The landscape of the solar industry is changing rapidly. Amid supply chain constraints, political battles, and groundbreaking legislation, solar continues to gain popularity in the U.S.
To celebrate how far the industry has come and has still to go, here are our top solar energy statistics, fully updated for 2023.
Statistics About the Potential of Solar Energy
Sunlight, a renewable source of energy, is the greatest source of potential energy on earth. However, only a fraction of the potential energy in sunlight that reaches the Earth is captured and used to generate electricity.
Only 0.03% of the solar energy available in the U.S. is harnessed to generate electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy found that, of the solar energy technologies assessed, only 133 terawatt-hours of solar energy were produced in 2020 despite 386,646 terawatt-hours of potential solar energy being available.
Watch Below: Learn which countries are generating the most solar energy today and how each country’s solar production has trended over the last 30 years.
Statistics About Solar Energy Usage Today
Ongoing global supply chain issues and logistical challenges stalled growth in renewable energy through 2022 and the beginning of 2023. Despite this, the solar industry continues to thrive.
New renewable capacity additions are set to increase by 107 GW in 2023, the largest increase ever. Record-breaking growth despite supply chain bottlenecks, construction delays, and high prices for raw materials and commodities shows the resilience of the renewable energy industry.
While solar prices are projected to decrease in 2024, they are expected to remain 10-15% higher than 2020 levels. These higher costs can be attributed to strong demand, supply chain issues, and higher costs for freight, polysilicon, and metals.
Although solar has become more expensive in 2022 and 2023, the cost of non-renewable sources of energy like oil, natural gas, and coal have increased even more rapidly.
Experts expect ongoing supply chain constraints within the solar industry to prevent Americans from realizing the full benefits of the IRA until at least 2024.
The solar industry in the U.S. has grown by more than 200 times over since the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) was introduced in 2006. The solar industry has added billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and has created hundreds of thousands of jobs.9
The number of solar workers in the U.S. increased by 3.7% between 2021 and 2022. That’s 12,256 jobs added.
The number of people employed by the solar industry increased in 42 states in 2022. California added the most with 2,404 new solar jobs.
Solar is the electric power generation technology that employs the most workers. There were 12,000 new jobs in solar in 2022 (+3.7% growth).
The amount of women working in the solar industry has increased from 27% in 2017 to 31% in 2022. However, women are still underrepresented in the solar industry, as only 31% of solar employees are women (despite representing 47% of the workforce).
Minorities are also underrepresented in the solar workforce, especially African Americans. Just 9% of solar employees are African American (despite representing 13% of the workforce.
In 2022, 44% of solar industry employers said it was “very difficult” to find qualified applicants—the highest such percentage ever recorded in the Solar Jobs Census.
The solar industry is an industry of opportunity for veterans. 8% of all solar employees are veterans, compared to 5% of the U.S. workforce.
The workers had spent the morning of November 8, 2021, clipping, trussing, and trellising hundreds of thousands of tomato plants that twisted almost four stories into the air. They were inside one of the world’s largest high-tech greenhouses, which sits on more than 60 acres of a former cattle field in Morehead, Kentucky.
As one of the greenhouse workers, who I’ll call Nora, sat down for lunch in the worker canteen, she heard her colleagues whisper about their new task for the day. U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell would be visiting that afternoon to give a speech praising the greenhouse company, AppHarvest. Before he arrived, management had to make sure their Spanish-speaking colleagues disappeared.
“We had very little time,” recalled Nora, whose real name is being withheld because she is subject to a nondisclosure agreement. “We had to get them off the premises and away before he got there.”
Nora watched her coworkers get dismissed, grab their stuff, and leave on white buses bound for a trio of small motels where the largely Mexican contract workers lived four or five to a room. When McConnell arrived, Nora joined her remaining, mostly-white colleagues on the sunny lawn. Their clean T-shirts advertised AppHarvest’s name and logo, intended to invoke both the Appalachian region where they worked and the iconic branding of Apple — Silicon Valley by way of the Middle American upstart.
“We all know the decline of the coal industry only got worse, and so this [AppHarvest] gives us hope,” the senator said, praising the local labor force encircling him. “You are the real leaders, I think, in beginning to fully develop all of Kentucky’s potential.”
It was a familiar message, one that had been touted over and over in nationally televised interviews, public filings, and company reports by AppHarvest’s then-CEO, a Kentucky native and entrepreneur named Jonathan Webb. In 2018, the 32-year-old Webb returned home with the promise of building a dozen high-tech, hydroponic indoor farms across Eastern Kentucky and the surrounding region, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, berries, and lettuce. Not only would he be piloting an advanced form of climate-resilient agriculture, he would also be generating gainful, blue-collar employment in some of the country’s most economically-distressed counties, where he argued that the coal industry’s downfall left a void that could be filled by sustainable industry.
Workers would start at $13 an hour, with hefty productivity bonuses and a track to internal promotions. Then there were the perks: 100 percent employer-paid health insurance premiums for both employees and their families, monthly boxes of farm-fresh produce, and stock options once the company went public. In a region terrorized by the opioid epidemic, AppHarvest also offered jobs to formerly incarcerated people in recovery from addiction.
Webb’s worker-centric pitch raised over $700 million for AppHarvest to get off the ground and catapulted him into the national spotlight, with largely glowing coverage from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, and Forbes. It also convinced a number of big names to join the company’s board: Martha Stewart, activist investor Jeffrey Ubben, former Impossible Foods CFO David Lee, and J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist and Hillbilly Elegy author who would later win election to a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio with a Trump-inspired, anti-immigrant message.
McConnell’s speech in Morehead highlighted another major theme in AppHarvest’s advertising: replacing what Webb has called “dirty” agricultural imports from Mexico with safe, nutritious berries, lettuce, and tomatoes from central Appalachia.
Lettuce grows in AppHarvests’s Berea greenhouse.
Courtesy of AppHarvest
Lettuce grows in AppHarvest’s greenhouse in Berea, Kentucky. Courtesy of AppHarvest
Lettuce grows in AppHarvests’s Berea greenhouse.
Courtesy of AppHarvest
“I like the idea of taking the tomato market away from the Mexicans,” McConnell said that afternoon, according to an employee’s video recording of the event. Some workers looked around in surprise. Others seated behind McConnell rocked nervously in chairs, trying to catch the eyes of friends on the lawn. Applause can be heard in the recording, but at least one employee booed. The moment felt rigid and frail, like a ship just beginning to sink below the sea.
“No wonder they sent the f—ing contractors [home],” one worker said, turning to a coworker off-camera.
The discontent that day wasn’t just about optics, or fairness to the contract workers. It was the culmination of a year of frustration with a company that had promised to deliver both Grade A tomatoes and fulfilling rural employment but was falling dramatically short on both counts. Even as Senator McConnell sang the company’s praises, AppHarvest was already well on its way to a spectacular collapse, the full story of which has never been told until now. The celebrated startup’s demise also highlights the dangers of expanding and relying on high-tech, indoor agricultural schemes that promise shortcuts to making farming more climate-friendly.
A worker in an AppHarvest-branded mask in a greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky. Courtesy of AppHarvest
A year earlier, Nora had seen a billboard for AppHarvest on a state highway. She was hired after hearing a version of the company’s pitch that promised a strict 40-hour week and the opportunity to advance — something she had rarely found in the service jobs she’d worked since graduating high school. The promise was quickly broken: She was almost immediately told she needed to start working weekend overtime or her job would be in jeopardy. She found that her training in tomato caretaking — planting, pruning, harvesting — left much to be desired, and she and other workers were often confused over their job duties and requirements.
By summer, the greenhouse began reaching dangerously high indoor temperatures, and Nora watched coworkers struggle with dehydration and heat exhaustion. Turnover spiked. Nora developed asthma and anxiety, but she stayed the course.
That same summer, the company told investors that low productivity and high turnover at its Morehead greenhouse had led to a $32 million net loss. Stockholders then filed the first of five lawsuits alleging securities fraud, noting that AppHarvest’s own leadership had repeatedly cited “employee training, turnover, and poor work ethic” as the root causes of the company’s failure to reach profitability.
An AppHarvest employee walks between rows of tomatoes in the company’s Morehead greenhouse. Courtesy of AppHarvest
As workers soldiered on over the next two years, AppHarvest’s financial position continued to decline. This summer, lenders started demanding repayment of$182 million. Soon after, Webb was out as CEO, and AppHarvest declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Bankruptcy filings show that the company owes over $1.4 million to at least three agricultural work placement agencies that help farms fill temporary agricultural jobs with foreign nationals. In September, Webb was fired from the company altogether. All of AppHarvest’s five facilities in Kentucky — two in Morehead, and one each in Berea, Richmond, and Somerset — are now in the hands of new owners. (In response to a detailed list of questions for this story, AppHarvest’s chief legal officer, Gary Broadbent, said that the company has no continuing operations and was not in a position to respond.)
A new investigation from Grist finds that what went on inside the company from its earliest days bore little resemblance to the sustainable, worker-friendly operation that Webb publicly touted. State documents obtained through open records requests, including complaints to Kentucky’s Occupational Safety and Health Committee, as well as interviews with 12 former employees from both the flagship Morehead greenhouse and corporate office, reveal issues widespread across AppHarvest’s operations. They expose how unsafe working conditions, negligible training that failed to prepare workers for their job requirements, and an unprofessional workplace doomed the company nearly from the start.
Editor’s note: Due to fear of legal reprisal from AppHarvest, all but three former employees interviewed for this story — including Nora, whose name is a pseudonym — requested anonymity to speak candidly about their experiences; AppHarvest employees signed nondisclosure agreements upon their hire, which have no termination date in the state of Kentucky.
Lights glow through the exterior of AppHarvest’s Somerset greenhouse. Courtesy of AppHarvest
Inside the Morehead greenhouse, the heat index could spike to 155 degrees Fahrenheit, according to worker interviews, leading to dehydration, heat exhaustion, and medical emergencies. The stress of the work environment led to panic attacks, ideation of personal harm, and relapses into addiction. Less than a year after the first seeds had been planted, benefits like employer-paid health insurance ended, company stocks plummeted, harvests failed to yield sufficient Grade A produce, and AppHarvest pivoted from uplifting Appalachia’s blue-collar workforce to bussing in workers from outside the region.
“My whole view of AppHarvest was we were all sold on this beautiful pipe dream,” one corporate worker told Grist. “This is sustainable, this is new, we’re going to make it. It turned out to just be a f—ing nightmare.”
Webb claims a connection to Eastern Kentucky through his ancestors: His great-grandfather died in a coal mining accident in Whitley County, where he says his grandmother grew up on a dirt floor. After graduation from the University of Kentucky’s business school, Webb moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a contractor on renewable energy projects under the U.S. Army Office of Energy Initiatives. Then, he read about controlled environment agriculture, or CEA, in a 2017 National Geographic story.
He quickly decided CEA could be as important a climate solution as renewable energy or electric cars — and as good an investment. CEA proponents argue both that farming needs to become less climate-dependent in a warming world and that its land footprint needs to shrink dramatically if the world hopes to preserve biodiversity and carbon sinks like forests. Indoor facilities outfitted with careful climate controls could theoretically accomplish this. For inspiration, Webb looked to the Netherlands, where high-tech greenhouses successfully grow produce for export year-round, on a total acreage that’s only twice the size of Manhattan. Without any prior professional experience in farming, he quit his job and founded AppHarvest the next year.
Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO of AppHarvest, speaks onstage during the Concordia Lexington Summit in April 2022. Jon Cherry / Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Webb was hardly alone in his bullishness on CEA. Congress’ 2018 Farm Bill, which expired earlier this year, expanded support of CEA research and development to mitigate food system risks, creating a federal Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production and distributing over $40 million in grants between 2020 and 2022. Over the last decade, the sustainability argument for CEA has helped the sector raise billions of dollars in private investments for a variety of startups.
Unlike in the Netherlands, where indoor farmers have learned best practices over half a century of trial and error, American startups like AppHarvest have overwhelmingly failed to turn a profit, or even break even. The crux of the problem is that roughly 75 percent of the industry’s costs stem from labor and energy. And while traditional agriculture works because it takes advantage of natural conditions, CEA has to artificially produce optimal growing conditions and power them with electricity. In a world still largely powered by commodified fossil fuels — nearly 70 percent of Kentucky’s grid remains coal-fired — that’s going to be prohibitively expensive in most places.
“It’s the fundamental physics challenge of turning fossil fuel energy into food,” said Bruce Bugbee, a plant scientist at Utah State University.
Even as the U.S. CEA market is predicted to be worth $3 billion by 2024, the high costs of running these facilities have accumulated quickly, leading to a domino of bankruptcies and closures over the last two years. Fifth Season, a Pennsylvania-based indoor farm that raised $35 million to sell salad kits in over 1,200 stores, closed without any warning a year ago, turning off its electricity and leaving its lettuce plants to die. In April, the Florida-based Kalera, which raised $100 million and became the first publicly-listed vertical farm in the U.S., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Then, in June, even 19-year-old AeroFarms, which had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, filed for bankruptcy, though it claims it will continue some operations while restructuring the business.
“People with billions of dollars became aware of this industry and they think it’s the wave of the future,” said Bugbee, “but it doesn’t mean there’s been a scientific shift. It staggers me how much money they’re putting in.”
Without a viable solution to CEA’s fundamental energy dilemma, AppHarvest took increasingly desperate measures to wring profits out of the problem that has plagued agriculture for as long as humans have been farming: labor.
By the time she turned 30, Ahna Baxter’s life had long been dictated by the demanding hours and low wages of jobs in restaurants and factories. But a temporary gig at a vineyard near her hometown of Frankfort, Kentucky, gave her a glimpse of something different. She learned to press grapes into wine; she grew cucumbers and cantaloupe and admired the sunflowers that waved above her head. For the next few years, she dreamt of starting a small farm of her own.
That dream dried up just before the COVID-19 lockdowns. Baxter had just lost both a friend and family member to suicide, and she became dependent on her prescription Adderall to get through the day and alcohol to sleep at night. She abandoned her fledgling agricultural business, Ahna’s All Naturals, and checked into a 30-day rehab program.
As Baxter got back on her feet after rehab, she found comfort returning from work every day in time to tune into Governor Andy Beshear’s evening updates. The televised talks were like Mister Rogers for adults: a familiar voice for Kentuckians dealing with the confusion, loneliness, and grief brought by the pandemic, not to mention everything else Baxter had just been through.
In the summer of 2020, Beshear announced something that revived Baxter’s hope in a future tied to the land: AppHarvest, a nascent company turning heads with its promise of cutting-edge agritech, was hiring in Eastern Kentucky. The startup was offering the highest wage she’d ever made, opportunities for promotions, and training in agriculture. Baxter immediately went online and applied.
Employee badges hang on a wall near AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 14, 2021, in Morehead, Kentucky. Jon Cherry
About a month later, she got a phone call from AppHarvest and met the hiring managers in Morehead. The interview was unlike any she’d had before. Instead of pressing her on why she would be a good fit for the position, AppHarvest seemed to be selling its vision to her. She thought this overt enthusiasm, coupled with a lack of clarity on basic job duties, was odd, but the opportunity was just too good to pass up. She quit her job as a landscape foreman, sold most of her belongings, and moved her RV to a friend’s backyard for her first month of employment before renting a trailer in the Cave Run Mobile Home Park in Morehead during the fall of 2020. After battling addiction, Baxter thought this clean break could help make a better life for herself and her then-16-year-old son, Eli, whom she’d had at 17.
“I sacrificed a lot, but I felt that this was it,” Baxter told me. “I felt like this was the end all be all. This is the company I’m going to be with forever.”
During orientation — a pep rally-style event with loud country music, cheering employees, and team-building games that lasted roughly a week — employees watched the David Attenborough documentary A Life on Our Planet. They learned that while traditional agriculture leaves soils depleted, their work growing produce indoors could save the food system. But the intricacies of working with tomato plants were largely glossed over during orientation, according to worker interviews. While some managers had formerly worked in indoor agriculture, most workers were new to the industry. Nora, who applied around the same time as Baxter after seeing an AppHarvest billboard go up in Morehead, recalled her husband was suspicious.
“He thought it was a bad idea from the get go,” said Nora. “I fed him the same lines they fed me: It’s a start up, it takes time working out the kinks.” Her husband replied that AppHarvest was either the greatest job ever, or it was going to be the greatest con.
But the company culture was contagious. When Nora and Baxter finally started working as clippers — attaching tomato vines to plastic hooks that hung from the ceiling — they were so excited that they often skipped between the rows of plants. Nora told herself she was making a difference.
An employee gestures among the rows of tomato plants and yellow adhesive bands, used to catch flying insects, in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Then, within weeks of the Morehead greenhouse opening in November of 2020, Nora and her colleagues were told they needed to work overtime.
“Ten minutes before the end of the shift they’d come over and say, ‘Due to a lack of attendance we’re doing work continuance until it’s done,’” Nora remembered. “So either you stay and work, or lose your job. You’d be so worn out and overheated and dehydrated you’d do anything they’d want you to do.”
An internal memo circulated to all Morehead employees the following spring confirms the policy. “At any given time an emergency could require immediate mandatory Overtime,” the document read, while attempting to maintain a sunny tone: “Working in a greenhouse has its challenges and one of them is keeping our Plants Happy!” Nora said that when she complained, her supervisor told her that she “needed to learn to sacrifice.”
But no amount of overtime could compensate for their light-touch training and resulting confusion over how exactly to truss, de-leaf, and prune the hundreds of thousands plants in the greenhouse. Plant diseases took hold. Tomatoes started rotting, resulting in almost 50 percent wasted product, according to the securities fraud suit. The bonuses workers were promised felt impossible to earn. Turnover spiked.
“They took people who had never done this before, threw them in a greenhouse, gave us minimal training on how to do it, and expected us to produce Grade A tomatoes when all we’d done was backyard farming,” said Nora. “No one was ever on the same page. No one in any greenhouse used the same techniques, and I think that was 90 percent of their quality issue.”
AppHarvest employees walk in the West greenhouse in Morehead on June 15, 2021. Jon Cherry
While AppHarvest’s failings were becoming clear to its workers even in its early months, Webb and other company leaders were still raising money. After 12 rounds of funding, AppHarvest had secured almost $800 million from funders like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Rise of the Rest, a D.C.-based seed capital firm focused on Middle American startups. By early 2021, it became the first controlled environment agriculture company in the United States to go public, at $35.69 per share. Webb personally got a $1.5 million bonus for the stock listing and $31 million in stock awards. The company’s initial valuation of $1 billion soon grew to $3.7 billion.
One afternoon during the first summer of AppHarvest’s operation, then-55-year-old Janet Moore threw up at least three times from heat exhaustion in the bathroom outside the greenhouse. Other workers recalled seeing coworkers pass out from heat and leave on steel trolleys — or, sometimes, in ambulances.
Though the position was a financial improvement on the $7 an hour Moore once made working on a tobacco farm, the heat inside the greenhouse turned out to be far worse than an outdoor farm. One worker called it “an absolute grueling hell on earth.” Workers were only allowed to leave the greenhouse if the heat index reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a worker who helped those suffering from heat exhaustion. Another worker said thermometers were covered in gray trash bags or moved to poles where workers couldn’t see a heat index that the medical assistant said once peaked at 155 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the company began having productivity challenges, it seemed like no temperature was high enough to relieve workers of their greenhouse shifts; according to worker interviews, managers would simply alternate workers in 30-minute increments between the greenhouse and the air-conditioned packhouse.
Starting as early as August 2020, during construction of the Morehead greenhouse, workers filed eight complaints to the Kentucky Education and Labor Cabinet for Occupational Safety and Health. Almost half of those complaints, revealed for the first time in an open records request received by Grist, concerned the heat in the Morehead greenhouse and a second AppHarvest greenhouse in Berea, a town about 80 miles southwest. In July 2021, one complaint said workers were laboring in a heat index ranging from 115 to 136 degrees Fahrenheit.
“For the past few days no one has taken any temperatures,” the labor filing reads, adding that the company doesn’t allow workers to go home early, even though they work in direct sunlight and several suffered heat exhaustion. (While no federal heat standard exists for workers, a heat index — what the air feels like when combining relative humidity and air temperature — above 103 degrees Fahrenheit presents “danger,” according to the National Weather Service, while anything over 126 degrees Fahrenheit indicates “extreme danger.”)
At the Berea farm, a July 2022 complaint said that even on high-humidity, nearly 100-degree days, potable water was only available to production workers if they walked eight minutes to an administrative trailer they could only access during breaks. And because non-potable water wasn’t labeled as such, desperate employees had drawn unsafe drinking water into their bottles when safe drinking water was unavailable.
Other safety concerns detailed in the complaints included the sudden onset of nausea, and on two occasions vomiting, when the plants were sprayed with “something unsafe.” Two more complaints said tearing out mold, dust, and insulation from walls caused eye and lung irritation. Employees reported that they didn’t receive respirators, and during the tear-out one team member went to the hospital for breathing issues, according to the complaints.
Another said guide wires holding tomatoes were snapping from the weight of the fruit. “If someone is working the rows and the wire snaps, over 500 tomato plants will fall on whomever is in the [row],” the complainant told the state safety office. In a separate filing, an employee said guide wires broke over three days in February 2023, and that as wires fell there was the possibility of “taking someone’s head off and/or extremely hurting their bodies.”
An employee stands among the tomato vines in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 15, 2021. Jon Cherry
Moore thinks that the repetitive motion of caring for the tomatoes — removing suckers, topping plants, ripping leaves off the bottom stems — led to carpal tunnel in her hands, both of which required surgery. She said her job was threatened if she felt sick from the heat or had to go to a doctor’s appointment for her hands. Moore and other workers also complained of rashes from the heat, plant matter, and gas agents sprayed to quickly ripen the tomatoes. Baxter, in recovery from addiction, relapsed when she drank a beer at a company field party that offered free drink tickets to workers.
While AppHarvest appeared to shrug off worker complaints in its early days, it publicized employees who represented the values that had earned it the label of a certified B Corp — intended for businesses with high standards of performance, accountability, and transparency, especially when it comes to employee benefits — as well as its designation as a public benefit corporation created to generate social good responsibly and sustainably. Erin Mays, who applied for her job at AppHarvest from the Rowan County Detention Center in February 2021, where she was serving her 10th sentence for drug possession charges, was perfect for the role: She was petite but strong, and she quickly took on the task of lowering plants, a job otherwise done mostly by men.
From the start, Mays was infatuated with AppHarvest; she appeared on the company’s Instagram as a “dedicated team member.” She told her family and friends to buy stock in the company, convinced it was the future for her region. Mays also met her now-spouse on the job, and the two were often asked to speak to greenhouse guests.
“We were used as poster kids,” Mays said. “If there were photo ops or people came in, I feel like they would start to use me or Leo because we were big members of recovery in our community. We were outspoken and well spoken.”
But a couple months into the job, Mays relapsed on Suboxone, a medication for opioid use disorder, which if misused can lead to dependency, addiction, or overdose. She remembered that her hiring packet said she could go to treatment and still keep her job. When she asked human resources, however, they said that if she left for rehab, they couldn’t guarantee her job would be waiting for her. And even if a job was available, she remembers being told, she wouldn’t be eligible for six months.
Mays didn’t want to lose her position, so she used over-the-counter pain relievers to work straight through a month of low-grade withdrawals while continuing her highly physical, monotonous tasks in the scorching greenhouse.
An employee looks out over rows of tomato plants from the top of a lift in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse. Jon Cherry
While standing at the top of her cart to lift and lower plants, which could rise up to 20 feet off the ground, she suffered aches and body chills. She would rush to the bathroom with a bout of diarrhea or to throw up. Because she was on the far west end of the facility, the closest bathroom was a porta potty, and Mays would have to be really sure she had to use it before she left — her bathroom breaks were monitored, and she didn’t want to get written up.
Workers said their jobs were at times so difficult and poorly managed that even physically fit and healthy employees could snap. One morning in August 2021 — the very same day that Webb admitted to investors that AppHarvest was staring down a $32 million net loss — Baxter arrived at work to find that she was in charge of more workers without additional assistance. The outside temperature was hovering in the 80s, she said, but the heat index in the greenhouse was 40 degrees higher, around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. She brought in five water bottles she’d frozen the night before to stay hydrated, along with the inhaler she kept in her locker in case of an asthma attack.
She was irritated, and her manager seemed on edge. He told Baxter to make her employees sweep the greenhouse rows differently three separate times. Because of the heat, they were alternating working between the greenhouse and the air-conditioned packhouse every 30 minutes. Her employees were overheated, and they told her they needed to sit down, drink water, and rest. She told them she knew they were exhausted, but to please pretend they were cleaning.
By mid-afternoon, drenched in sweat, Baxter took stock of the bustling greenhouse around her and the list of tasks still on her mounting to-do list. Overwhelmed, she put down her badge and her notebook, cleaned out her locker, and walked out the front door, quitting not only a job but her dream of making her living off the land. She drove home to the trailer she’d moved into only ten months earlier, let her dogs out, sat on the front stoop, and sobbed. That day, AppHarvest stocks fell 29 percent.
Employees and machinery at work at AppHarvest’s packhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
By the end of 2021, AppHarvest had earned only $9 million out of a projected $21 million in revenue. The next year, the company met less than half of its most optimistic sales projections. Beginning in early 2023, company stocks that once peaked above $42 per share never again rose above $1. In the spring, AppHarvest claimed it had only about $50 million on hand. Debt had reached $182 million. In order to remain in business, the company needed additional investors to provide an infusion of cash by October, according to public filings.
Workers who convinced family and friends to buy stocks in the company said those who invested lost thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, former board member Jeffrey Ubben “cashed out,” according to the securities fraud litigation, before the company’s problems were publicly acknowledged in August of 2021. He sold 3 million shares at an average price of $16.50 per share, making $49.5 million.
Baxter tried to get her job back, including by reapplying through Indeed. But she said once she walked out, no one ever contacted her again, or replied to her requests to return. Moore said she quit after she was told by the human resources manager that she couldn’t work while taking pain medicine for a back injury she acquired at work, after slipping on a loose mat meant to sanitize workers’ shoes. Other workers left for jobs that demanded less overtime or paid higher wages. Some were fired after being minutes late to work, and some were handed termination notices during mass layoffs. One corporate employee was walked off their job by a security guard.
“Ironically, in the next round of layoffs, I guess the security guard walked himself out because he got fired,” the employee told Grist.In February 2022, half the office staff and all but one employee in the marketing department were let go in a single day, according to another former corporate employee.
Over the course of 2021 and 2022, while AppHarvest let go of costly employees who drained the company pocketbook with high salaries and wages, health insurance premiums, and requests for promotions, the company hired contract laborers who wouldn’t get any of this. In a November 2021 public filing, AppHarvest noted the tightening nationwide labor market, the cost of training a new workforce, and issues of retention: “In order to forestall any potential labor shortfall, we have hired contract laborers from outside of the region to help complete our next harvest.”
Less than a year after opening, AppHarvest began bringing in contract workers, according to multiple statements by former workers, a Rowan County executive, local residents, and a 2021 public filing. The new workers arrived in Morehead each morning on big white buses, according to Nora. They worked longer hours, sometimes not leaving until midnight, after picking up a second shift in the air-conditioned packhouse, according to multiple worker statements. While paid a similar starting rate to the local workers, according to a visa application filed by AppHarvest for its Pulaski County facility, they didn’t receive benefits like health insurance or stock options, according to worker interviews. An open records request from the Kentucky Education and Labor Cabinet reveals that just over the last year, AppHarvest brought in at least 140 migrant workers at $13.89 an hour at its Madison and Pulaski County farms.
Workers were housed in mobile homes and apartment complexes where the number of laborers appeared to far exceed occupancy levels. In Pulaski County, three mobile homes with an occupancy total of 17 were listed as the housing options for 30 workers. In Richmond, a 15-unit apartment complex with a 61-person limit was listed as the housing option for 90 workers. In Morehead, workers have been housed at the Red Roof Inn, Days Inn, and Comfort Inn, where there are no cooking stations and workers sometimes squeeze five into a two-bed room, according to Anne Colbert, a retired physician who runs a volunteer migrant support group in Morehead.
Colbert said her organization first became aware of migrant laborers at AppHarvest last fall, when a volunteer saw a large group at Walmart. A few days before Thanksgiving, Colbert sent an email to Travis Parman, AppHarvest’s chief communications officer, and told him the group was “recently made aware of the needs of a group of Mexican contracted laborers working at AppHarvest who did not have appropriate winter clothing.” Though the volunteers had already gathered winter clothing to donate to the new workers, Colbert pressed Parman on the company’s plans to ensure that the group’s basic needs were met. “We don’t believe these guests should have to rely on donated goods,” she wrote.
Workers at AppHarvest’s packhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Parman responded the next day, noting he was “not the right person” for her to talk to but “close enough,” and promising to consult with other employees and reply promptly. Colbert never heard anything more. Instead, her group delivered bags of apples and oranges to the motels where workers were housed over Christmas.
Last year, Nora typically had 20 or more contract laborers on her team, and about 12 local people. All the greenhouse workers I spoke to who left in 2022 or 2023 said that, by the time they left, contract workers outnumbered local employees. As of this summer, AppHarvest retained more than 450 of these contract workers, paying them approximately $2.5 million each month.
This change in strategy was a complete departure from AppHarvest’s original pledge to hire Appalachian workers and build up the region with reliable, blue-collar careers. “Traditionally, many agricultural workers in the U.S. have been H-2A, temporary agricultural workers, who at best are offered housing and other perks if they’re seasonal,” the company had noted in a 2020 report. Instead, AppHarvest wrote, as a certified B Corp, the company valued collective benefit over individual gain, along with empowering Appalachians and improving the lives of employees and the community. In a 2021 interview, Webb said, “Prioritizing the employee, that’s just simple human decency.”
Jonathan Webb, then-CEO of AppHarvest, addresses employees during a pre-shift meeting on June 15, 2021, in Morehead. Jon Cherry
Harry Clark, the judge executive of Rowan County, said that Webb only reluctantly pursued contract labor when he couldn’t fill positions locally. But his comments run counter to what former employees say they saw and experienced: A former corporate employee said the work Webb did — talking to reporters, appearing on the news, uplifting the Appalachian labor force — was “all about image.” A former member of the marketing team recalled that photographers were told not to take pictures of the contract workers, most of whom were Hispanic, because the company wanted to show it was employing Appalachians, who were largely white. When the former marketing team member visited the greenhouse, they saw few workers in the thick rows of green tomato vines until a Mexican song came over the shared speaker system and they heard laborers sing along.
“He [Webb] was trying really hard to relate to the blue-collar workforce that we have in Morehead,” said the corporate employee. When I visited the greenhouse to report on AppHarvest for Rolling Stone in 2021, Webb called himself a “resident of Kentucky” who lived in his RV on the Morehead construction site while looking for apartments nearby. But the year before, he had bought a 4,000-square foot house for almost $1.4 million in Lexington, an hour’s drive away, which was later the subject of a home makeover featured on HGTV. (Webb did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)
Mays said she felt she was kept on as long as she was to “keep up appearances that they were giving jobs to Appalachian people.” But she was eventually fired over the phone, just a month after she and her fiance had gotten engaged at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and Webb’s personal assistant had offered to pay for their wedding on company grounds. “We legitimately thought these people were our family and they cared about us,” she said.
After two years with AppHarvest, Nora had a long conversation with her husband. She was miserable at work, and she felt her mental health wasn’t prioritized by her employer.
“I’ve been having these thoughts, and I think they’re dangerous,” she told him. “On the way to work every morning, I want to let go of my steering wheel and wreck it so I don’t have to go in. I don’t want to die, but I want to get hurt enough so I don’t have to work.”
Her husband encouraged her not to go back, but Nora felt an overwhelming sense that she owed AppHarvest her labor and her loyalty.
“A long time after I left I said I felt brainwashed,” said Nora. “Maybe they caught my little bleeding heart, and I wanted to save the world. … I think that’s what hooked us, trying to save the world.”
This spring, the faltering promise of CEA as a planetary savior finally dominoed into AppHarvest. A Delaware-based creditor demanded the repayment of over $47 million, while a west coast investor, Equilibrium, alleged the company needed to repay over $66 million, about a third of the company’s $182 million debt, or risk foreclosure. A third creditor staged a mutiny, threatening to evict AppHarvest from its Berea farm.
By mid-July, Webb left his position as CEO, and the company paid almost $2.5 million to its four-man executive team, which included Webb in his short-lived demotion as chief strategy officer. A week later, on July 23, AppHarvest filed for bankruptcy in a Texas court for all 12 of its affiliated businesses. The next day, AppHarvest received notice from Nasdaq that the company’s stock would be delisted; stocks closed at $0.09 per share. Then, on September 29, Webb was fired “without cause.” His severance package included $125,000 plus health insurance coverage, paid out over six months. (At the time of this story’s publication, he still serves on the company’s board.)
These losses, while staggering and sudden, are not surprising to Bugbee, the plant scientist. To make CEA profitable, he said, human labor has to be replaced with robotics to lower the costs of repetitive tasks like planting and harvesting, which are easily automated.
“We want to believe there’s some magic bullet we’re going to discover and all these [climate] problems will be solved,” he added. “But as a scientist, I feel it’s incumbent upon me to say, ‘Wait a minute. This is not a magic bullet.’”
American policymakers, on the other hand, remain bullish on CEA, despite the recent failures.
“It is unfortunate that AppHarvest has had the challenges that it has. But we know that agritech is a big part of Kentucky’s future, and we need to be at the forefront of it,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s office wrote in an emailed statement attributed to the governor. “Regardless of who is leading the company or who owns the facility, I believe in the end, they will have a bright future; and there are a whole lot of jobs there, so we should all be rooting for it.”
For Nora, it took nine months after she quit to stop crying herself to sleep. Now, she works as a building services technician in Morehead. Other ex-AppHarvest employees are scattered around the town: Some ended up at Buffalo Wild Wings or assembly lines in nearby plastics, cabinet, and barrel stave factories. Mays became assistant manager at the Family Dollar store. Moore went to the Family Dollar Distribution Center down the street from the greenhouse, where a night shift can earn $19.75 an hour. Baxter, who’s been staying at a campground in her RV, which she calls the Dream Capture, is looking for work.
“Other jobs you quit them and you move on. This job I feel like you had to detox from, because after you quit you’re so afraid to say anything because you’re afraid AppHarvest will sue you,” said Nora. “I told my husband I’m tired of hiding from the big, bad AppHarvest. You did me wrong.”
A branded AppHarvest water bottle hangs at the start of a row of tomatoes on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Nora’s worst memory is of her birthday in June 2021, when she had to sweep shattered glass that fell from the greenhouse ceiling. The task triggered nightmares of glass panels that exploded and decapitated her, grow wires that electrocuted her, and tomato stakes that impaled her.
“Any way I could imagine dying in that greenhouse, I dreamt it,” Nora said. In the months before AppHarvest’s bankruptcy, before the facilities were sold, Nora said she felt like when she joined AppHarvest, she’d joined a cult.
“We dress alike, we’re told what to say, what to do, we’re always there, we didn’t have time with family and friends. Our family and friends were AppHarvest,” she said. “How did I not see this? That this was not a good place to be?”
A little over a decade ago, Luyanda Hlatshwayo lived a double life. During the day, he woke early, donned a balaclava, and went through bins on the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa. He learned which types of materials could and could not be recycled, as he sifted through PET bottles, polystyrene foam, and multilayered plastic packaging. He kept a running tab on the going rate for recycled plastic, which rose and fell with the price of oil. At night, he returned to his family, who believed he still worked in hospitality.
“At some point I felt the need to take off the balaclava — not for everyone, but mainly for me,” Hlatshwayo told Grist. Over time, he began to take pride in his work, as he was now an entrepreneur serving a clear environmental purpose. In 2017, he and his fellow organizers began to advocate on behalf of the city’s 8,000 waste pickers. They pitched projects to municipal governments, representing themselves as environmental agents, incentivized to collect every piece of plastic, paper, or metal they could find.
While he still collects recyclables on Mondays and Tuesdays, Hlatshwayo now spends much of his time advocating for the rights of waste pickers at universities, resident councils, and corporate conferences. “Every street, every bin, every landfill — that’s where we are, because that’s where the value is,” he said at an industry conference last year.
In 2021, single-use plastic waste grew to more than 130 million tons worldwide, while governments around the globe ramped up efforts to address plastic pollution. But as cities, countries, and companies face increasing pressure to reduce their waste, they risk sidelining workers like Hlatshwayo. When recycling collection services are formalized, or outsourced to private companies, they often monopolize waste streams that more than 20 million waste pickers around the world rely on for income.
Reforms like these may not even decrease the volume of plastic in landfills or the environment, in part because they disrupt an informal sector that currently captures over 60 percent of all plastic recycled. In South Africa, this rate reaches up to 90 percent of all post-consumer packaging, and only 10 percent of urban households sort their own waste. By scouring alleyways on foot and sorting dumpsters by hand, waste pickers often go where few formal systems can follow. They can achieve collection rates that, though largely invisible, are far higher than systems that rely on residents or optimize for speed.
A 2020 pilot program in Johannesburg measured the volume of recyclable materials collected by waste pickers in the suburbs of Brixton and Auckland Park, finding recycling rates so high that, if extrapolated across the city, it would take all 8,000 waste pickers just 28 days to gather as much recycled material as the city and its contractors collected in one year.
“Private companies are not capable of extracting anywhere near the amount of recyclables that reclaimers are,” said Melanie Samson, an associate professor at the University of Johannesburg. “There’s no comparison, in terms of the efficacy of the recycling rate.”
While Hlatshwayo’s organizing efforts advance at the local level, a similar fight is taking place on the world stage. This week, delegates from over 175 countries arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, to negotiate the terms of a global treaty intended to end plastic pollution. Waste pickers from nine countries — South Africa, Kenya, Senegal, India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Italy, and the United States — will make their case through a series of events and interventions in treaty discussions.
Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, has called the plastics treaty the most significant multilateral environmental deal since the Paris climate accord. Once active, the treaty will legally bind United Nations member states to abide by its terms. (This week’s meeting is the third of five planned sessions to hammer out the details; the first took place in November 2022 and the last is scheduled for late 2024, with the treaty potentially in force as early as 2025.)
To protect their rights as workers, waste pickers are calling for explicit text requiring national governments and plastic producers to identify local waste picker leaders, include them in policy discussions, and account for their current contributions in the design of new collection systems. Failing to consider these demands from Hlatshwayo and others within the International Alliance of Waste Pickers — a union of waste picker organizations representing more than 460,000 workers in 34 countries — could have dire consequences for millions of the world’s poorest workers.
“If you were to cancel the production of plastic bottles, PET bottles — it’s great for the environment, yes we all agree — but there’s so much social impact connected to that plastic bottle,” Hlatshwayo told Grist. “A lot of livelihoods could be lost through a simple decision that is not properly communicated.”
Thousands of waste pickers are already fighting to keep their livelihoods. The Environmental Justice Atlas, a resource produced by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has documented dozens of cases around the world where privatization in the waste sector has threatened informal workers’ access to materials, including landfill closures and the development of incineration plants.
Nothing about the treaty has been fully ironed out yet, and the enormous uncertainty has locked environmental groups, industry representatives, and other interest groups in a war of communications. Each needs to convince the delegates of member states, who are the only people with the power to bring issues to the floor, that their strategies to reduce plastic pollution are the most effective, just, or economically viable.
Will there be, for instance, globally agreed upon targets, or will each country define these targets for themselves? Will there be a cap on the primary production of plastic, or should companies simply be required to use more recycled material? The suite of potential measures stretches from drastically reducing single-use plastics to phasing out chemicals of concern, like BPA, POPs, and PFAS, which remain in global circulation despite some regional bans.
In August, the United Nations Environment Programme released a “zero draft” of the treaty — a comprehensive outline, which provides options for different pollution reduction strategies that were raised during the first two sessions. During the week’s negotiations thus far, many states expressed their support for the zero draft, while a new coalition of countries — including Saudi Arabia and Iran — voiced interest in significant changes, likely toward a less ambitious treaty.
The zero draft drew widespreadsupport from environmental groups for its attention to curtailing plastic production, eliminating single-use plastics and chemicals of concern, promoting transparency in trade and labeling, supporting a “just transition” away from the status quo, and developing future targets.
At the same time, some called for greater specificity on key issues, like the role of producers in addressing plastic waste. The Environmental Investigations Agency, a global nonprofit, suggested that the treaty emphasize “reuse” as a priority for plastic producers, which would encourage companies to use less material overall, rather than relying on imperfect recycling systems.
Toward the end of the document, waste pickers appeared in three separate clauses. The language called for improved working conditions, integration into a “safe” plastics value chain, and the use of revenue from collection systems run by plastic producers for waste picker support or retraining.
For waste pickers, these improvements could look different depending on the local context, but they might include the provision of dedicated warehouses for sorting materials, trucks for transporting their wares, or protective equipment for working in hazardous conditions. While some waste picker cooperatives already have government contracts, as in Brazil and Colombia, integration for others will mean recognizing their work in local laws, including their contributions in national statistics, and providing salaries, because the vast majority of their income relies on the ever-fluctuating price of materials on the global market.
Given this variability, what a just transition means in the context of plastic policy is an ongoing dialogue. In South Africa, a working group between waste picker organizations, companies, and the government is moving forward on several fronts, including by building a database of decentralized workers and implementing a service fee per kilogram collected in certain neighborhoods.
The inclusion of “just transition” language in the zero draft was a major win for the waste pickers’ movement, one that reflected the strength of their advocacy and the number of member states willing to bring their issues to the floor, including Brazil, Uruguay, and the Philippines.
But according to Lucia Fernández, acting general secretary of the International Alliance of Waste Pickers, now is no time to rest easy. Her colleagues still need to ensure that these clauses make it to the final draft and that their specific measures are defined clearly, so the treaty can be enforced. Ideally, they will account for the way the work can be formal or informal, part-time or full-time, and organized or decentralized.
Bert De Wel, the climate policy officer for the International Trade Union Confederation, an umbrella organization for national trade unions, was surprised by the size and capacity of the waste pickers when they first arrived in force at the initial plastics treaty meetings.
“It’s due to them that [a] just transition and the workers’ aspects are mentioned in the [United Nations] mandate,” he said, adding that his organization looks forward to partnering with the alliance in the future.
Despite this solidarity, many waste pickers are in a more precarious position than other workers. At the base of a recycling hierarchy — in which waste pickers sell to waste collectors, who sell to buyers and brokers, who sell the aggregate materials to a recycling company — waste pickers are not only the most populous participants in the supply chain, but also the farthest from formal recognition, profits, and security. If countries are not careful, they could also disrupt the foundation of their recycling systems: A 2017 tax on plastic products in India actually reduced recycling rates by discouraging immediate buyers from paying waste pickers higher rates.
While the debate rages on in Kenya, Hlatshwayo decided to stay at home in Johannesburg, where he can see tangible improvements taking place in his city’s recycling system and plastic producers’ cooperation with waste pickers. In his city, he said, they are innovating new business models and community engagement, and these stories are not always documented at the national level.
“Our governments are rushing into making decisions internationally without even knowing what they’re doing locally,” Hlatshwayo said. “We’ve mastered the art of collecting and diverting all of this plastic … Come and integrate what is already working.”
This week, the United States government and leading climate researchers from institutions across the country released the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a report that takes stock of the ways in which climate change affects quality of life in the U.S. The assessment breaks down these impacts geographically — into 10 distinct regions encompassing all of the country’s states, territories, and tribal lands — and forecasts how global warming will influence these regions in the future.
Unlike other climate change-focused reports that are released annually, the National Climate Assessment comes out once every four years. The length of time between reports, and the volume of research each report contains, allow its authors to make concrete observations about climate-driven trends unfolding from coast to coast and island to island.
In the previous installment of the report, released in 2018, the government warned that rising temperatures, extreme weather events, drought, and flooding threatened to unleash a surge of fungal pathogens, toxic algal blooms, mosquito- and tick-borne illnesses, and other climate-linked diseases. The new report, published on Tuesday, demonstrates that this prediction is unfolding right on schedule.
“Health risks from a changing climate,” the report says, include “increases in the geographic range of some infectious diseases.” West Nile virus, dengue fever, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, rabies, and Valley fever, carried by mosquitoes, ticks, mammals, and soil, are among the infectious diseases the report has identified as “climate sensitive.” Climate change isn’t the only reason more people are being affected by these illnesses — urban sprawl, deforestation, cyclical environmental changes, and other influences are also at play — but it’s a clear contributing factor.
Here are a few of the diseases that the Fifth National Climate Assessment warns are spreading into new parts of the country as a changing climate sends their carriers creeping into different areas.
A map of climate-sensitive infectious diseases from the report. Fifth National Climate Assessment
Ticks
In the U.S., the vast, vast majority of reported cases of vector-borne disease — defined as diseases spread by blood-sucking invertebrates such as ticks, mosquitoes, and fleas — can be traced to ticks. Lyme disease, which has long been prevalent in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, is becoming endemic to the Midwest as winters in that region become milder. Western black-legged ticks, which can carry Lyme, are even creeping into Alaska, where conditions have historically been too harsh for the eight-legged bloodsuckers to survive. The costs of treating Lyme, which can cause effects that range from flu-like symptoms to neurological disorders, are “substantial,” the report says. One analysis puts the annual cost of treating Lyme, which affects some half a million Americans each year, at $970 million.
Lyme isn’t the only tick-borne illness expanding in range and severity across the U.S. The Gulf Coast tick, which carries multiple diseases, has been expanding through the Southeast. Deadly illnesses such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis, and alpha-gal syndrome, all spread by different kinds of ticks, could reach new areas as temperatures continue to rise, the report says.
Mosquitoes
Much like ticks, mosquitoes are benefiting from milder winters and longer breeding seasons. The uptick in flooding across major swaths of the country, brought on by a warmer, wetter atmosphere, can also be a boon to the winged insects. Every part of the contiguous U.S. is seeing changes in the geographic range and prevalence of mosquito-borne illnesses.
West Nile virus, a disease carried by Culex mosquitoes, is expanding in the Northeast and becoming a bigger threat in other parts of the country, like the Southeast, as the planet warms. “Black and under-resourced neighborhoods in Chatham County, Georgia, were identified as hotspots for West Nile virus,” the report says. The majority of people who contract West Nile experience no symptoms, but people who are immunocompromised, elderly, or pregnant, or who have comorbidities, often have severe symptoms and can even die.
Dengue fever, a deadly viral infection, is becoming a bigger risk in the contiguous U.S., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawaiʻi, and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands. Malaria, a parasitic mosquito-borne illness that was eradicated from the U.S. in the 1950s, is now a burgeoning threat in the Southeast and Pacific Islands regions.
A health inspector sprays a neighborhood for mosquitoes in 2016 in McAllen, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images
Bacteria
Climate change is helping to spread a bacteria called Vibrio, which proliferates in warm ocean water and causes an illness called vibriosis. Symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, and a rash that can progress into an infection called necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease. Bad cases, usually caused by eating contaminated shellfish, can lead to death. You can also get sick by swimming with an open wound or accidentally splashing contaminated water into a cut.
Under an intermediate warming scenario where temperatures rise up to 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit), climate change-associated cases of vibriosis are expected to rise 51 percent by 2090. Warming ocean temperatures along the coasts of the continental United States are allowing Vibrio to flourish and expand further north, particularly in the Northeast and the West. Three people died in New York and Connecticut this past summer after contracting the illness.
But Vibrio isn’t the only type of bacteria benefiting from rising temperatures. Leptospirosis, an illness caused by a waterborne pathogenic bacteria that can infect humans and other animals, is spreading in Hawai‘i and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands as ocean temperatures rise and tropical storms challenge this region’s water and sanitation infrastructure. Fecal coliform bacteria, which can lead to dysentery, typhoid fever, and hepatitis A, are also a climate-driven risk in this region, according to the report.
Vibrio vulnificus bacteria.
BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Foxes, fungi, and amoebae
The report also identifies some unexpected drivers of illness that are cropping up in states from Texas to Alaska.
In the Southwest, a fungal disease called Valley fever, which occurs when fungal spores take root in people’s lungs and cause painful symptoms such as lumps, rashes, fever, and fatigue, is spreading. As the continental U.S. warms, the fungus will move north into states where it has rarely been seen before, such as Oregon and Washington. If climate change continues completely unabated, cases of the disease will rise 220 percent by the end of the century, according to the report.
In Alaska, rabies is popping up in foxes and other animals, raising concerns about the potential for human cases. There is no cure for rabies and the fatality rate, nearly 100 percent, is the highest of any disease on earth. In the winter spanning 2020 and 2021, Alaska reported 35 cases of rabies in animals, up from an average of four to five cases in the preceding years. Researchers say melting sea ice and changing prey patterns could be reasons for the spike.
Naegleria fowleri, often referred to as the brain-eating amoeba, causes a deadly brain infection when the amoeba gets into the nose canal and, from there, into the brain. A toddler in Arkansas died after contracting the disease playing in a splash pad in September. An adult in Texas also contracted a fatal case of disease this year. Based on these limited cases and other scattered deaths that have occurred in recent years, the authors of the Fifth National Climate Assessment think the disease may be spreading north. “More research is needed,” they write.
Date/Time: December 14, 2023 (12-1PM ET / 9-10AM PT)
Global regulatory requirements such as CSRD, California’s SB-253 & SB-261, and pending SEC climate rules are fast-tracking the need for trusted ESG reporting. With various timelines, requirements, necessary preparations all eyes on sustainability and more, organizations are tasked with making sense of these regulatory complexities.
Join KPMG LLP (KPMG) and Workiva ESG leaders as they examine the significant impacts of these regulations while detailing key insights and innovative solutions for tackling these business challenges. They will discuss the importance of double materiality assessments, stakeholder engagement, how to prepare for regulatory reporting requirements, and their recommendations for disclosing ESG financial risks, impacts and opportunities. You’ll leave this webinar understanding various use-cases and insights for how your team can prepare for 2024 with critical sustainability strategies.
Learning Objectives:
Define the current challenges ESG data aggregation and curation are causing financial, risk, and ESG teams
Understand various steps and implications for regulatory compliance: Double materiality assessments, material topics and relevant impacts, risks and opportunities
Understand how innovations like automation and generative AI are driving sustainability and financial transformation
Some or all of the services described herein may not be permissible for KPMG audit clients and their affiliates or related entities.
Mandi McReynolds – Head of Global ESG, Workiva
Marcus Leach, Advisory Managing Director, KPMG
If you can’t tune in live, please register and we will email you a link to access the webcast recording and resources, available to you on-demand after the live webcast.
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The United States and China agreed on Wednesday to “sufficiently accelerate” the deployment of clean energy and boost global production of renewables in a bid to begin displacing fossil fuels and address the climate crisis.
Their joint announcement included a commitment by the world’s two largest polluters to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the decade in an effort to keep global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). To achieve that, the two countries pledged to ramp up their use of solar, wind, and battery storage through the end of 2030 to reduce their dependence on coal, oil and gas. They also aim to triple renewable energy capacity worldwide in the same timeframe.
“The United States and China recognize that the climate crisis has increasingly affected countries around the world,” the Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis states. Both countries said they would “rise up to one of the greatest challenges of our time for present and future generations of humankind.”
That lofty promise came just hours before presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were to meet in San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. More significantly, it comes two weeks before the annual United Nations climate talks known as COP28 brings representatives from nearly 200 countries to Dubai. An agreement by the U.S. and China to take steps to mitigate climate change could help shape the gathering’s outcome.
“This lays the foundation for the negotiations in Dubai,” David Sandalow, a former Clinton and Obama administration official and a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told the New York Times. “It sends a strong signal to other countries that this language works, and more broadly that differences can be overcome.”
Li Shuo, incoming director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society, told Reuters the relationship between the two countries is “a precondition for meaningful global progress” and said the pact would help “stabilize the politics” between two geopolitical rivals. “The Sunnylands statement is a timely effort of aligning the United States and China ahead of COP28,” he said.
Nothing in the statement specifies how, or when, China will phase out its use of fossil fuels to generate electricity, let alone stop building coal-fired power plants. Still, the country has been expanding its use of renewable energy faster than any other, and the International Energy Agency predicts China’s use of coal could peak next year, then dwindle in coming years.
Sandalow told the Times that the efforts described in the Sunnylands agreement would allow China and the U.S. to share knowledge as they bring more renewables online and invest in energy storage and improved transmission. “In my experience, neither the U.S. government nor the Chinese government make high-profile statements like this unless there are serious plans to implement the agreement,” he said.
Although the United States is, historically, the world’s largest emitter of planet-warming gasses, China currently ranks first. For the first time, China stated its intention to control the emission of all greenhouse gasses, not just CO2, in its 2035 national climate plan. Last week, it offered a blueprint for reducing methane emissions, though the drew widespread criticism for lacking firm targets.
The Sunnyland agreement also lacks targets, but says the two countries will work together to set them. Both nations also agreed to resume a working group on climate cooperation and outlined other areas where they can collaborate, including sharing information on climate policies and technologies, curbing deforestation, and reducing plastic pollution.
The Sunnylands agreement, released separately by the U.S. State Department and China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, followed several days of meetings between U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua. It’s named for the Sunnylands retreat in California where the two met earlier this month
Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, praised the accord in a statement and called it “a powerful message of cooperation on the existential challenge of our time” ahead of COP 28. “It sets a foundation of ambition going into global climate talks in Dubai,” he said. “Today’s agreement provides the urgent multilateral commitment we need — and not a moment too soon.”
A new study led by researchers from Griffith University in Australia contributes to the growing research on how global warming and pollution are impacting reproduction for endangered sea turtles.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, found that pollution exposure to heavy metals, like cadmium and antimony, as well as organic contaminants can influence the resulting sex of the offspring of green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas).
“Sea turtles’ embryos developing in their eggs have temperature-dependent sex determination, which means that more and more develop into females as temperatures keep rising,” Arthur Barraza, an author of the study and researcher at the Australian Rivers Institute at Griffith University, said in a statement. “Our research shows that the risk of extinction due to a lack of male green sea turtles may be compounded by contaminants that may also influence the sex ratio of developing green sea turtles, increasing the bias towards females.”
Already, more than 99% of hatched sea turtles near the Great Barrier Reef are female, according to the study authors.
The researchers studied sea turtles on Heron Island, where the ratio is more balanced. Here, there are about two to three female sea turtle hatchlings for every one male. They collected 17 clutches of eggs within two hours of the eggs being laid by the mother sea turtle and reburied them near temperature probes.
Heavy metals and organic contaminants, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), were found to influence the sex of hatchlings. Many of the nests had mostly female hatchlings, and researchers noticed that nests with higher trace elements, especially for cadmium, in the liver of hatchlings also had higher female bias.
“These contaminants are all known or suspected to function as ‘xenoestrogens’ or molecules that bind to the receptors for female sex hormones,” explained Jason van de Merwe, senior author of the study and a marine ecologist and ecotoxicologist at the Australian Rivers Institute. “Accumulation of these contaminants by female turtles happens at foraging sites. As eggs develop within her, they absorb the contaminants that she accumulated and sequester them in the liver of the embryos, where they can stay for years after hatching.”
Scientists have previously determined that global warming is impacting sea turtle reproduction. Temperature can impact the sex of offspring, and with rising temperatures, eggs can produce fewer males. As the Sea Turtle Conservancy reported, this creates concerns over reproduction and genetic diversity for endangered sea turtles.
Another study, published earlier this year, found that sea turtle development was also impacted by microplastic pollution. Microplastics in the sand could keep sand from cooling overnight, therefore maintaining higher sand temperatures that impacted sea turtles.
“Since most heavy metals come from human activity such as mining, runoff, and pollution from general urban waste, the best way forward is to used science-based long-term strategies to reduce the amount of pollutants going into our oceans,” van de Merwe said.
At least one-third of the forests on the planet are cut down for use in the timber industry, worth $1.5 trillion annually, according to The Conversation. The trees are used in paper manufacturing and timber milling, among other applications, but they are increasingly threatened by wildfires.
New research by scientists from Australia and the United Kingdom has found that, from 2001 to 2021, severe wildfires destroyed forests used for timber of an area equal to the size of Great Britain. A “severe” wildfire is one that reaches the tops of trees and consumes the forest canopy.
“Wildfires are a natural ecological process in many ecosystems. However, forest wildfires and associated forest loss have been increasing throughout the twenty-first century,” the authors wrote in the study. “Fire season length and fire extent are expected to increase significantly by 2100 because of climate change, placing forests under increasing threat of high-severity burning. Given the long-term nature of timber production, typically on 40–100+ year cutting cycles, future crops of timber trees will face a very different climate as they mature towards harvest.”
The last decade has seen an increase in the amount of forest used for timber production burned annually in severe wildfires, reported The Conversation. Brazil, Canada, the western United States, Siberia and Australia have borne the brunt of this disturbing trend.
“Timber demand is expected to almost triple by 2050. Supplying demand is clearly going to be challenging. Our research highlights the need to urgently adopt new management strategies and emerging technologies to combat the increasing threat of wildfires,” the scientists wrote in The Conversation.
The research team combined maps of severe wildfires and logging activity to figure out how much forest used for timber was destroyed by wildfires during the current century. As many as 61.8 million acres were severely burned, the scientists said. The extent of fire has increased dramatically in the past ten years, the average tripling since 2015.
Canada, the U.S. and Russia had the most “absolute” losses of timber-producing forest caused by wildfires, but Portugal and Australia lost the biggest proportion of total forestry land.
Climate change is a main cause of fire behavior and fire weather, as it can cause warmer temperatures and reductions in rainfall.
But the scientists said the reason so much timber forest was being lost wasn’t clear, especially the severe increase of the past decade.
If timber becomes harder to get and wood production more costly, governments and industry could start looking to log in other areas like tropical forests that have a high level of conservation and biodiversity benefit.
“Whatever the reason, it is clear these fires in wood-production forests will have profound impacts on global timber supplies and all the industries associated with them. This is a huge problem for society and the environment, because timber demand is expected to triple by 2050, in part to facilitate the transition away from carbon-intensive cement in construction,” the scientists wrote in The Conversation.
Yesterday, the U.S. government released a massive report analyzing the latest climate science and the ways in which this multifaceted crisis is impacting life in every part of the country. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, or NCA5, is the latest in a series of national reports published every several years since 2000.
Since the Fourth National Climate Assessment in 2018, a lot has changed. This new report focuses not just on how bad things could get if we don’t take decisive action to reduce carbon emissions, but on how bad things already have gotten, with climate impacts hitting every part of the country and threatening the things Americans hold most dear. But the report also reflects just how far the climate conversation has come in the past five years — and how every part of the country is taking steps to address and adapt to the crisis we’re facing. (Read our summaries of some of the key impacts and solutions highlighted for each region.)
Some other things that have changed since the last report: NCA5 is the first assessment that will be fully translated into Spanish. Visual artists were invited to contribute works that are sprinkled throughout the report, for the first time. And, in another first, this report includes mention of LGBTQ+ populations and the unique climate vulnerabilities they face.
“Because the National Climate Assessment is really based in peer-reviewed, evidence-based literature, there needs to be that type of research body there before it can even get into or be considered for the National Climate Assessment,” says Leo Goldsmith, a climate and health scientist who has been part of creating that body of research on LGBTQ+ people and climate impacts. He was also a technical contributor to the report’s chapter on human health (and was featured on this year’s Grist 50 list).
Goldsmith (who uses he and they pronouns) got interested in the question when they took an environmental justice course as a graduate student at the Yale School of the Environment. “As somebody who is pansexual and a transmasculine, nonbinary person, I did not see sexual orientation and gender identity being addressed in the literature as populations that are at risk for climate change,” they say. At the time, there was essentially no research in the U.S. on the disproportionate burdens and unique risks that queer and trans people face from climate impacts. Yet he knew, from lived experiences, that queer people face many of the same social, economic, and health disparities that other marginalized groups do.
The first paper is cited as a reference in the National Climate Assessment — and a section in the human health chapter titled Sexual and Gender Minorities’ Health, which Goldsmith wrote, describes some of the social, economic, and health disparities that LGBTQ+ populations face, making them more vulnerable to climate impacts. For instance, the report notes that disaster response plans “increasingly rely on faith-based organizations as first responders during disasters, which in some cases have blamed SGMs for devastating hurricanes and wildfires as a punishment from God.”
Goldsmith is now a doctoral student at Yale, where he intends to build on this work. We spoke with them about their contributions to NCA5 and the nascent body of research around LGBTQ+ populations and climate change. His responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What do you feel is the significance of the National Climate Assessment including research on LGBTQ+ populations for the first time?
A. Having that in the report means that this is something that is valid, and that LGBTQ+ communities are a vulnerable population, with the backing of the peer-reviewed literature. If it wasn’t scientifically rigorous, it wouldn’t be included. And the reason why I’m emphasizing that is because I feel that folks may not think that LGBTQ+ individuals are actually disproportionately impacted — due to what’s called the “gay affluence myth.” We primarily see in the media that LGBTQ+ individuals are white, wealthy, gay, cis men. [We’re] not really seeing the entirety of diversity within the community, and ways that they could be disproportionately impacted.
Having that in the report means that, now, community members can take that and use it for educational purposes or advocacy purposes. Decision-makers can use that information to create evidence-based policy. Academics and researchers can use that as a basis of [realizing that] there’s so much more research that needs to be done, and maybe they’ll include queer and trans communities within their research.
Q. Could you give an overview of some of the key vulnerabilities and disparities that LGBTQ+ people face with disasters and climate impacts?
A. Yeah, absolutely. So first I’ll mention that LGBTQ+ individuals are more likely to live in poverty, be unhoused, have a mental illness, have a chronic illness, have no health insurance, and also are much more likely to be incarcerated. All of those put people at higher risk for more negative experiences and impact during and after disasters.
When a disaster does hit, LGBTQ+ individuals [often] aren’t able to access the services and resources that they need in order to protect themselves or move back into their living situation. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, there were two Black trans women who went to use a shelter in Houston, Texas. And when they tried to use the bathroom of their gender, they were arrested for doing so.
There have been other stories of folks who weren’t able to access the medications that they needed — hormone replacement therapy, or medications for HIV. In addition, individuals may have been separated from those that they consider family. LGBTQ+ individuals are much more likely to be disowned by their biological family. And so they tend to create a group of relationships of strong ties that aren’t biological, but are what’s considered chosen family — that’s just as valid as biological family. But that’s not something that is considered as part of the policies and laws in place for disaster relief and response.
[Then] there’s federal policies such as the Robert T. Stafford Act, section 308, which is the nondiscriminatory policy that covers all of the different disaster response that the agencies do. They only include the term “sex” in relation to gender and sexual orientation. So that can be interpreted differently depending on the administration that’s in office at that time. Currently, it means sexual orientation and gender identity, but in a different administration, it might just mean that gender is only men and women, and that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. And that can affect the ways that the agencies are able to provide services and resources.
Q. Speaking of language — I noticed that the report uses the term “sexual and gender minorities.” Is that preferred technical speak?
A. The authors [and I] had a discussion on this, because we wanted to make sure that we were using the most accurate term for the report. Because there are so many different ways that people identify themselves — even in the literature, and also just within communities — “sexual and gender minorities” kind of encapsulates all of those different acronyms that people might use for themselves, like LGBTQ+ or LGBT or LGBTQIA or LGBTQ2S. So we just wanted to be as broad as possible.
You’ll see in the chapter, we use the term “Latinx,” and [in the Spanish translation] it’ll be “Latine.” That wasn’t something that was mandated, it was something that the authors chose. And we did that because we wanted to incorporate language that most represents LGBTQ+ communities and is most inclusive.
Q. So we’ve talked about risks. What are some of the solutions or strategies you have researched that could help address the disparities LGBTQ+ populations face with climate and disasters?
A. I just want to preface by saying this is all my own personal thoughts, and not the federal government’s. But some solutions that people can take — one, there need to be anti-discrimination policies that explicitly include sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics. And that especially needs to happen within section 308 of the Robert T. Stafford Act [for disaster relief and emergency assistance].
There also should be cultural competency training on sexual orientation and gender identity among all disaster organizations, or health organizations that are going to be working with disaster survivors. And disaster organizations should start figuring out how they can include LGBTQ+ individuals from the very beginning in their planning and preparedness. FEMA and other disaster organizations have advisory boards — but not one that’s focused on LGBTQ+ individuals.
In addition, [we should be] looking at other places that LGBTQ+ people feel comfortable going to as emergency response shelters or temporary shelters. So instead of going to maybe a shelter where trans folks have to be separated based on their sex assigned at birth, they can go to an LGBTQ+ community center where they can feel safe.
And then for healthcare, for example, there was a report that came out through the Center for American Progress saying that there’s a large percentage of transgender individuals in particular that are either refused care and service or discriminated against when they receive care and service. And this is especially true for trans people of color. So cultural competency training needs to happen for doctors, too, especially those that are doing disaster medicine. In some states, there are clauses that allow for medical professionals to basically refuse care to LGBTQ+ individuals on the basis of their religious beliefs. Those types of policies need to change.
And then the last thing I’m gonna say is that a policy — a law like the Equality Act, which basically prevents discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity — needs to be passed. What we’re finding now is that it’s a patchwork across the United States, which states have anti-LGBTQ+ laws and which states don’t. Individuals who are living in states with a high number of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, that’s really affecting folks’ mental health, physical health, economic well-being — and that puts LGBTQ+ individuals at even more of a disadvantage when it comes to disasters.
Q. Do you think research can help build the political will for protections like those?
A. I definitely think so. What I have found working with the agencies and talking to folks in the agencies, if there is no research or peer-reviewed literature on a subject, they can’t really do anything about it. It needs to be backed up with evidence that where their attention and their money is going is actually something that will be useful and will benefit folks. There’s a lot of really good intention, but unfortunately because it’s just so under-researched, it can kind of fall away.
I do want to mention that the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, which is the secretariat for the three environmental ministries of North America — so that includes the Environmental Protection Agency — has recently gotten more interested in learning about LGBTQ+ communities and disaster and environmental impact. They invited folks a few weeks ago to talk through what their strategy could be to do that.
From the EPA and FEMA and [the Department of Health and Human Services] — all three agencies that do emergency management and disaster work — I have seen that there’s been at least a little bit of progress. But we definitely need much, much more research. And not only research, but advocacy. The folks on the ground who are saying, “This is important and this needs to be listened to” — they’re the most important piece out of all of this.
The 2023 National Climate Assessment put out a call for visual artwork to accompany the scientific report. Organizers received over 800 submissions, and the final gallery features work from 92 artists, representing all 10 regions covered by the report. This piece is titled “Cheryl.” Painter Ellen Anderson wrote in her artist’s statement: “Cheryl is a very real person in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She works at a social services nonprofit and is a member of our gay community. I painted her to show her confidence and triumph over urban challenges. This painting depicts the density of urban life and the spirit of the individual in it. The power of the individual, for climate change, social change, and personal change is embodied in this painting.”
