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Perversely, aerosols might be preventing warming of up to 0.8 degrees Celsius, IPCC scientists say. But there’s a fix.
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is out — and the news is both good and bad.
As Neel Dhanesha writes here at Heatmap, the report notes that significant progress has been made on reducing the expected future trajectory of carbon emissions. Prior reports predicting that a “business as usual” approach would lead to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 are now out of date. Simply proceeding along the status quo instead would lead to perhaps 3 degrees of warming.
The bad news is that 3 degrees is still far too much. So far we have warmed the planet by just 1.1 degrees, and the ensuing droughts, flooding, extreme weather, mass extinctions, and so on speak for themselves. Much more progress is needed to avert disaster.
Media coverage of the report has focused on the emissions question, naturally enough. Yet there’s another aspect to it that is also both good and bad: namely, human aerosol pollution. So far these aerosols have partially mitigated the effect of greenhouse gas emissions — but they are being reduced thanks to pollution controls. Given the fact that humanity is on a trajectory to transition away from fossil fuels, but is not getting there nearly fast enough; and that ending aerosol pollution might boost our warming by up to 73%, intentionally injecting aerosols into the atmosphere for a limited time (sometimes called “peakshaving”) might be our least bad option.
Some background: Aerosols are tiny particles of stuff like sulfur dioxide produced by diesel exhaust, coal-fired power plants, cargo ships, as well as dust storms and ocean spray. These reflect a small percentage of sunlight back into space, which reduces the amount of heat that the planet absorbs. IPCC scientists now estimate that manmade aerosols provide a cooling effect somewhere between nothing … and 0.8 degrees Celsius.
So it’s rather alarming aerosol emissions are falling fast. Coal power plants are in terminal decline in rich countries, and given the cheap and falling cost of renewable energy, they will be in poorer ones sooner or later. Electric vehicles will replace most carbon-fueled cars and trucks over the next few decades. And thanks to long-overdue international regulations, emissions from container ships — which hitherto used ultra-filthy “bunker fuel,” containing something like 3,300 times as much sulfur as modern diesel — are plummeting. All that is good in terms of air quality, because ground-level pollution causes all kinds of health problems, but it also raises the prospect of a sudden increase in warming of nearly a degree on top of what has already happened.
Now, one wouldn’t want to just go spray sulfur dioxide willy-nilly into the atmosphere. The first order of business would be to conduct careful research on just how much cooling aerosols are providing, how an intentional aerosol injection might disperse around the globe, how that might affect precipitation and weather patterns, what the cheapest, most effective, and least dangerous form of aerosol might be, and so on. The think tank SilverLining, which advocates for such research, estimates that it might cost about $2.6 billion per year.
Now, most people don’t know about this kind of technology yet — and might have understandable reservations about messing with the atmosphere. But the recent Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults conducted by Benenson Strategy Group last month found that 51% of respondents favored conducting “a major research program into the feasibility of this technique” when it was explained to them, and 67% supported deploying it if the government found it to be “inexpensive, effective, and low-risk.”
An aerosol program would also have the advantage of being relatively cheap and easy to implement. Emissions reductions require massive changes to our energy system and economic structures which take years at least to implement. So far only a crisis event — like Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine drastically increasing the price of natural gas in Europe — can motivate nations to decarbonize at anything even close to the appropriate speed.
Moreover, the biggest climate problem by far today is China, which emits something like 63% more carbon dioxide than the U.S. and the EU put together. To be fair, China is investing heavily in renewable energy, but its economy remains heavily dependent on carbon, and it’s hard to imagine how America might bully or entice the Chinese leadership into accelerating the energy transition (at least without undermining the trade restrictions that were central to assembling the coalition behind President Biden’s big climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act). China is simply too big and powerful to be pushed around.
It might theoretically be possible to compensate for Chinese emissions with carbon capture and sequestration, but that technology is barely out of the prototype stage, and even it weren’t, sucking up China’s emissions would require an industrial complex on the order of the size of the entire American auto industry. That is a decade off in a best-case scenario.
What we could do, however, is mask the effects of excessive emissions for a few decades, while nations build out zero-carbon industry and carbon capture technology can get up to speed. The cost would likely be in the tens of billions per year — outside of the reach of all but the richest countries, but a pittance compared to the American military budget.
Again, it’s important to note that an aerosol program is not a solution to climate change. It would be a flawed, temporary measure to buy us time. (It wouldn’t reduce ocean acidification, for instance.) The energy transition is happening, and every possible effort should be made to speed it up. But we have to be realistic about the space of political possibility, particularly when it comes to the limits of influence on the other global superpower.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.