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On Trump’s power pledge, America’s offshore nuclear, and Japan’s offshore wind
France’s deadliest heat wave since 2003 killed more than 2,700 people — and possibly as many as 5,700.
We didn’t know days like this could happen. Then we learned how bad they really are.
Smoke is back. Again. It’s time to make a plan.
Heat kills more Americans than any other extreme weather event in the United States. But wildfire smoke — while not strictly “weather” — appears to kill even more. Current excess death estimates put American heat mortality at about 10,000 people per year, or possibly as high as 12,000. Recent studies on wildfire PM 2.5 exposure suggest a mortality of double that: 24,000 all-cause deaths every year.
Needless to say, wildfire smoke is definitely not something you want to inhale if you can avoid it. (And really, you should try to.) But for the 115 million Americans in the Great Lakes and Northeast regions of the country who’ve been exposed to hazardous air from the fires in Ontario and Minnesota this week, there’s a chance that the damage is already done. According to a wildfire smoke mortality estimation tool from Cornell University’s School of Public Health and the Northeast Regional Climate Center, the total mortality for this smoke event could already be as high as 424 people so far, including nearly 100 in Michigan and more than 50 in both New York and Wisconsin.
Alistair Hayden, an assistant professor of practice in Cornell’s Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, stressed to me that the tool is a “first draft,” and that his team is still working on getting it peer-reviewed. “We intend it as a hypothesis that people can test in the coming weeks or months to confirm our numbers,” Hayden told me. “I’m really hoping to be proven wrong.”
But Hayden also emphasized that while the West Coast might historically be where many smoke-related deaths have occurred, “this is the third out of four years [in the Northeast] that we’re having the smoke, so it seems like something we should be planning for,” he said. “It reminds me of that saying: ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’”
Admittedly, the smoke this week is a bit of a freak occurrence. A cooler-than-average sea surface pattern across the North Pacific, known as a negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, helped produce weak low-pressure areas in the northwestern part of the United States, which in turn allowed for heat domes to develop across the Southwest and Plains. After one did just that earlier this month, the hot, high-pressure dome then shifted north, where it developed “dryness across Canada, followed by the lightning-producing thunderstorms,” Chad Merrill, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, told me. Then, boom: widespread fires.
“It is very unusual to have a combination of an El Niño and a negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation,” Merrill went on. “That’s one of the unusual factors this year, which contributed to the heat dome being farther north in that particular position.” The heat dome and jet stream then worked together to direct the thick smoke down into some of the most populous regions of Canada and the U.S.
That’s what makes this particular smoke event so bad. Were the smoke blowing over remote regions of Canada, as it would under more usual conditions, “then the big cities and the Great Lakes wouldn’t experience the smoke; it would have gone north toward the Hudson Bay and then Greenland,” Merrill said. In fact, the Canadian fire season is tracking below average overall; it’s the meteorological conditions that made this week’s smoke events, as one outlet put it, “the perfect storm.”
Wildfire smoke in the region is not historically anomalous, however. A 1903 article in The New York Times describes a “yellow day” similar to smoky events in 1894, 1881, and earlier. But large-scale burns in Canada’s dense, remote boreal, which produce more smoke, are increasing. Though it’s difficult to attribute any one wildfire directly to climate change because of the complex nature of such events, we do know that fire weather is becoming more common with the warming of the atmosphere from greenhouse gas emissions. As modeled by Zeke Hausfather in the Friday edition of his newsletter The Climate Brink, “hotter, drier seasons burn the most” in Canada — and “recent years cluster there” as the country has outpaced the global average in warming.
But as Hausfather also writes, “While overall area burned is the climate-linked trend, who breathes the smoke on a given week in July is mostly driven by the weather.” This is similar to the way that, though it may be a quiet year in the Atlantic, it only takes one hurricane making landfall in the right (or wrong) spot for the season to be remembered as catastrophic.
On the other hand, as foolish as it might be for the Central Plains and East Coast to still believe smoke is the exclusive domain of Westerners, it is also a mistake to assume smoke only comes from without. As I reported earlier this year, the Eastern half of the country has seen a 10-fold jump in the frequency of large burns over the last 40 years. Nowhere is safe from the smoke.
Planning and preparation, then, should be paramount. But as Grist learned last month, there are no established Air Quality Index numbers that would trigger the postponement, relocation, or cancellation of, say, a FIFA World Cup game, including the final, which is set to be played in New Jersey on Sunday. White House officials are reportedly meeting with FIFA’s president on Friday to discuss contingencies, given the unhealthy air quality in the region.
Which brings us back to Hayden’s modeling. He offered a note of optimism in that research by Stanford’s Sam Heft-Neal and his colleagues indicates that emergency room visits do not rise in tandem with increasing wildfire smoke. “As smoke gets bad, the health impacts get bigger. But then as smoke gets worse and worse, the amount of health impacts actually goes down, measured for emergency room visits,” Hayden said. “The idea is that people modify their behavior in higher smoke” — say, by staying indoors, wearing masks, or canceling outdoor events.
It’s time to treat smoke as an East Coast phenomenon, in other words. Doing so will save lives. “Will [smoke events] become more frequent in the future? Most likely we will see a recurrence,” Merrill, the meteorologist, told me. “How often they happen is yet to be determined.”
On NRC moves, Blue Energy, and China’s solar and methanol breakthroughs
Current conditions: The World Cup’s final match between Argentina and Spain is set to take place Sunday in New Jersey, where the thick orange haze of Canadian wildfire smoke is still hovering • Temperatures are soaring to 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Ethiopia’s northeast Afar province • Researchers just categorized the first major dust storm of Arizona’s monsoon season, which struck Phoenix earlier in the week, as a Category 3.
An oil pipeline built in 1926 from Syria to Iraq. A century later, another may be coming. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
On Tuesday, I told you about the United Arab Emirates’ plan to build a new port to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Iraq and its oil partners are looking westward. The Financial Times reported yesterday that Chevron and Baghdad are in advanced discussions to form a consortium to build and restore a pipeline network through Syria as an alternate route to export oil. The U.S. oil giant is working with the Los Angeles-based TI Capital and an investment group owned by the Syrian-Qatari billionaire Al-Khayyat brothers, who own a major construction company in the Gulf nation and are, according to Bloomberg, “betting big” on Syria’s post-war reconstruction.
It’s yet another sign that, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote, it’ll be a long time before the Strait of Hormuz returns to normal operations — especially now that the war is back on.
Just two weeks ago, I told you that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had proposed both overhauling how it measures the risks from radiation exposure and giving more flexibility to developers to prove their reactors operate safely. Now the agency is continuing its regulatory blitz with another rule, posted Thursday to the Federal Register, to smooth the way for license renewals, speed up approvals to begin construction on certain components and structures at new nuclear plants, and provide more guidance for technologies that use coolants other than water.
In Spain, meanwhile, the country’s Nuclear Safety Council gave the country’s oldest nuclear station, the Almaraz plant two hours west of Madrid, the greenlight to continue operating until 2030, according to NucNet. Currently, the Spanish government is pursuing the world’s only active nuclear phaseout policy. Virtually every country that has phased out atomic energy now regrets it. Switzerland and Belgium already reversed course. German politicians complain constantly about what a mistake it was to quit nuclear power. Taiwan, which shut down its last reactor last year, now wants to reopen at least one. Even Italy, the first country to abandon nuclear energy, is now looking to revive the industry.
Constellation Energy knows a thing or two about what works with nuclear power. So it’s quite notable that the largest operator of civilian reactors in the nation is making a bet on one of the more unique startups hoping to shape the next generation of atomic power stations. Constellation’s venture arm announced a strategic equity investment into Blue Energy, a developer that is pitching itself as a project manager to get small modular reactors built on time and on budget. Unlike most other players in the nuclear game at the moment, Blue Energy isn’t designing its own reactor. The company calls itself “reactor agnostic.” Rather, Constellation said the company would focus instead on building GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s BWRX-300, a 300-megawatt boiling water reactor that is currently one of the leading designs in the U.S. “With demand for near-term power rising, Constellation’s investment will help Blue Energy meet America’s need by making new nuclear development predictable, rapidly scalable, and project financeable for the first time in history,” Blue Energy CEO Jake Jurewicz said in a statement. “This relationship helps us leverage an established operator, proven technology, and innovative, project-financeable deployment models to expand access to nuclear energy.”
Meanwhile, one of the most attention-grabbing startups in the next-generation reactor race is looking at an eye-popping valuation. Led by its 27-year-old CEO Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics made waves when it worked with the U.S. military to transport the components for its gas-cooled microreactor by plane. The company is now eyeing a $6 billion valuation, The Information reported last night.
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New York City’s brand-new power line connecting the five boroughs to Quebec’s hydroelectric system is down for repairs in the midst of the summer heat. Hydro-Quebec, the French-speaking province’s state-owned utility, said its teams had “identified a fault with the terrestrial cable” at a location on the U.S. stretch of the route. Governor Kathy Hochul’s office called the outage “unacceptable” in a statement to Gothamist.
Over in Hawaii, Governor Josh Green, a fellow Democrat, signed legislation to adopt a clean fuel standard, making the island state the fifth in the nation to adopt such a policy. The program will come into full effect at the start of 2029, and will use market incentives to reduce the carbon intensity of fuel over time. Texas, meanwhile, is serving as the model for the new bipartisan permitting reform bill my colleague Robinson Meyer broke news of last night.
Chinese panel manufacturer LONGi’s newest solar cell has made a breakthrough in increasing the power conversion efficiency of its panels to 35.5%. That figure was confirmed this week by a European certification test. The cell design is called a crystalline silicon-perovskite tandem cell, which PV Tech described as “widely regarded as a leading technology pathway for next generation” solar panels. A perovskite top cell with a crystalline silicon bottom cell allows the solar panel to tap into both technologies’ efficiencies. By contrast, the efficiency by percentage of energy converted to electricity in thin-film solar cells like those the U.S. manufacturer First Solar sells tap out somewhere in the teens. The more popular crystalline silicon cells that China has dominated have efficiency rates of up to 24%. So LONGi’s announcement represents a significant improvement.
Meanwhile, China’s state-owned pipeline company, PipeChina, successfully shipped two batches of methanol about 125 miles through existing oil pipelines in northwest China. Hydrogen Insight hailed the test as “a record-breaking trial that could transform” a sector long plagued by questions about how to transport fuel. It’s the latest sign, as I told you last month, that Beijing is doubling down on green hydrogen.
Like a Mesopotamian metal merchant of yore, I like to train a keen eye on copper prices in this newsletter. And with good reason: It’s the basic building block of the electrical system, and it’s subject to some wild geopolitical price pressures. Just look at why the price is sliding now. Per Mining.com, the major storms in Chile and the flareup of hostilities in Iran are depressing the market for the metal, which had hit an all-time high earlier this year.
