This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization. Sign up forWBEZ newsletters to get local news you can trust.
Celeste Flores can tell you the good news about living in Waukegan, Illinois: The air is safer to breathe now.
“Thankfully, we are no longer breathing coal being burned,” said Flores, a co-chair of Clean Power Lake County, or CPLC, an environmental justice organization serving the mostly Latino suburb about 40 miles north of Chicago. The explanation behind that is simple: The Waukegan Generating Station near the shore of Lake Michigan closed in 2022 after decades of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and coal ash into the ground.
Flores can also tell you the bad news: The toxic coal ash is still there, dangerously close to the groundwater.
But the explanation behind why the pollution remains in the ground is more complicated than shutting a plant down.
Coal ash is a cocktail of hazardous pollutants leftover from coal combustion. Across the country, plant operators dumped that heavy metal-laden sludge into holes in the ground, sometimes called ponds or impoundments. Sometimes these ponds are lined, and sometimes they aren’t. None of the ponds in Waukegan that are lined meet current state and federal standards.
In 2019, the state confirmed what advocates like Flores had long suspected: that coal ash had leached into nearby groundwater. Worse yet, the coal ash was stored right near Lake Michigan.
That same year, Flores helped push Illinois lawmakers to pass landmark coal ash regulation, which compelled managers of coal ash owners to submit plans to either clean up their operations or shut down.
About three years ago the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) finalized exactly how operators had to submit these proposals. But plans are on hold for securing the three coal ash storage pits in Waukegan. The IEPA hasn’t finalized permits for those sites, so they continue to threaten groundwater.
“When it comes to the implementation of these rules, it’s 2024 and we don’t have permits yet,” said Flores. “And I don’t think anyone was expecting that.”
Celeste Flores, left, said the air is easier to breathe now in Waukegan, Illinois. Both she and Dulce Ortiz, right, worked to get a coal-burning plant in their suburb shut down. Now they’re trying to remove the coal ash that threatens their drinking water and Lake Michigan.
Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / Grist
Illinois set itself apart from the majority of the country when it finalized its coal ash rules back in 2021. Most states, save for a handful like North Carolina and Michigan, relied on 2015 federal guidelines designed to monitor and clean up only some coal ash residuals.
For years, the federal rule excluded inactive coal ash ponds and landfills from oversight. An analysis by Earthjustice found that the 2015 rules grandfathered in over 300 of these sites across 48 states. Illinois’ more protective mandate, however, brought them into the state’s regulatory orbit.
Even so, advocates say the forthcoming permits are dragging.
“The Illinois EPA has been reviewing these proposed permits for almost two years,” said Andrew Rehn, the director of climate policy at Prairie Rivers Network in Champaign. “And that’s, like, a long time for these permits to sit and just be under review.”
The Illinois EPA is currently reviewing 44 separate coal ash surface impoundment permit applications for 25 current or former power plant sites across the state. Earlier this month, two and a half years since the first permit applications were submitted, the agency issued its first two draft permits.
The agency said in a statement to Grist and WBEZ that, “due to the complexity of the information required in the applications, in most cases [the] Illinois EPA has requested additional information or clarification from the applicants.” The statement went on to say that it can take weeks to months to “gather additional information or to analyze groundwater modeling data.”
Coal power plants have sought to make exceptions for their permits and have effectively stalled the permit process until the Illinois Pollution Control Board is able to resolve the requests. According to the IEPA, this is the major holdup with the Waukegan permits.
Meanwhile, new federal regulations issued last week give the nation’s fleet of coal power plants and new natural gas plants an ultimatum: adapt or shut down. The power plants have eight years to come up with a plan to capture 90 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions or commit to closing by 2039.
Advocates with the Waukegan group see this long awaited move as a step closer to phasing out coal for good. Although the coal business is in decline, it still has an outsized role in driving climate change and polluting surrounding communities. More than half of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions from electric power generation are attributable to burning coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Almost every coal power plant operator in the country is now staring down the same finish line in 2039. Included in the new rule are stricter safeguards for the coal ash pollution those plants will leave behind in the meantime.
“With the 2015 rules, there was a circle of ponds and landfills that were subject to regulation,” said Megan Wachspress, a staff attorney with the Sierra Club. “That circle of ponds and landfills and other dump sites just got bigger.”
Inactive coal ash ponds and landfills are now part of the family of coal ash dumps that the federal government demands operators monitor and clean up when they threaten water resources.
If it was just a coal plant in Waukegan, Flores said, her organization’s fight might be more manageable. “But there’s so many other things.”
There are five Superfund sites scattered in and around the north shore suburb. These are abandoned lots so contaminated with hazardous materials that the federal government has taken over cleanup. Pointing in several directions, Flores said there are Superfund sites immediately north, south, and west of the old coal plant.
And that means generations of Waukegan residents have had to struggle with medical problems and even premature death because of their toxic environment.
There’s no question for Flores about what comes next: The coal ash must be removed from the ground. But to do that, state and federal agencies need to pick up the pace.
“It’s about making sure that we know that we’re leaving behind a community that’s healthier than what we received,” Flores said.
A new study by researchers at University of Glasgow has found that pet parrots prefer video calling other parrots over watching pre-recorded bird videos.
Animal-computer interaction specialists provided nine parrots and their caretakers with tablets to explore how video chats might expand the social lives of the birds, a press release from University of Glasgow said.
“Our previous research had shown that parrots seem to benefit from the opportunity to video-call each other, which could help reduce the mental and physical toll that living in domestic situations can take on them,” said lead author of the paper Dr. Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas of the School of Computing Science at University of Glasgow in the press release. “In the wild, they live in flocks and socialise with each other constantly. As pets, they’re often kept on their own, which can cause them to develop negative behaviours like excessive pacing or feather-plucking.”
The results of the six-month study suggest that these intelligent creatures — who are often lonely being confined in human residences — can distinguish between live and pre-recorded digital content, but much prefer to interact in real time with other birds.
The parrots in the study initiated calls to other birds much more often than they chose to watch pre-recorded videos.
The birds also appeared more engaged when chatting live. They spent a lot more time on bird-to-bird calls than watching a variety of videos.
“In this study, we wanted to see if we could identify differences in behaviour when parrots were given agency over what they could see on their devices. Would they notice when the pre-recorded parrot on the screen didn’t respond the same way a live one did? And if so, what could that tell us about designing future systems to fit their needs?” Hirskyj-Douglas said in the press release.
The findings of the study could influence the developing “animal internet,” which gives animals the chance to interact with each other, as well as humans, in new ways using digital technology.
On the tablets given to the parrots’ caregivers were large colorful buttons with pictures of other birds in the study. The parrots were trained to indicate when they wanted to start calls on Facebook Messenger by ringing a bell.
Following introductions of the birds via video chat, they were given access to 12 sessions of a total of 36 hours. A maximum of two calls was allowed during each session for up to three hours.
Six sessions connected parrots with another bird from the study, while the other six were a pre-recorded video of one of the contacts. Following each session, caregivers recorded parrots’ reactions.
Overall engagement varied, but the parrots spent 4.43 minutes on average with other live birds and 2.77 minutes watching the recorded videos. They spent a total of 561 minutes on live chats and 142 minutes watching recorded content.
Of a possible 108 live calls, the birds initiated 65. However, in the pre-recorded part of the study they only watched 40 videos. During the live calls, they reached their limit of two calls 46 percent of the time, but opted for two pre-recorded videos just one-quarter of the time.
Caregivers reported that the parrots seemed to be more engaged during live calls, frequently moving closer to see their chat companion, as well as mirroring each others’ behavior. On the other hand, it was reported that birds appeared less interested in the pre-recorded videos. Some birds refused to initiate calls, while others flew quickly away from the screen.
“Working closely with caregivers to design the study has given us new insight into how these intelligent birds react to the complex stimulus digital tablets can provide,” Hirskyj-Douglas said in the press release. “The appearance of ‘liveness’ really did seem to make a difference to the parrots’ engagement with their screens. Their behaviour while interacting with another live bird often reflected behaviours they would engage in with other parrots in real life, which wasn’t the case in the pre-recorded sessions. Some caregivers believed that their parrots were capable of differentiating between the sessions. One told us that their bird enjoyed vocalising with another live bird but quickly lost interest when there was no response to their calls during pre-recorded videos.”
Caregivers said the study helped them feel more engaged and closer to their parrot, with 77 percent saying they thought their bird had a positive response to the live chats and 70 percent expressing observations of a positive reaction to the pre-recorded videos.
“This was a small study, and we can’t draw any definite conclusions at this stage about whether the parrots were in some way aware of the differences between live and pre-recorded interactions. However, the results are compelling, and suggest that further study is definitely warranted,” Hirskyj-Douglas said. “The internet holds a great deal of potential for giving animals agency to interact with each other in new ways, but the systems we build to help them do that need to be designed around their specific needs and physical and mental abilities. Studies like this could help to lay the foundations of a truly animal-centred internet.”
The paper, Call of the Wild Web: Parrot Engagement in Live vs. Pre-recorded Video Calls, will be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Honolulu from May 11 to 16.
Since March, flooding and landslides throughout Kenya have killed at least 188 people, with dozens still missing, according to the country’s ministry of the interior, as AFP reported. There have been at least 125 injuries with 165,000 people displaced.
The flooding has taken out bridges and roads while destroying homes and infrastructure. A flash flood on Monday killed at least 48 people in the town of Mai Mahiu in central Kenya, reported Reuters.
A heavy downpour caused a river to overflow its banks on Wednesday in the Maasai Mara wildlife reserve, stranding many people, including almost 100 tourists, AFP said.
“Accessing the Mara is now a nightmare and the people stuck there are really worried, they don’t have an exit route,” said Stephen Nakola, sub-county administrator of Narok West, who said there were likely to be waterborne diseases, as AFP reported. “I am worried that the situation could get worse because the rains are still on.”
Nakola told AFP bridges had been washed away and the area was currently inaccessible. Nakola added that roughly 50 camps at the reserve had been affected, causing more than 500 local workers to be temporarily unemployed.
Two helicopters had been deployed to rescue local staff and tourists who had been stranded, authorities said, according to CNN.
On Thursday, James Apolloh Omenya, a 27-year-old tour guide, told CNN that the sounds of rushing flood waters had awakened him. The water had risen to his waist, and the area surrounding Talek Bush Camp was submerged.
“My driver and I were the first to wake up, so we woke up all the 14 international tourists and 25 staff and climbed ladders to some water tanks that are raised,” Omenya told CNN. “We were being rained on from around 2 a.m. to 5.30 a.m. but we couldn’t get out.”
Kenya’s Red Cross said more than 90 people had been rescued, while more than a dozen camps in the area surrounding River Talek were closed.
Locals said the rainy season had flooded parts of the Mara before, but the extent of this year’s floods was unprecedented.
Rains last year came after the worst drought seen in decades in large swaths of East Africa, reported Reuters.
Red Cross workers from Kenya were helping residents marooned by floods in Kitengela, about 20 miles from Nairobi.
Highways and other roads had been closed because of flooding and debris.
“Kenya is facing a worsening flood crisis due to the combined effects of El Niño and the ongoing March-May 2024 long rains,” Jagan Chapagain, CEO of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said on X.
Pope Francis expressed his sympathy for people in the country at the Vatican on Wednesday.
“I… wish to express to the people of Kenya my spiritual closeness at this time as severe flooding has tragically taken the lives of many of our brothers and sisters, injured others and caused widespread destruction,” the pope said.
The Horn of Africa region, which includes Kenya, is a highly climate-vulnerable area, CNN said. Burundi and Tanzania were also severely affected by the deluge.
“The unfolding devastation highlights the government’s obligation to prepare for and promptly respond to the foreseeable impacts of climate change and natural disasters,” said Nyagoah Tut Pur, Human Rights Watch Africa researcher, as CNN reported.
A new study has uncovered that flight-related emissions from 2019 are far higher than reported. Scientists reviewed data for more than 40 million flights in 2019 and calculated the total global aviation emissions to be about 911 million metric tons, well above the 604 million metric tons reported to the United Nations in 2019.
While many countries report emissions to the United Nations following the 1992 international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), developing countries (or non-Annex I countries) aren’t required to submit aviation emissions, based on the treaty. However, some countries can still opt in to reporting their emissions.
So a team of scientists used a high-resolution aviation transport emissions assessment model to review and calculate emissions for 197 countries for 2019. They found that aviation emissions were about 50% higher than the numbers reported to the UN for that year and published their findings in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
“Now we have a much clearer picture of aviation emissions per country, including previously unreported emissions, which tells you something about how we can go about reducing them,” Helene Muri, co-author of the study and a research professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Industrial Ecology Programme, said in a statement.
According to the study, the U.S. had the highest aviation-related emissions of any country, both when considering international flights and domestic flights. But the model revealed that China, which did not report its flight emissions to the UN in 2019, was the country with the second-highest emissions, revealing large gaps of data in the reporting.
The model used in the study calculated carbon emissions as well as other pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, unburned hydrocarbons, black carbon and organic carbon. It also allows for emissions modeling almost in real-time, which can help track emissions even for countries not required to report.
“I think it very nicely illustrates the potential in this type of work, where we have previously relied on statistical offices and reporting loops that can take a year or more to get this kind of information,” Anders Hammer Strømman, co-author of the study and a professor at the university’s Industrial Ecology Programme, said in a statement. “This model allows us to do instant emissions modeling — we can calculate the emissions from global aviation as it happens.”
According to the International Energy Agency, aviation makes up about 2% of global emissions, and the amount of flight-related emissions needs to decrease to meet net-zero emissions targets by 2050. But the study authors pointed out that about 1% of global emissions linked to aviation are not being reported.
“Our work fills the reporting gaps, so that this can inform policy and hopefully improve future negotiations,” said Jan Klenner, first author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate at the Industrial Ecology Programme.
As Nour feeds another half-finished pair of pants through her sewing machine, her arms begin to shake. Amid the whir of fans, her T-shirt sticks to her like skin. She fights to focus, knowing full well her target of up to 100 pieces an hour isn’t going to hit itself.
“I am completely soaked in sweat,” the 38-year-old says of her work shifts. “The heat makes me exhausted.”
Nour, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal from her employer, works at Yakjin, a South Korean-owned garment factory in Cambodia. More than 2,500 employees here stitch apparel for major U.S. giants like Walmart and Gap. Workers at Yakjin say the heat often leads to near-fainting episodes, fatigue, and dehydration. With no windows, the air feels stifling but their requests for fans are at times ignored.
Workers at three other factories in Phnom Penh, the country’s capital, producing clothes for brands like Primark, H&M, and Old Navy (owned by Gap Inc.), told similar stories of worsening heat.
Around the world, fashion’s mostly female labor force is grappling with working conditions made increasingly unbearable and unhealthy by climate change. Women picking cotton in India’s sun-baked fields are toiling in temperatures of roughly 113 degrees Fahrenheit, while workers in Ghana’s Kantamanto — one of the world’s largest secondhand markets where clothing discarded by Western consumers is resold — are losing vital wages when flooding prevents trade. Nour is just one of nearly 1 million garment workers in Cambodia, a country that has experienced roughly 1.4 degrees F of warming per decade since the 1960s.
Employees work at a garment factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2021.
Ouyang Kaiyu/China News Service via Getty Images
Fashion has had a devastating impact on the planet, producing more greenhouse gas emissions than aviation and shipping combined. So far, labor experts say, the more than $2.5 trillion industry has mostly focused its climate change efforts on mitigation, such as using more recycled fabrics, while largely ignoring how it impacts workers.
“[Labor] violations in factories are so gross, as in so widespread, and so awful … that that’s where the attention has been,” said Liz Parker, an associate member of Clean Clothes Campaign, an Amsterdam-based alliance of labor unions and nongovernmental organizations. “But workers are suffering from heat stress, from flooding, from water pollution … and we need to protect [them] from that as well.”
To expose how climate change is impacting workers throughout fashion’s supply chain, The Fuller Project tracked products from several brands — including Walmart, Primark, H&M, Gap, and Old Navy — across several countries. At each stage, women play a vital role in the global business of fashion, yet their livelihoods — and lives — are being increasingly threatened by extreme weather.
Cotton fields appear outside the car window an hour into the drive from Ahmedabad, capital of Gujarat state on India’s western coast. In every field, a woman in a sari is scooping cotton blossoms into a bag, spots of bright color that punctuate green fields topped with white fluff.
Roshan Osmanbhai arrives at 7 a.m. daily and ties a strip of cloth around her head to protect it from the sun. By midday, the temperature will hit more than 80 degrees F. The last week of January is supposed to be the height of winter in Gujarat, with average temperatures hovering around 68 degrees F. She hasn’t felt that traditional winter for years.
India is the world’s biggest grower of cotton after China. Six million farmers make a living from the sector, most of them women, according to Better Cotton, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable production. Cotton’s global supply chain is complex and lacks transparency, but Primark and H&M both confirmed they source from India. Walmart, Gap, and Old Navy didn’t respond to The Fuller Project’s requests for comment, but nonprofits monitoring supply chains said they likely do as well.
“If you’re in the apparel business … you have to come here,” said Ashis Mondal, former director of Action for Social Advancement, an Indian nonprofit supporting small farmers. “You have no other option.”
Across the region, the farms might be run by women, but few of them own the land they cultivate. The precarious nature of their work is exacerbated further by the changing climate, with summers arriving earlier and monsoon rains delayed or declining, damaging crops. India recorded extreme weather events on nearly 90 percent of the days in the first nine months of 2023, according to The Centre of Science and Environment, a research organization based in New Delhi, killing nearly 3,000 people and ruining almost 5 million acres of crop area.
A woman picks cotton in Maharashtra, India in 2022.
Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In Gujarat last year, summer rolled in before March, the women said. The temperature shot up to roughly 113 degrees F before anybody knew what to do. Women farmers complained the heat was making it hard to carry on. “The heat makes our skin itch,” said Jessuben Jhapra, a 49-year-old farmer. “Heat rash can erupt all over the body. Our eyes are under enormous strain.”
The weather patterns have invited new and unfamiliar pests, requiring pesticides that have created further health problems for the women. Most own protective gear — gloves, boots, goggles — but don’t always use them when it’s hot. Two years ago, Alayben Zilriya, a 55-year-old farmer with sharp cheekbones and thin-rimmed spectacles, sprayed pesticides on the plants using her bare hands. She got such a severe reaction that she had to visit the doctor for treatment. Today, the skin on her hands is still shriveled, her nails grayish.
Excessive temperatures can do serious harm to humans. Heat exhaustion sets in when too much water and salt is lost, usually due to excessive sweating. Symptoms include nausea, dizziness, thirst, and palpitations. It can be hard to think clearly — hot weather is linked to reduced cognitive function, judgement errors, and higher risk of occupational injury.
For Nour, this sounds familiar. Even though drinking water is available at her factory, she feels dehydrated and has little energy to work. When it’s hot she takes more toilet breaks but misses her hourly targets and says her supervisors at Yakjin become verbally abusive.
“They curse or insult us,” she explained. “They blame us.”
Workers at Yakjin interviewed by The Fuller Project said they often feel ill or faint. Ry, 38, who has been employed at the factory for over a decade, thinks the heat is getting worse. Climate change is part of the problem, he says, but also fans aren’t maintained or replaced. While the building has fans that blow mist to keep workers cool, they do not reach all employees. For over two years, Ry has asked the factory for more, but says his requests have fallen on deaf ears.
Only a small handful of Cambodia’s roughly 1,300 garment factories have air conditioning, according to Seang Yot from The Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers’ Democratic Union, or C-CAWDU.
At lunchtime, Yakjin employees hang cloth above their heads in the outdoor canteen for extra shade. In heavy rains during the wet season, the area floods, as does the factory, workers told The Fuller Project. Cambodia is already highly vulnerable to flooding, including flash flooding, but projected climate change trends indicate this is only set to get worse — affecting tens of thousands more people each year by 2030. Workers are concerned about electric shocks as flood water comes in contact with the factory’s electrical systems, said Nour, though no one has been hurt yet.
“Anything involving money is always a problem,” explained Ry, who also asked to use a pseudonym. “The factory managers don’t care about how heat impacts us, only that we speed up and work faster.”
In an email, Yakjin Cambodia’s management said the factory maintains “a comfortable indoor temperature with cooling and ventilation systems,” including fans and air conditioners, but said there was no AC in the sewing line.
They said there have been no reported cases of fainting in the past two years, and that exhaustion could have many causes including inadequate healthcare, exercise, and lack of sleep, as well as heat.
There are grievance mechanisms in place for workers and no one had reported supervisors becoming verbally abusive when production targets were missed. Yakjin said the factory does not flood during the rainy season and there was no risk of electric shock.
Walmart, which sources from Yakjin, said it “does not tolerate unsafe working conditions” and is looking into the matter.
While Cambodia has always been hot, extreme heat now presents a major threat to human health. The country’s garment sector is particularly vulnerable to climate change because it emerged largely ad hoc with little oversight, according to a 2022 report led by Laurie Parsons, senior lecturer in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Workers wade through floodwaters trying to salvage clothes from a factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in October 2020.
Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP via Getty Images
Many of the factories, for example, are technically warehouses. “They’re not built for humans,” said Parsons. Most are also privately rented, which means factory owners have little power — or incentive — to implement changes, added Yot.
Cambodia’s labor law sets no limit on workplace temperatures, saying only that they must be “reasonable for employees.” In neighboring Thailand, with a similar-sized garment industry, the maximum is 93 degrees F wet-bulb temperature (a way of measuring heat stress that takes into account factors like temperature and humidity, among others).
Over two days, The Fuller Project asked a garment worker to measure temperatures using a digital thermometer in the sewing section of Jade Sun Garment, a factory producing for brands like Primark, Old Navy, and George, a British clothing line sold widely in Walmart. Recordings taken by a garment worker in February, one of the cooler months, hit 97.7 degrees F.
During the hottest months, from April to May, the country’s daytime outdoor temperatures can soar above 104 degrees F. Leakhena, a soft-spoken sewer who’s worked at Jade Sun for several years, often feels “nearly unconscious” during this period. “We need more oxygen,” she explained. “I cannot breathe properly.”
The water provided by the factory isn’t clean either, she said. “It smells a lot. When we drink water from that tap it gives us a sore throat.”
In response to inquiries from The Fuller Project about workers’ claims, Gap Inc. said it is opening investigations into Yakjin and Jade Sun Garment and will take appropriate action to remediate any breach of its policies. Primark is aware of the issues raised in connection with Jade Sun Garment and is in the process of “supporting remediation” with its management, adding that the safety of workers in its supply chain is “extremely important” to the company. Jade Sun Garment and George did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
In an email, Heng Sour, Cambodia’s Minister of Labour and Vocational Training, said the government is “deeply concerned” about worker welfare. He said The Fuller Project’s temperature recording at Jade Sun Garment offered a “limited view” because it used a single thermometer but pointed to the need for a “more detailed analysis to accurately assess and respond to temperature conditions.” The government is also in the process of “potentially” establishing maximum workplace temperatures and since being contacted has accelerated the deployment of additional cooling systems to factories.
Once their shift is over, women return home — yet there is no reprieve from the soaring temperatures. Many live in privately rented dormitories, often single-bedroom dwellings with low, metal roofs and little protection against extreme weather. Several workers described them as virtually unlivable in the heat.
“I want to see change,” said Leakhena, who also asked to use a pseudonym for fear of reprisals. “The heat is making us more exhausted every day. We don’t know what impact it will have on our health after five or 10 years. And by that point, it’s already too late.”
Inside Accra’s bustling central business district lies Kantamanto. A sprawling complex packed with vendors who sell what’s known locally as obroni wawu or “dead white man’s clothes.”
Ghana was the largest importer of used clothing in 2021, with $214 million worth of garments passing across its borders. When consumers in the United States or United Kingdom donate their old T-shirts, only 10 to 30 percent are resold in stores. The rest disappears into a vast network, often ending up here, West Africa’s hub for used garments from the West. In Kantamanto, stalls sell clothing from Primark, H&M, Walmart, Gap, and Old Navy.
Young women and teenage girls move through the market balancing 120-pound bales of clothing on their heads. Known as kayayei, they transport bales from importers to stalls, storage, and disposal sites, earning 30 cents to $1 per trip. The market’s narrow aisles don’t allow for motorized modes of transport, so the women play a crucial link in the secondhand supply chain. Their work frequently causes neck and spine injuries, said Liz Ricketts, co-founder of The Or Foundation, a Ghana and U.S.-based nonprofit. They also face sexual violence, including rape, and are at high risk of unplanned pregnancies, according to the United Nations.
Many are here because climate change has made farming in their villages unviable, but the cities have proven to be no refuge either. Ghana is experiencing more intense and frequent flooding and storms as global temperatures tick up. In Kantamanto, clothing waste clogs the gutters, which exacerbates the flooding, says Ricketts, and leads to an increased risk of cholera and malaria.
Women sort through secondhand clothes at the Kantamanto market in Accra, Ghana in 2023.
Nipah Dennis / AFP via Getty Images
The market is open every day but Sunday. When clouds gather, 18-year-old Mariam Karim starts to worry. She earns roughly $14 a week carting bales of second-hand clothes from trucks, which covers her basic needs such as rent and food. During the rainy season, fewer customers show up and the market shuts roughly twice a month from flooding, according to Ricketts, often leaving women without pay.
A downpour can also mean no sleep. “Flooding at my home is common,” said Karim, who lives near the market in a wooden, makeshift dwelling. “I will usually scoop the water out of my room until it subsides. It is scary because colleagues have even lost their lives and properties.”
West Africa is a climate change hotspot and Accra’s low elevation makes it particularly vulnerable. After more than three decades working at Kantamanto, it’s something Daniel Ampadu, vice chairman of the Kantamanto Used Clothing Association, has seen with his own eyes.
“I am old enough so I can tell you that these days, so much rain comes…and many places, especially our market, gets flooded,” he said. “This wasn’t the case 30 years ago.”
Of the five brands examined across India, Cambodia and Ghana, only Primark and H&M provided details in response to queries about what they are doing to protect workers in their global supply chain from climate change. Primark said it knows it must “act to mitigate” the causes and effects of climate change and support their supply chain partners in similar efforts, such as educating farmers in their Sustainable Cotton Programme, a training scheme. H&M said it is aware of the impact that climate change has on the people in its supply chains and “constantly review and adapt” the scope of its climate-related risks.
For decades, the fashion industry’s exploitation of workers in low-income countries has been well documented. But a new challenge now presents itself: Who will protect them from a climate crisis that the very same industry helped bring about?
Better Factories Cambodia, a partnership between the International Labour Organisation, the UN’s labor agency, and the International Finance Corporation, has repeatedly recorded what it says are unacceptable workplace temperatures during inspections. Although some factories have invested in improved lighting and better ventilation, most need to do more, it says. More recently, fashion brands involved in Action, Collaboration, Transformation, or ACT, a global agreement aimed at transforming the garment industry, have begun to discuss ways to solve the heat problem for its workers, said Yot. Unless extreme heat and flooding are addressed, countries vital for fashion production, including Cambodia, risk losing $65 billion in export earnings and 1 million potential jobs by 2030, according to research by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.
“The buck stops always with the brands,” said Parsons. “[But] it’s kind of like pushing an open door… They’re like, yes, we should think about this but they haven’t yet.”
For Nour, she’d simply like to feel cool air on her face. Or the freedom to catch her breath. After work, she showers, washing away the sweat. For a brief moment, she feels alive, before being engulfed by the factory’s heat once more.
Additional reporting by Sineat Yon
The Fuller Project is a non-profit newsroom dedicated to the coverage of women’s issues around the world. Sign up for the Fuller Project’s newsletter, and follow the organization on X or LinkedIn.
A congressional hearing on the fossil fuel industry’s “evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change” turned into a spectacle on Wednesday morning as lawmakers in Washington, D.C., grilled a panel of experts on wide-ranging — and often irrelevant — topics. The thousands of internal oil company documents released before the hearing, however, contained some bombshell findings.
One of the biggest revelations is that BP executives understood that natural gas, which the company promoted as a “bridge” or “destination” fuel to a cleaner future as coal declined, was incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015. “[O]nce built, gas locks in future emissions above a level consistent with 2 degrees,” at least without widespread carbon capture technology, according to a comment on a draft outline for a speech by BP’s CEO in 2017.
“This is the first evidence I’ve seen of them acknowledging internally, at the highest levels, that they know this — natural gas is a climate disaster — and yet, they still promote it,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy organization.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, invited expert witnesses to talk about the industry’s attempts to shape media coverage and academic research and allegations that they misled the public through deceptive advertising. But Republican lawmakers went off-script, asking questions about boreal forest fires and alleging that reducing fossil fuel production would result in Americans “having to sell blood in order to pay their electricity bill.” At one point, Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana read a list of old Twitter posts in an attempt to discredit Geoffrey Supran, a climate researcher who testified at the event, apparently without realizing that the posts were not written by Supran, although he did retweet one of them.
The hearing was the outcome of a three-year congressional investigation that sought to uncover new information about fossil fuel companies’ history of spreading disinformation about climate change. The first hearing, in October 2021, focused on an early chapter of that history, the 1970s, and drew testimony from executives of BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell, as well as two industry lobbying groups — the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce.
Now, lawmakers have turned their attention to recent history. Ahead of the hearing, they released some 4,500 subpoenaed documents dating back to 2015 that show how oil companies’ internal discussions about the Paris Agreement, methane emissions, and investigations into their own climate denial have diverged from their public statements. The new evidence, summarized in a 60-page report, could be critical for lawsuits alleging that oil companies lied to the public about climate change, since they provide evidence of ongoing deception.
U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, testifies during the Senate hearing on Capitol Hill on May 1.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
Internal documents show that BP recognized the risks associated with producing methane, a potent greenhouse gas that frequently leaks from old oil and gas wells. The company sought to respond to bad press around methane with a $1.1 million communications campaign, according to a draft presentation marked “confidential” from 2018. One of the pillars was to “harness excitement around renewables by positioning gas as the perfect partner,” including plans to fund research from Imperial College London “highlighting [the] role of gas as a friend to renewables.” The following year, when a study found that methane leaks can outweigh the fuel’s emissions-efficiency benefits, a BP executive wrote in an email that the findings were “quite concerning to us as another blow against natural gas.”
The documents also suggest that oil companies’ support for the Paris Agreement was superficial. Executives from Exxon and BP privately doubted that limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the aim of the international climate accord, was achievable, even though they publicly voiced support for it.
Other sections of the report detail the fossil fuel industry’s resistance to U.S. policies to reduce carbon dioxide and methane emissions, as well as their extensive promotion of low-carbon technologies that they didn’t think had much of a future. Exxon Mobil, for example, has heavily promoted its investments in carbon sequestration despite acknowledging internally that it does not plan to deploy the technology at the scale needed to avert dangerous levels of global warming. The company also spent $175 million to advertise its research into algae biofuels despite employees acknowledging that the possibility of actually putting the technology into large-scale practice remained “decades away” and that the ads were potentially misleading.
The documents also shed more light on the $700 million that BP, Chevron, Exxon, and Shell spent on academic research programs at universities including Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2010 and 2020. The funding was part of a philanthropic effort to “gain access to policymakers and influential thought leaders,” according to the report. Additional documents suggest the companies have tracked critics in “weekly activists reports” and attempted to quash news stories about them.
During the hearing, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, lamented the fossil fuel companies’ efforts to mislead the public rather than warn them about the consequences of their products. “They could have been the environmental Paul Revere,” he said. “But they were more like Rip Van Winkle and wanted everyone to go to sleep for a century.”
In response to Grist’s request for comment, BP and the American Petroleum Institute did not address Democratic lawmakers’ report but affirmed their commitment to moving toward renewables. BP said it is “investing in today’s energy system while helping to build out tomorrow’s.”
A spokesperson from Exxon Mobil said the report’s “tired allegations … have already been publicly addressed” in previous congressional hearings and in court, and pointed to the company’s efforts to reduce emissions. A spokesperson from Shell said documents highlighted in the report “are evidence of Shell’s efforts to set realistic targets … and meaningfully participate in the energy transition.” Chevron and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.
The results of the investigation could end up supporting attorneys general who have sued the fossil fuel industry. Oil companies are currently facing around 30 lawsuits for deceiving the public about the consequences of burning fossil fuels. Those suits, filed by state and local governments and Native American tribes, are moving closer to trial after years of delay. Some of them have drawn on subpoenaed documents released by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in 2022. The new evidence released this week, with its focus on the last decade, “really adds to the existing evidence base in the critical phase that’s going to be needed as a proof point in these cases,” Wiles said.
There is likely much more to uncover. During the hearing, Raskin said companies used a “paper blizzard tactic,” overwhelming investigators with hundreds of thousands of emails, newsletters, and other “fluff documents.” He alleged that thousands of documents were withheld or heavily redacted by oil companies to hide relevant information.
“If the companies had actually complied in good faith,” Raskin said, “who knows what else we might have discovered.”
This story has been updated with a clarification on social media posts reshared by Supran.
On the evening of August 8, hours after a wildfire ravaged West Maui, Maui County’s top emergency management official, Herman Andaya, texted his secretary to ask about the status of other fires across the island.
“Still burning,” she replied.
“Wow … Lol,” Andaya texted back.
The messages were released in mid-April as part of a new state report analyzing the government’s response to the fire that ripped through Lāhainā killing more than 100 people, making it the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. Documents, text messages and interviews reveal slow, poor communication between government agencies, causing hours of delay for leaders, like Andaya, to realize the gravity and extent of the crisis.
Andaya, who resigned soon after the wildfire due to broad criticism for his lack of qualifications and his agency’s decision not to sound any sirens as the fire spread, was at a training in Honolulu the day it happened. The texts show that hours after the inferno engulfed the town, Andaya didn’t know if any homes had been lost and thought only a single business had been leveled. The fire burned more than 2,000 buildings, displacing thousands of people.
To Alyssa Purcell, a Native Hawaiian archivist from Oʻahu, the lack of urgency in top officials’ response to the community’s struggles feels familiar.
“It’s a pattern,” she said. “This is not new. And I think the text messages show that there’s such a desensitization on their part to our needs that there’s nothing else that we can do at this point except go to the highest possible platforms and stages that we possibly can.”
Two days before the report came out, Purcell flew to the United Nations headquarters in New York City to speak at the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, urging those present to support the self-determination of Native Hawaiians like herself.
“The 2023 Lāhainā wildfires exposed a systemic disregard for Indigenous rights,” said Purcell, who is a member of the Ka Lahui Hawaiʻi delegation, a group working to advance Native Hawaiian sovereignty. “Hawaiian families are struggling with disaster capitalism, where corporations and developers are using the aftermath of the fires to acquire land, develop properties, and initiate projects that are not in line with the needs of Indigenous communities or sustainable practices.”
The wildfire’s unprecedented destruction underscored the stakes of the group’s decades-old appeal for international support for Native Hawaiian self-determination. In her remarks this year, Purcell called for the U.N. to relist Hawaiʻi as a non-self-governing territory. That list includes more than a dozen territories — Guam, French Polynesia, and New Caledonia, to name a few — whose people still haven’t yet achieved self-government, either by obtaining independence or choosing to join another country.
The Hawaiian Islands were removed from the United Nations list of colonies after Hawaiʻi residents voted to become a state in 1959. But Hawai’i had only been given the option of statehood over their previous status as a U.S. territory. Unlike other island nations like Palau, Vanuatu, and Fiji, the Indigenous peoples of Hawaiʻi were never given the option of independence after the United States overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893.
“If you go back to the root of all these seemingly disparate problems, you’ll find very, very quickly that the root of all of it is the lack of self-determination,” Purcell said.
Take Lāhainā. In the decades prior to the overthrow, the coastal community was the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Hawaiian royalty lived on a sandbar in the midst of an expansive fishpond along Maui’s leeward coast. But sugarcane owners in the 19th century diverted water from the wetlands to their fields, forcing many locals to abandon subsistence farming of crops like taro and breadfruit. Eventually, the fishpond was paved over for a parking lot and baseball field, and when last year’s wildfire came, the former wetland was arid and primed to burn.
The new state report on the Lāhainā wildfires found that as tourism and real estate have replaced large-scale agriculture as main economic drivers in Hawaiʻi in recent decades, landowners have left large tracts of land fallow and filled with highly flammable invasive grasses.
“The removal of active agriculture and the subsequent accumulation of highly combustible standing dead fuel on unmanaged lands is leading to more and larger fires,” the report said.
These destructive wildfires are modern and 99 percent human-caused, the report said.
“Unlike Indigenous uses of fire in continental fire-adapted ecosystems — where systemic and regular burns were used for millennia as a tool for forest health, regeneration, and swidden agriculture — the intentional use of fire in Hawaiʻi was largely limited to the clearing of lowland agricultural fields, cooking, the burning of waste, and small ceremonial practices,” the report said. “Since Hawaiian forests are less adapted to fire and are often destroyed when burned, the cultural ramifications of increased wildfires in Hawaiʻi are significant.”
Brandi Ahlo, another member of the Ka Lahui Hawaiʻi delegation to the U.N. who attended the Permanent Forum with Purcell for the first time this year, sees the Lāhainā wildfire as the inevitable consequence of Indigenous land dispossession.
“It goes back into history and the loss of water and the fact that us as Kanaka, who live on the land, aren’t able to steward our own resources,” Ahlo said. “I think bringing awareness to an international arena and forum is really important for people to see and to spotlight, because if it can happen here in Hawaiʻi, who is to say that it can’t happen to anywhere else?”
Extreme weather events like the wildfire are expected to grow more frequent as climate change accelerates. State leaders in Hawaiʻi are still trying to figure out exactly what happened in Lāhainā last year and plan to release two more reports analyzing officials’ decisions and how similar tragedies could be avoided.
A continuing concern is the potential for private interests to capitalize on the disaster’s aftermath by seizing more water and land, both highly contested limited resources on Maui long before the fires.
In the days following the fire, the state temporarily suspended water regulations in West Maui, benefiting a major local developer who had spent years fighting with Indigenous taro farmers over access to water. On the other side of the island, the state urged a court to allow corporations to divert more water from East Maui streams. The Board of Land and Natural Resources argued that limits on water diversion — limits imposed by the court after lawsuits from Native Hawaiian taro farmers asserting their right to the water — meant that there wasn’t enough water to fight fire in central Maui.
“It seems the BLNR tried to leverage the most horrific event in state history to advance its interests,” the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruling said.
Meanwhile, the community is still reeling emotionally from the grief of the fire’s destruction.
“When I look at the Lāhainā fires, I see cultural destruction, degradation. I see people dying. I see their homes — homes that they’ve lived on for generations — perished in a minute,” Purcell said. “And when foreigners look at the situation, when business owners look at the situation, they see opportunity.”
Plastic — once seen as a marvel of modern science with uses from packaging to textiles — is now a scourge polluting our waterways, exposing us to PFAS “forever chemicals” and making its way into our bloodstreams in the form of microplastics.
Plastic production doubled worldwide in the 20 years prior to 2019, according to a team of researchers writing in The Conversation. Up to 20 percent of the planet’s oil production could be taken up by plastic manufacturing and processing by 2040, using 15 percent of the yearly carbon emissions budget.
“Most of the plastic we make ends up as waste. As plastic manufacturers increase production, more and more of it will end up in our landfills, rivers and oceans. Plastic waste is set to triple by 2060,” the research team said.
The study, “The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics,” was published by the World Economic Forum.
A Center for Climate Integrity report from earlier this year — The Fraud of Plastic Recycling — said the plastics industry was well aware that widespread plastic recycling was unrealistic, but led the public to believe it was feasible.
In The Conversation, the authors of the new study said plastics producers have promoted the idea that how much of their product is produced is irrelevant as long as we — the customers — recycle.
The researchers discovered that this is far from the truth. They found a direct correlation between plastic production and increased plastic pollution.
“[A] 1% increase in plastic production leads to a 1% increase in plastic pollution, meaning unmanaged waste such as bottles in rivers and floating plastic in the oceans,” the researchers wrote. “Not only that, but over half of branded plastic pollution is linked to just 56 companies worldwide. The Coca-Cola Company accounts for 11% of branded waste and PepsiCo 5%. If these companies introduce effective plastic reduction plans, we could see a measurable reduction in plastic in the environment.”
According to experts, it is estimated that an additional 53 million tons of plastic waste will end up polluting the world’s oceans each year by 2030.
“Plastics can cause real damage to our health. Our first exposure to them starts in the womb. In the seas, plastics can choke turtles and seabirds. On land, they can poison groundwater. Socially and economically, plastic pollution now costs us about A$3.8 trillion a year,” the researchers said.
The researchers looked at five years of litter audit data — global surveys of environmental waste — to get an idea of types of plastic waste and their volumes. The data included more than 1,500 audits from 84 countries. The audits found that 48 percent of litter was brand-name, while the remainder was unbranded.
To figure out production levels, the team looked at data reported by major plastics companies to a circular economy organization, then compared it with branded plastic pollution data.
They found that 13 companies each added one percent or higher to the overall branded plastic problem. The companies all produced beverage, food or tobacco products that were mostly packaged using single-use plastic.
Roughly 36 percent of plastic pollution worldwide comes from single-use plastics.
“Even when collected, single-use plastics are a difficult waste stream to manage as they have little or no recycling value,” the researchers wrote. “Then there’s the fact recycling is not a circle, as the famous logo might suggest. The more we recycle plastic, the more degraded it becomes. Eventually, this plastic becomes waste. If recycling and landfilling can only go so far, the missing piece of the puzzle has to be capping plastic production.”
The researchers said this would involve manufacturers being required to reduce their plastic use over time while adopting sustainable and safe alternatives as they come along.
They added that countries could set measurable goals for phasing out hazardous, non-essential and unsustainable single-use plastics like plastic bags, cutlery and take-away containers; work on designing sustainable and safe products to reduce demand for new plastic worldwide while increasing reuse, repairing, refilling and recycling; and invest in non-plastic substitutes and alternatives that have improved environmental, social and economic profiles like reusables.
“One thing is certain – current trends mean ever more plastic, and more plastic means more plastic pollution,” the researchers said.
The accelerated temperature increase could have significant impacts on biodiversity — particularly coral reefs — as well as have wide-ranging socioeconomic effects.
“The future increase in heat content is equivalent to adding the energy of one Hiroshima atomic bomb detonation every second, all day, every day, for a decade,” Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll, the study’s lead author and an Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology climate scientist, toldDown To Earth.
According to the study, the temperature of the planet’s third-largest ocean experienced a basin-wide warming increase from 1871 to 2020. The average sea surface temperature in the 1870s was 79.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but had increased to 81 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2010s.
Ocean surface warming in the Indian Ocean — coupled with heat built up in the first 6,561.7 feet below — can have substantial effects on the region’s monsoon season, reported Down to Earth. The weather pattern brings roughly 70 percent of India’s yearly rainfall while affecting climate in other South Asian nations.
The increased warming could also cause more intense and frequent extreme weather like flooding and tropical cyclones, in addition to sea level rise from thermal expansion in the 40 countries that border the Indian Ocean. Koll pointed out that thermal expansion is responsible for more than 50 percent of sea level rise, exceeding that caused by sea ice and glacial melt.
“Marine heatwaves are projected to increase from 20 days per year (during 1970–2000) to 220–250 days per year, pushing the tropical Indian Ocean into a basin-wide nearpermanent heatwave state by the end of the 21st century,” the study said.
Marine heat waves can lead to coral bleaching, kelp forest degradation and seagrass loss. They can also contribute to the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones.
“These prolonged marine heatwaves will not only intensify cyclones but also affect fish migration, coral reefs, phytoplanktons and marine biodiversity,” Koll told Mongabay India.
The researchers looked at the ocean’s surface temperature warming and found it had increased at a rate of 0.12 degrees Celsius each decade from 1950 to 2020.
The most marked warming occurred in the northwest portion of the ocean, which includes the Arabian Sea, while the least warming was seen off the Java and Sumatra coasts, Down to Earth reported.
Warming in the Indian Ocean is also predicted to cause a decrease in the water’s pH levels from roughly 8.1 to 7.7 by 2100.
“The projected changes in pH may be detrimental to the marine ecosystem since many marine organisms — particularly corals and organisms that depend on calcification to build and maintain their shells — are sensitive to the change in ocean acidity,” Koll told Down to Earth.
The study said the most effective plan of action to mitigate current and future warming impacts is to build infrastructure that is climate resilient and reduce GHG emissions.
“The Indian Ocean, a climate change hotspot, faces rapid and strong increases in marine heatwave frequency and intensity unless global CO2 emissions are substantially cut,” said co-author of the study Thomas Frölicher, a University of Bern climate scientist, as reported by Down to Earth.
