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New research published today in Nature shocked even the study’s own authors.
Hurricane Helene is, by conventional measures, the deadliest hurricane to strike the continental United States since Katrina. At least 182 people have been confirmed killed by the storm, with hundreds of people still unaccounted for. Although all hurricanes are deadly, only a handful of storms have killed more than 100 people since 1950. Or at least that is what we have long thought. New research suggests that these conventional tallies may be a vast undercount.
Several years ago, two economists and public policy researchers — Rachel Young and Solomon Hsiang, now of Princeton and Stanford — began to study a seemingly simple question: How many Americans do hurricanes kill each year? According to the federal government, the average hurricane kills 24 people after making landfall. That seemed likely to be a modest underestimate. Economists know that natural disasters can have a long tail of suffering; Hsiang expected the real number to be a “single digit multiple” of that figure — perhaps 50 or 100 people per storm.
Yet when they ran the numbers and looked at mortality in places affected by storms, they were initially perplexed by the results, Hsiang told me earlier this week. The numbers they came up with didn’t even make sense at first.
“It was months of us trying to understand what we were looking at,” Hsiang said. “And then once we realized what we were seeing, it was years of us checking our work to find what we missed.” Only when it was clear that their work resembled other American public health statistics — specifically, that the white-Black mortality mirrored what has been found in other studies — that the horrifying truth sunk in.
The finding: Hurricanes are hundreds of times deadlier than anyone has realized.
Their study, which was published on Wednesday in Nature, finds that the average hurricane kills 7,000 to 11,000 people after making landfall in the United States. These previously uncounted deaths happened not during a storm or in its immediate aftermath, but as a long, slow trickle of mortality that plagues a region long after the clouds have cleared and floods have abated.
In any one year, the number of storm-related deaths is not very high. And yet a wave of excess deaths is visible in population data for at least 15 years after a storm hits an area, they found.
“It lasts for so many years, and because there’s so many storms hitting so many states, once you add up, it becomes this enormous number,” Hsiang told me. When added together, hurricanes’ long-term death toll exceeds American combat deaths in all wars, combined. The number so dwarfs previous estimates that it suggests tropical cyclones alone are a major determinant of public health across the United States.
Kerry Emanuel, an MIT meteorology professor who studies climate change and hurricanes, told me that the results were “truly astounding” and “persuasive,” although he noted that he is not an expert in the statistical approach used in the paper.
“Summed over all hurricanes, this amounts to three to five percent of all deaths near the Atlantic coast,” he said. “I expect this result will prove controversial and will be followed up by many other studies of long-term mortality from natural disasters.”
The paper fits into a growing body of research on what others have called the hidden or invisible public health threat of environmental threats. For years, researchers have known that air pollution and heat waves, seemingly silent hazards, can in fact kill tens of thousands of people. Lately they have begun to apply the same techniques to other hazards, with outsized results.
Officially, Hurricane Maria killed 64 people when it struck Puerto Rico in 2017. But when researchers surveyed households across the island months after the storm, they found the death toll was closer to 4,600. (The territory’s government later revised the official figure to 2,975.) These deaths were caused not by the cyclone’s high winds or torrential floods, but rather by secondary effects of the storm’s destruction. Maria took out the island’s power grid and road networks, for instance, and preventing people with heart attacks and strokes from reaching the hospital in time.
That paper was written six months after Maria struck the island; this new hurricane paper considers a wider time horizon, finding that more than 80,000 Americans die each year as a result of a hurricane, whenever it occurred. Black people were disproportionately killed by the aftermath of hurricanes, at least partly because a larger share of the country’s Black population lives in storm-afflicted areas. About 37,000 white deaths each year are due to a prior tropical cyclone.
How could such storms cause such a long tail of deaths, affecting areas 10 or 15 years after they come ashore? The paper cannot answer those questions today. But Hsiang and Young hypothesize that hurricanes cause extreme economic distress, which can resonate for years or decades afterward. “If someone suffers a loss and can’t invest in their business, then it will have ramifications for their income long into the future,” Hsiang told me. “If someone is on a fixed income and their garage is destroyed, and they pull from their retirement funds to fix the garage, then eight years later when they face a big medical decision, they might choose” a cheaper or less effective form of treatment.
“When you talk to people, you hear stories like this,” Hsiang added. The time and money invested in dealing with the storm is often a “pure loss,” even if some of the damage ultimately gets reimbursed. “Even if you have insurance, that just means you already paid for it in some way,” he said.
Storms cause disruption in other ways. They can break up communities and social networks. (If children move away, for instance, their parent can face higher medical bills.) Hurricanes can also impose high costs on states, towns, and cities, which may then have to reduce or restrict other services as a result.
“When you think about how communities rebuild — local municipalities and states — they also play a lot of games with their budget” in the aftermath of a storm, Hsiang said. “If they spend a lot of money to rebuild a bridge or boardwalk somewhere, does that come out of some social program 10 years later? Or building a new NICU hospital?” That could explain why an infant — even one born 15 years after a storm struck a given area — could face a higher chance of death.
Young and Hsiang think that these economic drivers are most likely to be the big reason for the excess deaths — the effect is just too big and drawn out to make any other cause likely — but other possibilities exist, they recognize. Hurricanes could be deadly simply because they are highly stressful events. “We see an effect on cancer rates and also cardiovascular illness. Stress matters a lot to those,” Hsiang said. It’s also possible that hurricanes unleash contamination into the environment that then makes people sick. A flooded basement can become a breeding ground for mold. “There’s gas stations in every town. What chemicals come out when there’s flooding?” Hsiang wondered.
The paper may also help resolve a riddle in American public health. On average, Americans die earlier in the eastern half of the continental United States than in the western half. This effect is worst in the Gulf Coast and Southeast but persists to some degree in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
The paper suggests that hurricanes may have something to do with this geographic phenomenon. For infants, people below the age of 44, and Black people of all ages, hurricanes may explain a large share but not all of the mortality gap.
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On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Current conditions: Storms continue to roll through North Texas today, where a home caught fire from a lightning strike earlier this week • Warm, dry days ahead may hinder hotshot crews’ attempts to contain the 1,500-acre Sawlog fire, burning about 40 miles west of Butte, Montana• Severe thunderstorms could move through Rome today on the first day of the papal conclave.
The International Energy Agency published its annual Global Methane Tracker report on Wednesday morning, finding that over 120 million tons of the potent greenhouse gas were emitted by oil, gas, and coal in 2024, close to the record high in 2019. In particular, the research found that coal mines were the second-largest energy sector methane emitter after oil, at 40 million tons — about equivalent to India’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Abandoned coal mines alone emitted nearly 5 million tons of methane, more than abandoned oil and gas wells at 3 million tons.
“Coal, one of the biggest methane culprits, is still being ignored,” Sabina Assan, the methane analyst at the energy think tank Ember, said in a statement. “There are cost-effective technologies available today, so this is a low-hanging fruit of tackling methane.” Per the IEA report, about 70% of all annual methane emissions from the energy sector “could be avoided with existing technologies,” and “a significant share of abatement measures could pay for themselves within a year.” Around 35 million tons of total methane emissions from fossil fuels “could be avoided at no net cost, based on average energy prices in 2024,” the report goes on. Read the full findings here.
Opportunities to reduce methane emissions in the energy sector, 2024
IEA
The Environmental Protection Agency told staff this week that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization, The Washington Post reports. The Energy Star program, which was created under President George H.W. Bush, has, in the past three decades, helped Americans save more than $500 billion in energy costs by directing them to more efficient appliances, as well as prevented an estimated 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere since 1992, according to the government’s numbers. Almost 90% of Americans recognize its blue logo on sight, per The New York Times.
President Trump, however, has taken a personal interest in what he believes are poorly performing shower heads, dishwashers, and other appliances (although, as we’ve fact-checked here at Heatmap, many of his opinions on the issue are outdated or misplaced). In a letter on Tuesday, a large coalition of industry groups including the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in defense of Energy Star, arguing it is “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the electric vehicle tax credit may be on its last legs, according to an interview he gave Bloomberg on Tuesday. “I think there is a better chance we kill it than save it,” Johnson said. “But we’ll see how it comes out.” He estimated that House Republicans would reveal their plan for the tax credits later this week. Still, as Bloomberg notes, a potential hangup may be that “many EV factories have been built or are under construction in GOP districts.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, President Trump flirted with ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs throughout his campaign, a move that would mark “a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles,” my colleague Robinson Meyer writes. That holds true for all EV makers, including Tesla, the world’s most valuable auto company. However, its CEO, Elon Musk — who holds an influential position within the government — has said he supports the end of the tax credit “because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, [and] it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance.”
Constellation Energy Corp. held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, announcing that its operating revenue rose more than 10% in the first three months of the year compared to 2024, beating expectations. Shares climbed 12% after the call, with Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez confirming that Constellation’s pending purchase of natural gas and geothermal energy firm Calpine is on track to be completed by the end of the year, and that the nuclear power utility is “working hard to meet the power needs of customers nationwide, including powering the new AI products that Americans increasingly are using in their daily lives and that businesses and government are using to provide better products and services.”
But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Dominguez also threw some “lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections,” telling investors that “it’s not hard to conclude that the headlines are inflated.” As Matthew points out, Dominguez also has some reason to downplay expectations, including that “there needs to be massive investment in new power plants,” which could affect the value of Constellation’s existing generation fleet.
The Rockefeller Foundation aims to phase out 60 coal-fired power plants by 2030 by using revenue from carbon credits to cover the costs of closures, the Financial Times reports. The team working on the initiative has identified 1,000 plants in developing countries that would be eligible for the program under its methodology.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.
Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob dive into what may have caused the Iberian blackout — as well as how grid operators manage supply and demand, voltage and frequency, and renewables and thermal resources, and operate the continent-spanning machine that is the power grid. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So a number of people started saying, oh, this was actually caused because there wasn’t enough inertia on the grid — that Spain kind of flew too close to the sun, let’s say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid. Some issue happened and it wasn’t able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that is?
Jesse Jenkins: So I don’t think it’s plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.
So let me break that down: When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there’s an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on just in Spain. They’re connected to this continen- scale grid, and so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France, and it drops a little bit in Latvia and all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time.
Once the system in Iberia disconnected from France, though, now it’s operating on its own as an actual island, and there it has very little inertia because the system operator only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non-inertia-based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn’t seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event.
Something — we don’t know what yet — caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we’ve observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency in Spain before all this happened. And we don’t know exactly what that disturbance was.
There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That’s possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system that manages the automatic response to changes in frequency — they were measuring the wrong thing, and they started to speed up or slow down, or something went wrong. That happened in the past, in the case of a generator in Florida that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong, and that causes caused oscillations of the frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection — as far away as North Dakota, which is like 2,000 miles away, you know? So these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Then again, there are reasons why he’d want to focus on existing generation.
Just how big is the data center boom, really? How much is electricity demand going to expand over the coming decades? Business plans, government policy, and alarming environmental forecasts are all based on the idea that we’re on an unrelenting ride upwards in terms of electricity use, especially from data centers used to power artificial intelligence.
It’s one reason why the new Trump administration declared in the first days of its return to power that the country was in an “energy emergency,” and hasbeen used as a justification for its attempted revival of the coal industry.
But one mildly dissenting voice came from a perhaps-unexpected corner: the power industry.
Constellation Energy’s Chief Executive Officer Joseph Dominguez spent a portion of the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday throwing lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections, even as the company looks to profit from increased demand for the power that its over 30,000-megawatt, largely nuclear fleet serves.
Dominguez told his audience of investors and analysts that utilities and their power customers have been telling Constellation that “the same data center need is being considered in multiple jurisdictions across the United States at the same time, just like fishing. If you’re a fisherman, you put a bunch of lines in the water to try to catch fish, and the data center developers are doing exactly the same thing.”
This means that different electricity markets or utility territories could report the same future data center demand, when ultimately the developer will pick just one site.
Tallying the demand growth projections from a few large power markets — namely MISO, which largely serves the Midwest; PJM, which largely serves the East Coast; and ERCOT, the Texas energy market — which together “account for less than half” of U.S. power demand, Dominguez said, Constellation finds that they project “notably higher” demand growth than many third-party consultants and analysts foresee for the country as a whole.
“It’s hard not to conclude that the headlines are inflated,” Dominguez said. He further claimed that Constellation had “done the math,” and that “if Nvidia were able to double its output and every single chip went to ERCOT, it still wouldn’t be enough chips to support some of the load forecasts.”
He argued that utilities tend to overstate load growth — an observation backed up by research from the Rocky Mountain Institute. “We get it,” he said. “Utilities have to plan to ensure that the system is reliable.” That frequently means erring on the side of having more generation and transmission to serve future demand as opposed to being caught short.
Dominguez is hardly the first voice to call into question load growth forecasts. Energy industry consultant Jonathan Koomey told Heatmap more than a year ago that “everyone needs to calm the heck down” about AI-driven load growth. Data center developers, chipmakers, and AI companies would likely find efficiencies to get more computing power out of less electric power, he predicted, similar to how the original data center buildout avoided catastrophic predictions of imminent power shortages and spiking electricity prices in the early 2000s.
Since then, demand growth projections have done nothing but rise. But even just a few weeks ago, Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, told Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, “It is simultaneously true that I think this is going to be a really large demand driver and that we have bubble-like characteristics in terms of the amount of stuff that people are trying to get done.”
Now, to be clear, Dominguez has a reason to talk down expectations of future demand growth — and with it the expectation that there needs to be massive investment in new power plants. Constellation owns and operates a fleet of nuclear power plants, and is bringing on a gas-heavy fleet with its planned acquisition of Calpine.
Dominguez also said that new natural gas and renewables were likely to prove expensive to build.
“The cost of new entry, whether that be for combined cycle machines or solar with storage, has gone up substantially, as has the time to build and site these assets,” Dominguez said. “Now, at the end of the day, in a tightening market, we compete with the cost of new entry.”
This is halfway consistent with what other big players in the energy industry have been saying. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra, which has a large renewables development business,has been telling anyone who will listen that the way to meet urgent load growth is with renewables and batteries, as they can be built cheaper and faster than natural gas, let alone nuclear.
Dominguez’s take, however, is that it’s all quite expensive and lengthy considering the likely level of need.
“When I listen to some of the comments on these calls, I just have to tell you, folks, I think the load is being overstated. We need to pump the brakes here.”