Print version by Adam Wagner and Aaron Sánchez-Guerra
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan
Reporting for The Raleigh News & Observer - North Carolina News Service collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
RALEIGH, N.C. -- José and the other farmworkers who live in a grower-provided barracks at a Johnston County farm are used to going to bed late and waking up early.
It's just too hot inside to do anything else.
"There's no air conditioning in our housing, just intake fans," José told The News & Observer in Spanish during an interview in August. "All the workers have to get their own fans and ventilators to cool ourselves off.
"We struggle to fall asleep at night because of, well, that damn heat," he said. José and other farmworkers quoted in this series are only being identified by their first names to protect their employment.
Inside the long white building where José and about 20 other farmworkers stayed, there was one room for sleeping with beds lined up along the walls. Many workers had draped sheets around their beds for some privacy. At the foot of several beds, box fans had been propped up to provide some cool air.
It is common for North Carolina farmworkers to live in grower-provided housing, and it is common for that housing to lack air conditioning. Beyond making it hard to fall asleep, that can be a health risk, especially for agricultural workers.
When farmworkers come home at the end of the day, they immediately set about cooling off, changing clothes and finding water. When they cannot cool off, experts told The News & Observer, their bodies could be more susceptible to heat illness.
Climate is likely making workers' recovery more difficult, too. Warmer nights are among the telltale signs of a warming planet, and the decade from 2008 to 2017 in North Carolina included more nights when the low temperature stayed above 75 degrees Fahrenheit than any other on record, according to the
N.C. Climate Science Report.
Box fans and cracked windows often aren't enough for workers to recover.
Less than half of the state's farmworker housing has air conditioning, said Gayle Thomas, the medical director of the N.C. Department for Health and Human Service's Farmworker Health Program. Most of the housing that does have air conditioning only has window units in the bedroom.
"I have not seen many farmworker camps that even have [window units]. Most of them I've seen just have big fans next to their beds, and they sleep with the fans on," Thomas said. "So not only are they exposed to heat at work, but when they come home, they don't have a place to recover."
Farmworkers return from a day of working in the fields at a Johnston County farmworker camp Thursday August 27, 2020. Travis Long TLONG@NEWSOBSERVER.COM
MORE WARM NIGHTS COMING
It is alarming when scientists use words like "astounding."
That's what
Kathie Dello, North Carolina's state climatologist, calls a graph showing the progression of North Carolina's average minimum temperature. After averaging 47.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the 20th Century, the annual minimum temperature has been above average since 2002.
And during the last five years, the average minimum temperature has hovered around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, reaching record highs each year.
That is, Dello said, almost entirely a consequence of nighttime temperatures failing to get as cool as they did for much of the 20th century. Nighttime temperatures are more sensitive to global warming because there is less air mass overnight, meaning the heat trapped by greenhouse gases has a more pronounced impact.
"We're doing a crazy experiment to our planet and it's just that much more sensitive [at night] because there's less to get warmed so it can heat up more," Dello said.
Making matters worse, the number of very warm nights is almost certain to dramatically increase over the rest of the century, according to experts.
Scientists working on the Climate Science Report looked at
two warming scenarios: Under one, temperatures would increase by about 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, while the other studied an increase of about 6.7 degrees.
Either way, the number of very warm nights in North Carolina's Coastal Plain would spike. Under the 3.2 degree scenario, the increase would be between 14 to 45, while the 6.7 degree scenario would see 48 to 87 more very warm nights.
Dello said, "If you're somebody who doesn't have sufficient access to cooling or can't afford to run an air conditioner the entire night, you might be physiologically stressed."
A farmworker named Fransisco dries his clothes on a clothesline at a Johnston County farmworker camp Thursday August 27, 2020. Travis Long TLONG@NEWSOBSERVER.COM
NO REGULATIONS
There are no states that mandate cooling in farmworker housing. North Carolina's
Migrant Housing Act requires growers to provide heating if the outside temperature drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit but does not address cooling.
In emailed responses to The News & Observer,
Cherie Berry, the longtime N.C. labor secretary, argued that federal and state laws don't require that homes have air conditioning.
"Until air conditioning is required of all private residences, I cannot see why we would burden farmers with a higher level of regulation than required of any other residence," wrote Berry, who is retiring this year.
Thomas Arcury and Sara Quandt have studied the impacts of heat on farm workers for more than a decade. The husband-wife team works out of Wake Forest University's
Center for Worker Health.
Migrant farmworkers who are in North Carolina for the growing season on an
H-2A visa have their housing provided by growers, Arcury said. That means that even if workers want air conditioning, it is virtually impossible to justify the investment.
"If you own your own house, you can air condition it. If you can rent a house, you can air condition it," Arcury said in an interview. "If you are in employer-provided housing then it's difficult to do such a thing, particularly if you are only there for a few months a year and you don't know if you are going back to that place."
Boots and a hat dry on a window air conditioning unit at a Johnston County farmworker camp Thursday August 27, 2020. Air conditioning is considered a luxury by many farmworkers in North Carolina farmworker camps. Travis Long TLONG@NEWSOBSERVER.COM
CONDITIONS IN FARMWORKER HOUSING
During an interview with The News & Observer, Arcury recalled one research trip to farmworker housing next to a cantaloupe field. He initially tried to take measurements outside, but small bugs soon drove him indoors to a space without air conditioning.
After three or four hours doing interviews and collecting data inside the house, Arcury said, "I was soaking wet from perspiration from head to toe. My jeans were soaking wet. My shirt was soaking wet. ... If you have to sleep in those conditions, you're not going to recover from a day's work."
For one study, Quandt and Arcury
visited 170 farmworker camps in North Carolina during the summer of 2010, with all visits coming after 4 p.m. They found that 55% of the workers they spoke with had no air conditioning at all, and 38.3% had window-mounted air conditioning units that are typically used to cool one room at a time. Only 6.6% had central air in their dwelling. Nearly 80% of workers had fans in their sleeping quarters.
The research team also measured the heat index inside the housing, or what the temperature actually feels like when the humidity is combined with the temperature. Heat indexes above 90 degrees Fahrenheit were common in sleeping quarters during summer months, they found.
"They're working all day in the heat, in the high humidity, doing strenuous labor which only compounds the heat. Then, if they get home and they're in a situation in which the inside of their dwelling is in the 80- or 90-degree Fahrenheit range, then they can't recover," Arcury said.
From mid-June to mid-July, 47.7% of the sleeping rooms measured reached 90 degrees, the heat index at which the
National Weather Service urges extreme caution. That dipped slightly to 40.4% of rooms measured from the middle of July through the end of August before dropping to 11% in rooms measured from September through early October.
"This study suggests that farmworkers' recovery from the heat stress experienced during daily work will be affected by the [heat index] experienced at night. The [heat index] in sleeping rooms decreases later in the season, but dangerous levels still occur into the late summer," Quandt wrote.
In another study, Arcury interviewed 101 farmworkers about heat illness. He found that 35.6% of the workers reported experiencing at least one heat illness symptom while working outside, while 13.9% reported experiencing a symptom while working inside. The most common symptoms were hot, dry skin and dizziness.
Arcury also tried to figure out what might be causing heat illness. Personal characteristics like age or being a smoker were not associated with heat illness while working outdoors, he wrote. But working in wet clothes, harvesting and cutting the top of tobacco plants off were.
He also found that 66.7% of the workers who had gotten heat illness while working outside had spent time in an extremely hot house after work. Arcury called this "an important association" and wrote, "This result argues for changes in the [federal] Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act requiring that farmworkers be provided cooled living spaces."
"I'd honestly really like to have air conditioning here in our housing," said José, the Johnston County farmworker.
Instead, most workers have bought fans, like José has, and set them around their sleeping areas. When they need to cool off, the workers find reasons to go outside, like talking on the phone or doing a load of laundry.
It's the night time that's the worst, though. Once the workers eventually fall asleep, they wake up tired, José said.
"At times you don't want to go to work because you don't sleep because of the heat. But we have to keep at it."
This story is part of the Pulitzer Center's nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. For more information, go to pulitzercenter.org/connected-coastlines.
This story was produced with original reporting from Adam Wagner and Aaron Sanchez-Guerra for the Raleigh News & Observer, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Read the full story here.
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By Stephen Battersby for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service, reporting for the Pulitzer Center-Public News Service Collaboration.
As a phrase and as a promise, net zero has been a great success. Hundreds of countries have pledged to reduce their net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by around the middle of this century. So, too, have thousands of regions, cities, and companies. Net zero has become a beacon of hope, guiding us to climate safety.
But look closely, and the beacon becomes a little blurry. Some scientists argue that net zero might lead us to rely too heavily on technologies that capture CO2 from the air. That could bring dangerous delays and unwelcome side effects, and give fossil fuel producers leeway to keep pumping and polluting. And its allure may be obscuring our need to look beyond net zero to a more ambitious goal-a world of net-negative emissions.
Some climate scientists have ideas about how we could refine net zero to make it a more focused and effective target. Others say it should only be one part of a new climate narrative. "We don't think enough about net zero, what it means, and if it's the right goal," says environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck, of the University at Buffalo in New York.
With the fate of the planet riding on the outcome, it's vital that governments and institutions are not led astray by their climate beacon-so the debate over net zero is more urgent than ever.
The Root of Zero
The idea of net zero is firmly based on climate science. In the 2000s, scientists worked out that if we stop pouring CO2 into the atmosphere, global average temperatures should roughly stabilize. That is because two effects of Earth's oceans happen to cancel out. Today, the atmosphere is kept relatively cool by the oceans. As seawater slowly warms, we lose that cooling effect, so if emissions fall to zero, we might expect the atmosphere to carry on warming for a few decades-a phenomenon known as thermal inertia. But the oceans also keep absorbing CO2, which should roughly balance the thermal inertia and keep temperatures steady.
Net zero took off in 2018, driven by the United Nations report "Global Warming of 1.5 °C." Three years earlier, the Paris Agreement had set out a goal to limit warming to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C. The new report laid out how the world might try to hit the more ambitious end of that goal, based on models that combine climate and economic activity. It concluded that to avoid warming of more than 1.5 °C, we would not only have to cut emissions deeply, but also remove a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere. Such removal could balance any stubborn, ongoing sources of greenhouse gases, known as residual emissions. These might include CO2 from concrete manufacture, for example, or nitrous oxide from fertilizers. So instead of absolute zero emissions, the new goal aimed for net zero, which allows some residuals to be balanced by removal.
This was only possible because technologies that remove CO2 from the air had become feasible. "Targets through the years have tended to reflect the practicality at the time of reducing emissions," says climate ecologist Stephen Pacala at Princeton University in New Jersey. "When you could envision a practical path to zero net emissions without leaving the world in poverty-all of a sudden, humanity jumped on net zero as a target."
It has undoubtedly had a galvanizing effect. "Before this, few companies had climate targets at all," says Sam Fankhauser, a climate economist at the University of Oxford in the UK. "So this is a step in the right direction."
But that shouldn't be the end of the story. "Net zero comes from the science, so it's subject to change as we learn more," says climate economist Sabine Fuss at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin, who was a lead author on the "Global Warming of 1.5 °C" report. Climate scientists agree that the concept holds several crucial ambiguities that need to be resolved.
Zero Sum
For a start, what is the best balance between cutting emissions and removing CO2? That depends on which emission sources will be too difficult to cut. But when Buck and her colleagues analyzed 50 national long-term climate strategies, they found that countries are inconsistent in how they consider residual emissions. "The risk is that governments put things that are expensive or politically inconvenient to abate into the 'residual box,'" the paper states. That makes it hard to know how much CO2 removal we need.
According to these strategies, the average residual emissions in developed countries will be 18% of current total emissions at the time of net zero. Extended to the whole world, that would imply annual removals of at least 12 billion tonnes of CO2.
Natural solutions, such as planting forests, can't come close to reaching this quantity on their own-and in a warming world, they will be increasingly vulnerable to fire, disease, and chain saws. So the assumption is that we will use a range of novel removal methods: using machines to suck CO2 directly from the atmosphere, for example, or burning biomass to generate energy while capturing and storing the CO2 emitted.
Most of these technologies operate at small scales today, collectively removing only about two million tonnes of CO2 per year. For now, most of them are expensive to operate. Some need a lot more research and development and may yet prove difficult to scale up. That's the first problem with asking too much of carbon removal: It might not have the capacity to meet such high demand, and then we would fail to hit net zero.
The second problem is unwanted side effects. Deployed at large scale, biomass-based CO2 removal could compete for land with agriculture or with rich ecosystems, which could push up global food prices or harm biodiversity. Other approaches are also likely to have snags, especially if stretched too far. Direct air capture requires a lot of energy, which must come from a very-low-carbon source not to be counterproductive. Enhanced weathering, which involves grinding certain types of rock to speed natural CO2-absorbing chemical reactions, could create air pollution.
Without defining the levels of reductions and removals that lead to net zero, there's no clear imperative for each country or company to cut its emissions to the bone. Instead, they might hope to pay others to remove lots of CO2 on their behalf. "Everyone thinks they will buy negative emissions from someone else," says climate scientist Bas van Ruijven at the International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.
Worse, it seems increasingly likely that CO2 removal will have to go beyond merely balancing residuals. "Now it looks like we will need net negative to meet the Paris goal," says Fuss. That means removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than we put in. Researchers in the international ENGAGE project have developed models that include a range of sociopolitical constraints, such as the ability of governments to enforce climate legislation. These models project that climate warming will overshoot the 1.5 °C target by 2050. Reversing that overshoot would require several hundred gigatonnes of CO2 removal during this century. "So you cannot have an enormous amount of residual emission, as then you need an even more enormous amount of carbon removal," says van Ruijven, who is a member of the ENGAGE project.
It may be wise to go further and try to repair some of the damage we have done, dialing down global temperatures closer to pre-industrial levels and curbing the ocean acidification caused by absorbed CO2. That would, of course, require even more removals. Despite this, companies and countries are not yet planning to reach net negative.
In some quarters, net zero is seen as a final goal. This could leave the door open for fossil-fuel production to continue at high levels and for new infrastructure that could commit us to burning those fuels for decades to come. "We haven't focused enough on the phaseout of fossil fuels," says Buck. "If we only focus on emission at the point of combustion, then we are missing half the picture." The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (known as COP28) alluded to this problem, calling for "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems." But, this falls far short of a phaseout. "It is promising that they said something, but it could have been stronger," says Buck. "What you need is a plan and a lot of resources committed to phaseout."
Zero Clarity
Net zero holds a host of other ambiguities. "Today, everybody has their own idea of what net zero means," says Fuss. "So we should take a step back and refine the concept. It is really important to get all these things straight, so we are not fooling ourselves."
For example, it's unclear whether net zero should include climate feedback effects, such as CO
2 emitted by thawing permafrost. These could require vastly more removals to prevent temperatures from rising.
Nor does the target emphasize urgency. If governments are aiming for net zero in 2050, they might feel free to kick their heels for a while. But many mitigation measures will need decades to scale up, so "it's vital to reduce emission as much as possible in the short-term," says Fuss. "You don't break something just to then repair it."
Net zero doesn't yet specify the durability of removals, either. Today's emissions will linger for centuries, so they can't simply be balanced by a form of removal that is likely to last only years or even decades. As Fankhauser et al. write: "Achieving net zero through an unsustainable combination of fossil-fuel emissions and short-term removals is ultimately pointless."
The sum should also explicitly include any knock-on effects. For example, planting forests at high latitudes can be counterproductive because they create a darker landscape that absorbs more solar heat, melting local ice and snow.
Then there is the question of whether to include other greenhouse gases, such as methane, in the net-zero sum. Methane has a much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere, so attempting to cancel out methane emissions with CO
2 removal would tend to mean more warming in the short term, and less in the long run. That could be good or bad, depending on whether it takes us past climate tipping points.
Zooming in on Zero
How can we do better? The first thing is to decide what should be classed as a residual. "We should make sure that residual emissions are truly hard to abate," says Buck. Voluntary codes are starting to address that, including the net-zero corporate standard launched by the Science Based Targets initiative, which calls for residuals to be only 5-10% of a company's current emissions.
To get removals moving, Fuss thinks that we need higher prices on carbon emissions. "If we are asking people to remove, we are asking them to perform a public service," she says, "so we should be compensating them for extracting each tonne of CO
2."
Carbon pricing could also curb fossil fuel production. Pacala led a 2023 National Academies report on accelerating decarbonization, which, among other things, recommended an economy-wide carbon tax in the United States. He says that the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (the nation's main policy tool for moving toward net zero) omitted any such tax in order to gain political traction.
Assuming that carbon removals can scale up fast enough, it will be vital to prove how much CO
2 they are removing, through monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems. That could be challenging. "MRV is hard enough with forests, where we already have decades of experience," says Buck. "With novel techniques, it's a big challenge, and I'm not sure it's solvable on a timescale of 20 years or so." But there are some promising signs. In November 2023, the European Parliament voted to adopt a new certification scheme for removals, aiming to boost their credibility and scale. Meanwhile, advances in remote sensing and machine learning could make MRV more achievable.
As well as trying to redefine net zero, perhaps nations and societies also need to take a step back and think more broadly about what to strive for. Buck thinks that net zero should become just one among a set of targets, including reductions in fossil-fuel production and enhancing the capacity of countries to implement the clean-energy transition. She also considers the term to be fundamentally unsatisfying, a piece of accountancy that is not compelling to most people. Perhaps the world needs a more inspiring climate narrative that comes not just from scientists, but also other groups. "We need to evolve broader languages," Buck says, "and make more effort to understand what would encourage people to change their lifestyles and consumption."
Fankhauser, meanwhile, cautions against focusing on climate impacts alone. "The risk is that we maximize natural systems for carbon uptake but compromise biodiversity and other ecosystem services," he says. "We need a holistic point of view."
Climate solutions should also avoid dumping pollution or costs disproportionately on disadvantaged communities. This isn't just a moral matter. "People are not going to go along with these changes unless they see benefits in their own lives," says Pacala, who points to the plight of coal miners in the United States and other workers whose jobs may be threatened by the energy transformation. "We have to manage the jobs of legacy workers, who were previously thrown under the bus," he says.
At the moment, there is no pithy phrase to sum up these diverse aims. "Net zero is powerful because it is two words," says Fankhauser. Adding more detail could spoil that rhetorical impact. Low-residual, urgent, all-greenhouse-gas net zero, aligned with biodiversity and poverty reduction-it hardly trips off the tongue. For now, at least, researchers and policymakers may have to stick with those two words, while carefully contemplating all the things that add up to zero.
Stephen Battersby wrote this article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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