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Yes, it will be hot. But we might learn a thing or two, too.
Pretty much everywhere, it’s gonna be hot.
That’s the message you’ll be seeing all over as the Northern Hemisphere formally begins what is sure to be a scorcher of a summer. But although June 21 is technically the estival solstice, many places across the globe have already been feeling the heat, with parts of Asia, Puerto Rico, India, and Texas all having faced dangerous temperatures this spring. Yet July and August — the hottest months of the year — still lie ahead.
Hotter-than-normal temperatures are only a part of the story, though. Here are six climate-related predictions for summer 2023.
Here’s something you don’t hear every day: Bret is remarkable.
Tropical Storm Bret, that is. Not only is the system one of the earliest named storms on record, but it has also formed farther east than any tropical storm this early in the year. And Bret isn’t alone: There is reportedly a second storm developing on its heels — a would-be Cindy.
Though climate change doesn’t increase the frequency of hurricanes, warmer oceans, high sea levels, and increased atmospheric moisture do mean the ones that form tend to be more intense, slow, and destructive. And currently, “the waters in the Atlantic are as warm as they would typically be at the peak of hurricane season two to three months from now,” The Washington Post reports. On Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center walked back its prediction that Bret would strengthen into a hurricane, though the fact that it was even considered a possibility this early in the season was stunning; as the Post adds, on average, the first Atlantic hurricane “doesn’t form until August 11.”
Early season NOAA forecasts anticipate a near-average Atlantic hurricane season, but the unusually warm ocean combined with uncertain models has some scientists wondering if predictions of 12-17 named storms might actually be on the low side.
\u201cThis plot shows just how warm the Atlantic Main Development Region has gotten in June 2023.\n\nIt's exceeded previous records from 2010 & 2005, two years that went on to have very active hurricane seasons.\n\nThe average temperature surpassed 28\u02daC in June for the first time on\u2026\u201d— Ben Noll (@Ben Noll) 1687198766
I didn’t grow up with air conditioning and my husband handles our household electricity bill, which means I’ve basically gone my entire adult life without thinking twice about cranking up the air conditioning when it starts to get hot. But as more and more Americans become climate- and energy-conscious — and the downsides of traditional AC units, including the potential for grid collapses when everyone is running theirs full blast, become more widely understood — alternative ways of keeping cool are starting to take off.
The most obvious example of this is the rise of heat pumps, which are much more energy efficient than central AC and window AC units. But there are other ways Americans can turn down their AC usage, including falling back on fans, strategically closing shades and windows, reducing ambitious cooking projects during heat waves, drinking ice slushies, and focusing on cooling primary rooms rather than the whole house. Getting out of the home during the peak of the heat and into a movie theater or swimming pool are tried-and-true strategies, too.
I wait all year for it to be nice enough to enjoy camping and hiking outdoors — but humans aren’t the only ones out enjoying the warm weather. Tick-borne illnesses are on the rise as the vectors’ ranges expand and their active seasons get longer due to our extended summers. As of this April, experts were predicting 2023 was going to be an “above average” year for tick activity and abundance; as of June, some are now warning it might be the worst tick year ever.
More ticks biting humans means more humans getting sick from diseases like Lyme, anaplasmosis, and babesiosis, all of which have the potential to be life-threatening. Concern about these diseases is so high that Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey recently signed a bipartisan law requiring K-12 students to learn about tick diseases and prevention as part of their school health curriculum.
And don’t get me started on the mosquitoes …
Heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States, but there are no federal protections for how outdoor laborers should be treated during extreme temperature events. This leaves the decision up to individual states — and in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has signed a law removing the guarantee to construction workers of 10-minute breaks for drinking water and shaded rest.
The Biden administration has directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to write rules federally protecting employees from the heat, but The Washington Post notes that “it can take an average of seven years to write new safety standards.” Still, increasing outcry — and increasing triple-digit days — might intensify pressure on leaders to write new labor laws sooner.
Other parts of the world are already scrambling to find solutions to help outdoor workers. Bloomberg recently described a special program for self-employed women in India to “buy insurance against peak daily temperatures and receive payouts whenever heat makes it impossible to work outdoors.” Similar struggles and solutions might appear elsewhere as heat this summer likely breaks records.
The recent smoke event on the East Coast was an early-season reminder that we really don’t know much about wildfire-related air pollution. But though the skies have been clear recently, the fires in Canada are still burning, which means that a “summer of smoke” in New York is still very much a possibility. Meanwhile, the West Coast is holding its breath to see how severe its fire season — which typically arrives in the late summer — will be this year.
Leaders have historically struggled with how to address wildfire smoke events since there is no firm point when the air quality goes from “healthy” to “dangerous,” despite the common labels. Major League Baseball, for instance, contends — with increasing frequency — with wildfire smoke during its season, although it doesn’t have clear-cut guidelines for when to postpone or relocate games.
\u201cI would really, really love to see the players union start advocating for AQI standards for games to protect their players. It\u2019s been an ongoing issue in LA and SF for years, and now it\u2019s affecting the east coast too. It\u2019s dangerous for player and fans.\u201d— Amanda Smith (@Amanda Smith) 1686091884
More wildfires this summer could additionally encourage further research into understanding how smoke affects the body, which could help down the line with writing tighter guidelines for things like school recesses and outdoor work.
For many years, the hottest recorded temperature on Earth was a reading of 134 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley, set in the year 1913. That record was recently discounted by the World Meteorological Organization due to suspicious discrepancies, meaning that when Death Valley hit 130 degrees back 2021, it set the new record for the hottest recorded temperature in global history — having beaten the previous reliable record of 129.9 set the year prior.
And the world is only getting hotter. The last eight years have been the warmest on record and the confirmed development of an El Niño means the world could face further record-breaking temperatures this year. The single hottest year on record, 2016, was also an El Niño year, and as Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, told Reuters back in April, an El Niño this year means there is “a good chance 2023 will be even hotter than 2016 — considering the world has continued to warm as humans continue to burn fossil fuels.”
Whatever heat records we set in 2023, though, aren’t likely to be followed by much relief. Enjoy this summer while it lasts — by all accounts, the summer of 2024 will be even worse.
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What’s a big multinational like Microsoft to do when it wants to build with clean concrete?
Imagine you’re a corporate sustainability exec and your company is planning to build a new data center. You’ve managed to convince the higher-ups to pay extra to use low-carbon building materials, lest the project blow up your brand’s emissions goals. But when you meet with the general contractor hired for the job, they don’t actually know of any low-carbon concrete purveyors in the area. Concrete is a hyper-local industry by necessity — you can’t hold the stuff for more than 90 minutes or so before it hardens and becomes unusable.
So here you are, one of the few people with the power and budget to pay a premium for zero-emissions concrete — a product that must become the standard if we are to stop climate change — and you can’t even get your hands on it.
This is, more or less, the situation Microsoft has found itself in. Last year, the company’s indirect emissions rose 31%, primarily due to the construction of new data centers. Cement, the main ingredient in concrete, is one of the most carbon-intensive materials on the planet, responsible for 6% of global emissions, according to Rhodium Group’s estimate. Low-carbon cement exists and is starting to be manufactured at a small scale, but first movers with deep pockets like Microsoft can’t necessarily access it.
To solve this and help clean cement startups access a bigger pool of buyers, Microsoft is leading the development of a new market for low-carbon cement — what climate finance experts call a “book and claim” market.
The tech giant has signed a memorandum of understanding with Sublime Systems, a Massachusetts-based cement startup, saying that it will buy “environmental attribute certificates” from Sublime’s first commercial cement plants. Microsoft will “book” the environmental attributes — the greenness, for lack of a better word — of Sublime’s cement, and “claim” those attributes in its own emissions accounting.
Let’s get a collective groan out of the way. Yes, once again, the business community is proposing a sort of carbon credit system as the best way — possibly the only way — to scale climate solutions. These certificates, however, have at least one notable difference from the beleaguered carbon offsets you’ve likely heard so much about: They are tied to a physical product. Microsoft won’t be buying one ton of CO2 avoided or removed from the atmosphere and then subtracting that from its overall emissions ledger. It will be buying the rights to say that it used one ton of cement with a carbon intensity of zero (or whatever the carbon intensity of Sublime’s product ends up being). Instead of neutralizing its cement-related emissions by paying someone to plant trees, it’s doing so by enabling Sublime to sell its clean cement to local buyers at a competitive price.
“It tremendously simplifies our logistics,” Leah Ellis, the CEO and founder of Sublime Systems told me, by solving the unavoidable problem that at this early point in the company’s development, it would be impossible to deliver its cement to all the early adopters willing to pay extra for it. “We end up doing death by 1,000 pilots if we have to pilot here, there, everywhere. Being able to use the cement locally and have the carbon attribute be counted against Microsoft's Scope 3 emissions is a really innovative way to unstick this whole problem.”
That’s key. Scope 3 is a category of emissions that encompasses all the carbon that is related to a business but not directly produced by it. When Microsoft builds a data center, it has no direct control over the process used to make the cement that goes into the building. In theory, it does have the ability to say, “We want to use clean stuff, not dirty stuff.” But in reality, companies are struggling to effect change within their supply chains.
“The thing to understand right out the gate is that basically no major consumer-facing company that uses things like steel or aluminum or cement knows where their stuff actually comes from,” Stephen Lezak, a researcher focused on carbon markets at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at Oxford University, told me. He thinks that’s going to change, and hopes that in 15 years we all look back on this fact in horror. But in the meantime, “the urgency of the climate crisis requires using high integrity tools that aren't ideal, but still preserve fundamental integrity from a carbon accounting perspective,” he said.
Microsoft, for its part, told me it sees this transaction as a near-term solution and “prioritizes buying and installing physical product first” i.e., before buying certificates, “where technical, geographical, and supply chain considerations align.”
Sublime is currently building its first commercial plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which will use its unique zero-emissions process to produce 30,000 tons of cement per year. The Department of Energy awarded the company an $87 million grant to fund the project earlier this year. Holcim and CRH, two of the largest building materials companies in the world, have also invested in Sublime and agreed to purchase most of the volume produced by the first plant.
Ellis hopes the deal with Microsoft will help attract additional investment and get the company through its “awkward teenage years.” Sublime needs to show investors that “people want this material, people will pay that green premium so that we can drive up the volume so that that premium goes away,” she said.
As with carbon offsets, there are still ways to game the system. Microsoft recently co-authored a report with the clean energy think tank RMI describing what a larger book and claim market for clean cement might look like and what questions need to be answered to ensure the market is credible. Until clean cement is just as cheap or cheaper than conventional cement, it’s pretty clear this kind of market will help reduce emissions. But should the environmental attributes be tied to cement, or to concrete? How should the carbon intensity be calculated? How will emissions be tracked and traced from the producer to the contractor to the building itself?
Perhaps the most critical question is how to avoid double-counting. If Microsoft is buying the right to say it used clean cement, what can the company that bought the actual cement say? Will it be able to brag that its building is green?
When I posed this question to Ellis, and Ben Skinner, a manager at RMI and one of the authors of the report, each gave me a version of the same answer: Yes and no.
Ellis launched into a passionate monologue about the concrete companies and contractors and structural engineers who should be celebrated for taking the risk of using a new material. “This problem of cement emissions is so intractable,” she said. “We need to make cement more visible. We need to talk about this more. We need more people to care. And so that physical embodiment, having it stamped ‘Sublime cement,’ and having a plaque that shows the public, hey, these are the emissions reduced by this thing you see here, you want to celebrate that physical embodiment.” At the end of all this, she added, “And by no means am I saying that you should double count.”
The suggestion is that it should be possible to separate carbon accounting and green marketing. If Microsoft has booked the green attributes of a delivery of cement, the contractors or building owners who used the physical stuff should not be able to claim they used clean cement on their emissions balance sheets, Skinner said. (What number they should use is a tricky question that will have to be solved.) But perhaps they still deserve some kind of recognition.
What kind of recognition, Lezak told me, is a gray area. “There's a really difficult part of this whole conversation, where you start anchored in material science and climate science and everything is really rigorous,” he said. “And at some point, the train sort of moves on to the political economy track, and it's really tough because you look for the same sort of black and white answers to these questions and they just don't show up.”
The details of the Microsoft deal and who can claim what are still being negotiated. At the same time, RMI and a new nonprofit called the Center for Green Market Activation have started work to stand up a larger book and claim market for cement. Their goal is to develop standards for how these certificates should be created, traded, and used so that companies that do not have the expertise or budget or resources that Microsoft has can access them. “We do think that it's possible to create a really high integrity system,” Skinner, told me.
Whether you like this idea or hate it, get ready to hear a lot more about it. The Center for Green Market Activation, which launched in June, is working to develop book and claim markets across a range of carbon intensive industries, including aviation, trucking, maritime shipping, and chemicals. There is one clear alternative to these paper-trading schemes — regulations that require companies to use more green materials over time. But proponents don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Lezak, though initially skeptical of these markets, has grown to support the idea. “There are people out there arguing that if you want to claim the emissions reduction in green steel, you need to make sure that the green steel actually shows up on your factory floor,” he said. “That's a beautiful idea, but you're talking about potentially pulling out the rug from billions of dollars of high integrity carbon finance.”
On the World Bank’s bad record keeping, Trump’s town hall, and sustainable aviation fuel
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France are flooded after heavy rains • Sydney’s Bondi Beach is closed because lumps of toxic tar are washing ashore • A winter storm warning is in effect for parts of Montana.
Nearly 40% of the climate finance funds that have been distributed by the World Bank over the last seven years are unaccounted for due to poor record keeping, according to a new report from Oxfam International. That’s up to $41 billion that is untraceable. “There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible,” the report said. “It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.”
The World Bank is the largest multilateral provider of climate finance, and has a goal of directing 45% of its total financing toward climate projects by 2025. The report noted that climate finance will be a key issue at the upcoming COP29, where countries will put forward a new global climate finance goal. “The lack of traceable spending could undermine trust in global climate finance efforts at this critical juncture,” Oxfam said.
During a town hall event hosted by Univision last night, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was asked by a veteran construction worker – who had seen first-hand “the devastating impacts of climate change” – if he still believed global warming was a “hoax.” In his response, Trump claimed to be an environmentalist, saying he’d won “many awards over the years” for the way he’d constructed his buildings, “the way I used the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand.” But, he said, “we can’t destroy our country” for the sake of saving the climate. He said the U.S. is competing against China, which “doesn’t spend anything on climate change.” According to the International Energy Agency, last year China alone accounted for one-third of the world’s clean energy investments.
Needless to say, Trump didn’t really answer the question about whether he thought climate change was real, but he did cast doubt on sea level rise and claimed “the real global warming we have to worry about is nuclear.”
I’ll just take this opportunity to remind you that Heatmap’s Jeva Lange put together an exhaustive fact-check on Trump’s climate and weather claims going back to 2001.
The Supreme Court yesterday allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now. The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. Whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
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The Department of Energy yesterday announced its first two loans for sustainable aviation fuel. The roughly $3 billion in funding will go to two companies:
“As the aviation sector aims to meet its decarbonization goals, SAF will become increasingly vital,” the DOE said in a statement. “SAF is the only viable near-term option to decarbonize the airline industry.”
A Canadian court’s ruling on a climate lawsuit today could influence similar cases in Canada and other countries. Seven young people are suing the Ontario government over its emissions targets, which they say are inadequate and violate their human rights. If the case heads to Canada’s Supreme Court, and the plaintiffs win, that would “dramatically open the door to new litigation,” constitutional law expert Emmett Macfarlane toldReuters. “That would be explosive. It would have immediate ramifications for all governments.”
The University of California, San Diego, is the first major public university to require all its undergraduate students to complete a climate change course.
They may not survive a full challenge, though.
The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.
The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA’s new rules, which were finalized in April, would be the government’s first successful effort to regulate climate pollution from the power sector. The electricity industry is the second most-polluting sector in the American economy.
The Obama administration previously tried to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. The Supreme Court blocked those rules from taking effect in 2016, before striking them down completely in 2022.
This time, the agency has written the rules within a framework laid out by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in that ruling. In that now landmark case, the court ruled that the EPA could restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants only by requiring new technology, such as carbon capture equipment, to be installed at the plant itself. The agency couldn’t require utilities to stop burning fossil fuels and build more renewables.
In the near term, whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. During his first term, Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental and climate protections.
Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
“The high court made the right call,” Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Given its rulings in recent years undercutting environmental protections, the refusal of the majority on the Supreme Court to block this vital rule is a victory for common sense.”
Not all the news from the Supreme Court on Wednesday was good for climate advocates, though.
In the same decision that let the new rules stand, the high court’s conservative justices signaled that they might block the rules next year.
“In my view, the applicants have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of their challenges” to the rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a short statement attached to the stay, which was cosigned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But because the rules don’t require utilities to start complying until next June, there was no reason to grant an emergency stay, the two justices added.
Justice Clarence Thomas would have gone further and stepped in to block the rules immediately. Justice Samuel Alito, another reliable conservative vote, did not participate in the deliberations.
That suggests that four justices could be ready to block the rules as soon as next year. They would need only one more vote — from Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to stay the protections from taking effect.
The statement didn’t provide any hints to what Roberts or Barrett are thinking.