Climate Change Is Bad for Your Health

Current conditions: At least 51 people were killed by flash floods in Spain yesterday • Rapidly intensifying Super Typhoon Kong-rey is barreling toward Taiwan • Mount Fuji has yet to see snow this year, marking the latest date the mountain has been bare in 130 years.

THE TOP FIVE

1. ‘Lancet’ Countdown shows new records for climate change’s impact on human health

British medical journal The Lancet’s annual report tracking climate change and public health paints a stark picture of worsening heat-related deaths, food insecurity, and exposure to life-threatening diseases. The authors find that 10 of their 15 indicators for climate change-related health hazards “reached concerning new records.” These impacts are, of course, not hitting everyone equally. Heat-related deaths among people over 65 were 167% higher last year than in the 1990s. The global population also lost 6% more sleep due to heat than the average between 1986 and 2005, with the worst impacts seen in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.

The authors warn that that oil and gas companies are reinforcing global dependence on their product. “The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts, and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far and put a healthy future further out of reach,” Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown told The Guardian.

2. First East Coast floating wind projects get leases

An offshore wind lease sale in the Gulf of Maine yesterday ended with two bidders offering a combined $22 million for the rights to develop projects on four ocean tracts. While that’s only half of the leases that were up for sale, the results were better than many local advocates had hoped for considering the uncertainty for the industry related to the upcoming election. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has written, “Trump has special contempt for wind energy in all its forms — to him, all wind turbines are bird murderers, but offshore turbines are especially deadly.” Trump has promised to shut down the industry on “day one.”

If fully developed, the leases could generate 6.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power about 2.3 million homes, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. But that part of the ocean is deep, and the projects will need to utilize still-nascent floating offshore wind technology.

3. Biden awards $3 billion to clean up ports

The Biden administration announced the winners of the Clean Ports program on Tuesday, a $3 billion grant program created by the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce toxic air pollution and carbon emissions at the nation’s shipping hubs. The 55 grants across 27 states and territories will support the electrification of cargo handling equipment, drayage trucks, trains, and ferries, as well as solar power projects and EV charging infrastructure. The projects are expected to cut more than 3 million metric tons of CO2 over the first 10 years of implementation. For context, the three largest U.S. ports emitted more than 2.5 million tons of CO2 in 2019.

4. Satellites can help fight air pollution

A report from the American Lung Association published this morning highlights the potential for satellites to improve our understanding of air quality. New methods for translating measurements of various gases and particles into estimates of ground-level pollution can help fill data gaps in communities that don’t have local air quality monitoring systems. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. counties lack monitoring stations, the report says, whether due to cost constraints, low population density, or rapid land use change. The authors identified 300 counties with incomplete or no monitoring data that likely had unhealthy levels of air pollution in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

5. A sneak(i)er carbon offset scandal

The indefatigable Ben Elgin at Bloomberg has uncovered yet another problem in the carbon market. Twenty years ago, Nike created millions of carbon credits tied to the sneaker brand’s efforts to stop using sulfur hexafluoride, a powerful greenhouse gas that was previously pumped into its soles. Now, ACR, formerly known as the American Carbon Registry, has disclosed that more than a million of those credits are in its “buffer pool,” which is supposed to provide insurance for buyers. If a forestry project in the registry burns, for example, credits set aside in the buffer pool can be cancelled to make up for the loss.

But Nike’s credits were basically meaningless to begin with — the decision to change the shoes had nothing to do with the carbon market, Nike confirmed to Bloomberg — and they’re even more meaningless 20 years later. “It was a somewhat notorious project for those of us in the North American carbon market 15 years ago,” Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told Elgin.

THE KICKER

Driverless Waymo vehicles now complete more than 150,000 passenger trips per week. “If ‘driverless Waymo car’ were a transit system, it would be the nation’s 11th most used, between Miami Metrorail and the Staten Island Railway,” according to NYU Stern professor Arpit Gupta.

A self-driving Waymo on the streets of Los Angeles. Mario Tama/Getty Images