“Extreme heat — this is a — I think going to surprise a lot of people — not you all — but extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States. More people die from extreme heat than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. Say that again: combined. More people die from heat than those three other major issues.”—President Joe Biden, July 2, 2024
“More than a century of burning coal, oil, and natural gas has given us an increasingly dangerous world. The heat waves popping up around the world this summer are unnatural disasters that will become more and more common until carbon pollution stops.”—Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central
Back in 1972, just over a year after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created, the agency published Occupational Exposure to Heat and Hot Environments with recommendations for addressing excessive heat perils in the workplace. Over the years, it also developed guidelines for how employers should protect workers from heat-related conditions. The trouble with voluntary guidelines is that they’re voluntary, and a large portion of employers simply ignore them. The consequences are reserved for workers who are injured or killed by excessive heat.
Despite that early start more than half a century ago, it wasn’t until 2021 that the Biden administration ordered OSHA to get to work coming up with a rule mandating heat protections on the job, indoors and outdoors. A proposed rule the administration says will protect 36 million workers was announced Tuesday, and it’s now open for public comment.
Currently, only five states—California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington—have established their own workplace heat standards. Two states—Florida and Texas—have not only set no standards, they’ve barred cities and counties in their states from enacting any. They just don’t care if workers are injured or die on the job.
In 1972 OSHA made recommendations for a heat standard in the workplace. Last week, the Biden administration announced one.
At the announcement, Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health Douglas L. Parker said: “Workers all over the country are passing out, suffering heat stroke and dying from heat exposure from just doing their jobs, and something must be done to protect them. Today’s proposal is an important next step in the process to receive public input to craft a ‘win-win’ final rule that protects workers while being practical and workable for employers.”
The proposed rule would apply to indoor and outdoor workers engaged in physical activity who are exposed to a heat index of 80°F or higher. It would require employers to develop annually reviewed plans for preventing injuries, illnesses, and death from heat hazards in the workplace. These plans must include employer scrutiny of excessive heat risks, provision of drinking water, institution of rest breaks, and restrictions on indoor heat. For certain jobs, employers would be required to designate a heat safety coordinator and procedures for dealing with heat-related symptoms. Also required are employer plans for orienting and protecting new employees not yet acclimated to working in high heat. OSHA reports that 50% to 70% of heat-related fatalities occur during the first week of work.
In the past it’s taken OSHA around seven years to go from a proposal to a finalized rule. So the speed with which the heat rule has moved through the process might, by comparison, be viewed as a whoosh. Just getting all the interagency vetting of a newly proposed rule is supposed to be done within three months, but this time it took just three weeks. At the paywalled E&E News, David Michaels, who led OSHA during the Obama administration, said: “That’s record time. I’ve never seen a major proposed rule go through the White House so quickly. It shows that if the president is committed to protecting workers, this process can move very quickly.”
Even under the best circumstances, however, with the rule being finalized in November after public comments are reviewed, it won’t take effect until 2026.
And if Donald Trump manages to squirm his way back into the Oval Office, it may not take effect at all. Indeed, it’s no stretch to imagine Trump at the podium making 3rd-grader-style fun of a worker dying from heat on the job. He, and the partisans of the Project 2025 manifesto, including those on the Supreme Court, are hellbent on wrecking environmental, health, and safety regulations as part of their crusade to disassemble or cripple regulatory measures in favor of boosting bottom lines.
Experts’ predictions about the future of the rule reflect the recent politicization of extreme heat. Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis enacted anti-immigrant legislation that included a law that bans municipalities from requiring employers to enact protections, such as shade or water breaks, for outdoor workers. The bill closely resembled a Texas law barring localities from creating such regulations, which passed last summer.
A bevy of the latest Supreme Court rulings have sabotaged both environmental regulatory implementation and enforcement, and there reportedly are more such cases headed to the court. As for the heat rule, lawsuits are inevitable. Trade groups and other lobbyists have opposed mandated heat rules for decades. OSHA itself has been repeatedly attacked from the right, and is grossly underfunded. Of the 7 million U.S. workplaces under its jurisdiction, OSHA inspected 31,820 in 2022. At that rate, it would take 219 years to inspect all workplaces.
“The likelihood is if Trump is elected, the rule will be put on the shelf for his four years,” said Juley Fulcher of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group that has long been active in seeking a heat rule. It first petitioned OSHA for a mandatory heat standard to protect workers in 2011. Fulcher noted in a statement:
“President Biden’s decision to protect workers with a comprehensive federal workplace heat standard is a monumental victory for those who toil in the summer heat. If enacted, the simple measures to protect workers—water breaks, a cool spot to recover, and rest—will provide key protection from illness, injury and death.
“Several states have put workplace heat protections in place and elected officials in Florida and Texas have taken action to strip workers of heat-related protections. The punitive cruelty of denying workers access to water and protection from heat by elected officials has been monstrous. White House approval of the OSHA proposed rule demonstrates the commitment of President Biden and the Department of Labor to protecting workers from deadly heat hazards. A nationwide protection standard is essential to ensure workers are protected and provided with the necessary and humane protections to work safely in the summer heat.
An E&E News review of federal data shows that, just since the Biden administration initiated work on the heat standard, there have been 83 heat-related workplace deaths. This, said an OSHA spokesperson, is “almost certainly an undercount.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2011 and 2020, there were 33,890 work-related heat injuries and illnesses between 2011 and 2020, with 436 deaths, a tally that is also widely viewed as a serious undercount.
As for the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Chevron deference last month, Jordan Barab, OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health during the Obama administration, noted that the decision means that federal judges could intervene and assert that they know better than any experts at OSHA to determine whether heat is dangerous enough to necessitate protections.
“Instead of the health experts at OSHA, it’s going to be totally up to a judge to decide if starting requirements at 80 degrees is reasonable, or if that trigger point should be 90 or 97 degrees,” Barab said. “They could even say, ‘Hey, people in Texas know how to handle heat, they don’t need this training’.”
ECO-VIDEO
RESOURCES & ACTION
GREEN BRIEFS
It’s been a long struggle hampered by media and other critics, geopolitics, physics, and prices, but in the first half of 2024, Germany got 58.4% of its gross electricity consumption. This milestone was paired with a fall of fossil fuels in the energy mix from 39.6% to 35% over 2023.
BDEW managing director Kerstin Andreae
The calculation was by the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the Federal Association of the Energy and Water Industries (BDEW). It marks nearly a 6 percentage point rise over the same period in 2023, which saw renewables at 52% and 49% in 2021.
Photovoltaic systems generated much more juice for Germany than the same period last year, generating a total of 37 terawatt-hours. This significant rise is credited mostly to substantial expansion of PV systems in 2023.
Kerstin Andreae, chairwoman of the BDEW executive board, told Sangita Shetty at Solar Quarter: “For the second time in a row, we are seeing a record share of renewables in electricity consumption. This is the reward for the persistent expansion of wind energy and photovoltaics in recent years.”
She stressed how reaching Germany’s ambitious goal of 100% renewables by 2035 will depend on new and upgraded infrastructures being developed alongside renewables. This include expanded the electricity grids, and building energy storage facilities, and that will require the federal government to clear remaining legal hurdles.
Frithjof Staiß, managing director of ZSW, said it is feasible to reach a 100% renewable energy supply. But this, he said, punctuating Andreae’s remarks will require legal and policy changes.
In fact, the German government is on the verge of changing the way the quarter-century-old subsidy program works. Going forward, instead of 20-year guarantees on the price of solar, wind, and biogas operations, the proposal shown in a finance ministry document last week is to give electricity generators one-time support of investment costs instead of set prices. This would make renewables less dependent on long-term government support and mean producers would have to bear higher financial risks. There’s no timeline yet being proposed for when this shift would be imposed.
ECO-quote
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”—Paul Coelho
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
The Justice Department’s Next Climate Test by Hannah Story Brown at The American Prospect. President Biden’s Justice Department has been offered two opportunities to act on holding oil and gas companies responsible for their deceit. It can protect state efforts to pursue accountability, and it can join them. At the end of May, the House Oversight and Senate Budget committees concluded a nearly three-year investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s misleading marketing practices by officially referring their findings to the DOJ. Thousands of subpoenaed documents revealed the gap between oil and gas companies’ private plans and public messaging. For example, the companies privately acknowledged that natural gas doesn’t support climate goals when you take methane emissions into account, and that their business plans violate the Paris Agreement. Publicly, however, they touted gas as “clean” and a “bridge fuel,” and pledged their alignment with international climate treaties. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD) referral urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to launch an investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s violations of federal consumer protection and fraud laws. With dozens of city, state, and tribal governments already pursuing such cases under state laws, the DOJ, by not undertaking a parallel suit, remains the elusive dog that didn’t bark in this wave of lawsuits seeking to make polluters pay. At the same time, the federal government has also been given a brief window in which it can influence the future of those state-level cases. On June 10, the Supreme Court asked the DOJ to offer the opinion of the United States on whether it should take up an industry petition. Sunoco, Shell, and several other fossil fuel companies have asked the Supreme Court to review the Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision to move forward with Honolulu’s lawsuit against the polluters.
Cooling pipes at a Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia.
Google’s greenhouse gas emissions jump 48% in five years by Camilla Hodgson & Stephen Morris at the Financial Times. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48 percent in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centers that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to “net zero” by 2030 in doubt. The Silicon Valley company’s pollution amounted to 14.3 million tonnes of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48 percent increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13 percent rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday. Google said the jump highlighted “the challenge of reducing emissions” at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that “the future environmental impact of AI” was “complex and difficult to predict.” Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt said the company remained committed to the 2030 target but stressed the “extremely ambitious” nature of the goal.
Supreme Court decision threatens Biden’s ‘whole of government’ climate plan by Jeff St. John at Canary Media. Friday’s 6–3 ruling by the court’s conservative majority overturned the so-called Chevron deference doctrine, in place since a 1984 Supreme Court decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which determined that judges should defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguously worded dictates of laws passed by Congress. Polluting industries and right-wing advocacy groups have made overturning Chevron a key goal of their anti-regulatory agenda. Now that they’ve succeeded, “I bet you dollars to doughnuts we’ll see a tsunami of litigation challenging every regulation that comes down the pike,” said Devon Ombres, senior director of courts and legal policy at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. “This court has decided that it, and not Congress, and not public agencies, is the chief policymaker in the country — even though they say they are not.”Well-funded industry and conservative groups already plotting lawsuits against federal agencies are likely to hold a considerable advantage in a federal court system with a large number of conservative judges appointed during the Trump administration, Ombres said. “We are seeing a reversion to a pre–New Deal standard of the law, in the sense that the court will almost unerringly side with corporate interests over public interests.”
In Michigan, homeowners associations can’t stop rooftop solar anymore by Carrie Klain at Canary Media. When a homeowner decides to get solar panels, it sets off a series of to-dos. They have to find a contractor, make sure their roof is ready, and — for some of the millions of Americans living under homeowners’ associations (HOAs) — make sure their neighbors won’t complain about the shiny new additions to their roof. Until now, the latter reason could have prevented 1.4 million Michiganders from saving money on utility bills and cutting their reliance on fossil fuels by using rooftop solar.HOAs govern housing communities and enforce rules for residents aimed at keeping common aesthetics, meaning they could say no to solar for reasons as simple as not liking the way the panels look. A bill passed last month will prohibit HOAs in the state from banning rooftop solar and other energy-efficiency updates, like heat pumps, electric vehicle chargers, and clotheslines. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is expected to sign the legislation into law in the coming days, allowing Michigan to officially join 29 other states and Washington, D.C., in taking away this barrier to rooftop solar adoption.
The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming by Alexandra Talty at Civil Eats. Five years ago, the American farmed-seaweed industry barely existed. Wild seaweeds had been harvested for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples on both coasts, for a range of uses including insulation, medication, and fertilizer. Later, seaweeds were then harvested from the wild for agricultural fertilizers and the cosmetics industry. As for kelp farms, though, there were only a smattering of them in Maine, selling products to restaurants or natural-foods stores. Most farmed seaweed available in the U.S.—including the familiar sushi nori sheets—came from Asia. Today, consumers can find burgers, chips, and even a cannabis gummy made from domestic farmed seaweed, and a recent Nielsen report estimated the value of the edible seaweed industry to be $1.87 billion in the U.S. One particular type of seaweed, kelp, has come to the fore: More than 2 million pounds were pulled from coastal U.S. waters during the 2022-2023 season, and experts predict that the 2023–2024 season will be even larger. What’s driving this growth? The answer goes beyond seaweed’s industrial applications or the fact that Americans are developing a taste for kelp as a nutritious, low-calorie food. Scientists say this seaweed also offers a multitude of ecosystem benefits. Kelp can pull excess carbon out of the atmosphere—with some estimating that it sequesters at least 10 times more carbon than a terrestrial crop. It reduces ocean acidification, too, and removes the excess nitrogen that feeds massive algal blooms, a threat to other marine life.
The Race to Save Glacial Ice Records Before They Melt Away by Nicola Jones at Yale Environment 360. When Margit Schwikowski helicoptered up to Switzerland’s Corbassière glacier in 2020, it was clear that things weren’t right. “It was very warm. I mean, we were at 4,100 meters and it should be sub-zero temperatures,” she says. Instead, the team started to sweat as they lugged their ice core drill around, and the snow was sticky. “I thought, ‘This has never happened before.’” What Schwikowski couldn’t see yet, but would find later in the lab, is that it wasn’t just the surface that was affected: Climate change had penetrated the ice and trashed its utility as an environmental record. Warming weather had created meltwater that trickled down, washing away trapped aerosols that researchers like her use as a historical record of forest fires and other environmental events. Because of the melt, she says, “we really lose this information.” Schwikowski, an environmental chemist at the Paul Scherrer Institut near Zurich, is the scientific lead for the Ice Memory Foundation, a collaborative group that aims to preserve glacial ice records before climate change wrecks them. Their goal is to get cores from 20 glaciers around the world in 20 years, and, starting in 2025, lock them away for long-term storage in an ice cave in the Antarctic — a natural freezer that will hold them at close to minus 60 degrees F (minus 50 degrees C). Since the program’s start in 2015 they have taken cores from eight sites, in France, Bolivia, Switzerland, Russia, Norway, and Italy. But the core attempted from Corbassière was a failure — and has the team wondering if they are already too late.
Researchers extract an ice core on an Ice Memory Foundation expedition to the Colle del Lys glacier in the Alps, October 2023
ECOPINION
Far right using climate crisis as bogeyman to frighten voters and build higher walls.It is no coincidence that ever more extreme politics has come at a time of ever more extreme weather. By Jonathan Watts at The Guardian. How rising emissions distort our political ecosystems is not nearly as well understood as the scientific certainty that they are heating our world. Hundreds of academic papers detail the tipping point risks of an anthropologically altered climate, but very few look at the feedbacks on governance and ideology. One thing, however, is certain: all of the world’s systems – biological, physical, economic and political – are coming under more climate stress and the longer this is left unabated, the greater is the likelihood that something will break. Democracy is starting to look almost as fragile as the rainforest. Politicians in the traditional parties will not face the fact that they are no longer living in the stable climate in which that political system was created. The right wants to go back to a past that no longer exists. The left wants to move towards a future that it will not dare to fund. Meanwhile, market zealots and xenophobes, fuelled by fossil fuel money, are using the unfolding chaos to frighten voters and take the opportunity to replace social safety nets and environmental protections with higher walls and rapacious extraction.
An oil pumpjack.
Why Colorado’s Celebrated Oil Well Cleanup Reforms Face a $3 Billion Shortfall by Joe Fassler at DeSmog. As costs related to aging oil and gas wells start to pile up across the U.S., regulators are looking for ways to force fossil fuel companies to foot the bill — and Colorado is supposed to have the answer. The state recently overhauled the financial and regulatory tools it uses to hold producers accountable, a much-lauded approach that Colorado governor Jared Polis last year called “an example the nation can follow.” And yet, unless the state acts quickly and decisively, those rules may end up with its taxpayers on the hook to pay for a $3 billion shortfall. That’s according to a new report published Thursday by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, an energy-focused think tank. Unless properly decommissioned, unplugged oil and gas wells can continue to leak cancer-causing chemicals and the powerful climate pollutant methane. But the process of shutting down extraction sites is costly and complex, requiring operators to plug deep holes with concrete, remove surface-level equipment, and restore the surrounding land. According to Colorado’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC), the state’s energy regulator, it can cost $110,000 or more to close a single well. In an exhaustive analysis, Carbon Tracker found that 27,000 oil and gas wells in Colorado — more than half of the state’s total — cannot possibly generate enough revenue to cover their own cleanup costs. These wells are located in areas with rapidly declining production volumes, where most of the profits were sucked out of the ground years ago. Collectively, these wells can only hope to generate another $1 billion in revenue, according to Carbon Tracker’s report. But all those sites will cost $4 to $5 billion to decommission responsibly, the analysts found — a looming cash shortfall of at least $3 billion.
Cinnamon Janzer
How Communities Can Power Their Own Just Clean Energy Transition by Cinnamon Janzer at Sierra magazine. Jessica Night never thought she’d be able to go solar. A Minneapolis-based artist with a blended family that includes six kids, she says, “I’m pretty lower income. I never thought that there was a way that I would be able to do it.” That changed in fall 2020 when the City of Lakes Community Land Trust, through which Night became a homeowner, sent out an email about a solar workshop held by Solar United Neighbors (SUN), a nonprofit that organizes groups of homeowners across the country into temporary co-ops that go solar at the same time. By doing so, SUN secures competitive bids from local installers that greatly reduce the costs of getting rooftop solar. By the summer of 2021, Night had solar panels on her roof and became one of now 8,500 other homeowners across the country—from more than 409 co-ops—who SUN has helped transition into a new home energy source. (Disclosure: My household also installed solar panels through a SUN co-op.) Organizations doing similar work at the state level also see the climate crisis and the clean energy transition it demands as an opportunity for social and economic justice. In Minnesota, Cooperative Energy Futures takes a statewide co-op approach to community solar projects, and in California, People Power Solar runs a mutual-aid-style battery sharing program, among other initiatives. While U.S. solar installations have grown by 24% in the last decade, just 4.2 million single-family homes out of the eligible 84.69 million homes across the country have solar. To close the gap between today’s utility landscape and a clean energy future, community-based programs like these are creating co-ops, shepherding subsidies, and organizing people along the way.
The Supreme Court Is Slowly Breaking the EPA by Robinson Meyer at Heatmap News. Taken together, the four cases — Loper Bright Enterprises, Corner Post, Jarkesy, and Ohio v. EPA — are not as high-profile as the Supreme Court’s broad grant of immunity to Trump. But they could substantially weaken the EPA for decades to come, stymying its ability to write and enforce rules limiting carbon pollution. They could also slow down the permitting and construction of new clean energy infrastructure. “All of these decisions — all four of them — inflate the role of the courts relative to the bureaucracy. This is part of a longstanding campaign by the conservative legal movement to bring the administrative state to judicial heel,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told me. “Congress has not comprehensively addressed climate change but the agencies are trying to,” Emily Hammond, an environmental law professor at George Washington University, told me. “What these cases do, all together, is fairly comprehensively limit the ability of agencies to protect health and human safety and try to mitigate climate change.” “It’s a shocking and scary grab of power by a court that is rapidly discarding principles that we’ve been able to rely on and expect for a long time,” she added.
Abandoned mines cover the West. Their legacy is destruction and pollution of lands and waters. By Jonathan Thompson at High Country News. There are at least 250,000 abandoned mining “features,” including at least 4,000 involving uranium, scattered across the Western U.S. — mines, waste piles, prospect holes and other infrastructure. Some are harmless and invisible to the untrained eye. Others continue to threaten the environment, people and wildlife, even after millions of dollars have been spent attempting to clean them up. Mining is hard — but healing the earth and the health of the communities affected by it is immeasurably harder. [...] Hardrock mining introduces oxygen and water to sulfide-bearing rocks, and the resulting reaction forms sulfuric acid. The now-acidic water dissolves and picks up naturally occurring metals such as zinc, cadmium, lead, arsenic, mercury and even uranium, ultimately depositing these harmful minerals in streams or lakes long after mining ceases. Acid mine drainage is mining’s most insidious, pervasive and persistent environmental hazard.
Each bubble represents one of the 55,320 hardrock mining sites that was a “producer” or “past producer” at the time it was reported to the USGS’s Mineral Resource Database. Many of the reports were made as far back as the 1970s, and nearly all “producers” since then have been idled and abandoned. You can find an interactive version of this map that provides data on minerals and mine sites.
Trump’s Bizarre Culture War Rhetoric Is Eroding Public Support for Clean Energy by Oliver Milman at Mother Jones. In his bid to return to the White House, Trump has branded Joe Biden’s attempt to advance electric cars in the US “lunacy,” claiming such vehicles do not work in the cold and that their supporters should “rot in hell.” He’s called offshore wind turbines “horrible,” falsely linking them to the death of whales, while promising to scrap incentives for both wind and electric cars. But the former US president and convicted felon, who has openly solicited donations from oil and gas executives in order to follow industry-friendly priorities if re-elected, has also spearheaded a much broader attack on a range of mundane rules and technologies that enable water and energy efficiency.
research & reports
A breakthrough in inexpensive, clean, fast-charging batteries. UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng's Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world's first anode-free sodium solid-state battery.With this research, the LESC—a collaboration between the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the University of California San Diego's Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering—has brought the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever. Always good to remember that the vast majority of laboratory breakthroughs, as exciting as they can be, don’t make it to mass production.
Threat of mining to African great apes. A third of Africa’s great apes at risk from mining of transition metals. In 2022 at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), seven major economies formed an alliance to enhance the sustainability of mining these essential decarbonization minerals. However, there is a scarcity of studies assessing the threat of mining to global biodiversity. By integrating a global mining dataset with great ape density distribution, we estimated the number of African great apes that spatially coincided with industrial mining projects. We show that up to one-third of Africa’s great ape population faces mining-related risks.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
As Canada braces for a raging summer, Indigenous communities remain displaced • Here’s how Michelin plans to make its tires more renewable • EU’s High Energy Costs to Persist in Net Zero Plans, Lobby Says • Shark eggs may stop hatching if global warming doesn’t stop, study shows • GM will pay $146 million in penalties because 5.9 million older vehicles emit excess carbon dioxide • These oldest inhabited termite mounds have been active for 34,000 years • In northern Spain, climate change is killing shellfish — and women’s livelihoods • Evidence shows ancient Saudi Arabia had complex and thriving communities, not struggling people in a barren land • Research finds humpbacks were happier during pandemic pause • The Federal Government Just Acknowledged the Harm Its Dams Have Caused Tribes. Here’s What It Left Out
