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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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That’s okay for clean energy firms, terrible for manufacturers, and a big risk for everyone.
Over the past few months, you could put together three different — and somewhat conflicting — pictures of the American economy.
For companies exposed to the AI boom, business has been good — excellent, even. The surge in ongoing capital investment into data centers and electricity has been larger than other recent booms, such as the telecom buildout. Electricity demand is soaring, especially in Texas and the Mid-Atlantic. Technology companies have signed power offtake deals with nuclear and hydroelectricity companies. If anything, companies exposed to artificial intelligence are more afflicted by congested supply chains and shortages than by slack demand — see the yearslong waiting lists to get a new transformer or natural gas turbine.
Outside of the AI economy, though, the economy has been a fair bit colder. You might even say it’s been frozen by indecision. When you talk to business leaders, they confess confusion about where things are heading. President Trump’s constantly changing tariffs — and his administration’s mercurial policy shifts — have made it difficult for non-AI-exposed businesses to plan long-term capital investment.
You could hear this view from clean energy manufacturing and traditional fossil firms alike. When I talked to John Henry Harris, the CEO of the medium-duty truck maker Harbinger Motors, for an episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast in June, he told me that his company was just about to shift a production process to Mexico when a last-minute Trump change made it cheaper to keep it in China. Meanwhile, an oil and gas executive recently told the Dallas Federal Reserve: “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”
But the data contradicted that tepid view. This was the third picture that we were getting of the economy. Through the summer, federal surveys showed an economy that was performing okay. In May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 139,000 jobs; it gained another 147,000 jobs, apparently, in June. The AI boom was clearly contributing to those robust reports. But how could an economy that business leaders otherwise described as difficult be going so well?
Now we can finally square these disparate pictures.
On Friday, the federal government released its newest tranche of job numbers. The headline number was mediocre — the U.S. added a mere 73,000 jobs in July — but the guts of the report were worse. The government revised down its estimate of the May and June reports by a total of 258,000 jobs. With these new numbers in hand, it’s clear that the labor market has essentially stalled out since Liberation Day in April.
The unemployment rate slightly rose to 4.2%, which was in line with what economists predicted.
These new reports clarify that the broader American economy wasn’t actually thriving. Its summer strength was a mirage the whole time. Outside of AI, things are downright frigid. And as President Trump continues to shuffle tariffs and increase trade uncertainty, we can expect conditions to worsen. Trump seems hellbent even on clouding our ability to understand the underlying economy: on Friday afternoon, he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, a career civil servant.
If you squint, you can see a hazy “AI sector” versus “non-AI sector” distinction in the data, even among the energy and decarbonization companies we cover at Heatmap. But it’s not obvious. Contrary to what you might expect when power demand is surging, utility employment was basically flat last month. Heavy and civil engineering construction jobs were up by 6,000, and “nonresidential specialty trade contractors” — a category that can include electricians — gained nearly 2,000 jobs.
But manufacturing lost 11,000 jobs last month, with the motor vehicles industry driving 2,600 of those losses. Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas jobs were down. The Institute of Supply Management report, a private survey of U.S. manufacturing activity, showed the sector shrank in July for the fifth month in a row.
And even though the Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred buyout program for more than 150,000 people has yet to hit, the federal government bled 12,000 jobs.
In a way, the clean energy industry — or at least solar, battery, nuclear, and geothermal developers — might consider themselves lucky. Despite the best efforts of Trump’s officials, and despite the chaos of President Trump’s policies, they have been able to eke through the past few months because of the AI boom. Nearly 70% of all new power-generating capacity added to the U.S. grid in the first quarter of this year came from solar panels, and the government has thrown its weight behind next-generation nuclear and geothermal technologies. A tepid jobs report might even bring some interest rate relief from the Federal Reserve.
But if that AI boom slows down, we should all watch out below.
A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.
The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.
The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.