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I went for a walk on Wednesday. I intended only to go as far as the first intersection — just to get a quick glimpse of how my New York neighborhood has been transformed by the smoke — but each block revealed itself to be stranger and yellower than the last. Mesermized and horrified, my “just stepping out” stretched into a longer walk as I wandered further and further away from the relative safety of the indoors, where my air purifier was on full blast.
By the time I returned home, the stupidity of my decision had struck me — physically. My throat burned and my voice was hoarse; my head pounded; and my eyes were goopy from the smoke. I’d inhaled something — millions of somethings — that my body was vehemently rejecting. How bad, I wondered in a hypochondriacal panic, was my mistake?
It is almost certain that this smoke will kill people. Many will be elderly or people with pre-existing serious health conditions; some of them may be unborn; some may be people who labor outside. But what we do know is that smoke this bad and that lasts for this long is deadly. One widely cited study by 70 international scientists found that short-term exposure to wildfire smoke causes around 3,193 deaths in the U.S. per year (“short-term” means just three days or less; other studies of short-term wildfire deaths found mortality slightly lower) and this week is already a top-three wildfire pollution event of all time for the nation.
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Wildfire smoke is particularly scary because it contains teeny tiny particles called PM2.5 that are small enough to enter our lungs and even our bloodstreams. PM2.5 particles are present at some level in every urban environment but wildfire-related PM2.5 is believed to be much more toxic than other normal “ambient” particles because of all the yucky things that burn up in fires.
The link between elevated PM2.5 particle concentrations and increased mortality can be dramatic. The aforementioned international study on wildfire-related PM2.5 and daily mortality found that “all-cause mortality” — that is, deaths that aren’t accidents — increases by 1.9%, cardiovascular mortality by 1.7%, and respiratory mortality by 1.9% with every bump of 10 micrograms of pollutant per one cubic meter of air. If New York’s PM2.5 concentration averages, say, 75 micrograms over three days this week (the concentration roughly expected for an average AQI of 150), that would mean people of all ages are 12% more likely to die than they otherwise would be.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean there is a 12% chance you will die this week, but rather that the odds of you dying are 12% higher than they are on an average given day. A young healthy person isn’t likely to die of non-accidental causes on a random normal day, so the danger of wildfire smoke exposure killing you tomorrow is still wildly low. But those numbers go up if you’re elderly or have a heart or respiratory condition to begin with; asthma hospitalizations also, naturally, spike during smoke events.
Put another way, wildfire smoke is an exacerbating factor of serious health conditions. In one study, the risk of dying of a heart attack in the five days after exposure to significant wildfire smoke was elevated by 6.3%; by another, the risk of having a stroke jumps 22% following smoke exposure. These differences are not insignificant; it means there will be people who die from heart attacks or strokes who might not have if the air had otherwise been clear.
But of course, these projections are all speculative, which is why figuring out a death toll for the 2023 smoke event will be a tricky and delicate thing to do. No single death can be blamed just on “smoke.” Researchers can use the established link between elevated PM2.5 levels and higher mortality rates to do back-of-the-envelope estimates of short-term deaths — it’s how University of Washington researchers projected about 200 smoke-related deaths immediately after fires in the state in 2020 — but crunching the numbers on excess deaths takes patience and time and remains inexact. A study that identified 133 excess cardiorespiratory-related deaths caused by wildfire-smoke exposure during the 2003 southern California fire season took nearly a decade to make it into print.
Short-term deaths, of course, are not the whole story either. One of the major concerns about wildfire smoke is what exposure does in the long term — hour after hour, week after week, and season after season. The East Coast had never needed to worry about that sort of prolonged exposure before. But perhaps now it might.
It may be months yet before we know how bad this smoke event was for the East, and years before we can say with much, if any, certainty. My smoky walk outside probably won’t kill me and, good news, yours probably won’t, either. But “probably” is more than I’d personally like to chance for a few yellowish pictures. Be smart. No poison is always better than “some.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
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Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.