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There’s a new term for all the work needed to prepare coasts and cities for the consequences of climate change, and it’s blissfully free of the words “climate change.” Introducing “future-proofing.” As in, it’s time to “future-proof” Texas to brace for future disasters like Hurricane Harvey, according to a new comprehensive report.
Prepared by Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s reconstruction commission, the report recommends myriad ways for the state to “future-proof”: elevate homes, construct storm-surge barriers, and offer buyouts for homes at high risk of flooding, to name a few.
What’s more interesting is what’s missing. Take the time to read the 168-page report, and you’ll find mention of rising sea levels and more intense storms. You might scratch your head upon finding phrases such as “changing human and environmental conditions” or “changing future weather patterns.” It would be hard to miss “future-proofing,” a phrase that’s employed 44 times. But you won’t find the exact words “climate change” anywhere except for the footnotes, as Dallas News reported on Thursday.
If you were reading very closely, you’d find a sole reference to the “changing climate” sitting in plain sight at the top of page 114. Score! (Governor Abbott shakes fist at sky.) The endnotes include scientific studies whose titles feature the words, too.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that climate change only makes one meaningful appearance in the report. When Abbott, a widely-reported climate denier, sent a 301-page plea to the federal government asking for aid after Hurricane Harvey last year, he neglected to mention “climate change,” too. His request did, however, use the term “future-proofing.”
Maybe avoiding the double-C phrase is just how you get things done in Republican-controlled Texas. Sure, sure, multiple scientific studies showed that climate change made Harvey wetter and more likely to occur. But why say it if you don’t need to?
The new report reflects a pattern of censorship in the Trump era. The Federal Emergency Management Agency dropped “climate change” from its long-term strategy this year, replacing it with oblique terms such as “pre-disaster mitigation.” The phrase has also vanished from government websites, with euphemisms like “sustainability” and “resilience” taking its place. Even National Science Foundation scientists have begun dropping the term from public summaries of their research, replacing it with terminology like “extreme weather” and “environmental change.”
Here’s the thing: According to the recent National Climate Assessment, Texas is unprepared for sea-level rise, stronger hurricanes, and intense flooding. Even if you don’t say the climate is changing, it still is.
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CNN put out a video this week titled, “Don’t believe these climate change lies.” It’s a change of pace for a mainstream media outlet long accustomed to presenting climate change as if it’s an issue that’s still debated by the scientific community.
CNN’s two-and-a-half-minute video features the network’s team of meteorologists debunking a bunch of talking points frequently spouted by deniers. Yes, the climate has always been changing. But never at this rate, the video says. “Only man-made influences, including the burning of fossil fuels, could have created this crisis.”
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As welcome as this is, there’s still a glaring problem: Two of the network’s four examples of how climate deniers operate are clips from CNN itself. One of those deniers, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, was hired by CNN as a senior political commentator last January. Right after the Trump administration released the 4th National Climate Assessment in November, Santorum was on air, arguing that “the reality is that a lot of these scientists are driven by the money that they receive.”
The next day, CNN invited Tom DeLay, the former Republican House majority leader, to discuss the assessment. He promptly unloaded a heap of nearly identical denier BS on viewers: “The report is nothing more than a rehash of age-old, 10 to 20 year assumptions made by scientists getting paid to further the politics of global warming.”
In other words, CNN is telling us not to believe these myths about climate change while giving a platform to people who … tell us these myths about climate change. Oy gevalt.
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CNN gave a platform to climate deniers, then debunked their lies
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
“Gender and climate are inextricably linked,” said environmentalist and author Katharine Wilkinson on stage at TEDWomen last week, a gathering of women thought leaders and activists in Palm Desert, California.
Women, she says, are disproportionately affected by climate change. When communities are decimated by floods or droughts, tsunamis or fire, the most vulnerable among them suffer the most. Because women across the world have fewer rights, less money, and fewer freedoms, in those moments of extreme loss, women are often hit the hardest. “There’s greater risk of displacement, higher odds of being injured or killed during a natural disaster. Prolonged drought can precipitate early marriage, as families contend with scarcity. Floods can force last-resort prostitution as women struggle to make ends meet. These dynamics are most acute under conditions of poverty,” she says.
With several new reports painting an increasingly bleak picture of the state of the world’s climate, Wilkinson is delivering her message at a time when leaders on the global stage are looking for solutions. As thousands of people gather this week at a major climate summit known as COP24, Wilkinson is making a plea to open people’s eyes to one fact: Women’s rights are Earth’s rights. “In my experience, to have eyes wide open is to hold a broken heart every day,” she says.
But she has hope. Though women feel the effects of climate the most, they also represent an opportunity. “To address climate change, we must make gender equity a reality. And in the face of a seemingly impossible challenge, women and girls are a fierce source of possibility,” Wilkinson says. She and her team at the nonprofit Project Drawdown have been studying the real-world steps people can take to fix climate change, resulting in a best-selling 2017 book highlighting the top 100 solutions to reverse warming.
Her argument is that if women are empowered in three distinct ways, the downstream effects on the environment will make a huge difference in the fight for climate change. She argues that if women were treated more equally professionally, they’d have fewer kids and the land they farm would be more efficient, all of which would help save the planet.
“Women are the primary farmers of the world,” Wilkinson says. They produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in lower-income countries, she says, on small plots. These farmers are known as “smallholders.”
Yet due to local laws and entrenched biases, women farmers are given fewer resources and support from their governments, and they have fewer rights to their own land. For example, in some countries women are not allowed to own their own land, which makes it impossible for them to use the land as collateral for a loan to buy farming equipment. In other places, women are are not able to borrow money without a man’s signature. These restrictions hamper their ability to run their farms efficiently, leading to lower yields.
This is a problem not just for their earning potential, but for the Earth. Every year, humans clear-cut forests to create more agriculture land to grow crops to feed the world’s growing population. In turn, this deforestation increases the rate of climate change.
Instead of clear-cutting new land, why not work to make the existing farms run by women more efficient? “Close that gap and farm yields rise by 20 to 30 percent,” says Wilkinson. “Support women smallholders, realize higher yields, avoid deforestation, and sustain the life-giving power of forests.” If women’s farms yielded as much on average as farms run by men across the world, it would stop approximately 2 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere between now and 2050. “That’s on par with the impact household recycling can have globally,” she says.
Besides addressing inequality in agriculture, Wilkinson says giving women access to high-quality voluntary reproductive health care would have tremendous benefit for the climate.
“Curbing growth of our human population is a side effect,” she says — one that would reduce global emissions. Do that by making birth control and medical care more available to women across the world.
And do it by educating women. Wilkinson notes that more than 130 million women worldwide are denied access to school. Yet the more education a woman attains, the fewer children she has. From a conservation perspective, empowering women to have smaller families is an objectively positive outcome. “The right to go to school effects how many human beings live on this planet,” says Wilkinson.
With these three changes — empowerment of women farmers, increased global access to family planning, and the right to an education — Wilkinson and her team at Project Drawdown predict that by midcentury, improving gender equality could equal 1 billion fewer people on Earth.
“Gender equity is on par with wind turbines and solar panels and forests,” Wilkinson says, adding, “This does not mean women and girls are responsible for fixing everything. But we probably will.”
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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Villablino, Spain — When the shutters come down on the last 10 privately owned pits in northwest Spain’s once mighty coal industry later this month, there will be tears and trauma in the region where the country’s mining unions were born.
There is also a fragile hope that a better, cleaner future could follow — but a barely hidden warning that the despair that propelled Trump to power in the U.S. lurks in the wings if it does not.
Spain’s uneconomic coal industry has been killed by a pincer movement: cheaper imports from developing countries on one flank and falling renewable energy prices on the other, fanned by binding E.U. targets to reduce emissions and a dawning awareness of coal’s climate and other environmental costs.
Industry shutdowns are painful, especially in sectors like coal mining which go back generations. The risk is unemployment and social dislocation. But this one may play out differently: in a “just transition” deal — brokered by unions and a new leftwing government — that could have implications for other coal-producing countries, including the U.S.
Spain plans to support laid-off miners and their communities by plowing $285 million over a decade into compensation payouts, retraining for low-carbon jobs and environmental restoration work in pit communities. The aim is to ensure a safety net to catch those whose jobs will disappear as the economy shifts to a low-carbon one. Politicians and union officials say the deal will ensure both environmental and social protection as the economy shifts away from coal.
However, on the ground in Spain, there is suspicion about this promised new future from workers who have watched an industry, identity, and way of life dying around for them for some two decades. More than a thousand miners and contractors will be laid off around Christmas, a third of them in the northern region of Castilla y León, home to Villablino, and there is concern over whether new jobs will materialize.
“New jobs are a utopia in our country,” says Salvador Osario, a 47-year-old miner from Castilla y León who took early retirement after 20 years of digging coal. “The miners are alone. No one wants to support us. Not the left- or the right-wing parties. Even the unions are divided.”
Salvador Osario, 47, is a retired miner in the Castilla y León region of northern Spain.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost
The valleys of Castilla y León once thrummed to the sound of the coal industry, and relics from its retreat are everywhere. Pit shafts litter the hillsides and monuments to miners are sprinkled around town squares. Diner cafes have stickers of miners on the doors, and coal train statuettes outside.
Coal workers here have a brave history of fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. In the early 1960s, miners in Villablino formed Spain’s first clandestine union, the Confederacion Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), which continued the fight against the dictator General Franco.
Spain’s coal industry employed more than 100,000 miners back then. That number had fallen to 45,000 by the late 1980s — nearly half of them in Castilla y León — and it continued to drop. More than 5,000 still worked in the northwest mines of Castilla y León, Asturias, Aragón, and Palencia at the start of this century. Next year, there will be none.
A monument to coal miners in Villablino, Spain.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost
The dying embers of Spain’s coal industry may leave a sad legacy for the miners, but coal needs to be phased out if we are to keep temperature increases below the levels at which we’ll see catastrophic climate change, climate scientists say. Coal emits more carbon dioxide than any other fossil fuel, as well as deadly toxins such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter, which are responsible for more than 20,000 deaths each year in Europe alone.
“The deal is a way forward for many problems that will appear and we are committed to it,” said Mariano Sanz Lubeiro, CCOO’s confederal secretary, from his Madrid office.
This sentiment is echoed by Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for the ecological transition. “We have worked hard to restore trust in regions that have suffered a long restructuring process, negotiating and coming up with social protection measures that the unions could accept,” she told HuffPost. “Now we have to deliver. Climate ambition and social protection have to go hand in hand if we want to succeed.”
“The objective we have is that the miners will be offered a [green-collar] job. We will have to register all of them. Instead of one year, it may take one year and three months, but that is very much the plan,”Laura Martin-Murillo, a government negotiator, said.
As well as work in solar or wind energy, she also believes there will be jobs in biomass, making energy from organic matter such as wood pellets or agricultural waste. They are also thinking about labor-intensive work such as retrofitting buildings to be more environmentally friendly.
But miners on eligible contracts will have to live on social benefits until an environmental restoration plan kicks in next autumn, at the earliest. Those who claim the retirement offer will take home around $20,000 a year on average.
This community has been here before. When the last round of closures happened 20 years ago, the miners affected felt it was not a just transition.
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Anxiety is clear in the bleary eyes of Rolando Prieto Perez, 43, an electrician in the century-old La Escondida pit who has just come off a night shift when I meet him in the Villablino CCOO office.
“We’re suffering from depression,” he says wearily. “We have the blues. The situation is unpredictable and our futures look bleak. Sometimes we just feel confused.”
Rolando Prieto Perez, 43, a miner.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost
Prieto Perez is a few years too young to qualify for early retirement, and while the government is registering all miners for new jobs, these could arrive at any time between March 2019 and March 2020: months, if not years, after the mine closures.
Stuck between the beneficiaries of the post-war boom and the clean energy transition, Prieto Perez says he is part of “the unlucky generation.”
Mining is “part of the DNA of this region and its people,” says Sanz Lubeiro, CCOO’s confederal secretary. “That is why its loss has been so traumatic for the community.”
“If the transition is not done right,” he added, “we are preparing the ground for populism which blames climate action or technology or migrant workers,” he says.
There are signs that this may already be beginning in Villablino. “I don’t support this climate change idea,”Prieto Perez says. “I consider this news very manipulated. The government only speaks about global warming, but they want to close the mine for [economic] reasons.”
Omar Garcia Alvarez, a local miners leader, claims that if every miner were guaranteed a job in clean energy, there would be no problem with closing the mines. But “there is no ecological transition,” he says. “We don’t believe in the deal because we don’t trust the government.”
Miners Salvador Osario and Omar Garcia Alvarez look through a window in derelict mine.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost
He notes that the $285 million will have to be split between four regions over 10 years — giving Castilla y León only 6 million euros (or $6.8 million) a year with which to heal its wounds.
Just 39 years old, Garcia Alvarez was forced to quit his pit job last August by spinal injuries caused by his job. He now speaks with a sense of romanticism about the industry and the solidarity it produced.
“All people have a right to defend their jobs,” he says when asked what he thinks about U.S. coal miners, who are facing their own struggle. “I don’t agree with Donald Trump’s politics, but if he supports the miners, it is very good news for them.” Appalachia’s miners are widely thought to have helped Donald Trump win in Kentucky.
Yet Trump’s promises to bring back coal haven’t been fulfilled. “Across the USA you can see the devastation already caused in communities that have lost livelihoods that were dependent on [fossil fuel] corporations who made the decision to exit,” said Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union confederation.
Burrow said Spain’s scheme should be a model for countries such as the U.S. to achieve their own just transition away from fossil fuels. “We need urgent climate ambition to save the planet — and humanity itself,” she said. “But if you don’t negotiate with working people, if plans are not transparent and communities don’t have trust in their futures, then resistance to climate action is absolutely a risk.”
Clean air and a climate-safe future mean little when you can’t put food on the table right now, says Brad Markell, the executive director of the industrial union council of AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S.
“There is no question that people in coal mining regions and around coal-fired generation plants thought that Trump was going to save them. He said he would and they thought it was worth taking a chance on him,” he said.
Markell would not comment on the gamble’s wisdom, despite mounting evidence that miners are now suffering from it. But he questioned whether a deal like Spain’s would translate to the more cutthroat U.S. labor market, where it could involve a 50 percent pay cut on a fossil fuel worker’s hourly rate. Starting pay in the U.S. solar sector can be as low as $15 an hour.
“It would be to everyone’s benefit if the new jobs created in the clean energy sector were high paying — and made available to people losing their jobs — but they won’t be, because in the USA, you’re on your own. That’s how things work here. We have a general deficit of working-class power and until we are able to reclaim that, it will be difficult to achieve economic justice.”
The Spanish government will this month outline how its just transition strategy will be rolled out nationally across all industries, including the car industry.
The issue is also taking center stage at the U.N. climate summit in Katowice which started this week, with Poland trumpeting a just transition for weaning countries off fossil fuels. Critics, however, say the aim is to mask international divisions over emissions-cutting obligations and targets, and divert attention from Poland’s own lack of climate ambition.
In Villablino, Eduardo Gonzalez Menazas, 60, a retired miner turned environmental activist, agrees that a just transition is “fundamental, very necessary, but at the moment too slow.”
He estimates only around 30 percent of his fellow miners believe that global warming is a problem and that saddens him, he said. In his spare time he plants trees around deserted mines. Menazas has noticed that the valley’s climate is already warming, with less snow and bird species such as the capercaillie nesting higher up.
“All people in Spain are responsible for this disaster,” he said.
“The energy transition has to be just because miners also need help from the government,” Gonzalez Menazas said. “In this area, there are no choices for people and that is also a problem. The transition has to be for everyone.”
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Trump wants to ramp up coal. Spain has found a way to quit it.
This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
David Attenborough, the famed naturalist and conservation advocate, issued a dire warning for the world during a speech at the United Nations’ annual climate summit on Monday: Act now, or the natural world, humanity included, may soon collapse.
“Right now we’re facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” Attenborough, 92, said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”
The comments came at the beginning of a two-week climate conference in Katowice, Poland, where emissaries from nearly 200 nations are meeting to determine how the world can dramatically scale back greenhouse gas emissions to abide by the landmark Paris climate agreement and, by doing so, stave off the worst effects of climate change.
“The world’s people have spoken. Their message is clear: Time is running out,” Attenborough said Monday. “They want you, the decision-makers, to act now. They’re behind you, along with civil society represented here today.”
The conservationist is serving in the “People’s Seat” during the conference, a role in which he will present comments from members of the public affected by climate change to the dignitaries and officials present at the summit.
The U.N. released a dire report in October that warned of severe, climate-related effects by as early as 2040 unless there is dramatic action to curb global emissions. The effects would include a mass die-off of coral reefs and an increase in extreme weather events. The world is working to implement the commitments made under the Paris Agreement but is still far off track from preventing catastrophic levels of warming.
At the same time, U.S. President Donald Trump has regularly denied the existence of climate change and its links to humanity. Following the White House release last month of a sweeping, 1,656-page report that warned of a bleak future for the country, Trump alluded that he was too intelligent to believe in the phenomenon. He has also moved to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris pact.
The U.N. has urged world leaders to unveil ambitious efforts to tackle emissions, calling this month’s summit the most important in years.
“Climate change is running faster than we are, and we must catch up sooner rather than later, before it is too late,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said at the beginning of the event. “For many people, regions, and even countries, this is already a matter of life or death.”
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David Attenborough’s dire climate warning: ‘Our greatest threat in thousands of years’
KATOWICE, POLAND — There’s a specter hanging over the COP24 climate talks, happening this week in the small city of Katowice, Poland. It’s not the goalpost-moving report that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released two months ago about the need to limit warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (instead of 3.6 degrees). It’s not the conspicuous absence of prominent U.S. politicians — with the exception of former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who parachuted in, Terminator-style, to brag about his four low-emission Hummers. (Wait, what?)
Nope, the cloud over COP24 is coal dust. Literally. Smokestacks and coal plumes are visible from the spaceship-shaped conference center, and the Wujek coal mine is less than three miles away. And if you thought Poland would try to downplay its historical (and, well, current) reliance on coal, you’d be wrong: The booth for the town of Katowice, sitting right next to the official one for all of Poland, proudly touts coal. And not just a little coal — coal made into soap, coal made into earrings and other jewelry, coal under glass, coal in cages — lots and lots of coal.
This is no accident. The host city is in the heart of the Polish region of Silesia, which sits on a lucrative coal deposit. A Katowice native running the booth explained that here everyone has a connection to coal: a family member or friend who has either worked in the mines or supported the industry in some other form. Coal isn’t just an energy source in Katowice — it’s a way of life.
COP24’s president, Michał Kurtyka, a state secretary in Poland’s Ministry of Energy, argued in his opening remarks that bringing the climate summit to Katowice was a strategic decision: to exhibit a city and region in need of transition away from its lifeblood. “How does one tell a region of 5 million people — in over 70 cities across the region — to just move on, your world is that of the past?” he asked the assembled dignitaries.
It’s a rhetorical question familiar in the United States, where coal-mining jobs have been on a fairly steady decline since the 1980s. But while coal in the U.S. now makes up 30 percent of electricity generation, thanks largely to falling natural gas prices, in Poland coal still accounts for almost 80 percent. And the government is planning the construction of further plants.
“Every government in Poland is coal, coal,” Monika Sadkowska, a Warsaw-based climate activist, told Grist. “The only strong worker union in Poland is mining. And every government is afraid of them.”
Even as the IPCC declared in its October report that coal must be almost entirely phased out by mid-century to keep average global temperatures from cresting over the 2.7 degrees F mark, Polish President Andrzej Duda has been hesitant to renounce it. “According to experts, we have coal deposits that will last 200 years,” he said at a press conference on Monday. “It would be hard to expect us to give up on it totally.”
Soap made from coal is displayed at the Katowice booth at the COP24 climate talks.Meghan Shea
Instead, the Polish government is promoting “carbon neutral” ways to have its coal and burn it, too. In a pamphlet handed out at the Polish country booth, the delegation is promoting “forest coal farms,” or tree-planting projects that will “enable the absorbance of even more CO2” from the country’s massive coal installations.
At a press conference, Robert Cyglicki, the director of Greenpeace for central and eastern Europe, was blunt about the scientific reality of such a project. “One coal power plant, Bełchatów, emits more annually than all Polish forests can absorb,” he said of the world’s largest brown coal-burning facility. Yes, forests are great carbon sinks. But they’re no match for all of Poland’s old, dirty coal plants.
And while Poland has started spreading the gospel of coal at COP24, the U.S. is poised to join the chorus. Last year, at COP23 in Bonn, Germany, the Trump administration ran a coal-focused side event that was interrupted by young protestors. This year, it has a similar gathering in the works, and reports say the U.S. delegation is likely to push for coal to be part of any future global energy mix.
Amid the heavy coal boosterism, this year’s conference has brought attention to the plight of workers whose livelihoods will be changed under an energy transformation. France’s recent “yellow vest” protests were in response to an increased fuel tax, and the populism spreading across Europe is omnipresent at COP24.
In Katowice, most delegates are calling for a “just transition” — a switch in energy sources that doesn’t leave society’s most vulnerable behind. Just as Trump has promised to save the coal industry, Poland’s leaders are promising to provide alternative livelihoods for their countrymen currently working in its mines and coal-fired plants.
Piotr Trzaskowski, the Polish organizer of 350.org, says the “just transition” talk in Poland is just that — talk. Coal is king here, and as President Duda suggested, Polish officials aren’t likely to abandon it. “Their vision is making sure it stays, but just tweaking it here and there,” he told Grist.
Meanwhile, attendees representing developing nations may be less concerned about what happens to today’s fossil fuel workers than with the fact that climate change’s worst effects are still on the horizon.
“Small islands feel like the ‘just transition’ conversation is only happening vis a vis workers who might lose their jobs,” explains Anabella Rosemberg, the international program director of Greenpeace. “They say,’ What about us? Yes they will lose jobs, but we are sinking.’ The ‘just transition’ for them is 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).”
But to even dream of averting 2.7 degrees F will involve phasing out coal — and coal workers’ jobs — fast.
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The holidays are a wonderful time to celebrate friends and family and linger in feelings of joy and gratitude. It’s also a great time to get your consumer habits in check!
Have a zero waster in your life who is trying to cut down on excess? Here are a few thoughtful gift ideas that won’t make them squirm, but smile instead!
Made from renewable, recyclable materials, these gorgeous steel and bamboo chopsticks are perfect for the foodie in your life! Plus, they come in a lovely little carry case, so they can be easily stashed in one’s purse.
Typical health and beauty products are designed for disposal and contribute to a significant portion of household waste. These beautifully crafted products may be used again and again, till the end of their life when they can be composted.
Coffee cup, to-go tin, cutlery…this kit has everything one might need to go out for lunch without creating an ounce of garbage. Bonus: these are perfect for picnics! You might just want to pick one up for yourself.
Perfect for that person in your life who loves luxury, this body oil smells sweet and nourishes the body with all sorts of delicious all-natural ingredients.
Help your recipient share their love for Mother Nature with the world! This bag will help them keep plastic bags out of landfills and make grocery shopping a whole lot more interesting.
This tiny but mighty pocket knife will be a no-brainer addition to your recipient’s “phone, wallet, keys” list. It has a million uses: cut off tags, open packages…you name it!
Now your loved one can talk, text and tweet the sustainable way! This case is durable, eye-catching and biodegradable. No guilt. Tons of style.
Zero waste makeup doesn’t have to be crunchy. It’s classy too! Pick up this delightful hazy mauve lip paint if you want something out there. It’s flattering on every skin tone.
Say goodbye to plastic water bottles! This lightweight bottle will serve every need on the go. Made from silicone, its spiral design allows it to collapse to half its size. Especially great in airports, coffee shops and on hikes!
Throwaway shampoo bottles are now a thing of the past! Plaine has done an incredible job designing a subscription service that delivers top-tier beauty products like shampoo and body lotion in refillable stainless steel containers. This is a serious zero waste win.
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.
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This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Three days after the Camp Fire erupted, incinerating the Northern California town of Paradise and killing 85 people, Katrina Sawa found herself struggling to breathe.
But Sawa wasn’t anywhere near Paradise. She lives almost 100 miles away in Roseville, a suburb northeast of Sacramento. Sawa puffed on her emergency asthma inhaler over and over again.
“Usually, I use it once a month,” said Sawa, a 48-year-old business coach who has had asthma since she was 13. “After using it four times in one day, I knew it was time to go to urgent care.” There, doctors had her inhale a powerful steroid medication to soothe her inflamed airways.
For two weeks after the fire ignited, the air in Northern California, stretching as far as 200 miles from the flames, was so full of smoke that it was deemed unhealthy to breathe, especially for people with heart and respiratory ailments.
But the health problems Sawa and others experienced while the blaze raged are just the beginning of effects that could plague people from Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay Area long after the smoke clears.
An analysis of hospital data by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that emergency room visits surged several months after a previous large wildfire was extinguished.
Three to five months after the 37,000-acre Tubbs Fire in Napa and Sonoma Valleys in October 2017, the region’s emergency rooms treated about 20 percent more patients for respiratory and cardiac ailments compared with previous years, according to the analysis, which used state data. At the time, the Tubbs Fire was the most destructive in California history, killing 22 people and destroying nearly 6,000 structures.
Seven of nine hospitals in Napa and Sonoma counties reported either significantly or slightly more cardiovascular and respiratory cases from January through March 2018 compared with the same period in 2016 and 2017. For instance, at Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center in Sonoma County’s largest city, emergency room visits for respiratory problems jumped by 570, or 37 percent, from January through March 2018 compared with the same period in 2017. Twenty miles down Highway 101 at Petaluma Valley Hospital, heart cases increased by 61 patients, or 50 percent.
Medical experts say these findings raise troubling questions about the long-term health effects of wildfires, which, worsened by drought and global warming, are raging across the West.
The life-threatening effects of smoke disproportionately harm the elderly, children, and low-income people of color. More than 2.3 million adults and 644,000 children in California have asthma and another 1.7 million suffer from heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and California Department of Public Health. Adult asthma rates are highest for multiracial people and African Americans, while heart ailments tend to afflict the state’s poorest and least educated residents across all racial groups.
Reveal’s analysis does not take into account other factors that might have driven up the emergency room visits, such as other pollutants or the weather. But the conclusion is in line with a growing body of research that has found more people suffer respiratory problems and heart attacks within days of being exposed to wildfire smoke.
“The uptick in ER visits is very consistent” with scientific research about smoke, said Kari Nadeau, director of Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research.
John Balmes, a pulmonologist and professor at the University of California San Francisco who studies air pollution, is not surprised that emergency room visits increased three months after the wine country fire.
“People with asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and other lung diseases could have persistent exacerbations,” he said, adding that inhaling ash could have longer-term consequences, too. The effects of smoke months or years after a fire are not well understood.
There was only a slight increase in immediate emergency room visits during the days when last year’s Tubbs Fire burned. That’s because two of the largest hospitals were evacuated and a third was destroyed. As a result, the analysis was based on the period three to five months later, using data from California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.
This month’s Camp Fire — the deadliest and largest in California history — was more than four times bigger than the Tubbs Fire. Throughout much of the Bay Area and Sacramento area, the smoke was so intense and widespread that many people wore masks, stayed indoors and bought air purifiers. At least two Northern California hospitals have reported busier ERs due to smoke from the fire, which burned 153,000 acres in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
Robin Scott, director of the emergency department at Adventist Health Clear Lake, reported a 43 percent increase in respiratory diagnoses when the smoke hung over the region compared with the two previous weeks.
In Berkeley, 160 miles from the fire, Sutter Health’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center treated “increasing numbers of patients with chief complaints that appear to be connected to the poor air quality,” including “asthma, eczema, respiratory illness — as well as worsening heart conditions like congestive heart failure and chest pain,” said Ronn Berrol, medical director of the emergency department.
Other hospitals in the region, however, reported small increases, while some, including Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, reported no increases.
“There has been a slight uptick in terms of patients coming through our ER with respiratory issues. Most have been quickly treated and discharged,” said William Hodges, director of communications at Dignity Health in Sacramento. “I would say the impact has been minimal at most.”
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Francesca Dominici, a biostatistics professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said understanding the health effects is critical because climate change is making fires more frequent, ferocious, erratic, and long lasting.
Dominici was on a team of researchers that published a study last year that collected data from wildfires across the West between 2004 and 2009 and compared it with hospitalizations of elderly residents. About 22 percent more African Americans 65 and older were hospitalized for respiratory problems on smoky days than on non-smoky days. For elderly women of all races, respiratory hospitalizations increased more than 10 percent on smoky days, and for elderly men, 4 percent.
Five of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last two years, and many of the state’s largest population centers have been exposed to smoke repeatedly.
Dominici said the impacts are likely cumulative.
“More people are becoming susceptible to air pollution because they have been breathing bad air from previous wildfires,” she said. “For these people, the risk of adverse health effects is going to be even larger than the rest of the population.”
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers, in a study published in April, examined more than a million emergency room visits during California’s 2015 fire season and found a 42 percent increase in heart attacks among adults over 65 on days with dense wildfire smoke. They also found increases in strokes and other cardiovascular effects.
The EPA researchers expressed a willingness to speak about their research, but the agency would not grant permission.
A major health concern is the makeup of the smoke. Fires emit clouds of fine particles known as PM2.5. For decades, researchers have shown that whenever these tiny particles — which largely come from vehicles and other sources of fuel combustion — increase in the air, deaths and hospitalizations from heart attacks and respiratory problems rise. The particles can irritate airways, travel deep into the lungs and disrupt the heart.
In addition, fires can emit toxic gases from a variety of sources, including oil, metals, and pesticides.
Among the estimated 19,000 buildings destroyed in the Camp Fire were gas stations, two grocery stores, eight schools, and a hotel.
“When you’re breathing smoke from that wildfire,” said Stanford’s Nadeau, “you’re breathing paint thinner, Drano, plastics, heavy metals, and burned leaves, which are very similar to tobacco.”
The long-term effects of breathing this cocktail are unknown.
In Palo Alto, 200 miles from the Camp Fire, pediatrician Kellen Glinder said he has seen a marked increase in number of children with breathing problems during each of California’s recent wildfires.
On Friday, after rain cleared much of the wildfire smoke, the waiting room at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a clinic where Glinder works, wasn’t as busy as it was in previous days. Several children sat or crawled around as a television played Toy Story overhead. But Glinder said he still was treating kids affected by the smoke.
About one third of the 20 children he treated each day during the fires — six to eight kids per day — had conditions the smoke exacerbated, Glinder said.
“We (saw) a lot of things hidden under the guise of a cold that wouldn’t have gotten worse unless the air quality was so bad,” he said.
In August, when the Mendocino Complex Fire blazed through the state, Glinder treated more patients with asthma and other conditions. And last year, the Santa Rosa fires brought similar health concerns.
“Each forest fire is going to have its own particular combination of chemicals, depending on what’s getting incinerated and blowing our way,” he said. “With this particular fire, I saw a lot more … skin irritation, headaches, and nausea than I had seen in prior forest fires.”
The waiting room had a box of miniature paper masks for the kids, decorated with Mickey Mouse heads. Glinder, however, said such flimsy masks are ineffective at protecting people from smoke’s particles and gases; they are designed to contain germs from colds and flu.
Like the elderly, children are particularly sensitive to soot and smoke.
“Children’s lungs are still growing, their nervous systems are still growing,” Glinder said. “That makes them more susceptible to these pollutants.”
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The smoke’s gone, but hearts and lungs still may be in danger months after wildfires
Thousands of the world’s top officials have gathered in Katowice, Poland to negotiate over the nuts and bolts of global climate solutions. The 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (otherwise known for its jazzier name, COP 24) kicks off on December 3, and will continue over the following two weeks.
A lot is riding on the summit. This year marks the deadline set by the Paris climate agreement during COP 21 to hammer out a rulebook for critical commitments made by nearly every country in the world to slow down climate change and avoid hugely damaging natural, economic, and human costs.
According to the Nature Conservancy, “This COP is just as important as the one in Paris, but without the fanfare.”
We’ll always have Paris … but a lot has changed since that climate accord was signed in April 2016. The United States has turned away from its Paris agreement pledge. The United Kingdom is preoccupied by Brexit, making it less likely to be able to focus on environmental goals. And Brazil, which recently backtracked on its offer to host next year’s U.N. climate talks, is about to inaugurate a leader who wants to open up the Amazon rainforest to deforestation, and could eff up the planet for all of us.
So what are we to make of COP 24 against all this ruckus? Here are three signs that already hint to what we might expect from this year’s global climate talks.
Look, given his recent comments on his administration’s own climate report, no one expected President “I don’t believe it” Trump to high-tail it to COP 24. But few if any top Democrats, who recently said they plan to use their House majority to prioritize the issue of climate change, seem to be schlepping it to Poland this year. According to Axios, no Democratic senators will be attending COP 24. Even the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, will be sending staff in his place.
Last year, several big-name politicians, including California Governor Jerry Brown and Oregon Governor Katie Brown, attended COP 23 in Bonn, Germany — but they won’t be attending this year. What gives? According to congressional aids, it’s about timing: COP 24 is a being held nearly a month later in the year compared to 2017’s talks, and Congress is still in session.
COP 24 will be held in Katowice, a coal mining city that is among the most polluted in Europe. Poland’s coal habit is becoming more expensive and damaging to the environment, but the country is still struggling to part ways with it. Poland currently uses coal to meet a whopping 80 percent of its energy needs. One of Poland’s leading coal companies, Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa (JSW), was the first official sponsor of the climate talks. Several other coal companies have followed suit.
The Trump administration has not been shy about its own love affair with coal. This year, it’s planning to have its own coal convention as a side event to COP 24 touting the “long-term potential” for so-called “clean coal.” Pffft.
There has been a spate of major scientific reports in the run-up to COP 24, including this one and this one and this one. The most comprehensive of these is arguably the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which underscores just how far governments still have to go if they’re to reach the goal agreed upon in Paris — namely to try to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But the IPCC report found that even in a 1.5-degree scenario, there will likely be an increase in extreme weather conditions, resulting in a major uptick in hunger, poverty, mass migration, and resource-driven conflicts.
The reports just might be the scary kick-in-the-ass world leaders need to up their commitments to reduce carbon emissions.
Stay tuned for Grist’s on the ground coverage of the goings-on at COP 24.
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3 things to know ahead of this year’s UN climate talks in Poland.
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