Poverty

This summer has shown how quickly high temperatures can pose serious health risks, with record-breaking heat waves claiming thousands of lives around the world. However, it’s not just high and low temperatures that matter. How many degrees the temperature swings within a day – the daily temperature variation – itself poses health risks. Studies have found that days with larger than normal temperature swings can increase asthma flare-ups and hospitalizations for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, leading to an overall higher death rate than normal. One study, based on data from 308 cities from 1972 to 2013, estimates that 2.5% of deaths in that time could be attributed to large daily temperature swings. Although humans can live in a wide range of ambient temperatures, a dramatic shift in temperature can tax multiple systems in the body, including the immune, musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems. It can be especially taxing on very young and older in...

Coast to coast, millions of Americans are experiencing sweltering temperatures this summer, with seemingly little relief in sight. For people who struggle to access or afford air conditioning, the rising need for cooling is a growing crisis. An alarming number of Americans risk losing access to utility services because they can’t pay their bills. Energy utility providers in 2022 shut off electricity to at least 3 million customers who had missed a bill payment. Over 30% of these disconnections happened in the three summer months, during a year that was among the hottest on record. In some cases, the loss of service lasted for just a few hours. But in others, people went without electricity for days or weeks while scrambling to find enough money to restore service, often only to face disconnection again. As researchers who study energy justice and energy insecurity, we believe the United States is in the midst of a disconnection crisis. We started tracking these disconnect...

After several years of pandemic-driven price spikes at the grocery store, retail food price inflation is slowing down. That’s good news for consumers, especially those in low-income households, who spend a proportionally larger share of their income on food. But there’s more to the cost of food than what we pay at the store. Producing, processing, transporting and marketing food creates costs all along the value chain. Many are borne by society as a whole or by communities and regions. For example, farm runoff is a top cause of algae blooms and dead zones in rivers, lakes and bays. And food waste takes up one-fourth of the space in U.S. landfills, where it rots, generating methane that warms Earth’s climate. Exploring these lesser-known costs is the first step toward reducing them. The key is a method called true cost accounting, which examines the economic, environmental, social and health impacts of food production and consumption to produce a broader p...

In a Zen parable, a man sees a horse and rider galloping by. The man asks the rider where he’s going, and the rider responds, “I don’t know. Ask the horse!” It is easy to feel out of control and helpless in the face of the many problems Americans are now experiencing – unaffordable health care, poverty and climate change, to name a few. These problems are made harder by the ways in which people, including elected representatives, often talk past each other. Most people want a strong economy, social well-being and a healthy environment. These goals are interdependent: A strong economy isn’t possible without a society peaceful enough to support investment and well-functioning markets, or without water and air clean enough to support life and productivity. This understanding – that economic, social and environmental well-being are intertwined – is the premise of sustainable development. In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly u...

Imperial County consistently ranks among the most economically distressed places in California. Its Salton Sea, the state’s biggest and most toxic lake, is an environmental disaster. And the region’s politics have been dominated by a conservative white elite, despite its supermajority Latino population. The county also happens to be sitting on enough lithium to produce nearly 400 million batteries, sufficient to completely revamp the American auto fleet to electric propulsion. Even better, that lithium could be extracted in a way consistent with broader goals to reduce pollution. The traditional ways to extract lithium involve either hard rock mining, which generates lots of waste, or large evaporation ponds, which waste a lot of water. In Imperial Valley, companies are pioneering a third method. They are extracting the mineral from the underground briny water brought up during geothermal energy production and then injecting that briny water back into the ground in a...