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“She was traumatized by the flood and wasn’t getting a nutrient-rich diet for several weeks.”
Ashwini Khandekar was in her first few months of pregnancy when the flood came. This was July 2021, the peak of the annual monsoon season, when a downpour destroyed more than 300 houses in Ganeshwadi, a village 400 kilometers south of Mumbai in India’s Maharashtra state. Authorities instructed Khandekar and her husband to evacuate, she told me, “but I couldn’t leave my house because all the evacuation centers were full. I had nowhere to go.” Though in the end her home was spared, for the next 15 days, Khandekar lived in constant fear, praying until the waters finally abated.
Four months later, Khandekar went to the doctor for a prenatal checkup. Her child, she learned, showed signs of anencephaly, a condition in which the fetal brain and skull fail to develop normally. Usually, babies born with anencephaly die within a few hours, and most pregnancies end in miscarriage. To cross-check the doctor’s claims, Khandekar visited eight more hospitals. Everyone confirmed the same. “I was heartbroken,” she said.
When a community health-care worker, Kavita Magdum, examined Khandekar’s medical records, she found that Khandekar had suffered from a severe deficiency of iron and folic acid, a known risk factor for anencephaly. This, in turn, pointed back to the storm. “She was traumatized by the flood and wasn’t getting a nutrient-rich diet for several weeks,” Magdum told me. The roads in and out of the village were closed for 20 days, cutting off food supplies. During this time, she ate only cooked rice and wheat flatbread. Sometimes she didn’t eat at all.
By the end of December, a month after she learned of her child’s condition, Khandekar had lost the pregnancy. She was 20 years old at the time.
Though tragic, stories like Khandekar’s are not rare. A research paper published in Nature this year found that from 2010 to 2020, maternal exposure to floods led to an average of 107,888 lost pregnancies per year in low- and middle-income countries, with South Asia reporting the most cases. Lack of access to nutrient-rich foods was one of the causes the researchers identified, along with physical and mental stress, disease, and lack of housing and safe childbirth services.
This year’s monsoon season will begin in June and stretch through September. The Indian Government has forecast above-average rainfall this year, at 106% of the long-term average. In the first two decades of this century, floods impacted 1.5 billion people in Asia, accounting for 93% of the globally affected population. Last year, over 80% of hydrometeorological disasters in Asia were floods and storms.
About 89% of the world’s flood-exposed population resides in low- and middle-income countries that lack adequate health-care facilities. India alone has more than 378 million women of childbearing age, and has experienced an average of 17 yearly flood events in the past two decades. Floods affected more than 218 million people in India from 2015 to 2020, and destroyed crops on nearly 35 million hectares of farmland, leading to rampant food insecurity. During this time, stillbirths in India increased 28.6%.
For women and their children, the risk begins even before a pregnancy occurs. Simran Jamadar was also 20 years old and living in Maharashtra’s tiny Kanwad village when the floods arrived in 2021. “The water was at least four feet in our house at 5 p.m.,” said Jamadar, forcing her to evacuate. Walking through muddy water with her family to the evacuation center 10 kilometers away, she had to tread carefully lest she disturb an unseen snake. After she reached her destination, she spent 12 days crammed in with 6,000 people from 15 villages. Overstressed and underslept, Jamadar found it difficult to eat. On top of everything else, the experience brought up painful memories from just over a year before, when another flood had wiped out her home, along with all its furniture, crucial papers, and six months of food supplies.
Five months later, still grappling with the trauma of the flood, Jamadar became pregnant. At about the seven-month mark, she experienced a sudden and unbearable stomachache and vomited. Sonography reports showed that she had developed an incompetent cervix — a weakened womb unable to hold a baby. Six hours later, Jamadar gave birth. The child was born and “passed away within a day,” Anita Kamble, a community health-care worker from Jamadar’s village, told me.
Kamble spoke to more than 30 community health-care workers from the flood-affected villages and found a similar pattern of stillbirths associated with stress — even when that stress began before the women became pregnant. This squares with other findings from the Nature study, which showed a significant association between pregnancy loss and exposure to floods even six months before conception. A controlled study of 340 women from Sweden who’d been pregnant in the same year found that 54% of those who experienced stress during pregnancy such as depression or anxiety gave birth prematurely.
With flooding, disruptions and their attending stressors can last for months, and sometimes even years. “The trauma was visible on her face,” Kamble said of Jamadar.
“The most important buffer for stressed pregnant women is social support,” Gloria Giarratano, a professor of nursing at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, told me. That includes resources to help cope with psychiatric stressors. Giarratano was the lead author of a study of women in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, which found that women without a network of trusted people to rely on were the most likely to become depressed while pregnant. The more support they have, Giarratano told me, the more that risk decreases.
India, however, for its population of 1.3 billion people, has just 9,000 psychiatrists and 1,000 psychologists. In the face of this challenge, community health-care workers like Magdum and Kamble have devised ad hoc solutions.
What India lacks in licensed medical practitioners, it somewhat makes up for in community-based health programs. India has over a million all-women community health-care workers, known as Accredited Social Health Activists, or ASHAs, who make public health care accessible. Appointed for every 1,000 people from the same village, they are responsible for at least 70 health-care tasks, including providing ante- and postnatal care and ensuring that infants and children are vaccinated on time. In the past seven years, they have gone beyond their duty to help pregnant women recover from the trauma caused by floods and other climate disasters.
After Jamadar lost her baby, for instance, Kamble began visiting her every three to four days, asking about her problems and listening patiently to the answers, sometimes for several hours. Often, Jamadar spoke of her fear of floods. Kamble started talking to more women and found that they all needed someone to share their frustration and fears with. “In several villages, even today, women aren’t allowed to talk about their stress,” Kamble told me.
She started organizing informal discussions in the community where women including Jamadar could be free to share their trauma — and where Kamble could monitor their stress levels and nutrition. “I knew I wasn’t alone in this, and listening to others gave me confidence that we could recover together,” Jamadar told me.
In April 2024, Jamadar gave birth to a child, Aiza, without complications. “From the start, we did everything right and made sure Jamadar wasn’t stressed,” Kamble told me proudly.
In addition to listening, Kamble also started making a list of where pregnant women could be evacuated safely in case of another flood. She would then check if these places had essential facilities like access to good-quality drinking water and sanitation. ASHAs also started pre-arranging private vehicle transport for pregnant women in case of emergency.
Through lengthy and careful community engagement, the ASHAs have started to compile lists of women they expect to become pregnant well before they actually are. “Three months before someone decides to conceive, we start providing them with iron and folic acid tablets,” Magdum told me. This has helped her reduce the anemia rate in her village by 50%. “Earlier, people didn’t take it seriously, but now everyone inquires beforehand about the tablets,” she said.
None of this has been easy, especially because many ASHAs themselves are victims of recurring floods and have faced tremendous personal losses. The state doesn’t consider them full-time workers, and pays them only an honorarium based on the number of tasks completed. In India’s wealthiest state, Maharashtra, the average income is just 4,000 to 7,000 Indian Rupees, or $48 to $83, per month, and often the payments are delayed. As a result, many ASHAs are forced to double up as farmworkers to make ends meet.
Despite the challenges, ASHAs keep coming up with solutions. “If we stop working insuch stressful times, how will the health-care system survive?” asked Kamble, who handles around 20 pregnancy cases every year and has counseled over 100 pregnant women since 2017. Since ASHAs are unionized, they often meet to discuss best practices and share their experiences. Today, thousands of ASHAs across India are helping women recover emotionally from the trauma caused by climate change.
“ASHA means hope in several Indian languages,” Kamble said, “and I am proud to bring a smile and hope to several women.”
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The Environmental Protection Agency just unveiled its argument against regulating greenhouse emissions from power plants.
In federal policymaking, the weight of the law can rest on a single word. When it comes to reducing planet-warming emissions from the power sector, that word is “significantly.” The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate any stationary source of emissions that “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
The EPA has considered power plants a significant source of dangerous greenhouse gases since 2015. But today, Trump’s EPA said, actually, never mind.
A proposed rule published in the Federal Register on Wednesday argues that U.S. fossil fuel-fired power plants make up “a small and decreasing part of global emissions” and therefore are not significant, and do not require regulation under the law. The rule would repeal all greenhouse gas emission standards for new and existing power plants — both the standards the Biden administration finalized last year, which have been tied up in court, as well as the standards that preceded them, which were enacted by Obama in 2015.
In a separate proposal, the EPA also took steps to repeal limits on mercury and hazardous air pollutants from coal plants that were enacted last year, reverting the standard back to one set in 2012.
The argument that U.S. power plants make up a small sliver of global emissions and thus aren’t worth addressing is like having “a five-alarm fire that could be put out if you send out all the trucks, and you don’t send any of the trucks because no one truck could put the fire out by itself,” David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “We just think that is a wacky reversal and a wacky interpretation of the Clean Air Act.”
When you add up every plug, power button, and light switch across the country, electricity usage produces 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year. Over the past 30 years, American power plants have contributed about 5% of the total climate pollution spewed into the atmosphere worldwide.
In the global context, that may sound small. But in a recent report titled “The Scale of Significance," New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that if U.S. power plants were a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter in the world, behind China, the European Union, India, Russia, and the remainder of U.S. emissions. The report also notes that U.S. actions on emissions make other countries more likely to follow, due to technological spillovers that reduce the cost of decarbonization globally.
In addition to the significance finding, the EPA gave two other reasons for repealing the power plant rules. It argued that “cost-effective control measures are not reasonably available,” meaning there’s no economic way to reduce emissions at the source. It also said the new administration’s priority “is to promote the public health or welfare through energy dominance and independence secured by using fossil fuels to generate power.”
The first argument is an attempt to say that Biden’s standards flouted the law. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could not simply tell states to reduce emissions from the power sector, which is what the Obama administration had initially tried to do. Instead, the agency would have to develop standards that could be applied on a plant-by-plant basis — so long as those rules were “cost-reasonable” and “adequately demonstrated.”
To comply with that ruling, Biden’s EPA based its standards on the potential to install carbon capture technology that can reduce flue gas emissions by 90%. The regulations would have required existing coal plants to install carbon capture by 2039, or else shut down. (To the chagrin of many energy system observers, the administration chose not to apply limits to existing gas-fired power plants.) But while fossil fuel companies and utilities had, in the past, asserted that carbon capture was viable, they deemed the standards impossible to meet.
Trump’s EPA is now agreeing. “In 2024,” Zeldin said on Wednesday, “rules were enacted seeking to suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment, to make all sorts of industries including coal and more disappear, regulate them out of existence.”
When Trump moved to overturn Obama’s power plant regulations during his first term, his EPA did not contest the significance of the sector’s emissions, and simply enacted a weaker standard. A week before he left office, the agency also finalized a rule that set the threshold for “significance” at 3% of U.S. emissions — which exempted major polluters like refineries, but still applied to power plants.
This time, Trump has a new apparent game plan: Strip the Clean Air Act of its jurisdiction over greenhouse gases altogether. Today’s action was the first step; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said the agency will similarly “reconsider” emissions rules for cars and oil and gas drilling. But the cornerstone of the plan is to reverse what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — the 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases present a threat to public health and welfare, and therefore are one of the pollutants EPA must address under the Clean Air Act.
“The Trump administration is trying to say, don’t worry about the Clean Air Act. It will never apply, so you can go back to your old ways,” said Doniger. But if the argument that power plant emissions are insignificant is a stretch, appraising greenhouse gas emissions as benign is inconceivable, he said. “The endangerment finding was based, in 2009, on a Denali-sized mountain of evidence. Since then, it’s grown to Everest-size, so there’s no way that they would be able to put together a rational record saying the science is wrong.”
These highly technical questions of whether emissions are “significant” or whether carbon capture is “adequately demonstrated” could soon be determined by a group of people who lack both the expertise to answer them and the inclination to wade through thousands of pages of atmospheric science and chemical engineering documents: judges.
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned a long-held precedent known as Chevron deference. That ruling means that the courts are no longer required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of statute — judges must make their own determinations of whether agencies are following the intent of the law.
When environmental groups begin challenging the EPA’s repeals in court, judges are “going to be bombarded with the need to make these highly technical, nuanced decisions,” Michael Wara, a lawyer and scholar focused on climate and energy policy at Stanford University, told me. He said the reason Chevron deference was established in the first place is that judges didn’t want to be making engineering decisions about power plants. “They felt extremely uncomfortable having to make these calls.”
The conservative Supreme Court overturned the precedent because of a sense that political decisions were being dressed up in scientific reasoning. But Wara doesn’t think the courts are going to like being put back into the role of weighing technical minutia and making engineering decisions.
“It’s a past that the courts didn’t like and they tried to engineer a way out of via the Chevron doctrine,” he said. “I would expect that we’re going to see a drift back toward a doctrine that looks a little bit more Chevron-like, maybe less deference to agencies. But it’s hard to predict in the current environment what’s going to happen.”
Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.