Fall in the U.S. is when three major sports leagues – football, basketball and hockey – start their seasons. Baseball also continues, and in the UK and Europe, some of the major soccer leagues like the Premier League have started their seasons as well. Additionally, college sports with larger budgets, like American football and basketball, have teams that travel by air.
With major sports comes major travel. And air travel is still a heavy contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, with some data saying it constitutes up to 12% of total global travel emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, air travel is heading in the wrong direction related to the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 goal.
Most professional sports rely on air travel to get to games. Between private planes, chartered flights and commercial flights, and because of the intensity of scheduling, there is no way around traveling by plane to meet league and TV scheduling requirements. On top of team travel, dedicated fans typically book flights to games that aren’t local enough to travel by car or bus.
So where do pro sports stand in terms of their carbon impact? Last year, the United Nations published a policy brief outlining the ways that sport can address climate change, by “raising awareness, influencing behaviors, and shrinking its carbon footprint.” The brief quoted a study that found the 2016 Rio Olympics was responsible for 3.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. The UN report recommended several actions: reducing the carbon footprint of buildings; compiling more data on the carbon footprint of sports; and using sports as a “tool for climate action.”
There are tangible examples of teams around the world taking action against climate catastrophe. In the English Premier League for soccer, a recent study by Sports Positive Leagues concluded that “we have probably seen one of the biggest leaps in progress from clubs across the board” in relation to sustainability and lessening impact on climate. This group, part of the Sports Positive network, measured such things as clean energy, energy efficiency, sustainable transport and single-use plastic reduction. Manchester United, a team in the Premier League that ranked third in the Sports Positive rankings, also announced they would buy carbon offsets against their recent travel to the U.S. The offsets that the team will use for its estimated 450 tons of CO2 emissions from its 2023 summer tour will be used at the Crow Lake Wind project in South Dakota.
In the U.S., just a few years ago the National Basketball Association (NBA) was the most polluting league of the four American sports leagues. But in 2022, the league reduced team travel mileage by about 2,000 miles per team. But it’s not just team travel – the overall carbon output is impacted by fans, the energy of the arena and the kind of materials, like single-serve plastic, used inside arenas. In April of 2022, Atlanta’s State Farm Arena — home to the Atlanta Hawks NBA team — received a TRUE Platinum certification from Green Business Certification Inc. for its efforts in reaching zero waste.
The most high-profile green sports event was the opening of Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena in 2021. The building is expected to receive a net-zero certification and purports to be the first net-zero carbon arena in the world, a claim that’s difficult to verify.
Other arenas are moving green: Sacramento’s Golden One Center is powered by 100% solar energy and uses 45% less water than required and is a LEED Platinum building. And Toronto’s arena uses deep-lake water cooling instead of air conditioning compressors. Other stadiums in the U.S. with significant climate initiatives include those in Philadelphia, Ohio State and Portland.
A recent news item out of Australia noted that the men’s national soccer teams in Australia purchased carbon offsets against their travel to the World Cup in Qatar. And the NFL’s Houston Texans have purchased offsets for this NFL season and two more from 1PointFive, a subsidiary of oil giant Occidental.
While such actions appear well-intentioned, however, carbon offsets have yet to be proven effective. A study from this year showed that 94% of forest offset credits did not offset any emissions. The Texans are purchasing their credits against the massive direct air carbon capture plant being built in the Permian Basin in Texas. These facilities haven’t even been built yet, and direct air carbon capture is a nascent technology that, some say, is more of a benefit to the fossil fuel companies than to the environment.
The Paris Olympics of 2024 is promising “to halve the emissions arising in relation to the Games, while offsetting even more CO2 emissions than we will generate.” A noble goal, to be sure, but as with all areas of the professional sports ecosystem, drastic improvements need to be made to make a dent in our warming climate.
In a new study, an international group of scientists with the World Weather Attribution initiative has concluded that climate change made the heavy rainfall that led to this month’s deadly Libyan floods up to 50 times more likely.
The first half of September brought extreme rainfall to several Mediterranean countries. On September 10, Libya was hit with disastrous flooding following torrential rainfall associated with Storm Daniel that caused 4,128 confirmed deaths with more than 10,000 still missing, a press release from World Weather Attribution said.
Following the devastating flooding in the Mediterranean, World Weather Attribution’s international team from the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, the United Kingdom and the U.S. came together to assess how much the intensity and likelihood of the extreme rainfall were influenced by human-induced climate change.
“The severe flooding in Spain, Greece, Türkiye, Bulgaria and Libya was caused by very heavy rainfall that fell, in the case of Spain in less than 24 hours, whereas it lasted 24 hours in Libya and up to 4 days over Greece and Türkiye,” the press release said.
The scientists used computer and climate simulations to compare current weather events with those in a world where the climate was not 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, reported Reuters.
A warmer atmosphere is able to hold in more water vapor, which allows moisture to build up in clouds, causing increased rainfall. Climate change can also cause erratic weather patterns.
The research team found that climate change not only made the severe rainfall in Libya up to 50 times more likely, but as much as 50 percent more intense.
Most people in the north-eastern cities of Derna, Sousa, Benghazi and Al-Marj were not prepared for the amount of rainfall or levels of flooding Storm Daniel brought.
“In Libya, the volume of water and overnight timing of the dam failures made it so that anyone in the path of the water was at increased risk, not just those who are typically highly vulnerable,” the study said. “In addition to the lack of maintenance, the Al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams were built in the 1970s, using relatively short rainfall records, and may not have been designed to withstand a 1 in 600 year rainfall event.”
Better forecasting, warning systems and communication of the warnings to the general public, as well as updated infrastructure, are needed to help people in the region be better prepared for extreme and unprecedented weather events.
“In conjunction with improved emergency management capacity, impact-based forecasts may help to provide a clearer understanding of how the rainfall translates into potential impacts and could lead to improved warnings in the future,” the study said. “This disaster also points to the challenge of needing to design and maintain infrastructure for not just the climate of the present or the past, but also the future. In Libya, this means taking into account the long-term decline in average rainfall, and at the same time, the increase in extreme rainfall like this heavy rainfall event; a challenging prospect especially for a country plagued by crises.”
If you’re looking for ways to reduce your carbon emissions you could start by staying home for work. A new study by researchers from Cornell University and Microsoft has found that working remotely can have great benefits for the planet.
According to the study, compared to those who travel to an office for work, people who work remotely all the time could reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 54 percent. Hybrid workers can reduce their carbon footprint by 11 percent when they work remotely two days a week and 29 percent when they spend four days working from home.
“The remote work has to be significant in order to realize these kind of benefits,” said Longqi Yang, an applied research manager at Microsoft and co-author of the study, as The Washington Post reported. “This study provides a very important data point for a dimension that people care a lot about when deciding remote work policy.”
The study, “Climate mitigation potentials of teleworking are sensitive to changes in lifestyle and workplace rather than ICT usage,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As a model for the projected greenhouse gas emissions of U.S. remote, hybrid and office workers, the researchers used data on teleworking and commuting from Microsoft employees. They looked at five types of emissions, including energy use at home and in the office.
“Office energy use is the main contributor to the carbon footprint of onsite and hybrid workers, while non-commute-related travel becomes more significant as the number of remote work days increases,” the study said. “In contrast, the effects of remote and hybrid work on ICT usage have negligible impacts on the overall carbon footprint. This highlights that people should shift their focus from ICT usage to commute decarbonization, facility downsizing, and renewables penetration for office buildings to mitigate GHG emissions of remote and onsite work.”
The researchers found that travel not related to work increased for remote workers.
“People say: ‘I work from home, I’m net zero.’ That’s not true,” said Fengqi You, one of the authors of the study and a Cornell professor whose research is focused on systems engineering and data science, as reported by The Guardian. “The net benefit for working remotely is positive but a key question is how positive. When people work remotely, they tend to spend more emissions on social activities.”
Professor You pointed out that people’s homes are not always the most energy efficient, and office printers tend to be more energy efficient than printers used at home.
“While remote work shows potential in reducing carbon footprint, careful consideration of commuting patterns, building energy consumption, vehicle ownership, and non-commute-related travel is essential to fully realise its environmental benefits,” the study said.
Improved fuel economy due to less congestion at rush hour was an additional benefit of more remote work.
“To have a comprehensive plan for something like this, you’re looking at more than just the workplace, and obviously the other choices that people make in their life will also impact the emissions that they create and that organizations might create as well,” said John Trougakos, a professor of organizational behavior and human resources management at University of Toronto-Scarborough, as The Washington Post reported.
The study found that communications and information technology made up only a small portion of overall carbon emissions, so the focus of emissions reductions should be on using renewables for office temperature control and decarbonizing transportation.
“We’re not trying to predict the future, but I think the future is all up to us,” Yang said, as reported by The Washington Post. “This study tells people, if we want to be more carbon neutral in the future, what can we do now?”
More than a year ahead of a state deadline, California has installed 10,000 fast chargers for electric vehicles, the latest in a series of recent milestones in the state’s race to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from passenger vehicles.
Direct-current fast chargers, or DCFC, play an important role in the transition to electric vehicles, because they are a driver’s best option to quickly recharge a battery while on the road. Fast chargers typically offer power outputs between 50 kW to 350 kW, and some can charge an EV battery to 80 percent in as quickly as 20 minutes. In contrast, the next-fastest type of charger, a Level 2, takes between four to 10 hours to reach the same level of charge.
In 2018, former Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order that mandated the state install 250,000 EV chargers, including 10,000 fast chargers, by 2025. Since then, the state has nearly quadrupled the number of public and “shared private” (chargers installed at places of business or apartment buildings) fast chargers to hit its target, from around 2,600 to more than 10,000.
“This is the future of transportation — and it’s happening right now all across California,” Governor Gavin Newsom said on Monday at Climate Week NYC in New York, where he made the announcement.
But the state is further behind in its goal to reach 250,000 total chargers by 2025. It currently has less than half that: There are about 93,800 public and shared private chargers in total, but only 41,000 of those are fully public. Additionally, its goal of 250,000 chargers, set more than five years ago, no longer reflects the breakneck pace at which Californians are transitioning to electric vehicles.
There are more than 1.6 million EVs in the state, and 25 percent of new cars sold in the first quarter of 2023 were electric vehicles. An August report from the California Energy Commission found that the state will need more than 1 million public and shared private chargers — including 39,000 fast chargers — to support 7 million electric vehicles by 2030, a steep increase from current targets.
“With new EV sales increasing every month, the charging market needs to step up the pace,” John Gartner, senior director of transportation programs at the Center for Sustainable Energy, told Grist in an email.
Still, Gartner said that installing 10,000 fast chargers was significant, considering the high equipment costs and long wait times for permitting and connection confronting the industry. Gartner said federal and state incentive programs would be crucial in reducing financial risk and attracting private investment in EV infrastructure.
California has invested billions in incentives. Last week, it opened applications for $38 million in equity-focused incentives to fund public charging stations in low-income and disadvantaged communities in 28 counties. And a newly passed bill awaiting Newsom’s signature would provide close to $2 billion for zero-emission vehicle incentives and for supporting infrastructure through 2035.
The rest of the country has even farther to go on EV infrastructure. The three most populous states after California have only a fraction of the number of fast chargers. Florida has 2,038, Texas has 2,017 and New York has 1,283. Alaska has the fewest number of fast chargers, with 32.
Germany is likely to generate enough energy from renewables to meet more than 50% of its energy demand by the end of this year, as the country’s Economy Minister Robert Habeck announced at a conference held by the Heinrich Böll Foundation on Monday.
As of 2022, Germany’s solar photovoltaic capacity was at about 67 megawatts, followed by about 58 megawatts of capacity from onshore wind energy and about 8 megawatts from offshore wind, according to a February 2023 report from the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action.
As Reuters reported, Habeck noted at the conference that Germany expected to reach its goal of 9 gigawatts of solar capacity for the year, and that the country had already met its goal for the year for onshore wind energy by the end of July.
However, offshore wind development has been more challenging, primarily because of supply chain issues, as Yale Environment 360 reported. In the first six months of 2023, offshore wind capacity grew to 8,385 megawatts. However, the country has a target to reach 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Wind energy development in Germany has also been stalled by delayed permit applications, as projects require permitting to transport the turbines. With over 15,000 backlogged applications as of early September, projects have been delayed. Transporting turbine components may require about 60 permits, while transporting a wind turbine requires around 150 permits, Reuters reported.
“I can’t apply for a transport permit and tomorrow say: ‘I’ll drive the green truck instead of the red’, because a new permit is needed,” Kai Westphal, a regional head of transport at Vestas, told Reuters.
Still, GlobalData, a data analytics company, predicted offshore wind energy capacity to quadruple and onshore wind capacity to double by 2035.
A report from the Federal Network Agency released earlier this year noted that Germany could meet its energy demand with clean energy, even by quitting coal earlier than anticipated.
“The report by the Federal Network Agency approved by the cabinet today shows that electricity demand can be reliably met at any time between 2025 and 2031,” Habeck said at the time. “This also applies if electricity consumption increases significantly due to new consumers such as electric vehicles and heat pumps and the phase-out of coal takes place by 2030.”
Although 2023 is expected to be the first year that Germany meets more than half of its energy demand with renewable energy sources, Habeck said the country is still not on track to meet its goal of meeting 80% of energy demand with renewables by 2030.
“We won’t get there at the current pace,” Habeck said.
Hello, welcome to Record High. I’m Kate Yoder, a staff writer at Grist, and today, we’re looking at how sweating can help us cope with climate change.
It is embarrassing to be a sweaty person. I remember making my way to the podium to give a speech at my sixth-grade graduation, my feet squelching audibly in flip-flops with every step; taking a test and noticing the warped paper beneath my moist hand; standing up from a plastic chair and hoping no one noticed the sweaty butt print I left behind. So it came as a relief to learn that sweating was actually good for something.
Once I learned that the science journalist Sarah Everts wrote a book called The Joy of Sweat, I knew that I had to talk to her. Everts makes the case that perspiration is a human superpower, a gift for enduring sweltering temperatures. “I think it’s funny that humans have this enormous taboo about a biological function that’s ultimately going to help us survive climate change,” she told me.
Paula Winkler / Getty Images
The science of sweat goes as follows: At the first hint of getting hot, your heart starts pumping blood toward the outskirts of your body. In tandem, sweat glands pump water — drawn from that blood — onto your skin. When those tiny beads evaporate, they move heat off the body and into the air. It’s an incredibly efficient way to cool down. The geneticist Yana Kamberov, who studies the evolution of sweat, told me that the ability to shed buckets of water is an ability as unique to humans as our oversize brains.
So why do we burn through all that water, one of life’s precious resources? To avoid getting cooked from the inside out. “Dying from a heat wave is like a horror movie with 27 endings that you can choose from,” said Camilo Mora, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, who has cataloged 27 different ways that heat can lead to organ failure and death.
“Dying from a heat wave is like a horror movie with 27 endings that you can choose from.”
The thing is, sweating has its limits, as I reported for Grist this week. Very hot, humid conditions can render it ineffective. When the air is thick with water molecules, it’s harder for sweat to evaporate, and the body starts overheating. The theoretical point at which no amount of sweating can help you is thought to be six hours of exposure to a “wet-bulb temperature” of 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Wet-bulb temperature — invented by the U.S. military in the 1950s after recruits kept collapsing from heat illness — is a measurement that combines heat and humidity with sunlight and wind.
But heat gets dangerous long before that point. Last year, a study found that the upper limit of safety for healthy people was a wet-bulb temperature of 31 degrees C, or 88 degrees F. And factors like age, illness, and body size change the math. Older people are especially vulnerable — partly because of health conditions, and partly because sweat glands tend to deteriorate with age.
That humidity poses a problem for sweating is well-known, but I was surprised to learn that the opposite extreme — hot, dry air — could present its own set of problems. Sweat evaporates very quickly in arid conditions, but the human body can only produce a limited amount of sweat, said Ollie Jay, a health professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. That limit is about a liter per hour at rest, or about three liters an hour during exercise. If you managed to reach that point of maximum sweatiness in dry heat, then you wouldn’t be able to sweat enough to cool down. But most climate models ignore this, leading almost certainly to overestimates for what humans can handle, Jay said.
Given how crucial perspiration is for survival, you’d think researchers would have the science of sweat all figured out by now, but there are still open questions. Read the full story here. (Teaser: It includes a robot that sweats.)
By the numbers
Earlier this month, researchers analyzed the hot and humid conditions under which the human body starts to overheat unless specific actions to cool down are taken. They found that under our current climate, 8 percent of the land on Earth will meet this threshold at least once a decade. That would increase to a quarter if global temperatures warm 2 degrees C above the preindustrial average.
It’s not only coral in trouble in Florida: Anemones, sponges, and jellyfish — usually resilient creatures — are struggling to survive in the Everglades amid record marine temperatures. “It’s a complete ecosystem problem,” Matt Bellinger, owner and operator of Bamboo Charters in the Keys, told Abigail Geiger and Gabriela Tejeda for their piece in Grist.
Take a siesta: A midday break with a meal and a nap doesn’t just sound pleasant, it also protects outdoor workers from exposure to the hottest time of day. Grist fellow Siri Chilukuri explains the benefits of reviving the Mediterranean tradition and the challenges of bringing it to the overworked United States.
The fight for worker safety heats up: After laboring in temperatures up to 118 degrees F, baggage handlers, runway signalers, and cabin cleaners at the Phoenix airport requested an investigation of working conditions they say leave them prone to heat illness and exhaustion. They are the first airport workers to file a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Grist fellow Katie Myers reports.
Heat waves and pregnancy are a dangerous combo: Exposure to both short- and long-term heat raises the risk of life-threatening complications during labor and delivery, Jessica Kutz reports for The 19th. A recent study found that extreme heat was associated with a 27 percent increase in “severe maternal morbidity,” a category that includes cardiac arrest, eclampsia, heart failure, and sepsis.
An “extreme heat belt” is emerging in the Midwest: When hazardous heat came to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska in August, emergency rooms saw a record number of people suffering from heat-related illnesses. Many homes in the region are designed in a way that’s ill-prepared for hotter temperatures, Holly Edgell writes for Kansas City’s KCUR.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Under the relentless sun in Africa, the birthplace of humanity, every living thing had to find a way to beat the heat. Lions rested in the shade, termites built giant ventilation mounds, and elephants evolved giant ears that could flap like fans. Around 2 million years ago, our ancestors perfected the weirdest technique of them all: pushing water from inside our bodies to outside, a gift for enduring sweltering temperatures.
Other animals can sweat a bit, but not like us. Running around in the heat, a person can shed more than two gallons of water each day, draining one of life’s precious resources at a speedy pace. As the body tries to cool down, blood vessels widen, redirecting hot blood from the core of your body toward the surface. In tandem, sweat glands pump water, drawn from that blood, onto your skin. When those tiny beads evaporate, they carry heat off the body and into the air.
“It is crucial to being human,” said Yana Kamberov, a geneticist studying the evolution of sweat at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s something that differentiates us from every other animal on the planet” — right up there with our oversized brains. The average person has between 2 and 4 million sweat glands in their skin, at 10 times the density of a chimpanzee’s, one of our closest living relatives. For humans, sweat proved even more useful than protective fur; our thick coat dwindled into peach fuzz to allow water to evaporate more efficiently.
Our biological sprinkler systems are now being put to the test. This summer was not just the hottest three consecutive months on record, but the hottest on Earth in 125,000 years. Phoenix spent 31 days in a row with a high of 110 degrees F or above. Across the Northern Hemisphere, from continent to continent, heat records fell at an alarming pace, with Morocco and China setting all-time highs above 120 degrees F. The swampy Gulf Coast heat soared as high as 115 degrees F, rewriting records for Houston and New Orleans. Even South America, in the throes of winter, saw unbelievable heat: A town in the Chilean Andes topped 100 degrees F — another all-time high.
It is getting to the point that life is dangerous without air-conditioning. If a widespread power outage hit Phoenix during a heat wave and lasted for days, it could kill thousands and send half the city to the emergency room, according to a recent study. And the soupy heat in the Gulf Coast comes with a challenge of its own: Super hot and humid air makes it hard for sweat to evaporate, because the environment is already thick with water molecules, which means more heat stays trapped inside the body, raising the risk of getting cooked from the inside out.
“Dying from a heat wave is like a horror movie with 27 endings that you can choose from,” said Camilo Mora, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, who has cataloged 27 different ways that heat can lead to organ failure and death.
As blood gets shunted toward the skin, for instance, it strains the heart and deprives the brain and gut of oxygen, leading to heart attacks and other grisly outcomes from widespread inflammation and clotting. Prolonged sweating can also cause dehydration, sometimes inducing kidney failure. Heat has so many ways to kill you that it’s easily the deadliest of all weather disasters Americans face. In 2017, Mora and colleagues found that 30 percent of the world’s population was already exposed to potentially deadly heat for 20 days or more each year.
Given how crucial perspiration is for survival, you’d think that researchers would have the science of sweat all figured out by now, but there are still open questions. Exactly how hot is too hot for the human body? How important is humidity? And why aren’t we more grateful for sweat? Its nasty reputation for making you stink belies the fact that it’s essentially a built-in life jacket to help you ride out record-breaking heat waves.
Feeling moist and sticky is much better than the alternative — death by heat stroke. “I think it’s funny that humans have this enormous taboo about a biological function that’s ultimately going to help us survive climate change,” said Sarah Everts, the author of The Joy of Sweat.
Deadly heat can hit basically anywhere, catching people off-guard. Take the record-breaking temperatures that swept over Europe last summer, sending the thermostat soaring above 100 degrees F across the continent, resulting in more than 61,000 deaths. Our bodies can acclimatize to heat over a period of weeks, giving us the ability to sweat more. But temperatures can skyrocket quickly — in February this year, thermostats in Washington, D.C., jumped almost 30 degrees in a day, from a high of 53 degrees F one day to 81 the next. These kinds of leaps are a lot for our bodies to handle, making heat waves in cooler climates especially deadly.
Even in countries like Pakistan, where people are well-adapted to heat, sweltering temperatures are taking casualties. “With climate change, things are just going beyond limits of adaptation,” said Fahad Saeed, a scientist with the global climate policy institute Climate Analytics, who is based in Islamabad. “When you’re witnessing that in this part of the world, it really kind of tells you something is going beyond normal, because the people are acclimatized to this kind of weather, and still they are dying.”
A measure called the “wet-bulb temperature,” which combines heat and humidity with sunlight and wind speed, is used to calculate the threshold at which a healthy human body can no longer survive. Invented by the U.S. military in the 1950s after recruits kept collapsing from heat illness at a camp in South Carolina, it’s determined by covering a thermometer in a damp cloth and swinging it through the air to speed up evaporation. The theoretical point at which no amount of sweating can help you is thought to be six hours of exposure to a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit. That translates to 95 degrees in complete humidity, for example, or 115 degrees at 50 percent humidity.
In recent years, parts of Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula have already briefly crossed this scary threshold. And more heat will come, bringing parts of Mexico’s coasts and more of South Asia into the danger zone. Worryingly, climate change is also driving up the moisture content of the air, especially in the tropics.
Newer research suggests that the limit might be even lower than 35 degrees C. In a study last year at Penn State University, young people volunteered to subject themselves to uncomfortably hot conditions in a lab. Participants swallowed telemetry pills that monitored their core body temperature and sat in a controlled chamber, moving just enough to mimic everyday activities like cooking and eating. When the body fails to stabilize its core temperature, things start to spiral out of control: In extreme conditions, heat stroke can set in within 10 to 15 minutes. The researchers found that the upper limit of safety, based on when the participants’ core temperatures started rising, was likely closer to a wet-bulb temperature of 31 degrees C, or 88 degrees F.
And that’s for healthy people. Factors like age, illness, and body size change the math. People over the age of 60, who account for an estimated 80 percent of the 12,000 heat-related deaths in the United States each year, often have health conditions that make heat more dangerous. What’s more, as people get older, their sweat glands deteriorate, undermining their ability to cool down. Some antipsychotic medications have a side effect of suppressing sweating, possibly one of many reasons why those diagnosed with schizophrenia are particularly vulnerable to dying in the heat.
The reality is that most people don’t take all the necessary steps to stay cool during a heat wave, like seeking shade or drinking lots of cold water — another reason that a pragmatic “danger zone” for temperatures starts well below 35 degrees C. Earlier this month, researchers from the University of Oxford and the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts analyzed the hot and humid conditions under which the human body starts to overheat unless specific actions to cool down are taken. They found that under our current climate, 8 percent of the land on Earth will meet this threshold at least once a decade. That would increase to a quarter if global temperatures warm 2 degrees C above the preindustrial average, the amount we can expect if existing and planned fossil fuel projects are carried through.
An AmeriGas propane truck drives past the World’s Tallest Thermometer landmark, which displays a temperature above 107 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius) in Baker, California, on August 30, 2022. Patrick T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
Still, there’s a debate around how much humidity matters in health outcomes, said Jane Baldwin, an Earth systems science professor at the University of California, Irvine. Humidity isn’t showing up as a key driver of deaths in real-world epidemiological data like you’d expect based on theories about wet-bulb temperature. Baldwin recently coauthored a study trying to explain this discrepancy. One explanation could be that epidemiological data tends to come from cooler parts of the world, like Europe and the United States, whereas data is limited from tropical countries like India, Ghana, and Brazil, where the link between humidity and death would likely be strongest. Nailing down an answer to this question would help scientists make more accurate predictions about how climate change will affect health, Baldwin said.
The opposite extreme — dry air — could present its own set of problems. In arid conditions, sweat evaporates very quickly. That’s great for cooling off, but sweat production has a limit, said Ollie Jay, a health professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. At rest, it’s hard to sweat more than a liter per hour, he said, but when you’re exercising, closer to three liters can pour out of your body in an hour. If you managed to reach that point of maximum sweatiness in dry heat, then you wouldn’t be able to sweat enough to cool down. “Most climate models for assessing future heat-stress risk assume that the body has an unlimited capacity to produce sweat,” Jay said, almost certainly leading to overestimates for what humans can handle in hot, arid climates.
Another unknown is just how much early exposure to heat changes our ability to sweat. One theory is that being exposed to high temperatures in the first two years of life can activate more sweat glands; we’re born with roughly the same number of sweat glands, but not all of them turn on and start pumping water. As a result, people born in hot places might have more active sweat glands than those born in cold climates.
It raises questions of whether those who spend their youth avoiding sweat-soaked clothes by hiding in artificially cooled buildings could be less prepared for life on an increasingly hot planet. “Imagine, if you raise your babies purely in air conditioning,” Kamberov said, “then in a warmer world, how capable of adapting will they be?”
Sweat is essentially saving our lives all summer long — though you probably don’t enjoy it. Everts, the author of The Joy of Sweat, speculates that it violates our desire to be in control. Sweat pours out of us involuntarily: We can’t hold it in or delay it with willpower, unlike burps or farts. “When your body gets the cooldown directive, those pores open, and the sweat pours out,” Everts said, “and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to control that, right?”
It doesn’t help that a sweaty person is often a stinky one, the curse of locker rooms everywhere. Sweat itself is odorless — it’s mostly just water — but when it mixes with bacteria on your skin, it can raise a stench. There are two types of sweat glands: Eccrine glands, the most prominent, are responsible for keeping your temperature in check and found all over the body — particularly on your forehead, palms, and the bottoms of your feet. Apocrine glands in hairy areas like the armpits and groin become active during puberty, secreting a thicker, protein-rich sweat that bacteria convert into that embarrassing aroma. Plugging your armpit pores with antiperspirant, then, won’t affect your ability to cool down: There are plenty of other escape routes on your skin.
In the olden days, people applied perfume and talcum powder to try to cover up the smell of B.O. But they were so used to it that by the time antiperspirants and deodorants came onto the market around the turn of the 20th century — the former aimed at blocking sweat pores, the latter at fighting odor-producing bacteria — hardly anyone wanted to buy them. That posed a problem for the manufacturers. So in 1919, a copywriter named James Young who was working for the antiperspirant company Odorono (odor, oh no!) “put the fear of sweat in Americans,” Everts said. One magazine ad with the headline “The most humiliating moment in my life” featured a young woman overhearing that no one would dance with her because she suffered “frightfully from perspiration.” The idea was not just to make people aware of their stink, but to make them afraid it would stop them from finding love or a decent job. “I just wish people were less mortified by sweat,” Everts said.
The marketing campaign was a lasting success, even a century later. Last year, the global deodorant market was valued at $24 billion, and it’s on track to grow to $37 billion by the end of the decade, in part because of global warming, according to the market research firm Fortune Business Insights.
A drugstore employee restocks deodorant and antiperspirant in Miami in March 2023. Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Today, some cultures are more matter-of-fact about sweat than others. In Pakistan, it’s simply a fact of life, Saeed said. Still, excessive sweating is frowned upon basically everywhere. “What can save you is not culturally accepted,” said Mora, the University of Hawaiʻi scientist. “I cannot imagine anywhere in the world where you would like to be hugged by a sweaty person.”
How sweaty you are isn’t in your control — but what you wear is. Hot, humid climates call for more exposed skin, making it easier for your sweat to evaporate; perhaps counterintuitively, loose, long sleeves and pants help you reap the benefits of sweat in arid climates, keeping the water from evaporating too quickly and at the same time blocking sunlight. Konrad Rykaczewski, a professor of engineering at Arizona State University, is researching how to help design clothing that maximizes the effectiveness of sweating. He says that scientists still don’t understand a lot about sweat on the scale that really matters for clothing design.
“The question is, how much of the sweat we produce actually goes to cooling us?” Rykaczewski said. Sweating profusely isn’t helping anyone — sweat that drips off your forehead is essentially wasted water, since it didn’t evaporate off you. By the same token, trapping a bunch of sweat underneath a hazmat suit could leave you susceptible to heat illnesses. Counterintuitively, even fabrics that wick sweat can end up stealing it away from your skin and wasting it, Rykaczewski said. When that water evaporates, it’ll cool the fabric and the air between the fabric and your skin, instead of your body directly.
Rykaczewski’s research is focused on understanding how heat affects the human body in the real world, something that’s difficult to study. “No one’s measuring someone that’s going to get heatstroke, right?” Rykaczewski said. “That’s not ethical.”
Arizona State University associate professor Konrad Rykaczewski points to the pores on ANDI, an Advanced Newton Dynamic Instrument that beads sweat like humans. Researchers are using ANDI to learn more about the effect of heat exposure on the human body. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
So, in place of live humans, he and his colleagues at Arizona State have developed a sweating robot, technically called a “thermal mannequin,” that simulates human responses to super-hot temperatures. The robot — named ANDI for “Advanced Newton Dynamic Instrument” — takes frequent trips into the sizzling Arizona heat, equipped with sensors, an internal cooling system, as well as pores for sweating. One unique thing about ANDI is that it can represent anyone. Rykaczewski can modify the program to simulate how a person might weather the heat, calculating how factors like age, body size, or drug use might affect the body’s response in different situations. And it all comes at the low cost of $650,000. “We basically are developing the most expensive way to measure heat impacts on humans,” Rykaczewski joked.
ANDI is essentially a crash test dummy for a hotter planet. Our bodies are up against heat that threatens to render our dampness useless. Humans have been sweating for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s core to who we are. But to truly understand it? For that, we needed to build a robot.
The clean energy transition will require lots of batteries — primarily to power electric vehicles and to store renewable energy that can be dispatched to the electric grid on demand. European Union policymakers are growing more concerned about where the bloc will get all the metals required to build those batteries. One potential source? Dead lithium-ion batteries from EVs, e-bikes, and consumer electronics, which contain lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other ingredients needed to make new ones.
Recycling the metals used in batteries has the potential to limit the need for environmentally damaging mining while also reducing electronic waste. But Europe’s lithium-ion battery recycling industry is in its infancy. While manufacturers sold nearly 700,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries into the European market last year, recyclers only had the capacity to process about 17,000 tons of battery waste, according to Circular Energy Storage, a data analysis firm for the battery industry.
New rules that entered force last month could help change that. After years of negotiations, the EU just adopted a comprehensive battery regulation that could spur battery recycling at a scale never seen before outside of China. Battery industry experts say the policy has the potential to supercharge lithium-ion battery recycling across the bloc.
The EU’s new battery rules “will make a very big impact for the whole supply chain not only in Europe but also globally,” Xiao Lin, CEO of the Chinese battery metal recycling consultancy Botree Cycling, told Grist.
Used batteries sit in a battery recycling plant in Montreal, Quebec on January 17, 2023.
MATHIEW LEISER / AFP via Getty Images
The battery regulation replaces a 2006 policy that focused on minimizing the health risks caused by hazardous battery ingredients like lead and cadmium. The new rules reflect the larger role that batteries, particularly lithium-ion ones, play in society today, and the EU’s desire to ensure they are sustainable throughout their entire life cycle, from manufacturing to disposal. The regulation requires manufacturers to collect waste lithium-ion batteries for recycling and, in the case of EV, e-bike, and energy storage batteries, incorporate recycled materials into new ones. The battery regulation also includes ambitious metals recovery targets, pushing recyclers to use technologies that do a good job reclaiming critical resources like lithium.
The regulation comes at a pivotal moment. EV sales are booming in Europe and around the world, causing demand for the metals inside their batteries to skyrocket. Hundreds of new mines may be needed to supply those metals by the mid-2030s. But mining takes a significant toll on the environment, and often, local communities. Most EU nations have limited battery metal resources, forcing them to rely on imports from countries with poor environmental and human rights track records.
Waste batteries are pooled for recycling at a facility in Jieshou, China, in July 2021. Liu Junxi / Xinhua via Getty Images
Battery recycling is often touted as a more sustainable way to ease long-term supply pressure. Spent EV batteries, as well as the smaller batteries inside e-bikes, power tools, smartphones, and more, are rich in the metals needed to make new ones. Today, China leads the world in lithium-ion battery recycling, thanks in part to policies that have encouraged it in the EV sector, specifically. In 2018, China’s government stipulated that EV makers are responsible for collecting dead batteries, and it set ambitious metals recovery rates that recyclers must meet to be included on a government white list.
The EU is now following in China’s footsteps by directing manufacturers to ensure that batteries are collected for recycling at no charge to consumers. For consumer electronic and “light means of transport” batteries — those used in e-scooters, e-bikes, and the like — collection rates will gradually increase over the next decade. In the EV and energy storage sectors, meanwhile, manufacturers are required to take back all batteries for recycling. Bosch, which manufacturers batteries for the European e-bike industry, told Grist in an emailed statement that bicycle makers have “either already successfully introduced or are currently working on collection systems” to meet the new requirements, with e-bike battery take-back programs currently up and running in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
Recyclers, meanwhile, are required to hit stringent metal recovery targets, including 80 percent of the lithium contained in a battery, and 95 percent of its cobalt, copper, nickel and lead, by the end of 2031. Alissa Kendall, a battery recycling expert at the University of California, Davis, says that these recovery rates will push recyclers away from pyrometallurgy, an older technique in which batteries are smelted in a furnace to produce a low-quality metal alloy. Instead, Kendall expects the new rules will accelerate the industry-wide shift toward hydrometallurgy. Hydrometallurgical recyclers typically shred batteries to produce a powder called “black mass,” then separate and purify individual metals using chemical solvents. While pyrometallurgical recycling often results in significant lithium losses, recyclers using hydrometallurgy claim they can recover lithium at high rates. There are also environmental benefits: While pyrometallurgy uses considerable energy and produces toxic gases that must be captured or remediated, hydrometallurgy requires less energy and generates lower emissions (although the strong acids involved require careful disposal).
A scientist poses with a beaker filled with aluminium foil, copper foil, casing particles, and a “black mass” made of used graphite, cobalt, nickel, and manganese from old lithium-ion batteries. JENS SCHLUETER / AFP via Getty Images
“Our industry-leading, sustainable lithium-ion battery recycling technology is geared towards meeting lithium, cobalt, and nickel recovery targets set forth in the Battery Regulation,” a spokesperson for Canada-based battery recycler Li-Cycle told Grist in an email, adding that Europe’s regulations are “very positive for the growth of the industry.” Li-Cycle is one ofseveral hydrometallurgical recycling companies in the process of massively expanding its presence in Europe: Last month, it opened a black mass facility in Germany and announced plans for a future recycling hub in Italy.
Recycling doesn’t have to take place in Europe as long as it meets EU standards. Lin says that many Asian recyclers are already meeting or exceeding the metal recovery rates in the European battery regulation. But Lin expects established recyclers will run into trouble with other EU standards, such as a requirement that 70 percent of the weight of batteries be recycled by the end of 2030. In China, about 65 percent of EV batteries sold today are lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, a chemistry that contains no nickel or cobalt. Aside from lithium, there’s very little in these batteries worth recycling. As a result, Lin says, recyclers are used to recovering about 3 percent of their materials by weight.
“It’s very different to reach 70 percent,” Lin said. Recyclers outside of Europe that want to cater to the EU market, Lin says, may have to set up new European facilities with more advanced technologies.
In addition to mandating efficient recycling, the new battery regulation seeks to ensure that recycled materials get incorporated into new batteries. By 2031, the EU will require that new EV and storage batteries contain at least 6 percent recycled lithium and nickel, 16 percent recycled cobalt, and 85 percent recycled lead. These figures will rise to 12 percent recycled lithium, 15 percent recycled nickel, and 26 percent recycled cobalt by 2036 (at which point they will also apply to “light means of transport” batteries). But while the intent of the recycled content standards is to promote the reuse of critical resources, experts warn that they could have unintended consequences.
Andy Leach, an energy storage analyst at consultancy BloombergNEF, says that if the recycled content standards are higher than what the recycling market can deliver on its own, companies might be forced to recycle batteries prematurely in order to reach them. Overly ambitious targets could also encourage battery makers to be wasteful, since the standards can be met with either end-of-life batteries or battery production scrap, which consists of cuttings and leftovers from the battery manufacturing process, as well as battery components that didn’t meet quality control standards. If there aren’t enough end-of-life batteries to meet the requirements, battery makers may be encouraged to keep generating large volumes of scrap, rather than implement efficiency improvements that reduce manufacturing waste over time.
“Recycling’s important, but we also shouldn’t rush into it if the materials aren’t there to be recycled,” Leach said.
An employee of European Metal Recycling disassembles a car battery pack into recyclable parts in Hamburg, Germany. Markus Scholz / picture alliance via Getty Images
Bosch, the e-bike battery manufacturer, called the recycled content targets “very ambitious,” adding that “the availability of recycled raw materials is the biggest challenge” to meeting them.
In particular, the achievability of the recycled content standards will depend on the return of heavy, mineral-rich EV batteries for recycling. But these batteries are long lived, and they are often repurposed for a second application like grid storage, meaning it could be years before large numbers of them are ready to be recycled. Li-Cycle told Grist that the company expects manufacturing scrap to represent “the bulk of our feedstock” over the next few years, with end-of-life EV batteries becoming more important in the 2030s. BASF, a German battery materials maker that is expanding its battery recycling operations, told Grist that it also “plans to recycle scrap” from battery production until more dead EV batteries are available.
While recycled content standards may encourage waste if they’re too aggressive, Kendall of UC Davis emphasized the importance of these standards for improving the economics of recycling. By placing a premium on recycled lithium and other metals, the standards could “increase the value globally for recycled materials,” she said. In a best-case scenario, that might help other emerging battery recycling markets become more economically viable over the long term. Those include the United States, where several companies are nowbuildinghuge new plants to recycle EV batteries despite no federal mandates. (U.S. recyclers are, however, being supported by bigfederal loans.)
Despite uncertainties, many in the industry are hopeful that the new EU regulation will help battery recycling reach the scale needed to ease future mining pressure. Kurt Vandeputte, senior vice president of battery recycling solutions at the Belgian-based metals company Umicore, called the regulation “a smart way of saying that we have to be careful and we have to create a closed loop of critical materials.”
“It’s going to be the blueprint for many other industries,” Vandeputte said.
