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Close your eyes and think of the American West. What do you see? The sandstone towers of Monument Valley. The dusty ruts of a wagon trail leading through a clapboard town. A cowboy on horseback.
Remove the horse and the mythic image of the American frontier collapses. But across the desert states — and in particular, in Arizona, the cinematic ideal of the West — extreme heat is making the land practically uninhabitable for horses. In 2018, nearly 200 mustangs were found dead near a dried-up water hole on the west side of the Navajo Nation, and now, with 18 consecutive 110-plus degree days in Phoenix and counting, longtime equestrians in the state are considering hitching up the trailer and moving to cooler climes.
“Tonight I think it gets down to 87, just for an hour, and then it goes back up,” Quincy Roxburgh, who moved to the region from the Sacramento area and owns four horses, told me late last week. “We don’t get that break from the heat [like you do in California]. I feel so bad for the horses. I’ve never dealt with anything like this.”
With an estimated $1.3 billion local equestrian industry, Phoenix has been described as a “horse mecca,” particularly when it comes to Arabians. Every year the city hosts the biggest Arabian horse gathering in the world, drawing more than 2,400 horses with some $3 million in prize money on the line. WestWorld, the fifth most-popular equestrian facility in the country, is located in nearby Scottsdale — “the West’s Most Western Town” — and has undergone a $56-million renovation that included the addition of climate-controlled stalls. Its outdoor arenas, though, still bake in the heat. You begin to understand why equestrian events don’t typically get scheduled for the Arizona summers.
But that doesn’t mean much for the horses that spend the year in corrals nearby. Like most mammals, horses pant; unlike most mammals, when panting becomes ineffective around 94 degrees, they’ll sweat, similar to humans. And horses are enthusiastic sweaters: A horse can produce a quarter of a liter of sweat per minute in order to cool itself down, Equus reports — that is, about the capacity of one large Nalgene water bottle in the time it takes you to pop a bag of popcorn.
This means horses face the same risk as people when the air is humid and the efficiency of evaporation slows down. “The thing that saves us [in Arizona] is the low humidity, typically,” Roxburgh said.
In addition to being champion sweaters, though, horses are four-legged space heaters. Because they’re so muscular (and muscles produce heat), horses warm up three to 10 times faster than people do, Michael Lindinger, an animal and exercise physiologist at the University of Guelph, has found. According to his research, just 17 minutes of “moderate intensity exercise in hot, humid weather” can put a horse in the danger zone.
Even eating and digesting can warm a horse up. “Arabians, your Spanish-bred horses — heavy, big-boned warmbloods — we call those ‘easy keepers,’” Catherine Enright of Sorum Veterinary Services, in Scottsdale, Arizona, explained to me. “Those have a propensity to have more risk of foundering in this heat than other equine breeds.”
Founder — a heat-related hoof condition that can require euthanasia in extreme cases and that Roxburgh said she’s “scared to death” of — can be induced by something as ordinary and horsey as eating grass. As Enright explained, “if you have grass pastures, which are very hard to come by in Arizona, we recommend that you only graze [your horses] at night or very, very early in the morning, and they come in before noon,” when the sugar in the grass is highest. Because of the way a horse’s metabolism works, “sugar, starch, carbs — those three ingredients are a death sentence to easy keepers in this heat.”
Enright additionally suggested not letting horses out during the day — and indeed many horsemen and women across the Valley of the Sun have been rising pre-dawn to exercise and feed their animals. She also suggestedputting up misters to help keep the horses cool. Roxburgh herself has invested in a large, SUV-sized swamp cooler for her horses, which she pointed out has the additional advantage of keeping her cool during barn chores.
But what about horses that don’t have access to tubs of water, misters, and even their own ACs?
The Phoenix area is home to some 430 wild horses that live along a river in the Tonto National Forest, on the northeastern outskirts of the city, beyond Scottsdale. That “wild” moniker is a bit of a contentious issue: The U.S. Forest Service claims the horses are “descended from … trespassing livestock” and thus they are not federally protected as “wild horses,” and the herd is instead overseen by a nonprofit, the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, which contends the lineage goes back to the 18th century.
When I spoke to Simone Netherlands, the founder and president of the volunteer management group, I braced myself for the worst: horses without access to state-of-the-art barn misters dropping from the heat.
“I would say that the Salt River wild horses are the only ones not affected by the heat,” she told me instead.
In fact, her group is far more worried about keeping the rescue horses at its facilities cool. That’s because the Salt River herd “will stand in the middle of the river to cool off,” giving them enviable relief when the temperatures climb into the triple digits — “and so they’re the lucky ones.”
The way Netherlands tells it, it makes sense; the herd “evolved and learned to deal with the heat,” just like other desert animals do. The horses that can’t take Arizona’s seasonal extremes — like, say, the memorable 120-degree day last year that Netherlands, Roxburgh, and Enright all mentioned to me — are in theory weeded out, although Netherlands says they haven’t had a horse die from the heat since the monitoring group was established in 2015. Any culling was likely done generations ago: “That’s why we actually don’t have black horses in the Salt River herd, because they would not survive the heat,” she said.
Of course, not all horses are lucky enough to have a river flowing through their turf. Netherlands also told me that Arizona doesn’t have a law that specifically requires domestic horses be provided shade.
The heat is part of the myth of the West, too: The heat wave frying Phoneix has been called an endurance test, and it’s one many locals proudly embrace. “National media describe metro Phoenix’s string of 110-degree-plus days as if it were an apocalypse,” one recent editorial in the Arizona Republic boasted. “But we learned long ago how to adapt.” But unlike the wild horses, that adaptation involves easy access to AC, something that isn’t at the disposal of everyone, including outdoor domestic animals and the people who diligently labor — or were hired to labor — to take care of them.
And so, until the heat breaks, there will be more pre-dawn mornings, more calls to the overloaded vets, more barn misters to be installed. When saying farewell to Enright, I wished her, optimistically, cool days ahead. “Yeah,” she replied dryly. “There won’t be.”
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Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”
Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.
What are you referencing when you say, ‘the wind industry’s strategy is failing’?
Anyone in the climate space, in the clean energy space, the worst thing you can do is go silent and pretend that this is just going to go away. Even if it’s the president and the administration delivering the attacks, I think there’s an important strategy that’s been lacking in the wind and other sectors that I don’t think has been effective. There was a recent E&E News story that noted a couple of wind developers when asked for comment just say, “No comment.” This to me misses a really big opportunity to not get in a fight with people but talk about the benefits of wind.
Not taking advantage of milestones like ground breaking or construction starting is a missed opportunity to drive public opinion. If you lose support in public opinion, you’re going to lose support from public officials, because they largely follow public opinion.
And there’s no way that’s going to change if you don’t take the opportunities to talk about the benefits that wind can provide, in terms of good-paying local jobs or supplying more electrons to the grid. By almost any measure the strategy employed so far has not really worked.
Okay, but what is the wind industry strategy that isn’t working? What are they doing to rebut attacks on the technology, on property values, on the environment?
We’re not hearing them. We’re not hearing those arguments.
You can’t let criticisms go unanswered.It would better serve the industry and these companies to push back against criticisms. It’s not like you can’t anticipate what they are. And what do you have to lose? You’re in the worst position of any energy sector in this political moment. It would be nice to see some fight and sharp campaign skills and strategic effort in terms of communication. And there’s no strategic value from what I can tell in [being silent].
I understand not wanting to pick a fight with folks who hold your fate in their hands, but there’s a way to thread a needle that isn’t antagonizing anybody but also making sure the facts have been heard. And that’s been missing.
You’d specifically said the industry should stop ‘being paralyzed in fear and start going on offense.’ What does that look like to you?
Taking every opportunity to get your message out there. The lowest hanging fruit is when a reporter comes and asks you, What do you think about this criticism? You should definitely reply. It’s lifting up third-party voices that are benefiting from a specific project, talking about the economic impacts more broadly, talking about the benefits to the grid.
There’s a whole number of tools in the toolbox to put to use but the toolboxes remain shut thus far. Targeted paid media, elevating the different voices and communities that are going to resonate with different legislators, and certainly the facts are helpful. Also having materials prepared, like validators and frequently asked questions and answers.
You’re trying to win. You’re trying to get your project to be successful and deliver jobs and tax revenue. And I think it would be wise for companies to look at the playbooks of electoral campaigns, because there’s lots of tools that campaigns use.
How do renewable energy developers get around the problem of partisanship? How do you get outta that through a campaign approach?
These projects are decided locally. It’s deciding who the decision-makers are and not just letting opponents who are getting talking points through right-wing media show up and reiterate these talking points. Oftentimes, there’s no one on the pro side even showing up at all, and it makes it really easy for city councils to oppose projects. They’re losing by forfeit. We can’t keep doing that.
And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Chautauqua, New York – More rural New York towns are banning renewable energy.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project will learn its fate under the Trump administration by this fall, after a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department must come to a decision on how it’ll handle a court challenge against its permits by September.
3. Bedford County, Pennsylvania – Arena Renewables is trying to thread a needle through development in one of the riskiest Pennsylvania counties for development, with an agriculture-fueled opposition risk score of 89.
4. Knox County, Ohio – The Ohio Power Siting Board has given the green light to Open Road Renewables’ much-watched Frasier Solar project.
5. Clay County, Missouri – We’ll find out next week if rural Missouri can still take it easy on a large solar project.
6. Clark County, Nevada – President Trump’s Bureau of Land Management has pushed back the permitting process for EDF Renewables’ Bonanza solar project by at least two months and possibly longer .
7. Klickitat County, Washington – Washington State has now formally overridden local opposition to Cypress Creek’s Carriger solar project after teeing up the decision in May.
It’s governor versus secretary of state, with the fate of the local clean energy industry hanging in the balance.
I’m seeing signs that the fight over a hydrogen project in Wyoming is fracturing the state’s Republican political leadership over wind energy, threatening to trigger a war over the future of the sector in a historically friendly state for development.
At issue is the Pronghorn Clean Energy hydrogen project, proposed in the small town of Glenrock in rural Converse County, which would receive power from one wind farm nearby and another in neighboring Niobrara County. If completed, Pronghorn is expected to produce “green” hydrogen that would be transported to airports for commercial use in jet fuel. It is backed by a consortium of U.S. and international companies including Acconia and Nordex.
One can guess why investors thought this rural Wyoming expanse would be an easier place to build: it’s an energy community situated in the middle of the Powder River Basin and the state’s Republican governor Mark Gordon has supported wind projects in the state publicly, not just with rhetoric but votes in favor of them on the State Board of Land Commissioners.
Wind is also often proposed on private land in Wyoming, which is supposed to make things easier. You may remember the Lucky Star and Twin Rivers wind farms, a pair of projects whose progress I’ve watched like a hawk because they’re tied to the future of wind permitting at the national level. As we first reported, the Trump administration is proceeding with potentially approving the transmission line for Lucky Star, a project that would be sited entirely on private land, and Twin Rivers received its final environmental review in the last days of the Biden administration, making it difficult for anti-wind advocates to curtail.
Unlike those projects, Pronghorn has created a fork in the road for wind in Wyoming. It’s because the people in its host community don’t seem to want it, the wind projects were on state land, and there’s politics at play.
Despite being considered an energy community, Converse and Niobrara are both areas with especially high opposition risk, according to Heatmap Pro, largely due to its low support for renewable energy, its demographics, and concerns about impacts to the local ranching economy. After Gordon and other members of the state land use board approved two wind facilities for the hydrogen project, a rancher living nearby sued the board with public support from the mayor of Glenrock and the area’s legislators in the statehouse. A member of the Converse County zoning board even published a “manifesto” against the project, detailing local concerns that are myriad and rooted in fears of overburden, ranging from water use and property value woes to a general resentment toward an overall rise in wind turbines across the county and state.
What’s probably most concerning to wind supporters is that this local fight is bubbling up into a statewide political fracture between Gordon and his secretary of state Chuck Gray, who is believed to be a future candidate for governor. Grey was the lone dissenting vote against the two wind projects for Pronghorn, saying he did not support the projects because they would be assisted by federal tax credits Trump is trying to gut. Gray then took to mocking the governor on social media for his stance on wind while posting photos of broken wind turbines. Gordon wound up responding to his secretary of state accusing him of being the “only member of the state land board to vote against individual property rights and Wyoming schools.”
“That is his prerogative to be sure, but it demonstrates his disregard for the duties of his office and a determination to impose his personal preferences on others, no matter the cost,” Gordon stated.
I’ve been reaching out to Pronghorn and its founder Paul Martin to try and chat about what’s happening in Wyoming. I haven’t heard back, and if I do I’ll gladly follow this story up, but there’s a sign here of an issue in Wyoming whether Pronghorn gets built or not – areas of Wyoming may be on the verge of a breaking point on wind energy.
I heard about the Pronghorn project in conversations this week with folks who work on wind permitting issues in Wyoming and learned that the Gordon-Gray feud is emblematic of how the wind industry’s growth in the state is making local officials more wary of greenlighting projects. Whether Gordon’s position on private property wins out over Gray taking up the mantle of the anti-wind conservative critic may be the touchstone for the future of local planning decisions, too.
At least, that’s the sense I got talking to Sue Jones, a commissioner in Carbon County, directly southwest of Converse County. Jones admits she personally doesn’t care for wind farms and that it’s “no secret with the county, or the developers.” But so far, she hasn’t voted that way as a commissioner.
“If they meet all our rules and regs, then I’ve voted to give them a permit,” she told me. “You can’t just say no to anything. It’s a good thing that we value private property rights.”
Jones said the problem in Carbon County and other areas of Wyoming is “saturation level.” Areas of the state where only a handful of landowners hold thousands of acres? That’s probably fine for wind projects because there’s a low likelihood of a neighbor or two having a genuine grievance. But as wind has grown into population-denser areas of the state the dissent is becoming more frequent.
My gut feeling is that, as we’ve seen in many other instances, this resentment will bubble up and manifest as sweeping reform – unless the wind industry is able to properly address these growing concerns head on.