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Employees grapple with re-entry anxiety as jobs call them back
Pandemic-related anxieties are entering a new phaseas more employers start to call vaccinated workers back into their offices.
Why it matters: Some employees simply don't want to go back to the office; some are desperate to. Some are struggling to rearrange their routines yet again; some don't have that flexibility. And everyone — employers and employees alike — is figuring out on the fly how to make it work.
Driving the news: "More and more employers are saying: 'If you've been vaccinated and we have all the safety precautions in place, it's time to come back to work.' That's causing a lot of anxiety," said Lucy McBride, a primary care physician in Washington, D.C.
- "There's also the anxiety of, 'I had to make all these adjustments to my life because my kids weren't in school," said Georgia Gaveras, co-founder and chief psychiatrist of Talkiatry, a telepsychiatry company. "Now it's like, 'What do I do now if I have to go back to work?'"
Many Americans are still easing into the idea of being in close quarters with other people again, even after being vaccinated. But many workers also may be suffering mental distress from over a year of isolation.
- Younger workers may be surprisingly skittish about going back into the office, said, Gregg Miller, the chief medical officer of Vituity, a firm that staffs hospital emergency departments.
- "COVID used to be a disease defined by the elderly and the infirm. Now it’s a disease of people who are in the workforce, so this is going to be a bigger issue than ever for employers," Miller said.
- Heading back to the office could bring unique stressors for women, who are more likely to shoulder the burden of parenting and household chores at the same time.
What we're watching: OSHA doesn't yet have a federal standard for workforces. “To date, it has been sort of a patchwork of incomplete guidance, unfortunately," National Safety Council CEO Lorraine Martin told Axios.
- Employers will need to consider everything from how they screen employees coming into the office to their investments in protective equipment and physical changes to their offices, including new ventilation systems — and they need to communicate those efforts to their employees, Miller said.
The intrigue: Plenty of workers may be distressed because they've rearranged their lives around their new reality — or they've realized they simply like remote work.
- In a survey released earlier this year by the Society for Human Resource Management, fewer than half of U.S. workers said they wanted to go back. In all, 52% said they'd prefer to work from home permanently.
- 45% of workers who preferred to stay home said they'd even accept a 5% pay cut in exchange for permanent work-from-home status.
Simple matters of socialization, such as how to dress and whether we'll return to handshakes, will require their own adaptations.
- "It's a lot to adjust to. We got used to living a certain way. We got used to it really fast, actually, and for a lot of people, they're enjoying it," Gaveras said.
- One indicator that people are headed out of the house: Sales of Spanx and other shapewear brands spiked in the last month, the Washington Post reports.
The bottom line: "We benefited in some ways from having more time at home, which meant you could throw a load of laundry in while you were on a conference call and you didn't commute. That itself was a pivot to change our entire work life in March and April of 2020," McBride said.
IEA analysis charts "narrow" pathway to Paris climate goal
The pathway for transforming global energy systems to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 is "narrow but still achievable" and demands unprecedented acceleration away from fossil fuels, an International Energy Agency report published Tuesday concludes.
Why it matters: It provides detailed analysis and estimates of what's needed for a good shot at limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels — the Paris Agreement benchmark for avoiding some of the most damaging effects of climate change.
Threat level: The IEAoffers frank assessments of the closing window to keep 1.5°C in sight, but also data-backed arguments for why this immensely heavy lift is cost-effectively achievable.
- Current national targets — even leaving aside the absence of policies to meet them — would still leave 22 billion tons of CO2 emissions in 2050, the IEA projects.
- Global greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption are nowhere near on pace for meeting a net-zero mid-century goal.
- Emissions are rebounding strongly from the pandemic-fueled drop and "further delay in acting to reverse that trend will put net zero by 2050 out of reach."
The big picture: The first-time report uses a "hybrid modeling approach" to explore needed uptake of renewables, hydrogen and other tech.
- It fuses methods from the IEA's annual long-term projections called the World Energy Outlook, and its Energy Technology Perspectives series that analyzes hundreds of technologies.
Key findings: "Beyond projects already committed as of 2021, there are no new oil and gas fields approved for development in our pathway," the report notes.
- New coal mines or extensions are also inconsistent with the IEA's net-zero pathway.
- Sales of new internal combustion engine cars would need to end by 2035.
What's next: A lot of changes have to happen really fast to keep the narrow net-zero pathway open.
- Energy efficiency would have to increase a lot. The net-zero pathway envisions 4% average annual improvements in energy intensity — that is, energy per unit of economic output.
- The report envisions annual additions of 630 gigawatts of solar photovoltaic generating capacity and 390 GW by 2030 — four times the record levels installed last year.
While the report is pretty clear-eyed about the difficulty of a net-zero pathway, one bright spot is the IEA's take on how much is possible with existing technology — at least in the medium term.
- "Most of the global reductions in CO2 emissions through 2030 in our pathway come from technologies readily available today," the IEA states.
- However, "in 2050, almost half the reductions come from technologies that are currently at the demonstration or prototype phase."
The bottom line: "The scale and speed of the efforts demanded by this critical and formidable goal — our best chance of tackling climate change and limiting global warming to 1.5°C — make this perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced," IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a statement.
Why infrastructure talks are setting climate advocates up for an anxious summer
Infrastructure talks between the White House and Congress have entered a phase that's making climate advocates extremely nervous.
Why it matters: Environmental groups and even some Democratic lawmakers are increasingly vocal with their fears that the White House will jettison central components of President Biden's climate plan during the talks, which could cause the U.S. to fall short of its new emissions targets.
Driving the news: The anxiety burst into the open following a statement that Biden's national climate adviser Gina McCarthy made to Politico on Tuesday, which pointed to the Clean Electricity Standard (CES) as one of the policies that might fall short.
- "While every piece like a clean electricity standard may not end [up] in the final version, we know that it is necessary, we know that the utilities want it, we are going to fight like crazy to make sure that it's in there," McCarthy said.
- "And then we're going to be open to a range of other investment strategies."
Zoom in: Biden's proposed CES would mandate that electric utilities generate 80% of their electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2030, with that figure hitting 100% by 2035.
- To backers of the policy, the CES is the most important policy in Biden's climate agenda. And some utilities are in favor of it.
- Although it's with some asterisks, the Edison Electric Institute, an investor-owned utility association, supports it as well.
- Proponents say a CES would have a ripple effect throughout the economy, making electric vehicles cleaner by connecting them to a renewable grid, for example.
The details: Biden has also proposed huge clean energy-related investments that advocates want to survive, but let's look at the CES...
- It would be difficult to accomplish Biden's ambitious emissions reduction targets without the CES, according to Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Stokes sits on the advisory board of Evergreen Action, a group that supports the CES.
- "If you want to do 50% by 2030, you have to make progress in the electric power sector. The electric power sector is the most important sector for decarbonization. It's the first linchpin," Stokes told Axios, referring to the administration's overall climate goal of cutting emissions by 50 to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030.
- "It enables decarbonization in buildings, transportation, parts of heavy industry, it could enable up to potentially 75% economy-wide emissions reductions in carbon," she added.
The big picture: It's not just activists who are getting nervous watching the legislative clock tick down. Senate Democrats are increasingly staking their ground on climate, too.
- Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a stalwart climate advocate, has taken to Twitter to vent his concerns about watered down climate provisions.
I tweeted earlier this week about climate failure. Well, I’m still nervous. We must get Senate Dems unified on climate on a real reconciliation bill, lest we get sucked into “bipartisanship” mud where we fail on climate.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) June 9, 2021
- So have Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Ed Markey of Massachusetts.(McCarthy sent a clarifying tweet of her own Wednesday.)
What we're watching: How any infrastructure bill or bills balances the thorny politics on Capitol Hill with the stark math of climate change will be one of the key stories to watch this summer.
HUD secretary: Bad enforcement of Fair Housing Act to blame for Black homeownership decline
During a wide-ranging interview for "Axios on HBO," I asked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge why Black homeownership rates have gone down, while rates for Asians and Hispanics have gone up.
The big picture: "Part of our problem is that we have never totally enforced the Fair Housing Act," Fudge told me during a visit to her native Cleveland.
The bottom line: "That is why we are doing things like homeownership assistance, why we're addressing the student loan issue, why we're looking at how credit is distributed. For people of color, especially Black people, homeownership is wealth. It is not only wealth to us, but it is generational wealth."
What's next: One solution is a HUD plan, outlined in a Wall Street Journal article, that aims to help prospective home buyers by relaxing the calculation on their qualification for government-backed loans.
- "Who has student debt?" Fudge said. "Poor people, Black people, brown people. We're the people who carry the most debt. And so the system's already skewed toward us not being creditworthy."
Fudge gave the example of a person who makes about $50,000 a year.
- "If they want to purchase a home — maybe $200,000 or in that ballpark — [if] they have $75,000 worth of student debt, they don't qualify," she said. "Once we make the adjustments we're going to make, that same person will qualify."
- She said that this hypothetical person would "qualify at a rate that gives them an opportunity to go into a home with some equity, but also be so vested in that home that they can afford to stay in that home."
Go deeper: The stark racial gap in homeownership