News

Sep 17, 2023

The smoke will clear. But the future is hazy.

By SEAN REILLY 06/08/2023 07:00 PM EDT Presented by With additional reporting

By SEAN REILLY

06/08/2023 07:00 PM EDT

Presented by

With additional reporting from Joanne Kenen

A thick layer of smoke envelops the Washington Monument. | Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo

APOCALYPSE NOW — Within a few days, the wildfire smoke blitz that is choking much of the Northeast will likely be gone. The unnerving portents it left behind will linger.

For years, scientists have warned that the hotter, drier conditions accompanying climate change were helping to drive the growth of bigger, longer-lasting wildfires. Until this month, however, the effects had been largely confined to West Coast states like California and Oregon. Now, the nation is being treated to photos of iconic Washington, D.C. monuments drenched in sickly yellowish haze and a New York City skyline almost blotted out by smoke.

"Just a massive, awful event," Stanford University professor in the Doerr School of Sustainability Marshall Burke wrote on Twitter, "with highly populated areas getting hit with unprecedented levels of pollution." Wednesday was the worst wildfire day in the U.S. since 2006, Burke said, and Tuesday was fourth worst.

Most worrisome, though, was the prospect that such disasters may now become more common.

"As climate change increases droughts, rain patterns will no longer match the seasonal memories that we or the landscape have, leading to large stands of dead trees and increasing the likelihood of extreme fires even in our eastern forests," Jessica McCarty, a Miami University geography professor, told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in prepared testimony at a hearing two years ago.

But the source of much of this week's woe lay not in the U.S. but in Quebec province, Canada, where a drop in spring rainfall by this week helped fuel more than 150 wildfires, many of them initially rated out of control. If the resulting plume was a reminder that air pollution knows no boundaries, it also highlighted a threat that state and federal regulators are unprepared to confront.

When Congress in 1970 determined that dirty air had become a national menace, the culprits were clear: The "growth in the amount and complexity of air pollution brought about by urbanization, industrial development, and the increasing use of motor vehicles, has resulted in mounting dangers to the public health and welfare," lawmakers wrote in the opening to the Clean Air Act signed that year.

That law has since yielded stunning improvements in air quality that have undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of lives over the years and yielded hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of health-related benefits. Much of that progress, however, is now jeopardized by a natural phenomenon that EPA still officially classifies as an "exceptional event" and has no strategy for addressing.

In parts of Delaware today, for example, air quality was rated as "hazardous," the rock-bottom rung on EPA's six-point rating scale. Wildfire smoke is laden with a variety of dangerous pollutants, the most pernicious being fine particulates that are tied to strokes, breathing problems and other ills. While the EPA says that most healthy adults and children will recover quickly from short-term smoke exposure, the agency also acknowledges the possibility of "more severe health effects" in people with heart disease and other chronic conditions. Long-term smoke exposure is more serious still; in a 2021 study, researchers blamed it for some 6,300 premature deaths each year.

Among some environmental advocates eager for a more aggressive political movement on climate change, there was hope that this week's episode might mark a turning point of sorts as the effects became spookily visible in both the nation's political and media capitals. News outlets’ fixation with those vistas drew some snarky rejoinders from West Coast residents who wondered where all the attention had been when their cities were shrouded in haze. Still to be seen, however, is whether indelibly memorable images can spur action.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight's author at [email protected] or on Twitter at @SeanatGreenwire.

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CAN TELEMEDICINE HELP THE PLANET? — Joanne Kenen, the Commonwealth Fund Journalist in Residence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health emails Nightly: With unhealthy smoky air blanketing much of the country, the planet sure told us it needed help. Virtual medicine might be one part of the solution.

People got used to telemedicine during the pandemic and overall they want to keep that option. But lawmakers and federal health officials still have questions about the bottom line — do people over utilize some health services for minor ailments if it's a simple click away? Do they have remote appointments — but then end up in the doctor's office in person anyway, adding to costs and burdens on a health system that's already costly and burdened?

But as I worked on a Politico Magazine piece about how hospitals spew carbon and how some are trying to slow that down, another question occurred to me. Do virtual visits help the planet? Do they keep us (and sometimes our doctors and nurses, too) out of our gasoline-fueled cars enough to make a difference?

Several early studies suggest that overall, they do. Not enough to stop climate change all by its lonesome, of course. But one of many helpful steps — particularly in underserved areas where people might have to drive a long distance to get to a doctor. And as I type this, watching the light on my home-office HEPA filter flicker from purple (bad) to red (really bad), it seems like we need to do all the small stuff we can, while still pursuing the big stuff.

The Providence hospital system for instance, which has had an ahead-of-the-pack sustainability program for three decades (and has many health facilities in wild-fire prone parts of the country) says telehealth visits pre-pandemic reduced greenhouse gasses by 540 metric tons carbon dioxide equivalent. For each of three pandemic years, 2020-22, Providence telehealth reduced carbon emissions an average of 8780 metric tons annually. (According to MIT, you emit about one metric ton of carbon for every 2500 miles you drive in a gas car — about the distance from MIT's Massachusetts campus to Salt Lake City.) Several other studies, including some published in Nature and JAMA Network, have also found climate benefits from telemedicine — even for cancer patients, who obviously need to come in person for some of their treatments but can consult with oncologists virtually.

One sustainability expert I spoke to pointed out that video calls aren't energy-neutral — there is some environmental impact on that side that these assessments need to take into account. But it seems like there are some other green spillover benefits that are hard to measure — like all the miles that friends and families drive to get to and from the home of a loved one who needs a ride to the doctor. That's more miles not driven — more gas tanks not filled. Unless, as one friend of mine pointed out, you still have to drive to Granny's to hit the button on her telemedicine Zoom.

— Voting Rights Act dodges bullet at Supreme Court: The Supreme Court has passed up a chance to further narrow the scope of the Voting Rights Act, unexpectedly siding with Black voters in an Alabama redistricting case and rejecting a legal theory that would have made it harder for minority voters to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders. In a surprising 5-4 decision today, the high court ruled that Alabama's Republican-controlled Legislature likely diluted the power of Black voters when it drew its congressional map after the 2020 census.

— Pat Robertson, evangelical and Christian political trailblazer, dies at 93: The Rev. Pat Robertson, an influential and often inflammatory voice of conservative Christianity who ran for president in 1988 and helped organize the political strength of evangelicals, has died. He was 93. His death was announced today by the Christian Broadcasting Network, but no cause was given. The son of a U.S. senator, Robertson initially made his name in broadcasting, as the host of "The 700 Club," which became the flagship of his Christian Broadcasting Network. The televangelist's influence was at his height in the 1980s and 1990s when a religious tint helped shift the Republican Party to the right, and Americans two centuries removed from the nation's Founding Fathers found themselves battling over the separation of church and state.

— Biden levels accusations of ‘prejudice’ behind anti-LGBTQ laws: President Joe Biden today offered a strong rebuke of anti-LGBTQ laws being enacted in state legislatures across the country. "We have some hysterical, and I would argue prejudice[d], people who are engaged in all what you see going on around the country," Biden said during a joint press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. "It's an appeal to fear, and [it's an] appeal that is totally, thoroughly unjustified and ugly," Biden added.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris arrive for an event in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 25. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

VP MIA? — When President Joe Biden last month met with the top congressional leaders to find a solution to avoid a government default, a key question followed: Where was Vice President Kamala Harris?

Harris was missing from the May 9 meeting, which was attended by other top White House officials, including Shalanda Young, Steve Ricchetti and Louisa Terrell, who went on to lead negotiations for an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. The vice president, who was in Washington, did not have any public events on her schedule that day.

In May, the month following the announcement of the Biden-Harris reelection campaign, the vice president did not have public events scheduled for nearly half — 15 days — of the month.

In interviews with more than 20 Democratic operatives, lawmakers, and donors, many have voiced complaints that the vice president isn't being utilized in the right ways, writes The Messenger. And they have looked for ways to boost her profile, especially since she and Biden launched their 2024 campaign in April.

WILDFIRE POLITICS — As wildfires in Canada have sent smoke over the United States, engulfing much of the Northeast in a haze of hazardous air pollution, scientists are clear: we are seeing the effects of climate change. But the Republicans campaigning for the presidency have largely downplayed the issue and rejected policies that would slow rising temperatures, reports the New York Times.

On Wednesday, even as the country experienced one of its worst days on record for air quality, with New York City especially hard-hit, former Vice President Mike Pence said in a town-hall event on CNN that "radical environmentalists" were exaggerating the threat of climate change.

His response reflected what has become a pattern among Republican officials. Many of the candidates acknowledge that climate change is real, in contrast to party members’ years of outright denial. But they have not acknowledged how serious it is, and have almost universally rejected the scientific consensus that the United States, like all countries, must transition rapidly to renewable energy in order to limit the most catastrophic impacts.

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THE SPIES NEXT DOOR — China is in talks with Cuba to establish a foothold there to spy on the United States, two senior U.S. officials said, a provocative move that already has lawmakers warning about parallels to the Cold War, writes Alexander Ward.

The officials, granted anonymity to discuss an extremely sensitive intelligence matter, said China was in direct conversations with Cuba to set up a base on the island nation just 100 miles from the United States. It would allow Beijing to collect signals intelligence on southeastern portions of America, home to many military facilities and major industries. Evidence of the negotiations came to light in recent weeks, the officials said.

Such a base could threaten to derail the Biden administration's efforts to "thaw" its frosty relations with Beijing. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reportedly planning to visit China in the coming weeks, a trip that was postponed in February after the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon after it traversed North America. Diplomacy with China continues mainly at the economic and trade level, while military-to-military discussions are practically nonexistent.

CIA Director William Burns made a secret trip to China last month to keep the lines of communication between Washington and Beijing open. President Joe Biden dispatched the spy chief in hopes of reviving higher-level conversations between the two powers.

The Biden administration has not yet confirmed the potential deal. "But we are well aware of — and have spoken many times to — the People's Republic of China's efforts to invest in infrastructure around the world that may have military purposes, including in this hemisphere," National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement today. "We monitor it closely, take steps to counter it, and remain confident that we are able to meet all our security commitments at home, in the region and around the world."

$115 million

The potential amount of savings for small firms in the U.S. and U.K. doing transatlantic trade, thanks to a deal on data protection that's part of The Atlantic Declaration, a new cooperative agreement between the two countries aimed at boosting defense industry ties, combating China's growing influence over technology and encouraging green investment.

CAT-ASTROPHE — In cities and towns around the world, residents are dealing with a surprising invasive species: cats. The cats that live on the streets, without any humans to regularly feed them, can wreck ecosystems, and are particularly harmful to bird populations. Cats, though, have their ardent defenders, who argue that attempts to control cat populations are needlessly hurting one animal to defend another. At conferences attempting to solve this problem, bird advocates and cat advocates often can't even share meeting rooms, lest they devolve into chaos. Carrie Arnold reports on these environmental issues — and these subcultures — for Noema Magazine.

On this date in 1967: A column of Israeli Army tanks on the third day of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The war resulted in Israel seizing Syria's Golan Heights and the Jordanian-annexed West Bank, territories that remain disputed today. | AP Photo

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Sean writes about air quality policy and regulations. His work has been honored by the National Press Club and Washington Press Club Foundation, among others; he also contributed a chapter to "Turning Carolina Red," an eBook published by E&E in 2014. He previously reported for the Federal Times and newspapers in Alabama. He has a bachelor's degree in political science from Carleton College and a master's degree in the same subject from Duke University.