Prince William announced 15 inaugural finalists Friday for the Earthshot Prize, his ambitious global environmental award that aims to find new ideas and technologies to tackle climate change, air pollution and the Earth’s most pressing challenges.

The finalists include a 14-year-old student who proposes using solar energy to replace charcoal to power millions of roadside ironing carts in India; a land-based coral farm in the Bahamas to restore dying coral reefs; a community project in Congo devoted to protecting gorillas; and a Kenyan enterprise that turns organic waste into fertilizer and insect protein for farmers.

Five winners will be chosen next month from the 15 finalists, and each will receive a grant worth £1 million ($1.4 million). In addition, 14 global companies and brands, including Microsoft, Unilever, Ikea and Walmart, have agreed to support and scale the ideas developed by the finalists.

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“When we launched the prize last year, our ambition was to find the most innovative solutions to the world’s greatest environmental challenges,” William said in a pre-recorded video announcing the finalists.

He said the award received over 700 nominations this year, and that the ambition and quality of the submissions “should fill us all with optimism and hope that our goals for this decisive decade are achievable.”

William and his charity, The Royal Foundation, launched the Earthshot Prize last year, inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “Moonshot” speech that challenged and inspired Americans to go to the moon. William said he wanted to capture that “spirit of human ingenuity, purpose and optimism.”

The prize is billed as the most prestigious of its kind, with a £50 million prize pot to be awarded to five winners every year until 2030.

One of the shortlisted candidates is Delhi-based Vidyut Mohan, who has developed a portable technology that rapidly converts crop residues that would otherwise be burned into bio-products like fuel and fertilizer.

Mohan, 30, said he was inspired to act after seeing the skies of his hometown engulfed with black smog from burnt agricultural and forest waste, putting his own family’s health at risk.

“It really felt nice that the problem that we are working on and mission that we are working on is now going to be projected on a global scale and the problem is going to be highlighted,” he said.

Teenager Vinisha Umashankar, also from India, wants to use solar energy to replace charcoal to power the millions of ironing carts used by street vendors pressing clothes daily on the roadside.

“Whatever suited people in the past doesn’t suit the present generation anymore, and it doesn’t suit our world situation anymore either,” said Umashankar, 14.

The award is the most ambitious project yet launched by William, who has long supported conservation charities in Africa and led work to tackle illegal wildlife trafficking.

Jason Knauf, chief executive of The Royal Foundation, said William was inspired by both his father’s and grandfather’s work on the environment and wanted to leave a “personal” legacy with the award.

“It’s like if you know that this is the 10 years that really matters, it’s the legacy: ‘What am I going to be able to say to my children in the future about what my contribution was during this decisive decade?’” Knauf said.

The winners will be chosen by a committee including veteran broadcaster David Attenborough, actor Cate Blanchett and World Trade Organization director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

The winners are due to be announced in a ceremony on Oct. 17.

—With assistance from James Brooks

Studies from COVID-19 vaccine makers and public health officials have been suggesting for a while that protection provided by the vaccines wanes over time. In a new study published on Sept. 15 to a preprint server—the study is not yet peer-reviewed—researchers at Moderna, which makes one of the two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (the other is from Pfizer-BioNTech), report that people vaccinated within the last eight months had 36% fewer breakthrough infections than those who were vaccinated a year ago.

That suggests vaccine-induced immunity is likely highest shortly after people get their recommended two doses of the vaccine, and starts to drop afterward. The Moderna vaccine received emergency use authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Dec. 2020; the FDA is currently reviewing the company’s request for full approval of the shot.
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The latest data are part of an ongoing Phase 3 study of that includes more than 14,000 people who were randomly assigned to receive either two doses of the Moderna vaccine or two doses of placebo from July to October 2020, and more than 11,000 people who were originally assigned to receive placebo doses from December 2020 to March 2021 and, after the EUA was granted, chose to receive two doses of the vaccine. In that latter group, which completed its two-dose regimen about eight months ago, 88 people tested positive for COVID-19, compared to 162 people who had breakthrough cases in the earlier vaccinated group. That means the more recently vaccinated people had a 36% lower incidence of breakthrough infections than those immunized a year ago. (Overall, only 19 of the 250 breakthrough cases were severe.)The results, Moderna says, suggests protection wanes over time, which is why the company submitted data to the FDA to authorize a booster dose to provide better protection against COVID-19.

To make its case for an additional dose, Moderna’s scientists published results from another study on Sept. 15, in the journal Nature Medicine, comparing the efficacy of four different types of booster approaches. In the small study of 79 people, some received a third dose of the same two-dose vaccine they already received, some got a dose of a vaccine developed specifically against the Beta variant, some received a lower dose of this Beta variant vaccine, and a final group received a combination of the original and Beta variant shots. The data confirmed that about six months after people are fully vaccinated with two doses, levels of antibodies that can neutralize the original version of SARS-CoV-2 dropped by about six- to seven-fold. But boosting with an additional dose of any of the four vaccines the researchers tested increased levels of antibodies about a month later. The combination dose was the most effective, increasing antibody levels by 46-fold, compared to a 16.7-fold increase with a third dose of existing vaccine, an 11.3-fold increase with the Beta-specific booster, and a 9.2-fold increase with the lower dose Beta-specific booster.

More encouraging, the researchers say, is that these antibody levels reached or exceeded—in some cases as high as by 4.4 times—those produced in the first month after two doses of the vaccine—even against variants like Beta, Gamma and Delta. That suggests the immune system retains some memory of SARS-CoV-2 and the booster can amplify and accelerate the immune response to build on the original protection against the virus and even tackle variants that have mutated from the original form.

“We’ve been saying that we are going to have to have a variant booster, and that booster is going to have to be multivalent [and able to recognize different variants],” says Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna. “Then the clinical trial data came in … and we see a small benefit when we match a variant strain with the booster. But it’s not dramatic, and it’s not overwhelming benefit. In fact the [original] vaccine does really well against Delta.”

The idea is similar to the concept of a rising tide lifting all boats. The Delta variant, fortunately, has not learned to escape the immune system’s defenses; its success spreading among human populations has largely been because of its ability to flood the zone and quickly infect as many cells as possible in any unprotected person. Confronting that onslaught with an equally massive immune response, which, it seems, can be generated by a booster dose of the original vaccine, is sufficient to keep Delta at bay—and keeping any virus that does get through from causing severe disease.

Hoge says he is not worried so much about Delta, as about what might come after Delta. While the Delta variant hasn’t learned to escape the immune system yet, other variants, including Beta and Gamma, have shown signs of such evolution. If, over the course of the next few months, some of the known strains find a way to meld their respective strengths, the resultant variant could become a public health nightmare. Moderna is working on a vaccine that would target Beta, Gamma and Delta, in case such a strain does actually emerge this winter. “The [mRNA] platform allows us to take a chance and get ahead of that possibility and be ready if we need it,” says Hoge. That booster could be ready and tested in a small group of people by the end of the year and available more widely in the first quarter of 2022 if needed, he says.

In the meantime, Moderna has already developed a vaccine designed specifically to protect against the Delta variant, but Hoge says it’s not likely it would be necessary as a booster, since the existing vaccine can generate an adequate enhanced immune response even against Delta.

Researchers at Pfizer-BioNTech, who have also developed an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, built a Delta-specific vaccine as well, and have begun testing it in the lab. But infectious-disease experts don’t agree on whether a COVID-19 booster is even needed at this point. While both Pfizer and Moderna have submitted data to the FDA as a part of requests to green-light an additional dose of their vaccines, and the White House COVID-19 team backs the idea, experts at the FDA do not seem convinced a booster is necessary. Ahead of a Sept. 17 FDA advisory committee meeting of independent experts who will review the latest data on Pfizer-BioNTech’s booster, the agency recently posted a report expressing the need for strong data to support the need for a booster dose. “Overall, the data indicate currently US-licensed or authorized COVID-19 vaccines still afford protection against severe COVID-19 disease and death in the United States,” the FDA scientists said. “There are many potentially relevant studies, but the FDA has not independently reviewed or verified the underlying data or their conclusions.”

In the end, the camping trip up the flank of Mt. Rainier that the Inspiration4 crew made back in April may have done more than anything else to prepare them for tonight’s successful launch into Earth orbit, at 8:02 p.m. ET from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Even the day before the launch, at a T-minus-27-hour press conference, they were still talking about the experience and what it taught them.

Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and who tonight became the first person to fly in space with a prosthetic—a rod in place of her left femur, which she lost to childhood cancer—called the hike the most daunting and transformative part of the training, one that forged powerful bonds among the all-civilian crew members. “It was 10 hours of hiking and three days of camping with four people in small tents,” she said.
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Chris Sembroski, 41, an engineer at Lockheed Martin in Everett, Washington, sees the three days the crew will spend in orbit before their Saturday splashdown as, in some ways, nothing more than an extension of the Mr. Rainier trip. “It will be like camping with your three closest friends in a van for three days,” he said. Sembroski even packed a ukulele for the journey, which he will use to perform a song from space as part of the mission’s goal of raising $200 million for St. Jude.

More: Watch TIME Studios’ Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space on Netflix

But if this is a camping trip, it began like no other, with a liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying Inspiration4’s SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft precisely on time on a warm but breezy Florida evening, with temperatures of 81º F under a partly cloudy sky. At T-0, the nine engines on the 230-ft. Falcon lit and the rocket muscled itself off the pad. The first stage burned for 156 seconds, carrying the crew 50 miles high before cutting off on schedule and coming in for an upright landing on a recovery barge. Then the second stage ignited, and just over eight and a half minutes after launch, the crew of Inspiration4 was in orbit.

The Inspiration4 mission was the brainchild of Isaacman, the billionaire CEO of Shift4 Payments, an online payments company, who bought all four seats aboard the Dragon for a reported $50 million apiece. The goal was to fly the first all-civilian, non-professional astronaut crew to space and, in the process, raise a bounty for St. Jude.

Isaacman knew from the start that he wanted a St. Jude employee on the crew, and the hospital recommended Arceneaux, who promptly accepted—after, as she likes to note, checking with her mom. Sembroski won his seat in a sweepstakes that he entered by making a contribution to St. Jude. The fourth crew member, Sian Proctor, 51, a professor of geosciences at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Ariz., had her ticket punched by winning a contest to design an online store using Shift4’s software. Proctor is only the fourth Africa-American woman to fly in space and, as second in command aboard Inspiration4, the first to carry the title “pilot.”

“This is really special,” she said at the press event. “One of my goals with this flight is to inspire the next generation of women of color.”

“Inspire” is a word that comes up a lot with this mission—and not just in its name. That’s the way Isaacman—a jet pilot who, as he says, could have just gone up with a bunch of his flying buddies if he had merely wanted to go to space—likes things. He even assigned each of the seats on the spacecraft the name of a quality he hopes the mission—and the astronauts—will embody. His own spot is the leadership seat; Arceneaux’s is hope, Sembroski’s is generosity and Proctor’s is prosperity. And if that seems as much marketing as anything else, it’s marketing that’s working: Isaacman donated the first $100 million to St. Jude out of his own pocket, but small donors have contributed another $30 million toward the final $200 million target. With the publicity generated by tonight’s launch and the three days the astronauts will be in space, that total is expected to grow.

“I know we’re going to crush that $200 million goal,” said Arceneaux.

While aloft, the crew will also be doing some hard science—and a bit of less-hard science. As medical officer, Arcneaux will be collecting saliva swabs and blood from fingertip pricks from the crew to conduct experiments on the microbiome in space, as well as conducting ultrasound experiments to analyze fluid shifts in the body in zero-g. Proctor, an artist in her terrestrial life, will be painting in space, and is anxious to learn about the fluid dynamics of water colors in a weightless environment.

The crew is also aiming for a record of sorts—flying to an ultimate altitude of more than 350 miles, about 100 miles higher than the International Space Station flies. That’s farther than any human beings have gone from Earth since the end of the Apollo lunar program in 1972. For Isaacman, scaling yet another mountain, this one off-planet, is about more than just bragging rights.

“We want to get outside of our comfort zone,” he said. “If we ultimately want to go to the moon and Mars we should start taking steps today so we can eventually make life interplanetary. I wish we pushed them to go even higher.”

There will be other perks to reaching that cosmic high ground. Since Inspiration4 is not going to the space station, SpaceX removed the docking collar at the nose of the Dragon and replaced it with a transparent cupola—the largest window ever built for space, and which should make for breathtaking sightseeing.

Much of the chatter surrounding the mission has involved the slow commercialization and, more aspirationally, democratization of space—an opening of the celestial door to more than just test pilots, rocket jocks and PhDs. If Inspiration4 is a step in that direction, it’s admittedly a small step. It still took a deep-pocketed and decidedly generous billionaire to make it happen—not a model that can be easily followed. But tonight’s launch nonetheless had irresistible appeal—for the character of the crew, for the charitable purpose of the mission, for the sweet and smooth liftoff on a soft Florida night. Inspiration4 may inspire more such flights; for now, this one is enough.

Are you ready to go to space? Join TIME and Netflix as we bring you the launch of Inspiration4—the first-ever all-civilian orbital mission—live.

The Inspiration4 crew, including mission commander Jared Issacman, mission pilot and geoscience professor Dr. Sian Proctor, payload specialist and Lockheed Martin aerospace engineer Chris Sembroski, and medical officer and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, has been training for the mission for months. The team has spent hours upon hours in simulators and classrooms, and now they’re ready for the real deal, launching for three days in orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Once in space, the crew will spend time communicating with loved ones, students and space fans back home, as well as conducting various experiments. The launch will be historic in more ways than one, as Arceneaux will become the first person with a prosthetic to fly to space. “People who went to space in the past had to be perfect physical specimens,” she recently told TIME, “and that’s not the case anymore. I’m going to be the first pediatric cancer patient to go, but I won’t be the last.”

To learn more about the Inspiration4 mission, read TIME’s previous coverage. Also be sure to check out TIME Studios’ Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission To Space on Netflix, a docuseries covering everything from the crew members’ unconventional selection and intensive months-long commercial astronaut training to the intimate moments leading up to liftoff.

Read More About the Inspiration4 Mission:

• The First All-Civilian Team of Astronauts Is Headed to Space. Here’s What to Know About the Inspiration4 Mission
• With Private Space Flight on the Rise, Who Gets to Be Called an Astronaut?
• From Civilians to Astronauts: How the Inspiration4 Crew Trained to Go to Space
• Inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon: Here’s how the Inspiration4 Crew Will Fly to Space
• Meet the All-Civilian Crew of Inspiration 4, From a St. Jude’s Physician Assistant to a Lockheed Martin Engineer

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here.

One of the perks of going out on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker in the Arctic is something called Ice Liberty. Ports are few and far between when you’re north of the Arctic Circle, so instead of shore leave, Coastguardsmen and women will locate a large slab of floating ice, cordon off a safe area, put up a watch for polar bears, and throw a football around. It’s cold, but worth it, says electrician master chief Mark Hulen, who, over the past two decades, has gone out for Ice Liberty on every one of his last six Arctic missions with the Coast Guard. But this year, as the Coast Guard cutter Healy —one of two ice breakers in the U.S. Fleet—traversed the Arctic from Seattle to Baltimore via the Northwest Passage, Ice Liberty wasn’t an option. “We struggled with finding a good enough piece of ice to stand on,” he says. “Nothing was thick enough.”

A small disappointment for Hulen and his crewmates is a warning sign of things to come. The Arctic is warming at roughly twice the rate as the rest of the world, and summer sea ice cover has declined to unprecedented lows. Arctic sea ice minimums are measured in September, before the winter starts a new cycle. This year’s extent was tied for seventh lowest in 43 years of recordings (2020 was the second lowest). Overall, minimum sea ice extent has decreased by more than a third since 1979. That means what would have been work for an icebreaker 40 years ago was largely smooth sailing this time around. But that doesn’t mean things will get any easier for the Coast Guard. In fact, it’s likely to get a lot harder. “A warming Arctic means more work for the Coast Guard,” says Admiral Karl L. Schultz, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard. And not just in the Arctic, but across the United States. “There is that old saying that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” he says. “Well, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.”

That sea ice decline has critical effects on climate and weather, says oceanographer Larry Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, and the lead scientist on the Healy expedition. “The greater extent of the open water in the Arctic is having a severe impact on storminess in North America. A lot of the anomalous weather patterns we’ve seen over the past few months are really a direct result of that.”

By some estimates, we could start seeing consistently ice-free Arctic summers as early as 2035 and certainly by 2050 if fossil fuel emissions are not radically reduced, according to a study published last year in Nature Climate Change. For centuries explorers had sought a sea route through the Arctic Archipelago north of mainland Canada. Such a route, dubbed the Northwest Passage, would dramatically shorten shipping times between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. In 1906, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first man to successfully navigate the passage by boat. But the perennially ice-bound route was never easy. By the 100^th anniversary of Amundsen’s successful transit, only 103 other transits had been completed. But as summer sea ice declines, the passage becomes increasingly viable. Since 2006, cruise liners, pleasure yachts, ice breakers and other vessels have transited the Northwest Passage more than 200 times. Easy access to the top of the planet opens up immense opportunities for resource extraction, tourism and shipping traffic. It also opens up the region to conflict, ecological disaster, and, for both the Canadian and U.S. Coast Guards, the potential for increased search-and-rescue operations as explorers and tourists venture further north in search of adventure.

On Sept. 6 Admiral Schultz joined his Canadian counterpart on the Healy to observe a joint search-and-rescue exercise in the Northwest Passage. TIME was invited along. As crewmembers raced to rescue a boat full of stranded and drowning mannequins in the vast, frigid expanse of Resolute Bay, Shultz spoke to TIME about what a warming Arctic means for U.S. foreign policy, maritime security and Arctic governance. And while he covered the expected geostrategic implications of trans-Arctic shipping routes and newly accessible mining resources, he returned repeatedly to the issue of climate change. It’s a subject impossible to ignore up in the Arctic. “Over the course of my 40-year Coast Guard career we’ve seen a 31 to 32% reduction in the amount of ice in the Arctic. That’s palpable,” says Schultz.

Sea ice reflects 80% of sunlight back into space. When there is no ice, the darker waters absorb up to 90% of that solar energy, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It’s like parking a black car and a white car next to each other on a sunny day,” says Shultz. “Take the thermometer inside, and you will see the black car is going to be a whole lot hotter.” The more the ocean absorbs the sun’s rays, the warmer it gets, which in turn melts even more ice in a continuous feedback loop. The effect stays through the winter, resulting in a decline of multi-year ice—the thick layers packed together over the course of years that make for good Ice Liberty sessions—which means at the beginning of the following summer, there is even less of an ice base to start from.

The Arctic, says Schultz, acts as the planet’s refrigerator. When it stops functioning the effects are felt globally, and not always predictably. A study published in Science last week drew strong links between a warming arctic and the deep freeze that devastated Texas in early 2021. “What we are seeing here is a harbinger for weather across the globe,” says Schultz. When the Arctic warms, there is less of a temperature difference between the northern and southern latitudes. That in turn weakens the jet stream, the band of wind that circulates the globe in the upper atmosphere, driving weather patterns. “When the jet stream is in a weaker state it tends to take these bigger north–south swings,” says climatologist Jennifer Francis, acting deputy director for the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center. It also moves more slowly, which means that the weather patterns stay in place longer. Both the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest earlier this summer as well as the droughts and subsequent wildfires that have plagued the Southwest and California can be attributed to this effect. So too can the rapid intensification of Hurricane Ida and unusually wet summers on the east coast. So even though those extremes seem like polar opposites, they are, in fact, two manifestations of the same phenomenon. “Those are all tied to the fact that the globe is warming so fast, and that what is happening in the Arctic is accelerating that warming,” says Francis.

A third of Americans were impacted by extreme weather events over the past three months, according to a recent assessment by The Washington Post. The Atlantic hurricane season of 2021 is shaping up to be just as bad, if not worse, than 2020’s record-breaking season. As someone who has served in the Coast Guard since 1983, and as its commander for the past three years, Shultz has had a front row seat to some of the worst weather-related disasters the U.S. has ever seen. More are bound to follow.

Just because Hulen and his fellow crewmates couldn’t find a good enough slab for ice liberty doesn’t mean the Healy saw nothing but open waters. Earlier in the transit, the icebreaker encountered a passage clogged with towering, jagged fragments of broken ice that had been compacted together by severe winds. Ridged ice, as the phenomenon is called, is much more dangerous to traverse than what is known as fast ice—flat slabs attached to land that make for easier ice-breaking. As multi-year ice declines, ridged ice will be more common. A warming Arctic means the Coast Guard will be navigating a more challenging route, both north of the Arctic Circle as well as further afield.

When Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans in early September, Tonya Freeman-Brown made the difficult decision to stay in the city. The 53 year-old and her family sheltered in an old brick hotel in the downtown area, watching fierce winds of up to 150 mph pelt rainwater at the windows, and remembering the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, 16 years earlier to the day. It was stressful, but Freeman-Brown had a job to do, she says. “We’re no match for nature, but this is what we’ve trained for. This is what the Resilience Corps was built for.”

Like firefighters put out fires, and waste collectors keep the city clean, the job of the New Orleans Resilience Corps is to help the city be resilient to shocks, crises and climate change. Launched by the city in October 2020, as a pilot to run for two years, the corp’s 40 workers were mainly people who had lost jobs in the hospitality industry during the pandemic, who are now on full-time contracts, starting at $12 an hour with a path to an $18 an hour wage. Freeman-Brown joined after losing her work as a corporate massage therapist at an insurance company. The corps spent much of the last year working to support the city through COVID-19 and get people vaccinated.
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Hurricane Ida is the first climate disaster that the corps has confronted. Though the sophisticated system of levees, pumps and flood barriers built in the wake of Katrina protected the city from water damage, the storm’s high winds battered the city, killing 13 people there and toppling thousands of power lines and hundreds of substations. The lights remained off across most of New Orleans for a week, with at least 10% of electric customers still without power nine days later. The city’s hospitals, already struggling with some of the highest COVID-19 case rates in the country, scrambled to treat a wave of heat and storm-related emergencies.

Ida has highlighted the disproportionate impact that climate disasters have on lower income residents and elderly or disabled people, says LaTanja Sylvester, program coordinator of the NOLA Resilience Corps. “This really is a tale of two cities. There are individuals who could evacuate, that are out on beaches running around with their kids,” she says. “And then there are families that are stuck in their homes because they could not afford to travel or pay for accommodation to evacuate.” Those that couldn’t evacuate were left stranded in 90°F-plus heat and humidity, with no internet, no cold water and food rotting in their fridges.

The corps aims to help those more vulnerable NOLA residents bounce back from a crisis as fast as more privileged groups. Since it became safe to go outside, Freeman-Brown and her colleagues have been delivering ice to homes, checking in on people who couldn’t evacuate, and serving up food donated by local restaurants to thousands left hungry by broken refrigerators. In the coming weeks, when power is fully restored, the team may pivot to helping those whose homes were damaged by the winds to rebuild or file insurance claims, or support those who catch COVID-19 during this period—whatever is needed.

The NOLA resilience corps’ work after Ida is a key test for a model that advocates hope to see repeated in cities across the country as climate change makes extreme weather events more common and more widespread. According to analysis published Sept. 4 by the Washington Post, in the last three months, nearly one in three Americans have experienced a weather disaster in their county. “Each of these disasters makes us realize what kind of new infrastructure we need, as with the levees in New Orleans,” says Saket Soni, the founder of Resilience Force, a national nonprofit labor organization which helped the city set up the corps. “But we also need a new workforce. Because the amount of work is exploding.”

As greenhouse gases build up in our atmosphere, and the earth warms, the global climate is becoming increasingly unstable. The result of that instability is an increasing number of extreme weather events—as the droughts, storms, heatwaves and floods of this summer have reminded us. In August, the World Meteorological Organization published a report finding that weather-related disasters have increased five-fold over the last 50 years, with a seven-fold increase in the economic losses they create.

Resilience Force argues that the increase in destructive events requires a professionalization of the workers who help to keep towns moving during slow-moving disasters like droughts and get them back on their feet in the wake of shocks like storms. Soni began thinking about what he terms the “resilience workforce” in 2005, after he came to New Orleans as a relief worker after Hurricane Katrina. Unemployed people had come from all over—neighboring states, the midwest, Mexico, Peru—he says, to take part in the rebuilding from the storm, which remains the most expensive weather event on record in the U.S. Soni spent the next 10 years working as a labor organizer, representing mainly migrant workers and people doing irregular, temporary jobs in the disaster clean-up sector. In 2015 he founded Resilience Force, a national labor organization that advocates for the rights of around 2,000 of those workers and helps direct them to where their services are needed.

“Volunteerism is really important and we will always need those surges in volunteers, but you can’t sustain it,” Soni argues. “You need a permanent infrastructure of people who are in jobs they can support families with and, given the enormous responsibilities they have, are trained.”

Momentum is building for that idea. Several other cities have launched jobs programs similar to the New Orleans Resilience Corps since the pandemic began. In November 2020, Portland, Maine, announced a 14-person resilience corps to work on transport planning and climate security. In March this year, San Jose, Calif., said it would hire 500 mostly young people to work on the pandemic response, environmental resilience, and disaster preparedness. According to Soni, Resilience Force is in talks with officials from Sonoma County in California, Miami and Houston about launching their own pilots.

For now, most of these programs, including the NOLA corps, rely on funding from charitable foundations and nonprofits. But support is growing among Democrats for the creation of federal funding for corps-style programs, inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the depression-era work relief program rolled out as part of the New Deal. Though not included in the bipartisan infrastructure bill approved by the Senate in August, some kind of climate corps is expected to be a significant part of a $3.5 trillion package focused on climate change and families that Democrats are bringing forward. The Climate Mayors coalition, a bipartisan group of 470 mayors focused on climate, wrote to congress in July advocating for support for 500,000 corps jobs.

The NOLA Corps’ local-focused model is a new frontier for Resilience Force. Unlike its national members, who move from town to town following crises, those in the NOLA Corp are people living long-term in New Orleans, from wards all over the city. That gives the group some advantages over larger out-of-town relief agencies, Sylvester says. “FEMA has to come in, set up, bring in people from out of town that they contract with. But we were on the ground [almost immediately].” Because corps members live and have often grown up in the communities they’re looking after, she adds, they know, for example, where there might be an elderly or disabled individual who can’t leave their home and might be struggling to reach help, she says, or who’s the “go-to” person in town for specific problems.

Being embedded in the community has allowed the corps to reach residents who often don’t know how to access support or resources during a crisis, says corps member Claudio Venancio, 33. Venancio has served on the corps’ Latinx outreach team, spreading information on the COVID-19 vaccine and delivering presentations on hurricane preparedness for Spanish-speaking residents of the city, including undocumented people. “I’m a recipient of DACA so I know firsthand what it’s like to think ‘well I’m not a citizen, so I don’t qualify for any [support],” he says.

Venancio joined the corps when it began in October 2020 after losing work as an actor due to the pandemic. He was promoted to team supervisor in August and says he now expects that resilience work will be his primary career for “the next half” of his life. “This job is so fulfilling to me that, like—I love acting and performing, but this is my career,” he says.

With three months to go in this year’s hurricane season—and the NOAA predicting above average storm activity—Venancio says the corps is bracing for a busy few months. “We’re prepared to aid our city however we can. Nobody’s going to help our community like our own community.”

For decades, the rangers at Denali National Park in Alaska were easily winning their battle against a slow-moving landslide underneath the park’s only road. Now, due in part to the effects of climate change, they are losing very badly.

This summer, the National Parks Service has been frantically dropping 100 dump-trucks-worth of gravel every week on the top of the Pretty Rocks Landslide in an effort to keep up with its accelerating pace, which is the result of rapidly thawing permafrost in the country’s fastest-warming state. Two weeks ago, as the landslide hit unprecedented speed, causing the ground around it to undulate with each passing truck, the team conceded defeat and closed the back half of the park weeks earlier than anticipated. The closure is bad news both in the short term—with hundreds of camping and hotel reservations cancelled on a local economy that depends on tourism—and a scary omen for an entire state that rests on similarly thawing terrain.
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“This is the canary in the coal mine for infrastructure disruption in Alaska,” says Simon Hamm, the owner of the lodge Camp Denali, who was forced to lead an evacuation of 70 guests and staff and shut down his business weeks early, resulting in potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss in revenue. “If things continue on the path they’re on, it’s not going to just be Pretty Rock—it’s going to be half of the Alaskan highway system.”

Rapid deterioration

Denali National Park is one of the U.S.’s largest national parks at 6 million acres, and sits about four hours north of Anchorage. While the entrance to the park is certainly beautiful, many people prefer to hop on buses to access the park’s marquee attractions deep down its single 92-mile road: views of Mt. Denali (formerly Mt. McKinley), the highest peak in North America at 20,000 feet; the gleaming Wonder Lake; rolling mountainsides that contain an abundance of wildlife, including grizzly bears, moose, caribou and bighorn sheep.

About halfway along the road lies the Pretty Rocks Landslide, a slowly sliding section of earth that acts more like a glacier than a rockfall. Since the 1960s, permafrost deep below the earth’s surface has thawed, causing the soil and road on top of it—which snakes alongside a steep cliff—to develop cracks, soften and cave. For most of that time, the landslide only required minimal maintenance, says geologist Denny Capps, who joined the park’s team in 2011. “When I came, it was more of a ‘If you have time’ kind of thing. We had other more pressing issues,” he says.

But starting in the mid-2010s, the pace of the landslide started to exponentially increase. While the landslide had initially moved several inches a year, it was now moving several inches per week, causing severe dips in the road as well as other chaotic movement. Over the last two years, the department has been forced to close that stretch of road multiple times due to heavy rains, rockfall and mudslides, including an incident in August 2019 that left 300 people and 17 buses stranded for hours.

This summer has been even worse. “In the last few days, the road itself is moving at about 15 and a half inches per day,” Capps says. “When you’re coming around the corner, it just drops into a swell in the road that’s getting larger and larger. It gets so steep that the buses have literally dragged their bumpers through there.”

As a short-term fix, the Parks Service had been digging up gravel from the nearby Toklat River and dumping it by the ton onto the dipping spot in the road. But two weeks ago, as the ground continued to soften and the river’s resources began to deplete, the park’s leadership pulled the plug and instead shut down the road.

“Changing climate is driving frozen ground to thaw, resulting in unpredictable and increasing landslide movement rates at Pretty Rocks that are unprecedented in the history of the park road,” Don Striker, Denali’s Superintendent, wrote in a press release on Aug. 24. “We cannot safely keep up with the accelerating rate of landslide movement caused by permafrost thaw.”

Dozens of campers who had set up their tents deep into the park were gradually bussed out; campers who had scheduled stays in the following days at Wonder Lake were relocated to closer campgrounds, while many more cancelled altogether. Adding to the chaos at the park was a bear attack on a camper, who was mauled by a protective mother bear and treated for puncture wounds, and a snowstorm that arrived ahead of schedule, forcing the road to close for all incoming visitors.

Now, the back half of the park is closed for the winter—and without the remedial gravel hauled in, the area around the landslide will deteriorate rapidly. The situation is extremely worrying to the surrounding community, which relies heavily on Denali tourism. Given that the landslide has been accelerating every year, many are skeptical the road will be passable at all next season. “The economic impact is in double digit millions of dollars—and for a population of 2,000 people, it’s really significant,” Vanessa Jusczak, the executive director of the Denali Chamber, says. “It’s almost immeasurable what this could do to the local economy, and especially on the heels of COVID, where so many businesses are cutting services and hours. To have this incredible unknown for another season makes business owners very hesitant to invest in growth in any way.”

At Camp Denali at the end of the road, Hamm had to cancel two full weeks of bookings, amounting to 15% percent of his total operating season after a blank 2020 cancelled by the coronavirus. He is reluctantly considering a business model for a future in which all guests and resources would be flown in. “There’s a whole lot of stuff that has to get reimagined,” he says.

Looking toward an uncertain future

Help may be coming: Alaska’s House of Representatives passed a resolution last year pleading for help from the federal government for a long-term fix to combat the landslide. Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski has been particularly active in stumping for robust construction, and in December, she helped guide an omnibus bill through congress that included funding for a physical bridge over the landslide that may serve as a useful temporary fix, as well as a requirement for the National Park Service to propose a more lasting solution.

“We know it will be an expensive fix. But outside of seeing glaciers and hoping to see a moose or a bear, what every tourist who comes to Alaska wants to be able to see is to see Denali,” Murkowski said last year during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.

While Capps says that a bridge could be helpful, he and other scientists foresee problems that go far beyond this one spot in the road. Geologists have identified more than 100 other unstable areas along the road corridor. A 2014 study asserted that while 75% of the park was covered in shallow permafrost in the 1950s, that number will drop to 6% by the 2050s. And in the surrounding land around the park and across Alaska, a similar thawing is occurring, triggering all sorts of underground movement and infrastructure disruption.

“Permafrost is ice-rich, and when that thaws, it contributes water to the ground, which is one of the main contributors to landslide activity,” Capps says. “Ice literally knits the ground together, and when you take that away, it decreases the stability of the ground. That is also impacting some of our other utilities: roads, pipes, powerlines, buildings.”

Meanwhile, the effects of climate change and extreme weather are being felt all over the world: there have been landslides in Canada, exploding craters in Siberia, wildfires in western U.S. and hurricanes in the tropics. Last week, the National Forest Service closed every national forest in California due to wildfire risk while Hurricane Ida battered states ranging from Louisiana to New York.

“Alaska has always been a difficult place to live and do business, but we’ve managed to do that thus far,” Capps says. “Nonetheless, I think we need to kind of take this as a lesson for what can happen. This is a microcosm for some of the bigger questions we’re having to ask ourselves around the globe these days.”

Scattered three miles deep along the floor of the central Pacific are trillions of black, misshapen nuggets that may just be the solution to an impending energy crisis. Similar in size and appearance to partially burned charcoal briquettes, the nuggets are called polymetallic nodules, and are an amalgamation of nickel, cobalt, manganese and other rare earth metals, formed through a complex biochemical process in which shark teeth and fish bones are encased by minerals accreted out of ocean waters over millions of years.

Marine biologists say they are part of one of the least-understood environments on earth, holding, if not the secret to life on this planet, at least something equally fundamental to the health of its oceans. Gerard Barron, the Australian CEO of seabed-mining company the Metals Company, calls them something else: “a battery in a rock,” and “the easiest way to solve climate change.” The nodules, which are strewn across the 4.5 million-sq-km (1.7 million-sq-mi.) swath of international ocean between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), contain significant amounts of the metals needed to make the batteries that power our laptops, phones and electric cars. Barron estimates that there is enough cobalt and nickel in those nuggets to power 4.8 billion electric vehicles—more than twice the number of vehicles on the road today, worldwide. Mining them, he says, would be as simple as vacuuming golf balls off a putting green.
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But conservationists say doing so could unleash a cascade effect worse than the current trajectory of climate change. Oceans are a vital carbon sink, absorbing up to a quarter of global carbon emissions a year. The process of extracting the nodules is unlikely to disrupt that ability on its own, but the very nature of the world’s oceans—largely contiguous, with a system of currents that circumnavigate the globe—means that what happens in one area could have unforeseen impacts on the other side of the planet. “If this goes wrong, it could trigger a series of unintended consequences that messes with ocean stability, ultimately affecting life everywhere on earth,” says Pippa Howard, director of the biodiversity-conservation organization Fauna and Flora International. The nodules are a core part of a biome roughly the size of the Amazon rain forest, she notes. “They’ve got living ecosystems on them. Taking those nodules and then using them to make batteries is like making cement out of coral reefs.”

The debate over the ethics of mining the earth’s last untouched frontier is growing in both intensity and consequence. It pits biologist against geologist, conservationist against environmentalist, and manufacturer against supplier in a world grappling with a paradox—one that will define our path to a future free of fossil fuels: sustainable energy that will run cleaner but also require metals and resources whose extraction will both contribute to global warming and impact biodiversity. So as nations commit to lower greenhouse-gas emissions, the conflict is no longer between fossil-fuel firms and clean-energy proponents, but rather over what ecosystems we are willing to sacrifice in the process.

History is littered with stories of well-intended environmental interventions that have gone catastrophically wrong; for example, South American cane toads introduced into Australia in the 1930s first failed to control beetles attacking sugarcane, then spread unchecked across the continent, poisoning wildlife and pets.

Nevertheless, a radical embrace of electric vehicles will be necessary to limit global warming to less than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, the goal of the Paris Agreement. But according to a May 2021 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA)—the Paris-based intergovernmental organization that helps shape global energy policies—the world isn’t mining enough of the minerals needed to make the batteries that will power that clean-energy future. Demand for the metals in electric vehicles alone could grow by more than 30 times from 2020 to 2040, say the report’s authors. “If supply chains can’t meet skyrocketing demand, mineral shortages could mean clean-energy shortages,” the report argues. Fears of such shortages have countries and companies racing to secure the supplies needed for the coming energy transition.

By most assessments, existing mines on land could supply the needed minerals. But after decades of exploitation, the quality of the ore is going down while the energy required to quarry and refine it is going up. Meanwhile, the efforts to extract cobalt, which is mined almost exclusively in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are dogged by persistent accounts of human-rights and environmental abuses. According to deep-ocean-mining proponents, the seabed nodules could provide most of the minerals the world needs, with minimal impact. “The biggest risk to the ocean right now is global warming,” says Kris Van Nijen, managing director of the Belgium-based deep-sea-mining company Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR). “And the solution can be found on the seafloor, where there is a single deposit that provides the minerals we need for clean-energy infrastructure.” GSR has already trialed a 12-m-long, 25-ton nodule-sucking robot that zigzags across the ocean floor on caterpillar tracks, kind of like a giant underwater Roomba. They dubbed their prototype “Patania,” after the world’s fastest caterpillar.

Commercial mining is not yet permitted in international waters. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N. body tasked with managing seafloor resources, is still deliberating how, and under what conditions, mining should be allowed to proceed. A few private companies, including GSR and Barron’s Metals Company, have scooped up a couple of dozen metric tons of the nodules on exploratory missions, and are now pressuring the ISA to approve commercial operations. Barron is already telling potential investors that he expects to be harvesting nodules by 2024. GSR says that by the time they are up and running, they will be able to collect up to 3 million tons a year with just two of their mining robots.

Not everyone is on board. Scientists, conservationists, the European Parliament and some national governments are calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until its ecological consequences can be better understood. The ocean environment is already under threat from climate change, overfishing, industrial pollution and plastic debris, they argue; added stresses from heavy machinery and habitat destruction could tip it over the edge. Three miles below the ocean’s surface, the deep seafloor boasts some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet; the perpetual darkness, intense cold and strong pressures foster unique life-forms rarely seen elsewhere, such as a newly discovered ghostly white octopus dubbed “Casper” and an armored snail that researchers believe doesn’t need to eat to survive.

The region may look lifeless, but it is home to thousands of species of tiny invertebrates fundamental to the ocean food web, says deep-ocean marine biologist Diva Amon, whose work is focused on the CCZ. The nodules themselves host microbial life forms that scientists are just starting to investigate—they play an important but poorly understood role in the nodules’ formation that may be vital for a wider comprehension of how ocean processes work. Removing them would be akin to yanking a couple of wires out of the back of your computer just because you don’t know what they’re for. “A lot of the life in the CCZ is very small, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant,” says Amon. “Think about our world without insects. It would collapse.”

The little data available suggests that deep-sea mining could have long-term and potentially devastating impacts on marine life. For example, in 1989, scientists simulated deep-sea mining in an area similar to the CCZ, and in those simulations, marine life never recovered, according to a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports. Plough tracks remain etched on the seafloor 30 years later, while populations of sponges, soft corals and sea anemones have yet to return. If the results of the experiment were extrapolated to the CCZ, the authors concluded, “the impacts of polymetallic-nodule mining there may be greater than expected and could potentially lead to an irreversible loss of some ecosystem functions, especially in directly disturbed areas.”

That said, it’s a hard call, says Amon. “We want to transition to a green economy. But should that mean destroying a potentially huge part of the ocean? I don’t know.”

In June, more than 400 marine scientists and policy experts from 44 countries signed a petition stating that the ISA should not make any decisions about deep-sea mining until scientists have a better understanding of what is at stake and all possible risks are understood. The ISA requires permit holders to undertake three years of environmental-impact assessments before it will grant a commercial license, but given the slow-moving nature of the deep sea, scientists say it would be impossible to understand the impacts in such a short time. Nor is it clear on what grounds, exactly, the ISA will evaluate the results of such studies.

A few days later, the debate grew even more heated as the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru, the ISA member sponsoring Barron’s company in a mining application, announced it wanted to start mining efforts, triggering the ISA’s “two-year rule,” a clause that allows member states to notify the organization of their intention to start deep-sea mining, even if the regulations governing mining have not yet been formalized.

It also triggered international uproar. “Deep-sea-mining companies are peddling a fantasy of untold profits and minimal risks,” says Louisa Casson of Greenpeace’s Protect the Oceans campaign. “Governments who claim to want to protect the oceans simply cannot allow these reckless companies to rush headlong into a race to the bottom, where little-known ecosystems will be ploughed up for profit and the risks and liabilities will be pushed onto small island nations.” Barron, who has invested millions of dollars in preliminary environmental-impact assessments, describes the abyssal plain where the nodules are located as a “lifeless desert” where the impact of mining is likely to be minimal, if felt at all. “I think we are overthinking this. There is a reason why they are full of battery metals. It’s so we can make batteries,” he says.

If you were to discover a cobalt seam in your backyard, the revenue would, in most cases, belong to you or your government. But much of the world’s known deep-sea metal deposits lies under international waters, which means it belongs to the world.

First discovered in the Arctic Ocean in 1868, polymetallic nodules can be found in almost all oceans, but are concentrated in the CCZ. They were widely regarded as geologic curiosities until the 1960s and ’70s, when several multinational mining consortiums started exploring the potential of the CCZ, with mixed results. Despite an estimated yield of 21 billion tons of nodules, commercial interest in mining the CCZ waned, largely because of high extraction costs and the relative abundance of existing sources of the same metals—particularly nickel—on land. Recognizing that the nodules, along with other potentially lucrative seabed mineral deposits in international waters, should be treated as a “common heritage of mankind,” the U.N. established the ISA in 1994, under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The 168-member-country bureaucracy was tasked with organizing, regulating and controlling all mineral-related activities in the international seabed area “for the benefit of mankind as a whole,” with proceeds shared among those who developed the resources and the rest of the international community.

The treaty gives the ISA two almost mutually exclusive mandates, says Aline Jaeckel, a specialist on international seabed-mining law at Potsdam University’s Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Germany: one to administer the mineral resources for the good of mankind, and the other to protect the marine environment from any harm from mining. “They are almost impossible to comply with because any mining will have environmental consequences. There is no way around that. So the question then becomes, How much harm is acceptable?”

Those conflicting mandates may explain why the ISA has yet to issue a single commercial mining permit—and why, in its nearly three decades of existence, it hasn’t even agreed on mining regulations, let alone how revenue from the globally owned resource should be distributed. So far, the ISA has awarded 18 exploration contracts in the CCZ to contractors representing China, Russia and the U.K., along with several other European, Asian and island nation-states. The U.S., which has not yet ratified UNCLOS, tacitly abides by it but has not sought any mining contracts. Once the mining regulations are formally established, exploration-contract holders can apply for commercial-mining permits.

According to the ISA’s mandate, mining revenue from those concessions should be equitably shared among members. Yet industry watchers expect that the organization will establish a royalty fee somewhere from 2% to 6% when it next meets in Kingston, Jamaica. A meeting scheduled to take place in July was postponed indefinitely because of the pandemic. In 2019, a group of 47 ISA members from Africa calculated that the proposed payment regime could lead to a return to member nations of less than $100,000 a year per country, hardly enough to “foster healthy development of the world economy,” as stipulated by the UNCLOS directive to the ISA.

The final amounts could be even less, especially if the ISA establishes more stringent environmental protections, which would require consistent monitoring, an expensive undertaking when it has to happen thousands of miles from port and three miles deep. “The more money put into monitoring, the less gets distributed to the developing states,” says Pradeep Singh, a research associate at IASS in Germany who focuses on seabed-mining issues, and who frequently attends ISA meetings as a consultant for member nations. Apart from a small number of private contractors and supporting states who could potentially receive a windfall, he says, few others would benefit.

Any member nation can sponsor a contract application, but developing nations are given preferential access to concessions with proven deposits, a practice meant to level the playing field. Most sponsoring countries work with their own government-run mining contractors. Nauru partnered with the Metals Company, giving the Canada-based startup preferential access to a 75,000-sq-km area rich in nodules. The details of the Metals Company’s agreement with the government of Nauru are not public, but according to the company’s regulatory filing with the SEC in advance of its pending public listing, the startup estimates that it will earn $95 billion over 23 years of production, of which it will pay 7.6% in royalties to Nauru and the ISA. The rest, presumably, goes to the investors that Barron is now courting.

Singh suspects that Nauru’s recent triggering of the two-year countdown to mining activity was directly linked to the Metals Company’s desire to create investor hype ahead of the listing. Either way, Barron has managed to crown what is at its core an expensive, untested and risky underwater-mining operation with a green halo, promising a surefire—and lucrative, at least for investors—shortcut for saving the planet.

A self-styled maverick with the requisite long hair, beard and leather jacket, Barron professes to be shocked that conservation groups have not wholeheartedly embraced his plan to mine the ocean for the battery metals that will help replace fossil fuels. The alternative, he says, is to keep plundering terrestrial mines with all their devastating environmental and social consequences: biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, contaminated waterways, displaced Indigenous groups and labor exploitation. “If we started mining over again, knowing what we know now, surely we would carry out extractive industries in parts of the planet where there was least life,” he tells TIME via video call. “We wouldn’t go to the rain forest. We would go to the deserts. That’s what we have here in the CCZ: the most desert-like place on the planet. It just happens to be covered by 4,000 m of water.”

Even if seabed mining were able to provide metals in sufficient quantities to feed growing demand for electric vehicles, it’s unlikely that terrestrial mining would come to an end. If anything, demand for the metals would increase, as manufacturers engineer based on the availability of more plentiful supplies. Nor would ocean mining necessarily be immune from the oversight problems that plague land extraction. Fishing on the high seas, for example, is highly regulated on paper, but enforcement is weak because of the difficulty and high costs of policing nearly 100 million square nautical miles of open ocean, leading to rampant abuse.

Nor is it certain that cobalt mining will even be all that important in car-battery technology going forward. To start, there are efforts among many battery manufacturers, Tesla among them, to recycle cobalt (among other elements) from spent batteries. More long-term, manufacturers have already started the shift to alternatives. Lithium-iron-phosphate options—which are jokingly referred to as rust-and-fertilizer batteries in the industry for the everyday ubiquity of their core ingredients—may have a lower energy density than cobalt versions, but engineers are willing to work around those limitations in order to reduce their dependence on imports, says Gavin Harper, a battery metals Ph.D. and research fellow at Birmingham University’s Energy Institute. “They won’t give you the extreme performance [of cobalt battery formulations], but they will give you a more than adequate performance that will meet a lot of people’s needs, without the baggage that comes with [cobalt] chemistries.” Many Chinese EV manufacturers have already made the switch, and Tesla announced in September 2020 that the batteries in its Model S will soon be cobalt-free. Even the IEA in its report noted that EV-battery manufacturers are shifting away from cobalt-rich chemistries in favor of those using cheaper, more readily available materials. “My concern is that we start mining the ocean for cobalt because it is profitable now, but once we move to next-gen batteries and more efficient recycling, we will have done irreversible damage for just a few years of profit,” says Harper.

The polymetallic nodules do contain other valuable minerals, such as nickel and trace amounts of rare earth, that could make mining them worthwhile, says Frances Wall, the principal investigator for the U.K.’s Research and Innovation Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre for Technology Metals. But if the nodules aren’t needed for power storage, “it just takes away that magic headline that you are mining the ocean for batteries. And without that, companies might find it harder to raise investment.” Without its green halo, the Metals Company becomes just another mining company hawking unproven riches at considerable risk.

Nor is mining in the deep sea exclusively about minerals. It’s also about access and market share. China, which holds three exploration permits in the CCZ (Russia and the U.K. each have two; every other nation that has any has one), invested early in developing deep-sea-mining machinery and is considered to be a world leader in submersible technology. After a tour of a Chinese submersible-mining-tech factory in 2017, Singh, the deep-sea-mining law expert from IASS, was convinced that the country would be the first to dive in. Instead, it seems to be holding back, he says, because leaders there appear unconvinced that nodule mining is commercially viable. As the world’s top manufacturer of solar panels, turbine parts, EV batteries and all manner of electronics, China is also unsurprisingly the world’s top importer of cobalt, buying some 95,000 metric tons annually, mainly from Congo. As long as supplies remain stable, China will have less interest in aggressively exploring seabed mining. Unless, of course, opening up a new seabed source threatens its dominance in the cobalt-refining business. “If someone is going to be at the front of the line with a cobalt supply that could compete, or threaten their position, then China is going to come quickly, and maybe even cut the line,” says Singh.

Meanwhile, China has focused investment on mining in the technologically challenging—and highly controversial—hydrothermal vent deposits of the deep sea, where it holds two additional exploration permits with the ISA. “China wants to do the stuff that nobody else has got access to yet,” says Jessica Aldred, editor of the Oceans special project at China Dialogue Trust, an independent nonprofit organization promoting environmental awareness in China.

Amon, the deep-sea marine biologist, has been going to the CCZ since 2013. Each time she returns from a research expedition, it is with a deeper understanding of the complex interactions between the creatures that live at inhospitable depths and the environment that supports them. Her research has shown that those relationships affect neighboring ecosystems as well, impacting biodiversity, feeding patterns and carbon sequestration in ways that scientists have yet to grasp. It has also shown her how much more there is to learn. Barron speaks of “plucking” nodules off the seafloor, but the mining robots work more like vacuums, sucking the nodules up along with a layer of sediment approximately 4 in. deep. Amon describes it as not just clear-cutting a forest but digging up the top 10 ft. of soil as well. She also worries that plumes of disturbed sediment could drift with ocean currents, smothering habitats miles away with unknown consequences.

Barron, who has already spent $3 million and committed a further $72 million to deep-sea research, says that preliminary findings show no such impacts. Amon argues that there hasn’t been enough time to know for sure. “No one is saying never,” she says about mining in the deep sea. “Just not yet. By rushing in, we risk losing parts of the planet and species before we know them, and not just before we know them but before we understand them and before we value them.”

Companies are starting to heed scientists’ call for a moratorium on exploration activities. In March, BMW and Volvo joined other businesses in a joint statement to say that they would not buy any metals produced from deep-sea mining before the environmental risks are “comprehensively understood.” Even the World Bank warned of the risk of “irreversible damage to the environment and harm to the public” from seabed mining, and urged caution. The mining companies argue that the ISA’s existing research requirements are sufficient. “No commercial licences will be granted by the ISA without a full environmental-impact assessment. If the science shows the deep seabed has no advantages over the alternatives, there will be no seabed-minerals industry,” says Van Nijen, of GSR. He points out that putting a stop to exploration could even be counterproductive. Both GSR and the Metals Company have already invested tens of millions in deep-seabed research. “A moratorium would put a halt to all that,” says Van Nijen. “[Stopping] exploration takes whatever certainty there is for the industry away, which means investment will disappear, which means that research isn’t funded, which means in 10 years’ time, we are in a similar boat as we are today, without a significant advance in knowledge.”

Barron may dismiss the bottom of the CCZ as a barren wasteland, but his scientists think differently. When the Maersk Launcher pulled into San Diego’s port on June 8, after a six-week research expedition to the CCZ sponsored by the Metals Company, the top deck was bustling with 21 marine scientists from eight universities packing up seafloor samples to take back to their labs for further analysis. Lead scientist Claire Dalgleish, a marine biologist working with the Seattle-based marine-consulting service Gravity Marine, peered into a box containing a 20-sq.-in. section of nodule-studded sediment that had been stamped out of the seabed with the underwater equivalent of a giant cookie cutter. Pointing with her finger, she identified several species of sea life all but invisible to the naked eye: bryozoans, algae, xenophyophores, miniscule sponges and a delicate fanlike creature called a chiton. “Initially you might look at this and think there’s nothing there,” Dalgleish says, “but there’s actually a fair amount of life. It’s just a really small scale.”

None of the scientists on board are ready to say what kind of impact, if any, mining will have. An assessment like that will take years of research, says principal investigator Andrew Sweetman, a marine scientist at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University. This is his eighth trip to the CCZ in the past decade, and on each expedition he has discovered something new: “It’s kind of like being the only person on a planet for the first time. It comes with an enormous amount of responsibility to work out exactly what’s going on. But that’s why we’re out here.” Sweetman doesn’t want to get sucked into the controversies over deep-sea mining, but he does agree that without mining interest, research like his wouldn’t be happening much at all. “With all the investment that the mining companies are putting into the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, it’s probably going to be one of the most well-studied areas on the planet by the time we’re finished,” he says.

Whether or not that research will open the deep sea to mining, he doesn’t know. What he does know is that in the drive to save the planet from human-induced global warming, there will have to be trade-offs. “I’m not for mining, and I’m not against it. We all have to look in the mirror and realize that in order to get electric cars or a new cell phone or a new computer, tons and tons of rock will have to be extracted from either the ocean or the land,” he says. “All I’m trying to do is get the best environmental data so that if mining does go ahead, we know with a good level of confidence what’s potentially going to be damaged, and what the effects are going to be. And then it’s up to society to make the decision to go ahead.”

—With reporting by Charlie Campbell/Beijing and Corinne Purtill/San Diego

As the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed over the northeast Wednesday night, dumping a record-shattering 3.15 inches of rain on New York City in a single hour, water began to pour into the city’s subways.

The system flooded in 46 locations and the MTA cut service across all lines overnight. Rescue operations had to be carried out to reach those unlucky enough to be caught in at least 15 subway cars stranded by flood waters and hundreds more people were rescued by police from stations. No one was injured, the MTA said.

The worst of the storm, which prompted city authorities to issue New York’s first ever flash flood emergency, has passed. But the events of summer 2021 have forced commuters all over the world to reckon with the vulnerability of their underground train systems as the climate crisis makes heavy rains and storm surges more common. Back in July, pedestrians in New York and London shared videos of station entrances almost entirely submerged. Later that same month in the eastern Chinese city of Zhengzhou, subway flooding reached a nightmarish worst-case scenario: hundreds of riders were trapped in cars as waters rose around them. Fourteen people drowned.
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Public transit agencies from New York to Tokyo have undertaken massive and expensive projects in recent years to make their systems more waterproof, says Singdha Garg, head of adaptation research and performance at C40, a coalition of cities focused on the climate crisis. “But with the size of these systems, the age, the cost—no city in the world is completely there: we will keep seeing cases of flooding.”

Safety is “in the DNA” of public transit agencies, according to Corentin Wauters, a rail expert at the International Association of Public Transport, and as the threat of extreme weather has grown in recent years, most major systems have developed plans to keep riders safe.

“In Paris, for example, where the last really major flood occurred more than a century ago, [the local transit agency] has a very well-established emergency plan,” Wauters says. The agency has developed a large stockpile of sandbags, aluminum barriers and concrete blocks to protect the metro, which opened in 1900, and carries out regular drills for transit workers and other city government departments to work together to deploy them.

Newer systems have climate protection embedded in their design, Wauters says. In Bangkok’s subway, which opened in 2004, stations in low-lying areas are raised around four feet aboveground with steps to enter, and have heavy, flood-proof doors. When a strong monsoon caused widespread flooding across Thailand, Wauters say, the subway maintained uninterrupted service.

Adapting older systems to the climate-crisis-era is complicated, though. Despite recent images of waterfalls gushing over platforms, and rider frustration over service failures, public-transit experts actually point to New York as a global leader in flood resilience. Since 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which flooded nine subway tunnels and let millions of gallons of equipment-damaging salt water into the network, the MTA has spent $5 billion on repairs and updates.

A colossal amount of work was needed. New York’s subway, which opened in 1904, was not designed to deal with the level of rainfall or coastal flooding that the city is now experiencing and can expect in future, says Janno Lieber, acting head of the MTA, speaking to TIME in August, before Ida struck. “Our system was built mostly through what you call ‘cut and cover’—where people basically dug big ditches and created subways that are only five or 10 feet underground,” he says. “We have a lot of vulnerability to surface water conditions. So, we’re attacking all of the points of vulnerability and where water can get in.”

The N.Y. MTA has revamped 11 under-river tunnels that were particularly vulnerable to coastal flooding. That included simple interventions, like moving essential cables and equipment up high on racks inside tunnels, as well as massively expanding the pumping system which clears water out of the train network. (Even on a dry day, the system pumps 13 million gallons of water out.) Water-tight doors that can be closed during storms have been placed at tunnel entrances and similar systems are being rolled out at vulnerable station entrances and stairways. Some 3,000 vents have been covered, either permanently or with temporary covers. The MTA has also spent almost $1 billion to protect train yards—often particularly vulnerable due to their positions at the end of lines near the coast—by adding new flood barriers and drainage systems.

But, though Lieber expects all those safeguards to keep seawater out of the subways during a Sandy-style storm surge, they weren’t enough to prevent rainwater disrupting services and stranding passengers this week. Flash floods, caused by sudden heavy rainfall, are expected to become more frequent as the climate warms and—as events in Zhengzhou’s subways showed—they can have deadly consequences for the public.

Lieber says that New Yorkers shouldn’t fear the fatal consequences of flooding that took place in Zhengzhou. Chinese state media reported that there was an unusual delay in suspending subway service, and that the metro company’s centralized power structure may have played a role. “The operators did not have the authorization, because of the way their system works, to actually stop and not proceed based on [the water levels] they were seeing. Our operators do have that authority, number one. Number two is we have an operating principle that when water reaches a certain level above, more or less the top of the rail, you don’t proceed any further. So, our passengers, I believe, needn’t be concerned that anybody will be driving into a condition like what happened in China.”

Yet a fragile subway system has the potential to impede passengers in other ways. It is an equity issue, since people who are reliant on subways in U.S. cities are disproportionately Black and Latino communities and people on low incomes. If subways increasingly must be closed for long periods for safety reasons, transit-reliant riders will have difficulty getting to and from work—which is especially a problem for low-income individuals who are more likely to have jobs that cannot be done from home.

Making subways and other public transit modes more resilient to extreme weather will require a city-wide approach to flood engineering, Garg says. “Transit agencies can only do so much if drainage and water absorption across the city aren’t there.”

In New York, the large areas covered by asphalt and the scarcity of green space make the city particularly vulnerable to large volumes of surface runoff during storms. Some of the flooding in subway stations this summer can be traced to the sewers that were overwhelmed. Improving coordination between the city government—which controls the sewers and streets—and the state government—which controls the MTA—could be key to managing future storms. Successive state governors and city mayors have struggled to do that, though there may be an opening to improve relations as new faces take over both roles this year. Lieber, who began his role last month, says he intends to begin joint work with the city government to “identify vulnerabilities in high ground areas which are away from the coastal flood zones.”

When it comes to reducing the pressure on subways systems during storms, New York could stand to learn from other parts of the world more used to dealing with floods. Rotterdam, in the famously low-lying Netherlands, has invested heavily in nature-based solutions to become what urban design specialists call a “sponge city.” Since 2008, the city has added more than 250,000 square meters of water-absorbing green roofs to its buildings, expanded parks, and planted vegetation along tramlines. Tokyo, which straddles five river systems, spent decades and billions of dollars developing a cavernous drainage system. Completed in 2006, it is designed to protect the city from many kinds of flood events, including tsunamis and dam bursts.

These kinds of projects are expensive, and intergovernmental collaboration, at least in New York, has historically proven complicated. But climate advocates hope the increase in disruption and devastation from floods will force more action on adapting public transit. “We’ve got to learn to live with the water,” Garg says. “Because the water will come.”

Some two weeks before U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Aug. 18 that nursing homes must require their staff to get vaccinated or risk losing their Medicare and Medicaid funding, Genesis HealthCare, which manages about 250 facilities nationwide that offer long-term care and other services, had said its workers would need to be vaccinated. “The growing spread of the Delta variant makes clear that we need to increase our vaccination rates substantially to better protect our patients, residents and employees,” read an Aug. 2 memo to employees, noting that 65% of staffers were vaccinated at that point; employees had until Aug. 23 to get their shots.
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In the memo, Dr. Richard Feifer, the company’s chief medical officer, said that while voluntary vaccination of staff was appropriate after the vaccines were first made available, “the pandemic is different now.”

With the U.S. in the grips of a fourth wave of COVID-19 fueled by the more transmissible Delta variant, many nursing home companies and other health care providers have, like Genesis, announced that staffers must either get vaccinated or agree to regular testing, or be fired or removed from schedules. Biden’s announcement means that other nursing homes will likely follow suit, as the rule is “effectively a mandate” given the industry’s dependence on Medicaid and Medicare funding, says Dr. David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School.

What’s less clear, however, is how many staffers will actually choose vaccination over quitting their jobs. Many will have to make this decision: nine months into the U.S. inoculation campaign, about 39% of U.S. nursing home staffers remain unvaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In interviews with TIME, unvaccinated nursing home workers offered a litany of reasons for their decision, including health concerns and skepticism regarding how quickly the vaccines were made available. Many also shared a sense that their employers have not done enough to keep them physically and mentally safe, and requiring vaccination is a step too far. For some, it’s reason enough to quit. If enough leave, it could exacerbate the industry’s pandemic-era staffing crisis—94% of nursing homes reported a staffing shortage over the last month, according to a American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living survey of 616 nursing facilities released June 23, and low staffing levels are tied to worse health outcomes and quality of life for residents.

Among those leaving is Ashley Lanctot, a 25-year-old licensed nursing assistant (LNA) at the Genesis-operated Wolfeboro Bay Center in Wolfeboro, N.H. She and other current and former Wolfeboro Bay employees told TIME that the facility has been frequently understaffed, making it impossible to give residents adequate care. At times, Lanctot says, two LNAs would be assigned to 40 patients. If such staffing levels were maintained for an entire 24-hour day, LNAs would only have about 1.2 hours per patient; in a 2013 report prepared for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), on average, the lowest-rated facilities offered about 2.36 hours of aides’ time per resident a day, while the highest rated facilities offered 2.55. (In a statement, a spokesperson for Genesis said, “while staffing is certainly a challenge throughout the industry, Wolfeboro Bay Center’s ‘Hours per Patient Day’ are well above the state average.”)

Wolfeboro Bay employees say they were forced to cut corners; patients had to go without proper bathing or opportunities to socialize, and would sometimes be left to languish in bed. “You couldn’t give showers,” says Lanctot. “You couldn’t get totally dependent people out of bed using the mechanical lift…I ended up becoming very depressed, knowing that I felt like I was neglecting these people.” Other workers say the facility continued to take in new patients even as the staff struggled to care for those already admitted. “That’s not fair to the person coming in,” says Joeline Barg, a registered nurse still working at Wolfeboro Bay. “And that is not fair to the people living there. Because it takes away from both sides.” Feifer says it is a general rule at Genesis facilities to only admit patients “when they are assured to have the necessary and adequate staffing to care for them.” A spokesperson said that admissions at the Center were put on hold following the vaccine requirement announcement, and that some modifications to residents’ care were necessary to keep patients safe, based on CMS guidelines; this included a restriction on taking residents to shower rooms. That said, the spokesperson noted, these modifications played a role in the fact that no staff members or residents at Wolfeboro Bay have been diagnosed with COVID-19 throughout the course of the pandemic.

Read more: America’s Assisted Living Residents Are Falling Through the Cracks of COVID-19 Response, Families Say

During the pandemic, Lanctot was diagnosed with hypertension from stress, and was put on bed rest for three weeks, she says. While other current and former Genesis employees say they probably would not have gotten vaccinated either way, Lanctot says that, while she has some reservations about the COVID-19 shot, she probably would have gotten vaccinated in order to keep her job if she felt that she was being treated with respect. “If you’re at a place of work, and you feel appreciated and respected, and feel like people care about you and your well being, that initiates someone to want to stay at work,” says Lanctot. “This place did not do that for me.”

The difficult tradeoff

It’s too early to know how many workers will follow Lanctot’s example. So far, only a small number of employees seem to be leaving their jobs; one study published as a pre-proof in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association in July found that, at one nursing home that implemented a mandate, just 18 of its nearly 250 staff members quit, a churn rate of about 7%.

All this raises the question: is it better for nursing homes to have a small handful of unvaccinated staffers, or to suffer a staffing crisis? Grabowski, for one, says the former is the lesser of two evils. “We’re sort of on the edge right now, in terms of staffing nationally,” he says. Low staffing levels are tied to worse treatment for residents, such as the overprescription of antipsychotic drugs, and increase the risk of injuries. One study published last August found an association between understaffing and COVID-19 cases, and an Associated Press report published in November found that besides COVID-19 deaths, 40,000 more people than usual died in U.S. nursing homes last year, deaths it largely attributed to neglect and isolation.

Yet there’s no denying the deepening viral crisis in the U.S., and nursing home residents, who account for nearly a quarter of total U.S. deaths due to COVID-19 so far, are particularly vulnerable. While the coronavirus vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization by as much as 94% among people over 65, older people sometimes have a weaker response to vaccination, and emerging data suggest vaccinated people’s immunity wanes over time (hence the current consideration of booster shots). There’s a decent argument, then, that if vaccine mandates cause some unvaccinated nursing home workers to leave, it could be a blessing for residents, who would likely be safer if all of those around them are vaccinated, especially as staff members are a link between long-term care facilities and the surrounding communities. “Understaffing may make the facility dirtier, and it may make the residents wait longer for their meals. Un-vaccination makes them dead.” says Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University School of Medicine.

How to fix nursing homes

If faced with mandate-triggered staff shortages, nursing home operators could theoretically raise wages to attract new workers, as many companies in other industries have done amid the recent labor crunch. However, some say that low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements—meaning, the payments they receive from the federal government to provide services—make it difficult to raise wages, and the pandemic has taken a major financial toll on nursing home operations. In a June 29 survey from the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living, about half of U.S. nursing homes and assisted-living facilities say they’re currently operating at a loss, and only a quarter are confident that they could stay in business for another year or longer. Yet some say higher wages are possible. “It’s primarily not so much a shortage of workers, but a failure to pay them adequately,” says Charlene Harrington, professor emeritus at the UCSF School of Nursing. “It’s a chronic problem, because most nursing homes are for-profit, and they’re trying to make money by keeping the wages and the benefits low.”

A potentially tougher problem to fix may be the culture within nursing homes. Staff members tend to come from vulnerable demographics; nine out of ten are women, a fifth are immigrants, and a majority are people of color. Additionally, nursing homes are often very difficult places to work; experts say that nursing homes tend to be hierarchical, and aides are typically undervalued. In the end, this leads to mistrust of the leadership among employees. Ongoing exploitation leads to a “culture of fear” at many facilities, including fear of reporting bad working conditions, says Jill Harrison, an assistant professor at Brown University School of Public Health.

All the same, some experts doubt that vaccine mandates will lead to nursing home staffing shortages. Harrington says that many nursing home aides who quit, in particular, are likely to seek employment at another nursing facility. And if all or most of the major nursing home chains issue vaccine mandates to keep receiving federal funds, there won’t be many places workers can go that wouldn’t require they get their COVID-19 shots.

It’s not a perfect analogy, given the unique circumstances of the current pandemic, but past research on flu vaccine mandates has found most health care workers chose to be vaccinated rather than quit. For example, a 2013 study published in the American Journal of Infection Control found that less than 1% of staff members sought an exemption or quit after Loyola University mandated all health care workers get vaccinated, and coverage rose from 65% to 99%.

Indeed, some nursing home workers have welcomed mandates as means to protect both themselves and their residents during a particularly harrowing time—as a July 2020 analysis published in the Washington Post showed, nursing home work was one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S. 2020, with double the fatality rate of famously dangerous jobs like logging, roofing and construction, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Read more: ‘It’s Getting Worse.’ Nursing Home Workers Confront Risks in Facilities Devastated by Coronavirus

Jenna Szymanski, a licensed practical nurse at the Good Samaritan Society–Luther Manor facility in Sioux Falls, S.D., says her reaction to the vaccine mandate was “hell yes.” To Szymanski, anyone who works at a nursing home facility has a responsibility to get vaccinated. Vaccination also makes her work feel safer, especially because she’s immunocompromised and a diabetic.

“I spend my entire shift protecting [the residents], helping them trying to heal what’s wrong. [Vaccination] just seemed like the next step to complete my duty as a nurse,” said Szymanski. “Nobody forced you into nursing … by taking that position, you are accepting all of the responsibilities, the priorities, everything that comes with it. And this is a new day and age, it’s 2021. This is now what is required.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here.

For many climate reporters, myself included, the arrival of Hurricane Ida brought a recognizable pit to the stomach. The details of the stories emerging as the storm barreled toward the Gulf Coast were new—of course—but they all had a familiar ring to them from the storms I’ve covered in the past decade. Ida offered an example of how climate change is making hurricanes stronger. The storm demonstrated the bigger trend of extreme weather harming the poorest the most. And the hurricane—like so many Gulf Coast storms before it—threatened the oil and gas infrastructure that powers much of the rest of the country.
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Welcome to climate change. The details—the storm surge, the wind speed, the death count—are going to vary. But as the effects of warming become increasingly obvious, we’re going to see more events with the same recognizable features.

The growing frequency of big storms, wildfires and floods marks a notable shift for those who have been looking to explain what a warmer planet will look like. Throughout my time reporting on this beat, I’ve heard the argument over and over that the increase in climate change-linked extreme weather events would drive new recognition of global warming and help alter the political atmosphere. That could still happen. But now that those events are here, it also seems plausible that each one may become just another storm or wildfire in the eyes of the public, a second-tier story in the constant barrage of other news. The challenge for anyone who communicates about climate change to the public—journalists, scientists, activists and elected officials—is to find ways to use each weather event as an opportunity to grow public understanding rather than contribute to a collective tuning out.

This requires thinking differently. For me, and probably many of you reading this newsletter, big extreme weather events prompt almost immediate consideration of what role climate change might have played. I look at the numbers coming from NOAA and take note when researchers say they will be conducting a rapid attribution analysis to see if indeed climate change contributed.

But researchers who study public perception of climate change say climate change barely registers during an extreme weather event for the average American. Most people are likely to view a big storm as just another in a long string of them. In fact, the historical record over the past few decades shows little shift in national public opinion on climate change driven by the increased frequency of hurricanes, droughts and wildfires that we might have expected to turn the tide. “The fact that these events are happening is not a smoking gun for Americans,” says Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University who studies public opinion on climate change. “Hurricane Katrina had no measurable impact on public opinion on climate at all. Hurricane Sandy had no measurable impact on public opinion on climate at all. Unusually cold winters in the East Coast had no impact.”

This may be disheartening, and raises the question of how communicators on climate can connect the dots in a way that will advance the public discussion.

Many argue that repetition will do the trick even though it hasn’t moved the needle yet. While media outlets have done a better job connecting extreme weather events to climate change in recent years, it’s a relatively new phenomenon. And, the thinking goes, it will take years of hearing the same message repeatedly before everyday people begin to connect the dots on their own. “We need to repeat, repeat until we’re so sick of hearing the same words come out of our mouth,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, who runs Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication. “And yet that may be the very first time somebody’s ever hearing it.”

Others say the only way to advance public understanding is to focus on solutions while others still say communicators need to localize the problem, talking about the impacts on the ground in each individual community. Can the circle be squared? One approach is for climate communicators to continue repeating the key role climate change plays in worsening extreme weather while finding new angles to inform the public about the breadth and depth of how climate change is reshaping our society incorporating both problems and solutions. Ultimately, more people talking honestly about climate can only help.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in late August 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with building a new flood-defense network. Congress allocated billions of dollars to build pumps, dikes and floodwalls for a system meant to withstand a so-called “100-year storm.”

That’s typical. In building flood protection, engineers can’t guarantee their designs can survive every possible weather event. Instead, they often build to a standard based on the 100-year storm, an extreme weather event with a 1% probability of occurring in any given year, calculated statistically from past floods and rains in a given area. That standard works fine when you’re building a dike in areas where a flood won’t cause enormous damage, like an area of farmland. But in New Orleans the metric is woefully inadequate to defend the city from another disaster, partially because the usefulness of past weather data in predicting what the future will hold is plummeting.
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But according to a former senior official in the Army Corps who worked on the project, the engineers designing new flood barriers in New Orleans stretched their calculations such that they would lead to the construction of better protection than a strictly by-the-book approach might have entailed. Those decisions may well have saved New Orleans from calamity this past week, when Hurricane Ida hit.

Don Resio, then a technical supervisor in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) coastal program, was assigned in 2006 to lead a group of specialists tasked with using statistics to model the likely threat that future storms would pose to New Orleans. He toured the city’s devastated defenses in the days after Hurricane Katrina, and today remembers the sight of children’s toys floating in the rancid floodwaters, along with the stench of rotting bodies emanating from waterlogged houses. He knew that legislators in charge of allocating funding for the project likely didn’t understand that building for a 100-year storm, the standard in many such projects, would leave populations at significant risk. For instance, there would be a cumulative 26% probability of a 100-year storm hitting sometime in the next 30 years. Across 65 years, it would be equivalent to the flip of a coin. And as climate change brought stronger and more frequent extreme storms, the likelihood of such events would only increase.

So the engineers tasked with designing and building the city’s new defenses fudged the numbers so that their work would actually protect New Orleans from the inevitable. After all, no one knew when Congress would get around to funding New Orleans protective measures again, and Corps engineers had a unique opportunity to win the resources needed to do their job properly.

The engineers didn’t lie; instead, they just were exceedingly “conservative” in all their approximations, says Resio. Certain variables were factored in twice. Those accounting for potential ocean waves, for example, were added in twice, meaning that the resulting levee was built with an extra few feet of clearance. If they had gone with a strictly “rule-based” 100-year flood system, it would not have accounted for the likelihood of climate change, says Resio. But instead, the engineers designed and built a system—which included the $1.1 billion West Closure Complex and the 1.8-mille long Lake Borgne Surge Barrier—that might be considered more like 200-year flood protection, Resio says.

“It was all done legitimately, rule-based, but it was done with a very conservative eye to uncertainty,” says Resio. “We knew we were going above the limits that somebody might have thought we should…We were making the decisions so it wouldn’t come back to haunt us.”

As the head of a nationally organized Army Corps specialist group in charge of post-Katrina risk statistics for New Orleans, Resio reviewed levee height estimates and other numbers coming out of other working groups and the local USACE district in the post-Katrina effort. “We were going to go for everything we could to protect the city, and it passed muster with everybody up the way. Nobody asked any silly questions,” says Resio. “The [local] district [USACE] people had come up with their numbers, and I knew they were higher than what were legitimate. I never asked them how they got their numbers. I knew they were higher then, and they knew they were higher then, but as long as you’re not openly saying it—I don’t think anybody said, ‘Hey let’s absolutely violate [the 100-year metric].’ Though maybe we did.”

Read more: How to Help People Impacted by Hurricane Ida

Hugh Roberts, the COO of The Water Institute of the Gulf, a non-profit research organization, worked with the Army Corps on post-Katrina flood protections. He characterizes the Army Corps’ work simply as solid engineering judgement that effectively accounted for future climate uncertainty. “There might have been some double counting, and there might have been some raising some numbers, because maybe there was enough funding to do that,” says Hugh. The reality, he says, is that 100-year flood levels of today are going to look far different 20 or 30 years from now, and engineers must factor in that likelihood.

Those measures were tested this past week, as Hurricane Ida pummeled the city. The defenses built in the post-Katrina years held, preventing the kind of devastating flooding that killed nearly 2,000 people in New Orleans in 2005. According to Resio, if they had designed the system strictly for a 100-year storm, it would have failed during Ida. The extra layers of protection added by the engineers might well have saved countless lives.

In areas, like New Orleans, that expect to see more frequent and extreme storms in the decades ahead, infrastructure designed to keep a population safe can depreciate rapidly, failing to keep up with what a warming climate may throw at it, explains Jeremy Brinker, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan. “With climate change and sea level rise, that [flood] water level that under historical statistics had a one-in-100 chance of occurring each year is going to gradually have a higher and higher chance of occurring,” he says. In other words, extreme weather events that can overpower infrastructure built to 100-year standards are becoming more and more common.

Such problems aren’t limited to New Orleans. Since 1950, storms that overmatch design specifications for infrastructure like dikes and dams have become increasingly common around the country, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. In essence, “100-year storms” have been coming more often than they should.

Read more: What Hurricane Ida Means for Louisiana’s COVID-19 Problem

One strategy in an infrastructure arms race against nature might be for cities to invest in so-called adaptive design, where they build infrastructure with the expectation that they may have to add to it later. For instance, a city could build extra-wide levees, allowing room at the top (and support underneath) to add additional height in anticipation of higher sea levels in decades ahead. Near Amsterdam, for example, engineers have built extra culverts into some of the dikes meant to protect the city from storm surges, planning for a future where extra pump stations would need them to face a rising ocean. Indeed, the Netherlands is seen as a leader when it comes to managing water in a changing climate—some infrastructure in the country has been designed to anticipate weather events expected once every 10,000 years.

But there’s a problem of expense in simply building bigger and bigger levees, slucegates, and other flood control structures. Joannes Westerink, a civil engineer and computational hydrologist at Notre Dame University, has spent much of his career developing software to predict hurricane storm surges. He says that it’s feasible to protect smaller, densely populated areas from the most extreme floods, but that the problem grows increasingly difficult and expensive as the physical area you’re trying to keep dry grows. In the long term, there’s a choice: Encourage people to live closer together—and reduce highways, lawns and golf courses—and you might be able to reasonably protect them from the worst a changing climate can throw at them. Or, make do with weaker flood-protection systems to cover a larger area and protect a much more widely spaced population.

Going into a future that will see more extreme storms and sea level rise, New Orleans appears to be on the latter path. More than 350 miles of levees protect the city from the waters that surround it. “That’s a heck of a lot,” says Westerink. “Can you [protect to a higher standard] in a footprint that might only be 100 miles? You bet. But you have to totally rethink infrastructure, how people live.”

And even with the formidable extra layers of protection engineers baked into New Orleans’s system, Resio still worries that the levee design he worked on will become inadequate to protect the city as seas rise and storms worsen. Currently, he expects the system can withstand waves and storm surges from a category 4 hurricane. “[There’s] also probably some conservativeness on top of that,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t be overtopped, and that still scares me.”

Rising extreme heat will make it increasingly hard for workers to do their jobs, shaving hundreds of billions of dollars off the U.S. economy each year. That’s according to a report published Tuesday by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank focused on climate adaptation. It’s a stark warning about the costs of failing to act on climate change.

Productivity losses due to heat currently cost the U.S. an estimated $100 billion a year, the report claims. As days of extreme heat become more frequent in the years ahead, that figure is projected to double to $200 billion by 2030—around 0.5% of GDP. By 2050, annual losses are projected to hit $500 billion, around 1% of GDP. These national losses are expected to come primarily from the southeast and midwest. But the effects will be felt across most of the country, with annual losses of at least 0.5% of economic activity projected for 62% of U.S. counties.
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This summer, it’s been hard to ignore that the U.S. is getting hotter. Since June, rolling heat waves have stifled nearly every region, weighing especially hard on western states, nearly all of which have recorded drought conditions. In the last week of August, 60 million people were under heat warnings across the country, with temperatures as high as 115°F in southwestern cities, and humidity making northeastern cities feel close to 100°F. Unusually high temperatures have not only been felt in the U.S.: according to scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July was the hottest month on Earth since records began, beating the previous high of July 2016 by 0.02°F.

As greenhouse gases in our atmosphere absorb more heat, the U.S. will experience more frequent and more widespread “high heat days”—defined as a day when the maximum temperature is above 90°F. Drawing on climate projections from the World Climate Research Program, downscaled to county-level, the report estimates that by 2050, up to 30% of the U.S. population will be exposed to more than 100 high heat days per year. That’s up from 5% under the prevailing climate conditions.

Though we may all feel the rising heat on warmer days, its long term consequences for the economy are still poorly understood, says Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. “It’s hard to isolate heat in economic data,” she says. “Where other climate hazards like hurricanes and floods have an impact on physical assets, heat’s impacts are mostly on the human body.”

On high heat days, studies show people are more likely to feel tired or sick at work, partly as a result of nighttime temperatures remaining too high to get a good night’s sleep. When people are tired, they take more breaks, work more slowly, make more mistakes and have a higher risk of getting injured.

To figure out how those factors affect the U.S. economy as a whole, researchers at consultancy Vivid Economics combined projections for the number of extreme heat days in counties across the U.S., a model on heat-related productivity loss, and government data on the predominance of outdoor work and access to air conditioning across industries. Researchers also included existing models for heat’s impact on ​four crops that are key to U.S. agriculture: corn, soy, wheat and cotton.

The result is only a partial view of heat’s impact on the economy. The analysis leaves out many other ways that heat may impact economic output across the country that were too difficult to measure reliably, including the impact that heat might have on leisure and tourism, the cost of wildfires, and the cost of mechanical failures for machines that stop working at high temperatures.

But even with the limited scope, the $100 billion in current annual heat-related productivity losses outweigh the estimated $60 billion cost of the record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season. And the annual losses projected in the near future are even worse.

The southeast and the midwest of the country will face the highest economic cost from extreme heat. Texas—the most-affected state due to its climate and relatively high levels of outdoor work— is currently losing an average of $30 billion a year, per the report, and is projected to lose some $110 billion a year by 2050, amounting to 2.5% of its total economic output.

Heat’s impact on work is not distributed equally among the U.S. population. Black and Hispanic workers tend to live in parts of the country that are more exposed to heat, and they face worse working conditions with less protection from heat; in 2020 they lost around 1.3% of their productivity due to heat, compared to a 1.1% loss for non-Hispanic white workers.

The industries most affected by extreme heat are construction and agriculture, where workers are most exposed. By 2050, construction is projected to lose 3.5% of its total annual economic activity to heat ($1.2 billion per year), while agriculture, where falling crop yields are also a factor, would lose 3.7% ($130.7 million per year).

But overall losses from heat are projected to be even bigger in the service sector, which dominates the U.S. economy. While those in office jobs are mostly protected from heat by air conditioning, workers in areas like food service or transportation can be exposed to dangerously high temperatures. The sector faces losses of $2.8 billion a year—0.7% of its economic activity—by 2050, per the report.

The study is part of a growing body of research that attempts to put a price tag on the risks the world’s economies face from climate change. The goal, Baughman McLeod says, is to show that doing nothing will cost more than taking action to cut emissions and adapt to climate change. In the case of heat, adaptation will include solutions like creating urban forests, improving early warning systems, and developing heat-resistant strains of crops. “These things require investment,” she says. “But protecting people first rather than paying for it later will, in the end, be the right decision for any business or government.”

We are in a planetary emergency. Horrific heat waves and fires blaze across North America, Turkey and Russia. Extreme floods wreak destruction and cause death from Europe to Africa to Asia. Ocean temperatures and the amount of carbon in our atmosphere have reached unprecedented highs. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Our planet, as the United Nations recently warned, is flashing a “code red for humanity.”

There is no single solution to a crisis this large. Nations must fulfill the commitments they made under the Paris Agreement. Industries need to decarbonize, and businesses—especially the Fortune 1000—need to achieve net zero emissions. We need to empower a new generation of ecopreneurs—entrepreneurs focused on protecting our planet—to unleash innovative climate solutions. In our own lives, we need to adapt our lifestyles and consumption patterns.
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None of these climate solutions are mutually exclusive. We need them all. If we are to save our planet—and ourselves—from irreversible climate change, we need to recruit everyone, everywhere in this mission.

This includes embracing a powerful climate solution that can be delivered by anyone, anywhere: trees.

Trees are our planet’s natural air purifiers—the single most effective “device” we have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. In the U.S., for example, forests capture and store almost 15 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions every year—equivalent to the annual emissions from 163 million cars.

Tragically, we are losing trees at the very moment we need them most. Every six seconds, our planet loses a football pitch worth of tropical rainforest to deforestation. Forests in colder regions are losing millions of acres to drought, pests and wildfire worsened by climate change, and our rapidly growing cities are often losing the natural cooling of trees.

That’s why, last year, we helped launch a new global partnership with a bold new climate action goal—conserving, restoring and growing 1 trillion trees by 2030. Why a trillion? Because cutting-edge scientific analysis, led by the Crowther Lab, has identified enough ecologically suitable land around the world to help achieve this goal with reforestation. By some estimates, a trillion trees could sequester some 200 gigatons of carbon over their lifetimes—equal to the annual emissions from more than 43 billion cars.

When we announced our trillion-tree goal last year, some skeptics dismissed our work as misguided or unrealistic. But the past year has proven that progress is possible. Great Britain, Canada, the U.S., the E.U., China, India, Pakistan and Colombia have committed to plant billions of trees. Partnerships with indigenous communities aim to permanently conserve the planet-protecting forests and biodiversity of the Amazon Basin and the Sahel. Conservation efforts that have removed the world’s second largest rainforest—the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo—from the endangered list show what’s possible.

In its inaugural year, the U.S. chapter of 1t.org has secured pledges from more than 70 U.S. cities and states, companies and NGOs to conserve, restore and grow over 50 billion trees in the U.S. and abroad by 2030, and invest billions of dollars in workforce development, carbon finance and technology.

Now, as the world comes together next month for Global Citizen Live to rally the international community to address climate change and defeat poverty, and prepares for the pivotal United Nations climate change conference in November, we have the opportunity to spark a truly global effort.

This is a movement that everyone can join.

Every national, state, provincial or local government can make a commitment, like the State of Wisconsin, which will conserve and plant a total of 89 million trees, and the City of Dallas, which will conserve and plant more than 18 million trees.

Every business, large and small, can take action, like Mastercard, Salesforce and Aspiration, which have each committed to planting or protecting 100 million trees.

Every group that cares about our planet can set a goal, following the lead of Eden Reforestation and Sustainable Harvest International, which will plant billions of trees in developing nations, and diverse non-profits reforesting landscapes across America, from abandoned mine lands in West Virginia to burn scars in California.

Every community group can do something, like Girl Scout Troop 4 in Orange, New Jersey that planted 50 dogwood trees as part of the new Girl Scouts Tree Promise to plant five million trees.

Planting one trillion trees won’t be easy. It will depend on all of us taking action in our countries, our companies and our communities. And at a time when it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the relentless news of our changing climate, it’s something we have the power to do—right now. As the legendary conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall has said, “Now is the time for everyone on the planet to do their part.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here.

It’ll take billions of dollars, tens of thousands of new forestry workers, and a systematic rethink of the way we build homes and manage the land to solve some parts of California’s wildfire crisis. Other aspects might be fixed with a paper and pen.

As a series of conflagrations burn through much of California, displacing thousands and filling skies with smoke, it might seem strange to say that changes to a few statutes could make a difference. Indeed, the lion’s share of the problem of West Coast wildfires is systemic, with decades of overgrowth in California forests combining with hot, dry weather exacerbated by climate change to create the perfect storm for the blazes that have consumed more than a million acres in the state this year. Easy answers have been hard to come by, with disagreements over strategy rampant and state and federal agencies at odds with one another over how to prevent seasonal wildfires going forward. But some lawyers say that tweaking a few legalities could make a real difference.
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Take liability laws around controlled burns. Small, well-managed burns are an essential aspect of land management in many fire-prone areas, removing tall brush and dead foliage that can cause bigger fires to burn out of control under the worst weather conditions. But some laws actually disincentivize landowners from taking such steps. In much of California, a landowner who undertakes to start a controlled burn on their property has to jump through a series of hoops, proving they have the expertise to set a controlled fire that will stay controlled, and under conditions where smoke will disperse relatively quickly. But even if they do everything right, if a neighbor sees smoke from a permitted controlled burn and calls fire control, the landowner gets billed for the firefighters’ trouble under current regulations in many areas, incurring a debt that can run to tens of thousands of dollars.

“There’s a bias in the law over the last 100 years toward creating lots of liability for people who try to create fires on their lands, and no liability for people who keep their land as a tinderbox,” says Michael Wara, a research scholar focusing on climate and energy policy at Stanford Law School. He says many of those who plan controlled burns are firefighters volunteering time in the offseason to make their own communities more resistant to wildfires. “If we’re not going to pay them, at least we shouldn’t put their own personal wealth at risk when they’re trying to be a good Samaritan,” says Wara.

In some parts of the state, particularly in the hotter, drier south, fire departments can declare a dangerously overgrown and fire-prone property a public nuisance, and then either have the landowner mitigate the problem themself, or else send workers to do it and bill the landowner later. But in some parts of Northern California, where drought has more lately brought extreme fire risk, county commissioners have to vote to declare an individual property a nuisance, a hurdle which all but guarantees that the procedure occurs seldom, if at all.

However, a significant chunk of California—and a large part of the land that has burned this season—is owned by the federal government, and with local authorities lacking jurisdiction over federal lands, no county board is going to make much headway accusing them of being a nuisance. Federal land management policy is a hotly contested issue in D.C. and Sacramento, with some officials advocating to stomp out every fire as soon as it is detected against the advice of scientists and forestry experts, who say it’s better to allow smaller burns to clear out decades of built up underbrush in order to prevent the worst and most dangerous conflagrations that can send clouds of wildfire smoke drifting into large cities.

There’s one legal change, Michael Wara thinks, which could help improve that conversation. Currently, wildfire smoke isn’t counted as air pollution under the Clean Air Act, even as it causes thousands of deaths across the state. A change to that policy might cause the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to get involved in the issue of forest management, potentially forcing federal action with an eye more toward protecting vulnerable populations from wildfire smoke. “That’s the kind of thing that EPA should be thinking about,” says Wara. “They’re not, because they have no legal obligation to do so.”

This summer, as a haze of wildfire smoke descended on the village of Magaras in the East Siberian region of Yakutia, crews of local residents set out into the taiga forest to defend their land from the encroaching flames. There was little in the way of protective clothing to go around, and no radios or GPS transponders, let alone firefighting aircraft to stop the blazes around this settlement of around 1,000 people. Locals made do with shovels, axes, and small fire-fighting pumps that they carried on their backs, along with their tractors, some dating back to the Soviet era, which they used to cut ditches into the vegetation in an attempt to hold back the fires. There was little choice but to undertake this dangerous work themselves, the local volunteers said. If they stood by and waited for government help to arrive, it would be too late.
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A hot, dry summer has fueled massive blazes in this East Siberian region over past weeks, burning through more than 10 million acres of Yakutia, also known as the Republic of Sakha, and sending clouds of smoke drifting all the way to the north pole. The fires have released more than 500 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere, the highest such total ever recorded for the region, according to the E.U.’s atmospheric monitoring service. This month, authorities evacuated two villages in the region as encroaching fires endangered residents.

Earlier this summer, photographer Alexey Vasilyev, a member of the Yakut ethnic group that comprises a large part of Yakutia’s population, set out to document efforts by firefighters and locals to battle those blazes. The experience, Vasilyev says, was deeply troubling. “I watched the forests smolder as the fire slowly consumed the trees, the grass. I watched as life slowly melted away in these places,” Vasilyev wrote over email. “I wasn’t scared, I was just sad to see nature die. I thought of the Yakut spirit of the forest, Bayanai. I wondered what had made him so angry that he had sent so many fires on people.”

Yakutia leaders have blamed global warming for the hot, dry conditions that seeded these blazes, with arctic temperatures warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, according to climate scientists. During an extraordinary heat wave last summer, the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk above the Arctic Circle set a temperature record of 100.4℉—climate scientists later determined that such extreme heat would have been essentially impossible without the effects of human-made climate change. Temperatures this summer have been unusually hot and dry as well, with firefighters battling blazes in 95°F heat (the region’s average summertime temperature is around 68°F).

Russian authorities have dispatched help, mobilizing jets and military helicopters, along with more than 2,000 firefighters. But critics have called out the government for a 2007 decision that cut Russia’s airborne forest protection service staff and transferred management of the country’s vast timberlands over to businesses and local authorities, which critics say has spread corruption and hurt early detection and rapid containment efforts.

Much of the effort to fight the blazes has come from local villagers, who have taken the work of defending surrounding hay fields—essential for their livelihoods raising horses and cattle—into their own hands. Community ties are tight here, and many people try to pitch in any way they can. One local blacksmith, Alexander Yakovlev, 40, who went out to fight the blazes with his 18-year-old son, says he doesn’t expect to get compensated much for his efforts, but he decided to put his work on hold anyway to help battle the fires.

In the nearby town of Kyuerelyakh, about 150 local volunteers and government firefighters were working to contain four large fires around the village when Vasilyev visited last month. The smoke was terrible, Vasilyev says, and it was difficult to breathe. He asked one of the professional firefighters if they ever got used to such conditions. The answer: never. On local social media, videos have been circulating of Siberian children saluting such firefighters like soldiers.

One older Kyuerelyakh couple, Kirill Kirillovich and Tatyana Nikolaevna, say they’ve never seen fires come so close to their village. It’s been a difficult stretch for the two; both caught COVID-19 last year, and they emerged from a long and difficult recovery to find themselves under siege by wildfires. Now Kirillovich has joined volunteer efforts to extinguish the blazes, despite the choking smoke, while Nikolaevna helps bring water and prepare food for the volunteers. “It’s very scary and unsettling,” says Nikolaevna. “You can just feel how badly this coronavirus has affected [our] lungs, plus this smoke. It’s impossible to breathe.”

In an isolated region beset by climate disaster, locals have mixed feelings about journalists who document their plight. Some wish reporters would leave well enough alone and quit asking questions they’ve answered before. Magaras mayor Vladimir Tekeyanov says he doesn’t care which journalists visit him, Russian or foreign, pro-Putin or opposition, so long as they help tell people about what’s happening in his region. And in the remote, seemingly endless wilderness of the taiga, some people simply want visitors to relay a message to the outside world. One professional firefighter who had been working in the wilderness for two weeks with no cell phone or internet connection asked a visiting journalist to send a video message to his wife telling her he was alright, and that he missed her.

For those who call this region home, the destruction of this summer’s fires may last far beyond this season, jeopardizing their means of survival and portending yet more disasters ahead as the climate continues to warm. In Kyuerelyakh, Kirillovich and Nikolaevna lost their croplands to the fires despite their best efforts to hold back the flames, leaving them with only a few bales of hay to feed their 26 cattle through the coming winter.

“I have no idea how to live,” says Nikolaevna. “What is waiting for us next year, no one knows.”

Welcome to COVID Questions, TIME’s advice column. We’re trying to make living through the pandemic a little easier, with expert-backed answers to your toughest coronavirus-related dilemmas. While we can’t and don’t offer medical advice—those questions should go to your doctor—we hope this column will help you sort through this stressful and confusing time. Got a question? Write to us at covidquestions@time.com.

Today, A.S. in Wisconsin asks:

My best friend is getting married in September and I’m in the wedding. I just found out at least one of the groomsmen has refused to be vaccinated, and the couple is not requiring vaccines or COVID-19 tests from their guests. I have been vaccinated, but I have young children who are not. I will not bring my children, but am I putting them at risk by attending? How do I balance wanting to support my friend but also protecting my family?

As I read your question, you’re asking two different things: First, there’s “what sacrifices should I make to protect my children from COVID-19?” Second, there’s “how do I navigate the social challenges of the pandemic?” Like so many other questions related to the pandemic, neither of these have easy or definitive solutions. But we spoke with a psychiatrist and several pediatric physicians to try and sort them out.

For starters, it’s important to consider the scientific evidence about the spread of COVID-19. You’ve already made one important decision that reduces the risk to yourself and your children: getting vaccinated. However, vaccination can’t completely eliminate the risks facing you or your kids. Emerging evidence suggests that even fully vaccinated people can spread the virus—especially the now-dominant Delta variant—to others. Concerns about this possibility led the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July to once again recommend that even fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors in most areas of the country.

So if your question is whether you could potentially go to this wedding, get infected with COVID-19, and bring it home to your kids, the answer is yes, there’s a chance that could happen. That would be true even if everyone there is vaccinated, though that would reduce the risk.

That said, children have so far proven remarkably resilient in the face of this virus. As of Aug. 18, 430 U.S. children have died of the coronavirus, and while the death of any child is an unspeakable tragedy, that’s a small fraction of the nearly 630,000 overall U.S. deaths so far. Furthermore, children face lots of dangers whenever they go out into the world, whether it’s for school, daycare or playdates. How a parent weighs any potential danger to their children comes down to their risk tolerance, says Dr. Allison Messina, the chief of the infectious disease division at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital.

Messina advises parents who are nervous about their children getting COVID-19 to ask themselves a question: what are you really worried about? As she points out, the data suggest previously healthy kids are at low risk of severe disease from the virus. However, the Delta variant makes this calculation harder—pediatric ICUs in hard-hit states are hitting capacity, but it’s unclear if Delta is inherently more dangerous to kids or if more kids are falling ill simply because this strain is so transmissible and kids under 12 can’t yet be vaccinated.

“When I answer these questions, I don’t really answer them as ‘you should’ or ‘you shouldn’t,'” Messina says. “I just say, these are the risks that you would face if you decided to do this.”

If you decide to attend the wedding, there are other ways you could reduce your risk of bringing the virus home to your kids. You could wear a mask, for instance, though they are better at preventing infected people from spreading the virus, rather than helping the wearer avoid getting infected, so consider wearing one at home for a while after you get back (getting tested afterwards and self-isolating if you’re positive could be smart, too). Depending on your relationship, you could ask the couple getting married to require masks, even if just for unvaccinated guests. You could also decide to attend the ceremony but skip the reception to lessen your overall exposure, but given that you’re in the wedding party, that could be socially difficult. (Also consider the venue—outdoor, well-ventilated spaces are generally safer than indoor, poorly ventilated ones.)

That brings us to the second part of your question: how to deal with the social side of your dilemma. The first step is having a conversation with your soon-to-be-wed friend, says Dr. Sophia Albott, a psychiatrist with the University of Minnesota Medical School and the practice University of Minnesota Physicians. Discuss your concerns, talk about potential solutions, and frame things around your children’s safety, she says. “These conversations are difficult to have, but there is potentially an opportunity even for some reaffirmation of their friendship or some sort of two-party empathy.”

If you decide not to attend the wedding or minimize your participation, your friend could be angry or disappointed. Weddings are always stressful, but the upheaval of the pandemic has drawn up a lot of extreme emotions in many people. Albott suggests that you work to keep your conversation respectful, and be sure to acknowledge how your friend is feeling. That’s especially wise if, like so many other engaged couples, your friend had to delay or otherwise change their wedding plans because of the virus.

Finally, while you’re worrying about your children and friends, Albott recommends showing yourself a little kindness, too. Problems like these aren’t easy to navigate, and it’s important to make sure that you’re getting enough sleep, exercise, and connection with other people. “The pandemic has just gone on so long, that I think everyone is tired,” says Albott. “As much as we can, [we should] take care of ourselves, give ourselves a break, and give other people a break.”

The United Arab Emirates is unlikely to set a net-zero emissions target before the COP26 talks starting in October, dealing a potential blow to the climate event.

While the country is considering such a goal, its extreme heat and dry conditions make reducing greenhouse gas emissions difficult because plenty of energy is needed for cooling and desalination, according to a senior Ministry of Climate Change and Environment official.

“Don’t expect us to announce anything by the COP26, but we are considering a net-zero target like any other part of the world,” Qais Al Suwaidi, head of the ministry’s climate change department, said in an interview.
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No major OPEC producer has announced a net-zero target, and the UAE was among the most likely to do so before the COP26 in Glasgow. The U.K. and U.S. want governments to commit to deep emissions cuts. Zeroing them out in the next three decades is viewed as crucial to prevent temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.

Other countries have rushed to announce climate targets without showing how they can be achieved or enshrining them in law, said Al Suwaidi.

“There is a lot of talk: ‘We can achieve net zero, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that’,” he said. “But then in practice we see contrary action. We like to do things differently.”

More time is needed for the UAE to carry out studies that will determine how quickly it can reach net zero, he said.

Adopting stronger commitments wouldn’t necessarily require the UAE to sell less oil, the bedrock of its economy. But setting a net-zero target for emissions produced within its borders would make the UAE an outlier among fellow producers and possibly lead others in the Persian Gulf to follow suit.

The UAE’s current targets are still ambitious, Al Suwaidi said. In December, it pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by almost 25% over 10 years, from a baseline that assumes moderate economic growth. The country, which is competing against South Korea to host the UN’s COP28 event in 2023, is on course to surpass the target, said Al Suwaidi.

In the 1850s, an American scientist named Eunice Foote deduced, based on experiments she’d conducted, that if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were higher, the planet would be warmer. And in the 1890s, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius calculated, by hand, exactly how much the earth would warm as carbon dioxide levels increased.

By the 1990s, the influence of human activities on the planet was obvious. The first United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report not only tracked the observed increase in carbon dioxide and its impact on global temperatures, melting ice and sea level rise; it also quantified a range of potential future scenarios that depended on human choices.
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This past Monday, the IPCC published the first volume of its latest Assessment Report. It’s the sixth in a series of assessments that have each been more exhaustive and comprehensive than the last. This new report once again painstakingly documents how, where, and why our climate has changed, and what we can expect in the future. Now, though, it also shows how climate change is no longer a distant, speculative threat. Its impacts are here and now, and they’re affecting all of us, in ways that matter to each of us.

Read more: The Latest IPCC Report Says We’re Probably Going to Pass the 1.5°C Climate Threshold. What’s Next?

In the eight years since the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report was released, we’ve experienced an increasing litany of costly and destructive disasters fueled by a changing climate: record-breaking wildfires from Australia to British Columbia; scorching heat waves from Siberia to Death Valley; devastating floods across China, Bangladesh, Germany and the Midwest; and supercharged hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones, from Texas to Japan.

In a world that seems increasingly out of control, we are desperate for hope: real hope, a hope that acknowledges the full magnitude of the challenge we face and the very imminent risk of failure. Real hope also offers a chance of a more vibrant future; a glimpse, however distant, of something better than what we have today, not worse.

Where can we find such hope? We find it in action. The world has changed before and, when it did, it wasn’t because a president, a prime minister, a CEO or a celebrity decided it had to.

Change didn’t begin with the King of England deciding to end slavery or the President of the United States giving women the vote or the National Party of South Africa opting to end apartheid. It began when ordinary people – people of no particular power, wealth, or fame – decided that the world could and should be different. Who were William Wilberforce, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and all the countless others who shared and supported and fought for their visions of a better world? They were people who had the courage of their convictions, who used their voices to advocate for the systemic societal changes needed. We are the the people who changed the world before: and we are the people who can change it again.

We don’t need to have hope to begin to act. Instead, action engenders hope. As Svante Arrhenius’ distant cousin Greta Thunberg has said, “The one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.”

Some of the impacts of climate change are already here today. Others are inevitable due to all the carbon we’ve emitted over the last few decades. But the IPCC report is clear: the worst can still be avoided. Our future is in our hands.

What can you do? Anything. Recycle your yogurt cup after breakfast tomorrow. Cut your food waste. Try a new veggie recipe. Replace your lightbulbs with LEDs. Go bigger: talk to your school or your place of work or worship about what you could do, together. Join an organization that shares your values and advocates for change. Attend the next climate march in your area, or even start a new one. Begin a petition in your community to require solar panels on municipal buildings. Call Congress and demand a clearer path to net-zero.

Don’t just do it: talk about what you’re doing, and why. We can’t change the world by ourselves. We have to do it together, and that requires us to connect. Talk about why climate change matters, in ways that affect you personally. Encourage others by sharing what you’ve done yourself, and what you’ve seen or heard or read about what so many others are doing. Climate action isn’t a giant boulder sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with just a few hands on it. It’s already at the top of the hill, it’s already got millions of hands on it, and it’s already slowly rolling in the right direction. It just needs to go faster.

One of my favorite ways to take action? Be a good neighbor. That might sound almost too easy, but in an increasingly polarized and inequitable world, looking out for and caring for each other is vital when faced with extreme weather events like flooding, heatwaves and wildfire. Sticking together as a community, building resilience together, is part of the fight against climate change, too.

It’s my hope that this report, and the worry and concern it generates in each of us, will inspire you to take action, to have a conversation, to be part of the change we need. Why you? Because to care about climate change, we only have to be one thing: a human, living on planet earth. And if you’re reading this, that’s exactly who you are.

Wandering around the sprawling 6.2 million-sq.-ft. Lordstown Motors assembly plant in Ohio, it’s tempting to imagine a green future that is full of jobs. The company’s signature product is a high-performing electric pickup truck, and around the facility workers are buzzing about, getting ready to bring it into production.

In one corner, according to company officials giving TIME a rare tour, the firm will build its cutting-edge motors, which will be located in each wheel. A short golf-cart ride away, engineers explain how the company will assemble the lithium-ion battery packs that will power the trucks instead of diesel fuel. And while an army of robots sit idle, ready to be put to use assembling the vehicle, company officials insist they will soon be hiring rapidly. At full capacity, the company says, the facility will be able to churn out hundreds of thousands of trucks every year, a best-case scenario that would make Lordstown Motors a major player in the American auto industry and revitalize a part of the country that has been left behind by a series of big industrial departures.

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But there’s a reason one local official calls this part of Ohio the “land of broken promises.” The Lordstown Motors jobs may be green, but it’s an open question whether they will be good—and how many of them there will be. Unlike the 10,000-plus people who used to make General Motors automobiles at this same building, Lordstown Motors employees do not belong to a union. Today, the plant employs only around 500 people, and it’s unclear how many will ultimately work in the facility. For many locals, there’s an air of uncertainty brought by recent headlines: Lordstown Motors is under federal investigation for allegedly misleading investors. The company’s CEO and CFO both resigned in June.

The combination of its vaulting promise and tenuous future captures well the larger state of play in the world of green jobs. As the auto industry rapidly transforms—moving from the internal combustion engine that has defined road transportation for more than 100 years to electric vehicles—workers and manufacturing communities are waiting anxiously to see what the scramble to lower the nation’s emissions will mean for them. On the one hand, building electric vehicles in communities like the Mahoning Valley, the region where Lordstown is located, promises to create the jobs of the future, resilient to the wave of imminent changes that will come as the post-pandemic economy rebuilds and modernizes. On the other, the picture of what an auto-manufacturing job in the new green economy looks like remains fuzzy.

The growth of electric-vehicle manufacturing in the U.S. could drive a renaissance for workers, creating new paths for unionization, training opportunities and better salaries. Or it could lead to lower wages, slashed benefits and a smaller workforce—and that’s just for the jobs that remain in the U.S.

The stakes rose dramatically on Aug. 5, when President Biden gathered executives and labor officials on the South Lawn of the White House to announce new vehicle-efficiency standards and a goal of making 50% of new-car sales electric by 2030. “There’s no turning back,” said Biden, with U.S.-made electric trucks parked in the driveway behind him. “The question is whether we’ll lead or fall behind in the race for the future. It’s whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries that got them to where they are here in the United States, or if we’re going to have to rely on other countries for those batteries; whether or not the job to build these vehicles and batteries are good-paying union jobs, jobs with benefits, jobs that are going to sustain continued growth of the middle class.”

Across the nation, auto companies, local officials and union leaders are trying to chart a path through this uncertain, fast-moving moment. Small towns and state governments are jockeying to capture their share of the emerging green economy, enticing electric automakers to invest in their backyards with tax incentives and worker-training programs. Legacy automakers are rethinking their businesses from the ground up, poised to spend tens of billions of dollars in the process, while union leaders are fighting to maintain a voice in the evolving industry. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is trying to use the federal dime to shape the industry’s transition in a way that will ultimately support communities.

The auto industry is not the only sector staring into the green unknown. Study after study shows that on a global scale, transitioning industry to a low-carbon economy will create new jobs, but those jobs won’t necessarily be in the same places, go to the same people, or offer the same pay and benefits. In the energy sector, for example, the International Labour Organization found that addressing climate change will create 24 million jobs globally while eliminating 6 million. This trend carries across large swaths of the economy.

But the science of climate change is urgent, and even the most wizened labor advocates acknowledge that such complexities cannot be an excuse for inaction. Instead, they say, this moment must be viewed as an opportunity to create the best jobs as early as possible. “All of these decisions on electric vehicles and clean energy… will need to be worker-centered,” says Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and longtime supporter of organized labor. “That will make all the difference.”

In eastern Ohio, residents are watching—hopeful, but not naive to the pitfalls and challenges ahead. They want Lordstown Motors to fulfill its promise of anchoring a new “Voltage Valley” that will bring thousands of jobs back to the area. Despite the uncertainty over the federal investigations the company faces, Lordstown Motors says things are on track. “At the end of the day, [community members] will see us producing a truck,” says Jane Ritson-Parsons, the company’s chief operating officer. And locals want to believe them. “We want what’s best for the valley economically, so we don’t want to see this project fail,” says Tim O’Hara, a GM assembly worker who served as the president of the local branch of the United Auto Workers (UAW) before moving to a GM plant in Kentucky. “We’re kind of in a wait-and-see situation about how this all turns out.”

Driving through the Mahoning Valley, a flat expanse between Cleveland and Pittsburgh with 530,000 residents, it’s hard to miss the region’s industrial roots—and the reverence for the workers who built it. The city of Youngstown, about 15 miles southeast of the Lordstown Motors plant, is home to the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry & Labor, celebrating the history of the Valley’s steel industry. You can’t drive across town without spotting a UAW bumper sticker. At Ross’ Eatery and Pub, the local bar, union gear is displayed alongside Marines paraphernalia and hunting trophies.

GM was once at the center of this community. The more than 10,000 workers the company employed in the region at the assembly plant’s peak supported thousands of other jobs. But changing consumer preferences and globalization destabilized everything, and the company’s hold on the region loosened. In 2017, GM cut the first shift from the Lordstown plant, which at the time produced the Chevy Cruze; by the end of 2018 the company had told workers the entire facility would close. At Ross’ Eatery, a poster hangs on the wall of the last car produced there, on March 6, 2019.

Mayor William “Doug” Franklin of Warren, a city a short drive from the plant, understands the personal impact of Mahoning Valley’s booms and busts. His father worked in a local steel mill and his mother at a local auto supplier. Before becoming mayor, Franklin himself worked at GM for 25 years. He now describes himself as a “UAW retiree.”

But Franklin doesn’t want to talk about the Mahoning Valley’s past. Instead of meeting at the historic mayor’s office in Warren, he asked to meet a few blocks away at BRITE, a local nonprofit that supports energy-tech startups, which is trying to build an electric-vehicle ecosystem in the area. Franklin wants to see a full-scale rebranding of the region, making the Mahoning Valley a center for electric-vehicle manufacturing that will bring job retraining, private investment and new technical jobs. “We know how to take a punch and how to recover; that’s just in our DNA,” he says. “This provides us a great opportunity to change our brand from the Steel Valley to the Voltage Valley.”

The shift began in earnest in 2019, when Lordstown Motors formed a new firm to take over the GM facility and produce an electric truck. On Dec. 5, GM announced its own EV project just next door: a battery-cell-assembly plant called Ultium Cells, which is scheduled to open next year. With those two anchors, small startups have flocked to the region, working in everything from energy storage to solar power, eager to benefit from the electric–vehicle hub that seems to be taking shape. “There will be a couple thousand jobs that show up here in the next three to five years, based purely on the location,” says Rick Stockburger, who runs BRITE.

More of these hubs could be on the way. Major automakers including GM, Ford and Stellantis are each spending tens of billions to prepare for an all-electric future. “This is transformational,” says Gerald Johnson, GM’s head of global manufacturing. “It’s the biggest technological change this industry has seen in over 100 years. This is going from buggies to engines.”

It has also given automakers an opportunity to think strategically about where to invest—and there’s no guarantee that they will do so in the same places they built the internal combustion engine. Companies are selecting sites based on a range of criteria, from geography and transportation access to the local workforce. And cities, towns and states are fighting to prove that they’re the best suited to absorb those jobs. The rapid EV investment in eastern Ohio “isn’t a surprise to us,” says Jonathan Bridges, who heads Jobs-Ohio’s efforts to recruit automotive companies to the state. “We’ve been actively working to position Ohio to be in that next generation of propulsion.”

Communities with deep histories in the automotive industry may have some natural advantage in this race, such as hosting an old plant that can be refurbished. But there’s no doubt that the change will also be disruptive. Making an electric vehicle is a less labor-intensive process than producing one of its gas-powered counterparts; many of the components under the hood of a car with an internal combustion engine simply aren’t needed in an electric vehicle. Automakers estimate that they will require 30% less labor to produce an electric vehicle than a gas-powered one. Many companies in the supply chain that make parts for cars will cease to exist entirely.

That creates new problems for the workers who remain. With fewer auto jobs than job seekers, companies may try to pay industry workers less. That’s difficult to do under current union contracts, but many auto companies have already begun to outsource work to subsidiaries and partners that are not unionized. While Ultium Cells, for example, says it won’t stand in the way of a union, workers will need to organize to join one. In any event, pay is expected to be significantly less than what UAW workers earned at GM. Ford too has invested in a separate battery company, which may or may not be unionized one day. Some startups, like Lordstown Motors, are not unionized at all. And earlier this year a federal judge found that Tesla, now the biggest incumbent EV maker, had illegally sought to discourage union participation at the company. “A significant number of jobs are in jeopardy,” says Marick Masters, a professor of management at Wayne State University. “And some of the jobs that are going to replace them may be nonunion, paying considerably less than the going rate.”

There’s also the skills challenge; many of the new jobs will likely require different technical capabilities than traditional auto-industry workers typically have. Software engineers, chemists and technical experts will be more in demand, while the engineers and technicians who spent their careers mastering components like the transmission will find their skills effectively irrelevant.

In Ohio, state and federal funds are already being put toward re-skilling. The Excellence Training Center at Youngstown State University, for example, is a former juvenile-correctional facility that recently got a government-funded $12 million makeover and began classes in July to provide locals with skills they will need to work at the new battery-cell–manufacturing plant. On the ground level, 3-D printers churned out YSU-themed tchotchkes to show off what they can do. In a vast second-floor space, more robots stood at the ready for the next trainee to take the wheel and learn how to operate them. “Higher ed is not meeting the needs of industry,” says Jennifer Oddo, executive director of the training center. “But industry can’t wait.”

Competition for this new generation of vehicle will be fierce, and some states are willing to spend big to incentivize. Around 500 miles southwest of the Mahoning Valley, in downtown Nashville, Bob Rolfe’s office feels more C-suite than state-government administrator. From a corner perch on the 27th floor of a skyscraper, Rolfe, who runs Tennessee’s Department of Economic & Community Development, surveys the city landscape as he works to bring new business here.

Tennessee is ahead of the curve in the American race to woo electric-vehicle investment: GM, Nissan and Volkswagen have all committed billions to build electric cars in the state, which already has auto-industry operations in 88 of its 95 counties. In the offices his department has set up overseas, from the United Kingdom to Japan, Rolfe’s pitch to electric-vehicle makers has been simple: Tennessee is “pro-business.” The state doesn’t have a personal income tax, it funds workforce-development programs, and it has billions of dollars in tax incentives at the ready to offer companies.

Forty-five minutes down the road, GM’s new, $2 billion Spring Hill EV-manufacturing plant is constructing the facilities to build its first electric Cadillac. New assembly floors rise from what was once empty land, part of an already sprawling GM complex that has been in operation since the 1980s. Next door, another new Ultium Cells plant is also breaking ground, and the state is working with GM to move a road to accommodate it. In total, Rolfe estimates the state is providing $65 million in incentives to support GM’s expansion here. “These are not inexpensive investments for the companies,” says Rolfe. “They’re not inexpensive for the state.”

Local governments’ aggressive maneuvers to attract the electric-vehicle business have unsettled a well-established dynamic among the typical auto-industry power players. The UAW, the longtime counterweight to the auto companies, has had to fight to maintain its influence. Its current contracts remain intact, but its leverage is limited as automakers rethink their business and local communities vie to host them.

The abrupt shift presents a conundrum to labor leaders. Climate change and global market trends mean electric vehicles are the future. The transportation sector in the U.S. emits nearly 30% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and nearly 60% of that comes from light-duty vehicles. The U.S. may be slow to change this equation, but the rest of the world—and the car market—is moving full speed ahead. For the UAW to fight EVs would be futile, and it’s in the union’s interest to ensure electric vehicles are made in the U.S. Yet those same market trends mean union membership is likely to take a hit.

A representative for the UAW national union declined to comment on the record for this story, and threatened to block access to union officials if TIME contacted local members.

As it turns out, local union leaders and rank-and-file workers alike around the country said the transition to EVs has generated mixed feelings. In places like the Mahoning Valley, there is a cautious optimism that electric vehicles will bring prosperity, at least in the near term, even without organized labor. “They’re high-quality, high-paying jobs,” Franklin, the Warren mayor, says of the clean-energy ecosystem developing in his backyard. “Compared to what UAW members made in the past? We lost those jobs.”

But in places that have yet to be chosen as a new EV hub, workers are skeptical, nervous, even terrified. In Facebook groups and after-hours chats, workers say, views of the country’s EV future are falling along the same partisan lines as so many other aspects of American life. Many conservatives doubt EVs even work, let alone represent an important part of the country’s future. Democratic autoworkers accept the benefits of EVs, but worry that they might end up casualties of the industry’s overhaul, no matter the rhetoric coming from Washington.

“Electric vehicles are the way of the future, it seems pretty obvious,” says Justin Mayhugh, an auto-worker at GM’s Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City, Kans., and a UAW member. “But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I think most of us here in Kansas City are pretty concerned about the lack of investment here.”

On May 18, Joe Biden traveled to Detroit to promote his infrastructure plan. Sitting in the driver’s seat of a new electric Ford F-150 truck wearing his signature aviator sunglasses, Biden told the gathered reporters, “This sucker’s quick,” before accelerating off into an empty parking lot. Shortly after, Biden conceded that the future of electric vehicles in this country is uncertain, warning that the U.S. is at risk of falling behind China. Then he quickly pivoted back to his mantra. “When I think of the climate crisis,” he said, “I think jobs.”

This has been Biden’s consistent talking point on climate change, from the campaign trail to the Oval Office. But the truth is that while the auto industry’s transition may be inevitable, the myriad “good-paying union jobs with benefits” that Biden has promised will come with it remain a possibility, not a guarantee. And for better or worse, the federal government will play a key role determining whether that becomes a reality. “The United States is at a crossroads,” says Trevor Higgins, senior director for domestic climate and energy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank. “Where and how these electric vehicles will be built is going to be determined by federal policy choices.”

The next few months may be decisive, as Congress decides the fate of Biden’s massive infrastructure package. Both the big-ticket spending items, such as the $174 billion Biden has proposed to stimulate electric-vehicle adoption, as well the small print outlining the labor requirements for federal-funding beneficiaries, will shape the future of this new American industry—and workers’ place in it. So far, much is left to be desired. A bipartisan infrastructure deal struck in the Senate contains some $7.5 billion in funding for EV-charging stations; a big sum, to be sure, but far short of what Biden proposed. Biden has also sought to use his presidential authority and convening power to shape the EV future: his Aug. 5 announcement included tightened vehicle standards that would incentivize the transition, as well as voluntary commitments from carmakers to go electric.

That’s the easy part. From there, the policy landscape gets more complicated, as Democrats try to infuse worker-friendly policies into other legislation that supports EVs. Democratic lawmakers have pushed legislation to revamp electric-vehicle tax -incentives so that cars would need to be assembled in the U.S. with union labor to qualify for a full tax rebate. Biden, widely viewed as the biggest union ally to occupy the White House in decades, has backed a measure that would make it easier for workers at fledgling EV companies—and businesses across the U.S.—to organize. “We have to get the President’s full agenda passed, so that we can get the best outcomes in the transition to EVs,” Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, said at a July virtual event.

In the places that stand to gain and lose in these negotiations, people give the President’s performance managing the industry’s transformation mixed reviews. Many acknowledge that Biden’s electric-vehicle agenda will help their local community. But there is also widespread understanding of what few in Washington want to admit: this transition is going to be messy. “When they say it’s creating all these new jobs, that’s a lie. I mean, you’re just shifting jobs from here to there,” says Dave Green, a GM assembly worker who previously led the local UAW branch in the Mahoning Valley. “‘I’m a little more hopeful with Joe Biden and Democrats in office, but at the same time, something’s got to give.”

Whatever Biden tries, it’s likely to run headlong into a wall of Republican opposition. Many in the GOP worry that supporting EVs will wreak havoc on the oil and gas industry, and cost millions of energy jobs in largely red states. It’s true, of course, that transitioning to electric vehicles will have downstream effects for oil and gas workers, gas-station owners, and a long list of other established industries. But clinging to the past is worse for everyone. The climate is changing, and jobs will need to too. The sooner we admit it, the better we can prepare. —With reporting by Leslie Dickstein