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An interview with Daniel Zarrilli, the city’s chief climate policy advisor under former Mayor Bill De Blasio
Flash floods hit New York City on Friday, putting 8.5 million people on warning and turning streets into rivers across Brooklyn and Queens. The scenes of inundated highways and subway platforms brought memories of Hurricane Ida, which just over two years ago, traveled up to New York from Louisiana, bringing some of the most intense rainfall the city has ever seen, and killing more than 40 people.
Friday’s storm had different origins, arising primarily from a weather pattern called an “inverted trough” that’s settled over the Northeast. But what’s similar is the volume of rain that poured from the skies in a brief amount of time, overwhelming the city’s sewer system, and the degree to which New Yorkers felt entirely unprepared or forewarned about what to expect.
New York’s vulnerability to flooding has been exposed again and again, beginning with Hurricane Sandy in 2012. To understand what the city has been doing about it, and why it’s been so hard to mitigate, I called up Daniel Zarrilli, the city’s chief climate policy advisor under former Mayor Bill De Blasio. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How does what you’re seeing today compare with what happened the last time New York City saw serious flash flooding, two years ago, during Hurricane Ida?
I mean, this all feels fairly familiar. Ida was record-breaking, but it was what happened two weeks before that I think really stunned everybody. It was Hurricane Henri. That broke the record. I think the number was like 1.94 inches of rain per hour at Central Park. It was the most intense rainfall the city has ever seen. And then Hurricane Ida, two weeks, later broke that record again by about 50%. And you saw the devastation all over the city. Basement apartments flooded. People died. It was a terrible tragedy in the city.
This morning, what I saw at the Central Park reading was just a hair more than what Hurricane Henri had been. Today would have been record-breaking had it happened two years ago. But of course, we know what’s happening with our climate. And we know that the warmer atmosphere holds more water. And we’re seeing more and more of these devastating and high intensity rainfall events.
What are some of the things that the city has done to try to improve its resilience to flash flooding?
The city has been working on these questions for quite some time. Several billion dollars went into drainage infrastructure in southeast Queens. The city has built thousands of bioswales and rain gardens to capture water, to keep it out of the sewer system, and help reduce the combined sewer overflows. All that helps with flooding.
But I think what we’re seeing here is that it’s that high intensity that matters most. The drainage network is designed to manage about an inch and three quarters of rain in an hour, and we’re seeing numbers that are higher than that. The infrastructure just can't handle it. These high intensity rainfalls and climate change is just continuing to stress that aging infrastructure that we have all across the city.
And you know, these events are not always citywide events. You can have much more localized, high intensity rainfall and it makes it much harder to predict where those things are going to happen around the city. What might seem like a similar rainfall event, if it happens geographically in a different way, the impacts are wildly different as well.
Does that mean that the solutions that we have just don’t match the scale of the problem, or does it mean that we’re just not going fast enough or doing enough?
I think it’s a little bit of both. I think there’s clearly more infrastructure investment that’s needed to handle higher intensity rainfall events, but I think we have to recognize that there’s going to continue to be these events that are going to exceed the design capacity of the infrastructure. We need to get more creative about how we handle the overflow so that it channels itself down a differently designed street to get to the harbor, instead of into the subway or into someone’s basement. The ability for the system to, sort of, fail more gracefully, instead of more catastrophically, is I think a really important way to think about this.
And the other is, how we communicate this in advance. We can’t just tell people something bad’s going to happen. We have to be much more direct on what they can do about it. That might mean things like closing schools or asking businesses to declare work from home, or something that doesn’t put people out in the conditions while it’s happening.
What are the biggest challenges to improving the city’s preparedness for flooding?
We’re a very high density city. Building out new infrastructure in a dense urban environment, whether it’s along the coast or it’s within our streets and our drainage networks, you’re trying to do new things on top of layers of existing built environment and infrastructure. That’s really complicated. And that doesn’t lend itself to easy answers.
I live on Staten Island and one of the really successful measures that has been accomplished is the blue belt network. It’s a really great solution for handling intense rainfall and filtering water and water quality and biodiversity. But it’s not the kind of thing that works everywhere, because it needs a fair amount of space. We need to apply similar creativity to find solutions that can be more rapidly implemented.
But again, you run into this big, dense urban environment with layers of existing infrastructure, and there are not easy answers.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.