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Geopolitics, the heightened importance of climate change, and the sheer size of the conference have transformed the event into something that it was never meant to be.
It didn’t attract a lot of attention, but for a few months, it looked like the United Nations climate process might break down.
There, process is substance: One of the most important acts every year is the selection of the next country to run the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP. This distinction normally rotates among the UN’s five regional country groups; next year, a country in the “Eastern Europe” group is due to host. All the members of a group must unanimously agree on which country will get to host.
This is a highly contingent way to decide who gets to host a climate conference. Really, the entire schema of UN regional groups represents a hangover of Cold War geopolitics that is now indefinitely unchangeable. (The “Western Europe” group is essentially the early members of NATO; it includes such notably non-western-European countries as Turkey, the United States, and — hilariously — Australia.)
The “Eastern Europe” group, meanwhile, amounts to more or less the former members of the Warsaw Pact. For obvious reasons, these countries cannot agree on a consensus choice in 2023. Russia, the group’s largest member, was not amenable to holding the COP in any eastern Europe NATO member state, such as Poland, Latvia, or Finland. The eastern European NATO members — as well as Ukraine, which is also in the UN regional group — were similarly opposed to holding the COP in Russia.
That meant that attention focused on the group’s countries in the Caucasus, at the edge of central Asia: Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Yet difficulties presented themselves here too. Azerbaijan successfully seized an Armenian exclave earlier this year, evicting up to 120,000 Armenians as part of a campaign described as ethnic cleansing. Armenia blocked any Azeri bid to host the COP.
For the first time in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s history, no country would have been able to lead COP the following year. Geopolitics had seemingly broken the consensus mechanism that makes the climate conference work.
This amounted to more than just a deficiency in party planning. It would have forced Bonn, Germany — the home of the UNFCC’s permanent headquarters — to host COP29, a kind of “break in case of emergency” default option. And it would have allowed the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate that has reportedly used the COP to make oil deals, to retain the conference presidency for at least another year.
That didn’t happen. Late last week, Armenia lifted its block of Azerbaijan’s bid, and the two countries mutually released prisoners in a gesture of good will. (Their rapprochement happened suspiciously close to President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the U.A.E.) Next year’s COP will seemingly happen in Baku, the Azeri capital.
But just because the COP process didn’t break doesn’t mean that it’s not being stretched. All is not well with the COP. During this year’s conference, a picture emerged of a COP being tested by a more rivalrous, conflict-prone world. Geopolitics, the heightened importance of climate change, and the sheer size of the conference have transformed the event into something that it was never meant to be.
This year, more than 100,000 people attended the COP. It was held at Dubai’s opulent Expo City, the Disney World-style convention campus initially built for the 2020 World Expo, the modern successor to World’s Fairs. Hundreds of nonprofit groups and companies, as well as more than 190 countries, ran public pavilions that advertised their climate accomplishments and views on decarbonization. Negotiators divided into different blocs: China and the United States, oil-producing states and small island nations, the West and the rest.
It wasn’t always like this. When the first COP was held in Berlin in 1995, the world was in a very different era, Lee Beck, the senior director for Europe and the Middle East at the Clean Air Task Force, told me. It was “the peak of multilateralism, followed by relative geopolitical stability and peace,” she said. The United States and the broader West set the agenda for global events.
“In the last two years — others would say the writing was on the wall as early as 2014 — geopolitical fragmentation really is visible,” she said. “You’re really pushing the limits of multilateralism at this one. One of the cracks is we’re unable to agree where the COP even will be.”
But geopolitics are not the only force stretching COP to the limit. Another is the sheer size of the event itself.
There used to be “big COPs” and “small COPs”: COP21, the 2015 meeting where the Paris Agreement was finalized, was a “big COP,” but the following year’s conference in Marrakech, Morocco, was a fairly minor one. Even COP21 was less than half the size of this year’s COP. And in one possible read, this year should have been a smaller COP — the biggest to-dos were formally launching the Loss and Damage fund and writing the Global Stocktake report, a kind of report card on the world’s climate progress (or lack thereof).
But small COPs don’t seem to happen any more. Since the pandemic ended and COP26 took place in Glasgow, Scotland, COPs have swollen in size, creating the age of the new “mega-COP.” More than 100,000 people attended the conference this year, making it by far the biggest COP ever. It was more than twice the size of last year’s confab in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt, which was previously the biggest COP ever. Most of those attendees had nothing to do with the negotiations ostensibly at the center of the conference — they were investors, technologists, scholars, scientists, or experts — and instead made up a de facto global trade show on climate solutions.
COP is now so big and climate is now so important that even the lack of news about the conference can generate news. When President Joe Biden declined to attend this year’s conference, The New York Times push-alerted it.
But there are possibilities that could improve the situation. One of them might be that COP simply becomes so unmanageable that it has to scale back. Few cities have the spare capacity to house an extra 100,000 visitors for 12 days. New York City, for instance, only has about 123,000 hotel rooms total. If COP were to keep growing, the problem would only get harder. When 150,000 people descended on San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual conference in 2015, the company docked a cruise ship in the bay to provide an extra thousand rooms.
There are solutions, Beck said. She noted this was the first year that every continent had held its own Climate Week: a smaller event focusing on more region-specific decarbonization challenges. This COP has also seen the emergence of country coalitions that rally around different issues or approaches. The set of countries that backed a pledge to triple renewable capacity, for instance, is different from the smaller coalition that wanted to triple nuclear capacity. These smaller, more sector-specific coalitions may have more ability to actually decarbonize and address climate change, she said.
For all these challenges, perhaps the biggest miracle is that the UNFCC process works at all, Eve Tamme, a former climate negotiator for the European Commission, told me.
“The UNFCCC process is based on consensus between almost 200 countries. Judging based on the complexity of the issue at hand and the divergence of views among the countries, it seems impossible that such a process could deliver anything at all,” she said. Even when you follow the negotiations closely, it may seem like there’s barely any movement at all, she said.
“But then again, we got the Kyoto Protocol,” she said. “And we got the Paris Agreement. So while it may look broken in the short term, somehow this dysfunctional process can still deliver.”
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Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.