radiofree.asia

Category: Extreme weather

  • After Ida, a “Just and Fair Recovery” Must Address Ongoing Poverty, Inequality

    As Hurricane Ida is downgraded to a tropical depression, Louisiana’s main utility company Entergy says it could be weeks before it restores electricity to nearly a million people in the storm’s path, including all of New Orleans. We speak with Flozell Daniels Jr., president of the Foundation for Louisiana, who evacuated his home city and is calling for “a just and fair recovery” that addresses preexisting crises, including COVID-19 and poverty. “These are disasters that were already happening,” he says. He also describes the power of the oil and gas industry lobbyists he has challenged as a member of Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards’s Climate Initiatives Task Force.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

    Hurricane Ida has been downgraded to a tropical depression, after it hit the Louisiana coast Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. On Monday, it continued to bring torrential rain and flooding to Louisiana and southern Mississippi, where two people died when a flooded highway collapsed. Louisiana’s main utility company, Entergy, says it could be weeks before it restores electricity to nearly a million people in the storm’s path, including all of New Orleans, as temperatures rise to near 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Meanwhile, the New Orleans Police Department drew criticism for diverting resources from helping vulnerable residents to sending out what it called “anti-looting” officers. Some of this recalled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the media and police spread misinformation that left people stranded without basic necessities as more than 1,800 people died in Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

    For more, we’re joined by two guests. Reverend Lennox Yearwood is president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, a civil and human rights group. He’s originally from Shreveport, Louisiana. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he helped lead protests against racial profiling of survivors and established the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign. He’s also a climate justice activist and Air Force veteran who’s spoken out against the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s joining us from Washington, D.C.

    Also with us, Flozell Daniels, president of the Foundation for Louisiana, formerly known as the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, founded just days after Hurricane Katrina. He’s a New Orleans native and lives there. He joins us from Katy, Texas, where he evacuated for Hurricane Ida. He’s also a member of Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards’ Climate Task Force.

    We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Flozell Daniels, if you could describe your decision to relocate — now many who stayed are being told to relocate because of the blackout right now, no power to a million people in the New Orleans area — and what you’re hearing about what’s happening on the ground?

    FLOZELL DANIELS JR.: Thanks, Amy. I’m glad to be here with you.

    You know, my family and I decided to relocate because we are natives of Louisiana. And what you’re going to find time and time again is that Louisianans know and understand how to take care of themselves. There’s a lot of wisdom on the ground. We understood the science of this storm. We understand that climate is driving the severity of these weather events — and we could talk some more about that. And so we knew it was going to be a dangerous storm. So it made sense for us, and we have the privilege of having the resources and family and friends who could take us in, here in Katy, Texas, so that we could roll up our sleeves and start to get to the business of doing the work to not only do emergency response from the perspective of social justice philanthropy, but also begin to build out a just and fair recovery from Hurricane Ida.

    I think what we’re hearing on the ground and what we know for certain is that we had some real struggles with regard to even emergency response. If you think about the layers of disaster we’re already dealing with — COVID, the spikes caused by the Delta variant, the economic calamity that Black and Indigenous and people of color in poor and rural communities, our neighbors who are queer and trans and gender nonconforming — these are disasters that were already happening, Amy, before Hurricane Ida hit the shores as one of the strongest storms in American history, stronger than Hurricane Katrina even. And so, what we saw were people struggling to evacuate, struggling to get the resources to safely shelter in place.

    We were fortunate enough, through some of our donors and supporters, to move resources to the mutual aid groups, that have been doing the most incredible work on the ground — people really should support them — to move resources to Indigenous communities, that are historically in coastal communities and they know — but we have trust and expertise and experience — how to get people out of the city safely.

    And now, to your point, we’re dealing with this catastrophic failure of the energy grid. We have to talk about infrastructure as a part of this conversation. People are going to have to leave the city. No one can survive for weeks on end without electricity. It’s going to have an impact on whether the water is clean and safe. And it’s going to take resources in one of the poorest communities — Louisiana, at least, is — in the union, in the nation. It’s going to take resources at the federal level. It’s going to take resources from philanthropy. And it’s going to take resources and real love and partnership from our fellow neighbors to help us move through this current disaster.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask, Flozell Daniels, if you could talk about the role of the oil and gas industry in Louisiana, because, clearly, because of the power grid failure now, all of the refineries are shut down in that area —

    FLOZELL DANIELS JR.: Sure.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — until power is back up. So, will there be a battle now over who gets the resources first — the industry or the people — to be able to get back on their feet?

    FLOZELL DANIELS JR.: Well, I’ll tell you, Juan, if history is any indication, it absolutely will be a battle. What we’ve seen before, and we continue to see this, is that infrastructure and resources, particularly mission-critical resources after a disaster, get prioritized toward industry and not to people. And, you know, folks get upset when you say that, but that’s what the evidence has been.

    The good news, Juan, is that what we have now, that we didn’t have as much of 16 years ago, is social infrastructure. And that is people and neighborhoods and organizations that are deeply committed to a social justice perspective. They have experience and talent by way of organizing and policy advocacy and moving a just and fair agenda. And so, there are folks who have been fighting the good fight, who are already mobilizing to make sure that we can fight for what’s right so that we can mobilize power, so that we can push elected and public officials to do the right thing by way of allocating those resources, and push back on the sort of industrial narrative that they have what’s in our best interest at heart, which has just not been the case.

    AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly — very quickly, Flozell, if you could talk about being on Governor John Bel Edwards’ Climate Task Force? Speaking of battles, the battles you’re having on that task force as a group of you try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase regulations, and a group is fighting to increase —

    FLOZELL DANIELS JR.: That’s right.

    AMY GOODMAN: — the greenhouse gas emissions and support the oil and the fossil fuel industry.

    FLOZELL DANIELS JR.: Well, there are two important things that we know, Amy. One is, we finally got the inventory on greenhouse gas emissions, and it showed us what we knew all along: Industry is responsible for more than 60% of the emissions. And so, we’re in a battle to limit and stop those emissions and move to a renewable economy that’s actually going to save us in Louisiana and the entire planet.

    I think what you’re finding is, both the scientists, the social justice activists, the folks who are in fenceline communities, particularly along the river, around the chemical refineries, are pushing for an agenda that’s going to allow us to not only stop the emissions, but to also limit and stop the poisoning of the people, the land, the air and the water, while we move towards renewable economies that are actually going to close the racial and gender wealth gaps that we see in Louisiana. Industry, of course, is pushing back on both the data and the science, and they’re pushing back on these social justice imperatives. We’re fortunate to have a community of actors that are going to make sure the narrative is out there and we can push for the kind of recommendations and policy that will help us get there.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Hurricane Ida and the coming eviction crisis

    Hurricane Ida has battered one of the poorest regions of the country, driving floodwaters into neighborhoods along the Gulf Coast and those along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Its winds knocked trees through houses, and its rising waters sent people into their attics where they waited for rescue. Thousands will likely be without shelter for weeks or even months.  

    A move by the Supreme Court last Thursday could make the struggle to find housing even worse. 

    Despite a push from community organizations and members of Congress, the conservative court blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from enforcing a federal moratorium on evicting renters during the pandemic. In the South, the fight by housing advocates to maintain the eviction ban was undergirded by the knowledge that the states most likely to see evictions were those set to be hit by Hurricane Ida, a storm likely intensified by climate change.  

    “Climate change is also a housing crisis,” said Andreanecia Morris, executive director of the housing advocacy nonprofit HousingNOLA. “Mother Nature is trying to evict us with cause.”

    While natural disasters may uproot families and their homes, landlords have used hurricanes, floods, and other wild weather events as an opportunity to kick renters out. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of low-income renters in Louisiana and Mississippi faced mass evictions and illegal price gouging. In New Orleans, homelessness rates soared in the following years, as people flocked to the city and helped drive average rental prices up 82 percent. 

    According to the most recent Census Bureau survey, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, 6 percent of renters nationwide say they are “likely” or “very likely” to face eviction. In Louisiana, the number is almost 1 in 5. In Mississippi, one of every 10 renters say they are at risk of eviction. Even before the pandemic, more than a third of renters in both states were low-income and facing the constant threat of eviction, according to tabulations of the 2019 American Community Survey by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. 

    Hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday, families across the state of Mississippi were given eviction orders through local court systems. This came three days before Hurricane Ida knocked out power and water systems for more than 1 million people across Louisiana and Mississippi. 

    “We see this after every disaster,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “This power imbalance that exists between renters and landlords allows them to turn tragedies into money in their pockets.” 

    Saadian says the Supreme Court’s ruling will give landlords a freer hand to evict tenants under the guise of remodeling and rebuilding battered homes and apartments. A loss of housing supply could also allow them to drive up their rents.

    “All of a sudden, after disasters, there’s less housing supply because a lot of homes are destroyed, but then there are also more people displaced from their homes for socially constructed reasons — and both groups need to find housing,” Saadian said. “So that usually creates a cycle where landlords raise their prices and oftentimes continue evicting people, even if there’s no damage to their property, so they can make more money.” 

    While resources for homeowners are typically made available following disasters through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, renters are offered much less protection. In the aftermath of storms, particularly in states with some of the weakest protections for renters like Mississippi and Louisiana, landlords sometimes manage to evict tenants without going through proper legal proceedings.

    Morris believes that while legislative attention will be focused on stopping legal evictions in the wake of Hurricane Ida, these illegal evictions will go under the radar. “I think we’re going to see a spike in homelessness as a direct result of informal evictions,” she said, “not the destruction caused by the storm.” 

    The timing of the storm, however, may have left people especially vulnerable. “With this storm coming at the end of the month, we have people either waiting to receive their next paycheck or people who’ve just used their money to pay rent,” Saadian said. “That means many people just didn’t have the resources to evacuate or be in a hotel for a couple of nights.” 

    In the meantime, as the results of Ida’s destruction come to light, housing advocacy groups will continue to call for more robust protections for renters. The housing crisis, compounded by the pandemic and natural disasters, deserves a more coordinated response, they say. 

    “We shouldn’t have a disaster response system that depends on whether or not you have money in your bank account,” Saadian said. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Ida and the coming eviction crisis on Aug 31, 2021.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Adam Mahoney.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The science behind super-strong hurricanes like Ida

    Less than a week ago, Hurricane Ida was known as Tropical Depression 9, a swirling mass of energy in the Caribbean Sea. That mass developed into a powerful tropical storm last Thursday, by which time there was no mistaking what would happen next: Ida was on track to become a major hurricane. Forecasters knew this with almost complete certainty for one simple reason: the storm was on track to pass through the Gulf of Mexico, where sea surface temperatures are unusually high. 

    Sure enough, Ida strengthened into a major hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico, gathering more steam as it moved closer to the coast over tepid water. It slammed into Louisiana near Port Fourchon on Sunday evening as a Category 4 storm packing maximum sustained winds of 172 miles an hour and unleashing as much as 20 inches of rain. Nearly half of the state was without power on Monday.

    “Hurricane Ida packed a very powerful punch,” Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said in a televised address on Monday. “She came in and did everything that was advertised.” 

    Climate scientists often emphasize that climate change doesn’t create hurricanes. Hurricanes are a naturally occurring phenomenon. Warming can exacerbate them though, often in devastating ways. That’s what may have happened with this storm, though Stephanie Herring, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Grist that we won’t know for sure exactly how climate change influenced Ida until a formal attribution study has been conducted. 

    But Herring said that Ida exhibited behavior similar to previous hurricanes that scientists have conclusively linked to climate change, such as Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria, all of which occurred in 2017. Those storms were able to intensify quickly because of warm ocean water. “Ida seems to be consistent with these patterns,” Herring said. 

    Hurricane Ida developed into a Category 4 storm over the course of just a few hours, sucking energy from the bath-like water in the Gulf of Mexico. Surface temperatures are typically warm there this time of year, but parts of the Gulf are currently 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were, on average, in the late 1900s. That made Ida more intense more quickly — creating stronger winds than would have existed if Ida had skated over water that was cooler. 

    “Hurricanes almost always now undergo this rapid intensification before making landfall,” S.-Y. Simon Wang, a professor of climate dynamics at Utah State University, told Grist. “That trend is part of global climate warming.” 

    Climate change supercharged Ida on the front end ahead of its landfall in Louisiana, and it likely contributed to the torrential rain the storm brought with it as it moved inland.  A planet warmed by anthropogenic climate change holds 7 percent more moisture in the air per degree Celsius of warming. That makes rain events much, much rainier, and it means more flooding for communities in a hurricane’s path. 

    “When storms rapidly intensify, they will be at a stage of absorbing more water because of the wind and all that energy, and when they start to dissipate, that’s when they dump all that water,” Wang said. “That can translate to heavy precipitation.” 

    Almost all of New Orleans is without power, one death from the storm has been confirmed with more expected, and thousands of buildings were damaged by Ida. It will take months for New Orleans and other areas affected by the storm to recover. But the Atlantic hurricane season is far from over. Meteorologists are currently monitoring three tropical disturbances in the Atlantic Ocean. Those storms are marked by climate change, too, whether they make landfall or not.

    “All weather systems today are part of the global warming trend,” Wang said. “It’s like adding lemon juice to your water, it doesn’t taste the same anymore. Any hurricane that happens in a warmer climate will contain part of the signals of global warming.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind super-strong hurricanes like Ida on Aug 30, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Hurricane Ida Slams Native Communities in Louisiana

    Hurricane Ida has completely knocked out power to the city of New Orleans and reversed the flow of the Mississippi River after it hit southern Louisiana and Mississippi, flooding the area with storm surges. The Category 4 storm hit on the same date Hurricane Katrina devastated the area 16 years earlier. “This is a storm like no other,” says Monique Verdin, a citizen of the United Houma Nation and part of the grassroots collaborative Another Gulf Is Possible. “This is a part of South Louisiana that is losing land at one of the fastest rates,” Verdin notes. She also discusses how the storm hit the area as “Delta has been raging in the Mississippi River Delta.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Hurricane Ida, one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the United States, roared ashore Sunday in southern Louisiana in an area dominated by the oil industry that’s also home to many Native communities. The storm brought a seven-foot storm surge, 150-mile-per-hour winds and up to two feet of rain to parts of the Gulf Coast. It was so powerful, it completely knocked out power to a million people, including the entire city of New Orleans, and reversed the flow of the Mississippi River. The Category 4 storm hit on the same day Hurricane Katrina devastated the area 16 years ago. It’s been blamed for at least one death, and more are expected.

    A system of dikes and levees that protects the New Orleans region from rising waters is reportedly holding, for now, much of it built since Katrina. But still, it is underfunded, and officials say they could be overwhelmed by a forecasted 20 inches of rain.

    Louisiana’s Gulf Coast is a major oil and gas hub, with 17 oil refineries, two liquefied natural gas export terminals, a nuclear power plant and many Superfund sites. Hurricane Ida made landfall near Port Fourchon, the oilfield service hub for almost all of the Gulf of Mexico and not far from the city of Houma.

    In a minute, we’ll be joined by Monique Verdin, a citizen of the United Houma Nation, who just evacuated — the Houma Nation, one of the largest Native American tribes in North America. First, this is a trailer, though, for a documentary Verdin co-produced in 2012 called My Louisiana Love.

    MONIQUE VERDIN: Our people have survived the natural cycle of floods and storms for centuries.

    NARRATOR: In the bayous and swamps of Southeast Louisiana, filmmaker Monique Verdin explores her Native Houma roots.

    MONIQUE VERDIN: I want to keep living on our land, but I’m inheriting a dying delta. Our love ties us to this place and makes us feel responsible to care for it.

    NARRATOR: As Monique discovers, they’re battling their deadliest storm yet: the explosive growth of the oil and gas companies in the area.

    DELTA RESIDENT: You see, the more gas and oil you got underneath your ground, the higher you’re going to sit. The more they’re going to pump, the lower your land is going to go.

    CLARICE FRILOUX: We’ve been treated bad throughout the years, but this could destroy our tribe as a whole.

    AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for the PBS documentary My Louisiana Love, co-produced by our guest, Monique Verdin, a citizen of the United Houma Nation. She has evacuated for Hurricane Ida. She’s also part of the collaborative Another Gulf Is Possible, which is now organizing mutual aid efforts to provide essential needs, repairs, supplies to the areas hit by Hurricane Ida.

    Monique, thanks so much for joining us. I know this is a very difficult time. Can you explain the extent of the devastation that you’re hearing about, not only in Houma, but all over the area — a million people without power, all of New Orleans in the dark, people reporting they’re up to their chest in water?

    MONIQUE VERDIN: Well, Amy, we’re really just starting to hear from folks. I know that many have just completely lost their homes. Many of our fishermen rode out the storm on their boats. We haven’t heard from a number of them. And there’s still — you know, everyone was waiting for the sun to come up, and that’s just happening. So, we’re not really sure, but we do know that there’s extreme flooding happening just to the west of the city. And all of those communities, all of the bayou communities, where the United Houma Nation, but also the Atakapa-Ishak of Grand Bayou and Plaquemines Parish, the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogee, Bands of Grand Caillou and Dulac, and the Isle de Jean Charles — you know, these are communities that often get left out of the news and have been weathering storms for many years. But this is a storm like no other.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about that. And talk about Houma. Talk about your community. And was a complete evacuation done of the Houma Nation?

    MONIQUE VERDIN: No. The Houma are not ones to run from a storm. You know, we have boats and lands to take care of. And so, many people usually stay. More people evacuated this time than ever before. And we’ve all been scattered to the wind. Everyone went to whichever direction that they could, if they could. And many just went from the low-lying areas, that are just inside risk reduction levee systems, to higher grounds.

    But they, too, you know, have — everyone is exhausted from just riding out the storm and the relentless wind and rains, that I’m hearing has been a very humbling experience. But we know that the disaster is only beginning to unfold. Hurricane Katrina really taught us that. Yes, the storm comes through, but the disaster keeps going for many years to come. And decisions get made in these moments, when people are completely disoriented and just trying to figure out how to get home. And at this moment, and knowing that all of Southeast Louisiana is out of power, when we get home and how we get home is a big question.

    AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your family members who did not evacuate? Are you able to even be in contact with them? I mean, being in the dark is more than the actual darkness of the night, of course, as, as you said, people cannot communicate. Much of the rescue efforts can’t even start until today in daylight.

    MONIQUE VERDIN: Yes. I have not spoken to very many. Social media is spotty, and I’m getting reports that cell service is also very spotty or nonexistent. I did get a text message in the middle of the night from a cousin saying that he didn’t think that he could get out of his home without a chainsaw, and also has — having no communication, so trying to be there for folks. But, you know, this is — everyone’s been kind of in shock. And now no one has power. No one has cell service. So, communication is going to be key.

    AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the community that your relatives live in, called Big Woods, where there’s a waste pit in the flood areas? What does this mean? And we’re talking about scores of toxic sites that are directly in the hurricane’s path.

    MONIQUE VERDIN: Yes. So, in the Yakni Chitto — it’s the “Big Country” between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers, where the majority of the Houma Nation still reside, at the ends of the bayous — this is a part of South Louisiana that is losing land at one of the fastest rates. And just to say to the audience, Louisiana is losing land at one of the fastest rates on the planet. The statistic is, every 100 minutes, a football field disappears from our shores. Of course, that’s a calculation divided over time, multiplied by disaster. So, you know, this is what we’re up against just in general.

    And where these waste pits are, which are taking offshore oil and gas waste and “treating” it in these open-air pits, is just north of some of the fastest-deteriorating land on the planet and just south of what is the Houma Navigation Canal, which is a man-made canal. And this pit — these pits have been there for a very long time. And with every storm, this low-lying area, because of all of the levee infrastructure, too, that has been added since Hurricane Katrina, water goes towards the path of least resistance. And Grand Bois is left out of that levee system in a big way.

    So, I haven’t gotten any reports from family in Grand Bois yet. I’m hoping to hear something today. The last photo I saw was a picture of my cousin’s house that was just completely flattened. So, what the water is like there, I’m not sure. Overnight, that’s when, you know, the surge just keeps — it had been pushing up against the levees all day. So —

    AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about climate change crashing into COVID? I mean, the reports on the South — Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Florida — you have oxygen running out in hospitals, where the patients who are dying are younger and younger. What does this mean at this time of the hurricane?

    MONIQUE VERDIN: Delta has been raging in the Mississippi River Delta. Our hospitals have already been at capacity for weeks now. I read a report that one of the hospitals in Thibodaux actually — their generators, they lost power for a while and were having to manually pump oxygen into people who were in ICU and on ventilators that were not hooked up to the electrical system.

    And it’s going to get really hot and humid, so wearing a mask is not ideal, and people are with each other and in each other’s homes at this time of evacuation and in the times of the disaster aftermath. You know, community is what gets you through this. And being in a time when we’re supposed to be social distancing and not being in the same space is really hard, especially when you’re going to start needing to rip out your walls and pull out your floors or, yeah, try to salvage what you have left.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • No matter the fire risk, California insurance companies can’t cancel your policy

    For Amy Bach, the turning point in her job came in 2018, when she heard the news that 1 million trees in the Sierra Nevada forests were dead. “I’m not a scientist, but I know that’s very dangerous,” said Bach, the executive director of the nonprofit United Policyholders, which helps homeowners find insurance policies to secure their properties. The way the wildfire season in California unfolded in the years that followed proved her hunch wasn’t a mistake — and completely transformed the way she did her job. 

    “Up until this crisis hit, we were trying to help people focus on the quality of their coverage,” Bach said. “But now, it’s a matter of helping them hold on to any kind of a policy.” 

    Last week, for the third year in a row, California banned insurance companies from revoking renewals of policies for homeowners and renters living in high fire risk areas. The year-long moratorium  will benefit at least 26,000 policyholders in Plumas, Lassen, and Siskiyou counties, and most likely will be extended to those affected by the Dixie and Caldor wildfires, which are still consuming thousands of acres every day. Last year, the ban covered 2.4 million homeowners in the state.

    The measure has been successful in giving a sense of calmness to residents, said Sarah Anderson, a professor of environmental science and management at the University of California, Santa Barbara who studies how wildfires affect the distribution of government funds. In 2019, insurance companies didn’t renew the policies for 235,274 clients living in ZIP codes with a high risk of being burned by wildfires — a 61 percent increase statewide from the year before, according to the California Department of Insurance. In the 10 most fire-prone counties, nonrenewal increased by 203 percent. 

    Nonrenewal of home insurance policies can leave low-income residents particularly vulnerable. When insurance companies drop policies, homeowners are often left with only two options: proceed without insurance or enroll in California’s FAIR plan, which is expensive compared to other alternatives and doesn’t provide as much coverage. The FAIR plan only covers the costs that a fire, lightning, storm or other disaster causes on the home’s structure, but homeowners have to pay extra dollars to get coverage for their personal belongings, unattached structures like their garages or fences, or additional living expenses that the disaster might prompt (such as staying in a hotel). 

    Previous research has found that 76 percent of residents in moderate to high fire risk areas are white and wealthy. But there are still about 12 million socially vulnerable people living near blaze zones — and they are twice as likely to be heavily impacted by a fire. This is because many don’t have the resources to mitigate their properties before the fire arrives and, after the emergency, they often can’t afford to rebuild.

    “Communities of color and poor communities tend to have less of what we call political efficacy, or political capital. That’s because they have less time and less money to invest in the kinds of activities that get you what you want out of the political system,” explains Anderson. Last year, Anderson co-authored a study that found that throughout Western states, federal help in the aftermath of wildfires predominantly ends up in white, educated, high-income communities. 

    According to natural resources economist Andrew Plantinga, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the fact that California has had to issue the same insurance cancellation moratorium for three years in a row puts doubt on “whether the [state’s home insurance] system is really up to the task of handling these rapidly changing risks.”

    Rather than cancellation bans year-after-year, what’s needed, he says, is a more nuanced approach towards insurance legislation. That includes changing the policies that are “essentially subsidizing people to move into these areas.” 

    In the broader perspective, “we have to realize that we have to live with wildfire, we can’t pretend that each year is an anomalous year,” Anderson said. “What changes do we need to make to be able to live with it as opposed to fight it, which has frankly been our mantra since the 1910s. We’ve always thought, ‘Oh, well, we’ll fight our way out.’ And the fact is, we can’t.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline No matter the fire risk, California insurance companies can’t cancel your policy on Aug 25, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Advocacy Groups Target Fossil Fuel Democrats With Extreme Weather Ads

    Joe Manchin looks surprised at something an aide is telling him while seated at a hearing

    More than two dozen advocacy groups launched “extreme weather ads” in five state newspapers on Monday to pressure right-wing Senate Democrats to stop giving taxpayer money to the oil, gas, and coal companies most responsible for the climate emergency.

    Full page ads — featuring artwork from Hannah Rothstein’s 50 States of Change Collection, which depicts some of the detrimental effects U.S. residents can expect if lawmakers refuse to swiftly enact robust climate mitigation measures — have been placed in The Arizona Republic, The Dover Post, The Billings Gazette, The Union Leader, and The Charleston Gazette-Mail, to mark the beginning of a week of action against fossil fuel subsidies.

    Those five publications were chosen because they are the home-state newspapers of Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), Chris Coons (Del.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), and Joe Manchin (W.Va.).

    The coalition is targeting the six senators because of their close ties with Big Oil, which were exposed in late June when Greenpeace U.K. and the British Channel 4 News teamed up to release secretly recorded videos, wherein ExxonMobil lobbyists admitted that the company deliberately sowed doubt about climate science to protect fossil fuel profits and worked with several GOP lawmakers as well as conservative Democrats to undermine climate legislation.

    According to the investigation, Coons, Manchin, Sinema, and Tester, along with Republican Sens. John Barrasso (Wyo.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), John Cornyn (Texas), Steve Daines (Mont.), and Marco Rubio (Fla.), have taken tens of thousands of dollars from Exxon.

    The 25 groups behind the ad campaign — including Greenpeace USA, Our Revolution, Public Citizen, the Indigenous Environmental Network, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Food & Water Watch, and the Sunrise Movement — noted that the federal government gives more than $15 billion in public funding to fossil fuel corporations every year.

    Moreover, the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill includes up to $25 billion in potential new subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The key author of the energy-related measures in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is Manchin, who has made more than $4.5 million from his family’s coal business since joining the Senate in 2010.

    The ad campaign comes just weeks after the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report, which, in the words of Greenpeace USA climate campaign manager Anusha Narayanan, “showed the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels will kill us all.”

    “Everyone saw the video where a Big Oil lobbyist named these six Democratic senators as key to their plan to delay climate action,” Narayanan said Monday in a statement. “Members of Congress like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have the fossil fuel industry on speed dial, while they keep the rest of us on hold. That’s a disaster for the future of the planet and its people.”

    “It’s time for Congress to stop taking over $15 billion from hardworking Americans and giving it to billionaire fossil fuel CEOs,” she continued. “Despite what these companies say, subsidies don’t actually lead to jobs and most subsidies go to profits.”

    Narayanan added that an amended infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion budget resolution, which Democratic Party leaders hope to pass through the reconciliation process, present a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for Sens. Kelly, Sinema, Coons, Tester, Hassan, and Manchin “to invest in a just transition to renewable energy, racial and economic justice, and working-class communities.”

    The new ads also come as the U.S. West is suffering from an increasingly severe drought and 93 active wildfires, while the Northeast is battered by Tropical Storm Henri, and parts of the South, including North Carolina and Tennessee, are grappling with deadly flooding after being pummeled by record-breaking rainfall.

    That lawmakers continue to collaborate with oil, gas, and coal companies despite dire warnings from scientists and glaring real-time evidence that fossil fuel emissions are exacerbating extreme weather events prompted Rothstein to ask: “What is wrong with our politicians?”

    “Why do they continue to support Big Oil and coal when it’s clear these industries are causing natural disasters that harm everyday Americans?” Rothstein asked Monday in a statement. “California’s increasingly rampant wildfires, Texas’ unprecedented February 2021 snowstorm, and the current water shortages in Arizona, Montana, and New Mexico are only a few examples of the unshakably clear evidence that we need urgent climate action ASAP.”

    “We can lessen, reverse, and prevent many of the issues depicted in 50 States of Change, but we need to act now, starting with an immediate and expedited shift away from burning fossil fuels,” she added. “This can’t be done solely on a consumer level. We need our elected officials on our side.”

    In addition to being featured in the ad campaign, Rothstein’s artwork is also being used in an interactive story map, which will “underscore a state-by-state breakdown of current and future state-level impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.” It is set to be published on Greenpeace USA’s website on Wednesday.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • North America’s very wet weekend bears the fingerprints of climate change

    Between Tropical Storm Henri, Hurricane Grace, and torrential downpours in Tennessee, it was a bad weather weekend for people living on the eastern side of North America

    On Saturday, flash floods overwhelmed the rural town of Waverly, Tennessee, damaging bridges and in some cases sweeping entire houses off of their foundations. Seventeen inches of rainfall — a state record for the most rain in a day — caused the area’s network of rivers and creeks to burst their banks. Some residents called the surging water a “tidal wave,” with water moving so fast that it left little time for evacuation. Thousands were stranded in Waverly, and as of Monday, 21 people were reported dead and another 40 remained missing.

    Farther north, Tropical Storm Henri brought heavy rains to large swaths of the mid-Atlantic and southern New England even before making landfall. On Saturday night, Central Park in New York City logged a record 1.94 inches in a single hour, and flooding was widespread over the weekend throughout coastal New York and New Jersey. One New Jersey town, Cranbury, saw more than 9 inches of rainfall from the storm, and first responders were forced to rescue many from surging floodwaters and waterlogged roads.

    Meanwhile, on the Gulf coast of Mexico, Hurricane Grace also brought heavy rains and flooding — as well as 125-mile-per-hour winds — making landfall around 1 a.m. on Saturday as a Category 3 hurricane. It was one of the two strongest hurricanes to ever touch down on the Bay of Campeche. At least eight people have died from the storm, and three more have gone missing. Almost all of the reported deaths occurred in the state capital of Xalapa, where local television showed coffins from a local business floating down an inundated city street, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the storm has caused power outages affecting more than half a million people.

    Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at MIT, said it was difficult to pin any of the specific events on climate change. But, he said, there’s reliable evidence that global warming is driving an increase in the frequency of highly destructive tropical storms and heavy rainfall.

    “These events give us an occasion to talk about how climate change affects hurricanes and floods,” Emanuel said. 

    In general, there’s a strong scientific consensus that rising temperatures are making storms produce more rain, since a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor. According to a press release from the nonprofit science initiative Climate Signals, the “copious” amount of rainfall produced in Tennessee “has the fingerprint of climate change all over it.” A 2020 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for instance, attributed an increase in one-day extreme precipitation events in North America to human-induced climate change.

    There’s more climate background for the tropical cyclones that struck the Northeast and Mexico this weekend, as well. Warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean — which are strongly linked to human activity — help set the stage for hurricane formation, and scientists are currently recording temperatures there that are between 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average for this time of year. And sea-level rise is exacerbating storm surges, making hurricanes more dangerous.

    “Henri’s excessive rains are certainly aligned with what our human-altered climate is doing across the globe,” concluded the meteorologist Bob Henson and the hurricane scientist Jeff Masters, writing in Yale Climate Connections.

    Scientists also say that highly violent storms like Grace have become more common in the past 40 years, and may clock faster wind speeds as global temperatures rise. “Hurricanes’ speed limit is going up,” said Emanuel. “Over the next 20 years, I would expect to see new records broken around the world.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline North America’s very wet weekend bears the fingerprints of climate change on Aug 24, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • More workers are dying from heat. Texas may make it harder to protect them.

    In the summer of 2010, the Workers Defense Project, a Texas-based group that supports immigrant workers in the construction industry, organized a “thirst strike” in front of Austin’s city hall. More than a dozen workers and advocates sat in the June heat and went without water for six hours on a day that reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit. 

    The strikers wanted the city council to require employers to provide drinking water and regular breaks to workers after a survey found that many construction workers were not receiving either, even though temperatures in Austin have reached as high as 112 degrees F. The campaign was a success — that year, the city council passed an ordinance mandating that construction workers get a 10-minute water break every four hours. In 2015, Dallas adopted a similar requirement. 

    But now, Republican lawmakers in Texas are pushing a bill that would eliminate these minimal protections that help workers survive on very hot days, which are increasing in number and severity with climate change. The bill, which was passed by the Texas Senate in May, strips municipalities of the ability to regulate employment benefits and policies, and was proposed in order to stop cities from issuing protections related to the COVID-19 pandemic, like mandatory sick leave. 

    More than 30 million Americans earn their living doing physical labor outdoors, according to a Union of Concerned Scientists analysis of census data, and increasingly, they are working in extreme heat. From farmworkers and foresters to construction and maintenance workers, outdoor workers are up to 35 times more likely to die from exposure to extreme heat than the general population, according to past research. But while the risks of working in heat have been documented and studied by government agencies since at least the 1970s, the United States has yet to enact national labor standards to protect workers on very hot days. In the absence of national standards, only a few cities and two states — California and Washington — have issued their own protections.

    Two new reports released on Tuesday illustrate the consequences of the government’s inaction and forecast how much worse the impacts of heat on outdoor workers could become if climate change is not curbed quickly.

    An investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations found that the three-year average of worker heat deaths has doubled since the early 1990s, and that workers of color have been hit hardest. Their analysis of data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there have been 384 documented heat-related on-the-job deaths since 2010, one-third of which were Hispanic workers. But that number is a “vast undercount,” the investigation says, because not all companies report worker fatalities.

    OSHA has considered but declined to issue national heat standards that would protect workers specifically from heat, like setting mandatory water breaks, since 1972. Instead, the agency enforces a hazier regulation that requires employers to protect workers from “recognized serious hazards in the workplace,” including heat-related hazards. 

    NPR and Columbia’s reporting, as well as internal OSHA assessments, have found that the agency’s enforcement of this regulation with regard to heat has been haphazard and mostly ineffective at preventing fatalities. The investigation uncovered at least 12 companies that have had multiple workers die from heat. In five of those cases, OSHA investigated the first death and issued a citation, but those actions did not prevent a second death. In at least one case with Hellas Construction in Fort Worth, Texas, OSHA negotiated a settlement under which the company would have to implement new safety measures. But records show Hellas did not carry them out, and OSHA did not follow up to enforce the settlement. At least 53 workers have died from heat-related causes in Texas since 2010.

    Former OSHA officials said that the agency has delayed setting enforceable heat standards because of industry opposition. “Every time OSHA proposes a standard, [the] industry accuses OSHA of killing jobs and destroying whatever industry is going to be regulated,” Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant labor secretary, told NPR and Columbia.

    But a new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists warns that failing to protect workers could have severe economic impacts as extreme heat gets worse in the future. The researchers found that under a scenario where greenhouse gas emissions don’t peak until 2040, there would be a threefold increase in the exposure of outdoor workers to days that feel like 100 degrees F or hotter by midcentury. Without paycheck and workplace protection measures in place, these hot days would result in lost work time, and therefore lost earnings, resulting in about a 10 percent reduction in annual earnings for 4 million people, or about $39 billion total. That would have ripple effects throughout communities, reducing local income tax revenue and increasing demand for public services, the study notes. But the authors write that adaptation measures, like adjusting work schedules to cooler times of day, and lightening workloads, have the potential to prevent these impacts.

    The preemption bill in Texas is currently in limbo until House Democrats return to the chamber after having fled the state earlier this summer to prevent a quorum that would allow new voting restrictions to pass. Texas Democrats don’t have the votes to block the new law that will kill Dallas and Austin’s worker protections, but there is finally momentum at the federal level to create new heat safety standards. In March, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio reintroduced the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, named after a farmworker who died in 2004 after 10 hours of work in 105 degree F heat. The bill would direct OSHA to develop new safety standards as well as training and education requirements that would help workers respond to heat-related illness. 

    But the Biden administration may develop new safety standards without the nudge from Congress. This spring, the Department of Labor put a request for information regarding a new heat standard on its regulatory agenda. Acting director of OSHA Jim Frederick, told NPR and Columbia that it was a “priority.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline More workers are dying from heat. Texas may make it harder to protect them. on Aug 19, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Haitians Plead for Help as Storm Makes Landfall Days After Earthquake

    A young woman carries water away from a truck supplying it to a line of waiting people

    Pleas for international aid poured out of Haiti on Monday in the wake of a weekend earthquake that killed at least 1,419 people amid growing concerns that Tropical Depression Grace will hamper search and rescue efforts as well as the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

    “We’re pleading for help,” Marie-Helen L’Esperance, mayor of the town of Pestel, told Haiti’s Pacific Radio. “Every house was destroyed, there’s nowhere to live, we need shelters, medical help, and especially water. We’ve had nothing for three days and injured victims are starting to die.”

    Marcelin Lorejoie, a volunteer, told CNN on Sunday that “we really need help, yesterday I was helping at the hospital and things were out of control.”

    “Not enough doctors, not enough medicines, and we have people with serious injuries,” Lorejoie said. “We need urgent help before things [get] more complicated.”

    Grace, which could dump up to 15 inches of rain on some areas, made landfall in Haiti Monday afternoon, while the Caribbean country was still reeling from the earthquake that struck as Haitians face political turmoil following the July assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

    “That heavy rainfall can really lead to life-threatening flooding and mudslides and potentially urban flooding as well,” Michael Brennan, branch chief of the Hurricane Specialist Unit at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, told The New York Times Monday.

    In a 2:00 pm ET update, the center warned of “heavy rains from Grace spreading westward across southern Haiti” and the “risk of flash flooding and mudslides” in Hispaniola, the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, through Tuesday.

    Over the past dozen years, Haiti has been repeatedly devastated by earthquakes. On Saturday, according to the Washington Post, “schools, medical centers, churches, bridges, and more than 84,000 homes collapsed or were damaged in the temblor, which struck a region already battered by Hurricane Matthew in 2016.”

    The weekend event, the Times noted, “occurred on the same system of faults as the one that devastated the capital, Port-au-Prince, in January 2010. And the previous quake almost certainly made this one more likely to occur.”

    Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, was still recovering from the 2010 devastation when the earthquake struck on Saturday.

    Ahead of the storm Monday, The Associated Press reported on the conditions of a coastal community in a country that was “already was struggling with the coronavirus pandemic, gang violence, worsening poverty, and the political uncertainty” after last month’s assassination:

    Injured earthquake victims continued to stream into Les Cayes’ overwhelmed general hospital, three days after the earthquake struck Saturday. Patients waited to be treated on stair steps, in corridors, and the hospital’s open veranda.

    “After two days, they are almost always generally infected,” said Dr. Paurus Michelete, who had treated 250 patients and was one of only three doctors on call when the quake hit. “That makes it hard on us.”

    The magnitude 7.2 earthquake left at least 5,700 people injured, with thousands more displaced from destroyed or damaged homes. Les Cayes was darkened by intermittent blackouts, and many people slept outside, clutching transistor radios tuned to news, terrified of the continuing aftershocks.

    The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Monday that “U.N. agencies and partners are mobilizing resources and personnel” to support the Haitian government, and noted that Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths allocated $8 million from the U.N. Central Emergency Response Fund to support the humanitarian response.

    “The health system in affected areas is being overwhelmed, as health workers are assisting the injured while also contending with the Covid-19 pandemic,” OCHA said. “The number of Covid-19 patients is expected to increase in the coming days and weeks.”

    Progressive U.S. lawmakers have emphasized the necessity of global aid for Haitians, with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) declaring that “the international community must come together with urgency to help with recovery.”

    Some lawmakers, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) emphasized the importance of U.S. assistance. She said that “we must do everything we can to help the recovery efforts.”

    Since Saturday, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has deployed a disaster assistance response team as well as an urban search and rescue team to Haiti, with transportation assistance provided by the U.S. Coast Guard and Department of Defense.

    Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) agreed with Warren and others, tweeting Monday afternoon that she remains “committed to doing all we can to support Haiti’s full economic and political recovery.”

    Highlighting the lessons from past disasters, K. Jessica Hsu and Mark Schuller wrote Monday for Common Dreams that “while Haitian people may lack financial resources, the response to the earthquakes must be a #HaitianSolution; solidarity not charity, built on justice, rights, relationships, and Haitian leadership.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Climate migrants are ‘invisible’ to many South American countries

    Before they became climate migrants, the people of Enseada da Baleia had lived on Cardoso Island, a secluded, wildlife-rich community about 170 southwest of São Paulo, for over a century. As caiçaras, coastal-dwelling descents of Brazil’s indigenous, Black, and Europeans, many of the locals’ traditions were based on their relationship with the surrounding ocean, marshes, and mangroves. But that changed in the 1990s when locals noticed the ocean coming closer and closer to their homes. By 2015, the thin stretch of sand separating the community from the sea was only 72 feet. Less than two years later, the gap had shrunk to 39 feet. 

    The government gave the community two options: to relocate to the nearest city — where they risked losing many of their traditions — or move to an unfamiliar community on the same island. Neither situation felt right to many members of the community, who said their identities were too closely linked to their environment.

    “I go with my broken heart,” said resident Débora Mendonça, in an interview with the refugee-focused publication Forced Migration Review. “It was here that we created ourselves.” 

    Climate migration is already a hot topic in a world that, according to the latest United Nations report, is on track to get much hotter. But a “successful” retreat from rising seas, worsening wildfires and floods, or more severe droughts doesn’t just mean relocating people from point A to point B. Ideally, the transition also includes a certain level of cultural competency and data collection — something that experts say governments in regions like South America should be thinking about sooner rather than later.

    “We know that climate change will increase disasters, and we know that these disasters will merge with pre-existent vulnerabilities [like poverty] and create a breeding soil for migrations,” said Brazilian lawyer Erika Pires Ramos, a co-founder of the South American Network for Environmental Migrations, or Resama. She worked with the Enseada da Baleia community during its climate relocation in 2017. Rather than move to an area chosen by the government, the village wanted to choose a place for itself that they felt was culturally and environmentally appropriate. 

    While Enseada da Baleia residents eventually relocated to a new location further inland on the same island, paying for the move themselves, Pires Ramos believes that their dilemma showcased how overlooked climate migrants are throughout much of Latin America: If countries don’t know who climate migrants are — what they need, where they came from, or why they left — they won’t be able to help them, nor prevent new migrations from the same areas, Pires Ramos said. “Right now, climate migrants are invisible in our region.” 

    According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report released last week, the northeast corner of South America and the majority of Central America are projected to become even hotter and drier in the coming decades. The report, however, sticks solely to the physical science of climate change; an analysis by the IPCC of the impacts of these changes is expected next year. 

    “You can’t say anything definitive about what’s going to happen with migration in the region with these [latest] predictions,” explained Susana Adamo, a research scientist at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University. She said that migrations are complicated processes that respond to multiple factors, including how governments will mitigate those physical changes or how badly droughts will impact things like agriculture and energy production (around half of Latin America’s energy comes from hydropower). 

    But advocates like Pires Ramos say there’s already enough evidence to get worried. Previous research has shown that extreme heat and drought are more strongly related to migration than other changes in climate and weather patterns, like increased rains (which, depending on the context, can be a positive thing). And a landmark 2018 World Bank report found that by 2050, between 9.4 and 17 million people will migrate in Latin America due to water scarcity, lost crops, and rising sea levels.

    Central and South America are no strangers to human movements, said Pablo Escribano, the Americas and the Caribbean specialist in Migration, Environment, and Climate Change at the International Organization for Migration, or IOM. Internal migrations — when people relocate within the same country —  are well documented throughout  the region, with nearly 11 million South Americans resettling or temporarily moving intranationally due to natural disasters in the last decade. But that data is almost non-existent when it comes to Latin American migration brought on by low-burn emergencies like droughts, Escribano said. 

    Mexico, for example, is the only country in the region with plans to include a question in its national census asking if someone left their home for climate-related reasons, the Latin American Observatory on Human Mobility, Climate Change, and Disasters found in a recent analysis. Similarly, there is no climate-related migratory status in most Latin American countries. Though a few like Argentina and Brazil have a sort of “disaster emergency visa,” the authorizations are temporary and don’t include many details about the reasons for relocation. 

    According to the Latin American Observatory on Human Mobility, Climate Change, and Disasters, countries generally fail to collect follow up with migrants beyond the immediate days after a climate-related emergency. That dearth of data makes it impossible to know where displaced groups eventually end up — information that could help with resource management and policy design.  

    Gathering better data and anticipating an uptick in extreme weather-related resettlement could help countries respond more effectively to climate migrants’ needs. That shift is already underway in a few Latin American countries. In Perú, for example, a multi-agency group is creating a plan to prevent and manage climate migrations, following a mandate included in the country’s national climate change law. Uruguay, the tiny coastal country tucked between Brazil and Argentina, already has a national resettlement plan; and officials in Chile have created a Migration and Disaster Risk Management Board tasked with using preventive approach to tackle environmental emergencies, including climate change.

    While the IPCC’s sixth assessment on climate impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability won’t be released until last year, Pires Ramos said she believes countries shouldn’t wait too long to connect the dots between climate change and climate migration. “Human movement will come with the predicted temperature rise observed by the IPCC,” she said. “And we can’t keep thinking and planning to act in 2030 0r 2040. The report is clear: we need to think now and act now. And with climate migration –well, we needed to have acted by yesterday.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate migrants are ‘invisible’ to many South American countries on Aug 17, 2021.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by María Paula Rubiano A..

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Earthquake Leaves Over 700 Dead in Haiti as Powerful Storm Approaches

    An injured woman lays on the ground

    More than 700 people were confirmed dead Sunday and many thousands more injured and left homeless due to the large earthquake which struck Haiti on Saturday.

    The Haitian government has declared a state of emergency following the 7.2 quake and the Office of Civil Protection put the official death toll Sunday afternoon at 724 individuals with approximately 2,800 injured — though both numbers are almost certain to rise.

    According to the Guardian:

    Aftershocks were felt throughout the day and through the night. Many people left homeless or frightened that their fractured homes would collapse stayed in the streets to sleep – if their nerves allowed.

    In the badly damaged coastal town of Les Cayes, some families salvaged their few belongings and spent the night at an open-air football pitch. On Sunday morning, people lined up to buy what little was available: bananas, avocados and water at a local street market.

    The prime minister, Ariel Henry, said he was rushing aid to areas where towns were destroyed and hospitals overwhelmed with patients.

    As the search for survivors continued on Sunday, fears grew that Tropical Storm Grace — currently on a path towards Haiti — could hamper rescue and recovery efforts in the coming days.

    Prime Minister Ariel Henry, recently appointed following last month’s assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, has ordered an assessment of the damage but said he will not be requesting official international assistance until the full scope of the disaster is understood.

    “When it comes to medical needs, this is our biggest urgency,” Henry said Sunday. “We have started to send medications and medical personnel to the facilities that are affected. For the people who need urgent special care, we have evacuated a certain number of them, and we will evacuate some more today and tomorrow.”

    Amid the devastation, many expressed caution over any misguided foreign interventions and interference — notably from the U.S., which has a long history of putting its own strategic interests above those of the Haitian people.

    And as the Washington Post noted in its reporting:

    As foreign charities, nongovernmental organizations and volunteer groups dispatched people, supplies and equipment to Haiti, Haitan authorities reiterated their insistence that all aid be channeled and cleared through them. Edmond said the government wants to avoid a repeat of massive amounts spent — and misspent — in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

    Speaking to reporters in the capital of Port-au-Prince, Prime Minister said, “All aid must be coordinated through the Civil Protection to prevent the errors of 2010.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The UK Is Exceeding US Climate Action — But That’s Not Saying Much

    A person photographs a large banner of sod reading "CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE WEEPING? OUT LOVE MUST SAVE THE WORLD" as it floats into a river

    The release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the impact of human-induced climate change detailed, in no uncertain terms, the scale of the disaster humanity is now facing, with the UN Secretary-General calling it a “code red” for human civilization. Devastating wildfires — like those experienced this summer in southern Europe, in Siberia and in the American west — extreme drought and flood conditions, and so many more horrors are all likely to become norms rather than once-in-a-century or once-in-a-millennia events.

    Over the past few weeks, the climate news has gotten worse. Heat domes over the northwest U.S. and the western provinces of Canada killed hundreds of people, devastated wildlife populations on land and in sea, and created desert-like thermometer readings in regions more used to temperate rains and snows. In California, the Dixie Fire is now the state’s second-largest in history. Pollution from western fires is now making the air quality in locales such as Salt Lake City and Denver more dangerous to breathe than the air in New Delhi, which, in recent years, has regularly posted some of the worst air quality data on Earth. Another report suggested the Gulf Stream had now become unstable, and that its breakdown could lead to unprecedented climatic changes in the northern hemisphere. And news stories abounded of the Arctic polar air clogged with smoke from Siberia’s burning tundra.

    In the United States, while President Joe Biden and his climate envoy John Kerry responded to the IPCC report by urging immediate action on climate change legislation — and climate activists insisted we must go above and beyond the Biden administration’s demands — Republican leadership, long skeptical of the science of global warming and loath to commit politically to the societal changes needed to get a handle on the cascading crisis, was largely silent in the face of this drumbeat of bad news.

    That telling silence from GOP grandees was, perhaps, marginally better than the party’s response to an IPCC report in 2018 that detailed the differences between limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees as opposed to letting things rip and accepting two degrees or more of temperature increases. Back then, under President Trump, the party attempted to dismiss climate change as a hoax, and mitigation strategies as being too much of a drag on the economy. But, in a closely divided Congress, today’s GOP silence is almost as destructive as GOP climate change denialism, making it desperately difficult to pass legislation vital to helping the world to transition away from carbon-based economies. Moreover, even if Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are staying silent on the IPCC report — and even if senators such as Marco Rubio now begrudgingly and belatedly accept that at least some of the causes of global warming involve human activity — a significant wing of the party, revolving around conspiracists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and far right senators such as Ted Cruz, is still firmly wedded to denialism.

    Should the Republicans reclaim Congress in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, it’s a fair bet that they would, in short order, reinstate Trump’s anti-environmental policies, and once more put the pedal to the metal on approving new oil drilling leases and weakening fuel economy standards.

    In Europe, by contrast, politicians from around the political spectrum have moved to accept the IPCC’s findings and, to varying degrees, take urgent action on climate.

    Perhaps nowhere is that contrast between U.S. and European conservatives more in evidence than in the U.K., which is hosting the COP26 summit in Glasgow later this year, where nations large and small hope to hash out specific carbon-reduction goals and international investments to mitigate climate change, and whose government has committed, even if it is hazy on the details, to a carbon net-zero society by the year 2050.

    Alok Sharma, the U.K. government’s climate change envoy and the minister in charge of the COP26 summit talks, has repeatedly referred to an imminent “catastrophe” if radical policies to curb the climate crisis are not enacted globally. He has said that large-scale actions need to be implemented now, rather than years down the line, and has averred that wealthy nations are morally obligated to help poorer countries, on the climate frontlines, to put in place costly mitigation strategies.

    And, in the wake of the IPCC report’s release, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has already committed the U.K. to phasing out petrol- and diesel-based internal combustion engines in new vehicles by 2030, said the world must “consign coal to history.”

    There are, of course, fierce policy debates in the U.K. as to whether the government is doing enough. Johnson’s conservative government has, quite rightly, come under heavy criticism for paying lip service to climate change goals while, at the same time, giving the green light to more oil exploration in the North Sea, and pondering in recent months whether to open new coal mines in England’s northeast, despite the acknowledgement that coal use is environmentally untenable.

    It has been praised for announcing the phase-out of the internal combustion engine in cars, while being critiqued for not having a strategy in place, as France now has, to reduce short-distance flights and replace them with less environmentally destructive train travel. And, internally, the Johnson government is deeply divided over whether or not to impose new import taxes on products that come from overseas with a high carbon footprint. Johnson himself is thought to favor such a tax, but fiscal conservatives in the Treasury have come out in opposition to the idea. So far, it looks as if the Treasury is poised to win that fight.

    On other themes dear to conservatives’ hearts, such as hostility to immigration, crafting tax policies that favor the rich and the powerful, eviscerating workplace safety regulations and proving their “tough on crime” credentials, right-wingers in Europe and the U.S. are often in lockstep. On the environment, however, and especially on climate policy, U.S. conservatives are a particularly destructive, and irrational, outlier (although we must also acknowledge that climate policy and economic policy are strongly linked).

    The fact that the U.K.’s conservative right-wing government is immersed in an internal policy debate not on whether climate change is a reality, but on how best to use government powers to tackle it, shows how much of an outlier U.S. conservatives have become on this issue — and, given the power they wield in Congress and at a state level, how dangerous their views on the environment are to the future well-being of the world.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Hot days mean worse air. So why are climate and smog seen as separate?

    Jorge Osvaldo Heredia lives in the San Bernardino foothills in a valley at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, a stunning backdrop on most days. But come summer, the air pollution in San Bernardino gets so thick, like a “hot blanket of smog” that it obscures the view of the mountains from Heredia’s working-class, predominantly Latino neighborhood near the San Bernardino International Airport.

    “It’s unlivable,” Heredia, 30, told Grist. “The people accommodate [the smog] to survive here, but it’s an area where, really, you can’t walk outside and enjoy the air; you can’t enjoy the outdoors here because the pollution, the air quality has really made it an unlivable space.”

    A 15-year-resident of San Bernardino, Heredia volunteers his time to create more green spaces in his neighborhood, and over the past several years has joined his community’s battle to address the environmental impacts of the sprawling warehouse industry in the region, which has brought congestion and traffic from heavy duty trucks, construction, airport flights and freight trains. 

    The combination of the oppressive heat and record bad air pollution days in the summertime has changed the very way Heredia lives his life, planning his schedule around traffic congestion and avoiding walks on the streets because the traffic is too dangerous. Some neighborhoods lack sidewalks, and it concerns Heredia to see residents walking on roads next to big rigs and heavy duty trucks. 

    The environmental impacts of the warehouse and logistics industry in the Inland Empire region have made it clear to Heredia and other residents that any solution to address this pollution must involve zero emissions, including all electric truck fleets that would provide residents with relief from the pollution that’s enveloped their lives, as well as solutions that acknowledge of the worsening impacts of climate change in the area. 

    Diesel trucks increase traffic at an intersection in San Bernardino, California.
    Diesel trucks can add significantly to air pollution, as shown here in San Bernardino, California. Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    In California, environmental justice advocates have long called on local government agencies to more aggressively address climate inequities such as air pollution across the state. The release last week of the report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered more evidence to buttress their argument that climate change isn’t just a planetary problem, but a local one too.

    Among its findings, the IPCC — the United Nation entity charged with assessing the science related to climate change — cited a growing body of research about the impacts of human-induced climate change and its role in intensifying weather extremes such as heat waves. The report detailed how greenhouse gas emissions are affecting increasingly hotter temperatures, how this warmer climate is expected to increase surface ozone over polluted regions, and how some aspects, such as heat, may be amplified in cities because urban areas are typically warmer than surrounding regions.

    Climate researchers described the report as a call to action for governments given the mounting and unequivocal scientific evidence. Yet, at the local level, that call to action has been unheeded for years, despite pressure from advocates who have called for the state and local air quality boards to comprehensively and holistically examine how climate change, via pollution and heat impacts, is influencing public health, says environmental planning and policy expert Michael Méndez, an assistant professor at the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine.

    The issue, he says, is that for the most part, policy makers and legislators have bifurcated the process for addressing global and local pollution, creating policy silos that examine smog and other types of local pollution as an issue separate from climate change. Climate change is seen as the fundamental role of state agencies, while local pollution is the purview of local air districts, he explained. 

    One example that Méndez pointed to is California’s 2016 reauthorization of its Global Warming Solutions Act, which called for a sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The reauthorization stripped local air quality agencies, such as the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which wanted to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from local area refineries, of the ability to directly address these emissions. 

    Mandating local agencies to focus exclusively on local pollution inhibits the agencies from approaching pollution from a broader perspective and denies them the tools to address pollution that’s impacted by climate, said Méndez, the author of the book Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement. 

    In California, while some of the most severely polluted regions in the state have improved air quality, the state is still failing to meet state and federal air quality standards. One of the reasons why, according to Adrian Martinez, a senior attorney with the environmental law organization Earthjustice, is that local air quality boards, such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Southern California, are failing to account for climate change impacts, such as global warming, when creating pollution models and setting emissions reductions goals. 

    Martinez likened this to setting the wrong course from the outset because heat is one of the ingredients, along with nitrogen oxides (a byproduct of combustion) and volatile organic compounds, that creates surface ozone. It’s why ozone levels tend to be higher during summer months. As climate change has increased temperatures and changed weather patterns, this has meant an increase in dirty air days earlier in the year and extending later in the year as well, said Martinez. 

    Failing to factor in rising temperatures and heat waves into pollution modeling means that the SCAQMD pollution estimates will be inaccurate, making it difficult to determine the appropriate amount of pollution to reduce, he said. 

    “Their failure to look at the impacts of climate change in all of their planning has meant that they’re not really hitting the mark,” said Martinez. “The consequences are that people are breathing dirty air, and the law allows it.”

    Children play tetherball during recess at a Los Angeles elementary school.
    Children play during recess at an elementary school close to a busy truck route in Long Beach, California. Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    While some might consider climate change as a distant threat, frontline communities throughout Southern California such as San Bernardino, which are severely impacted by extreme heat and pollution levels, have been paying the price of policy inaction via health impacts such as asthma and other harms, said Martinez. Last year, Los Angeles experienced the worst ozone season in nearly three decades, pushing the Los Angeles-Long Beach region to the No. 1 spot in the nation for high ozone days, followed by Bakersfield, and Visalia, Ca.      

    The American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” 2021 report reflects the impacts of climate change on air quality nationally. The report shows that despite some progress in cleaning up air pollution, more than 40 percent of Americans (about 135 million people) are living in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, and that people of color are more than three times more likely than white people to breathe the most polluted air. 

    While climate change and local pollution is still an emerging policy area, Méndez said there are already agencies that have taken the lead in incorporating climate change factors into their analyses and modeling and can serve as examples for agencies such as air quality districts. For example, California’s regional water boards are starting to revise regulations and are modeling climate change impacts in light of increasingly hotter temperatures, he said. Local air quality boards should be doing similar work via climate change modeling around air pollution, but this will require political leadership, mandates and funding, noted Méndez. 

    For residents like Heredia, the report’s findings represent an opportunity for local government agencies to take into consideration how rising temperatures affect the local environment before charging forward and approving additional industries that contribute pollution in a region already burdened by smog. 

    “I think it’s good to sound the alarm on these extreme weather patterns so at least there’s a call to action on a world wide level,” said Heredia. “But definitely it’s difficult, at least at the local level when your elected officials — they’re not getting it. They might feel that they don’t have any power against climate change, but I don’t think that’s true. I think everybody has the power to do something and it does start at the local level.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hot days mean worse air. So why are climate and smog seen as separate? on Aug 16, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • New study strengthens link between wildfire smoke and severe COVID

    Smoke from the West Coast’s wildfires last year didn’t only tinge skies an apocalyptic shade of orange; it increased the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

    According to research unveiled on Friday, the heavy wildfire smoke that blanketed Washington, Oregon, and California in 2020 significantly exacerbated the pandemic, causing 19,742 additional cases of COVID-19 and 748 additional deaths across the three states.

    Although previous research has documented the connection between wildfire smoke and COVID-19, this is the first time that scientists have calculated the specific toll from the pandemic that is attributable to last year’s wildfires.

    “We weren’t terribly surprised by the results as scientists,” said Kevin Josey, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who coauthored the new research. “But as humans, we are dismayed about the impacts.”

    The study, which was published in the journal Science Advances, chalked those impacts up to fine particulate matter — called PM 2.5, because the particles are 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter — in wildfire smoke. Those tiny pieces of ash can comprise everything that a fire has burned in its wake, including heavy metals like iron, zinc, and nickel. When inhaled, these particles can lodge deep into the lungs, making people more susceptible to respiratory disease. PM 2.5 can even make their way into the bloodstream, increasing the risk of negative cardiovascular and neurological outcomes.

    Previous research has suggested that this system-wide stress caused by inhaling small particulate pollution can make it easier for a mild case of COVID-19 to become a severe one, potentially causing more adverse symptoms in cases that would otherwise have been asymptomatic. Other studies have found evidence that PM 2.5 may weaken our antiviral immune response systems, allowing infections like the novel coronavirus to take greater hold in certain individuals.

    COVID-19 testing against a hazy orange sky.
    A COVID-19 testing center in Oakland, California, where raging wildfires turned the skies a hazy orange in 2020. Jane Tyska / Digital First Media / East Bay Times via Getty Images

    As part of their new study, Josey and his coauthors looked at 92 counties in Washington, Oregon, and California, a selection that covered roughly 95 percent of the states’ populations. They used satellite images and publicly available air quality records from March 15 to December 16 to calculate each county’s wildfire-related PM 2.5 exposure. Then, using county by county epidemiological data, the researchers calculated the percent increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths associated with a daily increase of 10 cubic micrograms of PM 2.5. For context, according to standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency, a 24-hour average PM 2.5 concentration of 35 cubic micrograms or less is considered safe. During the 2020 wildfire season, however, some counties exposed to wildfire smoke recorded PM 2.5 levels of 250 to 500 cubic micrograms or higher, sometimes for weeks at a time.

    Overall, researchers found that wildfire smoke was associated with an 11.7 percent increase in COVID-19 cases and an 8 .4 percent increase in deaths, but the relationship was significantly more pronounced in some areas. Whitman County, Washington, for example, saw a 71.6 percent increase in COVID-19 cases for each 10 cubic microgram increase in PM 2.5. And for San Bernardino County, California, a similar daily increase in PM 2.5 was linked to a 65.9 percent increase in deaths from COVID-19.

    “These results provide strong evidence,” the study concluded, that in many counties, “the high levels of PM 2.5 that occurred during the 2020 wildfires exacerbated the health burden of COVID-19.”

    The study comes at a critical time, as the coronavirus delta variant sweeps through the United States and devastating wildfires in California and Oregon spread smoke across the country. According to Josey, the results create a further incentive for vaccination against COVID-19. “If you’re protected from the disease itself, there’s no way for wildfire smoke or PM 2.5 to exacerbate the issue,” he said.

    There’s also a big-picture takeaway, Josey added, about the need to address wildfire risks in the long term. Wildfires burn an estimated 7 million acres of U.S. land every year — a staggering number that is only increasing due to climate change. As a result, millions of Americans are predicted to be at risk of “smoke waves” — periods of at least two days with unhealthy PM 2.5 concentrations from wildfires — by mid-century.

    “We need to better address the systemic issue of climate change,” Josey said. “Otherwise, we’ll continue to see worse outcomes created by pollution.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New study strengthens link between wildfire smoke and severe COVID on Aug 16, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Disasters aren’t natural — they’re political, a new book argues

    In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Samantha Montano was a high school junior in Maine. She signed up for a spring break service trip to help out in the aftermath in New Orleans.

    She had no idea what a disaster really looked like. 

    She soon found out. In New Orleans, she was surrounded by miles of rotting debris stacked high, mold-covered homes, streets dark from lack of electricity or streetlights. There was no recycling, mail, trash service, or transportation, and hardly anything that resembled a school system. 

    “It was not until I was standing in the aftermath of one that I fully grasped the scope and scale, the complexity, and really, the devastation,” she told Grist. 

    The trip changed her life. She applied to college in New Orleans so she could return to help. She ended up getting a doctorate in emergency management and, along with teaching at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, she is now a sought-out expert on emergency management, or what she calls “disasterology.”

    And, as she tells you in her new book, Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis, most people don’t really know what emergency management is — or, for that matter, what a disaster is.

    Here’s what Montano wants you to know: Most so-called disasters are, in fact, entirely predictable. Instead of focusing on prevention, lawmakers and the U.S. emergency response system focuses on reaction, and even then, our emergency management system is flawed because it doesn’t respond equally to all communities — especially lower-income neighborhoods of color.

    “Disasters, and catastrophes, are a choice,” she writes. “They are a political decision.” 

    Montano traces the history of America’s emergency response system, from the early days of the Civil Defense Act, when the country was terrified of a nuclear attack, to the tumult of the reaction to 9/11, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency was swallowed up by the new Homeland Security Department, a move many now credit as destructive because it removed FEMA’s authority as a cabinet-level agency and left it disorganized. 

    Mitigation efforts, such as building houses that are more resilient to intense flooding or adopting stronger building codes in earthquake-prone zones, save money. For every $1 of federal money spent on mitigation, $6 is saved. And yet, we cling to a militarized system that doesn’t prioritize prevention, Montano argues.

    Montano witnessed the inequity of disaster response in New Orleans, where it took a year for Congress to approve $4 billion in aid — not enough to rebuild the city. It took an additional two years for the program to get set up, leaving many low-income and Black homeowners homeless and in limbo for years about what to do with their property. It ended up taking almost a decade for the $4 billion to be dispersed, and Black neighborhoods received less money to rebuild homes than white neighborhoods. In the end, Katrina survivors received individually an average of just $7,000 in federal relief.  

    An aerial shot of houses destroyed as well as a highway and roads flooded.
    Areas of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans flooded after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images

    What all of this means, Montano stresses, is that our systems aren’t prepared to deal with the biggest disaster yet — the climate crisis. 

    This year’s annual report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released this week, emphasized that the planet is almost guaranteed to warm 1.5 degrees in the next two decades — the temperature marker between manageable and catastrophic warming. 

    To have a shot at contending with the devastation caused by natural hazards that are becoming more intense due to climate change, Montano says we need to act fast: The emergency management system needs major reform.

     In June, a group of bipartisan senators reintroduced a bill that Montano feels hopeful about. 

    The bill, called the Disaster Learning and Lifesaving Act, would create a National Disaster Safety Board to study the underlying causes of damages caused by hazards to inform how to improve disaster recovery programs. Additionally, Montano says, citizens need to organize, educate themselves, and take action, both by demanding change from lawmakers as well as participating in mitigation projects in their own communities. 

    And all of us need courage, Montano says, even though there is no assurance that the climate crisis will have a happy ending. “We can save most of the places and people we love, but we have to act quickly and wisely,” she writes in Disasterology. “I am making a choice to fight for our survival and I hope you will too.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Disasters aren’t natural — they’re political, a new book argues on Aug 16, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The best-case climate scenario is going to be extremely hard

    On Monday, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that makes it unequivocally clear that human beings have locked in a measure of warming for the planet that will be extraordinarily difficult to endure. Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius — roughly 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, a threshold the IPCC advised the world’s nations to avoid crossing as recently as 2018 — is guaranteed to arrive within two short decades. 

    And more warming than that is very likely. 

    The planet has already warmed approximately 1.1 to 1.2 degrees C (1.98 to 2.16 degrees F). The climate impacts communities across the world have experienced this summer — extreme heat, catastrophic flooding, wildfires, and more — are due, in part, to that roughly one degree of warming. A 1.5 degree-warmed world means more summers like this one: more evacuees in California, more intense drought in the West, more blistering heat waves, more tropical storms that dump a season’s worth of water in 24 hours. 

    And yet, the IPCC report makes it clear that this is officially the best case scenario. We’ll be lucky if we get away with that little warming. 

    So let’s take a closer look at the best case. What does 1.5 degrees really look like?

    It looks a lot like the world we’re living in now, but worse, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist and science communicator at the University of California, Los Angeles. “A lot of folks have been kind of shocked by the events of this summer,” he told Grist. “1.5 degrees is still a significant increment of additional global warming beyond what we’ve already experienced. By the time we get there, the impacts will be all that more pronounced.” 

    Heavy precipitation, extreme heat, and droughts will all occur more frequently depending on how hot things get, the report says. If the planet warms 1.5 degrees, for example, the chances of a 1-in-10-year heatwave — a heatwave that only occurs once a decade in a world in which man-made climate change does not exist — is likely to happen four times more frequently. If the planet warms to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), such a heat wave is likely to occur nearly 6 times a decade. 

    “The more you warm the planet, the more often extreme events occur,” Jessica Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and a lead author of the new IPCC report, told Grist. “To me, 1.5 means the best possible outcome.” 

    Warming at that level does not necessarily produce one-in-1,000-year heat events like the one that gripped the Pacific Northwest at the end of June. But Tierney pointed out that one-in-10-year events can still be incredibly damaging. Arizona, where she lives, had its driest monsoon season on record last summer — which, she said, is an example of a climate impact that will occur more often as temperatures increase. 

    It’s a big deal that climate scientists are linking extreme weather to climate change. The last time the IPCC came out with one of these assessments, in 2013 and 2014, experts were careful not to necessarily connect a big wildfire or a major drought to rising temperatures. The science hadn’t evolved to the point where researchers could confidently associate specific events to human activity. 

    “We’ve really shifted gears on that,” Tierney noted. 

    Swain explained that more of these impacts will be linked to climate change in the coming years as temperatures reach 1.5 degrees C of warming. More droughts, more intense hurricanes, wildfires in places that have never had them before will emerge. “I don’t really see any way around that,” Swain said. 

    And 1.5C is still the best-case scenario. While it’s not ideal, it’s infinitely better than the alternative, which is even more warming. “It would have been more ideal to not have gotten there in the first place,” Tierney said. “But here we are, we have to deal with it.” 

    Even more important to remember is that the IPCC isn’t saying that the planet will definitely warm 1.5 degrees, simply because that amount of warming is physically impossible to avoid. Theoretically, it still is. 

    “If you flipped the switch tomorrow and turned off all carbon emissions, then absolutely we could avoid greater than 1.5 degrees of warming,” Swain said. “It’s largely unavoidable because it’s sociopolitically impossible to avoid.” 

    In other words, the warming will happen because humans aren’t stopping it. What happens beyond 1.5 is up to us.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The best-case climate scenario is going to be extremely hard on Aug 12, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The Dixie Fire is moving too fast for California’s emergency alert systems

    Northern California’s Dixie Fire continued to make history this weekend, jumping past Oregon’s Bootleg Fire to become the biggest active blaze in the United States. As of Monday afternoon, it is California’s second-largest wildfire in recorded history, having ripped through nearly half a million acres since it sparked last month. 

    But it’s not just the Dixie Fire’s size that’s notable; it’s also incredibly fast-moving. Since its inception, the Dixie Fire has devoured California’s parched forests at a mind-boggling rate — on some days tearing through an acre of land every second. As a result, authorities have had to work swiftly to try to disseminate up-to-date information to local residents whose homes may be endangered by the flames.

    “We’re seeing truly frightening fire behavior,” said Plumas National Forest supervisor Chris Carlton in a public briefing on August 5, shortly after the historic town of Greenville, California, was razed by the Dixie Fire. “We have a lot of veteran firefighters who have served for 20, 30 years and have never seen behavior like this, especially day after day.”

    While that behavior is new, it’s not entirely unexpected. The Dixie Fire is just the latest in a series of wildfires that are much more extreme than the blazes of the previous century. A century-long history of bad forest management is partly to blame, but so is climate change: Severe drought and rising temperatures have sucked moisture out of California’s forests, creating tinderbox conditions that are ripe for massive and quick-moving conflagrations. Once wildfires get going, they can even create their own positive feedback cycles: On July 20, the Dixie Fire generated a “pyro cumulonimbus” cloud system that sparked lightning and drove strong winds, helping to accelerate the fire’s spread. 

    Even though California has been bracing itself for a potentially devastating fire season by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on prevention measures, some experts say the state hasn’t invested enough in systems that alert residents of evolving risks given wildfires’ new, faster pace. 

    “These fires are outpacing the traditional communication structures,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles. Televised public briefings, for example, usually only occur every few hours, if not even less frequently. And opt-in alert systems — like CodeRed or a “reverse 911” system, in which authorities call households’ landlines or cell phones to warn them of an approaching wildfire — may have low coverage, leaving large swaths of an at-risk population with incomplete information.

    “I’ve spoken to people who are panicked and don’t know whether they need to leave, or which direction to leave,” Swain said.

    In the wake of such rapidly-moving wildfires, many people have turned to social media for the most up-to-date fire news — especially Twitter, where nearby residents, hobbyists, and other amateur wildfire trackers have posted updates using the hashtag #DixieFire. Andrew Burke, whose home in Butte Creek Canyon, California, was burned in the 2018 Camp Fire, has kept tabs on this year’s flames by aggregating information from a number of sources — everything from online wind maps to specific Twitter accounts.

    “You have to be an armchair expert,” he said, otherwise, information from the authorities might not come until it’s too late. He said he and other residents of fire-prone areas have come to treat an evacuation warning as an order. “And if you actually get an order, that’s like where your hair is getting singed,” he added.

    Although wildfire information crowdsourced from social media may help fill an information vacuum for now, Swain says it is no substitute for a centralized emergency notification system that is updated for the fires of the 21st century — something that utilizes all possible modes of communication and makes available information that is currently inaccessible to the general public, such as real-time firefighter communications. He also recommends that firefighting units operationalize the Twitter model, hiring their own public information officers for the sole purpose of disseminating information as quickly as they can across multiple channels.

    Beyond preventing infernos in the first place, an improved communication infrastructure may be one of the most efficient ways to save people’s lives and property. “It’s something that could be addressed really fast,” Swain said, “if there were motivation and funding to do it.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Dixie Fire is moving too fast for California’s emergency alert systems on Aug 10, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • We can’t carry on like this if we want to save the planet

    Fires are burning in Greece. The Pacific Northwest is still aflame, heavy rain has flooded North Korea, droughts are ravaging Californian towns.

    Amidst all this, the IPCC has warned time is running out to salvage the planet.

    In its landmark climate report published on 9 August, the UN climate body said immediate and large scale action to reduce emissions is the only way to prevent catastrophic temperature rises.

    In order to take the level of action needed, major change is needed across the board, affecting both big corporations and our daily lives.

    “Unprecedented” and “irreversible” impacts

    The impacts of catastrophic climate change are unfolding right before us, all over the world. This summer alone has brought a barrage of extreme weather events from wildfires to deadly flooding.

    The IPCC report names humans as the “unequivocal” drivers of climate change, estimating that CO2 concentrations were higher in 2019 than they have been at any time in the past two million years.

    Similarly, surface temperatures have increased since 1970 at the fastest rate of any 50 years in the last 2000 years.

    As a result, sea ice levels are decreasing faster while sea levels rise faster. Heatwaves, droughts, heavy precipitation, and cyclones are all increasing.

    In 2020 alone, more people were displaced by climate disasters than by conflicts, particularly in the poorest nations. The rise of extreme weather events will only increase this.

    “A reality check”

    The Paris Agreement seeks to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees, a target that experts have warned several times we aren’t on track to meet.

    Estimates in today’s report say that “immediate, rapid and large-scale” changes are needed to our greenhouse gas emissions, or warming may not even be limited to two degrees, let alone 1.5.

    Working Group I of the IPCC estimates that strong action to reduce emissions would lead to an immediate increase in air quality, though temperature stabilisation may take 20-30 more years.

    IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Panmao Zhai said:

    Climate change is already affecting every region on Earth, in multiple ways. The changes we experience will increase with additional warming.

    Taking action

    With the report’s warnings, climate activists are taking to the streets to demand a different future.

    Extinction Rebellion have vowed to disrupt the City of London with two weeks of action to disrupt the political economy. Campaigners are demanding that the UK stop all fossil fuel investment immediately.

    Clare Farrell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, said:

    We are in the midst of a collective act of global, social evil which is unprecedented in all of history. We spend more time measuring it than trying to stop it, this is in and of itself a crime. …

    This government is a joke, telling us how to wash our dishes when they should be leading the world towards a mobilisation that saves humanity. The UK has a duty to set a good example and other countries will follow. People want to live, but we need leadership and it’s nowhere to be seen.

    The UK financial sector funded 805m tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2019 alone, nearly double the emissions for the whole of the UK in the same year.

    Making changes

    Zhai, who is also secretary general of the Chinese meteorological society, added:

    Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions. Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate.

    To do this, we need more ambitious targets.

    The UK government announced in December that it would end ‘direct support‘ for the overseas fossil fuel sector. However, several campaigners argued that fine print exceptions still meant UK money would be spent on fossil fuels.

    In March, the government approved oil drilling if companies were deemed ‘climate compatible‘.

    Instead, activists are calling for a complete economic overhaul. A campaign for a Green New Deal asks for the movement of the UK’s economy away from carbon and the creation of jobs in clean industries.

    Global campaigners say the transformation will require big companies being held to account for their polluting actions.

    Big and small changes

    A lot of the changes will be big and systematic – as is often pointed out, a small number of large companies are responsible for the majority of fossil fuel emissions.

    But our daily lives will have to change too.

    Small changes by households in how we use fossil fuels could still have a large impact on global emissions.

    The consumption of energy by households across the world is significant, and researchers estimate a large number of households reducing their car usage, air travel and meat consumption will be key in reducing overall emissions. Governments across the world have the power to create policies and make investments that will enable people to make the needed cuts at home.

    Although the conclusions of today’s report create a bleak future, the authors say there is still time. The government’s first step should be to plan at COP26 for how they can restructure the economy to cut emissions as well as encourage cuts at home.

    Featured image via YouTube/Sky News

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • When Even the Conservative IEA Sounds an Alarm on Climate, the World Must Listen

    Icebergs near Ilulissat, Greenland, on May 19, 2021.

    Like a carousel of bad news coming from all four corners of the globe, the year thus far has borne witness to a litany of extreme weather events and stark research findings with one grim overarching message: The world is still failing miserably to adequately respond to the already devastating impacts of the climate crisis.

    In the Arctic, the rate of sea ice loss is currently tracking just below that for 2012 and 2020, the two worst years for ice loss, as per the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s records. Indeed, the record melting rate of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is in line with worst-case scenarios as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate science arm of the United Nations (UN).

    In the Amazon, regarded as the globe’s largest carbon sink, the frantic rate of deforestation and wildfire damage has resulted in a terrifyingly paradoxical scenario: Parts of the rainforest now release more carbon than they store, according to a recent study in Nature.

    In Germany, floods the likes of which experts say have not been witnessed for between 500 to 1,000 years, coupled with wildfires across southern Europe fueled by tinder-dry conditions, prompted a top UN climate official to exhort major global leaders to do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

    The link between extreme weather events and impacts from anthropogenic climate change is a through line threading a string of recent weather-related headlines here in the U.S. as well.

    Experts say the June heat wave that gripped the Pacific Northwest — with a death toll nearing the 200 mark — would have been “virtually impossible” in pre-industrial times. The ongoing mega-drought burning up the western U.S. is behind historic low water levels at Lake Mead — one of the region’s key water resources — while the broader Colorado River system, which provides water to 40 million people, is running so dry that officials are soon expected to declare an unprecedented water shortage on the lower portion of the river, triggering water usage cuts. The drought has already prompted tribal communities in Colorado to massively scale back their agricultural output.

    On the flip side of the precipitation coin, flood damage caused by unusually punishing rain events is costing the U.S. an additional $2.5 billion annually, according to a recent study.

    Amid an onslaught of pre-apocalyptic events, major nations have been eager to tout their green bona fides as they inject vast wallets of stimulus monies to keep their economies oiled through a pandemic. At the same time, however, expert analyses of these recovery plans show they’re often weighted heavily in favor of fossil fuel-driven projects.

    More broadly, the International Energy Agency (IEA) — a policy adviser to its 29 member countries — warned earlier this year how governmental emission reduction pledges fall “well short” of what is required to bring global energy-related carbon dioxide releases to net zero by 2050 — a key benchmark in the fight to limit global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels.

    “Climate is a train wreck happening in slow motion,” says Ted Parson, co-director of the Dan and Rae Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles, who described the IEA’s warnings as something of a canary in the coal mine.

    “The IEA is a highly respected, very mainstream and rather conservative analytic organization,” Parson says, explaining that for many years, this rather gun-shy organization hedged short of pushing for a rapid and aggressive transformation away from fossil fuel-driven energy production. “So then comes this report which is astonishing.”

    We Could Reach 1.5°C by 2030

    The planet is already nearly 1.3°C hotter over pre-industrial levels, and the IPCC is clear on what happens if Earth warms by just another 0.2 degrees Celsius, with vulnerable regions especially susceptible to “high multiple interrelated climate risks.” Above a 2°C temperature increase, the impacts become noticeably worse for everyone, with some 61 million more people living in urban centers exposed to severe drought as compared to the 1.5°C benchmark, substantially higher sea level rises and major hits to global crop production, among a slew of other grisly predictions.

    Recent projections have shown we’re likely to reach an increase of 1.5°C as soon as 2030. Without immediate and massive emissions reductions, we could reach the 2°C threshold window in just 15 years. And key signs offer little encouragement into the immediate future.

    After a pandemic-driven lull in greenhouse gas emissions, releases of heat-trapping chemicals aren’t just rebounding back fast; in nations like China, they are on track to exceed pre-pandemic levels. Indeed, according to a recent IEA forecast, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will increase by 1.5 billion tons this year, the second-largest increase in history. All this, while we are nearing (or have already crossed) critical climate-related tipping points associated with things like ocean acidification and coral reef destruction.

    Senior figures from such institutions as the World Bank have portrayed the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to press the reset button on global efforts to tackle the climate crisis. Following the refrain of “build back better,” governmental officials were expected to unfurl various stimulus packages touting the chance to pivot away from fossil fuels in order to more comprehensively “green” their economies.

    But the reality of the situation doesn’t exactly square with the promises. According to a Guardian analysis at the end of 2020, only a handful of major countries had earmarked significant stimulus funds for green investments, with the E.U. — headed by France and Germany — leading the way. China and the U.S. trailed at the more miserly end of the spectrum.

    According to Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, some six months later, the broad complexion of the recovery looks grim for climate action. “Sadly, on all fronts, we have not seen governments take the kinds of transformative measures that are needed to make a climate-aligned recovery,” she told Truthout. “For the most part, we’re reverting back to our ‘business-as-usual’ ways of producing and consuming energy.”

    Other indicators suggest that things aren’t poised to change any time soon. China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan are scheduled to build some 600 new coal power plants — what would work out to be 75 percent of current coal capacity — even though the vast majority of them are forecasted to be financial money pits.

    In the U.S., natural gas production is forecasted to rise this year, even as demand falls.

    “All over the world, fossil fuel companies continue to hold a very strong political sway over policy making,” says Cleetus. Perhaps the most visceral indicator of this toxic relationship can be seen in the way the G20 countries — which includes the U.S., France and Germany — have funneled some $3.3 trillion towards fossil fuel subsidies since the signing of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, according to a new report by BloombergNEF and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

    Upcoming Climate Events

    Amid all these escalating climate threats, experts point to a few signs of encouragement around the globe — with heavy caveats attached.

    The electric vehicle market, for example, is set to increase between now and 2030 by a compounded annual growth rate of more than 25 percent. But the shift to electric vehicles is largely driven by voluntary pledges among car manufacturers. Indeed, President Biden’s new executive order surrounding tightened tailpipe emissions includes a promise among key automakers to make 40 to 50 percent of their new car sales electric vehicles by 2030. Instead, skeptics would rather see firm commitments hard-baked into governmental policy.

    China’s carbon-trading scheme is seen as a golden opportunity to rein in the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, but critics describe it as more of a Band-Aid than a fix, given that China has not put in place a firm cap on emissions, among other problems with the system.

    Here on U.S. shores, climate experts have been watching closely the ongoing negotiations surrounding the proposed infrastructure packages slogging their way through Capitol Hill. The current roughly $1 trillion bipartisan deal allots some $550 billion in new infrastructure spending, including for electric vehicles and modernizing the power grid. A dual “human infrastructure” proposal also portions out some climate-related spending.

    But these plans have garnered criticism from corners of the climate movement. In the infrastructure plan’s negotiation process, spending on key elements like transit funding and vehicle electrification were slashed. On the other hand, spending on the expansion of highways — a possible major stumbling-block toward climate goals — remained largely unchanged. Indeed, lobbyists for ExxonMobil were caught on video bragging about their efforts — ultimately successful — to weaken the proposals to protect their investments.

    “For electric cars and buses and appliances to have the impact needed, the power system must also be clean,” wrote Nathaniel Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, the successor to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, in an email. He added that, “the package’s expected significant investments in clean power infrastructure are a good start, but far short of what’s needed.”

    Some key global developments are on the horizon. At the end of October, the U.K. will host COP26, the latest UN Climate Change Conference. Before then, the IPCC is poised to release its first major global warming assessment since 2013. A new report claims that some of the climate models that the IPCC uses show rates of warming that are implausibly fast. But even if some of the worst impacts can’t be stopped, we must not simply look away, advocates say.

    “We’re already the proverbial frog boiling in the pot,” Cleetus says. “Every day we need to get up and fight for the world to be a better place and hold the policy makers’ feet to the fire. There is no time to be on auto-pilot.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Western wildfires are so intense they’re creating their own thunderclouds now

    This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    Last month, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory held a very 2021 press conference, in which scientists reported a very 2021 outbreak of “smoke thunderclouds.” Catastrophic wildfires, exacerbated by catastrophic climate change, had produced a rash of pyrocumulonimbus plumes over the western United States and Canada, known in the scientific vernacular as pyroCb.

    “You can think of them as like giant chimneys, funneling smoke that’s being released by the fire up into a thunderstorm,” said David Peterson, a meteorologist at the research laboratory, during the Zoom press conference. “You can imagine this extremely dirty thunderstorm, with all these smoke particles for water to condense on.” 

    Unlike a typical thunderstorm, though, the resulting water droplets don’t tend to get large enough to fall as rain. “But it is a cloud that can produce a lot of lightning,” Peterson added. These clouds can then advance across the landscape, sparking new wildfires as they go. So not only can the blaze propagate itself by flinging embers ahead of the main fire line (California’s wildfires are so deadly in part because of strong seasonal winds that push them at incredible speeds), it can also produce so much hot, rising smoke that it in essence recruits the atmosphere to light more fires for it. It’s a runaway self-proliferating machine.

    The pyrocumulonimbus plumes will also energize the wildfire that spawned them. As the hot air rises away from the fire, air near the ground rushes in to fill the void, supercharging wind speeds at the surface. But because a pyroCb is a thundercloud, it also produces a downdraft along with that updraft, creating extremely irregular wind behavior near the surface. Basically, if you’re expecting a pyroCb-spawning wildfire to behave in rational ways, marching across the landscape with the prevailing winds, you’ve got another thing coming.

    And these pyroCbs can be huge. The hotter a wildfire burns, the more rising air it produces. “These are pushing smoke upward at extreme velocities, such that they’re injecting smoke at altitudes above the cruising altitude of jet aircraft,” said Peterson. “So we’re talking 50, 60,000 feet, potentially.” In fact, he says, the smoke will actually pour into the atmosphere’s next layer, the stratosphere, which is above where weather typically occurs. Peterson added that one pyroCb that formed in British Columbia in 2017 produced a plume that persisted in the stratosphere for 10 months.

    Once all these smoke aerosols have made it into the stratosphere, they can have a contradictory effect. Because they can actually block out the sun, they’ll cool the landscape underneath. But the plume itself will absorb the sun’s energy, warming the air locally to create a “thermal bubble.” This creates an atmospheric engine that drives a circulation of the smoke, what scientists have dubbed a “swirl.” “So that little engine event, created by virtue of putting smoke in the stratosphere, leads to its own stratospheric weather,” said Mike Fromm, of the remote sensing division at U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, during the press conference. “That’s a brand new discovery, but it’s very real. And we’ve seen it now in a number of cases.”

    At the end of June, Peterson and Fromm tracked one of the largest pyroCb plumes ever recorded in North America. The formation of these kinds of clouds may not be a bug but rather a feature of a climate gone bizarro. “We’ve been in a wave of pyroCb activity in North America—near daily activity in recent days,” Peterson said. “This pyroCb outbreak is actually the latest in a series of pyroCb outbreaks that we’ve seen worldwide in recent years.” 

    The awful bushfire season of 2019–20 in Australia, for instance, produced 38 of these plumes over the course of just a few days. Siberia, of all places, has also been spawning them as its landscape warms, dries out, and ignites. “There have been conspicuously many of them, I would say, over the last few fire seasons,” says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. “And there’s probably a couple of different reasons for that.”

    For one, scientists have just been looking for them more, and have developed better detection tools. “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody sees it—but now we’ve got a lot of people hiking through the woods, if you will,” says Swain. “It may also be the case that there are more trees falling in the woods, in addition to there being more hikers.”

    Another key variable is the condition of the atmosphere, which needs to be unstable to spawn any kind of thunderstorm. Typically, the bigger the contrast between the warmer air near the ground and the cooler air above, the more unstable things get. A very intense fire burning under a stable atmosphere won’t produce a pyroCb. But a medium-intensity fire might, if the atmosphere is already unstable and the rising hot air gives it a little jolt. “That’s effectively what these fires are doing—they’re giving a kick to the atmosphere,” says Swain. 

    Another reason we might be seeing more of these plumes, he says, is that wildfires are simply getting bigger and hotter. “If there is an increase in these clouds, the most plausible reason would be an increase in the intensity of the wildfires themselves,” says Swain. Indeed, the places that are seeing more of the clouds—Australia, North America, Siberia—are also seeing fiercer wildfires. 

    And there’s yet another factor. “I think this is because of the record dryness of the fuels,” says Craig Clements, a fire weather researcher at San Jose State University. “Drier fuels lead to more heat release and more vigorous updrafts that can then penetrate deeper into the atmosphere.” Extreme drought in places like the American West has sucked virtually all of the moisture out of the vegetation, priming it to burn. 

    More pyroCbs mean more headaches for firefighters, who already have to worry about not getting overrun by increasingly massive blazes, much less them spawning lightning that starts more fires. But more pyroCbs could have major consequences for the larger Earth system, too. “If we get more of these large outbreaks, and we have these plumes that encircle a portion of the globe, as we’ve seen recently, what does that mean in terms of feedbacks?” asked Peterson. “Can that cool the surface? Can that affect meteorology?”

    This probably won’t be the last of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s very 2021 press conferences. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Western wildfires are so intense they’re creating their own thunderclouds now on Aug 6, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Conservatives may be willing to take on climate change — if you call it something else

    On July 6, lightning sparked a fast-spreading wildfire in southern Oregon that’s now the largest in the country and the state’s third-largest on record. The Bootleg Fire, only recently getting contained after a period of cooler weather, has led more than 2,400 people to evacuate, destroyed at least 161 homes, and sent toxic smoke traveling across the country. The heat of the flames was so intense that it spawned a fire tornado. 

    Drought and extreme heat have plagued the West this year, combining with a century’s worth of wildfire suppression for an unprecedented fire season. A warming planet makes these giant fires more likely, and people around the world are seeing the flames and smoke, coming months ahead of schedule, as a wake-up call. So what did locals in the largely rural, conservative parts of Oregon’s wildfire country think about the most recent conflagration? Recent reports suggest that many people living near the Bootleg Fire don’t see any connection to rising temperatures. 

    For those who accept the scientific consensus around climate change, this sounds like a denial of reality. But new research suggests that many conservatives won’t link extreme weather with global warming no matter how extreme the weather gets in their backyards. Some experts argue that the phrase “climate change” has become so polarizing that you’d be better off avoiding those words altogether if you really want to address the planetary crisis.

    “We get so hung up on forcing people to agree with us on the facts that I think we miss the bigger picture,” said Brianne Suldovsky, an assistant professor of communication at Portland State University. “You know, I want my conservative uncle to accept that climate science is real and valid and that humans are causing climate change. Fine, but we’ve tried that, and it’s not working.”

    The sun is seen setting amid thick wildfire smoke from the Bootleg Fire on July 25, 2021 near Bly, Oregon. Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP via Getty Images

    It’s not just conservatives who are ignoring the local evidence about their weather. It’s liberals, too. In a working paper, Suldosvky and a statistics researcher at Portland State surveyed people in Oregon, asking them if certain kinds of weather events were getting more or less frequent in their area, and more or less extreme. Then they looked at the ZIP codes that the participants lived in and compared their responses to local data on precipitation rates and temperature.

    People who accepted the scientific consensus around climate change saw adverse weather events as being more frequent in their area — even when they weren’t. Likewise, people who denied climate change didn’t see extreme weather as extreme, even when it was happening right in front of them. People of all political persuasions often choose to see what they want to see.

    “What is predicting people’s weather perceptions has nothing to do with their actual weather,” Suldovsky said. “It really is just whether or not they think climate change is happening, and whether or not they’re concerned about it.” Suldovsky attributes this to a mental quirk called “motivated reasoning,” a tendency people have to look for explanations to justify their preexisting conclusions, rather than weighing the evidence and drawing a conclusion. 

    The Washington Post recently spoke with locals in the small towns near the Bootleg Fire and found that many conservatives aren’t talking about the overheating planet — except maybe to scoff at the idea. They tended to point the finger for the supercharged blazes elsewhere, at environmentalists who have stopped logging efforts, for example. “Now the top end of the Forest Service are a bunch of flower children,” one resident of the town of Lakeview, southeast of the fire, told the Post. “That’s what the real problem is. It’s not that much hotter. It’s environmentally caused mismanagement.”

    Suldovsky grew up in a very conservative household in a rural town in Idaho, and she didn’t use to accept the science behind climate change or evolution. She remembers coming to a high school science class prepared with Bible verses, arguing with her teacher that the Earth was only 6,000 years old. Nothing would change her mind — until later on, when she discovered a love of philosophy and questioned her beliefs. She says that “shoving more information” at people, or calling them stupid or anti-science, usually backfires. 

    “I deeply empathize with feeling like experts aren’t on your side, and that science isn’t on your side,” Suldovsky said. “And that position isn’t remedied by being told more science, right?”

    Portland residents in a cooling center during a record-breaking heat wave in June. Nathan Howard/Getty Images

    Suldovsky recently co-authored another study, published in the journal Climatic Change, that looked at how liberal and conservative Oregonians think differently about climate change. Through surveys, she found that liberals see climate science as simple and certain, and they tend to defer to the experts on climate change, even if what scientists are saying contradicts their personal experience. On the other hand, conservatives see climate science as complex and uncertain and tend to prioritize their own life experience over expert opinion. That’s why Suldovsky recommends leveraging conservatives’ experiences when talking to them about issues related to our overheating planet (without using the words “climate change,” of course).

    There’s a growing sense among some experts in communication that it’s best to avoid the phrase. The American Meteorological Society has recommended talking about more frequent floods, worsening seasonal allergies, and extreme heat without mentioning the root of the problem. Sometimes that means using a byword, like “future-proofing” or “resilience.” Other times, it means changing your argument from one focused on climate change to an issue that conservatives tend to care more about, like the economy or energy independence.

    “There are lots of things we can gather support for that … don’t necessarily require us to convince people that human-caused climate change is real,” Suldovsky said. For example, consider the 115-degree heat wave that melted streetcar cables in Portland, buckled roads in Seattle, and killed more than 1,000 in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. It’ll be easier to convince conservatives in the Pacific Northwest that they need to be more prepared for super-hot temperatures in the future than to get them to say that the extreme heat was linked to global warming.

    There’s evidence that this approach works: Towns along the coast of North Carolina have adopted rules that restrict new construction to higher ground, mentioning “flood damage” but ignoring the hot-button topic “sea-level rise.” In the Great Plains, local governments have paved the way for bike paths and required tree planting on new developments in the name of outdoor recreation and clean air.

    Suldovsky gets that the pragmatic advice to gloss over “climate change” is controversial. But in the end, she said, it’s better to get something done than to keep arguing about a mostly lost cause. 

    “Do you want to prove that you’re correct, or do you want to adapt for climate change? It kind of feels like at this point, we need to choose between one or the other.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Conservatives may be willing to take on climate change — if you call it something else on Jul 30, 2021.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • As extreme heat and wildfires rage, a ‘protection gap’ threatens Californians

    Over the past decade, wildfires and extreme heat have destabilized California in ways both dramatic and subtle: 4.2 million acres burned last year alone, most of the state is experiencing emergency levels of drought, and heat-related deaths are on the rise. These climate-driven disasters have worsened the state’s housing crisis, as insurance in risky areas becomes unaffordable or unavailable entirely: California homeowners living in areas at high risk for wildfires have seen their premiums rise by as much as 500 percent.

    For the past two years, the California Insurance Working Group, a team of environmental advocates, researchers, and insurance industry representatives, has been meeting at the behest of the state legislature to answer a set of particularly thorny questions about insurance coverage in the Golden State. Last week, the group released an 88-page report outlining a slew of recommendations to better protect Californians from wildfires, flooding, and extreme heat. The group’s recommendations include strengthening building standards to better withstand wildfires, encouraging the uptake of renters insurance, and better communicating climate-related risks to the public through maps and other tools. The report argues that these solutions will help narrow the state’s “protection gap” — the difference between the actual damage caused by a natural disaster and the insured losses.

    Michael Peterson is a former legislative staffer who now works for the California Insurance Commission, heading the executive agency’s efforts on climate and sustainability. In a conversation with Grist, Peterson outlined the protection gap identified by the working group, argued that extreme heat should be recognized as a climate threat similar to hurricanes and wildfires, and made the case for limiting eligibility to the state’s insurer of last resort for wildfires. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

    Q. The report identifies an insurance “protection gap” in California. Could you explain what that is?

    A. After every disaster, there’s a gap between the losses that are covered by insurance and losses that aren’t. And if you look at floods, fires, heat waves, you see a widening gap over time. The working group used that as one of the fundamental impetuses for this report, because if you have a widening gap, more and more costs are potentially going to fall on the most vulnerable communities. Over time, this working group was looking at general trends where between 30 and 60 percent of losses are not covered by an insurance policy. Those costs have to go somewhere, and they’re very likely landing on local governments and households that don’t have insurance.

    Q. This gap is wider for communities of color: People of color are less likely to have insurance and also more likely to be hit by climate disasters.

    A. That’s precisely right. There’s two factors: Where are the strongest climate impacts occurring, and what is the access to insurance available for those areas?

    Q. It was interesting to me that the working group focused on extreme heat alongside wildfire and flooding. How did the group come to that decision?

    A. The strong sentiment of the working group was that we need to be thinking about not just what’s insured today but what types of coverage and risk reduction we need looking forward. Extreme heat is deadly and causes more deaths than other perils. It’s also less recognized, so there are fewer systems in place. For large storms like hurricanes and tropical storms, we have early warning systems to help communities prepare. For wildfires, we have red flag days in California. But for extreme heat, even though we have the National Weather Service providing forecasts, there’s not quite the same response infrastructure already in place for local governments and communities that can help people anticipate these events. The working group saw it as an opportunity where their focus could have a strong impact on protecting people’s health and well being.

    Q. The average person isn’t really thinking of extreme heat as a natural disaster the way they may think of hurricanes and wildfires. One of the main recommendations from the working group is to communicate the risks from extreme heat. Why is communication the first step?

    A. If it’s not recognized as a type of natural disaster, then we’re just not adept at dealing with it, and that’s going to have drastic consequences. If you can communicate the risk effectively, then communities can prepare, they can react. That has a substantial benefit from what we see with fires and floods. Those early warning systems are really important. One of the recommendations is ranking heat waves to give people that singular event to plan for. But also, from a more scientific perspective, how do we learn from each of these events? It’s very hard — if you don’t categorize them — to say how can public policy be better next time, or what types of risk reduction policies can we do differently.

    Q. Another recommendation was to create a risk pool, a type of fund that communities can draw from to handle extreme heat events. How would that work?

    A. The reason why you want an extreme heat risk pool is that currently when we have extreme heat events, there are substantial costs that are being felt by local governments and communities. How do you provide them with the infusion of resources that they need to deal with the extra cost of cooling centers and transportation for elderly and people with disabilities to get to the cooling centers? If you have every local government dealing with this individually, it could make sense to have a pool that the state has that provides a more specific backstop to this problem. 

    Q. Would cities and counties contribute to that risk pool over time?

    A. That’s a possibility. It could be the city and county, but it could also be state run. If you think about it, the state has response costs related to wildfires in terms of fighting wildfires and emergency response. So, this would be a more coordinated way to formalize how we respond to extreme heat events.

    Q. The report recommends that the California legislature disallow eligibility for insurance coverage through the FAIR plan, which is the state’s insurer of last resort, for new construction in high hazard areas. (In recent years, the number of Californians enrolled in the FAIR program has ballooned as private insurance has become unavailable in risky areas.) How did the working group think about balancing insurance affordability while also not placing people in harm’s way?

    A. The working group has land use recommendations because they came to the conclusion that where and how we build matters. One of the clearest ways to reduce future losses is by building better. That could mean stronger building standards in some areas or community planning. This recommendation is to provide the clearest incentive — it’s not a prohibition. For new developments, we really need to do community mitigation at the front end. That’s going to make them more sustainable moving forward. A home that may seem affordable when you purchase it, but the insurance may make it unaffordable over time. So that needs to be something that’s considered at the beginning. Community mitigation has to be strongly incentivized from the very beginning.

    Q. Do you worry that if wildfire insurance becomes unavailable in certain parts of California, it might worsen the housing crisis?

    A. The working group discussed this quite a bit and tried to come up with thoughtful and measured recommendations. Is a home that’s unaffordable because of insurance — and evacuation and risk of being burned down — is that an equitable solution? That’s the discussion that the legislature is going to have. There are a number of ways to try to address that, but really the pre-development mitigation planning is critical, and this group wanted to focus on that as much as possible. We want these communities to be able to understand the risks they’re getting into, to avoid situations where people are trapped in an unaffordable situation.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As extreme heat and wildfires rage, a ‘protection gap’ threatens Californians on Jul 30, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Chomsky: We Need Genuine International Cooperation to Tackle the Climate Crisis

    Activists from the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion take part in a protest march in St. Ives, Cornwall, on June 11, 2021, on the first day of the three-day G7 summit being held from June 11-13.

    Global warming is accelerating, bringing the world close to the edge of the precipice. Heat waves, floods and deaths are major news, and as Truthout has reported, “this summer’s record-breaking temperatures caused by a climate catastrophe that, until recently, even the most pessimistic climatologists thought was still two or three decades out.” Yet, as Noam Chomsky points out in the interview below, corporate media devoted almost as much coverage in one day to a space cowboy than it did the entire year of 2020 to the biggest crisis facing humanity.

    Is the world losing the war against climate change? Why is there still climate crisis denial and inactivism? The choice is clear: We need global action to tame global warming or face apocalyptic consequences, says Chomsky, a globally renowned public intellectual who is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, international affairs, U.S. foreign policy, political economy and mass media.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Climate emergency facts are piling up almost on a daily basis — extreme heat waves in various parts of the U.S. and Canada, with temperatures rising even above 49 degrees Celsius (over 120 degrees Fahrenheit); deadly floods in western Europe, with close to 200 dead and hundreds remaining unaccounted for in the flooding; and Moscow experienced its second-hottest June. In fact, the extreme weather conditions even have climate scientists surprised, and they are now wondering about the accuracy of prediction models. What are your thoughts on these matters? It appears that the world is losing the war against global warming.

    Noam Chomsky: You probably remember that three years ago, Oxford physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert, a lead author of the just-released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, wrote that “it’s time to panic…. We are in deep trouble.”

    What has been learned since only intensifies that warning. An IPCC draft report leaked to Agence France-Presse in June 2021 listed irreversible tipping points that are ominously close, warning of “progressively serious, centuries-long and, in some cases, irreversible consequences.”

    Last November 3 was a narrow escape from what might well have been indescribable disaster. Another four years of Trump’s passionate racing to the abyss might have reached those tipping points. And if the denialist party returns to power, it may be too late to panic. We are indeed in deep trouble.

    The leaked IPCC draft was from before the extreme weather events of summer 2021, which shocked climate scientists. Heating of the planet “is pretty much in line with climate model predictions from decades ago,” climate scientist Michael Mann observed, but “the rise in extreme weather is exceeding the predictions.” The reason seems to be an effect of heating of the atmosphere that had not been considered in climate studies: wobbling of the jet stream, which is causing the extreme events that have plagued much of the world in the past few weeks.

    The frightening news has a good side. It may awaken global leaders to recognition of the horrors that they are creating. It’s conceivable that seeing what’s happening before their eyes might induce even the GOP and its Fox News echo chamber to indulge in a glimpse of reality.

    We have seen signs of that in the COVID crisis. After years of immersion in their world of “alternative facts,” some Republican governors who have been mocking precautions are taking notice, now that the plague is striking their own states because of lack of preventive measures and vaccine refusal. As Florida took the lead nationwide in cases and deaths, Gov. Ron DeSantis backed way (only partially) from his ridicule — eliciting charges of selling out to the enemy from party stalwarts and perhaps endangering his presidential aspirations. A shift which might, however, be too late to influence the loyal party base that has been subjected to a stream of disinformation.

    Possibly the sight of cities drowning and burning up may also dent GOP-Fox loyalty to the slogan “Death to intelligence, Viva death,” borrowed from the annals of fascism.

    The denialism of environmental destruction naturally has an impact on public opinion. According to the most recent polls, for 58 percent of Republicans, climate change is “not an important concern.” A little over 40 percent deny that humans make a significant contribution to this impending catastrophe. And 44 percent think that “climate scientists have too much influence on climate policy debates.”

    If there ever is a historical reckoning of this critical moment in history — possibly by some alien intelligence after humans have wrecked this planet — and if a Museum of Evil is established in memory of the crime, the GOP-Fox dyad will have a special room in their honor.

    Responsibility is far broader, however. There is no space to review the dismal record, but one small item gives the general picture. The indispensable media analysis organization FAIR reports a study comparing coverage on morning TV of the climate crisis with Jeff Bezos’s space launch: 267 minutes in all of 2020 on the most important issue in human history, 212 minutes on a single day for Bezos’s silly PR exercise.

    Returning to your question, humanity is quite clearly losing the war, but it is far from over. A better world is possible, we know how to achieve it, and many good people are actively engaged in the struggle. The crucial message is to panic now, but not to despair.

    One of the most worrisome developments regarding the climate crisis is that while virtually all of the published climate science shows the impacts of global warming are increasingly irreversible, climate skepticism and inactivism remain quite widespread. In your view, is climate crisis denial motivated by cultural and economic factors alone, or is there possibly something else also at work? Specifically, I am wondering if there is a connection between postmodern attacks on science and objectivity and climate science denial and inactivism.

    There was a skeptical crisis in the 17th century. It was real, a significant moment in intellectual history. It led to a much better understanding of the nature of empirical inquiry. I’m not convinced that the postmodern critique has improved on this.

    With regard to your question, I doubt that the postmodern critique has had much of an impact, if any, outside of rather narrow educated circles. The major sources of climate science denial — in fact much broader rejection of science — seem to me to lie elsewhere, deep in the culture.

    I was a student 75 years ago. If evolution was brought up in class, it was preceded by what’s now called a trigger warning: “You don’t have to believe this, but you should know what some people believe.” This was in an Ivy League college.

    Today, for large parts of the population, deeply held religious commitments conflict with the results of scientific inquiry. Therefore, science must be wrong, a cult of liberal intellectuals in urban dens of iniquity infected by people who are not “true Americans” (no need to spell out who they are). All of this has been inflamed by the very effective use of irrationality in the Trump era, including his skillful resort to constant fabrication, eroding the distinction between truth and falsehood. For a showman with deeply authoritarian instincts, and few principles beyond self-glorification and abject service to the welfare of the ultrarich, there’s no better slogan than: “Believe me, not your lying eyes.”

    The organization that Trump now owns, which years ago was an authentic political party, had already moved on a path that provided a generous welcome to such a figure. We’ve discussed previously how the brief Republican flirtation with reality on environmental destruction during the McCain campaign was quickly terminated by the Koch brothers’ campaign of intimidation. The last time Republican leaders spoke freely without obeisance to Trump, in the 2016 primaries, all were loyal climate denialists, or worse.

    Scientists are human. They’re not above criticism, nor their institutions. One can find error, dishonesty, childish feuds, all of the normal human flaws. But to be critical of science as such is to condemn the human quest to understand the world in which we live. And truly to abandon hope.

    Many discussions on the climate crisis revolve around “equity” and “justice.” Leaving aside the question of “climate equity vs. climate justice,” especially in the context of the Paris Agreement, how much importance should we assign to these debates in the context of the overall goal of decarbonizing the global economy, which is obviously the only way to tackle the existential crisis of global warming?

    It shouldn’t be overlooked that it is the small, very affluent minority, most of them in the rich countries, who have overwhelming responsibility for the environmental crisis, in the past and right now. Decarbonizing and concern for equity and justice, therefore, considerably overlap. Beyond that, even on narrow pragmatic grounds, putting aside moral responsibility, the major socioeconomic changes required for the necessary scale of decarbonization must enlist committed mass popular support, and that will not be achieved without a substantial measure of justice.

    Robert Pollin has been making the case for a Global Green New Deal as the only effective way to tackle global warming, and the two of you are co-authors of the recently published work, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet. No doubt, we need internationalism in the fight against climate breakdown because, as you have so aptly put it yourself, it is either “extinction or internationalism.” My question to you is twofold: Firstly, how do you understand “internationalism” in the current historical juncture where, in spite of all of the globalizing processes under way in the course of the past 40 or 50 years, the nation-state remains the central agency? And, secondly, what system changes are required to give “internationalism” a real fighting chance in the war against the apocalyptic consequences of global warming which are already knocking at humanity’s door?

    There are many forms of internationalism. It’s worthwhile to think about them. They carry lessons.

    One form of internationalism is the specific kind of “globalization” that has been imposed during the neoliberal years through a series of investor-rights agreements masquerading as free trade. It constitutes a form of class war.

    Another form of internationalism is the Axis alliance that brought us World War II. A pale reflection is Trump’s sole geostrategic program: construction of an alliance of reactionary states run from Washington, including as one core component the Middle East Abraham Accords and its side agreements with the Egyptian and Saudi dictatorships, taken over by Biden.

    Still another form of internationalism has been championed on occasion by workers’ movements, in the U.S. by the “Wobblies,” the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Other unions, too, have the term “international” in their names, a relic of commitment to true internationalism.

    In Europe, the most eloquent spokesperson for this form of internationalism was Rosa Luxemburg. The conflict between internationalism and chauvinism came to a head with the outbreak of World War I. Chauvinism conquered. The Socialist International collapsed. In Luxemburg’s acidic words, the slogan, “Proletarians of all countries united” was abandoned in favor of “Proletarians of all countries cut each other’s throat.”

    Luxemburg held true to the internationalist vision, a rare stance. In all countries, intellectuals across the political spectrum rallied enthusiastically to the chauvinist cause. Those who did not were likely to find their way to prison, like Luxemburg: Karl Liebknecht, Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs. The IWW was crushed by state-capital violence.

    Turning to the present, we find other manifestations of internationalism. When the COVID pandemic broke out in early 2020, the rich countries of central Europe at first managed to get it more or less under control, a success that collapsed when Europeans chose not to forego their summer vacations.

    While Germany and Austria were still in fairly good shape in early 2020, there was, however, a severe pandemic in northern Italy a few miles to their south, within the Europe Union. Italy did benefit from true internationalism — not on the part of its rich neighbors. Rather, from the world’s one country with internationalist commitments: Cuba, which sent doctors to help, as it did elsewhere, extending a record that goes far back. Among others, Panama received assistance from Cuba, but the U.S. took care of that. In its final 2020 report, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services proudly announced that it had successfully pressured Panama to expel Cuban doctors to protect the hemisphere from Cuba’s “malign” influence.

    The malign influence, spelled out in the early days of Cuban independence in 1959, was that Cuba might infect Latin America with its “successful defiance” of U.S. policies since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. To prevent this threat, the U.S. launched a major campaign of terror and economic strangulation, following the logic spelled out at the State Department in 1960 by Lester Mallory. He recognized, as U.S. intelligence knew, that the “majority of Cubans support Castro,” and that the “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” Therefore, “it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba … to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

    The policy has been rigorously followed with bipartisan fervor in the face of unanimous world opposition (Israel excepted). The days of “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” have long faded to oblivion, along with such frivolities as the UN Charter and the rule of law. It is astonishing that Cuba has survived the relentless assault.

    The successes of the policy of strangulation and torture are reported with no little exuberance, an unusual exhibition of sadistic cowardice. Among the many popular protests underway in Latin America, one is front page news: in Cuba, giving Biden an opportunity to slap even more sanctions on the “villain” for its resort to abusive measures to suppress the demonstrations, which appear to be mostly about “economic dissatisfaction and hardship,” and failures of the authoritarian government to respond in timely and effective fashion.

    Cuba’s unique internationalism is also undermined, freeing the world from any departure from the norm of self-interest, rarely breached in more than the most limited ways.

    That must change. It is by now broadly understood that hoarding of vaccines by the rich countries is not only morally obscene but also self-destructive. The virus will mutate in countries with nondominant economies, and among those refusing vaccination in the rich countries, posing severe dangers to everyone on Earth, the rich included. Much more seriously, heating of the planet also knows no borders. There will be nowhere to hide for long. The same is true of the growing threat of nuclear war among major powers: the end.

    Rosa Luxemburg and the Wobblies sketched the kinds of “system changes” toward which humanity should strive, in one or another way. Short of the goals they envisioned, steps must be taken toward engaging an informed and concerned public in international institutions of solidarity and mutual aid, eroding borders, recognizing our shared fate, committing ourselves to working together for the common good instead of “cutting each other’s throats.”

    This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Huge ‘heat dome’ expected to bring punishing temperatures to the US. Again.

    This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    The most extensive heat wave of a scorching summer is set to descend upon much of America this week, further roasting areas already gripped by severe drought, plunging reservoirs and wildfires.

    A massive “heat dome” of excessive heat will settle across the heart of the contiguous United States from Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast, bringing elevated temperatures to the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the northern reaches of the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, and California.

    Places used to more mild summers are set for punishing heat, with temperatures expected to breach 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) in the Dakotas and Montana, a state in which the city of Billings has already experienced 12 days above 95 degrees F (35 degrees C) this month. Areas of states including Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma may get “sweltering” temperatures reaching 110 degrees F (43 degrees C), NOAA said, while cities such as Des Moines, Minneapolis, and Chicago will get significantly above-average heat.

    The latest, but most expansive, in a parade of heat waves to sweep the U.S. is likely to bring thunderstorms and lightning to some areas, as well as worsen drought conditions ranked as “severe” or “exceptional” that now cover two-thirds of the U.S. West.

    Climate scientists have said the barrage of heat waves over the past month, which have parched farms, caused roads to buckle and resulted in the obliteration of long-standing temperature records, are being fueled by predicted human-caused climate change – but admit to being surprised at the ferocity of the onslaught.

    us heat dome
    Heat dome over North America, showing high temperatures predicted across the continent. NOAA

    “It’s been a severe and dangerous summer, some of the heat waves have been devastatingly hot,” said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We certainly expected these type of temperatures as global warming continues, but I don’t think anyone anticipated they would be so hot right now. I don’t think we could’ve expected so many heat waves in the same general region in one summer.”

    The most extraordinary of the recent heat waves occurred in the Pacific Northwest in June where the normally mild region was bathed in heat that broke temperature records by more than 10 degrees F (5.5 degrees C). The heat, which caused hundreds of people to die in cities including Seattle and Portland, where it reached 116 degrees F (46 degrees C), has caused several scientists to question their previous estimates of how the climate crisis will reshape heat wave severity.

    “You expect hotter heat waves with climate change but the estimates may have been overly conservative,” Wehner said. “With the Pacific Northwest heat wave you’d conclude the event would be almost impossible without climate change, but in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer you’d also include it would be impossible with climate change, too. That is problematic, because the event happened.”

    Wehner said the ongoing heat waves should prompt governments and businesses to better prepare for the health impacts of high temperatures, which range from heatstroke to breathing difficulties caused by smoke emitted from increasingly large wildfires.

    “The good news is that heat waves are now on people’s radars a bit more,” he said. “But these sort of events are completely unprecedented, you expect records to be beaten by tenths of a degree, not 5 degrees F or more.

    “It’s a teachable moment in many ways for the public that climate change is here and now and dangerous. It isn’t our grandchildren’s problem, it’s our problem. But it’s been a teachable moment for climate scientists too.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Huge ‘heat dome’ expected to bring punishing temperatures to the US. Again. on Jul 27, 2021.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Oliver Milman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Good wildfire news? Evidence from the Bootleg Fire supports thinning forests.

    As the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon swept toward him last week, Pete Caligiuri of The Nature Conservancy hustled to lay out water pipes and start the sprinklers to wet down the area surrounding a remote research station. The approaching wildfire had raged so fiercely that it had begun generating its own weather. Clouds of hot smoke formed towering thunderheads, which cast lighting down among the dry trees and urged the flames forward with gusts.

    The Nature Conservancy had been preparing for this moment for decades. The Jim Castles research station sits at the north end of the Sycan Marsh reserve: 30,000 acres of mixed wetland and dry pine forest in the Klamath Basin, which the nonprofit acquired in the 1980’s. The conservation group worked with the Klamath Tribes that call this area home to restore the forested areas to the landscape that existed before Americans took over the land and began putting out fires. They cut down small trees, leaving fire-adapted specimens like thick-barked ponderosa pines, and they began setting fires, allowing them to consume decades of needles and branches on the forest floor.

    The Bootleg Fire, now the largest in the country, is testing these methods. And the results offer a lesson for woodland communities throughout the West struggling to adapt to harsher fire seasons brought on by rising temperatures. As Caligiuri, the conservancy’s forest program director, was getting the sprinklers going around the station, he was also listening intently to the voices of firefighters crackling through a radio. “What we were hearing was that, as the fire moved out of the denser forest into these areas that had been treated, it came down out of the canopy of the trees and dropped to the ground,” Caligiuri said.

    That’s exactly what the conservationists had hoped would happen. The fire moved gently along the ground and did not harm the research station. Caligiuri stressed that it’s far too early to consider his story as anything more than anecdotal evidence. But there’s abundant published science that supports the underlying theory.

    “We have overwhelming evidence that when we treat forests by removing fuels, it generally — not always, you can never say always, but generally — moderates fire behavior,” said Maureen Kennedy, a professor who studies forest fires at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

    Kennedy studied a similar situation as the one unfolding in the Sycan Marsh, following the 2011 Wallow Fire in Arizona. She looked closely at the places where people had thinned the forest around two small towns, Alpine and Greer, preparation that probably saved them. Forest treatments like this work by spacing out fuel, Kennedy said. When there is a continuous ladder of branches and small trees from the ground to the canopy, it allows fire to rise up into the treetops. And when trees are close together, fires move from one to the next, growing hotter and hotter. Trees that are farther apart, however,  encourage fires to fall to the ground. It makes sense, intuitively, but it’s still surprising when a wall of flame settles down and begins creeping across the forest floor, Kennedy said.

    “No matter how many times I study it, no matter how much sense it makes in theory, it’s still amazing,” she said. “When you look at photographs from the Wallow Fire, that landscape was nuked, it was burning so hot that there were only blackened sticks that used to be trees left behind. Then, as you move into the treatment area the trees are brown, and then further in, they are green.”

    The fire burned down the hill leaving a black area, as it encountered the treatment unit (brown area) and approached residences (green area). The treatment edge is obvious as is the change in fire behavior.
    In this photo, taken after the Wallow Fire, the area treated is the brown swath between the blackened trees and the green trees. Photo courtesy of Timothy Sexton.

    You can see the same thing in a photo (below) taken after the 2020 North Complex Fire, near Quincy, California. There, too, the fire mellowed when it reached the area where workers had removed fuels, said Hannah Hepner, program manager for the Plumas County Fire Safe Council.

    The burn line from the North Complex fire where trees transition rapidly from black to green.
    Photo courtesy of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy

    ”That aerial photo is pretty incredible, and that is precisely where the fuels treatment took place,” Hepner said. But, she cautioned, these images shouldn’t set expectations too high: Fire behavior is unpredictable, and some areas always burn more severely than others. Just across the street from that photo, she said, the fire continued to blacken trees — though even there, previous forest management allowed firefighters to get down a narrow road and save a wood shingled building.

    Examples abound: Forest management near Paradise, California, preserved the Pine Ridge School — a small island of standing structures amid the devastation of the Camp Fire. For years, other foresters thought John Mount was crazy for purposefully setting fires on the land that he managed for the electric company, Southern California Edison. But last September, the massive Creek Fire surrounded that land, licking up against it from three sides, but then settling to the ground and sparing trees.

    Today, Mount’s heretical ideas have become mainstream. The story is different in coastal wet forests or in brushland, which evolved with less frequent fires. But it seems clear that the arid pine forests of the American West are much more resilient to fire when they are not packed with small trees, brush, and a century of dry foliage. “Fires are natural, inevitable, and necessary in these dry forests, and we removed them,” Kennedy said.

    In the next few years, scientists will scrutinize the Sycan Marsh to see how the Bootleg Fire reacted to different types of forest management, Caligiuri said, which will help people understand how to tame wildfires. There’s a long way to go, but neighbors across the West are organizing community groups to thin trees and conduct prescribed burns, while state and federal agencies are ramping up spending to increase this kind of management. People are starting to move in the right direction, Hepner said, “and yet sometimes conditions seem to be outpacing us.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Good wildfire news? Evidence from the Bootleg Fire supports thinning forests. on Jul 26, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Who is responsible for climate change?

    Who should be taking the heat for climate change? Curtis Daly has the answer.

    Video transcript

    The met office has issued its first ever extreme heat warning in Britain, with people and infrastructure struggling to cope. This is another case of volatile weather due to climate change. The question is…. who is responsible for climate change?

    Our world is dying around us. From parts of the Amazon rainforest now emitting more C02 than they’re taking in, to forest fires in Australia and Serbia. In Canada, extreme heat waves have caused hundreds of human deaths. Incredible floods have affected places in Europe such as Germany and here in the UK.

    In the last decade, nearly 1.3 million people died, and millions more were displaced, due to extreme weather, with the poorest nations hit the hardest. We know that in order to stop things getting worse at the very least we need to more than halve our carbon emissions in the next 9 years. We need to rapidly decarbonise our ecommony.

    As urgent as this sounds, it seems we are doing the exact opposite of what needs to happen. Oil and gas extraction is on the rise, with a projected $213bn being poured into the industry by 2025.

    The UK government, for example, is apparently on course to greenlight a huge new oil field in the North Sea. The companies behind the Cambo field plan, Shell and Siccar Point Energy, want to drill for millions of barrels of oil right up until 2050, and our Oil and Gas Authority has granted 113 new licenses to 65 companies. 

    his is extremely worrying. Do our elected officials take this seriously? Do they even believe that climate change is man-made?

    Shortly after the Conservatives decisive victory in December 2019, one of Boris Johnson’s first acts was to appoint climate change skeptics to his cabinet.

    Monmouth MP David Davies, not to be confused with the other, more famous MP, has a history of climate skepticism. In 2018, he accused the UN’s Climate Change Panel of being alarmists, and has spoken against renewables. In 2010, Davies attended a meeting of climate science deniers in parliament called “Climate Fools Day”. Due to his collective responsibility as a cabinet member, Davies will need to deliver the government’s agenda – including climate policy.

    Even Boris Johnson himself wrote in 2015 for the Telegraph that the increasingly volatile weather has “nothing to do with the conventional doctrine of climate change”.

    Do you have any trust in these people? Because I certainly don’t.

    So with global corporations increasing its use of oil, and right-wing politicians all over the globe weak on tackling the climate catastrophe, why does the narrative of saving the planet fall on the shoulders of us….

    “Do your bit”

    “Buy better”

    “Check your carbon footprint”

    You know it’s bad that we even have Shell preaching to us with their new marketing campaign, you know; the one with Kaley Cuoco from the Big Bang Theory hosting a show about clean energy.

    To put this into context, 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. Let’s take a look at Aramco. Aramco is the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil and gas company. They are currently the largest corporate greenhouse emitter. However, you wouldn’t think that after watching their ad campaign.

    This is what’s known as Green Washing. Take some nice shots, put some inspiring music in the background, and then straight up lie to you… 

    Even if we, as consumers, did everything we were asked to do, it wouldn’t put a dent in the global climate catastrophe.

    We’re being completely gaslighted for a reason, Now, what reason do you ask?

    The same reason as almost everything today – to protect global corporations. It’s once again a class issue where we don’t dare take the fight to those with the most power.  Our politicians are bought and sold by these companies. Companies that have been involved in North Sea oil and gas kindly gave the Conservatives £419,900 from July 2020 and onwards. If we talk about people as individuals, it’s easy to shift the blame on to us. The current debate is surrounded by the question of our individual morals and of our choices as consumers, and that this alone can create a sustainable planet, rather than a political and economic system that extracts, exploits, and burns the planet for profit.

    These companies are destroying our planet, our home, with no care for the damage they are causing today or for our future generations. Rather than guilt-tripping people for buying less-sustainable products, because that’s all they can afford, we need a collective effort that takes aim at those who are the real architects and drivers of climate change – the rich and the powerful.

     

    By Curtis Daly

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The world is literally on fire and our leaders are fanning the flames

    There’s no need to venture abroad and end up in quarantine right now – I’m getting all the blistering heat of the Mediterranean right now in my back garden in the North of England.

    The UK saw its hottest day of 2021 at the weekend as temperatures soared, leading the Met Office to issue its first ever extreme heat warning. Elsewhere in the world, temperatures and weather are hitting even more worrying heights.

    While this country gets off relatively easily with its heatwaves, the cataclysmic effects of the climate crisis are becoming more and more apparent as extreme weather events become a regular fixture in the headlines.

    And it’s become increasingly clear that whittling away at decade long emission targets isn’t going to cut it.

    The west on fire

    In the west of America, forests are currently burning.

    The Bootleg fire in Oregon is the largest of them, and one of the largest in Oregon’s history, and it’s expanded to cover an area half the size of Rhode Island. Thousands have been evacuated and firefighters have faced dangerous conditions as they attempt to put out the erratic flames.

    This is only one of 70 wildfires that were burning across the west on 17 July.

    Climate change has caused the region to become hotter and drier over 30 years, and with that has come an increasing amount of less-containable wildfires.

    Temperatures beyond human tolerance

    In Canada, hundreds died at the beginning of the month in a vicious heatwave in British Columbia that saw fires break out across the Pacific Northwest.

    Along with western America, western Canada is now in its fourth heatwave in five weeks, and the fires are continuing to burn.

    In Jacobabad, Pakistan summers now reach 52 degrees, which is hotter than the human body is built to withstand – and scientists estimate it could get hotter.

    So as global warming promised, it’s already dangerously, terrifyingly hot. But the climate crisis isn’t just driving up the heat – it’s causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events around the world.

    Floods beyond scientist predictions

    Within only 48 hours in Germany last week, areas near the Rhine experienced nearly twice as much rainfall as they usually do in the whole of July.

    As a result, floods ravaged tens of thousands of homes, killing at least 58 people.

    Their intensity and size was beyond what climate scientists had predicted, leading to concerns climate change’s effect on extreme weather is accelerating faster than we thought.

    All of this has happened just within the last couple of months. Beyond that, extreme weather events have significantly increased during the last 20 years.

    The human cost

    From 2000 to 2019, the world saw 7,348 major natural disasters. They killed 1.23 million people and cost the planet nearly $3tn.

    The poorest countries are hit the hardest by extreme weather events. According to The Global Climate Risk Index 2021, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Myanmar were the countries most affected by extreme weather events from 2000 to 2019.

    Zimbabwe and Mozambique were the most affected in 2019, after an intense tropical cyclone hit them and Malawi. Over one thousand people died, and three million were impacted. Residents who survived were left homeless, many of their livelihoods ruined.

    Another devastating cyclone hit Mozambique just six weeks later.

    And the future looks no less bleak – a UN report in 2019 warned of a coming “climate apartheid” as rich people find ways to protect themselves from extreme weather and leave the poorest to suffer.

    So, what are we doing?

    We have the Paris Agreement – accords signed by 196 countries pledging to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

    But despite that, we remain tied to fossil fuels. UK councils have invested nearly £10bn into fossil fuels through pension funds; Brazil continues to decimate the Amazon, and Norway has given gas and oil exploration rights to 30 companies including Shell.

    Climate scientists have already warned current global policies wouldn’t be up to scratch even if we met them, and could very likely see the planet warm by more than two degrees.

    Former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said last year:

    We have lost a lot of time. Five years after the agreement in Paris was adopted with huge expectations and commitment by world leaders, we have not done enough.

    There are whispers of phrases like ‘green new deal’ and ‘green recovery’, because adding green in front of something is a quick way to make us all feel like we’re doing something.

    The way forward

    It’s fairly clear the once seemingly far-off effects of the climate crisis are already here. If the apocalyptic flames in the west right now aren’t evidence enough, the Amazon rainforest now officially emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs.

    We need urgent action.

    We need quicker divestment from fossil fuels, so we can cut emissions by the drastic amount needed. We need to work to reduce deforestation and forest fires, switch to electric vehicles more quickly, and yes, recover from the pandemic by creating jobs in green industries and investing in renewable technology.

    Even with all this, particularly in the west, we’re going to have to accept and make the effort to change our individual lifestyles to reduce emissions where possible – change needs to happen both structurally and individually.

    We’re hosting COP26 this year, which has instructed countries to update their emissions plans to get back on track for 1.5 degrees warming.

    This is the chance for world leaders to recognise the world is already burning and commit to real actions. If they don’t, and continue fanning the flames, it’s the world they’ll have to answer to.

    Featured image via YouTube/CNBC Television

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • On the heels of Europe’s devastating floods, scientists warn more is yet to come

    Scientists warn the catastrophic floods that devastated western Europe last week are a glimpse into the future for the region, as climate change fuels more intense, slower-moving storm systems that can hold vast amounts of precipitation. 

    According to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, similar slow-moving, low-pressure storms could become 14 times more frequent in Europe over the next century. To date, such weather patterns have been relatively uncommon in the region, but researchers, using detailed climate model simulations, found that storms in the coming decades will have higher peak intensities, longer durations, and will occur more frequently. Slower-moving storms formed in warmer atmospheric temperatures also means more water accumulation — for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more moisture — increasing the risk of flash flooding. 

    “This study suggests that changes to extreme storms will be significant and cause an increase in the frequency of devastating flooding across Europe,” Hayley Fowler, co-author of the study and a hydroclimatologist at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, said in a press release. 

    It’s a wake-up call, Fowler said, to improve emergency warning and management and to make infrastructure more resilient to the effects of climate change.

    Two months worth of rain fell in just 24 hours in parts of Germany late last week, causing damages to bridges and roads, rivers to overflow, hillsides to collapse, and homes and cars to be swept away. More than 1,000 rescue operations have been carried out, nearly 200 people have died, 700 have been injured, and many others remain missing as of Monday morning. Parts of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the UK were also affected by the flash flooding. 

    The new research by Fowler and her colleagues echoes a separate study published in January in the Journal of Climate that found annual and extreme precipitation will increase in most regions of Europe over the next century.  

    “Governments across the world have been too slow in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming continues apace,” Fowler said. 

    As climate impacts worsen around the world — from the floods in Europe to record-breaking wildfires in the American West to severe drought in Madagascar — several countries are acting ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference this November. The European Union and China, two of the world’s biggest economies, recently announced sweeping plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The commitment includes for the EU a globally first-of-its-kind tax on imports from high emitting countries. Environmentalists, however, say it’s still not enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. 

    The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change released a report in March showing that countries have to redouble efforts and submit more ambitious climate action plans in 2021 if the world is going to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting increases in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. 

    As of March, the world’s collective commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions put us on the path to reducing emissions by less than 1 percent by 2030, compared to 2010 levels. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, emissions reductions ranges should really be around 45 percent.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline On the heels of Europe’s devastating floods, scientists warn more is yet to come on Jul 20, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • With disasters mounting by the day, the U.S. may finally enact real climate policy

    This story was originally published by HuffPo and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    It’s the summer of cascading disasters in the United States: Downpours have made rivers of major metropoles’ transit lines, a coastal condo collapsed, flames have engulfed vast swaths of land, and triple-digit heat has roasted typically temperate regions. The catastrophes have brought a mounting death toll and incalculable trauma.

    But, for the first time in over a decade, the U.S. government may actually do something about the emissions destabilizing the climate. 

    Last week, the Biden administration and its allies in Congress announced plans to pack the federal budget with resources and rules that could jolt a country long paralyzed by corporate obstruction and science denial into finally confronting an unprecedented crisis. 

    Democrats plan to use their slim majorities in Congress to pass a $3.5 trillion spending package that includes mandates to cut 80 percent of planet-heating pollution from the electricity sector by 2030, fund a new green jobs corps, and make it easier for drivers to swap gas guzzlers for electric vehicles. 

    Whether enough funding will make it into the final budget to make the programs significant remains unclear. By tacking the proposals to the budget process, which requires only 51 votes to become law, Democrats can circumvent the 60-vote threshold for passing traditional legislation that grants Republicans filibuster power.

    But doing so gives Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, widely considered the most conservative Democrat in the caucus, kingmaker status, and already he’s signaled his opposition to anything that disadvantages fossil fuels. 

    There’s pull on the other end of Democrats’ ideological spectrum, too, as 16 senators, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, have vowed to vote against any budget that excludes climate provisions. But, as Mother Jones reported, those in the “No Climate, No Deal” contingent have yet to settle on any uniform demands about what kinds of policy they want to see in the budget. 

    “We cannot address a small sliver of our carbon pollution and call it a victory. We have to tackle this problem at scale,” Leah Stokes, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of ”Short Circuiting Policy,” wrote in The Atlantic last week. “The last chance we had for a federal climate bill was 12 years ago. I’m afraid that Congress will again fail to pass climate legislation that invests at the necessary level. I’m worried that we’ll keep burning time we no longer have.”

    While negotiators hash out the budget, other lawmakers are proposing standalone legislation that could ultimately appear in the final funding bill.

    • The Senate Energy Committee approved Manchin’s bill directing $95 billion to carbon capture and storage technology in fossil fuel plants on Wednesday. 
    • Last Thursday, Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Hampshire, unveiled a bill to provide Americans with rebates to buy efficient new appliances aimed at slashing the 37 percent of U.S. emissions that stem from household energy use. 
    • And last Friday, Democratic Senators Cory Booker, of New Jersey, and Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, joined two Republicans to introduce legislation to give grants to financially imperiled nuclear power plants in hopes of maintaining the supply of the country’s biggest source of carbon-free electricity.

    Progressives in the House of Representatives, meanwhile, are pitching their own vision for how to legislate on climate. 

    • In March, lawmakers announced the THRIVE Act, a $10 trillion spending plan, their banner policy. 
    • In April, Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Montana, put forward a plan to give $1 trillion in federal aid to cities, towns and tribes seeking to slash emissions in a bid to circumvent anti-climate mandates on the state level. 
    • Last Thursday, Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, proposed what he called the “Green New Deal for public schools,” a $1.4 trillion package to fund major retrofits at schools, hire more teachers and help kids living in poverty.

    The steeper price tags the left-leaning candidates are seeking may seem big. But the numbers are actually more in line with what economists on the left and right ― from the progressive Roosevelt Institute to George W. Bush-era Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ― say is needed to rapidly scale down the U.S. output of planet-heating gases. 

    Yet President Joe Biden and his treasury chief, Janet Yellen, worry that borrowing more money to justify climate spending poses financial risks for the country, despite warnings from economists and forecasters that failing to invest enough now in decarbonization carries even bigger risks as warming worsens. Under those self-imposed restraints, the White House sought to offset all its infrastructure and climate spending with new taxes.

    Facing ferocious blowback from industries and their allies in Congress, the federal policymakers could only come up with $2.4 trillion in direct revenue to offset the program and managed to muster another $1.1 trillion through accounting techniques with the budget.

    And while the Biden administration has faced mounting protests from climate activists demanding more action to curb emissions, pleas for something as wonky as “more deficit spending” have yet to materialize or gain popularity. 

    Despite far stricter budget constraints due to its multinational euro currency, the European Union last week took some even more aggressive climate steps, proposing a dozen bills that would, among other things, ban diesel- and gas-powered cars by 2035 and levy new taxes on heating gas. 

    Expanding on those efforts could prove crucial ahead of November’s United Nations climate conference in Scotland. The world is already 1.1 degrees Celsius hotter than in pre-industrial times, and even if every country adheres to its pledged emissions cuts, the planet would still be on pace to warm by at least another 2 degrees this century. Changing that trajectory depends not only on rich nations cutting emissions, but on poorer countries doing the same, and in many cases forswearing the development of heavily polluting industries that helped North America and Europe grow so wealthy. 

    If the U.S. and European Union — home to the people most responsible for the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere today — can’t rapidly slash emissions, convincing the majority of humanity in Africa, Asia and Latin America to do the same will be a tough sell. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline With disasters mounting by the day, the U.S. may finally enact real climate policy on Jul 20, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Be very careful where you build that seawall

    This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    Think back to being a kid at the beach, building walls around your sandcastles. If you engineered those fortifications properly, the tide would come in and flow around your kingdom, before the walls eventually eroded away. By redirecting the rising water, you would have saved your castle — at least for a little while. 

    Now think bigger. Imagine you’re a city planner in an area threatened by rising seas and you’ve spent a fortune to build a proper seawall. The tide comes in and the wall holds, saving you billions of dollars in property damage. But: whomp whomp. Like the waves you once redirected around your sandcastle, the rising waters hit the wall and flow into the communities on either side of you. You’ve saved your residents, but imperiled others.

    New modeling shows just how catastrophic this wayward-water phenomenon might be in the San Francisco Bay Area, where sea-levels could rise 7 feet in the next 80 years. “Those rising waters put millions of people and billions of dollars in buildings at risk,” says Anne Guerry, chief strategy officer and lead scientist at Stanford University’s Natural Capital Project, who coauthored a paper describing the research. It was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “One of the things that’s new about this work is that people haven’t necessarily thought about how communities, like in the Bay Area, are connected to one another through these shared waters,” she continues.

    Guerry and her colleagues did the modeling by breaking up the shoreline into sections, based on characteristics like geology. Then they used hydrological models to show where the rising water would go if a given section of coastline was fortified with a seawall. Basically, they imagined what would happen if the residents of one area decided to protect themselves without fully considering the resulting hydrology. “That water has to flow somewhere,” says Guerry. “And what we found is it ends up flowing into other communities, making their flooding much worse.” 

    They also incorporated economic modeling to calculate how much damage this would do. For example, they estimated that if the local government was to throw up a wall around San Jose, a city in the South Bay, it would inundate other communities with the equivalent of 14,400 Olympic-size pools’ worth of redirected waters. San Jose would be saved, but nearby Redwood City and other communities would be screwed. “That equates to $723 million of additional flood damage costs after just one high tide during spring, when the waters are naturally highest,” says Guerry. “And that’s just from building one large seawall in one small part of the bay.” And that $700 million-plus figure doesn’t account for potential damage to ecosystems and fisheries, so the tally is a conservative one.

    The extra water pushed back by San Jose’s wall would even accumulate clear across the bay, in Napa and Sonoma, 50 miles north. The damage would go the other way too: If the Napa and Sonoma coasts were walled off, the South Bay would see tens of millions of dollars in damages.

    That’s not great news, considering that humans have a habit of building big cities on coasts, which urban planners now have to fortify, and seawalls are often the best defense available. The authors of this paper note that by the year 2100, the U.S. alone is predicted to spend $300 billion on buttressing shorelines to hold back both sea-level rise and the bigger surges that come with storms made more powerful by climate change. Lawmakers must soon consider whether to spend $26 billion to wall off the area around Houston. Jakarta, too, needs to build a giant seawall, only it can’t until the land underneath it stops sinking.

    Up to this point, policymakers have assumed that seawalls might negatively affect nearby communities, but this new research puts numbers on the potential harm, says Laura Feinstein, sustainability and resilience policy director at SPUR, a nonprofit public policy group in the Bay Area. (She wasn’t involved in the research.) “It’s a really quantitative and rigorous demonstration of something that people have always said of sea-level rise, which is that regions either sink or swim together,” she says. “If one area pours resources into armoring its shoreline, that’s just going to exacerbate sea-level rise for its neighbors.”

    But getting local governments to act in concert may be a challenge, especially if they don’t all have the same financial resources or some are under particular pressure from lucrative local industries that would really rather not be underwater. The temptation for a county with a healthy tax base (read: one that’s full of rich people) will be to unilaterally build a seawall, low-income neighbors be damned. 

    In the Bay Area, where income inequality is profound (the gap between average high and low incomes is $263,000, compared to $178,000 nationwide), the scene is primed for disaster. “Communities of color and low-income communities have been pushed into low-lying areas in the Bay Area for decades,” says Feinstein, referring to shoreline neighborhoods in cities like Oakland and East Palo Alto. Many of these areas have also historically been home to manufacturing, warehousing, and the shipping and rail industries. “You have this colocation of old toxic waste sites, heavy industry, and transportation, and then low-income communities of color, all being most vulnerable to sea-level rise in the Bay Area,” she says. When waters rise, they could push up groundwater contaminated with these buried toxins; these areas will not only flood, but they may do so with polluted water.

    The Bay Area has a few seawalls already in progress. The Port of San Francisco is upgrading its century-old Embarcadero Seawall, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is studying ways to bolster the San Francisco International Airport’s levees. Foster City, to the south, is building a new levee that will stretch more than 6 miles, and the wastewater district in North Richmond, on the other side of the bay, is considering its own levee project.

    At the moment, local governments don’t have to work together to consider the unintended consequences of future seawalls. “That’s primarily because there’s no formal mechanism to require people to do that,” says Dana Brechwald, manager of the Adapting to Rising Tides program at the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, who wasn’t involved in this new research. (She’s also program manager of Bay Adapt, a regional collaboration that advocates for protecting people and ecosystems from rising seas.) “If someone were to do that at a local level, it would be completely voluntary.” 

    But by putting numbers on how bad the flooding could get if seawalls are erected haphazardly or without cooperation, the new modeling may encourage more collaboration between neighbors. “We’re really hoping to set that sort of stuff up in the future,” Brechwald adds. “Those mechanisms are going to be really critical to make sure that we have equitable adaptation.”

    And it might also make planners consider alternatives to walls. Nature actually has another solution ready to go: using the landscape to our advantage. (Climate scientists call this a nature-based solution, because it leverages natural processes instead of trying to engineer our way out of a problem.)

    Certain stretches of coastlines naturally take up seawater better than others—alluvial valleys, for example, the floodplains where rivers meet the sea. These have sandy, muddy bottoms, which soak up water like sponges, especially when compared to rocky shorelines. Guerry argues that instead of walling these off, we should route water toward them, so they can act as overflow areas. “Sometimes it’s more practical and more economical to strategically choose areas that can absorb the water,” she says. “These can be things like marshes and ponds, but they can also be parks and golf courses or other kinds of semi-natural areas, where intermittent flooding is going to cause less damage.” 

    “Seawalls aren’t the only answer to combating sea-level rise,” Guerry adds, “even though that’s kind of the traditional go-to solution.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Be very careful where you build that seawall on Jul 17, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.