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Midwesterners lived through the Dust Bowl. Why would climate change be any different?
When Canadian wildfire smoke descended on my hometown in Indiana this summer, I was distraught. I live in London now, but much of my family remains in the Midwest, and as an orange haze blanketed the landscape and the air quality plummeted, I worried about their health. “Smoke everywhere!” my dad texted, alongside a photo of the fields near my childhood home, shrouded in smog. “Guess I better stay inside when I get home.”
The effects of climate change will vary from region to region, but everyone’s life will be affected in some way, eventually. Even though I know this to be true, I had selfishly and naively hoped that the Midwest would be insulated from the worst of it. I fretted about my friends on the East Coast and my mom in California. But for my relatives in the middle of the country, I was never that worried.
And it seems I’m not alone. A recent Heatmap News poll found that, compared to people in the South, Northeast, and West, Midwesterners were consistently blasé about climate change. The poll tried presenting this question in different ways: Do you worry about what climate change means for you personally? Do you worry that extreme weather events will happen in your area more frequently? Do you worry about what climate change means for your kids? Over and over, Midwesterners registered the lowest level of alarm.
On the topics of wildfires, drought, flooding, and extreme heat, the Midwest has the highest share of respondents who say they are not concerned. Fifty-two percent of Midwesterners say climate change poses little or no risk to their region — no other region comes anywhere near that level of confidence in their own safety. In fact, all other parts of the country think the Midwest is at greater risk from a planet on fire than Midwesterners themselves do.
It would be easy to dismiss this phenomenon as politically fueled, but that would be too simple. It’s true that Pew surveys show the majority of voters in the Midwest lean conservative, and there’s no doubt Republicans are historically less likely to believe that climate change is a serious problem. But in Heatmap’s polling, at least, respondents in the Midwest largely identified as moderates and independents. Plus, the poll doesn’t show that Midwesterners doubt climate change is real. They just don’t think it affects them all that much.
And in some respects, they’re right. By virtue of its location, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles from the flood-prone coasts and the fire-prone regions to the south and west, the Midwest has so far been spared some of the scariest, most extreme weather events of recent years. No hurricanes decimating neighborhoods. No major wildfires scorching the landscape.
“We up to now haven’t suffered the loss and damage a lot of coastal or mountain areas have,” said Dr. Gabriel Filippelli, professor of Earth sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and executive director of the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute. But climate change is happening here. It’s just happening more slowly.
Take flooding, for instance. While warming oceans and sea level rise are imminent threats to America’s coasts, climate change is gradually making extreme precipitation more likely in the Midwest. “Our 100-year floods are no longer 100-year floods,” said Filippelli. “Now they happen every 10 to 15 years.” Last year heavy rain brought devastating deluges to states including Illinois and Missouri; 2019 was the Midwest’s wettest calendar year since 1895, causing at least $6.2 billion in damage.
Dangerous heat and “flash droughts,” extremely dry periods that come on quickly and with little warning, are also creeping risks. Research from the nonprofit First Street Foundation shows the Midwest is part of a growing “extreme heat belt” that will, over the next 30 years, experience more days when the heat index – what the temperature feels like to the human body, factoring in humidity – hits 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Heat like that can kill not only humans, but also farm animals and crops. The Natural Resources Defense Council says extreme heat and drought could wilt crops across “America’s Breadbasket,” “potentially causing ripples to food supplies across the world.”
Why aren’t Midwestern farmers sounding the alarm, then? Because many “believe that this is a cycle that we’re going to get through,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and 2023 recipient of the Climate Breakthrough Award for her work in blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline. “They’ve been through difficult times, whether it’s the Dust Bowl or the Depression or World Wars, and those generational lines are still threaded through families,” Kleeb said. “There’s a huge value in hard work in rural communities, and in the idea that as a community, we’re going to get through it together. I think that’s how they view climate change.”
In other words, Midwestern farming families are used to doing the Very American Thing of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and getting on with it. The federal government’s Crop Insurance program makes it easier to keep on believing in the power of pure gumption — the government pays if crops fail due to “ natural causes,” which means that rarely do farmers feel the full effect of climate change on their pocketbooks.
There are plenty of other effects of climate change the federal government won’t help with — a rise in tick- and mosquito-borne illnesses, for one. The federal government’s most recent National Climate Assessment projects that the Ohio Valley could see more than 200 cases of West Nile virus every year by 2050. Lyme disease is already endemic to the region.
There’s also the secondary risk of an influx of climate migrants seeking safety, which will affect not just rural and industrial communities but also population centers like Minneapolis and Kansas City. “It’s anecdotal at best,” said Filippelli, “but we have evidence there are people leaving the coasts because of fire danger as well as the water issues.” These people may come not just from the U.S., but also around the world.
And then there’s that wildfire smoke. The National Climate Assessment predicts that drifting haze will become a regular nuisance in the Midwest. Hoosiers were annoyed by the smoke this year, Filippelli said, but “they didn’t always link it to climate change.” That comes across in the polling: Sixty-three percent of Midwestern respondents said — in November of this year, a few months after their summer of smoke — that their areas have not been affected by climate change.
To Kleeb, bridging this disconnect is the project. Messaging matters, and climate advocates and policymakers would do well to know their audience. Extolling veganism or focusing on the environmental hazards of methane produced by cow burps probably isn’t going to land well with farmers and ranchers.
“Rural folks get very defensive because you’re essentially blaming their grandpa, their father, their husband or wife who is currently farming and, from their perspective, providing food not only for America, but for the world — and you’re saying they’re bad,” Kleeb said. “When people say they don’t believe in climate change, it’s because they feel they’re being blamed for something they’re not responsible for.”
Instead, Kleeb wants to see more emphasis put on how rural Midwesterners can be part of the solutions, from introducing regenerative farming to providing the land needed to build out renewable energy infrastructure. “If anything, they know the land,” Kleeb says. “They know every hill, every blade of grass. They know where it floods when they get heavy rains. So really acknowledging that local knowledge in asking them to be partners at the table is absolutely critical.”
One thing many don’t appreciate about the Midwest is how much sky there is — any weather that’s on its way you can see from miles out. The smoke hovered over my hometown for a few days. During that time, I hardly slept. I kept checking the weather obsessively, hoping for some sign of relief. I even sent my dad links to articles about how to build your own air purifier. Finally, on the third day, he texted me an update: A strong weather front was approaching Indiana from the west, expected to sweep away the wildfire smoke as it passed over the state.
“Rain!” the text read. “Beautiful rain!”
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The American Clean Power Association wrote to its members about federal guidance that has been “widely variable and changing quickly.”
Chaos within the Trump administration has all but paralyzed environmental permitting decisions on solar and wind projects in crucial government offices, including sign-offs needed for projects on private lands.
According to an internal memo issued by the American Clean Power Association, the renewables trade association that represents the largest U.S. solar and wind developers, Trump’s Day One executive order putting a 60-day freeze on final decisions for renewable energy projects on federal lands has also ground key pre-decisional work in government offices responsible for wetlands and species protection to a halt. Renewables developers and their representatives in Washington have pressed the government for answers, yet received inconsistent information on its approach to renewables permitting that varies between lower level regional offices.
In other words, despite years of the Republican Party inching slowly toward “all of the above” energy and climate rhetoric that seemed to leave room for renewables, solar and wind developers have so far found themselves at times shut out of the second Trump administration.
ACP’s memo, which is dated February 3 and was sent to its members, states that companies are facing major challenges getting specific sign-offs and guidance from the Army Corps of Engineers, which handles wetlands permits, as well as the Fish and Wildlife Service, our nation’s primary office for endangered species and migratory bird regulation.
Federal environmental protection laws require that large construction projects — even those on state and private lands — seek direction from these agencies before building can commence. Wetlands permitting has long been the job of the Army Corps, which determines whether areas dense with water are federally protected under the Clean Water Act. Wetlands have historically been a vector for opponents of large pipelines and mines, as such areas are often co-located with sensitive ecosystems that activists want to preserve.
Fish and Wildlife, meanwhile, often must weigh in on development far from federal acreage because, according to the agency, two-thirds of federally listed species have at least some habitat on private land. FWS also handles the conservation of bird species that migrate between the U.S. and Canada, which are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Any changes to federal bird consultation could impact wind developers because turbine blades can kill birds.
Now, apparently, all those important decision-makers are getting harder to read — or even reach. Army Corps district activity has become “widely variable” and is “changing quickly,” per the memo, with at least two districts indicating that for “wind or solar projects” they “will not be issuing any JDs,” meaning jurisdictional determinations for federally protected wetlands — that is, they won’t even say whether federal wetlands are present at a construction site or not. According to the Army Corps, receiving a JD is optional, but it is nevertheless an essential tool for developers trying to avoid future legal problems in the permitting process.
In addition, emails from staff in FWS’ migratory birds protection office now apparently include a “boilerplate notice” that says the office “is unable to communicate with wind facilities regarding permitting at this time.”
Usually, renewables developers just get a simple go-ahead from the government saying that they don’t have wetlands or bird nests present and that therefore work can begin. Or maybe they do have one of those features at the construction site, so guardrails need to be put in place. Either way, this is supposed to be routine stuff unless a project is controversial, like the Keystone XL pipeline or Pebble Mine in Alaska.
It’s not immediately clear how solar and wind developers move forward in this situation if they are building in areas where wetlands or protected species even may be present. Violating wetlands and species protection laws carries legal penalties, and with the Trump administration arranging itself in such an openly hostile fashion against renewables developers, it’s probably not a good idea to break those laws.
Unfortunately for industry, the ACP memo describes a confusing state of affairs. “Written guidance from ACOE [Army Corps of Engineers] to industry has been expected but members have not seen it yet. Actions and communications from regional districts appear to be guided by internal ACOE emails,” the document states. Staffing within the Army Corps is “uncertain” due to questions over whether money from the Inflation Reduction Act — which provided funds to hire permitting personnel — will be “available to continue funding staff positions in some offices,” or whether permitting staff will take the administration’s voluntary resignation offer, which the memo claims “is apparently still actively being pushed on staff with emails.”
Meanwhile, at Fish and Wildlife, ACP’s members “have indicated some staff are still taking phone calls and responding to emails to answer questions, while others are not.”
As with a lot happening in the early era of Trump 2.0, much of the permitting mess is still unclear. We don’t know who is behind these difficulties because there have been no public policy or guidance changes from the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife. Trump did order agencies to stop issuing “new or renewed approvals” for wind projects shortly after entering office, but the ACP memo describes something altogether different: agency staff potentially refusing to declare whether an approval is even necessary to build on state or private lands.
Another example of how confusing this is? Interior had issued a 60-day pause on final decisions for solar projects, but the Army Corps isn’t under Interior’s control — it’s part of the Defense Department.
It’s also unclear if the contagion of permitting confusion has spread to other agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, which we previously reported must regularly weigh in on wind turbines for aviation safety purposes. As I reported before Inauguration Day, anti-wind activists urged the Trump administration to essentially weaponize environmental laws against wind energy projects.
ACP didn’t respond to a request for comment. I also reached out to the Army Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service, so I’ll let you know if and when I hear back from any of them.
It took the market about a week to catch up to the fact that the Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek had released an open-source AI model that rivaled those from prominent U.S. companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic — and that, most importantly, it had managed to do so much more cheaply and efficiently than its domestic competitors. The news cratered not only tech stocks such as Nvidia, but energy stocks, as well, leading to assumptions that investors thought more-energy efficient AI would reduce energy demand in the sector overall.
But will it really? While some in climate world assumed the same and celebrated the seemingly good news, many venture capitalists, AI propenents, and analysts quickly arrived at essentially the opposite conclusion — that cheaper AI will only lead to greater demand for AI. The resulting unfettered proliferation of the technology across a wide array of industries could thus negate the energy efficiency gains, ultimately leading to a substantial net increase in data center power demand overall.
“With cost destruction comes proliferation,” Susan Su, a climate investor at the venture capital firm Toba Capital, told me. “Plus the fact that it’s open source, I think, is a really, really big deal. It puts the power to expand and to deploy and to proliferate into billions of hands.”
If you’ve seen lots of chitchat about Jevons paradox of late, that’s basically what this line of thinking boils down to. After Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella responded to DeepSeek mania by posting the Wikipedia page for this 19th century economic theory on X, many (myself included) got a quick crash course on its origins. The idea is that as technical efficiencies of the Victorian era made burning coal cheaper, demand for — and thus consumption of — coal actually increased.
While this is a distinct possibility in the AI space, it’s by no means a guarantee. “This is very much, I think, an open question,“ energy expert Nat Bullard told me, with regards to whether DeepSeek-type models will spur a reduction or increase in energy demand. “I sort of lean in both directions at once.” Formerly the chief content officer at BloombergNEF and current co-founder of the AI startup Halcyon, a search and information platform for energy professionals, Bullard is personally excited for the greater efficiencies and optionality that new AI models can bring to his business.
But he warns that just because DeepSeek was cheap to train — the company claims it cost about $5.5 million, while domestic models cost hundreds of millions or even billions — doesn’t mean that it’s cheap or energy-efficient to operate. “Training more efficiently does not necessarily mean that you can run it that much more efficiently,” Bullard told me. When a large language model answers a question or provides any type of output, it’s said to be making an “inference.” And as Bullard explains, “That may mean, as we move into an era of more and more inference and not just training, then the [energy] impacts could be rather muted.”
DeepSeek-R1, the name for the model that caused the investor freakout, is also a newer type of LLM that uses more energy in general. Up until literally a few days ago, when OpenAI released o3-mini for free, most casual users were probably interacting with so-called “pretrained” AI models. Fed on gobs of internet text, these LLMs spit out answers based primarily on prediction and pattern recognition. DeepSeek released a model like this, called V3, in September. But last year, more advanced “reasoning” models, which can “think,” in some sense, started blowing up. These models — which include o3-mini, the latest version of Anthropic’s Claude, and the now infamous DeepSeek-R1 — have the ability to try out different strategies to arrive at the correct answer, recognize their mistakes, and improve their outputs, allowing for significant advancements in areas such as math and coding.
But all that artificial reasoning eats up a lot of energy. As Sasha Luccioni, the AI and climate lead at Hugging Face, which makes an open-source platform for AI projects, wrote on LinkedIn, “To set things clear about DeepSeek + sustainability: (it seems that) training is much shorter/cheaper/more efficient than traditional LLMs, *but* inference is longer/more expensive/less efficient because of the chain of thought aspect.” Chain of thought refers to the reasoning process these newer models undertake. Luccioni wrote that she’s currently working to evaluate the energy efficiency of both the DeepSeek V3 and R1 models.
Another factor that could influence energy demand is how fast domestic companies respond to the DeepSeek breakthrough with their own new and improved models. Amy Francetic, co-founder at Buoyant Ventures, doesn’t think we’ll have to wait long. “One effect of DeepSeek is that it will highly motivate all of the large LLMs in the U.S. to go faster,” she told me. And because a lot of the big players are fundamentally constrained by energy availability, she’s crossing her fingers that this means they’ll work smarter, not harder. “Hopefully it causes them to find these similar efficiencies rather than just, you know, pouring more gasoline into a less fuel-efficient vehicle.”
In her recent Substack post, Su described three possible futures when it comes to AI’s role in the clean energy transition. The ideal is that AI demand scales slowly enough that nuclear and renewables scale with it. The least hopeful is that immediate, exponential growth in AI demand leads to a similar expansion of fossil fuels, locking in new dirty infrastructure for decades. “I think that's already been happening,” Su told me. And then there’s the techno-optimist scenario, linked to figures like Sam Altman, which Su doesn’t put much stock in — that AI “drives the energy revolution” by helping to create new energy technologies and efficiencies that more than offset the attendant increase in energy demand.
Which scenario predominates could also depend upon whether greater efficiencies, combined with the adoption of AI by smaller, more shallow-pocketed companies, leads to a change in the scale of data centers. “There’s going to be a lot more people using AI. So maybe that means we don’t need these huge, gigawatt data centers. Maybe we need a lot more smaller, megawatt-size data centers,” Laura Katzman, a principal at Buoyant Ventures, told me. Katzman has conducted research for the firm on data center decarbonization.
Smaller data centers with a subsequently smaller energy footprint could pair well with renewable-powered microgrids, which are less practical and economically feasible for hyperscalers. That could be a big win for solar and wind plus battery storage, Katzman explained, but a boondoggle for companies such as Microsoft, which has famously committed to re-opening Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its data centers. “Because of DeepSeek, the expected price of compute probably doesn’t justify now turning back on some of these nuclear plants, or these other high-cost energy sources,” Katzman told me.
Lastly, it remains to be seen what nascent applications cheaper models will open up. “If somebody, say, in the Philippines or Vietnam has an interest in applying this to their own decarbonization challenge, what would they come up with?” Bullard pondered. “I don’t yet know what people would do with greater capability and lower costs and a different set of problems to solve for. And that’s really exciting to me.”
But even if the AI pessimists are right, and these newer models don’t make AI ubiquitously useful for applications from new drug discovery to easier regulatory filing, Su told me that in a certain sense, it doesn't matter much. “If there was a possibility that somebody had this type of power, and you could have it too, would you sit on the couch? Or would you arms race them? I think that is going to drive energy demand, irrespective of end utility.”
As Su told me, “I do not think there’s actually a saturation point for this.”
On the fallout from the LA fires, Trump’s tariffs, and Tesla’s sales slump
Current conditions: A record-breaking 4 feet of snow fell on the Japanese island of Hokkaido • Nearly 6.5 feet of rain has inundated northern Queensland in Australia since Saturday • Cold Arctic air will collide with warm air over central states today, creating dangerous thunderstorm conditions.
President Trump yesterday agreed to a month-long pause on across-the-board 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but went ahead with an additional 10% tariff on Chinese imports. China retaliated with new levies on U.S. products including fuel – 15% for coal and liquefied natural gas, and 10% for crude oil – starting February 10. “Chinese firms are unlikely to sign new long-term contracts with proposed U.S. projects as long as trade tensions remain high,” notedBloomberg. “This is bad news for those American exporters that need to lock in buyers before securing necessary financing to begin construction.” Trump recently ended the Biden administration’s pause on LNG export permits. A December report from the Department of Energy found that China was likely to be the largest importer of U.S. LNG through 2050, and many entities in China had already signed contracts with U.S. export projects. Trump is expected to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
Insurance firm State Farm is looking to hike insurance rates for homeowners in California by 22% after the devastating wildfires that tore through Los Angeles last month. The company, which is the largest insurer in California, sent a letter to the state’s insurance commissioner, asking for its immediate approval to increase home insurance by 22% for homeowners, 15% for tenants and renters, and 38% for “rental dwelling” in order to “help protect California’s fragile insurance market.” So far, the firm has received more than 8,700 claims and paid out more than $1 billion, but it expects to pay more. “Insurance will cost more for customers in California going forward because the risk is greater in California,” the company said yesterday. “Higher risks should pay more for insurance than lower risks.” A report out this week found that climate change is expected to shave $1.5 trillion off of U.S. home values by 2055 as insurance rates rise to account for the growing risk of extreme weather disasters.
A new report outlines pathways to decarbonizing the buildings sector, which produces about one-third of global emissions. The analysis, from the Energy Transitions Commission, proposes three main priorities that need to be tackled:
“This will require collaboration right across sector, between governments, industry bodies, and private companies,” said Stephen Hill, a sustainability and building performance expert at building design firm Arup. “We need to be ambitious, but if we get it right we can cut carbon, generate value for our economy, and improve people’s quality of life through action like improving living conditions and reducing fuel poverty.”
Energy Transitions Commission
Fracking executive Chris Wright was confirmed yesterday as the new Energy Secretary. Wright is the CEO of the oilfield services firm Liberty Energy (though he has said he plans to step down) and a major Republican donor. He has a history of climate denialism. “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition,” Wright said in a video posted to LinkedIn last year. Although during his confirmation hearings, he struck a different tone, avowing that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons. He expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal and nuclear. Wright will be tasked with executing President Trump’s planned overhaul of U.S. energy policy, and expansion of domestic energy production. The Department of Energy has a $50 billion budget and is also in charge of maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
A few new reports find Tesla is seeing sales drops in some key markets, possibly due to CEO Elon Musk’s push into politics. In California, Tesla registrations fell by about 12% last year, according to the California New Car Dealers Association, and the company’s EV market share in the state fell by 7.6%, while Kia, Hyundai, and Honda all made decent gains. “While high interest rates, tough competition, and the introduction of a restyled Model 3 sedan hurt the EV maker’s sales in California, the loss of business was likely exacerbated by Elon Musk’s involvement in the U.S. election,” Reutersreported. Tesla is also running into trouble across the pond, where Musk has been meddling in European politics, throwing his weight behind far-right parties. In the European Union, Tesla registrations fell 13% last year, but dropped 41% in Germany, the bloc’s biggest BEV market. Last month, Tesla registrations dropped by about 63% in France, 44% in Sweden, and 38% in Norway.
Researchers have developed a new variety of rice that has a higher crop yield than other varieties, but emits 70% less methane.