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A Q&A with Villanova’s Stephen M. Strader on the legacy of Hurricane Andrew, unsustainable development, and why building codes alone aren’t enough.
In around 12 hours, Hurricane Milton is set to make landfall within miles of Tampa Bay, a region that is home to more than 5 million people. Once a sleepy retirement community, the area has seen a major development boom in recent years fueled by Millennials and Gen Zers seeking the perks of coastal living; it was the 11th fastest-growing city of its size in the U.S. as of this spring and has been expected to continue to grow at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the country over the next five years. A third of those residents, including many of the newcomers, live in low-lying neighborhoods now under urgent evacuation notices due to the threat of “unsurvivable” storm surge, which could rise up to 15 feet.
The development boom that has made Tampa Bay so desirable is also why it’s particularly vulnerable. In an analysis of Hurricane Ian — the most expensive storm in Florida’s history, which struck just south of Milton’s projected track in 2022 — the re-insurance company Swiss Re found that if the storm had struck in the 1970s, it would have caused a third to a half as much damage. Simply put: You can’t adapt your way out of a hurricane problem.
If there is anyone to talk to about the vulnerabilities unique to Tampa Bay, it’s Stephen M. Strader, an associate professor and hazard geographer at Villanova University. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You shared an image on Twitter of the explosive growth in the Tampa Bay area between 1940 and 2024. Why does this make the region vulnerable to a storm like Milton? Is it just about there being more people there?
When we think about disasters, we think of the intersection of three components: a violent event, like what we have with Milton; vulnerability, or what types of people could be in the path, which could be related to racial divides, age, and gender norms; and what a lot of my work focuses on, exposure.
Exposure is just the number of people or things that we care about — businesses, schools, and things like that — that are subject to losses if an event occurs. Florida is a great example of rapid urbanization since the 1900s, and it’s rapid development in a very hazard-prone region.
It can be easy for outsiders to sit back and wonder why anyone would buy a house on the water or on a barrier island near Tampa.
There are a lot of factors that come into play when you think about where we develop and why we develop certain locations. One of the biggest pressures that we see is that it’s desirable land: In the short term, people want to live near the water. It’s beautiful! People don’t think necessarily about the risk that comes with it because they’re too focused on their dream, which is to live near the ocean.
The other side of that is, from an economic standpoint, people see it as an opportunity to have businesses and to build condos. Developers see the land and think, “How much could I buy this for and sell it for with homes on it?” This really started back with Carl Fisher, who was famous for building the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He was a thrill-seeker, but also a businessman and developer, and he loved to go to South Florida — which is now Miami Beach, and then was swamps and mangroves and not developed at all. And he thought, Hmm, this would be a great place for people to visit for vacations and experiences. He slowly started filling in the wetlands with sand. And that’s the history of Florida's development: It continued because this was very valuable land.
There is a lot of socioeconomic pressure to develop in these areas, but we’re also starting to see it change. Those pressures are lessening because you have insurance industries now and events like this year after year.
There is another issue in Southwest Florida, which is that many of the homes were constructed before building codes were updated, right?
I tend to do a lot more work on the manufactured housing side. Before 1974, all manufactured homes were called mobile homes, and there wasn’t really a standard. Then, in 1974, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development came in and said, “We need to increase the standards,” and they did.
Fast-forward to 1992 and Hurricane Andrew, and they realized these codes were not strong enough. Many people lived in manufactured homes that were destroyed by Andrew, which was a very windy hurricane. We think hurricanes are wind threats because of Andrew, but hurricanes are water threats, and most deaths occur because of that water. Andrew was the opposite.
Between 1992 and 1994, they updated building codes for manufactured housing, and actually, along the coastline, Florida has some of the strongest codes for manufactured homes in the country. A lot of the areas that will be affected by Milton will have those strong standards. But many homes were also grandfathered in if they were built before that time.
That’s just one type of housing. My guess is that when you have a lot of rapid development since the 1990s — well, I have some questions about structural integrity since building codes can be strong but they might not be followed. And we sometimes don’t know until afterwards. A lot of what is being built are condos or McMansions — it’s basically, How fast can you build them, how cheap can you build them, and how high can you sell them? And they look great until their performance is put into question.
Insurance companies are starting to see this and ask, “How do we retrofit structures?” Structure-wise, though, I think Tampa is in a decent spot. The problem is, the water is so powerful that it’s not going to matter.
What kinds of conversations do you think Floridians should be having about development or potential redevelopment after Milton?
I’m a huge proponent of resisting the urge to build right back — the reason being that’s how you get repetitive losses. The hard part is, with a lot of insurance, if you have it, you only get provisions to build back the way you were. You don’t have the ability to improve. So what I end up telling people is, sometimes these disasters provide an opportunity to assess what we need to do from a planning standpoint. This is unsustainable development, and not just because of hurricanes, but because of rising sea levels and the stress on the environment. And unfortunately, a lot of these developments were built on top of wetlands and marshes and mangroves that used to protect the island areas as natural barriers.
The hard part is that people’s emotions are very strong after disasters, and they immediately want to return to how things were. That’s why you see people picking up the pieces the day after a storm, sometimes even when they’re injured. So we have to resist the urge as a group, and say, maybe this isn’t the time to think about rebuilding here.
Many wetland restoration projects in Florida are doing that very thing: reclaiming the environments that protected people inland. But on the other side you have developers and builders and local economies that rely on people coming to these areas, and that pressures people to come right back. Then you end up with a situation of repetitive losses and that’s why FEMA has been losing money over the years — it’s not so much that we’re putting money toward disasters but that we’re not getting value out of it, because it’s so much more likely for there to be impacts because of that exposure growth. Look at what happened after Helene and what’s going to happen with Milton: We’re splitting resources between the two. But we’re doing the best with the tools we have when there’s pressure on both sides, and considerations both economic and safety.
Is there anything else people should know about the geography of Tampa or the development risk there?
This storm is going to be different than other storms, and that’s because of the direction and intensity of it. The one thing we have to remember is that all that development — and everybody, for the most part, who isn’t 100 years old — has not experienced a hurricane of this magnitude in their life. That means everyone has the cognitive bias to say, “I’ve been through hurricanes before and was fine.” That is probably not going to be the case with this event; no one has been through this before.
What’s worrisome to me is that the trajectory of the hurricane is changing. A subtle shift north or south by 20 miles could mean a big difference for the Tampa region — if you have the right side of the hurricane push water into the Bay, it’s no different than 10 people jumping into a hot tub. The water level goes up and forces all that water into a smaller region, which is going to lead to more storm surge in Tampa Bay, Clearwater, and the St. Pete area. I don’t want to call it a “perfect storm,” but if you push all that water in there, you’re going to flood people in a way that hurricanes they’ve been through before never got close to. And I worry, if it goes south, about Fort Myers and the areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Ian. So it’s multilayered.
The good news that I’ll bring up is that we’re reeling from Helene, which means people have it in their brains about how bad this can be, which is probably causing more people to evacuate than normal. We have a problem with disaster amnesia in places where a hurricane hasn’t happened in a long time so “it’s not going to happen again.” And we forget. I remember Hurricane Katrina and what it did to New Orleans. It still has effects, but the students I’m teaching now weren’t even alive when it hit. These memories are short, and many people in Florida today weren’t there 30 years ago or 20 years ago. The only good thing to come out of Helene is that people are now aware of what can happen.
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On federal layoffs, copper tariffs, and Texas flood costs
Current conditions: Three people were killed in southern New Mexico after heavy rains on Tuesday caused flooding • Parts of the western Mediterranean Sea are 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average • Search operations are underway for 30 people missing in India’s Himachal Pradesh state following flash floods and landslides.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted a lower court ruling that had blocked mass layoffs of federal workers, clearing the way for a significant reduction in the civil service. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only dissenting vote, writing that the court had a “demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.” Technically, SCOTUS’ ruling is only temporary, and the case could eventually return for the court to consider at a later date, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor noting, “The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.” But “in practice,” the court’s move allows President Trump to “pursue his restructuring plans, even if judges later determine that they exceed presidential power,” The New York Times writes.
The Trump administration has signaled its intention to reduce the workforce by 107,000 employees in the next fiscal year. It plans the steepest cuts for the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, and the General Services Administration, but roles at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy are also up for reductions. As I’ve previously written, such cuts to the civil service will long outlast President Trump. “It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to restore the kind of institutional knowledge that’s being lost,” Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal government workers, told me.
President Trump announced on Tuesday that he intends to impose a 50% tariff on copper, a move that follows earlier tariffs on steel and aluminum. The process for imposing those tariffs, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin notes, involves recognizing that the product being tariffed is “essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.” But while a steep new tariff could incentivize increased copper mining in the United States, such mines can take years to open, and copper must be smelted and refined before it can be used — an industry that is currently at capacity in the U.S. and dominated by China. Nevertheless, copper is crucial for “a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors,” Matthew writes. “Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average.”
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The death toll in the Texas floods rose to over 100 on Tuesday, with Governor Greg Abbott telling reporters that another 161 people remain unaccounted for in Kerr County. Already one of the deadliest floods in modern U.S. history, the disaster is also set to be one of the costliest, with AccuWeather estimating total damage and economic loss between $18 billion and $22 billion. “The damage, impacts on future tourism, cost of search and recovery efforts, extensive cleanup that will be needed, as well as insurance claims after this catastrophic flash flood, will have long-lasting economic impacts in the Hill Country region of Texas,” AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter said in a statement.
As I wrote on Tuesday, the Texas floods were a disaster despite the forecasting, not because of it. While some global weather models underestimated the storm, NOAA’s cutting-edge specialized models “got this right,” UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist Daniel Swain told me. Funding for those models — as well as research into severe thunderstorms and rainstorms like the one in Texas — is set to be zeroed out in the Trump administration’s 2026 budget.
The Department of Energy has hired three scientists who are among the minority of experts to doubt or downplay the impacts of human activity on global warming, The New York Times has learned. The scientists include physicist Steven E. Koonin, the author of the bestselling book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters, which has been criticized for “not [comporting] with the evidence”; meteorologist Roy Spencer, the author of The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists, which alleges IPCC researchers made a “mix-up between cause and effect when analyzing cloud and temperature variations”; and atmospheric scientist John Christy, who’s been accused of using misleading graphs to downplay the extent of human activity on climate change. The New York Times was unable to immediately learn “what the three scientists were working on or whether they were being paid,” but the hires come at a time when the federal government is also laying off long-tenured climate and atmospheric scientists as well as removing mentions of climate change from government websites.
China is constructing nearly three-quarters of all solar and wind power projects being built globally, according to a new report by the Global Energy Monitor. Of about 689 gigawatts currently under construction worldwide, 510 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind were within China’s borders, the report found. Additionally, China accounts for 29% of all planned wind and solar projects worldwide, followed closest by Brazil, at just over 9%.
China’s wind and solar capacity surpassed its coal and gas capacity for the first time during the first quarter of 2025, supplying 23% of the country’s electricity consumption, the report adds. Even offshore wind, a “small portion of China’s overall renewable capacity,” now contributes over 50% of the overall offshore wind capacity in construction worldwide. You can read the full report here.
Image: Studio Pizza/Unsplash
Cemeteries are “a mosaic of different habitats. This means that species from forests, hedgerows, grasslands, and even fields can find substitute habitats there.” —Ingo Kowarik, an urban ecologist and retired professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, on the burgeoning field of cemetery biodiversity.
Jesse and Rob go back to basics on the steam engine.
Just two types of machines have produced the overwhelming majority of electricity generated since 1890. This week, we look at the history of those devices, how they work — and how they have contributed to global warming.
This is our second episode of Shift Key Summer School, a series of “lecture conversations” about the basics of energy, electricity, and the power grid for listeners of all backgrounds. This week, we dive into the invention and engineering of the world’s most common types of fossil- and nuclear-fueled power plants. What’s a Rankine cycle power station, and how does it use steam to produce electricity? How did the invention of the jet engine enable the rise of natural gas-generated electricity? And why can natural gas power plants achieve much higher efficiency gains than coal plants?
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It’s interesting thinking about the deployment of steam and these Rankine cycle generators in the late 19th century for us as people who care about the power grid. These are interesting techniques as they’re deploying electricity for the first time. But the use of coal to convert water into steam and the use of steam power actually comes way earlier than any of this, right? Like, it’s steam. That is actually the 19th century — the core 19th century and late 19th century, especially — energy medium. And actually, the history of the 19th century energy is switching from wood and hydropower to coal-powered steam.
And already by the time that the Pearl Street station is built in New York, the United States is crisscrossed with steam engines. Our economy already runs on steam. It’s actually the application of steam and coal — which at that point are kind of old and fundamental technologies to economic function — to power generation. They didn’t have to make any huge discoveries around steam and coal. They were already using steam and coal in factories, they just weren’t intermediating it through the electricity grid.
Jesse Jenkins: That’s right. And in all these cases, you’re just trying to convert that steam, the expansion of that steam, into motion, whether that’s the pistons of a steam engine or the pistons of a reciprocating generator attached to a dynamo in Pearl Street, or, in a lot of factories, just a bunch of belts, right? That would then move equipment throughout the facility. It’s just a lot easier to move energy around, and more precise to do that as electricity. And so over time, the devices in industrial facilities all converted over to using electricity directly, and then you could generate your energy somewhere far away.
And this is the other, second advantage of steam turbines. What made Westinghouse so successful is that they have large economies of scale, so it’s a lot cheaper to generate power from a big steam turbine than the equivalent amount of power from a lot of little steam engines. And that wasn’t … I mean, that’s true for reciprocating engines, but they kind of top out, given their complexity.
The Pearl Strait station generators were in the 100-kilowatt scale. I think there were six of them, originally, so 600 kilowatts, and they only powered a few hundred lights, which is remarkable. These lights, the original lights, were incredibly inefficient, so it took something like 1,000 watts or more per light bulb. Whereas again, now we’re down to like, 10 to 15 watts in an efficient LED bulb. But anyway, they were in that kind of hundreds of watts scale, and that kind of maxed out the scale of the reciprocating engines. Steam turbines you could increase and increase and increase into the megawatt scale, and by doing that utilities or generators were able to lower the cost of energy while expanding customer bases.
Mentioned:
Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, by Alexis Madrigal
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
The Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online clean energy programs equip you with tangible skills and powerful networks—and you can continue working while learning. In just five hours a week, propel your career and make a difference.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The Senate told renewables developers they’d have a year to start construction and still claim a tax break. Then came an executive order.
Renewable energy advocates breathed a sigh of relief after a last-minute change to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act stipulated that wind and solar projects would be eligible for tax credits as long as they began construction within the next 12 months.
But the new law left an opening for the Trump administration to cut that window short, and now Trump is moving to do just that. The president signed an executive order on Monday directing the Treasury Department to issue new guidance for the clean electricity tax credits “restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
The broad safe harbors in question have to do with the way the government defines the “beginning of construction,” which, in the realm of federal tax credits, is a term of art. Under the current Treasury guidance, developers must either complete “physical work of a significant nature” on a given project or spend at least 5% of its total cost to prove they have started construction during a given year, and are therefore protected from any subsequent tax law changes.
As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin previously reported, oftentimes something as simple as placing an order for certain pieces of equipment, like transformers or solar trackers, will check the box. Still, companies can’t just buy a bunch of equipment to qualify for the tax credits and then sit on it indefinitely. Their projects must be up and operating within four years, or else they must demonstrate “continuous progress” each year to continue to qualify.
As such, under existing rules and Trump’s new law, wind and solar developers would have 12 months to claim eligibility for the investment or production tax credit, and then at least four years to build the project and connect it to the grid. While a year is a much shorter runway than the open-ended extension to the tax credits granted by the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s a much better deal than the House’s original version of the OBBBA, which would have required projects to start construction within two months and be operating by the end of 2028 to qualify.
Or so it seemed.
The tax credits became a key bargaining chip during the final negotiations on the bill. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska fought to retain the 12-month runway for wind and solar, while members of the House Freedom Caucus sought to kill it. Ultimately, the latter group agreed to vote yes after winning assurances from the president that he would “deal” with the subsidies later.
Last week, as all of this was unfolding, I started to hear rumors that the Treasury guidance regarding “beginning of construction” could be a key tool at the president’s disposal to make good on his promise. Industry groups had urged Congress to codify the existing guidance in the bill, but it was ultimately left out.
When I reached out to David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in energy tax credits, on Thursday, he was already contemplating Trump’s options to exploit that omission.
Burton told me that Trump’s Treasury department could redefine “beginning of construction” in a number of ways, such as by removing the 5% spending safe harbor or requiring companies to get certain permits in order to demonstrate “significant” physical work. It could also shorten the four-year grace period to bring a project to completion.
But Burton was skeptical that the Treasury Department had the staff or expertise to do the work of rewriting the guidance, let alone that Trump would make this a priority. “Does Treasury really want to spend the next couple of months dealing with this?” he said. “Or would it rather deal with implementing bonus depreciation and other taxpayer-favorable rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill instead of being stuck on this tangent, which will be quite a heavy lift and take some time?”
Just days after signing the bill into law, Trump chose the tangent, directing the Treasury to produce new guidance within 45 days. “It’s going to need every one of those days to come out with thoughtful guidance that can actually be applied by taxpayers,” Burton told me when I called him back on Monday night.
The executive order cites “energy dominance, national security, economic growth, and the fiscal health of the Nation” as reasons to end subsidies for wind and solar. The climate advocacy group Evergreen Action said it would help none of these objectives. “Trump is once again abusing his power in a blatant end-run around Congress — and even his own party,” Lena Moffit, the group’s executive director said in a statement. “He’s directing the government to sabotage the very industries that are lowering utility bills, creating jobs, and securing our energy independence.”
Industry groups were still assessing the implications of the executive order, and the ones I reached out to declined to comment for this story. “Now we’re circling the wagons back up to dig into the details,” one industry representative told me, adding that it was “shocking” that Trump would “seemingly double cross Senate leadership and Thune in particular.”
As everyone waits to see what Treasury officials come up with, developers will be racing to “start construction” as defined by the current rules, Burton said. It would be “quite unusual” if the new guidance were retroactive, he added. Although given Trump’s history, he said, “I guess anything is possible.”