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On burning boreals, Last Energy’s new funding, and electric school buses
Current conditions: Thousands of dead fish are stinking up the port of Volos in Greece • At least 24 people are missing after flash floods hit Yemen • More than 4 million people are under evacuation orders in Japan because of Typhoon Shanshan.
The wildfires that raged through Canada’s boreal forests last year released as much carbon dioxide over just five months as a large country might throughout an entire year, according to new research published in the journal Nature. Just China, the U.S., and India emitted more CO2 than the fires.
NATURE
Canada is warming at about twice the global rate, and the average temperature during fire season last year was about 4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal. The heat is triggering “flash droughts,” where the ground dries out quickly and large areas of forest become easy kindling. Extreme fire events like those in 2023 are likely to become more common as the planet warms. Because forests absorb about 25% of the world’s carbon emissions, the research suggests the world may need to reconsider how the carbon budget is calculated.
Last Energy, a D.C.-based company making miniature, modularized nuclear reactors, announced today its $40 million series B round, led by the Austin-based venture capital firm Gigafund. CEO and founder Bret Kugelmass told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that the company already has commercial agreements for 80 units, all in Europe, and that nearly half of these will be deployed at data centers. The company has reached the permitting stage for some of its European projects, with aims to deploy the first microreactor by 2026. There are currently no operational microreactors anywhere in the Western world, though other companies, including Radiant, Westinghouse, and BWX Technologies are also trying to build one. Last Energy’s investors are betting, however, that it could be one of the first to market.
China’s energy officials are pouring cold water on the hot speculation that the country has reached peak carbon emissions, saying today that “great efforts are still needed to achieve the goals of peak carbon and carbon neutrality.” Song Wen, director of China’s National Energy Administration’s law and institutional reform department, cautioned that the country’s domestic energy demand is still growing and “the outlook is uncertain.”
A cyclone is gaining strength off the coasts of India and Pakistan in the Arabian Sea, forcing thousands to evacuate before the storm is expected to hit on Friday. Heavy rains are already bringing flooding to some of India’s western states. As a reminder, cyclones are the umbrella term for “intense rotating storm systems” that originate over warm tropical waters. Hurricanes and typhoons are also cyclones but have different regional names.
Scientists say climate change is making tropical storms more intense. New research from the World Weather Attribution found that Typhoon Gaemi, which hit the Philippines, Taiwan, and China last month and killed 90 people, was made worse by warmer sea temperatures, and that typhoons are 30% more likely now than during the pre-industrial era. “With global temperatures rising, we are already witnessing an increase in these ocean temperatures, and as a result, more powerful fuel is being made available for these tropical cyclones, increasing their intensity,” said Nadia Bloemendaal, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. So far, the Atlantic hurricane season has been somewhat quiet, but forecasters warn activity will likely ramp up in September.
Orsted announced today that it will shut down its last coal-fired heat and power plant this Saturday. The Esbjerg Power Station in Denmark consumes 500,000 metric tons of coal each year, equivalent to roughly 1.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the company said. “We’re well on track to becoming the first major energy company to completely transform its energy production from fossil fuels to renewable energy,” said Ole Thomsen, senior vice president and head of Orsted’s bioenergy business. According toReuters, 85% of Orsted’s heat and power production came from fossil fuels as recently as 2008.
This week the Oakland Unified School District in California became the first major school district in America to transition to 100% electric school buses.
Zum
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It’s known as the 50% rule, and Southwest Florida hates it.
After the storm, we rebuild. That’s the mantra repeated by residents, businesses and elected officials after any big storm. Hurricane Milton may have avoided the worst case scenario of a direct hit on the Tampa Bay area, but communities south of Tampa experienced heavy flooding just a couple weeks after being hit by Hurricane Helene.
While the damage is still being assessed in Sarasota County’s barrier islands, homes that require extensive renovations will almost certainly run up against what is known as the 50% rule — or, in Southwest Florida, the “dreaded 50% rule.”
In flood zone-situated communities eligible to receive insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program, any renovations to repair “substantial damage” — defined as repairs whose cost exceeds 50% of the value of the structure (not the land, which can often be quite valuable due to its proximity to the water) — must bring the entire structure “into compliance with current local floodplain management standards.” In practice, this typically means elevating the home above what FEMA defines as the area’s “base flood elevation,” which is the level that a “100-year-flood” would reach, plus some amount determined by the building code.
The rule almost invites conflict. Because just as much as local communities and homeowners want to restore things to the way they were, the federal government doesn’t want to insure structures that are simply going to get destroyed. On Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall, the base flood elevation ranges from 7 feet to 9 feet, meaning that elevating a home to comply with flood codes could be beyond the means — or at least the insurance payouts — of some homeowners.
“You got a 1952 house that’s 1,400 square feet, and you get 4 feet of water,” Jeff Brandes, a former state legislator and president of the Florida Policy Project, told me on Wednesday, explaining how the rule could have played out in Tampa. “That means new kitchens and new bathrooms, all new flooring and baseboards and drywall to 4 or 5 feet.” That kind of claim could easily run to $150,000, which might well surpass the FEMA threshold. “Now all of the sudden you get into the 50% rule that you have the entire house up to current code levels. But then you have to do another half-a-million above what [insurance] paid you.”
Simple probability calculations show that a 100-year flood (which is really a flood elevation that has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring every year) has a more than 25% chance of occurring during the lifetime of a mortgage. If you browse Siesta Key real estate on Zillow, much of it is given a 100% chance of flooding sometime over the course of a 30-year mortgage, according to data analysis by First Street.
Sarasota County as a whole has around 62,000 NFIP policies with some $16.6 billion in total coverage (although more than 80% percent of households have no flood insurance at all). Considering that flood insurance is required in high-risk areas for federally-backed mortgages and for new homeowners insurance policies written by Florida’s state backed property insurer of last resort, Citizens, FEMA is likely to take a close interest in whether communities affected by Milton and Helene are complying with its rules.
If 2022’s Hurricane Ian is any indication, squabbles over the 50% rule are almost certain to emerge — and soon.
Earlier this year, FEMA told Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Cape Coral, that it was rescinding the discount its residents and a handful of towns within it receive on flood insurance because, the agency claimed, more than 600 homeowners had violated the 50% rule after Hurricane Ian. Following an outcry from local officials and congressional representatives, FEMA restored the discount.
In their efforts to avoid triggering the rule, homeowners are hardly rogue actors. Local governments often actively assist them.
FEMA had initiated a similar procedure in Lee County the year before, threatening to drop homeowners from the flood insurance program for using possibly inaccurate appraisals to avoid the 50% rule before eventually relenting. The Fort Myers News Press reported that the appraisals were provided by the county, which was deliberately “lowering the amount that residents could use to calculate their repairs or rebuilds” to avoid triggering the rule.
Less than a month after Ian swept through Southwest Florida, Cape Coral advised residents to delay and slow down repairs for the same reason, as the rule there applied to money spent on repairs over the course of a year. Some highly exposed coastal communities in Pinellas County have been adjusting their “lookback rules” — the period over which repairs are totaled to see if they hit the 50% rule — to make them shorter so homeowners are less likely to have to make the substantive repairs required.
This followed similar actions by local governments in Charlotte County. As the Punta Gordon Sun put it, “City Council members learned the federal regulation impacts its homeowners — and they decided to do something about it.” In the Sarasota County community of North Port, local officials scrapped a rule that added up repair costs over a five-year period to make it possible for homeowners to rebuild without triggering elevation requirements.
When the 50% rule “works,” it can lead to the communities most affected by big storms being fundamentally changed, both in terms of the structures that are built and who occupies them.The end result of the rebuilding following Helene and Milton — or the next big storm to hit Florida’s Gulf Coast — or the one after that, and so on — may be wealthier homeowners in more resilient homes essentially serving as a flood barrier for everyone else, and picking up more of the bill if the waters rise too high again.
Florida’s Gulf Coast has long been seen as a place where the middle class can afford beachfront property. Elected officials’ resistance to the FEMA rule only goes to show just how important keeping a lid on the cost of living — quite literally, the cost of legally inhabiting a structure — is to the voters and residents they represent.
Still, said Brandes, “There’s the right way to come out of this thing. The wrong way is to build exactly back what you built before.”
The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.
In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?
No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”
But just because a landfill won’t turn into a mass of airborne dirt and half-decomposed projectiles doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Because landfills — especially large ones — often contain more advanced infrastructure such as gas collection systems, which prevent methane from being vented into the atmosphere, and drainage systems, which collect contaminated liquid that’s pooled at the bottom of the waste pile and send it off for treatment. Meyers told me that getting these systems back online after a storm if they’ve been damaged is “the most critical part, from our standpoint.”
A flood-inundated gas collection system can mean more methane escaping into the air, and storm-damaged drainage pipes can lead to waste liquids leaking into the ground and potentially polluting water sources. The latter was a major concern in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed a landfill’s waste liquid collection system in the Municipality of Juncos in 2017.
As for methane, calculating exactly how much could be released as a result of a dysfunctional landfill gas collection system requires accounting for myriad factors such as the composition of the waste and the climate that it’s in, but the back of the envelope calculations don’t look promising. The Southeast County Landfill near Tampa, for instance, emitted about 100,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2022, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (although a Harvard engineering study from earlier this year suggests that this may be a significant underestimate). The EPA estimates that gas collection systems are about 75% effective, which means that the landfill generates a total of about 400,000 metric tons of CO2-worth of methane. If Southeast County Landfill’s gas collection system were to go down completely for even a day, that would mean extra methane emissions of roughly 822 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. That difference amounts to the daily emissions of more than 65,000 cars.
That’s a lot of math. But the takeaway is: Big landfills in the pathway of a destructive storm could end up spewing a lot of methane into the atmosphere. And keep in mind that these numbers are just for one hypothetical landfill with a gas collection system that goes down for one day. The emissions numbers, you can imagine, start to look much worse if you consider the possibility that floodwaters could impede access to infrastructure for even longer.
So stay strong out there, landfills of Florida. You may not be the star of this show, but you’ve got our attention.
On the storm’s destruction, wildlife populations, and shipping emissions
Current conditions: Large parts of Pennsylvania are under a frost advisory today and tomorrow • The remnants of Hurricane Kirk killed at least one person in France • A severe solar storm is expected to hit Earth today.
Hurricane Milton is headed out to the Atlantic after raking across Florida overnight, and as the sun comes up, residents are assessing the damage left in its wake. Milton made landfall near Sarasota as a Category 3 storm, bringing heavy rainfall, dangerous winds, and flooding. St. Petersburg reported 16 inches of rain, which meteorologists say is a 1-in-1,000-year event. The storm also triggered more than 130 tornado warnings, possibly a new record. The Tropicana Field Stadium in Tampa sustained significant damage. While deaths have been reported, it’s not yet clear how many. More than 3 million people are without power.
Before the storm hit, the Florida Department of Financial Services issued a rule that requires insurance claims adjusters to provide an explanation for any changes they make to a claimant’s loss estimate, The Washington Postreported, calling the move “a groundbreaking win for policyholders.”
The World Wide Fund for Nature published its 2024 Living Planet Report yesterday, which tracks nearly 5,500 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles all over the world. It found that wildlife populations plummeted by about 73% between 1970 and 2020, as illustrated in this rather bleak but very effective chart:
WWF
Latin America, which is home to some of the most biodiverse regions in the world, saw the worst losses, at 95%. Freshwater species experienced the greatest decline at 85%. There are some success stories, such as a 3% increase in the mountain gorilla population, and the incredible comeback of the European Bison, but generally the report is pretty heartbreaking. It underscores the interconnected nature of the climate crisis and nature destruction. “It really does indicate to us that the fabric of nature is unraveling,” said Rebecca Shaw, WWF’s chief scientist. The report comes days ahead of the start of the UN COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, where delegates will discuss concrete ways to stop biodiversity loss.
More than 100 CEOs from some of the world’s biggest corporations have published a letter urging governments and the private sector to boost efforts to keep Paris Agreement goals alive. The letter, signed by the heads of companies including Ikea, AstraZeneca, A.P. Moller-Maersk, Bain & Company, Iberdrola, Orsted, and Volvo Cars, calls for governments to:
The head of the International Maritime Organization this week called on the shipping industry to do more to cut emissions from the sector. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The IMO recently set a new industry-wide target of a 20% emissions reduction by 2030, and net-zero by 2050. But the IMO’s Arsenio Dominguez said there is more to be done to hit these goals. That includes “low hanging fruit” like reducing ship speed, charting routes according to the weather, and cleaning the hulls of ships to reduce friction, The Associated Pressreported. But in the long-term, he said, the industry will need to switch to cleaner fuels, which have yet to scale.
Long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy, closed a $405 million Series F funding round this week, bringing its total funding to more than $1.2 billion. Form uses a novel method for storing energy, combining iron and oxygen to make rust, a process that the company claims can be used to store and discharge up to 100 hours of battery power. As renewable energy production ramps up, new ways of storing variable energy from wind and solar is essential, and Form’s latest fundraising underscores this need. Canary Mediareported that Form’s technology isn’t proven at utility scale yet but the company is working on commercial deployments and broke ground on a project in August to provide energy to a utility in Minnesota.
Some dragonfly species have evolved to have darker wing spots as a breeding advantage. A new study finds these dragonflies have also evolved to be able to withstand higher temperatures.
Noah Leith