Rising extreme heat will make it increasingly hard for workers to do their jobs, shaving hundreds of billions of dollars off the U.S. economy each year. That’s according to a report published Tuesday by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank focused on climate adaptation. It’s a stark warning about the costs of failing to act on climate change.
Productivity losses due to heat currently cost the U.S. an estimated $100 billion a year, the report claims. As days of extreme heat become more frequent in the years ahead, that figure is projected to double to $200 billion by 2030—around 0.5% of GDP. By 2050, annual losses are projected to hit $500 billion, around 1% of GDP. These national losses are expected to come primarily from the southeast and midwest. But the effects will be felt across most of the country, with annual losses of at least 0.5% of economic activity projected for 62% of U.S. counties.
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This summer, it’s been hard to ignore that the U.S. is getting hotter. Since June, rolling heat waves have stifled nearly every region, weighing especially hard on western states, nearly all of which have recorded drought conditions. In the last week of August, 60 million people were under heat warnings across the country, with temperatures as high as 115°F in southwestern cities, and humidity making northeastern cities feel close to 100°F. Unusually high temperatures have not only been felt in the U.S.: according to scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July was the hottest month on Earth since records began, beating the previous high of July 2016 by 0.02°F.
As greenhouse gases in our atmosphere absorb more heat, the U.S. will experience more frequent and more widespread “high heat days”—defined as a day when the maximum temperature is above 90°F. Drawing on climate projections from the World Climate Research Program, downscaled to county-level, the report estimates that by 2050, up to 30% of the U.S. population will be exposed to more than 100 high heat days per year. That’s up from 5% under the prevailing climate conditions.
Though we may all feel the rising heat on warmer days, its long term consequences for the economy are still poorly understood, says Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. “It’s hard to isolate heat in economic data,” she says. “Where other climate hazards like hurricanes and floods have an impact on physical assets, heat’s impacts are mostly on the human body.”
On high heat days, studies show people are more likely to feel tired or sick at work, partly as a result of nighttime temperatures remaining too high to get a good night’s sleep. When people are tired, they take more breaks, work more slowly, make more mistakes and have a higher risk of getting injured.
To figure out how those factors affect the U.S. economy as a whole, researchers at consultancy Vivid Economics combined projections for the number of extreme heat days in counties across the U.S., a model on heat-related productivity loss, and government data on the predominance of outdoor work and access to air conditioning across industries. Researchers also included existing models for heat’s impact on four crops that are key to U.S. agriculture: corn, soy, wheat and cotton.
The result is only a partial view of heat’s impact on the economy. The analysis leaves out many other ways that heat may impact economic output across the country that were too difficult to measure reliably, including the impact that heat might have on leisure and tourism, the cost of wildfires, and the cost of mechanical failures for machines that stop working at high temperatures.
But even with the limited scope, the $100 billion in current annual heat-related productivity losses outweigh the estimated $60 billion cost of the record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season. And the annual losses projected in the near future are even worse.
The southeast and the midwest of the country will face the highest economic cost from extreme heat. Texas—the most-affected state due to its climate and relatively high levels of outdoor work— is currently losing an average of $30 billion a year, per the report, and is projected to lose some $110 billion a year by 2050, amounting to 2.5% of its total economic output.
Heat’s impact on work is not distributed equally among the U.S. population. Black and Hispanic workers tend to live in parts of the country that are more exposed to heat, and they face worse working conditions with less protection from heat; in 2020 they lost around 1.3% of their productivity due to heat, compared to a 1.1% loss for non-Hispanic white workers.
The industries most affected by extreme heat are construction and agriculture, where workers are most exposed. By 2050, construction is projected to lose 3.5% of its total annual economic activity to heat ($1.2 billion per year), while agriculture, where falling crop yields are also a factor, would lose 3.7% ($130.7 million per year).
But overall losses from heat are projected to be even bigger in the service sector, which dominates the U.S. economy. While those in office jobs are mostly protected from heat by air conditioning, workers in areas like food service or transportation can be exposed to dangerously high temperatures. The sector faces losses of $2.8 billion a year—0.7% of its economic activity—by 2050, per the report.
The study is part of a growing body of research that attempts to put a price tag on the risks the world’s economies face from climate change. The goal, Baughman McLeod says, is to show that doing nothing will cost more than taking action to cut emissions and adapt to climate change. In the case of heat, adaptation will include solutions like creating urban forests, improving early warning systems, and developing heat-resistant strains of crops. “These things require investment,” she says. “But protecting people first rather than paying for it later will, in the end, be the right decision for any business or government.”
We are in a planetary emergency. Horrific heat waves and fires blaze across North America, Turkey and Russia. Extreme floods wreak destruction and cause death from Europe to Africa to Asia. Ocean temperatures and the amount of carbon in our atmosphere have reached unprecedented highs. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Our planet, as the United Nations recently warned, is flashing a “code red for humanity.”
There is no single solution to a crisis this large. Nations must fulfill the commitments they made under the Paris Agreement. Industries need to decarbonize, and businesses—especially the Fortune 1000—need to achieve net zero emissions. We need to empower a new generation of ecopreneurs—entrepreneurs focused on protecting our planet—to unleash innovative climate solutions. In our own lives, we need to adapt our lifestyles and consumption patterns.
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None of these climate solutions are mutually exclusive. We need them all. If we are to save our planet—and ourselves—from irreversible climate change, we need to recruit everyone, everywhere in this mission.
This includes embracing a powerful climate solution that can be delivered by anyone, anywhere: trees.
Trees are our planet’s natural air purifiers—the single most effective “device” we have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. In the U.S., for example, forests capture and store almost 15 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions every year—equivalent to the annual emissions from 163 million cars.
Tragically, we are losing trees at the very moment we need them most. Every six seconds, our planet loses a football pitch worth of tropical rainforest to deforestation. Forests in colder regions are losing millions of acres to drought, pests and wildfire worsened by climate change, and our rapidly growing cities are often losing the natural cooling of trees.
That’s why, last year, we helped launch a new global partnership with a bold new climate action goal—conserving, restoring and growing 1 trillion trees by 2030. Why a trillion? Because cutting-edge scientific analysis, led by the Crowther Lab, has identified enough ecologically suitable land around the world to help achieve this goal with reforestation. By some estimates, a trillion trees could sequester some 200 gigatons of carbon over their lifetimes—equal to the annual emissions from more than 43 billion cars.
When we announced our trillion-tree goal last year, some skeptics dismissed our work as misguided or unrealistic. But the past year has proven that progress is possible. Great Britain, Canada, the U.S., the E.U., China, India, Pakistan and Colombia have committed to plant billions of trees. Partnerships with indigenous communities aim to permanently conserve the planet-protecting forests and biodiversity of the Amazon Basin and the Sahel. Conservation efforts that have removed the world’s second largest rainforest—the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo—from the endangered list show what’s possible.
In its inaugural year, the U.S. chapter of 1t.org has secured pledges from more than 70 U.S. cities and states, companies and NGOs to conserve, restore and grow over 50 billion trees in the U.S. and abroad by 2030, and invest billions of dollars in workforce development, carbon finance and technology.
Now, as the world comes together next month for Global Citizen Live to rally the international community to address climate change and defeat poverty, and prepares for the pivotal United Nations climate change conference in November, we have the opportunity to spark a truly global effort.
This is a movement that everyone can join.
Every national, state, provincial or local government can make a commitment, like the State of Wisconsin, which will conserve and plant a total of 89 million trees, and the City of Dallas, which will conserve and plant more than 18 million trees.
Every business, large and small, can take action, like Mastercard, Salesforce and Aspiration, which have each committed to planting or protecting 100 million trees.
Every group that cares about our planet can set a goal, following the lead of Eden Reforestation and Sustainable Harvest International, which will plant billions of trees in developing nations, and diverse non-profits reforesting landscapes across America, from abandoned mine lands in West Virginia to burn scars in California.
Every community group can do something, like Girl Scout Troop 4 in Orange, New Jersey that planted 50 dogwood trees as part of the new Girl Scouts Tree Promise to plant five million trees.
Planting one trillion trees won’t be easy. It will depend on all of us taking action in our countries, our companies and our communities. And at a time when it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the relentless news of our changing climate, it’s something we have the power to do—right now. As the legendary conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall has said, “Now is the time for everyone on the planet to do their part.”
A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here.
It’ll take billions of dollars, tens of thousands of new forestry workers, and a systematic rethink of the way we build homes and manage the land to solve some parts of California’s wildfire crisis. Other aspects might be fixed with a paper and pen.
As a series of conflagrations burn through much of California, displacing thousands and filling skies with smoke, it might seem strange to say that changes to a few statutes could make a difference. Indeed, the lion’s share of the problem of West Coast wildfires is systemic, with decades of overgrowth in California forests combining with hot, dry weather exacerbated by climate change to create the perfect storm for the blazes that have consumed more than a million acres in the state this year. Easy answers have been hard to come by, with disagreements over strategy rampant and state and federal agencies at odds with one another over how to prevent seasonal wildfires going forward. But some lawyers say that tweaking a few legalities could make a real difference.
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Take liability laws around controlled burns. Small, well-managed burns are an essential aspect of land management in many fire-prone areas, removing tall brush and dead foliage that can cause bigger fires to burn out of control under the worst weather conditions. But some laws actually disincentivize landowners from taking such steps. In much of California, a landowner who undertakes to start a controlled burn on their property has to jump through a series of hoops, proving they have the expertise to set a controlled fire that will stay controlled, and under conditions where smoke will disperse relatively quickly. But even if they do everything right, if a neighbor sees smoke from a permitted controlled burn and calls fire control, the landowner gets billed for the firefighters’ trouble under current regulations in many areas, incurring a debt that can run to tens of thousands of dollars.
“There’s a bias in the law over the last 100 years toward creating lots of liability for people who try to create fires on their lands, and no liability for people who keep their land as a tinderbox,” says Michael Wara, a research scholar focusing on climate and energy policy at Stanford Law School. He says many of those who plan controlled burns are firefighters volunteering time in the offseason to make their own communities more resistant to wildfires. “If we’re not going to pay them, at least we shouldn’t put their own personal wealth at risk when they’re trying to be a good Samaritan,” says Wara.
In some parts of the state, particularly in the hotter, drier south, fire departments can declare a dangerously overgrown and fire-prone property a public nuisance, and then either have the landowner mitigate the problem themself, or else send workers to do it and bill the landowner later. But in some parts of Northern California, where drought has more lately brought extreme fire risk, county commissioners have to vote to declare an individual property a nuisance, a hurdle which all but guarantees that the procedure occurs seldom, if at all.
However, a significant chunk of California—and a large part of the land that has burned this season—is owned by the federal government, and with local authorities lacking jurisdiction over federal lands, no county board is going to make much headway accusing them of being a nuisance. Federal land management policy is a hotly contested issue in D.C. and Sacramento, with some officials advocating to stomp out every fire as soon as it is detected against the advice of scientists and forestry experts, who say it’s better to allow smaller burns to clear out decades of built up underbrush in order to prevent the worst and most dangerous conflagrations that can send clouds of wildfire smoke drifting into large cities.
There’s one legal change, Michael Wara thinks, which could help improve that conversation. Currently, wildfire smoke isn’t counted as air pollution under the Clean Air Act, even as it causes thousands of deaths across the state. A change to that policy might cause the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to get involved in the issue of forest management, potentially forcing federal action with an eye more toward protecting vulnerable populations from wildfire smoke. “That’s the kind of thing that EPA should be thinking about,” says Wara. “They’re not, because they have no legal obligation to do so.”
This summer, as a haze of wildfire smoke descended on the village of Magaras in the East Siberian region of Yakutia, crews of local residents set out into the taiga forest to defend their land from the encroaching flames. There was little in the way of protective clothing to go around, and no radios or GPS transponders, let alone firefighting aircraft to stop the blazes around this settlement of around 1,000 people. Locals made do with shovels, axes, and small fire-fighting pumps that they carried on their backs, along with their tractors, some dating back to the Soviet era, which they used to cut ditches into the vegetation in an attempt to hold back the fires. There was little choice but to undertake this dangerous work themselves, the local volunteers said. If they stood by and waited for government help to arrive, it would be too late.
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A hot, dry summer has fueled massive blazes in this East Siberian region over past weeks, burning through more than 10 million acres of Yakutia, also known as the Republic of Sakha, and sending clouds of smoke drifting all the way to the north pole. The fires have released more than 500 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere, the highest such total ever recorded for the region, according to the E.U.’s atmospheric monitoring service. This month, authorities evacuated two villages in the region as encroaching fires endangered residents.
Alexey VasilyevLocal firefighting volunteers sleep in a small hut near the village of Magaras in the Gorny District of Russia.Alexey VasilyevAlexander Yakovlev, 40, a volunteer from the village of Kyuerelyakh, together with his 18-year-old son Markel, has been working to extinguish wildfires near his home since early in the summer.
Earlier this summer, photographer Alexey Vasilyev, a member of the Yakut ethnic group that comprises a large part of Yakutia’s population, set out to document efforts by firefighters and locals to battle those blazes. The experience, Vasilyev says, was deeply troubling. “I watched the forests smolder as the fire slowly consumed the trees, the grass. I watched as life slowly melted away in these places,” Vasilyev wrote over email. “I wasn’t scared, I was just sad to see nature die. I thought of the Yakut spirit of the forest, Bayanai. I wondered what had made him so angry that he had sent so many fires on people.”
Yakutia leaders have blamed global warming for the hot, dry conditions that seeded these blazes, with arctic temperatures warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, according to climate scientists. During an extraordinary heat wave last summer, the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk above the Arctic Circle set a temperature record of 100.4℉—climate scientists later determined that such extreme heat would have been essentially impossible without the effects of human-made climate change. Temperatures this summer have been unusually hot and dry as well, with firefighters battling blazes in 95°F heat (the region’s average summertime temperature is around 68°F).
Alexey VasilyevFirefighters of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation resting after putting out small fires near the village of Dikimdya, on July 15.Alexey VasilyevA firefighter extinguishes a grassroots fire near Kyuerelyakh.
Russian authorities have dispatched help, mobilizing jets and military helicopters, along with more than 2,000 firefighters. But critics have called out the government for a 2007 decision that cut Russia’s airborne forest protection service staff and transferred management of the country’s vast timberlands over to businesses and local authorities, which critics say has spread corruption and hurt early detection and rapid containment efforts.
Much of the effort to fight the blazes has come from local villagers, who have taken the work of defending surrounding hay fields—essential for their livelihoods raising horses and cattle—into their own hands. Community ties are tight here, and many people try to pitch in any way they can. One local blacksmith, Alexander Yakovlev, 40, who went out to fight the blazes with his 18-year-old son, says he doesn’t expect to get compensated much for his efforts, but he decided to put his work on hold anyway to help battle the fires.
Alexey VasilyevVolunteers fill firefighting satchels with water, at a source near Magaras.
In the nearby town of Kyuerelyakh, about 150 local volunteers and government firefighters were working to contain four large fires around the village when Vasilyev visited last month. The smoke was terrible, Vasilyev says, and it was difficult to breathe. He asked one of the professional firefighters if they ever got used to such conditions. The answer: never. On local social media, videos have been circulating of Siberian children saluting such firefighters like soldiers.
One older Kyuerelyakh couple, Kirill Kirillovich and Tatyana Nikolaevna, say they’ve never seen fires come so close to their village. It’s been a difficult stretch for the two; both caught COVID-19 last year, and they emerged from a long and difficult recovery to find themselves under siege by wildfires. Now Kirillovich has joined volunteer efforts to extinguish the blazes, despite the choking smoke, while Nikolaevna helps bring water and prepare food for the volunteers. “It’s very scary and unsettling,” says Nikolaevna. “You can just feel how badly this coronavirus has affected [our] lungs, plus this smoke. It’s impossible to breathe.”
Alexey VasilyevAn employee of yhe Aerial Forest Protection Service of the Russian Federation puts a wet handkerchief on his head—an effective DIY protective against the dangers of wildfire smoke.Alexey VasilyevAt a morning briefing in the village of Kyuerelyakh., firefighters from the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations discuss a plan of action to extinguish nearby fires.Alexey VasilyevA forest fire along the Viluy highway between Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, and Berdigestyakh on July 16.
In an isolated region beset by climate disaster, locals have mixed feelings about journalists who document their plight. Some wish reporters would leave well enough alone and quit asking questions they’ve answered before. Magaras mayor Vladimir Tekeyanov says he doesn’t care which journalists visit him, Russian or foreign, pro-Putin or opposition, so long as they help tell people about what’s happening in his region. And in the remote, seemingly endless wilderness of the taiga, some people simply want visitors to relay a message to the outside world. One professional firefighter who had been working in the wilderness for two weeks with no cell phone or internet connection asked a visiting journalist to send a video message to his wife telling her he was alright, and that he missed her.
Alexey VasilyevThe mayor of Magaras, Vladimir Tekeyanov, in his office.
For those who call this region home, the destruction of this summer’s fires may last far beyond this season, jeopardizing their means of survival and portending yet more disasters ahead as the climate continues to warm. In Kyuerelyakh, Kirillovich and Nikolaevna lost their croplands to the fires despite their best efforts to hold back the flames, leaving them with only a few bales of hay to feed their 26 cattle through the coming winter.
“I have no idea how to live,” says Nikolaevna. “What is waiting for us next year, no one knows.”
Alexey VasilyevSmoke from a forest fire 3 kilometers away, seen from a playground in the village of Dikimdya.
Welcome to COVID Questions, TIME’s advice column. We’re trying to make living through the pandemic a little easier, with expert-backed answers to your toughest coronavirus-related dilemmas. While we can’t and don’t offer medical advice—those questions should go to your doctor—we hope this column will help you sort through this stressful and confusing time. Got a question? Write to us at covidquestions@time.com.
Today, A.S. in Wisconsin asks:
My best friend is getting married in September and I’m in the wedding. I just found out at least one of the groomsmen has refused to be vaccinated, and the couple is not requiring vaccines or COVID-19 tests from their guests. I have been vaccinated, but I have young children who are not. I will not bring my children, but am I putting them at risk by attending? How do I balance wanting to support my friend but also protecting my family?
As I read your question, you’re asking two different things: First, there’s “what sacrifices should I make to protect my children from COVID-19?” Second, there’s “how do I navigate the social challenges of the pandemic?” Like so many other questions related to the pandemic, neither of these have easy or definitive solutions. But we spoke with a psychiatrist and several pediatric physicians to try and sort them out.
For starters, it’s important to consider the scientific evidence about the spread of COVID-19. You’ve already made one important decision that reduces the risk to yourself and your children: getting vaccinated. However, vaccination can’t completely eliminate the risks facing you or your kids. Emerging evidence suggests that even fully vaccinated people can spread the virus—especially the now-dominant Delta variant—to others. Concerns about this possibility led the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July to once again recommend that even fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors in most areas of the country.
So if your question is whether you could potentially go to this wedding, get infected with COVID-19, and bring it home to your kids, the answer is yes, there’s a chance that could happen. That would be true even if everyone there is vaccinated, though that would reduce the risk.
That said, children have so far proven remarkably resilient in the face of this virus. As of Aug. 18, 430 U.S. children have died of the coronavirus, and while the death of any child is an unspeakable tragedy, that’s a small fraction of the nearly 630,000 overall U.S. deaths so far. Furthermore, children face lots of dangers whenever they go out into the world, whether it’s for school, daycare or playdates. How a parent weighs any potential danger to their children comes down to their risk tolerance, says Dr. Allison Messina, the chief of the infectious disease division at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital.
Messina advises parents who are nervous about their children getting COVID-19 to ask themselves a question: what are you really worried about? As she points out, the data suggest previously healthy kids are at low risk of severe disease from the virus. However, the Delta variant makes this calculation harder—pediatric ICUs in hard-hit states are hitting capacity, but it’s unclear if Delta is inherently more dangerous to kids or if more kids are falling ill simply because this strain is so transmissible and kids under 12 can’t yet be vaccinated.
“When I answer these questions, I don’t really answer them as ‘you should’ or ‘you shouldn’t,'” Messina says. “I just say, these are the risks that you would face if you decided to do this.”
If you decide to attend the wedding, there are other ways you could reduce your risk of bringing the virus home to your kids. You could wear a mask, for instance, though they are better at preventing infected people from spreading the virus, rather than helping the wearer avoid getting infected, so consider wearing one at home for a while after you get back (getting tested afterwards and self-isolating if you’re positive could be smart, too). Depending on your relationship, you could ask the couple getting married to require masks, even if just for unvaccinated guests. You could also decide to attend the ceremony but skip the reception to lessen your overall exposure, but given that you’re in the wedding party, that could be socially difficult. (Also consider the venue—outdoor, well-ventilated spaces are generally safer than indoor, poorly ventilated ones.)
That brings us to the second part of your question: how to deal with the social side of your dilemma. The first step is having a conversation with your soon-to-be-wed friend, says Dr. Sophia Albott, a psychiatrist with the University of Minnesota Medical School and the practice University of Minnesota Physicians. Discuss your concerns, talk about potential solutions, and frame things around your children’s safety, she says. “These conversations are difficult to have, but there is potentially an opportunity even for some reaffirmation of their friendship or some sort of two-party empathy.”
If you decide not to attend the wedding or minimize your participation, your friend could be angry or disappointed. Weddings are always stressful, but the upheaval of the pandemic has drawn up a lot of extreme emotions in many people. Albott suggests that you work to keep your conversation respectful, and be sure to acknowledge how your friend is feeling. That’s especially wise if, like so many other engaged couples, your friend had to delay or otherwise change their wedding plans because of the virus.
Finally, while you’re worrying about your children and friends, Albott recommends showing yourself a little kindness, too. Problems like these aren’t easy to navigate, and it’s important to make sure that you’re getting enough sleep, exercise, and connection with other people. “The pandemic has just gone on so long, that I think everyone is tired,” says Albott. “As much as we can, [we should] take care of ourselves, give ourselves a break, and give other people a break.”
The United Arab Emirates is unlikely to set a net-zero emissions target before the COP26 talks starting in October, dealing a potential blow to the climate event.
While the country is considering such a goal, its extreme heat and dry conditions make reducing greenhouse gas emissions difficult because plenty of energy is needed for cooling and desalination, according to a senior Ministry of Climate Change and Environment official.
“Don’t expect us to announce anything by the COP26, but we are considering a net-zero target like any other part of the world,” Qais Al Suwaidi, head of the ministry’s climate change department, said in an interview.
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No major OPEC producer has announced a net-zero target, and the UAE was among the most likely to do so before the COP26 in Glasgow. The U.K. and U.S. want governments to commit to deep emissions cuts. Zeroing them out in the next three decades is viewed as crucial to prevent temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.
Other countries have rushed to announce climate targets without showing how they can be achieved or enshrining them in law, said Al Suwaidi.
“There is a lot of talk: ‘We can achieve net zero, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that’,” he said. “But then in practice we see contrary action. We like to do things differently.”
More time is needed for the UAE to carry out studies that will determine how quickly it can reach net zero, he said.
Adopting stronger commitments wouldn’t necessarily require the UAE to sell less oil, the bedrock of its economy. But setting a net-zero target for emissions produced within its borders would make the UAE an outlier among fellow producers and possibly lead others in the Persian Gulf to follow suit.
The UAE’s current targets are still ambitious, Al Suwaidi said. In December, it pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by almost 25% over 10 years, from a baseline that assumes moderate economic growth. The country, which is competing against South Korea to host the UN’s COP28 event in 2023, is on course to surpass the target, said Al Suwaidi.
In the 1850s, an American scientist named Eunice Foote deduced, based on experiments she’d conducted, that if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were higher, the planet would be warmer. And in the 1890s, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius calculated, by hand, exactly how much the earth would warm as carbon dioxide levels.
By the 1990s, the influence of human activities on the planet was obvious. The first United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report not only tracked the observed increase in carbon dioxide and its impact on global temperatures, melting ice and sea level rise; it also quantified a range of potential future scenarios that depended on human choices.
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This past Monday, the IPCC published the first volume of its latest Assessment Report. It’s the sixth in a series of assessments that have each been more exhaustive and comprehensive than the last. This new report once again painstakingly documents how, where, and why our climate has changed, and what we can expect in the future. Now, though, it also shows how climate change is no longer a distant, speculative threat. Its impacts are here and now, and they’re affecting all of us, in ways that matter to each of us.
In the eight years since the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report was released, we’ve experienced an increasing litany of costly and destructive disasters fueled by a changing climate: record-breaking wildfires from Australia to British Columbia; scorching heat waves from Siberia to Death Valley; devastating floods across China, Bangladesh, Germany and the Midwest; and supercharged hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones, from Texas to Japan.
In a world that seems increasingly out of control, we are desperate for hope: real hope, a hope that acknowledges the full magnitude of the challenge we face and the very imminent risk of failure. Real hope also offers a chance of a more vibrant future; a glimpse, however distant, of something better than what we have today, not worse.
Where can we find such hope? We find it in action. The world has changed before and, when it did, it wasn’t because a president, a prime minister, a CEO or a celebrity decided it had to.
Change didn’t begin with the King of England deciding to end slavery or the President of the United States giving women the vote or the National Party of South Africa opting to end apartheid. It began when ordinary people – people of no particular power, wealth, or fame – decided that the world could and should be different. Who were William Wilberforce, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and all the countless others who shared and supported and fought for their visions of a better world? They were people who had the courage of their convictions, who used their voices to advocate for the systemic societal changes needed. We are the the people who changed the world before: and we are the people who can change it again.
Some of the impacts of climate change are already here today. Others are inevitable due to all the carbon we’ve emitted over the last few decades. But the IPCC report is clear: the worst can still be avoided. Our future is in our hands.
What can you do? Anything. Recycle your yogurt cup after breakfast tomorrow. Cut your food waste. Try a new veggie recipe. Replace your lightbulbs with LEDs. Go bigger: talk to your school or your place of work or worship about what you could do, together. Join an organization that shares your values and advocates for change. Attend the next climate march in your area, or even start a new one. Begin a petition in your community to require solar panels on municipal buildings. Call Congress and demand a clearer path to net-zero.
Don’t just do it: talk about what you’re doing, and why. We can’t change the world by ourselves. We have to do it together, and that requires us to connect. Talk about why climate change matters, in ways that affect you personally. Encourage others by sharing what you’ve done yourself, and what you’ve seen or heard or read about what so many others are doing. Climate action isn’t a giant boulder sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with just a few hands on it. It’s already at the top of the hill, it’s already got millions of hands on it, and it’s already slowly rolling in the right direction. It just needs to go faster.
One of my favorite ways to take action? Be a good neighbor. That might sound almost too easy, but in an increasingly polarized and inequitable world, looking out for and caring for each other is vital when faced with extreme weather events like flooding, heatwaves and wildfire. Sticking together as a community, building resilience together, is part of the fight against climate change, too.
It’s my hope that this report, and the worry and concern it generates in each of us, will inspire you to take action, to have a conversation, to be part of the change we need. Why you? Because to care about climate change, we only have to be one thing: a human, living on planet earth. And if you’re reading this, that’s exactly who you are.
Wandering around the sprawling 6.2 million-sq.-ft. Lordstown Motors assembly plant in Ohio, it’s tempting to imagine a green future that is full of jobs. The company’s signature product is a high-performing electric pickup truck, and around the facility workers are buzzing about, getting ready to bring it into production.
In one corner, according to company officials giving TIME a rare tour, the firm will build its cutting-edge motors, which will be located in each wheel. A short golf-cart ride away, engineers explain how the company will assemble the lithium-ion battery packs that will power the trucks instead of diesel fuel. And while an army of robots sit idle, ready to be put to use assembling the vehicle, company officials insist they will soon be hiring rapidly. At full capacity, the company says, the facility will be able to churn out hundreds of thousands of trucks every year, a best-case scenario that would make Lordstown Motors a major player in the American auto industry and revitalize a part of the country that has been left behind by a series of big industrial departures.
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But there’s a reason one local official calls this part of Ohio the “land of broken promises.” The Lordstown Motors jobs may be green, but it’s an open question whether they will be good—and how many of them there will be. Unlike the 10,000-plus people who used to make General Motors automobiles at this same building, Lordstown Motors employees do not belong to a union. Today, the plant employs only around 500 people, and it’s unclear how many will ultimately work in the facility. For many locals, there’s an air of uncertainty brought by recent headlines: Lordstown Motors is under federal investigation for allegedly misleading investors. The company’s CEO and CFO both resigned in June.
The combination of its vaulting promise and tenuous future captures well the larger state of play in the world of green jobs. As the auto industry rapidly transforms—moving from the internal combustion engine that has defined road transportation for more than 100 years to electric vehicles—workers and manufacturing communities are waiting anxiously to see what the scramble to lower the nation’s emissions will mean for them. On the one hand, building electric vehicles in communities like the Mahoning Valley, the region where Lordstown is located, promises to create the jobs of the future, resilient to the wave of imminent changes that will come as the post-pandemic economy rebuilds and modernizes. On the other, the picture of what an auto-manufacturing job in the new green economy looks like remains fuzzy.
Ross Mantle for TIMEA Lordstown Motors employee puts together battery packs
The growth of electric-vehicle manufacturing in the U.S. could drive a renaissance for workers, creating new paths for unionization, training opportunities and better salaries. Or it could lead to lower wages, slashed benefits and a smaller workforce—and that’s just for the jobs that remain in the U.S.
The stakes rose dramatically on Aug. 5, when President Biden gathered executives and labor officials on the South Lawn of the White House to announce new vehicle-efficiency standards and a goal of making 50% of new-car sales electric by 2030. “There’s no turning back,” said Biden, with U.S.-made electric trucks parked in the driveway behind him. “The question is whether we’ll lead or fall behind in the race for the future. It’s whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries that got them to where they are here in the United States, or if we’re going to have to rely on other countries for those batteries; whether or not the job to build these vehicles and batteries are good-paying union jobs, jobs with benefits, jobs that are going to sustain continued growth of the middle class.”
Across the nation, auto companies, local officials and union leaders are trying to chart a path through this uncertain, fast-moving moment. Small towns and state governments are jockeying to capture their share of the emerging green economy, enticing electric automakers to invest in their backyards with tax incentives and worker-training programs. Legacy automakers are rethinking their businesses from the ground up, poised to spend tens of billions of dollars in the process, while union leaders are fighting to maintain a voice in the evolving industry. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is trying to use the federal dime to shape the industry’s transition in a way that will ultimately support communities.
The auto industry is not the only sector staring into the green unknown. Study after study shows that on a global scale, transitioning industry to a low-carbon economy will create new jobs, but those jobs won’t necessarily be in the same places, go to the same people, or offer the same pay and benefits. In the energy sector, for example, the International Labour Organization found that addressing climate change will create 24 million jobs globally while eliminating 6 million. This trend carries across large swaths of the economy.
But the science of climate change is urgent, and even the most wizened labor advocates acknowledge that such complexities cannot be an excuse for inaction. Instead, they say, this moment must be viewed as an opportunity to create the best jobs as early as possible. “All of these decisions on electric vehicles and clean energy… will need to be worker-centered,” says Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and longtime supporter of organized labor. “That will make all the difference.”
In eastern Ohio, residents are watching—hopeful, but not naive to the pitfalls and challenges ahead. They want Lordstown Motors to fulfill its promise of anchoring a new “Voltage Valley” that will bring thousands of jobs back to the area. Despite the uncertainty over the federal investigations the company faces, Lordstown Motors says things are on track. “At the end of the day, [community members] will see us producing a truck,” says Jane Ritson-Parsons, the company’s chief operating officer. And locals want to believe them. “We want what’s best for the valley economically, so we don’t want to see this project fail,” says Tim O’Hara, a GM assembly worker who served as the president of the local branch of the United Auto Workers (UAW) before moving to a GM plant in Kentucky. “We’re kind of in a wait-and-see situation about how this all turns out.”
Ross Mantle for TIMELordstown Motors employees gather after work at Ross’ Eatery & Pub
Driving through the Mahoning Valley, a flat expanse between Cleveland and Pittsburgh with 530,000 residents, it’s hard to miss the region’s industrial roots—and the reverence for the workers who built it. The city of Youngstown, about 15 miles southeast of the Lordstown Motors plant, is home to the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry & Labor, celebrating the history of the Valley’s steel industry. You can’t drive across town without spotting a UAW bumper sticker. At Ross’ Eatery and Pub, the local bar, union gear is displayed alongside Marines paraphernalia and hunting trophies.
GM was once at the center of this community. The more than 10,000 workers the company employed in the region at the assembly plant’s peak supported thousands of other jobs. But changing consumer preferences and globalization destabilized everything, and the company’s hold on the region loosened. In 2017, GM cut the first shift from the Lordstown plant, which at the time produced the Chevy Cruze; by the end of 2018 the company had told workers the entire facility would close. At Ross’ Eatery, a poster hangs on the wall of the last car produced there, on March 6, 2019.
Mayor William “Doug” Franklin of Warren, a city a short drive from the plant, understands the personal impact of Mahoning Valley’s booms and busts. His father worked in a local steel mill and his mother at a local auto supplier. Before becoming mayor, Franklin himself worked at GM for 25 years. He now describes himself as a “UAW retiree.”
But Franklin doesn’t want to talk about the Mahoning Valley’s past. Instead of meeting at the historic mayor’s office in Warren, he asked to meet a few blocks away at BRITE, a local nonprofit that supports energy-tech startups, which is trying to build an electric-vehicle ecosystem in the area. Franklin wants to see a full-scale rebranding of the region, making the Mahoning Valley a center for electric-vehicle manufacturing that will bring job retraining, private investment and new technical jobs. “We know how to take a punch and how to recover; that’s just in our DNA,” he says. “This provides us a great opportunity to change our brand from the Steel Valley to the Voltage Valley.”
The shift began in earnest in 2019, when Lordstown Motors formed a new firm to take over the GM facility and produce an electric truck. On Dec. 5, GM announced its own EV project just next door: a battery-cell-assembly plant called Ultium Cells, which is scheduled to open next year. With those two anchors, small startups have flocked to the region, working in everything from energy storage to solar power, eager to benefit from the electric–vehicle hub that seems to be taking shape. “There will be a couple thousand jobs that show up here in the next three to five years, based purely on the location,” says Rick Stockburger, who runs BRITE.
More of these hubs could be on the way. Major automakers including GM, Ford and Stellantis are each spending tens of billions to prepare for an all-electric future. “This is transformational,” says Gerald Johnson, GM’s head of global manufacturing. “It’s the biggest technological change this industry has seen in over 100 years. This is going from buggies to engines.”
It has also given automakers an opportunity to think strategically about where to invest—and there’s no guarantee that they will do so in the same places they built the internal combustion engine. Companies are selecting sites based on a range of criteria, from geography and transportation access to the local workforce. And cities, towns and states are fighting to prove that they’re the best suited to absorb those jobs. The rapid EV investment in eastern Ohio “isn’t a surprise to us,” says Jonathan Bridges, who heads Jobs-Ohio’s efforts to recruit automotive companies to the state. “We’ve been actively working to position Ohio to be in that next generation of propulsion.”
Communities with deep histories in the automotive industry may have some natural advantage in this race, such as hosting an old plant that can be refurbished. But there’s no doubt that the change will also be disruptive. Making an electric vehicle is a less labor-intensive process than producing one of its gas-powered counterparts; many of the components under the hood of a car with an internal combustion engine simply aren’t needed in an electric vehicle. Automakers estimate that they will require 30% less labor to produce an electric vehicle than a gas-powered one. Many companies in the supply chain that make parts for cars will cease to exist entirely.
That creates new problems for the workers who remain. With fewer auto jobs than job seekers, companies may try to pay industry workers less. That’s difficult to do under current union contracts, but many auto companies have already begun to outsource work to subsidiaries and partners that are not unionized. While Ultium Cells, for example, says it won’t stand in the way of a union, workers will need to organize to join one. In any event, pay is expected to be significantly less than what UAW workers earned at GM. Ford too has invested in a separate battery company, which may or may not be unionized one day. Some startups, like Lordstown Motors, are not unionized at all. And earlier this year a federal judge found that Tesla, now the biggest incumbent EV maker, had illegally sought to discourage union participation at the company. “A significant number of jobs are in jeopardy,” says Marick Masters, a professor of management at Wayne State University. “And some of the jobs that are going to replace them may be nonunion, paying considerably less than the going rate.”
There’s also the skills challenge; many of the new jobs will likely require different technical capabilities than traditional auto-industry workers typically have. Software engineers, chemists and technical experts will be more in demand, while the engineers and technicians who spent their careers mastering components like the transmission will find their skills effectively irrelevant.
In Ohio, state and federal funds are already being put toward re-skilling. The Excellence Training Center at Youngstown State University, for example, is a former juvenile-correctional facility that recently got a government-funded $12 million makeover and began classes in July to provide locals with skills they will need to work at the new battery-cell–manufacturing plant. On the ground level, 3-D printers churned out YSU-themed tchotchkes to show off what they can do. In a vast second-floor space, more robots stood at the ready for the next trainee to take the wheel and learn how to operate them. “Higher ed is not meeting the needs of industry,” says Jennifer Oddo, executive director of the training center. “But industry can’t wait.”
Ross Mantle for TIMEFranklin, Mayor of Warren, Ohio, wants the region to rebrand
Competition for this new generation of vehicle will be fierce, and some states are willing to spend big to incentivize. Around 500 miles southwest of the Mahoning Valley, in downtown Nashville, Bob Rolfe’s office feels more C-suite than state-government administrator. From a corner perch on the 27th floor of a skyscraper, Rolfe, who runs Tennessee’s Department of Economic & Community Development, surveys the city landscape as he works to bring new business here.
Tennessee is ahead of the curve in the American race to woo electric-vehicle investment: GM, Nissan and Volkswagen have all committed billions to build electric cars in the state, which already has auto-industry operations in 88 of its 95 counties. In the offices his department has set up overseas, from the United Kingdom to Japan, Rolfe’s pitch to electric-vehicle makers has been simple: Tennessee is “pro-business.” The state doesn’t have a personal income tax, it funds workforce-development programs, and it has billions of dollars in tax incentives at the ready to offer companies.
Forty-five minutes down the road, GM’s new, $2 billion Spring Hill EV-manufacturing plant is constructing the facilities to build its first electric Cadillac. New assembly floors rise from what was once empty land, part of an already sprawling GM complex that has been in operation since the 1980s. Next door, another new Ultium Cells plant is also breaking ground, and the state is working with GM to move a road to accommodate it. In total, Rolfe estimates the state is providing $65 million in incentives to support GM’s expansion here. “These are not inexpensive investments for the companies,” says Rolfe. “They’re not inexpensive for the state.”
Local governments’ aggressive maneuvers to attract the electric-vehicle business have unsettled a well-established dynamic among the typical auto-industry power players. The UAW, the longtime counterweight to the auto companies, has had to fight to maintain its influence. Its current contracts remain intact, but its leverage is limited as automakers rethink their business and local communities vie to host them.
The abrupt shift presents a conundrum to labor leaders. Climate change and global market trends mean electric vehicles are the future. The transportation sector in the U.S. emits nearly 30% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and nearly 60% of that comes from light-duty vehicles. The U.S. may be slow to change this equation, but the rest of the world—and the car market—is moving full speed ahead. For the UAW to fight EVs would be futile, and it’s in the union’s interest to ensure electric vehicles are made in the U.S. Yet those same market trends mean union membership is likely to take a hit.
A representative for the UAW national union declined to comment on the record for this story, and threatened to block access to union officials if TIME contacted local members.
As it turns out, local union leaders and rank-and-file workers alike around the country said the transition to EVs has generated mixed feelings. In places like the Mahoning Valley, there is a cautious optimism that electric vehicles will bring prosperity, at least in the near term, even without organized labor. “They’re high-quality, high-paying jobs,” Franklin, the Warren mayor, says of the clean-energy ecosystem developing in his backyard. “Compared to what UAW members made in the past? We lost those jobs.”
But in places that have yet to be chosen as a new EV hub, workers are skeptical, nervous, even terrified. In Facebook groups and after-hours chats, workers say, views of the country’s EV future are falling along the same partisan lines as so many other aspects of American life. Many conservatives doubt EVs even work, let alone represent an important part of the country’s future. Democratic autoworkers accept the benefits of EVs, but worry that they might end up casualties of the industry’s overhaul, no matter the rhetoric coming from Washington.
“Electric vehicles are the way of the future, it seems pretty obvious,” says Justin Mayhugh, an auto-worker at GM’s Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City, Kans., and a UAW member. “But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I think most of us here in Kansas City are pretty concerned about the lack of investment here.”
Ross Mantle for TIMEThe shell of a Lordstown Motors pickup truck sits on the assembly line
On May 18, JoeBiden traveled to Detroit to promote his infrastructure plan. Sitting in the driver’s seat of a new electric Ford F-150 truck wearing his signature aviator sunglasses, Biden told the gathered reporters, “This sucker’s quick,” before accelerating off into an empty parking lot. Shortly after, Biden conceded that the future of electric vehicles in this country is uncertain, warning that the U.S. is at risk of falling behind China. Then he quickly pivoted back to his mantra. “When I think of the climate crisis,” he said, “I think jobs.”
This has been Biden’s consistent talking point on climate change, from the campaign trail to the Oval Office. But the truth is that while the auto industry’s transition may be inevitable, the myriad “good-paying union jobs with benefits” that Biden has promised will come with it remain a possibility, not a guarantee. And for better or worse, the federal government will play a key role determining whether that becomes a reality. “The United States is at a crossroads,” says Trevor Higgins, senior director for domestic climate and energy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank. “Where and how these electric vehicles will be built is going to be determined by federal policy choices.”
The next few months may be decisive, as Congress decides the fate of Biden’s massive infrastructure package. Both the big-ticket spending items, such as the $174 billion Biden has proposed to stimulate electric-vehicle adoption, as well the small print outlining the labor requirements for federal-funding beneficiaries, will shape the future of this new American industry—and workers’ place in it. So far, much is left to be desired. A bipartisan infrastructure deal struck in the Senate contains some $7.5 billion in funding for EV-charging stations; a big sum, to be sure, but far short of what Biden proposed. Biden has also sought to use his presidential authority and convening power to shape the EV future: his Aug. 5 announcement included tightened vehicle standards that would incentivize the transition, as well as voluntary commitments from carmakers to go electric.
That’s the easy part. From there, the policy landscape gets more complicated, as Democrats try to infuse worker-friendly policies into other legislation that supports EVs. Democratic lawmakers have pushed legislation to revamp electric-vehicle tax -incentives so that cars would need to be assembled in the U.S. with union labor to qualify for a full tax rebate. Biden, widely viewed as the biggest union ally to occupy the White House in decades, has backed a measure that would make it easier for workers at fledgling EV companies—and businesses across the U.S.—to organize. “We have to get the President’s full agenda passed, so that we can get the best outcomes in the transition to EVs,” Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, said at a July virtual event.
In the places that stand to gain and lose in these negotiations, people give the President’s performance managing the industry’s transformation mixed reviews. Many acknowledge that Biden’s electric-vehicle agenda will help their local community. But there is also widespread understanding of what few in Washington want to admit: this transition is going to be messy. “When they say it’s creating all these new jobs, that’s a lie. I mean, you’re just shifting jobs from here to there,” says Dave Green, a GM assembly worker who previously led the local UAW branch in the Mahoning Valley. “‘I’m a little more hopeful with Joe Biden and Democrats in office, but at the same time, something’s got to give.”
Whatever Biden tries, it’s likely to run headlong into a wall of Republican opposition. Many in the GOP worry that supporting EVs will wreak havoc on the oil and gas industry, and cost millions of energy jobs in largely red states. It’s true, of course, that transitioning to electric vehicles will have downstream effects for oil and gas workers, gas-station owners, and a long list of other established industries. But clinging to the past is worse for everyone. The climate is changing, and jobs will need to too. The sooner we admit it, the better we can prepare. —With reporting by Leslie Dickstein