This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Around the world, leaves play a critical central role in staving off the worst impacts of climate change. Their ability trap CO2 and combine it with water and sunlight to make food and oxygen is a critical part of what keeps life on Earth going. But according to a new study published in Nature, some tropical forests — including the Amazon rainforest — could become too hot for leaves to photosynthesize.
The Amazon rainforest was once one of the world’s most powerful carbon sinks, largely a result of its uniquely dense tree cover. But deforestation has slowly eaten away at its edges, and drought and fire have limited rainforests’ ability to withstand extreme temperatures. The Amazon was even a net carbon emitter for the first time in 2021. Still, the Amazon covers a land area roughly twice the size of India, and is among the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, with over 3 million species of flora and fauna.
All that could be lost if temperatures continue to increase, potentially turning once-lush tropical forests into a savannah-like plain. According to the study, photosynthesis in tropical trees begins to fail at about 46.7 degrees C (116 degrees F). In addition to monitoring the canopy using both research towers and high resolution images from the International Space Station, the research team heated leaves up in order to test the effects of higher temperatures, identifying the critical threshold at which the enzymes necessary for photosynthesis break down. The data was collected every few days from forests all over the world.
“Until now, we really didn’t know what that number was,” said Gregory Goldsmith, a professor of biology at Chapman University who worked on the study.
Though it doesn’t happen instantaneously, lengthy hot spells increase stress on the leaves, eventually killing them. If enough leaves die, the tree dies with them. And if enough trees die, so does the forest.
But so far, that tipping point remains mostly theoretical. The authors found that canopy temperatures between 2018 and 2020 peaked at around 34 degrees C (93.2 degrees F) on average. In a typical year, only around 0.01 percent of the leaves in the upper canopies surpass the temperature at which photosynthesis starts to fail. The global temperature increase that is associated with these changes is around 4 degree Celsius, which is currently in line with worst-case scenario projections.
“As a group, we do not feel that this is our fate,” said Goldsmith. Though he and other researchers emphasized the importance of reducing emissions and caring for the planet’s tropical forest ecosystems.
Tipping points are complex, though, and there may be more factors to consider than heat alone It’s still unclear how drought and wildfire could take its toll on tropical forests, though some appear to be more vulnerable than others, The Amazon shows the clearest signs of heat stress among forests spanning South America, central Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and Southeast Asia. Fragmentation, or the breaking of large swaths of forest into smaller patches through logging and development, also appears to be a major stressor, mostly because, Goldsmith says, forest edges are hotter and drier than the interior.
Researchers say political stability in rainforest countries plays a major role in ensuring forest protection, which could go a long way towards increasing forest resilience to catastrophic outcomes. In July of this year, deforestation in the Amazon fell by 66 percent, hitting a six-year low. Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has led initiatives to discourage deforestation and illegal ranching. His administration has set a goal to stop deforestation entirely by 2030.
Joshua Fisher, another researcher who worked on the Nature paper, said the international collaboration that went into the study made him hopeful for similar results on the political level.
“In some ways, you know, it doesn’t seem that daunting, because we’re all on spaceship Earth together,” he said.
The UN’s direction on the matter sets forth specific administrative measures nation-states should implement in order to tackle how climate change and humans’ degradation of the environment are affecting children’s rights of enjoyment, as well as to ensure a clean and sustainable planet for current and future generations, a press release from the UN said.
The UN Committee adopted its guidance, officially General Comment No. 26, following consultation with national human rights institutions, nations, international organizations, experts, civil society and children. Children from 121 countries contributed 16,331 comments to the discussion.
“Children are architects, leaders, thinkers and changemakers of today’s world. Our voices matter, and they deserve to be listened to,” said 17-year-old Kartik, an Indian child rights activist who is one of the child advisers of the committee, in the press release. “General Comment No. 26 is the instrument that will help us understand and exercise our rights in the face of environmental and climate crises.”
The general comment provides clarification on how the rights of children apply to environmental protection, as well as emphasizes children’s right to a healthy, clean and sustainable environment. This right is directly linked to the rights of survival, life and development, education, the highest attainable health standard and an adequate standard of living.
“This general comment is of great and far-reaching legal significance,” said Committee Chair Ann Skelton in the press release. “[I]t details States’ obligations under the Child Rights Convention to address environmental harms and guarantee that children are able to exercise their rights. This encompasses their rights to information, participation, and access to justice to ensure that they will be protected from and receive remedies for the harms caused by environmental degradation and climate change.”
The general comment goes on to declare that countries shall give children protection against the environmental damage caused by commercial activities. It says nations have an obligation to “provide legislative, regulative and enforcement frameworks to ensure that businesses respect children’s rights, and should require businesses to undertake due diligence regarding children’s rights and the environment,” the UN press release said.
General Comment No. 26 also says that, when children have been identified as victims, immediate steps should be taken in order to prevent further harm and to repair the damage.
It has been observed by the committee that, due to their status, children face barriers in the attainment of legal standing in many countries, which limit their ability to assert their rights as relates to the environment.
“States should therefore provide pathways for children to access justice for violations of their rights relating to environmental harm, including through complaints mechanisms that are child-friendly, gender-responsive and disability-inclusive. In addition, mechanisms should be available for claims of imminent or foreseeable harms and past or current violations of children’s rights,” the press release said.
The UN’s guidance highlights the requirement of countries to “take all necessary measures” to protect children’s rights as relates to climate change that is the result of businesses, such as making sure businesses quickly reduce their fossil fuel emissions.
The guidance also underscores the dire need for the climate finance gap to be addressed by developed countries, including by offering grants instead of loans to developing countries, so that negative impacts on children’s rights may be avoided.
“[C]limate finance is overly slanted toward mitigation at the cost of adaptation and loss and damage measures, which has discriminatory effects on children who live in areas where more adaptation measures are needed,” the UN press release said. “The Committee urges immediate collective States actions to tackle environmental harm and climate change.”
Not everyone thought the committee had gone far enough, however.
“I think this was such a missed opportunity – it’s an exercise in incrementalism instead of taking quantum leap forward,” said Kelly Matheson, Global Climate Litigation deputy director at Our Children’s Trust, which represented the youths who recently won in a climate trial against the State of Montana, as Reuters reported.
The California Air Resources Board has announced a new landmark for the state: for the first time, over half of diesel fuel used statewide was replaced by cleaner fuels, as of the first quarter of 2023.
The shift can be largely attributed to the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which is designed to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions through improving vehicle technology, decreasing fuel consumption and providing cleaner fuel alternatives.
“As technological advances put a zero-emissions future within reach, the use of cleaner fuels offers an essential tool to reduce pollution now,” California Air Resources Board Executive Officer Steven Cliff said in a statement. “A 50% reduction in diesel means cleaner air, healthier communities and a commitment to reaching carbon neutrality in California by 2045.”
According to the California Air Resources Board, the cleaner fuel sources include “renewable diesel, biodiesel, electricity, and hydrogen.”
As explained by the California Energy Commission, biodiesel was first introduced in the state in 2000 and is made mostly from soybean oil and other recycled oils. First introduced in 2012, renewable diesel is made from animal waste oils.
Through LCFS, the state has swapped nearly 2 billion gallons of diesel fuel with these other fuel alternatives in 2022. Compliance with the LCFS began in 2011, and since then, the program has replaced about 8.6 billion gallons of diesel.
Earlier this month, the California Air Resources Board announced a new program to help truck fleet owners and operators transition to zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. The program, called the Cal Fleet Advisor, offers free, personalized assistance and information on funding and other aid to make the transition.
“The transition to zero-emissions transportation — and to cleaner air — means working collaboratively with the owners and operators who provide a critical service to California’s economy by transporting goods across the state,” board chair Liane Randolph said in a statement. “Cal Fleet Advisor is an example of the innovative outreach and assistance that California has committed to provide to make a zero-emissions future a reality.”
Sea ice is the habitat of several animal species, including polar bears, Arctic fox, caribou and emperor penguins, who live and breed entirely on frozen Antarctic sea ice.
According to a new study, thousands of emperor penguin chicks from four colonies in Antarctica are thought to have died due to record-low sea ice levels that caused a “catastrophic breeding failure.”
“Abrupt reductions in sea ice extent can have profound effects on ecosystems and the species that depend on the sea ice for breeding, moulting or foraging… Almost all emperor penguin colonies depend upon stable land-fast sea ice, which they use for breeding and moulting, while also using the marginal ice zone as a foraging habitat,” the study said.
The study, “Record low 2022 Antarctic sea ice led to catastrophic breeding failure of emperor penguins,” was published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
In the study, the researchers from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said there was a high probability that none of the emperor penguin chicks from four out of five of the known colonies in the eastern and central parts of the Bellingshausen Sea had survived, a press release from BAS said.
The scientists looked at satellite images showing sea ice loss at emperor penguin breeding sites long before the chicks would have had time to develop their waterproof feathers.
“They still have their downy plumage. If the ice breaks out before they can safely enter the water, the plumage becomes waterlogged and, basically, the chicks die of exposure,” said Dr. Barbara Wienecke, a senior research scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division who has paid many visits to emperor penguin colonies, as The Guardian reported. “It’s horrendous and I find it extraordinarily distressing to think of this happening.”
For the penguins in their large colonies to breed, the sea ice must be stable and firmly attached to shore from April to January, according to the press release. The penguins lay their eggs during the Antarctic winter of May to June, with eggs hatching after 65 days. Chicks fledge during the summer, from December to January.
Antarctic sea ice extent at the start of December of 2022 equaled the previous record low from 2021. The eastern and central Bellingshausen Sea area experienced the most extreme loss at 100 percent for November of 2022.
“We have never seen emperor penguins fail to breed, at this scale, in a single season. The loss of sea ice in this region during the Antarctic summer made it very unlikely that displaced chicks would survive,” said lead author of the study Dr. Peter Fretwell of BAS in the press release. “We know that emperor penguins are highly vulnerable in a warming climate – and current scientific evidence suggests that extreme sea ice loss events like this will become more frequent and widespread.”
Antarctica has experienced its lowest four years of sea ice extent in its 45-year satellite record since 2016. The two lowest years were 2021 to 2022 and 2022 to 2023. Thirty percent of the identified 62 Antarctic emperor penguin colonies were affected by sea ice loss from 2018 to 2022.
In the past, emperor penguins have responded to the loss of their sea ice habitat by changing to more stable locations the following year. However, according to scientists, that doesn’t work when the whole region is affected; there is simply nowhere for them to go.
Emperor penguins have never had to contend with threats such as large-scale hunting, overfishing or even habitat loss caused by humans. The only major threat considered to affect their long-term population is climate change.
Recent predictions of population trends for emperor penguins based on sea ice loss forecasts have shown that if current rates of warming continue, by the end of the century more than 90 percent of their colonies will become quasi-extinct.
“It’s only by changing our behaviour and the amounts of fossil fuels we use will we reverse the trajectory for these emperor penguins, and many other species,” Fretwell said, as reported by The Guardian.
Satellite images from the European Commission’s satellite mission Copernicus Sentinel-2 were used to discover the five penguin colonies studied in the past 14 years, the press release said. All of the colonies had returned to the same place each year for breeding, and there had only been one prior instance of breeding failure, in 2010 at Bryan Peninsula.
“This paper dramatically reveals the connection between sea ice loss and ecosystem annihilation. Climate change is melting sea ice at an alarming rate. It is likely to be absent from the Arctic in the 2030s – and in the Antarctic, the four lowest sea ice extents recorded have been since 2016,” said Dr. Jeremy Wilkinson, a BAS sea ice physicist, in the press release. “It is another warning sign for humanity that we cannot continue down this path, politicians must act to minimise the impact of climate change. There is no time left.”
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
When Chris Hudson saw a heat advisory in the forecast for the Portland, Oregon, area earlier this month, he sprang into action. Things were about to get sweaty in his vegan food truck, and turning on its 75-pound deep fryer and 500-degree-Fahrenheit grill seemed like a bad idea.
“We are hoping to make it through the next few days by offering a cold menu,” he told his business’s followers on Instagram. Instead of grilling his famous meat-free burgers, he would serve a new “chik’n salad sando” and a “BBQ chik’n wrap.” In lieu of fries, chips. Plus, for dessert, several flavors of dairy-free milkshakes and soft-serve ice cream with chocolate dip.
The new menu was meant to tamp down temperatures inside Gnarlys, the popular food truck Hudson opened in 2021. But when the mercury climbs into the upper 90s and beyond — as it did earlier this month, breaking August records for the Portland area — there’s only so much he can do. “We were still at, like, 102 in the cart,” he told Grist, even with a portable AC unit and a fan running around the clock, and with all the windows open.
A food truck is basically “a metal box,” he added. “The sun is beating down on this metal box.”
Hudson is just one of many food truck owners across the U.S. who are struggling to contend with longer and hotter summers. This year alone has seen thousands of daily temperature records fall, and a brutal series of enduring heat waves has made this summer the hottest on record for more than a dozen cities in the South. Among major cities nationwide, heat waves are now happening three times more often than they used to in the 1960s.
The trend is particularly pronounced in Portland, a historically temperate city with more than 1,000 food trucks and carts, one of the highest numbers per capita in the country. All those mobile food businesses are dealing with a spike in the frequency, duration, and intensity of heat waves even more dramatic than what other U.S. cities are facing. Portland used to get about a week’s worth of 90-degree days every year; now it gets 27. Residents spend more than three times as many hours enduring a heat index above 90 degrees, sharply increasing the risk of heat-related illness.
“I didn’t think I would have to worry about heat in Portland,” said Hudson, who moved to the city from Chico, California in 2019. He had ruled out his second-choice city — Austin, Texas — because of its high temperatures. But now in Portland, he said, “we’re dealing with 100-something days every year … I’m worried to the point where I don’t really want to continue to be in a food truck next summer.”
Inside the Gnarlys food truck.
Courtesy of Gnarlys
Portland’s most recent heat wave reached its peak in the afternoon of Monday, August 14. Around 4 p.m. that day, the thermometer at the Portland International Airport read 108 degrees Fahrenheit, the second-hottest temperature ever recorded in the city.
But that was just the beginning for the city’s food trucks. Hours before then, as early as 9 in the morning, the temperature inside Rad Magic Subs had already hit 108 degrees. Justin Miller, who opened the submarine sandwich food truck two and a half years ago, didn’t stick around to see how hot things would eventually get — he announced a temporary closure on Instagram. But he knew from experience that the mercury would only climb higher inside the truck, potentially all the way up to 115 or 120 degrees, as the day went on. The owner of another food truck that did open for business that day reported a peak temperature of 122 degrees.
This is typical. Most food trucks are retrofitted from cargo vehicles like moving vans, and are inherently prone to high heat. They have metal exteriors, limited air flow, and lots of heat-generating kitchen equipment crammed into a relatively small space — sometimes as small as 70 square feet. The exact setup varies from truck to truck, depending on the kind of food being sold, but might include a massive flattop griddle next to a deep fryer, or perhaps an industrial-sized oven — in addition to a big fridge, which lets off heat in order to keep food cold. Other features of a typical food truck include a large ventilation system above the cooking equipment, a generator to keep the fridge and freezer running, tanks for wastewater and freshwater, and separate sinks for washing hands and doing dishes.
Unless clouds roll in to block the sun, “you really can’t get it much cooler in the cart,” said Miller. Small fans and AC units are often ineffective, since the air they blow tends to get sucked up into trucks’ exhaust fans. Even on a 61-degree evening, researchers have shown that temperatures near a food truck’s cooking area can reach as high as 105 degrees. In some jurisdictions like Los Angeles, although not in Portland, health-code regulations make it harder to cool off by preventing food trucks from opening their back doors, in order to keep insects away from the food.
Miller joined many Portland-area food truck owners in deciding to close down during the heat wave, rather than suffer through. But that’s not a decision to be taken lightly, in a sector marked by financial precarity. Many food truck owners will go to great lengths to stay open, even under sweltering, 100-degree-plus conditions.
“We have such a small profit margin that every single day matters,” said Kiaha Kurek, who owns a Hawaiian food truck in Portland called Hapa Howies, which serves a variety of hot lunch plates. Like many of the food truck owners Grist spoke with, she said she doesn’t let her two employees work once outdoor temperatures start to feel “unbearable.” But she’s willing to put herself through those uncomfortable conditions.
Portland, Oregon, during a heat wave in August 2021. Nathan Howard / Getty Images
If it’s been a slow couple of weeks, Kurek will brave the heat by herself, wrapping a wet towel around her neck as she prepares a limited menu of cold poke bowls. “You have to think strategically,” she said. “Make sure you have lots of water on you, wear tank tops, wear shorts.”
Other strategies to beat the heat include everything from running cool water over one’s hands to eating smaller meals and nibbling spicy foods to induce sweating. One crepe truck owner in Durham, North Carolina, told the News & Observer they close their eyes and pretend the intense heat is “from the sun’s rays as we lie on a pristine beach somewhere in Aruba.” Another said they sing Christmas carols, perhaps to conjure the cooling image of snow.
Leah Tucker, founder and executive director of the Oregon Mobile Food Association, a membership organization that represents the state’s food trucks and carts, said these kinds of coping mechanisms are typical: Most food trucks are owner-operated, and those owners often put their health and safety in the backseat so they can prioritize the well-being of their business. Tucker said she spends hot days encouraging food truck owner-operators to limit their hours or shut down temporarily.
“Taking a day off and closing on a really hot day is not the worst thing that could happen,” she said. “A worse scenario would be working a full shift in an extremely hot environment — and then having to take more time off because you’ve had a heat stroke.”
Indeed, the consequences of heat exposure can be crippling. Every year, extreme heat kills more Americans than any other kind of weather-related disaster, and even among food truck veterans who say they’re “used to” the heat, researchers out of the University of California, Los Angeles Heat Lab have documented many cases of heat-related exhaustion, vomiting, heart attacks, nausea, and more. Workers of color may be particularly vulnerable to the heat, due to centuries of baseless assumptions that these demographics are less affected by high temperatures. Sofia Sabra, a researcher at the Heat Lab, said she’s interviewed food truck workers who thought they were able to take longer shifts with no breaks “because they were Mexican.”
Despite the human health risks, many of the food truck owners Grist spoke with expressed a greater concern over equipment malfunctions during a heat wave — especially faulty refrigerators, which may not function well in temperatures above 90 degrees. Buddy Richter, who owns a Portland food truck called Buddy’s Steaks, said he stuffs ice into his fridge to keep the internal temperature from exceeding 40 degrees and spoiling his house-made vegan meats and cheeses. If the fridge breaks altogether, he said, that can lead to thousands of dollars in lost food and repair costs.
Inside Rad Magic Subs, which didn’t open during the heat wave, the temperature was already 108 degrees F at 9 in the morning.
Courtesy of Rad Magic Subs
As with Hudson’s chik’n sandos and Kurek’s poke bowls, Richter often prefers to offer a special “heat wave menu” rather than close down temporarily. Still, this strategy can cause further complications. When Richter offers a hot-weather special caprese sandwich instead of his normal plant-based cheesesteaks, some visitors grumble about the change. Some are reluctant to spend money on simpler menu items that they think they could prepare at home, for cheaper.
“Half the people show up and walk away,” he said. Sometimes, he barely manages to break even on these limited-run menus, since it costs extra to buy new ingredients and equipment. Miller, with Rad Magic Subs, experiences something similar — ”People say they can make [cold] sandwiches already” — while Kurek said she’ll get customers who say, “What do you mean, you don’t have your deep fryer on? It’s not that hot.”
“I look at them, and I’m like, are you crazy? It’s 104 degrees outside, how hot do you think it is in here?” she said. “There’s an absolute lack of understanding.”
Gnarlys, which not only changed its menu during the heat wave but also shifted its operating hours, took to Instagram with a request for customers to “be patient and understanding” in the face of heat-related service changes. “Being frustrated and taking it out on us is not helpful for anyone. Contrary to popular belief, we do not control the weather.”
As climate change progresses, summers are only expected to get hotter. Already, the number of Americans exposed to dangerous heat waves every year has jumped by more than 125 million since 2000. And in the Pacific Northwest, by 2050, heat waves as extreme as the one that killed more than 250 people in the region in 2021 are expected to occur once every six years — rather than once a millennium.
These forecasts only increase the feeling of precarity that defines daily life for many food truck owners. Combined with the increasing risk of wildfires and the suffocating smoke they bring, Miller, with Rad Magic Subs, said the weather is “like an unfightable foe.”
“It’s our biggest challenge for sure,” he told Grist, even bigger than “the economy, supply issues, anything.” With each summer forcing more and more multi-day closures, he added, “the business model of a food truck seems to be less viable year after year.”
Many of the food truck owners Grist spoke with have the long-term goal of opening a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant; the food truck is just a stepping stone along that path. But with so few options to mitigate the relentless and worsening heat, people like Hudson and Kurek have been eager to accelerate that transition. Kurek already has a September opening date for her restaurant — a joint venture with a Portland pop-up restaurant and a new brewery. (The Hapa Howies food truck will stay in operation.)
Hudson, the owner of Gnarlys, said he isn’t yet financially ready for that move. “But I’m ready when it comes to my mental state,” he said. He’s already planned out a new, expanded menu for when that day finally comes.
What if companies had to pay for the problems their carbon emissions cause? Their profits would plunge, according to new estimates, possibly wiping out trillions in financial gains.
For all of those companies combined, the damage would run into the trillions of dollars, Christian Leuz, a coauthor of the study and a business professor at the University of Chicago, told the Associated Press. The researchers only included direct emissions from companies, not “downstream” emissions related to the products they sell. (So emissions from the operations needed to build cars would count; the pollution that comes out of its tailpipe wouldn’t.)
They found that the cost of damage surpassed profits for highly polluting industries, including energy, utilities, transportation, and materials manufacturers — a group that accounted for 89 percent of the total. Researchers didn’t name any specific companies.
The study arrives during a summer when the costs of climate change are coming clearly into view, as historic flooding, deadly wildfires, and frequent heat waves have rattled the United States. The administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned last week that the pace of disasters has been so frequent that it’s running out of cash. And the economic consequences of climate change go beyond emergency response: Extreme heat is believed to cost the U.S. economy billions in lost productivity every year.
But even as the toll of carbon emissions becomes apparent, governments around the world are pouring more money into support for fossil fuel companies than ever before. Last year, subsidies for oil, coal, and natural gas reached a record high of $7 trillion, according to a report out Thursday from the International Monetary Fund, which works out to $13 million every minute. That’s nearly double what the world spends on education and equal to roughly 7 percent of global economic output. Subsidies often come in the form of tax breaks intended to keep people’s gas prices and energy bills low, but they come with huge costs, slowing the shift to a cleaner economy.
The economists behind the new study of corporate emissions make the case that forcing companies to disclose their greenhouse gas pollution is a start toward decreasing emissions. Some governments are starting to move toward this approach: The European Union adopted rules earlier this year that will require companies to disclose their emissions, following a similar move by the U.K. government in 2022. It’s an approach also being considered by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and California lawmakers.
There’s some evidence that such disclosures could prompt companies to reduce emissions. One study found that contamination levels dropped after fracking companies were forced to disclose their pollution, and that these kinds of regulations enabled more public pressure on corporations.
“Put plainly,” the study concludes, “it is difficult to imagine a successful approach to the climate challenge that does not have widespread mandatory disclosure as its foundation.”
After a blazingly hot stretch of summer in early July 2022, the skies broke open over Buchanan County, Virginia. Floodwaters damaged almost 100 homes and destroyed miles of road in the rural, overwhelmingly low-income mountain towns that dot the region. In the wake of the devastation, local officials spent $387,000 compiling a flood preparedness plan. The multistep blueprint analyzed inundation risks and recommended potential risk-reduction projects.
To develop the proposal, the county tapped the Community Flood Preparedness Fund, a state program that makes hundreds of millions of dollars available for disaster risk analysis and mitigation. They were among the first to do so after money for such things became available in 2021 through proceeds from a carbon-offset program called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. But those plans, and the fund, are now in doubt because Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wants to withdraw from the initiative despite the fact it has provided $657 million for flood preparedness and energy-efficiency programs and reduced the state’s carbon emissions by almost 17 percent.
Critics of such a move say that, beyond curtailing the significant emissions reductions RGGI has already incurred, pulling out will reduce the funding available to help communities prepare for increasingly common extreme weather. It is, they say, a huge mistake and, what’s more, illegal. A group of four Southern environmental nonprofits, led by the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed suit on August 21 to stop it.
“Repealing this regulation is just outside of their authority,” said Nate Belforado, a senior attorney with the center. “If they disagree with it, they have to take it to the General Assembly, and they’ve tried to do that and it hasn’t been successful.”
RGGI, often pronounced “Reggie,” is a collaborative cap-and-invest effort that links 12 states stretching from Maine to Virginia. Power plants in those states must acquire one carbon-emission allowance for every ton of CO2 emitted, with the permissible level of emissions declining over time. Ninety percent of the allowances are sold through quarterly auctions, generating money states can invest as they choose. The program reportedly has slashed power plant emissions in participating states by half and raised nearly $6 billion.
Virginia joined the program two years ago, following the legislature’s 53-45 vote to require participation. Of the $657 million Old Dominion has raised, 45 percent has gone toward the Community Flood Preparedness Fund to help communities with resilience planning and municipal projects. (At least a quarter of the fund’s annual allocations go to low-income communities.) The remainder has financed home weatherization for low-income residents, reducing their utility bills through simple, but often expensive, home improvements.
But Youngkin says the rate increases utilities instituted to cover the costs of participation in the initiative create a financial burden for low-income Virginians. “RGGI remains a regressive tax which does not do anything to incentivize the reduction of emissions in Virginia,” his office told 13th News NOW. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) “Virginians will see a lower energy bill in due time because we are withdrawing from RGGI through a regulatory process.”
The appointed Air Pollution Control Board, of which four of seven members were personally named by Youngkin, voted in June to withdraw from the program by repealing the Community Flood Preparedness Act that made Virginia a part of it in 2020. If the decision stands, the move would take effect December 30. Environmental groups said the proper procedure would have been to introduce a legislative bill and have lawmakers decide. One poll found that 66 percent of Virginians support staying in RGGI; to go against them, Youngkin’s critics argue, is a fundamentally anti-democratic move. A comment period for the withdrawal remains open until Wednesday.
Beyond that criticism, Benforado calls Youngkin’s move frustrating given the progress made under the initiative. “Virginia’s monopoly utilities are required to zero out their carbon by 2050,” he said. “RGGI is the tool that will help us get there.”
Municipalities all over Virginia have used the flood-resiliency funds to shore up infrastructure, draft evacuation plans, and restore blighted wetlands. “Local governments are on the front lines of the climate crisis,” said Mary-Carson Stiff, the executive director of the nonprofit Wetlands Water Watch, which worked with Buchanan County on its flood-resiliency plan. “And they are on their own, to come up with resources to come up with plans and to fund strategies to protect against losses.”
In a 2020 report, the organization noted that most of the state’s rural communities do not have any flooding or other climate resilience plans to speak of. Proponents of RGGI say that before Virginia joined, there was almost no money for disaster preparation and planning, which can be time- and labor-intensive, and requires hiring specialists and conducting environmental studies.
Stiff says Virginia’s use of funds raised through the initiative has been fairly forward-thinking. “We’re unique in the other participating RGGI states where our auction proceeds are being spent on grant programs that are actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.
Youngkin’s claim that Virginia ratepayers underwrite the cap-and-invest effort echoes an argument Dominion Energy, the state’s biggest utility, has made. It has said in public comments that the costs it had incurred under RGGI made it necessary to raise rates. It has proposed a rider of $2.29 on top of recent increases caused by fluctuating natural gas prices.
Mayor Justin Wilson of Alexandria, which has benefited from RGGI-funded flood-resiliency projects such as a redesigned downtown waterfront and storm drain expansion, says people were already paying dearly for the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, and that the Community Flood Preparedness Fund has been a godsend. Flooding costs Virginians $400 million per year, according to some estimates.
“I’ve stood in the homes of residents that have seen their livelihoods destroyed,” said Wilson. “The impacts of these storm events are a tax on the community.”
Youngkin has promised alternative sources of funding for flood preparedness and weatherization, and has proposed a $200 million revolving loan fund with a similar purpose. Wilson said he’ll believe there’s a contingency plan when he sees it. All the while, small floods that would have been unusual a couple of decades ago are happening with greater frequency, and the city struggles to keep up. “We have billions of dollars of investment we are gonna have to make,” the mayor said.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the state, Buchanan County’s flood-resilience planning may be complete, but officials must find money for the improvements it outlines. On the anniversary of last summer’s inundation, flood survivors were still fixing up their homes, mourning the woman who had died, wondering where the next resources for them were going to come from, and nervously looking at silt-filled and waste-dammed creeks as summer rain began to fall.
This story was originally published by The 19th and is republished with permission.
Extreme heat has already made pregnancy more dangerous. Now, it is also complicating efforts to control when and how someone becomes pregnant: Record heat waves across the country could threaten access to effective pregnancy tests, condoms, and emergency contraception pills.
All of these items can sustain serious damage in extreme heat, rendering them ineffective when used. And all have become critical resources for people living in states with abortion bans and who are trying to avoid pregnancy. In those states, few options exist to terminate an unintended pregnancy other than acquiring abortion pills online or traveling out of state for care.
Many states that have banned abortion are experiencing broiling summers, including Texas, Louisiana, parts of Mississippi, and Arkansas. Florida — where abortion is banned after 15 weeks of pregnancy and a six-week ban could take effect later this year — has also recorded unusually high temperatures.
“People aren’t thinking about the effects of extremely hot heat for all kinds of medical care,” said Rachel Rebouché, dean at the Temple University School of Law, who studies reproductive health law. “And, specific to reproductive health care, people aren’t thinking about condoms and contraception and reproductive health as essential health care.”
In some states that restrict or ban abortion, abortion funds — which typically aid people in paying for the procedure — have put more emphasis on distributing supplies to prevent pregnancy and to detect it early, even while noting that even the most effective contraception isn’t foolproof. Almost all of the supplies they ship are heat-sensitive.
The Yellowhammer Fund, which serves people mostly in Alabama and Mississippi, mails emergency contraception to people in those two states as well as in parts of Florida. Jane’s Due Process, a Texas-based organization, has for the past three years given people kits including emergency contraception, pregnancy tests, and condoms. The Lilith Fund, an abortion fund in Texas, recently began distributing “post-abortion” kits for people traveling out of state for care, which include pregnancy tests, condoms, and thermometers.
Pregnancy tests generally should be stored at a temperature between 36 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Emergency contraception pills should be kept between 68 and 77 degrees, per the Food and Drug Administration, though they can be transported in temperatures ranging between 59 and 86 degrees. For condoms, the World Health Organization recommends an average shipment temperature no warmer than 86 degrees, noting that peak temperatures shouldn’t exceed 122 degrees and that condoms could be damaged if they are stored at above 104 degrees for an extended period of time.
Extreme heat has already complicated efforts to disseminate contraceptive supplies. Last month, staff from the Lilith Fund reported heat damage to about $3,500 worth of pregnancy tests, thermometers and condoms, the result of a temporary air-conditioning outage at a storage facility in San Antonio. The organization was able to raise money from supporters to replace those items, but will be factoring heat risk in future budgets.
“It’s on our radar, and it’s on the radar of our partners as well,” said Cristina Parker, the fund’s communications director. “This definitely has an impact on our budget, no doubt.”
Other organizations haven’t experienced similar damage. But organizers and health scholars indicated concern that the unusually warm summer — with temperatures across much of the South consistently surpassing 100 degrees Fahrenheit at a higher frequency than usual — will undercut people’s ability to access heat-sensitive reproductive health supplies.
“One thing we’ve always stressed is do not keep kits in your car, especially in Texas heat,” said Graci D’Amore, who coordinates the distribution of reproductive health kits for Jane’s Due Process. “It’s 120 degrees in the car, and Plan B needs to be kept at below 80 degrees for it to maintain efficacy.”
Jane’s Due Process stores its supplies in an air-conditioned office building. But the fear of losing power is more pressing than it was even a few years ago, before a winter snowstorm — also unusual for the state — caused a massive power outage.
“The fear and threat of the [power] grid failing — I think it’s on everyone’s mind,” D’Amore said.
Many organizations, including the Yellowhammer Fund and the Texas family planning provider Every Body Texas, distribute emergency contraception through the mail. But even if medications are stored in a climate-controlled atmosphere, they risk exposure to heat while waiting in someone’s mailbox, at their doorstep or in a delivery vehicle. In those cases, there is little health or reproductive rights organizations can do other than encourage people to bring mail in as quickly as possible.
“When I bring in packages, even when they have not been outside for very long, the contents have been hot to the touch,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a health law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s no way to control what happens once it leaves your hand.”
The heat burden, Sepper and others noted, doesn’t fall equally. People who don’t have access to regular air-conditioning in their homes or cars are more likely to be exposed to extreme heat and to potentially risk damage to family planning and reproductive health supplies. Those who seek abortions and who have to travel out of state, which can mean several hours or even days’ worth of driving, could also suffer more.
“Even people who have cars with functioning air conditioners will find their car engines or air-conditioning can struggle in long travel in this heat,” Sepper said. “If you’re in a car that doesn’t have functioning air-conditioning or that might struggle to make long distances in the heat — we will see for poorer people, the travel out of state will become even more onerous than it already is.”
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