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Amid a difficult year for North Atlantic right whales, a proposed rule to help protect them is one step closer to reality.
Earlier this month, a proposal to expand speed limits for boats — one of the leading causes of death for the endangered whales — took a key step forward: It’s now under review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the last stage of federal review.
Fewer than 360 of the whales remain; only about 70 of them are females of reproductive age. Every individual whale is considered vital to the species’ survival, but since 2017 right whales have been experiencing what scientists call an “unusual mortality event,” during which 39 whales have died.
Human actions — including climate change — are killing them.
When the cause of a right whale’s death can be determined, it is most often a strike by a boat or entanglement in fishing gear. Three young whales have been found dead this year, two of them with wounds from boat strikes and the third entangled in gear. One of the whales killed by a boat was a calf just a few months old.
“Our impacts are so great right now that the risk of extinction is very real,” said Jessica Redfern, associate vice president of ocean conservation at the New England Aquarium. “To be able to save the species, we have to stop our direct human-caused impacts on the population.”
This is not the first time humans have driven North Atlantic right whales to the brink of extinction.
Their name comes from whaling: They were known as the “right” whale to hunt because they spend time relatively close to coastlines, often swimming slowly and near the surface, and they float when dead. They also yielded large amounts of the oil and baleen whalers were after. So humans hunted them to near extinction until it was banned in 1935.
Many of those same characteristics are what make right whales so vulnerable to human-caused dangers today. Because they’re often near the surface in the same waters frequented by fishing boats, harbor pilots, and shipping vessels headed into port, it’s easy for boats to collide with them.
“They’ve been called an urban whale,” said Redfern. “They swim in waters that humans are using; they have high overlap with humans.”
A dead 1-year-old female North Atlantic right whale calf on a beach in Savannah, Georgia. Experts found evidence of blunt force trauma consistent with a vessel strike. Courtesy of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation / NOAA #24359
To reduce the risk of vessel strikes, ships over 65 feet long have to slow down during set times of year when the whales are likely to be around. In the southeastern U.S., the speed limits are in force during the winter when the whales are calving; off the New England coast, the restrictions are in place in the spring and summer when they’re feeding. Regulators can also declare voluntary speed restrictions in localized spots if whales are seen, known as dynamic management areas.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, in 2022 proposed expanding those restrictions in three ways.
First, the new rule would cover larger geographical areas. The protection zones would extend down the coast from Massachusetts to Florida at various times of year, instead of only applying in certain distinct areas.
Second, the change would apply the speed limits to smaller craft like fishing boats, rather than only ships over 65 feet.
Third, the new rule would make the speed restrictions — the temporary speed limits where whales have been spotted — in dynamic management areas mandatory.
Since NOAA published and gathered feedback on the proposed rule in 2022, whale advocates have been clamoring for the agency to implement it. Those calls have increased in recent months as dead right whales have washed up on beaches.
“There have been three deaths, and that has been really devastating this year, and two of them are related to vessel strikes,” said Redfern. “It’s just highlighted that absolute urgency, the necessity of getting this rule out.”
A leading boating industry group is speaking out against the expanded speed restrictions, arguing they could hurt small businesses in the recreational boating industry.
“We are extremely disappointed and alarmed to see this economically catastrophic and deeply flawed rule proceed to these final stages,” said Frank Hugelmeyer, president and CEO of the National Marine Manufacturers Association, in a statement. “The proposed rule is based on incorrect assumptions and questionable data, and fails to distinguish between large, ocean-crossing vessels and small recreational boats.”
Right whale scientists have documented in recent years that small, recreational boats can injure and kill right whales. At least four of the lethal vessel strikes since the current restrictions began in 2008 have involved boats smaller than 65 feet and thus not subject to that speed limit, according to Redfern.
NOAA estimated that, based on the size and placement of the propeller wounds, the boat that killed the months-old calf this year was between 35 and 57 feet in length — too small to fall under the existing speed restrictions, but subject to the new rule if it were to be implemented.
In his statement, Hugelmeyer also pointed to new marine technologies aimed at detecting right whales in the water to reduce vessel strikes without expanding the speed rules.
Scientists like Redfern remain skeptical, though.
The tech “offers a lot of promise,” she said, but the speed limits are proven.
“It’s really important, I think, that we rigorously evaluate the technology that’s proposed to make sure that it is going to achieve the same type of risk reduction that we see with the slowdowns in expanded areas,” she said.
Many groups, meanwhile, have raised concerns that offshore wind turbines could harm whales. There is no evidence of that, according to NOAA.
Healthy coral reefs are complex ecosystems that serve as the feeding and spawning habitat for thousands of fish, molluscs, crustaceans and many other marine species. Reefs are not only colorful, but full of sounds, and it is this vast array of noises that is the focus of a new study by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
The research team found that using underwater speakers to play soundscapes made by thriving corals could help damaged and degraded reefs by encouraging coral larvae to make their homes there.
“A healthy coral reef is noisy, full of the croaks, purrs, and grunts of various fishes and the crackling of snapping shrimp. Research suggests that larval animals use this symphony of sounds to help them determine where they should live and grow,” a press release from WHOI said.
A reef that has experienced coral bleaching or been degraded by human impacts or disease is unable to support as many species, resulting in a quieter and less diverse soundscape. The researchers demonstrated that coral larvae responded to the broadcasting of healthy reef noises at degraded reefs by settling them at much higher rates.
“What we’re showing is that you can actively induce coral settlement by playing sounds,” said first author of the study Nadège Aoki, a WHOI doctoral candidate, in the press release. “You can go to a reef that is degraded in some way and add in the sounds of biological activity from a healthy reef, potentially helping this really important step in the coral life cycle.”
Since corals become immobile as adults, the larval stage is the only time they are able to choose their habitat. Coral larvae follow the currents, drifting or swimming in search of suitable conditions where they can affix themselves to the seafloor. Earlier research had demonstrated that light and chemical cues have the ability to influence their decisions, but the new study adds sounds to the combination of factors.
“We’re hoping this may be something we can combine with other efforts to put the good stuff back on the reef,” Aoki said, as The Guardian reported. “You could leave a speaker out for a certain amount of time and it could be attracting not just coral larvae but fish back to the reef.”
The study involved a single experiment that was conducted twice in the United States Virgin Islands in June and July of 2022. The researchers collected a species of coral larvae known as “mustard hill coral” due to its yellow color and cauliflower-like bumps, distributing them at three reefs on the coast of the island of St. John.
Tektite, one of the reefs selected, was relatively healthy, while Salt Pond and Cocoloba had a lower fish population and sparse coral cover.
After installing an underwater speaker system at Salt Pond, the scientists placed larvae cups in four locations from 3.28 feet to 98.4 feet away from the speakers. For three nights, healthy reef sounds that had been recorded at Tektite nine years earlier were broadcast. Similar installations were set up at the other reefs without any sounds.
After collecting the cups, the team discovered that much more larvae had settled at Salt Pond. Coral larvae had settled at an average rate from 1.7 to seven times more often in the sound-filled environment.
“The fact that settlement is consistently decreasing with distance from the speaker, when all else is kept constant, is particularly important because it shows that these changes are due to the added sound and not other factors,” said Aran Mooney, lead author of the study and a marine biologist with WHOI, in the press release. “This gives us a new tool in the toolbox for potentially rebuilding a reef.”
The Tektite and Cocoloba reefs had similar settlement rates to each other. A 2017 study showed higher rates at Tektite, which had experienced a major bleaching event, coral disease and several hurricanes in recent years.
“We seem to have lost some of the complexity of Tektite’s soundscape over the last decade,” Aoki said in the press release. “It could be that conditions there are not as good as we thought they were, but we don’t know for sure.”
The researchers pointed out that Tektite’s reduction in settlement rates is an example of the many threats facing coral reefs, as well as the necessity of scalable and timely solutions.
The study, “Soundscape enrichment increases larval settlement rates for the brooding coral Porites astreoides,” was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
More than a quarter of the planet’s marine animals are supported by coral reefs. They also provide tourism and food for millions of people and protect coastlines from storms and powerful waves.
It has been estimated by scientists that half of Earth’s coral reefs have been destroyed in the past three decades.
The research team has hope that their work could be used to aid coral restoration. For example, coral reef soundscapes could help increase larvae settlement rates in nurseries, or be broadcast at wild reefs to improve or maintain existing populations of corals.
“Replicating an acoustic environment is actually quite easy compared to replicating the reef chemical and microbial cues which also play a role in where corals choose to settle,” said Amy Apprill, a study co-author and WHOI microbial ecologist, in the press release. “It appears to be one of the most scalable tools that can be applied to rebuild reefs, so we’re really excited about that potential.”
According to key findings from the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s latest Annual Methane Tracker, in 2023, global methane emissions from fossil fuels stayed close to a record high despite new global reduction pledges.
“Emissions of methane from fossil fuel operations remain unacceptably high… There is no reason for emissions to remain as high as they are,” said Tim Gould, IEA chief energy economist, as AFP reported.
The new IEA report estimates that methane emissions from fossil fuel use and production were nearly 120 million tonnes (Mt) in 2023, with another 10 Mt from bioenergy — primarily coming from traditional biomass use. This level of emissions has held relatively steady since reaching a record high in 2019. Since then, the supply of fossil fuels has expanded, indicating that the average intensity of methane production worldwide has decreased slightly.
Analysis of the new IEA data — based on energy sector methane emissions, along with new scientific studies, satellite information and measurement campaigns — indicates signs of progress, as well as some concerning trends.
An increasing number of fossil fuel companies and governments have committed to taking action on methane emissions, while efforts to report estimates of emissions transparently and consistently are strengthening. Studies also suggest some regions are experiencing less methane emissions.
On the other hand, methane emissions overall are still much too high to meet global climate targets. Satellites detected a more than 50 percent increase in large methane emissions events in 2023 compared to the previous year, including more than five Mt from big fossil fuel leaks worldwide, such as the blowout of a well in Kazakhstan that lasted more than 200 days.
Around 80 of the 120 Mt of emissions estimated by the IEA to have come from fossil fuels last year came from the top 10 methane emitting countries. The United States leads the way as the largest emitter of the toxic greenhouse gas from oil and gas production, followed by Russia. China is the biggest emitter of methane in the coal sector. Additionally, 170 billion cubic meters of methane were lost globally last year from fossil fuel operations — more than the entire natural gas production of Qatar.
However, this year is likely to be a “turning point,” according to Gould, with new satellite images helping to improve transparency and monitoring surrounding methane leaks, helping companies to address them in a more timely manner, reported Reuters.
The IEA estimates that if all the methane pledges and policies made by companies and nations thus far were put into practice and achieved completely and on target, fossil fuel methane emissions would decrease by roughly half by the end of the decade. In most cases, however, pledges have yet to be backed up by detailed policies, plans and regulations.
“The detailed methane policies and regulations that currently exist would cut emissions from fossil fuel operations by around 20% from 2023 levels by 2030,” the IEA report said. “The upcoming round of updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, which will see countries set climate goals through 2035, presents a major opportunity for governments to set bolder targets on energy-related methane and lay out plans to achieve them.”
The report emphasized that it will take more than reducing the use of fossil fuels to cut methane emissions enough to keep global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“In our Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario – which sees the global energy sector achieving net zero emissions by mid-century, limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 °C – methane emissions from fossil fuel operations fall by around 75% by 2030. By that year, all fossil fuel producers have an emissions intensity similar to the world’s best operators today,” the IEA said. “Targeted measures to reduce methane emissions are necessary even as fossil fuel use begins to decline; cutting fossil fuel demand alone is not enough to achieve the deep and sustained reductions needed.”
A new study led by researchers at the University of Surrey in England has identified methods that, when applied together, could reduce air pollution in classrooms by up to 36%.
Researchers tested air purifying methods for two classrooms in a school located about 10 meters from a highway that has an average of 31,067 cars driving it daily. The study highlighted that the highway, A3, has some of the highest amounts of air pollution in England’s highway network, according to surveys by Highways England.
One of the classrooms was next to the highway, noted in the study as Classroom A, while the other, Classroom B, was on a different side of the school building and faced away from the highway. Both classrooms were similar in room size, class size, and number of teachers, and both were cleaned for the same amount of time each day.
For both classrooms, researchers monitored for PM10, PM2.5, PM1, carbon dioxide, temperature and relative humidity in three places inside each classroom and one point just outside each classroom.
From there, the researchers tested a variety of scenarios using air purifiers and natural ventilation via opening windows. For the base scenario, researchers did not use an air purifier and allowed those in the classroom to proceed with business-as-usual when it came to opening any doors or windows. Then, researchers tested rooms with combinations of using air purifiers and open windows to see how these factors impacted the air quality indoors.
“Alternating purifiers with scheduled window openings is an effective way to clean up classroom air,” Nidhi Rawat, co-author of the study and researcher at the University of Surrey’s Global Centre for Clean Air Research, said in a statement. “The most effective combination depends on the characteristics and location of the classroom, and when the teacher opens windows. We also understand that keeping the windows open is not always comfortable or practical — so a sensible, tailored approach is recommended.”
The results showed that the air quality had the most improvements when both classrooms used air purifiers and scheduled window openings. According to the study, coarse particle pollution declined by 36% in the classroom farthest from the highway and 18% for the classroom closest to the busy road. Carbon dioxide pollution fell 11% in Classroom B and 28% for Classroom A. The results were published in Journal of Building Engineering.
“Our timely study can help policymakers choose when and how to optimise the benefits of air purifiers and window openings in the classroom,” Prashant Kumar, a co-author of the study and professor at University of Surrey, said in a statement. “Globally, millions of children are forced to breathe poor quality air while they learn. We hope our study can be used to design ways to make classrooms safer and pupils healthier.”
A lot of attention has focused on phasing out single-use plastics, which create visible plastic pollution and release microplastics when they break down. But there’s growing recognition that plastics, and microplastics, are hidden in a staggering number of products we depend on — including, notably, our clothing.
The bits of plastic shed from synthetic textiles have their own term: microfibers. Scraps of polyester, nylon, elastane, and other synthetic fabrics slough off of our clothes in the course of wearing, storing, and washing them. Laundry alone may account for about a third of the microplastics released into the ocean each year — and some innovations and regulations have emerged to reduce the transfer of microplastics from our washing machines to our water systems. But another set of innovators are imagining something bigger: what our clothes could be made of instead.
The problem, of course, is that plastics are so darn functional. Synthetic fibers are typically cheaper to produce than organic materials, and they also offer performance benefits, like stretchiness and weatherproofing.
“The age of plastic began because it mimicked other things, and the functionality was so good that it became its own thing,” fashion designer Uyen Tran told Grist, when we interviewed her for our 2023 Grist 50 list. In 2020, Tran founded a company called TômTex to create bio-based materials that can replace synthetic fabrics as well as leather and suede. She believes that a wave of new materials is ready to outcompete plastic-based textiles. “I think biomaterial is on the edge of becoming its own thing as well. Just give us a few more years, and you will see.”
In this newsletter, we’re rounding up a handful of the materials — from apple waste to artificial spider silk — that are already on the market, offering a glimpse of a plastic-free future for our textiles.
Shrimp shells: TômTex’s bio fabrics are made out of the waste from mushrooms and shrimp shells. The company sources the latter partially from the shrimp industry in Tran’s native Vietnam, which creates hundreds of tons of shell waste annually. And, Tran noted in her Grist 50 profile, she eventually hopes to build a network of regional production facilities all over the world, sourcing materials from waste streams in different regions. The company debuted its fully biodegradable shell-based fabric at New York Fashion Week in 2022, in a collaboration with designer Peter Do. Its mushroom-based fabric was seen on runways in both London and Paris Fashion Weeks in 2023. Read more
Apple mush: Another example of a company harnessing waste streams as raw materials for textiles is Allégorie, a New York-based accessory company making bags and wallets out of apple pomace — the mush left behind from juicing — as well as cactus, mangos, and pineapple leaves. Co-founder Heather Jiang told Marie Claire that some of the products even retain a pleasant, fruity scent.
Allégorie’s fruit-based products are meant to offer a better vegan leather, as the majority of faux leather products currently on the market are made of plastics like polyurethane and vinyl. The company also sees reducing food waste as part of its mission. Read more
Old cotton: A perhaps less surprising waste stream is used clothing itself. Early last year, a Swedish company called Renewcell opened the world’s first commercial-scale textile-recycling facility. The company’s patented process involves shredding old cotton clothing (with up to 5 percent non-cotton content), like shirts and jeans, and then chemically processing them to separate the fibers, which results in a simple organic compound called cellulose. This can then be spun into new viscose fabric.
The company’s main draw was addressing textile waste; more than 100 billion clothing items are produced each year, and only 1 percent end up getting cycled into new garments. That existing stock would also become new clothes made without plastics — and clothes that in turn don’t create more microplastics. But despite its initial promise, and backing from funders like the Swedish fashion giant H&M, Renewcell filed for bankruptcy last month. The move is largely due to a lack of funding and underwhelming demand for its product, which some commenters have attributed in part to the difficulty of changing systems within the entrenched fashion industry. Next steps for the company, its technology, and its stores of recycled material are uncertain. Read more
*Correction: This section originally omitted information about Renewcell’s bankruptcy.
Enhanced cotton: A company called Natural Fiber Welding is working on enhancing natural materials like cotton to confer some of the same benefits that synthetic fabrics offer. Wired reports on how the process, known as (you guessed it!) “fiber welding,” uses liquid salts to partially break down the fibers and then fuse them together, creating longer and stronger threads that can mimic some of the coveted characteristics of synthetics, like strength and durability, especially relevant for athletic and outdoor apparel. The company announced a partnership with Patagonia in 2021. Read more
Lab-grown spider silk: A Japanese company called Spiber is pioneering what it calls “brewed protein” fibers — a way to produce desirable natural substances in a lab. As The Japan Times reports, it began in 2007 with efforts to engineer spider silk, which has long been admired for its strength, durability, and lightness. (Hence the name, which combines “spider” and “fiber.”) The company’s first product, made from a silk protein synthesized by bacteria enhanced with a snippet of spider DNA, was used in 2015 by The North Face, in a prototype coat called the Moon Parka.
But the company encountered a challenge in trying to create a product that wouldn’t shrink when wet, as spiderwebs do. Today, taking lessons from its initial engineering process, Spiber produces a brewed protein material that does not replicate any specific natural substance. The novel material is now being used by sportswear company Goldwin (the distributor for The North Face in Japan), which hopes to have 10 percent of its new products use brewed protein by 2030. Read more
Another increasingly common bio-based textile is lyocell. The semi-synthetic fiber, also sometimes known by the brand name Tencel, is famous for its softness and its relative sustainability. It’s made by chemically dissolving wood pulp (usually fast-growing eucalyptus), pushing the mixture through a shower-head-like device called a spinneret, and then spinning the fibers into a yarn. In this photo from The Fashion Awards 2023 in London, Nicole Scherzinger (of Pussycat Dolls fame) wears a custom Tencel gown by Patrick McDowell, a luxury designer who only uses sustainable and recycled fabrics.
The long-awaited jobs board for the American Climate Corps, promised early in the Biden administration, will open next month, according to details shared exclusively with Grist.
The program is modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, launched in 1933 to help the country make it through the Great Depression. The positions with the new corps could range across a number of fields including energy-efficiency installations, disaster response preparedness, recycling, and wildfire mitigation.
The White House plans to officially launch an online platform in April. At first, only a couple of hundred jobs will be posted, but eventually up to 20,000 young people are expected to be hired in the program’s first year. Interested candidates can apply to the positions through the portal, and the majority of the positions are not expected to require experience.
“The American Climate Corps is a story of hope and possibilities,” said Maggie Thomas, a special assistant to the president for climate change. “There’s an incredible demand signal from young people who we see as being put on a pathway to good-paying careers.”
That path could include work such as installing wind and solar projects, conserving energy in homes, and restoring ecosystems, such as wetlands, to protect towns from flooding. Thomas announced a logo for the program at the Aspen Ideas climate conference in Miami on Wednesday.
The White House announced a new logo for the American Climate Corps on Wednesday ahead of the launch of a long-awaited jobs board next month.
Courtesy of AmeriCorps
The American Climate Corps has wide support, meaning that those few hundred open spots available next month might fill up quickly. Some 71 percent of voters approve of the idea, including well over half of Republicans, according to polling Data for Progress conducted last October. And previous polling has shown that half of likely voters under 45 would consider joining the program, given the chance.
“We’re absolutely confident that there are millions of young people who are interested in these programs,” said Saul Levin, the legislative and political director at the Green New Deal Network.
That demand was evident at a series of public listening sessions held by the White House earlier this year. The events were oversubscribed and ran over time with participants eager to sign up for potential jobs, Thomas said. Given the demand, President Biden promised to triple the size of the corps in a decade at his State of the Union speech last week. His newly proposed budget calls for an $8 billion expansion of the American Climate Corps to employ an additional 50,000 corps members per year by 2031.
Still, that’s nowhere close to the dreams some progressives had for the program: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had hoped it would put 1.5 million Americans to work addressing the climate crisis. Nor is it comparable to the original Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired 3 million men to plant billions of trees, fight forest fires, prevent erosion, and build trails you can still hike at national parks today.
“We’ll say this again and again — hundreds [of positions] is not enough,” Levin said. “We’re talking about a country on fire. We’re talking about people not being able to breathe the air outside. So the scale needs to be dramatically ramped up.” He sees the president’s call for billions in funding for the program as a signal that the administration is committed to expanding it.
The current version of the American Climate Corps is in many ways a compromise of Biden’s initial plans to revive that program and update it for the problems of the 21st century. The corps was initially funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate bill Biden signed in 2021. But that funding was stripped from the bill before passage. As a result, funding for the American Climate Corps had to be cobbled together from existing funding from seven agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Interior.
One source of funding for these positions is the $2 billion in environmental justice community grants allotted to the EPA in November. The EPA grants could potentially be used by a grassroots community organization that, say, is deploying air monitors in neighborhoods, Thomas said. The group could apply for funding from the EPA and then use the money to hire a small team of people through the American Climate Corps website.
“We’ve been trying to think creatively about the sources of funds that we are bringing to the table to ensure that we’re building justice and equity into the fabric of the American Climate Corps,” Thomas said.
Whether Congress approves Biden’s request for $8 billion to expand the corps is very much up in the air, but Thomas hopes that the rollout of the program in the coming months will make its popularity clear.
“Once you see the impact of what the American Climate Corps will be in communities across the country, it’s going to be really hard for members of Congress to deny the incredible opportunity that exists with a program like this,” she said.
This story was co-published with the Tampa Bay Timesand produced in partnership with the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
Laurie Giordano stood before a committee of Florida lawmakers in 2020, her hands trembling. She was there to tell the story of her son Zachary Martin, a 16-year-old football player who had died from heat stroke three years earlier.
“No mom should ever drop their kid off at football practice and then never hear their voice again,” she said, pleading for the passage of a bill that would provide heat-illness protections for high school athletes in Florida.
“Exertional heat stroke is 100 percent preventable and survivable, if we are prepared,” Giordano told the lawmakers. If her son were alive today, she said, he would be fighting for the bill’s protections, like rest and water breaks, which could have saved his life.
Laurie Giordano, left, and her son Zachary Martin pose for a photo in 2014. Zachary died of exertional heat stroke after football practice in 2017. Courtesy of Laurie Giordano
The legislators heeded her call and passed the Zachary Martin Act in her son’s honor just two months later. Since then, no student athlete has died from heat stroke in Florida, which now ranks highest in the country for its school sports safety provisions.
Two years after Martin’s death in Fort Myers, a Haitian farmworker in his 40s named Clovis Excellent died from heat stroke at a farm just north in Bradenton. He had been working for five hours, pulling stakes from tomato beds in temperatures exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, investigated his death and found that, given the intensity of the work, the temperatures he was exposed to were unsafe without regular breaks in the shade. But Utopia Farms II, like many farms in the state, did not require its workers to take breaks, no matter the heat.
At least seven other outdoor workers died from heat illness in Florida in the two years between Martin’s and Excellent’s deaths, according to federal fatality records. During that time, labor advocates pushed lawmakers to establish heat-illness protections for Florida’s 2 million outdoor workers. These measures included rest breaks, shade, and water, as well as heat-illness first-aid training.
But those efforts failed. More worker heat-safety bills have been filed in Florida than any other state, but none has made it past a single committee hearing.
Members of WeCount, an advocacy organization for South Florida’s immigrant workers and their families, rally for workplace heat protections in Miami in July 2023. Wilfredo Lee / AP Photo
Florida is the hottest state in the country and has some of the highest rates of hospitalization due to heat illness, which kills more than 1,200 Americans a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. The number of workplace fatalities from heat has doubled since the 1990s, averaging over 40 workplace deaths a year for the last five years. While California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington have all passed regulations to protect workers from heat illness, there is no national heat standard; OSHA, the federal agency that regulates workplace safety, is in the process of drafting one, but it could take around seven years and there are no guarantees that it will be enacted.
Heat is already the deadliest weather event, and as climate change causes temperature spikes to become more common and unpredictable, the threat will only increase, especially for those most vulnerable to heat illness. No one can predict how communities will adapt — what investments will be made to prepare for the heat waves of the future and how those protections will be distributed — but the disparities in whom lawmakers choose to protect are telling.
When Zachary Martin, a 16-year-old football player, died from heat stroke, there was widespread press coverage and the Florida legislature voted unanimously to mandate that schools have emergency medical plans to treat heat injuries.
When Clovis Excellent, a Haitian immigrant in his 40s, died from heat stroke, his name never appeared in the papers, and bills recommending similar protections were largely ignored by lawmakers.
On June 29, 2017, Laurie Giordano was checking her phone in her parked car near Riverdale High School when one of her son’s teammates tapped on the glass.
“Zach is down,” the boy said.
Her son Zachary, or “Big Zach,” as his friends called him, had been playing football since he was in eighth grade. The summer before his junior year, he stood 6 feet, 4 inches tall, weighed 320 pounds, and wore a size 15 wide shoe. He wanted to play football in college, maybe even professionally. He worked hard in his classes and pushed himself during preseason practice, determined to be a starting player on the varsity team the next year.
Zachary Martin poses in his high school football uniform. Courtesy of the Zach Martin Memorial Foundation
When she got to the field, she saw Zachary seated on the ground. Two teammates were holding his arms and an assistant coach was propping him up from behind. Coach James Delgado told Grist that they were trying to keep him upright to prevent him from choking. The boy had collapsed after completing about three hours of indoor training and running drills outside in the 90-degree heat. His coaches and teammates had assumed Zachary was dehydrated, so they offered him water, but he immediately vomited after drinking it. Soon, his condition worsened.
Zachary was moaning. His eyes were closed; his head, drooping. He hardly looked conscious.
Giordano was shocked. “Everything in me was saying this was not right,” she told Grist.
Delgado called 911. The fire department was the first to arrive on the scene, followed by the paramedics, who brought Giordano’s son to the hospital. The doctors determined that Zachary was suffering from heat stroke, a condition that can be fatal.
When a person reaches that stage of heat injury, the body loses its ability to cool itself, and internal temperatures can rise within a matter of minutes to 107, 108, 109 degrees. If the person is not rapidly cooled within the first 30 minutes, their organs can fail. Time is essential.
Zachary made it to the hospital over an hour after he collapsed. The doctors covered him in ice to try to lower his temperature. He was in a coma for more than a week.
Giordano slept in the hospital every night. She saw him wake up twice: The first time, he tried to pull himself from his bed, half-conscious. It took multiple nurses to restrain him.
“He was scared,” Giordano said. “He didn’t know where he was.”
The second time, all he could do was squeeze her hand.
Two days later, he died.
“He fought,” Giordano said. “He fought so hard.”
On the ride home from the hospital, Giordano remembers turning to her husband.
“We’re not going to take a loss on Zach,” she told him.
“At the time, I wasn’t even 100 percent sure what had happened.” Giordano told Grist. But she sensed that the school’s response had been inadequate. Days after her son’s death, she set out to discover whether it could have been prevented.
She got on her computer and looked up what heat training Riverdale High School coaches received. The National Federation of State High School Associations certifies coaches throughout the country, and it had provided the training materials for Riverdale’s athletic staff. It had an online course on heat illness, but it was optional. She found that in Florida, no agency ensured that high school coaches were trained in heat-illness prevention.
Watching the online training videos, Giordano found that all the major symptoms of heat stroke — collapsing, disorientation, slurred speech, vomiting — were the exact symptoms Zachary had experienced. She also learned that, if treated quickly, heat stroke fatalities are entirely preventable using a technique called “cold water immersion.” It sounded essentially like dunking someone in a tub of ice water.
“It can’t be that simple,” Giordano thought.
She looked at resources from the Korey Stringer Institute, a leading researcher in sports medicine that specializes in heat illness, and found that it was. Schools could use “cold tubs” — essentially plastic tubs filled with ice water — to save students’ lives.
“As soon as I heard the term ‘cold tub,’ I knew exactly what they were talking about. Because I had seen them,” Giordano said.
The week before her son’s collapse, Giordano had seen him outside the high school’s athletic facility loading ice into a large plastic tub filled with water. When she asked him what he was doing, Zachary had said he was helping some teammates who were cramping from the heat. They would sit in the tub after practice to relax their muscles and cool down.
But when Zachary passed out, the tubs were nowhere in sight. And rather than moving Zachary to a shaded area and trying to immediately cool him, which the online training said was critical for survival, his coaches left him on the sundrenched field until the paramedics arrived.
Giordano realized that the coaches at Riverdale had the tools they needed to save Zachary’s life. But when it mattered, they were not trained to use them.
She learned that the Florida High School Athletic Association, or FHSAA, was responsible for maintaining safety standards for the state’s high school sports teams. She met with its leadership to talk about the possibility of mandating heat-injury emergency plans.
The FHSAA had guidelines about heat-illness prevention but did not mandate training for coaches or the use of the cold water immersion tubs that would have saved Zachary’s life. The agency could investigate schools that were failing to uphold safety standards and penalize them if they failed to do so. But it did not proactively inspect schools, and its enforcement was largely based on self-reporting. The executive director of the organization, George Tomyn, told Giordano that the FHSAA lacked the authority and the capacity to mandate such policies for all of Florida’s schools.
According to Rebecca Stearns, chief operating officer at the Korey Stringer Institute, many student athletic associations like the FHSAA, which set the statewide standards for high school sports around the country, assume that they are not ultimately responsible for enforcing safety standards in schools.
“My question to them is always, ‘If not you, then who?’” Stearns said, noting that athletic associations have the medical expertise required to make informed decisions about student safety. Leaving it up to individual schools that lack these resources can lead to negative outcomes, she said.
The FHSAA did not respond to requests for comment.
Student athletes pose with a cold water immersion tub donated by the Zach Martin Memorial Foundation.
Courtesy of the Zach Martin Memorial Foundation
Fort Myers’ local newspaper, the News-Press, wrote over a dozen articles about Zachary’s death and the dispute over the FHSAA’s policies. The story was picked up regionally by Fox 4 News and nationally by HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, which ran a 15-minute segment in which they confronted George Tomyn for not mandating the use of cold water tubs, despite training materials their organization provided that recommended their use.
The FHSAA debated the issue from 2017 to 2019. Their medical advisory board recommended that schools alter practice expectations based on the heat risk and keep cold water immersion tubs available. But the FHSAA decided not to act on the issue. They felt that the state legislature should be the one to enforce such a mandate.
Giordano attended these meetings for two years.
“It was heartbreaking,” she said.
Two months later, Giordano learned that another student athlete, a 14-year-old named Hezekiah Walters, had died from heat stroke during preseason football practice in the state.
While Giordano continued her fight for student athlete protections, a crew of laborers at Utopia Farms II were working in the fields outside of Bradenton, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. They moved along rows of barren tomato vines, yanking out stakes and preparing for next season’s planting.
A new employee, a man in his 40s who was working under the name Laurant Tersiuf, was struggling to keep up. Tersiuf had started at Utopia only three days prior, and his crew leader, Juan Lozano, had noticed him repeatedly sitting down between the rows to catch his breath and complaining of stomach pain. Lozano was unsure whether Tersiuf had worked in tomato fields before and assumed he was simply unaccustomed to the grueling work.
During the harvest season, tomato workers are paid for every pound they pick, with a typical day’s pay around $80. Hunched over for hours, pickers hurriedly yank tomatoes from the vines and drop them into plastic bins. When the bins are full, weighing over 30 pounds each, the workers hoist them onto their shoulders and rush down the rows to hurl their bin onto a truck that gradually moves along a dirt path, setting the pace for the workers. One worker carries over a ton of tomatoes per day.
Farmworkers routinely avoid rest breaks because each minute spent resting is a minute of pay lost. Some even deliberately avoid drinking water so that they will not need to stop working to go to the toilet, which can be located hundreds of yards away, according to worker advocates.
By summertime, the tomato harvest is over, and workers are paid by the hour, not by the pace of their work, but it’s still one of the hardest seasons because of the heat. In temperatures that easily exceed 90 degrees, tomato workers clear and prep crop beds for the next growing season, often coming into contact with materials covered in pesticide residue. Some wear long sleeves, pants, gloves, and masks to protect themselves from the chemicals, but, according to a report by the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, this can make workers feel hotter by up to 12 degrees.
Work-safety specialists say these conditions can be life-threatening without the ability to take rest breaks, drink water, and access shade. But in Florida — where workers spend over 100 days of the year in temperatures exceeding the limit the CDC recommends before safety measures are taken — it is up to the workplace to decide whether to provide these basic protections.
A worker picks tomatoes in South Florida’s tomato fields.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Lozano told Tersiuf he could take a day off if he was feeling sick, but he would lose that day’s pay. Tersiuf took some Pepto Bismol and returned to work. The wet bulb globe temperature, which accounts for factors like cloud exposure and humidity, climbed to 92.3 degrees, over 10 degrees higher than what OSHA deems high risk for workers performing strenuous labor. At 1 p.m. on June 27, 2019, after working for six hours, Tersiuf asked Lozano if he could sit in the shade next to a trailer and rest.
Around 3 p.m., according to investigators’ records, Tersiuf was found beside the trailer unconscious. The paramedics who arrived noted that his skin was dry and hot to the touch — a sign that his body had lost the ability to sweat. His temperature was 109 degrees.
Tersiuf was rushed to Lakewood Ranch Medical Center in Bradenton, but the doctors could not stabilize his temperature in time. His body was so hot that his cells began to break down, leading to organ failure.
Within two days, Laurant Tersiuf was dead.
When the hospital went through his belongings, they found identification indicating that Tersiuf’s real name was Clovis Excellent. Like many undocumented immigrants, he had probably gone by an alias to avoid immigration enforcement. And like many undocumented workers, his death was never reported by the local papers. Neither were the other heat-related deaths of farmworkers in the two years between Martin’s and Excellent’s deaths.
Administrators at Utopia Farms II notified OSHA about Excellent’s death, and the agency opened an investigation. OSHA has no mandated policies around heat exposure, despite demands for such provisions since the first years of its founding in the 1970s. They provide recommendations and educational materials about heat illness, but leave it up to businesses to decide what heat conditions are safe for their workers. And if a business chooses not to notify OSHA after a worker is seriously injured, as they are legally required to do, the agency may not even know about the incident. Injuries among undocumented migrant workers are easier to avoid reporting, because migrants often lack family and community members to advocate for them, are unaware of their rights, and fear retaliation. Researchers estimate that government reports on the number of occupational injuries among agricultural workers miss 79 percent of injuries and 74 percent of deaths.
Members of the Farmworker Association of Florida gather for a press conference and vigil in Homestead, Florida, on July 19, 2023, in honor of farmworker Efraín López García, who died from heat complications earlier that month. Giorgio Viera / AFP via Getty Images
In this sense, Excellent’s case is exceptional. Over several weeks following his death in 2019, federal investigators interviewed his co-workers and managers and inspected the fields where he worked. The investigators reprimanded the company for allowing their workers to perform such high-intensity work in extreme temperatures without shade or rest during the hottest period of the day. Utopia Farms II had provided fact sheets about the symptoms of heat illness to their workers in Spanish, English, and Creole, but investigators found that they had no plan to gradually introduce new hires — who make up 70 percent of reported worker-related heat fatalities, because their bodies are not acclimated — to the extreme temperatures. Clovis Excellent had been sent into the fields to work a full shift the same day he was hired and died five days into the job.
To redress Excellent’s death, OSHA requested in a citation letter that Utopia Farms II implement a new safety plan to prevent further heat injuries and send their agency a payment of $13,260. After Utopia challenged the fine, it was amended to $7,956. Because the agency has legal limits on the amount it can fine companies, the penalty was typical for serious violations of OSHA’s safety standards under its general duty clause.
The basic safety measures from heat illness Utopia had failed to provide are ignored by farms throughout the country, in part because OSHA has not mandated their use. They are merely recommended. If OSHA’s proposed heat standard passes, businesses will be required to change their act. But the agency will most likely struggle to enforce the rule because of perennial funding and staffing issues and their limited fines. In Florida, the agency has employed 59 inspectors to oversee the state’s approximately 10 million workers.
For years, farmworkers throughout Florida had been speaking to local labor organizers about the dangers of heat. Jeannie Economos, an advocate with the Farmworker Association of Florida, had heard countless stories of dizzy spells, muscle cramps, nausea, and dark, painful urination workers experienced after long shifts in the heat. Many told her they felt pressured by their employers to keep working no matter how sick they were and felt powerless to protect themselves.
Economos wondered whether Florida could join the few states that had introduced their own regulations to protect workers from heat illness. She knew that it would be an uphill battle. Florida’s legislature was unfriendly to pro-worker regulation, particularly for migrants, who largely make up the state’s outdoor industries, including construction, landscaping, and agriculture. She anticipated the agricultural industry, which she had battled with for years, would try to stamp out any pro-worker reforms, as they had in the past.
First, Economos wanted to better understand the problem and document its impacts. In 2017, she helped set up a research study conducted by the Farmworker Association of Florida and Emory University’s School of Nursing, which found that 84 percent of the workers they monitored experienced symptoms of heat exhaustion, like headaches, dizziness, and nausea. More than a third developed acute kidney injury on at least one day of work, which researchers say can be caused by heat exposure, potentially leading to chronic kidney disease.
With their research in hand, the Farmworker Association consulted with other worker groups to draft a bill proposal. They decided that the rule would be voluntary, with no fines or enforcement mechanisms, hoping that by working with industry to address the problem their effort would be more favorable to the Republican majority. They found a Democratic lawmaker who was willing to sponsor the bill, which was first introduced in 2018. It recommended that outdoor workplaces provide access to water, rest, and shade for workers along with training and emergency medical plans to prevent fatalities.
The first two years it was proposed, the bill never had a hearing. Worker advocates tried to find a Republican sponsor hoping that this would encourage congressional leadership to at least consider the issue. They found a new senator named Ana Maria Rodriguez from Miami-Dade County, a bipartisan, Latino district, who was willing to carry the bill in 2020.
That same year, the legislation for student athletes was being heard for the first time and was garnering attention. After the flurry of media coverage about Zachary’s case, Giordano was able to get meetings with senators to share her story and recommend reforms. The FHSAA had said that without state legislation they had no mandate to act, so lawmakers began to create one. Within months, a bill was drafted that required schools to monitor temperatures and adjust practice routines to adapt to heat levels. It called for regular water and rest breaks, training for coaches about heat-illness prevention, and cold water immersion tubs to treat students for heat stroke onsite.
Grist / Clayton Aldern
Karen Woodall, a lobbyist for the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy, who had been working on the heat-illness protection bill for outdoor workers, was watching the progress of the student athlete bill closely. She attended the committee hearings where it was first discussed and noticed that the committee members “were pretty outraged by what they heard.”
“I got up and said, ‘I know you’re talking about student athletes,” Woodall recalled, “‘but I want you to know that we have a bill about this very thing for outdoor workers.’”
It felt like the energy around the issue might provide the worker bill with much needed momentum. The AFL-CIO staged a press conference where outdoor workers and their children spoke about the impacts of heat in the workplace and the playing field. One high school athlete, whose father was a migrant farmworker, said he hoped his father would be seen as worthy of the same protections he had been given.
The bill for student athletes was approved by multiple committees. Representatives and school administrators debated the cost burden of mandating ice tubs and wet bulb globe thermometers, but the consensus was that a significant number of schools were failing to provide critical safety measures, the solutions were simple, and ignoring the issue would lead to more preventable deaths.
Giordano’s story was a major driver for the issue.
Laurie Giordano, left, at the Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2020. Bobby Caina Calvan / AP Photo
“You meet a parent that lost a son and that’s a pretty powerful emotional testimony to have,” said Senator Keith Perry, a Republican and the owner of a roofing business, who ended up sponsoring the student athlete bill. “That’s why we started to go ahead and run this bill. … This seemed like a really easy solution to a tragic problem.”
Three months after the Zachary Martin Act was introduced, the Florida legislature voted unanimously for Governor Ron DeSantis to sign it into law.
Meanwhile, the bill to protect outdoor workers went without a hearing for the third year in a row.
In 2022, with Senator Rodriguez’s support, the bill was heard for the first time in the Senate Agriculture Committee. Senator Perry was a member of the committee. As the owner of a roofing business, he took an interest in the issue. After hearing from workers, business owners, labor advocates, and the widow of a construction worker who died from the heat, he joined the six other members of the committee in voting for the bill.
The next day, it was sent to the Health Policy Committee, where it sat unaddressed until the legislative session ended.
When asked why the student bill had succeeded while the worker bill, calling for less strenuous protections, had failed, Perry equivocated, telling Grist that he did not remember the details of the worker bill that he had voted for. But, he said, typically students were in greater need of protection than adults, who were ultimately responsible for their own choices. Like many opponents of statewide protections for outdoor workers, Perry noted that OSHA already provides safety recommendations for avoiding heat injuries in the workplace — though it’s left up to individual businesses to act on them.
Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative who has repeatedly sponsored the worker bill in the House, sees it differently. “We have an anti-immigrant governor who demonizes all immigrants, but especially those that come to our state in search of work,” she said. “Farmworkers are targeted, especially in Florida, by political actors.”
A worker hauls a heavy bag of freshly picked oranges on a farm in Florida. Gaye Ajoy / Farmworker Association of Florida
The bill was reintroduced to the Agriculture Committee this year. A workers’ advocacy group called WeCount spearheaded an effort to take up the issue on the county level as well. They helped push for an ordinance in Miami-Dade County that would fine employers in agriculture and construction who failed to provide water and shaded rest breaks in dangerous heat conditions.
After a heat dome encircled the U.S. South last summer, organizers rallied large crowds to speak in favor of the ordinance at board hearings, and several prominent county officials, including County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, pledged their support. But facing fierce industry opposition, county officials voted to table the bill, and state congressional leaders moved to preemptively block their decision. Last week, a bill was approved that will void any local ordinances that protect workers from heat. The bill says that if federal OSHA does not create a national heat standard by 2028, the state’s Department of Commerce will have to create a statewide standard. But it doesn’t specify what the standard will require or whether it will include enforcement mechanisms like fines.
WeCount’s policy director, Esteban Wood, believes that the bill is intended to block their efforts in Miami-Dade and dissuade citizens and local officials from pushing for protections, rather than ensuring the safety of the state’s outdoor workers.
“You become a little disillusioned with the process,” Wood said, noting that after years of resistance, it’s unlikely that the state legislature will pass a bill on its own that provides meaningful protections for workers. “It’s a symptom of a larger issue — of a lack of priority for the health and safety of workers.”
Since Zachary Martin’s death, Florida schools are now required to monitor temperatures to ensure that students are not exposed to unsafe conditions and that cold water immersion tubs are available in case of emergencies. Since it passed, no student athlete in the state has died from heat.
Since Clovis Excellent’s death, the legislature has taken no steps to protect outdoor workers from heat, while at least five more Florida workers have died from heat illness.
“I’m just a little incredulous that it hasn’t been passed yet,” said Giordano, who has recently begun to collaborate with WeCount in their efforts to pass protections for outdoor workers, while pushing for a national bill to protect student athletes.“If it’s hot, there should be water, and they should be able to take breaks,” she said, whether you are “working out for football or cheering, or someone working on a roof.
As firefighters contained the largest wildfire in Texas history last week, the electricity provider for the state’s Panhandle region, Xcel Energy, announced some bad news: The wildfire, which burned more than a million acres of land and killed at least two people, seemed to have been caused by one of the utility’s electrical poles.
“Based on currently available information, Xcel Energy acknowledges that its facilities appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire,” the statement read, referring to the largest of several fires raging in the area. An investigation from the state’s forest management agency found that the fire began when a decayed wooden pole splintered and fell, sending sparks onto nearby grass. Photos obtained by Bloomberg News appear to show that the pole had been marked unsafe before the fire.
Seizing on this evidence, multiplelandowners in the area have already filed lawsuits against the company — as have family members of the fire’s victims, seeking millions of dollars in damages. Xcel has denied that it was to blame for the historic fire: In the same statement, the utility said it “disputes claims that it acted negligently in maintaining and operating its infrastructure.”
The lawsuits are just the latest in a string of high-profile wildfire cases against major electrical utilities, whose flammable power lines are among the most common culprits for major fire events. California companies such as Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison have paid out billions of dollars to fire victims and insurance companies over the past decade. Earlier this month, a jury delivered a verdict against the Oregon utility PacifiCorp, which could owe victims billions of dollars. Xcel itself is fighting hundreds of lawsuits in Colorado over its similar role in the 2021 Marshall Fire near the city of Boulder. These lawsuits have hit utilities with huge charges that they have passed onto customers in the form of rate increases.
The emergence of the trend in Texas, a state that has avoided massive fire losses over recent years, underscores that wildfires are now a national threat to utilities, according to Karl Rábago, a former Texas utility regulator and expert on utility law.
“They’re not pivoting to the world in which we live,” he told Grist. “When we face these situations, we do have a legal system that will likely dole out a measure of pain. The sad thing is, after paying out a certain amount of money, the problem will become so ubiquitous, and so oft-repeating, that we will treat it as business as usual.”
As in many previous lawsuits, the question in Texas is what counts as negligence on the part of a utility. If the fact that Xcel knew the pole needed repairs but hadn’t yet repaired it is sufficient evidence of neglect, the company will likely be on the hook for a large share of the fire damages, which could amount to hundreds of millions. The state utility regulator requires companies to plan for emergencies, and Xcel has told the state in the past that it conducts rotating inspections of old poles. However, most experts agree that utilities need to do more, burying power lines or adding technology that allows for rapid and precise power shutoffs during fire weather.
“There is a recognizable negligence, at least, in the failure to ensure that the systems are not extremely vulnerable,” said Rábago. “If your pole [is] 40 years old, it’s probably gotten to be so weak that it’ll get knocked over in severe winds.” Other fires that broke out in the Texas Panhandle at the same time as the Smokehouse Creek Fire have also burned thousands of acres, but investigators haven’t yet determined the cause of those events.
Xcel declined to comment for this story.
Xcel’s subsidiary in the Texas Panhandle delivers power to around 400,000 customers over a vast and sparsely populated service area of around 50,000 square miles. Pacific Gas & Electric in California, by comparison, provides power to 16 million people across a service territory that isn’t much larger. On the other hand, the fire mostly burned open rangeland, destroying far fewer homes than the Marshall Fire or other urban blazes. That could keep the potential damages relatively low.
The Smokehouse Creek Fire and its companion blazes are the most devastating in Texas history, but there is some precedent for holding Lone Star State utilities accountable. Dozens of victims and insurance companies sued the much smaller Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative near Austin for failing to remove dead trees ahead of a 34,000-acre fire. The company and its tree-trimming contractor settled those cases over the following years, with the contractor paying $5 million as recently as 2020. The fire was the most destructive ever in Texas at the time, but the Panhandle complex is many times larger.
“The consequences of utility ignitions are larger than they used to be, and there’s an increasingly clear set of practices that utilities can take, which some do, to avoid these kinds of ignitions,” said Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford Law School and an expert on how climate change affects utilities. “This is creating a situation where juries are more likely to hold utilities liable when they cause these catastrophic fires, if they haven’t taken appropriate steps.”
Wara said the most cost-effective steps include installing more accurate weather stations and shutting off the power proactively during extreme weather events.
These lawsuits may become more common as climate change ratchets up the potential for massive fires in many parts of the country. The Texas Panhandle has always seen rangeland fires, but studies show that the state’s high plains now see an additional month of “fire weather” each year compared to the mid-20th century. The combination of high temperatures and high winds that started the Smokehouse Creek Fire will only get more common as the Earth continues to warm, which could mean more costly fires and more litigation.
Utilities in other states have responded to fire lawsuits by raising rates on customers and using the money to pay out settlements or upgrade their infrastructure. Most Texans purchase power through a controversial wholesale market that has come under criticism for jacking up prices during extreme weather, but Xcel’s system in the Panhandle isn’t part of that market, so the utility’s customers could see a direct rate increase depending on how the lawsuit shakes out.
The growing trend of utility lawsuits has started to make markets nervous. Warren Buffett, whose company Berkshire Hathaway owns the Oregon utility PacifiCorp, said in his annual letter to shareholders last month that “the regulatory climate in a few states has raised the specter of zero profitability or even bankruptcy … in what was once regarded as among the most stable industries in America.” The legendary investor referred to his failure to foresee this trouble as “a costly mistake.”
In an interesting twist, Buffett then speculated that this threat to utility profits may someday lead more areas to adopt public power models, where governments rather than corporations control electrical infrastructure.
“Eventually, voters, taxpayers, and users will decide which model they prefer,” he said.
