The Brief

Nine months ago, the oceans became bathwater. As historically hot sea temperatures forced corals to expel the microorganisms that keep them alive, the world endured its fourth mass coral bleaching event, affecting more than half of all coral reefs in dozens of countries. As the temperatures continued to climb, many died.

It was an early taste of what would become a year marked by the consequences of record-breaking heat. And now it’s official: Earlier this month, when much of the world’s attention was turned to the U.S. presidential election, scientists from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service crowned 2024 as the hottest year on record — and the first year to surpass the 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark. And that’s with a little more than a month left to go in the year.

“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records...," said Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’ deputy director, in a press release. Burgess called the announcement “virtually certain” because, barring an extreme event like a volcanic eruption that blocks the atmosphere’s excess heat, it’s nearly impossible for temperatures to fall enough for 2024 not to break the record.

It’s against this backdrop that world leaders, policymakers, and activists descended on Azerbaijan for the 29th United Nations Climate Conference of the Parties, to tout their new climate goals and negotiate funding for vulnerable countries affected by climate change. Back home, many of their countries will still be recuperating from this year’s floods, fires, and other natural disasters. At the last conference in December 2023, governments agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the aim of trying to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures.

“2024 is the hottest year on record, and nothing can change that at this point,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, which, due to slight variations in their model, found last year exceeded 1.5 degrees C, too. “It’s not about a single year passing that 1.5 level. It’s more important to consider the longer term average of human contribution to climate change.”

There are half a dozen groups, including Berkeley Earth, Copernicus, and NASA, that calculate the progress of global warming, and each has its own approach to filling in data gaps from the beginning of the century when records were less reliable, leading to different estimations of how much the Earth has warmed since then. The average of these models is used by international scientific authorities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization. This is the first year, Hausfather said, that this communal average also shows the 1.5 C threshold has been passed.

“1.5 degrees is not a magic number. Each degree matters,” said Andrew Dessler, director of Texas A&M University’s Texas Center for Climate Studies. Because each part of our climate system has different thresholds for tolerating the excess heat, small changes in temperature can have major consequences and push ecosystems past their tipping points. “The world is engineered for the climate of the 20th century,” he said, “and we’re just now exiting that climate. We’re maladapted.”

Global warming alone can’t account for all the excess heat from these past two years. At least some of the supercharged temperatures and the disasters they catalyzed can be chalked up to a strong El Niño — a cyclical upwelling of warm water in the Pacific Ocean that shifts weather patterns across the globe. Although the most recent El Niño cycle was expected to give way to the cooler La Niña pattern this summer, the heat has persisted into the end of the year.

Once El Niño’s effects ease up, there’s a chance that coming years may dip back below the 1.5 C mark. Hausfather noted that only once the planet’s temperatures have remained above the 1.5 degrees C threshold for a decade or more will scientists consider international emissions agreements to be breached. “A big El Niño year like this one gives us a sneak peek as to what the new normal is going to be like in a decade or so,” he said.

And the new normal isn’t pretty. In addition to the widespread demise of coral reefs, the year brought record-setting heat waves in the Arctic and Antarctica that melted sea ice to near historic lows, stoking concerns that sea levels would rise faster than anticipated. During summer months, some 2 billion people, a quarter of all humans on Earth, were exposed to dangerously hot temperatures, including 91 million people in the United States and hundreds of millions in Asia.

The extra heat fueled disasters throughout the year. Deadly wildfires raged in South America, burning millions of hectares across the Amazon Basin and Chile. Arctic forests in Russia and Canada went up in flames too, spewing record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Catastrophic flooding killed hundreds in Spain, Africa, and South Asia. And recently, hurricanes Helene and Milton, catalyzed by hot ocean temperatures, tore through the Caribbean and the U.S. South. Meanwhile, droughts gripped communities on nearly every continent.

Those impacts are unacceptable. They’re being felt by those who are most vulnerable, which also happen to be, in general, those that are least responsible,” said Max Holmes, president and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Heavy rains from Hurricane Helene caused record flooding and damage on September 28, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina

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At the U.N. conference in Azerbaijan, organizations like the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the World Wildlife Fund were given a platform to speak directly to country representatives and showcase their research on climate change. There, activists hope that wealthy countries shore up their commitments to support poorer countries in their efforts to cope with the climate crisis, develop clean energy, and restore ecosystems.

“People shouldn’t think the game is over because we passed 1.5 degrees,” Dessler said. “The game is never over.”

The World Cup has officially taken over Los Angeles, and not without controversy.

Fans have voiced frustration over ticket pricing and questions linger over whether the Iranian football team should be playing in the tournament.

Listen: Should Iran be playing at SoFi? Listeners weigh in as tentative US-Iran deal is announced

The man at the center of these decisions and how fans in Southern California are experiencing the World Cup is FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

Here's why he's the most influential voice in soccer right now.

How he got elected

The election of Infantino followed one of the worst corruption scandals in sports history. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted more than a dozen FIFA officials and executives on charges of bribery, money laundering and wire fraud.

Swiss authorities launched an additional investigation, which led to former FIFA President Sepp Blatter's resignation. He had held the position since 1998.

Following the corruption scandal, Congress passed a reform package, but criticism remains over lack of follow through.

Part of Infantino's success has been built on his ability to boost revenue for FIFA over the years.

Ticket pricing, human rights and other critiques

Getting in on the World Cup games here in L.A. has likely been... expensive.

And that's been one of the biggest critiques of Infantino as matches approached and FIFA announced ticket pricing would adjust based on demand. Infantino has defended the pricing method, comparing it to other major American sporting events.

Coaches, players and fans are also split on FIFA's decision to add three-minute mandated hydration breaks to matches, according to Reuters.

Infantino has also been criticized for downplaying concerns over human rights. For example, the Guardian reported in 2021 that more than 6,500 migrant workers died in Qatar during the 10-year lead up to it hosting the World Cup in 2022.

Oliver Kay, The Athletic's senior soccer writer, said during a conversation on LAist 89.3's AirTalk that Infantino's legacy is complicated and leaves true soccer fans with questions.

" How many of these decisions are being made for the good of the game, and how many of them are being made for whichever world leaders Infantino is cozying up to at that time?" Kay said.

With the World Cup fully underway and the LA28 Olympics on the horizon, bathroom access is bound to cause a stir for fans visiting from all around the world.

Los Angeles, like other major cities in the U.S., doesn’t have the most robust stock of accessible restrooms, and although that’s nothing new, it wasn’t always like this.

Read more: Visiting LA? Our public bathrooms are tricky to find but we’ve got maps

LA’s opulent toilets

As it turns out, L.A. was one of the epicenters of the early 20th century bathroom boom (no pun intended).

Temple University professor Bryant Simon, who is the author of the forthcoming book For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, joined AirTalk, LAist’s daily news program, to talk about the history of public bathrooms and how we got to where we are today.

“Cities would compete with each other to build the most lavish public bathrooms,” Simon said. “In 1911 in L.A., the mayor held a ribbon-cutting ceremony and bragged about how ornate the bathroom was.”

When things started to go down the toilet

The goal was simple: encourage the public to feel safe and confident leaving their homes by creating convenient spaces for people to relieve themselves.

Instead, these public bathrooms attracted a different type of crowd.

“Drinkers and smokers, people using drugs and most ominously for city leaders, people seeking sex,” Simon said, adding that almost immediately authorities throughout Southern California started arresting men who were seeking sex with other men.

So, cities felt they had no choice but to close public bathrooms all together.

“Jim Crow laws fall down and cities closed public bathrooms,” Simon added.

Simon said this trend continued into the 1980s, with stricter policies around homelessness.

Toilet anxiety

United Sites is one of the companies that supplies portable toilets to the city of L.A.

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Today, you can see from this map how many bathrooms there are in the city and county, which has put some LAist listeners in a tough spot and on both sides of the issue.

Where do we go from here?

Similar to European models — big U.S. cities previously instituted for-pay toilets, but by 1974, they were outlawed after a gender equity campaign argued they discriminated against women who were forced to pay, while men could use urinals for free.

“ We have pay toilets now. It's called Starbucks,” Simon said.

Starbucks is trying to stem the loss of customers by simplifying its menu, reintroducing ceramic mugs and making other changes to be more like a local coffee house.

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Simon added that when private companies are essentially operating public toilets, they tend to become inherently unfair because the focus is on profits.

He says if public bathrooms are to come back at scale, they need to be maintained, including proper cleaning — and this likely means human attendants are involved.

“Public bathrooms have been closed over decades in order to keep other people away to the point that now we're all in the same boat of having no public bathrooms,” Simon said.

In March, Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco introduced a measure that would have made it more expensive for Californians to obtain government records.

Amid opposition from transparency advocates and public access concerns from her own Assembly colleagues, though, the Downey Democrat diluted her proposal to simply give governments more time to respond to records requests, a change that allowed the measure to sail through the Assembly in May.

Now, she’s brought the controversial elements back — and they are even more restrictive than before, drawing fierce opposition from transparency advocates.

The latest version of her proposal, Assembly Bill 1821, would allow government agencies to delay responding to certain requests and to charge at least $88 an hour to search for and review the records they deem are for “commercial use.”

Government agencies could also take requests to court if they believe someone is asking for the records for a malicious reason.

Pacheco told CalMatters her measure aims to prevent frivolous records requests from inundating local governments, especially requests generated by artificial intelligence.

For years, local agencies have argued that fulfilling extensive records requests burdens public workers and allows bad actors to overwhelm governments. In 2023, someone requested Bay Area city officials’ emails to train an AI service they wanted to sell to local governments, said Donald Larkin, an attorney representing the League of California Cities, which supports the legislation.

“Transparency is important to me,” Pacheco said in an interview. “We just want it to run efficiently, and these are just minor amendments or minor tweaks to the Public Records Act.”

But First Amendment advocates say state law already allows agencies to decline frivolous records requests by arguing that they are “unduly burdensome.” Even when requests are legitimate, agencies routinely delay fulfilling them or withhold records for months or years, drawing legal challenges.

Pacheco’s measure would create barriers that would chill the public from filing requests, effectively gutting the state’s open records act and violating the spirit of Californians’ constitutional right to government information, transparency advocates argue.

“The only way that there’s any government accountability is that people know what the government is doing,” said David Snyder, a former journalist and now the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

“This looks a lot like an effort to evade accountability.”

The proposed changes would “make California stand out as the most secretive state in the country,” said David Cuillier, a University of Florida journalism professor who sits on the federal Freedom of Information Act advisory committee.

The whiplash of amendments angered many transparency advocates, who criticized Pacheco for overhauling her proposal only after it was approved by the Assembly.

The move, prevalent in the Legislature, “often leads to badly written bills with dangerous side effects and AB 1821 now fits squarely into that category,” said Tracy Rosenberg, advocacy director at local watchdog group Oakland Privacy, who called the proposal “a virtual horror show of governmental non-transparency.”

Authority to sue for ‘malicious’ requests

While many local governments across the nation have sued — and largely lost — over what they consider “vexatious” requests, California would be the first state to explicitly allow agencies to sue for “malicious intent.” Requesters the court deems malicious would have to pay $88 an hour to obtain records.

Public agencies already use the courts to target requests they don’t like, and rubber-stamping that authority by writing it into law would embolden them to deny more requests, First Amendment advocates say.

“It would be easily weaponized by agencies seeking to thwart transparency and accountability, as has already happened elsewhere in the country,” Snyder said.

The threat of a lawsuit alone would “chill requesters from submitting public requests,” said Shaila Nathu, a senior attorney with ACLU of Northern California, which also opposes the bill.

Pacheco dismissed the concerns, stating that she doubts that cities would sue very often because it’d require them to go to court just to recover a limited amount of fees. But the provision would offer a tool just in case, she said.

“Hopefully this will curb the bad actors,” she said. “I don’t anticipate that this would slow down legitimate requests.”

‘Outrageous’ fees risk chilling public engagement

Advocates also criticized Pacheco’s fee proposal, arguing it would discriminate against requesters based on their use for the records. State law bars agencies from limiting access to public records based on purpose.

The measure would allow agencies to charge more for requests they deem to further someone’s “commercial, trade, or profit interests.” It would exempt just a small group of people, such as academics, journalists and government agencies. Under current law, agencies can only charge for making copies of the records, usually at between 10 to 50 cents a page.

For the rest of the public, agencies could ask them to submit information “promptly” to prove their intent and automatically treat those who don’t as commercial requesters. The bill includes no standard for what is “prompt.”

“It’s so fact-specific that it’s kind of hard to say what’s reasonable, what’s prompt,” Pacheco said. “Most people will reply if a city asks, and then the city can then obtain the records for the individual.”

Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco during a floor session at the state Capitol in Sacramento on March 23, 2026. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters In an email, Pacheco spokesperson Alina Evans told CalMatters that the assemblymember wants to prevent taxpayers from subsidizing “the cost of building or improving a private company’s commercial product.” But, she said, Pacheco will amend the measure to prevent forcing every requester to justify their request.

Snyder said that language would give governments broad authority to play favorites — “to see why it is somebody’s requesting records and then to potentially make decisions based on that.”

Those deemed commercial would have to pay $22 an hour in “administrative fees” and $66 an hour in “professional fees” for the search, review and redaction of the records, although the California Supreme Court already ruled in 2020 that such charges threaten Californians’ right to access.

That hourly rate would be “outrageous” and could easily become so burdensome that low-income Californians stop filing requests altogether, Cuillier warned.

Critics also slammed the measure for empowering agencies to decide how quickly they need to respond to requests based on how people file them.

Under current law, government agencies must respond to a request within 10 calendar days and extend the deadline for providing the records by no more than 14 calendar days. The law does not mandate a specific format for submission, although many local and state agencies allow requests through an online portal.

Pacheco’s bill would extend the timeline to 10 and 14 business days respectively, but only if the requests are filed in person or by email during normal business hours.

Those requesting records by fax, by mail or through an online portal would be at the agencies’ mercy.

The initiative originated from one of Pacheco’s many trips sponsored by special interest groups last year, her spokesperson, Alina Evans, told CalMatters in March. Last year, Pacheco reported receiving more than $45,000 in sponsored travel — the most of any California lawmaker — including a study tour in Spain, a golf tournament in Pebble Beach and a conference in Maui. When asked Wednesday, however, Pacheco said she did not remember which one inspired her measure and said the idea came from multiple conversations with local governments.

The latest amendment reflects talks Pacheco had with the League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties, the city of Downey, municipal clerks and several lawmakers on the Assembly Judiciary Committee, which approved a much narrower version of her proposal, Evans said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A fire at a Boyle Heights commercial building Wednesday prompted a shelter-in-place order for hours due to hazardous materials, including ammonia.

The fire broke out at Lineage, a logistics company that offers cold storage services, according to the company’s website. 

A shelter-in-place order was lifted at around 8:45 p.m. Wednesday, but the fire remained smoldering as of 11 a.m. Thursday, and firefighting efforts continued. 

Residents are also still expressing concerns over air quality. Here’s what we know.

What materials burned in the fire?

The fire spread across the building’s rooftop solar panels, prompting firefighters to use helicopters to take on the flames and prevent further spread. 

“Any sort of structure fire with [solar] panels burning, there’s going to be some sort of hazardous materials in the air,” LAFD firefighter Jennifer Middleton.

The fire also reached an ammonia line, causing it to off-gas the chemical, and adjacent structures were evacuated to keep people from breathing it in.

The ammonia is not toxic to individuals unless they have respiratory issues or come into direct contact with it, fire officials said. 

What to know about smoke and air quality 

A particle pollution advisory was in effect until at least 12:30 p.m. Friday for an area including Boyle Heights, central LA and parts of Northeast LA.

At a press conference Thursday morning, LAFD officials said air quality was being monitored in the area, adding that there was no public threat.

However, residents in Boyle Heights reported concerns over smoke, ash and the lingering smell; the air remained acrid and smelled like plastic on Thursday morning.

Boyle Heights Beat reached out to the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the LA County Department of Public Health to ask about air quality levels and how officials determine whether there is a threat to public health. 

“Preliminary results from the mobile monitoring showed particulate matter was generally near background levels, however, elevated particulate matter concentrations were observed for a few seconds at a time within the plume,” the AQMD said. “During those few seconds, increased levels of bromine and chlorine were also observed. Bromine and chlorine are typically found at trace levels during structural fires and the levels seen were below short-term health-based exposure thresholds. Concentrations below this level are not expected to cause adverse health effects. No significant levels of air toxic metals were seen.”

As firefighting continues, people downwind may continue to notice poor air quality, the agency added. Smoke becomes cooler as firefighters gain control, causing it not to rise as dramatically into the air. 

What should residents do

The LA County Public Health Department issued guidance Wednesday on how residents can protect themselves. 

• Officials recommend remaining indoors, keeping windows and doors closed, and limiting exposure to outdoor air if residents can see or smell smoke.
• Residents with respiratory conditions should continue monitoring local air quality and exercise caution.
• Run an air purifier if available, but avoid using air conditioners, which bring in outside air (you may qualify for a free one here)

What symptoms to watch for

Contact your doctor, go to urgent care or call 911 if you experience:

• severe coughing
• shortness of breath,
• wheezing
• chest pain,
• palpitations
• nausea
• unusual fatigue

How to monitor air quality

• Download the South Coast AQMD mobile app
• Sign up for advisories at AirAlerts.org

The post What burned in the Boyle Heights hazmat fire, and what it means for air quality appeared first on LA Local.