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Ice melt is creating many geopolitical dangers, thanks largely to a familiar foe.
The Arctic is becoming dangerously destabilized.
This is true in a literal sense. The north’s precipitous loss in glacial ice sheets, permafrost, and sea ice will have global ripple effects. Should the “Earth’s air conditioner” become perennially iceless, as scientists fear could happen as early as 2050, the fallout has the power to trigger worst-case scenarios around the world: Sea levels could rise in New York City, monsoon rains could swamp Lagos, Nigeria, and precious forest cover in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, could dwindle to nubs. Each glacier that collapses is another tick of the time-bomb.
But it’s also true in a more metaphorical sense: Arctic ice melt is creating many geopolitical dangers, thanks largely to a familiar foe: Russia.
The Kremlin controls 50 percent of the Arctic coastline. But isolated from the other countries encircling the North Pole due to its war of aggression in Ukraine, Russia has retreated from any sort of Arctic cooperation. That has left experts fearful not only of scientists’ ability to stay on top of the impacts of climate change, but also that the warming region might give Russian President Vladimir Putin a pretext to break more international rules.
For the last 15 years, Russia has jockeyed for Arctic control — from aggressively building its military capabilities, to scaling up its shipping capacity, to even unlawfully planting a flag along the North Pole seabed and claiming the land as its own. But it was still hemmed in by the Arctic’s web of laws and accords.
These laws, unfortunately, are quite vulnerable to ice melt.
Maritime claims, upheld by entities like the International Maritime Organization, for example, are one way for states to protest rule-breaking in the region. But melting sea ice has opened up previously frozen zones, threatening to undermine laws like Article 234 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which gives coastal states special rights to ice covered areas. “If the ice melts, do you still have that legal basis?” said Rebecca Pincus, the director of the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center.
Valuable shipping lanes are also emerging in the north, encouraging Russia to further engage in a two-fold strategy: mass resource extraction to underpin its national wealth and taking “the most extreme position possible on its right to control all foreign navigation through the internal waters of the [Northern Sea Route],” as Cornell Overfield wrote recently in Foreign Policy. However, this state of affairs might not last long. “As sea ice continues to retreat in the Arctic, it will become possible for ships to navigate outside of the Russian zone through the central Arctic Ocean and bypass the Russian coastline entirely,” Pincus said. “That will shift the balance of the, I guess you could say, ‘power’ to a certain extent.”
These central Arctic Ocean shipping routes will not be open for decades and pose a number of operational challenges along the way, she explained. But when they do, it would allow ships to navigate outside Russian waters, reducing the potency of Russia’s de facto control along the Northern Sea Route, further isolating a country that sees the icy region as a part of its power projection.
Meanwhile, Russia is essentially alone among its neighbors.
Mathieu Boulègue, a consulting fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, told me a bifurcation is emerging in the north, where a singled-out Russia has recused itself from the Nordic-North American camp — a once-staid Arctic 8 now made into an awkward, asterisked Arctic 7. With Finland having joined NATO this month, and Sweden close behind, Russia might see itself as not just alone, but surrounded. Experts fear that spells trouble.
“More human activity and more military activity will lead to more accidents, more incidents, more miscalculation, and therefore more tension,” said Boulègue. “Now that the signs are on the wall, we can't really ignore them anymore.”
The United States and other countries rimming the Arctic are carefully initiating exploratory military exercises in the region to see how they can navigate safely and effectively in newly-melted territories. Because of how remote the Arctic is, accidents and emergencies are exponentially harder and more expensive to triage. The latest U.S. Arctic strategy promises to increase its military presence there, too, in order to keep pace with the Russian military presence. But experts warn that neither technology nor policy in a territorially hostile area could keep up with the speed of these melting passages. Indeed, they say it would take the West at least 10 years to catch up with Russia’s military in the region. This opens up dangers for Russia to do just about anything it’d like to, including seizing new territory and setting up military bases in contested areas.
“We're seeing some pretty aggressive, unprofessional, and unsafe behavior by the Russian military in regards to American military assets [in the Arctic],” said the Wilson Center’s Pincus. “Think about that level of risk-taking and aggression on the part of the Russian military and now extrapolate that to, for example, a naval exercise that is contesting Russian claims to waters in the Arctic. That gives me pause and argues for great care.”
Beyond the threat of Russia’s mounting military capabilities in the region, Arctic cooperation has also suffered more generally from Russia’s absence. The Arctic Council is a Nobel Prize-nominated diplomatic forum that convenes the Arctic 8, six non-Arctic states, and a cadre of non-governmental observers which include Arctic Indigenous communities. This preeminent intergovernmental venue had to suspend all of its programming after the start of the war in Ukraine. It has only picked up projects since June of last year that do not require cooperation with Russia. Norway is set to assume the chair of this forum come May, but will have to tread delicately if it means to keep Russia within the Council’s orbit.
“The accession by Finland and Sweden to NATO will strengthen security and stability in Northern Europe, including in the Arctic. While security related aspects will understandably become more important, we must ensure that we do not lose sight of the broader issues in Arctic cooperation,” said Finnish Ambassadors Petteri Vuorimäki and Anne Mutanen in a statement to Heatmap.
These so-called broader issues not only impact high-level powers in the Arctic, but also those who are native to the region. Today, six Arctic Indigenous NGOs hold a non-voting status in the Arctic Council, making it one of the world’s only multilateral forums where national government officials sit at the same table as Native leaders.
Many of the six Arctic Indigenous communities who participate in the Arctic Council have ancestral lands that extend into Russia. Leaders among the Indigenous Saami people, for instance, fear that while Arctic states are busy ironing out tension spurred by Russia and its war, their priorities — from phasing out ecologically harmful heavy fuel oil, to prioritizing climate-resilient infrastructure, to recognizing land rights agreements which enable important climate science research, to triaging the potential displacement of Indigenous communities amid coastal erosion and sea ice melt — may take a back seat. “It's not said straight; it's a feeling underlying there that they have more important things to deal with,” said Gunn Britt-Retter, head of the Arctic Environment Unit of the Saami Council, which represents the Saami people spread across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and parts of Russia.
And then there’s another way Russian isolation is punishing the world: science. The world’s leading scientists desperately need access to this corner of the world to establish what they call a “ground truthing,” — basically an up-close understanding of what they’re only seeing now via satellites.
As Tim Lydon warned in The Atlantic last April, “cooperation with Russian scientists has ground to a halt.” Things haven’t improved over the past year. In February, French scientist Jérôme Chappellaz told the Arctic Institute that Russia’s absence from the international scientific community has led to an “environmental emergency.” Field sites have been cut off, data can’t be shared among climate experts based elsewhere, and scientific endeavors have been significantly scaled down.
Russian isolation is being felt everywhere in the Arctic. With global shipping, climate science, international cooperation, and adversarial militaries involved, the rest of the world might also feel the repercussions if something doesn’t change soon.
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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.