You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
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.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.