This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A new study delving the emotional and psychological impact of climate change on 16,000 young Americans provides crucial empirical evidence for what until now “we’ve been relying on our intuition to tell us,” the study’s first author says.

A clear majority of young Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 are either very, or extremely, worried. 

Eric Lewandowski, a psychologist at New York University, focuses on the mental and emotional effects of climate change and co-authored a 2021 paper on the subject but still felt there was more to be studied in the United States. 

His new paper, “Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events,” was published October 17 in The Lancet Planetary Health.

The bottom line nationally: Young people are overwhelmingly concerned about climate change. The study found that nearly 60 percent of respondents said they were either very or extremely worried when asked, “How worried, if at all, are you about climate change and its impacts on people and the planet?” and more than 85 percent said they experience some level of climate anxiety.

“It was very striking” that endorsement of climate issues was above 50 percent no matter political affiliation. 

“This was a chance, in such a big country, to try to get a better feel across the country, where the impacts of climate change are so heterogeneous, to try to get a feel for the emotional and psychological impacts of climate change,” said Lewandowski. 

To get a sense of how both geography and politics impact the perceived mental toll of climate change, the study compiled survey data on approximately 400 youths from each state or state cluster (states with smaller populations and similar geography and political landscapes were grouped together during data analysis, with the exception of Hawaii which had a sample size of around 100, but was considered too dissimilar from other states to be clustered).

Though this study still only provides an “emerging picture” of the mental impact of climate change on American youth, it provides crucial empirical evidence for what until now “we’ve been relying on our intuition to tell us about the emotional and psychological impact of climate change,” said Lewandowski. 

There was similarity in responses across dramatically different geo-political regions of the country. The responses never differed by more than 25 percent across all surveyed populations. 

The survey also tracked the emotional and psychological impact of climate change across the political spectrum. “Endorsement was high regardless of political identification, and yes, it was lower in the Republican group…One of the widely recognized features of thinking about climate change in this country is the political divide, and that’s also documented in the research,” said Lewandowski. 

“It was very striking,” he said, that endorsement of climate issues was above 50 percent no matter political affiliation. 

“We also asked people to report which of a range of seven severe weather events they had experienced in the area where they lived,” said Lewandowski. “As people endorsed or reported that their area had experienced more and more of these things, there was correlated increased distress and increased desire for action.”

“Everyone’s worried about this, and so it’s like, what does that mean for policy outcomes in places like Texas or Missouri or Florida.”

On both a hopeful and tragic note, the slope of that increase in distress and calls for action, stayed static between people of different party identification. “It really seems that this increase is happening, and we suggest the increase will happen across the political spectrum as there are more and more impacts,” said Lewandowski.

To Olivia Ferraro, a 25-year-old climate activist and member of the Climate Mental Health Network Gen Z advisory board who lives and works in New York City, this is just more evidence of right wing politicians being out of touch with their Gen Z constituents. 

This is exciting news to Ferraro. “Many of those respondents might not have ever participated in the democratic process before. So it’s very encouraging to see to me that it’s not really a partisan issue for young people,” said Ferraro. “Everyone’s worried about this, and so it’s like, what does that mean for policy outcomes in places like Texas or Missouri or Florida over the next five to 10 years, as these young people age into voting age groups?”

Overall Ferraro found the study results validating. For her, climate change is not just terrifying, but also personal. In 2022, Ferraro found herself unhealthily obsessed with climate change while feeling like she could do nothing after taking a deep dive into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the comprehensive state of the climate and the outlook of climate change. Then she got heat stroke one summer afternoon while on vacation in Florida. 

“I just passed out,” said Ferraro, who had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance and received stitches for a head wound. “It was very stressful, and I was just existing in the hot weather. I wasn’t even doing anything particularly exerting,” she said.

Given her own experience, she understands how going through an extreme weather event can be a catalyzing moment. “All of these factors together over months were a cocktail of distress,” she said. 

She expects concern over climate will only grow as more people feel the impact of extreme weather first hand. Ferraro just hopes that the effects of climate exposure on increased calls for action carries across generations.

“I feel like data won’t be what changes the minds of older generations,” said Ferraro. “I honestly think that a lot of the empathy and understanding about how distressing climate experiences are will most likely come from a close personal connection, who is thoughtful enough to share a first hand experience, or someone living through a serious weather event.” 

Caroline Hickman, a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Bath, welcomes the latest research on climate change and young people in the US. 

Much of the current data on regional variation in youth response to climate change comes from the 2021 paper she, Lewandowski, and numerous other authors published in The Lancet.

One thing Hickman wishes would get more attention is the way climate distress waxes and wanes at various stages of life. When the results of the 2020 British Association of Counseling and Psychotherapy survey on the mental health impact of climate change first came out, she was struck by how much concern over climate change decreased during midlife. While approximately 60 percent of people aged 16 to 34 and around 55 percent of people over the age of 55 experience some level of climate distress, only 44 percent of people aged 45 to 54 experienced any form of climate distress.

While we can speculate, said Hickman, “You could say, midlife, you’re busy trying to pay the mortgage…maybe getting divorced, separated, maybe trying to keep your head above water financially, right? You’ve got a lot of pressure all around from every direction, at midlife, particularly generationally, you’re taking care of aging parents and children, so you’re sandwiched.” But, she said, “the trouble is that is also the age of most industry CEOs and politicians, right? These are the people with the power to do something about this.”

Saahitya Uppalapati, a PhD student and climate communications researcher at George Mason University in Virginia, thinks the climate crisis has a PR problem. “People think, ‘Oh, it’s a luxury to be concerned about [the climate], but that’s not true,” she said. 

Her research has shown that it’s “people from Gen Z, with fewer economic resources and people of color who are experiencing the highest levels of climate distress,” especially when compared to the level of climate distress among “white Boomers.”

Uppalapati’s research has shown that 3 percent of Americans are already experiencing clinically significant climate anxiety, and 3 percent are so distraught over climate change, they meet the diagnostic criteria for depression. 

While this 3 percent is already a significant number of Americans, the percentage of Latino Americans experiencing climate anxiety and depression is much higher, with 10 percent reporting clinically significant anxiety and 10 percent reporting climate triggered depression. 

This holds true across other vulnerable communities. “There’s also some research to say that they’re also more likely to report that they’re involved in climate change activism, and more environmentally engaged than white people, and they also feel more confident about taking action,” said Uppalapati. “I think the historical and the systemic challenges that people of color have experienced, be it wider situations that have been exacerbated by climate change, like living close to highways because of zoning and the heat that comes with it, I think that has really fostered a sense of concern among people of color. You tend to see that they’re more concerned and anxious and depressed about it, but they’re also more engaged.”

Uppalapati’s work is the first of its kind. By modifying some of the existing diagnostic screening questions, she was able to use well established screening criteria for anxiety and depression, but specifically geared toward climate change.

The true number of people experiencing climate-triggered anxiety and depression may be much higher, said Uppalapati. “I think there’s hesitation to use that word [climate], but people might be experiencing it and not realize it, especially if they’re hesitant or reluctant to acknowledge climate change.”

“It’s okay to have some level of anxiety and depression. It’s a very normal response, but we don’t want it to get to a stage where it truly impedes your life. And we saw that over 3 percent are likely experiencing distress that is limiting their everyday life. That’s concerning, and it’s important that they provide mental health resources,” said Uppalapati.

That said, some climate distress is beneficial for climate action. Uppalapati co-authored another paper that showed the people who are experiencing the most climate distress are the ones most likely to take action. Another forthcoming paper looks at the connection between race, climate distress, and climate action. 

“You can’t shake off the fact that exposure to higher climate harms and social inequities stem from some level of systemic racism, And I just think it’s interesting that despite having the highest exposure, they’re also the people who are doing the most,” said Uppalapati. “They’re able to channel that distress into action.”

An education reporter turned climate organizer, Anya Kamenetz, of the Climate Mental Health Network, knows the importance of a good communication tool in helping gauge the emotional toll climate change is taking on the young—and old.

That was the idea behind the so-called climate emotions wheel, which Kamenetz created with the Network to help find new ways for people to voice their feelings around the climate crisis. 

A riff on the traditional emotions wheel common to therapists the world over, the climate emotions wheel features the 27 emotions most commonly associated with climate change. Laid out in a tiered rainbow pattern, there are four core emotions— anger, positivity, fear, and sadness—with secondary feelings radiating off of the central emotions. The 23 secondary emotions range from inspiration to indignation with everything from loneliness to panic to the old standby, hope in between. 

The wheel is available under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can use it. Since its creation a year ago, “it’s traveled all over the world. It’s been translated by volunteers into 15 languages. It’s been presented in classrooms and libraries. It was presented at the last UN conference at the cultural pavilion, and at a talk there,” said Kamenetz. 

There is even an emoji climate emotions wheel. Designed to be used with small children experiencing climate distress, the emoji wheel has since become a hit with people of all ages. 

Panu Pihkala, the Finnish interdisciplinary environmental studies researcher whose work the wheel is based on, was actually hoping to create something like the climate emotions wheel when he set out to work on his 2022 paper Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions. But it was “so complicated and I was so busy that I never did it. So I was very glad that somebody was doing it, and I enjoyed the cooperation!” said Pihkala, who was a member of the working group that translated his paper into the climate emotions wheel. 

In addition to trying to identify what feelings are most commonly associated with climate change, in his 2022 study, Pihkala also asked about people’s self recognition of stronger, more psychosomatic symptoms. But, he said, “a major issue in this kind of research is that it may be difficult for people, first of all, to recognize what they are feeling at all. And second, to recognize what they are feeling exactly in relation to climate change.”

This emotional disconnect can cause people to shy away from acknowledging their feelings and taking any subsequent action on climate change, especially when they stem from political alignment or potential for social alienation. 

“Fundamentally, the whole range of emotions can be constructive if the energy in these emotions becomes channeled in constructive ways,” said Pihkala. “For example, guilt can lead people to just distance themselves problematically from these issues, or it can lead people to change their ways.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The morning temperature is nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Keith Seaman sweats beneath his bucket hat, walking door to door through the cookie-cutter blocks of a subdivision in Casa Grande, Arizona. Seaman, a Democrat who represents this Republican-leaning area in the state’s House of Representatives, is trying to retain a seat he won by a margin of around 600 votes just two years ago. He wants to know what issues matter most to his constituents, but most of them don’t answer the door, or they say they’re too busy to talk. Those that do answer tend to mention standard campaign issues like rising prices and education—which Seaman, a former public school teacher, is only too happy to discuss.

“We’ll do our best to get more public money into education,” he tells one man in the neighborhood, before turning to the constituent’s kindergarten-age daughter to pat her on the head. “What grade are you in?”

“Why are you at our house?” the girl asks in return.

Seaman has knocked on thousands of doors as he seeks reelection this year. While his voters are fired up about everything from inflation to abortion, one issue doesn’t come up much on Seaman’s scorching tour through suburbia—even though it’s plainly visible in the parched cotton and alfalfa fields that surround the subdivision where he’s stumping for votes.

That issue is water. In Pinal County, which Seaman represents, water shortages mean that farmers no longer have access to the Colorado River, formerly the lifeblood of their cotton and alfalfa empires. The booming population of the area’s subdivisions face a water reckoning as well: The state has placed a moratorium on new housing development in parts of the county, as part of an effort to protect dwindling groundwater resources.  

Over the past four years, Arizona has become a poster child for water scarcity in the United States. Between decades of unsustainable groundwater pumping and a once-in-a-millenium drought, fueled by climate change, water sources in every region of the state are under threat. As groundwater aquifers dry up near some of the most populous areas, officials have blocked thousands of new homes from being built in and around the booming Phoenix metropolitan area.

“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan.’ That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

In more remote parts of the state, water-guzzling dairy farms have caused local residents’ wells to run dry. The drought on the Colorado River, long a lifeline for both agriculture and suburbia across the US West, has forced further water cuts to both farms and neighborhoods in the heart of the state. 

Arizona voters know that they’re deciding the country’s future—the state is one of just a half-dozen likely to determine the next president—but it’s unclear if they know that they’re voting on an existential threat in their own backyards. The outcome of state legislative races in swing districts like Seaman’s will determine who controls the divided state legislature, where Democrats are promoting new water restrictions and Republicans are fighting to protect thirsty industries like real estate and agriculture, regardless of what that means for future water availability. 

“Everybody’s running for reelection,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”

For these lawmakers’ voters, topics like abortion, the economy, and public safety are drawing far more attention than the water in their taps, and it will be these issues that drive the most people to the polls. But for the state officials who win on election day, their most consequential legacy may well be what they decide to do about the future of water in Arizona.

“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan,’” Ferris added. “That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

It’s not hard to see why hot-button issues like immigration and the cost of living are on the minds of Arizona voters: The state sits on the US-Mexico border and has experienced some of the highest rates of inflation in the country over the past few years. Meanwhile, its Republican-controlled state legislature has cut public education funding and allowed a 19th-century abortion ban to remain in effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state is at the center of almost every major political debate—“the center of the political universe,” in Politico’s words—and its nearly evenly divided electorate makes its swing votes key to determining who controls both the White House and Congress.

Even when the temperature doesn’t top 115 degrees F, the resulting campaign frenzy can make an out-of-state visitor lightheaded. Lawn signs clutter gas station parking lots, highway medians, and front yards; virtually every other television commercial is an ad for or against a candidate for Congress, the presidency, or some state office. A commercial slamming a Democratic candidate as a defund-the-police radical will frequently air right after an ad condemning a Republican as a threat to democracy itself. Mailers and campaign literature clog mailboxes and dangle on doorknobs. 

This avalanche of campaign advertising seldom mentions water. During a week reporting in the state, I saw exactly one ad that focused on the issue. It was a billboard in Tucson announcing that Kirsten Engel, the Democratic candidate for a pivotal congressional seat, supports “Protecting Arizona from Drought”—not exactly the most substantive engagement with the issue.

The reason for this avoidance is simple, according to Nick Ponder, a vice president of government affairs at HighGround, a leading Arizona political strategy firm. He said that while many voters in the state rank water among their top three or four issues, most don’t have a detailed understanding of water policy—meaning it’s unlikely that they’ll vote based on how candidates say they’ll handle water issues.

“They understand that we’re in a desert, and that we have water challenges—in particular groundwater and the Colorado River—but I don’t think that they understand how to best manage that,” he told Grist.

“We’re supposed to be able to get a part of that water, and now we can’t. It’s all going to California, to the f—ing liberals and the Democrats.” 

And how could they? Understanding Arizona water policy involves a maze of acronyms—AMA, GMA, INA, ADWR, CAWS, DAWS, DCP, CAP, and CAGRD are just the entry-level nouns—and complex technical models that track water levels thousands of feet underground. Even many elected officials on both sides of the aisle aren’t well versed in the issue, so they defer to the party leaders who have the strongest grasp on how the state’s water system works.

One upshot of this confusion — as well as the state’s bitter partisan divide — is that, even as Arizona’s water crisis has gained national attention, state lawmakers have failed to pass significant legislation to address the deficit of this critical resource. Over the past two years, the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, has been unable to broker a deal with the Republicans who control both chambers of the state legislature. Hobbs has put forward a series of proposals that would reform both agricultural water use in rural areas and rapid development in the suburbs of Phoenix, but she has come up a handful of votes short of passing them. Republicans have put forward their own plans—which are friendlier to the avowed water needs of farmers and housing developers—that she has vetoed.

Once you cut through the thicket of reports and acronyms, it’s clear that this year’s election is pivotal for breaking this gridlock and determining the future of water policy in the state. Republicans hold one-vote majorities in both chambers of the legislature, so state Democrats only need to flip one seat in each chamber in order to gain unified control of the government. If that happens, Hobbs will be able to ignore the objections of the agriculture and homebuilding industries, which have kept Republicans from signing on to her plans.

Hobbs and the Democrats want to limit or prohibit new farmland in rural areas, while simultaneously making it harder for homebuilders around Phoenix and Casa Grande to resume building new subdivisions. This would slow down, but not reverse, the decline in water levels around the state — and it would likely diminish profits for two industries that are pillars of the state’s economy. If Republicans retain control of the legislature, they would reopen new suburban development and roll out more flexible rules for rural groundwater, giving a freer hand to both industries but incurring the risk of more groundwater shortages in decades to come.

Legislators came close to reaching agreement on both issues earlier this year. Republicans passed a bill that would relax development restrictions on fallow farmland where housing tracts could be developed—a compromise with theoretical appeal to both parties’ desire to keep building housing for the state’s booming population—but Hobbs vetoed it, saying it lacked enough safeguards to prevent future water shortages. At the same time, lawmakers from both parties made progress on a deal that would allow the state to set limits on groundwater drainage in rural areas, but the talks stalled as this year’s legislative session came to a close.

“We had so many meetings, and we’ve never gotten closer,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who is the party’s foremost expert on water issues in the legislature. “Now we’re in campaign mode.”

In Seaman’s district of Pinal County, where water restrictions have created difficulties for both the agriculture and real estate industries, many of those who are engaged on water issues see a stark partisan divide. Paul Keeling, a fifth-generation farmer in Casa Grande, framed the shortage of water on the Colorado River as a competition between red Arizona and blue California.

“We’re supposed to be able to get a part of that water, and now we can’t,” he told Grist. “It’s all going to California, to the f***ing liberals and the Democrats.” 

Keeling has had to shrink his family’s cotton-farming enterprise over the past few years, because he’s lost the right to draw water from the canal that delivers Colorado River water to Arizona. It’s one reason among many that Keeling said he’s supporting former President Donald Trump this year, as he has in the past two elections.

The Republican leadership of Pinal County has sparred with Governor Hobbs and state Democrats on housing issues as well, albeit in far less animated terms. In response to studies showing the county’s aquifer diminishing, the state government placed a moratorium on new groundwater-fed development in the area in 2019. Homebuilders and developers pinned their hopes on Republicans’ proposed reform allowing new development on former farmland, but Hobbs’ veto dashed those dreams.

Stephen Miller, a conservative Republican who serves on the county’s board of supervisors, told Grist that he views the Democrats’ opposition to new Pinal County development as motivated by partisan politics. The Republicans legislators who represent the area voted in favor of the bill that would restart development, but Seaman, the area’s lone Democratic representative, voted against it.

“We’re just sitting back watching because the makeup of the House and the Senate will determine what happens here,” Miller said. “If they’re both taken over by the Democrats, I think there’s probably very little we can do [to relax the development restrictions].”

As Miller sees it, the restriction on new housing is part of a ploy by the state’s Democratic establishment to suppress growth in a conservative area—or even repossess its water.

“It shouldn’t be a partisan thing at all,” he said. “You’d think that they’d all want to pull this wagon in the same direction. But all they want Pinal County for is to stick a straw in here and take our water.”

Another reason for the relative campaign silence on water issues is that the regions where water is most threatened—areas where massive agricultural groundwater usage has emptied household wells and caused land to crack apart—tend to be represented by the politicians who are most dismissive of water conservation efforts, and vice versa.

Cochise County, where an enormous dairy operation called Riverview has residents up in arms over vanishing well water, backed Trump by almost 20 points in 2020; La Paz County, where a massive Saudi farming operation has drained local aquifers, backed the former president by almost 40 points. The state representatives from these areas are almost all Republicans opposed to new water regulation; many have direct ties to the agriculture or real estate industries.

Meanwhile, the majority of pro-regulation Democrats in the state legislature represent urban areas that have more diverse sources of water, stronger regulations, and more backup water to help them get through periods of shortage. 

The state legislature’s two leading voices on water exemplify this divide. Democratic state senator Priya Sundareshan represents a progressive district in the core of Tucson, where city leaders have banked trillions of gallons of Colorado River water, all but ensuring that the city won’t go dry—and can even continue to grow as the river shrinks.

Sundareshan’s chief adversary is Republican Gail Griffin, a veteran legislator from Cochise County who chairs the lower chamber’s powerful natural resources committee. Griffin, a realtor, has blocked nearly all proposed water legislation for years, preventing even bills from members of her own party from getting a vote. Other legislators and water experts often cite her as the principal reason the state has not moved any major bills to regulate rural water usage—even though the county she represents faces arguably the most acute water crisis of them all. (Griffin did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.)

Sundareshan, for her part, admits that it’s awkward that urban legislators are trying to set water policy for the rural parts of the state. But she says that Republicans have stalled on the issue for too long.

“It doesn’t look great,” she said. “But right now, rural legislators are setting policy for urban areas. That’s why that’s why legislators like me are stepping up to say, ‘Well, we need to actually solve these issues.’ Water is water, right? And the lack of availability of water in a rural area is going to impact the availability of water in our urban areas.”

The backlash to unsustainable groundwater pumping is not just coming from urban progressives, though—it’s also coming rural Republicans’ own constituents. In 2022, Cochise County voters approved a ballot proposal to restrict the growth of their water usage. (The strictness of the new rules is still being debated.) Even so, there’s no sign that any of these areas will endorse a Democrat. When Hobbs held a series of town halls in rural areas facing groundwater issues last year, she and her staff faced significant blowback from attendees who didn’t want the state meddling in their water usage. This year, elections in these areas are not even close to competitive. Griffin, the legislature’s strongest opponent of water regulation, is running unopposed.

This means that the future of the state’s water policy depends on voters in just a few swing districts that straddle the urban-rural divide: suburban seats on the outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson, where new subdivisions collide with vestigial farmland and open desert. For many voters in these purple districts, Arizona’s water problems are far from a motivating political issue—and likely won’t be for decades to come, as aquifers silently diminish underground. Voters might hear about water issues in other parts of the state, or wince when they see their water bills, but the disappearing water under their feet is all but invisible, and may remain so for the rest of their lives.

This dissonance is best exemplified by the 17th state legislative district, perhaps the most pivotal swing seat in the legislature. The district extends along the northern edge of Tucson, roping in a mix of retirement communities, rural houses, and cotton farms that may soon be replaced by new tract housing. Many of the new developments in these areas, such as the sprawling Saddlebrooke neighborhood, rely on finite aquifers and get water delivered by private companies. To comply with Arizona law, developers have to prove that they have enough water to supply new homes for 100 years, but even that doesn’t guarantee that the aquifers won’t continue drying up. 

It’s difficult to interest voters in a groundwater decline that is happening out of view, in a crisis that almost nobody is talking about publicly. The best that local Democrats can do is make a general pitch that water security is a common sense, bipartisan problem that they are committed to solving—without needing to explain how they would resolve complex questions about the interplay between water regulation and economic growth, among other nuances. 

John McLean, a former engineer who is running against a conservative legislator in an effort to flip the 17th district, has sought to position himself as a straight-down-the-middle moderate. His campaign literature tends not to mention his party affiliation, but it does tout water as one of his three key policy issues, along with public education and abortion access. The campaign pamphlet he’s been leaving in the doorways of homes in Saddlebrooke argues for a “commonsense approaches to secure our water future” and declares that “we must stop foreign and out-of-state corporations from pumping unlimited water out of our state”—something that has happened in the conservative, rural parts of Arizona, but nowhere near Saddlebrooke and the 17th district.

When I joined him as he knocked doors in Saddlebrooke, McLean told me that he’s found that almost every voter he meets agrees with him on the need for sensible water regulations—a far cry from lightning-rod issues like public safety, abortion, and inflation. 

“Everybody is really serious about water independence, and I think that they’re concerned about partisanship,” he said. “I don’t think there’s really much of a partisan difference among citizens when it comes to water.”

That apparent consensus, however, does not extend to the state’s elected officials.

“My Republican opponent voted to relax groundwater pumping restrictions,” McLean, referring to a bill that would have eliminated legal liability for groundwater users whose water usage compromised nearby rivers or streams. “So he was on exactly the wrong side of that one.”

In August, political science professor Ashley Moraguez started the fall semester at the University of North Carolina Asheville with “grand plans” for engaging students on electoral politics. As the director of UNC Asheville Votes, a nonpartisan student-run group, Moraguez planned for fall to be the “Semester of Civics”—including voter registration tabling events, meet-and-greets with local candidates, and a “Party at the Polls” in Reed Plaza with food and live music.

North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin; Trump leads Harris there by about 1 percentage point.

For students, an age group with historically low turnout, these efforts weren’t an abstract exercise: North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin. Donald Trump won the state by less than 75,000 votes in 2020 and now leads Kamala Harris there by about 1 percentage point, according to recent polls. In other words, every vote in North Carolina matters.

Then in late September, Hurricane Helene hit. The storm dumped nearly 14 inches of rain on Asheville, causing roads and neighborhoods to flood and killing nearly 100 people statewide. UNC Asheville, a campus of 2,900 undergraduates, lost electricity and running water. Students and faculty relocated. Classes were canceled and will be held virtually for the rest of the semester.

Now, after Helene, getting to the polls—or getting a hold of an absentee ballot—got even harder for college students in western North Carolina.

This has made Moraguez’s work more challenging, and also much more important. With the campus closed, the university relocated its early voting site from the student union to the edge of campus, at a health center. Moraguez and UNC Asheville Votes pivoted to providing virtual resources—a website, Instagram page, and email address where students could ask voting-related questions. “I’m really heartened by how many students, amidst everything they’re dealing with, have been reaching out with questions so that they’re making sure that their ballots do count,” she says.

Still, she says, it’s hard to know who, or how many, the group is reaching. Parts of western North Carolina still don’t have utilities, electricity, or wifi. And many students, understandably, have more pressing issues than figuring out how to vote. “They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones,” Moraguez says. “And they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”

As a political science professor and voting leader in Asheville, Moraguez is uniquely positioned to explain the challenges this key demographic faces post-Helene. And she, at least in part, understands what they’re going through: When I spoke to her earlier this month, on the first day of early voting in North Carolina, she had no reliable internet or potable water at her home in Asheville and had spent the previous weeks “bouncing around” and staying with family in other parts of North Carolina and Georgia.

Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation:

With the university on hiatus and then switching to remote classes, there’s almost an echo to what happened when Covid broke out. Did the pandemic help prepare you for this? Does it feel familiar?

Yes and no. In the 2020 election cycle, we had to completely rethink how we did voter engagement on campus. I’ve learned a lot since 2020 about how to engage people remotely.

Students taught me how to use social media more effectively. We figured out how to communicate better about complex electoral information over email through trial and error. We had the website ready to go. We had the Instagram page ready to go. We didn’t have to start those from scratch, as we did in 2020. So in that respect, despite these really unfortunate and tragic situations, we were ready to pivot our electoral engagement efforts much more quickly than in the past.

The challenge is that I still don’t have reliable internet at my home. I don’t have potable water at home. Will I be able to teach online? Do I go stay with family? My students are going to have utility and infrastructure issues. Those issues are more severe than I remember from 2020.

What do you mean when you say students helped you learn to navigate social media better?

When I was in college, Facebook was the social media of choice. I graduated from college in 2009. I wasn’t super familiar with Instagram Stories, and I don’t think I fully recognized the extent to which young people do get some of their information and news from social media.

Students really taught me how to more effectively convey useful information on social media in a way that’s palatable to young people, and how to make things more aesthetically pleasing, more likely to get attention. I don’t primarily get my news from social media, and so it was really helpful for me to have students leading this. I’ve learned just as much from them as they have from me.

What are your biggest challenges right now in getting-out-the-vote efforts?

It’s hard to know who we’re reaching. I fear that in our campus outreach efforts— since they all have been online—that we’re missing some potential voters in western North Carolina who are most affected by these storms.

Our State Board of Elections and our state legislature have adopted a slate of emergency measures to help voters in western North Carolina have better access to the polls, but those changes are only effective in so far as voters are aware of them.

“They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”

And there are some people who just have much more pressing issues on their plate right now than thinking about the election. They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now. And you know, their votes matter, their voices matter. And I think right now, especially, we want to hear from people who are having those experiences, but they might not be getting the information they need or have the capacity to vote right now.

I was in college during the 2016 election. I requested an absentee ballot from Florida, which is where I grew up and where I was hoping to vote. It never came. And I just never followed up on it and never voted. Is there a concern that, at the end of the day, these are teenagers or young adults in their early 20s and we’re asking a lot of them to stay on top of voting?

It’s undoubtedly true that young people—which I’m defining as 18 to 25, roughly—have lower voter turnout rates than other demographic groups. But I think there’s a couple reasons why that is and why it’s unfair to compare young voters to older groups.

Political science research shows us that voting is habitual. It’s a habit that you develop over time, and once you get into that habit, you are going to almost certainly be a reliable voter for the rest of your life. And so how can we expect first-time voters to have those habits when they haven’t been legally allowed to engage in those habits?

There’s also a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe in working with young people in or outside of the classroom. Instead, I tend to see it as an issue of access. It’s just hard to get involved. There’s a lot of rules and deadlines and barriers in place, regardless of where you live. There’s just a big startup cost to getting involved. And so if there isn’t someone there to help you navigate that, it can be really disincentivizing to vote or to get engaged in politics otherwise, because you just don’t know where to start.

For students who are studying at UNC Asheville from out of state, will they be able to access the absentee ballots sent from their home states?

Overwhelmingly, our students are North Carolina residents. I think this year, about 13 percent of our student body is an out-of-state US resident. So that would equate to about 300 to 400 students. Of those students, it’s hard to know how many of them would be registered in North Carolina versus in their home state.

“There’s a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe.”

For those students who were on campus and had requested an absentee ballot before the storm hit, it is possible [they] had to evacuate before they received their ballot. It’s hard to know how many students this is affecting, but almost certainly, it is affecting some voters.

The advice we’ve been giving those voters is to contact their local or county elections office as soon as possible and request a reissuance of their ballot.

Historically, after severe hurricanes, you often see a decline in voting. Has disaster-related voter suppression come up in your classes at all?

I teach courses on US elections. We talk about barriers to voting, not just devices or laws in place that could make it easier or more difficult for people to vote, but also socioeconomic factors that can make it harder for some groups of people to vote than others. I’ve never spoken with my students specifically about how natural disasters and recovery efforts could affect the dynamics, but rest assured that we will be once our classes pick back up.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A large majority of people tell pollsters they support renewable energy. But when ordinances and projects come before local governments, opponents show up more often than supporters.

Greenlight America, a new national nonprofit, wants to change this. I spoke with its co-founders this week in one of their first interviews about their mission and strategy.

The group launched last year, has raised $5 million and has a staff of about 20. It is incorporated in Washington, DC, with employees all over the country.

Matt Traldi, CEO and co-founder, said he takes inspiration from the way the labor movement prioritizes local voices and focuses on organizing. He was a co-founder of Indivisible, an advocacy group formed to counter the policy agenda of Donald Trump, and previously he spent a decade working for labor unions.

“There’s a lot of support out there for clean energy projects,” he said. But he found that supporters sometimes “don’t know when and where to show up.”

The stakes are high. The United States needs to add vast amounts of renewable energy to be able to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and avoid the worst effects of climate change. Local opposition has slowed or canceled many projects.

“One way to think about Greenlight is as a counterweight to groups that oppose renewable energy, such as Virginia-based Citizens for Responsible Solar.”

Greenlight America aims to alert local groups and people of the issues in their communities, and foster greater participation by people who support a shift to cleaner energy.  “The reality is that most people aren’t reading agendas or minutes of their local government proceedings, and most organizations in the nonprofit space aren’t focused at the local level,” said Ari Appel, chief program officer and co-founder.

He previously ran campaigns for environmental and renewable advocacy organizations, such as Building Back Together, which seeks to support the implementation of President Joe Biden’s climate and clean energy legislation.

Ethan Todras-Whitehill, chief communications officer and co-founder, said Greenlight wants to give renewable energy supporters “the information and the training they need to feel comfortable going up there and standing up in front of their town council.”

He previously founded Swing Left, which works to elect Democrats in state legislatures.

While the co-founders have deep ties to groups that support Democrats, they emphasized that Greenlight is nonpartisan. Public opinion research, such a 2023 report from Pew Research Center, shows that support for renewable energy is strong across partisan lines.

And yet opponents of renewable energy projects are often highly organized at the local level to the point that supporters of projects feel ostracized and are reluctant to speak.

People fight renewable energy for a variety of reasons. The most common one I’ve observed is concern about how a project will change the look and feel of a place, which is something I can sympathize with, especially for people who live closest to the site. The benefits of development—for the environment and the local tax base—get talked about much less.

One way to think about Greenlight is as a counterweight to groups that oppose renewable energy, such as Virginia-based Citizens for Responsible Solar.

“We’re very much students of the opposition,” said Traldi, the CEO. He compared this to how Indivisible took lessons from how the Tea Party movement organized against President Barack Obama.

But it would be an oversimplification to say Greenlight is a pro-renewables version of groups that oppose the projects. Opposition organizations tend to focus on disseminating misleading information to make people fear renewable energy. A common message is to say or imply that solar farms are a threat to human health—which isn’t true.

In contrast, Greenlight views itself as more of an organizer and convener, and won’t necessarily get into the specifics of what is discussed in local campaigns.

Greenlight’s agenda overlaps with that of renewable energy developers, but it doesn’t take money from developers.

An example is how the group participated in a debate this year in Erie County, Pennsylvania: The County Council was considering revisions to its solar ordinance that contained a provision saying a project needed to have an interconnection agreement with the regional grid operator to be able to apply for a building permit.

The provision would essentially shut down new permits because the grid operator is working through a years-long backlog of processing applications for interconnection. In most other jurisdictions, a developer would get their building permit at the same time they are waiting in a queue for grid access.

It’s not clear to me whether the proposal was a deliberate attempt to hinder development. Regardless, Greenlight learned of it and then got in touch with groups that typically support renewable energy to speak to the County Council.

Records from council meetings show that local representatives from Solar United Neighbors and PennFuture, nonprofits that support renewable energy development, spoke about what the proposal would do and urged the council to remove the provision. The council followed this advice.

“A coalition came together really quickly,” said Jenny Tomkins, a PennFuture clean water campaign manager, who is based near Erie.

The ability of local and national groups to collaborate was essential and Greenlight helped to bring the parties together, she said.

“Local folks provide firsthand knowledge of the proposed projects, community concerns and tight-knit relationships with local elected officials,” she said. “The statewide and national groups bring lessons learned from other communities, relationships with the solar industry and legal and policy expertise.”

Greenlight’s agenda overlaps with that of renewable energy developers, but it doesn’t take money from developers. This is an important distinction because opposition campaigns like to say supporters are acting out of financial self-interest.

Success for the organization means local people show up to participate, and this helps to nudge officials. Don’t expect Traldi or his colleagues to stand up to speak in your town. But if Greenlight can find ways to fill seats and dockets, it could change the dynamics of local debates.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Helene and Milton, the two massive hurricanes that just swept into the country—killing hundreds of people, and leaving both devastation and rumblings of political upheaval in seven states—amounted to their own October surprise. Not that the storms led to some irredeemable gaffe or unveiled some salacious scandal. The surprise, really, may be that not even the hurricanes have pushed concerns about climate change more toward the center of the presidential campaign.  

With early voting already underway and two weeks before Election Day, when voters will decide between Vice President Kamala Harris, who has called climate change an “existential threat,” and former President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” Grist’s editorial staff presents a climate-focused voter’s guide—a package of analyses and predictions about what the next four years may bring from the White House, depending on who wins. 

The next administration will be decisive for the country’s progress on critical climate goals. By 2030, just a year after the next president would leave office, the US has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels, and expects to supply up to 13 million electric vehicles annually. A little further down the line, though no less critical, the country’s climate goals include reaching 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 and achieving a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

As you gear up to vote, here are 15 ways that Harris’ and Trump’s climate- and environment-related policies could affect your life—along with some information to help inform your vote. 

Energy
Over the last year or so, utility companies across the country have woken up to a new reality: After two decades of flat growth, electricity demand is about to spike, due to the combined pressures of new data centers, cryptocurrency mining, a manufacturing boom, and the electrification of buildings and transportation.

While the next president will not directly decide how the states supply power to their new and varied customers, he or she will oversee the massive system of incentives, subsidies, and loans by which the federal government influences how much utilities meet electricity demand by burning fossil fuels—the crucial question for the climate. 

Trump’s answer to that question can perhaps be summed up in the three-word catchphrase he’s deployed on the campaign trail: “Drill, baby, drill.” He is an avowed friend of the fossil fuel industry, from whom he reportedly demanded $1 billion in campaign funds at a fundraising dinner last spring, promising in exchange to gut environmental regulations. 

Vice President Harris is not exactly running on a platform of decarbonization, either. In an effort to win swing votes in the shale-boom heartland of Pennsylvania, she has reversed course on her past opposition to fracking, and she has proudly touted the record levels of oil and gas production seen under the current administration. Despite the risk of nuclear waste, the Biden administration has also championed nuclear power as a carbon-free solution and sought to incentivize the construction of new reactors through subsidies and loans. Although Harris says her administration would not be a continuation of Biden’s, it’s reasonable to expect continuity with Biden’s overall approach of leaning more heavily on incentives for low-emissions energy than restrictions on fossil fuels to further a climate agenda. —Gautama Mehta, environmental justice reporting fellow

Home improvements
In 2022, the Biden administration handed the American people a great big carrot to incentivize them to decarbonize: the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA provides thousands of dollars in the form of rebates and tax credits for a consumer to get an EV and electrify their home with solar panels, a heat pump, and an induction stove. (Though the funding available for renters is slim, it is also out there.) In 2023, 3.4 million Americans got $8.4 billion in tax credits for home energy improvements thanks to the IRA.

If elected, Trump has pledged to rescind the remaining funding, which would require the support of Congress. By contrast, Harris has praised the law (which, as vice president, she famously cast the tie-breaking vote to pass) and would almost certainly veto any attempts by Congress to repeal it. As a presidential candidate, she has not said whether she would expand the law, though many expect she would focus on more efficient implementation.  

But while repealing the IRA might slow the steady pace of American households decarbonizing, it can’t stop what’s already in motion. “There are fundamental forces here at work,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “At the end of the day, there’s very little that Trump can do to stand in the way.” 

For one, the feds provide guidance to states on how to distribute the money made available through the IRA. More climate-ambitious states are already layering on their own monetary incentives to decarbonize. So even if that IRA money disappeared, states could pick up the slack. 

And two, even before the IRA passed, market forces were setting clean energy on a path to replace fossil fuels. The price of solar power dropped by 90 percent between 2010 and 2020. And like any technology, electric appliances will only get cheaper and better. It might take longer without further support from the federal government, but the American home of tomorrow is, inevitably, fully electric—no matter the next administration. —Matt Simon, senior staff writer focusing on climate solutions

Insurance premiums
Whether they know it or not, many Americans are already confronting the costs of a warming world in their monthly bills: In recent years, home insurance premiums have risen in almost every state, as insurance companies face the fallout of larger and more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms. In some states, like Florida and California, many prominent companies have fled the market altogether. While some Democrats have proposed legislation that would create a federal backstop for these failing insurance markets—with the goal of ensuring that coverage remains available for most homeowners—these proposals have yet to make much headway in a divided Congress. For the moment, it’s state governments, rather than the president or any other national politicians, that have real jurisdiction over homeowner’s insurance prices.

Near the end of the presidential debate in September, when both candidates were asked about what they’d do to “fight climate change,” Harris began her response by referring to “anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up” as a way to counter Trump’s denials of climate change. 

Traditional homeowner policies don’t include flood insurance, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency runs a flood insurance program that serves 5 million homeowners in the US, mostly along the East Coast. Homeowners in the most flood-prone areas are required to buy this policy, but uptake has been lagging in some particularly vulnerable inland communities—including those that were recently devastated by Hurricane Helene. Project 2025, which many experts believe will serve as the blueprint to a second Trump term (though his campaign disavows any connection to it), imagines FEMA winding down the program altogether, throwing flood coverage to the private market. This would likely make it cheaper to live in risky areas—but it would leave homeowners without financial support after floods, all but ensuring only the rich could rebuild. —Jake Bittle, staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation

Transporation
The appetite for infrastructure spending is so bipartisan that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed in 2021, has become more widely known as the bipartisan infrastructure law. But don’t be fooled. A wide gulf separates how Harris and Trump approach transportation, with potentially profound climate implications.

Harris hasn’t offered many specifics, but she has committed to advancing the rollout out of the Biden administration’s infrastructure agenda. That includes traditional efforts like building roads and bridges, mixed with Democratic priorities including union labor and an eye toward climate-resilience. The infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act include billions in spending to promote the adoption of electric vehicles, produce them domestically, and add 500,000 charging stations by 2030. They also include greener transportation efforts aimed at, among other things, electrifying buses, enhancing passenger rail, and expanding mass transit.

That said, Harris has not called for the eventual elimination of internal combustion vehicles, despite such plans in 12 states. Trump has also been sparse on details about transportation—his website doesn’t address the issue except to decry Chinese ownership. During his first term and 2020 campaign, he championed (though never produced) a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. It focused on building “gleaming” roads, highways, and bridges, and reducing the environmental review and government oversight of such projects. He has favored flipping the federal-first funding model to shift much of the cost onto states, municipalities, and the private sector.

Ultimately, Trump seems to have little interest in a transition to low-carbon transportation—the 2024 official Republican platform calls for rolling back EV mandates—and he remains a vocal supporter of fossil fuel production.  —Tik Root, senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition

Health
Rising global temperatures and worsening extreme weather are changing the distribution and prevalence of tick- and mosquito-borne diseases, fungal pathogens, and water-borne bacteria across the US. State and local health departments rely heavily on data and recommendations on these climate-fueled illnesses from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—whose director is appointed by the president and can be influenced by the White House. 

In his first term, Trump tried to divorce many federal agencies’ research functions from their rulemaking capacities, and there are concerns that, if he wins again in November, Trump would continue that effort. Project 2025, a sweeping blueprint developed by right-wing conservative groups with the aim of influencing a second Trump term, proposes separating the CDC’s disease surveillance efforts from its policy recommendation work, meaning the agency would be able to track the effects of climate change on human health, like the spreading of infectious diseases, but it wouldn’t be able to tell states how to manage them or inform the public about how to stay safe from them. 

Harris is expected to leave the CDC intact, but she hasn’t given many signals on how she’d approach climate and health initiatives. Her campaign website says she aims to protect public health, but provides no further clarification or policy position on that subject, or specifically climate change’s influence on it.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration has made strides in protecting Americans from extreme heat, the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the US. It proposed new heat protections for indoor and outdoor workers, and it made more than $1 billion in grant funding available to nonprofits, tribes, cities, and states for cooling initiatives, such as planting trees in urban areas, that reduce the risk of heat illness.

It’s reasonable to expect that a future Harris administration would continue Biden’s work in this area. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the IRA, which includes emissions-cutting policies that will lead to less global warming in the long term, benefiting human health not just in the US but worldwide. 

But there’s more to be done. Biden established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in the first year of his term, but it still hasn’t been funded by Congress. Harris has not said whether she will push for more funding for that office. —Zoya Teirstein, staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health

Food prices
Inflation has cooled significantly since 2022, but high prices—especially high food prices—remain a concern for many Americans. Both candidates have promised to tackle the issue; Harris went so far as to propose a federal price-gouging ban to lower the cost of groceries. Such a ban could help smaller producers and suppliers, but economists fear it could also lead to further supply shortages and reduced product quality.

Meanwhile, Trump has said he will tax imported goods to lower food prices, though analysts have pointed out that the tax would likely do the opposite. Trump-era tariff fights during the US-China trade war led to farmers losing billions of dollars in exports, which the federal government had to make up for with subsidies.

Trump’s immigration agenda could also affect food prices. If reelected, the former president has said he will expel millions of undocumented immigrants, many of whom work for low pay on farms and in other parts of the food sector, playing a vital role in food harvesting and processing. Their mass deportation and the resulting labor shortage could drive up prices at the grocery store. Meanwhile, Harris promises to uphold and strengthen the H-2A visa system—the national program that enables agricultural producers to hire foreign-born workers for seasonal work. 

In the short term, it must be emphasized that neither candidate’s economic plans will have much of an effect on the ways extreme weather and climate disasters are already driving up the cost of groceries. Severe droughts are one of the factors that have destabilized the global crop market in recent years, translating to higher US grocery store prices. Warming has led to reduced agricultural productivity and diminished crop yields, while major disasters throttle the supply chain. Even a forecast of extreme weather can send food prices higher. These climate trends are likely to continue over the next four years, no matter who becomes president. 

But the winner of the 2024 election can determine how badly climate change batters the food supply in the long run—primarily by controlling greenhouse gas emissions. —Frida Garza, staff writer focusing on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture & Ayurella Horn-Muller, staff writer focusing on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture

Drinking water
“I want absolutely immaculate, clean water,” Trump said in June during the first presidential debate this election season. But if a second Trump presidency is anything like the first, there is good reason to worry about the protection of public drinking water. 

During his first term in office, the Trump administration repealed the Clean Water Rule, a critical part of the Clean Water Act that limited the amount of pollutants companies could discharge near streams, wetlands, and other sources of water used for public consumption. “It was ready to protect the drinking water of 117 million Americans and then, within a few months of being in office, Donald Trump and [former EPA administrator] Scott Pruitt threw it into the trash bin to appease their polluter allies,” former Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a press release. 

While in office, Trump also secured a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which last year tipped the court in favor of a decision to vastly limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate pollution in certain wetlands, forcing the agency to weaken its own clean water rules. 

A Harris administration would likely carry forward the work of several Biden EPA measures to safeguard the public’s drinking water from toxic heavy metals and other contaminants. For example, in April, the EPA passed the nation’s first-ever national drinking water standard to protect an estimated 100 million people from a category of synthetic chemicals known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancer, high blood pressure, and immune system deficiencies. Enforcing the new standard will require the agency to examine test results from thousands of water systems across the country and follow up to ensure their compliance—an effort that will take place during the next White House administration. 

“As president,” Harris’ website says, “she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all.” Project 2025, the policy plan drawn up by former Trump staffers to guide a second Trump administration’s policies, indicates that a future Trump administration would eliminate safeguards like the PFAS rule that place limits on industrial emissions and discharges. 

Just this month, the EPA issued a groundbreaking rule requiring water utilities to replace virtually every lead pipe in the country within 10 years. With funds from Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, the agency will also invest $2.6 billion for drinking water upgrades and lead pipe replacements. Harris has previously spoken out about the dangers of lead pipes, stating at a press conference in 2022 that lead exposure is “an issue that we as a nation should commit to ending.” 

The success of these and other measures will rely on a well-staffed EPA enforcement division, which may end up being one of the most insidious stakes of this election for environmental policies. Budget cuts and staff departures during the first Trump administration gutted the EPA’s enforcement capacity — a problem that the agency has spent the past four years trying to mend. Project 2025 “would essentially eviscerate the EPA,” said Stan Meiburg, who served as acting deputy administrator for the EPA from 2014 to 2017.  —Lylla Younes, senior staff writer covering chemical pollution, regulation, and frontline communities

Clean air
President Biden’s clean air policy has been characterized by a spate of new rules to curb toxic air pollution from a variety of facilities, including petroleum coke ovens, synthetic manufacturing facilities, and steel mills. While environmental advocates have decried some of these regulations as insufficiently protective, certain provisions—such as mandatory air monitoring—were hailed as milestones in the history of the agency’s air pollution policy. Former EPA staffer and air pollution expert Scott Throwe told Grist that a Harris- and Democratic-led EPA would continue to build on the work of the past four years by  enforcing these new rules, which will require federal oversight of state environmental agencies’ inspection protocols and monitoring data. 

Project 2025 proposes a major reorganization of the EPA, which would include the reduction of full-time staff positions and the elimination of departments deemed “superfluous.” It also promotes the rollback of a range of air quality regulations, from ambient air standards for toxic pollutants to greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. 

What’s more, a growing body of research has found that poor air quality is often concentrated in communities of color, which are disproportionately close to fossil fuel infrastructure. Conservative state governments havepushedback against the Biden EPA’s efforts to address “environmental justice” through agency channels and in court—efforts that will likely enjoy more executive support under a second Trump administration. —Lylla Younes

Public lands
Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a national monument can be created by presidential decree. The act can be a useful tool to protect important landscapes from industries like oil, gas, and even green energy enterprises. Tribal nations have asked numerous presidents to use this executive power to protect tribal homelands that might fall within federal jurisdiction. During his first term, Trump argued that the act also gives the president the implicit power to dissolve a national monument.

In 2017, Trump drastically shrunk two Obama-era designations, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, in what amounted to the biggest slash of federal land protections in the history of the United States. At the time, Trump said that “bureaucrats in Washington” should not control what happens to land in Utah. While giving back local control was Trump’s stated rationale, tribes in the area, like the Diné, Ute, Hopi, and Zuni, had been working for years to protect the two iconic and culturally significant sites. Meanwhile, his decision opened up the land for oil and gas development. While not all tribal nations are opposed to oil and gas production, tribal environmental advocates are worried that a second Trump term will erode federal environmental regulations and commitments to progress in the fight against climate change. 

Since 2021, the Biden administration has put more than 42 million acres of land into conservation by creating and expanding national monuments. This includes the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, a new monument spanning a million acres near the Grand Canyon—the kind of protection that tribal activists for years had worked to prevent industrial uranium mining. And just this month, Biden announced the creation of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary—a 4,500-square-mile national marine sanctuary to be “managed with tribal, Indigenous community involvement.” 

But Harris might not continue that legacy. While she has remained silent about what she would do to protect lands, she has been vocal about continuing the US’s oil and gas production as well as a push for more mining to help with the green transition—like copper from Oak Flat in Arizona and lithium from Thacker Pass in Nevada—both important places to tribal communities in the area. Tribes have been subjected to the adverse effects of the energy crisis before—namely dams that destroyed swaths of homelands and nuclear energy that increased cancer rates of Southwest tribal members—and without specific protections, it’s easy to see green energy as a changing of the guard instead of a game changer. —Taylar Dawn Stagner, Indigenous affairs reporting fellow

Climate disasters
Congress controls how much money the Federal Emergency Management Agency receives for relief efforts after catastrophic events like hurricanes Helene and Milton, but the president holds significant sway over who receives money and when. A second Trump administration would likely curtail some of the climate-focused resiliency projects FEMA has pursued in recent years, such as cutting back money for infrastructure that would be more resilient against hazards like sea level rises, fires, and earthquakes. Republican firebrands, like Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, have decried these projects as wasteful and unnecessary.

Under the Stafford Act, which governs federal disaster response, the president has the power to disburse relief to specific parts of the country after any “major disaster”—hurricanes, big floods, fires. In September, Trump suggested that he might make disaster aid contingent on political support if he returns to office, promising to withhold wildfire support from California unless state officials give more irrigation water to Central Valley farmers. Harris has not given an explicit indication of how she would fund climate-resiliency or disaster-response programs, though she has boosted FEMA’s recovery efforts following Helene and Milton. —Jake Bittle, staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation

Climate science
The United States has long been a leader in research essential to understanding—and responding to—a warming world. The government plays a key role in advancing climate science and providing timely meteorological data to the public. Neither Trump nor Harris address this in their platform, but history yields clues to what their presidency might mean for this vital work. 

Trump has consistently dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and downplayed scientific consensus that it is anthropogenic, or driven by human activities. As president, he gutted funding for research, appointed climate skeptics and industry insiders, and eliminated scientific advisory committees from several federal agencies. Thousands of government scientists quit in response. (In fact, still reeling from Trump’s attacks, new union contracts protect scientific integrity to combat such meddling.) His administration censored scientific data on government websites and tried to undermine the findings of the National Climate Assessment, the government’s scientific report on the risks and impacts of climate change. If reelected, Trump would almost certainly adopt a similar strategy, deprioritizing climate science and potentially even restructuring or eliminating federal agencies that advance it.

Harris has long supported climate action; she co-sponsored the Green New Deal as a senator and, as vice president, cast the deciding vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which bolstered funding for agencies that oversee climate research. As part of its “whole of government” approach to the crisis, the Biden administration created the National Climate Task Force, with the EPA, NASA, and others to ensure science informs policy. Although Harris hasn’t said much about climate change as a candidate, climate organizations generally support her campaign and believe her administration will build on the progress made so far. —Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, climate news reporting fellow

Your electric bill
A lot goes into calculating the energy rates you see on your monthly electric bill—construction and maintenance of power plants, fuel costs, and much more. It’s pretty tough to draw a direct line from the president to your bill, so if you’re worried about your energy costs, you’d do well to read up on your local public utility commission, municipal electric authority, or electric membership cooperative board.

What the president can do, though, is appoint people to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—the board of up to five individuals who regulate the transmission of utilities across the entire country. As the US continues to shift away from fossil fuels, a fundamental problem stands in the way: The country’s aging and fragmented grid lacks the capacity to move all of the electricity being generated from renewable sources. In May, FERC, which currently has a Democratic majority, approved a rule to try to solve that issue; it voted to require that regional utilities identify opportunities for upgrading the capacities of existing transmission infrastructure and that regional grid operators forecast their transmission needs 20 years into the future. These steps will be essential for utility companies to take advantage of the subsidies offered in the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law. 

The rule is facing legal challenges, which like much else in US courts, appear to be political. So even if Harris wins November’s election, and maintains a commission that prioritizes the transition away from fossil fuels, the oil and gas industry and the politicians who support it will not acquiesce easily. If Trump wins, he’d have the chance to appoint a new FERC chair from among the current commissioners and to appoint a new commissioner in 2026, when the current chair’s term ends. (Or possibly sooner.)

Although FERC’s actions tend to be more insulated from changes in the White House because commissioners serve five-year terms, a commission led by new Trump appointees would most likely deprioritize initiatives that would upgrade the grid to support clean energy adoption. Trump’s appointees supported fossil fuel interests on several fronts during his previous term, for instance by counteracting state subsidies to favor coal and gas plants. —Emily Jones, regional reporter, Georgia, and Izzy Ross, regional reporter, Great Lakes

Plastic waste
Some 33 billion pounds of plastic waste enter the marine environment globally every year, and the problem is expected to worsen as the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries ramp up plastic production.

Perhaps the most important step the next president could take to curb plastic pollution is to push Congress to ratify and implement the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, which is scheduled to be finalized by the end of this year. The Biden administration recently announced its support for a version of the treaty that limits plastic production, and, though Harris hasn’t made any public comment about it, experts expect that her administration would support it as well. Meanwhile, a former Trump White House official told Politico this April that Trump—who famously withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement in his first term—would take a “hard-nosed look” at any outcome of the plastics negotiations and be “skeptical that the agreement reached was the best agreement that could have been reached.”

The Biden administration has also taken some positive steps to address plastic pollution domestically, including a ban on the federal procurement of single-use plastics. Experts expect that progress to continue under a Harris administration. In 2011, as California’s attorney general, Harris sued plastic bottle companies over misleading claims that their products were recyclable. As a senator, she co-sponsored a Democratic bill to phase out unnecessary single-use plastic products.

Trump, meanwhile, does not have a strong track record on plastic. Although he signed a 2019 law to remove and prevent ocean litter, he has taken personal credit for the construction of new plastic manufacturing facilities and derided the idea of banning single-use plastic straws. And Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda could increase the extraction of fossil fuels used to make plastics. —Joseph Winters, staff writer covering plastics, pollution, and the circular economy

Down–ballot elections
After decades of failed attempts to tackle the climate crisis, Congress finally passed major legislation two years ago with the Inflation Reduction Act. Not a single Republican voted for it. 

Elections aren’t just important for getting the legislative power needed to enact climate policies—they’re also important for implementing them. The IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, another key climate-related law, are entering crucial phases for their implementation, particularly the doling out of billions of dollars for clean energy, environmental justice, and climate resiliency. Trump, having vowed to rescind unspent IRA funds if elected, seems poised to hamper the law’s rollout, slowing efforts to get the country using more clean energy.

But it’s a mistake to imagine that only federal elections matter when it comes to climate change. Eliminating greenhouse gases from energy, buildings, transportation, and food systems requires legislation at every level. In Arizona and Montana, for example, voters this year will elect utility commissioners, the powerful, yet largely ignored officials who play a crucial role in whether—and how quickly—the country moves away from fossil fuels. State legislators can also open the door to efforts to get 100 percent clean electricity, as happened in Michigan and Minnesota after the 2022 election. Even in a state like Washington with Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, who once campaigned for the White House on a climate change platform, votes matter—climate action is literally on the ballot in November, when voters could choose to kill the state’s landmark price on carbon pollution.

Depending on what happens with the presidential and congressional races, state and local action might be the best hope for furthering climate policy anyway.
—Kate Yoder, staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability

International cooperation
During his first term, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, a global commitment to reduce the burning of fossil fuels in an effort to curb the worst impacts of climate change. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said from the Rose Garden of the White House in 2017. Trump didn’t entirely abandon global climate discussions; his administration continued to attend global climate conferences, where it endorsed events on fossil fuels.

The Biden administration rejoined the Paris Agreement and pledged billions of dollars to combat climate change both domestically and abroad, but a second Trump administration would likely undo this progress. Trump says that he would pull out of the Paris Agreement again, and reportedly would also consider withdrawing the US from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty that’s the basis for modern global climate talks.

Harris is expected, at least, to continue Biden’s policies. Speaking from COP28 in Dubai last year, an annual United Nations climate gathering, she celebrated America’s progress in tackling the climate crisis and petitioned for much more to be done. “In order to keep our critical 1.5 degree-Celsius goal within reach,” she said, “we must have the ambition to meet this moment, to accelerate our ongoing work, increase our investments, and lead with courage and conviction.” 

But both the Trump and Biden administrations achieved record oil and gas production during their time in office, and Harris opposes a ban on fracking. In order to make a dent in the climate crisis, whoever becomes president would have to reject that status quo and put serious money behind global promises to mitigate climate change. Otherwise, climate change-related losses will just continue to mount—already, they are expected to cost $580 billion globally by 2030. —Anita Hofschneider, senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

By now, the canvassers at Make the Road Nevada know how to prepare themselves for the record-breaking heat.

Members of the progressive group—which focuses on mobilizing Black and Latino voters—layer on white, UPF-protective shirts, and sweat-wicking performance wear. They fill their 50-quart coolers with ice-cold water. And they pack lots and lots of chips—barbecue Lays and Cheetos and Doritos—for the road. The salt helps stave off dehydration.

“Hey, at least it hasn’t broken 100 yet,” said Marco Rangel, an electoral campaign manager for the group, as the canvassers made their way outside, into the boiling autumn sun. By 10 am, the temperature had already ticked past 90 degrees Fahrenheit, but a mid-October heatwave was expected to bring highs of 105. “Be careful out there,” Rangel warned.

Residents of this desert city are used to searing summers, but this year Las Vegas endured a string of record-breaking heatwaves. This June was the city’s hottest ever, and in July it endured a record seven days when temperatures registered at 115 F or higher. It also marked an all-time temperature record of 120.

Even during the final few weeks before Election Day, as campaigns across the key swing state kicked into high gear, the weather did not let up. Extreme heat across the US south-west broke hundreds of records this fall. In mid-October, temperatures in Vegas ticked up past 104 fahrenheit.

Political strategists believe that face-to-face conversations are crucial in a state that could decide the outcome of the presidential election, as well as which party controls the Senate. The state’s Clark and Washoe counties—which encompass the cities of Las Vegas and Reno, respectively—are especially key. These regions encompass 90 percent of the state’s population, and this year they have seen a rash of extreme heat that has threatened to derail voter outreach.

“I could be inside, in the AC at my job, but I want to talk to people and share my story…I want to make sure people understand why they need to vote.”

“This is the hottest year I’ve ever experienced here,” said Patience Denise Marble, 40, a lead canvasser for Make the Road. The heat can slow outreach, she said—because canvassers have to move more slowly and take more breaks. At the door, voters also tend to rush the conversation. “They tend to be more anxious to finish the conversation and get back inside,” she said. “But I also get a lot of people thanking us for being out there in the heat. And they’ll offer us cold drinks or ice.”

The brutal conditions were especially pronounced in Vegas’s east side, north side and downtown—predominantly working-class Latino and Black areas that campaigns across the political spectrum believe could swing the election. A heat-mapping project of southern Nevada found that these neighborhoods were up to 11 degrees hotter than other parts of the region, due to a lack of natural landscaping and the ubiquity of concrete and asphalt.

Make the Road halts on-person canvassing when the temperatures tip over 110 degrees, or during excessive heat warnings, and transitions to phone banking instead. Otherwise, to shield against the sun’s harsh rays, the organization’s team wears white clothing branded with the Make the Road logo to help shield them from the harsh rays in shadeless neighbourhoods. And team leaders mandate frequent breaks—every 40 minutes or so, the team piles into air-conditioned vehicles to cool off, or drive over to climate-controlled coffee shops.

This summer, the conservative Libre Initiative, meanwhile, bought cooling neck wraps for its canvassers to wear and shifted schedules to avoid the hottest parts of the day. And canvassers for the Culinary Workers Union Local 226—which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in the city and each election launches one the biggest voter mobilization efforts in the region—said they usually opted to drive in their air-conditioned vehicles, rather than walk, from one street to the next in order to avoid heat exhaustion.

“Yes, it’s hot, but it’s important,” said Urbin Gonzalez, who had taken time off from his full-time job in housekeeping on the Las Vegas Strip to canvass with the Culinary Union. “Because I could be inside, in the AC at my job” he said. “But I want to talk to people, and share my story, and listen to their stories. I want to make sure people understand why they need to vote.”

In Reno, City Council member Miguel Martinez said campaign season has not only collided with extreme heat, but also wildfire. In September, as Martinez was gearing up canvassing efforts for his own campaign as well as that of Harris and Walz, the Davis fire turned skies over the city orange. “There were big pieces of ash falling in our driveway,” Martinez said. “Big black chunks.”

His team ceased campaigning that week, he said—both because the wildfire smoke made it difficult to breathe outdoors and because Martinez wanted to avoid distracting residents from the messaging and updates coming from local fire crews.

Once canvassing efforts resumed, Martinez said canvassers contended with an unseasonably warm autumn. He and his wife, who often go canvassing together, would pack their cars with frozen water bottles, and drink them as they melted to stay hydrated. “And we would try to walk quickly from, you know, shade to shade,” he said. During especially hot days, those who answered the door would hand him cold beverages or invite him inside to rest.

Still, Martinez said, that voters have surprisingly seldom brought up the environment or climate change as a big concern when he goes door-knocking. “I didn’t hear about it as much as I hear about the economy or the cost of living, or safety concerns,” he said. “A lot of times I guess people just feel they have to tough it out – that is how it is, and we have to deal with it.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In 2022, fish farms produced an unprecedented 131 million tons of seafood, officially surpassing the global wild-caught fishing industry for the first time, according to a report released in July. Also known as aquaculture, the fish farming sector is often touted as a sustainable way to rapidly scale up the production of crucial fish protein sources without pulling them directly from wild habitats. 

But there’s a catch—literally. Some of the main ingredients that farmers feed their fish are, ironically, wild-caught fish. And a new study suggests that the aquaculture industry uses far more wild fish than previously estimated. The research is the latest in a wave of criticism against fish farming, which a group of scientists and conservationists say is fueling environmental degradation.

However, the global demand for fish is expected to skyrocket in the coming decades. Some experts say that despite its shortfalls, aquaculture is improving, and will be a crucial part of the sustainable food supply chain. 

While certain species like mussels dine mostly on algae, omnivorous and carnivorous fish require a certain amount of fish in their diets to thrive on farms. To quantify aquaculture’s reliance on wild-caught fish, researchers rely on a seemingly straightforward equation: How much fish goes into the food to produce a certain amount of farmed fish—otherwise known as the “fish-in: fish-out” (FIFO) metric.  

In 1997, aquaculturists were using a staggering amount of fish in their feeds to produce relatively low quantities of farmed fish across the board, with a global FIFO of about 1.9, according to a 2021 study. That’s almost two fish in for every fish out, by weight. In some cases, it took as much as 3.16 kilograms of wild-caught fish to produce a single kilogram of salmon. That research found that the FIFO ratio sharply decreased by 2017 as the aquaculture industry sought alternative feed ingredients.

“The metrics used to assess the sustainability of manufacturing aquaculture feed have left out large aspects of its environmental impacts.”

However, there are a variety of ways to calculate this metric. A new study shows how different the results can be if you broaden the definition of the “fish in” side of the equation. Using data from four sources of industry-reported feed composition during 2017, researchers calculated fish inputs to farmed outputs at a range of 0.36 to 1.15. That high end is roughly four times the previous study’s estimate.

One of the main reasons for this discrepancy is that the researchers accounted for several additional factors in their equation, including updated values for fish oil and something called wild fish trimmings. Those are the parts of marine animals’ bodies that are removed during wild-caught fish processing because they are undesirable to many consumers (think heads and tails).

These parts are often used in fish feeds but rarely accounted for in FIFO equations since they are considered waste byproducts. In a separate calculation, the authors also factored in estimates for some of the unintended animal deaths involved in the fishing process, including the accidental catch of non-target species known as bycatch. That pushed the FIFO figures even higher.

“The main recommendation that emerges from the work is to have a closer look at the data,” study co-author Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, told me over email. “When that happens what is clear is that the picture is not as rosy as the aquaculture industry or the fishery industry wants us to believe.”

Small fish such as anchovies and sardines are among the main species targeted for aquaculture fishmeal. The issue is that wild animals depend on these fish for food as well. Studies show that depleting these stocks could be particularly bad for seabirds. For example, penguins in Cape Town are declining largely due to the intense fishing pressure on sardines and anchovies, which I wrote about last year. 

“One of the take-homes that I really liked of this paper was [its] underscoring that we need better transparency and data availability to really have a good understanding” of the different proportions and species of wild-caught fish being used in aquaculture, said Halley Froehlich, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the industry and was not involved in the study. 

However, Froehlich noted that the study’s findings may not be as bad for wild ocean fish populations as they seem because the use of fish trimmings in feed is seen by many as a sustainable option.  

“It creates a circular economy,” she told me in a phone interview. “Otherwise, [fish trimmings] would just be thrown out.” 

The tricky part is that fishers can make additional income selling their trimmings, study author ​​Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor in environmental studies at New York University, told me over email. 

This “provides further incentive for fisheries to continue contributing to this value chain,” he said. The study also notes that whole fish from species that are less desirable on the market—dubbed “trash” fish—are sometimes added into that mix as well. 

To help mitigate aquaculture’s wild-fish problem, scientists and companies are formulating plant-based alternatives, which have been increasingly integrated into carnivorous fish diets, particularly salmon. This option comes with its own set of risks, according to the new study. For example, they say soy and maize feed options can increase the generation of agricultural-based emissions as well as freshwater consumption. 

“Our takeaway is that the metrics used to assess the sustainability of manufacturing aquaculture feed have left out large aspects of its environmental impacts, both at sea and on land,” study author Spencer Roberts, a doctoral student at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School. “These omissions have helped to portray fish and crustacean farming as uniquely efficient or sustainable. Our research shows that it is more similar to other forms of animal farming, albeit with a uniquely high reliance on wild fish extraction.”

Despite these impacts, research shows that our appetite for seafood is expected to double by 2050. As a result, the demand for aquaculture is rising as well. Froehlich stressed that the industry has to find a way to feed fish somehow, and that plant-based or other alternative feeds—particularly microalgae—are the most sustainable options at the moment. In the end, she said, “there is no free lunch.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

An Alabama mining company is taking final steps toward a major buildout of its operations in the central part of the state. 

The expansion, which is proposed to include the mining of federally owned coal, comes in the wake of a settlement over the company’s environmental record and as its mines continue to be cited by regulators for alleged safety violations. 

The project’s fate has become a litmus test for the Biden administration, which has moved to phase out mining of federal coal in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming.

Warrior Met Coal, based in Brookwood and one of the largest producers of metallurgical coal in the United States, is nearing regulatory approval for expanded operations at its Blue Creek facilities between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, according to corporate filings.

The project would be among the largest recent expansions of coal mining in Alabama, expected to increase Warrior Met’s production by up to 60 percent.

If approved by state and federal regulators, the project would be one of the largest expansions of coal mining in Alabama in recent years, with the new facilities expected to increase Warrior Met’s production by up to 60 percent. Public financial support for the facility and its export of coal to overseas markets for use in steel-making may top $400 million. 

The project is set to use the destructive longwall mining method, where bladed machines shear coal from expanses as wide as 1,000 feet, extracting coal from an area that can extend well over a mile. The rock ceiling, called “overburden,” then collapses behind the cutting tool. When the ceiling of the mine collapses, the ground above the mine sinks, sometimes by several feet, even though it may be hundreds of feet above the mine.

This subsidence, or sinking of land, caused by longwall mining can lead to serious surface impacts, such as damage to buildings and draining of creeks and ponds, as well as increasing risks related to methane escape. Oak Grove, a small community about 25 miles southeast of Warrior Met’s expansion, has become an ominous example of those impacts, with residents outraged by closing businesses, undermined homes and a fatal home explosion atop the mine. 

Unlike the operation in nearby Oak Grove, however, Warrior Met’s expansion at Blue Creek may also include the extraction of publicly-owned coal managed by the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency. 

In Alabama, as in many other states, so-called “mineral rights”—the right to, for example, mine for coal under one’s property—have been separated from surface ownership over time. One person or entity can own a surface property under Alabama law while another person or entity can own the rights to all of the resources below that same piece of land, a situation known as a “split estate.” In significant portions of Alabama, for example, the federal government retains mineral rights despite private land ownership on the surface. 

BLM announced in April that it would conduct an environmental assessment related to Warrior Met’s proposal to mine 14,040 acres of federal minerals underlying privately owned land in Tuscaloosa County. Warrior Met’s applications to lease the coal rights propose to extract approximately 57.5 million tons of recoverable public coal reserves, documents show.

In July, the Biden administration announced that the federal government plans to phase out coal leasing in Montana and Wyoming, a decision lauded by environmentalists and criticized by industry representatives and right-wing politicians. Now, Biden must decide whether his administration will adopt the same policy concerning federally-owned coal in Alabama. 

According to records from the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the federal underground mine regulator, the Blue Creek facility is regularly fined for safety violations. Records show that just this year, employees of Warrior Met and their contractors inside Blue Creek No. 1 have been cited 76 times for safety violations, 22 of which were labeled “significant or substantial.” In each of these 22 cases, federal inspectors found “a reasonable likelihood the hazard…[would] result in an injury or illness of a reasonably serious nature.” The violations pertained to mining coal through private, not federal, mineral rights.

Warrior Met has also been the target of litigation over its environmental record. In September, Black Warrior Riverkeeper, an environmental group founded to protect and restore the Black Warrior River and its tributaries, settled a suit with the company over a leaking coal slurry impoundment at Warrior Met’s No. 7 Mine in Brookwood. The riverkeeper had documented nearly two dozen distinct leaks from the coal waste pond in the year before the suit was filed, the organization’s lawyers wrote in a court filing earlier this year. The settlement agreement, approved by a federal judge on Sept. 18, requires Warrior Met to limit and monitor leaks from the site, pay $250,000 to the Freshwater Land Trust for a conservation project and reimburse the nonprofit for its legal fees. 

“This case is a textbook example of why citizen suits are a critical enforcement mechanism when governments fail to enforce the law,” Eva Dillard, a staff attorney with Black Warrior Riverkeeper, said in September. “We are pleased that [Warrior Met] was willing to take responsibility for the problems at Mine No. 7…”

Public officials have already made major commitments to Warrior Met related to its planned expansion, including both infrastructure investments and tax abatements. 

The project would receive an estimated $26.5 million in total tax breaks from Tuscaloosa County.

In March, Gov. Kay Ivey announced that, with the support of the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, the Appalachian Regional Commission would provide $500,000 in taxpayer funding to install public water service to the proposed Blue Creek mine site. 

“Access to dependable local water service is essential to attract and grow new business and jobs,” Ivey said at the time. “I am pleased to support this grant to extend water service to support Warrior Met Coal’s expansion in west Alabama.”

Warrior Met also managed to secure a $26.5 million tax abatement from the Tuscaloosa County Industrial Development Authority before the project began initial moves toward construction in 2020. 

At the time, a breakdown of the tax incentive estimated that Warrior Met would receive $18 million in tax breaks during the project’s construction and $8.5 million over a decade afterward. 

“This project represents a significant investment in our community by Warrior Met Coal,” said Mark Crews, chairman of the Tuscaloosa County Industrial Development Authority, “but also represents valuable job opportunities for our citizens for several decades to come.”

The coal produced at Blue Creek is metallurgical coal, most commonly used in the production of steel. Nearly all met coal extracted in Alabama is shipped overseas to places like China and South America through the Port of Mobile, according to federal records. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.

Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in northeast Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply, which was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.

The company behind the drilling, Texas-based Coterra, was barred from the area for years for its role in poisoning the private water wells Dimock relies upon and, in a landmark later move in 2020, was charged with multiple crimes. But it has now been ushered back into the area following a deal struck by the state’s Democratic leadership.

“I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

The restarting of drilling around Dimock late last year comes as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris clamor to cast themselves to Pennsylvania voters as supporters of fracking—or hydraulic fracturing, whereby water, sand, and chemicals are injected deep underground to extract embedded oil and gas.

“If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said of Harris, who previously supported a ban, during the duo’s televised debate last month. The former president has run a barrage of ads in the state accusing Harris of wanting to shut down the fracking industry. But during the same debate, Harris insisted “I will not ban fracking,” and boasted of new fracking leases granted during Joe Biden’s administration.

This bipartisan embrace of fracking has stirred fury among residents of Dimock whose well water is still riddled by toxins linked to an array of health problems and, most spectacularly, contains so much flammable methane that people have passed out in the shower, wells have exploded, and water running from the tap could be set on fire by match, according to official reports and accounts from locals.

“Sure as hell, I’m not voting for either of those two assholes,” said Ray Kemble, a bearded military veteran and former trucker, as he puffed on a cigar in his home. Reams of documents and photos chronicling the long fight against fracking lay on the table next to Kemble, along with a bottle of his murky tap water, three Sherlock Holmes-style smoking pipes and a briefcase filled with handguns.

Shortly after a gas well was drilled a few hundred feet from Kemble’s home, he said his drinking water turned from dark brown to green and finally jet back, with the liquid smelling like he had taken “every household chemical you can think of, dump it into a blender, take two asses of a skunk and put that in there, put it on puree, dump it out, and take a whiff.”

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Victoria Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started.

“The water is still not fixed,” said Kemble, who blames the loss of most of his teeth to the presence of uranium, along with other contaminants such as copper and arsenic, in his water.

“When a politicians’ lips are moving they are lying,” he said. “It’s a fricking nightmare. We are back to square one from before the moratorium came into effect—there’s massive drilling like crazy. I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

Kemble, a Republican who has printed cards featuring the Gadsen flag snake coiled around a gas well, has found unlikely allies in this saga, with figures such as Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo voicing concern for Dimock’s plight. His neighbor Victoria Switzer, a former school teacher turned artist whose paintings adorn a soaring timber-framed home beside a bucolic creek, is a rare liberal in this staunchly conservative county but also shares Kemble’s frustration.

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started. Like Kemble, she now gets bottled water deliveries each week from Coterra.

“But then the other guy [Trump] just says, ‘We’ll drill more, we’ll get rid of the regulations’—so that should scare us. People are held hostage by the fossil-fuel industry here.”

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry.”

Although 1.5 million people across Pennsylvania live within half a mile of oil and gas wells, compressors and processors, not all feel as sharply affected by fracking and to win the state’s crucial 19 electoral votes, according to prevailing political thinking, means not threatening an industry that directly employs around 16,000 people, around 0.5 percent of all jobs in the state.

“Fracking has become a big part of the election but there really isn’t much opposition to it now, it’s become part of life in Pennsylvania,” said Jeff Brauer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania’s Keystone College. “A fracking ban would be very unpopular and Kamala Harris knows she can’t be against fracking if she’s going to win here. She had to clean that up.”

But how popular is fracking? Polling shows a complicated picture rather than overwhelming support, with two 2020 surveys showing slightly more Pennsylvania voters want to ban fracking than keep it, while a separate 2022 poll found the reverse. Unusually, Pennsylvania’s constitution enshrines the right to “clean air, pure water and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment,” unlike neighboring New York, which is among a handful of states to ban fracking.

“The idea you have to court some fictional rural fracking supporter with Trump signs in their yard is ludicrous,” said Josh Fox, a filmmaker and activist whose 2010 documentary, Gasland, showed people in Dimock and elsewhere holding up jars of muddy brown drinking water and turning their tap water into a roaring flame by lighting it.

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry,” he said. Fox added he will still vote for Harris but that “Democrats have thrown away a chance to tell people in rural Pennsylvania they will fight to protect their children from toxins. It’s a legacy of moral failure going back to Obama.”

In Dimock, particular ire is reserved for Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, who in his previous role as state attorney general in 2020 convened a grand jury and charged Coterra, then known as Cabot, prior to a merger, with eight felonies for endangering the town’s drinking water. “There were failures at every level,” Shapiro claimed, pointing to testimony of children in Dimock waking up with severe nosebleeds because of the pollution exposure.

Yet, the denouement of the case in a local courtroom in 2022 unveiled a deal in which all the felony charges were dropped, with Coterra pleading no contest to a single misdemeanor in return for the company agreeing to build a new $16 million water pipe for residents. Crucially, on the same day, the state department of environmental protection—which had found Coterra tainted 19 private wells and barred drilling in the Dimock area for more than a decade—allowed the company back into the region.

“I was shocked. I was a fan of Shapiro but he betrayed us. He betrayed me,” said Switzer, who took part in a press conference with Shapiro, prior to knowing details of the deal, where she praised the then attorney general.

“It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“I wish I could retract that. I would’ve called out that traitor Shapiro if I’d known,” she said. “We walked into a trap that allowed the drilling to restart. I mean, when I heard he was in the mix to be vice president I almost threw up.”

A spokesman for Shapiro said he is an “an all-of-the-above energy governor, and he is taking action to invest in affordable and reliable renewable energy while continuing to support the key energy resources that have helped Pennsylvania become the leader it is today.” The settlement with Coterra is “historic,” the spokesman said, and that the governor “will never forget the people of Dimock.” Coterra did not respond to a request for comment.

The water line should emerge by the end of 2026, although construction of it, unlike the new drilling, has yet to start. Coterra is not allowed to drill directly in the heart of Dimock but can do so at its edges, and already has three towering well complexes boring 7,000 feet down into a section of the Marcellus shale, a thick formation of layered, radioactive rock, which contains about 1.3 trillion cubic feet of gas worth an estimated $3.9 billion.

From these wellheads sprout 11 drilling lines, known as laterals, that bend underground horizontally and snake for several miles underneath about 80 Dimock properties, with one running directly under Switzer’s house. “They are cutting up the valley like Swiss cheese,” she said.

The rumbling from a new oil pad two miles away keeps Switzer awake at night, as does the hundreds of trucks shuttling the vast cocktail of water, sand, and chemicals used in fracking. “I can’t sleep now, so I find it harder to take than I once did,” she said. “We came here to enjoy nature, and this has just torn our lives apart.”

This new drilling requires Coterra to monitor local water supplies, plug the older gas wells that dot this rolling landscape and provide water to residents. Still, avoiding further contamination as the drills pierce the water table, via failures in the drill casings or leaks of the substances used to pry open the shale for its gas, cannot be fully assured.

“The operations are on a much larger scale now, using millions of gallons more water, so no company can guarantee there will be no further leaks. Once wells are drilled they will leak,” said Anthony Ingraffea, an environmental engineer at Cornell University who has advised affected residents.

“The nine square miles of Dimock is a goldmine of natural gas. It’s the most productive in the world,” Ingraffea said. “Coterra will be happy getting hold of that in return for a water pipeline that I don’t think will ever be built. It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“One of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful… There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Much of the newly drilled gas will be shipped overseas and marketed as a “clean” fuel in a process that, in fact, emits more planet-heating pollution than coal. The fracking itself, which is exempt from certain clean water regulations, will also pose fresh health risks, with studies showing that Pennsylvanians who live near fracking are at heightened risk of childhood lymphoma, asthma, preterm births and low birth weights.

The Environmental Protection Agency, however, only regulates 29 out of more than 1,100 shale gas contaminants potentially found in drinking water, with a 2016 federal report acknowledging that wells in 27 Dimock homes contain unhealthy levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and copper, with 17 of these homes at risk of exploding because of the build-up of flammable gas.

For Kemble, the resumption of drilling is the final straw after years of him and his neighbors suffering cancers he believes is a result of the air and water pollution. Kemble said he has rigged up cameras at his home and fears he could be targeted for his activism.

Despite the pressure around being outspoken, Kemble said: “I’m still here…but one of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful in Yellowstone one day. There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Kemble, who hauls water from a hydrant to a huge water tank that he then has to filter into his house, recently donated his home to a new research nonprofit that will test the property’s water, soil, and plants for contamination to help inform potential new laws. He will soon leave Dimock, his home of 30 years, like others have done before him, because of the water.

“This is my final fuck you to everybody; there’s going to be a scientist behind every tree here,” he said. “I’m tired of all the bullshit, all the stories and all the fucking crap. I want the hell out of here.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.

Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in northeast Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply, which was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.

The company behind the drilling, Texas-based Coterra, was barred from the area for years for its role in poisoning the private water wells Dimock relies upon and, in a landmark later move in 2020, was charged with multiple crimes. But it has now been ushered back into the area following a deal struck by the state’s Democratic leadership.

“I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

The restarting of drilling around Dimock late last year comes as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris clamor to cast themselves to Pennsylvania voters as supporters of fracking—or hydraulic fracturing, whereby water, sand, and chemicals are injected deep underground to extract embedded oil and gas.

“If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said of Harris, who previously supported a ban, during the duo’s televised debate last month. The former president has run a barrage of ads in the state accusing Harris of wanting to shut down the fracking industry. But during the same debate, Harris insisted “I will not ban fracking,” and boasted of new fracking leases granted during Joe Biden’s administration.

This bipartisan embrace of fracking has stirred fury among residents of Dimock whose well water is still riddled by toxins linked to an array of health problems and, most spectacularly, contains so much flammable methane that people have passed out in the shower, wells have exploded, and water running from the tap could be set on fire by match, according to official reports and accounts from locals.

“Sure as hell, I’m not voting for either of those two assholes,” said Ray Kemble, a bearded military veteran and former trucker, as he puffed on a cigar in his home. Reams of documents and photos chronicling the long fight against fracking lay on the table next to Kemble, along with a bottle of his murky tap water, three Sherlock Holmes-style smoking pipes and a briefcase filled with handguns.

Shortly after a gas well was drilled a few hundred feet from Kemble’s home, he said his drinking water turned from dark brown to green and finally jet back, with the liquid smelling like he had taken “every household chemical you can think of, dump it into a blender, take two asses of a skunk and put that in there, put it on puree, dump it out, and take a whiff.”

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Victoria Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started.

“The water is still not fixed,” said Kemble, who blames the loss of most of his teeth to the presence of uranium, along with other contaminants such as copper and arsenic, in his water.

“When a politicians’ lips are moving they are lying,” he said. “It’s a fricking nightmare. We are back to square one from before the moratorium came into effect—there’s massive drilling like crazy. I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

Kemble, a Republican who has printed cards featuring the Gadsen flag snake coiled around a gas well, has found unlikely allies in this saga, with figures such as Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo voicing concern for Dimock’s plight. His neighbor Victoria Switzer, a former school teacher turned artist whose paintings adorn a soaring timber-framed home beside a bucolic creek, is a rare liberal in this staunchly conservative county but also shares Kemble’s frustration.

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started. Like Kemble, she now gets bottled water deliveries each week from Coterra.

“But then the other guy [Trump] just says, ‘We’ll drill more, we’ll get rid of the regulations’—so that should scare us. People are held hostage by the fossil-fuel industry here.”

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry.”

Although 1.5 million people across Pennsylvania live within half a mile of oil and gas wells, compressors and processors, not all feel as sharply affected by fracking and to win the state’s crucial 19 electoral votes, according to prevailing political thinking, means not threatening an industry that directly employs around 16,000 people, around 0.5 percent of all jobs in the state.

“Fracking has become a big part of the election but there really isn’t much opposition to it now, it’s become part of life in Pennsylvania,” said Jeff Brauer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania’s Keystone College. “A fracking ban would be very unpopular and Kamala Harris knows she can’t be against fracking if she’s going to win here. She had to clean that up.”

But how popular is fracking? Polling shows a complicated picture rather than overwhelming support, with two 2020 surveys showing slightly more Pennsylvania voters want to ban fracking than keep it, while a separate 2022 poll found the reverse. Unusually, Pennsylvania’s constitution enshrines the right to “clean air, pure water and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment,” unlike neighboring New York, which is among a handful of states to ban fracking.

“The idea you have to court some fictional rural fracking supporter with Trump signs in their yard is ludicrous,” said Josh Fox, a filmmaker and activist whose 2010 documentary, Gasland, showed people in Dimock and elsewhere holding up jars of muddy brown drinking water and turning their tap water into a roaring flame by lighting it.

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry,” he said. Fox added he will still vote for Harris but that “Democrats have thrown away a chance to tell people in rural Pennsylvania they will fight to protect their children from toxins. It’s a legacy of moral failure going back to Obama.”

In Dimock, particular ire is reserved for Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, who in his previous role as state attorney general in 2020 convened a grand jury and charged Coterra, then known as Cabot, prior to a merger, with eight felonies for endangering the town’s drinking water. “There were failures at every level,” Shapiro claimed, pointing to testimony of children in Dimock waking up with severe nosebleeds because of the pollution exposure.

Yet, the denouement of the case in a local courtroom in 2022 unveiled a deal in which all the felony charges were dropped, with Coterra pleading no contest to a single misdemeanor in return for the company agreeing to build a new $16 million water pipe for residents. Crucially, on the same day, the state department of environmental protection—which had found Coterra tainted 19 private wells and barred drilling in the Dimock area for more than a decade—allowed the company back into the region.

“I was shocked. I was a fan of Shapiro but he betrayed us. He betrayed me,” said Switzer, who took part in a press conference with Shapiro, prior to knowing details of the deal, where she praised the then attorney general.

“It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“I wish I could retract that. I would’ve called out that traitor Shapiro if I’d known,” she said. “We walked into a trap that allowed the drilling to restart. I mean, when I heard he was in the mix to be vice president I almost threw up.”

A spokesman for Shapiro said he is an “an all-of-the-above energy governor, and he is taking action to invest in affordable and reliable renewable energy while continuing to support the key energy resources that have helped Pennsylvania become the leader it is today.” The settlement with Coterra is “historic,” the spokesman said, and that the governor “will never forget the people of Dimock.” Coterra did not respond to a request for comment.

The water line should emerge by the end of 2026, although construction of it, unlike the new drilling, has yet to start. Coterra is not allowed to drill directly in the heart of Dimock but can do so at its edges, and already has three towering well complexes boring 7,000 feet down into a section of the Marcellus shale, a thick formation of layered, radioactive rock, which contains about 1.3 trillion cubic feet of gas worth an estimated $3.9 billion.

From these wellheads sprout 11 drilling lines, known as laterals, that bend underground horizontally and snake for several miles underneath about 80 Dimock properties, with one running directly under Switzer’s house. “They are cutting up the valley like Swiss cheese,” she said.

The rumbling from a new oil pad two miles away keeps Switzer awake at night, as does the hundreds of trucks shuttling the vast cocktail of water, sand, and chemicals used in fracking. “I can’t sleep now, so I find it harder to take than I once did,” she said. “We came here to enjoy nature, and this has just torn our lives apart.”

This new drilling requires Coterra to monitor local water supplies, plug the older gas wells that dot this rolling landscape and provide water to residents. Still, avoiding further contamination as the drills pierce the water table, via failures in the drill casings or leaks of the substances used to pry open the shale for its gas, cannot be fully assured.

“The operations are on a much larger scale now, using millions of gallons more water, so no company can guarantee there will be no further leaks. Once wells are drilled they will leak,” said Anthony Ingraffea, an environmental engineer at Cornell University who has advised affected residents.

“The nine square miles of Dimock is a goldmine of natural gas. It’s the most productive in the world,” Ingraffea said. “Coterra will be happy getting hold of that in return for a water pipeline that I don’t think will ever be built. It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“One of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful… There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Much of the newly drilled gas will be shipped overseas and marketed as a “clean” fuel in a process that, in fact, emits more planet-heating pollution than coal. The fracking itself, which is exempt from certain clean water regulations, will also pose fresh health risks, with studies showing that Pennsylvanians who live near fracking are at heightened risk of childhood lymphoma, asthma, preterm births and low birth weights.

The Environmental Protection Agency, however, only regulates 29 out of more than 1,100 shale gas contaminants potentially found in drinking water, with a 2016 federal report acknowledging that wells in 27 Dimock homes contain unhealthy levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and copper, with 17 of these homes at risk of exploding because of the build-up of flammable gas.

For Kemble, the resumption of drilling is the final straw after years of him and his neighbors suffering cancers he believes is a result of the air and water pollution. Kemble said he has rigged up cameras at his home and fears he could be targeted for his activism.

Despite the pressure around being outspoken, Kemble said: “I’m still here…but one of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful in Yellowstone one day. There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Kemble, who hauls water from a hydrant to a huge water tank that he then has to filter into his house, recently donated his home to a new research nonprofit that will test the property’s water, soil, and plants for contamination to help inform potential new laws. He will soon leave Dimock, his home of 30 years, like others have done before him, because of the water.

“This is my final fuck you to everybody; there’s going to be a scientist behind every tree here,” he said. “I’m tired of all the bullshit, all the stories and all the fucking crap. I want the hell out of here.”

Jeff VanderMeer insists that he does not predict the future. Yet mere weeks before his new novel, Absolution, hit shelves, Hurricane Helene tore through the part of Florida where he lives, sharing an uncanny likeness to the fictional hurricane in his book. Of course, there’s a difference between art and reality. The through line between the storms is the climate crisis that inspired VanderMeer to write the trilogy of books that made him a household name a decade ago. 

Absolution is the latest and last installment in the lush, eerie series covering an unknown biological phenomenon known as Area X, located in VanderMeer’s home state of Florida in the real place known as the Forgotten Coast. The original trio of books covers the area and its tendency to affect living creatures and create bizarre refractions of life within its confines. The series, called the Southern Reach trilogy, garnered enormous praise, a legion of fans, and a movie adaptation. For the record, VanderMeer told me he found Hollywood “frustrating” because “they stripped out all the environmental stuff.” But he did enjoy the movie’s surreal ending. 

“We get displaced. We have to be resilient. We have to form a new narrative.”

A decade later, Absolution marks the conclusion of a weird and wonderful journey involving an assortment of biological abnormalities and government secrets. In the meantime, it seems as if the unusual world that VanderMeer wrote about and the one that we live in today are growing closer and closer. Our warmer world is not just more volatile in terms of natural disasters, like Helene and Milton, but it is also becoming a large-scale petri-dish for new diseases, the type of biological mixing and matching that VanderMeer’s books are known for—albeit on a much smaller scale. 

In VanderMeer’s fiction, the mirror world of Area X produced strange, haunting results like a character’s transformation into a whale-like creature covered in eyes, or a murderous bear with a human voice. But for VanderMeer, climate change is the scariest thing of all. 

I spoke with him just as he was returning to his home in Tallahassee after evacuating from Hurricane Helene. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

What is it like being a climate and science fiction writer right now? 

I guess it feels like kind of a privilege to be able to talk about this stuff, that the novels have reached enough readers and had enough of an impact that anyone cares what I have to say.

It’s also true that I’m right now in Florida, at the epicenter of a lot of extreme weather events. And so that creates a weird echoing effect. For example, I was fleeing Hurricane Helene up to Greenville, South Carolina, unsure if that was even the right thing to do. And then also asked by the New York Times to write a piece about fleeing the hurricane. So there’s all this real-world consequence. 

You’re getting me at the end of fleeing a hurricane, writing about it, coming back to Tallahassee, seeing the consequences of extreme weather because of warming waters because of climate crisis, and feeling both thankful that I can kind of capture a feeling people have here about these events and write about it, but also kind of caught up in it as well.

That sounds pretty jarring.

You can get in loops too, where you don’t really adapt to the situation and you’re just doing the same talking points which, relevant to your question, is something I worry about. You know, where [people on the internet] were saying, “Well, why did people even build in Asheville?” it was this weird disconnect. And it’s like, “Well, because they didn’t expect there’d be these mega-storms that would still have a huge effect, hundreds of miles inland.”

People in the aftermath of destruction seem to want to try to form their own narratives about what’s happening, and I’m sure you are someone who see this clearly, being in the epicenter, but also being someone who works in fiction.

It’s definitely something that I write about in my fiction: the idea of character agency in the face of systemic or system-wide events, whether they’re human systems or systems in the natural world. Especially in Western fiction, we have this idea of rugged individualism, right? And by the end of the narrative, things will have gone back to normal, because something’s been solved.

That’s not really what happens in the real world. We get displaced. We have to be resilient. We have to form a new narrative. We’re not always the same person we were before, you know, especially with regard to the climate crisis. And so I try to capture that. There’s a hurricane in Absolution that comes up suddenly in the middle of all these other events. And I really wanted to capture how a hurricane these days can seem like an uncanny event, even to those of us who are familiar with them. 

“People think the climate crisis is on the horizon…But more and more, we’re all being affected by it.”

Helene, to be candid, scared the crap out of me when I saw it coming to Tallahassee with 150 mile per hour winds. A lot of people decamped from Tallahassee up into North Carolina, and then were completely trapped. People think the climate crisis is on the horizon, and if they think that it’s because they haven’t been affected by it yet. But more and more, we’re all being affected by it.

In this book, Absolution, and in all the books, there are these in-group, out-group dynamics, and I’m just wondering, why is that something that you’re really interested in exploring narratively?

I’m trying to explore the psychological reality of being in these situations. I’m not trying to extrapolate, I’m not trying to predict. I’m simply trying to show what people are like facing these kinds of choices. Because, you know, people talk a lot about the landscapes and uncanny events, but they’re all filtered through a particular character point of view. And I often ask myself, is this person open to what’s happening or are they closed? Are they in denial? Are they understanding to some degree? Are they trying to form connections or are they disconnected and alienated? These are some of the issues that we find in modern times.

How do you talk to scientists? Because this series is very science-based, but the emotional resonance of why people are drawn to science is something that comes through a lot. 

My dad is a research chemist and entomologist who’s always headed up or been part of some lab, usually like fire ants and other invasive species. And so I grew up around these kinds of places. My mom was a biological illustrator for many years, and so that also brought a kind of a scientific element to her art. And between those two kinds of locations, I got to see the real human side of science. 

I think that actually really helps, along with going on actual scientific expeditions with my dad to Fiji as a kid, it’s just kind of intrinsically in you at that point that you have an understanding of science. I was really quite lucky in that regard.

What was helpful to you to get this book across the finish line?

One thing that was helpful is that there’s actually a lot of humor in it. I don’t like to write books that are monotone. Even in Annihilation, in the earlier books, there’s some sly humor going on. Here, I think it’s a little more overt in some of the relationships and some of what the secret agency is doing that’s so absurd. And then in the last section, especially with this very dysfunctional, almost tech bro-esque personality that’s in this expedition. It’s kind of unintentionally funny. That’s something that anchors me, because it gives me pleasure to write, along with the uncanny stuff.

What’s the role of fiction at this point in the climate crisis? 

I think one thing I don’t want the books to do when they skirt the edge of “prediction” is to be unrealistic. I get asked a question a lot, “Where’s the hope in your books?” or things like that. And it’s like, I don’t want the hope, I want the analysis. And I don’t want the faux analysis where we’re doing like carbon offsets that are meaningless. I don’t want to put that in my book as something that’s viable. 

I think that what fiction adds is—it’s kind of like: What do you get from religion versus science, or what do you get from philosophy rather than science? Fiction is not science, but it can give you this immersive three-dimensional reality of what it’s like to be in a situation, and it can bring your imagination to it in such a way that it really lives in your body to some degree. 

And so I think that’s why the thing that makes me most happy is having people come up to me and say that Annihilation was one reason they became a marine biologist or went into environmental science, that there was something about the character of the biologists in that book that was compelling to them. That to me, is what fiction can provide.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.

“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.

Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.

All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.

To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.

The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.

“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”

Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.

“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.

The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.

Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.

James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.

“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”

On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.

In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.

For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.

Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.

This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”

While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.

The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.

Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.

By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”

Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.

Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.

Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”

So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.

“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.

Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.

All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.

To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.

The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.

“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”

Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.

“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.

The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.

Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.

James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.

“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”

On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.

In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.

For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.

Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.

This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”

While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.

The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.

Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.

By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”

Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.

Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.

Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”

So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Approval of the construction of two gas power plants without public comment. Another’s expansion approved without an environmental review. 

New fees for homeowners with rooftop solar that the Arizona attorney general has called “discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.” Approval of an 8 percent rate increase for customers of Arizona’s largest utility, largely to cover the costs of expanding its grid despite the availability of cheaper options. The gutting of the utility’s plan to provide financial support for communities impacted by the closures of coal-fired power plants.

And all of that in just the past year.

Those decisions by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) have drawn an outcry from environmentalists and the state’s attorney general, spawned lawsuits, and prompted public campaigns by climate advocacy groups to hold the commission and Arizona Public Service Co., the state’s largest utility, accountable for continuing to use fossil fuels for electricity generation in Arizona.

In previous years, APS has invested tens of millions of dollars in influencing ACC elections.  But this November, the commission’s actions and the responses to them will play a pivotal role in determining who will be elected to the commission, which advocates say has the potential to dictate Arizona’s climate and renewable energy future more than any other vote for office holders in the state. 

“When it comes to mitigating climate change…the corporation commission plays a huge role in that,” said Emily Doerfler, a clean energy attorney with Western Resource Advocates who represents the climate-focused nonprofit in Arizona. 

Created in 1912 under the state’s constitution, the Arizona Corporation Commission regulates the state’s water and power utilities and determines how much customers can be charged, how much profit utilities can make, and how Arizona’s power grid is built and operated, along with other responsibilities. The state is one of 10 where the commissioners are elected and are separate from the state’s other branches of government, meaning only elections and lawsuits can hold them accountable.

“We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.” 

In 2022, Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats, giving them a supermajority. But three seats are up for election this year, setting the stage for a possible shift of the commission’s balance of power in one of Arizona’s most important, but often forgotten government entities. 

The election comes on the heels of the ACC approving two more gas-powered plants and yet another summer of record-breaking heat in Phoenix, with over 100 days straight of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in 339 confirmed heat-related deaths and another 336 cases under investigation. 

Eight candidates—three Democrats, three Republicans and two Greens—are on the ballot for the three spots. Only one candidate, Republican Lea Marquez Peterson, is running for reelection. 

In interviews and debates, Marquez Peterson and her Republican running mates, Rene Lopez and Rachel Walden, have defended the current commission’s approval of rate increases, citing the need to maintain grid stability, which they argue requires a “balanced” energy portfolio, including fossil fuels. 

“The reality is, as Arizona continues to grow, whether it’s residential growth or we have this long line of data centers and semiconductor industries that want to come to this state, we need to prepare for that energy demand, and that is why energy reliability needs to be our No. 1 factor,” Marquez Peterson said during a debate on Sept. 3.

The Republican candidates have also downplayed the energy sector’s role in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and argued that creating a mandate for renewables would raise rates further. About a quarter of the country’s emissions come from electric power, according to data from the EPA.

Democratic candidates Ylenia Aguilar, Jonathan Hill, and Joshua Polacheck have campaigned on allowing the free market to dictate Arizona’s energy sources, which they say would favor solar and other renewable energy sources leading to lower emissions and costs, and they have attacked the current commission for failing to protect Arizonans from rising energy costs and climate change. They say they will stick up for customers when utilities ask to increase rates and work to address climate change by expanding renewables in the state.

“Arizona is not known as an oil and gas capital of the country,” Hill, who is currently a mission planner at Arizona State University’s Mars Space Flight Facility, said during the debate. “We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.” 

Polacheck, a former foreign service officer with the US Department of State, said in an interview with Inside Climate News that the commission’s actions aren’t just affecting Arizonans today, but also future generations.

“The commissioners will be constructing the future of our state, and whether that state is going to be livable, whether it’s going to be a state where people can afford to raise their families and whether it’s a place where we can coexist with the environment,” he said. 

Just a few years ago, it seemed Arizona was close to setting a path to relying on an electricity mix made up entirely of renewable energy by 2050 thanks to a bipartisan plan from the ACC to reach that goal. 

But the plan ultimately unraveled. Since Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats in 2022, they have consistently approved new natural gas plants and are attempting to roll back what standards for renewable electricity still exist, though the state’s largest utilities have implemented their own clean energy goals. 

The commission’s decisions have prioritized “making it easier for utilities to continue expanding and investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, which is historically much more profitable for them but much more expensive for ratepayers,” said Keriann Conroy, a research associate for the Energy and Policy Institute, a pro-clean energy watchdog organization. “And of course, has a lot of climate and health and environmental impacts.”

The ACC has “abandoned” its duty to protect Arizonans” in favor of profit, says environmental lawyer Emily Doerfler.  “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission.”

This year, two major actions have dominated the headlines about the commission. The first was a decision approving a rate hike from APS that increased customers’ bills by roughly 8 percent, while also adding a surcharge for rooftop solar customers. That action also allowed utilities to build new power plants without first going through a rate hike case that allows public comment on the plan. The second decision expanded UNS Electric’s natural gas-powered Black Mountain Generating Station without an environmental review, which reversed 50 years of precedent and a vote from the commission’s Line Siting Committee that required the project to undergo such a review. 

The first action, climate groups argue, raised costs for customers to subsidize the utility’s continued consumption of fossil fuels despite its own studies finding that maintaining its coal-fired plants is uneconomical and that transitioning to renewables sooner would save it and ratepayers money. The ACC even went so far as to amend APS’s own plan, removing a $100 million fund the utility proposed for communities impacted by the coal-fired power plants eventually shutting down. 

The Black Mountain Generating Station decision led to legal action. Western Resource Advocates, the Sierra Club and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a former corporation commissioner herself, separately filed lawsuits appealing the commission’s decision.

UNS Electric plans to add four new gas-powered plants to its Black Mountain facility at 50 megawatts each, for a total of 200 MW. The utility argued that it was not under the jurisdiction of the commission or subject to an environmental review because each of the plants was under 100 MW. 

Arizona law requires a Certificate of Environmental Compatibility for power plants over 100 MW, and opponents of the ACC’s action say the new plants should be considered for their combined power output. The commission’s Line Siting Committee rejected the company’s argument in a 9-2 vote, arguing the commission had jurisdiction as the combined power of the plants at the single facility exceeded 100 MW. But the commissioners sided with the utility.

Doerfler, with Western Resource Advocates, said the ACC decision is just the latest example showing the commission has “abandoned” its constitutional duty to protect Arizonans, especially rural ones, “over and over and over again” to instead prioritize utility profits. “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission,” Doerfler said.

As essentially the state’s fourth branch of government, the ACC almost exclusively has the power to either end or continue Arizona’s reliance on fossil fuels, she said. That would include decisions like whether to mandate a quicker end to coal-fueled plants like APS’s Four Corners Power Plant.

“That means that the emissions that are coming from this coal plant in the next year are almost directly in the hands of the Arizona Corporation Commission,” Doerfler said. 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Approval of the construction of two gas power plants without public comment. Another’s expansion approved without an environmental review. 

New fees for homeowners with rooftop solar that the Arizona attorney general has called “discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.” Approval of an 8 percent rate increase for customers of Arizona’s largest utility, largely to cover the costs of expanding its grid despite the availability of cheaper options. The gutting of the utility’s plan to provide financial support for communities impacted by the closures of coal-fired power plants.

And all of that in just the past year.

Those decisions by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) have drawn an outcry from environmentalists and the state’s attorney general, spawned lawsuits, and prompted public campaigns by climate advocacy groups to hold the commission and Arizona Public Service Co., the state’s largest utility, accountable for continuing to use fossil fuels for electricity generation in Arizona.

In previous years, APS has invested tens of millions of dollars in influencing ACC elections.  But this November, the commission’s actions and the responses to them will play a pivotal role in determining who will be elected to the commission, which advocates say has the potential to dictate Arizona’s climate and renewable energy future more than any other vote for office holders in the state. 

“When it comes to mitigating climate change…the corporation commission plays a huge role in that,” said Emily Doerfler, a clean energy attorney with Western Resource Advocates who represents the climate-focused nonprofit in Arizona. 

Created in 1912 under the state’s constitution, the Arizona Corporation Commission regulates the state’s water and power utilities and determines how much customers can be charged, how much profit utilities can make, and how Arizona’s power grid is built and operated, along with other responsibilities. The state is one of 10 where the commissioners are elected and are separate from the state’s other branches of government, meaning only elections and lawsuits can hold them accountable.

“We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.” 

In 2022, Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats, giving them a supermajority. But three seats are up for election this year, setting the stage for a possible shift of the commission’s balance of power in one of Arizona’s most important, but often forgotten government entities. 

The election comes on the heels of the ACC approving two more gas-powered plants and yet another summer of record-breaking heat in Phoenix, with over 100 days straight of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in 339 confirmed heat-related deaths and another 336 cases under investigation. 

Eight candidates—three Democrats, three Republicans and two Greens—are on the ballot for the three spots. Only one candidate, Republican Lea Marquez Peterson, is running for reelection. 

In interviews and debates, Marquez Peterson and her Republican running mates, Rene Lopez and Rachel Walden, have defended the current commission’s approval of rate increases, citing the need to maintain grid stability, which they argue requires a “balanced” energy portfolio, including fossil fuels. 

“The reality is, as Arizona continues to grow, whether it’s residential growth or we have this long line of data centers and semiconductor industries that want to come to this state, we need to prepare for that energy demand, and that is why energy reliability needs to be our No. 1 factor,” Marquez Peterson said during a debate on Sept. 3.

The Republican candidates have also downplayed the energy sector’s role in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and argued that creating a mandate for renewables would raise rates further. About a quarter of the country’s emissions come from electric power, according to data from the EPA.

Democratic candidates Ylenia Aguilar, Jonathan Hill, and Joshua Polacheck have campaigned on allowing the free market to dictate Arizona’s energy sources, which they say would favor solar and other renewable energy sources leading to lower emissions and costs, and they have attacked the current commission for failing to protect Arizonans from rising energy costs and climate change. They say they will stick up for customers when utilities ask to increase rates and work to address climate change by expanding renewables in the state.

“Arizona is not known as an oil and gas capital of the country,” Hill, who is currently a mission planner at Arizona State University’s Mars Space Flight Facility, said during the debate. “We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.” 

Polacheck, a former foreign service officer with the US Department of State, said in an interview with Inside Climate News that the commission’s actions aren’t just affecting Arizonans today, but also future generations.

“The commissioners will be constructing the future of our state, and whether that state is going to be livable, whether it’s going to be a state where people can afford to raise their families and whether it’s a place where we can coexist with the environment,” he said. 

Just a few years ago, it seemed Arizona was close to setting a path to relying on an electricity mix made up entirely of renewable energy by 2050 thanks to a bipartisan plan from the ACC to reach that goal. 

But the plan ultimately unraveled. Since Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats in 2022, they have consistently approved new natural gas plants and are attempting to roll back what standards for renewable electricity still exist, though the state’s largest utilities have implemented their own clean energy goals. 

The commission’s decisions have prioritized “making it easier for utilities to continue expanding and investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, which is historically much more profitable for them but much more expensive for ratepayers,” said Keriann Conroy, a research associate for the Energy and Policy Institute, a pro-clean energy watchdog organization. “And of course, has a lot of climate and health and environmental impacts.”

The ACC has “abandoned” its duty to protect Arizonans” in favor of profit, says environmental lawyer Emily Doerfler.  “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission.”

This year, two major actions have dominated the headlines about the commission. The first was a decision approving a rate hike from APS that increased customers’ bills by roughly 8 percent, while also adding a surcharge for rooftop solar customers. That action also allowed utilities to build new power plants without first going through a rate hike case that allows public comment on the plan. The second decision expanded UNS Electric’s natural gas-powered Black Mountain Generating Station without an environmental review, which reversed 50 years of precedent and a vote from the commission’s Line Siting Committee that required the project to undergo such a review. 

The first action, climate groups argue, raised costs for customers to subsidize the utility’s continued consumption of fossil fuels despite its own studies finding that maintaining its coal-fired plants is uneconomical and that transitioning to renewables sooner would save it and ratepayers money. The ACC even went so far as to amend APS’s own plan, removing a $100 million fund the utility proposed for communities impacted by the coal-fired power plants eventually shutting down. 

The Black Mountain Generating Station decision led to legal action. Western Resource Advocates, the Sierra Club and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a former corporation commissioner herself, separately filed lawsuits appealing the commission’s decision.

UNS Electric plans to add four new gas-powered plants to its Black Mountain facility at 50 megawatts each, for a total of 200 MW. The utility argued that it was not under the jurisdiction of the commission or subject to an environmental review because each of the plants was under 100 MW. 

Arizona law requires a Certificate of Environmental Compatibility for power plants over 100 MW, and opponents of the ACC’s action say the new plants should be considered for their combined power output. The commission’s Line Siting Committee rejected the company’s argument in a 9-2 vote, arguing the commission had jurisdiction as the combined power of the plants at the single facility exceeded 100 MW. But the commissioners sided with the utility.

Doerfler, with Western Resource Advocates, said the ACC decision is just the latest example showing the commission has “abandoned” its constitutional duty to protect Arizonans, especially rural ones, “over and over and over again” to instead prioritize utility profits. “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission,” Doerfler said.

As essentially the state’s fourth branch of government, the ACC almost exclusively has the power to either end or continue Arizona’s reliance on fossil fuels, she said. That would include decisions like whether to mandate a quicker end to coal-fueled plants like APS’s Four Corners Power Plant.

“That means that the emissions that are coming from this coal plant in the next year are almost directly in the hands of the Arizona Corporation Commission,” Doerfler said. 

When Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified last week, exploding into a Category 5 storm, large parts of Florida were bracing for disaster. For Cruz Salucio, Milton wouldn’t be the first, or the worst, hurricane he’d endured. But it sparked anxiety all the same.

Salucio works for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ local radio station, Radio Conciencia. The organization primarily serves farmworkers in Southern Florida, but its various programs have a presence in 15 states around the country. 

When hurricanes like Milton, Idalia, and Ian have approached, Salucio and other radio DJs were often the most direct source of reliable, fact-checked information for the region’s Spanish- and Mayan-speaking migrant workers. Climate change is intensifying these types of storms and in the process straining resources, endangering millions of people. For workers with few resources, hurricanes can be isolating and devastating events. But Radio Conciencia tries to fill the gaps as much as possible.

People at the station often answer questions about shelters and evacuation routes. Amid the deluge of information and misinformation, Radio Conciencia has become a trusted resource for many. It helps that, when there’s not a crisis, the station plays traditional genres of music like Banda, a regional Mexican style originally influenced by polka, or marimba-centric music popular in Guatemala. It also supplements the music with messages about workers’ rights and safety, filling a vital knowledge gap. 

Salucio spoke with me, via translation, about what it feels like to provide a lifesaving resource in trying times. His story has been edited and condensed for clarity:

I remember when I first came to Immokalee trying to find a radio station to listen to. Scrolling through the dial, I came across the music that was playing on Radio Conciencia. It was a Sunday, and I remember hearing marimba, which is a traditional Guatemalan instrument, and also hearing the radio host speaking in Q’anjob’al, an Indigenous language from Guatemala. It was so striking to me at that moment to hear not only the music, but also my first language, and to have that direct connection to where I had just come from.

From there, I got really involved. I came to Radio Conciencia because it’s a community radio station. You yourself can get involved and learn how to speak on radio and manage it technologically.

When I was working in the fields back in the 2000s, you’ll often have this experience where the bosses on a particular farm want to get as much harvested as possible, quickly, before the hurricane arrives. They’ll wait till the very last minute to let people leave. Having that experience myself—that’s really what drives me.

When I’m sitting and broadcasting from the radio during these moments of crisis, where I know that members of the community, their lives and their wellbeing are in danger, it feels incredibly important to make sure they know that. I feel a profound commitment to the radio and its purpose, especially in those moments, to the point that, especially now that I have a family, there’s that kind of balancing act of being home with family and sometimes needing to get back to the office to record some last-minute audio tracks or be live on the radio.

Our goal is always to ensure that people have the information they need when they need it, that they know how to prepare for these types of crises, and, especially during a hurricane, to know where they can go to shelter.

Days ahead of a hurricane’s arrival, we will work on original announcements that we can program with important information about what to do, how to prepare, how to stay safe during and after. We’ll record and program those announcements to play to everyone periodically, so even if there’s not someone live in the station, those messages are still getting out there. And of course the other limitation is if power goes out. That does affect the radio but we try to be as prepared as possible for those eventualities.

The good news is that our radio station and community center are in quite a safe building. Even during this most recent hurricane [Milton], some of our staff and radio DJs actually sheltered and stayed here, so they were able to continue broadcasting. We’re safer here than they might have been in their homes. 

The main thing we hear from listeners during these times is just deep gratitude. A lot of people in the community, by phone and on social media, reach out to say thank you for having a place they can go to in their language that has good and reliable information, that isn’t creating panic. They will call us and say, “I live in a really crappy trailer and I don’t feel safe—where can I go? Where are the shelters?” 

These storms not only impact the community but will wipe out entire agricultural fields. So they’ll call and say, “Have you heard anything? Do you know what’s happened in the tomato fields?” 

“I’ve gone to the public shelters as well…It’s actually kind of a beautiful scene sometimes, and a good place to connect with the community and chat with people and see how everyone’s doing.”

Sometimes we’ll give them the terrible news that the entire fields got wiped out, which means no work. It always depends on the nature of the storm. For this particular storm, we could tell, basically in the final hours before the storm, that it wasn’t going to hit as hard here. So I sheltered at home with my family. The worst of it did not come inland to Immokalee. 

During other hurricanes, when I’ve lived in trailers and other insecure housing, I’ve gone to the public shelters not only to be safe myself, but it’s actually kind of a beautiful scene sometimes, and a good place to connect with the community and chat with people and see how everyone’s doing.

The reality for so many farmworkers is, especially when you’re living in trailers and really poor housing, you have so little and you are afraid of losing the little you do have of your belongings. Some people try to ride it out in their housing. Or they’re afraid that if they leave and then come back, what are they going to come back to? It might be nothing. Ideally, people will go when they need to, find a shelter to be safe if it’s going to be an extreme storm—even with that fear of losing everything they have.

Correction, Oct. 18, 2024: This story was corrected to accurately reflect the number of states where the Coalition of Immokalee workers has programs.

As a child, Senegalese-born chef Pierre Thiam took trips from Dakar to the countryside to visit his grandparents. There, he often ate fonio, a locally grown seeded grass rarely found outside rural areas. After making a name for himself at New York restaurants decades later, Thiam’s thoughts returned to the ingredient. “It’s very versatile,” he says. “It’s a delicate grain,” mild and nutty with a fluffy texture that resembles couscous.

But he couldn’t find it anywhere, so he began importing it through his food supply company, Yolélé. It wasn’t just fonio’s texture that he saw as a boon for the US market: The grain has attributes that make it especially enticing in a warming world.

Fonio, grown predominantly in West Africa, is a staple in many African and Asian countries. Part of the millet family, it is fast-growing, highly nutritious, resilient to changing conditions, and able to thrive in poor, arid soils.

Few farmers grow millets these days, despite the need for adaptable crops.

Like corn, sorghum, and sugarcane, it is a C4 plant, which, to spare you a long lesson in cellular biology, means it retains water more efficiently than most plants, especially in sunny environments. Millets have among the lowest water requirements of any cereal crop for another reason, too: Their elongated and dense root systems can access moisture deep in the soil, reducing reliance on regular rainfall.

But few farmers grow millets these days, despite the need for adaptable crops. Nearly every region of the world is getting hotter. Twenty-one of the world’s 37 major aquifers—including many in the United States—are being depleted faster than they can be replenished, and major rivers are drying up due to prolonged drought. Research published in Nature Climate Change in 2021 showed that human-­caused warming has already reduced global agricultural production by 21 percent since 1961. And a new report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water warns that half the world’s food production is in areas at risk of serious water shortages by the middle of the century.

If millets are such an attractive choice for our changing climate, why aren’t we growing more of them? Commercialization, it turns out, faces several roadblocks. “It’s relatively difficult to process them,” explains Jonathon Landeck, co-founder of the nonprofit North American Millets Alliance. The seeds are typically sifted for impurities, cleaned, and dried before being dehulled—a task traditionally accomplished by hand with a mortar and pestle—and sorted by size and color. These are tedious tasks, and there isn’t much to be had in the way of efficient, millet-specific processing equipment.

In 2022, a Malian agro-processing venture involving Yolélé and another firm received a $2 million grant from the US Agency for ­International Development to develop a transparent supply chain and better technology. The partnership has collaborated with the Swiss equipment manufacturer Bühler to engineer a machine that virtually eliminates fonio loss during processing—previously as much as half the crop—increasing its output of edible grain from 1 ton per workday to 3 tons per hour.

But markets require demand. Few American consumers are familiar with millet, let alone know how to prepare it, Landeck says. While the UN declared 2023 the International Year of Millets, government funding for research and crop subsidies on anywhere near the scale of those enjoyed by corn, wheat, and rice growers “is yet to follow,” says chemist Amrita Hazra, a co-founder of the Millet Project, a research collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The USDA maintains a collection of millet seeds from around the globe, Hazra adds, and should invest in research to determine which species grow best in different climates and altitudes, knowledge that could incentivize farmers to propagate millets.

The agency is, in fact, funding a small-scale exploration of millet as an economically viable US crop. Earlier this year, it granted $4 million to Zego, a company that aims to increase domestic processing capacity, marketing, and consumption of organic millet.

Thiam would be excited if Americans fell in love with fonio, though he’d rather we continue sourcing it from West African farmers who are often overlooked by the global supply chain and have been growing this climate-resilient grain for millennia. Meanwhile, he says, “creating a market for fonio would not only allow this crop to not disappear, it would also create a model for other crops out there that are just waiting to have their potential unlocked.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump campaigns for a second term in the White House, the former president has repeatedly promised to enact the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history. It’s a bold threat that legal experts say should be taken seriously, despite the significant technical and logistical challenges posed by deporting 11 million people from the United States. 

Even if only somewhat successful, Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration—with its laser focus on removing immigrants who live in the US without permanent legal status—has the potential to uproot countless communities and families by conducting sweeping raids and placing people in detention centers.

Mass deportation would also, according to economists, labor groups, and immigration advocates, threaten the economy and disrupt the food supply chain, which is reliant on many forms of migrant labor.

The ramifications of a mass deportation operation would be “huge” given “immigrant participation in our labor force,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer of workers, environment, and climate at the Migrant Clinicians Network, a nonprofit that advocates for health justice. Immigration is one of the reasons behind growth in the labor force, said Liebman. “And then you look at food, and farms.” 

“Button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken? Like, hello?”

The possibility of deportation-related disruption comes at a time when the US food system is already being battered by climate change. Extreme weather and climate disasters are disrupting supply chains, while longer-term warming trends are affecting agricultural productivity. Although inflation is currently cooling, higher food costs remain an issue for consumers across the country—and economists have found that even a forecast of extreme weather can cause grocery store prices to rise. 

Mass deportation could create more chaos, because the role of immigrants in the American food system is difficult to overstate. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of them coming from Mexico, legally obtain H-2A visas that allow them to enter the US as seasonal agricultural workers and then return home when the harvest is done. But people living in the US without legal status also play a crucial role in the economy: During the pandemic, it was estimated that 5 million essential workers were undocumented. And the Center for American Progress found that nearly 1.7 million undocumented workers labor in some part of the US food supply chain.

A stunning half of those immigrants work in restaurants, where during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they labored in enclosed, often cramped environments at a time when poor ventilation could be deadly. Hundreds of thousands also work in farming and agriculture—where they might work in the field or sorting produce—as well as food production, in jobs like machine operation and butchery.

The agricultural sector is just one of several industries in recent years that has experienced a labor shortage, which the US Chamber of Commerce has classified a “crisis.” This ongoing shortage makes the Trump campaign’s proposal to force a mass exodus of people without legal status an inherently bad policy, said Liebman. “Part of me is like, ‘Oh, button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken?’ Like, hello?”

“With fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.”

The health and safety risks undocumented immigrants have undertaken to keep Americans fed—both in times of crises and during all other times—have been met with few legal and workplace protections. A bill to give undocumented essential workers a legal pathway to citizenship, introduced by Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, died in committee in 2023. Padilla told Grist he will continue working to “expand protections for these essential workers, including fighting for a legal pathway to citizenship.”

“Agricultural workers endure long hours of physically demanding work, showing up through extreme weather and even a global pandemic to keep our country fed,” he added. “They deserve to live with dignity.” 

If this workforce were to be unceremoniously deported, without regard for their economic contributions to U.S. society or consideration of whether they actually pose a threat to their communities, it would be disastrous, according to Padilla. 

“Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations as a part of Project 2025 are not only cruel but would also decimate our nation’s food supply and economy,” said Padilla, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a Trump presidency. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

US farmers, who rely on many forms of migrant labor (including undocumented workers and H-2A temporary visa holders), have said that a crackdown on undocumented immigrants would essentially bring business to a grinding halt. In response to federal and state proposals to require employers to verify the legal status of their workers, the American Farm Bureau Federation has said, “Enforcement-only immigration reform would cripple agricultural production in America.”

The Farm Bureau, an advocacy group for farmers, declined to comment on Trump’s mass deportation proposal, but a questionnaire the group gave to both presidential candidates states, “Farm work is challenging, often seasonal and transitory, and with fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.”

Small farmers agree. A first generation Mexican-American immigrant who works in Illinois as an urban farmer, David Toledo says that the consequences of mass deportation for the country’s food system would be hard to imagine, especially since he believes that “many Americans don’t want to take the jobs” that many undocumented workers currently fill for very low pay.

“We need people who want to work in fields and in farmlands. [Farmworkers] are waking up way before the sun because of rising temperatures, and living in horrible conditions,” said Toledo. He added that the US should remember “that we are a welcoming community and society. We have to be, because we are going to see a lot more people shifting [here] from countries all over the world because of climate change.” 

Stephen Miller, the advisor who shaped Trump’s hard-line immigration policy, has touted mass deportations as a labor market intervention that will boost wages for American-born workers. But analysts point out that previous programs aimed at restricting the flow of immigrant workers have failed to raise wages for native-born citizens.

For example, when the US in 1965 ended the Bracero Program, which allowed half a million Mexican-American seasonal workers to labor in the US, wages for domestic farmworkers did not increase, according to analysis from the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Additionally, a recent analysis found that a Bush- and Obama-era deportation program known as Secure Communities—which removed nearly half a million undocumented immigrants from the US—resulted in both fewer jobs and lower wages from domestic workers. One reason is that when undocumented immigrants were deported, many middle managers who worked with them also lost their jobs.

Such a shock to the agricultural labor force could result in higher food prices, too. If farmers lose a large portion of their workforce due to mass deportation, they may not have enough people to harvest, grade, and sort crops before they spoil. That sort of reduction in the supply of food could drive up prices at the grocery store. 

Many experts note that even attempting to deport millions of immigrants would disrupt the nation’s economy as a whole. “It will not benefit our economy to lose millions of workers,” said Debu Gandhi, senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “There is no economic rationale for it.”

For instance, mass deportation would deprive governments of essential tax revenue. A report from the American Immigration Council found that a majority of undocumented immigrants—or three-fourths—participated in the workforce in 2022. This tracks with other analysts’ understandings of the undocumented workforce. “Undocumented immigrants, when they get to the United States of America, they have an intention to work, to make money and contribute not only to their families, but also to the federal, state, and local government,” said Marco Guzman, a senior policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. A recent report co-authored by Guzman found that undocumented immigrants paid a whopping $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.

Moreover, advocacy groups worry about the impact mass deportation would have on families. “What does this look like on the ground?” said Liebman, who wondered who would be tasked with enforcing mass deportation, and whether it would require local law enforcement agencies to carry out raids in their own neighborhoods and communities. She noted that the bulk of migrant families across the country are “mixed status”—meaning that some members of a household have documentation while others don’t. “Are we going to go into people’s houses and rip families apart?”  

“My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement [mass deportations] a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution.”

Immigration is the purview of the federal government, and for decades, elected leaders across the political spectrum have failed to pass policies to fix America’s strained immigration system. “It has been very hard to find solutions on immigration reform,” said Gandhi. “And we do have bipartisan solutions on the table. But we just have not been able to get them through.”

In the absence of other policy solutions—such as addressing the root causes of migration to the US from other countries, including climate change—all-or-nothing imperatives to “close the border” have become popular among conservatives. In fact, a Scripps News/Ipsos poll released last month found that a majority of American voters surveyed support mass deporting immigrants without legal status. 

Experts have debated the feasibility of Trump’s promise to enact mass deportations—pointing out that deportations during Trump’s first term were lower than under his predecessor, Barack Obama. (The Biden administration has also enacted considerably more enforcement actions against immigrants than were carried out during the Trump administration.) Although the specific details on how the proposal would be carried out and enforced have yet to be clarified by Trump’s campaign, Paul Chavez, litigation program director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm, is highly skeptical about the likelihood of such a move holding up in federal court. 

“I can’t imagine any sort of mass deportation program that doesn’t result in racial profiling of both immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants,” said Chavez. Any form of racial profiling that came out of such an enforcement process would be in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which effectively prohibits a state from adopting policies that target any person in its jurisdiction based on race, color, or national origin. A mass deportation operation would lead to people being profiled across the country and treated in “a discriminatory fashion based on national origin,” said Chavez—triggering all sorts of lawsuits. 

“My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement in a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution,” said Chavez. 

But whether or not courts upheld mass deportation, the threat of raids would send a strong message to workers, according to Antonio De Loera-Brust, an organizer with United Farm Workers, a labor union for farmworkers that represents laborers regardless of their immigration status. He posited that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is purposefully designed to have a chilling effect on US residents without legal status. “The point is not to remove millions, it’s to scare them,” said De Loera-Brust.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump deliberately withheld disaster aid to states he deemed politically hostile to him as president and will do so again unimpeded if he returns to the White House, several former Trump administration officials have warned.

As Hurricane Helene and then Hurricane Milton ravaged the southeastern US over the past two weeks, Trump has sought to pin blame upon Joe Biden’s administration for a ponderous response to the disasters, even suggesting that this was deliberate, due to the number of Republican voters affected by the storms.

But former Trump administration officials have said the former president, when in office, initially refused to release federal disaster aid for wildfires in California in 2018, withheld wildfire assistance for Washington state in 2020, and severely restricted emergency relief to Puerto Rico in the wake of the devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017 because he felt these places were not sufficiently supportive of him.

“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics—because they didn’t vote for him.”

The revelations, first reported upon by E&E News, have raised major doubts over what Trump’s response to disasters would be should he win next month’s presidential election. The former president has already been criticized for his role in spreading misinformation about Helene and Milton that has allegedly slowed the disaster response and even led to online death threats against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staff and meteorologists.

“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics—because they didn’t vote for him,” said Kevin Carroll, former senior counselor to Homeland Security secretary John Kelly during Trump’s term. Carroll said Kelly, later the president’s chief of staff, had to “twist Trump’s arm” to get him to release the federal funding via FEMA to these badly hit areas.

“It was clear that Trump was entirely self-interested and vengeful towards those he perceived didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told the Guardian. “He even wanted to pull the Navy out of Hawaii because they didn’t vote for him. We were appalled—these are American civilians the government is meant to provide for. The idea of withholding aid is antithetical to everything you want from in a leader.”

The effort to overcome Trump’s reluctance to provide aid for California succeeded only after the then-president was provided voting data showing that Orange county, heavily damaged by the wildfires, has large numbers of Republican voters, according to Olivia Troye, who was a Homeland Security adviser to the Trump White House.

“We had to sit around and brainstorm a way where he would agree to this because he looked at everything through a political lens,” Troye told the Guardian. “There were instances where disaster declarations would sit on his desk for days, we’d get phone calls all the time on how to speed things up, sometimes we had to get [Vice-President] Mike Pence to weigh in.

“It was shocking and appalling to us to see a president of the United States behaving in this way. Basically if it doesn’t benefit him, he’s not interested. We saw this in the Covid pandemic too, when it was red states versus blue states, and it’s still evident in his demeanor now, where he’s politicizing disaster response. It’s dangerous and reckless.”

“Most human beings would feel guilt in punishing people in pain whose homes are in ashes or are under 8 feet of water. It’s a window into the darkness of his soul, frankly.”

One of the most “egregious” delays, Troye said, came after Hurricane Maria smashed into Puerto Rico, causing widespread damage and nearly 3,000 deaths. In the wake of the disaster, Trump claimed the death toll had been inflated “to make me look as bad as possible,” called the mayor of San Juan “crazed and incompetent,” and halted billions of dollars of federal support for the island.

Ultimately, FEMA covered debris cleanup in Puerto Rico, and Trump visited the US territory, throwing paper towels to hurricane survivors. But not all recovery costs for the island were paid for by the federal government, with an independent inspector general report finding that FEMA mismanaged the distribution of aid following Maria.

This came just months before Trump agreed to pay 100 percent of Florida’s costs after the state was hit by Hurricane Michael. “They love me in the Panhandle,” Trump said, according to an autobiography written by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor. “I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”

While officials around Trump were able to persuade him to relent somewhat in these instances, the former president held firm in refusing to provide disaster relief to Washington after wildfires ravaged the east of the state, largely destroying the communities of Malden and Pine City, in 2020.

For months, Trump denied Washington’s request for federal help due to his dislike of Jay Inslee, the state’s Democratic governor and a prominent critic, according to an aide of Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican congresswoman whose district was scorched by wildfires.

McMorris Rodgers wrote to Trump to side with him in his dispute with Inslee while pleading with the president to release the funding. “Despite our governor’s bad faith personal vendetta against your administration, people in my district need support, and I implore you to move forward in providing it to those who have been impacted by devastating wildfires in our region,” McMorris Rodgers wrote.

Trump, however, did not agree to provide the help, which was only given once Joe Biden came into office. “Trump consciously and maliciously withheld assistance in a fit of juvenile pique because my state had the effrontery to question his policies,” Inslee told the Guardian.

“What’s so stunning is that Trump enjoys his authoritarian instincts in refusing to help people. Most human beings would feel guilt in punishing people in pain whose homes are in ashes or are under 8 feet of water. It’s a window into the darkness of his soul, frankly. We’ve seen with North Carolina again that he will use natural disasters for his own purposes and his fragile ego. He’s a clear and present danger.”

Carroll and Troye, former Trump administration officials, predicted there would be fewer constraints on Trump withholding disaster aid should he win another term in the White House. Several Trump allies, including those who wrote the Project 2025 conservative manifesto, have called for the Republican nominee to root out dissenters and install obedient political apparatchiks within the federal government to help enact his wishes.

“Next time you won’t have the integrity of Mike Pence: You’ll have JD Vance who will do whatever Trump wants,” said Troye, who is a Republican but has endorsed Kamala Harris for president. “It’s concerning to think about a future Trump administration with just loyalists in these positions around him in these sort of moments that should be non-partisan.

“I hope voters are paying close attention to contrast between the responsible leadership shown by Biden and Harris and the dangerous demeanor of Donald Trump.”

Just last month, Trump signaled that his dealmaking over disaster aid would not change if he were president again, warning that he would block assistance to California unless the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, agreed to deliver more water to farmers. “Gavin Newscum is going to sign those papers,” Trump said from his golf course in California. “If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires, and if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.”

Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary of the Trump campaign, did not answer questions regarding the allegations made by Carroll and Troye, and instead referenced efforts by Trump to improve forest wildfire management and repeated debunked claims that disaster relief money has been diverted by FEMA to migrants.

“President Trump visited Georgia twice in one week to tour destruction from Hurricane Helene and has encouraged his supporters to donate more than $6 million for relief efforts on the ground,” she said, and then repeated a lie: “Kamala Harris stole $1 billion from FEMA to pay for illegal migrant housing and now there’s nothing left for struggling American citizens. President Trump is leading during this tragic moment while, once again, Kamala leaves Americans behind.”