Democrats are blowing the best shot they’ve had to pass a climate bill in a decade.
That opportunity lies in the Build Back Better Act, or BBB, a sweeping “soft infrastructure” bill that contains about half a trillion dollars in climate funding. Democrats hoped they could pass the bill via the budget reconciliation process — a Senate procedure that allows the majority party to circumvent minority party opposition and pass legislation that pertains to the budget with 50 votes instead of 60 votes. The bill hit a wall when Democratic Senator Joe Manchin announced that he opposes it. With even one member of their caucus opposed, Senate Democrats can’t move forward with Build Back Better or any other major agenda item on President Joe Biden’s long list of presidential priorities.
But Manchin isn’t against all of BBB, only certain parts of it. He hasn’t taken issue with the climate parts of the bill, which Democrats already watered down to appeal to his fossil fuel–friendly tastes. This week, Democratic leadership started thinking seriously about moving forward with BBB by breaking it up into pieces. “I’ve been talking to a number of my colleagues on the Hill,” Biden said at a press conference on Wednesday. “I think it’s clear that we would be able to get support for the $500 billion plus for energy and the environment.”
A funny thing happens when you separate out the $500 billion climate portion of the Build Back Better Act from the rest of the package: It starts to look a lot like the kind of climate plan Republicans say they support.
Even a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine Republicans supporting a federal climate plan. The Republican party has eschewed climate action since the 1980s, when oil companies started lobbying Republican lawmakers to vote against climate legislation and making hefty financial contributions to the campaigns of politicians who ran on anti-environmental regulation platforms. But recently, some Republican politicians have realized that their hard line on climate change is alienating portions of their voter base, especially younger Republicans who are beginning to sound a lot like Democrats when it comes to this issue specifically. The physical impacts of climate change have become harder to ignore, and Republicans fear being left behind. “We should be a little nervous,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said at a political conference in 2019. Progressive Democrats in Congress whipped up a media and activist frenzy when they started touting the benefits of an economy-wide climate and justice plan called the Green New Deal earlier that year. What did Republicans have to tout? Nothing — lawmakers from their party were busy holding press conferences about why the existence of photosynthesis discredits climate change.
So some Republicans have been trying to show voters that they’ve turned a new leaf on climate change. They’ve stopped denying the reality of the issue and started to drum up conservative solutions to it instead, ones that they say focus exclusively on emissions — not the “laundry list” of progressive objectives Democrats want to accomplish. Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana serves as the co-chair of the Senate Conservative Climate Caucus, which was formed in 2019, and championed a green agriculture bill that passed the Senate last year. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska introduced climate legislation focused on sequestering carbon dioxide in oceans and has been reaching across the aisle to fund clean energy research and development. A cadre of House Republicans unveiled a swath of climate-related bills in 2020.
There is clearly an appetite for modest climate action on the right that didn’t exist just a few years ago. What’s more, there’s actually quite a bit of overlap between Democrats’ climate plan in the BBB and Republicans’ preferred ways of fighting climate change. Democrats have been finessing the contours of their climate agenda for months, converting a transformative plan to decarbonize the nation’s power sector into a middle-of-the-road, don’t-rock-the-boat suite of incremental actions that jibe with Manchin’s centrist sensibilities. The bill contains $300 billion in clean energy tax credits, but those credits are technology neutral, so they can be applied toward nuclear energy, hydropower, and geothermal energy, all of which Republicans like because they say they’re more established than solar and wind power and have a proven track record of reliability. The bill also contains funding for capping abandoned oil wells, a method of cutting down on methane emissions that has been embraced in several Republican-led states, and money for advanced battery technology that looks similar to bills House Republicans recently introduced.
“Certainly on the policy, there’s nothing in the bill that is inherently partisan, and Republicans have supported some similar things at the state level,” said Matt Grossmann, professor of political science and public policy at Michigan State University, referring to the climate portion of the Build Back Better act.
Quillan Robinson, a conservative and director of government affairs at the free-market environmental group the American Conservation Coalition, agreed that there are areas of overlap.
“Republicans have pushed very hard against Build Back Better,” he said. “But in terms of some of the specific things in there, there are things Republicans and Democrats can agree on, absolutely,” Robinson added. “There’s probably a whole host of things from potentially clean energy tax credits to investment in things like geothermal that Republicans have and probably will continue to support.”
But even though Republicans might theoretically get behind the contents of the climate portion of the Build Back Better Act, that doesn’t mean they’ll be voting for a new version of the package anytime soon. Indeed, this week the New York Times asked all 50 Republican members of the Senate if they would support just the climate portions of the bill, and none of them said yes. That’s in part because the Build Back Better Act was never meant to be a bipartisan piece of legislation — Democrats aimed to pass it without Republicans via the budget reconciliation process. So Republicans, who were locked out of negotiations on this bill, aren’t going to be particularly keen to jump on board now and salvage what’s left of it.
Bob Inglis, a former Republican representative from South Carolina who lost his seat after he came out in support of a tax on carbon emissions, said some Republicans might be able to support “a free-standing bill that expands tax credits for wind, solar, batteries, geothermal and electric cars, that aids nuclear power plants at risk of premature closure and that incentivizes carbon capture and storage.” If Republicans and Democrats are able to come together on climate change, it will be for a separate, fully rebranded bill that includes Republicans from the beginning. “It would need to be billed as a new effort to do something rather than ‘we’re trying to do the climate parts of Build Back Better,” Grossmann said.
A spokesperson for Representative John Curtis, Republican from Utah, emphasized the nonviability of any legislation that resembles the Build Back Better Act in a comment to Grist. “We have had no input in BBB,” the spokesperson said, “but Congressman Curtis is working with his colleagues on bipartisan climate legislation.”
If Republicans do come to the table on climate change, it likely won’t be this Congress, because there’s little political incentive for the party to work with Democrats now. The 2022 midterm elections are rapidly approaching, and Republicans are favored to take back the House and possibly the Senate, too. “If you’re the party that stands the chance of gaining the majority, it doesn’t make sense to help the majority party do something when you can do it next Congress your way,” Grossmann said. In other words: Republicans’ hostility to the Democratic agenda is clearly stronger than their desire to take action to slow down climate change.
But Grossmann thinks it’s possible that some Republicans could be willing to work with Democrats in the next Congress. It’s happened before — Republicans and Democrats worked together in a divided Congress to pass the American Energy Innovation Act in 2020, a comprehensive energy bill. And 19 Republicans voted with Democrats to pass Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill last fall. “It’s not like it’s some yesteryear period in which we’ve had bipartisan legislation; we had it quite recently,” Grossmann said. “Next year at this time, it could be the case that a gang of senators could move forward with a set of bipartisan energy proposals that would look not that much different from the ones in Build Back Better.”
In the interim, Grossmann hasn’t given up on the possibility of a smaller, Manchin-approved climate bill hitting the Senate floor. Such a bill would still bypass Republicans and get passed via a simple Democratic majority. “There’s a lot of agreement on the table and it would be sort of crazy for that agreement to not result in something,” he said. “Usually, when there’s enough agreement to pass something that’s better than the status quo, eventually you get to that agreement.” Whether Democrats are able to create and pass such a bill before the 2022 midterms remains to be seen. If they can’t, the success of a federal climate policy may depend on Republican lawmakers putting their votes where their mouths are.
On Tuesday, oil giant Exxon Mobil announced that it aims to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. More specifically, it has the “ambition” to reach net-zero emission from its operations within the next 28 years. “We’ve got a line of sight,” Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, said in an interview with the New York Times. “By the end of this year, 90 percent of our assets will have road maps to reduce emissions and realize this net-zero future.” The plan builds on an announcement Exxon made last month that said the company is aiming for net-zero emissions from its operations in the Permian Basin by 2030.
Now, the company has changed its tune, saying it has made a list of 150 modifications to its business practices that would whittle down emissions, like transitioning its operations to renewable energy.
But experts say Exxon’s net-zero plan has a major blind spot: It only covers Scope 1 and 2 emissions — the emissions the company produces directly, while digging for oil, for example, and the emissions produced by the utilities it buys its power from. The plan doesn’t extend to cover Exxon’s largest contributions to climate change. They’re called Scope 3 emissions, the greenhouse gases produced by the companies clustered along Exxon’s supply chain and the emissions produced by customers who buy and burn the company’s oil and gas.
“It’s not the best plan because it’s only targeting a small slice of the company’s overall emissions,” Paasha Mahdavi, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Grist. What’s more, the plan doesn’t stack up to similar net-zero plans from Exxon’s competitors because Exxon hasn’t promised new investments in non-oil activities. Mahdavi, who worked on an analysis of the top 10 major oil and gas companies’ decarbonization plans, said even Chevron, which has a plan that looks very similar to Exxon’s, has promised some investments in renewable energy and other non-oil projects. Exxon’s plan mainly revolves around making their existing oil and gas operations marginally greener.
“Exxon is the only one that has not made any meaningful investments in solar, wind, electric vehicles, renewables, anything,” Mahdavi said. “This announcement fits into that vision of what the future transition will hold. From their perspective, it’s oil and gas.”
There is one silver lining in Exxon’s announcement: It’s taking methane more seriously. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years it spends in the atmosphere. Recent analyses show that the methane that leaks out of active and abandoned oil and gas operations, as well as the methane purposely emitted by gas operators in a practice known as venting, accounts for a much larger slice of warming than previously thought. Exxon’s plan includes resources dedicated specifically to reducing methane emissions and methane flaring. “It’s something they should have done a long time ago,” Mahdavi said, “but at least they’re targeting it, right?”
Climate change, a negative force for so many types of native flora and fauna in the U.S., has been an enormously positive development for ticks. As temperatures rise across the nation, more of the U.S. has become hospitable to ticks, and the prevalence of diseases carried by ticks has increased. Approximately 500,000 Americans are now diagnosed with Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne disease, annually — double the number of cases reported in the 1990s. Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a previously rare bacterial disease that can cause fever, rash, headache and, in very severe cases, death in humans, is on the rise. So is babesiosis, a parasite that infects red blood cells and causes malaria-like symptoms.
Right now, there is no coordinated national response, as there is for sexually transmitted diseases or COVID-19, to tick-borne disease in the U.S. State health departments are required to report cases of Lyme and some other tick-borne illnesses to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but the burden of protecting oneself from ticks and seeking out a diagnosis and treatment for a tick-borne illness is still shouldered almost entirely by individuals.
A vaccine against tick-borne illnesses would help alleviate some of that burden. But prior attempts to distribute such a vaccine have failed spectacularly. A moderately effective vaccine for Lyme disease, called LYMErix, was used in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but its manufacturers withdrew it after just a few years on the market after a lawsuit from a group that claimed the vaccine caused arthritis problems, despite negligible evidence that it did anything of the sort. The saga had a chilling effect on tick vaccine research for decades.
Now, a group of researchers at Yale University is trying to revive a Lyme vaccine — and their new effort looks nothing like the LYMErix of years past. In fact, if it ends up working in humans, it won’t just protect against Lyme disease; it would protect against ticks more generally.
By using messenger RNA — the same technology that Pfizer and Moderna used in their COVID-19 vaccines — the researchers were able to pack 19 different kinds of proteins found in tick saliva into a single vaccine. Then, they administered those vaccines to guinea pigs and attached Lyme-carrying black-legged ticks to the animals. Once ticks attach to a host, they don’t let go until they’ve filled up on blood, which can take days. The researchers found that the vaccine, currently called 19ISP, may be effective in preventing not just Lyme disease in guinea pigs but other types of other tick-borne illnesses, too.
The vaccine works in two ways. First, it makes tick bites inflamed, itchy, and red. Tick bites usually don’t itch, which makes it hard for humans to notice them and pull ticks off. The longer a tick gets to feed undetected, the higher the chances that it will impart whatever disease it’s carrying into the bloodstream of its host. Not all ticks carry disease, but if they are harboring Lyme bacteria or some other pathogen, transmission of that disease can be stopped in its tracks if the tick is removed early.
The vaccine also works by decreasing the amount of time that a tick wants to feed on its animal host. Ticks that attached to guinea pigs that had received 19ISP fed poorly, the study showed, and started to detach from the animal by themselves 48 hours after they started sucking blood. By the 96th hour, 80 percent of the ticks that had been attached to guinea pigs that had received the vaccine were detached. By comparison, only 20 percent of the ticks that had attached to guinea pigs in the control group had detached by themselves within 96 hours. The researchers found that when Lyme-infected ticks were removed from the guinea pigs when the tick bite became itchy and inflamed, mimicking what a human would do once they noticed an inflamed tick bite, none of the animals later tested positive for the disease. Almost half of the control group of guinea pigs tested positive for Lyme.
“This tick usually feeds for three to five days,” Erol Fikrig, a professor of epidemiology at Yale University and one of the study’s authors, told Grist. “This vaccine makes it so that those ticks feed for half that time. It’s like if I gave you a rotten apple, you wouldn’t eat it all. So these ticks don’t feed properly.”
The combination of better detectability and less efficient feeding has the potential to make this vaccine effective not just in preventing Lyme disease, but other tick-borne illnesses, too. “Other tick-borne diseases are transmitted more slowly or more rapidly,” Fikrig said. “We’re likely to get some degree of protection if the target is something that is transmitted slowly from a tick. But protection is likely to be less if the infectious agent is transmitted rapidly from a tick.”
Fikrig and his coauthors don’t have data yet that would show whether their vaccine could be effective against other types of tick-borne illnesses, though they feel comfortable hypothesizing that it could be. They also haven’t tested it on ticks other than black-legged ticks yet, so future experiments need to be done on the American dog tick as well as other ticks found in the United States. The next phase of their research will focus on identifying which of the 19 agents in 19ISP produced the immune response in the guinea pigs and turning that strain or multiple strains into its own vaccine.
It’s worth noting that this vaccine hasn’t been tested in humans yet. The idea for the vaccine was sparked by evidence that some animals develop natural immunity to ticks. In other words, some ticks feed poorly on animals that have been bitten several times. There’s anecdotal evidence that the same may be true for humans who have been bitten a lot, Fikrig said. But not all animals develop this natural immunity. Guinea pigs, for example, can develop it. Mice, however, don’t.
“One big question to ask when it comes to taking next steps is whether the human immune system behaves more like guinea pigs or more like mice,” Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York who was not involved in the vaccine research, told Grist. “If we’re more like mice, then this might not work for us. If we’re more like guinea pigs, it might. And I don’t think we know the answer to that question yet.”
Despite the caveats, Ostfeld is heartened by the research thus far. “This could be central to a national response that would actually begin to take the responsibility off of individual patients. Right now, we’re responsible for buying our own DEET, buying our own protective clothing, and doing our own tick checks,” he said. “Prevention is really where it’s at. We should be leaving no stone unturned and I think some kind of centralization of our response has to happen to take away that individual burden that is so problematic.”
The data is in: 2021 was another no good, very bad year for the planet and the people who live on it.
According to multiple comprehensive assessments of annual surface temperature data published by three national climate monitoring entities this week, 2021 was the one of the hottest years on record. The reports were published by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and a consortium of American groups including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Each of these organizations uses slightly different methods to calculate global surface temperatures, but all the assessments found that 2021 was hotter than any year before 2015 and among the seventh hottest years ever recorded. That’s especially bad considering that these temperatures were recorded in a year when La Niña conditions developed, which should have contributed to slightly cooler temperatures globally. Scientists say it may have been the hottest La Niña year ever.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service released its annual land and sea temperature findings which show that, globally, 2021 was among the seven warmest on record. This graphic shows air temperature at a height of two meters for 2021, shown relative to its 1991–2020 average. Copernicus Climate Change Service / ECMWF
For the third year in a row, the world ocean set a record for the hottest temperature ever logged by humans, according to a study published Tuesday in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The heat contained by the world ocean was 14 zettajoules (that’s 14 x 1021 joules) higher in 2021 than in 2020 — “the equivalent of seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” according to Climate Signals, an initiative that tracks climate records.
On Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a report that shows 20 weather and climate disasters individually caused at least $1 billion in damages in the United States in 2021. Together, these 20 disasters killed nearly 700 people and cost the nation $145 billion in damages — helping to make 2021 one of the three costliest years for disasters in U.S. history.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
These impacts are a direct result of what happens when unchecked consumption of fossil fuels heats up the planet. As the years tick by and Earth continues to warm, scientists will continue to clock record-breaking temperatures on land and sea, and countries will continue to experience record-breaking disasters that claim lives and cost billions.
Ironically, when we look back on 2021 in the future, we’ll remember it as one of the coldest years of the 21st century. That’s the message Andrew Dessler, a professor of geosciences at Texas A&M University, emphasizes when he communicates with the public about record hot temperatures. Here’s Dessler’s template auto-response for the media requests he receives asking him to comment on record-breaking temperatures every year.
“Thank you for emailing me asking for comment about 20__ being one of the hottest years on record,” it reads. “Here is a comment you can use for your story: ‘Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest in the record. This means that 20__ will end up being among the coolest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.’”
When Sophia Huston started working as a hotshot — a specialized wildland firefighter with advanced technical training — she was 19 and didn’t know what she was getting herself into. She was physically fit and worked out regularly, but she wasn’t ready for preseason training, when the U.S. Forest Service, the agency she worked for, weeds out the unprepared with intense and physically demanding drills. “You’re going on hikes with full gear and chainsaws,” she said. “I weigh about 115 pounds and I’m carrying about upwards of 80 pounds of gear up a hill. I’m feeling the stress on my body and joints. I’m waking up in the middle of the night to eat food because I can’t get enough calories in.”
Shortly after the training began, Huston got what would be her last menstrual cycle of the fire season. She’s been working in fire for six years now and hasn’t gotten her period for the past three years, which she speculates is due to lack of sleep, poor quality of food, and the physical strain of the job. She doesn’t know what the long-term repercussions of working in the fire service are on her health and fertility. “I just know it’s not good for you,” she said. “It’s not very conducive to fertility and reproductive health.” New research suggests that Huston’s hunch is spot-on.
Smoke, heat, fire-suppressing chemicals, and the physical exertion required to put out and control fires all have effects on humans, but the body of published research on how firefighting affects health is astonishingly small. Studies have shown that being exposed to smoke in general is linked to lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. But little is known about the cumulative impacts of fighting fires year after year, whether soot and other compounds can get absorbed through the skin and cause health problems, and how, exactly, smoke impacts the body in the long-term.
The ways in which fighting fire, and fire itself, affect women are even less understood. Women make up a tiny fraction of the national fire service, both in structural fire departments — the local departments that put out house fires — and the wildland crews that fight fires that occur in the wilderness and areas where wildland meets urban zones. They operate in a system that was built for and around men. And despite evidence that even short-term smoke exposure can affect pregnancy outcomes, female firefighters receive little to no information from their employers on how fire could impact fertility or pregnancy. “Nobody says, ‘smoke is bad, don’t stand there,’” Megan Saylors, a career wildland firefighter for a federal agency, told Grist. “It’s just such an accepted part of our work environment.”
A recent study published in the journal Environmental Health builds on the slim body of research on how work in the fire service specifically affects the reproductive health of women, and trans and nonbinary people who can get pregnant. By analyzing nearly 2,000 pregnancies in more than 1,000 female firefighters, the study found that self-reported miscarriage was 2.3 times more common among female firefighters than it was among female nurses, a cohort that is exposed to similar chemicals and work strains. Twenty-two percent of female firefighters miscarried, compared to 10 percent of female nurses.
The study found that, overall, volunteer firefighters had increased risk of miscarriage compared to career firefighters. And volunteer wildland firefighters had nearly three times the risk of miscarriage compared to career wildland firefighters. Less than 5 percent of career firefighters are women, and 84 percent of the female firefighters in the U.S. are volunteers, which means a disproportionate percentage of the women who fight fires in the U.S. may be at increased risk of miscarriage.
Alesia Jung, a postdoctoral student at the University of Arizona and the lead author of the study, told Grist that she was surprised by the results of her research. She had initially hypothesized that career firefighters would present with the highest risk of miscarriage, because those women are exposed to fires more often than volunteers. “Generally the assumption is that career firefighters who generally respond to more fires in a year would have greater occupational exposures than volunteer firefighters who typically serve smaller communities and may have a smaller amount of fire responses,” she said. “So it was really interesting to see that volunteer firefighters appeared to have a greater risk of miscarriage, and this did vary by wildland firefighter status.”
Jung said that more research needs to be done on why firefighters face such high rates of miscarriage and what can be done to better protect them. Current and former firefighters agree.
Saylors, who has worked on crews based in Alaska, southern Nevada, southern Utah, California, and Oregon, says she’s never worked for a department that had policies or advisories in place to inform women about the risks of the job to their pregnancies. “I know women who were still working on a fire engine doing wildland stuff eight months pregnant. But then you have other people who, as soon as they find out they’re pregnant, they stop doing operational stuff,” she said. “Structural departments and wildland agencies struggle with, what do we do with those women? When do we no longer go put out the fire? When do we no longer go help with a prescribed fire during pregnancy?” Saylors said federal firefighting agencies should collect and conduct research on fertility and put policies in place to protect employees based on that research.
Zora Thomas, a seasonal wildand firefighter working for the Forest Service, told Grist she wasn’t surprised that wildland firefighters face an increased risk of miscarriage due to the requirements of the job. “Exposure to smoke is so ubiquitous and unavoidable, and wearing a respirator really isn’t practical or even possible due to the intensity and duration of our working days,” she said. “It doesn’t surprise me that the obvious occupational hazards we face would have some impact on health and pregnancy, and I would expect that there are also impacts to male reproductive health.”
There’s some evidence that the fertility of male firefighters is also jeopardized by smoke and other hazards of the job. A 2019 study of Danish male firefighters found full-time firefighters were at greater risk of infertility than a comparison group of men in the military. Another study published in October that tracked male fertility in the general population following 10 days of unprecedented hazardous smoke in Oregon during the 2020 fire season found that semen quality greatly deteriorated following the onset of hazardous air quality. “Among male firefighters, reproductive issues are also a topic of concern,” Jung said. She hopes that future studies will help isolate the factors behind firefighters’ fertility problems and shift the status quo so women, and men, are better protected on the job.
Huston isn’t waiting around for the Forest Service to figure out how to better protect women. In December, she finished her sixth season as a hotshot in California. It’ll be her last. “I’m sad to leave but at the same time, I realized this year that I really care about my health, it’s one of my core values and almost everything we do seems to compromise my health,” she said. “Firefighting is a part of my life that I’m very thankful for, but I’m ready to get out.”
In less than a week in mid-December, two enormous storm systems plowed through the South, Midwest, and Great Plains, spawning 17 tornadoes and killing almost 100 people between them. The worst of the wreckage occurred in western Kentucky, where a tornado packing 190-mile-per-hour winds and bearing a footprint nearly a mile wide etched a 163-mile path of destruction that included the town of Mayfield. When President Joe Biden visited Mayfield the week after the tornado, he observed a town half-standing, many of its homes, businesses, and public infrastructure rubbed off the map by one of nature’s most powerful and bewildering disasters. Biden was quick to pledge limitless aid to Kentuckians affected by the event.
Men sort through a destroyed business Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021, in Mayfield, Ky.
AP Photo / Mark Humphrey
“The president’s message today is that he and the federal government intend to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes by providing any support that is needed to aid recovery efforts and to support the people of Kentucky,” White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. It’s an assurance the Biden administration has had to give out many, many times over the course of the president’s short time in office, after hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. But emergency management experts say that until the United States reforms its emergency management system from the ground up, sending the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, out to clean up communities in the aftermath of disasters is akin to stanching a catastrophic injury with a Band-Aid. Ultimately, it’s unsustainable.
Right now, the U.S. responds to disasters almost exclusively with FEMA’s muscle. A disaster occurs, and FEMA comes in to repair the damage and dole out disaster aid. Meanwhile, states and municipalities haven’t done the work required to prepare for these events, mitigate damage and loss of life, and chart out a course for recovery ahead of the event. In many cases, towns don’t have the resources they need to make those plans or the know-how to access the federal grant money that exists to help them recover from extreme weather. In the view of experts Grist spoke to, this month’s tornadoes are more proof that the status quo isn’t working.
“Until local agencies have their capacity substantially expanded in essentially every community across the country, we’re going to keep running into problems,” Sam Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told Grist. “Either local governments can start funding them, state governments can start funding them, or the federal government can fund them. I don’t really care where the funding comes from, but that’s what needs to happen.”
In this aerial photo, cars drive past destroyed homes in the aftermath of tornadoes that tore through the region, in Mayfield, Ky., Sunday, Dec. 12, 2021.
AP Photo / Gerald Herbert
Residents of Greensburg, Kansas, know exactly what people in Mayfield are going through right now. On a Friday night in May 2007, an EF5 tornado — the strongest designation a tornado can receive, meaning that it has winds over 200 miles per hour — struck Greensburg head on, killing nine people. When the sun rose on Greensburg Saturday morning, more than 90 percent of the town was gone. “From Main Street west, there was nothing but piles of rubble three feet high,” John Janssen, who was head of the Greensburg city council at the time and later became the mayor of Greensburg for 11 months during the peak of its recovery efforts, told Grist. “There wasn’t much you could identify.”
Instead of rushing to build Greensburg back to the way it was before the tornado hit, the Greensburg city council decided to build back better — and, surprisingly, greener. Three months after the disaster occured, Greensburg had published a long-term community recovery plan in collaboration with its county and FEMA. The plan established an office of Sustainable Development, which would be dedicated to building out renewable energy capacity and transforming Greensburg into a hub of sustainability in the middle of red-state Kansas. It established a Housing Resource Office that identified and applied for grants and loan programs and helped residents use those programs to rebuild and repair their homes. It revamped its building and zoning codes to encourage energy efficiency and tornado safety.
Money and resources flowed into Greensburg from nonprofit aid groups, private funders, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Energy. The president at the time, George W. Bush, had just emerged from a scandal in New Orleans two years prior, when FEMA severely botched the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. Greensburg indirectly benefited from that disaster — FEMA money came raining down.
With help from Greensburg’s new Housing Resource Office, most homeowners rebuilt their homes stronger and more efficiently than before, with six-inch thick styrofoam walls reinforced with concrete. The thicker walls made houses cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter, and more resistant to tornado damage than the four-inch walls that were the norm in the 20th century. Homeowners also put in stronger roofs made of metal instead of shingles. Today, tornado shelters in Greensburg are plentiful; the Sustainable Comprehensive Plan recommended residents take advantage of FEMA funding for safe rooms and enhanced garage doors that help fortify basements, and many people did. Janssen built a safe room directly into his house.
Irvin Schmidt, age 75, looks for items in a field next to his demolished home in Greensburg, Kan. Thursday, May 10, 2007
AP Photo / Charlie Riedel
Greensburg is not tornado proof. The town knows that even the best building materials can’t withstand an EF5. But it’s considerably safer than it once was. Other towns in tornado-prone areas need to do what Greensburg did, preferably before a tornado comes through and levels every structure in its path. But not every town has the resources and expertise to follow in Greensburg’s footsteps, even if they might want to. “It’s just crazy that there’s no blueprint, no expertise, no guidance to help towns,” Daniel Wallach, a Greensburg resident and former executive director of Greensburg Greentown, a nonprofit he co-founded after the tornado to help the town rebuild.
If the federal government did work with states to put together a blueprint to help towns prepare for tornadoes, emergency preparedness experts say it would include a few common-sense solutions that work best with ample communication between residents, local politicians, and local emergency managers. First, every town needs an emergency manager — someone whose job it is to prepare residents for disasters and coordinate recovery efforts after an event occurs. Right now, many towns don’t have room in their budget to hire a full-time emergency manager. Experts say local governments and states need to start prioritizing those positions, and the federal government needs to earmark funding for them if state or local funding doesn’t exist.
Next, municipalities need an effective emergency alert system in place to alert residents to extreme weather events — which is not always as simple as it sounds. Stephen Strader, a professor of geography at Villanova University, remembers attending an emergency management conference in Alabama a few years ago, where he suggested sending out tornado warning alerts to people’s cell phones to a local emergency manager. The manager “looked at me and he goes, ‘That would be great, except half of my county doesn’t have cellphone coverage,’” Strader said. “It made me realize that what’s going to work for one big city won’t work for a lot of places.” This is why it’s important for local officials to play an active role in emergency preparedness, instead of leaving it to the federal government. Following its tornado in 2007, Greensburg took advantage of the National Weather Service’s Storm Spotter training sessions, which trained volunteers how to spot severe weather events. Greensburg taught residents what to pack in their go-bags and where to evacuate to.
In this May 5, 2007 file photo, Widespread destruction in shown in Greensburg, Kan. after the city of 1,400 was ravaged by a F-5 tornado.
AP Photo / Orlin Wagner
The next step is the most straightforward: everyone who lives in tornado country needs to have access to a safe place to shelter. But some places don’t have tornado shelters due to lack of funds. “We have to provide programs and tax dollars for people to have shelters, particularly in places where they don’t have basements or can flee their homes,” Strader said. Cities and towns should build public tornado shelters, and homeowners should have access to grants to reinforce their basements or build tornado shelters into their homes.
Another way local governments could keep people safe during tornadoes would be to implement smarter building codes that require people to build stronger and more resilient houses, like Greensburg did, and incentives for homeowners of mobile homes to anchor their units into the ground. Eric Holdeman, former emergency management director for King County, Washington, told Grist that building codes are key to preventing damage during all kinds of extreme weather events. People who live in substandard housing in the U.S., frequently low income and minority communities, have to bear the brunt of these increasingly frequent and intense disasters. Policies that require a certain standard for new buildings and policies that mandate retrofits of existing residential structures would help alleviate some of that burden. “We’re letting people put themselves in danger,” Holdeman said, “and they’re in danger sometimes only based on where they can afford to live and the quality of housing they have.”
It would be great if every town could make the investments Greensburg made. But right now, a federal program to help communities prepare for disasters doesn’t really exist.
In this photo taken April, 18, 2014, wind turbines rise beyond a sign welcoming visitors to Greensburg, Kan.
AP Photo / Charlie Riedel
FEMA used to administer a program called Project Impact, a $25 million initiative started in 1997 that ran until George Bush’s administration cut it in 2001. It gave out grants to communities seeking to prepare themselves for extreme weather events. Manhattan, Kansas, is one of the communities that used Project Impact funds to prepare for tornadoes. When a massive tornado struck the town in 2008, people ran into tornado shelters the program helped fund. “I’m sure it saved lives,” Dori Milldyke, the former director of Project Impact, said in a 2009 interview with the site Govtech. “One couple lived by hiding in their shelter under their concrete steps. Others found safe refuge in group safe rooms built in mobile home parks. And others knew where to grab the safest improvised shelter, following our Project Impact preparedness tips.”
FEMA administers a program now called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC. The bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law in November directs billions more dollars to FEMA for resilience work. But BRIC is directed toward communities that have already experienced a major disaster, and it still isn’t funded at the scale necessary to ensure every community that needs it can access funds. More importantly, some places don’t have the know-how to apply for those funds in the first place.
“We know that there are disparities in which communities are getting those dollars,” Montano said. A community that has a dedicated emergency manager is more likely to be able to tap into the federal government’s disaster aid programs. Communities without an emergency manager are far less likely to be able to get the help they need. “They don’t have the knowledge, the staff, and the expertise to even be able to apply for those mitigation grant programs,” Montano said.
Until towns are equipped with the tools they need to prepare for disasters and recover from them in smarter ways, tornadoes and other disasters will continue to destroy communities. Add climate change into the mix, and it’s clear that without serious emergency management reform, people will continue to die in events that could have been less catastrophic with the right planning. “If we don’t do that, we’re going to be stuck in this cycle,” Strader said. “We’re doomed.”
When the U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act last month, momentum for the climate and social welfare package was strong. Democrats planned to pass the Senate version within several weeks, hand the bill back to the House for a final vote, and then send it to Biden’s desk for his signature by the end of 2021. Passing that bill would have delivered on the second half of Biden’s agenda — the first being the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill he signed in November — and given Democrats a bible to thump as they prepare for the 2022 midterm elections.
More importantly, Build Back Better would have delivered on Biden’s ongoing promises to make America a leader on climate change. The legislation includes $555 billion for climate action, the largest amount of money directed at reducing emissions and preparing Americans for the effects of global warming in U.S. history.
But it seems the bill is not to be. At least, not this year. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wanted his caucus to pass the act by Christmas — a self-imposed and somewhat arbitrary deadline that was mostly aimed at keeping the fire lit under Democrats’ feet. But Democratic leadership and the president couldn’t get Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic senator from West Virginia, on board with the plan. Democrats are now turning their attention to legislation that will help shore up voting rights across the country ahead of the midterms — though it’s unclear how they’ll pursue that course of action with only 50 votes in the Senate, as Republicans have made it obvious that they are fiercely opposed to making a deal on voting rights.
The tricky thing about the Build Back Better bill is that Senate Democrats have to vote in complete lockstep in order to pass it via the budget reconciliation process — an obscure senatorial procedure that allows the majority party to pass legislation that has to do with the tax code, the debt limit, or federal spending with a simple majority instead of a two-thirds majority, effectively bypassing Republican opposition. Manchin has made it clear that he won’t play along — he’s reportedly opposed to key components of the legislation and has expressed fears that the bill, which clocks in at $1.7 trillion, will add to rising inflation in the U.S. And that means that the fate of a bill that contains provisions that a vast majority of American voters support is essentially in Manchin’s hands alone.
On Thursday night, Biden pretty much admitted that the bill was stalled because he couldn’t come to an agreement with Manchin on the contours of the spending. “It takes time to finalize these agreements, prepare the legislative changes, and finish all the parliamentary and procedural steps needed to enable a Senate vote,” he said in a statement. “We will advance this work together over the days and weeks ahead; Leader Schumer and I are determined to see the bill successfully on the floor as early as possible.”
In other words, the Christmas deadline is off. And truthfully, Democrats might not be able to get this package done at all. If Manchin succeeds in watering down the bill to his taste, progressives in the House may not give it their support when the bill arrives back in the lower chamber for a final vote.
So what becomes of the U.S.’s biggest federal effort to tackle the biggest existential threat to humanity? It’s still possible that Senate Democrats will pass the bill sometime in January when the Senate is back in session. But if negotiations continue to drag out in the next legislative session, Democrats may decide to just cut their losses and move on, adding Build Back Better to the list of failed federal climate initiatives.
Nebraska is a reliably red state. The last time Nebraskans backed a Democrat in a presidential election was 1964. Former president Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by a double-digit margin. So it’s no surprise that Nebraska, like 15 other Republican-controlled states, does not have a plan in place to tackle climate change — its conservative lawmakers have blocked efforts to create such a plan. But, unlike other states, Nebraska has other elected officials capable of making progress on reducing emissions.
On Thursday, the board of directors of the Nebraska Public Power District, the largest electric utility in the state, voted in favor of adopting a nonbinding decarbonization goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, which means that Nebraska is now the only Republican-controlled state in the U.S. to plan to fully decarbonize its electricity sector by mid-century.
Plenty of private utilities have pledged to go green in recent years, even in Republican-controlled states. But Nebraska is unique because it’s the only state in the country where electric utilities are publicly owned. That means that Nebraskans actually vote for the people who sit on the boards of its three power utilities.
“That gives voters in Nebraska quite a bit of power to determine the future of our electricity generation” independent of their opinions on “other issues that often go into election decisions,” said Chelsea Johnson, deputy director of Nebraska Conservation Voters, a nonprofit that has been instrumental in getting Nebraskans to elect pro–clean energy candidates to its utility boards in the past five years.
Nebraska’s two other major utilities, Omaha Public Power District and Lincoln Electric System, have committed over the past few years to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and 2040, respectively. Nebraska Public Power District’s announcement on Thursday means almost every single Nebraskan could get 100 percent of their power from zero-carbon sources by midcentury.
“Carbon emissions and emissions regulation are a significant business risk for Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) and its customers,” the resolution adopted by the Nebraska Public Power District’s board said. “NPPD adopts the goal of achieving ‘net zero’ carbon emissions from NPPD’s generation resources by 2050.”
There are some caveats. Net-zero keeps the door open to carbon capture, a nascent technology that traps emissions from the smokestacks of coal- and natural gas-fired power plants that would otherwise float into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. That means coal could continue to represent some portion of the state’s electricity supply past 2050. And 2050 isn’t a particularly aggressive goal for the power sector. Other state climate plans seek to eliminate emissions from electricity generation faster, by 2030 or 2040. But it’s still an ambitious goal for a red state that currently gets more than half of its electricity from coal. And it’s especially noteworthy because six Republicans sit on the Nebraska Public Power District’s board, which voted 9 to 2 in favor of the net-zero resolution on Thursday.
That’s a major shift for a state that was extremely slow to embrace renewables in the early to mid-2000s. Nebraska’s carbon emissions increased more than any other state’s between 2000 and 2015, according to the Energy Information Administration. In 2010, wind power comprised just 1 percent of the state’s energy mix. But as renewables got cheaper, Nebraska started building more and more wind farms. Its open skies and farmland are conducive to strong wind, and the U.S. Department of Energy ranks it among the states with the best wind potential in the country. By 2019, wind power had grown to comprise 20 percent of the state’s power mix.
Much of this growth is due to the opinions of the people Nebraskans elected to their public utility boards. In 2016, voters sent three pro-renewable candidates to the Nebraska Public Power District. Three more renewable-friendly candidates were elected to the Omaha Public Power District’s board in 2018. It’s possible that Nebraskans will elect people who are anti-renewable and who might undo some of this progress in the future. But that’s unlikely, said Johnson, from Nebraska Conservation Voters. “There’s pretty significant evidence that this is the direction that voters want utilities to go,” she said.
And Johnson said it’s important to remember that Nebraska is committing to clean energy not just because it’s good for the planet, but because it’s good for the state’s economic outlook. “There are not very many industries that want to invest billions of dollars in rural Nebraska, and clean energy is one of those industries,” she said. “I think these elected officials are thinking about that.”
Everyone knows that the fossil fuel industry drives global warming. A new report shows that the chemical industry contributes to the climate crisis, too. But the conversation about solutions to climate change has largely omitted the role that chemicals and petrochemicals play in exacerbating the crisis, and the report says policymakers should start thinking about ways to green the industry.
The chemical sector doesn’t just make products like inks, solvents, glues, and soaps. It also makes products out of oil and gas like plastics, fertilizer, and synthetic rubber. The chemical industry often relies on fossil fuels to power its factories and make its products. And some of these chemicals, like refrigerants, are potent greenhouse gases themselves. All of those emissions add up.
The report, published by the nonprofit Center for Progressive Reform with input from other environmental nonprofits, shows the chemical industry is responsible for 7 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions — some 3.3 gigatons of greenhouse has emissions a year. That’s orders of magnitude less than the 89 percent of global carbon emissions that the fossil fuel industry produces, but it’s still a significant contribution, especially considering the fact that world governments are scrambling to slash emissions wherever possible as climate change accelerates and the window to take action grows narrower. Yet chemicals, the report said, “continue to be overlooked in efforts to mitigate climate change.”
Emissions from the chemical industry are on the rise. In the U.S. alone, emissions from this sector increased 43 percent between 1990 and 2019 to meet growing demand. By the end of this decade, petrochemicals — chemicals derived from oil and gas — could account for more than a third of growth in oil demand, more than the freight, aviation, and shipping industries. In short, if governments don’t intervene, the chemical industry could become an increasingly serious obstacle to global efforts to decrease emissions.
In addition to the role chemicals and petrochemicals could play in exacerbating global warming, the industry also poses a risk to the communities in which it operates — areas the report shows are often inhabited by people of color and low-income residents. Some of these communities are already experiencing chemical disasters due to extreme weather fueled by warming temperatures, and more neighborhoods could experience such disasters as extreme weather continues to plague the United States and other countries. An analysis of the industrial facilities regulated under the federal Risk Management Program, which use, manage, or store hazardous chemicals, showed a third of these facilities in the U.S. — nearly 4,000 buildings — are at risk of being impacted by wildfires, flooding, hurricane storm surge, or coastal flooding.
So what can legislators do to better protect residents from hazardous substances and prevent the chemical industry from tanking the planet? The report recommends that the Environmental Protection Agency put more stringent measures in place requiring chemical manufacturing facilities to become more energy efficient. Chemical and petrochemical companies could transition their factories and facilities to renewable energy, which would reduce emissions from at least one facet of their operations. Legislators could also continue to pass laws outlawing single use plastics, which help reduce demand for oil-based products. And they could pass more laws that phase out chemicals that produce greenhouse gases like hydrofluorocarbons, which are used in refrigeration. Lastly, the EPA could conduct risk assessments of neighborhoods and communities that are home to hazardous chemical facilities and require those facilities to plan for extreme weather disasters.
“We can’t solve the climate crisis without significantly reducing and replacing fossil fuels throughout the chemical industry,” Darya Minovi, policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform, said in a press release. “The chemical industry must do its part to stop our global temperatures from rising to the point of no return.”
Unlike the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Build Back Better Act faces many obstacles before it lands on Biden’s desk, if Democrats manage to shepherd it there at all. Conservative and progressive senators remain divided over its scope, cost, and ambition. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia with connections to the coal industry, has successfully campaigned to shrink the bill and to eliminate a program of incentives and penalties that would have pushed the power sector to decarbonize by 2035. Despite the concessions, Manchin maintains that he has “a lot of concerns” about passing the bill. Senate Democrats need Manchin’s vote in order to pass the Build Back Better Act via reconciliation, a process that allows the upper chamber to bypass the filibuster and approve legislation pertaining to the budget with a simple majority. It remains to be seen whether the disparate factions of the party will be able to agree on the details of a bill of this magnitude.
If they do pass the Build Back Better Act, the federal government would take its first real step toward orchestrating a response to global warming, a problem that scientists agree puts all of humanity in grave danger. In its current form, the climate portion of the bill includes:
$300 billion in tax incentives for producers and buyers of wind, solar, and nuclear power, and for purchasers of electric vehicles, who would get up to $12,500 in tax credits.
A $29 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that will help state, nonprofit, and local climate finance organizations invest in emissions-reducing technologies.
$20 billion in workforce development funding for jobs in climate resilience and mitigation.
$19 billion in home energy efficiency and electrification rebates, funding for new transmission lines, and investments in advanced efficiency technologies.
$16 billion to help farmers and rural electricity cooperatives and businesses transition to clean energy.
Language that permanently bans oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and federal waters in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico.
The bill also contains funding for better climate change modeling and mapping, environmental justice initiatives, planting new trees in underserved areas, buying urban and community forests, and research into sustainable agriculture.
Democrats had planned to vote on the bill on Thursday evening, but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican from California, used his floor time to lambast the legislation until 5 in the morning on Friday. Democrats finally passed the bill, 220 to 213, a little before 10 a.m.
“This bill is monumental,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, said at a press conference celebrating the passage of the bill. “It’s bigger than anything we’ve ever done.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised to take up the legislation in the Senate soon. “We will act as quickly as possible to get this bill to President Biden’s desk and deliver help for middle-class families,” he said on Friday.
The $1.2 trillion infrastructure package signed by President Joe Biden on Monday will not go down in history as a milestone in America’s effort to control the climate crisis. A Princeton University analysis of the bill, which President Joe Biden initially hoped would deliver on many of his climate-related promises from the campaign trail, showed the policies in the package will only shave a hair off of the U.S.’s annual carbon emissions by the end of this decade, if they make any difference at all. But the bipartisan infrastructure bill could mark a turning point in the way the U.S. regards an equally important environmental issue that many scientists say comprises the flip side of the climate change coin: biodiversity.
There’s an extinction event underway in the U.S. and most other parts of the globe. The planet’s flora and fauna are getting squeezed by development, agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, and rising temperatures. One million species could sputter out, many of them in a matter of decades, because of humans. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” Robert Watson, chair of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, said in 2019. “We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.” Ensuring a liveable planet doesn’t just mean keeping global warming below a certain threshold; it also means stemming the loss of species and shoring up the planet’s biodiversity.
For more than a century, infrastructure projects in the U.S. have largely sought to stymie nature, not encourage it or coexist alongside it. The Army Corps of Engineers walled off the Mississippi River with levees to prevent flooding along its banks, inadvertently severing Louisiana’s intricate web of wetlands from its lifeblood and accelerating the rate of land loss in the state. The Federal Highway Administration’s highways help Americans get from point A to point B, but they bisect millions of square miles of habitat, and cars on those roads kill hundreds of millions of animals every year. The Bureau of Reclamation’s dams churn out hydropower, but they prevent fish from getting upstream to spawn, and entire salmon species are on the brink of collapse.
“If you look at the Army Corps and even the way we build highways and other stuff, it’s almost all fighting against nature,” Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, told Grist. “This bill is using nature as an ally instead of an impediment.”
Biodiversity experts told Grist that, by passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill, U.S. policymakers took an important step toward stemming the loss of the nation’s species and, perhaps, initiated a shift in the way the country considers the natural world. The bill doesn’t use the word “biodiversity” explicitly, but it will put $40 billion into pots of funding that will go toward projects related to natural infrastructure and conservation. Not all of the money allocated toward these projects will benefit biodiversity, but a lot of it is aimed at more carefully managing the natural world and protecting habitats.
“Maybe they’re not talking specifically about biodiversity, but they’re talking about a lot of programs that will benefit biodiversity by improving vegetation and habitat and hydrology and sediment movement,” Rusty Feagin, professor of ecology, conservation biology, and engineering at Texas A&M University, told Grist. “There’s a ton in there.”
The package’s biodiversity-friendly funding includes:
$350 million for a new grant program to help wildlife navigate existing road infrastructure via overpasses, underpasses, and fencing.
$8 billion for flood resilience and wildfire prevention and management.
$130 million per year for growing back some of the trees lost to wildfires.
More than $15 billion to reclaim abandoned mines and cap orphaned oil and gas wells, sources of pollution that affect wildlife, people, and the climate, on federal lands.
$800 million for a grant program focused on removing, replacing, and restoring old culverts — tunnels or drains that channel water — which are often impediments to fish and other aquatic life.
The bill is the single largest investment in conservation in U.S. history — on par with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was responsible for the planting of 3 billion new trees, and bigger than the 2012 RESTORE Act, which directed billions of dollars in funding to ecosystems out of a federal settlement with BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
The bill’s scope of ambition is no accident — wildlife groups, conservation nonprofits, and even hunting associations put pressure on Biden back when he was still a candidate for president to take a strong position on protecting biodiversity. And when it came time for negotiations between Republicans and Democrats on the infrastructure deal back in July, the 10 centrist senators who worked to reach a deal represented states with strong conservation legacies. According to O’Mara, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, a state that’s warming three times faster than the rest of the planet, pushed for resilience funding. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, advocated for mine reclamation and capping orphan wells. Republican Susan Collins from Maine, the most forested state in the U.S., was a big proponent of funding for forests.
“There was more commonality on resilience investments than there was on standards and regulations,” O’Mara said. “That’s where the common ground was among the original 10 negotiators.” The resulting bill married infrastructure and conservation in a way that had never been done before in the U.S.
“It’s a significant improvement from the status quo in the sense that traditional highway bills, traditional water resources development bills, they barely acknowledge that wildlife matter,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told Grist. “We’re finally seeing an acknowledgement of the need to make these investments.”
The bill’s most important contribution to protecting biodiversity may be how it reframes the conversation around infrastructure in the U.S. in general. “If this was 20 or 30 years ago, and you had this bill happen, you wouldn’t have any of this in there, it would just be like concrete. Here’s money for roads, build a bunch of roads,” Feagin said. “At least now we’re getting to a point where we’re like, ‘OK, how can we do these things to fix damages we’ve already done or how we can stop doing damages?’”
The extinction crisis is not going to be solved by one infrastructure bill. All the experts Grist talked to agreed that more still needs to be done. There’s more money earmarked for threatened species in the Build Back Better Act, the second half of Biden’s agenda that is currently tied up in congressional negotiations.
Regardless of what happens to the Build Back Better Act, Feagin thinks the infrastructure package will go down in history as a fork in the road for the U.S. “When you really look at the impact of this, conceptually, over the next couple of decades, it’ll be a turning point in the way we’re driving our economy,” he said. “I think it’ll change it from an economy that’s built to benefit human needs without regard for the natural world to one in which we’re building a better world for humans while also trying to sustain the base on which it relies, which is nature.”
World leaders and diplomats are gathered in Glasgow, Scotland, this month for the 26th meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to tout their countries’ progress on controlling global warming. The Paris Agreement — the 2015 international treaty aimed at keeping temperatures “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) — obligates almost every nation on the planet to slash its emissions as fast as possible. But the success of the treaty, and the possibility of a livable planet, rely on countries being honest about the true scope of their contributions to climate change.
A months-long investigation by the Washington Post, published Sunday, shows many nations are using faulty data as the basis for their climate pledges. The gap between the emissions numbers world leaders are reporting at COP26 and the true impact of their emissions on the atmosphere is huge — equivalent to somewhere between the amount of emissions produced in a year by a major industrialized nation (8.5 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases) and almost a quarter of humanity’s total annual contribution to the climate crisis (13.3 billion metric tons). The gap is wide enough to bump the world off course as it tries to rein in warming.
“The plan to save the world from the worst of climate change is built on data,” the report, which assessed the emissions numbers that 196 countries reported to the U.N. against independent scientific global emissions assessments, said. “But the data the world is relying on is inaccurate.”
A United Nations spokesperson told the Washington Post that “the application of different reporting formats and inconsistency in the scope and timeliness of reporting (such as between developed and developing countries, or across developing countries)” were to blame for the emissions gap, and acknowledged that it could do more to bolster accuracy.
Nations shrink the net emissions on their official balance sheets in two ways: by reducing the use of fossil fuels to lower absolute emissions, and by using natural resources like forests and peat bogs to offset continued emissions. The latter method is largely responsible for the emissions gap identified in the Washington Post report. Countries are overestimating how effective their efforts to offset their own emissions are. At least 59 percent of the emissions gap comes from the manner in which countries tally emissions from land. The rest came from systemic underreporting of methane and fluorinated gases — powerful contributors to global warming that are more potent than carbon dioxide.
Malaysia, for example, submitted a 285-page report to the U.N. that claims that its forests are absorbing carbon at a rate four times faster than nearby forests in Indonesia. Malaysia hasn’t planted a breed of super-absorbent trees; it just credits its forests with above-average carbon-absorbing capabilities and simultaneously undercounts the emissions produced by its palm oil industry. Malaysia claims that natural carbon sinks absorbed 73 percent of its emissions. Its true contributions to climate change are a different story. It was one of the top 25 highest emitters in the world in 2016.
Flawed accounting techniques are “rife in the developing world,” Jake Schmidt, senior strategic director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program, told Grist, “but it’s common in the forest sector of the developed world, too.” For instance, Canada loses more old-growth forest to deforestation driven in large part by American consumption of toilet paper every year than any country except for Russia and Brazil. But some 80 million metric tons of emissions released by clearcutting of boreal forests aren’t counted in Canada’s official emissions report to the U.N., Schmidt said, citing a 2021 NRDC report, because Canada is operating under the assumption that the trees will grow back. There’s no guarantee that’ll happen at the speed and scale reflected in Canada’s accounting.
“It seems wise right now to have a healthy skepticism about country numbers, and promises,” Chris Mooney, a climate journalist at the Washington Post and a lead author of the report, said on Twitter, summing up the biggest takeaways from the investigation. “And it seems clear that we need much, much greater transparency about these numbers, and more independent checks.”
Part of the problem is that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, doesn’t have a lot of power to actually enforce the goals laid out in the Paris agreement. “There’s no true enforcement power,” Cinnamon Carlarne, a professor of climate change law and policy at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, told Grist. The institution’s power comes from the countries that belong to it, but none of those countries is strong enough on climate change to want the UNFCCC to take a tougher position on countries that are, knowingly or not, fudging the numbers on their greenhouse gas inventories.
“Our top 10 emitters are all still working to develop blueprints for addressing climate change,” Carlarne said. “So the idea that they could be in a position to encourage the UNFCCC to create a ‘hammer’ to either use against them in the context of mitigation or against developing countries who aren’t doing a great job of emissions reporting, it doesn’t seem likely.”
The tools that the UNFCCC does have are largely facilitative. It can work with states to make sure they have consistent access to good information on emissions and solid accounting guidelines.
The private sector and nonprofits are starting to play a role, too, by filling in the gaps where data is lacking, Schmidt, from NRDC, said. “There’s definitely innovations in the system to try to make sure that we can not only trust what governments bring forward but also have an independent way to assess that,” he said. Schmidt pointed to detailed satellite-based forest mapping as an example of this kind of innovation.
“I do think that civil society, nongovernmental organizations, like the Washington Post itself with this report — that’s going to be a powerful source of accountability,” Carlarne said. “Reputational harm is one of the biggest tools that can be used against these big state actors in this context.”
Schmidt, who is attending COP26 this week, told Grist that the Washington Post’s report is already having an impact on negotiations in Scotland. “I think it’s put increased pressure on what the actual impact of these policies are,” he said. “We’ve got a growing number of pledges and promises that put us within a closer reach of 1.5 degrees Celsius, but the reality is not yet delivering that.”
On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. After President Joe Biden signs it, which he’s expected to do shortly, it will inject $550 billion in new spending over the course of five years into America’s roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and other physical infrastructure badly in need of an update.
The bill was helmed by Democrats in both chambers, but 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican representatives voted for it — a testament to the fact that infrastructure is widely recognized as a critical priority by both major political parties in the U.S. “This legislation will mean that our majority will have delivered a major victory for the American people in a bipartisan way,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in an address to the House.
Climate change, on the other hand, is still squarely in Democrats’ wheelhouse. That’s why this infrastructure bill, which Biden initially envisioned largely as a climate package, pretty much exclusively focuses on what Republicans like to call “traditional” infrastructure — bridges, tunnels, roads, and the like.
The rest of Biden’s climate agenda — half a trillion dollars in funding to address the causes and impacts of climate change — is in a “human infrastructure” bill called the Build Back Better Act. That bill is now on hold, following weeks of disagreement between moderates and progressives in both the House and Senate over how much the bill should cost and what, precisely, should go in it. On Friday, five Democratic moderates in the House released a statement committing to pass the Build Back Better Act as soon as the Congressional Budget Office releases an assessment of its costs.
Until the Build Back Better Act passes both houses of Congress — if it passes at all — the only semblance of federal climate policy isn’t so much a policy per se as a jumble of green spending buried in the infrastructure bill. Here’s a breakdown.
A portion of the climate spending in the bill falls under the category of “climate resilience,” measures that don’t necessarily bring down emissions, but will provide people and infrastructure with some measure of protection from the effects of climate change (i.e. extreme weather). The Army Corps of Engineers, the government’s Bob the Builder, will get $11.6 billion for projects related to flood control. The Federal Emergency Management Administration will get another $3.5 billion for flood mitigation and assistance. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will get $140 million for forecasting climate change and roughly half a billion additional dollars to better map and forecast inland and coastal flooding, specifically. More than $100 million will go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for relocating Indigenous communities away from climate risks like sea-level rise.
Other measures will result in fewer emissions. Aging power grids across the U.S. will get $65 billion for upgrades — thousands of miles of new transmission lines and technologies to make grids smarter and more efficient. The Energy Department’s Weatherization Assistance Program will get $3.5 billion to help more low-income households become more energy efficient. The bill invests $39 billion in modernizing public transit and $66 billion in doing the same for passenger and freight rail. Traveling via public transit and rail is more fuel efficient, and therefore more environmentally friendly, than traveling by car or plane. However, critics note that $39 billion will only put a dent in the $176 billion transit investment backlog in the U.S.
The bill also contains $5 billion to get started on a national network of electric vehicle chargers, and another $2.5 billion that can be put toward any kind of “alternative fueling infrastructure,” including natural gas, hydrogen, and propane. The bill also allocates $5 billion to replace old, polluting school buses with lower-carbon options, with half the money designated for electric school buses.
There are a few major provisions in the bill for researching and developing new carbon-cutting technologies, though not all climate advocates agree that these measures are a step in the right direction. For example, the bill includes more than $8.5 billion to start building the machinery, pipelines, and other infrastructure necessary to capture carbon dioxide emissions, both from industrial plants and directly from the air, and bury them underground. Many environmental groups disapprove of these solutions, claiming they do little more than prop up the fossil fuel industry. But proponents, including the world’s leading body of climate researchers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say it could be impossible to achieve net-zero emissions without them. The same goes for scaling up the production and use of clean hydrogen fuel. The bill allocates $8 billion to create four “clean hydrogen hubs” that will test out its use in new applications.
Some of the spending is dedicated to remediating old oil and gas infrastructure. With $4.7 billion set aside for cleaning up orphaned wells, the bill tries to make a dent in the backlog of wells that have been abandoned by oil and gas operators. When companies go under, the wells they were operating become the state, federal, or tribal government’s responsibility. These wells belch methane — a potent climate-warming gas — into the air, leak pollutants into the groundwater, and can be a safety hazard for animals and people alike. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are 2.1 million unplugged orphaned wells nationwide, and recent reporting by Grist and the Texas Observer indicate thousands more are likely to join the roster in the coming years.
The infrastructure bill sets aside a maximum of $25 million per state for cleaning them up. The bill also requires the Bureau of Land Management to set up a program to plug wells on federal lands. The plan received bipartisan support because it’s seen as both a jobs program for oil and gas workers and funding for environmental remediation. But some environmental and good government groups have raised concerns that it foists clean-up costs — which the oil and gas industry is responsible for — onto taxpayers and creates a moral hazard. Robert Schuwerk, executive director of Carbon Tracker’s North America office, warned of the “unintended consequences of the bill,” including perhaps incentivizing operators to abandon wells instead of fulfilling their environmental obligations. “What’s the message to operators who were considering plugging wells on their own dime?” he asked.
The majority of the funding in the bill goes toward the aforementioned “traditional” infrastructure: $110 billion for roads, bridges, and major infrastructure projects; $11 billion for transportation safety; $55 billion to upgrade aging water infrastructure and replace lead service lines and pipes; $25 billion to fixing America’s airports. Investing in new highways further encourages people to drive cars instead of taking public transit. And at least one of the bill’s offerings — $18 billion in loan guarantees for a $38 billion liquified natural gas export terminal in Alaska — moves the needle in exactly the wrong direction.
It’s worth remembering that the green spending in this bill was much higher before a bipartisan group of senators negotiated it from its original, $2 trillion size to a punier $1 trillion version. Total funding for electric vehicles was slashed 90 percent, funding for clean energy tax credits cut out entirely, the list goes on.
Patrick Gaspard, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, praised the passage of the infrastructure bill while calling on Congress to pass the Build Back Better Act. “While today we take a significant step forward, no thriving 21st-century economy can sustain the social and economic injustices and inefficiencies of centuries past, nor can they look the other way in the face of fundamental threats like climate change,” Gaspard said in a statement. “The only way for Congress to redress these wrongs is to send both of these bills to the president’s desk.”
Soon after taking office, President Joe Biden announced a plan to cut emissions in half by the end of this decade. So far, conservative members of his own party have been the biggest obstacle to achieving progress on climate change. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of two crucial Democratic swing votes in the Senate, succeeded in removing the most aggressive climate policy from Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which is still being negotiated.
But a greater obstacle looms on the treacherous path to reining in greenhouse gas emissions, one that the White House won’t be able to negotiate with: the Supreme Court.
Under former president Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, ensuring a conservative supermajority for decades to come (unless Democrats pass a law to expand the number of seats on the bench). The effect of the court’s new ideological makeup on climate policy will be put to the test next year.
In order to understand what the Supreme Court could do to Biden’s climate agenda, we need to go back to something that happened under former president Donald Trump. In 2017, Trump directed his EPA to review former president Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015, which sought to cut emissions from the power sector 32 percent by 2030. It took Trump’s EPA two more years to complete its alternative to the Clean Power Plan, a coal-friendly proposal called the Affordable Clean Energy rule that would have reduced emissions from the power sector just 0.7 to 1.5 percent by 2030. The rule offered suggestions for how power plants could become more efficient, but didn’t impose any specific limits on emissions or require electric utilities and power plant operators to shift to renewable energy.
On the last full day of Trump’s term, a divided three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit tossed Trump’s rule and sent it back to the EPA, soon to be staffed by Biden appointees, to redo it from scratch. Trump’s EPA, the court said, had devised its new rule through a “tortured series of misreadings” of the Clean Air Act.
But the Supreme Court may now decide that those series of misreadings aren’t so tortured after all. Last Friday, the Court announced it will review four petitions filed by two Republican-led states and two coal companies. The petitioners are appealing the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling and asking the Supreme Court to limit the EPA’s power to regulate emissions.
“How we respond to climate change is a pressing issue for our nation, yet some of the paths forward carry serious and disproportionate costs for states and countless other affected parties,” a brief filed by the attorney general of West Virginia, one of the states petitioning the Supreme Court, stated. “The court should intervene now.”
The Supreme Court’s decision to review the petitions baffled onlookers. The Biden administration asked the court to wait to review the case until it had proposed a rule to replace Trump’s Affordable Clean Energy rule. The court is going ahead with the review anyway, which means it won’t have a new rule from the Biden administration to consider. “It’s extremely surprising,” Michael Gerrard, professor of environmental law at Columbia Law School and founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told Grist.
Legal experts say there are likely two ways the review, which is expected to take place over the course of next spring and summer, could go.
Option one: The Supreme Court will invoke the “major questions doctrine,” which is a tool for how courts interpret and review statutes such as the Clean Air Act. The doctrine states that where a rule will have “vast economic and political significance,” courts shouldn’t defer to an agency’s interpretation of that rule and should ensure that Congress has “spoken clearly” about its intent to allow the agency to make the rule.
The major question at hand is “What’s the role of EPA in regulating coal-fired power plants?” Gerrard said. “Or, even more broadly, what’s the role of the EPA in regulating the energy system?” That’s such a huge question that it requires Congress to “speak clearly” to it before an agency can start regulating it.
Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act directs EPA to establish emissions standards for stationary sources of air pollution that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” such as coal plants. And it says the agency should do so through the “best system of emission reduction.” But what qualifies as the “best system”? Section 111(d) doesn’t say.
Trump’s EPA argued that Section 111(d) required the agency to only regulate greenhouse gas emissions right at their source by, for instance, requiring a coal plant to add carbon capture technology so that its emissions don’t float into the atmosphere. Requiring that kind of targeted intervention is called “regulating in the fenceline.”
The D.C. District Court disagreed, ruling that EPA doesn’t have to take such a narrow approach to regulating emissions. That ruling left the door open for the agency to take a more holistic approach to greenhouse emissions by imposing measures “outside of the fenceline,” such as potentially requiring electric utilities to include renewables in their power mix. That’s what Obama’s Clean Power Plan essentially did by requiring states to create their own plans to green their electricity mix. The Supreme Court blocked Obama’s plan not long after it was introduced in 2016 by putting a temporary stay on it before a federal appeals court could even review it — an unprecedented development. At the time, the court said the plan couldn’t move forward until all legal arguments had been heard, preventing the plan from being enforced.
The Supreme Court will now review the D.C. District Court’s decision to toss Trump’s rule. If the Court sides with the petitioners — West Virginia, North Dakota, the North American Coal Corporation, and Westmoreland Mining Holdings — its ruling would limit the Biden administration’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from industry in a systemic way.
“Section 111(d) is one of the most important tools under existing statutes to control emissions from coal-fired power plants,” Gerrard said. “There’s a concern that EPA may take that tool out of the toolbox. There’s also a concern that the Supreme Court might go even further in reducing EPA’s powers.”
That brings us to option two. The court may opt to look at the case through the “nondelegation doctrine” lens. The nondelegation doctrine says that laws violate the separation of powers when they delegate authority that shouldbelong to Congress to an administrative agency (in this case, the EPA) without adequate guidance. The idea is that Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act itself fails to give enough direction to the EPA. In other words, the issue at hand in this scenario is not what kind of authority EPA has over power plant emissions, but whether the statute that gives EPA that authority in the first place is even valid. If the Supreme Court goes after Section 111(d) directly, then Biden’s EPA may not have statutory authority to enact its own Clean Power Plan or otherwise regulate emissions from power plants.
Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said that the chances of the Supreme Court pursuing this course of action are slim, because it would set a legal precedent that could undermine the way Congress delegates power to federal agencies. “It is an outside chance,” he said. It’s far more likely that the court will require EPA to regulate in the fenceline instead of making rules that would force electric utilities to shift to greener sources of energy. Or the court could affirm the D.C. Circuit’s position, which was that Section 111(d) does not require the EPA to limit its authority to the fenceline. The first outcome would close the door on sweeping emissions regulations for U.S. power plants, while the other would illuminate a path forward for the Biden administration to introduce a Clean Power Plan 2.0.
“In my view, the question of how EPA can exert authority over greenhouse gas emissions is what’s at stake in the case,” Burger said. “The question of whether EPA can exert authority over greenhouse gas emissions may come up, but let’s hope it doesn’t.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like the United States — the biggest carbon polluter in history — was going to show up to the COP26 climate summit next month without a serious climate plan in hand.
A conservative member of the Democratic party with deep ties to the coal industry, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, had succeeded in stripping President Joe Biden’s first-term agenda of its central climate component — a $150 billion system of incentives and penalties that would eliminate most of the emissions from the U.S.’ power sector. The White House was scrambling to come up with an alternative plan that would garner support from the disparate factions of the Democratic party, reduce emissions at the scale recommended by the Paris Agreement, and fit the strict rules that govern the U.S.’s Senate budget reconciliation process, which allows Democrats to bypass Republican opposition if they vote in absolute lockstep and sculpt their priorities into legislation that pertains to taxes, spending, and the debt limit.
On Thursday, the White House announced that a framework for such a plan had been reached. “When enacted, this framework will set the United States on course to meet its climate goals,” the White House said in a fact sheet unveiling the framework, which also includes the broad strokes of the legislation’s provisions on child care, home health care, affordable housing, and more. In all, the plan will cost $1.85 trillion, less than the $3.5 trillion Biden initially wanted but more than the $1.5 trillion Manchin said was his limit.
Biden hopes that the announcement will spur House Democrats to pass the first part of his agenda, a bipartisan infrastructure bill that contains a smattering of climate provisions and that has already passed the Senate. Finalized infrastructure legislation, along with the reconciliation framework, would give Biden something,at least, to point to as an accomplishment at COP26.
The long-awaited framework is light on details. Democrats still haven’t written legislation to flesh out the general provisions in the White House’s fact sheet. But the fact sheet says that the final reconciliation bill will include $555 billion to fight climate change — the “largest effort to combat climate change in American history,” the White House said. Here’s what it includes:
$320 billion in tax credits for clean energy, energy transmission and storage, electric vehicles, and clean energy manufacturing.
$110 billion in investments and incentives for new technologies (think: advanced energy storage) and domestic supply chains for these technologies. A portion of this funding will also go toward making existing industries like steel, cement, and aluminum greener.
$105 billion in “resilience investments” — that’s money to address the effects of extreme weather like wildfires and hurricanes. Some of this money will also go toward creating a Civilian Climate Corps modeled after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps.
$20 billion that the federal government will spend directly buying next-generation green technologies like small-scale nuclear reactors and clean construction materials.
The bill will also create a Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator that will fund clean infrastructure and energy projects across the country with the aim of delivering 40 percent of the benefits of these projects to disadvantaged communities — communities of color, low-income communities, and communities that have suffered due to their proximity to fossil fuel infrastructure.
That’s most of what we know will be in the bill so far. It’s a far cry from Biden’s initial vision — a modified clean electricity standard that would have eliminated emissions from the power sector by 2035 in the service of his greater vision of putting America on a path to net-zero emissions by 2050. It also lacks a fee on emissions of methane from the oil and gas sector, a provision that Manchin reportedly nixed during negotiations. Energy wonks are still puzzling out whether the tax incentives in the budget reconciliation bill and the green funding in the infrastructure plan combined will reduce emissions at the scale that the Paris Agreement demands.
And it’s worth noting that, while the climate portion of this bill looks different from what Biden initially envisioned, it’s the only portion of the budget reconciliation package that emerged from negotiations with more or less all of its funding intact. Other programs weren’t so lucky. The bill no longer includes half a trillion dollars for a federal paid family and medical leave benefit. It was going to include an expansion to Medicare to cover vision, dental, and hearing. Only hearing made it through. And the plan, which was going to be funded by a tax on the wealth of billionaires, is now a surtax on multimillionaires that will affect their income but not their wealth.
Biden seemed confident that his party would be able to unite behind the framework as he headed to Congress to meet with lawmakers on Thursday morning. “It’s a good day,” Biden said as he arrived. “Everyone’s on board.” But it’s not clear that’s true. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another conservative Democrat, have not yet actually committed to voting for the reconciliation bill as it stands. And progressives in the House, who have long insisted on passing the infrastructure and reconciliation bills in tandem, are loath to vote on infrastructure by itself. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for a vote on the infrastructure bill as soon as the White House announced it had a framework for its budget bill.
At a meeting with House lawmakers this morning, Biden asked for help passing his legislative agenda. “I need your votes,” he said, as some lawmakers started chanting, “Vote, vote, vote.”
As global leaders gear up for a major climate change summit in Scotland next month, researchers from 43 academic institutions and United Nations agencies warn that the world is missing its shot to address the public health impacts of the climate crisis and prepare for future warming.
For the past six years, the medical journal the Lancet has published its annual Countdown report, a comprehensive analysis of the preceding year’s scientific literature on climate change and public health. Last year, the journal’s report said that rising temperatures and emissions threaten to undo 50 years of public health gains from interventions like banning trans fats and restricting cigarette smoking. This year’s major takeaways are no less grim.
The Lancet tracked 44 health indicators that are directly linked to climate change for this year’s report. Three of those indicators — mental wellbeing, the influence of heat on safe physical activity, and pollution related to the consumption of goods and services — are new this year. The report found that the world’s senior citizens collectively experienced 3.1 billion more days of heatwave exposure in 2020 than average, particularly in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. (The annual averages used in the report are based on data collected between 1986 and 2005.) Children under 1 year old experienced 626 million more heatwave days than average.
The report notes that, in addition to physical risks, heat exposure poses diverse risks to mental health globally. But the way mental health conditions are diagnosed, tracked, and treated varies wildly from country to country, so the authors aim to figure out how to better quantify and document this indicator in future reports.
One of the Countdown report’s starkest takeaways is that during any given month in 2020, 19 percent of the land surface of the entire planet was affected by extreme drought. Drought and heat combined are putting the world’s major staple crops — corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice — at risk, which means food insecurity will continue to rise in the absence of global leadership on climate change.
The report’s authors note that the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic was a golden opportunity for nations to invest in public health by using recovery dollars to transition away from fossil fuels and create new climate, health, and equity programs. But world leaders in most countries didn’t take advantage of it.
“Less than one dollar in five being spent on the COVID recovery is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Marina Romanello, lead author of the report, said in a statement. “We are recovering from a health crisis in a way that is putting our health at risk.”
Ruth McDermott Levy, co-director of Villanova University’s Mid-Atlantic Center for Children’s Health and the Environment, who was not involved in the Lancet report, told Grist that she was struck by the tone of this year’s report. “The Lancet Countdown’s assertions and pleas for action to protect life are much stronger than past Countdown reports,” Levy said.
In a brief for U.S. policymakers, public health experts involved in the Lancet report along with some independent doctors and researchers highlighted the way the health impacts tracked in the Countdown report are playing out in America. They specifically focused on heatwaves, drought, and wildfires, three interrelated issues that are undermining public health across the nation.
U.S. seniors experienced nearly 300 million more days of heatwave exposure compared to the 1986 to 2005 baseline average, and babies under 1 year old experienced roughly 22 million more heatwave days. The brief notes that particulate matter, tiny particles that infiltrate the lungs and bloodstream and can cause extensive health problems in humans, is up to 10 times more harmful when it comes from wildfire smoke as opposed to other sources. The researchers also pointed to early evidence that wildfire smoke becomes more toxic as it moves further away from its source and interacts with oxygen. And drought compounds all of these issues by worsening water quality, the effects of heat, and even mental health issues in rural areas.
“The data in this report are more than just alarming statistics and trends,” Renee N. Salas, a practicing emergency medicine doctor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the policy brief, said in a statement. “I took an oath to protect health and prevent harm, and I can’t do that unless we address climate change.”
The Lancet Countdown points out that there are solutions to the myriad health impacts caused by climate change, and nearly all of them require significantly reducing global reliance on fossil fuels. Sixty-five of the 84 most polluting countries in the world reviewed by the report’s authors continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of $1 billion per year on average. Redirecting those subsidies to national health budgets would be a win-win for the planet and public health, the report says.
And while world leaders have been slow to understand the negative health consequences of a warming planet, they have been equally slow to grasp the potential health benefits of keeping warming in check. Using COVID-19 recovery funds in a way that helps countries meet the goals of the Paris Agreement — by protecting natural ecosystems, transitioning to renewable energy, and investing in climate-resilient infrastructure — could prevent millions of deaths every year.
“This pivotal moment of economic stimulus represents a historical opportunity to secure the health of present and future generations,” the report says. If the world lets this moment slip, however, “climate change will become the defining narrative of human health.”
As the world gears up for a massive United Nations climate change conference next month, a couple of U.S. senators are working to ensure that the U.S. fumbles a once-in-a-decade opportunity to address its climate-warming emissions.
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed like President Joe Biden was on track to accomplish what previous administrations have attempted and failed to achieve: writing an emissions-reduction policy into federal law. That policy, the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, is a system of carrots and sticks that would have pushed America’s electric utilities to go green between 2023 and 2030. The power these companies supply to your home would become progressively cleaner over that timeframe, putting the U.S. electricity sector, currently the second-most polluting sector in this country, on track to producing 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.
The Biden administration aimed to pass this program via a process called budget reconciliation, which allows Congress to make changes to laws that have to do with spending, revenues, or the federal debt limit. Crucially, reconciliation is immune to the filibuster — it only takes 51 votes to pass it in the Senate — which meant that Senate Democrats could vote to approve the budget reconciliation bill as a bloc, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as a tie-breaker, and bypass Republican opposition to the bill. (Not one congressional Republican, not even the ones who say they care about climate action, has expressed support for any of the climate measures in the reconciliation bill.)
From the outset, it was clear that Senators Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, centrist Democrats, were going to oppose the Clean Electricity Performance Program. Sinema reportedly said she wanted at least $100 billion cut from the climate programs in the budget bill (though she didn’t specify which ones). This might have been doable by chipping away at other climate spending in the package — like clean energy tax credits and funding to help rural electricity cooperatives —while keeping the Clean Electricity Performance Program intact. The Biden administration thought it could convert Manchin, who represents a coal state and has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, to the cause by tweaking the program to allow electricity generated by gas- and coal-fired power plants to count as “clean” as long as those plants prevent their emissions from going into the atmosphere by using carbon capture and sequestration technology. On Friday, the New York Times reported that those conversion efforts had failed and that the White House was rewriting the budget reconciliation bill to exclude the Clean Electricity Performance Program.
Manchin’s problem with the plan was never explicitly about its exclusion of fossil fuels. He believes that utilities are decarbonizing on their own, as renewable energy becomes cheaper, and that it would be a waste of money to pay them to cut emissions. “Senator Manchin has clearly expressed his concerns about using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to do things they’re already doing,” a Manchin spokesperson told the Times.
But the problem is that utilities won’t go green fast enough without a kick in the pants from the federal government, research shows. An analysis provided to Grist by the center-left think tank Evergreen Action shows that 12 of the more than 3,000 electric utilities in the U.S. are even coming close to growing their share of clean electricity by the amount that would be incentivized by the Clean Electricity Performance Program. The rest of them aren’t at all on track to reduce emissions in line with Paris Agreement goals or many of these utilities’ own climate plans. An analysis from the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future estimates that without new legislation, emissions from the power sector will only come down 43 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade. Biden has promised to cut emissions 50 percent economy-wide, not just from the power sector, by 2030. So letting utilities meander toward net-zero emissions on their own doesn’t really get the U.S. to where it needs to be from an emissions perspective.
Manchin’s opposition to the Clean Electricity Performance Program is more than a blow to Biden’s climate agenda. Climate change is a problem with myriad solutions, but all of them center around phasing out fossil fuels and phasing in renewables fast. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. can’t galvanize the political will to do that. And that political failure will have incredibly difficult long-term consequences for not just all Americans, but everyone on the planet — especially people in countries that have contributed comparatively little to the climate crisis.
“The longer you take to do something about it, the more it’s going to cost in livelihoods as well as lives,” Transportation Secretary and former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Climate change is already responsible for 5 million deaths per year, according to one estimate. Warming the planet above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is projected to kill tens of millions more by the end of the century.
It’s unclear what happens now that Manchin has put the kibosh on the centerpiece of Biden’s climate agenda. Democrats are discussing digging up an old chestnut, putting a price on carbon pollution, to bring down emissions. The Washington Post reported that a voluntary emissions-trading program among aluminum, steel, concrete and chemicals manufacturers is also one of the ideas being bandied about on Capitol Hill. Biden might even end up at COP26, the U.N. climate conference, without an emissions policy in hand. Anything is possible, except, perhaps, averting catastrophic planetary warming.
Most of the air we breathe comes from algae and other aquatic organisms that have been photosynthesizing sunlight into oxygen for a billion years. But not all algae are life-giving. Blue-green algae contain a powerful class of toxins called cyanotoxins. When these algae form blooms — rapid accumulations of algae in fresh or marine water — they can damage ecosystems and cause vomiting, fever, headache, neurological problems, and even death in humans and animals.
These poisonous organisms have been cropping up a lot lately. Beaver Lake in Asheville, North Carolina, was closed last week after local officials found toxic algae in the water. Three dogs died from playing on a beach suspected to be contaminated with toxic algae on the Columbia River in Washington state last month. In California, the Bureau of Land Management closed a 28-mile stretch along the Merced River after water samples south of where a family of hikers mysteriously died in August showed high levels of toxic algae. These types of incidents are not rare. A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that toxic algae sent more than 300 Americans to the emergency room between 2017 and 2019.
But despite the dangers of algae-related poisoning and the harmful and costly impacts of blooms on ecosystems, the federal government doesn’t have a cohesive strategy for dealing with freshwater harmful algal blooms, or HABs. That’s the conclusion of a new watchdog report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General. “The EPA does not have an agency-wide strategy for addressing harmful algal blooms,” the report says, “despite Congress appointing the EPA administrator as the leader for federal actions focused on reducing, mitigating, and controlling freshwater HABs.” The report recommends that the EPA needs to focus on developing a national program to “forecast, monitor, and respond” to these blooms; establish new water safety criteria for algae-causing chemicals in lakes, rivers, and streams; and take a closer look at whether water with algae in it is safe to drink.
Algal blooms are sparked by nutrients, an umbrella term for the chemical elements phosphorus and nitrogen, which are often used by farmers to fertilize their fields. Nutrients can also come from other sources, like chemically treated water from wastewater plants and water from storm drains containing a cocktail of urban pollution. Atmospheric pollution from fossil fuel plants and cars can seed algal blooms, too.
Climate change also fuels blooms, albeit more indirectly. Research shows that algae thrive in bodies of water warmed by climate change. And erratic weather like intense tropical storms and extreme rainfall, byproducts of a warming planet, serve as catalysts for new blooms by helping nutrients leach into bodies of water and moving algae around. Blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, particularly like it when heavy rain is followed by a big drought — a pattern that’s becoming more common with climate change — because the rain pushes algae downstream into new areas and then drought forces that water and the algae in it to stagnate, which then allows the algae to proliferate unchecked. “It’s the perfect storm scenario for cyanobacteria,” Hans Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at University of Carolina, Chapel Hill, told Grist.
As the risk of harmful blooms grows, the EPA has been more or less asleep at the wheel, according to the watchdog report. According to the report, the agency has been chipping away at the HABs problem little by little, by investigating localized blooms in individual states and collecting water data from the public to be used for better monitoring, among other small-scale initiatives. But the EPA has not invested in expanding these efforts into a national algae monitoring network. The report notes that the EPA has also not exercised its full authority to regulate HABs under the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water acts.
In 2015, Congress put the EPA in charge of developing informational drinking water health advisories for cyanotoxins. Exposure to even low doses of the toxins over a long period of time can encourage liver tumors and other disease. But the report notes that the agency still hasn’t developed those advisories. Experts say the EPA should go a step further and set maximum contaminant limits, a legal threshold on the amount of a substance that is allowed in public water systems under the Safe Drinking Water Act, for cyanotoxins, which would require states to meet those standards for their drinking water supplies. Only two states, Oregon and Ohio, have forged ahead without the EPA and regulated cyanotoxins in drinking water. Until the EPA releases a set of federal standards, most states won’t monitor their drinking water supplies for these toxins. “If you think about how people respond to regulations in general, they typically step up to the plate to meet what regulations are on the books,” Christine Kirchoff, associate professor of water policy and management at the University of Connecticut, told Grist. “And there aren’t regulations for cyanotoxins except in those two states.”
In the EPA’s defense, there isn’t a ton of research on the public health effects of algal contaminants in drinking water. It’s difficult for the EPA to amass enough evidence to determine which thresholds of algae in drinking water are safe or not safe.
In response to the inspector general report, EPA officials said they plan to “explore the potential for new or revised numeric nutrient criteria” — in plain English, standards for nutrients in waterways like lakes and rivers — by the end of 2022. But the inspector general said that wasn’t good enough and that the EPA should make a more concrete plan. Outside experts agree with that.
“Even though the EPA’s HABs program is getting better and more involved, it’s still not up to the scale of the problem,” Donald Anderson, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Grist. He wants the EPA to work with the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, which is the agency in charge of monitoring HABs in marine environments, so that the programs can inform one another. And he thinks that Congress needs to not just authorize the EPA to lead the nation’s response to HABs, but also ensure that the agency is getting enough money, or congressional appropriations, to sufficiently address the problem. “There really isn’t a recurrent funding program in the EPA on multiple areas of HAB research,” he said. “It’s a little more piecemeal, hit and miss.”
Paerl said the EPA could be more aggressive about collecting and disseminating data on HABs. “The role the EPA really needs to play is to bank the data, so to speak, and then from that develop strategies that can be used across the U.S.,” he said. Some of the areas that are prone to blooms, like agricultural watersheds, stretch across multiple states, which means that effectively addressing those blooms will require an interstate response. The EPA can draw inspiration for its HABs program from the few states that have put successful strategies in place already. In Ohio, for example, state legislators passed a bill preventing farmers from applying fertilizer to saturated ground or if the forecast says the chance of 1 inch of rain over the next 12 hours is greater than 50 percent. A regulation like that on a much wider scale could help stem the flow of nutrients into waterways. “What we need to do is known, it’s just sort of getting the regulatory push to do it,” Kirchoff said.
President Joe Biden ran on a platform that promised climate action on a scale never seen before in American politics. One of the supporting beams of that plan is something called a clean energy standard — a mandate for utilities to generate a certain amount of clean electricity by a set date. Biden’s proposed standard targeted a carbon-free electricity sector — the second-most polluting slice of the emissions pie in the U.S. behind transportation — by 2035.
Congressional Democrats sought to put that clean energy standard into Biden’s first major legislative priority — a $2 trillion infrastructure package aimed at improving the nation’s infrastructure and simultaneously reducing emissions. But a handful of centrist Republicans and Democrats succeeded in whittling down the package by about a trillion dollars and removing the standard from the bill, which has already passed the Senate and is poised for a vote in the House this week. Biden and progressives promised to get their clean energy standard done another way. That’s how something called the Clean Electricity Performance Program, a wonky and complicated climate policy that nobody had ever heard of before this month, made its way into Democrat’s $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill.
The CEPP, as it’s called, could be Democrats’ last best chance to pass climate policy this decade. And if it passes, it will become the nation’s first-ever federal policy aimed at significantly reducing emissions from the power sector. A year ago, the CEPP didn’t even exist as a concept. Its invention is an acrobatic feat and a calculated effort to get past arcane Senate rules.
In January, Democrats found themselves in a rare and unexpected position. Joe Biden had ousted former President Donald Trump, Democrats had hung onto a slim majority in the House, and Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff had pulled off two extremely unlikely Senate runoff races in Georgia, meaning Democrats finally had, by the skin of their teeth, a trifecta.
Environmental policy groups immediately started putting their heads together to find a way to make Biden’s clean energy standard happen without Republicans. The groups that initially led the charge — Third Way, a center-left think tank; Evergreen Action, an environmental policy outfit; and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the nonprofit environmental advocacy group — knew that there was only one pathway to success: a little-known process called budget reconciliation.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) holds up a visual aide to represent the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package as he speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on September 28, 2021.
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“Ever since we realized that budget reconciliation was going to be a process that we could do, conversations about how you could do a budget-based clean energy standard started up,” Lindsey Walter, deputy director for Third Way’s climate and energy program, told Grist.
Each year, the House and Senate pass budget resolutions that establish the dollar amounts that the various federal agencies, like the Department of Defense and the Department of Commerce, can spend. These resolutions are not binding, but they set the course of debate for the entire year in both chambers.
Budget reconciliation is when committees make changes to laws that have to do, exclusively, with spending, revenues, or the federal debt limit. Crucially, reconciliation is immune to the filibuster — it only takes 51 votes to pass it in the Senate. That meant that the majority party could pass a climate policy like the clean energy standard in a budget package, if all 50 Democratic senators voted for it and Vice President Kamala Harris served as a tiebreaker. But it would have to look different in order to abide by the strict rules that govern the reconciliation process.
Since January 6, the day Democrats clinched the Senate, Senator Tina Smith, the junior Democratic senator from Minnesota, had also been thinking about how to make a clean energy standard fit the budget reconciliation process. She had introduced a clean energy standard bill back in 2019, a policy she knew was doomed under Trump but could get a second chance at life in the next presidential cycle. But the clean energy standard was a mandate, not a fit for the parameters of reconciliation. In order to figure out the best way to make the standard amenable to the process, Smith’s office started collaborating with the green groups, some of which had already put out policy papers on how to get a clean energy standard passed via reconciliation. Their powers combined produced the CEPP, the first federal climate policy of its kind.
Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) participates in a discussion on climate change-fueled extreme weather and its impact on local communities on July 22, 2021 in Washington, DC.
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“I haven’t seen a policy like this in front of Congress before,” Walter, from Third Way, said. “This would be in many ways a first.”
Here’s how the CEPP works as both a clean energy standard and a reconciliation-friendly piece of policy.
A clean energy standard is built on a foundational assumption: If utilities produce more clean power, they’ll become greener over time, and emissions will go down. But forcing utilities to get clean isn’t a budgetary matter, it’s a policy change. The CEPP gets around that by using federal dollars — which, of course, pertain to the budget — to reward utilities for going green.
More specifically, any type of company that retails electricity that increases its share of clean energy by 4 percent each year can tap into a $150 billion grant program created by the CEPP. Clean energy is defined as power sources that emit no more than 0.1 metric tons of emissions per megawatt-hour, which include wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and hydropower.
So if you’re a company that sells power to customers and you manage to increase the amount of clean electricity you provide to customers by 4 percent in a year-long period, you would get $150 for every megawatt-hour of clean energy you sell over 1.5 percent of the previous year’s target. And if you don’t meet that 4 percent goal, you get penalized $40 for every megawatt-hour of clean electricity you failed to come up with. Plus, you have to make up the deficit the following year. This concept, applied to utilities across the U.S., would ultimately lead to emissions reductions of about 82 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, when the program would end.
“You’ve now taken a policy idea — the clean energy standard — and turned it into a budgetary tool,” Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat from Illinois who formerly worked in clean energy development (and used to be a contributor to this magazine), told Grist. “If we’re doing it right, hopefully it has the same impact as a clean energy standard.”
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Critics of the plan have argued that transitioning to a grid that mostly relies on clean energy within a decade would sacrifice reliability, a concern that has been top of mind for many since a deadly winter storm in February knocked out power for wide swaths of Texas and created a humanitarian crisis.
“Any time you make rapid changes to a system you potentially put some reliability at stake,” Rich Powell, executive director of the centrist climate and energy policy think tank ClearPath, told Grist. “I think most people who look at the Texas situation for example would say that actually if a number of the big coal plants that had recently retired in Texas had been around and available they very likely could have contributed to getting the power back on that system faster.” Powell argued that maintaining a diversity of fuel sources, pairing polluting energies like natural gas with carbon capture, and weatherizing all of them against extreme events like the Texas winter storm would be the best way to accomplish emissions reductions without sacrificing reliability.
But it’s not a foregone conclusion that a grid that relies primarily on renewables would result in a situation where there’s not enough electricity to go around. “I think that’s a bunch of hogwash, frankly,” Sam Ricketts, cofounder of Evergreen Action, told Grist. “I vehemently disagree with the assertion that this can’t be done. Utilities are already showing that the transition is possible.”
An analysis provided to Grist by Evergreen Action suggests that the CEPP would not sacrifice grid reliability. A 70 to 90 percent clean grid would be able to provide enough supply to meet demand, the analysis said. It also shows that at least 12 U.S. utilities are already on track to grow their share of clean electricity by more than 3 percent annually in the coming years. “We need to help those utilities and ensure that every utility is actually making the transition, which means faster than they’re planning to go and using federal investment to make it happen,” Ricketts said.
Casten also rejected the reliability argument. “The sun does not shine 24 hours a day and the wind does not always blow. Nobody doesn’t know that,” he said. “The question of what can you do in order to get a 100 percent zero-carbon grid just with existing technologies? There’s an infinite number of ways you could do that. We could expand nuclear. We could build out a ton of geothermal. We could invest in energy efficiency. There’s no reason you can’t technologically get there.”
The plan may be possible from a technological standpoint, but it remains to be seen whether it’ll work politically. Democratic Senators Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona are at odds with progressives in their caucus, like Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, about the size, cost, and ambition of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) speaks during a news conference after a procedural vote for the bipartisan infrastructure framework at Dirksen Senate Office Building July 28, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
A spokesperson for Senator Tina Smith’s office told Grist that Smith and Manchin have been discussing the possibility of a clean energy standard for months. But there’s no saying, at this point, exactly what the powerful West Virginia Senator wants the CEPP to look like, if he agrees to vote for it at all. It’s possible that he will advocate for eliminating the penalty from the program, which would make it all carrot and no stick. He might seek to redefine what “clean” energy means — Manchin has long been an advocate of carbon capture technology, which is still relatively nascent but could, hypothetically, be added to natural gas–fired power plants to reduce emissions and fit the contours of the CEPP. Or he may refuse to vote for it altogether. Manchin has said publicly that he believes utilities are already decarbonizing on their own as renewable energy becomes more affordable. Still, Smith’s office is confident that the program will garner support from 50 senators when all is said and done.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to bring the bipartisan infrastructure bill to a vote in the House on Thursday, despite promising her progressive colleagues that she would bring the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package to the floor at the same time. The idea was to use the bipartisan deal as leverage to force the warring factions of her party to pass both bills. But on Monday, Pelosi announced that she was forging ahead with the infrastructure deal because her party hadn’t agreed on a price tag for the reconciliation bill. On Tuesday, the chair of the House Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal from Washington, said that progressives “will only vote for the infrastructure bill after passing the reconciliation bill.”
Depending on what happens next, the budget reconciliation bill, and the CEPP within it, could shapeshift a lot in the coming days and weeks. Casten is confident that the general structure of the CEPP will remain in the deal, but beyond that, he’s not sure about anything. “There’s more people than Joe Manchin I wouldn’t trust in a dark room with climate policy,” he said. “Until it’s written into law and signed, assume that all the text is variable.”
Summer may be officially over, but mosquito season is showing no sign of abating. If you’re cursing the influx of winged whiners, save some vitriol for climate change, which definitely played a role in exacerbating this year’s mosquitogeddon.
It was an unusually warm summer — the hottest summer on record for the contiguous United States — and that has helped mosquitoes thrive. But experts say the chief reasons for the explosion in mosquito populations this year are the season’s record-breaking storms and above-average rainfall in many states.
Parts of the Northeast received a foot of rain in just three weeks in July, due to a series of back-to-back thunderstorms and the remnants of Hurricane Elsa. In August, Tropical Storm Fred and its remnants doused the East Coast from Florida to Massachusetts, and Tropical Storm Henri hit New England head on. Less than two weeks later, Ida soaked the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 and blasted the Northeast with record-breaking amounts of rainfall as a disorganized storm system. Meanwhile, in the Southwest, a “super” monsoon season eased drought conditions in parts of Arizona, producing Tuscon’s wettest month on record in July.
Climate change plays a role in exacerbating these storms. The air becomes 4 percent more saturated with water for every 1 degree Fahrenheit that the planet warms. The most torrential downpours in the Northeast now unleash 55 percent more rain compared to the 1950s, according to the most recent National Climate Assessment, and could increase another 40 percent by the end of the century.
Unfortunately for humans, the abundance of mosquitoes varies massively with rainfall. The more rain there is, the more scattered pools of water there are across the landscape that the insects can use to lay their eggs in. This summer’s rains basically turned half of the U.S. into a perfect breeding ground for mosquito larvae.
“The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey,” Andrew Dobson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, told Grist. “But this year seems much worse than normal.”
It’s early to say how, exactly, this year stacks up to previous years in terms of mosquito populations. But the uptick in mosquitoes has been clocked by experts and officials in multiple states so far.
“This is actually one of the worst mosquito seasons in recent memory with a record number of the bugs plaguing communities across New York,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat from New York, said at a press conference over the weekend. He called on federal agencies to make funds available to New York to fight off the invasion. In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, officials told a local news station that 2021 has brought more mosquitoes to their county than they’ve seen in the past decade. In New Orleans, city officials reported more mosquitoes than usual, and nearby St. Tammany Parish reported a 300 percent increase in two types of mosquitoes. Steven Oscherwitz, an infectious disease specialist in Arizona, told Grist that he’s seen an increase in mosquitoes in the Southwest, too, due to the extremely heavy monsoon season. Even Southern California is seeing more mosquitoes than usual, due not to rain but to heat and humidity.
Some of those mosquitoes are more than just a nuisance. The Culex genus of mosquito carries West Nile virus, a disease in the Yellow Fever family that causes no symptoms in most people but severe disease — including high fever, headaches, tremors, paralysis, and even death — in older and immuno-compromised people. Multiple state public health departments have issued warnings about West Nile virus in recent weeks. Arizona, Arkansas, California, Idaho, New Jersey, and Texas have each reported one to two deaths related to the disease so far, and many more states have recorded human cases of West Nile.
West Nile virus is relatively new to the U.S., as far as vector-borne diseases go. The first cases were reported roughly 20 years ago. The illness has no cure, and there is no vaccine available to prevent infection. But Dobson, from Princeton, said that many Americans have immunity to West Nile without knowing it, because they’ve been exposed to bites from mosquitos carrying the virus for multiple summers in a row. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, may have contributed to decreased immunity this year, Dobson hypothesized, because people were stuck inside last summer and weren’t getting bitten as much, leading to a drop in the number of people getting immunity from the virus last year. “You might expect to see more cases of West Nile because people have been isolating themselves because of COVID,” Dobson said.
Climate change has helped mosquitos carrying West Nile and other diseases like malaria and dengue fever move around to new and higher ground, where warmer temperatures are helping the insects survive and bite humans. And higher temperatures can also affect the quantity of virus the mosquitos carry, Oscherwitz said. “When it’s really hot, the West Nile virus can multiply in them more, so they each carry a higher load of that virus than they would if we had cooler weather,” he said.
The impact of climate change on vector-borne disease more generally has experts worried. “We’ve got to be thinking much more cogently about planet change and what we’re going to do to stop it,” Dobson said. “Otherwise we’re going to have more floods, more diseases.”
As the West burns and the South soaks, Democrats on Capitol Hill are gunning for an actual federal climate plan, one that would bring down emissions across the United States and put the country on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. But in order to deliver on what may be the federal government’s last best chance to pass climate policy this decade, progressives will need to figure out how to convince the party’s moderates to play along.
On Tuesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the details of legislation that, if passed, would get the U.S. closer to President Joe Biden’s goal of eliminating all carbon emissions from the power sector by 2035. The bill is called the Clean Electricity Performance Program, or CEPP. It would essentially use federal money to pay utilities to pick up the pace on selling clean electricity to Americans.
More specifically, the legislation says that if a company that sells electricity to consumers increases its share of clean energy — we’re talking wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and hydroelectricity — by 4 percent every year, it can tap into the CEPP’s $150 billion grant program. Companies that don’t hit that 4 percent target have to pay a penalty to the government, and when they try to hit the target the next year, they’ll have to meet 4 percent plus whatever percent they were short the year before. The program would start in 2023 and run through the end of the decade.
The CEPP isn’t just about ramping up the megawatts of clean energy feeding into the grid — the legislation would also prompt utilities to train workers and pay them good wages by limiting the amount of incentives that companies can get by increasing their shares of clean energy 4 percent. For example, if a company doesn’t utilize jobs training programs and pay competitively, it’ll only get one-fifth of the full value of some of the CEPP’s incentives.
But the plan has to fit a specific set of criteria if it is to become law. Democrats plan to push the $3.5 trillion budget plan through Congress using a process called budget reconciliation. Reconciliation allows legislators to incorporate spending and tax measures into the federal budget — and to bypass the filibuster process that allows the minority party to block any Senate bill that doesn’t have 60 votes. The plan has to be “budget germane” in order to get past the House and Senate parliamentarians — the nonpartisan advisers in charge of deciding whether a budget plan meets the reconciliation guidelines. The CEPP has been carefully crafted as a combination of incentives and penalties that Democrats believe meet the criteria for reconciliation packages.
The biggest obstacle in the way of the CEPP becoming law isn’t the parliamentarians; it’s centrist Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Senate Democrats’ bid to pass the budget plan via reconciliation means they need every single member of their party to play along. No Republicans are expected to approve the bill, so if a single Democrat defects the party won’t have the 50 votes it needs to carry its budget plan over the finish line.
This week, Manchin came out swinging against the plan. In a Sunday interview with CNN’s State of the Union, the coal-state senator said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “will not have my vote on the 3.5.” He later told NBC that he was a “hard no” on the package. On the CEPP, specifically, Manchin said, “It makes no sense.” Congress shouldn’t pay utilities to reduce their emissions because the market, he argued, has already influenced utilities to become greener over the past two decades.
Manchin said he wants to whittle the package down to a $1.5 trillion plan. That doesn’t sit well with progressive Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who was quick to shoot back when asked if $1.5 trillion was an acceptable number to him on CNN. “No, it’s absolutely not acceptable to me,” he said. “I don’t think it’s acceptable to the president, to the American people, or to the overwhelming majority of the people in the Democratic caucus.”
This isn’t Sanders and Manchin’s first showdown. They practiced this choreography earlier this summer as the moderate and progressive factions of the Democratic party hashed out the details of a $1 trillion infrastructure package. Manchin prevailed in that fight, working with moderates from both parties to make the infrastructure plan about $1 trillion cheaper than the package Biden originally envisioned. What didn’t make it into the infrastructure package is now, for the most part, in the reconciliation bill. And the president seems intent on getting this one passed intact. On Wednesday, Biden met with Manchin and Sinema, separately, to discuss the budget plan. The same day, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the White House expects the package to “move forward” before the next big U.N. climate summit, which is scheduled for the first two weeks of November. That deadline suggests that Biden wants to arrive at the summit with a federal climate plan in hand.
“We have to think big,” Biden said of the budget plan after touring areas damaged by wildfires in California earlier this week. “Thinking small is a prescription for disaster.”
At 5 a.m. on December 4, 2017, Jesse Merrick got a text from his roommate. “Hoping your family is OK,” he remembers reading when he woke up. The Thomas Fire had just broken out in Southern California and was quickly growing into a nearly 300,000-acre behemoth. Jesse frantically tried to reach his relatives in Ventura. When he finally got hold of his mom, she was broken. “She answers the phone and she’s crying hysterically,” Jesse said. “She says, ‘It’s gone. It’s all gone.’”
The Merricks’ ranch-style home, with most of Jesse’s childhood stuff in it, burned down that day. A week after the fire, he flew out to help his mom salvage what was left. They spent days sifting through the rubble. Jesse, a former college football player, took on the strenuous task of sorting through the wreckage in the deep, charcoaled hull of their basement. The whole family wore masks to protect their lungs from the dust and gloves to shield their hands from sharp objects. But it wasn’t protection enough from the danger lurking in the dirt.
Smoke and dust blow off the burned remnants of Jesse Merrick’s family’s home after the 2017 Thomas Fire. Photos courtesy of Jesse Merrick.
Three weeks later, Jesse had to fly back home to Alabama, where he was working as a sportscaster. He was in charge of covering the annual Sugar Bowl college football game in New Orleans — a big opportunity. But when he got there, something didn’t feel right. “I felt like I had gotten hit by a bus,” he said. Jesse chalked it up to jet lag and pushed through with the broadcast. But his symptoms didn’t subside. Instead, they got much, much worse. Within a couple of days, he was coughing and running a low-grade fever. A rash had appeared on his upper torso. “I remember being miserable,” he said. “I wasn’t sleeping.” Once the rash started moving up his neck, about four days after he first started feeling sick, Jesse knew he had to get to an urgent care clinic.
That was the first of many doctor’s visits. For a month, Jesse’s symptoms worsened. Giant welts appeared around his joints like someone had whacked him all over with a baseball bat. He developed pneumonia, which made everything hurt, even breathing. Walking was painful. “It felt like someone was stabbing the bottom of my feet with knives,” Jesse recalled.
Jesse Merrick, shown here in better health, covers a football game in his job as a sportscaster. Courtesy of Jesse Merrick
By the time his primary care doctor discovered a six-centimeter mass in his lung, Jesse was starting to think that whatever disease he had might actually end up killing him. He was scheduled for a biopsy and a spinal tap — last-ditch efforts to find the source of his illness. But on the morning of the procedures, a team of infectious disease specialists appeared in his hospital room. “It was like I was on an episode of House or something,” Jesse said, chuckling. The biopsy and the spinal tap were suddenly irrelevant. The specialists were able to give him what his regular doctor couldn’t: a diagnosis.
Jesse had a disease called Valley fever. It’s caused by one of two strains of a fungus called Coccidioides, Cocci for short, that thrive in soils in California and the desert Southwest. The mass in his lung wasn’t cancer, it was a fungal ball — a glob of fungal hyphae, or mushroom filaments, and mucus. The infectious disease specialists started him on an intravenous drip of fluconazole, an antifungal medication. “Instantly, I started feeling better,” Jesse said.
Jesse got lucky that day. The infectious disease experts were in the right place at the right time. Some 60 percent of Valley fever cases produce no symptoms or mild symptoms that most patients confuse with the flu or a common cold. But 30 percent of those infected develop a moderate illness that requires medical care, like what Jesse had. And another 10 percent have severe infections — the disseminated form of the disease, when the fungus spreads beyond the lungs into other parts of the body. Those cases can be fatal.
Patients in California undergo treatment for Valley Fever.
Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Doctors don’t know why certain people experience no symptoms while others wind up in the emergency room. But they do know that pregnant people, the immunocompromised, African Americans, and Filipinos are especially at risk. And they also know that Cocci is a generalist. Any person, dog, or other mammal who breathes in air laced with the fungal spores is at risk of developing the disease, which kills roughly 200 people in the U.S. every year. No vaccine currently exists, and the antifungal treatment is a bandaid, not a cure.
Jesse’s difficulty getting a fast and accurate diagnosis isn’t an isolated incident. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the CDC, estimates that some 150,000 cases of Valley fever go undiagnosed every year, though that’s likely just the tip of the iceberg, doctors and epidemiologists told Grist. The disease is only endemic to certain geographic areas and it’s technically considered an “emerging illness,” even though doctors have been finding it in their patients for more than a century, because cases have been sharply rising in recent years. In some places, astronomically so. According to CDC data, reported Valley Fever cases in the U.S. increased by 32 percent between 2016 and 2018. One study determined that cases in California rose 800 percent between 2000 and 2018.
In most states where the disease is endemic, public health departments have been slow to grasp and advertise the breadth and potential impact of the illness, experts say, and the federal government could be doing more to fund research into a cure or vaccine for the infection. To date, there’s only been one multi-center, prospective comparative trial for the treatment of Valley fever. And, more troubling, researchers haven’t pinned down exactly what’s behind the rise in cases or how to stop it. One thing is nearly certain, though: Climate change plays a role.
In 1892, a medical student in Buenos Aires named Alejandro Posadas met an Argentinian soldier who was seeking treatment for a dermatological problem. Posadas documented a fungal-like mass on the patient’s right cheek. Over the course of the next seven years, the soldier experienced worsening skin lesions and fever, and eventually died. His story is the first case of disseminated Coccidioidomycosison record.
Around the same time, a manual laborer in the San Joaquin Valley walked into a hospital in San Francisco with skin lesions that looked a lot like the lesions on the Buenos Aires patient. The methods doctors used in San Francisco to treat the patient were barbaric. They cut chunks out of his face and treated the lesions with oil of turpentine, carbolic acid, and scrubbed his raw skin with a bichloride solution. They only succeeded in torturing their patient, who eventually died.
Over the next few decades, as more people got sick with Coccidioidomycosis and died, doctors figured out that the organism causing this disease often entered victims through the lungs. In 1929, a 26-year-old medical student at Stanford University Medical School cut open a dried Coccidioides culture and accidentally breathed in its spores. Nine days later, he was bedridden. But this time, the patient’s conditions improved and he eventually recovered. His illness would soon help doctors make a crucial connection.
A 1964 histological slide shows a lung infected with Valley fever caused by the fungus Coccidioides immitis. Image courtesy CDC/Dr. Martin Hicklin.
Courtesy CDC/Dr. Martin Hicklin, Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
It was only a few years later that the Kern County Department of Public Health in California began investigating the causes of a common disorder called “San Joaquin fever,” “Desert fever,” or “Valley fever,” which got its name from the state’s Central Valley, where the disease was prevalent. As doctors reviewed evidence from Kern County, they noticed commonalities between cases of Valley fever there and the disease the Stanford student experienced. Valley fever, they hypothesized, represented the Coccidioidomycosis infection.
Over the following decades, researchers would discover some important truths about Valley fever. They found that it is endemic to certain areas of the world, that the fungus that causes the disease lives in soil, that a majority of people infected by it are asymptomatic, and, crucially, that weather patterns and seasonal climate conditions have an effect on the prevalence of Coccidioides.
A few years ago, Morgan Gorris, an Earth systems scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, decided to investigate an important question: What makes a place hospitable to Cocci? She soon discovered that the fungus thrives in a set of specific conditions. U.S. counties that are endemic to Valley fever have an average annual temperature above 50 degrees Fahrenheit and get under 600 millimeters of rain a year. “Essentially, they were hot and dry counties,” Gorris told Grist. She stuck the geographic areas that met those parameters on a map and overlaid them with CDC estimates on where Cocci grows. Sure enough, the counties, which stretch from West Texas through the Southwest and up into California (with a small patch in Washington State) matched up.
But then Gorris took her analysis a step further. She decided to look at what would happen to Valley fever under a high-emissions climate change scenario. In other words, whether the disease would spread if humans continued emitting greenhouse gases business-as-usual. “Once I did that, I found that by the end of the 21st century, much of the western U.S. could become endemic to Valley fever,” she said. “Our endemic area could expand as far north as the U.S.-Canada border.”
Morgan Gorris / GeoHealth / University of California Irvine
There’s reason to believe this Cocci expansion could be happening already, Bridget Barker, a researcher at Northern Arizona University, told Grist. Parts of Utah, Washington state, and Northern Arizona have all had Valley fever outbreaks recently. “That’s concerning to us because, yes, it would indicate that it’s happening right now,” Barker said. “If we look at the overlap with soil temperatures, we do really see that Cocci seems to be somewhat restricted by freezing.” Barker is still working on determining what the soil temperature threshold for the Cocci fungus is. But, in general, the fact that more and more of the U.S. could soon have conditions ripe for Cocci proliferation, she said, is worrying.
There is a massive economic burden associated with the potential expansion of Valley fever into new areas. Gorris conducted a separate analysis based on future warming scenarios and found that, by the end of the century, the average total annual cost of Valley fever infections could rise to $18.5 billion per year, up from $3.9 billion today.
Gorris’ research investigates how and where Cocci might move as the climate warms. But what’s behind the rise in cases where Cocci is already well-established, like in Ventura, where Jesse Merrick’s family home burnt down, is still an area of investigation.
Jesse thinks the cause of his Valley fever infection is obvious. “I clearly see a correlation between the fires and Valley fever,” he told Grist. But scientists aren’t exactly sure what environmental factors drive Cocci transmission, and neither are public officials.
In a December 2018 bulletin, Ventura County Health Officer Robert Levin cast doubt on the connection between Cocci and wildfires. “As Health Officer for Ventura County, I don’t see a clear-cut connection between wildfires and Cocci infections,” he said, noting that only one of the 4,000 firefighters who worked on the Thomas Fire in 2017 got Valley fever. Jennifer Head, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who works for a lab studying the effects of wildfires on Valley fever, hasn’t seen much evidence backing up such a connection either. “The media talks a lot about wildfires and Valley fever and the general speculation is that wildfires will increase Valley fever,” she said. But the closest thing Head could find linking the two was a non-peer-reviewed abstract — a scientific summary — that wasn’t attached to a larger paper.
What experts do know, however, is that disturbing soil, especially soil that hasn’t been touched in a long time, in areas that are endemic to Cocci tends to send the dangerous fungal spores swirling into the air and, inevitably, people’s lungs. That’s why wildland firefighters tend to get Valley fever, not necessarily from the flames themselves, but from digging line breaks in the soil to help contain fires. Construction sites are responsible for a huge quantity of Valley fever infections for the same reason.
And the fact that researchers haven’t been able to find a link between wildfires and Cocci doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesse’s theory about how he contracted his illness is incorrect. Researchers have documented the Cocci fungi living in many parts of California. But the fungus isn’t evenly distributed throughout the areas where it grows. Think of a mountainside covered in wildflowers, John Galgiani, director of the Valley Fever Center for Excellence in Arizona, told Grist. Wildflowers grow in swaths across mountains, not evenly saturated throughout the landscape. Coccidioides similarly grows in flushes across the landscape. That means a wildfire that breaks out in an area that is endemic to Valley fever won’t necessarily encounter a vein of Cocci fungi.
A firefighter in Vacaville, California, works under smoky conditions during the 2020 Hennessy Fire. Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
“If a fire happened to be where there was Valley fever fungus in the soil, then that would be a risk,” Galgiani said. “But that’s a little different statement than all wildfires cause Valley fever.”
And no research has been published, yet, on the possibility of Cocci being spread to humans in wildfire smoke, though plenty of research has been conducted on the effects of smoke on human respiratory systems. “The potential for human pathogens to be spread in wildfire smoke has been ignored by those working on the health impacts of wildfire smoke just completely,” Jason Smith, a professor of forest pathology at the University of Florida, told Grist. He’s working with a group of researchers across the U.S. on a study that seeks to determine whether Cocci spores and a host of other fungal pathogens can travel via wildfire smoke. The portion of his research that focuses on Cocci is still in its early stages, but previous studies he’s worked on have demonstrated that fungal spores can indeed travel quite far in smoke. “There’s just no reason why Cocci would be immune from that,” he said. “Now humans getting sick from it? More so than they do under ambient conditions? That’s the difficult part — determining that that’s occurring.”
The connection between climatic changes and Valley fever is a bit clearer. Researchers speculate that a pattern of intense drought followed by intense rain may be driving the rise in Valley fever cases. When there’s a prolonged drought, the fungus in the soil tends to dry up and die. But no drought goes on forever — at least not in most parts of the U.S. When the rains eventually come back, the fungus flourishes. Then when the next drought hits and soils and the fungus dry out again, it is easy for wind — or a firefighter’s shovel or a hiker’s boot — to disturb and disseminate the abundant rain-spurred spores.
“The big issue is drought, it’s dryness,” Julie Parsonnet, a specialist in adult infectious diseases at Stanford University, told Grist. “And after a period of rain it’s even worse.” Parsonnet sees the real-world consequences of that dry-wet cycle at Stanford, where she works at a referral center that sees patients with even worse Valley fever than Jesse had — the really bad cases. “We see really terrible disease with the fungus affecting their brains and their bones,” she said. “In terms of how severe it is and the lifelong requirement for some of these people for treatment, it’s worrisome. We don’t want to see it. It would be a bad thing to see more Cocci than we have already.”
Parsonnet has been at Stanford for three decades, and over that time, she’s not only seen more Valley fever cases, but more severe cases. “In the last few years, I’ve been taking care of three or four Valley fever patients at any given time,” she said. “In the first 20 years I was here, I saw maybe one or two total.”
Decades have come and gone since researchers first connected the dots between the Cocci fungus and Valley fever. A growing body of research supports the idea that climate change is now making this disease worse. Yet public awareness of what Valley fever is and how it works, in addition to the medical know-how to tackle this disease, is still lacking, even in states where Valley fever is prevalent. “You’d be surprised by how delayed the diagnosis is,” Galgiani, from the Valley Fever Center for Excellence in Arizona, told Grist. “And that’s the patients who get diagnosed.”
Part of the blame lies in the way doctors practice medicine. An accurate Valley fever diagnosis may hinge on no more than where the attending physician went to medical school. “Many of the doctors who practice here learn medicine where the disease doesn’t exist, like in New York, for example,” Galgiani said. Another issue is the length of time it takes for the Valley fever blood test to come back from the lab — typically around two weeks. Clinicians in an outpatient setting like an urgent care clinic or emergency room are often reluctant to order a test that won’t come back before the patient goes home. “If the test comes back positive, they have to find the patient and tell them, ‘There’s a problem here.’ It’s not what they like to do,” Galgiani said.
A woman tends to her husband, who is suffering from Valley fever and other medical problems, in their apartment in Madera, California in 2008. AP Photo/ The Fresno Bee / John Walker
When doctors do order a Valley fever blood test, the results of that test aren’t guaranteed to be accurate. One in five Valley fever tests produce a false negative, said Steven Oscherwitz, an infectious disease doctor at Southern Arizona Infectious Disease Specialists. “It can be kind of silent and hard to diagnose because our tests just aren’t that great,” he said.
But part of the blame also lies with states and the way their public health departments prioritize diseases. Laurence Mirels, an infectious disease specialist in San Jose, California, who is affiliated with the California Institute for Medical Research, said that Valley fever has long languished behind HIV, West Nile Virus, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and other communicable or vector-borne diseases in states’ list of public health priorities. That’s despite the fact that the disease’s morbidity rate in the regions where it is endemic is comparable to polio, measles, and chicken pox before those diseases were stymied by vaccines.
“The things that public health departments tend to focus on are things that can be transmitted and can increase exponentially if the source isn’t dealt with,” Mirels said. “Cocci isn’t quite that way.” The disease can’t be passed on from person to person.
“It’s not like COVID where you’re well one day and dead the next week,” Parsonnet, from Stanford University, said. “If you have bad Cocci it’ll drag on for years and maybe even decades. And for that reason it makes less of a splash.”
Out of all the states in the U.S. that are endemic to Valley fever, Arizona is best equipped to handle the rise in Cocci cases. The state public health department keeps close tabs on Valley fever and regularly reports cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Valley Fever Center for Excellence, housed within the University of Arizona, helps facilitate collaboration between doctors and researchers across multiple counties within Arizona and develops strategies for diagnosing and treating Valley fever. The Arizona Department of Health Services, the state’s public health department, has spent time and resources trying to raise Valley fever awareness among Arizonans.
There’s a reason Arizona is ahead of the curve. It has the highest rates of Valley fever in the nation. “Arizona is a special case because it’s hard for them to ignore it,” Galgiani said. “It’s the second or third most frequently reported public health disease in the state. That’s not the case anywhere else in the country.” Other states like Utah, Texas, New Mexico, and Washington are also clocking rising rates of Valley fever, but it may be some time before the disease poses a big enough risk to residents that public health departments in those states start dedicating significant time and resources to it. West Texas, for example, is an “intensely endemic” region, Galgiani said. But the Texas Department of State Health Services doesn’t even report Valley fever cases to the CDC yet.
A map of the average incidence of reported Valley fever per 100,000 people, by county, during 2011–2017 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
“I think it’ll probably take expanding numbers to get people’s attention to make this a higher priority among everything else that needs attention,” Galgiani said.
There’s evidence that that is already starting to happen in California, where Valley fever is becoming an increasingly serious public health threat. In an email to Grist, a spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health noted that Valley fever cases in the state nearly tripled between 2015 and 2019, from roughly 3,000 cases to 9,000. “The annual number of reported cases has increased significantly since 2010,” the spokesperson said. The Department of Public Health got funding from the CDC in 2012 to hire an epidemiologist to study fungal diseases in the state, and it launched a $2 million Valley fever awareness campaign in 2018. “I think there is a kind of an awakening of the understanding that this is a problem,” Mirels said.
But even in Arizona, the state at the head of the pack, more could be done to alert residents to the dangers posed by Valley fever. Some residents suspect optics may be trumping public safety. “Imagine that you put ads up that say, ‘You’re going to catch this terrible disease if you come here, look at what it does to people,” Oscherwitz said. “They’re not going to really want to do that because tourism would be affected and nobody is going to come here who hears that.”
“I think there’s been reluctance by politicians to advertise this disease because it might deter people from coming here,” said Mark Johnson, President of the Tortolita Alliance, a conservancy group in Arizona that advocates for better Valley fever awareness. “But that is not the important thing. They should be doing everything in their power to make people aware of the disease.” Johnson, who contracted valley fever last year after retiring to Arizona, argued that if the state was really dedicated to protecting Arizonans from Valley fever, it would run advertisements on TV, put up signs up airports, and send out brochures, especially to new residents.
Valley fever on its own is a formidable and expensive illness to contend with. But it’s not the only fungal pathogen lurking beneath our feet. There are three main types of fungi that cause lung infections in humans in the U.S., including Cocci. Histoplasmosis and blastomycosis also pose risks to humans. It’s possible that the same environmental conditions that may be helping Cocci spread into new areas and become more prevalent are also motivating those fungi. Researchers can’t say for sure whether that’s happening yet, but it’s something they’re working on.
“I can’t really speak to what those predictions might be,” Barker, from Northern Arizona University, said. “But my colleagues have noticed similar trends where there’s an increase in reported disease.”
And another wrinkle: There aren’t nearly enough people studying these pathogens. Every time a human fungal pathogen researcher retires, the field grows smaller. “We’re behind all of these other groups,” Barker said. “We’re behind the bacteriologists and the virologists in terms of our understanding of some of these ecological principles driving distribution of these organisms and what might cause them to emerge in human populations.”
For most of the rest of us, the pathogens hiding in the ground aren’t much of a consideration at all. That applies to Jesse Merrick, too. For him, Valley fever is a distant, if terrible, memory now. He doesn’t let it stop him from doing the things he wants to do. He still goes on hikes and visits his mom in California. And he recently moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, an area that is endemic to Valley fever. “It’s in the back of my head but nothing where it’s something I think about daily or anything like that,” he said.
It may only be a matter of time before we start thinking about fungus more often, Barker said. “I honestly think that the fungal pathogens are going to be a huge problem for us going forward.”
After Superstorm Sandy hit New York in 2012, the city and state spent billions recovering from the storm and building new storm surge protections for its subway system. Seven years after the storm, a reporter asked then–Metropolitan Transportation Authority chair and CEO Pat Foye whether the subway was prepared for another Sandy. “The answer is ‘much better prepared,’” Foye said. But when the remnants of Hurricane Ida rolled through the tristate area earlier this month, the subway ground to a halt anyway, not because of storm surge, but because of extreme, rapid rainfall.
New York City didn’t focus on the wrong thing by investing in storm surge protections like sea walls. Storm surge badly affected the city in 2012, and it could happen again. But designing a flood-resilient city in the age of rapidly escalating climate change requires thinking more comprehensively — each part of the urban landscape needs to play a role. Urban resilience experts interviewed by Grist said it also requires thinking farther ahead, not just about how a policy measure or a piece of infrastructure will serve the city this decade, but two, three, and four decades from now.
Climate change is already intensifying flooding in much of the country, including the Northeast, the Mississippi River Valley, and the Midwest. The air becomes 4 percent more saturated with water for every 1 degree Fahrenheit that the planet warms. When that water comes back down as rain, it’s heavier than it used to be. The most torrential downpours in the Northeast now unleash 55 percent more rain compared to the 1950s, according to the most recent National Climate Assessment, and could increase another 40 percent by the end of the century. Flooding is one of the deadliest forms of disaster in the U.S. — the flooding from Ida’s remnants in the Northeast killed at least 52 people, less than two weeks after flooding in central Tennessee killed 22. This week, Tropical Storm Nicholas is dousing Texas and Louisiana, where the ground is still saturated by Ida’s rains, threatening more lives.
Data about flood risks could help cities make these kinds of events less deadly, but good data is hard to come by. The Federal Emergency Management Administration’s, or FEMA’s, flood maps are outdated and don’t account for “pluvial” flooding, the kind caused directly by extreme rainfall. “What FEMA’s flood maps don’t do is attempt to model the kind of flooding New York City just experienced,” Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. “This flooding is not caused by a river coming out of its banks, it’s flooding caused by too much water hitting the ground and having nowhere to go because the man-built environment can’t handle it.”
The First Street Foundation, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that quantifies climate risk from flooding, makes its own maps that take more factors in account, such as intense rainfall. Those maps show that 70 percent of American homeowners are at risk of flooding that isn’t captured by FEMA’s maps. “At the community and city-wide level, the crucial element is to ensure governments have the data they need to understand the true risk to their populations from a changing climate,” Jeremy Porter, head of research and development for First Street, told Grist via email.
In cities, the stormwater infrastructure — street-level drains, concrete sewers that can capture and hold water, roadside ditches, and flood-control reservoirs — are the first lines of defense against intense rainfall. Most urban stormwater infrastructure needs an update. There are large-scale efforts underway in some cities to shore up stormwater infrastructure to better handle extreme flooding. Chicago is building a $4 billion project called Deep Tunnel that will funnel water into three huge reservoirs. North Dakota and Minnesota are constructing a $2.2 billion flood-diversion project that will usher water away from the Fargo-Moorhead area via channels. But these projects are expensive and won’t be completed until later this decade.
In the shorter term, “green” infrastructure projects to alleviate pressure on stormwater systems are the lowest-hanging fruit. Concrete functions like a giant waterslide when it rains — the water flows off of it and into storm drains, ditches, and canals. More green spaces could help soak up some of the water from those intense precipitation events by holding it where it falls instead of channeling it into a drain. But many cities are losing green space.
John Carr, an instructor of emergency and disaster management at Northwest Missouri State University, recently asked his undergraduate students to look at New Orleans, Isle de Jean Charles, Miami, and other areas susceptible to flooding and compare images from Google Maps 15 years ago to the same maps today. “In major cities, what they saw is that most of the green space has now been taken up by massive infrastructure projects,” he said. “We have to be careful because we’re turning cities into one giant sheet of concrete, and that’s going to make those flash flooding events even more serious.”
In New Orleans, some neighborhoods are testing out small-scale, affordable alternatives to concrete like bioswales — troughs of grasses and other plants that can soak up rainwater — and porous concrete blocks that let the water through into drains below instead of letting it pool at the lowest point of a street. These interventions could work in any city.
Preparing for climate change–driven flooding requires thinking carefully about not only which infrastructure to invest in, but which infrastructure not to put any more energy toward. City governments could adopt stronger building and zoning codes that would prevent developers from building in areas that are projected to flood over and over in the coming years. “When you’re trying to get out of a hole, you have to stop digging,” Moore said.
In Norfolk, Virginia, the city government passed a zoning ordinance in 2018 that requires developers to build on an elevated foundation, regardless of whether the property is technically in a flood zone. The ordinance also encourages people to make their way to higher ground by telling homeowners that the city will only be making “judicious” investments in protecting homes from flooding. In other words, the city said what most won’t say: Some neighborhoods are going to experience so much flooding that it doesn’t make sense to try to protect them. That doesn’t mean that homeowners can’t elevate their own houses, but the city basically said, “our energies are going to go into other initiatives,” Moore said. “The streets are going to be underwater no matter how many houses we elevate.” It’s a difficult and unpopular decision to make, but a necessary one. Relocating at-risk populations to safer neighborhoods was agenda item number one on a list of things cities could do to adapt to climate change provided to Grist by First Street.
These interventions can help alleviate the deadly consequences of extreme flooding. But it is yet to be seen whether a specific formula of climate infrastructure and policy can protect 100 percent of a city against flooding or any of the other impacts brought on by climate change. “Can we build our way out of climate change?” Moore asked. “I think the answer is a definite maybe.” And, putting aside the question of whether it is actually possible to fortify America’s cities against climate change, what happens to the people who don’t get the protections afforded to major metropolitan centers? When Ida hit Louisiana, New Orleans was protected from storm surge by a new and improved, $15 billion system of levees it put in with the federal government’s help after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But some parishes outside of the walls got swamped. “If fortification is the answer, the questions become: how many places is the federal government going to go to that expense to support that outcome?” Moore said. “And the second question is, who is going to be inside of those fortifications and who is going to be outside of them?”
New York City was quiet early on Wednesday evening as the remnants of Hurricane Ida barreled toward the Tri-State Area. At 7 p.m., wind and rain had descended on the city, soaking pedestrians and sending rivulets down sidewalks. But the subway system was running, people were out drinking at bars and walking their dogs, and traffic was moving through city streets.
Just two hours later, walking outside meant putting your life in immediate danger. The torrential rain prompted the National Weather Service to issue a flash flood emergency for New York City, its first such warning for NYC ever. Service on every subway line was suspended, and videos from stations across the city showed waterfalls pouring from ceilings and flowing down subway steps. Geysers churned in the middle of subway platforms as cars bobbed like buoys in the streets above.
Commuters walk into a flooded 3rd Avenue / 149th st subway station and disrupted service due to extremely heavy rainfall from the remnants of Hurricane Ida on September 2, 2021, in New York City. David Dee Delgado / Getty Images
“Global warming is upon us,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat from New York, said at a press conference on Thursday. “When you get all the changes we have seen in weather, that’s not a coincidence.” Ida hit the Northeast less than two weeks after Hurricane Henri broke rainfall records in the regions.
It’ll be some time before climate scientists are able to calculate exactly how climate change affected Hurricane Ida, which devastated Louisiana and Mississippi earlier this week before charting a path toward the northeast. But climate science supports Schumer’s assertion that the storm system was supercharged by the climate crisis.
Hurricanes like Ida are a naturally occurring phenomenon. But global warming is responsible for making storms like Ida worse. “All storms, including Ida, are contaminated by this warming trend,” S.-Y. Simon Wang, a professor of climate dynamics at Utah State University, told Grist earlier this week.
Before Ida barreled into the Gulf Coast, it was a significantly less powerful tropical storm meandering around the Caribbean Sea. As it came closer inland, it sucked energy from the unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and transformed into the Category 4 behemoth that caused so much damage in Louisiana and Mississippi.
By the time it got to the Northeast, Ida was no longer an organized weather system, but it still managed to deliver the kind of flooding the Northeast hasn’t seen since Superstorm Sandy in 2012. That’s in part because climate change has primed the atmosphere for precipitation. The air becomes 4 percent more saturated with water for every 1 degree Fahrenheit that the planet warms. When that water comes back down as rain, it’s heavier than it used to be. The most torrential downpours in the Northeast now unleash 55 percent more rain compared to the 1950s, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, and could increase another 40 percent by the end of the century.
“In general, Ida is very consistent with exactly what we expect to see from climate change and also what we have been seeing in terms of a growing trend of more and more rainfall in these types of events,” Ilissa Ocko, a senior climate scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, told Grist.
The remnants of Ida are emblematic of the kind of storms the region could get as global warming accelerates, and it’s clear that the Northeast has not adequately prepared for the forecast. On Thursday, the governors of New Jersey and New York emphasized the need for climate resiliency. “As it relates to our infrastructure, our resiliency, our whole mindset, the playbook that we use, we’ve got to leap forward and get out ahead of this,” New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a Democrat, said. “We haven’t experienced this before but we should expect it next time,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, said. “I don’t want this to happen again.”
Ocko says that we could continue seeing the kind of impacts that the tail end of Ida brought to the Northeast unless we start planning for the future differently. “We really have to do a big rethink of what our infrastructure is able to handle,” she said. “It’s no longer just about fixing the state of what it was. We need to think ahead to what it needs to be.”
Less than a week ago, Hurricane Ida was known as Tropical Depression 9, a swirling mass of energy in the Caribbean Sea. That mass developed into a powerful tropical storm last Thursday, by which time there was no mistaking what would happen next: Ida was on track to become a major hurricane. Forecasters knew this with almost complete certainty for one simple reason: the storm was on track to pass through the Gulf of Mexico, where sea surface temperatures are unusually high.
Sure enough, Ida strengthened into a major hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico, gathering more steam as it moved closer to the coast over tepid water. It slammed into Louisiana near Port Fourchon on Sunday evening as a Category 4 storm packing maximum sustained winds of 172 miles an hour and unleashing as much as 20 inches of rain. Nearly half of the state was without power on Monday.
“Hurricane Ida packed a very powerful punch,” Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said in a televised address on Monday. “She came in and did everything that was advertised.”
Climate scientists often emphasize that climate change doesn’t create hurricanes. Hurricanes are a naturally occurring phenomenon. Warming can exacerbate them though, often in devastating ways. That’s what may have happened with this storm, though Stephanie Herring, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Grist that we won’t know for sure exactly how climate change influenced Ida until a formal attribution study has been conducted.
But Herring said that Ida exhibited behavior similar to previous hurricanes that scientists have conclusively linked to climate change, such as Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria, all of which occurred in 2017. Those storms were able to intensify quickly because of warm ocean water. “Ida seems to be consistent with these patterns,” Herring said.
Hurricane Ida developed into a Category 4 storm over the course of just a few hours, sucking energy from the bath-like water in the Gulf of Mexico. Surface temperatures are typically warm there this time of year, but parts of the Gulf are currently 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were, on average, in the late 1900s. That made Ida more intense more quickly — creating stronger winds than would have existed if Ida had skated over water that was cooler.
“Hurricanes almost always now undergo this rapid intensification before making landfall,” S.-Y. Simon Wang, a professor of climate dynamics at Utah State University, told Grist. “That trend is part of global climate warming.”
Climate change supercharged Ida on the front end ahead of its landfall in Louisiana, and it likely contributed to the torrential rain the storm brought with it as it moved inland. A planet warmed by anthropogenic climate change holds 7 percent more moisture in the air per degree Celsius of warming. That makes rain events much, much rainier, and it means more flooding for communities in a hurricane’s path.
“When storms rapidly intensify, they will be at a stage of absorbing more water because of the wind and all that energy, and when they start to dissipate, that’s when they dump all that water,” Wang said. “That can translate to heavy precipitation.”
Almost all of New Orleans is without power, one death from the storm has been confirmed with more expected, and thousands of buildings were damaged by Ida. It will take months for New Orleans and other areas affected by the storm to recover. But the Atlantic hurricane season is far from over. Meteorologists are currently monitoring three tropical disturbances in the Atlantic Ocean. Those storms are marked by climate change, too, whether they make landfall or not.
“All weather systems today are part of the global warming trend,” Wang said. “It’s like adding lemon juice to your water, it doesn’t taste the same anymore. Any hurricane that happens in a warmer climate will contain part of the signals of global warming.”
On Monday, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that makes it unequivocally clear that human beings have locked in a measure of warming for the planet that will be extraordinarily difficult to endure. Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius — roughly 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, a threshold the IPCC advised the world’s nations to avoid crossing as recently as 2018 — is guaranteed to arrive within two short decades.
And more warming than that is very likely.
The planet has already warmed approximately 1.1 to 1.2 degrees C (1.98 to 2.16 degrees F). The climate impacts communities across the world have experienced this summer — extreme heat, catastrophic flooding, wildfires, and more — are due, in part, to that roughly one degree of warming. A 1.5 degree-warmed world means more summers like this one: more evacuees in California, more intense drought in the West, more blistering heat waves, more tropical storms that dump a season’s worth of water in 24 hours.
And yet, the IPCC report makes it clear that this is officially the best case scenario. We’ll be lucky if we get away with that little warming.
So let’s take a closer look at the best case. What does 1.5 degrees really look like?
It looks a lot like the world we’re living in now, but worse, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist and science communicator at the University of California, Los Angeles. “A lot of folks have been kind of shocked by the events of this summer,” he told Grist. “1.5 degrees is still a significant increment of additional global warming beyond what we’ve already experienced. By the time we get there, the impacts will be all that more pronounced.”
Heavy precipitation, extreme heat, and droughts will all occur more frequently depending on how hot things get, the report says. If the planet warms 1.5 degrees, for example, the chances of a 1-in-10-year heatwave — a heatwave that only occurs once a decade in a world in which man-made climate change does not exist — is likely to happen four times more frequently. If the planet warms to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), such a heat wave is likely to occur nearly 6 times a decade.
“The more you warm the planet, the more often extreme events occur,” Jessica Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and a lead author of the new IPCC report, told Grist. “To me, 1.5 means the best possible outcome.”
Warming at that level does not necessarily produce one-in-1,000-year heat events like the one that gripped the Pacific Northwest at the end of June. But Tierney pointed out that one-in-10-year events can still be incredibly damaging. Arizona, where she lives, had its driest monsoon season on record last summer — which, she said, is an example of a climate impact that will occur more often as temperatures increase.
It’s a big deal that climate scientists are linking extreme weather to climate change. The last time the IPCC came out with one of these assessments, in 2013 and 2014, experts were careful not to necessarily connect a big wildfire or a major drought to rising temperatures. The science hadn’t evolved to the point where researchers could confidently associate specific events to human activity.
“We’ve really shifted gears on that,” Tierney noted.
Swain explained that more of these impacts will be linked to climate change in the coming years as temperatures reach 1.5 degrees C of warming. More droughts, more intense hurricanes, wildfires in places that have never had them before will emerge. “I don’t really see any way around that,” Swain said.
And 1.5C is still the best-case scenario. While it’s not ideal, it’s infinitely better than the alternative, which is even more warming. “It would have been more ideal to not have gotten there in the first place,” Tierney said. “But here we are, we have to deal with it.”
Even more important to remember is that the IPCC isn’t saying that the planet will definitely warm 1.5 degrees, simply because that amount of warming is physically impossible to avoid. Theoretically, it still is.
“If you flipped the switch tomorrow and turned off all carbon emissions, then absolutely we could avoid greater than 1.5 degrees of warming,” Swain said. “It’s largely unavoidable because it’s sociopolitically impossible to avoid.”
In other words, the warming will happen because humans aren’t stopping it. What happens beyond 1.5 is up to us.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, came out with its sixth annual climate change assessment on Monday. The IPCC report, which compiles all of the latest scientific research on climate change and presents it in one massive assessment, has served as a wake-up call for policymakers and the public every time it has been published.
As the wake-up call has gone largely unheeded, with little done globally to rein in emissions, the IPCC’s main takeaways have grown increasingly dire with each successive assessment. This year, the report’s authors delivered one of their bleakest messages yet: Climate change is baked into our immediate future, and the window of opportunity to do something about how bad its effects can be is closing fast.
The planet has already warmed just over 1 degree Celsius, 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels due to human activity. That number might sound small, but it can translate into some pretty severe climate impacts — ones that are already being felt across the globe. In the U.S., climate scientists have determined that major wildfires in California, extreme flooding in the Northeast, and drought in the West have all been exacerbated by that one degree of warming. The sixth annual assessment found that the planet is all but guaranteed to continue heating up and will reach 1.5 degrees of warming — the boundary line between ‘manageable’ and ‘catastrophic’ warming — in the next two decades.
But what does that distinction really mean — and how can someone without a science background decipher a technical and lengthy climate change report? Luckily, some of the IPCC report authors and other climate scientists took to Twitter to break down the biggest takeaways.
First off, Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a lead author of the assessment, wrote a thread explaining how the report actually works. It is conducted by volunteer scientists over the course of three years. Why do they volunteer for such a time consuming job? “Because we care about making sure the world knows about what has happened and what will happen if we don’t cut emissions,” Tierney wrote. The main portion of the report has 12 chapters, but if you want a concise summary of the main takeaways, go straight to the “summary for policymakers.”
Darrell Kaufman, a paleoclimate scientist at Northern Arizona University and another lead author of the report, described how this report differs from the IPCC’s previous report in 2013. The global surface temperature is 0.3 degrees Celsius (0.54 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer now than it was back then. What does that tell us? “There’s no going back, at least not for centuries,” Kaufman wrote. He also noted that global temperatures are warming to a level that hasn’t been documented on planet Earth for about 125,000 years, the Last Interglacial period.
Scientists who were not involved in writing the report are also digesting the findings online. Take Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center in Berkeley, California, who has research that is included in the assessment. In a Twitter thread, Hausfather says the assessment “provides an unprecedented degree of clarity about the future of our planet.” The previous IPCC report, he noted, estimated that the planet would likely warm somewhere between 1 and 6 degrees C (1.8 to 10.8 degrees F). This report narrows that range to 2 to 5 degrees C (3.6 to 9 degrees F).
That’s both good and bad news, Hausfather said. It means the mildest warming scenario is all but off the table. We are not going to be riding out the climate crisis at a cool 1 degree C of warming. On the other hand, the absolute worst case scenarios are also unlikely. The planet is projected to hit 1.5 degrees C of warming by the 2040s, but there’s still time for us to determine how bad it gets from there.
Finally, if twitter threads aren’t your thing, Miriam Nielsen, a climate science Ph.D. student at Columbia University, made a 7.5-minute video explaining how the report works and what’s in it in crystal clear terms.
It’s a warm day in early June, and researcher Nicholas Dietschler is standing in front of an eastern hemlock sapling about a quarter of a mile up a steep ridge in New York’s Catskill Mountains. The evergreen is not looking good. Its lower branches are brittle and dead. Its upper limbs are balding. Dietschler visually scans the tree’s stubby needles. It doesn’t take long for him to find what he’s looking for. Tiny, woolly white bumps the size of sesame seeds coat the sapling’s spindly branches. Dietschler runs his thumb along the bumps. “Blood,” he says, holding up a finger streaked with orange. “They’re alive.”
A blue cooler lies open on the ground, filled to the brim with neatly stacked plastic vials. “I just signed up to spend the next five years of my life working on this,” Dietschler says, looking at the cooler. The hemlock Dietschler is standing in front of will probably be dead before those five years are up, as will many more hemlocks throughout the northeastern United States.
The tiny bumps are the egg sacs of a destructive insect called the woolly adelgid, which caught a ride with Japanese goods bound for America in the early 20th century and has been wreaking havoc on the nation’s Eastern forests ever since. The aphid-like insects suck the sap out of hemlock needles, killing the trees where they stand. The bugs are all female and can reproduce asexually, which makes them a formidable enemy to begin with. But climate change is assisting woolly adelgid in its quest for total domination of the Northeast’s hemlocks by helping it spread north into colder climes. It’s already rampaged through the southern Appalachian mountains, leaving a trail of millions of devastated hemlocks on its way North. If adelgid continues to proliferate unchecked, hemlocks could disappear entirely from the Northeast.
The survival of species hangs by a thread, and the outcome could depend on the contents of the blue cooler.
Nicholas Dietschler and Marshall Lefebvre, lab technicians with the New York State Hemlock Initiative, stand in front of hemlocks in the Catskill Mountains. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Invasive species are difficult to contain in the absence of climate change. But they’ve become especially tricky to stop as winters have grown warmer and more of the nation has become temperate, allowing these pests to explore previously impenetrable territory. As a result, invasive tree bugs and blights are on the rise across the United States. Hundreds of thousands of elms are being taken out by the Dutch elm disease, spread by the voracious elm bark beetle. Butternut canker disease has infected the white walnut. Beeches are falling ill with beech bark and beech leaf disease. An iridescent green beetle called the emerald ash borer has lain waste to ash trees. Sudden oak death, a pathogen, is coming for oak trees. And hemlocks are succumbing to woolly adelgid.
The U.S. can’t afford to lose its trees. The nation’s existing forests absorb 9 percent of its carbon emissions by turning carbon dioxide and water into wood via photosynthesis. When trees die, that process is reversed, and the carbon dioxide stored in the wood is slowly released into the atmosphere. Just 15 nonnative pests, including woolly adelgid, threaten to destroy upward of 40 percent of those forests. Already, the biomass lost to invasives every year releases emissions similar in magnitude to the emissions produced by trees killed in wildfires — the carbon equivalent of the tailpipe emissions produced by 5 million cars on the road each year.
Meanwhile, “natural” solutions to climate change — using landscapes to sequester carbon dioxide — are growing more popular. Governments around the world, including the United States, are pouring millions of dollars into planting trees. In the U.S., members of Congress want to plant 100 billion new trees. But their plans don’t take exotic species into account. It’s not a given that these new trees, or the trees already in the ground, will be able to withstand the rising tide of invasive pests. If the pressures of climate change force the nation’s trees to start emitting carbon dioxide instead of sequestering it, our Hail Mary climate solution may become part of the problem.
Lake George, New York. The hemlocks surrounding the lake are threatened by woolly adelgid. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
The individual hemlock that Dietschler, the researcher, is standing in front of is likely doomed. But at the very top of the ridge, a grove of pristine, old-growth hemlocks grow straight and healthy out of the forest floor. Their canopies are thick and bushy, untouched by saws or pests for hundreds of years. The difference between these hemlocks and the tattered trees downslope is stark. Stepping into the healthy grove feels like entering a cathedral. It’s quiet, dark, and cool, even on a summer day.
“The reason we’re releasing here is because of that stand up there,” Dietschler says, looking uphill. What he’s releasing rests inside of that blue cooler: a little more than 1,000 live silver flies. If all goes according to plan, the flies will feast on the woolly adelgid in the infested trees, arresting the spread of the invasive insect and protecting the healthy hemlocks at the top of the ridge. The battle between adelgid and fly is a preview of future fights to curtail invasive species. Nonnative pests are difficult to contain in normal climatic conditions. Can scientists save the nation’s trees from invasives supercharged by climate change? The Northeast stands to lose a great deal if they can’t.
In the early 1900s, ships carrying plants laden with woolly adelgid arrived in America from southern Japan. It didn’t take long for adelgid to establish a foothold on the continent, but it wasn’t discovered until the 1950s, in Virginia. Soon after that, adelgid was found in more states. The bugs moved fast, sucking the juice out of hemlock needles and killing trees up and down the Eastern seaboard — young, old, big, and small — in as little as four years. They hopped the Long Island Sound in the 1980s and invaded the Catskill Mountains a decade or so after that. For a time, the pest’s range was capped by the Northeast’s cold winter temperatures. Adelgid can’t withstand temperatures below freezing for very long. But warming winters have made the Northeast, where there are large sections of uninterrupted hemlock forest, more inviting to invasive species. Now, woolly adelgid is everywhere. More than half of America’s Eastern forests are infested with it — almost every state in the Eastern Seaboard.
Woolly adelgid cluster on hemlock branches in upstate New York. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
“It’s basically killed untold millions of trees on the East Coast,” said Mark Whitmore, head of the New York State Hemlock Initiative, a state-funded lab housed at Cornell University that works in concert with the Department of Environmental Conservation. The Hemlock Initiative also employs Dietschler and organizes the release of the adelgid-eating flies. “It’s like one of those wild sci-fi-like scenarios, but it’s right there on our doorstep. With warmer winter temperatures, the problem is just going to get worse.”
That’s exactly what happened last winter. Warm winter temperatures contributed to extremely low mortality rates among adelgid populations across much of the East Coast. That led to an explosion of pests this summer. “They are everywhere in high abundance,” David Orwig, a senior ecologist at the Harvard Forest, a 4,000-acre research area in Petersham, Massachusetts, managed by Harvard University, told Grist. “The warming winters exacerbate the problem. No question.”
If the U.S. can’t afford to lose its trees, the Northeast really can’t afford to lose its hemlocks. “No other tree species in our eastern landscape exerts such a widespread and profound influence on the environment and other organisms, including ourselves,” researchers who work in the Harvard Forest, Orwig among them, wrote in a book published in 2014 titled Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge. Losing the hemlock, the book says, is like “losing a conductor and the music.”
Deciduous forests are made up of many different kinds of trees that lose their leaves every winter — oak, birch, ash, maple, poplar. When an ash tree disappears from a deciduous forest — because it’s been killed off by an emerald ash borer, perhaps — other leafy trees crowd out the carnage. Hemlock forests are dominated by one type of tree. They grow in massive, undulating stands of homogenous green that are vibrant 365 days a year. When the hemlock disappears from a hemlock forest, not much is left behind.
Eastern Hemlocks sickened by woolly adelgids poke through a line of healthy trees. ThomasTakacs / Getty Images
Hemlocks are a foundation species, meaning they play a pivotal role in structuring ecological communities. Their greatest contribution is the deep shade that they create. Just 1 percent of the sunlight that hits a hemlock canopy manages to reach the forest floor. The trees’ feathered branches slope down to the ground instead of up toward the light, creating a muffled dome. Temperatures beneath this green tent can be as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the outside world at the top of the tree and another 5 to 10 degrees F colder at its base.
In the winter, the tent keeps snow off the ground. Deer gather in the circumference of the hemlock boughs, safe from the deep snow that accumulates beneath leafless deciduous trees. Ruffed grouse and barred owls nest in hemlock’s upper canopies. Snowshoe hares nibble on its green branches. Porcupines gnaw on its tannin-rich bark. In the spring, as the sun beams down and melts snow and ice elsewhere, hemlock preserve circles of snow at their trunks, which leech slowly into nearby streams and creeks and keeps them cool. Brook trout depend on these cooling infusions of icy water, as do many species of salamander, frog, toad, and fly.
Humans do, too, even if they don’t know it. Hemlocks use water more conservatively than hardwood species of tree because their dense branches create moist and cool microclimates. “If you have hemlocks along streams that are replaced by hardwood that use more water, you do have the potential for drying streams, at least in the summertime,” Orwig, the Harvard Forest ecologist, said. Those streams are used for swimming, fishing, and recreation — a major part of the Northeast’s regional identity. And no matter where they grow, hemlocks provide financial and aesthetic benefits that humans enjoy. A study that looked at hemlock decline in central Connecticut and Massachusetts over the course of five years in nine counties found an accompanying decline in property values of $105 million.
“Most people just look at hemlocks as this green thing,” Whitmore, from Cornell, said. “But then you drill in further and then you see all kinds of really important ecosystem functions associated with the cooling and the climate they create.”
And hemlocks aren’t just good for the critters and humans who live nearby. They’re also very good at trapping carbon dioxide.
A sick hemlock grove in upstate New York. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Hemlocks can sequester approximately 12 metric tons of carbon dioxide per two and a half acres, according to a 2002 study that compared the hemlock to other tree species. That’s more CO2 than the oak trees and ponderosa pines the study analyzed. But woolly adelgid could transform hemlocks from carbon sinks into carbon sources. That already happened in 2014 in the Harvard Forest. Researchers documented a hemlock stand that started producing carbon instead of sequestering it. “The forest can behave as a source of carbon with the loss of the hemlock,” Orwig, who helped document that shift from sink to source in a 2020 study, said.
A prior Harvard study showed that woolly adelgid could take an 8 percent bite out of northeastern forests’ carbon sequestering capabilities between 2000 and 2040. But that study and others predict that hardwood tree species, and an opportunistic tree called black birch in particular, will eventually replace the dead and dying hemlock — a trend researchers have already noticed in northeast woods. Past 2040, the Harvard study projects that those black birches will capture 12 percent more carbon than the hemlocks they replaced. But in the short term, that 8 percent decrease in carbon sequestration is a big deal, says Audrey Barker Plotkin, a senior scientist at the Harvard Forest who has spent years studying the impact of invasives on hemlocks.
“If we lose hemlock and there’s a reduction in carbon uptake for, say, 40 years, that’s exactly the time when we need to be doing everything possible to mitigate carbon loss,” she said. “That time frame is super important to having any chance of not losing the fight against climate change.”
And other scientists have questioned whether black birch would really be an improvement over hemlock when it comes to carbon storage. A 2018 study looking at trees and soil carbon found that 80- to 90-year-old hemlocks sequestered 6.8 times more soil carbon than black birches of the same age. That study estimated that woolly adelgid could potentially lead to a net release of 4.5 tons of carbon per roughly two and a half acres of hemlock forest replaced by black birch.
“Then if you think, wait, what if we lost all hemlocks? That gives you a ridiculously big number,” said Danielle Ignace, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of British Columbia and the lead author of the study on soil carbon. For now, the full extent of the carbon hole soon to be left by the disappearance of eastern hemlock is a big question mark. There is one major takeaway from Ignace’s research, however. “Our work is saying that it will take decades before we know the ramifications of losing the eastern hemlocks,” she said.
In the early 2000s, researchers had pinned their hopes of saving the eastern hemlock on a black beetle from the Pacific Northwest called laricobius nigrinus. Prior attempts to keep woolly adelgid at bay using predator beetles from East Asia had failed because they were difficult to breed and had a hard time surviving East Coast winters. The black beetle seemed hardier. The U.S. Forest Service was using limited funding to release thousands of them in forests in the South.
For a time, it seemed like it was working. The beetle laid its eggs in the woolly adelgid ovisacs, and when those eggs hatched, the larvae ate the woolly adelgid eggs. The larvae were able to eat upwards of 90 percent of the woolly adelgid. But, over time, it became clear that no matter how much adelgid the beetles ate, they couldn’t eat fast enough to outsmart the pest. That’s because woolly adelgid produces two generations per year: a winter generation and a spring generation. The beetle chewed through the winter generations, but the adelgid was able to rebound completely in the spring.
An adult laricobius nigrinus beetle feasting on woolly adelgid. Bryan Mudder / U.S. Forest Service
Something had to be done, but researchers and states were loath to admit that the black beetles, the biocontrol they had spent time and resources rearing and releasing, weren’t working. “This is not a field where people throw a lot of money at you,” Whitmore, who runs the New York State Hemlock Initiative, said. “Resources were thin.” Privately, Whitmore, who was also focused on black beetles at the time, had realized that they weren’t getting the job done.
Then, in 2014, Whitmore attended an annual invasive species meeting in Annapolis, Maryland. At that meeting, a man named Darrell Ross, a professor of entomology at Oregon State University at the time, stood up. He had conducted an analysis of all of the woolly adelgid predators in the Pacific Northwest, and he thought that the labs in attendance were missing something big: silver flies, the only other bugs in the Pacific Northwest other than the black beetle that researchers are sure only eat woolly adelgid. The flies had been overlooked for years because they’re difficult to trap and breed. But they’re just as common as black beetles on the West Coast, and, more importantly, they feed on the second crop of woolly adelgid, the spring generation.
“Darrell sort of got a bee in his bonnet,” Whitmore remembered. “He was wondering why everyone was so worked up about the laricobius beetle when we were ignoring the silver flies. It was an uncomfortable confrontation he had in the group, but he got my attention.”
After that meeting, Whitmore knew what he had to do. The key to saving the hemlocks might be releasing the silver flies and the black beetles together, so that they could attack both generations of adelgid. It would be another three years before Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, gave Whitmore the funding he needed to start his lab at Cornell. Once he did, Whitmore hit the ground running. “That’s what enabled me to really get going,” he said. In May 2017, his lab released its very first silver flies, just 740 of them, at four locations in New York over a period of three days. Whitmore remembers it as “a whirlwind adventure.” To date, Cornell has released 25,239 flies at 47 different sites.
It may be some time before researchers find evidence that the beetles and flies are keeping adelgid at bay. So far, the New York State Hemlock Initiative has documented evidence that the flies can survive year to year. But there’s not enough data to say for sure whether the flies are thriving and eating the spring generation of woolly adelgid in the wild yet. It may be years before Whitmore’s lab and the other, smaller scale initiatives to rear and release these predators know for sure if their efforts have paid off. Until then, states with eastern hemlock can spray and inject select trees with pesticides that kill off adelgid. That course of action, however, is expensive and doesn’t address the problem on a species-wide scale. The flies and beetles are the only potential long-term, cost-effective solution to the East’s growing pest problem.
Woolly adelgid–eating flies await release in a hemlock grove in the Catskills. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Orwig, who has not been involved with the New York State Hemlock Initiative’s efforts, has been skeptical of the efficacy of biocontrols ever since researchers found evidence in the 1990s that the predators they were shipping in from East Asia weren’t surviving East Coast winters. But Orwig is cautiously optimistic that the silver flies can fill a crucial niche. “There’s a better chance for success,” he said. “I’m still hopeful that biocontrol can be helpful.”
But Orwig noted that the beetles and silver flies can only be effective as long as the funding exists to continue rearing and releasing them. “There’s limited resources,” he said.
For now, New York is being generous with its hemlock funding. In 2020, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection agreed to give the New York State Hemlock Initiative $1 million over five years. “We’re definitely concerned,” Bryan Ellis, a forester with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, told Grist. “We’re kind of like throwing the kitchen sink at this problem.”
But adelgid isn’t the only invasive threatening native flora in the state, which has earmarked more than $13 million for invasive prevention and control activities in its 2021 budget. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation is also battling multiple invasives: hunting down the spotted lanternfly, doing damage control on the emerald ash borer, keeping tabs on the Asian longhorned beetle, ripping out an insidious herb called giant hogweed. “You can’t focus on just one,” Ellis said. “We have a lot of priorities and we’re getting to them the best that we can.”
Researchers estimate biological invasions will increase by 20 to 30 percent by midcentury, in large part because of climate change. Those invasives, the study says, will cause major impacts to biodiversity around the world.
A biological invasion may be on the horizon, but on the ridge in the Catskill mountains, everything is peaceful and quiet. Birds rustle in the branches of a large, wizened hemlock. A soft breeze lifts the leaves on an oak tree. The Pantherkill Creek burbles in the valley below. Dietschler takes a vial out of the cooler and pops the lid. He turns it upside down over a branch on the sickly hemlock sapling and nudges the silver flies, lethargic after their three-hour trip from the lab at Cornell, free. The predators, each no bigger than a pinhead, come to their senses and zigzag out of the vial. In the blink of an eye, they’ve flitted away into the understory.
“I wouldn’t choose to waste my own personal time, passion, and effort on this,” Dietschler says softly, watching them go. “I truly believe that there is hope.”
Climate scientists have long warned that global warming would lead to extreme heat in many parts of the world. But the 120 degree Fahrenheit temperatures brought on by the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest in June were more in line with what researchers had imagined would occur later this century. “Astonished” is the word Michael Wehner, an extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, used to describe his reaction to the heat in an interview with National Geographic. He was one of two dozen extreme weather and climate researchers who conducted an analysis in the days following the heatwave that found it would not have occurred in the absence of anthropogenic climate change.
“We said it is virtually impossible without climate change,” Wehner said of the event. “But I would have said beforehand it is virtually impossible with climate change.”
As more seemingly impossible events followed — intense flooding in Germany and Belgium killed more than 200 and counting, a massive wildfire in Oregon grew by 1,000 acres per hour, and a year’s worth of rain fell on central China in just three days — news outlets began reporting on researchers’ unease. “This catastrophic summer even has climate scientists worried,” a headline in the National Observer read. “Climate scientists shocked by scale of floods in Germany,” the Guardian wrote. CNN: “Scientists are worried by how fast the climate crisis has amplified extreme weather.”
What are we to make of this? Has climate change entered warp speed?
Not exactly, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who is an authority on extreme weather, wildfires, and other climate impacts.
“I’m less convinced that recent events tell us that things are moving faster than projections have suggested,” Swain said. “But I am increasingly convinced that we’ve underestimated the impacts of some of the changes that were actually fairly well predicted.”
Grist caught up with Swain to talk about extreme weather, climate models, and how even subtle increases in temperature can bring about immense change.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Q. Have you felt like this summer’s extreme weather events — the drought in the western U.S., the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, the flooding in Germany and China — are evidence of climate change happening really fast, or have they been in line with what you had been expecting around this time?
A. There’s a lot of headlines right now reading, “Models failed. Science didn’t predict these extremes.” That just doesn’t ring true to me, because there have long been predictions that we’d see much more frequent and more intense extreme heat waves, more frequent and more intense extreme downpours. And that’s exactly what’s happening. The magnitude of these specific events have been particularly extreme. But is that necessarily because the models failed in a way that they shouldn’t have failed? I’m not totally convinced that’s the case.
I think what’s interesting is actually the diversity of responses in the scientific community. There are some folks who say that they were pretty surprised by what’s happened recently. But there are also some folks who say, “Yeah, it’s certainly shocking, but not really scientifically surprising.” And I would generally fall into that latter group, actually, because I think where the divergence may be coming from is that I think historically there’s been a little bit of a lack of imagination regarding what different levels of warming actually mean.
By this I mean, the planet has warmed 1 to 1.3 degrees centigrade so far. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you talk to planetary scientists and particularly people who study extreme events, that’s an enormous shift in the mean state of things already. But the problem is not the mean state shift unto itself. No one really feels 1.3 degrees of warming. The individuals in specific places on earth experience the changes that are happening in day-to-day weather where they actually live, which can be really different if you’re in the Arctic or the tropics or an island nation or the middle of a big continent somewhere.
So I think it’s important to differentiate between “the climate system is careening out of control faster than we thought that it would” versus “actually, even this amount of warming is a lot more problematic than we thought it was.” And I tend to think that it’s more the latter than the former.
Q. So this is what climate models said would happen?
A. There are some aspects of this where I do think that climate models have not fully captured everything that’s going on. There is evidence that, while climate models have done a very good job overall, when it comes to regionally specific changes or certain kinds of extreme events, that they don’t necessarily have a great handle on these events.
But where I differ with some other folks is that the models aren’t really designed to capture those things very well necessarily. Global climate models are designed and intended to simulate global climate. And in doing that, they do a really good job. They aren’t really tools that were expected to be really good at simulating regional-scale climate extremes. We know that they fail sometimes when they’re asked to do that somewhat out-of-scope task.
So when we get these really extreme events, like the unbelievable heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and these really extreme over-the-top flood events in Western Europe recently — these sorts of things that are beyond extreme relative to what we’ve seen historically — it probably shouldn’t be tremendously surprising that climate models don’t do a good job capturing them. Because the underlying physical processes are evolving on temporal and spatial scales that are finer than these models are intended to represent.
Q. If climate models aren’t intended to predict things like the Pacific Northwest heatwave, then is there a way to capture these localized events ahead of time?
A. What’s interesting to me is that the weather models we use day to day to predict the weather did a great job with these events. If anything, they did a better job than the humans who were monitoring them.
In the Pacific Northwest event, for example, the weather models were saying, yeah, this is going to be something that’s completely unprecedented historically and looks kind of absurd at face value. I was skeptical of what the models were telling us a week in advance about the temperatures in Seattle, Portland, and British Columbia. And then they actually happened. The models were right. But those are the weather models, not the climate models. And what’s interesting is, they aren’t fundamentally different. They’re just tasked with doing different things.
Weather models are designed to predict the weather on day-to-day timescales over smaller regions. The weather models did a good job predicting the extreme flood event in Western Europe, too. It wasn’t that the meteorologists didn’t know it was coming. You can have conversations about why that knowledge didn’t translate to the right kind of evacuation or preparation. But it was not a mystery. It wasn’t like it came out of the blue. So what’s interesting is that the weather models do capture these events in advance.
Q. Do you hope the heatwave and other extreme weather events will alert the public to the variability of a couple of degrees C of warming?
A. I hope so. I think this just keeps coming back to this notion that a degree or two of global warming doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is a tremendous shift in the system. But that’s not intuitively obvious to really anyone except for folks who really understand the dynamics of these nonlinear Earth systems interactions. I think we’ve had, from a broader societal standpoint, kind of a failure of imagination in the sense that there hasn’t been enough conversation about what it really means to warm a degree or two degrees or five degrees, god forbid. I don’t think people really understand — and I think this is even true of some scientists, even some climate scientists, honestly. People who are climate scientists might study the carbon cycle or might study large-scale dynamics or paleoclimate. I think a lot specifically about the extreme climate, these transient huge bursts of severe weather that can occur. And we’re adding a lot of extra energy to the system.
Poison ivy is a fixture of the landscape in eastern North America and parts of Asia. The noxious, rash-causing weed grows in rocky outcroppings, open fields, and at the edge of forests — it generally loves to take over disturbed areas. It can grow in partial shade and doesn’t give a damn about soil moisture as long as it’s not growing in a desert. The ivy is often identified in its plant form on the ground, but it can grow into a thick and hairy vine that curls around big trees and chokes out other native flora. No one knows why the ubiquitous plant causes an allergic reaction in human beings and some apes. It doesn’t affect any other animals that way, and researchers suspect that its allergenic defense mechanism may have evolved by accident.
If you live in areas where there is a lot of poison ivy, you may have noticed that the plant appears to be thriving lately. The leaves are looking leafier, the vines more prolific. Your poison ivy rash may even feel more itchy. It’s not your imagination. Research shows that the main culprit behind climate change — increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — is supercharging poison ivy.
The effect has been known since 2006, when Duke University researchers published a six-year study that showed poison ivy grew double its normal size when it was exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide — levels on a par with the atmospheric carbon scientists anticipate seeing around 2050. The leaves on some individual plants grew by as much as 60 percent. Researchers also found that CO2 makes urushiol, the oil in poison ivy that causes the allergic reaction in humans, stronger. Plants rely on CO2 to make the sugars they need to grow, and increased concentrations of it were helping everyone’s least favorite plant thrive. The researchers surmised that increased levels of CO2 in coming decades would lead to bigger, faster growing, and itchier poison ivy plants.
Elevated levels of CO2 might not be the only climate-related factor making poison ivy more of a threat. Jacqueline Mohan, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia and one of the researchers who conducted that initial research on poison ivy and CO2 at Duke University, is looking into analyzing the effect that rising soil temperatures, another consequence of a changing planet, might have on poison ivy. The experiment is in early stages in the Harvard Forest — a 4,000-acre forest managed by Harvard University in Petersham, Massachusetts — and the findings have not been submitted for peer review yet.
Mohan’s preliminary results show that a 5 degree Celsius (9 degree Fahrenheit) increase in soil temperature — roughly in line with the soil warming models predict under a worst-case climate change scenario — makes poison ivy grow 149 percent faster on average compared to ambient soil temperatures. “That’s just incredible,” Mohan told Grist. “Poison ivy might love soil warming even more than it loves CO2.” By comparison, the other plants she studies at the Harvard Forest only grow between 10 and 20 percent faster in warmer soil. She found that warmer soil temperatures led to larger poison ivy plants, too. Mohan did not find that the temperature of the soil had an effect on the potency of plants’ urushiol, a small silver lining.
Mohan’s research at the Harvard Forest indicates that poison ivy is poised to do well in a warming world. “So far, poison ivy benefits from CO2, andit benefits from warmer conditions, and gosh only knows what happens when we do them both,” she said. “Which is of course what the planet is doing.”
There’s also a much more direct way that humans are making poison ivy worse — by messing around with its habitat. “Humans are definitely making ideal poison ivy habitat,” John Jelesko, an associate professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a poison ivy researcher, told Grist. He conducted some research recently while hiking along a section of the Appalachian Trail and found that human disturbance — campsites, picnic spots, well-trodden trails — increased the probability of poison ivy, because it likes to grow where other plants are scarce and there is a lot of sunlight. “It’s not very prevalent in the middle of the forest, let me tell you,” Jelesko said. “Whenever you get to disturbed habitat you find a lot more of it.”
The takeaway is bleak: Climate change is supercharging poison ivy, and the plant likes to cohabitate with humans. Which means an extra dose of caution is in order when you’re out in nature. Even if you think you’re not allergic to poison ivy, Mohan says it’s best to keep an eye out for its distinctive clusters of three leaflets and steer clear just in case. The Forest Service found that between 70 and 85 percent of the population is sensitive to urushiol, and people are likely to become more allergic to it every time they are exposed. Tuck your pants in and watch where you walk, Mohan said. “When you’re dealing with nature, be smart,” she said. “Because nature is always going to win.”
