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“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.”
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It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order as part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill, which also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to subsequent actions by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to freeze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7 but was unable to reach them in time for publication. If I hear from them confirming the project is canceled – or that BLM is wrong in some way – I will let you know.
It’s not perfect, but pretty soon, it’ll be available for under $30,000.
Here’s what you need to know about the rejuvenated Chevrolet Bolt: It’s back, it’s better, and it starts at under $30,000.
Although the revived 2027 Bolt doesn’t officially hit the market until January 2026, GM revealed the new version of the iconic affordable EV at a Wednesday evening event at the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles. The assembled Bolt owners and media members drove the new cars past Amity Island from Jaws and around the Old West and New York sets that have served as the backdrops of so many television shows and movies. It was star treatment for a car that, like its predecessor, isn’t the fanciest EV around. But given the giveaway patches that read “Chevy Bolt: Back by popular demand,” it’s clear that GM heard the cries of people who missed having the plucky electric hatchback on the market.
The Bolt died at the height of its powers. The original Bolt EV and Bolt EUV sold in big numbers in the late 2010s and early 2020s, powered by a surprisingly affordable price compared to competitor EVs and an interior that didn’t feel cramped despite its size as a smallish hatchback. In 2023, the year Chevy stopped selling it, the Bolt was the third-best-selling EV in America after Tesla’s top two models.
Yet the original had a few major deficiencies that reflected the previous era of EVs. The most egregious of which was its charging speed that topped out at around 50 kilowatts. Given that today’s high-speed chargers can reach 250 to 350 kilowatts — and an even faster future could be on the way — the Bolt’s pit stops on a road trip were a slog that didn’t live up to its peppy name.
Thankfully, Chevy fixed it. Charging speed now reaches 150 kilowatts. While that figure isn’t anywhere near the 350 kilowatts that’s possible in something like the Hyundai Ioniq 9, it’s a threefold improvement for the Bolt that lets it go from 10% to 80% charged in a respectable 26 minutes. The engineers said they drove a quartet of the new cars down old Route 66 from the Kansas City area, where the Bolt is made, to Los Angeles to demonstrate that the EV was finally ready for such an adventure.
From the outside, the 2027 Bolt is virtually indistinguishable from the old car, but what’s inside is a welcome leap forward. New Bolt has a lithium-ion-phosphate, or LFP battery that holds 65 kilowatt-hours of energy, but still delivers 255 miles of max range because of the EV’s relatively light weight. Whereas older EVs encourage drivers to stop refueling at around 80%, the LFP battery can be charged to 100% regularly without the worry of long-term damage to the battery.
The Bolt is GM’s first EV with the NACS charging standard, the former Tesla proprietary plug, which would allow the little Chevy to visit Tesla Superchargers without an adapter (though its port placement on the front of the driver’s side is backwards from the way older Supercharger stations are built). Now built on GM’s Ultium platform, the Bolt shares its 210-horsepower electric motor with the Chevy Equinox EV and gets vehicle-to-load capability, meaning you’ll be able to tap into its battery energy for other uses such as powering your home.
But it’s the price that’s the real wow factor. Bolt will launch with an RS version that gets the fancier visual accents and starts at $32,000. The Bolt LT that will be available a little later will eventually start as low as $28,995, a figure that includes the destination charge that’s typically slapped on top of a car’s price, to the tune of an extra $1,000 to $2,000 on delivery. Perhaps it’s no surprise that GM revealed this car just a week after the end of the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases (and just a day after Tesla announced its budget versions of the Model Y and Model 3). Bringing in a pretty decent EV at under $30,000 without the help of a big tax break is a pretty big deal.
The car is not without compromises. Plenty of Bolt fans are aghast that Chevy abandoned the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integrations that worked with the first Bolt in favor of GM’s own built-in infotainment system as the only option. Although the new Bolt was based on the longer, “EUV” version of the original, this is still a pretty compact car without a ton of storage space behind the back seats. Still, for those who truly need a bigger vehicle, there’s the Chevy Equinox EV.
For as much time as I’ve spent clamoring for truly affordable EVs that could compete with entry-level gas cars on prices, the Bolt’s faults are minor. At $29,000 for an electric vehicle in the U.S., there is practically zero competition until the new Nissan Leaf arrives. The biggest threats to the Bolt are America’s aversion to small cars and the rapid rates of depreciation that could allow someone to buy a much larger, gently used EV for the price of the new Chevy. But the original Bolt found a steady footing among drivers who wanted that somewhat counter-cultural car — and this one is a lot better.
“Old economy” companies like Caterpillar and Williams are cashing in by selling smaller, less-efficient turbines to impatient developers.
From the perspective of the stock market, you’re either in the AI business or you’re not. If you build the large language models pushing out the frontiers of artificial intelligence, investors love it. If you rent out the chips the large language models train on, investors love it. If you supply the servers that go in the data centers that power the large language models, investors love it. And, of course, if you design the chips themselves, investors love it.
But companies far from the software and semiconductor industry are profiting from this boom as well. One example that’s caught the market’s fancy is Caterpillar, better known for its scale-defying mining and construction equipment, which has become a “secular winner” in the AI boom, writes Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal.
Typically construction businesses do well when the overall economy is doing well — that is, they don’t typically take off with a major technological shift like AI. Now, however, Caterpillar has joined the ranks of the “picks and shovels” businesses capitalizing on the AI boom thanks to its gas turbine business, which is helping power OpenAI’s Stargate data center project in Abilene, Texas.
Just one link up the chain is another classic “old economy” business: Williams Companies, the natural gas infrastructure company that controls or has an interest in over 33,000 miles of pipeline and has been around in some form or another since the early 20th century.
Gas pipeline companies are not supposed to be particularly exciting, either. They build large-scale infrastructure. Their ratemaking is overseen by federal regulators. They pay dividends. The last gas pipeline company that got really into digital technology, well, uh, it was Enron.
But Williams’ shares are up around 28% in the past year — more than Caterpillar. That’s in part, due to its investing billions in powering data centers with behind the meter natural gas.
Last week, Williams announced that it would funnel over $3 billion into two data center projects, bringing its total investments in powering AI to $5 billion. This latest bet, the company said, is “to continue to deliver speed-to-market solutions in grid-constrained markets.”
If we stipulate that the turbines made by Caterpillar are powering the AI boom in a way analogous to the chips designed by Nvidia or AMD and fabricated by TSMC, then Williams, by developing behind the meter gas-fired power plants, is something more like a cloud computing provider or data center developer like CoreWeave, except that its facilities house gas turbines, not semiconductors.
The company has “seen the rapid emergence of the need for speed with respect to energy,” Williams Chief Executive Chad Zamarin said on an August earnings call.
And while Williams is not a traditional power plant developer or utility, it knows its way around natural gas. “We understand pipeline capacity,” Zamarin said on a May earnings call. “We obviously build a lot of pipeline and turbine facilities. And so, bringing all the different pieces together into a solution that is ready-made for a customer, I think, has been truly a differentiator.”
Williams is already behind the Socrates project for Meta in Ohio, described in a securities filing as a $1.6 billion project that will provide 400 megawatts of gas-fired power. That project has been “upsized” to $2 billion and 750 megawatts, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that “energy constraints” are a more pressing issue for artificial intelligence development than whether the marginal dollar invested is worth it. In other words, Zuckerberg expects to run out of energy before he runs out of projects that are worth pursuing.
That’s great news for anyone in the business of providing power to data centers quickly. The fact that developers seem to have found their answer in the Williamses and Caterpillars of the world, however, calls into question a key pillar of the renewable industry’s case for itself in a time of energy scarcity — that the fastest and cheapest way to get power for data centers is a mix of solar and batteries.
Just about every renewable developer or clean energy expert I’ve spoken to in the past year has pointed to renewables’ fast timeline and low cost to deploy compared to building new gas-fired, grid-scale generation as a reason why utilities and data centers should prefer them, even absent any concerns around greenhouse gas emissions.
“Renewables and battery storage are the lowest-cost form of power generation and capacity,” Next Era chief executive John Ketchum said on an April earnings call. “We can build these projects and get new electrons on the grid in 12 to 18 months.” Ketchum also said that the price of a gas-fired power plant had tripled, meanwhile lead times for turbines are stretching to the early 2030s.
The gas turbine shortage, however, is most severe for large turbines that are built into combined cycle systems for new power plants that serve the grid.
GE Vernova is discussing delivering turbines in 2029 and 2030. While one manufacturer of gas turbines, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has announced that it plans to expand its capacity, the industry overall remains capacity constrained.
But according to Morgan Stanley, Williams can set up behind the meter power plants in 18 months. xAI’s Colossus data center in Memphis, which was initially powered by on-site gas turbines, went from signing a lease to training a large language model in about six months.
These behind the meter plants often rely on cheaper, smaller, simple cycle turbines, which generate electricity just from the burning of natural gas, compared to combined cycle systems, which use the waste heat from the gas turbines to run steam turbines and generate more energy. The GE Vernova 7HA combined cycle turbines that utility Duke Energy buys, for instance, range in output from 290 to 430 megawatts. The simple cycle turbines being placed in Ohio for the Meta data center range in output from about 14 megawatts to 23 megawatts.
Simple cycle turbines also tend to be less efficient than the large combined cycle system used for grid-scale natural gas, according to energy analysts at BloombergNEF. The BNEF analysts put the emissions difference at almost 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour for the single turbines, compared to just over 800 pounds for combined cycle.
Overall, Williams is under contract to install 6 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power, to be completed by the first half of 2027, Morgan Stanley analysts write. By comparison, a joint venture between GE Vernova, the independent power producer NRG, and the construction company Kiewit to develop combined cycle gas-fired power plants has a timeline that could stretch into 2032.
The Williams projects will pencil out on their own, the company says, but they have an obvious auxiliary benefit: more demand for natural gas.
Williams’ former chief executive, Alan Armstrong, told investors in a May earnings call that he was “encouraged” by the “indirect business we are seeing on our gas transmission systems,” i.e. how increased natural gas consumption benefits the company’s traditional pipeline business.
Wall Street has duly rewarded Williams for its aggressive moves.
Morgan Stanley analysts boosted their price target for the stock from $70 to $83 after last week’s $3 billion announcement, saying in a note to clients that the company has “shifted from an underappreciated value (impaired terminal value of existing assets) to underappreciated growth (accelerating project pipeline) story.” Mizuho Securities also boosted its price target from $67 to $72, with analyst Gabriel Moreen telling clients that Williams “continues to raise the bar on the scope and potential benefits.”
But at the same time, Moreen notes, “the announcement also likely enhances some investor skepticism around WMB pushing further into direct power generation and, to a lesser extent, prioritizing growth (and growth capex) at the expense of near-term free cash flow and balance sheet.”
In other words, the pipeline business is just like everyone else — torn between prudence in a time of vertiginous economic shifts and wanting to go all-in on the AI boom.
Williams seems to have decided on the latter. “We will be a big beneficiary of the fast rising data center power load,” Armstrong said.