British Empire for the better part of the 19th century. The queen was walking the grounds at one of her palaces, accompanied by a science advisor, when she noticed that it was raining heavily in one corner of her garden but not at all in another corner. She wondered why that was. “Ever since then, imperial meteorologists have been trying to figure out why extreme rainfall can vary so much,” said Studholme, who is now a researcher at Yale University. “It’s only really now that we’re getting the technology to answer that question.”
Earlier this month, Studholme and three colleagues at Yale published a study that seeks to finetune our understanding of extreme rainfall, now and in the future. They, and other researchers, suspect that the trick to accurately pinpointing the magnitude and frequency of extreme rainfall doesn’t just come down to measuring and tracking rain; it also hinges on the way researchers model climate change.
Climate scientists have long known that global warming increases rainfall, since a hotter atmosphere holds more water vapor. But when the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept into the Northeast in the summer of 2021, they brought the kind of catastrophic rain event experts had predicted would typically occur later this century. Studholme’s study sought to investigate why Ida, and the many other record-breaking rain events that occurred last year across the globe in Europe, China, and other places, seemed to happen ahead of schedule. The question that guided his study wasn’t all that different from Queen Victoria’s query to her science advisor: Why is it raining where it’s raining, and why is it raining so hard in certain places? Luckily in the 21st century we have the know-how — decades of precipitation data and many different types of climate models that can help us predict what the future will look like — to start narrowing down the answers to those questions.
A climate model is a set of mathematical equations that quantify the earth system processes that occur on land, in the atmosphere, and in the ocean, and the external factors, such as greenhouse gases, that affect them. Scientists around the world use dozens of different kinds of models that can be regional or global, fine-grained or coarse, primitive or advanced.
Studholme’s study used climate models to predict how much extreme rain the world will get in the future. But unlike previous studies that averaged all of the available climate models in order to figure out how much rain the planet will get in coming decades, Studholme decided to only use the group of models that predict that climate change will result in an increase in something called precipitation efficiency — how much of a falling raindrop reevaporates into the atmosphere before it hits Earth’s surface. He excluded the models that forecast a decrease, since scientific observations over the past two decades indicate that climate change is leading to an increase in precipitation efficiency. “Sometimes taking the average is a bad idea,” Studholme said. “If you were leaving New York and you wanted to go to Mexico and someone in the back seat said, ‘You’ve got to go South,’ and then another guy goes, ‘You’ve got to go North,’ and you split the difference, you end up in Los Angeles which is not where you wanted to go.”
By focusing on the group of climate models that most realistically simulate the actual physics of raindrops, Studholme’s study found that the average climate model likely underestimates how extreme precipitation will change in response to global warming. It’s possible that there will be a twofold increase in the volume of extreme rainfall in the 21st century compared to what previous studies estimate, he said, which would help explain why the globe is already seeing such intense and unprecedented rainstorms. “So a very significant increase in how much rainfall the atmosphere dumps out on the land every day at its most extreme,” Studholme said.
Chad Thackeray, a climate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in Studholme’s study, said the research was “super interesting and useful” because it identifies relatively small tweaks that climate modelers can make to improve their simulations. In other words, we’re getting closer to successfully using climate models to understand how rain works and how climate change is influencing it.
Thackeray published his own study in April that looks at a related piece of the rain puzzle: how frequent intense rain will become as climate change accelerates. In order to obtain his results, Thackeray also had to weed through climate models to find the simulations that most accurately showed how warming is already influencing precipitation. He found that extreme rainfall will occur about 30 percent more often by the end of the century, compared to how often it happens right now, under a medium-emissions scenario — if humans reduce greenhouse gas emissions to some extent instead of continuing on business as usual.
“There’s a lot of work that’s trying to untangle why climate models developed around the world will give slightly different answers to a question,” Thackeray said. “There’s been a lot of progress in recent decades, but once you get to highly impactful, extreme events that are very rare, we find that there’s still significant uncertainty.” Studholme and Thackeray’s studies get us a couple of steps closer to clearing up that uncertainty. And they both point to the unfortunate reality that rain is going to get more extreme as the planet warms.
The good news is that there are solutions that governments can invest in to protect citizens from flooding, starting right now. Two things lawmakers can do to help people prepare for extreme rainfall is fund initiatives that harden home infrastructure, such as rooftops, and improve drainage systems so that water has somewhere to go instead of pooling when it hits the ground. Though much of the United States is unprepared for extreme flooding events and other climate-related disasters, states are beginning to think seriously about how to become more resilient. And the federal government has been freeing up money for those efforts. The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress last year allocates funding to states to harden transportation infrastructure against climate change, create loan funds for resilience projects, upgrade old sewer systems, and more.
“That’s the silver lining,” Studholme said. “You don’t need a nerd from Silicon Valley to write some AI to solve this problem. We already have the technology to do this.”
Democratic members of Congress are considering a last-ditch attempt to reach a deal on something resembling a federal strategy to manage the emissions that cause climate change. Negotiations around that legislation are hitting snags left and right: Inflation and Russia’s war with Ukraine are top of mind as lawmakers weigh the pros and cons of approving another round of major government spending, potentially including roughly $300 billion worth of clean energy tax credits aimed at greening the nation’s power sector. The 2022 midterm elections are looming; Democrats likely have just a couple of months to deliver a climate plan before Republicans take back one or more chambers of Congress.
But climate change isn’t waiting around for politicians to figure out a clean energy strategy — the impacts of the climate crisis are becoming more visceral with each passing year, and global emissions are still rising. A new analysis from the independent analytics company Rhodium Group shows the U.S. is on track to fall “significantly short” of its climate goals.
Rhodium assessed the suite of climate-related policies in effect in the U.S. right now, including the bipartisan infrastructure bill Congress passed last year, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new standards for light-duty vehicles, and various state-level renewable energy targets. It paired those assessments with an analysis of trends in clean energy technologies, the cost of renewables, shifts in energy markets, and the overall economic outlook for the U.S. The group found that, without any additional action on climate change, the nation is on course to reduce emissions by 24 to 35 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade.
That may sound like a step in the right direction, and the report’s authors note that this year’s outlook is an improvement over the analysis Rhodium conducted last year, which estimated a 17 to 30 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. But the progress this year is basically a fluke — it was caused by slowing economic growth and rising fossil fuel prices driven by inflation, not by any kind of concerted policy effort to reduce emissions. And the nation is projected to drastically undershoot its goal of reducing emissions 50 and 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, part of its commitment to other countries as a member of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“Even by 2035, GHG emissions remain stubbornly high,” the report said — between 26 and 41 percent below 2005 levels. “The clock is ticking on both achieving the U.S.’s 2030 climate goals and on reducing emissions to avert the worst impacts of climate change.”
There are a few silver linings in Rhodium’s 2022 outlook. Under current policies, emissions from the power sector will continue to slow. The transportation sector, currently the top-emitting sector in the U.S., is expected to lose its position in first place to the industrial sector as fuel efficiency improves and Americans buy more electric vehicles. And by 2035, households will be spending less on gasoline thanks to an upswing in electric vehicle sales, leading to a 16 to 25 percent decrease in household energy costs compared to 2021.
If there’s one takeaway from this year’s report, however, it’s that these estimates can change at the drop of a hat. Geopolitical and economic uncertainty are largely responsible for the shift in emissions projections this year. How countries like the U.S. respond to these events could set the stage for deeper emissions cuts or higher emissions in the coming years. For example, Democrats in Congress might manage to pass climate legislation before the midterms, boosting the renewable energy industry and setting the U.S. on a greener path. If that happens, research shows that the nation has a good shot of reducing emissions 50 percent below 2005 levels by around 2035. But the opposite could occur: America could ramp up its production of natural gas to meet European demand, domestic inflation could prompt some Democratic lawmakers to abandon efforts to funnel new spending into the economy, and issues with the supply chain, among other obstacles, could stymie renewable energy deployment.
“Uncertainty is our watchword” this year, a spokesperson for the Rhodium Group said in a press release. “Global and U.S. energy markets and economic expectations look very different now than they did a year ago.”
In early May, a woman in her 90s was hospitalized in Connecticut with a strange assortment of symptoms: confusion, nausea, chest pain, chills, and fever. Two weeks later, on May 17, she died. The culprit was a blacklegged tick, a minuscule arachnid about the size of a sesame seed when fully grown.
Blacklegged ticks, commonly known as deer ticks, carry a wide range of illnesses. They’re best known for carrying Lyme disease, a sickness that causes a rash, fatigue, fever, and other unpleasant, sometimes debilitating, symptoms. The tick that killed the woman in Connecticut was carrying a disease that is far rarer and deadlier than Lyme: It’s called Powassan virus, or POWV. Blacklegged ticks carrying Powassan kill one in 10 of the people who develop severe symptoms. Half of those who survive a serious bout of the illness continue to experience the effects of the disease, such as loss of muscle mass and recurring headaches, for the rest of their lives.
The fatality in Connecticut is the second Powassan-related death in the United States this year. In April, someone in Maine died in the hospital after contracting the illness from a tick bite. Two deaths in the span of a couple of months may not sound like a lot, but they represent what looks like a significant rise in the disease that’s concerning experts. The 134 cases documented in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020 represent a number 300 percent higher than in the previous five-year period. And the cases that are reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, are most likely the symptomatic cases, typically the ones that land people in hospitals.
The true extent of the virus’ reach throughout the U.S., experts told Grist, could be greater than what’s reported by the CDC. Many cases of Powassan are asymptomatic and, even when a patient presents with symptoms, doctors may not accurately diagnose the disease because of its rarity. Experts expect cases of Powassan virus, and other diseases that people contract from carriers in the natural environment, to continue to rise as the climate continues to change due to greenhouse gas emissions. Warming temperatures are helping ticks shift their ranges into new areas, and warmer winters are helping the bloodsuckers survive from one year to the next. Most Powassan cases have been diagnosed in the Great Lakes region and the Northeast, but cases have also cropped up in states as far flung as North Dakota and North Carolina.
So when’s the right time to freak out about Powassan virus? Tick researchers have differing opinions on how serious of a public health threat Powassan is at the moment. But the general takeaway is that Powassan is a growing concern, and, if it were to become a more common disease in the U.S., it would be extremely bad news.
In New York state, Saravanan Thangamani, director of the SUNY Center for Vector-Borne Diseases at SUNY Upstate Medical University, runs a tick testing initiative out of his lab. When someone finds a tick in their backyard or crawling up their leg, they can send it off to Thangamani’s lab to have it tested. By cataloging those submissions, Thangamani found that the lower Hudson Valley in New York state has become a hotspot for Powassan virus in ticks. But he still doesn’t know what factors are responsible for the uptick in Powassan virus among the arachnids in that area. In fact, no one even knows exactly where ticks pick up Powassan virus — it’s still an open area of research.
“We don’t know where most of it comes from,” Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, told Grist. “There’s some evidence now that short-tailed shrews might be a very important reservoir host for this,” he said, adding that white-tailed mice, skunks, raccoons, weasels, and woodchucks have also been known to transmit Powassan to ticks, which can then in turn bite humans and infect them with the virus. “But we don’t know whether one of those hosts is more important than others in terms of infecting ticks,” he said.
Putting aside how little we know about where the virus comes from, and why the ticks that carry it tend to accumulate in certain areas, Thangamani says his research shows that there’s potential for Powassan to become more common in coming years. “In my opinion, people should be very very concerned,” he said. “There’s potential for it to become a major public health hazard.” Incidents of Powassan virus in ticks he’s tested in the lower Hudson Valley have increased between 3 and 5 percent in the three years that he’s been collecting citizen data. It’s also possible that other tick species, like the American dog tick or the lone star tick, can carry a version of the Powassan virus, too. As ticks continue to expand their range across the country, Thangamani worries that more humans could come into contact with Powassan-carrying ticks.
Ostfeld isn’t so sure that the increase in human cases documented by the CDC is evidence that there’s been a huge surge in the number of ticks carrying Powassan virus throughout the U.S. The increase could be due to more doctors becoming aware of tick-borne illnesses and testing patients for them, random chance, or a number of other factors. “I’m very comfortable saying, ‘yes, it’s very concerning,’ and I’m comfortable saying ‘it looks like it’s probably going up,” he said. “But I’m not going to swear on the origin of species that we have a statistically significant trend.”
But Ostfeld emphasized that now is the time for dedicating more resources and attention to understanding Powassan and how it functions in the environment. “It’s very very difficult to get funding from federal agencies for something like Powassan virus because of its rarity,” he said. “But one could argue that its rarity is exactly the time when we should be figuring out more of the basic biology of this virus and which factors influence human exposure so we’re prepared if and when it becomes more common.”
Lack of funding for tick-borne illnesses is an issue the Minnesota Department of Health has run into. In Minnesota, public awareness about Powassan and many other tick-borne diseases is low, public health officials told Grist. But resources to change that, and to expand the state’s understanding of tick-borne illnesses in general, have been stretched thin between many different public health priorities, most notably the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. “We don’t have the resources,” Erin Kough, an epidemiologist at the vector-borne disease unit at the Minnesota Department of Health, told Grist, “but we know that if changes in climate expand the territory of a tick then that means we’re going to get diseases in new parts of our state.”
Many of us have spent the last two-and-a-half years worried about the health risks posed by other people. In the United States alone, more than 1 million have died from COVID-19, a painful consequence of how ill-prepared the nation was (and, in many ways, still is) for an infectious disease outbreak.
As the climate warms, more health risks will come not only from other people, but increasingly from the environment around us. We’re equally unprepared to handle those.
Some of these risks come from diseases that many of us are already familiar with: Lyme disease, for example, which is carried by ticks, or West Nile virus, proliferated by mosquitoes — both vector-borne diseases spread by blood-sucking arachnids and insects. But the environment harbors dozens of other carriers of illnesses you’ve probably never heard of. They come from bugs, shellfish, and even soil. With global temperatures rising, well-known vector-borne illnesses are becoming more common, and other, lesser-known diseases are spreading into new areas.
These illnesses will “continue to tax our public health and medical care systems for years to come,” experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, wrote in a 2016 analysis. “The question remains whether we will be prepared.”
This field guide to tomorrow’s climate-driven diseases introduces you to some of the carriers that are growing in number and expanding into new parts of the U.S. as the environment changes. The viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites they spread can cause joint pain, skin lesions, long-term memory problems — even death. Some of these maladies have no treatment or cure, though experts emphasize that numerous preventative measures to limit infection exist. In other cases, successful treatment depends on a rapid diagnosis by a medical professional, but doctors in areas where disease carriers have historically been rare are struggling to recognize an onslaught of unfamiliar illnesses. Ensuring a less deadly future requires taking actions right now to protect ourselves against what’s coming. The first step, as with any climate change-related issue, is sizing up the scope of the threat.
Powassan virus
Carried by the blacklegged (deer) tick, an arachnid about the size of a poppy seed
Powassan virus, or POWV, is a rare, tick-borne illness that infected just 134 people in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020. That may not sound like a lot, but it represents a more than 300 percent increase from the previous five-year period.
The virus causes a neuroinvasive disease that has no treatment, vaccine, or cure. Early symptoms include headache, fever, nausea, and weakness — similar to other tick-borne illnesses. But Powassan is different from most tick diseases because it has an extremely high mortality rate: One in 10 people who develop the acute form of the illness die. Half of those who survive a severe bout of Powassan have long-term health issues such as recurring headaches, loss of muscle mass and strength, and memory problems.
Powassan virus has mainly been found around the Great Lakes and in the Northeast, but, between 2016 and 2020, cases were reported as far away from those regions as North Dakota and North Carolina.
Historically, the range of blacklegged ticks has been constrained by environmental factors — ticks can’t survive winters that are very cold or conditions that are too dry. But changing weather patterns and warming temperatures have allowed this tick to grow in number and expand its hunting range into new territories, catching people and the doctors who treat them off guard.
“Roughly 50 percent of those who recover from an acute Powassan infection have some kind of long-lasting, if not permanent, debilitation.”
— Rick Ostfeld, tick researcher at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
While there is no vaccine or cure available for people who contract Powassan virus, researchers at Yale University are working on an mRNA vaccine that could help protect against many tick-borne illnesses at once. The vaccine targets ticks by making it harder for the bloodsuckers to extract a full blood meal from animals, and hopefully one day humans, once they latch on. Until vaccines such as this one are widely available, the best way to avoid a tick-borne illness is to exercise extra caution in areas where ticks are common, use insecticides such as permethrin on the hems of your pants, and check your body for ticks regularly.
Chikungunya fever
Carried by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes
The virus that causes chikungunya is still rare in the U.S., but experts at the CDC are watching it extremely closely because the illness has the potential to spread at blinding speeds. The first case of chikungunya in the Western Hemisphere was discovered in 2013 in the Caribbean. By 2014, it had become an epidemic in Jamaica, and an outbreak of 107 cases had been documented in Florida. By 2017, more than 1 million people had been infected in the Americas. Some 80 percent of the Jamaican population may have been infected.
Symptoms include fever, debilitating joint pain, muscle pain, headache, nausea, fatigue, and rash. Death from chikungunya is rare and mostly occurs in severely immunocompromised patients. Severe joint pain can persist for months and even years in some cases.
Chikungunya fever was first identified in Tanzania in the 1950s, remained relatively rare for half a century, and then exploded into more than 60 countries throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas after 2004. Since 2014, cases of the virus in the U.S. have been identified in Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Most of those cases were acquired after travel to countries where chikungunya is more prevalent.
Much like ticks, mosquitoes thrive in warm, moist conditions. Climate change isn’t just warming the planet, it’s throwing the hydrological cycle out of whack, causing periods of extreme wetness in regions all over the globe. These conditions may be encouraging the spread of the mosquito species that carry chikungunya from California down through the southern half of the U.S. and up into the Northeast.
“We are not prepared.”
— Charles Ben Beard, deputy director of the CDC’s division of vector-borne diseases
Similar to Powassan virus, chikungunya has no vaccine or cure. Doctors can make patients more comfortable with fluids, local anesthetics, and aspirin. The most effective tools against chikungunya are preventative. To that end, the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved the release in California and Florida of 2.4 billion genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that have been engineered to only produce male offspring. The initiative is aimed at reducing the number of female mosquitoes — the only ones that bite — in the environment. By shifting the gender balance, it could also eventually lead to a reduction in the number of these insects buzzing around in the U.S.
Vibriosis
Carried by uncooked shellfish such as clams, mussels, and oysters
Vibrio is a marine bacterium that lives in the salt and brackish waters of estuaries around the globe. Different strains of Vibrio can cause infections of varying severity. Vibrio vulnificus is a particularly dangerous variant.
Shellfish can accumulate high concentrations of Vibrio and then pass that dose on to humans if consumed raw. Humans can also be infected with Vibrio when swimming in water with an open wound. When it infects humans via an open wound, Vibrio vulnificus can end up causing necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease. If the bacteria is ingested orally, it enters the bloodstream and can cause large pus-filled lesions on the extremities. The chance of death following a wound-acquired Vibrio vulnificus infection is 25 percent. That number doubles with food-borne infections. Immunocompromised people are particularly at risk.
Vibrio vulnificus is found in the Gulf of Mexico and, more recently, along much of the East and West Coasts.
The optimal water temperature for all Vibrio, including Vibrio vulnificus, is between 68 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Coastal waters around large swaths of the U.S. are hitting that temperature threshold earlier in the year as the planet warms, giving Vibrio a longer window to proliferate in the water and potentially accumulate in shellfish. In addition, water that has historically been too chilly for Vibrio vulnificus to properly thrive is warming up, allowing the bacteria to spread north into new areas like the Northeast and Pacific Northwest, and even into Canada.
“If you feel bad when you go to bed, by the time you wake up you could be ready for amputation, so don’t sleep on it. Go to the doctor as soon as you feel ill.”
— Brett Froelich, assistant professor of microbiology at George Mason University
Pay attention to signage and advisories from your local public health department when harvesting your own shellfish. Cook your bivalves thoroughly before eating them, or be careful not to leave shellfish out in the sun or in a warm place if you plan to eat them raw. And never swim with an open wound, even if the injury is very small.
Antibiotics can knock out vibriosis, but only if they’re administered early in the infection.
Chagas’ disease
Carried by triatomine insects, commonly known as kissing bugs
Kissing bugs are bloodsucking insects that often attach themselves to the soft skin around the mouths of humans, dogs, and other animals. But Chagas isn’t spread by the bloodsucking itself. When kissing bugs feed — at night when people are sleeping — the bugs defecate. People tend to rub the kissing bug’s feces into their mouths by accident either in their sleep or when they wake, inadvertently infecting themselves with Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas.
In the weeks and months after infection, symptoms can include fever or swelling. If Chagas is left untreated, it becomes chronic. An estimated 20 to 30 percent of people with chronic Chagas develop life-threatening complications such as a dilated heart that can’t pump enough blood, life-threatening gastrointestinal issues, and cardiac arrest.
Millions of people in the Americas have been infected with Chagas since the first human case of the disease was diagnosed in 1909 in Brazil. Some 300,000 of them live in the United States, but most live in Latin America. A vast majority of the Chagas cases documented in the U.S. have been in immigrants who came to the country from Latin America or elsewhere where the parasite is prevalent.
While Chagas is still relatively rare in the U.S., climate change could help the disease spread by causing an increase in the number of triatomine insects across the nation. Kissing bugs have already been found in 29 U.S. states, and researchers have documented the Chagas parasite in 55 percent of those bugs. Research shows the temperature increases expected under climate change will cause kissing bugs to mature faster and bear more offspring, which suggests that cases of Chagas may rise as the planet warms.
“[Chagas’ disease] is already in the U.S. but spreading and will become a big problem.”
— Daniel Brooks, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto
Chagas can be knocked out by antiparasitic medications if it’s caught early. Chronic Chagas can also be treated with similar medications, but success is less certain. In the U.S., six states currently screen blood donations for evidence of the parasite. However, only four of those states require that cases be reported to public health authorities, so it’s difficult for the CDC to ascertain how many cases of Chagas there are in the U.S. and how quickly they are rising. Window screens and insecticides may help control the insect when it becomes more widespread in the U.S.
Valley fever
Carried by soil containing the fungus Coccidioides
When Coccidioides spores living in dirt circulate in the air — kicked up by wind, construction, farming, or possibly wildfire smoke — humans and other animals can breathe the spores in. Most individuals with healthy immune systems can fight off the fungus by themselves, but in people with compromised immune systems, the spores are more likely to survive and extend their fungal filaments throughout the lungs and sometimes the rest of the body. Studies have also shown that pregnant people, Filipinos, African Americans, and perhaps Native Americans are more prone to hospitalization after contracting the disease than other demographics, even if they have healthy immune systems.
Some 60 percent of Valley fever cases produce no symptoms or mild symptoms that most patients confuse with the flu or a common cold, including fever, headache, and fatigue. But 30 percent of those infected develop a moderate illness that requires medical care. And another 10 percent have severe infections — when the fungus spreads beyond the lungs into other parts of the body. Those cases cause meningitis and can be fatal.
Valley fever has been documented in the desert Southwest and parts of California for decades. Cases have cropped up recently in the Pacific Northwest and non-desert areas in the Southwest. Arizona has the highest rates of Valley fever in the U.S. The disease is also prevalent in Mexico and Central and South America.
The fungus that causes Valley fever thrives in warm, wet conditions. Researchers have demonstrated that, if the world continues emitting greenhouse gases, much of the U.S. could become hospitable to the fungus. Cases are already on the rise. Valley fever cases in the U.S. rose by 32 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to the CDC. One study determined that cases in California rose 800 percent between 2000 and 2018. Oscillating drought and flooding in certain areas, a cycle research shows is exacerbated by climate change, could lead to even more cases. Like most other fungi, Coccidioides proliferates after heavy rain. When drought hits after the rainy season, those rain-fueled spores can get kicked up out of the soil and settle in people’s lungs.
“In terms of how severe it is and the lifelong requirement for some of these people for treatment, it’s worrisome. It would be a bad thing to see more Cocci than we have already.”
— Julie Parsonnet, specialist in adult infectious diseases at Stanford University
Caught early, Valley fever can be beaten back with antifungal medications. But the problem is that doctors in states where the disease is not common may not know Valley fever’s warning signs. If diagnosis is delayed, the more severe forms of the illness are more difficult to treat and can result in death; antifungal treatments are not a cure and can only give your immune system a boost as it works to fight off the fungus. Researchers in Arizona are working on a vaccine against Valley fever for dogs. At some point in the future, with enough funding, the researchers hope they can apply the same vaccine research to developing an inoculation against the fungus for human beings.
This story was reported and written by Zoya Teirstein. Illustrations were done by Amelia K. Bates. Design and development were handled by the Innovation & Growth team. Art direction by Teresa Chin. Megan Merrigan and Angelica Arinze handled promotion.
The project was edited by Katherine Bagley and L.V. Anderson. It was copy edited by Joseph Winters and fact-checked by Lina Tran.
For a downloadable field guide to emerging climate-charged diseases, click here: 8.5×11 | 11×17
The Biden administration is proposing a major overhaul to the National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP — the main source of insurance for homeowners who are required to or choose to obtain coverage for flooding. Last month, Alice Lugo, assistant secretary for legislative affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, put forth 17 legislative proposals that would collectively represent the biggest reform to the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s National Flood Insurance Program since the program’s inception.
The proposals, which have to make their way through a politically polarized Congress before they can become law, have the potential to drastically alter the way Americans protect their homes and businesses against flooding. At the moment, 21 states have no laws in place requiring sellers to disclose whether the property they are selling has flooded or sustained water damage before, and if it is likely to flood again. The Biden administration wants to change that by implementing a nationwide disclosure law that would ensure that prospective homeowners and renters have a property’s flood history in hand before signing a contract.
Even more radically, Americans hoping to build new homes on eroding beaches and other flood-prone areas will have to look elsewhere for flood insurance if the administration’s proposed reforms pass. One of the proposals in Lugo’s letter would prevent the NFIP from insuring newly built homes in risky areas, which means homeowners who go ahead with such construction would have to go to private insurance companies, which typically offer more expensive premiums, for insurance. The same applies to people who hold mortgages on properties that flood repeatedly. People who own “excessive loss properties,” or properties that flood multiple times and require insurance payouts of at least $10,000 each time, could lose access to government insurance on their properties after the fourth claim. And the NFIP would not issue any new insurance policies for commercial buildings point blank, no matter where they’re located or when they were built, because FEMA says it wants to promote growth in the private flood insurance market.
These changes, and the rest of the proposals in the letter, are more evidence that the climate crisis — and the myriad expenses that come with it — are forcing the nation to rethink the status quo. But experts say the administration’s proposals may have mixed results and raise major questions about the mission of the public flood insurance program.
For decades, the NFIP has been hemorrhaging money as flooding has hit Americans across the United States with increasing intensity. That’s been, in part, by design. The federal government never intended for the NFIP to generate a profit like a private insurance company would. The NFIP was established by necessity: Flooding was, and still is, difficult to insure against. It creates a lot of correlated risks — it’s rare for a single house to flood in a flooding event; more commonly, multiple houses flood in the same neighborhood or town. Private insurers just weren’t up for insuring against flooding; starting in the 1920s, the industry decided that flood insurance would never be a profitable enterprise. (Some companies have since changed their tune.)
So the NFIP was formed by Congress in 1968 to provide a public option, which was, the federal government figured, better than no option at all and cheaper than bailing people out every time a hurricane or other major flooding event occurred. The NFIP now covers roughly 5 million Americans — anyone living in a floodplain, as designated by FEMA, and carrying a federally-backed mortgage is required to have it. But the program is in the red after years of consecutive major hurricanes and decades of charging policyholders discounted rates for flood insurance — it carries $20.5 billion in debt to the Treasury Department and pays $300 million in annual interest. The status quo, according to the Biden administration, isn’t working anymore.
That’s where these reforms come in. In addition to putting a national flood insurance standard in place, banning insurance for new homes in flood-prone areas and commercial buildings, and canceling insurance for excessive loss properties, the administration is asking Congress to wipe out that $20.5 billion in debt and set up a subsidy program so that lower-income Americans can afford flood insurance. Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council and an expert on flooding, thinks that giving the NFIP a clean slate is a great idea. “It’s really encouraging that FEMA has put this out,” he told Grist.
But Moore and other flooding experts flagged concerns about some aspects of the proposal — namely, the portion that would require FEMA to drop flood coverage for “excessive loss” properties. The reforms might discourage new construction in flood-prone areas, Miyuki Hino, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert in climate risk and adaptation, told Grist. But it’s less clear whether the reforms would actually lead to a measurable reduction in the number of people living in flood-prone areas across the U.S.
“Some of the people who live in flood-prone places, they’re not there because it’s a beach house and they love the amenity of being near water,” Hino said. “They’re there because that’s the housing that’s affordable or their family has owned the house for generations and they don’t have real alternatives.” If those homeowners aren’t able to obtain insurance through the NFIP, they may choose to forgo flood insurance altogether instead of endeavoring to move or get potentially more expensive coverage through a private insurer. That would leave them more vulnerable the next time their home floods. Hino would have liked to see the Biden administration provide more alternatives for these types of homeowners and bulk up government assistance, either to help people elevate their houses (which would, in some scenarios, allow them to participate in the NFIP even if their house has flooded multiple times) or to move somewhere else.
The existential question at the heart of the conversation around what to do about public flood insurance in this country comes down to this: Should a program that was established to fill a void left by private insurers, to ensure that Americans wouldn’t be left financially devastated by flooding, be expected to be financially solvent, or is it enough that it serves a public good? “There are ways in which that goal of making insurance available and affordable runs counter to the goal of having it run like a private insurance company,” Hino said. The flood insurance program doesn’t exist to generate revenue for the federal government, Moore pointed out. “We don’t require the Department of Defense or the Department of State to run in the black,” he said. “I don’t think the NFIP is a failure if it doesn’t run a profit.”
Both Hino and Moore agreed that the Biden administration’s proposal to establish a national flood disclosure standard would be an unmitigated win for homeowners and the federal government alike. More information in the hands of buyers and renters provides a layer of protection against flooding that is especially crucial as the climate crisis continues to throw the nation’s hydrological cycles out of whack. But it’s not clear that even that fairly uncontroversial proposal stands a chance of passing Congress. “This has as much chance of passing both houses and being signed into law as any other bill that’s in Congress right now,” Moore said. “That’s a little bit of a back-handed compliment.”
Despite the political gridlock dogging the U.S. Senate, there’s evidence that there’s an appetite for exactly these kinds of flood insurance reforms among Republicans. In 2017, the Trump administration proposed a set of reforms that look nearly identical to the proposal the Biden administration is touting now, down to the national flood disclosure standard. The similarities between the two proposals didn’t sit right with some Democratic lawmakers. “It’s unacceptable to see FEMA taking cues from the Trump administration on reforms for the NFIP,” Senator Robert Menendez, from New Jersey, told E&E News in a statement. But the fact that the Trump and Biden administrations, so often on opposing ends of the spectrum when it comes to climate policy, agree on the matter of flood insurance reform indicates that public servants on both sides of the political aisle think the status quo is becoming unsustainable.
Summer heat descended on the desert Southwest and parts of the Western U.S. over the weekend, breaking temperature records and prompting federal officials to issue excessive heat warnings for approximately 53 million Americans. The National Weather Service called the heat “oppressive” and said to expect critical fire weather conditions across a large portion of the Southwest and the Rockies through Monday.
More than 25 major U.S. cities tied or broke maximum heat records on Saturday. Las Vegas, Nevada, hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature not felt in Sin City since 1956. California’s Death Valley reached 122 degrees. Phoenix, Arizona, clocked in at 114 degrees, the hottest day there in more than a century. Winds started pushing the heat east on Monday, which could bring sweltering temperatures and heat advisories to the upper Mississippi Valley, western Great Lakes, and Ohio Valley by midweek.
Triple-digit temperatures, while not unusual in the U.S. Southwest, are arriving earlier and more often in the summer season due to climate change. Worse, above-average temperatures are sticking around through the night — another consequence, climate studies show, of planetary warming. In the areas where officials issued excessive heat warnings this weekend, nighttime temperatures stayed above 75 degrees, which means people did not get a break from the heat during the night.
Medical experts around the world are becoming increasingly concerned that the 24/7 nature of heatwaves in recent decades is exacting a rising and deadly toll on public health. Already, excessive heat causes more deaths in America than any other weather-related disaster. Government analyses show that extreme heat claims up to 1,300 lives every year in the U.S., and an independent study indicated that the true number of heat-related deaths is several times higher. And heat-caused deaths are on the rise: Globally, such deaths rose 74 percent in nine countries between 1980 and 2016.
The rising health risks of summer-time heat has prompted some experts to give summer a new name: “danger season.” “Climate change has pushed a lot of these types of events into a new realm that is much more dangerous,” Kristy Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Grist’s Kate Yoder recently.
During a heat wave, limiting your exposure to heat by taking cool showers or baths, avoiding physical activity as much as possible during the day, and using an air conditioner if you have one can help you and your loved ones stay safe. So can knowing the warning signs of heat exhaustion, such as nausea, excessive sweating, and a rapid pulse.
Humans have evolved to spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping. How we sleep impacts productivity, alertness, mood, hunger, energy, and other basic functions that comprise a huge chunk of the human experience. But we are not sleeping well. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 1 in 3 American adults don’t get enough sleep, and we’re sleeping less than we did about a decade ago. Similar trends are developing across the globe.
Previous studies have pinned some of the blame for our collective sleep problems on technology and noise and light pollution. But Kelton Minor, a doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Social Data Science, wondered whether rising nighttime temperatures due to climate change might be contributing to the growing sleep deficit. On Friday, Minor and some colleagues published the largest study ever conducted on the relationship between ambient temperature and sleep. Their findings, published in the science journal One Earth, don’t bode well for humans’ sleep outlook in a climate-changed world.
Studies have shown that people recall sleeping poorly during hot periods, but, until now, researchers haven’t been able to pinpoint what, exactly, is happening to people’s sleep patterns during heatwaves. Are they waking up earlier, going to bed later, more restless throughout the night? Fitness wristbands and other wearables, like Apple Watches, clued Minor and his fellow researchers into how, exactly, temperatures affect sleep and what our sleep might look like as climate change accelerates.
By working with an enormous data set — 10 billion sleep observations pulled from 7 million sleep records from 47,000 individuals across 68 countries — and comparing that data to meteorological and climate data, the researchers found that warming temperatures have already eroded 45 hours of sleep per person per year by influencing people to fall asleep later and wake up earlier. That’s roughly 10 or 11 additional nights of poor sleep annually. The effects of climate change on sleep start at surprisingly low temperatures, at around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and grow more severe as temperatures rise. By the end of the century, even if we stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, we’ll lose 50 hours of sleep per year, or 13 days of short sleep.
“What we found is that, already, early in the 21st century, right around now, we already estimate that suboptimal ambient temperatures erode quite a lot of sleep,” Minor told Grist.
Robbie Parks, a researcher of environmental health sciences at Columbia University who was not involved in this study, called it a “landmark” addition to the field of climate change and sleep. “Using rigorous methodology and an unprecedented dataset of human wearables around the globe, Minor and colleagues have demonstrated how the loss of sleep due to rising temperatures could worsen everywhere under future climate projections,” Parks said. “Lack of sleep can have far-reaching consequences for human health, worsening physical and mental health, potentially resulting in injuries such as transport accidents, and also potentially increasing aggression and deaths of despair,” he added.
As with most climate change-related impacts, the effects of rising temperatures on sleep will not be felt by everyone equally. Minor’s study shows that people in low-income countries, the elderly, and women are experiencing bigger sleep impacts from climate change. The researchers aren’t sure why, exactly, that is, though they have some theories. Reduced access to cooling technology like air conditioning could be a factor in why people in lower-income countries are three times more impacted by higher nighttime temperatures than people in higher-income nations.
Minor’s research shows that, for the elderly, sleep quality is twice as impacted per degree of warming. That could be because thermal sensitivity increases with age. For cisgender women, core body temperature decreases earlier in the night than it does for cis men, which means they go to sleep earlier on average and may be exposed to higher temperatures as they’re preparing for bed.
Howard Frumkin, former Dean of the UW School of Public Health and senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land, who was not involved in the study, said the research is an advancement over previous studies. He wasn’t surprised that climate change affects the way people sleep unevenly. “While the paper didn’t provide data, it’s likely that poor people here in the U.S. are disproportionality affected too,” Frumkin told Grist. “In fact, the study was likely skewed toward relatively wealthy people (that’s who wears fancy wristbands) so it may underestimate the impact of heat on sleep.”
Minor was surprised to discover that people in warmer climates were more likely to experience sleep loss as temperatures rise than people in colder climates. He had assumed that people living in warmer places are already acclimated to hot temperatures and wouldn’t have trouble adjusting to a new normal. That wasn’t the case. “This really suggests that there’s limited evidence of adaptation,” he said. In other words, it looks like we’re not going to get used to sleeping in hotter temperatures any time soon.
Limiting climate change as much as possible will also limit the number of nights of short sleep we’ll experience by the end of the century. But some of that warming is already baked in. That doesn’t mean that climate change’s worsening impacts on sleep are inevitable, though. The fact that individuals’ sleep in richer countries is less impacted by climate change than the sleep of those in lower and middle-income countries indicates that there is a way to limit the impact of rising temperatures on sleep. More research needs to be done, Minor said, but it’s a good bet that expanding access to cooling technologies like air conditioning, planting more trees in urban areas to prevent streets and houses from absorbing so much heat, and lifting people out of poverty could all contribute to better sleep.
“It provides a path forward,” Minor said, “as long as cooling is provided equitably.”
In 2014, former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office announced an ambitious new climate target: 80 percent fewer emissions city wide by 2050. In order to reach that goal, the city aims to install 1,000 megawatts of solar technology within the five boroughs by 2030, enough to supply 250,000 homes with electricity.
But New York City has fallen behind. As of April, it had only installed 333 megawatts of solar — less than half of the solar capacity it aims to achieve by the end of this decade. NYC has a 70 megawatt solar gap to close this year alone in order to fulfill its 2030 goal.
A number of regulatory hurdles stand in the way of the city making progress on its climate ambitions. One of those obstacles can be found in a surprising place: New York City’s fire and building codes.
In a city as densely populated as New York, rooftops play an essential role in deploying renewable energy. Without rooftop solar, the city can’t install enough solar capacity to meet its climate goal. City leaders know this — as of 2019, the city requires all new buildings and major renovations of existing buildings to include either solar panels or a green roof system. But putting a solar installation on every rooftop in the city isn’t easy — and especially on the rooftops of existing buildings. Solar panels are clunky objects that have to share space with bulkheads — structures on roofs that cover water tanks, shafts, or service equipment — mechanical equipment, stairways, railings, emergency pathways and exits, and more.
An NYC rooftop devoid of solar panels.
kkong5/Getty Images
The New York City Fire Department’s, or FDNY’s, fire code seeks to balance the long list of items, including solar panels, on NYC’s rooftops with the agency’s primary firefighting efforts. Firefighters often access rooftops to vent smoke from burning structures, perform rescue operations, and put out fires before they spread to neighboring buildings, and they need clear paths to do it.
The code “balances requirements that are fair to all industries, while also maintaining safety,” a spokesperson for the FDNY told Grist. But solar industry experts say the FDNY’s code, one of the strictest in the nation, isn’t fair to solar companies and sidelines the city’s goal of reaching 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity by 2030 by unnecessarily squeezing the amount of panels that can go on a rooftop. “They’re constantly trying to encroach on the usable rooftop,” T.R. Ludwig, CEO of an NYC-based solar company called Brooklyn Solarworks, told Grist.
A revision to the fire code that took place at the end of last year is at the heart of New York’s solar industry’s beef with the FDNY. In December 2021, after seeking input from the public and various industries within the city, the FDNY revised its 2014 fire code, and the city council voted to approve it. The updated code said that new buildings constructed in New York City would have to comply with even stricter safety requirements around rooftop solar — more access pathways around panels and railings around rooftops that have solar on them. Ludwig, the CEO of Brooklyn Solarworks, wasn’t thrilled about the change. “But we kind of gave in on that particular point,” he said, “if it was new construction.”
Pretty soon, however, Ludwig noticed that the FDNY’s rooftop enforcement unit, a different unit from the one that had written the initial revision to the code, had interpreted the revision differently. It appeared as though that unit saw the code as requiring all buildings, not just new ones, to adhere to the updated safety requirements. The Department of Buildings, the agency that approves or denies building permits in the city based, in part, on whether a given work permit adheres to the fire code, seemed to interpret the FDNY’s revisions in a similar way and, in addition, now viewed solar panels as “serviceable equipment.” That triggers a new set of requirements for railings around the installations, which further squeeze the amount of rooftop space and cast shadows on the panels, making them less efficient. All of a sudden, Brooklyn Solarworks’ plan sets for solar installations on existing buildings, plans that Ludwig says would have likely had no problem getting the green light before the revision to the fire code, started getting rejected.
Ludwig provided Grist with 13 examples of new Brooklyn Solarworks installations on existing buildings that had failed to pass inspection because they didn’t comply with the revision to the fire code. “There’s been no communication with the industry. There’s been no public forum,” he said. “One decision has been made that’s going to cause a pretty serious ripple effect on solar system sizes, solar system production, and the cost.”
Ludwig estimates that adding more pathways and railings around solar installations, in line with what the fire code and the Department of Buildings have been calling for, adds between $5,000 and $8,000 to the cost of a given project — a cost increase of between 10 and 20 percent. “That just seems counter to what New York City is striving for in terms of renewable energy deployment,” Ludwig said.
The FDNY sees things differently. “The FDNY’s Code dealing with Rooftop Access requirements is not and has never been retroactive,” the FDNY spokesperson said. “Rooftops existing in a legal state prior to the enactment of the 2022 code do not have to be brought into full compliance with the new requirements unless work is being done.” The problem is that the FDNY now sees solar panel installation as “work,” and the solar industry does not. “That’s really the crux of it there,” Ludwig said. “If there’s a new building or someone is tearing off the top level of a building and putting in a roofdeck with a building permit, then sure. But the fact that they’re coming back and saying solar is part of this, that’s not what we agreed on.”
A rooftop solar installation in NYC.
Travel_Motion/Getty Images
The FDNY spokesperson told Grist that “ALL work done on a rooftop that doesn’t fall under the category of repairs” triggers the new code requirements. As far as Ludwig is concerned, that contradicts what the industry understood the new code to mean when it was passed. “We do feel burned,” he said.
There is a way around the new requirements. Companies can apply for a variance — a permit from the FDNY that allows a rooftop project to skirt a fire code requirement. Veronica Ciechowska Polanco, a project manager at commercial real estate inspection company Burnham who often applies for solar permits for commercial and residential buildings, said that when she runs into an issue with the fire code, she applies for a variance. “That’s just another additional application with FDNY that they kind of treat case by case,” she said. Ludwig pointed out that applying for a variance costs $420 and can add weeks to a process that’s already complex and time-consuming. Plus, in his experience, the FDNY hasn’t been amenable to variances around making access pathways narrower or eliminating railings in his experience. “What we’ve seen is they’re not terribly open to variances,” he said.
Ludwig’s frustration with the FDNY’s fire code illuminates an underrated challenge in the city’s quest to decarbonize: NYC’s efforts to equip rooftops with solar panels are being slowed not by technological feasibility or even a lack of climate ambition on the part of city government. The issue comes down to a somewhat mundane conversation about how code should be interpreted. On one side, you have the city’s solar industry, which believes the code should encourage solar installation, not hamper it. On the other, the FDNY maintains that the fire code’s chief priority is to protect the public and its firefighters.
“When you talk to anyone at any of these agencies, what they say is they’re very supportive of clean energy and climate goals,” Joe Lipari, who oversees permitting for rooftop solar installations at Brooklyn Solarworks, told Grist. “But the devil’s really in the details. There are bureaucratic hurdles they’ve proposed that introduce significant challenges that, frankly at this point in the climate crisis, I don’t think anyone needs to be dealing with.”
Ben Furnas, who served as director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Sustainability under de Blasio, told Grist that the task of balancing those two priorities doesn’t necessarily fall on solar companies or the FDNY; it should be shouldered by the elected officials who are responsible for meeting the city’s climate goal. Right now, that means both the city council and the administration of Eric Adams, who was sworn in as mayor in January and who oversees both the FDNY and the Department of Buildings.
“I think this is an opportunity for folks in the administration now to be making sure that the fire code and the building code are aligned with the imperative of confronting climate change, recognizing that these aren’t easy tradeoffs,” Furnas said. “These are really serious issues with really important goals you’re trying to achieve on both sides and balancing it is sort of the job of elected officials and folks in government.”
Balancing public safety and climate action was something Furnas focused on during his time in the de Blasio administration. “We carried the torch for the city’s solar goals,” he said. Adams will have to do the same if the city is to meet its targets. “The fire code is just a piece of legislation,” Furnas said, and the city council “is well within their rights to make adjustments based on what they see as the appropriate way of balancing these different things. And I think similarly, the mayor and folks in the mayor’s office can be striking this balance.”
The mayor’s office seems to have taken some of the criticism into consideration. In response to a request for comment from Grist, Rachel Finkelstein, a senior policy advisor for the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, which oversees the city’s climate change efforts, said that the Department of Buildings has reconsidered its view of solar panels as serviceable equipment. “After conversations with stakeholders,” Finkelstein said, the Department of Buildings “no longer interprets this section of Code as requiring railings for solar installations.” The fire code remains unchanged.
Millions of Americans own homes that could flood at any moment. Many of them don’t have a clue. That’s what happened to Ralph Patricelli, a 57-year-old real estate agent who bought a house in North Carolina’s Outer Banks last summer. Last week, the four-bedroom waterfront vacation home he purchased with his sister for $550,000 was swept into the ocean. The house’s collapse was captured on video, which quickly went viral on Twitter. “I didn’t realize how vulnerable it was,” Patricelli said in an interview with the Washington Post.
Erosion, extreme weather, and sea-level rise have long threatened homes built on barrier islands like the one Patricelli’s house was located on. And yet Americans still buy homes in these areas with little to no knowledge of the risks and financial burdens they’re taking on. Studies show that 13 million Americans could become displaced by rising sea levels and $1 trillion worth of homes and commercial property could be inundated by the end of the century. Without intervention, more and more people, like Patricelli, will be left holding the deed to an empty lot or a severely damaged building. But there’s plenty that cities, states, and the federal government can do to prevent homebuyers from sinking money into properties that are destined to sink into the sea.
One major way to discourage homebuyers from buying flood-prone houses is to require sellers to disclose a property’s history of flooding to prospective buyers. But almost half of states don’t give homebuyers the right to this information. According to the National Resources Defense Council, 21 states have no flood disclosure requirements at all, and another five states have “inadequate” requirements.
North Carolina is one of the states with inadequate flood disclosure laws, according to the group. A state real estate commission requires sellers to tell buyers if the seller has “actual knowledge” of the property being subject to flood risk or being located in a federally-designated flood area. But the term “actual knowledge” isn’t specific enough to require a comprehensive assessment of past flooding. And the NRDC also points out that North Carolina does not require sellers to tell buyers whether or not a property must have flood insurance under federal law. Other states have a confusing bungle of disclosure requirements that result in buyers getting an incomplete picture of how risky their prospective property is.
“The deck is stacked against home buyers, leaving millions of people investing their life savings in risky properties without knowing it,” said Joel Scata, an NRDC attorney, in a statement last year. “With flood risks rising throughout the country, we need to strengthen these disclosure rules across the board.”
A high cliff-side road near the ocean shows signs of major breakage in Pacifica, California.
JOSH EDELSON / AFP via Getty Images)
There’s more the federal government can do to protect homebuyers, too. The National Flood Insurance Program, which is administered by the Federal Emergency Management Administration and issues policies that are a prerequisite for most homeowners with mortgages in flood zones, recently increased premiums in certain areas to better reflect flood risk. That move could potentially help discourage people from building or buying homes in especially at-risk areas like the barrier island Patricelli’s house was built on. But FEMA could do more to ensure people have access to flood hazard information such as a property’s history of flooding before buying a home. FEMA could create an accessible database that people could use to search for a home’s flood history. The agency could also require states to pass comprehensive flood disclosure laws as a prerequisite to participating in the National Flood Insurance Program.
Ultimately, even stronger action will be needed to protect homebuyers, and people who already own homes in flood-prone areas, from sea-level rise. Managed retreat — the organized coordination of people and assets away from coastlines — could help save lives and money. But politicians aren’t ready to have that conversation yet. Managed retreat is a political hot potato — few state senators or representatives, and certainly no members of Congress, want to tell their constituents that climate change will eventually force them to leave their homes.
In the meantime, people like Patricelli will continue to be caught unawares. “I was aware that erosion was happening there,” Patricelli, who had been informed of the way the sellers of his property had tried to bolster the house against erosion, told the Washington Post. “I was not aware of the rate that it was happening.” He told the Post that he was in the midst of relocating the house further inland prior to last week’s incident. “We really thought we were going to be able to move the house and save it,” he said. Time is running out for many other Americans, too, even if they don’t know it yet.
In mid-April, New York state regulators voted to approve two clean energy projects that are expected to reduce the city’s reliance on fossil fuels by more than 50 percent over the next 10 years. The first project, called Clean Path, will ship 1,300 megawatts of wind and solar from a northern New York county to NYC via a 175-mile underground transmission line starting in 2027. It has broad support from civil society groups across the state.
The second project, called the Champlain Hudson Power Express — or CHPE, pronounced “Chippy” — will do something similar: it will funnel clean energy into the city via a transmission line, part of which will be buried under the Hudson River. But the power CHPE will bring in isn’t local — it’s sourced from Canada, where dams owned by a company called Hydro-Québec generate a bounty of electricity. To meet its climate goals, the city has approved the construction of a 339-mile power cable carrying that excess hydropower from Québec all the way to Queens. This project, however, has faced stiff opposition from environmentalists and community groups, who argue that it outsources clean energy and jobs to a different country; from First Nations in Canada, who allege the company’s dams perpetrate environmental harms on Indigenous communities in Québec; and from critics who say hydropower isn’t as clean as its proponents claim.
Those groups did not succeed in stopping CHPE. The April vote by New York regulators was the last hurdle standing in its way. And from an emissions perspective, that appears to be a good thing: New York City will get 1,250 megawatts of clean power from Canada starting in 2025. That electricity, plus the power from the Clean Path line, are expected to supply more than a third of the city’s annual electricity consumption. The hydro will also do what wind and solar generated in the state can’t: provide a source of reliable power that keeps energy flowing into the city when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
A hydroelectric dam in Québec, Canada.
Giuseppe Minervini/EyeEm/Getty Images
But the way CHPE divided communities in New York, and the plan’s impact on First Nations in Canada, are worth paying attention to. Many states across the U.S. are embarking on a clean energy transition that should have begun decades ago. Now, up against hard deadlines and intensifying pressure to decarbonize their grids, states are being forced to make tough choices.
“This is the stuff that keeps me up at night,” Tracy Brown, president of the clean water advocacy group Riverkeeper, one of the environmental organizations that opposed CHPE, told Grist. “We’ve gotten to a point where there’s really no great alternatives left. We’ve waited so long that everything is going to involve a tradeoff.”
For decades, New York City had a powerful source of reliable low-carbon energy: the Indian Point nuclear power plant. After 59 years of operation, the plant’s last reactor was shuttered last year thanks to a dogged campaign waged against the reactors by environmentalists, who said the aging plant had become unsafe and was killing billions of fish and harming other aquatic wildlife as it siphoned water from the Hudson River to cool its reactors. Some 25 percent of the power keeping the lights on in New York City and the Hudson Valley winked off the grid just as the state was ramping up its efforts to reduce emissions.
Wind and solar couldn’t fill the void left by Indian Point for two reasons: Wind and solar are intermittent sources of energy that don’t provide the same kind of reliable, 24/7 power that nuclear provides. More importantly, the city has a transmission problem. There’s no way to get green power from the cleaner grid in upstate New York down to the city efficiently. Three natural gas-fired power plants came online between 2019 and 2021 to help New York City make up the slack as Indian Point’s reactors wound down. But regulators hoped they would be a short-term fix.
In January 2021, several months before Indian Point closed for good, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA, put out a call for renewable energy projects. Hydropower projects, NYSERDA said, would be eligible if they were “existing or already under construction” by 2020. It received seven proposals from developers, CHPE and Clean Path among them.
For the city, CHPE looked like a neat solution to its transmission problem. It also fit NYSERDA’s requirements: Hydro-Québec completed its first dam in 1917. Construction on its latest hydroelectric project, which company officials say will be its last, started in 2009. In all, the company operates 61 hydroelectric generating stations that have been supplying Québec with clean power for decades. New York regulators liked the idea of plugging New York City’s grid into all of that existing clean power via a giant extension cord, and they ultimately approved both CHPE and Clean Path last month.
CHPE won’t just alleviate some of the city’s reliance on fossil fuels, it will help eliminate key sources of air pollution in some of New York City’s poorer neighborhoods. The city currently houses 19 antiquated and polluting “peaker” power plants, which run on natural gas, and sometimes kerosene, and get switched on during periods of peak energy demand. People in areas around those plants suffer from high rates of asthma and endure other negative health effects due to peaker plant pollution. “Low-income and communities of color are literally gasping to breathe,” Adrienne Esposito, executive director at the nonprofit Citizens Campaign for the Environment, a group that opposed Indian Point and supports CHPE, told Grist. A spokesperson for NYSERDA told Grist that CHPE will “substantially aid and accelerate the current efforts of peaker plant owners to explore the conversion of their facilities into energy storage and other clean energy technologies,” though the agency didn’t say how many of the 19 peaker plants will be offset by CHPE.
A power plant in Long Island City, Queens. fotog/Getty Images
“These projects help bridge past that transmission bottleneck and help us use this in city fossil fuel generation half as much,” Daniel Zarrilli, former Chief Climate Policy Advisor to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and a special advisor on climate at Columbia University, told Grist. “It’s a huge impact.” But others don’t think that plugging into Québec’s excess hydro is the best idea.
Brown, the president of Riverkeeper, said the narrative around the CHPE has become “it’s either hydro from Canada or natural gas,” but she maintains that any of the other projects the city was considering, all of which focused on expanding wind or solar energy within the state, would have been better. “Our main thing is just we think there were better choices, better options,” she said.
Stephen Eisenman, cofounder of the community group the Anthropocene Alliance, also opposes the project on the grounds that it outsources economic opportunities and revenue to Canada. “If there’s profits to be made they ought to be made by New York State,” he said. He also took issue with the fact that the company that’s building the transmission line from Canada to New York City is owned by Blackstone, a massive investment group.
There are environmental justice concerns on the other end of the project, too. Several First Nations oppose CHPE, citing Hydro-Québec’s long history of flouting their rights and concerns.
Some of Hydro-Québec’s dams flooded First Nations lands in Québec that were never ceded to the Canadian government, impacting terrestrial and aquatic wildlife that the tribes depend on for food and traditional practices. Naturally occurring mercury in the soil of land that got flooded turned into methylmercury when it came into contact with bacteria in the water. Methylmercury is a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in fish and other aquatic organisms and can make its way up the food chain into humans. “The mercury is always there, it’s always present in the water and the fish,” Lucien Wabanonik, a Lac Simon Anishinaabe Nation councilor in Québec, told Grist.
Wabanonik wonders why Hydro-Québec would sell off its hydropower to the highest bidder when First Nation communities in Québec still lack power. One community, Kitcisakik, lives beside one of Hydro-Québec’s dams but doesn’t have access to the electricity that comes from it. “They only have generators, and they put gas in there to have light,” Wabanonik said. “To warm them up in their cabins they have to cut wood.”
In 2020, the Innu Nation of Labrador, another Indigenous community that opposes the project, partnered with the Center for Biological Diversity to send a formal notice of opposition to the U.S. Department of Energy calling on the agency to do a more thorough assessment of CHPE’s environmental impact. The impacts of Hydro-Québec’s dams on Indigenous communities, the letter says, “have historically been ignored.”
Wabanonik said Hydro-Québec should compensate tribes in the area for the harms they’ve experienced as a result of the company’s dams. “We have to live with these conditions,” he said. “They say this is for all of society, everyone benefits from it. Well, I don’t think First Nation people are really benefiting from it.”
The waterfalls of Shawinigan, situated on the Saint-Maurice river in Québec, Canada.
Getty Images
However, last month, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke, representing Mohawk communities in southeastern Canada and northern New York, released a statement blasting critics of the project and arguing that Hydro-Québec did its “due diligence in consulting with Indigenous groups.” The council acknowledged Hydro-Québec’s historical impacts on Indigenous communities but pointed out that no new power infrastructure will be built for CHPE. The council said it “has been a strong supporter of the CHPE and its construction, as it will significantly reduce the use of fossil fuel power plants” in the region.
Activists who tried to stop CHPE’s approval often touted a shocking statistic: some hydropower projects produce as many greenhouse gas emissions as coal-fired power plants. “There’s no clear evidence that CHPE will do anything to lower greenhouse gases,” Eisenman, cofounder of the Anthropocene Alliance, said.
It’s true that hydropower can produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane emissions. That’s because flooding a wooded area to create a reservoir prevents the area from absorbing carbon dioxide, turning it from a carbon sink into a carbon source as the submerged vegetation decomposes. In tropical regions, these emissions can indeed rival the emissions produced by coal-fired plants. Some reservoirs continue to produce emissions long after the original organic matter that once grew there has decomposed because of algae or agricultural runoff. Others produce emissions for a number of years and then stop becoming a significant source of methane and CO2.
It’s not true, however, that Hydro-Québec’s existing dams — the ones that will be sending excess power to NYC once CHPE is built — are major sources of emissions. Most studies, including some funded by Hydro-Québec, indicate thatthe company’s reservoirs producefar fewer emissions than natural gas or other fossil fuels. An independent 2021 study showed that the electricity produced in Québec, 95 percent of which comes from hydropower, emits just 35 grams of emissions per kilowatt-hour. Natural gas, by comparison, produces between 400 and 600 grams per kilowatt-hour. Coal produces between 900 and 1,000.
“What we’ve seen in Québec, and a lot of measurements have been done, is that emissions are not so high,” Annie Levasseur, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Québec and the lead author of the 2021 study, told Grist. Levasseur found that emissions in Québec spiked in the first 10 years after a reservoir was created, but those emissions, she said, “are still much much lower than, for instance, producing electricity from natural gas or coal.”
The general consensus among academics and researchers is that hydropower is a crucial aspect of the transition to clean energy. It’s not just that hydropower tends to be a low-carbon alternative to natural gas; it’s also that it’s flexible. It can fill in the gaps left by greener but more intermittent technologies like wind and solar.
Some of the activist groups that worked to close the Indian Point nuclear point plant think that’s reason enough to support CHPE. These groups have thrown their support behind the transmission line not because they think it’s a perfect plan, one community organizer told Grist, but because they recognize the urgency of the climate threat and because few other options exist at this point. Any ratcheting down of emissions that occurs in the short term, such as the one that will take place when CHPE comes online and NYC’s peaker plants shut down, will alleviate some degree of warming, and the suffering that comes with it, in the future.
New York City lost a key source of electricity when the Indian Point nuclear power plant, seen here on the banks of the Hudson River, closed in 2021. That gap was later filled by natural gas. AP Photo/Seth Wenig
“We can’t be whimsical about what kind of power should go to New York City,” Esposito, the director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment, said. “Saying no to the clean hydro is saying yes to continuing on with fossil fuels and the antiquated power plants. It’s our ethical obligation to choose the infrastructure project with the least impact.”
But CHPE’s opponents argue that the ethics of the transmission line aren’t so clear cut. Powering down polluting peaker plants in New York City solves an environmental justice problem in Queens, but what happens to Indigenous communities in Québec who have their own issues with Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs? The company has said it won’t build any new dams, but hydropower is proving to be a valuable and in-demand commodity. Brown, the Riverkeeper president, doesn’t trust that Hydro-Québec will stick to its promise not to build any new dams. “Of course, if they’re opening new markets in the U.S., it’s going to trigger dam building,” she said. Whether or not Brown’s prediction comes true, First Nations in Québec maintain that the existing dams have been taking a toll on their way of life and will continue to do so. That’s an impact energy consumers in New York City won’t see or feel.
Weighing these kinds of tradeoffs will be the name of the game in coming years, as states scramble to make the belated transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Community opposition to large-scale clean energy projects across the country shows how complicated that transition already is and will continue to be. Activists oppose an 800-megawatt offshore wind project off New England on the grounds that it will harm whales. Communities near Las Vegas oppose the now-approved $1 billion Gemini solar and battery storage project because it’s too big. Last year, voters in Maine approved a measure that temporarily stopped a project similar to CHPE after environmental groups, conservationists, and tribes in Maine and Canada waged a campaign against it. That project, if completed, will channel hydropower from Québec into Maine via a 145-mile transmission corridor. The legal fight that followed the vote in Maine made it all the way to the state’s Supreme Court this week.
“CHPE is just one of many projects that are going to be complicated and difficult but necessary in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Zarrilli, the former New York City climate advisor, said. “These are the kinds of choices we’re going to be faced with quite often going forward. We’re going to need to be able to make hard choices.”
Although COVID-19’s precise origins may always remain a mystery, the disease that has claimed more than 6 million lives, halted global economies, and caused immense suffering most likely came from a bat. The scientific term for the phenomenon in which a virus jumps from one species to another is “viral spillover.” A new study shows that climate change is creating ideal conditions for viral spillover, which could have resounding implications for human health in the not-so-distant future.
Research published in the science journal Nature on Thursday shows global warming is shaking the world like a snow globe, causing mammals to move into new areas in search of food and comfortable habitat, and at a faster rate than they would if human-caused warming didn’t exist. Those mammals carry diseases that can jump from animal host to animal host and, eventually, to human beings, sparking pandemics like COVID-19, or worse. Basically, climate change is making it difficult for animals to social distance from each other.
“As the world changes, the face of disease will change, too,” Gregory Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University and a coauthor of the new study, said at a press conference. “The coming decades will not only be hotter, but sicker.” The study projects that there will be at least 15,000 new viral transmissions between animal species in the next 50 years.
The researchers got their results by analyzing the zoonotic diseases, or infectious diseases that can be spread between animal species, that circulate in wild mammals. Then, they looked at projections of geographic range shifts, or changes in the areas where species live, for nearly 4,000 mammals by the year 2070 under various climate change scenarios. By comparing these data sets and other data on land use change and biodiversity, the researchers were able to simulate potential future viral hotspots — areas where zoonotic diseases may spillover into areas of high human population density. They found that the Sahel region in northern Africa, the Ethiopian highlands, eastern China, and the Philippines are among the places poised to become tropical viral hotspots. Parts of East Asia and East Africa are already hotspots, the study found. The areas where species are likely to mix and potentially exchange diseases are located on mountainsides and other places where species coming from different directions meet up.
“Unequivocally, in every simulation we do, every way we change the parameters and the data, climate change is creating inumerable hotspots of future zoonotic risk or present day zoonotic risk right in our backyard,” Albery said.
In addition to mapping out future areas of concern, the study demonstrates that climate change and land use change (or the development of wild land for human activities like agriculture) are already having an impact on the way disease jumps between animal species in the wild. The researchers expected that most disease-swapping encounters between mammal species would occur later this century, but instead they found that more of these first encounters will happen between 2011 and 2040.
“Our simulations suggest that in the next half-century, this process will completely restructure the global mammal-virus network,” Colin Carlson, a coauthor of the study and an assistant research professor at Georgetown, told Grist.
When it comes to global warming, the name of the game is limiting damage. Every degree of warming averted helps limit additional suffering. But curbing warming won’t curb the spread of disease. The roughly 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming that has occurred so far has already created many climate-related opportunities for viral spillover. And slowing down climate change — by, for instance, limiting it to the less than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming that the Paris Agreement calls for — actually greases the wheels of spillover. If the planet heats up extremely quickly, animals won’t be able shift their ranges fast enough and will perish as a result. But slower warming gives them time to adapt and move around. “Overall, our results indicate that a mild perturbation of the climate system could create thousands of new opportunities for viruses to find new hosts,” the study says.
Daniel Brooks, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and coauthor of a book on emerging infectious diseases called The Stockholm Paradigm: Climate Change and Emerging Disease, pointed out that this study, which he was not involved in, provides an incomplete accounting of the disease risks of climate change. “This particular contribution is an extremely conservative estimate of the potential for emerging infectious disease,” he said. Brooks said that the study underestimates both the types of animals that can spread disease, because it exclusively focuses on mammals, and the number of viruses circulating in the wild that can infect humans, because the authors didn’t take something called the stepping-stone concept into account. That theory holds that while a given pathogen may not be able to infect a given host, it can infect a different host which can, in turn, infect the original host, widening the umbrella of potential pathogens threatening that host. The true potential impact of climate change on infectious disease, Brooks said, is much larger than the study indicates.
The study’s authors call for the development and implementation of wildlife disease surveillance systems that can sound the alarm when diseases jump between animal hosts, which can help humans try to prevent that disease from spilling over and infecting a human host. Brooks has promoted a framework for developing such a surveillance system called the DAMA protocol. It advocates for documenting the existence of disease-causing organisms, then assessing those organisms based on how alarming they are to humans, monitoring the most significant ones, and, finally, taking action to alert the public if necessary before the pathogen makes its way into the human population. It’s clear from the way the world handled the COVID-19 pandemic that governments are a long way off from implementing the tenets of the DAMA protocol.
The authors of the new Nature study hope their research will help galvanize action to prevent future spillover events into human populations. But they also say that preventing all of these spillover events may be impossible. “Our study raises serious questions about whether that’s even an achievable strategy,” Carlson said. Any efforts to prevent viral spillover must be paired with equally dogged efforts to prepare the world for the pandemics that are surely headed our way.
“The main message is this,” Albery said. “This is happening, it is not preventable even in the best-case climate change scenarios, and we need to put measures in place to build health infrastructure to protect animal and human populations.”
In 2020, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden made a promise to voters. “No more drilling on federal lands, period,” he said. “Period, period, period.”
Last week, Biden broke that promise. His administration announced it was opening up public land to new oil and gas leases, several months after suspending those types of leases.
Biden officials have a handy excuse for the reversal. In the summer of 2021, a federal judge in Louisiana struck down the Biden administration’s pause on new oil and gas leases on public lands. Climate advocates were furious when the White House announced the new leasing plan last week, but senior officials, citing the 2021 ruling, said their hands were tied. Biden’s new leasing plan opens up approximately 144,000 acres for new drilling, 80 percent less acreage than the Department of the Interior had originally evaluated for leasing. It also hikes up royalty rates on new leases from 12.5 percent to 18.75 percent. The Biden administration tried to balance its leasing move by releasing a report yesterday that shows it is on course to produce enough renewable energy to power roughly 9.5 million homes by 2025. Some climate activists weren’t sold.
“This is the Biden administration caving to the fossil fuel industry and directly breaking the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Collin Rees, a U.S. program manager at the climate group Oil Change International, told Grist, referring to Biden’s new leasing plan.
Biden’s latest decisions don’t have much to do with meeting (or not meeting) his climate goals. They’re not even really about reducing gas prices. Opening up new acreage for drilling won’t affect gas prices for at least a year; it certainly won’t have an impact as soon as the summer, when gas demand peaks.
So what’s it really about? “It’s a political move,” Paul Bledsoe, a strategic advisor for the Progressive Policy Institute and a former climate advisor for President Bill Clinton, told Grist. Nearly all of Biden’s domestic energy policies these days are centered around controlling the way American voters perceive his administration. Biden, Bledsoe said, “is playing a four-dimensional game of chess.”
An aerial view of an oil derrick in the mountains of Western Colorado.
grandriver/Getty Images
Those moves will do little to nudge gas prices down in the short term. But that’s not really the point. “I think the White House’s view is: ‘We’re in a bit of a crisis, we need to check every box,’” Bledsoe said. “The domestic leasing was one of those boxes. I think we’re done now, there’s going to be no more focus on additional near-term supply policy. He’s done everything he can do.”
Bledsoe argues that the Biden administration had to make these tough decisions, and not just because inflation and high gas prices will hurt Democrats as they head into a tough midterm election cycle. Biden’s ultimate goal is to get Democrats to repackage and pass a slimmer, more climate-focused version of his Build Back Better Act. That act, which was passed by Democratic lawmakers in the House last November and included $320 billion in clean energy tax credits, stalled out in the Senate after two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema of Arizona, indicated they couldn’t get behind it. Recently, Manchin has hinted that he’s open to supporting the climate portion of that bill, reinvigorating discussions around the legislation in the Senate.
Despite the strange optics of a pro-climate president boosting fossil fuels, Bledsoe doesn’t think Biden’s recent decisions are at odds with the president’s climate vision. If Biden shows American voters and the Senate that he has done everything he can to alleviate rising gas prices in the short term, he said, perhaps he can convince lawmakers to turn to the arduous task of rejiggering Build Back Better into something that can pass.
“I think the president can now argue that he’s done everything he can to alleviate near-term gasoline prices, now let’s focus on medium and long-term energy prices and driving down those costs,” Bledsoe said. But the clock is ticking. If Democrats are going to pass the climate portions of Build Back Better before the midterms, then they need to start writing up a new bill now. “It can’t be done overnight,” Bledsoe said. “I’m starting to worry that the clock is running out.”
Rees, the climate advocate, doesn’t buy the argument that increasing oil and gas production now will ultimately help Biden achieve his climate goals. “It’s one thing to try to boost production in the very short term but the big question mark for us is whether you’re locking in new production and expanding the fossil fuel industry,” he said. “Nothing is worth locking that in and it’s certainly not clear that doing so will help him pass a climate bill.”
When the world’s scientific community caught wind of a novel coronavirus circulating in Wuhan, China in 2020, it sprang into action. In the span of just 12 months, researchers came up with an effective inoculation against COVID-19, beating the previous record for fastest vaccine development and deployment by three years. But experts quickly ran headfirst into a crucial problem: human behavior.
Despite reassurances from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccine disinformation spread. Influencers such as Fox News pundits, right-wing podcasters, and anti-vax parent groups slowed the response to the pandemic. At the end of last year, 15 percent of the American population remained unvaccinated.
A similar story is playing out, albeit on a much longer time scale, with humanity’s response to the climate crisis. This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, released a report that emphasized that the barriers to accomplishing progress on climate change are largely political, not scientific.
The report, dedicated to analyzing the solutions to climate change, found that, thanks to decades of work by researchers, the world has the science, the technologies, and much of the engineering prowess needed to scale down emissions and ensure a livable planet. The missing ingredient is the political will to make those adjustments. Actions taken by a powerful minority — led by lawmakers and lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry — have prevented the world from confronting this existential threat. Now, scientists warn that the window to take effective action is rapidly closing.
“For some time, there was this assumption among many in the science community that, if only decision-makers had the right information and the public had the right information, then of course everyone would work to do what is necessary to mitigate the climate threat,” Matto Mildenberger, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Grist. “But that’s not how we work.”
For the first time in IPCC history, the report includes a chapter on the social science barriers to solving the climate threat. Chapter 5 of the report, titled “Demand, Services and Social Aspects of Mitigation,” makes an effort to parse the conditions under which humans will take action to slow the climate crisis. The intergovernmental panel has included social science in its global assessments before, but this is the first report that has dedicated an entire chapter to understanding and analyzing human behavior. “I think in some ways, this chapter is sort of the IPCC catching up with an understanding that many of our political leaders already have that this is a challenging political issue,” Mildenberger said.
The chapter shows that lifestyle sector changes, when adopted en masse, have significant power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Taking fewer flights and more public transportation, switching to plant-based diets, and living in more energy-efficient buildings, among other strategies, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all economic sectors between 40 and 70 percent by 2050.
So what’s standing in the way of more people making those lifestyle decisions? In short, it’s policy.
“Individuals can’t just up and make a different decision, necessarily, to emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” Sarah Burch, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada and a coauthor of the IPCC report, told Grist. In order to make choices that result in fewer emissions, people need policymakers to shift the status quo. They need public transit options that allow them to easily leave their cars at home or ditch them altogether, access to affordable housing stock that runs efficiently on clean energy, and the ability to buy fresh vegetables and other plant-based foods.
Those policies are entirely feasible, at least in theory. In the United States, lawmakers in several states have introduced (and sometimes passed) bills aimed at retrofitting existing buildings to make them more energy efficient and transitioning power grids to green energy. The IPCC report shows that those types of policies not only result in reduced greenhouse gas emissions, but can also address issues of income inequality and economic insecurity, and vice versa.
“There is high confidence in the literature that addressing inequities in income, wealth, and decent living standards not only raises overall well-being,” the report reads, “but also improves the effectiveness of climate change mitigation policies.” Passing policies that improve people’s lives can also improve the planet’s outlook.
Despite gains at the state level, the United States and many other developed countries still lack federal climate policies that reduce emissions at the scale scientists say is necessary. The report’s new emphasis on the entrenched barriers to the myriad solutions it outlines in its report signals a shift for the intergovernmental panel. The IPCC is coming to the belated realization that just laying out the science and hoping policymakers use it to take action isn’t enough to move the needle.
Granted, government apathy and delay is in no small part due to political meddling by the fossil fuel industry, which has been waging concerted disinformation campaigns against climate science and lobbying lawmakers to reject climate policy since before the first IPCC report was published in 1990. Companies have successfully claimed that ditching coal, oil, and gas isn’t economically feasible and that passing climate policy would shift a massive economic burden onto consumers.
The new social science section of the latest IPCC report asserts that the opposite is true: Failing to act on climate change will incur enormous economic costs, and passing climate policy has the potential to lift people out of poverty.
But transitioning off of oil and gas will hurt the fossil fuel industry’s bottom line. “Climate policy threatens a particular set of concentrated interests who have made a lot of money from releasing carbon pollution into the atmosphere without paying the true cost of that,” Mildenberger, who contributed to the IPCC report but was not involved in the chapter on social barriers to action, said. “We’re facing a really significant economic and political conflict between the winners and losers from climate change.”
In the U.S., the political barriers to achieving climate action have been on full display over the past six months. President Joe Biden took office in January with plans to pass a climate plan that would have begun to match the scale of the crisis. But his efforts were foiled by a member of his own party: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin, who has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, negotiated with his fellow Democrats and the Biden administration for months, and ultimately succeeded in watering down Biden’s initial climate plan, which would have slashed emissions from the power sector 82 percent by 2030. Eventually, Manchin pulled his support from the weakened plan, too. Manchin’s reticence is a microcosm of what the IPCC has identified as a global issue and what pro-climate politicians, activists, and parts of the general public have long understood: politics and power are getting in the way of progress.
The full scope of chapter 5’s findings, particularly the parts about vested interests working to slow and stop climate policy, didn’t make it into the report’s Summary for Policymakers — the most important piece of the assessment that must be approved by government representatives before the report can be released to the world. An earlier draft of the report, leaked to the Guardian, included information about those vested interests (AKA, the fossil fuel industry). But it was cut in the final draft.
“The scientists clearly did their job and provided ample material on climate obstruction activities in the report,” Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University, told The Guardian. “The political process of creating the Summary for Policymakers ended up editing all of this information out.” Politics is still getting in the way of climate science, even in a report that discusses the ways politics are getting in the way of climate science.
Mildenberger said the fact that the sharper conclusions in chapter 5 didn’t make it into the Summary for Policymakers means that the chapter’s full insights weren’t fully elevated to the forefront of the messaging around this latest IPCC report. He still sees chapter 5 as an important downpayment on a more thorough understanding of how to get decision-makers to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and pass climate policy. But in his view, the Summary for Policymakers and the larger report leaves a lot of important questions unanswered.
“How do we disrupt the political power of the fossil fuel industry? How do we help depolarize an issue like climate change that has become politicized?” he asked. “We don’t have clear cut answers on how to deal with some of these thorny political issues.”
Democrats will need a miracle if they want to keep their majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives this fall. The president’s party almost always loses in midterm elections. But to make matters worse for Democrats, inflation is leading to ballooning costs for everyday essential items like groceries and gasoline, and, while many voters approve of President Joe Biden’s handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions against Russia are compounding high energy prices. Right now, 52.5 percent of the public disapproves of the President’s performance in office thus far. None of this bodes well for Democrats’ political prospects this midterm election cycle.
If Republicans take back one or more houses of Congress this fall as they are favored to do, Democrats have a narrow window of time before then to pass a climate plan. Luckily, such a plan already exists. It comprises roughly $320 billion worth of clean energy tax credits, $105 billion in resilience investments, $110 billion in tax credits for green technology and manufacturing, and $20 billion to buy clean energy. The House of Representatives voted to pass the plan late last year and sent it on to the Senate, where all 50 Democratic senators are amenable to it. Sixty percent of Americans support the climate provisions, a reflection of the public’s massive appetite for federal climate action.
So what’s the holdup? The problem is that all of that climate spending is tied up in a package called the Build Back Better Act, which also advances other progressive priorities, such as prescription drug pricing reform, expanded child tax credits, and making health insurance more affordable, that have proven to be contentious among Democratic senators. Passing climate policy alone would require dismantling the legislation and reintroducing elements of it as a new, climate-focused bill. Political experts say that lawmakers have been hesitant to focus exclusively on climate for a number of reasons, but that now might be the perfect moment for Democrats to restructure their original climate plan and bill it as an effort to both combat inflation and invest in domestic energy security.
There’s reason to believe the climate portions of the Build Back Better Act would pass if they were rejiggered into their own piece of legislation. “The climate thing is one that we probably could come to an agreement much easier than anything else,” Joe Manchin, the centrist senator from West Virginia who has thwarted many of the progressive aspects of Biden’s agenda thus far, including Build Back Better, told reporters in January. Manchin has a track record of being a fickle negotiator, but, for the moment, there’s little downside to taking his comments at face value.
“It seems clear that there are 50 senators who are in favor of taking action on a climate investment package,” Jared Leopold, cofounder of the climate policy think tank Evergreen Action, told Grist. “It would be malpractice for the Senate not to get something done on that right now.”
But little progress has been made on a new, climate-focused piece of legislation. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Biden, who have both called climate change the number one threat to our planet, have been curiously silent on the status of the Build Back Better Act. Last week, 89 Democratic lawmakers sent Biden an open letter urging him to restart bicameral negotiations around the climate provisions in Build Back Better. The Biden administration hasn’t publicly said whether it is planning to encourage a fresh round of climate talks.
“The Senate has proven themselves incapable of treating climate with the seriousness it deserves,” Sean Casten, a Democratic representative from Illinois who led the effort, told Grist. (Casten used to be a writer for this magazine.)
A number of factors could be contributing to Congressional inertia on climate. Some senators may be loath to elevate climate action above the other priorities in Build Back Better. Going ahead with a climate-focused package means leaving a bunch of other important policy items on the table. “I think there are a lot of Democrats whose priority is other parts of the Build Back Better agenda,” Paul Blesdoe, a former Clinton administration climate official who is now a strategic adviser for the Progressive Policy Institute, told Grist. “It’s not easy to give those up.”
Senate logistics are also slowing things down. Democrats are striving to pass the meat of Biden’s presidential agenda via the budget reconciliation process, wherein the majority party can pass legislative priorities that pertain to the congressional budget with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster. Not a single Republican has signed on to the Build Back Better Act, forcing Democrats to use the reconciliation process to get Biden’s agenda done. It took them months to figure out how to craft the package in a way that fit budget reconciliation rules, which are strict. Creating a stand-alone clean energy bill out of the ruins of Build Back Better, complete with a tax structure to pay for the clean energy tax credits Democrats want, is hard to do. “The Senate operates at the speed of a sloth,” Danielle Deiseroth, lead climate strategist for the progressive think tank Data for Progress, told Grist. “I think it’s getting bogged down by a lot of the procedural stuff.”
Some political insiders wonder how big a priority climate change really is for Democratic leadership, particularly now, as Russian soldiers push deeper into Ukraine, inflation soars, and gas prices go up. As has happened with climate legislation countless times in the past, other, seemingly more pressing issues may have shunted the issue onto the sidelines. A couple of weeks ago, Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the war in Ukraine emphasizes the need to pursue an “all of the above” domestic energy policy, including boosting oil and gas production on public lands.
“The world has been completely flipped upside down since December when there were the last really live talks about the full social and climate spending agenda,” Deiseroth said. But she’s hopeful that climate action will take center stage again soon. “I would predict that climate is going to be like Tom Brady,” Deiseroth said. “He’s just gonna come back from retirement better than ever.”
There’s some evidence to support Deiseroth’s prediction. On Wednesday, E&E News reported that momentum is building around restarting Build Back Better talks and that negotiations could begin in earnest soon with the goal of reaching a deal in April or May. A source familiar with the matter confirmed that timeline to Grist. Four people who spoke to E&E News said lawmakers are passing around the beginnings of draft text legislation. But it’s not clear whether the $320 billion in clean energy tax credits, or any other part of the original Build Back Better Act, will make it into whatever legislation lawmakers cook up. If a bill is introduced later this spring, there’s no saying what it will look like or how aggressively it will support a transition to clean energy.
Blesdoe, the former Clinton advisor, thinks the war in Ukraine has presented senators with a golden opportunity to promote a bill that simultaneously tackles energy insecurity, inflation, and climate change by incentivizing a shift to renewables. “The package has got to be marketed around reducing long-term energy costs and increasing energy security,” he said.
In the near term, Blesdoe said that the Biden administration may have to make some not-so-climate-friendly concessions to appeal to centrist lawmakers, like using executive action to open up more reserves of oil and gas or exporting more natural gas to Europe to make up for Russian shortfalls. “There is an element here of trying to reduce near-term prices and that may require some short term oil and gas supply increases,” he said. “If that’s the price to pay for a huge down payment in long-term improvements in energy security, reducing costs, and cutting emissions, that’s fine. That may be the deal that Manchin and the Biden administration could coalesce around.”
Experts say that the absolute worst-case scenario for Democrats would be to do nothing on climate change at all. “Looking ahead to November, they’re going to have to deliver something,” Deiseroth said. “When climate is one of the top three issues that Democratic voters care about, you gotta deliver.”
On Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, announced a new pot of funding for victims of flooding in four states that got pummeled when Hurricane Ida slammed into the Gulf Coast last August and moved inland up through the Northeast in remnants. Starting April 1, the agency will open up $60 million in flood assistance grants to Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, with $40 million of that money earmarked for Louisiana — a state that’s home to six of the 20 most at-risk counties in the country for flooding. New Jersey will receive $10 million, and Mississippi and Pennsylvania will get $5 million apiece.
“In recent years, so many communities around our nation have been damaged by storms and floods,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at a press conference in Sunset, Louisiana, on Monday, where she announced the new funding. “Our administration is committed to helping all communities to prepare for, to respond to, and to recover from extreme weather.”
The $60 million fund, called the Swift Current initiative, will be administered through FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance Program and is part of $3.5 billion allocated for flood mitigation assistance grants by the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden last fall. It’s the first FEMA project to get funded by the bill.
The president had originally hoped Congress would be approving another, bigger bill with a lot more money in it for emissions reduction and climate adaptation efforts. But the Build Back Better Act and its $555 billion in climate spending are currently stalled in the Senate. So the Biden administration is using the few tools available to deliver on its promise to advance environmental justice and climate action at the federal level.
FEMA’s new tranche of money for flood-prone homes is evidence of that. Individuals in the four states chosen by FEMA who own homes and properties that are insured by the National Flood Insurance Program and were substantially damaged by Hurricane Ida or have repeatedly flooded will be eligible for the money. FEMA will prioritize homes that are worth less than $750,000 so that the funding can be stretched between many properties. The grant funding, which will be distributed by local governments, can go toward one of five flood mitigation categories, including elevating buildings off the ground, retrofitting them, and making them more resilient to water.
The funding can also go toward a sixth category: “property acquisition and structure demolition/relocation.” In non-agency speak, that means the federal government will either pay homeowners for their land and tear down the house built on it or pay to have the house moved. As storms become more intense and seas rise, parts of the coastline in the U.S. will become so inundated by water that living there will become impossible. That means people will have to move, or retreat, from these areas.
The Swift Current initiative is both an acknowledgment that retreat is a reality for some people and evidence that the federal government isn’t ready to incentivize or mandate retreat from flood-prone areas. It’s up to towns to decide what kind of projects they want to submit for grant money, so there’s no saying how many individual homes will end up receiving buyouts thanks to this program. “A lot will depend on which communities come in for funding,” Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “If it’s a town where the local government is really interested in buyouts and a lot of residents think it’s the right choice, then you could see that happen.”
Swift Current will be administered in a way that complements the Biden administration’s effort to direct 40 percent of the benefits of its climate and environment programs toward disadvantaged neighborhoods, FEMA told CNN, by shouldering 90 percent of the cost share of rebuilding “substantially damaged” homes in “socially vulnerable” communities. A substantially damaged home is one where the cost of restoring the structure to its pre-disaster condition would equal or exceed 50 percent of the market value of the house. The agency typically takes on 75 percent of the cost of substantially damaged homes, but the remaining 25 percent can still be prohibitively expensive for many homeowners. For properties that have flooded more than twice, FEMA said it will cover between 90 and 100 percent of the cost of rebuilding, depending on the severity of the flooding.
“The Swift Current initiative represents FEMA’s commitment to quickly and equitably getting hazard mitigation funding to the communities who need it the most,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in a statement.
While it’s a good start, the $60 million isn’t enough funding to match the scale of the flooding crisis in the U.S. Extreme flooding fueled by climate change already costs the U.S. roughly $32 billion a year. A recent study showed that, by 2050, that financial burden could rise 26 percent to $41 billion a year, and a majority of that risk will fall on predominantly Black communities. “Sixty million dollars is nowhere near enough to make a dent even in addressing the most flood-prone properties in the nation,” Weber said. “But in the bigger picture, this is a situation where FEMA is trying out something new, so it makes sense that they’re only looking at a limited pool of funding.” Depending on how Swift Current goes, FEMA says it could make similar funding available to more states. And the agency provides more money for flood mitigation in states via other streams of funding every year.
However, in some places, no amount of federal funding will be able to stave off flooding brought on by rising sea-levels. Eventually, people in those areas will have to leave their homes. That’s a problem that FEMA can’t tackle alone. Managed retreat, the coordinated movement of people, assets, and infrastructure from coastlines further inland, will require stronger leadership and a holistic, all-of-government approach, Weber said. “Managed retreat isn’t the jurisdiction of any single federal agency or person,” she added. “I think that we’re going to need a lot more coordination and collaboration if we’re going to have something that actually addresses communities’ needs.”
Last week, as Russian soldiers and tanks pushed deeper into Ukraine, members of Congress came together in a rare show of bipartisan cooperation to rapidly approve and pass a $1.5 trillion government spending bill that will fund the federal government through September. The 2,700-page bill, which President Joe Biden signed on Tuesday, averts a government shutdown, amply funds domestic programs and the military, and channels $13.6 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine.
But that’s not all the bill does. For the first time in more than a decade, this omnibus funding bill included earmarks — provisions that direct funds to be spent on specific projects. Democratic senators and representatives used the opportunity to funnel federal funding to climate change projects across the nation.
The earmarked funding pales in comparison to the amount of funding Biden wanted for climate action at the federal level. Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which has passed the House but not the Senate, contains upward of half a trillion dollars for clean energy tax credits, electric vehicles, and more. All of the earmarks in the omnibus bill, not just the climate ones, comprise only 1 percent of total discretionary spending, or spending that lawmakers control through annual appropriations bills. But the earmarks aren’t insignificant. With most of the president’s climate agenda stalled in Congress currently, every ounce of climate spending counts.
Prior to the mid-2000s, earmarks were a common accoutrement of appropriations bills. They were meant to be used as a way to get members of Congress on board with big pieces of legislation by giving them skin in the game. A senator or representative is more likely to vote for something if they can go home to their constituents and show them that the bill they voted for contains funds specifically earmarked for a popular community project or proposal. But by the 1990s and early 2000s, the earmark system was being abused. Lobbying and gift rules were looser then, too, and some members of Congress appeared to be trading earmarks for money or favors. In 2006, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a Republican representative from California, went to prison for taking millions of dollars from a lobbyist for earmark-related favors. In 2007, Democrats instituted stricter transparency laws around earmarks. In 2011, Republicans banned the practice completely.
But Democratic leadership succeeded in bringing earmarks back for yearly budget appropriation bills this year, thanks to waning distaste for the practice and an appetite among Democrats and even a few Republicans to renew them. So far, that may be a good thing from a climate perspective. The appropriations bill contains funding for climate science, flood resilience, beach restoration work, and clean transportation projects. Earmarks like these are advocated for by members of Congress who are often trying to meet a need their constituents have been vocal about, so the climate-related earmarks in the bill are a reflection of what some communities in the U.S. are saying is important to them.
“The fact that so many members are requesting climate adaptation measures indicates the measure to which climate change is affecting daily lives,” Jared Leopold, cofounder of the climate policy nonprofit Evergreen Action, told Grist.
“I think you saw a lot of adaptation money through a lot of the various projects,” said Casten, who used to work in the clean energy industry (and also used to write for Grist). That’s a step in the right direction, but Casten and other climate experts say that earmarks are no substitute for a top-down, federal climate plan.
“I don’t see earmarks being any kind of replacement for a broader climate strategy,” Ryan Fitzpatrick, director of the climate and energy program at the climate and energy nonprofit Thirdway, told Grist. “But what we do see is that this gives an opportunity for members, not all of whom would normally be tapping into climate issues or concerns, to do that, whether it’s through land management or agricultural practices, weatherization of homes, and innovation investments.”
Not all the earmarks in the bill are good for the planet. There’s also funding in the bill for infrastructure that will result in new emissions, such as a 44,035-square-foot indoor fitness center at an Air Force base in Nevada. But Fitzpatrick said that all the earmarks, even the not-so-green ones, helped indirectly support climate action by galvanizing bipartisan support for the legislation.
In addition to expanding the military’s budget and sending aid to Ukraine, the appropriations bill as a whole ultimately directed increases in funding to federal agencies that are seeking to limit the effects of climate change as part of the Biden administration’s larger climate agenda. The United States Department of Agriculture is getting $78.3 million to address the climate crisis in farming and rural communities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Climate and Health program is getting $10 million more to prepare for the public health consequences of rising temperatures. The Environmental Protection Agency is getting close to $10 billion to expand environmental enforcement and reduce pollution.
“Again, it’s not everything we need it to be, but we have been seeing steady increases in funding,” Fitzpatrick said. “If congressionally directed spending helps to bring people on board to continue to ramp up spending on things like clean energy and innovation, that’s a good thing.”
On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a stark warning that time is running out to adapt to climate change. Climate change is already having “widespread, pervasive impacts” on people everywhere in the world, a new report from the scientific panel says, due to the warming that has occurred so far — roughly 1.09 degrees Celsius (1.96 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
Global warming doesn’t only affect humans by changing the weather and melting the ice caps, the report warns. It also has resounding implications for how insects and other organisms move through the world, intermingle, and spread disease to human populations. “Climate-sensitive food-borne, water-borne, and vector-borne disease risks are projected to increase under all levels of warming,” the report says. (Vector-borne diseases are those spread by blood-sucking bugs like ticks and mosquitoes.) What’s more, the warming that has already taken place has already caused unprecedented disease impacts across the globe. Climate change is no longer a future prospect; it’s making people sick right now.
“One of the most striking conclusions in our report is that we’re seeing adverse impacts being much more widespread and being much more negative than expected in prior reports within the current 1.09 degrees that we have,” Camille Parmesan, a coordinating lead author of the report, told reporters on Sunday. “Some of the things that we’re seeing that were not expected at 1.09 degrees are diseases emerging into new areas.”
Insects and other organisms that carry disease spend much of their lives in the same place, which is why certain diseases are endemic to specific areas. Lyme disease, for example, is an illness spread by black-legged ticks — tiny, eight-legged, blood-sucking creatures that live in the Northeastern United States and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. But climate change is messing with the environmental factors that geographically constrain these ticks. Warming temperatures and shifting weather patterns across the U.S. are making it easier for ticks to proliferate and move into new areas, where people and the doctors who treat them are unaccustomed to Lyme disease. It’s a double whammy, the report shows: Ticks are preying on bigger swaths of the population and growing more common where they already live. “Climate change can be expected to continue to contribute to the geographical spread of the Lyme disease vector,” the report says.
Similar stories are playing out in every corner of the globe, as diseases are emerging in places they have never been found before. Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne tropical illness that causes fever, headache, and vomiting and has a 20 percent death rate if it progresses and goes untreated, is projected to become an increasingly big risk for people in Asia, Europe, Central and South America, and sub-Saharan Africa as warm seasons grow longer and aedes aegypti mosquitoes expand their geographic range. “There are estimates of billions of additional people at risk of dengue fever later in the century,” Kristie Ebi, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and a co-author of the report, said on Sunday.
Other mosquito-borne illnesses such as Zika virus, Chikungunya disease, and West Nile virus are at risk of becoming more common as climate change accelerates. So are serious water-borne diseases such as vibriosis and cholera, which cause nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. Diarrheal diseases have decreased globally thanks to better distribution of medicines and low-tech medical interventions like treating patients orally with a mixture of water, glucose, and salts, but the report notes that increased rainfall and flooding in many regions has driven up the occurrence of diarrheal diseases such as cholera and other gastrointestinal infections.
And if existing diseases aren’t scary enough, melting permafrost and coastal erosion could surface prehistoric cemeteries, campsites, and reindeer burial grounds in the Arctic, unleashing ancient diseases that modern humans have no immunity to.
The report’s authors said that putting a number on future climate-related fatalities is extremely difficult, but they predict 250,000 extra deaths per year from heat, undernutrition, malaria, and diarrheal disease combined by 2050. Hundreds of existing diseases and more that will emerge in the coming years will add to the death toll.
Reducing the burden of disease on people is possible, but the clock is ticking to make those necessary adjustments, the report says. Developing surveillance systems for vector-borne diseases, implementing early warning systems to alert communities to those diseases and the prevalence of new vectors, and developing vaccines to inoculate people against vector-borne illnesses are all essential additions to the preparedness toolbox. To adapt to water-borne and food-borne illnesses, the report recommends governments improve access to potable water and protect water and sanitation systems from flooding. And protecting and preserving wild spaces such as wetlands, peatlands, and forests from human development has the two-pronged effect of sequestering carbon dioxide and preventing the spread of disease to humans by limiting contact between wild animals and people.
Zak Smith, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s wildlife division, who was not involved in the IPCC’s report, told Grist that governments largely aren’t prepared to take the necessary steps to protect public health from the increased risk of disease due to climate change. “What happened with COVID doesn’t raise my confidence level that people are ready to make the kinds of investments we need,” he said. “I think COVID is a warning. We don’t have this.”
On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report that warned of “widespread, pervasive impacts” to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure if the world does not take swift action to adapt to climate change. Already, storms, floods, and other extreme weather events are displacing millions of people around the world. Heat and drought are killing crops and will put wide swaths of global populations at risk of famine. Insects and the deadly diseases they carry are migrating into new areas and jeopardizing public health. In short, things are getting worse much more quickly than even climate experts expected.
President Joe Biden didn’t talk about any of that during his first State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Instead, he talked at length about his administration’s response to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, his plan to bolster American manufacturing, and the actions he’s taken to keep the COVID-19 pandemic in check. He paid special attention to the American consumer, promising to “lower your costs” and touting and a collaborative effort between the U.S. and 30 other countries to release “60 billion barrels of oil from reserves around the world” to limit the effect of sanctions against Russia on domestic oil prices — a line that was met with rapturous applause from members of Congress.
“I want you to know that we are going to be OK,” Biden said. The IPCC report indicates the U.S. and other nations are going to be anything but OK if swift actions aren’t taken to avert further planetary warming. “Any further delay,” the IPCC report says, “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
Biden made only occasional allusions to the climate crisis during the speech. “We’ll create good jobs for millions of Americans, modernizing roads, airports, ports and waterways all across America,” he said, touting the bipartisan infrastructure plan Congress passed in November, “and we’ll do it to withstand the devastating effects of the climate crisis and promote environmental justice.” He advocated for cutting energy costs for American families to the tune of $500 a year on average by providing tax credits for weatherizing homes and doubling America’s clean energy production. He said he wanted to lower the cost of electric cars and build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations. Biden’s only bill aimed at tackling the root causes of climate change in the U.S. — the Build Back Better Act, which contains $500 billion for clean energy tax credits — is currently stalled in the Senate. Biden didn’t mention the bill by name, though he did talk up some popular provisions that appeared in previous versions of the legislation.
Undeniably, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the biggest news story in the world right now, and it makes sense that Biden spent lots of time on it. This certainly isn’t the first time climate change has taken a back seat to other political priorities in a time of crisis.
But it was striking to watch Biden, who made climate action a centerpiece of his presidential campaign and his domestic agenda during his first year in office, skate over the IPCC’s stark warning about climate change — especially when the world’s oil addiction is also a contributing factor to Russia’s attitude of impunity in Ukraine.
“Fossil fuels have driven conflict, human rights abuses and ecological catastrophes around the world for decades,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement after the address. “It’s time for President Biden to stop equivocating and fully embrace every tool at his disposal to end the fossil fuel era.”
In the past few years, wildfires have broken out around the world at a scale rarely experienced by modern humans. In 2020, fires in the western U.S. charred more than 10 million acres, killed at least 43 people, and inflicted $16.5 billion in damage. Australia’s Black Summer, the devastating fire season that started in late 2019 and burned through early 2020, razed some 4.4 million acres on the continent, directly killing at least 34 people and harming billions of animals.
By 2100, the likelihood of unusually intense fire seasons happening in a given year will have increased by 31 to 57 percent, depending on the rate of global climate change. That’s according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme, which also says that the annual number of wildfires around the globe could rise 50 percent by the end of the century. The rise in the number and frequency of wildfires will exacerbate global warming by releasing the carbon stored in trees. That will create a vicious cycle in which climate change and wildfires intensify each other.
Already, wildfires cost governments billions of dollars, contribute to adverse health outcomes, and claim hundreds of lives each year. Those impacts are projected to get worse, the report says, as a combination of rising temperatures and poor forest management practices give rise to monster wildfire seasons. Wildfires won’t just continue to grow in intensity and frequency, the report warns, they’ll start cropping up in areas that haven’t seen fires in millennia. Even the Arctic, a region that has historically been too wet and cold for large wildfires, could start to regularly host big fires like it did in 2020 and 2021 as global warming transforms permafrost and peatland swamps from soggy, fire-resistant areas into flammable tinderboxes.
“What climate change is doing is it’s leading to a situation where wildfires are burning hotter and burning longer in places where they already occur regularly,” Hugh D. Safford, a coauthor of the report, a former Forest Service ecologist, and a member of the research faculty in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California-Davis, told Grist. “But they’re starting to flare up in places where they’re unexpected, too,” he said, citing recent fires in Indonesia’s peatlands. The report shows that fires could also start cropping up in eastern Asia’s arid areas, parts of the central United States, and the South American desert.
Some of the projected fire risk outlined in the U.N. report is already baked in. “Even with the most ambitious efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the planet will still experience a dramatic increase in the frequency of extreme fire conditions,” more than 50 experts from research institutions, government agencies, and international organizations from around the world wrote in the report, which is the Environment Programme’s first effort to assess the scale of the global wildfire crisis. But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. On the contrary, the report shows that there are actions governments can take right now to alleviate future fire risk.
The first and most important step nations can take is to spend more money on fire prevention — practices like thinning forests so that trees aren’t crowded close together and clearing brush and other fuels from the forest floor by burning or mulching them — instead of pouring all of their resources into stopping fires once they start. Right now, the world spends about two-thirds of its wildfire-related resources on responding directly to fires when they break out. Just 1 percent of fire-related expenditures go toward planning and prevention, the report said. “The biggest issue is that we are almost entirely playing a reactionary role rather than a proactive role,” Safford said. The U.S. Forest Service, for example, still spends roughly two-thirds of its budget on fire suppression when it would be more cost-effective to put more resources toward managing forests before they start burning. “It’s beggaring the entire Forest Service budget,” Safford said. “And the paradox is that it’s increasing the probability of catastrophic outcomes in the long run.”
Aside from directing more money and personnel to preventive activities like prescribed burning, the report recommends that governments also collaborate with other countries and with Indigenous peoples who have expertise in fire management dating back hundreds or thousands of years. Ultimately, the report recommends creating an international standard for wildfire management that’s the product of joint cooperation and problem solving between nations that regularly deal with fire. Right now, nations frequently tap one another for help quenching fires. The report’s authors want countries to work together before fires break out, too.
Some countries are already beginning to think more collaboratively about solving their wildfire problems. Officials in parts of Australia and California have turned to Aboriginal Australians and Native American tribes, respectively, to help manage the landscape. The report also urges governments to invest in research on fire behavior and mapping, so that firefighters have more information going into blazes and firefighting agencies can deploy resources in smarter and more effective ways.
The stakes are high. If the world doesn’t start thinking about managing fire more carefully, public health, water quality, and entire ecosystems could degrade even further in coming years, particularly in low-income countries with few resources to help communities recover post-disaster. Fires could even give rise to new zoonotic infectious diseases similar to COVID-19 by pushing animals out of their natural habitats and closer to areas where humans live, according to the report.
The question for Safford is whether governments will start planning for wildfire in time to limit the damage. “When is it going to be that we’re going to burn up so much and kill so many people that people are finally going to say, ‘Fire is an inevitability; we need to learn how to live with it, and we need to learn how to manage ecosystems that are resilient to it’?”
In January 2020, when the novel coronavirus was making its way across China, a woman eating at a restaurant in Guangzhou had the virus and didn’t know it yet. She infected nine of the 82 other people eating at the restaurant that day. Months later, researchers uncovered the reason why the infected diner got some people sick while others walked away unscathed: An air conditioning unit near the woman had carried the virus through the air, circulating it in a pattern through the restaurant.
Some 1,600 miles south of Guangzhou in Singapore, Stephen C. Schuster, director of the Singapore Center for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, watched the research coming out of China with interest. It fascinated him that airflow, just as much as virology, seemed to be a critical factor in many early studies of how the virus worked. For years, his research has focused on something similar — not the way airflow affects coronaviruses, but the way ventilation affects the entire planet.
Last week, Schuster and a team of researchers in Singapore published a study shedding new light on the air microbiome — the puzzling and complicated combination of microorganisms in the air. If this is your first time hearing the term “air microbiome,” you’re not alone. Most researchers don’t even know it exists, Schuster said. But there is an entire ecosystem in the air, just like there are terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems teeming with life across the planet.
“People make the assumption that there’s nothing in the air because we can’t see it,” he said. But there is another world up there swirling with bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that have been blown off the surface of the planet and suspended in the air. Schuster’s study is the first in the world to examine how climate change may be affecting the way this invisible ecosystem moves. His paper cracks open the door to an entirely new chapter of research into the field of air microbiology and its implications for human and planetary health in a warming world.
Four years ago, Schuster set about trying to map the air microbiome and quickly ran into trouble. He set up air samplers on a building in Singapore called the Pinnacle@Duxton, the tallest public residential complex in the world, and found the exact same combination of fungi and bacteria in the air on the ground floor as he found on the 50th floor. He sampled air at the bottom of a mountain in Switzerland and turned up the same formula of bioaerosols as there were at the mountain’s peak. How could it be, he wondered, that there was absolutely no change to the air microbiome no matter how high up in the sky you went? He knew he was doing something wrong, but what was it? “There were so many months and years where I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to fail,’” he said.
The problems Schuster ran into with his research echoed the crux of the analysis of that COVID-infected diner in Guangzhou. Schuster wasn’t accounting for ventilation and airflow. He didn’t realize that the air he was measuring at the bottom of the mountain was flowing up along the ridge to the top of the peak, so the air he sampled at the top of the mountain was the same air he had tested just minutes earlier below. And he also wasn’t accounting for a phenomenon called “atmospheric mixing,” when warm temperatures and turbulence mix up all the microorganisms in the air like a giant centrifuge. Peak mixing occurs during the day, when temperatures are warmer, and settles down at night, when it gets cooler.
Once he had developed a system for analyzing the air column that accounted for airflow, using sensor technology climate scientists have been using for years, Schuster and his team hit the jackpot. They were able to create a vertical map of the atmospheric microorganisms in the lower atmosphere, between 300 and 3,500 meters off the ground. By running many tests on the concentrations of atmospheric microorganisms at different heights and at different times of the day and night, Schuster’s team found that the factor that determines how those microorganisms are distributed and move through the air is temperature. “That’s the climate connection,” Schuster said.
Warmer temperatures change the formula of fungi and bacteria in the atmosphere. More warming equals more fungi, many of which are pathogens, rising up through the earth’s boundary layer — the lowest part of the troposphere. “With climate change, the fungi are now being transported to a higher and higher level” within the troposphere, Schuster explained. The higher fungi rise off the ground, the more easily they can spread out and colonize new terrain. “At the moment you are at a high level, you can distribute much much wider,” he said. In the tropical regions of the world, the air microbiome has a lot more fungal pathogens, plant pathogens, and bacteria swirling around than the air in colder regions.
The takeaway is alarming: As the planet warms, Schuster’s research suggests that those tropical air microbiomes could move north and south. Eventually, they might even reach the Earth’s poles, Schuster said. “This will mean that plant and animal pathogens will become invasive in regions where they are currently not seen,” he added. That could have implications for humans and the crops we grow for food.
“The study was done very well,” Mary Ann Victoria Bruns, a professor of soil microbiology and biogeochemistry at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the research, told Grist. “What we really need to understand to a much greater extent is how microbes are responding to environmental factors that are highly driven by climate change.”
Ken Aho, an associate professor of community ecology and statistics at Idaho State University, agreed, calling Schuster’s paper “a big addition.”
Schuster doesn’t know what the knock-on effects of the higher and wider distribution of fungal pathogens may be on people or crops, but he suspects that humans who are immunocompromised are already experiencing the effects of climate change on the air microbiome. A previous study Schuster worked on, published in 2020, showed that people in Singapore are breathing in between 100,000 and one million species of microorganisms every day. He’s using that finding to try to figure out how those microorganisms might be affecting people with respiratory problems, such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The research is still ongoing, but Schuster’s hypothesis is that people with chronic respiratory illnesses may be affected by the fungal pathogens in the microbiome, and may be poised to suffer worse symptoms as climate change accelerates.
Bruns warned that Schuster’s findings, while significant, don’t necessarily mean that the fungal pathogens and other microbes floating around in the air microbiome are all capable of causing illness in immunocompromised people. “Just because he discovered DNA doesn’t mean that these are live cells,” she said. “We don’t really know how infectious these particles are. But I think it’s reasonable to say yes, temperature is affecting the mix of microorganisms that we are all exposed to on a daily basis and we should probably expect higher risks of exposures to different pathogens.”
Schuster hopes his study will inspire researchers in other places around the world to use his system for sampling the air microbiome to map the air columns where they live and help him create a global map of the air microbiome. “We can be the doctors for this planet and the atmosphere by monitoring how this air microbiome composition will change in different climatic conditions,” he said.
Robert Moses, the public official responsible for transforming much of New York City’s landscape in the 20th century, built East River Park in the 1930s. It’s a ramshackle stretch of land that sits on the other side of a six-lane highway from four mammoth public housing complexes. Until recently, it was home to basketball courts, barbecue pits, and a large, concrete amphitheater. East River Park is the biggest green space in Manhattan south of Central Park and an oasis in a neighborhood that doesn’t have many options when it comes to outdoor areas. Like the rest of lower Manhattan, East River Park is threatened by sea-level rise spurred by climate change and by storm surge during hurricanes like 2012’s Superstorm Sandy.
The city of New York has a plan to transform the park over five years into a protective buffer between rising seas and lower Manhattan as part of its $1.45 billion East Side Coastal Resilience project, a flooding protection development that, once completed, will stretch from East 25th Street southward to the Lower East Side. Using federal and city funds, New York City plans to fully demolish the old park, which it began doing in December, and build a new park on top of it. Once completed, the entire 2.4-mile project will serve as a barrier between rising seas and the 110,000 residents who live near the water. But the city has faced fierce opposition from a small, organized group of community members who say the plan will temporarily eliminate an important community resource, change East River Park for the worse, and have negligible impact on storm surge and flooding.
The old East River Park.
Jerry Trudell the Skys the Limit/Getty Images
On its face, it doesn’t make much sense for a community to oppose a project aimed at saving it from sea-level rise. But the East River Park controversy highlights what can happen when a city fails to adequately seek community input. As more cash flows to states and cities to fund climate resilience, thanks to the Biden administration’s environmental justice agenda and money earmarked in the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year, public officials are at risk of repeating New York City’s blunder. Experts told Grist that when officials fail to consult the communities they serve ahead of a project like East River Park, that project is destined to falter, fail, or wind up inadequately addressing the threat it’s meant to allay.
“I think in 30 years we’re going to look back and what we’re going to see is the communities that were most successful were the ones that had the courage to engage their community members very early on about the problems they’re facing,” Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “If you want to wait until you’re in the middle of a disaster recovery operation to figure out your plan, you’ve already lost.”
The hullabaloo over the new East River Park stems from an unexpected change of plans. In 2018, six years after Sandy, the city finalized a plan, with community input, to make a part of the park into an “undulating berm” — an elevated piece of land covered in plants and trees that would serve as a barrier between the river and the rest of the park. The park itself would act as a flood plain, turning into a large sponge when a Sandy-like event rolled through and protecting nearby residents from flooding.
But then the city brought in a group of engineers who determined that the original plan wasn’t feasible. The berm was to be built on high-voltage power lines owned by Consolidated Edison, the largest investor-owned utility in the United States, which would require the company to build a tunnel around its lines. Plus, the New York City Parks Department would have to maintain a park that doubled as a wetland — try keeping a public space clean and accessible when it’s covered in a foot of water — and the Department of Transportation would have to arrange the closure of a highway lane for construction to proceed. The clock was ticking: A significant portion of the $335 million the federal government was kicking in for the construction of the project was set to expire in 2022. (The deadline has since been extended to 2023.)
In March 2018, just a few months after the city had finalized its original plan, it announced that the old plan had been scrapped and a new effort was underway: The park would be buried under eight feet of landfill, and a new park would be built on top — effectively turning the park into a sea wall high enough to protect inland areas from storm surge.
A rendering of what the East Side Coastal Resilience project will look like. NYC Parks
“They switched the plan after four years of consulting the community and actually co-designing a real resilience plan,” Harriet Hirshorn, a documentary filmmaker who has lived a few blocks from East River Park for 40 years, told Grist. She’s a member of a group called East River Park Action that has been fighting the city over the project since 2018. “That whole action of having a meeting behind closed doors and completing changing a plan, erasing the community input by doing so, just fomented incredible mistrust.”
Changing course isn’t inherently a bad thing, Deborah Morris, the former executive director of resiliency planning for NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, told Grist. But the city “did a terrible job communicating about it,” she said.
The community was blindsided. The original plan, the one they had had the opportunity to weigh in on, was cheaper than the new plan and would have kept most of East River Park intact by installing berms and flood barriers along the highway. The new plan got rid of the old park entirely. Hirshorn and other community members also questioned the city’s decision not to turn the park into a flood plain when the threat of flash downpours is on the rise — particularly after the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought unprecedented flash flooding to the city last fall.
Community opposition to the new project sprang up just as quickly as the city had changed its mind about which plan to pursue. In early 2021, East River Park Action sued the city to stop it from uprooting the existing park. The group managed to delay elements of the construction process until this past December, when a judge denied the activists’ appeal and dismissed the case.
“The approach that the city took is a case study in how not to do things,” Karen Imas, vice president of programs at the New York-based nonprofit the Waterfront Alliance told Grist. “When you need to revisit a project or revisit designs, you really need to make sure that the community is a partner and that they really understand why certain decisions are being made.”
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office of New York City declined to provide comment for this story.
East River Park is not an outlier in the world of flood control projects. Similar sagas have played out across the country in recent years. In South Carolina, a plan to ring downtown Charleston with concrete sea walls is facing opposition from community members who want more input in the planning process. The plan has been delayed more than a year due, in part, to community backlash. In Miami, Florida, a similar plan to construct a sea wall rising 20 feet in some places across Biscayne Bay is sputtering thanks to pushback from community members who argue that the plan leans too heavily on metal and concrete infrastructure in lieu of green solutions and will be detrimental to quality of life in downtown Miami.
It’s not always easy to tell the difference between communities asking in good faith for more input on climate resilience projects and those attempting to derail initiatives that would benefit the common good. Wealthy owners of coastal properties in New York state opposed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new flood maps aimed at better representing the true flood risk because it raised insurance rates for higher-cost homes. In California, the San Diego town of Del Mar rejected a plan that would have helped residents safely retreat from encroaching sea water because homeowners, many of them wealthy, didn’t want to leave their homes.
Even the East River Park controversy fits in this category to some extent. Much of the vitriol against the city’s revised plan came from a particularly vocal group of middle- and upper-class white residents who had a sentimental attachment to the park. Tenant leaders from the neighborhood’s public housing initially opposed the new park plan but quickly reversed course and threw their support behind the project.
Activists with East River Park Action chain themselves to a tree outside New York’s City Hall to protest the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. Friday, Oct. 8, 2021. AP Photo / Mary Altaffer
Resiliency is messy. It requires a lot of concrete, a lot of construction, a lot of noise. It might require old buildings to come down and new, stronger ones to be built in their place. It’ll require Western states to thin their forests so that wildfires don’t explode out of control and Gulf Coast states to dismantle infrastructure that accelerates erosion. And, ultimately, it means a lot of people will need to leave their homes in coastal and disaster-prone areas. None of that is particularly fun and, oftentimes, it is incredibly divisive and painful.
Experts say the projects that have been able to move forward, the initiatives that were most successful in uniting the disparate factions of a neighborhood or town, have one thing in common: Local public officials reached out to their constituents early and often.
Just a few blocks south of where the East Side Coastal Resilience Project ends, New York City is planning to create a flood barrier that stretches from the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge to the southernmost tip of the borough, in order to protect the Financial District and Seaport neighborhoods from rising seas. The city’s plan is to elevate one mile of shoreline while keeping the historical and recreational value of the waterfront intact.
It won’t be easy, but the plan hasn’t received the vitriol the East River Park project faced. That’s partly because the project doesn’t involve closing a large, beloved green space for half a decade; the one-mile waterfront between Brooklyn Bridge and Battery Park is more commercial than the area near the East Side Coastal Resilience Project. But it’s also because the city launched a two-year public planning process in 2019 that brought the many disparate factions of the community together, not to weigh in on an existing plan, but to actually create it and guide the project into fruition. The plan the community worked on is the plan the city is sticking with. “There was a lot of feedback and a lot of changes to the design that were born out of community feedback,” Imas said. “It wasn’t just marginally tweaking at the edges but real, substantive change based on what they heard from the community.”
Building out channels of communication between communities and public officials has never been more important. Last year, climate disasters in the U.S. claimed nearly 700 lives and inflicted more than $145 billion in damage. If every town in America had elected officials who knew what specific climate-related threats their constituents faced and worked preemptively to make communities more resilient to those threats, the number of people who die in disasters and the staggering amount of money spent on recovery would both go down.
“We need to build capacity,” Moore, from NRDC, said. Disaster recovery experts agree that every community in the U.S. needs an emergency manager whose job it is to prepare for disasters and recover from them. They also say states need to provide resources to those managers and make sure there’s someone in state government whose job it is to apply for federal funding for resilience work. And, when that funding comes through, experts say emergency managers and other local officials must look to their communities for input early and often. Not just the community members who pay the most in taxes, but the whole community. “The most vulnerable should be the first ones to have an opportunity to engage in these planning processes,” Imas said.
Harriet Festing, co-founder and director of Anthropocene Alliance, a Florida-based network of frontline communities who advocate for climate justice, agrees that building out capacity at the local level is imperative to achieving climate resilience. Much of her work focuses on educating communities and local officials about climate change, empowering them to advocate for the solutions they want, and then connecting them to the resources that will help them put those solutions into motion. She worries that the federal government doesn’t understand the barriers between municipalities and the climate adaptation projects they so badly need. “They’re so far away from even being able to start to put in an application,” she said. “They’re just in crisis mode and they don’t have a project to apply for, and they can’t have the staff to think about a project to apply for.”
Meanwhile, the battle over East River Park continues. In January, Christopher Marte, a Democratic member of the New York City Council, sent an open letter to the commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction, on behalf of residents of the Lower East Side. He requested that the city test the construction site of the new East River Park for air pollutants, provide daily air quality reports to the public, and, lastly, “establish a clear channel to hear community feedback.” The community is still fighting to be heard.
The fumes emitted by coal-fired power plant smokestacks contain a number of unhealthy pollutants, including the toxic heavy metal mercury, that are linked to adverse neurodevelopmental effects in babies, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in adults, and premature death. Those negative health impacts tend to affect people living in the immediate vicinity of power plants — primarily low-income communities of color.
Under former President Barack Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, finalized the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, a rule that required coal-fired power plant operators to use scrubbers to clean the smoke coming out of their smokestacks. The price tag for the scrubber technology was steep: The administration found that adhering to the rule would cost industry $9.6 billion per year.
But the Obama administration found that the public health benefits of limiting mercury pollution and fine particulate matter — tiny airborne particles produced by burning coal (and other fuels) that can penetrate deep into the lungs — far outweighed the costs. They found the rule would prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, and 130,000 asthma attacks annually, yielding a $3 to $9 return in public health benefits for every dollar spent to reduce pollution.
When Donald Trump took office in 2017, he directed the EPA to reevaluate much of Obama’s legacy. In 2018, the agency determined that the cost of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards outweighed the benefits. The Obama administration, it said, shouldn’t have taken the co-benefits of limiting air pollution — the lives saved by reducing particulate matter, for example — into account in its cost-benefit analysis. In 2020, the EPA finalized the process of rolling back Obama’s rule.
This week, Biden’s EPA reversed course, proposing a legal finding that states that regulating harmful air pollutants from the power sector is “appropriate and necessary” under the Clean Air Act. In other words, it’s kosher for the EPA to take the co-benefits of minimizing air pollution into account when making rules. The move will reinstate the Obama-era air pollution standard and set the stage for even stricter standards.
Although the intention of the reinstated rule is to protect the public from breathing in dangerous chemicals, it could have the side effect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by making it uneconomical for coal-fired power plants to stay operational. Biden came into office with plans to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s power sector entirely. But that vision is under threat right now. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court will hear a case soon that could undermine the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, which means Biden might have to resort to other means, such as issuing stricter air pollution rules, to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired plants.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the devastation was immediate and intense — hundreds of thousands of people in the region lost their homes, the area’s infrastructure was decimated, and more than 1,800 people died, most of them Black and low-income. In the weeks and months following the storm, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, nonprofit groups, and disaster aid organizations arrived in Louisiana to lend a hand.
So did migrant workers from Honduras, Venezuela, and other countries. Undocumented workers, along with formerly incarcerated American citizens, helped rebuild New Orleans. When that job was done, many of these workers moved on to the next storm-ravaged American city or town, and then the next, and the next.
As climate change has intensified natural disasters, disaster recovery work has become increasingly lucrative, evolving into its own, multi-billion dollar industry. But the industry is highly exploitative. Companies compete for contracts from FEMA and states to do disaster recovery work. When they’re awarded a contract, some of those companies hire migrant workers and workers with criminal records at low wages. In some cases, migrants will pay labor brokers, disaster recovery middlemen, to put them in touch with contractors that are hiring.
The recovery workforce is largely undocumented and lacks the kind of job stability, health care benefits, and labor protections that government employees receive. There are many documented instances of contractors or subcontractors threatening to call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on undocumented workers in order to get out of paying them for their labor after a job is done. If a migrant worker is exposed to toxic chemicals or breaks an arm on the job, or worse, they have to pay for their own medical bills. When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the U.S., contractors forced workers to risk their safety working in cramped conditions without adequate protective gear or COVID tests.
On Tuesday, U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, introduced the Climate Resilience Workforce Act, the first federal effort to recognize these workers and provide them with health care, wage stability, and a path to citizenship, among other things. She crafted the bill in collaboration with nonprofit groups, chiefly an organization called Resilience Force, which was established by a group of laborers in the early 2000s in response to unfair labor practices in Louisiana post-Katrina. The act seeks to “create the decentralized, skilled, equitable workforce our nation needs to achieve climate resilience.” It’s cosponsored by 29 Democrats in the House.
In addition to establishing basic rights for resilience workers, the act would create an Office of Climate Resilience in the White House, which would coordinate federal activities that relate to climate resilience and disaster recovery. It would create “millions of jobs” in the climate resilience sector by providing states, counties, cities, tribal governments, labor organizations, and community-based nonprofit organizations with new grants for climate resilience projects that offer workers a guaranteed wage, the right to organize, and healthcare. The bill would eliminate barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated people by awarding grants to contractors that prioritize hiring people with criminal records. It would establish a federal pilot program that would allow people who engaged in climate resilience labor while incarcerated in state prisons — for abysmally low hourly wages — to obtain federal jobs in the same kind of work upon release. A similar initiative is underway in California right now, where the state is making it possible for formerly incarcerated wildland firefighters to get jobs in the state’s fire service when they get out of prison.
“I could not believe that there wasn’t already a federal planning effort, an Office of Climate Resilience, given everything we’ve seen across the country,” Jayapal said at a panel discussion on Tuesday, citing last year’s hurricanes, wildfires, and tornados. “I hope that this bill is the beginning of a kind of framing of what a vision looks like to actually tackle climate resilience and turn it into an incredible opportunity.”
Saket Soni, cofounder and director of Resilience Force, told Grist that “there are hundreds of thousands of resilience workers, and it’s among the fastest-growing U.S. occupations.” But it’s unclear when those workers will get the protections they need, if ever. Jayapal’s act, which doesn’t have a price tag yet, will have to pass the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate before it can become law, which will be tough. States represented in Congress by Republicans benefit from undocumented labor in the aftermath of disasters, but Republican lawmakers frequently vote against efforts to invest more federal dollars in disaster management and relief. Plus, Republicans won’t be keen to create pathways to citizenship for undocumented workers. And there’s no saying how long Democrats will retain control of the House — Republicans are favored to take back the lower chamber later this year in the 2022 midterm elections, which could doom Jayapal’s bill if it doesn’t pass this Congress.
Still, the introduction of this act is a step forward for migrant, undocumented, and formerly incarcerated laborers who have been silently toiling in the nation’s disaster zones for at least a decade. “This bill is in a way the answer, the solution,” Soni said. “I can’t overstate how important it is to have this workforce.”
