Recent satellite data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center shows that Antarctic sea ice extent is far below any level ever recorded.
The continent’s sea ice is an important regulator of Earth’s temperature by not only lowering the temperature of the water below, but also reflecting the sun’s rays back into the atmosphere.
“It’s so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind-blowing,” Dr. Walter Meier, a sea ice monitor with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told BBC News.
Right now Antarctic sea ice is less than 17 million square miles, which is 1.5 million square miles less than the average for September, much lower than the average record low for winter.
“The bottom line is that we don’t know for sure [the cause] – the Antarctic system is complex and poorly sampled,” professor Martin Siegert, a University of Exeter glaciologist, told MailOnline. “It would be good to have a definitive answer, but it doesn’t actually matter that much. We certainly can’t afford to assign it to variability as some excuse for not stopping fossil fuel burning – that would be crazy.”
Krill is a species largely depended on by other species, but according to environmental activists, the fast pace of warming in the region has changed the keystone species’ distribution.
Meier said the sea ice in the Antarctic may not significantly recover.
“We can see how much more vulnerable it is,” said Dr. Robbie Mallett, a sea ice researcher with the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Earth Observation Science, who is based on the Antarctic peninsula, as BBC News reported.
Sea ice forms from March to October, during the Antarctic winter, then melts during the summer months.
Last year’s Antarctic heat wave caused temperatures to be 40 degrees Celsius higher than normal.
“When I started studying the Antarctic 30 years ago, we never thought extreme weather events could happen there,” Siegert said, as reported by BBC News.
A 2020 study published in Nature Climate Change found that land ice loss in Antarctica since the 1990s has contributed more than a quarter of an inch to sea-level rise. Just moderate sea-level rise can cause hazardous storm surges that have the potential to destroy communities along the coast.
“Are we awakening this giant of Antarctica?” Siegert asked, according to BBC News. If so, it would be “an absolute disaster for the world.”
At the stroke of midnight on Friday, in three automotive factories across the Rust Belt, night shift workers left their posts and poured out onto the streets to join whistling, cheering crowds. TV news footage from the night showed picketers intermingled with cars honking in support as R&B blared from sound systems on the sidewalks in front of the factory gates. For the first time in history, the United Auto Workers union, or UAW, initiated a strike targeting all of the “Big Three” automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, which owns brands like Chrysler, Jeep, and Dodge.
The strike marks a breaking point after months of negotiations failed to result in a deal to renew the union’s contract with Big Three automakers, which expired on Friday. For now, the strike covers only 13,000 workers at a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio; and a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. But the three closures could be just the beginning. UAW president Shawn Fain has warned that all 146,000 union workers are ready to strike at a moment’s notice. “If we need to go all out, we will,” said Fain Thursday night on Facebook Live. “Everything is on the table.”
If the work stoppage goes on for more than 10 days, analysts estimate it could cost automakers over $1 billion and hurt plans to push new electric vehicles, or EVs, onto the market.
EVs, and what they mean for the future of union labor in the automotive sector, loom large over the picket line. Automakers say meeting the union’s demands would threaten their ability to compete with non-unionized EV producers like Tesla, adding burdensome labor costs just as they’re making expensive investments in EVs. Workers, meanwhile, worry that billions in EV investments aren’t translating into good-paying, union jobs.
Employees work at the assembly line of the Volkswagen ID 4 electric car in northern Germany on May 20, 2022.
David Hecker/AFP via Getty Images
“It’s our job to organize,” Tony Totty, president of UAW Local 14 in Toledo, Ohio, told Grist. “These corporations don’t wanna share in our sweat equity with the profits we provide them.”
Collectively, the Big Three have committed to investing well over $100 billion in EV manufacturing over the next few years. The companies have also proposed 10 EV battery plants owned jointly with companies including South Korea-based LG Energy Solution and Samsung. Most new EV and battery plants are located in a growing “Battery Belt,” with Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee leading the charge alongside the traditional automotive heartlands of Michigan and Ohio. Many of those states have “right to work” laws that curtail collective bargaining, leading to lower union density and lower pay grades overall. Indeed, the vast majority of the Big Three’s proposed battery plants are nonunion.
To keep union membership strong, protect worker safety, and prevent the EV surge from undermining their bargaining power, the union has asked to include EV battery workers in their national contracts. “Now is really the moment, as the industry starts to take off, to ensure that those jobs can be union jobs,” J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz who studies labor issues and climate justice, told Grist.
Ford and Volkswagen have estimated that 30 percent less labor is required to build an EV compared to an internal combustion engine car, since EVs don’t require the complex parts needed to build engines and transmissions. Meanwhile, non-union automakers like Tesla and Toyota are gaining an edge in the EV space, and offering substantially lower compensation than the Big Three. Ford has estimated the Big Three’s average hourly labor costs, including benefits, amount to around $65 per worker, compared to about $55 for foreign non-union automakers in the U.S. like Toyota and Nissan. Tesla’s labor costs are even lower — at around $45 to $50 per worker per hour, according to industry analysts.
Auto workers are watching this change with some trepidation, according to Marick Masters, a professor of management at Wayne State University who studies the auto industry and labor. “The shift to electrification both threatens jobs and it also threatens to establish another lower tier of wages in the industry,” he said. The UAW has so far had a string of organizing failures in the South, mostly associated with the region’s large number of foreign automakers, like Volkswagen and Nissan.
Totty, the Toledo-based UAW local president, has advocated heavily for union contracts at new battery plants. He personally welcomes the EV shift. His plant, Toledo Propulsion Systems, received $760 million in federal funding to transform the transmission plant into a plant that makes EV parts. Totty doesn’t believe it’ll take much extra training, or that anyone at the plant will lose their job. “We’re embracing it,” he said. What’s more concerning to him is the power and income imbalance between the people who do the backbreaking work at the plant, and the people who own it.
Among the UAW’s demands for its new contract is a 40 percent raise over the next four years, which it says is equal to the collective rise in CEO compensation at the Big Three over the past four years. The union has also asked for cost of living adjustments, the reinstatement of pensions, a 32-hour work week, and the elimination of a tiered wage system that pays newer employees less for the same work. So far, the three companies have countered with a 20 percent raise. As of Monday, the companies had not agreed to most of the union’s other demands.
In an interview with the New York Times, Ford CEO Jim Farley claimed that meeting UAW demands would prevent the company from investing in EVs. “We want to actually have a conversation about a sustainable future,” he told the Times, “not one that forces us to choose between going out of business and rewarding our workers.”
According to the union, the companies continue to make record-breaking profits, netting over $21 billion in just the first six months of 2023 and $250 billion over the last 10 years. Though the vast majority of those profits come from internal combustion engine cars, with EVs still a relatively small market, the auto companies are already tapping into billions of dollars in federal investments to electrify their fleets.
EVs are central to President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. Through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has authorized nearly $100 billion in funding dedicated or availables to support growth in the industry’s domestic supply chain. It’s part of Biden’s plan to, according to a recent Department of Energy EV funding announcement, “Create Not Just More Jobs But Good Jobs, Including Union Jobs.” More than $15 billion of that number is intended to support existing factories in the EV transition, in hopes of keeping manufacturing jobs in communities that rely on them. The administration has also made aggressive regulatory moves to push for EVs — under vehicle emissions standards released by the Environmental Protection Agency in April, EVs would need to make up two-thirds of all car sales in the U.S. by 2031.
Masters says that auto companies are responding to this pressure. “The companies,” he said, “are on board, and their train has left the station. They’re going out of the internal combustion engine business.”
Some are calling the UAW strike the biggest labor crisis of the Biden presidency so far. The UAW has not yet endorsed Biden as a presidential candidate, citing inconsistencies between the administration’s push for EVs and its close ties with the labor movement. The union has previously criticized the president for lending billions to auto companies for EV manufacturing without requiring protections for union labor. UAW leaders have asked Biden to hold firm on his promises to deliver union jobs with clean energy investment, or else risk the energy transition exacerbating economic inequality.
The strike will continue, UAW has said, as long as parties fail to reach a consensus. Workers are organizing at Big Three factories across the country, preparing to shut them down if the moment calls for it. Experts say that a long-term strike could seriously hurt sales at the Big Three, possibly giving companies like Tesla a competitive edge.
“The UAW supports and is ready for the transition to a clean auto industry,” Fain said in a release. “But the EV transition must be a just transition that ensures auto workers have a place in the new economy.”
The Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah is one of the richest oil shale deposits in the country. It is estimated to hold more proven reserves than all of Saudi Arabia. Enefit, an Estonian company, was the latest in a long line of firms that hoped to tap it.
It’s also the latest to see such plans collapse — but perhaps not yet for good.
The company has lost access to the water it would need to unearth the petroleum and relinquished a federal lease that allowed research and exploration on the land. The two moves, made late last month, appear to signal the end of Enefit’s plans to mine shale oil in the Uinta Basin.
“If they’re getting cut off from this water, it’s kind of the nail in the coffin for this whole project,” said Michael Toll, an attorney for the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation nonprofit that opposed the project. “Just ensuring that this water won’t be used for oil shale is a major win for the Colorado River Basin.”
Still, the company may develop other assets in the Basin. In a written statement, Ryan Clerico, Enefit American Oil’s chief executive officer, said that the company holds “extensive private lands and mineral resources in the Uinta Basin” and that it “is currently evaluating a number of different business cases, including some that are unrelated to oil shale.” The company currently leases its private land for grazing, but it has considered solar, wind, and energy storage projects on it, he said.
“There is no active development or construction on the property, but there are also no definitive or imminent plans to terminate our operations in the U.S.,” Clerico said.
Enefit had over at least the last 15 years secured that federal research and development lease, along with rights to billions of gallons of water and the right of way needed to build the infrastructure for such a massive project. The company hoped to produce 50,000 barrels of oil daily for the next 30 years — almost double the Uinta Basin’s current production.
The environmental and public health consequences of that would have been staggering. The carbon emissions from burning all that oil is equivalent to the emissions of 63 coal plants, and the water required would serve nearly 60,000 homes for a year. As a result, Grand Canyon Trust has for years fought the project by challenging the water rights and suing the Interior Department for improperly granting the rights of way to build a pipeline and transmission corridor on federal land.
Enefit’s plans hinged on the ability to access 10,000 acre-feet, or 3.2 billion gallons, of water from the White River, a tributary of the Green River that flows into the Colorado River. Because Utah is not allocating new water rights, Enefit purchased a water right from a public utility called Deseret Generation and Transmission Cooperative in 2011.
However, Enefit quickly ran afoul of state water laws. Because that resource is scarce in the West, most states, including Utah, require rights holders to “use it or lose it.” Once rights are granted, the recipient must put the H2O to “beneficial use” within a certain time — 50 years, in Utah’s case. Any rights that aren’t exercised in that period revert to the state to prevent water hoarding.
In Enefit’s case, its right was appropriated in 1965 and due to be returned to the state in 2015. The only exception to the 50-year rule is for public utilities. Since Deseret Generation could apply for a 10-year extension, Enefit transferred the right back to Deseret, which then applied for an extension. Once received, Deseret leased the water to Enefit again.
The Grand Canyon Trust claimed the move was illegal and raised the issue with the state Division of Water Rights, which approved the transfer and extension. The Trust requested an administrative hearing, which eventually led to a settlement under which Deseret agreed not to use the water for anything other than generating electricity. The agreement, reached late last month, explicitly “prohibits Deseret Power and all other entities or persons from using the water right for fossil fuel mining, extraction, processing, or development.”
“Although the water right is not going to be forfeited, the most important thing for us is that there is a guarantee that this water will not be used for fossil fuel development,” Toll said.
Enefit has also relinquished a 160-acre federal lease for research and development on the land. Last month, it sent a letter to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees drilling on public lands, noting that it does not plan to convert the research lease into a commercial lease. The Trust’s lawsuits against the Bureau and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are pending in federal court.
“The Basin already has some of the least healthy air in the country, and this project would have just made it much, much worse,” said Toll. “It’s a win for the environment. It’s a win for public health.”
Sunday, while attending an event for Climate Week in New York, California Governor Gavin Newsom said he will sign new legislation — the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act — that would require corporations earning $1 billion or more doing business in the state to disclose their carbon footprints in all parts of their supply chains, as well as in their investments, reported Common Dreams.
The governor said preserving California’s reputation as a climate leader was important.
“Would I cede that leadership by having a response that is anything but, ‘Of course I will sign that bill?’” Newsom told a reporter, as Common Dreams reported. “No, I will not.”
Newsom said there had been quite a bit of opposition to the bill, and that there was still some tweaking to do.
“We have some cleanup on some little language,” Newsom said, without providing any more details, as reported by Reuters.
Some international companies have expressed their support of the bill, including Microsoft and Apple.
“THIS IS HUGE!… Signing #SB253 into law is nothing short of historic. This piece of legislation is integral to our lowering our emissions and fighting the climate crisis,” California Environmental Voters said on X.
It is expected that the new legislation will apply to around 5,400 companies, Politico reported. The law requires more than federal climate disclosure rules proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which apply exclusively to publicly traded companies without mandating all of them to report their Scope 3 supply chain emissions.
The Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act requires complete Scope 3 disclosure for privately held companies as well.
“This is exactly the kind of policy framework that investors have long sought to better understand how companies are working to manage and mitigate the immense financial impacts of the climate crisis,” said Mindy Lubber, CEO and president of sustainability advocacy group Ceres, in a press release from Ceres. “Notably, the package also has the support from more dozens of leading businesses that recognize the massive opportunity of the shift to a low-carbon economy and deserve a standardized and consistent platform to showcase their efforts.”
The new bill could still face court challenges, some lawyers have said, reported Reuters.
The suit filed by California on Friday alleges that fossil fuel companies “have known for decades” that reliance on fossil fuels could cause climate change, but “they suppressed that information from the public,” The Hill reported.
Requirements for corporations to start reporting certain data on their greenhouse gas emissions under the Climate Corporate Accountability Act would begin sometime in 2026, while yearly reports on Scope 3 emissions would be required beginning in 2027, according to the text of the bill.
A new study has found a link between PFAS exposure and increased risk of certain types of cancer, including ovarian, melanoma, uterine and breast cancers. The research linked exposure of these “forever chemicals” to more of these hormone-related cancers in women, but not in men.
The team of researchers analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2005 to 2018.
They reviewed seven per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) concentrations and 12 phenols or parabens as well as self-reported diagnoses of melanoma and hormone-related cancers, such as thyroid, ovarian, uterine, testicular, prostate and breast cancers for people over 20 years of age.
In total, the researchers studied nearly 17,000 people in the PFAS dataset and more than 10,400 people in the phenols/parabens dataset. The researchers noted that phenols and parabens were not included in the 2017-2018 survey, leading to the smaller dataset.
Ultimately, they found associations between both PFAS and phenols/parabens exposures and reported cancer diagnoses. They published their findings in the journal Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.
“Of note, the PFAS chemicals PFDE, PFNA, and PFUA were associated with increased odds of prior melanoma diagnosis among women, but not men. Also, among women, concentrations of BPA, BP3, and two dichlorophenols were associated with greater odds of ovarian cancer,” the authors wrote in the study. “Both dichlorophenols showed positive associations with the odds of every cancer type assessed, particularly among women. Finally, greater odds of previous cancer diagnoses among White women were observed with higher PFAS exposure, while Black and Mexican American women were more likely to have a previous cancer diagnosis with increased phenol/paraben exposure.”
PFAS are a group of synthetic chemicals found in many products that people use or are exposed to daily, including nonstick cookware, stain-resistant fabrics, water-repelling fabrics, food packaging, carpets, paint and more. PFAS have been found in breast milk, as well as in human and animal blood, the CDC reported.
The authors of the latest study concluded that their findings could help policymakers further evaluate the risks of exposure to these chemicals.
“People should care about this because we know that there is widespread human exposure to these chemicals and we have documented data on that,” Max Aung, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told The Guardian. “These chemicals can increase the risk of various different health outcomes and they can alter your biological pathways… That is important to know so that we can better prevent exposures and mitigate risks.”
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Summer afternoons on Florida Bay are a wonder. The sky, bright blue and dotted with clouds, meets the glassy water in a blur of blue that melts away any sign of the horizon. Wading birds rustle in the verdant branches of mangroves. Beneath the surface, fish and other creatures dart among tangled mangrove roots adorned with colorful sponges and corals. Out in the shallow flats, redfish forage for crabs, snails, and shrimp hidden in fields of seagrass as manatees graze and bottlenose dolphins hunt.
But this vast estuary, which by some estimates stretches at least 800 square miles — roughly the size of Tokyo — and comprises about one-third of Everglades National Park has looked very different lately. In the mangroves, anemones and jellyfish, stressed by unprecedented water temperatures, appear ghostly white. Suffocated fish and soupy patches of dead seagrass litter the sandy flats. Sponges and coral languish beneath thick sheaths of algae.
This summer, as water temperatures across the Everglades reached triple digits, much of the nation’s attention focused on the Atlantic side of the Keys, where rapid bleaching devastated much of the Sunshine State’s beautiful coral reefs. But in Florida Bay, which sits on the west side of the Keys, many marine species have been fighting their own battle with bleaching and other effects of extreme heat, sending a strong, if silent, message about their own stress and the health of the essential habitat they inhabit.
Normally resilient creatures are struggling to survive. The record heat has not only threatened individual species — an astonishing effect on clear display in the warm South Florida waters — but the expansive and interconnected habitats, stretching from the Florida Bay to the wider Everglades and beyond.
“It’s not a grass problem, it’s not a coral problem, it’s not a sponge problem,” said Matt Bellinger, owner and operator of Bamboo Charters in the Keys. “It’s a complete ecosystem problem.”
Jerry Lorenz, the state director of research for Audubon Florida who has decades of experience in Florida Bay, likens the risks facing the estuary to playing Jenga.
“You can pull this piece, you can pull out that piece,” he said. “And you can pull out a lot more pieces. But eventually, you’re going to pull out one last piece that’s going to topple the whole thing. And that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re seeing here.”
Nestled between the southernmost end of Florida and the Keys that stretch 180 miles westward toward the Dry Tortugas, this shallow estuary features swaths of luscious seagrass. These marine prairies cover the vast majority of the bay floor and shelter lobster, shrimp, crab, and other creatures. Thousands of mangrove islands protect juvenile reef fish, invertebrates, and nesting birds like the endangered roseate spoonbill. All of them play a crucial supporting role in a much larger ecosystem. The Florida Bay is intrinsically linked to the Atlantic side of the Keys, and many fish and other species make their home in both.
A roseate spoonbill searches for food at a mangrove key on Florida Bay at Everglades National Park in 2019. Robert F. Bukaty / AP Photo
“A lot of these reef species go back into the Bay, treating it as a nursery,” said Kelly Cox, director of Everglades policy at Audubon Florida. “There’s a lot of interaction between the ecosystems. So a healthy Florida Bay means healthy fish populations on the reef and vice versa. And that goes for crustaceans, it goes for sponges, it goes for all different types of fish and wildlife.”
A vibrant and productive Florida Bay does more than allow wildlife to thrive — it boosts commerce, too. Beyond offering ample opportunities for sport and recreational activities, the estuary supplies a bounty of seafood.
“Everything in our economy is somehow intertwined with our environment,” Cox said. “We’re talking about expansive reliance on healthy marine ecosystems in the state of Florida.”
The health of the bay and surrounding areas declined significantly in early July during the four consecutive days that Earth experienced the hottest average global temperatures ever recorded. Weeks of intense heat, exacerbated by the lack of usual summer rain showers, saw shallower areas of the Florida Bay top 100 degrees Fahrenheit. During the scorching weather, neighboring Manatee Bay recorded a startling water temperature of 101.1 degrees, which might be a world record. While snorkeling recently on the western edge of Florida Bay, Lorenz recalled it being too hot to swim.
“It was uncomfortable,” Lorenz said. “When I swam up under the mangroves, it was jam-packed with fish. I just had this impression go through my head that these guys are trying to stay in the shade.”
Boats are anchored at Manatee Bay off the Florida coast near Key Largo on July 28, 2023. Triple-digit ocean temperatures are stunning even in Florida, where residents are used to the heat. Daniel Kozin / AP Photo
The astonishing effects of the heat wave on the bay may be partly responsible for the extensive coral bleaching and mortality seen across the reef of the Atlantic side. This year’s intense heat evaporated a lot of the bayside’s water, leaving it extremely salty and, therefore, dense. In normal conditions, when natural currents pull the bay water into the Atlantic, the warmer water sits on the ocean surface.
But this time, something unusual happened. The extremely hot and salty bay water sank — a phenomenon known as a reverse thermocline — below the cooler Atlantic Ocean water, and smothered coral reefs down to 30 feet below with its extreme temperatures, resulting in mass coral bleaching and, in some cases, instant death.
Hotter, saltier water poses a grave threat to marine species that can only withstand so much stress before their metabolic processes begin to fail. Such strain can lead to bleaching, seagrass die-offs, algal blooms, and fish kills. If the salinity of Florida Bay rises to that of the Atlantic more than 10 or 15 days a year, “it knocks the whole system out of balance,” Lorenz said.
Dramatic increases in water temperature can throw a potentially catastrophic knock to the entire ecosystem where even the most robust and resilient species, including glass anemones, relatives to coral, are fighting to survive. These common and resilient spindly invertebrates, normally difficult to see due to their brown hues, are now easily spotted in ghostly white clusters — a sign that something is very wrong.
Bleaching occurs when corals, anemones, and jellyfish, pushed beyond their thermal limits, eject the algal cells in their tissues. Left without their colorful symbiotic counterparts, the animals are vulnerable to predation, starvation, and disease, said Anthony Bellantuono, a biological sciences postdoctoral researcher.
In his laboratory at Florida International University, marine biologists have tested these creatures at temperatures between 89.6 and 93.2 degrees F. Yet in the most recent heat wave, the waters of the bayside and southern Everglades reached heights never tested in the lab. Bellantuono has been stunned to see the widespread bleaching, which likely extended across the length of Florida Bay and beyond, among such a robust species.
“Anemones are these super-resilient creatures that are highly tolerant to stress,” Bellantuono said. “It should be a bit of a concern that they’re bleached so thoroughly. They don’t bleach often and it is really, really bad when they do.”
And it’s more than animals at risk; the seagrass they nestle in and the mangroves that harbor them are threatened as well. That could reduce the amount of oxygen in the water, creating another threat for the wildlife of the bay.
Algonside mermaid’s wineglass and green feather algae, a curlique anemone shows signs of stress due to warming water temperatures in the Florida Bay. Gabriela Tejeda
Compounding the problem, Florida Bay battles an insufficient influx of fresh water. Natural outflow across the Everglades has been significantly disrupted, with much of its historic flow now diverted by canals, roads, agriculture, and development — and considerably less ending up in the estuary. Insufficient fresh water to balance the influx of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other pollutants from the Gulf of Mexico, coupled with extremely hot temperatures, could leave the water uninhabitable.
Conservation organizations such as the Audubon Society have been working to educate and empower audiences to engage, through citizen science and efforts to push policymakers to act, with an environmental challenge that otherwise might seem insurmountable.
“It’s really, really hard to sit on the sidelines,” Cox said. “We’re not going to be able to pull seagrasses out of the water, right? We’re not able to pick up wading birds and move them to other locations. These are things that Mother Nature is going to have to handle on her own, and we have to hope that the interventions that we’ve designed so far are enough to sustain a lifeline.”
Cox said that the northeastern portion of Florida Bay that her team covers has yet to see any seagrass die-offs this season, primarily due to long-term efforts — such as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, the single largest restoration underway in the South Florida ecosystem — to facilitate the flow of fresh water, much of which comes from rain, through the Everglades and into the bay.
“The mechanisms and interventions that we put in place are providing that little glimmer of hope that we might make it through this heat wave, and that the seagrass beds are going to be able to hold on in the national park,” she said. “That’s really encouraging for us.”
The chief science officer of the Everglades Foundation wades in the swamp during a 2023 seagrass tour of the Everglades. Mike Stocker / South Florida Sun Sentinel / Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Yet both Lorenz and Bellinger confirmed they had seen fish and seagrass die-offs in other parts of Florida Bay. And the heat is far from over: Above-average temperatures are expected over the next several months. For those in South Florida, the effects of persistent extreme heat and high water temperatures in the Florida Bay and the surrounding marine ecosystems are a sign of a potentially dire future.
“These are warnings,” says Bellantuono. “When the most tolerant creatures in our shallow waters are all bleaching, starkly white … it’s an alarm bell for these ecosystems. Will these ecosystems be as strong as they have been? It seems uncertain. When we see the ecosystem melting around us, I hope it makes people as scared as they should be about this.”
The videos in this story were created by Gabriela Tejeda.
Indigenous peoples are largely being excluded from trillions in global spending to mitigate climate change, with governments doing little to ensure that climate funding not only respects Indigenous rights but supports Indigenous-led green projects.
That’s according to a new report focused on green financing by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, which will be discussed at the U.N.’s Human Rights Council this month. The 54th regular session of the United Nations body kicked off last week in Geneva.
“The shift to green finance is necessary and urgent, and if done using a human rights-based approach it can be a source of opportunity for Indigenous Peoples to obtain funding to preserve their lands, knowledge and distinct ways of life, and to create economic opportunities that may help them to maintain and strengthen their indigenous identity,” wrote Calí Tzay, who is Kaqchikel, among the Mayan peoples of Guatemala.
The Special Rapporteur’s report comes eight years after the Paris Agreement, an international climate change treaty to limit global warming, called for $100 billion in annual funding to address the effects of climate change in developing countries. That goal is still aspirational, but overall sustainability investment continues to grow, with a 2020 analysis estimating it reached $35.3 trillion in 2020.
Green financing, a term that broadly refers to investments in climate action and sustainable development, is increasingly seen as a critical tool for addressing climate change. However, a 2019 working paper from the Asian Development Bank Institute concluded that financial institutions continue to support fossil fuel projects over green development because the former have higher rates of return. The study’s authors emphasized a need to boost green financing in order to reach sustainable development goals established by the United Nations the same year as the Paris Agreement.
Many green development projects take place on Indigenous lands. At Thacker Pass in the United States, Indigenous nations have sued the federal government over a lithium-mining operation that’s expected to support the Biden administration’s push toward electric vehicle batteries, but at the cost of producing hazardous waste and disturbing burial sites. In Norway, wind turbine development continues to violate the rights of Sámi communities. The Special Rapporteur’s report says more green projects are expected to take place on Indigenous lands and governments should ensure their rights are respected.
Calí Tzay points out that Indigenous peoples have largely been excluded from having a say in such green energy projects, with many communities being perceived simply as “vulnerable” rather than as rights holders. As well, an analysis by the Rights and Resources Initiative and the Rainforest Foundation Norway found that just 17 percent of $270 million in global climate and conservation funding that’s invested annually in Indigenous and local communities actually supports projects led by Indigenous people. Far less — only 5 percent — goes to projects led by Indigenous women.
Some international finance organizations have policies requiring free and informed consent designed to safeguard such rights, but Calí Tzay added that they aren’t consistently applied.
“In Africa and Europe, wind farms and geothermal projects have been undertaken without their free, prior and informed consent,” he wrote. “Too often, Governments and foreign investors assume that land used by nomadic herders and pastoralists is simply “empty”. Investors too often rely on formal registration of State or private ownership, or government assurances that land is available to use, when a diligent independent analysis prior to investment would have indicated that the land may be subject to the customary rights of Indigenous Peoples.”
The Special Rapporteur emphasized the importance of making it easier for Indigenous peoples themselves to access funding, echoing concerns raised by the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Co-Coordinating Committee, or IPACC, an organization that represents more than 100 Indigenous communities in Africa. The group was among several that submitted comments to Calí Tzay ahead of the report’s publication in July.
“Issues of lack of effective consultations are common in most green financing projects,” IPACC wrote, noting that in some cases Indigenous peoples live in vast landscapes with limited communication. Such consultation is extremely important when projects such as hydroelectric dams have the potential to displace Indigenous communities or use their land and resources “without their consent or compensation.”
The Special Rapporteur concluded state governments bear the largest responsibility for ensuring Indigenous people are active participants in green projects by establishing regulations and legal frameworks to ensure their involvement, but noted private funding, like philanthropy, may have more flexibility to directly support Indigenous groups.
Not everyone who provided input on the report agreed with that conclusion. The Indigenous Environmental Network, a U.S.-based coalition of Indigenous activists, was skeptical about the push for private financing, writing that capitalistic pressures are likely to prevent private funders from respecting Native rights.
“Placing climate finance in the hands of the private sector prioritizes the chase for perpetual growth over Mother Earth and threatens the lands, livelihoods, and cultures of Indigenous Peoples and impacted communities,” the coalition wrote. “In reality it is the endless search for profit that has driven us to the current state of climate catastrophe.”
Still, Calí Tzay stopped short of discouraging private funding for green projects, contending that better public and private policies that guarantee the rights of Indigenous peoples could make a difference.
“The purpose of the present report is not to condemn or deter the financing of green projects and green market strategies,” he wrote, “but to ensure that Governments and other financial actors take all precautions to ensure their support for the much-needed transition to a green economy and that climate change action does not perpetuate the violations and abuses currently plaguing extractive and other fossil fuel-related projects.”
An interactive dialogue about the report is expected to take place on Thursday, September 28.
For decades, communities living in the shadows of the nation’s petroleum refineries were in the dark about the quality of the air that they breathed. Residents in places like Port Arthur, Texas, and Artesia, New Mexico, could sense their exposure to toxic pollution on days when the air was thick with the sweet smell of benzene, a carcinogen. But access to information on the actual levels of chemicals in the air — data that could help vulnerable individuals make critical decisions regarding their health — was largely unavailable.
That changed in 2018, when the federal Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, began requiring refinery operators to monitor concentrations of benzene around the fencelines of their facilities — and, crucially, to publish the results of those measurements online. Since then, benzene concentrations near the country’s 118 refineries have trended downward. However, a lack of enforcement and a dearth of monitoring data has still left some communities behind, according to a new report from the Office of the Inspector General, or OIG, the EPA’s internal watchdog.
The report authors analyzed data from 18 refineries that exceeded the federal benzene “action level” — the level above which operators are required to take corrective measures — between January 2018 and September 2021. They found that 13 of them continued to violate federal standards in 20 or more weeks after their initial violation. Many of these refineries, the report noted, are located in and around neighborhoods of color. The report raises doubts that merely asking companies to collect and report their own data as well as analyze the causes of their own violations, as the 2018 fenceline monitoring requirement did, will lead them to keep their toxic emissions below permissible levels.
Environmental advocates argue that such measures must be accompanied by robust enforcement action from the EPA.
“Even if it has helped a little bit, it’s not enough,” said Ana Parras, co-director of the Houston-based Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Group, of the agency’s fenceline monitoring requirements. “The lack of enforcement, it’s always been there.”
The report comes as the EPA has made efforts to incorporate similar fenceline monitoring requirements into other air pollution regulations. Most recently, the agency proposed to require monitoring in a rule that covers many of the nation’s most toxic chemical plants, a high percentage of which are concentrated in the industrial corridors of Texas and Louisiana. Like the regulations for petroleum refineries, these rules would require operators to analyze the cause of their violations and submit a “corrective action plan” to the agency if they continue to violate federal standards.
When the EPA issued updated regulations for petroleum refineries in 2015, it was the first time that operators of large industrial facilities were required to monitor and report their toxic emissions. The new rules were seen as a novel approach to pollution reduction: Until that point, refinery pollution was controlled through various technologies designed to capture and eliminate emissions; with the exception of occasional facility inspections, regulators effectively took operators at their word that they were operating correctly. When the new regulations went into effect in 2018, refinery personnel had to submit measurements to the EPA every two weeks, and conduct an analysis to identify underlying problems if their average benzene levels exceeded the federal action level of 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air over that period.
The advent of these requirements surfaced information that was previously unavailable to the public and regulators alike. As the data slowly came online, it became clear that the emissions around certain refineries were severe, in some cases exceeding federal standards for many months on end.
Despite this, state and federal regulators failed to curb a number of these emissions. The OIG report pointed to several potential reasons for this, including operators’ failures to identify the cause of their emissions and limited enforcement action by the EPA. In some cases, enforcement was stymied by the fact that refinery operators did not submit monitoring results at all. In others, they estimated nearby industrial plants’ contributions to airbore benzene levels using computer models, instead of actual air monitors, as required by the law.
A failure to reduce benzene levels could cause serious long-term health effects in communities near refineries, according to the report. Benzene is just one of a litany of chemicals released during the process of refining crude oil. Prolonged exposure over years has been linked to leukemia and other cancers of the blood, and breathing high concentrations of benzene in the short term can cause shortness of breath, headaches, and dizziness.
Parras told Grist that residents of cities like Port Arthur and nearby Baytown, Texas, are no strangers to these symptoms. According to the OIG report, Texas is home to 9 out of the 25 refineries where benzene levels exceeded the action level at least once.
“There’s days that you go down there and the smell is so powerful, people don’t want to get off the bus,” Parras said. “This is life on the fence line.”
In its report, the OIG recommended that the EPA improve its approach to addressing unsafe levels of benzene near refineries by providing better guidance to state and local regulators on what constitutes a violation and how to identify gaps in the data that companies submit. The report also advised the agency to develop a strategy to address refineries that continually exceed federal standards. The OIG wrote that the EPA had agreed with its set of recommendations, and that it considered them to be “resolved with corrective actions pending.”
