It’s hard to make money selling home insurance in Florida. For one thing, the state is very vulnerable to hurricanes, and those hurricanes are getting stronger thanks to climate change. That means that insurance companies often have to pay out billions of dollars to rebuild homes after big storms. For another, a legal loophole has made the state a hotbed for fraudulent litigation over insurance claims, and companies lose even more money fighting those lawsuits. Furthermore, these companies have to buy their own insurance from multinational corporations called reinsurers — and reinsurers are charging a lot more money these days, due in part to the increasing severity of hurricane damage.
This difficult environment has made Florida one of the most expensive states in the country for property insurance, with prices about four times as high as the national average. Despite sky-high prices, however, most insurers still can’t turn a profit. The financial pain for the industry got a lot worse last year thanks to Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the city of Fort Myers as a Category 4 storm and caused at least $60 billion in insured losses — more than any U.S. disaster since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
That’s been too much for some companies to bear. At least eight Florida carriers have gone bankrupt in the past two years. And just last week two major national insurers, AAA and Farmers, announced that they would trim their business in the state, pulling back from risky areas. The moves may jeopardize as many as 100,000 policies in the state. That’s around 2 percent of the entire state’s market.
“It is pretty rare to have this many insurers leaving a state at a similar time,” said Matthew Palazola, an insurance analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence who studies the Florida market. “Any of these companies leaving probably wouldn’t be hugely significant normally, but it’s more significant with the tide of leaving we’ve seen.”
These departures have forced more Floridians to buy insurance from a state-backed program called Citizens. The program is meant to be an “insurer of last resort” for people who can’t get coverage elsewhere, but it’s ballooned to record size this year as more private companies leave the state. By the end of the year it may have 1.7 million customers. In some areas like hurricane-prone Miami, more than two-thirds of homeowners depend on it.
Florida’s Republican leadership has tried to play down the recent departures as a blip, arguing that the industry is stable and that Citizens’ growth is temporary. The state’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, called Farmers “the Bud Light of insurance” in what appeared to be an attempt to suggest that its decision was politically motivated. Governor Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, insists that the market is on the mend thanks to recent reforms: Last year, the Florida legislature cracked down on fraudulent litigation and created a new fund to help companies buy reinsurance, which experts believe will stall further bankruptcies.
“It’s hopefully optimistic, but I think it still will take a long time,” said Palazola. “I haven’t heard any [insurers] say, ‘Oh, they put these reforms in place, that’s great, we’re all in.’ I’ve heard them say, ‘Let’s wait and see.’” Litigation has started to decline since last year’s reforms took effect, and if the trend continues some companies may come back to the market, but no one’s sure how well the new laws are working.
Even if Florida avoids a total market collapse, insurance prices are going to remain high, and that’s thanks in large part to climate change. Rapidly intensifying hurricanes like Ian are so large and so powerful that even healthy insurance companies have a hard time dealing with them, and many resort to fraud and deception rather than pay out all their claims. A Washington Post investigation found that several companies cut payments below required levels, leaving victims short on cash when they needed it most.
Even during quiet seasons, the mere threat of a hurricane will keep prices high. In preparation for hurricane season, insurance companies buy reinsurance policies that can help them survive the cost burden of big storms, and those policies are getting more expensive: In the months after Hurricane Ian, multinational reinsurers raised prices by as much as 50 percent.
Local companies in Florida are passing those costs onto their customers, who open their bills each year to find that their premiums are ticking higher. To make matters worse, many insurance policies aren’t sufficient to recover from storms. In Cape Coral, which bore the brunt of Hurricane Ian’s winds last year, many victims have found their insurance payouts are so small they can’t afford to rebuild their homes.
Homeowners won’t see much relief any time soon, according to Palazola.
“In a middle-of-the-road scenario where the reforms work and there’s an average hurricane season, I could see a scenario where prices don’t go up dramatically from here,” he told Grist. “You’ve got an extreme scenario where we have a giant hurricane this year, and the reforms don’t work, you have more large insurers leaving, and the price becomes untenable, to the point where the average person feels it.”
Something similar is happening in other states that are vulnerable to climate disaster. In Louisiana, which has seen at least four major storms in the last few years, several private companies have collapsed since 2021’s Hurricane Ida, forcing more customers onto the state-backed plan. And multiple national insurers have fled California in recent weeks rather than try to make a profit selling policies in the state’s wildfire-prone mountains. There, too, homeowners have rushed to buy coverage from a state-backed insurer of last resort. In both of these states, prices have soared as natural disasters continue to strike.
If Hurricane Ian sent a big price shock through an unstable market, another storm this summer could deliver an even bigger blow, pushing more insurers away and forcing more Floridians into the Citizens program. Industry leaders and top government officials insist that the state’s market could survive such an event without total collapse, but another storm would raise prices even further for millions of homeowners across the state. Not only would reinsurers push costs higher to account for the storm risk, but the state government would likely have to charge a tax assessment to keep Citizens afloat.
In other words, no matter how well the legislature clamps down on fraud, the mounting toll of climate change is going to make Florida a less affordable place to live. Even on a sunny day, the status quo is expensive.
A new kind of food may soon be arriving on grocery store shelves: climate smart. Under the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a nascent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, this amalgam of farming methods aims to keep the American agricultural juggernaut steaming ahead while slashing the sector’s immense greenhouse gas footprint.
This spring, the Biden administration began allocating $3.1 billion to hundreds of agriculture organizations, corporations, universities, and nonprofits for climate-smart projects. These entities will pass most of the money on to tens of thousands of farmers, ranchers, and forest owners, including growers who manage thousands of acres and underserved and disadvantaged farmers who often have much smaller operations. The first agreements have now been signed; the money is starting to flow.
The USDA estimates that the 141 funded projects will, collectively over the project’s five-year lifetime, eliminate or sequester the equivalent of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, on par with removing more than 2.4 million gas-powered cars from the road over the same period. They will achieve this by paying growers to adopt practices thought to either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or capture carbon dioxide from the air. These practices include reducing or eliminating tilling of soil, planting “cover crops” that grow during the off-season and are not harvested, improving how farmers use fertilizer and manure, and planting trees.
More importantly, the agency aims to catalyze new, premium markets for products such as climate-smart corn, soybeans, and beef, which it hopes will spur farmers to continue these practices far into the future. “People want to know that when they’re spending their dollar at the grocery store that they’re not hurting the environment; they want to be helpful,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said last December when announcing projects that received funding. The emerging market for climate-friendly products, he added, represents “a transformational opportunity for U.S. agriculture.”
The idea has enthusiastic supporters. The market that Vilsack envisions “is potentially massive — much bigger than any federal program could be,” says Ben Thomas, senior policy director for agriculture at the Environmental Defense Fund. “And it’ll last as long as the conditions that create the market still exist.”
But the high-profile effort has also come under fire. Some researchers fear that the agency lacks a workable plan for measuring and verifying the impacts of the practices federal dollars will be paying for. Others say science has yet to prove that climate-smart practices truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “We don’t have that understanding yet for most climate-smart management practices,” says Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University.
The program’s harshest critics assail it as a giveaway to rich corporations that will do little to rein in climate change — and might even exacerbate it. “This program is just pork for big polluters,” says University of Iowa economist Sylvia Secchi. “It’s a greenwashing scheme. It’s going to allow nothing to get done.”
For decades, efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions have focused on power plants, factories, and automobiles, not farmland. “Agriculture has just not been at the table in a meaningful way,” says Thomas.
But it should be. For all of industrial farming’s success at feeding people and livestock and producing biofuel, the sector is also a major polluter, accounting for roughly 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and roughly a quarter of emissions globally. The main greenhouse gases emitted by U.S. agriculture today are nitrous oxide, which comes mainly from soil microbes that digest nitrogen fertilizer, and methane, burped by the nation’s roughly 92 million cows. Both warm the atmosphere far more, per molecule, than carbon dioxide.
Farmland itself was also once a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide as farmers cleared carbon-rich forests and plowed up prairie soils, releasing carbon from trees and the ground. Now, climate-smart agriculture aims to recapture some of that carbon.
Ryan MacKay raises beef, pork, lamb and poultry using natural, sustainable methods on his Hudson, MA farm.
John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Unlike with organic farming, climate-smart farming has no list of allowed or prohibited practices. “There is no single definition of climate smart,” says Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Instead, it comprises a mélange of practices that, studies show, can either reduce farms’ greenhouse gases emissions or increase the amount of carbon stored in their soils.
Funded projects are receiving up to $95 million over five years to help farmers take up these practices and to create monitoring and marketing programs that, it’s hoped, will keep farmers on the climate-smart track after the program ends. That all-carrot, no-stick strategy is intentional and necessary to reduce agriculture’s climate impact, says Robert Bonnie, under secretary for farm production and conservation at USDA and one of the program’s chief architects and champions.
“A voluntary, collaborative approach is the only approach that works here,” says Bonnie. “Regulation isn’t very good at asking people to adopt new practices.”
The department says the program will deliver benefits to underserved and disadvantaged farmers, a group that includes farmers of color, women, veterans, and small and beginning farmers who have, in the past, struggled to access USDA funding streams and have sometimes been intentionally excluded from them. Many of the projects whose signed agreements have been made public, for example, will direct at least 20 percent of funds to underserved farmers.
Champions of the program also note that expected benefits go beyond increasing carbon sequestration and reducing greenhouse gases from farm fields. By encouraging farmers to reduce tillage, plant cover crops, and take other measures, “we’re improving water quality; we’re reducing erosion,” says Adam Kiel, executive vice president of AgOutcomes, which is managing a $95 million climate-smart partnership led by the Iowa Soybean Association.
But as the climate-smart commodities program gets underway, many experts are warning that even its most-touted practices often fall far short. For example, some cover crop studies have found that the practice did not sequester significant amounts of carbon in soils, while other studies that did find gains also had gaps or methodological problems that diminished confidence in the results. And an analysis published in May in Nature Sustainability found that yield losses resulting from cover crops in the United States could erase as much as 70 percent of their climate benefits if farmers cut down trees elsewhere or plow up grasslands to compensate for those losses.
“I wouldn’t say we should pause everything, because there are some real benefits to cover cropping,” says David Lobell, a food security researcher at Stanford University and a coauthor of the Nature paper. “But I think we should be much more vigilant about maintaining productivity” as more farmers start using cover crops.
Other projects aim to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of beef and dairy herds by more carefully managing how these animals graze pastures, so their manure can feed perennial grasses and other plants whose roots pull carbon deep into the soil. But grass-fed cows can also emit significantly more methane over their lifetimes than those that spend more of their lives in feedlots. Some projects plan to feed cows experimental additives that could reduce those methane emissions.
Measuring and modeling nitrous oxide emissions accurately is also notoriously difficult. And practices thought to reduce such emissions — like applying some fertilizer in the spring, just before planting, rather than applying all fertilizer in the fall — sometimes backfire. In fact, few long-term assessments of any climate-smart practices have been conducted on working farms, says Novick, making it hard to tailor practices to particular soil types, climates, and situations.
“It doesn’t appear that funding decisions from this program were necessarily made in a way that maximizes climate mitigation,” says Novick, who led a team that last fall authored a report on how science can inform nature-based climate solutions. “Ideally we would have first invested in the data tools necessary to understand when and where a practice is likely to succeed as a climate solution.”
There’s also the question of how to measure the program’s benefits. Funded groups are required to take measurements that will allow the USDA to assess the impacts of the practices farmers are implementing. But the agency is also relying heavily on a computer model that was designed to estimate greenhouse gases for planning large-scale projects and that cannot accurately quantify emissions and carbon capture from individual farms, notes Jon Sanderman, a soil scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
Bill Hohenstein, director of the USDA’s Office of Energy and Environmental Policy, acknowledges that the science behind climate-smart agriculture remains a work in progress. But he says it’s mature enough to take action. “We could wait a decade and probably understand these benefits better,” Hohenstein says. “But our view is that we would end up with generally the same recommendations.”
In addition to the technical challenges of measuring carbon and greenhouse gas changes, the Climate-Smart program will have to get farmers to stick with new practices after payments have ended. Officials say that payments to cover the startup costs for enrolled farmers are essential. “If this stuff was free, folks would already be doing it,” Bonnie says. But once they’ve bought equipment like seed drills for no-till planting and climbed the learning curve, he and Hohenstein say, reduced input costs, yield increases resulting from healthier soils, and premiums for climate-smart products will start to pay for themselves.
Many experts view such projections as overly optimistic. Hanna Poffenbarger, a soil scientist at the University of Kentucky, says it may take a decade for cover crop benefits, such as reduced need for fertilizer and increased soil organic matter, to translate into profits. That aligns with the experience of early adopters like Trey Hill, a farmer in Maryland who says that even after planting cover crops for more than 20 years, he’s still seeing yield losses in some of his corn fields and an unclear impact on his bottom line. “When you talk about improving soils,” he says, “we’re talking about a 10-year commitment before you would really even see anything significant.”
Details on the projects themselves have been slow to emerge. Though the projects receiving the bulk of the funding were announced last September, the USDA has so far shared fewer than a quarter of the signed agreements on its website. For the remaining projects, the department has published scant information. For example, a $61-million project led by the agribusiness giant Tyson to create and market “climate-smart beef” comes with only a two-sentence description that does not explain what practices will make beef climate smart. In response to an interview request, a Tyson representative linked to a blog post lacking substantive information on how the company’s claims will be verified.
The vagueness troubles observers like Goswami, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who says that without clear standards, companies will define “climate smart” in different ways, potentially confusing customers. “If Tyson comes in and says farms and ranches who we’re buying cows from have implemented X amount of cover cropping, does that make their beef climate smart?” she asks.
Even people who received funding fear that the program could overwhelm or confuse farmers who are suddenly inundated with competing climate-smart offers. “In Iowa alone, there are 17 different climate-smart projects” that will be recruiting farmers, Kiel notes. At the same time, another branch of the USDA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, has been tasked with disbursing nearly $20 billion injected by the Inflation Reduction Act into farm programs, including ones that pay farmers to grow cover crops or set aside land for conservation. Private-sector carbon markets are also courting farmers. And many of these initiatives require that farmers not take money from competing programs, to avoid double counting of climate benefits. “There’s going to be farmer confusion,” Kiel says. “It’s unfortunate, but at least there’s going to be lots of choices.”
Secchi, meanwhile, questions why some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in industrial agriculture are receiving additional federal money. She would have instead liked to see the government insist that growers already receiving government subsidies through other programs do more to reduce their climate impact. “Why can’t we ask farmers who are getting crop insurance subsidies to plant cover crops at zero extra cost for the taxpayer?” Secchi asks. She’d also like to see more of the funds directed toward minority, Indigenous, and other disadvantaged farmers.
Bonnie, the USDA undersecretary, responds that catalyzing large-scale change requires working with companies big enough to reach thousands of growers farming millions of acres. Building a program that will create new markets rather than new regulations and policies, he adds, insulates climate-smart agriculture from future Congresses and administrations that may be less climate friendly.
One thing is certain: As the government looks to steer the ocean liner that is American farming in a direction that’s climate friendlier yet still highly profitable, a lot of eyes — both hopeful and skeptical — will be watching closely.
Canada is currently experiencing its worst wildfire season ever, and on Monday smoke from the hundreds of blazes once again drifted across the border into the United States, prompting another round of air quality warnings.
The new bout of smoke and haze led to air quality alerts being issued for around 70 million people in 32 states and the District of Columbia, from Montana across to Vermont and all the way down into Northern Alabama, reported CNN and The New York Times. Cities affected included New York, Cleveland and Chicago.
“We are acutely aware that the recent weather events prominently impacting our City this summer are the direct result of the climate crisis,” said Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, as The New York Times reported.
Precautions like wearing masks and limiting time outside were recommended by officials. Wildfire smoke can irritate the nose, throat and eyes, and can lead to breathing issues. Exposure has also been associated with increased risks of heart attack, lung cancer, stroke and cognitive decline.
Haze caused by smoke from wildfires in Canada shrouds the skyline of midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in New York City behind the city of Hoboken, New Jersey on July 18, 2023, as seen from Jersey City, New Jersey. Gary Hershorn / Getty Images
“The advice to limit strenuous activities is because when your respiratory rate is higher, you inhale more particulates,” said Yale Medicine’s Dr. Carrie Redlich on the Yale Medicine website. The tiny particles from the smoke “get everywhere through the bloodstream and trigger inflammatory pathways, which can exacerbate a number of underlying cardiac and respiratory conditions.”
Redlich said the best kind of mask to wear to protect yourself from the poor air quality that comes with wildfire smoke is an N95 or P100.
According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, 904 active fires were burning across Canada on Monday, with 587 out of control and 203 under control. In British Columbia (B.C.), officials reported 391 active fires, with 125 in Alberta and 107 in Québec, according to CBS News.
In some parts of the country, “light to moderate” smoke is forecast to hang around through mid-week, ABC News reported.
In the past week, two firefighters have lost their lives battling the epic blazes, prompting an outpouring of tributes and thanks for those on the front lines of the thus far untamable and relentless fires, reported The Guardian.
Of 19-year-old nursing student Devyn Gale, who had been helping to combat a fire near her hometown in B.C., the B.C. wildfire service said, “She was one of us. She was the heart of us,” as The Guardian reported.
“When they burn like this there’s no way to even put people in front of it to stop the fire, there’s no amount of resources on the ground or from the sky that’s going to be able to stop… these fires when they get the momentum,” said Matt Rau, an incident commander with the U.S.-based Southwest Area Incident Management Team, according to CNN in another report.
Some days, wildfire crews can work as long as 16 hours battling the unrelenting blazes.
Currently, fire crews from Mexico, New Zealand, the U.S. and, most recently, Australia are helping to fight the blazes alongside Canadian firefighters.
Olive harvests are expected to face a second challenging year in a row as heat waves threaten crops across Europe.
This year’s heat waves arrived a month earlier than the first heat waves of last year’s hot, dry season, according to Earth.org. The first heat wave arrived in late April, following a warmer- and drier-than-usual March. The winter was also unusually warm.
During the first heat wave of 2023, the trees were just beginning to flower, putting them in a vulnerable position.
“This happened as the olive trees were in bloom,” said Rafael Pico, director of Asoliva, the Spanish association of olive oil producers and exporters in Spain, as reported by Phys.org. “If there are no flowers, there’s no fruit. And if there’s no fruit, there’s no oil.”
Spain, the largest olive oil producer in Europe, has had its annual supply decline by half because of the heat and drought. Last year, heat waves caused the country’s olive oil production to decline from 1.48 million metric tons in 2021 to 2022 to just 660,000 metric tons from 2022 to 2023. Experts are predicting olive oil supply to reach 850,000 metric tons this year, still far below average, but continuing heat waves could impact the harvest.
“In Spain we already know it is going to be another bad year, but no one has got to grips with the what’s currently happening. The record temperatures are not going to help the situation,” Walter Zanre, the chief executive of the UK branch of Filippo Berio, the largest olive oil producer globally, told The Guardian. “I can’t share how much anxiety this is causing us. Last year, Spain came into crop with a bit of carry-over [from the year before], which negated the shortfall somewhat. This year the barrels are dry. Even if Spain produces the predicted 850,000 tonnes, the price situation is worse.”
Spain isn’t alone. Other major olive oil-producing countries, such as Italy and Portugal, have experienced smaller yields because of the harsh conditions.
Since June 2022, olive oil prices have surged in response to the poor olive harvests, as the crop has been affected by the extreme heat. Olive oil prices have hit over $6,000 per metric ton, the highest price this product has been since 1997, Weather.com reported.
As The Guardian reported, consumers may expect to see shortages of olive oil in the fall, as last year’s supply is expected to run out in September, and the new supply for 2023 isn’t expected to be ready until November.
Many crops are facing shortages amid the climate crisis. The current heat waves in Europe are also threatening vineyards, even putting types of grapes that have long been known to survive in extreme conditions at risk. Maturing tomatoes in Italy are at risk from blistering in the extreme temperatures, and these crops were already impacted by severe floods earlier this year.
Climate Connections is a collaboration between Grist and the Associated Press that explores how a changing climate is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases around the world, and how mitigation efforts demand a collective, global response.
Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, are on strike, asking for familiar items like better pay, voting rights, and health care benefits. They’re also asking for one unique condition: to shift their production plant to greener technology.
The plant workers in Erie, two hours north of Pittsburgh, manufacture locomotives for Wabtec Corporation. Locomotives are the engine of the train and generally run on diesel fuel.
Manufacturing workers have been on strike since June 22 and are represented by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America union, or UE. Initial conversations to renegotiate working contracts began in April. Scott Slawson is the president of the local 506 UE chapter in Erie and said there are currently 1,400 workers on strike.
“The members are dug in for the long haul,” Slawson said. “This is a passionate fight for them and they’re willing to go the distance if required.”
He said his union and train operator unions are working together to push for better environmental standards and greener technology in the industry.
Trains aren’t massive polluters, but the industry is trying to reduce emissions. The transportation industry is responsible for the highest amount of greenhouse gas emission of all industries in the country, with rail being responsible for two percent of the sector’s emissions, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Compared to other options, both freight and passenger rail lines emit fewer pollutants than automobiles or planes.
Still, trains are known to release air pollutants in the communities they operate in. For example, diesel emissions from locomotives are responsible for 70 percent of cancer risk in California and the rail industry releases 640 tons of air pollutants every year in that state alone. This reality recently pushed California regulators to create the nation’s first emissions regulations for trains.
To prevent pollution, train companies would purchase and use emissions-reducing locomotives, commonly referred to as Tier 4 locomotives, from manufacturers like Wabtec.
These machines decrease emissions by an estimated 70 percent more than their counterparts, according to industry projections. Top rail companies Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific have made pledges to reduce their emissions (30 percent by 2030 and net zero by 2050, respectively) and adopt some of these greener locomotives.
The industry is moving slowly to make this change, according to a report from the investigative labor outlet Workday Magazine and the progressive public policy organization American Prospect. The Environmental Protection Agency told Workday that, as of 2020, 74 percent of all of the locomotives operated by major rail companies are Tier 2 or lower, with almost all smaller rail companies operating outdated, polluting technology.
Slawson wants to speed up this industry shift and said workers are using their voices to get it done. A report from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that manufacturing green, Tier 4 locomotives at the Erie plant would create between 2,600 and 4,300 estimated new jobs, and additional several thousand in the region.
“It’s not just about building the locomotive; it’s about requiring the rail industry as a whole to make this switch,” Slawson said. “Even though rail is one of the least polluting things out there, there still has to be a push to adopt the newest technologies.”
Organized workplaces and strikes are on the rise across the country. Industries across the nation are now dealing with the realities of what the transition away from fossil fuel dependency logistically looks like. The UE has said its industry is deeply tied to fossil fuel usage to power the cars they create and they want to break ties with the polluting past.
“The company is not willing to make commitments towards assisting us in this venture and they’re not willing to make commitments to the workforce to allow us to do this,” Slawson said, “and that’s a problematic piece of this.”
In a statement to Grist, a Wabtec spokesperson said the company is disappointed the union has engaged in a strike and that “no one benefits from a walkout.”
“The company is a leader with a proven track record in developing environmentally zero or low-emission locomotives for the rail industry,” Tim Bader, Wabtec spokesperson said.
In addition to the Tier 4 locomotives, Wabtec also manufactures a green technology locomotive that is 100 percent battery-powered, known as a FLXdrive. Bader said Erie engineers, who are not striking, do significant design work for these locomotives, but the manufacturing is done on a “case-by-case basis factoring in plant capacity, location, cost competitiveness, and schedule.”
Bader said most of the Tier 4 manufacturing is being done in Fort Worth, Texas.
Past labor battles over a green transition have been rooted in anxiety that as industries try and pivot away from fossil fuel use or polluting machinery, workers would be left in the lurch. This has played out before when offshore wind came to Texas and oil workers worried the transition would leave them behind.
But, this doesn’t mean that workers in these industries don’t support the change. In 2021, 4,500 California oil workers signed on in support of renewable energy projects like wind and solar. That same year, the nation’s largest coal mining union announced its support for clean energy projects, albeit with a few caveats.
Liz Ratzloff said the ongoing strike in Pennsylvania is an example of how industries not directly operating in fossil fuels are moving towards greeners solutions and their workers are demanding they be active participants in any sort of transition.
Ratzloff is the co-executive director of the Labor Network for Sustainability, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on the intersection of labor organizing and climate action. She said as the nation pushes for more renewable technologies in transportation, it makes sense the frontline workers creating those products are organizing.
“These companies are using this point of transition as a way to undo a lot of labor standards that have been won,” Ratzloff said.
Right now, the auto industry is preparing for a round of labor negotiations. The United Auto Workers, or UAW, are advocating for a guaranteed transition for workers who currently manufacture gas-powered vehicles to the manufacturing of EVs. The union, which represents roughly 400,000 active workers across the country, has criticized the lower pay associated with EV production. UAW has also called out the Biden administration for not requiring union laborers and fair pay standards when giving federal subsidies to EV manufacturers.
She said the strike in Pennsylvania echoes similar pushes in auto manufacturing to decarbonize and manufacture electric vehicles, all with fair pay. Auto industry workers who manufacture electric vehicles are often paid less than their legacy coworkers who create gas-powered vehicles, she said. For example, a battery cell manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio currently has a starting wage of $16.50 an hour, with the chance to make up to $20 per hour after seven years. The plant, a General Motors project, replaced an assembly plant that closed in 2019 where GM union workers made double the current starting pay.
Ratzloff said the fight in Pennsylvania goes behind a push for a green transition and is ensuring that workers continue to have rights and a say in their jobs as the industry changes.
“[The Wabtec strike] shows the potential power of workers, communities, and the labor movement in addressing the climate crisis where companies are uninterested and unwilling, and the government is seemingly unable,” she said.
