My personal experience of this week’s “heat apocalypse” in Europe involved discovering large globs of hot, sticky tar stuck to my leg after I trod in melted asphalt on a mountain road in France on Sunday afternoon: The road that I was walking on had literally begun to melt.
I was standing on the melted road because the heat was so extreme that my car’s engine had overheated, and my kids and I ended up stranded on top of a steep mountain pass in the Pyrenees until a tow truck finally came to tow us down the mountain to a nearby town. Around the continent, roadside assistance agencies predicted spikes in the number of car breakdowns as the thermometer readings headed north.
Meanwhile, others across Europe were facing much more frightening emergencies as fires engulfed swathes of forest in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary and France, and as the extreme heat triggered housefires and wildfires in and around London. Europe is finally waking to the ghastly realities of the climate crisis and the rampant fires that come with it.
Touring the Gironde, a picturesque region in southwestern France hammered by the fires, Macron pledged a “major national project” of reconstruction and called for new rules and prevention plans designed to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.
Europe’s leaders have realized that the continent has got to play catch-up to shore up its infrastructure, and to protect its fire-vulnerable lands from wildfires.
Now, as heat waves become more common and more ferocious in Europe, the continent’s governments (both in national capitals and in Brussels, headquarters of the EU) will also have to adjust upward the amounts they invest in fire prevention services, as well as in firefighting equipment and personnel. It will, inevitably, put a strain on state budgets, and will do so just at the moment when the continent is teetering on the edge of recession and is being battered by stubbornly high inflation.
The human dislocation that the heat caused has also threatened to magnify Europe’s already stark economic woes — its currency in decline against the dollar, inflation running at above 9 percent, its loss of stable supplies of Russian gas and oil. If Europe does fall into a severe recession later this year, no single factor will be to blame; but the hit to the region’s economy brought on by a string of debilitating heat waves will certainly be one of the causes contributing to the malaise.
Heat is something of a relative concept. In California or Texas, in Arizona or Oklahoma, summer temperatures a few degrees north of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (100°F) would barely raise eyebrows. Even higher temperatures, such as the 120°F sometimes reached in Las Vegas, Phoenix or Tucson, don’t tend to do quite the same damage that soaring temperatures inflict in Europe. In the American West, populations are accustomed to such temperatures; and houses, public transport systems, office buildings, entertainment centers, malls and so on are designed to include air conditioning. By contrast, in Europe, most buildings, both public and private, do not have air conditioning; many transit systems are similarly lacking; and populations are woefully unfamiliar with how to navigate extremely hot weather.
Moreover, electricity prices have soared so quickly in Europe this past year that even those with air conditioning have had to think twice before using their systems. Electricity wholesale prices rose more than 400 percent in Spain and Portugal from the winter of 2021 through early 2022, and by more than 300 percent in Greece and France. While not all of that has been passed onto consumers, much has; in the 12 months leading up to March of this year, home energy prices around the EU increased by 41 percent. Since then, as gas and oil prices have soared, they have gone up still higher. Faced with shortages of Russian natural gas, the EU has announced a rationing plan to try to cut usage by 15 percent over the coming months. Vastly increased reliance on air conditioning simply isn’t possible in Europe at the moment, given current energy supply and price conditions.
At Luton airport, just outside of London, outbound flights were canceled and incoming flights had to be diverted after a runway buckled in the heat. Railway tracks around the country also started to fail. Put simply, the U.K.’s infrastructure simply isn’t built to withstand triple-digit temperatures.
For years, European leaders have been at the forefront of global efforts to create meaningful climate change agreements. Yet, despite the strong rhetoric, when push came to shove last week, the continent’s preparedness for extreme weather events was shown to be inadequate. In the U.S., activists are pressuring President Biden to declare a climate emergency. In Europe, where the populace is far more in favor of strong actions to tackle climate change than are Americans, leaders have long realized this is an emergency. Yet the crisis is worsening seemingly by the day. This past week is a preview of just how bad things can get. It’s far past time to tackle this catastrophe with the focus and urgency it so clearly merits.
This storywas originally published by The Guardianandis reproduced here as part of theClimate Deskcollaboration.
The U.K. is no longer a cold country, scientists have said, as climate breakdown means “previously impossible heatwaves are killing people.”
This week temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, have been predicted for the first time by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, but climate models show these weather events are expected to become more common.
Climate scientists have called for the U.K. to quickly adapt to extreme heat or risk thousands of excess deaths.
This includes having a specific heat risk strategy drawn up by the government, updating housing stock and ensuring new builds can cool down in hot weather.
Bob Ward, the policy and communications director at the London School of Economic’s Grantham Institute, said: “The current prime minister has ignored repeated calls to create a national heat risk strategy that would engage all relevant government departments in tackling the growing threat from heatwaves.”
He hit out at commentators and members of parliament who have said those who fear heatwaves are “snowflakes.” Sir John Hayes, the chair of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, said at the weekend that heat warnings were evidence of a “cowardly new world,” adding: “It is not surprising that in snowflake Britain the snowflakes are melting. Thankfully most of us are not snowflakes.”
Ward responded: “In the U.K. media in recent days, some have claimed that the increasing attention being paid to the dangers of heatwaves is a sign of a decline in British resilience. But such displays of callousness about hundreds of preventable deaths simply highlights the challenge we face in dealing with the growing risks from climate change.
“It is time for the U.K. to stop thinking of itself only as a cold country, where any bout of summer sunshine is celebrated as an opportunity for beach visits and ice-creams. Heatwaves are deadly extreme weather events that will grow worse for at least the next 30 years. We must adapt and do a better job of protecting ourselves, particularly those who are most vulnerable to hot weather.”
Scientists have urged governments to work quickly to phase out fossil fuels and reach net zero emissions in order to stop the situation becoming more deadly.
Dr Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute, said: “Climate change is driving this heatwave, just as it is driving every heatwave now. Greenhouse gas emissions, from burning fossil fuels like coal, gas, and oil, are making heatwaves hotter, longer lasting, and more frequent. Heatwaves that used to be rare are now common; heatwaves that used to be impossible are now happening and killing people.
A series of wildfires have broken out across England as the UK heatwave reached record temperatures of 40.3 degrees Celsius.
Cameron Smith / Getty Images
“Heatwaves will keep getting worse until greenhouse gas emissions are halted. The longer it takes the world to reach net zero emissions, the hotter and more dangerous heatwaves will get, and the more common and longer lasting they will be. The only way to stop heat records being broken time and again is to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
Dr Eunice Lo, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol Cabot Institute for the Environment, said: “The climate has warmed since 1976 significantly. We have a record going back to 1884 and the top 10 hottest years have all occurred since 2002.
“Previously unthinkable temperatures are now happening. This hasn’t happened before; it is unprecedented. There is no comparison to 1976 – that record has already been broken in 2019. There is a high chance of breaking this again in the next couple of days. By definition these are new extremes.”
Meteorologists have given the news of the scorching heat with dismay. “We hoped we wouldn’t get to this situation but for the first time ever we are forecasting greater than 40 degrees C in the U.K.,” said Dr Nikos Christidis, a climate attribution scientist at the Met Office.
He added: “Climate change has already influenced the likelihood of temperature extremes in the U.K. The chances of seeing 40 degrees C days in the U.K. could be as much as 10 times more likely in the current climate than under a natural climate unaffected by human influence. The likelihood of exceeding 40 degrees C anywhere in the U.K. in a given year has also been rapidly increasing and, even with current pledges on emissions reductions, such extremes could be taking place every 15 years in the climate of 2100.”
It looks as if the threat of extreme heat will not be over this week. Prof Hannah Cloke, natural hazards researcher at the University of Reading, said: “From what I understand we will hopefully see temperatures dip back down in a couple of days, but there is a risk of temperatures shooting back up in a week or so, which for the U.K. and Europe is very concerning.
“There is a strong risk of further heatwaves across the world for the rest of the summer and we will be watching that very carefully.”
Firefighters don’t normally allude to early English epics, but in a briefing on the massive Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico, a top field chief said, “It’s like Beowulf: it’s not the thing you fear, it is the mother of the thing you fear.” He meant that the flames you face may be terrifying, but scarier yet are the conditions that spawned them, perhaps enabling new flames to erupt behind you with no escape possible. The lesson is a good one and can be taken further. If tinder-dry forests and high winds are the mother of the thing we fear, then climate change is the grandmother.
The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire blazed across 534 square miles of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost extension of the Rockies. Although the fire was the largest in New Mexico’s history, it had competition even as it burned. This spring, the Black Fire, a megafire of nearly equal size, devoured forests in the southern part of the state. The combined area of the two fires is roughly equal to that of Rhode Island, the American standard for landscape disasters on a colossal scale.
Records amassed by the Forest Service indicate that, at the fire’s peak, 27,562 people were evacuated from their homes. Four hundred and thirty-three of those homes were destroyed and more damaged, while an even greater number of barns, garages, sheds, and other outbuildings were also lost. The unquantified property damage, including destroyed power lines, water systems, and other infrastructure, will surely exceed the nearly billion dollars in damages arising from the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, which torched more than 200 residential structures in the city of Los Alamos. Meanwhile, the heartbreak resulting not just from destroyed homes but lost landscapes — arenas of work, play, and spiritual renewal, home in the broadest sense — is immeasurable.
The Hermits Peak fire began April 6th with the escape of a prescribed fire ignited by the U.S. Forest Service in the mountains immediately west of Las Vegas, New Mexico. A few days later and not far away, a second, “sleeper” fire, which the Forest Service had originally ignited in January to burn waste wood from a forest-thinning operation, sprang back to life. It had smoldered undetected through successive snowfalls and the coldest weather of the year. This was the Calf Canyon fire. Driven by unprecedented winds, the two fires soon merged into a single cauldron of flame, which stormed through settled valleys and wild forests alike, sometimes consuming 30,000 acres a day.
The blaze marks a turning point in the lives of all who experienced the fire. It also marks a transformative change in the ecological character of the region and in the turbulent history of the alternately inept and valiant federal agency that both started and fought it.
The Turning of a Climate Tide
Two and a half decades ago, a long-running wet spell came to an end in the Southwest. Reservoirs were full, rivers were meeting water needs, and skiers and irrigators alike gazed with satisfaction on deep mountain snowpacks. The region’s forests were stable, if overgrown.
Then came a dry winter and, on April 26, 1996, an unextinguished campfire in New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains flared into a major conflagration that came to be known as the Dome Fire. I vividly remember the startling whiteness of its mushroom-shaped smoke plume surging into the sky, a sight all the more unnerving because the fire was burning within rifle shot of Los Alamos National Lab, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
It engulfed much of Bandelier National Monument and stunned observers in two ways. The first surprise was that it erupted so early in the year, before fire season should properly have begun. The second was that it grew to what was then considered immense size: 16,516 acres. How times have changed.
The outbreak of the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires, weeks earlier than the Dome, shows yet again that fire season is much longer than it used to be. The size of the burned area speaks for itself. A day when the combined fire consumed only as much land as the Dome did in its entirety sometimes felt like a good day.
Meanwhile, the news on water here in the Southwest is hardly less worrisome. Arizona’s Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, was full in 2000. Today, it’s at 27% of capacity, as is its younger and slightly smaller sibling, Lake Powell, which is also on the Colorado River. Plummeting water levels jeopardize the capacity of both lakes to produce hydroelectricity, which bodes ill for the region’s electrical grid.
On the Rio Grande in New Mexico, Elephant Butte reservoir, the state’s largest, is down to 10% of capacity and New Mexico’s inability to meet its water delivery obligations to Texas reveals the absurdity of interstate water compacts based on outdated assumptions about streamflow.
Then came the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires, both sparked by Forest Service land treatments intended, ironically enough, to reduce the risk of rampant wildfire. Both projects were executed in accordance with the existing management rulebook, but the rules are rooted in a past more stable than the bone-dry, wind-fickle, and imperious present.
Chief Forester Randy Moore, who ordered a review of all actions relating to the prescribed fire that exploded into the Hermits Peak disaster, captured the essence of his agency’s failure this way: “Climate change is leading to conditions on the ground we have never encountered… Fires are outpacing our models, and… we need to better understand how megadrought and climate change are affecting our actions.”
To say that macro conditions have rendered the Forest Service’s procedures obsolete should not obscure the issue of human fallibility. The chief’s review uncovered a host of minor bungles (80 pages worth, in fact) that cumulatively unleashed the catastrophe. The bottom line: setting prescriptive fires is inherently dangerous, and the extremes of heat, dryness, and wind brought on by climate change leave only a razor-thin margin for error.
Being behind the curve of change this time around has been a replay of the agency’s formerly nearsighted view of fire itself. The Forest Service was born in fire. It was a young, struggling agency until the heroics of fighting the “Big Blowup” of 1910 in the northern Rockies established its identity in the national consciousness. PR campaigns exploiting the anti-fire icon of Smokey Bear helped complete its branding.
The agency’s fierce stance against fire in all forms crystallized its identity and mission, while also blinding it to important ecological realities. Many forest systems require periodic doses of “light fire” that burns along the ground consuming underbrush, seedlings, and saplings. In its absence, the forest becomes overcrowded, choked with fuel, and vulnerable to a potentially disastrous “crown fire” that storms through the treetops, killing the entire stand. The ponderosa and “mixed conifer” forests that dominated a large part of the area consumed by the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire were overstocked in exactly that way. The Forest Service rightly deserves criticism for more than a century of all-out fire suppression, which led to unnaturally dense, fuel-heavy forests.
But that’s just one part of the story. Climate change is writing the rest.
The Fire Service
The Southwest is now in the midst of its second-worst drought in the last 1,200 years. Less publicized is the news that, were it not for greenhouse-gas pollution, the current dry spell would be rather ordinary. Nor is the forecast encouraging: given the warming of the regional climate, by perhaps 2050, coniferous forests in the Southwest — the majestic stands of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, Englemann spruce, and subalpine fir that clothe the region’s blue mountains — will be, if not extinct, then rare indeed.
Fire, insects, drought, and outright heat, all driven by rising temperatures, will deliver a flurry of blows to doom the forests. However, it is (if, under the circumstances, I can even use the term) cold comfort to realize that, along the way, the ecological impact of the Forest Service’s misconceived ideology of all-out fire suppression will be — and already is being — erased by the implacable dynamics of a changing climate.
Having recognized its error on fire and having also been weaned by endless litigation from its post-World War II subservience to the timber industry, the Forest Service has attempted to recast itself as the nation’s premier steward of our wild lands. The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, unleashed by the Forest Service itself, appears to have brought that process of reinvention to an inglorious conclusion.
But all is not lost, for the Forest Service is actually two agencies, and only one of them has failed. The portion of the Forest Service committed to day-to-day custodianship of the national forest system may be underfunded, uninspired, and (despite many outstanding individuals in its workforce) poorly led, but its fire-fighting sibling is thriving. Some people call this portion of the agency the Fire Service.
In an era of global warming, fire-fighting is a growth industry and the Fire Service has managed to outfit itself accordingly. It sports the organizational coherence and high morale of a crack military outfit, while possessing equipment and funding to match its mission. Its infantry consists of fire crews recruited across the West that rotate in and out of action like combat troops.
The “armor” of the Fire Service consists of bulldozers, pumper trucks, masticators (that grind trees to pulp), feller-bunchers (that cut and stack trees), and other heavy equipment that clear fire lines scores of miles long. For air support, it commands not just spotter planes, slurry bombers (which douse fires with retardant), and bucket-wielding helicopters, but drones and state-of-the-art “Super Scoopers” that can skim the surface of a lake to fill their capacious cargo tanks with thousands of gallons of water. Then they head for the burning edge of the fire and, assisted by infrared guidance systems, drop their loads where the heat is fiercest.
Like any modern military unit, the Fire Service also uses satellite imagery, advanced communications, and specialists in logistics and intelligence (who predict fire behavior). Against the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, it deployed more than 3,000 personnel around a 648-mile fire periphery. For a time, the nation’s entire fleet of eight Super Scoopers was based at the Santa Fe airport.
You Don’t Need a Weatherman
The trouble with low-altitude air support is that bad weather can keep planes, choppers, and even drones on the ground. In fire-fighting parlance, it’s a “red-flag day” when the weather service issues a red-flag warning (RFW) signaling that winds are strong enough to produce explosive fire behavior. Such a warning also leaves the Fire Service’s air fleet grounded.
In April and May, in the area of our recent fires, more than half the days — 32, to be exact — warranted red flags, a record since such warnings were first counted in 2006. That included nine straight days of RFWs — April 9th to 17th — when the fire-fighting air force was largely grounded and the flames raged.
I remember those blustery days. I live in a village on the west side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The fire was on the east side. Most afternoons, I climbed a ridge to watch its immense smoke plumes boil into the sky. A fire volatilizes the water in the trees and other vegetation it combusts, dry though they may be. The vapor ascends the smoke column, crystallizing to ice as it reaches the frosty altitudes where jetliners fly. There, it condenses into blinding white cottony clouds that dwarf the mountains below them. A terrible sight to behold, those pyrocumulus clouds embody the energy released when our oxygen planet flaunts its power.
Wind may be the most neglected subject in the science of climate change. Nevertheless, it appears that the strength and distribution of wind phenomena may be changing. For example, derechos — massive, dust-filled weather fronts of violent wind — are now materializing in places where they were once little known. In their vehemence and duration, the gales that drove the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire seem to have been no less unusual.
Making People Whole
In multiethnic New Mexico, history and culture color every calamity. The vast majority of the people evacuated from the path of the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire were Hispanic, most of them descendants of families that settled the region prior to its conquest by the United States in the war against Mexico of 1846 to 1848.
The Forest Service arrived relatively late on the scene as the colonizing arm of an Anglo-Protestant government centered 2,000 miles away. It assumed control of mountain expanses that had previously functioned as a de facto commons vital to local farmers and ranchers. Some of the commons were de jure as well, consisting of Spanish and Mexican land grants that were spirited away from their rightful heirs by unscrupulous land speculators, most of them Anglo.
The Forest Service may not have wrenched those lands from the people who owned them, but because many such lands were later incorporated into national forests, the agency inherited the animosity that such dispossession engendered. Restrictions the Forest Service subsequently imposed on grazing, logging, and other uses of the land only added to those bad feelings.
The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon catastrophe has understandably rekindled old resentments. Many of those who lost their homes or other property lacked insurance. (A typical house had been in the family for generations, was never mortgaged, and relied on wood stoves for heat.) Compensation, if it materializes, will have to come from Congress or, failing that, a class-action lawsuit which would grind on for years.
So far, the federal government has provided funding for emergency supplies, shelters, and public safety, but nothing to reimburse individuals for lost property. The four Democrats in New Mexico’s congressional delegation — a fifth member is Republican — have jointly introduced legislation to help the fire’s victims, but its prospects are, at best, unclear and expectations are low since, to state the obvious, the willingness of the Senate to conduct the people’s business is ever more in doubt.
Given that this country has so far done little to protect its citizens from the dangers of climate change, the damage and suffering in northern New Mexico will now show whether it is willing to take the next step and care for the victims of that growing nightmare.
If the Thunder Don’t Getcha…
We prayed for rain to stop the fire and ease the record-breaking dryness. When the rain finally came, it filled us with dread as much as gratitude. Severe burns produce “hydrophobic” soils, which absorb a downpour no better than a parking lot. The resulting floods can be orders of magnitude greater than normal runoff. In addition, sometimes the detritus of the fire — downed trees, mud, ash, and unmoored boulders — mixes into a “debris flow,” a sort of gooey, fast-moving landslide.
Thousands of people living below the fire’s charred slopes now worry for their safety. Already, following a recent cloudburst, the village of Rociada (which means “dew-laden”) was inundated by a flow of hail and ash two feet deep. Like their neighbors throughout the burned area, its residents are likely to be living behind sandbags for years. Many others beyond the fire’s periphery, including the 13,000 residents of Las Vegas, New Mexico, depend on water drawn from valleys now choked with ash. The taste of the fire, both literally and metaphorically, will be with us indefinitely.
And thanks to climate change, there will be plenty more fire. Our dawning new age, shaped by human-wrought conditions, has been called the Anthropocene, but historian Steve Pyne offers yet another name: the Pyrocene, the epoch of fire. This year, it was New Mexico’s turn to burn. Last year, an entire Greek island combusted, along with swaths of Italy, Turkey and large chunks of the Pacific Northwest and California. Fires in Siberia, meanwhile, consumed more forest than all the other areas combined. When it comes to ever more powerful fires, we New Mexicans are hardly alone.
On my side of the mountains, the county sheriff ordered us to prepare to evacuate. Fortunately, the flames halted a few miles away. We never had to leave. But packing our “go” bags and securing our houses now seems to have been a useful dress rehearsal. The drought and winds will be back. A bolt of lightning, a fool with a cigarette, a downed power line, or… goodness knows… the ham-fisted Forest Service will eventually provide the necessary spark, and then our oxygen planet, warmer and drier than ever, will strut its stuff again.
My neighbors and I know that this time we were lucky. We also know our luck can’t last forever. We may have dodged a bullet, but climate change has unlimited ammo.
On Wednesday morning, the punishing heatwave that has roiled western Europe over the last week abated, heading east toward central Europe. The heat broke records across the United Kingdom and France and leaves a path of destruction in its wake: Train tracks and roads in London buckled, homes burned down in what was the city fire service’s “busiest day since the Second World War,” and parts of France and Portugal continued to blaze, forcing thousands to flee.
Extreme heat already inflicts a deadly toll on public health. In Spain and Portugal, where the national high reached 117 degrees, officials have reported more than 1,900 heat-related deaths in the last week — a number sure to rise in the coming weeks. But there’s a dangerous side effect too: air pollution. And as climate change leads to more frequent and severe heatwaves, bouts of bad air quality are exacerbating their health impacts.
On Tuesday, scientists from the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service warned of unhealthy levels of ozone across a large swath of Europe. “The potential impacts of very high ozone pollution on human health can be considerable,” said Mark Parrington, a senior Copernicus scientist, in a release. Ozone can cause a host of respiratory issues, like a sore throat, cough, or asthma attacks, and cardiovascular illness. According to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, it contributes to 1 million premature deaths around the world each year.
Ground-level ozone pollution is not emitted directly to the atmosphere. Rather, it forms when greenhouse gasses and emissions from cars, industrial facilities, and power plants are mixed into a chemical soup, which the sun then bakes into ozone. Heat speeds up those reactions, so ozone levels tend to skyrocket on extremely hot days.
The searing heat and dry conditions also primed southern Europe to burn, and wildfires are still raging across Portugal, Spain, and France. Those blazes also contributed to poor air quality by producing thick plumes of fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5. When people inhale the fine soot, it makes its way deep into the lungs or even the bloodstream, increasing their risk for asthma, heart attacks, and strokes.
When a heatwave settles over a region, the air flow halts and pollutants linger. “The stable and stagnant atmosphere acts as a lid to trap atmospheric pollutants,” said Lorenzo Labrador, a scientist at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, in a briefing last week. “These result in a degradation of air quality and adverse health effects, particularly for vulnerable people,” such as older people, the immuno-compromised, or the homeless.
According to Copernicus, wildfires in Spain have also poured 1.3 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere in the last two months — more than any previous June-July period in the country since 2003.
Joshua Studholme was finishing his doctoral program in physics and math at Lomonosov Moscow State University when his thesis advisor told him a story about Queen Victoria, the monarch who ruled the British Empire for the better part of the 19th century. The queen was walking the grounds at one of her palaces, accompanied by a science advisor, when she noticed that it was raining heavily in one corner of her garden but not at all in another corner. She wondered why that was. “Ever since then, imperial meteorologists have been trying to figure out why extreme rainfall can vary so much,” said Studholme, who is now a researcher at Yale University. “It’s only really now that we’re getting the technology to answer that question.”
Earlier this month, Studholme and three colleagues at Yale published a study that seeks to finetune our understanding of extreme rainfall, now and in the future. They, and other researchers, suspect that the trick to accurately pinpointing the magnitude and frequency of extreme rainfall doesn’t just come down to measuring and tracking rain; it also hinges on the way researchers model climate change.
Climate scientists have long known that global warming increases rainfall, since a hotter atmosphere holds more water vapor. But when the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept into the Northeast in the summer of 2021, they brought the kind of catastrophic rain event experts had predicted would typically occur later this century. Studholme’s study sought to investigate why Ida, and the many other record-breaking rain events that occurred last year across the globe in Europe, China, and other places, seemed to happen ahead of schedule. The question that guided his study wasn’t all that different from Queen Victoria’s query to her science advisor: Why is it raining where it’s raining, and why is it raining so hard in certain places? Luckily in the 21st century we have the know-how — decades of precipitation data and many different types of climate models that can help us predict what the future will look like — to start narrowing down the answers to those questions.
A climate model is a set of mathematical equations that quantify the earth system processes that occur on land, in the atmosphere, and in the ocean, and the external factors, such as greenhouse gases, that affect them. Scientists around the world use dozens of different kinds of models that can be regional or global, fine-grained or coarse, primitive or advanced.
Studholme’s study used climate models to predict how much extreme rain the world will get in the future. But unlike previous studies that averaged all of the available climate models in order to figure out how much rain the planet will get in coming decades, Studholme decided to only use the group of models that predict that climate change will result in an increase in something called precipitation efficiency — how much of a falling raindrop reevaporates into the atmosphere before it hits Earth’s surface. He excluded the models that forecast a decrease, since scientific observations over the past two decades indicate that climate change is leading to an increase in precipitation efficiency. “Sometimes taking the average is a bad idea,” Studholme said. “If you were leaving New York and you wanted to go to Mexico and someone in the back seat said, ‘You’ve got to go South,’ and then another guy goes, ‘You’ve got to go North,’ and you split the difference, you end up in Los Angeles which is not where you wanted to go.”
By focusing on the group of climate models that most realistically simulate the actual physics of raindrops, Studholme’s study found that the average climate model likely underestimates how extreme precipitation will change in response to global warming. It’s possible that there will be a twofold increase in the volume of extreme rainfall in the 21st century compared to what previous studies estimate, he said, which would help explain why the globe is already seeing such intense and unprecedented rainstorms. “So a very significant increase in how much rainfall the atmosphere dumps out on the land every day at its most extreme,” Studholme said.
Chad Thackeray, a climate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in Studholme’s study, said the research was “super interesting and useful” because it identifies relatively small tweaks that climate modelers can make to improve their simulations. In other words, we’re getting closer to successfully using climate models to understand how rain works and how climate change is influencing it.
Thackeray published his own study in April that looks at a related piece of the rain puzzle: how frequent intense rain will become as climate change accelerates. In order to obtain his results, Thackeray also had to weed through climate models to find the simulations that most accurately showed how warming is already influencing precipitation. He found that extreme rainfall will occur about 30 percent more often by the end of the century, compared to how often it happens right now, under a medium-emissions scenario — if humans reduce greenhouse gas emissions to some extent instead of continuing on business as usual.
“There’s a lot of work that’s trying to untangle why climate models developed around the world will give slightly different answers to a question,” Thackeray said. “There’s been a lot of progress in recent decades, but once you get to highly impactful, extreme events that are very rare, we find that there’s still significant uncertainty.” Studholme and Thackeray’s studies get us a couple of steps closer to clearing up that uncertainty. And they both point to the unfortunate reality that rain is going to get more extreme as the planet warms.
The good news is that there are solutions that governments can invest in to protect citizens from flooding, starting right now. Two things lawmakers can do to help people prepare for extreme rainfall is fund initiatives that harden home infrastructure, such as rooftops, and improve drainage systems so that water has somewhere to go instead of pooling when it hits the ground. Though much of the United States is unprepared for extreme flooding events and other climate-related disasters, states are beginning to think seriously about how to become more resilient. And the federal government has been freeing up money for those efforts. The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress last year allocates funding to states to harden transportation infrastructure against climate change, create loan funds for resilience projects, upgrade old sewer systems, and more.
“That’s the silver lining,” Studholme said. “You don’t need a nerd from Silicon Valley to write some AI to solve this problem. We already have the technology to do this.”
A scorching heat wave continues to fuel wildfires across southern Europe and parts of North Africa, resulting in hundreds of heat-related deaths and forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. The record-breaking temperatures come as Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has effectively killed President Biden’s Build Back Better climate legislation after stringing Biden along for 18 months. “It’s appalling, but it’s not unexpected. It’s why we have to keep building movements bigger,” says Bill McKibben, climate author, educator, environmentalist and founder of the organizations Third Act and 350.org.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:Bill McKibben, I also want to ask you about the scorching heat wave that continues to fuel wildfires across southern Europe and parts of North Africa. In France, thousands have been forced to evacuate fires that have scorched over 22,000 acres. Meanwhile, the governments of Spain and Portugal said hundreds of people died from heat-related causes during the second week of July. In the United Kingdom, the British government has issued its first-ever “Red” extreme heat national severe weather warning, with forecasters predicting high temperatures will top 40 degrees Celsius, 105 degrees Fahrenheit, for the first time ever.
This coming as last week West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin told Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill he will not support legislation to combat the climate emergency or any tax increases on the wealthy and large corporations. The youth-led climate justice group Sunrise Movement called Manchin’s decision “nothing short of a death sentence.” And you tweeted in response, “Manchin has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in DC. And the return on that investment has been enormous. Big Oil got its money worth a thousand times over.”
Talk more about what’s happening in the world with these scorching heat waves, and what the U.S. is not doing about it.
BILLMcKIBBEN:Well, let’s talk first about the heat. Britain has the longest temperature record in the world. People have been looking at thermometers there longer than they have any other part of the planet. And the temperatures we’re seeing today and tomorrow in Britain are going to smash those records, not even just beat them by a tenth of a degree but by a full 1 or 2 degrees Celsius, 3 or 4 degrees Fahrenheit. That shouldn’t be statistically possible, but it is, because we’re living on a different world than those old thermometers were on.
The scariest thing, really, about what’s happening this week, not just in Europe, but also in China, where there’s an extraordinary heat wave underway, and also across much of the U.S. — the temperature is going to be 104 in Minneapolis today, I think — the scariest thing is, we’re in the middle of a La Niña, a cold cycle on this planet. As you know, we break new global temperature records normally when we’re in an El Niño phase in the Pacific, but June, last month, was the hottest June ever recorded on Earth. When we next have an El Niño, the numbers are going to be just completely off the charts. This is very, very scary.
And what makes it scarier, as you point out, is the lack of a real political response from most places around the world, the U.S. in particular. Joe Manchin choosing this moment to sabotage finally the climate legislation that the president had put forward is particularly galling. This is the third time in the last 30 years that the U.S. Congress has considered serious climate legislation — the Kyoto stuff back in the 1990s, the cap-and-trade stuff in 2009, 2010, and now this Build Back Better bill, that groups like the Sunrise Movement had fought for years to get through.
I’m afraid that, in retrospect, it’s pretty clear Manchin was going to do this all along. You remember that leaked secret hidden videotape that came out last year, where Exxon’s chief lobbyist described Manchin as their “kingmaker” and said that they met with him every week to discuss policy. It’s pretty clear how those meetings have been going. He’s played this very well by stringing it out all these many, many months, 18 months. He’s kept the Biden administration from being able to take executive action for fear of offending him. It’s appalling, but it’s not unexpected. It’s why we have to keep building movements bigger. We need more pressure on this system in order to make change, or we’re going to be stuck just where we are.
The one upside? We know, and we get more confirmation with each passing week, that renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. There was an auction last week in the United Kingdom for new tenders for electricity provision. And the cost of offshore wind was coming in at one-quarter the price of burning gas to produce electricity.
We can do this. We can get out of a world where we have to go kowtow, fist-bump the idiot king of Saudi Arabia. We can do it, but only if we’re willing to make the effort that Joe Manchin has kept us from making this week.
AMYGOODMAN:Let’s name some names. I’m looking at aPoliticopiecethat talks about where Senator Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, you know, the top recipient of oil and gas funds, gets his money. Last quarter’s campaign finance data shows the trend is continuing. “The senator received donations from executives at Georgia Power, including the utility’sCFOAaron Abramovitz, and from Dominion EnergyCEORobert Blue. Energy services firm Concord EnergyCEOMatthew Flavin gave Manchin the maximum allowable amount of $5,800, as did Southern Company GasCEOKim Greene and Harvest MidstreamCEOJason Rebrook. Southern Company’s chair andCEOChris Cummiskey gave Manchin $2,000, while three other company executives gave at least $1,000. An in-house lobbyist for the company donated $1,000 as well. Kara G. Moriarty, president of the Alaska Oil & Gas Association, gave $1,000, too, along with two executives from the energy storage company Form Energy.”
And it goes on: “Manchin also took in more than $19,000 from political action committees belonging to fossil fuel or energy companies and their trade groups, including the Coterra Energy, NextEra Energy, North American Coal Corp., the American Exploration & Production Council’sPAC. The PACs for private equity giant the Carlyle Group and AT&T contributed $10,000 and $5,000, respectively.” Your response, Bill?
BILLMcKIBBEN:You know what’s pathetic? It’s pathetic how cheap it is to buy these guys. So, you know, for a few hundred thousand dollars, you can afford a senator, and he is able to put the kibosh on hundreds of billions of dollars in renewable energy spending. The list you just read is a list of all the people who don’t want the status quo to change, who want to slow down that change as much as they can. That’s what they are paying for, and that’s what they got, man. This was money well spent, from their point of view.
AMYGOODMAN:António Guterres said today, the U.N. secretary-general, “Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction. … We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.” Bill McKibben, your final comments on this?
BILLMcKIBBEN:Guterres has actually been a hero, and he’s exactly right. And it’s not that hard. Look, there’s four big banks that are the big funders to the fossil fuel industry. They’re all American. That’s why at Third Act we’re working so hard to try and cut off that flow of funding to the fossil fuel industry. There’s a handful of people who are keeping us on a path toward existential destruction, and we have got to stand up to them, and we’ve got to do it now.
AMYGOODMAN:Your final comment about Saudi Arabia and other countries the U.S. is relying on to increase oil production, when in fact, actually, now gas prices are dropping, but, more importantly, it looks like these oil companies — while people think it’s because there’s a lack of oil and gas, it’s that they’re using this moment, this opportunity, this war in Ukraine — these corporations — to gouge consumers and are making more than they ever have in their history?
BILLMcKIBBEN:If you don’t like the oil companies — and, man, you should not like the oil companies — if you don’t like the Saudis — and I sure don’t — we need e-bikes, e-buses, electric vehicles. The day that we’ve got a bunch of them on the road is the day that we can tell these guys to go take a jump in the lake.
AMYGOODMAN:Bill McKibben, author, educator, environmentalist, founder of Third Act, organizing people over 60 for progressive change, also founder of350.org, we’ll link to yourpieceinThe New Yorker, “If Egypt Won’t Free Alaa Abd El-Fattah, It Had Better Brace for an Angry Climate Conference.” His book is just out,The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
Next up, as Republican-led states move to ban nearly all abortions since the U.S. Supreme Court overturnedRoe, we’ll speak with Laura Hazard Owen, editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University about how “Unimaginable abortion stories will become more common. Is American journalism ready?” Stay with us.
Record-breaking heat has killed over 1,000 people in Western Europe over the past week, while firefighters battle to contain blazes scorching swathes of three countries amid a worsening climate emergency, officials said this weekend.
El Paísreportsheat killed 360 people in Spain between July 10 and July 15. This follows the heat-related deaths of more than 800 people last month, according to the Spanish government’s Carlos III Health Institute. Madrid-Barajas International Airportrecordedan all-time high temperature of 108°F Thursday, while some Spanish municipalitiesregisteredhighs of 110°F to 113°F.
One 60-year-old Madrid sanitation worker collapsed in the middle of the street while working Friday. The man was rushed to the hospital with a body temperature of over 106°F and died of heat stroke. He was one of 123 people who suffered heat-related deaths Friday in Spain.
In drought-ravaged Portugal, where temperaturessoaredto over 116° in Pinhão on Friday, the Health MinistrysaidSaturday that 659 people, most of them elderly, have died from heat-related causes over the past week.
For the first time 40C has been forecast in the UK and the Met Office has issued the first ever ‘red alert.’
Experts have praised this warning for jolting the public’s understanding of next week’s event, from day at the beach to unnatural disaster.https://t.co/baSWWmsGsV
In Britain, the U.K. Met Office on Fridayissuedits first-ever Red Extreme heat warning for Monday and Tuesday, when an “exceptional hot spell” is expected to hit the country.
AccuWeathersenior meteorologist Tyler Royssaid“there is concern that this heat could become a long-duration heatwave” lasting into August in places including “the valleys of Hungary, eastern Croatia, eastern Bosnia, Serbia, southern Romania, and northern Bulgaria.”
Parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are alsosufferingheatwaves and wildfires.
Meanwhile, more than 10,000 people in France, Spain, and Portugal have been evacuated as firefighters battle out-of-control wildfires burning throughout parts of those countries. More than half of Portugal is on red alert status as firefighterswork to contain14 separate conflagrations.
Hungary, Croatia, and the Greek island of Crete have also fought wildfires this week, as have Morocco and California. Italy is in the midst of an early summer heatwave, coupled with the worst drought in its north in 70 years—conditions linked to a recent disaster, when a huge chunk of the Marmolada glacier broke loose, killing several hikers.
Scorching temperatures have even reached northern Europe. An annual four-day walking event in the Dutch city of Nijmegen announced Sunday that it would cancel the first day, scheduled for Tuesday, when temperatures are expected to peak at around 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit).
Studies haveshownthat the human-driven climate emergency is increasing the frequency and severity of heatwaves.
Last year, Congress allocated $3.5 billion over five years to a little-known federal program designed to help low-income households pay for energy efficiency upgrades like attic insulation, new windows, and energy-saving appliances.
Called the Weatherization Assistance Program, or WAP, it’s one of the best tools the Biden administration has at its disposal to lower carbon emissions while investing in underserved communities. WAP has historically been funded at a few hundred million dollars per year, serving only about 0.2 percent of low-income households annually, by one estimate. So a new average of $700 million per year is a big deal.
But funding isn’t the only factor preventing WAP from reaching more people. The program has a fundamental flaw. Many homeowners who are eligible for WAP upgrades based on their income are ultimately turned away by program administrators, or “deferred,” told that their homes require repairs before any energy efficiency improvements can be made — repairs they often can’t afford.
“Deferrals are a significant problem for equity, because the households that could stand to benefit the most are not able to access a significant source of federal funding,” said Gabriel Chan, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Minnesota. Plus, the conditions that cause deferrals — plumbing problems, asbestos, and leaking roofs, to name a few — “layer health burdens on top of energy burdens,” he said.
A new program in Pennsylvania aims to address the issue. Earlier this month, the legislature voted to create a $125 million Whole Home Repairs Program as part of the state budget. In addition to paying directly for new roofs, septic systems, and other structural repairs, the money will go toward building up the state’s administrative capacity to help people apply to the program and developing the skilled workforce available to do the repair and weatherization work. It was a rare win for progressive Pennsylvania Democrats, who secured bipartisan support in the Republican-controlled legislature.
“The issue cuts across geographies and partisan lines,” said Nikil Saval, the first-term state senator from Philadelphia who spearheaded the policy. “Virtually all of the legislators I talked to, Democratic or Republican, recognize the issue in their districts.”
The issue isn’t just lack of access to energy efficiency funding. It’s an aging housing stock, with homes falling into disrepair, which can lead to abandonment, which can contribute to the collapse of communities.
Health and safety issues have also been exacerbated by the increase in extreme weather due to climate change. Saval’s program garnered support from community organizers like Angelo Ortega, an Allentown, Pennsylvania, resident whose house suffered damages when the remnants of Hurricane Ida blew through last year. He had just moved into his mother’s house to take care of her after an injury and was supposed to stay in the finished basement, but it flooded during the storm. Almost a year later, he and his mother, who suffers from asthma, are still trying to manage problems with mildew and can’t afford the work required to prevent future flooding. Friends of his in the community are in need of major roof repairs.
Ortega is a member of Make the Road Pennsylvania, a grassroots organization that advocates for working-class Latino communities. He said once Make the Road started spreading the word about Saval’s Whole Home Repairs proposal, a lot more people began showing up at their biweekly meetings, and Ortega learned how widespread the need for the program was.
“We didn’t know that there were so many persons with problems with their roofs, water decay, and persons with similar situations like myself with the basement flooding,” he told Grist. “It was an all-out expense for some of them.”
According to the most recent U.S. Census American Housing Survey, some 280,000 homes in Pennsylvania lack adequate plumbing, heating, or electricity, or have physical deficiencies like leaky roofs or pipes. But it’s unclear how many homeowners get deferred from the weatherization program — neither the Department of Energy nor the state collects data on how many people apply to the program or how many are turned away. The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the state agency that distributes WAP funding, recently surveyed the local agencies that actually implement the program to get a sense of how many homes were being deferred and came up with an estimate of 36 percent.
Better data could be on the way. The U.S. Department of Energy recently told NPR that it aims to begin tracking deferrals in spring 2023. However, the agency’s instructions to states, tribes, and territories for 2022 says that tracking deferrals is optional.
Saval’s Whole Home Repairs Program isn’t the first aimed at addressing the issue. Vermont has a “zero deferral” policy, scraping together funds from different sources to pay for repairs. Since 2016, Delaware has run a “Pre-Weatherization” program that’s funded by proceeds from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a partnership between several Eastern states that forces power plant operators to buy permits to pollute.
Steve Luxton, the CEO of the Energy Coordinating Agency, a nonprofit that’s responsible for administering WAP in Delaware and Philadelphia, said the former’s Pre-Weatherization program is “as good as it could possibly get, to be honest with you.” Luxton estimates that in both places, close to 50 percent of eligible applicants are deferred due to structural issues. “In this case, rather than saying, ‘Well, I got bad news for you,’ we just let them know that you’ve got this issue. They don’t have to fill out documents or anything, we can take most of the information we already have and pretty much do what we have to do.”
The challenge for Pennsylvania, and for many of these other programs, is finding a stable source of funding. Both Pennsylvania and Connecticut’s programs are backed by grants from the American Rescue Plan Act, the COVID-19 stimulus package Congress passed last year.
“We will need to find a recurring source of funding, because this is one-time dollars,” said Saval.
Vicious heat waves are sweeping parts of the globe this week, along with the dangers that come with blazing-hot temperatures: wildfires, dehydration, and even death. The hot weather could also push prices up for food, making inflation even worse.
Western Europe is facing sweltering temperatures again this week, with the thermostat hovering around 110 degrees in Seville in southern Spain. More than 20 wildfires are burning in Spain and Portugal, and persistent drought has left rivers and reservoirs running so low that they’re exposing ancient artifacts.
In Italy, the hot and dry conditions are expected to destroy a third of the seasonal harvest of rice, corn, and animal fodder — at a minimum. Locusts have descended on the island of Sardinia in the worst invasion in three decades, hurting the production of hay and alfalfa. The European Commission recently downgraded its soft-wheat harvest estimates from 130 million tons to 125 million tons — more bad news amid a food shortage precipitated by Russia’s blockade on exports from Ukraine. (Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s biggest exporters of grain.)
Across the world in China, a record-breaking heat wave is causing major problems. Roofs are melting, residents are relocating to public cooling zones in underground air-raid shelters, and health workers are strapping frozen food to their too-hot hazmat suits. The Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo has warned that the heat could further hurt the production of corn and soy, worsening inflation. These crops are used to feed pigs, and early-season failures have already sent the price of pork, China’s staple meat, soaring.
When major crops wither, it can have knock-on effects across the ocean and show up on your grocery bill. Inflation has been climbing in the United States at the highest rate in 40 years, up 9.1 percent over the past 12 months, much of it the result of spiking food and energy prices. The surge has been egged on by the pandemic-beleaguered supply chain and by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But climate change is becoming a driver of inflation, too. Experts are warning that heat, flooding, drought, wildfires, and other disasters have been wreaking economic havoc, with worse to come.
“If we wish to control inflation, we must address climate change now,” David A. Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown, recently argued in The Hill. Beyond crops, the changing climate has driven up the price of lumber as well as insurance premiums.
“Heatflation” might already have something to do with escalating food costs around the world. A heat wave in India this spring devastated wheat plants, leading it to ban exports. In the United States last year, searing heat and drought in the Great Plains scorched the wheat crop and also enabled wheat-munching grasshopper populations to flourish. The grain’s price nearly doubled to $10.17 a bushel, its highest level since 2008. Extreme temperatures endanger livestock, too: The heat wave that struck much of the country last month caused thousands of cattle to die of heat stress in Kansas.
“We all know our grocery bills are going up,” Bob Keefe, the author of the book Climatenomics, told me last month. “Part of the reason is that when you lose crops to storms or drought or flooding, prices are going to go up.”
In a report last year, researchers at the European Central Bank examined the evidence that abnormal temperatures can drive inflation. Looking at seasonal temperatures and price indicators in 48 countries, they found that hot summers had “by far the largest and longest-lasting impact” on food prices. The effect lasted almost a year and was especially noticeable in developing countries. “We find that higher temperatures over recent decades have played a non-negligible role in driving price developments,” the authors concluded.
While climate action and economic concerns are often pitted against one another, the evidence is piling up that in many cases, they are one and the same.
The result wasn’t in line with what most Americans want, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center released on Thursday. Seventy-two percent of people polled before the ruling approved of requiring power companies to use more energy from renewable sources like wind and solar. About half of Republicans hold views at odds with the conservative court’s decision.
The poll suggests that there’s broad support for doing something to try to alleviate the climate crisis, though Republicans don’t appear to like what President Joe Biden has done so far. According to Pew, 90 percent of Americans are in favor of planting a trillion trees to absorb carbon emissions, and 79 percent support giving tax credits to businesses to encourage them to develop technology to capture carbon and store it — including a strong majority of Republicans. “You can still find common ground on ways to achieve some of these goals,” said Cary Funk, director of science and society research at Pew Research Center and a co-author of the new report.
Even with that consensus on what should be done, the partisan divide that pervades U.S. politics shows up in the survey, particularly when it comes to Biden, who assumed office at the start of 2021 promising to tackle climate change. Seventy-nine percent of Democrats said the administration’s climate policies were taking the country in the right direction; 82 percent of Republicans thought it was the wrong direction.
Despite this polarization, the Pew poll finds that people of all stripes are finally connecting the dots between climate change and the strange weather around them. Most Americans (71 percent) said that their community has experienced at least one form of extreme weather in the past year, including intense storms and floods, heat waves, droughts, major wildfires, or rising seas. Of those who said they’d lived through sweltering temperatures last year, a full 91 percent thought that climate change contributed at least a bit.
Extreme weather has become hard to ignore. Last September, a survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found substantial increases in the public’s awareness of climate change over the course of the year. For the first time, more than half of Americans said they’d personally experienced the effects of global warming, jumping 10 percentage points from six months earlier.
“That was really the biggest increase in all those measures that we’ve ever seen in the entire 15-year record,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of Yale’s program.
He attributes the change to a couple of factors: One, 2021 was a brutal year for extreme weather — remember the unprecedented 100-degree-plus heat wave that broiled the Pacific Northwest for days in late June? And two, more news articles are pointing to climate change as an explanation for these types of events. “Many people just are not going to automatically make that connection on their own,” Leiserowitz said. He thinks that seasonality is starting to affect polling, too: People may be worried about climate change when recent hot-weather disasters like heat waves, hurricanes, and wildfires are still top of mind.
The Pew survey suggests perceptions about the weather can be influenced by political affiliation, too. Democrats were 25 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say that their community experienced long periods of unusually hot weather, for example. This effect was less pronounced for drought and wildfires, which saw gaps of 7 and 5 percent, respectively.
“People’s perceptions of these events can reflect both kind of what’s happening in their communities as well as … their partisan lens,” Funk said. This is in line with previous research that suggests that climate change has become so politicized that it can actually affect how Democrats and Republicans experience the weather. So much for one of the few remaining realms of small talk.
The United States has caused more damage to global economies than any other nation by burning fossil fuels, causing $1.9 trillion in lost gross domestic product between 1990 and 2014, according to a new study released Tuesday by Dartmouth College.
Environmental advocates have warned for years that greenhouse gas emissions from wealthy nations are triggering devastating climate impacts like droughts, heat waves, floods, and hurricanes, leading to income losses in poorer countries. But the Dartmouth researchers put a number to that assertion, finding that the five largest emitters – the U.S., China, Russia, India, and Brazil – collectively caused $6 trillion in losses worldwide, or about 14 percent of annual global GDP, over the study’s quarter-century period.
The greatest damage has come from the U.S. and China, the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Together, the two countries have caused $3.74 trillion in income losses, nearly a third of the total damage calculated. Russia, India, and Brazil each caused more than $500 billion in losses. While the European Union is normally counted as one bloc when adding up emissions, this study considered each country separately, placing nations like Germany further down the list. The study was published in the journal Climatic Change.
Overall, the greatest losses have come from countries located in the Southern Hemisphere. Nations like low-lying Bangladesh, where floods accelerated by global warming have “severely affected” more than 7.2 million people so far this summer, have contributed the least to climate change, the researchers said, but are paying the greatest price.
“The responsibility for the warming rests primarily with a handful of major emitters, and this warming has resulted in the enrichment of a few wealthy countries at the expense of the poorest people in the world,” Justin Mankin, an assistant professor of geography and one of the study’s co-authors, said in a press release.
While the numbers are startling, they may actually be on the low end. The research did not factor in the value of biodiversity, the psychological benefits of nature, cultural connections to the environment, and other costs that aren’t reflected in market-based measures like GDP. A UN report released Monday urged countries to consider these aspects of their relationship with the environment rather than focusing purely on economic indicators.
Generally, wealthier and more northern nations have slightly benefited from climate change, Mankin said. Although Canada, Russia, and Scandinavian countries have faced wildfires and melting permafrost, they’ve also experienced longer growing seasons and increased agricultural yields as a result of warming temperatures.
As the divide between regions’ vulnerabilities became apparent in recent years, countries like the U.S., Germany, and France pledged to help finance adaptation measures for the parts of the world that face the greatest risk. But the funds have been slow to arrive, despite a 2009 pledge to provide $100 billion annually starting in 2020.
The study’s new figures, however, could help push that initiative along at November’s COP27 meeting in Egypt. Nations are slated to discuss “loss and damage,” a controversial effort to get the U.S. and other wealthy countries to sufficiently pay for that destruction. Though attempts to create a legal framework for loss and damage payments have stalled at previous global climate talks, a coalition of youth activists recently urged the COP27 president to make them a priority.
“For far too long, efforts to reduce emissions and scale up adaptation have been utterly inadequate[,] exceeding people’s ability to adapt,” the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition wrote in an open letter in June. “Therefore, loss and damage is now part of the reality of climate change and must be addressed.”
An unusually early and intense summer heat wave hit many parts of Europe this past weekend. The heat wave sent temperatures soaring to as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit above normal temperatures for this time of year. That’s especially concerning given that Europe is also experiencing an energy crisis, driving up the costs – and potentially the carbon emissions – associated with staying cool.
This heat wave which started last month is likely to crack temperature records in parts of France, Britain, Portugal and Spain – where temperatures could reach up to 113 degrees Fahrenheit. And cooler temperatures probably aren’t coming anytime soon: Greg Dewhurst, a meteorologist at the UK Met Office, noted that this heat wave will “continue for at least another week or two.”
While it’s too soon to say whether this particular heat wave is directly caused by climate change, scientists have linked rising greenhouse gases to lower summertime precipitation in parts of Europe. Climate change has also been linked to higher nighttime temperatures, making it especially hard for people to find respite during heat waves that span several days.
When temperatures hover around 90 degrees Fahrenheit for several days in a row, it can put a strain on electrical grids. The increased demand for air conditioning, especially in countries that seldom need it, is already resulting in a sharp increase in energy prices throughout Europe. In Britain last Friday, for example, day-ahead power prices, or the price of power set the day before the electricity is actually used, increased to their highest values in over two months. Extreme heat can also make it harder to produce certain forms of energy. Italy has grappled with drought conditions due to rapidly evaporating glacial melt, reducing the levels of rivers and reservoirs needed for hydropower.
“They have very little water to produce with,” said Silje Eriksen Holmen, a hydrologist at Volue. “There’s no end to it that we can see in the forecast.”
The heatwave may also hurt nuclear energy production in countries like France. Without enough river water to cool down nuclear operations, electric utility companies like Electricite de France SA might be forced to reduce energy production.
These energy struggles come just as many European countries have enacted embargoes on Russian natural gas. As a result of the war in Ukraine, natural gas prices have spiked as much as 700 percent. Even before the heat wave, some countries were considering planned blackouts and others had turned to coal power to close the gap between production and demand.
When storms like last year’s Hurricane Ida come barreling toward the mainland U.S., the first thing they often strike are barrier islands: wisps of land that run parallel to the shore, shielding the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Around the world, they can be found protecting some 10 percent of the planet’s shores, from the Venetian Lagoon to Brisbane’s Moreton Bay. But a new study suggests they will start retreating faster toward the mainland as a delayed effect of sea level rise — diminishing their ability to protect coastlines from storms.
The fate of barrier islands like Alabama’s Dauphin Island and New York’s Fire Island is important for all coastal residents, even if they don’t live on them. Barrier islands shield the mainland from hurricanes, waves, erosion, and flooding, taking the brunt of a storm’s early blows. Without them, experts say hurricane damage to towns and cities inland would be even worse. Last year, Louisiana’s Grand Isle, the state’s only inhabited barrier island, faced Hurricane Ida head-on. Nearly half the homes there were demolished, and no structure was left untouched.
“These findings can be applied all over the world, but they may be particularly significant in the U.S., where houses are being built extremely close to the beach,” said Giulio Mariotti, a coastal scientist at Louisiana State University and lead author of the study, in a release. Previous studies have estimated that 13 million Americans could be displaced by rising seas, and $1 trillion worth of coastal real estate could be flooded by the end of the century. In May, a viral video of a stilted vacation house on a barrier island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks offered a picture of Americans’ precarious existence on the coast when it collapsed into the ocean.
The scientists created a model based on measurements from a string of islands off the Virginia coast. The islands are uninhabited, so they’re useful for studying a system free of common interventions like sea walls or jetties. Even though climate change has accelerated sea level rise over the past century, the Virginia islands have experienced little change to how fast they migrate, meaning they erode and build up sand in different places, leading them to shift location over time. The model shows that won’t always be the case.
As the seas modestly rose over the last 5,000 years, they created a vast reserve of sand and muck across the coast. Over the last century, storms and tides have devoured that sediment, clearing the way for barrier islands to shift gears. Now that the reserve has been depleted, the scientists expect rising sea levels will hasten the islands’ movements. Even in the unlikely case that the pace of sea level rise remains the same, scientists predict the rate at which the Virginia islands retreat will accelerate by 50 percent — from 16.5 feet per year to 23 feet — in the next century. If the seas keep rising, as experts expect they will, the islands would get pushed even closer to shore, leaving coastal communities even more vulnerable.
“This study shows that what we are seeing out there today is only a hint of what’s to come given increasing rates of sea level rise, and what is likely in store for developed islands globally,” said Christopher Hein, a co-author of the study and coastal geologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
The scientists noted their prediction may be conservative, since their model doesn’t account for the strength and frequency of storms, both of which hurry barrier islands toward the mainland.
Lloyd Arthur can run his hand through the soil at his cotton farm and know what kind of year he’s going to have. His dry, cracked field is making him think this could be a repeat of one of the state’s worst years.
“We can’t outfox what Mother Nature sends us,” said Arthur, whose farm is about 30 miles outside of Lubbock. “2022 has been one for the record books. We’ve always compared years to 2011, as far as droughts and whatnot, but 2022 is worse. We don’t have any underground moisture.”
According to the United States Drought Monitor, more than 80 percent of Texas has been facing drought conditions most of the year, and some areas for much longer. Prolonged drought can lead to crop loss, heat stress, and limited feed availability for livestock, as well as increased risk of wildfires.
An irrigation system on a farm field near the High Plains town of Ralls, about 30 miles east of Lubbock, on June 22, 2022.
Trace Thomas for The Texas Tribune
The drought has been affecting West Texas since last August. There has been some rainfall in recent weeks, but not enough. After receiving about three inches of rain in May, Ralls saw less than an inch in May, a big difference from the two inches of rain the area receives on average in June.
“Planting time came and we got a few rains, but they were short-lived rain events,” Arthur said. “It kind of gave us a little false hope. We were so dry, with no moisture underneath, that a lot of the rain did run off.”
Arthur said there is still a chance for a decent crop this year — there are areas of his farm where crops are standing, including a little area on his dryland patch. He uses an app to monitor where he should focus his irrigation, but he is still wary of investing in a crop that may not make it past the summer.
“At this point, we’re at triple digits, 20-miles-per-hour winds with humidity — there’s no way this crop can sustain this much longer,” Arthur said. “All of my irrigated [crop], in the heat the last few days that we’ve had, is stressed. We do have some places that look good, but only Mother Nature and time will tell what’s going to happen with that.”
New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows there is a reason for Texans to be concerned about the weather this year: May of this year tied for the warmest May on record in the state, along with May 2018.
The early heat was followed by more drought, which has led officials to say this year could be as bad as, if not worse than, the historic 2011 drought — the driest year on record for Texas that caused billions of dollars in losses. According to Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, the total cost of crop and livestock losses was estimated at $7.62 billion. This was due to low crop yields, increased use of water irrigation systems, and loss of pastures.
“It’s a valid fear right now,” said Victor Murphy, climate service program manager for NOAA. “I’ve been holding off saying that for a while, because parts of the state had good rainfall in May. But seeing June be as dry as it’s been, we’re actually running ahead of 2011 right now.”
The drought is widespread in West Texas. According to Murphy, Midland had its driest period on record from September 2021 to May 31, when it received only 8 percent of its normal rainfall. The second-driest was in 2011.
In the same time period, Lubbock has experienced its seventh-driest time on record overall, but the driest since 2011. Lubbock also had six days reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher from March through May — tying for the third-highest number of 100-degree F days in those months in Lubbock’s records, going back to 1914.
Murphy said when dry conditions combine with heat, it creates a feedback cycle that can be hard to get out of. The cycle can evaporate precipitation before it can reach the soil, causing a critical impact on agriculture. Murphy said dryland crops would not be able to survive and would need irrigation.
“If you go long enough without any rainfall, the ground becomes bone dry,” Murphy said. “So whatever heat comes down, it just radiates back up. I think the state of Texas as a whole right now is very susceptible to that, and that’s what happened in 2011 too.”
The feedback cycle is part of why the soil at Arthur’s farm in Ralls couldn’t retain the rainfall. There was enough rain to get this year’s cotton crop started, including some of his dryland crop which is not irrigated and dependent on rainfall. However, he’s not sure if it can make it through a dry summer, with high temperatures causing water loss, even with irrigation.
“We lose a lot of valuable irrigation water to evaporation here in a normal year,” Arthur explained. “With this dry heat and low humidity, we’ll lose even more than that. So that’s where I’m going to be cautious and go by a field-by-field basis.”
A farm irrigation system on a High Plains farm near Ralls, a small town in Crosby County about 30 miles east of Lubbock.
Trace Thomas for The Texas Tribune
The harsh weather conditions could cause major hiccups for the region’s highest cash crop. According to Plains Cotton Growers, the Texas High Plains area produces about 66 percent of the state’s cotton and cottonseed, and about 30 percent for the U.S.
Arthur said he and many other producers in the region depended on crop insurance after the 2011 drought. Crop insurance covers crop losses caused by natural events, including drought and destructive weather. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than $1.65 billion covered the losses in 2011, with much of that being distributed in West Texas.
Even with the insurance, it took a long time to recover from 2011. Arthur is worried it could be the same way this year, especially as inputs like fertilizer, water pumping and seed are higher from inflation.
“We had to rely on crop insurance, but 2012 and 2013 were not much better, we didn’t really start having a normal rainfall until the 2014 crop,” Arthur explained. “But now, we started off the year with no moisture, and our expenses are way larger. Some of our inputs have doubled and even tripled, so there’s going to be a larger expense for irrigation with those fuel costs and because we’re facing inflation. So people will be evaluating the cost.”
In the Panhandle, producers are already weighing their options when it comes to replanting lost acres. According to NOAA, the Amarillo area was on track to have its third-driest year on record until it had rainfall in early June. However, the rainfall was too intense for budding crops.
“Many of the recent rainfall events brought hail, so we have tens of thousands of acres that have been hailed out. It’s almost a Catch-22,” said Jourdan Bell, an agronomist for Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Center at Amarillo. “Then unfortunately, depending on where producers were, many of these areas received a sprinkle of rain and heavy winds, so we’ve had a lot of wind injury and fields that are blown out.”
Bell said many areas of the Panhandle were receiving two inches of rain in 30 minutes, but because of how dry the land already was, they experienced water runoff. On top of that, she said, only the topsoil retained moisture, so the soil below is still dry.
“If we don’t have the soil moisture, and we don’t have the rainfall, we’re not going to make it through the season,” Bell said. “Even with irrigation, just because we apply an inch doesn’t mean that is automatically available for the crop. We have to meet the plant demands plus the environment’s demands.”
State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said the longer the drought goes on, the more water resources will be affected.
”As we enter the heat of the summer, there will be greater water demand, both in agriculture and urban use,” he explained. “That can cause greater groundwater depletion and create issues as wells start running dry.”
A runner in Hodges Park in Lubbock, which saw six days reach 100 degrees or higher from March through May in 2022.
Trace Thomas for The Texas Tribune
Data from the Texas Water Development Board shows that the state’s reservoirs are about 77 percent full. However, most of the fuller reservoirs are closer to Central and far East Texas. Aside from Lake Alan Henry in Lubbock County, reservoir levels in West Texas range from one percent to 32 percent full.
“It takes a prolonged period of wet weather to start producing significant runoff to begin replenishing reservoirs, or alternatively a flood can do it,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “It’s actually a saying here in Texas, that droughts end with floods.”
The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Every year, heat causes at least 170,000 work-related injuries and as many as 2,000 fatalities. It’s one of the top five causes of workplace injuries and deaths, and summers are getting hotter. Despite the growing risk of heat, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency responsible for regulating safe working conditions, has not taken action to protect workers from heat.
That’s according to a new report from Public Citizen, a non-profit consumer advocacy organization calling on OSHA to implement standards to reduce heat-related injuries and illnesses. The report’s authors say an immediate, short-term regulation known as an Emergency Temporary Standard could reduce those injuries by 30 percent.
“Given the danger, OSHA must create an emergency safety rule to do its job of protecting workers,” said Dr. Juley Fulcher, Public Citizen’s health and safety advocate and the author of the report.
Since 2011, Public Citizen and other advocacy groups have been pushing OSHA to create both temporary standards to address heat-related injuries and a permanent rule. Last year, OSHA began working on a new heat standard, but it could be years before the rule is implemented, hence the need for an Emergency Temporary Standard.
According to the report, employers should be required to adopt a range of practices, including temperature thresholds, rest breaks, and hydration requirements. Based on analysis of data from California after the state implemented similar guidelines, Public Citizen estimates that up to 50,000 workplace injuries could be eliminated each year.
Between 2011 and 2020, OSHA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate that heat was responsible for roughly 340 injuries and 40 deaths per year but are likely “vast underestimates.” Public Citizen estimates that the true figures are closer to 170,000 injuries and 2000 deaths each year. Workers of color and low-income workers, who often lack health coverage and do not qualify for workers’ compensation, face the highest risk of heat-related injury and death. According to the report, the lowest paid workers experience five times as many heat-related injuries as the highest paid workers.
“Today’s heat waves are just another indication of how extreme heat due to the climate crisis is endangering workers, especially immigrant farm workers,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.
OSHA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s just a few days into summer, and heat waves have already toppled records across the globe, from the Russian Arctic to the muggy Gulf Coast. With July and August — usually the hottest summer months — still to come, the early extreme heat offers a grim picture of summer’s growing danger.
Heat has gripped much of the United States over recent weeks. In mid-June, thousands of records were broken from coast to coast as a heat dome settled over the West and slinked east. Since June 15, at least 113 weather stations across the U.S. have registered temperatures that tied or broke record highs. Nightfall has offered little relief, as climate change has made nighttime warmer and warmer.
“These temperatures are occurring with only 2 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming and we are on track for 4 degrees Fahrenheit more warming over this century,” Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist, told the Associated Press. “I literally cannot imagine how bad that will be.”
After a heat wave broiled the Pacific Northwest last year, Dessler told Grist that there’s so much evidence to show climate change inflames heat waves, it’s now safe to assume that all heat waves are more severe or likelier because of the carbon humans have put into the atmosphere.
Last week, oppressive heat and humidity blanketed the South, bringing heat indexes up to 115 degrees across Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. In Jackson, Mississippi, high demand for water, combined with outdated infrastructure, led to low water pressure in the system and a resulting boil-water advisory. Even the northern cities of Minneapolis and Milwaukee reached above 100 degrees, causing roads to buckle and subsequent traffic jams under the hot solstice sun.
Meanwhile, China and Japan have also set blistering new records. On Saturday, Isesaki, a city about 70 miles northwest of Tokyo, reached 104.4 degrees — the highest temperature in June ever measured in Japan. In Tokyo, where temperatures in the 90s are expected to persist for the rest of the week, residents have been instructed to conserve energy after spikes in demand stoked concerns over power outages. The same heat wave smothered eastern China, where some 25 weather stations in the province of Hebei, near Beijing, notched their hottest day ever for any month, ranging from 109.6 to 111.6 degrees.
Even the Arctic hasn’t escaped the sweltering heat: The Russian city of Norilsk, above the Arctic Circle, hit 89.6 degrees on Thursday, setting a new record for its hottest June day and tying with the highest temperature on record.
On Monday, the National Weather Service said this week should bring relief and rain to some. “Areas of the Pacific Northwest and Lower Mississippi Valley that have experienced record high temperatures recently will be cooling down,” the forecast said. Meanwhile, a “hot spell” will be building over the Northern and Central Plains in the next few days.
According to a recent survey, a little more than half of Americans say they have been personally affected by extreme heat. That number is much higher in California, where 71 percent of the survey respondents say it has affected their lives, whether through climbing electricity bills or declining health. After this summer, it may spike higher still.
Only a few years ago, it was considered a fluke for temperatures in New England, the mid-Atlantic states and the Pacific northwest to reach 85 degrees Fahrenheit (85 °F) before the official start of summer. But as the 2021-2022 academic year drew to a close, thousands of students and their teachers found themselves scrambling to stay comfortable in sweltering classrooms.
Some public school districts felt the extreme heat was a danger and closed early on several steamy May and June days. The situation reflected the gross neglect of public infrastructure for the 55 million mostly Black, Asian and Latinx kids who attend the country’s approximately 130,000 K-12 programs.
“Even before [COVID-19], we knew that we had an indoor air quality crisis in schools that were built 50 or 100 years ago,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) told Truthout. “You can’t teach or learn in freezing cold or scorching hot buildings. This is a public health issue, an equity issue.”
According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report, 54 percent of United States public schools need to upgrade or replace multiple building systems. What’s more, the repairs extend beyond heating, ventilation and air conditioning to include maintenance (or placement) of water filtration and condensate drainage systems, roof replacement, mold and asbestos abatement, and the installation of CO2 sensors and high-efficiency particulate absorbing filters to monitor air flow and quality.
COVID, of course, has accentuated the need for the refurbishment of the nation’s schools. Nonetheless, it is excessive heat, as well as excessive cold, that pose the most immediate problems for educators and school kids.
As the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), an agency of the U.S. Department of Education, reports, “When the body is subjected to thermal discomfort, a person’s brain will be distracted by signals from the body. When you are in an environment that’s hot or cold, maintaining homeostasis becomes your mind and body’s priority, making it harder to concentrate on school work.”
Ideally, the IES states, classroom temperatures should be between 68°F and 75°F during the winter and between 73°F and 79°F during the summer.
Indeed, educators know that when it is too hot or too cold, learning is disrupted. A 2020 article published in Nature Human Behavior noted that the impact of excessive temperatures is most severe for elementary school-aged children who do not yet know how to pace themselves. In addition, those without permanent homes, or who are living in spaces without adequate temperature controls, tend to do worse academically since studying and test preparation are typically less rigorous when a person is uncomfortable.
Fighting Rampant Inequality
Hillary Linardopoulos, legislative representative of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), calls the conditions of most public school buildings a disgrace. “Many of Philly’s 217 public schools are really old,” she begins. “Their average age is 75, a full 30 years older than the average age of public schools in other parts of the country. More than 80 buildings have no air conditioning and every time there’s a heatwave, students and staff suffer.” But, she adds, it is not as simple as buying window units for classroom use; before air conditioning can be installed in these buildings, they will have to undergo costly electrical upgrades.
And that’s not the only infrastructure deficit plaguing Philadelphia’s schools. “Some schools have severe leaks and it is quite literally raining in hallways and classrooms. There are also problems with degrading asbestos, flaking lead paint, sewage leaks and mold,” Linardopoulos explains.
Most frustrating, she continues, is that the neglect goes back at least 25 years; this deferred maintenance will now require an estimated $4.5 billion to fix.
Additionally, funding disparities — wealthy Pennsylvania districts spend an average of $3,778 more per student than poorer districts like Philadelphia — has become central to a lawsuit brought by the Public Interest Law Center, The Education Law Center and the law firm of O’Melveny and Myers on behalf of six schools districts and a group of parents. The goal is to force state authorities to ensure educational equity.
The suit was initiated in 2014 and is slowly winding its way through the court system; it is supported by the Fund Our Facilities Coalition, a network of more than 70 community-based organizations and progressive public officials. The group, Linardopoulos told Truthout, is demanding that the inequity be addressed and is pushing both the courts and the state legislature to rectify the imbalance.
“Pennsylvania currently has a budget surplus of $13 billion,” Linardopoulos continues. “There is $8 billion in a surplus revenue fund, $2 billion in a rainy-day fund, and another $2.2 billion in federal COVID relief money that is available. There is plenty of money for the necessary improvements, but it’s a matter of political will. Republicans continue to argue that our school facilities are adequate. One lawmaker actually stood up and said, ‘If a child is on the McDonald’s track, they don’t need algebra classes.’ This is what the union and the Fund Our Facilities Coalition are up against.”
Baltimore is facing a similar equity battle. Like Philadelphia, educators in “Charm City” estimate that the longstanding neglect of school buildings has caused a $3 billion repair backlog for the city’s 159 schools.
Cristina Duncan Evans, a former high school social studies teacher who is now on the executive board of the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, told Truthout that in addition to temperature issues, many Baltimore schools lack drinkable water. “Others,” she adds, “have no hot water and some are full of mice and pests.”
About a decade ago, she explains, 26 schools were closed and a promise was made that they would be replaced with new, state-of-the-art facilities. “This did not happen,” she says. “While some new schools were constructed, the number promised was not realized. This has led to the destabilization of some of the poorest, Blackest and Brownest areas of the city.”
Equally appalling, she continues, the new buildings were poorly constructed and were not made to endure heavy wear-and-tear. “Many are already falling apart,” she says. “Some have windows that can’t be opened; staff parking lots are absurdly small; and people still can’t drink the water in many buildings. We’ve also received reports that the air filters were not changed once during the 2021-2022 school year and are clogged with dust and dirt. This aggravates the health of people with asthma and respiratory conditions.”
Another issue, Duncan Evans says, is the city’s reliance on an outdated building as a temporary “swing space” when schools are being renovated. “Whenever I go into this building I feel as if the air is cutting up my lungs,” she says. “It’s obviously unhealthy. Worse, if they do the remediation of existing schools as poorly as they did the new construction, we will have another big problem to deal with.”
“[The union is] constantly negotiating around conditions,” Duncan Evans continues, “and we constantly raise our concerns at the bargaining table.” But, because Baltimore’s schools are not controlled by the city, but are instead under the control of the Maryland Department of Education, she says that the union often feels stymied.
“Staff are frustrated and exhausted,” she says. “Every teacher is juggling multiple demands. So yes, a teacher may notice that the closet in her classroom is full of mice, but she has to decide if this is a battle she wants to fight. In most cases her answer will be ‘no,’ and she will instead decide that it is more important to focus on the learning of her students.”
And it’s not just Baltimore and Philadelphia that are in crisis.
Social studies teacher and Chicago Teachers Union delegate David Marshall considers himself lucky that he does not have to contend with rodents, shoddy construction or contaminated water. But he faces a different dilemma.
“Carl Schurz High School was constructed in 1910 and has landmark status so we can’t alter the facade or add air-conditioning to many of the classrooms,” he told Truthout. “About 10 years ago, the administration installed two 365-ton centrifugal chillers, but when it’s really hot out, the chillers are not enough. They’re inconsistent. In some parts of the building the chillers work well, in other parts they don’t. Still, it’s tricky because all repairs or upgrades need to follow guidelines that preserve the history and beauty of the building.”
But even this landmarked building may soon find additional relief thanks to the National School Superintendents Association. Members of the Association recently asked the Department of Education to give them two additional years to plan and complete work to improve ventilation, purchase air filters and cleaning devices, and improve HVAC systems. They plan to do this with the $190 billion in federal COVID relief money that has already been allocated. While the bulk of the money will be spent on hiring teachers, guidance counselors, psychologists, and custodial and technical staff, union activists see this administrative nod to improved conditions as a step forward.
“We are pushing hard to strengthen the role of unions and worker groups to build better systems of accountability,” AFT’s Weingarten told Truthout. “We have to make sure we have a seat at the table to push for a high-quality union workforce to build new schools and make repairs. We’re being very loud in our demand for better health and safety in every single public school in the country.”
Last week, Louisiana insurance commissioner Jim Donelon held a press conference to announce some very bad news.
A few months earlier, a major insurance company called Lighthouse had gone bankrupt, leaving almost 30,000 homeowners in the state without storm coverage. The company went under thanks to last year’s Hurricane Ida, which led to $400 million in damage claims, far more money than the company had on hand. It had been up to Donelon to find a new company to take over these abandoned policies, but no other company wanted them. In fact, other companies were fleeing the state en masse.
“Unfortunately, the unprecedented level of damage from Hurricane Ida broke the backs of [these] companies,” Donelon said at the press conference. “Right now, we are trying to stop the flow of companies exiting our state.”
As another hurricane season promises to bring extra-strong storms driven by high ocean temperatures, Louisiana’s insurance market is headed for a tailspin. The damage from Hurricane Ida caused at least seven private insurance companies to collapse or cancel their policies, and several more could be on their way out, with dire implications for the state’s housing market. The market collapse threatens to leave tens of thousands of homeowners uninsured during the most dangerous time of year. Following on the heels of upheaval in the fire and flood insurance markets, the turmoil in Louisiana is yet another glaring signal that property and insurance markets aren’t prepared to deal with the financial fallout of climate-driven disasters.
“There’s a lot of panic going on right now,” said Quan Huynh, an insurance agent with Allstate in the suburbs of New Orleans. “A lot of people really don’t have options.”
Damage from hurricanes falls into two broad categories. The first category is flood damage, which is covered by the government-run National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP. The second category is everything else, from leaks caused by heavy rainfall to wind damage, which are covered under traditional homeowner’s insurance.
In the early twentieth century, private insurance companies stopped covering flood damage, in large part because they couldn’t turn a profit — the same homes were flooding over and over again, leading to huge claim payouts every time. In the late 1960s, Congress stepped in to create NFIP, a public insurance program that would offer universal flood coverage.
Private insurance companies still cover other kinds of hurricane damage, though, because those risks are lower: Floods happen over and over again in communities near the water, but an individual homeowner’s chances of getting hit by a whopper tropical storm are always going to be pretty low.
The geographic exception to this reliable rule of thumb is storm-battered Florida, where the insurance market collapsed after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The claim payouts from the storm totaled around $30 billion, enough to cause seven insurance companies to fail and several more to consider leaving the state. The state legislature stepped in to stabilize the market, beefing up building codes and creating a state-run “insurer of last resort” that could provide coverage to risky customers.
Now, as Louisiana’s insurance industry reels from the effects of Hurricane Ida, the state seems to be headed for a similar crisis. Ida destroyed tens of thousands of homes from Baton Rouge to the New Orleans suburbs. The storm reached peak intensity thanks to extra-warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, and it maintained high speed even after making landfall in part thanks to the disappearance of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.
As storm victims filed damage claims after the storm, the dominoes started to fall. Two insurance companies that covered around 30,000 customers in the state announced in early December of last year that they were unable to pay out all their claims from Ida. One of them, Access Home Insurance, had received more than $180 million in claims but only had $115 million in cash and assets available. A third insurer failed just days later, and another one collapsed a few months after that. Another folded earlier this month.
Even insurers that didn’t face financial ruin have moved to exit the state market, canceling all their policies rather than risk having to make an enormous payout this hurricane season. A dozen insurance companies in total have either failed or left the state over the past two years, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, disrupting coverage for at least 100,000 customers. At least two state lawmakers have lost their coverage, including one member of the state’s House Committee on Insurance.
“It’s very common now for companies to leave, considering we’ve been hit with multiple storms,” said Huynh. “That caused a lot of companies to reevaluate the business, and then once they saw a couple of companies going bankrupt, a couple other companies decided to pull out. The pool of risk is getting narrower and narrower.”
Huynh’s own company, Allstate, stopped including wind coverage in its homeowner’s policies years ago; he used to refer his clients to a partner carrier for wind coverage, but that company stopped issuing policies this year.
In theory, the state takes over failed insurance companies and holds them in receivership until another private company comes along to purchase the failed policies. That’s what happened to the first three companies that failed in December, all of which were snapped up by a company called SafePoint. Since then, though, the outlook for the insurance market has gotten darker: The state has been unable to find a buyer for one of the more recent failures, Lighthouse, which had more than 30,000 policies on its books. The company’s former customers and tens of thousands of other Louisianans are now on their own to find new insurance, with just months to go before the peak of hurricane season.
In the short term, Ida victims can probably count on getting their money eventually, even if their insurance companies fail. That’s because the state mandates that all private insurers contribute to a collective emergency fund that can cover claim payouts for failed companies. The payouts from the fund have a hard cap, though, which may not cover full repairs for everyone.
The bigger question is where Louisianans will buy insurance for the future. Like Florida, the state runs an insurer of last resort that offers coverage to people who can’t get it on the private market. The so-called Louisiana Citizens plan will provide a temporary solution to homeowners whose insurers have failed, but it may not stabilize the state market over the long term. For one thing, the coverage is expensive and comes with a hard cap on claim payouts. It also tends to attract the riskiest customers, which may jeopardize its own finances in the future. Huynh says that in many cases the premiums for Citizens are around double those for a plan on the private market.
If more big providers leave the state in the coming years, it could trigger a downward spiral in the housing market. Not only would Citizens struggle to stay afloat as more customers seek public-option coverage, but individual costs for homeowners on the private market would also soar as companies sought to maintain profit margins. That’s what’s happening in Florida right now as homeowners see double-digit premium increases this year ahead of storm season. Farther down the road, lenders might hesitate to write loans in areas where they know the insurance market is thin, which would make it more difficult for many buyers to secure mortgages.
The crisis in Louisiana is yet another example of how climate change is stressing the financial assumptions that undergird the U.S. real estate market. In California, for instance, private insurers have dropped thousands of insurance policies amid escalating wildfire risk, leaving homeowners and businesses alike scrambling for new coverage. In coastal areas, meanwhile, research has shown that lenders are more likely to securitize their flood-prone mortgages with the federal government, transferring climate-change-related risk off their individual balance sheets, and onto the public’s.
“At this point,” Huynh said of Louisiana’s insurance market, “it all depends on how this hurricane season unfolds. If we get hit with a hurricane this year, I do think it’s gonna implode.”
The Biden administration is proposing a major overhaul to the National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP — the main source of insurance for homeowners who are required to or choose to obtain coverage for flooding. Last month, Alice Lugo, assistant secretary for legislative affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, put forth 17 legislative proposals that would collectively represent the biggest reform to the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s National Flood Insurance Program since the program’s inception.
The proposals, which have to make their way through a politically polarized Congress before they can become law, have the potential to drastically alter the way Americans protect their homes and businesses against flooding. At the moment, 21 states have no laws in place requiring sellers to disclose whether the property they are selling has flooded or sustained water damage before, and if it is likely to flood again. The Biden administration wants to change that by implementing a nationwide disclosure law that would ensure that prospective homeowners and renters have a property’s flood history in hand before signing a contract.
Even more radically, Americans hoping to build new homes on eroding beaches and other flood-prone areas will have to look elsewhere for flood insurance if the administration’s proposed reforms pass. One of the proposals in Lugo’s letter would prevent the NFIP from insuring newly built homes in risky areas, which means homeowners who go ahead with such construction would have to go to private insurance companies, which typically offer more expensive premiums, for insurance. The same applies to people who hold mortgages on properties that flood repeatedly. People who own “excessive loss properties,” or properties that flood multiple times and require insurance payouts of at least $10,000 each time, could lose access to government insurance on their properties after the fourth claim. And the NFIP would not issue any new insurance policies for commercial buildings point blank, no matter where they’re located or when they were built, because FEMA says it wants to promote growth in the private flood insurance market.
These changes, and the rest of the proposals in the letter, are more evidence that the climate crisis — and the myriad expenses that come with it — are forcing the nation to rethink the status quo. But experts say the administration’s proposals may have mixed results and raise major questions about the mission of the public flood insurance program.
For decades, the NFIP has been hemorrhaging money as flooding has hit Americans across the United States with increasing intensity. That’s been, in part, by design. The federal government never intended for the NFIP to generate a profit like a private insurance company would. The NFIP was established by necessity: Flooding was, and still is, difficult to insure against. It creates a lot of correlated risks — it’s rare for a single house to flood in a flooding event; more commonly, multiple houses flood in the same neighborhood or town. Private insurers just weren’t up for insuring against flooding; starting in the 1920s, the industry decided that flood insurance would never be a profitable enterprise. (Some companies have since changed their tune.)
So the NFIP was formed by Congress in 1968 to provide a public option, which was, the federal government figured, better than no option at all and cheaper than bailing people out every time a hurricane or other major flooding event occurred. The NFIP now covers roughly 5 million Americans — anyone living in a floodplain, as designated by FEMA, and carrying a federally-backed mortgage is required to have it. But the program is in the red after years of consecutive major hurricanes and decades of charging policyholders discounted rates for flood insurance — it carries $20.5 billion in debt to the Treasury Department and pays $300 million in annual interest. The status quo, according to the Biden administration, isn’t working anymore.
That’s where these reforms come in. In addition to putting a national flood insurance standard in place, banning insurance for new homes in flood-prone areas and commercial buildings, and canceling insurance for excessive loss properties, the administration is asking Congress to wipe out that $20.5 billion in debt and set up a subsidy program so that lower-income Americans can afford flood insurance. Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council and an expert on flooding, thinks that giving the NFIP a clean slate is a great idea. “It’s really encouraging that FEMA has put this out,” he told Grist.
But Moore and other flooding experts flagged concerns about some aspects of the proposal — namely, the portion that would require FEMA to drop flood coverage for “excessive loss” properties. The reforms might discourage new construction in flood-prone areas, Miyuki Hino, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert in climate risk and adaptation, told Grist. But it’s less clear whether the reforms would actually lead to a measurable reduction in the number of people living in flood-prone areas across the U.S.
“Some of the people who live in flood-prone places, they’re not there because it’s a beach house and they love the amenity of being near water,” Hino said. “They’re there because that’s the housing that’s affordable or their family has owned the house for generations and they don’t have real alternatives.” If those homeowners aren’t able to obtain insurance through the NFIP, they may choose to forgo flood insurance altogether instead of endeavoring to move or get potentially more expensive coverage through a private insurer. That would leave them more vulnerable the next time their home floods. Hino would have liked to see the Biden administration provide more alternatives for these types of homeowners and bulk up government assistance, either to help people elevate their houses (which would, in some scenarios, allow them to participate in the NFIP even if their house has flooded multiple times) or to move somewhere else.
The existential question at the heart of the conversation around what to do about public flood insurance in this country comes down to this: Should a program that was established to fill a void left by private insurers, to ensure that Americans wouldn’t be left financially devastated by flooding, be expected to be financially solvent, or is it enough that it serves a public good? “There are ways in which that goal of making insurance available and affordable runs counter to the goal of having it run like a private insurance company,” Hino said. The flood insurance program doesn’t exist to generate revenue for the federal government, Moore pointed out. “We don’t require the Department of Defense or the Department of State to run in the black,” he said. “I don’t think the NFIP is a failure if it doesn’t run a profit.”
Both Hino and Moore agreed that the Biden administration’s proposal to establish a national flood disclosure standard would be an unmitigated win for homeowners and the federal government alike. More information in the hands of buyers and renters provides a layer of protection against flooding that is especially crucial as the climate crisis continues to throw the nation’s hydrological cycles out of whack. But it’s not clear that even that fairly uncontroversial proposal stands a chance of passing Congress. “This has as much chance of passing both houses and being signed into law as any other bill that’s in Congress right now,” Moore said. “That’s a little bit of a back-handed compliment.”
Despite the political gridlock dogging the U.S. Senate, there’s evidence that there’s an appetite for exactly these kinds of flood insurance reforms among Republicans. In 2017, the Trump administration proposed a set of reforms that look nearly identical to the proposal the Biden administration is touting now, down to the national flood disclosure standard. The similarities between the two proposals didn’t sit right with some Democratic lawmakers. “It’s unacceptable to see FEMA taking cues from the Trump administration on reforms for the NFIP,” Senator Robert Menendez, from New Jersey, told E&E News in a statement. But the fact that the Trump and Biden administrations, so often on opposing ends of the spectrum when it comes to climate policy, agree on the matter of flood insurance reform indicates that public servants on both sides of the political aisle think the status quo is becoming unsustainable.
Scientists revealed new measurements this week that show parts of the Arctic are warming five to seven times faster than the rest of the world, warming that could bring about even more extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere.
The data comes from a portion of the Arctic Ocean north of Norway and Russia. Scientists with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute compiled surface air temperatures from islands in the northern Barents Sea from 1981 to 2020. In findings published Wednesday in the journal Scientific Reports, they wrote that annual average temperatures there are rising by up to 2.7 degrees Celsius per decade, making it the fastest warming region known on Earth.
“We expected to see strong warming, but not on the scale we found,” Ketil Isaksen, the climate researcher who led the work, told the Guardian. “This is an early warning for what’s happening in the rest of the Arctic.”
The study also found that the connection between the amount of sea ice in the region and rising temperatures is even stronger than researchers initially thought. White sea ice reflects sunlight, but when it melts, dark blue water absorbs heat from the sun, creating a cycle of more melting and more warming. This feedback loop is well-known, and is one of the key reasons temperatures in the Arctic are rising faster than the global average. “But what’s happening in the far north is off the scale,” Isaksen told the Guardian.
Extraordinary changes in the Arctic don’t just affect the far north. Earth’s climate patterns are dictated by small differences in temperature and density, which drive everything from globe-spanning atmospheric circulation patterns to ocean currents. Crank up the heat in the Arctic, and the effects reverberate elsewhere, too.
A series of unprecedented floods surged through the region around Yellowstone National Park this week, cutting off several small communities in Montana and Wyoming and forcing officials to close the country’s oldest and most iconic national park. As rescue workers began to survey the damage, several people were marooned in the park and in mountain towns where the roads were blocked, waiting for emergency supplies to arrive.
The flooding began over the weekend as a low-pressure system rolled across the Rocky Mountains and dropped between two and three inches of rain on the area around the park. The rain by itself was not extraordinary, but it arrived at a dangerous time, said Dan Borsum, a senior forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Billings, Montana. The storm comes on the heels of a late-season snowfall from Memorial Day weekend, and the snow from that event had just started to melt amid high temperatures. The combination of rain and snowmelt pushed waterways in the region to record highs.
“Two inches of snowmelt came out, along with three inches of rainfall, so it’s like five to six inches of rain occurred over the mountains — and that was in a 36-hour period,” Borsum told Grist. The park typically experiences around 20 inches of rain per year.
This additional water pushed the Yellowstone River and several of its branches to overwhelm their banks, triggering floods and mudslides across the national park and in the communities that surround it. Borsum said that the water levels at one flood gauge were a full foot-and-a-half higher than the largest flood in recorded history, in 1918. The river rose by six feet over the course of 24 hours.
Although the rainstorm that caused the flood was not unprecedented, studies have shown that climate change tends to produce larger and more intense rain events, leading to flash floods like the kind Montana and Wyoming are experiencing right now. A study released last year by Montana State University and the U.S. Geological Survey found that climate change would bring more annual precipitation to the greater Yellowstone area, as well as more runoff from melting snowpack.
The flooding along the river has already destroyed critical infrastructure in several places, overwashing roads and knocking out bridges. One video shows the flood ripping a two-story building from its moorings and carrying it off into the river, an eerie echo of the home that collapsed in North Carolina’s Outer Banks earlier this year. Another video showed a torrent of water wrenching apart a metal bridge; a park visitor in the background says, “that was our way home.”
Borsum said the biggest worry right now was that flood waters had turned many small communities into islands, washing over the only entry and exit roads. That was the case on Tuesday in the town of Gardiner, a well-known “gateway” community to the park, where water had destroyed roads to the north and the south. Helicopter footage showed that the river had caused a road near the town to crumble in at least five different places.
Elsewhere in the region, floodwaters had threatened local water supplies, either by contaminating groundwater wells or breaching water treatment plants. In the town of Red Lodge, where waters rushed through main streets earlier in the week, city officials shut down the local water main after it broke during the flood. A local sheriff’s department advised residents of multiple other towns not to drink water from wells.
Officials evacuated thousands of people from the park ahead of the flooding, but as of Tuesday the Montana National Guard and other agencies were still trying to retrieve remaining campers and rush supplies to people in nearby towns. The state Guard said it had dispatched two helicopters to ferry out 12 marooned park visitors. As for the national park itself, officials there said it might take days or weeks to repair the damage and reopen at full capacity, and one local commissioner told the Associated Press that the floods might have altered the course of certain rivers forever.
The destruction in Yellowstone is one more sign that the West is in for a rough summer. Just 100 miles away from the park, on the other side of the continental divide, the land is baked in extreme drought. Furthermore, Borsum noted that the floods happened on the one-year anniversary of a brutal heat wave that broke multiple temperature records, bringing the mercury in Billings to 108 degrees Fahrenheit.
Summer is not something to look forward to in Phoenix, Arizona. For many in the hottest city in America, summer is something to survive.
Masavi Perea, 47, knows this well. A former construction worker, he’s now the organizing director of Chispa Arizona, a grassroots group that fights for clean air and water, healthy neighborhoods, and climate action in Latino communities. One of his top priorities is to protect the people in West and South Phoenix who are most likely to suffer, get sick, and even die from extreme heat.
Heat is the number one weather-related killer in the U.S. Last year, there were 338 heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located — the most of any county in Arizona. Like many other aspects of climate change, extreme heat highlights inequities, such as who lives in a neighborhood with plenty of shade and green space, and who lives in a neighborhood with more pavement than parks.
In a recent study, Dr. Vivek Shandas, a professor of climate adaptation at Portland State University, analyzed temperatures in 108 different urban areas. He found that areas that underwent redlining — the government’s practice of excluding people of color from federally-insured mortgages — were consistently hotter than other areas. “For communities of color, immigrant communities, and lower income communities living in those historically redlined areas, disinvestment brought lots of concrete, asphalt in the form of highways and freeways, big box stores, industrial facilities,” said Shandas. The areas that were redlined are still the hottest areas within cities — sometimes by 18 degrees Fahrenheit, Shandas found.
And that’s outdoors. Within homes, the difference is often greater. On the same day during a heat wave, a home in a wealthy neighborhood with tree-lined streets and access to air conditioning might be 75 degrees, while a home a few miles away in a low-income neighborhood with lots of pavement and no access to air conditioning might be over 120 degrees. “That’s where we run into some pretty big disparities in terms of health outcomes,” Shandas said. “They end up getting exposed to temperatures that are lethal in terms of human health and wellbeing.”
In Phoenix and in other cities across the country, Perea and countless others have been working to help those who are the most vulnerable keep safe from the rising temperatures. “Phoenix is a bellwether,” said Dr. Melissa Guardaro, a research professor at Arizona State University. “People are still dying, and every heat death is an unnecessary death,” she said. But in many ways, the city is better prepared than others that are experiencing more and more extreme heat due to climate change. While more needs to be done, Phoenix does have protocols in place for when extreme heat hits, and was the first city in the country to fund an office of heat response and mitigation. These steps offer an example for other cities throughout the country that are grappling with deadly heat. “Right now it’s happening in Phoenix, but soon, it’s going to be happening everywhere,” Perea said.
Though it may sound basic, Perea says that the first step towards adapting to the heat is to talk with the people who are most at risk. Too often, Perea has seen government officials and nonprofit organizations come into neighborhoods like West Phoenix to try to tell people what to do without bothering to listen. “When people from the outside come to these communities, they already have the solutions. So people, community members, they don’t buy it. They don’t feel part of it,” he said. When outsiders try to communicate with them “from the top down,” it goes nowhere.
A few years ago, Perea participated in a project that took a different approach. A coalition of community based organizations, including Chispa, researchers from Arizona State University and the Nature Conservancy, and city and county officials came together to create hyper-local heat plans for the three neighborhoods most at risk in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
In Phoenix, local residents worked with researchers and city and county officials to develop hyper-local heat plans.
David Crummey, Courtesy of Melissa Guardaro
At first, people were distrustful. They could look around their neighborhoods and see streets and parks that had been neglected for years. “People were not expecting the government to do anything,” Perea said. But he and others with roots in the community were able to bring people into face-to-face meetings with local government officials and researchers. Once the people in power started listening to the community, “that’s when many solutions came up, many solutions from our own people,” he said.
At an individual level, people can keep their homes cooler by taking simple, low-budget steps, like using foam tape to seal gaps around doors, or making larger renovations, like installing insulation. At a community level, neighbors can check in on one another, paying particular attention to the elderly or those who might not have as many social connections. At a city level, governments can reverse decades of disinvestment by adding and maintaining green spaces and tree cover and targeting upgrades, like pavement that reflects the sun’s heat, to certain areas. Finally, at a state and federal level, policymakers can make electricity more affordable and offer assistance programs for people who struggle to pay their utility bills.
In the West Phoenix neighborhood that Perea worked with, some of the solutions people proposed included: adding shaded walkways for common routes (along with water fountains), expanding the warning system that lets residents know extreme heat is imminent, and offering first aid training so they could recognize the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke to help each other.
When trying to protect people from extreme heat, “you really need to drill down to the local level in order to do effective interventions,” Guardaro, who wrote a paper on the process of developing the heat plans in Phoenix. Locals were able to mark the routes children take walking to school and the bus stops that people without cars rely on the most so the group could prioritize where to plant trees or build shade structures. “There are limited funds, and we want to make sure that when we’re making investments, it’s the proper investment in the proper place,” Guardaro said. To do that, local expertise is essential.
Perea says he has seen some improvements as a result of the process. For example, the neighborhood he worked with prioritized renovating a local park. Green spaces help cool neighborhoods and provide a place for people to go when their homes are overheated. The city spent $500,000 to add a new playground (which is shaded), picnic areas with tables and grills (which are also shaded), a walking path, more trees, and a public restroom.
Before, “it was a very depressing park,” Perea said. Now, “that park in the evenings is totally different. You see it’s full of people playing and walking and enjoying their community.”
People need to understand the risks associated with extreme heat and what can be done about them. That’s where Jessica Bueno’s work comes in. Bueno is director of the Urban Heat Leadership Academy, a program run by the Nature Conservancy and the Phoenix Revitalization Corporation, a local nonprofit.
Signs point visitors towards a cooling center at the Wesley United Methodist Church in South Phoenix.
Rosalyn Gorden
The Urban Heat Leadership Academy is a five-month program that meets roughly twice a month and teaches Phoenix residents about how to address the urban heat island effect. It also connects them with academics researching solutions and local government officials responsible for managing the problem.
“The city comes up with plans all day,” said Bueno. “But if residents aren’t implementing it and holding the city accountable, nothing happens.” The goal of the Urban Heat Leadership Academy is that residents learn how to hold the city accountable, advocate for themselves, and implement their own solutions.
In the long term, Phoenix would be in a much better position to protect residents from the heat “if we could figure out how to give safe, affordable, livable housing to everybody who needed it,” said Guardaro, the ASU researcher. In the short term, cooling centers can provide lifesaving relief. That’s where Rosalyn Gorden and other graduates of the academy chose to focus their efforts.
During the pandemic, a cooling center at the Wesley United Methodist Church, a predominantly Black church in South Phoenix, closed down due to staffing shortages. With a grant from The Nature Conservancy and the Phoenix Revitalization Corporation, the graduates reopened the church cooling center, providing an indoor, air-conditioned space, along with cool drinks and snacks, games and activities for children, and toiletries and other supplies for homeless people. It’s open every day from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., and it’s the only cooling center in South Phoenix that allows people to bring their pets. The facility is staffed by one full time employee, by nearby nursing students who require community health outreach hours to complete their degree program, and by volunteers from the church and surrounding community.
Gorden grew up in South Phoenix, raised two children there, and remembers serving meals to the homeless with her mother at the church, where her family have long been members. The Urban Heat Leadership Academy “opened the door for me to be able to start getting involved in the community, and to be a part of decision-making,” Gorden said. Reopening the cooling center was “a wonderful opportunity” to do something to help people in her neighborhood, she said.
Last week, the first heat wave of the summer hit the Southwest. In Phoenix on Saturday, temperatures climbed to 114 degrees Fahrenheit, tying the daily record. More extreme heat is coming, but that doesn’t mean that more people have to suffer or die.
Summer heat descended on the desert Southwest and parts of the Western U.S. over the weekend, breaking temperature records and prompting federal officials to issue excessive heat warnings for approximately 53 million Americans. The National Weather Service called the heat “oppressive” and said to expect critical fire weather conditions across a large portion of the Southwest and the Rockies through Monday.
More than 25 major U.S. cities tied or broke maximum heat records on Saturday. Las Vegas, Nevada, hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature not felt in Sin City since 1956. California’s Death Valley reached 122 degrees. Phoenix, Arizona, clocked in at 114 degrees, the hottest day there in more than a century. Winds started pushing the heat east on Monday, which could bring sweltering temperatures and heat advisories to the upper Mississippi Valley, western Great Lakes, and Ohio Valley by midweek.
Triple-digit temperatures, while not unusual in the U.S. Southwest, are arriving earlier and more often in the summer season due to climate change. Worse, above-average temperatures are sticking around through the night — another consequence, climate studies show, of planetary warming. In the areas where officials issued excessive heat warnings this weekend, nighttime temperatures stayed above 75 degrees, which means people did not get a break from the heat during the night.
Medical experts around the world are becoming increasingly concerned that the 24/7 nature of heatwaves in recent decades is exacting a rising and deadly toll on public health. Already, excessive heat causes more deaths in America than any other weather-related disaster. Government analyses show that extreme heat claims up to 1,300 lives every year in the U.S., and an independent study indicated that the true number of heat-related deaths is several times higher. And heat-caused deaths are on the rise: Globally, such deaths rose 74 percent in nine countries between 1980 and 2016.
The rising health risks of summer-time heat has prompted some experts to give summer a new name: “danger season.” “Climate change has pushed a lot of these types of events into a new realm that is much more dangerous,” Kristy Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Grist’s Kate Yoder recently.
During a heat wave, limiting your exposure to heat by taking cool showers or baths, avoiding physical activity as much as possible during the day, and using an air conditioner if you have one can help you and your loved ones stay safe. So can knowing the warning signs of heat exhaustion, such as nausea, excessive sweating, and a rapid pulse.
Summer has remained mostly the same for a millennium or more. Around the year 900, Old English speakers were already using the word sumor for the warmer months. Some say the word summer is probably close to the version heard 4,000 years ago, when people spoke the prehistoric Indo-European language believed to be the ancestor to many languages spoken across Europe and India today.
But summer isn’t what it used to be. The season is getting so hot that it might be time for a new name: “danger season.”
The phrase, part of a new campaign by the Union of Concerned Scientists, refers to the period from May to October marked by a drumbeat of disasters in the United States. During these months, people across the country still splash in pools and head to the beach but, increasingly, they also suffer through heat waves, flee from wildfires, breathe smoky air, and board up homes as hurricanes approach.
This summer is predicted to be another menacing one, with forecasts showing hectic hurricanes and above-normal wildfire activity. In a prelude, a heat wave scorched the Southwest over the weekend, breaking records in more than a dozen cities. Temperatures hit 100 degrees F in Denver and reached a blistering 114 degrees at the Phoenix airport.
“Climate change has pushed a lot of these types of events into a new realm that is much more dangerous,” said Kristy Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “So as we were thinking about this season, and how we’re going to respond to it, the phrase ‘danger season’ seemed appropriate.”
Consider, for example, that heat kills more people in the U.S. each year, on average, than any other kind of extreme weather, often in predictable ways. Every summer, older adults die in their homes without access to air conditioning, and young athletes die from heatstroke while practicing in searing temperatures. “These sorts of deaths are preventable,” Dahl said. She hopes the framing of “danger season” can better help people grasp summer threats, “because if you understand it, you can start to do something about it.”
That’s not to say Dahl wants to replace the word “summer” or take away your ice cream cones or days at the beach. “You know, we struggled a little bit with feeling like we’re taking away the joy of summer,” she said. It’s possible that a cultural affection for hot weather might make people overlook the season’s dangers — but for some, that sunny attitude is already changing. Where Dahl lives in California, as in much of the western U.S, summer means fires and smoke, and comes with an annual sense of dread. “It feels very different from how I approached the start of summer from when I was younger, which was, ‘It’s warm, let’s have barbecues!’”
The new foreboding name for summer was coined by Erika Spanger-Siegfried, an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The organization introduced the phrase in a pair of blog posts and on social media last week, and the team plans to keep using the expression as warm-season disasters descend. All 50 states are expected to experience unusually high temperatures this summer, and with extended drought across much of the West, these threats could strain the electric grid and lead to blackouts.
Of course, danger season comes at a different time depending where you live: In the southern hemisphere, summer runs from December to February, when the Australian bushfires can get out of control. No matter where you are, though, warm-weather disasters are creeping into the late spring and early fall, said Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Schools without air conditioning are closing for “heat days” more and more often, as they did in Philadelphia in late May, when classroom temperatures topped 100 degrees F.
Plenty of climate threats lurk outside danger season, too. Consider the devastating floods that hit Washington state and British Columbia in November, sending mudslides over highways and forcing thousands to evacuate. What makes summer particularly threatening is the ways that disasters can collide and compound one another. In the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, major hurricanes have knocked out power and water services just as summer heat waves set in. “You suddenly have people who are trying to rebuild their lives, who are doing so in dangerously hot conditions without any access to cooling, to water,” Dahl explained. As extreme heat becomes more frequent and storms get stronger, “it becomes more and more likely that you’re going to get the coincidence of a heat wave and a major hurricane.”
People walk in searing heat in Uttar Pradesh, India, where temperatures soared to 115 degrees F on June 7, 2022. Ritesh Shukla / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Part of the thinking behind using the phrase “danger season” is to make it harder for people to sugar-coat the climate crisis. “I just want to say straight-up, frankly, 10, 15 years ago, when we would talk about these things, we didn’t want to scare people,” Cleetus said. “We wanted people to understand the science and really be invited into understanding the implications. And now we’re scared, we’re terrified, for what we have already unleashed on the world.”
Edward Maibach, the director of George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication, said that “danger season” struck him as a useful framing to help people realize they need to prepare for recurring disasters instead of reacting to them. “Knowing that danger seasons are getting longer will, hopefully, help people, businesses, and governments recognize the need to take actions now to protect the things they value and depend on,” Maibach wrote in an email to Grist.
Dahl called for a “national resilience strategy” that would coordinate efforts to help communities weather disasters and put policies in place to protect people. That means building codes in the West that require buffer space around homes to reduce fire danger, and national heat protection and smoke protection standards for outdoor workers. “There’s a lot that can be done locally,” she said, “but we also need to be thinking at a much bigger scale.”
A bright yellow building with bold green trim hums with activity in Caguas, a city sprawled across a mountain valley south of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In a spacious kitchen, volunteers chop vegetables and cook rice for community meals. Down the hall, visitors browse racks of free and discounted produce, canned beans, and bottles of oil. Outside, beneath a large metal awning, retirees soak in calming music as they take part in a stress-relief workshop.
The community services on offer here at the Centro de Apoyo Mutuo, or Mutual Support Center, are made possible by the 24 solar panels mounted on the rooftop. Two lithium-ion batteries the size of suitcases are kept in a windowless storage room, allowing the center to stay open on cloudy days and in the evenings. The building doesn’t use any electricity from the utility grid.
Nearly five years ago, after Hurricane Maria tore a path of devastation across the United States territory and all but destroyed Puerto Rico’s electricity system, residents in Caguas reclaimed what had for decades been an abandoned Social Security office. They ripped out moldy carpet, scrubbed the walls and began providing food and supplies to neighbors.
“This was a space that wasn’t serving the people, and now the community has taken it over,” Marisel Robles, one of the center’s organizers, says on a muggy day in early May, just weeks before the start of the next Atlantic hurricane season.
Robles guides me up a thin metal ladder to the rooftop of the one-story building, pushing aside tree branches sagging with brown seed pods. Saúl González, a volunteer and local solar installer, joins our expedition. The three rows of solar panels form a “mosaic” of different makes and models, all of them donated by nonprofit organizations, he explains.
Raúl González, left, and Marisel Robles help maintain the solar system on the Mutual Support Center’s rooftop in Caguas, Puerto Rico.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
With 6 kilowatts of solar capacity and 30 kilowatt-hours of battery storage, the system can typically meet the center’s power needs. Occasionally, members cut the lights and fans during the day to save electricity for an evening dance class. Still, Robles says it’s better than running expensive, polluting diesel generators or depending on the island’s electric grid — which, despite years of post-hurricane repairs, remains prone to routine outages, sweeping blackouts, and frequent voltage surges that fry people’s appliances. In early April, the entire island lost grid power for three days after an aging electric breaker caught fire on the southern coast.
“Sometimes, we hear the ‘boom’ of people turning on their diesel generators, and that’s how we know the power went out in town, because here we still have power,” Robles says, looking out over the tops of neighboring buildings. “For us, it’s like a victory every day this happens, because we feel like we did something right.”
The Mutual Support Center is not unique in its ability to produce its own clean energy. A rising number of Puerto Ricans are installing solar panels and batteries on their homes and businesses, fed up with the unstable electric grid, high electricity bills, and the state-owned utility’s reliance on fossil fuels. As of January 2022, some 42,000 rooftop solar systems were enrolled in the island’s net-metering program — more than eight times the number at the end of 2016, the year before Hurricane Maria struck the island, according to utility data. Thousands more systems are operating but are not officially counted because, like the center’s unit, they aren’t connected to the grid.
Spearheaded largely by residents, business owners, and philanthropies, the grassroots solar movement sweeping the island is happening despite headwinds from the territory’s centralized utility — which claims it’s working to advance the island’s clean energy goals but continues investing in fossil fuels. Solar proponents say that, for the technology to reach most of Puerto Rico’s 3.2 million people, the government and its utility will need to more fully participate in what has largely been a bottom-up energy transformation. With billions of federal recovery dollars set to flow to Puerto Rico, they argue that now is the time for public policies and investments that shift the island away from an outdated model of large, far-flung power plants to one that supplies clean electricity close to where people need it.
The vulnerability of Puerto Rico’s centralized system became painfully evident in September 2017, when the island was hit by two consecutive disasters.
Hurricane Irma narrowly skirted the island on September 7, leaving more than a third of all households without power. Many residents still didn’t have electricity when, on September 20, Hurricane Maria barreled ashore. The storm carved a diagonal 100-mile path from southeast to northwest, mowing down the island’s transmission lines and inundating infrastructure. Maria damaged, destroyed or otherwise compromised 80 percent of the island’s grid.
Without electricity, daily life ground to a halt. Schools shuttered, banks closed, supermarket food spoiled, and drinking water supplies slowed to a trickle. One study estimated that more than 4,600 people died as a result of the storm, including those who couldn’t operate their oxygen machines, refrigerate vital medications like insulin, or stay sufficiently cool in the sweltering heat. In some places, power wasn’t restored for more than a year after the hurricane.
“Maria made life very difficult. It was like a new beginning for many of us,” recalls Atala Pérez, who lives in Caguas and volunteers at the Mutual Support Center.
Pérez says she went more than six months without any electricity in her home. With no fan or air conditioner, she spent many restless nights in the sticky heat, slapping away mosquitos. Tired of waiting in line for eight hours to buy a bag of ice, she grew used to drinking tepid tap water. She could still cook but couldn’t keep any food in the refrigerator. “I didn’t have any backup power,” she says, standing inside the yellow building’s makeshift supermarket. “I was simply without electricity, and I had to adapt.”
The ferocity of Hurricane Maria would’ve battered any electric grid. But Puerto Rico’s power system was uniquely unprepared for the disasters that struck.
After years of economic recession, the island’s government had amassed $72 billion in debt. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, the state-owned utility, had filed for bankruptcy months earlier. The economic crisis compounded decades of documented missteps, neglect, and ill-advised practices at PREPA. With its workforce slashed in half, the utility had delayed routine maintenance. Warehouses that should’ve stored spare equipment for use in emergencies instead had empty shelves.
In Maria’s aftermath, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency allocated $3.2 billion to restore power to the island. Utility crews worked tirelessly to install concrete towers where wooden poles had snapped like twigs and to string up wires where old ones lay entangled on the ground. Yet the problems that plagued Puerto Rico before the storms — mismanagement, corruption, the island’s challenging geography — ultimately served to slow and complicate recovery efforts. Much of the work since Maria has focused on resurrecting and extending the life of the existing grid.
In 2020, Puerto Rico signed a 15-year deal that transferred the publicly operated transmission and distribution system to Luma Energy, a private consortium of Canadian and U.S. companies that now operates the grid and handles reconstruction. PREPA remains in charge of producing and procuring electricity.
In its latest quarterly report, Luma said it made significant improvements in the first three months of this year, replacing hundreds of aging utility poles and enrolling more than 21,000 rooftop solar customers in net metering, a program in which utilities pay solar-equipped households for the electricity their panels supply to the grid.
Nonetheless, the consortium is facing widespread backlash from residents, who blame it for rising electricity bills and continued outages. In San Juan, thousands of protestors have marched past Luma’s headquarters and the governor’s mansion holding signs declaring “Fuera Luma” or “Out with Luma.” Similar posters are plastered on billboards near Luma’s office in Mayagüez, on the island’s western coast.
For many Puerto Ricans, rooftop solar systems offer a way out of an endless cycle of disruptions and disappointment. Energy experts estimate that thousands of new solar arrays are hooked up every month. As of January, households in particular had installed at least 225 megawatts of combined solar capacity, equal to about 5.5 percent of total residential electricity demand, according to a recent report.
“The transformation is happening at a scale that is very satisfying to see,” says Arturo Massol Deyá, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico who co-authored the report and the executive director of Casa Pueblo, a community organization that helps people access solar power.
“We call this an energy insurrection,” he adds. “Even though in California and other states, you have incentives to help people [go solar], in Puerto Rico, we don’t. And yet people are doing it here because we’re confronting climate change in a hard way, and we’re confronting a utility that people can’t rely on.”
One of the most striking examples of the bottom-up transformation of Puerto Rico’s energy landscape can be found in Adjuntas, a tranquil town that sits high up in the island’s central mountain range. Casa Pueblo is located here, in a stately pink building near the town’s main square. The organization installed solar panels on its rooftop in 1999 and is now spearheading a first-of-its-kind community-scale solar initiative.
Over a dozen businesses near the palm-tree-studded plaza put solar panels on their rooftops last year, totaling about 200 kilowatts in capacity. This August, they’ll also install a total of 1 megawatt-hour of battery storage capacity. Participants will share the solar electricity they produce and draw from the interconnected batteries, which tie the installations together like a mini power plant.
Gustavo Irizarry, the owner of Lucy’s Pizza, slides into a yellow dining booth on a recent cool and quiet evening. His unassuming pizzeria hugs a corner of the main square, its rooftop solar panels visible from the sidewalk.
Gustavo Irizarry, owner of Lucy’s Pizza, heads an association of solar-powered businesses in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
When he’s not running the shop or ferrying pizzas along steep, winding roads, Irizarry leads the Community Solar Energy Association of Adjuntas. The group, in a sense, acts like a utility. Participating businesses pay a fixed monthly rate for the solar electricity they consume. The association uses that money to cover the project’s operation and maintenance costs, and also to help lower-income families and rural stores to install their own solar-and-battery systems.
“The hardest part is explaining this philosophy to people in the business community, who compete with one another or who plan to retire in a few years,” says Irizarry, who, at 39, is the association’s youngest member. “My role is to convince them that what we’re doing will help our planet and our people last longer.”
Lucy’s Pizza served as a safe haven during Hurricane Maria, when massive landslides buried highways and complicated relief efforts in Adjuntas. For weeks, it was the only place in the isolated town of 18,000 people where residents could get a warm meal or charge electronics. Irizarry says the shop spent around $17,000 during that period just to fill its generators with diesel fuel, which was hard to find on the supply-constrained island.
The community-scale solar system should enable businesses to keep their lights on for at least a week if the utility grid goes down again. “Our mission is to be able to cover people’s basic needs during a catastrophe, so that they can come to us to get food, ice, charge their phones [and] their medical equipment, and get internet,” Irizarry explains as hungry customers trickle past us. A cashier calls out names over the loudspeaker, sliding warm takeout boxes over the counter.
Grid operator Luma Energy isn’t involved in the project, but it hasn’t interfered either, participants say. However, many other partners are contributing to the effort. The U.S.-based Honnold Foundation has led a $1.7 million investment in the project, an amount that includes donated panels and batteries, electrical contracting work and technical support, says Cynthia Arellano, the foundation’s project manager for the Adjuntas initiative.
Engineers from the University of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories are helping to fine-tune the software programs and electronic controls that will do the unseen work of managing electricity flows between the businesses. Experts from both institutions are studying the project closely to see how the system might be replicated in other towns and regions across the island.
“If you start sharing energy between all your neighbors, you can create these kinds of solutions and get stronger against the next hurricane,” says Fabio Andrade, an associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico’s campus in Mayagüez.
Andrade heads the university’s Microgrid Laboratory, which is helping to develop the Adjuntas initiative, as well as two small microgrid projects in the communities of Maricao and Castañer. While the term “microgrid” is often used broadly to describe any small-scale electricity system with storage — such as solar panels and batteries — the concept more accurately refers to a group of interconnected systems, he says. Together, these systems can hook up to the grid, supplying electricity and also using utility power when the grid is working well. Crucially, microgrids can detach and operate independently when disruptions occur.
Fabio Andrade, seated at a table made from a solar panel, studies microgrids in Mayagüez, Puerto, Rico.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
Since Hurricane Maria, researchers and policymakers in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland have called for building resilient microgrids across the island to support — or potentially even supplant — the centralized electricity system. In a room tucked inside a faded green Cold War–era building, Andrade and student researchers experiment with different microgrid scenarios. They replicate the flow of power from wind turbines, solar panels, electric car batteries and the main grid and analyze how microgrids might respond to rising voltage levels, errant frequencies, or shrinking or surging power supplies.
“We need to understand how all of this is working,” Andrade says, adding that his research draws from his own experience of living without power for three months after Hurricane Maria.
“Microgrids can give you the minimum electricity you need for survival,” he says.
The Puerto Rican government has taken some steps to help realize this vision of cleaner, more resilient power. The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, which regulates the island’s energy system, recently adopted rules allowing microgrids to connect to the main grid. Other reforms ostensibly make it easier and faster for individuals to enroll their rooftop solar systems in net metering.
Nevertheless, the island has far more work to do to achieve its mandate of 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, which the governor’s office set in 2019. Only about 5 percent of the island’s electricity comes from renewable sources. Petroleum is the grid’s largest fuel source, representing 48 percent of electricity generation in April. Puerto Rico’s reliance on imported diesel has led to surging electricity bills in recent months as global oil prices climb. That fuel, along with the island’s gas and coal plants, continues contributing greenhouse gases and pumping harmful air pollution into communities.
In March, after lengthy delays, regulators conditionally approved 884 megawatts’ worth of large-scale renewable energy projects, which should raise the island’s total share of renewables to 23 percent by the end of 2024. Officials have said they’re working to accelerate the slow-moving permitting process to meet Puerto Rico’s near-term goal of achieving 40 percent renewables by 2025.
At the same time, though, Puerto Rico is expanding its investments in fossil fuel infrastructure.
In 2019, PREPA awarded U.S. company New Fortress Energy a $1.5 billion contract to convert two oil-burning power plant units in San Juan from petroleum to gas. The deal also included building an import terminal for liquefied natural gas, which began operating in San Juan’s harbor in 2020 — before the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had authorized the project. Last year, the commission ordered New Fortress to retroactively apply for a permit, though the gas company is pushing back in court.
Puerto Rican officials have said converting the San Juan units to gas provides cleaner, cheaper fuel for the grid. Energy experts and environmentalists who oppose the contract say investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure only detracts from the government’s goals to curb emissions and improve resiliency.
Posters declaring “Fuera Luma,” or “Out with Luma,” appear in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, near an office of Luma Energy, the private consortium that operates the island’s grid.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
“We’re in a climate crisis that’s growing worse every day,” says Daniel Muñoz, a homeowner in University Gardens, a quiet neighborhood of one-story houses in San Juan. “Our generation, we should make the change [to renewable energy] now, because if not, the crisis will become a total disaster.”
Last year, Muñoz banded together with 21 of his neighbors to put solar panels and batteries on their individual houses. The systems aren’t tied together as in a microgrid. But by negotiating as a group, the neighbors secured a discount of roughly 20 percent with a local solar installer, shaving thousands of dollars off the cost of each installation.
Muñoz and his neighbor Victor Santana take me up to Santana’s rooftop to see the 26 blue solar panels installed there. Santana leads the neighborhood association and helped organize the collective solar effort. He says he paid $27,000 for the solar panels and two lithium-ion batteries, which can cover all of his household’s energy needs.
The University Gardens project is the first of its kind in Puerto Rico, though hundreds of communities on the U.S. mainland have negotiated similar bulk-purchase discounts with the help of nonprofit Solar United Neighbors. The Washington, D.C.-based organization recently partnered with Cambio, an environmental group in San Juan, to guide Santana, Muñoz, and their neighbors through the solar-buying process.
“We wanted to help improve the environment and also make our community a little more resilient,” Santana says over the din of squawking — vibrant green parrots called cotorras bounce up and down in a nearby tree. So far, his solar setup has spared him from two major blackouts: the islandwide outage that occurred in April and another disruption that swept San Juan last year after a fire broke out at the city’s Monacillos substation.
Now the homeowners say they want to help organize a second bundled solar purchase for other neighbors, particularly older, retired residents living on fixed incomes and grappling with rising electricity bills.
In Puerto Rico, some 43 percent of people live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated widespread unemployment in the tourism-dependent economy. In the absence of a robust public policy facilitating access to clean energy, groups like the University Gardens neighbors are working to share their resources with residents who otherwise can’t afford to install their own rooftop solar systems.
“Right now, only well-off people and industries can get their own localized generation, and the majority of people can’t,” says Ruth Santiago, an environmental attorney who lives in the south coast city of Guayama and serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “This is very much a social justice and equity issue.”
Energy access isn’t just about enabling people to produce power at home. It’s also about improving the resilience of essential services, especially in the face of the worsening impacts of climate change.
Sergeant Luis Saez leads the fire department in Guánica, a sunbaked city near the turquoise waters off Puerto Rico’s southwest coast. Firefighters serve the municipality of some 16,000 people and respond to calls on the tourist-packed beaches and in the dry forest, where thousands of fires erupt every year. The Guánica station also connects far-flung units in remote towns to larger urban stations with more trucks and firefighters.
“Our whole computer dispatch system, telephone system, radio communications — all of that needs power,” Saez says. “If we don’t have communications, we can’t do our jobs.”
Sergeant Luis Saez, left, and Edgardo Gelabert Santiago are on duty at the solar-powered fire station in Guánica, Puerto Rico.
Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
The sergeant steps into the garage where, beside the big red fire engine, four Tesla Powerwalls are attached to the wall. The lithium-ion batteries store electricity from the 52 solar panels sprawled across the building’s rooftop. Should the clouds roll in and the grid go down, the station’s essential systems could run just on battery power for about a week, he says.
Firefighters couldn’t receive calls immediately after Hurricane Maria, so they had to patrol the area looking for emergencies or wait for people to walk in. A similar scenario unfolded in January 2020 after a series of earthquakes left Puerto Ricans in the dark for days. Guánica was near the epicenter of one of them — a magnitude-6.4 earthquake that seriously damaged Puerto Rico’s largest power plant, an oil and gas-burning facility located just down the coast.
“There was no power, so we didn’t know where to go,” Saez recalls. Across from the fire station looms a forested hill with a deep scar from where a chunk of earth collapsed. “We just started seeing where people screamed and where people needed us. That was a bad moment.”
The Guánica station’s solar-and-battery system replaces the few small diesel generators that firefighters previously used in emergencies. Solar Responders, a nonprofit organization, helped install and maintain the system using a $277,000 grant from AbbVie, a pharmaceuticals manufacturer in Puerto Rico. Fifteen other fire stations have similar systems, though the nonprofit aims to put solar panels and batteries in all of the island’s 96 stations, says Hunter Johansson, the founder and CEO of Solar Responders.
There’s no doubt that Puerto Rico’s rooftop-solar movement is enabling many houses and facilities to avoid persistent outages and become more resilient in the face of disasters. But solar advocates emphasize that the current approach isn’t enough to meet the energy challenges facing the island.
“What people are doing now is…voting with their feet, so to speak,” says Agustín Irizarry, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico who works with the Microgrid Laboratory in Mayagüez (and has no relation to Gustavo Irizarry of Lucy’s Pizza).
“They are installing the systems themselves. And that’s a problem,” the professor says. “If we do this collectively, by investing the public money wisely, it will be cheaper for everyone. And the poor will have access to it as well.”
Earlier this year, the Biden administration reached a deal with Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi, a Democrat, that will steer $12 billion in federal recovery funds to help modernize the outdated electric grid and move toward renewable energy, in line with the territory’s goals of getting to 100 percent renewables by 2050.
For Irizarry and other experts, the federal funding represents a crossroads for Puerto Rico’s energy future. As they see it, if the majority of those dollars are spent resurrecting transmission towers and building more far-flung power plants — even those powered by the wind and sun — then the island will have missed an opportunity to create a more nimble system dominated by local power generation.
Santiago, the environmental attorney, argues that the public utility PREPA should use much of that $12 billion to install solar panels and storage systems on buildings. The utility would still charge customers for the electricity they consume, except that the power would come from distributed systems instead of fossil fuel power plants. The idea is that “people continue to pay their bills, but they have access to resilient, locally sited renewable energy that doesn’t depend on transmission,” she says. “That’s the only way we see that most low and middle-income people will have access to these systems.”
More high-level participation in local solar development would also allow utility planners, regulators, and communities to install systems more strategically, creating interconnected microgrids that serve entire neighborhoods or regions, instead of only individual buildings. “If you coordinate this from the very beginning and make sure that all the equipment can talk to each other, it requires less investment,” Irizarry says.
Until that happens, however, groups like the Adjuntas business association and University Gardens neighbors are left to create ad hoc solutions that expand access to clean energy to those who can’t afford it.
Back in Caguas, the Mutual Support Center is already supplying solar electricity to its neighbor. Standing on the yellow building’s rooftop, Marisel Robles and Saúl González point to a small cultural museum across a common courtyard. The center’s solar panels can connect by wire to the museum, keeping its lights on whenever the center produces more electricity than it needs.
“In Puerto Rico, right now the model for moving to renewable energy is, save yourself if you can, or save yourself if you have the resources,” González says. “We’re trying to see how we can change that situation.”
As the heavy rainfall of Hurricane Harvey thundered down on the Texas Gulf Coast at the end of August 2017, the roof on a massive ExxonMobil storage tank “partially sank.” The collapse caused the facility to release more than 185,000 pounds of pollutants, including carcinogenic compounds like benzene. That same week, Harvey damaged storage tanks at eight other similar facilities.
Petrochemical storage tanks often have floating roofs that sit right above the product, and the unusually heavy rainfall caused tank roofs to sink, partially submerge, or float and release their contents into floodwaters. In total, the storage tanks released 3.1 million of the reported 8.3 million pounds of excess pollution that were emitted during Harvey.
Many of these accidents could have been prevented if the tanks had been designed to account for the heavier rainfall events brought on by climate change, according to a new report by the environmental and consumer rights nonprofit Public Citizen Texas. The report argues that state regulations and industry standards use outdated rainfall data to set minimum thresholds for building storage tanks and other petrochemical equipment. With climate-fueled storms bringing more frequent and heavier rainfall, the facilities are more likely to fail and release toxic chemicals into the air and water, according to the report.
“Natural disasters are being followed by man made chemical disasters,” said Adrian Shelley, Public Citizen’s Texas office director. “If we know of a weakness, then it should be fixed. If these failures happen again, neither industry nor regulators can claim they weren’t warned.”
Extreme weather events on the Gulf Coast are almost always followed by industrial accidents and pollution. Pollution during hurricanes can take several forms. Facilities that choose to shut down in anticipation of a hurricane often release tens of thousands of pounds of emissions as they burn off excess product in the system and wind down operations. Similarly, these facilities release an elevated amount of pollution when they start back up after the rainfall has subsided. Aside from these foreseen emissions, facilities often also face equipment failures of various types. Generators may become submerged and cause power outages. Valves or pipes may break off. And, as was overwhelmingly the case during Harvey, storage tank roofs may sink or be otherwise damaged.
A key cause of such accidents is Texas’ reliance on outdated and inaccurate standards, according to the report. Construction standards in Texas, including those embedded in state statutes and industry handbooks, often rely on definitions of “100-year storms” and “25-year storms.” The former has a 1 percent chance of occurring during any given year, and the latter has a 4 percent chance. State administrative codes refer to Technical Paper 40, a compendium of rainfall frequency published by the Weather Bureau in 1961, to define these storm events.
The problem is that the compendium uses rainfall data from 1938 to 1958, and rainfall patterns of today are very different from those of the 1940s and 1950s. For instance, Hurricane Harvey dropped nearly 20 inches of rain in the first 24 hours, but the paper’s 24-hour rainfall data for Houston tops out at 12 inches.
The Public Citizen report recommends adopting Atlas-14, a set of rainfall data released by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association in 2018, in place of Technical Paper 40. Although Atlas-14 uses data from the 1980s, the rainfall estimates are more accurate than those the state currently uses. It defines 17 inches of rain over 24 hours as a 100-year event and 29.8 inches of rain as a 1,000-year event.
“Texas’ petrochemical industry is unprepared for severe rainfall because our laws and regulations have not kept pace with our new climate reality,” the report concludes. “Updating these definitions is one way to prepare for even more extreme weather resulting from climate change. Just as the National Weather Service has redrawn its maps, it is time for Texas to redefine extreme weather.”
When scientists say climate change will bring flooding, most people think of big coastal cities: New Orleans, New York, Newport News. They picture TV coverage of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, crashing waves and blown-away beaches.
But across the U.S., flooding is arguably the most universal climate menace, threatening more than low-lying coastal cities and sandy beaches. The danger comes from saturated Great Plains, overwhelmed Appalachian creeks, and washed-out wildfire-ravaged hillsides, and it defies all forms of struggling infrastructure. Nearly 15 million properties across the country are at substantial risk of flooding in the next 30 years. Flooding is also — in part due to the fact that it can happen anywhere — the most expensive natural disaster, racking up $100 billion in damages in 2021 alone.
We wanted to highlight the specific and varied challenges that inland communities face when it comes to flooding — and more importantly, how they’re taking on those challenges. We spoke with community leaders, government officials, and residents all across “flyover country” about how they’re shoring up against a wetter future. Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Greenbrier County, West Virginia
“The flood is woven into the social fabric of these towns now.”
Two residents of White Sulphur Springs, in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, hug as they clean up from the devastating June 2016 flood.
Steve Helber / AP
When a devastating “1,000-year flood” hit Greenbrier County, West Virginia, in June 2016, as much as 10 inches of rain fell in one hour. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and 15 lives lost. This area — like much of West Virginia – is made up of small, rural communities nestled at the bases of hills in narrow valleys, with lots of tributaries and creeks running through. The region’s geography makes it susceptible to extreme, intense flooding, but the likes of this particular event had not been seen in living memory, and it had lasting, traumatic effects. In fact, recovery from the 2016 flood continues to this day in some form all across southern and central West Virginia.
We spoke with two local experts and one researcher about how the community built itself back up with the help of its own long-standing organizations: Jamie Shinn, a geographer at West Virginia University who studies Greenbrier County’s flood recovery; David Lumsden, vice president of the community development organization the Meadow River Valley Association; and Dara Vance, an Americorps volunteer who works with Lumsden at the association.
Jamie Shinn: One thing that stands out is the toll that the flood has taken on people over time. Everyone has a story of the flood, it doesn’t matter who or what you’re talking about, but people tend to circle back to: Where were you in the flood? What was your response?
So I think the flood is woven into the social fabric of these towns now. People talk a lot about: “What happens now, every time it rains? Will it happen again?” They’re panicked. The weather alerts we get on our phones can be anxiety-producing, and they’re not always accurate, so they’re constantly having to navigate the post-trauma of what it was like to live through that flood. And the stories people tell are extremely harrowing: hosting 20 people in your hardware store and eating out of the vending machine, trapped in an attic for an entire day.
I learned a lot about how the federal government relies on these local and faith-based organizations, some of these groups set up in the communities for years. They were themselves rebuilding, and meanwhile coordinating volunteers. And several hundreds of homes have been built by these groups, been refurbished, and gotten new appliances.
Dara Vance: The faith-based organizations and nonprofits, they don’t arrive as the result of a flood. They are here, and they marshal their resources to respond to floods. But because West Virginia is a state that always needs help, and a home repair is happening all the time, there may be a repair going on that brings that home closer to surviving the next flood, just because someone needed their porch replaced, a new roof, a new wheelchair ramp. And then when there is a disaster, that kinda gets kicked into high gear. It’s a very interesting situation that this help is happening year round, and then in these events, even more help comes.
David Lumsden: My concern, having been a long-term recovery committee chairman, is that knowledge is perishable. As we get further and further away from the last disaster in Greenbrier County, and folks like myself age out, how is it that the community behind us, the younger folks, how do they retain the knowledge we’ve gained the hard way? At the end of the day, it’s maintaining the local network and partnerships that are so important.
Miami, Oklahoma
“The land that was given to the tribes in exchange for what they lost will be underwater.”
The Tar Creek, which is a designated Superfund site due to heavy metal contamination, runs through the town of Miami, Oklahoma.
Courtesy of LEAD Agency, Inc.
At the end of the 19th century, a lead and zinc mining boom in the northeast corner of Oklahoma gave birth to the town of Miami. The town thrived for several decades until the mine business dried up. But the abandoned chat piles (heaps of lead- and zinc-contaminated dust and rock left over from excavation) and resulting heavy metal pollution lingered long after. The Tar Creek watershed that surrounds the former mining sites and the adjacent communities was designated a Superfund site in 1983.
Today, Miami lies at the nexus of several compounding threats. The highly polluted Tar Creek floods into the town whenever its feeding tributary, the Neosho River, overflows its banks. The Neosho River itself is fed by the Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees, which is the subject of a request by the Oklahoma Grand River Dam Authority (the state agency that oversees the Grand River waterway) to have its water levels raised for both hydropower and recreation. Rebecca Jim, executive director of the Miami-based organization Local Environmental Action Demanded, or LEAD, and a member of the Cherokee Nation, explains how she is working to help the community protect itself and prepare for floods to come.
Rebecca Jim: This little corner of Oklahoma was the last piece of land available to a group of tribes that had lost theirs — it became a dumping ground for all of the remnant tribes. You’re gonna have Quapaw, Miami, Peorie, Ottawa, Shawnee, Modonk, Seneca-Cayuga. And so they were squeezed into the tiny little piece of the state, out of what was Indian territory, stacked up here together on the other side of the Neosho River.
So when flooding happens, and we’re expecting more flooding over time, more of the land that was given to the tribes in exchange for what they lost will be underwater. It won’t be all underwater all of the time, but a great deal of it will be, and not usable as they were promised.
The Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees is not as deep as it once was, because it is filling up with sediment from the Neosho River and also the creek. And the Grand River Dam Authority, with help from Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, is asking for the ability to raise the lake level to accommodate people who want it deeper. So our senator put an amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act to allow that to happen. That will allow the lake to fill with water quicker and back up water more quickly into these communities that flood.
If the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approves a further raising of the lake levels — which is in review right now — that’s a great concern to the community of Miami. And the city is fighting it with legal actions, and hoping they can save the town. At LEAD, we’ve been working with the Thriving Earth Exchange to develop a map that would illustrate how much flooding this community, and the whole county, experience. We also show how many of the mine waste piles are in the floodplain, and would be inundated with water that then continues to drain into the creek continually.
And in these periods where the Tar Creek spreads, it bleeds its sediment in yards and playgrounds and parks and gardens, and deposits those heavy metals. And with the lake level going up, and climate change, those metals will be spread even farther. We know that in this watershed, because of the metals that are deposited, that the wild plants are not edible. And so when you look at native people, and people that live off the land, they don’t gather the wild onions or strawberries or blackberries that might be in your face wanting to be picked. They don’t do that because they’ll be loaded with heavy metals.
If the lake level comes up, it deposits more lead on more land. But it’s also a Superfund site. And all of Ottawa County is eligible to have any residents’ land or yards checked for lead, and funding from the Environmental Protection Agency will pay for it to be removed. Some of what they’ve already cleaned up is in the flood zone, and so they may have to keep remediating some of these properties into the future.
We’re working with an organization called Buy-In. We’re going to do some surveys that we’ll complete by September. And we’ll interview people in the area, and then pull together a document from that, on how people feel about adaptation, how many that live in the flood areas would want a buyout, or would they want to stay there if there’s some things that they could do, or have done that would allow them to stay.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
“We cleared land to allow the river to move and to remove people from harm’s way.”
During the June 2008 flood, water submerged houses on the southwest side of town for several days.
Scott Olson / Getty Images
In June 2008, the city of Cedar Rapids experienced its most devastating flood in history. The Cedar River that runs through the center of the city rose to 31 feet, or? 19 feet above flood stage, following a perfect storm of spring weather conditions. Snow melt from a wet winter raised the river levels, and then huge amounts of rain filled the watershed.
After a week of downpours, 10,000 people had been evacuated from their homes, and all of the city’s downtown and economic center was inundated. The city hall, courthouse, and jail — on an island in the middle of the river — were submerged by several feet. Electricity was lost throughout the city for days, and water usage quotas were imposed due to power failures at the treatment plant. The Quaker Oats factory — at the time, the largest cereal factory in the world — was so badly flooded that it had to close for several weeks.
Sandi Fowler, deputy city manager of Cedar Rapids, explains how they rebuilt their downtown and the neighborhoods surrounding it — knowing that this wouldn’t be the last extreme flood they’d see.
Sandi Fowler: The flood affected about 10 percent of Cedar Rapids residents located in the core of downtown and then all of the core neighborhoods around it. And then in a buyout process with the government, we ended up purchasing 1400 structures. We cleared land to allow the river to move, and to remove people from harm’s way.
Right before this happened, we’d been working with the Army Corps of Engineers to study the river. We wanted to evaluate the hazard of the river flooding and how to protect against future flooding. We were very aggressive, we pre-funded some of those designs, we adopted an Army Corps Chief’s Report, all for millions of dollars. And then we immediately started working with them after the flood. By November of 2008 we’d engaged thousands of residents in the planning process: When it comes to river core redevelopment and neighborhood density, where do neighborhoods go and what do they look like?
When we were designing the flood system with the Army Corps of Engineers and the community, our goal was to take some of that land and give the river room to breathe. We can build taller walls, but knowing the climate is changing, we wanted to increase the volume and amount of space given to the river. And the flood system that now runs through downtown is transparent to the community but it blends into the landscape. On the west side of the river, there’s huge amounts of water coming into that basin that we’re now going to manage with a pump station.
Once we had the flood system drawn, that’s how we decided whether you could build back or not. If you were in the greenway, we wouldn’t allow you to rebuild. Those people were really sad; that’s a family home, they wanted to stay there. The construction zone was the swathe where we thought the footprint or the levy would go; you could build back, but with no public money because we were trying to disincentivize. In the neighborhood redevelopment area, we encouraged you to rebuild and gave as much money as needed to anyone who wanted to rebuild. We wanted those areas repopulated. That was where we expected neighborhoods to redevelop and thrive, based on the 500-year flood projections.
I’d encourage any city to do their planning now, so you know: These are the pinch points, the hazard areas that we should not continue to populate, and this is what we want our community to look like.
Three Forks, Montana
“New people coming in probably aren’t aware of the floodplain or what that means.”
The town of Three Forks sits just south of the Missouri River Breaks National Monument, the source of the Missouri River, where the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin Rivers meet.
Visions of America / Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The town of Three Forks, population around 2,000, gets its name because it lies just south of where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers converge to form the Missouri, the longest American river. In the mountain west, waterways are not only subject to flash flooding but also to ice jam flooding, where giant chunks of ice form a sort of dam on a tributary, backing up water over its riverbanks. After a wildfire tears through a forested region, the freshly bald mountainsides become a flood risk when rain pours down them and carries a torrent of water, dirt, and ash to the rivers and towns below.
The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation has been working on new draft maps to more accurately show the flood risk across the state. These maps show a significant portion of Three Forks at risk of a 100-year flood. (The designation of 100-, 500-, or 1000-year flood, however, is increasingly problematic because climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme flooding.) Kelly Smith, floodplain administrator and deputy city clerk for the city of Three Forks, and Kristin Smith (no relation), program manager with the community development and land management research group Headwaters Economics, describe the work they have done to help the community of Three Forks prepare for floods to come.
Kelly Smith: They have better technology for mapping, as the years go on, and the engineers found that the Jefferson River would come out of its banks about two miles south of a bridge we have here. This new map puts most of the west side of our town into the floodway, which means no building. If your house floods or burns down you can rebuild, but you can’t enlarge it or build anything new. Coming up the Madison, it showed that we’d have greater flooding there also, raising the base flood levels by about 2 feet.
With climate change — it’s hard to predict, but if we do have drought conditions and then we get a big ice jam, the ground won’t be able to soak up the water, and the river could spill further over into town. But they’re modeling these maps on historical data, because no one knows what will happen in the future.
When we first found out about these new maps, the city council said doing nothing is not an option. That’s when we got help from Headwaters Economics and Great West Engineering. There’s some farmland a couple of miles outside of town where the engineers have found that they could build a shallow, wide channel to capture almost all of the quantity of water that would come in from the Jefferson River in a 100-year flood event. There are two landowners of this farmland that we’re working with — we don’t have anything signed yet, but they are being helpful. There could still be cattle grazing in the channels. The ground wouldn’t need to be unusable.
Two years ago we applied for a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant. We didn’t get any money — the coastline communities got all the money last year. We felt pretty defeated, because we put a lot of time and energy into it and Headwaters paid for the engineering. We got some pointers on how to reapply, and so we reapplied in December for two FEMA grants. One or the other would work. If we get that, the new maps go into the place, but we hope to get the channel in before a major flood would happen.
We sent notices and postcards to everyone who would be affected by the map. We’ve had newspaper articles, Facebook posts, website information — we’re trying to push this out because it will have a huge effect on people in the floodplain. But we have had very few in the community even contact us. So I’m concerned when the new maps become effective and people start being told about them by their mortgage companies, that’s when we’ll have the outcry, because I feel they’re not paying attention.
We have realtors from Bozeman listing houses in Three Forks, and I send messages to the realtors: This is in the floodplain, it’ll be in the floodway, make sure they disclose it. And they’re still not disclosing it! People have no idea they bought a house that is going to be remapped.
New people coming in probably aren’t aware of the floodplain or what that means. We have had a large number of people moving in because we’re cheaper than Bozeman, but it’s still the highest prices people have ever seen in Three Forks that I know of. With working online and COVID, you don’t have to be in an office anymore, so you can live in a rural area and not have to worry about getting to your job as much. And we have had a lot of longer term residents that have sold and left town, cashing out on high property prices.
Kristin Smith: In Three Forks, there’s significant flood risk but actually the community has not flooded seriously in a very long time. They’re not really worried because it hasn’t happened in living memory. But they are very concerned about keeping their community affordable, and of course the flood risk regulations. If they don’t figure out a solution, housing prices will go up. We often emphasize: This project has to occur, not only to reduce flood risk, but also to keep the community affordable.
People keep talking about the risk from a natural hazard or hazard point of view, and the problem isn’t the flood, the flood is natural. But the problem is the people impacted by it. In my work, I keep coming back to: “Why does this matter for the community?”
A lot of our climate adaptation is presented in terms of: “This is how it should be,” versus, “How can we meet communities where they’re at?” And that is a huge barrier for all of rural America.
Imagine you’re moving from Tampa, Florida, to Dallas, Texas. You own a house in Tampa, but you’re changing jobs, so you put the house on the market. Soon, potential buyers start showing up. You tell them about the nice neighborhood, the good restaurants nearby, and the community pool — but there’s one thing you hesitate to mention: The house flooded four years ago during a hurricane, ruining the living room. You fixed everything like a good owner should, but you also know that it could happen again. The storms seem to be more frequent in recent years, and more severe.
You have to sell the house in the next few months before you move to Dallas, and you’re worried about scaring off buyers. Your real estate agent suggests that you don’t mention the flood, especially since the house has been fixed and there are no structural defects.
What do you do? Do you have a responsibility to discuss the flood with would-be buyers, even if it means scaring them off? Or can you omit unflattering information that hasn’t even left an enduring mark on the property? After all, the flood was years ago. Where do your ethical obligations end?
When a homeowner puts her house on the market, she does have a legal obligation to disclose certain facts and risks to potential buyers. These disclosure obligations vary by state, but the most common ones apply to invisible hazards like lead paint and asbestos. Many states also require sellers to disclose if their home has been the site of a murder, or even if it has a reputation for being haunted.
When it comes to disclosing flood history, though, there’s no federal mandate, and state requirements are spotty. More than one-third of states have no flood disclosure laws whatsoever, and a few more have laws that experts deem too weak or too vague. These laggards include Florida, New York, and New Jersey, all of which rank in the top five states with the largest coastal populations. Other offending states include population centers like Virginia and Georgia, plus states like Missouri and Maryland with long histories of riverine and ocean flooding.
To make matters worse, homeowners who live in these states don’t have any way to find out whether a home has flooded. Members of the public can search the flood map database of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to find out whether a home is inside a designated flood zone, and thus whether it requires flood insurance. However, simply being inside a flood zone doesn’t mean a home has ever flooded, and there are plenty of homes outside these zones that see frequent and significant water damage. When Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas, for instance, more than half of all damaged homes were outside FEMA flood zones.
A man bags up damaged items as he helps a friend clean out his flooded home after Hurricane Harvey in Richwood, Texas.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Due to federal privacy regulations, only the current owner of a home can request to see a home’s flood claim history. This means that, unless there’s a state law mandating disclosure, the seller of a home can leave that information out of her conversations with a potential buyer, and the buyer will remain in the dark until she signs the last paperwork and becomes the owner of a home herself. There are some independent tools, like the nonprofit First Street Foundation’s Flood Factor, that can shed light on an individual home’s risk, but a seller is under no more obligation to tell a potential buyer about sea-level rise projections than they are to tell them about the guy down the street who plays loud music on weekends.
Sea-level rise in South Florida is “not a prevalent thing for home sellers,”said Tony Scornavacca, a real estate agent who works in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida.
That is in spite of the fact that Scornavacca has noticed water levels around Miami Beach rise around a foot over the course of his adult life. But most buyers in the city’s beachfront neighborhoods aren’t worried. “For the wealthy who want a waterfront property, flooding is a low priority on the list of concerns,” he said.
Even so, Scornavacca believes that home sellers and their agents have an ethical obligation to talk about flooding. Florida law requires sellers to disclose “known defects,” but if all the damage from a flood has been repaired, that requirement is moot — and there is no legal requirement to talk about the potential for future flooding.
“If a seller said to me, ‘Listen, we have slight flooding here, but let’s not mention that to the buyers,’ I’m gonna say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t work with you,’” he said. “Some realtors will just say, ‘Okay, we won’t tell anybody.’”
These concerns aren’t just academic: There is already a great deal of evidence that information about flood history and climate vulnerability affects a home’s value. When Congress raised flood insurance rates back in 2012, coastal property markets started to falter, prompting an outrage that soon led lawmakers to roll back their rate hikes.
In Florida, meanwhile, researchers have found that home values in areas most vulnerable to sea-level rise are growing more slowly than home values in less vulnerable areas. In many of these at-risk areas, the overall number of home sales has fallen, which in many cases is a prelude to a crash in value. One nationwide study, meanwhile, found that flood-prone properties are overvalued by about $34 billion because the market hasn’t accounted for potential flood risk. As buyers grow more wary of risks related to climate change, some researchers believe that the most vulnerable homes might lose so much of their value that they become impossible to sell.
A residential street in Bonita Springs, Florida after Hurricane Irma in 2017.
Jeff Greenberg / Getty Images
Such issues aren’t deeply concerning at the moment, because the overall housing market is so hot. Demand for homes has exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic began, even as supply-chain issues have caused a slump in the number of new homes being built. That means that many homes are selling for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars above asking price. In a market where some buyers are offering to name their children after home sellers if it means they can make a deal, the fact that a home has flooded in the past might not be a deal breaker. The froth of current demand might make up for the value hit you take from mentioning a past flood. In looser markets, though, climate factors might depress home values enough that some sellers are forced to sell below what they bought for, giving them every incentive not to disclose flood risk.
When homes lose value, people lose money. For many homeowners, those losses can be ruinous. All the same, the revaluation of property markets that are vulnerable to climate change is an essential step toward climate adaptation. Given that sea levels are poised to rise around a foot by 2050, it’s safe to say that a great deal of coastal property is overvalued right now. If a given house will be underwater at high tide in two decades, it’s hard to justify asking a buyer for $1 million to take it off your hands.
If prices fall in a given area to reflect future risk, that sends a signal to potential buyers to stay away. It also opens up the area to interventions such as government-sponsored home buyouts. Information symmetry might have negative consequences for individual homeowners, but it leads to a fairer market.
“Ideally, it wouldn’t be the homeowner’s responsibility to do that,” said Miyuki Hino, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the effects of flood risk disclosure on property values. “There should be easy-to-access information from other sources [than the seller]. The goal should be to take that decision burden off of the sellers’ shoulders.” Hino’s research has found that floodplain properties in the U.S. are overvalued by tens of billions of dollars, but that the valuation gap is smaller in states that have strict disclosure rules.
We hear a lot about how individual actions can’t solve climate change, but the owners of vulnerable homes are some of the few people who face a binary moral choice about how to respond to the climate crisis. It would be difficult to deny that revealing a home’s flood risk is the right thing to do. For one, it helps nudge a property market toward information symmetry. But there is also something to be said, however touchy-feely, for being kind enough to the buyer of your property not to place them blindly in the path of enormous home repair costs, or even financial ruin.
Of course, doing the “right thing” can also mean taking a significant financial hit. This is why so many people don’t do it. Different homeowners will have varying abilities to absorb such a hit, and admittedly some may not be able to afford it.
There may be a way to square this circle, although it’s still not without some cost for the owners of flood-prone properties. There are plenty of steps that individual homeowners can take to protect their homes from flooding, from installing flood vents to planting water-absorbing grasses. For homes that are right on the water, there’s the option of installing living shorelines of marsh vegetation, which can soak up waters from high tide.
In the most dramatic cases, the federal government offers grants to assist with elevating one’s home on stilts or a slab, an expensive but effective long-term solution. Thousands of people in states like Louisiana have elevated by a few feet in an effort to keep their homes floodproof and marketable. (It’s not entirely a coincidence that the state has one of the strongest disclosure laws in the nation.) All these interventions do is shift the cost burden up a little bit, so that homeowners spend to make their homes more resilient rather than take a financial hit at the moment they sell.
Hino also cites federal home buyouts as a potential solution to the problem. She notes that many people who participate in buyout programs like the one run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency say they don’t want to pass their flood-prone home to someone else. These programs are very limited, though: FEMA typically only deploys buyouts when local governments apply for them after major disasters. As a result, the agency has only purchased around 40,000 homes over the course of three decades. Most owners of flood-prone properties don’t have access to buyouts and instead have to retail their flooded homes on the private market. For now, at least, the difficult decisions aren’t going away.
“Ideally, for those homeowners that would feel better if people didn’t live in that same house, they would have an option to do what they feel is the right thing without hurting themselves financially,” Hino said. “And I think that doesn’t really exist all that often right now.”
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the neighborhood of Hoffman Triangle was overwhelmed by 6 feet of water. But it doesn’t take a hurricane to make this wedge in the center of the city flood. The sidewalks, where they exist, are buckled, cracked, and overgrown from past deluges. Every time it rains, the narrow streets become rivers, the potholes tiny lakes. When the water comes — which it does, and will continue to — it makes navigating Hoffman by foot or by car feel like an obstacle course.
Dana Eness expertly navigates that gauntlet. The executive director of the Urban Conservancy, a New Orleans nonprofit that provides resources related to environmental stewardship, knows the neighborhood well. From her car, she can identify what material was used to make a particular parking lot, which homes have the best drainage systems, and which native plants, from muhly grass to sweetbay magnolias, would best serve the drainage or water management needs of each yard. She’s part of a grassroots coalition called Umbrella working to keep Hoffman relatively dry — no mean feat in a city that averages over 60 inches of rain a year — using landscaping interventions that can be implemented one yard at a time.
“You can do two things at once,” says Eness. “You can create space for water to go, and, if you’re thoughtful about it, you can create space within society for people who are being shut out economically.”
New Orleans is in the midst of a green infrastructure revolution, and in smaller neighborhoods like Hoffman Triangle, residents are leading the way, house by house, block by block. Along oak-lined South Galvez Street, Eness pulls over in front of Stronger Hope Baptist Church. It’s one of roughly 17 congregations in the neighborhood, which sits on less than a square mile. She points out a small rain garden the Umbrella coalition constructed to capture runoff from the church parking lot. Once, this was nothing more than ragged tufts of grass sprouting up from a broad swath of concrete. Now, there’s rich mulch with manicured rows of shrubs and clean, permeable pavement in the driveway. It’s been raining all week, and the new garden is soaked through, but the sidewalk and driveway are dry. The front yards of the homes across the road, meanwhile, are swamped with several inches of water.
One year after installation, the green infrastructure project the Umbrella coalition put in next to Stronger Hope Baptist Church in Hoffman Triangle is thriving, showing how green infrastructure projects can become more effective as plants take root. All grown in, this project can store over 20,000 gallons of water.
Urban Conservancy
For many New Orleanians, water management isn’t about billion-dollar levees or century-old pumps. It’s about small, nature-based projects like that rain garden or pavement that allows water to soak in, new wetlands, or streets lined with trees. These installations reduce the burden on the city’s aging, overwhelmed drainage system and can do a lot toward improving the quality of life for residents fed up with routine flooding.
But as the neighborhood of Hoffman Triangle has shown, flood resilience takes a village. Many of the Umbrella projects are constructed by landscaping firms owned and operated by New Orleans locals using this green revolution as an opportunity to bring in jobs and money. And by harnessing the power of the community, it can be done cheaply and effectively when time is running out for adaptation.
Year-round, New Orleanians deal with a chronic kind of inundation researchers vaguely call “urban flooding.” Overtaxed pipes back up, roadside ditches fill, and water pools, creating mosquito breeding grounds and blocking access to sidewalks and front steps. It eats away at foundations, damages cars, and allows mold and mildew to flourish.
For over a century, the city’s rapid, haphazard development created vast landscapes of pavement and concrete, which can’t effectively absorb water. Increasingly intense storms linked to climate change have brought one swift inundation after another. No longer able to soak into the ground, runoff from rainstorms flows into aging stormwater pipes, picking up all kinds of junk from fertilizer residue to miscellaneous litter along the way.
Much of New Orleans lies in a shallow bowl that dips below sea level, so to prevent flooding, every drop of water must be siphoned into Lake Pontchartrain through an elaborate system of canals and pumps. That leaves the underlying clay soils parched and brittle, unable to support the weight of the city’s infrastructure. As a result, New Orleans sinks a little lower every year. Meagan Williams, an engineer at the Department of Public Works, compares the soil under the city to a sponge: When it rains, the sponge expands; wring the water out, and it shrivels and hardens.
To compound the sponge problem, the city’s so-called “gray” infrastructure — the existing network of concrete pipes, pumps, and levees — isn’t always reliable. During floods in August 2017, several pumps failed. One investigation found that over 11,000 of the city’s catch basins were clogged by debris. Old-fashioned neglect has also created areas that Todd Reynolds, executive director of the nonprofit Groundwork New Orleans, calls “drainage deserts.” On South Johnson Street in Hoffman, for] example, there are four blocks without a single catch basin. “When it rains, every corner has two feet of water on it,” Reynolds says of these undeveloped stretches. “People shouldn’t have to live that way.”
Water pools in people’s back yards and driveways in Hoffman Triangle whenever it rains.Thrive NOLA
Excessive paving and concrete front yards are common across New Orleans and can exacerbate street flooding.Urban Conservancy
One solution to all this flooding would be to rip up all the underground pipes and put in bigger ones to handle more water. But Reynolds says that’s a “trillion-dollar fix,” completely out of reach for any American city, let alone New Orleans.
Green infrastructure is a cheaper option to improve urban drainage. Some projects are as simple as the installation of a rain barrel that catches water flowing off a rooftop. Others transform entire “green” streets with planters, rain gardens, trees, and permeable pavement. They can be easier to build — simple enough for an individual homeowner to install — and, in the case of plant-based fixes, they can get stronger as greenery takes root and grows, rather than decaying with age.
The goal of “nature-based” solutions is to reduce the pressure on pipes and pumps by using landscaping to slow the flow of water. Projects can store water so it soaks into the soil or slowly flows into a storm drain at a rate the system can handle. Plants can also absorb water into their roots, leaching out pollutants in the process. They also come with various added benefits like improved water quality, mosquito control, and increased open space to cool the sweltering Louisiana air.
But even natural flood resilience measures can get expensive. Before green infrastructure projects can really take root, residents and city officials need to invest in undoing the damage that’s been done: namely, hacking away the existing concrete jungle.
The Urban Conservancy has carved out a niche for itself as the pavement removal experts. Its signature program, the Front Yard Initiative, provides technical assistance and partial reimbursement for DIY projects transforming patches of concrete into colorful native plant gardens, gravel trenches called French drains, trees, and porous pavement that can capture water.
Hoffman, though, has one of the lowest median incomes of any neighborhood in New Orleans, and many residents can’t afford a Front Yard project, even with partial reimbursement. So the Urban Conservancy partnered with a handful of groups, each with their own green infrastructure expertise, to form Umbrella, a neighborhood-wide program in the Triangle that provides pro bono residential installations.
The model is all about “small but meaningful actions.” At the home of Mr. Leroy on South Rocheblave Street, for example, water used to pool up to his back steps when it rained. The Umbrella coalition replaced 500 square feet of concrete with permeable paving and sod, allowing up to 1,000 gallons of water to slowly soak into the soil. Jesse and Ardean, other Hoffman homeowners, say they use water stored in their rain barrels for their gardens, helping plants and trees to thrive on their properties and saving money on their monthly water bill in the process.
Plants and permeable gravel help water soak into the ground of this front yard transformed through Urban Conservancy’s Front Yard Initiative.
Urban Conservancy
“If every house does a little bit, we can make a huge impact,” said Arien Hall, a co-founder of the landscaping firm Mastondonte.
Mastondonte worked on another home on South Johnson Street owned by Leo Young, a longtime resident fondly referred to as “Coach” by his neighbors. Young had to deal with water pooling in the vacant lot next door, subsidence, and a sidewalk riddled with potholes and mud. The Umbrella coalition helped replace his home’s rusted gutters, fix pothole-riddled sidewalks leading up to his drive, and put in gravel trenches to help water soak into the ground and restore access to the sidewalk. But to truly fortify the neighborhood, properties can’t just be considered in isolation and Coach realized he needed to convince his neighbors to do the same. Since then, he’s become something of an ambassador for green infrastructure in Hoffman, talking about his project on the evening news and encouraging his neighbors to undertake similar work.
For all its climate benefits, New Orleans’ green infrastructure boom is as much about building a community and mutual aid as storing water. “We’re there to meet the felt needs of people,” says Chuck Morse, one of Umbrella’s founding members and a minister at a local Baptist church. “I believe that people don’t care how much you know, until they know that you care.”
The Umbrella coalition ended up in Hoffman largely because of Morse’s many connections in the neighborhood. In addition to his other roles, he’s also president of the neighborhood association and sits on the Equity Committee for the city’s Climate Action Plan. His personal breaking point with flooding came in 2018 when he almost missed his daughter’s graduation due to inundated streets after a storm. “That’s just truly not how it needs to be,” he says, shaking his head.
Morse’s role is to run a workforce development program to train young residents in green infrastructure construction and support locally-owned landscaping firms that can build these projects. He’s also connected Umbrella with faith-based communities in Hoffman. He frames water management in terms of his Christian notions of “stewardship” to get local ministers on board, and Umbrella has branched into larger green infrastructure projects on church property. While a homeowner can store maybe 1,000 gallons of water on a small lot, a church can store upwards of 20,000.
Kenneth Thompson, the pastor of Pleasant Zion Baptist a few blocks down from Coach, has said that the new trees and rain barrels on the church property are “a blessing to the neighborhood,” making community spaces more resilient in a way that will benefit more than just one building. That’s especially important because the majority of Hoffman residents are renters, meaning they have less power to modify their homes. To that end, the current homeownership crisis in the United States certainly illuminates some of the limitations of a property-focused approach to climate resilience — at some point, the city does have to step in.
In 2016, New Orleans secured over $140 million in funding through the federal government to develop a multi-faceted “resilience district” in one of the city’s largest neighborhoods. There’s $3 million for workforce development (which Morse’s Thrive is managing), a Community Adaptation Program that installs projects for homeowners, and over 8 miles of streets and canals that will be transformed into blue and green corridors of open space. At the same time, the city is undertaking its largest investment ever in roadwork, with $2.2 billion across 200 projects that include green infrastructure elements wherever possible.
It’s hard to compare the scale of grassroots effort to the city’s plans, or even what is needed overall to shore up New Orleans against the rising seas of the 21st century. Yet, everyone agrees that there’s a great need for the kind of house-by-house, neighborhood-level adaptation that Umbrella facilitates.
Rain gardens are increasingly common in the public right of way and along sidewalks in some New Orleans neighborhoods like Bayou St. John.
Leah Campbell / Grist
Colleen McHugh, a planner at the Water Institute of the Gulf, adds that grassroots efforts bring stability. Every time a new mayor comes on board, McHugh says, “you have a bunch of folks who started something, leave, and move on.” Community groups are more nimble, though, and keep momentum going through those transitions.
Williams, from the Department of Public Works, says that the city needs people working at every level to make green infrastructure work. Grassroots groups, she says, provide a “huge service” for individual residents. As the Stormwater Program Manager for the entire city, she adds that groups like Umbrella “shine a light on some of the boots-on-the-ground issues” like where it regularly floods, what’s working, and what’s not.
Of course, there are challenges. Projects on public property require permits that can be cumbersome to acquire. Todd Reynolds, from Groundwork, says it’s taken him years in some cases to get approval. The original design for Coach’s house on South Johnson Street, for example, originally envisioned putting permeable pavement in the right-of-way in front of his house, but the city blocked it because it interfered with its planned roadwork.
Then there’s the question of maintenance. Green infrastructure saves money down the line, but it can require more routine maintenance, such as nurturing seedlings as their roots take hold. On paper, it’s straightforward: The homeowner is responsible for upkeep, like keeping native plants alive, dumping out rain barrels, or clearing drains. But in a neighborhood like Hoffman with many older and fixed-income residents, that means carefully designing projects that owners will be able to manage physically and financially. Eness has taken to driving around with trash bags in her trunk to collect litter and keep projects clean.
Eness recently drove by a newly constructed home on Jackson Avenue where the Umbrella coalition had put in a permeable driveway to help direct water away from the structure. She hopes to see more projects like that in the future, where green infrastructure is incorporated into new constructions, to spare future residents the stress and cost of flood management. Without better long-term strategies and dedicated funding for maintenance, everyone agrees that no acres of rain gardens or miles of green corridors will solve the flooding problem.
There will also always be rainstorms that overwhelm the system, and green infrastructure alone won’t save the city from rising seas, intensifying storms, and sinking streets. As Hoffman resident Coach says: “The water got to go somewhere. You got to live with it.”
David Haakenson thinks about water a lot. That’s because the farm he owns in western Washington experiences frequent, catastrophic floods. And climate change is making that trend worse.
“We had floods in October. We had floods in November, December, January, February, and March,” said Haakenson, the owner of Jubilee Farm. “There’s this kind of anxiety that involves — like, when you look out on the field and say, ‘Wow, I make my living off that field and now it’s a lake.’”
To protect Jubilee Farm, Haakenson is looking to an unlikely ally: Beavers. Because it turns out, beavers might actually offer some real protection against climate impacts like flooding and wildfires — if people can learn to live with them.
Farmers and beavers don’t often get along. Even Haakenson has had his share of conflicts with the local family of beavers who regularly turn his field into what he calls “Lake Jubilee.”
“The beavers have their goal in life and I have my goal in life,” Haakenson said. “My job is to farm and there is some friction there. But if I were to remove the beavers, more beavers would just come over because it is like a beaver paradise.”
Beavers have lived in North America for more than 7 million years. Until recently, the United States was home to a staggering number of them: Somewhere between 60 million and 400 million. That means for millions of years, North America looked completely different. It was a country covered in swamps, from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of the U.S. Southwest.
But by the end of the 1800s, everything had changed. Fur trappers hunted beavers to near extinction – and without them, American ecosystems completely changed. So when most of modern America was built, beavers weren’t really on anyone’s radar.
“It was all without beavers in mind. Without thinking about how they could affect our infrastructure, our roads, our yards, our driveways, our homes, our farms,” said Jen Vanderhoof, a senior ecologist for King County in Washington state. “They weren’t here. And we didn’t have to think about them.”
But in the last few decades, beaver populations have started to rebound — only to a fraction of their previous levels, but enough to cause trouble when they flood properties, wash away roads, or chew up trees.
“People are always like, ‘We didn’t used to have beaver problems,’ or ‘We didn’t used to have beavers and never saw beavers here before,’” said Vanderhoof. “But things are changing and they’re not going away at this point.”
“A lot of people get kind of irate about beaver dams, because beavers have one joy in life: and that is stopping water,” said Haakenson. “They probably have other ones. I’m sure they lead rich inner lives. But they really like stopping water from flowing.”
Now, as rising global temperatures make rainstorms more intense and frequent, Haakenson thinks that beavers’ ability to stop water might be able to actually help his farm.
To understand how that might work, let’s take a trip to a hypothetical creek. Like a lot of creeks, it’s just a single narrow channel. During winter storms, water rushes downstream. During summer, the creek dries up to a trickle. Climate change is making those floods and droughts even more extreme.
But here’s what happens if a beaver moves in: The beaver builds a dam, and water starts to back up into a pond. During a flood, a lot of that water can get stored in the pond, and in the soil underneath the pond, where it permeates through the ground and eventually comes out downstream. During summer droughts, when everything on the surface is usually dried up, there’s still water stored in the ground under the beaver pond, creating a lush oasis in an otherwise dry landscape.
An oasis that can even stand up to wildfire. One recent study looked at five streams that were hit by wildfires, comparing damage in areas with and without beaver dams. In every single case, the stream sections with beaver dams experienced only a third of the fire damage. All this matters, because climate change is contributing to more severe droughts, fires, and flooding, and beavers can help communities with those problems, just by doing what they do.
Take the Snoqualmie River, which regularly floods David Haakenson’s farm. It starts high in the Cascade Mountains, fed largely by melting alpine snow. But a warming climate is changing that. Storms are starting to deliver less snow and more rain — rain that rushes downstream during storms, and floods the river valley below. And flooding in the valley is probably only going to get worse.
“I feel like it’s going to be the thing that eventually the farm will go under because of – flood water,” Haakenson said. “The flooding is getting worse. The beavers might actually be able to help with that.”
One study estimated that on the Snoqualmie River, more beaver dams upstream could help store over 6,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of water.
On his farm, Haakenson keeps an eye on the dam, trying to keep it from overtaking his field. But beyond that, he pretty much lets the beavers do their thing.
“There’s kind of two ways to approach nature, and one is to fight it and the other one is to try to figure out how to coexist,” Haakenson said.
As beaver populations return, more people are following that strategy: Using tools like pond levelers or fences to protect the things that matter to them, but also letting beavers be when they’re not hurting anyone.
Americans are used to a world without beavers, but that’s changing, whether we like it or not.
Sure, beavers can be frustrating. But if we can learn to get along with these giant aquatic rodents, they might even turn out to be helpful neighbors.
