You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
“Climate change is a huge public health concern”
When Gaurab Basu saw the news about wildfire smoke from Canada hitting the U.S. earlier this month, one of the first things he did was check his patient chart.
“I was scanning my chart for pregnant patients and thinking about whether we could reschedule or maybe do a televisit and have them stay at home instead of taking a bus to come in,” said Basu, a physician in Boston and health equity fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
It was a prescient concern: One of Basu’s patients who already suffered from asthma had to be hospitalized for an aggressive cough and low oxygen levels, which Basu suspects were related to the air quality. A few hundred miles south in New York City, which saw even worse pollution from the wildfires, there were more than 1,000 asthma-related emergency department visits over the weekend after the smoke event. “It’s been a hard few months for my patients with asthma. I had more conversations about air quality with my patients and colleagues than ever before,” Basu told me.
These conversations are becoming more and more common. Across the country, healthcare providers are watching in real time as climate change affects their patients’ health, from wildfire smoke to particularly bad allergy seasons, extreme heat, and vector-borne diseases like Lyme and dengue fever. In response, clinicians of all stripes are increasingly talking about climate change in their practice — and in effect becoming climate educators.
“Climate change is a huge public health concern, and part of my role as a physician is to highlight awareness,” said Neelu Tummala, an otolaryngologist (an ear, nose, and throat specialist, or what’s colloquially known as an ENT) and co-director of the Climate and Health Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “It’s not to scare people and say that global warming is going to be the end-all of society, but to make them conscientious of it and maybe inspire them to act on it.”
Healthcare providers occupy a rarefied space in American society. Nurses consistently rank as the most trusted profession in the country in an annual Gallup poll, followed closely by doctors and pharmacists (high school teachers were fourth in the 2023 poll; journalists are distrusted by a plurality of Americans). Patients tend to listen to what their clinicians have to say. That makes them uniquely placed to talk about climate change.
“We make it human,” Basu told me. “There’s a lot of translational work we can do, because emissions and pollutants are confusing and abstract and kind of invisible.”
As climate change increasingly moves from concept to lived reality, bringing it up in the doctor’s office is just a natural progression of the conversation a healthcare provider has with their patient. Take Tummala, whom I first met as a patient myself: I have a history of allergy-induced asthma, and before being taught how to calm my body down I would sneeze and wheeze my way through allergy season. So when I went to Tummala for a consultation this spring, it made sense that she mentioned, as our visit was wrapping up, that climate change was making allergy season worse.
Education has always been part of the job for healthcare providers; they routinely discuss medical science with their patients, whether when discussing individual diagnoses like diabetes or broader public health concerns like, say, COVID-19 or Mpox. But all of the clinicians I spoke with told me that for many patients, their conversation was the first time someone had drawn a connection between climate change and health, and in some instances the first time they’d heard of climate change at all.
The main difference between educating their patients about climate change and other public health concerns, Tummala pointed out, is that the solution to climate change lies not in medical research but in policy. There is no vaccine for climate change; the most a healthcare provider can do to address the problem within the confines of their clinic is give their patients tips for living with the impact of a global issue far beyond their control.
That also means this is new territory for clinicians, some of whom may not even know much about climate change themselves. As Karen Pennar wrote for STAT News in April, there’s a growing, student-led movement to incorporate climate change at medical schools across the country, and some programs, like those at George Washington University and Harvard Medical School, have begun adding climate change to their curricula. But there are already millions of clinicians at work across the country, and reaching them is just as important as training the next generation.
“It’s great to say we’re going to train the next generation of healthcare professionals, but the reality is climate impacts are here,” said Cecilia Sorensen, director of the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education at Columbia University. “We can’t wait ten years for kids to grow up and start doing their own jobs. We have to train the existing health workforce.”
That means training not just doctors but also nurses and other clinicians who often spend more time with patients than doctors do. Academic initiatives like the Global Consortium are developing workshops, webinars, and other training programs to close the gap, and clinicians are also coming together on the local level: Tummala is on the steering committee for a group called Virginia Clinicians for Climate Action, or VCCA, which organizes educational events for clinicians at hospitals and clinics across the state of Virginia.
“Many of us in practice are figuring this out together and learning together,” said Samantha Ahdoot, a pediatrician and founder of VCCA. “It’s really a whole new field of medicine that’s developing quite quickly.”
As the name would suggest, VCCA goes beyond education. Its members directly advocate for climate policy at the state level, from an annual lobby day in Richmond to testifying on the health impacts of climate change at public hearings. This kind of political organizing is a tricky line to walk: Doctors are pressed for time and energy already, and their involvement in advocacy of any sort is sometimes frowned upon — as illustrated by the recent case of Indiana doctor Caitlin Bernard, who was reprimanded after speaking publicly about an abortion she provided for a 10-year-old girl.
Climate change is just as embroiled in the culture war as COVID-19 and abortion are, and the clinicians I spoke with told me they’re careful to separate any advocacy work they do from their conversations with their patients. Instead, they focus on the patient’s experience of the changing world, as Tummala did with me. That grounds those conversations in the health impacts and makes clear she’s speaking from a perspective of transparent, science-driven healthcare rather than advocacy.
“We have the ability to depoliticize this. We can talk about this as a health issue, not a political issue,” Tummala told me. “You have to meet people where they’re at. If you, for example, try talking to a patient about losing weight, they may think you’re judging them. But if you bring it up in a way that shows it could help their sleep apnea or heart disease, they may be more willing to listen. I think it’s the same with climate change.”
In Cheryl Holder’s experience, those health realities are harder to deny than the high-level concept of climate change. “I get pushback from folks who are not experiencing it like my patients experience it,” said Holder, founder of Florida Clinicians for Climate Action (FCCA) and a physician who primarily treated members of lower-income communities until she retired last December. As part of her advocacy mission with FCCA, she started using Instagram and TikTok to talk about the connection between climate change and health — and she would inevitably see comments from climate deniers.
Her conversations with patients, however, were a different story. Most of them worked outdoors, where they could tell things were changing. “If you work outdoors and you feel the heat, see the grass growing faster and the trees flowering earlier, you know something is happening,” Holder told me. “When I tell them it’s because of pollution from humans, they accept it.”
But just as a patient may decide not to follow a doctor’s advice for treating a medical condition, Basu accepts that sometimes the climate conversation just won’t land. That doesn’t make him any less likely to bring it up, however.
“Hopefully, the patient can trust in a pattern of me making good decisions about their care enough that they believe in [the climate connection],” Basu told me. “I think that’s a critical moment to bring people into the conversation, and to do it with care.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.