This story was originally published in Modern Farmer and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.

Chris Rauch was strolling past booths at the annual ag show in Spokane last summer when he spotted a large jar full of basalt powder. A nearby sign urged him to spread it on his croplands to help improve soil pH. 

Rauch looked at the gray dust and shook his head. 

“That’s crazy,” he thought. “Why would I want to put even more rocks in my fields?”

Rauch grows dryland wheat in the rolling gold-brown hills surrounding the Pendleton, Oregon, municipal airport. His farm lies on the Columbia Plateau, a 63,000-square-mile basin formed by ancient basalt lava flows. At the end of the last Ice Age, retreating glaciers scoured the bedrock, leaving a wake of grit and gravel to form the deep loess soil. 

Not much rain falls in this grassland habitat. Some years, it’s 9 to 12 inches, but lately, it’s more like 6 to 9. Pre-cultivation, the region owed the healthy pH of its soils to the lucky coincidence of sitting atop a volcanic bed. However, the topsoil is powerless to counteract the acidifying effect of ammonia-based fertilizers. Over the years, this has caused pH levels to drop to 5 and below, according to Dr. Francisco Calderon, director of the Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center.

“It’s not a widespread problem yet, but it’s rearing its ugly head in some places,” says Calderon.

A few weeks after the ag show, Rauch got the latest results of his soil pH tests: 5.3. He recalled the message from the ag show booth, run by a company called UNDO. The crushed rock raised soil pH levels. And it was free. 

His first thought was, why? It seemed too good to be true. Yet the more he read, the more it seemed legit.

“You can’t beat zero,” he finally decided, and gave UNDO a call. 

Rauch is one of many farmers taking a chance on a new process called Enhanced Rock Weathering, or ERW. Startup companies across the country are bringing crushed volcanic rock to farmers’ fields and spreading it to improve their soils. The rock powder, usually basalt, is often scavenged from local mines or quarries, where it exists as a waste by-product. ERW companies collect the rock powder, sometimes milling it further to reduce the grain size. Then they truck it to farms, where it is used in place of ag lime. Studies show that volcanic rock dust can raise the pH of overworked soils, improving productivity. And because enhanced rock weathering is considered a form of permanent carbon dioxide removal, the startups can sell “carbon credits” to large corporations like Microsoft that want to reduce their carbon footprint and show they are acting on climate change. 

The method is based on decades of scientific research that exploits what some call “earth’s thermostat.” Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere naturally reacts with water to form a weak acid. This acid then bonds with minerals in volcanic stone and permanently removes the CO2 from the air. Geochemists discovered that this natural carbon cycle could be accelerated by crushing the rock, which exposes more of its reactive surface. A study published last month by the American Geophysical Union stated that ERW had the potential to sequester more than 200 gigatons of CO2 in a 75-year period. That would put a small but meaningful dent in the world’s CO2 emissions, which currently stand at around 37 gigatons per year.

Saving the world wasn’t on Rauch’s mind as he watched a spreader rumble over his fields, delivering what looked and sounded like dirty sleet. Rauch was worried about seeding, soil compaction and whether he’d end up with one giant gravel pile. To his surprise, the basalt blended with his soil as if it were just one more thing that had blown in on the wind.

According to Zoe Young, UNDO’s local agent in the Pacific Northwest region, Rauch’s skepticism is a common response. At first, farmers think it sounds crazy. Then they want to know why they’re being offered something for nothing.

“It seems sneaky,” she says. 

Young attributes farmers’ doubts to their fraught history with well-meaning programs. 

“The green industry has taken advantage of farmers in a lot of ways,” she says. Farmers join waitlists for solar panels in exchange for not farming their fields, then the solar companies never show up. Or they’re tricked into signing multi-year contracts. 

“Farmers can see the benefit for their farm,” Young explains. “But they say, ‘You’re just cashing in on the new bullshit market.’”

Michigan, the state shaped like a mitten, has acidic soils up towards its fingertips and alkaline soils down in its palm, where agricultural consultant Jesse Vollmar lives. The clay loam soil there is relatively good, with a natural pH between 6.5 and 7, and rainfall is an enviable 20 inches per year. While these Midwest conditions may sound ideal for farming, years of tilling and heavy fertilizer use have taken their toll. 

Vollmar is from a 5th-generation farm family. He began his career helping other farmers enroll in federal sustainable agriculture programs and saw their struggles firsthand. Farmers needed years’ worth of tillage and cover crop records to be eligible. Once enrolled, they were required to conduct regular soil tests. Payout came only after a decade. 

Two years ago, Vollmar began working with Lithos Carbon, a small ERW company based in Seattle. He likes that ERW companies do all the soil tests and record-keeping and require only a one-year commitment. Vollmar remains a strong proponent of regenerative farming and believes the two should be practiced together. But in his view, the economics of ERW can’t be beat.  

“It’s just a no-brainer for farmers,” he says. “The hardest part is keeping up with demand.” 

A few states over in the Piedmont region of southern Virginia, farmer Rick Bennett is a Lithos client. Bennett grows corn, sweet beans, soybeans and cereals on old tobacco land that has seen two centuries of heavy use. The soil, a mixture of silt and clay, is acidic and low in organic matter. 

Last spring, Bennett chose a particularly acidic plot and contracted with Lithos to treat it. The company created a series of test strips so that Bennett could observe the difference, and he planted soybeans over the entire area. Five months later, Bennett doesn’t see a great deal of difference, but he says he will know for certain when he puts a combine in the field. 

“It’s not about looks but the number of pods and beans in the pods.”

Former professional football player turned farmer Jason Brown also tried basalt powder last spring on First Fruits Farm, his 1,000-acre farmstead in Louisburg, North Carolina. Brown donates much of what he raises to help fight hunger in his community. But he understands the razor-thin budgets of his fellow farmers, which forces many of them to pick and choose which crops they can afford to grow. Enhanced rock weathering can help ease the crunch, says Brown. 

“It’s all-around mutually beneficial, but for farmers, this is a really big deal,” Brown explains. “Most times, we have to write very large checks for every amendment we add to our soils. This is one of the rare times when farmers not only get a break but a benefit.” 

Brown says that local farmers are waiting to see whether first adopters like him get better soil test results—and, importantly, a check in the mail for allowing liming on their fields. 

“Once that happens, I promise you that every farmer from Virginia to South Carolina is going to be waiting in [the] queue to sign up.” 

Basalt is the most common volcanic rock on earth, coating the floors of most seas, underlying areas such as the Columbia Plateau, and jutting out in strange columnar formations such as the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. But volcanoes spew out many types of molten rock. Another volcanic mineral is olivine, a greenish stone that comprises the majority of earth’s upper mantle. Studies show that olivine has a higher capacity than basalt to capture CO2 and may be quicker—at least initially—to alter soil pH. 

The Princeton-based company EION uses olivine to lay down rock dust in the steamy fields of the Mississippi River Delta region. Soils there are old, red and acidic, like soils in the tropics. The landscape is a patchwork of timber, pasture, row crops, hunting habitat, and buffer strips—an ideal model for managing agricultural land for multiple ends, according to Adam Wolf, founder and CEO of EION.

“They have an appreciation for the natural world,” says Wolf. “It’s not as reductionist as in places like California, where you see vast landscapes dominated by one crop.” 

Heat and humidity speed the reaction of rock weathering, and EION uses that plus olivine’s high CO2 capture rate to do more with less. The company spreads two to three tons of olivine per acre instead of nine or 10 tons of basalt. However, because local olivine sources don’t exist, EION must import the olivine by ship from Norway. Once it reaches the vast river system of the Mississippi, it can be milled and distributed to farms as far away as North Dakota.

Dan Prevost is a Mississippi farmer and agricultural consultant for EION. He rents patches of “used and abused” land near his home in south-central Mississippi and helps local farmers try out rock dust in their fields. 

“I don’t own any land of my own, so I get the land nobody else wanted,” Prevost jokes. 

“Rebuilding the soil is my number one priority.”

Like Vollmar, Prevost started in regenerative farming and knows the critical importance of soil pH. 

“Once you get a piece of farmland, the very first thing you do is get your pH right,” says Prevost. ‘That optimizes nutrient availability. If you have a low pH, you can put all the fertilizer on that you want, but the nutrients aren’t going to be available.”

Prevost tested olivine on his land last spring. He chose a poor, acidic soil section and laid down two tons per acre, then planted corn on both treated and untreated plots. Although he’s still waiting for final data, Prevost says that the corn on the treated side was “super dark green” compared to the untreated section.

Prevost has plenty of farmers willing to try ERW, but, like Young and Vollmar, he understands their initial reluctance. Farmers are constantly harangued about the latest ‘hot topic,’ he says, from sedimentation and erosion to pesticides, nutrient loading in waterways and declining irrigation aquifers. While all are important, the sheer quantity can be overwhelming.

“Now we’re talking about climate change,” says Prevost. “Next on the list is going to be biodiversity. Farmers get jaded with things pretty quick.”  

Climate programs also get a bad rap in the Deep South because they often promise unachievable carbon capture levels. Soil microbes cycle faster there than in colder, drier climates, says Prevost. Their carbon is released back into the atmosphere when they die, defeating the programs’ goals.

Prevost talks about improved pH, micro-nutrients and crop yields in his work with farmers rather than saving the planet.

“Typically, we don’t talk about climate change because that’s just another hot topic,” he says. “But everybody can pretty much agree that things are different. We’re getting more intense weather patterns—drier dries and wetter wets and more frequent hailstorms.” 

Across the country, farmers are testing a new method of improving the health and productivity of their soils. From the semi-arid high desert of eastern Oregon to the subtropical floodplain of the Mississippi Delta, they’re partnering with new companies that offer an apparently legitimate something-for-nothing deal. Whether soils are naturally acidic or made so by man, volcanic rock dust appears to help restore healthy soil pH levels and, along with it, soil fertility and productivity. 

The next few years should tell whether enhanced rock weathering becomes one more bothersome “hot topic” or catches on as a boon to both farmers and the planet. The lab research proves ERW’s potential; the first field data is coming in with the fall harvest. 

Out in Pendleton’s golden wheat fields last month, Chris Rauch received the latest soil pH test results: 5.7-5.8, substantially higher than last year’s reading of 5.3.

Rauch was surprised.

“Whether it’s the rock or that the stars lined up that day, it’s too soon to know for sure,” he says.

“But it’s a trend in the right direction.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To reverse a troubling trend, farmers are adding rocks to their fields on Oct 1, 2023.

by Janelle Retka, Samantha McCabe, Jiahui Huang and María Inés Zamudio, Columbia Journalism Investigations and The Center for Public Integrity

This article was produced in partnership with Columbia Journalism Investigations, the Center for Public Integrity and it was co-published by Futuro Investigates, a division of Futuro Media. It is reproduced with permission.

Standing before a two-story house on the coast of Fort Myers Beach, Florida, where Hurricane Ian unleashed a seven-foot storm surge two weeks earlier, Marcos looked at the structure, shredded beyond repair. 

Wearing a paper mask and gloves, the 54-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant walked inside. He could see and smell the mold, dark and pungent, blooming in the walls. Marcos spent the day ripping out soggy insulation –– first with hammers and later, his hands. The dust coated his clothes and skin. 

Marcos, a construction worker for 25 years, was no stranger to grueling labor. But after Ian devastated a 47-mile swath of Southwest Florida in September 2022, Marcos found himself on a worksite rife with hidden hazards. His eyes swelled, and his skin grew itchy. By day’s end, his breathing had become strained –– an ailment that would linger.   

“Everything was falling apart,” Marcos said in Spanish, describing how he had to throw away his clothes every day he worked on the post-Ian cleanup, after spending hours exposed to toxins. (Columbia Journalism Investigations and the Center for Public Integrity are not publishing the full names of immigrant workers interviewed for this story to protect their identities.)

As climate change accelerates natural catastrophes, the disaster-restoration industry has capitalized on low-wage immigrant labor. These workers — who clear debris and build anew after hurricanes, floods and wildfires — perform the most arduous tasks. And this comes at a health cost for those exposed to harmful toxins like mold, asbestos and lead. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency created to protect workers, has ignored research on workplace safeguards against post-disaster toxic exposures. OSHA has enacted an emergency-response policy favoring a fast recovery over worker health.

This booming industry runs on mostly working-age and undocumented migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean who fled poverty, violence and natural disasters in their homelands. Preoccupied with survival, they can fall victim to abuses routinely inflicted upon immigrant workers in the U.S. — wage theft, harassment. But these workers also contend with an overlooked threat: the potentially lethal contaminants propagated by climate-fueled disasters.

Many disaster-restoration workers are exposed to known carcinogens and various toxins, often unwittingly and without protections, which can make them sick, an investigation by CJI and Public Integrity found. Some suffer debilitating health issues long after they’ve left cleanup jobs. 

CJI and Public Integrity asked 100 restoration workers primarily based in Florida and Louisiana to share their employment experiences. Nearly all said they tore out drywall and busted up sheetrock following a climate disaster. Most worked at least three events over seven years — from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana (2005) to Hurricane Harvey in Texas (2017) and Hurricane Ian in Florida (2022) — drawing out their toxic exposures across multiple worksites. Many started this work in the wake of Katrina, the first of what would be 13 billion-dollar tropical cyclones to hit New Orleans in the 18 years since.

More than two-thirds of workers said they were exposed to asbestos, lead and mold on the job; of those, all but two said they experienced health symptoms linked to these toxins, such as skin and eye irritations, respiratory issues and headaches. Some said they’ve developed chronic ailments caused by these pollutants, including lung cancer, asthma and vision loss. Others said they don’t know about the long-term impact on their health because they don’t have access to a doctor. 

Linda Birnbaum, who headed the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences before retiring in 2019, calls the workers’ responses “depressing.” The number of workers sickened by post-disaster cleanups “is only going to get worse,” she said, “unless there are steps taken to reduce their exposure.”

Under pressure for its post-Katrina response, OSHA researched the toxic threats that can endanger workers and sounded alarm bells in 2006, only to go quiet since. Today, the agency often suspends enforcement of workplace standards following disasters. Inspectors offer guidance — with little accountability — to companies violating regulations that would limit such risks.

Meanwhile, agency officials have tried for 16 years to create disaster-specific rules for worker health and safety — from hazards training to health monitoring. The proposed regulation, focused on those who first respond to a calamity, would overlook this immigrant-heavy industry.

OSHA declined to make Assistant Secretary Douglas Parker available for an interview and instead provided a written statement stressing that “employers have a responsibility to protect workers from deadly hazards such as mold, asbestos and lead,” and that OSHA maintains its right to enforce health and safety standards in the wake of catastrophes. Ultimately, the agency defended its typical approach of suspending enforcement. 

“Compliance assistance allows OSHA to intervene at hundreds of worksites involving thousands of workers,” the agency said. “Using the same number of staff on an enforcement footing, OSHA would only reach a small fraction of those workers.”

Months after Hurricane Ian — the third-costliest hurricane on record in the U.S., causing $112 billion in damages — hundreds of immigrant workers, like Marcos, have flocked to day-laborer corners and cleanup sites across Florida’s Lee County. Hired by brokers and contractors, they’ve shoveled debris and dismantled buildings. 

These laborers represent an expanding web of companies — from mom-and-pop shops to multinational corporations — profiting off of climate-driven devastation. In the last three years, federal data shows, the warming planet has fueled 20 major hurricanes, floods and wildfires – five fewer than in the entire 1990s. 

But while corporations like Amazon and Starbucks face heightened scrutiny for their labor practices, the disaster-restoration industry has grown into a loosely regulated system that many industry players describe as “the wild west,” largely under the public’s radar. Its workers remain invisible even as the climate crisis makes them essential. 

“The system is not designed to protect workers,” said Mario Mendoza, himself a disaster restoration worker since Katrina and founder of the New Orleans-based grassroots group Familias Unidas en Acción. “They [employers, regulators and the American public] care about a beautiful city and they don’t care about the workers – especially people with my skin tone.”

‘No one warned us’

Nothing prepared Santos for the stench — a mixture of mold, rotten food and dead bodies — that lingered throughout New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward for months after Katrina. As he cleaned the kitchen of a now-demolished elementary school,  the odor permeated his hazmat suit, mask and glasses. It followed him to the dormitory where he slept with hundreds of other workers rebuilding the city. At night, he wondered whether it could seep into his brain. 

One week after arriving in the hurricane-battered city from Dallas, Santos found work at the public school, assigned to cut open industrial-sized refrigerators to dispose of decaying food. The 43-year-old laborer took pride in finishing his putrid shifts without vomiting or fainting — unlike some coworkers. 

At first, Santos was happy to be earning a $12 hourly wage. It was $5 more per hour than his previous job,  and he needed the money to send home to Honduras to support his five children. The fisherman had lost everything after Hurricane Mitch contaminated the river where he fished.

Still, his gratitude turned to dread within months, when his wheezing cough lingered. Soon he needed an inhaler for the first time in his life.

“When a hurricane passes [over], you’re exposed to all that,” said Santos, whose cough often interrupts his speech. “No one warned us about the danger.” 

Thousands of workers like Santos descended on a 70-mile stretch in and around New Orleans, where an estimated 134,000 homes sustained damage. It was ground zero for OSHA, its first and largest response to a climate disaster.

Dean Wingo, OSHA’s deputy incident commander for Katrina in Louisiana and Texas, helped lead that effort. He remembers rolling out the agency’s new emergency-response policy, piloted after the September 11 terrorist attacks: OSHA inspectors would offer guidance to companies that violated health and safety regulations in exchange for immediate fixes, rather than issue citations.

Forty inspectors patrolled the area, searching for worksite hazards. Asbestos and lead have clear mandates that employers must follow to protect workers’ health. For mold, which has no legal standard, inspectors encouraged employers to hand out masks.

Wingo remembers his staff were overwhelmed by the vast and chaotic scene. Inspectors couldn’t keep up with all the companies relying on immigrant labor. As a result, he said, immigrant workers “were exploited quite a bit.” 

Six months after Santos started clearing debris — exposing him to what public officials and researchers called a “toxic gumbo” — he noticed other workers getting sick, too. He remembers them queuing up to shower: “I could hear the orchestra,” he said, describing the coughs and wheezes. “It sounded like chickens or roosters.”  

Kevin Stephens, then New Orleans’ public health director, had his department help test the air and soil for asbestos and lead, among other toxins. “We found everything everywhere,” said Stephens, who launched a public awareness campaign urging people to wear masks and gloves.

OSHA also tested post-Katrina cleanup sites and, in 2006, published a guidance known as the Hurricane eMatrix, meant to help companies prevent post-disaster hazards. The eMatrix warns that American structures built before the 1980s likely contain asbestos, and flags potential lead exposure from pipes, paint and dust. 

Even small doses of asbestos have been shown to cause mesothelioma, a lung cancer. Chronic exposures to lead can cause reproductive issues, kidney problems and seizures, while mold can contribute to pulmonary disease and asthma. 

As laborers slogged through the demolition in New Orleans, health risks from such toxic exposures became evident. Researchers found the cleanup was causing workers’ bouts of sinusitis and inflamed lungs, dubbed “Katrina cough.” One survey of 200-plus workers found that half had reported asbestos and mold present on sites. The workers said they suffered from respiratory conditions and headaches, according to Ted Smukler, the lead researcher.

Smulkler later testified about these results at a 2007 congressional hearing on OSHA’s post-Katrina activities. Policymakers and advocates criticized OSHA for failing to protect immigrant workers. The message was clear: By suspending labor enforcement, agency officials had allowed contractors to operate as if they were unregulated, with dire consequences for workers’ health. 

That year, OSHA began its effort to regulate post-disaster sites. Experts urged the agency to protect the most vulnerable –– the immigrant workers who restore American cities long after the first responders have left. They called for testing of workplace toxins, providing workers training and gear, and monitoring their health. 

“The hearing was an early recognition that a massive workforce, mostly composed of immigrants, was at the center of the rebuilding,” said Saket Soni, of  the restoration-worker organization, Resilience Force,  who testified about labor abuses he’d cataloged on cleanup sites around New Orleans. The hearing left him hopeful that OSHA would create new protections for disaster-restoration workers, he said.

The case for such protections continued to mount. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studied the effects of post-disaster hazards on workers in the U.S., and found there were “significant gaps and deficiencies” in workplace safeguards. A 2009 report concluded that the adverse impact on Latino laborers’ health after Katrina was “likely to be duplicated throughout the country” without rigorous regulatory oversight.

By then, Santos was responding to another climate disaster. He cleared debris from 10 hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas over 13 years — including Sandy, Harvey, Laura, Ida and Ian. With every event, he said, his breathing worsened. On every site, he said, he experienced similar conditions.

His family was worried, Santos said, and “would tell me that I couldn’t finish a phrase or a sentence without coughing.”  

Unwatched, an industry explodes

As workers like Santos hopscotched around the country cleaning up after climate calamities, the industry has burgeoned. Today, its largest trade group, the Restoration Industry Association, estimates that 15,000 companies comprise the $150 billion sector. Many of these contractors bring in just $3 million annually, the RIA says. That pales in comparison to billion-dollar industry giants like Belfor and Servpro Industries — and suggests that most restoration work occurs on a small scale. 

Six industry insiders from mid-sized companies say the explosion of this work — and its increasing stream of public and private dollars — have lured traditional construction contractors who view it as recession-proof. Some companies — dubbed “storm chasers,” “charlatans” and “cowboys” — are ill-prepared to do the job, the insiders say. 

Any construction company can get into the disaster-restoration business, which has no special certifications.

While OSHA intended its Hurricane eMatrix to be a tool for companies, its data show that few make use of the information. OSHA estimates the English-only online guide has received thousands of unique page views over a two-year period — including from its own employees. Only one of the 30 companies interviewed for this story said it had heard of the resource. 

Agency regulations require construction companies to train employees on how to properly handle lead- and asbestos-laden materials before coming into contact with them. Employers must provide suitable protective gear and monitor worker health.

Resilience Force’s Soni said he often sees contractors boost profits by eliminating worker health and safety measures. While organizing immigrants in the field, he and his team have documented companies skipping safety meetings and requiring their workers to buy their own protective gear. 

Most immigrants surveyed by CJI and Public Integrity said their employers didn’t provide protective equipment, and never offered training on toxins.

Tens of thousands of immigrants have been recruited into restoration work by companies just like this, according to Resilience Force. They show up at day-laborer corners and join WhatsApp groups. Some are pulled in by friends and family.

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At 35, Joel has become a restoration veteran. Over the past five years, he’s cleared destruction left behind by 18 hurricanes, floods and wildfires in four states. Recruited by friends from his native Venezuela, Joel said he didn’t receive training until his third event. The hour-long session didn’t prepare him for the asbestos, lead and mold that he would encounter, he said. It was the first and last time an employer offered him instruction. 

In 2018, when Joel came across a tar-black material mixed in the Hurricane Florence debris, an older laborer identified the poisonous material as asbestos, and warned it could harm his health. In 2021, Joel recognized the black asbestos tiles that his coworkers removed from a house devastated by the Marshall Wildfire, in Colorado. 

“I immediately told everyone, ‘Guys, don’t touch that. Everyone get out,’” he said, explaining that no one was trained in asbestos abatement. Joel, who wasn’t wearing protective gear, feared speaking up would be risky. He decided to tell his manager, a Servpro contractor, who threatened to get him deported for disrupting the workflow, he said.

Servpro Industries declined to comment, saying that as a franchisor it “does not provide, contract or subcontract any direct services,” and thus is not responsible.

“We’re kind of disposable,” Joel said. “We’re used to rebuild cities after disasters, but when we’re not needed, we’re simply discarded.”

Failing to learn from the past

Under OSHA’s emergency-response policy, inspectors are supposed to work with employers to address hazards before workers suffer ill effects. That’s faster than the agency citing an employer for violating regulations, officials say, an enforcement action that can take months to resolve. 

But that’s assuming an agency inspector can visit the worksite in time to catch infractions. An OSHA spokesperson said the agency typically deploys two dozen inspectors after major hurricanes, less for smaller storms. And only five companies told CJI and Public Integrity that they had interacted with an OSHA inspector on a cleanup site. 

An internal agency memo dated September 2014 concedes that this policy of voluntary compliance has staffing issues and other shortcomings, but ultimately defends it. The memo presents enforcement as a prolonged, bureaucratic process that could slow down recovery. 

“We’re trying to do the best that we can to ensure that information gets out and that worker safety and health is raised,” said Young Wheeler, who heads OSHA’s emergency-management division. 

Records obtained by CJI and Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request portray OSHA’s post-disaster activities as superficial at best. During the agency’s Ian response, inspectors often reported spending just 15 minutes at worksites. According to inspection reports, they spoke with workers mostly while driving by, and made note of visible hazards — the lack of roofing harnesses, for instance, or the improper use of ladders. 

Inspectors noted that four out of every 100 post-Ian workers had some type of respirator, such as an N95 mask, the records show. 

CJI and Public Integrity obtained two internal databases meant to track OSHA’s company interventions during climate disasters. The records are incomplete: The data didn’t include any floods or wildfires; nor did it include at least four major hurricanes during which the agency had carried out its compliance assistance policy. Instead, the data catalogs OSHA interventions following five hurricanes since 2017 — from Harvey to Ida and Ian. The agency’s sporadic record-keeping suggests that workplace issues can go unchecked from one calamity to the next.

In the wake of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, for instance, Thompson Consulting Services, a Florida-based disaster debris monitoring company, came onto OSHA’s radar. Records show a Thompson worker in Lumberton, North Carolina, filed identical complaints with the North Carolina Department of Labor against the company concerning three of its demolition worksites. According to the complaints, Thompson failed to consistently enforce the use of safety equipment it provided to its employees at the worksites. Without steel-toed boots, some workers wore tennis shoes and Ugg boots, according to the complaints. This series of complaints was  logged in OSHA’s central information systems database. 

OSHA inspectors visited all three worksites, but only found workers on one of them. Two complaints were closed. It’s unclear the status of the third inspection. 

Thompson has continued to hire workers to monitor debris on post-disaster cleanup sites. The company has more than a dozen contracts with municipalities in four states, including a $10.4 million deal for monitoring Ian debris in Lee County, records show.  

Workers have reported similar concerns about Thompson in Florida. 

Michelle, a 48-year-old immigrant from Venezuela, worked for Thompson Consulting in the aftermath of Ian. Hired at a job fair in October 2022, she said she didn’t know much about the company. Ian destroyed her mobile home three weeks earlier — killing her dog, Chico. Thompson offered her $15 an hour to oversee the removal of debris from sunrise until sunset, plus an additional $2 a day for gas. She started almost immediately –– without the minimum two-hour training required for her post, she said, as outlined in the company’s Lee County contract. 

For weeks, Michelle watched a truck carrying rubble out of Saint James City, an island off the Southwest Florida Coast, and transporting it to the weighing station. Every night before she slept inside her Toyota Sienna van, she had to scrub off the dust caked on her body.

“My respiratory system felt as if … I was breathing fire,”  she said, adding that within two weeks her ears felt so clogged that she temporarily lost her hearing. A Red Cross clinician told her that she had a respiratory infection and needed antibiotics. When she notified her manager at Thompson, she was told to wear a mask, she said, but the company refused to provide her one. She quit soon afterwards. 

Thompson Consulting Services did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails seeking comment. 

OSHA records show inspectors visited Thompson worksites across Lee County on seven occasions from mid-October to mid-December 2022. On the last visit, an inspector noted that the company’s site supervisor and another employee declined OSHA safety hand-outs. The pair weren’t “receptive of education,” the inspector’s report states.

In its statement, OSHA said it is overhauling its data collection around post-disaster interventions to allow for “more timely, consistent and accurate entry of information.”

Referring to the company, Michelle said, mostly in English, “When I got sick, they don’t care. They don’t show care.”

‘We want to protect each other’

Just before sunrise on a foggy morning in November, six weeks after Hurricane Ian had hit Fort Myers, restoration workers filled a parking lot on the city’s north end, waiting to be hired. Marcos had woken at 4:30 a.m. that day, fought back his symptoms and trekked here to join dozens of immigrants. Many slept in cars or tents behind a dollar store. Most were dressed in baseball caps, long-sleeve shirts, jeans and tennis shoes. Few could afford masks and gloves. 

“All of us Hispanics who have worked hard [in this industry], we feel it in our own flesh. We all have suffered,” said Marcos, describing the coughs, hives and reddened eyes he’d experienced after demolishing hurricane-impacted buildings. 

Local parcel data shows that more than a third of the structures damaged by Ian were built before the 1980s, when asbestos and lead were common in building materials.

No government body maintains a system for cataloging companies on the ground in Lee County, post-Ian. But Sanibel Island, an affluent community of 6,800 residents located on a 16-mile stretch of land off the county’s west coast, has tallied up a log: After officials there blocked the road connecting Sanibel to Florida’s mainland during the recovery, they handed out 2,284 “hurricane passes” to construction companies hailing from Florida, Texas, Alabama and beyond. Only 154 companies were local.

That’s a scale the architect of OSHA’s emergency-response policy never envisioned. As OSHA’s assistant secretary during the 9/11 cleanup, John Henshaw, now a Sanibel Island city councilor, agreed to lift the agency’s enforcement activities for the four contractors sifting through the pile of wreckage –– an act that gave birth to the current policy. He helped formalize the voluntary compliance approach for future disasters in 2003, as part of the agency’s emergency-response plan. 

As he sat in his Sanibel office last March, when heavy construction equipment still cleared debris on the adjacent lots, the 75-year-old Henshaw said he now believes it’s infeasible for OSHA inspectors to oversee so many contractors rebuilding devastated communities.

“For a natural disaster, the only way I think it can work is that there is some degree of enforcement,” said Henshaw, surrounded by 9/11 memorabilia, including former-President George W. Bush’s hard hat. But that means OSHA inspectors would have to surveil cleanup sites at all times, he said. “They just don’t have the resources to do it.”

OSHA acknowledged its limited staff and resources in its statement, adding, “We do everything we can to protect the safety and health of all workers during emergency response and recovery operations.” 

Meanwhile labor advocates have tried to fill this gap. Over the past two decades, worker groups have received about $3.1 million in OSHA funds to provide safety and health training for immigrant restoration workers. 

Last December, one grantee, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, worked with OSHA inspectors on Spanish-language outreach, post-Ian. NDLON staff say they donated gear to roughly 200 Spanish-speaking workers at cleanup sites across Lee County.

Members of Resilience Force, the restoration-worker rights organization, have shown up at the county’s day-laborer corners nearly every month since Ian, enrolling workers in OSHA safety and health training sessions, and connecting them with other services.  

Some 770 miles west, in New Orleans, the Familias Unidas en Acción can be found doing similar advocacy work. One sunny morning last spring, one of the group’s community health workers handed out free NIOSH-approved masks and leaflets on workplace toxins and to day laborers waiting in a local Lowe’s parking lot. 

“How many times have [workers] been exposed to mold, to asbestos, and how many times have the contractors given them protection?” the volunteer community health worker, Miriam Romero, asked in Spanish. “This is not the time to be silent.” 

But the advocates’ reach has limits as restoration workers are called to respond to more frequent and more intense hurricanes, floods and wildfires nationwide. For many, policy solutions can’t come soon enough. 

When OSHA began drafting its proposed disaster-response regulation in 2007, Joseph “Chip” Hughes Jr. was among those who urged the agency to include immigrant restoration workers. Hughes, who led the worker-training program for the National Institutes of Health for three decades, had hoped the regulation would eliminate OSHA’s voluntary compliance approach to climate events, and apply workplace health and safety protections across an entire cleanup site. 

Today, the rule is still pending. As proposed, it would focus on first responders, not immigrant restoration workers. 

“We had this dream that people would be prepared for the [next] climate disaster,” said Hughes. “But I don’t think that’s the nature of the OSHA emergency-response standard.” 

While OSHA’s Bill Hamilton, who oversees the rulemaking process, said that the new rule would not include restoration workers, OSHA touted its commitment to equity in its statement: “We are embedding equity in everything we do, including in emergency response work.”

Some lawmakers are looking beyond the agency for solutions. U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, has proposed federal legislation that would create a temporary immigrant status for these workers. Immigrant laborers would receive training on toxins, among other benefits. Jayapal’s office describes the bill as “a gold standard” for creating an equitable climate-restoration workforce.

But for now, climate disasters are continuing to fuel the restoration industry’s growth –– and its growing population of ailing workers. Many, like Santos, are left to worry about whether their short-term symptoms will turn into more serious diseases.

He still feels the impact of his 17 years in the industry. Once a dominating force on the soccer field, Santos, now 60, has asthma, and struggles to play with his 13-year-old son for more than five minutes. His nightly ritual includes dabbing VapoRub under his nose to soothe his cough. Recently, he temporarily lost his eyesight after dust from a hurricane-related demolition clouded his vision.

Santos and other veterans see themselves as the elders of this workforce, compelled to pass down their knowledge and training to newer arrivals.

“I warn others about the consequences from this work,” Santos said. “We only have one life.”

José Luis Castillo, of LaEsquinaTX.com, a digital platform in Spanish based in Houston, collaborated on this story.

Janelle Retka, Samantha McCabe and Jiahui Huang reported this story as fellows at Columbia Journalism Investigations, the investigative-reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. María Inés Zamudio is an investigative reporter for the Center for Public Integrity based in Chicago. CJI and Public Integrity provided reporting, editing, fact checking and other support.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A warming planet is creating a booming, and dangerous, disaster-restoration industry on Sep 30, 2023.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died on Thursday evening at the age of 90, leaves behind a long and complex legacy on climate and environmental issues. Feinstein represented California as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate for more than 30 years, becoming the longest-serving woman in Senate history, and during that time she brokered a number of significant deals to protect and restore the natural landscapes of the West. In recent years, as politics shifted, she found herself on the receiving end of criticism over her approach to tackling the climate crisis.

After taking office in 1992 following a decade as the mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein established herself as a champion for conservation. She worked to pass legislation that would protect millions of acres of California wilderness from development and extractive industry, using her deft skills as a negotiator to bridge disputes between competing interests. She succeeded in that conservation effort where her predecessors had failed, spearheading a 1994 bill that created the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks, which encompass millions of acres. She later passed bills to protect Lake Tahoe, the California redwoods, and the Mojave Desert.

Feinstein also supported action to reduce carbon emissions for much of her Senate career, and she was a key backer of a cap-and-trade bill that failed to pass the Senate during the first years of the Obama administration. She also authored successful legislation on automobile fuel economy standards, and pushed forward new regulatory standards for oil and gas pipelines following a 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people.

Even so, as a compromise-oriented legislator from California, she often had to weigh the competing interests of farmers, ranchers, and environmentalists, and at times she angered all of them. This tendency toward centrism was evident in her legislative work on water in the state’s Central Valley. She brokered a monumental restoration agreement on the valley’s overstressed San Joaquin River in 2009, but then helped override species protections for fish on that same river in 2016.

“That is wrong, it is shocking,” her colleague Senator Barbara Boxer said at the time, according to E&E News.

Even so, as the pace of the climate crisis advanced, Feinstein attracted criticism from the left for not supporting more ambitious policies to tackle climate change, and her reputation as a broker of compromise came back to haunt her. In early 2019, a group of activists with the Sunrise Movement confronted Feinstein in the Capitol building, urging her to support progressive calls for Green New Deal legislation.

Feinstein rebuffed the protestors. 

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,” she said in a viral video. “You come in here and say it has to be my way or the highway.” Her office later released a statement on the incident that mistakenly referred to the protestors as part of the “Sunshine Movement.” 

In the following years, following reports that Feinstein was experiencing a loss of her mental faculties, some politicians called for her to step down from the Senate. She resisted those calls and instead said she would retire at the end of her current term, which would have lasted through next year’s election. 

The senator’s death will create even more turmoil in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers tangle over a looming government shutdown. The Senate has moved closer to passing a resolution to fund the federal government over the course of the week, but it’s unlikely to pass the House of Representatives thanks to a revolt from hardline Republicans.

Feinstein cast her final vote on Thursday morning on a procedural item relating to the Federal Aviation Administration, but she didn’t vote on an environmental bill later that afternoon. In the vote she missed, Republican lawmakers managed to override endangered species protections for a variety of prairie chicken. The vote was 47 to 46 in favor of overriding the protections, with the Democrats just one vote short of defeating the effort.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Dianne Feinstein dies, leaving a complicated legacy on climate issues on Sep 29, 2023.

This story was produced through a collaboration between Climate Central, BridgeDetroit, and Grist.

Wilma Price was sleeping in her basement bedroom in 2021 when she woke up to a cacophony of noise, including an alarm coming from her sump pump, a device meant to prevent basement flooding. 

As she sat up in bed she saw her freezer and its contents floating by on several inches of water. The bedroom of her home in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood was quickly flooding with water coming in from the toilet and shower. 

“I thought I was dreaming,” said Price, 69. “It was gushing out of my toilet like a geyser, it was coming out of my shower. … I just couldn’t believe my eyes. It was so terrifying.” 

The alarm she heard was the crying sound of her sump pump failing as approximately four feet of water accumulated, almost entirely engulfing the stairs from her basement and destroying computers, furniture, appliances, and most tragically, photos of her siblings, parents, and husband, all of whom have died. After a few days the water receded, but black mold — a toxic fungus — developed.

As fossil fuel pollution traps heat, flooding is intensifying and disasters are becoming more frequent and more intense. The floods are wreaking financial damages, and they’re exacerbating health hazards as flooded streets and basements foster mold and release pathogens from raw sewage. In Rust Belt cities like Detroit with combined sewer and rainwater systems, untreated sewage can back up into streets and homes when pipes become overwhelmed with stormwater.

Price paid thousands of dollars to eradicate the mold by ripping out the floors, several feet of her walls, and all of her new bathroom fixtures. 

Sometime this spring, Price moved the winter coats she had stored in a closet on the home’s first floor and found black mold crawling up about a foot of the wall. Then she found it in a second room on the opposite side of the house. 

Price wonders where else the mold might be silently growing from that day in 2021.

Extreme rainfall events like Detroit’s historic flood in 2021 are growing more common because of climate change. The floods of years past will likely be dwarfed by the deluges of the future, powered by a warmer atmosphere that’s able to hold more moisture, climate scientists say. 

“It doesn’t take much imagination to think about how serious this problem is, especially for children born in Detroit and living in those environments,” said Peter Larson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan and one of the lead authors on a 2021 study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, that found more than half of almost 4,000 Detroit homes surveyed had experienced recurrent flooding between 2012 and 2020.

“They face lifelong problems from asthma,” Larson said.

Among the Detroit homes included in the study, 84 percent that had flooded in the past were found to have mold in the basement. An additional 55.4 percent of homes that had not flooded during those years still had moldy basements — underscoring the fact that more frequent, climate-induced rainfall can pose problems even for homes that haven’t flooded, because with more rain comes more moisture.

Detroit received more than 25,000 calls on June 25, 2021, when six to eight inches of rain washed across the city over two days, leading to disaster declarations in four Detroit-area counties and 67,000 damage claims with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. About 24,000 damage claims were also filed with the regional water authority in Metro Detroit, all of which were denied because water officials deemed widespread basement flooding to be inevitable. Several pump stations that move water out of the east side of Detroit failed that day due to electrical issues. Still, authorities said there was just too much rain for the system to handle.

Following the flood, President Joe Biden declared an emergency for the state of Michigan, opening up more federal funding for flood victims. Before that, in 2014, four to six inches of rain left Detroit with $1.8 billion in direct flood damages, according to the National Weather Service. Then again in 2016, 2019, and 2020, major rainfall caused severe flooding in Detroit.  

“The last flood was the worst of them all. It was devastating,” said LeJuan Council, a Detroit resident whose home has flooded. Council lives in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood, which has experienced some of the worst effects of Detroit flooding because of its low elevation, its proximity to the Detroit River, and the way the sewer system is designed. “We are all very clearly in a depressing situation around this time of year — you should typically be able to enjoy the sun, but summer rain is becoming violent for us.”

This has profoundly concerning health implications for Detroit residents.

“What you have is a situation where residents are facing just an enormous amount of potential challenges because of this,” said Lyke Thompson, director of Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies and a mold researcher. “A number of older and younger adults in that neighborhood already have asthma, and we have found from a larger study … an association between flooding and asthma occurrence in Detroit.

“The mold was the major thing that was still there months after [the 2021 flood]. And we still are going into homes and finding mold in that neighborhood,” he said.

Other research conducted after extreme weather events, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has shown high mold levels indoors can lead to or exacerbate a host of health problems, including asthma, respiratory infections, bronchitis, allergies, and even neurological damage. A number of studies have shown that mold can even increase the risk of developing asthma for the first time in both children and adults.

This is particularly concerning in Detroit, which has some of the highest asthma rates in the country. Larson and other researchers found a positive association between mold growth and asthma in the thousands of Detroit homes they surveyed: A whopping 74.4 percent of households that had flooded in recent years reported having at least one adult in the home who had been diagnosed with asthma.

“We’re seeing an overburdened set of communities who keep experiencing a lot of the local industry and commercial truck traffic, and you just keep adding these layers on top,” said Natalie Sampson, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan’s College of Education, Health and Human Services, and another author on the 2021 study. “Mold from flooding is just one more contributor that can really spark asthma symptoms, that’s for sure.” 

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A follow-up draft paper from Larson and other researchers that has not yet been published mapped crowdsourced data from a municipal hotline operated by Detroit’s sewer department to visualize and understand where flooding was most pronounced in the city. It found that virtually everyone in Detroit is at risk of flooding due to increasing frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall, proximity to the Detroit River, the city’s low elevation, poor housing conditions, and Detroit’s combined sewer-and-stormwater outflow system that puts people at particular risk for flooded basements.

Although flood risk was found everywhere in Detroit, the draft study — like previous studies before it — found that the highest density of calls made to the city flood hotline in 2021 were clustered near the east side of the city, bordering Grosse Pointe, and on the southwest side of the city near Dearborn.

The city of Detroit at first declined to provide Climate Central, BridgeDetroit, and Grist with data showing the locations of these calls without paying an exorbitant amount (more than $13,000). The city later provided a partially redacted list of these calls for one day from 2021 that excluded full addresses of the homes where the calls originated.

Detroit is filled with old and abandoned homes — and these can be fertile ground for mold to grow after a flood.

Low-income and Black households are also much more likely to call the city due to flooding, according to researchers who’ve studied Detroit. Black families are meanwhile much more likely to live in substandard housing with cracks in the foundation, walls, or basement windows. These issues allow outside moisture to seep in through gaps in the foundation and roof. And having gutters that don’t drain water away from the house properly is a problem, too.

“We were seeing flooding in homes that weren’t near major bodies of water,” said Carina Gronlund, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan and one of the authors in the 2021 study on recurrent household flooding in Detroit. “We also saw in a more northern section of the city a hotspot of flooding, and that is not in a low-lying area of the city or along a major body of water. So this really points to housing conditions as potentially being a major driver of basement flooding in Detroit.”

But Detroit’s combined sewer system is also a major problem for residents, experts say. And it’s unlikely to change.

According to the last cost estimate, about four years ago, from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, or DWSD, it would cost roughly $20 billion to decouple the rainwater and sewage systems — a massive infrastructure project that would involve constructing new pipes and disrupting the water service, and would likely “take decades to complete,” DWSD spokesman Bryan Peckinpaugh said in an email. (To put things in perspective, the entire 2022 state budget was about $76 billion.)

“This is not an option in our view,” Peckinpaugh said. “DWSD is determining opportunities in parts of the city to redirect the stormwater through green stormwater infrastructure projects similar to the work well under way in the Far West neighborhood, as well as collaborate with MDOT [the Michigan Department of Transportation] to capture the freeway rain and snowmelt, and directly discharge it into the Detroit and Rouge rivers. This work will increase the capacity in the combined sewer system to handle wet weather events.”

The city is also working with a variety of agencies on projects to improve the stormwater system, including infrastructure upgrades, installing special valves that are supposed to prevent sewage from backing up in people’s basements in 11 flood-prone neighborhoods, and installing large bioretention basins meant to trap water and stop it from flooding people’s homes.

So far, Detroit has installed 382 backflow valves in flood-prone neighborhoods, completing 60 percent of homes in the first phase, according to DWSD.

DWSD director Gary Brown declined an interview for this story.

Many of these fixes are workarounds to the problem that Detroit is an exceedingly flat city, and the soil is predominantly clay. This leads to pools of water that don’t soak into the ground, says University of Michigan landscape architecture professor Joan Iverson Nassauer.

“When rain falls or snow melts in Detroit, it really doesn’t have anywhere to go because 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, nearly all of what is Detroit today was a glacial lake,” she said.

One Detroit neighborhood in particular has seen some of the worst effects of flooding: Jefferson Chalmers.

The low-lying, east side neighborhood boasts 160 acres of waterfront parks, canals, and plenty of opportunities for anglers and boaters. It was built at the site of a former swamp, next to the river, and the area’s terrain still causes water to pool there. A number of homeowners live directly on the Detroit River canals, which swell when it rains. The area is also on the receiving end of a sewage pipeline connected to northern-suburb water systems — so when there’s major flooding, Jefferson Chalmers residents can find their basements full of combined sewage and stormwater from their northern neighbors.

The results can be devastating for residents — not just for their health, but also financially.

Price estimates that in recent years, flooding has cost her upwards of $100,000, which has been spent on replacing lost items, mold cleanup, and repairs. Though she’s lived in her home on the canal since 1990, she said her house never flooded before 2014. During the 2021 flood, she lost the most. “I cried my eyes out. I could not believe that I had lost so much stuff,” she said. 

After the 2021 flood, she paid $3,200 to Servpro, a local water-damage restoration company, to clean up her basement.

“I thought that they had killed most of the mold,” said Price. But as she recently discovered in her closet, not all of the mold was eradicated. She believes it is contributing to new health issues. Though she hasn’t been diagnosed with asthma, in the last year, Price has developed breathing problems, a small cough, and a constant throat irritation prompting her to always carry throat lozenges.  

“It makes your skin crawl. I have been in homes where it looks like someone has tacked black velvet on the walls,” said Mary Lloyd, a flood consultant for Jefferson East Inc., a Detroit nonprofit that works with low-income residents to help with flood preparedness and repairs after storms. “In a lesser situation it’s speckled, like a splash.”

Lloyd says almost every house that flooded across Detroit in 2014 had mold. In 2016, gray, contaminated water entered Detroit homes again — and mold grew again. Some Detroit homes have had mold three or four times in the last decade, she said. 

“Mold grows in damp, dark places,” she said. “If it isn’t cleaned properly, then it multiplies and grows and consumes the space that it’s in.” 

For the last decade, Lloyd has led groups of volunteers to clean up mold in residents’ homes. Before volunteers are dispatched she sends them a picture of the house in part to prepare them emotionally. Then a team of up to 25 volunteers donning hazmat suits, respirator masks, and gloves get to work remediating the mold. Large sections of the walls may be cut out, the studs removed, or the dry wall taken out. They take frequent breaks and avoid going into other parts of the home. There’s a persistent odor while they work, both from the residual sewage left in the basement and from the mold itself. 

“If I spent too much time in a basement without a mask and without taking breaks, my tongue would swell,” Lloyd said.

After cleanup, volunteers give residents dehumidifiers and indoor air purifiers to help clear the tiny microscopic mold spores that can linger and contribute to bad air quality. With additional funding, they’re also able to move furnaces, water heaters, and electrical systems up from the basements of residents’ homes to protect them from future flooding. 

The nonprofit has recently refocused their home-repair program to address ongoing flooding by making residents’ homes more resilient to climate change-driven disasters. So far, the group has surveyed a few hundred homes, said Joshua Elling, Jefferson East’s executive director. But they have a backlog of 270 residents waiting for repairs in the flood-prone Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood.

Volunteers with Jefferson East aren’t the only ones tackling Detroit’s frequent flooding. Wayne State University is also helping fix up Detroit homes and boost climate resilience. With the help of AmeriCorps, small teams of young people are dispatched to survey homes for flood and mold-damage potential. Once the homes are identified, the teams equip residents with the fixes they need to stave off or better handle flooding, such as planting rain gardens and providing air purifiers. Wayne State researchers are also surveying homes for mold concentrations, data that Jefferson East will use to inform a $1.8 million resilient-homes program.

Lyke Thompson, the Wayne State mold researcher, worked with chemist Judy Westrick to take samples from structures in Jefferson Chalmers for a pilot study. They’re applying for grants in the hopes of conducting more extensive research on the neighborhood’s mold problem.

They surveyed basements in a small cross section of 20 houses and found pervasive mold in all but two of the homes. Corroborating previous research done in Detroit, “We concluded from this study that, yes, flooded basements are more likely to have mold,” Westrick said.

Detroit’s combined sewer-and-wastewater system is aging and in disrepair. Pipes taking in drinking water leak, and pipes taking stormwater away also leak, Nassauer said.

“You have sort of a perfect storm of events that makes Detroit vulnerable to pluvial flooding,” she added.

To address that, Detroit is working on two major projects meant to redirect and trap water in special areas to reduce flooding. That includes a project on the far west side of Detroit for which construction began last year. It’s supposed to remove 100 million gallons of stormwater annually by the time construction is finished in 2027, redirecting rain and snow runoff to two bioretention basins connected to the Rouge River, according to the city.

Other initiatives include the Fenkell stormwater projects meant to use 50 acres of land near the northwest border of Detroit in the Brightmoor neighborhood to reduce street flooding and basement backups, funded by $1.6 million in grants. Construction is slated to begin in 2024.

Nassauer said she thinks it’s possible that green infrastructure projects like this could help the city endure the floods to come without resorting to “the almost unimaginable cost of separating the sewer system.”

Detroit is also working on fixing aging pipes in the stormwater system, according to DWSD’s Peckinpaugh. In 2022, the department cleaned 2,500 stormwater-catch basins and 250 miles of sewers, and the city is “evaluating potential legal actions” to enforce sewage volume limits in place in northern suburbs — another factor behind the severe flooding in Jefferson Chalmers. Community advocates argue that the city has not enforced existing limits, much to the detriment of Detroiters in that neighborhood.

In the meantime, climate scientists say flooding and the health problems associated with it are likely to get worse in the future.

“This intensification of precipitation is occurring much faster than we thought it would,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. 

According to Overpeck, scientists already have witnessed the heaviest storms occur much more frequently than records indicate they did in the early 19th century. And it will likely continue to get worse — “almost for sure [doubling] the impact that we’ve seen already. And that will just completely overwhelm our infrastructure,” Overpeck added. 

It’s that future that engineers should be planning for. But some critics argue that Detroit — and every other major city planning sewer upgrades to handle more climate-induced rainwater — is using outdated data to make those plans.

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A DWSD department’s spokesman did not answer a question about whether Detroit uses future projected rainfall data, or just past rainfall data.

“Precipitation numbers are going up, up, up, up, up. So you really need to design your stormwater system for the 100-year storm 50 years from now,” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Municipalities, states across the country are wasting millions, if not billions of dollars building infrastructure that’s not designed for their future needs,” Moore continued. “It’s wasteful. It’s financially irresponsible. It’s indefensible. We’re building things that are designed to fail, and we gleefully spend a lot of money on it.”

Many Detroit residents share the sentiment that a large part of the cause of the city’s ongoing flooding issues is due to its aging, inadequate water system.

“Their infrastructure needs a lot of work to work, and they need to address that,” said Jefferson Chalmers resident Price, who always planned to leave her house to her son. “It was really a failure on their part,” she said, adding that she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to pass down the house after all, if it keeps flooding. 

Price said she feels abandoned by the very same city she served for decades as a police officer and that her mother served as a nurse for the health department. She said she loves Detroit and does what she can for her neighborhood and community, even in retirement. But she doesn’t feel like the city reciprocates the care. 

“The city dumped on me,” Price said. “They just did a cover-up and they just washed their hands, and they’re moving on.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Detroit has a flood problem. It’s got an even bigger mold problem. on Sep 29, 2023.

It’s been a tough year for residents of Perry County, Kentucky, and the federal government isn’t making it much easier right now. 

Raging flood waters ravaged the mountain county of 28,000 last year, sweeping away homes and killing at least three people. The underfunded local government has been able to recover only with help from Washington, which promised about $3.7 million to repair roads and buy out flooded homeowners.

Last month, after the county had spent $2 million of its own money on recovery efforts, County Executive Scott Alexander received a concerning letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The agency was running low on money, the letter said, and it was pausing the reimbursements it had promised. Not only would the county not be paid back for its road repairs, it also wouldn’t receive money for home buyouts. The projects would be suspended until Congress gave FEMA more cash. That’s left homeowners in limbo, and the county with a fiscal hole that’s equivalent to 10 percent of its annual budget.

“It’s huge, and it’s crippled us right now,” Alexander said. “It really puts a hardship on us, and it will be hard for all smaller communities going forward. We want to do [the buyouts] as quickly as possible for the homeowners so they can get on with rebuilding their lives.” 

Many, many more communities and homeowners face similar situations. Even as the nation veers toward the first government shutdown since late 2018, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in a desperate financial state. Despite repeated requests for more funding, Congress has let the agency’s all-important disaster relief fund empty out, imperiling its ability to respond to devastating floods, fires, and other catastrophes.

As the agency tries to save cash, it has paused $2.8 billion in funding for thousands of disaster recovery projects across the country. A list of interrupted projects reviewed by Grist shows that the hiatus has affected everything from post-hurricane school construction in Florida to road repairs in Colorado, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in reimbursements for pandemic response. 

If the looming government shutdown delays lawmakers’ efforts to pass legislation to fund the government, this suspension could last for weeks, straining the nation’s long-term recovery from Hurricane Idalia, the fires on Maui, summer floods in Vermont, and other recent disasters.

“We’re talking about an agency that is understaffed, that’s dealing with a disaster declaration on average every three days, and now we’re in this dysfunctional state of Congress where they can’t seem to get done the basic job of refilling the Disaster Relief Fund,” said Shana Udvardy, a policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists who studies disaster response. “It’s stressing communities who can’t actually implement these projects that have been in the tunnel for quite some time.”

The pot of money that FEMA uses to fund disaster relief has been running low for months as the agency fights a series of expensive climate disasters and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Deanne Criswell, the agency’s top official, warned lawmakers as early as April that it might have to constrain disaster response efforts if Congress didn’t provide more money. FEMA often has to ask for additional funding during bad years, but lawmakers let the fund run dry this year as they bickered over whether to couple disaster spending with Ukraine aid. 

“We’re seeing politics at its worst,” Udvardy told Grist.

A summer of heavy spending on disasters like the Maui wildfires brought the fund down to around $4 billion in August, leaving FEMA with just 20 percent of the money it had at the start of the year. Criswell on August 29 halted all spending except for “immediate needs,” which included response to new disasters such as the Maui fires and Hurricane Idalia. The agency says it has enough money left to carry it through October, but it’s one big disaster away from hitting zero.

According to the most recent rundown of funding cuts, the areas most impacted as of September 22 are Florida, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico, all of which have dealt with major hurricanes in recent years. FEMA has frozen more than $560 million in funding for Hurricane Ian recovery in Florida and almost $250 million in funding for Puerto Rico’s response to hurricanes Maria and Fiona.

While almost all the paused money supports long-term recovery, around $108 million in grants for climate resilience are also in jeopardy. These subsidies are designed to help communities prepare for future disasters. The suspended projects include a buyout program for flood-prone homes in Kentucky and a $4.7 million water infrastructure project in eastern Puerto Rico. 

Two years ago, the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded a public housing complex owned by the Englewood Housing Authority in Englewood, New Jersey. The inundation destroyed 22 of the building’s 150 apartments and the authority’s headquarters. The agency is now ready to begin repairs, and has cleared the permits necessary to do so, but can’t proceed until FEMA sends the $8 million it promised. 

“Unfortunately, due to all the natural disasters throughout the U.S., FEMA needs to wait … to fund the rebuild,” said Samuel Lee, the commissioner of the housing authority. He said construction “will hopefully occur later this year.”

For some local governments without deep financial reserves, the funding pause has prompted a cash crisis. Municipal leaders in Garnett, Kansas, spent $3 million over the past year fixing an aging reservoir spillway, bolstering the town’s protection against heavy rains. The city expected to FEMA to cover the bill, but the money hasn’t arrived.

“ The funding pause has caused some headaches here,” City Manager Travis Wilson told Grist. “We have yet to see a reimbursement, my reserve is depleted, and I’m having to borrow from other utility reserves to continue to pay for the project. It truly is a domino effect.” A prior storm in 2019 caused significant damage to the reservoir spillway, and Wilson is worried about future flooding if the repairs don’t happen soon.

The Washington Post reported an earlier version of the list, which was accurate as of September 15. In a statement to Grist, FEMA said it  could continue to provide emergency disaster aid and support victims of recent disasters. The agency also called on Congress to refill the relief fund.

The prospect of a government shutdown is bad enough for FEMA on its own. Craig Fugate, a former agency administrator under President Obama, told the Washington Post this week that shutdowns can hamper the agency’s coordination efforts and the government’s two-week closure in 2013 left him with a “skeleton crew.” The agency can still deploy emergency responders to floods and fires under such circumstances, for example, but its command center in Washington, DC shuts down, making nationwide communication and coordination almost impossible.

It will take a big infusion of money for FEMA to resume normal operations. According to the agency’s most recent report, it expects to end this month with just $556 million in the bank, down from $4 billion last month. The most recent stopgap funding bill under consideration in the Senate would give the agency only $6 billion in direct funding, which would likely only last for a few months.

In a statement on Thursday, the White House excoriated House Republicans for what it called financial brinkmanship, highlighting the delays that resulted from FEMA’s funding shortfall.

“Extreme House Republicans are playing partisan games with peoples’ lives,” the statement said, “including delaying long-term disaster recovery and undermining preparedness in communities across the country.”

Those partisan games have Michael Heinen, the CEO of the Jeff Davis Electrical Cooperative, pondering his next move. The co-op is erecting wind-resistant power lines to replace those that collapsed during hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020, leaving customers to rely on generators. The work was possible only because the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided more than $30 million in grants to support the state’s hurricane recovery.

He already knew that money would be a little late in arriving; FEMA told him that weeks ago, saying it was pausing payments even though he’d already hired contractors, secured permits for the project and had enough money to start construction. With FEMA subsequently freezing funding, he isn’t sure what to do.

“It’s a concern, it’s one of those things that keep you up at night,” said Heinen. “It affects the timeline on trying to get that done, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s going to be temporary.” 

Even so, he was caught off guard by the funding freeze — he hadn’t even heard which projects FEMA is suspending until Grist told him on Thursday.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Disaster recovery projects stall nationwide as FEMA runs out of money on Sep 29, 2023.

The insurance industry is in a state of flux because of climate change. This year has seen a record-breaking number of costly disasters in the United States, and insurance companies are on the hook for much of that property damage. But even as insurers pull out of disaster-prone areas, deeming them too risky to insure, they are continuing to cover one of the most polluting industries: coal. 

A new report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy organization, and Insure Our Future, a global coalition aimed at holding the insurance industry accountable for its role in climate change, details the extent to which global insurers are propping up U.S. coal mining companies. In 2022, five insurers — AIG, Liberty Mutual, Lloyd’s of London, Swiss Re, and Zurich — provided policies covering 41 percent of U.S. coal production, even though most of these insurers have made climate commitments. These companies’ policies enable coal mines to continue operating despite their destructive impact on the climate. 

The report found that many of the companies still insuring coal mines have publicly promised to stop underwriting coal projects, or made net-zero pledges, in response to pressure from investors and activists. The report details how companies use loopholes like covering mining subsidiaries instead of parent companies, in addition to blatantly breaking their own rules, to continue to insure coal production. Mary Sweeters, a co-author of the report and an organizer with Insure Our Future, said the findings show that commitments alone are not enough to prevent warming. 

“Climate commitments are only as strong as the details in their policies,” Sweeters told Grist. “This shows that these policies are weak and are not aligned with a 1.5 degrees [Celsius] pathway.” 

A recent report from the International Energy Agency found that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, which would prevent the worst impacts of climate change, is still possible if countries accelerate their deployment of renewables. 

Carly Fabian, an insurance policy advocate at Public Citizen who contributed research to the coal report, pointed out that the insurance industry plays a crucial role in determining the fate of fossil fuel projects. 

“Fossil fuel projects can’t operate without insurance,” because insurance is typically needed to secure financing, she explained. “Insurance companies are sort of gatekeepers — they provide a lifeline to the fuel industry.” And if they stop providing coverage, it becomes that much harder for coal mines to continue operating.

In some ways, insurance companies’ climate commitments are working. Even as they continue to insure mines, insurers’ restrictions on underwriting coal power generation “has generally rendered new coal plants almost uninsurable at this point,” said Sweeters. 

Meanwhile, many of the same insurers still covering coal mines have stopped issuing policies to homeowners who are at risk of fires, hurricanes, and other disasters exacerbated by coal emissions. For instance, AIG, which underwrites 28 percent of U.S. coal production, stopped insuring homeowners in California last year. According to Fabian, this means that insurers are contributing to climate change while shifting the consequences onto individuals. 

“The insurance industry has so far been saying, ‘We’re gonna offload these costs and risks onto the public, consumers and taxpayers,’” she said. “‘They’re gonna pay through higher insurance premiums, deductibles, reduced coverage, and we’re gonna walk away from the homeowners.’” 

The report calls on insurance companies to stop underwriting coal mining and to strengthen their climate commitments. Sweeters also noted increased regulation could help, by requiring the insurance industry to disclose ties to the fossil fuel industry. But since insurance is regulated on the state level, it would have to happen in a piecemeal fashion.  

“Regulators need to step up and recognize the role that insurance companies are playing in continuing to enable the expansion of fossil fuels and driving climate change,” said Sweeters. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Despite climate promises, insurance companies are still covering coal on Sep 28, 2023.

Four years ago, the United Kingdom became the world’s first major economy to legally commit to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The unprecedented move came even as the country had already reduced emissions by 42 percent from 1990 levels — mainly by slashing its dependency on coal and oil for electricity generation. It cemented the U.K.’s role as a global climate leader, but that position is now showing cracks.

Last week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced an about-face on some of the country’s core decarbonization initiatives, citing the need to relieve costly burdens on working-class households.

“We seem to have defaulted to an approach which will impose unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families, costs that no one was ever really told about and that may not actually be necessary to deliver the emission reduction that we need,” Sunak said in a live address hastily arranged after the BBC broke news of the planned policy shifts. 

Sunak said he would push back a deadline on banning the sale of new internal combustion cars, and another prohibiting new fossil-fuel boilers for home heating. He also scrapped proposals that would have strengthened home insulation requirements. 

The prime minister, who was elected last year after the chaotic resignation of Liz Truss, insisted Britain could still reach its net-zero goals, and that the new approach would simply shift the burden away from families that could not afford to shoulder it. 

But critics saw the announcement as a thinly veiled populist appeal to a minority segment of the population, ahead of a general election next year in which Sunak’s Conservative Party trails the Labour Party by nearly 20 points in polls. They say the moves will derail the U.K.’s race to zero emissions, and along the way, could penalize the very people Sunak said his rollbacks would safeguard. 

“This feels to me like the beginning of the end of British exceptionalism in climate policy,” Dustin Benton, policy director of the British independent think tank Green Alliance, told Grist.

As part of its 2050 commitment, the U.K. set a target of reducing emissions 68 percent by 2030. Before Sunak announced his changes, the Green Alliance calculated that the country was on track to fall short of that goal by about 13 percent. Now it estimates the deficit will increase to 21 percent. “This is a substantial change,” said Benton.

The biggest losses would come from the changes to electric vehicle policy, Benton said. Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Britain, yet Sunak pushed back a ban on the sale of new internal combustion cars from 2030 to 2035, citing the high upfront costs for EVs, insufficient charging infrastructure, and a nascent manufacturing industry. 

Emissions cuts will also be hampered by Sunak’s easing of restrictions on gas boilers in homes. Heating and cooking account for about one-fifth of UK emissions. The country was slowly transitioning to heat pumps, which have been shown to be three to five times more efficient than gas boilers, but which Sunak said are too expensive for families already under pressure from rising inflation. 

A ban on new fossil-fuel boilers for homes, mostly in rural areas, that are not connected to the gas grid would have taken effect in 2026, but Sunak pushed it back to 2035, when a nationwide ban kicks in. He also created an exemption for homes deemed “unsuitable” for heat pumps, even though a government-funded study found there was no such housing type. The Green Alliance predicts the changes will delay the move to zero-emission heat systems for about 2.5 million homes. 

Another way to reduce emissions is to make homes more energy efficient. New insulation standards would have required landlords to meet minimum energy efficiency standards by 2025 to rent their properties, but Sunak said he was scrapping them. “While I will continue to subsidize energy efficiency, we will never force any household to do it.” 

These decisions don’t just undermine the U.K.’s ability to meet its emissions goals, they also could cost more for the households they purport to protect, said Esin Serin, a policy fellow at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.  

“So many of the decisions were justified by an ambition to remove unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families,” Serin told Grist, “but what that fails to recognize is by keeping the households that will find it most difficult to make these changes exempt from making them, you’re actually elongating their dependence on fossil-fuel based technology, whether that’s a gas boiler or a petrol car, and that makes them vulnerable to future price shocks.” 

Unpredictable energy bills were already straining British households. Gas prices across Europe began skyrocketing in 2021 due to increasing post-pandemic demand and plunging supply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the summer of 2022, natural gas prices in the U.K. were almost 100 percent higher than a year prior, and electricity costs were 50 percent higher. 

An analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, or ECIU, found that Sunak’s changes could cost British households $9.7 billion (£8 billion) in higher bills, and more if gas prices spike again. A quarter of renters (who would have benefited from the insulation requirements) already live in fuel poverty, the ECIU found. The Green Alliance estimates delaying the EV transition will cost drivers $12.1 billion in fuel and maintenance costs. 

Serin said to alleviate such burdens, the government should accelerate households’ access to green technologies. “It’s not a case to remove the targets for these households, it’s a case to better target support so these households can afford the upfront costs of making these switches.” 

Some of that support exists: This month, the government announced $1.4 billion in grant assistance through the Great British Insulation Scheme to help households make efficiency upgrades. And Sunak coupled his rollback on boiler restrictions with a 50 percent increase in the government subsidy for heat pumps, which is now up to $9,100.  

The rollbacks announced last week also will be checked by other government policies that remain in place. A mandate requires that zero-emission vehicles comprise at least 80 percent of each automaker’s production by 2030. Similar controls exist for sellers of gas boilers. 

While the quantitative impacts remain to be seen, Sunak’s speech signals a willingness to turn the green transition into fodder for the culture wars, similar to the squabbles in the United States over gas stoves and electric vehicles. 

The prime minister repeated assurances that the government would “never force someone to rip out their gas boiler,” which was never part of any policy, and said he was scrapping proposals to tax meat and travel and force people to sort their recycling into seven bins — ideas that were not being seriously considered.

Benton of the Green Alliance said that while these tactics are common in the United States, Britain had enjoyed a long period in which climate change was a relatively nonpartisan issue. (Former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Brexit champion, was even the one to establish the EV and boiler initiatives Sunak is now unwinding.) “There was a pretty robust consensus for climate action,” he said. “Clearly Sunak has decided that adopting a populist message on climate is a route to political success, and down that way are a lot of dangers.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The climate culture wars reach British shores on Sep 28, 2023.

The rig operator was stumped. He’d been making good progress, but now something blocked the way forward. The operator, Denny Mong, stared at an unassuming metal tube in the ground — the fossil of an oil well. Spread around it was an array of industrial detritus and steel tools like giant surgical implements, which sunk into the spongy Western Pennsylvania meadow.

Above the hole, Mong’s rig, which towered 50 feet into the air, suspended a vertical ramrod. When it dropped, the ramrod only shot 17 feet into the ground before slamming to a stop. Earlier, Mong had managed to reach more than 500 feet deeper into the well. Then this obstruction, whatever it was, sent him back to the start.

Clearing it — prime suspects included metal casing, rocks, or a tree branch — would allow him to send cement and pea gravel into the hole, which reached hundreds of feet into Appalachian rock formations. Once an active oil well, now it was an environmental nuisance and the target of an ambitious federal cleanup program.

The well needed to be decommissioned, along with at least 21 more spread across woodlands and fields in McKean County, Pennsylvania. The job fell to Mong and other employees of an oil service outfit called Plants & Goodwin, which specializes in plugging so-called orphan wells. Oil and gas companies are supposed to plug and clean up wells that they’ve drilled, but if they go bankrupt or otherwise disappear, that responsibility falls to the state, which then contracts with companies like Plants & Goodwin. If left festering, these wells can leak contaminants into surrounding groundwater or release methane, a greenhouse gas at least 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Uncorking a well in this part of Appalachia reveals a blend of oil and gas that has a nauseous maté color and gurgles like witch’s brew. After generations of drilling, the remnants of both vernacular backyard digs and professional oil operations pockmark the land. Since drillers operated for more than a century with little regulatory oversight, documentation of well locations is scarce and cleanup quality is inconsistent. 

“Until the 1970s there were no strong plugging standards in place,” said Luke Plants, who heads Plants & Goodwin. “People just shoving tree stumps down a well to plug it, or a cast iron ball or something like that.”

The exact number of orphan wells nationwide is unknown. In late 2021, The Interstate Oil and Gas Commission, a multi-state organization, had more than 130,000 orphan wells on record but estimated that anywhere between 310,000 and 800,000 remained unidentified. That year the federal government took notice, folding $4.7 billion into the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help states handle their orphan well inventories. The first batch of that money has trickled down to states and has been distributed to contractors like Plants & Goodwin. It’s easily the most funding ever spent to address the problem, but both states and pluggers are now facing hurdles as they begin to identify and plug wells. 

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The state oil and gas regulators responsible for issuing well-plugging contracts are typically understaffed. As a result, the pace of contract assignment in some states has been inconsistent, making it difficult for plugging companies to staff up and plan ahead. Well pluggers are also few and far between. Since oil operators tend to avoid the costly work of well capping, the service has remained a niche industry. Plugging companies have also struggled to find trained workers, not to mention the specialized equipment required to plug wells. Along the way, some states have handed out millions of dollars in contracts to a subsidiary of an oil company with hundreds of compliance violations.

All the while, the oil and gas industry continues to spawn new orphan wells — magnitudes more than the number being plugged. Between 2015 and 2022, more than 600 oil and gas companies filed for bankruptcy, leaving thousands of wells unplugged. Market downturns affecting oil prices during the mid-2010s pushed many operations to insolvency. And even in times of industry booms, wells near the end of their production lifespans often end up in the hands of small oil patch operators with tight margins. Further, state laws requiring companies to post collateral for their wells in case of bankruptcy are meager. This combination of weak rules and bankruptcies has caused orphan well inventories to balloon. For example, Pennsylvania’s list of 20,000 orphan wells grows by about 400 each year; the state has plugged just 73 wells with the federal money that began to arrive last year.

In the muddy pasture in northwest Pennsylvania, Mong was trying to unclog his way to the well’s bottom. Using a rig attachment called a cherry picker — imagine a four-foot steel clothespin — he worked to spear unknown detritus from the depths. Next to the hole lay 30-foot-long clay-frosted tubes of steel casing already hauled out. After reducing the borehole to a hollow dirt cavern, the pluggers will pour cement until it nearly fills to the surface and top the rest of the way with gravel, insulated by steel casing to protect groundwater. They will then decapitate the casing to a few feet below ground and cover it with dirt. 

For the pluggers, the work is a bespoke combination: a little science and a lot of art. Sharp intuition, engineering know-how, grit, and luck imbue each effort. One capping can take anywhere from three days to three months, sometimes costing more than $100,000.

A lot needs to happen to orphan wells before they’re plugged — at least on paper. The state has to identify them, the threat they pose, the costs to plug them, and search for any elusive owner to pin the costs on. And while that’s a process states have handled for many years, most state plugging programs have relatively small budgets and staff compared to the well inventories. Now, federal funding is compelling those programs to exponentially increase the number of well-capping contracts, an impossible task without bigger staffs and nimbler processes. 

In a normal year, the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), which regulates oil and gas production in the state, might contract plugging for 30 wells. According to former CalGEM employees, decommissioning even that number of wells had the agency running on all cylinders. 

“Available staffing for oversight was definitely a major limiting factor,” said Dan Dudak, who was the Southern District Deputy of CalGEM from 2011 to 2020, and now acts as a consultant on well-plugging projects. In just the last five years, the department “lost a lot of their institutional knowledge” in three different leadership changes, he said. Nonetheless, CalGEM revealed an $80 million project last July to cap 378 wells with funding from state and federal money along with industry fees.

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Other states also have catching up to do. One 2022 Ohio state audit observed that its Department of Natural Resources struggles to meet orphan well program spending targets, in part due to staffing shortages. “[T]he Division can only increase efforts dedicated to well plugging preparation work as fast as it can recruit, train, and hire permanent employees,” the audit claimed, recommending that the agency double its staff to post plugging contracts in a more timely fashion and consider outsourcing the task of drafting contracts.  

Pennsylvania has 70 well inspectors and a tally of around 20,000 orphan wells. According to Neil Shader, spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, the agency is considering hiring more inspectors to increase its oversight. Earlier this year, the state legislature approved a $5.75 million budget increase for DEP, some of which may boost its well plugging contract capacity.

Still, the pace of contract creation in Pennsylvania has put pluggers in a precarious place. Plants said that when Pennsylvania received $25 million in its first batch of federal funding, he staffed up. A torrent of contracts were awarded but then stopped — leading from feast to famine. A six-month gap meant furloughs and mothballing equipment. “It costs contractors a tremendous amount of money to do all that,” he said. “You end up creating an incentive to not scale at all, just stay small.”

To expedite aspects of the contract-drafting process, DEP has signaled that it may outsource some of that work. Meanwhile, Ohio is putting some of its federal money into an expedited process called the Landowner Passover Program, where approved landowners who find orphan wells on their land may act as a surrogate for the state, awarding a contract to a plugger that Ohio will pay for. 

Ohio has 44 contractors on its rolls and utilizes a pre-approval process for its pluggers to maintain quality control. Pennsylvania’s DEP is considering adopting its own vetting process, according to Shader, the agency spokesperson. Without it, there is no central parapet to separate under-qualified contractors from federally funded plugging. “There are not enough defined rules in place,” said Plants. “And even the rules that are there don’t get followed so well all the time.” 

Not much stands in the way of a corner-cutting contractor. In remote pockets of Appalachia, improperly dumping chemical fluids from a site or shoddy plug job could go unnoticed. “I think it’s even less likely to get checked now,” Plants said. “Because nobody wants to limit the pool of potential well pluggers. We need to get more pluggers involved — whether that plugging is being done correctly or not.”

Last year, Pennsylvania Deputy Secretary Kurt Klapkowski of the DEP’s Office of Oil and Gas Management addressed that anxiety by announcing that parties with significant outstanding violations, such as contractors with a poor service record or operators with environmental infractions, wouldn’t receive state contracts. “I feel pretty confident that we would not be issuing contracts to operators that had significant outstanding violations — either on the contracting side of things or on the environmental protection side,” he said.

For a plugger, non-compliance could mean illegal dumping or improperly sealing a well; for an operator, it might mean abandoning a well without plugging it. But such policies can be difficult to implement when oil and gas companies sometimes operate through a bevy of subsidiaries in multiple states. 

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In December of last year, the Pennsylvania DEP awarded Next LVL Energy contracts to plug 30 wells in the state. The company is a subsidiary of Diversified Energy, an energy giant that has amassed a massive number of wells at the end of their lives, stoking fears that the company is likely to orphan them. According to one class action lawsuit against Diversified in West Virginia, around 10 percent of its 23,309 wells in the state are technically abandoned but unplugged. Just this year Pennsylvania inspectors slapped the operator with around 300 new or unresolved operational violations. (The state DEP didn’t respond to a request for comment on Next LVL’s contracts.)

Ohio has also given half of its first installment of federal money, $12.5 million, to Next LVL Energy to oversee the plugging of as many as 320 wells. To the southeast, West Virginia has given the company a similar sum to plug 100 wells. Spokespeople for both state environmental agencies defended their decisions, noting that they followed state and federal guidelines while selecting pluggers. “We will keep a close eye on implementation,” said Andy Chow, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Should any violations in this contract be discovered or otherwise come to our attention we will review those actions.”

In West Virginia, Next LVL isn’t plugging any wells associated with Diversified, according to Terry Fletcher, chief communications officer with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. “At the time the contracts were awarded, Next LVL had no outstanding environmental violations in the state,” he added.

Finding qualified workers for the oil field is no easy feat, either. The last decade has seen drops in oil prices that rendered many fossil fuel companies insolvent, along with a shift to shale exploration, which requires fewer workers. As a result, job openings have dwindled and many qualified workers have left Appalachia.

Plugging wells also requires skilled labor. Thus, the limited number of qualified workers is in high demand. That’s good for wages, but without a large workforce to fill positions as states push out contracts with increasing frequency, another problem arises: “You just get this arms race for the same small pool of workers,” said Plants. “That’s not actually helpful for scaling or expanding the supply side of this business.” 

Plants has brought inexperienced pluggers from Texas oil fields to help train up a new generation of skilled Pennsylvania hands. “We want to develop a local workforce that understands this work,” he said. But “you can’t just put whole crews of inexperienced people out there.”

There’s a lot of on-the-job training, but that extra work advances his vision. Some of his most recent hires came from area high schools and technical schools, where he has made a pitch: “We want to give you a long-term career.” 

Bronson Knapp, who owns Hagen Well Services in Ohio, has faced similar challenges. “The good old farm boy is hard to find,” he said. A worker shortage is one of the reasons Ohio is behind on well pluggings. The state has awarded new contracts even as work from previous contracts hasn’t been completed. “We awarded 380 wells this year, but our contractors are still 400 wells behind us,” said Jason Simmerman, the orphan well program engineer with the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

Rigs used to plug wells can be hard to come by, too. Drilling technology may advance, but orphan well-plugging is frozen in time. The tech required is often vintage, which means pluggers are on the prowl for a shrinking number of rigs that may be older than the wells they plug. It’s not unusual for a plugger in New York to look as far as Texas for a used rig. Mong’s rig was from the 1950s. Another rig at a nearby work site was manufactured in 1981 and welded to the bed of a Vietnam War-era military truck.

On the whole, a few recent high school graduates on Plants’ payroll might not seem like bellwethers of a next-generation workforce. But some experts watching the federal orphan well program contend that a well-plugging wave could revive regions whose economic fates are tied to dwindling resource extraction sectors. “The most positive thing that could happen is that we begin to get more companies plugging wells, especially in rural, distressed areas to help their local economies,” said Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a think tank focused on economic and environmental sustainability in Appalachia.

“Oil and gas industries have lost thousands of jobs over the last decade,” he told Grist. “This is helping people who lose their jobs” and providing “a way for people to transition into cleaning up this mess of the last 150 years.”

The federal program includes requirements and guidance to help ensure that the work on the ground benefits workers. In order to qualify for funding, states must ensure that plugging contracts meet standards outlined by the Davis-Bacon Act, a federal law that guarantees government-funded labor matches average pay rates for similar work in a region, known as the prevailing wage.

Failure to follow the federal government’s requirement risks its scrutiny. For example, last year the GOP-led Pennsylvania legislature passed a law dictating how much a contractor might receive to plug a well as part of Pennsylvania’s orphan well program. The amounts allocated were a fraction of typical costs, likely leaving contractors unable to pay their workers the prevailing wage. With federal money tied up in the program, the Department of Interior filed a brisk response warning that the law could threaten Pennsylvania’s ability to comply with program standards and that the state could be cut off from federal funding.

In Ohio, Davis-Bacon requirements appear to have an effect on well-capping work not funded by the federal program. Though the Buckeye State doesn’t have any wage requirement for general well-plugging work, cappers who have taken contracts appear to be paying higher wages — whether or not the job is federally funded. “Because nobody wants to make one wage one day and another the next day, our contractors that are working on our federal program are taking that perspective and paying those wages across the board now,” said Simmerman, Ohio’s orphan well program engineer.

Out west, California is working to nurture a workforce at a much larger scale. Last year, the state legislature passed a law directing the California Workforce Development Board, or CWDB, to launch apprenticeship programs to train new classes of well pluggers. It could become a model for skilled labor creation. Its first pilot program is using the expertise of a Kern County well-capping company, California Legacy Well Services, which is creating a plugging curriculum to fold into existing training provided by Local 12, the International Union of Operating Engineers. As a result, union-affiliated labor will represent part of the well-plugging workforce. 

The thinking is two-pronged: access to quality jobs and layoff mitigation. That means offering good work to skilled laborers vulnerable to the energy transition. “So rather than just worry about the loss of jobs, it’s an opportunity to think about the new jobs for trades workers,” said Tim Rainey, executive director of CWDB. The program is in the early stages, but it offers a glimmer of what an effective orphan well program could yield.

Organized labor in California’s oil fields is of two types: industrial unions and trades unions. Members of industrial unions cultivate skills on a worksite, while trades unions learn the ropes through training apprenticeships like the ones CWDB is developing. 

A quirk in California law may lock out the industrial unions. The law requires “a skilled and trained workforce” for capping jobs, an innocuous-sounding phrase that refers to highly technical requirements in the state labor code that disqualify oil workers from industrial unions such as the United Steelworkers, or USW.

Norman Rogers, a spokesperson and member of USW Local 675 in Southern California, called the legislative sleight of hand “a control job.” Trades unions “have a larger workforce and are able to influence the political landscape,” he said. “They can have all sorts of people go to lobby.”

By expanding the language to characterize eligible workers as “skilled and trained or covered by a labor management agreement,” the law could tap into tens of thousands of union workers represented by USW, Rogers said.

The question of who dominates the green jobs of tomorrow remains an open one. Despite the many bottlenecks, the orphan well program could be an attractive coda to the fossil fuel era if it benefits workers. 

“We drilled the first oil well in America,” said James Kunz, an administrator at the Pennsylvania Foundation for Fair Contracting, who has worked to ensure favorable wages in state capping contracts. “We have the scars of that and a real opportunity.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the rough-and-tumble race to clean up America’s abandoned oil wells on Sep 28, 2023.

The National Flood Insurance Program isn’t doing too well. The program, which offers public flood insurance to almost 5 million households nationwide, is about $20 billion in debt, and it lost almost half a million customers last year after debuting a new system for calculating risk. To make matters worse, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s legal authorization to run the insurance program will expire on Saturday amid a broader fight in Congress over federal spending. At that point, policies will start to lapse at the end of their term, leaving thousands of people without flood coverage during the tail end of hurricane season.

As expiration looms, FEMA is facing not one but two lawsuits over the program. The lawsuits take aim at the program from opposite directions: A case brought by Louisiana officials and a group of Republican state attorneys general argues that the agency’s new risk estimates have raised flood insurance prices too high, and a case brought by a group of Oregon environmentalists argues that the agency is keeping prices too low. 

The contradictory allegations underscore the need for careful policymaking around flood insurance. If the agency raises flood insurance rates, it could inflict economic devastation on floodplain homeowners, but if it keeps premiums low, it will enable continued development in flood-prone areas, ensuring huge future losses. 

“Nobody wants to pay a lot for insurance, and as risks are going up from climate change, we are really stuck with this question of who’s going to pay for that increasing risk,” said Carolyn Kousky, the associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund and an expert on disaster insurance.

The original purpose of the NFIP was to discourage people from living in flood-prone areas, but it has failed at this for decades. The law requires most homeowners in floodplains to purchase insurance from the program, but these homeowners pay rates that are often far too low to reflect the risk they face. These low prices have encouraged developers in cities like Houston to build thousands of homes near rivers and coastlines, and they have also plunged the program into debt.

FEMA can’t change the program’s pricing system without help from Congress, but lawmakers have dodged the issue for years, wary of blowback from coastal homeowners. In the absence of legislative action, FEMA tried to fix the program back in 2021 by updating its system for calculating flood danger. The new system, which the agency calls Risk Rating 2.0, incorporates more data about flood dynamics and home elevations into a complex algorithm. It’s a big upgrade from the agency’s previous system, which was developed before modern computing.

The new system has lowered prices for about 20 percent of NFIP customers, but it’s also led to massive rate increases for coastal homeowners who had been paying subsidized prices in states like Florida and Louisiana. In some jurisdictions, such as Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, the average flood insurance premium has risen by more than 1,000 percent. These premium hikes have drawn protests from both sides of the aisle.

The backlash over these price increases has triggered a multistate lawsuit over Risk Rating 2.0. A group of 10 Republican-controlled states and 43 Louisiana parishes sued in June to stop the system, asking a federal judge to cancel it. They’re also demanding that FEMA release more information about its new risk model, which they say relies on “undisclosed, hypothetical, and abstract possibilities.”

In their initial complaint against the agency, the plaintiffs claimed that the housing market in their states and parishes will take a nosedive if the program remains in effect.

Risk Rating 2.0 “will depress property values, particularly in areas where flood insurance is required,” they wrote. “High insurance rates will also discourage individuals from purchasing property” in the affected states, they claimed. “Fewer residents lead to a reduction in … tax base, resulting in lower tax revenue and hampering the [states’] ability to invest in future mitigation projects.”

Meanwhile, the environmental groups in Oregon argue that flood insurance rates are still too low. In their complaint, filed earlier this month, the groups wrote that the NFIP’s affordability mandate has incentivized hazardous development by charging households artificially low premiums that don’t reflect their true risk. This development, they argue, jeopardizes the survival of threatened and endangered species that rely on the floodplains for habitat.

“The program has encouraged floodplain development in high-hazard areas by providing insurance policies that obscure risk to property owners and provide taxpayer-subsidized, discounted coverage,” the groups alleged.

The new lawsuit follows in the footsteps of previous litigation in Oregon. Another coalition of environmental groups in the state sued FEMA back in 2009, arguing that real estate development in floodplains threatened the survival of several endangered marine species, including steelhead salmon and the orcas that feed on them. The National Fish and Wildlife Service endorsed that view, and FEMA agreed to set more restrictions for development in Oregon floodplains, but the new plaintiffs say the agency is slow-walking those changes.

If both lawsuits succeeded, they would push the NFIP in contrary directions: The Louisiana case would force FEMA to offer flood insurance at lower rates, making it cheaper to live in floodplains, while the Oregon case would force FEMA to stop offering coverage in floodplains that would impact vulnerable fish species. The Oregon plaintiffs have been successful before, but legal experts told Grist that the Republican attorneys general will have a hard time prevailing against Risk Rating 2.0. FEMA is required by law to charge fair and accurate rates for flood insurance, and the NFIP’s previous, outdated risk assessment created serious problems on both counts.

“My general impression is that they’re just throwing stuff at the wall to see if anything sticks,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, of the Louisiana case.

Even so, the dual litigation highlights FEMA’s position between a rock and a hard place. The National Flood Insurance Program has failed for decades to discourage development in floodplains, as evidenced by the Oregon case, and FEMA’s attempts to fix the program have caused enormous economic pain to homeowners in coastal areas, as evidenced by the Louisiana case.

Thousands of these homeowners have dropped their insurance since Risk Rating 2.0 rolled out, fleeing to cheaper private programs with more selective risk pools, and this has left the NFIP in even worse financial straits. With declining enrollment, the program will take in even less revenue from premiums, which will likely increase its debt load over the coming years. Meanwhile, the policyholders that remain in the program will likely see their property values fall as a result of their gargantuan insurance rates.

Kousky says Congress could ease the transition to Risk Rating 2.0 by passing a law that would calibrate insurance premiums to household income. This would make flood coverage affordable for low-income households while charging high premiums to wealthy owners of seaside mansions. But if lawmakers won’t act, she says, homeowners in Louisiana and other flood-prone states will have no choice but to swallow a bitter pill. 

“If you keep the cost of living in high-risk areas artificially low, and you encourage development in these places, then eventually there’s gonna be a big disaster,” she said. “And that’s going to be way more economically costly.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is being sued for making flood insurance too expensive — and too cheap on Sep 28, 2023.

Aluminum isn’t just for soda cans — it’s a critical clean energy material. The metal’s exceptionally light weight and durability make it an essential component of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. As the world scales up these green technologies, demand for aluminum is expected to grow by as much as 40 percent by 2030, compared to a 2020 baseline. 

But aluminum production isn’t environmentally benign. As noted in a new report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, the global aluminum industry causes some 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year — a little less than three times Australia’s annual emissions — as well as widespread air and water contamination. 

To ensure that the harms of aluminum expansion don’t outweigh the benefits, the report calls for stricter pollution standards from the U.S. government, an acceleration of of less-polluting smelting technologies, and an increase in aluminum recycling rates — so that less new aluminum needs to be made in the first place.

“Without strong action, the promise of aluminum in attaining a lower-carbon world will prove to be a false one,”  said Nadia Steinzor, a policy and research analyst with the Environmental Integrity Project and lead author of the report, in a statement. 

Before aluminum becomes foil or a car part, it has to be extracted from bauxite, a kind of ore that contains aluminum in its mineral form. Strip-mining for bauxite requires extensive land-clearing that displaces communities, destroys forests and topsoil, and releases mercury into the air and water. This mining happens all over the world, but some of the largest mines are in Australia, Brazil, Guinea, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Vietnam. According to the Environmental Integrity Project’s estimate, about 7,600 acres of land is cleared globally every year for bauxite mining — an area half the size of Manhattan.

The complicated industrial process that follows turns bauxite ore into aluminum — but not without creating some nasty byproducts. For example, refining bauxite into alumina powder — aluminum’s precursor — creates a waste residue known as “red mud,” which contains contaminants including arsenic, lead, and the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. Smelting, which turns alumina into aluminum, releases more pollutants into the air and water, most significantly sulfur dioxide but also carbonyl sulfide, hydrogen fluoride, and the human carcinogen benzo(ghi)perylene.

In the U.S., which produces about 1 percent of the world’s new aluminum, the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are meant to limit the release of these pollutants — but parts of these laws related to alumina refining and smelting have not been revised for decades, and the Environmental Integrity Project says they don’t reflect what’s possible using the most modern pollution-controlling technologies. For instance, sulfur dioxide scrubbers — filtration chambers that can remove sulfur dioxide from the air going out of a facility’s smokestack — could dramatically reduce emissions of the pollutant if installed at smelting facilities, but they aren’t currently required.

Smelting is also where most of the aluminum industry’s climate damages stem from. It takes a lot of energy to reach the 1,800-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures under which alumina can be converted to aluminum, and most smelting facilities get this energy from fossil fuel sources. The carbon-based anodes that conduct electricity for this process also release perfluorocarbons, greenhouse gases that can be thousands of times more potent than CO2 over a 100-year time frame.

To mitigate this climate pollution, the Environmental Integrity Project report says that states should dramatically expand the supply of renewable energy and that companies should commit to decarbonizing their aluminum production. Facilities in Iceland and Canada have already shown that aluminum production is possible using hydropower, and the United Arab Emirates in 2021 announced the world’s first commercial production of aluminum using solar power. 

Replacing today’s anodes with carbon-free “inert” ones would also reduce aluminum’s climate impact, although inert anode technologies aren’t yet fully developed.

Greeshma Gadikota, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, called the report “timely,” since booming demand for aluminum is already causing pollution and energy consumption challenges around the world.. “There is urgency in creating solutions to address this,” she said.

In particular, she praised the report’s recommendation to expand aluminum recycling CK, which uses 95 percent less energy than new aluminum production and preempts the harms of bauxite mining. According to the World Economic Forum, about 73 percent of used aluminum currently gets recycled, but raising that rate to 95 percent would reduce demand for primary aluminum by 15 percent and prevent 250 million metric tons of CO2 emissions every year — about as much climate pollution as Spain produced in 2022.

One priority area identified by the Environmental Integrity Project is increasing the amount of aluminum recycled from used cars, planes, appliances, and products, rather than relying on industrial scrap. In the U.S., less than half of today’s recycled aluminum comes from those non-industrial sources. 

Still, Gadikota noted that, in the near term, recycled aluminum may not be able to keep up with rising demand for the material, meaning more primary production will be needed.

The report notes that manufacturers and consumers can also help drive down unnecessary demand for aluminum — for example, by favoring smaller cars. Americans’ taste for big trucks and cars is a “key factor” driving aluminum demand within the automotive industry, the report says, but compact vehicles can contain less than half as much aluminum. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cleaning up aluminum will be critical to a low-carbon future on Sep 28, 2023.

Young climate activists took center stage again on Wednesday, as the European Court of Human Rights heard a case brought by six Portuguese youth, ranging in age from 11 to 24, who argued that Europe’s governments aren’t doing enough to prevent climate change from harming them. It is one of the most ambitious legal efforts yet to force action on climate change and, if successful, could have legally binding consequences. 

“We’ve had a packed court,” said Gearóid Ó’Cuinn, director of Global Legal Action Network, or GLAN, a human rights nonprofit that is supporting the Portuguese applicants. In the statement, he also noted that there were more than 80 lawyers representing 32 countries at the hearing, including all European Union member states, along with the United Kingdom, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, and Turkey. 

The young people are suing because they argue that governmental failure to adequately curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change is a violation of their fundamental rights. “’It’s well within their power to do much, much more to do their part to protect the rights of these youth applicants,” said Gerry Liston, a lawyer with GLAN, after the hearing. “They’re just choosing not to.”

Governments questioned whether the applicants’ claims of harm could be directly linked to the government’s emissions, as well as whether the case was admissible, given that the plaintiffs have no formal relationship with the countries they’re suing, other than Portugal. They contend that the plaintiffs should have gone through national courts. 

The applicants, however, fired back.

“I am shocked by the countries’ attempt to ignore evidence and to trivialize the harms we already face,” said André Oliveira, 15. “But I remain hopeful that the court understands the urgency of this situation and will rule in favor of our case.”

The competing sides argued their case in front of a “grand chamber” of 17 judges, which the court chose to employ instead the typical seven-judge panel. The grand chamber is handling just 15 of the roughly 75,000 cases currently pending before the court.

“They took this case very seriously,” said Dennis van Berkel, a lawyer with the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch organization promoting sustainability. “It was a really special day.”

The Portuguese youth filed their case in the wake of heat waves and wildfires that ravaged their country in 2017, leaving more than 100 people dead. Four of the plaintiffs are from Leiria, one of the worst-hit areas. The two other applicants are from the capital city of Lisbon, which has experienced record-breaking temperatures in recent years.

The European Court of Human Rights is based in Strasbourg, France, and charged with interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights, which was developed during and just after World War II. Its decisions are legally binding, but it does not have the ability to enforce its judgements, thousands of which have not been implemented. Still, if this case is successful, the potential effects could be sweeping.

“This would be a legal requirement on [governments] to act, to actually increase what they’re doing to try and stop climate change,” said Ann Harrison, a climate advisor at Amnesty International, which filed a written submission to the court arguing that governments are obligated to protect international human rights through robust climate policies. “They would be required to reduce their emissions faster, and by more.” 

Wednesday’s hearing is only the latest attempt by climate activists to use the courts as a tool for combating climate change. There are two other climate-related “grand chamber” cases pending before the European Court on Human Rights, as well as a number of lawsuits in the United States.

One such suit is set to go trial in Hawaiʻi next summer. And, just last month, youth climate activists scored a major victory in Montana, where a judge ruled that the state’s support of fossil fuels violated the young people’s right to a clean and healthy environment. Plaintiff Kian Tanner said in a statement at the time, “We set the precedent not only for the United States, but for the world.”

Back in Europe, the court is expected to issue a verdict in this latest case in the first half next year.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Young people take European governments to court over climate inaction on Sep 27, 2023.

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

Rising out of the arid scrubland of western Texas is the world’s largest project yet to remove excess carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, a quest that has been lauded as essential to help avert climate catastrophe. The creators of the project have now been awarded funding from the Biden administration, even as critics attack the technology as a fossil fuel industry-backed distraction.

Proponents of setting up enormous fans to gulp in huge amounts of air and remove planet-heating carbon from it, a process called direct air capture (DAC), are basking in their greatest breakthroughs yet in the US. In June, ceremonial shovels were plunged into the dirt in Ector County, Texas, to mark the start of a $1 billion project called Stratos, which aims to remove 500,000 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere a year once fully operational in 2025.

The advent of the 65-acre (26-hectare) site, which will be marked by a vast network of pipes, buildings and fans to scrub CO₂ from the air and then inject it into underground rock formations, was solemnly likened to the Apollo 13 moon mission by Lori Guetre, vice-president of Carbon Engineering, the Canadian-founded company spearheading Stratos, during the groundbreaking.

“This time the Earth has some serious complications, and it needs the brightest minds,” Guetre said, adding that “that the world is watching and counting on us … The team’s will to overcome is quiet, steady, and unwavering.”

This milestone was followed, in August, by President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy announcing that two facilities – one a separate venture by Carbon Engineering, in the southern reaches of Texas – will be given $1.2 billion to act as DAC “hubs” to help jumpstart the carbon-removal industry in the US while also purging more than 2 million tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere between them. A further two hubs will be chosen by the federal government, as part of a $3.5 billion effort to help create a market for carbon that will be “crucial to tackling climate change”, according to Jennifer Granholm, the US secretary of energy.

The commitments to remove such volumes of CO₂ is a step-change for a direct air capture industry still nascent, small-scale, and unproven in its capacity to curb the worsening climate crisis, even as hope, and dollars, are ladled upon it. “It’s an extraordinarily big moment for carbon removal right now and for direct air capture in particular,” said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a climate NGO that works on a range of different carbon-removal options.

“There’s too much CO₂ in the atmosphere. People are already feeling the impacts of climate change. We need to address legacy emissions and direct air capture could play a big role in that.”

But some climate campaigners have argued that DAC is, at best, a costly irrelevance to the more pressing need to cut emissions and, at worst, a cynical ploy by the fossil fuel industry to maintain its polluting status quo. The Stratos project is ultimately owned by Occidental Petroleum, an American oil company that bought Carbon Engineering for $1.1 billion last month and views carbon removal as a sort of future-proofing for its industry.

“We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s chief executive, told an industry conference in March. “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

While Occidental maintains that the CO₂ captured in Texas will be stored underground and used as a sort of carbon credit system for other companies to purchase, the company also touts itself as an exemplar of what it calls “net zero oil,” whereby removed CO₂ is injected into rock formations to dislodge gas and oil for further extraction.

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“We are going to pay an oil company to pump crap out of the ground and then pay them to put some back in – it’s plainly obvious this isn’t a climate solution,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which works on responses to the climate emergency.

“It’s just so silly. If you just buried dollar bills it would make more sense. This has just given big oil decades of talking points to promote a fake solution so they don’t have to stop polluting today; it’s a huge greenwashing exercise and we are falling for it.”

Foley said the Biden administration would be justified in spending a smaller amount on helping academia research direct air capture, to help mop up stubbornly persistent emissions from sources such as concrete and steel manufacture, or aviation.

But giving oil companies public money for such ventures is “unconscionable,” he said, and reminiscent of the mostly fruitless backing of carbon capture and storage – the effort to capture emissions at source from power plants and other industrial facilities that has failed to catch on despite enjoying bipartisan support in Congress.

“When it comes to throwing funding at big industries for things that have never been demonstrated at scale, there’s suddenly a lot of money for it,” Foley said. “I’ve seen this movie many times before. This is clearly playing into the big oil playbook, and to subsidize that with public money is crazy.”

There is now a yawning gap between the amount of carbon that scientists estimate will have to be removed from the atmosphere to avoid breaching dangerous global heating thresholds and the actual amount of carbon removal currently happening, or even planned.

Human activity, primarily through burning coal, oil and gas, produces about 36 billion tons of CO₂ emissions a year. Given how emissions have grown in recent years despite urgent warnings of an unfolding climate crisis, there is little chance of the rapid, massive cuts needed – by as much as half this decade – to avoid severely escalating heatwaves, floods, drought and other impacts.

This shortfall, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), means almost every plausible scenario to avoid 2C of warming above pre-industrial times, and certainly 1.5C warming, which countries have agreed to, involves removing large amounts of CO₂ directly from the atmosphere. Up to 10 billion tons of CO₂, which is double the U.S.’s total annual emissions, may have to be removed each year by 2050 just to secure a chance of hitting these goals and get to net zero emissions.

“Carbon dioxide removal is essential to achieve net zero,” as Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, vice-chair of the IPCC working group on the matter, put it last year. The IPCC says this could be done in a number of ways, such as by reforesting large areas, given that trees are the original, and best, carbon dioxide removers, or via something called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (also known as BECCS), which involves burning trees and other vegetation for energy and capturing the resulting emissions before they escape into the atmosphere.

But issues with these alternatives – such as the vast amount of land required and uncertainties over “lost” carbon from trees due to a growing threat of wildfires – has only added to the allure of DAC, even though it remains very much in its infancy. Today, there are only 18 facilities worldwide that remove carbon from the air and store it underground, capturing less than 10,000 tons of CO₂ a year, which is as much as the carbon footprint of just a few hundred Americans.

Companies such as Climeworks, which has led the way until now with its plant in Iceland, and Carbon Engineering, which has said it could achieve 100 million tons of CO₂ removal in little more than a decade from now, have remained bullish that this equation will swiftly change. Meanwhile, businesses such as Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and McKinsey have started to purchase carbon removal themselves.

To facilitate this, Carbon Engineering would need to build dozens of new facilities that push air across surfaces containing a potassium hydroxide solution that chemically binds to the CO₂ molecules, separating them from the air and trapping them in the liquid solution as a carbonate salt.

This would require huge amounts of money and a vast ramp-up of technology, even to make just a modest dent in the carbon debt. The Stratos facility itself would eliminate “about 260 seconds of the world’s emissions, if they could do that annually,” said Foley, working on a calculation based around there being about 36bn tons of CO₂ emissions a year. “This isn’t something that is ready for prime time.”

It’s unlikely that direct air capture alone will remove all 10 billion tons a year required by 2050, according to Burns, who added there remains “a million questions” about DAC, such as the amount of energy it will require and environmental justice concerns from communities over where and how CO₂ is stored underground.

“But I think we’ve seen direct air capture can be an entry point for a lot of different people to support larger climate action,” she said. “It’s about investing in a portfolio of carbon-removal solutions. There’s a sense of the need to play catch-up on mitigation, because we’re already behind where we should be on reducing emissions.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world’s biggest carbon capture facility is being built in Texas. Will it work? on Sep 27, 2023.

Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is still within reach if countries rapidly scale up renewables within the next decade, the International Energy Agency announced on Tuesday.

The agency’s new report is an update to its Net Zero Roadmap from 2021, which outlined scenarios for the world to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. According to the IEA, solar power installations and electric vehicle sales are on track to help reach that target, owing to a rapid growth in both technologies over the last two years.

“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, in an interview with the Guardian. 

But on pretty much every other front, the agency warned that countries still need to make much more progress to reach net-zero by 2050 and have a shot at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, an ambitious target set in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2022, driven in part by rising electricity demand during extreme weather events and coal-fired power in Asia. While the IEA says that demand for oil, natural gas, and coal should peak this decade, the current rate of clean energy development is still “not nearly enough.” 

“The pathway to 1.5 C has narrowed in the past two years, but clean energy technologies are keeping it open,” Birol said in a press release. 

To reach net-zero by 2050, countries will need to triple renewable power capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, according to the agency. They will also need to cut 75 percent of methane emissions from fossil fuels — a solution that would cost $75 billion, or just 2 percent of the oil and gas industry’s profits in 2022. Altogether, global clean energy investments will need to rise from $1.8 trillion this year to $4.5 trillion each year by the early 2030s.

The agency also called for the end of new oil and gas projects and coal-fired power plant approvals, echoing a recent U.N. report that identified removing oil and gas subsidies and phasing out fossil fuels as key strategies to slow climate change.

The report’s findings arrive ahead of U.N. climate negotiations at the COP28 summit in Dubai this November, where world leaders are expected to review national climate commitments made under the Paris Agreement. The IEA found that current pledges made by countries to lower emissions are “not sufficient” to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and that all target dates for national net-zero pledges need to be moved up. Failure to do so would make limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius dependent on carbon removal technologies, which the report noted are “expensive and unproven at scale.”

Critics ranging from world leaders to Indigenous activists have denounced the lack of progress made at these annual U.N. conferences. The world’s biggest carbon polluters have put forth very different timelines for reaching net zero. While many developed countries, including the United States and European Union, have set a target date of 2050, China has a target of 2060, and India’s target is 2070.

“We have the tools to hit those net-zero emissions targets,” Birol told the New York Times. “But the biggest worry for me is the growing political fragmentation between countries. There is no route to net zero without fair and effective international cooperation.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Report: The world’s most critical climate target is still within reach on Sep 26, 2023.

Hello, and welcome to the last issue of Record High. I’m Zoya Teirstein, and today, we’re going to talk about the elephant in the room: heat inequity. 

In his book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History, the physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer explains, unflinchingly, why the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak killed more than 11,000 Africans while almost every single Westerner who contracted the illness survived. The difference between life and death came down to, quite simply, access. In clinics in Guinea, Libera, and Sierra Leone, equipment and fluids that would have saved countless lives were nonexistent. A few simple interventions would have made all the difference. “How many of these deaths were caused more by the virulence of social conditions than by the virulence of the pathogen?” Farmer asked. 

I was reminded of Farmer’s book recently while interviewing a researcher about an unrelated topic, a study on the temperature thresholds at which the human body can no longer keep itself cool. That researcher, a scientist at the University of Oxford, found that parts of the world have already become too hot for human survival. As climate change accelerates, more portions of the globe will approach this threshold, what the study calls “the danger zone.” Whether someone dies in that zone depends in large part on their access to cooling strategies — such as fans, cold drinking water, and, of course, air conditioning. 

Climate reporter Jeff Goodell writes extensively about this divide between the “cooled and the doomed” in his new best-selling book The Heat Will Kill You First. “There’s a profound gap in every city, everywhere, between people who have air conditioning and people who don’t,” Goodell told me in July, as Phoenix was experiencing what would become a 31-day stretch of 110 degree days — the hottest month in any U.S. city on record. 

Heat is swiftly becoming one of the most formidable climate-fueled health threats of our time. It kills more people than any other extreme weather condition. Like Ebola and other deadly outbreaks in global history, it kills unequally. Finding this inequality in the United States is appallingly easy — just follow the racial boundaries that divide many cities and towns. Wealthy, white neighborhoods are less likely to experience deadly heat than non-white areas. A lot of these segregated communities are clustered in Southern states, among the hottest in the nation, and big cities that lack green space. 

A recent paper published by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that the average Black urban resident is exposed to markedly higher heat stress than the average white urban resident. On average, Black people are exposed to temperatures that are a little more than half a degree hotter than the city average, while white people live in areas that are a little less than half a degree cooler. Much of this temperature imparity — which leads to more hospitalizations and deaths within minority communities — is due to segregation and redlining. “The findings reveal pervasive income- and race-based disparities within U.S. cities,” the study’s authors wrote. 

This newsletter may be winding down, but heat isn’t going anywhere. It’s likely that in the future, we’ll remember the summer of 2023 — the hottest on record — as among the coolest summers of this century. There are as many right ways to approach the challenge of a hotter world and its health impacts as there are wrong ways. Successfully mitigating extreme heat also necessarily means fighting inequalities in health, the built environment, and local and national government policies, which will determine who lives and who dies as the planet continues to warm. Any effort to address the impacts of extreme heat that doesn’t take that into account the “virulence of social conditions,” as Farmer wrote, isn’t much of a solution at all. 

Today concludes our run of Record High, but our team still has a few big stories in the works. We’ll be using this newsletter to (very occasionally) let you know when those new projects publish over the next few months.

Thanks for sticking with us this summer. We’ll see you next time.   

P.S. If you’d like to keep seeing Grist content in your inbox, sign up for our flagship newsletter — 10 of our newest stories delivered to you once weekly — here. And if you want to play a role in shaping next year’s extreme weather newsletter, fill out this audience survey. It takes just a few minutes.

By the numbers

Data Visualization by Clayton Aldern

In the U.S., non-white populations are exposed to higher temperatures than white populations. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders experience this disparity most acutely, but all non-white people are subject to elevated temperatures, while white populations experience cooler-than-average temps. 

What we’re reading

The strange connection between alcohol and heat: A new study found short-term temperature spikes lead to marked increases in the rate of hospitalizations for alcohol-related disorders. Even a slight increase in temperature, say from 15 degrees Fahrenheit one week to 20 degrees F the next week, or from 60 to 65 degrees F, led to more hospitalizations for substance use.
Read more

South America’s hot winter comes to a close: And it’s 110 degrees in parts of Brazil. It looks like an enormous heat dome afflicting much of South America isn’t going away anytime soon. My colleague Max Graham writes about what the beginning of summer following a record-breaking winter means for the continent and the rest of the world.
Read more

This summer’s record-breaking heat in charts: Heat this summer has broken previous records “by a truly staggering margin,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute wrote in a blog post. Hausfather said there’s a chance 2023 will “emerge as the first year exceeding 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
Read more 

The worst heat wave ever recorded happened in … Antarctica? A new study shows the most intense heat wave on the planet took place in Antarctica in March 2022, when temperatures on the continent spiked 70 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Kasha Patel writes about it for the Washington Post.
Read more

Another victim of extreme heat: recess. Schools across the country closed early, trimmed recess, and canceled outdoor after-school activities altogether due to sweltering heat this month. This isn’t the first year kids have suffered at school due to rising temperatures, and the trend has experts worried. NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo and Beth Wallis have a great segment about the issue on All Things Considered.
Read more

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The heat gap on Sep 26, 2023.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live. 

Many studies have shown that climate change threatens alcohol production around the world, from vineyards in France to whiskey distilleries in Scotland. Now there’s alarming evidence that climate change affects hospitalizations for alcohol consumption, too. 

A study published this week in the journal Nature Communications Medicine found that temperature spikes due to climate change have led to a marked increase in the number of hospital visits for alcohol-related disorders — such as alcohol poisoning, alcohol withdrawal, and alcohol-induced sleep disorders — in New York state. “We found that there was an almost linear relationship between temperature increases and alcohol-related disorder hospital admissions and visits,” said Robbie Parks, an environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University and the lead author of the study. 

The researchers also found associations between temperature and hospitalizations related to cannabis, cocaine, opioids, and sedative use — a result that was felt most acutely in the suburban and rural areas outside of New York City. But the connection between hospitalizations related to alcohol use and temperature was the most “robust” in the study, Parks said. 

A growing body of research that shows Americans have become increasingly reliant on drugs, especially opioids, and alcohol over the past few decades. There has been a fivefold increase in overdose deaths in the United States since the turn of the century. This trend could be made even worse “with rising temperatures under climate change,” the study’s authors write.

By looking at hospital admission records and comparing them to weather data over the course of three decades between 1995 and 2014, the researchers figured out how short-term spikes in temperature over the course of a few days affect hospital admission rates related to substance use. 

Even a slight increase in temperature, say from 15 degrees Fahrenheit one week to 20 degrees F the next week, or from 60 to 65 degrees F, led to more hospitalizations for substance use. That trend held strong from negative 22 degrees F all the way up to 86 degrees F — the full range of daily average temperatures across New York state between 1995 and 2014. 

“It’s not just seasonal,” Parks said. “If today was 5 degrees hotter than this time last week or this time next week, we would expect more hospital visits for alcohol and substance disorders.” 

Daily average temperatures in New York have risen 3 degrees F statewide since 1970 and are expected to rise another 3 degrees F by 2080, due to the warming effects of fossil fuel combustion. This trend has contributed to the short-term temperature fluctuations Parks and his team compared against local hospitalization rates in their study. 

Previous research has shown that temperature fluctuations can influence drug use in the United States and overseas, but this study is among the first to look at different types of drugs and find that climate change is linked to spikes in hospital admissions for alcohol-related disorders in the U.S., specifically. Parks and his team found that the pattern was near-universal across the demographic characteristics they looked at, which included age, sex, and social vulnerability (an umbrella term for socioeconomic and minority status). The study controlled for seasonal variations in alcohol use, such as peoples’ tendency to drink more during the winter holidays and summer months. 

“This is obviously relevant in the context of climate change, where we’re anticipating hotter average temperatures, including more frequent and severe heat waves,” said Francis Vergunst, an associate professor at the University of Oslo who has researched the effects of climate change on behavioral disorders and was not involved in the Columbia study. “That means there will be more days in which people potentially could be using substances at harmful levels that could require hospital admission.” 

Though it’s not entirely clear why rising temperatures lead to more hospitalizations for substance use, Vergunst said researchers have some ideas about what may be behind the trend. One possible explanation is that people are more impulsive and uninhibited during periods of elevated heat, which leads them to drink more and consume more drugs. For some types of drugs, such as opioids, warm weather can diminish the perceived effects of the drug and lead people to take higher doses to get to their desired level of inebriation, which in turn could contribute to more hospital admissions for overdoses. Drinking alcohol, popularly thought to raise the body’s internal temperature, actually destabilizes the body’s ability to regulate its core temperature, which could also contribute to hospitalizations during periods of elevated heat. 

“I think it’s really important to start understanding what those underlying factors are,” Vergunst said, “because that could be the primary potential intervention point.” In other words, understanding what causes people to consume more drugs as temperatures warm will be crucial to preventing them from ending up in the hospital because of an overdose or some other substance-related condition.  

The study doesn’t make projections about how future warming due to climate change may influence the prevalence of hospital admissions for substance use, and Parks warned against extrapolating New York’s data to the rest of the country. More research needs to be done to figure out how people living in the United States’ many various and distinct climates respond to rising temperatures. But Parks said that the study hints at the possibility of a larger trend that needs to be investigated. It’s a starting point for beginning to understand how climate change may influence substance use across the nation and elsewhere. 

“New York is the fourth-largest state in the country, one of the most diverse, one of the most extreme in terms of socio-demographic profile,” Parks said. “You might surmise, though cautiously, that this would be an issue across the U.S. and worldwide.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is fueling alcohol-related hospitalizations on Sep 26, 2023.

The justices of Brazil’s Supreme Court voted 9-2 last week against a legal framework that would have made it impossible for Indigenous tribal leaders to reclaim traditional land and that would have eased the way for more mining, agriculture and other extractive industries on that land.

The ruling sets a precedent for hundreds of acres of Indigenous land claims and is expected to have a widespread impact on Indigenous land rights.

The legal thesis at the heart of the case, known as marco temporal, had been moving through the courts since 2007 and was overwhelmingly endorsed in the nation’s conservative-dominated lower congressional house.

It involved a legal interpretation of Brazil’s 1988 constitution, which gives Indigenous people the right to claim lands they “traditionally occupied.” Since the adoption of the constitution in 1988, more than 700 Indigenous territories have been claimed. To date, 496 have been officially recognized, or demarcated, by the government, which defines property boundaries and guarantees the possession of the land and the exclusive use of its natural resources to the Indigenous peoples who live on it.

The theory would have limited tribal claims to territories they were occupying or legally disputing on the day the constitution was ratified. However, due to the Indian Statute of 1973, Brazil gave Indigenous people the same legal status as children, meaning they didn’t have standing to represent themselves in the state’s legal system — including in land matters.

The ruling marks the end of the yearslong fight that grew intensely under former President Jair Bolsonaro. Over the last four years, deforestation in the Amazon rose 56 percent with an estimated 13,000 square miles of land destroyed by development. During that time, Indigenous peoples lost an estimated 965 square miles of their traditional territories due to Bolsonaro’s policies. 

Brazil’s right wing, agribusiness sectors and other industries such as developers, loggers, miners, and farmers with business interests in Indigenous lands, including the Amazon, have supported the effort. Many proponents cited economic development as a key reason to support the idea — particularly for soybean production, cattle farming, and mining. 

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January and pledged to protect existing lands and create new territories. In recent months he has made climate and the environment central to his agenda. In August, his administration unveiled infrastructure investment programs and other initiatives that he pitched to start Brazil’s green transition.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Brazil’s Supreme Court upholds Indigenous rights to reclaim land on Sep 25, 2023.

As gas-guzzling cars are replaced by their electric counterparts, tailpipe emissions are on the decline. But cars have other negative impacts on environmental health, beyond what comes out of their exhaust pipes.

One of the bigger, and lesser known, problems is tire pollution — or “tire and road wear particles,” in industry terminology.

Tires shed tiny particles with every rotation. Tire wear happens most dramatically during rapid acceleration, braking, and sharp turns, but even with the most conservative driving, particulate pollution is an unavoidable consequence of car use. And it’s a problem that’s poised to get worse as drivers transition to EVs.

“We’re pushing for decarbonization by going to battery electric vehicles, and in doing so we’re pushing up tire wear emissions … which is going to prove difficult to solve,” said Nick Molden, founder and CEO of Emissions Analytics, a London-based company that performs independent tests on cars’ real-world tailpipe and tire emissions. Molden pointed out that tailpipe exhaust is dramatically reduced by filters and catalytic converters, which use chemical reactions to reduce pollution. Meanwhile, tires are a fundamentally open system, so there is no viable way to capture the polluting particles that fly off of them.

Emissions Analytics found that a single car sheds almost 9 pounds of tire weight per year, on average. Globally, that amounts to 6 million metric tons of tire pollution annually, with most of it coming from wealthier countries where personal car use is more prevalent.

The amount of tire pollution emitted per vehicle is increasing as more electric cars hit the road around the world — some 14 million of them this year, according to the International Energy Agency. EVs tend to be significantly heavier than gas-powered or hybrid cars due to their larger, heftier batteries. The average battery for an EV on the market today is roughly 1,000 pounds, with some outliers approaching 3,000 pounds — as much as an entire gasoline-powered compact car. Emissions Analytics has found that adding 1,000 pounds to a mid-sized vehicle increased tire wear by about 20 percent, and also that Tesla’s Model Y generated 26 percent more tire pollution than a similar Kia hybrid. EVs’ more aggressive torque, which translates into faster acceleration, is another factor that creates more tire particulate mile for mile, compared to similar internal combustion engine cars.

Tire particulate is a toxic slurry of microplastics, volatile organic compounds, and other chemical additives that enter the air, soil, and water around trafficked areas. The rubber, metals, and other compounds coming off tires settle along roads where rain washes them into waterways. Smaller bits of tire particulate linger in the air, where they can be inhaled, and the smallest of this particulate matter — known as PM 2.5, because each particle is 2.5 micrometers or less — can directly enter the bloodstream. A 2017 study estimated that tire wear is responsible for 5 to 10 percent of oceanic microplastic pollution, and 3 to 7 percent of airborne PM 2.5 pollution. 

One particularly concerning chemical in tires is 6PPD, which is added to virtually all tires to prevent rubber from cracking. But in the environment, 6PPD reacts with ozone to become 6PPD-quinone, a substance that has been linked to salmon die-offs in the Pacific Northwest. A 2022 study confirmed the compound is also lethal to rainbow trout and brook trout.

Further research has shown that the chemical is absorbed by edible plants like lettuce and has the potential to accumulate in them. A study in South China found both 6PPD and 6PPD-quinone in human urine samples. The human health effects of the chemical are not yet understood, but other chemicals found in tires have been linked to problems ranging from skin irritation to respiratory problems to brain damage.

Given the intensifying realities of climate change, phasing out gas-powered vehicles rapidly is a must. But experts say the U.S. and other wealthy countries can accomplish this while also mitigating the environmental and health problems caused by EVs’ increased tire wear — namely by curbing car use overall.

Foremost, local policymakers can take steps to make U.S. cities less cripplingly car-dependent. Although that might sound like a daunting task, there’s historical precedent: The Netherlands used to be dominated by cars and experienced a higher rate of traffic fatalities than the U.S.,  until activist groups like Stop de Kindermoord (“Stop Child Murder”) mobilized in the 1970s to let policymakers know that they wanted less traffic on their streets. According to Chris Bruntlett, the co-author of Building the Cycling City, policymakers created the low-traffic, bike-friendly Dutch cities we know today by instituting traffic-calming measures. “Officials started with speed-limit reductions, parking restrictions, through-traffic limitations, and lane narrowings and removals,” Bruntlett told Grist.

David Zipper, a mobility expert and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, says that city leaders can also remove subsidies for car ownership, such as free residential parking on public streets. “Once car subsidies are removed, fewer people in cities will choose to buy and own them,” Zipper said.

Of course, measures to reduce car use only work in tandem with investments in alternative transportation. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 provided some federal funding for transit and pedestrian and bike infrastructure, but making the most of these funds will require political will from state and local lawmakers. Zipper said that policymakers in some U.S. cities have begun to take positive actions — like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who has committed to expanding her city’s bike lane network until 50 percent of the population lives within a three-minute walk of a bike lane.

Another way to reduce tire pollution is to trade big, heavy cars for smaller and lighter ones. Especially in the U.S., cars have grown significantly in size and weight in recent decades. Automakers began promoting SUVs in the 1980s, because a legal loophole allowed vehicles designated as “light trucks” to skirt fuel efficiency regulations. Nine out of the 10 best-selling cars in the U.S. last year were trucks or SUVs, and the International Energy Agency has found that SUVs were the second largest cause of the global rise in CO2 emissions between 2010 and 2018.

One legislative solution to car bloat is introducing weight-based vehicle taxes, which encourage consumer interest in lighter cars and can be used to offset the cost of increased wear on roads caused by heavier vehicles. France implemented a weight-based car tax in 2021, charging consumers a penalty of 10 euros (about $10) for every kilogram above 1,800 (about 4,000 pounds) that their car weighs. This year, Norway also extended its weight-based vehicle tax to include EVs at a rate of a little more than a euro per kilogram above the first 500 kilograms (about 1,100 pounds) for EVs. Norway also taxes vehicles on their carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions. Taken together, these three taxes have the combined effect of dramatically incentivizing small electric vehicles. 

In the U.S., some states already prorate vehicle registration fees based on weight, and Washington, D.C. recently overhauled its registration system to more heavily penalize larger cars. In D.C., owners of cars heavier than 6,000 pounds now have to pay $500 in annual fees. New York state lawmakers also recently introduced legislation that would similarly incentivize smaller cars.  

Regulators can also take steps to minimize the harm caused by tire pollution — and in California, the process has already begun. In October, a new regulation implemented by the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, or DTSC, will require manufacturers of tires on the California market to research safer alternatives to 6PPD. Manufacturers that sell tires in the state are obligated to notify DTSC about products containing 6PPD by the end of November. 

Karl Palmer, deputy director of safer consumer products at DTSC, believes that making tire makers conduct an “alternatives analysis” will ultimately result in products that are safer for the environment.

“We’re using California’s market strength to say, ‘If you want to park here, you’ve got to comply with our rules,’” Palmer told Grist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline EVs are a climate solution with a pollution problem: Tire particles on Sep 25, 2023.

As the Northern Hemisphere emerges from the hottest summer on record, South America has, for now, anyway, taken up the planet’s extreme-heat mantle. Winter just ended there, but a large swath of the continent is sweltering under an unprecedented heat dome that’s pushing temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Brazil. That could leave people paying more for a cup of joe. 

The hot, dry conditions, spurred by El Niño’s warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, have sparked wildfires and are threatening the livelihoods of farmers in a country that produces more coffee and soybeans than any other. The heat, coupled with a lack of rain, has disrupted the start of Brazil’s soy planting season, and could keep coffee trees from fruiting. Java prices have surged globally as a result.

“There is always an impact from these conditions,” Jose Braz Matiello, a researcher at Brazil’s Funcafe agency, told Reuters, referring to the country’s coffee production. “But it is something that will take time to evaluate.” 

The worst of the heat has been in Paraguay and Brazil, where searing highs between 107 and 111 degrees F made the country one of the hottest places in the world, according to the weather organization MetSul Meteorologia. It had predicted conditions in the nation’s south-central and southeastern regions would rival “the deserts of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.” The hottest temperature ever recorded in Brazil is 112.6 degrees F, set during the late spring of 2020.

As odd as it may seem for winter in South America’s largest nation to feel like summer in the Middle East, the blistering conditions should come as no surprise: Scientists have long warned that climate change is making heat waves worse, and the ongoing El Niño is only amplifying the effect. In July, the Earth was as hot as it has been in 120,000 years.

Brazil’s National Institute of Meteorology has classified this hot spell as a “great danger,” but rising mercury isn’t the only concern. The warm front and high winds sparked wildfires in Bahia, a state in Brazil’s northeast. Farther south, smoke from forest fires has coated buildings and reportedly blocked navigation on the Amazon River. The suffocating weather also could foment heavy rain. If storms materialize, they would follow a cyclone that caused floods that killed dozens of people, and displaced thousands more, in the country’s southern states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. 

The heat dome, which is also stifling parts of Bolivia and Argentina, mirrors a rare wave of searing temperatures that swept across central South America last month. Residents of Buenos Aires donned shorts and whipped out fans to endure the strange winter heat, which broke records in Paraguay and hit triple-digits in the Chilean Andes. Clear skies and copious sunshine heated the ground and led to another bout of heat in Brazil in late August, when temperatures in Rio de Janeiro broke 100 degrees F. (Black spider monkeys at the Rio zoo shed their winter fur early and are sucking on watermelon ice pops to cool down.) 

“These temperatures are going to keep on rising,” a meteorologist in Chile told the New York Times last month. Forecasts suggest that the coming summer in Brazil could be the country’s warmest on record. 

For the country’s soy and coffee farmers, who raise more than a third of the world’s supply of those crops, that’s not good news. Triple-digit temperatures and minimal rainfall can scorch soybeans. And Coffea arabica, the world’s dominant species of coffee plant, is especially sensitive to heat, even short-term spells. That’s one reason that researchers predict planetary warming could shrink the amount of land suitable for growing the beans by 50 percent in coming decades. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Winter just ended in South America. It’s 110 degrees. on Sep 25, 2023.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is republished with permission.

In Arizona, utilities have used a counterintuitive tool to help keep the lights on despite the state’s ongoing wave of historic heat — they’ve asked customers to turn their air conditioners down.

In July and August, Arizona’s three biggest utilities were able to call on more than 100,000 customers to reduce their electricity use by a total of 276 megawatts during afternoon and evening hours when demand for power was at its peak. For most of those same months, the southern Arizona territories served by those utilities were in the midst of a record-setting stretch of consecutive days over 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

These statistics come from EnergyHub, the company that operates smart-thermostat-based demand-response programs for utilities Arizona Public Service, Salt River Project, and Tucson Electric Power. Like many utilities across the country, APS, SRP, and TEP offer incentives and free or discounted smart thermostats for customers who agree to let the utility remotely turn their temperature settings up by several degrees when the grid needs relief from air-conditioning power use — with the option for customers to ​“opt out” by manually resetting their thermostats.

But not every utility is able to get such consistent results out of customers facing as dreadful and persistent a heat wave as the one Arizona has endured this summer. During those two summer months, customers stayed engaged during eight to 10 separate events across the three utilities, delivering up to 300 megawatts of load reduction at the peak of participation, said Jessie Guest, EnergyHub’s strategic client success manager.

That’s not a huge amount, especially compared to the record high of more than 18,000 megawatts of peak electricity draw experienced by those three utilities over this summer.

But every little margin counts in times of peak demand, which makes these customer-enabled ​“demand-response” resources a vital tool in the grid-balancing toolbox. More and more U.S. utilities are facing the necessity of cutting power to entire neighborhoods to preserve grid stability as climate change drives increasingly hot summers. Demand-response programs offer one way to avoid that last-resort outcome.

Convincing customers to use less energy at critical times is also quite a bit less expensive and polluting than building and firing up new fossil-gas-powered ​“peaker” plants to cover short-term grid shortfalls. And because a large portion of utility costs are tied up in the investments and energy costs related to meeting peak demand, demand-response programs are especially cost-effective.

That’s in part the reason why Arizona Public Service (APS), the state’s largest utility with 1.3 million customers, plans to rely heavily on distributed energy and demand response to reach its goals of 65 percent carbon-free energy by 2030 and a 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2050.

APS plans to add more than a gigawatt of new solar, wind and batteries over the next four years. But the utility is already closing in on its 2024 target of enlisting 200 megawatts of demand response, with 170 megawatts as of this summer. More than half of that comes from its Cool Rewards residential smart-thermostat program, which launched in 2018, hit 42 megawatts in 2020, 80 megawatts in 2021 and about 100 megawatts last year.

As of this summer, the program has 78,000 connected thermostats and the capability of shedding more than 110 megawatts of load, said Kerri Carnes, APS’ director of customer-to-grid solutions. ​“These customer partnership programs are going to be increasingly important for us on our journey to 100 percent clean energy,” she said.

Designing a smart-thermostat demand-response program that works for customers

There’s no single trick to getting so many people to so consistently endure discomfort to keep the grid up and running. But a combination of attractive financial incentives, closely managed customer expectations, and tight integration with utility power grid and energy market operations have certainly helped in Arizona.

Free or steeply discounted smart thermostats are a key starting point, Guest said. A growing number of utilities and demand-response providers nationwide have been offering customers free or low-cost smart thermostats from companies like Google Nest, ecobee, Honeywell Home, and other well-known brands so they can capture the greater flexibility and control these devices offer.

That trend is present in Arizona, too: APS has offered free thermostats to customers who sign up for Cool Rewards for years. Salt River Project and Tucson Electric Power have provided smart-thermostat rebates of up to $100 or more for years, and they both offered free thermostats this summer.

Incentives are available for customers who already have smart thermostats, too, with up to a one-time $50 credit for each device they enroll in demand response. Participants also earn annual credits of between $25 and $40, depending on the utility, Guest said.

Importantly, these programs don’t penalize customers who opt out of participating on certain days, she added. That’s not universally the case for demand-response programs — particularly those involving commercial and industrial customers that utilities rely on for larger-scale power reductions during grid emergencies.

But EnergyHub’s experience running residential programs for more than 60 utilities across the U.S. has shown that ​“a pay-for-performance model decreases overall participation,” she said. ​“You’re penalizing customers for choosing comfort over the program.”

Carnes agreed that if a demand-response program ​“feels overly complicated or overly punitive, customers will walk away.”

“Say the day you’re calling an event, I’m having a birthday party,” she said. ​“Should I be penalized” for opting out of turning off the air conditioning ​“because I wanted to make sure the people at my kid’s birthday party are comfortable and treated well?”

“If the industry truly wants to have customer-sited resources as part of the solution, then we have to treat customers like people,” she said.

Treating customers like people also means keeping the lines of communication open, Guest said. EnergyHub uses emails and text messages to inform customers before a request to reduce power use of ​“what to expect, how long it’s going to be, how much temperatures are going to increase above the setpoint,” she said. ​“Even sending a midseason message, saying, ​‘You’re having an impact on keeping the lights on in Arizona’ — that has been big.”

That communication goes both ways. After the first two years of the Cool Rewards program, ​“in some surveys, customers said, ​‘You should pay us more,’” Carnes said. ​“So we went back and did the math, and agreed — our customers should be paid more.” So in 2022, they boosted the annual participation credit from $25 to $35. Enrollment numbers have risen since the increase was put in place.

While plenty of other utilities around the country have demand-response programs that are as lucrative — or even more so — as the Arizona utilities’ offerings, many have been far less aggressive in implementing them. And those utilities without programs that pay customers to reduce power use during grid emergencies are forced to ask their customers to voluntarily cut power use for free — a last resort that runs the risk of turning people off of demand response entirely.

Finding a smart-thermostat demand-response program that works for utilities

But while the human touch is important, Carnes also emphasized the need to balance ​“the art and science” of treating customers ​“like a resource,” similar to the power plants APS controls or the energy-trading relationships it maintains with neighboring utilities. Paying too much for demand response may erase its relative cost-effectiveness compared to simply buying more power.

But traditionally, the key limitation for residential demand-response programs has been retaining enough customers to ensure that the reductions they can deliver are worth the costs of administering and running a program. Utilities have been criticized in the past for failing to adequately inform or reward customers for their participation in demand-response programs, limiting their growth over the decades they’ve been in place.

At the same time, utilities and their regulators have tended to express skepticism about customers being able to deliver meaningful load reductions when the grid really needs it. That uncertainty has limited utilities’ willingness to rely on demand response in order to forgo more expensive ways of dealing with demand peaks, like investments in new power plants or grid capacity.

As it stands, no utility is tapping the full theoretical demand-response potential that reports from a variety of federal agencies and energy analysis firms have identified across the country. A 2019 report from consultancy Brattle Group found that the U.S. could double its nearly 60 gigawatts of existing demand-response capacity by 2030, yielding $15 billion per year in benefits — and largely avoiding the use and construction of additional power plants — with smart thermostats making up one of the largest new sources of capacity.

But as utilities in Arizona and around the country struggle with increasingly extreme weather and the need to replace fossil-fired power with zero-carbon alternatives, so-called ​“demand-side” alternatives like Cool Rewards are becoming more and more central to their plans.

APS has made demand response an integral part of its strategy on this front, Carnes said. ​“My team is integrated with our operations team. We attend the weekly planning meetings — what does the energy market look like, what the weather is going to look like, any changes in the fleet that we need to prepare for.”

APS is using this tight integration between its smart-thermostat-equipped customers and its grid and energy market operations in a number of innovative ways, Carnes said. One example is ​“precooling” — turning up air conditioning earlier in the day, when grids across the Southwest are awash in low-cost solar power, to store up cold in homes that can then keep their air conditioners off for longer in the late afternoon and evening, when solar power fades away but outdoor temperatures and electricity demand remain high.

That’s not just a way to keep homes cooler through the late afternoons, Carnes said — it’s also a way for APS and its customers to take advantage of the hour-by-hour shifts in electricity costs. APS is among the growing number of utilities with ​“time-of-use” rates that charge customers less during midday hours and more during late afternoon and evening hours when demand for electricity often spikes. At the same time, widespread precooling allows APS to buy more cheap off-peak solar power from its neighbors, including solar-saturated California, and use less power during expensive peaks.

APS can also ​“stagger” the times when smart-thermostat-equipped homes are called on to reduce energy use to better balance fluctuations on its grid, Carnes said. That can help ensure that customers aren’t asked to keep their homes too hot for too long, but it’s also a way to react to real-time conditions that don’t correspond exactly to the preset hours of 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. when customers are charged more for electricity. ​“Just because the residential peak ends at 7:01 doesn’t mean the system peak ends,” she noted.

Flexible dispatch also helps APS avoid ​“snapback,” she said — the effect of turning lots of air conditioners back on at the same time, which can lead to huge power draws that further unbalance the grid. That’s a common problem with demand response, and one that well-designed programs should try to avoid, she said.

Comparing and contrasting approaches to demand response 

The approach Arizona’s biggest utilities are taking stands somewhat in contrast to the way residential demand response is developing in two other states suffering from heat-related grid strains: California and Texas.

California has invested billions of dollars in emergency grid resources since it experienced rolling blackouts during an August 2020 heat wave, and hundreds of thousands of customers in the state are enrolled in smart-thermostat programs, including more than 100,000 customers of Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, and more than 200,000 signed up with demand response provider OhmConnect.

But the state’s increasingly complex and cumbersome structures for rewarding participation in these programs have held back their impact, according to demand-response advocates. Recent changes in the state’s approach to demand response could further erode this potential, the industry warns.

And in Texas, where energy market deregulation and policy have limited investment in and incentives for residential energy efficiency and demand response, the state remains well behind many others in tapping the grid-relief potential of homes and apartments, grid experts say. That’s despite the state’s ongoing challenges meeting rising summer power demand — not to mention its catastrophic grid collapse during the winter storms of February 2021.

A May report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that investments in energy efficiency and demand response could reduce Texas’ summer and winter grid emergencies far more cheaply and quickly than the state’s current focus on building more fossil-gas-fired power plants — with the biggest summertime load reductions potential coming from free or low-cost smart thermostats combined with air-conditioner demand response.

Paul Hines, EnergyHub’s vice president of power systems, highlighted preliminary 2022 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration that shows how different approaches are yielding different results in Arizona compared to Texas. That data shows that Arizona utilities were enabling nearly three times the number of kilowatts of peak load reduction per customer compared to utilities in Texas, while only spending twice as much per customer, he said.

“Both California and Texas have a complicated layer of incentive programs to work within,” Hines said. ​“What we’ve found is, the simpler we’ve made this, the more success you have.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Smart thermostats are helping Arizona’s grid ride out extreme heat on Sep 24, 2023.

This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News.

Olivia Dreizen Howell wasn’t seeking out a climate lesson when she and her kids, aged 7 and 9, tuned into Molly of Denali, a popular children’s show on PBS. 

But there it was: Molly, a 10-year-old Alaska Native and vlogger from the fictional village of Qyah, goes with her friends to visit an old clubhouse. Upon arriving, they find it has begun to sink into the ground.  The episode, “Not So Permafrost,” follows Molly as she uncovers why her refuge is sinking in the first place. It served as an unexpected opening for Dreizen Howell and her family to discuss the climate crisis.

“It helped us to talk about different cultures, how climate change impacts cold climates and how we can combat it,” said Dreizen Howell, who lives in Huntington, New York.

Like many parents, Dreizen Howell worries for her children’s future on a hotter planet. By the time her children are in their thirties, New York will have, on average, 57 days above 90 degrees per year, compared to 18 on average today.

But outside of talking about science lessons at their Montessori school, she hadn’t discussed the crisis with them.

“The show helped us discuss it,” Dreizen Howell says. “We watched the show at night before bed, and it was a nice moment to talk about how the earth is different now and what we can do to help keep our planet going strong.”

Increasingly, children’s programs are taking on the climate crisis. In April, Apple TV released Jane, a show about a young environmentalist who idolizes Jane Goodall and tracks down endangered species. On Netflix’s Octonauts: Above and Beyond, the titular team travels the world protecting animals and habitats from a changing climate. Other shows like Sesame Street and PBS’s City Island have also aired climate-related episodes.

Experts say shows like these can help families find the language to discuss a stressful subject.

“We need to be talking about [the climate crisis], and programming can be a way for parents to ask questions about what kids observed in the show and see what comes up,” said Erica Smithwick, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and member of Science Moms, an advocacy group.

But these shows are exceptions from the norm, said Alisa Petrosova, associate director of climate research and consulting programs at Good Energy, a nonprofit that aims to increase the number of climate storylines on film and television. 

In 2022, Good Energy published an analysis of nearly 38,000 scripted TV shows and films. “Only 2.8 percent [of analyzed scripts] included key terms around climate change,” Petrosova said. Key terms included “climate change”, “fracking”, “global warming” and “save the planet,” among others. Good Energy aims to get that figure up to 50 percent of all shows — for children and adults alike — by 2027. 

(Good Energy has currently paused consulting projects with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to adhere to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, although it is consulting with independent creators within strike parameters.)

Wanting to hide scary things like the climate crisis from children is a natural caregiver response, said Leslie Davenport, a therapist specializing in climate-related mental health issues. But avoiding the topic can do more harm than good, especially since children likely already know and are concerned about climate change.

“There are a lot of sensitive, almost taboo topics, like drugs, sex and death,” Davenport said. “But when caregivers avoid conversations, it can create more anxiety.”

According to a 2022 report by Siena College Research Institute, nearly 8 in 10 Americans agree that climate change is a “very” or “somewhat serious” problem, but only about half of parents with children (49 percent) said they had talked with their children about it. Yet, 3 in 10 respondents with children said their children had told them that they worry about climate change.

Yatibaey Evans, the creative producer of Molly of Denali, who is herself Alaska Native, said the show has helped raise awareness about how Alaskans are dealing with climate change and has sparked intergenerational conversations about the crisis. 

“We’re seeing, on a large scale, more folks wanting to learn how we can help create resilience in our children as the environment is changing around us,” Evans said. “We’re also seeing how we can gain strength from the wisdom of our ancestors.” (As a non-commercial public television program, Molly of Denali is not affected by the WGA or actors guild strikes.)

Children’s programming about climate change doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom — and in fact, it shouldn’t be, advocates say. “Neuroscience has shown that people learn in a different way when they’re laughing and dancing,” Petrosova said. “It’s not like every single climate narrative needs to have the reaction of laughter, but it is still important to figure out what are the most entertaining ways, dramatic or comedic, to incorporate the stories.” 

Of course, no one’s suggesting that screens should do all the work of educating children on the climate crisis — or assuaging their anxiety. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends limiting screen time for children under 2 years old to supervised, educational programming and to 1-3 hours per day for children between 2 and 5.)

Climate programming needs to be accompanied by conversations, especially given the gravity of the topic, Smithwick said, adding that adults can help young people avoid climate doom and anxiety by highlighting ways people are coming together to solve problems. 

“I do worry that, in general, communication on climate change is very dire,” she said. “[The situation] is dire, but at the same time, I’m inspired every day by the solutions I’ve seen, and it’s really important for kids to understand that message, too.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline From <i>Jane</i> to the <i>Octonauts</i>, children’s TV is taking on the climate crisis on Sep 23, 2023.