Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now post, young activists are protesting and calling out world governments for the lack of climate change progress. Despite COVID-19 times, this is an effort to shift their attention to what has been happening in the world’s environment. Article written by Fiona Harvey for The Guardian.
Mock Cop26 set up in frustration at lack of progress due to coronavirus crisis
Young climate activists have begun a parallel process to the UN climate crisis talks, in frustration at the lack of progress they perceive in world governments’ efforts to address the emergency.
Crunch negotiations aimed at fulfilling the Paris climate agreement, called Cop26, were to be hosted by the UK this November, but have been delayed by the coronavirus crisis. Activists, participants and observers have told the Guardian they are concerned at a lack of progress so far.
The UK government has said little in public since the launch in February, before widespread lockdowns hit, other than to agree a postponement with the UN. The rescheduled Cop26 will take place next November, but the hosts face an uphill struggle to bring countries grappling with the Covid crisis to agree stiffer targets on greenhouse gas emissions.
While public progress on the postponed Cop26 has been meagre, young activists in Fridays for Future, the movement sparked by Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, are pushing ahead with their own online event this November, called Mock Cop26.
They are inviting young people to “fill the void of the postponed Cop26 with a big, inclusive online Mock Cop”. The event will be run by young climate activists, aiming to get between three and five delegates from as many countries as possible, with a focus on the global south – to contrast with what they see as the dominance of developed countries in the UN negotiations.
The two-week event will mimic the format of the real thing, with high-level opening statements by the youth delegates, keynotes and panels by global names, followed by a week of facilitated workshops and regional caucuses. The discussions will be framed around five conference themes: climate justice; education; health and mental health; green jobs; carbon reduction targets.
The event is planned to culminate in a statement to world leaders from the youth of the world, with demands for the achievements they want to see from the real Cop26 next year.
“We are so far quite disappointed in how [the UK’s hosting of Cop26] is shaping up,” said Joel Lev-Tov, coordinator of Fridays for Future. “[That is why we] have started to work on our own Mock Cop26 to address what we presume will be the failure of Cop26 … to show what Cop could look like if governments actually acted on the climate crisis.”
Climate change activists demonstrate against BP outside the British Museum in February 2020. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Reuters
The move to initiate a parallel young people’s conference came as developing countries and international observers told the Guardian they were concerned at the slow progress being made towards Cop26 by the UK hosts.
“We are behind, in our opinion,” said Carlos Fuller, of the Alliance of Small Island States, whose 44 member states are some of the world’s most at risk from climate breakdown. “We are very disappointed that we are so far behind. The UK needs to exercise its muscle more.”
Earlier this week, the UK’s top official in charge of the Cop26 summit admitted that formal negotiations had not yet started, as the face-to-face sessions supposed to take place earlier this year were delayed.
Greater leadership from the UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, is also vital, according to several leading experts. Johnson has said little in public about Cop26 or the climate crisis since the launch of Cop26 in February, which was overshadowed by the botched sacking of the ex-MP originally appointed to lead the conference, Claire O’Neill.
Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and twice a UN envoy on climate issues, told the Guardian: “I have not seen the leadership necessary to deliver a successful Cop. It takes every ounce of influence and diplomatic muscle, and we are not seeing that yet.”
She contrasted the lack of movement with the activities of the French government in the two years before the Paris agreement was signed in December 2015. “They threw everything at it, every ambassador, every country was engaged.”
Mohamed Adow, director of PowerShift Africa, a developing country thinktank, added: “The UK has made some positive noises as COP president but it’s clear that Number 10 really needs to start making it a political priority. We need to see some real leadership from Boris Johnson. If he wants the ‘Global Britain’ brand to mean anything more than just a PR stunt, he needs to step up and lead from the front on climate.”
A further complication is the government’s stance on the Brexit withdrawal agreement. That the government has openly admitted its proposals will break international law has caused consternation among the climate community. Many fear that the willingness to flout international law will be used by opponents of the Paris agreement to discredit the summit’s hosts and foster discord.
Tom Burke, co-founder of the E3G thinktank, said: “The prime minister has destroyed his global credibility. [The decision to break international law] has cast a blight on our ability to influence other leaders on Cop26.”
“Countries at [the UK talks] use weaknesses that they perceive in other countries,” warned Robinson. “This is very unhelpful at a time when we have enough difficulties to cope with.”
One key sticking point, however, is that the UK has still not made a public commitment on a new plan for cutting its own emissions. Current commitments to cut emissions under the Paris agreement are too weak, and the treaty requires them to be ratcheted up. All nations are being asked to come forward this year with strengthened plans on curbing their emissions by 2030, preferably with a view to net-zero emissions by 2050, or soon after in the case of the developing world.
Despite urging other countries to meet the deadline, when questioned by MPs earlier this week, Alok Sharma, the UK’s business secretary and president of Cop26, would not commit to the UK producing a revised plan on its emissions this year.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now Post, Facebook re-evaluates and takes a new step in fact-checking climate change content. Article written by Sarah Frier for Bloomberg.
The initiative will give climate information a more similar treatment to Covid-19 and election content.
In the geographic heart of the tech industry Wednesday, it was hard to think of anything except the orange skies, dark and tinted by wildfire smoke. The image software on iPhones failed to capture the dystopian hue, or the feeling of being surrounded by it. Silicon Valley workers tweeted that it felt like night time, or a perpetual sunset, or a scene from “Blade Runner 2049.” It marked the fourth week of severe fire and ash in the Western U.S.
The conversation shifted from the already-apocalyptic pandemic to another global public health disaster: climate change. For those who don’t know, this is not what California is usually like. The first time I smelled smoke in my San Francisco apartment, in 2015, I imagined something nearby was on fire—not that it was happening miles north of the city. I turned on an air purifier, which I’d purchased for my partner’s allergies, never expecting it would be necessary for anything else.
The climate disaster is undeniable to those who have experienced its harms, and a political talking point for the rest. Facebook is full of misinformation on the topic, which, when noticed and reported by users, is sent to the company’s third-party fact-checkers. Over the summer, a nonprofit called C02 Coalition, which claimed that carbon dioxide created by humans was beneficial for the planet, was banned from advertising on Facebook after too many fact violations. The group successfully appealed its ban, and had the fact-checks labels on its posts removed.
Facebook said that it considered such posts to be opinions, ineligible for fact-checking, causing a miniature scandal when the checker, Climate Feedback, spoke out. “We don’t believe that articles in an opinion section should be immune from fact-checking,” Climate Feedback science editor Scott Johnson wrote in an email to Bloomberg.
Facebook also doesn’t take the additional step of removing misinformation on the climate, because the company has ruled that such posts don’t cause imminent harm to human health.
But, in the aggregate, they do. Facebook has recently re-evaluated its approach to climate misinformation, according to spokesman Andy Stone. The company is working on a climate information center, which will display information from scientific sources. Stone said Facebook isn’t ready to officially announce anything, but it’s easy to imagine what this might look like. Facebook has already devised centers for factual information about Covid-19, and about voting and the upcoming election, both of which it has promoted heavily on its site.
The info center approach would put less pressure on evaluating each individual post, in favor of directing users to what they need to know more about generally. It could plausibly be more effective than the fact-checking process, which sometimes takes days or weeks to complete, long after a claim has gone viral. Of course, it won’t help address individual disputed claims.
In the meantime, to get the general idea of what’s going on, anyone in Silicon Valley can look out the window.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now Post, cities around the world are seeking Covid-19 spending to be made more “climate smart.” Article written by Andrew McCormick for The Nation.
This story is part of a collaboration between The Nation and InsideClimate News as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The piece below focuses on cities; to read how green recovery spending can impact rural areas, click here.
Trillions of dollars are on the table, as governments around the world seek to dig out from the economic crater caused by the coronavirus. With time also running short to avoid the worst of the climate crisis, the growing consensus among world leaders is that Covid-19 recovery spending must be “climate-smart.”
“This terrible challenge that has caused so much suffering is an opportunity,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said yesterday in an interview with Covering Climate Now. “We can either rebuild as it was, which is a huge mistake, because of the fragilities of the world, or we can rebuild a more inclusive and more sustainable economy and society.” The secretary general’s comments echoed statements in favor of a “green” stimulus by the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the International Energy Agency, and BlackRock, the world’s largest investments asset manager.
Climate-conscious stimulus spending creates more jobs per dollar invested than do expenditures on fossil fuel projects, according to an Oxford University study of more than 700 stimulus programs initiated after the 2008 global financial crisis. Nevertheless, with the exception of the EU, a majority of Covid-19 recovery spending to date by the world’s leading economies has reinforced the carbon-intensive status quo, propping up the very economic sectors and practices that have driven the climate crisis, including the fossil fuel and airline industries.
At the local level, however, leaders are calling for a better way.
In a recent letter coordinated by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, dozens of mayors from the world’s biggest cities declared that the economic recovery “should not be a return to ‘business as usual,’ because [business as usual is] on track for 3 degrees Celsius or more of over-heating.” What’s more, mayors say, their cities have existing and “shovel-ready” projects that could put climate-smart stimulus spending to work right away, if only national governments or central banks provide it.
“Mayors are in a position to really define what a recovery from Covid-19 looks like,” David Miller, a former mayor of Toronto and C40’s director of international diplomacy, said in an interview. “It’s not just their voices advocating to the national governments; it’s their actions demonstrating what’s possible.”
Here are five leading examples.
South Beach, Miami. (pisaphotography / Shutterstock)
IN MIAMI, A REPUBLICAN MAYOR EMBRACES CLIMATE-SMART STIMULUS SPENDING
Francis Suarez, Miami’s Republican mayor, has been consistently aggressive on climate. Dismissing the idea that taking climate change seriously makes him somehow less conservative, Suarez says the idea of a green stimulus is “music to my ears.”
In 2017, on the same day Suarez was elected, Miamians voted to authorize a $400 million “Miami Forever” bond that seeks to develop long-term resilience for the city, including against sea-level rise, flooding, and hurricane storm surge. That means building seawalls, installing stormwater pumps with valved outfalls (so water ejected from the city into water bodies is clean and doesn’t damage local ecosystems), and physically raising some city roads.
Flooding in the city is already routine, putting billions of dollars in property at risk and leaving many low-lying residents—nearly 60 percent of Miami-Dade county is less than six feet above sea level—anxiously looking for somewhere else to go. This past November, Suarez led Miami to declare a “climate change emergency.”
But $400 million isn’t nearly enough to prepare Miami for the full extent of what’s coming, Suarez said. And Covid-19 budget cuts have only complicated matters: Recently, the city weighed eliminating its chief resilience officer, for instance. “Miami Forever was sort of a down payment,” Suarez said. “It’s not going to solve all our problems. So, if we were to get a stimulus, we would be able to put the money to use right away.”
A green stimulus would also give a boost, Suarez said, to more ambitious, engineered solutions in the works. Large urban reservoirs, designed to trap and expel excess waters, are under construction along the inland Miami River, and along the ocean-side Biscayne Bay. The benefits are three-fold, Suarez said: elevating the sea wall, creating a buffer for the community in the form of a reservoir, and creating new public space. “And whenever you’re investing in public spaces, you get infinite return, because by their very nature they’re not going anywhere,” Suarez said.
Phoenix (Dreamfarmer / Shutterstock)
REVIVING A BATTERED SOLAR INDUSTRY TO HELP COOL PHOENIX
Phoenix is hot. It’s among the fastest-warming cities in the United States, with temperatures topping 100 degrees on 103 days in 2019. This summer was the city’s hottest season ever. And for four years running, Phoenix has set records for heat-related deaths.
This June, Phoenix’s Street Transportation Department fast-tracked a “cool pavement” pilot program. Roads in eight neighborhoods are being outfitted with a special, water-based treatment that is lighter in color than traditional asphalt and reflects sunlight instead of absorbing it. If the cool pavement proves effective in mitigating the urban “heat island” effect—and is resilient to Phoenix’s high temperatures, persistent sunshine, and monsoon storms—officials hope to implement it far and wide in the city.
Meanwhile, however, the Covid-19 lockdown has shrunk potential sources of funding for climate-smart projects. With ridership way down on public transit, fare collection has fallen by more than 50 percent. To ensure that cooling projects and sustainable development continue to reach the city’s residents, Phoenix needs a green stimulus, said Mayor Kate Gallego.
Federal support, Gallego said, would aid the expansion of cooled bus stops, shaded walking paths, and elevated solar panels around the city. The solar panels would provide not only electricity but also badly needed shade in open areas, especially in lower-income neighborhoods where regular access to air conditioning is not guaranteed.
In 2019, Arizona was the state with the sixth most solar-related jobs—last year, the state produced enough solar energy to power three-quarters of a million homes—and nearly 90 percent of those jobs reside in the Phoenix metropolitan area. But the economic slowdown following the coronavirus hit the solar industry hard. Thousands of solar jobs were lost, and plans to expand solar deployment in Arizona were dramatically scaled back. Federal funding, especially for workforce training and development, could help the industry bounce back.
The government could also provide up-front loans to help people and businesses, particularly in low-income areas, adopt solar and other green technologies, such as more efficient windows, air conditioners and other appliances. “There are so many energy efficiency products that pay for themselves over time, but there are upfront [financial] barriers to some people taking advantage,” Gallego explained.
“There are beautiful and important ideas waiting to happen,” the mayor added. “If the federal government could lead the way, there are so many transformative projects that could happen, just when local government needs them most.”
Bogotá, Colombia. (Alejo Miranda / Shutterstock)
BOGOTÁ’S MAYOR SAYS DEVELOPING NATIONS CAN BE SUSTAINABILITY LEADERS
In Colombia, the funds a city receives from the national government are more or less fixed in the constitution, based on the city’s population and relative wealth compared with other parts of the country. When it comes to a stimulus, then, it’s a matter less of lobbying for better support than of rebalancing priorities in Bogotá’s budget.
That’s fine for the new mayor, Claudia López Hernández, who already counted climate action among her foremost priorities in Bogotá. The coronavirus pandemic has caused a significant shortfall in tax collection, so this is a time for fearless and intelligent use of debt, López said. “This is a time to invest heavily and push. This moment [calls for] a Keynesian approach. If we start doing some neoliberal solution, we’ll only depress the economy.”
López, who began her four-year term this January, is the first member of Colombia’s center-left Green Party elected to Bogotá’s mayorship, generally viewed as the second-most-important elected position in the country after president. López is also the first woman—and the first gay woman—elected to the post. “We don’t want to just comply [with UN climate goals]. We want to be a world leader,” López said. “We want to be a big, developing city in a developing country leading not only in what we achieve but in how we achieve it.”
Equity and reconciliation are foremost on López’s mind, in a country that is recovering from a long and recent civil war. “What we do has to be sustainable in both climate change and social inclusion terms, otherwise it’s not really sustainable in the long-term,” López said. In the near-term, López plans to implement a universal basic income and invest heavily in education, especially post-secondary education, with a focus on skills that lead to green jobs in digital and knowledge-based economic sectors.
Before the pandemic hit, López’s government declared a general alarm for environmental pollution in the city, where air pollution levels often are more than twice as high as the World Health Organization recommends, contributing to thousands of deaths annually.
Cleaning up the air means changing how Bogotá gets around. Since March, the city has added 80 kilometers of new bikeways, adding to the 500-some already in place. By the end of her term, López hopes to add 300 kilometers more, taking space away from cars directly and giving it to bikers: “inverting the pyramid” of how transportation space is allocated in the city, López said, enough that 80 percent of commuters in the city will be able to get around by bike if they choose to. (López has set an example in this regard, biking seven kilometers from home to her inauguration ceremony in Bogotá’s Parque Simón Bolívar.) The city will also aim to replace its buses with lower-emissions models and push forward with a new, all-electric mass transit system.
All of these plans were already in the works, López said, but in the wake of Covid-19 she’s front-loading them and striking while the iron is hot. “We have no choice,” she explained. “Just like we have no choice to wear masks and social distance and invest to improve our health and testing systems, there is no point to discuss here. The way we produce, the way we live, the way we consume, it’s simply unsustainable for humanity. We need to act.”
Paris (Thomas Samson / AFP via Getty Images)
PARIS CHAMPIONS “THE 15-MINUTE CITY” TO CUT BOTH STRESS AND EMISSIONS
Around the world, pandemic shutdowns prompted cities to reclaim streets from cars and preserve them for bikes and pedestrians. In Paris, that work had been underway for years. Since her inauguration in 2014, mayor Anne Hidalgo has eliminated thousands of on-street parking spots across Paris, barred high-polluting vehicles from entering the city, and banned cars from some streets entirely, including along the river Seine. Still, the lockdown this spring offered a calming, if uneasy, glimpse of what a green future could look like in the City of Light. “We could breath,” Hidalgo recently told Time magazine. “We could hear birds.”
Environmental pledges were central to Hidalgo’s campaign for reelection, which she won this June by a landslide. Hidalgo championed “the 15-minute city,” a planning concept in which neighborhoods function as villages unto themselves, where virtually all needs can be met with 15 minutes or less of walking or biking: stores, restaurants, fitness centers, schools, banks, work centers, and more. The need for cars, in turn, decreases.
The 15-minute city, or la Ville du quart d’heure, represents a shift away from the conventional zoning wisdom, which separates residential and commercial districts, that has dominated city development over the past century, said Carlos Moreno, an urban planning advisor to Hidalgo and professor at the Sorbonne.
It’s not just Paris that’s going green. France is in the midst of a “green wave,” with environmental party candidates winning mayoral elections in June in large cities across the country, including Marseilles, Lyon, Strasbourg, and Bordeaux. The election marked a decided shift, commentators said, toward public concern for climate action, driven perhaps in part by the unbearable heat of recent summers in Western Europe; Emmanuel Macron, the centrist president, has suggested a referendum to amend the country’s constitution to include language about fighting climate change.
With people’s movement necessarily constricted, the pandemic shutdown was a great time to pilot many aspects of the 15-minute city, including a further reclamation of public space from cars, Moreno said. Now, he added, the 15-minute city will prove key to Paris’s economic revitalization. As part of a “big bang of proximity,” as Hidalgo puts it, the city will move to reimagine work life, revolutionize child and elder care, revisit dated real estate practices, and ensure that cafés and cultural opportunities are more ubiquitous in all 20 arrondissements. In theory, this will help rekindle economic activity citywide, Moreno said—including in parts of the city that were underdeveloped and marginalized under France’s old economic status quo.
But to do all of this, while also ensuring that those devastated financially by the coronavirus shutdown don’t fall through society’s cracks, will take spending. “Automatically, we will have a deficit,” Moreno said. The 15-minute city is a Paris project, and not something that requires explicit support or approval from France’s central government. But the central government can, Moreno said, help the city stay afloat financially as it charts a way forward in this difficult time.
Los Angeles. (4kodiak / Getty Images)
IN LOS ANGELES, A GREEN STIMULUS WOULD “SUPERCHARGE” THE SHIFT TO EVS
In the car capital of the world, it’s little surprise that plans for tackling climate change would focus on how Angelenos move.
As a part of the city’s extensive and thorough Green New Deal, announced by Mayor Eric Garcetti in the spring of 2019, work is underway to electrify the city’s bus fleet and to get more car owners into electric vehicles; the goal is for a complete, citywide transition to zero-emissions vehicles by 2050. That requires installing more EV chargers. The city’s Green New Deal calls for increasing the number of chargers from 8,000 at present to 10,000 by 2022 and 28,000 by 2028.
That was the plan, at least. But the coronavirus lockdown is forecast to cost the city’s transit agency, which partially funds green initiatives, $1.8 billion—a quarter of all forecast revenues for 2020, according to Doug Mensman, Los Angeles’s director of transportation. That doesn’t mean that the city’s Green New Deal projects will be scrapped, but all could be delayed or deferred. “It may take up to two years to recover to pre-Covid levels of financial security, so federal funding is imperative to backfill that loss,” Mensman said.
The transition to low-emissions cars, in particular, is funded by Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits, which reward the sale and consumption of cleaner fuels. But that requires a robust marketplace. Here, too, the federal government can play a role, in part by telling car manufacturers that low-emissions vehicles are the way of the future, said Lauren Faber O’Connor, LA’s chief sustainability officer. The Trump administration has done the opposite, rolling back fuel emissions standards for gas-powered vehicles.
A crucial element of the city’s Green New Deal, O’Connor said, is that all the city’s residents reap the benefits of change. That includes ensuring that jobs created through the Green New Deal reach historically underemployed populations. “We’re building a new economy. We need to be very deliberate about ensuring that everyone has the ability to participate in it.” To help low-income residents access electric vehicles, the city’s EV car-share program, BlueLA, offers steeply subsidized rates to consumers who need them. BlueLA is another program that could benefit immediately from climate-smart stimulus spending, O’Connor said. “We want to help people in every way to make the right decision.”
Los Angeles is also working to get drivers out of their cars and instead to choose public transportation, walking, bike share systems, or micromobility systems, such as scooters. “It’s not rocket science. The solutions are there,” O’Connor said. “We know what we need to do, and the strategies are no-regrets, economically and from a health perspective. All signs point in this direction. We just need the federal government to embrace it.”
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now Post, we dive into current changes of environmental regulations and its lasting effects. Written by Vernon Loeb for Inside Climate News.
Pursuing an unrelenting fossil fuel agenda, Trump has scaled back or eliminated over 150 environment measures, expanded Arctic drilling, and denied climate science.
In the middle of his 44th month in office, two weeks before the start of the Republican convention in late August, President Trump rolled back Barack Obama’s last major environmental regulation, restricting methane leaks.
The move represented an environmental trifecta of sorts for the president, who had handed the oil and gas industry another gift in his quest for “American energy dominance,” thumbed his nose yet again at climate change and came close to fully dismantling his predecessor’s environment and climate legacy.
“I applaud and strongly support President Trump’s continued support for the oil and gas industry,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said after the administration proposed its rollback of the Obama methane rules. “During these uncertain times, it makes no sense that we would be placing additional regulatory burdens on our vital industries which are not supported by sound science and do not consider economic impact.”
Environmental lawyers and climate activists who’ve been battling Trump since day one are in agreement that Trump, beginning with his decision to lead the nation out of the Paris climate accord, has done more to roll back and weaken environmental laws and regulations than any president in history.
Trump extolled the accomplishment and put a different spin on the superlative during a White House speech in July, saying, “We have removed nearly 25,000 pages of job destroying regulations, more than any other president by far in the history of our country.”
A few days earlier, as his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, unveiled a $2 trillion plan to combat climate change, Trump promoted what he called a “very dramatic” series of revisions to the National Environmental Policy Act, the foundation of environmental protection in the United States that had been signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon 50 years ago.
Environmentalists have used the law to block everything from pipelines to the destruction of natural habitats. Trump has now limited environmental reviews under the act to between one and two years and relieved federal agencies from having to consider a project’s impact on climate change during the review and permitting process.
“While our world is burning, President Trump is adding fuel to the fire by taking away our right to be informed and to protect ourselves from irreparable harm,” Gina McCarthy, Obama’s EPA administrator who now serves as president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of weakening the act.
By late summer, Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law had counted 159 actions since Trump took office “to scale back or wholly eliminate climate mitigation and adaptation measures.” Many have been slowed or blocked by the courts.
“We are going to turn everything around,” Trump declared. “And quickly, very quickly.”
Once in office, Trump pursued a policy of unfettered support for fossil fuel development. He immediately signed memorandums to revive the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, projects blocked by Obama.
In early March 2017, his administration ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to stop gathering data from oil and gas companies needed to rein in leaks of methane, a potent short-lived climate pollutant. Fossil fuel infrastructure adds to greenhouse gas emissions, in part by leaking methane into the atmosphere.
He followed up, at the end of March, by issuing a sweeping executive order directing all federal agencies to target for elimination any rules that restrict U.S. production of energy. He set guidance to make it more difficult to put future regulations on fossil fuel industries and he moved to discard the use of a rigorous “social cost of carbon,” a regulatory measurement that puts a price on the future damage society will pay for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted.
As his first year in office came to a close, Trump and Alaska’s Republican senators inserted a provision into his signature tax cut legislation that called for opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling.
Many of Trump’s regulations have also been tailored to favor the coal industry, often at the expense of cheaper, cleaner energy. Robert Murray, founder of the now-bankrupt coal company Murray Energy and one of Trump’s closest industry allies, gave the president a “wish list” early on that became a virtual template for the administration’s rollback of regulations.
The administration swiftly lifted an Obama moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands, to no real benefit. The decline of coal continued unabated, but Trump remained an unapologetic champion of the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Trump’s War on Science
When U.S. government scientists released their latest volume of the National Climate Assessment in November 2018, it revealed much about the robust, sobering scientific consensus on climate change.
It also revealed the striking disconnect between Trump and essentially every authoritative institution on the threat of global warming.
The president rejected the assessment’s central findings—based on thousands of climate studies and involving 13 federal agencies—that emissions of carbon dioxide are caused by human activities, are already causing lasting economic damage and have to be brought rapidly to zero.
“I don’t believe it. No, no, I don’t believe it,” Trump told a reporter after the assessment’s release.
In almost every agency overseeing energy, the environment and health, people with little scientific background, or strong ties to industries they would be regulating, were appointed to scientific leadership positions.
One of the administration’s first actions was to order scientists and other employees at EPA and other agencies to halt public communications. Several federal scientists working on climate change have said they were silenced, sidelined or demoted. The words “climate change” have been purged from government reports and other reports have been buried.
The administration’s mistrust of scientists and its tendency toward science denialism would also become a prominent feature of its response to the coronavirus pandemic, when the president muzzled scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and chafed at the dire predictions of many epidemiological models for Covid-19 deaths.
With the nation in a state of emergency over the pandemic, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who serves as Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, moved in late March to fast-track the “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule. Wheeler replaced Scott Pruitt, an Oklahoma Republican who served as Trump’s first EPA administrator before resigning in 2018 amid an ethics scandal.
Critics call Wheeler’s transparency proposal Orwellian and say it would actually limit the use of human health science in environmental decision-making, by eliminating studies that rely on patients’ anonymous medical data.
While Trump and his conservative allies contend that the reliance on such studies amounts to “secret science,” scientists and leading medical authorities respond that it is standard practice to honor patient confidentiality in peer-reviewed studies.
Numerous studies, including one based on health data from 60 million Medicare recipients, have shown that one of the signature pollutants from the burning of fossil fuels, microscopic particles less than 2.5 microns in width—known as PM 2.5—kill as many as 52,100 Americans prematurely each year.
Less than a month later, as much of the nation remained locked down to halt the spread of Covid-19, a respiratory disease, the Trump administration rejected a recommendation from government scientists to strengthen the national air quality standard for particulate matter. Trump chose instead to maintain the current PM 2.5 standard, handing the fossil fuel industry a major victory.
A ‘Concerted Attack’ on Alaska, Public Lands
The Trump administration knew no bounds for its fossil fuel agenda, pursuing drilling from the outset on pristine public lands in Alaska and the lower 48 states, where oil companies have long sought access.
Less than four months after taking office, Trump moved to lift Obama’s offshore Arctic drilling ban and, then, in July 2017, gave Italian oil company Eni a quick green light to drill exploratory wells.
In March 2018, the Trump administration proposed a resumption of leasing in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. President Obama, shortly before leaving office, had “permanently” withdrawn from drilling there.
By then, Trump had also carved 2 million acres of land from the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in southern Utah in what amounted to the most sweeping reductions in protections for public land in U.S. history.
In September 2018, the Interior Department finalized a rule that loosens methane requirements for oil and gas operations on federal lands. A month later, the administration proposed a regulation to streamline and expedite oil and gas permits on national forest lands.
The following summer, the administration proposed weakening protections under the Endangered Species Act for threatened species and critical habitat. Shortly thereafter, the Interior Department commenced the public comment period on its plan for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that had been included in the 2017 tax bill.
In early August 2020, the president signed the Great American Outdoors Act appropriating $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and $9.5 billion over five years to reduce maintenance backlogs in the national parks.
The bipartisan legislation was sponsored by a House Democrat, but Trump extolled its passage as the most significant act in support of parklands since Teddy Roosevelt.
Still, the administration was preparing, on the eve of the Republican convention, to start selling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The sale was one of six pending projects in which Trump was pursuing more drilling, logging and mining in Alaska.
One environmentalist called it the most “concerted attack” in 30 years on Alaska’s natural resources.
All six of the Trump initiatives could still be blocked or rolled back in the courts, or undone by a new Biden administration working with a Democratic Congress. But for now, they are proceeding, with enormous consequences for Alaska’s environment, and global climate change.
One by One, Obama’s Main Climate Accomplishments Fell
The same could be said for President Obama’s environment and climate legacy: Trump’s relentless attacks could be wholly or partially undone by a new administration and Congress. But for now, Trump has accomplished his mission: a near total elimination of his predecessor’s most significant measures.
After countless piecemeal rollbacks during Trump’s first two and a half years in office, the administration in June 2019 launched its long-awaited attack on Obama’s signature plan to tackle climate change. Designed to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants, Obama called it the Clean Power Plan.
While the plan was challenged by industry and 27 states and blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court before Obama even left office, it encouraged many states to begin a process of planning for a transition away from coal-fired electricity at a time when cheaper natural gas and renewable energy already were forcing coal plants to shut down.
Next came Trump’s rollback of Obama’s 2012 automobile fuel efficiency standards, the single largest step any nation had taken to address global warming by cutting carbon emissions from cars and trucks. The weakened Trump plan will allow automakers to deploy fleets that average just 40 miles per gallon by 2025, instead of 54 mpg.
If Trump’s standard ultimately survives legal challenges, cars and trucks in the United States would emit nearly a billion tons more carbon dioxide during their lifetimes than they would have under the Obama standards.
Finally, in mid-August, Trump proposed the rollback of the methane rules, the last major Obama environmental regulation still standing. Methane, a super-pollutant, is 86 times more potent in warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
In the climate realm, Obama is best known, of course, as the driving force behind the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Trump first announced in a Rose Garden speech in June 2017 that the U.S. would withdraw from the accord in three years, as soon as the treaty allowed.
So, right on cue, two years later, on Nov. 4, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo notified the United Nations of the formal exit of the United States, activating the final one-year waiting period.
The actual U.S. withdrawal is set for Nov. 4, 2020, one day after the presidential election.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now Post, we explore the second of our three part series on sustainable fashion.
by Mihaela Manova
Following the introduction of sustainability (you can view the article here), a much less known part of the fashion industry remains to be discussed. Fast fashion as previously discussed is on the verge of collapse, as now celebrities and influencers are seeking alternatives to bettering the environment and spreading awareness on the issue. But what is the foundation of fast fashion? Its workers of course.
The working conditions
Firstly, we present the statistics on garment producers for fast fashion by the source, War on Want (this includes their 2011 report) :
Three million people in Bangladesh work for fast fashion, 85% of them are women.
The wage for a garment factory helper is £25 a month (or $32.72 a month)
80% of workers work more than 12 hours a day, more than the legal limit for working hours
Three quarters of the women workers that War on Want has spoken to have been verbally and 1/2 of them physically abused at work
While researching this topic, it is important to note that there is a distinct difference from the living wage of a single person and the minimum legal wage. As stated on Sustain Your Style, the living wage consists of being able to pay for food, rent, healthcare, education, clothing, transportation, and to also have savings. In the biggest countries for large manufacturing of clothes, companies brag about paying their workers “half to a fifth of the living wage,” which constitutes the “minimum legal wage.”
An infographic from The Clean Clothes Campaign showcases the difference between a living and minimum wage.
In December of 2019, Sanam Yar wrote an article for The New York Times that depicted various garment workers around the world. The people behind the clothing brands, who’s work we see up on hooks at the mall, shared their stories of what they do and their equally dark experiences.
‘You basically have to kill yourself in front of a sewing machine in order to provide for your family.’
The quote above is from Maria Valdinete de Silva, 46, from Brazil, who was one of the many interviewed by Yar. Details from what Mrs. da Silva has gone through entail the monotony of creating something over and over for little pay, while having to work from day to night in exchange for minimum wage.
Much like the topic of fast fashion and it using cheap labor to make more quantity than quality, Mrs. da Silva is currently working at making her own pieces, but this time at her own pace.
‘It’s not so much the salary, it’s that I am here because we’re all one family.’
On the contrary, Yar showcases Antonio Ripani, 72, who works for Tod’s Group, the massive luxury footwear brand. In Casette d’Ete, Italy, Mr. Ripani’s job is centered on leather quality control for the shoes that the brand produces. The quote above distinguishes Mr. Ripani’s feelings towards his job and the environment there, providing a positive connotation to making garments and practicing a good quality standard. In the article, Mr. Ripani mentions apprenticeship and how he is teaching the younger generation to his craft, something most fast fashion workers could never do.
Valuing the external factors that contribute to a happier, and safer workplace, Mr. Ripani mentions that he can choose his hours and work with assistants, while also being credited for his work by the company.
The Shein Scandal
Shein, one of the fastest growing online retailers has been under fire for more than one instance. According to Study Break, Shein “issues about 500 new items a day,” establishing and solidifying their place in the fast fashion industry. This retailer has had glowing reviews from many consumers, allowing them to shop items that are inspired by social media trends and high fashion companies at extremely low prices. As Study Break puts it, “And if it seems too good to be true, it’s because it is.”
Recently, the company was caught selling Islamic praying mats as decoration, while also displaying a swastika necklace for the low price of $2.50. Outrage was prompted towards the site, and an apology post later appeared on their official Instagram.
Details about their production remain hazy to the public as the site has specified that it will not engage in work with in any underage workers producing for the company. Here is their statement:
“We strictly abide by child labor laws in each of the countries that we operate in. Neither we nor any of our partners are allowed to hire underage children. Any partners or vendors found to have violated these laws are terminated immediately and reported to the authorities.”
With that said, Study Break notes that “The statement disregards the fact that child labor laws vary significantly from country to country. In Bangladesh, for example, where many fast fashion factories are located, their amended child labor laws allow children as young as 14 to work.”
Since the public outrage, more consumers are backing off fast fashion and beginning to focus on sustainability, to become better contributors to the environment and to advocate for better working conditions for its workers.
The cluttering of the environment
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2017, 11.2 million tons of textile waste has ended up in landfills. But the worst entails, as fabric can take up to 200 or more years to decompose in those same landfills.
Many companies have gone under fire for how they discard their garments after seasons. Some, like H&M, have been exposed throughout the years with altering their unsold clothing so no one can wear it after. In 2010, an H&M store in New York City was exposed with cutting holes in their discarded apparel, a factor that did not help the growing homeless population during that time.
As we all, maybe most of us, try to recycle plastic and paper throughout the house, companies like USAgain and American Textile Recycling Service are the ones whose main goal is to recycle textiles and garments that one is too tired of.
The Saturday Evening Post details these services as some that “You might recognize some of these “rag yards” from the donation bins they’ve peppered throughout cities in the last 10 years or so. Even nonprofit organizations like Goodwill Industries and The Salvation Army sell to such companies what they cannot use or store.”
Here are the addresses to the nearest centers in our area:
Local Charity Clothing Dropbox Locations:
After seeing this side of fast fashion, we must ask ourselves if we wish to continue the cycle until our world gains more and more unnecessary textiles. In our final piece, we will talk about some of best stores to get sustainable yet fashionable clothing that not only benefits the consumer but also their planet. Until next time…
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now Post, we are taking a look at the current state of chaos that surrounds us, as we often forget about what’s happening in the natural world. Article written by Jeff Berardelli for CBS News.
From the historic heat wave and wildfires in the West, to the massive derecho that tore through the middle of the nation, to the record-breaking pace of this year’s hurricane season, the unprecedented and concurrent extreme conditions resemble the chaotic climate future scientists have been warning us about for decades — only it’s happening right now.
While climate catastrophes are typically spaced out in time and geographic location, right now the U.S. is dealing with multiple disasters. The Midwest is cleaning up from a devastating derecho that caused nearly $4 billion in damage to homes and crops, as nearly a quarter-million people in the West are under evacuation orders or warnings from fires that have burned over 1 million acres, and at the same time residents along the Gulf Coast are bracing for back-to-back landfalls of a tropical storm and hurricane.
“This current stretch of natural catastrophe events in the United States are essentially a snapshot of what scientists and emergency managers have long feared,” says meteorologist Steven Bowen, the head of Catastrophe Insight at AON, an international risk mitigation firm.
Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University, happened to be in Australia on sabbatical last year and witnessed the devastating wildfires there — a similar scene to what is playing out in California right now. For years Mann has sounded the alarms about the acceleration of human-caused climate change, but even he is somewhat surprised at the pace.
“In many respects, the impacts are playing out faster and with greater severity than we predicted,” he said.
To be sure, these events are not all related to each other, but the one thing they do have in common is that climate change makes each one more likely. The simple explanation is that there’s more energy in the system and that energy is expended in the form of more extreme heat, fire, wind and rain.
It may be tempting to look at these extremes as a “new normal,” but Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, says while it may be new, it won’t be normal.
“For some time we have talked about a ‘new normal’ but the issue is that it keeps changing. It does not stop at a new state. That change is what is so disruptive,” he said.
California wildfires
The fires unfolding in California right now have no parallel in modern times. With more than 1 million acres burned in just one week, the season is already historic with more acres burned in this past week than is typical of an entire year. Two of the state’s top three largest fires on record are burning at the same time — the LNU and SCU complex fires — with the likelihood that one of these will take over the top spot soon.
As of Monday morning, CalFire reports over 7,000 fires have burned more than 1.4 million acres this season, overwhelming resources to the point where many of the smaller fires are being allowed to burn. CalFire stated that to fight these fires to the maximum of their ability, the agency would need nearly 10 times more firefighting resources than are available.
As is the case in any natural disaster, the cause can be traced to multiple coinciding events. In this case, the spark for most of these fires was a siege of lightning strikes as a result of moisture drawn into California from two decaying tropical systems in the eastern Pacific, which ignited dry brush.
Daniel Swain is a well-known climate scientist who specializes in studying the link between climate change and weather in the West at the University of California, Los Angeles. In a blog post he described how even someone like him, well-versed in climate disaster, is shocked by the current situation: “I’m essentially at a loss for words to describe the scope of the lightning-sparked fire outbreak that has rapidly evolved in northern California – even in the context of the extraordinary fires of recent years. It’s truly astonishing.”
While it’s not rare for tropical moisture to invade California, it is infrequent, and extremely unfortunate that it happened during one of the worst western U.S. heat waves in recent history, not to mention an ongoing short- and long-term drought. Researchers believe that in the year 2000 the western U.S. entered a megadrought, one of the worst in the past 1,200 years.
This is why climate scientists often say that climate change “loads the dice” for extreme weather. The cause of the fires is not climate change, but many of the factors which set the stage and made conditions ripe for fire ignition and spread are a direct result of a warming climate.
On August 16, Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth. It was just a small part of a monster heat wave which broke hundreds of heat records over a two-week span. The link between heat waves and climate change is straightforward, and multiple studies have shown that a warmer climate is making heat waves more likely and more intense.
“Basically there is more heat available: Earth’s energy balance is out of whack,” says Trenberth. That extra heat energy, trapped in the atmosphere by excess greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels, must be used up in some way.
Trenberth explains, if the land was wet the heat would be used first to evaporate water, keeping air temperatures moderate. But when the air and ground are bone dry, as is typical of the dry season in California — especially in summers like this — the excess heat energy is expended by drying out the brush and warming and drying the air.
This long-term drying out of the air has created a “vapor pressure deficit” — or in simpler terms, a moisture deficit. According to a 2019 study, this is a leading reason for the intensified summer fire seasons in California, presently at record levels.
According to the paper, “Nearly all of the increase in summer forest-fire area during 1972–2018 was driven by increased vapor pressure deficit.”
Midwest derecho
A derecho is a particularly fierce and long-lasting line of thunderstorms, often causing winds over 75 mph. While these weather events are common during summer, the eventthat took place August 10 in Iowa and Illinois seemed otherworldly.
The squall line plowed a path 800 miles long and 40 miles wide through communities and corn fields, damaging 43% of Iowa’s corn and soybean crop and causing nearly $4 billion in damage. Winds are estimated to have reached up to 140 mph, with hurricane-force winds lasting 40 to 50 minutes.
At first glance it would seem that this is just a freak natural event, with no real connection to climate change, but that may not be the case. While there is not much research on the connection between climate change and derechos, one recent paper found some alarming results.
The research team used a climate model to simulate mesoscale convective systems (MCSs), a technical term for masses of thunderstorms, in a warming world. These MCSs are the parent structures which sometimes spawn derechos. Using a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, the paper concluded: “At the end of the century, the number of intense MCSs are projected to more than triple in North America during summer due to more favorable environmental conditions.”
The research also found that MCSs’ maximum hourly precipitation rates will increase by 15% to 40% in the future, due to a warmer atmosphere loaded with more moisture. “The moisture source for MCSs in the central U.S. is predominantly the Gulf of Mexico and climate change will increase the low-level jet stream moisture transport from the Gulf northward,” explains lead author Dr. Andreas Prein, from the National Center For Atmospheric Research.
“How this all relates to changes in derecho frequency and intensity is poorly understood,” Prein admits, but now that climate models are capable of modeling this, he plans to make it a priority in future studies.
While Mann did not comment specifically on derechos, he does feel extreme events are not properly captured in current climate models. “I have argued that the climate models are likely underpredicting the impact on the frequency and severity of various types of extreme summer weather events due to deficiencies in their ability to capture some of the relevant jet stream dynamics.”
Hurricane season
Having two tropical systems like Marco and Laura in late August, the beginning of the peak of hurricane season, is not abnormal, even if the storms are very close to one another. But what is abnormal is the record-setting pace of the current hurricane season. So far the Atlantic season has tallied 14 named storms, 10 days ahead of record pace. That’s two more than the average number for an entire season, which runs through the end of November. Seasonal forecasters are predicting up to 25 named systems this year, which would place second behind 2005.
While there are many factors that contribute to how active a hurricane season will be, the most obvious is the warm water which fuels storm development. This year, nearly the entire tropical Atlantic Basin is above normal. This is part of a long-term trend of warming in which Atlantic sea surface temperatures have increased by around 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, and the measure of Ocean Heat Content hits record highs each and every year.
Warmer ocean temperatures do not guarantee more storms, but they do tip the balance, giving storms that extra boost to develop. After years of research, climate science is still not sure how a warming climate will impact the number of systems in the future, but there is consensus that, in general, hurricanes will get stronger and the strongest, most destructive hurricanes will get more frequent. Since major hurricanes — Category 3 and greater — are responsible for 85% of the damage, a warmer climate is likely to have devastating economic and human consequences.
Compound events
Within research circles and among emergency planners, the concept of compound threatshas become a very popular subject. For years now scientists have warned that increasing population, exposure and vulnerability combined with extreme events spiked by climate change, would overwhelm resources and compromise emergency response. Experts argue we are now seeing that unfold in real time.
“These equally profound events occurring in different parts of the country at the same time — what we call compounded or connected extremes — run the risk of putting significant strain on resources, budgets, and the supply chain,” said Bowen.
This is a topic often missed in general discussions of climate change. It may seem easy to dismiss a few degree rise in global temperatures as inconsequential. However, when a cascade of extreme events, each made worse by human-caused climate change, pile on top of one another, it exposes the fragility of interconnected human systems.
“Add in the continued complications posed by COVID-19, and you’re faced with even greater challenges in trying to get communities back on their feet,” Bowen said.
Bowen recently authored a paper with other prominent scientists attempting to tackle this complicated issue. He says because of socioeconomic factors, population spreading into more high-risk regions, and an acceleration of climate change, more intense events “will only exacerbate the impacts of these compound scenarios in the future.”
Experts warn that what we are witnessing in the present moment is a window into everyday life in the not-too-distant future if humans do not reverse course and curb emissions. This is how climate change becomes a truly destabilizing force. That’s why Bowen and colleagues argue that much more urgency is needed to identify these unexpected combinations and the risks they pose to society.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now Post, Greta Moran explains the factors behind the recent surge in California’s wildfires and the aftermath that entails. Article written by Greta Moran for Teen Vogue.
Corporate negligence and climate change can help explain year after year of destructive, deadly blazes.
California’s beautiful stretches of forest and grassland are meant to burn. Fire is a natural part of the state’s diverse ecosystems, and native plants (including sequoias and redwoods) have adapted to withstand periodic fires. But California was never meant to burn the way it is now. Over time, these natural, regenerative wildfires have turned into highly destructive, deadly catastrophes without historical comparison, to the point that fire historian Stephen Pyne has named this era “the Pyrocene.”
Wildfires may seem like sudden accidents of nature, but these recent conflagrations are in some ways a more slow-moving disaster: the result of overlapping, systemic issues, including the historical suppression of indigenous fire management practices and accusations of corporate negligence of vital public resources, climate experts tell Teen Vogue. The staggering amount of deaths, destruction, and displacement from recent wildfires is so tragic, in part, because so many of the factors involved are caused by humans.
What exactly is driving these supercharged wildfires?
An investigation by the Wall Street Journal claimed that California’s largest investor-owned utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, knew that parts of its aging 18,500-mile transmission system were in desperate need of repair and a potential fire hazard, but that the company failed to act. The state found the utility giant responsible for the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in the California’s history, and blamed for sparking more than 1,500 fires in total.
“PG&E has really struggled as a company with safety,” Michael Wara, a lawyer and Stanford University professor focused on climate and energy policy, tells Teen Vogue. But the utility is not solely responsible for the intensity of the fires. Says Wara, “Whether or not PG&E maintains its lines properly wouldn’t matter so much if layered on top of that wasn’t climate change.”
In an email to Teen Vogue, a PG&E spokesperson said the company “didn’t agree with or support” the Wall Street Journal’s findings, but added, “We have acknowledged that the devastation of the 2017 and 2018 wildfires made it clear that we must do more to combat the threat of wildfires and extreme weather while hardening our systems.” (The spokesperson has not yet responded to a follow-up email asking if there is a date set for when the system will be fully updated.)
The warming climate has dried out California’s landscape, turning it into a tinderbox. It’s no coincidence that, last year, vegetation was at record levels of dryness in the part of California where the most destructive fire in the state’s history was burning. One study showed that the burned areas consumed by California’s wildfires have increased by more than 400% between 1972 and 2018. This is due in part to climate change: rising temperatures, have an exponential impact when it comes to setting the stage for catastrophic wildfires, the researchers found, particularly in forests.
“The hotter the air is, the drier the air is,” says Park Williams, the lead researcher on the study and a bioclimatologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “The drier the air is, the more easily it can dry out the vegetation and make it flammable.”
Over the past three years, this has all come to a head in the autumn, Williams explains. Supercharged wildfires have happened when the dry season, which has intensified due to climate change and delayed rains, coincided with the hot, dry “devil winds” from the high desert: Northern California’s Diablo winds and Southern California’s Santa Ana winds. “If these wind events get going in fall, say, early October, and the first big rain has not yet occurred, then that’s a perfect recipe for a big wildfire,” Williams says.
But climate change, “devil winds,” and PG&E’s alleged mismanagement aren’t even the full story behind the wildfires. Historically, federal and California state wildfire management policies have been geared toward suppressing nearly every fire, including beneficial fire. (Teen Vogue reached out to Cal Fire and the Forest Service for comment.) Native tribes have long used fire to steward and build fire-resiliency on their lands, but were forced to give up or reduce this important eco-cultural practice for over a century. As a result of these policies, enacted on the federal level by the Forest Service in response to 1910 fires, California’s grasslands and forests are choked with vegetation and plant debris, which help kindle wildfires.
“These are not natural disasters at all. These are very much man-made disasters,” says Leaf Hillman, director of the department of natural resources for the Karuk Tribe in Northern California. “They are directly attributable to fire suppression policy.” Hillman explains that in the past, “the landscape was managed with fire at such frequent intervals that fuels were never allowed to accumulate to these dangerous levels.”
There’s a now broad consensus among leading fire scientists that supports what native tribes have long known: Intentionally applied fire, often called prescribed fire, is an essential tool for managing wildfires and ecosystems. While state and federal fire management approaches are shifting to reflect this, and also now allowing native tribes, including the Karuk Tribe, to reintroduce and scale-up prescribed fire use, there’s still a long way to go in dismantling the legacy of fire suppression. According to data collected by McClatchy, and Climate Central, an independent organization of climate scientists and journalists, California as a whole is still barely “making a dent” in clearing the state’s dangerous fuel load, the McClatchy Bee reported.
What are the impacts of the wildfires?
The most visible impact of a wildfire is the immediate destruction left in its wake. Wildfires are swallowing up more and more land: Since 2000, 7 million acres on average, across the United States, have burned from wildfires every year, which is double the average acres burned in the 1990s. In 2018, wildfires killed more than 100 people and destroyed more than 25,000 structures in the U.S., including 18,137 homes.
Much of this destruction isn’t happening in the thick of California’s forests. The areas most vulnerable to wildfire are a part of what’s known as Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), which is “basically where human development meets up with these unoccupied or more natural ecosystems,” says Erin Banwell, a fire ecologist living in Northern California. These areas are more prone to destruction because of the density of flammable structures nestled within or near ecosystems that have grown less adapted to fire, due to fire suppression policies, explains Banwell.
So why are people living on the edge of wildlands? In part because there is not enough affordable housing in California. An Atlanticarticle describes this as a “vicious cycle”: thousands of houses are destroyed every year by wildfires, the affordable housing crisis deepens, pushing even more people toward wildfire-prone areas.
“What you see in the short term is that people just become emotionally triggered much more quickly. Their bandwidth is really shortened,” says Adrienne Heinz, a member of the collaborative and a clinical research psychologist at the VA National Center for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the longer term, survivors of wildfires can develop PTSD, especially if they lacked support earlier in the healing process.
To aid survivors with healing, Heinz helped develop a free app, Sonoma Rises, which provides content geared specifically toward assisting survivors as they cope with the aftermath of a wildfire, and features a section just for teens.
How can California become more fire resilient?
There isn’t a silver-bullet solution to the California wildfires and the many crises folded into them. But there are some clear changes that need to happen.
First, experts say, the power transmission system needs to be updated as soon as possible (some argue that transitioning utilities into public ownership could make them more accountable). Second, entire communities need to find ways to live and adapt to the growing realities of fire. There’s a growing network of neighborhoods collaborating on strategies to do this. These include updating homes to be fire resistant (or “hardened”), designing buffer zones (“defensible spaces”) between buildings and vegetation to disrupt the spread of fire, and building community-wide involvement in wildfire planning.
The fuel provided by California’s dry and overgrown forests and grasslands needs to be reduced by increasing the use of fire intentionally applied to the landscape. There are already many communities ramping up prescribed fire efforts. For instance, the Karuk Tribe recently released a detailed climate adaptation plan, centered on the intentional reincorporation of fire, and have added education on prescribed fire to the local schools’ curriculum. But to really safeguard California, these efforts need to be regional.
Getting to the root of this crisis, explains Hillman, will require massive public re-education to shift our relationship to fire and to a rapidly heating world.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now post, The Guardian details new information about the current staggering increases in temperature at the Death Valley landscape. Article written by Bob Henson.
How hot was it at the Furnace Creek visitor center at Death Valley national park on 16 August 2020? It was so hot that the huge electronic temperature display (which serves as a ubiquitous selfie backdrop) went on the fritz. Parts of the blocky digital display malfunctioned, resulting in numbers even higher than the actual mind-melting high on what turned out to be a landmark day.
An automated weather station at the visitor center recorded a preliminary high of 129.9F (54.4C) at 3.41pm PDT on Sunday. Even for heat-favored landscapes such as Death Valley, it is remarkable for temperatures to inch into such territory so late in the summer, when the sun is considerably lower in the sky than at the summer solstice in late June. According to weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera, the previous global record high for August is 127.9F (53.3C), recorded in Mitribah, Kuwait, in 2011.
If Sunday’s high at Death Valley is confirmed, it will be the planet’s highest temperature in almost a century and its third-highest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Owing to the fact that the two higher readings are in question, it may, in fact, be the hottest air temperature ever recorded on Earth.
The 130F afternoon in Death Valley fits snugly in the “what next?” narrative of life in 2020. But because human-caused climate change is such a ubiquitous yet gradual process, it’s rarely at the top of the news. A surging societal issue will typically bump climate from the headlines. There’s been no lack of such US events in 2020, from the coronavirus pandemic to police brutality and the state of the US Postal Service ahead of the November elections.
Climate science, and common sense, warn that it would be unwise, however, to skip over what has just happened in the California desert.
While competing events jostle for our attention, the machinery driving the climate crisis lumbers onward. Even in a year when global carbon emissions are on track to dip by a few percent, thanks largely to reduced travel and shuttered workplaces, the total amount of carbon dioxide concentrated in the atmosphere will once again reach its highest value in millions of years, about half a percent more than in 2019.
A visitor takes a selfie in front of the unofficial thermometer at Furnace Creek visitor center. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
The effects are perceptible. The Arctic experienced its first 100F day on record on 17 June when the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk hit 100.4F (38C). July 2020 was the hottest single month in more than a century of recordkeeping at such far-flung US locations as Phoenix; Miami; and Portland, Maine.
How can we be sure that the 130F reading really is the record-setter it appears to be? Even higher temperatures often make the rounds in newspapers or social media. However, these are typically drawn from thermometers exposed to the sun, which leads to readings higher than the actual air temperature, as was the case with the 145F (63C) reported from Kuwait in 2019. Official temperatures are collected from shaded instrument shelters, designed and outfitted under strict protocols established by the WMO (part of the United Nations).
The WMO, which also serves as the global arbiter of major weather records, plans to investigate the Death Valley report. Such post-mortems typically involve double-checking the temperature sensor’s performance, evaluating the station and its landscape, and assessing nearby observations to make sure they support the case.
The only readings hotter than Sunday’s that are recognized by WMO are 134F (56.7C) at Death Valley on 10 July 1913, and 131F (55C) at Death Valley on 13 July 1913, and at Kebili, Tunisia, in July 1931.
Questions swirl around those early 20th century values, though. For decades, the world’s all-time record high was believed to be the 136.4F (58C) reported from Al Azizia, Libya, on 13 September 1922. Weather historian Christopher Burt was skeptical: the value didn’t comport with nearby stations, and the thermometer design made it easy to misread the temperature.
Burt’s work with colleagues led to an overturning of the Al Azizia record by WMO in 2012, a saga documented in the Weather Underground film Dead Heat. Burt and Herrera have called out similar issues with the Death Valley and Kebili readings from the 1910s and 1930s. Thus far the WMO has not re-evaluated those.
Parsing the planet’s highest temperature by degrees, or tenths of degrees, may seem like a pedantic task in the face of a global climate crisis with vast consequences. Yet without careful, consistent measurement, it will be all the more difficult to keep track of a changing climate as it careens through our lives.
Death Valley is already a forbidding landscape, one where heat and dryness rule and few people spend more than a day or two. A warming planet is unlikely to yield more Death Valleys in our lifetimes. However, it is pushing saline water into the delicate freshwater landscape of the Everglades, attacking the namesake ice of Glacier national park, and triggering an onslaught of changes both subtle and profound to ecosystems across the continent.
With all this in mind, perhaps we should linger over a 130-degree afternoon a little longer.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now post, Rolling Stone reports of a new podcast aimed at battling climate change and saving our planet. Article written by Daniel Kreps.
A new podcast, Spotify and Gimlet’s How to Save a Planet, is set to explore ways to solve the ongoing climate crisis and what we need to do to implement these necessary changes. The series will also examine topics like disaster prep, Europe’s Green New Deal and the similarities between the climate movement and the Black Lives Movement.
“Does climate change freak you out? Want to know what we, collectively, can do about it? Us too,” Spotify and Gimlet said of the podcast.
“How To Save A Planet is a podcast that asks the big questions: what do we need to do to solve the climate crisis, and how do we get it done? Join us, journalist Alex Blumberg and scientist and policy nerd Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, as we scour the Earth for solutions, talk to people who are making a difference, ask hard questions, crack dumb jokes and — episode by episode — figure out how to build the future we want.”
Ahead of the podcast’s August 20th premiere, Rolling Stone is sharing a trailer for the series:
The podcast also features Kendra Pierre-Louis, a former New York Times climate reporter, and Rachel Waldholz, a reporter focused on climate change, as well as interviews with prominent scientific experts like Mary Anne Hitt, Dr. Kate Marvel, Bren Smith and Colette Pichon Battle.
As evidenced by the trailer, How to Save a Planet tackles the key climate change question, “How screwed are we?” “We can choose to be completely screwed if we want to,” Marvel says in the trailer, “but we also have the ability to limit the damage. So we can choose whether we’re screwed.”
Additionally, the streaming service also posted a 12-minute prologue for the series ahead of its August 20th arrival.
Cover/featured image: All rights to Rolling Stone and Gimlet’s How to Save a Planet
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
As the fashion industry continues to evolve, so do its consumers. Labels now read of “sustainability!” and “made ethically!”, as people take pride in knowing that a better future is coming. “Fast fashion” is now in the past, as the focus is now on what’s behind the scenes of production instead of what’s ready to wear.
“Fast fashion” can be categorized as the one of the most lucrative and busy markets that appeal to a massive pool of consumers- at any age, race, sex, etc. Google it and you will see the official definition: “inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends.” Once seen on social media and how big a trend has gotten, most people want a designer inspired garment (or something trendy) for more than half of the price.
The problem with “Fast Fashion” stems from the work process that these garments need to be produced at. Usually, big retailers will use the work of people in largely populated countries who could be paid below minimum wage at the ease of the company and the disadvantage of its workers. (More on this topic in part II of this series)
The best introduction for what sustainable fashion is can be defined by Green Strategy. This term “implies continuous work to improve all stages of the product’s life cycle, from design, raw material production, manufacturing, transport, storage, marketing and final sale, to use, reuse, repair, remake and recycling of the product and its components.”
This resource divides the definition into an environmental and socio-economic perspective for separating the goals and for an overall better understanding. If you were to look from the environmental perspective, the product at hand would have passed through the best product life cycle by: “(a) ensuring efficient and careful use of natural resources (water, energy, land, soil, animals, plants, biodiversity, ecosystems, etc); (b) selecting renewable energy sources (wind, solar, etc) at every stage, and (c) maximizing repair, remake, reuse, and recycling of the product and its components. “
And in the socio-economic perspective, the companies should “work to improve present working conditions for workers on the field, in the factories, transportation chain, and stores, by aligning with good ethics, best practice and international codes of conduct.”
With that said, this brief introduction will allow us to dive deeper into the world where more sustainable options are available for both the garments that are made and the workers who make them. Here are facts taken from the official Sustainable Fashion Matterz website:
As this three part series progresses, we will be talking about the good and bad sides of the fashion industry’s trial at sustainability and how this can progress into a wide-spread market. With that said, we will also reveal how to do it yourselves and how to make an impact with your clothing choices. Until next time…
