Since the 1980s, the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that connects New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been known as “Cancer Alley.” The name stems from the fact that the area’s residents have a 95 percent greater chance of developing cancer than the average American. A big reason for this is the concentration of industrial facilities along the corridor — particularly petrochemical manufacturing plants, many of which emit ethylene oxide, an extremely potent toxin that is considered a carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency and has been linked to breast and lung cancers.
But even though the general risks of living in the region have been clear for decades, the exact dangers are still coming into focus — and the latest data show that the EPA’s modeling has dramatically underestimated the levels of ethylene oxide in southeastern Louisiana. On average, according to a new study published on Tuesday, ethylene oxide levels in the heart of Cancer Alley are more than double the threshold above which the EPA considers cancer risk to be unacceptable.
To gather the new data, researchers from Johns Hopkins University drove highly sensitive air monitors along a planned route where a concentration of industrial facilities known to emit ethylene oxide are situated. The monitors detected levels that were as many as 10 times higher than EPA thresholds, and the researchers were able to detect plumes of the toxin spewing from the facilities from as many as seven miles away. The resulting measurements were significantly higher than the EPA and state environmental agency’s modeled emissions values for the area.
“From over two decades of doing these measurements, we’ve always found that the measured concentrations of pretty much every pollutant is higher than what we expect,” said Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study. “In the case of ethylene oxide, this is particularly important because of the health risks associated with it at such low levels.”
There is no safe level of ethylene oxide exposure. The EPA calculates exposure thresholds for various chemicals by assessing the level at which it causes an increased incidence of cancer. For ethylene oxide, the EPA has determined that breathing in nearly 11 parts per trillion of the chemical for a lifetime can result in one additional case of cancer per 10,000 people. The higher the concentration, the higher the risk of cancer.
DeCarlo and his team found that, in three quarters of the regions where they collected data, ethylene oxide levels were above the 11 parts per trillion threshold. On average, the level was roughly 31 parts per trillion. In some extreme cases, they observed area averages above 109 parts per trillion. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Environmental Science & Technology. The study was funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which launched a campaign in 2022 to block the construction and expansion of new petrochemical facilities.
“We definitely saw parts per billion levels at the fence line of some of these facilities, which means people inside the fence line — workers, for example — are getting exposed to much, much higher concentrations over the course of their day,” DeCarlo said.
Ethylene oxide is emitted from petrochemical manufacturing and plants that sterilize medical equipment. Earlier this year, the EPA finalized rules for ethylene oxide emissions from bothtypes of facilities. The rule that applies to the manufacturing facilities in Louisiana requires companies to install monitors and report data to the EPA and state environmental agency. If the monitors record concentrations above a certain “action level,” companies will be required to make repairs. The rule is expected to reduce emissions of ethylene oxide and chloroprene, another toxic chemical, by 80 percent. Companies have two years to comply.
Heather McTeer Toney, who heads the campaign against petrochemical facilities at Bloomberg Philanthropies, told Grist in an email that the new measurements provide a baseline understanding as the EPA’s new regulations take effect. “The EPA’s new rule was necessary but should only be the start of how we begin to make things right here,” she said. “I’m hopeful to see levels go down, but the data suggest we have a long way to go.”
Tracey Woodruff, a professor studying the impact of chemicals on health at the University of California in San Francisco, said that the study “affirms that EPA is doing the right thing to regulate” ethylene oxide and that the agency “needs to improve their modeling data.” The levels identified by the researchers are 9 times higher than those estimated by the EPA’s models.
For residents in the area, the study’s findings confirm their lived experience. Sharon Lavigne, the founder of Rise St. James, a community organization battling the expansion of the petrochemical industry in St. James Parish, told Grist that the study “is a step in the right direction” and helps the community get a deeper understanding of what they’re being exposed to. But ultimately, without accountability and follow-through, monitoring data will do little to help her family and neighbors.
“These monitors are good, but in the meantime, people are dying,” she said.
In the winter of 2010, the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier strapped knee pads over her leggings and pulled on a pair of Levi’s blue jeans. The denim brand had just opened a popup shop on Wooster Street in lower Manhattan to promote a new clothing line designed around the motif of the “urban pioneer.” For the site of its ad campaign, the company chose Braddock, Pennsylvania, aestheticizing the town’s post-industrial landscape in a series of images plastered across magazine pages and New York billboards, and making it appear as a place in motion with ample economic horizons for any working American. “Go Forth,” one ad instructed the viewer over a black and white image of a horse flanked by two denim-clad supermodels. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Wearing combat boots, a cap, and thick industrial gloves, Frazier, who was born and raised in Braddock, crouched on the sidewalk outside the Manhattan store and began dragging her lower body back and forth over the pavement, first her thighs, then her knees. The moves were choreographed, taken from footage of steel industry workers on the job, and meant to create a dissonance between Levi’s glossy campaign ads and the reality of life in a mill town after a long period of decline. Frazier’s repeated motions made a rough, scratching sound, and the jeans she’d worn began to fray. By the end of the hour, they were in tatters, hanging from her legs.
The short film documenting the performance, LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s, shot by the visual artist Liz Magic Laser, is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, part of the exhibit “Monuments of Solidarity,” which showcases more than two decades of Frazier’s work. Themes of deindustrialization, environmental injustice, and unequal health care access are present throughout the photographs on view. From Braddock to Flint, Michigan, during the lead drinking water crisis to Lordstown, Ohio, in the aftermath of the General Motors layoffs, the artist captures communities facing economic declines, not as a single catastrophic event, but as a process initiated by the country’s power brokers and borne by ordinary working-class people. In many towns, what’s primarily left from the industrial past is the pollution, which continues to accumulate in the soil and the water, making people sick even as the hospitals shutter from disinvestment.
What is the purpose of this documentation? Frazier has said that she feels called “to stand in the gap between the working and creative classes,” to use photo-making as a means of resisting “historical erasure and historical amnesia,” symptoms of an economic and political system that discards communities whose labor it no longer deems valuable. She does this by not only taking pictures of working-class people, but also by treating her subjects as “collaborators” and displaying their testimonies alongside their portraits. Some of Frazier’s portraits may look like so much documentary work you’ve seen, but she’s not interested in photography as an isolated or objective act. No art for art’s sake; she invites communities to see themselves in a different way — as historical subjects, as agents in a broader struggle — a step toward believing that they are not powerless.
Louis Robinson, Jr., UAW Local 1714.
LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery
That the awareness of a person’s agency can alter their lived experience is not theoretical. For half a decade, I’ve reported on communities reckoning with legacy pollution and unbridled industrial expansion, and along the way, I’ve found that a deep sense of the past can have a galvanizing effect. To recognize oneself as belonging to a wider context or system is to also imagine a world beyond its daily injustices, one worth fighting for: What if the chemical company built someplace else? What if the district had the resources to offer its children a future?
I saw this firsthand in my home state, Louisiana, where a maze of petrochemical infrastructure clings to the banks of the lower Mississippi River, dumping cancer-causing chemicals into the air and water of predominantly Black towns, some of which were founded by formerly enslaved people more than a century ago. The people of “Cancer Alley” describe the plants as only the most recent installment in a long arc of racial injustice. Plantations once stood on the mammoth tracts of land where companies like Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, and BASF erected smoke stacks and ethylene crackers. By telling a different story about their communities, and placing themselves at the center of it, local advocates have had some success in challenging proposed industrial projects in court, arguing that building new facilities over the graves of their enslaved ancestors amounts to a violation of their civil rights and the desecration of historic sites.
Before Frazier could open anyone else’s eyes, she started at home. She was 16 when she first picked up a camera and began photographing herself and her family. In an article timed with the opening of “Monuments of Solidarity,” Frazier describes how she once felt a simple, but no less deeply felt, connection to Braddock as the place where she was born and raised. Witnessing its landscape through her camera’s viewfinder changed that relationship: “My spiritual bondage to Braddock was broken the instant light exposed my film’s silver halide crystals as I created “United States Steel Mon Valley Works Edgar Thomson Plant” (2013), hovering over the city with a bird’s-eye view,” she wrote. “Permeating the 21st century postindustrial landscape were the vestiges of imperial war, patriarchy, and the death and destruction of nature.”
“Monuments of Solidarity” opens with these early works, which are part of her collection “The Notion of Family” (2001-2014). Her primary subjects are herself and the matriarchs that raised her, her mother and grandmother. “I was combating stereotypes of someone like my mother and I,” who are often portrayed as “poor, worthless, or on welfare,” she explained in a 2012 documentary about her work. “We find a way to deal with these types of problems on our own through photographing each other.”
Frazier shot the images on black-and-white film using only the available light. The effect is a sense of intimacy, an impression that the women were asked to look up in the middle of what they were doing or feeling. There is her mother, working the bar at a local restaurant, and again, leaning over the sink with her chest exposed, a jagged scar across her breast, the mark of a recent surgery. In Frazier’s emergent story of herself, the town plays a role, too. Images of Braddock’s abandoned buildings, crisscrossing railroad tracks, and faded billboards are interspersed among the portraits. In one such photo, a mural on the side of a building reads: “JESUS SAID! YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN! OF WATER & SPIRIT.” Amid images of a run-down Braddock, this one serves a dual function, alluding to local officials’ failed attempts at revitalization and affirming that any rebuilding would have to come from the people themselves, the true witnesses of their own experience.
As a storyteller, Frazier doesn’t confine herself to one frame, and frequently uses multiple images to draw connections and offer more complete views of how she sees things. In this mode, Frazier recontextualizes the industrial plant as not just a place to work; she situates it within a broader experience of life. What happens in the plants follows workers into their homes. They suffer the health effects of prolonged chemical exposure. They endure the impacts of job loss.
Edgar Thomson Plant and The Bottom from A Despoliation of Water: From the Housatonic to the Monongahela River (1930-2013), 2013
LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery
In one two-panel work, an image of her mother on a hospital bed is placed beside a photo of a demolition site. The slant of her mother’s body and the rope of wires connected to her skull rhyme with the tangle of rebar and concrete of the crumbling building. A nine-panel series shows Frazier and her mother posing behind a patterned cloth, just their shadows visible. The names of the industrial chemicals in Braddock’s air adorn the wall around the frame: benzene, toluene, chloroform. “Your environment impacts your body, and it shapes how you perceive yourself in the world,” the photographer said in the documentary about her work. And in the triptych “John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie” (2010), a photo of the artist as a child is set between a historical plaque about John Frazier, a fur trader and frontiersman who aided George Washington in the French and Indian War, and Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist who built Braddock’s first steel factory. With this work, Frazier wrote, she is posing a question: “Weighed against the two colossal Scotsmen that dominate Braddock’s history, what is the value of a Black girl’s life?”
It’s well worth interpreting Frazier’s subsequent work as her own answer to that question. In 2016, she spent five months living in Flint, Michigan, photographing residents as they lived through the worst days of the city’s lead drinking water crisis. Like Braddock, Flint experienced a prolonged deindustrialization crisis, with General Motors slashing its local workforce from 80,000 in 1978 to under 8,000 by 2010. Over the same period, the city’s population nearly halved. The public health emergency started in 2014 after the cash-strapped local government elected to divert the city’s water source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River, causing levels of bacteria and lead in the city’s water supply to spike. While in Flint, Frazier met Shea Cobb, a local poet and activist, and her daughter Zion, whom she would come to document across the three-part series, “Flint Is Family.” Like Frazier’s mother, who helped stage and shoot many of the portraits in Braddock, Cobb became someone who had a say in the work, an artist in her own right.
“Shea Brushing Zion’s Teeth with Bottled Water in Her Bathroom, Flint, Michigan,” Flint is Family in Three Acts, 2016-2017 LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery
Over the years, Frazier followed Cobb and her daughter as they moved in with Cobb’s father in Newton, Mississippi, where they sought refuge from the lead crisis, lived closer to nature, and learned to care for horses. She also photographed the family as they moved back to Flint after Zion experienced discrimination in her Mississippi school. The photographs from Newton and the family’s return to Flint depart from the black and white of Frazier’s earlier photography, creating a sense of vibrancy and forward momentum in spite of the hardships they faced. In perhaps the most striking photograph of the series, Zion poses on a horse, one hand on her hip, flanked by her mother and grandfather, also on horses. The three generations stare down the camera defiantly.
“We laugh sometimes to throw off the frustration,” Cobb said in a text accompanying one of her portraits in the exhibit. “We brush our teeth, we laugh.”
“Zion, Her Mother Shea, and Her Grandfather Mr. Smiley Riding on Their Tennessee Walking Horses, Mares, P.T. (P.T.’s Miss One Of A Kind), Dolly (Secretly), and Blue (Blue’s Royal Threat), Newton, Mississippi” from Flint is Family in Three Acts, 2017-2019 LaToya Ruby Frazier; Courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery
In the end, Frazier’s work engages an enduring, if cliche question: Can art change things? On one of her trips to Flint, Frazier learned about the invention of an atmospheric water generator that could supply clean water to the most neglected areas of the city. When local officials indicated that they weren’t interested in the technology, Frazier decided to use funds from an exhibit of her early photos of Flint to pay for the machine’s transportation.
The process is incremental, a slow revealing of places and people once unseen, cast in new light. Can journalism change things?
Each year, nearly 1.3 million households across the country have their electricity shut off because they cannot pay their bill. Beyond risking the health, or even lives, of those who need that energy to power medical devices and inconveniencing people in myriad ways, losing power poses a grave threat during a heat wave or cold snap.
Such disruptions tend to disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic families, a point underscored by a recent study that found customers of Minnesota’s largest electricity utility who live in communities of color were more than three times as likely to experience a shutoff than those in predominantly white neighborhoods. The finding, by University of Minnesota researchers, held even when accounting for income, poverty level, and homeownership.
Energy policy researchers say they consistently see similar racial disparities nationwide, but a lack of empirical data to illustrate the problem is hindering efforts to address the problem. Only 30 states require utilities to report disconnections, and of those, only a handful provide data revealing where they happen. As climate change brings hotter temperatures, more frequent cold snaps, and other extremes in weather, energy analysts and advocates for disadvantaged communities say understanding these disparities and providing equitable access to reliable power will become ever more important.
“The energy system as it is currently designed is failing to adequately serve all customers,” said Shelby Green, a researcher with the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute. “Economically disadvantaged and minority people’s lives will be the ones most at threat.”
The research in Minnesota, led by Bhavin Pradhan and Gabriel Chan, found that households of color served by Xcel Energy experienced disproportionately more shutoffs and more frequent outages. Between 2020 and 2022, neighborhoods with the highest concentration of people of color were 47 percent more likely than other areas to lose power for more than half a day.
Pradhan told Grist he was surprised to find that those racial differences held even over a period of several years. “It wasn’t just one year where there was a spike, but consistently over time,” he said. The team analyzed data for groups of a few hundred households from 2017 to 2022 — a level of spatial detail that allowed them to isolate the effect of race at a neighborhood level. Xcel Energy has noted that its own grid equity analysis found similar racial disparities in shutoffs and outages. But the utility highlighted the age of a home as an equally significant factor for extended outages, and largely attributed cutoffs to a customer’s income. In a submission to the public utilities commission, the company noted that “disconnections are correlated with poverty, and — for a variety of deeply entrenched economic and social reasons that are not driven by the energy system — poverty is correlated with race.” It added that the utility offers programs to help customers cover their bills.
Erica McConnell, staff attorney at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, countered that the utility’s own disconnection data proves those efforts are insufficient. Xcel Energy is currently updating a five-year plan outlining future grid investments, a process McConnell says provides an opportunity for the utility and regulators to invest in communities disproportionately impacted by disconnections and outages. The Center and other organizations have also called on the state Public Utilities Commission to consider reinstating a moratorium on disconnections, introduced at the height of the pandemic, until it can determine how best to address these disparities.
One potential measure that could help is expanding community solar, battery storage, and other distributed energy resources. The University of Minnesota study found that the communities bearing an outsized burden of disconnections and outages also have the greatest capacity to host small-scale clean energy projects like rooftop solar — a point McConnell echoed.
“Historically, a lot of communities haven’t had access to those kinds of programs,” she said. In the long term, distributed energy resources that “encourage ownership by the communities and wealth-building could be a valuable way to address the issue” by ensuring residents have access to cheap, reliable power.
Green, the researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, noted that rather than simply pointing to broader issues, utilities like Xcel Energy should look at how their operations might be perpetuating or amplifying existing inequities.
Minnesota’s study is one of a few that have documented the role race plays in shutoffs. In Illinois, researchers found that from 2018 through 2019, electricity customers in predominantly Black and Hispanic zip codes were four times more likely to be disconnected than other areas, even when accounting for income and other factors. A national survey by researchers at Indiana University reached a similar conclusion: between April 2019 and May 2020, researchers found that Black and Hispanic households were roughly twice as likely to have their power shut off compared to white households.
Those studying energy insecurity aren’t sure exactly what causes so strong a correlation between race and shutoffs. Sanya Carley, a professor and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, cites two possible factors. One is energy burden, or the proportion of a household’s income spent on gas and electricity. The other is the age of their housing, since older buildings tend to be less energy efficient. But her team’s research has found that those reasons account for only around 10 percent of the racial disparities found in utility disconnections.
“There is something left unexplained about the energy experiences of Black and Hispanic households that needs to be identified to fully understand the prevalence of energy insecurity in these groups,” the study authors wrote. Green suggested another factor could be implicit bias in utility operations. A customer service representative, for example, could respond less leniently to a customer living in a community of color or low-income area. But overwhelmingly, energy policy experts told Grist that more data is needed to understand the extent of racial inequities and the forces driving them. Carley noted that unless required by law, most utilities don’t voluntarily share data on disconnections. Just six states, including Minnesota, Illinois, and California, require location data on utility shutoffs, typically at the zip code level. In most others that require reporting, utilities often share only the total number of disconnections each year. What’s more, those laws apply only to regulated investor-owned utilities, meaning municipal utilities or co-ops may not share any data at all.
Energy justice advocates have long called for widespread requirements for utilities to report on disconnections and who they impact. Pradhan, the co-author of Minnesota’s study, told Grist that access to such data could enable “more studies and more data-driven decisionmaking” on where and how utilities should invest in improving their grid and electricity service.
More urgently, Carley, Green, and others say consumer protections against disconnections can shield households from the brunt of life-threatening cutoffs. Already, 41 states prevent or limit utilities from disconnecting customers during bouts of extreme cold. But only 20 states, including Minnesota, have restrictions against shut-offs during periods of extreme heat — though that is beginning to change. After a deadly 2021 heat dome across the Pacific Northwest, lawmakers in Washington passed a law last summer preventing utilities from cutting off power to customers on days when a heat-related alert is issued.
“Power and water can be a matter of life and death during a heat wave,” Washington State Representative Sharlett Mena said at the time. “This legislation will ensure that every Washingtonian has the ability to protect themselves against extreme heat.”
Elephants are some of the most intelligent, compassionate and social creatures on Earth, forming tight-knit family groups, social networks and an extended “clan structure,” the members of which not only care for each other, but, as new research shows, call each other by name.
A new study by researchers from Save the Elephants — a conservation and research organization based in Kenya — ElephantVoices and Colorado State University (CSU) has found that when wild African elephants are called by their names, they answer back. They also address one another with name-like calls — a rarity among nonhuman animals.
“Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogues exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the named individual,” the authors wrote in the study. “Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver.… Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual.”
Using machine learning, the research team confirmed that elephants’ calls had a name-like feature that identified the intended recipient, which they had suspected based on earlier observations, a press release from CSU said.
When recorded calls were played back, elephants responded to those addressed to them with response calls or by approaching the speaker. Calls intended for other elephants did not receive as much of a reaction.
“[O]ur data suggest that elephants do not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls to address one another, which is more similar to the way in which human names work,” said lead author of the study Michael Pardo, who was a postdoctoral researcher for the National Science Foundation at Save the Elephants and CSU during the study, in the press release.
Learning to produce novel sounds is rare among animals, but a necessary feature of identifying individuals by name. A sound that represents an idea without imitating it is called “arbitrary communication” and is seen as a “next-level cognitive skill” that vastly augments the ability to communicate.
“If all we could do was make noises that sounded like what we were talking about, it would vastly limit our ability to communicate,” said co-author of the study George Wittemyer, a CSU professor at the Warner College of Natural Resources, as well as chairperson of Save the Elephants’ scientific board, in the press release.
Wittemyer added that elephants’ use of arbitrary vocal labels means they may also be capable of abstract thinking.
Their complex social systems, similar to those of humans, likely led to the evolution of arbitrary vocal labeling of individuals using abstract sounds, the researchers said.
“It’s probably a case where we have similar pressures, largely from complex social interactions. That’s one of the exciting things about this study, it gives us some insight into possible drivers of why we evolved these abilities,” said Wittemyer.
Elephant calls communicate not just their identity, but their sex, age, emotional state and context of their behavior.
Their vocalizations include low rumbles and trumpeting across a wide spectrum of frequencies, including infrasonic sounds too low for humans to hear. Group movements can be coordinated by using these calls over long distances.
“Our finding that elephants are not simply mimicking the sound associated with the individual they are calling was the most intriguing,” said Kurt Fristrup, a CSU research scientist with the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering, in the press release. “The capacity to utilize arbitrary sonic labels for other individuals suggests that other kinds of labels or descriptors may exist in elephant calls.”
The four-year study included 14 months of fieldwork in Kenya where the team recorded elephant vocalizations while following them in a vehicle. They captured approximately 470 distinct calls from 101 individual callers to 117 receivers in Amboseli National Park and Samburu National Reserve.
The study, “African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls,” was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Wittemyer noted that elephants are expressive and those who are familiar with them can easily read their reactions. Samples played back resulted in elephants responding positively and “energetically” to recordings of family members and friends calling to them, while calls directed to others did not garner an enthusiastic response or movement toward the caller, indicating they recognized their own names.
The researchers also discovered that, like humans, elephants don’t always use each other’s names in conversation. Addressing an individual by their name was more often seen when adult elephants were talking to calves or addressing others over long distances.
The research team said they would need much more data to be able to distinguish names within calls to determine if elephants give labels to things such as food, water and specific locations.
Elephants are listed as endangered, primarily due to habitat loss and poaching. The researchers said new insights into their communication and cognition as revealed in the study further bolster the case for conserving these magnificent animals.
Pachyderms need a lot of space because of their size. Wittemyer explained that, while humans conversing with elephants is still far off, the ability to communicate with them could enhance their protection.
“It’s tough to live with elephants, when you’re trying to share a landscape and they’re eating crops. I’d like to be able to warn them, ‘Do not come here. You’re going to be killed if you come here,’” said Wittemyer.
The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) has tightened fuel mileage standards for vehicles in an effort to transform the country’s auto market into one dominated by more climate-friendly electric vehicles.
“Not only will these new standards save Americans money at the pump every time they fill up, they will also decrease harmful pollution and make America less reliant on foreign oil. These standards will save car owners more than $600 in gasoline costs over the lifetime of their vehicle,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in the press release.
The new standards will save nearly 70 billion gallons of gas through 2050 and prevent more than 782.6 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions by mid-century.
“When Congress established the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program in the 1970s, the average vehicle got about 13 miles to the gallon. Under these new standards, the average light-duty vehicle will achieve nearly four times that at 50 miles per gallon,” said Sophie Shulman, NHTSA deputy administrator, in the press release.
The final rule will increase fuel economy by two percent annually for passenger cars with model years 2027 to 2031 and light trucks with model years 2029 to 2031. This will mean that by model year 2031, the average light-duty vehicle will get roughly 50.4 miles per gallon.
The new rules are not as strict as last year’s USDOT draft rules, which would have required that automakers make passenger cars with an average 66.4 miles per gallon and light trucks with a standard 54.4 miles per gallon before 2032, reported The New York Times. The proposal was weakened following lobbying from automakers.
Under the new final rule, van and heavy-duty pickup truck fuel efficiency will go up by 10 percent each year for vehicles with model years 2030 to 2032, while model years 2033 to 2035 will increase by eight percent annually. This will mean an average of roughly 35 miles per gallon fleetwide by model year 2035, resulting in a savings of more than $700 in gasoline costs for van and heavy-duty pickup owners.
“President Biden’s economic and climate agenda has catalyzed an American clean energy and manufacturing boom,” said national climate advisor Ali Zaidi in the press release. “On factory floors across the nation, our autoworkers are making cars and trucks that give American drivers more choices today than ever before. These fuel economy standards, rigorously aligned with our investments and standards across the federal government, deliver on the Biden-Harris Administration’s promise to build on this momentum and continue to spur job creation, and move faster and faster to tackle the climate crisis.”
NHTSA consulted with unions, consumers, environmental advocates, states, automakers and other stakeholders in the process of crafting the final rule.
The new rule sets standards consistent with the direction of Congress regarding the conservation of fuel and promotion of the country’s automotive manufacturing and energy independence, while at the same time giving the automotive industry flexibility on how to reach those goals.
“Though NHTSA does not consider electric and other alternative fuels when setting standards, manufacturers may use all available technologies – including advanced internal combustion engines, hybrid technologies and electric vehicles – for compliance,” the press release said.
The updated fuel economy standards set by NHTSA complement similar vehicle fleet emissions standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). NHTSA worked with the EPA to improve its standards while minimizing the costs of compliance, consistent with relevant statutory factors.
“These new fuel economy standards will save our nation billions of dollars, help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and make our air cleaner for everyone. Americans will enjoy the benefits of this rule for decades to come,” Shulman said.
For the first time, the amount of aquatic life — such as fish, clams and shrimp — that was farmed outpaced wild-caught aquatic life in 2022, according to the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
In the UN’s latest The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report, it found that aquaculture, or farmed aquatic life, produced 130.9 million metric tons in 2022. By comparison, the same year saw 92.3 million metric tons of aquatic life products from global capture fisheries. Inland fisheries generated 11.3 million metric tons, while marine capture produced 81 million metric tons.
According to the UN, this is the first time that aquaculture production has outpaced capture fisheries, although it said that both are essential for feeding the global population.
In total, fisheries and aquaculture production produced 223.2 million metric tons of aquatic life, most of which (185.4 million metric tons) was animals. About 37.8 million metric tons produced were algae, which is expected to be an important food source for the growing human population by 2050.
“FAO welcomes the significant achievements thus far, but further transformative and adaptive actions are needed to strengthen the efficiency, inclusiveness, resilience and sustainability of aquatic food systems and consolidate their role in addressing food insecurity, poverty alleviation and sustainable governance,” FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said in a press release. “That’s why FAO advocates Blue Transformation, to meet the overall requirements of better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life, leaving no one behind.”
The UN has noted that the rise in farmed fishing is a way to reduce food insecurity, as well as a way to minimize overfishing and unsustainable practices in the capture fishing industry, especially as the report predicted a 10% increase in aquatic animal production by 2032 to meet an estimated 12% increase in demand for consumption.
Overfishing is a major threat to aquatic life, contributing to the greatest rate of removing wildlife from their habitat than any other industry. According to the report, the amount of marine aquatic life that were fished within biologically sustainable levels declined in 2021 by 2.3% compared to 2019 levels.
But aquaculture is not without its environmental concerns. As KQED reported, aquaculture can pollute waterways from the excess nutrients and fecal waste generated in aquatic farms. For larger fish, smaller fish may still be wild-caught to feed the farmed fish. Farmed fish can also be vulnerable to disease transmission, and they may pass those illnesses on to wild fish, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported.
As The Associated Press reported, some of the most farmed aquatic life include freshwater carp, oysters, shrimp, clams, tilapia and prawns. Some of the most common captured aquatic life include skipjack tuna, Alaska pollock and Peruvian anchovies.
Last month, Oscar Hernández couldn’t sleep. The cook, who worked at a restaurant located inside of a Las Vegas casino, had found that after coming home from his shifts, his body would not properly cool down.
The air conditioning at work had been broken for about four months. Hernández worked eight-hour shifts during the restaurant’s brunch service, whipping up eggs, waffles, and fried chicken. He spent hours in front of a scaldingly hot grill — an older model that only ran at extremely high temperatures. Most often, his station on the line was in a corner, and it seemed as if all of the other heat sources in the kitchen — the gas burners, the four deep-fryers, the waffle iron — converged right there. Summer had not officially started, but Las Vegas was already seeing above-normal temperatures in May, sometimes reachingtriple digits. The fans that the owners put in the kitchen were not strong enough to cool down the space.
Extreme heat is nothing new to Hernández, who lives in Nevada and has worked in the restaurant industry for 22 years. But the situation at this non-union restaurant, a rarity on the Las Vegas strip, was becoming untenable. Sometimes it got so hot in the kitchen that Hernández preferred the heat outside, where at least there was a breeze. He had a headache that would not go away, and at home he sometimes found himself getting irritated with his children over small things.
“The heat inside a restaurant is different — it gets into your body,” Hernández said in an interview in Spanish. He knew doctors recommend getting adequate rest to help recover from overheating, but now he could not do even that. So he quit.
“I’m the only one who works in my family,” he said. “So I decided that I’d rather look for another job, one where I can work comfortably and then hopefully, I’ll be able to get some sleep.” He has since found a job at a different restaurant.
Stories of working under heat stress are common in the restaurant and food service industry, where back-of-house workers stationed “on the line” must stay on their feet for hours, cooking and prepping next to hot stoves, ovens, fryers, and more. But increasingly, this workforce must contend with an additional source of heat exposure: the record-breaking summer temperatures and heat waves taking place outside the kitchen. The confluence of indoor and outdoor heat has inspired some workers to unionize and fight for stronger safeguards at work. Employees at a Seattle-based sandwich chain recently secured historic protections against extreme heat in their first union contract. Labor organizers say they expect more food service workers to organize and bargain around heat in the years to come.
Of all the climate issues that workers are facing on the job, “heat, I would say, is one of the most common right now,” said Yana Kalmyka, a volunteer organizer for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a grassroots effort started out of the pandemic to support worker organizing.
Scientists now largely agree that all heat waves are made more likely or stronger because of climate change. That’s thanks to a relatively new but growing field called attribution science, which allows researchers to determine how much more likely extreme weather events are made by global warming. A report published last month found that in the last year, human-caused climate change led to a global average of 26 additional days of extreme heat.
Food workers have long been on the front line of worsening global temperatures. Farmworkers in the U.S. are necessarily exposed to the elements, but lack federal regulations around heat exposure and safety. Delivery workers must also travel through extreme heat (and other weather events) to earn a living, and may not have adequate places of rest throughout the day.
Similarly, restaurant cooks and servers can often be subject to extremely high indoor temperatures — and depending on their workplace setup, outdoor temperatures can exacerbate that heat stress. The nature of restaurant work — where quick service is key and kitchens stay open even during global pandemics — means that workers are expected to show up for shifts even during historic heat, when their safety and that of their customers might be compromised.
Jason Flynn, a Chicago line cook who has worked in restaurants for many years, said that the fast-paced, high-pressure nature of commercial kitchens, where workplace injuries are often simply toughed out, means workers may feel as if working through excessive heat exposure is their only option. The result of that, he said, is that “people are going to pass out, have strokes, or other kinds of long-term heat-related issues, like blood pressure and heart problems.”
Women and people of color are disproportionately represented in certain restaurant roles. For example, Hispanic people are more likely to be staffed as dishwashers or cooks, according to an Economic Policy Institute report. Many are immigrants or undocumented, and may fear retaliation or losing work for speaking out about working conditions. These are “populations who already experienced heightened impacts of climate injustice at home in their community,” said Kalmyka. “And their growing exposure to extreme heat at work is just another dimension of how inequitable the impacts of the climate crisis are.”
There are a few ways that outdoor heat exacerbates indoor heat for restaurant workers. Tall windows in restaurants and cafes can let in a lot of heat on sunny days — as is the case at multiple locations of Homegrown, the Seattle-based sandwich chain that recently won heat protections after unionizing.
Some Homegrown locations, according to workers, are in older buildings that lack adequate climate control. Most are set up for counter service, meaning the workers take orders in the same area where they toast and prepare sandwiches. “We’re in this big old brick building,” said Zane Smith, a worker-organizer at Homegrown. “And we don’t have very good air conditioning, and we have an oven. So the whole building becomes this big brick oven.”
Smith, a Seattle native, said heat was one of the main issues workers were rallying around when they first started talking about forming a union. Despite working indoors, Homegrown workers say they have been feeling the impact of Seattle’s record-topping summer heat. The city, which has historically lacked air conditioning, faced record-shattering heat in 2021, with temperatures as high as 108 degrees Fsending many to the hospital with heat-related illnesses. Attribution scientists said the unprecedented heat wave was made at least 150 times more likely by human-induced climate change.
“It’s always hotter inside than it is outside,” said Smith. “Every time it’s 80 degrees outside, it’s 85 in the store; when it’s 90, it’s 95 in the store.”
Homegrown workers set up a cooling station to help with the impacts of extreme heat.
Mike Rodriguez
In what is likely an industry first, the workers at Homegrown won language in their union contract in March that could help with that. The workers fought for a clause that allows them to receive time-and-a-half pay when temperatures in the store reach 82 degrees Fahrenheit and double pay when store temperatures reach 86 degrees F. (According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, when a workplace reaches 77 degrees F, it becomes potentially unsafe for workers to engage in “strenuous work.”)
Emily Minkus, who has worked for Homegrown for nearly six years, said her colleagues shared stories about working through heat stress and illness during bargaining sessions with management.
“We have people who have passed out. We have people who have had asthma attacks,” said Minkus. “We have locations where people were taking breaks in walk-in” freezers.
She credits these testimonials with convincing management that workers were asking for heat pay not because “ideologically, it’s good for the world. We’re doing it because we need it.”
Homegrown workers unionized with Unite Here Local 8, which represents about 4,000 hospitality workers in Oregon and Washington state. Anita Seth, the president of Unite Here Local 8, said the goal of the Homegrown heat pay language is to “really incentivize the employer to update and improve their heat mitigation systems,” which could include repairing and maintaining AC but also installing shade coverings for windows. It seems to be working — Minkus reported that when the AC broke down at her store this spring, she and her colleagues received heat pay for three days straight. The following week, a technician arrived to repair the equipment.
Homegrown’s management didn’t reply to Grist’s request for comment.
Homegrown isn’t the only food chain where heat and faulty cooling systems have become a labor issue. Last summer, workers at a Starbucks located in Houston, Texas, went on strike over extreme heat in their store.
“We did not have a functioning air conditioner last summer, and we were forced to work in temperatures between 80 and 85 degrees,” Madelyne Austin, a Starbucks barista organizing with Starbucks Workers United, said in a statement. “Our managers had known the air conditioner wasn’t working correctly for months, but refused to listen to us when we begged them to fix it.”
The Starbucks union is currently bargaining with the coffee chain over a “foundational framework” that will help shape contracts at the store level. Austin said that workers are fighting for “universal safety standards” to mitigate extreme heat.
In response to a request for comment, Starbucks said the company is committed to ensuring worker and customer safety and routined review conditions in stores. “Where issues in store jeopardize the well-being of our partners,” the company said in a statement, “we have been working with deep care and urgency to take action.” (Starbucks refers to all employees as “partners.”)
The Starbucks story demonstrates how sometimes the quickest way restaurant workers can secure their own safety during a climate emergency is to shut down. Starbucks Workers United confirmed that after the Houston store employees walked out, their AC was repaired.
Homegrown workers also understand this well. In addition to their heat pay language, they won a clause in their contract that allows them to clock out due to extreme heat in their store without facing disciplinary action. Minkus and Smith say workers have already been taking advantage of this provision, and that staff members are prepared to simply close up for the day if it ever gets too hot.
Minkus called working in 88-degree heat next to a 600-degree oven “miserable.” “And so a lot of workers are leaving early. We had one location shut down early because everybody was just so, so hot.”
Smith says that when Homegrown workers first approached the bargaining table, they were fighting for better air conditioning. “That’s still what we want,” he added. “Heat pay is great, but we would actually like the workplace to be a reasonable, safe temperature year round.” Until then, workers at Homegrown know they’ll be paid extra for working through the heat; Smith says that since the contract went into effect in March, his store has received 10 or 15 days of heat pay.
Seth notes that extreme heat is increasingly impacting workers across industries, most immediately outdoor workers, and that heat has come up in other food service contract negotiations. For Kalmyka, the connection between climate change and labor organizing takes on even greater urgency when considering productivity demands on workers. “Across the service industry and many other industries, we see employers continually trying to squeeze their workers to produce more for less,” she said, adding that “as a result, workers are often forced to work more and faster under pretty dire levels of short staffing,” which can exacerbate the effects of heat stress.
As the labor movement continues to be impacted by the climate crisis, organizers like Kalmyka are hoping to help workers draw connections between their struggle and the planetary one. To her, the connection between worker exploitation and human-induced climate change is clear. “Both have the same root cause, which is putting profits ahead of people and the planet.”
It’s no secret that a warming world will drive food prices higher, a phenomenon increasingly known as “heatflation.” What’s less known, but a growing area of interest among economists and scientists alike, is the role individual extreme weather events — blistering temperatures in Texas, a destructive tornado in Iowa — may have on what U.S. consumers pay at the supermarket.
At first glance, the answer might seem logical: A drought or flood that impacts agricultural production will, eventually, drive up prices. But it’s not that simple, because what consumers pay for groceries isn’t only reflective of crop yields or herd sizes, but the whole supply chain. That’s where it gets interesting: Economists are beginning to see a growing trend that suggests weather forecasts play a part in sticker shock. Sometimes the mere prediction of an extreme event — like the record-breaking temperatures, hurricanes, and wildfires forecasters are bracing for this summer — can prompt a spike in prices.
It isn’t the forecast itself to blame, but concerns about what the weather to come might mean for the entire supply chain, as food manufacturers manage their risks and the expected future value of their goods, said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University.
“When it comes to the climate risk on food prices, people typically look at the production side. But over the last two years, we learned that extreme weather can raise food prices, [cause] transportation disruptions, as well as production disruptions,” said Lee.
How much we pay for the food we buy is determined by retailers, who consider the producer’s price, labor costs, and other factors. Any increases in what producers charge is typically passed on to consumers because grocery stores operate on thin profit margins. And if manufacturers expect to pay more for commodities like beef or specialty crops like avocados in the future, they may boost prices now to cover those anticipated increases.
“The whole discussion about the climate risks on the food supply chain is based on probabilities,” Lee said. “It is possible that we do not see extreme temperatures this summer, or even later this year. We may realize there was no significant weather shock hitting the supply chain, but unfortunately that will not be the end of the story.”
Supply chain disruptions and labor shortages are among the reasons food prices have climbed 25 percent since 2020. Climate change may be contributing as well. A study published earlier this year found “heatflation” could push them up by as much as 3 percentage points per year worldwide in just over a decade and by about 2 percentage points in North America. Simultaneous disasters in major crop and cattle producing regions around the world — known as multi-breadbasket failure — are among the primary forces driving these costs. Crop shortages in these regions may also squeeze prices, which can create volatility in the global market and bump up consumer costs.
A drought that started in 2022 and ended earlier this year drove the Mississippi River to record lows, wreaking havoc with shipping and impacting the availability of commodities like corn and soybeans. Scott Olson / Getty Images
Historically, a single, localized heat wave or storm typically wouldn’t disrupt the supply chain enough to prompt price hikes. But a warming world might be changing that dynamic as extreme weather events intensify and simultaneous occurrences of them become the norm. How much this adds to consumers’ grocery bills will vary, and depends upon whether these climate-fueled disasters hit what Lee calls “supply chain chokepoints” like vital shipping channels during harvest seasons.
“As the weather is getting more and more volatile because of climate change, we are seeing this issue more frequently,” he said. “So what that means is the supply chain is getting more likely to be jeopardized by these types of risks that we have never seen before.”
Transportation barriers created by low water hampered the ability of crop-producing states in the Corn Belt to send commodities like corn and soybeans, primarily used for cattle feed, to livestock producers in the South. Thus emerged a high demand, low supply situation as shipping and commodity prices shot up, with economists expecting consumers to absorb those costs.
But although it seems clear that the drought contributed to higher prices, particularly for meat and dairy products, just how much remains to be gauged. One reason for that is a lack of research analyzing the relationship between this particular weather event and the consumer market. Another is it’s often difficult to tease out which of several possible factors, including global trade, war, and export bans, influence specific examples of sticker shock.
While droughts definitely prompt decreases in agricultural production, Metin Çakır, an economist at the University of Minnesota, says whether that is felt by consumers depends on myriad factors. “This would mean higher raw ingredient costs for foods sold in groceries, and part of those higher costs will be passed onto consumers via higher prices. However, will consumer prices actually increase? The answer depends on many other supply and demand factors that might be happening at the same time as the impact of the drought,” said Çakır.
In a forthcoming analysis previewed by Grist, Çakır examined the relationship between an enduring drought in California, which produces a third of the nation’s vegetables and nearly two-thirds of its fruits and nuts, and costs of produce purchased at large grocery retailers nationwide. While the event raised consumer vegetable prices to a statistically significant degree, they didn’t increase as much as Çakır expected.
This capricious consumer cost effect is due largely to the resiliency of America’s food system. Public safety nets like crop insurance and other federal programs have played a large part in mitigating the impacts of adverse weather and bolstering the food supply chain against climate change and other shocks. By ensuring farmers and producers don’t bear the brunt of those losses, these programs reduce the costs passed on to consumers. Advanced agricultural technology, modern infrastructure, substantial storage, and efficient transport links also help ensure retail price stability.
A 2024 study of the role climate change played on the U.S. wheat market from 1950 to 2018 found that although the impact of weather shocks on price variability has increased with the frequency of extreme weather, adaptive mechanisms, like a well-developed production and distribution infrastructure with sufficient storage capacity, have minimized the impact on consumers. Still, the paper warns that such systems may collapse when faced with “unprecedented levels of weather variability.”
Last year was the world’s warmest on record, creating an onslaught of challenges for crop and livestock producers nationwide. And this year is primed to be even more brutal, with the transition from El Niño — an atmospheric phenomenon that warms ocean temperatures — to La Niña, its counterpart that cools them. This cyclical change in global weather patterns is another potential threat for crop yields and source of supply chain pressures that economists and scientists are keeping an eye on.
They will be particularly focused on the Midwest and stretches of the Corn Belt, two regions prone to drought as an El Niño cycle gives way to a La Niña, according to Weston Anderson, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Those growing regions for corn and soybeans are what he’ll be watching closely as La Niña develops.
It’s something Jennifer Ifft, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University, is also thinking about. “If you have a very severe drought in the Corn Belt … that’s going to be the biggest deal, because that’s gonna raise the cost of production for cattle, hogs, poultry,” said Ifft. “So that would probably have the largest inflationary impacts.”
As of January, U.S. beef herd inventory was at its lowest in 73 years, which multiple reports noted is due to persisting drought that began in 2020. Americans, the majority of whom are already spending more on groceries than last year, are poised to soon see “record” beef prices at the supermarket. Food prices are also expected to rise another 2.2 percent in 2024, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service.
In a world enmeshed in extremes, our already-fragile food supply chain could be the next system teetering on the edge of collapse because of human-caused climate change. And costlier groceries linked to impending risk is the first of many warning signs that it is already splintering.
