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Your climate disaster zone is ruining your skin.
If you’ve been avoiding making your annual skin screening appointment for, like, years, rest assured that some things never change: Dermatologists are still obsessed with telling you to wear sunscreen, and your mole probably isn't cancerous (you should get it tested, anyway). But while paper robes with confusing openings aren’t going anywhere, conversations about climate change don’t typically make it into the examination room.
Some doctors think maybe they should. Our skin is our largest organ as well as the one that interacts most immediately with our environment, serving as the first line of defense against harmful microbes; a barrier against UV radiation and pollution; and a regulator of our body temperature via sweat glands. It is, as a result, on the frontline of how our bodies handle their increasingly extreme environments.
Though the International Journal of Women’s Dermatologydevoted an entire 2020 issue to climate change, which ran over 120 pages, looking at dermatology through a climate lens is still gaining traction in the medical community.
“When I lecture about climate change, I invariably get lower grades and more negative comments, including hate mail,” Dr. Misha Rosenbach, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of the American Academy of Dermatology’s climate change and environmental issues expert resource group, and the co-author of the Women's Dermatology introduction told me, speaking in the capacity as an individual. “And every time I give a lecture, someone will stand up and say it’s a hoax from China — like literally, without fail, no matter what venue, some doctor says it’s a hoax.”
At the same time, the dermatologic response shouldn’t be limited to “wear more sunscreen” and “limit your time in wildfire smoke.” Since our skin is our primary defense against the external world, it is also being impacted in as many ways as there are expressions of climate change. Here are just a few, broken down loosely by American geography.
The northeastern United States is warming faster than the rest of the country, and unlike the southern U.S., where climbing temperatures will make regions far less habitable, winters and shoulder seasons in the East are becoming, well, pretty pleasant!
But the good weather also means people are spending more time outside. And remember the ozone layer? Though the Montreal Protocol in 1987 helped eliminate the chemicals that were causing its depletion and consequently exposing people to higher levels of UV radiation, its full recovery isn’t expected “until 2050,” the World Health Organization warns. Skin cancer rates, partially as a result, have been rising: Between 2000 and 2010, the overall rates of basal cell carcinoma rose 145 percent and squamous cell carcinoma rose 263 percent, the American Academy of Dermatology reports.
More time outside also means more exposure to pollutants generally. “I grew up in Harlem,” Dr. Lynn McKinley-Grant, the current president of the Skin of Color Society and an associate professor of dermatology at Howard University College of Medicine, told me. “The people who grew up there have a lot of these diseases that affect the skin like sarcoidosis and lupus” — an inflammatory disease that can cause small growths on the skin, and an autoimmune disease that can cause rashes — and “there are some people who have had mycosis fungoides,” a skin cancer that often begins its presentation with a rash.“It’s something we’ve seen for a while,” McKinley-Grant went on, “unrelated to the sun but related environmentally to things that affect us.”
“Urban air stagnation events” — four or more days of low wind speeds and little precipitation, when pollutants can settle — are also a risk, the International Journal of Women’s Dermatology’s introduction adds. Those pollutants can trigger autoimmune skin diseases like lupus, and a blistering disease called pemphigus vulgaris also has “increased hospitalizations if there’s high pollution in the environment,” Rosenbach told me.
There are small annoyances, too: Apparently more CO2 also means more poison ivy.
Pollen seasons across the country are getting worse due to climate change, but particularly so in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and parts of Canada — something any sufferer of seasonal hay fever will tell you can quickly develop into a nasty dermatology concern.
Speaking of nasty, research also shows that increased rainfall in the Great Lakes region due to climate change is resulting in a runoff of “metals, pesticides, pathogens, and fecal indicator bacteria” into recreational waters. “Summertime bacteria concentrations in an inland lake in Wisconsin,” for example, exhibited “positive, significant correlations” with the amount and duration of seasonal rainfall. Swimmer’s itch also appears to be on the rise due to warming temperatures. Fun!
Then there’s Lyme disease, which causes a rash that, if addressed quickly with antibiotics, can head off the development of more serious post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. The concern is, ticks are now moving into areas where they haven’t been seen before — “dermatologists in Canada went their whole careers without ever encountering Lyme disease,” Rosenbach said — as well as emerging earlier in the season and hanging around through the late fall. “And that ... can mean that you’re not expecting Lyme disease [when] it walks in the door,” Rosenbach said. “And if you don’t recognize that, you can have severe consequences.”
Alaska, meanwhile, gets to enjoy thinking about a “worst-case scenario” of smallpox re-emerging from the melting permafrost.
When a fire burns through the West, it doesn’t just burn trees — there are cars, houses, and other not-great-to-breathe-in materials being incinerated and ending up in the air. Our skin doesn’t love that. Last year, a study that looked at the 2018 Camp Fire near San Francisco found that instances of eczema rose in local health clinics compared to 2015 and 2016. “Fully 89% of the patients that had itch during the time of the Camp Fire did not have a known diagnosis of [eczema], suggesting that folks with normal skin also experienced irritation and/or absorption of toxins within a very short period of time,” one of the authors said.
Skin is also affected by pollution, which disproportionately affects Black and Latino neighborhoods. Due to historic redlining, these areas are often “low-income, densely populated urban areas adjacent to industrial activities and lacking green spaces,” conditions that compound “health impacts such as chronic dermatitis exacerbations and carcinogenic skin damage,” the International Journal of Women’s Dermatology found. One study that looked at pemphigus flares — that’s the blistering autoimmune disease — “found an association between UV index and hospital admissions only in the subset of Hispanic/Latino patients,” despite using a representative U.S. sample.
The high heat in the West is also a concern since being unable to properly cool off via sweat can cause heat-related illnesses, currently the leading cause of death from extreme climate events in the United States. “The laborers who are out there working in the sun, not only do they get skin cancer, but they end up getting very dehydrated,” McKinley-Grant said, citing studies that have found high rates of kidney failure in agricultural workers and construction workers who labor in high heat conditions.
If you’re taking a dermatology board exam and the question mentions that a patient went camping in Costa Rica, “everyone knows the answer is leishmaniasis,” Rosenbach said. “The key word is ‘Costa Rica.’”
Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease spread by sand flies that can cause skin sores and impact internal organs, but it’s taught to aspiring doctors as being a tropical and subtropical disease. Yet parts of the United States are now subtropical too, including Texas and Oklahoma — where, indeed, endemic leishmaniasis cases have begun to appear. But if dermatologists aren’t looking for leishmaniasis in patients with no travel history, they could miss a crucial diagnosis.
Speaking of new diseases, “chikungunya and dengue are now reported within the southern United States, with Zika on the horizon,” one of the papers in the Women’s Dermatology special issue found. And with more powerful storms and flooding slamming southern coasts, “there is terrible dermatitis,” said McKinley-Grant, who has seen firsthand how unidentified infections arose in patients in North Carolina after they waded through waters up to their waists. In extreme environmental conditions such as we live in now, infections of any kind “need to be addressed immediately,” McKinley-Grant went on to stress, even if they seem as innocuous as a bug bite.
Skin problems are actually the “most common issues” medics see after major storms, Rosenbach said. Part of the reason is simple things, “like laceration from flying debris,” he went on. Part of it is that when water rises, “humans and animals are in closer contact, you get animal bites and things like that.” And part of it is that when “you get standing water [...] it releases some of these vector-borne things.”
Oh yeah, and then there are jellyfish. Seabather eruption, an itchy skin reaction caused by jellyfish larvae, “has become increasingly common potentially because of increased ocean temperatures,” the Women’s Dermatology paper found. “This eruption can occur in up to 16% of patients swimming during peak seasons in southeast Florida.”
If you go to the hospital for a broken hip, a doctor might suggest a home safety search. Someone will come to your house, tape down your carpets, and move low-hanging objects in order to prevent future trips and falls.
Rosenbach envisions a future where doctors would do the same for something like repeated childhood asthma hospitalizations. “What if someone at your house was like, ‘Hey, you have a gas-burning stove, and you have mold here, and you’re actually losing a lot of heat through these single pane windows and no insulation. And what we should do is, get rid of your gas stove, rip out this mold, and make your environment better and have some air filters, or whatever,” he mused. “Imagine you could go and make these changes, and suddenly this kid never had asthma anymore, never [needed to be] admitted to the hospital.”
Rather than play whack-a-mole with medical symptoms, then, Rosenbach is thinking like a dermatologist — that is, we ought to cut out the real cancer, which is our dependence on fossil fuels.
Admittedly, that’s daunting to tackle if you’re more immediately concerned with the weird rash you keep getting at the beach. But beyond “eating less meat, flying less, electrifying everything,” from a health-care standpoint, “I don’t think a lot of people think about talking about climate change with their medical team,” Rosenbach said. “And if they do, it pushes the medical team to educate themselves and educate the field.”
Good news for oversharers — talking about your weird rash with friends and acquaintances is also praxis. “No one should be afraid to say, ‘I saw my doctor and they said I got Lyme. I got bit by the tick in February, because of climate change! That’s kind of crazy!’” Rosenbach added. “Just having those conversations and showing people that these are real-time impacts that they’re experiencing I think is important.”
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.