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On dry conditions in the Big Apple, biodiversity goals, and the future of the IRA
Current conditions: Schools are closed this week in Lahore, Pakistan, due to unprecedented pollution • An extreme red alert for torrential rain has been issued in Barcelona • A storm system in the Caribbean could strengthen into a hurricane by Wednesday.
The COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia came to a disappointing close over the weekend, with negotiators failing to agree on how the world can monitor and fund nature restoration. There were high hopes that the meeting would produce a roadmap for protecting large swathes of land, water, and degraded ecosystems by 2030, but rich nations blocked a proposal for a new fund to help pay for poorer nations’ efforts. “This COP was meant to be a status check on countries’ progress toward saving nature and all indicators on that status are blinking red,” said Crystal Davis, the World Resources Institute’s global director of food, land, and water. There were some bright spots, though, including the creation of a subsidiary body that will ensure Indigenous peoples have a seat at the negotiating table in future UN conservation talks, and a plan to encourage corporations that derive biotechnology products from nature to pay into a conservation fund.
New Yorkers are being asked to conserve water after Mayor Eric Adams placed the city under a drought watch. Last month was the driest NYC October on record, The Washington Postreported. Just 0.01 inches of rain fell in Central Park, far short of the 4 inches or so that usually fall during the month. Residents have been told to take shorter showers and fix leaks, and Adams called on the city’s agencies to draw up plans to conserve water. “Mother Nature is in charge, and so we must make sure we adjust,” he said. More than half the country was under drought conditions last month.
In case you missed it: Regulators from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Friday rejected a proposal to increase the load capacity of Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. The proposal was part of a deal to supply more power to a nearby Amazon data center. FERC voted 2-1 to block the move, citing concerns about grid reliability and rising energy bills for the public. FERC Chairman Willie Phillips dissented, and said the decision “fails to recognize the creative approach the agreement took and fails to demonstrate flexibility to ensure the grid can reliably and affordably handle rising demand.”
The CEO of oil giant TotalEnergies called for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to keep existing environmental laws in place if he wins this week’s election. Patrick Pouyanné told the Financial Times that revoking climate rules enacted under President Biden would create a “wild west” situation and hurt the oil industry’s reputation. “My view is that this will not help the industry, but on the contrary it will demonize, and then the dialogue will be even more antagonized,” Pouyanné said. Trump has promised to rescind much of the Inflation Reduction Act funding. Exxon’s chief financial officer Kathy Mikells told the FT that the IRA is helping support the economy, and “that gives a lot of people a lot of incentive to stand behind the IRA.”
Canada, the fourth-largest oil producer in the world, will publish a proposal today to cap greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel energy production. Energy is Canada’s highest-polluting sector, with oil and gas accounting for a quarter of all emissions and producing “more than double the greenhouse gas pollution than all other industries combined,” according to Hermine Landry, a spokeswoman for Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault. Landry toldReuters that the cap-and-trade system would incentivize high-emitting companies to invest in projects that reduce pollution, though an earlier report from Deloitte said the cap would likely nudge companies to cut production. Canada has a goal of curbing emissions by at least 40% compared to 2005 levels by the end of the decade. Whether this new proposal comes into effect will depend largely on the outcome of the next election, set to be held in late 2025.
“This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.” –Tim Stevens at The Vergetries to describe the digital acceleration tone produced by Rolls-Royce’s first EV, the ultra-luxury Spectre, which starts at $420,000.
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Elections inspire hyperbole. Every two years, we have “the most important election of our lifetime,” America’s future constantly “hangs in the balance,” and the stakes perennially “couldn’t be higher.”
But this year, some breathlessness does seem appropriate. 2024 marks the first presidential election since the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt, which historians and constitutional scholars have described as the gravest threat to the peaceful transfer of power since the Civil War. No less existentially, tomorrow’s election will also have global consequences. Americans will either elect a leader who continues the build-out of renewable energy and prioritizes a healthy, clean environment, or they will elect a leader whose retrograde embrace of the fossil fuel industry would, in the space of one presidential term, “negate — twice over — all the savings from deploying wind, solar, and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years,” as Carbon Brief writes.
Make no mistake: Picking the next president of the United States is the single most important race of this election. However control of the U.S. House and Senate, which voters will also decide on Tuesday, will either help or hinder the next president’s agenda, whichever candidate takes the office. It’s not a coincidence that a number of those critical races involve candidates whose names will be familiar to the climate and energy world: Senator Jon Tester, a moderate Democrat in Montana who proved crucial in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, dreams of owning an electric tractor, and stands to lose to a Republican who’s vowed to fight the “climate cult”; outgoing Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who helped shape the IRA but will either leave her seat to a Republican who claims not to “be afraid of the weather” or a Democrat who voted for the law that’s brought 18,000 new clean energy jobs to the state; Congressperson Yvette Herrell of New Mexico, who voted against the IRA while at the same time being one of the top recipients in the House of donations from the oil and gas industry. The list goes on and on.
Smaller local elections will be crucial, too. Democrats need a pickup in New York’s 4th Congressional District, just to the north of deep blue New York City, where Republican Representative Anthony D’Esposito is defending his seat with the help of Elon Musk’s super PAC; former Earth sciences teacher Tony Vargas, who believes Nebraska has a “moral obligation” to fight climate change, is attempting to unseat Republican Representative Don Bacon, a climate skeptic; and Montanans will elect their next attorney general, picking between the incumbent who leads the state’s case against the 16 young plaintiffs in Held v. Montana, and Democrat Ben Alke, who has extensive experience in environmental law. As Heatmap has covered, there are also several public utilities commission races, the results of which will have “an outsized influence on the country’s energy mix.”
In many places, climate will be on the ballot even more directly. In South Dakota, the debate over carbon capture and CO2 pipelines is being put in the hands of voters; in Berkeley, California, voters will decide if they want to incentivize the decarbonization of large buildings with a natural gas tax; and Washingtonians will have two different climate-related policies to defend, with repeal initiatives on the ballot thanks to a determined Republican millionaire.
Starting on Tuesday at 6 p.m., Heatmap will update a list of our most anticipated climate-related races — 36 in all — with live results as states and municipalities count the votes. For all the models, polls, and punditry, it’s still impossible to know what will happen on Tuesday; however, it’s no exaggeration to say we can be sure we’ll be living in a different country come January 20, 2025. We can endlessly speculate about how different it will be and what the climate and energy transition will look like in the years ahead. But only tomorrow knows.
Counties that veered from Obama in 2008 to Trump in 2016 are more likely to oppose renewables development.
In Texas, the Oak Run Solar Project would have been a slam dunk.
Developers would install 800 megawatts of solar panels — enough to power 800,000 homes — across nine square miles of unused land. It would devote some of its acreage to new farming practices that incorporate solar panels. And it would sell its electricity cheaply — and profitably — because it was near the state capital and because it could take advantage of a pre-existing onsite connection to the regional power grid.
But Oak Run wasn’t proposed in Texas. It was proposed in Ohio, and that means it has faced enormous opposition. Ohio has some of the country’s strictest restrictions on solar development, and 10 counties have blocked solar development outright.
Although Madison County, where Oak Run was proposed, is not one of them, the blowback to the project cost a local Republican county commissioner his job. Oak Run was eventually approved by the state’s power siting board earlier this year, but its opponents are now appealing that decision in the state’s Supreme Court.
Madison County, Ohio, also illustrates the political transformation that has revolutionized the upper Midwest. The predominantly rural county near the state’s capital, Columbus, has favored Republicans since the 1960s. But in recent decades it has swung hard to the right. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly 40% of the county’s vote. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton picked up just 27%.
These two facts may seem like they have little to do with each other. But they point to one of the biggest trends in clean energy development across the country: The counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and then Donald Trump in 2016 are some of the worst places in the country to permit and build renewable projects.
The size of a county’s swing from 2008 to 2016 is one of the biggest predictors of whether a proposed wind or solar project will be contested or blocked, according to a new Heatmap Pro analysis of more than 8,500 projects and local policies around the country.
The magnitude of that swing is by far the most important political variable to emerge from Heatmap Pro’s analysis of more than 60 risk factors influencing community support or opposition to renewable projects. It is more strongly associated with a given project’s success than whether a county votes for Democratic or Republican candidates overall.
The only variables that are more closely correlated than the 2008-to-2016 swing are fundamental measures of a region’s population or local economy, such as its median income, racial demographics, or dominant industries. Towns and regions that heavily depend on farming, for instance, have become particularly reluctant to accept new solar projects in recent years.
Heatmap Pro’s analysis focused not only on whether a county’s residents support wind or solar projects in theory, but also on whether renewable projects proposed in the area are canceled, contested, or exposed to political turbulence. It surveyed more than 7,000 wind and solar projects proposed and built across the United States since the 1990s.
Many of the counties with the largest Obama-to-Trump swings have passed proposals meant to limit renewable development. Vermillion County in Indiana — where more than a quarter of voters swung from Obama to Trump — has an extensive set of restrictions on new solar projects. Solar projects in Elk County, Pennsylvania, which saw a similar swing, have also turned out against solar projects using up “prime farmland.”
There are a few reasons why the Obama-to-Trump swing might be associated with more opposition to renewables.
In 2008, solar and wind were still frontier technologies and were not price-competitive with fossil fuels. Although vaguely associated with Democrats, politicians on both sides of the aisles championed wind and solar so as to wean the country off foreign oil.
But in the following decade, the U.S. increased its solar capacity by roughly 100-fold, while it has more than doubled its installed wind capacity.. Today, solar and wind energy are major features of the electricity system, and many Republicans have openly embraced fossil fuels and cast doubt on the value of cleaner alternatives.
To be sure, the Obama-to-Trump swing was influenced by other social and economic factors, as well as a state’s specific political environment. Leah Stokes, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist who has studied the growing local opposition to wind farms, told me that the correlation with Obama-Trump voters may originate from Trump’s dominance of the upper Midwest in 2016. Because a small group of anti-renewable advocates can change an entire region’s policies, that could lead to more opposition to renewables in one part of the country or another.
“Is there a person, or a network of people, who are going place by place pushing these anti-solar and wind local laws? That would lead to a geographic concentration,” she said.
Even within individual counties, the electorate wasn’t the same in 2016 as it was in 2008. Throughout the 2010s, tens of millions of Americans moved around the country, with the largest net change moving from the Northeast to the South. Cities became younger on average, while rural areas and suburbs became older.
Even within counties, a different set of voters showed up to the polls in each election. One reason why the 2012 election might not be correlated with opposition to renewables is that many voters who voted for Obama in 2008 skipped the next cycle. Those same voters — many of whom were white and working class — showed back up in 2016 and backed Trump.
What is driving the opposition to renewables? Perhaps a county’s swing against renewable energy is happening precisely because voters there are persuadable. From 2008 to 2016, many voters in these counties changed their minds about which candidate or political party to support. As they shifted their stance to the right, they also adopted more seemingly Republican views about wind and solar development. Donald Trump has distinguished himself by his embrace of fossil fuels and climate change skepticism — perhaps as voters come to support him, they also adopt his positions.
What’s interesting, however, is that deep red counties that have not seen a political shift — places that backed, say, McCain and Romney by roughly the same margin as they backed Trump in 2016 — continue to build wind and solar at a good clip. Texas, for instance, is the No. 1 state for renewable deployment. A county’s partisanship, in other words, is not as good a predictor of its opposition to renewables as its swinginess.
Edgar Virguez, an energy systems engineer at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, has studied what drives opposition to renewables in North Carolina. He told me that some of the same factors that predict a county’s Trump support — such as its population density and education level — also predict whether that county has enacted a local restriction on renewable energy.
When he and his colleagues studied local policies in North Carolina, they found that lower density and less educated counties “had significantly higher reductions in the land available for solar development” when compared with denser or more educated counties, he said. Once a county has fewer than 35 people per square mile, or when less than 20% of the population has a bachelor’s degree, the number of restrictions on local land use shot up. That’s a problem for decarbonization, he added, because less dense counties also usually have the best and most affordable land available for solar development.
That finding may not hold true in other states. Heatmap, for instance, has found that whiter and more educated counties are more likely to oppose renewables. And to some degree, less dense counties are exactly where you’d expect to see more solar and wind projects get built — and thus more local policies restricting them pop up. But it is nonetheless not great news for advocates, given that a couple of America’s political institutions — namely, the Senate and the Electoral College — favor rural voters or Midwestern states. If the trend takes root, then it could eventually curtail renewable development across the country. That question — and many others — will partly be decided in this week’s presidential election.
Voters in the crucial swing state will also decide key questions on their — and our — climate future.
In four days, Pennsylvania will become just about the most important place on Earth.
It is unlikely that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump can reach the White House without carrying the Keystone State; winning Pennsylvania bumps either’s odds of prevailing in the whole election to over 90%, according to polling analyst Nate Silver’s models. The state will also play a deciding role in control of the U.S. House and Senate, which in turn will help or hamper the next president’s agenda. America’s domestic trajectory, its foreign policy decisions, and even its allies and enemies could all come down to the whims of the state’s 8.9 million registered voters.
But Pennsylvanians have other important choices to make on their ballots, too. “Pennsylvania is a major energy state, and its decisions — regardless of what type of energy it is — have a huge impact on America’s energy portfolio,” John Qua, the campaign manager of Lead Locally, which is supporting 17 down-ballot candidates in the state, told me.
As the nation’s second-biggest gas producer after Texas and third-biggest coal producer after Wyoming and West Virginia, Pennsylvania also holds the distinction of being the fifth-largest greenhouse gas-emitting state in the nation. Its state legislature hasn’t passed new climate legislation since 2008, in large part because of the influence of the fossil fuel industry over local politics. The American Petroleum Institute donates more to Pennsylvania lawmakers than those in any other state, and while fracking isn’t the decisive local issue it’s made out to be in the popular consciousness, it still employs around 100,000 people — more than made the difference in deciding the 2020 election in the state. (Harris notably reneged on her 2019 pledge to ban fracking if elected in an apparent overture to Pennsylvanians, although the state’s imperiled Democratic senator, Bob Casey, has been hammered by his Republican challenger over her prior position.)
Pennsylvania has a Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, until at least 2026, and Democrats hold slim control over the state House of Representatives by a margin of 102 to 101. The ambition this cycle is to keep the state House and flip the Republican-held state Senate. Picking up three seats there would earn Democrats a governing trifecta, with a tie-breaking vote going to Democratic Lt. Gov Austin Davis. Flip four seats, and they’d have the majority.
But “if you asked me to bet you $10 that the Democrats would win, I wouldn’t take the bet,” David Masur, the executive director of PennEnvironment, a green research and advocacy group that works in the state, told me. “I think it’s just a long shot.”
The path to winning the state Senate and achieving a governing trifecta clearly runs through three districts. The first and easiest pickup is in SD-15, around the state capital in Harrisburg, where the “map is much friendlier to Democrats,” according to Masur. The party would then need to win a competitive seat in SD-37, in the Pittsburgh suburbs, which has tilted blue recently and also seems theoretically within reach. But things get trickier in SD-49, Democrats’ “white whale” district in Erie County, which President Biden won by 2 points but where Republican senator Dan Laughlin remains well-liked. To wrest back the chamber, in other words, the Democrats would “have to run the table,” Masur said. “I don’t even think there’s another race where you could go, ‘Oh, they could get the majority by winning this other seat.’ There’s nowhere else to go. They have to win those three.”
Because of recent redistricting, the climate groups working in the state are cautious about getting their hopes up too high. “Flipping the [state] Senate, which is currently held by Republicans, might be a two-cycle endeavor with these new maps,” Lead Locally’s Qua said. This doesn’t necessarily mean all is lost: Even maintaining control of two of the three levers of government in Pennsylvania would be a victory, and Democrats this summer managed to garner enough bipartisan support to pass legislation to bring solar panels to state schools.
But the stakes — and promises — of a trifecta feel crucial and tantalizingly close. According to a recent analysis by PennEnvironment, Pennsylvania is 48th in the nation for the percentage growth of total solar, wind, and geothermal in the past decade, and 46th in the nation for the percentage of growth in total solar over the past five years, generating less than its neighbors New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio. “The fossil fuel industry is extremely moneyed and extremely influential, and it’s created a political reality where it’s very difficult to move good climate and clean energy policy forward in Harrisburg,” Flora Cardoni, PennEnvironment’s deputy director, told me. Climate obstructionists in the state Senate often refuse to call up good environmental policies for votes, leaving the state with “no laws on the books that require utility companies in Pennsylvania to increase the amount of clean renewable energy that they provide to their customers” which is “a huge impediment to progress.”
It’s not as if Democrats aren’t ready to go — they are. Shapiro is sitting on a two-bill plan for tackling climate change in the state. One would boost renewable energy to 35% of Pennsylvania’s total generation by 2035, which Cardoni described as “a huge step in the right direction, although we need to do much more.” The second bill would make polluters pay for their carbon emissions and spend the resulting money on clean air, water, and energy efficiency projects — essentially, a backup plan for if the state’s attempt to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative fails. (Owing to a question of constitutionality, RGGI is in limbo with the state’s Supreme Court.)
So, in a sense, you have to go for it. “Yeah, they’re really hard races,” admitted Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, which is supporting 26 candidates in the state. “But if you win,” she added, “you win the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the country.” While she was loath to “compare our states against each other,” Spears pointed out that Pennsylvania’s emissions are about two and a half times those of Arizona, which makes it a much bigger opportunity for reductions.
Perhaps the most important point: No one really knows what’s going to happen. Not only are organizers working with new maps in the state due to 2022 redistricting, but state-level races also rarely attract substantial enough polling to make reliably predictive guesses, especially when there are so many toss-ups and razor-thin margins. Adding to the trickiness, Pennsylvania is one of the few states where residents still appear willing to split their tickets; in 2020, ticket-splitting between the president and the state Legislature was up to 15 points in places, which is part of why Climate Cabinet has targeted races in the state with margins of up to 10 points that other groups wouldn’t touch. “Folks have been like, ‘the Pennsylvania Senate’s not doable.’ That’s the word on the street,” Spears told me. “But I think people are forgetting a little bit that that was also the word on the street about the Minnesota Senate and the Michigan legislature,” which flipped during the 2022 midterms.
What’s encouraging is that Pennsylvania voters — contrary to their image of being fracking obsessives — have been curious or even enthusiastic about pivoting to clean energy when organizers have spoken with them. Following Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused outages across the state, many residents now “recognize that the grid is outdated,” Julia Kortrey, the deputy state policy director at Evergreen Action, a national climate advocacy group, told me. There’s an acknowledgment among many that “the status quo is not working.”
As in many parts of the country this year, local races in Pennsylvania are mainly focused on battles over education, abortion access, immigration, and crime, not necessarily clean energy. But often, climate-related issues are bubbling just under the surface. “I’m not going to go up to someone’s door and ask ‘What issue is on your mind today?’ and have them say, ‘I’m really worried about the PM2.5 concentration or the Mauna Loa CO2 readings,’” Spears told me. “But if they’re like, ‘The cost of living is too high,’ I’m going to have a conversation about home insurance.”
A particularly good example of this is playing out in one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House races, which will help determine the ultimate makeup of Congress. In the Lehigh Valley, Democratic Representative Susan Wild is attempting to hold off her Republican challenger, state Representative Ryan Mackenzie, who voted against the school solar bill and the state’s clean water act. Wild had been particularly instrumental in helping to replace lead pipes in the area, and she’s made her leadership on the issue prominent in her campaigning. “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and lead pipe removal can seem very — I don’t want to say national, but it can be hard to visualize,” Nate Fowler, the regional campaigns director of the League of Conservation Voters, told me. “But for voters in this part of the Commonwealth, it’s easy for them to understand why this is so important.”
It won’t be until after the dust from Tuesday settles — when Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes have been allocated, and its U.S. House and Senate races decided — that national attention will turn to the consequences of the state’s down-ballot races, if it ever does. But whether Democrats run the table or Republicans eat into their opponents’ grip on the legislature, Pennsylvania’s elections will be pivotal to the nation’s greater evolving energy story.
“So much of what we can accomplish in Pennsylvania will lay the groundwork for what is accomplished across the country,” Kortrey, of Evergreen Action, said. “I tell folks, ‘If we can do it in Pennsylvania, we can do it anywhere.’”