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Dr. Cliff Kapono sometimes still surfs the way his Indigenous Hawaiian ancestors did 1,000 years ago, on a traditional wooden board and all. But the professional surfer and molecular biologist fears his descendants might not have the same privilege. The reason is the looming scarcity of surfable waves.
While climate change could be a boon for big-wave surfers, as some have highlighted, the beloved recreational side of the sport is endangered by the shifting climate. Dramatic changes are already locked in, with rising waters swallowing surf breaks and wary communities erecting sea walls that alter the shape of the coastline. But this tension — between the masses losing access to cherished resources and the few who benefit even as they lament — is not exclusive to surfers; it’s one that bedevils almost anything related to climate adaptation.
There are several ways climate change could jeopardize surfing, but the most dramatic is also the most counterintuitive: sea level rise could drown waves.
Put simply, surfing is made possible by the interplay of water and wind. Waves form as energy from gusts passes through water and underwater obstacles (shallower ocean floor, coral reefs, even a man-made jetty) trip them up, allowing the top of a wave to crest as the water below the surface slows down. Whether it’s surfable, however, depends on everything from the break’s geography to how high the tide is on any given day.
Models of future wave conditions indicate sea level rise could change the shape of waves that generations of surfers have relied on. A2017 analysis of 105 California surf spots found that 34% are at risk of “drowning” by 2100, meaning the wave will break too close to shore or not at all. Just 5% of the state’s surf spots are expected to improve, the study found.
Erosion, which will alter the shape of coastlines, is partly to blame. But surfing’s precarity also results from the larger volume of water inherent to sea level rise. Many breaks perform best at low or medium tide; but in most places, sea level rise will push high tide higher while rendering low tide unrecognizable.
Accordingly, head of the Surfrider Foundation’s coast and climate initiative Stefanie Sekich said, “millions of people … will have their surf breaks drowned before their eyes.” Sekich herself has already seen a treasured and unnamed pocket break near San Diego swallowed up by erosion.
Climate change could also result in changes in the water quality that make surfing untenable, such as algal blooms that release toxins that kill fish and irritate swimmers’ skin.
Warmer waters also can stress the coral reefs that often help shape the most reliable surf breaks. This causes them to expel the algae living within them (“bleaching”) and leaves them at risk of dying off entirely.
“A balance and a natural flow that has existed over millennia is being disrupted as a result of human interaction,” Kapono said of this suite of effects. “And change is difficult for people. It requires either time or money, patience or adaptation.”
Determining how to adapt to this change, however, involves hard choices about what we value and why. Surf communities vulnerable to coastal erosion are being forced to weigh the risk that homes could slip into the sea against the risk that new infrastructure could upend a chief reason people seek to live there in the first place: surfing, and the lifestyle and natural splendor that goes with it.
Nik Strong-Cvetich, who leads the non-profit Save the Waves Coalition, argues that surf breaks themselves have unappreciated economic power. In the last 70 years, surfing’s spread has transformed it from a spiritual and social practice for small island communities to a global sport. But towns like his own Santa Cruz, California, do not account for ridable waves when it comes to erecting sea walls, breakwaters, and other manmade structures along the shore, even though the waves are the main attraction for many tourists and transplants.
This so-called “armoring” of the coast via cement structures designed to simultaneously block the waves and prevent the shore’s slip into the sea can negatively impact intertidal ecosystems and even hasten beach erosion. The California Coastal Commission, charged with protecting coastal resources and regulating development, has accordingly become choosier about where this armoring is allowed; in recent cases, it has required owners of new coastal properties to waive their rights to future sea walls to protect their vulnerable developments.
Still, a cement-forward approach to adaptation, Strong-Cvetich said, is among climate change’s biggest threats to surfing, and to the ecosystems and economies that go hand-in-hand with the sport. His organization, Save the Waves, argues for nature-based solutions to sea level rise, such as dune restoration, and for legally protecting surf breaks.
This latter point is controversial. For non-surfers it can sound an awful lot like prioritizing recreation over people’s homes. But if done well, Strong-Cvetich maintains, it is possible to both protect surfing and walk back people’s exposure to environmental hazards.
Both Save the Waves and Surfrider are joining those calling for the government to fund relocating some vulnerable coastal neighborhoods. This too is quite controversial. Several California towns have already considered and shot down “managed retreat” proposals, which many affected homeowners view as jeopardizing the value of their beachfront properties. Meanwhile, a California Legislative Analyst report found that sea level rise is projected to submerge $10 billion worth of property by 2050.
In the midst of any likely climate tragedy, there will be those that come out ahead. When it comes to surfers and climate change, one prominent story goes, the winners are the big-wave surfers.
For certain elite surfers, there may be some truth to this. The swells that launch the waves sky-high at breaks like Nazaré result largely from storm activity thousands of miles offshore; one of climate change’s knock-on effects is stronger hurricanes and surface winds, which cause those swells to carry even more energy within them. In fact, this has already begun to happen, with global wave power increasing 0.4% per year since 1948, according to a 2019 study.
In combination with sea level rise, this has the potential to fuel the monster waves that surfers like Garrett McNamara and Kai Lenny watch for.
Kurt Korte, vice president of forecasting for the surf report service Surfline, said the question of where new 100-footers could be found lingers in the back of his mind as his team monitors changing ocean conditions.
“When you see a storm system that does something a little bit atypical, or you see a shift in the general pattern from one winter to the next, you get … thinking about what that may mean,” Korte said. He expects that climate change makes uncovering the next Nazaré especially likely at higher altitudes: think Alaska, Western Canada, or Greenland.
This would be a boon for the extreme surfers that increasingly get the spotlight in documentaries like the glossy HBO documentary series 100 Foot Wave — and for the fans that devour footage of their work. But the rise of monster waves while gentler, warmer breaks are swallowed would represent a gradual sea change for surfing more broadly: from leisure activity to extreme sport, most accessible to those who can afford the training, equipment, and travel required, and increasingly unrecognizable to Kapono’s ancestors
But Li Erikson, a research geographer at the U.S. Geological Survey, notesher own team’s models paint a more nebulous picture of the big-wave future. While there are some places where waves are projected to grow taller (including at the higher latitudes), there are others where they are expected to shrink.
As is so often the case in conversations of the climate crisis’ winners and losers, treating bigger and better waves as a foregone conclusion betrays both a desire to simplify the phenomenon’s effects, and to focus on the not-that-bad-actually-perhaps-even-good elements of the story. While this might be an effective coping mechanism, it’s also one that threatens to distract us from adapting before it’s too late.
The reality of the surf community’s experience of climate change is one that mirrors our collective experience: A few will gain, while most will lose. For instance, the internet brims with articles on the few regions that will fare best when so much of the world weathers floods and drought and fires. (The area around the Great Lakes seems particularly promising.) And while climate change has already caused the number of people suffering from hunger in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries to more than double since 2017, a warming Siberia will see its lucky farmers able to produce new crops.
Preserving what we value in the face of climate change is complicated and often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what we stand to lose. But sticking our heads in the sand and relying on a sea wall to save us only promises to compound our grief. Adaptation is the task of stemming the losses, especially while resources still abound.
“There’s a finite number of people that are really impacted by the big wave stuff,” Korte said. But when it comes to the future of the smaller coastal breaks that have lured an increasing number of surfers into the water, he added, millions stand to lose.
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Investing in red states doesn’t make defying Trump any safer.
In the end, it was what the letters didn’t say.
For months — since well before the 2024 election — when asked about the future health and safety of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, advocates and industry folks would point to the 20 or so House Republicans (sometimes more, sometimes fewer) who would sign on to public statements urging their colleagues to preserve at least some of the law. Better not to pull out the rug from business investment, they argued. Especially not investment in their districts.
These letters were “reassuring to a lot of folks in clean energy and climate communities,” Chris Moyer, the founder of Echo Communications and a former staffer for longtime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told me.
“I never felt reassured,” Moyer added.
Plenty of people did, though. The home solar company Sunrun, for instance, told investors in a presentation earlier this monththat a “growing number of Republicans in Congress — including 39 overall House members and four Senators — publicly support maintaining energy tax credits through various letters over the past few months.” The company added that “we expect a range of draft proposals to be issued, possibly including draconian scenarios, but we expect any extreme proposals will be moderated as they progress.”
Instead, the draft language got progressively worse for the residential solar industry, with the version that passed the House Thursday morning knocking billions of dollars off the sector, as tax credits were further squeezed to help make room for other priorities that truly posed an existential threat to the bill’s passage.
What Sunrun and others appear to have failed to notice — or at least publicly acknowledge — is that while these representatives wanted to see tax credits preserved, they never specified what they would do if their wishes were disregarded. Unlike the handful of Republicans who threatened to tank the bill over expanding the deduction for state and local taxes (each of whom signed one of the tax credit letters, at some point), or the Freedom Caucus, who tend to vote no on any major fiscal bill that doesn’t contain sizable spending cuts (so, until now, every budget bill), the tax credit Republicans never threatened to kill the bill entirely.
Ultimately, the only Republicans to outright oppose the bill did so because it didn’t cut the deficit enough. All of the House Republicans who signed letters or statements in support of clean energy tax credits voted yes on the legislation, with a single exception: New York’s Andrew Garbarino, who reportedly slept through the roll call. (He later said he would have voted for it had he been awake.)
“The coalition of interests effectively persuaded Republican members that tax credits were driving investment in their districts and states,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me in a text message. “Where advocates fell short was in convincing them that preserving energy tax credits — especially for mature technologies Republicans often view skeptically — should take precedence over preventing Medicaid cuts or addressing parochial concerns like SALT.”
The Inflation Reduction Act itself was, after all, advanced on a party-line basis, as was Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Combined, those two bills received a single Democratic no vote and no Republican yes votes.
In the end, Moyer said, Republican House members in the current Congress were under immense political pressure to support what is likely to be the sole major piece of legislation advanced this year by President Trump — one that contained a number of provisions, especially on SALT, that they agreed with.
“There are major consequences for individual house members who vote against the president’s agenda,” Moyer said. “They made a calculation. They knew they were going to take heat either way. They would rather take heat from clean energy folks and people affected by the projects.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
White House officials and outside analysts frequently touted job creation linked to IRA investments in Republican House districts and states as a tangible benefit of the law that would make it politically impossible to overturn, even as Congress and the White House turned over.
“President’s Biden’s policies are leading to more than 330,000 new clean energy jobs already created, more than half of which are in Republican-held districts,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told reporters last year, previewing a speech President Biden would give on climate change.
Even after Biden had been defeated, White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi told Bloomberg that “we have grown the political consensus around the Inflation Reduction Act through its execution,” citing one of the House Republican letters in support of the clean energy tax credits.
One former Biden White House climate official told me that having projects in Republican districts was thought by the IRA’s crafters to make the bill more politically sustainable — but only so much.
“A [freaking] battery factory is not going to save democracy,” the official told me, referencing more ambitious claims that the tax credits could lead to more Democratic electoral victories. (The official asked to remain anonymous in order not to jeopardize their current professional prospects.) Instead, “it was supposed to make it slightly harder for Republicans to overturn the subsidies.”
Congresspeople worried about jobs weren’t supposed to be the only things that would preserve the bill, either, the official added. Clean energy and energy-dependent sectors, they thought, should be able to effectively advocate for themselves.
To the extent that business interests were able to win a hearing with House Republicans, they were older, more traditionally conservative industries such as nuclear, manufacturing, agriculture, and oil and gas.The biofuels industry (i.e. liquid Big Agriculture) won an extension of its tax credit, 45Z. The oil and gas industry’s favored measure, the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration, was minimally fettered. Nuclear power was the one sector whose treatment notably improved between the initial draft from the House’s tax-writing committee and the version voted on Thursday. Advanced nuclear facilities can still claim tax credits if they start construction by 2029, while other clean energy projects have to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be in service by the end of 2028.
“I think these outcomes are unsurprising. In places where folks consistently engaged, things were protected,” a Republican lobbyist told me, referring to manufacturing, biofuels, and nuclear power, requesting anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. “But assuming a project in a district would guarantee a no vote on a large package was always a mistake.”
“The relative success of nuclear is a testament to the importance of having strong champions — predictable but notable show of political might,” a second Republican lobbyist told me, who was also not allowed to speak publicly about the bill.
But all hope isn’t lost yet. The Senate still has to pass something that the House will agree with. Some senators had made noises about how nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal were treated in the initial language.
“Budget reconciliation is, first and foremost, a fiscal exercise,” Venkatakrishnan told me. “Energy tax credits offer a path of least resistance for hitting lawmakers’ fiscal targets. As the Senate takes up this bill, the case must be made that the marginal $100 billion to $200 billion in cuts seriously jeopardizes grid reliability and energy innovation.” Whether that will be enough to generate meaningful opposition in the Senate, however, is the $600 billion question.
A loophole created by the House Ways and Means text disappeared in the final bill.
Early this morning, the House of Representatives launched a full-frontal assault on the residential solar business model. The new language in the budget reconciliation bill to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed Thursday included even tighter restrictions on the tech-neutral investment tax credits claimed by businesses like Sunrun when they lease solar systems to residential buyers.
While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”
This is how you kill a business model in legislative text.
“Expect shares of solar companies to take a significant step back,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning, calling the exclusion “scathing.” Investors are “losing the now false sense of security that we had 'seen the worst' of it with the initial House draft.”
Joseph Osha, an analyst for Guggenheim, agrees. “Considering the fact that ~70% of the residential solar industry is now supported by third-party (e.g. lease or PPA) financing arrangements, the new language is disastrous for the residential solar industry,” he wrote in a note to clients. “We believe the near-term implications are very negative for Sunrun, Enphase, and SolarEdge.”
Shares of Sunrun are down 37.5% in mid-day trading, wiping off almost $1 billion worth of value for its shareholders. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Shares of fellow residential solar inverter and systems Enphase are down 20%, while residential solar technology company SolarEdge’s shares are down 24.5%.
“Families will lose the freedom to control their energy costs,” Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement, in reference to the last-minute alteration to the investment tax credit.
When the House Ways and Means Committee released the initial language getting rid of 25D by the end of this year but keeping a limited version of the investment tax credit, analysts noted that Sunrun was an unexpected winner from the bill. It typically markets its solar products as leases or power purchase agreements, not outright sales of the system.
The reversal, Dumoulin-Smith wrote, “comes as a surprise especially considering how favorable the initial markup was” to the Sunrun business model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
The new bill, Dumoulin-Smith writes is “‘leveling the playing field’ by targeting all future residential solar originations, whether leased or owned.” The bill is “negative to Sunrun with intentional targeting of the sector.
Last year, Sunrun generated over $700 million from transferring investment tax credits from its solar and storage projects. The company said that it had $117 million of “incentives revenue” in 2024, which includes the tax credits, out of around $1.4 billion in total revenue.
But the tax credits play a far larger role in the business than just how they’re recognized on the company’s earnings statements. The company raises investment funds to help finance the projects, where investors get payments from customers as well as monetized tax credits. Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. Conversely, the financing “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote to clients that “this is a noteworthy change for the residential solar industry, and Sunrun in particular, which dominates the residential solar [third-party owned] market and has recognized ITC credits under 48E.”
Current conditions: A late-season nor’easter could bring minor flooding to the Boston area• It’s clear and sunny today in Erbil, Iraq, where the country’s first entirely off-grid, solar-powered village is now operating • Thursday will finally bring a break from severe storms in the U.S., which has seen 280 tornadoes more than the historical average this year.
1. House GOP passes reconciliation bill after late-night tweaks to clean energy tax credits
The House passed the sweeping “big, beautiful” tax bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote, mostly along party lines. Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no, while House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present;” two additional Republicans didn’t vote.
The bill will effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written — although the Wednesday night manager’s amendment included some tweaks to how, exactly, as well as a few concessions to moderates. Updates include:
The bill now heads to the Senate — where more negotiations will almost certainly follow — with Republicans aiming to have it on President Trump’s desk by July 4.
2. FEMA cancels 4-year strategic plan, axing focus on ‘climate resilience’
The combative new acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, rescinded the organization’s four-year strategic plan on Wednesday, per Wired. Though the document, which was set to expire at the end of 2026, does not address specific procedures for given disasters, it does lay out goals and objectives for the agency, including “lead whole of community in climate resilience” and “install equality as a foundation of emergency management.” In axing the strategic plan, Richardson told staff that the document “contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission.”
A FEMA employee who spoke with Wired stressed that while rescinding the plan does not have immediate operational impacts, it can still have “big downstream effects.” Another characterized the move by the administration as symbolic: “There are very real changes that have been made that touch on [equity and climate change] that are more important than the document itself.”
3. Energy Department redirects Puerto Rican rooftop solar investment to upkeep of fossil fuel plants
The U.S. federal government is redirecting a $365 million investment in rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico to instead maintain the island’s fossil fuel-powered grid, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday. The award, which dates to the Biden administration, was intended to provide stable power to Puerto Ricans, who have become accustomed to blackouts due to damaged and outdated infrastructure. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority declared bankruptcy in 2017, and a barrage of major hurricanes — most notably 2017’s Hurricane Maria — have destabilized the island’s grid, Reuters reports.
In Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s statement, he said the funds will go toward “dispatching baseload generation units, supporting vegetation control to protect transmission lines, and upgrading aging infrastructure.” But Javier Rúa Jovet, a public policy director for Puerto Rico’s Solar and Energy Storage Association, added to The Associated Press that “There is nothing faster and better than solar batteries.”
4. EDF, Shell, and others to collaborate on hydrogen emission tracker
The Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday that it is launching an international research initiative to track hydrogen emissions from North American and European facilities, in partnership with Shell, TotalEnergies, Air Products, and Air Liquide, as well as other academic and technology partners. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that, through chemical reactions, can affect the lifetime and abundances of planet-warming gases like methane and ozone. Despite being a “leak-prone gas,” hydrogen emissions have been poorly studied.
“As hydrogen becomes an increasingly important part of the energy system, developing a robust, data-driven understanding of its emissions is essential to supporting informed decisions and guiding future investments in the sector,” Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist and senior vice president of EDF, said in a statement. Notably, EDF took a similar approach to tracking methane over a decade ago and ultimately exposed that emissions were “a far greater threat” than official government estimates suggested.
5. The best-selling SUV in America will now be available only as a hybrid
Toyota
The bestselling SUV in America, the Toyota RAV4, will be available only as a hybrid beginning with the 2026 model, Car and Driver reports. The car will be available both as a conventional hybrid and as a plug-in that works with CCS-compatible DC fast chargers, meaning “owners can quickly fill up its battery during long road trips” to minimize their fossil fuel mileage, The Verge adds. The RAV4 will also beat the Prius for electric range, hitting up to 50 miles before its gas engine kicks in.
Toyota’s move might not come as a complete surprise given that the automaker already introduced a hybrid-only lineup for its Camry. But given the popularity of the RAV4, Car and Driver notes that “if you ever wondered whether or not hybrids have entered the mainstream yet, perhaps this could be a tipping point.”
Nathan Hurner/USFWS
The Fish Lake Valley tui chub, a small minnow threatened by farming and mining activity, could become the first species to be listed as endangered under the second Trump administration.