The program, which will be administered jointly by the California Labor & Workforce Development Agency and the Department of Social Services, will include case review services, legal advice and representation by an attorney, according to the governor’s office.

“Farmworkers are the backbone of our economy and we won’t stand by as bad actors use the threat of deportation as a form of exploitation,” Newsom said in a statement.

“In the absence of Congress modernizing our broken, outdated immigration system, California continues our efforts to support immigrant families,” the governor added.

Legal services will be available to farmworkers whose cases are under review in the Department of Industrial Relations’s Labor Commissioner’s Office, the Division of Occupational Safety and Health or the Agricultural Relations Board, per the terms of the program.

The pilot will focus on supporting the enforcement of labor rights, particularly during worksite-wide investigations, and will not be limited based on an individual’s immigration status, the terms stressed.  

About half of California’s farmworkers are undocumented. Fears of retaliation from employers — such as threats of deportation — are common reasons why many individuals do not submit labor claims, the governor’s office noted.

“Prosecutorial discretion ensures that farmworkers will be empowered to enforce their labor rights and stand up against the abuse and exploitation they often face,” Diana Tellefson Torres, CEO of the United Farm Workers Foundation, said in a statement.

“It is of utmost importance that undocumented workers have access to free and low-cost legal services, so that any farmworker who has experienced workplace violations can come forward knowing they are protected from deportation,” Tellefson Torres added.

Cancer-linked “forever chemicals” and certain compounds used in plastic production may be associated with a heightened risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, according to a study from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Exposure to these substances — which are all widespread in the San Francisco region — could carry an increased threat of gestational diabetes, life-threatening preeclampsia and pregnancy hypertension in Bay Area individuals, according to a study published Wednesday in Environmental Health Perspectives.

“While many chemicals used in plastics and other products are assumed to be safe, our study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that many of these chemicals are leading to subtle changes in health outcomes that are cause for concern,” lead author Jessica Trowbridge, of UCSF’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, said in a statement.  

Describing prenatal exposures to environmental contaminants as “ubiquitous in the United States,” the authors stressed that fewer than 1 percent of the more than 40,000 chemicals that are processed, imported or used in the U.S. are routinely monitored for their presence in the human body.

Even fewer compounds, they explained, are evaluated for adverse health impacts during pregnancy, even though existing research has shown that such exposures “can have lifelong consequences for maternal and child health outcomes.”

To shed light on the impacts of specific compounds, Trowbridge and her colleagues took maternal and umbilical cord samples from 302 participants in the “Chemicals in Our Bodies” group — a pregnancy cohort within the National Institutes of Health Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes Program.

The researchers measured for the presence of two types of “forever chemicals,” PFOS and PFHxS, which are part of an umbrella group of thousands of synthetic and long-lasting compounds, called per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS).

These substances, which are linked to thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer and other illnesses, are found in certain firefighting foams and a variety of household products, such as nonstick pans, cosmetics and waterproof apparel.

In addition to measuring PFAS levels, the scientists also looked for monoethylhexyl phthalate (MEHP), a common plasticizer; 4-nitrophenol, a known endocrine disruptor used in pesticides, dyes and pharmaceuticals; and tetraethylene glycol, a plasticizer and solvent.

They also assessed levels of deoxycholic acid, a bile acid associated with gestational diabetes, as well as those of tridecanedioic and octadecanedioic acids — two types of fatty acids used in plastic synthesis that had previously only been linked to Reye syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by liver failure.

Ultimately, the researchers detected PFOS, PFHxS, octadecanedioic acid and deoxycholic acid in at least 97 percent of the maternal samples.

Meanwhile, they found deoxycholic acid, tridecanedioic acid and PFHxS in at least 87 percent of cord blood samples — meaning, these compounds readily pass through the placenta.

As far as MEHP, 4-nitrophenol and tetraethylene glycol were concerned, the scientists observed these compounds in fewer than 50 percent of the maternal samples. They therefore excluded these substances from further analyses.

The scientists identified pregnancy complications — gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and pregnancy-related hypertension — by accessing clinical diagnoses and medical records, as well as glucose tolerance tests for diabetes in particular.

They found that 19 percent of participants had a diagnosis of gestational diabetes, 14 percent had gestational hypertension and 7 percent had preeclampsia.

After modeling all the data, the authors observed a trend of increased odds of gestational diabetes as exposure to environmental contaminants rose, with the strongest connections to PFOS, octadecanedioic acid, tridecanedioic acid and deoxycholic acid.

Regarding pregnancy hypertensive disorders — including both preeclampsia and gestational hypertension — they found that exposure to tridecanedioic acid came with the greatest risk.

“The association between these chemicals and an increased risk of poor pregnancy outcomes … should be a wake-up call on the effects of the proliferation of plastic chemicals and PFAS,” senior author Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, said in a statement.

“I hope policymakers and EPA regulators will take a good, hard look at the results of this study and others that show a link between plastic chemicals and PFAS and health harms,” Woodruff added. 

When reservoir levels and river flows succumb to dry heat, hydropower plants can no longer operate — meaning that utilities must kindle facilities that burn coal and natural gas to meet rising electricity demand.

But the researchers found that with such a shift comes dramatic consequences.

This sharp transition from hydropower to fossil fuels results in surging carbon dioxide emissions, methane leakages, air quality-related deaths and enormous financial expenses, the scientists recently revealed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The impact on greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and human health could represent a large and unaccounted-for cost of climate change,” lead author Minghao Qiu, a postdoctoral scholar in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, said in a statement.

Qiu and his colleagues calculated that the total health and economic damages caused by drought-driven fossil fuel power generation in the U.S. was equivalent to about $20 billion between 2001 and 2021.

Carbon emissions were the biggest contributor to these damages, costing about $14 billion, while deaths associated with fine particle pollution accounted for about $5.1 billion and methane leakages were responsible for just under $1 billion, according to the study.

To draw their conclusions, the authors conducted their calculations based on widely accepted estimates for costs of carbon and methane emissions.

They assessed the statistical value of a human life based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s “mortality risk valuation” — a measure that considers how much people are willing to pay for small reductions in air pollution-related risks of death.

The authors also used best available estimates to ascertain how much methane leaks to the atmosphere during the production, processing and transportation of oil and gas: 2.3 percent per unit of gas consumed.

Under extreme drought conditions, electricity generation from individual fossil fuel plants can skyrocket up to 65 percent relative to average conditions, mostly due to the need to compensate for lost hydropower, according to the study.

And the resultant pollution does not respect state lines.

More than 54 percent of this drought-driven, fossil fuel-based electricity production is transboundary, with drought in one region leading to net imports of electricity — and therefore increasing emissions from power plants in other regions, the authors found.

“This is not a local story,” Qiu said. “A climate shock in one place can have serious ramifications for a totally different geographic area due to the interconnected nature of many energy systems.”

The total monetized costs of excess death and greenhouse gas emissions are about 1.2 to 2.5 times greater than reported economic costs that directly result from reduced hydropower production, the researchers estimated.

In California alone, the drought-induced shift away from hydropower electricity production led to more than $5 billion in damages from 2012 to 2016, or 2.5 times the direct economic cost of switching to more expensive fossil fuels, according to the study.

Those states that are heavily dependent on hydropower for their electricity — such as California, Washington and Oregon — have suffered particularly dramatic effects from the switch to fossil fuel reliance during dry periods.

During future years of extreme drought, such shifts could end up responsible for up to 40 percent of total emissions released via electricity production, the scientists warned.

Previous research, they contended, has underestimated the toll droughts are taking on electricity systems by failing to account for factors beyond the direct economic costs of these disruptions.

Increasingly frequent extreme heat periods will therefore present a challenge to policymakers set on achieving net-zero emission goals in hero-dependent states, according to the authors.

While this specific study focused on the American West, the researchers stressed that many countries around the world are facing similar risks.

Higher-emitting coal-fired plants could end up replacing lost resources in some nations, as opposed to the comparatively lower-emitting fossil fuel — natural gas — that tends to stand in for hydropower in the West, the authors explained.

Meanwhile, other countries that lack excess generation capacity could endure blackouts if hydropower operations shut down, they warned.

“In these regions, drought’s interaction with the energy system can have a cascading series of negative impacts on emissions and health,” corresponding author Marshall Burke, an associate professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, said in a statement.

Going forward, the scientists recommended that policymakers implement “more ambitious and targeted measures” to mitigate the both the emissions and health burden that stems from the electricity sector during drought.

“If we want to solve this issue, we need an even greater expansion of renewable energy alongside better energy storage, so we don’t need to tap into fossil fuels as much,” Qiu said.

“Ultimately, to limit future warming and the drought risks that come with it, we need to reduce our emissions,” he added.

The bill, which would expedite the development of multifamily housing, including in previously exempt coastal zones, overcame a significant hurdle this week, as the state legislature heads into a month of summer recess.

Those in favor of SB 423, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), view the legislation as a critical tool that could alleviate the state’s housing crisis while protecting the integrity of California’s coast.

But many opponents fear the bill could drive a wedge between housing and environmental interests, in a state that for decades has been a national benchmark for climate policy.

“That is really backwards,” Wiener told The Hill, describing this perspective as a “narrow view of what climate action is.”

“When you oppose putting dense, affordable housing in our existing urbanized communities, then all you're doing is fueling sprawl, and more driving, and more carbon emissions,” he said.

Despite the deep divides regarding SB 423’s fate, the legislation advanced Monday at a fiery hearing in the State Assembly Natural Resources Committee, garnering bipartisan support.

Three of the seven members who supported it were Republicans, while all four votes against were Democrats, including the committee’s chair.

“I calculated, I think, four and a half years since I've walked into a committee without having full agreement with the chair,” Wiener said at the hearing, noting that he has introduced 140 bills.

SB 423 seeks to extend Wiener’s existing SB 35, a 2017 law that launched a streamlined, opt-in approval process for multifamily housing in cities that have not yet met their housing targets.

Projects built through SB 35, which is set to sunset in 2025, must comply with existing residential and mixed-use zoning and set aside at least 10 percent of units for lower-income families.

From 2018 through 2021 alone, developers proposed nearly 18,000 units of affordable housing under the law, according to a recent analysis from University of California, Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Three-quarters of these units were designated for lower-income households — or those below 80 percent of their area’s median income, per the analysis.

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D), co-author of SB 423, described its predecessor as “one of the most impactful laws on the books in the state of California to actually build affordable housing.”

SB 423 bill would not only extend SB 35’s provisions through 2036, but it would also incorporate stronger labor standards signed into law last year. Mixed-income projects that surpass 85 feet would only be eligible for streamlining if they included a skilled and trained workforce.

Among the most divisive elements in SB 423, however, is its deletion of a provision in SB 35 that had prohibited the streamlining of multifamily housing projects in coastal zones.

“We're not looking to build new homes on coastal bluffs or in sensitive areas,” Wiener told The Hill, noting that the bill includes many exclusions. “But the coastal zone includes places like Santa Monica, and Santa Cruz and parts of Los Angeles.”

Trade organizations representing carpenters, laborers and operating engineers have all voiced their support for the legislation, Wicks noted at the hearing.

“This is a labor-friendly, labor-positive bill,” said Jay Bradshaw, executive officer of the Nor Cal Carpenters Union, on behalf of a broad coalition of laborers. “We need 2.5 million housing units as fast as possible.”

Workers in California’s coastal communities travel about 10 percent more each day than commuters heading elsewhere, according to a 2015 report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office. These communities also take about two-and-a-half months longer than inland towns to issue building permits: seven versus four-and-a-half months, per the report.

While recognizing the need for more affordable housing, SB 423’s opponents expressed alarm about streamlining the development of multifamily housing along California’s coast.

Sean Drake, a senior legislative analyst for the California Coastal Commission, told committee members Monday that while he and his colleagues disapprove of SB 423 in its current form, they would be willing to remove their opposition with the addition of certain amendments.

Important provisions include limiting such development to areas already zoned for residential or multifamily use, to protect businesses that are “enjoyable for everyone to visit,” Drake said.

Addressing this demand, Wiener told The Hill that “SB 423 only applies to areas that are already zoned residentially — period, end of story.”

“The Coastal Commission has been spreading misinformation in that regard that is just absolutely inaccurate,” he said.

The Commission called for an amendment that would ban streamlining in “areas vulnerable to five feet of sea level rise as determined by best available science,” according to a document shared with The Hill. Such steps would aim to address concerns that homes could become uninhabitable in the coming decades.

In response to this request, revisions from Wiener suggested a ban in “areas vulnerable to three feet of sea level rise as determined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the Ocean Protection Council.”

At the Monday hearing, Drake stressed that construction practices must look toward the year 2100, by which time low and moderate projections for sea level rise are five feet or more.

“Five feet is the lowest benchmark that we think is acceptable for ensuring that housing will actually be protected for its useful life, and that we’re not locating affordable housing in sacrifice zones,” he said.

Laura Walsh, California policy manager for the Surfrider Foundation, echoed Drake’s sentiments, noting that “five feet is a very conservative estimate.”

Walsh also expressed fears that the bill could become “a Trojan horse” that might “deregulate qualified housing development along a very thin strip of land that contains some of the nation's most lucrative real estate.”

At the hearing, Wiener responded to concerns about rising sea levels, saying that although he is “open to five feet,” he had adopted federal standards because “best available science” is not an objective measure.

Revisiting this point Friday, Wiener said the parties are “very close to an agreement” on sea level rise and on identifying an objective measurement standard.

The state senator also stressed that even if the bill stayed as is, about 85 percent of California’s coastal zone would still be exempt from the streamlined development process.

While Natural Resources Committee members remain at odds over the current version of the bill, these divisions did not necessarily align with partisan interests.

Among the most vocal opponents was Committee Chair Luz M. Rivas (D), who said that her San Fernando Valley constituents — including families of four with collective annual incomes of $30,000 — would not “be able to afford the housing that's built through this bill.”

Rivas commended Wiener for getting labor groups on board with the bill, but she took issue with potential coastal, wildfire and environmental justice effects.

She emphasized the need to include stronger language on wildfire risk, referring to a revision to the bill that she proposed in a legislative analysis of SB 423. The concern in this case is "[again, think we just want to be a little more explicit about what the concern is — that new affordable housing and its denizens could be vulnerable to fires."

Rivas’s analysis proposed keeping a clause that prohibits development “within a very high fire hazard severity zone,” as identified by the Forestry and Fire Protection Department (Cal Fire) director or in “high or very high fire hazard severity” areas on maps adopted by Cal Fire.

But her revision called for the deletion of a sentence that would lift the ban in “sites excluded from the specified hazard zones by a local agency … or sites that have adopted fire hazard mitigation measures pursuant to existing building standards.”

“My concern is that we will be developing in a very dangerous area, and I want to be clear on what parameters we will be putting there,” Rivas said at the hearing.

Wiener responded that he could not accept such “a categorical exemption or exclusion from the bill for these zones,” which he said would be “a massive body blow to this bill.”

Elaborating on his stance Friday, the state senator said that such an exclusion “would set a terrible precedent.”

Wiener acknowledged that there are certain places where development should not occur, such as “a hilly area with a one-lane road going up and down,” which he described as “a tinderbox.”

But he also called attention to “places that are in very high-severity zones, where you can take steps and mitigations to make it completely appropriate to build.”

While divisions among Democrats stood out in the state Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee, Wiener noted that the bill received “strong majority Democratic support” in the state Senate and earned 29 votes out of 40 on the chamber’s floor.

“Housing is not a partisan issue in legislature,” Wiener said. “There are Democrats and Republicans on both sides.”

Among those committee members who expressed support for SB 423 was Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D), who pointed out that “California has the highest functional poverty rate of any state.” 

“We need to do everything we can to incentivize and remove the barriers to building more housing,” Chavez Zbur said.

Assemblymember Josh Hoover (R), meanwhile, called for “an all-hands-on-deck approach,” adding "that we have to make California a place where our kids can afford to live.”

Once the California legislature returns from recess, which began at the end of the session Friday, SB 423 will head to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. If the bill passes there, it could be eligible for a floor vote on August 21, according to Erik Mebust, a spokesperson for Wiener.

The bill would then have until Sept. 14 to return to the Senate for a concurrence vote, after which Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) would have 12 days to sign it into law — which Mebust said the governor “has signaled he is excited to do.”

Going forward, Wiener expressed feelings of positivity about the bill’s path and the prospects of resolving differences regarding wildfire risk and those with the Coastal Commission.

“I feel very good about that,” he said. “They've come to the table, we've come to the table, and I think we're very, very close.”

But rising temperatures aren’t the only reason that extreme heat is becoming a bigger risk.

Other important reasons include discriminatory urban planning, the insidious nature of heat illness itself and the decade-long federal tug of war over how to respond to heat waves.

Here are five reasons — aside from climate change — why heat risk is worsening.

The US spent years ‘moving backward’ on heat

In 2013, President Barack Obama issued a sweeping executive order that aimed to make U.S. communities more resilient in the face of the impacts of climate change — from rising seas to rising temperatures.

That order sought to coordinate actions by federal agencies to protect populations from climate risk — and to ensure that infrastructure spending wasn’t inadvertently making the country less safe. 

It was specifically intended to begin the process, using science, to ensure cities and infrastructure were strengthened in the face of climate change. 

Systems to “pay attention to vulnerable communities in particular” were also a part of the order, said Robert Verchick, who served in the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration and now serves as president of the Center for Progressive Reform. 

For communities, Verchick said, “you could do simple things like get more tree cover and put in more awnings. Or if you’re living in Phoenix or Las Vegas, we've got issues where people just standing outside waiting for a bus can end up in the emergency room — so some of it is about rebuilding bus stops or making sure that buses run more regularly.” 

But that rule won’t be out until late this year at the earliest — about a decade after the original Obama executive order.

Heat is a quiet killer

While heat danger — and deaths — are rising, the public sense of that risk hasn’t kept up with its actual magnitude.

Repeated studies have shown that people’s sense of heat risk — even among those most vulnerable — often doesn’t correspond to its actual risk.

Heat’s tendency to fly under the radar has serious impacts for both individual behavior and public policy. 

One reason is that unlike other threats from extreme weather, heat waves don't create the kind of visually dramatic moments that characterize floods or wildfires.

“Even if there's record-breaking temperatures, there's still usually less to see than when something dramatic happens — like the flooding that was happening in New England just a couple of days ago,” said Ladd Keith, who studies heat and urban planning at the University of Arizona. 

While heat’s impacts are subtle, its death toll isn’t.  

In Arizona's Maricopa County alone, at least 12 people died from heat this year, compared with a single death in the Vermont floods. 

Last year, 425 people died in the county from heat — an increase of 25 percent over the prior year, and nearly five times the number of U.S. residents that died during Hurricane Ida.

But because those populations “tend to fall off the radar” for policymakers, Keith said, the rising toll hasn’t caused much political action.

Housing is getting less affordable

Because access to water and air conditioning largely eliminates the risk of death from heat, those who die from heat tend to be those who struggle to secure shelter — or to keep the power on.

There is no county in the United States where a person working a full-time, minimum-wage job can earn enough for a two-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. 

And in June, researchers published the results of a survey of thousands of people living without housing in California about how they had lost housing — with most saying that high costs had forced them out. 

Due to health crises, rent hikes, layoffs or simple bad luck, “people just ran out of the ability to pay, whether it happened quickly or slowly,” lead author Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco, told National Public Radio. 

In Maricopa County, exposure to the elements was the biggest risk factor for dying of heat: 80 percent of those killed in 2022 died of heat injuries they sustained outdoors — and the rise in outdoor deaths was the largest component. 

Most of those outdoor deaths — and the largest single cadre of fatalities — were the 178 people experiencing homelessness who died in Maricopa last year. 

Energy prices are rising

Even those who have housing may be at risk. Most of those who died indoors in 2022 in the Phoenix area lived in houses with air conditioning — but in nearly 80 percent of those cases, it didn’t work. 

Keith of the University of Arizona said that’s another factor of housing prices.  

Rents or mortgages “also strain the resources available to upkeep homes,” he added. 

When air conditioners break, many don’t have the money to repair or replace them.  

According to a report by the Federal Reserve, 37 percent of Americans in 2022 couldn’t have come up with $500 in cash to deal with an emergency. That sum is about ten percent of the price of a new air conditioner, which costs an average of $5,000. 

Energy prices also rose 14 percent in 2022, twice as fast as inflation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The main driver behind that rise was “global calamities,” Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen told Utility Dive. 

Slocum noted that high electricity prices are disproportionately borne by poorer Americans, who tend to rent their homes. Slocum told Utility Dive that this caused a paradox, because “to cut costs, consumers must improve efficiency. But renters can’t make the investments needed to boost energy efficiency.” 

That helps explain the people who died in houses with air conditioning units that were functional but not turned on, Keith said.  “If you're spending more money on housing, less money is available to go towards the utility bill — which may lead you to turn on the air conditioner less.” 

Urban fixes don’t target those who need them most

Especially when the air conditioning fails, heat risk tends to be less a function of abstract temperature and more a function of urban design, which can drive up urban heat indexes faster than climate change itself. 

The science on how to confront this risk is simple to state, if tough to implement, Keith said. He called for targeting projects so that they prioritize reducing heat risk areas where that risk is most serious. 

But in a study of five major cities carrying out pilot projects to reduce heat, Keith and his collaborators found that only Boston had done so. 

The others — Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, Seattle and Baltimore — had no discernible relationship between the areas where people were most at risk and the projects they funded. 

There is a common blind spot around heat interventions, Keith said: Many cities set generic benchmarks, rather than targeted ones. “You say, ‘You're going to plant a million trees' — but you don't specify where or say that it has to go to the places that need it most.”

The hearing marked the beginning of a series that will be held by the GOP-controlled House Financial Services Committee taking aim at environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.

The once-arcane financial philosophy, which is built on the idea that investors have a right to information about companies beyond the strictly financial due to the impact other factors can have on business, has increasingly come under fire from Republicans.

Since the party assumed control of the House in January, GOP-led committees have held repeated hearings attacking ESG investing.

The target of Wednesday's hearing was the federal government — specifically, financial regulations proposed by the Biden administration that seek to facilitate ESG investors by requiring companies to disclose information related to a company’s impacts on climate change, as well as the risks it faces from extreme weather.

While none of these bills are likely to make it through a Democratic-controlled Senate, the hearings served to advertise the GOP's priorities should it retake control of the upper chamber — or the presidency.

Here are five things to know about the fight over ESG. 

Both sides attacked each other as “anti-capitalist”

At an event following the hearings, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) said the GOP wants to ignore popular demands for climate action "because I've got this industry, which is unable to compete in a competitive market. And I want to force you to put your capital there."

“That’s not free markets. That ain't capitalism. That is stupidity,” he added, noting the argument was particularly ironic coming from “the party of Ronald Reagan.”

And Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) repeatedly compared Republican attacks on ESG to the Socialist Workers Party of Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who sought to overthrow the global capitalist system.

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) countered such arguments during Wednesday's hearing by contending that regulations facilitating ESG investing would themselves be anti-capitalist. 

“I find it very interesting that we were accused in the very beginning of this hearing of driving a political agenda,” Sessions said.

“We know who the political agenda is because free markets like to make their own decisions. And people who are investors like to invest in what will gain them what they're after. And when it's driven by the government, I think we make a mistake.”

But Democrats argued that anti-ESG rules made it functionally impossible for environmentally conscious investors to invest according to their values.

Without rigorous disclosure of ESG information, “I don't know how you can make a decision about an investment if you don't have that information,” said Keith Ellison, a former committee member turned Minnesota attorney general who was called as a witness by the Democrats.

Republicans focused their attacks on the federal government 

At past anti-ESG hearings held by the party, GOP lawmakers have often focused their ire on corporate asset managers like BlackRock and State Street — third-party investors who manage trillions of dollars in index and pension funds and have been principal proponents of ESG disclosures.

But at Wednesday’s hearing, Republicans and the experts they called kept circling back to their principal target: federal financial regulators at agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

These agencies’ policies requiring climate disclosures are the real threat, said witness Benjamin Zycher of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute.

“I urge Congress not to focus on the large asset managers — however silly their public pronouncements,” Zycher said. 

“I urge Congress instead to reform the SEC regulatory framework I urge Congress to enact legislation restraining the efforts of regulatory agencies to pursue climate policies not authorized in the law — and justified on the basis of fundamentally dishonest benefit cost analysis.”

GOP lawmakers repeatedly insisted they were not opposed to ESG investing — but that any climate disclosures should be voluntary, not required. Democrats argued that voluntary disclosure policies were inconsistent, unreliable and hard for investors to use — and that national-level financial rules proposed by federal regulators were the only way to generate rigorous data.

Devolving the responsibility of setting such rules to the states would create a “race to the bottom,” Sherman said.

The California representative noted that this wasn't only a problem for environmental factors — the 'E' of ESG — but for the control of corporate boards by their shareholders. (That "governance" factor is part of the G of ESG.)

The California representative outlined a system in which a company's board goes to the tax haven state of Delaware, “and they’ll agree to pay some fees as long as [state regulators] give them rules to make it clear that shareholders can’t tell the board what to do. And then if Delaware won’t do that, you go to Wyoming, and if they won’t you go to North Dakota.”

“If we’re going to have shareholder democracy,” he concluded, “it has to be protected by the SEC.”

The fight hinges on an argument about costs 

Republicans argued that consideration of any non-financial factors — like a company’s exposure to climate risk — by third-party asset managers handling pension funds is inherently at odds with what they say should be a financial firm’s top priority: yielding maximum returns for shareholders. 

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers homed in on a proposed rule from the SEC that would require businesses to report their carbon emissions — though to what extent remains unclear — as well as the climate risks they face.

For Republicans, this was anathema. 

“This misguided approach has … increased costs and burdens for those participating in U.S. public markets,” Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) said in Wednesday's hearing.

“These politically motivated regulations not only discourage private companies from going public, but also hinder the competitiveness of American public companies.” 

But Democrats said this accounting of costs missed the bigger impacts of the climate and social issues ESG investing considers. 

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) argued that if ESG had been invented in the 1990s, it could have spared America the de-industrialization caused by offshoring of industry.

“Maybe it is cheaper — and it can raise up your bottom line — to use our 13-year-old to clean the killing floors in your slaughterhouse,” he said.

“But maybe that is so outside of our values and something we won't do that just to make some more bucks. I think these things are to be considered, should be factored in.”

Ellison, meanwhile, argued that Republicans' view of cost left out the impact of climate disasters, which scientific consensus shows are made more likely and more severe by the rising levels of greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels.

Republicans contend ESG would do little to help the climate

Republicans and Democrats clashed over whether the climate disclosure requirements that ESG investors demand would benefit the U.S. — or impact the climate.

“The climate effects are literally zero,” said Zycher of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

A single firm’s emissions “cannot possibly have measurable climate effects and thus would have no impacts on prospective returns on investments,” he said.

Democrats countered that considering ESG factors — which the disclosure rules would facilitate — translates to better returns for investors and that investors are asking for this material to help avoid risk.

“ESG is data,” Ellison said, “and data shows a positive correlation between ESG principles and returns on equity.” 

The Minnesota attorney general charged that the campaign against ESG and climate disclosure was a rear-guard action in defense of “one industry in particular, the fossil fuel industry, that bears so much responsibility for costs of climate change, and has waged a decades-long campaign of deception to deflect [climate action].”

In the arguments over the disclosure rule, lawmakers and experts from the two parties were separated by a yawning gap over their belief in the benefits of the broader Biden administration climate policy, of which its backing of ESG disclosure rules is one aspect.

The administration has advocated that the country reach “net zero” — a state in which carbon emissions are balanced by carbon pulled from the atmosphere — by 2050.

On a global scale, this is a conservative position in that the U.K. Conservative Party was the first national legislature to pass such a policy, and it’s one that many climate groups are skeptical of, characterizing it as a potential excuse for delaying necessary action for decades. (A recent report by two analysts at the London School of Economics suggest that the Tory-led U.K. is doing just that.)

Republicans argued that this effort was, in a word, worthless.

“The Biden administration’s net-zero proposal would — using the EPA climate model — reduce global temperatures near 2100 by 0.17 percent,” Zycher said.

That number comes from a report released Monday by the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), which sought to calculate the impacts on the climate if the United States moves off carbon by 2050 — and the rest of the world does not.

But the TPPF scenario is one that climate scientists see as implausible, because they say climate action will either involve a global effort — or a global refusal to make one. “It’s not a good faith argument because it buys into the single-actor fallacy — the notion that any one nation can solve on its own a problem that requires international cooperation,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann told The Hill.

The U.S.’s role as the largest historical contributor to climate change makes it easier for the rest of the world not to act if it does not take the lead, he said. “If the U.S. fails to lead here, then other nations who have less of a legacy in having contributed to the problem have an excuse for inaction themselves.”

Texas Public Policy Foundation President Jason Isaac, however, dismissed the idea that there was any broader benefit to America leading on ESG, or on climate in general.

“Why us?” he asked. “We did more about this than anybody else in the other direction. We're a world leader in environmental protection and we're a world leader in clean air. We've done more on environmental leadership than anyone else.”

The anti-ESG campaign is having an effect — though not on federal legislation

With control of Congress divided, the Republican campaign against climate disclosures is unlikely to lead to any near-term legislation. 

But it’s having other impacts, proponents argue. 

The broader campaign by state legislatures and attorneys general — not to mention the House — has pushed many large Wall Street banks to quietly retreat from a leading climate coalition, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.

For many big Wall Street banks, the American right’s attack on ESG has gotten sufficiently severe to constitute a risk in its own right, The Financial Times reported — and one that is sufficiently serious that they now feel obligated to disclose it to investors.

The fear of being sued over “energy discrimination” is making ESG "a four-letter word" in the financial industry, Isaac of TPPF told The Hill. 

“Some are reversing their positions, which I think is great,” he added.

Through its production of paper, pulp, pellets and lumber, the industry releases at least 3.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year, according to a study published last week in Nature.

That is a large number in its own right: more than three times the annual emissions from aviation and nearly twice the carbon burned off by fossil fuel-dependent Russia.

But it is particularly dramatic when compared to the carbon cost claimed by the wood products industry itself — which is often calculated to be less than zero.

“For the most part, people treat wood harvests as though they're not causing emissions,” said study coauthor Timothy Searchinger, who splits his time between Princeton and the World Resources Institute.

The findings in Nature, however, show that wood harvests exert “a really, really big carbon cost,” he said.

“And we're not paying attention to it,” he added.

On the surface, the idea that wood harvests release carbon dioxide is intuitive, Searchinger said. Wood is mostly made of carbon, and every aspect of the process of harvesting it, whether for pulp, housing or furniture, dumps carbon into the atmosphere.

The biggest portion of wood’s carbon emissions comes from simply burning it. About half of the volume of wood that enters saw, pellet and paper mills — like bark and small branches — is stripped off and burned up to power the factories.

Much of what remains is sold as firewood — to be burned in homes — or wood pellets, which largely go to power plants.

While this energy is renewable — the wood can grow back — it isn’t carbon-free, unlike potential replacements like solar or wind power, Searchinger noted. 

And yet for decades, the industry has operated under the assumption that wood harvests offer only benefits in the fight to slow climate change.

The reason: It assumes any trees that are chopped down to create wood products will be replaced by the new trees that grow in their place, replacing the carbon that was lost in the products’ creation. 

This logic is commonplace. “Harvested wood products … represent a common widespread and cost-efficient opportunity for negative emissions,” according to a 2018 study in Carbon Balance and Management. 

And a study by the U.S. government agency charged with promoting timber products found “notable carbon emissions savings when wood products are used in constructing buildings in place of nonwood alternatives.”

The idea that wood products are carbon negative by definition reached its apogee in the 2022 climate stimulus bill, which argued that this holds true even if those products are burned up in biomass or “wood-to-energy” plans — in which pelletized wood is burned in place of fuels like coal, with similar amounts of carbon released into the atmosphere.

(Some studies have found that wood pellets release more carbon dioxide than even coal.)

In a move championed by forest-state lawmakers like Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), federal law now requires federal agencies to design policies that “reflect the carbon neutrality of forest bioenergy and recognize biomass as a renewable energy source.”

A spokesperson for Collins told E&E News that such a conclusion “not only aligns with the science, but also encourages investments in working forests, harvesting operations, bioenergy, wood products, and paper manufacturing.”

Based on this logic, wood industry lobbyists argue that logging is ultimately good for the forests it draws on — because, as the thinking goes, a healthy market in wood products keeps them from being cleared and replaced with agriculture.

“If forest markets are unable to provide sufficient financial incentive to landowners, forest land would be converted to higher income-generating agriculture or development,” writes Virginia-based biomass giant Enviva.

That idea that wood harvests are inherently sustainable — even if they’re used to create products that are ultimately burned — has over the last decade provided justification for a massive uptick in wood harvests in vital creekside bottomlands along the U.S. East and Gulf coasts.

Additionally, the wood industry argues that a freshly logged and rapidly regrowing plantation forest grows far faster — and therefore stores more carbon — than the more sedate carbon sequestration offered by an older one.

This argument is correct, Searchinger argued — at least, up to a point. 

On a global scale, the fast growth rate of formerly cleared forests means Northern Hemisphere forestry can benefit from an extremely rapid rate of carbon sequestration — because Europe, the U.S. and Canada so thoroughly deforested their territory in the 19th and 20th centuries that the current rate of forest regrowth is very high.

In terms of the carbon storage of its forests, Searchinger said, “the Northern Hemisphere was born on third base and thought it hit a triple. It's basically, ‘We're great because we're not as bad as we were in the past.’”

But the rest of the arguments for wood’s inherent carbon-neutrality don't hold up, he said.

The industry, Searchinger said, “has also managed to convince people that the reason that forests exist is because of our demand to cut them down. And there’s almost no evidence for that.”

While wood industry proponents often argue that demand for wood products — and therefore logging — keeps forests standing, Searchinger argued that this misunderstands the major factors driving American land use: the qualities of the land itself.

Most commercial wood is grown in plantations more akin to oversized corn fields than biodiverse forests. States like Maine grow these trees in place of corn because such crops grow badly there.

And while old growth stores less carbon over time than new growth, that’s because it is holding down that carbon in the bodies of trees and in the structure of the soil — carbon that is lost once those trees are cleared, and that (in the best case) will take decades to reaccumulate.

Searchinger compared the process of forest growth and regrowth to that of a worker getting paid.

“If I take your paycheck — well, I can say, you get a paycheck next month, right? It's renewable, but that doesn't mean if I take your paycheck you're not worse off.”

He likened the loss of stored carbon when forests are cleared to a still more significant theft. 

Assume someone steals your identity and raids your pension fund, he said — “But they don't take out more than you added that year. So I say ‘Hey, you haven't lost anything, right?’”

In the paper, meanwhile, the authors compare claims that wood is carbon negative to the idea that driving a small gas-powered car over a large one is. While less carbon may be burned, they say in no real sense is it being saved.

The study's findings come with a substantial silver lining, Searchinger said: While the costs of the wood industry are huge, they mean humanity has an additional policy dial we can turn to slow climate change.

For example, carbon emissions could be reduced by burning far less wood for fuel; packing more wood production into dense plantation forests, instead of pulling it from natural ones; and practicing less destructive forms of logging, which lead to less disruption of forests, and therefore less planet-heating carbon in the atmosphere.

The Nature authors give several distinct policy prescriptions for how to cut the carbon cost of wood in a fact sheet published through the World Resources Institute. 

Getting lower-income countries to use more renewable electricity in place of wood stoves — and getting the higher-income world to turn away from burning biomass in its power plants and paper mills — could cut global emissions by 500 million tons per year, the authors say.

Increasing tree plantation yields by 50 percent could cut another 600 million tons; and harvesting wood from tropical forests more carefully could cut another 200 million, they add.

Performing these actions alone would net 1.3 billion tons of carbon savings, according to the fact sheet — equivalent to decarbonizing Japan and nearly equivalent to decarbonizing leading fossil fuel exporter Russia

But solving the high carbon cost of wood begins with admitting it exists, Searchinger said.

It still surprises him that this is controversial, he told The Hill.

“I just had a piece in Nature based on the fact that ‘land is not free,’” he said. “It’s kind of embarrassing, right? It’s like, ‘Really? You get to publish all these scientific papers just because you realized that land is not free?’”

“Well,” he laughed, “I’m willing to admit that this should be ridiculous. I should not have a scientific career.”

But the state should have enough in reserve to avoid serious disruption, according to projections from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

Demand on the grid hit an all-time record June 27 with nearly 81 gigawatts of demand, according to Reuters. That’s a record that the state will repeatedly break over the coming week, the ERCOT projected.

That electric load is expected to crack 83.6 gigawatts Tuesday and 84.4 gigawatts Wednesday.

Demand is expected to dip over the weekend as businesses and factories close before roaring back again to 83.4 gigawatts Monday.

This week’s projections are all higher than the all-time peak demand of 82.3 gigawatts that the ERCOT projected for the year.

In large part, that high demand is a function of high temperatures.

“The large cities will see high temperatures at least as hot as the last week of June, with the potential to reach 1-2 degrees hotter,” according to an ERCOT forecast.

Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio were all significantly higher than their 15-year averages Tuesday.

But that gap between current and historic heat was particularly notable in the latter two cities. San Antonio’s high was 104, and Austin’s was 106 — compared to their respective 15-year averages of about 96 and 97.  

Those temperatures drove prices for natural gas — which fuels about half of the state's electric generation — to record highs, according to Reuters.

Texas may not hit these projections, however. The ERCOT skews conservative in its projections, which are used in part to encourage businesses and homeowners to cut demand — which, if successful, can make those estimates appear incorrect.

For example, the regulator projected in late June that the state would break 83 gigawatts last month.

But while the grid did hit a demand record in late June, that record was set at 2 gigawatts lower than the ERCOT projections — or about a third of the state’s current reserves.

Heat Ready CA, a statewide multi-ethnic education initiative, provides planning information, emergency resources and strategies for staying safer during periods of intense heat, which the governor’s office described as “the deadliest form of climate-driven extreme weather.” 

“The impacts of climate change have never been more clear — the hots continue to get hotter in our state and across the West putting millions of Californians at risk,” Newsom said in a statement.

“California is launching Heat Ready CA as another tool in the state’s arsenal to protect people from extreme heat,” the governor added.

The two-year campaign focuses on heat-sensitive groups at the highest risk, such as those 65 years and older, workers, individuals with chronic illnesses or disabilities or those who are pregnant, according to Newsom’s office.

The effort is part of the governor’s $400 million Extreme Heat Action Plan, which guides the state’s response to heat waves by reaching out to vulnerable populations, protecting front-line workers and opening cooling centers.

“We’re asking everyone to stay alert to changing weather and take the necessary steps to keep themselves and their families safer from deadly heatwaves,” Newsom said.

The National Weather Service’s (NWS) Los Angeles Branch warned Sunday that an excessive heat watch was in store for the deserts, lower mountains and interior valleys of Southern California from Tuesday through Saturday.

Highs are expected to reach 100-112 degrees Fahrenheit, the NWS noted, while also reporting a potentially elevated risk of wildfire.

The NWS’s Phoenix branch warned lower desert residents to expect high temperatures around 110 degrees through Wednesday, adding that some locations could reach 115 degrees “from Friday through at least Sunday.” 

As far as California is concerned, the governor’s office said that the state will likely move on Tuesday to Phase II of its Extreme Temperature Response Plan, which involves greater coordination among state and local partners.

“Heat-related illnesses such as dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, as well as respiratory problems, are among the potentially dangerous effects of extreme heat,” California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly said in a statement.

“But as with earthquakes, floods or other natural weather events, Californians can better protect themselves and others with a few simple tips,” Ghaly continued.

Among those tips are recommendations to close shades, windows and blinds, while setting air conditioners between 75 and 80 degrees or relocating to a state-supported cooling center or other air-conditioned public space.

The governor’s office also emphasized the importance of drinking at least two cups of water every hour, while avoiding alcoholic and caffeinated drinks.

“Check in on friends and family, especially elderly relatives or neighbors,” Newsom’s office advised. “Call 911 if there are signs of high fever (103°F or higher) or in case of other emergencies.”

A new study finding "forever chemicals" in nearly half of U.S. drinking water adds to a growing body of research on the toxic substances’ pervasiveness in American life. 

Yet many Americans remain oblivious to the very existence of a cancer-linked group of compounds known as PFAS — or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. 

Research announced by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) last week estimates that 45 percent of U.S. taps contain at least one type of PFAS or forever chemical.

This comes on top of other evidence that the chemicals are widespread, including research finding them in the blood of about 97 percent of Americans, as well as significant portions of U.S. waterways. 

Toxicologist Jamie DeWitt told The Hill that she is hardly shocked by the findings, which she described as a “verification” from a government agency “that PFAS are present in multiple drinking water supplies as well as in finished drinking water.”

“Where scientists look for PFAS, they find them,” said DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina University. “If they can find them in polar bears and in the bottom of the ocean, then we shouldn't be surprised that we find them across drinking water supplies.”

DeWitt expressed dismay as to what she feels is an ongoing lack of public awareness about the very existence, let alone pervasiveness, of forever chemicals, even as an accumulating body of evidence piles up about their dangers. 

She recalled speaking to an undergraduate student from Fayetteville, N.C. — home to a major PFAS manufacturer, Chemours — who had never heard of PFAS despite wanting to become a toxicologist. 

“Maybe we're not reaching the right audiences who really need to hear about PFAS, but I think that's not uncommon with many different types of environmental pollutants, unfortunately,” she said.

Also problematic in the current political environment is the “mistrust of science right now,” according to DeWitt. “That’s another hurdle to overcome in terms of public health protection from contaminants,” she added.

Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health and the National Toxicology Program, echoed DeWitt’s sentiments with regards to the public’s insufficient knowledge of a growing PFAS problem. 

“I wish the public understood and were concerned, but lots of people are still unaware,” Birnbaum said. 

Exposure to PFAS — which are present in certain firefighting foams, Teflon pans, waterproof apparel and cosmetics — has been linked to illnesses such as kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease and high cholesterol. 

While there are thousands of types of PFAS, the USGS study only looked for 32 types. Seventeen kinds of PFAS were observed at least once, while PFBS, PFHxS and PFOA were observed most often — in about 15 percent of the samples, according to the study. 

Scott Bartell, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of California, Irvine, said that people who have the chemicals in their water should be concerned about elevated risks of cancer and other illnesses. 

“We have good evidence that, for example, exposure to PFOA, which is one of the chemicals that was detected in many of the water supplies in the study, that it almost certainly causes kidney cancer,” he said. 

Carmen Messerlian, an assistant professor of environmental reproductive, perinatal and pediatric epidemiology at Harvard, said that it’s not one specific chemical that is the problem, it’s the PFAS family.

“We know that the class of chemicals is carcinogenic, immunotoxic, reprotoxic, endocrine-disrupting,” she said. 

Messerlian added that the fact that the study only looks at 32 chemicals rather than the thousands that are out there means it is very likely an undercount. 

“If we’re only looking at PFOA and PFOS, for example, those are just two … types of PFAS. There’s thousands of them,” she said. “You can’t find something that you’re not looking for.” 

Similarly, while the study's authors — who sampled 716 spots nationwide — found that urban areas are more at risk than rural ones when it comes to PFAS, they also warned of “a notable paucity of data available for private-wells across the U.S.,” where information is often “limited or not available.” 

“It highlights an area of our population that really aren't going to receive the same types of protections that people like me receive,” said DeWitt. 

“I get my water from a utility that serves a big population,” she added. 

Utilities, DeWitt explained, will be required to adhere to the guidelines of the Safe Water Drinking Act as soon as the Environmental Protection Agency regulates maximum contaminant levels for the two most notorious PFAS variations, PFOA and PFOS. 

But private well owners “aren’t going to be subject to the same set of rules,” according to DeWitt. 

“So if you’re a well owner in a rural area, or if you get your water from a well in a rural area, you're on your own,” DeWitt said, identifying what she described as “a huge gap.” 

Many people who rely on private wells are also located in rural or underserved areas — and therefore already face numerous challenges, DeWitt explained. 

“And yet again, they’re kind of left out in the cold,” she said. 

The USGS findings were based on the 716 samples collected around the country and then extrapolated through a model. 

The chemicals were found in about 70 percent of areas that are either urban or have a known history of PFAS contamination, compared to just 8 percent of rural areas. Areas with the greatest concentrations were in the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the Eastern Seaboard and Central and Southern California.

“Some of the concentrations are probably due to population densities and where there are activities where PFAS are either manufactured or used,” DeWitt said. 

It is also logical to find higher levels of PFAS near airports, municipal firehouses, military bases or places where the compounds are entering a wastewater stream, according to DeWitt. 

“So I’m not surprised that it kind of tracks with where there are greater populations,” she added.

As far as public health ramifications are concerned, DeWitt was hesitant to draw a definitive conclusion as to whether the entire country is at risk based on the study’s conclusions.

But at the same time, she stressed that the world’s leading cause of chronic disease-related premature deaths is environmental pollution, citing findings from a 2017 Lancet study.

“If pollutants are the world's leading cause of chronic disease, and PFAS are part of the mix of pollutants to which we are exposed, a logical conclusion would be that PFAS are contributing to chronic diseases,” DeWitt said. 

“So in terms of public health, they’re undoubtedly part of the problem that leads to chronic diseases that we all will likely experience or that our loved ones will experience within our lifetime,” she added.

Erin Bell, a professor of epidemiology and environmental health sciences at the State University of New York at Albany, pointed to guidelines from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which recommend that doctors screen patients for different illnesses depending on the level of PFAS in their blood.

She also noted that PFAS is even being observed in the blood of newborn babies, referencing a study she conducted on infants born in New York state between 2008 and 2010. 

“We detected measurable amounts in 99 percent of those infants,” she said. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) Monday signed into law a package of infrastructure bills that aim to cut the red tape associated with building new projects, while also ensuring environmental protection.

The package, which includes five wide-ranging bills, generally centers on streamlining permitting processes, speeding up judicial review to prevent undue delays from legal challenges and addressing cumbersome elements of the California Environmental Quality Act.

Monday’s signing also marks the end of a contentious few months in which Newsom and his Democratic colleagues have clashed over certain elements of his streamlining agenda — which also delayed the finalization of the state’s 2023-2024 budget to nearly the last minute.

“We’re celebrating partnership here today, we’re celebrating progress here today,” Newsom said at a Monday press conference, prior to the signing.

Alongside the infrastructure bills, Newsom also signed into law legislation known colloquially as “Budget Bill Jr.,”  which amends a version of the budget passed last month and “reflects the final budget agreement between the legislature and the administration,” according to state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D).

That final budget, Skinner explained, will maintain “a record level of reserves so that if we face a shortfall say next year or future years,” while protecting programs that serve those “who need the most.”

Newsom stressed the importance of “Democrats working with Democrats” on fiscal discipline while “addressing some of the most vexing and challenging issues of our time.”

“We once again recognized that we needed to reconcile the challenges and the vagaries of a progressive tax structure,” he said.

The governor and his colleagues had announced at the end of June that they had come to an agreement over the terms of the state’s $310.8 billion budget, which would aim to bridge a nearly $32 billion deficit without touching $37.8 billion in reserves.

The infrastructure bills signed into law alongside “Budget Bill Jr.” include provisions to streamline workforce equity, include community benefits in project labor agreements and expedite project-procurement processes for both California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and Department of Water Resources projects.

Also included in the bills are measures to construct wildlife crossings over Interstate-15, as well as require Caltrans to acquire property that can be preserved and restored to offset the environmental impacts of the state highway system.

Another piece of the package allows the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to permit projects that could affect protected species, assuming the plans meet certain requirements and do not cause the extinction of the species in question.

Skinner expressed confidence that this package “will help us accelerate California's efforts and infrastructure projects to meet our climate and clean energy goals.”

State legislators approved the infrastructure package last week.

Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D), chair of the Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, described the package as “a testament to what is possible here in California — what is possible when we all work together.”

Acknowledging that the future will require “a massive shift and growth” in infrastructure deployment, Bauer-Kahan emphasized the importance of also ensuring that environmental justice communities do not bear the burden of this transition.

“This package cuts green tape to move projects faster,” Bauer-Kahan said, referring to the often-arduous environmental permitting processes.

California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D) touted the bills for their success in striking “a crucial balance” while “spurring future growth and good paying jobs” and protecting the environment.

Going forward, Newsom emphasized how California is continuing “to make unprecedented investments,” while also slipping in a dig at Texas’s handling of the ongoing heat wave — adding that the state “can barely keep the lights on with old fossil fuel-burning plants.”

That situation, he added, serves to reinforce “the imperative to move aggressively and to address these issues head on.”

For context, the last time things were this hot, the first modern humans were just beginning to leave Africa, and chips of sharpened flint represented the bleeding edge of high technology.

Science moves slowly, and it will be years before we learn the impacts of this new era of heat on urban infrastructure, public health, and the natural world.

But as temperatures have consistently climbed over the past decade in a punctuated procession of once-anomalous heat waves, scientists worldwide have worked in tandem to figure out ways to mitigate its impacts.

One overall conclusion of their work is that while heat waves are now inevitable — thanks to decades of human failure to slow the burning of fossil fuels — deaths from heat are not.

And the dramatic — and often tragic — impacts that extreme heat can inflict on the natural world are also largely optional: the result of short-term policy choices, not the implacable movements of the Earth’s natural systems.

Here are five things scientists learned in 2023 about heat waves' insidious impacts — and how to head them off.

Beachgoers flock to the beach south of the pier in Huntington Beach, Calif., Friday, June 30, 2023, amid a heat wave. (Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register via AP)

Rising heat waves are sickening people — and workers in particular

Rising heat has been making people sick for more than a decade. Heat-related illness and injury increased steadily in Arizona, California and Nevada between 2011 and 2019.

This misery will soon have a great deal of company.

A fifth of the world will experience two month-long episodes of combined heat and drought per year by the end of the century if human society doesn’t burn dramatically less fossil fuels.

Some of the risks posed by heat are industry specific. Construction workers laboring in the heat faced higher risks of illness like heat stroke, kidney disease, anxiety, and depression.

To some extent, lifestyle adaptations can help. Acclimation matters a lot: those traveling to hot climates from more temperate ones face "an increasing threat" of heat related illness, which is part of why the federal government advises that new workers in hot climates slowly ease into their new conditions.

That’s not always possible, however. Exposure to pesticides made tropical farmworkers on non-organic farms more susceptible to heat waves, in part by slowing their bodies' ability to adapt.

Extreme heat raises the risk of dying from stroke and heart disease, and may raise the risks of death from respiratory disease even higher.

Fetuses exposed during the second trimester to temperatures that were unusually high for a given area had lower birth weights.

A crew repairs a roof during a heat wave in Los Angeles, Wednesday, July 5, 2023. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

City design, not climate change, is the main contributor to dangerous heat

A 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) increase in temperatures would lead to "substantial" impacts on human heat stress across American cities, according to a draft study in Nature Portfolio.

But much of this stress is only indirectly related to rising temperatures.

A study from the sweltering East Asian city of Macau, with a climate similar to that of the U.S. Gulf Coast, found that while the amount of "insolation" — how much solar radiation hits a city — and the amount of water were the biggest contributors to rising temperatures, they had little impact on the populace's resilience to heat.

A much bigger impact came from a neighborhood's ability to move water through it — porosity — and its vegetation.

Urban areas tend to run significantly hotter than the surrounding countryside, due to the tendency of asphalt and concrete to soak up, store and radiate heat.

Such heat islands are driving up temperatures even faster than climate change itself. A study of U.S. cities found that between 2001 and 2014, the rise in the forcing power of heat islands — which drove a temperature rise of about 1 to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit — outpaced the rise in the heat index.

The stifling power of the heat island is dramatic: the cooling "lake effect" breezes that blow off Lake Michigan still aren't enough to fully counter the heating impacts of the city's massive heat island.

This greater urban heat dramatically heightens other risks.

A midday blackout during a heat wave (perhaps from a large storm) could double the mortality rate across an urban populace, according to a study in Environmental Science and Technology.

Kayak and canoe outfitter Jessie Fuentes walks along the Rio Grande under a warm sun Thursday, July 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Simple fixes can make big changes — even as temperatures rise

There's a silver lining to the dangerous impacts of heat islands: simple interventions to break them up can do a great deal to make cities — cooler, safer and more pleasant, studies suggest. 

Conversely, weakening the effect of the heat island makes cities more resilient.

A study of 70 parks in Beijing found that they served as "cooling islands" that cut temperatures in surrounding neighborhoods. It also found that the cooling impact of the parks themselves can be amplified by paying attention to the kind of development that surrounded them.

A study of "cool roof" technology in Chicago — which reflects more light back into space, leading to less absorption into the heat island — found that the reflective roofs were the only roofing technology able to lead to significant cuts in street-level temperatures, according to Science of the Total Environment.

An experiment in Phoenix found that reflective pavement absorbed less heat than asphalt-covered roads, leading to lower temperatures — particularly at night when the asphalt would normally radiate much of that absorbed heat back into the air.

That provides a potentially life-saving respite, as night is a crucial time for the human body to recover from the day's heat, and high nighttime temperatures are a major contributor to heat stress.

However, that neighborhood-level cool came at the cost of reflecting more of the sun's heat onto passing pedestrians, leading to greater street-level risk during the hottest hours.

A fisherman reels in his catch as the sun rises over the Atlantic Ocean, Wednesday, June 28, 2023, in Bal Harbour, Fla., as a heat dome is spreading eastward from Texas. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

In unequal world of heat exposure, better planning saves lives

Studies published this year further confirmed that the cost of heat is not spread fairly.

In Africa — a continent that in 2021 released just 4 percent of world fossil fuel emissions, millions of additional people will be exposed to heat stress by the end of the century.

And a study of 911 calls in Austin, Texas, found that calls were most frequent in areas with elderly people, those living alone, Hispanics, and those on some form of government assistance.

Historical examples bear this out: those suffering from schizophrenia, chronic kidney disease and heart disease faced the highest risk of death from the extreme heat wave that hit British Columbia in 2021.

Other risks scientists found were more indirect, though no less serious: in Chicago, heat waves were found to have raised the risks of urban crime.

Because risks are spread so unevenly, some public health experts recommend triage.

A study from the dense, humid metropolis of Hong Kong — another city where a steamy climate intersects with a massive heat island — scientists writing in Science of The Total Environment suggested that planners and first responders should focus on the most impacted areas first.

The Hong Kong experts recommend that city officials first focus on mitigating heat in areas with the most intense heat island effects and vulnerable populations — which means poorer and more elderly communities.

Other studies from this year found an urgent need for such targeted interventions and of better coordination among public officials in meeting the threat of heat waves.

A February study in Public Health Reports found that a large percentage of the populace of 81 U.S. cities lacked access to cooling centers — public buildings where those without air conditioning can go to get their body temperature back to a safe level.

Those numbers ranged from 99.9 percent of the population lacking access in Atlanta to just 37 percent in (comparatively dense) Washington, D.C.

Another study in Applied Geography dug deep into who used cooling centers in Los Angeles during the 2017 heat wave and found that many city cooling centers were misplaced. 

The scientists found that vulnerable residents were less likely to use cooling centers further from public transit, and tended not to visit cooling centers in wealthier neighborhoods. 

People cruise along the path north of the pier in Huntington Beach, Calif., Friday, June 30, 2023. (Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register via AP)

Heat is hollowing out the natural world — but ambitious climate action can stop it

Late June featured a staggering week of broken records — including subsequent-day record temperatures measured for average ocean temperature and then for the surface of the North Atlantic specifically, according to Nature.

Evidence from the past decade of heat waves helps paint a scattershot picture of possible marine impacts from the current records.

The heat wave that baked Washington State between 2014 and 2016 disrupted the region's rich coastal ecosystems, as warmer waters led to a 50 percent die-off in underwater kelp "forests."

Though the kelp canopy quickly recovered, sea star populations did not, according to the study by scientists the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA).

Faster heating was a likely predictor of greater "bleaching" among coral reefs, according to a Marine Ecology Progress Series study. Bleaching is a potentially lethal condition that occurs when the algae that give corals their bright colors — and food — "jump ship," according to NOAA.

The 2014-2016 heat waves also seem to have contributed to declines in the number of Steller sea lion pups to survive to adulthood — likely because of its impact on the sleek predators’ favored prey.

Higher temperatures also led common guillemots — a Northern European seabird — to pant and pace, to spend less time with their breeding partners and even to temporarily abandon their nests.

Some animals have managed to make the heat work for them — like Europe's reed warbler, which has taken advantage of the shortened winter to kick start the breeding season.

Other animals beat the heat by adapting what, in a human context, might be called their built environments.

The midday gerbils of China's Mu Us desert countered the searing — and anomalous — heat with their heat-absorbing burrows, which led them to be "barely exposed to heat stress."

But in general, these disruptions are only the beginning, a study in Nature suggested: rising temperatures will wreak havoc across the natural world if humans don't keep to their climate commitments.

If human burning of fossil fuels isn't reduced — leading to about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.4 C) in warming — 41 percent of all land vertebrates will face heat extremes above recorded levels over at least half of their ranges.

That breaks down to a quarter of birds, a third of mammals, and roughly half of amphibians and frogs.

This is an avoidable tragedy, the scientists emphasized. 

Intermediate cuts in emissions — enough to keep warming at about 5 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 3 Celsius) would drop that top-line risk from 41 percent of species to 15 percent.

And dramatic emission cuts — enough to keep the world within the Paris Climate Accord target zone of about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.8 degrees Celsius) would mean only 6 percent of land-based vertebrates would face such exposure, and many species would avoid it entirely.

By contrast, a failure to cut our level of fossil fuel use will lead to a drastically impoverished world as “constant severe thermal stress” withers the biosphere, the Nature scientists wrote.

“Deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts are urgently needed to limit species’ exposure to thermal extremes,” they added.

Place a rattlesnake in a bucket and shake it, and the result will be predictable: The stressed-out reptile will begin rattling its tail to warn off the enemies outside. 

But place two rattlesnakes in a bucket and something entirely different happens, according to findings published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.

In the presence of a comrade — even a stranger — the jostled rattlesnakes' heart rates stayed lower than when the snakes were alone.

That finding is potentially revolutionary, as it represents the first peer-reviewed discovery of reptiles that draw emotional support from each other's presence.

The phenomenon the researchers were studying is called "social buffering," and it has been widely documented across the bird and mammal families — as well as being a nearly universal human experience.

Anyone who has felt a stressful situation eased by the presence of a friend has firsthand experience of what this is like.

But until this study, scientists had never found evidence of the behavior in any reptile species — even amid a broader reevaluation of the class's social lives.

The findings call further into question scientists' long held — and rapidly eroding — beliefs that the scaly vertebrates are less social than their furred and feathered cousins.

“In the past, historically, people have had a very negative perception of reptiles and they thought of them as being kind of not very complex robots,” said lead author Chelsea Martin of Loma Linda University School of Medicine.

That deep-seated bias is an unintended result of snakes’ appearance, Martin argued. “They're not fluffy. They don't have facial expressions. It can be really difficult for us to perceive what they're feeling or what's going on with them. And so I think historically, people have thought, oh, there's nothing happening.”

The study was born from a chance observation by William Hayes, Martin's adviser. 

As a recognized local snake expert, Hayes occasionally finds himself called into the mountains to pick up rattlesnakes trapped by anxious homeowners — animals that would otherwise likely be killed.

This procedure involves transporting a snake that has been trapped in a bucket, which can be a noisy experience, Hayes said.

The reptiles “get scared really easily,” Hayes said. “Rattlesnakes aren’t angry — they're not trying to hurt us. They're just afraid of us. So they’re in the buckets and they often rattle.”

But in some cases, homeowners had captured two snakes a few days apart — which Hayes brought out in the same bucket.

“And it seemed to be that when there were two of them in there, they weren't rattling as much,” he said.

Hayes's offhand observation came amid a broader rethinking of sociality in snakes — and of vipers like rattlesnakes in particular.

“When I was in graduate school, the general paradigm was that animals don't even think, they just follow simple stimulus responses,” he said. 

As a graduate student, he was lead author on a paper that found rattlesnakes could precisely control how much venom they injected when they struck — and could choose not to inject venom at all.

After that paper, a leading snakebite expert wrote him to complain. “He says ‘They don't have the mental capacity to make these decisions,’” Hayes recalled — even though that behavior had already been established in insects, which would have been assumed to be simpler.

But while snakes lack the expressive faces, fur or feathers that accompany sociality in birds and mammals, they have their own means of sensing and communication.

Some of these are all but invisible to humans, because of our vastly different sensory tools. 

Snakes take in information — and potentially transmit it — via channels of scent, heat and vibration, according to the book "Rattlesnakes of Arizona."

But with the weight of decades of studies, scientists now know that despite their unsavory reputation — their Latin name is the evocative Crotalus horridus — rattlesnakes are among the most social reptile species, and many of their behaviors echo those among mammals.

For example, it had long been known that rattlesnake mothers give birth to live babies — hatched from eggs that remain within their bodies.

But a big breakthrough came in 2002, when a landmark study found that pit viper mothers — the broader grouping that rattlesnakes are a part of — cared for their newborns for several days after birth. 

In fact, the scientists suggested that the heat-sensing facial "pits" that give the vipers their name  — which allow them to strike prey in total darkness — evolved in tandem with their rattling tails and habit of maternal care.

Added together, the scientists suggested that this complex of behaviors means a watchful mother can see a threat coming for her newborns and ostentatiously warn them off. 

Subsequent studies found that females of many species spend the winter coiled together in communal dens with each other and their offspring — with an influential 2004 study finding that female rattlesnakes tended to sleep dramatically closer to their sisters than to unrelated females.

This finding was particularly remarkable, given that the snakes had been separated at birth and raised in isolation, the scientists noted.

This 2004 finding was strong evidence that the snakes "may lead much richer social lives than previously thought," said lead author Rulon Clark of Cornell University at the time.

And since then, a slow accretion of evidence has built up, tilting the scientific scales toward a growing acceptance of social behavior in snakes.

A 2011 study showed that black rattlesnakes actively cared for their newborns, including protecting them against predators.

After their mother leaves them, newborn timber rattlesnakes also tend to follow her scent — a small study found that of six newborns, five spent the winter in the same den as their mother, and the remaining one in the den of a related female. 

These behaviors appear widespread among the pit vipers. A 2016 study found that 94 species in the group live communally at least part time. And in at least 18 species, these communities are "stable," drawing in snakes from diverse ranges and sometimes lasting for years. 

And sociality seems to go beyond the viper family. According to a 2016 study in Nature, young water snakes hatched from eggs that incubated alone — instead of in direct contact with their siblings — grew up to be markedly less social.

This social behavior can be a devastating liability where humans are concerned. Since the 1950s, communities across the West have carried out “rattlesnake roundups,” in which gasoline is poured into dens of rattlesnakes, forcing them to the surface — where they are captured to be killed en-masse in carnivalesque public gatherings.

In the world’s largest such display, which happens each March in Sweetwater, Texas, thousands of snakes are milked of venom and forced to show their fangs — before being beheaded and skinned for leather.

These sorts of events are only possible because people don’t consider snakes to be “sentient,” Hayes said. 

“People would go to jail if they treated dogs and cats that way. It's just horrible,” he said.

To test whether snakes drew comfort from each other's presence, Martin and Hayes created a deceptively simple experiment. 

First, they maneuvered the front half of an unsedated rattlesnake into a specially made clear plastic tube — which allowed them to safely attach heart rate-tracking electrodes to “the other half,” Martin said.

They then jostled the wired-up snakes in buckets — either alone, with a snake-sized length of rope, or with another rattlesnake of the same species.

Even though the snakes were strangers to each other — unrelated members of the same species — the heart rates of the snakes who had been given a cellmate stayed lower.

Martin said that she hoped the study would help people to see snakes as kindred creatures — and therefore to treat them better.

“When people start to see that they're more similar to us, and that they maybe have more complex things that are going on with them — then that might change their perception,” she said.

“And that's the goal. So again, you know, knowing that ‘Hey, humans socially buffer and so do snakes,’ or ‘Hey, female rattlesnakes take care of their babies” — it might make people say that, well, we're not that different from them. It might make them a little friendlier and less fearful.” 

The plan announced Thursday incorporates measures that help the trucking industry meet California's emissions requirements while enabling the state to simultaneously reach its climate goals, according to those involved.

In striking this compromise, the state averts a potential legal battle with major truck manufacturers, who have long been challenging California’s unmatched emissions requirements as technologically and economically unfeasible.

“Today, truck manufacturers join our urgent efforts to slash air pollution, showing the rest of the country that we can both cut dangerous pollution and build the economy of the future,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in a statement.

The Clean Truck Partnership, a joint initiative of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association, includes the industry’s biggest players: Cummins Inc.; Daimler Truck North America; Ford Motor Company; General Motors Company; Hino Motors Limited Inc.; Izuzu Technical Center of America Inc.; Navistar Inc.; Stellantis N.V.; and Volvo Group North America.

Among the terms of the agreement is a commitment on CARB’s part to align with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2027 regulations for nitrogen oxide emissions — regulations that are less stringent than those promoted by California.

The EPA’s rule, cemented in December, aims to cut nitrogen oxide emissions by 50 percent by 2045 — a weaker rendition of a previous version that would have cut this type of pollution by about 60 percent in the same period.

In 2020, California's regulatory body adopted first-of-their-kind rules that sought to expedite the transition of diesel trucks and vans to zero-emission models and reduce nitrogen oxide emissions.

Through these measures, 40 percent of tractor trailers, 55 percent of small trucks and 75 percent of heavy trucks and vans sold in California by 2035 would need to be zero-emission. But already by 2024, 5 percent of trailers, 5 percent of small trucks and 9 percent of heavy trucks would need to meet such standards.

The Golden State, which typically leads other states on pollution regulation, had applied to the EPA for a special waiver to enforce these rules because the Clean Air Act prohibits states from implementing their own emissions standards.

Members of the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association have vehemently opposed California’s request, stressing that while they “support a program that can be a successful bridge to a zero-emission commercial vehicle future,” that plan “is not technologically feasible.”

As part of the deal announced Thursday, California's regulatory body has agreed to modify elements of its 2024 nitrogen oxide emission regulations, while manufacturers will provide offsets to maintain the state’s emission targets.

CARB also committed to providing no less than four years of lead time and at least three years of regulatory stability before imposing the new requirements.

“This agreement makes it clear that we have shared goals to tackle pollution and climate change and to ensure the success of the truck owners and operators who provide critical services to California’s economy,” CARB Chairwoman Liane Randolph said in a statement.

For their part, truck manufacturers agreed to meet the state regulator's zero-emission and pollutant standards within the state, regardless of any attempts by other entities to challenge California’s authority.

Jed Mandel, president of the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association, on Thursday touted his organization’s “longstanding commitment to reducing emissions” and the potential to “work together to achieve shared clean air goals.”

“Through this agreement, we have aligned on a single nationwide nitrogen oxide emissions standard, secured needed lead time and stability for manufacturers, and agreed on regulatory changes that will ensure continued availability of commercial vehicles,” Mandel said in a statement.

— Updated July 7 at 10:05 a.m.

While policies like the federal Inflation Reduction Act include measures to provide clean energy to low-income households at minimal or no cost, the dissemination of these services has thus far faced numerous challenges, according to the authors, who published their findings Thursday in Nature Energy.

Customers eligible for these services may lack information about the relevant technology, be distrustful of program providers or simply not have the bandwidth to inquire about the application process, the authors explained.

Aiming to identify ways to make participation more appealing, the researchers collected data from homeowners who received fully subsidized solar through California’s GRID Alternatives, which administers the state’s Single-Family Affordable Solar Homes (SASH) Program.

Although the program had already established that referrals were an important tool for finding new participants, the researchers said they wanted to pinpoint cost-effective and scalable strategies to optimize this process.

"Growing evidence points to the power of social networks to encourage adoption of new energy technologies,” lead author Kim Wolske, a research associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, said in a statement.

"For subsidized low-income programs, existing program participants may be especially important,” Wolske continued. “They know what it takes to qualify and can more readily identify eligible friends and family.”

SASH had an existing rewards initiative through which customers received postcards reminding them that they could get $200 if they referred friends who went on to install solar, according to the study.

Wolske and her colleagues — from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — decided to test different referral strategies by sending all 7,680 of GRID Alternatives clients one of three randomized mailers.

The control situation mimicked the status quo and simply included the postcard reiterating the possible $200 reward and including a toll-free number and a website address.

A second mailer then sought to test what would happen if this request also included a $1 gift as a thank-you to existing clients for their participation, the authors noted.

The goal of this strategy, they explained, was to create a feeling of reciprocity — that customers could return the favor by referring qualified households to the program. The inclusion of that dollar led to twice as many nominations — one referral from every 52 clients — and 2.6 times the number of solar contracts, the authors found.

In the third mailer, the researchers opted to combine the dollar gift and $200 reminder with a postmarked referral slip, on which participants could simply write the contact information of friends on the back of the card and drop it in the mail.

This blend of strategies generated one referral for every 14 clients, as well as 5.2 times more solar contracts than the isolated offer of a $200 reward, the authors concluded.

“To get the most out of peer referrals, the request for referrals needs to remove uncertainty about what referring entails and make the process simple,” Wolske said.

Fostering a sense of reciprocity may be particularly effective in clean energy subsidy programs, as doing so reminds customers about “the much larger gift they already received — in this case a rooftop photovoltaic system,” according to Wolske.

Going forward and beyond California’s GRID Alternatives program, the researchers expressed hope that their findings could help inform future policy measures.

"The strategies we've identified could work for other energy assistance programs, from heating and insulation upgrades to electric vehicle incentives,” Wolske said. “The ultimate goal is to extend the reach of these programs, making our energy systems more efficient, cleaner and inclusive."