Making homes more efficient and more electric is critical to combating climate change. But the undertaking can be expensive and beyond the financial reach of many families.
“For the federal government, this is the largest investment in history,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “These rebates have the potential to provide tremendous support, particularly for low-income households, in terms of reducing pollution, reducing energy costs, and making homes more comfortable.”
States will administer the rebate programs under guidance the Department of Energy released in late July. The money could become available to consumers as early as the end of this year, though the bulk is expected throughout 2024. In some cases, the incentives could cover the entire cost of a project.
Incentives will fall into two buckets, with about half designated for home electrification and the remainder going toward overall reductions in energy use. The funding will be tied to household income.
States must allocate about 40 percent of the electrification money they receive to low-income single-family households and another 10 percent toward low-income multifamily buildings. The rest of the electrification rebates must go to moderate-income households. These are minimums, said Kresowik, noting that states can, and some likely will, make even more of the rebates need-based.
The rebates also are larger for low-income households. On the electrification front, the guidelines call for up to $8,000 for heat pumps, $840 for induction stoves, and $4,000 to upgrade an electric panel, among other incentives. That said, no single address can receive more than $14,000 over the life of the program. The discounts are largely designed to be available when the items are purchased, which avoids having to paying out of pocket and waiting for a check from the government.
“These are advanced technologies. Therefore they often cost more, but they save more energy and help save the climate,” said Kara Saul-Rinaldi, president and CEO of the AnnDyl Policy Group, an energy and environment strategy firm. “If we want our low-income communities to invest in something that’s going to benefit everyone, like the climate, we need to provide them with additional resources.”
For the energy-reduction incentives, the type of technology used doesn’t matter as long as households lower their overall energy use. Homeowners could do this by installing more insulation, sealing windows, or upgrading to more efficient heating and cooling systems, among other options. The rebate amounts are a bit more complex to calculate but are based on either modeled or actual energy savings, and increase if you save more energy or are low income.
Kresowik says efficiency retrofits can cost $25,000 to $30,000 or more. For many people, the Inflation Reduction Act could help put such projects within reach for the first time. While a homeowner cannot claim both an electrification and efficiency rebate for the same improvement, the incentives can be added to other federal weatherization and tax credit initiatives and any offers from utility companies.
But the latest rebates will be available only after states have set up their respective programs. For that reason, “the families who most need that help will be better served to wait if they can,” said Sage Briscoe, director of federal policy for the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America. Of course, that may not be feasible if, say, an appliance breaks, but doing so could potentially net a low-income household thousands of dollars in savings.
“The key is to start planning,” Kresowik said of the coming rebates. Talking to a contractor now, he said, can position households to take advantage of the programs as soon as they start accepting claims.
The rebates, though, may not be available everywhere. Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and South Dakota have so far declined to apply for Inflation Reduction Act funds and could reject the home energy rebates as well. That means a sizable number of Americans may not see a boon from these latest rebates, either because they earn too much money or live in a state that refuses to participate in IRA programs.
Federal tax credits, however, are available now to help anyone pursuing projects such as installing solar panels or heat pump water heaters. The credits reset annually, but because they offset tax liabilities, the ability to fully utilize them often depends on a filer’s tax burden.
“There are those among us who are privileged enough that they probably can go ahead and start making those investments now,” said Briscoe. Rewiring America is in the process of launching tools to help people plan for, claim, and receive incentives, which can be complicated. But experts say that even this influx in funding won’t ultimately be enough to meet the need nationally.
“This is just a drop in the bucket,” said Saul-Rinaldi. Kresowik notes that there are 26 million low income households that still use fossil fuels for heating. At $30,000 each, electrifying those homes alone would cost $780 billion.
Saul-Rinaldi also sees a risk that the current program is limited by quirks in the guidance from the Department of Energy that may keep some contractors from participating, such as mandating in-person energy audits, even when utility data would suffice. But, she says, there is still time to smooth out those issues, and she hopes that the programs are “so successful that there is a wide demand across the country for additional funds so that we can continue to upgrade and electrify America’s homes.”
Ideally, Briscoe wants to see high-efficiency appliances and design become the norm, and she thinks incentives can help push the market in that direction. Previous federal rebate efforts, such as a Great Recession stimulus bill included $300 million in appliance efficiency funding, didn’t quite do that. But Briscoe says this latest attempt through the Inflation Reduction Act is not only orders of magnitude more ambitious but also more holistic and works in concert with other programs — such as installer training initiatives — to ensure the rebates aren’t operating in a vacuum.
“There’s some real urgency to making sure that we try to get the fossil fuels out of our homes,” said Briscoe. “The climate isn’t going to wait.”
Scientists are managing the critically endangered kākāpō population in New Zealand using population sequencing. In addition to helping with kākāpō conservation, the project could also provide more information for similar projects to protect other threatened species.
“Using technology created by Google, we have achieved what is likely the highest quality variant dataset for any endangered species in the world,” Joseph Guhlin, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Otago, said in a statement. “This dataset is made available, through DOC and Ngai Tahu, for future researchers working with Kākāpō.”
The researchers created whole-genome sequence data for almost the entire remaining kākāpō population, or about 169 individuals as of 2018. The study led to the creation of a reusable code and other tools for experts in conservation genomics to use to protect other vulnerable species. It also created a deeper understanding of kākāpō biology, exploring susceptibility to diseases, egg fertility, growth and other biological factors. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“Kākāpō suffer from disease and low reproductive output, so by understanding the genetic reasons for these problems, we can now help mitigate them,” explained Andrew Digby, the university’s Science Advisor for Kākāpō Recovery at the Department of Conservation. “It gives us the ability to predict things like kākāpō chick growth and susceptibility to disease, which changes our on-the-ground management practices and will help improve survival rates.”
Kākāpō, a nocturnal type of large, flightless parrot, is endemic to New Zealand and faces threats from disease, predators and infertility, according to the New Zealand Department of Conservation. These birds rely on fruiting rimu trees for breeding, so they breed only every few years, Reuters reported. Because they don’t fly, kākāpō are especially vulnerable to non-native predators who have been introduced to New Zealand over the years.
Conservation efforts are helping the population recover, though. There were only 86 individuals in 2002, Deidre Vercoe, the operational manager for government’s Kākāpō Recovery program, told Reuters. From 2021 to 2022, the population increased 25% to 252 individuals.
The authors of the study on kākāpō sequencing hope that their research will help inform kākāpō conservation decisions and further conservation efforts for other species.
“The Kakapo125+ project is a great example of how genetic data can assist population growth,” Digby said. “The novel genetic and machine learning tools developed can be applied to improve the productivity and survival of other taonga under conservation management.”
The sequencing project was funded by Genomics Aotearoa, a group of research institutions and universities focused on genomics and bioinformatics in New Zealand.
Hurricane Idalia made landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida at 7:45 a.m. today after strengthening into a Category 3 storm in the Gulf of Mexico.
Idalia began as a tropical storm that passed to the west of Cuba, cutting off power and causing major flooding and evacuations.
Florida’s coastal residents were anticipating a surge of flood waters of up to 16 feet, with warnings posted from Sarasota to Apalachicola Bay, reported Reuters.
“We fear that residents will walk outside, see it’s sunny outside and think everything’s fine. But there’s more water coming,” said Rob Herrin, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokesperson, as CNN reported. “There’s still so many hazards after the winds and rains have cleared.”
When Idalia made landfall sustained winds were 125 miles per hour, making it the strongest hurricane to hit Big Bend since records started in 1851, The Weather Channel said.
Idalia made landfall in Taylor County at Keaton Beach this morning at 7:45 a.m., reported Reuters. Waters had reached eight feet at a monitoring station in Steinhatchee, two feet higher than the flood stage of six feet.
“Folks, this storm is not over. If you are in a safe location, please remain there,” said Emergency Management Director Timothy Dudley, pointing out that the cresting of local waterways would occur with high tide at 2:30 p.m., as Reuters reported.
Officials said there was widespread flooding and damage in Hillsborough County, an area with 1.5 million residents.
By 11 o’clock this morning, Idalia’s maximum sustained winds had lowered to 90 miles per hour, making the storm a Category 1 hurricane as it moved into Georgia and South Carolina, where hurricane warnings and other storm advisories have been issued.
“Idalia is likely to still be a hurricane while moving across southern Georgia, and possibly when it reaches the coast of Georgia or southern South Carolina late today,” the hurricane center said today, as reported by CNN.
More than 272,000 residences and businesses were experiencing power outages in Florida, according to PowerOutage.us.
Four to eight inches of rain could pummel the region through tomorrow, with some isolated places experiencing up to a foot of rain, warned the hurricane center, as Reuters reported.
“Time will tell on how bad it is… and we could have more” storms, said Deanne Criswell, administrator of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, as reported by Reuters. Criswell added that it has already been “a very active hurricane season.”
Florida has now had four major hurricanes in the last seven years, including last year’s Ian, Michael in 2018 and Irma in 2017.
A new study by Joshua Pearce of London’s Western University and Richard Parncutt of the University of Graz in Austria has found that, if global heating reaches or surpasses two degrees Celsius by the year 2100, there is a high probability that over the next century humans, mostly the wealthiest, will be responsible for the deaths of approximately one billion mostly poorer humans.
Many of the most powerful and profitable businesses on the planet are part of the oil and gas industry, which is both indirectly and directly responsible for over 40 percent of carbon emissions, which impact billions of lives in some of the world’s most remote communities that have the least resources, reported Western News.
The study advises a substantive and immediate lowering of carbon emissions, as well as accelerated action by governments, corporations and citizens to decarbonize the global economy, with the goal of minimizing the number of human fatalities.
“Such mass death is clearly unacceptable. It’s pretty scary really, especially for our children,” said Pearce, who is Western’s John M. Thompson chair in information technology and innovation and the lead author of the study, as Western News reported. “When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom. We’ve done that here too and it still doesn’t look good.”
The study, “Quantifying Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Human Deaths to Guide Energy Policy,” was published in the journal Energies.
For the study, the researchers reviewed more than 180 scientific articles and found that they intersected on what is called the “1,000-ton rule,” which estimates that one premature death will be caused each time about 1,000 tons of fossil fuels are burned.
“Energy numbers like megawatts mean something to energy engineers like me, but not to most people. Similarly, when climate scientists talk about parts per million of carbon dioxide, that doesn’t mean anything to most people. A few degrees of average temperature rise are not intuitive either. Body count, however, is something we all understand,” said Pearce said, as reported by Western News. “If you take the scientific consensus of the 1000-ton rule seriously, and run the numbers, anthropogenic global warming equates to a billion premature dead bodies over the next century. Obviously, we have to act. And we have to act fast.”
Pearce hopes that more industry leaders and policymakers will begin to face the consequences of humans’ reliance on fossil fuels when confronted with updated metrics and language surrounding global warming.
“As predictions of climate models become clearer, the harm we are doing to children and future generations can increasingly be attributed to our actions,” Pearce said.
Once the cause and effect between greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting consequences to the environment and human health become clear, so do the liabilities.
The study said that, in order to mitigate climate change, energy policy should focus on the main areas of the total replacement of oil, natural gas and coal with zero carbon fuels like electricity and hydrogen derived from renewable sources like wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and hydropower; improvements in energy efficiency and conservation; carbon taxes to replace carbon subsidies; and the development of carbon waste management technologies, as well as regenerative agriculture and natural carbon sequestration.
“To be clear, predicting the future accurately is hard. The 1000-ton rule is only an order of magnitude best estimate. The number of caused deaths will likely lie between a tenth of a person and 10 people per 1,000 tons. Regardless, the bottom line that we need to act fast is still crystal clear,” Pearce said, according to Western News. “Global warming is a matter of life or death for a billion people. Almost everyone agrees that every human life is valuable, independent of age, cultural or racial background, gender or financial resources. Therefore, the energy transition will have to change much, much faster, starting now.”
This year’s first major hurricane made landfall early Wednesday morning, bringing 125 mile per hour winds to Florida’s Big Bend region. Officials and residents told Grist that the sparsely populated coastal area, which stretches from near Gainesville to just south of Tallahassee, was wholly unprepared for Hurricane Idalia, a Category 3 storm fueled by exceptionally hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The area hasn’t been struck directly by a hurricane in more than a century.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mandy Lemmermen, the battalion chief for the Dixie County fire department, who was hunkered down in an operations center in the county seat of Cross City when she spoke to Grist on Tuesday evening. “You can’t survive this.”
After taking shape in the Gulf of Mexico, Idalia underwent a process known as “rapid intensification,” swiftly strengthening from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane as it passed over the hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico, then weakening just before it made landfall. The most devastating Atlantic hurricanes of the past few years, including 2022’s Ian and 2021’s Ida, have all undergone this process. Scientists believe that climate change is making it more common.
By early morning Wednesday, just minutes after landfall, the storm had already pushed more than six feet of storm surge over the island town of Cedar Key, submerging many buildings in the beachfront area. A similar tide was flowing up the Steinhatchee River, where it was poised to cause similar flooding. More than 160,000 customers in the state had lost power, and more than 20 counties across the state had issued some form of mandatory evacuation order. Areas as far north as Georgia and South Carolina were expected to see rain damage, and areas as far south as Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg had already experienced flooding as winds pushed storm surge into city streets.
But the longest-lasting effects are likely to be in the rural communities along the remote Big Bend coast.
“It’s Waterworld there,” said Kathryn Frank, a professor of urban planning at the University of Florida who has worked with Big Bend communities on climate adaptation. “You have water coming from every direction, and that’s why it hasn’t developed much.”
Because the area is so flat, storm surge reaches farther inland than it does even in other parts of Florida. In Levy County, for instance, Frank’s team found that a Category 3 storm could inundate terrain as far as 20 miles away from the water’s edge.
The coastal shelf along the Big Bend is shallow and flat as well, which leads to much higher waves, increasing the depth of hurricane flooding. The National Hurricane Center estimated yesterday that Idalia would produce 12-foot surges along the coast, but Dixie County’s own hazard mitigation plan estimates that surges could reach as high as 24 feet, large enough to inundate almost every structure in coastal towns like Horseshoe Beach. The fact that the storm is arriving during a full moon, which produces higher tides, will make the surge even worse.
The region also floods from the inland side, because it sits atop the Floridan Aquifer, an underground water layer that discharges up to the surface when it rains. Rivers like the Suwanee and the Steinhatchee often flood for weeks at a time. The vast majority of land area in areas like Taylor County sits inside the hundred-year floodplain, indicating a level of risk that many cities like Houston have deemed unsustainable for development.
To make matters worse, residents often have limited resources to deal with flooding. The median household income in Dixie County is around $44,000, far below the national average. A recent report from United Way of the Big Bend found that far more families in the region are struggling to meet basic needs than in the rest of the state.
Some residents in Dixie County have already experienced prolonged displacement from even minor rainfall events. A series of floods back in the spring and summer of 2021 brought five feet of water to many houses in the county’s Old Town neighborhood, which sits on the Suwannee River, and locals were still waiting to get back into their homes in January of the following year.
“It feels like living in a swamp,” said Deena Long, who moved to a manufactured home in the area from Georgia in 2018. “The first two years, everything was underwater. It came right up to our trailer and our well house, and everything else was totally underwater, and it was the same for our neighbors on both sides.”
Long said she and her husband have to wear galoshes to walk through her yard, and they often see snakes floating around in the water. Nevertheless, she planned to stick it out at home during Hurricane Idalia. Long and other residents have blamed the county for not maintaining the area’s drainage infrastructure.
“There’s not enough culverts, there’s not enough drainage. It’s poor planning on the government’s part,” she told Grist. “It’s been a strong conversation, but nothing ever happens. It gets pushed back under the rug.”
Even several miles inland, in areas that sit higher off the ground, the winds were substantial on Wednesday.
“There are trees down in all directions,” said Rebecca Greenberg, a criminology graduate student who stayed behind in Dixie County to keep track of her dogs and horse. “I can hear loud booms. I think it’s trees or trailers or propane tanks getting blown down.”
Having struggled with even minor flood events, the Big Bend’s infrastructure is nowhere near prepared for a storm of Idalia’s magnitude. As of 2015, more than 30 percent of residents in Taylor and Dixie counties lived in mobile or manufactured homes, which can sustain huge damage or collapse altogether during big wind storms. A large portion also use residential septic systems, which can fail and backflow into homes. When Frank conducted a study of sea-level rise in Levy County, her team found that many coastal roads and wastewater plants would sink several feet underwater during even a mild storm.
“Even during dry seasons, it’s wet, so when you get a storm like this one, with a big storm surge, it can travel really far inland,” said Frank. “That’s very bad for environmental health.” It’s possible that septic and drinking water systems could be inoperable for weeks or months, she added.
Unlike in rural parts of the Louisiana coast, there are no levees or shoreline-protection projects that can control flooding. In the three coastal counties in Idalia’s path, which have a combined population of around 80,000, just 2,000 households buy flood insurance from the federal government, according to FEMA data. The state’s Resilient Florida grant program, which has spent millions on climate adaptation projects, has only funded a few planning initiatives in the Big Bend.
The roads in Long’s area are made out of dirt, so they become muddy and impassable even during mild rain. During the worst flood events over the past few years, she has relied on her neighbor to drive her out of the area on a tractor.
Idalia’s track over the rural Big Bend will likely ensure that overall monetary damages from the storm are far lower than for storms like Hurricane Ian, which hit a densely populated area. But for the people who do live in the Big Bend, the devastation could be total, according to Frank.
“The eye is going straight at these little towns, like Steinhatchee, that are just trying to make the best of it,” she said. “My heart goes out to that little little small town.”
Under New York’s Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, through a set of doors wedged between a parking garage and a pizza shop, a gray and gold throne emblazoned with the letters “S” and “R” sits behind a pair of velvet ropes. The letters stand for “Slick Rick,” one of hip hop’s pioneering rappers, whose hits have been sampled more than 1,000 times by acts ranging from Snoop Dogg to Miley Cyrus.
Slick Rick himself donated the ornate chair to the Universal Hip Hop Museum, the genre’s long-awaited answer to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, set to open in early 2025 as part of a brand-new development on the other side of the Deegan. The museum will be a slightly belated anniversary tribute to hip hop, which turned 50 earlier this month. For now, Rick’s throne resides at the museum’s pop-up location in the Bronx Terminal Market.
“That basically is one of our most important artifacts,” the museum’s president, Rocky Bucano, told me on a recent visit. Bucano, 63, stands six foot eight, with matching stature in the hip hop world: The trailblazing DJ now works to preserve the larger-than-life legacies of artists like Rick. “When he put out his debut album on Def Jam, he took that throne with him on tour every day,” he added.
Universal Hip Hop Museum President Rocky Bucano speaks alongside Busy Bee, in white shirt, and architect Michael Ford, in black, to a crowd gathered in front of the museum during the Hip Hop 50th Birthday Jam on August 11, 2023, in New York City. Richard Bord / Getty Images
It’s no secret that hip hop’s most famous artists often glorify conspicuous consumption. Many of the genre’s lyrics and music videos create an aspirational energy around gas-guzzling luxury cars and private jets. Yet hip hop’s roots lie in activism, and it has long served as a voice on everything from systemic police brutality to discriminatory housing policies. The genre has also been sounding the alarm on what we now call environmental justice.
In recent years, many of hip hop’s New York havens have felt the impact of extreme weather events — from the lethal floods in Run D.M.C.’s Queens to the danger of rising waters in Cardi B’s South Bronx. The creative community has rallied in response to these climate-driven disasters, with stars donating their time and money to relief efforts. And it’s been reflected in the music as well — beyond the occasional nod from the likes of Pitbull, whose 2012 dance-oriented album Global Warming had more in common with Nelly’s hit single “Hot in Herre” than with David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, and beyond the nom-de-plume of Migos cofounder Offset (a merely coincidental reference to carbon credits).
Hip hop’s relationship to the environment, both in terms of lyrics and political activism, goes back to its very beginning, when smoke from apartment fires blackened the skies of the 1970s South Bronx. And yet its role in advocating for climate solutions has largely gone unnoticed.
“People have spent time bobbing their heads to our stories of this despair and not seeing it as a call to action,” said Michael Ford, the self-proclaimed “Hip Hop Architect” who designed the museum (and who was featured on the 2019 Grist 50 list). “Now, I think, is this generation’s opportunity to go back and look at 50 years of these unsolicited, sometimes unfiltered and raw stories of environmental injustices and climate change.”
A burned lot in the South Bronx, 1973, the same year hip hop was born. In the 1970s, fires ravaged much of the borough, with several census tracts losing the majority of their buildings. Vergara, Camilo J. / Library of Congress
Hip hop dates back to August 11, 1973, when Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell hosted a back-to-school party in a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. His revolutionary innovation: physically manipulating two copies of the same record in real time to extend the “breaks,” or the danceable interludes, of popular songs.
Back then, the genre’s activism centered around the built environment, calling attention to egregious living conditions in places like the South Bronx. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 classic “The Message” served as perhaps the most potent example: “I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise / Got no money to move out, guess I got no choice.”
“What is today called the climate crisis was in full effect in the underserved communities when this song was released,” said the Universal Hip Hop Museum’s Kate Harvie. “Whatever has been happening to the climate was first to affect unprotected and unrepresented lands.”
But as hip hop heated up through the 1990s, environmental advocacy took a back seat, at least until Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. The storm uprooted scores of New Orleans residents, including the founders of Cash Money Records — whose roster, at the time, included Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, and Drake. (The company has since decamped to Miami.) Chief executive Bryan “Birdman” Williams told me he lost “20 houses, 50 cars, and memories” in the disastrous flood surge.
Artists like Jay-Z and Diddy donated seven-figure sums to Katrina relief efforts. Others, including Lil Jon and Ludacris, performed on charity telethons to aid disaster recovery. During one, Kanye West, incensed over the federal government’s feeble response in communities of color in New Orleans, famously declared “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”
Recording artist Remy Ma performs at David Banner’s Hurricane Katrina Benefit Concert At B.B. King on September 19, 2005, in New York City.
Ray Tamarra / Getty Images
People mingle outside David Banner’s Hurricane Katrina Benefit Concert at B.B. King on September 19, 2005, in New York City. Ray Tamarra / Getty Images
It wasn’t just musicians who were incensed. Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr., a Louisiana native and president and CEO of the nonprofit group Hip Hop Caucus, also noted the disproportionate damage to New Orleans’ poorest neighborhoods. “Climate justice is racial justice, and racial justice is climate justice,” said Yearwood. “It was the Ninth Ward that was devastated and not the French Quarter.”
Yearwood got his start as a minister in 1994 and served as director of student activities at the University of the District of Columbia before signing on to run Diddy’s Vote or Die! initiative ahead of the 2004 presidential election. He saw unique potential in the hip hop community to mobilize for political, social, and environmental causes — including climate change.
Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, speaks at the Hip Hop Caucus’ inaugural A. Donald McEachin Environmental Justice Award reception at the House Rayburn Office Building on April 20, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Shannon Finney / Getty Images
Black neighborhoods often sit in flood-prone areas, a consequence of historic segregation. Environmental racism — which also includes dumping of toxic materials and building highways that cut through communities of color — has led to higher rates of diseases from asthma to cancer. And climate change will continue to have a disproportionate impact, even beyond flooding: If the planet warms by just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F), Black people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with deadly heat waves.
Through the Hip Hop Caucus, Yearwood and others have raised awareness of these realities while also advocating for solutions. Early initiatives included the Green the Block campaign in the mid-aughts, when the Caucus worked with Drake during his tour to “educate his fans about the benefits of going green.” Post-Katrina, Yearwood established the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign to support survivors. In 2013, the Caucus teamed up with the Sierra Club to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, bringing some 35,000 people to the National Mall — then the largest documented climate protest.
The Hip Hop Caucus’s push for climate justice circled back to the music. In 2014, the group helped organize HOME (Heal Our Mother Earth), an album dedicated to saving the planet. On the track “Trouble in the Water,” the rapper Common delivered the line: “We think our opponent is overseas / But we messin’ with Mother Nature’s ovaries.”
The overlap between hip hop and climate activism is not unique to the United States. Some of hip hop’s most urgent activism is taking place in the Global South, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In Kenya, there’s rapper King Kaka, the driving force behind a brand called Majik Water, which harvests clean drinking water from the air and aims to hydrate drought-prone communities. Dave Ojay, an artist manager, runs a global environmental justice campaign called My Lake My Future to help save places like Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest.
Some rappers from the continent are even trying to bring the message to U.S. audiences, like Henry “Octopizzo” Ohanga, who traveled to New York for the United Nations’ 2023 Water Conference. Though he grew up in Nairobi, he spent many years of his youth in his familial hometown of Saiya, in Kenya’s rural west. His relatives there have reported rapid declines in crop yields in recent years.
Hip hop artist Henry Ohanga, aka Octopizzo, who hails from Kenya’s largest slum, Kibera, in Nairobi, sits in a recording studio in Nairobi on January 16, 2018. Tony Karumba / AFP via Getty Images
In his song “Hakuna Matata,” a Swahili expression that equates to “no problem,” Octopizzo juxtaposed the familiar slogan with the reality that “drought is killing livestock and humans” while “politicians still in denial are just abusing each other in public.” At the water conference, Octopizzo grew frustrated with the quantity of talk and paucity of action — especially given the confab’s outsized carbon footprint.
“We are converging in New York; we have 7,000 people, probably 80 percent flew in, so already we are f–king up,” he told me. “The hotels, all this money we are spending, we could put it in a bucket, and it could build, like, almost a thousand water spaces in, like, 20 countries in Africa.”
And yet, in many circles, the hip hop community’s cultural and financial contributions to climate advocacy still go unnoticed. Yearwood pointed out that Rihanna doesn’t get much recognition for the $15 million she donated to environmental justice groups through her foundation. (Though Rihanna isn’t a hip hop act by the strictest definition, her example is emblematic of the genre.) Indeed, she’s nowhere to be found on most climate warrior lists, which are typically dominated by white celebrities.
Rihanna performs during the Live Earth concert in Tokyo in July 2007. The Live Earth concerts around the world, supported by Al Gore, were designed to call attention to the climate cause.
TORU YAMANAKA / AFP via Getty Images
Stars like Diddy and Cardi B supported Joe Biden during his 2020 presidential run; one that resulted in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the most consequential climate legislation in decades. Eco-friendly startups have garnered venture investment from rappers like Jay-Z (Oatly and Partake) and Lupe Fiasco (Zero Mass Water).
According to Yearwood, just because these artists don’t “look like” climate advocates, many observers dismiss or minimize hip hop’s role in the climate movement.
“I like Ben & Jerry’s, I have a Patagonia jacket,” he said, referencing brands favored by environmentalists. But he added that the hip hop community has “for many years struggled to find ourselves trying to be part of, or appreciated within, the climate movement.”
With our tour of the Universal Hip Hop Museum’s pop-up exhibit complete, Bucano led me across the street toward the construction site, the first two floors of a 22-story tower, the centerpiece of a $350 million mixed-use development at Bronx Point. The building will eventually include 542 affordable housing units, most of them overlooking the Harlem River. Below the outline of the museum taking shape, backhoes and bulldozers rumbled across the dirt, sloshing through puddles left by recent rain.
As we entered the ground floor, I noticed something on the bare concrete: more puddles. This isn’t necessarily unusual at a construction site, but it’s emblematic of the challenges Bucano and his crew have had to confront. The building is in Flood Zone 1, the designation for New York’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.
It’s the reason the building can’t have a functional basement. Ford, the architect, initially wanted visitors to enter by descending a series of steps, as though walking into a subway station, before coming face-to-face with a real graffiti-covered train. Instead, a subway car will be suspended in the air over the main staircase.
Ford sees his mission as creating the sort of spaces that the Bronx rarely got to have: a place designed for both tourists and those who actually live nearby.
The Bronx Point development, as seen in May 2022, will house the Universal Hip Hop Museum and around 540 apartments. Christina Horsten / picture alliance via Getty Images
“It’s the Universal Hip Hop Museum,” Ford said. “A large portion of it’s going to be about people who spent most of their formative years living in affordable housing and critiquing affordable housing through their lyrics. But also showing opportunities for young people. You can’t become what you can’t see.”
Bucano would love to see the museum team up with the United Nations for a climate-oriented summit. It’s a topic close to his heart, as he’s already noticed seasons in the Bronx shift compared to his childhood memories.
“Here we are in 2023, and we had our first snowfall at the end of February,” said Bucano. “My sons, those are gonna be the ones that are going to have to deal with climate change.”
After my tour with Bucano, I walked down to the river by myself to get a wider view of Bronx Point. I stood on a little patch of sand and stared up at the museum’s rising outline, trying to imagine where Slick Rick’s throne would eventually reside.
Even on a calm day, the waters lapped against the mossy rocks just a few feet below street level, the most recent high tide already blanketing the outcropping halfway up. It reminded me of something Ford said earlier.
“How do we deal with future tides?” the architect had asked, rhetorically, before offering his answer. “You create a space that’s flexible, that allows you to tell the history — while also leaving room for what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
In April 2016, a wildfire burned 2,000 acres of Minnewaska State Park, a nature preserve in New York’s Hudson Valley. The blaze, the largest and most destructive to hit the park in more than half a century, turned a verdant forest into a blackened wasteland. But by summer, the scorched land was regenerating. Green shoots poked out of the charred earth, and dwarf pitch pines — conifers native to the region — bristled with new growth.
The conflagration was an example of what forest ecologists like to call “good fire” — one that consumes underbrush and dead vegetation, opens the canopy to let light and water in, unlocks seeds tightly shut in pinecones, and clears out invasive species that crowd native plants. Many of the wildfires that have burned millions of acres across the United States and Canada in recent years have had this effect; they’re beneficial in the long term because these forests have evolved to coexist with fire. They’re built to burn.
New growth in Sam’s Point after the record-breaking 2016 wildfire in Minnewaska State Park. Zoya Teirstein
A pitch pine shows signs of life after a wildfire in Minnewaska State Park 2016. Zoya Teirstein
Some forests are not built to burn. Earlier this month, wildfires tore through Maui, engulfing the port city of Lahaina, burning 3,200 acres of land and killing at least 115 people, more than any other wildfire in modern U.S. history. Maui was at a unique disadvantage: Two centuries of colonial occupation and large-scale transformations of the natural landscape have transformed large swaths of the island’s moist, native forests into dry prairie littered with highly flammable invasive grasses. A recent flash drought, a rapid-onset dry period connected to climate change, dried out these grasses and fueled the blazes.
Naturally occurring wildfires are not a regular part of Maui’s native ecosystem, which evolved slowly over the course of millions of years. But it is part of the ecosystem in the places where some of the invasive grasses originally came from, like tropical Africa. In the coming weeks, months, and years, those invasive grasses, not Maui’s endemic species, stand to benefit from the wreckage of this year’s wildfires.
“In general, those nonnative invasive species are going to be much more adapted to reoccupying that environment after a fire than native species,” said Creighton M. Litton, a professor and forest ecology researcher at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa.
A Maui County firefighter extinguishes a fire near homes during the upcountry Maui wildfires in Kula, Hawaiʻi, on August 13. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
As residents rebuild in the weeks and months ahead, wildfire ecologists and botanists say they must consider restoring the native vegetation and forests that existed before Europeans arrived. Maui’s wet season, which spurs new plant growth, is two months away. Without human intervention, the same invasive plants that helped create the wildfires will move in, creating another dangerous cycle of invasive growth and wildfire risk.
“You can’t wait forever,” Mike Opgenorth, a plant ecologist and director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s Kahanu Garden and Preserve on Maui, told Grist. “It’s going to get harder as invasive plants reestablish in these areas that were burned.”
For millennia, before humans came into the picture, every species of plant that took root on Maui got to the island by wind, wing, or wave — carried in by a gale, dropped by a bird, or washed ashore by the sea. The National Park Service estimates that just one species managed to gain a foothold on the Hawaiian islands every 35,000 years. Whatever wildfire defenses these plants arrived with in their genetic codes were mostly lost over time in the absence of a sustained threat.
An aerial view of Lahaina after the fires. MANDEL NGAN / Contributor
Then, between 1,200 and 1,600 years ago, Polynesians arrived in canoes, carrying a plethora of new species with them — taro, sugarcane, pigs, and chickens. Some of these alien species were harmless to the existing ecosystem; others meet today’s definition of “invasive” — prone to overpopulation and damaging to the environment. Still, Polynesians understood the importance of the wet and mesic, or moderately wet, forests they found in Hawaiʻi. The Polynesian name for one of these trees, the ‘Ōhi’a lehua, translates loosely to “water collector.”
The trend accelerated when European colonizers descended on Hawaiʻi some 1,000 years later. Hardier and more aggressive invasive species, introduced both intentionally and by accident, steadily took over. These species included mosquitoes and cats, as well as flammable grasses such as guinea, buffel, and cane grass, planted by Westerners to feed cattle, seed lawns, and prevent erosion. They were able to spread widely and crowd out native species in the absence of predators. Now, Hawai‘i is the endangered species capital of the world — 100 plant species, subspecies, and varieties have gone extinct and more than 400 are at risk.
Clermontia micrantha, or ‘Õhā wai, hāhā, a native Hawaiian species that grows in the upper West Maui mountains. Mike Opgenorth, Kahanu Garden and Preserve
European colonizers also introduced sugar plantations, clearing away forest, ponds, and bogs to grow the crop, which quickly became Hawaiʻi’s main export. Toward the end of the 19th century, Hawaiʻi was exporting more than 24 million pounds of sugar, up from just 300,000 pounds in 1846. For the better part of a century, the industry boomed. Then it went bust as rising labor costs made Hawaiian sugar less competitive in the world market. In 2016, Hawaiʻi’s last sugar mill, on Maui, shut down.
Invasive species, stronger and more aggressive than the islands’ native plants, encroached on the vacated land. Nonnative grasses now make up a quarter of Hawaiʻi’s land cover. “These grass-dominated landscapes allow wildfires to propagate rapidly,” according to a 2015 study conducted by several of the state’s foremost wildfire ecologists. That same study showed that, between 1904 and 2011, most of the terrain burned by wildfire on the islands was dry, nonnative grassland. That vegetation encouraged fire to spread into native forests, beating back the endemic species and allowing invasives to expand farther.
Agricultural workers in a sugar plantation in Hawaiʻi.
CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
The Maui fires have briefly paused the spread of invasives in parts of Maui by wiping all species — native and foreign — from the landscape. But the fires won’t keep the invasives at bay for long. Research shows that in the aftermath of extreme weather events, invasives tend to regrow faster than native plants. “It’s essentially a blank canvas, where invasive species will thrive much more than our native ones,” Opgenorth said, referring to the Maui fires.
To see what the canvas should look like, Opgenorth pointed to the upper West Maui mountains, where the forests are dynamic, multilayered, and dominated by native plants. In the lowlands that burned, invasive species create a dry, monolithic environment characterized by one or two types of plants. Higher up in the mountains, the native forests are home to a variety of species — mosses such as Thuidium hawaiiense, many types of tree fern, medium-size bushes and shrubs including silversword, and larger trees like koa. Together, these species create a mosaic that traps rainwater and creates a damp, fire-resistant environment.
Replicating that kind of wild forest in Lahaina, a small town of 13,000 people, isn’t feasible. But mimicking some fire-resistant aspects of the upper slopes is possible. In fact, it used to be the status quo there.
A wet forest in the upper West Maui mountains. Mike Opgenorth, Kahanu Garden and Preserve
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Hawaiians planted a 10½-square-mile breadfruit forest in Lahaina, from Māla to Launiupoko and up into the lower slopes of the West Maui mountains. The diverse forest produced many types of fruits and vegetables in addition to breadfruit, including coconuts, bananas, taro, wild sugarcane, and sweet potato — plants that vary in size and create a multilayered canopy. As Lahaina developed, this food forest and others like it disappeared.
But in recent years, Native Hawaiian farmers have begun replanting those forests. The devastation wrought by the recent wildfires, and the invasive species that exacerbated them, illuminates the importance of such initiatives to ensuring Maui’s resiliency. If Hawaiian officials and lawmakers supported agroforestry systems like the ones being piloted by Indigenous farmers on the island, Maui could accomplish the interconnected goals of better protecting the island against future wildfires, supporting Native Hawaiians, and reconnecting Mauians to their cultural history.
“The goal is to knock the empire down and replace those corporate ag guys with something more environmentally sustainable that reflects our values,” Kaipo Kekona, an Indigenous farmer who planted a food forest on depleted farmland on a mountain ridge on Maui, told the Guardian last year. Kekona is a member of the island’s burgeoning Indigenous sovereignty movement.
Terraced taro fields at Limahuli Garden on Kauai Island, Hawaiʻi. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
Replanting food forests on Maui is a daunting undertaking. Real estate investors are already trying to snap up charred land. As Mauians fend off speculators hoping to cash in on the island’s tragedy, Opgenorth thinks the time to act is now. Up to 90 percent of Maui’s food is imported, and the island directs less than 1 percent of its budget to agriculture. Real post-fire resiliency would see many different stakeholders, including private landowners, coming together to change that.
“Where is the priority in the grand scheme of things?” Opgenorth asked. “The underlying thing that should be thought about is revitalization — not just ecosystem-friendly outplantings as we recover, but also things that connect us to our past.”
Exxon Mobil projected that greenhouse-gas emissions and the efforts to keep the planet’s temperature from rising beyond an increase of 2 degrees Celsius by 2050 is destined to fail in a report released by the oil giant on Monday.
Oil and natural gas are projected to meet more than half of the world’s energy needs in 2050, or 54 percent, because of their “utility as a reliable and lower-emissions source of fuel for electricity generation, hydrogen production, and heating,” according to the Houston-based company.
The report stated carbon emissions stemming from burning fossil fuels and energy consumption will drop to 25 billion metric tons in 2050, due to the rise of renewable energy sources, decline of coal, and improvements in energy efficiency. This is expected to bring down energy consumption by 26 percent from a peak of 34 billion metric tons projected sometime in the current decade. But despite that decline in emissions, the worldwide carbon output is predicted to rise well above the levels the United Nations’ climate-science advisory body says would limit the effects of climate change.
According to Exxon’s researchers, the world will see a 25 percent increase in population that will drive an economy twice the size of today’s. That level of growth is practically unprecedented: The report points out that it took thousands of years for the world to reach its first 2 billion people, which happened around 1930. Now the planet, already home to 8 billion people, is projected to add 2 billion more over the next 27 years.
“Fossil fuels remain the most effective way to produce the massive amounts of energy needed to create and support the manufacturing, commercial transportation, and industrial sectors that drive modern economies,” the report said. ExxonMobil is investing more money to increase oil and gas production than any other company in the U.S., according to its website.
Additionally, global gross domestic product, or GDP, is expected to more than double from 2021 to 2050, with developing nations growing at more than twice the rate of developed countries. Between now and 2050, developing countries will see GDP per capita more than double, driving higher demand for energy.
“Meeting that demand with lower-emission energy options is vital to making progress toward society’s environmental goals,” said the researchers. “At the same time, failing to meet demand would prevent developing nations from achieving their economic goals and their citizens from living longer, more fulfilling lives.”
In order to achieve the targets outlined by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and avoid the worst of climate change and natural disasters, the world needs emissions to drop to 11 billion metric tons on average by 2050, Exxon said. The researchers also noted that the world’s current push to halt carbon emissions by more than 25 percent by 2050 “is a testament to the significant progress expected to be made.”
Currently, the oil company faces several lawsuits across the U.S. accusing it of climate change deception, seeking billions in damages.
The oil company has said it supports the 2015 Paris climate accord but maintains the world will have to keep consuming oil and natural gas to fuel economic growth.
Exxon is investing $17 billion over a six-year span through 2027 in lower carbon emissions technologies, including carbon capture and sequestration and hydrogen. The company says these two technologies hold significant promise for hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as the steel, chemical, and cement industries.
Most of the funds are directed to reducing carbon emissions in-house and from third-party operations. While Exxon has so far stayed away from developing renewable sources, it expects wind and solar to provide 11 percent of the world’s energy supply in 2050, or five times today’s contribution.
