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Not that the movie was correct, but it wasn’t totally wrong — and we could soon face the consequences.
At 2:30 a.m. on June 6, 1998, Whitley Strieber awoke to a knock on his hotel door. Strieber, a UFOologist — that is, a scholar of unidentified flying objects and other paranormal phenomena — was in Toronto that night on tour, promoting his latest book, and he groggily got up to let his visitor in, assuming it was room service. It wasn’t.
According to Strieber, he and his nocturnal visitor proceeded to speak on a wide range of topics in his room over the next half hour. Although he never heard from the man again after that night, Strieber took notes during their meeting, during which the visitor tipped him off about “what was then rather obscure climatology,” Strieber told me. Specifically — according to Strieber — the visitor told him about the pending collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, the system sometimes described as the oceanic conveyor belt responsible for influencing the climate of the Northern Hemisphere.
The late-night conversation became the premise of Strieber’s next book, 1999’s The Coming Global Superstorm, which he co-wrote with the paranormal radio show host Art Bell. The scientific community was not exactly impressed by the work: “I think they’d rather forget I even exist,” Strieber told me. (Bell died in 2018.)
But Strieber got the last laugh: The Coming Global Superstorm not only became the premise for The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 disaster movie in which Dennis Quaid plays an NOAA paleoclimatologist, and New York freezes over and is beset by wolves, but recent modeling also indicates that the AMOC actually is slowing down. In some of the latest worst case scenario models, researchers say it could reach the point of no return, sending it into collapse as soon as this year. Once that happens, researchers predict that “the ice age pattern of a cooling north and warming south would play out again,” and while Northern Europe would bear the brunt of the effects, the Arctic temperatures experienced across North America this week — from a dangerously cold Inauguration Day to a blizzard warning for the Gulf Coast — could become a norm rather than an anomaly.
“I have watched [The Day After Tomorrow] a couple of times over the last few years, and I’m surprised at how the general premise isn’t that bad,” David Thornalley, a paleoceanographer at University College London, told me.
Of course, there is more wrong in The Day After Tomorrow (and The Coming Global Superstorm, for that matter) than there is right: Thornalley added that following an actual AMOC collapse, weather-related changes would take place on a “multi-decadal time scale” rather than in the mere weeks of exaggerated calamity depicted in the film.
Still, The Day After Tomorrow — which predated Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth by two years and was many Americans’ first introduction to the idea of anthropogenic extreme weather — can seem, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient. It anticipated global warming-caused fresh water runoff from Greenland, which is upsetting the salinity of the ocean — essentially making it less dense — and breaking down the warm-and-cold water circulation across the globe that currently keeps our climate stable. With enough fresh water, the planet’s circulatory system could shut down for the first time since the Neanderthals went extinct.
And while Los Angeles isn’t going to be leveled by tornadoes and wolves won’t roam the tundra of Midtown Manhattan, Europe couldcool by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which would have disastrous consequences for the continent’s agriculture. Additionally, the sharp temperature disparities between Northern Europe and the Mediterranean region could result in expansive (albeit not global) storms. While the U.S. would likely dodge the worst of an AMOC-induced cooldown, an ensuing sea level rise would impact many of the nation’s populous and iconic seaboard cities.
As shrewd as Day After Tomorrow and its source material might seem now, research into the possibility of an AMOC collapse dates back to the work of oceanographer Henry Stommel, who made the ocean salinity-conveyor belt connection in 1961. “That wasn’t taken very seriously because it wasn’t really an ocean model but just a sort of conceptual view on salt and heat interaction on the density,” Henk Dijkstra, a professor of physical oceanography at Utrecht University and one of the authors of the recent modeling that points toward an impending AMOC collapse, told me.
By 1986, however, the field of paleoclimatology was expanding rapidly. Researchers sampled ice cores collected from places like Greenland, and learned that there had been “very abrupt changes in climate” in the past, Thornalley told me. The Northern Hemisphere “would appear to be switching from a warm climate to a cold climate — flickering back and forth. And [scientists] put two and two together.”
The news was something of a revelation. “We started to develop this paradigm that, yes, we’ve had abrupt climate change in the past, and we think we can relate it to these changes in the Atlantic circulation, and the climate models suggest that, if possible, it could happen in the future,” said Thornalley, who began his PhD the year that Day After Tomorrow was released. The precedent wasn’t exactly reassuring news — the last time the AMOC collapsed, after all, “there were massive ice sheets and wooly mammoths,” Thornalley added. “It’s not a nice world for humans to try and live in.”
Despite the dire warning in the ice cores, an AMOC collapse wasn’t on the public’s radar before its introduction via Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal. That isn’t to say it wasn’t a buzzy topic of discussion in the scientific community (not to mention that of beings who make a habit of dropping in on UFOlogists in the wee hours of the night). “It was really a hot topic” in climate circles, Thornalley confirmed. The film was “very much of its time.”
The Day After Tomorrow’s scientific resonance today, then, is due more to the fact that AMOC modeling has continued to hone in on the theory of a pending collapse with precision than because of any stunning predictive qualities of the movie itself. The scientific community is still in deep debate over the possibilities and potential outcomes and timelines of the process — a new paper out last week even argues that the AMOC hasn’t been declining — but for all the messiness and caveats, Thornalley ultimately lands in a place not so far from Strieber’s own position. “I don’t think we should be happy to wait until we’re really confident because, by then, it’d be too late,” Thornalley told me. “It’d be rubbish if in 30 to 40 years time, [the AMOC has collapsed] and people go, ‘Well why didn’t you warn us about it?’ ‘Oh, because we wanted to make sure we were really, really, really sure.’
Modern modeling of an AMOC collapse circles back to its speculative offshoots in other ways. Dijkstra told me he’s been working recently on models that consider how to encourage AMOC’s recovery, including via the rapid reduction of emissions. But his team has also run experiments that consider climate geoengineering, including “putting aerosols in the stratosphere” and “closing the Bering Straight,” both of which have the potential to limit freshwater from pouring into the Atlantic. “It’s a bit science fiction, but in models you can do everything,” Dijkstra said.
UFOlogists and mainstream scientists don’t often find themselves on the same side. But while many would dismiss Strieber as an environmental conspiracy theorist, the epigraph to The Coming Global Superstorm reads as urgently and poignantly today as it did umpteen AMOC models ago: “May the children of tomorrow look back on our era as the one where the healing of the earth began.”
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A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.