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Tag: energy and utilities

  • Inside efforts to avert environmental ‘catastrophe’ in the Red Sea | CNN

    Inside efforts to avert environmental ‘catastrophe’ in the Red Sea | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.



    CNN
     — 

    Moored five miles off the coast of Yemen for more than 30 years, a decaying supertanker carrying a million barrels of oil is finally being offloaded by a United Nations-led mission, hoping to avert what threatened to be one of the world’s worst ecological disasters in decades.

    Experts are now delicately handling the 47-year-old vessel – called the FSO Safer – working to remove the crude without the tanker falling apart, the oil exploding, or a massive spill taking place.

    Sitting atop The Endeavor, the salvage UN ship supervising the offloading, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen David Gressly said that the operation is estimated to cost $141 million, and is using the expertise of SMIT, the dredging and offshore contractor that helped dislodge the Ever Given ship that blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week in 2021.

    How to remove one million barrels of oil from a tanker

    Twenty-three UN member states are funding the mission, with another $16 million coming from the private sector contributors. Donors include Yemen’s largest private company, HSA Group, which pledged $1.2 million in August 2022. The UN also engaged in a unique crowdfunding effort, contributing to the pool which took a year to raise, according to Gressly.

    The team is pumping between 4,000 and 5,000 barrels of oil every hour, and has so far transferred more than 120,000 barrels to the replacement vessel carrying the offloaded oil, Gressly said. The full transfer is expected to take 19 days.

    The tanker was carrying a million barrels of oil. That would be enough to power up to 83,333 cars or 50,000 US homes for an entire year. The crude on board is worth around $80 million, and who gets that remains a controversial matter.

    Here’s what we know so far:

    The ship has been abandoned in the Red Sea since 2015 and the UN has regularly warned that the “ticking time bomb” could break apart given its age and condition, or the oil it holds could explode due to the highly flammable compounds in it.

    The FSO Safer held four times the amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez off Alaska in 1989 which resulted in a slick that covered 1,300 miles of coastline. A potential spill from this vessel would be enough to make it the fifth largest oil spill from a tanker in history, a UN website said. The cost of cleanup of such an incident is estimated at $20 billion.

    The Red Sea is a vital strategic waterway for global trade. At its southern end lies the Bab el-Mandeb strait, where nearly 9% of total seaborne-traded petroleum passes. And at its north is the Suez Canal that separates Africa from Asia. The majority of petroleum and natural gas exports from the Persian Gulf that transit the Suez Canal pass through the Bab el-Mandeb, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

    The sea is also a popular diving hotspot that boasts an impressive underwater eco-system. In places its banks are dotted with tourist resorts, and its eastern shore is the site of ambitious Saudi development projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

    The first step of the mission was to stabilize and secure the vessel to avoid it collapsing, Gressly said. That has already been achieved in the past few weeks.

    “There are a number of things that had to be done to secure the oil from exploding,” Gressly told CNN, including pumping out gases in each of the 13 compartments holding the oil. Systems for pumping were rebuilt, and some lighting was repaired.

    Booms, which are temporary floating barriers used to contain marine spills, were dispersed around the vessel to capture any potential leaks.

    The second step is to transfer the oil onto the replacement vessel, which is now underway.

    exp Yemen tanker United Nations cnni world 072611ASEG1_00001402.png

    Oil being removed from tanker near Yemen in Red Sea

    After The Safer is emptied, it must then be cleaned to ensure no oil residue is left, Gressly said. The team will then attach a giant buoy to the replacement vessel until a decision about what to do with the oil has been made.

    “The transfer of the oil to (the replacement vessel) will prevent the worst-case scenario of a catastrophic spill in the Red Sea, but it is not the end of the operation,” Gressly said.

    While the hardest part of the operation would then be over, a spill could still occur. And even after the transfer, the tanker will “continue to pose an environmental threat resulting from the sticky oil residue inside the tank, especially since the tanker remains vulnerable to collapse,” the UN said, stressing that to finish the job, an extra $22 million is urgently needed.

    A spill would shut the Yemeni ports that its impoverished people rely on for food aid and fuel, impacting 17 million people during an ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by the country’s civil war and a Saudi-led military assault on the country. Oil could bleed all the way to the African coast, damaging fish stocks for 25 years and affect up to 200,000 jobs, according to the UN.

    A potential spill would cause “catastrophic” public health ramifications in Yemen and surrounding countries, according to a study by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea would bear the brunt.

    Air pollution from a spill of this magnitude would increase the risk of hospitalization for cardiovascular or respiratory disease for those very directly exposed by 530%, according to the study, which said it could cause an array of other health problems, from psychiatric to neurological issues.

    “Given the scarcity of water and food in this region, it could be one of the most disastrous oil spills ever known in terms of impacts on human life,” David Rehkopf, a professor at Stanford University and senior author of the study, told CNN.

    Up to 10 million people would struggle to obtain clean water, and 8 million would have their access to food supplies threatened. The Red Sea fisheries in Yemen could be “almost completely wiped out,” Rehkopf added.

    The tanker has been an issue for many people in Yemen over the past few years, Gressly said. Sentiment on social media surrounding the removal of oil is very positive, as many in Yemen feel like the tanker is a “threat that’s been over their heads,” he said.

    The tanker issue remains a point of dispute between the Houthi rebels that control the north of Yemen and the internationally recognized government, the two main warring sides in the country’s civil conflict.

    While the war, which saw hundreds of thousands of people killed or injured, and Yemen left in ruins, has eased of late, it is far from resolved.

    Ahmed Nagi, a senior analyst for Yemen at the International Crisis Group think tank in Brussels, sees the Safer tanker issue as “an embodiment of the conflict in Yemen as a whole.”

    “The government sees the Houthi militias as an illegitimate group controlling the tanker, and the Houthis do not recognize (the government),” Nagi told CNN.

    The vessel was abandoned after the outbreak of the Yemeni civil war in 2015. The majority of the oil is owned by Yemeni state firm SEPOC, experts say, and there are some reports that it may be sold.

    “From a technical point of view, the owner of the tanker and the oil inside it is SEPOC,” Nagi said, adding that other energy companies working in Yemen may also share ownership of the oil.

    exp un yemen oil spill tanker achim steiner vause intv FST 071912ASEG2 cnni world_00003204.png

    U.N. begins high-risk operation to prevent catastrophic oil spill from Yemen tanker

    The main issue, Nagi added, is that the Safer’s headquarters are in the government-controlled Marib city, while the tanker is in an area controlled by the Houthis. The Safer is moored off the coast of the western Hodeidah province.

    Discussions to determine the ownership of the oil are underway, Gressly said. The rights to the oil are unclear and there are legal issues that need to be addressed.

    The UN coordinator hopes that the days needed to offload the oil will buy some time for “political and legal discussions that need to take place before the oil can be sold.”

    While the UN may manage to resolve half of the issue, Nagi said, there still needs to be an understanding of the oil’s status.

    “It still poses a danger if we keep it near a conflict zone,” he said.

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  • Unprecedented ocean heat is changing the way sharks eat, breathe and behave | CNN

    Unprecedented ocean heat is changing the way sharks eat, breathe and behave | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Sharks have been made villains in most stories, whether it’s fact or fiction. But as the planet’s climate and oceans rapidly change, these boneless, aquatic, apex predators are also misunderstood victims — under severe environmental pressure yet historically capable of incredible adaptation.

    Sharks are among the most endangered marine animals on the planet, with 37% of the world’s shark and ray species threatened with extinction, primarily due to overfishing, coupled with habitat loss and the climate crisis, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List.

    And as ocean temperatures climb, researchers say many sharks are beginning to change their behaviors — shifting where they live, what they eat and how they reproduce — which could cause cascading effects for the rest of the marine ecosystem.

    “Sharks and rays are fascinating species that have been misunderstood and underappreciated for far too long,” Heike Zidowitz, shark and ray expert at the World Wildlife Fund-Germany, told CNN, noting that they are essential for the health of the oceans.

    “If these beautiful animals were to be wiped out from our oceans, it would not only be a heartbreaking loss, it would trigger ocean imbalances with ecosystem consequences that we cannot yet imagine.”

    The oceans are heating to record levels this year — a shocking temperature increase that shows no sign of ceasing. Rising ocean surface temperatures began to alarm scientists in March. Temperatures then skyrocketed to record levels in April, leaving scientists scrambling to analyze the heat’s potentially dire ripple effects.

    As with most creatures, sharks need certain conditions to thrive. With the climate crisis impacting the temperatures and acidity of the oceans, these agile ocean creatures are sheering off their normal paths and traveling to unknown, often taxing, territories.

    Valentina Di Santo, an ecophysiologist and biomechanist who studies swimming performance in fish, said temperature changes play a dominant role in the ways they breathe, digest food, grow and reproduce.

    For sharks in particular, these physiological processes speed up as ocean temperatures get warmer, doubling in speed every 10 degrees, according to Di Santo’s research.

    “An increase in metabolic rates means that sharks are using more energy to just be alive and swim,” Di Santo told CNN. “Every activity needs extra energy. An increase in digestion rates often mean that they absorb fewer nutrients as digestion becomes less efficient and they possibly need to eat more frequently.”

    Sharks always seem to be on the hunt, maneuvering their way through the water in search of new fish or other sharks to eat. But research has shown that warming oceans have pushed many fish populations northward to cooler waters, which has disrupted the ocean’s availability of food. Some fish species are not able to find new, suitable habitats, which causes a decline in their population. Overfishing also intensifies the issue by pushing fish stocks to drop.

    Di Santo said understanding the interplay between predator and prey behavior is critical when considering how sharks respond to the climate crisis.

    “It is important to consider that sharks are very much tuned in the behavior of their prey,” Di Santo said. “Therefore, it is not surprising that they may track the geographic shifts of their preferred food sources.”

    A great white shark swims just off the Cape Cod National Seashore in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on July 15, 2022.

    Di Santo also said that sharks respond to ocean warming in two ways: shifting their latitudinal range or choosing deeper, cooler waters to enhance their physiological processes.

    A climate vulnerability assessment from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that sharks off the Northeast coast have a high likelihood of shifting their distributions or expanding into new habitats to follow preferable ocean conditions.

    “These small-scale movements can be just as crucial for their survival as poleward relocations,” Di Santo said. But “the shift in depth has been found to be more pronounced than the latitudinal shift,” and some temperate species are already exhibiting seasonal shifts toward deeper waters.

    As the climate crisis escalates, sharks’ paths will only become further strained, Zidowitz said, which could ultimately close off vast swaths of the ocean to sharks.

    But sharks also have “a remarkable history of survival,” Di Santo said, having withstood all five major mass extinction events in the last 400 million years. It’s the never-before-seen compounding consequences of overfishing, climate change, prey scarcity and habitat destruction that has shark experts worried about whether they can adapt and survive these huge planetary changes.

    Zidowitz said progress on conservation to protect shark species is “too slow to keep pace” with the numerous threats they face, yet she remains hopeful.

    “If we can find the last remaining refuges around the world where the most threatened sharks and rays live, and work together with local communities, we can bend the curve towards their recovery,” Zidowitz said.

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  • The risks are rising for Western firms in Russia. So why are so many staying put? | CNN Business

    The risks are rising for Western firms in Russia. So why are so many staying put? | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a slew of Western companies left in protest. But some of the world’s biggest firms — including Nestlé, Heineken and snack maker Mondelez — stayed put.

    More than a year later, companies that chose to remain in Russia are in an increasingly sticky position: Leaving has become costlier and more complex, while staying has grown riskier.

    Companies now find themselves caught between Western sanctions and public outrage on the one hand, and an increasingly hostile Russian government on the other. The Kremlin is making it more difficult for Western firms to sell their Russian assets — and imposing steep discounts and punitive taxes when they do.

    The experience of French yoghurt maker Danone

    (DANOY)     and Danish brewer Carlsberg

    (CABGY)     provides a chilling example of the kind of far-reaching state intervention that could befall other foreign firms hoping to beat a retreat from Russia.

    Both companies had been finalizing sales to local buyers when President Vladimir Putin signed an order nationalizing their local assets earlier this month.

    Carlsberg said the development meant the prospects for the sale of its Baltika Breweries — one of Russia’s largest consumer goods companies — were now “highly uncertain.”

    The “window of opportunity to exit Russia is almost closed,” Maria Shagina, a sanctions expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told CNN. “Western companies are now caught between a rock and a hard place.”

    More than 1,000 foreign companies have exited or suspended operations in Russia since the war broke out, according to researchers at Yale University.

    Spurred by sweeping Western sanctions, oil companies, automakers, technology firms, consultancies and banks led the initial wave of departures. McDonald’s

    (MCD)     sold more than 800 local restaurants, writing off well over $1 billion in the process.

    BP

    (BP)    , meanwhile, took a $24.4 billion charge for giving up its 19.75% shareholding in Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company. The move also took a bite out of the British energy giant’s oil and gas reserves.

    But even after the mass exodus of major corporations, the Yale researchers estimate that more than 200 companies from around the globe continue to do business as usual in Russia.

    An additional 178 firms are “buying time,” meaning they have suspended new investments and scaled back their operations but still have a presence in the country.

    Unilever

    (UL)    , Nestlé, Mondelēz and Procter & Gamble

    (PG)     — the world’s biggest consumer goods companies — fall into this category.

    Nescafé coffee, produced by Nestlé, in a store in Moscow in March 2022

    While the exact reasons each company gives for staying vary, common themes include concern for the welfare of employees and their families in Russia, as well as obligations to local partners, including farmers. The companies also say they are delivering vital supplies to ordinary people and some argue that abandoning their Russian assets would only boost the Kremlin’s war chest by giving it easy access to new sources of revenue.

    To be sure, selling up is not straightforward and comes with hefty penalties. Companies are obliged to sell their assets at a 50% discount to market value and pay the Kremlin a sizable fee. US companies would need permission from the Treasury to pay such a fee, according to guidance issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control in March.

    Western sanctions against almost 2,000 individuals and entities further complicate the picture, making it hard to find legitimate buyers.

    “We do not intend to further contribute to the capacity of the Russian state,” Unilever CEO Hein Schumacher told journalists Tuesday.

    With that objective in mind, the company — which paid 3.8 billion rubles ($42.2 million) in taxes to the Russian government in 2022 — had not been able to find a “viable solution” involving a sale of its operations in the country, he added.

    Deserting its business in Russia, which has €800 million ($884 million) in assets, including four factories, would only increase the risk of nationalization, which leaves Unilever with no other option but to keep operating, Schumacher said.

    “None of the options are actually good but… operating in a constrained manner is the least bad.”

    A spokesperson for Nestlé, which has six factories and around 7,000 employees in Russia, told CNN it had “drastically reduced” its range of products in the country to provide only “essential and basic foods for the local people.”

    Procter & Gamble did not respond to a request for comment, but the company previously said it would “focus on basic health, hygiene and personal care items needed by the many Russian families who depend on them in their daily lives.”

    Mondelez said in June that it planned to “have the Russia business stand-alone with a self-sufficient supply chain” by the end of the year. “If we suspended our full operations, we would risk turning over our full operations to another party who could use the full proceeds for their own interests,” it added.

    But the Kremlin’s actions toward Danone and Carlsberg — and before them German energy company Uniper and Finland’s Fortum Oyj, whose Russian utilities were seized in April — highlight that even companies staying put could find themselves targeted for nationalization.

    For Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who leads the team tracking foreign companies’ responses to the war, leaving is the only legitimate choice. “The idea is to increase the level of discomfort, so [the Russian people] start to ask who the author of their misfortune is,” Sonnenfeld told CNN earlier this month.

    — Olesya Dmitracova contributed reporting.

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  • Deadly extreme heat is on the rise in national parks — a growing risk for America’s great outdoors | CNN

    Deadly extreme heat is on the rise in national parks — a growing risk for America’s great outdoors | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Extreme heat appears to be killing people in America’s national parks at an alarming pace this year, highlighting both its severity and the changing calculus of personal risk in the country’s natural places as climate change fuels more weather extremes.

    More people are suspected to have died since June 1 from heat-related causes in national parks than an average entire year, according to park service press releases and preliminary National Park Service data provided to CNN. No other year had five heat-related deaths by July 23, park mortality data that dates to 2007 shows, and the deadliest month for heat in parks – August – is yet to come.

    The deaths reported so far are still under investigation, but all five died in temperatures that hit 100 degrees, a searing microcosm of a much more widespread pattern of extreme heat that has broken more than 3,000 high temperature records across the US since early June.

    That kind of heat has proven an indiscriminate killer in the nation’s parks:

    • A 14-year-old boy died on a trail in southwest Texas’ Big Bend National Park in 119-degree heat, his 31-year-old father died seeking help to save him.
    • A 65 year-or-older man died hiking on June 1 in Big Bend.
    • A 57-year-old woman died hiking a trail in Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park.
    • A 71-year-old man collapsed and died outside a restroom in California’s Death Valley National Park after park rangers believe he hiked a nearby trail.
    • A 65-year-old man was found dead in his disabled vehicle on the side of the road in Death Valley National Park, with park rangers suspecting he succumbed to heat illness while driving and then baked in temperatures as high as 126 degrees.

    Heat is the deadliest type of weather, killing on average more than twice as many people each year as hurricanes and tornadoes combined. But heat deaths are notoriously difficult to track in the US, with one 2020 study estimating that they were undercounted in some of the most populous counties.

    The National Park Service faces the same challenges, and told CNN that the true toll of this year’s extreme heat and recent past heat may be even higher. They need to collect and corroborate death reports with hundreds of individual parks and the equally vast and complex web of local and state officials that medically determine cause of death.

    As a result, some of the most recent death statistics from 2020 to 2023 could “change significantly,” park spokespeople said.

    That’s already proven true. Two of this year’s five deaths happened after the park service provided the data to CNN in early July. Still, the current statistics offer a glimpse into the deadly potential of this unrelenting heat, especially in its epicenter: the Southwest.

    All of this year’s suspected heat-related deaths took place in just three national parks: Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Big Bend. These three parks are also responsible for more than half of the 68 heat-related deaths reported by the park service since 2007.

    And that’s no surprise – all three parks are located in the nation’s oven, the Southwest, and all but one of the deaths happened west of the Mississippi River.

    It’s normal for the Southwest to be hot. But the heat this year, especially the longevity of it, is far from normal. Phoenix, just a few hours south of the Grand Canyon, shattered its record for consecutive days at 110 degrees-plus and only dropped to 97 degrees overnight at times during the streak, a record warm low temperature.

    A recent report from Climate Central, a non-profit research group, found that the Southwest heat wave in the first half of July was made at least five times more likely by human-caused climate change.

    Average annual temperatures across the Southwest increased by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit between 1901 and 2016, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s periodic climate change report. The climate crisis has also worsened the region’s most severe drought in centuries, which created an ongoing crisis over water supplies from the river that etched the Grand Canyon into the earth. And projections show that temperatures will continue to rise to the tune of 8.6 degrees – resulting in 45 more days over 90 degrees each year for parts of the region by 2100 under the worst-case scenarios.

    The country’s national parks are ground zero for this warming. A 2018 study found that they had warmed twice as fast as the rest of the US from 1895 to 2010 due to human-caused climate change.

    National parks in the Southwest and in Alaska were the “most severely damaged by human-caused climate change” and experienced the most pronounced warming, said Patrick Gonzalez, climate scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and the study’s author. But he also said that damage was happening “all across America and all across our national parks.”

    “Carbon pollution from cars, power plants and deforestation – human sources – has already damaged our national parks, and in years like this we see the potential acute damage, severe one year damage,” Gonzalez told CNN.

    Heat risk and damage to national parks will only increase if unabated carbon pollution continues, Gonzalez said. That’s changing the personal risk calculus for summer recreation now and in the future in increasingly hotter national parks.

    The 300 million-plus people who visit the parks each year are already encountering warmer temperatures and are at a greater risk for heat illness as a result. Park visitation also peaks during the summer, furthering that risk.

    The park service doesn’t universally keep track of heat-related illnesses that don’t result in death, but multiple park representatives said the number of heat illnesses was much greater than heat mortality. Multiple medical responses a week that are “probably heat-related” happen during the summer at Death Valley National Park, park spokesperson Abby Wines told CNN.

    Grand Canyon National Park doesn’t track heat-specific illness, but carries out hundreds of rescues and so-called “hiker assists” for less-severe issues most commonly because of “lack of physical conditioning,” park spokesperson Joelle Baird told CNN.

    Baird said they see a spike in ranger responses to heat-related illnesses when temperatures reach 95 degrees on trails at the midway point between the top and the bottom of the canyon.

    Extreme heat can trigger heat illness in as little as 20 to 30 minutes for people doing anything strenuous outdoors, like hiking, because heat acts as a “perfect storm,” which overloads the body until it eventually short-circuits and shuts down, Dr. Matthew Levy, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told CNN.

    Hiking was the most common cause of heat-related death in the national parks data, representing more than 60% of all deaths. Park spokespeople said that typically, less-experienced hikers find themselves in compromising situations by overestimating their abilities or underpreparing for the heat, but heat illness and death can and has happened in experienced hikers, too.

    Maggie Peikon is a self-proclaimed “avid hiker” who has climbed some of the country’s highest mountains and even scaled an active volcano in Indonesia.

    She said part of the allure of hiking for experienced hikers is to “challenge my will.” But even so, she said, hiking in this kind of heat isn’t worth it.

    “Most of the challenges I’ve pushed myself to do, there’s a level of enjoyment there, and it just feels like a punishment to go out when it’s that hot,” said Peikon, who works as the manager of communications at the American Hiking Society.

    “I think I’ve just learned what I’m capable of, and that’s not just from a physical standpoint, hiking is very mental as well,” Peikon told CNN. “That was something that has stuck with me on every single hike that I do, especially the challenging ones: What you’re capable of is entirely up to you.”

    Tourists stand next to an unofficial heat reading at Furnace Creek Visitor Center during a heat wave in Death Valley National Park.

    Personal responsibility weighs heavily in the policy direction the individual national parks take when dealing with the heat.

    Parks proactively message visitors about the heat online and in signage posted at the trails that warns of the dangerous and “tragic” consequences of high temperatures. Death Valley posts bright red “STOP Extreme Heat Danger” signs at low elevation trailheads, which urge people to stay off trails after 10 a.m. and to hike only at high elevations, where temperatures are lowest.

    “People are responsible for their own safety,” Death Valley spokesperson Abby Wines told CNN. “We try to get information out to people so they’re aware, but one of the problems with heat, I think, is that often people think it’s a matter of being tough enough. They think ‘oh, I might be uncomfortable, but that’s all and I can push through it.’ But heat is deadly.”

    It’s so hot in Death Valley that the park warns visitors that it can’t and won’t rescue people.

    “We don’t want to put our own staff at risk of heat fatality by doing a physical carry out in extreme heat conditions,” Wines said, adding that the medical helicopter can’t get enough lift to take off because temperatures are so hot.

    That was the case in the most recent death in Death Valley on July 19 when the temperature was 117 degrees, a park release notes.

    What parks seem to rarely do is close trails because of the heat. The park representatives CNN spoke to said there is no national policy or guidance to close if temperatures reach a certain level.

    Trails do close because of other kinds of extreme weather, including winter storms and tropical systems. Park officials said those decisions are made at the individual park level based on the hazards there and that it was technically possible individual parks could choose to close trails or limit access if the heat got too extreme.

    Trails in Lake Mead National Recreational area in Arizona and Nevada do close seasonally because of the heat, and Grand Canyon National Park has at least entertained the idea to close trails.

    “It is something that I’ve heard come up every single year, this time of year, so I don’t think it’s beyond the National Park Service or Grand Canyon,” Baird, Grand Canyon National Park’s spokesperson, told CNN. “I think the thought and stance has always been to push out more hiker education to try to change and influence people’s behavior rather than having a reactionary decision to close trails, because people can hike successfully. We just have to provide enough information and tools for them to be successful.”

    Grand Canyon is the deadliest park for extreme heat with 16 deaths since 2007, the preliminary data from the National Park Service would suggest, a toll Baird said would be “much higher” if the park didn’t also have one of the most robust and proactive responses to heat.

    Grand Canyon pioneered a Preventative Search and Rescue team after a particularly dangerous and taxing year for rescue teams in 1996.

    Emergency Services Coordinator James Thompson observes and directs operations during a search and rescue training exercise at the Grand Canyon.

    The teams are medically trained and meet hikers at the start of trails to make sure they are adequately prepared for the journey, provide assistance with water or snacks and even contact and check in with hikers once they’re on the trails.

    This preventative approach has decreased the number of expensive, “last resort” search and rescues that are typically done via helicopter. But despite these efforts, there are still between 300 and 350 search and rescues each year at Grand Canyon and there have been 172 so far this year, with around 70 coming since Memorial Day.

    “Grand Canyon is an amazing place, everyone should hike into the canyon if they have the ability to do so,” Baird said. “However, this time of year is not optimal.”

    Park officials and hiking experts recommended checking the weather and park alerts before going out on the trail, to get acclimated to heat before your trip and know your personal limits, to shorten activities outdoors, carry more water than you think you might need, find shadier trails, tour the park by air-conditioned car or even just skip the hike altogether to reduce the chance that heat continues to turn deadly.

    “It’s not worth the risk of experiencing heat illness because of the outcomes,” Andrea Walton, Southeast Region Public Affairs Specialist for the park service, told CNN. “At minimum you’re going to feel really bad the next day” or worse, “potentially ending up in the hospital, or worst case, experiencing a fatal incident.”

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  • Xi says China will follow its own carbon reduction path as US climate envoy Kerry meets top officials in Beijing | CNN

    Xi says China will follow its own carbon reduction path as US climate envoy Kerry meets top officials in Beijing | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    China will follow its own path to cut carbon emissions, leader Xi Jinping vowed Tuesday, as US climate envoy John Kerry called for faster action to confront the climate crisis in a high-profile visit to Beijing.

    Xi told a national conference on environmental protection that China’s commitment to its duel carbon goals – reaching a carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 – is “unwavering,” according to state news agency Xinhua.

    “But the path, method, pace and intensity to achieve this goal should and must be determined by ourselves, and will never be influenced by others,” he said.

    The comments came as Kerry met China’s Premier Li Qiang and top diplomat Wang Yi Tuesday, with Washington and Beijing – the world’s two largest polluters – resuming their long-stalled climate talks amid scorching heat waves across much of the globe.

    In the meeting with Li, Kerry stressed the “need for China to decarbonize the power sector, cut methane emissions, and reduce deforestation,” a spokesperson for the US State Department said in a statement.

    He also urged China to “take additional steps to enhance its climate ambition in order to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.”

    China has invested heavily in clean energy in recent years. Its solar capacity is now greater than the rest of the world combined, and the country is also leading the world in wind capacity and electric vehicles.

    On the other hand, it has accelerated the approval of new coal plants due to a renewed focus on “energy security,” sparking concerns from environmentalists that these new projects will make the shift away from coal slower and more difficult.

    But Xi’s remarks at the conference suggest that China has no desire to be pushed, or be seen to cave to pressure – especially from the United States.

    China and the US are the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, so any attempt to address the climate crisis will need to involve deep emissions cuts from these two powerhouse nations.

    China’s emissions are more than double those of the US, but historically, the US has emitted more than any other country in the world.

    China and other fast developing nations have long argued that the world’s richest countries, especially those in the West, were able to become wealthy while churning out huge carbon emissions for decades.

    Relations between the US and China are at their worst in years with the world’s two largest economies feuding over a host of issues, from geopolitics to trade and technology.

    The US has said climate cooperation with China should be a standalone issue, separate from their disputes.

    But Beijing views it differently. Last year, it cut off climate talks with the US in protest at then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan – in the middle of the worst heat wave China had seen in six decades.

    It also halted cooperation on other common causes issues, including communications between military and law enforcement.

    That difference in views has been on full display in Beijing, even as the two sides return to the table to restart talks.

    When meeting Wang, China’s top diplomat, on Tuesday, Kerry stressed the two countries “cannot let bilateral differences stand in the way of making concrete progress” on climate cooperation.

    But Wang insisted this cooperation “cannot be separated from the overall environment of Sino-US relations.” He urged the US to pursue a “rational, pragmatic and positive policy toward China” and “properly handle the Taiwan issue,” referring to the democratic self-ruled island that Beijing claims sovereignty over.

    On Wednesday, Kerry reiterated his message to Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng that climate should be handled separately from broader diplomatic issues, Reuters reported.

    Acknowledging the diplomatic difficulties between the two sides in recent years, Kerry said climate should be treated as a “free-standing” challenge that requires the collective efforts of the world’s largest economies to resolve, according to Reuters.

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  • The fight for the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota takes center stage in the documentary ‘Lakota Nation vs. United States’ | CNN

    The fight for the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota takes center stage in the documentary ‘Lakota Nation vs. United States’ | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Jesse Short Bull grew up a mile from an Indian reservation in South Dakota not realizing the ground he was stepping on was once soaked with the blood of his ancestors.

    Less than a century ago, the Indigenous people of the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation were killed defending themselves from the United States government, which broke a treaty that vowed the sacred lands, including the Black Hills, would belong to the tribes forever.

    “I was like any other kid in America. The real history didn’t exist to me. I had no clue, and the truth was never taught to us,” Short Bull, whose Lakota name is Mni Wanca Wicapi (Ocean Star), told CNN. “When I became older, I wanted to understand what happened and why, and I started to fill in all the missing pieces.”

    These missing pieces, which led to Short Bull’s revelation of the violent injustices that led to the creation of South Dakota, is the topic of his documentary, “Lakota Nation vs. United States,” which was released Friday.

    The documentary, co-produced by actor Mark Ruffalo, is an in-depth and seldom-heard account of American history – a history that begins with the theft of land and the sacrifice of the Indigenous people who refused to surrender it.

    “This film is very much a push for land back, for the return of land, there’s no misunderstanding that’s what they’re looking for,” said film co-director Laura Tomaselli.

    Woven together by interviews with community leaders and activists, historical footage and racist Hollywood film depictions, the IFC Films documentary is split into three parts: extermination, assimilation and reparations.

    “It’s not about being angry, it’s not about being bitter. It’s about a lot of people appreciating this country and its constitution. Not realizing our treaty, which was bound to that constitution, is negated to being an old dusty antique that has no meaning,” Short Bull said. “Nothing exists to them from our country or our land or our people. But to us, it exists. We’re real.”

    The documentary, elegantly narrated by Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier, begins with a string of broken treaties by the federal government.

    Within the land legally protected by these treaties are the Black Hills, a holy site described in the film by Milo Yellow Hair, an Oglala Lakota elder and activist, as “our cradle of civilization, the heart of everything that is.”

    The Black Hills are a place of emergence, the birthplace of dozens of Indigenous tribes who consider it to be the most sacred place in the world.

    “It is one of the oldest places on the Earth, over 5 billion years old,” Yellow Hair said. “So we say from the Black Hills and the Wind Cave is that place, that opening on this mother Earth that breathes.”

    When gold was discovered on this land in 1851, war broke out for 17 years, forcing Indigenous leaders to fight gun-holstered soldiers with bows and arrows.

    In 1868, in efforts to make peace after consistently losing battles against Indigenous tribes, the US government signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The treaty designated millions of acres west of the Missouri River for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Great Sioux Nation, which encompasses over a dozen tribes.

    The treaty says the US government “solemnly agrees that no person, except those herein designated and authorized so to do…shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory described in this article.”

    But it became another broken promise.

    In 1980, the US Supreme Court ordered over $100 million to be paid to the Great Sioux Nation because of the broken treaty. But the nation hasn’t taken the money. Since 1980 that original $100 million has accrued interest and grown to more than $2 billion.

    The Black Hills of South Dakota, a holy site for dozens of Indigenous tribes who are fighting to see the land returned to them.

    But despite the poverty they face, the Great Sioux Nation still refuses the money. Because the land was never for sale.

    “We are nothing without the Black Hills, that’s why the Black Hills are not for sale, because we are not for sale,” Sicangu Lakota historian Nick Estes says in the documentary. “How can you sell your very identity of what makes you an Indigenous person?”

    The documentary also offers in-depth analysis into forced assimilation tactics deployed by the US government to weaken Lakota Dakota Nakota tribes who were still fighting back. One method was killing off their buffalo and depleting their resources, so they began to starve and had no choice but to depend on the government, according to the film.

    Another method was taking away their children and enrolling them in boarding schools, stripping them of their Indigenous names and clothing, banning them from speaking their languages and forcing them to cut their hair. If they resisted, they were punished, often violently.

    With the intention of conquering their people by destroying their culture, says Oglala Lakota activist Nick Tilsen, “they outlawed our language, they made our ceremonies illegal, they criminalized us for living our way of life.”

    After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022, “Lakota Nation vs. United States” has played on the screens at Indigenous reservations where the tragic story takes place.

    At Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, nearly 200 people, including elders who still carry stories of dark days, attended the screening, and many were in tears, says Hunkpapa Lakota elder Cedric Good House.

    “We were impressed with Jesse and everybody else because it took real bravery to do this, a lot of courage,” Good House told CNN. “It’s coming at a time when people think they can know it all in a matter of a minute. They’ll read a little clip on Facebook and that’s it.”

    “But here is this lengthy documentary and people are getting captivated by the truth, and after they finish watching they can see this is still applicable to us today. We can point it out for them,” he continued. “Look what’s happening today here and here and here, we are still fighting.”

    The Standing Rock Sioux have been recently entangled in another battle against the federal government, mainly the US Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for approving the Dakota Access Pipeline.

    A violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the pipeline is a 1,172-mile underground conduit that would transport some 470,000 barrels of crude oil a day – stretching across North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois.

    The Standing Rock Sioux, whose reservation resides near where the pipeline runs, say it will not only endanger their main source of drinking water – the Missouri River – but also their sacred tribal grounds.

    “This movie is about our history, but here in the present we see nothing has changed,” Good House said. “This is our sacred land, and we try to get ourselves into the process, but the process still doesn’t address us.”

    In a desperate fight to protect their land and Unci Maka, or Mother Earth, Native tribal members alongside non-Indigenous allies and environmentalists demonstrated for years against the construction of the oil pipeline until they were forcibly removed from the protest site in 2017.

    “We’re not here to chase people off land. We’re not here to take over their farms and ranches and start charging people for crossing our territory,” Good House said. “We are protecting this Earth, we’re not here to do what the government has done to us.”

    In the land where ceremonies were once held and their ancestors bones now lay, Indigenous holy sites are still being exploited for profit, elders and activists say in the film.

    After killing those who attempted to protect it, the US government has turned stolen land into tourist attractions, Short Bull says, making money off the ongoing pain and suffering of Lakota Dakota Nakota tribes.

    Deep in the Black Hills stands a mountain known as the Six Grandfathers, or Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, whose peaks were blown up to carve the faces of four presidents – now known as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

    Mt. Rushmore, in Keystone, South Dakota, is carved into the Black Hills, which had been occupied by Lakota Sioux Natives.

    “Mount Rushmore represents and is the ultimate shrine to White supremacy,” activist Krystal Two Bulls of the Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota says in the film. “Our sacred mountain, the Six Grandfathers, of course they carved four racist White men into our sacred mountain, who believed in slavery, who actually removed us from our lands.”

    Today the children of the Indigenous leaders who died to preserve whatever land they could continue their ancestors’ purpose: demanding their land back.

    And as the world suffers a climate crisis where Indigenous traditions, like controlled burning, are now being used to fight it, “it’s a no brainer” to return the land to those who can actually care for it, says Tomaselli, the film’s co-director.

    “If you are a non Indigenous person and you’re concerned about the climate, it should be obvious to throw all of your energy behind people that were living here before any of our ancestors showed up, tribes who have been taking care of this environment better than anyone has before,” Tomaselli said.

    As calamities happen around them for the sake of money, Short Bull says – gold mining, coal mining, the pipeline development, deforestation – the Indigenous people living there still have no say.

    But with their demand for land back comes a warning.

    “I want people to remember that there is bloodshed on Earth and our relatives’ blood is on this ground,” Short Bull said. “This planet was not created for you to just take, take, take. The Earth is an extension of you, and if you’re not going to take care of it, disaster is coming.”

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  • Climate change is making our oceans change color, new research finds | CNN

    Climate change is making our oceans change color, new research finds | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The color of the ocean has changed significantly over the last 20 years and human-caused climate change is likely responsible, according to a new study.

    More than 56% of the world’s oceans have changed color to an extent that cannot be explained by natural variability, said a team of researchers, led by scientists from the National Oceanography Center in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, in a statement.

    Tropical oceans close to the equator in particular have become greener in the past two decades, reflecting changes in their ecosystems, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

    The color of the ocean is derived from the materials found in its upper layers. For example, a deep blue sea will have very little life in it, whereas a green color means there are ecosystems there, based on phytoplankton, plant-like microbes which contain chlorophyll. The phytoplankton form the basis of a food web which supports larger organisms such as krill, fish, seabirds and marine mammals.

    It’s not clear exactly how these ecosystems are changing, said study co-author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the Center for Global Change Science. While some areas are likely to have less phytoplankton, others will have more – and it’s likely all parts of the ocean will see changes in the types of phytoplankton present.

    Ocean ecosystems are finely balanced and any change in the phytoplankton will send ripples across the food chain. “All changes are causing an imbalance in the natural organization of ecosystems. Such imbalance will only get worse over time if our oceans keep heating,” she told CNN.

    It will also affect the ocean’s ability to act as a store of carbon, Dutkiewicz said, as different plankton absorb different amounts of carbon.

    While the researchers are still working to unpick exactly what the changes mean, what is clear, they said, is that the changes are being driven by human-induced climate change.

    The researchers monitored changes in ocean color from space by tracking how much green or blue light is reflected from the surface of the sea.

    They used data from the Aqua satellite which has been monitoring ocean color changes for more than two decades and is able to pick out differences that are not visible to the human eye.

    They analyzed color variation data from 2002 to 2022 and then used climate change models to simulate what would happen to the oceans both with additional planet-heating pollution and without.

    The color changes matched almost exactly what Dutkiewicz predicted would happen if greenhouse gases were added to the atmosphere – that around 50% of our oceans would change color.

    Dutkiewicz, who has been running simulations that showed the oceans were going to change color for years, said she is not surprised at this finding.

    “But still I found the results very sobering; yet another wake-up call that human induced climate change [has] significantly impacted the earth system,” she told CNN via email.

    Dutkiewicz told CNN it was difficult to say whether color changes could become visible to humans if the process continues.

    “If a big tipping point was reached in some places: maybe. Though you’d have to study the colors for a while to be able to pick up on the changes,” said Dutkiewicz.

    Next up, Dutkiewicz will try to better understand the color changes in different ocean regions, as well as looking into what might be causing them, she said.

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  • IAEA chief ‘completely convinced’ it’s safe to release treated Fukushima nuclear wastewater | CNN

    IAEA chief ‘completely convinced’ it’s safe to release treated Fukushima nuclear wastewater | CNN

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    Tokyo
    CNN
     — 

    Japan’s plan to release treated radioactive water into the ocean is safe and there is no better option to deal with the massive buildup of wastewater collected since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog told CNN.

    Japan will release the wastewater sometime this summer, a controversial move 12 years after the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown. Japanese authorities and the IAEA have insisted the plan follows international safety standards – the water will first be treated to remove the most harmful pollutants, and be released gradually over many years in highly diluted quantities.

    But public anxiety remains high, including in nearby countries like South Korea, China and the Pacific Islands, which have voiced concern about potential harm to the environment or people’s health. On Friday, Chinese customs officials announced they would ban food imports from ten Japanese prefectures including Fukushima, and strengthen inspections to monitor for “radioactive substances, to ensure the safety of Japanese food imports to China.”

    Speaking in an interview during a visit to Tokyo Friday, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said that while fears over the plan reflect a “very logical sense of uncertainty” that must be taken seriously, he is “completely convinced of the sound basis of our conclusions.”

    “We have been looking at this basic policy for more than two years. We have been assessing it against … the most stringent standards that exist,” he said. “And we are quite certain of what we are saying, and the scheme we have proposed.”

    Grossi told CNN he had met with Japanese fishing groups, local mayors and other communities affected by the 2011 disaster – and whose livelihoods may be hurt by the release – to listen to those concerns.

    “My disposition … is one of listening, and explaining in a way that addresses all these concerns they have,” he said.

    “When one visits Fukushima, it is quite impressive, I will even say ominous, to look at all these tanks, more than a million tons of water that contains radionuclides – imagining that this is going to be discharged into the ocean. So all sorts of fears kick in, and one has to take them seriously, to address and to explain.

    “This is why I’m here, to listen to all those who in good faith have questions and criticism and question marks, and to address them.”

    On Tuesday, Grossi formally presented the IAEA’s safety review to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. The report found the wastewater release plan will have a “negligible” impact on people and the environment, adding that it was an “independent and transparent review,” not a recommendation or endorsement.

    exp iaea fukushima lyman intvw 070512ASEG3 cnni world_00035521.png

    IAEA approves plan for Fukushima’s wastewater

    Japanese authorities have said the release is necessary because they are running out of room to contain the contaminated water – and the move will allow the full decommissioning of the Fukushima plant.

    The 2011 disaster caused the plant’s reactor cores to overheat and contaminate water within the facility with highly radioactive material. Since then, new water has been pumped in to cool fuel debris in the reactors. At the same time, ground and rainwater have leaked in, creating more radioactive wastewater that now needs to be stored and treated.

    That wastewater now measures 1.32 million metric tons – enough to fill more than 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

    Japan has previously said there were “no other options” as space runs out – a sentiment Grossi echoed on Friday. When asked whether there were better alternatives to dispose of the wastewater, the IAEA chief answered succinctly: “No.”

    It’s not that there are no other methods, he added – Japan had considered five total options, including hydrogen release, underground burial and vapor release, which would have seen wastewater boiled and released into the atmosphere.

    But several of these options are “considered industrially immature,” said Grossi. For instance, vapor release can be more difficult to control due to environmental factors like wind and rain, which could bring the waste back to earth, he said. That left a controlled release of water into the sea – which, Japanese officials and some scientists point out, is frequently done at nuclear plants around the world, including those in the United States.

    The IAEA will also remain on site for years to come, with a new permanent office set up in Fukushima to help monitor progress.

    “We have the benefit of science,” Grossi said. “Either you have a certain radionuclide in a water sample or you don’t have it … it’s a measurable thing. We have the science, we have the laboratories … to ensure the credibility and the transparency of the process.”

    Japan fukushima 12 years later reactors stewart pkg contd intl hnk vpx_00023612.png

    CNN goes inside the Fukushima nuclear plant where wastewater is being treated

    But some critics have cast doubt on the IAEA’s findings, with China recently arguing that the group’s assessment “is not proof of the legality and legitimacy” of the wastewater release.

    Many countries have openly opposed the plan; Chinese officials have warned that it could cause “unpredictable harm,” and accused Japan of treating the ocean as a “sewer.” The Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum, an inter-governmental group of Pacific island nations that includes Australia and New Zealand, also published an op-ed in January voicing “grave concerns,” saying more data was needed.

    And in South Korea, residents have taken to the streets to protest the plan. Many shoppers have stockpiled salt and seafood for fear these products will be contaminated once the wastewater is released – even though Seoul has already banned imports of seafood and food items from the Fukushima region.

    IAEA chief Rafael Grossi during an inspection in Fukushima, Japan, on July 5, 2023.

    International scientists have also expressed concern to CNN that there is insufficient evidence of long-term safety, arguing that the release could cause tritium – a radioactive hydrogen isotope that cannot be removed from the wastewater – to gradually build up in marine ecosystems and food chains, a process called bioaccumulation.

    While Grossi said he takes these objections seriously, he added that he “cannot exclude” the possibility some are driven more by politics than science.

    “We understand that there is a political environment … which is tense. Geopolitical divisions are very, very strong these days so we cannot exclude these things,” he said.

    Grossi also denied media reports that the IAEA had shared a draft of its final report with the Japanese government ahead of its publication. “It’s absurd,” he said. “This is the DNA of the IAEA – to be the nuclear watchdog for nuclear operations, the nuclear watchdog for nuclear safety and security. When we come to a conclusion, it is our independent conclusion.”

    And more broadly, the future of nuclear as an alternative energy source relies on the success of the Fukushima release, he said. Though there has been heightened public alarm toward nuclear plants recently – for instance, regarding the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine – “the problem there is war, the problem is not nuclear energy,” Grossi said.

    “If there was one lesson that came clearly after the Fukushima accident, it’s that the nuclear safety standards should be observed to the letter,” he added. “If you do that, the probability of having what happened in Fukushima is extremely low.”

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  • The planet saw its hottest day ever this week. The record will be broken again and again | CNN

    The planet saw its hottest day ever this week. The record will be broken again and again | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    This week saw the hottest global temperature ever recorded, according to data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

    On Monday, the average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), the highest since records began. On Tuesday, it climbed even further, to reach 17.18 degrees Celsius. The previous record of 16.92 degrees Celsius was set in August 2016.

    Experts warn that the record could be broken several more times this year. Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, said in a Twitter post on Tuesday that the world “may well see a few even warmer days over the next 6 weeks.”

    This global record is a preliminary one, but it’s another indication of how fast the world is heating up, as the arrival of the natural climate phenomenon El Niño, which has a warming effect, is layered on top of climate change-fueled global heating.

    “It’s not a record to celebrate and it won’t be a record for long, with northern hemisphere summer still mostly ahead and El Niño developing,” said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in the UK.

    This year has already seen heat records broken around the world, with devastating consequences.

    In the US, Texas and the South sweltered in a brutal heat wave in late June, with triple-digit-Fahrenheit temperatures and extreme humidity. Soaring temperatures in Mexico have killed at least 112 people since March.

    A searing heat wave in India killed at least 44 people across the state of Bihar. China, too, has experienced several blistering heat waves and it registered the highest number of hot days – where the maximum daily temperature exceeded 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) – over a six-month period since records began.

    This is what happens to your body when temperatures soar

    The UK recorded the hottest June since records began in 1884, according to the country’s national weather service, the Met Office. The average temperature for the month was 15.8 degrees Celsius (60.4 Fahrenheit), breaking the previous record by 0.9 degree Celsius.

    “Alongside natural variability, the background warming of the Earth’s atmosphere due to human induced climate change has driven up the possibility of reaching record high temperatures,” Paul Davies, Met Office climate extremes principal fellow and chief meteorologist, said in a statement.

    As the climate crisis intensifies, scientists are clear that record-breaking heat waves are set to become more frequent and more severe.

    The new global average temperature record is another wake-up call, Otto told CNN. “It just shows we have to stop burning fossil fuels, not in decades, now. This day is just a number, but for many people and ecosystems it’s a loss of life and livelihood.”

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  • California man sentenced to over 6 years in prison for $8.7 million cow manure Ponzi scheme, US attorney’s office says | CNN Business

    California man sentenced to over 6 years in prison for $8.7 million cow manure Ponzi scheme, US attorney’s office says | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    A man from California who ran a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme where he claimed to turn cow manure into green energy has been sentenced to over six years in prison, the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of California announced this week.

    Ray Brewer, 66, stole over $8.7 million from investors, court records from between March 2014 and December 2019 showed.

    Brewer’s scam involved convincing investors he could build anaerobic digesters – large machines that create methane through microorganisms breaking down biodegradable material – on dairies in several California and Idaho counties, the US attorney’s office said in a news release. This methane can “then be sold on the open market as green energy,” the release stated.

    Brewer’s investors were meant to receive tax incentives and 66% of all net profits as part of the scheme, authorities said.

    Brewer gave the investors tours of the dairies where he claimed he’d build the digester machines and “sent them forged lease agreements with the dairy owners,” according to the US attorney’s office release.

    “He also sent the investors altered agreements with banks that made it appear as though he had obtained millions of dollars in loans to build the digesters,” the release said.

    Wanting to appear as though he had secured revenue streams, Brewer also sent investors forged contracts with multinational companies, authorities said, and showed them fake photos of the digesters under construction.

    After receiving investors’ funds, authorities said he transferred the money to bank accounts opened in the names of an alias, his relatives and different entities.

    In some cases, Brewer offered refunds that came from “newly received money from other investors who had not authorized Brewer to use their money in this way,” the US attorney’s office said.

    Brewer assumed a new identity and relocated to Montana after his investors became aware of his fraud, authorities said.

    When he was arrested, Brewer attempted to trick authorities by telling him they had the wrong person.

    He also told officers stories about being in the Navy and “how he once saved several soldiers during a fire by blocking the flames with his body so that they could escape” – tales he later admitted were lies “meant to curry favor with law enforcement,” the news release stated.

    Some of Brewer’s purchases with the stolen money included two plots of land of 10 or more acres, a custom 3,700 square-foot home and new pickup trucks, according to authorities.

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  • The company supplying water to millions of Londoners is in deep trouble | CNN Business

    The company supplying water to millions of Londoners is in deep trouble | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Britain’s biggest water supplier said Wednesday it needed to raise more cash from investors, as UK media reported the government was preparing contingency plans to rescue the company.

    Thames Water provides drinking water and waste water services to 15 million customers in London and the southeast of England. The utility, which counts one of Canada’s largest public pension funds among its top investors, has around £14 billion ($17.5 billion) of debt on its balance sheet.

    News that it needs more money came just a day after CEO Sarah Bentley resigned with immediate effect after three years in the role. She was in the second year of an eight-year turnaround plan to address aging infrastructure, tackle leakage and reduce pollution in rivers, a legacy of underinvestment.

    Thames Water received £500 million ($635 million) from shareholders in March, but said Wednesday it would need more.

    The firm “is continuing to work constructively with its shareholders in relation to the equity funding expected to be required to support Thames Water’s turnaround and investment plans,” it added.

    The company said it was keeping the water industry regulator Ofwat “fully informed” of its progress and added that it had a “strong liquidity position,” including £4.4 billion ($5.6 billion) of cash.

    Ofwat said it was in “ongoing discussions” with Thames Water “on the need for a robust and credible plan to turn the business around.”

    “We will continue to focus on protecting customers’ interests,” it added.

    Government ministers, including representatives from the UK Treasury and the environment department, Defra, are holding emergency talks with Ofwat over Thames Water’s future, according to UK media reports.

    One possibility would be to place the company into a special administration regime that effectively takes the firm into temporary public ownership. Sky News was first to report the discussions.

    A government spokesperson told CNN: “This is a matter for the company and its shareholders. We prepare for a range of scenarios across our regulated industries — including water — as any responsible government would.”

    The spokesperson added that the UK water sector “as a whole is financially resilient.”

    Thames Water says about 24% of the water it supplies to customers is lost through leakage.

    The company’s single biggest shareholder is the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, which holds a stake of around 32%. The Universities Superannuation Scheme, a pension fund for the academic staff of UK universities, owns nearly 20%.

    Other large investors include the Chinese and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, as well as British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, which invests on behalf of public sector workers.

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  • Hundreds of thousands are without power as tornado-spawning storms batter the Southeast and Ohio Valley | CNN

    Hundreds of thousands are without power as tornado-spawning storms batter the Southeast and Ohio Valley | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Severe tornado-spawning storms battered the the Southeast and Ohio Valley, knocking out power to more than 615,000 homes and businesses across multiple states.

    A possible twister damaged dozens of homes in Bargersville, Indiana, on Sunday as thunderstorms moved through the state, threatening hail and damaging winds. As they sift through the rubble, Bargersville residents were warned to prepare to be without power for the next two days.

    Scattered severe thunderstorms are likely across the Mid-Atlantic states Monday, bringing damaging wind gusts and large hail, according to the Weather Prediction Center.

    Already, thunderstorms have walloped parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and parts of the Ohio Valley Sunday, knocking out power and leaving behind destruction.

    Much of the power outages Sunday night were in Georgia, where more than 150,000 customers were in the dark, according to poweroutage.us.

    “We are seeing large amounts of damage across Metro Atlanta and North Georgia. In areas that are the most heavily affected, our team is working to navigate the damage and get the lights back on for customers,” Georgia Power tweeted.

    The storms came as more than 50 million people from Arizona to Louisiana on Sunday sweltered under a heat wave that is expected to spread and continue through the beginning of the July 4 holiday week.

    The heat alerts include much of Texas as well as parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, according to the National Weather Service.

    The extreme heat in Texas contributed to at least two deaths Friday at the remote Big Bend National Park, where temperatures reached 119 degrees.

    In Bargersville, a severe storm cut a path of destruction roughly 3 miles long, Bargersville Fire Chief Eric Funkhouser said.

    One of the Bargersville Fire houses “witnessed the tornado going just north of the fire house” around 4:15 p.m. then reports began rolling in of homes collapsing and damage throughout the area, Funkhouser said.

    At least 75 homes were left with moderate to severe damage “from the tornado being on the ground,” Funkhouser said, adding that the storm “took down the apartment complex that was under construction.”

    No serious injuries were reported as of Sunday evening, according to the fire chief.

    “This is the second tornado to hit Johnson County in the last three months,” Funkhouser said. “It’s amazing to have two tornadoes to come through, that were on the ground for that amount of time in Johnson County and for us to be able to hopefully – once we get through this – find out there were minor injuries only.”

    Videos posted on social media showed a funnel-shaped cloud ripping through buildings as debris flew around it. Several houses could later be seen with their roofs ripped off.

    “Given the photos and videos that we’ve seen, it’s virtually certain it was a tornado. We will be sending a survey team to make a final determination tomorrow,” National Weather Service Indianapolis Meteorologist Joseph Nield told CNN on Sunday.

    Bargersville is about 17 miles south of Indianapolis and is located in Johnson County.

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  • 31 dead after gas explosion at barbecue restaurant in China | CNN

    31 dead after gas explosion at barbecue restaurant in China | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    At least 31 people are dead and seven injured in the Chinese city of Yinchuan, in northwest Ningxia region, after a gas explosion at a barbecue restaurant Wednesday night, according to state media.

    The explosion was caused by a leak of a liquified gas tank inside the restaurant, and took place around 8:40 p.m., according to state broadcaster CCTV.

    Among the seven injured, one person is still in critical condition. The other six are being treated in the hospital for minor injuries, burns and glass cuts.

    Local fire authorities sent 20 vehicles and more than 100 personnel to the scene, with search and rescue operations lasting until 4 a.m. Thursday morning, according to state media.

    Photos posted by state media show the damaged building, with blackened exteriors, debris on the ground and smoke in the air. Firefighters are seen entering the second floor on a ladder and lifting people out on stretchers.

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping called the explosion “heartbreaking,” and said it was a “profound lesson.” He has issued instructions to authorities on the scene, requiring “all efforts” to treat the injured, strengthen safety supervision and protect residents’ safety, according to CCTV.

    The restaurant is located on a busy street, state media reported. The incident came just before China began its three-day national public holiday, from Thursday to Saturday, marking Dragon Boat Festival.

    The country has been rocked by a number of safety incidents this year. A coal mine collapse in Inner Mongolia in February left dozens dead; then in April, the deadliest fire to hit Beijing in two decades killed 29 people in a hospital.

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  • Thousands of Americans are leaving homes in flood-risk areas. But where are they moving to? | CNN

    Thousands of Americans are leaving homes in flood-risk areas. But where are they moving to? | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    For more than four decades, the US government has been paying cities and states to move homeowners away from areas that are at high risk of severe flooding.

    When a hurricane or major flooding event devastates an area, a neighborhood can send a request for the local or state government to buy the impacted land and give residents money to start over someplace else.

    The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s buyout program is a form of so-called “managed retreat” – a long process that relocates people, businesses, homes and infrastructure to an area that’s safer from the impacts of climate change-fueled weather events. But until recently, little was known about where people ultimately moved and whether their new location actually reduced their flood risk.

    A new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters — which coincides with a managed retreat conference unfolding in New York City this week — provides a clearer picture of these home buyouts.

    Data from thousands of home buyouts shows people aren’t moving that far from their original homes — and often they are moving within the same floodplain. But overall, their risk of flooding decreased after the move, a nod to the program’s success. Researchers also found that race has played a role in who is moving and where they’re relocating to.

    “As climate change and rising insurance costs increase the pressures to retreat from the coast and flooded areas, we need to pay more attention to where people are going,” James Elliott, a professor of sociology at Rice University and a co-author on the study, told CNN.

    The findings “point to how the program plays out differently in different types of communities and neighborhoods across the country,” he said.

    Using flood risk estimates, housing values, race and income data from the US Census Bureau, and FEMA relocation data between 1990 and 2017, researchers from Rice University built a nationwide database to map out where nearly 10,000 Americans sold their flood-prone homes and where they moved.

    They found people who have taken advantage of the FEMA buyouts typically did not move that far to reduce their risk, and usually stayed within the same floodplain.

    On average, buyout participants reduced their future flood risk by up to 65%, Elliott said. The average driving distance between their former homes and their new ones was around seven miles, with almost 74% of homeowners remaining within 20 miles of their old, flood-damaged homes.

    The findings were also racially segmented, Elliot said. About 96% of homeowners who relocated from a predominantly White neighborhood ended up moving to another majority White community.

    In contrast, residents of predominantly Black and Hispanic communities were far more likely to relocate to a new neighborhood with a different demographic: Only 48 percent of Black homeowners who go through the buyout moved to predominantly Black neighborhoods.

    The study also found that buyout areas with predominantly White homeowners had a nearly 90% chance of flooding by 2050, while majority-Black buyout areas had a roughly 50% chance, suggesting that White residents tend to only participate in buyouts when flood risk is much more intense.

    Though the data suggests that homeowners in White neighborhoods have a higher tolerance for flood risk, 80% of the people who took advantage of the FEMA program previously lived in majority-White neighborhoods. This could be because White communities “are more successful at winning the opportunity and money to participate” in the FEMA program, Elliott said.

    The home buyout program, which is the largest managed-retreat initiative in the country so far, is “disproportionately targeted toward Whiter residential areas,” Elliott said.

    “Communities of color and lower income areas just have fewer options to move nearby, so they are less likely to participate in the managed buyout,” Elliott said. In Houston, he found in a previous study that most of the people participating in buyouts in racially diverse communities tend to be White homeowners.

    “It’s sort of the last wave of White flight in those neighborhoods,” he added. And when “flood risks come, the final White residents begin to pull up stakes through the buyout program and move further out.”

    Alexander de Sherbinin, a senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School and deputy manager of NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, said it’s not clear from the study that White homeowners are reluctant to move to racially diverse neighborhoods, and noted that there is evidence to the contrary.

    De Sherbinin pointed out that there is a process of “climate gentrification” playing out in areas that have experienced climate disasters, “whereby more affluent households are moving into ethnically diverse neighborhoods that are less at risk of flooding, and are even displacing local residents.”

    He pointed to Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood as an example of this phenomenon, where higher ground helps protect the neighborhood from sea level rise and higher storm surges.

    “The research findings make sense in one regard, which is that whiter, more affluent neighborhoods are more likely to have the insurance coverage and resources to stay in place, despite rising risks,” de Sherbinin told CNN. “In other words, they’re able to rebuild, and possibly accommodate risks by raising their houses above flood lines.”

    As the climate crisis advances, more homeowners and businesses will be forced to relocate, adding stress and vulnerability to new regions. Previous research has shown that climate migration will become more likely as the planet warms and people seek places they consider safer and more stable.

    “We really need to think about how people relocate locally, what the options are, and how the ongoing racial segregation, especially in urban environments, is affecting those local retreats and people’s decisions and abilities not to retreat, because all we see are the people who actually say yes to the program,” Elliott said.

    “That’s the classic thing with climate change — it’s not about ‘if’ people have to move from these places, but ‘when and how’.”

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  • Record heat and power outages create ‘the perfect storm,’ meteorologist says | CNN

    Record heat and power outages create ‘the perfect storm,’ meteorologist says | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the weekly weather newsletter, the CNN Weather Brief, which is released every Monday. You can sign up here to receive them every week and during significant storms.



    CNN
     — 

    People in the South are storm weary. I’ve heard it from friends and family in my home state of Louisiana, where storms have hit exceptionally hard, and the damage extends much further.

    Six tornadoes were reported in Mississippi alone in the last 24 hours, and strong storms are still in progress right now.

    Tornadoes have been reported in the South every day during the last week, and more could occur in the next few days. They have caused serious damage, several deaths, and as of this morning half a million people are in the dark, according to PowerOutage.us. Making matters worse, some are expected to be without power for much of the week, leaving them without air conditioning as temperatures reach the triple digits.

    The combination of power outages and dangerous heat “made this event the perfect storm,” meteorologist Michael Berry from the National Weather Service office in Shreveport said.

    His region is recovering from an EF-1 tornado that hit Cass County, Texas on Friday night, along with extensive wind damage that uprooted trees and damaged power lines, littering them all over the region. He said the damage is in some ways worse than a tornado because it is so widespread.

    Power crews have not been able to keep up. SWEPCO, which services Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas issued a statement late Sunday saying, “Nearly 3,000 utility professionals have now joined forces to tackle the work and rebuild communities across northwest Louisiana, east Texas and the western communities in Arkansas following the continued onslaught of extreme weather.” They added, “When you have devastation at this scale, with widespread damage that includes significant impacts to both our transmission and distribution stations the prolonged effort requires time to mobilize additional resources.”

    Utility crews from as far away as Michigan and Indiana have come to the region to help rebuild the power grid.

    According to Berry, straight-line winds Friday night approached 100 mph, which is what resulted in the damage to be so widespread, as well as causing damage to the power grid. He said it is the type of storm they typically only see once or twice a decade.

    Another round of storms came through many of the same areas Saturday night, causing even more damage. Saturday’s round of storms produced nearly a dozen tornadoes across the South, hail greater than three inches in diameter and widespread wind reports stretching from Kansas to the Florida Panhandle. It caused even more power outages and set back power crews from getting power restored from Friday’s storms.

    SWEPCO’s outages account for about 30% of the power outages across the South and some could be in the dark another week or more. It creates another concern for not only this region but for all the residents without power across the South: the heat!

    Heat alerts are up for roughly 35 million people across the South, with temperatures remaining in the upper 90s to triple digits but feeling much hotter when you factor in the humidity.

    weather extreme heat

    “Widespread high and low temperature records are forecast to be tied or broken over the coming days,” the Weather Prediction Center said.

    The heat index will be running anywhere from 115 across northern Louisiana and East Texas to close to 125 degrees across South Texas. The heat index is the “feels like” temperature when you factor in the humidity. It could be deadly for the hundreds of thousands without power.

    “Our message quickly became how deadly the heat can become with the widespread power outages, encouraging people without power to try to stay cool by any means possible, drinking plenty of water, staying in the shade, relocating to friends or a family member’s home with power and AC,” Berry warned.

    Many areas have opened cooling centers for those without power and in need of a place to cool off.

    How to find cooling centers by state

    With nighttime temperatures staying in the upper 70s to low 80s, they could be just as dangerous. Overnight is when the body needs to cool and reset, and if temperatures are staying warm overnight, we could see serious heat-related consequences as a result.

    Why high overnight temperatures are so deadly

    More than 50 million people are in the path of more severe weather today across the South.

    A Level 2 of 5 slight risk of severe weather covers parts of the Gulf Coast from southeastern Louisiana to the East Coast of northern Florida. Areas possibly affected include New Orleans, Mobile and Jacksonville.

    A broader area at a Level 1 of 5 marginal risk covers 40 million people and extends from central Texas to the Carolinas and down to South Florida. Cities like Austin and Fort Worth in Texas, Atlanta and Miami could face severe weather today.

    “Any storm that develops will have the potential to become severe with large hail and damaging winds being the primary threats,” the weather service office in Fort Worth warned.

    While tornadoes are not the primary threat today, they will also be a possibility.

    The areas facing a severe threat also run the risk of excessive rainfall, which could lead to flash flooding. The storms could produce heavy downpours capable of dropping up to four inches of rain in some locations.

    The severe threat continues tomorrow, before winding down for the rest of the week, giving the South a much-needed break.

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  • The ‘climate kids’ want a court to force Montana’s state government to go green | CNN

    The ‘climate kids’ want a court to force Montana’s state government to go green | CNN

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    Helena, Montana
    CNN
     — 

    It’s a Big Sky story fit for a big screen.

    On one side: 16 kids from ranches, reservations and tourist boomtowns across Montana – a group of wannabe climate avengers ranging in age from 5 to 22 and assembled to fight for a livable planet.

    On the other side: Montana’s governor, attorney general and the Republican supermajorities of both houses, who may have lost a three-year fight to kill the nation’s first constitutional climate case before it hit court, but are still determined to let oil, gas and coal keep flowing for generations.

    The setting is a small courtroom in Helena and the whole plot pivots around the Montana constitution, widely considered the greenest in the nation.

    “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations,” reads Article 9, and those pivotal words “clean and healthful environment” are also guaranteed separately in the state’s bill of rights.

    “This case is about the equal rights of children,” attorney Roger Sullivan began in his opening argument in Held vs. Montana this week, “and their need now for extraordinary protection from the extraordinary dangers of fossil fuel pollution and climate crisis that their state government is exposing them to.”

    In the half-century since the environmental promises were added to the constitution, the Treasure State has never rejected a fossil fuel project for potential harm to air or water. And this spring, after a county judge cited the constitution in pulling the permit of a new gas-fired power plant, state leaders quickly crafted House Bill 971 to make it illegal for any state agency to analyze climate impacts when assessing large projects, like power plants, that need environmental review.

    In a region full of ranchers and farmers who depend on stable weather and the kind of National Park beauty that draws millions of outdoor enthusiasts a year, the bill created the most buzz by far in the May legislative session, drawing more than 1,000 comments.

    But while 95% of the comments were opposed, according to a legislature count, the bill passed.

    “Skinny cows and dead cattle,” Rikki Held said, when asked how drought changed her family’s Broadus ranch.

    Since she was the only plaintiff of legal age when the suit was filed, the historic case bears her name. Now finally on the stand, she described with emotion what it was like to work through smoke and ash on 110°F days. “We have the technology and knowledge,” said Held, now an environmental science major at Colorado College. “We just need empathy and willingness to do the right thing.”

    One after another, her fellow plaintiffs have testified how the effects of a warming planet are already causing them physical, emotional and financial pain. “You know, it’s really scary seeing what you care for disappear right in front of your eyes,” said Sariel, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, after describing how the loss of consistent snow affects everything from native plants to tribal traditions.

    “Do you believe the state of Montana has a responsibility to protect this land for you?” a lawyer asked Sariel, who, like the other children who were under 18 when the case was filed, is being referred to only by her first name. “Yes, I do,” she replied in a soft voice. “It’s not only written in our constitution, an inherent right to a healthy land and environment, but it’s also just about being a decent person.”

    “During the course of this trial, the court will hear lots of emotions,” Montana Assistant Attorney General Michael Russell said in his opening argument. “Lots of assumptions, accusations, speculation, prognostication … including sweeping, dramatic assertions of doom that awaits us all.” But this case is “far more boring,” Russell argued, and is little more than a show trial over statutes “devoid of any regulatory authority.”

    Montana’s population of 1.1 million is “simply too minuscule to make any difference in climate change,” Russell told the court, “which is a global issue that effectively relegates Montana’s role to that of a spectator.”

    Attorneys for the plaintiffs have tried to poke holes in this argument, pointing out Montana’s outsized energy footprint.

    On Thursday, Peter Erickson, a greenhouse gas emissions expert and witness for the plaintiffs, pointed out Montana has the sixth largest per-capita energy-related CO2 emissions in the nation – behind other big energy-producing states like Wyoming, West Virginia and Louisiana.

    “It’s significant. It’s disproportionately large, given Montana’s population,” Erickson said.

    While attorneys for the state objected when Rikki Held tried to connect her mental health to the climate crisis, they have largely saved cross-examination for the experts as the plaintiffs lay out their case.

    “If the judge ordered that we stop using fossil fuels in Montana would it get us to the point where these plaintiffs are no longer being harmed in your opinion?” Mark Stermitz, an attorney for the state, asked Steven Running, professor emeritus of ecosystem and conservation sciences at the University of Montana.

    “We can’t tell in advance,” said Running, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 as one of the scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Because what has been shown in history over and over and over again is when a significant social movement is needed, it often is started by one or two or three people.”

    Montana's state capitol building rises above Helena, even as it is dwarfed by mountains.

    The trial is set to conclude on June 23 and is being heard before Judge Kathy Seeley, with no jury. While Seeley has no power to shut down fossil fuel use or order the end of new extraction permits, a ruling against Montana could help kill the new law outlawing climate impact analysis and set a powerful precedent for similar cases winding their ways through the courts.

    “I think we’re really at a tipping point right now,” Our Children’s Trust attorney Nate Bellinger told CNN. The Oregon-based legal nonprofit has filed similar actions in all 50 states and will go to trial in September with a group of young Hawaiians suing their state’s transportation department, claiming it is allowing rampant tailpipe pollution. The group also supports the 21 young plaintiffs in Juliana vs. United States, who will get their day in federal court after amending their complaint that actions by the federal government have caused climate change and violated their constitutional rights.

    When the Ninth Circuit put the Juliana case back on track, 18 Republican-led states – including Montana – tried to intervene as defendants and take on the so-called Climate Kids but were rejected.

    It is likely the case will reach the US Supreme Court.

    Back in the Wild West days of 1889, Montana’s original constitution was written under the guidance of a copper baron named William Clark, who claimed that arsenic pollution from mining gave the women of Butte “a beautiful complexion.”

    But less than a century later, mining and logging had done obvious harm to the rivers, skies and mountainsides of “the last best place,” just as the movements for social change and environmental protection were sweeping the nation.

    This was the backdrop when in 1972, 100 Montanans from all walks of life gathered in the town of Last Chance Gulch to hammer out a new constitution with not a single active politician among them. Mae Nan Ellingson was the youngest delegate back then, and as the plaintiffs set out to establish the intent behind “a clean and healthful environment for present and future generations,” she became the first witness in Held vs. Montana.

    “It was important, I think, for this constitution to make it clear that citizens could enforce their right to a clean environment and not wait until the pollution or the damage had been done,” she testified.

    The Montana Supreme Court agreed with her in a 1999 ruling and the majority wrote, “Our constitution does not require that dead fish float on the surface of our state’s rivers and streams before its farsighted environmental protections can be invoked.”

    Claire Vlases, one of the young plaintiffs, is hopeful the court will check the power of the legislature.

    Regardless of the verdict, it is likely that Held vs. Montana will end up in Montana’s Supreme Court, but for plaintiffs like Claire Vlases who are too young to vote, that will be just fine.

    “I just recently graduated high school, but I think that’s something everyone knows is that we have three branches of government for a reason,” she said, sitting by the river that runs through her Bozeman yard. “The judicial branch is there to keep a check on the other two branches. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

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  • Four major environmental groups endorse Biden’s reelection | CNN Politics

    Four major environmental groups endorse Biden’s reelection | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Four major environmental groups endorsed President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection for president on Wednesday night, ahead of his speech at a League of Conservation Voters dinner in the nation’s capital.

    LCV Action Fund, NextGen PAC, the Sierra Club, and the NRDC Action Fund endorsed Biden together at the dinner, which is honoring former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It is the first time all four groups have issued a joint endorsement, Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, told CNN.

    During his remarks at the event, Biden touched on the hazardous air quality stemming from wildfires in Canada that hung over much of the American Midwest and Northeast last week, noting that while there are many threats to future generations, climate change “is the only truly existential threat.”

    “If we don’t meet the requirements that we’re looking at, we’re in real trouble,” Biden said, adding that work of the environmental groups “has never been more important than it is today. Together we’ve made a lot of progress so far, but we’ve got to finish the job.”

    The president listed his environmental wins to applause from the crowd, including new acreage that his administration has designated for conservation.

    Sittenfeld said the endorsement is a recognition of Biden’s achievements on climate, clean energy, and environmental justice, including the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and strong federal regulations issued by Biden administration agencies.

    “They have done more than any administration in history by far to address the climate crisis and advance clean energy solutions and environmental justice,” Sittenfeld told CNN.

    Sittenfeld said environmental groups want to see Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris elected for four more years so they can “finish the job” on their climate agenda, especially given that Republican candidates running for president could undo part of that agenda.

    “The stakes have never been higher and we’ve seen day after day MAGA Republicans in Congress trying to gut commonsense climate progress,” Sittenfeld told CNN, adding the contrast between Biden and Republican candidates for president “could not be more stark.”

    “Clearly as much progress as we’ve made, there’s so much more needed,” Sittenfeld said.

    “We are endorsing because of the transformational progress we already made and the progress they’re going to continue to make,” former EPA administrator Carol Browner, the chair of LCV’s board of directors, echoed.

    The four groups have considerable sway in the environmental movement and the Biden administration. Their political arms have spent millions of dollars on past elections and mobilized voters across the country on climate issues.

    The Sierra Club is one of the oldest environmental groups in the country, while NextGen calls itself the nation’s biggest group mobilizing youth voters. Meanwhile, Biden’s first White House Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy came most recently from NRDC before serving in her post (McCarthy was also EPA administrator in the Obama administration).

    “President Biden’s climate leadership has been nothing short of historic,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the NRDC Action Fund, said in a statement.

    However significant the groups early endorsement of Biden is, it doesn’t necessarily represent the views of the entire climate movement. Some groups and activists have recently expressed frustration with the president and his administration for approving fossil fuel projects, most recently pushing for the Mountain Valley pipeline to be included in the debt limit law.

    As wildfire smoke choked DC’s air quality last Thursday, activists staged a large sit-in outside of the White House to protest the pipeline.

    “President Biden, we are all out here because we want you to declare a climate emergency and do the right thing,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a progressive Democrat from Michigan, told the crowd.

    As CNN has reported, a White House official had said the White House pushed for the pipeline to be included in the debt limit provision to deliver on a compromise that the White House and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer struck with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia last year to secure his vote for the Inflation Reduction Act.

    But some climate activists balked at that reasoning, saying they want to see Biden reject fossil fuel projects in addition to passing bold climate bills.

    “Why does Manchin get priority over millions of young people who put their disillusionment aside to vote in 2020 and 2022?” said Elise Joshi, acting executive director of youth group Gen-Z for Change. “Every single time young people are showing up for the Democratic Party, and the uphold of promises doesn’t seem to apply to us.”

    Joshi said she will ultimately vote for Biden in the 2024 election, but added the president needs to give her and young people more reasons to turn out enthusiastically for him.

    “Most importantly I don’t want a Republican presidency, we know that would be horrific,” she said. “But if (Biden) is our best option of two, why not make that option better?”

    This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.

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  • Tens of thousands evacuated as India and Pakistan brace for Cyclone Biparjoy | CNN

    Tens of thousands evacuated as India and Pakistan brace for Cyclone Biparjoy | CNN

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    Islamabad and New Delhi
    CNN
     — 

    Tens of thousands of people are being evacuated as India and Pakistan brace for the impact of Cyclone Biparjoy, which is expected to make landfall in densely populated areas across the subcontinent Thursday, putting millions of lives at risk.

    Biparjoy has been churning across the northeastern Arabian Sea, heading toward southern Pakistan and western India since late last week, with winds of 160 kph (100 mph) and gusts up to 195 kph (121 mph). It has weakened slightly since Tuesday, sustaining winds of 150 kph (90 mph), equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane.

    Landfall is expected Thursday afternoon local time, bringing the triple threat of heavy rain, damaging winds and coastal storm surges across the region, according to the India Meteorological Department.

    Mass evacuations have started in Pakistan’s Sindh province, with about 60,000 people sent to temporary shelters, according to local authorities.

    The provincial capital Karachi – Pakistan’s largest city, with a population of 22 million – has shut malls and businesses along the coast.

    Pakistan’s national carrier, PIA, has implemented a string of precautionary measures, including operating round-the-clock security to minimize any potential hazard to lives or equipment.

    In India’s Gujarat state, more than 8,000 people have been evacuated from coastal areas, according to the state’s health minister. Livestock have also been moved to higher ground, he said, adding some schools have been ordered to shut and fishing suspended.

    Heavy rainfall warnings are in place over the northern Gujarat region, where total rainfall may reach 10 inches, leading to flash flooding and landslides.

    In neighboring Maharashtra state, home to about 27 million people and a sizable fishing community, strong winds are expected to hit parts of the financial capital Mumbai. High waves slammed into coastal roads this week, turning roads into rivers.

    Four boys drowned off the coast of Mumbai on Monday, Rashmi Lokhande, a senior disaster official for the regional administrative body, told CNN.

    Since the drownings, local authorities have deployed police officers and lifeguards along the beaches to prevent people from going into the sea.

    Authorities in both countries have been warning residents to seek shelter and stay safe.

    Pakistan’s Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman has warned against reading too much into the storm’s slight weakening, saying on Twitter “it is highly unpredictable so please do not take it casually.”

    Cyclone Biparjoy comes less than one year after record monsoon rain and melting glaciers devastated swathes of Pakistan, claiming the lives of nearly 1,600 people.

    On that occasion, the force of the floodwater washed away homes, leaving tens of thousands stranded on the road without food or clean water and vulnerable to waterborne diseases.

    An analysis of last year’s floods by the World Weather Attribution initiative found that the climate crisis had played a role. It said that the crisis may have increased the intensity of rainfall by up to 50%, in relation to a five-day downpour that hit the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan.

    People gather near the shore before the arrival of Cyclone Biparjoy at Clifton Beach in Karachi, Pakistan, on June 13.

    The analysis also found that the floods were likely a 1-in-100-year event, meaning that there is a 1% chance of similarly heavy rainfall each year.

    A study published in 2021 by researchers at the Shenzhen Institute of Meteorological Innovation and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and published in Frontiers in Earth Science, found that tropical cyclones in Asia could have double the destructive power by the end of the century, with scientists saying the human-made climate crisis is already making them stronger.

    That year, Tropical Cyclone Tauktae, one of the strongest storms on record, slammed into India’s west coast, killing at least 26 people across five states.

    Tropical cyclones are among the most dangerous natural disasters. Over the past 50 years, these cyclones have led to nearly 780,000 deaths and around $1.4 billion worth of economic losses globally, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

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  • How charging drivers to go downtown would transform American cities | CNN Business

    How charging drivers to go downtown would transform American cities | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden’s administration is set to allow New York City to move forward with a landmark program that will toll vehicles entering Lower Manhattan, after a public review period ends Monday.

    The toll is formally known as the Central Business District Tolling Program — but it’s commonly called “congestion pricing.”

    In practice it works like any other toll, but because it specifically charges people to drive in the traffic-choked area below 60th street in Manhattan, it would be the first program of its kind in the United States.

    Proposals range from charging vehicles $9 to $23 during peak hours, and it’s set to go into effect next spring.

    The plan had been delayed for years, but it cleared a milestone last month when the Federal Highway Administration signed off on the release of an environmental assessment. The public has until Monday to review the report, and the federal government is widely expected to approve it shortly after.

    From there, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) can finalize toll rates, as well as discounts and exemptions for certain drivers.

    New York City is still clawing out of from the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Congestion pricing advocates say it’s a crucial piece of the city’s recovery and a way to re-imagine the city for the future.

    “This program is critical to New York City’s long-term success,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said last month.

    The plan would also mark the culmination of more than a half-century of efforts to implement congestion pricing in New York City. Despite support from several New York City mayors and state governors, car and truck owners in outer boroughs and the suburbs helped defeat proposals.

    In 2007 Mayor Michael Bloomberg called congestion “the elephant in the room” when proposing a toll program, which state lawmakers killed. A decade later, Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who had long resisted congestion pricing — said it was “an idea whose time has come” and declared a subway state of emergency after increased delays and a derailment that injured dozens. Two years later, the state gave the MTA approval to design a congestion pricing program.

    Ultimately, it was the need to improve New York City’s public transit that became the rallying cry for congestion pricing.

    Each day 700,000 cars, taxis and trucks pour into Lower Manhattan, one of the busiest areas in the world with some of the worst gridlock in the United States.

    Car travel at just 7.1 mph on average in the congestion price zone, and it’s a downward trend. Public bus speeds have also declined 28% since 2010. New Yorkers lose 117 hours on average each year sitting in traffic, costing them nearly $2,000 in lost productivity and other costs, according to one estimate.

    The toll is designed to reduce the number of vehicles entering the congestion zone by at least 10% every day and slash the number of miles cars travel within the zone by 5%.

    Congestion comes with physical and societal costs, too: more accidents, carbon emissions and pollution happen as belching, honking cars take up space that could be optimized for pedestrians and outdoor dining.

    Proponents also note it will improve public transit, an essential part of New York life. About 75% of trips downtown are via public transit.

    But public-transit ridership is 35% to 45% lower compared to pre-pandemic levels. The MTA says congestion fees will generate a critical source of revenue to fund $15 billion in future investments to modernize the city’s 100-year-old public transit system.

    The improvements, like new subway cars and electric signals, are crucial to draw new riders and improve speed and accessibility — especially for low-income and minority residents, who are least likely to own cars, say plan advocates.

    New York City is “dependent on public transit,” said Kate Slevin, the executive vice president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning and policy group. “We’re relying on that revenue to pay for needed upgrades and investments that ensure reliable, good transit service.”

    Improving public transportation is also key to New York City’s post-pandemic economic recovery: If commutes to work are too unreliable, people are less likely to visit the office and shop at stores around their workplaces. Congestion charge advocates hope the program will create more space for amenities like wider sidewalks, bike lanes, plazas, benches, trees and public bathrooms.

    “100 years ago we decided the automobile was the way to go, so we narrowed sidewalks and built highways,” said Sam Schwartz, former New York City traffic commissioner and founder of an eponymous consulting firm. “But the future of New York City is that the pedestrian should be king and queen. Everything should be subservient to the pedestrian.”

    While no other US city has yet implemented congestion pricing, Stockholm, London and Singapore have had it for years.

    These cities have reported benefits like decreased carbon dioxide pollution, higher average speeds, and congestion reduction.

    Just one year after London added its charge in 2003, traffic congestion dropped by 30% and average speeds increased by the same percentage. In Stockholm, one study found the rate of children’s acute asthma visits to the doctor fell by about 50% compared to rates before the program launched in 2007.

    Some groups are fiercely opposed to congestion charges in New York City, however. Taxi and ride-share drivers, largely a low-income and immigrant workforce, fear it will hurt drivers already struggling to make ends meet. The MTA said congestion pricing could reduce demand for taxis by up to 17% in the zone.

    Commuters and legislators from New York City’s outer boroughs and New Jersey say the program hurts drivers who have no viable way to reach downtown Manhattan other than by car, and that this would disproportionately impact low-income drivers. (But out of a region of 28 million people, just an estimated 16,100 low-income people commute to work via car in Lower Manhattan, according to the MTA.)

    Other critics say it could divert more traffic and pollution from diesel trucks in Manhattan into lower-income areas like the Bronx, which has the highest rates of asthma hospitalization in the city.

    The MTA and other agencies have plans to mitigate many of these adverse effects, however.

    Taxis and for-hire vehicles will be tolled only once a day. Drivers who make less than $50,000 a year or are enrolled in certain government aid programs will get 25% discounts after their first 10 trips every month. Trucks and other vehicles will get 50% discounts during overnight hours.

    Additionally, the MTA pledged $10 million to install air filtration units in schools near highways, $20 million for a program to fight asthma, and other investments to improve air quality and the enviornment in areas where more traffic could be diverted.

    The stakes of New York City’s program are high, and leaders in other cities are watching the results closely.

    If successful, congestion pricing could be a model for other US cities, which are trying to recover from the pandemic and face similar challenges of climate change and aging public infrastructure.

    “It’s good to see New York City’s program is moving forward,” said the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board last month. “Los Angeles should watch, learn and go next.”

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  • A ‘once-in-200 years’ heat wave caught Southeast Asia off guard. Climate change will make them more common | CNN

    A ‘once-in-200 years’ heat wave caught Southeast Asia off guard. Climate change will make them more common | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Every day, countless mopeds criss-cross the congested city of Hanoi, in Vietnam, with commuters traveling to work or motorbike taxis dropping off everything from parcels to cooked food and clients.

    One of them is Phong, 42, who starts his shift at 5 a.m. to beat the rush hour, navigating the dense swarm of mopeds and drives for over 12 hours a day with little rest.

    But an unprecedented heat wave that engulfed his country in the past two months has made Phong’s job even more arduous. To get through the heat of the day, he equipped himself with a hat, wet handkerchiefs and several bottles of water – precautions that provided little relief as recorded daytime temperatures soared to more than 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

    The average May temperature in Hanoi is 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit).

    “If I get a heatstroke, I would be forced to suspend driving to recover,” he told CNN. “But I cannot afford it.” 

    Phong, who declined to give his surname, said he carries a tiny umbrella to protect his phone, the main tool he uses for work as a driver for the ride-hailing platform Grab, along with his bike. If the phone breaks, he misses out on much-needed income. “I was worried that the battery would overheat once exposed to the sun,” he said.

    Nearby in the same city, sanitation worker Dinh Van Hung, 53, toils all day cleaning garbage from the bustling streets of Hanoi’s central Dong Da district.

    “It is impossible to avoid the heat, especially at noon and early afternoon,” Dinh told CNN. “Extreme temperatures also make the garbage smell more unpleasant, the hard work is now even more difficult, directly affecting my health and labor.”

    Dinh says “there is no other way” but to change when he starts and finishes his shift.

    “I try to work early in the morning or afternoon and evening,” he said. “During lunch break when the temperature is too high, I find a sidewalk in a small alley, spread out the cardboard sheets to rest for a while and then resume work in the afternoon.” 

    Phong and Dinh are among millions of drivers, street vendors, cleaners, builders, farmers, and other outdoor or informal economy workers across Southeast Asia who were hit the hardest during what experts called the region’s “harshest heat wave on record.” 

    Workers like them make up the backbone of many societies but are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events, with dangerously high temperatures greatly impacting their health and the already precarious nature of their professions.

    April and May are typically the hottest months of the year in Southeast Asia, as temperatures rise before monsoon rains bring some relief. But this year, they reached levels never experienced before in most countries of the region, including tourism hotspots Thailand and Vietnam. 

    Thailand saw its hottest day in history at 45.4 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Fahrenheit) on April 15, while neighboring Laos topped out at 43.5 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit) for two consecutive days in May, and Vietnam’s all-time record was broken in early May with 44.2 degrees Celsius (112 degrees Fahrenheit), according to analysis of weather stations data by a climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera.

    Herrera described it as “the most brutal never-ending heat wave” that has continued into June. On June 1, Vietnam broke the record for its hottest June day in history with 43.8 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) – with 29 days of the month to go.

    In a recent report from the World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international coalition of scientists said the April heat wave in Southeast Asia was a once-in-200-years event that would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.

    The scorching heat in Southeast Asia was made even more unbearable and dangerous due to high humidity – a deadly combination.

    Humidity, on top of extreme temperatures, makes it even harder for your body to try and cool itself down.

    Heat-related illnesses, such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion, have severe symptoms and can be life-threatening, especially for those with heart disease and kidney problems, diabetes, and pregnant people.

    “When the surrounding humidity is very high, the body will continue to sweat trying to release moisture to cool itself, but because the sweat is not evaporating it will eventually lead to severe dehydration, and in acute cases it can lead to heat strokes and deaths,” said Mariam Zachariah, research associate in near-real time attribution of extreme events to climate change at World Weather Attribution initiative at Imperial College London. 

    “Which is why a humid heat wave is more dangerous than a dry heat wave,” she told CNN.

    To understand the health risks of humid heat, scientists often calculate the “feels-like” temperature – a single measure of how hot it feels to the human body when air temperature and humidity are both taken into account, sometimes alongside other factors such as wind chill.

    Perceived heat is usually several degrees higher than observed temperature and gives a more accurate reading of how heat affects people.

    CNN analysis of Copernicus Climate Change Service data found that between early April and late May, all six countries in the continental portion of Southeast Asia had reached perceived temperatures close to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) or more every single day. This is above a threshold considered dangerous, especially for people with health problems or those not used to extreme heat.

    In Thailand, 20 days in April and at least 10 days in May reached feels-like temperatures above 46 degrees Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit). At this level, thermal heat stress becomes “extreme” and is considered life threatening for anybody including healthy people used to extreme humid heat.

    Throughout April and May, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Malaysia all had several days with potential to cause extreme heat stress. Myanmar had 12 such days – until Cyclone Mocha brought relative relief, but severe devastation, when it made landfall on May 14.

    The April-May heat wave in Southeast Asia caused widespread hospitalizations, damaged roads, sparked fires and led to school closures, however the number of deaths remains unknown, according to the World Weather Attribution report.

     The study found that, because of climate change, the heat was more than two degrees hotter in perceived temperature than it could have been without global warming caused by pollution.

    “When the atmosphere becomes warmer, its ability to hold the moisture becomes higher and therefore the chances of humid heat waves also increase,” Zachariah, one of the authors, told CNN.

    If global warming continues to increase to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), such humid heat waves could occur ten times more often, according to the study. 

    And if emissions continue to increase at the same pace, the next two decades could already see 30 more deaths per million from heat in Thailand, and 130 more deaths per million by the end of the century, according to the UN’s Human Climate Horizons projections.

    For Myanmar that number would be 30 and 520 more deaths per million respectively, for Cambodia – 40 and 270, data shows.

    Extreme weather events also expose systemic inequalities.

    “Occupation, age, health conditions and disabilities, access to health care services, socioeconomic status, even gender – these are all factors that can make people more or less vulnerable to heat waves,” said Chaya Vaddhanaphuti, one of the WWA report’s authors and lecturer at the department of geography at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

    Marginalized members of society, those without adequate access to healthcare and cooling systems, and those in jobs that are exposed to extremely hot and humid conditions are most at risk of heat stress.

    “It’s important to talk about who can adapt, who can cope, and who has the resources to be able to do this,” Emmanuel Raju, also an author and director of the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, said in a press conference on May 17.

    “For those working in the informal economy a lost day means a day lost in wages,” Raju said.

    More than 60% of the employed population in Southeast Asia work in informal employment, and over 80% in Cambodia and Myanmar, according to a 2018 International Labour Organization (ILO) report.

    Farmers and children harvest rice in a field in the southern Thai province of Narathiwat on March 27.

    In late April, Thai health authorities issued an extreme heat alert for the capital Bangkok and several other places across the country, warning people to stay indoors and of heat stroke dangers.

    But for migrant workers like Supot Klongsap, nicknamed “Nui,” who temporarily left his home to work in construction in Bangkok during the pre-monsoon season, staying indoors was simply not an option.

    He said that this year’s hot season was exceptional, causing him to sweat all the time and feel exhausted. “I started to sweat from 8 a.m., and it was difficult to work. I felt very exhausted from losing so much water.”

    Nui, who slept at the construction site, said even the nights were unbearable. “Water coming from the pipe even during nighttime remained very hot just like it was boiled. It was difficult to find comfort.” 

    He said the accommodation for construction workers is roofed and walled with corrugated sheets, and it barely protects from heat. Any access to air-conditioned rooms is a luxury Nui couldn’t afford. “We had to rely on buying ice and adding it to our drinks, our simple way to cool down,” he said.

    A 2021 study found that outdoor workers in developing countries have higher core body temperature than to those working indoors, and they are two to three times more at risk of dehydration, leading to a higher chance of reduced kidney function and other related conditions. 

    Pedestrians use umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun in Bangkok, Thailand, on April 25.

     In Thailand, the government recommends reactive measures, such as staying indoors, hydrating adequately, wearing light-colored clothes, and avoiding certain foods, Chaya told CNN. 

    “But that doesn’t mean that everybody has the same capacity to do so.” 

    The burden of cost often falls on individuals, Chaya said, making it their responsibility to cope with the heat.

    What is needed, he said, is a cohesive international plan that can protect the more vulnerable populations in the face of increasing climate change risks, and proactive measures to prevent potential health issues.

    Governments need to develop large-scale solutions, such as early warning systems for heat, passive and active cooling for all, urban planning, and heat action plans, World Weather Attribution scientists recommended in their report.

    Intensifying heat waves not only affect individuals’ health, but threaten the environment and people’s livelihoods, worsen air quality, destroy crops, increase wildfire risk, and damage infrastructure – so the need for government action plans on heat waves are vital.

     In Yotpieng and Phon villages in northeastern Laos, people’s livelihoods are intimately connected with weather patterns.

     Villagers’ lives here revolve around tea. For centuries, every day at 7 a.m. the tea farmers start collecting leaves, until 11 a.m. when they would bring the harvest back home. The survival of these communities depends on collecting tea leaves to generate income for whole families.

    But this year’s extreme heat is disrupting their ability to work according to their ancient working habits – they had to change from working in the morning to the afternoon during heat waves, and they are worried the quality and quantity of tea leaves will be affected, members of the local community told CNN.

     ”[The] weather is extremely hot for everyone this year and farmers are struggling,” according to Chintanaphone Keovichith, management officer at the Lao Farmer Network.

     “This year the weather is hotter than last year, and the tea leaves are dry,” said tea farmer, Boua Seng.

    The manager of a 1,000-year-old tea processing factory, Vieng Samai Lobia Yaw, said she is worried this year’s tea leaves have not grown enough, which decreases harvest by almost 50% daily.

    This photo taken on May 30 shows a woman watering her rooftop to cool it down in Hanoi, Vietnam.

    “It’s so wasteful – we spend more capital on laborers’ fees but getting less product,” she said.

    For now, tea farmers in Laos have invented solutions to protect their trees. Some have planted large fruit trees, such as peach or plum, to provide shade for tea plantations, while others added more compost to nourish their plants.

    “The tea [trees] in the shade will have a nice green leaf, but the ones without shade will have yellow leaf,” explained tea farmer Thongsouk. “We also collect additional income by selling fruit products.” 

    But they cannot do it alone.

    Without a comprehensive international approach to rapidly reduce planet-warming pollution and to address the interconnected impacts of extreme weather events on individuals, communities, and the environment, the health and economic costs from heat waves will only worsen as the climate crisis unfolds.

    As May turns into June, many are still waiting for some respite.

    “May was the worst month – that’s when the rain usually comes in, but this year [it] still hasn’t arrived yet,” said Chintanaphone.

    Data graphics
    Lou Robinson and Krystina Shveda

    Editing
    Helen Regan

    Photo editing
    Noemi Cassanelli

    Additional reporting
    Kocha Olarn in Bangkok

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