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More Californians have searched for news about “floods” in 2023 than “wildfires,” which seems in keeping with this summer’s series of out-of-left-field climate disasters. The worst smoke pollution hit … the East Coast. The deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history leveled … a former wetland in Hawaii. Naturally a hurriquake in Los Angeles and catastrophic flooding in Palm Springs would come next?
But California’s reputation as the land of drought and fire has obscured the fact that extreme flooding is the other player in the state’s deadly climatological triumvirate. From the atmospheric rivers this winter, which caused some 500 mudslides and inflicted as much as $1 billion in damage, to Hurricane Hilary dumping record-breaking rains over the southwestern United States this weekend, floods are understandably top-of-mind (especially with a relatedly somewhat slow start to the state’s fire season).
Here’s what you need to know about the future of extreme floods in the Golden State:
Former Hurricane Hilary was the first tropical storm to make landfall in California in 84 years, easily snapping the practically nonexistent late August daily rainfall records around L.A. In fact, hurricanes making landfall in the lower lefthand corner of the U.S. is so rare that there isn’t actually much of a data record for scientists to use as a point of comparison, Inside Climate News reports — which makes forming future projections and establishing links to climate change actually rather difficult.
What we do know is this: California has largely avoided hurricanes in the past due to the generally cold waters off its coast, which NBC News describes as acting as a sort of “shield” for the state. Hurricanes get their strength and moisture by forming over warm waters, and the eastern Pacific has historically been as much as 9 degrees cooler than the same latitude in the Gulf of Mexico.
But California’s shield has a crack. July was the hottest recorded month on planet Earth and the waters Hilary passed over on its journey north were 4 degrees warmer than usual, the Los Angeles Times explains. Sure enough, research shows that hurricane landfalls in the eastern Pacific could increase dramatically along with global and oceanic warming — bringing more rain and floods along with them.
There are certain conditions that made Hilary particularly unusual, however: A heat dome that formed over the central United States, for example, helped tug the storm directly over California, as opposed to a more typical path of a hurricane or tropical storm being pushed out to sea by easterly winds off the continent. So while hurricanes might be more intense and wet in the future, they won’t necessarily continue to make it over to California the way Hilary has.
Yes, to some extent. In addition to greenhouse gas emissions making the oceans warmer, the weather pattern called El Niño is likely responsible for some of the warming of the waters off of Baja California, which intensified Hurricane Hilary. But again, there were also unique conditions that contributed to Hilary’s unusual path over the southwestern United States, including the prevailing wind patterns. Strong El Niño years, as a result, don’t necessarily mean more hurricanes for Southern California.
El Niños have tended to bring higher winter rainfalls to Southern California, though that is also not necessarily a guarantee. NOAA’s outlook for the coming winter doesn’t currently show above-average precipitation expected for the state. Some El Niño years are actually drier than average, which goes to show that “El Niño is just one hand on the atmospheric steering wheel,” Weather Underground writes.
California isn’t a land of droughts or floods — it’s a land of both. A better way to think about the future of weather in the state is as one of extremes.
That’s because, “[i]n a seeming paradox, drought and flooding are two sides of one coin,” Governing explains. “A warmer atmosphere can hold more water, and higher temperatures cause more water on the Earth’s surface to evaporate. This can result in bigger rainstorms.”
The good news is, most of California is now free of drought conditions and this year’s fire season has been quieter because of all the wet vegetation. But while Tropical Storm Hilary apparently only inflicted minor damage and no known deaths this weekend, floods have been a devastating fixture of life in the Golden State before and they will be again.
As Yale Climate Solutions warned earlier this year, “Given the increased risk [due to climate change], it is more likely than not that many of you reading this will see a California megaflood costing tens of billions in your lifetime.”
California doesn’t need 40 days and nights of rain to experience its worst-case flood event, researchers have found. If a 30-day rainstorm similar to one that hit the then-unpopulous state in 1862 were to strike again today, it could potentially be a $1 trillion disaster — “larger than any in world history” — UCLA’s “ARkStorm 2.0” scenario modeling found last year.
“Every major population center in California would get hit at once — probably parts of Nevada and other adjacent states, too,” Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist and co-author of the paper, said in a statement at the time.
Unlike a tropical storm, which passes in a number of days, the ARkStorm flood event would last a month in the form of sequential atmospheric rivers, like the kind that battered the state this past winter. The link between climate change and heavy precipitation is well understood, and the researchers found that “climate change has already doubled the likelihood of such an extreme storm scenario,” with “further large increases in ‘megastorm’ risk … likely with each additional degree of global warming this century.”
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From the notebooks of Heatmap’s reporters and editors.
The three letter acronym I heard the most during New York Climate Week wasn’t EPA, COP, NDC, or GHG. It was PJM. The country’s largest electricity market — the PJM Interconnection, which reaches into 13 states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan — has become the poster child for data center growth, clogged interconnection queues, and political backlash to rising electricity prices. Nearly every conversation I have about PJM includes a preamble about how nerdy and impenetrable the whole field of wholesale electricity markets is. Even so, it’s quickly becoming a central preoccupation of the political system, especially in states like New Jersey, where electricity prices have become a central issue in the gubernatorial campaign. — Matthew Zeitlin
As expected, this climate week featured lots of chatter about artificial intelligence — both the pros and the cons. On Tuesday, I attended an actual debate on the topic hosted by Deloitte, titled “AI for Sustainability: Friend of Foe,” which asked four participants to argue for or against a strongly worded motion: “AI is humanity’s best hope for tackling climate change.” To be frank, I disagreed with the premise before either side launched into their arguments, as did many others in attendance. When the audience was polled ahead of time, 49% disagreed, 36% were undecided, and 15% agreed.
The AI advocates — Riaz Raihan of Trane Technologies and Jen Huffstetler, HP’s chief sustainability officer — did share a few striking figures. Raihan, for instance, noted that Trane’s AI platform can make HVAC systems up to 25% more efficient. If that tech were deployed worldwide, it would save significantly more power than all the world’s data centers currently consume. But it was ultimately David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times who expressed the sentiment that I found most compelling when he cited the very human problems that keep renewable energy projects stuck in interminably long interconnection queues for years.
“What is it that’s stopping that renewable power from getting online. Is it a lack of intelligence? Is it too limited, too scarce intelligence? Or is it the human challenges, the concrete, real-world challenges? How do we deal with politics? How do we deal with land use? How do we prioritize what we’re doing in this world?” Ultimately, the audience appeared persuaded by his arguments, too — as well as those of his co-debater, Sarah Myers of the AI Now Institute. When the debate was over, 78% of the audience disagreed with the motion, 16% agreed, and 6% remained undecided. — Katie Brigham
At this point, I think we’re used to the idea that the artificial intelligence boom is creating more demand for electricity — and that this higher demand is helping renewable developers during what would otherwise be a tough moment. One theme that stuck out to me at New York Climate Week, though, is how much the surge in Big Tech investment is harmonizing what used to be otherwise regional markets.
Because a relatively small number of companies are driving such a large share of electricity capex, utilities across the country — who would normally do business with residential developers or small-to-medium-sized industrials — are now working with the same few tech firms. Those firms have the same sorts of demands everywhere. And because those tech firms are so flush with cash (and so far from achieving their climate goals), they are becoming important buyers for early-stage climate tech products. In that way, the AI boom — whose first-order labor effects have been quite concentrated in the San Fransisco area — is already transforming the U.S. economy. — Robinson Meyer
Here at Heatmap, we promise to bring you the “inside story of the race to fix the planet.” I’m biased, of course, but I think we tend to deliver, and my colleague Emily Pontecorvo certainly did this week with her story on the obscure accounting debate that has the potential to reshape our emissions future for years to come. We’re talking specifically about the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the primary standard-setting body for corporate carbon accounting, which is in the process of revising its guidelines for how companies should report the emissions from the electricity they consumer, otherwise known as scope 2 emissions.
While it hasn’t cracked the headlines in many places, Amazon Director Sustainability Policy told the crowd at our Heatmap House event on Wednesday that it was on everyone’s minds all week — and indeed, it came up over and over again during our “Up Next in Tech” session. I’ll spare you the details of the debate (though you should definitely read Emily’s story), but suffice it to say that it comes down to some pretty profound questions about why we count emissions in the first place. Is it to help consumers make informed choices? Or is it to help decarbonize the global economy? — Jillian Goodman
The administration argued in the name of national defense — but Orsted had receipts.
When the Trump administration ordered work on Orsted’s Revolution Wind offshore wind project to shut down in late August, it cited national security concerns as the reason for the delay.
Within weeks, a federal judge had lifted the stop work order, allowing construction to proceed.
What happened in between matters. In its rush to stop a wind project, the Trump administration exposed the first cracks in its anti-wind policy agenda — a loss that may embolden companies targeted by the crackdown on renewable energy development to fight back.
Orsted, the Danish wind giant, was more than halfway done building Revolution Wind by August 22, the day the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ordered an immediate stop to construction. In a one-page letter explaining the order, the agency dedicated a single paragraph to the rationale behind its decision: “BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas,” it said.
Orsted filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government within days and asked for a preliminary injunction against the stop-work order. The Trump administration had acted arbitrarily when it halted construction on Revolution Wind, the company argued, a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, which forces the government to have at least some sensible reason for its decision-making.
There were urgent financial stakes to the court’s decision, the company said. On top of strict timelines for completing the project that were laid out in power purchase agreements, the cable installation company working on Revolution Wind has just a brief window before it is booked for other projects through mid-2028. Unless the judge acted quickly, according to Orsted, Revolution Wind could face “project cancellation and termination of the enterprise,” at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.
After Orsted filed its suit, the attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island — two of the three states designated to receive electricity from Revolution Wind — soon followed course. The Trump administration responded by doubling down on its claims related to national defense. Revolution Wind, officials argued, would negatively impact radar detection and result in dangerous electromagnetic emissions. They also asserted that Defense Department officials were overruled or ignored when they raised concerns about this matter in the review process for the project, which received its final permits in 2023. (It’s worth noting the Trump administration’s legal filings refer to the military as the Department of War, or DOW.)
The Department of the Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, Adam Suess, told the court on September 12 in a sworn declaration that Revolution Wind had not fully addressed a host of concerns. Suess elaborated on the stop work order, asserting that it concerned the project’s “continued inability to reach certain mitigation agreements” with the military and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Suess stated Revolution Wind was not in full compliance with the terms of its construction and operations plan, which are subject to government approval. He also said there were outstanding issues with Revolution Wind’s coordination with military operators at sea, and that there was still “risk from distributed optical fiber sensing and acoustic monitoring equipment.
“The Department has been in touch with NOAA and the DOW to gather more information,” the filing said, somewhat cryptically.
Suess also acknowledged that the Trump administration is reconsidering its prior green lights for Revolution Wind, including its approval of the construction and operations plan, linking this to a broader all-of-government review of the offshore wind industry Trump ordered on Day One via executive order.
In response, Orsted called the government’s bluff. The company submitted sworn declarations from top company officials who had worked on Revolution Wind, attesting to the fact that before Trump came into office, the military and NOAA were saying everything looked A-OK.
“Mr. Suess’ declaration makes new allegations against Revolution Wind that were not mentioned in the stop work order,” Orsted’s attorneys wrote in their reply. “These new allegations are factually inaccurate and controverted by Revolution Wind’s compliance with project requirements.”
One of Orsted’s declarations was from Melanie Gearon, the company’s head of northeast permitting. Suess had claimed that Revolution Wind was far from reaching a critical agreement with NOAA’s Fisheries division, known as the National Marine Fisheries Service, to mitigate the effects of sea surveys on fishing vessels. But Gearon painted a completely different picture, detailing years of negotiations with NOAA and BOEM about how to handle the surveys.
These talks had apparently continued months into the Trump administration. Orsted submitted an email from BOEM to the company dated July 9, in which an official explicitly says that agency staff were discussing scenarios where Orsted could just “state that they are continuing to work with [the National Marine Fisheries Service] on a Survey Mitigation agreement, which could still be submitted at a later date.” Gearon said the company had received “updated cost modeling” from the agency as recently as September 9, days before Suess’ comments were submitted in court.
Then came the comments from Orsted’s head of marine affairs, Edward LeBlanc, who served in the military for decades and worked on offshore energy oversight. He told the court that the Navy had never once raised any issues with the project’s export cable and that as recently as July 2025, no military officials had expressed lingering concerns about electromagnetic emissions, vessel collisions or other potential national security problems.
“To date, Revolution Wind has never received a notice or any indication that it has failed to coordinate with DOD regarding its offshore activities, or that the U.S. Navy or DOD has any concerns with the ongoing coordination,” LeBlanc stated.
It was after this filing that the justice overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, approved the preliminary injunction and lifted the stop-work order.
As long as offshore wind has existed there has been tension with the U.S. military over use of the sea, and it is true that turbines could hinder radar detection.
In 2011, the Defense Department established a “clearinghouse” to resolve any potential issues with ocean energy development of any kind, whether oil, gas, or wind power. The clearinghouse reviews more than 5,000 projects every year, and its activities include regular give and take with the Interior Department and Federal Aviation Administration. One of the many pieces of evidence Orsted submitted in the Revolution Wind case was a December 2024 letter from the clearinghouse stating the project “would not have adverse impacts to DOD missions in the area.”
Josh Kaplowitz, an environmental attorney who represents renewable energy companies including offshore wind developers, and who previously worked in the Interior Department solicitor’s office, told me: “There is not a single situation I am aware of where the Defense Department ever requested something and the approving agency said, ‘No, we’re going to do something else.’”
“There are some problems with coming in after the fact and coming up with post hoc national security rationalizations when the process of review was so rigorous,” Kaplowitz said.
Independent analysis has also cleared the military’s consultation with offshore wind permitting agencies of having any serious issues.
Earlier this year the Government Accountability Office — a quasi-independent watchdog under the control of Congress — released a detailed review of the offshore wind industry’s federal permitting process. The review was requested by one of the sector’s biggest adversaries in Congress, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, who has been heavily involved in fighting offshore wind development in his home state.
Smith, a Republican, ultimately celebrated the review’s publication because it pointed out certain ways offshore wind could impact radar detection and military readiness. In his public statements, however, the lawmaker left out a key detail of the report — that it raised no issues with interactions between the military and offices involved in greenlighting offshore wind projects. In fact, it went into great detail on the lengths researchers and government officials had gone toward solving these potential problems.
“We didn’t have any recommendations there,” Frank Russo, director of GAO’s natural resources department, told me in an interview. “It seemed like coordination was going well, that DOD was satisfied with what was going on, and if there were concerns they could be mitigated.”
Russo said that Defense officials had for years been involved in offshore wind leasing, meaning that military staff from the Navy and Coast Guard had already weighed in on potential safety and readiness problems before companies even knew where they were allowed to build, and certainly prior to the project-specific permitting stage.
“At the very start of it, they know where their main concerns are,” Russo said of the Defense Department’s role in offshore wind development.
The Interior Department normally declines to comment on pending litigation. But I still wanted to ask Interior to comment on the assertions from Russo that the Interior Department and military were properly handling the security implications of offshore wind. It felt especially important to ask them about this because Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last month explained the Revolution Wind stop work order on national TV by claiming radar interference would leave the country vulnerable to “swarm attacks” from underwater drones.
Tory Peabody, a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management spokesperson, provided the following statement to Heatmap: “As a result of the court’s decision, Revolution Wind will be able to resume construction as BOEM continues its investigation into possible impacts by the project to national security and prevention of other uses on the Outer Continental Shelf. The Department of the Interior remains committed to ensuring that prior decisions are legally and factually sound.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from BOEM, and to remove an errant “not” in the second-to-last paragraph.
Packed hearings. Facebook organizing. Complaints about prime farmland and a disappearing way of life. Sound familiar?
Solar and wind companies cite the rise of artificial intelligence to make their business cases after the United States government slashed massive tax incentives for their projects.
But the data centers supposed to power the AI boom are now facing the sort of swift wave of rejections from local governments across the country eerily similar to what renewables developers have been dealing with on the ground over the last decade. The only difference is, this land use techlash feels even more sudden, intense, and culturally diffuse.
What’s happening is simple: Data centers are now routinely being denied by local governments in zoning and permitting decisions after local residents turn against them. These aggrieved denizens organize grassroots campaigns, many with associated Facebook groups, and then flood city council and county commission hearings.
Just take this past week. Last Thursday, Prince George’s County, Maryland, paused all data center permitting after a campaign against converting an abandoned mall into a data center gained traction online, with a petition garnering more than 20,000 signatures. On Monday, faced with a ferocious public outcry, Google rescinded a proposal to build what would’ve been its second data center in Indiana in Franklin Township, a community in southeastern Indianapolis – a withdrawal requested mere minutes before the township council was reportedly going to reject it.
That same day, the rural Illinois town of DeKalb denied a solar company’s request to build a “boutique data center” on the same site as a previously-permitted solar farm. And on Tuesday, the small city of Howell – located smack between Lansing and Detroit, Michigan – denied a data center proposed by an anonymous Fortune 100 company. Apparently, so many people showed up to voice their opposition to the project that the hearing was held in a high school gymnasium.
Opponents cite many things in their arguments against development, some unique to the sector like energy and water use, and others familiar to the solar and wind industry, like preserving prime farmland or maintaining a way of life.
These arguments are incredibly salient, as polling conducted by Heatmap News has revealed: less than half of Americans would ever support a data center coming near them, and this technology infrastructure is less popular than any form of renewable energy. Digging into the cross-tabs of that poll, data centers are unpopular with essentially all age demographics, and arguments against the facilities – like “they use too much water” or “they consume too much electricity” – get relatively similar agreement from registered Democrats and Republicans alike.
Ben Inskeep, a clean energy advocate in Indianapolis, told me he started fighting data centers last year after he became aware of the total power needed to fuel the rising number of projects in the state. His advocacy organization, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, previously weighed in on rate hikes and electricity generation decisions. Now, they’re tracking more than 40 data center projects they say are proposed in the state and getting involved in the fight on the ground against them.
Inskeep told me that, from his point of view, the primary support for data centers comes from local governments and municipally-funded works like schools and health facilities that are facing slashed budgets. In some cases the projects are being rejected despite representing millions – even billions – in capital investments and potential tax revenues so large that municipal governments are put between a rock and a hard place as they’re pressured by a weakening economy and state funding cuts.
That’s what happened in Indianapolis. Earlier this month the school district that would’ve been funded by the now-rejected Google data center came out in support of the project, declaring it would welcome new tax revenue, and said it would also lead to new educational partnerships with the tech giant. But none of that mattered. Some local officials even lambasted their colleagues' support as unwarranted, a lashing out that reminds me of what happens to pro-solar officials in Ohio.
Heatmap News has been tracking contested data center projects since the spring of this year and has found almost 100 projects under development across the country that are being actively fought by local organizers, citizens advocacy groups, and environmental organizations. The data is preliminary and likely an undercount.
Still, there’s lots to glean from it. Crucially, as we’ve seen with renewable energy development, data center opposition crops up most often in tandem with the number of projects proposed and constructed. This is only logical: the more of something that is built in a place, the more likely people are to say, “We’ve built enough of that.” This is why Virginia is the top state when it comes to data centers being opposed – it’s a hub that’s seen development spike for far longer than elsewhere in the United States.
I believe that as data center project proposals continue to rise across the country, we’ll see in parallel rising hostility to their development – potentially much larger than anything renewable energy has ever faced. It will undoubtedly also be a problem for anyone in solar or wind who is riding on an AI boom to add demand for their projects.