wildfires

By Rebecca Burns - The Lever, August 9, 2023

Fossil fuel and corporate lobbying groups blocking action on climate change are also fighting labor protections meant to safeguard workers from its intensifying effects. As record-high temperatures kill the workers who grow our food, deliver our packages, and build our homes, industry lobbying has stalled heat safety measures in Congress and at least six states, according to a Lever review.

As a result, most of the nation’s workers still aren’t guaranteed access to water, rest, and shade — the basic precautions needed to fend off dangerous heat stress. Heat exposure could already be responsible for as many as 2,000 workplace deaths each year, and research suggests that it is three times as deadly when combined with exposure to air pollution from sources like wildfire smoke.

Business lobbies representing the agriculture, construction, and railroad industries have also opposed state rules protecting outdoor workers from smoke exposure.

The key opponents to worker climate protections include the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), a well-funded influence machine that describes itself as “the voice of small business” while pushing corporate agendas like the rollback of child labor protections. The group reported spending more than $1 million lobbying the federal government last year on issues including legislation to fast-track heat protections for workers. Soon after, the bill stalled.

By Al Weinrub - Non Profit Quarterly, July 13, 2023

There are two very different (and antagonistic) renewable energy models: the utility-centered, centralized energy model—the existing dominant one—and the community-centered, decentralized energy model—what energy justice advocates have been pushing for. Although both models utilize the same technologies (solar generation, energy storage, and so on), they have very different physical characteristics (remote versus local energy resources, transmission lines or not). But the key difference is that they represent very different socioeconomic energy development models and very different impacts on our communities and living ecosystems.

Let me start by recounting some recent history in California—the state often regarded as a leader in the clean energy transition.

In recent years, California’s energy system has failed the state’s communities in almost too many ways to count: utility-caused wildfires, utility power shutoffs, and skyrocketing utility bills, for starters. Currently, state energy institutions are advancing an all-out effort to suppress local community ownership and control of energy resources—the decentralized energy model.

Instead, they are promoting and enforcing an outmoded, top-down, utility-centered, extractive, and unjust energy regime—the centralized energy model—which effectively eliminates local energy decision-making and local energy resource development. This model forces communities to pay the enormous costs of unneeded transmission line construction and bear the massive burden of transmission line failures.

Using the power of the state to enforce the centralized energy model is at the heart of California’s new renewable energy tyranny. And this tyranny has now spread to the federal level, as substantial public investment is now set to go toward large-scale renewable energy projects across the country. These projects will be controlled by and benefit an increasingly powerful renewable energy oligarchy. Being touted as a solution to what is popularly regarded as the “climate emergency,” this centralized energy model has actually failed to meet our communities’ energy needs, and at the same time has exacerbated systemic energy injustice.

By Willy De Backer - European Trade Union Institute, May 2, 2023

IPCC 6th assessment report – synthesis

On 20 March 2023, climate scientists published another ‘last warning’ on the climate emergency. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the synthesis report of its 6th assessment on the state of the global climate crisis. This synthesis draws together all the main findings of the three working group reports which were already published in 2021 and 2022.

The IPCC press release points to the fact that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising globally, and demands more ambitious actions to secure a ‘liveable future for all’. For a longer summary of the main messages of this synthesis report, read the analyses by Carbon Brief and the World Resources Institute.

Despite these scientifically alarming reports, the IPCC’s political impact in terms of real effective climate policies remains extremely low and therefore every cycle of reports leads to a more fundamental critique of the organisation’s way of working.

Hereunder, a collection of links to some of the critical articles we found on this new IPCC report:

• The Conversation: IPCC’s conservative nature masks true scale of action needed to avert catastrophic climate change
• Inside Climate News: Corporate Interests ‘Watered Down’ the Latest IPCC Climate Report, Investigations Find
• European Green Journal: Why the IPCC Can’t Escape Climate Politics
• The Nation: The Media’s Recent Turn to “Climate Optimism” Is a Cruel Fantasy
• Carbon Copy: IPCC’s climate reports reveal an unequal science

By Brooke Anderson - Yes! Magazine, April 25, 2023

Immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers in California reclaim the power of their labor.

Sandra de Leon adds branches to a burn pile in Santa Rosa, CA on December 18, 2022. Photo by Brooke Anderson

On most days, Sandra de Leon prunes grapevines in Northern California’s wealthiest vineyards. But today she is dressed head to toe in a yellow fire-resistant suit, helmet, safety goggles, and gloves, carrying a machete and drip torch. She calls out over her crackling mobile radio, “Jefe de quema: aquí Bravo, informandoles que …” (“Burn chief: Bravo unit here, informing you that …”) and then rattles off data in Spanish on the number, size, duration, and temperature of a dozen or so burn piles she is monitoring on the sun-speckled forest floor. 

De Leon is one of 25 immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers gathered on a cold December morning in Sonoma County, California, for the first-in-the-country Spanish-language intentional-burn certification program. Like de Leon, each of these firefighters-(and firelighters!)-in-training has been haunted by fire. During a massive inferno in 2017, de Leon was one of many “essential workers” escorted by vineyard managers through mandatory evacuation zones to harvest grapes while breathing in toxic fumes from nearby blazes. 

“When we arrived at work, there were patrol cars because it was an evacuation zone, but they waved us through to harvest. The skies were red and heavy smoke was in the air. They didn’t give us any protective equipment. No masks,” de Leon says. “There was so much ash on the grapes that when you’d cut the grape, it would get on your face. Our faces were black.”

While she didn’t get sick, she says her co-workers struggled with asthma. De Leon recalls harvesting like this for eight hours and getting paid just $20 per hour. 

“They should have paid us more,” de Leon says. “We risked our lives for their profits.”

Today, however, de Leon and her fellow farmworkers are here to learn about “good fire”—a controlled burn land stewards use to reduce underbrush in overgrown forests to prevent the spread of more destructive wildfires. Thanks to North Bay Jobs With Justice, de Leon and her fellow farmworkers are (re-)learning skills many of their ancestors knew well. And they are putting that know-how to work healing a fire-ravaged landscape and people. 

By Ray Levy Uyeda - Prism, September 28, 2022

Fires fueled by climate crisis expose the intersecting injustices incarcerated people face and the comprehensive reforms needed for a Just Transition:

Fall is a tough season for Da’Ton Harris, a wildland firefighter who spends multiple weeks at a time attempting to tamp down fires without hoses. Harris and his crew of 20 other firefighters with the Urban Association of Forestry and Fire Professionals, where he’s a superintendent, are responsible for cutting down a forest to its soil so that, theoretically, there’s less fuel to burn. It’s a critical job, especially as climate change continues to dry up California’s forests and prolong the summer heat, which now overlaps with increased winds during typical fall months—creating a ripe environment for wildfire. 

Many firefighters have been at the front lines of these dangerous jobs while being incarcerated, but policies block them from being hired by municipal fire stations after their release because they have conviction and felony records, despite the growing need for more firefighters to combat intensifying wildfires.

California legislators are starting to acknowledge this reality. In 2021, a state law went into effect that may make it easier for firefighters who were trained while they were incarcerated to expunge a felony conviction from their record, which is needed to gain the required licensing to become a municipal firefighter. Harris, a staff member at Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), which helps formerly incarcerated people find jobs, went through the expungement process this year.

“With me being able to get this off my record, I can try to head back to school to work for a paramedic license, so I can work closer to home,” Harris said. He lives in Victorville, California, with his wife and five children, and he said that he’ll be able to go to his son’s baseball games and maybe even help coach the team. The expungement, he said, will change everything.

Advocates say the change in the law is a prime example of the progress that needs to happen around felony records and removing employment restrictions for those who’ve been arrested or incarcerated. However, others warn that reforms to a system that is restrictive by design won’t bring about the justice needed to address climate change-induced wildfires or change the way a conviction record can shadow someone long after they’ve served their sentence. 

While incarcerated wildland firefighters are tasked with combating the consequences of climate change, justice-involved community leaders and grassroots activists say that the intertwined issues of climate change and retributive policies of incarceration deserve a deeper look that questions the efficacy of piecemeal solutions to systemic issues. They also echo a call for a Just Transition, a union term for shifting the workforce away from harmful industries to those that don’t risk climate and ecological balance.

By NRDC - Grist, July 19, 2022

Last summer, the Pacific Northwest was hit by a once-in-a-millenium heat dome. While temperatures were higher than ever recorded, L.A.* was outside, working Washington’s blueberry harvest. (Fearing potential work repercussions, L.A. did not wish to be identified by her full name.) Soon, she was dehydrated, dizzy, and vomiting. Her minor son, who was also working in the field out in the heat, got a bloody nose and headache. When the harvest was moved to the middle of the night to avoid the most intense heat—”to protect the fruit, not the workers,” L.A. says—her friend cut herself badly laboring in the dark. 

Whether it’s heatwaves, wildfire smoke, or attempts to adapt that create new hazards, the climate crisis is exacerbating risks for America’s workers. From home health aides and school teachers to construction and farm workers, people across the country are now facing compounding challenges on the widening frontlines of the climate crisis. Yet federal protections for the workplace have not kept pace.

During California’s recent wildfires, shocking photos emerged of farmworkers harvesting grapes in California vineyards under an orange-tinged sky. That may be one of the most visible examples of people being forced to work in dangerous conditions, but it’s far from the only climate-related health risk employees regularly face. “The reality is that millions of workers—across our society—are being exposed to multiple environmental stressors all at once, including searing heat and toxic air pollution,” says Dr. Vijay Limaye, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). 

For instance, Limaye explains that the formation of ground level ozone—air pollution formed in the atmosphere from building blocks including emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas—is intensified by hotter temperatures. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for setting exposure limits, but the agency’s models often don’t account for compounding circumstances or cumulative impacts. While the EPA sets some legal limits for ozone, for example, outdoor workers are frequently exposed to smog and extreme temperatures simultaneously. From a health risk perspective, “the sum is often greater than the parts,” Limaye says.

By Irene Calimlim, Dr Jose Pablo Ortiz Partida, Elizabeth Strater, Kimberly Warmsley, et. al. - The Climate Center, June 8, 2022

Over the past few years, extreme heat episodes have been on the increase throughout California and especially in the Central Valley. Home to 4.3 million Californians and nearly one million people working in agriculture, the Central Valley faced more than 35 days of extreme heat in 2021. This number is expected to double in the next few decades. In this webinar, presenters will discuss the impact on Central Valley residents, workers, and the agricultural sector, along with how to build community resilience in the face of these climate-fueled hazards.

Spanish interpretation brought to you by Linguística Interpreting & Translation.

En los últimos años, los episodios de calor extremo han ido en aumento en todo California y especialmente en el Valle Central. California es hogar a 4.3 millones y casi un millón de personas que trabajan en la agricultura, el Valle Central enfrentó más de 35 días de calor extremo en el 2021. Se espera que este número se duplique en las próximas décadas. En esta videoconferencia, los presentadores analizarán el impacto en los residentes, los trabajadores y el sector agrícola del Valle Central, además de cómo desarrollar la resiliencia de la comunidad frente a estos peligros provocados por el clima.

Interpretación en español presentada por Linguística Interpreting & Translation.

By Hannah Wilton and Davida Sotelo Escobedo - California Climate Agriculture Network, June 24, 2022

TIC’s work always comes back to strengthening relationships with members of the local community — giving everyone the means to stay in a place, liberated from the pains of poverty.

“I’m from here and hope to live here for the rest of my life,” Chester remarks. “Being committed to place allows you to go deep where you live and not be worried about moving on to the next professional step or location. We’re here and we want our community to be a better place — for our children and grandchildren and everyone else’s children and grandchildren.”

Why We Can’t Build a Fire-Resilient Future Without Worker Justice

Navigating the threat of wildfire is an ongoing reality of life in Sonoma County. From 2017 to 2020, fires burned more than 300,000 acres across the county, resulting in devastating losses to ecosystems, homes, communities, and human lives.¹ Recent years of extreme wildfire events have not only transformed the land itself, but also shifted the priorities of the public, management agencies, and local governing bodies around the essential need for fire adaptation and mitigation.

This work looks different everywhere, but in Sonoma County (SC) where over half the land area is forest and woodlands, there has been a strong focus on “vegetation management” – a set of practices that alter vegetation to reduce wildfire risk, promote public safety, and support healthy ecosystems.² Often, the goal is to reduce high “fuel load” or flammable vegetation that cause fires to build heat and intensity, through strategies like understory thinning, grazing, clearing along evacuation routes, and prescribed fire. Vegetation management is important in light of extractive land use patterns and decades of fire suppression that have disrupted or altogether eliminated natural disturbance regimes, leading to dense vegetation overgrowth. The removal of fire as a keystone process from California’s landscapes is also inextricably tied to colonization and the criminalization of traditional fire stewardship practiced by Native communities for thousands of years.

To reduce immediate wildfire risk, hazardous fuels reduction is needed at every scale – first, vegetation must be managed around homes to create “defensible space” delineated by a 100-foot perimeter around a structure³, and second beyond 100 feet into adjacent vegetation or wildland. Homeowners are on the hook for defensible space with California law and insurance companies, yet more and more attention is going toward the forest and wild areas beyond in order to create wildfire resiliency at a landscape-scale. Through such targeted vegetation management strategies, humans can take an active stewardship role in healing ecosystems and building fire adaptability for animal and plant life, forest health, and communities.

By staff - 350 Bay Area, November 3, 2021

In an era where many things don’t make sense (and are frequently enraging), the way we treat our essential workers still manages to stand out. We’ve been reminded of just how important farmworkers, truckers, and grocery workers are to providing affordable, accessible food, and to keeping our economy humming along. But still – minimum wage hasn’t budged in over a decade, and worker protections in the US rank behind almost every other country in the world.

The worst, though, and by far, is the way we treat farmworkers, particularly our undocumented community members. As Jean Guerrero’s excellent piece in the LA Times points out, California depends on 500,000 undocumented farmworkers (about 75% of the total needed to harvest our crops), yet these critically important community members are treated incredibly badly: wages are poor to begin with, and wage theft is rampant; the work is physically demanding, often damaging onto dangerous; and they face living in fear every day because they are willing to do this difficult work to feed their families. The injustice is outrageous.

By Olamide Olaniyan and Naomi Klein - The Tyee, October 22, 2021

The way we currently talk about the climate emergency and how to get out of it has been very much determined by Naomi Klein.

The author of This Changes Everything and other bestsellers, Klein is a major critic of global capitalism, has helped articulate its effects on the environment and climate change and supports transforming society in ways that improve the lives of people and protect them from its worst and unequal effects.

The Canadian journalist, author and activist was involved in drafting the 2015 Leap Manifesto — a plan for transitioning to a clean energy economy — which was the centre of much debate within the federal New Democratic Party and amongst its supporters, including in these pages.

In recent years she’s been involved with climate justice movements in the U.S. and Canada pushing for a Green New Deal and was even a surrogate for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 election campaign for the U.S. presidency.

Now Penguin has decided to package excerpts from her previous writing for a volume in its Green Ideas series.

Surely that counts as success, right? Well, as she pointed out to The Tyee in an interview last week, after a near decade of advocating for a range of climate goals, “We haven’t gotten any of those things.”

A 2016 NDP resolution based on the Leap Manifesto passed, but party leadership has since distanced itself from it. Klein’s spouse, filmmaker and climate activist Avi Lewis, ran in the 2021 federal election but ultimately lost his bid to become the NDP MP for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country.

Below the 49th parallel, Bernie Sanders didn’t win the Democratic nomination to run as president. None of the various Green New Deal bills in the U.S. have passed.

And when we talked to Klein last week, citizens of the country where she’d spent the last couple of years living and organizing had been agonizing over whether significant legislation to address climate change would make it through the Senate, thanks to two centrist democrats.

And on a grander scale, not much has changed. Many countries, including Canada and the U.S. — two of the largest per capita emitters — continue to drag their feet and have yet to hit their commitments to cut emissions.

All this Klein would readily admit. But she’s far from ready to declare defeat. As in chess, even among the losses, there is the fight for a fighting chance. And in the long run, every move matters.

The author, who’s studied and long been involved in climate justice movements, says she won’t “indulge” in climate doom-ism. She still believes this moment has quite a bit of potential.

“We have locked in a very, very rocky future, but it is not too late for us to avert truly, unlivably catastrophic warming,” she said.

In September, Klein joined UBC’s geography department as a professor for climate justice, along with her spouse Lewis.

She’s also involved in building the university’s new Centre for Climate Justice. The goal, she says, “is to be useful on the timeline of the climate emergency, and very much to take leadership from the most impacted constituencies.”

Klein talked to us about her new role, the recent Canadian election, and the “infrastructure of care.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.