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An interview with journalist and academic Christina Gerhardt, who maps the shifting geographies of islands in her new book Sea Change.
The scattered Pacific islands of Kiribati are famously at the frontlines of climate change.
Two of the nation’s islands disappeared underwater as early as 1999, and in the years since Kiribati’s residents have had to grapple with the likelihood that more will meet the same fate by mid-century. Already, one in seven moves there are due to the encroaching seas.
In an attempt to provide options, in 2012, the president of Kiribati bought 6,000 acres of land on Fiji, as an alternate home for his people. But Fiji itself — larger, more mountainous, but still vulnerable — also faces the need to relocate its own communities. As the world heats up, islanders have had to reorient their lives around fraught decisions and constant change.
Kiribati is just one of the 49 islands (or collections of islands) that environmental journalist and academic Christina Gerhardt details in her book, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, out this month from University of California Press. Working with cartographer Molly Roy, Gerhardt paints portraits of what is at stake as each island watches the seas creep gradually higher, from decimated coral reefs to inundated farms.
Sea level rise is not just about a slowly moving line on a map, said Gerhardt when we spoke about the book. It is a dynamic phenomenon that changes everything from coastal erosion to storm surge, high winds to flooding.
“A livable life isn't about whether or not one is underwater,” Gerhardt said.
There’s a huge range in the population and political power of the islands highlighted, spanning Singapore to Pine Island in the Antarctic Ocean. But Sea Change is woven together by what each island has in common: A relationship to sea level rise that is more urgent and more nuanced than those of us on the continents often appreciate.
What follows is the rest of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
There's no shortage of scientific data outlining the latest numbers with regard to sea level rise. And while that data is absolutely vital, my approach was to weave the science in with these other components.
What I'm really bringing to the forefront in Sea Change is an atlas that depicts the histories and the cultures, and the languages, and the flora, and the fauna of islands. How people will connect with and appreciate islands and islanders is through their history and cultures. You have to provide something to engage with, and that’s where the work of the environmental humanities is really important.
Every single island has a different cluster of issues. So for every island, I gave our cartographer, Molly Roy, different elements to focus on. For one island, it might be the fact that what’s imperiled by sea level rise is agriculture: If you have too much salt water in soil, the plants can’t take up the water they need to survive. For another, I had her focus on sea turtle nesting grounds, which can be inundated or destroyed by sea level rise.
Ultimately, sea level rise should not be thought of as a line, but rather as a zone of inundation. The Marshall Islands, for example, are on average six and a half feet above sea level, and three feet of sea level rise is expected by the end of the century. You may think “Oh, well, that’s not going to be an issue then.” But a livable life isn't about whether or not one is underwater. It's whether or not that home has been inundated enough that it's soggy and moldy and just not inhabitable anymore.
No, this was a huge challenge when we started. The inequities that frontline communities suffer also play out in the resources that are allocated for mapping.
We started the map of the East and the West Coasts of North America, from Deal Island in the Chesapeake Bay to islands off the western coast of Alaska. We have no problem finding data for these islands.
And then we moved into the Pacific. The islands that we had the easiest time getting data for are ones that have U.S. military bases on them, like Guam or the Marshall Islands. But when we were talking about independent nations that don't have this kind of relationship to the U.S., we had a really hard time finding the data. To track down this data I would contact ministers of environment, and other government agencies, and they often didn't have it themselves.
First of all, I have some issues with the tendency to frame islands as harbingers of what awaits people who are continental land dwellers. I think the situation facing islands should, in and of itself with no other qualifications, be of concern. Full-stop.
That said, we also have to think about the audience and how to cast a wide net and share stories from one geographic region with people who are predominantly of another geographic region, which happens to be the hegemonic one. It was really important to also underscore that this is not a situation that remains relevant only to people who are living on islands. Almost half of the U.S. population, about 40 percent, live in coastal states and cities. That's about 130 million people in the US that are going to be impacted. And so I think this is something that we really need to grapple with.
The question of how to get movement on a global stage is a really important one. One of the successes coming out of the UN meeting last year was the push for the establishment of a loss and damage fund. It basically lays the blame of creating the climate crisis squarely at the feet of nations in the Global North, and asks them to compensate frontline nations in the Global South for the damages that have been created. The details have yet to be worked out, but it took 30 years to get to that point. Tina Stege, who was climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, was one of the tenacious leaders who really worked intensely to get this across the finish lines.
The UN gets criticized all the time because it’s so slow — which is true — and because even if there is an agreement that comes out of the UN, it’s not legally binding — also true. But I think the UN is a really important vehicle because it’s the one forum in which 198 nations get together and nations in the Global North do have to listen to these speeches from members of nations in the Global South. Before the latter weighs in, they typically describe the situation in their home countries. And so if you go to the UN, you have a really visceral sense of what’s going on around the world — last year was the floods in Pakistan, and then it was the drought in the Horn of Africa. That sharing between nations happens every year, but I don’t see coverage of these issues. The papers don’t really seem motivated.
The first kind of island in Sea Change is low-lying islands or atolls — often just a couple of feet high, a couple yards across, a couple of miles long — which are the ones that are most at risk. And then there are the high islands, also known as volcanic islands, which often still have active volcanoes. Obviously, the atolls are the ones that are most at-risk, but I decided to include volcanic islands as well, which initially puzzled my cartographer and editor: “These aren’t going to be underwater,” they said. That’s right, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t at risk. On those islands, most people and infrastructure are clustered around the coastline, so they’re going to be at-risk from sea level rise.
In terms of solutions, I talk a lot about soft engineering, or nature-based solutions. This would include the preservation and restoration of coral and oyster reef, and of mangroves and wetlands. Coral reefs and oyster reefs buffer waves when they come toward the island, which is important because wave action is responsible for eroding the coastline. Mangroves also provide a buffer, as one of the only trees that can deal with that high salinity of soil. They also provide a really important marine habitat, where little tiny fish swim around their roots and big predator fish can’t get in. A lot of these things have been ripped from the coastlines to set up urban environments, like harbors or airports.
There’s also hard-engineering, like the great U they’re putting around the tip of Manhattan, or the sea walls in Venice. These are so expensive, and often by the time they’re in place sea level rise has increased to yet another level where they’re not enough to do the work they were originally intended to do.
When I was teaching at Princeton, my students were often so despondent because of all of the catastrophes and disasters unfolding. And I always said it's important to just pick your area and do what you can. You don’t need to solve every issue, everywhere. Just pick your thing. Some people love working in their communities; some people like working more at the international level; some people really like engaging with some of the sources of the catastrophe (meaning the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who are supportive of subsidies for fossil fuels); some people work on the shift to renewables, and consider becoming electricians. There’s no shortage of action points to pick.
I think the really important message for people who are in the Global North that I would love to see connected to Sea Change is that we are the source of the emissions. So even as we go about our busy lives, there are things we can do large and small to actually tip the scales and have a direct impact on people who are in frontline communities. And those inequities are not just global, they're also within our own nation. But action is better than inaction. And of course systemic change is more important than individual change, but I don't want to discount the latter.
Exactly.
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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.