Heavy rain has once again brought flash floods to eastern Kentucky, a region still reeling from last summer’s deadly inundations — which social justice advocates say were exacerbated by the environmental destruction wrought by decades of strip mining.
At least one person died in the latest torrents, which followed a storm that dropped more than 3 inches of rain on some communities beginning Thursday. Rising water stranded motorists, prompted road closures, and led to several rescues. It was an eerie reminder of last summer’s deluges, which caused historically high waters, led to the deaths of dozens of residents, and damaged thousands of homes.
Social justice and environmental groups in Kentucky say those impacts were aggravated by the state’s long history of strip mining and lax oversight of an industry with no regard for the damage they’ve wrought or accountability to the communities dealing with the long-term consequences.
Last week, the social justice organization Kentuckians for the Commonwealth sent a letter to the U.S. Interior Department requesting a review of the effectiveness of regulations governing strip mining that go back nearly 50 years. The group says it has gathered evidence showing a correlation between 36 of the 43 verified drowning deaths and their location downstream from large-scale strip mines at the head of local valleys.
The organization wants the Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation, a branch of the Interior Department, to launch an investigation into how the state’s actions — and inactions — to enforce surface mine regulations contributed to the high death toll. The letter also notest that, according to the American Red Cross, the flooding damaged or destroyed more than 1,600 homes.
Steve Peake lives in the eastern Kentucky town of Fleming-Neon, which sits downstream of several abandoned strip-mining sites. His home was heavily damaged last summer as torrential rains battered the region, causing the creek adjacent to his home to overrun its banks and flood his property beneath nearly two feet of water.
“I’m 70 years old and never seen anything like that,” he told Grist. “In all my years we’ve had floods, I guess five or six floods, but the water never got out of the bank.” It took volunteers from around the country two days to clear the mud and water from his home.
Eastern Kentucky has a long and complex relationship with the coal industry. While few coal mining companies still operate there, the landscape bears the scars of strip mining, which carved away many of the mountain ridges at the head of populated valleys, leaving thousands of acres of land devoid of trees and healthy topsoil. That allows heavy rain to rush down the slopes toward the communities below. According to Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, many of the towns most heavily impacted by last summer’s floods are located where strip mining activity was most prominent.
Over a century ago, following the discovery of coal in Kentucky and the broader Appalachian region, speculators traveled through the region with broad form deeds — legal documents that allowed the deed holder to extract mineral resources from beneath a parcel of land — and convinced many residents to sign them. That effectively severed landowners’ relationships to any mineral riches beneath the surface of their property.
Yet coal mine operators were not legally bound to restore the land, either by replanting trees or replacing the topsoil, nor obligated to compensate landowners for property damage caused by the extraction of coal. In the 1960s, as strip mining technology developed, Kentucky courts further cemented the privileges of mining holders by granting them the right to extract coal through any method they deemed appropriate.
Organizations like Kentuckians for the Commonwealth have for nearly 50 years fought for stronger regulation of the mining industry and its environmental impacts, but have made little headway since 1977, when President Jimmy Carter signed the federal Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act. The law reiterated the importance of underground coal mining in meeting the nation’s energy needs at the time, but also took steps to regulate and inspect coal mines and acknowledged the inherent hazards they posed to the environment and communities. The law required mining companies to restore land to its approximate original state after extracting the resource.
But enforcement was left to the states. Activists and former regulators say state authorities have been far too lenient in holding mining companies accountable for the environmental damage they’ve wrought and its lingering impacts.
“The mining operators walk away, and years later there’s erosion and it’s nobody’s fault,” Davie Ransdell, a former state mine inspector in Kentucky, told Grist.
Peake put it even more plainly, saying, “They don’t plant trees or anything to hold the soil back.” Those responsible for the damage to his community, and his home, are long gone, leaving him to deal with the mess. He tries not to get too nervous when the forecast calls for storms, even as he monitors the flood warnings issued by local radio stations and worries about his 27-year-old daughter, who has Downs syndrome.
“She’s looking out the window,” he said, “and wondering if it’s going to start raining.”
A new study released Thursday warned that the planet has entered “a new chapter in the climate and ecological crisis,” in which communities are forced to direct massive resources to responding to the escalating impacts of the climate emergency, taking focus away from efforts to slash fossil fuel emissions — causing what the report authors called a “doom loop” that will make avoiding the worst…
A national state of emergency has been declared today after Cyclone Gabrielle unleashed fury across the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.
There has been widespread power outages, flooding, slips and damage to properties.
Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty said both the prime minister, and the Opposition spokesperson for emergency management were supportive of the move.
He said this was an unprecedented weather event impacting on much of the North Island.
This is only the third time in New Zealand history a national state of emergency has been declared — the other two being the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes and the covid-19 pandemic.
The national state of emergency is declared. Video: RNZ News
The declaration, signed at 8.43am, will apply to the six regions that have already declared a local State of Emergency — Northland, Auckland, Tairāwhiti, Bay of Plenty, Waikato, and Hawkes Bay.
A national state of emergency gives the National Controller legal authority to apply further resources across the country and set priorities in support of a national level response.
Speaking to media at the Beehive, McAnulty said Tararua District had also declared a state of emergency.
‘Significant disaster’
“This is a significant disaster with a real threat to the lives of New Zealanders,” he said.
“Today we are expecting to see more rain and high winds. We are through the worst of the storm itself but we know we are facing extensive flooding, slips, damaged roads and infrastructure.
“This is absolutely not a reflection on the outstanding work being done by emergency responders who have been working tirelessly, local leadership, or civil defence teams in the affected areas.
“It is simply that NEMA’s advice is that we can better support those affected regions through a nationally coordinated approach.”
He said the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) met with local civil defence teams early this morning and heard that a national state of emergency would be beneficial for them.
It allowed the government to support affected regions, coordinate additional resources as they are needed across multiple regions and help set the priorities across the country for the response, he said.
“Our message to everyone affected is: safety first. Look after each other, your family and your neighbours. Please continue to follow local civil defence advice and please minimise travel in affected areas.
‘Don’t wait for services’
“If you are worried about your safety — particularly because of the threat of flooding or slips — then don’t wait for emergency services to contact you.
“Leave, and seek safety either with family, friends, or at one of the many civil defence centres that have been opened.”
He said iwi, community groups and many others had opened up shelters and were offering food and support to those in need.
“I also want to acknowledge that there have been reports of a missing firefighter – a volunteer firefighter — who is a professional and highly trained but left their family to work for their communities and the search continues.
“Our thoughts are with the FENZ staff and their families.”
Acting Civil Defence Director Roger Ball said we have had multiple weather warnings and watches in place and the effects of the cyclone will continue to be felt across the country today.
He said that if other regions or areas declared local states of emergency, they would be added to the national declaration.
“Under a state of national emergency, myself as the director and my national controller have authority to direct and control the response under the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act, including allocation of resources and setting priorities.”
He said no effort would be spared.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins speaking at a media briefing today. Image: 1News screenshot APRFlooding on a main road near Waimauku in the Auckland region. Image: Marika Khabazi
Images of Hikuwai River bridge north of Tolaga Bay with the water level at more than 14m. Source: Manu Caddie FB
A state of emergency has been declared in Northland, Auckland, Thames-Coromandel and this morning Ōpōtiki and Tairāwhiti as Cyclone Gabrielle starts to wreak havoc across northern Aotearoa New Zealand.
In Whangārei, Civil Defence said today there was a high risk of tidal flooding in the central business district and the town basin.
It was urging residents to evacuate before the forecast high tide at 2pm and said shelter is available at McKay Stadium in Kensington.
Meanwhile in Thames-Coromandel, Civil Defence said the intensity of rain and wind would start to build-up from early afternoon in the region.
The eye of the storm was near the top of Coromandel.
And over the next 20 hours 400 millimetres of rain and wind gusts of 130 km/h are expected.
Civil Defence Controller Garry Towler said the eastern side of Coromandel would feel the full force of the storm.
Mass flight cancellations
Air New Zealand is preparing to resume flights tomorrow ahead of mass cancellations from the cyclone.
More than 500 flights were cancelled which saw around 10,000 international customers disrupted with 6500 of them needing to rebook.
The airline has added 11 domestic flights into its schedule and has changed six services into larger aircrafts, said chief customer and sales officer Leanne Geraghty.
Residents on Great Barrier Island were totally cut off from the mainland– with high seas and strong winds continuing to get worse.
Izzy Fordham, chairperson of the island’s local board, said the wind was starting to roar through the island.
She said the island was “virtually cut off” from the mainland as no flights had come in since Saturday afternoon and there were no ferries either.
“The seas are huge,” she said.
Cyclone Gabrielle is forecast to bring large waves to some coasts for the next few days. Check out the significant wave height forecast for NZ here https://t.co/y7sa5Ofj1O ^PL pic.twitter.com/HGVYTGJoZt
It has been a soggy few weeks for Aotearoa New Zealand’s upper North Island, with late January’s Auckland downpour and now, Cyclone Gabrielle.
States of emergency have been declared across Ikaroa-a-Māui, schools and non-essential services shut and public transport in the country’s biggest city running at a minimum.
“This summer just keeps on giving to the top of the North Island,” said Dr Dáithí Stone, a climate scientist with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).
“Each summer, Northland and Auckland are usually on the verge of drought, with a pretty severe one experienced just three years ago. Not this summer.”
Cyclone Gabrielle . . . feeding off “unusually warm water in the Tasman Sea and around Aotearoa”. Image: Nick Monro/RNZ News
So what has changed? “Tropical cyclones feed off of the energy provided by hot ocean waters,” said Stone, noting recent summers — including the one we are in now — have seen “unusually warm water in the Tasman Sea and around Aotearoa”.
“This warm water is partly an effect of the warm ‘La Niña’ waters spanning the western tropical Pacific and partly some local ocean activities happening in the Tasman Sea, but the ongoing warming trend from human-induced climate change is playing a big role too.”
La Niña is an atmospheric phenomenon that usually happens every few years, when winds blow warm surface water from the eastern Pacific Ocean towards Indonesia.
In New Zealand, the result is “moist, rainy conditions” in the north and east of the country and warmer-than-average sea and air temperatures.
“Large-scale climate drivers (like La Niña) have elevated the risks of [a tropical cyclone] happening this summer,” said Dr Luke Harrington, a senior lecturer in climate change at the University of Waikato.
“In fact, seasonal predictions pointed to elevated chances of multiple [tropical cyclones] occurring in this region of the Pacific as early as October.”
Climate change cannot be blamed for Gabrielle’s existence — recent studies have suggested the globe’s warming is actually reducing the frequency of tropical storms in the Pacific — but the extra energy it affords systems could be making those that do form stronger.
“It’s likely that the low pressure centre of the system will be slightly more extreme than what might have been in a world without climate change, with the associated winds therefore likely also slightly stronger,” said Harrington.
Not many cyclones make it this far south intact, but the combined effects of climate change and La Niña are helping. Image: Mick Hall/RNZ News
Not many cyclones make it this far south intact, but the combined effects of climate change and La Niña are helping there too.
“The waters in the Tasman Sea and around New Zealand have been unusually warm,” said Dr Joao de Souza, director of the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment-funded Moana Project.
“The rate of warming has been above the global average since 2012-2013, with the last two years presenting record-breaking ocean temperatures leading to unprecedented marine heat waves around Aotearoa.”
As a result, Stone said extreme weather systems like Gabrielle “can maintain themselves much closer to us than before and are not disrupted so much by cooler seas that are no longer there”.
“La Niña events also change the winds, bringing more hot and wet air from the tropics our way.
“Finally, the warmer air of a warming world can hold all of that moisture until it meets the mountains of Aotearoa.”
More to come? And there could be more like Gabrielle on the way, sooner than you might expect.
“As the storm passes over New Zealand we see the ocean surface temperatures decrease as a consequence of the energy being drawn and surface waters being mixed with deeper, cooler waters. This is happening right now with Cyclone Gabrielle,” de Souza said.
“Once the cyclone moves away we should see the ocean surface temperatures rise again . . . All this means we have the pre-conditions necessary for the generation of new storms in the Coral Sea and their impact on New Zealand. And this situation is forecasted to prevail at least until April-May.”
The Coral Sea is a region of the Pacific between Queensland, the Solomons and New Caledonia.
The longer-term remains unclear, said Stone.
“Is Gabrielle’s track toward us a fluke… or does it portend the future? We do not really know at the moment, but NIWA, the MBIE Endeavour Whakahura project, and colleagues in Australia are developing techniques that we hope will help us answer that question very soon.”
Information for this article was provided by the Science Media Centre. It is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Northland has declared a state of emergency and the Auckland Harbour Bridge has been closed as steady rain and strong winds from Cyclone Gabrielle hit Aotearoa New Zealand today, but MetService says this is just the beginning.
The Northland Regional council said a precautionary state of emergency had been declared for an initial period of seven days, as part of the regional response to Cyclone Gabrielle.
It said emergency declarations were relatively rare in Northland, with only six emergency declarations in the past 50 years, some of which affected only parts of the region.
Meanwhile, Waka Kotahi confirmed all lanes on the Auckland Harbour Bridge were closed due to strong winds at 3.40pm.
Its website said the closure is “until further notice” and motorists were urged to delay their journey or use detours such as the Western Ring Route.
A red heavy rain warning has been issued for Coromandel, Gisborne north of Tolaga Bay, and Auckland, including Great Barrier Island and other islands in the Hauraki Gulf, while strong wind warnings are also in place — including a red one for Coromandel Peninsula, Northland and Auckland.
Speaking at today’s official update, MetService meteorologist Georgina Griffiths said that even with significant wind gusts in Northland already being reported, the weather today was just the start.
“This is the entree. This is not the impact day.”
She said they had not seen pressure this low in 40 years.
“This is a serious event for New Zealand.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The summer before, I’d moved here from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its perpetual gray drizzles and, on the 60-odd days a year when the sun deigns to shine, dazzling displays of greenery. My girlfriend had spent a year convincing me that San Francisco had much more to offer me than Portland did for her.
Every few months, I’d scrape the bottom of my bank account to travel to San Francisco and taste its charms. Once, I even hitched a ride on a private plane. (Those were the days!) In a week’s visit, she’d take me to multiple women’s music concerts — events you’d wait a year for in Portland. We’d visit feminist and leftist bookstores, eat real Mexican food, and walk through Golden Gate Park in brilliant sunshine. The sky would be clear, the city would be sparkling, and she convinced me that San Francisco would indeed be paradise. Or at least drier than Portland.
So, I moved, but I wuz robbed! I knew it that first winter when, from December through March, the rain seemed to come down in rivers — atmospheric rivers, in fact — though none of us knew the term back then. That would be my initial encounter with, as a Mexican-American friend used to call it, “el pinche niño.” El Niño is the term meteorologists give to one-half of an oscillating cyclical weather phenomenon originating in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño usually brings drought to the southern parts of North America, as well as Central America, while deluging northern California and the Pacific Northwest. La Niña is the other half of that cycle, its effects roughly flipping those of El Niño geographically. (As for the meaning of “pinche,” go ahead and Google it.)
San Francisco sits in the sweet spot where, at least until the end of the last century, we would get winter rains at both ends of the cycle. And boy, did it rain that winter! I soon began to wonder whether any amount of love or any number of concerts could make up for the cold and mud. Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t really blame the girlfriend. The only other time I’d lived in San Francisco was during the then-unusual drought year of 1976. Of course, I came to believe then that it never rained here. So, really, if there was a bait-and-switch going on, I had pulled it on myself.
Still, looking back, as much as the rain annoyed me, I couldn’t have imagined how much I’d miss it two decades into the twenty-first century.
But Is It Climate Change? And Would That Actually Be So Bad?
Along with the rest of the western United States, my city has now been in the grip of a two-decade-long megadrought that has persisted through a number of El Niño/La Niña cycles. Scientists tell us that it’s the worst for the West and Southwest in at least the last 1,200 years. Since 2005, I’ve biked or walked the three miles from my house to the university where I teach. In all those years, there have probably been fewer than 10 days when rain forced me to drive or take the bus. Periodic droughts are not unknown in this part of the country. But climate scientists are convinced that this extended, deadly drought has been caused by climate change.
It wasn’t always that way. Twenty years ago, those of us who even knew about global warming, from laypeople to experts, were wary of attributing any particular weather event to it. Climate-change deniers and believers alike made a point of distinguishing between severe weather events and the long-term effects of changes in the climate. For the deniers, however, as the years went on, it seemed that no accumulation of symptoms — floods, droughts, heat waves, fires, or tornadoes — could legitimately be added together to yield a diagnosis of climate change. Or if climate change was the reason, then human activity didn’t cause it and it was probably a good thing anyway.
Not that long ago, it wasn’t even unusual to encounter “climate-change-is-good-for-you” articles in reasonably mainstream outlets. For example, the conservative British magazine The Spectator ran a Matt Ridley piece in 2013 that began: “Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion.” It turned out that Ridley’s “consensus of expert opinion” derived from a single economist’s (and not a climate scientist’s) paper summarizing 14 other economists on the subject.
“The chief benefits of global warming,” Ridley wrote then, “include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts; maybe richer biodiversity.” He added that, were the world’s economy to continue to grow by 3% annually, “the average person will be about nine times as rich in 2080 as she is today. So low-lying Bangladesh will be able to afford the same kind of flood defenses that the Dutch have today.”
There was so much wrong with those last two sentences (beginning with what “average” means), but I’ll content myself with pointing out that, in October 2022, historic floods covered one-third of Pakistan (next door to Bangladesh), including prime farmland the size of the state of Virginia. Thirty-three million people were affected by those floods that, according to the New York Times, “were caused by heavier-than-usual monsoon rains and glacial melt.” And what led to such unusual rain and melt? As the Times reported:
“Scientists say that global warming caused by greenhouse-gas emissions is sharply increasing the likelihood of extreme rain in South Asia, home to a quarter of humanity. And they say there is little doubt that it made this year’s monsoon season more destructive.”
It seems unlikely those floods will lead to “better agricultural yields.” (If only Pakistan had thought to build dikes, like the Dutch!)
Maybe it’s easy to take potshots at what someone like Ridley wrote almost a decade ago, knowing what we do now. Back then, views like his were not uncommon on the right and, all too sadly, they’re not rare even today. (Ridley is still at it, having recently written a piece twitting the British Conservative Party for supporting something as outré as wind power.) And of course, those climate change denials were supported (then and now) by the companies that stood to lose the most from confronting the dangers of greenhouse gases, not only the fossil-fuel industry (whose scientists knew with stunning accuracy exactly what was already happening on this planet as early as the 1970s), but electric companies as well.
Back in 2000, an ExxonMobile “advertorial” in the New York Times hit the trifecta: climate change isn’t real; or if it is, humans (and especially fossil-fuel companies!) aren’t responsible; and anyway it might be a good thing. Titled “Unsettled Science,” the piece falsely argued that scientists could not agree on whether climate change was happening. (By that time, 90% of climate scientists, including ExxonMobile’s, had reached a consensus that climate change is real.) After all, the ad insisted, there had been other extended periods of unusual weather like the “little ice age” of the medieval era and, in any case, greenhouse gas concentrations vary naturally “for reasons having nothing to do with human activity.”
We shouldn’t be surprised that Exxon-Mobile tried to keep climate change controversial in the public mind. They had a lot to lose in a transition away from fossil fuels. It’s less common knowledge, however, that the company has long bankrolled climate denial “grassroots” organizations. In fact, its scientists knew about climate change as early as the 1950s and, in a 1977 internal memo, they summarized their research on the subject by predicting a one- to three-degree Celsius average temperature rise by 2050, pretty much the future we’re now staring at.
Water, Water, Anywhere?
California has been “lucky” this fall and winter. We’ve seen a (probably temporary) break in the endless drought. A series of atmospheric rivers have brought desperately needed rain to our valleys and an abundance of snow to the mountains. But not everyone has been celebrating, as floods have swept away homes, cars, and people up and down the state. They’ve shut down highways and rail lines, while forcing thousands to evacuate. After years of thirst, for a few weeks the state has been drowning; and, as is so often the case with natural disasters, the poorest people have been among those hardest hit.
I’ve always enjoyed the delicious smugness of lying in a warm bed listening to wind and water banging at my windows. These days it’s a guilty pleasure, though, because I know how many thousands of unhoused people have suffered in and even died during the recent storms. In Sacramento, rain marooned one tent encampment, as the spit of land it occupied became an island. In the city of Ontario, near Los Angeles, flash floods washed away people’s tents and may have drowned as many as 10 of their inhabitants.
My own city responded to the rains with police sweeps of unhoused people hours before a “bomb cyclone” hit on January 4th. In such a “sweep,” police and sometimes other officials descend suddenly to enforce city ordinances that make it illegal to sit or lie on the sidewalk. They make people “move along,” confiscating any belongings they can’t carry off. Worse yet, shelters in the city were already full. There was nowhere inside for the unhoused to go and many lost the tents that had been their only covering.
The same climate change that’s prolonged the drought has exacerbated the deadly effects of those rainstorms. Over the last few years, record wildfires have consumed entire communities. Twenty years of endless dry days have turned our forests and meadows into tinderboxes, just waiting for a spark. Now, when rain bangs down in such amounts on already burnt, drought-hardened land, houses slide down hills, trees are pulled from the earth, and sinkholes open in roads and highways.
There is one genuine piece of luck here, though. Along with the rain, more than twice as much snow as would accumulate in an average year has covered the Sierra mountains of northern California. This is significant because many cities in the region get their water from the Sierra runoff. San Francisco is typical. Its municipal water supply comes from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, near Yosemite National Park, fed from that runoff. For now, it looks as if a number of cities could, for the first time in a while, have extra water available this year. But there’s always the chance that warm weather early in the spring will turn snow to rain, melting away the snowpack and our hopes.
Much of northern California’s water comes from the Sierra mountains, but it’s a different story in the south. The 9.8 million residents of Los Angeles County, along with most of southern California, get their water from the Colorado River. A century-old arrangement governs water use by the seven states through which the Colorado runs, along with 30 tribal nations and parts of northern Mexico — about 40 million people in all. Historically, the “northern basin” states, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, have been allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water a year. Nevada, California, and Arizona have received 8.5 million and Mexico has treaty rights to 1.5 million. Dams on the two lakes — Mead in Nevada and Powell in Utah — provide hydroelectric power to many people in those same states.
The megadrought has drastically reduced the levels of these two artificial lakes that serve as reservoirs for those seven states. The original agreement assumed that 17.5 million acre-feet of water would be available annually (each acre-foot being about what two households might use in a year). For the last three years, however, the flow has fallen below 10 million acre-feet. This year, the states have been unable to agree on how to parcel out those allocations, so the Biden administration may have to step in and impose a settlement.
Both lakes are at their lowest historic levels since they were first filled. Several times, while working on a midterm election campaign in Reno, Nevada last year, I noticed stories in the local press about human remains being uncovered as Lake Mead’s shoreline recedes, some of them apparently victims of mob hits in decades past.
Less water in those giant lakes means less water for agriculture and residential consumption. But the falling water levels threaten a further problem: the potential failure of their dams to provide electric power crucial to millions. Last summer, Lake Mead dropped to within 90 feet of the depth at which its dam can no longer generate power. Some estimates suggest that Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon dam may stop producing electricity as soon as July.
Earthquakes, Drought, and Disaster
The woman I moved to San Francisco for (whom I’ve known since I was a young teen in the 1960s) spent her college years at the University of California, Berkeley. I remember her telling me, in the summer of 1969, that she and a number of friends had spent the previous spring semester celebrating the coming end of the world as they knew it. Apparently, some scientists had then predicted that a giant earthquake would cause the San Francisco Bay Area to collapse into the Pacific Ocean. Facing such a possible catastrophe, a lot of young folks decided that they might as well have a good party. There was smoking and drinking and dancing to welcome the approaching apocalypse. (When a Big One did hit 20 years later, the city didn’t exactly fall into the ocean, but a big chunk of the San Francisco Bay Bridge did go down.)
Over the last months, we Californians have experienced both historic drought and historic rainfall. The world as we knew it really is ending faster than some of us ever expected. Now that we’re facing an imminent catastrophe, one already killing people around the globe and even in my state, it’s hard to know how to respond. Somehow, I don’t feel like partying though. I think it’s time to fight.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
After decades of intense public debate and misinformation campaigns, nearly three-quarters of Americans now accept that climate change is happening; not only that, more than half understand it is caused by human activity. This shift has forced fossil fuel companies — and the organizations they fund — to alter their tactics to avoid regulation. Where they once denied climate science outright, companies now engage in “discourses of delay,” publicly accepting the science but working to stall climate policy by redirecting blame, pushing non-transformative solutions, and emphasizing the downsides of taking action.
But the Heartland Institute, the infamous, free-market think tank that has operated at the center of climate misinformation for decades, is still hanging onto the old ways as it pushes on with its attempt to discredit established climate science.
This week, the organization sent copies of its book “Climate at a Glance” to 8,000 middle and high school teachers across the country, in order to provide them, it says, with “the data to show the earth is not experiencing a climate crisis.”
H. Sterling Burnett, who directs Climate and Environmental Policy for the Heartland Institute and edited “Climate at a Glance,” said he hoped the book would reach educators who are teaching climate change, “not to replace the material they have, but to supplement it.”
But science education advocates aren’t too worried about the impact of the materials.
“This is not Heartland’s first rodeo,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the non-profit National Center for Science Education, which promotes and defends accurate science education. “In previous campaigns, the bulk of teachers and students who received the materials threw them out or put them in the recycling bin.”
The institute’s last big mailout was in 2017 when it sent out 350,000 copies of its “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” According to Branch, while only a few picked up the information and taught from it, a number of educators used the materials in their classrooms to teach about propaganda techniques. Branch also thinks the fact that this year’s campaign is so scaled back from the 2017 mailout means even Heartland itself recognizes this as a failing strategy.
The new 80-page document, presented in the style of a slick and authoritative textbook, covers 30 climate topics often discussed in science classes. Many of the sections acknowledge modest planetary warming, but assert that it is either good for species and ecosystems, or doesn’t really have the impacts on extreme weather events that climate scientists say it does.
“They typically give a straightforward observation or statistic that’s not in dispute and add some commentary that’s wildly exaggerated or a completely false interpretation,” said Branch. A section on crop production, for example, notes how a longer growing season improves yields; it does not acknowledge the net-negative impact of a hotter, drier climate and extreme precipitation on agriculture in the long term. A page on sea-level rise says “levels have been rising at a fairly steady pace since at least the mid-1800s,” but the rate has actually more than doubled in the 2000s when compared to most of the 20th century.
“It’s a misleading interpretation of scientific facts and questionable inferences drawn from cherry picked data from unreliable sources,” said Robert Brulle, a visiting professor of sociology at Brown University who has researched the public relations strategies of the fossil fuel industry. “It almost seems quaint that they’re still running with this. It’s like ‘The 1990s called. They want their scientific misinformation back.’”
Burnett defends the institute’s new booklet. “People say ‘oh, you don’t have the proper context’,” he said, “but that’s their opinion on what the proper context should be.”
Founded in Chicago in 1984, the Heartland Institute received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies and industrial billionaires the Koch brothers until association with outright science denial started to become more of a liability for the industry. The last of the big oil companies mostly gave up on funding extreme climate denial groups like Heartland around 2007, said Brulle. Any direct links that might still exist would be hard to find; climate misinformation has historically been funded and spread through a network of front groups, and Heartland no longer discloses its major supporters. While its revenue has declined over the years, it still receives millions from conservative foundations and philanthropies.
“What Heartland is hoping for is to catch those who haven’t been equipped to understand climate science well enough to realize the highly misleading nature of the materials,” said Branch. A survey from 2015 found that about 57 percent of high school and middle school science educators have not formally studied climate change. As states increasingly add climate change to their science standards, Branch hopes to see more states follow in the path of Washington, California, Maine, and New Jersey in appropriating funds for teacher professional development on the issue, which would equip them with the tools to identify misinformation.
Even if teachers today are unlikely to fall for Heartland’s claims, the organization’s messaging could still help the fossil fuel industry in a roundabout way. In social science there’s a theory called the radical flank effect, explained Brulle, where a position that is perceived as extreme can be made to look more moderate by a position that is even more extreme.
“If Exxon Mobil is saying ‘climate change is probably real and it can cause harm, but we can adapt,’ without Heartland, they’re the extremists,” said Brulle. “But if Heartland is out there saying ‘climate change is going to be good for us,’ it makes the major oil companies look moderate and reasonable.”
New Zealand’s capital remained under a state of emergency Monday after the heaviest rainfall on record flooded the city. This month’s unprecedented dousing, which the prime minister attributed to climate change, has left four people dead and thousands more with damaged homes.
Hundreds of emergency personnel are converging on Auckland to assist even as forecasts call for another soaking Tuesday. Authorities have evacuated scores of people. “We have more adverse weather coming and we need to prepare for that,” Rachel Kelleher, the Auckland Emergency Management duty controller, said during a press conference, according to Reuters.
January typically ranks among New Zealand’s drier months. The country’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research says 13 inches of rain has fallen so far this month, an amount usually received during the entire summer. That figure easily eclipsed the 8-inch record for the month set in 1986 and makes it the wettest month since record keeping began in 1909 – surpassing the 11 inches that fell in July of 1998. Another 3 to 5 inches could sop the area in coming days.
“It’s a 1-in-100-year weather event, and we seem to be getting a lot of them at the moment,” Prime Minister Chris Himpkins said in a news broadcast on TVNZ. “I think people can see that there’s a message in that … Climate change is real, it’s with us. We are going to have to deal with more of these extreme weather events in the future.
The flood follows deluges that soaked Canterbury in June and central New Zealand in August of 2021. Those floods, during one of the warmest winters in New Zealand’s recorded history, displaced more than 1,000 people.
Rising global average temperatures are associated with the widespread changes in weather patterns, which can intensify extreme weather events. That, in turn, can create a positive feedback loop of more violent storms, more intense heat waves, rising sea levels, and higher temperatures. Studies have shown that such events will likely become more frequent and more extreme with human-induced climate change.
California, for example, experienced record rainfall as a series of atmospheric rivers dumped more than 17 inches of rain on the state in just three weeks after Christmas. The storms killed at least 19 people and caused some $30 billion in damage from flooding, landslides, and problems. New Zealand can expect similar challenges. “When you have a significant rainfall event like this, rivers can rise quickly,” meteorologist Luis Fernandes said in a statement to CNN, “and roads can literally fall away or become covered and can cut off communities.”
According to research published in May 2022, the seas surrounding New Zealand are expected to rise sooner than previously thought. With the rate of that increase doubling over the past 60 years, the prognosis suggested that while the global sea level is expected to rise more than 19 inches by 2100, New Zealand, which is sinking, could see more than 3 feet of sea level rise. That will bring a higher risk of coastal storms, erosion, and flooding.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has acknowledged the way Aucklanders have come together and opened their homes to those in need, with the New Zealand government focused on providing the resources needed to get the city back up and running.
The new prime minister — just four days into the job — has been speaking to media after assessing flood damage and talking to locals around West Auckland this afternoon.
Hipkins was joined by Auckland mayor Wayne Brown and Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty in northwest Auckland.
With three deaths now confirmed, the prime minister offered his condolences to the families of the deceased.
He said he was focused on supporting Aucklanders through this event and providing the full resources to get Auckland back up and running in the safest way possible
“I want to focus on getting Auckland through the next period.”
Hipkins said the government’s priority was to ensure Aucklanders were housed. He said there was an assessment of public and community housing underway today.
Having surveyed the damage, he said it was clear it was going to be a big clean up job after Auckland’s wettest day on record.
Watch a live stream here
PM Chris Hipkins and mayor Wayne Brown speaking. Video: RNZ News
Hipkins said it was important for Aucklanders to avoid unnecessary travel and to stay out of the water.
He said this was the time to check in with loved ones and “take care of each other”.
He acknowledged the way Aucklanders had come together and opened their homes to those in need, when dealing with an unprecedented event in recent memory
The prime minister said Aucklanders should expect more rain — “don’t take the good weather for now for granted”.
Hipkins thanked those working in the emergency services, the lines companies, supermarkets and health sector.
‘Tough night for all’
Mayor Wayne Brown said last night was a “tough night for all”.
Brown said he shared concerns and worries for families deeply affected — especially those who had lost their lives.
He said the response to the storm last night took a lot of concentration, happened quickly and the response was way quicker than people believed.
“Everyone was out there way before [the emergency was declared] and lasted all night long.”
He said he followed the advice of the professionals when deciding whether to declare an emergency.
“It’s not something you do lightly.”
He said the council would review “everything that took place”.
‘Lessons to be learned’
Hipkins said he accepted people would have questions and observations — and there would be an appropriate time soon to go through those.
“There will be lessons to be learned from the experience.
“The most important thing is supporting Auckland through the next 24 hours and beyond.”
Duty Controller Andrew Clark from Auckland Emergency Management said the event was “beyond anything we’ve ever seen”.
He said rescuing people was the priority, while also providing shelter for those in need.
“We had a crisis within a crisis.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Auckland flooding: Third death confirmed after body found in Remuera house https://t.co/DW8P4F1kMG
In early 1862, a storm of biblical proportions struck California, dropping more than 120 inches of rain and snow on the state over two months. The entire state flooded, but nowhere was the deluge worse than in the Central Valley, a gash of fertile land that runs down the middle of the state between two mountain ranges. In the spring, as melting snow mixed with torrential rain, the valley transformed into “a perfect sea,” as one observer put it, vanishing beneath 30 feet of water that poured from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. People rowed through town streets on canoes. A quarter of all the cows in the state drowned. It took months for the water to drain out.
More than 150 years later, climate scientists say the state is due for a repeat of that massive storm. A growing body of research has found that global warming is increasing the likelihood of a monster storm that could inundate the Central Valley once again, causing what one study from UCLA and the National Atmospheric Center called “historically unprecedented surface runoff” in the region. Not only would this runoff destroy thousands of homes, it would also ravage a region that serves as the nation’s foremost agricultural breadbasket. The study found that global warming has already increased the likelihood of such a storm by 234 percent.
In the crosshairs of that storm is the Stockton metropolitan area, which sits at the mouth of the San Joaquin River. Stockton and its neighboring suburbs are home to almost 800,000 people, and they rank among the most diverse places in the country — as well as some of the most economically distressed places in California. Thanks to decades of disinvestment, the city’s only flood protection comes from decades-old, leak-prone levees. If a major rain event caused enough runoff to surge down the mountains and northward along the San Joaquin, it could burst through those levees, inundating the city and flooding tens of thousands of homes. One federal study found that much of Stockton would vanish beneath 10 to 12 feet of water, and floods in the lowest-lying areas could be twice as deep. The result would be a humanitarian disaster just as costly and as deadly as Hurricane Katrina.
The “atmospheric river” rainstorms that rolled into California from the Pacific Ocean this month have underscored the Golden State’s vulnerability to floods, but experts insist that the destruction of Stockton isn’t inevitable. As is the case in flood-prone communities across the country, local officials know how to manage water on the San Joaquin River, but they’ve struggled to obtain funding for Stockton and other disadvantaged cities along the waterway. Even as California lawmakers have plowed money into drought response in recent years, they’ve left flood measures by the wayside, and the federal government has also been slow to fund major improvements.
“Areas like Stockton that don’t have political clout … often get bypassed terms of consideration for funding,” said Mike Machado, a former California state senator who has long advocated for better flood management in the Central Valley. “Even if any funding is available, Stockton is usually at the bottom of the list.”
Even as Stockton’s infrastructure decays, the city’s flood risk is only increasing thanks to climate change, which will cause more severe rains in the San Joaquin Valley and further stress the city’s levees. The city has grown at a rapid pace over the past two decades, but state and local officials have been more focused on protecting local agricultural irrigators from drought than on protecting the city’s residents from flooding. When the next big storm hits, it is Stockton’s communities of color, which make up more than 80 percent of the city’s population, that will see the worst of the damage.
“We are at the bottom of the bowl,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, the executive director of Restore the Delta, a Stockton-based environmental nonprofit. “We’re the drain. And they don’t value us.”
Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of the Stockton-based community organization Restore the Delta, stands next to a flooded creek following a recent rainstorm. Gabriela Aoun / Grist
The Central Valley’s flood protection system has never been equal. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, farmers and ranchers constructed a hodgepodge of levees along rivers like the San Joaquin, piling sand only high enough so that water would flood someone else’s land rather than their own. The levees were owned and maintained by local districts, rather than any centralized governing body, so wealthier areas ended up with stronger defenses.
As the region’s flood protection system expanded, the San Joaquin region fell behind. To protect the state capital of Sacramento in the 1920s, the federal Army Corps of Engineers built a diversion system called the Yolo Bypass that funnels water away from the city, but Stockton never saw any similar investment. Local authorities couldn’t raise as much money to bolster levees as their counterparts around Sacramento, and money from the state and the federal government never filled the gap.
This is in part because lawmakers have overlooked Stockton’s vulnerable populations, according to Jane Dolan, president of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, a state agency that oversees flood management. But Dolan says the disparity also exists because leaders along the San Joaquin River have long tended to focus more on securing water for agricultural irrigation than on managing the rivers, which has made it hard to secure momentum for big flood improvements.
“They don’t have that consensus about managing floodwaters and allowing space for the river,” she told Grist. “Politicians from city councils to Congress are all focused on water supply.”
Not only does the San Joaquin have the shoddiest flood protection infrastructure, but it also faces the greatest degree of risk from climate-fueled storms. Both the UCLA study and a separate study by Dolan’s organization found that warmer climates will increase runoff in the San Joaquin watershed by more than they will in the Sacramento watershed — in large part because higher temperatures will cause what used to be snow to fall as rain instead. Furthermore, Stockton faces flood risk from all sides: Not only does the San Joaquin River flood during rain events, but the Calaveras River on the city’s north side does as well. Water from the Pacific Ocean could even flood the city from the west during high tides as it pushes across a long flat expanse known as the Delta.
Stockton faces extreme flood risk from the San Joaquin River, which drains through the Central Valley toward the Pacific Ocean. The city’s only flood protection comes from decades-old levees. Grist
“The San Joaquin Valley is the most vulnerable to intense floods, because the climate science is clear that there will be less snow there, and more rain,” said Dolan. The river’s levee system was designed for a long snowmelt, not an all-at-once deluge, she added, which means that bigger atmospheric river storms are all but certain to overwhelm it.
Despite this risk, Stockton has expanded rapidly over the past few decades. Not only has the city grown into a hub for the valley’s all-important agricultural industry, its relatively cheap land and proximity to the populous San Francisco Bay Area has made it a boom site for new warehouses and packing facilities owned by companies like Amazon. During the last housing boom, developers built subdivision after subdivision along the San Joaquin River to house new arrivals, relying on the decades-old levees to protect them.
As it has grown, Stockton has become one of the most diverse cities in the country, with substantial Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, Cambodian, and African American communities. Many of these have poverty rates that are much higher than the state average, and they also face severe environmental justice risks: The neighborhoods of southwest Stockton are surrounded by freeways, factories, and port infrastructure, making them among the most exposed in the state to soot and diesel pollution.
“Because of redlining and historical discrimination, we have a lot of people of color, and people are at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, right behind these levees,” said Barrigan-Parrilla.
Mary Gómez is a 50-year resident of the Conway Houses, a low-income housing development on the south side of Stockton. The development sits just feet from the Walker Slough, a small waterway that drains off the San Joaquin River. Gómez, 70, told Grist that she worries about flooding from the river frequently and feels the area doesn’t get enough attention from city officials.
“It’s because they think we’re ghetto,” she said. “We are worried, because what if it floods [upstream] and we don’t hear about it, and they don’t tell us? Who’s gonna come and help us, or get us out? There’s so many of us that don’t have cars, that have kids.”
Gómez said she also worries about whether the neighborhood’s elderly and disabled could get out in time. The last time it came close to flooding, she said, her neighbors told her that she should protect her house with sandbags.
Mary Gómez, a resident of the Conway Homes development in south Stockton. The community faces severe flood risk from the San Joaquin River.
Gabriela Aoun / Grist
For decades, local officials have tried to secure state and federal money for flood protection projects, but progress has been slow as the risk has only increased. Way back in 1995, when the federal government was weighing whether to deem the levees in north and central Stockton inadequate, the area’s flood control authority had to self-finance levee improvements through tax assessments on local property owners — a costly proposition in a relatively low-income area with a meager tax base.
“We have a severely disadvantaged community,” said Chris Elias, director of the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency, the authority that manages the region’s levees. “We cannot impose too much burden on them — they’ve borne too much burden already. So we explore those other funding avenues. But just like everything else, we are competing with a whole bunch of other priorities that the state has.”
The state has passed a number of bond measures over the years to fund flood improvements, but local officials say Stockton hasn’t received a fair share of that money. For every five dollars spent in Sacramento, Elias said, Stockton has seen only one dollar of spending. He said that’s in part because the state money went to projects that were already “shovel-ready,” and Stockton-area officials lacked the resources to design projects and apply for grants.
Federal help has also been hard to come by. In 2010 the Army Corps of Engineers finally decreed that many of Stockton’s levees were inadequate and that much of the city was vulnerable to massive flooding. The agency spent the next seven years studying the problem, but in the end it proposed only a partial solution. While the Corps agreed to pursue a $1.3 billion suite of levee repair projects in north and central Stockton, it punted on a proposal to bolster the levees in south Stockton and two nearby suburbs — the parts of the area that faced the greatest economic hardship and the greatest exposure to flooding on the San Joaquin. The agency’s argument was that repairing levees in those areas would encourage new development, thus increasing the risk. It has since agreed to revisit that decision, but in the meantime tens of thousands residents in the area are still just as vulnerable to flooding as they were a decade ago.
In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson from the Corps’s Sacramento district said that the agency had been constrained by an executive order that limits federal investment in flood-prone areas.
“Deferring decisions regarding the area to the south of Stockton … allowed [the Corps] and its state and local partners to prevent further delays in gaining congressional authorization to protect Stockton from catastrophic flooding,” said the spokesperson. He added that the agency plans to “reexamine federal interest in the [area] and identify potential flood risk management and ecosystem restoration opportunities.… However, the outcomes of that study are not yet determined.”
A levee stands in front of the Weston Ranch development on the south side of Stockton, California. Gabriela Aoun / Grist
Another problem is that levees alone aren’t sufficient as a flood management strategy. No matter how high you build a levee, a future flood can always overtop it, and the consequences when a levee breaks are often worse than they would have been if the levee hadn’t been there in the first place, as was demonstrated in New Orleans after Katrina. Many local officials believe that, instead of just building more levees, the state should give flood waters another place to go by creating natural floodplains out of conserved land. That’s what the state did near Sacramento with the Yolo Bypass.
“You can build a levee stronger and better, but it’s still vulnerable to breaking,” said John Cain, director of conservation at River Partners, a nonprofit that advocates for such floodplain restoration projects. “If you want to have more resiliency in the system, you literally need more room.”
Cain’s organization has put this approach to the test about 20 miles upstream on the San Joaquin by purchasing unused land and converting it into a natural floodplain. During big rain events, water flowing downstream on the river can spill onto the reserved land instead of flowing toward Stockton, taking pressure off the city’s levees. Officials in Stockton have been trying to replicate this strategy closer to the city by creating a wide flood bypass called Paradise Cut on reserved farmland. The project would reduce the depth of potential flooding in the Stockton area by as much as two feet, but the Army Corps rejected that project back in 2018 as well, questioning whether it would pass a cost-benefit analysis.
Former California state senator Mike Machado at his farm in Linden, California. Machado has pushed for decades to secure increased flood protection for the Central Valley.
Gabriela Aoun / Grist
Meanwhile, state funding for flood management has all but dried up even as lawmakers plow billions into drought relief, leaving Stockton dependent on the slow-moving Army Corps of Engineers for project money. Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for the coming year proposes to spend just $135 million on flood management, less than a third of what Dolan’s organization says the state should be spending every year. The proposed budget also seeks to claw back $40 million that was allocated in last year’s budget for floodplain restoration along the San Joaquin River.
Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Machado, the former state senator, hopes this month’s storms will bring some attention to flood risk in the state, but he’s not sure the attention will translate into new spending.
“After a flood, the holes get plugged, the sun comes out, and they forget,” he told Grist. “All of a sudden you’re in a drought period, or an extended period with no imminent threat of a flood, and it becomes a backburner issue.”
Gabriela Aoun contributed reporting to this story.
California has nearly seen the last of the relentless sequence of storms that inundated the state since late December, leading to tens of thousands of evacuations, at least 20 deaths, and an estimated $1 billion in damages.
From failed levees in the Central Valley counties of Merced and Sacramento to overflowing rivers along the coast, the rains touched almost every part of the state, with many areas receiving four to six times above average precipitation for the past several weeks. Mudslides closed major roads, thousands of homes were flooded, and trees knocked out power lines, with over 13,000 electric customers yet to regain service as of Tuesday afternoon.
Meteorologists expect that by Thursday, the last storm, this time a weaker one, will have cleared from the northern and central parts of California. But in the coming weeks, as flood waters recede and the rains’ full impact comes into view, many residents may find themselves facing a second crisis: A widespread lack of flood insurance that will leave thousands of homeowners grappling with the cost of repairing and rebuilding homes.
“California is a place where the preoccupation about water is about scarcity, not abundance,” said Rebecca Elliott, a professor at the London School of Economics who wrote a book about flood insurance in the United States. “Many, many thousands of Californians will assume that they have flood coverage and find out that they don’t.”
Standard homeowners insurance does not include flood coverage, even though, according to a recent survey, 47 percent of Americans assume that it does. Just 1.33 percent of California households have standalone policies through the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal-run system that makes up 95 percent of flood coverage in the United States. The share of private flood policies in California is even smaller. Yet as of earlier this month, 90 percent of the state’s population was under flood watch.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, requires homeowners with federally-underwritten mortgages to buy flood insurance if they are in what it designates as “special flood hazard areas.” That’s essentially the 100-year flood plain, or places that have a 1 percent annual chance of flooding. But the maps FEMA uses to delineate these areas are wildly out of date. First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that models flood risk, found there are 5.9 million property owners nationwide who face substantial flood risk outside FEMA’s official hazard areas.
“I show them the topography maps,” said Nick Ramirez, an insurance agent based in Los Angeles, of his clients who aren’t required by law to purchase flood insurance. “I say, ‘Do you want to protect yourself?’ Some say yes, and some just roll the dice.”
Streets and homes flooded in the Felton Grove neighborhood of Santa Cruz, California, on January 9.
Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images
FEMA’s California maps, most of which were last updated in the 1980s and early 90s, if not before, leave out about 80 percent of the state’s rivers and streams. They also don’t account for the worsening effects of climate change, which include expanded flood risk as the climate system shifts towards hydrological extremes. Part of the reason they haven’t been updated is the expense. Communities have also often resisted expanding the flood zones to avoid costs for homeowners and restrictions on development.
Where FEMA does require mandatory insurance, the policy is underenforced. Flood insurance requirements don’t apply to mortgages that have been paid off or to properties purchased in cash. And experts say it’s common for homeowners to let their policies lapse because mortgage companies don’t check up on them. According to Elliott, the fact that lenders securitize their mortgages may be one reason for why they aren’t paying close attention. “They’re chopping up those mortgages, bundling them, and selling them on,” she said.
In recent years, the number of Californians holding flood insurance policies has been declining in line with a national pattern. Experts attribute this in large part to premium costs, and particularly to an increase in insurance rates that occurred starting October 2021 under FEMA’s new pricing methodology called Risk Rating 2.0.
The National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, has long struggled with debt, the result of worsening climate-fueled disasters paired with static policy premiums. With Risk Rating 2.0, FEMA re-assessed flood risk using independent models and then adjusted pricing to better reflect today’s trends. The idea, according to the agency, was to make insurance more equitable, so that people in flood zones paid more in line with their level of risk, and people outside wouldn’t have to subsidize them. (The new maps did not impact who was required to hold a policy.)
The result, however, has been a precipitous decline in policies. “We had been seeing a nationwide drop in the number of people with flood insurance [for several years],” said Nick VinZant, a senior research analyst at QuoteWizard, an online platform that allows customers to shop for and compare insurance prices. “It really started to drop as soon as FEMA put Risk Rating 2.0 in place.”
Though the state as a whole paid less under the new program than it had previously, 73 percent of California policyholders saw a price increase, in some cases as substantial as $100 a month. Between March 2021 and August 2022, 11 percent of state policyholders dropped the plan, one of the largest decreases nationwide, according to VinZant. (Nationwide, the program lost 6 percent of policyholders in the same period).
Residents sweep water out of a flooded home on January 11 in Planada, California.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
FEMA does not provide zip code-level data on policies in force, so it’s difficult to confirm that the places where premiums rose the most are the same places where people dropped the NFIP. But most experts think that’s what happened. “FEMA was very opaque. The numbers they gave were limited, so it’s hard to track,” said Nicholas Pinter, a professor and associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “There is strong suspicion that the increase in premiums has driven an exodus from the program.”
Another driver of the exodus: the multi-year mega-drought drying up rivers and reservoirs across the Western U.S. Typically, flood insurance policy enrollments increase after a flood and go down during dry years, when people forget about the potential for deluge. “Right now, my phone is ringing off the hook,” said Ramirez.
FEMA is running with the drought explanation. “There are many factors that could influence this drop in policyholders, including the economic impact of the pandemic, inflation, the housing market, affordability, or purchasing flood insurance from the private market,” David Maurstad, deputy associate administrator of resilience for FEMA, told Grist in a statement. “For California in particular, [it may be] due to the several years of drought in the area and the belief that flooding may not impact them.”
Given the increasing frequency of floods and the increasing cost of repair, Elliott believes it’s unrealistic to expect the National Flood Insurance Program to function like a private insurance company, charging enough to cover its risk and break even on its losses, while still being affordable. In California, the average cost of this insurance is $779 per year, though rates vary by region. Research by Pinter and his colleagues shows that besides a small number of waterfront communities like Malibu that have a lot of at-risk properties and high incomes, most of the state’s flood exposure is in low-income areas.
The national program tries to incentivize more flood-resilient building and planning by offering grants and lower rates to people and communities who take certain steps to protect their homes. But those investments can be costly and the agency has been criticized for not making enough support available and accessible. “We’ve been expecting [the NFIP] to underwrite the American dream of homeownership while also expecting it to signal risk, nudge people away from the water’s edge, and reduce overall exposure to flood risk,” said Elliott. “It has always had a really hard time doing all those things.” She says a better approach would be to think of insurance as just one part of the larger strategy and set of policies protecting people from floods.
On Saturday, President Biden approved California Governor Gavin Newsom’s request for a major disaster declaration in three counties, following the state’s emergency declaration for 41 of its 58 counties. Merced, Sacramento, and Santa Cruz are now eligible for grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to help cover uninsured property losses, and additional forms of support. More counties may be added as officials continue to assess the damage across the state.
In California, at least 19 people have died as storms continue to batter the region, leading to widespread flooding, mudslides and power outages. The National Weather Service says large portions of Central California have received over half their annual normal precipitation in just the past two weeks — and more rain is coming. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 34 million…
A new report reveals the devastating cost of extreme weather events in the United States last year, with 18 events resulting in costs over $1 billion each and hundreds of lives lost. In total, 474 people in the U.S. died in 2022 due to those 18 weather events, according to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Last year placed third “for the highest number of…
As the death toll from the extreme weather facing California this week rose to at least 17 and thousands in the state were displaced by mudslides and flooding, scientists from 16 international universities and institutes published a study Wednesday showing that a major driver of extreme weather—the heating of the world’s oceans—was worse than ever in 2022.
Experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other institutes found that the oceans had their hottest year on record last year. Record-keeping began in 1940 and the planet’s oceans have been heating steadily for more than six decades—with the trend accelerating particularly after 1990—but scientists believe the oceans are now the hottest they’ve been in 1,000 years.
“Measuring the oceans is the most accurate way of determining how out of balance our planet is,” John Abraham, a professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and one of 24 scientists who authored the study, toldThe Guardian. “We are getting more extreme weather because of the warming oceans and that has tremendous consequences all around the world.”
“The Earth’s energy and water cycles have been profoundly altered due to the emission of greenhouse gases by human activities, driving pervasive changes in Earth’s climate system.”
The oceans absorb more than 90% of excess greenhouse gas emissions that enter the atmosphere largely as a result of fossil fuel extraction, and study co-author Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania warned that as long as humans continue extracting fossil fuels, record-breaking ocean heating will remain likely each year.
“The oceans are absorbing most of the heating from human carbon emissions,” Mann told France 24. “Until we reach net zero emissions, that heating will continue, and we’ll continue to break ocean heat content records, as we did this year. Better awareness and understanding of the oceans are a basis for the actions to combat climate change.”
The public can “thank your fossil fuel friends” for the “supercharged storms” and other devastating weather patterns that have been linked to warming oceans, said U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
The scientists evaluated temperature data on the 2,000 meters (6,561 feet) of the oceans closest to the surface, where most heating occurs, and measured heating in zetta joules, finding that the oceans absorbed about 10 zetta joules more heat in 2022 than in 2021.
That amount of added heat is the equivalent of “every person on Earth running 40 hairdryers all day, every day,” The Guardian reported.
“The Earth’s energy and water cycles have been profoundly altered due to the emission of greenhouse gases by human activities, driving pervasive changes in Earth’s climate system,” the researchers concluded.
The study also found that rising water temperatures combined with record-high salinity contribute to the “stratification” of oceans, in which water separates into layers. This process can lead to a loss of oxygen in the oceans because it alters “how heat, carbon, and oxygen are exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere above it.”
“Deoxygenation itself is a nightmare for not only marine life and ecosystems but also for humans and our terrestrial ecosystems,” the researchers said in a statement. “Reducing oceanic diversity and displacing important species can wreak havoc on fishing-dependent communities and their economies, and this can have a ripple effect on the way most people are able to interact with their environment.”
The heating of the oceans can cause “shockwaves of disruption in the food chain [that] will lead to food shortages for many marine mammals,” said U.K.-based advocacy group Surfers Against Sewage. “For a thriving ocean we need a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Buffalo, New York, has long been known as a resilient city of “good neighbors.” From our annual snowfall totals to our sports teams, Buffalonians know how to stick together in challenging times. Many of us are struggling to dig out of the past year fraught with crises of epic proportions. Nearly two weeks ago, our city was buried under nearly six feet of snow with 70-mph sustained winds at times.
Last year was the hottest year on record in the United Kingdom, the national meteorological service reported Thursday, emphasizing that the human-caused climate emergency was what drove the country to see record-breaking heat last summer and an annual average temperature of 50°F, or 10.03°C.
Experts at the Met Office expect to see average yearly temperatures above 10°C as frequently as every three to four years as fossil fuel extraction and carbon emissions persist, while “in a natural climate” without human-induced planetary heating, such temperatures “would occur around once every 500 years,” according to climate attribution scientist Nikos Christidis.
“It reinforces what scientists have been saying for decades now, that climate change is real and is happening.”
Signs that the U.K. was experiencing an unusually hot year were evident last summer, when the country experienced temperatures above 104°F (40°C) for the first time ever.
“Human-caused climate change explains the unprecedented nature of the summer heatwave in the U.K. as well as the sustained warmth seen throughout most of 2022,” Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said in a statement.
Christidis said the Met Office used “climate models to compare the likelihood of a U.K. mean temperature of 10°C in both the current climate and with historical human climate influences removed.”
“Climate change made this around 160 times more likely,” the Met Office said of the unusually high average temperature.
\u201cThe 2022 UK annual mean temperature was 10.03\u00b0C, the highest in records dating back to 1884. \n\nThis made the year 0.89\u00b0C above the 1991-2020 average and 0.15\u00b0C higher than the previous record of 9.88\u00b0C set in 2014.\n\n\ud83e\uddf52/4\u201d
Stephan Harrison, professor of climate and environmental change at the University of Exeter, called the Met Office’s report “extremely significant.”
“It reinforces what scientists have been saying for decades now, that climate change is real and is happening, and it supports the arguments that change is likely to be faster over the land masses of the Northern Hemisphere than almost anywhere else,” said Harrison. “The impacts of continued warming on agriculture and ecosystems will be profound.”
The Met Office released its findings for 2022 as countries across Europe reported unusually warm winter weather, with ski resorts across the Alps shutting down during what’s normally the height of skiing season.
“Climate change is at work,” Laurent Reynaud, managing director of Domaines Skiables de France, the national body representing ski resorts, toldCNN Wednesday as he explained that about half of France’s 7,500 ski slopes are closed due to “a lack of snow and a lot of rain.”
Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Poland are among the European countries that reported record warm temperatures on the first day of the new year this week.
Countries across the continent faced numerous extreme weather events last year that scientists said were made far more likely by fossil fuel emissions and their effects on the planet.
Extreme heat across Western Europe was blamed for more than 20,000 excess deaths, while heavy rains triggered a landslide that killed at least a dozen people on Italy’s island of Ischia.
“Higher temperatures in the U.K. are contributing to more severe heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires but also more intense rainfall events and associated flooding,” said Allan, “and these impacts will become progressively worse until global temperatures are stabilized by cutting global carbon emissions to net zero.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Now the state’s weather has taken a violent swing in the other direction. A series of powerful “atmospheric river” storms — so called because they look like horizontal streams of moisture flowing in from the Pacific — have brought record-breaking precipitation to the Golden State over the last two weeks, dropping almost a foot of rain in the San Francisco Bay Area, overwhelming the state’s rivers, and bringing several feet of snow to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the eastern part of the state. The storms have caused widespread devastation, destroying critical roadways in the Bay Area and killing at least five people.
Though it has come at a tremendous cost, the past few weeks of rain have helped to refill the reservoirs that supply much of the state’s water, and snowpack levels in the Sierra Nevada are now well above their average levels for this time of year, meaning that major rivers will be much more robust after the snow melts in the spring. Barring a major dropoff, this year will be much wetter than the last few.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Jered Shipley, the general manager of the Anderson-Cottonwood Irrigation District, which provides water to pasture owners in the northern part of the state. “It gets us on track.” Shipley’s district takes water from Lake Shasta, the state’s largest reservoir, which all but bottomed out during the drought but has started to rebound over the past month.
If the reservoirs fill up as predicted, that will be great news for farmers and cities up and down the state, from Chico all the way to San Diego. Come spring and summer they’ll release the stored-up precipitation to cattle ranchers, nut farmers, and local water utilities around the state, ending a three-year spell of privation.
“To put it very bluntly, it’s been total devastation,” said Shipley. “This drought was a natural disaster. You may not have seen apartment buildings on fire or communities underwater, but [there were] displaced families, migrant workers not having jobs, businesses closing because nobody needed to service their tractors, feed stores closing.”
Even if 2023 does end up a wet year, it won’t prevent an ongoing water crisis, because surface precipitation is only one pillar supporting the state’s water needs. Since the reservoirs can’t hold more than a year of water, officials don’t have the option of holding it back to conserve for future years. And the other two pillars ensuring regular water availability in the Golden State — groundwater and the Colorado River — are facing crises that even a wet year won’t fix.
“This will fill our reservoirs, so that’s the good news,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center, who studies atmospheric rivers and their impact on California’s water. “But we have been in a really dry period for the last 20 years, and that hasn’t come to an end yet.”
A false-color satellite image shows the flooding caused by an “atmospheric river” rain event that struck California around New Year’s Day. NASA Earth Observatory
In the agriculture-heavy Central Valley, for instance, many farmers rely on water deliveries from a federal canal that funnels water westward from the Sierra Nevada. But households in this area also depend on groundwater withdrawn from underground aquifers, and recent research shows that these aquifers are drying up at an alarming rate. This dropoff has led to a surge in the number of dried-up wells in recent years and has forced some towns to rely on deliveries of bottled water.
A deluge of snow may help recharge the reservoirs that supply major Central Valley irrigators, but it won’t refill the underground aquifers in the region, in part because most valley communities don’t have the ability to store excess water. In other parts of the country like Arizona, officials can bank water from wet years in underground aquifers, but any extra rainfall in the Central Valley just gets lost.
Cities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area face a similar two-pronged challenge. The region gets about a third of its water from the State Water Project, a canal system that diverts water from the reservoirs in the northern part of the state, and these deliveries have declined in recent years, forcing some cities to make drastic cuts.
The current bout of rain will help fill up those reservoirs, but the rest of the water used by these cities comes from the Colorado River, which snakes through the arid western United States. The river’s two main reservoirs in Nevada and Arizonaare both in danger of bottoming out this year, and the federal government may soon slash California’s water allotment to stop that from happening. The rainfall from this week’s atmospheric river event won’t do anything to alleviate that crisis, although it will make the most dire scenarios for Los Angeles much less likely.
“Our focus tends to be on filling of surface reservoirs, and everybody declares the drought over,” said Mount. “That’s just fundamentally wrong.”
Atmospheric river storms like the one that struck California this week account for as much as half of all West Coast precipitation even in normal years, which makes them critical for bringing the region out of prolonged drought periods. The most recent forecasts suggest that this year’s wetter trend will persist through the winter, but there’s still a small chance that “the door slams shut,” as Mount puts it, and rain stops altogether. The northern Sierras also saw high precipitation totals in November and December of 2021, but then the rain flatlined in January and February of last year, leaving the state well short of average rainfall.
“It doesn’t look like that right now,” Mount told Grist. “None of the models I’m aware of are saying that it’s going to stop.”
Europe broke heat records last year, and 2023 is shaping up to be no different. A winter heat dome descended on the continent right just in time for New Year’s Day, crushing thousands of standing high-temperature records. Eight countries — Belarus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Poland — set new all-time records for warmest January weather on the first of the month. The heat wave caused temperatures to rise up to 36 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) above average for this time of year.
“This is exactly the kind of very abnormal event that is progressively rewriting global climatology,” Nahel Belgherze, a meteorologist in France, said in a tweet. Other experts based in Europe said the heat wave was unprecedented and alarming. Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera told CNN it’s “the most extreme heat wave in European history.”
Climate researchers say the science linking climate change to record-setting heat waves is indisputable. Analyses of more than 100 hot spells over the past decade have shown that modern-day global warming, the majority of which has been brought about by the burning of fossil fuels, made nearly all of them more likely or severe. For example, an unusually hot summer in Texas in 2011 and a summertime European heat wave in 2017 were made 10 and four times more likely by climate change, respectively.
It’ll take time for researchers to parse exactly how much rising global temperatures influenced this particular weather event. Abnormal heat is still moving through Europe as the heat wave mixes with Arctic air edging in from the northeast and dissipates. But it’s already abundantly clear that Europe just experienced a severe departure from the norm.
Poland broke its national temperature record before the sun had even breached the horizon on New Year’s Day when the town of Glucholazy hit 65.7 degrees F, according to the Washington Post. France broke more than 100 heat records that day. A town in western Belarus clocked a maximum temperature of 61.5 degrees F — the norm there in midwinter is 32 degrees F. The warm winter has turned famed European skiing destinations soupy and brown. Parts of the Alps were totally devoid of snow as of January 1; a major skiing competition set to take place in Switzerland next week will depend entirely on artificial flakes.
The extremely warm temperatures aren’t expected to stick around for much longer, but meteorologists say above-average temperatures could plague mainland Europe for at least another week.
Researchers in the U.S. have linked the climate crisis and the extreme weather patterns it causes to the country’s epidemic of gun violence in a first-of-its-kind analysis, showing that thousands of shootings in the U.S. in recent years were attributable to higher-than-average temperatures.
As Environment Journal reported Tuesday, experts at Boston University School of Public Health and University of Washington School of Social Work analyzed 116,000 shootings in 100 of the country’s most populous cities between 2015 and 2020 and found that 7,973 took place during periods of unseasonable heat, concluding that about 7% of shootings could be attributed to extreme heat.
The research, which was originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open in December, found that the Northeast and Midwest saw the greatest increases in gun violence on days that were unseasonably hot, but the trend was observed across the country.
“We know that segregation and disinvestment lead communities of color, especially Black communities, to have greater exposure to adverse environmental conditions that contribute to gun violence risk.”
When the temperature rose within the 96th percentile of average daily temperatures, the cities of Seattle and Las Vegas saw the highest elevated risk of gun violence, according to the analysis. In Seattle, the temperature rose to 84°F, while people in Las Vegas faced 104°F temperatures.
“It could be that heat causes stress, which makes people more likely to use aggression,” said Dr. Jonathan Jay, a co-author of the study and faculty member of Boston University’s Center for Climate and Health. “Or it could be that people are more likely to get out on warmer days and have more interactions, which creates more opportunities for conflict and violence. Most likely, it’s a combination of both.”
While it is the first analysis of the correlation between the climate crisis and gun violence in the U.S., the study offers the latest evidence of a dynamic that has been previously reported: violent incidents, including domestic and gender-based violence, increase during and after extreme weather events driven by the climate emergency.
As The Washington Postreported Tuesday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2022 identified a link between extreme weather and domestic violence, while The Lancetpublished an analysis of more than 40 studies showing “an increase in one or several [gender-based violence] forms during or after extreme events, often related to economic instability, food insecurity, mental stress, disrupted infrastructure, increased exposure to men, tradition, and exacerbated gender inequality.”
\u201cWe spoke to women in three countries – Kenya, India & Philippines – to unpack how #climatechange worsened violence at home for them. \nGeoffrey Ondieki, @AieBalagtasSee and I co-reported this piece for @FullerProject & @washingtonpost. \nhttps://t.co/XmDkoyeFsL\u201d
The Lancet report included research completed in 2021 at St. Catherine University in Minnesota, which found that economic stresses caused by flooding, drought, and extreme heat in Kenya were linked to a 60% rise in domestic violence in certain parts of the country.
Evidence for the connection between violence and the effects of the climate emergency is “overwhelming,” Terry McGovern of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health told the Post on Tuesday.
“Heat waves, floods, climate-induced disasters increase sexual harassment, mental and physical abuse, femicide, [and reduced] economic and educational opportunity and increase the risk of trafficking due to forced migration,” McGovern told the newspaper.
Researchers at Boston University and Washington University said their new study makes the case both for lawmakers to pass gun control and climate action measures and for local investment in heat mitigation strategies, such as increasing tree cover in “urban heat islands.”
When introducing the Saving Hazardous and Declining Environments (SHADE) Act in 2021, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) noted that many formerly redlined urban neighborhoods are on average 4.68°F hotter than non-redlined areas, “due to reduced tree cover and increased asphalt or concrete surfaces.”
“We know that segregation and disinvestment lead communities of color, especially Black communities, to have greater exposure to adverse environmental conditions that contribute to gun violence risk, such as abandoned buildings, liquor stores, lack of green space, and more intense urban heat islands,” Jay said in a statement in December.
Heat mitigation strategies could be a crucial part of an effort that is “part racial justice, part climate change mitigation, and part gun violence prevention,” he added.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
As Europe closed the books on its warmest year ever recorded, an exceptionally potent winter heat dome descended on much of the continent over the holiday weekend, with thousands of daily and monthly high-temperature records shattered from Spain to Russia.
“The intensity and extent of warmth in Europe right now is hard to comprehend,” meteorologist Scott Duncan toldThe Times of London. “There are too many records to count. Literally thousands. Overnight minimum temperatures are like summer.”
The Times reported:
Bilbao in northern Spain reached 24.9°C, the hottest temperature recorded for the city in January and more akin to a summer’s day than the start of the year. Records were broken throughout Germany, including Dresden in the east where it was 13.5°C. Temperatures in Switzerland were at 20°C. The Czech Republic recorded a January national record of 19.6°C at the town of Javornik.
The Washington Postnoted that at least seven countries—Belarus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Poland—recorded their warmest January temperatures ever.
\u201cThe New Year’s heatwave stands as “the most extreme event ever in European climatology.” \nIn Poland, the old January record was broken before sunrise–in one town it was 65.7 degrees at 4 a.m., which is warmer than its average low temperature in midsummer \nhttps://t.co/FKa0NGBgbJ\u201d
Poland’s Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (IMGW) said Sunday that “the average daily temperature for Słubice was 15.3°C for the last day, and 15°C in Warsaw and Wrocław.”
“This means that we have a one-day thermal summer in the middle of winter,” IMGW added. “The thermal anomaly is over 15°C. This is an unprecedented situation in our climate.”
Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who specializes in extreme weather, called the temperatures “totally insane” and “absolute madness.”
It’s “the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology,” Herrera told the Post. “Nothing stands close to this.”
\u201cWe just observed the warmest January day on record for many countries in Europe.\n\nTruly unprecedented in modern records.\u201d
This exceptional wintertime warmth comes on the heels of the warmest 2022 in many parts of Europe, including in the U.K., Germany, and Switzerland.
Extreme heat visited Europe in waves throughout the year and was intensified by a historically severe summer drought. The combination helped push the United Kingdom to 104°F (40°C) for the first time on record in July.
Climatologists said that while weather conditions caused the heat dome currently over Europe, there is a proven link between the continued burning of fossil fuels and rising global temperatures.
“The record-breaking across Europe over the new year was made more likely to happen by human-caused climate change,” Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto told The Times, “just as climate change is now making every heatwave more likely and hotter.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The year 2022 was a tough year around the world in terms of climate disaster, something that the just exploded “bomb cyclone” seemed to punctuate with an exclamation point as the storm crippled much of the nation in a sub-zero deep freeze and led to the death of at least 40 people in western New York. Fortunately, we were spared the theatrics of misleading statements and snowballs in the halls of Congress as scientists explained how rapid warming of the Arctic may have led to the major disruption of the “polar vortex” allowing the dramatic escape of winter Arctic air to wreak havoc far to the south.
A record-deadly blizzard stands as a bone-chilling paradox in the face of the much more deadly poster child of climate change—record-breaking heat waves supercharged by climate change. And 2022 saw lots of these.
As long anticipated by scientists, climate change means the water cycle can produce both more devastating dry and wet extremes.
Brutal record-breaking heat waves hit much of Europe, southern Asia, and China this past year, creating a circum-Northern Hemisphere crisis of searing heat, economic troubles, and human suffering. Further south, Argentina and Paraguay saw record climate change-worsened heat, while record heat waves also continued to scorch Australia and help stoke a growing humanitarian crisis in East Africa.
Even in a year with yet another major “polar vortex” cold event, concern continues to grow that some parts of the world may eventually become largely uninhabitable due to climate-change-aggravated high heat extremes.
Droughts are often exacerbated by record heat because a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, and as a result can demand more moisture from snow, water bodies, vegetation and soil. In 2022, we saw this scenario play out in the United States, Europe, China, and East Africa. Another paradox of climate change is that the global surge in hot drought around the world is happening at the same time the planet is also seeing many more cases of extreme rainfall and associated flooding. In these cases, the greater water-holding capacity of a warming atmosphere also means that when it does rain it can rain more and harder. In the United States, Hurricane Ian provided a costly example of how climate change is not only able to generate bigger, more powerful storms, but also storms that can rain harder with devastating flooding as a result.
Extreme rainfall disasters were even worse globally in 2022. Australia’s biggest threat a couple years ago was heat-enhanced unprecedented drought and ruinous “Black Summer” wildfires, but in 2022 record-breaking rainfall, flooding, and increased risk of mosquito-borne disease was the biggest challenge. As long anticipated by scientists, climate change means the water cycle can produce both more devastating dry and wet extremes. Sadly, the worst 2022 example of the latter crippled Pakistan in an almost apocalyptic manner when climate change intensified summer monsoon rains coincided with extreme mountain heat and glacier melting to cause unprecedented flooding that killed thousands and affected tens of millions. Extreme rainfall also killed hundreds and affected millions in West Africa in 2022.
Yet, another climate change paradox went largely unnoticed by the media in 2022. On one hand, media attention did focus on how the ongoing slow yet relentless rate of sea-level rise is already starting to wreak havoc on some coastlines, and how a couple feet of sea-level rise could submerge hundreds of thousands of individual, privately owned coastal properties in the United States by mid-century. Yet, the media hasn’t widely reported on a fact that the scientific community also highlighted in one of the most recent reports of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): continued climate change over just a few decades could trigger the irreversible loss of large portions of the massive Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, and in doing so result in the submergence of innumerable coastal communities—and even whole island nations—around the globe.
In other words, the seemingly small rate of current sea-level rise could paradoxically result in perhaps the most devastating of all climate change impacts. That is, unless we work fast to halt climate change.
The year 2022 brought one more major climate change paradox into clear focus: Many countries of the world that are suffering the most from climate change are countries that did little to cause the climate crisis. The biggest carbon polluting counties—namely the United States, China, and European countries—are suffering too, but they have resources to deal with, and recover from, climate change impacts. At the same time, less affluent counties like Pakistan, African countries, and low-lying island nations such as Tuvalu have generated little carbon pollution and are already getting hit with existential climate change impacts that are worsening fast.
It is no wonder that the most consequential result of the U.N.’s 2022 Sharm el-Sheikh climate change conference (COP 27) was the official recognition that the rich carbon polluters of the world need to finance climate solutions as well as pay for the mounting damages to those less affluent counties who have done little to cause the climate crisis.
The year 2022 will be remembered for its brutal climate change impacts and the growing crisis these impacts make clear. At the same time, 2022 was a breakthrough year of climate action juxtaposed on the increasingly stark evidence that fossil fuels and their producers are the primary cause of the planet’s growing peril. Fortunately, 2022 also made clear that fossil fuels are too expensive, too polluting of air and water, and too enabling of petrostate evil to persist in a world of cheaper, more globally equitable, and clean energy sources like wind and solar.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
We need to put it clearly: 2022 was an unyielding disaster. The effects of what happened this year will echo for decades to centuries, but far from there being any lessons learned from it, what the managers of global capitalism are doing is trying to make next year even worse.
The most worrying statistic of the year, the one that assures us that what happened in 2022 is not fleeting, is the fact that the record for global-scale greenhouse gas emissions has been broken again. With a 1% increase over 2021, the decrease in emissions that occurred during the pandemic has already been surpassed. The year’s increase was led by the burning of more fossil fuels, particularly in the United States and India.
The volume of extreme events this year, both meteorological and social, economic, and political, means that most of them have simply been wiped from our collective mind and consciousness, because we effectively have no capacity to process what is happening to us, and the institutions that run global capitalism even less so. The cost of living crisis, intrinsically linked with the gas on which so much of the European economy depends, looks like the crisis that will precipitate a new global recession. That is the decision of governments and central banks. These institutions have decided that prices and inflation will be reduced by rising interest rates, that is, by widespread defaults on loans, evictions, bankruptcies, unemployment and austerity.
The global average temperature for the year was 1.15°C above the pre-industrial era, which will make this year the 5th or 6th warmest year ever recorded. This comes in the third year in a row that we have been under the “La Niña” phenomenon, which generally lowers the temperature. Next year there will be no La Niña, so an even greater increase in temperature is expected.
This was a year of great losses in glaciers around the world. All melting records in the European Alps were broken, with a decrease of between 3 and 4 meters in ice thickness. In the Swiss Alps, the ice volume was reduced by 6.2%. In Zermatt, a Swiss town in the shadow of the Matterhorn, the temperature reached 33ºC at 1620 m altitude. For the first time, there was widespread ice loss on the summits in July, ensuring no accumulation of new ice. The water cycle in the Himalayas is also breaking down, with permafrost in the Asian range melting ever faster, leading to glacier collapse, landslides and downstream flooding.
The climate justice movement globally has taken to the streets in large numbers and in major actions, from the mobilization of scientists in the Scientist Rebellion, to the Letzte Generation, to the movement to abolish debt to fund climate action, Debt for Climate, to Just Stop Oil in the UK and the End Fossil Occupy school occupations in Europe and the US. Visible climate degradation is leading to the radicalization of the movement and linkages with other causes, notably that of gas-related increases in the cost of living. From the most outrageous actions like throwing soup on picture frames to sabotaging of cement factories and slaughterhouses, the movement has blocked roads and refineries, ports and airports, occupied schools and marched in streets all over the world. This rise in activity has led to an escalation of repression by governments and judicial systems around the world, with the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of activists, particularly in the UK, Germany and Australia. The system defends itself and, at this moment, defends climate collapse.
The “good news” of the year have so far caused no hindrance to the downward spiral we are in. The election of Lula da Silva, stopping Bolsonaro, does not represent a reversal in the extractivist policy that he has followed in the past. Joe Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” falls far short of a Green New Deal useful in halting climate collapse, and this year emissions in the United States have even increased by 1.5%. The excitement over a successful nuclear fusion experiment, which may be useful at scale decades from now, is currently of no use except to distract from the need for a massive cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. That leaves the Kunming-Montreal biodiversity agreement which, as usual, is doubtful to be implemented effectively.
It is very important to review some of what has happened to us this year, so that the chronology helps our memory and places us in the moment.
January to June: stirring the fire
January and February saw record temperatures in South America, with torrential rains in Petrópolis, Brazil, creating floods and landslides that killed more than 230 people (there was another tragedy in the city in March). Three storms in a row hit Madagascar (Cyclone Emnati, Cyclone Batserai and Tropical Storm Dumako), devastating the country. In March, Cyclone Gombe hit Mozambique in Nampula, killing nearly fifty people. In April, Tropical Storm Megi would lead to landslides in the Philippines, killing over 200 people
In late February, Russia invaded Ukraine in a military action that caused chaos in Europe, exacerbated the energy crisis that had already begun with speculation by oil and gas companies, and increased tensions over food trade. The food tension is happening particularly in cereals (wheat, corn, barley), as Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s leading producers and exporters.
In March and April, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were already suffering under severe heat waves, while in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia drought created conditions for a food crisis that would affect more than 20 million people (it is the fourth consecutive year that rainfall has been below the needs for agricultural production in East Africa). In May, several areas of Bangladesh began to flood, directly affecting millions of people, which lasted until June. Melting glaciers, rising river flows, and heavy rain precipitated the situation.
In March, protests began in Sri Lanka, a combination of rampant inflation, food and energy shortages. Falling agricultural production took the country from being an exporter to an importer of rice within a year. There was an escalation in demonstrations against the Rajapaksa family and the state stepped up repression against the millions of protesters.
In April, floods in South Africa, particularly in the Kwazulu-Natal area, forced all industrial activity to stop, the port of Durban to close, and killed more than 450 people. In June, the Trump packed’ United States Supreme Court overturned a 50 year old ruling that protected the right to abortion in the country. Since then, republican led states have all but banned abortion in the USA, a massive step backwards for women’s rights of global impact.
July to September: A boiling world
A deluge fell over Pakistan and India in July and August. The floods in Pakistan killed at least 1700 people, inundated a third of the country, and caused the displacement of 33 million people, combining the effect of rainfall and the melting of thousands of glaciers in the highlands of the country. The scale of this event is difficult to comprehend, as there is a geological and social change right now in full operation that will last decades, if not centuries, to stabilize. Some parts of the country have been under water for months.
In China, meanwhile, the longest and largest heat wave ever recorded in the country unfolded, with the Yangtze and Wuhan rivers without water in several stretches. Industrial production was paralyzed in several cities for extended periods as power had to be cut off or directed to cooling homes and hospitals. Street circulation became restricted at various times for public health reasons, particularly for the most vulnerable people. In other parts of the country, in Guangdong and Sichuan, flash floods killed more than 200 people.
Europe baked under record temperatures, with heat wave after heat wave. In the old continent, which is experiencing the largest temperature increases, the longest drought in 500 years has occurred. While in the UK the temperature reached the extreme 40ºC, large stretches of the Rhine, Danube, Tagus, Ebro or Thames rivers were dry and all navigation was made impossible. In the midst of this scenario, forest fires once again swept through the Mediterranean. Many landscapes submerged decades or centuries ago came into view, including villages submerged by dams and the “hunger stones” in the Czech Republic and Germany. Electricity production from dams and nuclear power has dropped dramatically, due to water shortages, which combined with gas restrictions has made Europe almost exclusively dependent on solar and wind power, which it has not yet built in quantities even close to what is needed for energy security. Some industry in central Europe is suspended or has reduced production because of energy shortages. European corn production will have fallen by 16%, soybeans by 15%, and sunflower by 12%, further increasing the tension over food prices. The long multi-year drought in Brazil with agricultural impacts adds to the tension.
In mid-July there was a brief agreement between Russia and Ukraine to open the Black Sea ports of Odessa, Pivdenny and Chornomorsk and let some grain from the millennia-old Black Rails head to other countries. Back and forth, closures and bombings of ports and ships in the following months fueled speculation and uncertainty in food supplies.
Near this time, thousands of protesters stormed the presidential palace in Colombo in Sri Lanka, toppling the ruling family and creating powerful images of contrast between popular misery and the luxurious mansion of political power.
The temperature continues to rise in the oceans, which are more energetic, continuing to cause more and more storms that are also increasingly intense. This year, 55% of the oceans have experienced at least one maritime heat wave. In the summer in the Mediterranean, the water was as much as 5°C above the average of the last thirty years. With these temperatures, many species and sea vegetation collapsed
September to December: speculation, revolt, repression and the greatest show in the world
In September, the sabotage of the Nordstream 1 and 2 gas pipelines took from the hands of Vladimir Putin directly into the hands of Western and Persian Gulf gas companies control under the power of speculation and unilateral determination of energy prices. The historic profits made by these companies have turned into unparalleled prices in Europe, reverberating around the world. Floods in Nigeria have accentuated this pressure, adding power to the Persian Gulf countries. In Europe, protests against the rise in cost of living began, and two British Prime-Ministers were sacked in a little over a month.
The Atlantic hurricane season leaves Fiona, Julia and Ian as major records. Hurricane Fiona was notable for lasting a long time, forming near the west coast of Africa, heading towards the Caribbean and up into eastern Canada, where it dissipated. It killed several dozen people in Puerto Rico and was the strongest hurricane ever to reach Canada. Hurricane Ian left 11 million people in Cuba without electricity before moving on to Florida, where more than 2.4 million people were without electricity and at least 140 died (the biggest death toll for a hurricane in the US since Katrina). Hurricane Julia killed more than 90 people devastating Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. It is one of the most southerly-reaching Atlantic hurricanes ever. While this was happening, in the Pacific Typhoon Merbok was reaching Alaska, fed by the very hot waters for that time of year. It produced 15m waves in the Bering Strait, flooding several coastal communities, particularly indigenous people, in the middle of the harvest season.
In October, Elon Musk, then the richest man in the world, bought the social network Twitter, triggering a resurgence of climate denialism that has far outpaced Trumpism. The obsession with the myth of the self-made man, focused on Musk, has proven very useful to the cultural revival of the far right, offsetting the defeats of Bolsonaro and Trump. Climate denialism, however, continues to clash with thermometers. In 2022 the hottest October ever recorded in Europe occurred, the Mississippi River dried up in several stretches of its course, preventing river navigation in the middle of autumn, and at the end of the month tropical storm Nalgae killed more than 100 people, again in the Philippines.
In November the umpteenth useless climate summit, COP27, was held, this time organized by and for the oil industry, in the tourist resort of Sharm-El-Sheik, under the bloodthirsty dictatorship of General Sisi in Egypt. The siren songs of institutionalism appeal to fewer and fewer unwary people, and the climate justice movement – largely out of physical impossibility – walked away from this institutional process that was, on its own terms, a success (since halting the climate crisis has long since ceased to be the goal of this trade summit). It was also this month that what is probably one of the greatest washouts in history began. Qatar, an Islamic state under a medieval regime organised the World Cup. The stadiums were erected under the corpses of thousands of slaves paid with the gas money that is cooking the planet. The political, economic and sporting elites have united to render allegiance to the emirate, with useless little gestures that do not erase the shame and the amnesty to barbarism that the whole event comprised. The economic and political dividends reaped by Qatar are the greatest evidence of the collapse of any kind of democratic shame that still remained in the elites that run European capitalism. The arrest of a vice-president of the European Parliament, accused of bribery like others, including the secretary-general of the ITUC (trade union confederation) was the corollary of the successful Qatari strategy, which uses European gas dependence as a safe-conduct for all eventualities. And Europe’s plan is still more gas.
After the death of Mahsa Amini in September at the hands of the Islamic morality police in Iran, protests have rocked the regime for months, and remain simmering. The uprising by Iranian women has been an example of courage around the world in the face of a violent and ultra-conservative regime. On the other hand, in China the massive protests, unparalleled in recent decades, against Covid’s restrictive measures, seem to have made the inflexible authoritarianism of the country’s state capitalism give way. The measures were relaxed closing the year. Everything that seemed solid and unchanging is dissolving into thin air.
A large area of South America, including parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay suffered two consecutive heat waves between late November and early December. This month, large forest fires devastated eucalyptus groves in Chile.
In Portugal, heavy rains ravaged various parts of the country, particularly Lisbon. Two episodes of heavy rainfall caused floods as records were broken for precipitation in 24 hours, which combined with the chronic poor construction and waterproofing of the city, caused enormous damage to the lives of thousands of people. In the United States, the worst cold snap in fifty years occurred, with several states simultaneously experiencing temperatures below -30ºC (-41ºC in Wyoming, -45ºC in Montana) and abrupt drops in temperature, dropping as low as 26ºC in less than two hours (from 8ºC to -18ºC in Colorado). Dozens of people died – several of them trapped inside their cars – and the electrical infrastructure failed in several places, with millions of people trapped in the dark and cold while it snowed heavily. More than 150 million people are in the territories affected by this cyclone-bomb, an icy storm with winds of more than 120km/h and temperatures that kill in minutes.
Courage
In climate terms, 2022 was an avalanche of phenomena of historical scale. Society is unable to process this and the media doesn’t interpret and express what is happening, and doesn’t critically assess it, in particular by omitting the causes of what is happening. We are already living in Planet B.
These devastating facts should not be interpreted as demotivating. Quite the opposite. We don’t have time for that. We are living absolutely extraordinary times. Nothing will stay the same, no matter how much individuals, classes or entire societies wish it. Knowing reality is the first step to act, but we need to act, harder than ever, faster than ever. Capitalist institutions have only one plan, which they repeat every day: accept collapse. The strength of the youth that mobilize shows us the way, but the youth cannot walk alone. In a society where meanness and cowardice are promoted, where we are only told that we have to get by or look for opportunities to get rich, we need to regain our courage, because the narratives of the past are useless for the extraordinary times in which we live. We need to stop the road to collapse. We need to be brave, courageous, bold like many other societies and generations had to.
Yes, we can change. Yes, we are responsible for where we live. Yes, we have courage. Yes, we are millions of people who will not accept to stand by and watch while the future is thrown down a cliff. Yes, we will fight to win.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The year 2022 will be remembered across the U.S. for its devastating flooding and storms — and also for its extreme heat waves and droughts. By October, the U.S. had already seen 15 disasters causing more than US$1 billion in damage each, well above the average. The year started and ended with widespread severe winter storms from Texas to Maine, affecting tens of million of people and causing…
A year that started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is ending with famine in Africa, while still spreading death and misery through an enduring pandemic and a deteriorating climate crisis — 2022 has been an apocalyptic warning of the frailty of our planet and the woeful shortcomings of humankind.Beyond the stark statistics of millions of people displaced by war and natural disasters, it has been a 12 months that tragically highlighted our global interconnections and how a confluence of events and trends can bring another year of record levels of hunger.
Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians (numbers given by the UN and involved parties vary enormously) have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched war on February 24. More than 7.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country. Billions of dollars have been spent on armaments.
But the impact of the war has been felt worldwide, driving up prices of basic commodities such as oil, gas, grain, sunflower oil and fertilisers. Somalia, now in the grip of the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 40 years, used to import 90 per cent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine.
Commodities have been weaponised. Countries slipped back into recession, just as they were slowly recovering from the economic distress of Covid-19 lockdowns. A deepening relationship between sanctioned Russia and an energy- hungry China exacerbated existing tensions with the US over Taiwan. The result? China broke off climate cooperation efforts with the US in the run-up to the COP27 climate conference hosted by Egypt in November with 200 countries and 35,000 people attending.
Against the backdrop of devastating floods in Pakistan and West Africa, and with 2022 on its way to becoming one of the five hottest years on record, agriculture and food security joined the COP27 agenda. Talks ran into extra time, as they tend to, and countries of the global South emerged with the landmark creation of a special fund paid by wealthier countries to address the Loss and Damage caused by climate change in the most vulnerable nations.
“After 30 contentious years, delayed tactics by wealthy countries, a renewed spirit of solidarity, empathy and cooperation prevailed, resulting in the historic establishment of a dedicated fund,” said Yamide Dagnet, director for climate justice at the Open Society Foundations, reflecting a sense of hard fought victory among developing countries.
Still unresolved however is which countries will give money and to whom. China in particular seems uneasy over which category it belongs to. However COP27 joined its 26 forerunners since 1995 in not reaching a binding agreement on cutting fossil fuel burning which has continued to rise globally, except for a brief pandemic dip. For this, many branded it a failure. “Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish. It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact – or a Collective Suicide Pact,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the opening plenary session. By the end, many felt the conference had concluded with the latter. Rather than falling, the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project show that total worldwide CO2 emissions in 2022 have reached near-record levels.
Victims of devastating floods, heatwaves and forest fires, and severe drought in Central Sahel and East Africa surely needed no confirmation from the final decision text of COP27 which recognises “the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and ending hunger” and the vulnerability of food production to climate change.
In this respect, COP27 recognised the importance of nature-based solutions – a theme driven by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in ringing alarm bells on the degraded soil, water sources and eco-systems caused by intensive agriculture with overuse of fertilisers and pesticides. According to FAO, more than 25 percent of arable soils worldwide are degraded, and the equivalent of a football pitch of soil is eroded every five seconds. The planet’s bio-diversity is being devastated as a result. As highlighted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in stressing the vital connections between Nature and people, a landmark report in July found that 50,000 wild species provide food, cosmetics, shelter, clothing, medicine and inspiration. Many face extinction. As international agencies and NGOs (and media outlets) jostled and competed for funding to deal with the fallout from wars and climate emergencies, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) which is active in the Sahel cautioned that only 1.7 per cent of all climate finance reaches small-scale producers in developing countries and as little as 8% of overseas aid goes to projects focused primarily on gender equality. Women’s empowerment has been made a major focus of ASAP+, IFAD’s new climate change financing mechanism.
Women and girls are paying “an unacceptably high price” among communities hit by severe drought in the Horn of Africa, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). It launched a $113.7 million appeal to scale-up life-saving reproductive health and protection services, including establishment of mobile and static clinics in displacement sites.
Also overshadowed by wars and pandemics in 2022 were marginalised communities lacking a voice, suffering diseases such as leprosy or exploited in the form of child labour.
Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, says many issues have been sidelined because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Society has the knowledge and means to stop and cure leprosy, he says in the ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’ campaign by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative.
“When people are still being discriminated against even after being cured, society has a disease. If we can cure society of this disease—discrimination—it would be truly epoch-making,” he told IPS.
A similar message was delivered by Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi who told the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour that a mere $53 billion per annum – equivalent to 10 days of military spending – would ensure all children in all countries benefit from social protection. International Labour Organisation and UNICEF statistics from 2020 show at least 160 million children are involved in child labour, a surge of 8.4 million in four years. Children denied education became a burning issue in Afghanistan in March when the Taliban declared that girls would be banned from secondary education. The UN said 1.1 million girls were affected. The late-night reversal of a decision by Taliban authorities to allow girls from grades 7 to 12 to return to school was met with outrage and distress, inside and outside Afghanistan. Denial of human rights to girls and women has fuelled the desire of many to get out of Afghanistan and seek a better life elsewhere, adding to the millions around the world forced to flee their homes because of conflict, repression or disaster. The Ukraine conflict has displaced more than 14 million people, about a third of the population.
A UN Office on Drugs and Crime report on trafficking warns that refugees from Ukraine are at risk of including sexual exploitation, forced labour, illegal adoption and surrogacy, forced begging and forced criminality.
As they come over border crossings into Poland, refugees – including victims of rape – are greeted with posters and flyers carrying warnings about jail terms for breaking local abortion laws, images of miscarried foetuses, and a quote from Mother Theresa saying: “Abortion is the greatest threat to peace”.
UNDP, which is assisting the Ukraine government in getting access to public services for IDPs, says in its 2022 report, Turning the tide on internal displacement, that earlier and increased support to development is an essential condition for emerging from crisis in a sustainable way.
“More efforts are needed to end the marginalization of internally displaced people, who must be able to exercise their full rights as citizens including through access to vital services such as health care, education, social protection and job opportunities” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator.
Nearly one million Rohingya refugees languishing in refugee camps in Bangladesh after being driven out of Myanmar in waves since 2016 would surely agree.
Asif Saleh, executive director of BRAC, said to be the world’s largest NGO and founded by Sir Fazle after the independence of Bangladesh in 1972, says work needs to “shift towards a development-like approach from a very short-term humanitarian crisis-focused approach”. But the only solution for the Rohingya refugees is their sustainable and voluntary repatriation to Myanmar. As 2022 closes, that unfortunately looks highly unlikely as the military junta that seized power in 2021 fights ethnic armed organisations on multiple fronts.
There was one seismic milestone event that happened in late 2022 although no one is quite sure exactly where and when. The few people to witness it were not aware either – not that it prevented the UN from declaring it a special day. The birth of the 8 billionth person was celebrated on November 15. The world’s population has doubled from 4 billion in 1974 and UN projections suggest we will be supporting about 9.7 billion people in 2050. Global population is forecast to peak at about 10.4 billion in the 2080s.
Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN environment programme, sent a message to the baby, and the rest of the world, as countries meet in Montreal for the COP15 biodiversity conference this month.
“We’ve just welcomed the 8 billionth member of the human race on this planet. That’s a wonderful birth of a baby, of course. But we need to understand that the more people there are, the more we put the Earth under heavy pressure,” she said.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Just before Christmas, much of the United States was hit by an extraordinary weather event: Winter Storm Elliott. In Chicago, we saw temperatures that dipped down to -10 degrees Fahrenheit with windchills that hit below -40 on the backs of 40-mile-per-hour winds. Such weather is dangerous to everyone,but it is particularly dangerous to people experiencing homelessness on our streets. Regardless of how good a person’s tent, gloves, hat and coat are, it is impossible to stay safe and warm in those conditions for more than a few minutes. Add in that many people experiencing homelessness are dealing with health issues due to limited access to regular health care, and we have incredible cause for concern.
We solve homelessness through housing—affordable housing.
For example, in Chicago, the city mounts an emergency response that involves utilizing aseries of warming centers, including using public libraries and park field houses, paired with a 311 call system that will dispatch people to do wellness checks on those in danger and take them to a place they can be safe and warm, if they so choose. This system is far from perfect, but the hardworking city and nonprofit employees who assist those experiencing homelessness in these moments are doing lifesaving work.
While the homeless services community must always be looking at how we improve our emergency response in moments of crisis, the best place for us to put or time, energy and resources establishing the deep funding and strong policies necessary for creating the permanent housing and supports that people living on the streets, in shelters, and living doubled-up need.
The good news is, we know how to end homelessness. It is not a mystery.
We solve homelessness through housing—affordable housing. Affordable housing and supports to attend people’s health and well-being.Study after study shows people stay out of homelessness when they have access to permanent housing they can afford.
Our question isn’t what do we do, but where do we find the political will to do it?
The latest omnibus federal funding bill passed by Congress included a13.1 percent increase in Homelessness Assistance Grants, as well as other increases in existing programs. While this increase is promising, it does not meet the need we see across the nation. At the same time, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) released its new strategic plan, “All In,” which sets the goal of reducing unsheltered homelessness by 25 percent by 2025. Focusing both on getting people out of homelessness and preventing them from entering it to begin with, the plan rightly centers equity and focuses on coordination across federal agencies and different levels of government.
While these are promising steps toward focusing on the core issue, it’s not enough.
The scope and depth of funding must be increased on the federal, state and local levels and policies need to be changed to make it easier to build the affordable housing people need and for those in need to access that housing.
On the federal policy level, aside from increasing funding, Congress should pass theHomeless Children and Youth Act, which reforms HUD Homeless Assistance programs by aligning federal definitions of homelessness, allowing children, youth and families access to the services they need. Such a change would make it easier for people experiencing all forms of homelessness, including doubled-up, to access help to prevent them from moving into unsheltered homelessness which increases exposure to extreme weather.
Creating robust local funding is another critical component to creating resiliency. In Chicago, for example, theBring Chicago Home campaign has been working for years to create a local, dedicated funding stream at scale that would create funding for permanent housing and supports, as well as homelessness prevention, that could generate $130 million annually to serve not only the unsheltered homeless—but also those living doubled-up with others. This initiative requires voter approval of a ballot question,but both Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her allies on city council have reportedly blocked the measure. Similar measures have been created in cities and states across the nation.
These are just two examples of where there has apparently not been the political will to enact the proactive policies and funding needed to reduce the scope of future crisis. The best way to ensure people are protected when harm comes is to ensure they aren’t in harm’s way to begin with. For homelessness, we do that by creating affordable housing at scale for people experiencing homelessness in its many forms. If our elected officials focus on practical measures to end homelessness instead of reactive ways to manage it, the next bomb cyclone, polar vortex or extreme winter storm might not be so dangerous and deadly.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
2:00 am. Boink! My eyes pop open. It’s Christmas Eve, but it’s not that I just heard Santa wandering through the house. It’s far more banal: gotta use the bathroom. I crawl out of bed, step bare-assed into… oh my God… a learning experience.
Another one!
The heat was off. The furnace had shut down. And it was below-zero outside—apparently way below zero. The previous day, weather advisories had flowed in: lots of snow, cold as hell. And now here I was, naked in a house that had lost its heat. Uh… now what?
He left me with a space heater, which was capable of heating up about a foot of space in the house, and I spent the rest of Christmas Eve wedged next to it and covered with a blanket, staring at my computer.
Step one, of course, was to complete my intended task: go to the bathroom, which I did. But at 2:00 am, I couldn’t envision any further productive action. I crawled back into bed, pulling the covers around me. I fell back to sleep, returned to the coziness of dreaming, at least for a while. But eventually I got up for real. Getting dressed didn’t stop with putting my clothes on. I also wrapped myself in a winter jacket. Then I called the furnace guys. Problem solved, right?
Well, not exactly. This was Christmas Eve, after all: aka, Saturday, December 24. Turns out people throughout the Chicago area were having furnace problems and initially the person I talked to said she couldn’t schedule an appointment for me till… good God, Monday. But she said she could also put me on a waiting list—if there’s a cancellation or whatever, a technician might be able to work me in.
That was the best I could do, and I was left—winter-bundled in my own house—to ponder with awe how fully I take warmth and comfort for granted. Without warmth and comfort, I’m not free to be bored! I’m not free to be self-indulgent, annoyed, or even depressed, much less opinionated and politically angry. I just stood there shivering and staring into the unknown. Finally (warning: I’m about to reveal how complex my life is, at age 76) I decided that I might as well drive over to Walgreens and pick up the prescription they have waiting for me. I had nothing else to do.
It was on this brief journey, a mile and a half from my house, that I first felt a penetration of awareness—or something. Life amounts to more than just me.
Come on! I already know this. Nonetheless…
I parked my car in the lot, walked 20 feet through the frigid weather to the drugstore, and there was a guy… there was a guy… just sitting on the sidewalk next to the revolving door, a Styrofoam cup in his hand. He needed money on this below-zero day and he was sitting on the sidewalk. My brain swirled in confused empathy. I put a dollar in his cup.
Somehow I felt… what? Connected to his plight? I had been shivering that morning as well. We’re all one? I picked up my prescription and, as l left the store, I dug into my empathy and gave him another five dollars.
That was it. I headed home, beset with a sense of collective guilt. Something big is wrong here, right? Even though I already knew this, my awareness in this moment felt, for God’s sake, different: not merely abstract, but physical.
And shortly after I got home I was informed that a technician was on the way. Wow! Now I felt great. And all that collective guilt vanished as I prepared to reclaim “normalcy.” Alas, it didn’t happen quite that easily. Since this was Christmas Eve, the technician did not have access to the new motor that my furnace needed, and he shrugged: He’d have to come back on Tuesday. And suddenly I was catapulted back into a sense of shivering victimhood.
He left me with a space heater, which was capable of heating up about a foot of space in the house, and I spent the rest of Christmas Eve wedged next to it and covered with a blanket, staring at my computer. Ah, life! That night I stacked about 10 blankets on the bed and crawled in without removing anything except my shoes. The house temperature by then was in the low 40s, but the blankets and multi-layers of clothing kept me warm enough to sleep.
The next day was Christmas. Ta-da! “We wish you an ironic Christmas,” ran the song in my noggin. Because of unusual circumstances, I had no particular plans that day. I had already celebrated an early Christmas in Wisconsin, with my sister and her family, and I was just planning to hang out, surf the Internet, ponder life, and (maybe) write something profound and change the world. I did have one actual plan: to call my daughter, Alison, the artist who lives in Paris. We talked, via FaceTime, and she saw her dad dressed as though he were calling from Antarctica. I tried to make it seem funny—I simply didn’t want anyone to be concerned. But for some reason she was concerned.
And so she called her aunt—my sister-in-law—who a short while later called me and invited me over. Uh… I was momentarily hesitant as I sat wedged next to the space heater, but quickly felt the lure of warmth and normalcy. “Gosh, thanks! I’ll be there.” I packed my toothbrush, some socks, and underwear, whatever, and headed off to Skokie, to the home of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. Apparently, I’m not quite the lone wolf I think of myself as. Their invite began warming me before I felt the heat of their house. And suddenly the irony disappeared from Christmas.
I spent the rest of Christmas and all day Monday being happily part of their lives, then returned home on Tuesday. The technician came a little after 9:00 am, installed the new motor—which was under warranty, so it cost me nothing—and for the rest of the day the house began warming up from 40°F. End of story.
Except… no way is it the end of the story. For instance:
“As people across the country brace for upcoming cold weather, many of those set to suffer the most are incarcerated in prisons and jails,” writes Katie Rose Quandt at Truthout. “Each winter, people in old, drafty facilities shiver for months in their cells, struggling to function and fearing for their health. They have no control over cell temperature, and often little access to warm clothes or extra blankets. Inevitably, some outdated heating systems across the country will fail, leaving people in dangerously frigid temperatures.”
And that’s just one piece of it—men, women, children caught in the lethal cold, caught well beyond their own control, without hope, without space heaters, across the country, at our borders, around the world. I sigh into my own private warmth.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
On the heels of yet another extreme weather event showcasing the inadequacy of the United States’ fossil fuel-dependent energy system, U.S. and North American regulators on Wednesday announced an investigation into power outages during Winter Storm Elliott.
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), and the latter’s six regional entities “will open a joint inquiry into the operations of the bulk power system during the extreme winter weather conditions,” the regulators
revealed in a statement.
More than 1.5 million homes and businesses across the United States lost power last week amid intense rain, snow, wind, and cold temperatures, according toReuters.
“This storm underscores the increasing frequency of significant extreme weather events… and underscores the need for the electric sector to change its planning scenarios and preparations for extreme events.”
“The effects of Winter Storm Elliott demonstrate yet again that our bulk power system is critical to public safety and health,” stressed FERC Chairman Richard Glick. “The joint inquiry with NERC we are announcing today will allow us to dig deeper into exactly what happened so we can further protect the reliability of the grid.”
Referring to the rotating Arctic air that typically circles the North Pole but occasionally shifts south, bringing bitter cold temperatures to swaths of the United States, as the nation endured in recent days, NERC president and CEO Jim Robb said that “there will be multiple lessons learned from last week’s polar vortex that will inform future winter preparations.”
“In addition to the load shedding in Tennessee and the Carolinas, multiple energy emergencies were declared and new demand records were set across the continent. And this was in the early weeks of a projected ‘mild’ winter,” he continued. “This storm underscores the increasing frequency of significant extreme weather events (the fifth major winter event in the last 11 years) and underscores the need for the electric sector to change its planning scenarios and preparations for extreme events.”
In many states, utilities and grid operators only narrowly averted greater disaster by asking customers to conserve their energy or prepare for rolling blackouts (when a utility voluntarily but temporarily shuts down electrical power to avoid the entire system shutting down). Some of the largest operators, including Tennessee Valley Authority, Duke Energy, and National Grid used rolling blackouts throughout the weekend. Texas also barely got through the emergency. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy permitted the state to ignore environmental emissions standards to keep the power on.
[…]
It wasn’t that the country didn’t have enoughgas to go around to meet the high demand. There was plenty of gas, but the infrastructure proved vulnerable to the extreme weather. Enough wells and pipes were frozen or broken to bring the grid to its brink.
“This latest storm shows, yet again, that fossil fuels aren’t especially reliable in extreme weather,” the climate reporter wrote. “Yet so much of energy politics focuses purely on supply—the mining and extraction, and how much oil, gas, and coal is in reserve. It’s often taken for granted that this supply will always be accessible.”
“In the meantime, we’ve failed to build more important infrastructure throughout our energy system; more energy storage, distributed power generation, interconnections across the major power grids, redundancy, and demand response are all needed,” she concluded. “Simply adding more gas or coal to the grid won’t prevent blackouts from happening again in the future.”
\u201cUnreliable fossil fuels failed the US again last week as “natural” gas pipelines froze (again again).\n\nMy neighbors who heat with gas had 200% increases in monthly bills because of shortages caused by a fossil-dictator who invaded Ukraine.\n\nhttps://t.co/m8w56oUm4W\u201d
The nation’s latest deadly winter storm—dozens are confirmed dead and the National Guard is going door-to-door in hard-hit Buffalo, New York, to search for victims—comes amid worldwide demands from climate scientists and activists to rapidly transition from planet-heating fossil fuels to renewable energy, and improve grid resiliency in the process.
On a global scale, campaigners condemned COP27 last month as “another terrible failure” because the climate conference’s final agreement failed to call for phasing out all fossil fuels, which experts warn is necessary to meet the temperature goals of the 2015 Paris accord—and as Common Dreamsreported last week, blowing past those targets, even temporarily, could have dire consequences for all life on Earth.
While U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half, relative to 2005, by the end of the decade, much of his climate agenda has been limited by Congress over the past two years and the incoming Republican-majority House of Representatives is expected to further obstruct the Democratic Party’s priorities—including and especially a transition to a cleaner and more reliable energy system.
Despite the recent blackouts, Angelena Bohman—who received a doctoral degree from Carnegie Mellon University after researching grid resilience—toldThe Hill ‘s Rachel Frazin that the current U.S. system is “fairly resilient,” noting that utilites make improvements in anticipation of extreme weather.
However, improvements also take time, Bohman added, explaining that “many utilities own hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines and if you’re going to upgrade any section of line, you’re doing very small amounts every year and you only have so much money to do that.”
\u201cPower outages have hit so many parts of the U.S. lately amid extreme weather, showing that our system isn’t prepared for this storm\n\nhttps://t.co/FrrWX3WjiN\u201d
Frazin highlighted that one way to better protect transmission lines is to put them underground, but that can be expensive. Bohman told her that though a provision of last year’s bipartisan infrastructure legislation directing $5 billion to improving grid resilience is a “great start,” in terms of what is needed on a national scale, it is a “drop in the bucket.”
While policymakers at all levels of U.S. government fail to address fossil fuel-driven global temperature rise and its devastating effects, such as extreme weather, to the degree that scientists say is needed, and people across the country and beyond suffer as a result, “fossil fuel industry barons win no matter what,” Thom Hartmann wrote Monday.
As the author and progressive radio host put it:
They all know accountability for corporate executive decision-making is nonexistent in today’s America, corrupted as we have been by five conservatives on the Supreme Court legalizing political bribery. And as long as the GOP has anything to say about it, their hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies will never end. When extreme weather hits the U.S.—be it extreme heat in the summer or extreme cold in the winter—more of their product is burned to create electricity and heating/cooling, earning them more profits.
“When weather is ‘normal,’” Hartmann added, “they just go back to bribing climate science deniers and Republican politicians across the nation to block any action to hold them accountable for 60 years of intentional lies.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
A faith-based coalition’s annual report on the economic impact of climate-driven natural disasters revealed Tuesday that each of the costliest extreme weather events of 2022 caused more than $3 billion in damage.
The report—entitled Counting the Cost 2022: A Year of Climate Breakdown—was published by Christian Aid, a London-based relief agency of over 40 U.K. and Irish churches seeking more urgent climate action by Global North nations, which are most responsible for the greenhouse emissions that fuel global heating.
“Without major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, this human and financial toll will only increase.”
The costliest disaster in this year’s report, Hurricane Ian, struck Cuba and the southeastern United States, killing more than 150 people in both countries, causing around $100 billion in damage, and displacing 40,000 people.
Other major natural disasters covered in the report include the floods in Pakistan that killed over 1,700 people while displacing seven million others and causing $30 billion in economic damage, and the European drought and heatwave, which killed more than 1,000 people and cost around $20 billion.
The report’s contributors note that most of the damage estimates are based solely on insured losses and that the true financial cost of each event is likely even higher.
“The number of extreme weather events we have seen across the globe in both 2021 and again in 2022 should be a wake-up call to the international community,” Newcastle University School of Engineering professor Hayley Fowler, who specializes in the impacts of climate change, said in a statement.
\u201cNew Christian Aid report published today shows top 10 most expensive climate events of 2022 – plus 10 other disasters which went under the radar.\n\nHopefully a wake up call for politicians to take urgent climate action in 2023.\n\nhttps://t.co/Uoru68eVGs\u201d
Christian Aid CEO Patrick Watt said that “having 10 separate climate disasters in the last year that each cost more than $3 billion points to the financial cost of inaction on the climate crisis.”
“But behind the dollar figures lie millions of stories of human loss and suffering,” he added. “Without major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, this human and financial toll will only increase.”
Christian Aid said the report underscores the importance of urgent climate action, including the speedy implementation of the loss and damage fund recently agreed upon at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt. Described by proponents as a form of climate reparations, the fund will be financed by wealthy nations in order to help countries of the Global South—which are least responsible for the planetary emergency—mitigate climate impacts.
“The creation of the loss and damage fund at the COP27 climate summit was a huge breakthrough for people living on the frontlines of this crisis. This report shows just how badly it is needed and the urgency with which we need to see it up and running,” said Nushrat Chowdhury, Christian Aid’s climate justice policy adviser in Bangladesh. “The people flooded in Pakistan or victims of Cyclone Sitrang in my country of Bangladesh need this support to rebuild their lives.”
“Many people in the Global South dealing with these disasters cannot afford insurance to cover their losses and they often can’t rely on the state to act as a safety net,” Chowdhury added. “The fact they have done almost nothing to cause the climate emergency is why it is so unfair they are left to suffer without support. We must see that change in 2023.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
William Clay didn’t realize this was the weekend fossil fuel billionaires’ intentional actions would lead to his death, but that’s what happened. He died in Buffalo on his 56th birthday, Christmas Eve, and was found frozen to death about a mile from his house, attempting to walk home from the store. While Buffalo is famous for the intensity of its winter storms, this appears to be worse than…
