The 65-page report was the result of a three-year investigation and was made public hours before a Senate Budget Committee hearing about the role that oil and gas companies have played in global warming.

“They could’ve been the environmental Paul Revere but, instead, they were more like Rip Van Winkle, wanting everyone to go to sleep,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said about fossil fuel companies’ efforts to mislead and distract the American public for more than 60 years. “The thing that gets me the most is thinking back to the decades when ‘Big Oil and Gas’ understood the problem in a way almost no one in the country or the world did.”

Democrats’ investigation revealed research, transcripts and even video recordings that show the fossil fuel industry knew the consequences of its emissions since at least the 1960s. Their report also showed how oil and gas companies initially tried to hide that information but employed new tactics to downplay the urgency of eliminating emissions.

Geoffrey Supran, an associate professor and director of the Climate Accountability Lab at the University of Miami, researches climate disinformation and propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. He said that oil and gas companies’ claims of decarbonizing are just their latest strategy to delay climate action. 

“Putting spin before science continues at oil companies to this day,” he said of his research into the tactics of the industry.

“This is greenwashing 101,” Supran added. “Talk green, act dirty.”

Senate Republicans called the hearing purely partisan and attempted to refocus the discussion on the financial cost of rapidly transitioning away from oil and gas. 

“We spend all this money, and we don’t lower global temperatures one scintilla of a degree,” said Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, one of the top oil and gas producing states in the U.S.

The American Petroleum Institute (API), a major lobbying group for the industry, was repeatedly blamed in the report and Senate hearing for helping oil and gas companies hide the truth about climate change. According to Senate Democrats, API both advised fossil fuel companies on public relations strategies, while also acting as a scapegoat for congressional scrutiny.

In a statement to NBC News, an API spokesperson said, “At a time of persistent inflation and geopolitical instability, our nation needs more American energy – including more oil and natural gas – and less unfounded election year rhetoric. America’s energy workers are focused on delivering the reliable, affordable oil and natural gas Americans demand while scaling the next generation of low-carbon technologies like hydrogen and carbon capture, and any suggestion to the contrary is inaccurate.” 

Democrats reiterated that oil and gas companies have damaged the planet for decades without having to pay for the consequences. That led Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to ask what happens next. 

“If we have an industry that knowingly, and that’s the point … knowingly understood that climate change would bring devastating destruction to the lives of billions of people, what are the legal grounds we can hold them accountable for?” he said.

The organization’s report — its 25th annual analysis of the “State of the Air” in the country — found that between 2020 and 2022, 131 million people were living in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution. The figure increased by nearly 12 million since the last survey a year ago. 

The report also found that people in the United States experienced more “very unhealthy” or “hazardous” air quality days than any time in the survey’s history. 

Katherine Pruitt, the national senior director for clean air policy at the American Lung Association, said climate change is chipping away at decades of cleanup efforts made through the Clean Air Act, a federal law passed in 1963 to regulate air pollution and set air quality standards. 

“The changes happening in our climate and with heat and drought, and especially wildfire, have started to undo some of that progress we’ve made,” Pruitt said. “It is distressing to find that so many people are living with air quality that threatens their health.” 

Wildfires are a fast-growing pollution source that policymakers are struggling to address. Climate scientists expect wildfire smoke to increase in the future, as greenhouse gas emissions push temperatures higher. The lung association’s analysis comes to the same conclusion as peer-reviewed research published last year in the journal Nature. Marshall Burke, an author of that study, suggested that wildfire smoke has undone about 25% of the Clean Air Act’s progress. 

“If we take some steps back and tell what the root cause is, it’s the burning of fossil fuels,” said Dr. Lisa Patel, a clinical associate professor who practices as a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. “We don’t need to be in this situation. We have the technology, we have the federal investment to get on renewables. What we need now is the political will.” 

Every year, the “State of the Air” report analyzes air quality data of the three previous years. The analysis focuses on ozone exposure and on short-term and year-round exposures to particle pollution. The report issues grades for each measure and then summarizes how many areas pass or fail for each grade. Nearly 44 million people now live in areas that failed at all three criteria, according to the report.

Small particles are a significant concern because they can penetrate into people’s lungs, circulate in the bloodstream and affect other organs. 

These particles, which are merely a fraction of the size of a human hair, have been shown to raise risk for asthma, lung cancer, chronic lung diseases, preterm birth and pregnancy loss. 

Patel, who is also the executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, said she has noticed an uptick in preterm births during periods of heavy wildfire events and has begun to counsel parents about how heat and smoke are a risk factor during pregnancy. 

“When we have weeks of poor air quality, we see more pregnant individuals coming in and delivering before 37 weeks,” Patel said, adding that parents often question whether their actions could have contributed to an early birth. “When they ask about risks for premature birth, I do say climate change. Both heat and wildfires are a risk factor. They’re not in your control.” 

Additionally, Patel said she has noticed that patients in her pediatric clinic often complain of nasal infections, eye irritation and asthmatic exacerbations, among other ailments, when wildfire smoke events happen in California. 

Pruitt said particle pollution concerns once centered on the industrial Midwest and the Northeast. But in this report, for the first time, all 25 of the cities with the most daily particle pollution were in the West. Most were in California.  

“Early in our history, a lot of particle pollution was coming from coal-fired power plants and transportation sources and industrial processes,” Pruitt said. “As the Clean Air Act has cleaned those sources up, particle pollution problems in the eastern U.S. have gotten much less serious. But in the West, they’ve of course had the same access to regulations and cleanups, but they are also being gobsmacked by climate change and wildfire.” 

Daniel Mendoza, an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, said many communities in western states are dealing with acute, short-term pollution episodes rather than chronic exposures over a long period of time. Scientists are still trying to untangle how damaging wildfire episodes are in comparison to extended exposures from industrial sources. 

“Not all bad air pollution is created equal,” Mendoza said. 

Pollution from transportation and industrial sources could continue to decline if the Environmental Protection Agency is able to implement the more stringent standards it has proposed. The EPA proposed a rule last year that would require nearly all of the country’s coal and large gas plants to reduce or capture about 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2038. 

This March, the agency implemented stricter rules to reduce tailpipe emissions from passenger vehicles. Another EPA policy, aimed at curbing nitrogen oxide pollution that travels across states, was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2022, the Supreme Court limited the administration’s ability to use the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

The report has one bright spot: Ozone pollution has continued its dramatic improvement. About 2.4 million fewer people are living in areas with unhealthy ozone pollution in comparison to last year. 

Wildfire smoke has worsened in the time since this analysis was complete: Americans in 2023 breathed in more wildfire smoke than any other year on record, the Stanford researchers found last year. 

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Biden is marking Earth Day by announcing $7 billion in federal solar power grants
• Trump says RFK Jr. will hurt Biden. In private, he’s not so sure.
• Judge skewers Trump defense’s ‘credibility’ in gag order hearing ahead of key witness testimony

The phenomenon is impacting our health, our safety and our economy, which is why several communities have already begun to adapt and explore mechanisms to protect the environment and themselves.

Scientists agree that the main cause of climate change is human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. These fuels release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“We are mainly seeing an increase in the temperature of both the land surface and the ocean,” explained Edil Sepúlveda, a NASA engineer.

Over the last decade, Earth has recorded a steady rise in temperatures, to the point that 2023 was a record year with the warmest temperatures since records began in the mid-1800s. 

To give a real and complete picture of climate change and how it is transforming daily life, Telemundo stations worked on this original documentary “Nuestro Planeta: Voces del Cambio Climático” (“Our Planet: Voices of Climate Change”).

REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE, THE SOLUTION?

In the face of climate change, regenerative agriculture is emerging as a hopeful method to ensure food security and is already being implemented in many U.S. crops.

“It’s very important to adapt to climate change and to help and promote the sustainability of sustainable production…and do my part to combat the effects of climate change,” said Fabricio Prico, an agronomist at Rio Grande Valley College.  

Regenerative agriculture and livestock farming incorporate techniques including crop rotation and soil cover. It requires less machinery and energy, translating into a smaller carbon footprint. 

The key is to always keep the soil alive, which translates into better quality produce and, most importantly, limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

“Everyone wants to eat more beef or chicken and all that production is associated with the production of greenhouse gases,” said Alexis Racelis, professor of Environmental and Land Studies at the University of Rio Grande Valley.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND HISPANICS

In charge of one of the most relevant 2023 studies was Edil Sepúlveda, a Puerto Rican engineer who is the senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

After the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, part of his work focused on disaster recovery and resilience, according to his NASA bio page.

Sepúlveda talked about the reasons for increasing temperatures in an interview with Telemundo Stations Group.

“They were due to natural changes on planet Earth, many of them due to small changes in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Others had to do with significant volcanic eruptions… or, for example, the fall of an asteroid or comet,” Sepúlveda said.

In Alaska, Telemundo stations met Samarys Seguinot Medina, a Puerto Rican environmental researcher at the Arctic Pole.

She has led important efforts to understand climate change and protect vulnerable communities.

“This is a real problem… I honestly feel that a decision needs to be made at the governance level,” Seguinot Medina said.

In California, there are workers like Carlos Contreras, who has spent a lifetime doing the important work of harvesting food and now, he says, has begun to see losses because the heat destroys the crops.

Fausto Sánchez is a representative of the organization Asistencia Legal Rural de California. As part of his work, he tours farmland to monitor the welfare of workers and make sure they are not exposed to extreme heat conditions.

Students at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley are also looking for solutions to minimize the effects of climate change.

“I am very proud of the work we are doing because we are starting with a group of students and maybe in the future we will be able to develop technologies that we can use globally,” said Fabricio Prico, agronomist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

FROM INVESTMENT TO REJECTION: US POLICY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

United States policy on the climate crisis has depended on the political party occupying the White House.

After landmark agreements signed by former President Barack Obama, former President Donald Trump was quick to call the issue a sham and withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement, a pact of 200 countries aimed at mitigating climate change.

Now, President Joe Biden has called the crisis the No. 1 problem facing humanity.

Under his administration, the U.S. rejoined the Paris Agreement and dozens of laws have been signed to allocate funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce the burning of fossil fuels.

The Biden administration’s plan focuses on three components: encouraging the production of more affordable electric vehicles; enacting legislation to limit greenhouse gas pollution; and investing in mitigation projects in the most vulnerable communities across the country and around the world.

Heading into the upcoming election in November, climate change could be an important issue for U.S. residents.

Yale University research in 2023 found that 72% of respondents believe global warming is occurring and 70% fear it will hurt future generations.

Of those surveyed, 55% believe the issue should be a priority for the next president and Congress.

CLIMATE CHANGE, A RACE AGAINST TIME

Signs of climate change are already visible on our planet, such as devastating fires, powerful hurricanes, rising sea levels and melting at the poles.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), sea level rise has accelerated from 1.7 mm/year during most of the 20th century to 3.2 mm/year since 1993.

But as time marches on, the time frame we have to respond is shortening. 

According to the United Nations, the average global temperature of planet Earth is about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2.8 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than that recorded in 1800.

“We are at a very important moment in which we all have to do our bit and take action,” Sepúlveda said.

HOW TO CURB CLIMATE CHANGE

The answer is complex but the biggest change will be seen if we reduce our carbon footprint.

Some countries and large companies are major contributors to emissions that cause climate change, so changes in government and private policies will be key.

The most important thing would be to switch from fossil fuel energy systems to renewable energies such as solar or wind, according to the United Nations.

Moreover, there are no small actions and change can start with ourselves. Here are some recommendations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):

• Buy products with the “ENERGY STAR” certification label.
  
• Reduce food waste by buying only what you need, composting food scraps and donating what you don’t use.
  
• Buy used items and donate what you no longer use.
  
• Change your vehicle to an electronic one or walk, use bicycles or the public system.
  
• Take shorter showers.
  
• Plant trees whenever you can.

When Suter was a sophomore in high school, his mom brought home a copy of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a 2006 documentary about climate change narrated by former Vice President Al Gore.

“(I) did some research. Turned out it was all true and really scary. From that point on, it was on my heart to do something about it,” Suter said.

Now, as an established Major League Baseball pitcher, Suter uses his platform to advocate for the environment by sparking conversations and taking action.

One of the organizations Suter has partnered with is La Soupe, a Cincinnati organization that rescues food set to be wasted and uses it to make soup and meals to be distributed around the city for people who need it.

Suter said he is also working with Sam Hubbard Organization, which gives cupboards, along with food and medical supplies, to schools that need it. But he is doing so with an environmental spin.

“We’re gonna try to get a cupboard into a school that has a rooftop garden and try to implement that garden into the cupboard,” Suter said.

Yet, on a day-to-day level, Suter said he tries to bring awareness to the environment with his own personal habits. Many ballplayers Suter is around on a daily basis notice the things he is doing and that sparks a window for Suter to talk about his cause.

“So, I noticed I have this Tupperware, and I always use Yetis or reusable bottles. But I have this Tupperware that I take everywhere that we don’t have reusable dishware. I eat out of it and it sparks a lot of good conversations,” Suter said. “Guys are really curious about it, ‘Like what are you doing there?'”

Suter is also a part of an organization called EcoAthletes, which draws attention to and helps athletes organize their work for the environment with the hopes of recruiting more athletes to the cause.

As for what Suter would like to see change in MLB?

“I would love to see more reusable containers being sold,” Suter said. “I love people drinking, having a good time at ballparks, but I would love to have some type of reusable, like a refillable drink station at ballparks rather than like the single cup of beer, single cup of soda.”

Suter’s final pitch to people is to look at being an environmentalist as being an “everything-ist.”

“Because I care about the environment, I care about you, I care about me, I care about your kids, I care about animals, plants,” Suter said. “Our economy and our man-made systems are all subject to and at the mercy of the environment and our planet. So, environmentalists would really be called an everything-ist.”

The average lifespan for a cherry tree is about 40 years, but many trees in the District and surrounding areas are living far beyond that — in part because of the round the clock care they receive — even as they face threats from their own environments. Some of the cherry trees that line the Tidal Basin are estimated to be over 100 years old. They have survived rising sea levels and the soil around their roots being trampled by millions of people.

“It’s kind of remarkable, but you know, 112 years later, a lot of these trees have sort of adapted to that environment,” said National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst.

At the American University (AU) Arboretum, four cherry trees were initially planted in 1943 by Syngman Rhee – who would eventually become the first president of South Korea – as a gift from the Korean Women’s Relief Society of Honolulu. More than 80 years later, the AU Arboretum cares for more than 200 cherry trees, and three of the four original trees are still standing and reliably blooming each year.

“Trees are surprisingly resilient to their surroundings…” said Mike Mastrota, the AU Arboretum manager. “But the cherries in particular, I think, tend to be pretty hardy in this area.”

Here’s a look at how D.C.’s famous cherry trees thrive in the face of natural and manmade threats.

The hazards of climate change, heat and too much salty water

Cherry blossoms in the District have lived through a multitude of climate change-related challenges over the years.

Heat can take a toll on a cherry tree as higher temperatures bring out more pests. In the future, hotter weather could mean more pests and fungal diseases specifically for the cherry trees, which could result in fewer flowers or blooms on afflicted trees, according to Litterst.

However, none of the pests common for D.C. cherry trees specifically are currently posing a major threat, according to NPS’ cherry tree care guide. If the population of a pest reaches a certain threshold, the trees will be sprayed with a horticultural oil. The most common pest, a category of insects called scales, is controlled through pruning and treating wounds on the tree’s bark.

Cherry Blossoms Mar 23

Why Stumpy, the ‘Little Cherry Tree That Could,' can't be transplanted — and how he'll live on anyway

Cherry Blossoms Mar 20

Flowers, whiskey, and a mascot that stops traffic: Tributes left to Stumpy during tree's final peak bloom in DC

Mastrota said that the AU Arboretum hasn’t had to cut down any of its trees due to disease or other hazards, and they continue to thrive on the university’s bustling campus.

Heat can also affect trees in the same way it affects humans – when the temperature is too high and there is not enough water available, it can cause physical consequences, sometimes even death.

“There’s [been] differences in rain, so we’re having longer periods of drought, and water stress can obviously kill a plant,” said Meghan Avolio, an ecologist at Johns Hopkins University.

To prevent water stress, trees at the Tidal Basin that are one to three years old are watered as needed using water trucks, and older trees get irrigated during droughts, according to NPS.

On the opposite end, trees can also suffer from getting too much water. The water surrounding the Tidal Basin now sits 6 feet above the existing sea wall. Just the sheer amount of water – and its brackish nature – flooding the trees’ roots can contribute to tree death.

“Cherry trees simply aren’t adapted for not only the salty water, but as much water as they’re seeing coming in,” Litterst said. “People think ‘Oh, well, you know, trees need water.’ Well, like most things, there’s too much of a good thing.”

When a tree’s roots and the soil around them become overwhelmed with water, especially if that water is salty, it can prevent oxygen from circulating in the soil and result in tree death, according to Avolio.

To combat the flooding, NPS is undertaking a massive seawall repair project. The $112 million repair will start in May with the hope of expanding the seawall’s lifespan by 100 years.

Stumpy, the tiny cherry tree of internet fame, has outlived his neighbors along the waterline, though he will be removed this year as the seawall repair begins.

“There’s a line of about 100 yards where there are no cherry trees because the trees that were there when they were inundated with water, for whatever reason, didn’t have Stumpy’s resilience, died and have long since been removed,” Litterst said. “And we can’t replace those trees until we fix the underlying cause of their demise, which is the sea walls.”

‘Trying to make it in the city’

Cherry blossoms in the District also may encounter threats posed by everyday city life. A major issue is what can happen when the trees’ roots are constantly being walked on, especially during peak bloom.

“That can pack the soil, and that creates some fewer spaces for water and air to flush in the soil, so it all can make more difficult conditions for trees to grow,” Avolio said

Mastrota said that if the soil gets compacted, it’s “almost like concrete.”

“So if your soil gets compacted — whether people are laying on and walking on it, sometimes you’ll see cars driving, parking under a tree because of the shade — not good for the tree, ” Mastrota said.

Yet, many trees are still standing, partly thanks to how they are actively managed and tended to.

The Arboretum staff puts holes into the soil to make sure air can circulate, and Tidal Basin staff will do air spading, which loosens the soil using pressurized air.

Wood chip therapy can also help improve soil health, according to NPS. This is where wood chips are placed on top of the soil in order to shade it from the sun, create space to hold water and air and help foster communities of good insects.

There are also simple things that people can do to help ensure the cherry trees’ longevity, even if you’re not an arborist.

Litterst and Mastrota said to refrain from climbing the trees or breaking off branches and to try to stay off their roots as much as possible. Avolio also mentioned that for trees along streets and roads, it’s important to avoid hitting them with your car door.

One big, basic rule: Trees are living things, and it’s crucial to treat them with respect and care.

“I think sometimes we take them for granted,” Avolio said. “They’re part of the street, they’re part of the landscape, and it’s easy to forget that they’re trying to make it in the city just like we are.”

Here are answers to some common questions about Earth Day and how it came to be:

Why do we celebrate Earth Day?

Earth Day has its roots in growing concern over pollution in the 1960s, when author Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” about the pesticide DDT and its damaging effects on the food chain, hit bestseller lists and raised awareness about nature’s delicate balance.

But it was a senator from Wisconsin, Democrat Gaylord Nelson, who had the idea that would become Earth Day. Nelson had long been concerned about the environment when a massive offshore oil spill sent millions of gallons onto the southern California coast in 1969. Nelson, after touring the spill site, had the idea of doing a national “teach-in” on the environment, similar to teach-ins being held on some college campuses at the time to oppose the war in Vietnam.

Nelson and others, including activist Denis Hayes, worked to expand the idea beyond college campuses, with events all around the country and came up with the Earth Day name.

Why is Earth Day on April 22?

A history of the movement by EarthDay.org, where Hayes remains board chair emeritus, says the date of the first Earth Day — April 22, 1970 — was chosen because it fell on a weekday between spring break and final exams and the aim was to attract as many students as possible.

Is Earth Day a federal holiday?

It’s not a federal holiday. But many groups use the day to put together volunteer events with the environment in mind, such as cleanups of natural areas.

You can see a list of events worldwide here, or register your own event, at EarthDay.org.

Has Earth Day had any major impact on climate?

It has. The overwhelming public response to the first Earth Day is credited with adding pressure for the U.S. Congress to do more to address pollution, and it did, passing landmark legislation including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. More broadly, it’s seen as the birth of the modern environmental movement. In later years, Earth Day expanded to become a truly global event. It now claims to have motivated action in more than 192 countries.

In 2000, Earth Day began taking aim at climate change, a problem that has grown rapidly more urgent in recent years.

What is the theme for Earth Day 2024?

This year’s Earth Day is focused on the threat that plastics pose to our environment, with a call to end all single-use plastic and find replacements for their use so they can quickly be phased down.

NOAA on Monday declared that a “4th global coral bleaching event” was taking place and that bleaching had been documented over the last 14 months in every major ocean basin, including off Florida in the United States, in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and in the South Pacific, NBC News reported.

“As the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe,” said Derek Manzello, a coral reef ecologist who coordinates NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Program, in a news release. “When these events are sufficiently severe or prolonged, they can cause coral mortality, which hurts the people who depend on the coral reefs for their livelihoods.”

Sea surface temperatures have set daily records for more than a year, which has prompted concerns among scientists who are trying to untangle how the oceans got so hot, so quickly. Warming from climate change and cycles of natural variability, like El Niño, have played a significant role. 

The health of corals is intertwined with ocean temperatures because the invertebrates are extremely sensitive to heat stress. When corals are stressed, they turn white as they release symbiotic algae that live in their tissues. Bleaching is a signal that corals’ health is endangered. 

“When a coral bleaches, it doesn’t mean it’s dead. It means it’s weak and at risk of dying if conditions don’t get better,” said Ana Palacio, an assistant scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, a research institute that is based at the University of Miami in partnership with NOAA. 

US & World

Florida Apr 11

Here's how Florida researchers are using biodegradable boba straws to protect baby corals

Apr 3

Saving the world on the way out: Why some families are opting for a coral memorial instead of a funeral

Corals are critical ecosystems that support a vast array of fish and aquatic species, which help feed coastal communities and attract tourists. The economic value of reefs is estimated at $2.7 trillion per year, according to a 2020 report from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. 

“They protect our coastline. They offer protection from storms and hurricanes. They have a great value for our economy and safety,” Palacio said.  

Coral ecosystems are among the ecosystems scientists think are most at risk because of global warming. In 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that 70% to 90% of the world’s coral reefs would disappear if global average temperatures crossed a threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average.

Last year was Earth’s hottest on record. Average global temperatures approached that threshold for the first time, though scientists believe the temperatures were boosted by El Niño and that 2023 was an anomaly. 

In Florida, as sea surface temperatures spiked, bleaching started early in the season, experts said. 

“Normally, bleaching will be observed in the Northern Hemisphere around August and September. We started to observe bleaching in July last year,” said Phanor Montoya-Maya, a marine biologist with the Coral Restoration Foundation, an organization that collects, restores and repopulates corals.

Palacio said the region saw widespread mortality of elkhorn and staghorn corals, two species that have been the focus of restoration efforts. 

“In some locations, about 20% of those populations survived,” Palacio said of restored corals. “We’re concentrating our hope on why those corals survived and what they can tell us about resistance and how corals can be more resilient.” 

The last global coral bleaching event happened in 2014 and lasted until 2017. More than 56% of global reef areas saw temperatures that could cause bleaching during that time period.  

In an email on Monday, Manzello said that 54% of the world’s coral reef areas had experienced bleaching-level heat stress in the past year and that the event was poised to become the worst bleaching event in history. 

“The percentage of reef areas experiencing bleaching-level heat stress has been increasing by roughly 1% per week,” Manzello said. “It is likely that this event will surpass the previous peak.” 

Montoya-Maya said a bleaching alert is already in effect in Florida, even earlier than last year. He said the Coral Restoration Foundation was preparing for a busy summer responding to another bleaching event. 

The natural pattern of El Niño has begun to dissipate and NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center estimates there is a 60% chance La Niña develops this summer, which could help cool Atlantic waters and allow some corals to recover, at least temporarily.   

“This is quite heartbreaking and it’s going to cause damage to a lot of reefs in the world,” Palacio said. “I’m hoping this bleaching event is going to create some traction and people will start caring more and paying attention to what’s happening with the climate.” 

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Swiss women score a landmark climate win in a court decision that could ripple across Europe
• Heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane levels in the air last year spiked to record highs again
• As some countries spurn cars, the U.S. continues to embrace highways

Carbon dioxide, the most important and abundant of the greenhouse gases caused by humans, rose in 2023 by the third highest amount in 65 years of record keeping, NOAA announced Friday. Scientists are also worried about the rapid rise in atmospheric levels of methane, a shorter-lived but more potent heat-trapping gas. Both jumped 5.5% over the past decade.

The 2.8 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide airborne levels from January 2023 to December, wasn’t as high as the jumps were in 2014 and 2015, but they were larger than every other year since 1959, when precise records started. Carbon dioxide’s average level for 2023 was 419.3 parts per million, up 50% from pre-industrial times.

Last year’s methane’s jump of 11.1 parts per billion was lower than record annual rises from 2020 to 2022. It averaged 1922.6 parts per billion last year. It has risen 3% in just the past five years and jumped 160% from pre-industrial levels showing faster rates of increase than carbon dioxide, said Xin “Lindsay” Lan, the University of Colorado and NOAA atmospheric scientist who did the calculations.

news Mar 22

World's first-ever global emissions tax takes a step closer to reality

“Methane’s decadal spike should terrify us,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who heads the Global Carbon Project that tracks worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide but wasn’t part of NOAA’s report. “Fossil fuel pollution is warming natural systems like wetlands and permafrost. Those ecosystems are releasing even more greenhouse gases as they heat up. We’re caught between a rock and a charred place.”

Methane emissions in the atmosphere come from natural wetlands, agriculture, livestock, landfills and leaks and intentional flaring of natural gas in the oil and gas industry.

Methane is responsible for about 30% of the current rise in global temperature, with carbon dioxide to blame for about twice as much, according to the International Energy Agency. Methane traps about 28 times the heat per molecule as carbon dioxide but lasts a decade or so in the atmosphere instead of centuries or thousands of years like carbon dioxide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Carbon dioxide and methane levels have been higher in the far ancient past, but it was before humans existed.

The third biggest human-caused greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, jumped 1 part per billion last year to record levels, but the increases were not as high as those in 2020 and 2021. Nitrous oxide, which lasts about a century in the atmosphere, comes from agriculture, burning of fuels, manure and industrial processes, according to the EPA.

“As these numbers show we still have a lot of work to do to make meaningful progress in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere,” NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory Director Vanda Grubisic said in statement.

Companies across the globe last year pledged massive — almost complete — cuts in methane emissions from the oil and gas industry in a new initiative that could trim future rises in temperature by a tenth of a degree Celsius. And the EPA issued a final rule to reduce oil and gas industry generated methane emissions.

But the past five years, methane levels have risen faster than any time in NOAA record-keeping. And recent studies have shown that government efforts to track methane are vastly underestimating the pollution going into the air from the energy industry.

Studies of the specific isotopes of methane in the air show much of the increased methane is from microbes, pointing to spiking emissions from wetlands and perhaps agriculture and landfills, but not as much the energy industry, Lan said.

“I’m still mostly concerned about carbon dioxide emissions,” Lan said.

Carbon dioxide emissions going into the air from burning fossil fuels and making cement hit an all time high last year of 36.8 billion metric tons, twice the amount spewed into the air 40 years ago, according to Global Carbon Project. But about half of what’s coming out of smokestacks and tailpipes are temporarily sucked up and stored by trees and oceans, keeping it out of the atmosphere, Lan said.

Methane doesn’t have that temporary carbon storage that carbon dioxide has, Lan said.

The shift last year from a three-year La Nina, the natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide, to a warm El Nino, played a role in dampening methane’s increasing rate in the air and spiking carbon dioxide levels, Lan said.

That’s because methane’s biggest emissions comes from wetlands, which during a La Nina is wetter in much of the tropics, creating more microbes in the lush growth to release methane, Lan said. The La Nina ended mid year last year, giving way to a strong El Nino.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere tend to rise higher during hotter El Ninos, but the current one is starting to peter out, Lan said.

The work is unfolding as global instability and growing demand drive uranium prices higher.

The Biden administration and dozens of other countries have pledged to triple the capacity of nuclear power worldwide in their battle against climate change, ensuring uranium will remain a key commodity for decades as the government offers incentives for developing the next generation of nuclear reactors and new policies take aim at Russia’s influence over the supply chain.

But as the U.S. pursues its nuclear power potential, environmentalists and Native American leaders remain fearful of the consequences for communities near mining and milling sites in the West and are demanding better regulatory oversight.

Producers say uranium production today is different than decades ago when the country was racing to build up its nuclear arsenal. Those efforts during World War II and the Cold War left a legacy of death, disease and contamination on the Navajo Nation and in other communities across the country, making any new development of the ore a hard pill to swallow for many.

The new mining at Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon’s South Rim entrance is happening within the boundaries of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukv National Monument that was designated in August by President Joe Biden. The work was allowed to move forward since Energy Fuels Inc. had valid existing rights.

Low impact with zero risk to groundwater is how Energy Fuels spokesman Curtis Moore describes the project.

The mine will cover only 17 acres (6.8 hectares) and will operate for three to six years, producing at least 2 million pounds (about 907,000 kilograms) of uranium — enough to power the state of Arizona for at least a year with carbon-free electricity, he said.

“As the global outlook for clean, carbon-free nuclear energy strengthens and the U.S. moves away from Russian uranium supply, the demand for domestically sourced uranium is growing,” Moore said.

Energy Fuels, which also is prepping two more mines in Colorado and Wyoming, has produced about two-thirds of the uranium in the U.S. in the last five years. In 2022, it was awarded a contract to sell $18.5 million in uranium concentrates to the U.S. government to help establish the nation’s strategic reserve for when supplies might be disrupted.

The ore extracted from the Pinyon Plain Mine will be transported to Energy Fuels’ mill in White Mesa, Utah — the only such mill in the U.S.

Amid the growing appetite for uranium, a coalition of Native Americans testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in late February, asking the panel to pressure the U.S. government to overhaul outdated mining laws and prevent further exploitation of marginalized communities.

Carletta Tilousi, who served for years on the Havasupai Tribal Council, said she and others have written countless letters to state and federal agencies and sat through hours of meetings with regulators and lawmakers. Her tribe’s reservation lies in a gorge off the Grand Canyon.

“We have been diligently participating in consultation processes,” she said. “They hear our voices. There’s no response.”

A group of hydrology and geology professors and nuclear watchdogs sent Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs a letter in January, asking she reconsider permits granted by state environmental regulators that cleared the way for the mine. She has yet to respond and her office declined to answer questions from The Associated Press.

Lawyers for Energy Fuels said in a letter to state officials that reopening the permits would be an improper attempt to side step Arizona’s administrative procedures and rights protecting permit holders from “such politicized actions.”

The environmentalists’ request followed a plea weeks earlier by the Havasupai saying mining at the foot of Red Butte will compromise one of the tribe’s most sacred spots. Called Wii’i Gdwiisa by the Havasupai, the landmark is central to tribal creation stories and also holds significance for the Hopi, Navajo and Zuni people.

“It is with heavy hearts that we must acknowledge that our greatest fear has come true,” the Havasupai said in a January statement, reflecting on concerns that mining could affect water supplies, wildlife, plants and geology throughout the Colorado Plateau.

The Colorado River flowing through the Grand Canyon and its tributaries are vital to millions of people across the West. For the Havasupai Tribe, their water comes from aquifers deep below the mine.

The U.S. Geological Survey recently partnered with the Havasupai Tribe to examine contamination possibilities that could include exposure through inhalation and ingestion of traditional food and medicines, processing animal hides or absorption through materials collected for face and body painting.

Legal challenges aimed at stopping the Pinyon Plain Mine repeatedly have been rejected by the courts, and top officials in the Biden administration are reticent to weigh in beyond speaking generally about efforts to improve consultation with Native American tribes.

It marks another front in an ongoing battle over energy development and sacred lands, as tribes in Nevada and Arizona are fighting the federal government over the mining of lithium and the siting of renewable energy transmission lines.

The Pinyon Plain Mine, formerly known as the Canyon Mine, was permitted in 1984. Because it retained existing rights, the mine effectively became grandfathered into legal operation despite a 20-year moratorium placed on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region by the Obama administration in 2012.

The U.S. Forest Service in 2012 reaffirmed an environmental impact statement that had been prepared for the mine years earlier, and state regulators signed off on air and aquifer protection permitting within the past two years.

“We work extremely hard to do our work at the highest standards,” Moore said. “And it’s upsetting that we’re vilified like we are. The things we’re doing are backed by science and the regulators.”

The regional aquifers feeding the springs at the bottom of the Grand Canyon are deep — around 1,000 feet (304 meters) below the mine — and separated by nearly impenetrable rock, Moore said.

State regulators also have said the geology of the area is expected to provide an element of natural protection against water from the site migrating toward the Grand Canyon.

Environmental reviews conducted as part of the permitting process have concluded the mine’s operation won’t affect visitors to the national park, area residents or groundwater or springs associated with the park. Still, environmentalists say the mine raises a bigger question about the Biden administration’s willingness to adopt policies favorable of nuclear power.

The U.S. Commerce Department under the Trump administration issued a 2019 report describing domestic production as essential to national security, citing the need to maintain the nuclear arsenal and keep commercial nuclear reactors fueled to generate electricity. At that point, nuclear reactors supplied nearly 20% of the electricity consumed in the U.S.

The Biden administration is staying the course. It’s in the midst of a multibillion-dollar modernization of the nation’s nuclear defense capabilities, and the U.S. Energy Department on Wednesday offered a $1.5 billion loan to the owners of a Michigan power plant to restart the shuttered facility, which would mark a first in the U.S.

Taylor McKinnon, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Southwest director, said pushing for more nuclear power and allowing mining near the Grand Canyon ”makes a mockery of the administration’s environmental justice rhetoric.”

“It’s literally a black eye for the Biden administration,” he said.

Using nuclear power to reach emissions goals is a hard sell in the western U.S. From the Navajo Nation to Ute Mountain Ute and Oglala Lakota homelands, tribal communities have deep-seated distrust of uranium companies and the federal government as abandoned mines and related contamination have yet to be cleaned up.

A complex of mines on the Navajo Nation recently was added to the federal Superfund list. The eastern edge of the reservation also is home to the largest radioactive accident in U.S. history. In 1979, more than 93 million gallons (350 million liters) of radioactive and acidic slurry spilled from a tailings disposal pond, contaminating water supplies, livestock and downstream communities. It was three times the radiation released at the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania just three months earlier.

Teracita Keyanna with the Red Water Pond Road Community Association got choked up while testifying before the human rights commission in Washington, D.C., saying federal regulators proposed keeping contaminated soil onsite rather than removing it.

“It’s really unfair that we have to deal with this and my children have to deal with this and later on, my grandchildren have to deal with this,” she said. “Why is the government just feeling like we’re disposable. We’re not.”

There is bipartisan backing in Congress for nuclear power, but some lawmakers who come from communities blighted by contamination are digging in their heels.

Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri said during a congressional meeting in January that lawmakers can’t talk about expanding nuclear energy in the U.S. without first dealing with the effects that nuclear waste has had on minority communities. Bush pointed to her own district in St. Louis, where waste was left behind from the uranium refining required by the top-secret Manhattan Project.

“We have a responsibility to both fix — and learn from — our mistakes,” she said, “before we risk subjecting any other communities to the same exposure.”

___

Montoya Bryan reported from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Associated Press writer Walter Berry in Phoenix contributed to this report.

The new rules relax initial tailpipe limits proposed last year but eventually get close to the same strict standards set out by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The rules come as sales of electric vehicles, which are needed to meet the standards, have begun to slow. The auto industry cited lower sales growth in objecting to the EPA’s preferred standards unveiled last April as part of its ambitious plan to cut planet-warming emissions from passenger vehicles.

Consumer Reports Jan 14

As EV sales slow, some drivers could buy one for as little as $10,000 this year

Biden Administration Jan 11

Biden administration awards $623 million in grants for nationwide EV charging network

The EPA said that under its final rule, the industry could meet the limits if 56% of new vehicle sales are electric by 2032, along with at least 13% plug-in hybrids or other partially electric cars, as well as more efficient gasoline-powered cars that get more miles to the gallon.

That would be a huge increase over current EV sales, which rose to 7.6% of new vehicle sales last year, up from 5.8% in 2022.

The new standards will avoid more than 7 billion tons of planet-warming carbon emissions over the next three decades and provide nearly $100 billion in annual net benefits, the EPA said, including lower health care costs, fewer deaths and more than $60 billion in reduced annual costs for fuel, maintenance and repairs.

President Joe Biden, who has made fighting climate change a hallmark of his presidency, cited “historic progress” on his pledge that half of all new cars and trucks sold in the U.S. will be zero-emission by 2030.

“We’ll meet my goal for 2030 and race forward in the years ahead,” Biden said in a statement Wednesday.

The EPA rule applies to model years 2027 to 2032 and will significantly reduce emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases, as well as other air pollution such as nitrogen oxides and particulate matter from new passenger cars, light trucks and pickups.

Transportation makes up the largest source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and cars and trucks account for more than half of those emissions. The EPA said the new rule will help “tackle the climate crisis” while accelerating the adoption of cleaner vehicle technologies. The agency is finalizing the rule as sales of clean vehicles, including plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles, hit record highs last year.

The new rule slows implementation of stricter pollution standards from 2027 through 2029, after the auto industry called proposed benchmarks unworkable. The rule ramps up to nearly reach the level the EPA preferred by 2032.

“Let me be clear: Our final rule delivers the same, if not more, pollution reduction than we set out in our proposal,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters. In addition to carbon pollution, the final standards also will reduce other serious air pollution that contributes to heart attacks, respiratory illnesses, aggravated asthma and decreased lung function, Regan said.

“Folks, these new standards are so important for public health, for American jobs, for our economy and for our planet,” he said.

The standards are designed to be technology-neutral and performance-based, Regan said, giving car and truck manufacturers the flexibility to choose pollution-control technologies that are best suited for their customers while meeting environmental and public health goals.

The changes appear aimed at addressing strong industry and labor opposition to the accelerated ramp-up of EVs, along with public reluctance to fully embrace the new technology. There is also a legitimate threat of legal challenges before conservative courts.

The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has increasingly reined in the powers of federal agencies, including the EPA, in recent years. The justices have restricted the EPA’s authority to fight air and water pollution — including a landmark 2022 ruling that limited the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming.

At the same time, the Democratic president needs cooperation from the auto industry and political support from auto workers, a key political voting bloc.

“U.S. workers will lead the world on autos — making clean cars and trucks, each stamped ‘Made in America,’” Biden said Wednesday. “You have my word.”

The United Auto Workers union, which has endorsed Biden, said it supports rules that benefit workers and the environment, not just the industry. The new rule protects workers who build combustion engine vehicles “while providing a path forward for automakers to implement the full range of automotive technologies to reduce emissions,” the union said.

Generally, environmental groups have been optimistic about the new EPA plan, which is aimed at slashing emissions from a source that causes one-fifth of the nation’s carbon pollution.

David Cooke, senior vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the rule would significantly reduce vehicle pollution from current requirements. But the standards are weaker than those EPA proposed a year ago and make it unlikely that the U.S. will be able to meet its commitments under the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which aims to keep global warming from increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, he said.

Still, the new rules over time will prevent more carbon pollution “than the entire U.S. economy coughs up in a year,″ said Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. In the short term, the rules “will save drivers money at the pump and cut tailpipe pollution that endangers public health,″ he added.

“In the longer journey to confront the climate crisis, these standards take us in the right direction,″ he said.

But Dan Becker at the Center for Biological Diversity said he fears loopholes will let the industry continue to sell gas burners. He also is afraid the industry will get away with doing little during the first three years of the standards, which could be undone if former President Donald Trump is reelected.

“The bottom line is that the administration is caving to pressure from big oil, big auto and the dealers to stall progress on EVs and now allow more pollution from cars,” Becker said.

Republicans criticized the new standards, saying they essentially decide for the public which vehicles they should buy. “These regulations represent yet another step toward an unrealistic transition to electric vehicles that Americans do not want and cannot afford,” said West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, called the rule a “misguided electric vehicle mandate” that will force the U.S. to rely on China and other foes for critical minerals needed for batteries.

Regan said the government isn’t requiring people to buy EVs or any other technology, adding that there are “multiple pathways companies can choose to comply″ with the rule.

“We are staying well within the confines of the law and our statutory authority by not mandating a specific technology,” he said.

The EPA could achieve its carbon pollution goals even if sales of battery electric vehicles are as low as 30% in 2032, as long as other standards are met, he said.

U.S. electric vehicle sales grew 47% last year to a record 1.19 million as EV market share rose to 7.6%. But EV sales growth slowed toward the end of the year. In December, they rose 34%.

The Alliance for Auto Innovation, a large industry trade group, praised the EPA’s slower implementation of the standards, saying the pace of the EV transition matters as the industry moves to produce more electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids to convert more traveling miles to electricity. The group had complained that the ramp-up to 67% initially proposed by the EPA was too fast for the industry to achieve. The proposal was faster than Biden’s goal of ensuring that EVs account for half of new vehicles in the U.S. by 2030.

“Moderating the pace of EV adoption was the right call because it prioritizes more reasonable electrification targets in the next few, very critical years of the transition,” said John Bozzella, the Alliance CEO.

The adjusted emissions targets will still be a stretch for the industry to achieve, Bozzella said, but they should give the market and parts supply chains a chance to catch up to higher EV sales. The plan also gives the industry more time to set up public charging stations, and it allows government tax incentives for EV manufacturing and for consumers to buy EVs to take hold, he said.

Toyota, the top seller of hybrid vehicles in the U.S., said it believes the fastest way to reduce carbon emissions quickly is to give consumers choices of battery electric vehicles and hybrids. The new EPA standards allow for more sales of plug-in hybrids and regular gas-electric hybrids to meet emissions limits.

____

AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher reported from Detroit.

About one in five children in the United States already has seasonal allergies, and 6.5% have asthma, most commonly triggered by pollen. If carbon pollution continues, asthma-driven emergency room visits are expected to rise. 

“We have to understand that this problem is going to get worse unless we get off of fossil fuels,” said Dr. Lisa Patel, clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Children’s Health in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Children typically spend more time outdoors than adults, so are more likely to be exposed to potential allergens, and their airways are also smaller, she said.

“So mechanically, just a little bit of irritation in a smaller airway can produce big problems,” she said.

The nonprofit organization Climate Central examined temperature trends in 197 U.S. cities to determine how the pollen season had changed from 1970 through 2023. Its findings, released Wednesday, show what's happening in a warming world:

• In 164 of those cities, the freeze-free season lengthened by 19 days on average. 
• The city where the freeze-free growing increased the most? Reno, Nevada.
• In 60 cities, the time between the last freeze and the first freeze was at least three weeks longer.
• All of the country’s climate regions — nine in total — saw an increase of at least 11 days on average in their freeze-free growing seasons. The greatest increase occurred in the Northwest, by 26 days. The Northeast and Southeast saw 15 more days for each. The Upper Midwest had an increase of 14 days. 

Pollen is traditionally produced from spring until early fall -- trees and grasses in the spring and summer, and ragweed in the late summer and early fall. But the season is getting longer thanks to the burning of fossil fuels — oil, natural gas and coal — which releases carbon dioxide and other emissions and traps heat in the atmosphere. An earlier and warmer spring brings a longer growing season and more time to release pollen, Climate Central notes.

"What climate change is doing is driving longer pollen seasons and more intense pollen seasons and so you might notice that your child is having symptoms at a time of year that isn’t usual for them and that’s because our external climate is different than it used to be," said Patel, who is also the executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.

Higher levels of carbon dioxide also increases the the production of pollen, especially in grasses and ragweed. The United States could see a 200% increase in pollen production by the end of the century, according to a 2022 study published in Nature. 

"When there’s more carbon dioxide, plants produce more pollen and the more pollen there is, the more exposure there is," Patel said.

climate change Feb 17

Dandelions and shrubs to replace rubber, new grains and more: Are alternative crops realistic?

climate change Mar 19

When American farmers battle climate change, you feel the pain at the grocery store checkout

And not only is the season getting longer, the pollen is becoming more potent, said Theresa MacPhail, author of "Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World." The protein in pollen is increasing in strength, meaning our immune systems are more likely to respond, she said. 

“So you’re not just changing quantifies or getting extended seasons of pollen, you’re actually getting qualitative different pollen,” she said.

For children also exposed to air pollution, there's a one-two punch, said MacPhail, an associate professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Pollen can attach to the fine particulates — diesel exhaust is an egregious culprit — and be delivered deeper in the lungs that they would otherwise would be, she said. 

“So it’s almost like they’re hailing a taxi cab and going a little bit further into your lungs, which is causing more irritation,” MacPhail said.

Children breathe more frequently than adults — infants can breathe about twice as often — so for them it is a bigger problem, she said.

Reducing young children's exposure to some airborne substances, dust mites or tobacco smoke, might delay or prevent allergy or asthma symptoms, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. But exposure to pets or farm animals may be benefit your child. Children who grow up on a dairy farm are protected from allergy, hay fever, and asthma, studies have shown.

Asthma-related emergency room visits could soar

For children, seasonal allergies and asthma can disrupt school, alter their moods and interrupt their sleep. They will be wheezing and sneezing, with stuffy noses and coughing. 

“The symptoms tend to get worse at night, as they do with all of us, so you are not imaging that your allergies get worse at night, they do,” MacPhail said. “And it’s similar for children. So they’ll just simply have trouble sleeping because they’re having trouble breathing.”

An increase in temperature of 3.6 Fahrenheit could drive a 17% increase in asthma-related emergency room visits each year, the Environmental Protection Agency found. Oak pollen disproportionately affects Hispanic, Asian and Black children, the EPA says. Black and Puerto Rican children are two to three times more likely to have asthma than white children, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

Advice for parents of children with allergies or asthma

Many of the patients Patel treats as an emergency room doctor are children with asthma, who may be having symptoms earlier or later than expected.

She tells their parents, "Be mindful that what the burning of fossil fuels is doing in terms of climate change is just throwing predictability out the window."

What else can parents do? 

• When pollen counts are high, consider keeping children with allergies or asthma indoors. 
• Try to keep pollen out of children’s bedrooms by keeping the windows and doors closed.
• Invest in a portable air cleaner or consider making one yourself with a box fan and a MERV 13 air filter. The EPA provides information about research on DYI air cleaners on its website. The American Thoracic Society in 2018 noted: "A study evaluating air filtration in homes of children with asthma found that using central forced air system air filters to remove particles may be generally less effective than using portable air cleaners, which removed about 50% of fine particles."
• Encourage children to take a bath or shower before bed to get the pollen off.
• Make sure your home is free of other possible triggers, including tobacco smoke and gas stoves, Patel said. The federal Inflation Reduction Act offers rebates to replace gas stoves

"We have a lot of work to do for people to understand that climate change isn’t just something for the polar bears,” she said. “Climate change will actually be the greatest driver of a child’s health born today.”

This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

Cornish, a professor at Ohio State University who studies rubber alternatives, isn’t the only one pouring energy into alternative crops like that desert shrub, guayule, or the rubber dandelions that bloom with yellow petals in the greenhouse where Cornish works. In Arizona, too, guayule thrives amidst drought, its blue-green leaves set apart from dry dirt at a research and development farm operated by the tire company Bridgestone. And in Nebraska and other parts of the central U.S., green grasses of sorghum spring up, waving with reddish clusters of grains.

They’re not the corn, soybeans, wheat or cotton that have dominated those areas for decades. Instead, they’re crops that many companies, philanthropic organizations and national and international entities tout as promising alternatives to fight climate change. But while some researchers and farmers are optimistic about the potential of these crops, many of which are more water-efficient and important in certain parts of the world to fight hunger, they also say drastic changes would need to happen in markets and processing before we ever see fields full of these out-of-the-box plants or many products in stores made with them, especially in the United States.

Most rubber processing happens overseas, and the U.S. isn’t prepared to process rubber domestically. But Cornish also says the threats of disease, climate change and international trade tensions also mean that it would be a smart investment to work on growing and processing domestic alternatives.

climate change Feb 8

NASA launches new satellite to study climate change influence in our oceans, atmosphere

Mexico Feb 11

Why your game-day guacamole could get more difficult to make amid climate change

With sorghum, too, grown for people to eat as well as for farm animals or even pet food, processing would need to be scaled up, said Nate Blum, chief executive officer of Sorghum United, an international non-governmental organization focused on spreading awareness about sorghum. Though the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of sorghum, it still represents only a small fraction of acres grown compared to commodity crops like corn and soybeans. And though corn and soybeans are heavily incentivized in the U.S., Blum is hopeful that consumer demand will encourage more investment in the sorghum and millets industry.

However, farmers are more likely to plant whatever crops get subsidies, said James Gerber, a senior scientist with climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown. Gerber, who recently published a paper in Nature Food about which crops will continue to see yield growth and which may stagnate in the coming years, said comparing sorghum production in India and the U.S. illustrates this principle. India has invested heavily in improving sorghum yields there, but the U.S. has not, he said.

Still, Blum thinks there are real benefits to pursue with sorghum, and perhaps more urgent benefits in other parts of the world than in the U.S. On the heels of last year, when the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization declared a focus on millets including sorghum, Blum thinks there’s still much more to be done. “The end of the international year is not the end. It’s actually just the beginning,” he said.

With climate change bearing down on agriculture around the world, the need for crops that can withstand extreme weather like persistent drought is especially important in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where smallholder farmers rely on just a few acres of land. Some of the breeding programs for those crops are based in the U.S., but they are much less frequently included in the American diet or lifestyle.

That’s why specialty markets will be critical if these crops have any hope of taking off here, Cornish said. She thinks that, just as Tesla opened up the possibility of mainstream electric cars by first marketing the product as a luxury good, premium goods like condoms, trachea tube parts and radiation-rated surgical gloves need to be made with dandelion and guayule to inspire producers to grow more meaningful amounts of either of those crops.

“You can’t do it without going to that route because you have no economies of scale, and you do not have enough to go into markets that require a large amount,” Cornish said.

Guayule is “clearly a specialty crop and probably always will be” in terms of acres grown, said Bill Niaura, Bridgestone’s executive director of sustainable innovation. He said that Bridgestone’s work on guayule has been strictly in the research and development realm for about the last ten years, and only within the past two years or so has the company been transitioning it into an exploratory business. “You’re trying to develop a new industry for the Americas that currently doesn’t exist,” he said.

In the meantime, farmers in the U.S. rely on an agricultural economy built on scale, so they farm the crops that allow them options of where to sell, said Curt Covington, senior director of institutional business at AgAmerica Lending, a private investment manager and lender focused on agricultural land. He added that the bankers financing those farmers often don’t want to take the risk on a full switch to a crop that doesn’t have established markets. That, he said, could be a problem for the country as climate change exacerbates threats to crops like cotton and alfalfa, thirsty crops grown in the Southwest, in the future.

Farmers in Arizona have already had to fallow land, stopping their planting altogether and sometimes struggling with or giving up on family businesses as a result of Colorado River water cuts. Though guayule only uses half as much water as cotton and alfalfa, if the economics don’t support it, that doesn’t do the majority of farmers much good.

“Ultimately what you end up with is potential for, honestly, a lot of fallowed land, and that same crop being imported into this country from other countries,” Covington said. “And so to me that creates a security risk for this country.”

That’s something Cornish thinks can be prevented, she says, by reimagining the United States not as a land dominated by waves of grain, but also as a dominant producer of natural rubber.

“My job isn’t done until this is a permanent feature of the landscape,” she said.

___

Associated Press journalists Joshua A. Bickel in Wooster, Ohio, and Ross D. Franklin in Eloy, Arizona, contributed to this report.

Studies have shown that the strongest tropical storms are getting more intense because of climate change. So the traditional five-category Saffir-Simpson scale, developed more than 50 years ago, may not show the true power of the most muscular storms, two climate scientists suggest in a Monday study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They propose a sixth category for storms with winds that exceed 192 miles per hour (309 kilometers per hour).

Currently, storms with winds of 157 mph (252 kilometers per hour) or higher are Category 5. The study’s authors said that open-ended grouping doesn’t warn people enough about the higher dangers from monstrous storms that flirt with 200 mph (322 kph) or higher.

Several experts told The Associated Press they don’t think another category is necessary. They said it could even give the wrong signal to the public because it’s based on wind speed, while water is by far the deadliest killer in hurricanes.

Since 2013, five storms — all in the Pacific — had winds of 192 mph or higher that would have put them in the new category, with two hitting the Philippines. As the world warms, conditions grow more ripe for such whopper storms, including in the Gulf of Mexico, where many storms that hit the United States get stronger, the study authors said.

“Climate change is making the worst storms worse,” said study lead author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkley National Lab.

It’s not that there are more storms because of climate change. But the strongest are more intense. The proportion of major hurricanes among all storms is increasing and it’s because of warmer oceans, said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy, who wasn’t part of the research.

From time to time, experts have proposed a Category 6, especially since Typhoon Haiyan reached 195 mph wind speeds (315 kilometers per hour) over the open Pacific. But Haiyan “does not appear to be an isolated case,” the study said.

Storms of sufficient wind speed are called hurricanes if they form east of the international dateline, and typhoons if they form to the west of the line. They’re known as cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Australia.

The five storms that hit 192 mph winds or more are:

— 2013’s Haiyan, which killed more than 6,300 people in the Philippines.

— 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, which hit 215 mph (346 kph) before weakening and hitting Jalisco, Mexico.

— 2016’s Typhoon Meranti, which reached 195 mph before skirting the Philippines and Taiwan and making landfall in China.

— 2020’s Typhoon Goni, which reached 195 mph before killing dozens in the Philippines as a weaker storm.

— 2021’s Typhoon Surigae, which also reached 195 mph before weakening and skirting several parts of Asia and Russia.

If the world sticks with just five storm categories “as these storms get stronger and stronger it will more and more underestimate the potential risk,” said study co-author Jim Kossin, a former NOAA climate and hurricane researcher now with First Street Foundation.

Pacific storms are stronger because there’s less land to weaken them and more room for storms to grow more intense, unlike the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, Kossin said.

So far no Atlantic storm has reached the 192 mph potential threshold, but as the world warms more the environment for such a storm grows more conducive, Kossin and Wehner said.

Wehner said that as temperatures rise, the number of days with conditions ripe for potential Category 6 storms in the Gulf of Mexico will grow. Now it’s about 10 days a year where the environment could be right for a Category 6, but that could go up to a month if the globe heats to 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. That would make an Atlantic Category 6 much more likely.

MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel said Wehner and Kossin “make a strong case for changing the scale,” but said it’s unlikely to happen because authorities know most hurricane damage comes from storm surge and other flooding.

Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, said when warning people about storms his office tries “to steer the focus toward the individual hazards, which include storm surge, wind, rainfall, tornadoes and rip currents, instead of the particular category of the storm, which only provides information about the hazard from wind. Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale already captures ‘catastrophic damage’ from wind so it’s not clear there would be a need for another category even if the storms were to get stronger.”

McNoldy, former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Craig Fugate, and University of Albany atmospheric sciences professor Kristen Corbosiero all say they don’t see the necessity for a sixth and stronger storm category.

“Perhaps I’ll change my tune when a rapidly intensifying storm in the Gulf achieves a Category 6,” Corbosiero said in an email.

The nation’s largest homeowner’s insurance company, State Farm, stopped accepting new applications for policies on property in California in May. Allstate announced in November that it would “pause new homeowners, condo and commercial insurance policies in California to protect current customers,” the Associated Press reported in June.

This trend will likely continue across the insurance industry, said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research organization that compiles comprehensive climate risk data.

“They know the risk is just too high to be actuarially sound for their business,” he said.

In its announcement, State Farm said too many buildings are being destroyed by climate catastrophes, inflation is making it too expensive to rebuild, and it can’t protect its investments any longer.

More from Personal Finance:
Why a ‘death note’ is as important as having a will, advisor says
Economists say the labor market is strong, but job seekers don’t agree
Amid FAFSA delays, what to do if your financial aid letter is late

The problem is not just in California, where wildfires are prevalent. Louisiana and Florida homeowners are also contending with a lack of access to insurance, due to flood risk.  

“Losses are increasingly related to climate risk,” said Sean Kevelighan, president and CEO of the Insurance Information Institute, an insurance industry association. “As that risk increases, so does the cost of insuring those assets that people have on hand.”

Even though there wasn’t an increase in major disasters in 2023, he said, the industry is still expecting to see $50 billion in losses just because of “severe convective issues” such as flash flooding and the implications of heavier everyday storms. 

What happens when a homeowner can’t get insurance

Without insurance, many homeowners can find themselves in big financial trouble. 

Darlene Tucker, 66, and Tom Pinter, 68, are longtime homeowners in Sonora, California. The couple bought their “dream home” 18 years ago and have been enjoying their retirement from their respective jobs in manufacturing.

Tucker also cares for her horses and a rescued 100-pound tortoise on the property, and runs a dog day care center to help make ends meet. She said Pinter also works as a delivery driver to help out.

The couple received a nonrenewal notice from Allstate in November. Tucker told CNBC she has been working with her Allstate agent to find another insurer.

“I had one company step up and said they’d do it for $12,000 a year,” she said — that’s roughly six times her previous annual premium under Allstate of about $2,000.

She said there was no way the couple could afford that new policy, and they would likely have to move. 

But Tucker and Pinter may find that selling their home also comes with a steep cost.

Porter said First Street Foundation’s research in California concluded that “the moment that an individual gets a non-renewal letter from the private insurance market, they essentially lose 12% of their property value.”

Insurance costs ‘should be an alarm’ for homebuyers

Experts say the insurance landscape in California is particularly tricky because, in addition to the wildfire risk, the state has a law that adds extra approval measures, including board approval and review by the insurance commissioner, if an insurance company wants to raise the rate of insurance by more than 7%. That’s been in effect since the 1980s.

Kevelighan, of the Insurance Information Institute, said that law, called Proposition 103, creates a regulatory environment in California that restricts the industry from adequately including climate risk in its forecasting and is one of the reasons the industry is being forced to pull back coverage in the state.

“Risk management does not come into play until it’s entirely too late when it comes to individual personal property purchasing,” Kevelighan said. “It comes into play when the mortgage provider needs you to go get it.”

“And that’s the first time when a consumer even begins to think about where they’re living and what the risks might be,” he said. “The cost reflects that risk. That should be an alarm to tell them that they’re living in a risky place and then ask themselves: How could I reduce that risk? Or do I need to think about living somewhere else?”

‘Give me something to work with’

With just days remaining until Tucker and Pinter’s Allstate policy expires, on Feb. 15, the couple is still looking for more options. Tucker told CNBC that a recent quote they received was three times what they were originally paying, with a $10,000 deductible.

Of the whole situation, she said she feels frustrated.

“We’re doing everything we can,” Tucker said. “You know, we worked hard, we retired. We take good care of our house. I’m never late on my bills. I paid that [policy] for 18 years … And you just give me no choice. That’s the part that bugged me the most, I think. Give me a list. Give me something to work with. Raise [the price] if you need to, reasonably. But don’t just give me no choice. That’s not right.”

Tucker’s insurance agent from Allstate told CNBC that “most insurance companies are not currently writing polices in high fire prone areas,” and confirmed the company was trying to help her find other options.

State Farm did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

Watch the video to learn more about why some American homeowners are losing their property insurance and the changes the insurance industry would like to see to be able to offset some of the mounting risks. 

Agriculture Sec. Tom Vilsack said the goal was to provide an “ecologically-driven” approach to older forests — an arena where logging interests have historically predominated. It would be the first nationwide amendment to U.S. Forest Service management plans in the agency’s 118-year history, he said.

Details were obtained by The Associated Press in advance of Tuesday’s public release of the proposal.

It follows longstanding calls from environmentalists to preserve older forests that offer crucial wildlife habitat and other environmental benefits. The timber industry has fought against logging restrictions on government-owned lands.

President Joseph Biden’s administration appears to be aiming for a middle ground: It would sharply limit commercial timber harvests in old growth forests while allowing logging to continue on “mature forests” that have not yet reached old growth stage.

climate change Dec 18, 2023

Flooding drives millions to move as climate migration patterns emerge

Dec 12, 2023

California wildfires created toxic chromium, research finds

“This creates a commitment to resiliency, a commitment to restore and protect the existing old growth that we have from the threats that we see,” Vilsack said in an interview.

Old growth forests, such as the storied giant sequoia stands of northern California, have layer upon layer of undisturbed trees and vegetation.

There’s wide consensus on the importance of preserving the oldest and largest trees — both symbolically as marvels of nature, and more practically because their trunks and branches store large amounts of carbon that can be released when forests burn, adding to climate change.

Underlining the urgency of the issue are wildfires in California that killed thousands of giant sequoias in recent years. The towering giants are concentrated in about 70 groves scattered along the western side of the Sierra Nevada range.

“This is a step in the right direction,” said Chris Wood, president of Trout Unlimited and a former Forest Service policy chief. “This is the first time the Forest Service has said it’s national policy will be to protect old growth.”

Yet experts say there’s no simple formula to determine what’s old. Growth rates among different tree types vary greatly — and even within species, depending on their access to water and sunlight and soil conditions.

Groves of aspen can mature within a half century. For Douglas fir stands, it could take 100 years. Wildfire frequency also factors in: Ponderosa pine forests are adapted to withstand blazes as often as once a decade, compared to lodgepole pine stands that might burn every few hundred years.

The results earlier this year from the government’s first-ever national inventory of mature and old-growth forests on federal land revealed more expanses of older trees than outside researchers had recently estimated. The Forest Service and federal Bureau of Land Management combined oversee more than 50,000 square miles (129,000 square kilometers) of old growth forests and about 125,000 square miles (324,000 square kilometers) of mature forests, according to the inventory.

Most are in Western states such as Idaho, California, Montana and Oregon. They’re also in New England, around the Great Lakes and in Southern states such as Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia, according to the Forest Service.

But representatives of the timber industry and some members of Congress have been skeptical about Biden’s ambitions to protect older forests, which the Democrat launched in 2021 on Earth Day. They’ve urged the administration to instead concentrate on lessening wildfire dangers by thinning stands of trees where decades of fire suppression have allowed undergrowth to flourish, which can be a recipe for disaster when fires ignite.

“Let’s be real about who the groups asking for this are: They have always opposed commercial timber harvests on the national forest system,” said Bill Imbergamo with the Federal Forest Resource Coalition, a timber industry group. “Is that the correct emphasis right now when most of the old growth losses are coming from insects, fire and climate change stressors working in tandem?”

The proposal to revise management plans for 128 national forests and national grasslands is expected to be completed by early 2025. However, it’s uncertain if the change would survive if Biden loses his 2024 re-election bid.

Under former President Donald Trump, federal officials sought to open up millions of acres of West Coast forests to potential logging. Federal wildlife officials reversed the move in 2021 after determining political appointees under Trump relied on faulty science to justify drastically shrinking areas of forest that are considered crucial habitat for the imperiled northern spotted owl.

Asked about the durability of Tuesday’s proposal, Vilsack it would be “a serious mistake for the country to take a step backwards now that we’ve taken significant steps forward.”

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the threat of flooding convinced more than 7 million people to avoid risky areas or abandon places that were risky, according to a paper Monday in the journal Nature Communications and research by the risk analysis organization First Street Foundation.

Climate change is making bad hurricanes more intense and increasing the amount of rain that storms dump on the Midwest. And in the coming decades, researchers say millions more people will decide it is too much to live with and leave.

First Street found that climate change is creating winners and losers at the neighborhood and block level.

US & World

Dec 12, 2023

California wildfires created toxic chromium, research finds

climate change Dec 5, 2023

Scientists say November is 6th straight month to set heat record; 2023 a cinch as hottest year

news Dec 4, 2023

U.S. leads coalition to triple nuclear power by 2050 in effort to address climate change

Zoom out to consider the whole country and Americans appear to be ignoring the threat of climate change when they decide where to live. Florida, vulnerable to rising seas and strong storms, is growing fast, for example. But that misses an important way people behave locally. Most moves are short distance; people stay near family, friends and jobs.

Jeremy Porter, head of research at First Street, said “there’s more to the story” than population gains in Sun Belt states.

“People want to live in Miami. If you live in Miami already, you’re not going to say, ’Oh, this property is a 9 (out of 10 for flood risk), let me move to Denver,’” Porter said. “They are going to say, ‘This property is a 9, but I want to live in Miami, so I’m going to look for a 6 or a 7 or a 5 in Miami.’ You are going to think about relative risk.”

That’s what First Street projects over the next three decades: blocks in Miami with a high chance of getting hit by a bad storm are more likely to see their population drop even though a lot of the city is expected to absorb more people.

Behind these findings is very detailed data about flood risk, population trends and the reasons people move, allowing researchers to isolate the impact of flooding even though local economic conditions and other factors motivate families to pick up and live somewhere else. They analyzed population changes in very small areas, down to the census block.

Some blocks have grown fast and would have grown even faster if flooding wasn’t a problem, according to First Street. Expanding but flood-prone places could have grown nearly 25% more — attracting about 4.1 million more people — if that risk were lower. Researchers also identified areas where flood risk is driving or worsening population decline, which they called “climate abandonment areas.” About 3.2 million people left these neighborhoods because of flood risk over a two-decade span.

When First Street projected out to 2053, many of the new climate abandonment areas were in Michigan, Indiana and other parts of the Midwest. Flood risk is just one factor driving this change and it doesn’t mean communities are emptying out, said Philip Mulder, a professor focused on risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“People can live in smarter places within those communities. That’s just as true for Detroit as it is for Miami,” he said.

When people know a home is prone to flooding, they are less likely to buy it. Some states, however, don’t require that flood history be disclosed, according to Joel Scata, a senior attorney on the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate adaptation team.

“Access to good information is really important in the real estate market,” Scata said.

Even for people who get assistance to move, the choice can be excruciating. Socastee, a community near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, flooded not only when hurricanes hit, but sometimes just when it rained hard and water would reach doorways and saturate yards. First Street’s data says Horry County won’t grow quite as fast over the next three decades because of flood risk.

One resident who endured repeated flooding said it “makes you sick” with worry whenever it storms and rips away your sense of security.

Terri Straka decided to move from the area but had a hard time convincing her parents to do the same. Eventually, she brought them to a house for sale and said it could be their dream home. They reluctantly agreed to move.

“Them being able to visualize what a future might look like is absolutely critical to people being able to move. They have to imagine a place and it needs to be a real place that they can afford,” said Harriet Festing, executive director of Anthropocene Alliance that supports communities like Socastee hit by disaster and climate change.

Older people move less often and it takes money to move, so if people don’t get enough assistance and don’t have the means, they are more likely to stay in risky areas. When people do start to move, it can create momentum for others to depart, leaving behind fewer residents to support a shrinking local economy, according to Matt Hauer, a demographic expert and study author at Florida State University.

But there are also winners. Louisville, Kentucky, Detroit and Chicago as well as several other big cities have a lot of space with little flood risk, which will be attractive in the future, First Street found.

The University of Wisconsin’s Mulder said of cities like Chicago: “They shouldn’t discount their relative benefits that will come from being a safer place in a warming world.”

Fassett reported from San Francisco.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres returned to the summit on Monday and said it was “time to go into overdrive, to negotiate in good faith, and rise to the challenge.” He said negotiators at the COP28 summit in particular must focus on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and climate justice.

He said the global stocktake — the part of talks that assesses where the world is at with its climate goals and how it can reach them — should “phase out all fossil fuels” in order to reach the goal of limiting the rise of global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times. That phase-out was, he said, ”a central aspect” for the summit to be considered a success.

“We can’t keep kicking the can down the road,” Guterres said in brief remarks. “We are out of road and almost out of time.”

“What is very clear is that the bar for success is high,” said EU Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. “And that is not because these Europeans say so, or because small islands say so, or Africa or Latin America say so. But because scientists tell us that we have no alternative if we want to keep future generations safe.”

climate change Dec 5, 2023

Scientists say November is 6th straight month to set heat record; 2023 a cinch as hottest year

news Dec 4, 2023

U.S. leads coalition to triple nuclear power by 2050 in effort to address climate change

As the Secretary-General spoke about a dozen silent protesters held out cards that spelled “hold the line.”

Guterres brought back up the concept of a two-track phase-down of fossil fuels between wealthy nations acting faster and harder and giving more time and money to poorer countries. Other negotiators, including Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, have also floated the idea, but it hasn’t been prominent in negotiating texts.

Activists responded with skepticism of the plan.

Nnimmo Bassey, a longtime Nigerian environmental activist, said that the ultimate goal should be for “fossil fuels to be kept in the ground” as Indigenous communities around the world have often borne the cost of oil exploration.

“We can’t keep on running the tap while pretending we’re mopping the floor,” Bassey said. “We have to turn off the taps.”

The presidency of the conference — run by the CEO of the United Arab Emirates national oil company — “recognizes that for this to be viewed as a success, we need to find some agreement on fossil fuels,” said Steven Guilbeault, Canadian environment minister and one of eight super-negotiators tasked with helping find common ground. “I think if we can’t do that, people will see this as a failure, even though we’ve agreed on lots of other good things.”

But Guilbeault said, “I’m confident we can finish tomorrow.”

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, told journalists Monday morning that the “climate wolves” remained at the world’s doors as negotiations reach their climax at the summit.

“We do not have a minute to lose in this crucial final stretch and none of us have had much sleep,” Stiell said. “One thing is for certain: I win, you lose is a recipe for collective failure,” he said.

Negotiators from powerhouses United States and China were working together Monday morning.

But signs of trouble were all around.

As Monday wore on, Emirati officials cancelled a hastily called news conference with COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber, then cancelled another with another official in the early afternoon. They offered no explanation for the cancellations, which drew into question an earlier promise by al-Jaber to bring the COP to an end sharply at 11 a.m. Tuesday. They were part of a series of cancellations by prominent negotiators.

Sticking points for the global stocktake are along familiar lines. Many countries, including small island states, European countries and Latin American nations, are calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels, responsible for most of the warming on Earth. But other nations want weaker language that will allow oil, gas and coal to keep burning in some way.

One of the major players in all this is India, which in 2021 torpedoed the idea of a “phase-out” of coal but then in 2022 proposed the idea of phasing out all fossil fuels, not just coal, which never got on the agenda in last year’s climate talks. It’s now the center point of discussion.

The world’s most populous nation, and No. 3 carbon dioxide emitter, is trying to be both ambitious yet keep the backbone of its economy, coal, said Vaibhav Chaturvedi of New Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water.

Alden Meyer, an analyst with climate think tank E3G, said Saudi Arabia was trying to mobilize the other members of the OPEC oil cartel to object to any inclusion of fossil fuels in the text – which he said would violate the terms of the Paris climate accord.

“This could be a very long week,” he said.

Canada’s Guilbeault said OPEC countries are “being very unwilling to even contemplate even a conversation, and I think that’s unhelpful.”

Joseph Sikulu, a Pacific climate warrior who was protesting outside of Guterres’ briefing, said, “we know that on the inside of the negotiations the high exploiting countries like the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Australia, are the ones who are blocking on the phase out of fossil fuels.”

“We need them to step aside … so that we can get the results that are needed from these negotiations,” Sikulu said.

Norway’s Barth Eide said “all countries want ambition, but some countries have their priorities one place and other countries another place. … So this can still both end up as a very successful COP, and it can also be much less successful depending on where we find the final language.”

As of early Monday afternoon, delegates were still waiting on a new draft of the global stocktake.

But Barth Eide said: “I am much more concerned about having a good text than an early text. So if the hours delay means that it will be better, I think that’s worth it.”

___

Associated Press journalists Sibi Arasu, Olivia Zhang, Malak Harb, Bassam Hatoum and David Keyton contributed to this report.

In the background of those discussions are carbon capture and carbon removal, technologies most, if not all, producers are counting on to meet their pledges to get to net-zero emissions. Skeptics worry the technology is being oversold to allow the industry to maintain the status quo.

“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals – which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said before the start of talks.

What exactly is carbon capture?

Lots of industrial facilities like coal-fired power plants and ethanol plants produce carbon dioxide. To stop those planet-warming emissions from reaching the atmosphere, businesses can install equipment to separate that gas from all the other gases coming out of the smokestack, and transport it to where it can be permanently stored underground. And even for industries trying to reduce emissions, some are likely to always produce some carbon, like cement manufacturers that use a chemical process that releases CO2.

“We call that a mitigation technology, a way to stop the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Karl Hausker, an expert on getting to net-zero emissions at World Resources Institute, a climate-focused nonprofit that supports sharp fossil fuel reductions along with a limited role for carbon capture.

The captured carbon is concentrated into a form that can be transported in a vehicle or through a pipeline to a place where it can be injected underground for long-term storage.

Then there’s carbon removal. Instead of capturing carbon from a single, concentrated source, the objective is to remove carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. This already happens when forests are restored, for example, but there’s a push to deploy technology, too. One type directly captures it from the air, using chemicals to pull out carbon dioxide as air passes through.

For some, carbon removal is essential during a global transition to clean energy that will take years. For example, despite notable gains for electric vehicles in some countries, gas-fired cars will be operating well into the future. And some industries, like shipping and aviation, are challenging to fully decarbonize.

“We have to remove some of what’s in the atmosphere in addition to stopping the emissions,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, who leads the federally supported Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s carbon initiative in the U.S., the world’s second-leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

How is it going?

Many experts say the technology to capture carbon and store it works, but it’s expensive, and it’s still in the early days of deployment.

There are about 40 large-scale carbon capture projects in operation around the world capturing roughly 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s a tiny amount — roughly 0.1% — of the 36.8 billion metric tons emitted globally as tallied by the Global Carbon Project.

The IEA says the history of carbon capture “has largely been one of unmet expectations.” The group analyzed how the world can achieve net zero emissions and its guide path relies heavily on lowering emissions by slashing fossil fuel use. Carbon capture is just a sliver of the solution — less than 10% — but despite its comparatively small role, its expansion is still behind schedule.

The pace of new projects is picking up, but they face significant obstacles. In the United States, there’s opposition to CO2 pipelines that move carbon to storage sites. Safety is one concern; in 2020, a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured, releasing carbon dioxide that displaced breathable air near the ground and sent dozens of people to hospitals. The federal government is working on improving safety standards.

news Nov 29, 2023

A showdown is brewing over money, oil and carbon. Here's what's at stake at the COP28 climate summit

climate change Dec 5, 2023

World carbon dioxide emissions increase from year before: ‘Clearly not going in the right direction'

Companies can also run into difficulty getting permits. South Dakota regulators this year, for example, rejected a construction permit for a 1,300-mile network of CO2 pipelines in the Midwest to move carbon to a storage site in Illinois.

The technology to remove carbon directly from the air exists too, but its broad deployment is even further away and especially costly.

Who’s supporting carbon capture?

The American Petroleum Institute says oil and gas will remain a critical energy source for decades, meaning that in order for the world to reduce its carbon emissions, rapidly expanding carbon capture technology is “key to cleaner energy use across the economy.” A check of most oil companies’ plans to get to net-zero emissions also finds most of them relying on carbon capture in some way.

The Biden administration wants more investment in carbon capture and removal, too, building off America’s comparatively large spending compared with the rest of the world. But it’s an industry that needs subsidies to attract private financing. The Inflation Reduction Act makes tax benefits much more generous. Investors can get a $180 per ton credit for removing carbon from the air and storing it underground, for example. And the Department of Energy has billions to support new projects.

“What we are talking about now is taking a technology that has been proven and has been tested, but applying it much more broadly and also applying it in sectors where there is a higher cost to deploy,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an industry advocacy group.

Investment is picking up. The EPA is considering dozens of applications for wells that can store carbon. And in places like Louisiana and North Dakota, local leaders are fighting to attract projects and investment.

Even left-leaning California has an ambitious climate plan that incorporates carbon capture and removing carbon directly out of the air. Leaders say there’s no other way to get emissions to zero.

Who’s against it?

Some environmentalists argue that fossil fuel companies are holding up carbon capture to distract from the need to quickly phase out oil, gas and coal.

“The fossil fuel industry has proven itself to be dangerous and deceptive,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at Center for Biological Diversity.

There are other problems. Some projects haven’t met their carbon removal targets. A 2021 U.S. government accountability report said that of eight demonstration projects aimed at capturing and storing carbon from coal plants, just one had started operating at the time the report was published despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

Opponents also note that carbon capture can serve to prolong the life of a polluting plant that would otherwise shut down sooner. That can especially hurt poorer, minority communities that have long lived near heavily polluting facilities.

They also note that most of the carbon captured in the U.S. now eventually gets injected into the ground to force out more oil, a process called enhanced oil recovery.

Hausker said it’s essential that governments set policies that force less fossil fuel use — which can then be complemented by carbon capture and carbon removal.

“We aren’t going to ask Exxon, ‘pretty please, stop developing fossil fuels,’” he said.

___

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

And with only one month left, 2023 is on the way to smashing the record for hottest year.

November was nearly a third of a degree Celsius (0.57 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the previous hottest November, the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced early Wednesday. November was 1.75 degrees Celsius (3.15 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, tying October and behind September, for the hottest above average for any month, the scientists said.

“The last half year has truly been shocking,” said Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess. “Scientists are running out of adjectives to describe this.’’

November averaged 14.22 degrees Celsius (57.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which is 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the average the last 30 years. Two days during the month were 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, something that hadn’t happened before, according to Burgess.

climate change Dec 5, 2023

World carbon dioxide emissions increase from year before: ‘Clearly not going in the right direction'

news Nov 23, 2023

Oil and gas industry needs to let go of carbon capture as solution to climate change, IEA says

So far this year is 1.46 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, about a seventh of a degree warmer than the previous warmest year of 2016, Copernicus scientists calculated. That’s very close to the international threshold the world set for climate change.

The 2015 Paris climate agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times over the long term and failing that at least 2 degrees (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Diplomats, scientists, activists and others meeting at the United Nations climate conference in Dubai for nearly two weeks are trying to find ways to limit warming to those levels, but the planet isn’t cooperating.

Scientists calculate with the promises countries around the world have made and the actions they have taken, Earth is on track to warm 2.7 to 2.9 degrees Celsius (4.9 to 5.2 degrees) above pre-industrial times.

The northern autumn is also the hottest fall the world has had on record, Copernicus calculated.

Copernicus records go back to 1940. United States government calculated records go back to 1850. Scientists using proxies such as ice cores, tree rings and corals have said this is the warmest decade Earth has seen in about 125,000 years, dating back before human civilization. And the last several months have been the hottest of the last decade.

Scientists say there are two driving forces behind the six straight record hottest months in a row. One is human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas. That’s like an escalator. But the natural El Nino-La Nina cycle is like jumping up or down on that escalator.

The world is in a potent El Nino, which is a temporary warming of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide, and that adds to global temperatures already spiked by climate change.

It’s only going to get warmer as long as the world keeps pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, Burgess said. And she said that means “catastrophic floods, fires, heat waves, droughts will continue.’’

“2023 is very likely to be a cool year in the future unless we do something about our dependence on fossil fuels,” Burgess said.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The increase was reported early Tuesday at international climate talks, where global officials are trying to cut emissions by 43% by 2030. Instead, carbon pollution keeps rising, with 36.8 billion metric tons poured into the air in 2023, twice the annual amount of 40 years ago, according to Global Carbon Project, a group of international scientists who produce the gold standard of emissions counting.

“It now looks inevitable we will overshoot the 1.5 (degree Celsius, 2.7 degree Fahrenheit) target of the Paris Agreement, and leaders meeting at COP28 will have to agree rapid cuts in fossil fuel emissions even to keep the 2 (degree Celsius, 3.6 degree Fahrenheit) target alive,’’ study lead author Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter said.

climate change Dec 4, 2023

Far more fossil fuel employees present at UN climate talks in Dubai than year before, report finds

climate change Dec 3, 2023

Earth is running a fever. And UN climate talks are focusing on the contagious effect on human health

Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is “just possible’’ but only barely and with massive emission cuts, said Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Jim Skea.

“We are clearly not going in the right direction,” Friedlingstein said.

This year, the burning of fossil fuel and manufacturing of cement have added the equivalent of putting 2.57 million pounds (1.17 million kilograms) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every second.

If China and India were excluded from the count, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and cement manufacturing would have dropped, Friedlingstein said.

The world in 2023 increased its annual emissions by 398 million metric tons, but it was in three places: China, India and the skies. China’s fossil fuel emissions went up 458 million metric tons from last year, India’s went up 233 million metric tons and aviation emissions increased 145 million metric tons.

Outside of India and China, the rest of the world’s fossil fuel emissions went down by 419 million metric tons, led by Europe’s 205 million metric ton drop and a decrease of 154 million metric tons in the United States.

Europe’s 8% decrease was across the board with reduced emissions in coal, oil, gas and cement emissions, the report said. The U.S. decrease was almost entirely in coal, with slight increases in oil and gas emissions.

Last year the world’s carbon emissions increased but dropped in China, which was still affected by a second wave of pandemic restrictions. This year, China’s 4% jump in emissions is similar to the post-pandemic recovery other parts of the world had in 2022, Friedlingstein said.

The calculations are based on data from nations and companies for most of the year with the scientists projecting it through the end of this month.

United Nations Environment Programme Director Inger Andersen said the world needs to get to zero fossil fuel emissions “as fast as possible,” with developed nations getting there by 2040 and developing nations by 2050 or at least 2060.

Aside from the new disclosure rules, the figure may have been boosted by a surge in attendance as Earth staggered through a year of record heat and devastating extreme weather attributed to climate change — conference registrations are nearly double that of last year’s talks. The United Nations body responsible for running the conference also released the details of far more attendees than in past years, including people not considered part of official state delegations.

The hundreds of fossil fuel-connected people make up just a tiny share of the 90,000 people who registered to attend the climate summit known as COP28. But environmentalists have repeatedly questioned their presence at an event where meaningful negotiations have to take aim at the heart of their businesses.

Bob Deans, director of strategic engagement for the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council, said his group is hoping this year’s talks are the point where oil and gas “might begin to shift from being the biggest part of the climate problem to finally being part of the fix.”

“The industry needs to turn away from a business model that relies on destroying the planet,” said Deans, whose own group registered nearly two dozen people to attend. “That business model needs to change. Dubai must be the starting point.”

The companies represented by the 1,300-plus employees make up a big part of global emissions — which is also why they should have a place at the conference, they said.

COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber fielded criticism in the months leading up his role presiding over COP28 because of his other job — heading up the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company. Al-Jaber alluded to the question about the proper role for fossil fuel companies in his opening remarks.

“Let history reflect the fact that this is the Presidency that made a bold choice to proactively engage with oil and gas companies,” al-Jaber said. He went on to praise many of those companies for commitments to reduce emissions, but added: “I must say, it is not enough, and I know that they can do more.”

On Saturday, al-Jaber announced that 50 oil companies representing almost half of global production had pledged to reach near-zero methane emissions and end routine flaring by 2030. Experts and environmentalists called it significant and meaningful, but still not enough.

COP28 comes as the planet faces a mounting imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Global warming reached 1.25 degrees Celsius in October compared to pre-industrial levels, according to the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. And the UN warned in a pivotal September report “the window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all is rapidly closing.”

Fossil fuel companies have long had a hand in the talks, the first of which was in 1995. Research by the advocacy group Kick Big Polluters Out Coalition shows four of the “big five” oil and gas companies — Shell, Chevron, TotalEnergies and BP — have sent representatives to the annual climate talks nearly every year.

The four companies each said in statements they attend COP in order to advance green or low-carbon technologies and work toward their net-zero commitments. Low-carbon can mean such things as biofuels, hydrogen development and carbon capture and storage. All four have pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

The AP arrived at its tally for COP28 by analyzing the United Nations list of likely attendees to review details they offered upon registration, including the company they represented. Those details were checked against lists of operators and owners of coal mines, oil fields and natural gas plants, as well as manufacturers of carbon-intensive materials like steel and cement. It also included trade associations that represent those interests.

TotalEnergies registered to send a dozen people to COP28, the UN data shows. Paul Naveau, the company’s head of media relations, said TotalEnergies would have six experts on climate, carbon markets and biodiversity at the talks, and its CEO Patrick Pouyanné is speaking at a side event.

“The subjects broached at these events lie at the heart of the company’s ambition; our experts attend to listen to the discussions and support collective action,” Naveau said.

Naveau said in response to AP questions that no TotalEnergies employees take part — or are even present for — the negotiations between countries.

Naveau highlighted the company’s plans for a third of its capital spending through 2028 to go toward “low carbon” energy. He also said the company is transparent about its attendees in Dubai “in order to kill the (false) idea that our company’s presence could be negative.”

The Kick Big Polluters Out analysis, which covers 20 years, showed that Shell has sent the most people to the talks overall and most consistently. The company averaged six people over the last 20 years, though that’s likely an undercount since the U.N. didn’t require attendees to list their “home organizations” before this year.

Shell’s international policy positions support phasing out coal, expanding renewables, and treating natural gas as a “partner” to renewable sources of energy. Natural gas emits less carbon than most other fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency, but it still contributes to climate change. The IEA describes it as having “a limited role” in transitioning from coal to renewables.

The Kick Big Polluters Out research also identified the most frequent attendees.

Arthur Lee, a 30-year employee of Chevron, has been to every COP since 1999, he said on his LinkedIn page, and is registered to attend COP28. He was a contributor to the fourth IPCC assessment, the official UN climate report, as an expert on carbon capture and storage.

David Hone, Shell’s chief climate adviser, is in Dubai for at least his 17th appearance at the annual climate talks. Hone wrote in a blog post ahead of the talks that net-zero emissions goals “will require a major emphasis on the development of carbon removal practices and technologies.”

Neither Shell nor Chevon would make the two men available for interviews.

Fossil fuel companies are depending heavily on carbon capture to meet their net zero targets, even as some experts have expressed doubt about scaling it up sufficiently. At the moment, it’s preventing about 0.1% of the energy sector’s carbon emissions from reaching the atmosphere, according to the IEA.

Rachel Rose Jackson is director of climate research and international policy at Corporate Accountability, a group in the coalition that produced the Kick Big Polluters Out analysis, said carbon capture and storage are unproven technologies at the scale that would be required.

“It’s a massive diversion of resources, capacity and money that could be going to solutions that we know work, that are cost effective, that do reduce emissions and keep fossil fuels in the ground,” she said. “These so-called solutions are often dangerous distractions.”

Under a brown haze over Dubai, the COP28 summit moved past two days of lofty rhetoric and calls for unity from top leaders to concerns about health issues like the deaths of at least 7 million people globally from air pollution each year and the spread of diseases like cholera and malaria as global warming upends weather systems.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it’s high time for the U.N. Conference of Parties on climate to hold its first “Health Day” in its 28th edition, saying the threats to health from climate change were “immediate and present.”

“Although the climate crisis is a health crisis, it’s well overdue that 27 COPs have been and gone without a serious discussion of health,” he said. “Undoubtedly, health stands as the most compelling reason for taking climate action.”

After two days of speeches by dozens of presidents, prime ministers, royals and other top leaders — in the background and on-stage — participants were also turning attention to tough negotiations over the next nine days to push for more agreement on ways to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

Pope Francis, who was forced to abandon plans to attend because of a case of bronchitis, on Sunday said that “even from a distance, I am following with great attention the work.” In remarks read at the Vatican by an aide, the pope called for an end of what he called “bottlenecks” caused by nationalism and “patterns of the past.”

US & World

climate change Nov 29, 2023

New study shows liquefied natural gas might be worse for climate change than coal

Animals and Wildlife Nov 29, 2023

Biden administration moves to protect wolverines as climate change threatens extinction

news May 11, 2023

Massive city growth and climate change are twin opportunities, says manager of $40 billion fund

Protests began in earnest Sunday at COP28: In one, a group gave mock resuscitation to an inflatable Earth.

“Well, I mean, it’s cheesy doing CPR on the Earth,” said Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency room physician from Alberta, Canada, who took part. “We’re kind of in a lot of trouble right now,” he said, so will do “anything we can do to bring attention to this issue.”

Saturday capped off with conference organizers announcing that 50 oil and gas companies had agreed to reach near-zero methane emissions and end routine flaring in their operations by 2030. They also pledged to reach “net zero” for their operational emissions by 2050.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “the promises made clearly fall short of what is required.”

In comments Sunday, he called the methane emissions reductions “a step in the right direction.” But he criticized the net zero pledge for excluding emissions from fossil fuel consumption — where the vast majority of the industry’s greenhouse gases come from — and said the announcement provided no clarity on how the companies planned to reach their goals.

“There must be no room for greenwashing,” he said.

Germany’s climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said Sunday the oil and gas industry needs to go beyond just cutting emissions that are generated to make those products and slash emissions from indirect activities too, as well as fossil fuels burned by the end users.

“It’s 2023,” the former Greenpeace International co-director said. “I was already speaking to Shell about this in 1998.”

Temperature rises caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal have worsened natural disasters like floods, heat waves and drought, and caused many people to migrate to more temperate zones — in addition to the negative knock-on effects for human health.

“Our bodies are ecosystems, and the world is an ecosystem,” said John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy. “If you poison our land and you poison our water and you poison our air, you poison our bodies.”

He said his daughter Vanessa, who works with the WHO chief, “repeats to me frequently that we should not measure progress on the climate crisis just by the degrees averted, but by the lives saved.”

A COP28 declaration backed by some 120 countries stressed the link between health and climate change. It made no mention of phasing out planet-warming fossil fuels, but pledged to support efforts to curb health care sector pollution, which accounts for 5% of global emissions, according to the WHO head.

In the United States, 8.5% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the health sector and the Biden Administration is trying to use funds from the Inflation Reduction Act to try to cut that down, Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Admiral Rachel Levine said.

U.S. officials said one of the main issues has been waste anesthesia emissions from hospitals and greenhouse gases that escape when patients are treated for respiratory diseases like asthma with albuterol inhalers.

Part of the solution may come through raising awareness: when officials used a system that showed anesthesiologists how much gas they used and how much escaped, emissions fell by as much as half, said Dr. John Balbus, the Health and Human Services climate change and health equity director.

Dr. Yseult Gibert of Montreal said 70 percent of operating-room emissions come from the way patients are given anesthesia. She said some types of anesthesia are more climate-friendly than others, without sacrificing on quality or effectiveness when it comes to care.

A report last week issued by Unitaid, which helps get new healthcare products to low- and middle-income countries, explored how product redesign, improvements in manufacturing and other measures could reduce the carbon footprint of 10 products used for health emergencies, women’s and children’s health, and HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.

Forest fires caused in part by climate change can have dramatic effects on homes, health and lives. Heat waves, which can be deadly, also can weigh on mental health, Gibert said, while poor air quality can make life harder for those facing lung and heart ailments and cause respiratory issues, like asthma in kids.

“Not a lot of people know that the climate crisis is a health crisis,” she said.

The impact of human activity on the climate was visible to conference-goers in Dubai, an oil-rich boom city that often faces higher levels of air pollution than other places on Earth due to its location. Haze is common.

The Dubai government, on its web site, listed its Air Quality Index level mostly at “good” on Sunday.

IQAir, a Swiss vendor of air-quality monitoring products, listed Dubai as the city with the 18th-worst air quality in the world with “moderate” air quality levels as of noon local time on Sunday. It cited high levels of two types of particulate matter in the air and advised mask-wearing for “sensitive groups” and a reduction of outdoor exercise.

Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell, Seth Borenstein and Peter Prengaman in Dubai and Frances D’Emilio in Rome contributed to this report.

The World Meteorological Organization also warned that the average temperature for the year is up some 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial times – a mere one-tenth of a degree under a target limit for the end of the century as laid out by the Paris climate accord in 2015.

The WMO secretary-general said the onset earlier this year of El Nino, the weather phenomenon marked by heating in the Pacific Ocean, could tip the average temperature next year over the 1.5-degree (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target cap set in Paris.

“It’s practically sure that during the coming four years we will hit this 1.5, at least on temporary basis,” Petteri Taalas said in an interview. “And in the next decade we are more or less going to be there on a permanent basis.”

WMO issued the findings for Thursday’s start of the U.N.’s annual climate conference, this year being held in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates city of Dubai.

The U.N. agency said the benchmark of key Paris accord goal will be whether the 1.5-degree increase is sustained over a 30-year span – not just a single year – but others say the world needs more clarity on that.

“Clarity on breaching the Paris agreement guard rails will be crucial,” said Richard Betts of Britain’s Met Office, the lead author of a new paper on the issue with University of Exeter published in the journal Nature.

“Without an agreement on what actually will count as exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, we risk distraction and confusion at precisely the time when action to avoid the worst effects of climate change becomes even more urgent,” he added.

WMO’s Taalas said that whatever the case, the world appears on course to blow well past that figure anyway.

“We are heading towards 2.5 to 3 degrees warming and that would mean that we would see massively more negative impacts of climate change,” Taalas said, pointing to glacier loss and sea level rise over “the coming thousands of years.”

Recommended:

climate change Nov 29, 2023

New study shows liquefied natural gas might be worse for climate change than coal

news Nov 27, 2023

Why climate change may cost you big bucks — and what to do about it

The nine years 2015 to 2023 were the warmest on record, WMO said. Its findings for this year run through October, but it says the last two months are not likely to be enough to keep 2023 from being a record-hot year.

Still, there are “some signs of hope” – including a turn toward renewable energies and more electric cars, which help reduce the amount of carbon that is spewed into the atmosphere, trapping heat inside,” Taalas said.

His message for attendee at the U.N climate conference, known as COP28?

“We have to reduce our consumption of coal, oil and natural gas dramatically to be able to limit the warming to the Paris limits,” he said. “Luckily, things are happening. But still, we in the Western countries, in the rich countries, we are still consuming oil, a little bit less coal than in the past, and still natural gas.”

“Reduction of fossil fuel consumption — that’s the key to success.”

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

New research from Cornell University shows liquefied natural gas, known as LNG, has an even bigger impact on climate change than burning coal.

“A broader conclusion is the need to move away from any use of LNG as a fuel as quickly as possible, and to immediately stop construction of any new LNG infrastructure,” wrote Robert Howarth, the author of the analysis.

The findings have major implications for global climate goals and for the United States, which became the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas earlier this year.

LNG exports were banned until 2016, and now, more than 60 members of Congress are urging the Department of Energy to reconsider shipping the fossil fuel abroad.

In a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and 64 other Democrats wrote they’re “concerned” the department’s decisions to approve every LNG project are “inconsistent with the latest climate science.”

The letter also raised concerns about CP2 LNG, a project in Southwest Louisiana that would be the single largest export facility in the U.S., which would allow American exports of liquefied natural gas to increase by as much as 20%.

“The thing about it is there’s nothing natural about LNG,” said Roishetta Sibley Ozane, the founder of the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a group fighting to stop gas expansion on the Gulf Coast. Ozane lives a few miles from Cameron, Louisiana where Venture Global hopes to expand its existing LNG facility.

Ozane and her volunteers have already collected more than 100,000 signatures to stop the approval of CP2, and she plans to personally deliver the petition to the Department of Energy in Washington.

“I’m doing this as a mom and as a grandmother, and that’s who I’m fighting for,” Ozane emphasized. “If this project is built, its impacts will be felt throughout the world.”

However, Venture Global LNG contended that the CP2 expansion would actually offset emissions from coal power plants, projecting a global decrease in emissions of 140 million tons per year. The company said it will also directly capture a portion of the carbon emissions on-site in Louisiana.

“American LNG is the best weapon in our arsenal to quickly displace global coal use and combat climate change,” Venture Global Spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said in a statement to NBC.

news Nov 23, 2023

Oil and gas industry needs to let go of carbon capture as solution to climate change, IEA says

news Nov 27, 2023

Why climate change may cost you big bucks — and what to do about it

Nevertheless, Howarth claims short-term energy needs are better met by reopening closed coal facilities temporarily, instead of expanding LNG use.

Howarth’s assertion is based on the repeated methane emissions throughout the lifecycle of natural gas — from drilling and fracking, to liquefying, shipping, and eventually burning the gas.

According to Howarth, even in the most sophisticated systems, methane is leaked or directly emitted at virtually every step, and over a 20-year span, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide — heating the atmosphere much more quickly.

“The scale of it is off the charts,” said Bill McKibben, journalist and founder of climate action group Third Act. “We have to get off fossil fuel and leave this stuff in the ground. That’s what the scientists keep telling us.”

McKibben, who advocates for a full embrace of green energy, both as a journalist and because of his faith, said we should instead focus on capturing the full power of the sun instead of burning fossil fuels.

“The good Lord was kind enough to hang a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky. We now know how to make absolutely full use of it, so we should give up on energy from hell and substitute energy from heaven.”

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent agency under the Department of Energy, is set to make a final decision on CP2 as soon as December 19th.

The Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment by NBC.

“What’s happening here in Southwest Louisiana, along the Gulf Coast directly impacts everyone,” adds Sibley Ozane, emphasizing concerns of environmental justice amid the rapid expansion of LNG. “We have to save this Earth. We only get one.”

The iceberg, known as A23a, split from the Antarctic’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986. But it became stuck to the ocean floor and had remained for many years in the Weddell Sea.

The iceberg is about three times the size of New York City and more than twice the size of Greater London, measuring around 4,000 square kilometers (1,500 square miles).

Andrew Fleming, a remote sensing expert from the British Antarctic Survey, told the BBC on Friday that the iceberg has been drifting for the past year and now appears to be picking up speed and moving past the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, helped by wind and ocean currents.

“I asked a couple of colleagues about this, wondering if there was any possible change in shelf water temperatures that might have provoked it, but the consensus is the time had just come,” Fleming told the BBC.

“It was grounded since 1986, but eventually it was going to decrease (in size) sufficiently was to lose grip and start moving,” he added.

Fleming said he first spotted movement from the iceberg in 2020. The British Antarctic Survey said it has now ungrounded and is moving along ocean currents to sub-Antarctic South Georgia.

The only bright spot is that global sales of electric passenger vehicles are now on track to match what’s needed — along with many other changes — to limit future warming to just another couple tenths of a degree, according to the State of Climate Action report released Tuesday by the World Resources Institute, Climate Action Tracker, the Bezos Earth Fund and others.

On the flip side, public money spent to create more fossil fuel use is going in the wrong direction and faster than it has in the past, said study co-author Kelly Levin, science and data director at the Bezos Earth Fund.

“This is not the time for tinkering around the edges, but it’s instead the time for radical decarbonization of all sectors of the economy,” Levin said.

“We are woefully off track and we are seeing the impact of inaction unfold around the world from extensive wildfire fires in Canada, heat-related deaths across the Mediterranean, record high temperatures in South Asia and so on,” she said.

Later this month, crucial international climate negotiations start in Dubai that include the first time world negotiators will do a global stocktake on how close society is to meeting its 2015 climate goals. In advance of the United Nations summit, numerous reports from experts are coming out assessing Earth’s progress or mostly the lack of it, including a United States national assessment with hundreds of indicators. Tuesday’s 42 indicators offers one of the grimmest report cards, detailing multiple failures of society.

US & world news

Food & Drink Nov 11, 2023

Climate change is impacting hops and barley crops, forcing beer industry to adjust

news Nov 10, 2023

Australia offers refuge to Pacific island nation threatened by rising sea levels

news Nov 9, 2023

Keeping 1.5 alive? IEA lists ‘crucial ingredients' to keep worst effects of climate change at bay

The report looks at what’s needed in several sectors of the global economy — power, transportation, buildings, industry, finance and forestry — to fit in a world that limits warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times, the goal the world adopted at Paris in 2015. The globe has already warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid 19th century.

Six categories — the carbon intensity of global steel production, how many miles passenger cars drive, electric buses sold, loss of mangrove forests, amount of food waste and public financing of fossil fuel use — are going in the wrong direction, the report said.

“Fossil fuel consumption subsidies in particular reached an all-time high last year, over $1 trillion, driven by the war in Ukraine and the resulting energy price spikes,” said report co-author Joe Thwaites of the Natural Resources Defense Council environmental group.

Another six categories were considered “off track” but going in the right direction, which is the closest to being on track and better than the 24 measurements that are “well off track.” Those merely off track include zero-carbon electricity generation, electric vehicles as percentage of the fleet, two- and three-wheel electric vehicle sales, grazing animal meat production, reforestation and share of greenhouse gas emissions with mandatory corporate climate risk reporting requirements.

People should be worried that this report is one of ’’too little, too late,” said University of Arizona climate scientist Katharine Jacobs, who wasn’t part of the report but praised it for being so comprehensive.

“I am not shocked that at a global scale we are not meeting expectations for reducing emissions,” Jacobs said in an email. “We cannot ignore the fact that global commitments to (greenhouse gas) reductions are essentially unenforceable and that a number of major setbacks have taken a toll on our progress.”

When trying to change an economy, the key is to start with “low-hanging fruit, i.e., the sectors of the economy that are easiest to transition and give a big bang for your buck,” said Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin, who isn’t part of the report. But he said the report shows “we’re really struggling to pick the low-hanging fruit.”

In the news

news Nov 8, 2023

‘Like something out of a Hollywood movie': Scientists say 2023 likely to be the hottest year on record

Prince William Nov 5, 2023

Prince William arrives in Singapore for the Earthshot Prize award, the first to be held in Asia

climate change Oct 31, 2023

Climate change is driving insurance rates up, forcing developers to add weather-proofing

Thunberg was speaking to a crowd of tens of thousands when she invited the women onto the stage.

“As a climate justice movement, we have to listen to the voices of those who are being oppressed and those who are fighting for freedom and for justice. Otherwise, there can be no climate justice without international solidarity,” Thunberg said.

After the Palestinian and Afghan women spoke and Thunberg resumed her speech, a man came onto the stage and told her: “I have come here for a climate demonstration, not a political view,” before he was ushered off the stage.

The man’s identity was not immediately clear. He was wearing a jacket with the name of a group called Water Natuurlijk that has elected members in Dutch water boards.

The Afghan woman, Sahar Shirzad, told The Associated Press that Thunberg allowed them to take the stage with her.

“Basically, she gave her time to us,” she said.

Before Thunberg took the stage, the event was briefly interrupted as a small group of activists at the front of the crowd waved Palestinian flags and chanted pro-Palestinian slogans.

She appeared undeterred and was later seen dancing behind the stage as band played.

The incident came after tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Amsterdam calling for more action to tackle climate change, in a mass protest just 10 days before a national election.

Organizers claimed that 70,000 people took part in the march and called it the biggest climate protest ever in the Netherlands.

US & world news

Food & Drink Nov 11, 2023

Climate change is impacting hops and barley crops, forcing beer industry to adjust

news Nov 10, 2023

Australia offers refuge to Pacific island nation threatened by rising sea levels

news Nov 8, 2023

‘Like something out of a Hollywood movie': Scientists say 2023 likely to be the hottest year on record

Thunberg was among those walking through the historic heart of the Dutch capital.

Political leaders including former European Union climate chief Frans Timmermans, who now leads a center-left, two-party bloc in the election campaign, later addressed the crowd gathered on a square behind the landmark Rijksmuseum.

“We live in a time of crises, all of which are the result of the political choices that have been made. It has to be done and it can be done differently,” organizer the Climate Crisis Coalition said in a statement.

While the coalition included the Fridays for Future youth movement, protesters were all ages and included a large contingent of medics in white coats carrying a banner emblazoned with the text: “Climate crisis = health crisis.”

“I am a pediatrician. I’m here standing up for the rights of children,” said Laura Sonneveld. “Children are the first to be affected by climate change.”

Tackling climate change is one of the key policy areas for political parties contesting the Nov. 22 general election.

“It is time for us to protest about government decisions,” said Margje Weijs, a Spanish teacher and youth coach. “I hope this influences the election.”

___

The peer-reviewed report says burning gasoline, coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels that release planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide, and other human activities, caused the unnatural warming from November 2022 to October 2023.

Over the course of the year, 7.3 billion people, or 90% of humanity, endured at least 10 days of high temperatures that were made at least three times more likely because of climate change.

“People know that things are weird, but they don’t they don’t necessarily know why it’s weird. They don’t connect back to the fact that we’re still burning coal, oil and natural gas,” said Andrew Pershing, a climate scientist at Climate Central.

“I think the thing that really came screaming out of the data this year was nobody is safe. Everybody was experiencing unusual climate-driven heat at some point during the year,” said Pershing.

The average global temperature was 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the pre-industrial climate, which scientists say is close to the limit countries agreed not to go over in the Paris Agreement — a 1.5 C (2.7 F) rise. The impacts were apparent as one in four humans, or 1.9 billion people, suffered from dangerous heat waves.

At this point, said Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University, no one should be caught off guard. “It’s like being on an escalator and being surprised that you’re going up,” he said. ”We know that things are getting warmer, this has been predicted for decades.”

Here’s how a few regions were affected by the extreme heat:

• Extreme heat fueled destructive rainfall because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which lets storms release more precipitation. Storm Daniel became Africa’s deadliest storm with an estimated death toll that ranges between 4,000 and 11,000, according to officials and aid agencies. Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey also saw damages and fatalities from Storm Daniel.

• In India, 1.2 billion people, or 86% of the population, experienced at least 30 days of elevated temperatures, made at least three times more likely by climate change.

• Drought in Brazil’s Amazon region caused rivers to dry to historic lows, cutting people off from food and fresh water.

• At least 383 people died in U.S. extreme weather events, with 93 deaths related to the Maui wildfire event, the deadliest U.S. fire of the century.

• One of every 200 people in Canada evacuated their home due to wildfires, which burn longer and more intensely after long periods of heat dry out the land. Canadian fires sent smoke billowing across much of North America.

• On average, Jamaica experienced high temperatures made four times more likely by climate change during the last 12 months, making it the country where climate change was most powerfully at work.

climate change Nov 7, 2023

Independent voters reach record numbers, prioritize climate change heading into 2024

climate change Nov 1, 2023

Ghost forests and zombie fires: How climate change haunts the planet

“We need to adapt, mitigate and be better prepared for the residual damages because impacts are highly uneven from place to place,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington, citing changes in precipitation, sea level rise, droughts, and wildfires.

The heat of the last year, intense as it was, is tempered because the oceans have been absorbing the majority of the excess heat related to climate change, but they are reaching their limit, said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University. “Oceans are really the thermostat of our planet … they are tied to our economy, food sources, and coastal infrastructure.”

China has become the world’s biggest importer of beef, and Brazil is China’s biggest supplier, according to United Nations Comtrade data. More beef moves from Brazil to China than between any other two countries.

But the Brazilian cattle industry is a major driver of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Data analysis by The Associated Press and the Rainforest Investigations Network, a nonprofit reporting consortium, found that a little-known American company is among the key suppliers and distributors feeding China’s hunger for beef – and the Amazon deforestation that it fuels.

The world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon plays a critical role in the global climate by absorbing carbon emissions. A new study published this week in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences linked Amazon deforestation to warmer regional temperatures.

Salt Lake City-based Parker-Migliorini International, better known as PMI Foods, has been a major beneficiary of the beef trade between Brazil and China. PMI has shipped more than $1.7 billion in Brazilian beef over the last decade – more than 95% of it to China, according to data from Panjiva, a company that uses customs records to track international trade. Over the last decade, Chinese beef imports have surged sixfold, U.N. Comtrade data shows, and PMI has helped satisfy China’s growing demand.

As a middleman that has been one of the leading importers of Brazilian beef to China, PMI provides a window into how that growing international trade is driving deforestation.

world news Jul 6, 2023

Deforestation in the Amazon dropped 34% in first half of 2023, Brazilian officials say

Brazil Jan 23, 2023

Brazil's Lula Aims to Stop Illegal Deforestation of Amazon and Protect Rainforest

How do PMI’s operations affect the Amazon rainforest?

Holly Gibbs, a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies land use changes linked to the beef industry, says that PMI has contributed to the Amazon’s destruction, because it sources beef from companies that purchase cows raised on deforested land.

Last year, the Brazilian Amazon lost more than 4,000 square miles (10,360 square kilometers) of rainforest, the equivalent of nearly 3,000 soccer fields each day, according to a January report by Imazon, a Brazilian research group that uses satellite monitoring to track deforestation.

More than two-thirds of deforested land in the Brazilian Amazon has been converted to cattle pastures, according to Brazil’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

PMI gets more of its Brazilian beef from Sao Paulo, Brazil-based meat processing giant JBS SA than from anywhere else. In a series of reports released between 2018 and 2023, Brazilian prosecutors have determined that JBS purchased massive numbers of cattle raised on illegally deforested land. Last December, prosecutors found that JBS had bought more than 85,000 cows from ranches that engaged in illegal deforestation in Pará, one of nine states in the Brazilian Amazon. Their latest report, released October 26, found that JBS had substantially lower but still significant rates of purchases from ranches involved in environmental violations across four Amazon states.

“There’s no doubt that PMI Foods is benefiting from the deforestation of the Amazon,” Gibbs said. “They’re also helping to drive that deforestation by continuing to pay into that system.”

In an email, a PMI spokesperson said that “in a world where famine, malnutrition and acute food insecurity are a global concern, PMI is focused on feeding millions of people all over the world,” including providing meals to refugees.

PMI said it is working to strengthen environmental practices of its beef operations. “While our absolute primary priority is feeding people, we remain committed to continuous improvement of sustainability across the beef value chain,” the spokesperson said.

PMI Foods is a $3 billion global enterprise that buys and sells more than 1.6 billion pounds (725.7 million kilograms) of beef, pork, chicken, seafood and eggs each year. In the last decade, PMI Foods shipped more than $616 million of Brazilian beef from JBS, almost twice as much as from any other supplier, shipping records show.

JBS, in turn, purchased a significant share of its cattle from ranches that were illegally deforested, Brazilian prosecutors have found. These properties accounted for 15% of JBS’s cattle supply in the Amazon state of Pará from 2019 to 2020, according to an audit by prosecutors audit last December. The company’s purchases from properties linked to environmental violations decreased to 6% of its supply across four Amazon states in the following year, prosecutors found in an audit published in October.

JBS has been investigated and fined by Brazilian authorities in connection with its purchases of cattle from illegal farms, but these are separate from the audits, which are focused on improving company practices.

JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, asserts that it has fixed the problems identified in previous audits by prosecutors. In a statement, JBS said it has a “zero-tolerance policy for illegal deforestation” in its supply chains, and is adopting block chain technology to include vetting of indirect suppliers by 2025.

Yet as recently as last fall, JBS admitted to a large-scale purchase of cattle raised on illegally deforested land. Following an investigation by Repórter Brasil, a contributor to the Rainforest Investigations Network, JBS acknowledged it had illegally bought nearly 9,000 cattle from a rancher whom Brazilian authorities have described as “one of the biggest deforesters in the country.” The rancher, Chaules Volban Pozzebon, is now serving a 70-year prison sentence for offenses including leading a criminal gang.

PMI also buys in large volume from Brazil’s second largest meat processor, Marfrig, which has been dogged as well by reports by environmental groups and news outlets alleging that it purchased cattle from ranches that were involved in illegal deforestation. In February 2022, the Inter-American Development Bank scrapped a $200 million loan to Marfrig amid criticism of the company’s environmental record. In September, the Swiss food multinational Nestlé dropped Marfrig as a beef supplier in Brazil following media reports last year that Marfrig had bought cattle raised on land that was seized from indigenous peoples.

Marfrig said in an email that the ranch cited in last year’s reports was on land that had not yet been designated protected indigenous territory. Marfrig did not face legal penalties in connection with the case. The company said it has a “rigorous livestock sourcing policy” that uses satellite monitoring to avoid suppliers linked to deforestation.

Asked about its leading suppliers, JBS and Marfrig, buying cattle raised on deforested or illegally seized lands, PMI said it requires its suppliers to follow local laws, and depends on government environmental agencies in Brazil and elsewhere to enforce them. “PMI relies on the assurances set forth in the sustainability policies of its suppliers,” a company spokesman said in an email.

For its part, Brazil’s Environment Ministry said independent audits have shown that major meat processors are still buying significant quantities of cattle raised on deforested land through their indirect suppliers.

“The persistence of these cases shows that the companies’ systems are flawed and there is not sufficient effort to avoid illegal purchases,” the ministry said in a statement.

PMI Foods has come under scrutiny from U.S. authorities before for its shipments to China.

Between 2008 and 2011, PMI took in more than $289 million in revenue from illegal beef shipments to China, representing the majority of U.S.-sourced sales to the country, according to a spreadsheet produced by a whistleblower for FBI investigators.

“They were willing to break laws,” whistleblower Brandon Barrick said in an interview in 2022, referring to the time that he worked at PMI. “They were willing to do whatever it took to make a buck for themselves.”

In spring of 2014, PMI pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of making a false statement to U.S. authorities about the destination of its beef exports and paid a $1 million fine.

In an email, PMI said it had put the “entire episode behind us” nine years ago, and emphasized that it pleaded guilty only to making a false statement. “PMI was never charged with a crime for its export operations,” said company attorney Mark Gaylord.

Where is PMI sending the beef?

In the last decade, Chinese imports of beef from Brazil have increased from $1.3 billion in 2013 to more than $8 billion in 2022, according to U.N. Comtrade data.

PMI has been a major player in feeding that growing market. As of 2017, the company was the second largest importer of Brazilian beef to China, according to a 2020 report by Trase, a research group that studies commodity supply chains.

As Brazil became China’s biggest supplier, cattle production ramped up. China imposes relatively few environmental demands on its beef importers, meaning suppliers who need land for cattle may be tempted to engage in deforestation, said Gibbs, the University of Wisconsin geography professor.

“As China’s demand for beef goes up, so does the stress on the rainforest,” Gibbs said.

Daniel Azeredo, a Brazilian federal prosecutor who has led crackdowns on illegal deforestation in the beef industry, said companies must ensure that products from the Amazon region do not come from illegally deforested land.

“Everyone who participates in the trade of products that come from the Amazon has to be able to transparently determine the products’ origin,” Azeredo said.

What is PMI doing to address deforestation?

In response to inquiries about whether it had raised concerns about deforestation with JBS or other suppliers, PMI Foods said it “has discussions with our partners, vendors and suppliers including JBS, about always improving best practices towards the environment and sustainability.”

As a middleman rather than a company that raises animals or processes meat, PMI’s role in deforestation has been little examined.

PMI’s reliance on JBS is not unusual among food companies. While a handful of European retailers have dropped JBS beef products in recent years due to deforestation concerns, major American brands such as Kroger and Albertsons, the parent company of Safeway, still purchase its beef.

Albertsons confirmed that it sources beef from JBS, but said it is only a small quantity. Kroger did not respond to inquiries but its online store includes JBS beef products.

JBS, Marfrig and other top beef producers have signed pledges to work against illegal deforestation. But unlike most leading meat processors and commodity traders, PMI has not signed on to agreements to fight deforestation, such as the New York Declaration on Forests, in which endorsers commit to goals including eliminating deforestation by 2030.

Two months after initial inquiries about its environmental policies for this story, PMI said it was joining industry efforts to combat deforestation.

“We are now proud to partner with One Tree Planted, Green Business Bureau and the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef,” the company said last November. Since then it has planted 10,000 trees in the Amazon, the company said, part of a longer-term plan to plant a million trees.

The company has not yet signed a pledge against rainforest destruction, but last month said it was considering making one. “We are open to pledges and currently working on these matters,” the company said.

Gibbs, the University of Wisconsin professor, said that because PMI and other middlemen have such strong purchasing power, they “need to come to the table” to help stop deforestation.

So far meat brokers have been “completely ignored,” she said, allowing beef to reach consumers’ tables without meeting environmental standards strong enough to protect the Amazon.

Azeredo, the Brazilian prosecutor, emphasized that not just meat processors, but all companies in the beef and leather industries share the obligation to avoid suppliers that violate environmental laws.

“The entire industry that buys those animals, that sells leather or meat, must make sure that they don’t allow products from areas of illegal deforestation,” Azeredo said.

___

AP journalists Camille Fassett in Seattle and Fabiano Maisonnave in Brasilia, Brazil, contributed to this report. This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.

The former British elite marathon runner from Great Britain will participate in the New York City Marathon on Sunday, Nov. 5. Instead of wearing her country’s name across her chest like she has at other competitions, she will be sporting waste around her waist in the name of sustainability.

Muir partnered with fashion designer Natalia Trevino Amaro to create an “upcycled” skirt made out of wrappers and bottles that she will wear while running across the Big Apple. She will also be writing climate-change statistics on her body with the hopes of getting other runners and spectators to think.

“These are the items that we use often, but also they are items that are colorful and eye-catching, and it’s something that can provoke a conversation,” Muir exclusively told NBC.

Muir was first drawn to sustainability after watching “FernGully: The Last Rainforest” as a kid. Her passion for the topic only grew as she became a mother.

“It was recently after I had my two children and just being out in the world and seeing the effects through my own eyes as a runner,” she said. “I got to the point where I was thinking about it a lot and I felt I had to use my platform to say something, because surely if I was feeling these things, then other people would be, too.”

Muir retired at 28 years old in 2017 during the self-proclaimed “peak” of her career. She explained that she hadn’t had a period in nine years and said her body wasn’t functioning properly.

Instead of leaving the sport entirely, Muir remained committed to sharing other runners’ stories. She launched the “Running for Real” podcast, a show that began with just interviews but evolved into a larger platform for the running community that examines all parts of the industry.

“‘Running for Real’ is now continuously morphing, but we are this global community that cares about our community as runners, but also as a community as a whole,” she said. “We want to use our running to be better people or be the best people that we can be.”

Muir flipped the page to a new chapter in August with the release of “Becoming A Sustainable Runner: A Guide to Running for Life, Community, and Planet,” which she co-authored with Zoë Rom.

“Those three areas of people, community and planet are three things that I’ve always been very passionate about,” she said. “And we wanted to weave them together and pull them in to show people that one builds off the other, but each of them need the other two parts to be functioning as they should be.”

Muir recognizes that other runners are not as eager to talk about sustainability issues in running, let alone embrace them.

Waste diversion stations are designed to help runners get rid of plastic water bottles, wrappers, food scraps and more during events. However, in the midst of a race, competitors aren’t focused on bringing that waste to its designated spot.

One of Muir’s roles is getting the thousands of racers to pay attention to an event’s sustainability initiatives before they get off the starting line, that way they don’t have to think about it during their runs. She is keen on getting buy-in from the “average” person, and in her mind, that starts with simple conversations.

“I think environmental activists have a very important role in our space, but most promote a message that for the average person is overwhelming and too much and will make them kind of back away and say, ‘I can’t deal with this,’” she said. “But one thing we can all do, even though it’s uncomfortable, is talk about it. …

“Even if they seem small, even if they have minimal impact on actual emissions, by having these conversations, the politicians are going to listen, the companies are going to listen, those who have the opportunity to make big change happen. We’ll only start doing so if we continue to talk about it.”

Muir will take her mission global in 2025 when she heads sustainability efforts at the World Athletics Road Running Championships in San Diego. Soon after, another global sporting event will descend upon California with another chance to make a sustainability stand.

“The Olympics absolutely has a huge opportunity to make the most of sustainability, to put it as a priority,” Muir said of the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. “The world will be watching.”

There’s a long way to go between Sunday’s New York City Marathon and the 2028 Olympics, of course. Muir’s sustainability efforts will continue in the meantime, and just like a marathon, each step will bring her a little closer to the finish line.

“Ultimately, we should all be using our platforms to find ways to connect with our audiences and remind them that their voice matters,” she said. “Because at the end of the day, it may feel like we are just one in a million, but you know, an ocean is made up of droplets. We all add up together to make that difference.”

The saltwater brought ashore when the sea level rises is killing acres of forests. What’s left? Ghost forests. 

Down a dirt road, through a forest that’s still alive, Delaware Bay is haunted by one.

“As the salt comes in, it poisons things, poisons the soil and saturates it,” said Lenore Tedesco, the executive director of The Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, N.J. “And it kills these forests.”

As the sea level rise accelerates, saltwater reaches further inland, producing fields of wooden tombstones. Estimates vary, but potentially millions of acres of coastal forest have been lost to saltwater intrusion that has been accelerated by climate change. 

US & world news

climate change Sep 21, 2021

Ghost Forests Creep Up US East Coast

climate change Oct 31, 2023

Americans are still putting way too much food into landfills. Local officials seek EPA's help

climate change Oct 31, 2023

Climate change is driving insurance rates up, forcing developers to add weather-proofing

Ghost forests are doubly disastrous because living trees absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. A healthy forest is what’s known as a “carbon sink,” which stores carbon and keeps it out of the atmosphere and oceans. When an entire forest dies from saltwater — or wildfires — all of that carbon returns, further heating the planet.

Wildfires of the past can also come back to haunt us. They’re known as zombie fires. 

“They go underground in the fall and winter months, and they can carry over in terms of continuing to combust in the ground fuels, sometimes right underneath the snowpack, right through the winter,” said Merritt Turetsky, a professor at the University of Colorado. “And then they emerge like a zombie the following spring.”

Turetsky studies zombie fires across Canada and Alaska. She is researching whether climate change is helping more undead fires rise from an icy grave each spring. 

“So what it means is through this zombie burning, fire years may not be totally independent on the landscape,” she said. “One fire year might actually affect the next fire season.”

“And that’s a very interesting management question, particularly given the extreme amount of resources and just human stress and toil and capital that went into fighting the fires across Canada in 2023,” she said. “Truly an epic fire year.”

Along East Boston’s waterfront sits The Eddy, a two-building property with over 250 luxury apartments. Its harbor-side location provides unobstructed views of the Boston skyline. It also leaves the building particularly vulnerable to sea surges and flooding.

When developers imagined The Eddy in 2014, they kept that weather exposure in mind.

According to the Urban Land Institute, or ULI, the developers built The Eddy nine inches higher than the original property that was previously located on the site. They put an emergency generator on the roof, built an 18-inch floodgate layered with sandbags at the base and planted coastal vegetation that can survive a saltwater immersion. The developers also constructed The Eddy with walls that can withstand up to 100 miles per hour of wind.

Those renovations reduced The Eddy’s estimated flood loss risk from $10 million to $1 million, which meant ten-times cheaper annual flood insurance premiums, plus savings on wind insurance, according to ULI.

Since The Eddy completed construction in 2016, extreme weather has become more common. As a result, insurance has grown more expensive.

Climate-resilient features that might have once been considered architectural frills are now helping commercial real estate owners lower property costs in the long-term.

Lindsay Brugger, vice president of urban resilience at ULI, said that, along with reducing insurance premiums, climate resilience can generate savings by lowering operating expenses, improving the marketability of a building and avoiding construction costs when a natural disaster hits.

“Resilience should be for everybody. It does not need to be a luxury,” said Brugger.

A 2018 study by commercial property insurer FM Global found that for every dollar spent on hurricane protection, a building will lower its loss exposure by $105.

And a 2019 report by the National Institute of Building Sciences spoke on the non-financial savings as well. It found that implementing mitigation measures according to modern building codes could save 600 lives and prevent 1 million nonfatal injuries.

Climate’s insurance crisis

Commercial real estate properties have seen insurance rates rise an average of over 7% since 2017, according to an August Moody’s report. That’s compared to a typical yearly increase of about two to three percent.

“It’s not all really due to climate hazards, but that is one of the core issues,” said Kevin Fagan, who authored the report and leads Moody’s commercial real estate analysis division.

Some insurers have pulled out of high-risk markets like California and Florida, scared off and priced out by the increasing regularity of extreme weather conditions.

Christine Chipurnoi, an executive at USI Insurance Services, said as a result, her clients have seen “astronomical” premiums. One Florida office property she advises saw its annual wind insurance quote climb from $30,000 to $44,000 in just four weeks.

“The market is just changing so fast,” she said.

Major commercial real estate trusts have all cited climate risk as a significant threat to their financial stability.

In February, Vornado Realty Trust noted that its concentrated investment in markets like New York, Chicago and San Francisco leaves it especially vulnerable to natural disaster damages and elevated costs. Climate change could increase the cost of property insurance, energy maintenance and damage repair, Vornado said.

“Over time, these conditions could result in declining demand for office and retail space in our buildings or the inability of us to operate the buildings at all,” the company said in the filing.

Boston Properties and Highwoods Properties made similar statements in their own 10-K filings.

As climate change risks make insurance more unavailable, commercial property owners are looking to weather-proof their assets rather than solely rely on pricey insurance to cover their damages.

“Investing in the asset as opposed to depending on insurance coverage just makes more sense nowadays,” said Tony Liou, president of sustainable engineering firm Partner Energy.

Climate resilience is ‘not a nice-to-have’

Consequently, climate-resilient architecture is no longer just a luxury expense — it’s a means of securing discounted insurance and lowering long-term costs.

In California, for example, insurers are required to discount rates based on the mitigation measures an owner has taken to protect their property like having fire-resistant vents or a Class A fire-rated roof.

Despite the construction costs of weather-proofing, Fagan said, “You do kind of get paid back.”

According to a ULI case study, a south Florida resort saved itself an estimated $500,000 in annual insurance premiums because it integrated hurricane-proof windows, located its electrical units above storm-surge zones and installed other climate resilience measures.

Sometimes, it’s not just about cheaper insurance but rather securing insurance at all.

Climate-resilient architecture “makes you writable,” said Chipurnoi. “It will make more insurance companies come to the table and actually give a quote.”

Holly Neber, the chief executive of AEI Consultants, helps assess risk on commercial real estate and has seen firsthand how clients can be priced out of insurance coverage without integrating climate change mitigation for their properties.

She recently consulted on a trio of 1970s vintage multifamily buildings in Miami Gardens, Florida whose owner, in order to meet new lending requirements, needed to increase the property’s wind insurance policy by 850 percent — from $5 million of coverage to over $47 million. After an initial risk assessment, insurance firms only felt comfortable covering an additional $5 million.

“The owner was stuck. How could they refinance if the required wind coverage was not available?” Neber said.

But the buildings recently had a weatherproofing makeover: new roof truss framing, hurricane ties on the rafters, plywood sheathing and new windows.

What may have once been viewed as extraneous renovations now allowed the client to go back to the insurance companies with a new risk assessment of wind damage, which convinced more insurers to finance the $47 million insurance policy.

Beyond finding better insurance deals, without weather-proof features, it has become harder to get insurers to play ball in the first place.

Climate resilience then, Neber said, “becomes not a nice-to-have, but it’s integrated into good risk management and good investment.”

As opposition grows, once-routine regulatory processes are taking several years, if they are completed at all. Some communities are concerned about landscape changes, some property values and others wildlife preservation. Layered on top of these debates is misinformation, which sows doubt and mistrust among developers and communities.

A new class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a glimpse into a novel way of resolving these types of conflicts.

MIT is offering a first-of-its-kind course that trains students to be mediators in conflicts over clean energy projects. Supervised by a professional mediator, students work directly with developers, local officials and community members. Students get academic credit and hands-on experience addressing real-world dilemmas, while the community and developer get free help resolving conflict.

“Most coverage of clean-energy opposition sloppily reaches for the term NIMBYism,” said Larry Susskind, the MIT professor behind the course, during one recent class a reporter visited. He was referring to the common acronym for “not in my backyard” opposition. Ultimately, Susskind said, such framing delegitimatizes affected community members and stokes acrimony.

Curbing climate change — and extreme weather for future generations — depends squarely on society’s ability to rapidly build new clean energy infrastructure despite the messy puzzle of local, state and federal reviews projects must overcome.

Today, the technologies being built are mostly wind and solar farms, storage facilities and powerlines. In the coming decades, new projects will include everything from carbon dioxide pipelines to facilities capturing CO2 directly from the sky to renewable hydrogen production.

US & world news

climate change Oct 31, 2023

Americans are still putting way too much food into landfills. Local officials seek EPA's help

news Oct 30, 2023

Shipping industry could lose $10 billion a year battling climate change by 2050

climate change Oct 29, 2023

How extreme weather in the US may have affected the pumpkins you picked this year for Halloween

There has been debate in Washington D.C. and elsewhere around the country about how to speed up project reviews. Most has focused on streamlining permitting processes, such as limiting the time local officials can spend on reviews and giving state and federal governments power to overrule local authorities. New York and California recently passed such laws and these could become models for the whole country.

But “this risks simply ignoring community concerns instead of finding ways to make the siting process more just in the eyes of those who are protesting,” Susskind and research colleagues write in an article set to be published in the January 2024 issue of the scientific journal Cell Reports Sustainability.

In Susskind’s class, dubbed the MIT Renewable Energy Clinic, he hopes to create collaboration that may slow down projects initially by incorporating more input but ultimately speed them up by avoiding later-stage conflicts.

In one recent Friday afternoon class, students debated everything from environmental justice concerns to misinformation to oil companies. Ultimately, several students said they will need to put their own opinions aside to assume the role of mediator.

“We must find a way to be fair and create equal conditions for all parties,” Leyla Uysal, a design school student from Harvard University with an urban planning background, said. “It’s going to be difficult, but I will educate myself not to take sides.”

The students, about two dozen across a range of disciplines, ages and other area schools, recently completed a certification exam. The certification prepares them to begin the real-world part of the class. The projects in this first course are two solar farms proposed by Chicago-based Ranger Power for counties in Michigan, which are already facing opposition.

“We’re not starting at the beginning,” Susskind said. “We’re coming in because they are stalled.”

It’s not Susskind’s first hands-on academic effort. He helped create the first student-led cybersecurity clinic in 2021 to help defend public infrastructure from hacking. It has since expanded to 15 universities and received $20 million from Google this summer.

He hopes to create a similar national consortium of universities serving communities and projects in their respective regions regarding clean energy.

Columbia University is already talking with Susskind. Abraham Silverman directs a new initiative at the university focused on permitting and other non-technical challenges in the clean energy transition, and said he favors processes that focus more on expediting permitting decisions, but that he’s “intrigued” by Susskind’s approach of more directly engaging communities.

“That is a very Jeffersonian democracy approach on siting and permitting,” said Silverman, a former top official at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. “It’s refreshing to have people like Larry take a look at these kinds of things.”

One foundational challenge Susskind faces is potential lack of trust from community members skeptical of outsiders.

“Some students may naively think that coming in as MIT is a good thing, but they may find out soon enough that’s a bad thing,” said Patrick Field, a senior mediator at the Consensus Building Institute who is supervising the class and recently visited Cambridge.

Undergraduate student Anushree Chaudhuri has a cautionary tale. She faced angry phone calls (or no callbacks at all) while studying projects this summer in California on behalf of research associated with the clinic. Part of the problem, she said, was wording on the webpage forthe clinic that implied preference for development over engagement, which has since been changed, she said.

“For students who are new to this kind of engagement with communities, it can be hard to develop empathy unless you start having conversations,” Chaudhuri says. “And it can be hard to have empathy if everyone angrily hangs up on you.”

Students are seeking to engage with local company representatives, public regulators and community members in the two Michigan solar projects over the coming weeks, with the goal of making progress by mid-December.

Progress will be measured not by the projects moving forward, but instead by all stakeholders finding more understanding of the other side, Field said: “Did people walk away with emotions turned down and a sense of understanding and respect, even if an agreement doesn’t exist?”

On the subject of trust, Sarah Mills, an urban and regional planning professor at the University of Michigan, who is not involved with the clinic, noted the rural-urban divide that exists in many states. Rural residents often trust schools with deeper rural ties more than universities like hers, she said. She is exploring the potential for agricultural extension programs to act as facilitators in renewable energy siting conflicts.

The next iteration of the MIT course, slated for spring, may engage with communities and developers on projects that are not (yet anyway) at loggerheads, according to Susskind.

“We’re not going to give up if we fail the first or second time,” Susskind said. “It may be a function of the places we choose to work. It may be easier to start with a place that isn’t already in a battle.”

___

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a collaboration between Cipher News and The Associated Press.

The letter came on the heels of two recent reports from the EPA on the scope of America’s food waste problem and the damage that results from it. The local officials pressed the agency to expand grant funding and technical help for landfill alternatives. They also urged the agency to update landfill standards to require better prevention, detection and reduction of methane emissions, something scientists already have the technology to do but which can be challenging to implement since food waste breaks down and starts generating methane quickly.

Tackling food waste is a daunting challenge that the U.S. has taken on before. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the EPA set a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030, but the country has made little progress, said Claudia Fabiano, who works on food waste management for the EPA.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Fabiano said.

Researchers say the EPA reports provide sorely needed information. One report found that 58% of methane emissions from landfills come from food waste, a major issue because methane is responsible for about a quarter of global warming and has significantly more warming potential than carbon dioxide.

news Jun 18, 2023

Chipotle Wants You to Think Composting Before Burrito Bowl Becomes Trash

Halloween Oct 31, 2022

What to Do With Your Pumpkins After Halloween? They Can Be Composted, Donated to Farms, and Even Fed to Wildlife

With the extent of the problem clearly defined, some elected leaders and researchers alike hope to take action. But they say it will take not just investment of resources but also a major mindset shift from the public. Farmers may need to change some practices, manufacturers will need to rethink how they package and market goods, and individuals need to find ways to keep food from going to waste.

So for the first time since the 1990s, the EPA updated its ranking of preferred strategies for waste reduction, ranging from preventing wasted food altogether (by not producing or buying it in the first place) to composting or anaerobic digestion, a process by which food waste can be turned into biogas inside a reactor. Prevention remains the top strategy, but the new ranking includes more nuances comparing the options so communities can decide how to prioritize their investments.

But reducing waste requires a big psychological change and lifestyle shift from individuals no matter what. Researchers say households are responsible for at least 40% of food waste in the U.S.

It’s a more urgent problem than ever, said Weslynne Ashton, a professor of environmental management and sustainability at the Illinois Institute of Technology who was not involved with the EPA reports. Americans have been conditioned to expect abundance at grocery stores and on their plates, and it’s expensive to pull all that food out of the waste stream.

“I think it is possible to get zero organic waste into landfills,” Ashton said. “But it means that we need an infrastructure to enable that in different locations within cities and more rural regions. It means we need incentives both for households as well as for commercial institutions.”

With the problem clearly defined and quantified, it remains to be seen whether communities and states will get extra help or guidance from the federal level — and how much change they can make either way. The EPA has recently channeled some money from the Inflation Reduction Act toward supporting recycling, which did include some funding for organics waste, but those are relatively new programs.

Some local governments have been working on this issue for a while. California began requiring every jurisdiction to provide organic waste collection services starting in 2022. But others don’t have as much of a head start. Chicago, for instance, just launched a city-wide composting pilot program two weeks ago that set up free food waste drop-off points around the city. But prospective users have to transport their food scraps themselves.

Ning Ai, an associate professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois Chicago, said the report could be bolstered by more specific information about how different communities can adopt localized solutions, since preventing food waste might look different in rural and urban areas or in different parts of the country. But she was also impressed that the report highlighted tradeoffs of environmental impacts between air, water and land, something she said is not often as aggressively documented.

“These two reports, as well as some of the older ones, that definitely shows up as a boost to the national momentum to waste reduction,” said Ai, who was not involved with the EPA’s research.

Last year, Ceres launched an effort to press companies with large water footprints to protect those resources and address related financial risks. On Wednesday, the group released an analysis that included such powerhouses as Coca-Cola, General Mills and Amazon.

“There’s no doubt that companies need to do better,” said Kirsten James, senior program director for water at Ceres.

Ceres said the companies were chosen from the four sectors based on factors including size and their impact on water. They were ranked based on a variety of factors, including commitments to protect the quantity and quality of the water they use, as well as the ecosystems that supply it. They were also assessed on whether they helped improve access to water and sanitation in communities where they do business. Ceres drew on publicly available information, including the companies’ filings and other voluntary disclosures through March.

None of the companies scored above 70% of the points available. Almost a dozen scored well enough to be rated “On Track” to meeting the goals, with at least 50% scores.

That included Coca-Cola, which said its water use in 2022 was 10% more efficient compared to 2015. The company said it aspires to have 100% circular water use — where every bit of water is used and eventually returned to the watersheds it has drawn from — at 175 locations by 2030.

But the company didn’t say how likely it was to reach that target, nor how much progress it has made. Coca-Cola also said manufacturing its product isn’t where most of its water footprint lies; rather, it’s in growing what goes into it.

“The agricultural ingredients that we use use vastly more water to produce than the actual manufacturing process,” said Michael Goltzman, vice president of Coca Cola and a sustainability head. “And it doesn’t really matter where you are in the world.”

The index was produced with funding that included a grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation, a separate entity from The Coca-Cola Company. Ceres said the index wasn’t funded directly by any of the companies evaluated, and said its work isn’t influenced by funders.

US & world news

climate change Oct 29, 2023

How extreme weather in the US may have affected the pumpkins you picked this year for Halloween

news Oct 14, 2023

A big climate change stress test is coming for Amazon sellers and suppliers

Joe Biden Oct 13, 2023

Pres. Biden announces $7B for clean hydrogen hubs across the country

Tech companies like Amazon and Apple, meanwhile, need large amounts of water to cool the computers in their sprawling data centers. The Ceres index had both companies below 20% progress toward the nonprofit’s targets.

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel disputed the Ceres findings, saying it was “an inaccurate reflection of both our commitment and progress toward becoming water positive.”

Apple did not respond to a message.

Food company General Mills was among the companies furthest along in meeting the 2030 targets, at 65%.

Mary Jane Melendez, the company’s chief sustainability global impact officer, said 85% of the company’s water use is in agriculture. And extreme weather in the U.S. has affected the company in recent years.

“We are seeing that there are challenges in getting ingredients out of the ground when these extreme weather events are hitting our key sourcing regions,” said Melendez. She cited freezing and thawing that has hurt the company’s sourcing of sugar beets and drought that has hit its oats supply.

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, said that corporations’ self-interest in protecting their operations from water vulnerability could motivate them to take bigger steps to protecting freshwater resources.

“Is there any official legal accountability to Ceres’ metrics and reporting? Absolutely not. Does money talk? When it talks, it talks pretty loud,” Kiparsky said.

James, of Ceres, said the nonprofit hopes to update its findings every two years.

But one season of above-average snowfall wasn’t enough to refill the dwindling reservoir he relies on to irrigate his pumpkins. He received news this spring that his water delivery would be about half of what it was from the previous season, so he planted just half of his typical pumpkin crop. Then heavy rains in May and June brought plenty of water and turned fields into a muddy mess, preventing any additional planting many farmers might have wanted to do.

“By time it started raining and the rain started to affect our reservoir supplies and everything else, it was just too late for this year,” Mazzotti said.

For some pumpkin growers in states like Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, this year’s pumpkin crop was a reminder of the water challenges hitting agriculture across the Southwest and West as human-caused climate change exacerbates drought and heat extremes. Some farmers lost 20% or more of their predicted yields; others, like Mazzotti, left some land bare. Labor costs and inflation are also narrowing margins, hitting farmers’ ability to profit off what they sell to garden centers and pumpkin patches.

This year’s thirsty gourds are a symbol of the reality that farmers who rely on irrigation must continue to face season after season: they have to make choices, based on water allotments and the cost of electricity to pump it out of the ground, about which acres to plant and which crops they can gamble on to make it through hotter and drier summers.

Pumpkins can survive hot, dry weather to an extent, but this summer’s heat, which broke world records and brought temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit to agricultural fields across the country, was just too much, said Mark Carroll, a Texas A&M extension agent for Floyd County, which he calls the “pumpkin capital” of the state.

“It’s one of the worst years we’ve had in several years,” Carroll said. Not only did the hot, dry weather surpass what irrigation could make up for, but pumpkins also need cooler weather to be harvested or they’ll start to decompose during the shipping process, sometimes disintegrating before they even arrive at stores.

America’s pumpkin powerhouse, Illinois, had a successful harvest on par with the last two years, according to the Illinois Farm Bureau. But this year it was so hot into the harvest season in Texas that farmers had to decide whether to risk cutting pumpkins off the vines at the usual time or wait and miss the start of the fall pumpkin rush. Adding to the problem, irrigation costs more as groundwater levels continue to drop — driving some farmers’ energy bills to pump water into the thousands of dollars every month.

Lindsey Pyle, who farms 950 acres of pumpkins in North Texas about an hour outside Lubbock, has seen her energy bills go up too, alongside the cost of just about everything else, from supplies and chemicals to seed and fuel. She lost about 20% of her yield. She added that pumpkins can be hard to predict earlier in the growing season because the vines might look lush and green, but not bloom and produce fruit if they aren’t getting enough water.

US & world news

Joe Biden Oct 13, 2023

Pres. Biden announces $7B for clean hydrogen hubs across the country

OLYMPICS Oct 13, 2023

2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics sites continue to feel the impact of climate change concerns

news Oct 4, 2023

Pope Francis warns planet ‘is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point' as he urges climate action

Steven Ness, who grows pinto beans and pumpkins in central New Mexico, said the rising cost of irrigation as groundwater dwindles is an issue across the board for farmers in the region. That can inform what farmers choose to grow, because if corn and pumpkins use about the same amount of water, they might get more money per acre for selling pumpkins, a more lucrative crop.

But at the end of the day, “our real problem is groundwater, … the lack of deep moisture and the lack of water in the aquifer,” Ness said. That’s a problem that likely won’t go away because aquifers can take hundreds or thousands of years to refill after overuse, and climate change is reducing the very rain and snow needed to recharge them in the arid West.

Jill Graves, who added a pumpkin patch to her blueberry farm about an hour east of Dallas about three years ago, said they had to give up on growing their own pumpkins this year and source them from a wholesaler. Graves said the pumpkins she bought rotted more quickly than in past years, but it was better than what little they grew themselves.

Still, she thinks they’ll try again next year. “They worked perfect the first two years,” she said. “We didn’t have any problems.”

Mazzotti, for his part, says that with not enough water, you “might as well not farm” — but even so, he sees labor as the bigger issue. Farmers in Colorado have been dealing with water cutbacks for a long time, and they’re used to it. However, pumpkins can’t be harvested by machine like corn can, so they require lots of people to determine they’re ripe, cut them off the vines and prepare them for shipping.

He hires guest workers through the H-2A program, but Colorado recently instituted a law ensuring farmworkers to be paid overtime — something most states don’t require. That makes it tough to maintain competitive prices with places where laborers are paid less, and the increasing costs of irrigation and supplies stack onto that, creating what Mazzotti calls a “no-win situation.”

He’ll keep farming pumpkins for a bit longer, but “there’s no future after me,” he said. “My boys won’t farm.”

And it conflicts with oft-repeated Republican talking points of a Biden “war on American energy.”

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration reported that American oil production in the first week of October hit 13.2 million barrels per day, passing the previous record set in 2020 by 100,000 barrels. Weekly domestic oil production has doubled from the first week in October 2012 to now.

With the United Nations and scientists saying the world needs to cut carbon emissions — from burning coal, oil and natural gas — by 43% by 2030 and down to zero or close to it by 2050, several developed countries across the world are dangerously producing more, not less, fossil fuels, experts say.

“Continuing to expand oil and gas production is hypocritical and not at all consistent with the global call to phase down fossil fuels,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics which helps track global actions and policies to curb climate change. “The U.S. support for expanded fossil fuel production will undermine global efforts to reduce emissions.”

But the U.S. isn’t alone in this. Hare pointed to Norway, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada, adding France because of support of the company TotalEnergies. And the designated president of upcoming climate negotiations heads the United Arab Emirates national oil company, which has announced plans to boost drilling.

“From Exxon-Mobil to Shell, Guyana to Cote d’Ivorie, those with fossil resources seek to boost production and delay action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” said MIT professor John Sterman, a senior advisor at Climate Interactive, an organization that models future warming based on countries’ proposed actions. He said that path will lead to “catastrophe.”

Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who heads the emissions-tallying group Global Carbon Project, said no country or company wants to cut oil and gas production if someone else is going to sell oil anyway.

“We’re in a fossil trap,” Jackson said.

White House officials have long considered increased oil production inside the United States as a bridge to help soften the transition to renewable energy sources. Officials have closely tracked domestic production, noting that output has risen by an average of more than one million barrels a day over the past year. It’s evidence that many of the oil price increases reflect the policy choices of other countries including Saudi Arabia on what is a globally priced commodity.

The Biden administration has committed several hundred billions of dollars in government incentives for moving away from fossil fuels to limit the damage from climate change.

Just because the United States is increasing oil production, that doesn’t mean it won’t phase down emissions, said Samantha Gross, director of energy security and climate at the centrist Brookings Institution. She said U.S. oil is less carbon-intensive than other oil, an argument the UAE’s oil company also makes.

“So long as oil is demanded,” Gross said. “Demand drives production — we need to change the whole system to reduce oil demand.”

“Replacing oil in power production is a lot easier than replacing oil in transportation,” Gross said in an email. “We need changes in the transportation sector, along with policies to reduce demand for transport — like teleworking, walkable neighborhoods and good public transportation.”

The Energy Department’s EIA in a separate document predicted global carbon emissions will rise, not plummet, through 2050.

“If the EIA is right, we’ll add another trillion tons of CO2 pollution to the atmosphere by 2050 and millions of people will die,” Stanford’s Jackson said. “There’s no other way to see it.”

Republican senators and congressmen, including the House Energy and Commerce Committee, this year have repeated the phrase “Biden’s War on American Energy.”

Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, pushed back on that last month.

“There are thousands of available permits — places where oil companies could drill,” Bernstein said. “They’ve been highly profitable. They’ve been highly productive. So, I don’t think that’s the problem.”

Stanford’s Jackson said the Biden administration has swung back and forth on energy exploration, approving the Willow oil project in Alaska but cancelling drilling permits in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“It’s clear that the Biden administration is not running a war against fossil fuels, or if it is, it’s a very unsuccessful war,” Climate Analytics Hare said.

Associated Press reporter Joshua Boak contributed from Washington, D.C.

The Mamiraua Institute, a research group of Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, said two more dead dolphins were found Monday in the region around Tefe Lake, which is key for mammals and fish in the area. Video provided by the institute showed vultures picking at the dolphin carcasses beached on the lakeside. Thousands of fish have also died, local media reported.

Experts believe high water temperatures are the most likely cause of the deaths in the lakes in the region. Temperatures since last week have exceeded 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Tefe Lake region.

The Brazilian government’s Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, which manages conservation areas, said last week it had sent teams of veterinarians and aquatic mammal experts to investigate the deaths.

There had been some 1,400 river dolphins in Tefe Lake, said Miriam Marmontel, a researcher from the Mamiraua Institute.

“In one week we have already lost around 120 animals between the two of them, which could represent 5% to 10% of the population,” said Marmontel.

Workers have recovered carcasses of dolphins since last week in a region where dry rivers have impacted impoverished riverside communities and stuck their boats in the sand. Amazonas Gov. Wilson Lima on Friday declared a state of emergency due to the drought.

Nicson Marreira, mayor of Tefe, a city of 60,000 residents. said his government was unable to deliver food directly to some isolated communities because the rivers are dry.

Ayan Fleischmann, the Geospatial coordinator at the Mamirauá Institute, said the drought has had a major impact on the riverside communities in the Amazon region.

“Many communities are becoming isolated, without access to good quality water, without access to the river, which is their main means of transportation,” he said.

Fleischmann said water temperatures rose from 32 C (89 F) on Friday to almost 38 C (100 F) on Sunday.

He said they are still determining the cause of the dolphin deaths but that the high temperature remains the main candidate.

Sample a good wine and you might get notes of oak or red fruit. But sip on wine made from grapes that were penetrated by smoke, and it could taste like someone dumped the contents of an ashtray into your glass.

Wine experts from three West Coast universities are working together to meet the threat, including developing spray coatings to protect grapes, pinpointing the elusive compounds that create that nasty ashy taste, and deploying smoke sensors to vineyards to better understand smoke behavior.

The U.S. government is funding their research with millions of dollars. Wineries are also taking steps to protect their product and brand.

The risk to America’s premier wine-making regions — where wildfires caused billions of dollars in losses in 2020 — is growing, with climate change deepening drought and overgrown forests becoming tinderboxes. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, grapes are the highest-value crop in the United States, with 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of grape-bearing land, 96% of it on the West Coast.

Winemakers around the world are already adapting to climate change, including by moving their vineyards to cooler zones and planting varieties that do better in drought and heat. Wildfires pose an additional and more immediate risk being tackled by scientists from Oregon State University, Washington State University and the University of California, Davis.

“What’s at stake is the ability to continue to make wine in areas where smoke exposures might be more common,” said Tom Collins, a wine scientist at Washington State University.

In the news

climate change Jul 20, 2023

Climate change is hitting menus, from disappearing salmon to dying chickens and smoky wines

climate change Jul 25, 2023

What 100-year-old menus reveal about global warming and how it's changing what we eat

Researcher Cole Cerrato recently stood in Oregon State University’s vineyard, nestled below forested hills near the village of Alpine, as he turned on a fan to push smoke from a Weber grill through a dryer vent hose. The smoke emerged onto a row of grapes enclosed in a quasi greenhouse made of taped-together plastic sheets.

Previously, grapes exposed to smoke in the MacGyvered setup were made into wine by Elizabeth Tomasino, an associate professor leading Oregon State’s efforts, and her researchers.

They found sulfur-containing compounds, thiophenols, in the smoke-impacted wine and determined they contributed to the ashy flavor, along with “volatile phenols,” which Australian researchers identified as factors more than a decade ago. Bush fires have long impacted Australia’s wine industry. Up in Washington state, Collins confirmed that the sulfur compounds were found in the wine that had been exposed to smoke in the Oregon vineyard but weren’t in samples that had no smoke exposure.

The scientists want to find out how thiophenols, which aren’t detectable in wildfire smoke, appear in smoke-impacted wine, and learn how to eliminate them.

“There’s still a lot of very interesting chemistry and very interesting research, to start looking more into these new compounds,” Cerrato said. “We just don’t have the answers yet.”

Wine made with tainted grapes can be so awful that it can’t be marketed. If it does go on shelves, a winemaker’s reputation could be ruined — a risk that few are willing to take.

When record wildfires in 2020 blanketed the West Coast in brown smoke, some California wineries refused to accept grapes unless they had been tested. But most growers couldn’t find places to analyze their grapes because the laboratories were overwhelmed.

The damage to the industry in California alone was $3.7 billion, according to an analysis that Jon Moramarco of the consulting firm bw166 conducted for industry groups. The losses stemmed mostly from wineries having to forego future wine sales.

“But really what drove it was, you know, a lot of the impact was in Napa (Valley), an area of some of the highest priced grapes, highest priced wines in the U.S.,” Moramarco said, adding that if a ton of cabernet sauvignon grapes is ruined, “you lose probably 720 bottles of wine. If it is worth $100 a bottle, it adds up very quickly.”

Between 165,000 to 325,000 tons of California wine grapes were left to wither on the vine in 2020 due to actual or perceived wildfire smoke exposure, said Natalie Collins, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers.

She said she hasn’t heard of any growers quitting the business due to wildfire impacts, but that: “Many of our members are having an extremely difficult time securing insurance due to the fire risk in their region, and if they are able to secure insurance, the rate is astronomically high.”

Also in the news

politics Sep 27, 2023

Should President Biden declare climate change a national emergency?

climate change Sep 25, 2023

More Americans see climate change as a culprit, new poll shows

news Sep 22, 2023

Washington D.C. is the No. 1 place in the U.S. for taking climate change seriously

Some winemakers are trying techniques to reduce smoke impact, such as passing the wine through a membrane or treating it with carbon, but that can also rob a wine of its appealing nuances. Blending impacted grapes with other grapes is another option. Limiting skin contact by making rosé wine instead of red can lower the concentration of smoke flavor compounds.

Collins, over at Washington State University, has been experimenting with spraying fine-powdered kaolin or bentonite, which are clays, mixed with water onto wine grapes so it absorbs materials that are in smoke. The substance would then be washed off before harvest. Oregon State University is developing a spray-on coating.

Meanwhile, dozens of smoke sensors have been installed in vineyards in the three states, financed in part by a $7.65 million USDA grant.

“The instruments will be used to measure for smoke marker compounds,” said Anita Oberholster, leader of UC Davis’ efforts. She said such measurements are essential to develop mitigation strategies and determine smoke exposure risk.

Greg Jones, who runs his family’s Abacela winery in southern Oregon’s Umpqua Valley and is a director of the Oregon Wine Board, applauds the scientists’ efforts.

“This research has really gone a long way to help us try to find: are there ways in which we can take fruit from the vineyard and quickly find out if it has the potential compounds that would lead to smoke-impacted wine,” Jones said.

Collins predicts success.

“I think it’s increasingly clear that we’re not likely to find a magic bullet,” he said. “But we will find a set of strategies.”

Researchers warn the shift can have dire consequences for animals like penguins who breed and rear their young on the sea ice, while also hastening global warming by reducing how much sunlight is reflected by white ice back into space.

Antarctic sea ice extent peaked this year on Sept. 10, when it covered 16.96 million square kilometers (6.55 million square miles), the lowest winter maximum since satellite records began in 1979, the NSIDC said. That’s about 1 million square kilometers less ice than the previous winter record set in 1986.

NSIDC in a statement said that the figures were preliminary with a full analysis to be released next month.

Seasons are reversed in the Southern hemisphere with sea ice generally peaking around September near the end of winter and later melting to its lowest point in February or March as summer draws to a close.

The summer Antarctic sea ice extent also hit a record low in February, breaking the previous mark set in 2022.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

“It’s always been really hot here, but nothing like this past summer,” said Maxwell, 50, who last week opened her windows for the first time since March and walked her dog outdoors for the first time since May. “I was seriously scared. Like, what if this doesn’t end and this is how it’s going to be?”

Maxwell blames climate change, and she’s not alone.

New polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicates that extreme weather, including a summer that brought dangerous heat for much of the United States, is bolstering Americans’ belief that they’ve personally felt the impact of climate change.

About 9 in 10 Americans (87%) say they have experienced at least one extreme weather event in the past five years — including drought, extreme heat, severe storms, wildfires or flooding — up from 79% who said that just a few months ago in April. And about three-quarters of those believe climate change is at least partly to blame.

In total, 64% of U.S. adults say both that they’ve recently experienced extreme weather and that they believe it was caused at least partially by climate change, up from 54% in April. And about 65% say climate change will have or already has had a major impact in their lifetime.

This summer’s heat might be a big factor: About three-quarters of Americans (74%) say they’ve been affected by extremely hot weather or extreme heat waves in the last five years, up from 55% in April — and of those, 92% said they’ve had that experience just in the past few months.

This summer was the hottest ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere, according to the World Meteorological Organization and the European climate service Copernicus.

Millions of Americans also were affected by the worst wildfire season in Canada’s history, which sent choking smoke into parts of the U.S. About six in 10 U.S. adults say haze or smoke from the wildfires affected them “a lot” (15%) or “a little” (48%) in recent months.

And around the world, extreme heat, storms, flooding and wildfires have affected tens of millions of people this year, with scientists saying climate change has made such events more likely and intense.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said researchers there have conducted twice-yearly surveys of Americans for 15 years, but it wasn’t until 2016 that they saw an indication that people’s experience with extreme weather was affecting their views about climate change. “And the signal has been getting stronger and stronger year by year as these conditions continue to get worse and worse,” he said.

But he also believes that media coverage of climate change has changed dramatically, and that the public is interpreting information in a more scientific way than they did even a decade ago.

Seventy-six-year-old Bruce Alvord, of Hagerstown, Maryland, said it wasn’t unusual to experience days with a 112-degree heat index this summer, and health conditions mean that “heat really bothers me because it’s restricted what I can do.”

Even so, the retired government worker doesn’t believe in human-caused climate change; he recalls stories from his grandparents about bad weather, and thinks the climate is fluctuating on its own.

“The way the way I look at it is I think it’s a bunch of powerful politicians and lobbying groups that … have their agenda,” said Alvord, a Republican who sees no need to change his own habits or for the government to do more. “I drive a Chrysler 300 (with a V8 engine). I use premium gas. I get 15 miles a gallon. I don’t give a damn.”

The AP-NORC poll found significant differences between Democrats and Republicans. Among those who have experienced extreme weather, Democrats (93%) are more certain that climate change was a cause, compared to just half of Republicans (48%).

About 9 in 10 Democrats say climate change is happening, with nearly all of the remaining Democrats being unsure about whether climate change is happening (5%), rather than outright rejecting it. Republicans are split: 49% say climate change is happening, but 26% say it’s not and an additional 25% are unsure. Overall, 74% of Americans say climate change is happening, largely unchanged from April.

Republican Ronald Livingston, 70, of Clute, Texas, said he’s not sure if human activity is causing climate change, “but I know something is going on because we have been sweating our butts off.”

The retired history teacher said it didn’t rain for several months this year, killing his grass and drying up a slough on his property where he sometimes fishes. It was so hot — with 45 days of 100 degrees or more — that he could barely go outside, and he struggled to grow a garden. He also believes that hurricanes are getting stronger.

And after this summer, he’s keeping an open mind about climate change.

“It worries me to the extent that I don’t think we can go two or three more years of this,” Livingston said.

Jeremiah Bohr, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who studies climate change communication, said scientific evidence “is not going to change the minds that haven’t already been changed.” But people might be swayed if people or institutions they already trust become convinced and spread the word, Bohr said.

After a brutal summer, Maxwell, the Phoenix resident, said she hopes more Americans will accept that climate change is happening and that people are making it worse, and support measures to slow it.

“It seems very, very obvious to me, with all of the extreme weather and the hurricanes and flooding,” said Maxwell. “I just can’t imagine that people wouldn’t.”

___

The poll of 1,146 adults was conducted Sept. 7-11, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

For 39 million properties across the country — one in four in the United States — the insurance costs do not yet reflect climate risk. They face the same rising premiums or lost coverage as a result of flooding, hurricane winds and wildfires.

“The 9th National Risk Assessment: The Climate Insurance Bubble” was released by the Brooklyn-based First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research and technology group that aims to define the country’s growing climate risk. 

Among the additional 39 million properties, according to First Street Foundation, 4.4 million are in zip codes where an average of at least 10 structures are expected to burn down every year, 23.9 million are in areas with a high likelihood of destruction from 3-second wind gusts and 12 million are at significant risk of flooding even beyond the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood zones.

“Whether it be wildfire, wind, or flood, they have some level of significant risk from those climate hazards that makes them likely candidates for having either insurance premium increases in the future or potential pullouts of private insurance companies in their communities,” Jeremy Porter, the foundation’s head of climate implications research, told NBC.

The report notes the average cost of wildfires has increased from $1 billion a day through 2016 to more than $17 billion in 2021. The number of buildings destroyed by wildfires is growing faster than the additional area burned, meaning that fires are  disproportionately breaking out where people and structures are located.

Since 2020, California has had eight disasters that caused between $20 billion and $50 billion in damages, according to NBC. For Florida, 16 severe storms or hurricanes resulted in between $100 billion and $200 billion in damages. 

So far in 2023, there have been 23 confirmed weather or climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion each, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.

The country is already facing an insurance crisis. In all, 6.76 million properties are already having to rely on a state-run insurer of last resort because no other insurer will provide coverage.

“Private insurers aim to price their risks accurately, so we should pay close attention to the choices that they make.” Benjamin Keys, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, said in U.S Senate testimony in March.

Louisiana’s Citizen’s Insurance program began the year with an average 63% increase on all premiums. Some of the largest were in the New Orleans area. 

“It’s our poor citizens who are affected first,” said Matthew Jewell, the president of St. Charles Parish, east of New Orleans. “Maybe you inherited your house from your mother and father and you just have enough money to pay the bills and now these rates go up. What do you have to do? You either have to sell your home, relocate, foreclose.”

In California, between 2015 and 2021, the state-run FAIR insurance plan has increased by 90% to nearly 270,000 policies, according to First Street Foundation’s report. The average home insurance premium each year is now $1,300, up 16% since 2019, NBC reported.

For Florida, the state-run insurer Citizens Insurance Agency is now the largest insurer in the state, jumping from fewer than 500,000 policies to about 1.3 million. Average premiums have risen to $3,300 from $2,000 a year.

The insurance industry also blames Florida’s rising costs to a legal system that left insurers liable for abuse. Insurance Information Institute estimated that between 2012 and 2021, Florida property insurers paid $51 billion to settle litigated claims, with 71% percent going toward legal fees and public adjusters, NBC reported.

“The over reliance of property owners on state run insurers of last resort is a big flashing sign that standard practices in the insurance market cannot keep up with our current climate reality,” Matthew Eby, the founder of First Street Foundation, said in a statement. “We are rapidly moving to a place where the cost of insurance will make the most at-risk homes effectively uninsurable.” 

A report from First Street Foundation released Wednesday says states such as California, Florida and Louisiana, which are prone to wildfires and damaging storms and flooding, are likely to see the most dramatic increases in premiums. But the fire that destroyed the Hawaiian community of Lahaina on Aug. 8, as well as the historic flooding that happened in Vermont and Maine in July, are examples of events that could drive up insurance costs for homeowners in other states.

“If you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention,” said California Sen. Bill Dodd, whose district includes the wine-country counties devastated by the LNU Complex fires in 2020.

First Street estimates, factoring climate models into the financial risk of properties in its report, that roughly 39 million properties — roughly a quarter of all homes in the country — are being underpriced for the climate risk to insure those properties.

“Some places may be impacted very minimally, but other places could see massive increases in insurance premiums in the coming years,” said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street and a co-author of the report.

insurance claims May 30, 2023

How to review your insurance claims record

Business Oct 6, 2022

The 10 States Where Home Insurance Rates Are Rising the Fastest—and None Are New York Or California

First Street, a New York-based non-profit, has been a to-go researcher on the financial implications of climate change for years. Their research is used by Fannie Mae, Bank of America, the Treasury Department and others for understanding the potential risks to properties.

There are several signs that climate change is taking its toll on the insurance industry. The U.S. homeowner’s insurance industry has had three straight years of underwriting losses, according to credit rating agency AM Best. Losses for the first half of 2023 totaled $24.5 billion, which is roughly what was lost in all of 2022.

“(Climate change) is a problem that is already here,” said Todd Bevington, a managing director at the insurance broker VIU by HUB. In his 30 years of doing insurance, he said “I’ve never seen the market turn this quickly or significantly.”

Skyrocketing insurance costs are a serious concern for the small town of Paradise in Northern California, which was nearly wiped out by a deadly 2018 wildfire that killed 85 people.

Jen Goodlin moved back to her hometown from Colorado with her family in 2020, determined to help in the town’s recovery. They began building on a lot they had purchased, and moved into their new house in October 2022.

In July, she was shocked to receive notice that the family’s homeowner insurance premium would be $11,245 — up from $2,500.

“Our insurance agent said, ‘Just be thankful we didn’t drop you,’ and I said, ‘You did, you just dropped me,’” she said.

Goodlin, a former dental hygienist who is now executive director of the nonprofit Rebuild Paradise Foundation, said hundreds, if not thousands, of people are being hit by these rate hikes in a town being built with updated fire-safe building codes and little if any fuel to burn. She knows a homeowner whose premium is now $21,000 for a newly constructed home.

Record numbers of Americans are now insured through state-affiliated “insurers of last resort” like California’s FAIR Plan, or Louisiana or Florida’s Citizens property insurance companies. These programs were designed to insure properties where private insurance companies have refused to insure or the price for private insurance is too expensive.

Goodlin will soon be one of those homeowners. She said she’s in the process of transitioning to the FAIR Plan.

The number of homeowners covered by California’s FAIR Plan was 268,321 in 2021, almost double what it was five years before. That figure has almost certainly increased in the last two years, experts say. In Florida, Citizens Property Insurance Corp. now has 1.4 million homeowners’ policies in effect, nearly triple in five years.

In some cases, policymakers have bound the hands of insurance companies, leading to an underpricing of risk. For example, the most a California insurance company can raise a homeowner’s premium by law each year is 7% without involving a public hearing, a process that most insurers want to avoid. Those policies, along with the increased chance of catastrophic events, have led insurers like State Farm and Allstate to either pull out of the California market or pause underwriting new policies.

As a result, California’s FAIR plan, which was created 50 years ago as a temporary stopgap measure for those impacted by riots and brush fires in the 1960s, is now the only option available to homeowners in some ZIP codes.

“We’ve got to find a way to get insurers to get back into the market, to take people out of the FAIR Plan so that we can reduce the risk there,” Dodd said.

Dodd was one of the key lawmakers trying to negotiate a bill in the final weeks of the state’s legislative session to address the issue. But all sides failed to reach an agreement.

There are likely to be more insurance market failures in the future, Porter said, as more insurers simply refuse to underwrite policies in certain communities or go property by property. Comparisons to the National Flood Insurance Program, which is now $22.5 billion in debt, have become common.

Even the backstop programs are buckling under tremendous losses. Louisiana’s insurer of last resort, Citizens, raised its rates for 2023 by 63.1% statewide to cover higher costs.

This summer, reinsurance companies such as Swiss Re and Munich Re raised their property catastrophe reinsurance premiums in the U.S. by an average of 20% to 50%. Reinsurance brokerage firm Guy Carpenter & Co. said it was the highest increase for reinsurance rates since the year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

“It’s a global problem. Virtually every geography is seeing a repricing of risk,” said Lara Mowery, global head of distribution at Guy Carpenter, in an interview.

Reinsurers step in to help cover losses resulting from a catastrophe, so regular insurance companies do not take on all of the risk. In one example of a typical reinsurance contract, a $20 million contract could require the insurance company to cover the first $10 million in claims and the reinsurer to pick up the other $10 million.

Mowery added that many reinsurance firms now have resources dedicated to studying the impact of climate change on how to price catastrophes.

There have been other factors impacting the insurance industry as well. Inflation has made the cost of repairing homes pricier and home prices remain near record levels. A labor shortage means getting damaged homes repaired may take longer, requiring insurers to pay for temporary housing for policyholders longer.

In short, an industry whose business model is calculating risk based on what happened in the past is increasingly unable to do so.

“You can no longer rely on 100 years of wildfire data to price risk when the unprecedented has happened,” Mowery said.

While the intensity of wildfires, floods and storms can vary from year to year, the trend lines in these models point to more wildfire activity as well as more intense storms, all likely to result in more catastrophic amounts of damage that insurance companies will have to cover.

Factoring in climate models and acres estimated to be burned, First Street estimates that by 2050, roughly 34,000 homes will burn down because of wildfires every year. That’s roughly the equivalent of losing the city of Asheville, N.C., every year.

Going forward, it may become more necessary for potential homebuyers to look at the cost of insuring the property they are looking at before locking in a mortgage rate, due to the potential for significant rate hikes in the future.

“It used to be homeowner’s insurance was an afterthought when you are looking at buying a property. Now you’ll really need to do your research into what risks there may be in that property in the coming years,” Bevington said.

____

Reporter Adam Beam contributed to this report from Sacramento, Calif., and reporter Janie Har contributed from San Francisco.

But protesters say it’s not going to be enough. And they aimed their wrath directly at U.S. President Joe Biden, urging him to stop approving new oil and gas projects, phase out current ones and declare a climate emergency with larger executive powers.

“We hold the power of the people, the power you need to win this election,” said 17-year-old Emma Buretta of Brooklyn of the youth protest group Fridays for Future. “If you want to win in 2024, if you do not want the blood of my generation to be on your hands, end fossil fuels.”

The March to End Fossil Fuels featured such politicians as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and actors Susan Sarandon, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, Kyra Sedgewick and Kevin Bacon. But the real action on Broadway was where protesters crowded the street, pleading for a better but not-so-hot future. It was the opening salvo to New York’s Climate Week, where world leaders in business, politics and the arts gather to try to save the planet, highlighted by a new special United Nations summit Wednesday.

Many of the leaders of countries that cause the most heat-trapping carbon pollution will not be in attendance. And they won’t speak at the summit organized by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a way that only countries that promise new concrete action are invited to speak.

California Sep 16, 2023

California lawsuit says oil giants deceived public on climate, seeks funds for storm damage

Joe Biden Sep 16, 2023

Biden's goals for labor and climate collide in United Auto Workers strike

Organizers estimated 75,000 people marched Sunday.

“We have people all across the world in the streets, showing up, demanding a cessation of what is killing us,” Ocasio-Cortez told a cheering crowd. “We have to send a message that some of us are going to be living on, on this planet 30, 40, 50 years from now. And we will not take no for an answer.”

This protest was far more focused on fossil fuels and the industry than previous marches. Sunday’s rally attracted a large chunk, 15%, of first-time protesters and was overwhelmingly female, said American University sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies environmental movements and was surveying march participants.

Of the people Fisher talked to, 86% had experienced extreme heat recently, 21% floods and 18% severe drought, she said. They mostly reported feeling sad and angry. Earth has just gone through the hottest summer on record.

Among the marchers was 8-year-old Athena Wilson from Boca Raton, Florida. She and her mother Maleah, flew from Florida for Sunday’s protest.

“Because we care about our planet,” Athena said. “I really want the Earth to feel better.”

People in the South, especially where the oil industry is, and the global south, “have not felt heard,” said 23-year-old Alexandria Gordon, originally from Houston. “It is frustrating.”

Protest organizers emphasized how let down they felt that Biden, who many of them supported in 2020, has overseen increased drilling for oil and fossil fuels.

“President Biden, our lives depend on your actions today,” said Louisiana environmental activist Sharon Lavigne. “If you don’t stop fossil fuels our blood is on your hands.”

Nearly one-third of the world’s planned drilling for oil and gas between now and 2050 is by U.S. interests, environmental activists calculate. Over the past 100 years, the United States has put more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than any other country, though China now emits more carbon pollution on an annual basis.

“You need to phase out fossil fuels to survive our planet,” said Jean Su, a march organizer and energy justice director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Marchers and speakers spoke of increasing urgency and fear of the future. The actress known as V, formerly Eve Ensler, premiered the anthem “Panic” from her new climate change oriented musical scheduled for next year. The chorus goes: “We want you to panic. We want you to act. You stole our future and we want it back.”

Signs included “Even Santa Knows Coal is Bad” and “Fossil fuels are killing us” and “I want a fossil free future” and “keep it in the ground.”

That’s because leaders don’t want to acknowledge “the elephant in the room,” said Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. “The elephant is that fossil fuels are responsible for the crisis. We can’t eat coal. We can’t drink oil, and we can’t have any new fossil fuel investments.”

But oil and gas industry officials said their products are vital to the economy.

“We share the urgency of confronting climate change together without delay; yet doing so by eliminating America’s energy options is the wrong approach and would leave American families and businesses beholden to unstable foreign regions for higher cost and far less reliable energy,” said American Petroleum Institute Senior Vice President Megan Bloomgren.

Activists weren’t having any of that.

“The fossil fuel industry is choosing to rule and conquer and take and take and take without limit,” Rabbi Stephanie Kolin of Congregation Beth Elohim of Brooklyn said. “And so waters are rising and the skies are turning orange (from wildfire smoke) and the heat is taking lives. But you Mr. President can choose the other path, to be a protector of this Earth.”

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

As a record-smashing and deadly hot summer draws to a close, the United Nations and the city that hosts it are focusing on climate change and the burning of coal, oil and natural gas that causes it. It features a special U.N. summit and a week of protests and talk-heavy events involving leaders from business, health, politics and the arts. Even a royal prince — William — is getting in on the action.

The annual Climate Week, which coincides with the U.N. General Assembly, kicks off Sunday with tens of thousands of people expected in the “March to End Fossil Fuels” Manhattan rally, one of hundreds of worldwide protests.

This week “is the start of an incredible pressure cooker that we are all part of,” said Jean Su, a march organizer and energy justice director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It is coming from the top down, from that chief of the United Nations and now it is coming from bottom up in over 400 distributed actions across the world.”

Much of the heat is coming from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who is convening a new Climate Ambition Summit on Wednesday that has a special twist: Only leaders from nations that bring new and meaningful action will be allowed to speak. And the U.N. isn’t saying yet who will get that chance.

It won’t be Biden, who is speaking Tuesday at the U.N., the White House said. Nor will it be the leaders of China, the United Kingdom, Russia or France – all major players in the development and use of fossil fuels — who won’t even be in New York.

Guterres has repeatedly aimed his criticism at fossil fuels, calling them “incompatible with human survival.” He and scientific reports out of the United Nations have emphasized that the only way to curb warming and meet international goals is to “phase out” fossil fuels.

Phase-out is a term that world leaders in past climate negotiations and meetings of large economic powers have refused to back, instead opting for watered-down phrases such as “phase down” of unabated coal, allowing fossil use if its emissions are somehow captured and stored. The president of the upcoming international climate negotiations in Dubai is an oil executive from the United Arab Emirates and will be speaking at Wednesday’s summit, though his dual role has upset activists and some scientists.

“This really is an unprecedented soft power moment where the U.N. chief is throwing fossil fuels into the limelight and forcing heads of states to respond,” Su said. “Whether it’s yes or no, he’s at least forcing them to respond as to will you commit to no new fossil fuel development in line with climate science?”

But U.N. chiefs have little real power, said Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, a climate scientist.

“They can talk. They can persuade. They can from time-to-time constructively criticize and that’s all the tools that he’s got,” Hare said. “The U.N. secretary-general has moral authority and he’s using that.”

Guterres “can shame leaders who show up with pitiful offers in terms of climate action,” said Power Shift Africa Director Mohamed Adow, a longtime climate diplomacy observer. “We’ve got to a point where we can no longer be able to afford the velvet glove diplomacy.”

Guterres will ask nations to accelerate their efforts to rid themselves of carbon-based energy, with the richest nations that can afford it going first and faster, and providing financial aid to the poorer nations that can’t afford it, said Selwin Hart, Guterres’ special adviser for climate action.

“We know the use of fossil fuels is the main cause of the climate crisis, coal, oil and gas,” Hart said Friday. “We need to accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels. But it must be just, fair and equitable.”

But the same 20 richest economies who promise to slice carbon emissions “are now issuing new oil and gas licensing at a time when the (International Energy Agency and the science-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has clearly stated that this is incompatible with the 1.5 degree (Celsius, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) goal of the Paris Agreement,” Hart said.

Yet speeding to net zero emissions of carbon requires rapid and huge reshaping of the energy landscape that “could inflict serious harm on the economy,” American Energy Alliance President Thomas Pyle said last month.

Environmental activists calculate that five rich northern countries – the United States, Canada, Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom – that talk about cutting back emissions are responsible for more than half of the planned expansion of oil and gas drilling through 2050. The United States accounts for more than one-third.

So activists and protesters at Sunday’s march say they are aiming their frustration – and pressure – at Biden and America.

However, Biden has repeatedly trumpeted last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $375 billion to fight climate change, mostly on solar panels, energy efficiency, air pollution controls and emission-reducing equipment for coal- and gas-fueled power plants.

“They want to be seen as the good guys, but the fact is they have very little to back it up,” said Brandon Wu, policy director at ActionAid USA. He pointed to the new drilling plans and said the United States has failed to deliver on its promised climate-based financial aid to poor countries and has not increased its money pledges like other nations.

“How much carnage does the planet have to suffer for global leaders to act?” Su said. “We want President Biden and other major oil gas producers to phase out fossil fuels.”

Lee could also be a dreadful harbinger of what is to come as ocean temperatures climb, spawning fast-growing major hurricanes that could threaten communities farther north and farther inland, experts say.

“Hurricanes are getting stronger at higher latitudes,” said Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program and a past president of the American Meteorological Society. “If that trend continues, that brings into play places like Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.”

As the oceans warm, they act as jet fuel for hurricanes.

“That extra heat comes back to manifest itself at some point, and one of the ways it does is through stronger hurricanes,” Shepherd said.

During the overnight hours on Thursday, Lee shattered the standard for what meteorologists call rapid intensification — when a hurricane’s sustained winds increase by 35 mph (56 kph) in 24 hours.

“This one increased by 80 mph (129 kph),” Shepherd said. “I can’t emphasize this enough — we used to have this metric of 35 mph, and here’s a storm that did twice that amount and we’re seeing that happen more frequently,” said Shepherd, who describes what happened with Lee as “hyper-intensification.”

With super-warm ocean temperatures and low wind shear, “all the stars were aligned for it to intensify rapidly,” said Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Category 5 status — when sustained winds are at least 157 mph or 253 kph — is quite rare. Only about 4.5% of named storms in the Atlantic Ocean have grown to a Category 5 in the past decade, said Brian McNoldy, a scientist and hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

More intense major hurricanes are also threatening communities farther inland, since the monster storms can grow so powerful that they remain dangerous hurricanes for longer distances over land.

“I think that’s a story that’s kind of under-told,” Shepherd said. “As these storms are strong coming to landfall, in some cases they’re moving fast enough that they’re still hurricanes well inland.”

Hurricane Idalia was the latest example, when it came ashore in the Florida Panhandle last month and remained a hurricane as it entered south Georgia.

It then slammed into the Georgia city of Valdosta more than 70 miles (116 kilometers) away from where it made landfall. At least 80 homes in the Valdosta area were destroyed and hundreds of others damaged.

In 2018, Hurricane Michael carved a similar path of inland destruction, tearing up cotton crops and pecan trees and leaving widespread damage across south Georgia.

While it’s too early to know how close Lee might come to the U.S. East Coast, New Englanders are keeping a wary eye on the storm as some models have projected it tracking perilously close to New England – particularly Maine. It has been 69 years since a major hurricane made landfall in New England, McNoldy said.

On Sept. 8, 1869, a Category 3 hurricane known as “the September Gale of 1869” struck Rhode Island, the National Weather Service in Boston noted on Friday. The storm cut all telegraph lines between Boston and New York and capsized a schooner, killing 11 crew members.

“If Lee actually does make landfall in New England, there’s no doubt the storm surge would be a huge threat,” he said.

As Lee roils the ocean as it creeps closer to the eastern coast of the U.S., it could bring high seas and rip currents all up and down the eastern seaboard.

“What we are going to see from Lee — and we’re very confident — is it’s going to be a major wave producer,” Mike Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a Friday briefing.

“This morning the highest significant wave height we were analyzing in Lee was between 45 and 50 feet, and the highest waves could even be double that,” Brennan said. “So we could be looking at 80, 90-foot waves associated with Lee.”

Emanuel was tracking the storm this weekend in New Harbor, Maine. Since it has been so long for any type of hurricane warning in New England, some residents might be complacent and think that hurricanes are a Florida or Louisiana problem, he said.

“One worries whether they’re going to take it seriously when it comes to that,” he said.

Forecasters will be watching any possible interaction in coming days between Lee and newly formed Tropical Storm Margot, which is expected to become a hurricane next week.

It’s possible that Margot could alter Lee’s path, though it’s too soon to know whether that will happen, experts say.

Margot is far to the east of Lee, but as Margot strengthens it could affect the weather systems in the region that steer hurricanes.

A phenomenon known as the Fujiwhara Effect can occur when two tropical storms rotate around each other, but that doesn’t mean they will in this case, Emanuel said. If it does happen, though, the two storms could push each other around in the Atlantic, which could alter their paths.

The world just experienced its hottest three months on record by a substantial margin, according to the UN weather agency, prompting the UN chief to call for world leaders to take urgent climate action.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization and European climate service Copernicus on Wednesday announced that the June to August season of 2023 was the warmest such period in records that began in 1940.

The average temperature for those three months was 16.77 degrees Celsius (62.19 degrees Fahrenheit), which was 0.66 degrees Celsius above average for the period.

The month of August was found to be the hottest on record by a large margin and the second hottest month after July 2023.

The global average surface air temperature of 16.82 degrees Celsius for August was 0.71 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1991 to 2020 average for the month, and 0.31 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous hottest August, logged in 2016.

It comes after a series of extreme weather events across the Northern Hemisphere, with repeated heatwaves fueling devastating wildfires.

“Climate breakdown has begun,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement.

“Scientists have long warned what our fossil fuel addiction will unleash,” Guterres said, adding that “surging temperatures demand a surge in action.”

The UN chief said that this latest global heat record must coincide with world leaders urgently pursuing climate solutions. “We can still avoid the worst of climate chaos – and we don’t have a moment to lose,” Guterres said.

The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, is the chief driver of the climate crisis.

What about El Niño?

The WMO made clear that the extreme weather events seen across the world this summer were taking place before the full warming impact of El Niño, a major climate phenomenon which typically plays out in the second year after it develops.

El Niño — or “the little boy” in Spanish — is widely recognized as the warming of the sea surface temperature, a naturally occurring climate pattern which happens on average every two to seven years.

The effects of El Niño tend to peak during December, but the impact typically takes time to spread across the globe. This lagged effect is why forecasters believe 2024 could be the first year that humanity surpasses 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

The 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold is the aspirational global temperature limit set in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement. Beyond this level it is more likely to experience so-called tipping points — thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic shifts in Earth’s entire life-support system.

“Eight months into 2023, so far we are experiencing the second warmest year to date, only fractionally cooler than 2016, and August was estimated to be around 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, ECMWF.

“What we are observing, not only new extremes but the persistence of these record-breaking conditions, and the impacts these have on both people and planet, are a clear consequence of the warming of the climate system,” Buontempo added.

The climate crisis is making extreme weather more frequent and more intense.

The pandemic had its ups and downs for tourism, with a total shutdown followed by a rush of vacations due to pent-up demand. This year, small businesses say vacation cadences are returning to normal. But now, they have extreme weather to deal with — many say it’s hurting business, but more temperate spots are seeing a surge.

Tourism-related businesses have always been at the mercy of the weather. But with heat waves, fires and storms becoming more frequent and intense, small businesses increasingly see extreme weather as their next long-term challenge.

For Jared Meyers, owner of Legacy Vacation Resorts, with eight locations, including four in Florida, Hurricane Idalia’s landfall Wednesday as a Category 3 storm led to a loss in revenue as he temporarily closed one resort and and closed another to new guests. It also means a lengthy cleanup period to fix gutter and other damage and beach cleanup, including replanting of sea grass, sea grapes and other plants to protect against the next storm.

Hurricane Idalia

Florida Sep 1, 2023

‘Heartbreaking damage': Residents find homes gone, towns devastated in Idalia's path

news Sep 1, 2023

White House asks for additional $4 billion for FEMA after Hurricane Idalia, Maui fires

hurricane season Aug 31, 2023

Residents pick through rubble, navigate clogged roads and live without power after Hurricane Idalia

“Even when the hurricane doesn’t hit directly, it wreaks havoc economically, emotionally — to those that have suffered previous losses — and to our way of life,” he said.

A lifelong Florida resident, he’s used to hurricanes, but fears their intensity is getting worse. In fact, the number of storms that intensify dramatically within 240 miles (385 kilometers) of a coastline across the globe grew to 15 a year in 2020 compared to five a year in 1980, according to a study published in Nature Communications.

“It does feel like and probably will continue to feel like we’re just hopping from one emergency to another based on climate change,” Meyers said.

For Steve Silberberg in Saco, Maine, who runs Fitpacking, a company that guides people on wilderness backpacking trips in national and state parks and forests, extreme weather is becoming a serious obstacle. National Park Service Research has shown that national parks are experiencing extreme weather conditions at a higher rate than the rest of the country because of where they’re located.

Historic snowfall in March at Yosemite — followed by a wildfire — affected one hike Silberberg had planned. Another hike was canceled due to unusually large snowfall rendering the Narrows — part of Zion Canyon in Zion National Park in Utah — impassable due to a high volume of meltwater. He had to cancel a trip to the Los Padres National Forest in California due to wildfires and subsequent flooding, which destroyed trails and made them impassable.

“We are quickly approaching a crossroads as to how to keep the business viable,” he said. “It seems that almost half of our trips are affected in some way by increasingly extreme weather events.”

Silberberg is trying to find ways to make climate change work for him, however. He is thinking about starting a company that helps people visit places that may disappear due to climate change, such as Glacier National Park in Montana or the Everglades in Florida, which is threatened by rising sea levels.

In Southern California this summer, businesses faced sweltering heat, followed by Tropical Storm Hilary, the first tropical storm the region had seen in 84 years.

“Definitely extreme weather is here to stay,” said Shachi Mehra executive chef and partner at Adya, Indian restaurant in Anaheim, California. The restaurant is located in the Anaheim Packing House, a food hall in a historic 1919 citrus-packing house near Disneyland.

The restaurant closed for a day proactively during Tropical Storm Hilary, losing a day of sales. Heat has been more of an issue, as business slowed in late July this summer during a surge in temperatures. Mehra said she suspects the heat is behind the slowdown since typically things start to slow in late August or September.

Media focus on extreme weather can hurt business, too. Dan Dawson, owner of Horizon Divers in Key Largo, Florida, saw business boom during the pandemic. Now it’s back to pre-pandemic levels. But when storms like Idalia close in, tourists flee — even though Dawson’s spot in Key Largo was 300 miles (480 kilometers) from where Idalia hit.

“Once a storm is coming close we stop diving and once it goes by it can take up to two weeks for tourists to come back, and that is if we don’t have any damage,” he said.

Still, in some places that offer a respite from the heat and storms, businesses are getting an unexpected bump.

At Little America Flagstaff, a hotel set in 500 acres of private forest celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, temperatures in the 90s felt pleasant compared to the record-breaking heat in Phoenix, a two-hour drive to the south, which had temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit-plus for 31 straight days.

“When you see temperatures rising to the amount they were in Phoenix you immediately saw, not just with our hotel but all the hotels in the area, our occupancies all went up,” said Fred Reese, the hotel’s general manager.

Similarly, at Mission Point Resort on Mackinac Island, a historic island in Lake Michigan that doesn’t allow cars, temperatures have hovered in the temperate 70s while other places around the country have seen triple-digit heat. That leaves Michigan tourists often rubbing elbows with visitors from other states.

“It has been brutally hot in most of the country and it has been very, very nice up here in northern Michigan,” said Liz Ware, sales and marketing executive and part of the family that owns Mission Point. “And so we have seen a lot of people from the Texas, Florida, Georgia area coming up north to northern Michigan because it is so temperate up here.”

This week, the National Park Service announced that it is partnering with a contractor from Maine to repair the seawall and help keep the cherry trees safe.

The National Park Service says it awarded a $112 million contract to rehabilitate 6,800 feet of the Tidal Basin seawall in an effort to address flooding and safety concerns, mentioning that the wall around the monument is old and sinking deeper into the ground and that the water is quickly rising as a result of climate change.

Mike Litterst of the National Park Service says the goal of the three-year project is to expand the seawall’s life span by 100 years.

“It’s a safety concern for us and it is also damaging the iconic cherry trees around the Tidal Basin,” Litterst said.

They plan to anchor the wall to the bedrock in the ground to make it more stable.

“The sooner we can get this done, the sooner we’ll stop that damage,” Litterst said.

This situation is becoming increasingly frequent due to climate change. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say that sea level is expected to rise by a feet in the next 30 years.

“We should expect not only the foot of sea level rise, but more flooding. What used to be minor nuisance flooding now is going to become about a foot deeper and happening at about the similar frequency,” NOAA oceanographer William Sweet said.

The National Park Service says it hopes to start the wall construction by the middle of next year.

Stumps that used to be cherry trees around the Tidal Basin had to be cut down by the National Park Service due to flooding damage.

Nonetheless, the Park Service is hopes it can plant more cherry trees once the seawall is fixed in a few years.

To celebrate, the transit agency threw a party — complete with DJ — in Lorton, Virginia.

That money will expand WMATA’s electric bus fleet and help convert bus garages so they serve all electric vehicles. It’s an example of how the fight against climate change is changing transit — and creating new learning curves for the people who keep public transportation running.

Metro already has two all-electric buses, expected to be on the road this fall. And with 10 more on the way, mechanics like Kelvin Hall will soon see changes to the way they do their jobs.

“It makes the job a little easier,” Hall said. He’s been a mechanic for Metro for 24 years.

“And it makes the job cleaner. Not the grease and the oil and those things, yeah,” he told News4.

That’s because the buses are powered with lithium-ion batteries. The new electric buses have two batteries at the back, and two more on the roof — keeping the bus on the road without the use of gasoline.

The new buses are also very quiet, cutting down on noise pollution as they roll around, according to Metro officials.

Current diesel Metrobuses, on the other hand, are louder, and have many parts to worry about.

But while the electric buses may be simpler to repair, there are still some unknowns about the exact range that electric buses can travel between charges.

“This thing never stops,” Metro General Manager Randy Clarke said. “It has hundreds and hundreds of people on it, has massive amounts of air conditioning, has all these doors, all these systems. This thing has to work all day long.”

Hall agrees.

“If it only stays on the road for four hours, then we’ll need twice as many buses,” he explained. “Whereas diesel, now they are dirty, but you can send them out and pretty much they’ll be out there all day long.”

That’s why Metro is converting a number of bus garages to all-electric facilities. The goal is to have the entire Metrobus fleet — nearly 1,600 buses — to zero emissions by 2042.

news Aug 30, 2023

Climate risk guarantees home insurance policies will keep getting more expensive

climate change Aug 25, 2023

Paying damages for the climate change pollution they produce would cost corporations 44 percent of their profits, study shows

climate change Jul 25, 2023

Cases of tick-borne illnesses are on the rise. Some experts believe climate change is the cause

The money going toward the garage conversions and the new electric buses came from the Federal Transit Administration.

According to U.S. Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who was at the WMATA party on Wednesday, it’s “a clear example of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law at work,” he said in a news release about the grants.

“Investing in better, cleaner transit options for commuters will improve our air quality, cut congestion, and contribute to the fight against climate change. With this grant, we are improving the quality-of-life for all residents of Northern Virginia.”

President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in November 2021. The legislation put more than $1 trillion into transportation, broadband and utilities, and one of the goals included in the bill was building up that infrastructure in a sustainable way for the climate.

Some of the grant money Metro received will also be used to train first responders in lithium-ion battery safety.

Metro has more information about zero-emission bus initiatives on its website.