The emotional highs and lows of that conversation were something Coco Faber, Camilla Dopulos, Liv Ridley, Mark Price, and Jack Eibel wanted the world to hear and feel, from 21 miles out to sea from the coast of Maine.

The joy

The joys were obvious. One was that, despite the Gulf of Maine overall being one of the fastest-warming bodies of ocean on Earth, it was a near-spectacular summer for puffins on Seal Island, a place legendary in the world of conservation. A part of the National Wildlife Refuge System and managed by the Audubon Seabird Institute, the island is part of the world’s first successful restoration of seabirds where humans killed them off.

Atlantic puffins were wiped out here and across several islands in Maine by the 1880s as coastal fishing and farming communities hunted them for their meat and eggs. Seal Island, a mile long, had hosted the then-largest-known puffin colony in the Gulf of Maine.

In the 1970s, Steve Kress, then an Audubon bird instructor in his late 20s, launched what became known as Project Puffin (and now known as the Seabird Institute). He brought hundreds of puffin chicks down from Newfoundland to hand raise on Eastern Egg Rock, a tiny seven-acre island, six miles off Pemaquid Point. Puffins began breeding anew on that island in 1981 and set a record 188 breeding pairs in 2019.

Kress repeated the experiment with hundreds more chicks on Seal Island, much farther out to the northeast. Puffins began breeding once more here in 1992. Last year, Faber and her team counted a record 672 active burrows.

“I’m very confident that there are more burrows,” said Faber, 31, who is the island supervisor and in her tenth summer with the Seabird Institute. “There are so many more that we have found since and burrows we might have missed because the chick fledged before we could get to them.”

You could not doubt her. In my visit in mid-July, I often had between 100 and 200 puffins stretching across my view from my bird blind. Puffin parents brought in a steady stream of juicy haddock, nice long sand lance, and even occasional herring to feed their chicks. Faber reported to fellow researchers on other islands that many Seal puffin chicks were “big and healthy.” Alcid cousins of puffins, black guillemots and razorbills, had their highest chick productivity ever.

If only all the birds the crew managed were so lucky.

The angst

The same ocean that was a sea of plenty for puffins was more of paucity for Arctic, common, and roseate terns. They are species also restored across the Gulf of Maine by the Seabird Institute and the US Fish and Wildlife Service after decades of absence. They screech and dive to protect their chicks on the ground from gulls. By coincidence, that vigilance also offers protective cover for puffins down below.

Many species of terns were among the estimated 300 million birds slaughtered in the late 19^th and early 20^th century for feathers to adorn women’s hats. Public outcry led to the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The protections helped the tern population in Maine briefly rebound until the 1930s.

But the overall ecosystem was so upset by the prior massacres that terns were crowded off many islands by herring gulls and great black-backed gulls. Both species of gulls were also decimated in the feather trade. But being omnivores that feast both on bird chicks and garbage from landfills and fishing waste, their populations recovered much faster than terns and puffins, which feed solely on fish. Terns left Seal Island by mid-century and the island became even more inhospitable as it became a Navy bombing range from the 1940s to the 1960s.

With the help of decoys, recorded tern calls, and gull control, 16 pairs of Arctic and 1 pair of common terns nested once more on Seal Island in 1989. By 2011, the colony grew to 3,038 pairs.

But the colony has shrunk steadily and dramatically since then. This summer, the island crew counted only 1,203 Arctic and common tern nests. That was the lowest combined census count since 1995.

The reasons are likely many. The last decade and a half has seen the warmest water temperatures ever recorded in the Gulf of Maine. When temperatures are particularly high, species of fish that terns snatch on the surface to feed chicks often flee too deep to be caught. Unlike puffins, razorbills, and guillemots, which can dive to hunt a variety of fish, terns feed only at the surface.

Then add the fact that terns are only in the Gulf of Maine from May to August. Common terns migrate as far south as Chile and Argentina. Arctic terns are the world’s longest-traveling migratory bird, breeding at the top of the Northern Hemisphere and wintering off Antarctica. Some Arctic terns hatched in Maine veer around South Africa into the Indian Ocean before joining other terns in the Weddell Sea.

Between their fall and spring migrations and the incessant flying for food, they can cover 55,000 miles in one year. In a lifetime, an Arctic tern, which can live past 30, could have made three round trips to the moon.

In its journey, a single tern can face a myriad of uncertainties from sea ice loss, overfishing, pollution, and coastal development. In recent years, many Arctic terns have returned to Seal Island in poor body condition. An international team of researchers found in a 2023 study that what might seem “minor changes” in conditions along the migration routes of Arctic terns may sum up to an effect that proves to be “greater than the parts.”

The Seal Island crew said they are already witnessing the compound effects. This year, as in several recent years, many Arctic terns arrived from spring migration in poor body condition. After an early tease of herring and hake, most of the food being brought to chicks by summer’s end was tiny crustaceans. In my blind stints, parent terns landed before me with a single krill, a dragonfly, a moth, or a tiny pufferfish.   

And it could be even worse. This summer was relatively dry, but in years of both poor food supply and incessant rains, crews have told me there is no more helpless feeling than being holed up in their cabin and tents while weakened chicks are being soaked into fatal hypothermia.  

“Our observations of the terns show us how the impacts of climate change can cascade in interesting and often horrifying ways,” Faber said. She said low weight adults may lay smaller clutches of eggs, abandon nests early in the season or flush more easily from nests when gulls swoop down to try to eat eggs or chicks. Parents that get lucky and return to the island with a juicy fish for a chick are mugged in midair by other terns and gulls, often dropping a fish that no chick gets to eat.

Poor fish availability of course leads to poor growth of the chicks that survive and less chance of surviving during their first migration. “If the fish don’t last for the entire season, tern chicks that started out fat and grew quickly can still starve to death,” Faber said. “Adults are also more aggressive to neighboring chicks, sometimes to the point of killing them and chicks will pile onto each other if an adult does land with a fish.”

It makes it all the more celebratory when luckier chicks do survive and start flying around the island. The first sight of a chick fledging is often a cause for cheering and clapping. “I call it Tern TV,” said Dopulos, 24. “Sometimes it’s comedy, sometimes it’s tragedy.”

Price, 19, noting how hard parent terns work to find food for chicks, even to the point of bringing insects back, said, “They’re such fierce fighters. The funny thing is, with puffins, we don’t ever see most of the chicks under the rocks. We see the tern chicks every single day. It feels more personal.”

Ridley, 27, added, “To think that they go from little fluff balls to trying to fly in three weeks and then fly to Antarctica never stops being amazing.”

The crew said if people, who pack boat tours by the thousands each summer to admire puffins with their clownish orange, yellow and black bills and tuxedo-like plumage, really cared about that bird, they would also care about the challenges for terns.

Fortunately, terns did much better elsewhere in the Gulf of Maine as several islands racked up record numbers of common terns in 2022. But with seabirds in severe global decline, nothing can be taken for granted. Neither Arctic terns nor common terns are federally endangered, but Arctic terns are a threatened species in Maine as they “still far below historic levels.” Common terns are in decline in the Great Lakes.

Faber said it was “morally repugnant” to her that in a world where humans consider themselves the center of existence, that a “cute” species like puffins merits attention, while so many other creatures, like terns, are afterthoughts or ignored altogether. “I love the puffins,” she said. “They are the umbrella species for conservation. But terns are the umbrella species for puffins.”

The anger

And this is where the crew’s angst simmers into anger.

It feels harder to get people to care when the nation is currently under a White House that is trying to weaken or gut the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and firing thousands of federal staff involved with conservation.

The effects of the actions in DC earlier this year were acutely felt within the crew this summer. Dopulos had a job lined up this summer with the National Park Service. But it was cut by the Trump administration. She has several friends who lost their jobs in a service that has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent employees and left thousands of seasonal jobs unfilled.  

“Some of them are still doing what they were doing to protect wildlife and resources, but as volunteers,” Dopulos said. “And they’re joining protests at the same time. They’re so passionate about what they do that they’re not going to let government get in the way. It’s a way of saying ‘We still persist.’”

The gratitude

For Dopulos and the crew, talking about persistence led back to a more joyful place. Even with the oft-dour drama of terns, they all said they were grateful for the privilege of living for three months of the year out of tents, tending to such an historic sanctuary.

“It’s my favorite place in the world,” said Ridley, who winters as a line cook in Idaho. “You get to live in a place that is not human dominated. Everywhere else, we manipulate the world. People think that the human way is the only way, but living in a society of seabirds proves to me daily that it isn’t. I feel lucky to have that perspective.”

Faber said Seal Island has become her own sanctuary. “We get to escape from the darkest parts of the world,” she said. “I feel extra lucky to be here at this moment.”

Feeling just as lucky was Steve Kress, who came out to Seal Island for a day while I was there. He and I have co-authored two books on his seabird restorations. Being much more remote than Eastern Egg Rock, Seal Island has never come close to receiving the press the pioneering island still receives. But while Egg Rock proved puffins could be brought back, Kress said Seal’s restoration, with three times more puffins, “makes me see the grand possibilities for restoration where there is such abundant, quality nesting habitat.

“When puffins first nested at Seal Island, we weren’t as overwhelmed and relieved as when the first pairs reclaimed Egg Rock. But the fact that similar methods led to the same outcome proved that we were on to something very important. It’s encouraging to find that given enough time, persistence, and patience, successful restoration projects can become the norm.”

Amid this frenzy in May on the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, I asked Refuge Manager Oscar Reed what he most appreciates about this place. The first thing that came to mind was not the fine feathered friends, frogs, or foxes that virtually all the other visitors—like me—had cameras, scopes, and binoculars trained on.

“The marsh,” Reed responded. “In the fall, I just love the amber color in the sun and watching it wave in the wind.”

 “In one word, how would you describe it?” I asked.

 “Tranquil.”

In appreciating the serenity of the marsh, it was as if Reed channeled Rachel Carson, the great environmental writer whose 1962 book, Silent Spring, helped inspire the modern environmental movement. Two decades earlier, in her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, she wrote that “to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh…is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”

I came to this wildlife refuge in Delaware for the birds. Reed and Carson reminded me that without the marshes of coastal wetlands, so much of what is essential for this thriving ecosystem would be dramatically diminished. In the past, Congress and Democratic and Republican administrations going back to the 1980s have agreed, mandating a report every 10 years on the status and trends of wetlands in the conterminous United States.

In the most recent report to Congress last year, the Interior Department and its United States Fish and Wildlife Service said wetlands are vital to up to half of bird species found in North America, more than 80% of threatened and endangered birds and about half of all the animals and plants covered under the Endangered Species Act.

Priceless natural gifts

If Carson were alive in this epoch of climate change, she would have likely added that the breath of marsh mist should stir the soul to remember how priceless a wetland is. According to a 2022 study by researchers at Resources for the Future and Columbia University, wetlands are worth between $1.2 trillion and $2.9 trillion in flood mitigation value alone, a value that has grown more critical with sea level rise and increased frequency and intensity of storms and wildfires.

Then add crab, lobster, scallops, salmon, and shrimp, which are among the nation’s most valuable seafoods. They all spend a portion of their lives in wetlands. The marshes further clean the water for recreational fishing. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), commercial and recreational fisheries provide 1.7 million jobs.

Add in other benefits, such as filtering pesticides and fertilizers from agricultural runoff before they run off into rivers and lakes, and other forms of recreation—which of course includes bird watching—and the annual benefits of wetlands soar to $7.7 trillion, according to the congressionally mandated report, a backbone of the nation’s $30 trillion economy.

(By historical coincidence, the $7.7 trillion is eerily about the same amount of money that the Federal Reserve lent, spent or pledged to save the banking system after the 2008 financial collapse, according to Bloomberg News.)

“The ecosystem services provided by wetlands are unmatched by any other habitat except coral reefs,” the report said.

The unmatched value has been recognized in the past on a bipartisan basis. Congress overwhelmingly voted for the Clean Water Act in 1972, and George H.W. Bush respectively signed into law the Clean Water Act and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act in 1989.

When President Bush, a hunter and fisherman, signed the wetlands act, he said he was “disturbed” that the fall flight of ducks was near all-time lows, in a nation that had lost more than half of its original wetlands. He went so far as to make a “no net loss” pledge for wetlands. He declared in a 1989 speech to Ducks Unlimited:

“It’s time to stand the history of wetlands destruction on its head. From this year forward, anyone who tries to drain the swamp is going to be up to his ears in alligators.”

Bush’s “no net loss” pledge resulted in only one recorded period of slight net wetland gain, 1998 to 2004. But the rhetoric helped the nation pump the brakes on wetland loss just enough to see what could happen if there was increased investment in conservation instead of allowing total exploitation.

Progress imperiled

The 2022 State of the Birds Report compiled by more than 30 government agencies and conservation organizations, found that wetlands were about the only habitat that showed signs of thriving. While bird populations declined dramatically in most habitats in the United States, the report found that wetlands saw major increases in ducks, geese, swans, and water birds such as pelicans. The report hugely credited the funding triggered by the North American Wetlands Conservation Act in facilitating a “model conservation success story.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), one of the agencies participating in the report, said that since 1991, the act has led to the conservation of more than 32.6 million acres of habitat in 3,300 projects, funded with nearly $7 billion in grants and partner contributions. A joint report in December by USFWS and NOAA found that the rate of wetland loss in coastal watersheds from 2009 to 2019 was less than the rate of loss from 1998 to 2009, indicating “progress towards reducing net wetland loss.”

Such progress is a miracle, partially a result of the Fish and Wildlife Service cobbling together enough partnerships to protect species despite declining congressional funding over the last decade for its refuge system and a resulting erosion of employees. A Congressional Research Service report in January said the number of employees had decreased from about 2,750 in 2014 to about 2,300 in 2023.

The National Wildlife Refuge Association, the leading advocate for the refuge system, says the number of full-time employees at USFWS is now down to 1,750 because of early retirements, unfilled positions, and departures as the Trump administration regained the White House and established the Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate jobs. That is such a massive loss of staffing over the years that the association calls the refuge system “gutted.”

Bombay Hook is part of that erosion, down to 8 employees from 10. That makes continued progress, let alone the elusive goal of no net loss, highly uncertain. The joint report by USFWS and NOAA said that without a “strengthening” of conservation efforts, the loss of inland and coastal wetlands alike may intensify with the combination of local development, commercial agriculture, sea-level rise, and the ever-more severe storms of climate change. “Scientists and decision-makers around the world are concluding that coastal wetlands are critical landscape features that help drive and sustain economic prosperity,” the report said.

Unfortunately, too much of the last decade has been dominated by a Washington that dismisses science and scientists. The Supreme Court, packed to a conservative supermajority by President Trump in his first term, has rolled back many air, water, and wetland protections on behalf of industry and developers, handcuffing the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect the public against pollution and the natural world against habitat loss.

The second Trump administration is going for the jugular, to choke conservation itself. In its proposed fiscal year 2026 budget, it wants to slash Fish and Wildlife Service funding by 32%, from $1.68 billion down to $1.14 billion. The administration would end several conservation funds and end its Science Applications program that coordinates large-scale conservation planning across jurisdictions. Within the overall USFWS budget, the administration would cut the wildlife refuge system by 22%.

In a particular act of bureaucratic cruelty, the administration wants to cut a third of USFWS’s budget, while at the same time absorbing NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service Office of Protected Resources to administer the Endangered Species Act. The administration would also cripple other agencies that are key partners with Fish and Wildlife. For example, the US Geological Survey would be cut by 38%, losing its ecosystems research division and taking major hits to its core science systems programs and science support programs.

This is despite the USGS’s website still saying that its ecosystem science is a “critical piece” of government efforts to understand the complex mechanisms of animal disease outbreaks, toxic chemical contamination, invasive species, and the economic burdens of climate-induced weather events and disasters. 

There are many other cuts across the government that could imperil wildlife refuges because of their interconnected conservation science, pollution prevention, and climate change data. Among the most notable are the Trump administration’s proposed cuts of 54.5% to the Environmental Protection Agency, 55.8% to the National Science Foundation, and 27% to NOAA. 

Effects unknown

All of these cuts would drastically affect what I have seen over the years on the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge. It was established in 1937 and developed by a segregated African American Civilian Conservation Corps team from 1938 to 1942. The team cleared swamps, built dikes and causeways, and created freshwater lakes.

The fruits of their labor were immediate, with the refuge manager writing in 1940, “Every night the croaks, squawks, and hoarse guttural screams of Great Blues, American Egrets, and Black-crowns (herons) can be heard as never before on any section of the refuge. This is something entirely new, and very much a spectacle to us as well as to our Natural-History minded friends.”

I’ve heard the croaks, squawks, and hoarse guttural screams on several visits. One year I visited, tens of thousands of snow geese honked in the marsh. When they were spooked by something overhead, I could feel the concussive power of them taking off all at once, so tightly packed that it was as if I were looking at a white sheet. On another trip, a river otter cruised along a creek shimmering with the orange, yellow and red reflection of fall foliage. On another, gorgeous, rusty-red headed avocets foraged in the shallows.

On this last visit, Oscar Reed drove me around, telling me how none of what I saw was an accident. We spoke on the condition that the discussion was solely on the beauty of the place and not about politics. The refuge has one of the largest tidal marshes in the mid-Atlantic, with a low tide that exposes mud flats as far as out as the eye can see. High tide turns the area into what seems to be a series of lakes, but the water in many places is only 18 inches deep.

Reed, 60, oversees a delicate manipulation of this environment, raising and lowering water in impoundments as needed for the best feeding conditions for shorebirds, wading birds, and ducks. Sometimes, the work can be backbreaking, such as wading out into the marsh with a potato rake to clear beaver logs that hinder the effectiveness of water control structures. “The logs are so well knitted together, it takes everything to dislodge them,” he said.

He said that visiting scientists studying the refuge for marsh management can find it more than a notion to do their work. And hunters might have a surprise waiting if they are not careful. “There was one researcher who went out in the mudflats and got stuck where she couldn’t move her legs,” Reed laughed. “We also had a hunter who got stuck and had to use his brand-new shotgun to push himself out.” 

The reward for the management is a parade of sights that never stop surprising him. Populations of threatened piping plovers have inched up. This spring for instance, uncommon birds for Delaware found this place a haven, such as sandhill cranes and a roseate spoonbill way off course from its Gulf Coast climes. The number of bald eagles cruising through in the spring to feed on fish has grown over the years to as many as 50 in a single day.

They are sights that have 100,000 visitors a year coming to this refuge to see, as Carson would say, creatures far more eternal than us. Eagles, for instance, started evolving around 36 million ago. The oldest fossils of great blue herons, which look like prehistoric pterodactyls to many onlookers, are 1.8 million years old. Our species of humans has been around for only 300,000 years. As we passed the eagles, herons, and sandpipers, Reed said, “Some of the best satisfaction I get is when I look at the guest book in the visitor center and I see lots of exclamation points.”

The best exclamation point would be if the nation rose up to remind the Trump administration—to borrow from President George H.W. Bush—that anyone who tries to drain the wetlands and murder the marsh is going to be up to their ears in protest. In their simultaneous tranquility and cacophony, the nation’s 573 national wildlife refuges remain arguably the nation’s greatest place, as Carson said, to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.   

For deportation, the administration virtually froths for an Amazon-like fulfillment center to robotically sort out handcuffed humans and shuffle them down the aisles onto trucks and planes.

Todd Lyons, the acting director of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), recently told private security companies seeking contracts that ICE needs to be “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours…trying to figure out how to do that with human beings and trying to get them pretty much all over the globe is really something for us.”

That is really something, on many levels. One is the sheer immorality of reducing humans to shrink-wrapped products to shove onto conveyor belts and stack on forklifts. Another is that so far, ICE is as indiscriminate and incompetent as Amazon is efficient. President Trump promised “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” Border czar Tom Homan said the United States government was “targeting the worst of the worst” for deportation.

Instead, there have been notorious incidents of students being rounded up for exercising their right to free speech and deportations of untold numbers of people without US criminal records. One recent notorious case is that of 238 mostly Venezuelan migrants deported to prisons in El Salvador; Bloomberg News found that only about 10% of them had a criminal record in the United States. The legality of many deportations is highly questionable, as the White House has defied court orders to turn back deportation planes and return wrongly deported people back to the United States

According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, founded at Syracuse University, ICE issued 18,000 “detainer” requests for local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to hold people for possible deportation in the first month of the new Trump administration. That was more than triple the detainers issued in the first full month of the Biden administration, which faced its own fierce criticism from immigration rights advocates.

ICE says detainers are mostly for people who have been convicted of burglaries and robberies, kidnapping, homicide, sexual assault, weapons offenses, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. But only 28% of people targeted by a detainer in the first month of the new Trump administration had a prior conviction in the United States, with the most frequent offenses involving drunk driving and other traffic violations.

As for the “worst of the worst,” just one half of one percent of detainers involved a convicted rapist or murderer. So far, all that the government is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process to separate children from parents and deport US citizen children, including one with late-stage cancer.

That the nation would spend $45 billion on this malicious ruination of lives and destruction of families looks even more unconscionable when President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. want to cut $40 billion from a department that says its mission is to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.”

A review of the proposed cuts—as detailed in a 64-page memorandum that was leaked to the media—shows how profoundly the Trump administration is about to betray that mission.

Cuts despite deadly toll

The administration would end the HIV Epidemic Initiative, even though nearly 5,000 people a year in the United States still die with HIV/AIDS as the underlying cause. Despite many advances in HIV treatment that allow patients longer lives, there were still 38,000 HIV diagnoses in 2022, half of them in southern states. While one in five people in the United States with HIV are still not able to access treatment.

The administration would kill the Minority AIDS Initiative, even though the disease is rife with gross racial disparities. Though African Americans are 12% of the nation’s population, they accounted for 37% of new HIV diagnoses in 2022.

The cuts would eliminate the division of Firearm Injury and Mortality Research. In doing so, the administration is imposing an ignorance that will likely further paralyze any debate on gun control, since the division’s mission is to provide data “to inform action” on a major cause of death in the United States. Last year, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence an “urgent public health crisis,” as gun deaths soared to a record 48,830 in 2021.

New research funded by HHS’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that emergency rooms were receiving a gunshot victim every 30 minutes in nine southern and western states and the District of Columbia. Even though murders have subsided somewhat from a record 21,000 in 2021 during the COVID crisis, gun suicides kept rising to a record 27,300 in 2023.

Yet, HHS has scrubbed Murthy’s advisory from its website.

The Youth Violence Division would also be eliminated, even though gun deaths are the leading cause of death for youth under 18, killing 2,500 kids a year. Due to the Trump administration’s demands to end equity across all public policy, HHS proposes to eliminate the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. More than half of Black youth who die before the age of 18 are victims of gun violence, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Black youth are six times more likely to die a gun death than White youth.

Besides the 27,300 gun suicides in 2023, another 22,000 suicides occurred that year from other methods, primarily suffocation and intentional poisoning. About another 100,000 people died in 2022 from unintentional overdoses of fentanyl, methamphetamine, prescription opioids, cocaine, heroin, and other substances.Yet, despite the approximately 150,000 combined deaths a year from suicides and overdoses, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy propose to eliminate dozens of mental health and substance abuse training and treatment programs for children, families, people of color, people in the criminal justice system, first responders, community recovery support, and crisis response.

As if the Flint Water Crisis never happened, HHS under the Trump administration would end the Childhood Lead Poisoning Program and the Lead Exposure Registry. That is despite a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal that showed half of the US population was exposed to high levels of lead in early childhood, and a 2016 Reuters analysis that 3,000 communities across the nation had higher lead levels than Flint. A 2022 study found that without stronger congressional action to protect children from the brain damage of lead exposure, the nation will “needlessly absorb” about $80 billion in annual costs to the nation’s economy, double the proposed cuts to HHS.  

HHS would end the direct involvement of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in routine inspections of food facilities, trusting an uneven patchwork of state vigilance on bacteria, parasites, and viruses in our food systems. Never mind that the CDC says there are 48 million cases of foodborne illness every year, costing 3,000 lives and requiring 128,000 hospitalizations. A study last year done by researchers from US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Colorado School of Public Health found that food illnesses cost the nation $75 billion a year in medical care, lost productivity, premature deaths, and ongoing chronic illnesses.

Yet, HHS wants to cut $40 billion from the budget.

Cuts range from chronic diseases to drowning programs

The Trump administration and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, have disingenuously stated that funding and eliminations of departments are targeting waste and fraud. One need not be a math major to see that what they propose is the opposite.

For instance, the cuts would eliminate the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, even though cancer, heart disease, and stroke kill more than 1.5 million people a year in the United States, and cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars a year in health care costs and lost productivity. Many of those diseases, along with diabetes and obesity, are often preventable, and the national center has been a resource for programs to reduce smoking, promote physical activity, lower alcohol intake, and improve nutrition. 

The administration wants to eliminate the National Institutes for Nursing Research and several other nursing programs. This is in the face of studies that show that lower nurse-to-patient ratios and lower patient waiting times (because of more nurses) can save a hospital a couple of million dollars a year. It is also in the face of a 2021 study that found that in New York state alone, lower nurse-to-patient ratios could save more than 4,000 lives and more than $700 million over a two-year period.

The administration is so heartless that it even wants to eliminate its program for drowning, even though 4,500 people a year perish underwater, even though it is the top cause of death for preschoolers, and even though 55% of US adults have never taken a swim lesson.

All this raises real questions of how people in this nation could needlessly die if the HHS cuts become real in the areas of gun safety, mental health, food safety, HIV, or nursing. It should be unfathomable that the nation would let its guard down after Flint, risking stunted brain development in untold children.

For these $40 billion-worth of cuts to come at the same time our government wants to spend $45 billion to become Amazon-efficient at shipping human beings “all over the globe” to foreign prisons is establishing this nation as a beacon of cruelty in the developed world. The government wants a conveyor belt of deportation as it dismantles health systems in the name of efficiency.

That would be quite the fulfillment center. Immigrants are forklifted into misery. The rest of us are being carted into a cavalier world by a government that clearly does not care how many people die.

They cannot tell Kayla Butler she is crooked.

They dare not accuse Luis Antonio Flores or Colin Kramer of lollygagging on the golf course. 

If Zeldin, Musk, or Trump knew a scintilla about them, they would dare not froth at the mouth with their toxic stereotypes about federal civil servants. All four work in Region 5 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for pollution monitoring, cleanups, community engagement, and emergency hazardous waste response for Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

The Midwest is historically so saturated with manufacturing that just those six states generated a quarter of the nation’s hazardous waste back in the 1970s, and it is still today home to a quarter of the nation’s facilities reporting to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory Program. When I recently visited Region 5’s main office in Chicago, one enforcement officer, who did not give her name because of the sensitivity of her job, told me there are still toxic sites where “we show up [and] neither the state nor the EPA has ever been [there] to check.”

With irony, I visited the office the same week the Trump administration and Zeldin, President Trump’s new EPA administrator, announced they planned to cut 65% of the agency’s budget. Zeldin has since then dropped even more bombshells in a brazen attempt to gut the nation’s first line of defense against the poisoning of people, the polluting of the environment, and the proliferation of global warming gases.

Zeldin announced on March 12^th more than 30 actions he plans to undertake to weaken or cripple air, water, wastewater, and chemical standards, including eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and getting the EPA out of the business of curbing the carbon dioxide and methane gases fueling global warming. Despite record production that has the United States atop the world for oil, Zeldin said he was throttling down on regulations because they are “throttling the oil and gas industry.”

Last week, the New York Times reported the EPA is considering firing half to three-quarters of its scientists (770 to 1,155 out of 1,540) and closing the Office of Research and Development, the agency’s scientific research office. Zeldin justifies this in part by deriding many EPA programs as “left-wing ideological projects.” He violently brags that he is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”  

Impact of cuts at EPA felt deeply, broadly

Kelly, Butler, Flores, Kramer, and many others I talked with in Region 5 said all these plans are actually a bayonet ripping out the heart and soul of their mission. They all spoke to me on the condition that they were talking as members of their union, Local 704 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Nicole Cantello, union president and an EPA attorney, said the attacks on her members are unlike anything she’s seen in her more than 30 years with the agency. As much as prior conservative administrations may have criticized the agency, there’s never been one—until now—that tried to “fire everybody.”

Flores, a chemist who analyzes air, water, and soil samples for everything from lead to PCBs, said a decimated EPA means less scrutiny for another Flint water crisis, less eyeballs on Superfund sites, and limited ability to investigate toxic contamination after train derailments, such as the incident two years ago in East Palestine, Ohio. He added, “And we have a Great Lakes research vessel that tests the water across all the lakes. It’s important for drinking water, tourism, and fishing. If we get crippled, all that goes into question.”

Butler is a community involvement coordinator who works through Superfund legislation to inform communities about remediation efforts. She was deeply concerned that urban neighborhoods and rural communities will be denied the scientific resources to tell the full story of environmental injustice. Superfund sites, the legacy of toxic chemicals used in manufacturing, military operations, mining and landfills, are so poisonous, they can have cumulative, compound effects on affected communities, triggering many diseases. A 2023 EPA Inspector General report said the agency needed stronger policies, guidance, and performance measures to “assess and address cumulative impacts and disproportionate health effects on overburdened communities.”

Butler is deeply concerned cumulative impact assessments will not happen with cuts to the EPA, denying urban neighborhoods and rural communities the scientific resources to fully expose the horror of environmental injustice. “It’s a clear story that they’re trying to erase.” Butler said of the new administration.

For Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based out of Michigan, the rollbacks and the erasing of the story of environmental harms have an obvious conclusion. “People will die,” he said. “There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”

What these workers also fear is the slow death of spirit amongst themselves to be civil servants.

Start with Kelly.

I actually talked to him from Chicago by telephone because he was out in Los Angeles County, deployed to assist with the cleanup of the devastating Eaton Fire that killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 structures.

Between the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, which took another 12 lives and destroyed another 6,800 buildings, the EPA conducted what it said was the largest wildfire hazardous materials cleanup in the history of the agency, and likely the most voluminous lithium battery removal in world history—primarily from the electric and hybrid vehicles and home battery storage people were forced to leave behind as they fled.

During a break, Kelly talked about how nimble he and his colleagues must be. He has worked cleanups of monster storms Katrina, Sandy, and Maria, and the East Palestine trail derailment. Based normally out of Michigan, he recalled a day he was working in the Upper Peninsula on a cleanup of an old abandoned mine processing site. He received a call from a state environmental emergency official asking him to drop what he was doing because 20 minutes away a gasoline tanker truck had flipped over, spilling about 6,000 gallons of gasoline onto the roads and down through the storm sewer into local waterways.

When he arrived, Kelly asked the fire chief how he could help. He was asked to set up air monitoring. But then he noticed anxious contractors who were wondering if they were going to get paid for their work. “They’re ordering supplies, they’re putting dirt down to contain this gasoline from getting any further,” Kelly said. “But they’re like, ‘Are we going to get paid for this?’”

“I found the truck driver who was talking to their insurance company. So I get on the phone with the insurance company and say, ‘Hey. This is who I am. This is what’s happening here. You need to come to terms and conditions with these contractors right now or EPA’s going to have to start taking this cleanup over!’”

The insurance was covered. Kelly said he could not have been so assertive with the insurance company without a robust EPA behind him.

“It’s one thing to be able go out and respond to these emergencies, but you have to have attorneys on your side,” Kelly said. “You’ve got to have enforcement specialists behind you. You’ve got to have people who are experts in drinking water and air. You can’t just have one person out there on an island by themselves.”

“Cruel for the sake of being cruel”

Butler wonders if whole communities will become remote islands, surrounded by rising tides of pollution. The very morning of our interview, she was informed she was one of the thousands of federal workers across the nation who had their government purchase cards frozen by Elon Musk, the world’s richest human and President Trump’s destroyer of federal agencies. In launching the freeze, Musk claimed with no evidence, “A lot of shady expenditures happening.”

Butler threw shade on that, saying the purchase system is virtually foolproof with multiple layers of vetting and proof of purchase. She uses her purchase card to buy ads and place public notices in newspapers to keep communities informed about remediation of Superfund sites.

She has also used her card to piece together equipment to fit in a van for a mobile air monitor. The monitor assists with compliance, enforcement, and giving communities a read on possible toxic emissions and dust from nearby industrial operations.

“I literally bought the nuts and bolts that feed into this van that allow the scientists to measure all the chemicals, all the air pollution,” Butler said. “I remember seeing the van for the first time after I bought so many things for years. And I was like ‘Wow this is real!’”

Not only was the van real, but air monitoring in general, along with soil monitoring— particularly in places like heavily polluted Southeast Chicago—has been a critical tool of environmental justice to get rid of mountains of petcoke dust and detect neurotoxic manganese dust in the air and lead in backyards.

“Air monitoring created so much momentum for the community and community members to say, ‘this is what we need,’” Butler said.

Kramer is a chemist in quality assurance, working with project planners to devise the most accurate ways of testing for toxic materials, such as for cleanups of sites covered in PFAS—aka ‘forever chemicals’—from fire retardants, or at old industrial sites saturated with PCBs from churning out electrical equipment, insulation, paints, plastics, or adhesives. His job is mostly behind the scenes, but he understood the meaning of his work from one visit to a site to audit the procedures of the Illinois EPA.

The site had a small local museum dedicated to the Native tribes that first occupied the land. “The curator or director told us how the sampling work was going to bring native insects back to the area and different wildlife back to the streams,” Kramer said. “It was kind of a quick offhand conversation, but it gave me a quick snapshot of the work that’s being done.”

Kramer wonders how many more scientists will follow in his footsteps to see that the work keeps getting done. He remembered a painful day recently when a directive came down that he could not talk to contractors, even those who happen to work in the same building as he does.

“I see them every day,” Kramer said. “They come say hi to me. They know my child’s name. Being told that I couldn’t respond if they came to my desk, looked me in the face, and said, ‘good morning,’ is just such an unnecessary wrench into our system that just feels cruel for the sake of being cruel.”

Staff stifled, heartbroken

The culture of fear is particularly stifling for one staffer who did not want to give her name because she is a liaison to elected officials. Before Zeldin took over, she would get an email from an elected official asking if funding for a project was still on track and “30 seconds later,” as she said, the question would be answered.

Her job “is all about relationships,” keeping officials informed about projects. Now, she said just about everything she depends on to do her job has basically come to a halt. “Everyone’s afraid to say anything, answer emails, put anything in writing without getting approval. Just mass chaos all the way to the top.”

Relationships are being upset left and right according to other staffers. One set of my interviews was with three EPA community health workers who feel they are betraying the communities they serve because their contact with them has fluctuated in the first months of the Trump administration. They’ve had to shift from silence to delicately dancing around any conversation that mentions environmental justice or diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They did not want to be named because they did not want to jeopardize the opportunity to still find ways to serve communities historically dumped on with toxic pollution for decades because of racism and classism.

“Literally since January 20, my entire division has been on edge,” said one of the three. “We kind of feel like we’re in the hot seat. A lot of people working on climate are afraid. If you’re working with [people with] lower to moderate income or [places] more populated by people of color, you’re afraid because you don’t want to send off any flags to the administration.”

The tiptoeing is heartbreaking to them because they see firsthand the poisoning of families from chemicals the EPA has regulated. One of the health workers has painful memories of seeing the “devastated” look on mothers’ faces when giving them the results of child lead tests that were well above the hazardous limit. “I feel like I made a promise to them that I would be there for what they needed,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve been forced to go back on that promise.”

Remembering their mission boosts morale

Despite that, and despite President Trump’s baseless ranting, which included saying during the campaign that “crooked” and “dishonest” federal workers were “destroying this country,” these EPA staffers are far from caving in. Nationally, current and former EPA staff last week published an open letter to the nation that said, “We cannot stand by and allow” the assault on environmental justice programs.

Locally in Region 5, the workers’ union has been trying to keep morale from tanking with town halls, trivia nights, lunch learning sessions, and happy hours. In a day of quiet defiance, many of the 1,000 staffers wore stickers in support of the probationary employees that said, “Don’t Fire New Hires.” Several of the people I interviewed said that if Zeldin and the Trump administration really cared about waste and inefficiency, they would not try to fire tens of thousands of probationary workers across the federal system. 

One of them noted how the onboarding process, just to begin her probationary year, took five months. “It wastes all this money onboarding them and then eliminating them,” she said. “That’s totally abusing taxpayer dollars if you ask me. It’s hard enough to get people to work here. We’re powered by smart people who went to school for a long time and could make a lot of money elsewhere.” Federal staffers with advanced degrees make 29% less, on average, than counterparts in the private sector, according to a report last year from the Congressional Budget Office.

Individually, several said they maintained their morale by remembering why they came to the EPA in the first place. Flores, whose public service was embedded into him growing up in a military family, said, “I didn’t want to make the next shampoo,” with his chemistry degrees. “I didn’t want to make a better adhesive for a box…the tangible mission of human health and environmental health is very important me.”

The enforcement officer who wanted to remain anonymous talked about a case where she worked with the state to monitor lead in a fenceline community near a toxic industry. Several children were discovered to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.

“People’ lives are in my hands,” she said. “When we realized how dire the circumstance was, we were able to really speed up our process by working with the company, working with the state and getting a settlement done quick. And now all those fixes are in place. The lead monitoring has returned back to safe levels, and we know that there aren’t going to be any more kids impacted by this facility.”

One of the community health workers I interviewed said her mission means so much to her because at nine years old she lost her mother to breast cancer after exposure to the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). That carcinogen is used in home, furniture, and automotive cleaning products. The Biden administration banned TCE in its final weeks, but the Trump administration has delayed implementation.

“The loss of her rippled throughout our community,” the worker said of her mother. “She was active in our church, teaching immigrants in our city how to read. The loss of her had such a large impact.” She said if the EPA were gutted, so many people like her mother would be lost too soon. “We play critical roles beyond just laws and regulations,” she said. “We do serve vital functions for communities based on where the need is the most.”

The same worker worried that if an agency as critical to community health as the EPA can be slashed to a shell of itself, there is no telling what is in store next for the nation. “I know people don’t have a lot of sympathy for bureaucrats,” she said. “But I think what is happening to us is a precursor to what happens to the rest of the country. We’re supposed to be this nonpartisan force that’s working for the American people, and attacks to that is a direct attack on the American people.”

One of her co-workers seconded her by saying, “We’re fighting for the American people and we are the American people. We all began this job for a reason. We all have our ‘why.’ And that hasn’t changed just because the administration has changed, because there’s some backlash or people coming after us. Just grounding yourself with people whose ‘why’ is the same as yours helps a lot.” 

He said he “would welcome an opportunity to read through all the science and research” on pesticides and search for “common sense, pragmatic solutions” on environmental issues. Claiming there was “no dollar large or small that can influence the decisions that I make,” Zeldin went so far as to say, “It is my job to stay up at night, to lose sleep at night, to make sure that we are making our air and our water cleaner.”

It was all a lie. Last week, President Trump said Zeldin was considering firing 65% of EPA’s staff, which would amount to nearly 10,000 of the agency’s 15,000 workers. The White House later issued a clarification—as if it made any difference—that Zeldin was “committed” to slashing 65% of the agency’s budget. The EPA issued a statement saying President Trump and Secretary Zeldin “are in lock step.”  

Also last week, the news broke that Zeldin is urging the White House to strike down the 2009 EPA finding that global warming gases endanger public health and the environment. That finding, made under the Obama administration, girded federal efforts to reduce vehicle and industrial emissions. The finding, long a legal target for climate deniers, has so far held up, even in an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, but that has not stopped the administration from attacking it. Project 2025, the blueprint organized by the Heritage Foundation to guide this White House, calls for an “update” to the endangerment finding. Leading climate denier and former Trump transition adviser Steve Milloy told the Associated Press last week that without the finding, “everything EPA does on climate goes away.”

This is after Zeldin told senators in written answers for his confirmation that he planned to “learn from EPA career staff about the current state of the science on greenhouse gas emissions and follow all legal requirements.” Instead, Zeldin has scientists in a state of bewilderment. In one fell month, he has every employee looking over their shoulder, fearing the dismissal of their work or the tap of outright dismissal.

Zeldin’s latest “lock-step” actions cap an already-breathtaking first month in running the EPA.

He has launched an illegal effort to claw back $20 billion in EPA clean energy funding significantly targeted for disadvantaged communities. He placed nearly 170 workers in the office of Environmental Justice on administrative leave and oversaw the firing of about 400 probationary staff (although some have momentarily been brought back after public outcry). He has begun a rollback of Biden administration energy efficiency and water conservation regulations for home appliances and fixtures.

There are surely many more attempts to come that will turn back the clock on environmental protection.

An EPA led by industry apologists 

Zeldin’s EPA includes a rogue’s gallery from President Trump’s first term.

Returning to the EPA in top spots for chemical regulation are Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva. Both formerly served on the American Chemistry Council, the top lobbying arm of chemical manufacturers, and Dekleva spent more than three decades at DuPont, one of the most notorious companies for burying the dangers of PFAS.  

In the first Trump administration, Beck was at the center of the suppression on science to resist the most stringent regulation or bans on carcinogenic chemicals such as trichloroethylene, PFAS, methylene chloride, and asbestos. She was also reported to have helped in burying the strongest possible health and safety guidelines to help communities reopen during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dekleva was accused during her first stint in President Trump’s EPA of pressuring employees to approve new chemicals and colluding with industry to weaken the Toxic Substances Control Act.

The nominee to be Zeldin’s assistant administrator, David Fotouhi, is another returnee who was at the center of the first Trump administration’s efforts to strip wetlands protections. When not inside the EPA, Fotouhi has a long record defending industries in legal battles over standards or contamination lawsuits about toxic chemicals, such as asbestos, PFAS, PCBs, and coal ash.

Holding high-level positions in the Office of Air and Radiation are Abigale Tardif and Alex Dominguez. Tardif lobbied for the oil and petrochemical industry and was a policy analyst for the Koch-funded network Americans for Prosperity. Dominguez lobbied for the American Petroleum Institute, which opposed the vehicle pollution standards of the Biden administration.

Aaron Szabo has been nominated to be assistant secretary for Air and Radiation. Szabo was a contributing consultant to the Project 2025 chapter on the EPA that recommends sharply curtailing the agency’s monitoring of global warming gases and other pollutants and eliminating the Office for Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.

Other recent EPA appointees who also contributed to Project 2025 (which President Trump disavowed during the presidential campaign) are Scott Mason and Justin Schwab. Steven Cook, a former lobbyist for plastics, chemicals, and oil refining, and another veteran of the first Trump administration, is also returning.

Zeldin may be inexperienced at regulation, but none of the above are. Kyle Danish, a partner at Van Ness Feldman, a consulting firm for energy clients, told the New York Times, “This group is arriving with more expertise in deploying the machinery of the agency, including to unravel regulations from the prior administration. They all look like they graduated one level from what they did in the first Trump administration.”

Same playbook at other agencies

Other agencies responsible for addressing climate change pollution have also quickly deployed the machinery of environmental destruction.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memorandum ordering a review of the fuel economy standards of the Biden administration, claiming without evidence that the standards would destroy “thousands” of jobs and “force the electrification” of the nation’s auto fleets. This is despite the agency’s own analysis showing the rules would save consumers $23 billion in fuel costs and result in annual health costs benefits of $13 billion from reduced air pollution.

Secretary Duffy also issued a memorandum canceling the Department of Transportation’s plans to address environmental justice in low-income populations and communities of color, climate change, and resilience polices for department assets and the department’s Equity Council. Again, no facts were offered as to why communities disproportionately beset with pollution and pollution-related diseases should be excluded from protection. He was just following President Trump’s Orwellian executive order that aims to wipe any consideration of race, gender, climate, equity, and disproportionate impacts from federal programs.

Over in the Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum issued a memorandum directing all his assistant secretaries to provide action plans that “suspend, revise, or rescind” more than two dozen regulations. The obvious goal is to plunder more public land and water for private profit for the fossil fuel and mining industries. Many of those regulations to be revised or killed involve endangered wildlife and plants, landscape and conservation health, the Migratory Bird Treaty, and accounting for the benefits to public health, property, and agriculture of reducing climate-related pollution.

In a recent interview on FOX News, Secretary Burgum said he was “completely embracing” the massive shrinking of the federal workforce by the Department of Government Efficiency, a cruel act that means he is just fine with DOGE’s 2,000 job cuts at Interior, including 1,000 in the chronically understaffed National Park Service, which has a $23.3 billion backlog for deferred maintenance. 

Climate mockery at Department of Energy

And then we have the reported layoff of between 1,200 and 2,000 workers at the Energy Department, now run by Chris Wright, a former CEO of one of the nation’s largest fracking companies. In President Trump’s Cabinet, Secretary Wright is the most blunt in dismissing the effects of the climate crisis. In 2023, he said the “the hype over wildfires is just hype to justify” climate policies. He said, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition.”

He has doubled down on his rhetoric during his first month in office. Wright told a conservative policy conference in February—without evidence —that net zero goals for carbon emissions by 2050 were “sinister” and “lunacy.” Wright also went on FOX Business in February to say that climate change is “nowhere near the world’s biggest problem today, not even close.”

Despite all the evidence already unfolding that climate change is a factor in the increasing number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the US, and despite a major 2023 study projecting that five million lives a year could be saved around the world by phasing out fossil fuels and their pollution, Wright said a warmer planet with more carbon dioxide is “better for growing plants.” Never mind the communities living in the crosshairs of contamination and climate catastrophe or conservationists who are concerned anew about endangered species.

Wright spent his first month in office postponing Biden-era energy efficiency standards for home appliances, claiming without evidence that they have “diminished the quality” of them. His office announced the canceling of $124 million in contracts, many of them connected to diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives. He said those contracts were “adding nothing of value to the American people.” When asked if he wanted fossil fuels to “come back big time,” Wright responded, “Absolutely.”

Behind the pablum of confirmation hearings was an iron fist

And over in the Commerce Department, the 6,700 scientists and 12,000 staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are reeling from the recent first wave of hundreds of layoffs. Many more job losses are threatened, with sources telling major media outlets that the Trump administration and new Secretary Howard Lutnick are considering a 50% cut in staff and a 30% cut in the agency’s budget.

It is irrelevant to the Trump administration that NOAA is a bedrock agency that protects the public with its real-time tracking of dangerous storms. It is at the center of long-term federal analysis on climate, the toll in property and life of global warming, the health of our oceans, and the state of our fisheries. Instead of being placed on a pedestal for this central role, NOAA is as much a bullseye for polluters and plunderers as the EPA. Project 2025 calls for the breaking up of NOAA because it “has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity.”

Lutnick, a billionaire Wall Street financier, told senators in his January confirmation hearing that he had “no interest” in dismantling NOAA. The firings suggest the dismantling has begun.

When Lee Zeldin promised at his confirmation hearing that he would “defer” to talented scientists on climate change data, it was a mere six days after NOAA and many other weather agencies around the world confirmed that Earth had its hottest year yet in 2024. That was obviously lost on him. In just one month, the only demonstrated deference of Zeldin, Burgum, Wright, Duffy, and Lutnick is to President Trump’s mantra of “drill, baby, drill” and the deregulation of toxic industries.

Left in the wake are demonized and demoralized federal scientists.

In his address to Congress this week, President Trump boasted about ending “environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable.” Hopefully it will not be one hurricane, one contamination, or one disappearing species too many to realize we cannot afford to be without those scientists. We will be far less safe without them.

Obscured by his “green new scam” rhetoric is a mad scramble by his supporters in Congress to reap the economic benefits of green industry for their states and districts. The increasing investments, precisely in the places that voted for him, make President-elect Trump’s pledge to “terminate” many green programs political wolf talk. That is because the renewable energy industry is growing jobs more than twice as fast as the overall economy.

A lasting irony of the outgoing Biden administration will be how no Republican in Congress voted for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Yet 85% of the announced clean energy projects and 68% of the jobs triggered by the IRA, such as those related to electric vehicles, wind power, solar power, and battery storage, have gone to Republican-held congressional districts, according to E2, a nonpartisan group that monitors the clean energy industry.

The representatives of those districts see no apparent contradiction in touting the attractiveness of their areas for clean energy investments, while publicly supporting the President-elect’s rhetoric and proposals to end clean energy programs.

Love/hate relationships abound

For instance, Texas Congressmember Jodey Arrington, who represents a House district that includes Lubbock and Abilene, called the IRA a “failed liberal spending spree that crippled our economy and left working American families worse off.” The Washington Post reported in October that Arrington’s district is the nation’s fifth-highest recipient of investments for clean energy and manufacturing, receiving nearly $5 billion.

Then there is Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn: a climate skeptic who says infrastructure projects that fight climate change are a “gateway to socialism.” She told the Republican National Convention this summer that the “green new scam” was “destroying small businesses.”

Huh? Relative to the size of the state’s economy (as measured by gross domestic product), Tennessee ranks first in the nation in clean technology manufacturing investment from the IRA, according to the Clean Investment Monitor, maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Rhodium Group.

Senator Blackburn seems well aware of it. Even before the IRA, when vehicle maker Ford cut the ribbon on a $5.6 billion electric battery plant in her state in 2021, she boasted how Tennessee is “leading the way for innovation” with a “historic project” that would directly create 5,800 jobs and create “countless opportunities in supporting industries.”  

The champion of hypocrisy is Representative Richard Hudson, congressman for North Carolina’s Ninth District, nestled in the center of the state. In voting against the IRA, he blasted clean energy programs as “woke climate and social programs that won’t work.”

Hudson was wide awake for the money coming to his district to expand a massive Toyota battery plant for electric vehicles and hybrids. According to E2, Hudson’s district is top in the nation both for clean energy investment and for clean energy job growth triggered by the IRA. The Toyota plant alone promises more than 5,000 jobs. Estimates of investment in his district range from nearly $10 billion to nearly $13 billion.

Selective cuts desired

If the next Trump administration is serious about pulling the plug on clean energy, that will add up to a lot of jobs and investments to undo in states and districts where the President-elect handily won the election. North Carolina Representative Hudson hinted he agrees. When CNN asked him in June if he would vote to repeal the IRA if the Republicans won control of the federal government in the election—which they did—he responded, “Rather than try to repeal one big bill with another big bill, we ought to look at the individual policies.” 

Another sign that Republicans ultimately won’t scrap all the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act came in an August letter by 18 Republicans to House Speaker Mike Johnson. The lawmakers asked Johnson to preserve clean energy tax credits in any effort to repeal or reform the IRA. The letter acknowledged that energy tax credits “have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference.”

The letter warned that repealing energy tax credits, especially those for projects that have already broken ground “would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing.”

This acknowledgement from conservative lawmakers that clean energy and electric vehicles are good business makes it reasonable to bet that the investments they’ve secured for their districts will survive the President-elect’s rhetoric of a “green new scam.”

Risks to offshore wind loom

Much less clear is the near-term future for offshore wind.

While campaigning, President-elect Trump promised to sign an executive order on the first day of his return to bring a halt to the offshore wind industry. Never mind that onshore wind is booming in red states in the windy, rural middle of the United States, providing 130,000 jobs. The fastest growing occupation in the nation is wind turbine service technician, paying an average of nearly $62,000 a year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

According to the Energy Information Agency, the top four states for electricity generation from wind in 2023 were the red states of Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

The offshore wind industry, a staple of energy generation in northern Europe, is still in its infancy in the United States. It remains highly vulnerable to price shocks, supply-chain issues, local opposition to siting, and being a political dartboard. The industry is currently centered in more liberal Northeastern states thanks to ideal water depths off the Atlantic coastline and forward-looking governors from Massachusetts to Virginia who have been competing the last two decades for ports and projects.

The US has the technical capacity to harness three times more electricity from offshore wind than it currently uses today, with the Atlantic Ocean off the Northeast coast possessing some of the strongest wind speeds in the country. 

Surprisingly, despite its “Drill, Baby, Drill” mantra for oil, the first Trump administration promoted offshore wind when it found out how much money the leases could put into federal coffers. It conducted a then-record auction for waters off Massachusetts to site off-shore wind projects. Ports and manufacturing facilities as far south as Louisiana, home state of House Speaker Mike Johnson, helped launch the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Rhode Island.

But that has not stopped oil and gas companies from continuing to conduct disinformation campaigns to stir up opposition to offshore wind. It is clear they have a lot to lose from a full-blown offshore wind industry in the Northeast. For example, gas accounts for at least half of the electricity generation in New England and New Jersey. New York City generates between 85% and 90% of its electricity from fossil fuels. The Northeast Gas Association boasts that about half the entire region gets its electricity from gas.

On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump elected to play off that disinformation. He attacked offshore wind with gale force lies about its impact on whales and the environment, claims which have zero science behind them as NOAA and others explain.

The unending verbal assault makes it reasonable to worry that under this second administration President-elect Trump may truly try to score political points by directing the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to slow permitting of new projects and telling the Justice Department to side with opponents of incomplete projects. Many experts say that just the slowing of the permitting process risks making construction more expensive and may scare off investors.  

Then there’s the issue of equity

In even more serious doubt is a just transition, where communities that suffer the most from fossil fuel production and pollution can get jobs, lower energy costs, and cleaner air from a move to renewables.

Almost by definition, the growth of clean energy industries in more sparsely populated, majority white, Republican-held districts may exacerbate the existing structural racism in the energy sector’s workforce, which has been a driver of the Biden administration’s goal of directing 40% of federal climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities.

For instance, Black people are 13% of the nation’s workforce and account for only 8% of the solar and wind workforce, according to the Department of Energy. The Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) says the percentage of Black solar workers has not budged since 2022. Yet, the second-fastest growing job in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are solar panel installers, making on average $48,000 a year.

The percentage of people of color in leadership positions in the renewable energy supply chain is currently infinitesimally small. A 2022 report by the American Council on Renewable Energy found that of 658 manufacturers involved in utility-scale wind, solar, and battery storage, 1.8% were owned by people of color or women. And while there is one bright spot in diversity, with 33% of new clean energy jobs last year being filled by Latinos, 88% of solar industry executives are white and 80% are male, according to the IREC.

Only a quarter of solar firms in the IREC’s annual National Solar Jobs Census reported that they had strategies to hire more people of color or women.

With the return of President-elect Trump, accompanied now by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, it will take maverick clean energy companies to improve diversity. Just this past June, Vance co-introduced (along with Senator Blackburn) a bill in the Senate to eliminate all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and funding for any entities that receive federal funding. Representatives Arrington and Hudson co-sponsored the measure in the House. Cynically twisting the purpose of DEI to ensure fair opportunities for people from historically excluded groups, Vice President-elect Vance claims DEI “breeds hatred and racial division.”

President-elect Trump himself has already begun to nominate members of his cabinet with direct ties to Project 2025, the de facto Republican Party platform that also calls for the elimination of DEI throughout government. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the end of DEI in the Energy Department and eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in the Environmental Protection Agency.

The pall placed over the nation is already being felt even before Inauguration Day, as Walmart recently announced it was rolling back DEI policies or dismantling DEI teams, joining companies like Ford, Boeing, Toyota, Lowe’s, Harley Davidson, Molson Coors, John Deere and Tractor Supply. That follows the scores of universities that are eliminating DEI in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 striking down of affirmative action. It was a ruling virtually assured by President Trump’s packing of the court in his first term.   

In a blog last year on this flood of renewable money flowing into Republican districts from a Democratic-inspired law, I wrote that the nation would be so much stronger in the fight against climate change and the effort to clean up communities and boost the economy if conservatives would “drop the two-faced charade of climate denial while diving unabashedly into the pot of federal renewable incentives and tax breaks.” Now that the forces of climate denial have regained the White House and control of both chambers of Congress, they don’t even need two faces. They can just be bald-faced aggrandizers.

The renewable energy industry will indeed have a strong expansion in the US. It’s just that it will be heavily driven by a real green scam—an expansion being led by politicians who harness and hoard solar power, wind power, and electric vehicles for their own constituents, but deny it for everyone else. 

At a table for a Black talk radio station, host Aaron Smith said he sensed a lot of energy for the election from his listeners, particularly Black women. “For a lot of Black women, it’s an opportunity to be heard and seen for the first time in a long time,” said Smith, 49.

Zorita Dorsey, 47, the block party’s production manager, said she was hearing mixed messages. She said more people than she expected were giving $1,000 to the Harris campaign. But she also said some friends say they may not vote at all in anger over what they perceive as the Biden-Harris administration’s inaction on the war in the Middle East.

She said some friends are discouraged by what they see as a broken system. “Some of them are very concerned that their vote is not going to mean anything because the election is going to be stolen,” Dorsey said.

Gap in party registration narrows, even in deep blue Philly

That range of sentiments adds to the mystery that makes Pennsylvania one of the most bitterly contested presidential swing states and one of the hardest states to predict an outcome. After Democrat Barack Obama won this state handily in 2008 and 2012, Donald Trump won the state by 44,000 votes out of 6.2 million votes cast in 2016. Joe Biden won the state back for the Democrats in 2020 by 80,000 votes out of 6.9 million cast in record turnout among its 9.1 million registered voters.

Biden won in Pennsylvania despite Republicans dramatically closing the gap in voter registration. In 2016, there were nearly 900,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. In 2020, the gap was 666,000.

This year, the gap has been slashed much narrower still. There remains about 9.1 million registered voters, but the gap in voter registration between parties is now 298,000. There are also 1.4 million registered voters in Pennsylvania who are not registered with either party, up from 1.2 million in 2016.

The gap in voter registration between parties has narrowed even in Philadelphia, where between 80 percent and 85 percent of votes routinely go to Democratic presidential candidates. In the 2020 election, the city saw its highest turnout since 1984. This year, the number of registered voters in the presidential general election in the city is around 1.1 million, about the same it has been since 2008. But according to data from the state, as of the October 21 deadline to register, the number of registered Democrats has fallen dramatically from 856,949 in 2020 to 796,221. The party gap has shrunk by nearly 70,000 votes.

There are many reasons according to several media analyses. They include voters who finally switched parties after years of voting more conservative, voters in communities that have shifted to the right, voters who are disgusted with both parties and go independent, and voters who have moved out of state. The Philadelphia Inquirer also recently reported on working-class and low-income communities in Philadelphia that have also drifted rightward, frustrated with economic struggles.

Racial disparities in voter turnout exist

The Philadelphia Inquirer and many other local and national media outlets have also noted that since 2020, Philadelphia turnout has slumped in majority Black and Latino working-class neighborhoods. A multi-county Union of Concerned Scientists analysis earlier this year found there were significant racial disparities in both turnout and ballot acceptance in 2020 in 11 key counties in 7 swing states, including Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania. The findings from UCS showed that in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods with low turnout, voters also are more likely to have their provisional or absentee ballots rejected.

Michael Latner, a former UCS senior fellow and report co-author said the Philadelphia neighborhood of Cedarbrook, a majority Black neighborhood with low poverty, had a voter turnout rate of 84 percent in 2020, while Kensington, a majority Black neighborhood in Philadelphia with high poverty, saw less than a third of registered voters turn out. “More than any other social condition, concentrated poverty erodes the cooperative networks on which democratic participation depends,” Latner said.

Study co-author Liza Gordon-Rogers said, “People who live just blocks apart might have totally different experiences in the political process, and that has real consequences for election outcomes.”  

The differences were summed up in a feature in The Philadelphia Inquirer where one activist told the newspaper that the cry of the Democrats about threats to democracy in this election “means very little for people who can’t keep the lights on.”

To be sure, registration data and past turnout is not destiny. Even in the 2020 election with its record turnout, more than 2 million registered voters stayed home in Pennsylvania. That means that the election results this year will likely come down to who has the most effective ground campaign in the final days, especially in hard-hit areas.

Get-out-the-vote events proven to work

Many attendees at the West Philadelphia block party wondered exactly if events such as this would help boost turnout for this election. One study published this year by researchers at Rice University, Oberlin College, and the University of Pennsylvania found that voter block parties can increase turnout, particularly in African American communities and sometimes on par with other get-out-the-vote interventions, such as door-to-door canvassing, mailers, and phone calls.

Can that compete with the siege of advertising swamping voters? Antonio Zachary, a 42-year-old stagehand for the event, said he and friends have been bombarded as never before with text messages full of slanderous disinformation. He wondered if that would have a numbing effect on voters. “I honestly can’t tell you how enthusiastic people will be.” Zachary said.    

Rashida Northington, 46, is a canvasser for the city’s overdose response unit in between gigs such as being a Door Dash driver. She said on one hand, there is a lot of excitement about Harris from Black women connected to sororities. On the other, she hears a lot of complaints from working class voters about immigration and taxes. “People going to a food bank want to see the benefits of voting,” she said.

The next few days will tell if enough people see the benefits of voting to make Philadelphia a major story in the most major of battleground states.

Lead author Adam Gold, a watershed researcher for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the wild uncertainty is because the court arbitrarily created a new standard for federal protection divorced from the science of how wetlands support larger streams, rivers, lakes and the ocean.

The Sackett case involved an Idaho couple who sued after the Environmental Protection Agency stopped their backfilling of a lot near a lake to build a home. The court was unanimous in saying that in the case of that couple, the EPA overstepped its authority. But a 5-4 conservative majority, led by Justice Samuel Alito, a long-time skeptic of both EPA authority, and what constitutes any kind of pollution, went a fateful extra step.

Alito famously said that carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, a key contributor to global warming, is not a pollutant. That is despite studies tying carbon dioxide to skyrocketing rates of childhood asthma. A 2011 study in the journal Asthma and Allergy, said the parallel increase of global asthma and carbon dioxide emissions is “remarkable.” There is evidence linking elevated carbon dioxide to longer pollen seasons.

On wetlands, Alito’s razor-thin majority instituted an “eyeball” test. The court said a wetland merits federal protection only if it is “indistinguishable” from larger waters, evidenced by a “continuous surface connection” to them.

Court rejects decades of science

The ruling was hailed by industrial and agricultural polluters and developers. Groups that filed briefs against the EPA’s authority included the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Home Builders. The Chamber of Commerce said the ruling put an end to a  “tortured definition” of water protection that “threatened to strangle projects with years of red tape.”

But the court’s tortured institution of a visual test for continuous water in wetlands rejected decades of federal wetlands science, much of it conducted under the administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama.

Federal reports found that all types and sizes of nontidal wetlands, that is places without visible, continuous surface connections, still serve critical downstream ecosystem functions. Some are seemingly far from large bodies of water. In others, water flows into underground aquifers. In others still, the soil is saturated but surface water is visible for only part of the year.

And then there are ephemeral streams that run only during rainfalls. A 2008 EPA report published during the Bush administration said, “Given their importance and vast extent, it is concluded that an individual ephemeral or intermittent stream segment should not be examined in isolation.”

Years later, a 2015 EPA report published during the Obama administration said, “All tributary streams, including perennial, intermittent, and ephemeral streams are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to downstream rivers.” It emphasized there is “ample evidence that many wetlands and open waters located outside of riparian areas and floodplains, even when lacking surface water connections, provide physical, chemical, and biological functions that could affect the integrity of downstream waters. Some potential benefits of these wetlands are due to their isolation rather than their connectivity.”

That left Gold with the unenviable task of trying to fit a square peg of data into the round hole of nonsense—that one must see water in a wetland for it to be wet enough to be a wetland. Basically, he found out that any future permitting disputes between developers and federal agencies, especially for inland, nontidal wetlands, will likely depend on legal decisions of “wetness.”

For instance, if just geographically isolated wetlands were removed from protection, that would amount to 19% of the nation’s 90 million acres of nontidal wetlands. If a court ruled that a wetland must be flooded for more than a month during the growing season, that would knock out 61% of wetlands from federal protection. If a wetland needed to be semi-permanently flooded, that would remove 91% of acreage from protection.

“I was surprised by the uncertainty,” Gold said in a telephone interview. “A reason it is so hard to determine is because the language used by the court is neither scientific nor objective.” He said the high court’s insistence on a ‘continuous surface connection’ as a condition for protection “are subjective words that are not defined by anything related to how wetlands work. If we start parsing out wetland protection by how ‘wet’ they are, it is highly unclear where this all ends up.”

Wetlands are environmental heavyweights

What we do know is that wetlands are an underrated champion of the environment, the economy and climate mitigation, despite representing less than 6% of land in the contiguous United States. Wetlands are the nurseries for commercial and recreational fisheries, which generated $321 billion and supported 2.3 million jobs in 2022, according to a report last year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Along with anglers, wetlands are the critical backdrop for hunters and wildlife watchers, who spent $400 billion in 2022, according to a report last year by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Yet, the nation is losing ground on wetlands. A report this year by the US Fish and Wildlife Service found between 2009 and 2019, the nation lost enough acreage of forest and scrub wetlands to equal the size of Rhode Island. That cannot happen when so many studies also show how wetlands are a carbon sink.

Globally, wetlands such as peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows cover 6% of the world’s surface. But they sequester a third of the world’s organic ecosystem carbon. A 2022 study in the journal Science said the function of wetlands as a climate workhorse makes preserving them a matter of “utmost importance.”

Losing so many acres of wetlands also cannot happen when the EPA says wetlands are “biological supermarkets” for insects and small fish that are feasted on by larger creatures: fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals. The agency says wetlands are the sole home for more than a third of the nation’s threatened and endangered species. Nearly half of threatened and endangered species dine in, or seek shelter in, wetlands during their lives.

It also cannot happen when wetlands literally save property and lives by being buffers against winds and storm surges. A 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that wetland losses in Florida between 1996 and 2016 resulted in an additional $430 million in property damage from Hurricane Irma in 2017.

A 2021 study in the journal Global Environmental Change found that globally coastal wetlands save $447 billion in damages and 4,620 lives a year. A 2019 study in the journal of Marine and Freshwater Research found that the world’s wetlands deliver $47 trillion a year in ecosystem services. The prime ones are erosion and flood control, waste treatment, water purification, recreation, and tourism.

States offer unwieldy checkerboard of wetland protections

None of those wetland benefits registered with the Supreme Court majority that now demands an “eyeball” test of surface water to determine if a wetland is a wetland. Such a test leaves protection to the mercy of the states.

An analysis by the Environmental Law Institute found that 24 states do not independently protect their wetlands, relying completely on the Clean Water Act. The map of the states with no protections and those with their own protections closely mirrors the red and blue maps of presidential elections. Most states in the South and the Great Plains have no protections, thus leaving their wetlands at the highest risk of destruction (though notable exceptions include the Everglades wetlands in Florida and prairie pothole wetlands in Minnesota).

None of that makes sense when everyone (except perhaps five members of the Supreme Court) knows that pollution from one state can easily travel downstream into another state. Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who this year voted in a 5-4 majority to block EPA rules to limit power plant and industrial pollution from crossing state lines, joined the court’s three liberals, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in saying the new test of a “continuous surface connection” raises all kinds of questions.

“How does that test apply to the many kinds of wetlands that typically do not have a surface water connection to a covered water year-round—for example, wetlands and waters that are connected for much of the year but not in the summer when they dry up to some extent?” Kavanaugh wrote. “How ‘temporary’ do ‘interruptions in surface connection’ have to be for wetlands to still be covered?

“How does the test operate in areas where storms, floods, and erosion frequently shift or breach natural river berms? Can a continuous surface connection be established by a ditch, swale, pipe, or culvert?”

That is why Adam Gold found it so hard to come up with a firm number of how many wetlands have lost protection. “No one likes uncertainty,” Gold said. “Not the regulators, not the permit applicants, not the scientists…. It is very clear what a wetland is. But now it’s unclear what protections they have.”  

That is because for the majority of the Supreme Court, a wetland where the water is out of sight is a wetland out of mind.

For an hour, all talk centered around a mortal enemy of tern chicks: the black-crowned night heron. The latter is a beautiful, stocky wetland bird with glowing red eyes and two delicate white plumes shooting out the back of its head. A nocturnal hunter, lucky photographers can catch it at dusk or dawn along rivers and ponds snapping fish out of the water in a split second.

Stratton Island is three miles out to sea from Orchard Beach, Maine. The Audubon Seabird Institute, formerly known as Project Puffin, began restoring terns here in the 1980s. Kress founded the project in 1973.

On this island, in the dead of the night, the heron has other prey on the menu. It includes a precious colony of least terns, the smallest tern in the world, with a striking black cap and bright yellow bill. The tern was nearly wiped out on the East Coast in the late 19^th century for hat feathers.

Despite their recovery from that slaughter —a recovery aided by the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty—least terns are listed today as an endangered bird in Maine. It nests on sandy beaches, which often puts it in competition with human development and recreation. That fragility makes it critical to keep herons out of tern colonies as one heron can kill many chicks in hours. In 2022, just 14 chicks fledged out of 91 nests on Stratton. Last year, maybe four chicks survived to fledge off Stratton.

The team of Ben Becker, Kay Garlick-Ott, Tiffany Christian, Ellie Bretscher, Katelyn Shelton, and Joe Sweeney told Kress they are always “on edge” for the heron attacks and do everything possible to scare off herons. They use lights and lasers and make every kind of noise possible with bangers, screamers, and pot banging.

Kress chimed in that crews have also tried (in vain) to use a mannequin to startle the herons. There was one researcher years ago who dressed up as the action film character Rambo to hunt a heron that was terrorizing chicks. Another attempt to use lights to see herons resulted in federal authorities roaring out to Stratton in a boat, on a tip that it was a landing strip for drug runners.  

Sadly, right after this visit, a heron evaded the crew and unleashed another lethal attack, reducing the number of least tern chicks from more than 60 to less than 20. The moment was symbolic of how Kress’s original vision for Project Puffin evolved dramatically over the years.

Protecting tern chicks from predators and other threats

All Kress had wanted to do a half-century ago was restore just one species, the Atlantic puffin, to Eastern Egg Rock, one small island off the coast of Maine. Puffins were hunted off nearly every island in Maine in the 1880s. Kress hoped that once he re-established the bird, with chicks translocated from Canada, it could maintain itself and that would be the end of the project.

He came to realize that breeding puffins and eventually other birds, such as terns, requires people to guard them for the entire 3 to 4 months of their breeding season. Whatever the ecosystem was centuries ago that allowed puffins and terns to thrive in Maine, now there are just too many threats. Some threats are other birds that thrive thanks to major conservation victories. For example, herring gulls, which also were slaughtered for hat feathers, recovered with the 1918 treaty. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons are flourishing again after the 1972 banning of the pesticide DDT. Other threats are tied to human sloppiness: Gulls went beyond recovery to crowding out other birds on Maine islands, boosted by banquets of coastal landfills and fishing waste.

It may all be part of a larger struggle of birds competing for dwindling habitat in the face of development, climate change, pesticides, industrial agriculture, and pollution. A 2019 study in the journal Science found that North America has lost more than a quarter of its bird population since 1970; there are nearly 3 billion birds less than there used to be.

“I had no idea we would face this complexity of the ongoing need for management,” Kress said. “It’s a myth that islands are separate from everything else. We can’t walk away from [the restorations], or they would eventually unravel.”

Passing on the torch at Project Puffin

They have not unraveled. The project has had at least 700 research assistants. At 28 years old, Becker, Garlick-Ott, and Christian are the same age that Kress (now 78) and his colleagues were when they started Project Puffin 51 years ago. The half-century age gap punctuates the success of Kress effectively sharing his vision with young researchers and entrusting them to carry out the mission. (That is exceedingly elusive in other spheres. For example, a 2008 Harvard Business School paper estimated that 4 of every 5 founders or co-founders are eventually forced out as CEOs. The long list includes founders or co-founders of Apple, JetBlue, Tesla, Zipcar, Twitter, Uber, PayPal, OpenAI, and Yahoo!.)

As Kress’s co-author and photographer on two books about Project Puffin, this aspect, the passing on of the founder’s torch, has enthralled me as much as the birds. Garlick-Ott, a former island supervisor who studies tern aggression on Stratton for her doctorate at the University of California Davis, said, “You get a quick sense that the torch is constantly being passed. It’s empowering and humbling at the same time. I feel like I have a purpose and a place in this project. When I became a supervisor, I wanted so badly to do what my supervisor did. I really wanted to be like her.”

Keenan Yakola, 31, is in his 11^th summer with Project Puffin and the Seabird Institute. A former island supervisor and now a doctoral student at Oregon State University, he leads the GPS tagging of puffins, terns, and storm petrels to study where they feed. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming seas on Earth. He hopes the tracking will indicate how seabirds adapt to ocean heatwaves and help offshore wind developers site facilities to avoid conflict with birds.

Yakola said he learned early on that Project Puffin patiently welcomed innovation by college-age assistants. Perhaps that was because Kress himself almost did not get the chance to restore puffins. At first, a top Canadian official balked at the idea that Newfoundland puffin chicks would return to Maine as adults. Even after getting permission, it took eight years until Kress, then an Audubon camp bird instructor, reestablished puffin breeding on Eastern Egg Rock. His first artificial burrows for chicks were too hot or they flooded. The puffin chicks he raised in 1973 and 1974 disappeared into the Atlantic, never to be seen again.    

“My first summer on the project, I didn’t feel I had a particular contribution to make other than to be a good intern and collect data,” Yakola said. “I just thought it was cool being with birds. But when I asked about analyzing diet data for my undergraduate thesis [at the University of Massachusetts Amherst], Paula [Shannon, the institute’s seabird sanctuary manager)] simply said, ‘Yeah, sure. Just ask Steve.’”

Shannon, 48, a former island supervisor who first began working with the project in 2002 and co-authored a 2016 paper with Kress showing how puffin diet was changing with the warming Gulf of Maine, seconded Yakola. She talked about how crews kept repositioning common murre decoys on Matinicus Rock until the first egg in more than a century was laid on that island in 2009. A cousin of the puffin, common murres, were also hunted in the 1800s until there were no breeding pairs left in Maine. Last year, a dozen murre chicks fledged off Matinicus Rock.

Kress once asked Shannon and others a question about an extinct bird.

“What would you do if a Great Auk showed up with the puffins?” he said.

She laughed and replied to him, “We’d probably take a picture and send the bird on its way because no one would believe us.” The question was both in jest and a suggestion that trying new things can have unforeseen victories in science.

The Great Auk indeed will never come back, but Kress’s restoration of puffins and murre have helped conservationists all over the world bring back seabirds from the brink of extinction. One or more of the methods used by Project Puffin, such as the translocation of chicks, decoys, taped bird calls, and mirrors, have now been used in more than 850 projects in 36 countries to restore (or relocate from danger or competition with other animals), 138 seabird species. Some restored species were thought to be extinct, such as the Chinese crested tern.

Sue Schubel, 62, has been associated with the project for most of the last 40 years. In 1996, she advised the placing of murre decoys, mirrors, and recorded calls atop a northern California sea stack. A colony of 2,900 breeding murre had been wiped out by an oil spill a decade earlier. The day after decoys were installed, murres returned and began breeding again.

Affectionately known as Seabird Sue, current research assistants say they are inspired by her ceaseless energy. She is an assistant sanctuary manager, decoy project manager, a logistics expert for all the boats that get crews, provisions and gear on and off the islands, public educator, and artist. When she first joined the project, she herself fed off the sense that “everybody was willing to do everything for the birds.”

A culture of caring for the birds, for each other

Kress and Schubel came out to Eastern Egg Rock this summer to see what has become of his original project island. The crew of supervisor Theresa Rizza, 28, and assistants Arden Kelly, 25, Coco Deng, 19, Camryn Zoeller, 20, and Anson Tse, 27, said they know they are in a special world.

“This is an island and project of hope,” Zoller said. “The fact that this project is a success is a reason to not get distraught about all the destruction all around us.”

Rizza added, “The puffins are proof that as long as someone wants to try, good things can happen.”

Arden said, “You really see the can see the passion that is still in their eyes. You want to be your own Steve Kress.”

The sentiments were echoed 32 miles away in the Gulf of Maine out on Seal Island, another island where puffins were restored after a century’s absence. The crew there consisted of supervisor Coco Faber, 30, and assistants Amiel Hopkins, 19, Liv Ridley, 26, Reed Robinson, 19, and Nacho Gutierrez, 24.

Faber, in her ninth summer with the project, has seen some of the most volatile years of boom and bust for seabirds with the warming Gulf of Maine. “With climate change, the threats feel so amorphous and big, it’s hard to know where to go,” she said. “There are no more normal years. I now wonder every summer, what am I going to witness. When I [feel] down, I think of Steve and all his optimism, and how he threw spaghetti at the wall to bring these birds back.”

Ridley added, “They say one person can only do so much,” Ridley said, “But here, with [Kress’s] legacy you know you’re carrying on. You’re inspired to say I’m going to give my life to seabirds.”

Kress retired from the project in 2019, handing it over to Don Lyons, a tern researcher from Oregon State. Lyons said Kress left behind “community and continuity” that he could not find a comparison to.

“Steve is very focused on thanking people for their contributions,” Lyons, 59, said. “That includes a new researcher who lugged a boat up onto rocks or other seemingly menial tasks like data entry. It makes people feel valuable.”

So valuable that back on Stratton Island, Tiffany Christian, who lives the rest of the year in the Chicago area and is in her first summer on a Maine research island, said the magic of being surrounded by seabirds on an island was like being in “an ornate castle built in the sky.” She said the project’s legacy and the camaraderie “gives me a new awareness of what I want to do in the future.”

Kress himself said he did not intentionally set out to pass on a culture of such caring, but as it turns out, he looks at that culture as the “greatest hope” for seabirds. “Wherever I go, China, Ecuador, I see the same type of person,” he said. “There is this idea of healing the earth. I sure didn’t create that, but perhaps there’s something about this project that captured that.

“It helps that this project is such a conspicuous success that people are today surrounded by come-back birds, baby birds, all this life. I hope that future generations of seabird stewards  continue this amazing story. You can’t avoid the feel-good part of it. I don’t need to say anything. The birds constantly remind the researchers that they are part of a miracle.”

Read more about Puffin Island and the efforts to save seabirds in Maine here and here.

Yet, despite several requests from states over the years, most recently California during a 2022 “heat dome” and wildfires, no White House has ever approved a disaster declaration for heat or smoke.

Some states outright ignore the dangers in the name of greed. Over the last 13 months, Texas and Florida have enacted laws that block localities from issuing heat protection rules for workers. Nationally, the Biden administration proposed on July 2 new rules to protect workers from heat. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a host of construction and agricultural lobbying groups have opposed the prospect of rules for months and are sure to oppose them in the courts.

It is clear that the opposition is willing to risk sacrificing lower-wage construction and farm workers to the sun’s brutality as executives count the cash in air conditioned offices. Farm workers make an average $13.59 an hour. Hispanic construction laborers make $15.34 an hour, well below the $25-an-hour living wage for a family of four in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator. Farm workers respectively have 35 times and 12 times higher risk of heat-related injuries than in all other industries.  

Making the latest case for disaster declarations is a consortium of 31 environmental, public health, labor, and justice groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity. In a June 17 petition to FEMA, the groups warned that the record-breaking heat and fire disasters we are already experiencing are likely only the beginning. The world’s nations, particularly the top burners of fossil fuels such as the United States, have yet to unify to prevent uncontrolled global warming.

“These may be the coolest days and the cleanest air of the 21st century,” the petition said, “and it is already unbearably hot and unsafe for too many Americans.”

The petitioners hope that disaster declarations can unlock federal funds for short-term relief such as cooling centers, water supplies, emergency air conditioning and air filtration systems, and financial assistance for evacuations. Declarations could also lead to money for long-term, proactive mitigation, such as renewable energy storage and microgrids to withstand utility blackouts, and retrofitting of homes and buildings to be more energy efficient and weatherized.

That is vitally important for disadvantaged families who are more likely to live on shadeless, asphalt and concrete “heat islands.” Such communities are often already overburdened with pollution associated with fossil fuel burning and proximity to polluting industries. The petition called extreme heat a “harm multiplier” for these communities because of poor housing stock, difficulty in paying utility bills, and pre-existing poorer health.  

In making their case, the 31 environmental groups cite data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, projecting that financial cost of extreme heat in the United States will explode fivefold to half a trillion dollars a year by 2050.

There is something else that would make their case even stronger: Data on people. The federal government is woefully behind university researchers in calculating the current and future mortality of heat and smoke. 

It should be just as much an emergency for the government to tell us the toll of heat and wildfire smoke. Especially since the government itself says “most heat-related deaths are preventable.”

Death behind closed doors

Property damage from tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods is easy to visualize and leaves the costs of emergency assistance and repair without much question. Because of the nation’s overall wealth, which gives us relatively sturdier dwellings and stronger rebuilds, deaths from those weather disasters are a fraction of the fatalities suffered in lesser resourced parts of the world. For instance, while Hurricane Katrina took 1,400 lives in the US in 2005, Cyclone Nargis in the Bay of Bengal made landfall in Myanmar in 2008 and killed 140,000 people—100 times more people than Katrina.

People perishing by heat or smoke one by one in the privacy of their homes or in the sterility of hospitals is relatively invisible. An analysis of heat deaths by the Cincinnati Enquirer found that about half of heat deaths happen at home, often to people who lack air conditioning, are elderly with pre-existing medical conditions, or who are socially isolated.

The petition by environmental groups points to the current invisibility of heat deaths. It cites federal data saying there were 2,300 deaths last year where heat was listed as a factor on death certificates. That by itself was a record in nearly a half-century of such record keeping. But left as is, that toll would seem to pale next to last year’s nearly 43,000 car fatalities, nearly 43,000 gun-related deaths, or 107,000 drug overdose deaths.

The number of heat deaths is assuredly far more. Heat is often not listed on death certificates as a contributing factor to the final cause of death, such as kidney failure, organ failure, and heart attack. There is no uniform protocol tying together how the federal government, the 50 states, or the nation’s 3,000 counties calculate heat-related deaths.

University scientists and health and safety groups are filling in the gaps as best they can.

In 2020, a study in the journal Environmental Epidemiology determined that 5,600 deaths a year were attributable to heat from 1997 to 2006, eight times higher than federal figures. In 2022, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center calculated that the number of people who died from heat-related causes between 2008 and 2017 was two to three times higher than federal figures. The Penn and Philadelphia VA researchers also found that extreme heat days were associated with “significantly higher” cardiovascular mortality among adults.

This spring, Texas A&M climate scientists Andrew Dessler and Jangho Lee told the Associated Press that last year’s real national annual heat death toll may be 11,000, nearly five times higher than the 2,300 cited by the government.

In the work world, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics says 43 workers died in 2022 from heat. But reports by Public Citizen, the most recent being in May of this year, estimate that as many as 2,000 workers a year (46 times more) die from heat and another 170,000 are injuries triggered by heat, such as becoming dizzy and falling off a roof.

But the injury might simply be listed as a fall without mention of heat. Public Citizen says government figures are “decidedly unreliable” and “notoriously problematic” because they are based on self-reporting surveys of employers and “less than half of employers even maintain the required records.”

No matter what number you’re looking at, all of them are likely to soar much higher without concerted global action on climate change. Without a drastic and immediate cut in fossil fuel emissions, the planet is currently staring at a 5-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures this century, with the U.S. being the world’s biggest historical contributor to global warming gases.

According to a study published last year by Lee and Dessler in the journal GeoHealth, the US suffered an average of 36,444 deaths a year from extreme temperatures a quarter century ago, with most of those deaths being cold-related. With a rise of 5 degrees Fahrenheit, that number could explode to 200,000 a year this century, driven significantly by shifts of heat mortality to Northern cities. Among the cities with the highest projected temperature increases are Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Muskegon, Minnesota.

Smoking out data

Parallel to that, and arguably worse, there is virtually no federal data on the fatal impacts of wildfire smoke. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lists a mere 535 deaths directly from wildfires over the last 45 years in its list of “Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters.” But there are likely thousands more from the smoke, which is associated with cardiovascular, ischemic heart disease, digestive, endocrine, diabetes, mental, and chronic kidney disease mortality.

Such smoke is not covered by the Clean Air Act, and there is growing evidence that it is eroding decades of gains in the nation’s air quality under the act. A new study by researchers at UCLA found that the fine particulate matter (known as PM2.5) in wildfire smoke that easily passes into the lungs and spreads throughout the body, contributed to the premature deaths of more than 50,000 people in California from 2008 to 2018, with an economic impact of between $432 billion and $456 billion.

Another study this spring by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 16,000 people a year died from smoke PM2.5 across the US from 2011 to 2020. That study found that elevated long-term smoke concentrations “increase mortality rates at both low and high concentrations.” Wildfire smoke, as the nation found out last year with its orange-brown skies that dulled the sun into a moon-like disk, spreads for so many thousands of miles from its source that the study projects a “large mortality burden not only in regions where large fires occur but also in populous regions with low smoke concentrations (e.g., the eastern US).”

Juan Aguilera, a physician researcher at the University of Texas School of Public Health in El Paso, found that wildfire smoke stresses immune systems and triggers inflammation. He told National Public Radio that living in a wildfire-prone area is “something equivalent to smoking like one pack a day, or 10 packs a week.”

Today’s 16,000 deaths a year from wildfire smoke could grow to nearly 28,000 by mid-century under a high warming scenario and take a cumulative 700,000 lives by 2055, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“Our research suggests that the health cost of climate-driven wildfire smoke could be among the most important and costly consequences of a warming climate in the US,” NBER scientists said.  

That concern is bolstered by a new study by Australian researchers who found that the number of extreme wildfires has doubled since 2003, with the last seven years including six of the most extreme. Lead author Calum Cunningham told the New York Times last month, “That we’ve detected such a big increase over such a short period of time makes the findings even more shocking. We’re seeing the manifestations of a warming and drying climate before our very eyes in these extreme fires.”

Adaptation could cut into the mortality risk, but it alone is likely not enough, given how Lee and Dessler noted in their study: “Many adaptive responses (e.g., installing air conditioning, improved health care, better urban planning) are too expensive for poorer individuals or communities, so adaptation will necessarily require society to pay for much of the adaptation. This would represent a huge transfer of wealth from richer to poorer members of our society, a dicey proposition in today’s political environment.”

Even better, of course, would be a serious drive toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency says no new gas, oil or coal investment is necessary as renewables, energy efficiency and electrification already can deliver the vast majority of emissions reductions.

New mentality needed at FEMA

Though all heat-related disaster declaration requests to FEMA thus far have been denied, agency spokesperson Daniel Llargues told National Public Radio that “there’s nothing specific” in federal law that precludes such a declaration. “If a circumstance did occur where an extreme heat incident exceeded state and local capacity, an emergency or major disaster declaration request submission could be considered,” Llargues said in an email.

And the White House can make a disaster declaration regardless of FEMA’s recommendation. In May, President Biden overruled a FEMA denial of a major disaster declaration so parts of Massachusetts could get federal aid to recover from severe storms and flooding last September.

The process of FEMA better understanding a “circumstance” where extreme heat and wildfire smoke constitutes a disaster starts with a better understanding of the danger. Some parts of the government are trying to mine the data, such as the National Institute of Health’s Heat Information System.

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke also offers FEMA a fresh chance to create new paradigms of aid, to avoid inequities seen in other disasters. Current FEMA storm funding often maintains systemic racism, putting communities with more white residents and higher property values back on their feet, while low-income people and communities of color, historically hemmed into lower property values by redlining, are left on their knees.  

As Politico wrote in 2022, FEMA grants to help richer families raise homes above flood levels “have helped turn dozens of wealthy or overwhelmingly white areas into enclaves of climate resilience. The communities are seeing rising property values and economic stability, while much of the nation faces devastating effects of rising seas and intensifying floods.”

One can only imagine the results if the same mentality is ultimately applied to communities marooned on “heat islands.” Seniors and Black adults are at disproportionate risk of cardiovascular deaths from extreme heat according to a Penn study last year. A 2022 Penn study warned, “As extreme heat events increase, the burden of cardiovascular mortality may continue to increase and the disparities between demographic subgroups may widen.”

The same can be said for those lower-wage farmworkers, construction workers and other industries where heat is a major risk. Often, the workers in those industries are disproportionately of color and immigrants. Other trades where heat is a high risk include landscaping, and indoor jobs in warehouses, restaurant kitchens, mills, and doing maintenance.

And let’s not forget public school teachers and staff, as huge percentages of the nation’s public school buildings are not equipped for the rising heat.

Better data needed

There are scientists, including UCS’s Juan Declet-Barreto, who have long called for standard methodology to more accurately determine whether excess deaths originated with heat or smoke exposure. Last year, Ashley Ward, the director of Duke University’s Heat Policy Innovation Lab, wrote in STAT that we need much better and uniformed coding for external causes of injuries and incentives for health systems to apply the codes for cases involving extreme heat. Without uniform coding, the public is left to weigh the emerging body of studies that have different estimations and may “add to the incorrect assumption that there is a lack of scientific consensus.”

Seconding the call for data collection is the Federation of American Scientists. Among its major list of recommendations is a “whole-of-government strategy to address extreme heat.”  The federation said that true mortality counts are “essential to enhancing the benefit-cost analysis for heat mitigation and resilience.”

But having heat- and smoke-related mortality data is more than that. Knowing the true toll might help jolt the nation into action on climate change sooner and lessen the mitigation and resilience we will need. One only need think back to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and how critical data was to devise public health policy. Currently, the federal data on extreme heat and wildfire smoke itself constitutes a major disaster. 

• Eliminates requirements for businesses to consider climate friendly products and practices in lodging and vehicle fuel efficiency;
• Prohibits offshore wind energy;
• Prohibits localities and homeowners associations from restricting or banning fuel sources and appliances, most notably gas;
• Eliminates requirements for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to establish goals and strategies to increase renewable energy and include renewable energy development and reduction of fossil fuels in long-range forecasts of energy supply and demand;
•  Repeals grant programs and incentives for individuals, businesses, school districts and local governments to diversify energy supplies to mitigate the effects of climate change;

Waving his magical-thinking wand to make climate change disappear from virtually every aspect of policymaking, DeSantis bloviated that he is “rejecting the agenda of radical green zealots.” Not even two weeks later, Florida was hit with a Memorial Day weekend of yet more heat records in Miami and Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Tampa hit a daily record of 97 degrees on May 29.

That caused a television meteorologist at NBC’s Miami affiliate to all but say that Florida is under a state of climate emergency, inflamed by political insanity. Meteorologist Steve MacLaughlin said on social media that “Florida is on fire, underwater and unaffordable.” He told viewers in a video that the state was rolling back important climate change legislation and language despite “record heat, record flooding, record rain, record insurance rates and the corals are dying all around the state.”

MacLaughlin did not stop there. He made a public plea for viewers to register their concern for climate change at the ballot box. “Please keep in mind the most powerful climate change solution is the one you already have in the palm of your hands — the right to vote,” MacLaughlin said. “And we will never tell you who to vote for, but we will tell you this: We implore you to please do your research and know that there are candidates that believe in climate change and that there are solutions, and that there are candidates that don’t.”

MacLaughlin’s stance was especially notable given the harassment many television weather forecasters have experienced for following the science to tie climate change to increasingly severe weather. The harassment was symbolized by last year’s resignation by Chris Gloninger, an award-winning television meteorologist in Des Moines, Iowa after he received threatening emails.  

“Danger Season” realities

Florida is hardly the only state in a state of denial as the United States enters what the Union of Concerned Scientists describes as “Danger Season”–the period from late spring through early fall where the nation is at particular risk of a host of devastating rains that can trigger floods, hurricanes and storms that can deliver baseball-sized hail, and extreme heat and drought that can kill people and ignite wildfires.

As heat saturated the Sunshine State, a siege of severe storms killed at least dozen people on Memorial Day weekend across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama. Hundreds of thousands of people in Texas lost power, many streets in Houston were under water and several people were killed by blown-down trees and limbs that fell on houses, tents, trailers and vehicles. A few days later, Denver recorded the largest hailstones in 35 years.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has dutifully issued disaster declarations for many counties that have been battered by severe weather since late April. On May 15, as DeSantis deleted climate change from state policy while Florida broke heat records, Abbott wrote President Biden for a White House disaster declaration. Abbott said the incidents were “of such severity and magnitude that an effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments, and that supplementary federal assistance is necessary to save lives and to protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster.”

Deadly state policies

When it comes to acting on climate change to avert the threat of disasters, though, Abbott is much like DeSantis. He has vetoed legislation for energy efficiency in new construction, signed laws banning localities from banning gas in new construction and issued an executive order that directs “every state agency” to fight federal actions to reduce dependence on oil and gas.

Most cruelly, Abbott signed a bill last year that bars cities and counties from mandating heat protection rules stronger than the state’s, that might allow for things such as more frequent water breaks. This year, DeSantis signed a similar bill. This is despite the fact that Texas has set heat death records three years in a row, and  leads the nation in heat-related construction worker deaths. Both Texas and Florida were in the top five states for heat deaths last year. A 2021 analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that by 2065, the outdoor exposure to hazardous heat could quadruple.

Last week, the Associated Press published an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that last year was the deadliest for heat across the nation in 45 years of record keeping, with heat listed as a factor on more than 2,300 death certificates. It was a sorry exclamation point on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s assessment that 2023 was the Earth’s warmest year on record.

And even that number of US deaths may be a vast understatement given that heat illnesses are often not mentioned on death certificates. Texas A&M climate scientists Andrew Dessler and Jangho Lee told the AP that last year’s real national annual heat death toll may be more like 11,000–and that it could get much worse. “We’re going to look back at 2023 and say, man, that was cool,” Dessler said. “The problem with climate change is, if it hasn’t pushed you over the edge yet, just wait.”

The question is: when will the toll of heat and severe weather push DeSantis, Abbott and like-minded politicians toward policies to cool the planet? Last year, the nation suffered a record 28 billion-dollar weather disasters, hugely impacting Midwestern and Southern states thus far resistant to climate-friendly policies.

Quietly reaping benefits

There are occasional nods to reality as DeSantis last month signed into law a measure requiring homeowners to disclose a property’s flood history. But for the most part, conservative states are engaged in a selfish game of quietly reaping the benefits of renewable energy while doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, to retard progress on the national level.

For instance, the top four states for wind generation growth over the last decade, according to a report in April by Climate Central, are Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas. The top states for solar power growth since 2014 are Texas and Florida. Two of the top three states for adding clean energy jobs in 2022 were Texas and West Virginia, according to the US Department of Energy.

Nonetheless, all of those states are among the more than two dozen suing the Environmental Protection Agency over the Biden administration’s rules that cut carbon pollution at the national level from existing coal-fired power plants and new natural gas plants. They all are also among the two dozen states that currently have laws on the books prohibiting localities from banning gas in new buildings, despite the wealth of science showing that the methane associated with gas production is a potent contributor to global warming. Not surprisingly, many of these same states also rank in the bottom half of the State Energy Efficiency Scorecard published by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

Yet, when climate-related disaster strikes, these same states beg for federal disaster aid. Only then do they become, to borrow from DeSantis, “radical green zealots.” Except that the only green they are seeking is federal cash.

While the government should indeed deliver aid to families and businesses that suffer destruction, it would be a lot better if Abbott and others returned the favor by not trying to destroy federal efforts to stem the forces behind the damage. Abbot has boasted that “Texas is not going to stand idly by and watch the Biden administration kill jobs.” It will be more momentous when he and his ilk are finally humbled enough by storms and heat to say they will no longer stand idly by to watch climate change kill people.

The new era would be even more inevitable if the United States fully committed to phasing out fossil fuels. More on that shortly. But first, the undeniably good news.

The new global record in the generation of renewable energy was powered primarily by solar and wind. Solar power has been the fastest growing source of electricity in the world for 19 years in a row according to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2024. Providing just 1.1 percent of the globe’s electricity in 2015, solar now produces 5.5 percent of the supply.

In that regard, the United States is a major player. Our share of solar electricity has grown from 1 percent to 6 percent since 2015. In terms of raw numbers, the United States is the world’s second-leading generator of electricity from solar energy, with China the global leader by far.

Wind power offers a similar story, having more than doubled its share of the world’s electricity from 3.5 percent in 2015 to nearly 8 percent in 2023. And again, the United States looks great, doubling wind’s share of US  electricity generation from 5 percent in 2015 to 10 percent in 2023, coming in, again, second behind China.

The combined 16 percent of wind- and solar-powered electricity flowing throughout the nation is especially impressive given the fact that only 0.2 percent of US electricity came from these sources just a quarter century ago. The shift helped the United States to drop its share of fossil fuels in the energy mix from 67 percent in 2015 to 59 percent last year. The shift, combined with the huge shift from ultra-dirty coal to more-moderately dirty gas helped cut our power sector carbon dioxide emissions by 41 percent  from a peak in 2007.

US still needs to do more

But that pace of change remains far from sufficient for the United States to do its part for climate change and to help the planet’s temperatures stay under the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-degrees Fahrenheit) limits of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The main reasons: our unsustainable levels of energy consumption as a wealthy nation and our too-slow phaseout of fossil fuels.

According to the Ember report, per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are three times higher than the global average and remain among the highest of all major economies.

Many US politicians who are apologists for the fossil fuel industry often deflect blame for heat-trapping gases onto newer mass emitters such as China or India. Indeed, China is a conundrum, adding more than half of the world’s solar and wind installations last year yet still producing more than half the world’s electricity from coal and spewing nearly a third of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Countries like China and India clearly need to do more. But the fact remains that, even with reductions of recent years, the United States, which produced one quarter of the world’s global warming gases two decades ago, still produces between 13 percent and 14 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, more than triple our share of the world’s population. As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its Climate.gov website: “The United States bears a greater share of the responsibility for current conditions—on both a national and per-person level.”

A recent analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) shows that the best ways for the United States to meet its climate goals under the Paris Agreement and achieve a near phaseout of fossil fuels are to ramp up renewables in the power sector, increase energy efficiency, and  electrify buildings, transportation, and industry.

Doing so would generate tremendous benefits, including a more than $100 billion reduction in consumer energy costs in 2030, $800 billion in public health benefits by 2050, and nearly $1.3 trillion in avoided climate damages by 2050. While the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) roughly doubles the current pace of annual emissions reductions to about 3 percent per year through 2030, the country will need to further accelerate its reductions to roughly 5 percent per year to achieve its climate targets.

Slash gas

Fully decarbonizing the power sector—which is a key strategy for meeting our climate goals—will require dramatically slashing gas use as we continue to phase out coal. A UCS analysis showed that wind, solar and other renewables would nearly triple to 60 percent of US electricity generation in 2030 and 92 percent in 2050, while gas use would fall from more than 40 percent of the US electricity mix today to 25 percent in 2030 and a mere 2 percent in 2050.

Gas once played an important role in suppressing coal-fired electricity, with less carbon emissions. But the benefit has expired. The emissions of methane, which traps heat much more effectively than carbon dioxide, is now widely viewed alongside carbon dioxide as a critical threat that could lead the United States to miss its commitment to the Paris Agreement.

One key reason our power sector emissions are triple the global rate, according to the International Energy Agency, is that we still source 42 percent of our electricity from gas. Politicians can sneer at China all they want for coal and carbon emissions, but the United States spews so much methane via gas and oil operations that it is far and away the world leader for that fossil fuel. The United States pumped a world-record amount of crude oil last year, with ExxonMobil and Chevron seeing some of their biggest profits in a decade. Our gas generation last year hit a new record too, preventing a global drop in generation.

Globally, the IEA’s net zero scenario says the world’s gas generation must fall from its current 23 percent of the world’s electricity to just 2.4 percent over the next 16 years, with “no need for new long lead time upstream oil and gas conventional projects.” To help meet that goal, both UCS and IEA analyses call for roughly tripling the electricity generated by wind, solar, and other renewables by 2030. 

Other wealthy nations are proving that the technology is already here to reduce our carbon intensity and speed the energy transition. While 59 percent of electricity in the United States is produced by fossil fuels, the share in several other wealthy major economies such as the United Kingdom and Germany, now stands under 50 percent. Britain’s per-capita carbon emissions are a quarter of those in the United States.

Tug of war

The major question in this country is the will to act. We are currently in a tug-of-war between progress and the pugnacity of the fossil fuel industry. Our potential to speed toward net zero is obvious. There are the commercial-scale offshore wind farms being developed off the East Coast. Solar offers many avenues for adoption, from individual rooftops to large-scale fields. Electrification, from home heat pumps to vehicles, is no longer an oddity.

Significant tax credits and incentives are available in the Inflation Reduction Act that will significantly ramp-up investments in all these areas. The Biden administration has also launched several initiatives to boost renewable energy infrastructure and announced several major rules to cut methane emissions and carbon pollution from coal plants and motor vehicles and trucks. If they all became permanent, the United States would take a rightful place in global leadership.

But some of those rules are already being challenged in the courts by the fossil fuel and auto industries, and conservative states friendly to oil and gas interests; more are likely to be challenged. The ultimate future of those rules may rest in the hands of a conservative US Supreme Court and former President Trump, who pledges to kill those rules if elected.

He renewed that pledge last month at a private gathering of oil and gas executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In attendance, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times, were executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron and the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s top lobbying arm.  

Meanwhile the oil industry continues to smother this nation like no other wealthy nation with disinformation, denial, and delay on the transition. Last month, Democrats in the House and Senate published a joint staff report loaded with so much evidence of disinformation that Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin last week urged the US Department of Justice to investigate the fossil fuel industry for its coordinated campaign.

Last fall, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods deployed the industry’s playbook of doubt and diversion in a speech to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit. Despite the IEA’s assessment that no more major oil and gas projects are needed, Woods claimed, “While renewable energy is essential to help the world achieve net zero, it is not sufficient—wind and solar alone can’t solve emissions in the industrial sectors that are at the heart of a modern society.”

This month, the American Petroleum Institute launched an ad campaign urging the nation to “harness America’s abundant oil and natural gas.” The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a top trade organization representing many top oil and chemical companies, launched a Don’t Ban Our Cars ad campaign against the Biden administration’s new tailpipe rules. The rules are not a ban; rather, they tighten standards that the administration hopes will result in incentivizing 56 percent of new cars to be electric by 2032.

When you consider all the disinformation, it’s remarkable that the United States has any kind of leadership in the renewable revolution. What we can hope for is that reports such as the one from Ember are a sign that, for all the huffing and puffing of Big Oil and Gas, the market—that is to say, the people—are speaking more loudly.

Most people in the United States—perhaps because of disinformation—are not yet be ready to completely do away with oil and gas. Still, according to a Pew survey last year, two of every three people in the United States want policies that prioritize renewables over more fossil fuel generation. In a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll last year, three out of four respondents say they would be comfortable with solar panels in their community and nearly 7 in 10 respondents said they would be comfortable with wind turbines.

As Darren Woods pontificates about the “unmatched” societal benefits of oil and gas, the deficits are piling up all around us. Climate change and its associated storms, heat waves, droughts and spread of infectious diseases now stand at the tipping point of making life miserable and unsustainable across the planet. Woods skips over the wealth of studies in recent years that say millions of people die every year around the world from pollution associated with fossil fuels.  

More and more, people no longer want to join Woods and the fossil fuel industry in skipping over the carnage. No matter the disinformation, the nation has begun to say the benefits are far greater from weaning ourselves off oil and gas. A majority wants the United States to enter the new era of renewable energy and play its part in assuring that inevitable decline of fossil fuels.

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would regulate two forms of PFAS contamination under Superfund laws reserved for “the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites.” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the action will ensure that “polluters pay for the costs to clean up pollution threatening the health of communities.”

That was an encore to the Food and Drug Administration announcing in February that companies will phase out food packaging with PFAS wrappings and the mid-April announcement by Regan that the EPA was establishing the first-ever federal limits on PFAS in drinking water. At that time, he declared, “We are one huge step closer to finally shutting off the tap on forever chemicals once and for all.”

One can forever hope the tap will be eventually shut, since it took seemingly forever for the nation to begin to crack down on this class of per-and polyfluoroalkyl synthetic chemicals. The chemical bonds of PFAS, among the strongest ever created, resulted in an incredible ability to resist heat, moisture, grease and stains. PFAS chemicals seemed like miracle substances in the 20^th-century quest for convenience. They became ubiquitous in household furnishings, cookware, cosmetics, and fast-food packaging, and a key component of many firefighting foams.

The bonds are so indestructible they would impress Superman. They don’t break down in the environment for thousands of years, hence the “forever” nickname. Unfortunately for humans, the same properties represent Kryptonite.  

Today, the group of chemicals known as PFAS is the source of one of the greatest contaminations of drinking water in the nation’s history. Flowing from industrial sites, landfills, military bases, airports, and wastewater treatment discharges, PFAS chemicals, according to the United States Geological Survey, are detectable in nearly half our tap water. Other studies suggest that a majority of the US population drinks water containing PFAS chemicals—as many as 200 million people, according to a 2020 peer-reviewed study conducted by the Environmental Working Group.

PFAS chemicals are everywhere

No one escapes PFAS chemicals. They make it into the kitchen or onto the dining room table in the form of non-stick cookware, microwave popcorn bags, fast-food burger wrappers, candy wrappers, beverage cups, take-out containers, pastry bags, French-fry and pizza boxes. They reside throughout homes in carpeting, upholstery, paints, and solvents.

They are draped on our bodies in “moisture-wicking” gym tights, hiking gear, yoga pants, sports bras, and rain and winter jackets. They are on our feet in waterproof shoes and boots. Children have PFAS in baby bedding and school uniforms. Athletes of all ages play on PFAS on artificial turf. PFAS chemicals are on our skin and gums through eye, lip, face cosmetics, and dental floss. Firefighters have it in their protective clothing.

As a result, nearly everyone in the United States has detectable levels of PFAS in their bodies. There is no known safe level of human exposure to these chemicals. They are linked to multiple cancers, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children, high cholesterol, and damage to the cardiovascular and immune systems. A 2022 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and Sichuan University in China estimated that exposure to one form of PFAS (PFOS, for perfluorooctane sulfonic acid), may have played a role in the deaths of more than 6 million people in the United States between 1999 and 2018.

As sweeping as PFAS contamination is, exposures in the United States are also marked by clear patterns of environmental injustice and a betrayal to military families. An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that people of color and low-income people were more likely to live near non-military sources of PFAS contamination than wealthier, white people.

Another study by UCS found that 118 of 131 military bases had PFAS contamination concentrations at least 10 times higher than federal risk levels. A federal study last year found a higher risk of testicular cancer for Air Force servicemen engaged in firefighting with PFAS foams.

Tobacco-like disinformation

In the end, the whole nation was betrayed, in a manner straight out of the tobacco disinformation playbook. Behind the image of convenience, manufacturers long knew that PFAS chemicals were toxic. Internal documents uncovered over the years show how DuPont and 3M, the two biggest legacy makers of PFAS, knew back in the 1960s that the compounds built up in blood and enlarged the livers of laboratory animals. By 1970, a DuPont document referring to a PFAS chemical under its famed “Teflon” trademark said that it “is highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when injected.”

By the late 1970s, DuPont was discovering that PFAS chemicals were affecting the liver of workers and that plant employees were having myocardial infarctions at levels “somewhat higher than expected.” But that did not stop the industry from downplaying the risk to workers.

One internal 3M document in 1980 claimed that PFAS chemicals have “a lower toxicity like table salt.” Yet, a study last year of documents by researchers at the University of California San Francisco and the University of Colorado found that DuPont, internally tracking the outcome of worker pregnancies in 1980 and 1981, recorded two cases of birth defects in infants. Yet, in 1981, in what the researchers determined was a “joint” communication to employees of DuPont and 3M, the companies claimed: “We know of no evidence of birth defects” at DuPont and were “not knowledgeable about the pregnancy outcome” of employees at 3M who were exposed to PFAS.  

The same suppression and disinformation kept government regulators at bay for decades. The San Francisco and Colorado researchers found internal DuPont documents from 1961 to 1994 showing toxicity in animal and occupational studies that were never reported to the EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act. As one example, DuPont, according to a 2022 feature by Politico’s Energy and Environment News, successfully negotiated in the 1960s with the Food and Drug Administration to keep lower levels of PFAS-laden food wrapping and containers on the market despite evidence of enlarged livers in laboratory rats.

A patchwork response

Eventually, the deception and lies exploded in the face of the companies, as independent scientists found more and more dire connections to PFAS in drinking water and human health and lawsuits piled up in the courts. Last year, 3M agreed to a settlement of between $10.5 billion and $12.5 billion for PFAS contamination in water systems around the nation. DuPont and other companies agreed to another $1.2 billion in settlements. That’s not nothing, but it is a relatively small price to pay for two industrial behemoths that have been among the Fortune 500 every year since 1955.

In the last two decades, the continuing science on PFAS chemicals and growing public concern has led to a patchwork of individual apparel and food companies to say they will stop using PFAS in clothes and wrapping. Some states have enacted their own drinking water limits and are moving forward with legislation to restrict or ban products containing PFAS. In 2006, the EPA began a voluntary program in which the leading PFAS manufacturers in the United States agreed to stop manufacturing PFOA, one of the most concerning forms of PFAS.

But companies had a leisurely decade to meet commitments. Even as companies negotiated, a DuPont document assumed coziness with the EPA. “We need the EPA to quickly (like first thing tomorrow) say the following: Consumer products sold under the Teflon brand are safe. . .there are no human health effects to be caused by PFOA [a chemical in the PFAS family].”

Two years ago, 3M announced it will end the manufacture of PFAS chemicals and discontinue their application across its portfolio by the end of next year. But the company did so with an insulting straight face, saying on its products are “safe and effective for their intended uses in everyday life.”

EPA action finally, but more is needed

The nation can no longer accept the overall patchwork or industry weaning itself off PFAS at its own pace. The EPA currently plans to issue drinking water limits for six forms of PFAS and place two forms under Superfund jurisdiction. The Superfund designation gives the government its strongest powers to enforce cleanups that would be paid for by polluters instead of taxpayers.”

But there are 15,000 PFAS compounds, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. There is nothing to stop companies from trying to play around with other compounds that could also prove harmful. Cleaning up the PFAS chemicals that have already been allowed will take billions of dollars and water utilities around the country are already screaming, with some justification, that the federal government needs to provide more money than it is offering. And even the Superfund designation does not actually ban their use.

It would be better if the United States were to follow the lead of the European Union which is now considering a ban or major restrictions on the whole class of chemicals, fearing that “without taking action, their concentrations will continue to increase, and their toxic and polluting effects will be difficult to reverse.”

The effects are scary to quantify. Regan said in his drinking water announcement that the new rules would improve water quality for 100 million people and “prevent thousands of deaths and reduce tens of thousands of serious illnesses across the country.” A draft EPA economic analysis last year predicted that tight standards could save more than 7,300 lives alone from bladder cancer, kidney cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and avoid another 27,000 non-fatal cases of those diseases.

That makes it high time that the federal government borrow from DuPont’s arrogant assumption that it could push around the EPA. We need the EPA to quickly (like first thing tomorrow) say the following: Consumer products with PFAS are not safe and are causing unacceptable environmental consequences. We are shutting off the tap on ALL of them.”

Like almost all things chemical in the United States, the recent announcement by the Biden administration that it is banning a major form of asbestos is both a triumph and a disgrace. 

The triumph is that after decades of Sisyphean advocacy by public health groups and scientists, chrysotile asbestos, a known carcinogen, is finally facing an assorted set of deadlines for import and use in this nation. In a bit of rhetorical ecstasy, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan proclaimed that the federal government “is finally slamming the door on a chemical so dangerous that it has been banned in over 50 countries.”

While this administration does deserve credit for acting on asbestos after years of neglect, it is more accurate to describe the White House as politely showing the door to companies who use what is nicknamed “white asbestos.” Two years ago, when the EPA first started proposing rules to get the last uses of asbestos out of current applications, the agency floated a two-year deadline. After heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, which still uses asbestos diaphragms to produce a third of the nation’s chlorine, it now may be up to 12 years before the last chlorine company converts to non-asbestos technology.

The Biden administration is also generally giving a two to five-year phase out period to companies that use asbestos sheet gaskets to seal pipes. The quickest prohibition is six months against asbestos in automotive brakes and linings, other vehicle friction parts and oilfield gear.  Brenda Mallory, the White House’s chair of its Council on Environmental Quality said, “This action marks a major step to improve chemical safety.”

It should be clear that it is only a step, and therein lies the disgrace. Even with this move, the United States remains many steps behind other developed nations when it comes to asbestos and chemical safety across the board—thanks to decades of industrial and political suppression of science, the enduring might of industrial lobbyists, and our ever-divided government.

Deny, delay, disinform

Asbestos makers have known since the 1930s that their products were dangerous and yet they purposely buried that knowledge for decades. They banked on being able to avoid consequences for cancers that took decades to develop in workers who inhaled asbestos fibers. Johns-Manville, the 20^th century’s largest asbestos manufacturer, was infamous for a longstanding policy of not telling employees whether asbestosis showed up in their physical examinations.

The entire industry and insurers led by Metropolitan Life copied the same playbook. According to a paper in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, the final draft of a 1957 industry study deleted the internal finding that asbestos miners with asbestosis were more likely to develop lung cancer than a person without asbestosis. That, in turn successfully , dampened the concern of the American Medical Association.

The leading AMA industrial health editor wrote the authors of the industrial study to say he was “particularly pleased” at the findings of no association of lung cancer to asbestosis. The association’s top consultant for occupational disease went so far as to claim in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association that there was “no epidemiological evidence” of increased lung cancer among workers exposed to asbestos.

The legacy of death and disease from disinformation and “disappeared” information haunts us to this day. By the beginning of 2001, according to a 2004 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 600,000 people had filed lawsuits over asbestos-related illnesses that had already cost companies $54 billion in legal costs, with an eventual projected total cost of between $200 billion and $265 billion. The NBER said asbestos cases “involve more plaintiffs, more defendants, and higher costs than any other type of personal injury litigation in U.S. history.”

Just two years ago, a Montana jury awarded $36.5 million to a man who worked in the late 1960s at a vermiculite mine and mill in the town of Libby where the mineral was contaminated with asbestos. The operations were owned by W.R. Grace, but the villain, according to the verdict, was the mill’s workers compensation insurer, Maryland Casualty.

The doctors for the insurer did not tell workers that their annual X-rays showed scarring of the lungs. A New York Times feature quoted a 1967 memo from a lawyer of the insurer who feared “the extent and severity of the problem.” The mine was closed in 1990, but its asbestos dust has so far been tied to 400 deaths and 2,400 cases of disease. In 2009, for the first time ever, the EPA declared a public health emergency, calling the asbestos contamination in Libby “the worst case of industrial poisoning of a whole community in American history.”

Still a modern killer

Even today, asbestos exposure is still tied to 40,000 deaths a year in the United States and 255,000 worldwide. It was not until the 1970s that the United States began banning the crumbly forms of asbestos insulation on boilers and hot water tanks, fireproofing sprays, and wall patching. By then, no one knew how much asbestos the average American was living with. ”No one has any kind of numbers,” Sandra Eberle, chemical hazards program manager of the Consumer Product Safety Commission told the New York Times in 1984. ”We don’t have statistics on how many homes asbestos is in, and we don’t know whether or not it poses a hazard in those homes.”

Numbers continue to be hard to come by. As many other nations began enacting bans over the course of the rest of the 20^th century, US efforts stalled. In 1989, under President George H.W. Bush, the EPA attempted to ban most products containing asbestos by 1997. The chemical lobby responded by suing the EPA.

A federal court overturned much of the ban in 1991on technical grounds. It faulted the EPA for not adequately evaluating potentially less burdensome alternatives to asbestos and not comparing the toxicity of potential alternatives. Although the ruling was primarily concerned with the EPA’s process, Robert Pigg, a top asbestos trade-group executive, seized on it to claim: “We have known for many years that asbestos can be safely and securely bound in today’s products.”

The result was three decades of mostly federal silence, with untold exposures to workers at plants still using asbestos. In the 2000s, companies such as Georgia Pacific tried to fend off lawsuits over its use of asbestos in its Ready-Mix joint compound in the 1960s and 70s with highly flawed counterfeit research.

In 2022, as the Biden administration launched its effort to ban chrysotile asbestos, ProPublica/National Public Radio interviewed more than a dozen laborers who worked at a chlorine plant that operated until 2021 in Niagara Falls, New York. The story said “asbestos dust hung in the air, collected on the beams and light fixtures, and built up until it was inches thick. Workers tramped in and out of it all day, often without protective suits or masks, and carried it around on their coveralls and boots.”

One worker said, “We were constantly swimming in this stuff.”

Chemical industry wins compromise

Yet, none other than the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s highest-spending lobbying group, opposed the ban. It claimed, like Pigg in 1991, that the mineral “has been utilized safely in the United States for decades.” The American Chemistry Council unleashed a host of scare tactics. It claimed that an asbestos ban was itself a health hazard that could “cause substantial harm” to the nation’s drinking supply and retard “the production of products necessary to achieve our climate and sustainability goals including batteries, windmills, and solar panels.” 

The council began pining for a 15-year phase-out period for asbestos. Two years later, the final rule clearly reflects a compromise, with the Biden administration saying it recognizes that converting chlorine facilities to non-asbestos technology “requires extensive construction, additional permits, specialized expertise and parts for which there are limited suppliers.”

Even if that compromise holds up against lawsuits, the “final” rule is likely far from a final say on asbestos. While the EPA says that chrysotile asbestos is the “only known form” of the mineral still being used and imported to the United States, there are several other forms that the current regulation is silent on, leaving the door open for their use.

There is also the unresolved issue of “legacy” asbestos installed in walls, ceilings and flooring and basements over most of the 20^th century. In older school buildings, a 2018 EPA Inspector General report said, “substantial amounts” of asbestos were sprayed for insulation and as fire retardants in school buildings, particularly from 1946 through 1972. A 2017 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that deaths from mesothelioma remained “substantial” and were increasing, likely due to workers maintaining or remediating older buildings with asbestos.

The EPA said it will release an evaluation of other types of asbestos and legacy uses by December. But the piecemeal approach is why advocates such as Linda Reinstein, co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, have long pushed for more sweeping federal legislation banning all asbestos fibers in products and requiring chlorine companies to convert to non-asbestos technology in two years, as the EPA had originally planned. Such legislation would make asbestos regulation less vulnerable to the highly variable whims of whoever is in the White House. The legislation is named for Reinstein’s late husband Alan, who died from mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer tied to asbestos exposure.

While Reinstein said in an interview that she was “delighted” that the EPA has issued its current rule, she remained highly concerned that there remain loopholes the asbestos-using industry can exploit, especially since she feels that little has changed in its mentality of putting “profits over people.” She emphasized, “This does not ban what you can find on a store shelf.”

A painfully long journey

The protracted journey to any kind of asbestos ban is a sobering reminder of how long the United States takes to regulate chemicals on any shelf, such as menthol in tobacco products, PFAS “forever chemicals” in our water, pesticides in agricultural fields, and even cosmetics in the bathroom cabinet. National Public Radio’s “Living on Earth” recently featured a study from China finding that women undergoing in vitro fertilization who used skin care products were more likely to miscarry than women who did not use skin care products.

Cosmetics have increasingly been tied to endocrine disruption and cancers. The “Living on Earth” feature served as a reminder that here at home, the United States has banned only 11 chemicals in cosmetics, while the European Union has banned more than 1,300. Leonardo Trasande, director of New York University’s center of environmental hazards, told the program, “The more you unravel the onion, the more you realize–whoa, this is a bigger and more complicated story than you might be able to deal with fully in a lifetime.”

The journey has already spanned several generations to get to where we are on asbestos. We should not have to wait so long to deal with the rest of the chemical world. None other than Reinstein said it best: “What we do matters. What we don’t do matters even more.”

The US Supreme Court seems to have appointed itself as a rogue Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to protect polluters rather than the public.  

The latest evidence comes in the arguments the court heard last month in the challenge by Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia to the Biden administration’s “good neighbor” plan. The plan cuts power plant and industrial ozone pollution that wafts from central parts of the nation into eastern states.

According to the American Lung Association, nearly 120 million people in the nation—one of every three—lives with unhealthy levels of particle and ozone pollution. The White House says its plan would decrease asthma symptoms for millions of people and prevent up to 1,300 premature deaths per year. The plan would also provide “a broad range of unquantified benefits, including improving visibility in national and state parks and increasing protection for sensitive ecosystems, coastal waters and estuaries, and forests.”

Science leaves little doubt that the plan protects people. Globally, fine particulate pollution and ozone are tied to more than 8 million deaths each year according to a 2023 study in the British Medical Journal. That includes 5 million deaths linked to breathing in the emissions of fossil fuels. In the United States, a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that more than 50,000 lives per year would be saved by eliminating those emissions.

But in the rogue EPA that is the Supreme Court, packed to an ultra-conservative majority by presidents with little or no concern for the environment, science and the fatal toll of pollution seem to take a back seat to concerns about the unfettered freedom of polluters to profit regardless of their harmful business practices. In a prime example during the “good neighbor” arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts told lawyers for the EPA he was worried the agency will not assess the impact of the ozone rule “until after the hundreds of millions of dollars of costs are incurred.”

The majority also seems utterly disinterested in the fact that a solid majority of people in this country want action on climate change and pollution. A CNN poll in December found that 73 percent of respondents in the United States say the federal government has some level of responsibility to curb climate change. In a Pew poll last summer, two-thirds of respondents said the federal government is not doing enough to protect air and water quality.

Nonetheless, decision by eviscerating decision, the court is rendering the EPA a shadow of what it was intended to be. Considering the rulings the court has already made and rulings it is expected to make this term, there is hardly any aspect of air, water or land that is not losing protection. The implications for human life are direct and deadly.

Ignoring pollution’s toll

The court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v EPA  limited the EPA’s ability to cut carbon emissions from power plants, effectively ending efforts launched by the Obama administration. The proposed rules would have saved up to 3,600 lives a year and avoided 90,000 asthma attacks, 1,700 heart attacks and 300,000 missed school and workdays.

Then there is the 2023 ruling in Sackett v EPA. It removed wetlands and ephemeral streams from federal protection unless they were indistinguishably connected to larger lakes and rivers at the surface. The decision blatantly ignored decades of hydrology showing how wetlands have invisible underground connections to larger bodies of water and serve a critical role as nurseries for many creatures.

The court’s conservative majority went so far as to ignore EPA science conducted during the conservative George W. Bush administration. The EPA back then discerned that the drinking water for one of every three people came at least in part from streams that did not run all the time. Thus, the EPA said seasonal streams “should not be examined in isolation.”

And despite the sympathetic ears conservative justices give to the profit concerns of big business, they ignored how clean water is its own economic engine, contributing mightily to the national outdoor recreation economy. The Bureau of Economic Analysis last year estimated that recreation economy was worth $564 billion in 2022, providing nearly 5 million jobs.

Ominous signs in decisions ahead

The rulings to come may defang the EPA even more. In addition to the “good neighbor” ozone case, is one that may end up being the most important of them all. A 40-year-old Supreme Court ruling (Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council) compels judges to defer to federal agency scientists and experts in disputes over how ambiguously written laws should be implemented. But in January, during arguments in two cases involving herring fishermen in Rhode Island and New Jersey who objected to federal requirements to pay for at-sea monitors to prevent overfishing, the conservative justices seemed sympathetic to the notion that such deference results in too many burdensome regulations.

Justice Neil Gorsuch has already said that Chevron should be overturned, denigrating government scientists as bureaucrats. He wrote in 2022 that deference “deserves a tombstone no one can miss.” In the January arguments, he bemoaned an atmosphere where “automatically whatever the agency says, wins.”

What Gorsuch did not say is that a ruling that destroys deference to federal agency science, on top of the high court’s relentless stripping of the EPA’s powers to protect our air and water, will surely mean that whatever polluters say, wins. It would put any new initiative for environmental protection at automatic risk of being snuffed out.

For instance, the Biden administration last month announced tighter rules for industrial soot pollution, saying the move will prevent 4,500 premature deaths a year and 290,000 lost workdays. EPA Administrator Michael Regan called the rules a “game changer” for public health. But industry is already howling about the rule. The US Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Association, the American Chemistry Council, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a host of lobbyists for polluting industries wrote a joint letter to the White House complaining that cutting soot will cost the nation jobs; the Chamber of Commerce and some 25 states have already filed lawsuits opposing the rule.

But what about the millions of people whose lives have been extended over the last half century by federal regulation and millions more who could benefit from the tightening of rules as the science of pollution and climate change keep improving? For instance, the science on forever chemicals that do not break down in the environment (PFAS) has emerged in just the past few years, suggesting that they may have played a role in millions of deaths in recent decades.

The current court is silent on that. It is living up to the fears of Justice Elana Kagan. In a blistering dissent over the 2022 decision to curtail the powers of the EPA on regulating power plant carbon dioxide emissions that fuel global warming, she said: “Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. . . The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

A history of bipartisanship

In the end, given the lives at environmental risk, the Supreme Court’s kneecapping of the EPA will have an enormous impact on public health. Impervious with its lifetime appointments, this court is so conservative on environmental issues that it is erasing the bipartisan commitments of the 1970s, including the capitulation to public sentiment by one of the most conservative US Presidents of all: Richard Nixon.

Nixon was never an environmentalist at heart. In a secretly taped meeting with automotive executives Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca, Nixon said environmentalists wanted to drive the nation backward to living like “damned animals” and back to what he unforgivably described as the “dirty, filthy, horrible” ways that Native Americans lived.

But, despite his personal beliefs, Nixon was pressured by the times to respond to burgeoning ecological concerns ignited by Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, and the 20 million people protesting for the planet in the first Earth Day in 1970. For all of his private ill will, he created the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and signed the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

In his 1970 State of the Union address, Nixon went so far as to say, “The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water? Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions.”

One can only hope that at some point, the people’s voices will echo as loudly as they did on Earth Day, 1970. If the likes of Nixon could be forced to bring the EPA into existence, perhaps today, with some 1 billion people around the world participating in Earth Day events, the people can once again speak loudly enough to get Justices Gorsuch, Roberts and their fellow conservative colleagues to recognize the vast expanse of tombstones from pollution and climate change that will result from their rulings.

The hypocrisy of the world’s biggest banks on climate change keeps mounting. Last month, the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported that London-based HSBC, one of the world’s top-10 biggest banks, has helped raise $47 billion for the fossil fuel industry since its 2022 announcement that it would not finance new gas and oil infrastructure.

Some of HSBC’s dealings were on behalf of Saudi Aramco, the world’s second-ranked company in Fortune’s Global 500 and often dubbed the world’s biggest polluter for being the largest corporate emitter of greenhouse gases. In response to the report, the bank told TBIJ that its investments remain “science-based,” under a presumption that “net zero-aligned scenarios require continued, though declining, financing of fossil fuel supplies to meet energy demand, security, and affordability during the transition.”

It was another corporate spit in the face of science. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that all scenarios to meet the Paris Agreement’s targets for holding planetary temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit from pre-industrial levels require “rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade.”

Many UN documents say emissions should be cut by 45 percent by 2030. Modeling by the Union of Concerned Scientists says it is possible to slash heat-trapping emissions by more than half by 2030, with “deep” and “direct” reductions.

It also requires a deep reduction in fossil fuel finance and an opening of the vaults for clean energy. The International Energy Agency said the world last year saw record growth in solar power, adoption of electric vehicles, and global clean energy investments that outstripped fossil investments last year by $1.74 trillion to $1 trillion. But it is not even close to enough. For the world to truly be on a path to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the IEA says clean energy spending needs to soar to $4.5 trillion per year by the 2030s.

Fill ‘er up at the bank

It is hard to see that happening when banks like HSBC remain filling stations for the oil and gas industry. Nearly every major bank these days claims to have net zero financing and operations policies. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said about those policies, “We must have zero tolerance for net-zero greenwashing.”

So far, the pledges aren’t worth a plug nickel.

A November report by the United Nations and several other climate science groups found that government plans add up to increases in coal production through 2030 and in oil and gas production through 2050—a date by which we’re supposed to be at net zero. A report this past fall by the human rights group ActionAid, says that the world’s biggest banks have poured $3.2 trillion into oil and gas development in the Global South in the seven years since the Paris Agreement was signed. Many nations in the Global South, which tend to be lesser resourced countries than industrialized Europe and the United States, are at the most risk of tragic consequences from the heat, rising seas and extreme weather of runaway climate change.

Another report this past summer by the Sierra Club found that the four biggest banks in the United States–JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, and the British-based Barclays–are the top five financial institutions propping up the coal power industry in the United States. All of that is on top of reports earlier in 2023 by consortiums of environmental groups.

One said the world’s 60 largest banks, led by JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, have poured an overall $5.5 trillion into fossil fuel projects since the Paris agreement went into effect in 2016. Another said financial institutions in the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero have financed more than 200 of the world’s largest companies involved with the extraction, transport and production of coal, oil, and gas.

Banking on pseudoscience

The banks justify this by clinging to a stale “all of the above” energy strategy that too often leaves loopholes big enough to shove pipelines and coal trains through. In rationalizing their strategy, they often grasp for pseudoscience that is years behind the real science. Leading the way is the CEO of the world’s biggest financier of fossil fuels. In a 2022 House hearing, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase said ending fossil fuel investments is the “road to hell.” He added that investing in oil and gas “is good for reducing CO2,” to get away from coal. 

Dimon obviously missed—or dismissed—the memo that the benefits of swapping out coal for natural gas evaporated years ago and that the methane from gas production now shares top billing with CO2 in frying the planet and harming human health. His counterparts, such as Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, Citi’s Jane Fraser, and Wells Fargo’s Charles Scharf, all use the same type of excuses used by Fortune 500 companies and the Reagan administration in the 1980s to reject divestment from apartheid South Africa.

At the same 2022 House hearing in which Dimon said divestment was the road to Hades, Moynihan, Fraser and Scharf all claimed that financial engagement with oil, gas, and coal companies would nudge them to produce less oil, gas, and coal. Huh? While companies like ExxonMobil keep expanding?

The CEOs keep snubbing their noses at studies such as the 2022 report by the federal National Renewable Energy Laboratory saying there were multiple pathways for the United States to achieve 100 percent clean electricity by 2035. They also purposely ignore the IEA when it says “No new oil and natural gas fields are needed in the net zero pathway.” Similarly, a UCS analysis in November found at least two pathways to net zero, but said they cannot happen “if we simultaneously keep expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, production, exports, and use.”

Funding needless death

Worst of all, the banks’ continued support of fossil fuels is literally immoral as mounting studies tie fossil fuel burning to millions of deaths a year. The latest, from an international team of researchers in the British Medical Journal, found that 5.1 million people die prematurely from the ambient air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. The study said that phasing out fossil fuels would be an “effective intervention.”

For now the banks actions are making this effective intervention impossible. That fact should raise public ire considering that the nations of the world agreed at the latest round of international climate talks to transition away from fossil fuels and the majority of people in the United States want action on climate change. In one of the most recent surveys, a December CNN poll found that 73 percent people think the United States should design its federal policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030—the  current target of the Biden administration. 

The big question now is whether international pressure and US public engagement can build enough momentum to put us on the path to fossil fuel phase out we urgently need. The banks have a huge role to play. They can either choose to be part of the solution or, to borrow from Jamie Dimon, they can continue to propel us down the road to hell.

As hard as it is for Black students to earn advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) fields, a final insult accompanies the diploma. They leave school dragging a ball and chain of debt far heavier than that for most White graduates.

The latest evidence of this comes in a report last week by the Research Triangle Institute and the Sloan Foundation. It found that 49 percent of Black PhD graduates in STEM fields leave school with more than $50,000 in debt. That is more than triple the 15 percent of White PhD recipients who graduate with the same level of debt.

Meanwhile, 68 percent of White PhD graduates finish school with no debt at all, a luxury enjoyed only by 28 percent of Black counterparts.

Even more stark is the difference in federal loans borrowed for graduate education.

Among White PhD recipients, 79 percent took out no loans at all. Just 6 percent borrowed more than $40,000. It was the reverse for Black and Latino PhD graduates: 81 percent took out federal loans of more than $40,000. Put in the most dramatic terms, White PhD graduates were 13 times more likely than Black and Latinx graduates to avoid federal loan debts of more than $40,000 and six times more likely than Black and Latinx graduates to avoid any federal loans.

In an op-ed for Diverse Issues in Higher Education, report co-authors Erin Dunlop Velez and Lorelle Espinosa summed up the findings as “The $40,000 tax on Black Scientists.” They wrote that the data demands “a reconsideration of how the scientific community shapes and supports the educational trajectories of aspiring Black scientists,” including “reevaluating the way doctoral education is funded.”

STEM pathway already hard enough

Structural racism in STEM is already tough enough on the front end of undergraduate education. Last year, I highlighted a groundbreaking study that shattered conventional assumptions that poorer Black achievement in STEM is due to inferior K-12 education. That study found that even when students enter college with equal high school qualifications, universities foster an environment far more rewarding for White males than Black men or women.

White men with least a C in all first term STEM-related courses have nearly double the chance of graduating with an undergraduate STEM degree than Black women with the same grades. White males with at least one D or F, or withdrawal from an introductory core course still had a higher chance of graduating than Black students with no D’s, F’s, or withdrawals.

This RTI/Sloan report on what happens on the back end for PhD earners should equally end any pretense that Black and Brown students play on equal fields of opportunity compared to their White colleagues. Velez and Dunlop cite many reasons for the loan debt disparity, including the realities that:

• Black and Latino PhD students are significantly less likely than White PhD students to receive fellowships, assistantships and employer assistance to defray school costs;
• Black STEM PhDs are less likely to attend top-tier research institutions and more likely to attend lesser-ranked research institutions with less funding, or for-profit institutions, where, despite their cost, offer less fellowships;
• Black STEM PhDs take longer to earn degrees. They often need to work, have other family obligations, or were unnecessarily guided or misguided into separate Masters-degree programs prior to pursuing a PhD by counselors who may not have thought the candidate capable of earning a doctorate.

One devastating bottom line of all this is that 48 percent of Black PhDs report that their primary source of funding support comes from their own coffers, in savings, loans or family support. That is more than double the 21 percent of White PhD earners who dip into family resources. In yet another reversal of data, 48 percent of White PhDs say their primary source of support comes from teaching and research assistantships—more than double the 21 percent of Black PhD earners with such support.

Debt diverts PhDs from academia and government

Unless those numbers are themselves reversed, Espinosa told Inside Higher Education that the ranks of university-based scientists will never become as diverse as the nation’s population. While African Americans and Latinos respectively make up 14 percent and 19 percent of the population, they only accounted for 5 percent and 8 percent of STEM PhD recipients in 2021.

Instead, she predicts that a disproportionate number of Black and Brown scientists will go into industry. “If you’re carrying debt, you’re going to want to go to a place where you can pay that debt off quickly and support your family … and that’s not academe,” she said.

Nor government science, which critically needs a diverse STEM workforce to tackle a world of problems that disproportionately afflict communities of color, including climate change, pollution, and public health. In a new report by my colleagues at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a key issue in diversifying the nation’s federal STEM workforce is closing the pay gap between government scientists and researchers in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers with professional degrees or doctorates earn 24 percent less than counterparts in the private sector. A National Science Foundation survey of doctorate recipients found that respective median salaries in the private sector, government and education were $142,000, $120,000, and $93,000. The UCS report said the government has to ask itself how to make its pay and/or benefits more lucrative and “grapple with a long history of lower pay for STEM professionals from historically excluded groups.”

The government knows quite well it must ask itself that question, especially for first generation STEM undergraduates from underrepresented groups. A 2021 White House report on STEM diversity said that when heavier debt loads force students to work to afford college, they “may miss out on professional growth opportunities accessible to more affluent students, such as unpaid research experience, professional meeting attendance, and summer academic experiences.”

Redressing the situation

Velez points to many layers of barriers leading to such high financial burdens for underrepresented PhD earners of color that deserve “a hard look,” including how those students are being advised at the undergraduate level. In her email to me, she said universities should analyze why so many of those students end up at for-profit institutions. For me, the systemic racism embedded in financing a graduate degree cries out for some level of reparation in the form of loan forgiveness, even as such programs are highly controversial for undergraduates.

Faculty and administrators of graduate programs should take a hard look at equity in their programs,” Velez says “Are they more likely to advise them into a master’s program because they don’t believe they can complete a PhD? Do they see that students of color are less likely to receive assistantships and fellowships at their institution? Do they see that students of color are taking on more debt than White students?.”

In the effort to diversify the STEM world, there are a handful of notable ongoing efforts to support Black and Brown students in the classroom. The University of Maryland Baltimore County and Historically Black Colleges and Universities North Carolina A&T, Howard, Spelman, Florida A&M all have produced more than 100 STEM PhD recipients from 2010 to 2020.

The University of Puerto Rico’s Mayaguez and Rio Piedras campuses, the University of Texas El Paso, the University of Florida, and Florida International University have each produced more than 200 Hispanic PhDs in the same decade. Predominantly White Institutions such as Northeastern University are nationally known for their near-full undergraduate retention of Black and Latinx STEM students and a 90 percent graduation rate.

Such efforts toward equaling the playing field of STEM studies must now be met with a full commitment to equity at graduation. It is no way to inspire diversity among doctorates in STEM when the diploma confers financial bondage.

The House bill cuts between $5 billion and $6 billion from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act which passed both houses of Congress without a single Republican vote.

Johnson’s new bill ends rebates for electric appliances, home electrification projects, and training funds for project installation. It eliminates or slashes funding for clean energy and energy efficiency efforts throughout the Department of Energy and defunds a national Climate Corps, modeled after the New Deal era Civilian Conservation Corps. It blocks funding for state net zero programs and tighter building energy codes. It stops the government from factoring in the social cost of greenhouse gases in budgets and environmental reviews.

The legislation also reeks of the manic efforts of an 85-percent White party to try to bury the nation’s history of systemic racism. Even though Black, Latino, and Indigenous “sacrifice zones” have endured decades of disproportionate pollution from redlining and industrial zoning, the GOP bill  bans funding for the White House’s Justice40 initiative to direct the benefits of environmentally related investments to dumped-on communities. Even though those communities now face disproportionate health, flooding and heat exposure risks from climate change, the legislation also withholds funds from the Energy Department to boost diversity in the science workforce (which is sorely needed) and to start a new national laboratory focused on diverse communities.

The House Republicans who crafted the bill so obviously want to unburden themselves from repairing decades of federal, state, and municipal environmental injustice that they threw into the bill a ban on “any program, project, or activity that promotes or advances Critical Race Theory.” This despite the fact that no one has ever mistaken the Department of Energy for a sociology department.    

Fortunately, this laundry list of attacks is not likely to survive either the Senate or President Biden’s veto pen. But it exacerbates the party’s hypocrisy on the environment just as European scientists say 2023 is “virtually certain” to be Earth’s warmest year on record.

Denying climate change, but not climate change projects

By choosing Johnson to lead them, Republicans in the US House of Representatives hardened their public position as climate change deniers. Despite the fact that 99.9 percent of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is driven by human burning of fossil fuels, Johnson clings to the lie that there “are facts on both sides.” He holds that climate change is due to “natural cycles.”

Despite the United States having spewed a quarter of all the world’s cumulative global warming gases, Johnson blathered at a 2017 town hall: “What about Africa? … they burn huge areas and forests, and they do all these things without impunity.” For the record, of all the continents, Africa produces the least global warming gases—some four  percent of the global total. The United States currently emits at least three times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all 54 nations in Africa combined.

One might expect that from a representative of northwest Louisiana who is one of many politicians propped up by the fossil fuel lobby to impede sweeping public support to fight climate change and clean up polluted communities. According to Open Secrets, oil and gas companies led all other industries in campaign contributions to Johnson during his congressional career.

Look closer, and it’s actually a ruse. Johnson’s district is one of many in red states turning neon green with cash from clean energy manufacturing. The latest example comes in a new report on the effects of the Inflation Reduction Act released by the nonpartisan business group E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs).

The IRA passed without a single Republican vote, with the GOP complaining about “wasteful” federal spending. But Republican-held districts haven’t wasted a moment in chasing the dollars unleashed by the act. The IRA triggered the announcement of nearly 250 projects, primarily for solar and wind energy, electric vehicle manufacturing, and battery storage. So far, the investments add up to about $100 billion. The E2 report says that a full buildout of all the projects within five years could result in 303,000 construction jobs, 100,000 permanent jobs, $110 billion in new worker wages, and $32 billion in local, state, and federal tax revenues.

As Canary Media’s interactive atlas of the E2 report reveals: three-fourths of the $100 billion in current investments—some $73 billion—are being made in states either won in 2020 by former President Donald Trump or where state legislatures are solidly controlled by Republicans. States with at least $10 billion in clean energy investments include Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. This despite the fact that former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley condemned the Inflation Reduction Act as a “communist manifesto filled with tax hikes and green subsidies.”

Other conservative states with at least $1 billion of clean energy and vehicle projects included Johnson’s home state of Louisiana as well as Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. In Johnson’s very own congressional district, a joint venture between US-based General Electric and Mexican-based Xignux will build electrical transformers for wind farms and solar fields. Johnson hasn’t stopped that project even though he still spouts views about Mexican immigration that echo White supremacists and accuses the Biden administration of the “intentional destruction of our country.” 

Old story

The idea of Republicans hurling political bricks at climate science and stereotyping green subsidies as communist, while their states cash in on progressive energy policies is nothing new. In 2016, the American Clean Power trade association said 86 percent of onshore wind farms were in Republican congressional districts representing 88,000 jobs and $126 billion in investment over the preceding decade.

Today, the energy data analytic firm Enersection says eight of the top ten congressional districts for onshore wind farm output are in Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Wyoming, Kansas and North Dakota. Four of the top five congressional districts for solar power output are also in Republican districts. The top district in the nation for solar is in California, represented by recently ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But that didn’t stop McCarthy from blasting the Inflation Reduction Act for alleged “green giveaways for companies that distort the market.”

Just imagine how much stronger our position would be in the fight against climate change and the effort to clean up communities and boost the economy if House Speaker Mike Johnson and his colleagues would ever drop the two-faced charade of climate denial while diving unabashedly into the pot of federal renewable incentives and tax breaks.

When progressives on Capitol Hill proposed a Green New Deal, Johnson chaired a Republican Study Committee “analysis” that blasted the wind and solar energy as an “impossible investment” that would usher in “a new socialist society in America.” Yet, all the while, the steel foundations for the nation’s first offshore wind farm, the five-turbine project off Block Island, Rhode Island, were designed and manufactured in Johnson’s Louisiana by oil and gas rig engineers and fabricators.

Meanwhile, the $5 billion or $6 billion that Johnson’s party want to claw back from the IRA is peanuts compared to the record number of 24 climate weather and climate disasters in 2023 that have cost the nation at least $1 billion each, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the 1980s, such disasters cost the nation an average of $21.4 billion per year in adjusted dollars. In the last three years, they have averaged $152 billion a year—seven times more.

Perhaps most ironic of all, few states feel this as acutely as Louisiana. The risk of climate disasters in that state is fueling some of the fastest rising rates of home insurance and some of the largest losses of population in the nation. According to a Louisiana State University survey last year, 40 percent of state residents with homeowner’s insurance, flood insurance, or renter’s insurance reported filing a damage claim within the past two years. The percentage was 57 percent for residents in the New Orleans area.

Mike Johnson has nothing to say about this. He dares not open his mouth. He and his House colleagues are  too busy snapping up federal green programs for their districts while decrying it all in Washington as a communist conspiracy.

Most election workers are probably like my late mother-in-law. Mary Holmes spent many of her senior years volunteering at the polls in Cambridge, MA. She considered this work a part of her civic duty, just as she had decades earlier when she volunteered as a school traffic guard.  

She never voiced a moment of fear, either from motorists who respected her waving of arms and her reflective vest, or from voters, many of whom hurriedly hustled in and out of the ballot box on their way to work or on the way home from work to dinner. I cannot recall anything specific she ever said about this work. It was just what you did in a community. Her many years of service spoke for themselves about her pride in playing a seemingly small role in democracy.

We’ve learned more in recent years about how large a role she actually played. The mobs of January 6, 2021 and the malevolent harassment of election workers and officials all over the nation by deniers of the 2020 defeat of former President Donald Trump have left this slice of democracy on an unprecedented precipice. According to a report released last month by Issue One, a nonpartisan democracy think tank, roughly 40 percent of chief local elections officials in 11 western states have left their posts since the 2020 election.

Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico, states won by Biden, experienced election worker turnover of more than 50 percent. So did Utah, a state Trump won by an overwhelming margin. Turnover in both California, a very blue Democratic state, and Idaho, a flaming red Republican state, exceeded 40 percent.

This is, at least in part, fallout from the vilification of election officials and poll workers by Trump and his camp in the immediate wake of losing states he had won in 2016, especially Georgia. Top victims of the Georgia attacks included Black women like my mother-in-law, most notably Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss. They were the two Fulton County election workers falsely accused of ballot tampering by Trump and ally Rudy Giuliani. This summer, Giuliani admitted making false statements against the two women and a federal judge found him liable for defamation.

But that verdict can’t erase how those lies temporarily ruined the lives of Moss and Freeman. They went into hiding under a barrage of racist death threats and the invasion of Moss’s grandmother’s house by Trump supporters. One social media threat clearly hinted at lynching with: “be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.” In congressional testimony last year, Moss said, “I just felt bad for my mom, and I felt horrible for picking this job and being the one that always wants to help and [who was] always there, never missing not one election.”

That symbolizes the seismic trauma suffered by election workers across this nation in the last three years, regardless of race, gender, political party, or the political leanings of their country or state.

Election worker exodus

The Issue One report did not give a direct comparison to turnover in years past for the 11 states it covered, but a Boston Globe analysis last year found that the turnover of top elections officials had only been 3.4 percent in Utah and 23.3 percent in Arizona after the 2016-18 election cycle. The Globe also found a dramatic rise in turnover rates between the 2016-18 election cycle and the 2020-22 election cycle in the battleground state of Pennsylvania and in solidly Republican South Carolina.

Issue One also calculated that, in the 11 western states alone, more than 1,800 years of combined experience was lost in the exodus of elections officials. The report called it a huge loss in an era “where officials work with specialized voting machines, oversee ballot tabulation, and combat cybersecurity threats,” and where even a single mistake, “however innocuous, may be interpreted by hyper-partisans as malicious acts.”

Josh Daniels, the former clerk of Utah County, Utah, recently told National Public Radio that he did not run for reelection in 2022 because his job had become an “exhausting” combination of The Twilight Zone and Groundhog Day. Even though Trump routed Biden in that county by 68 percent to 27 percent, Daniels felt stuck in a surreal time loop of attacks on his integrity.

“Every day you wake up and it’s the same thing over and over again,” Daniels said. “It doesn’t matter how much information and data you share; it doesn’t matter how many concerns you answer. There will just be a new group of critics to again dish out the new conspiracy of the day.”  

It is highly unclear whether the new group of election officials who are taking the place of people like Daniels will be any better protected when hyper-partisan critics dish out new conspiracies. This summer, the Justice Department announced two more guilty pleas and two more convictions of men who issued death threats to elections officials in Arizona and Georgia.

But that totals only nine convictions over the last two years, out of more than 2,000 reports of harassment and threats. The Justice Department says most reports, however abusive, do not cross the line separating free speech from threats of “unlawful violence.”

The situation deeply concerns Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold for the 2024 elections. One of the federal convictions was against a man who threatened her. “I anticipate it will get worse as we end this year and go into the presidential election next year,” Griswold told the Associated Press. “Do we have the best tools to get through the next period of time? Absolutely not.”

In a recent interview with Salon, Griswold added that new tools are needed in the face of “a coordinated national effort to undermine American elections,” by hardline supporters of Trump.

“Everything that we have done for my security, we have had to fight tooth and nail for,” she said. “State and federal governments have largely abandoned election workers.”   

Who will have election officials’ backs?

The Brennan Center for Justice, one of the top think tanks watchdogging the threats to elections workers, has suggested the need for much stronger coordination between federal and local law enforcement to be aware of threats. It says more federal funding is needed to bolster security at local and state election sites and offices. The center also calls on states to protect the private information of elections officials and for Internet companies to develop more stringent screening for severe cases of disinformation and corrective information about posts that are clearly false.

“Although the United States avoided widespread violence in 2022, the 2024 election will bring more division and heightened tensions,” the Brennan Center said. It also warned that artificial intelligence “could result in a rise of deepfakes—manipulated images, video, and audio used to misrepresent election officials and exacerbate threats against them. Now is the time to take action to protect election workers—and, ultimately, the electoral process.”

There has been positive movement in that arena. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 11 states have enacted laws in 2022 and 2023 intended to better protect poll workers and elections officials. Most of the new laws make it crime to threaten these workers and offer them more confidentiality. While most of these 11 states fall on the more liberal side of the political spectrum, very conservative Oklahoma has now also enacted penalties of up to $1,000 for someone who harasses or threatens an election official with the intent of influencing the results.

In addition, the National Conference of State Legislatures recommends higher pay for poll workers. The Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists says that increased public access to voting data can help to proactively neuter disinformation and conspiracy theories about voting results. It recommends more support for local officials to process and organize data quickly and accurately to help boost real-time confidence in election results.

Any discussion of data and democracy also depends on making sure science and scientists are being protected, just like poll workers. With the politization around issues and events such as Covid19, climate change, and environmental protection, local and state scientists are also having their integrity attacked, and their data altered, censored, or disregarded as never before. In a 2022 survey of 45,000 health care workers in state and local government public health departments, some 41 percent said they were bullied, threatened, or harassed for their guidance and decisions during the pandemic on measures such as masking, social distancing and vaccination campaigns. Nearly a third of state health workers said they were considering leaving their organization in the next year.

In a report co-authored last month by the Brennan Center and UCS, the two groups urged state legislatures to require their agencies to: rely on the best available science, bolster ethical standards for science advisory committees, strengthen conflict-of-interest policies, take into consideration equity for underserved communities in decisionmaking, and adopt stronger state and federal protections for scientists and whistleblowers against politically motivated attacks.

Fighting back

Now is the time to act, before fear and demoralization among election workers and state scientists alike triggers an irreparable wave of resignations that leaves few, if any, to take their place. A Brennan Center survey this year found that nearly a third of local elections officials say they have experienced harassment, abuse or threats. Nearly half of these threats go unreported, and only 27 percent of officials believe that the federal government is doing a good job to support them.

In a blog last year, I cited the frustration of Scott Konopasek, former director of elections for Fairfax County, Virginia. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee how personal threats were not taken seriously by local law enforcement and how federal law enforcement referred him back to local law enforcement.

“The lack of concern and follow up made me feel foolish and silly and less willing to share further threats,” said Konopasek, who added that threats, harassment and intimidation of election officials should be a federal offense under the immediate jurisdiction of the FBI. As he rightly noted, threats and threatening behavior “do not have to involve violence or bodily harm before they have an effect on an individual, a staff, and the effective conduct of elections.”

Most all of the available data suggests that the 2024 elections will represent a crossroads for our democracy. According to the Brennan Center, since 2020, 28 states have passed 65 laws that make it harder to vote. The current frontrunner for the Republican nomination is the very former president who made poll workers a bullseye for his supporters with his lies. In Lyon County, Nevada, which is 88.5 percent White, and where Trump beat Biden 69 percent to 28 percent, Nikki Bryan, a lifelong Republican, called it quits last year after more than two decades as clerk and treasurer. She told the Christian Science Monitor: “I love this county and I want to see elections done right. But I can’t fix the anger. I’ve tried.” 

For now, there remains a legion of election workers dedicated to their duty and thousands of Americans who have responded to the attacks on the election process by signing up to work the polls themselves. The nonpartisan Power the Polls says it recruited 275,000 potential poll workers for the 2022 midterms. In a post-election survey of 4,700 of them, 61 percent said they indeed showed up to serve.

More recently, elections officials were buoyed by this summer’s indictment in Georgia of Trump, Giuliani and 17 other allies for allegedly trying to overturn Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in that state, out of nearly five million votes cast for the two candidates.

Olivia Coley-Pearson, a city commissioner in half-Black Douglas, Georgia who was once falsely accused and acquitted of illegally assisting voters, told the Washington Post: “Black women have been the backbone for years of a lot of stuff: Of our families, of our churches. It’s kind of in our nature to do what it takes to make things happen, to stand up for what’s right. This is about survival. And we realize that. If we don’t do what we must do, our children won’t have a future.”

Like Coley-Pearson, my late mother-in-law worked at the polls because it was in her nature to do what it takes to make things happen and to stand up for what’s right. I cannot say what Mary Holmes would have done if she had faced the kinds of threats election workers often do today. But I’m pretty sure she’d say that unless we protect those workers, we’ll leave a future for our children we don’t want to contemplate.

For instance, there is the practice called “grubbing.” Interns still twist themselves into pretzels to get under boulders to find puffin chicks so they can affix identification bands and weigh and measure the chicks to assess their health.

In my visit this summer to Eastern Egg Rock, the project’s original island six miles out to sea from Maine’s Pemaquid Point, I watched Liv Ridley, 25, slide as flat as a pancake to grub under one set of boulders. Jacob Ligorria, 22, reached upside down in his area, joking about blacking out. Emma Lachance Linklater, 28, looked like a human pinwheel, legs and arms shooting out in four directions. Meg Getzinger, 24, curled herself under a cave to eventually thrust up a puffin chick to me through a crevice.

Climate change bullseye

At dinner, the crew shared with me what they relished about grubbing. They know that the bird’s potential to help humans piece together the mysteries of the ocean has grown exponentially over the decades. “You don’t know how special that bird you grub might become,” Ligorria says. “It could give us data for the next 30 years.”

The data is also exponentially more critical as Project Puffin is in a bullseye of climate change. The project today spreads over seven islands in the Gulf of Maine, one of the fastest warming bodies of ocean on Earth. The last decade has seen unprecedented swings between cooler, calm summers with record numbers of birds, and blazing, stormy summers of catastrophic nesting failure. Water that is too warm drives seabird prey too deep or too far away to catch. Extreme weather events flood nests and soak chicks into hypothermia.

None of this was on the mind of project founder Steve Kress in 1973, when he began bringing down puffin chicks from Newfoundland to raise them on Eastern Egg Rock. Back then, the goal was simply to restore a colorful bird wiped out by hunters on nearly every breeding island in Maine in the late 1800s.

In the early years, Kress and his team fledged nearly 2,000 chicks from Eastern Egg Rock and Seal Island, another island that had gone without puffins for nearly a century. Chicks fledge far out into the Atlantic for two or three years before returning to islands as adults. Kress hoped the grown-up birds would choose Maine over Newfoundland to breed. To make the islands seem like home for puffins and other birds, such as terns, he put up decoys, mirrors and speakers blaring sound recordings of seabirds.

Puffins began breeding anew on Eastern Egg Rock in 1981 and on Seal Island in 1992. Down to a pair of birds in the entire state in 1902, there are now more than 1,300 pairs across several islands in the Gulf of Maine. The project also revived tern species and cousins of puffins, called razorbills and common murre. Chick translocation and tools of social attraction have now been used in more than 850 projects in 36 countries, assisting nearly 140 species of seabirds as far away as Japan, China, and South Africa.

“I could see that, if successful, the methods developed could likely help these species,” said Kress, who retired in 2019. “But I never thought that the methods would be so enthusiastically embraced by so many other researchers so quickly and so very far from Egg Rock.”

Global warming threats

In retrospect, those restorations occurred with no time to spare, amid an almost unimaginable 70-percent decline in the global seabird population between 1950 and 2010. That is equivalent to nearly a quarter billion birds, according to a widely publicized 2015 study. The causes: plastic and oil pollution, overfishing, fishing gear entanglements, development, rats and cats brought to islands by humans, and of course climate change.

Thankfully, a new generation of researchers recognizes that, to save seabirds for the next 50 years, they will have to do far more than put out decoys. They’ll have to work toward saving the sea itself.

Gemma Clucas, a 35-year-old post-doctoral fellow at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, conducts DNA analysis on the diet of seabirds, from puffins in Scandinavia to penguins in Antarctica. When I met her this summer, she was out on Matinicus Rock, another island in Project Puffin, 25 miles out into the gulf from the closest coastal town of Rockland, Maine.

Clucas’s research takes the timeless inelegance a serious step further. She often gathers her lab samples by walking through tern and gull colonies with a trash bag over her head. Seabirds have no love for a human traipsing around nests and eggs. They show their displeasure by taking to the skies to poop on intruders. That is exactly what Clucas wants. She scrapes poop from everywhere it plops. The more the better for the lab.

If the birds miss the trash bag, the pants, shirts, hands, faces, even beards of fellow researchers work just as well. She jokes on social media that gathering penguin poo is worse in Antarctica, saying, “I’ll take a tern dive-bomb over an angry, flipper-whacking penguin any day.”

Foraging challenges

I met Will Kennerley two years ago on Matinicus Rock as he launched a study of puffin foraging habits. The research was for his master’s degree earned this spring at Oregon State University. Kennerly analyzed samples from the summers of 2021 and 2022, which happened to respectively be the warmest and second-warmest years on record for average sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.

“We’re still pretty in the dark about what puffins actually do for most of their lives.” Kennerley told me. “Protecting these breeding islands is an incredibly important step, but providing a place to raise a chick is of little use to a seabird if they’re not able to find enough food.”

Kennerley’s study, mentored by Clucas, brought several new things to light. Even with the warmest waters on record, puffin adults are quite impressive in finding what fish they can—at least up to a point.

When Project Puffin started, the primary fish for puffins was herring. While herring are rare for puffins today because of overfishing, Kennerley found that adult puffins brought back to their chicks a total of 17 species of sea life and fed themselves 28 species out at sea. Several species detected were previously unknown in the diet of adult puffins, including Atlantic salmon.

But warm water can quickly flip variety into scarcity. During marine heat waves, puffins flew farther away from Matinicus Rock to find food and made more dives yet brought back less fish. That resulted in below-average puffin reproduction.

“There are limits to just how hard they can work and successfully raise a chick,” Kennerley said. That limit appeared as a bright line during the record warmth and climate-change-driven rain extremes of 2021 which led to mass nesting failures and chick mortality. As Kennerley wrote:  “an invisible threshold of prey scarcity had been crossed, beyond which no added effort could compensate.”

GPS connects ecosystem dots

Back on Eastern Egg Rock, Stef Collar, a researcher who’s worked extensively to monitor and track seabirds all the way to China, was performing another of those timelessly inelegant tasks, waiting patiently for puffins to land on a box on the boulders. When one did, Collar pulled a string that opened a trap door. She texted Lachance Linklater to rush over to help pull the puffin out of the box and put a GPS tag on the bird.

This particular puffin was being tagged for a new set of foraging studies being led on several islands in the Gulf of Maine by Keenan Yakola, a doctoral student at Oregon State, and a 10-year veteran of Project Puffin. Yakola, with the help of each island’s intern teams and accomplished veterans like Collar and Clucas, tagged puffins, terns and Leach’s storm petrels. The latter bird is a favorite of researchers because it is mysteriously nocturnal and unleashes loud trilling calls in the middle of the night from nests that can be right under the tent platforms.  

Leach’s storm petrels are also remarkable for leaving breeding islands for three to five days at a time, traveling hundreds of miles to forage for a single chick. An adult might come back to an island for only 15 to 20 minutes to regurgitate food to the chick, then fly off on another 500-to-600-mile feeding journey.

One of the petrels Yakola tagged flew from Maine to waters off Virginia. Another made five trips over three weeks to the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument. The southern part of that protected ocean lies at the latitudes of Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and the iconic birding area of Cape May, New Jersey.

The monument, a major feeding ground for seabirds and whales, was created by the Obama administration. Its protections against commercial fishing were temporarily gutted by the Trump administration, then restored by the Biden administration. Nearly a decade ago, Project Puffin discovered that some puffins wearing geolocators used the Canyons and Seamounts as a late-winter feeding ground before returning to Maine to breed.

Yakola’s findings help cement the science warning us what lines should never be crossed in ecosystem protection. He and Kennerley both hope their work helps inform the burgeoning offshore wind industry where to site farms with minimal impact to seabird feeding grounds and migratory routes.

 “This helps show just how many habitats we actually need to protect,” Yakola said. “With the changing water temperatures, terns and puffins are constantly on the move, so we need to get as fine a scale as we can.”

How fine a scale of understanding these researchers can get to may help tip the scales toward ensuring that Project Puffin lasts another 50 years and that seabirds all over the world have a chance to rebound. “People look out at the ocean and think of it as kind of empty,” Collar said. “Every puffin surprises us with more knowledge of how it is not.”

For a precious hour or so, zips of light etched the skies, punctuated by periodic long trails and fireballs. Then, shortly after 3 a.m., a milky film slid across the sky as if a window shade were being closed sideways. My eyes fought to peer through the thickening mystery until even the brightest bursts of light were obliterated. Because the weather forecast called for clear skies, I kept hoping it was rogue cloud cover. I stuck it out until dawn.  

It was a daylight I had never seen or smelled. Glacier Point is famous for its spectacular vantage point of looking straight across a gulf to 8,839-foot Half Dome. It is a view made famous by photographer Ansel Adams. Unlike a sunrise that quickly brightens from gold to blinding white, the sun rose behind Half Dome as a pinkish-orange pinhole and bizarrely remained a tiny, reddish-orange pea in the sky more than an hour later.

It was because of smoke during the 2007 wildfire season in the United States, the second worst at the time for acreage burned. It was an apocalyptic encore of the worst-ever 2006 season that saw 9.9 million acres burned. The smoke draped so thick over Half Dome that its chiseled granite features were lost in silhouette. The odor of burnt wood saturated my nose.

After a couple hours, I drove down to Yosemite Valley. Before I got there, I stopped at another view Adams made famous, the sight of the valley from the Wawona Tunnel. On clear days, the sight of 7,500-foot El Capitan on the left, Bridalveil Falls plunging 600 feet on the right, Half Dome in the middle, and conifer forest below can well up the eyes.

On this morning, the view was obscured by a golden dust bowl as smoke settled in the valley.

Smoky norms

This was just a prelude. In 2015, then again in 2020, the number of burned acres from wildfires crossed the 10 million-acre mark. The view of Yosemite Valley has repeatedly been obscured by wildfire smoke, including in 2018, 2020, and last year, when fires forced park closures and evacuations. It is a reason why Yosemite is a poster park of global warming, beset in recent years not just by drought, blistering heatwaves and wildfires, but also by  epic blizzards and snowmelt floods. Parts of the park were closed for several days this spring over fears of flooding.

All those extreme events are made more likely by global warming.

Beth Pratt, the California regional executive director for the National Wildlife Federation, told the Guardian newspaper in April, “Yosemite is ground zero for climate change.” A Los Angeles Times feature seconded that, reporting that climate change “has been one of the park’s biggest challenges in recent years, undermining the concept of Yosemite as a refuge where nature prevails unaffected by man-made forces.”

It also undermines the concept of national parks being a refuge for families seeking nature. Wildfires in 2021 temporarily closed Sequoia National Park and a popular part of Big Bend National Park in Texas. Wildfires have led to multiple closures in recent years in and around the Grand Canyon.

Last year, record rainfalls triggered floods and mudslides and temporarily closed Yellowstone. Monsoon rains unleashed flash floods that buried cars in Death Valley and floods that caused closures in Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. Out east, flash floods from deluges caused landslides and partial closures and evacuations in Smoky Mountains National Park.

This summer has just started and wildfires have already led to closures in parks as far apart as  Joshua Tree in California and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. Several roads in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park remain closed because of severe road damage from epic winter storms.

Parks heating faster than the nation as a whole

It begs the question of how often families must be smoked out, scorched out, or flooded out of parks for these treasures become a more prominent rallying cry to fight global warming. National parks are unique for their locations at high and low elevations and delicate layers of ecosystems. It makes them ripe for disproportional impacts from climate change, relative to the nation in general.

According to studies in 2018 and 2020 led by Patrick Gonzalez, who was the principal climate scientist for the National Park Service, a White House climate advisor, and a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the mean annual temperature of the parks has increased at double the US rate since 1895.

Without major reductions in the carbon emissions fueling global warming, the impacts on the parks would be endless. Even under a scenario of drastic emissions reductions, Gonzalez’s 2018 study found that more than half of national park area would exceed the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit limits set by the Paris Agreement to avoid catastrophic climate impacts—more than double the 22 percent of the US as a whole that would exceed that temperature. The 2020 study offered an exclamation point:

“Without emissions reductions, climate change could increase temperatures across the national parks, up to 9ºC (16ºF) by 2100 in parks in Alaska. This could melt all glaciers from Glacier National Park, raise sea level enough to inundate half of Everglades National Park, dissolve coral reefs in Virgin Islands National Park through ocean acidification, and damage many other natural and cultural resources.”

Since wildfires and their smoke are currently so prominent in the news, it is of note that Gonzalez’s 2020 study predicts that the frequency of wildfire could increase by up to 300 percent in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, and up to 1,000 percent in Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. In 2019, Gonzalez, despite being pressured by superiors during the Trump administration to not talk about “anthropogenic,” or human-caused climate change, testified to Congress that, “Cutting carbon pollution would reduce human-caused climate change and help save our national parks for future generations.”

Crowds grow even as temperatures rise

So far, saving the parks has not been enough to inspire Congress toward mandatory cuts to carbon pollution. Nor has any amount of wildfire smoke or flood damage kept the crowds away. Park attendance has steadily increased over the years, to about 330 million a year before the pandemic, and 311 million last year as leisure travel returned to close to normal. That is the equivalent of every person in the United States visiting a park during the year. Visitors now spend more than $20 billion a year in the gateway regions of the parks, supporting 323,000 local jobs.

Two studies, one last year in the journal Forest Policy and Economic and another last month in the journal Ecosphere, found that wildfire smoke thus far has not limited park visitation. Boise State University researcher Matthew Clark, lead author of last month’s study, said, “I have actually lived my data. I had driven six hours to go climbing in Yosemite. When we got there, we said, ‘Well, what are we going to do? We’re not going to turn around.’ We stayed anyway.”

Clark added, “I was kicking myself for days afterward. My lungs were burning.”

Paradoxically, global warming might entice even more people to come to the parks, putting pressure on a National Park Service that has long dealt with chronic underfunding of services and a $22 billion backlog of deferred maintenance. A 2015 study by the National Park Service estimates that the warmer temperatures associated with global warming will lengthen the shoulder seasons for visitation in most parks, as so many of them are either in historically colder mountainous regions or in more northerly latitudes.

Examples of that in the study are the popular and often packed Acadia in Maine, Grand Teton in Wyoming, and the Blue Ridge Parkway stretching from the North Carolina side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

Conversely, a few parks, particularly in deserts, might become intolerable much of the year, such as Joshua Tree (which would lose all its Joshua trees under high emissions scenarios), Arches in Utah, and Big Bend in the southwest bottom of Texas.   

Big temperatures in Big Bend

In April, my wife and I traveled to Big Bend. We were there to enjoy one of the nation’s birding hotspots. My wife saw more than 50 new species for her list in one week, with vermillion flycatchers and painted buntings hugging watery areas along the Rio Grande. At night, I was treated to the darkest skies and clearest views of the Milky Way I’ve ever seen.

Most of our time there, the temperatures were comfortably warm. We had only one 100-degree day. That is changing rapidly for future visitors. Under current emissions rates, Climate Central estimates that Big Bend will see the largest increase in temperatures in the national park system by 2100. Its number of life-threatening, 100+ degree days will explode by six and a half times, from 17 days a year to 113 days a year. According to Backpacker magazine, Big Bend is already the nation’s third most dangerous park because of its heat. 

On June 23, a 14-year-old boy died hiking in 119-degree heat and his stepfather died in a car crash over an embankment, speeding for help. That followed the respective hiking deaths this past March and in March 2022 of a 64-year-old woman and a 53-year-old woman in temperatures approaching or topping 100 degrees.

Big Bend’s defining river feature, the Rio Grande, is no longer a naturally flowing river because of dams and irrigation diversions for agriculture. It so routinely runs dry that the National Park Service says it is not managed to maintain a flow to sustain riverbank habitat. Half of the 27 historically native fish to the river in New Mexico no longer exist.

On our visit, the Rio Grande was so shallow that on one day, my wife and I easily waded across in knee-deep water into Boquillas, Mexico for lunch. On another day, we felt lucky there was any water at all. We waded across a creek in the spectacular Santa Elena Canyon. Last year, the river completely dried up, leaving the classic cracked patterns of parched earthen floor.   

“There’s not a little bit of river that’s dedicated to keeping it a river, and keeping the living things of the river, not even healthy, but surviving,” Raymond Skiles told Marfa Public Radio in far west Texas last year. Skiles was Big Bend’s biologist for 30 years before retiring in 2018.

“This is happening in a national park,” he said. “This is happening in a component of the United States’ Wild and Scenic River system. I have to think, what world is this okay in, for the river just to stop because of human extraction and depletion of the river?”

Hope through the haze

That question can easily be extended to ask, in what world is it okay to allow our crowning jewels of nature and landscapes to be depleted by our extraction of fossil fuels?

Since that night 16 years ago when my view of the Perseids disappeared, wildfire smoke has almost become a normal part of forecasting whether the skies will allow people to see the meteors. A 2018 headline in San Francisco Bay Area’s Mercury News asked: “Will smoke from California fires block this weekend’s Perseid meteor shower?

Three years later a headline in the Oregonian said, “Perseid meteor shower returns for 2021, wildfire smoke could dampen the show.” In Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, volunteer astronomy ranger Bob Bohley told the New York Times in 2021 that the viewing conditions for much of the summer were “horrible” because of smoke.

“Some nights it’s been so thick that even the brightest stars were hard to make out,” Bohley said. “I would just point in the direction of a constellation and hope folks would see something.”

For decades we have pointed people in the direction of the national parks in the hopes that families would see flora, fauna, landscapes, seascapes, and night skies to peer into infinity. As great as his photography was, Ansel Adams said, “You don’t improve nature. You reveal your impression of nature or nature’s impact on you.”

Perhaps we cannot improve nature, but we can sure preserve it. And if there is anywhere in the nation that holds the promise to inspire unified action on climate change, it is the national parks. We flock to them, knowing we will be impressed and hoping to be inspired. The National Park Service is our most popular federal agency, with 81 percent of respondents in a Pew survey this spring saying they have a favorable view of it and 82 percent saying in a 2019 poll that the nation should use oil and gas leasing fees to pay for the deferred maintenance of the parks.

Such support led to the Great American Outdoors Act, overwhelming passed in 2020 by a usually bitterly divided Congress and signed by President Trump, despite his relentless assault on conservation and science and his gutting of environmental regulations that would have reduced the carbon pollution fueling global warming. The act authorized Congress to spend up to $6.65 billion over five years on deferred maintenance in national parks. The National Parks Conservation Association praised the act for providing “crucial funding” to start repairing the parks.

The association also warned that the funding, at $1.3 billion a year against a $22 billion backlog, should only be the beginning of proper protection, as it does not “account for unforeseen damage our parks will continue to deal with as a result of climate change like the devastating flooding at Yellowstone and raging wildfires at Yosemite.”

To borrow from Bohley back at Great Sand Dunes, no one wants the parks to get to the point where the roads are impassible, the hikes too hot, and the stars are impossible to make out. People all over the world, more than 300-million-a-year-strong, say loud and clear that the national parks are our constellation, right here on earth.

The onslaught has led to another round of media headlines and press releases from environmental and public health groups asking whether the nation is at a tipping point of urgency to fight climate change.

A Los Angeles Times headline for reader letters on the floods said, “California rains are a wake-up call for climate upheaval to come.” Many other media outlets and advocacy groups, from Al Jazeera to the American Lung Association, speculated as to whether the recent smoke plumes may also be such a “wake-up call.”

A Vox headline on the orange skies from Canadian wildfires said, “Wildfire smoke reminded people about climate change. How soon will they forget?” A Washington Post story carried the headline: “How the Canadian wildfire smoke could shift Americans’ views on climate.” A Philadelphia Inquirer column carried the headline, “America sleepwalks through a climate crisis. Will this smoke alarm wake us up?”

So far, no alarm bell has been loud enough to stop the sleepwalking. Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017, and Hurricane Irma in 2021 were all accompanied by the same question. After the 2021 “heat dome” that saw Portland, Oregon hit 116 degrees and Seattle soar to 106, a Los Angeles Times headline said: “Northwest heat wave swamped the vulnerable, was a harsh climate wake-up call.”

The usual and eventual response to such things was summed up in an Associated Press story five years after Superstorm Sandy. The headline was “5 years after Superstorm Sandy, the lessons haven’t sunk in.” It was about most plans for climate security in the New York City area being unrealized.

A harsh new normal

Whether we wake up or not, a harsh climate is the new normal. To date in 2023, the United States has already suffered nine climate and weather disasters resulting in at least a billion dollars of damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That fits with the last five years, which have seen an annual average of 18 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. That is a six-fold increase over the three such events a year during the 1980s, in adjusted dollars. Since 1980, hurricanes, severe storms, floods, and wildfires from billion-dollar events have cost the nation more than $2.5 trillion in damage and taken 16,000 lives. A quarter of the damages have come in just the last five years, causing major home insurers to astronomically raise rates in states seeing frequent severe weather and climate events, such as California, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Colorado. Allstate and State Farm have announced they will not issue any new homeowner policies in California. 

This of course is not the entire picture as there are countless storms under $1 billion that still ravage communities and drain state budgets. “It is important to keep in mind that these estimates do not reflect the total cost of U.S. weather and climate disasters, only those associated with events more than $1 billion in damages,” NOAA says. “That means they are a conservative estimate of how much extreme weather costs the United States each year.”

According to one major global property database, nearly 15 million homes, or nearly 1 of every 10, was impacted in 2021 by natural disasters that are worsening with global warming, to the tune of $57 billion in property damage. Those costs are not yet steep enough. Part of that is that humans in the U.S. are normalizing the new normal, simply adapting to a seemingly incremental warmer environment rather than leap to action against an existential threat.

A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that temperatures initially considered remarkable are unremarkable about five years later. The normalization effect is so strong that the study concluded: “It may be unlikely that rising temperatures alone will be sufficient to produce widespread support for mitigation policies.”

The study’s lead author, Frances Moore of the University of California Davis, said in a press release, “We saw that extreme temperatures still make people miserable, but they stop talking about it. This is a true boiling-frog effect (referring to the false myth that a frog will not feel gradually warming temperatures until it boils to death). People seem to be getting used to changes they’d prefer to avoid. But just because they’re not talking about it doesn’t mean it’s not making them worse off.”

Disinformation dulls urgency

Climate change denial and skepticism is a key feature of the deep political divide in this nation, fueled by long-running and coordinated campaigns of disinformation, often funded by fossil fuel interests. Most recently, as many cities broke pollution records and New York City momentarily recorded the worst air quality in the world from the plumes of smoke flowing down from Canadian wildfires, climate and pollution deniers blew their own smoke at the public on right-wing media.

The infamous fossil fuel and tobacco industry shill Steve Milloy falsely claimed on FOX News—which itself glorifies oil and gas and lambasts environmental regulations—that the wildfire smoke posed “no health risk.” Not-a-scientist Milloy further pontificated, “This doesn’t kill anybody. This doesn’t make anybody cough. This is not a health event. This has got nothing to do with climate . . .This is not because of fossil fuels.”

Laughing FOX host Laura Ingraham then gave Milloy the floor to deny the science of particulate matter to her audience, which averages 2 million viewers. Milloy promptly said that concern about particulates was “crazy” and “invented” by the EPA. He said particulate matter is so “innocuous,” that any attempt to claim otherwise is “total junk science.”

A world of actual scientists can junk that lie. Fine particulate pollution, known as PM 2.5, kills between 4.2 million and 5.7 million people a year, according to a range of studies. More life years are lost around the globe from PM 2.5, according to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, than from cigarette smoking or alcohol.

In the U.S., exposure to PM 2.5 prematurely kills at least 100,000 people a year. That is more than gun deaths and fatal car crashes combined. This is before considering a world with more wildfire smoke. Emergency room visits for asthma doubled in New York during the June plume, with most of the afflicted coming from Black, Latino, and high-poverty neighborhoods.

A 2021 study in Lancet Planetary Health found that worldwide, 33,500 people a year die from cardiovascular and respiratory complications due to the fine particulate matter of acute wildfire smoke. The study said its findings were so “robust” that policy makers should “manage vegetation and mitigate climate change as far as possible.”

The findings are an urgent warning as NOAA says climate change is “supercharging” drought conditions, lengthening wildfire seasons. A new study in PNAS found that the area of California’s summer wildfires has grown fivefold over the last half century and could increase by another 50 percent by 2050. Nearly all the increase is due to global warming that is generally drying out the state. Additionally, fires that engulf communities carry even more risk in the smoke. Smoke from California’s 2018 Camp Fire contained high levels of lead and metals from burning buildings.

Lost in the haze: new poll highlights a stunning public disconnect on climate reality

The overall scientific consensus on global warming cannot get more robust. A decade ago, a review of nearly 12,000 studies conducted between 1991 and 2011 found that 97.2 percent of them agreed that humans were causing global warming. A 2021 analysis of more than 88,000 studies since 2012 now finds 99.9 percent agreement.

If only such agreement could escape the lab. The enduring gap in public awareness and understanding received a fresh exclamation point in a new poll this month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. The survey found that that only 58 percent of people in the U.S. believe that “most” scientists agree on global warming and only 20 percent know that more than 90 percent of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening.

“Public misunderstanding of the scientific consensus – which has been found in each of our surveys since 2008 – has significant consequences,” the survey said. Among those consequences are a decreased level of concern and support for climate action.

In line with the PNAS “boiling frog” study, climate harm remains a far-off concern for many people despite the six-fold increase of disasters in the last five years compared to the 1980s.  Only 48 percent of respondents believe people in the U.S. are being harmed “right now” by global warming. More than half of respondents (55 percent) still say that they have not yet personally experienced the effects of climate change.

Perhaps even more stunning were perceptions about the future. While about 70 percent of people in the poll think future generations, the world’s poor, or plant and animal species will be affected by global warming, only 47 percent think they will personally be affected.

Will this year’s Danger Season build support for action?

If the next six months of 2023 are anything like the first six, the ability of people to normalize global warming may be put to its most severe test yet. The nation is only two months into the six-month period that the Union of Concerned Scientists calls “Danger Season,” for the likelihood of climate change-amplified heat waves, severe storms, wildfires, and hurricanes from May through October.

Even if the remainder of this year is relatively calm, there is no long-term relief ahead. The World Meteorological Organization announced this spring that Earth is hurtling into its hottest five-year span yet. Petteri Taalas, the secretary-general of the WMO, said the planet was entering “uncharted territory.”   

That calls for uncharacteristic urgency to turn down the heat. There actually are hopeful signs that it is arising, despite the current indifference sowed by disinformation. The Yale survey found that two-thirds of people disagree that it is too late to do anything about global warming. A Pew poll last year found that 69 percent of respondents thought that the U.S. should take steps toward being carbon neutral by 2050 and should prioritize renewable energy over expanding fossil fuel exploration.

The call for action to stop global warming is growing louder in Latino and Black communities hit hardest by fossil fuel pollution and living disproportionately on urban “heat islands” that lack trees and parks.

Climate scientists are not sitting on their 99.9 percent consensus. They have stepped up efforts to expose fossil fuel companies for their deceit and assign responsibility to them for their damage to the planet.

A study this year in the journal Science exposed ExxonMobil for its public skepticism on climate science even as its own scientists accurately predicted what is happening now. A study led by the Union of Concerned Scientists and published last month in Environmental Research Letters found that the emissions traced to the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and cement companies have play a massive role in altering the atmosphere’s drying power and wildfires. More than a third of the forest area burned in the western U.S. and southwestern Canada since 1986—nearly 20 million acres—can be attributed to those emissions.

Also last month, Boston University held a symposium to strategize on fighting fossil fuel disinformation. Benjamin Sovacool, director of Boston University’s Institute for Global Sustainability, said, “Misinformation is pervasive, it’s at a very unique moment in our culture, and a post-truth society cannot survive.”

Nor can a post-truth planet.

The US Supreme Court’s recent undermining of wetlands protections in Sackett v. EPA could not have come at a worse time for our streams, rivers, and lakes. Now, only a week after the high court removed tens of millions of acres of wetlands from federal protection, a major study in the journal Nature found that human activities on Earth are breaching ecological limits for a host of vital systems.

One key system is water.

According to the study by more than 40 researchers for the Earth Commission, less than half the world’s population now benefits from easy access to free flowing rivers that sustain biodiversity and nourish healthy fisheries, which in turn support local economies. That is because too many rivers are altered by dams and development. Only 23 percent of the world’s large rivers (more than 620 miles in length) flow uninterrupted into the ocean. 

Under the Earth’s surface, groundwater levels in nearly half the world’s basins are in decline from overuse. Invisible from above, groundwater is a critical source of drinking water, providing the base flow for rivers and, as the study said, “directly sustain[ing] wetlands and terrestrial vegetation.”

Compounding that are unsustainable levels of nitrogen and phosphorous runoff into rivers, lakes, and coastline estuaries from fertilizers. The runoff can trigger a tragic process known as “eutrophication,” leading to major fish kills and aquatic dead zones.

While much of the concern about climate change is understandably centered on staying beneath a threshold of temperatures that will unleash catastrophic climate impacts, the study is a reminder that there is much more to the preservation of the planet. A lead author, Joyeeta Gupta, told the media that if Earth was undergoing a medical exam, “Our doctor would say the Earth is really quite sick right now, in many areas.”

Earth Commission co-chair Johan Rockström added in a press release, “Unless a timely transformation occurs, it is most likely that irreversible tipping points and widespread impacts on human well-being will be unavoidable.”

Earth’s sickness lost on the Supreme Court

None of that appeared to be on the mind of the Supreme Court in Sackett v. EPA. The case involved an Idaho couple who wanted to develop over a wetland on their property near a lake; all nine justices on the high court concurred that the EPA went too far in regulating the particular wetland on the couple’s property.

But a razor-thin 5-4 majority, led by Justice Samuel Alito, seized on the case to gut a key portion of the 1972 Clean Water Act itself, ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can enforce environmental laws under the Clean Water Act only if a wetland is “indistinguishable” from larger bodies of water, with a “continuous surface connection” that has “no clear demarcation.”

The ruling by Alito and fellow Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett willfully ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence showing the connections between wetlands and downstream waters, and the fact that wetlands play an outsized role in biodiversity, despite covering only 5.5 percent of land in the contiguous 48 states.

The ruling ignored findings by the EPA that our own waters mirror the state of those around the world: they are quite sick right now. According to the EPA’s 2017 National Water Quality Inventory Report issued to Congress, nearly a third of wetlands and nearly half of the nation’s river and streams are in “poor biological condition.” More than 30 years ago, the US Fish and Wildlife Service reported to Congress that the nation has lost more than half of the wetlands that existed in colonial times in the contiguous 48 states.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was sadly predictable given that Alito wrote long ago that, as far as he was concerned, the EPA can step in to protect water only “when a pollutant is discharged directly from a point source to navigable waters.”

Also ridiculously predictable was who applauded the ruling most loudly and lined up to drive over the bridge to troubled waters: fossil fuel, mining, road building and agricultural polluters and commercial and residential developers who desire minimal regulation when plowing over the landscape. In its friend of the court brief in the Idaho case, the American Petroleum Association, the American Gas Association, and the Association for Oil Pipelines complained that the Clean Water Act led to a permitting system so “onerous” that the failure to obtain a permit after years of waiting “can be ruinous.”

Wetland connectivity proven long ago

Actually, polluters want to leave science-based permitting in ruins. The EPA under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations determined that wetlands are critically connected to the quality of drinking water and to the quality of larger bodies of water, even when one cannot see the connections on the surface. In a 2015 report based on 1,200 peer-reviewed publications, the EPA cited “ample evidence” that many wetlands that lacked surface water connections still “provide physical, chemical, and biological functions that could affect the integrity of downstream waters.”

The functions, such as filtering pollutants, absorbing storm surges, slowing floods, preventing erosion and being protective nurseries for fish, add up to being almost priceless. Wetlands saved the 12 states ravaged by Hurricane Sandy from an additional $625 million in damage, according to a study by researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz and the Nature Conservancy. More than half of the nation’s $5.6 billion commercial seafood bounty in 2018 came from fish (such as salmon) and shellfish (such as crabs and shrimp) which spend part of their lifecycle in wetlands, according to NOAA.

Most people understand this. Two-thirds of respondents told the Pew Research Center in 2020 that the federal government is doing too little to protect the water quality of lakes, rivers and streams.

Accelerating wetland losses

In making its ruling in Sackett v EPA, the Supreme Court was oblivious to the fact that the world has lost a third of its wetlands since 1970. Wetlands are disappearing faster than forests, according to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. The high court has set the stage for the United States to lose tens of millions of acres more. Environmental groups say the ruling in Sackett v EPA is so sweeping, that the result may be even worse than when the Trump administration tried to gut the Clean Water Act in 2019.

At that time, nearly four dozen current and former federal scientists filed a complaint with the EPA’s inspector general, warning that 40 million acres of wetlands, equivalent to the size of Wisconsin, would be removed from protection—a massive chunk of the nation’s 110 million acres of wetlands in the contiguous 48 states.

It appears that this slim Supreme Court majority wants to open the floodgates to polluters even as we continue to learn more about just how connected wetlands are to bigger bodies of water and also to our entire way of life. A Canadian study two decades ago found that degraded water from human land use could be detected in wetlands up to two and a half miles away. That study concluded: “Effective wetland conservation will not be achieved merely through the creation of narrow buffer zones between wetlands and more intensive land-uses. Rather, sustaining high wetland water quality will require maintaining a heterogeneous regional landscape containing relatively large areas of natural forest and wetlands.”

In this latest case, the high court didn’t even bother with narrow buffer zones. Paired with last year’s ruling curtailing the EPA’s powers to curb the carbon emissions fueling global warming, Alito and his majority are further disconnecting our nation from the science that could help us heal the planet.

The evidence could not be clearer that the Earth really is quite sick. Rather than aiding its recovery, this US Supreme Court seems intent on scurrying around the hospital, ward by ward, bed by bed, unplugging every life-support system and vital-signs monitor it can.

Rose Sims has lived in South Memphis, Tennessee, for 25 years. She loves the stability of her block, with many homes owned by retired neighbors. Sundays come with aromas of dinners made by grandmothers wafting down the street. Weekends have men out washing cars and cutting lawns. On a good air day, people wave at each other from porches. 

“I like where I am because I know everyone,” she says.

Yet, Sims, 58, a retired workforce manager at the Internal Revenue Service, agonizes that she needs to move; she literally fears that the air she breathes could kill her. Her South Memphis neighborhood is nestled in one of the nation’s most infamous industrial zones. Her neighborhood and adjoining zip codes are home to about 90 facilities listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Toxic Release Inventory.

They include the nastiness of oil and coal tar refineries; hazardous waste storage and treatment facilities; and companies making or handling asphalt, concrete, fertilizers, paint, pharmaceuticals, plastics, solvents, appliances, furniture coatings, laminates, animal feed, and automotive parts. Several are owned by corporate titans such as Valero, Nucor, Sherwin-Williams, General Electric, Owens Corning, Exxon Mobil, and Land o’ Lakes. 

With such a high concentration of chemical plants, Sims said that, in her 25 years there, hardly a week has gone by without some kind of odor. “Somedays you can see the smog, some days, you can’t tell where the smells are coming from. It just ain’t right. We’ve been dumped on all our lives.”

In the past two years alone, South Memphis residents defeated a crude oil pipeline that would have slashed through the community to provide more profits for Fortune 500 companies Valero and Plains All American Pipeline. But that victory was quickly deflated by the roar of belching diesel trucks moving millions of tons of coal ash through the community from a defunct Tennessee Valley Authority power plant. The removal of the ash was out of fears of poisonous cadmium, arsenic and mercury seeping into Memphis’s drinking water.

But the 120 truckloads of ash a day are going to a landflll in South Memphis, continuing the nation’s history of disproportionately siting hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities in communities of color. While Tennessee is 73 percent White, a 2021 study by researchers from the University of California Berkeley and UC Davis found that 53 percent of the population living near hazardous facilities are of color.  

Justin Pearson, a community activist who helped lead the fight against the pipeline and was elected this year to the state legislature at the age of 28, called the onslaught of pollution a “slow lynching.”

Attention turns to ethylene oxide threat

Incredibly, though, all those polluting factories are not the most urgent reason driving Sims to the brink of moving. The pollutant bedeviling her and her neighbors is one they learned about just last year. It’s colorless and is emitted without the cacophonic clanging of heavy industry.

It is ethylene oxide, also known as EtO, a gas spewing out of a facility run by Sterilization Services of Tennessee, which uses it to sterilize medical equipment. The EPA considers ethylene oxide emissions to be cancer causing. In 2016, the agency concluded that the gas is 60 times more toxic than previously estimated, causing many communities that had never given facilities that use ethylene oxide facilities much thought—at least  compared to refineries, coal-fired power plants, and hazardous waste—to take fresh stock of the unusually high levels of disease they were seeing.

The most publicized example to date comes from the Chicago suburb of Willowbrook, Illinois. A 2018 federal analysis said the cancer risk from ethylene oxide emitted from a Sterigenics medical sterilization plant there constituted a “public health hazard.” And last year, a Cook County jury awarded a Willowbrook breast cancer survivor $363 million for her exposure to ethylene oxide from the now-shuttered facility. In January, Sotera Health, the parent company of Sterigenics, agreed to a $408 million settlement with as many as 870 other people who blame their cancers, miscarriages, and other serious health issues on ethylene oxide.

While Willowbrook, a predominately white suburb, was able to muster local and state support to shut down Sterigenics, there are still nearly 100 facilities around the nation using ethylene oxide to sterilize medical equipment and spices. According to a 2022 analysis, nearly a quarter of them are listed by the EPA as presenting an elevated cancer risk that could result in at least 100 additional cases per million people.

Millions of people, thousands of schools at risk

One of these higher risk facilities is the Sterilization Services of Tennessee plant near Rose Sims’s house. The level of emissions from this facility is so high that people who live closest to it face a cancer risk of 2,000 additional cases per one million people.   

The Memphis plant is among those highlighted by my colleagues at the Union of Concerned Scientists in a new report on ethylene oxide, Invisible Threat, Inequitable Impact. UCS did the analysis because the EPA last updated its ethylene oxide regulations 17 years ago and the agency is nearly a decade late in issuing new rules to slash emissions in line with much-better-known cancer and health risks. With the absence of adequate federal regulation over these years, the sterilization industry and its emissions have expanded in many densely populated areas.

UCS estimates that today some 14.2 million people live within five miles of two types of facilities that emit ethylene oxide, including sterilizers. More than 10,000 schools and childcare facilities are situated within these five-mile zones. Children are particularly sensitive to ethylene oxide exposure as it can damage their DNA, which divides more rapidly for them than for adults.   

Ethylene oxide emissions in the census tract where Sterilization Services is located in South Memphis are responsible for nearly 82 percent of the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollutants, according to Darya Minovi, lead author of the UCS analysis (UCS is also a partner, along with several other environmental and grassroots groups, in a lawsuit pressuring the EPA to come up with new, stricter ethylene oxide standards for sterilizers).

More than 130,000 people live within five miles of the Sterilization Services facility near Rose Sims. Scores of schools and childcare facilities lie within the zone too. Typical of the skewed demographics of who lives within five miles of ethylene oxide facilities, the residents of South Memphis are disproportionately people of color (87 percent) and low income (57 percent).

The Sterilization Service plant has been around since 1976. It was hit with two EPA enforcement actions in 2021, resulting in $9,857 in fines—an amount that adds up to less than pennies in a $4.5 billion global medical sterilization services market.

But it was only last summer that the EPA brought the plant’s dangers fully to the attention of South Memphis residents. For Sims, many illnesses among her relatives and friends suddenly made sense. A major noncancerous effect of ethylene oxide exposure, according to the federal government, can be “compromised respiratory function.”

Many neighbors frequently complain of sinus issues and bronchitis. Asthma runs rampant among the people Sims knows, including her own two children and grandchild. She said her son was hospitalized repeatedly for respiratory problems. “I can’t even explain how many times I spent the wee hours in the emergency room,” Sims said. “Then we’d come home, and I was up every four hours making sure he was breathing. It was so tiring.”  

Then there is cancer. “I was talking to a lady a few days ago and she said she had cancer,” Sims said. “It seems like you can go up one street and there’s eight to 10 people with cancer. It can’t be hereditary.”

But actions to mitigate the problem in Memphis remain scant to an outrageous level, compared to the attention and action Willowbrook ultimately received. There is no excuse to ignore South Memphis residents when some plants throughout the nation (including a sister facility of Sterilization Services in Georgia) have bowed to harsh publicity, state government scrutiny, and lawsuits in more empowered and resourced communities to install filters and other controls to limit emissions.. The EPA’s website says the Sterilization Services of Tennessee plant has had “no recent installation of controls,” and has “no current plans for new controls at this time.”

Unconscionable inaction

A resolution from the Memphis City Council calling on the plant to reduce ethylene oxide emissions to thus far no effect. The county thus far has been passive.  On February 7, the Southern Environmental Law Center, writing on behalf of South Memphis residents, petitioned the Shelby County Health Department to exercise emergency powers to shut down the Sterilization Services facility or halt ethylene oxide pollution. The petition cited the UCS analysis and noted that the average life span of a person living in the census tract where the facility is located is 65.3 years, 11 years below the state average. Four adjoining census tracts have average life spans between 66.5 years and 69.4 years.

“The South Memphis community should not be forced to endure several more years of
unnecessary exposure to a cancer-causing chemical while EPA completes its rulemaking,” the petition said.

But, just two days later, the county rejected a shutdown, saying the plant meets “current” federal, state, and local rules for ethylene oxide emissions. While admitting that South Memphis residents “face inequitable health, social, and environmental conditions,” the county said all it would do is ask for more federal and state health risk data.   

The response came so fast and was so unresponsive to community pleas that Angela Johnson, outreach director for Memphis Community Against Pollution, asked out loud in a telephone interview, “Did they even read our petition?”

EPA action needed

Such acute local inaction makes federal action urgent. But, so far, South Memphis residents are not sure what to make of the EPA’s sincerity. For one, the current movement of coal ash through the community is essentially federally approved, given that the Tennessee Valley Authority utility was created by Congress.

For another, the EPA under the Trump administration delayed telling even Willowbrook residents about the potential danger posed by its Sterigenics plant. Thirdly, the EPA under the Biden administration has sent a muddled message to South Memphis about ethylene oxide. One slide of a community presentation by the EPA last fall said, “Reducing EtO coming out of the facility is the best way to reduce risk.” But an EPA regional air quality director enraged some people at the presentation by adding that residents should reduce their risk by “spending less time near the facility.”

Sims was one of those who took the EPA comment as an implied recommendation that she and her neighbors should move, while the agency shirked its responsibility to address the pollution. “Come on now,” she said. “Where are these people going to move when the housing market is so ridiculously high? You got elderly people here and some people at jobs making barely more than $1,000 a month (Tennessee has no minimum wage law, putting many wage earners below the $7.25 an hour federal minimum). It’s the plant that needs to move. Take that plant and move it somewhere next to nobody.”

Johnson said it is critical for the EPA to act because the threat of ethylene oxide is so much more invisible than the black clouds belching from a coal plant or a crude oil or natural gas pipeline slashing a scar through communities. “This fight against ethylene oxide will look a little different,” Johnson said. “We can win if everybody comes together. But it will be harder.”

“With a pipeline, you could pull people together across the city when you can talk about a leak ruining the water source of Memphis and Shelby County. With EtO, we must connect more dots. How far does it travel? What does it cost the city for so many people to be sick? Even Willowbrook, with their resources, they still had a fight on their hands before the company backed away. I can’t fathom what we will have to go through.”

Sims says that for her part, she will try to see the fight through, meeting by meeting, hearing by hearing and asking people on the street if they know that they are living under a cloud of carcinogenic gas. Sims says she doesn’t want to be living in a place that’s so dangerous to her health and that of her family and neighbors, but she also doesn’t want to move.

Her conundrum could end if the EPA would finally follow its own 2016 risk assessment and require ethylene oxide sterilizers  to either cap their emissions (and ideally, transition to safer methods of sterilization),  or close their doors.