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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 becauseof 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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Instead of rocket fuel, they’re using biomass.
Arbor Energy might have the flashiest origin story in cleantech.
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
Take that, all you founders humble-bragging about starting in a dingy garage.
“It’s not new science, per se,” Hartwig told me. The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions. Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
“Arbor is the first to bring forward a technology that can provide clean baseload energy in a very compact form,” Clea Kolster, a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital told me. Lowercarbon is an investor in Arbor, alongside other climate tech-focused venture capital firms including Gigascale Capital and Voyager Ventures, but the company has not yet disclosed how much it’s raised.
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires. Hartwig told me that for every ton of organic waste, Arbor can produce about one megawatt hour of electricity, which is in line with current efficiency standards, plus about 1.8 tons of carbon removal. “We look at being as efficient, if not a little more efficient than a traditional bioenergy power plant that does not have carbon capture on it,” he explained.
The company’s carbon removal price targets are also extremely competitive —- in the $50 to $100 per ton range, Hartwig said. Compare that to something like direct air capture, which today exceeds $600 per ton, or enhanced rock weathering, which is usually upwards of $300 per ton. “The power and carbon removal they can offer comes at prices that meet nearly unlimited demand,”Mike Schroepfer, the founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, told me via email. Arbor benefits from the fact that the electricity it produces and sells can help offset the cost of the carbon removal, and vice versa. So if the company succeeds in hitting its cost and efficiency targets, Hartwig said, this “quickly becomes a case for, why wouldn’t you just deploy these everywhere?”
Initial customers will likely be (no surprise here) the Microsofts, Googles and Metas of the world — hyperscalers with growing data center needs and ambitious emissions targets. “What Arbor unlocks is basically the ability for hyperscalers to stop needing to sacrifice their net zero goals for AI,” Kolster told me. And instead of languishing in the interminable grid interconnection queue, Hartwig said that providing power directly to customers could ensure rapid, early deployment. “We see it as being quicker to power behind-the-meter applications, because you don’t have to go through the process of connecting to the grid,” he told me. Long-term though, he said grid connection will be vital, since Arbor can provide baseload power whereas intermittent renewables cannot.
All of this could serve as a much cheaper alternative, to say, re-opening shuttered nuclear facilities, as Microsoft also recently committed to doing at Three Mile Island. “It’s great, we should be doing that,” Kolster said of this nuclear deal, “but there’s actually a limited pool of options to do that, and unfortunately, there is still community pushback.”
Currently, Arbor is working to build out its pilot plant in San Bernardino, California, which Hartwig told me will turn on this December. And by 2030, the company plans to have its first commercial plant operating at scale, generating 100 megawatts of electricity while removing nearly 2 megatons of CO2 every year. “To put it in perspective: In 2023, the U.S. added roughly 9 gigawatts of gas power to the grid, which generates 18 to 23 megatons of CO2 a year,” Schroepfer wrote to me. So having just one Arbor facility removing 2 megatons would make a real dent. The first plant will be located in Louisiana, where Arbor will also be working with an as-yet-unnamed partner to do the carbon storage.
The company’s carbon credits will be verified with the credit certification platform Isometric, which is also backed by Lowercarbon and thought to have the most stringent standards in the industry. Hartwig told me that Arbor worked hand-in-hand with Isometric to develop the protocol for “biogenic carbon capture and storage,” as the company is the first Isometric-approved supplier to use this standard.
But Hartwig also said that government support hasn’t yet caught up to the tech’s potential. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct air capture companies with $180 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, technology such as Arbor’s only qualifies for $85 per ton. It’s not nothing — more than the zero dollars enhanced rock weathering companies such as Lithos or bio-oil sequestration companies such as Charm are getting. “But at the same time, we’re treated the same as if we’re sequestering CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant or a coal plant,” Hartwig told me, as opposed to getting paid for actual CO2 removal.
“I think we are definitely going to need government procurement or involvement to actually hit one, five, 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal,” Hartwig said. Globally, scientists estimate that we’ll need up to 10 gigatons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Even at $100 per ton, 10 gigatons of carbon removal is still a pretty hefty price tag,” Hartwig told me. A $100 billion price tag, to be exact. “We definitely need more players than just Microsoft.”
New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.