Climate models predicted heatwaves like America’s record-breaking weekend


Michael J. Coren
Sun, June 20, 2021

QUARTZ


The US hasn’t seen anything quite like this. Over the weekend, temperatures soared to new triple-digit heights across the American West. The immediate cause was a “heat dome,” a mass of high-pressure air trapping heat beneath it, one far stronger and larger than normal.

But what we saw this weekend is what climate scientists have been predicting for decades. And it’s a taste of what’s to come. “It’s surreal to see your models become real life,” Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, says in the Guardian.

Records fell across the region. On June 17, California’s capital of Sacramento hit 110°F (43°C), smashing the last record of 102°F set in 1976. Similar all-time highs fell in Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, and other cities thousands of miles apart. In Death Valley National Park, where temperatures soared to 128°F, just one degree off the record, nighttime temperatures stayed above 111°F (44°C) well past midnight, among the hottest nights ever recorded in North America.

It’s hard to argue with climate models

What climate models predicted is coming true. Scientists forecast global warming would fuel higher temperatures, falling humidity, dwindling snowpack, and intensifying drought. So far, this is coming to pass, despite some uncertainty about how this will play out in the coming century.

Extreme heatwaves are now an estimated 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer across the US, estimates Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In the West, the hottest days have gotten about 33% drier in Nevada and California over the last 40 years, according to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) climate scientist Karen McKinnon. A “megadrought” now engulfing the region is eclipsing any period for the last 1,200 years.

Little of this is surprising for scientists who run supercomputers modeling the planet’s atmosphere. In 2019, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather analyzed 17 climate models run between 1970 and 2007 and found more than half predicted outcomes “indistinguishable from what actually occurred.” More than 80% correctly analyzed how the atmosphere would respond to rising greenhouse gases level after controlling for models that overestimated humans’ GHG emissions.
When will the heatwave be over?

The West’s drought appears to be without precedent in recorded history. From Oregon to the Mexican border, drought intensity has reached “exceptional” levels. Decades of low rainfall, and two especially dry years, have turned the region into a tinderbox with 100 million dead trees in California alone, and millions more ready to burn. With the hottest, and driest, period of the year still ahead, conditions are “as bad as they can be,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.


Last year, similar (but not as dry) conditions led to an apocalyptic fire season that killed 33, burned 4% of the state (4.4 million acres), and left the entire coast languishing under blood-red skies. Fires are breaking out again in California more than a month early, with forests primed to go up in flames. Ranchers and farmers are starting to talk about shrinking their herds, or ending their livelihoods, as the wells dry up: 20% of California’s prime farmland in the San Joaquin Valley has been fallowed.

On the surface, water is vanishing as well. For the first time, the massive reservoir behind the Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, registered just 37% full. That’s threatening power and water supplies for seven states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) in the Colorado River basin (the dam’s generation is already down 25%). In California, the loss of snowpack means that power generation is forecast to drop 70% below the 10-year average, while some power-producing dams, such as the one on Lake Oroville, could stop generating power for the first time since they were built more than 50 years ago.

This week’s misery won’t go on forever, and some relief is in sight for the West this week. Temperatures will ease as the heat dome begins to dissipate over the Southwest. But a new heatwave is already gaining steam, this time in northern California and up along the Pacific coast. More misery is in store. “Additional records may be set, once again,” writes Swain.

Wildfires break out across Western states amid hottest week in history

Kathryn Prociv

Mon, June 21, 2021

Last week featured one of the worst June heat waves in decades across the West, shattering hundreds of daily records, as well as several all-time hottest temperatures recorded for the month.

Death Valley soared to a blistering 128 degrees, and Denver saw a rare hat trick of three 100-degree days in a row.

Tucson saw eight straight days of temperatures 110 degrees or higher, breaking the record for the number of consecutive days above that barrier and making it the city's hottest week. Phoenix endured a record-setting six straight days of temperatures 115 or higher.

All of this heat contributed to a high fire danger which came to fruition over the weekend when multiple blazes broke out in several Western states including California, Colorado, Arizona and Oregon.

The Willow Fire in Monterey County, which forced evacuations Friday, continued to burn over the weekend sending smoke billowing into the Bay Area.

The Cow Fire in Shasta County also prompted evacuation orders, and at one point Sunday required a large air tanker to be diverted off the Willow Fire for increased firefighting efforts.

On Monday, 7 million people were under red flag warnings across six Western states where the combination of hot temperatures, wind gusts to 40 mph and bone-dry humidity lead to a critical fire threat.

Las Vegas was included in the risk zone for the fire danger.

The most recent heat wave was focused over portions of the Four Corners, desert Southwest and Southern and Central California. Next week, however, the area of most exceptional heat could park over northern California and the Pacific Northwest.

California Wildfires (Ringo Chiu / via AP)

This will lead to another week with a high risk of wildfires due to the already desiccated landscape void of much precipitation whether falling from the sky or locked in the mostly-melted snowpack.

With ground fuels already sitting at highly flammable and record-dry levels, all experts can do is warn people of the impending danger and hope for the best in what has already proven to be an early and destructive start to the Western wildfire season.

With climate change making heat waves three times more likely compared to 100 years ago and contributing to the current 22-year megadrought, wildfire seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer into the year. As the gap closes, experts say there isn't so much a defined wildfire season in the West anymore, but instead it lasts year round.

WHAT GLOBAL SOUTH
Only five Africans are on a new, global list of top 1,000 climate scientists

REUTERS/THIERRY GOUEGNON

Research from the global south is vital in climate change discussions.

Published June 21, 2021

The Reuters Hot List of “the world’s top climate scientists” is causing a buzz in the climate change community.

Reuters ranked these 1,000 scientists based on three criteria: the number of papers published on climate change topics; citations, relative to other papers in the same field; and references by the non-peer reviewed press (for example on social media). The list does not claim that they are the “best” scientists in the world. But the ranking enhances position and reputation, influencing the production, reproduction, and dissemination of knowledge.

What matters to us, as global South researchers and practitioners working in the field of climate change, is that the geography of this “global” list reveals a striking imbalance. While over three quarters of the global population live in Asia and Africa, over three quarters of the scientists on the list are located in Europe and North America. Only five are listed for Africa.

The geography of this “global” list reveals a striking imbalance.

The list includes 130 of the 929 authors who are contributing to the current reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, arguably the most influential source for climate change policy. Again, the imbalance is stark: 377 (41%) of panel authors are citizens of developing countries (95 from Africa) and only 16 of these are on the Reuters list (only two from Africa).

Climate change science dominated by knowledge produced in the global North cannot address the particular challenges faced by those living in the global South. It also misses significant lessons emerging from the global South, for example from the intersection of climate change with poverty, inequality, and informality.

Reuters maps the 1,000 scientists, making it clear that their location is important, yet it does not reflect on what this portrays. While the list is presented as a neutral, data-driven assessment of the top climate scientists, it is silent on the questions of power, authority and inequality this map raises. Where are the global South scientists, and why are they not featuring in this analysis of influence?

We believe that this inequality in influence is a result of unequal access to knowledge production essentials and processes. It also reflects the unequal valuing of climate change scientists’ research focus, which for scientists in the global South is often context-specific, to improve human outcomes and achieve localized return on investment in knowledge.

The list elevates research that contributes to well-established bodies of knowledge on the processes of climate change, and its global and local impacts, much of which has been produced in the global North. Research questions developed in and framed by the global North, for instance questions about environmental perceptions and values, often have limited application or meaning in the global South.

Science from global South matters

The science that is elevated by the list is not the only science that matters. Research from the global South tends to focus on solving challenges on the ground, drawing on multiple voices in local spaces and including practitioner knowledge, to co-produce solutions.

From our experience in Durban on South Africa’s east coast, local researchers, drawing on contextualized and decolonized global knowledge, influence the position of local policy makers and practitioners on climate change solutions. An example is research undertaken in informal settlements by university researchers with communities, which is shaping Durban’s climate change action.

To achieve a better global balance of important work on climate change, a list like the Reuters one could include a measure of the localized application and influence of research. What also matters is that the exclusion of ideas inhibits the production of knowledge for globally relevant innovation, transformation and action. Northern literature dominates global thinking and practice as shown through the spatiality of the list, but this science does not always provide globally relevant solutions, and often has limited application or meaning in the global South.

Addressing the global problem of climate change requires an engagement with the theories, knowledge and experiences from all parts of the world. Science from the global South may well provide innovative climate change solutions, but very little of this science makes it into the global conversation. The imbalance in influence, therefore, has implications for both global and local action.

Global South vulnerable to worst impacts of climate change

The global South is faced with the most severe consequences of climate change. Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and small island developing states are identified as key vulnerability hotspots. Sub-Saharan Africa already has a large share of the population living in multidimensional poverty. Across the continent there is a high dependence on agriculture which is predominantly rain-fed. Changing rainfall patterns and low irrigation rates are compromising these livelihoods. Rapidly growing coastal population centers are increasingly exposed and vulnerable to rising sea levels.

Much of the global literature is blind to and silent on the lived experiences of the majority of the globe. This includes extreme and multidimensional poverty, inequality, informality, gender inequity, cultural and language diversity, rapid urbanization and weak governance, and how these intersect with climate change. An incomplete literature will miss important solutions in the global fight against climate change.

The most compelling story in the Hot List publication is the unequal global distribution of knowledge and expertise. But this is not acknowledged, debated or highlighted as a cause for grave concern. It may not be the responsibility of an international news agency like Reuters to solve this issue, but an agency that claims to provide “trusted intelligence” and “freedom from bias” should at least point it out.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

World-leading scientists launch international climate crisis advisory group

Harry Cockburn
Tue, June 22, 2021

Panel will focus on global approaches to cutting emissions, advancing carbon capture technology and restoring nature (Getty)

Leading scientists are to launch an independent body to scrutinise governments’ responses to the climate and biodiversity crises, and suggest how policymakers can mitigate the worst impacts.

The Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG) has been inspired by Independent Sage – which has provided independent scientific advice to the UK government and public during the coronavirus pandemic – and the new body will be lead by Sir David King, the former UK chief scientific adviser, and current leader of Independent Sage.

“We are calling for urgent, large-scale action to curb the effects of climate change,” the group said in a launch statement.

The group is made up of 14 experts from 10 nations across every continent, and will issue monthly reports on global efforts to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises.

They include Fatih Birol, the chief executive of the International Energy Association, Robert Corell, the principal and director of the US Global Environment Technology Foundation, Professor Ye Qi, of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Professor Mercedes Bustamante, an ecologist at the University of Brasilia, in Brazil, Lavanya Rajamani, a professor of international environmental law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, and Dr Tero Mustonen, an expert in Arctic biodiversity at the non-profit Snowchange Cooperative in Finland.

“I believe we have a truly superb group of scientists, one that I am looking forward to working with,” Sir David said.

Sir David King, the head of Independent Sage, will lead the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (AFP/Getty)

The group has said it is committed to three approaches to dealing with the crises. These are: reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, scaling up technologies to remove greenhouse gases from the air, and repairing and restoring the natural world.

“Current targets are not enough,” the statement on the CCAG website says. “Nations need to triple their emissions-cutting pledges to limit the Earth’s warming.”

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are still in their infancy, with none currently operating at a large enough scale to significantly offset emissions of greenhouse gases, but the group has said “urgent innovation” and “critical investment” is required in this field.

The group also said “deep research is needed to explore and investigate safe methods and technologies that could repair parts of our damaged climate systems”.

Sir David told The Observer: “We are not just going to say ‘this is the state of the global climate’, but also what should the global response be from governments and companies … What we do in the next five years will determine the future of humanity for the next millennium.”

Arunabha Ghosh, founder and chief executive of India’s Council on Energy, Environment and Water, and one of the experts in the group tweeted: “I joined @ClimateCrisisAG because #sustainability needs to shift from the #margin2mainstream. For that we must communicate the science but we also must listen to communities. We must #ReduceRemoveRepair & in doing so, sidestep our hubris.”

The group will have its first public meeting on Thursday where it will present a launch paper and invite questions from the media and public.

US Fed's Daly says climate change poses 'significant' economic risk


FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Mary Daly poses in San Francisco

Tue, June 22, 2021

(Reuters) - Climate change poses a "significant risk" to the global economy and the financial system, San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly said on Tuesday, adding that large swaths of the United States could be disrupted.

The economic reckoning with the effects of climate change - everything from how people work to what crops can be grown to property damage and capital investment - may also be unevenly felt across communities, Daly said in remarks prepared for delivery at a virtual event at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

"As monetary policymakers, our job is to navigate this uncertainty," she said. "No one really knows the severity and scale of climate change, where and who will be most affected, or the nature, extent, and duration of our response to the risks."


Republicans have criticized the U.S. central bank for delving into the effects of climate change, saying that doing so distracts it from its congressionally-mandated job to pursue full employment and stable prices.

Daly argued on Tuesday that climate change can and is affecting both employment and prices, and understanding its effects are, as a result, squarely in the Fed's purview.

It could even affect the savings rate, labor productivity and capital investment, she said, potentially pushing down on the long-term neutral rate of interest, which would give the Fed reduced leeway to fight future economic downturns with conventional monetary policy.

"The Fed and all central banks also need to be forward-looking, responding to the risks we see today, while anticipating those that have yet to unfold," she said.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Paul Simao)

THIRD WORLD USA

This Louisiana Town Is A Bleak Forecast Of America's Future Climate Crisis

LONG READ

 Zahra Hirji

Mon, June 21, 2021

Bridget Boudreaux didn’t know she was saying goodbye to her father last August when an ambulance took him away from her sweltering, hurricane-battered home near Lake Charles, Louisiana. The 72-year-old died alone after medics rushed him from a hospital to nursing homes, trying to find a facility that still had power after Hurricane Laura hit. But Boudreaux’s grief didn’t end there: It took her family another seven months to finally bury her father, as one disaster after another pummeled the riverbank city where she grew up.

With its 150-mile-per-hour sustained winds, Laura was the worst storm to hit the state in a century. Then, in October, Hurricane Delta rammed into Lake Charles as a Category 2 storm. Hurricane Zeta hit later that month. These were followed by a brutal ice storm that froze pipes and wrecked houses in February of this year. In May, historic rains flooded the area with upwards of 19 inches of water in a single day. Now, as the 2021 hurricane season gets underway, Boudreaux’s three-bedroom home — still askew on its foundation, with holes in its roof — is one of thousands in Lake Charles still waiting for a recovery that never happened.

“Right when you think you’re catching your breath, boom,” Boudreaux told BuzzFeed News. “You are constantly getting hit with these natural disasters, and sometimes it feels like you’re living in Revelations.”

Lake Charles exposes a grim, rarely discussed reality of climate change: Back-to-back or overlapping disasters, also known as compounding disasters, are becoming more frequent. And the US government’s largely hands-off approach to disaster recovery means the most vulnerable cities — those already struggling with aging infrastructure, housing shortages, pollution problems, segregation, and poverty — can’t cope.

Far from being an outlier, Lake Charles’s plight is “actually more of a window into the future,” said Jeff Schlegelmilch, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness.

Lingering heaps of debris render the city vulnerable to more flooding from future rains and storms.

And the city is close to its breaking point. People are exhausted, stressed, and hurting, and many cannot afford to change their circumstances. The crushing housing crisis has left families like Boudreaux's living in unsafe conditions in their broken, mold-infested homes or in tents. Others have moved away. And lingering heaps of debris render the city vulnerable to more flooding from future rains and storms.

“There is a lot of PTSD in this community from what we have gone through,” Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter told BuzzFeed News. “In the past 25 years, Lake Charles had been through 11 federally declared disasters; five of those occurred just in the past year. We can debate what is causing it. But something is happening. You don’t have to be a scientist or a genius to see that.”

As the planet warms and people continue to build homes and businesses in high-risk areas, disasters have become more destructive, more frequent, and more costly. In 2020, the US experienced the most billion-dollar disasters on record. And it’s often low-income families and communities of color that are most impacted and get the least amount of support to build back.

Of the more than 56,000 homes statewide that were damaged by Laura, most were in Calcasieu Parish, home to Lake Charles. It’s one of the most segregated residential communities in the US, and its Black residents have among the highest rates of poverty and unemployment in the country. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many Black communities already clustered near the chemical plants and refineries spewing toxic emissions along the state’s Gulf Coast, the compounding disasters in Lake Charles epitomize how climate change disproportionately impacts those already most at risk.

“Lake Charles will be the poster child for climate racism,” said Kathy Egland, a climate rights activist who chairs the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Committee.

The parish now faces not only digging itself out of billions in damages, but also strengthening local defenses against future disasters. Though it has already received hundreds of millions from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the state’s request for an extra $3 billion from Congress — an unusual boost reserved for the nation’s worst disasters — remains in limbo.

“Lake Charles will be the poster child for climate racism.”

“What we are trying to do right now is use a water gun to put out a brush fire,” said Hunter, who has been begging leaders in Washington, DC, for help for months. Although President Joe Biden recently visited his city and met with him in person, the mayor is still waiting for the White House and Congress to push through the billions in additional disaster relief.

“We are languishing because of politics,” Hunter said.

The White House and the offices of Louisiana’s two senators have publicly come out in support of extra funding in the past month. But when asked about the holdup, none of them commented.

As the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season gets into full swing, Lake Charles residents worry that another major storm could mean they won’t ever fully recover.

“We are praying that we get a break this year so we can get on our feet and stay standing for a minute,” Boudreaux said. “If we get hit again, we will lose everything.”

More than nine months after Hurricane Laura’s devastating blow to Lake Charles, many of the city’s streets are still lined with homes covered by blue tarps.

“It’s startling, gut-wrenching to see how many people are living under blue tarps. It’s everywhere you look,” said Gary LeBlanc, cofounder of the nonprofit Mercy Chefs, which has provided food in disaster response situations for more than a decade. The group has visited Lake Charles multiple times over the past year. “We’ve been in places that had [Category 5 hurricane] damage, and we’ve never seen this many blue tarps a year after a storm.”

Chastity Bishop is one of those people. After a freak fire in her attic burned a hole in her roof last July, the 41-year-old, her fiancé, and her 9-year-old daughter moved to a rental on the southeastern side of town. When Hurricane Laura tore through the city, it caused severe wind and water damage in both structures. The rest of the year came with even more destruction: In October, Hurricane Delta flooded their rental home, and in February, the historic winter storm froze and burst its pipes. Then, as sheets of rain hit Lake Charles on May 17, Bishop watched in disbelief as water rose from the sidewalk to her porch to the windows before hitting her waist and submerging the house. Her fiancé helped rescue stranded residents, loading them into boats floating down the street, before they made it to higher ground a few miles away.

“It’s hard to explain the smell of flood — you have to live it to understand it.”

After the floods receded, Bishop’s family did everything they could to dry out the house with fans and dehumidifiers. But two weeks later, she and her daughter got sick from the mold. They had to evacuate so that the landlord could rip out all the flooring and walls.

“It’s hard to explain the smell of flood — you have to live it to understand it,” said Bishop, who grew up in Lake Charles. “And in these situations, you either live in a molded house or you come up with some money or find some family to live with.”

The family was able to shell out $1,500 to stay in hotels for a week before running out of money and moving back to their original home, where they’re living in their garage while they fix their tattered roof. They’ve set up a porta-potty, a gas grill, a microwave, and a mini fridge and are sharing a mattress. To bathe, they heat water on a burner. It’s tough, but there are much worse situations around them: Many people are still camping out in their yards and on their patios.

“People who didn’t need help for hurricanes need help now after floods, and no one is really helping,” Bishop said. “You are seeing people just quit, give up. People who are just trying to retire, who had all these plans, what do they do?”

It’s been hard for officials to tally the number of damaged structures or displaced residents in Lake Charles because the numbers keep shifting with each new disaster. Hunter estimates that Laura impacted 95% of the city’s homes and businesses and that 1,000 buildings still remain unoccupied just from that one hurricane. Hurricane Delta and the May floods then battered and rendered another 2,000 houses in the city unlivable.

“What we’re seeing is that the recovery cycle is continuing to get interrupted by disasters, so you can never quite get back up to that previous baseline,” said Columbia’s Schlegelmilch.

The main issue is supply. Building materials are so scarce and expensive that people are driving nearly 150 miles to Houston just to buy lumber. The direst scarcity is housing. Residents in ruined homes, as well as workers who are being hired to fix them, can’t find affordable places to live.

The housing situation “is a serious crisis,” said Tarek Polite, the director of human services for Calcasieu Parish, who is also in charge of recovery support for housing. “The supply that is left has become extremely expensive. Unfortunately, 50% of our low-income housing was damaged, and many apartment complexes are still fighting with insurance companies for payouts.”

“I have over 80 pictures of the damage,” Washington said. “You can’t tell me I can live there.

Lake Charles was already on the brink of an affordable housing shortage before the August hurricane struck, thanks to an industrial boom and an influx of chemical and energy plant workers, Polite explained. The result, he said, is a “new class of homeless individuals” who are toughing it out until they get money from the federal government.

Since Laura hit Lake Charles, the city has lost an estimated 6.7% of its population, according to Mark Tizano, the city’s community development director, though he said the real number is probably much higher. “People are living with relatives, gone out of town, anywhere they can lay their heads,” Tizano said.

For a small percentage of those who stayed, FEMA has helped fill the housing gap. As of mid-June, nearly 2,100 people statewide who were displaced after Laura and Delta were living in federally provided temporary housing.

But that’s not nearly enough, local officials say, and they don’t understand why the city has yet to receive more housing support from the federal government. “This is the first time we’ve seen this type of displacement after storms,” Tizano said. Months after Hurricane Rita slammed into Lake Charles in 2005, he added, “we were already quickly underway with a program to help people with housing.”

Monica Washington says she’s one of the lucky ones. After Laura’s intense winds tore open her condo, Washington, her 32-year-old daughter, and their two dogs and cat spent nearly a year hopping between hotels and sleeping crammed together in their car. She ended up spending about $21,700 on hotel bills, depleting her savings. Finally, they got a break on May 13 when FEMA placed them in one of the coveted temporary housing trailers outside of town.

It took months of back-and-forth with FEMA, and a formal request from Rep. Clay Higgins, to prove her family qualified for temporary housing. “I have over 80 pictures of the damage,” Washington said. “You can’t tell me I can live there. There’s no power.”

There wasn’t much to move into the trailer. Most of what they own has been destroyed, including Washington’s grandmother’s silverware and her daughter’s baby pictures. “Everything we own fits in one drawer,” she said. “Everything I have worked for my entire life, gone.”

To keep supporting her family, Washington, 58, will have to come out of retirement. She’s still fighting with her condo’s rental insurance for a payout and repeatedly emailing and calling FEMA about getting additional aid. “I can feel the anger building up when I think about what that storm did to us,” she said.

A big reason the country’s disaster response system is dysfunctional, experts say, is because the federal government’s role is limited. While FEMA is the country’s expert on emergency response, officials are adamant that their job is only to advise and support state and local governments as they rebuild, not take the lead. Local governments are usually the ones in charge of disaster response and finances.

But if it weren’t for nonprofit and volunteer organizations, many Americans, especially those with low incomes, would not make it through a disaster. These groups are on the ground first and often stay for months, filling a crucial void for survivors by providing food, healthcare, and other support, such as helping people navigate the confusing FEMA claims process.

“The issue with how the US approaches recovery is that it is highly reliant on people using their own resources to pay for their own recovery,” said Samantha Montano, an assistant professor in emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

Insurance is “usually your best bet” to get enough money to rebuild your home, Montano explained. But, she later added, “there can be all kinds of problems actually getting payouts from insurance.”

Since many residents in Lake Charles were uninsured or renting their homes, they are responsible for trying to rebuild their lives using whatever savings they might have. And for those who did have insurance and have applied for assistance from FEMA, there is often a sizable gap between the reimbursement they receive and what it will cost to actually repair their homes.

FEMA also runs the nation’s flood insurance program, a broken system that has racked up billions in debt. Louisianans submitted more than 3,600 flood insurance claims for the three hurricanes combined, resulting in more than $120 million in funds paid by early June. More than 3,200 claims have already been filed in the aftermath of the May storms, roughly half of them coming from Calcasieu Parish, according to FEMA.

But most flood insurance policies do not repay people for hotels, food, or other costs incurred because their home was uninhabitable, meaning they have to pay those thousands of dollars on their own.

And it’s often people of color and those with low incomes who “get aid last,” said LeBlanc from Mercy Chefs. This heartbreaking reality has grown more widespread as climate change–fueled weather events have intensified in the last decade.

After 2020’s historic spate of disasters, a federal advisory panel published a scathing report that found FEMA’s disaster relief programs perpetually shortchange low-income communities and people of color while providing “an additional boost to wealthy homeowners.”

FEMA did not respond to questions from BuzzFeed News about Lake Charles’ slow recovery. “The people of Lake Charles, Calcasieu Parish and all of [Southwest] Louisiana have been through a difficult time,” Debra Young, a FEMA spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News in an email. Young added that FEMA has been a constant presence in the area and will “continue to work in Lake Charles to assist survivors by providing grants, loans and housing to those who are eligible.”

While Lake Charles is an extreme example, there are more than 50 towns and cities across the country currently dealing with compounding disasters, according to Mustafa Santiago Ali, vice president of environmental justice, climate, and community revitalization at the National Wildlife Federation.

“People don’t talk about it because they are Black, brown, and Indigenous people,” Ali said. “They are unseen and unheard.” He attributed the problem in part to decades of discriminatory housing policies, such as redlining, that forced people of color into floodplains and other disaster-prone areas.

“Many people ask, ‘Well, why don’t they just leave?’” said Egland, the NAACP climate justice chair. “They can’t. People who are economically challenged don’t have the luxury of choice; they’re bound by their situation.”

Egland, who lives in Gulfport, Mississippi, and survived Hurricane Katrina, said the ripples of climate racism are extensive and long-lasting. One event can impact food supply, agriculture, housing, access to healthcare, and education for years afterward, setting struggling communities even further back.

“You can get hit one time and maintain hope,” said LeBlanc. “You can get hit twice and still have hope and a promise for a new day. But getting hit a fourth time, a fifth time...people get to a place emotionally where it’s hard to find a bright spot. They’ve used them all up.”

For officials in Lake Charles and at the state level, getting Washington to provide enough financial aid and housing support to lift the community out of the shadow of these disasters feels impossible.

Last November, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards sent a letter to former president Donald Trump asking for support, including asking Congress to approve nearly $3 billion to help rebuild homes and create more affordable rental housing. Without this funding, he wrote, “many neighborhoods and communities will not be able to recover.”

“The most disaster-stricken city in the most disastrous year in recent memory.”

The Trump administration did not fulfill his request. He then made a fresh appeal to Biden, writing to him in January to ask Congress to approve the money. The Biden administration appeared to take notice.

“When someone inevitably writes the book of what it was like to live through the past year, they might want to begin the story in Lake Charles,” said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen following a roundtable with Hunter after the winter storm in late February. Lake Charles, she said, might have the unfortunate distinction of being “the most disaster-stricken city in the most disastrous year in recent memory.”

President Biden visited the city on May 6, using the Calcasieu River Bridge as a backdrop to announce his $2 trillion national infrastructure proposal, which could eventually help Lake Charles and places like it. He also announced $1 billion in additional funding for FEMA specifically to help communities prepare for future disasters. But weeks after his visit, there’s still no word on whether more recovery funds will be given to Lake Charles and the surrounding region.

For Mayor Hunter, the experience has left him feeling like his city is a “pawn” in a nonsensical political battle.

“Washington, DC, is failing American citizens in southwest Louisiana,” he said. “I have a problem with the narrative that it’s everyone else’s problem.”

As the days continue to tick by, bringing the area deeper into hurricane season, Boudreaux and other residents hope their funds and resilience will stretch until more help arrives. If she had a choice, Boudreaux would leave or buy a home, she doesn’t want to leave her family, her hometown. Her children and grandchildren are here. So she’ll continue to do what she and others in Lake Charles have gotten too good at doing: wait.

“We are good people, we work, we pay our bills, we live in a decent home, we go to church and do right by others,” she said. “Just seems everything is against us.” ●

Jun. 21, 2021, at 16:49 PM

More on this

• These Seniors Were Left Behind When Hurricane Laura Hit. No One Claimed Responsibility.Brianna Sacks · Sept. 23, 2020

• Residents Have Been Forced To Shelter In Place After A Chemical Fire Ignited In Hurricane Laura’s WakeEmmanuel Felton · Aug. 27, 2020

• The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State SaysPeter Aldhous · May 26, 2021

• In Jackson, Mississippi, You Can Go Into Debt Trying To Take A ShowerBrianna Sacks · April 7, 2021

“It feels like you’re living in Revelations.”

From left: Scott Boudreaux, Bridget Boudreaux, Dorothy Conner, and Virginia Coberly stand outside of their home, which was damaged during last year’s hurricane season in Westlake, Louisiana. Callaghan O’Hare for BuzzFeed News

 

Young people in Russia's largest cities are finding LGBTQ community despite restrictions

Elizabeth Kuhr and George Itzhak

Tue, June 22, 2021

When Lisa Androshina threw her first lesbian party in Moscow in 2017, she had low expectations.

“We wanted to just gather with our friends and just listen to cool music,” Androshina, 34, told NBC News. “We didn’t plan to do anything serious.”

She booked a bar that she said was often empty and invited her friends and some DJs. After a few parties, her event, called LVBZ, grew in popularity.

Image: Lisa Androshina, right, and the other organizers of the LVBZ lesbian party in Moscow. (Mikhail Vetlov)

Androshina, who lives in Moscow, said about 500 people now attend the quarterly LVBZ nighttime dance, which features DJs from around the world.

Despite the government’s anti-gay restrictions and the country’s conservative views on LGBTQ issues, some lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Russians, like Androshina, are publicly sharing their identities and forming community, particularly in the country’s largest cities. This has spawned a cultural shift, albeit a small and partially underground one.

“We’re not hiding,” Androshina said. “We’re openly speaking about who we are now.”

‘Tired of being targeted’

In 2013, Russia passed a law that bans distributing information on LGBTQ issues and relationships to minors. Known as the “gay propaganda law,” the legislation states that any act or event that authorities deem to promote homosexuality to those under 18 is a finable offense.

The legislation has had a far more sinister impact than just a financial one: After it passed, anti-LGBTQ violence in the country increased, according to a 2018 report from the international rights group Human Rights Watch. A 2019 poll from the Russian LGBT Network, a Russian queer advocacy group, found 56 percent of LGBTQ respondents reported experiencing psychological abuse, and disturbing reports have emerged in recent years of the state-sanctioned detention and torture of gay and bisexual men in Chechnya, a semiautonomous Russian region. Just last year, a survey found that nearly 1 in 5 Russians reported wanting to “eliminate” gay and lesbian people from society.

“I don’t think Russian society is homophobic on its own,” Svetlana Zakharova, a boardmember of the St. Petersburg-based Russian LGBT Network, said. “The law’s inspiring homophobic hatred.”

Zakharova said younger residents are less trusting of the Russian government and are more accepting of LGBTQ people. She said that despite the “gay propaganda law,” more people from across the country are attending public, LGBTQ-focused events.

“Many people are tired of being targeted constantly, and they want to change something,” she said.

Creating ‘beautiful things’ amid fear

News articles, TV segments and documentary films about LGBTQ life in Russia tend to chronicle the challenging, and at times violent, experiences of the queer people that live there. This media narrative, even if accurate, contributes to the difficulty of being LGBTQ in Russia, according to Nikita Andriyanov, who lives in Moscow and co-hosts a podcast, roughly translated in English as “wide open,” about LGBTQ life and culture in Russia.

“It is not easy, and it’s not fun to be a gay person here,” he said.

Andriyanov, however, is among those trying to change the narrative. He said smaller media outlets, like his own, are helping to shape Russia’s emerging LGBTQ community. To avoid fines from the “gay propaganda law,” he said he adds a disclaimer to his podcast stating that it is for people over 18. And if the government were to fine him, despite the disclaimer, he said, people in the LGBTQ community would help support him.

“Once you are ready to accept the fact [that you are LGBTQ] and try to fight it, you become an activist,” Andriyanov said. “[There’s] that extra responsibility.”

Sasha Kazantseva, a 34-year-old lesbian living in Saint Petersburg, is also trying to change the narrative and help build community through media. In 2018, she created a digital magazine about queer Russian culture called O-Zine. She said she wanted to publish the magazine, in part, to counter the news coverage focused on the difficulty of being gay in Russia. The publication features queer art and culture stories, as well as positive articles about people in the community. She said she hopes O-Zine helps empower LGBTQ Russians to feel proud of their identities.

“When you’re a queer person and you live in a very homophobic country,” she said, “it makes it rather hard to just feel connection to other people.”

She’s trying to change that — and she said O-Zine has helped to document the progress that has been made so far. When the publication first launched, Kazantseva said, finding openly LGBTQ people to feature was difficult. Now, she added, Russians living in larger cities are open, and at times eager, to share their stories.

“Paradoxically [the gay propaganda law] helps the process of self-reflection of who we are, how we live as a community, how we can feel proud of who we are,” Kazantseva said.

She said both a drive to fight governmental restrictions and access to social media has slowly fortified the community over the past several years.

Despite collaborating with high-profile Russian creators and celebrities, O-Zine has not been fined under the country’s propaganda law. The magazine has avoided issues because it is independent and not an official media organization, according to Kazantseva.

“When you live under this risk daily, you start to just not care,” said Kazantseva, who like Zakharova said the younger generation is more progressive and open. “We can be arrested the next day, but let’s do what we want to do, and let’s create beautiful things.”

She did, however, note that the situation is drastically different in smaller Russian towns, where she said it’s nearly impossible — if not deadly — for queer people to form community.

“In Moscow and in St. Petersburg, big cities, it’s possible for us to have friendly spaces,” Kazantseva said. “For smaller cities [in] Russia, it’s nearly impossible, because people know each other, and people are less tolerant.”

Andriyanov, who moved from the vast province of Siberia to Moscow after college, agreed.

“It is not really that dangerous for me to be openly gay as it would have been if I grew up, if I stayed in [Siberia],” Andriyanov said. “I don’t think it would have been possible for me to reach that level of openness about my identity.”

He said living in a large city has helped him to accept his sexuality, and added that he would likely be in danger if he stayed in his hometown and lived openly as a gay man.

Creative ‘freedom’

A few films in Russian cinema are also reflecting the shift. The 2019 film “Beanpole” is a drama about a romance between two women in the former Leningrad that is set during World War II. Another 2019 film titled “Outlaw” is widely regarded as the first Russian film to feature a transgender character. “Outlaw” weaves the story of a gay teenager in modern-day Moscow and a transgender dancer in 1980s Soviet Union.

“‘Outlaw’ is about the impossible, about freedom — internal and external,” Ksenia Ratushnaya, the film’s director and screenwriter, said.

Ratushnaya, who lives in Moscow, said she thought the propaganda law would prevent her from screening “Outlaw” in Russia. She was nonetheless able to secure a governmental certificate to show the film in theaters, with the proviso that she edit out curse words and a few seconds of a sex scene involving a priest. That scene was flagged by government censors as breaking another law prohibiting offense against religious people.

Even though Ratushnaya was able to produce and release a film that featured LGBTQ characters without facing legal challenges, she said her film was not shown widely in Russia. Just 10 theaters agreed to screen it to the public, far fewer than most films, according to Ratushnaya. She said she believes many theater operators were simply too afraid to show it.

“I want people to have access to any information that they want,” said Ratushnaya, who added that it’s a battle to navigate the laws and create art. “Freedom, for me, is extremely important.”

‘You can move slowly to the light’

Androshina said the cultural shift she has observed, including the success of her lesbian party, has made her hopeful for the future. Currently, however, she’s not without concerns, ranging from her inability to marry or adopt children to fear for her physical safety as an out lesbian.

Image: LVBZ lesbian party in Moscow (Mikhail Vetlov)

She also noted that because her party, LVBZ, is for people over 21, the event should be legal but added that the propaganda law and its application is not entirely clear to her. She said she is constantly balancing potential threats, including legal ones, and her dedication to creating an open and celebratory space for LGBTQ Russians. But despite all the challenges, she stressed that her experience as an out person in Russia may surprise some inside and outside her country.

“People think that it's too bad, and [we all] really have to hide without doing anything. That's not true,” she said. “We’re actually moving in a good direction.”

“You may have some fears,” she added, about being openly LGBTQ in Russia. “At the same time, there is a tunnel. You can move slowly to the light; you can make an impact.”

Op-Ed: Why Biden's strategy for preventing domestic terrorism could do more harm than good

LIKE CLINTON'S DID AFTER THE OKLAHOMA BOMBING


Harsha Panduranga
Mon, June 21, 2021

Members of the extremist group Boogaloo Boys armed with weapons and flags rally during Lobby Day in Richmond, Va., on Jan. 18. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Even as American cities are working to reduce the use of police in responding to mental health and social crises, the Biden administration is doubling down on an ineffective strategy that further entrenches law enforcement in these same spheres under the umbrella of violence prevention.

President Biden’s just-released National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism features this approach in its plan to combat far-right violence. The Department of Homeland Security recently created a new Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, which will provide funds and support to local law enforcement, community groups and institutions such as universities to carry out such prevention efforts. Among its purposes is to identify people who may become violent and connect them with mental health and social services, often in cooperation with police.

The Homeland Security Department describes this as a “public health” approach, which may sound appealing. But decades of research show that we cannot reliably identify potentially violent people. And trying to do so will invite more police involvement in mental health and social services and bias against the same communities that bear the brunt of far-right violence, as a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice documents.


Many of the behaviors and traits the center identifies as markers of potential violence — being socially alienated, depressed, having a “grievance,” for example — are both vague and common. Treating what are often adverse social conditions as potential police matters hurts efforts to support people struggling with these conditions.

The new center essentially puts a new label on Homeland Security's old Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program, which Biden had promised to end. That program, in turn, was a rebrand of a war-on-terror-era program called Countering Violent Extremism, which broadly treated Muslim Americans as terrorism risks.

These earlier programs treated actions such as attending a mosque more frequently and being concerned about anti-Muslim discrimination or human rights abuses as reasons for criminal suspicion. While the Biden administration’s disavowal of the heavy-handed targeting that marked the war on terror approach is welcome, the new program’s prevention activities rest on the same flawed foundation and impose many of the same harms.

The Biden program claims its prevention model is evidence-based, but the very studies it cites say that predicting who will engage or attempt to engage in terrorism “is an unrealistic goal.” Instead, government-run studies in this field claim to identify commonalities among those who have carried out violent attacks, labeling them risk factors and indicators that bear on whether a person is going to commit violence.

The main problem is that these signs — such as mental health issues, having trouble at home or in relationships, having a political or personal “grievance” — are shared by millions and hardly serve to separate out potentially violent people from ordinary Americans. The involvement of law enforcement means that individuals with these conditions are unfairly tagged as potential criminals and become at risk of being funneled into the criminal justice system.

Nor does Homeland Security account for how race, religion and ethnicity influence who is tagged as dangerous. This holds true in schools, where discipline falls more heavily on children of color; in policing, where race often dictates who is targeted for enforcement; and in counter-terrorism, where Muslims have borne the brunt of suspicion.

The new program is supposed to work with the Homeland Security Office of Civil Rights and Liberties to ensure rights are protected, but it has not specified any concrete safeguards. The program formally requires those receiving its grants to address privacy and civil rights concerns when applying for funds. But these requirements also existed in the earlier programs, without much effect.

Of course, people experiencing conditions that the program identifies as potential markers of violence could well benefit from mentorship programs or mental health treatment. But linking access to such services to a propensity for violent crime makes it less likely that people will seek out help when they need it.

A better path forward is to wall off security agencies such as Homeland Security from efforts to address the social problems the department frames as threats and leave these issues to people with the right expertise. One blueprint is the recently reintroduced Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, which proposes funds to replace police in schools with social service providers such as teachers, counselors, social workers and nurses and prohibits the use of money for partnerships with law enforcement.

Homeland Security's Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships is unlikely to help prevent violence by mixing health and social services in a law enforcement framework, but it will harm the communities it is trying to protect. The Biden administration should instead invest in badly needed social services through the agencies most equipped to provide them.

Harsha Panduranga is counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program.

Could Fracking Save Colombia’s Oil Industry?


Editor OilPrice.com
Mon, June 21, 2021

Despite being wracked by nationwide anti-government protests the prospects for Colombia’s beaten-down oil industry are improving. Most of the protests and blockades of major roads have been ended allowing onshore drillers to recommence operations. Another important development is the progress of allowing hydraulic fracturing in the strife-torn Andean country. This controversial technique for extracting oil and natural gas has faced strong and lengthy opposition in Colombia. It was touted by crisis-driven president Ivan Duque during late-2018 as a means of resolving a critical problem facing Colombia’s oil-dependent economy, its lack of proven oil and natural gas reserves. There have been no major hydrocarbon discoveries in Colombia since 2009. Energy ministry data shows (Spanish) that at the end of 2020 proved reserves were 1.8 billion barrels, an 11% reduction compared to 2019, which is sufficient to support six years at the current rate of production, and just under 3 trillion cubic feet of gas with a production life of almost eight years. The direness of the situation is underscored by the petroleum industry is responsible, during 2020, for nearly a fifth of government income, 3% of gross domestic product, and 28% of exports by value. Those numbers highlight just how important it is for the national government in Bogota to boost Colombia’s economically crucial hydrocarbon reserves if it is to head off a major economic crisis.

Fracking has long been held as a solution with it estimated that Colombia holds up to seven billion barrels of recoverable shale oil and 30 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. If those vast hydrocarbon resources can be successfully accessed, they will significantly boost Colombia’s hydrocarbon reserves and production life, averting a fiscal crisis and giving the economy a healthy boost. Nonetheless, there has been significant opposition to fracking in Colombia. In 2018, the country’s highest administrative court the Council of State established a moratorium against fracking. That was upheld in 2019, but the tribunal found that fracking projects were not banned. In the latest development, a bill aiming to ban fracking and the exploitation of unconventional oil and natural gas deposits in Colombia was effectively sunk (Spanish). Only half of the representatives supporting the bill arrived last Saturday to debate its approval and a vote made last week ended with the bill being delayed. This effectively stymies the implementation of the bill, indicating that it will not be approved by congress, seeing the end of a major hurdle to allowing fracking in Colombia. Earlier this year, the head of the National Hydrocarbon Agency (ANH – Spanish initials), Armando Zamora, stated that he believed the moratorium would be lifted in 2022 once comprehensive fracking regulations had been established.

Fracking pilots have been approved and are underway in Colombia’s Middle Magdalena Valley Basin. It is the La Luna geological formation that is being targeted in the basin.

EIA


Source: U.S. EIA.

La Luna has been compared to the prolific Eagle Ford shale. In 2013 the ANH released survey data to support its claim that the geological formation’s rock quality is similar to and in some cases better than many North American shale plays. Some sources believe that it could hold hydrocarbon resources of up to 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent, making it a priority target for Colombia’s energy ministry and hydrocarbon regulator.

Related: U.S. Government Considers Making Ransom Payments Illegal

Colombia’s national oil company Ecopetrol was awarded approval last November for the Kale project near the municipality of Puerto Wilches in the Middle Magdalena Valley Basin.

Ecopetrol

Source: Ecopetrol.

The state-controlled energy major expects to invest $80 million to bring the operation online, with Ecopetrol currently establishing the monitoring plan and gaining community approvals. In early April 2021 global energy supermajor ExxonMobil was awarded the only contract from the second unconventional round. Exxon was awarded the rights to the Platero project, also near Puerto Wilches in the Middle Magdalena Valley. The global energy supermajor has committed to investing $53 million in developing the asset with a seven percent local content requirement. The project is focused on exploring the unconventional geological formations of the VMM-37 Block which is 70% controlled by Exxon as the operator, with the remaining 30% held by Canadian oil junior Sintana Energy.

VMM-37 Block Middle Magdalena Valley Basin

Manati

Source: Sintana Energy.

Exxon drilled the A3 Manati Blanco well in 2015 on the block but it was never tested, and operations were suspended pending an environmental permit being awarded. That was blocked because of the controversy surrounding the introduction of fracking in Colombia and the eventual moratorium imposed on the practice.

While the latest developments bode well for the future of fracking in Colombia, the ANH is finding it difficult to attract the desired level of interest from foreign energy companies in unconventional oil exploration and production. Exxon submitted the only valid bid during the ANH’s April 2021 round, with the two other participants Drummond and Ecopetrol declining to make offers. The uncertainty surrounding the future of fracking in Colombia, coupled with an escalating security crisis and recent nationwide anti-government protests which forced onshore energy companies to shutter production, is weighing on investor sentiment. While most of the oil production shut-in by the anti-government protests and related blockades has been brought back online, considerable political turmoil remains. There are long-standing grievances among various civil society groups which were amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic that Bogota has failed to address. Roadblocks, oilfield invasions, and community protests against Colombia’s economically vital hydrocarbon sector remain ever-present threats, particularly with the oil industry’s social license deteriorating in many communities where it operates.

The considerable uncertainty surrounding the future of fracking and Colombia’s oil industry is being magnified by former leftist presidential candidate and senator Gustavo Petro taking a massive lead in the polls. Those numbers indicate that at this time he will win the 2022 presidential elections. Petro’s 2018 candidacy and subsequent lead in the polls prior to the May 2018 electoral round unnerved financial markets, the oil industries, and mining industries, notably because he campaigned (Spanish) on a platform of reducing Colombia’s dependence on oil as well as opposing fracking. It was Ivan Duque’s eventual victory that saw much of that nervousness dissipate. The sharp increase in political turmoil, Bogota’s inability to reactivate the economy, and heightened insecurity are all weighing on the outlook for fracking in Colombia.

By Matthew Smith for Oilprice.com