Category: Environment

To Meet Paris Accord Goal, Most of the World’s Fossil Fuel Reserves Must Stay in the Ground

Inside Climate News – Fossil Fuels

To Meet Paris Accord Goal, Most of the World’s Fossil Fuel Reserves Must Stay in the Ground

A new study in Nature reports that oil, gas and coal production must begin falling immediately to have even a 50 percent chance of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Nicholas Kusnetz                              September 8, 2021

Oil pump jacks operate at the Inglewood Oil Field in Culver City, California, on July 11, 2021. Credit: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Oil pump jacks operate at the Inglewood Oil Field in Culver City, California, on July 11, 2021. Credit: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

After a summer of weather extremes that highlighted the urgency of limiting global warming in starkly human terms, new research is clarifying what it will take to do so. In order to have just a 50 percent chance of meeting the most ambitious climate target, the study found, the production of all fossil fuels will need to start declining immediately, and a significant majority of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves will have to remain underground over the next few decades.

While the research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is only the latest to argue that meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement goals to limit warming requires a rapid pivot to clean energy, it lays out with clear and specific figures exactly how far from those targets the world remains.

“The inescapable evidence that hopefully we’ve shown and that successive reports have shown is that if you want to meet 1.5 degrees, then global production has to start declining,” said Daniel Welsby, a researcher at University College London, in the United Kingdom, and the study’s lead author. As part of the Paris Agreement, nations agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

The study found that nearly 60 percent of global oil and gas reserves and about 90 percent of coal reserves must be left unexploited by 2050, though a portion of those fuels could be produced in the second half of the century. Total oil and gas production must begin declining immediately, the research said, and continue falling at about 3 percent annually through 2050. Coal production must fall at an even steeper rate.

While the authors noted a few signs of change, including that coal production is already on the decline, the current course is far off what’s needed. In March, the International Energy Agency warned that oil production was on track to rebound from a pandemic-driven dip and would surpass 2019 levels within a couple of years. That projection came on the heels of a separate report in December by the United Nations Environment Program, which said energy producing countries are set to expand fossil fuel output for years.

The new paper builds on these studies and other related work to estimate the “unextractable” portion of the fossil fuel stores that are currently considered profitable to exploit—so-called proven reserves. Put another way, the research effectively says that most of the fossil fuels that energy companies currently list as financial assets, or that governments report as strategic ones, would be rendered worthless if the world is to have a shot at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“It is abundantly clear from this and other work that the conversation now is about declining production, it’s about leaving fossil fuel reserves in the ground,” said Greg Muttitt, senior policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank. Muttitt was not involved in the new research, though he is working on a separate paper with some of the authors.

A Steep Decline

A 2015 study, which shares a co-author with the new paper, ran a similar experiment geared toward limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit)—the amount that countries in the Paris Agreement committed to keep global warming “well below.” The new work shows that roughly twice as much oil would have to be left unexploited by 2050 to have a 50 percent chance of reaching the more ambitious 1.5 degree target.

Regions Vary in How Quickly They Must Slow Production

By looking primarily at the cost of production in different parts of the world, the new research provided regional estimates, too, and found significant variation. The Middle East, with its vast stores of oil and gas, would have to leave massive quantities undeveloped. But because its reserves are so large, and its production costs so low, the region would take on an even more dominant role in the world’s future supply.

Canada—where most of the oil reserves are found in the tar sands, which are expensive and polluting to produce—would see more than 80 percent of its reserves go undeveloped, by far the largest share.

The United States is the only region that would see oil production increase from current levels, to about where it was before the pandemic, before peaking within a few years and then declining steadily. U.S. natural gas production, however, would see an immediate and sharp decline in the paper’s scenario as renewable energy sources displace gas for generating electricity.

The paper found less regional variation for coal, which emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than oil or gas. The vast majority of coal reserves would need to be left underground in nearly every region.

Reserves That Can't Be Tapped

The authors said their findings make the case for restricting production by removing subsidies, imposing new taxes or even by prohibiting mining and drilling.

President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to end new fossil fuel leasing on public lands, and his administration is currently conducting a review of the nation’s oil and gas leasing program that could result in higher royalty rates and other restrictive measures. Congressional Democrats are considering legislation that could scale back or eliminate federal subsidies for fossil fuel production, or even implement new fees or taxes on major producers. Other countries, including Denmark and Costa Rica, have begun banning or phasing out production.

The paper also highlights the risks to governments that are highly dependent on fossil fuels for revenue if they don’t diversify their economies.

The same could be said for private companies and investors in the fossil fuel industry, said Mike Coffin, who is a senior analyst at the climate and financial think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative, which has conducted similar research but was not involved in the new paper.

“The drastic change that’s going to have to happen is going to make those business models unviable,” Coffin said.

At a briefing covering the research, co-author James Price said their findings, as dramatic as they may seem, probably underestimate the volume of fossil fuels that must be left unexploited. Their modeling is aimed toward achieving only a 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, he said.

“If we want a higher chance,” Price said, “then we have to of course keep more carbon in the ground.”

Beyond probabilities, however, he said their model assumes that carbon capture technologies and natural processes like forest regeneration will be able to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere later this century to compensate for some of the fossil fuels the world continues to burn, even though there remain significant questions about the scale of those practices that is feasible.

“This dependency introduces a risk of underestimating just how rapid the decarbonization needs to be,” Price said.

Nicholas Kusnetz, Reporter, New York City

Nicholas Kusnetz is a reporter for Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN, he worked at the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. His work has won numerous awards, including from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including The Washington Post, Businessweek, The Nation, Fast Company and The New York Times.

Imagine If We Had Spent the Last 20 Years Fighting Climate Change Instead of the War on Terror

In These Times – Feature

Imagine If We Had Spent the Last 20 Years Fighting Climate Change Instead of the War on Terror

At the dawn of the new millennium, we directed our national resources in the exact wrong direction. But it’s not too late to turn things around.

Sarah Lazare                              September 7, 2021

Catera Whitson (C) and Kyler Melancon (R) ride in the back of a high water truck as they volunteer to help evacuate people from homes after neighborhoods flooded in LaPlace, Louisiana on August 30, 2021. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES.

Twenty years into a nebulous ​“War on Terror,” the United States is in the grips of a full-fledged climate crisis. Hurricane Ida, whose severity is a direct result of human-made climate change, flooded cities, cut off power to hundreds of thousands, killed at least 60 people, and left elderly people dying in their homes and in squalid evacuation facilities. This followed a summer of heat waves, wildfires and droughts — all forms of extreme weather that the Global South has borne the brunt of, but are now, undeniably, the new ​“normal” in the United States.

The U.S. government has turned the whole globe into a potential battlefield, chasing some ill-defined danger ​“out there,” when, in reality, the danger is right here — and is partially of the U.S. government’s own creation. Plotting out the connections between this open-ended war and the climate crisis is a grim exercise, but an important one. It’s critical to examine how the War on Terror not only took up all of the oxygen when we should have been engaged in all-out effort to curb emissions, but also made the climate crisis far worse, by foreclosing on other potential frameworks under which the United States could relate with the rest of the world. Such bitter lessons are not academic: There is still time to stave off the worst climate scenarios, a goal that, if attained, would likely save hundreds of millions of lives, and prevent entire countries from being swallowed into the sea.

One of the most obvious lessons is financial: We should have been putting every resource toward stopping climate disaster, rather than pouring public goods into the war effort. According to a recent report by the ​​National Priorities Project, which provides research about the federal budget, the United States has spent $21 trillion over the last 20 years on ​“foreign and domestic militarization.” Of that amount, $16 trillion went directly to the U.S. military — including $7.2 trillion that went directly to military contracts. This figure also includes $732 billion for federal law enforcement, ​“because counterterrorism and border security are part of their core mission, and because the militarization of police and the proliferation of mass incarceration both owe much to the activities and influences of federal law enforcement.”

Of course, big government spending can be a very good thing if it goes toward genuine social goods. The price tag of the War on Terror is especially tragic when one considers what could have been done with this money instead, note the report’s authors, Lindsay Koshgarian, Ashik Siddique and Lorah Steichen. A sum of $1.7 trillion could eliminate all student debt, $200 billion could cover 10 years of free preschool for all three and four year olds in the country. And, crucially, $4.5 trillion could cover the full cost of decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid.

But huge military budgets are not only bad when they contrast with poor domestic spending on social goods — our bloated Pentagon should, first and foremost, be opposed because of the harm it does around the world, where it has roughly 800 military bases, and almost a quarter of a million troops permanently stationed in other countries. A new report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that between 897,000 and 929,000 people have been killed ​“directly in the violence of the U.S. post‑9/​11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.” This number could be even higher. One estimate found that the U.S. war on Iraq alone killed one million Iraqis.

Still, the financial cost of war is worth examining because it reveals something about the moral priorities of our society. Any genuine effort to curb the climate crisis will require a tremendous mobilization of resources — a public works program on a scale that, in the United States, is typically only reserved for war. Now, discussions of such expenditures can be a bit misleading, since the cost of doing nothing to curb climate change is limitless: When the entirety of our social fabric is at stake, it seems silly to debate dollars here or there. But this is exactly what proponents of climate action are forced to do in our political climate. As I reported in March 2020, presidential candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary were grilled about how they would pay for social programs, like a Green New Deal, but not about how they would pay for wars.

In June 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) estimated that the Green New Deal would cost $10 trillion. Her critics on the Right came up with their own number of up to $93 trillion, a figure that was then used as a talking point to bludgeon any hopes of the proposal’s passage. But let’s suppose for a moment that this number, calculated by American Action Forum, were correct, and the price of a Green New Deal came to 4.43 times the cost of 20 years of the War on Terror? So what? Shouldn’t we be willing to devote far more resources to protecting life than to taking it? What could be more valuable than safeguarding humanity against an existential threat?

The reality is that warding off the worst-case scenario of climate change, which the latest IPCC report says is still possible, will require massive amounts of spending upfront. Not only do we have to stop fossil fuel extraction and shift to decarbonized energy, but we have to do so in a way that does not leave an entire generation of workers destitute. Several proposals for how to achieve this have been floated: a just transition for workers; a revamping of public transit and public housing; public ownership of energy industries for the purpose of immediately decarbonizing them; global reparations for the harm the United States has done. Any way you look at it, meaningful climate legislation will require a huge mobilization of public resources — one that beats back the power of capital. And of course, dismantling the carbon-intensive U.S. military apparatus must be part of the equation.

In our society, it’s a given that we spend massive amounts of these public resources on military expansion year after year, with the National Defense Authorization Act regularly accounting for more than half of all discretionary federal spending (this year being no exception, despite President Biden’s promise to end ​“forever wars”). Over the past 20 years, the mobilization behind the War on Terror has been enabled by a massive propaganda effort. Think tanks financed by weapons contractors have filled cable and print media with ​“expert” commentators on the importance of open-ended war. Longstanding civilian suffering as a result post‑9/​11 U.S. wars has been ignored. From abetting the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction to the demonization of anti-war protesters as ​“terrorist” sympathizers, the organs of mass communication in this country have roundly fallen on the side of supporting the War on Terror, a dynamic that is in full evidence as media outlets move to discipline President Biden for actually ending the Afghanistan war.

What if a similar effort had been undertaken to educate the public about the need for dramatic climate action? Instead of falsehoods and selective moral outrage, we could have had sound, scientifically-based political education about the climate dangers that Exxon has known of for more than 40 years. We could have spent 20 years building the political will for social transformation. It may seem ridiculous to suggest that the war propaganda effort could have gone toward progressive ends: After all, the institutions responsible — corporate America, major media outlets and bipartisan lawmakers — were incentivized against such a public service, and would never have undertaken similar efforts for progressive ends.

But this gets at something crucial — if difficult to quantify — about the harm done by 20 years of the War on Terror. The push for militarization has been used to shut down exactly the left-wing political ideas that are vitally needed to curb the climate crisis. As I argued in February 2020, U.S. wars have repeatedly been used to justify a crackdown on left-wing movements. World War I saw passage of the Espionage Act, which was used to crack down on anti-war protesters and radical labor organizers. The Cold War was used as pretext for crackdowns on a whole host of domestic movements, from communist to socialist to Black Freedom, alongside U.S. support for vicious anti-communist massacres around the world. The War on Terror was no different, used to justify passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was used to police and surveil countless protesters, including environmentalists. The Global Justice Movement was sounding the alarm about the climate crisis in the late 1990s, and was not only subjected to post‑9/​11 government repression, but was then forced to refocus on opposing George W. Bush’s global war effort.

The War on Terror also makes it nearly impossible to attain the kinds of global cooperation we need to address the climate crisis. It is difficult for countries to focus on making the transformations needed to curb climate change when they are focused on trying to survive U.S. bombings, invasions, meddling and sanctions. And it’s difficult to force the United States to reverse its disproportionate climate harms when perpetual war and confrontation is the primary American orientation toward much of the world, and the vast majority of U.S. global cooperation is aimed at maintaining this footing.

Such grim reflections on the climate harms wrought by 20 years of the War on Terror do not amount to a nihilistic ​“I told you so.” We vitally need to apply these grisly lessons now, as the nebulous ​“War on Terror” is still being waged, from drone wars in Somalia to the bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, while Biden claims to be ​“ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” he is overseeing an increasingly confrontational posture toward China, an approach championed by members of Congress in both parties. As dozens of environmental and social justice organizations noted in July, it is inconceivable that the world can curb the climate crisis without the cooperation of the United States (the biggest per-capita greenhouse gas emitter) and China (the biggest overall greenhouse gas emitter). Instead of militarizing the Asia-Pacific region to hedge against China, the United States could acknowledge this stark reality and launch an unprecedented effort for climate cooperation with China.

The possibilities for an alternative global orientation are both vast and difficult to know. What we do know is that the status quo of the War on Terror is not working. In addition to the hospitals the United States has bombed, the homes it has destroyed, the factories it has obliterated, and the people it has terrorized, the American military project has deeply worsened the climate crisis. And that crisis is now, undeniably, on our shores.

Sarah Lazare, is web editor and reporter for In These Times.

Hurricane Ida power outages, misery persist 9 days later

Hurricane Ida power outages, misery persist 9 days later

Kevin McGill and Melinda Deslatte           

 

LaPlace, La. (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Louisiana, most of them outside New Orleans, still didn’t have power Tuesday and more than half the gas stations in two major cities were without fuel nine days after Hurricane Ida slammed into the state, splintering homes and toppling electric lines.

There were also continuing signs of recovery, however, as the total number of people without electricity has fallen from more than a million at its peak, while hundreds of thousands of people have had their water restored.

State health officials, meanwhile, announced that they are revoking the licenses of seven nursing homes that evacuated to a warehouse where seven residents died amid deteriorating conditions after the hurricane.

The disparity in power restoration between New Orleans, where nearly 3/4 of the city had electricity again, and other communities where almost all residents were still in the dark prompted frustration and finger-pointing.

State Rep. Tanner Magee, the House’s second-ranking Republican who lives in the devastated city of Houma in Terrebonne Parish, said he’s convinced his region is being shortchanged in favor of New Orleans.

“It’s very infuriating to me,” Magee said.

Though water was running again in his area, most hospitals in the region remained shuttered and the parish was in desperate need of temporary shelter for first responders and others vital to the rebuilding effort, he said.

Warner Thomas, president and CEO of the state’s largest hospital system Ochsner Health warned that it would be “some time” before two Ochsner hospitals — one in Terrebonne Parish and the other in Lafourche Parish — fully reopen. Emergency rooms at the two hospitals, however, were operating.

Carnival Cruise Line announced Tuesday that it will keep one of its ships, Carnival Glory, docked in New Orleans through Sept. 18 to serve as housing for first responders.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said while there had been much progress in restoring water and power, “there’s an awful lot of work to be done.”

Without power, the Louisiana heat is the hardest thing to cope with, said Kim Bass, who lives in St. John the Baptist Parish. She and her husband are using a generator to keep food refrigerated but have no air conditioning. Water service is intermittent.

“So you may have water one minute, then you may not have water for the next two days,” Bass said.

In many neighborhoods, homes were uninhabitable. State and federal officials said about 3,200 people are in mass shelters around Louisiana while another 25,000 people whose houses have been damaged are staying in hotel rooms through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s transitional sheltering program. FEMA already has approved more than 159,000 household applications for disaster assistance, according to Louisiana’s emergency preparedness office.

Shontrece and Michael Lathers looked on despondently as workers wrestled a billowing blue tarp into place over what was left of the roof of their home in the St. John the Baptist Parish town of LaPlace. Ida’s floodwaters had risen to about 3 feet (1 meter) inside their home and rain that had poured in through the wind-damaged roof obliterated most of the drywall ceilings.

 

The house will have to be gutted floor to ceiling, Michael Lathers said, adding that he had no idea how much the repairs will cost.

Fuel shortages also persisted across hard-hit areas of the state. More than 50% of gas stations in New Orleans and Baton Rouge remained without gasoline Tuesday afternoon, according to GasBuddy.com.

The power situation has improved greatly since Ida first hit. In the first hours after the storm, nearly 1.1 million customers were in the dark, but that number was down to about 430,000 on Tuesday. With the help of tens of thousands of workers from power companies in numerous states, the state’s biggest energy provider, Entergy, has been able to slowly bring electricity back, leaving only 19% of its customers in the region without power as of Tuesday.

For residents in the state’s five hardest-hit parishes in southeastern Louisiana, however, that number is little comfort. Fully 98% of those residents are still without power more than a week after Ida slammed onshore with 150 mph winds (240 kph) on Aug. 29.

Power probably won’t be widely restored to St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes until Sept. 17 and until Sept. 29 to Lafourche, St. Charles and Terrebonne parishes, Entergy said Tuesday. The parishes are home to about 325,000 people.

In contrast, nearly all power has been restored in the capital of Baton Rouge, and only 25% of homes and businesses are still suffering outages in New Orleans. Entergy said it expected to have the vast majority of New Orleans brought online by Wednesday. Once areas such as New Orleans have their power restored, Entergy is moving its crews into communities south and west of the city that saw more widespread damage, said Entergy Louisiana President and CEO Phillip May.

As Entergy worked to get the lights turned on everywhere, the Louisiana Department of Health reported that the number of people without water had fallen from a peak of 850,000 to 62,000, though about 580,000 people were being advised to boil their water for safety. And grocery stores reopened in some places.

Ida’s death toll in Louisiana rose to 15 people Tuesday after the state Department of Health reported two additional storm-related fatalities: a 68-year-old man who fell off of a roof while making repairs to damage caused by Hurricane Ida and a 71-year-old man who died of a lack of oxygen during an extended power outage. The storm’s remnants also brought historic flooding, record rains and tornados from Virginia to Massachusetts, killing at least 50 more people.

Deslatte reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana in New Orleans; Jeff Martin in Marietta, Georgia; Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta; and Lisa J. Adams Wagner in Evans, Georgia, contributed to this report.

‘I don’t have a choice’: Hurricane Ida leaves devastated Louisiana communities struggling with new reality

‘I don’t have a choice’: Hurricane Ida leaves devastated Louisiana communities struggling with new reality

Oliver Laughland in Mount Airy and Reserve, Louisiana  

As they sifted through the wreckage of their childhood home in Mount Airy, members of the Robinson family were hunting for memories.

They came in the form of a dozen family photo albums, somehow preserved amid the rubble. There was nothing much else to salvage as most of the house was destroyed. It had been in the family for generations, built and preserved with toil and hard work.

Judy Robinson, 70, had raised her two children here, working as a plant operator at a nearby Marathon Oil refinery and then living on income support as a retiree.

Related: Florida shooting: ex-US marine suspected of killing four, including a baby

Her daughter, Gayle Robinson, struggled as she watched Judy’s reaction to seeing home for the first time since Hurricane Ida struck seven days ago.

“I have never seen her look how she looked,” she said, outside in the oppressive heat. “Confused. Lost for words. It’s like someone threw a grenade into the house.”

As cable news channels pivoted away from Ida’s destruction in south-east Louisiana over the weekend, the storm only a week into history, thousands of people, including the Robinson family, were still coming to terms with a new reality. Power is gradually returning to New Orleans, with hopes for full restoration by the middle of this week, but residents here in St John the Baptist parish, just 35 miles (56km) away and which took a harder hit than New Orleans, look set for at least another two weeks waiting.

The Robinson family had evacuated during the storm, fanning out across Louisiana and Texas and now returning for the first time on Sunday. Their family home is just a few miles from where president Joe Biden visited on Friday, promising: “We’re not going to leave any community behind.”

But for Gayle Robinson, the words were beginning to feel a little hollow. She had tried and failed to reach the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the US government agency tasked with managing the aftermath of disasters, to request a tarp for her mother’s decimated roof in order to protect the remains inside. It left her questioning what resources were available to assist.

I have no telephone service, so I have no way of knowing a thing

Sterling Bazilet

“You’ve got to do more than just show up. We need support,” she said, clutching a family photo album. “It’s not about a show and tell. People’s lives are at stake right now. They have lost everything, when they have worked so hard to provide for their families. And right now, Fema are not trying to help.”

With limited funds available and faltering federal government assistance, the family worried they would be forced to live out of their car in a matter of days.

Down the street, Sterling Bazilet, 63, sat out on the half of his front porch that remained. The rest was strewn as rubble over the roadside. A retired pipe fitter, who has lived here all his life, Bazilet was unable to evacuate as his truck was broken down. He had been living without power and no generator for the past seven days, finding comfortable sleep nearly impossible in the still, stifling late summer air.

“With no electricity there’s no way to keep cool,” he said, sitting topless.

Fema had not reached his home yet either, but a group of church volunteers had begun to tarp his roof and the left side of his home, almost completely destroyed.

Without power or connectivity, Bazilet was not even aware Biden had visited on Friday.

“I have no telephone service, so I have no way of knowing a thing,” he said.

‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take’

Related: How a Tahoe refuge saved owls, coyotes and raccoons from wildfire

Officials in St John the Baptist parish have issued an area-wide water boil advisory and told residents to limit “all non-essential sewer services”. There are three food, ice and water handouts throughout the parish, which is comprised of 42,000 residents, 58% of whom are Black.

The roadway between Mount Airy and the neighboring town of Reserve gives a small taste of the continuing catastrophe here. In the heart of the region’s “Cancer Alley”, a heavily industrialized region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with some of the most polluted air in America, petrochemical plants with flaring stacks frame the felled trees and shattered homes. One main road remains blocked after a grain export elevator, owned by the agricultural giant Cargill, collapsed during the storm.

In Reserve, many families and residents have left amid widespread destruction. But of the handful still present on Sunday, some were attempting to keep their spirits up.

Brian Millet, a 59-year-old drummer and DJ, had bought a generator, allowing him to blast big band jazz onto the empty streets through a loudspeaker. He had cobbled together some coals and cuts of meat and was barbequing by his home, battered by Ida and sustaining significant roof damage.

The six sausages, two steaks and handful of chicken wings were supposed to last the next three days, he said. “I’m thankful for what I have.”

Millet lost his home over a decade ago when Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana in 2008. As Ida’s floodwaters crept into his new home , he thought about that experience all over again.

Millet had been handed a roof tarp by local volunteers, but he had no means to put it in place. He has splints in both his legs and suffers with diabetes, high blood pressure and ​​carpal tunnel syndrome.

But as grey skies loomed on the horizon and rain began to fall, Millet’s spirits took a turn. He worried his roof would leak again, and the water put out the fire on his barbeque.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he said. “But I don’t have a choice.”

For Louisiana’s coastal tribes, ‘being at the end of the earth is a dangerous place’

The Times Picayune – nola

For Louisiana’s coastal tribes, ‘being at the end of the earth is a dangerous place’

After Hurricane Ida, Native Americans confront loss of homes, income, sacred sites

By Halle Parker, Staff Writer                     September 6, 2021

 

When Shirell Parfait-Dardar returned to her home in Dulac, she found that Hurricane Ida’s unforgiving winds had ripped the roof off and blown the walls in. A dressmaker by trade, she discovered her sewing shop seemed to have been lifted off the ground, flipped upside down and smashed.

“Every building on my property was destroyed,” said the chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, now staying with her mother in Thibodaux. Almost every member of her Native American tribe suffered the same fate. Those who lived in mobile homes saw their trailers blown up or “thrown to the ground and beaten up to the point where it’s unlivable,” she said.

“If they haven’t lost their home, they’re on the verge of losing their home because there’s so much damage to it,” she said. And for those residents, the clock’s ticking a week after the Category 4 storm struck: They must salvage what they can and secure their property before mold sets in.

From the air, tribal communities across Louisiana’s coast appear to have been decimated by Hurricane Ida:

  • In Pointe-aux-Chênes, home of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe, the storm leveled the elevated houses near the bayou’s end. Left behind were piles of splintered wood surrounded by a pool of water five days after the storm. Just 15 homes remained livable, said Theresa Dardar, a Pointe-au-Chien tribal member.
  • The United Houma Nation, a tribe of 19,000 spread across several communities from Houma to Golden Meadow and the Lafitte area, saw more than three quarters of its residents’ houses destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, said Thomas Dardar, the tribe’s hurricane relief manager. “The storm was pretty much as if a bomb went off,” he said, speaking from the tribal center where more than a dozen people and several pets were still sheltering Friday. Recovery will take years, he added.

All four of the state-recognized tribes suffered tremendous loss from Ida, as well as several other tribes without any formal status such as the Grand Bayou Indian Village in Plaquemines Parish. Surveying the coast by airplane, Tammy Greer, a United Houma Nation citizen with family in other tribes, was astounded by the scope of the damage.

“This one was so spread out,” she said. “Usually it’s one or two communities affected, and we can help each other out. This time, everybody else is just as bad as you are.”

Without federal recognition, recovery will be slower. None of the coastal tribes has met the criteria put in place for Washington, D.C., to recognize their tribal governments as sovereign powers.

Adam Crepelle, an assistant law professor at George Mason University and a United Houma Nation citizen, said federal recognition would allow tribes to negotiate directly with the U.S. government and open up more aid money and relief programs.

“As far as the federal government is concerned, they’re not a tribe,” Crepelle said, who specializes in federal law concerning Native Americans. “It’s definitely a barrier because, historically, the tribe was denied access to education and things like that, so they’re already starting from lower opportunities to begin with.”

Lafitte after Hurricane Ida
Boaters try to contain an oil spill after Hurricane Ida in the Lafitte area on Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. (Flight courtesy of SouthWings). STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER

Instead, unrecognized tribes are treated as nonprofits. That lets them apply for some grants, but their citizens are treated the same as any other U.S. citizen: Each must file an individual claim if aid is wanted. And the lack of federal recognition precludes some relief money for the tribes, Crepelle said.

“I’m definitely Indian, but I’m not Indian enough,” said Parfait-Dardar, who views the recognition process as discriminatory.

Without direct help from the federal government, each tribe leans on its own networks to obtain supplies and donations and shares with other tribes. They also try to secure help from the parish and state governments. So far, however, Parfait-Dardar and Theresa Dardar said they’ve yet to hear from Terrebonne and Lafourche parish officials as of Sunday.

Dulac after Hurricane Ida
A levee in Dulac is flanked by water on both sides on after Hurricane Ida on Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. (Flight courtesy of SouthWings). STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER

Louisiana tribes outside of the disaster zone, and ones out of state, also send help. Thomas Dardar said the United Houma Nation had already begun distributing supplies and was working alongside Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes to erect communications towers in some of the hardest-hit areas.

“We’re operating in a disaster, but we’re not in disaster mode,” he said.

Greer and Parfait-Dardar expect many of their tribes’ citizens to return and rebuild. Still, each storm can make their citizens anxious over a loss of culture and identity should members choose to migrate inland.

Pointe-aux-Chênes after Hurricane Ida
A house that was ripped to its foundation by Hurricane Ida on Sunday, Aug. 29, 2021, is shown in Pointe-aux-Chênes.  PHOTO BY MÉLANIE AKOKA

Thinking of her tribe’s elders, Greer said the constant rebuilding process can take a physical toll. And for those who make money off traditional wood carving or basket weaving, losing a home means losing inventory and income.

Plus, as storms grow more intense and Louisiana’s coast continues to recede, tribes have less protection from the sea and cultural sites such as sacred mounds or cemeteries are at risk of washing away, taking history with them.

“We’re not protecting them, and that’s the history of this land and this place,” Greer said. “Being at the end of the Earth is a dangerous place to be.”

Golden Meadow after Hurricane Ida
A workboat blocks Bayou Lafourche after Hurricane Ida in Golden Meadow on Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. (Flight courtesy of SouthWings). STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER

Outsiders forget, she said, that the tribes didn’t choose to settle in the swamp but were forced there as others moved onto their land to the north. Yet they made it work and adapted over centuries.

As Ida relief donations trickled in, Parfait-Dardar hoped her community will manage to build back stronger, using more innovative techniques to live with water.

“I can’t live anywhere else. I love my home, I love our people, and I love the environment that I’m in,” the Dulac chief said. “We need to respect the environment we’re in if we’re going to live here safely.”

Drought has farmworkers dreaming of escape from California’s breadbasket

Drought has farmworkers dreaming of escape from California’s breadbasket

Priscella Vega                            
A truck rolls through nut trees almost ready for harvest near Cantua Creek. The drought in the Central Valley is taking its toll of farmworkers with reduced hours and jobs evaporating like the limited water resources.
A truck rolls through nut trees almost ready for harvest near Cantua Creek, Calif. The drought in the Central Valley is taking its toll on farmworkers, with reduced hours and jobs evaporating like the limited water resources. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Rosario Rodríguez never wanted to leave her hometown of Trigomil, Nayarit. She was surrounded by family and could quickly get to the nearest grocery store or clinic.

But love called, and she followed her then-boyfriend to Three Rocks — a speck in Fresno County where he worked in the fields.

At first life there reminded her of home in central Mexico — the enticing small-town feel, the lushness all around. The charm wore off as the reality of living in a rural town in Central California set in. Then the drought broke the spell.

“It was never my intention to come to this country,” Rodríguez said. “I was happy in Nayarit, but we got married and he brought me here. And so here I am.”

Rosario Rodríguez hold a picture of her parents, Herminia and Martin Rodriguez in her garage in Three Rocks.
Rosario Rodríguez hold a picture of her parents, Herminia and Martin Rodriguez, in her garage in Three Rocks, Calif. “It was never my intention to come to this country,” she said. “I was happy in Nayarit, but we got married and he brought me here. And so here I am.” (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

For decades, farm labor has kept unincorporated communities alive throughout the Central Valley. But the drought is making it hard to stay. The dearth of essential resources — clean water, adequate housing and fair employment wages — has crippled towns that are easily overlooked and triggered a slow exodus to bigger places.

It can be seen in the dwindling number of people attending nonprofit-led workshops and meetings on agricultural worker rights, said Chucho Mendoza, an environmental and public health advocate who has worked with migrants and small farming families in the Central Valley for 25 years. The pandemic further hollowed out rural life.

In the Cantua Creek area, where pistachio and almond crops reign, some families are grappling with what’s next. Faced with a confluence of challenges, some are leaving; others are arguing over whether they should. Still others are determined to make it work here.

“They don’t know what to pinpoint but they’ll say, ‘We know something is wrong, but we don’t know what it is,'” Mendoza said. “Those who leave move to the next town but don’t realize hell is a lot bigger.”

The California Aqueduct brings water through Cantua Creek.
The California Aqueduct brings water through Cantua Creek. In this area, where pistachio and almond crops reign, some families are grappling with what’s next. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

As the drought worsened, Rodríguez’s husband traveled farther and farther for work. She considered joining him in the field, but leaving her two teenager daughters alone at 3 a.m. felt dangerous. So she began baby-sitting for $25 a day.

Wishing a better future for her daughters, Rodríguez proposed moving to a “bigger” town like Kerman, population 15,000, where there were schools, churches, a fire station and doctors’ offices. But her husband didn’t want to leave. Why push their luck if they were making ends meet?

“It’s a decision we have to make together,” Rodríguez said reluctantly.

For most families in small Central Valley communities, where the residents are overwhelmingly Latino, the emotional toll of staying or fleeing to a new place is exacerbated by scarce finances, immigration status and the lack of a family safety net to fall back on.

Moments before Victor Avila watched his eldest daughter celebrate her quinceañera, he told his wife, Maria, about an idea. A visit to his brother-in-law in Bakersfield inspired him to imagine a life outside of the valley, away from the field work he’d known his whole life.

Maria Avila sits in her kitchen in Three Rocks.
Maria Avila sits in her kitchen in Three Rocks. She said her husband has floated the idea of moving. “I’m not leaving,” she told him. But despite her reluctance, deep down she feels as though the drought is making leaving an inevitability. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Since he arrived here from Durango, Mexico, in the 1990s, Victor did everything he could on a farm. For 12 hours, six days a week, he exhausted his body harvesting tomatoes and cotton. He tried his hand at welding metals with a blowtorch. He even tested out new agricultural machines.

His dedication paid off. He no longer spends shifts in the blistering sun. Instead he sits inside a giant, crab-like harvesting machine he steers down rows of almond trees. It helps keep his respiratory problems at bay after years of inhaling dust.

But he knows fellow laborers have it worse. Some struggle finding steady work, with the rise of agricultural machines that no longer require as many bodies to work the harvest. A bill that requires employers to gradually increase minimum wage and pay employees time and a half by 2022 has prompted some to slash overtime.

Maria knew her husband was worried. To help with finances, she thought about applying at the local Carl’s Jr. about 30 minutes away, but it would mainly be night and weekend shifts. They both agreed she couldn’t leave their four children alone that long.

Amid a worsening drought, Victor knew he needed a backup plan. But when he told Maria about moving, she shot it down.

Nut trees adjacent to Cantua Creek.
Nut trees adjacent to Cantua Creek. Faced with a confluence of challenges, some families are leaving; others are arguing over whether they should. Still others are determined to make it work here. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Their eldest daughter, a rising senior at Tranquillity High School, didn’t want to spend her final year adapting to a new campus. Moving away from the fields would also exclude her from a college scholarship, she said.

Maria said her husband has floated the idea about three more times. “I’m not leaving,” she told him.

But despite her reluctance, deep down Maria feels as though the drought is making leaving an inevitability. The dusty, discolored jungle gym at a run-down park across from her house is a daily reminder.

“In the end, I’ll go wherever,” she said.

About two miles from Rodríguez and Avila’s neighborhood, Lucia Salmeron Torres wishes her husband would agree to return one day to their beloved Jalisco, Mexico.

“This is the worst place to live in,” said Torres, 57.

Her home is situated on the edge of a rancher’s property where her husband works. She keeps the house tidy, even though there isn’t much inside. Portraits of Jesus next to artificial roses decorate the living room and hallway walls. She gardens for fun, but only when there aren’t workers nearby because she doesn’t like to feel under surveillance.

Lucia Salmeron Torres sits in her living room on the outskirts of Fresno County.
Lucia Salmeron Torres, 57, sits in her living room on the outskirts of Fresno County. She wishes her husband would agree to return one day to their beloved Jalisco, Mexico. “This is the worst place to live in,” she said. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Her 5-year-old granddaughter and son’s pit bull are her only companions when her husband and five sons are at work. In years past, she could count on seeing them more during the rainy season. The drought changed that.

“Now they rarely come home” during the day, she said. “And they struggle with work because there aren’t enough hours.”

Torres first tried persuading her husband to move to the city when one of her sons began attending college. Then she wanted to join her son, Sergio, when he started working as a truck driver for an agricultural company and talked about moving. He had worked in the fields since he was 14, but he saw how the drought was choking the valley.

He knew it wasn’t as simple as packing up and leaving, however. He needed a better income to help provide for his daughter and help his parents.

“I always thought of a better future,” Sergio said. He used to get paid $11 an hour but now makes twice as much, he said.

With few community activities, Torres looks forward to the days when school administrators call for parent-teacher meetings. Or when nonprofit organizations host community workshops on healthful eating and how to be better parents.

On those days, she, Avila and Rodríguez organize a potluck among themselves. They stay as long as possible until they have to return to their routines. Torres and Rodríguez each pay about $5 for a ride from the county’s rural transit agency; Avila drives home in her car.

Irrigation pipes lay unused in Cantua Creek.
Irrigation pipes lay unused in Cantua Creek. For decades, farm labor has kept unincorporated communities alive throughout the Central Valley. But the drought is making it hard to stay. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Still, Rodríguez hasn’t lost hope.

She believes they will move when her daughters are older and ready for college. Fresno City College and Fresno State are both about an hour away, and the commute can be dangerous in the winter when tule fog blankets the area.

Her daughters are looking to the future too. Her eldest, Bianca, is eager to explore places where she isn’t told to be cautious of the water and mindful of the drought.

“The only good thing about this place is that it’s pretty peaceful,” she said. “But it gets lonely and there’s not much to do out here, so it gets really boring.”

For now, Rodríguez is thinking of ways to remain busy. If she isn’t baby-sitting, she’ll take orders for homemade piñatas and make mosaic gelatin for parties. So far she’s had only a handful of orders.

“It’s not that we can’t be successful here,” she said. “But we have to fight for better.”

If you feel that the world’s environment is doomed after the raging summer of hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, you could be suffering from ‘eco-anxiety’

If you feel that the world’s environment is doomed after the raging summer of hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, you could be suffering from ‘eco-anxiety’

Sophia Ankel                       
man
A young man watches as flames rise and smoke billows from a forest during a wildfire near Gonfaron, France, on August 17, 2021. Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images
 

  • Eco-anxiety is on the rise as more people become aware of how climate change will impact them.
  • Younger people are feeling particularly anxious about the world they’re inheriting, research shows.
  • Insider spoke to experts and people with eco-anxiety to find out more about their worries.

Jennie Ferrara’s husband brought home the newspaper one day because he thought the front-page story would interest his wife. Instead, it almost made her faint.

The year was 2008, and some of the leading oil companies in the world were announcing plans to extract more oil from Canada’s tar sands – a move that would prove detrimental to the environment.

Ferrara, who is originally from Texas but lives in Denmark, had felt pessimistic about the environment for many years, but the headline that day tipped her over the edge.

“When I looked, just looked, at the front page, I practically went comatose,” Ferrara recalled to Insider.

“It feels like you’re suddenly zooming in on something, your body goes a bit numb and everything around you goes quiet … You lose all energy and question your will to live,” she said.

Ferrara was experiencing a form of so-called “eco-anxiety” – a term that’s officially been defined by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) ​​as “the chronic fear of environmental doom.”

She is among a growing number of people who have found that the rapidly declining state of the planet is impacting their mental health.

New York City historic flooding
New York City historic flooding Reuters

According to the latest research, “eco-anxiety” is more present than ever.

A recent survey published by Yale University found that more than 40% of Americans felt “helpless” about the state of the planet. And according to a 2020 poll by the APA, more than half of Americans said they were somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.

The world is waking up to climate change

“We’ve seen a growing number of people who are feeling an emotional response to what’s happening by living in such a changing world,” Leslie Davenport, a climate psychology consultant and therapist based in Tacoma, Washington, told Insider.

Davenport said that part of the reason behind the rise of “eco-dread” is that more people are realizing “how much climate change is impacting us on a personal level.”

This summer alone, Hurricane Ida submerged entire homes in water, much of Germany was destroyed by historic flooding, and wildfires in southern Europe and North America displaced hundreds of people.

“It was easier in the past to keep climate change as somewhere off in the future, something happening somewhere else to somebody else … But now, as the effects are on the rise, our responses are on the rise too,” Davenport added.

As a climate psychology consultant, Davenport works with clients who experience a whole spectrum of reactions to climate change.

Some – like Ferrara – experience very strong physical sensations. They have difficulties breathing or feel like they’re having a heart attack, she said.

Others have more subtle symptoms – they cry randomly, can’t sleep at night, or often feel irritable and on edge.

wildfire
Fred Heldreth covers his face for protection from the holy fire smoke burning through Orange and Riverside county in Lake Elsinore, CA. Maria Alejandra Cardona/Contributor/Los Angeles Times

 

Her clients vary in age, although research shows that specifically younger generations feel distraught about the planet they’re inheriting.

A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll from 2019 found that 57 percent of American teenagers said that climate change made them feel scared, while 52 percent said it made them angry.

In 2019, climate activist Clover Hogan set up Force of Nature, which aims to tackle this. Her team teaches students aged 11-24 about the climate crisis to help them navigate their anxiety and realize their potential to get involved.

“At the end of the day, none of us are responsible or capable of solving the climate crisis alone. We’re not capable of changing it overnight. Yet what we are capable of changing overnight, is our mindset,” Hogan told Insider.

“If we can change the way that we think about the issues, if we can change the way that we respond to those emotions and rather than running away from them, hold space for them and think about the power of them to create change, the more empowered and agency we are going to feel.”

California climate strike
Protesters are seen during a climate change demonstration shouting slogans while holding placards in Los Angeles, CA. Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

 

Ferrara has dealt with her climate-induced fears by channeling them into her own forms of activism.

In 2011, she started a blog called “Climate Worrier, made numerous podcasts about eco-anxiety, and is now teaching school children in Denmark about the climate and saving urban trees.

Apart from a few exceptions, she has stopped flying and said she hasn’t gotten a physical reaction from reading news headlines in years.

“We need to be careful and open and kind when we are talking about the climate crisis and climate anxiety because we’re often made to think that the problem lies with the individual, which makes it seem as though it’s the individual’s problem to fix,” she said. “It is not.”

Oil boom remakes N. Dakota county with fastest growth in US

Oil boom remakes N. Dakota county with fastest growth in US

Matthew Brown                  

WATFORD CITY, N.D. (AP) — First came the roughnecks and other oil field workers, almost all men.

Lured by steady wages as the nation climbed out of the Great Recession, they filled McKenzie County’s few motel rooms, then began sleeping in cars, tents, trailers — anything to hide from the cold wind cutting across the North Dakota prairie. Once empty dirt roads suddenly were clogged with tanker trucks. Crime rates spiked.

Soon everything shifted yet again: The workers’ spouses and children arrived. Classrooms swelled. Apartment buildings cropped up beside oil rigs. And the newcomers made this Northern Plains community their own.

The growth made McKenzie the nation’s fastest-growing county during the past decade, according to the Census Bureau. It swept through like a twisting dust devil, shattering the rural innocence of a region known for inhospitable winters and long summer days perfect for growing crops. But it also brought youth, diversity and better wages — breathing new life into somnolent towns that had been losing population since the 1930s.

Dana Amon, who grew up in a double-wide trailer on a farm on the edge of the county seat, Watford City, remembers riding her horse across fields now dotted with tracts of modest housing lit up at night by flares from nearby oil wells.

“Our little town just blew up at the seams,” she said.

FIGHTS AND FRENZY

Since the boom began in 2010, jobs in McKenzie County have come and gone with oil’s changing fortunes. Crude prices peaked last decade at more than $130 a barrel, fell below $40, then rebounded before falling again when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

McKenzie just kept growing.

Watford City — perched on a bluff, its skyline defined by a pair of grain elevators — spilled out onto surrounding farmland. The flat, largely barren landscape of Amon’s childhood now features mile after mile of worker camps, shopping centers, subdivisions, hotels, truck yards and warehouses.

When fights became frequent in bars along Main Street and fatal wrecks commonplace on the highways, people like Amon started to lock their doors at night.

Ten years on, the frenzy has settled. The wariness locals and newcomers held for one another eased. Along the way, lives got stitched together through school events, church services and along the sidelines of youth football games.

“I tell the locals, ‘If you guys kick me out, I’m not leaving. It’s my town,’” said Yolanda Rojas, a Tucson, Arizona, native who followed her husband to McKenzie County with their five children a year after he got a job in the oil fields.

From 2010 to 2014, the amount of crude produced in the county grew 1,800%. By the end of the decade, census figures show, its population more than doubled, to 14,704 residents.

Rojas and her husband, Ruben Vega, saved enough money to open a Mexican restaurant in March 2020 — just as the pandemic arrived. The business was teetering on failure when Rojas reached out to the community on social media. People in Watford City rallied to help, regularly ordering takeout to keep the family afloat.

Many of the customers were Hispanic and unknown to Rojas. Only when the census data came out did she learn that the number of Hispanics increased tenfold over the decade, a stark cultural shift for a community long dominated by farmers of northern European descent.

Hispanics now make up about 10% of the population — a share roughly equal to American Indians in the county, which includes part of the Fort Berthold Reservation. The reservation’s three tribes — the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara — trace their roots in the area to long before the first European settlers.

‘A BIG, EXTENDED FAMILY’

Oil was first discovered in McKenzie County in the 1950s, but it was the industry’s fracking revolution that opened once inaccessible crude reserves and transformed North Dakota into a global energy player. Tens of billions of barrels of oil have yet to be tapped, according to government estimates, and new wells keep getting drilled.

County officials say the growth is far from over. School enrollment tripled over the past decade and is expected to double again by 2030.

Pump jacks pulling oil from the ground dot the landscape across the county’s 2,860 square miles (7,400 square kilometers). Bordered by the Yellowstone River to the north, Lake Sakakawea to the east and Montana to the west, McKenzie is larger in land mass than Delaware.

Howdy Lawlar, who chairs the McKenzie County Commission and whose family has grown wheat and raised cattle northwest of Watford City for five generations, recalled widespread frustration among farmers as thousands of oil trucks clogged roads not designed for such traffic.

Leaving his farm and trying to turn left into Watford City, Lawlar could wait for an hour for a gap in traffic.

Bypasses were built to ease congestion. Pipelines went in to replace tanker trucks. At the height of the boom, almost 4,000 trucks daily crawled through Watford City. Recent counts tallied just over 320 trucks a day.

More police officers were hired to keep order and new schools built to get students out of temporary trailers.

“I feel like we’re becoming a big, extended family,” Lawlar said. “It’s a good thing.”

But while most families age, this one has become younger, with a median age of 30 compared to 39 in 2010. It’s also more prosperous, with median household income increasing 61% to almost $78,000, according to census data.

The money lured J.T. Smith, a 31-year-old native of the Fort Worth, Texas, area who took an oil field job in McKenzie County six years ago. His parents had moved to North Dakota for oil work several years before. At first he found the region bleak and uninviting.

Smith went back to Texas, where his wife and two children had remained, swearing he’d never come back.

STAYING FOR COMMUNITY

A few years later, another job offer in North Dakota came his way, so he decided to try again. This time he brought his family, and the rhythms of their lives have grown comfortable.

J.T. Smith leaves before dark for his job as an oil field safety adviser, climbing into a white company pickup and joining throngs of near-identical pickups that fan out every morning to drilling rigs, gas processing plants and pipeline construction projects across western North Dakota.

An hour later, the Smiths’ 10-year-old son climbs onto a school bus that falls in with dozens of others funneling students to a gleaming new elementary and high school complex at the edge of town.

Smith and his wife, Virginia, have become deeply involved with the Assembly of God church, which doubled in size in recent years to about 400 members. Their children have made friends through a mixed martial arts gym.

Now when the Smiths go to the grocery store, they’re bound to run into a half-dozen friends. It’s one of many glimpses of lingering small-town charm.

“You’re here for a month and everybody knows you,” Virginia Smith said.

Despite the drastic changes over the last decade, the open landscape around Watford City retains a feeling of remoteness.

As Lawlar, the county commission chairman, worked recently to replace a barbed-wire fence bordering wheat fields that stretched to the horizon, the only sign of industry was the occasional truck rumbling on a distant road.

Grasshoppers sprung up ahead of Lawlar as he silently walked the fence line. His farmhand, Charlie Lewis, lumbered along in a Bobcat they used to push steel fenceposts into the dry dirt.

Lewis came for oil field work, then took a job with Lawlar during a downturn in crude prices. He plans to make this place his home and start a family.

“People come for the work and stay for the community,” Lewis said. “The only time I think of going back is when it’s 40 below.”

After a Summer of Disasters, Some Lawmakers See a Chance for Climate Action

After a Summer of Disasters, Some Lawmakers See a Chance for Climate Action

Coral Davenport and Brad Plumer            
A flooded underpass on Queens Boulevard in New York after torrential rains from storms precipitated by Hurricane Ida, Sept. 2, 2021. (Dakota Santiago/The New York Times)
A flooded underpass on Queens Boulevard in New York after torrential rains from storms precipitated by Hurricane Ida, Sept. 2, 2021. (Dakota Santiago/The New York Times)

 

WASHINGTON — As the country reels from the cascade of deaths and devastation wrought by this summer’s record floods, heat waves, droughts and wildfires, President Joe Biden and progressive Democrats are using the moment to push for aggressive climate provisions in a sweeping $3.5 trillion budget bill.

On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader, said that when the Senate returns to Washington on Tuesday to continue work on budget legislation, it would include provisions designed to reduce fossil fuel emissions linked to extreme weather.

Congress is also considering a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that includes money to help communities gird against climate disasters. The Senate passed the bill last month and the House is expected to vote on it by late September.

That legislation includes $47 billion over five years in funding to improve the nation’s flood defenses, limit damage from wildfires, develop new sources of drinking water in areas plagued by drought and relocate some communities away from risky areas. It also contains $27 billion in spending to help harden electric grids against extreme weather events that are causing more frequent blackouts.

Schumer said the infrastructure and budget bills were paramount to prepare communities for more powerful storms, fires, droughts and floods and to stop the pollution that would heat the planet further and lead to even more extreme weather.

“Global warming is upon us, and it’s going to get worse and worse and worse unless we do something about it, and that’s why it’s so imperative to pass the two bills, the infrastructure bill and the budget reconciliation bill,” he said.

Of the two pieces of legislation, the budget bill faces the more perilous path. Republicans are uniformly opposed to it because it also includes a raft of social spending, like funds for universal child care.

Some Democrats are also unhappy with the $3.5 trillion price tag and want to scale it back, although a few who initially balked at the cost now say they may make an exception when it comes to climate provisions.

The budget bill will include a potent tool to cut greenhouse gas emissions — an incentive program designed to replace most of the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants over the next decade with wind, solar and nuclear plants. It would be the strongest policy to fight climate change enacted by the United States.

Biden and progressive Democrats say the summer disasters that have shocked the country, from lethal flooding in New York to severe drought in the Midwest to raging wildfires in California, will give them leverage during negotiations on the budget bill. Progressive Democrats also hope to use the budget bill to make polluters pay for those clean power programs — for example, by imposing tariffs on imported goods from countries that don’t regulate greenhouse pollution, and fees on emissions of methane, a planet-warming gas that leaks from oil and gas wells.

It remains far from certain whether those provisions will make it into the budget bill.

Because no Republicans are expected to vote for the final package, Democrats will need every vote in their razor-thin House and Senate majorities to push it through.

But this week, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., called for Congress to “hit a strategic pause” on the bill. In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, he wrote, “I have always said if I can’t explain it, I can’t vote for it, and I can’t explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion.”

A spokeswoman for Manchin did not return an email requesting comment.

Manchin, whose coal-rich state could be hurt by climate legislation designed to phase out fossil fuels, has been noncommittal about the program to replace coal- and gas-fired plants with zero-emission energy sources. If he or any other Democrat from a coal, oil or gas state opposed the provision, it could be dropped from the final version.

But Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., chief author of the power plant provision, said she believed the extreme weather that has so recently scorched, deluged and destroyed so many regions of the country would make it harder in the next two weeks for any Democrat to justify cutting it.

“For the last couple of days, this part of the state has been in one of the most extreme droughts that we’ve seen in a generation,” said Smith, who spoke by telephone from Minnesota. “I spent yesterday talking with cattle producers. They are liquidating their herds way earlier than they would have. They don’t have the feed and forage to keep their herds together. And I can’t believe I’m the only senator hearing about this while I’m home, when you think about the reach of extreme weather across the country. And I think that dynamic is shaping the negotiations.”

Meanwhile, in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, Reps. Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Henry Cuellar of Texas, both moderate Democrats, laid out “overarching principles” they wanted to see as lawmakers write the details of the budget bill. Both members were among the group of moderate and conservative Democrats who had recoiled at passing the initial $3.5 trillion budget before Pelosi issued a series of commitments, including assurances that the measure would be fully financed and would not include any provisions that could not clear the Senate.

But in the letter, first reported by Politico and later obtained by The New York Times, the two Democrats said they were willing to make a possible exception for spending to address climate change because nonpartisan cost estimates “do not adequately account for the future costs associated with inaction on the climate crisis.”

While efforts to reduce emissions remain contentious, there is a broader consensus around the need to prepare communities for the impacts of extreme weather. Few corners of the country have been left unscathed by the string of disasters this summer: overflowing rivers in Tennessee, a hurricane in Louisiana, a deadly heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and floods in New York City.

The infrastructure bill approved by the Senate would mark a large shift in the federal government’s approach to extreme weather events. Rather than simply paying to rebuild communities after disasters, the bill would provide the largest single infusion of federal money ever to prepare states and cities for future climate impacts ahead of time.

For instance, the Department of Transportation would get $8.7 billion to help states address future climate risks to their roads and transit systems. Much of the nation’s infrastructure was designed to handle weather conditions of the past, which are becoming increasingly obsolete as the planet warms. This week, New York City’s subway, parts of which were designed a century ago, was paralyzed after a storm poured huge amounts of water into stations and tunnels.

Many of those provisions have drawn support from Republicans, including those who have dismissed the threat of climate change in the past. In an interview with CNBC this week, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., urged his party to rally around the infrastructure bill after Hurricane Ida left a trail of destruction in his state.

“If we are going to make our country more resilient to natural disasters wherever they are, we have to start preparing now,” Cassidy said. “I’m sure hoping that Republicans look around my state, see this damage and say, ‘If there’s money for resiliency, money to harden the grid, money to help sewer and water, then maybe this is something we should be for.’ ”

But while climate experts praised many of the resilience measures in the bill, they cautioned that it quite likely wouldn’t be enough. In 2018, the federal government’s National Climate Assessment estimated that adapting to climate change could ultimately cost “tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year.”

“If we really want to get ahead of the curve of ever-steepening climate impacts, it’s not enough to do a one-off resilience bill every five years,” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We need to start weaving resilience measures into every single dollar that governments spend on infrastructure.”

For now, there seems to be little appetite in Congress for enlarging the adaptation provisions in the infrastructure bill, although some lawmakers have pushed for additional measures in the budget bill. Some progressive Democrats have, for instance, pushed for the creation of the Civilian Climate Corps, modeled after a New Deal program, that would hire young Americans to work on climate resilience projects.

But even if adaptation measures garner wide bipartisan support, some experts warn that they could soon reach their limit unless nations like the United States rapidly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and slow the pace of global warming.

“We’re not even ready for the disasters that are coming at us now,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And there’s just no way we’re going to be able to get ahead of what’s coming in the future unless we can get our emissions and climate change in check.”

Over 200 medical journals warn climate crisis is the “greatest threat to public health”

Over 200 medical journals warn climate crisis is the “greatest threat to public health”

Rebecca Falconer                      

 

Global warming is affecting people’s health and officials need to urgently address the climate crisis now as it can’t wait until the COVID-19 pandemic is over, editors of over 230 medical journals warned Sunday evening.

Why it matters: This is the first time so many publications have come together to issue such a joint statement to world leaders, underscoring the severity of the situation — with the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal among those issuing the warning.

  • Ahead of this November’s UN general assembly and the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, with the journals warn: “The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C and to restore nature.”

Threat level: “Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world,” states the editorial, also run in the New England Journal of Medicine, the International Nursing Review, the Chinese Science Bulletin and Brazil’s Revista de Saude Publica.

  • “Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with Covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.”
  • The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming could reach 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared to pre-industrial levels by 2030.

Of note: World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement ahead of the editorial’s publication that the “risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease.”

  • “We will end the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s no vaccine for the climate crisis,” Tedros added.

State of play: The editorial reports that heat-related mortality among people older than 65 has risen by over 50% in the past 20 years.

  • Global warming has also impacted on farming production, “hampering efforts to reduce under-nutrition,” the journal editors-in-chief write.

“Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.”

The bottom line: “The science is unequivocal: a global increase of 1.5° C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse,” the editorial warns.

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