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Thousands of federal firefighters face a looming pay cut. How much is up to Congress

by www.npr.org Leave a Comment

In this Sept. 19, 2021 file photo, flames burn up a tree as part of the Windy Fire in the Trail of 100 Giants grove in Sequoia National Forest, Calif. Noah Berger/AP hide caption

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Noah Berger/AP

In this Sept. 19, 2021 file photo, flames burn up a tree as part of the Windy Fire in the Trail of 100 Giants grove in Sequoia National Forest, Calif.

Noah Berger/AP

Federal wildland firefighters were on the frontlines of some of the harshest wildfires to hit the U.S. and Canada this summer. But as Congress is inching towards its Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government, those firefighters stand to lose half their salaries.

And whether or not the government makes a deal, rent is due Oct. 1.

That’s because last year, the bipartisan infrastructure law provided a temporary pay bump to these federal first responders of $20,000 or 50%, whichever was less. The money is estimated by officials to last about two years and was retroactive to October 2021.

“We’re going to finish this season out, but there’s going to be a lot of people who don’t come back,” predicted Rachel Granberg, a wildland firefighter in Washington State. “Even with that infrastructure money, people are still leaving and it’s only going to get worse once that money runs out.”

But the money was always expected to run out, and federal officials relied on Congress to draft and pass into law a permanent pay fix that would increase the base pay of these firefighters. While there is one bipartisan effort in the Senate, Republicans in the House have not been able to coalesce around a solution.

“All of the fixes that have been proposed don’t match the amount of money that we get thanks to the infrastructure bill,” Granberg said. “So even if something does pass, we’re still going to see a pay decrease, which is really frustrating.”

Wildland firefighter Rachel Granberg takes a selfie in her uniform Rachel Granberg hide caption

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Rachel Granberg

Wildland firefighter Rachel Granberg takes a selfie in her uniform

Rachel Granberg

Granberg’s base wage is $37,000. Like many wildland firefighters, she relies on overtime hours to supplement the rest of her paycheck. The pay bump from the Infrastructure Law brought her up to almost $50,000.

“I can’t afford to live on 40 hours a week,” she said.

Still, officials and firefighters are urging for some action to be attached to the larger effort to fund the federal government. Congressional staffers estimate the Interior Department will run out of money on Sept. 30. As of Sept. 13, the Forest Service reports, at most, enough funding to cover the cost of just two pay periods after the end of the fiscal year.

“Put simply, without a permanent pay fix that creates certainty for our federal firefighters at both the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, we will continue to lose these employees to other, higher paying jobs which leave communities, wildlife and public safety in jeopardy,” said a spokesperson for the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service.

USDA warns employees they could see their pay cut in half

The USDA began warning its employees of a pay cliff, meaning when pay would sharply and suddenly drop, earlier this year. In materials obtained by NPR, USDA warned entry-level employees could see their base pay drop nearly $20,000, from just under $60,000 to $40,000.

“It really comes down to the fact that so a lot of our firefighters are our entry-level firefighters make $15 an hour and even our more senior firefighters do not make a living wage,” said Forest Service Deputy Chief Jaelith Hall-Rivera in an interview. “If they don’t have a solution in hand that they can depend on, they have job offers in hand, and they will take them — and they should.”

Hall-Rivera said the pay supplement allowed workers to decrease their need to work overtime.

“It was a game changer for a lot of people. And we are now coming to a time when that is going to go away and in its place, firefighters don’t know what to expect,” she said in an interview. “So right now there’s nothing.”

Pay issues are not new to federal fire forces , which for over a decade have faced staffing shortages and low morale. In 2021, President Biden increased federal wildland firefighter wages to a $15 an-hour minimum. Still, some state outfits like the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire) and the Unified Fire Authority in Utah will pay upwards of $50,000 base salary to someone even without experience.

The threat of a pay cliff has many worried staffing shortages could worsen in the coming year. Even with the supplemental wages, many reported staffing issues this year. DOI hired more than 87% of the goal for firefighters. The Forest Service said it hit 99% of its hiring target in July.

But the numbers don’t always match the story on the ground.

A prescribed fire burns during a wildland firefighter training June 9, in Hazel Green, Ala. George Walker IV/AP hide caption

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George Walker IV/AP

A prescribed fire burns during a wildland firefighter training June 9, in Hazel Green, Ala.

George Walker IV/AP

“I can tell you where I am at is not fully staffed,” said Ben McLane, a wildland firefighter captain. He noted his current $70,000 salary will drop to $50,000 after the money runs out while someone at CalFire with his experience could make $120,000.

“There are engines parked that we can’t take to wildfires because we don’t have the amount of people to even minimally staff what we have on paper,” he explained.

McLane, like others who spoke to NPR, reported fire truck engines and equipment not being used this year because the staff was not there to operate them. Others told NPR they have been moved around to account for shortages in other areas, and have also seen their own crews operate with limited personnel.

Hiring numbers reported by agencies will reflect hires made at a given time but not if crews are still minimally staffed and won’t account for employees who quit or never show up.

“We did well on our goal, but we’re going to have shortages everywhere because the fact of the matter is we don’t have the number of firefighters we need to deal with what we’re seeing in fire years,” Hall-Rivera said.

The pressure mounts each year as workers fear worsening fire seasons across North America. This year, for example, over 2,200 federal firefighters were deployed to Canada — the largest mobilization of U.S. resources to Canada in the 40-year history of an agreement that allowed for shared personnel.

A DOI spokesperson told NPR that before 2023, the most robust exchange of U.S.-Canada resources occurred in 2020 when nearly 600 firefighters and incident management personnel supported wildfire suppression operations in the Pacific Northwest and California.

Officials say firefighting isn’t as seasonal as it used to be, in part due to climate change, and that leaves the workforce behind without an updated pay or benefits structure to accommodate the new reality.

“We’re asking people to do a very different job in a very different way than when how we fight fire was conceptualized. And it truly was kind of the summertime for that and we’re just not in that place anymore,” Hall-Rivera explained.

Bipartisan support in the Senate, while the House is in limbo

The idea of increasing firefighter pay has generally broad bipartisan support. Bills in both the House and the Senate have been introduced by members of both parties. Still, an agreement has not been reached.

Janelle Valentine is the wife of a federal firefighter of 10 years and she is spending days lobbying lawmakers on Capitol Hill to pass a bill in any stopgap effort to avert a government shutdown.

“If the pay cliff is not mitigated, we’ll very quickly lose our home,” Valentine said, noting that her husband received $750 extra each paycheck, which barely covers their monthly mortgage.

With two young kids in the home, and living in a rural area of New Mexico an hour away from childcare, Valentine has opted to pursue higher education from home as opposed to seeking a job. But she’s not just taking student loans out to pay for school.

“I actually took out $10,000 in student loans this school year to mitigate those losses if they happen,” Valentine said. “We’ll start having to use the loan money for housing payments and then he’ll start looking for a new job.”

That new job would likely not be in firefighting — New Mexico’s state agency doesn’t pay as high as others, either, Valentine said.

In the Senate, lawmakers have garnered around the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act , which would permanently increase base pay for federal firefighters.

But in the House, Republicans and Democrats have separate efforts. While some acknowledge that DOI will run out of money by the end of the month, others take issue with how the Forest Service has calculated when it is set to run out of money.

“We all are in agreement they need a long term solution but in the short term firefighters are saying they are going to quit in two weeks,” said a Republican staffer familiar with negotiations, adding that the Forest Service recently calculated it would have money for two additional pay cycles instead. “A permanent solution is not mutually exclusive from transparency questions.”

Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., introduced his own measure, which would keep the base pay increases from the infrastructure law but only for two more years.

Meanwhile, firefighters on the ground are still working and a pay cliff, they said, will eventually affect them.

“There’s just the uncertainty of what my income is going to be,” said a wildland firefighter who asked to be kept anonymous because of a pending job offer could be withdrawn for publicly criticizes the legislation. They said they also stand to lose up to $20,000. “Even with the Paycheck Protection Act. We’re still going to see a pay cut with that. But we don’t even know if that’s going to be passed. So I think it’s kind of coming down to how much of a cut are we going to be seeing?”

The summer that reality caught up to climate fiction

by gizmodo.com Leave a Comment

This summer, the United States roasted like never before. People got third-degree burns from simply falling onto hot pavement in Arizona, filling up all the beds in Maricopa County’s burn center. High humidity teamed up with the Midwest’s worst heat wave in years to send the heat index, or the “feels like” temperature, soaring above 130 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Kansas, sending record numbers of heat-stricken people to emergency rooms. Off the coast of Florida, the ocean warmed to hot tub temperatures , leading to mass death in the coral reefs.

Catastrophes have become a familiar aspect of summer, which some scientists now call “ danger season ,” but the disasters of the summer that just passed seemed to have reached a new level. A flash drought in Maui turned invasive grasses into kindling, priming the way for a fast-moving blaze that engulfed the town of Lahaina in one of the deadliest fires in American history. More than 1,000 fires burned across Canada’s forests, scorching seven times the acreage that usually burns in a year. In a peculiar twist, disasters began to escape their usual geographical and seasonal confines . Canadian wildfire smoke traveled south and smothered New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago ; a rare tropical storm rained down on Southern California; wildfires scorched the bayous of Louisiana .

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What once sounded outlandish, like material for a dystopian novel, is looking more and more like reality. So what is a writer of fiction supposed to do? For decades, authors have speculated what the world might look like when the climate from hell arrives. Consider American War by Omar El Akkad, set in 2074 during the outbreak of a civil war set off by a ban on fossil fuels, when Florida is erased from the map and Louisiana is half-underwater. In the six years since the book’s publication, the United States has become the most deeply polarized democracy in recent history; the intensity of heat waves and other disasters have eclipsed expectations. Earlier this year, the magazine Writer’s Digest called American War an “all-too-realistic cautionary tale.”

But El Akkad never intended it to be realistic at all. I asked him if it felt like the novel was starting to come true. “I thought that the way I had structured it was enough of an extrapolation that I wouldn’t have to deal with precisely the question you’re asking,” El Akkad told me. “And that has been obliterated in the last few years. That, to me, is terrifying.”

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Extreme weather has melted the distinction between fact and fiction. As El Akkad described it, global warming doesn’t feel slow and steady; it feels more like falling down the stairs, with big drops that shake your expectations. One moment, you’re taking a nap in your house; the next, you’re running for your life from a wildfire. This year, a naturally hotter weather pattern called El Niño started setting in, adding extra heat on top of the climate change we’ve become accustomed to. July was the planet’s hottest month on record, clocking in at 1.5 degrees C (2.4 F) warmer than the preindustrial average. The disasters this summer serve as a preview of what the world could see during a typical year in the early 2030s. We no longer need authors or scientists to imagine it; real-world experience does the trick for anyone who’s paying close attention.

“For a long time, readers could return to a real world in which they could imagine that the people whose lives are wrecked are always going to be someone else,” said Kim Stanley Robinson, the sci-fi writer behind several prominent novels about climate change, including The Ministry for the Future and New York 2140 , in an email. “Now, as more catastrophes happen in the real world, science fiction stories about the near future — what we now have to call climate fiction — these are simply realism.”

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To be sure, stories about climate change have felt like they’ve been creeping closer to reality for a while. Take Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower , a dystopia written in 1993 that traces the journey of a teenager migrating north away from a drought- and fire-stricken California. “If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it’s one written in the past that has already begun to come true,” Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist, observed in 2016 .

For authors trying to imagine the outer edge of what’s plausible, the pace of recent real-world extremes has prompted revisions to their drafts. That happened to Stephen Markley, author of The Deluge , a nearly 900-page book replete with disasters from the dust storm of 2028 to a super-hurricane that reduces the Carolinas to rubble in 2039. When he was revising the book in June 2021, a freak heat wave struck the Pacific Northwest, sending temperatures to 121 degrees F in British Columbia, off the charts of what climate scientists thought was possible at the time. Looking back at his draft, Markley said, what once seemed like surprising temperatures for the London and D.C. of the future “all looked so silly.”

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Once or twice every week, someone sends Markley a message suggesting that reality is starting to parallel his book — linking to a news article about the Lahaina fire, for example, that has similarities to his book’s L.A. fire of 2031. “What I’ve sort of had to accommodate myself to,” he said, “is that my novel is going to be coming true for the rest of my life.”

For many Americans, the summer of 2023 could be remembered as the time that climate change became personal. At the end of June, 110 million people , more than a third of the U.S. population, were subject to air quality alerts as smoke from Canada drifted across the eastern half of the country. As July came to a close, 170 million Americans were under a heat alert; in late August, again, 130 million faced heat warnings. By the end of the summer, virtually no corner of the country had been left untouched by extreme weather and no part of the globe, either: 98 percent of the world’s population was exposed to hotter temperatures linked to climate change.

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In the realm of fiction, alarming events like these often precede some kind of far-reaching response. The Ministry for the Future starts with a harrowing heat wave in India that causes the swift death of 20 million people. The rest of the world basically shrugged its shoulders, but the catastrophe caused a political shakeup in India. Citizens voted a new party into office, one focused on tackling climate change and inequality; ditching coal and building battery storage and wind, solar, and hydro plants became a national priority. As the years go on, the book is filled with attempts to deal with climate change, from economic policy solutions, like a “carbon coin” that incentivizes reducing and sequestering carbon, to scientific ones, like trying to save the glaciers by pumping out the water beneath them, allowing them to refreeze to the rock.

Will this summer’s climate disasters spur a similar response? Robinson makes the case that the real world is responding to climate change even better than in his book, though much of it is at the stage of plans and promises. He pointed to international treaties that he didn’t expect to see so soon, such as the recent global target to conserve 30 percent of the world’s land and water by 2030 . “I wrote about the 2030s as ‘zombie years,’” Robinson said. “That was wrong — our 2030s won’t be like that, because we’re already in the thick of the fight to cope.”

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It’s often thought that when floods, heat, and fires hit home, it’ll spark some kind of awakening, opening people’s eyes to the problem. People have certainly taken notice: Even before this hellish summer, in polls taken this spring , half of Americans were already convinced that people are being harmed by global warming “right now.” But the line between awareness and action on a planetary crisis is not straightforward — popular support does not translate directly into policy change, though it might affect how people vote. “We happen to live in a world where rich people have to become convinced of something before policy is enacted on it,” El Akkad said.

Still, there’s some evidence that experiencing hot weather firsthand can have an effect on people’s concern. “We’ve seen that people do respond to climate change, but in a pretty limited way,” said Parrish Bergquist, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. By studying public opinion polling and weather patterns, her research in 2017 found that when a state’s average temperatures increased of 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) from one year to the next, it led to about a 1 percent increase in the number of residents who worry about climate change. The effect only showed up for temperature, not other climate-related impacts like flooding, and it decayed over time.

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“But in a way, I feel like we’re living through this time where the signal is just getting much, much bigger,” Bergquist said. It’s hard to know whether that means we’ll approach a tipping point for action, or simply get accustomed to a new, ever-worsening normal .

Whatever the case, waiting around for catastrophes to jar people out of their indifference isn’t a great strategy for addressing climate change. “The movement has to come from another place besides waiting for the next calamity to strike,” Markley said. Given that the technological and policy solutions to reduce emissions rapidly are already at hand, the discussion on climate disaster should come with a firm look at what could be done to prevent the worst, he said: “Sometimes the doom loop leads to a fatalism that is not warranted given the incredible policy progress we’ve made in just the past few years.”

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Take the Inflation Reduction Act, the most sweeping climate legislation ever enacted in the United States, signed a year ago by President Joe Biden. Containing $369 billion in clean-energy tax credits and funding for climate and energy programs, the law is expected to reduce emissions between 29 percent to 42 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. Already, businesses are planning to pour $240 billion into investments in electric vehicles, batteries, and clean energy, according to numbers from the White House.

The sense that we are well into the thick of life on a hotter planet has prompted some authors to question whether “climate fiction” can last. “‘Cli-fi’ is often interpreted to be a subset of ‘sci-fi,’ and thus it’s expected to contain a speculative element,” Jeff VanderMeer, the writer of Annihilation , wrote in Esquire earlier this year. “Yet, in this moment, cocooned uncomfortably within [the] climate crisis, as if trapped within a porcupine turned inside out, the issue is not speculative.” Lydia Millet, the author of A Children’s Bible , has also argued against the category. “Aside from some shared source material, the highly diverse novels sometimes referred to as cli-fi have little in common beyond a recognition of the terrible cultural and emotional weight of a swiftly changing biosphere,” Millet wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2021.

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The way El Akkad looks at it, cli-fi might not survive much longer simply because climate change will be the backdrop of everything that’s written, fiction or not. “If you are going to say something about what it means to be human, you cannot ignore the overarching bucket in which all of humanity sits, which is this planet. And from there, you can’t ignore what we’ve done to this planet. … It’s baffling to me how anyone can write anything and not consider the greater context in which that thing is happening.”

This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here . Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

How climate change could make fungal diseases worse

by arstechnica.com Leave a Comment

Back at the turn of the 21st century, Valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases per year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of Valley fever are exploding, increasing more than sevenfold and expanding to other states.

And Valley fever isn’t alone. Fungal diseases in general are appearing in places they have never been seen before, and previously harmless or mildly harmful fungi are turning deadly for people. One likely reason for this worsening fungal situation, scientists say, is climate change. Shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns are expanding where disease-causing fungi occur; climate-triggered calamities can help fungi disperse and reach more people; and warmer temperatures create opportunities for fungi to evolve into more dangerous agents of disease.

For a long time, fungi have been a neglected group of pathogens. By the early 2000s, researchers were already warning that climate change would make bacterial and viral infectious diseases like cholera and dengue more widespread. “But people were not focused at all on the fungi,” says Arturo Casadevall , a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That’s because, until recently, fungi haven’t troubled humans much.

Our high body temperature helps explain why. Many fungi grow best at around 12 to 30 degrees Celsius (roughly 54 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit). So, while they find it easy to infect trees, crops, amphibians, fish, reptiles, and insects—organisms that do not maintain consistently high internal body temperatures—fungi usually don’t thrive inside the warm bodies of mammals, Casadevall wrote in an overview of immunity to invasive fungal diseases in the 2022 Annual Review of Immunology . Among the few fungi that do infect humans, some dangerous ones, such as species of Cryptococcus , Penicillium , and Aspergillus, have historically been reported more in tropical and subtropical regions than in cooler ones. This, too, suggests that climate may limit their reach.

Fungi on the move

Today, however, the planet’s warming climate may be helping some fungal pathogens spread to new areas. Take Valley fever, for instance. The disease can cause flu-like symptoms in people who breathe in the microscopic spores of the fungus Coccidioides . The climatic conditions favoring Valley fever may occur in 217 counties of 12 US states today, according to a recent study by Morgan Gorris , an Earth system scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

But when Gorris modeled where the fungi could live in the future, the results were sobering. By 2100, in a scenario where greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, rising temperatures would allow Coccidioides to spread northward to 476 counties in 17 states . What was once thought to be a disease mostly restricted to the Southwestern US could expand as far as the US-Canadian border in response to climate change, Gorris says. That was a real “wow moment,” she adds, because that would put millions more people at risk .

Some other fungal diseases of humans are also on the move, such as histoplasmosis and blastomycosis . Both, like Valley fever, are increasingly seen outside what was thought to be their historical range.

Such range extensions have also appeared in fungal pathogens of other species . The chytrid fungus that has contributed to declines in hundreds of amphibian species, for example, grows well at environmental temperatures between 17 and 25 degrees Celsius (63 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit). But the fungus is becoming an increasing problem at higher altitudes and latitudes, likely because rising temperatures are making previously cold regions more welcoming for the chytrid . Similarly, white pine blister rust , a fungus that has devastated some species of white pines across Europe and North America, is expanding to higher elevations where conditions were previously unfavorable. This has put more pine forests at risk. Changing climatic conditions are also helping drive fungal pathogens of crops, like those infecting bananas, potatoes, and wheat , to new areas.

A warming climate also changes cycles of droughts and intense rains, which can increase the risk of fungal diseases in humans. One study of more than 81,000 cases of Valley fever in California between 2000 and 2020 found that infections tended to surge in the two years immediately following prolonged droughts . Scientists don’t yet fully understand why this happens. But one hypothesis suggests that Coccidioides survives better than its microbial competitors during long droughts, then grows quickly once rains return and releases spores into the air when the soil begins to dry again. “So climate is not only going to affect where it is, but how many cases we have from year to year,” says Gorris.

By triggering more intense and frequent storms and fires, climate change can also help fungal spores spread over longer distances. Doctors have observed unusually large outbreaks of Valley fever just after dust storms or other events that kick up clouds of dust. Similarly, researchers have found a surge in Valley fever infections in California hospitals after large wildfires as far as 200 miles away. Scientists have seen this phenomenon in other species, too: Dust storms originating in Africa have been implicated in moving a coral-killing soil fungus to the Caribbean.

Researchers are now sampling the air in dust storms and wildfires to see if these events can actually carry viable, disease-causing fungi for long distances and bring them to people, causing infections. Understanding such dispersal is key to figuring out how diseases spread, says Bala Chaudhary , a fungal ecologist at Dartmouth College who coauthored an overview of fungal dispersal in the 2022 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics . But there’s a long road ahead: Scientists still don’t have answers to several basic questions, such as where various pathogenic fungi live in the environment or the exact triggers that liberate fungal spores out of soil and transport them over long distances to become established in new places.