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The smoke pouring into Seattle from Spokane is particularly bad, but there’s also no such thing as good smoke.
On another offshore wind kill, inverter bans, and NYC’s new power line
A D.C. appeals court upheld an injunction preventing the Trump administration from clawing back $20 billion in climate grants.
The state’s crystal clear lakes are turning into the Reflecting Pool.
Life is a constant process of dying — even for lakes. For Lake Kanasatka, a 350-acre body of water born when the glaciers raked their retreat into the bedrock of what is now New Hampshire, everything nearly came to an end in 2023.
The first sign that something was wrong appeared in 2009. That November, the state’s Department of Environmental Services noticed a “green scum” in the water near Camp Quinebarge Beach. Over the next few years, the DES continued to dutifully report the emergence of “greenish slime” along the shoreline until, in August 2020, the concentration reached a level that prompted the lake’s first warning of a toxic algae bloom.
In recent years, many lake-loving Americans have added that term — “toxic algae bloom” — to their summer lexicon. It’s also a bit of a misnomer: the culprit, cyanobacteria, are not technically algae but ubiquitous single-celled microorganisms, their photosynthetic chlorophyll and an additional pigment giving them the blue-green appearance suggested by their name. “They’ve been around forever,” Amanda McQuaid, a water quality ecotoxicologist at the University of New Hampshire and director of the school’s citizen-science lake monitoring program, told me. “I personally think they’re probably on Mars. I think they’re everywhere. They’re indestructible.”
Cyanobacteria are present across habitats, from the Sahara dust in Africa to the shelves of our grocery stores to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. (The Trump Administration can attest firsthand to their indestructibility.) What transforms a healthy concentration of cyanobacteria in a lake into a bloom is access to nutrients — specifically phosphorus, which enters lakes via runoff from fertilized lawns or farms, leaky septic tanks, pet waste, and eroding shorelines. As lakeside living has increased in desirability and housing development has encroached on natural bodies of water, blooms have consequently followed.
Though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not keep an official count of cyanobacterial blooms, a conservative estimate puts the number of advisories issued nationally in the hundreds, and more likely in the thousands, every year. Cyanobacteria are a class of organisms with thousands of species, like plants, but many produce toxins as part of their metabolic processes. These toxins are numerous and include microcystin, which affects the liver and can cause skin irritation and gastrointestinal problems upon contact with swimmers and waders, as well as anatoxin, a neurotoxin that can kill a dog within minutes of it lapping up contaminated lake water on a hot summer day.
Most alarming, though, is that many cyanobacteria also produce the neurotoxin BMAA, which can become airborne and which researchers have connected to neurodegenerative diseases in humans. According to another study by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center neurologist Elijah Stommel, people living within a half-mile radius of cyanobacterially contaminated lakes had a 2.3-times greater risk of developing the devastating and terminal nervous system disease ALS compared to the rest of the population. In the case of one contaminated lake near Enfield, New Hampshire, the incidence of sporadic ALS was 10 to 25 times above what was to be expected. And in a state like New Hampshire, which was gouged by the glacial retreat at the end of the last ice age, nearly 80% of residents live within half a mile of some body of water.
Scuzzy green water occurs in every state in the country. Nationally, the Environmental Protection Agency detected the telltale microcystin toxin in 39% of U.S. lakes in a 2012 survey; by the EPA’s most recent survey, in 2022, that number had risen to 50%. Still, in places like New Hampshire, cyanobacterial blooms are a relatively new phenomenon, having recently intensified due to increased development and climate change. “People are not used to going to a lake in New Hampshire and not being able to see through the water,” McQuaid said. “So if things are green or scummy or turbid, they’re like, ‘What is happening?’”
Between 2001 and 2008, Andrea LaMoreaux worked for the state’s Department of Environmental Services, running a water-quality testing program. She told me that during that time, she saw only one lake with a cyanobacterial bloom. But by 2015, blooms had become a topic of conversation in the state, and by 2023, just three years after its first toxic algae advisory, Lake Kanasatka was in a full-blown crisis.
“This is a lake that had a reputation for always being pristine — a very quiet lake,” state Representative Rosemarie Rung, who represents nearby Merrimack and owns a seasonal cottage on Kanasatka, told me. But 2023 was markedly different: the bloom was bad enough to dissuade recreation for weeks on end — in the “Live Free or Die” state, the DES doesn’t close beaches, even due to blooms. One woman described the feeling of her lips going numb while kayaking.
Kanasatka had crossed a tipping point. As part of a lake’s natural aging process, organic debris settles on its floor and decomposes, eventually consuming all the oxygen in the water. When that happens, phosphorus normally bound to iron in the sediment is released into the water — where it in turn provides extra nutrients for cyanobacteria. While human-caused inputs like runoff might previously have limited the cyanobacteria, lake anoxia offers them a firehose of nutrients to feast upon.
The tipping point is around 10 parts per billion of phosphorus in the water; in Kanasatka in 2023, there was around 200 parts per billion. “All of a sudden, [Kanasatka residents] woke up one morning and literally almost overnight, it looked like someone had dumped Mountain Dew into the lake,” LaMoreaux, the former DES employee who now serves as the president of NH Lakes, a statewide nonprofit lake conservation and advocacy group, told me.
Left untreated, Kanasatka would have slowly suffocated, with dead cyanobacteria adding to the decomposing organic matter at the bottom of the lake and blocking light to lake plants, making the anoxia worse. But there is one reliable way to treat a cyanobacteria bloom: with alum.
Phosphorus breaks apart from iron in the absence of oxygen, but it binds permanently with aluminum. An alum treatment, then, involves coating the lake bottom with an aluminum-heavy chemical concoction and is one of the only ways out of the slimy green cyanobacterial feedback loop. But so-called “biomanipulation” also has unknown downsides — including potentially spurring cyanobacteria to release more toxins as they rupture — and it isn’t cheap, either, running about $500,000 in the case of Lake Kanasatka. Rung, who helped create a $2 million cyanobacteria mitigation fund to support alum treatments across the state, told me it helped with Kanasatka’s treatment and “another alum treatment for a lake in Littleton, New Hampshire, which also had suffered very severe chronic blooms. But then the money ran out.”
But while Kanasatka today is the state’s poster child for algae blooms — it appears healthy two years out from its treatment, although alum only lasts about two or three decades — it wasn’t a one-off, either. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people moved to New Hampshire’s lakes to work remotely, fertilizing new lawns and cutting down shoreline brush to better enjoy their views in the process. That’s sped up the encroachment of cyanobacteria across one of the country’s healthiest lake systems.
There is another powerful factor driving the blooms, and it is out of New Hampshirites’ hands alone. Climate change supercharges cyanobacteria blooms, with a strong correlation between hotter, sunnier summers and high concentrations of the warm-water-loving, photosynthetic microorganisms. Even more crucially in a state like New Hampshire, milder winters mean fewer weeks of ice cover on its lakes — cover that essentially acts as a “reset” by depriving cyanobacteria of sunlight. And heavier rains and flooding in New Hampshire, phenomena that greater water retention in a warmer atmosphere makes possible, mean greater runoff into the lakes and a firehose of food for the waiting microorganisms.
Unchecked, cyanobacteria pose a threat not just to human and animal life, but to the lives of recreation-based towns and economies. “I know anecdotally that people who have rented a lake house for a week or so, and there’s been a bloom, have been very, very angry,” Rung, the state representative, said. “They’ve tried to get out of that rental and get their money back, and there has not been guidance on what to do. Pretty much, they’re out of luck.”
But political will and funding challenges are real — Rung tried and failed to create a lake-lovers vanity plate to help pay for future mitigation treatments, and a recent deadline to create a task force to identify other funding sources expired with no progress.
“People don’t even want to say the word climate change in New Hampshire,” Rung told me in frustration. “Even the terminology triggers people, but it can’t be ignored. We’re just a small state. We don’t have a big population. We can’t do anything about it. But yet, we’re suffering the consequences.”
On Texas data centers, Microsoft’s carbon removal, and cross-border aluminum
Current conditions: Dangerous degrees of wildfire smoke swept into the Pacific Northwest, leaving air quality in fire-struck Spokane, Washington, at very unhealthy levels through midweek • Yesterday’s thunderstorms across the Northeast grounded flights and delayed thousands of passengers as key airports in New York City, New Jersey, and New England halted incoming arrivals for hours • Temperatures in Abu Dhabi are soaring to nearly 110 degrees Fahrenheit all week.
A vessel sails past the partially dried-up river bed of the Rhine in Duisburg, western Germany. Ina FASSBENDER / AFP via Getty Images
Europe’s rivers are running dry amid the prolonged drought and third major heat wave this summer. On Monday, the Rhine River’s water levels dropped to their lowest level in nearly 150 years, beaching cargo barges and jeopardizing output from the various thermal power plants that line the waterway stretching through France, Germany, and Switzerland. The water levels at Kaub, a key crossing for vessels heading to southern Germany and Switzerland, fell to 24 centimeters, the lowest level since records started in 1880, according to a Bloomberg analysis of German federal data compiled by the university ETH Zurich. In Eastern Europe, the Danube’s flow is so depleted that just one reactor at Hungary’s only nuclear station, the four-unit Paks plant, is operating — and only at 50% as cooling water dwindles, NucNet reported.
In Washington State, meanwhile, nearly 65,000 people have now been evacuated from the wildfires that incinerated almost 700 homes in the Spokane area with a “wall of flames.” As of Monday evening, the fire was still 0% contained, according to Fox 13 Seattle, a local broadcaster.
You might not think it, given the partisan politics of our age, but the governors of New York and Texas actually have a lot in common. New York Governor Kathy Hochul is a Democrat, and Texas’ Greg Abbott is a Republican. But they’re both pro-nuclear. They’re both up for reelection this year. And they’re both banning data centers, at least temporarily. Last month, New York became the first state to halt permitting on new, large data centers for a year. Now Texas has put approvals for new data centers on hold until the state’s power regulators and grid managers can audit existing facilities that are seeking to connect to the state’s grid. Until then, E&E News reported, “no more additional data centers can be approved or move forward until that process is over.” In a letter to both the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Abbott wrote: “Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUC and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.” On the local level, moratoriums on data centers blossomed in recent months, with more than 530 municipalities having slapped new restrictions on server farms, per a recent Heatmap analysis my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote.
Hochul, as our colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote later last month, is “walking a fine line” with her moratorium, issued via executive order, especially as her administration seeks to appease renewables boosters who say she isn’t doing enough to speed up deployments of that kind of infrastructure. But blocking disfavored types of infrastructure is nothing new for the Texas GOP. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is among the big names now trying to thwart a $33 billion transmission buildout in the state.
Back in April, Rob broke news that Microsoft was pausing its carbon removal purchases. The break marked a major setback for a nascent industry that had come to rely on the tech giant as its biggest and deepest-pocketed source of demand. While the company never confirmed the pause, it appears to be ending. Last night, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo passed along a big exclusive for this newsletter: Microsoft is set to announce a big carbon removal purchase. CREW Carbon, the Brooklyn-based startup that permanently traps carbon dioxide using a limestone and wastewater mix, inked an offtake agreement with Microsoft for 23,602 “durable, verified” credits. CREW “uses strategically-sourced alkaline minerals, such as calcium carbonate, to optimize key conditions, like pH and alkalinity, in each wastewater treatment plant’s specific process to minimize the carbon footprint of plant operations,” the company said in a press release shared in advance with Emily.
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As my colleague Katie Brigham reported last week, Commonwealth Fusion Systems made waves in the clean energy financing world for yet again raising an eye-popping $1 billion to commercialize fusion energy, notably bringing on institutional investors for the first time. Now another fission startup is bringing in a similar chunk of coin. California-based Valar Atomics just pulled in $1 billion to help bring its next-generation high-temperature gas-cooled microreactors to market. The venture capital giant Sequoia led the round, and added the firm’s Shaun Maguire to its board.
Even with progress on nuclear, the future for gas continues to look rosy. On Monday, Utility Dive reported that American Electric Power now has 13 gigawatts of gas turbine capacity in the pipeline.
Zerluma, a Mexican aluminum recycler, has broken ground on a new $50 million facility in Mission, Texas, the San Antonio Business Journal reported. The deal in the city near Texas’ southern border, marks one of the largest private investments in the city’s history, according to the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal.
The agreement comes as the Trump administration seeks to support the opening of the first new American aluminum smelter in half a century, a project that — as you may recall — has attracted scrutiny from state Republicans in Oklahoma. The effort is facing yet more criticism. The Muscogee Nation’s National Council voted unanimously to approve a resolution opposing aluminum smelters on tribal land following the Trump-backed proposal for a $4 billion plant by Emirates Global Aluminum. Last month, city leaders in Port of Inola approved a 60-day moratorium on smelter-related construction, according to the Tulsa broadcaster News On 6.
The United Kingdom has a coke problem: The snortable white stuff is too good and too cheap. So, what is a criminal enterprise that needs something tradeable of high value to do? Well, increasingly, they’re going for gold. Illegal gold mining has replaced cocaine as organized crime’s most profitable business, according to Mining.com. That has grave implications for human rights — and for communities in places such as the Amazon.
