WaPo: Work will be a thing of the past?! ‘Workers around the world are suffering from excessive heat fueled by climate change’
…Scorching heat is driving down economic productivity around the world
An Indian girl splashes her face with water to keep off the heat as her mother works at a nearby road construction project on a hot summer afternoon in New Delhi in 2014. (AP/Saurabh Das)From construction workers in Dubai to farmers in India, workers around the world are suffering from excessive heat fueled by climate change. This heat is leading to huge productivity losses and mounting economic strain for dozens of countries, according to research published Monday ahead of a U.N. forum.
The study builds on research detailing how extreme heat in some places prevents employees from working during the hottest hours of the day. People simply tire faster and accomplish less the hotter it gets. That lost work time translates into significant hits on the gross domestic product in nations across the globe, and it is a problem that could deepen as the Earth continues to warm.
“For certain tropical countries that are not so well-economically developed, they might lose up to 10 percent of working hours during daylight,” said Tord Kjellstrom, one of the co-authors of the research and a visiting professor at Australian National University. “It’s a whole working month that would be lost because it’s so hot you can’t work.”
[Sweeping study claims that rising temperatures will sharply cut economic productivity]
Kjellstrom and fellow researchers found that in dozens of countries, daylight work hours lost to excessive heat have increased since the 1990s. They also estimate that at the current rate of global warming, that trend will continue. For instance, countries such as India, Vietnam and Indonesia could see the number of lost work hours more than double by 2055 and more than triple by 2085.
The idea that heat and work productivity are intertwined is not a new concept, of course. Researchers have long studied whether the high heat in the southern U.S. hampered economic activity there, even as the North benefited from an industrial boom.
Here They Go Again: #ExxonKnew Activists to Re-Release Old Documents in Desperate Bid for Relevance
In its crusade to draw parallels between Big Tobacco and Big Oil, the #ExxonKnew campaign is making its most desperate pitch to date this week, following the publication of a devastating op-ed in the Washington Post authored by Dennis Vacco, a former New York attorney general who actually litigated and settled the Big Tobacco cases and pointed out that “ExxonMobil is nothing like them.”
The latest desperate move comes from a group called the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), which – according to a news release obtained by Energy In Depth – is about to release documents that purport to show how the “denial” playbook “originated not with tobacco—as long assumed—but with the oil industry itself.”
Now, if you’re feeling as though you’ve heard this tale before, it’s because you have – and it was pretty weak the first ten times. But before we get into the documents themselves, reporters and the public should know who CIEL actually is: yet another Rockefeller-funded key player in the #ExxonKnew campaign.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
CIEL’s President and CEO Carroll Muffett sits the board of the Climate Accountability Institute, which co-hosted the now infamous La Jolla conference in 2012 where activists brainstormed how they could use racketeering laws to prosecute ExxonMobil. He was also one of the participants in that closed-door meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund offices where activists strategized on how they could establish “in the public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution.” Prior to joining CIEL, Muffett worked for a number of activist organizations including Greenpeace and the International Conservation and Defenders of Wildlife. He recently joined activists such as Naomi Oreskes, who wrote a book that attempts to tie ExxonMobil to Big Tobacco, at a recent forum on Capitol Hill held by members of Congress sympathetic to their campaign. Matt Pawa, the activist who made himself famous for briefing the attorneys general ahead of their March 29th press conference with Al Gore, is on the CIEL board of trustees.…