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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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Unlike just about every other car sales event, this one has a real — congressionally mandated — end date.
Car salespeople, like all salespeople, love to project a sense of urgency. You know the familiar seasonal rhythm of the TV commercial: Toyotathon is on now — but hurry in, because these deals won’t last. The end of the discount is, of course, an arbitrary deadline invented to juice that month’s sales figures; there’ll be another sale soon.
But in the electric vehicle market there’s about to be a fire sale, and this time it really is a race against the clock.
Federal incentives for EVs and EV equipment were critically endangered the moment Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now, with the passage of the omnibus budget reconciliation bill on the Fourth of July, they have a hard expiration date. Most importantly, the $7,500 federal tax credit for an EV purchase is dead after September 30. Drivers who might want to go electric and dealerships and car companies eager to unload EVs are suddenly in a furor to get deals done before the calendar turns to October.
The impending end of the tax credit has already become a sales pitch. Tesla, faced with sagging sales numbers thanks in part to Elon Musk’s misadventures in the Trump administration, has been sending a steady slog of emails trying to convince me to replace my just-paid-off Model 3 with another one. The brand didn’t take long to turn the impending EV gloom into a short-term sales opportunity. “Order soon to get your $7,500,” declared an email blast sent just days after Trump signed the bill.
On Reddit, the general manager of a Mississippi dealership posted to the community devoted to the Ioniq 9, Hyundai’s new three-row all-electric SUV, to appeal to anyone who might be interested in one of the three models that just appeared on their lot. It’s an unusual strategy, a local dealer seeking out a nationwide group of enthusiasts just to move a trio of vehicles. But it’s not hard to see the economic writing on the wall.
The Ioniq 9 is a cool and capable vehicle, but one that starts at $59,000 in its most basic form and quickly rises into the $60,000s and $70,000s with fancier versions. Even with the discount, the Ioniq 9 costs far more than many of the more affordable gas-powered three-row crossovers. And now the vehicle has come down with a serious case of unlucky timing, with deliveries beginning this summer just ahead of the incentive’s disappearance. As of October 1, the EV could become an albatross that nobody in suburban Memphis wants to drive off the lot.
Over the past year, Ford has offered the Ford Power Promise, an excellent deal that throws in a free home charger plus the cost of installation to anyone who buys a new EV. That deal was supposed to expire this summer. But the Detroit giant has extended its offer until — surprise — Sept. 30, in the hopes of enticing a wave of buyers while the getting is good.
This isn’t the first time EV-makers have been through such a deadline crunch. When the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases first started in 2010, the law was written so that the benefit phased out over time once a car company passed a particular sales threshold. By the time I bought my EV in the spring of 2019, for example, Tesla had already sold so many vehicles that its tax credit was halved from $7,500 to $3,750. We had to rush to take delivery in the last few days of June as the benefit was slated to fall again, to $1,875, on July 1, before it disappeared completely in 2020.
The Inflation Reduction Act passed under President Biden not only reinstated the $7,500 credit but also took away the gradual decline of the benefit; it was supposed to stick around, in full, until 2032. But despite Trump’s on-again, off-again bromance with Elon Musk, the president followed through on his long-term antagonistic rhetoric against EVs by repealing the benefit as part of this month’s disastrous big bill.
Trump, despite his best efforts, won’t kill the EV. The electric horse has simply left the barn — the world has come too far and seen too much of what electrification has to offer to turn back just because the current U.S. president wants it to. But the end of the EV tax credit (until a different regime comes into power, at least) seriously imperils the economic math that allowed EV sales to rise steadily over the past few years.
As a result, now might be the best time for a long time to buy or lease an electric vehicle, with remarkably low lease payments to be found on great EVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Chevy Equinox. Once the tax breaks are gone, lease deals (which got lots of drivers into EVs without them having to worry about long-term ownership questions) are likely to grow less enticing. EVs that would have been cost-competitive with gasoline counterparts when the tax credits taken into account suddenly aren’t.
Plenty of drivers will continue to choose electric even at a premium price because it’s a better product, sure. But hopes of reaching many more budget-first buyers have taken a serious hit. It could be a dream summer to buy an EV, but we’re all going to wake up when September ends.
On the NRC, energy in Pennsylvania, and Meta AI
Current conditions: Air quality alerts will remain in place in Chicago through Tuesday evening due to smoke from Canadian wildfires • There is a high risk of a tropical depression forming in the Gulf this week • The rain is clearing on the eastern seaboard after 2.64 inches fell in New York’s Central Park on Monday, breaking the record for July 14 set in 1908.
The Trump administration is putting pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “rubber stamp” all new reactors, Politico reports based on conversations with three people at the May meeting where the expectation was relayed. The directive to the NRC’s top staff came from Adam Blake, a representative of the Department of Government Efficiency, who apparently used the term “rubber stamp” specifically to describe the function of the independent agency. NRC’s “secondary assessment” of the safety of new nuclear projects would be a “foregone conclusion” following approval by the Department of Energy or the Pentagon, NRC officials were made to believe, per Politico.
A spokesperson for the NRC pointed to President Trump’s recent executive order aiming to quadruple U.S. nuclear power by 2050 in response to Politico’s reporting. Skeptics, however, have expressed concern over the White House’s influence on the NRC, which is meant to operate independently, as well as potential safety lapses that might result from the 18-month deadline for reviewing new reactors established in the order.
President Trump and Republican Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania will announce a $70 million “AI and energy investment” in the Keystone State at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit today in Pittsburgh. The event is meant to focus on the development of emerging energy technologies. Organizers said that more than 60 CEOs, including executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BlackRock, and Palantir, will be in attendance at the event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. BlackRock is expected to announce a $25 billion investment in a “data-center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania, along with a joint venture for increased power generation” at the event, Axios reports.
Ahead of the summit, critics slammed the event as a “moral failure,” with student protests expected throughout the day. Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Bluesky that the summit was a “slap in the face to real clean energy researchers,” and that there is “nothing innovative about propping up the fossil fuel industry.” “History will judge institutions that chose short-term gain over moral clarity during this critical moment for climate action and scientific integrity,” she went on.
On Monday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on Threads that the company aims to become “the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online” — an ambitious goal that will require the extensive development of new gas infrastructure, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reports. The first gigawatt-level project, an Ohio data center called Prometheus, will be powered by Meta’s own natural gas infrastructure, with the natural gas company Williams reportedly building two 200-megawatt facilities for the project in Ohio. The buildout for Prometheus is in addition to another Meta project in Northeast Louisiana, Hyperion, that Zuckerberg said Monday could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. “To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts,” Matthew writes. Read his full report here.
BYD
Electric vehicle sales are currently on track to outpace gasoline car sales in China this year, Bloomberg reports. In the first six months of 2025, new battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and extended-range electric cars accounted for 5.5 million vehicles sold in the country (compared to 5.4 million sales of new gasoline cars), and are projected to top 16 million before the end of December — both of which put EVs a hair over their combustion-powered competitors.
By contrast, battery-electric cars only accounted for 28% of new-car sales in China last year, per the nation’s Passenger Car Association. But “sales this year have been spurred by the extension of a trade-in subsidy” as well as the nation’s expansive electrified lineup, including “several budget options” like BYD’s Seagull, Bloomberg writes. “China is the only large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,” BloombergNEF reported last month.
Window heat pumps are an extremely promising answer to the conundrum of decarbonizing large apartment buildings, a new report by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has found. Previously, research on heat pumps had primarily focused on their advantages for single-family homes, while the process of retrofitting larger steam- and hot-water-heated apartment buildings remained difficult and expensive, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo explains. But while apartment residents used to have to wait for their building to either install a large central heat pump system for the whole structure, or else rely on a more involved “mini-split” system, newer technologies like window heat pumps proved to be one of the most cost-effective solutions in ACEEE’s report with an average installation cost of $9,300 per apartment. “That’s significantly higher than the estimated $1,200 per apartment cost of a new boiler, but much lower than the $14,000 to $20,000 per apartment price tag of the other heat pump variations,” Emily writes, adding that the report also found window heat pumps may be “the cheapest to operate, with a life cycle cost of about $14,500, compared to $22,000 to $30,000 for boilers using biodiesel or biogas or other heat pump options.” Read Emily’s full report here.
California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023 — the latest year data is available — making it the “largest economy in the world to achieve this milestone,” Governor Gavin Newsom’s office announced this week.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.
Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.
“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis that
That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.
At the end of last year, Zuckerberg said that a datacenter project in Northeast Louisiana, now publicly known as Hyperion, would take 2 gigawatts of electricity; in his post on Monday, he said it could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts.
As one could perhaps infer from the fact that their size is quoted in gigawatts instead of square feet or number of GPUs, whether or not these data centers get built comes down to the ability to power them.
Citing information from the natural gas company Williams, Semianalysis reported that Meta “went full Elon mode” for the New Albany datacenter, i.e. is installed its own natural gas infrastructure. Specifically, Williams is building two 200-megawatt facilities, according to the gas developer and Semianalysis, for the Ohio project. (Williams did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment.)
Does this mean Meta is violating its commitments to reach net zero? While the data center buildout may make those goals more difficult to achieve, Meta is still investing in new renewables even as it’s also bringing new gas online. Late last month, the company announced that it was procuring almost 800 new megawatts of renewables from projects to be built by Invenergy, including over 400 megawatts of solar in Ohio, roughly matching the on-site generation from the Prometheus project.
But there’s more to a data center’s climate footprint than what a big tech company does — or does not — build on site.
The Louisiana project, Hyperion, will also be served by new natural gas and renewables added to the grid. Entergy, the local utility, has proposed 1.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation near the Meta site and over 2 gigawatts of new natural gas in total, with another plant in the southern part of the state to help balance the addition of significant new load. In December, when the data center was announced, Meta said that it planned to “bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid.” Entergy did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment on its plans for the Hyperion project.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg wrote.