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On climate plans, Super Bowl ads, and hydrogen planes
Current conditions: People in Sydney, Australia, were told to stay inside after an intense rainstorm caused major flooding • Temperatures today will be between 25 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit below average across the northern Rockies and High Plains • It’s drizzly in Paris, where world leaders are gathering to discuss artificial intelligence policy.
Well, today was supposed to be the deadline for new and improved climate plans to be submitted by countries committed to the Paris Agreement. These plans – known as nationally determined contributions – outline emissions targets through 2030 and explain how countries plan to reach those targets. Everyone has known about the looming deadline for two years, yet Carbon Brief reports that just 10 of the 195 members of the Paris Agreement have submitted their NDCs. “Countries missing the deadline represent 83% of global emissions and nearly 80% of the world’s economy,” according to Carbon Brief. Last week UN climate chief Simon Stiell struck a lenient tone, saying the plans need to be in by September “at the latest,” which would be ahead of COP30 in November. The U.S. submitted its new NDC well ahead of the deadline, but this was before President Trump took office, and has more or less been disregarded.
Many of the country’s largest pension funds are falling short of their obligations to protect members’ investments by failing to address climate change risks in their proxy voting. That’s according to new analysis from the Sierra Club, which analyzed 32 of the largest and most influential state and local pension systems in the U.S. Collectively, these funds have more than $3.8 trillion in assets under management. Proxy voting is when pensions vote on behalf of shareholders at companies’ annual meetings, weighing in on various corporate policies and initiatives. In the case of climate change, this might be things like nudging a company to disclose greenhouse gas emissions, or better yet, reduce emissions by creating transition plans.
This report looked at funds’ recent proxy voting records and voting guidelines, which pension staff use to guide their voting decisions. The funds were then graded from A (“industry leaders”) to F (“industry laggards”). Just one fund, the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management (MassPRIM), received an “A” grade; the majority received either “D” or “F” grades. Others didn’t disclose their voting records at all. “To ensure they can meet their obligations to protect retirees’ hard-earned money for decades to come, pensions must strengthen their proxy voting strategies to hold corporate polluters accountable and support climate progress,” said Allie Lindstrom, a senior strategist with the Sierra Club.
Football fans in Los Angeles watching last night’s Super Bowl may have seen an ad warning about the growing climate crisis. The regional spot was made by Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists who are also mothers. The “By the Time” ad shows a montage of young girls growing into adults, and warns that climate change is rapidly altering the world today’s children will inherit. “Our window to act on climate change is like watching them grow up,” the voiceover says. “We blink, and we miss it.” It also encourages viewers to donate to LA wildfire victims. A Science Moms spokesperson told ADWEEK they expected some 11 million people to see the ad, and that focus group testing showed a 25% increase in support for climate action among viewers. The New York Times included the ad in its lineup of best Super Bowl commercials, saying it was “a little clunky and sanctimonious in its execution but unimpeachable in its sentiments.”
General Motors will reportedly stop selling the gas-powered Chevy Blazer in North America after this year because the company wants its plant in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico, to produce only electric vehicles. The move, first reported by GM Authority, means “GM will no longer offer an internal combustion two-row midsize crossover in North America.” If you have your heart set on a Blazer, you can always get the electric version.
In case you missed it: Airbus has delayed its big plan to unveil a hydrogen-powered aircraft by 2035, citing the challenges of “developing a hydrogen ecosystem — including infrastructure, production, distribution and regulatory frameworks.” The company has been trying to develop a short-range hydrogen plane since 2020, and has touted hydrogen as key to helping curb the aviation industry’s emissions. It didn’t give an updated timeline for the project.
“If Michael Pollan’s basic dietary guidance is ‘eat food, not too much, mostly plants,’ then the Burgum-Wright energy policy might be, ‘produce energy, as much as you can, mostly fossil fuels.’”
–Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the new era of Trump’s energy czars
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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.