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If trees are the lungs of the Earth, then it’s reasonable to wonder how the plants of the Northeastern United States are faring during this week’s record-breaking wildfire smoke event. Certainly, we oxygen-gulping inhabitants of their sister kingdom, Animalia, have seen better days: Wildfire smoke contains tiny particles known as PM2.5 that penetrate deep into our lungs, enter our bloodstreams, and cause irritation and inflammation while exacerbating life-threatening conditions and doing who-knows-what-else. For living beings with the evolutionary luxury of both bipedal mobility and frontal cortexes capable of inventing the air purifier, it is wise, if at all possible, to get out of the smoke and stay out.
Meanwhile, trees, home gardens, and the precious Finger Lakes vineyards had to stand and bear an Air Quality Index that topped 400 in places. So … are the plants okay?
Maybe you’ve heard of “smoke taint,” an effect that happens when the highly permeable skin of a grape absorbs wildfire smoke, causing the resulting wine to taste “sooty and dead.” Smoke taint has been a serious problem for vignerons in Washington and California as wildfire seasons have gotten worse. The good news is, in this particular case, it’s still early enough in the growing season that New York’s wine industry — the third largest in the nation — likely dodged a bullet.
“Even if it’s a fairly severe [smoke] exposure, the real risk starts after the bloom is finished and the berries start to form,” Dr. Tom Collins, an assistant professor of wine and grape chemistry at Washington State University, told me. “So if you have smoke events that occur after that time, then the risk goes up significantly.” But since New York grapevines are still pre-bloom, “they probably are not going to be hurt by this.”
Kyle Anne Pallischeck, the executive director of the Finger Lakes Wine Association, confirmed that “from conversations I’ve had, there isn’t much concern at this point” about the Canadian smoke impacting the season’s harvest. Phew.
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Smoke is made up of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter, the latter of which wreaks havoc on animal respiratory systems — which plants luckily don’t have. More importantly, plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and there’s some evidence that suggests wildfire smoke as a result might increase plant productivity.
Additionally, the same researchers found that smoke potentially allows plants to use sunlight more efficiently since the smoke diffuses light: “Whereas direct sunlight might fall mainly on upper foliage, leaving the rest of a plant in shade, diffuse light can reach a greater number of photosynthesizing leaves throughout the vegetation canopy,” Eos explains. (Other research indicates photosynthesis might drop because of reduced light intensity, though this likely only matters if it happens for a prolonged period of time in the window where a crop is ripening).
Smoke, however, is much worse for plants when it’s from a nearby source since the ash can clog stomatal pores, effectively choking the plant. But while the smoke event in the East still “looks awful [and] it still smells awful, it’s not going to have as big an impact on local agriculture,” Collins said, because the fires are hundreds of miles away. By the time the smoke reaches most of the U.S., “a lot of the things that are most problematic to plants have begun to fall out or are reacted in the atmosphere into things that are less impactful.”
You worked hard to cultivate your dramatic little strawberry plant and you should get to enjoy your harvest, darn it! But maybe watching the plant endure all that yellow air has ruined your appetite.
You don’t have to hold back, though. Smoke likely won’t have penetrated deep into the plant and washing it off well is probably the biggest precaution you’ll need to take before you enjoy it. Of course, use your best judgment: If your plant is covered in a fine layer of ash, you don’t want to put it in your mouth (“When it doubt, throw it out,” the Oregon State University concurs).
You can also be extra safe by soaking fruits and veggies in a white vinegar solution at a ratio of one teaspoon of vinegar to three cups of water.
Farm workers are one of the highest-risk groups for short- and long-term health effects from wildfires due to their strenuous outdoor labor that can’t often be put off. But if you have the ability to opt out of tending to your garden for a few days when the AQI is this bad, then yes, absolutely opt out.
Read more about the wildfire smoke engulfing the eastern United States:
Why Are the Canadian Wildfires So Bad This Year?
How to Stay Safe from Wildfire Smoke Indoors
Wildfire Smoke Is a Wheezy Throwback for New York City
Wednesday Was the Worst Day for Wildfire Pollution in U.S. History
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.