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This summer was hot. It was wet. It was deadly. For most of us, it was a preview of the rest of our lives.
So here we are: Another summer in the books.
After Labor Day, whites go back in the closet; kids go back to school. Astronomically speaking, there are still technically 20 days left of summer, and climatologically speaking, we may have even longer to go than that — summers are getting longer as autumns contract. But culturally, anyway, we’re now headed into fall, an incongruous transition epitomized by the bastardized existence of the iced pumpkin spice latte. You know you’re living in the age of climate change when ...
It’s a good time, though, for taking stock. An astonishing 96% of Americans have faced at least one extreme weather alert from the National Weather Service since May 1, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Danger Season tracker reports. Further, only seven counties out of 3,224 in the whole country and its territories had no heat, flood, fire, or storm warnings between May 1 and August 29 of this year, according to additional numbers supplied to Heatmap by the UCS — including, surprisingly, San Fransisco County in California, home of what has been called the single-most economically vulnerable major city to climate change in the U.S.
These were the others that dodged extreme weather alerts: Aleutians East Borough (Alaska); Aleutians West Census Area (Alaska); Ketchikan Gateway Borough (Alaska); Kodiak Island Borough (Alaska); and Norton City (Virginia). Together, they have a population of around 39,500 — just a fraction of San Francisco County’s 815,200.
But while San Francisco, some islands and bays in remote regions of Alaska, and a sliver of Virginia got lucky (this time and so far), it was a bad summer to be in Arizona, where there were more NWS extreme weather alerts issued than in any other state. Coconino County, home of the capital of Flagstaff, saw 146 alerts this summer due to a parade of heat, flood, and fire threats, followed closely by Mohave County, in the state’s northwesternmost corner, with a total of 145. New Mexico was right on Arizona’s tail with five counties in the top 10:
When it came to heat alerts specifically, Texas and Puerto Rico dominated the top of the list. In fact, Louisiana’s Sabine Parish was the highest-ranked non-Texan or Puerto Rican county for heat alerts, clocking in way down at #96.
The most flood alerts were experienced by California’s Inyo County, the home of Death Valley, which might be surprising until you remember how little rain it takes to trigger a disaster in the desert. Washington’s Yakima, Kittitas, and Skamania counties lead the list for fire weather alerts; and South Carolina’s Georgetown, Colleton, and Charleston counties lead for storm alerts. (The data was collected just before the brunt of Hurricane Idalia swept through northern Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas). California’s Los Angeles County, the most populous in the country, faced a total of 80 extreme weather alerts this summer; the average for all counties was around 44.
The UCS Danger Season data (which will continue to be collected here through October) did not account for air quality warnings, which were the main story of the early summer in the U.S. — at times, more than a third of Americans faced degraded AQI due to smoke billowing south from the Canadian wildfires (which are themselves record-breaking). June 7 was the worst day for wildfire smoke exposure in American history “by far,” my colleague Robinson Meyer reported, and it happened not on the West Coast, where fires are routine, but in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Toronto.
The next month, July, was the hottest month on Earth in probably 120,000 years (so you have that bragging right on about 4,000 or so generations of your ancestors). Some 40,000 different locations around the world recorded their hottest days ever in 2023, with nearly 20,000 of those in the United States, according to NOAA’s records. Though we didn’t break the global heat record this year (Death Valley only reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit, short of the 130 it needed to beat), the planet recorded its warmest day ever a few different times. Meanwhile, Vermont saw catastrophic summer flooding.
Then, in August, a grass fire fueled by hurricane winds ripped through Maui. Even three weeks later, we still don’t know how many people were killed. Undoubtedly, though, it is the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history — and all the more shocking for the fact that it burned through a former wetland, a grim testament to the effects of colonialism. America might not be through reckoning with massive fires, either; the peak of fire season is known as “Snaptember” among hot shot crews for a reason.
And summer wasn’t through with us yet. Hilary became the first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years, and while the damage wasn’t too bad, the Los Angeles Times credits the urgency of the early warnings for saving lives. Subsequently, Hurricane Idalia became the first hurricane to make U.S. landfall in what is predicted to be an “above normal” season, strengthening from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm in 24 hours thanks to record-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Reports of the damage are still trickling in, but it can’t be good news for insurers in Florida and the Southeast.
It is difficult to tie any one weather-related disaster to climate change, but as Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, once succinctly put it to Mother Jones: “It’s not: Climate change flooded my house. It’s: Climate change changed the chances of flooding my house.” So, let’s look at the chances.
A recent study found that the prime wildfire conditions in Canada this year, which caused the choking smoke on the East Coast, were “at least twice as likely to occur there as they would be in a world that humans hadn’t warmed by burning fossil fuels,” The New York Times reports. The July heat dome that baked the South was “at least five times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” an analysis by Climate Central and The Guardian found. The odds of Vermont’s supposedly once-a-century flooding happening within 12 years of another 100-year storm in the state, Hurricane Irene, was just 0.6 percent. The fires in Maui were caused by compounding climate problems, The Washington Post reports, such as higher average temperatures and more intense hurricanes — both of which also have links to emissions-fueled warming. And Hurricane Idalia’s rapid intensification is what we’d expect to see from human-fueled ocean warming, too. Then there’s El Niño, which plays a part in all this chaos as well; it’s why scientists expect next year to be an even bumpier ride for earthly life than this summer has been.
That might not be very heartening to hear but consider this: If you’re a resident of anywhere other than San Francisco and a few odd places like Alaska’s Bristol Bay Borough (population: 838), then this summer was your dry run. You’ve learned more than you ever expected you’d need to know about indoor air purification; you spent 90 minutes prepping for wildfire season; you’ve checked in on elderly neighbors; you’ve even brushed up on your gin rummy skills so you can stay off your phone when the power goes out during the next (or same?!) hurricane. Look at you go. You’re adaptable. Heck, even iced pumpkin spice lattes are starting to grow on you now.
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On a Justice Department crackdown, net zero’s costs, and Democrats’ nuclear fears
Current conditions: Hurricane Lorena, a Category 1 storm, is threatening Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. with flooding and 80 mile-per-hour winds • In the Pacific, Hurricane Kiko strengthened to a Category 4 storm as it heads toward Hawaii • South Africa’s Northern Cape is facing extremely high fire risks.
The owners of Revolution Wind are fighting back against the stop-work order from President Donald Trump that halted construction on the offshore wind project off the coast of Rhode Island last month. On Thursday, Orsted and Skyborn Renewables filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accusing the Trump administration of causing “substantial harm” to a legally permitted project that was 80% complete. The litigation claimed that the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management “lacked legal authority for the stop-work order and that the stop-work order’s stated basis violated applicable law.”
“Revolution Wind secured all required federal and state permits in 2023, following reviews that began more than nine years ago,” the companies said in a press release. “Revolution Wind has spent and committed billions of dollars in reliance upon this fulsome review process.” The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut filed a similar complaint on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, seeking to “restore the rule of law, protect their energy and economic interests, and ensure that the federal government honors its commitments.” Analysts didn’t expect the order to hold, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, though the cost to the project’s owners was likely to rise. As I have reported repeatedly in this newsletter over the past few weeks, the Trump administration is enlisting at least half a dozen agencies in a widening attack meant to eliminate a generating technology that is rapidly growing overseas.
After the cleanup in Altadena, California.Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Department of Justice sued South California Edison on Thursday for $77 million in damages, accusing the utility of negligence that caused two deadly wildfires. Federal prosecutors in California alleged the utility failed to maintain infrastructure that ultimately sparked the Eaton fire in January, and the 2022 Fairview fire in Riverside County, The Wall Street Journal reported. The fires collectively killed about two dozen people and charred more than 42,000 acres of land. “Hardworking Californians should not pick up the tab for Edison’s negligence,” said Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. Attorney for California’s Central District, where the lawsuit was filed.
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It sure sounds like a lot of money. In a new research note released this week, the energy consultancy BloombergNEF calculated the total cost to transition the global economy off unmitigated fossil fuels by 2050 at $304 trillion. But that’s only 9% above the cost of continuing to develop worldwide energy systems on economics alone, which would result in 2.6 degrees Celsius of global warming. That margin is relatively narrow because the operating costs of cleaner technologies such as electric vehicles and renewable power generators are lower than the cost of fuel in the long term. The calculation also doesn’t account for the savings from avoided climate disasters in a net-zero scenario that halts the planet’s temperature spike at 1.7 degrees Celsius. While the cost of investing in renewables, grid infrastructure, electric vehicles, and carbon capture technology would add $45 trillion in additional investment, it’s ultimately offset by $19 trillion in annual savings from making the switch.
Microsoft has signed a series of deals that tighten the tech giant’s grip on the nascent carbon removal market. With new agreements that involve direct air capture in North American and burning garbage for energy in Oslo, Microsoft now accounts for 80% of all credits ever purchased from tech-based carbon removal projects. The company made up 92% of purchases in the first half of this year, the Financial Times reported, citing the data provider AlliedOffsets. By comparison, Amazon made up 0.7% of the market and Google comprised 1.4%.
We are still far from where carbon removal needs to be to make an impact on emissions. All the Paris Agreement-consistent scenarios modeled in the scientific literature require removing between 4 billion and 6 billion metric tons of carbon per year by 2035, and between 6 billion and 10 billion metric tons by 2050, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote recently. “For context, they estimate that the world currently removes about 2 billion metric tons of carbon per year over and above what the Earth would naturally absorb without human interference.”
At a hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the two Democrats left on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress they feared Trump would fire them if they raised safety concerns about new reactors. Matthew Marzano said the “NRC would not license a reactor” that didn’t pass safety standards, but that it’s a “possibility” the White House would oust him for withholding approval. “I think on any given day, I could be fired by the administration for reasons unknown,” Crowell told lawmakers, according to a write-up of the hearing in E&E News.
Hitachi Energy announced more than $1 billion in investments to expand manufacturing of electrical grid infrastructure in the U.S. That includes about $457 million for a new large power transformer facility in Virginia. “Power transformers are a linchpin technology for a robust and reliable electric grid and winning the AI race,” Andreas Schierenbeck, chief executive of Hitachi Energy, said in a press release. “Bringing production of large power transformers to the U.S. is critical to building a strong domestic supply chain for the U.S. economy and reducing production bottlenecks, which is essential as demand for these transformers across the economy is surging.”
All of the administration’s anti-wind actions in one place.
The Trump administration’s war on the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry has kicked into high gear over the past week, with a stop work order issued on a nearly fully-built project, grant terminations, and court filings indicating that permits for several additional projects will soon be revoked.
These actions are just the latest moves in what has been a steady stream of attacks beginning on the first day Trump stepped into the White House. He appears to be following a policy wishlist that anti-offshore wind activists submitted to his transition team almost to a T. As my colleague Jael Holzman reported back in January, those recommendations included stop work orders, reviews related to national security, tax credit changes, and a series of agency studies, such as asking the Health and Human Services to review wind turbines’ effects on electromagnetic fields — all of which we’ve seen done.
It’s still somewhat baffling as to why Trump would go so far as to try and shut down a nearly complete, 704-megawatt energy project, especially when his administration claims to be advancing “energy addition, NOT subtraction.” But it’s helpful to see the trajectory all in one place to understand what the administration has accomplished — and how much is still up in the air.
January 20: Trump issues a presidential memorandum temporarily halting all new onshore and offshore wind permitting and leasing activities “in light of various alleged legal deficiencies underlying the Federal Government’s leasing and permitting of onshore and offshore wind projects,” while his administration conducts an assessment of federal review practices. The memo also temporarily withdraws all areas on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing.
March 14: The Environmental Protection Agency pulls a Clean Air Act permit for Atlantic Shores, which was set to deliver power into New Jersey.
April 16: The Department of the Interior issues a stop work order to Empire Wind, a New York offshore wind farm that began construction in 2024. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum accuses the Biden administration of giving the project a “rushed approval” that was “built on bad and flawed science,” citing feedback from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
May 1: The Interior Department withdraws a Biden-era legal opinion for how to conduct permitting in line with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that advised the Secretary to “strike a rational balance” between wind energy and fishing. The Department reinstated the opinion issued under Trump’s first term, which was more favorable to the fishing industry.
May 2: Anti-offshore wind group Green Oceans sends a 68-page report titled “Cancelling Offshore Wind Leases” to Secretary Burgum and acting Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals Management Adam Suess, according to emails uncovered by E&E News. The report “evaluates potential violations of Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) and related Federal laws in addition to those generally associated with environmental protection.”
May 5: Seventeen states plus the District of Columbia file a lawsuit challenging Trump’s January 20 memo halting federal approvals of wind projects.
May 19: The Interior Department lifts the stop work order on Empire Wind after closed-door meetings between New York governor Kathy Hochul and President Trump, during which the White House later says that Hochul “caved” to allowing “two natural gas pipelines to advance” through New York. Hochul denies reaching any deal on pipelines during the meetings.
June 4: Atlantic Shores files a request with New Jersey regulators to cancel its contract to sell energy into the state.
July 4: Trump signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which imposes new expiration dates on tax credits for wind and solar projects, including offshore wind, as well as on the manufacture of wind turbine components.
July 7: The Environmental Protection Agency notifies the Maryland Department of the Environment that the state office erred when issuing an air permit to the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, also known as MarWin, because the state specified that petitions to review the permit would go to state court rather than the federal agency. The state later disagrees.
July 17: New York regulators cancel plans to develop additional transmission capacity for future offshore wind development, citing “significant federal uncertainty.”
July 29: The Interior Department issues an order requesting reports that describe and provide recommendations for “trends in environmental impacts from onshore and offshore wind projects on wildlife” and the impacts that approved offshore wind projects might have on “military readiness.” The order also asserts that the Biden administration misapplied federal law when it approved the construction and operation plans of offshore wind projects.
July 30: The Interior Department rescinds all designated “wind energy areas” on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, which had been deemed suitable for offshore wind development.
August 5: The Interior Department eliminates a requirement to publish a five-year schedule of offshore wind energy lease sales and to update the lease sale schedule every two years.
August 7: The Interior Department initiates a review of offshore wind energy regulations “to ensure alignment with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and America’s energy priorities under President Donald J. Trump.”
August 13: The Department of Commerce initiates an investigation into whether imports of onshore and offshore wind turbine components threaten national security, a precursor to imposing tariffs.
New Jersey regulators also decide to delay offshore wind transmission upgrades by two years. They officially cancel their contract with Atlantic Shores.
August 22: The Interior Department issues a stop work order on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind project set to deliver power to Rhode Island and Connecticut, citing national security concerns. The 65-turbine project is already 80% complete.
Interior also says in a court filing that it intends to “vacate its approval” of the Construction and Operations Plan for the Maryland Offshore Wind Project.
August 29: The Interior Department says in a court filing that it “intends to reconsider” its approval of the construction and operations plan for the SouthCoast wind project, which was set to deliver power to Massachusetts.
The Department of Transportation also withdraws or terminates $679 million for 12 offshore wind port infrastructure projects to “ensure federal dollars are prioritized towards restoring America’s maritime dominance” by “rebuilding America’s shipbuilding capacity, unleashing more reliable, traditional forms of energy, and utilizing the nation’s bountiful natural resources to unleash American energy.” The grants include:
September 3: The Interior Department says in a court filing that it intends to vacate its approval of the construction and operations plan for Avangrid’s New England Wind 1 and 2, which were set to deliver power to Massachusetts.
The New York Times also reports that the White House has instructed “a half-dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry,” including asking the Department of Health and Human Services to study “whether wind turbines are emitting electromagnetic fields that could harm human health,” and asking the Defense Department to probe “whether the projects could pose risks to national security.”
September 4: The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as Orsted, file lawsuits challenging the stop work order on Revolution Wind.
At the start of all this, the U.S. had three offshore wind projects that were fully operational and five that were under construction. As of today, the Trump administration has halted just one of those five, but it has threatened to rescind approvals for each and every remaining fully permitted project that hasn’t yet broken ground.
The tumult has rippled out into the states, where regulators in Massachusetts and Rhode Island are delaying plans to sign contracts to procure additional energy from offshore wind projects.
Looking ahead, we can expect a few things to happen over the next few weeks. We’ll see the Interior Department formally begin to rescind permits, as it indicated it would do in numerous court filings. We’ll also likely get an opinion from a federal court in Massachusetts in the case that states filed fighting Trump’s Day One memo. Orsted also said it intends to ask for a temporary injunction, so it’s possible that Revolution Wind could resume construction soon.
It’s been barely a month since Jael dubbed the Trump administration’s tactics a “total war on wind.” While the result hasn’t been a complete shutdown of the industry, it seems he might still be in the early stages of his plan.
The Nimbus wind project in the Ozark Mountains is moving forward even without species permits, while locals pray Trump will shut it down.
The state of Arkansas is quickly becoming an important bellwether for the future of renewable energy deployment in the U.S., and a single project in the state’s famed Ozark Mountains might be the big fight that decides which way the state’s winds blow.
Arkansas has not historically been a renewables-heavy state, and very little power there is generated from solar or wind today. But after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state saw a surge in project development, with more than 1.5 gigawatts of mostly utility-scale solar proposed in 2024, according to industry data. The state also welcomed its first large wind farm that year.
As in other states – Oklahoma and Arizona, for example – this spike in development led to a fresh wave of opposition and grassroots organizing against development. At least six Arkansas counties currently have active moratoria on solar or wind development, according to Heatmap Pro data. Unlike other states, Arkansas has actually gone there this year by passing a law restricting wind development and requiring all projects to have minimum setbacks on wind turbines from neighboring property owners of at least 3.5-times the height of the wind turbine itself, which can be as far as a quarter of a mile.
But activists on the ground still want more. Specifically, they want to stop Scout Clean Energy’s Nimbus wind project, which appears to have evaded significant barriers from either the new state law or a local ordinance blocking future wind development in Carroll County, the project’s future home. This facility is genuinely disliked by many on the ground in Carroll County; for weeks now, I have been monitoring residents posting to Facebook with updates on the movements of wind turbine components and their impacts to traffic. I’ve also seen the grumbling about it travel from the mouths of residents living near the project site to conservative social media influencers and influential figures in conservative energy policy circles.
The Nimbus project is also at considerable risk of federal intervention in some fashion. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, Nimbus applied to the Fish and Wildlife Service for incidental take approval covering golden eagles and endangered bats throughout the course of its operation. This turned into a multi-year effort to craft a conservation plan in tandem with permitting applications that are all pending approval from federal officials.
Scout Clean Energy still had not received permission by the time FWS changed hands to Trump 2.0, though – putting not only its permit but the project itself in potential legal risk. In addition, activists have recently seized upon risks floated by the Defense Department during development around the potential for the turbines to negatively impact radar capabilities, which previously resulted in the developer planning towers of varying heights for the blades.
These risks aren’t unique to Nimbus. Some of this is a reflection of how wind projects are generally so large and impactful that they wind up eventually landing in a federal nexus. But in this particular case, the fact that it seemed nothing could halt this project made me wonder if Trump was on the minds of people in Carroll County, too.
That’s how I wound up on the phone with Caroline Rogers, a woman living on Bradshaw Mountain near the Nimbus project site, who told me she has been fighting it since she first learned about it in 2023. Rogers and I chatted for almost an hour and, candidly, I found her to be an incredibly nice individual. When I asked her why she’s against the wind farm, she brought up a bunch of reasons I couldn’t necessarily fault her for, like concerns about property values and a lack of local civil services to support the community if there were a turbine failure or fire at the site.
“I still pray every day,” she told me when I asked her about whether she wants an outside force – à la Trump – to come in and do something to stop the facility. “There have been projects that have been stopped for various reasons, and there have been turbines that have been taken down.”
One of the things Rogers hopes happens is that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s bird crackdown comes for the Nimbus project, which is under construction even as it’s unclear whether it’ll ever get the take permits under the Trump administration. “Maybe it can be more of an enforcement [action],” she told me. “I hope it happens.”
This is where Trump’s unprecedented approach to energy development – and the curtailment of it – would have to cross a new rubicon. The Fish and Wildlife Service has rarely exercised its bird protection enforcement abilities against wind projects because of a significant and recent backlog in the permitting process related to applications from the sector. Bill Eubanks, an environmental attorney who works on renewables conflicts, told me earlier this week that if a developer is told by the agency it needs a permit, then “they’re on notice if they kill an eagle.” But while enforcement powers have been used before, it is “not that common.”
Even Rogers knows intervention from federal species regulators would be a potentially unprecedented step. “It can never stop a project that I’ve seen,” she told me.
Yet if Trump were to empower FWS to go after wind projects for violating species statutes, it is precisely this backlog that would make projects like Nimbus a potential target.
“They got so many applications from developers, and each one takes so much staff time to finalize,” Eubanks told me. “Even before January 20, there was already a significant backlog.”
Scout Clean Energy did not respond to requests for comment. If I hear from them or the Fish and Wildlife Service, I will let you know.