Tag: Renewable Energy

Why FEMA doesn’t respond to heat waves

Hello and welcome back to Record High. I’m Jake Bittle, and this week we’re going to explore the bureaucratic reason that the federal government doesn’t do more to help during heat disasters.

If you take a look at the primary law that dictates how the United States responds to disasters, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, you’ll see a long list of perils that qualify for federal emergency aid. The act defines a “major disaster” as “any natural catastrophe (including any hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, winddriven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought), or, regardless of cause, any fire, flood, or explosion.”

The word “heat,” however, does not appear on that list — or in any other part of the act, for that matter. That simple omission has had big implications for how we respond to heat waves.

In order to unlock the full resources of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, the president must declare a “major disaster” in a given area. But the Stafford Act doesn’t name heat as a qualifying catastrophe, and no president has ever made a disaster declaration over a heat wave. President Joe Biden has made more than 40 such declarations so far this year, but he hasn’t made one for the ongoing heat wave in the U.S. South. That’s despite the fact that the heat in Phoenix has become so severe that dozens of people have gotten burns from falling down on the sidewalk and local authorities have brought in freezer trucks to hold the bodies of heatstroke victims.

“Disaster funding is geared towards fixing expensive things that are broken, not people,” said Juanita Constible, a senior climate and health advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So because heat is mostly a health consideration, it got left out.”

In theory, FEMA can reimburse state and local governments for any disaster response effort that exceeds local resources, but in practice it has never done so for a heat wave. Because the agency historically hasn’t devoted significant resources to fighting heat, Constible said, most state and local emergency management departments haven’t done much work to plan for heat either.

A FEMA representative surveys a woman about heat and power availability in a New York City neighborhood damaged during Hurricane Sandy.
A FEMA representative surveys a woman about heat and power availability in a New York City neighborhood damaged during Hurricane Sandy.
Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

Part of the issue is that the damage caused by a heat wave is less physical than the devastation caused by a hurricane, tornado, flood, or similar event, so recovery isn’t just a matter of buying bricks to rebuild a school or sending trucks to carry away debris. Even so, heat waves place a massive financial strain on hospitals and power grids, and most local governments can’t afford to ramp up health services on short notice. Local economies also suffer as retail foot traffic plummets and outdoor industries like construction shut down.

During the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, for instance, hospitals in Portland were dunking heatstroke victims in ice baths to keep them alive. But as temperatures climbed, eventually reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, they ran out of ice and had to scour the city for more. The Pacific Northwest heat wave ended up killing at least 229 people in Oregon and Washington over the course of the week, and perhaps as many as 600. Constible says the immense resources of the federal government might have been able to prevent some of those deaths if they had been available.

“When there are mass casualty events, there’s no big pulse of money that can come into the state or counties to help deal with the aftermath,” she told Grist. “One of the things that hospitals realized after the 2021 event, in Oregon in particular, was that they were wildly unprepared for the impact of that heat wave, and they had to do all this work after the fact to get up to some minimum level. Funds just aren’t really available for that kind of work without a disaster declaration.”

“Disaster funding is geared towards fixing expensive things that are broken, not people.”

Juanita Constible, Natural Resources Defense Council

The main FEMA initiative that could theoretically help with heat right now is the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, or BRIC, which distributes money to cities and states to help them prepare before disasters happen. FEMA released guidance this year signaling to state and local governments that they could use BRIC money to adapt to heat risks, and an agency spokesperson told Grist that more money will soon be available. But even this program hasn’t been much help so far: When the New York City Housing Authority submitted a BRIC application for a cooling center in 2020, FEMA declined to select the project for funding, saying it wasn’t cost-effective.

Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, introduced a bill earlier this summer that would add “extreme heat” to the list of disasters in the Stafford Act. The bill has some bipartisan support, but Constible says it still faces long odds of advancing given the gridlock in the present divided Congress. In the meantime, Biden has asked federal agencies like the Department of Labor and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to get better at protecting workers from heat and measuring heat waves. But in reality, these measures can’t compare to the immense resources of FEMA’s standard disaster response.

At a press conference on Thursday where Biden announced the new measures, Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego said that local governments are doing everything they can to address heat risk, including by tapping pandemic stimulus money and using Inflation Reduction Act grants to plant new trees. But she also warned that the adaptation effort wouldn’t succeed without more help from the feds.

“We would love it if Congress would give you the ability to declare heat a disaster,” she said to Biden. “We need a whole-of-government approach.”

Reporting on extreme heat doesn’t just involve covering brutal temperatures. We need to focus on the solutions that can help us adapt and chart a new path forward. That’s why we’re continuing our extreme heat coverage through the end of September. But we need your help by MIDNIGHT TONIGHT to unlock critical funding. We are just $195 away from unlocking a $20,000 match to support our work. Please take a moment to donate what you can as every dollar counts.


By the numbers

A new report from Climate Central revealed which U.S. cities suffer most from the “urban heat island” effect. Urban environments tend to get hotter than surrounding rural areas because streets and buildings absorb heat over the course of a day and release it at night.

A graphic showing what percentage of people in major U.S. cities live in an urban heat island

Data Visualization by Clayton Aldern / Grist


What we’re reading

The hottest month ever: July was the hottest month in more than 120,000 years of recorded history. The last time the world was this hot, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were still vying for species dominance. My colleague Lyric Aquino reports on a month of devastating temperatures. 

.Read more

The Last of Us was a documentary: In the latest installment of a Grist-Associated Press collaboration on climate change and disease, the AP’s Camille Fassett explores how warmer temperatures are enabling a fungus known as Candida auris to spread through the U.S. like never before. The fungus can cause sepsis and fever when it infects human beings.

.Read more

Grid stress in New York City: Amid a sweltering heat wave last week, New York utility ConEd asked customers to reduce their energy consumption during peak hours. The City’s Samantha Maldonado explains why this happened and why a popular call on social media to “turn off Times Square” wouldn’t have helped prevent blackouts.

.Read more

What “record-breaking” really means: Every heat wave brings with it the news that dozens of temperature records around the world have been shattered, but Umair Irfan over at Vox explains that not all temperature records are created equal. The significance of a broken record in a given location depends on how long we’ve been measuring data there, and those nuances often get lost in flashy headlines.

.Read more

More heat means more fossil fuels: One big winner from the past month of heat waves? Natural gas. Grid operators around the country have responded to skyrocketing energy demand from air conditioners and fans by burning more gas than ever. Despite rapid growth in renewable energy, gas is still the baseload fuel of choice in almost every region of the U.S. Timothy Puko of the Washington Post reports on the vicious cycle. 

.Read more

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why FEMA doesn’t respond to heat waves on Aug 1, 2023.

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Climate change may be fueling a global surge in cholera outbreaks

Climate Connections is a collaboration between Grist and the Associated Press that explores how a changing climate is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases around the world, and how mitigation efforts demand a collective, global response. Read more here.


In early 2022, nearly 200,000 Malawians were displaced after two tropical storms struck the southeastern part of Africa barely a month apart. Sixty-four people died. Amid an already-heavy rainy season, the storms Ana and Gombe caused tremendous devastation across southern Malawi to homes, crops, and infrastructure. 

“That March, we started to see cholera, which is usually endemic in Malawi, becoming an outbreak,” said Gerrit Maritz, a deputy representative for health programs in Malawi for the United Nations Children’s Fund. Cholera typically affects the country during the rainy season, from December to March, during which time it remains contained around Lake Malawi in the south and results in about 100 deaths each year. 

The 2022 outbreak showed a different pattern — cholera spread throughout the dry season and by August had moved into Malawi’s northern and central regions. By early February of this year, cases had peaked at 700 per day with a fatality rate of 3.3 percent, three times higher than the typical rate. When cases finally began to decline in March, cholera had claimed over 1,600 lives in a 12-month period — the biggest outbreak in the country’s history.  

As climate change intensifies, storms like Ana and Gombe are becoming more frequent, more powerful, and wetter. The World Health Organization, or WHO, says that while poverty and conflict remain enduring drivers for cholera around the world, climate change is aggravating the acute global upsurge of the disease that began in 2021. According to WHO, 30 countries reported outbreaks in 2022, 50 percent more than previous years’ average; many of those outbreaks were compounded by tropical cyclones and their ensuing displacement. 

A line chart showing that global cholera cases have increased roughly fourfold since 2000

“It’s difficult to say that [Tropical Storm Ana and Cyclone Gombe] caused the cholera outbreak,” UNICEF public health emergency specialist Raoul Kamadjeu said. “What we can say is they were risk multipliers.” 

Cholera is a diarrheal illness that spreads in places without access to clean water and sanitation, when people swallow food or water contaminated with Vibrio cholerae bacteria. 

“Malawi’s water-sanitation indicators were already extremely bad,” said Kamadje, “but the storms made a bad situation worse.” 

Flash floods spread sewage into lakes and boreholes, washed away pipelines and sanitation infrastructure, and ruined roads integral to the delivery of supplies. By one government estimate, Ana alone destroyed 54,000 latrines and about 340 wells. People displaced from their homes turned to whatever water sources were available, often ones that were highly contaminated, and transmitted the disease as they moved to new areas. 

While Malawi’s outbreak was spreading across its borders to Zambia and Mozambique, hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan reported cholera symptoms amid a massive monsoon season that left a third of the country fully underwater. And in Nigeria, cases spiked after over a million people were displaced by extreme flooding during the 2022 rainy season. 

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The global cholera surge drove a vaccine shortage right when countries needed it most. Malawi in the past used the cholera vaccine for prevention, but “now if you don’t have an outbreak, you don’t get the vaccine,” said Otim Patrick Ramadan, WHO incident manager for regional cholera response in Africa. In response to the shortage, the international coordinating group for cholera vaccines changed its vaccination protocol in October from two doses to one, reducing protection from two years to about five months. 

Climate change doesn’t only affect cholera through worsening floods and storms. Hotter temperatures and longer and drier droughts can also have an impact. 

“With a severe shortage of water, the remaining sources become easily contaminated, because everyone is using them for everything,” Ramadan said. “We have seen that in the greater Horn of Africa.” Amid a prolonged and extreme drought, which has been directly attributed to climate change, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya all saw cholera proliferate over the past year. In drought areas that have experienced crop failure, malnourishment has also reduced immunity to diseases.

Climate change doesn’t only affect cholera through worsening floods and storms. Hotter temperatures and longer and drier droughts can also have an impact. 

Johns Hopkins University infectious disease epidemiologist Andrew Azman, who specializes in cholera research, cautions against making sweeping statements about climate change turbocharging cholera globally. 

“We know cholera is seasonal in much of the world, but the associations between precipitation, drought, floods, and cholera are not really clear,” Azman said. “In some places, more precipitation increases cholera risk. In some places, it’s less precipitation.” He added that destructive storms in the past have not led to massive cholera outbreaks at the scale of the recent epidemic in Malawi, so it’s important to also consider other factors. 

“While the storms may have created good conditions for transmission, the outbreak happened after a few years of relative calm in terms of exposures,” Azman said. “Immunologically, you had a much more naive population.” The strain circulating had also been newly introduced from Asia, and scientists are currently studying whether it was more transmissible.

Research suggesting that cholera is largely contracted from bacteria that lives in the aquatic environment and thrives under increasing temperatures has mostly been discredited, said Azman. “But one of the big mechanisms by which extreme events will impact cholera risk is the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure,” he said. “That is an important point, because we can block those impacts if we invest in [those things].” 

Climate Connections: A warming planet, pathogens, and diseases

How climate change is making us sick

Animals, bugs, algae, and even fungi are shifting to accommodate an ever-hotter planet — and they’re bringing dangerous diseases with them.

Mosquitos are moving to higher elevations — and so is malaria

Climate change is driving mosquitoes to new heights, bringing the bugs, and the diseases they carry, to newly vulnerable populations.

A brain-swelling illness spread by ticks is on the rise in Europe

Experts say climate change plays a role: “It’s a really common problem that was absent 20 or 30 years ago.”

In the US, a fungal disease is spreading fast. A hotter climate could be to blame.

A potentially fatal pathogen, Candida auris has adapted to cross the “temperature barrier” into humans, causing cases to jump by 1,200% since 2017.

Kamadju agrees. “Cholera is just a mark of inequity and poverty,” he said. “It’s a problem of investment, development, and infrastructure.” Malawi’s outbreak came at a time of economic crisis, with its currency devalued in May 2022. Limited health resources were also stretched thin by COVID-19 and a polio outbreak, the first in 30 years

This March, a year after the cholera outbreak began and as cases were beginning to go down, Malawi and its neighbors braced for a new storm. Cyclone Freddy turned out to be the longest-lasting cyclone ever on record, causing untold damage and killing more than 800 people across Mozambique, Madagascar, and Malawi, with some counts even higher. But while cholera cases started to spike in Mozambique as predicted, in Malawi they continued their downward trend. 

Ramadan says that’s in large part because the ongoing cholera response already occurring in Malawi’s southern region — high vaccination rates, advanced distribution of water tablets and supplies, and messaging around cholera — reduced transmission in spite of the direct impacts to infrastructure. 

Maritz of UNICEF worries that a shift in Malawi’s methodology for reporting cholera cases may be giving a false impression of just how successful those mitigation efforts are. On June 1, as cases continued to decline significantly, Malawi shifted to an endemic protocol for measuring cholera, which requires a rapid diagnostic test and a lab sample to confirm an infection. In contrast, during an outbreak, anyone who presents at a clinic with symptoms gets marked as a case. 

Kamadjeu said this strategy made sense given the low number of current cases. But Maritz says that capacity challenges and delays in testing with the new protocol have led to underreporting of cases.

[Read next: Mosquitos are moving to higher elevations — and so is malaria]

“We are still seeing people arriving at clinics with cholera symptoms that are not being reported in the national dashboards,” said Mira Khadka, an emergency health specialist leading cholera response for UNICEF in Malawi’s Blantyre district. It’s hard to mask a big cholera outbreak if people start dying, but the reporting lag is still cause for concern. 

“Agencies that were responding to the cholera outbreak are now withdrawing,” said Khadka. “This can create the potential for another big outbreak to start.” 

A team of government officials and health experts is assessing reporting methods in the southern districts where cases persist.

“What climate change means for us as a humanitarian agency is that we cannot do business as usual anymore,” Maritz said. “We are already preparing that most likely come January, February, there will be another cyclone with a huge flooding event.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change may be fueling a global surge in cholera outbreaks on Aug 1, 2023.

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Did big expectations doom the tiny house movement?

This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Remember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds.

In 1997, Jay Shafer built his first tiny house: a miniature country chapel with tastefully weathered wood, a high-pitched roof, and tall, crimson-trimmed windows. The exercise was part design challenge, part architectural rebellion. Shafer’s abode measured roughly 12 feet tall and 8 feet wide, less than the minimum size requirements for a house dictated by most building codes. 

“Once I learned it was illegal to live in a house that small, I decided I had to,” he said, “just to show that it was actually a safe and efficient and reasonable thing to do.”

But as Shafer would soon learn, tiny-home living appealed to more than those with a taste for civil disobedience. While most Americans were never going to move en masse into trailer-size homes, within certain environmental circles, it was fairly common to hear someone sigh into a Nalgene and declare, “I’d really like to live in a tiny house someday.” The idea particularly seemed to enchant people who idealized a low-footprint, quality-over-quantity style of life — one in which they could awaken in a loft bed, wrap themselves in linen, brew a French press in a compact yet exquisitely designed kitchen, emerge onto the tiny dew-covered porch, and sip thoughtfully as sunlight filtered through pine needles. 

A tiny home sits on an RV trailer in Richmond, Virginia, in 2015.
Mike Morgan / The Washington Post via Getty Images

One of the very early tiny-house adopters, Shafer is sometimes credited with “inventing” the minicottage aesthetic that launched this fantasy. In 2000, he founded his own design and construction company, Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, and by the time he left the company 12 years later, the business had seen “exponential growth.” An entire ecosystem of tiny house blogs, books, reality series, and documentaries had cropped up extolling the virtues of living better by living with less.

But for all the hubbub, tiny houses never really entered the mainstream realm of homeownership. Instead, they entered the province of tourists seeking a brief decampment to a smaller-scale, climate-friendly lifestyle. You’re more likely to encounter one while scrolling through $300-a-night Airbnb listings than browsing Zillow.

This is not to say that the tiny-house movement failed. Rather, the expectations placed upon it were too high: that it could take on all the sins of a bloated, profit-driven housing industry, and deliver us as a nation to a humbler, happier way of living.

“The movement is still strong,” said Shafer. “It just seemed like a lot of parasites were attaching themselves to it. You have the movement, and then a lot of people that were trying to make money off it.”

a plaque says babe on the wall of a tiny house
A sign hangs on a tiny house called “Babe,” which is used as a holiday lodge in the Catskills. Christina Horsten / picture alliance via Getty Images

Shafer defines a tiny house as one in which “all the space was used efficiently and nothing was lacking.” A more technical definition is a structure taking up no more than 600 square feet, with permanent provisions for living, sleeping, eating, cooking, and sanitation, but those are relatively palatial parameters for the more hardcore tiny house devotees. They would argue that a true tiny house is 8.5 feet wide and able to fit on a wheeled base, like an RV chassis. The amenities of such structures can range enormously, from a barely glorified camp bedroom to a fully functioning home complete with hot water, a composting toilet, and a solar array.

A tiny home with all the trimmings might set you back $100,000 or so — not exactly a small investment. But shortly after the 2008 recession and housing market crash, tiny houses started to look appealing to a generation of young people disillusioned by their parents’ overblown, overmortgaged homes.

There is also, of course, an environmental appeal to a tiny house. The size of a house strongly correlates with the resources required to keep it powered, cooled, and heated. If your home is very, very small, your personal use of those resources will be quite minimal. (Granted, this is equally true for a Manhattan studio as it is for a tiny house, and a Manhattan studio will never need to be hauled using a 500-horsepower truck.) And extremely limited storage eliminates the opportunity for wasteful consumption of stuff, a significant American climate culprit.

a lofted bed in a tiny home above a small kitchen
A ladder leads to a lofted bed in a tiny home in Richmond, Virginia, in 2015.
Mike Morgan / The Washington Post via Getty Images

In 2011, Christopher Smith, freshly out of college and starting to imagine the shape his adult life might take, bought a plot of land in “middle-of-nowhere” Colorado with the dream of building a small homestead on it with his own hands. The precipitous costs of meeting building code requirements quickly eroded that vision, and he began to lose faith in ever having enough money to have a home on that land.

By chance, Smith’s mother had recently sent him a copy of YES! Magazine, with tiny-house movement pioneer Dee Williams on the cover. After reading Williams’ profile, he realized that the wheeled design of the tiny-house base would remove the costly requirements of building a foundation structure that was up to code. “It made the whole project possible,” he said. “For me, the tiny house was a solution to a problem. But for a lot of people, I think it was more of a lifestyle choice — to simplify, downsize, control finances — a bit of a different motivation.”

a man and a woman sit in a field in front of a tiny home
Christopher Smith and Merete Mueller, photographed in 2012, sit in front of their tiny home on land near Hartsel, Colorado. The exterior of the home is 19 feet by 7 feet. Cyrus McCrimmon / The Denver Post

Smith built the house with his then-partner, Merete Mueller, and the two filmed the whole process in a documentary, TINY: A Story About Living Small.

“After the film came out, the tiny-house movement kind of blew up,” he said. “I’m not saying it was entirely due to the film, but it had a fairly large impact on it, the fact it was on Netflix and Hulu and all that. We knew it was this idea that was coming at the right time, but the speed, the way it became this phenomenon, took us by surprise.”

Suddenly, tiny houses were popping up everywhere across the internet. You couldn’t shake a stick at your Facebook feed without hitting a shared photo of some wee storybook cottage tucked away in a forest grove. Mueller categorizes the phenomenon of the tiny-house social media craze under a very “millennial” way of posting — one that leans heavily on perfection and idealization, in contrast with Gen Z’s ostensibly more unfiltered approach.

“All of this coincided with this era of Instagram and social media and a time where the thing was more, ‘Look at these cute perfect houses!’” she said. “Even me and Christopher, the way we were posting and sharing about our experiences did definitely have this perfect, hashtaggy — now looking back on it — barf-inducing flavor.”

A man with a camera peers through the windows of a tiny house
A reporter looks in the window of a tiny home called Alfa in the woods of Tiny Home Estates on June 5, 2019 in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
DON EMMERT / AFP via Getty Images

By 2014, the debut of the Netflix home improvement-style reality show Tiny House Nation had launched the movement fully into the mainstream. And that was around when, to hear Jay Shafer tell it, the good intentions of the tiny-house movement became overshadowed by consumer obsession. “The industry became a commercial thing,” he said. “It wasn’t so much about civil disobedience or about aesthetics so much as it was about selling houses.”


In 2005, when the sustainable-housing developer and writer Lloyd Alter first laid eyes on a sleek, solar- and wind-powered tiny house on wheels, designed by the architect Andy Thomson, he fell completely in love with it. It was a “gorgeous, modern design,” and he imagined toting it around the continent to park in beautiful scenic places and show at conventions. He happily paid $120,000 for it.

But what he quickly learned was that hauling the house was prodigiously expensive. One such journey from Toronto to Philadelphia cost around $4,000, and finding a place to park the damn thing for long periods of time was nearly impossible. If you don’t own land, it’s very challenging — especially in cities — to find a place to legally park a tiny house and connect it to utilities. Even if you do own land, you might be subject to all kinds of restrictions on the usage of your tiny house, due to aforementioned pesky minimum housing-size requirements.

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“It just became a millstone,” Alter said. “I paid all this money, I couldn’t afford to take it to shows, it’s too expensive. And because it was small, people would say, ‘You want $450 per square foot for it? What are you smoking?’ And in a sense, they were right. You could get a house for much, much, much cheaper per square foot, and they did come with land! I finally sold it last year at an incredible loss, and sort of put it out of my mind as one of my bigger mistakes.”

In the United States, a person’s home is usually their most valuable financial asset. Traditional real estate tends to appreciate in value, which arguably rationalizes the massive upfront cost of buying a home. But tiny houses are different, particularly ones built on wheels, because they depreciate pretty quickly. That’s on top of an extremely high price per-square-foot, which is also hard to swallow for the standard American homebuyer.

a truck pulling a tiny home on wheels
A truck pulls a 135-square-foot tiny house built on a Tumbleweed trailer through Portland, Maine, in 2013
Yoon S. Byun / Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

But the rise of Airbnb offered a “guaranteed business model” for people who wanted to make a tiny house into a legitimately profitable investment, said Zach Milburn, a real estate developer. That’s because short-term rentals will always net more money than month-to-month ones, according to an economic theory known as the “rent gap.” Several scholars have pointed to this phenomenon as a cause of gentrification driven by Airbnb, as homeowners convert what would otherwise be stable monthly housing into more profitable short-term rentals.

Tiny houses are tailor-made Airbnb bait, so to speak, and have become the highest-grossing “unique space type” on the platform, producing $195 million in revenue for hosts in 2021.

“There are three parts,” said Milburn. “They’re Instagrammable, and the cute-cozy aspect is attractive to people as well. And especially after the birth of these shows like Tiny House Nation, I think a lot of people want to try it out and are willing to pay a decent amount for a unique experience.”

Merete Mueller suggests that the proliferation of tiny houses as vacation retreats may have contributed to the fading of a cultural craze around them. “It used to be something that was an extreme enough lifestyle that it was more exciting to get a window into how someone did it, why they chose to go that route, and how it was panning out or impacting their daily life,” she said. “But when you could book one for the weekend and stay in it as a vacation house, it just became more and more normal. It became less exciting.”

Though tiny-house media coverage today is dominated by listicles of petite properties one can rent in any vacation destination under the sun, the idea that tiny houses could be harnessed for the greater good of society hasn’t gone away entirely. Cities like Seattle and Oakland have floated them as a stopgap measure for homelessness, to mixed degrees of success. The Accessory Dwelling Unit, or ADU, movement has fought for years and years to make tiny houses a viable solution to the affordable housing crisis. The idea is that if enough homeowners construct tiny houses in their backyards, it could increase supply in neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes. The concept is particularly appealing in increasingly expensive, lower-density cities like Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

a tiny shed house with green stripe
One of 150 tiny homes constructed for people transitioning from homelessnes sits in a community in North Hollywood.
Gutknecht / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

Smith, the TINY documentarian, said that he sees the clearest evidence of the effectiveness of the tiny-house movement in a quieter yet crucial realm: incorporation into municipal building codes.

At the beginning of the movement, “from a regulatory or legal perspective, it really felt like it could go either way,” he said. “Government could clamp down, or it would always be this gray area or this fringe thing. But it became bigger and people started fighting to get building codes for tiny houses, and it’s been embraced by the housing-first community and people working on homelessness. There’ve been a lot of people in the tiny-house world who really fought to legitimize tiny houses, and they’ve largely done that.”


Anything that becomes wildly popular eventually faces backlash. After all, you will bang your head on the ceiling that hovers four feet over the loft bed and crack the glass carafe of the French press on the corner of the countertop in the ridiculously small kitchen. Winter makes the beautiful tiny porch unusable for six months of the year.

As tiny houses surged in popularity, along came the contrarian blog posts: “The Tiny House Dream Is Actually A Nightmare,” “Are People Actually Happy in Tiny Houses?” and — a personal favorite — “Screw Your Tiny House and the Tiny Horse It Rode In On.” The tone implied that people who had fallen in love with tiny houses had been fooled by an unrealistic fantasy, and been forced to slink back to a mainstream, normal-size lifestyle.

“It kind of became political in a way that it wasn’t,” said TINY documentarian Smith. “When I started to learn about tiny houses, a lot of conservatives were in this movement, people who were looking at ways to be more self-sufficient and live a simpler life. I think what ended up happening was there was a group of people who started taking it as this liberal ploy to get everyone to cram themselves into tiny houses, saying that’s what the environmental movement wanted, and we saw a lot of those reactions to our movie.”

a tiny house in the foreground, a couple in the background
Christopher Smith and Merete Mueller, seen here in 2012, stand beside the tiny home they built together. Cyrus McCrimmon / The Denver Post

Mueller also attributes the backlash to the glowing, idealized nature of tiny-house media coverage in the first place. “Maybe if it had been framed in a more normal, realistic, middle-of-the-road way, it wouldn’t have had such a peak and decline,” she said. “I actually think that the most realistic representation of tiny houses is that it’s a thing that people do for a number of years to get to the next stage in their life.”

Mueller and Smith didn’t live in the tiny house they built together for more than a couple of months. They moved to New York for some time to work on their documentary, and eventually broke up. Smith moved to Los Angeles, intermittently transporting the tiny house around rural properties in Colorado and Montana. The cost and ordeal of moving it became too onerous, and he eventually sold it in 2020.

For her part, Mueller ended up staying in New York. “I was always excited about tiny houses as an ethos and a philosophy that could be applied to other square footages — it didn’t have to be the 120-square-foot house that fits on a flatbed,” she said. “Minimalism, experiences, and relationships over material possessions, those are still things I really stand by, and still kind of how I live my life. A New York City apartment is perfect for me.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Did big expectations doom the tiny house movement? on Aug 1, 2023.

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Best of Earth911 Podcast: NAPCOR Study Suggests PET Bottles Are More Sustainable Than Metal & Glass

Take a deep dive into plastic recycling and the environmental impacts of plastic, aluminum, and…

The post Best of Earth911 Podcast: NAPCOR Study Suggests PET Bottles Are More Sustainable Than Metal & Glass appeared first on Earth911.

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The case of the Colorado River’s missing water

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

High winds tore at Gothic Mountain as the sleeping giant watched over the cabins nestled in Gothic, Colorado, a remote outpost accessible only by skis during the valley’s harsh alpine winters. The plumes of snow that lifted from the peak briefly appeared to form a cloud and then disappeared.

To many, the snow that seemed to vanish into thin air would go unnoticed. But in a region where water availability has slowly begun to diminish, every snowflake counts. Each winter, an unknown percentage of the Rocky Mountain West’s snowpack disappears into the atmosphere, as it was doing on Gothic Mountain, just outside the ski resort town of Crested Butte. 

In the East River watershed, located at the highest reaches of the Colorado River Basin, a group of researchers at Gothic’s Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) are trying to solve the mystery by focusing on a process called sublimation. Snow in the high country sometimes skips the liquid phase entirely, turning straight from a solid into a vapor. The phenomenon is responsible for anywhere between 10 percent to 90 percent of snow loss. This margin of error is a major source of uncertainty for the water managers trying to predict how much water will enter the system once the snow begins to melt. 

Although scientists can measure how much snow falls onto the ground and how quickly it melts, they have no precise way to calculate how much is lost to the atmosphere, said Jessica Lundquist, a researcher focused on spatial patterns of snow and weather in the mountains. With support from the National Science Foundation, Lundquist led the Sublimation of Snow project in Gothic over the 2022-’23 winter season, seeking to understand exactly how much snow goes missing and what environmental conditions drive that disappearance.

“It’s one of those nasty, wicked problems that no one wants to touch,” Lundquist said. “You can’t see it, and very few instruments can measure it. And then people are asking, what’s going to happen with climate change? Are we going to have less water for the rivers? Is more of it going into the atmosphere or not? And we just don’t know.”

The snow that melts off Gothic will eventually refill the streams and rivers that flow into the Colorado River. When runoff is lower than expected, it stresses a system already strained because of persistent drought, the changing climate and a growing demand. In 2021, for example, snowpack levels near the region’s headwaters weren’t too far below the historical average — not bad for a winter in the West these days. But the snowmelt that filled the Colorado River’s tributaries was only 30 percent of average.

“You measure the snowpack and assume that the snow is just going to melt and show up in the stream,” said Julie Vano, a research director at the Aspen Global Change Institute and partner on the project. Her work is aimed at helping water managers decode the science behind these processes. “It just wasn’t there. Where did the water go?” 

As the West continues to dry up, water managers are increasingly pressed to accurately predict how much of the treasured resource will enter the system each spring. One of the greatest challenges federal water managers face — including officials at the Bureau of Reclamation, the gatekeeper of Lake Powell and Lake Mead — is deciding how much water to release from reservoirs to satisfy the needs of downstream users. 

While transpiration and soil moisture levels may be some of the other culprits responsible for water loss, one of the largest unknowns is sublimation, said Ian Billick, the executive director of RMBL.

“We need to close that uncertainty in the water budget,” Billick said. 

Doing it right 

The East River’s tributaries eventually feed into the Colorado River, which supplies water to nearly 40 million people in seven Western states as well as Mexico. This watershed has become a place where more than a hundred years of biological observations collide, many of these studies focused on understanding the life cycle of the water. 

Lundquist’s project is one of the latest. Due to the complexity of the intersecting processes that drive sublimation, the team set up more than 100 instruments in an alpine meadow just south of Gothic known as Kettle Ponds. 

“No one’s ever done it right before,” Lundquist said. “And so we are trying our very best to measure absolutely everything.”  

Throughout the winter, the menagerie of equipment quietly recorded data every second of the day — measurements that would give the team a snapshot of the snow’s history. A device called a sonic anemometer measured wind speed, while others recorded the temperature and humidity at various altitudes. Instruments known as snow pillows measured moisture content, and a laser imaging system called “Lidar” created a detailed map of the snow’s surface. 

From January to March, the three coldest months of the year, Daniel Hogan and Eli Schwat, graduate students who work under Lundquist at the University of Washington, skied from their snow-covered cabin in Gothic to Kettle Ponds to monitor the ever-changing snowpack. 

Their skis were fitted with skins, a special fabric that sticks to skis so they can better grip the snow. The two men crunched against the ground as they made their near-daily trek out to the site, sleds full of gear in tow. It was a chilly day in March, but the searing reflection of the snow made it feel warmer than it was. When Hogan and Schwat arrived, they dug a pit into the snow’s surface, right outside the canopy of humming instrumentation.

The pair carefully recorded the temperature and density of the snow inside. A special magnifying glass revealed the structure of individual snowflakes, some of them from recent storms and others, found deeper in the pit, from weeks or even months before. All of these factors can contribute to how vulnerable the snowpack is to sublimation. 

This would be just one of many pits dug as snow continued to blanket the valley. If all of the measurements the team takes over a winter are like a book, a snow pit is just a single page, Hogan said.

“Together, that gives you the whole winter story,” he said, standing inside one of the pits he was studying. Just the top of his head stuck out of the snowpit as he examined its layers. 

Lundquist’s team began analyzing the data they collected long before the snow began to melt. 

They hope it will one day give water managers a better understanding of how much sublimation eats into the region’s water budget — helping them make more accurate predictions for what is likely to be an even hotter, and drier, future.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The case of the Colorado River’s missing water on Jul 30, 2023.

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