Melinda French Gates Says World Debt Woes Need Bold Action Now
Margaret Collins and Shawn Donnan
Sun, June 18, 2023
(Bloomberg) -- Melinda French Gates is urging world leaders gathering in Paris this week to take bolder action to reform the global financial system and offer a way out of growing debt woes for places like Africa.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, French Gates said too many African countries are emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with debt loads that are forcing them to contemplate sacrificing investments in social programs with proven long-term benefits to make short-term payments. This also comes as they struggle to raise funds to confront climate catastrophes.
French Gates, 58, likened the dilemma to a life-or-death version of the choices families in the rich world have made in the face of the highest inflation in decades.
“You talk to those finance ministers, they’re saying ‘I have to make tradeoffs, just like a household has to make tradeoffs’,” the co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said. “They’re in these terrible situations of making tradeoffs between ‘Do I continue to invest in those primary health clinics that are leading people to live healthier lives? Do I pull back on education? Where do I pull back, given I have to spend so much money servicing my debt?’”
French President Emmanuel Macron and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley are convening the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact on Thursday to discuss how to create a more inclusive successor to the western-led Bretton Woods institutions that have financed development and economic rescues since the 1940s. Leaders and senior policymakers including Chinese premier Li Qiang, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are scheduled to attend.
How Aid for Poor Nations With Big Debts Got Stuck: QuickTake
French Gates said she was hopeful that momentum was building for a global solution to the debt problems and to reform the International Monetary Fund and World Bank via a series of meetings this year, including this week’s summit.
She was also optimistic that the US and China could overcome geopolitical differences that have complicated Group of 20 efforts to hammer out a new set of global rules for creditors and debtors caught up in the debt throes. The pandemic, soaring food prices, higher borrowing costs and the stronger dollar — driven by the US Federal Reserve’s campaign against inflation — have worsened the burden.
Yet even as those talks proceed, French Gates, who established the foundation with her former husband, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, says she’s worried many rich countries including the US are increasingly inward-looking coming out of the pandemic.
Turning Inward
“My biggest concern is that the high-income countries completely turn inward and just say ‘We have our own problems at home, so we’re just going to let that languish’,” she said.
The world is now too interconnected for citizens in the US or other rich countries to be able to ignore problems outside their borders, whether they be wildfires caused by climate change or the growing number of people going hungry.
“It’s reminding people we are part of a global economy, like it or not,” she said. “We just have to call on the better nature of people and just say ‘Look, it’s not just about me at home, it’s about everybody.’”
French Gates said the IMF and World Bank are the best institutions to lead a new push to resolve the growing debt problems in the developing world. She also endorsed a G-20 effort to draft new common rules to address how to handle debt relief.
But those institutions need urgent reform — and for shareholders to give them more financial resources, she said.
Wealthy countries also need to think more creatively by taking measures such as reallocating or onlending their share of $650 billion in new IMF reserves released in 2021 — known as special drawing rights — to poorer nations.
The institutions “have served us incredibly well,” French Gates said. “But the frameworks that are in place — as the G-20 nations are expressing very vociferously — they aren’t working right now.”
The extra funding is also needed to close an even larger economic gap left by the pandemic, which pushed some 70 million people into extreme poverty globally in 2020, according to the World Bank.
While rich countries spent 20% of their gross domestic product to prop up their economies and social services during the pandemic the equivalent figure for low-income countries was only around 3%, French Gates said.
Despite rising geopolitical tensions between China and the US and Western allies, any efforts to address debt problems and issues plaguing the developing world must include Beijing, she said.
Earlier: Xi Tells Gates China Is Willing to Engage in Tech Cooperation
“China has to be at the table,” she added, pointing to Chinese investment in Africa and its inescapable position as the largest creditor to many countries on the continent.
She also expressed confidence that Washington and Beijing could overcome their public differences and work together on things like securing debt relief and future funds for poor countries.
“The US does not want to be in a war with China. China does not want to be in the war with the US, right? So at the end of the day, there’s going to have to be some give and take,” French Gates said. “The countries will do the right things. I think it’s going to come out OK.”
--With assistance from Sydney Maki.
Bloomberg Businessweek
Zoos and aquariums shift to a new standard of 'animal welfare' that depends on deeper understanding of animals' lives
Michael J. Renner, Professor of Biology, Psychology, and Environmental Science & Sustainability, Director Zoo & Conservation Science, Drake UniversityTHE CONVERSATION
Sun, June 18, 2023
Climbers must climb, diggers must dig and runners must run. Doris Rudd Designs, Photography/Moment via Getty Images
In 1980 I visited the zoo in a major U.S. city and found row after row of bare concrete boxes with jailhouse-style bars occupied by animals from around the world. The animals appeared to be in good physical condition, but many were staring into space or pacing restlessly around the edges of their tiny quarters. It was depressing. I’m not naming the zoo, because you could have seen the same thing at most U.S. zoos in that era.
More recently, visitors to many zoos and aquariums see animals in surroundings that resemble their native habitat, behaving in ways that are typical for their species. What has changed?
In the intervening years, the professional zoo and aquarium community has fundamentally altered the way it views the task of caring for the animals in its collections. Instead of focusing on animal care, the industry is now requiring that zoos meet a higher standard – animal welfare. This is a new metric, and it represents a huge change in how zoos and aquariums qualify for accreditation.
I am a scientist who studies animal behavior, both in captivity and in the wild. This recent development in the zoo world is the result of an evolution in the scientific understanding of animals’ lives and welfare. It also reflects zoos’ and aquariums’ increasing focus on conservation.
From trophy case to conservation message
Since the first animal menageries in ancient Egypt, zoos and aquariums have taken a progression of forms.
The British Royal Menagerie, which was housed in the Tower of London from the early 13th century until 1835, served as an animated trophy case. In Europe, exotic animal collections were often displayed in garden settings for the amusement of the gentry, and by the late 18th century, for the general public as well. These places often functioned as stationary circuses, sensationalizing the strangeness of animals from afar.
A thylacine, or ‘Tasmanian wolf’ or ‘Tasmanian tiger,’ in captivity, circa 1930. These marsupials are now presumed extinct. Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
Early zoos weren’t very good at keeping animals alive. In the first half of the 20th century, though, zoos began to focus on animals’ physical health. This ushered in the “bathroom” era in zoo design, with an emphasis on surfaces that could be steam-sterilized, such as ceramic tile.
Over the past 50 years, a landscape immersion model of zoo design has risen to prominence, as institutions have evolved into conservation and education organizations. By displaying animals in settings resembling their natural habitat – and setting the scene for visitors to imagine themselves in that habitat – the hope is to instill in visitors who might never see a lion in its element a passion for its preservation.
Changing standards
Accreditation is a mechanism for maintaining and pioneering best practices. Being accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums is the highest level of professional recognition for North American zoos and aquariums. Fewer than 250 out of approximately 2,800 animal exhibitors licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture are AZA accredited.
To earn that accreditation, a zoo or aquarium must demonstrate alignment with its mission, a sound business operation and significant activity in the areas of education, conservation and research. But the centerpiece of accreditation is demonstrating quality of life for animals under human care.
A marine mammal trainer brushes the teeth of a seal at the New England Aquarium in Boston in 2020. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
For decades, the focus was on practices that correlate with animal health, like absence of illness, successful reproduction and longevity. The AZA has published objective standards for what it means to provide proper care for a tapir, a tiger or a Japanese spider crab – for example, requirements specifying certain amounts of physical space, environmental temperature ranges and cleaning routines. These extensive and detailed standards were devised by working groups of experts in various species from across the zoo and aquarium community and based on the best available scientific evidence.
A recent revision to accreditation standards in 2018, however, supersedes this model in favor of a new goal – that a zoo or aquarium demonstrate it has achieved animal welfare. Not only must animals be healthy, but they should also display behavior typical of their species. Climbers must climb, diggers must dig and runners must run.
Understanding the lives of animals is central
Over the past 60 years, scientific understanding of animals’ cognitive abilities has exploded. A large body of scientific work has shown that a relatively rich or impoverished environment has effects on both brain and behavior. Such awareness has led the zoo and aquarium community to formally embrace a higher standard of care.
Zoo or aquarium personnel can provide such behavioral opportunities only if they know what is normal for that species in the wild. So optimizing animal welfare requires a knowledge base that is both broad and deep. For example, a zoo must understand what is normal behavior for a pygmy marmoset before it can know what behavioral opportunities to provide.
An African lion investigates a new enrichment device at the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2021. Nick Moffitt, Blank Park Zoo, CC BY-ND
Many zoos and aquariums house hundreds of animal species. Each species exists because it occupies a unique niche in the ecosystem, so the conditions that produce ideal welfare for one species may not be the same as those for a different species.
Developing welfare standards for the wide diversity of zoo species will take time and quite a bit of research. Although AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums contribute over 0 million per year to research in over 100 countries around the world, the need for conservation research always far outstrips the available funding.
How old is an eastern black rhinoceros before it begins to go on adventures away from its mother? If a flamingo chick has a medical issue that is successfully resolved, how can keepers tell if its development has been affected? How can keepers evaluate whether items introduced into the enclosure of a troop of Japanese macaque monkeys, intended to enrich their environment, are actually serving that purpose? Knowing the answers to these questions, and a multitude of other similar ones, will help the zoo community truly optimize the welfare of animals under their care.
Another major factor behind the AZA’s new standard is its role in species conservation. Captive animals typically outlive their wild counterparts. Zoos and aquariums are the figurative lifeboat for an increasing number of species that are extinct in the wild. Simply keeping an animal alive is now no longer enough. Zoo-based efforts to save endangered species will succeed only if understanding of the animals’ lives is fully integrated with husbandry standards.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
It was written by: Michael J. Renner, Drake University.
Read more:
Scientist at work: Endangered ocelots and their genetic diversity may benefit from artificial insemination
The neural cruelty of captivity: Keeping large mammals in zoos and aquariums damages their brains
Flamingos with flu and hippos in hurricanes: emergency preparedness in zoos and aquariums
Michael J. Renner is a pro bono member of the board of directors and chairperson of the research commitee at Blank Park Zoo (www.blankparkzoo.net), an AZA accredited zoo. He is also a pro bono member of the board of directors for the Ape Initiative (www.apeinitiative.org), an AZA certified facility.
HEY MISTER LEAVE THOSE BEARS ALONEWhy grizzly bears will start to be trapped in parts of Yellowstone
Hillary Andrews
Sun, June 18, 2023
BOZEMAN, Mont. – Scientists will start capturing grizzly bears Monday to study in the greater Yellowstone National Park area. The baiting and trapping operations will continue through August 31 in parts of the Custer Gallatin National Forest as well as private lands.
"Research and monitoring of the grizzly bear population is vital to ongoing recovery and management of grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem," said the U.S. Forest Service in a statement.
Grizzlies, once found throughout western North America, were reduced to surviving in only 2% of their historic range by the 1960s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1973, the Department of the Interior formed the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team and Committee.
AGENCIES EVALUATE OPTIONS TO RESTORE GRIZZLY BEARS TO NORTH CASCADES AFTER POPULATION VANISHES
The green represents the historic range of the Grizzlies and the yellow represents the species current range.
Its findings prompted the lower 48 to list the animal as threatened under the Endangered Species Act due to population and range reduction due to human impact in 1975.
"In the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Grizzly bear numbers had declined to perhaps fewer than 250," stated the USGS in a preservation video.
After almost 50 years of research, the bears are making a comeback. The USGS said it could be the largest collection of scientific evidence on any bear species in the world
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK WARNS OF DANGERS AFTER FIRST GRIZZLY BEAR SIGHTINGS OF 2023
A female grizzly bear exits Pelican Creek October 8, 2012 in the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
"Today, the study team estimates that the population has rebounded to a minimum of 700," the USGS continued. "And these bears are now delisted from the Endangered Species Act, though much of the credit goes to the grizzly bear and its resilience over decades of management and landscape changes. Rigorous science that informs effective management decisions is also part of the equation."
Biologists will bait foot snares and culvert traps with natural food like road-kill elk and deer, the Forest Service said. Culvert traps are cages or enclosures with one open end that closes when the bait is pulled.
The committee recommends radio-collaring at least 25 adult females annually. They also collar male bears.
BEAR TAKES ABOUT 400 SELFIES AFTER DISCOVERING WILDLIFE CAMERA IN COLORADO
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING, UNITED STATES - 2017/06/02: A Mother Grizzly and her cub walk through a meadow in Yellowstone National Park. (Photo by Will Powers/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
"Data collected from radio-marked bears provide information necessary for tracking key population parameters," stated the USGS on its site. "By observing radio-collared bears, we document age of first reproduction, average litter size, cub and yearling survival, how often a female produces a litter, and causes of mortality. These data allow us to estimate survival among different sex and age classes of bears."
Grizzlies can weigh up to 600 pounds and eat over 200 food items, including plants, animals and fungi. A bear can live up to 30 years, but they reproduce slowly, said the USGS.
"Since the mid-1980s, science has shown that Yellowstone grizzly bears have increased in number and expanded their range, ensuring the future viability of grizzly bears in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem will require continued public engagement, along with the reliable scientific information that assists wildlife managers in conserving the Yellowstone grizzly bear," explained the USGS.
Officials placed bright yellow signs in baited areas.
The study team conducts similar capture operations in other national parks.
Column: State Farm is right. California can't keep building housing in high-risk places
Erika D. Smith, Anita Chabria
Sun, June 18, 2023
Brenda Ortega salvages items from her flooded home in Merced during California's catastrophic winter storms. Only about 230,000 homes and buildings in the state are covered by flood insurance. (Noah Berger / Associated Press)
Back in January, on a dark night of pelting rain, Erica Lopez Bedolla had only minutes to evacuate her family from the impoverished Central Valley town of Planada after a levee broke.
“It was so quick,” she told our Times colleague Jessica Garrison, recalling the speed with which the water rushed into her town and then her home, destroying almost everything and displacing hundreds. But after a few months, Bedolla already felt as if the rest of California had “forgotten this happened.”
In a community of mostly undocumented farmworkers, no one is sure whether Planada will recover. But if it does, and if families like the Bedollas do rebuild, we can be certain that the town and its beleaguered residents will remain vulnerable to future floods.
From Planada to Paradise, the urgent fallout of climate change on California's already terrible housing crisis is undeniable — except perhaps to our state politicians who pay it lip service but have dodged the big questions about where we should build and rebuild in the future.
Our most vulnerable communities often lie in our most vulnerable regions: mountains marred by years of unprecedented wildfires, or Central Valley farm fields drowned in record rains and now epic snowmelt. It's a big part of the reason several insurance companies are refusing to issue new policies and otherwise limiting their financial exposure in the Golden State.
State Farm, California's largest home insurer, announced in May that it would no longer take on new residential and commercial properties, a devastating blow that will be felt most keenly in fire-prone areas where coverage is costly and hard to find. Flood insurance typically has to be purchased separately.
Allstate, another major insurer, also has pulled back in California and, last week, declined to reverse course even as state insurance officials agreed to let the company raise premiums by 4%.
Such business decisions should prompt California's leaders to rethink land-use policies. After all, losing access to insurance creates another barrier to homeownership by making it impossible for most people to get a mortgage, compounding our housing crisis.
But once again, like Florida — a red state our political leaders love to denigrate — California is ignoring the obvious, knowing the consequences of doing so will be catastrophic.
"The reality is most people across the West live in zones that are on some risk map," said Lisa Dale, a lecturer at Columbia University's Climate School.
Indeed, there are few places left to live in California that are safe from climate disasters. And yet, in an attempt to help the tens of thousands of people sleeping on our streets and the millions more at risk of getting priced out of their apartments and ending up in a tent, Gov. Gavin Newsom has started cracking down on cities and counties that refuse to build more affordable housing.
His administration has famously made an example of intransigent Huntington Beach, suing the Orange County city for violating state housing laws.
The urgency is refreshing after years of state officials letting cities and counties promise to build but then failing to deliver housing at the rate needed to address a crucial shortage that is driving sky-high rents, homelessness and an exodus of residents to more affordable states.
The problem is Newsom and his administration have required little oversight of where all this housing is being built. Nor have they communicated a cohesive philosophy about mitigating the current and future development risks linked to climate change.
Instead, the decisions underpinning this nexus of climate and housing have largely been left to local governments, with county supervisors and city councils navigating the complicated and emotional terrain of determining where people can and cannot safely live — a topic we wrote about last year after the Dixie fire leveled the Northern California community of Greenville.
Near Tulare County, for example, record precipitation has brought back Tulare Lake, a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. Selecting sites for new housing, as the state has ordered the county to do, means balancing the risk of flooding with the need to have agricultural workers near farms — even if those farms are in a floodplain.
"We've got to make sure that we've got housing that's available, affordable and close to the workplace," Supervisor Pete Vander Poel III told us, explaining that a commute from the county's largest city to "a dairy or a ranch in Allensworth, that round trip is over 100 miles."
In Monterey County, where a long-neglected levee failed in March, inundating the farmworker town of Pajaro, Supervisor Luis Alejo said he has been focused on approving housing projects that can better withstand flooding. That's a crucial issue throughout California, given that only about 2% of homeowners have flood insurance — and through a federal program stretched to its limits.
Under state law and the governor's more aggressive goals, the county must build 35,000 units in the next eight years, meaning supervisors are trying to be clear-eyed about both future risks and the current emergency.
A vehicle braves a flooded highway in the Tulare Lake Basin, an historic lakebed drained for agricultural use that has refilled following record winter storms.(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
"To tell a disadvantaged community that because there's a floodplain they cannot build at all," Alejo said, pausing to find the right words, "I think that is putting limitations on a community. They love living in Pajaro. They want to see investment. They want to see more housing and businesses come here. But I think in moving forward, housing and businesses have to be designed smarter."
What's "smarter"? In many ways, officials in Monterey County, as in Tulare County, are making it up as they go along. Meanwhile, climate change is accelerating.
After a winter of record precipitation, this summer's "big melt" may leave more people knee-deep in the misery of waterlogged homes. And, experts warn, one good rainy season might reduce the risk of wildfire this summer, but it won't keep us safe from future conflagrations. Climate experts say weather whiplash, ricocheting between extremes, should be our expectation for life in the West in coming decades.
In a 2022 report from the Legislative Analyst's Office, lawmakers were told they will need to acknowledge the significance of climate change on housing policy and take a greater role in crafting that policy.
"In recent years, much of the new housing construction in the state has occurred in areas that are at significant risk of the effects of climate change," the report warned, noting that in the last decade, 6 in 10 of the fastest growing counties are in areas of the Central Valley and Inland Empire that are at rising risk for excessive heat — and now for flooding.
In 2022, California had nearly 1.3 million homes in high-risk fire areas, according to the Insurance Information Institute. More than 1.5 million California properties have a greater than 26% chance of being severely hit by flooding during the next 30 years, according to Risk Factor, a site that tracks climate-related risk across the U.S.
And a 2020 study found that the number of affordable housing units vulnerable to coastal flooding in the state will increase by 40% by 2050. Risk Factor also found that more than 340,000 properties sit in areas threatened by extreme heat days, another climate-change emergency.
That's a lot of potential misery and ruin. Although State Farm, Allstate and other insurers have complex reasons for cutting back, they aren't ignoring those future losses the way California is. Rather than leading, the state seems to be following the Florida model by ignoring reality until disaster forces us to pay for our mistakes.
Allowing our new affordable housing stock to be built or rebuilt in high-risk areas is an abdication of governmental responsibility and a cheat on Californians who mistakenly believe they are buying a home as a generational investment.
As the insurance companies know, a house is not affordable, for renters or owners, if it is destroyed by fire or flood.
Firefighters battle the devastating 2021 Caldor Fire along Highway 89 near Lake Tahoe (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
It is time for California to create a comprehensive land-use policy at the state level — or at least engage in an honest and robust conversation — that ensures our affordable housing isn't just affordable but as safe as we can make it from the known dangers of climate change. And, dare we say, this must include a discussion of managed retreat, not just from areas of our forests that will grow hotter, dryer and more dangerous in coming decades, but from coastal communities where sea level rise is already toppling homes.
We aren't saying that the state has done nothing, and we acknowledge there are no easy answers. The governor and lawmakers are walking a tightrope between the desperate need for more housing and the realities of climate risk.
There are programs and grants that encourage infill development in urban areas; a new generation of fire-risk maps that come with regulations about how we build in those areas; and more technical guidance from the state for local officials to use when deciding whether to approve new developments.
State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta is emerging as a leader in this area, bringing at least two lawsuits — one in Lake County and one in San Diego — against developments where risks may not have been properly evaluated.
And Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara championed a law in effect this year that requires the disclosure of a home's risk score — the measure insurance companies use in evaluating how vulnerable a property is — in an attempt to help consumers grasp exactly how much of a chance they have of losing their home to disaster, whether in the wilds of Humboldt County or the combustible hillsides of Malibu.
But we are also sending mixed messages, providing state-backed fire insurance for high-risk properties through the FAIR plan when other options are gone, and emphasizing an urgency to #rebuild at all costs when disaster does strike. As our colleague Sam Dean reported, the FAIR plan has doubled in size since 2018, leaving more consumers with coverage that is limited and expensive.
Although existing homeowners may need that safety net, new communities and homes that fail to properly mitigate for dangers should be excluded. Because as Columbia's Dale said, while such policies benefit vulnerable homeowners, they also "obscure real risk."
And, really, there you have it. It's hard and unpleasant, but Newsom should take leadership on building not just affordable housing but a California ready for our changing climate.
If we don't, we are investing in failure. Because Californians don't just need homes, they need homes that will last.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Eye-popping chart shows which corporations ‘owe’ money to communities they’ve harmed: ‘[They] have a moral responsibility’
Julia Taravella
Sun, June 18, 2023
A chart created by One Earth highlighting how much damage major corporations have done to our planet is making the rounds online, sparking outrage among viewers who want such companies to pay for the pollution that has damaged our homes and health.
The chart, which was published on April 4, shows which dirty energy corporations — or companies that make money by drilling for and selling coal, oil, and gas — have played the biggest roles in rising global temperatures and severe weather events.
Next to each company’s name is the dollar figure that experts believe they should pay to the communities they’ve harmed the most.
The One Earth report that accompanied the chart states that the 21 companies listed will be responsible for the majority of severe weather events caused by changing temperatures between 2025 and 2050.
“Fossil fuel companies have a moral responsibility to affected parties for climate harm and have a duty to rectify such harm,” states the report. “A direct way to do so is through payment of reparations to wronged parties … in the case of the carbon fuel industry, reparations require that companies relinquish part of their tainted wealth to provide affected subjects with financial means for coping with climate harm.”
While the companies listed in the chart and ones like them continue to get richer, their profits often come at the expense of poor communities.
A report from the University of Michigan shows that toxic waste plants are most often found in low-income neighborhoods. These plants increase pollution and expose the residents to serious health hazards like cancer.
Extreme flooding caused by global warming also tends to hit low-income areas the hardest. In 2017, when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, poor neighborhoods suffered the most damage because they were situated in the areas most prone to flooding, according to Brookings.
Low-income areas also suffer the most during the heat waves that are brought on by global warming. The Los Angeles Times reported that these neighborhoods are the least likely to have air conditioning.
“The case is clear for oil and gas companies to pay reparations for the harm their fossil fuels have caused,” Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, told the Guardian.
“This new report puts the numbers on the table — polluters can no longer hide from their crimes against humanity and nature,” said Harjeet Sing, a prominent member of Climate Action International, according to the outlet.
Verdict in Oregon wildfires case highlights risks utilities face amid climate change
CLAIRE RUSH
Sun, June 18, 2023
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A jury verdict that found an Oregon power company liable for devastating wildfires — and potentially billions of dollars in damages — is highlighting the legal and financial risks utilities take if they fail to take proper precautions in a hotter, drier climate.
Utilities, especially in the U.S. West, are increasingly finding themselves in a financial bind that’s partly of their own making, experts say. While updating, replacing and even burying thousands of miles of powerlines is a time-consuming and costly undertaking, the failure to start that work in earnest years ago has put them on the back foot as wildfires have grown more destructive — and lawsuits over electrical equipment sparking blazes have ballooned.
“How do they pay for that and at the same time try to do grid hardening at a pace that could prevent the need for constant shutting down of the power?” Josh Hacker, chief science officer at Jupiter Intelligence, a company that provides advice on managing climate change risks, said of lawsuit damages. “This is an enormous challenge. Now it’s biting them. And in the end it’s going to bite all of us, because they have to recover that expense.”
Last week, a jury in Oregon found PacifiCorp liable for damages for negligently failing to cut power to its 600,000 customers during a windstorm over Labor Day weekend despite warnings from top fire officials and for its powerlines being responsible for multiple blazes.
PacifiCorp said it was disappointed with the jury's decision and that it plans to appeal.
Oregon Wildfires Utility Lawsuit Plaintiff Rachelle McMaster wipes tears from her eyes as one of her attorneys greets her after a jury in Portland, Ore., on Monday, June 12, 2023, awarded her $4.5 million in non-economic damages and about $150,000 in economic damages after finding the electric utility PacifiCorp liable for wildfires in 2020. McMaster lost her home in Oregon. Looking on are her spouse and daughter. (AP Photo/Andrew Selsky)
The fires were among the worst natural disasters in Oregon’s history. They killed nine people, burned more than 1,875 square miles (4,856 square kilometers) and destroyed upward of 5,000 homes and other structures. While total damages remain to be determined, they are expected to reach into the billions.
Because utilities make money from customers, they often raise revenue for infrastructure upgrades by hiking rates. In California, for example, Pacific Gas and Electric has requested to increase its rates for residential customers this year by roughly 18%, partly to bury more than 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) of overhead powerlines underground, according to a fact sheet from the state’s public utilities commission. The commission, which regulates utility rates, said it expects to make a final decision on the request between July and September.
PG&E’s planned upgrades come amid heightened scrutiny of the utility, which serves more than 16 million people over 70,000 square miles (181,300 square kilometers) in central and northern California. Facing billions of dollars in damages stemming from multiple blazes, it filed for bankruptcy in 2019, shortly after its neglected equipment caused a fire that virtually razed the town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 2018. The Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history.
PG&E’s bankruptcy settlement with wildfire victims was an eye-popping $13.5 billion. Only half of the money was paid to victims in cash, while the other half was paid out in PG&E stock, which has since declined in value.
PacifiCorp, meanwhile, says it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars since the Labor Day 2020 fires in Oregon in upgrading its equipment and expanding its weather stations and weather modeling. But customers are also helping fund those investments. Oregon’s public utility commission approved rate increases for PacifiCorp in 2023 in part so that the utility could cover “non-energy costs,” including wildfire mitigation and vegetation management.
The revenue model of utilities — and the way some have settled previous wildfire claims — have raised questions about the extent to which such companies are truly being held accountable for their role in sparking wildfires.
“Where is public safety and the durability of the entire system in the priorities of what are basically profit-making enterprises? That is the big question that is being addressed here,” said Scott McNutt, a part-time lecturer in bankruptcy law at the University of California, Davis, who also worked as counsel to the fee examiner in the PG&E bankruptcy case.
Utilities, meanwhile, say the growing risk of wildfires to public safety is being driven by forces beyond their control, such as climate change and population growth in the wildland-urban interface — the boundary where development encroaches on natural areas.
“These systemic issues affect all Oregonians and are larger than any single utility,” PacifiCorp said in a statement earlier this week after the jury handed down one of its verdicts.
Some experts agree to a certain extent, saying that hardening the electrical grid is just one of many critical steps that must be taken to protect people and their homes from wildfires.
“Power companies ... should always be working to reduce any potential ignition risk,” said Michael Gollner, associate professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “But you also want to make it so that if there are those fires, those fires aren’t going to cause death and destruction.”
Changing the materials that homes are built with, Gollner said, is one way communities can protect themselves from wildfires. Having fire-retardant roofs made of asphalt or tile instead of wood, covering vents with fine mesh to keep embers out, and having nonflammable siding can help prevent homes from burning down. Creating what’s known as a “defensible space” around one’s home — a buffer area where there is less vegetation, helping to slow down a fire’s progress — is also key. Prescribed burns and thinning out fuels in forests are important as well, he said.
“We haven’t taken a more holistic step to harden our communities so they don’t invite in fires,” he said. “We haven’t done the hard, other work."
Global temps exceed climate-change benchmark for first time as El Nino builds
Angeli Gabriel
Sat, June 17, 2023
A study by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) found that the global-mean air temperature for the first 11 days of June were the highest temperatures for this time of year in at least 83 years.
The C3S added this is the first time that global surface air temperatures have exceeded the pre-industrial level, or reference values from 1850 to 1900, by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius during the month of June.
The threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, along with 2 degrees Celsius, were adopted in the Paris Climate Agreement in December 2015 as the target limit for climate change over 20- or 30-year periods, the C3S said.
(a) Global-mean temperature (⁰C) averaged for each day of ERA5 from 1 January 1940 to 11June 2023, plotted as time series for each year, with years from 2015 onwards distinguished by color. The dashed and dotted lines denote values that are respectively 1.5⁰C and 2⁰C above the 1850-1900 reference values taken to represent pre-industrial levels.
The C3S looked at data from ERA5, the agency’s fifth generation atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate since January 1940.
They noted that the rise in June 2023 temperatures occurred during the development of El Niño, a climate pattern that leads to unusually warm waters in the Pacific Ocean that are pushed to the west coast of the Americas.
IT'S OFFICIAL: WORLD ENTERS EL NINO CLIMATE PATTERN
According to the C3S, there is good reason to expect periods within next 12 months when the global-mean air temperature will again surpass pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
(b) Global-mean temperatures for 2016, 2020 and parts of 2015 and 2023 expressed as differences (⁰C) from 1850-1900 levels.
The increase in June temperatures also came on the heels of record sea-surface temperatures in May.
This community lost 5 million gallons of clean, drinkable water a day — all because of an abandoned golf courseBLACK CITY WHITE GOLF COURSE
Laurelle Stelle
Sat, June 17, 2023
Jackson, Mississippi, experienced frequent water shortages and contamination for years, all while a leaking water main poured five million gallons per day into a nearby stream until finally being repaired.
What happened?
According to The New York Times, the leak was located under a golf course at the Colonial Country Club and had been there since 2016. It affected one of the two main pipes carrying water from the local treatment plant to the rest of the city, where the pressure was so strong that water from the leak shot into the air like a geyser and carved a swimming pool-sized pit in the ground.
Not only did the country club leak lose enough to supply 50,000 people with water every day, but it was only one of many large leaks affecting Jackson’s aging water system. The New York Times reports that the city’s two water plants were built in the 1910s and 1980s, meaning that many of the pipes the city relies on are over 100 years old and could break at any time.
Why does it matter?
Jackson residents have been experiencing problems with their water for years, according to the Times. They receive frequent “boil notices” — warnings that the tap water is unsafe and should be boiled before use — and at times receive no tap water at all. Many residents stockpile bottled water to prepare for the next crisis. Being without clean drinking water is bad enough, but experiencing these shortages while clean water is being poured out on the ground is especially alarming.
As temperatures rise across the globe, Jackson isn’t the only part of the U.S. experiencing water shortages. California and other western states have been facing a years-long drought, while pollution has affected the water supply in towns like Dimock, Pennsylvania. These shortages lead to increased water costs and may have long-term effects on agriculture that could drive up food prices.
What is being done to fix it?
Until recently, poor management has prevented any real improvement in Jackson, which is why the Justice Department ordered the city to bring in an outside manager for the water department in 2022, the Times reports. Repairs are finally underway, starting with the Colonial Country Club leak and aided by a recent infusion of federal funds.
Human Rights Groups Blast White House For Modi Visit: ‘Shame On You’
Rowaida Abdelaziz
Sun, June 18, 2023
President Joe Biden during a prior visit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Oval Office of the White House on Sept. 24, 2021.
President Joe Biden during a prior visit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Oval Office of the White House on Sept. 24, 2021.
Human rights groups are blasting the White House for rolling out the red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is set to meet with President Joe Biden and address Congress during his visit to Washington, D.C., next week.
The Indian government called the trip “historic,” and the White House noted that “the visit will strengthen our two countries’ shared commitment to a free, open, prosperous, and secure Indo-Pacific.”
But critics want Biden to press Modi about human rights violations in India related to the steep rise of Hindu nationalism — a political and extremist ideology that seeks to transform a secular and diverse India into an ethnoreligious Hindu state that targets minorities. Religious minorities in India are at risk of continued state-sanctioned violence and harassment if the U.S. continues to overlook Modi’s role in it, they say.
“For almost a decade now, human rights activists and others have regularly brought to the White House — Democrats or Republicans — that Modi’s regime is authoritarian, it’s right-wing, it’s anti-Muslim and it’s anti-minority,” said Suchitra Vijayan, the author of “Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India.”
“The fact that they continue to whitewash him by giving them a platform is very worrying,” she added.
Modi was banned from the U.S. in 2005, before he became prime minister, for supporting Hindu extremist groups who rioted and targeted Muslims. But this will be Modi’s third White House visit at least, and the second time he addresses a joint session of Congress. He first did so in 2016 under former President Barack Obama.
This will be the third official state dinner Biden has hosted. The White House previously hosted the president and first lady of South Korea for a state dinner in April and the president and first lady of France last December.
When pressed about human rights concerns in India, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the visit, adding that the president believes “this is an important relationship that we need to continue and build on as it relates to human rights.”
The White House did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Despite who is in the White House, the U.S. has a long history of propping up authoritarian regimes for its own personal ends.Suchitra Vijayan, author of “Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India”
India continues to be a powerful ally to the U.S. as the world’s most populous country and largest democracy. But inviting Modi to the White House sends a dangerous message to religious minorities across the globe, critics argued.
“What happens in a country of a billion people will have global ramifications,” said Vijayan.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have scheduled a private screening next week of a BBC documentary on Modi and his role in the 2002 Gujarat riots where at least 1,000 people were killed, most of them Muslim. During the pogrom, Hindu mobs torched Muslim homes and businesses, killed Muslim women and children, and demolished mosques and graves. The Indian government has since blocked the documentary on social media, including Twitter.
“The screening of the film provides an opportunity to demonstrate what, in practice, freedom of expression and what dissent looks like and also educate the public and remind people of the horrific acts of violence and killings against Muslims in Gujarat,” said Amanda Klasing, the national director of advocacy at Amnesty International USA.
Biden is hoping to secure a package for India to buy dozens of U.S.-made armed drones worth billions of dollars in an effort to strengthen U.S.-India ties amid China’s growing influence.
“Despite who is in the White House, the U.S. has a long history of propping up authoritarian regimes for its own personal ends,” said Vijayan.
Critics of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in India, including journalists and activists, have faced targeted harassment and prosecutions. The rights of religious minorities, especially Muslims, continue to deteriorate. BJP supporters and Hindu nationalist groups commit violent attacks against Muslims and government critics with impunity. At least 50 anti-Muslim hate rallies took place in the span of four months last year starting in November 2022.
In fact, a 2022 religious freedom report by the U.S. State Department recorded a rise in violence against religious minorities in India, including incidents of the government bulldozing Muslim-owned homes and shops and reports of Christians being attacked, arrested and detained by police. Christian groups said police sometimes aided crowds in disrupting their worship services, according to the report.
“Biden should be listening in to his own State Department and articulating all this publicly and clearly on the record about human rights abuses,” said Klasing. “The failure to do that doesn’t reflect well on what the strength of the relationship is. This is a crucial test.”
As of 2020, about 15% of Indians are Muslim, while Christians make up between 2% and 3% of the country’s population. Last month, ethnic violence broke out in Manipur, a remote state in India’s northeast, where churches were burned down and dozens of people were killed, most of them Christians.
John Prabhudoss, the chairman of the Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations, told HuffPost that he has been communicating with dozens of Indian pastors and that most of them are terrified for their families back in India.
“Their family could be jailed or even the worst, killed. The fear is real,” said Prabhudoss.
Prabhudoss, who visited India alongside lawmakers in 2002 after the Gujarat riots and saw the impact of the violence firsthand, called Modi’s visit “unforgivable.”
“For the president to bring him to the White House … is shameful,” said Prabhudoss. “Mr. Biden, shame on you.”
SEE
Rotting seaweed, dead fish, no sand: Climate change threatens to ruin US beaches
Elizabeth Weise, Asbury Park Press
Sat, June 17, 2023
As Americans flock to the beach this summer, they're often greeted with disconcerting news: Their destination might be smelly with dead fish or rotting seaweed — and danger often lurks from rip currents or even shark attacks.
In a warming world, those problems are set to get worse, experts say.
"The climate is changing and it's changing drastically," said Todd Crowl, director of the Institute of Environment at Florida International University in Miami. "It is measurable and happening."
No single ruined beach day should be directly attributed to a warming globe. But the rise in both atmospheric and ocean temperatures is rapidly altering the stretches of coastline where land and water meet.
The most obvious impact is rising sea levels that over years will erode beaches, threaten coastal homes and swamp stretches of coastline. But some climate change effects are less obvious and beginning to unfold right now.
This year could be a portent of even more extreme, seashore-ruining, events. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday that global ocean temperatures hit a record high in May, the second consecutive month where ocean temperatures broke a record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
Here are just a few ways warming oceans may affect beaches in the U.S.
Thousands of dead fish washed up on beaches along the Texas Gulf Coast, including Quintana Beach County Park.
Smelly dead fish
What's happening? Thousands of dead fish recently washed ashore in Texas, creating a smelly, disgusting mess some on beaches.
The same thing happened in Louisiana last June when soaring temperatures and storms caused a "rash of fish kills," according to the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Florida had a major event in 2020 that killed tens of thousands of fish in Biscayne Bay.
"The oxygen went to zero, everything died," said Crowl. "It was very sad, we had one section where there were 20 or 30 sting rays swimming upside down trying to gasp for air."
Such die-offs can lead to rejuvenated water systems once temperatures return to normal, adding nutrients to the water and bottom. But when they're happening they make beaches smelly and unappealing. In Texas, officials warned people to stay out of the water due to high levels of bacteria and sharp fins on the rotting fish.
Why is it happening? Warmer water holds less oxygen. When water temperatures rise above 70 degrees, it became hard for the Texas fish, mostly menhaden, to receive enough oxygen to survive, Quintana Beach County Park officials said.
Is climate change to blame? Heat-caused fish kills have long occurred in shallow coastal areas but the concern is as overall ocean temperatures rise, they will become more common.
"We hadn't seen a fish kill in 20 years and now we've seen three in three years," Crowl said of Florida.
Increasing water temperatures due to climate change may make low oxygen conditions worse in locations around the U.S. that are susceptible to hypoxia, and in extreme cases fish kills, caused by extremely low oxygen, say experts with NOAA's National Ocean Service
There's also a negative feedback loop involved because fish are endothermic, meaning they are the same temperature as the water they're swimming in. As the water warms up, their metabolism increases, which increases their need for oxygen, said Andre Boustany, global science director at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California.
Giant blobs of Sargassum hug the shoreline next to the William O Lockhart Municipal Pier in Lake Worth Beach, Florida on June 1, 2023.
More stinky seaweed
What's happening? Beachgoers in Florida are dealing with heavy blankets of rotting brown seaweed as an enormous swath of sargassum drifts westward and piles onto white sandy beaches.
"You're basically swimming through rafts of sargassum," said Kevin Boswell, director of the marine biology program at Florida International University. "It's itchy and scratchy, it's like swimming through bushes."
Sargassum, a naturally occurring type of macroalgae, has grown at an alarming rate this winter. The belt of ocean where it naturally occurs stretches across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to Florida and the Yucatan Peninsula and is as much as 200 to 300 miles wide.
The seaweed mats grow larger when they have more nutrients, which they’re getting as dust is blown out to sea from the Sahara Desert in Africa. These bring fertilizing iron and phosphorus to the water, allowing the mats to grow.
Large mats of Sargassum seaweed does not keep sunbathers away from Midtown Beach Palm Beach on March 30, 2019. [Meghan McCarthy/palmbeachdailynews.com]
Is climate change to blame? More frequent appearance of these seaweed blobs along the US coast are likely due to multiple factors, say, scientists, including climate change. But warmer ocean temperatures stimulate growth of the seaweed blobs.
"It's always come in some amount to the coast of Florida," said Arlo Hemphill, project lead for ocean sanctuaries with Greenpeace. "But this is completely new. You might get a foot of sargassum, which was quickly cleaned up. What we're talking about now is not a foot, it's many feet high. It's completely unmanageable."
Dangerous rip currents
What's happening? Each year more than 100 Americans die in rip currents, according to the US Lifesaving Association.
Could climate change make it worse? As the atmosphere warms, it's adding additional energy to the global environment, because heat = energy.
"With climate change and global temp increasing, you’re putting more energy into the environment. One of the ways that energy can come out is in increased wave formation. Waves are just another form of energy, they’re kinetic energy," said Boustany.
Increased land temperatures also increase wind, which in turn increases waves. Both of those contribute to rip currents, which are the result of wave energy.
NOAA is studying this but so far the results are uncertain. Rip currents are known to be primarily caused by breaking waves at the beach, and tend to be more frequent and stronger with larger waves.
There's been some research suggesting climate change may increase wave heights in some locations. If wave heights do increase, rip current occurrence and intensity could increase as well, NOAA experts told USA TODAY.
TOPSHOT - An Atlantic White Shark Conservancy boat and crew work to tag a Great White Shark in the waters off the shore in Cape Cod, Massachusetts on July 13, 2019. - Three Cape Cod beaches were temporarily closed to swimming July 13, 2019 after great white sharks were spotted as close as 150 feet offshore, according to the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP)JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images ORIG FILE ID: AFP_1IR00AMore
Sharks on the move
What's happening? Sharks are showing up more in areas inhabited by humans. It's partly because shark populations are increasing due to decades of conservation, but also because the prey they eat, including fish, seals, sea lions and squid, are moving as ocean temperatures warm.
In some cases, these shifts are changing sharks' migratory patterns, bringing them into greater contact with humans in the water. Studying this is one of NOAA's priorities.
Shark attacks remain rare and appear to be holding steady, but the sight of a 10-foot Great White is still enough to clear beaches and keep even the most avid swimmers out of the water.
Where's it happening? Wherever there's unusually warm ocean water, but scientists are seeing it especially on the West Coast, said Boustany.
Is climate change to blame? Climate change is warming the oceans which is driving this behavior as sharks, an apex predator, follow their prey.
More red tides
What's happening? Red tides are the common name for what scientists call harmful algal blooms. They occur when colonies of plant-like organisms called algae grow out of control. Some can produce toxic or harmful effects on people, fish, marine mammals and birds. The name "red tide" comes because some forms stain the water red.
"They're happening more and more frequently and they're happening in places where they really haven't before," said Crowl.
Is climate change to blame? While Texas and the Gulf Coast of Florida have always experienced such tides, they're now beginning to occur in the Florida Keys and the beaches near Miami, said Crowl.
"We just launched a big project with NOAA to build early warning sensors for red tides so we can warn people before they become harmful," he said. "They can cause respiratory problems in children so we have to send out warnings to not swim on this or that beach when they're present."
Beaches are disappearing
What's happening? Sea level rise and increasingly ferocious storms are predicted to eventually engulf many of the world's beaches, but that's not expected to happen for decades. However, some areas are already beginning to see the effects of higher sea levels.
“Sea level rise is something we’ve been measuring for 100 years,” said Crowl. “It’s not a prediction, it’s not a guess. It’s reality.”
Because of that, there are days in Florida when there's a full moon, a high tide and westerly winds when some beaches literally disappear because the water goes all the way up to the dunes, Crowl said from St. Augustine, along Florida's northern Atlantic coast.
Is climate change to blame? A study released in 2020 predicted half the world's beaches could disappear in the next 75 years due to climate change. A 2023 study found 70% of California's beaches could be threatened.
"We already see times when you can't get to the beach unless you're willing to wade – and our beach is 75 feet wide a low tide," Crowl said.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Gross climate change effects soil US beaches: Seaweed, dead fish
