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The bugs are already out in New York and the West is in for ”a very bad spring.” Here’s what experts say is in store for the U.S. this year.
It got me in March.
Maybe it happened while I was on a run, enjoying one of the first warm days of spring. Maybe I’d been waiting unsuspectingly for the train on an open-air platform. Maybe it happened in my own apartment. Regardless, at some point last month, I hesitated too long before brushing away a soft, fleeting sensation on my cheek. In the ongoing, 10,000-year-long game of tag between mosquitoes and humans, I’d taken another L.
Though it’s only early April, many New Yorkers have already gotten their first bites of the year: interviewer Isaac Fitzgerald and interviewee James Hannaham were driven out of a backyard by the bugs in Brooklyn; the city’s Department of Health has officially declared “it’s mosquito season in NYC!” and started tweeting out standing-water advisories; and CBS’ local affiliate recently ran a segment about how “it’s going to be a bad summer” for biting insects. Other metropolitan areas are also bracing for a buggy season ahead: “It’s looking like it’s going to be worse than it has [been in] the past two years,” Minnesota’s MPR News reports. “Epic rains expected to take one more swat at California, with masses of mosquitoes,” adds the Los Angeles Times. “We could possibly see more mosquitoes than we wanted to see,” a biologist warned the Ohio area.
Predicting the severity of mosquito season is a bit of an imprecise science, like trying to nail down a long-range weather forecast. Actually, it’s a lot like trying to nail down a long-range weather forecast, since mosquito populations fluctuate based on immediate and unreliable conditions, like spring rainfall and small changes in temperature. Generally speaking, more rain tends to precede “a greater prevalence of mosquitoes within the same month,” while “hotter temperatures [are] associated with increases in mosquitoes one to two months later,” reports one study, which focused on Dengue-carrying Aedes mosquitoes in Sri Lanka. (Invasive Aedes mosquitoes are also found on both U.S. coasts and throughout the South, with their habitats shifting north toward Chicago due to climate change.)
Mosquitos require standing water and temperatures steadily above 50 degrees Fahrenheit in order to start their breeding cycles. In the western United States, in addition to spring rainfall, natural occurrences of standing water are created by snowmelt, which causes floods that dry into perfect mosquito-breeding pools. Snowpack in the West, then, is one of the best early determinants of the coming mosquito season — unfortunate news for Californians, since their state broke a 40-year snowfall record over the winter. “Many places out west where they’ve received record rainfall and snowfall, they’re likely to have a very bad spring,” Daniel Markowski, the technical director of the American Mosquito Control Association, told Heatmap.
Snowmelt can also be a determining factor in the Midwest and East, where fears of spring flooding are already high. That said, their spring mosquito seasons are “less dependent upon the snow” than the West since they “always get at least some snow in many of the same areas,” Markowski went on. The bigger variable for the region is spring rainfall and how early it gets warm.
Mixed news on that front: NOAA expects the East Coast to be warmer than usual from April through June, with above-average precipitation concentrated around the Great Lakes region and potentially stretching south and seaward, through Pennsylvania, New York City, and the D.C.-area. Though the severity of the coming mosquito season is thus still a bit of an unknown, the stakes are high: Last year saw the largest number of ever recorded West Nile virus-positive mosquito pools in New York City, resulting in four deaths. There’s every indication that could happen again in 2023: “We expect mosquito and tick activity in NYC to be at similarly high levels,” M&M Pest Control, a Long Island City-based exterminator, writes on their website.
Warmer temperatures in the south and east could mean earlier emergences of mosquitoes.NOAA
Rainfall in most of the United States is expected to be normal this spring, but potential damp conditions around the Great Lakes and southern Acela Corridor could increase mosquito populations.NOAA
In the South, mosquito populations are “almost all rainfall- and temperature-driven” because snow is not the primary cause of standing water in the region, according to Markowski. While temperatures might not yet be high enough in the region for a major larvae boom, recent storms have authorities “concerned right now in southeast Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee about mosquito populations,” Markowski said. Not to mention another reason for the South to be on high alert: Culex lactator, a species of mosquito native to South and Central America, has been discovered spreading throughout southwest Florida. Though it hasn’t been extensively studied, we do know Culex is a potential vector for West Nile and St. Louis Encephalitis.
Of especially high concern for infectious disease experts this year will be a place not usually thought of for its mosquitoes: Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Back in 2021, the region experienced the largest single outbreak of West Nile virus in U.S. history, likely due to a wetter-than-average monsoonal season; statewide, 127 people died. This year, winter snowmelt and spring rains have pulled the region out of its drought, but once the floodwaters start to recede, they’ll create major mosquito breeding grounds, NBC’s 12 News reports. The wetter desert environment will also attract more birds — the natural hosts of West Nile virus.
So while there is no guarantee that 2023 is going to be another “monster mosquito season” for the U.S. like 2021, there is no guarantee it won’t be, either. We know the West is unusually wet, which will almost certainly mean more bugs, while the Midwest and East are likewise tracking warm and damp. In the South, where storms are one of the biggest causes of standing water, there are fears that this year’s record number of early-season tornadoes is only a “prelude” of what’s to come.
That makes it all the more important to minimize mosquitoes where we do have some control: “What I try to get people to understand is, just as nature — rainfall, snowfall amounts; temperatures — impact mosquito problems, we have a lot of control over what bites us in our backyards,” Markowski said. “If we’re over-watering our property, or we’re allowing water to stand on our property, you’re making mosquitoes right there that bite you.”
Meanwhile, in New York City, the warmest days of the year so far are expected this week. Short-sleeved, sun-starved urbanites will be out in droves.
As will be mosquitoes.
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …