We're also covering a feeding program for Florida manatees, manicured lawns, the clean-energy revolution, climate attribution studies, and more. |
 | | Homes in Buxton, N.C., threatened by beach erosion this year.Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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The climate bill includes billions in funding. Will it be spent fairly? |
The new infrastructure law signed by President Biden includes almost $50 billion to protect communities against climate change, the largest such investment ever. But, spending that money will test the president's promise to pursue climate justice. |
Biden has pledged to direct 40 percent of climate spending to underserved places, including communities of color and small towns. Those places tend to be especially exposed to climate change, but usually have a harder time protecting themselves. |
Keeping that pledge could be a challenge. Much of the money for climate resilience goes through competitive grant programs, and those programs tend to favor wealthy, white, urban communities. That's because, among other things, those communities have more money to hire experts to navigate the complicated process of getting federal grants. |
I spoke to officials throughout the Biden administration for my article on the bill, and it's unclear whether they've found a way to remake those grant programs. Some advocates, meanwhile, say they're looking for actions to back up the president's promises. |
Quotable: "What is most important?" asked Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of the CLEO Institute, a nonprofit group in Florida. "Protecting property values, or protecting the lives of people?" |
Manatees gets some help: A feeding program |
Wildlife officials are doing something they've never done before to help manatees in Florida: They plan to provide food for hundreds of malnourished animals at a key location on the state's east coast in an urgent effort to get them through the winter. |
The decision is a fraught one, because scientists have found that feeding wild animals can sometimes do more harm than good. But Florida's manatees, already threatened with extinction, have suffered catastrophic losses over the last year. Wildlife officials have linked the deaths to a sharp decline in the availability of sea grasses that the aquatic animals eat. |
Numbers: In 2016, about 8,800 manatees remained in Florida waters, according to state wildlife officials. So far this year, more than 1,000 have died. |
 | | Bill Jacobs, founder of the St. Kateri Conservation Center, outside his house in Wading River, N.Y., on Long Island. |
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An ecologist who works for God (and against lawns) |
Bill Jacobs is an ecologist who believes in the sanctity of every life: of every butterfly, every bird, every beetle, and every bee. |
Which is why, for more than 25 years, he and his wife, Lynn, have opted against having a lawn, and instead filled their yard on the North Shore of Long Island with pollinating plants, most of them native, to provide food and habitat for our feathered and antennaed friends. |
As I wrote in my recent article, with gorgeous photographs by Karsten Moran, this penchant for the natural has put the Jacobs increasingly at odds with their lawn-loving neighbors, two of whom work as landscapers. But Jacobs says that, as a Catholic, he feels a responsibility to be a steward of the land, and that everyone can help fight biodiversity collapse by planting native plants outside their front doors. |
Quotable: "This lawn is an obsession, like a cult," Mr. Jacobs said. "This is a poverty that most of us are not even aware of." |
Opinion: What privilege means in the climate crisis |
Teachers: Please share your thoughts |
The New York Times Headway team, a new group set up to investigate big national and international challenges through the lens of progress, published its first series this month. You can read the climate articles here: |
 | | The Fleuve Congo Hotel rolled out the red carpet for Félix Tshisekedi, the country's president, in April. Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times |
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A five-star emporium of ambition on the Congo River |
What do a former NBA star, a Trump fund-raiser, an R&B singer, a fashion executive and a famous military contractor have in common? They're all trying to invest in cobalt, a crucial metal in the clean-energy revolution. |
And, all of them have strolled through the lobby of the Fleuve Congo Hotel in Kinshasa, on the banks of the muddy, furious Congo River, in a country that produces more than 70 percent of the globe's supply of cobalt, which keeps electric-car batteries from overheating and gives vehicles longer range without needing a charge. |
The high-end Fleuve, with its $29 cheeseburgers and seven-chandeliered lobby in a country where most people live on $2 a day, is an emporium of ambition in a nation that serves up raw materials crucial to the planet's battle against climate change. Practically everyone who passes through the hotel seems determined to grab a piece of Congo's wealth, despite the fact that many have little or no experience in the mining industry. |
You can read about this new wave of investors, and how years of corruption and labor abuses in Congo opened the door to them, in our article here. |
Also important this week: |
A drought study underlines the complexity of climate |
 | | Digging for water in the dry bed of the Mandrare River in Madagascar in November 2020.Laetitia Bezain/Associated Press |
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Higher global temperatures mean more droughts. Sounds obvious, right? Well, it's not so simple. |
Two years of low rainfall in Madagascar have created a hunger crisis in the African nation's poor, agrarian southwest. But an international team of scientists has found that human-caused climate change is probably not a driving factor. |
The researchers, working as part of the World Weather Attribution initiative, used computer simulations to compare today's world with a hypothetical one in which industrial activity had not added heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. They did not find a significant difference in the likelihood of such a long, severe drought in that part of Madagascar. |
The findings point to how tricky it can be to draw straight lines between individual extreme weather events — think flooding, heat waves, cold spells — and the changing global climate. Droughts are the result of multiple factors including precipitation, temperature and soil and vegetation conditions. |
The study does not give Madagascar reason to rest easy, though. Other research has indicated that the island will probably suffer more droughts if average global temperatures rise beyond the level that the researchers considered in the latest study — as seems likely in the coming decades under current policies. |
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