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Climate

Climate Tech for Disaster Relief

On a new FEMA initiative, recycled jewelry, and more.

Briefing image.

AM Briefing: Climate Tech for Disaster Relief

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Millions of people on the West Coast are under flood alerts as two atmospheric rivers are set to hit the region, bringing torrential rains but also the possibility of critical snowpack replenishment • The Colombian president declared a national disaster as firefighters struggle to put out wildfires in the mountains around Bogotá • Forecasters in the UK are warning of the chance of tornadoes as 85 mile per hour winds batter the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. FEMA will cover solar panels and other clean tech after disasters

Yesterday the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, announced that it will help local governments pay to install solar panels and energy-efficient appliances like heat pumps in public buildings such as hospitals, fire stations, and schools in the wake of disasters. It’s a move that will help those communities become more energy independent and resilient, while also reducing the emissions that are intensifying weather-related disasters to begin with. Last year saw a record 28 disaster costing $1 billion or more in the United States, according to the agency, which added that buildings account for nearly 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

2. A bleak picture of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley”

A new report from Human Rights Watch is an in-depth look at how Louisiana’s hands-off approach to its fossil fuel industries has led to devastating levels of cancer, birth defects, and respiratory ailments, writes my colleague Jacob Lambert in Heatmap.

“The failure of state and federal authorities to properly regulate the industry has dire consequences for residents of Cancer Alley,” said Antonia Juhasz, a senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch. “It’s long past time for governments to uphold their human rights obligations and for these sacrifices to end.”

An image of gas flaring in Louisiana.Drew Angerer/Getty Images

3. More than 4 million lives lost to climate change

We’ve long known that climate change impacts human lives, but putting a number on just how many people it has affected so far is a difficult task. A new analysis, published as commentary in the journal Nature Medicine, tries to do just that, and arrives at a breathtaking figure: at least 4 million people have been killed by climate change since 2000. And as Zoya Teirstein writes in Grist, that’s probably an underestimate.

“Climate change is killing a lot of people, nobody is counting it, and nobody is moving in the direction of counting it,” Colin Carlson, a global change biologist and assistant professor at Georgetown University who wrote the commentary, told Teirstein. “If it were anything but climate change, we would be treating it on very different terms.”

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  • 4. Truck makers team up for EV chargers

    On Tuesday, the three largest heavy-duty truck makers in America — Daimler Truck, Volkswagen subsidiary Navistar, and Volvo North America — announced a new coalition called Powering America’s Commercial Transportation that will advocate for governments and utilities to help build more charging stations for electric trucks. There are only nine charging stations in the country that can serve electric long-haulers, writes Jack Ewing in The New York Times, and the truck companies argue that without more support from federal and state governments they can’t introduce more electric trucks to the market. This may, as Ewing notes, also be a bit of a ploy to shift blame: earlier this month, more than 40 advocacy groups accused Daimler and Volvo of trying to get in the way of stricter emissions regulations.

    5. Pandora goes recycled

    Pandora, the world’s largest jeweler, announced that it has stopped using mined silver and gold and now only uses recycled materials. The change, Reuters reports, should lead to significant emissions reductions: Pandora estimates using recycled materials cuts the company’s indirect carbon dioxide emissions by 58,000 metric tons each year.

    THE KICKER

    Heatmap is hiring a climate tech reporter! If you are — or know — a smart, ambitious reporter who can navigate the ins and outs of the technology at the forefront of the energy transition, we’d love to hear from you.

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    Climate

    AM Briefing: World’s Warmest Year

    On rising global temperatures, LA’s fire disaster, and solar stations in space

    2024 Was the Year We Broke 1.5C
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Current conditions: A sinkhole threatens to swallow up Ecuador’s large hydroelectric power plant • Air quality is poor in Delhi where dense smog has caused travel chaos • Nearly 40,000 customers are already without power in Texas as a winter storm rolls in.

    THE TOP FIVE

    1. Biden directly links LA fires to climate change

    At least 10 people are known to have died in the Los Angeles fires, and some 10,000 structures are believed to have been destroyed. Five blazes continue to burn. The Palisades fire, the largest in the city’s history at 20,000 acres, remains just 6% contained. The Eaton fire has consumed 13,700 acres and is 0% contained. While lower wind speeds have helped firefighters make some progress over the last 24 hours, the Santa Ana gusts were expected to peak at 75 mph last night. “We are absolutely not out of this extreme weather event,” Los Angeles fire chief Kristin M. Crowley said in a news conference.

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    A destroyed house and a blueprint.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Recovering from the Los Angeles wildfires will be expensive. Really expensive. Insurance analysts and banks have already produced a wide range of estimates of both what insurance companies will pay out and overall economic loss. AccuWeatherhas put out an eye-catching preliminary figure of $52 billion to $57 billion for economic losses, with the service’s chief meteorologist saying that the fires have the potential to “become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss.” On Thursday, J.P. Morgan doubled its previous estimate for insured losses to $20 billion, with an economic loss figure of $50 billion — about the gross domestic product of the country of Jordan.

    The startlingly high loss figures from a fire that has only lasted a few days and is (relatively) limited in scope show just how distinctly devastating an urban fire can be. Enormous wildfires thatcover millions of acres like the 2023 Canadian wildfires can spew ash and particulate matter all over the globe and burn for months, darkening skies and clogging airways in other countries. And smaller — and far deadlier fires — than those still do not produce the same financial roll.

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    Green
    Climate

    Why the L.A. Fires Are Exceptionally Hard to Fight

    Suburban streets, exploding pipes, and those Santa Ana winds, for starters.

    Firefighters on Sunset Boulevard.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    A fire needs three things to burn: heat, fuel, and oxygen. The first is important: At some point this week, for a reason we have yet to discover and may never will, a piece of flammable material in Los Angeles County got hot enough to ignite. The last is essential: The resulting fires, which have now burned nearly 29,000 acres, are fanned by exceptionally powerful and dry Santa Ana winds.

    But in the critical days ahead, it is that central ingredient that will preoccupy fire managers, emergency responders, and the public, who are watching their homes — wood-framed containers full of memories, primary documents, material wealth, sentimental heirlooms — transformed into raw fuel. “Grass is one fuel model; timber is another fuel model; brushes are another — there are dozens of fuel models,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me. “But when a fire goes from the wildland into the urban interface, you’re now burning houses.”

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