The majority of disposal assets in this market are managed by a handful of companies, similar to the MSW market, said Noah Kaye, a managing director and senior analyst at Oppenheimer. That concentration and relatively limited capacity may lead these companies — and competitors — to invest in “waste-to-value” options that find other uses for certain streams. Options and strategies may differ for hazardous, nonhazardous, liquid and industrial waste, as well as field and emergency services, but all are currently seeing interest.

This competition around disposal capacity “remains a major moat in the industry,” Kaye said, meaning there may be fewer deals in that area. “As we think about other parts of this environmental services industry that are far more fragmented — like field and industrial services — without a doubt, there will be ongoing consolidation.”

Browns Gibbon Lang & Co., an advisory firm that has worked on many waste deals, recently put out a report about waste-to-value and sustainability as areas of future M&A and investment opportunity. It notes that this market is “seeing strong activity as emphasis on sustainability continues to grow.” Federal regulations around PFAS and other areas may play a role in this activity.

This interest from customers is “leading companies to seek acquisitions that can more rapidly build scale and expand service capabilities into adjacent technologies and waste treatment categories and end markets,” the report said. It cites “significant dry powder” available to both private equity firms and infrastructure funds in the future.

“The nontraditional waste streams — whether it be liquids, hazardous, industrial, nonhazardous — there is massive opportunity to consolidate and also follow a path of waste-to-value and vertically integrated disposal. So we’d say those are in the earlier innings than MSW and C&D,” said Effram Kaplan, managing director and head of BGL’s services and infrastructure verticals.

Future environmental services plans

The waste sector has seen numerous transactions in this area in recent years, including Republic Services acquiring US Ecology and others, Crystal Clean going private through a private equity sale, Heritage Environmental Services selling to EQT Infrastructure and EQT-backed Reworld acquiring multiple companies, among many others.

During a panel at WasteExpo’s investor summit on May 6, many companies said they expect that pace to continue.

Brian Recatto, CEO of Crystal Clean, said acquisitions will be a “large component of what we do now as a private company” and pointed to one in hazardous waste earlier this year.

“We’ll do a lot of acquisitions focused on infrastructure and assets for us in the markets where we’re not currently very strong in [and] don’t have a lot of density,” he said, citing the Western U.S. as an example, while also noting plans for other investments in new and updated facilities.

Selma Kivran, executive vice president and divisional president at Reworld, said the company’s eight deals within the past 18 months were focused on finding options to replace existing disposal practices. Heightened customer attention to compliance and sustainability is driving those efforts.

“We continue to look for opportunities to do that and accelerate and add more to the portfolio,” she said.

Ambipar, an international emergency response company that recently expanded into the U.S., said it plans to take time to absorb a string of prior acquisitions.

Bob Cappadona, CEO of Veolia North America’s environmental solutions division, said the company is primarily focused on completing a hazardous waste incinerator project in Arkansas, but added “I think you’ll see quite a bit of activity from Veolia” in the future.

Republic has done multiple deals in addition to US Ecology, including last year’s purchase of ACTenviro, and the company said it continues to assess other options.

“We’re very surgical. We know what we need to do, where we need to go, the density, the vertical integration, the internalization of waste disposal,” said Rich Kang, Republic’s senior vice president of operations for environmental solutions. Speaking about the company as a whole, Kang said that “we generate a lot of cash that we’ve got to put to use, and we’re always looking at good opportunities, but we’re going to be very, very selective.”

Clean Harbors has also done multiple deals this year and expects to do more.

“We feel there’s great M&A opportunities in both our businesses,” said co-CEO Mike Battles, referring to the company’s environmental services and Safety-Kleen divisions. “I see that opportunity for us … because of our national footprint, because of our network of assets, being able to provide good value to sellers and to our customers.”

Going forward, Kaplan said, the number of “large, scalable opportunities” in the broader waste sector are limited. Instead, he said, “we see huge opportunities at the subscale level” — including in liquid and industrial waste. “There are many businesses and business models that can be developed through properly putting together the collection network and the processing and disposal or value-out-of-waste components.”

Over the next five years, Kaplan expects to see more of these businesses grow, and certain larger ones transacting to prepare for the next phase of that growth. Aggregate deal value in this category may go up, despite transaction volume being steady or down.

The role of inflation and pricing

Companies in waste and environmental services more broadly are also placing a greater emphasis on pricing. Executives from multiple companies said the recent period of inflation, and ongoing demand due to the reshoring of manufacturing, have helped this segment shift the focus from volume to price. These trends are also playing a role in the broader M&A interest.

“Republic integrated US Ecology and grew that business during a period of high inflation in the economy, which gave some cover, but the company was very clear in prioritizing price increases,” said Kaye. “Republic had the balance sheet to be able to remain disciplined around which business it chose and which it could walk away from. And I think that pricing discipline did have a positive ripple effect on Clean Harbors and the entire industry as well.”

During the summit, Kang said Republic felt confident in this pricing approach because the business is “safety-sensitive” with complex material streams. Looking ahead, he said, the sector’s financial potential is “very promising.” Crystal Clean and others said they also benefited from this shift.

“Having new entrants in our space — people like Republic that own solid waste assets, that are very disciplined in their pricing approach — that’s really helped some of the legacy players in the business that didn’t feel like we had that type of pricing power. But we do now because we have scarce assets,” said Recatto.

As these larger companies maintain their focus on pricing, future acquisitions of smaller companies that may not have the same pricing rigor could present further opportunities to boost profits.

“Generally, larger players, where investors are carefully scrutinizing margins, tend to behave in this disciplined way,” said Kaye. “So we certainly believe that further industry consolidation would be positive for profitability and margin profiles for the big players.”

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SCiFi Foods, a startup engaged in developing cultivated meat, has ceased operations and initiated the sale of its intellectual property and assets through an advisory firm.

The San Leandro, California-based company, originally founded as Artemys Foods in 2019, had rebranded to SCiFi Foods in 2022. The company aimed to produce a hybrid burger combining cultivated beef and plant-based ingredients to reach price parity with conventional beef.

The company had raised approximately $40 million from various venture capital funds and notable investors, including the British band Coldplay, according to AgFunderNews. SCiFi Foods distinguished itself by utilizing CRISPR technology to accelerate the cultivation process and by aiming to produce hybrid burgers containing around 10% cultured meat and the remainder plant-based proteins.

©SCiFi Foods

Technological breakthroughs

The company reported achieving a 1000x cost reduction in producing cultivated beef by growing edible beef cell lines in single-cell suspension. This method allowed for the use of standard large-sized bioreactors, streamlining the scaling process. SCiFi Foods then partnered with Michigan State University to test the scalability of its hybrid burgers, seeking to expedite production and gain insights into the manufacturing process.

Despite these advancements, SCiFi Foods faced funding obstacles. The founders explained in an announcement, “Last week, we shut down SCiFi operations and handed off to an advisory firm to run a sale process of our IP and assets. We did not make this decision lightly, but it was the best option as we reached the end of our runway. Unfortunately, in this funding environment, we could not raise the capital that we needed to commercialize the SCiFi burger, and SCiFi Foods ran out of time.”

The founders expressed disappointment in not being able to bring their product to market, noting the broader challenges faced by the cultivated meat and meat alternative markets. The founders hope that other companies can utilize their intellectual property and cell lines to further the development of cultivated meat. “SCiFi Foods was founded out of a sense of optimism for a better future, and we remain optimistic that one day, cultivated meat will be part of a sustainable food system,” the company stated.

Industry reflections and future hopes

SCiFi Foods’ journey began with an aspiration to create 100% cultivated meat. Initially, the technology was not advanced enough to realize this vision, leading the company to pursue a blended product strategy. Over the past five years, SCiFi Foods achieved a significant reduction in the cost of producing their burger, from $20,000 to under $15, due to advancements in cell line performance and media cost reduction.

The company’s scientific team developed beef cell lines that grow in single-cell suspension, 100% serum-free, in low-cost culture media, with a 24-hour doubling time, and achieved titers of 10 g/L in a fed-batch process. Despite these technical successes, the company was unable to secure the necessary funding amid a challenging market environment and shifting regulatory landscape.

The founders concluded their message with a reflection on the broader industry challenges and the need for continued innovation to achieve commercial viability for 100% cultivated meat. They remain hopeful that their contributions will aid in the future success of the industry.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” the company concluded.

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In the winter of 2010, the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier strapped knee pads over her leggings and pulled on a pair of Levi’s blue jeans. The denim brand had just opened a popup shop on Wooster Street in lower Manhattan to promote a new clothing line designed around the motif of the “urban pioneer.” For the site of its ad campaign, the company chose Braddock, Pennsylvania, aestheticizing the town’s post-industrial landscape in a series of images plastered across magazine pages and New York billboards, and making it appear as a place in motion with ample economic horizons for any working American. “Go Forth,” one ad instructed the viewer over a black and white image of a horse flanked by two denim-clad supermodels. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

Wearing combat boots, a cap, and thick industrial gloves, Frazier, who was born and raised in Braddock, crouched on the sidewalk outside the Manhattan store and began dragging her lower body back and forth over the pavement, first her thighs, then her knees. The moves were choreographed, taken from footage of steel industry workers on the job, and meant to create a dissonance between Levi’s glossy campaign ads and the reality of life in a mill town after a long period of decline. Frazier’s repeated motions made a rough, scratching sound, and the jeans she’d worn began to fray. By the end of the hour, they were in tatters, hanging from her legs.

The short film documenting the performance, LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s, shot by the visual artist Liz Magic Laser, is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, part of the exhibit “Monuments of Solidarity,” which showcases more than two decades of Frazier’s work. Themes of deindustrialization, environmental injustice, and unequal healthcare access are present throughout the photographs on view. From Braddock to Flint, Michigan during the lead drinking water crisis to Lordstown, Ohio in the aftermath of the General Motors layoffs, the artist captures communities facing economic declines, not as a single catastrophic event, but as a process initiated by the country’s power brokers and borne by ordinary working-class people. In many towns, what’s primarily left from the industrial past is the pollution, which continues to accumulate in the soil and the water, making people sick even as the hospitals shutter from disinvestment.

What is the purpose of this documentation? Frazier has said that she feels called “to stand in the gap between the working and creative classes,” to use photo-making as a means of resisting “historical erasure and historical amnesia,” symptoms of an economic and political system that discards communities whose labor it no longer deems valuable. She does this by not only taking pictures of working-class people, but also by treating her subjects as “collaborators” and displaying their testimonies alongside their portraits. Some of Frazier’s portraits may look like so much documentary work you’ve seen, but she’s not interested in photography as an isolated or objective act. No art for art’s sake; she invites communities to see themselves in a different way — as historical subjects, as agents in a broader struggle — a step toward believing that they are not powerless.

That the awareness of a person’s agency can alter their lived experience is not theoretical. For half a decade, I’ve reported on communities reckoning with legacy pollution and unbridled industrial expansion, and along the way, I’ve found that a deep sense of the past can have a galvanizing effect. To recognize oneself as belonging to a wider context or system is to also imagine a world beyond its daily injustices, one worth fighting for: What if the chemical company built someplace else? What if the district had the resources to offer its children a future?

I saw this firsthand in my home state, Louisiana, where a maze of petrochemical infrastructure clings to the banks of the lower Mississippi River, dumping cancer-causing chemicals into the air and water of predominantly Black towns, some of which were founded by formerly enslaved people more than a century ago. The people of “Cancer Alley” describe the plants as only the most recent installment in a long arc of racial injustice. Plantations once stood on the mammoth tracts of land where companies like Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, and BASF erected smoke stacks and ethylene crackers. By telling a different story about their communities, and placing themselves at the center of it, local advocates have had some success in challenging proposed industrial projects in court, arguing that building new facilities over the graves of their enslaved ancestors amounts to a violation of their civil rights and the desecration of historic sites.

Before Frazier could open anyone else’s eyes, she started at home. She was 16 when she first picked up a camera and began photographing herself and her family. In an article timed with the opening of “Monuments of Solidarity,” Frazier describes how she once felt a simple, but no less deeply felt, connection to Braddock as the place where she was born and raised. Witnessing its landscape through her camera’s viewfinder changed that relationship: “My spiritual bondage to Braddock was broken the instant light exposed my film’s silver halide crystals as I created “United States Steel Mon Valley Works Edgar Thomson Plant” (2013), hovering over the city with a bird’s-eye view,” she wrote. “Permeating the 21st century postindustrial landscape were the vestiges of imperial war, patriarchy, and the death and destruction of nature.”

“Monuments of Solidarity” opens with these early works, which are part of her collection “The Notion of Family” (2001-2014). Her primary subjects are herself and the matriarchs that raised her, her mother and grandmother. “I was combating stereotypes of someone like my mother and I,” who are often portrayed as “poor, worthless, or on welfare,” she explained in a 2012 documentary about her work. “We find a way to deal with these types of problems on our own through photographing each other.”

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The city’s Department of Sanitation recently awarded contracts for companies in 20 non-exclusive zones, plus citywide contracts for containerized compactor service. The goal of these agreements is to reduce vehicle miles traveled, standardize service, increase recycling rates and improve safety, among other categories.

But supporters of the initial law have questioned how companies were selected and the way pricing was weighted in those decisions. The industry has been asking for more clarity on implementation timing. Meanwhile, rumblings about acquisitions involving awardees are raising concerns about competition.

Hours before Monday’s sanitation committee hearing started, as first reported by Streetsblog, DSNY announced plans to install an independent monitor at awardee Cogent Waste Solutions as well as a related joint venture company. Cogent faces a large number of alleged violations from the city’s Business Integrity Commission and is one of multiple companies with a record of serious or fatal crashes.

“That we would put this legislation forward specifically to address Cogent and that they would get a contract is beyond me,” said Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, lead sponsor of the 2019 law, at the hearing.

DSNY Commissioner Jessica Tisch said companies’ records were one factor of more than a dozen considered and the agency couldn’t exclude any bidder with an active BIC license.

“I did not have the authority to do that and doing that would have undermined the entire procurement and the entire program,” she said.

Council Member Shaun Abreu, chair of the committee, asked BIC why the agency kept the company in contention. Commissioner Liz Crotty said revoking a license for any company is rare. It has only happened four times in prior years, versus 150 license denials. Cogent’s license is currently up for a periodic renewal.

“This is a company we have put a lens on. They have put themselves under our lens and it’s something that we take very seriously,” she said.

Any company operating in the city must have a BIC license, and loss of that license would trigger the loss of a zone contract. DSNY will also have additional authority once contracts take effect.

“I submit to you and to every carter listening that crashes where they are found at fault, and a pattern of them, will constitute material breach in this program,” said Tisch, speaking to the council. “We have a lot of regulatory authority that you have given us and I am not afraid to use it.”

Cogent said in a statement after the hearing that it would “work productively” with the monitor and disputed how it was characterized.

“We maintain the most rigorous safety standards in the industry, using new equipment operated by qualified union employees under the supervision of highly-trained, certified safety professionals and 24-hour video and GPS surveillance,” wrote spokesperson David Vermillion. “We strongly disagree with Borough President Reynoso’s comments about our company, which illustrate a lack of familiarity with our employees and our operations.”

Local elected officials also implied they weren’t pleased with some of DSNY’s other decisions.

“There were good players who didn’t make it who had better records,” said Council Member Sandy Nurse, calling for companies to be “held accountable” because “we don’t want to undermine the whole intention of this bill.”

Companies that weren’t selected can possibly still serve as subcontractors. DSNY is reviewing initial submissions and expects to soon make subcontractor decisions for the first zone to launch, Queens Central.

Another recurring grievance at the hearing was how the RFP process, which started in 2021, emphasized pricing. DSNY originally weighted pricing at 35%, but increased that to 40% in May 2022 amid a concern about pandemic-driven inflation.

Tisch said DSNY wanted to avoid “massive price spikes that have hampered similar reform events around the country.” Reviewers assessed factors from other criteria first, but Tisch said all plans hinged on pricing.

“Pricing was very important because it was the key to getting all of the other benefits intended by the law,” she said.

Abreu said after the hearing that “I was especially dissatisfied with the commissioner’s giving special weight to price over 13 other factors.” He noted that it’s important to protect small businesses, but not at the expense of other considerations.

“We want to see how those rubrics were applied on a case-by-case basis, universally through these applications,” he said.

DSNY said some companies’ maximum rates will be at or below BIC’s rate cap in 18 of the 20 zones. The current cap is $24.21 per cubic yard and $15.89 per 100 pounds, which the industry feels isn’t sufficient. BIC announced plans on Thursday to raise rates to $26.87 and $17.64 respectively.

The zone system’s pricing structure will be different, by incentivizing discounts on organics and recycling collection and allowing carters to charge based on service frequency. DSNY said its assessment of maximum rates being lower than the rate cap accounts for all of these factors.

The agency recently released a rate calculator, which has become popular among carters looking to scope out their competition. Rates vary widely, in part due to how companies structured their frequency charges. All maximum rates for curbside garbage in Queens Central are above the current cap; one company’s recycling and organics rates are below. Rates in some other zones are well below the current cap.

Annual adjustments will kick in starting July 2025, but sources say this won’t offset potential losses for any companies that may have misjudged pricing for 10-year contracts.

DSNY will start sending mailers to customers in Queens Central on July 1 ahead of implementation in September. All customers must have a signed contract by early January. The five companies with citywide contracts will also begin service in this zone.

Tisch said the agency needed time to review results of the first waste zone before sharing next steps. She committed to seeing the program through, but declined to say when the other 19 zones would start.

“We do have a two-year schedule in our planning. I don’t want to commit to that to you today,” she said.

No awardees testified, but others urged the city to share more information.

“The awardees deserve to know the entire schedule and they deserve to know that now,” testified David Biderman president of Biderman Consulting, citing the time needed to order trucks and hire staff. Reynoso said “there’s nobody in this room that is in this business, outside of DSNY, that doesn’t think this is taking too long.”

In the meantime, all awardees must complete required safety training this summer. They’re also watching proposed technical changes from DSNY and BIC.

The dozens of licensees who didn’t win contracts, and may not become subcontractors, face tough decisions.

“Should they sell now or go out of business, or should they wait a few years until the zones in which their customers are located are subject to CWZ?” asked Biderman.

Local M&A activity has been quiet for years, due to uncertainty about this program, but that’s expected to change soon and Abreu introduced a bill to limit its impact on commercial waste zones.

“When things are afoot that we believe are against the spirit of this law, specifically the preservation of competition within the commercial waste zones, it should be a scary thing,” he said in an interview. “That’s going to lend itself to a monopoly, and we believe it’ll impact pricing in a negative way.”

The bill says if any deal results in a company servicing more than 15 zones then DSNY would have to authorize an additional awardee in that zone or terminate the acquiring company’s agreement. Tisch said the concept was “great,” but wanted to see unspecified language changes before endorsing it.

BIC may be considering multiple pending acquisitions involving awardees, according to sources. Nicole Mathias, director of policy, declined to comment on the number but said “as part of our normal course of business, at any given time there are typically pending sale and subcontract applications under review.”

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His family found the 73-year-old lying on the ground, his lower body burned. Hom died at the hospital, his core body temperature at 107 degrees.

The death certificates of more than 2,300 people who died in the United States last summer mention the effects of excessive heat, the highest number in 45 years of records, according to an Associated Press analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. With May already breaking heat records, 2024 could be even deadlier.

And more than two dozen doctors, public health experts, and meteorologists told the AP that last year’s figure was only a fraction of the real death toll. Coroner, hospital, ambulance and weather records show America’s heat and health problem at an entirely new level.

“We can be confident saying that 2023 was the worst year we’ve had from since … we’ve started having reliable reporting on that,” said Dr. John Balbus, director of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“It’s people that live the hot life. These are the ones who are dying. People who work outside, people that can’t air-condition their house,” said Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who was in hard-hit southern Texas. “It’s really quite, quite grim.”

Dallas postal worker Eugene Gates Jr., loved working outdoors and at 7:30 a.m. June 20, the 66-year-old texted his wife that it was close to 90 degrees. He kept working in the heat that felt like 119 degrees with the humidity factored in and finally passed out in somebody’s yard. He ran a fever of 104.6 degrees and died, with the medical examiner saying heat contributed to his death.

FILE – Police officer James Rhodes uses a wet towel to cool off as he directs traffic after a sporting event in Arlington, Texas, on Aug. 19, 2023. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

FILE – Juan Carlos Biseno sweats as he dances to music from his headphones as afternoon temperatures reach 115 degrees on July 19, 2023, in Calexico, Calif. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)

“The way that my husband died, it could have been prevented,” said Carla Gates.

“There’s just very low awareness that heat kills. It’s the silent killer,” said University of Washington public health scientist Kristie Ebi, who helped write a United Nations special report on extreme weather. That 2012 report warned of future dangerous heat waves.

Ebi said in the last few years, the heat “seems like it’s coming faster. It seems like it’s more severe than we expected.”

DEATHS DOWN SOUTH

Last summer’s heat wave killed differently than past ones that triggered mass deaths in northern cities where people weren’t used to the high temperatures and air conditioning wasn’t common. Several hundreds died in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, in Philadelphia in 1998 and in Chicago in 1995.

Nearly three-quarters of the heat deaths last summer were in five southern states that were supposed to be used to the heat and planned for it. Except this time they couldn’t handle it, and it killed 874 people in Arizona, 450 in Texas, 226 in Nevada, 84 in Florida and 83 in Louisiana.

Those five states accounted for 61% of the nation’s heat deaths in the last five years, skyrocketing past their 18% share of U.S. deaths from 1979 to 1999.

At least 645 people were killed by the heat in Maricopa County, Arizona, alone, according to the medical examiner’s office. People were dying in their cars and especially on the streets, where homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness made matters worse.

Three months after being evicted from her home, 64-year-old Diana Smith was found dead in the back of her car. Her cause of death was methamphetamine and fentanyl, worsened by heat exposure, Phoenix’s medical examiner ruled.

“In the last five years, we are seeing this consistent and record kind of unprecedented upward trend. And I think it’s because the levels of heat that we have seen in the last several years have exceeded what we had seen in the last 20 or 30,” said Balbus, of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity at the Department of Health and Human Services.

UNRELENTING HEAT

Phoenix saw 20 consecutive days of extreme heat stress in July, the longest run of such dangerously hot days in the city since at least 1940, according to the data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Phoenix wasn’t alone.

Last year the U.S. had the most heat waves since 1936. In the South and Southwest, Last year was the worst on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It was crazy,” said University of Miami tropical meteorology researcher Brian McNoldy, who spent the summer documenting how Miami broke its daily heat index record 40% of the days between mid-June and mid-October.

Houston’s Hobby airport broke daily high temperature marks 43 times, meteorologists said. Nighttime lows set records for heat 57 times, they said. That didn’t give people’s bodies chances to recover.

Across five southern states, the average rate of emergency department visits for heat illness in the summer of 2023 was over double that of the previous five summers, according to an analysis of data from the CDC.

THE DEATHS

Experts warned that counting heat mortality based on death certificates leads to underestimates. Heat illness can be missed, or might not be mentioned.

They pointed to “excess death” studies for a more realistic count. These are the type of long-accepted epidemiological studies that look at grand totals of deaths during unusual conditions — such as hot days, high air pollution or a spreading COVID-19 pandemic — and compare them to normal times, creating an expected trend line.

FILE – Patrons try to cool off inside at the Justa Center as temperatures are expected to hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit, on July 18, 2023, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

FILE – A man wipes his brow as he walks under misters, on July 13, 2023, in downtown Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)

Texas A&M’s Dessler and his colleague Jangho Lee published one such study early last year. According to their methods, Lee said, about 11,000 heat deaths likely occurred in 2023 in the U.S. — a figure that would represent a record since at least 1987 and is about five times the number reported on death certificates.

Deaths are also up because of better reporting, and because Americans are getting older and more vulnerable to heat, Lee said. The population is also slowly shifting to cities, which are more exposed to heat.

THE FUTURE

In some places, last year’s heat already rivals the worst on record. As of late May, Miami was on track to be 1.5 degrees warmer than the hottest May on record, according to McNoldy. Dallas’ Murphy pointed to maps saying conditions with a broiling Mexico are “eerily similar to what we saw last June” so he is worried about “a very brutal summer.”

Texas A&M’s Dessler said last year’s heat was “a taste of the future.”

“I just think in 20 years, you know, 2040 rolls around … we’re going to look back at 2023 and say, man, that was cool,” Dessler said. “The problem with climate change is if if it hasn’t pushed you over the edge yet, just wait.”

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