In the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned Congress that millions of Americans were idly “walking the streets,” presenting a threat to the country’s stability, even though they “would infinitely prefer to work.” It’s part of the reason he proposed the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program that would hire men to preserve forests, prevent soil erosion, and control floods. “More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work,” Roosevelt said.
President Joe Biden referenced that line last month when he announced the launch of the American Climate Corps, a government jobs program inspired by Roosevelt’s that tackles the environmental problems of the 21st century. Besides the obvious benefits of restoring wetlands and installing solar panels, the climate corps is intended to pave a path to green careers for those who sign up. Another advantage of joining, though less-discussed, is that it could help alleviate widespread climate anxiety, channeling young people’s concern into concrete, hands-on work. More than half of Americans are anxious, to some degree, about how climate change is affecting their mental health. There are only about 250 job openings in the climate corps right now, but the White House expects to employ 20,000 people over the program’s first year.
While the vast majority of 18- to 28-year-olds in the United States say they’re worried about climate change, two-thirds of them are unsure what they can do to make a difference, according to polling from the think tank Data for Progress in 2022. The combination is ripe for “climate anxiety,” a catch-all term for the feelings of grief, fear, and distress that’s not so much a clinical diagnosis as a logical response to living through the hottest period on Earth in 125,000 years.
According to common wisdom, the best way to treat existential dread about global warming is to “take action.” But not all types of climate action are equal. Proponents of the American Climate Corps suggest that the program offers something more substantial than ditching meat or taking a bike ride — it’s a chance to work on climate change or environmental justice issues all day as part of a larger cause. “There’s something about, ‘Here is a clear job with a clear timeline and a clear local goal. I can, like, put my hands in the dirt,’” said Kidus Girma, campaign director of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate organization that fought to make the climate corps happen.
In small doses, anxiety can prompt people to do something, but in large doses, it can be incapacitating. The structure of the American Climate Corps could be useful for young people who are overwhelmed by the enormity of a global problem and aren’t sure where to start, said McKenna Parnes, a clinical psychology researcher at the University of Washington.
Taking action as part of a group, as opposed to going it alone, can significantly alleviate the distress associated with climate change, according to a study Parnes co-authored in 2022. Climate corps members wouldn’t necessarily need to be working with people all day to get those benefits. “Even if it’s folks that are doing individual jobs but part of the greater collective, just by nature of being part of the climate corps, there’s already that collective piece,” she said.
Climate activists demonstrate outside the White House in June 2021, calling for the Civilian Climate Corps.
Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
Jennifer Rasmussen, a registered nurse and an education fellow with the Planetary Health Alliance, a global network of organizations addressing the health effects of environmental changes, said that social support networks are key for improving mental health, especially with the rise of loneliness among young people. Being a member of the corps could also provide a sense of purpose and fulfillment, as well as help people build self-confidence by learning new skills — all of which tend to increase people’s psychological resilience and well-being, she said.
Roosevelt might have been ahead of his time when he wished the initial Civilian Conservation Corps members a “pleasant, wholesome, and constructively helpful stay in the woods.” Recent research suggests that feeling a connection to nature is associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety, another promising sign for American Climate Corps members who end up tending to forests, streams, or community gardens.
Climate anxiety comes in different forms: It can spring from a disaster, such as living through a flood, hurricane, or smoke-filled wildfire season. It can also take the shape of some existential dread about the future, even if you haven’t experienced a disaster yourself. A survey in 2021 found that climate anxiety was common in 10 countries across four continents, with 45 percent of young people saying that worrying about the environment was affecting their daily lives and ability to function.
That report suggested that this emotional distress stemmed from governments’ failure to respond to the problem. That rings true for Matt Ellis-Ramirez, a coordinator at Sunrise Movement Miami who recently graduated from the University of Miami and is thinking about joining the American Climate Corps. In Florida, for instance, a bill that removes most mentions of climate change from the state’s laws was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday, and last month, DeSantis signed legislation that bans local rules to protect outdoor workers from extreme heat.
“I think that’s where my anxiety comes from — that if we’re not actually able to shift our political system, that we might actually just be watching Miami become unlivable,” Ellis-Ramirez said.
Ellis-Ramirez is most excited about applying for hands-on positions in the American Climate Corps, like restoration efforts in the Everglades or planting trees in neighborhoods that lack them. Girma said that if he was looking for a job in the corps, he’d like to work on coastal restoration. “But I don’t think I would confidently say coastal restoration is the thing for people who have anxiety,” he said. “I think it’s broadly like, ‘Can I see a clear, measurable impact from my work day to day?’”
Saul Levin, the legislative and political director at the Green New Deal Network, says that there’s something empowering about knowing that people are working around you to address climate change and make communities safer. “It’s really not just the thousands and thousands of people who will be employed through the [American Climate Corps] who I think could have had their mental health improved, but also their acquaintances, families, neighbors, who similarly will benefit from knowing that folks are actually being hired to work on this.”
This story has been updated to reflect Governor DeSantis’ signing of a bill.
The rising cost of homeowner’s insurance is now one of the most prominent symptoms of climate change in the United States. Major carriers like State Farm and Allstate have pulled back from offering fire insurance in California, dropping thousands of homeowners from their books, and dozens of small insurance companies have collapsed or fled from Florida and Louisiana following recent large hurricanes.
The problem is fast becoming a crisis that stretches far beyond the nation’s coastal states. That’s owing to another, less-talked-about kind of disaster that has wreaked havoc on states in the Midwest and the Great Plains, causing billions of dollars in damage. In response, insurers have raised premiums higher than ever and dropped customers even in inland states such as Iowa.
These so-called “severe-convective storms” are large and powerful thunderstorms that form and disappear within a few hours or days, often spinning off hail storms and tornadoes as they shoot across the flat expanses of the central United States. The insurance industry refers to these storms as “secondary perils”—the other term of art is “kitty cats,” a reference to their being smaller than big natural catastrophes or “nat cats.”
But the damage from these secondary perils has begun to add up. Losses from severe convective storms increased by about 9 percent every year between 1989 and 2022, according to the insurance firm Aon. Last year these storms caused more than $50 billion in insured losses combined—about as much as 2022’s massive Hurricane Ian. No single storm event caused more than a few billion dollars of damage, but together they were more expensive than most big disasters. The scale of loss sent the insurance industry reeling.
“As insurers, our job is to predict risk,” said Matt Junge, who oversees property coverage in the United States for the global insurance giant Swiss Re. “What we’ve missed is that it wasn’t a big event that had a big impact, it was a bunch of small surprise events that just added up. There’s this kind of this reset where we’re saying, ‘Okay, we really have to get a handle on this.’”
Part of the reason for this steady accumulation is that more people are moving to areas that are vulnerable to convective storms, which raises the damage profile of each new tornado or hailstorm. The cost of rebuilding a home has increased due to inflation and supply-chain shortages, which drives up prices. But climate change may also be playing a role: Convective storms tend to form in hot, moist, and unstable weather conditions.
“We have such a dearth of observations about hailstorms and tornadoes, so the trend analysis is tricky,” said Kelly Mahoney, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who studies severe convective storms. “But you are taking storms that are fueled by heat and moisture, and you are watching them develop in a world that is hotter and moister than ever. It’s a tired analogy these days, but it’s still true here, of loaded dice or a stacked deck.”
Climate attribution is much harder for these ephemeral storms than it is for hurricanes and heat waves, Mahoney said, but it stands to reason that climate change will have some influence on how and where they develop. Warming has already caused the geographic range of “Tornado Alley” to extend farther south and east than it once did, delivering more twisters to states like Alabama and Mississippi.
Whatever the cause, this loss trend is making business much harder for many insurance companies. Most vulnerable are the small regional insurers with large clusters of customers in one state or metropolitan area. When a significant storm strikes, these companies have to pay claims to huge portions of their risk pool, which can drain their reserves and push them toward insolvency.
“The local mutuals, you have a couple storms, you have a bad year, and they’re in trouble, because all their business is here and that risk isn’t spread out,” said Glen Mulready, the insurance commissioner of Oklahoma. The state has some of the highest insurance premiums in the country, and Mulready said many insurers are now refusing to write new policies for homes with old roofs that are vulnerable to collapse during tornadoes and hailstorms.
Even large “reinsurers,” which sell insurance to insurance companies around the world, are feeling the sting from these storms. Global reinsurance firms such as Swiss Re take in premium revenue from all over the globe, insuring earthquakes in Japan as well as hurricanes in Florida, so they aren’t vulnerable to collapse during local disasters, even major ones. But the increasing trend of “attritional” losses from repeated convective storms does threaten to cut into their profit margins.
“We have less of a concern about the tail on these types of events,” said Junge of Swiss Re, using the industry term for the costliest disasters. “The concern for us is just the impact on earnings.”
Ed Bolt, the mayor of Shawnee, Oklahoma, has seen this impact up close. A tornado raged down his town’s main boulevard last year and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, knocking the roof off Bolt’s own house. His insurance company paid to replace the roof, but it mailed him a letter a few months ago with a notice that his annual premium was going to increase by 50 percent, reaching around $3,600 a year.
“The cost used to tick up and tick up a little bit, but last year we knew we would get a big hit because of the tornado,” Bolt told Grist. “I’m sure that would be a pretty consistent experience across town.”
Most states require insurers to get permission from regulators before they raise rates, which presents governments with a tough dilemma. If they raise rates, they make it harder for homeowners to keep up with their insurance payments, and they also risk dampening property values. If they keep rates down, insurers might react by ceasing to write new policies or pulling out of the state. Mulready, the Oklahoma commissioner, says he had one national insurer leave his market earlier this year.
Still, the Midwest has yet to encounter a large-scale exodus, and industry representatives say it’s unlikely that they will pull out of the region the way they have from California. But it’s a safe bet that insurers will keep raising premiums as high as states will let them. Insurers may also raise deductibles, setting a higher minimum amount of damage before insurance kicks in. The upshot is a bigger financial burden for homeowners in fast-growing metro areas like Denver, where insurers’ storm exposure has skyrocketed in recent years.
Perhaps the worst part of the problem is that most states have made little progress in preparing for these storm events. Florida imposed a strict building code after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and most newer homes in the state can withstand high winds. The housing stock in the central United States is far less resilient to tornado winds and hail, and just a few cities have forced builders to fortify homes against those hazards.
Erin Collins, the lead state policy advocate at the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, the nation’s largest insurer trade group, said carriers might have to keep raising rates until the nation’s housing stock becomes more resilient to severe storms.
“It’s going to take community-scale hardening to bend that loss curve down,” she told Grist.
That won’t be easy. Insurers need to convince large home builders that they should build with more expensive, storm-resistant materials, and they also need to nudge millions of people in existing homes to upgrade their roofs and windows, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Because severe convective storms can strike such a wide geography, it will take a long time for this mitigation work to “bend the loss curve down.”
The good news is that we know how to build storm-resistant homes, and there’s proof that building better makes a big difference, says Ian Giacomelli, a senior meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger building standards.
Giacomelli points to the city of Moore, Oklahoma, which rolled out some of the strictest storm-resilience standards in the country after it suffered three devastating tornadoes in two decades. Now almost the city’s entire housing stock has roofs that can bounce off large hail storms and strong joints that prevent roofs from flying off during tornado events. Giacomelli says the nation’s current insurance crisis would likely ease up if more cities followed Moore’s lead.
“I think the solutions are coming into focus,” he told Grist. “It’s more about can we get the will to do them.”
Bumblebees are essential pollinators, but many species are in a downward spiral that is sometimes a mystery to scientists.
In a new study, researchers have found that the increasing temperatures of the human-caused climate crisis may be interfering with climate control in bumblebee nests, threatening future generations.
“The decline in populations and ranges of several species of bumblebees may be explained by issues of overheating of the nests and the brood,” said lead author of the study Dr. Peter Kevan of Canada’s University of Guelph, in a press release from Frontiers. “The constraints on the survival of the bumblebee brood indicate that heat is likely a major factor, with heating of the nest above about 35 degrees Celsius being lethal, despite the remarkable capacity of bumblebees to thermoregulate.”
There are more than 250 species of bumblebee on Earth, inhabiting a variety of environments. Many are in decline due to climate change, but the specific cause has been difficult to pinpoint.
Following a review of the scientific literature, the research team found that the optimal temperature window of bumblebee nests — roughly 28 to 32 degrees Celsius — was consistent between many species around the world.
“We can assume that the similarity reflects the evolutionary relatedness of the various species,” Kevan said in the press release.
The right temperature means minimal metabolic expenditure, while warmth in excess of that window can lead to dangerous heat stress. This means adaptation to higher temperatures could prove hard for bumblebees.
“Excessively high temperatures are more harmful to most animals and plants than cool temperatures. When conditions are cool, organisms that do not metabolically regulate their body temperatures simply slow down, but when temperatures get too high metabolic processes start to break down and cease,” Kevan explained. “Death ensues quickly.”
After a review of 180 years of literature, the team discovered that bumblebees seemed to survive at temperatures as high as 36 degrees Celsius, while 30 to 32 degrees was the optimal range for development, though that window could differ between biogeographical conditions and species.
“The similarity of the optimum temperature range in incubating nests is remarkable, about 28–32°C regardless of species from the cold High Arctic to tropical environments indicates that the optimal temperature for rearing of brood in Bombus spp. is a characteristic common to bumblebees (perhaps a synapomorphy) and with limited evolutionary plasticity,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The researchers said that, while bumblebees have a number of behavioral adaptations for thermoregulation, they may not be adequate to adapt to climate change. They called for more research on how the pollinators can survive the rising temperatures, as well as more studies into bumblebee ecology — temperature, thermoregulation, nest morphology and material properties.
A bumblebee colony acts as a “superorganism,” with reproductive fitness dependent on collective reproduction and survival rather than on individual bees, the press release said. Individual bees may be better able to cope with heat than others, but if the bees’ nest is too hot for raising healthy larvae, the entire colony will suffer.
“The effect of high nest temperatures has not been studied very much, which is surprising. We can surmise that nest temperatures above the mid-30s Celsius would likely be highly detrimental and that above about 35 Celsius death would occur, probably quite quickly,” Kevan said in the press release.
Honeybee studies have shown that hotter nest temperatures sap the strength of queen bees and weaken their ability to reproduce, leading to smaller worker bees and less optimum conditions. If heat affects bumblebees in a similar way, global heating could be a direct cause of their decline.
Some bumblebee colonies may be able to adapt the selection and form of nest site or their behavior to cool down their nests. Ground-penetrating radar might aid in the study of ground-nesting bee species and nest analysis using flow-through respirometry at varying temperatures could help researchers assess how much stress is being placed on bee colonies inside.
“We need both to understand how different colonies cope with the same conditions and how different species cope with different conditions, including whether some bumblebee species have broader thermal neutral zones, affording them more resilience,” the press release said.
“We hope that future scientists may take the ideas we present and apply them to their own research on bumblebee health and conversation,” Kevan concluded.
The study, “Thermodynamics, thermal performance and climate change: temperature regimes for bumblebee (Bombus spp.) colonies as examples of superorganisms,” was published in the journal Frontiers in Bee Science.
Humans and other animals have the ability to teach important skills to their contemporaries that allow for knowledge building across generations.
According to two new studies, bumblebees and chimpanzees are two animals who have the capability of learning skills so complex they would never have been able to master them alone — an ability scientists previously believed was unique to humans.
“Culture refers to behaviours that are socially learned and persist within a population over time. Increasing evidence suggests that animal culture can, like human culture, be cumulative: characterized by sequential innovations that build on previous ones,” the bumblebee study said.
“Cumulative culture” is the human capacity to build knowledge, skills and technology over time while improving upon them as they are taught to successive generations, reported AFP. It is a technique that is viewed as an essential part of humans’ dominance over their environment.
“Imagine that you dropped some children on a deserted island,” said Lars Chittka, co-author of the study on bees and a behavioral ecologist at London’s Queen Mary University, in a video accompaniment to the study, as AFP reported. “They might — with a bit of luck — survive, but they would never know how to read or to write because this requires learning from previous generations.”
Earlier experiments had shown that some animals demonstrate “social learning,” where they figure out a skill through observation of individuals of their own species. But while some of the behaviors appeared to have been honed over time — such as the ability of chimpanzees to crack open nuts or the navigational skills of homing pigeons — it is hard for scientists to eliminate the possibility that these animals did not figure out how to accomplish the specific tasks on their own.
A research team from the United Kingdom looked at bumblebees to determine whether they had some of the characteristics of cumulative culture.
First they trained a group of “demonstrators” to perform a complicated skill that could be passed on to others.
They gave some of the bees a two-step puzzle box that involved pushing a blue tab followed by a red tab that released a sugary reward.
“This task is really difficult for bees because [during the first step] we are essentially asking them to learn to do something in exchange for nothing,” Alice Bridges, co-author of the study and a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University, told AFP.
The bees initially attempted to only push the red tab without moving the blue tab first, then gave up.
In order to motivate them, the team placed the sugary prize at the end of the blue tab, then took the reward away gradually as they mastered the task.
The researchers then paired the demonstrator bees with “naive” bees unfamiliar with the process who watched their peers solve the puzzle.
Of the 15 new bees, five quickly solved the puzzle with no prize during the first step. Naive bees who were not taught how to obtain the treat were still not able to open the box after extended exposure for as long as 24 days.
Bridges said the team was “surprised” and thrilled when they saw the swift learning behavior.
They said the study was the first to observe an invertebrate species demonstrating cumulative culture.
“This finding challenges a common opinion in the field: that the capacity to socially learn behaviours that cannot be innovated through individual trial and error is unique to humans,” the study said.
The study, “Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone,” was published in the journal Nature.
The task involved first retrieving a wooden ball, then holding a drawer open, putting the ball in and closing it to get a peanut at the end.
During the course of three months, 66 chimpanzees attempted but were not able to solve the puzzle.
The team then trained two demonstrator chimpanzees who showed their peers how to do it.
Within two months, 14 of the naive chimpanzees had mastered the puzzle. What’s more, the researchers discovered that the more often they observed the demonstrators, the faster they were able to solve it.
The study, “Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate,” was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
Bridges said both studies “can’t help but fundamentally challenge the idea that cumulative culture is this extremely complex, rare ability that only the very ‘smartest’ species — e.g. humans — are capable of.”
After studying tree rings from the past 2,000 years, researchers have found that the Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest summer in 2023 in the past two millennia.
The researchers used both observed and modeled surface air temperatures for the period from June to August each year, along with 2,000 years of tree ring data. Their results, published in the journal Nature, showed that summer 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere was the hottest since the height of the Roman Empire.
“When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” Ulf Büntgen, co-author of the study and professor at University of Cambridge’s Department of Geography, said in a statement. “2023 was an exceptionally hot year, and this trend will continue unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.”
Additionally, the findings revealed that the Northern Hemisphere has already surpassed the 1.5-degree-Celsius limit outlined in the Paris Agreement, a target meant to curb global warming and prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
In September 2023, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) found that the period from June through August 2023 was the hottest summer on record. Further, C3S predicted in December of last year that 2023 would be named the warmest year on record.
As the researchers of the new study pointed out, records are often limited either by location or by date, with instrumental evidence of warming typically dating back to about 1850 or later. The older recorded data can also be inconsistent.
Tree rings helped fill gaps of knowledge and provide more accurate measurements of historic summer temperatures, and the study confirmed the record-breaking summer heat.
The researchers linked many of the warmer summers in the tree ring data to El Niño events, but they noted that rising emissions and global warming have led to stronger El Niño events, like the one experienced in 2023.
“It’s true that the climate is always changing, but the warming in 2023, caused by greenhouse gases, is additionally amplified by El Niño conditions, so we end up with longer and more severe heat waves and extended periods of drought,” said Jan Esper, lead author of the study and professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. “When you look at the big picture, it shows just how urgent it is that we reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately.”
The study authors reported that El Niño could bring record-breaking temperatures in the early summer this year, although forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have found evidence of a weakening El Niño last month. NOAA officials have also predicted a 69% of a La Niña event by July to September.
A La Niña event, which could last from summer through early winter or longer, could bring other detrimental climate impacts. This climate event could bring frequent tropical storms and hurricanes to the eastern U.S., PBS reported, along with increased risks for drought and wildfires in the southwestern U.S.
Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would regulate two forms of PFAS contamination under Superfund laws reserved for “the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites.” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the action will ensure that “polluters pay for the costs to clean up pollution threatening the health of communities.”
That was an encore to the Food and Drug Administration announcing in February that companies will phase out food packaging with PFAS wrappings and the mid-April announcement by Regan that the EPA was establishing the first-ever federal limits on PFAS in drinking water. At that time, he declared, “We are one huge step closer to finally shutting off the tap on forever chemicals once and for all.”
One can forever hope the tap will be eventually shut, since it took seemingly forever for the nation to begin to crack down on this class of per-and polyfluoroalkyl synthetic chemicals. The chemical bonds of PFAS, among the strongest ever created, resulted in an incredible ability to resist heat, moisture, grease and stains. PFAS chemicals seemed like miracle substances in the 20th-century quest for convenience. They became ubiquitous in household furnishings, cookware, cosmetics, and fast-food packaging, and a key component of many firefighting foams.
The bonds are so indestructible they would impress Superman. They don’t break down in the environment for thousands of years, hence the “forever” nickname. Unfortunately for humans, the same properties represent Kryptonite.
Today, the group of chemicals known as PFAS is the source of one of the greatest contaminations of drinking water in the nation’s history. Flowing from industrial sites, landfills, military bases, airports, and wastewater treatment discharges, PFAS chemicals, according to the United States Geological Survey, are detectable in nearly half our tap water. Other studies suggest that a majority of the US population drinks water containing PFAS chemicals—as many as 200 million people, according to a 2020 peer-reviewed study conducted by the Environmental Working Group.
PFAS Chemicals Are Everywhere
No one escapes PFAS chemicals. They make it into the kitchen or onto the dining room table in the form of non-stick cookware, microwave popcorn bags, fast-food burger wrappers, candy wrappers, beverage cups, take-out containers, pastry bags, French-fry and pizza boxes. They reside throughout homes in carpeting, upholstery, paints, and solvents.
As a result, nearly everyone in the United States has detectable levels of PFAS in their bodies. There is no known safe level of human exposure to these chemicals. They are linked to multiple cancers, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children, high cholesterol, and damage to the cardiovascular and immune systems. A 2022 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and Sichuan University in China estimated that exposure to one form of PFAS (PFOS, for perfluorooctane sulfonic acid), may have played a role in the deaths of more than 6 million people in the United States between 1999 and 2018.
As sweeping as PFAS contamination is, exposures in the United States are also marked by clear patterns of environmental injustice and a betrayal to military families. An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that people of color and low-income people were more likely to live near non-military sources of PFAS contamination than wealthier, white people.
Another study by UCS found that 118 of 131 military bases had PFAS contamination concentrations at least 10 times higher than federal risk levels. A federal study last year found a higher risk of testicular cancer for Air Force servicemen engaged in firefighting with PFAS foams.
Tobacco-Lke Disinformation
In the end, the whole nation was betrayed, in a manner straight out of the tobacco disinformation playbook. Behind the image of convenience, manufacturers long knew that PFAS chemicals were toxic. Internal documents uncovered over the years show how DuPont and 3M, the two biggest legacy makers of PFAS, knew back in the 1960s that the compounds built up in blood and enlarged the livers of laboratory animals. By 1970, a DuPont document referring to a PFAS chemical under its famed “Teflon” trademark said that it “is highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when injected.”
By the late 1970s, DuPont was discovering that PFAS chemicals were affecting the liver of workers and that plant employees were having myocardial infarctions at levels “somewhat higher than expected.” But that did not stop the industry from downplaying the risk to workers.
One internal 3M document in 1980 claimed that PFAS chemicals have “a lower toxicity like table salt.” Yet, a study last year of documents by researchers at the University of California San Francisco and the University of Colorado found that DuPont, internally tracking the outcome of worker pregnancies in 1980 and 1981, recorded two cases of birth defects in infants. Yet, in 1981, in what the researchers determined was a “joint” communication to employees of DuPont and 3M, the companies claimed: “We know of no evidence of birth defects” at DuPont and were “not knowledgeable about the pregnancy outcome” of employees at 3M who were exposed to PFAS.
The same suppression and disinformation kept government regulators at bay for decades. The San Francisco and Colorado researchers found internal DuPont documents from 1961 to 1994 showing toxicity in animal and occupational studies that were never reported to the EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act. As one example, DuPont, according to a 2022 feature by Politico’s Energy and Environment News, successfully negotiated in the 1960s with the Food and Drug Administration to keep lower levels of PFAS-laden food wrapping and containers on the market despite evidence of enlarged livers in laboratory rats.
A Patchwork Response
Eventually, the deception and lies exploded in the face of the companies, as independent scientists found more and more dire connections to PFAS in drinking water and human health and lawsuits piled up in the courts. Last year, 3M agreed to a settlement of between $10.5 billion and $12.5 billion for PFAS contamination in water systems around the nation. DuPont and other companies agreed to another $1.2 billion in settlements. That’s not nothing, but it is a relatively small price to pay for two industrial behemoths that have been among the Fortune 500 every year since 1955.
In the last two decades, the continuing science on PFAS chemicals and growing public concern has led to a patchwork of individual apparel and food companies to say they will stop using PFAS in clothes and wrapping. Some states have enacted their own drinking water limits and are moving forward with legislation to restrict or ban products containing PFAS. In 2006, the EPA began a voluntary program in which the leading PFAS manufacturers in the United States agreed to stop manufacturing PFOA, one of the most concerning forms of PFAS.
But companies had a leisurely decade to meet commitments. Even as companies negotiated, a DuPont document assumed coziness with the EPA. “We need the EPA to quickly (like first thing tomorrow) say the following: Consumer products sold under the Teflon brand are safe. . .there are no human health effects to be caused by PFOA [a chemical in the PFAS family].”
Two years ago, 3M announced it will end the manufacture of PFAS chemicals and discontinue their application across its portfolio by the end of next year. But the company did so with an insulting straight face, saying on its products are “safe and effective for their intended uses in everyday life.”
EPA Action Finally, but More Is Needed
The nation can no longer accept the overall patchwork or industry weaning itself off PFAS at its own pace. The EPA currently plans to issue drinking water limits for six forms of PFAS and place two forms under Superfund jurisdiction. The Superfund designation gives the government its strongest powers to enforce cleanups that would be paid for by polluters instead of taxpayers.”
But there are 15,000 PFAS compounds, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. There is nothing to stop companies from trying to play around with other compounds that could also prove harmful. Cleaning up the PFAS chemicals that have already been allowed will take billions of dollars and water utilities around the country are already screaming, with some justification, that the federal government needs to provide more money than it is offering. And even the Superfund designation does not actually ban their use.
It would be better if the United States were to follow the lead of the European Union which is now considering a ban or major restrictions on the whole class of chemicals, fearing that “without taking action, their concentrations will continue to increase, and their toxic and polluting effects will be difficult to reverse.”
The effects are scary to quantify. Regan said in his drinking water announcement that the new rules would improve water quality for 100 million people and “prevent thousands of deaths and reduce tens of thousands of serious illnesses across the country.” A draft EPA economic analysis last year predicted that tight standards could save more than 7,300 lives alone from bladder cancer, kidney cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and avoid another 27,000 non-fatal cases of those diseases.
That makes it high time that the federal government borrow from DuPont’s arrogant assumption that it could push around the EPA. We need the EPA to quickly (like first thing tomorrow) say the following: “Consumer products with PFAS are not safe and are causing unacceptable environmental consequences. We are shutting off the tap on ALL of them.”
Derrick Z. Jackson is a UCS Fellow in climate and energy and the Center for Science and Democracy. Formerly of the Boston Globe and Newsday, Jackson is a Pulitzer Prize and National Headliners finalist, a 2021 Scripps Howard opinion winner, and a respective 11-time, 4-time and 2-time winner from the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and the Education Writers Association.
“Denying climate change is tantamount to saying you don’t believe in gravity.”
— Christina Figueres, climate advocate and diplomat,
in her 2020 book The Future We Choose
The spotlight
How do we know that the climate is changing — and that humans are causing it? To a certain extent, we can see and feel it ourselves. New temperature and weather extremes are undeniable, and affect more and more places every year. And the greenhouse effect (the mechanism by which carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere) is taught in many basic science classes. But when asked how they know that “climate change is real,” some people will respond simply that 99.9 percent of scientists agree that it is.
“For me, intellectually, that always felt like a little bit of a cop-out,” said Jesse Nichols, a video producer at Grist. Sure, it’s a compelling statistic, and there’s nothing wrong with putting our faith in the consensus of the scientific community. But Nichols also felt that understanding how scientists have come to this conclusion and supported it — sometimes in surprising ways — can be enlightening, and empowering.
“Something that always has really fascinated me is people who are able to uncover giant stories from tiny little pieces of evidence,” he said, “like environmental detective stories.”
That’s a large part of the ethos behind Proof of Concept, a video series created by Nichols that profiles the science and scientists behind some of the most surprising recent environmental research and discoveries. The videos take viewers from a lab at MIT to a primate research center in California to a museum basement in Seattle stocked with jars of centuries-old preserved fishes.
In one, Nichols interviews scientists studying one of the world’s healthiest coral reefs — the Flower Garden Banks, in the Gulf of Mexico, which also happens to be surrounded by offshore oil drilling.
Like trees, corals grow bands every year that enable researchers to date them — and to gain insight into what was going on in the ocean climate each year that the corals were growing. As Nichols says in his narration: “The legacy of oil extraction, carbon emissions, and climate change are quite literally etched on the hard skeletons of the corals themselves.”
These coral “time capsules,” as one scientist puts it in the video, are exactly the kinds of clues that Nichols was referencing when he likened scientific discovery to a detective story. By analyzing small scrapes of coral from each of the different bands, scientists have been able to track changes over time that align with world events. By looking at the carbon contained in the coral, they could see an increase in an isotope that’s associated with fossil fuel emissions — a clear sign that our planet’s rising carbon emissions are indeed caused by humans. Another finding was the increased presence of barium in the reef skeleton, an element that is often used as a lubricant in offshore oil wells.
“By analyzing the dust that you got from that coral skeleton, you could show that climate change was happening — or that oil had spiked in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1970s, or that fertilizer had been increasing from the Mississippi River, or that nuclear weapons testing had been happening throughout the Cold War,” Nichols said. “All of these world history events were visible inside the skeleton of a coral, and I thought it was so cool that scientists could tell such big stories from such tiny pieces of evidence.”
In another video from the series, Nichols talks with Chelsea Wood, a parasitologist. “I don’t think anyone is born a parasitologist — like, no one grows up wanting to study worms,” Wood jokes in the video. But when she learned about how biodiverse parasites in fact are, and the often crucial roles they play in ecosystems, it felt like she had discovered a whole new secret world. She decided to devote her career to studying parasite ecology, and how humans are impacting it.
Wood wanted to find out what had been happening in the world of parasites over the past 100 years of global change, and that data didn’t exist. So she figured out a way to get it. Much like the scientists at Flower Garden Banks used the historical record preserved in corals themselves to study how environmental changes have affected reefs, Wood found a historical record of parasites — in the bellies of fishes. She opened up jars of fish samples in the Burke Museum in Seattle dating back to the 1800s and dissected the fish to find out what kinds of parasites were living inside them.
“Chelsea was uncovering a completely overlooked story about how parasites were changing over the last century, using these fish samples that were collecting dust in a basement,” Nichols told me. One thing she and her team discovered is that complex parasites — ones that depend on biodiverse ecosystems with several different host species — have been steadily declining, and climate change is almost certainly the culprit.
The third follows Lisa Miller, a researcher at the California National Primate Research Center. In 2008, summer wildfires were blanketing Northern California with smoke — and Miller had an idea. A group of 50 rhesus monkeys had just been born at the center and, like everybody else in the area, they were exposed to the unusually high levels of wildfire smoke. She wondered if they could study these monkeys, compared with a control group born the next year, to learn more about the effects of early exposure to air pollution.
The scientists monitored the monkeys’ health through routine medical examinations like blood draws and CT scans, and also by equipping them with Fitbit-esque collars to monitor their physical activity. They found that the wildfire smoke led to lifelong health impacts. The exposed monkeys had weaker immune systems when they were young, which then turned to overactive immune systems when they were adults. They developed smaller and stiffer lungs than the control group, and didn’t sleep as well.
Because rhesus monkeys are genetically similar to humans, these findings have implications for human health as well. Long-term health studies in humans are notoriously difficult, because it’s all but impossible to control different environmental and lifestyle factors that complicate things. But the wildfire smoke that descended over the primate research center, a completely controlled environment, offered a unique opportunity to learn more about this climate impact.
“It really was, in my view, serendipity — in the sense that we were at the right place at the right time,” Miller says in the video.
The fourth and final video in this year’s series will publish tomorrow. Check out grist.org/video to watch it then!
As a sneak peek: The story looks at ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, or RuBisCO — an enzyme that enables plants to pull carbon dioxide from the air to support photosynthesis, a process that in turn fuels all life on Earth. The twist is that RuBisCO is notoriously bad at its job, and climate change appears to be making it even worse. But scientists are working to engineer a new variety.
“I think that science in itself helps us know how the world works, and you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know how the system works,” Nichols said. “All of these are stories of people who are trying to get a clearer picture of what’s going on. And having a good picture of what’s going on, it’s kind of like having a map when you’re lost in the wilderness.”
— Claire Elise Thompson
A parting shot
In last week’s newsletter about the 15-minute city, we asked what you can walk to within 15 minutes of where you live. For fun, I put some of your answers into an AI image generator to see what our collective 15-minute city could look like. One thing I found interesting — even with my prompts, the generator struggled to conjure up a “city” without cars, and to fit many different specific features (a pizzeria, a taco truck, a bookshop, a church, an urgent care clinic …) into a single scene. But I’d still live here, I think. What about you?
Les Clark III took charge of the West Side Recreation and Park District in 2018, just as the bottom was falling out in Taft, California. The oil pumps that surrounded the town of 9,000 had been nodding up and down for decades, but all at once they froze in place, beams hovering in the air like hammers about to fall. The drilling rigs and service trucks vanished from the winding roads around the town, blanketing it with an unfamiliar silence.
For as long as Clark could remember, the oil fields around Taft had swarmed with motion. At the time that he took over the rec center, Kern County drilled over 140 million barrels every year, more oil than almost any other county in the U.S. That oil flowed out of the ground and through a network of pipelines to nearby refineries for conversion into diesel. Above the pipelines, workers in hard hats and jumpsuits circled the fields in pickup trucks to monitor production; others manned towering drill rigs that rattled as they bored into the ground.
Trucks drive along a road near Taft, California. The town’s economy has declined over the last decade as oil production has fallen. Brian L. Frank / Grist
All this motion made money, and the companies that ran the oil fields shared some of that money with Taft, showering the town with millions of dollars in tax revenue and making philanthropic donations to fund schools, scholarships, and community events. While Taft is home to just 1 percent of Kern County’s population, the town’s plight is emblematic of that facing the entire county, a sprawling metropolitan area of nearly a million people whose middle class and tax base are firmly anchored by oil.
As the heart of Kern County’s oil industry, Taft enjoyed a prosperity that neighboring areas did not; the town sits at the southern end of California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region that struggles by almost every metric of healthandsocialwelfare. Many Central Valley towns don’t have grocery stores or parks, let alone an athletic complex like the one run by Clark.
Indeed, Clark’s recreation center campus, which stretches across four buildings, encapsulates the town’s unique prosperity. It boasts a virtual empire of sports and leisure activities — not just the usual youth football and softball but also bingo, jazz dance, bunco, jiujitsu, and bowling, plus a weekly potluck dinner. More than half its budget comes from oil industry contributions, and individual companies have endowed some of the biggest expansions: the Aera Energy gymnasium, the Berry Petroleum movie theater, the Chevron science room for kids. Clark, who just turned 49, proudly dons a black ball cap adorned with the park district’s logo, an oil rig rising up from green fields on a sunny day.
Les Clark III manages the West Side Recreation and Park District in Taft. Most of the district’s funding comes from the oil industry. Brian L. Frank / Grist
But starting about a decade ago, Taft began to lose its grip on middle-class prosperity. The world oil market took a nosedive in 2014, leading local companies to lay off workers and idle wells in the fields around Taft. Even after oil prices bounced back, a new wave of environmental lawsuits and an oil permitting pause instituted by Governor Gavin Newsom stopped local oil companies from drilling new wells. Meanwhile, the rise of fracking diverted industry investment to untapped shale deposits in states like North Dakota and Texas.
As drilling slowed in Kern County, oil company contributions to the parks district disappeared as well, forcing Clark to lay off 10 of his 14 employees and scale back sports when he couldn’t find volunteers. Then the families of laid-off oil workers started telling him they couldn’t afford to enroll in youth sports — except for the baseball and softball leagues, where Chevron continued to cover all the costs.
The baseball and softball fields at the parks district in Taft are sponsored in part by Chevron. The home and away teams are “roustabouts” and “roughnecks,” both of which are terms for oil field workers. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Clark’s father and grandfather both worked in the oil fields, but he had never wanted to follow them there. His passion was for sports, and when pro football didn’t work out he figured that coaching at the town’s rec center was the next best thing. But the oil crash hit him just as hard as it hit his neighbors who worked for Chevron; when the industry sank, it took the rec center and the rest of the town with it. Clark is a large man, with a voice that travels even without the aid of the basketball gym’s acoustics, but his speech gets clipped when he talks about the impact of the oil crash on the kids who played on his softball teams, and the adults who took his fitness classes.
“It’s a tough deal,” he said. “We’re at a point where we can’t afford to spend in the red anymore.”
In recent years, as governments around the world have begun to shift away from fossil fuels and commit to stemming climate change, scholars and activists have promoted the idea of a “just transition” for communities that rely on carbon-intensive industries. The promise of a just transition is that the government will step in to support displaced workers and abandoned communities, offering subsidies and direct financial support to help build new industries and stave off economic collapse.
So far, this has not happened. The collapse of coal in Appalachia has helped slow climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it has also eliminated tens of thousands of jobs and emptied out towns across Kentucky and West Virginia. Efforts to stoke new growth with corporate tax breaks, relocation stipends, and broadband investment have so far borne little fruit — though a recent wave of industrial policy legislation from Congress hopes to change that. The growth of renewable energy and the rise of electric vehicles now threaten to condemn oil communities to the same fate. Multiple large California refineries have closed in recent years, pushing hundreds of workers into lower-paying jobs or long-term unemployment.
General Petroleum Road in Taft. Many of the town’s residents work in the oil fields or in related industries. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Kern County hopes to take a very different path, transforming its fossil fuel industry into an industry that will help reduce carbon emissions. In 2021, the oil company California Resources Corporation, or CRC, unveiled a first-of-its-kind plan to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide and stash it in depleted wells near town, preventing the greenhouse gases from wreaking havoc on the atmosphere.
Both CRC and Kern County officials promise that the project will deliver thousands of new manufacturing jobs, many of them perfect for former oil workers. They also say it will refill local tax coffers and restore institutions like Clark’s rec center. In theory, a carbon storage boom would help Kern County leap over the abyss created by the decline of oil, allowing the county to fashion its own “just transition” without a government bailout. To Clark, it all sounds like a godsend.
A pump jack at the Elk Hills oil field near Taft, California. The oil company California Resources Corporation is seeking to repurpose a section of Elk Hills for carbon capture. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The plan’s ambitious promise has created a curious spectacle: an oil town rallying around a pivot to climate action by the state’s largest oil company. Leaders from the high school, the community college, and its chamber of commerce have all joined Clark in endorsing the project. It even landed an endorsement from Taft’s mayor, an ardent critic of renewable energy.
“There’s some kind of window of opportunity, because the industry is trying to evolve,” said Clark.
The consensus view of the “just transition” is that governments will have to make big investments in places like Taft to fill the void left by fossil fuel companies. Kern County is attempting something altogether different by trying to build a new boom industry out of the ashes of an old one, allowing oil companies like CRC to pass the torch to themselves as the county’s economic leaders. If the scheme pans out, the carbon management industry will act as a pacemaker for an ailing economy, replacing a carbon-spewing business with a carbon-saving one, all while protecting the fragile middle class created by oil.
Les Clark III points to the “Chevron S.T.E.A.M.” room at the West Side Recreation and Park District. The new facility offers video games, computers, and science activities for local kids. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The audacious initiative is not without its critics. Many residents of the Latino communities near Elk Hills, the massive oil field where the carbon will be stored, are concerned about the safety of stashing such huge volumes of the greenhouse gas underground a few miles from their homes. Some California climate activists are skeptical that the potential benefits of carbon capture are worth extending a lifeline to the oil fields near Taft, and they question if an effort designed to revive the oil industry can help the Kern County communities that never benefited from it in the first place. (Taft is about 60 percent white, but Kern County overall is about 60 percent Hispanic.)
From Clark’s vantage point at the rec center, there isn’t much of an alternative. As he sees it, Taft’s relationship with companies like CRC is the reason his hometown has so much more to offer residents than the towns around it. In fact, CRC representatives reached out to Clark directly to talk about how the company’s carbon capture plan could benefit the parks district. Next week, the rec center will unveil a new sports complex with a soccer field, volleyball court, and bonfire area — all thanks to CRC. If carbon capture can renew Taft’s prosperity, Clark is all for it.
“They made a point to come to us, because they know we’re hurting,” said Clark. “They wanted to make sure that we’re OK.”
A woman walks down the street in Taft. Many residents of Taft and surrounding towns work in agriculture and have seen little benefit from the oil industry. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Most booms begin with the sudden discovery of a new resource: Think of the gold strike at Sutter’s Mill that drew hundreds of thousands of people to California’s mountain mines, or the Spindletop oil gusher in Texas that gave birth to an American petroleum boom almost overnight. The carbon boom in Kern County, if it comes to pass, will be very different. It will have been reverse engineered, built not around a new resource but around the loss of an existing one.
Oil production in Kern County has been falling for decades, but the industry’s rapid decline over the last 10 years has thrust the county of almost a million people into a crisis. In 2014, when crude prices started to slump, oil and gas facilities accounted for almost a third of all assessed property tax value in the county. Within two years, the value of the county’s wells had fallen by half, dealing a $61 million hit to the county’s budget and wiping out more than 4,000 of the county’s approximately 12,400 oil jobs. Those jobs were some of the highest-paying in the area, with many salaries more than triple the average county salary of around $50,000.
The petroleum industry has long been the bulwark of Taft’s economy. Here, the local rotary club commemorates the famous Lakeview oil gusher. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The crisis fell into the hands of Lorelei Oviatt, the county’s director of planning and natural resources, a powerful and divisive public official with an astonishingly intricate grasp of economics and environmental law. When Oviatt attended college in Ohio in the 1970s, she watched the Rust Belt economies around her collapse as manufacturing jobs fled overseas. She was determined not to let the same thing happen in Kern County, where she took over the planning department in 2010.
Oviatt’s strategy for economic revival could be summarized as “all of the above.” While she has tried to speed up permits for new oil drilling, she also hedged her bets by simultaneously permitting several large solar and wind farms in the county. In doing so, she helped make Kern County a national leader in renewable energy and filled the landscape around her home in the county’s eastern mountains with thousands of rotating wind turbines. But neither solar farms, which require very little labor after construction and are exempt from local property taxes in California, nor wind, whose footprint is limited by the county’s geography and transmission constraints, could match the economic windfall of oil.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” said Oviatt. “The state of California’s energy policies are pushing us at an accelerated rate, because climate change is an urgent issue, but they are not providing us any assurances that we can keep our libraries open, or that we can keep Meals on Wheels. So we’re kind of under the perspective here that Kern County needs to design our own future.”
Lorelei Oviatt, Kern county’s director of planning and natural resources, is a proponent of developing both carbon capture and green technologies in the county.
Brian L. Frank / Grist
Lorelei Oviatt, Kern County’s director of planning and natural resources, has promoted both oil and renewable energy in the county. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Kern County, California is undergoing one of the nation’s fastest and most turbulent energy transitions as its famous oil industry shuts down amid declining reserves and aggressive state climate action. The county is putting its faith in a new and untested industry—carbon capture as well as expanding green-energy alternatives such as wind and solar. It’s far from clear that the benefits of these new industries will alter the county’s longstanding political and social inequalities.
Wind and solar have been greatly expanded in recent years in Kern County. Local officials and oil companies have touted the benefits of combining green technology with carbon capture to offset the carbon footprint of the petroleum industry and provide needed energy to California.
Brian L. Frank / Grist
Oviatt has permitted almost 20,000 megawatts of solar and wind energy in Kern County, making the county one of the nation’s leading producers of renewable power. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Wind and solar have been greatly expanded in recent years in Kern County. Local officials and oil companies have touted the benefits of combining green technology with carbon capture to offset the carbon footprint of the petroleum industry and provide needed energy to California.
Brian L. Frank / Grist
The oil companies themselves approached Oviatt in 2021 with a potential solution. If Newsom and the courts wouldn’t let them drill more in Kern’s oil fields, maybe they could use those same fields to store carbon dioxide. Studies suggested that depleted oil wells and the underground formations that stretch out beneath them were an ideal place to store captured gas: The wells stretched more than a mile into the earth, they sat in remote fields that were miles away from any residential area, and the companies already had the expertise to move gas around underground. California was betting on carbon sequestration to help it achieve its climate goals, and a provision in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act nearly doubled the tax credits available to companies capturing carbon. Even conservative estimates suggest that the Central Valley could store at least 17 billion metric tons of carbon in perpetuity, which theoretically is far more than enough to get California to net-zero emissions.
There are two types of carbon capture: “point-source” capture, which involves sucking up carbon-filled air directly from pipes and smokestacks before they release it into the atmosphere, and “direct air capture,” a newer process that uses high-energy fans to extract carbon dioxide from ambient air. Kern County’s oil industry has thrown its weight behind both. CRC, Chevron, and Aera have all announced plans to pursue point-source capture at pipelines and power plants on their existing oil fields, and they also all won federal grants to build direct air capture facilities near Taft.
A power plant at the Elk Hills oil field near Taft, California. The oil field’s owner, California Resources Corporation, is seeking to capture and store carbon dioxide in the field. Brian L. Frank / Grist
No company was more devoted to this idea than California Resources Corporation. After exiting a debt-driven bankruptcy in 2020, the company began an aggressive pivot toward carbon capture, planning a slew of carbon storage projects in the Central Valley and pitching itself as a “different kind of energy company” to new investors. CRC later bought Aera in a transaction that the company said would double its “premium CO2 pore space.”
“In our efforts to mitigate climate change, we are … laser-focused on investing in and growing our carbon management business,” said Francisco Leon, the company’s CEO, in an open letter to investors last year.
It was easy to see the business case: CRC’s inaugural project at Elk Hills, which it calls “Carbon TerraVault I,” will capture gas from the oil field’s infrastructure and its onsite power plant, reducing the carbon emissions tied to the company’s traditional oil production and streamlining its compliance with California climate regulators.
Even more important, though, is the revenue CRC hopes to generate by selling space in its carbon wells. If other factories or companies want to reduce their emissions, they can pay CRC to bury captured gas underground. The company has already signed deals to store carbon for a hydrogen plant, a dimethyl ether plant, and a “renewable gasoline” plant, all in the works near Elk Hills. All told, Carbon TerraVault could store more than 46 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas, enough to theoretically negate the annual emissions of a million passenger cars.
Pipelines at the Elk Hills oil field. CRC plans to capture carbon dioxide from pipelines and power plants as well as other nearby factories and industrial facilities. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Oviatt saw something even bigger in CRC’s strategy, something that she thought could reverse the county’s economic tailspin. She drafted a proposal for what she called a “carbon management business park,” an interlinked complex of new factories that would produce hydrogen or steel — and store the carbon they emitted doing so in nearby oil fields. CRC, Chevron, and Aera had all expressed their interest in such projects, and Oviatt wanted them to know the county was open for business. She also invented what she termed a “cumulative impact oil and gas reservoir pore space charge” — basically a county tax on the space used for carbon capture.
When the county commissioned a third-party study to estimate the economic benefits of all this new industry, the results told Oviatt all she needed to know: A full-size carbon park would generate up to $56 million in tax revenue, about three-quarters of what the oil industry contributed in 2019. Even more importantly, it promised to provide a destination for former oil workers. The report was light on precise details, but it claimed that “at full buildout, the [business park] and related off-site activities would directly and indirectly support 13,500 to 22,000 permanent jobs.”
Oil industry signs adorn the walls of Jo’s Restaurant in Taft. The diner has long been a popular haunt for local oil field workers. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Despite the rosy projections, the scope of the challenge was not lost on Oviatt. CRC and the county were proposing to engineer the kind of industrial boom that typically happens by accident, and to do so in the span of a single decade. Success would require buy-in from almost every civic pillar of the county — not just its elected officials, industry advocacy groups, and three chambers of commerce, but also the institutions that support its residents from cradle to grave.
Kern County’s colleges and workforce development programs have already begun to pivot. After California Resources Corporation donated $2 million to the Kern Community College District in 2022, the district established the “CRC Carbon Management Institute” to create “customized workforce development opportunities” in the new industry. Bakersfield College debuted a new course on the subject, “ENER B52NC, Carbon Capture and Storage,” which included “discussion about the upcoming career opportunities in this field.” Even high schools are buying in; a handful of area teachers have been trained to teach carbon capture by experts from the world-famous Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley. At a recent high school career day in Taft, CRC passed out handheld signs that allowed students to announce they were “future leaders in carbon management.”
Oil companies like Chevron and Berry Petroleum provide most of the West Side Recreation and Park District’s funding and also contribute to schools and colleges in Taft. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Labor unions also endorsed the plan. Most oil field jobs in the county are nonunion, but construction trade unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers could benefit from hundreds of temporary construction jobs that such a buildout would create. Plus, the business park promises to bring thousands of new manufacturing jobs to a county that has historically had very few, given that any new factory would theoretically have instant access to a system that could neutralize its carbon emissions. It helped that CRC already had a cozy relationship with the trade unions; the company agreed in 2016 to hire union contractors for all its maintenance work, and the unions are now negotiating a new agreement with CRC that would cover the company’s carbon projects.
It’s easy to understand the reasoning behind these endorsements: Carbon capture promises to solve one of the most vexing problems of the just transition, the question of how to replace a high-paying and labor-intensive industry. A high school graduate in Kern County can make six figures working for Chevron or CRC without attending a day of college, and thousands of families in the area have attained middle-class prosperity thanks to oil field work. Many workers who’ve lost jobs with these companies have left Taft for states like Texas and North Dakota rather than transition to a new industry. They have taken their sales taxes and property taxes with them, exacerbating the area’s economic pain.
A flag supporting former president Donald Trump flies outside a home in Taft. Kern County is far more conservative than California as a whole; a majority of voters backed Trump in the 2020 election. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Still, Kern County is better off than many other coal- and oil-producing regions, because it is still growing: The county has recently secured new investments in hydrogen, biodiesel, and warehousing, and its solar and wind farms have created hundreds of temporary construction jobs. The county has done its best to help laid-off oil workers transition into these new fields. Its workforce development department holds “rapid response” orientations at oil fields where companies are about to announce layoffs and pays for laid-off workers to take construction or electrician training courses. Kern Community College District also runs a “21st Century Energy Center” that designs certificate programs for energy workers, allowing them to train in electric vehicle charger maintenance and solar panel installation.
But none of these industries has reached anything like the scale of the oil industry, and many of them are either too temporary or too low-paying to be more attractive than oil field work, which requires far more operational and safety expertise than working in an Amazon warehouse or building a solar panel — and thus tends to pay much better. Until a few years ago, the Kern Community College District’s renewable energy center still offered a rudimentary oil safety training called the “oil field passport.”
“To be honest, if our people get jobs out working in the oil field, that’s not a negative, because the ultimate measure is that they got a family-sustaining job,” said Dave Teasdale, the director of the 21st Century Energy Center. “But we do have the concern about, how much longer are they going to be working there?”
A pump jack in the Elk Hills oil field. Petroleum production in Kern County has been falling for decades, eliminating thousands of jobs in Elk Hills and other nearby fields. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The manufacturing complex at Oviatt’s new carbon business park promises to marry the best of both worlds: the labor intensity and remuneration of oil field work with the sustainability and growth potential of renewable energy. Plus, the skills needed to put carbon dioxide into an oil well are not that different from those required to take oil out of it, so many oil workers could transition to the new work with minimal retraining.
But the avalanche of jobs is hardly guaranteed. The state permit for CRC’s first cluster of carbon wells says that they will create 80 temporary construction jobs but only five permanent positions. The county won’t see the full benefit of carbon capture unless steel manufacturers and hydrogen startups flock to the county for CRC’s carbon storage space, and that depends on factors that are outside the county’s control. If companies find other ways to cut their emissions — or if the EPA halts the process of carbon storage out of safety concerns — the market for the carbon business park might vanish.
A sign in Taft promotes “Oildorado,” a celebration of the oil industry that takes place every five years. Brian L. Frank / Grist
That hasn’t stopped most of the county’s civic leaders from pinning their hopes on the project. Earlier this year, when the EPA hosted a public hearing to discuss the carbon storage project’s potential impact on underground aquifers, representatives from almost every major county institution attended to praise carbon capture as an economic boon. The EPA had already given provisional approval to CRC’s carbon storage effort, but everyone from union leaders to community college administrators showed up to stress their support for it.
The hearing was held in the farmworker community of Buttonwillow, which is almost 90 percent Hispanic, and a number of residents and environmental justice advocates showed up to voice their fears that the stored carbon dioxide would leak into the surrounding air. This has happened at least once before when a pipeline in Mississippi ruptured and hospitalized 49 people, but the EPA views such a calamity as unlikely in Kern.
California Resources Corporation argues that capturing and storing carbon dioxide in the Elk Hills oil field could be an economic boon for the county, offsetting the decline of traditional oil production. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Meanwhile, the boosters kept beating the drum of economic development. One oil company owner declared that the project would help “hundreds or thousands of young men and women to launch their careers,” while another former oil worker who taught at Taft High School said the project would help “those people who are being transitioned out of the petroleum industry” to keep working in the county. Les Clark and his rec center employees were there, too, and Clark took a turn at the microphone to celebrate the economic revival CRC promised to bring to Taft.
The EPA officials at the hearing only had the legal authority to consider the project’s effects on water quality, and many of them were only present because of their geological expertise. As dozens of locals stood up one by one to thank CRC for saving Kern from economic ruin, the regulators could only smile and nod.
The California Aqueduct runs through Kern County, delivering water to farm fields in the area. Many county residents work on almond and pistachio farms for very little pay. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Danny Gracia, 45, grew up in Buttonwillow, near the Elk Hills oil field and about 20 miles from Taft. At that time Buttonwillow was a hub for the American cotton industry, and the work was grueling. Gracia’s mother and father worked long shifts at the town’s massive cotton gin to provide for him and his three older brothers. As soon as Danny’s brothers reached adolescence they joined their parents at the gin to help support the family, making only $8 an hour each.
This was the status quo for tens of thousands of people in Kern County in the 1990s — and it still is today — but Gracia managed to escape it. He was still in high school when one of his brothers heard about a job opportunity on a drilling rig; soon he was making far more money than the rest of his family. When Gracia graduated high school, he joined his brother in the field for a summer job, then quickly took a permanent position expanding old wells. His company paid for him to rack up trainings and certificates, and within a few years he got a promotion to rig supervisor, which allowed him to buy a house at the age of 21. His mother was able to quit working at the gin and stay at home cooking for Danny and his brothers, who paid her for feeding them between shifts.
“My intention coming into the oil fields was to provide a good life for my families like my brothers and friends,” he told me. “I did more than that. I made a career out of it. I gave my family more than I ever thought possible.”
Danny Gracia has worked in the oil industry for more than 20 years. He grew up in a family of farmworkers and credits the oil industry with helping him achieve a middle-class existence. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Gracia’s story shows why so many of Kern’s institutions have rallied around carbon capture as a successor to the oil industry. But it also shows why many environmental and economic justice organizations are critical of the county’s plans: Carbon capture might help oil workers like Gracia, but it doesn’t do much for other people in towns like Buttonwillow who have never benefited from the oil industry — and who may have suffered harmful health effects from living near oil infrastructure. Agriculture employs around 30,000 people in Kern County, more than twice as many as the oil industry, but most of those workers make around $20,000 a year, and there are nowhere enough training programs or job openings in the oil industry for these workers to ascend the economic ladder. As some activists see it, the county is missing out on the opportunity for broader economic reform with its focus on mitigating the decline of oil.
“We talk a lot about oil workers, and I respect that, but at the same time, there are a lot of agricultural workers that are sustaining a lot of the economic health of the region,” said Daniel Rodela, a community organizer who grew up in an agricultural community near Taft and now works at a nonprofit called Faith in the Valley. “But obviously, in our community, there’s going to be folks that are going to be advocating for things remaining the way that they are.”
Oil companies like California Resources Corporation own much of the land around towns like Buttonwillow, but many low-income residents in these towns say they’ve never benefited from the oil industry. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The Biden administration has sought to alter this dynamic as it plows money into clean energy projects in fossil fuel communities. The federal grant that CRC received for its direct air capture facility requires the company to create a “community benefits agreement” for its carbon projects, including commitments to disadvantaged areas around Taft. As it applied for permits to store carbon underground, the company also had to build social consensus across the county, including in agricultural communities like Buttonwillow.
CRC did not shrink from this task. As the company pushed Carbon TerraVault, it erected billboards near highways and oil fields in Bakersfield, announcing that the company was “committed to our net-zero future.” It held dozens of meetings with city leaders, environmental organizations, unions, and the family members of the activist Cesar Chavez, who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in Kern County in 1962. CRC employees knocked on doors in Buttonwillow and the other communities around Elk Hills, taking selfies to document the effort, and sent out mailers in English and Spanish. They held a meeting at a movie theater in Taft that Clark’s rec center runs, playing a teaser video for carbon capture before screening the action movie Expendables 4. The company even dreamed up a partnership with Grandma Whoople Enterprises, an “anti-bullying entertainer” in nearby Bakersfield who agreed to conduct “elementary field trips for frontline community children.”
Children play with a slingshot in Taft. Social justice organizations have criticized the county’s proposed carbon capture plan for not doing enough to address the county’s economic disparities. Brian L. Frank / Grist
But these efforts don’t seem to have succeeded in building popular support for carbon capture, despite the wave of institutional endorsements for Carbon TerraVault. When the social justice nonprofit Dolores Huerta Foundation partnered with the University of California, Merced, to survey hundreds of disadvantaged Kern residents last year, asking them where they wanted to see more jobs, the top answers included solar, wind, and oil well abandonment. Carbon capture placed a distant seventh, with only 1 in 3 respondents endorsing it.
California Resources Corporation declined interview and comment requests for this story. A spokesperson for the company said it was in a “media quiet period” as it sought carbon capture permits. A representative for Chevron did not respond to questions about the company’s projects in Kern County.
The “Chevron S.T.E.A.M.” room at the West Side Recreation and Park District in Taft. Companies such as Chevron have pushed carbon capture as an economic lifeline for Kern County. Brian L. Frank / Grist
There are alternative visions for Kern County’s revival, ones that don’t involve a project sponsored by oil. Many environmental organizations have given particular attention to proposals that would employ workers to seal defunct oil wells and clean up the land and water around abandoned oil fields. A report published by the Sierra Club last year found that there are more than 40,000 idle or orphaned wells in the state, and CRC and Chevron own more than two-thirds of them. Plugging all these wells could create at least 13,000 jobs in Kern County alone, the report found — almost as many as the carbon business park, though the former would by nature be short-term. Hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law could help kickstart the effort. These jobs wouldn’t last forever, but they could allow much of Kern’s aging oil workforce to reach retirement without retraining. Temporary solar construction jobs could help fill the gap.
This remediation industry is at the center of a recent economic development proposal by the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, or CRPE, a decades-old environmental justice organization based in Kern County. Drawing a contrast with the county government’s embrace of carbon capture, the proposal lays out a vision for a new workforce that would seal old wells, remediate oil land, and build public infrastructure, supplemented by a state program that would replace the wages of laid-off workers as they seek new employment. It’s a vision where government rather than industrial initiative is the driving force.
Juan Flores, a lead organizer at CRPE and one of the authors of this plan, said that many people in disadvantaged parts of the county are wary of the oil industry because they’ve suffered the health impacts of oil production, like cancer and preterm births.
“I think on that rubric of [a] ‘just transition,’ the county has failed,” he said. “They continue to think, ‘how can we keep the oil industry alive?’”
Juan Flores, a community organizer at the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, rejects the county’s plan for a transition focused on carbon capture. He argues the county should focus on remediating abandoned oil wells instead. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Others argue that carbon storage in Kern County could function as a public good rather than a private business. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is proposing a “community-centered direct air capture hub” that would run like a public utility. Whereas CRC’s carbon complex could pitch in a share of its revenue to the county through property taxes, the Berkeley proposal could see locals elect a governing board that would manage the carbon facility directly and route its revenue toward impoverished areas.
These alternatives might not be that much more ambitious than Oviatt’s carbon business park, but realizing them would require a herculean amount of coordination between local governments, employers, schools, labor unions, and advocacy groups.
Kern County has shown that this coordination is possible, but only in service of certain ends. As the region’s largest taxpayers and most sought-after employers, oil companies have had an outsize influence over how the county navigates the energy transition. These companies have plowed millions of dollars into education and capital projects in the region even as oil itself declines, a stark contrast with the fate of Appalachian communities that saw their biggest employers cut and run during the collapse of coal. But the condition of this investment is that the county has to pursue economic development on the industry’s terms, and its transition to a low-carbon future will happen in a manner that benefits the industry rather than dismantling it.
The Oil Worker Monument in downtown Taft. The government of Kern County is seeking both to attract new industries and to preserve legacy industries like oil. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The risks of this dynamic became apparent in the weeks after the carbon capture hearing, when a state appellate court dealt Kern County’s oil industry another defeat. A panel of judges voted to throw out Oviatt’s attempt to permit thousands of new oil wells, ordering the county to draw up a third environmental review for the drilling plan. This effort could take the county as long as a year to complete, and even then it would be subject to new legal challenges. But Oviatt was undeterred, and she got right back to work revising the permits.
“There’s no oil drilling, there’s no more money — those companies can roll up and leave and decimate our community,” she said. “These companies have to have money in order to evolve.”
