Equilibrium/Sustainability — How to sleep better during heat waves

As soaring temperatures bring sleepless nights to households around the world, scientists are offering advice on how to sleep better and thereby mitigate the adverse health impacts of extreme heat.  

Certain groups — older adults, children, pregnant women and individuals with psychiatric conditions — may be particularly vulnerable to the sleep-disruptive effects of heat waves, according to the researchers, who published their findings in the Journal of Sleep Research on Thursday.   

The authors, from the EU’s European Insomnia Network, adapted several coping methods from elements of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.  

While the researchers stressed that those with a history of sleep or health problems should always check with a medical professional, they offered some general tips. 

Sleep cool: Keep bedroom temperatures at a 66-degree-Fahrenheit constant. If this is not possible, keep them as close as possible to 68-77 degrees Fahrenheit.  

They also advised using ventilators to cool down the bedroom — particularly fans, which consume up to 50 times less electricity than air conditioning. 

Refreshment through evaporation: Before going to bed, take a cool or lukewarm shower, and cool the body temporarily with water sprays.  

Drink lots of water: The scientists advised those suffering through heat waves to drink plenty of water during the day to help temperature regulation at night — and minimize the consumption of alcohol, as it inhibits sleep and causes dehydration.  

Keep it regular: Finally, they advised that parents and caregivers keep children on a regular sleep schedule. 

Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. We’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Send us tips and feedback. A friend forward this newsletter to you? Subscribe here.

Today we’ll start with California’s cruel combination of heat and hurricane, followed by a decision from United Airlines to invest in an electric fleet. Then we’ll turn to a report on America’s so-called “highway boondoggles.” 

Amid heat and fire, Californians brace for hurricane

As sweltering temperatures bake California this week amid an unprecedented heat wave, southern portions of the state are bracing for the possible impact of a hurricane this weekend.  

A year’s worth of rain: Hurricane Kay is on a northbound trajectory in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico and may inundate Southern California with a year’s worth of rain over just two days, according to CNN.  

• Flood watches are in effect for this region, as well as for western Arizona.  
  
• The storm is expected to remain at hurricane strength until it’s about 250 miles from San Diego — joining just a handful of similar storms since 1950.

Bicoastal attack: As Kay approaches, another hurricane is headed for the Atlantic Seaboard.  
 
Hurricane Earl is currently passing between Bermuda and the Bahamas — possibly leading to “dangerous swells” hitting the U.S. East Coast by evening, according to the National Weather Service. 

Flash floods, swells: An excessive heat warning remains in place for California through Friday night, but by the weekend, the heavy rains may begin falling, ABC Los Angeles reported.   

• Heavy moisture, including thunderstorms and possibly flash floods, could affect mountain areas.  
  
• Big swells could also form on local beaches.  

For now, heat and fire: While an influx of precipitation may be in the forecast, Californians were contending with triple-digit temperatures and wildfires on Thursday.  

Firefighters were struggling to gain control of several major blazes, including the Fairview Fire in Southern California, the Mosquito Fire in the Sierra Nevada and another incident in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, The Associated Press reported. 

United invests $15 million in flying electric taxis  

United Airlines has recently invested $15 million in a flying taxi company, The Hill’s Changing America reported. 

• The Chicago-based airline’s investment in Eve Air Mobility follows other American aerospace giants’ forays into the “urban air mobility market.” 
  
• American Airlines and Boeing each have a partnership with an electric air taxi company.

Coming soon: United is buying up to 400 electric aircraft capable of vertical takeoff and landing — similar to how a helicopter operates without use of a runway, and a must for the crowded cities where United hopes to deploy the vehicles. 

Such electric flying cars, long a staple of science fiction, could be winging above American cities by 2026, Changing America reported. 

Activists: Fix old highways before building new ones 

State use of federal infrastructure dollars to prioritize highway expansions over repairs could waste billions of dollars and worsen the impacts of climate change, activists argued in a new report. 

Re-envisioning the future: The report, published on Thursday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups (U.S. PIRG), urged lawmakers to reconsider proposed forthcoming “highway boondoggles” proposed in their states.  

• “Every time we spend money on infrastructure, we have an opportunity to re-envision the future,” Matt Casale, director of U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s environment campaigns, said in a statement.  
  
• “The projects that we choose to invest in should be ones that are going to make American lives better,” he added.  

Revamping U.S. transportation: States have found themselves with funds to make such decisions following November’s passage of the bipartisan infrastructure law.  

• But the infrastructure law, the report authors noted, gives states the flexibility to choose how best to spend much of the funds they receive.  
  
• Many states are already spending billions of dollars’ worth of new highway expansion projects, which the report authors argued would be better spent on attending to maintenance backlogs on existing roads.  

Expansion projects at odds: U.S. PIRG Education Fund focused in Thursday’s edition on seven new highway “boondoggles” that would cost a total of more than
$22 billion:  

• $16 billion to widen the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway
• $2.8 billion to construct a 10-lane, double-decker bridge across the Ohio River
• $1.3 billion to build Maryland’s proposed Montgomery County M-83 highway
• $900 million plan to widen I-205 in Oregon
• $750 million to create an eight-mile bypass in southwestern Virginia
• $510 million to reconstruct I-35 in Minnesota
• $66-$100 million to redesign of the Erie Bayfront Parkway in Pennsylvania

Industry disagrees: While the report highlights highway expansion projects, aggregate data from the Federal Highway Association “tells a different story,” according to Brian Turmail, a vice president for the Associated General Contractors of America trade group. 

• “In the last 30 years, states have gone from spending about 50 percent of funds on highway expansion projects to less than 20 percent in 2019,” Turmail said in an emailed statement, noting that most of that expansion is concentrated in a few states.  
  
• “This shows that states are already ‘fixing it first’ rather than expanding and building new highways,” he added.  

To read about the proposed projects featured in the report, please click here.

‘Tipping points’ loom even at current temperatures 

Rising temperatures fueled by continued human emission of greenhouse gasses are pushing key Earth systems from the Amazon to the Arctic ever closer to collapse, a new study has found. 

One-way door: The paper, published in Science on Thursday, found that increased temperatures increase the likelihood that the Earth will pass more than a dozen key “tipping points.” 

• “The world is heading towards 2-3 degrees Celsius of global warming. This sets Earth on course to cross multiple dangerous tipping points that will be disastrous for people across the world,” co-author Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a statement.  
  
• “We must do everything possible to prevent crossing tipping points. Every tenth of a degree counts,” he added. 

Back to the accords: The risk of reaching such a scenario gets dramatically worse above 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)  — the limit world governments agreed to strive for in the 2015 Paris Accords. 

• The nations’ firm commitment was to 2 degrees Celsius — which is possible if nations keep their pledges, PBS News Hour reported. 
  
• But even 1.5 degrees Celsiusis not necessarily enough to avoid many tipping points, the Science study stressed.  

No longer safe: The risk of triggering many climatic tipping points arose as soon as the planet reached 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, the scientists found. 

At today’s temperatures, five of the 16 serious risks on their list are already possible, including:  

• Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets  
• Collapse of oceanic circulation in the Labrador Sea  
• The massive die-off of coral reefs  
• The sudden thaw of Arctic Circle permafrost 

The permafrost thaw is of particular concern, as it could potentially lead to runaway warming from the release of planet-warming methane, as Smithsonian reported.  

UNKNOWN RISKS AND DEFORESTATION ‘FOR NOTHING’ 

Several scenarios the scientists outlined are already underway.   

• The Thwaites glacier — a keystone piece of the West Antarctic ice shelf — is on the verge of collapse, per a study published in Nature on Monday.  
  
• Last weekend, Greenland experienced melting across 35 percent of its surface — a first for September, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  
  
• Permafrost peatlands in Northern Europe and Siberia are on track to collapse by 2040, Nature Climate Change reported.  

Compound dangers: Further warming will turn these tipping points from possible to “likely” — and open the door for worse disruptions, the Potsdam Institute team found. 

These include the collapse of important earth systems like the West African Monsoon or the Amazon rainforest.  

• The Amazon is currently in the midst of a “tipping point crisis,” according to a report this week by Amazon Watch, a team of Amazonian and international scientists.  
  
• More than a quarter of the region is already undergoing the transition to Savannah.    

Pointless collapse: The climatic pressure on tropical landscapes like the Amazon is made worse by rampant deforestation for agriculture — which accounts for up to
99 percent of forest loss, according to a study in Science published on Thursday.  

• The murders this week of two Indigenous ‘forest guardians’ by illegal loggers in Brazil’s Amazon highlights the lawlessness that accompanies and enables forest clearing, Reuters reported.  
  
• As much as two-thirds of such cleared land never gets turned into productive farmland, the Science study found.    

“A big piece of the puzzle is just how much deforestation is ‘for nothing’” coauthor Patrick Meyfroidt, of France’s University of Louvain, said in a statement.  

To read the full story, please click here. 

VIRTUAL EVENT INVITE

The Hill’s Infrastructure Summit,Wednesday,Sept. 14 at 1 p.m. ET

Improved, sustainable infrastructure means cleaner water, safer roads, enhanced connectivity and a modern future. New federal investment is raising hopes that America’s crumbling infrastructure will get a new lease of life. How can we build next-generation infrastructure and what technology will be at the forefront of this transition? Infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu, FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Sam Graves (R-Mo.), Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner and more join The Hill to discuss the great rebuild. RSVP today.

Thursday Threats

Oil refineries linked to stroke — but ethanol refineries emit more carbon dioxide. Plus: a leading seafood certified marks most Atlantic lobsters “unsustainable.” 

Study finds possible link between stroke rates, refinery pollutants  

• Residential exposure to pollutants emitted by petroleum refineries could be related to the prevalence of stroke rates across the U.S. South, a new study covered by The Hill has found. Living near such refineries was potentially linked to 5.6 percent of strokes among adults surveyed in seven states across the region, according to the study, published on Thursday in Environmental Research Letters.   

Ethanol plants release more CO2 than gasoline refineries 

• Ethanol plants produce almost twice as much carbon pollution per gallon as the fossil fuels they replace, Reuters reported. While the fuel is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the average ethanol plant released 1,187 tons of carbon dioxide per million gallons of fuel — compared to 500 metric tons for an equivalent amount of gasoline, Reuters reported.  

Threat to whales makes many U.S. lobsters unsustainable 

• Lobster fishers will have to take heightened care to protect critically endangered right whales in order to avoid “red listing” by prominent fish sustainability group Seafood Watch, The Guardian reported. The finding builds on a July ruling by a federal court that the U.S. government had violated the law in failing to protect the whales from lobster fishing gear, which can entangle and kill them, E&E News reported. 

Please visit The Hill’s Sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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