Whenever Ram Amar explains his idea for mitigating climate change, people usually look at him strangely and ask if he’s crazy. It’s easy to see why. 

His startup, Rewind, wants to sequester a gigaton of carbon each year — about 10 percent of what climate scientists deem necessary each year to reach net zero by 2050 — in a remarkably simple way. The elevator pitch goes like this: Gather millions of tons of agricultural waste and send it to the bottom of the Black Sea, where it won’t decay. Wilder still, an ancient Greek ship that sank 2,400 years ago helped inspire the idea.

At first glance, the proposal might seem counterintuitive. The carbon that plants absorb from the atmosphere through photosynthesis is released when they decompose (or, alas, are compressed over eons to make fossil fuels). This is where the Black Sea comes in. Unlike most other large bodies of water, it is mostly anoxic, meaning there is precious little oxygen — and almost none at all at depths beyond 300 feet or so. It takes a long time for anything to biodegrade down there, which explains why dozens of intact shipwrecks litter its floor.

After selling his software company to Google in 2019, Amar pondered growing seaweed to sequester carbon, but realized that anything it captured would eventually return to the atmosphere. He put the sequestration idea aside until he met Peter Kroust, a German marine biologist who suggested stashing carbon in the Black Sea — something that occurred to him after cycling along the Danube and seeing tons of agricultural waste headed downriver. “And at that point, it was just like a click,” Amar said with a laugh. After getting initial funding (he wouldn’t say how much), they launched Rewind in Tel Aviv last year. 

It’s an intriguing idea, and Rewind, which employs 12 people, just wrapped up a yearlong experiment in the Black Sea and the Sea of Galilee (portions of which are anoxic) that suggests it could work. The research team left a bit more than 650 pounds of hardwood submerged in a linen bag at a depth of 820 feet. The material retained 97 percent of its biomass over the 12 months that followed. “We saw that there is some degradation over the first three months, and then from three months on it stayed mostly consistent,” Amar said. “That’s really great.” 

In their control of pine submerged in normal water, the researchers recorded 10 percent degradation in six months. The reduced rate of decay in anoxic water can be attributed to lignin, a key organic polymer, found in the tissue of most plants, that does not break down without oxygen. Amar’s team plans further experiments at depths of 3,200 feet, followed by two deposits to be made more than a mile down.

Similar tests with wheat stalk, corn stover, and grapevines revealed varying levels of decay, but Amar said this small amount of degradation won’t be a problem 7,200 feet beneath the surface. “Whatever does break down will stay in the deep Black Sea and will not mix and float back up into shallower layers where it can come in contact with the air,” he said.

According to Amar, carbon dating shows that the deepest parts of the Black Sea haven’t had contact with the air in two millennia, making it an excellent carbon (and methane) sink. The company is confident the science stacks up, but because Rewind hopes to fund the project by selling carbon credits, its process must be vetted by independent experts to ensure it works.

There are several potential pitfalls, the biggest of which is carbon sequestration being difficult to measure. There also is little recourse should something go wrong. “Once you put material in the deep sea, it is almost impossible to get it back again without a huge expense,” said Martin Palmer, a geochemistry professor at the National Oceanography Center in South Hampton, England. “So you need to be 100 percent confident that the process is safe.”

Palmer also notes that although organic matter is better preserved in anoxic environments, it still undergoes degradation that results in some level of methane production. “You would need to be very sure that you would not exceed the methane solubility in the Black Sea waters, or there could be problems,” particularly in an area that is seismically active, Palmer told Grist.

And then there are the logistical challenges, including where to source so much biomass. However, the Black Sea is bordered by six agriculturally productive countries that generate a lot of waste. Much of it is usually burned, or shipped down the Danube and dumped into the sea at depths above the anoxic zone, where it degrades and releases carbon. Given the existing infrastructure for moving all that material, Rewind calculates that the carbon needed to transport it far from shore to dump it at an appropriate depth would amount to no more than 3 percent of the carbon that could be sequestered. With a volume of more than 131,000 cubic miles, there is plenty of space to do the job.

However, stashing a gigaton of carbon a year will require such large quantities of biomass that it will demand geopolitical coordination. That means convincing politicians, policymakers, and the public. Communicating the idea that his startup isn’t simply dumping waste in the sea — something Amar calls the “understanding gap” — won’t be easy, especially in such a politically tense region. Rewind remains in the early phases of those discussions with government agencies and officials, but is confident it can sell them on the idea.

“As humanity, we’re a huge intervention to the planet,” he said. “So we’re trying to fix the biggest intervention we’ve made, with a smaller intervention.”

His idea, though perhaps counterintuitive, may not be as crazy as it first sounds.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A look inside the plan to store carbon at the bottom of the Black Sea on Sep 12, 2023.

Four months before the close of 2023, the United States has already broken its record for the number of weather and climate disasters with damages exceeding $1 billion in a calendar year.

There have been 23 “billion-dollar disasters” to date this year, according to a monthly report issued Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, or NOAA. The last calendar-year record was set in 2020, with 22 disasters costing $1 billion. (NOAA adjusts its count of past years’ billion-dollar disasters to account for inflation.) This year’s 23 disasters have cost Americans a total of nearly $58 billion and caused at least 253 deaths. 

The events include Hurricane Idalia, the strongest hurricane to hit Florida’s Big Bend region in 125 years, and the Lahaina fire storm, the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in more than a century. A winter storm in the Northeast, flooding in California and Vermont, and 18 severe storm events — including thunderstorms, tornado outbreaks, and hail storms — also contributed to the record.

With 12 weeks remaining in the Atlantic hurricane season and autumn wildfires common in the West, the U.S. is likely to end the year with an even higher number of billion-dollar disasters. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, much of the country faces above-normal risk of significant wildfires in September, though parts of southern California are expected to have below-normal potential.

In a statement released Monday, Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the NOAA report “sobering,” and “the latest confirmation of a worsening trend in costly disasters, many of which bear the undeniable fingerprints of climate change.”

Cleetus said the staggering financial losses underscored the need for more funding and attention toward climate resilience and adaptation. “It’s imperative that U.S. policymakers invest much more in getting out ahead of disasters before they strike rather than forcing communities to just pick up the pieces after the fact,” she said. 

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included nearly $50 billion for climate resilience projects and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act added several billion more, including $2.6 billion for coastal communities, $235 million for tribes, and $25 million for Native Hawaiians.

It will be years before the country sees the possible benefits of those investments. In the meantime, the federal government is struggling to keep up with the immediate impacts of natural disasters.

As part of a supplemental funding request that Congress is currently considering, the Biden administration requested $16 billion dollars in additional funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to get the agency’s disaster relief fund through the fiscal year, which closes at the end of September. 

As climate change contributes to more intense storms and larger and more frequent fires, the price of adaptation and recovery efforts will only grow.

“The science is clear that adapting to runaway climate change is an impossible feat,” said Cleetus, “so we must also sharply curtail the use of fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 2023 has already broken the US record for billion-dollar climate disasters on Sep 11, 2023.

For years, companies have been trying to offset their greenhouse gas emissions with carbon credits. Now, they want to do the same thing for their plastic pollution.

A growing number of companies are claiming “plastic neutrality” through the purchase of so-called plastic credits, tradable units that typically each represent 1 metric ton of plastic waste that’s been removed from the environment. These credits, sold by dozens of unregulated businesses and nonprofits, are supposed to complement companies’ internal plastic reduction strategies while also funding waste collection in the developing world. 

Companies as varied as Burt’s Bees, Nestlé, and the pet food brand Nature’s Logic have vowed to neutralize at least some of their plastic footprint using credits. The beauty product company Davines, for example, says that for every piece of plastic it sells to consumers, it funds the removal of an equivalent amount of plastic from coastal areas in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brazil. 

“We are reaching a 1:1 balance between the plastic we use and the plastic we remove from the environment,” the company says on its website. 

But does plastic waste collection in one part of the world really “offset” the impacts from ongoing plastic production, use, and disposal somewhere else? Some experts and environmental groups are skeptical. They worry that plastic credits place a disproportionate emphasis on managing, rather than reducing, plastic garbage. Some say credits are just a way for polluters to burnish their reputations without taking responsibility for the plastic they produce.

“Frankly, it’s all greenwashing,” said Kevin Budris, advocacy director for the nonprofit Just Zero. “The only real solution to the full suite of plastic pollution problems is to stop making so much plastic in the first place.”

If you look at most of the plastic crediting initiatives out there — and there are a lot — most of them offer a similar value proposition: Plastic credits can help fund waste collection in the developing world.

Here’s how they work: A crediting organization funds a project that purports to collect plastic pollution, or prevent it from escaping into the environment. This could be a beach or river cleanup that collects low-value, nonrecyclable plastic waste and disposes of it in a controlled landfill. Or it could be a program to pay “waste pickers,” the uncontracted workers who make their living by collecting refuse from dump sites and the natural environment and selling it to recyclers. The main requirement is that activities funded by plastic credits would not have taken place otherwise: They have to be “additional,” in the industry parlance.

That crediting initiative then measures the amount of waste collected and posts the appropriate number of credits in a registry, usually one credit per metric ton. Companies buy those credits, and by doing so they support the underlying plastic collection activity.

According to Peter Hjemdahl, co-founder of the plastic crediting initiative Repurpose Global, this financing from the private sector is “critical” for cleaning up plastic waste and “empowering” waste pickers. After all, many parts of the world lack formal waste management infrastructure to deal with domestically generated trash, let alone the 14 million metric tons of plastic that enters the ocean each year and may wash up on their shores.

Hjemdahl claims companies want to fund these activities because their employees have “moral consciousness.” But there are other, more practical reasons companies might want to buy plastic credits: According to Thierry Sanders, co-founder and director of the crediting company Circular Action BV, polluters that have to comply with “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, laws — policies that make companies financially responsible for dealing the pollution they cause — can use plastic credits to demonstrate that a certain percentage of the plastic they sell is ultimately collected and recycled. In Vietnam, for example, an EPR law enacted last year set mandatory recycling targets for a range of products, including plastic packaging. Any company wanting to sell plastic packaging could use plastic credits to prove that the required percentage of its sales was eventually recycled. (At least, they could prove that a certain amount of plastic was recycled; it would be nearly impossible to prove it was their plastic that was collected and turned into new products.)

The current reality, however, is that most parts of the world don’t have EPR laws — which leads to the third and perhaps most salient reason companies are interested in plastic credits: for their marketing value. Credits are “more for corporations that want to make specific claims,” said Vincent Decap, co-founder of a crediting initiative called Zero Plastic Oceans.

Indeed, many plastic crediting programs have a prominent section of their website explaining how companies can use credits to make green marketing claims, or affix proprietary labels to their products. Repurpose Global notes on its website that eco-friendly labels help products “scale significantly faster.” PCX, another crediting organization, encourages brands to “wear your badge with pride,” because doing so will help consumers “know you’re the real deal.”

Most of these badges and labels involve some kind of offsetting language, like “plastic neutral,” “net circular plastic,” and “net-zero plastic to nature.” Similar to carbon credits, these claims generally mean that a company has purchased enough plastic credits to “offset” whatever plastic pollution it contributes to the world. In this way, the impact of one plastic bag sold to the public — and potentially littered into the ocean — is supposedly neutralized by the collection of an equivalent amount of plastic pollution by weight.

The problem, however, is that not everyone believes those neutrality claims are the real deal. First is an equivalency concern: Unlike with carbon molecules, which one can reasonably assume will all behave similarly in the atmosphere, not all plastics are created equal. Plastic film is the most lethal form of plastic to marine life and is extremely difficult to remove from the environment and recycle. Plastics labeled with a number 3, 6, or 7 may be more likely than others to release hormone and endocrine disruptors. Meanwhile, PET water bottles, labeled with the number 1, aren’t as dangerous to natural environments and tend to get recycled. Yet crediting programs may ignore these differences, using the collection of one polymer to ostensibly neutralize the impact of another.

More broadly, there are concerns that neutrality will be used to justify ongoing plastic use and production, since the phrase implies that plastic production can be impact-free as long as it is “canceled out” with credits. To the contrary, plastic — which is made from fossil fuels — causes harms at every stage of its life cycle. Oil and gas extraction can create air and groundwater pollution that harms people living nearby. Manufacturing can release additional pollution that disproportionately impacts low-income communities and people of color, and plastic products sitting on supermarket shelves can leach toxic chemicals into people’s food and beverages. 

According to Alejandra Warren, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Plastic Free Future, these impacts are by no means erased when a plastic producer in one country pays for garbage to be removed from another country’s shoreline. “Plastic credits do not address the ongoing and future environmental injustices caused by the plastics industries around the world,” she told Grist. 

Plastic crediting organizations are not oblivious to these concerns, especially as the carbon market has become engulfed in controversy over alleged greenwashing and “phantom” carbon credits that don’t actually cancel out ongoing greenhouse gas emissions. By selling potentially fraudulent carbon offsets, some lawyers say carbon crediting organizations have put themselves at risk of a “wave of litigation” from consumer protection lawsuits. According to the legal nonprofit ClientEarth, plastic creditors may be exposing themselves to the same risks.

Some crediting organizations are trying to distance themselves from those controversies by moving away from neutrality claims and toward something called a “contribution model,” in which companies pay for plastic credits without the goal of claiming plastic neutrality. Rather than bearing a “net-zero plastic” label, a product might read, “This company paid for the removal of 5 tons of plastic litter in 2022.”

That kind of label describes “what’s actually happening,” said Alix Grabowski, director of plastic and material science for the nonprofit WWF, “versus this vague term of ‘neutral,’ which no one knows what it really means.” She said it would be helpful for regulators like the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the United States’ consumer protection laws, to step in with some clearer guidelines on these kinds of environmental claims. Others are hopeful that an initiative called the Plastic Footprint Network, composed of consulting groups, plastic crediting initiatives, and a small number of nonprofits, will rally the industry around a common set of standards.

Decap, whose organization Zero Plastic Oceans offers companies a label that reads “ocean-bound plastic neutral,” said he hopes to switch to contribution-based labels by sometime next year. That way, he said, “we will not have this stain from what’s happening in the carbon market, which is honestly pretty ugly.” Hjemdahl also said more contribution-based language is needed, although he didn’t say whether or when Repurpose Global would phase out its plastic neutrality labels.

Regardless of the kinds of claims companies make about plastic credits, they remain controversial. Credits represent a waste management approach to addressing the plastic pollution crisis, rather than the strict controls on plastic production that many experts and environmental advocates would prefer to focus on. 

Hjemdahl, with Repurpose Global, said reducing plastic production needs to be prioritized “first and foremost,” but also said that choosing one over the other creates a “false dichotomy” that is “actively allowing polluters to thrive amid the lack of clarity from practitioners.” According to him, plastic reduction “is not going to have an impact by itself if there is no infrastructure to actually collect waste in the first place.”

Environmental advocates, on the other hand, say it’s the other way around: Even the sincerest efforts to ramp up waste collection and recycling will be futile in the face of the plastic industry’s plans to triple plastic production by 2060 — a scenario that’s expected to generate 44 million metric tons of plastic pollution annually. “If reduction and cleanup efforts are pursued simultaneously, but cleanup efforts are getting even an equal amount of attention, then those are resources and efforts that are misplaced,” said Budris, with Just Zero.

He and others argue that cleanups like those encouraged by plastic credits align with the petrochemical industry’s “sophisticated greenwashing” strategy to build good will among consumers and policymakers so they can justify not imposing caps or reductions on the production of plastic. This dynamic has played out prominently in negotiations for a global plastics treaty, in which oil-producing nations have called for more cleanups and recycling as an alternative to a cap on plastic manufacturing. It’s also manifested in industry-led cleanup initiatives like the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, whose fossil fuel and petrochemical company members, including Exxon Mobil and Shell, have a vested interest in keeping the world dependent on plastics. 

Budris called it “preposterous” to frame plastic credits as a way to support waste pickers in the developing world. So much of the plastic waste that pickers deal with, he said, can be traced to the fact that they’re “drowning in a tide of single-use plastic” whose production they had no say in or control over.

“If these companies really want to do something to improve waste management in the Global South,” he added, “they need to just stop making so much plastic. That’s the easiest route to addressing so many of these issues.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Companies are claiming to be ‘plastic neutral.’ Is it greenwashing? on Sep 11, 2023.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Private equity firms are increasingly profiting from cleaning up climate disasters in the United States, while failing to better protect workers and often also investing in the fossil fuels that are causing the climate emergency, new research has found.

The demand for skilled disaster restoration or resilience workers, who are mostly immigrants and refugees from Latin America and Asia, is soaring as greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels heat the planet, provoking more destructive storms, floods and wildfires.

As the industry has become more profitable, at least 72 companies that specialize in disaster cleanups and restoration have been acquired by private equity firms since 2020, according to the research, by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PSEP) and Resilience Force, a labor rights organization with thousands of members.

Wage theft, lack of protective clothing, and other unsafe conditions are rampant across the industry at the expense of workers, communities and climate, according to the report, Private Equity Profits from Disasters, shared exclusively with the Guardian.

At risk are tens of thousands of resilience workers, traveling from disaster to disaster cleaning up and rebuilding American communities while facing hazards such as unstable buildings, ash and other toxins, and water-borne diseases.

Researchers found that an increasingly complex web of franchises, contractors and subcontractors, insurance providers, labor brokers, and agencies and mostly temporary jobs makes it difficult for workers to know who is ultimately accountable for violations.

“Disasters have become more intense and destructive, and rebuilding has become more profitable. As the money started pouring in, companies started consolidating, and private equity started circling and buying up these companies,” said Saket Soni, director of Resilience Force. “Wage theft and health and safety violations are deeply endemic … and private equity is failing to establish higher standards.”

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recorded 194 violations at private-equity owned restoration companies and their franchises between January 2015 and January 2022, the report found.

Most violations were classified as serious, and included failures to protect workers from asbestos, respiratory problems, and falls. (The true number of health and safety violations is likely to be higher given the small number of OSHA compliance officers).

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It is impossible to say precisely what proportion of the disaster workforce is currently controlled by private equity, but acquisitions are gathering pace, with 14 in the first six months of this year compared to 13 during the entire course of 2020. Acquisitions included companies from 28 states, but most were in Florida and Texas – states hit by multiple billion-dollar climate disasters in recent years.

“This is the latest example of a disturbing trend where we see private equity coming into industries where there is a lot of money – and indeed a lot of federal investment – in order to pad their pockets by cutting costs,” said the Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. “This is already a dangerous industry … cutting costs will cut quality, and increase the threats to essential workers – who are already extremely vulnerable to greedy employers. Those who put up the money, in this case private equity, are ultimately responsible.”

Overall, the number and cost of weather and climate disasters in the US is rising due to a combination of population growth, development and the influence of human-caused global heating on extreme events like floods, drought, and fires. Over the past seven years (2016 to 2022), 122 separate billion-dollar disasters have killed at least 5,000 people and cost more than $1 trillion in damage, according to data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Historically, the disaster restoration industry was made up of smaller, independent businesses handling local projects. But after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, private equity firms saw an opportunity to consolidate the market by buying up smaller companies, and some estimates value the US restoration industry as high as $200 billion. The Restoration Industry Association, whose board includes three private equity executives, did not respond to the Guardian.

Taxpayer dollars increasingly pay for restoration costs – involving public buildings like schools and hospitals, and for folks without insurance. Yet the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, does not attach mandatory labor or health and safety standards to its payouts, while private equity firms have a track record in cost cutting to maximize profits.

Private equity refers to an opaque form of private financing in which funds and investors buy and restructure companies, including troubled businesses and real estate, using money from wealthy individuals and institutional investors such as university endowments and state employee pension funds.

In recent years, some private equity firms have become major greenhouse gas polluters, often acquiring risky oil, gas, and coal projects with minimal public scrutiny or regulatory oversight – which means firefighters, nurses, and teachers have little way of knowing if their retirement nest egg is financing police surveillance equipment, disaster companies, or leaky pipelines.

Researchers found a third of the private equity companies with disaster restoration company investments are also backing fossil fuel-linked projects – ostensibly profiting from the cause and effect of the climate emergency.

The Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity firm, which manages over $1 trillion, backs 21 energy companies, of which 52 percent are fossil-fuel projects. In 2020, Blackstone’s power plants produced 18.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere – equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 4 million gas-powered vehicles.

Blackstone’s institutional investors include Los Angeles, Maine, Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, New York state, and Oregon public sector worker pensions.

In March 2019, Blackstone acquired a majority share in Servpro Industries, a damage restoration company with more than 2,000 independently owned and operated franchises across the US and Canada. Servpro franchises helped with restoration efforts after Hurricanes Harvey, Matthew, and Sandy – some of the most devastating storms to hit the US mainland in recent years.

Higher temperatures and sea level rise caused by burning fossil fuels are making storms more intense and destructive.

In Massachusetts, a Servpro franchise in 2022 settled claims by the state that its restoration work at an elementary school led to asbestos contamination, forcing the school to close for months. In November 2019, a Servpro franchise in Boynton Beach, Florida, was forced to pay more $200,000 in back wages to almost 150 restoration workers after a department of labor investigation.

In another example the commercial restoration firm BlueSky, which operates in more than 40 states, is owned by two private equity companies including Partners Group, whose portfolio also includes gas pipeline companies in the US and Europe.

“Firms like Blackstone are using the public’s money to personally profit off both sides of disasters,” said Azani Creeks, PESP research coordinator and co-author of the report.

“Public employees have a right to know that their pension dollars are being used to purchase fossil-fuel plants that are contributing to climate disasters – and companies that profit off of these very disasters, most often off the backs of wage workers with little health and safety protections.”

A Blackstone spokesperson rejected the report’s findings as “cherry-picking,” and said that some of the cases related to matters prior to their investment – and that there was no evidence that the alleged shortcomings were related to private equity ownership.

“As a franchisor, Servpro Industries does not control or direct the operations of its independent local franchises, nor does it employ their workers … Since Blackstone’s investment, the company has expanded the training resources available to its franchisees – including worker safety related to OSHA compliance and use of personal protective equipment, among other areas – and continually evaluates ways to further expand and enhance those efforts.”

Blackstone had invested more than $20 billion in the energy transition, the spokesperson said: “Legacy exploration and production investments today total less than 1 percent of our overall fair market value portfolio.”

According to the 2022 state of the industry report, the biggest issues facing the disaster restoration industry is finding – and retaining – skilled workers, and increasing wages for certified employees.

Information about the disaster workforce is limited, but more than 100,000 people are estimated to work occasionally or full time in the industry, according to Resilience Force. Most workers are concentrated in southern states prone to natural disasters like Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, but are often deployed thousands of miles away for weeks or months at a time. It is a male-dominated industry, but also includes thousands of women, with Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, India, and the Philippines among some of the most common countries of origin.

While the work is predominantly done by immigrants who are often undocumented or have temporary residency status, the workforce also includes current and ex-incarcerated people and US-born people of color – also groups which have historically faced discrimination and poor working conditions.

In one case, migrant workers who helped rebuild luxury hotels destroyed by Hurricane Irma in Florida Keys in 2017, were forced to sue Cotton Commercial, acquired by the private equity firm Sun Capital in 2020, and a temp agency to recover more than $280,000 in back pay and damages.

A spokesperson for Cotton said: “All Cotton contracts include provisions on subcontractors’ responsibility for payment to their personnel in accordance with all applicable employment laws and regulations, as well as strict safety requirements.”

The need for climate resilience workers is likely to continue rising, and next month Jayapal will re-introduce the 2022 Climate Resilience Workforce Act which would help create a well-trained, fairly paid workforce to help the US prepare for the climate emergency – and ease the transition to a green economy.

Soni, the director of Resilience Force, said: “Disaster restoration is a public good, and we need a strong sustainable workforce as disasters increase. Many people deeply love the work and are dedicated … but the work gets more dangerous year after year, because there are no standards. We’re depleting the workforce when we ought to be building it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Private equity profits from climate disaster clean-up – while investing in fossil fuels on Sep 10, 2023.