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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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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.