A new study emphasizes the urgent need for enhanced air quality monitoring in rural regions, while drawing attention to the efforts required to decrease emissions in North Carolina’s most crowded areas.
According to the American Lung Association’s State of the Air report, only 35 of 100 counties could report on at least one air quality measure, with 33 earning an “A” rating.
Mecklenburg received an “F” rating, and Union County a “C,” suggesting local air quality might be jeopardizing the health of residents.
Kirsten Minor, health manager for CleanAIRE NC, pointed out increased travel in populated areas is a major contributor to the problem.
“Mecklenburg is one of the fast-growing metropolitan areas in the United States so many people are moving to North Carolina,” Minor pointed out. “Most of those emissions come from the transportation sector, and at the state level the governor’s office did just release the clean transportation plan.”
Although there is still work to be done in tackling air quality, Minor noted Mecklenburg has made significant progress. Just 20 years ago, the area experienced 65 high ozone days, in contrast to recent data revealing a drop to just under four. State officials are working to combat emissions through initiatives like Executive Order 271, focusing on electrifying medium and heavy-duty trucks and reducing diesel emissions on highways.
In North Carolina, only three counties, Buncombe, Forsyth, and Mecklenburg, have local air programs to enforce federal, state, and local air quality regulations.
Minor argued air quality improvement is a health priority needed in all areas, but emphasized it will take action at the state and local levels.
“You may be able to work with community members,” Minor acknowledged. “But I believe that you can advance changes more in the local level, because state action that’s dependent on the administration as well as who’s within the house and within the General Assembly.”
Another way people can advocate for cleaner air is by working with a community science group. Minor said CleanAIRE is collaborating with other organizations to increase hyperlocal air monitoring. People who are interested in reporting pollution concerns can fill out a form on their website.
A new report found a mix of good and bad findings for air quality in Maryland.
The American Lung Association recently released its annual State of the Air Report, and while some areas of the state showed improvement, metro Washington-Baltimore was ranked 26th worst for ozone pollution among 227 metro areas in the nation.
Four area counties — Prince Georges, Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Harford — received a failing grade for ozone. The report showed the number of unhealthy air quality days for ozone in the metro area was 6-point-7, which is unchanged from the year prior. Ozone, often called smog, is produced mainly by burning fossil fuels and has both short- and long-term health effects.
On a more positive note, overall the number of unhealthy ozone days for the state dropped.
Aleks Casper, director of advocacy for the American Lung Association, said it is still important to promote policies to improve air quality.
“While areas can show slight improvements, progress is not always guaranteed,” Casper pointed out. “We really need to focus on policies to make sure that we’re doing the best we can to improve air quality.”
The report showed ozone pollution generally improved nationwide. The Lung Association attributes the improvement to the success of the Clean Air Act. For a look at air quality in your area, you can visit airnow.gov.
The report also covered particle pollution, with metro Washington-Baltimore showing worse numbers this year. The metro area was given a C grade for short-term particle pollution, although Casper noted the state has made recent moves to improve air quality.
“Maryland has made some great announcements in the last couple of weeks about looking at adopting Advanced Clean Cars II, which would cover passenger vehicles, and the bill that passed the Legislature around advanced clean trucks implementation, so looking at medium- to heavy-duty trucks,” Casper outlined.
In March, Gov. Wes Moore announced Maryland would join the multistate Advanced Clean Cars II rule, which requires manufacturers to continuously increase the percentage of electric vehicles sold in the state, reaching 100% of passenger cars and light trucks by 2035.
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By Michelle Ma for Reasons to be Cheerful.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Before he joined the Civilian Climate Corps, Robert Clark assumed building and electric work was all low-skilled labor, akin to “working at McDonald’s,” he said. That was before he learned to install electric heat pumps, maintain electric vehicle charging stations and perform 3D image modeling of spaces about to get energy upgrades.
The apprenticeship program has been life-changing, Clark said. Before joining, he struggled to find work, in part because of a felony conviction for burglary. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said of joining the Civilian Climate Corps, which pays him $20 per hour to learn skills and receive the certifications that he needs to get work. He hopes to go back to school to become an engineer.
Clark is one of 1,700 New Yorkers who has gone through the Civilian Climate Corps, which was developed by BlocPower, a Brooklyn-based building electrification startup, and the city of New York.
The program, launched in 2021 with $37 million from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, has a heady dual mandate: develop a workforce that can help the city meet its ambitious climate goals and bring those jobs to neighborhoods affected by gun violence.
“The labor supply is a big problem, but it’s also a massive opportunity,” said Donnel Baird, CEO and founder of BlocPower. Baird grew up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he said many Black and low-income families like his own would turn on their gas stoves in the winter to make up for inefficient heating systems.
“We are going into the lowest-income communities, where folks are at risk of gun violence — personally, their families, their communities — we’re training them on the latest, greatest software to install green infrastructure in urban environments, in rural environments,” Baird said in 2021. “That’s going to solve not only crime rates in low-income communities in New York City,” he added. “It’s [also] going to solve the business problem of the shortage of skilled construction workers across America.”
In several studies, access to jobs has been shown to correlate with lower crime rates; one study of youth employment in New York City revealed a 10 percent drop in incarceration for those who had summer jobs.
New York has ambitious plans to decarbonize its buildings, the city’s largest source of emissions. It has banned gas connections in new buildings and put caps on how much existing buildings can emit. By 2027, all new buildings will need to be fully electric. Officials say those changes will help the city reduce building emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050.
New federal tax credits that are part of the Inflation Reduction Act provide additional incentives for developers and homeowners to replace outdated gas furnaces and boilers for electric upgrades.
There’s just one problem: there aren’t enough skilled workers.
“America has a shortage of skilled construction workers of any kind,” said Baird. Finding skilled construction workers who know how to install heat pumps, solar panels and transmission lines is especially challenging, with more electricians retiring each year than are replaced, according to the National Electrical Contractors Association. Rewiring America, an electrification nonprofit, estimates that the country needs a million new electricians to complete the new wiring needed for the energy transition.
“The pipeline for new electricians has been too narrow for too long,” said Rewiring America CEO Ari Matusiak. By his organization’s estimates, over a billion machines will need to be installed or replaced across American households over the coming decades, from breaker boxes to rooftop solar.
“The scale that is needed to meet the moment when it comes to our climate goals—but also to deliver savings to households and to reinvest in our communities—is pretty massive. And that requires people who know how to do that work,” Matusiak said.
Sam Steyer is the co-founder and CEO of Greenwork, a startup that connects clean energy developers with local contractors. Like Matusiak, he is intimately acquainted with the labor shortage in clean energy, a reality which he partly attributes to negative messaging about skilled trade work to Millennial and Gen Z workers.
“If you look back ten years, even, everyone was saying, ‘Oh, everything’s going to be replaced by automation and globalization, and the only path to a strong economic future is college,’” Steyer said. “I think we’re suffering the consequences of that now.”
Baird and his colleagues designed the Civilian Climate Corps program specifically to address these shortages. The program recruits trainees (or, as BlocPower prefers to call them, “members”) from low-income areas identified as having high rates of gun violence. It typically offers one month of workplace etiquette and business communication classes followed by about two months of technical training, which includes low-voltage electrical work, heating, ventilation, and air conditioner (HVAC) installation and workplace safety training. Most members then move on to on-site apprenticeships.
According to BlocPower, over 400 Civilian Climate Corps participants have secured jobs in related fields, and 62 percent have completed OSHA training. And perhaps most significantly for members, over 81 percent of whom were previously underemployed or unemployed, they get paid $20 per hour during their training.
This fall, BlocPower opened two training hubs in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and the South Bronx. In October, Mayor Eric Adams announced a $54 million expansion of the program, which will allow 3,000 more New Yorkers to participate in the year ahead.
Policymakers in Washington have been pushing for a federal civilian climate corps for years. Early in his administration, President Joe Biden called for a program “to mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers,” and Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation calling for the creation of a national civilian climate corps. Funding for such programs was ultimately dropped from the final version of the Inflation Reduction Act, but BlocPower hopes its program can “serve as a model for future national programming,” according to a spokesperson.
BlocPower is in the early stages of bringing its job-training program to cities like Buffalo, Denver and San Jose, according to a BlocPower spokesperson.
Cities like Ithaca, Philadelphia and Menlo Park, California have tapped the company to help electrify their buildings. Menlo Park has the ambitious goal of electrifying 95 percent of its existing buildings — about 10,000 of them — by 2030.
“One of the reasons we chose BlocPower is they’re very much aligned with our goals to focus first in areas that are predominantly communities of color, where the folks have been left out of energy innovations and need good-quality, long-term jobs,” said Angela Evans, Menlo Park’s environmental quality commissioner, who’s responsible for the city’s electrification program.
Though it’s known for being home to tech companies like Meta, Menlo Park is deeply segregated with large pockets of poverty and unemployment, especially in formerly redlined neighborhoods, Evans said. Menlo Park enlisted a local organization to build out its own job training program and plans to select its first cohort of 20 participants — primarily women and people of color — in early 2023.
“We absolutely have the tech, and we know that [electrification is] more efficient than gas, but it’s finding the folks who can do this and who are willing to do it,” Evans said. She’s spoken with quite a few “first-movers” who are eager to electrify their homes but are having a tough time finding available contractors.
Evans said that the city is raising funds to pay participants a comfortable living stipend; the state of California recently granted Menlo Park $4.5 million for its electrification program, part of which will be used to support job training, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has also committed $75,000 to workforce development efforts. The training program will also offer onsite childcare and other benefits, Evans said.
Menlo Park’s program has not yet launched, but Evans said she is already getting calls from other cities across the country, including Chicago and Denver, interested in learning about Menlo Park’s decarbonization and workforce development efforts.
“My genuine hope is that not only will building electrification scale in cities throughout the country, but that we’re going to create good quality, clean energy jobs while we do it,” she said.
For Baird, it’s not just about training low-income communities for good-paying jobs. He wants to ensure they’re also able to get the same energy upgrades their wealthier neighbors have. If BlocPower can help increase the nation’s labor supply, it will reduce the cost of electrification for everyone, he reasons.
Clark, who is now in his second year in the program and helping BlocPower mentor new members, said he’s become a green-jobs evangelist and hopes to excite friends and families about opportunities in the burgeoning field. “The only reason people are hesitant about it is because they don’t understand it. They don’t know about green jobs,” he said.
Michelle Ma wrote this article for Reasons to be Cheerful.
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By Kate Wheeling for Nexus Media News.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
After a series of winter storms pummeled California this winter, thousands of trees across the state lost their grip on the earth and crashed down into power lines, homes, and highways. Sacramento alone lost more than 1,000 trees in less than a week. Stressed by years of drought, pests and extreme weather, urban trees are in trouble.
The U.S. Forest Service estimates that cities are losing some 36 million trees every year, wiped out by development, disease and, increasingly, climate stressors, like drought. In a recent study published in Nature, researchers found that more than half of urban trees in 164 cities around the world were already experiencing temperature and precipitation conditions that were beyond their limits for survival.
“So many of the trees that we’ve relied upon heavily are falling out of favor now as the climate changes,” said Nathan Slack, the urban forest superintendent for the city of Santa Barbara. Conifers, like pines and coastal redwoods, once extensively planted along the coast, are dying in droves, he said. “The intensity of heat [and] the longer periods [without] rainfall really force us, as urban forestry managers, to reimagine what are good street trees.”
Trees help keep neighborhoods cool, absorb rain water and clean up air pollution. But in order for them to provide those critical functions they need to survive those same conditions. For many cities, that means reconsidering what species are planted.
Slack said he is looking to trees that typically grow further east, like the paloverde, that do better in warmer, drier conditions. “The trees that survive in the desert are going to be much more useful to us here,” he said.
In Sacramento, species like the “Bubba” desert willow are replacing redwoods, said Jessica Sanders, the executive director of the Sacramento Tree Foundation. “It’s sad because it’s an iconic tree,” Sanders said, “but it’s not really suited to the Sacramento region’s climate at this point.”
It’s not just California cities that are rethinking their canopies.
In Harrisonburg, Virginia, officials are bringing in willow oak and sweetgum – trees that are more tolerant to heat than many local species – from the coast. In Seattle, they’re planting more Pacific madrone and Garry oaks, which stand a better chance of surviving hotter, drier summers.
In Detroit, which was once known as the “City of Trees,” for its extensive canopy, officials are planting hardy trees like the Eastern redbud, American witch hazel and White oak that can withstand extreme heat and flooding.
City officials are also expanding species diversity to fend off disease, aiming not to allow any single species to comprise more than 10% of the city’s canopy. Detroit lost much of its canopy between the 1950s and 1990s to Dutch elm disease and an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer. Today almost 40% of the trees that remain are considered “poor quality,” said Jenni Shockling, the senior manager of urban forestry in Detroit for American Forests, a nonprofit. “[They] consist of species that are prone to disease and storm damage, cause property and infrastructure damage, and drop heavy amounts of debris.”
Preserving urban tree cover can mean the difference between life and death on a heating planet. Extreme heat kills roughly 12,000 people annually already in the United States; experts say that figure could reach 100,000 by century’s end. A study published by the Lancet in January found that increasing a 30% increase to a city’s tree cover could cut heat-related deaths by a third.
Poorer neighborhoods with large non-white populations tend to have less tree cover and can get up to 20 degrees warmer than wealthier (and greener) neighborhoods, according to several studies. “A map of trees in any city in America is a map of income and a map of race,” said Jad Daley, the president and CEO of the nonprofit American Forests.
Cites may soon see some relief. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law last year, includes $1.5 billion for the Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program, amounting to a five-fold increase in the program’s annual budget.
The funding has the potential to transform urban canopies, according to experts like Daley. But as Slack and other arborists across the country turn to new species to fill their streets, they’re running into a new issue: supply.
“Right now there are bottlenecks in the traditional nursery supply line,” said Shockling. “Growers tend to favor specific species because they grow well in the nursery or grow quickly, but that doesn’t necessarily speak to the species diversity standards that we’re trying to adhere to.”
American Forests has partnered with the U.S. Forest Service to invest in and develop nurseries across the country to improve the supply chain. “The nurseries need some assurances that what they’re growing is going to have market value, and we have the assurance that what we’re going to purchase will have a supply,” Shockling said.
Those large-scale investments will be crucial to updating the make-up of urban canopies, according to David Teuschler, the chief horticulturist at Devil Mountain, one of California’s largest nurseries.
According to Teuschler, even California native trees, like the Coastal Live oak, are struggling in the state’s droughts. He’d like to invest more in trees like Mesa oak or Silver oak to sell in Northern California and Swamp mallet or Salt Marsh gum to sell in Southern California, but it can take years to grow trees to a saleable size, and then he has only a limited time to sell those seedlings. Unsold trees are usually composted, burned, or otherwise destroyed.
He needs to know he’ll have customers who have a clear eye toward the future.
“You have to remember that there are a lot of old-school people out there that want to plant redwoods,” he said. “You want to be the nursery that has these drought-adapted species, but if you can’t sell them, it’s waste.”
One of Devil Mountain’s longtime customers is California arborist Dave Muffly, who stocks all his projects with drought-tolerant species.
Muffly first began looking for drought-resistant trees 15 years ago, while leading a project to plant 1,000 trees along a two-mile stretch of highway that runs through East Palo Alto. He wanted evergreens, to block freeway pollution from reaching the low-income community on the other side, and drought-tolerant varieties, but most of the state’s nurseries held few options.
Muffly began scouring the Southwest for acorns from hardier species of oaks; with more than 500 species of oak around the world that can breed and create viable hybrids, the trees are particularly likely to evolve traits that can help them survive rapid climate change, Muffly said.
With Teuschler’s help, his projects – including a 9,000-tree mega-project around Apple’s campus – have served as a proof of concept for cities as they work toward climate-resilient tree canopies.
Through channeling federal funding toward nurseries like Devil Mountain, this kind of holistic system could be replicated around the country to meet each region’s unique needs, Muffly said.
“The truth is we don’t grow anywhere near enough trees in the United States to spend the money that the government just put out,” Muffly said. “So now it’s time to build an arsenal of ecology, and the production lines are the new nurseries that will have to be built to grow the trees.”
Kate Wheeling wrote this article for Nexus Media News.
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