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Same goes for the Midwest, according to Stanford air quality researcher Marshall Burke.
It’s not just you: Summers are getting smokier.
For the third year in a row, cities like Detroit, Minneapolis, Boston, and New York are experiencing dangerously polluted air for days at a time as smoke drifts into the U.S. from wildfires in Canada.
Smoke has traveled to these places in the past, Stanford University researcher Marshall Burke told me. But the data is clear that the haze is becoming more severe.
“The worst days are worse,” said Burke, “and you can see that in the averages, the last couple of years are much, much higher across the Midwest and the East Coast than we’ve observed in the past many decades.”
Burke is one of the leading scholars studying wildfire smoke, investigating everything from its effect on air quality, public health, and behavior, to preventative and adaptive public policy responses. In one of his most recent papers, which has not yet been peer reviewed, he and his co-authors analyzed the influence of smoke on air quality over the past two decades, using satellite imagery of smoke plumes to disentangle how much of the fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, measured by air monitoring stations came from fires versus more typical sources like cars and furnaces.
The study shows a sharp increase in the amount of smoke in the air around the U.S. in just the past few years. From 2020 to 2023, the average American breathed in concentrations of smoke-related PM2.5 that were between 2.6 and 6.7 times higher than the 2006 to 2019 average.
The paper also contains a stunning set of charts that show that wildfires are eroding decades of air quality gains — and the efficacy of air quality regulation in general — and that without these smoke events, PM2.5 levels would have been significantly lower.
Courtesy of Marshall Burke
I caught up with Burke to better understand what we know about this seemingly sudden escalation of smoke events, and what we can do to better protect ourselves from them moving forward. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Given the smoke events we’ve seen in the last three years, can we say anything about the next three years?
I don’t think you want to make bets on any specific years. The long run trend, unfortunately, suggests that the last few years are going to be more representative than the sorts of years we got 10 to 15 to 20 years ago. And that is due to the underlying physical climate that’s warming and drying out fuels and making fire spread faster and fires much larger. Larger fires generate more smoke.
Has it all been driven by Canadian wildfires?
No. The East Coast and the Midwest will get exposure from fires as far as California, often in the Northern Rockies. But the recent very bad exposure — 2023 was by far the worst year in the Midwest and East Coast — that was nearly all from Canadian fires. This year, again, it’s nearly all from Canadian fires.
Why is that?
The reason we’ve seen a lot more Canadian fires is the same reason we’ve seen a lot more fires in the U.S. West — increasing fuel aridity. As temperatures warm, forests dry out. And so when you get lightning strikes, which tend to start most of the large fires in Canada, you get faster fire spread and much larger fires.
Interestingly, we’ve seen in Canada fewer total fires over time. Often I see people posting this on Twitter — Climate change is not a problem, we’re getting fewer fires in Canada — and that’s true. I think they’ve reduced other sources of ignitions. But you still get lightning ignitions.
Burned area has gone the other way — you’ve seen an increase in burned area. So, fewer fires, but much larger fires, and these larger fires are the ones that put out a lot more smoke, and the smoke gets pushed into population centers in Canada and into the U.S.
There were really large wildfires in California before 2023. Why weren’t places on the East Coast having smoky days as a result of those?
It’s the way the wind blows and how far it has to go. In the large 2020 and 2021 fire seasons we had in the U.S. West, some of that smoke certainly was making it to the East Coast, but given the prevailing wind patterns and the distance the smoke had to travel, the influence of those fires on air quality was not as big as the recent Canadian fires.
Are there other events that cause comparable air quality degradation to wildfires?
You can get really specific things — if a train crashes and lights on fire and a given town is exposed to really high levels of whatever pollutant for a few days. Sometimes you can get dust events that have broad scale exposure. But basically never do you reach the AQI levels that we see in wildfires. Wildfires are pretty unique in their ability to expose very large numbers of people to a very high level of pollutants for days, or unfortunately now, weeks, at a time. Nothing else compares in the U.S.
If you go to other parts of the world where you have large anthropogenic sources — Indian cities, Chinese cities — it can be quite different. There’s some exceptions. Salt Lake City and places where you get inversions and you get pollution trapped for many days, you can get pretty high levels of exposure, but typically nowhere close to what you get during these acute wildfire events.
When the AQI goes back down to levels that are more common in a city after a smoke event and people feel safer going outside, are you able to measure how much of the PM2.5 remaining in the air is from a wildfire? Does it matter?
We try to measure that directly — on any given day, how much of the PM that you’re experiencing is from wildfires versus from other sources. What you see is these events can turn on really quickly, and they can also turn off really quickly, either because the wind direction changes or because it rains — if it rains, you rain out a lot of these pollutants, and then you’re breathing mostly clean air right away.
We also try to measure, how does human health respond? One thing that science doesn’t give us a crisp answer to yet is, is one day of 100 micrograms better or worse than 10 days of 10 micrograms of exposure? We don’t actually really know. What we do see is people respond very differently to those two scenarios in ways that likely affect health outcomes. On really bad days, people tend to stay inside. In California, total emergency department visits go down instead of up, and that’s because people are not getting in their cars, they’re not getting in car accidents, they’re not spraining their ankle playing football or whatever because they’re staying at home.
On lower smoke days, we see emergency department visits go up. That’s probably because people are not changing their behavior. But, maybe surprisingly, we still don’t have a crisp answer if you’re thinking about asthma or mortality or other cardiovascular outcomes.
What are some of the other questions researchers are trying to answer as this becomes more of a national issue?
All sorts of things. The immediate health impacts that you think about — respiratory outcomes have been the one that’s been measured best in a lot of different settings. Cardiovascular outcomes, I would say the evidence is surprisingly more mixed on that. There’s a long-standing literature that shows cardiovascular mortality impacts of exposure to PM, but for wildfire PM, specifically, that evidence is less clear. Sorting that out and trying to understand whether there are differences is important.
Cognitive outcomes — does it increase your risk of dementia? Does student learning go down? Does it reduce cognitive performance at work? I think there’s emerging evidence that smoke is pretty important. Exposure to air pollution, more broadly, is important, but wildfire smoke, specifically, can impact these outcomes.
Birth outcomes is another one we and others have looked at. You see a pretty clear signature of wildfire smoke in birth outcomes — increases to the risk of pre-term birth, for instance. We used to just think about sensitive populations as elderly populations or people with pre-existing conditions. And basically what the research is showing is, no, actually, everyone is sensitive in some way. The list of people who are likely affected probably includes most, if not all of us.
What are the potential policy responses to this in places that haven’t had to deal with it in the past?
I think there’s three policy buckets. This is more true in the U.S. than Canada, but our fire problem is a combination of a warming climate and a century of fire suppression that has left abundant fuel in our landscapes, so number one is dealing with climate change as best we can, and two is doing something about the accumulated fuel loads. There’s a lot we can do there — prescribed burning is one approach that we and others are studying a lot; mechanical thinning, where you go out and actually remove the fuel. Understanding when and where to do that and what the benefits are is an ongoing scientific challenge, but I think most of the evidence would suggest we’re going to need a lot more of that than we’ve done, historically.
But even if we do a lot of that, we’re going to get more of these smoke events, unfortunately. And so we need to protect ourselves when these events happen. Indoor air filtration works really well, so we need to make sure people have access to filters of various types. The evidence would suggest that we see health impacts even at pretty low levels of exposure, and so if you have a portable filter — I drive my family crazy, I’m turning ours on all the time. You should basically just be running them all the time.
What about in terms of messaging? I’m thinking about city officials or state officials, when a smoke event is coming — and maybe this is still an active area of research — but what’s the current thinking on what message to send to people?
Yeah, I think it is an ongoing area, in terms of exactly how to do this and who to target with the information. The way we typically do this is to set these thresholds, right? So, above some threshold, you get a notice, and below, you don’t. That is understandable.
But what we see in the data is that there’s not some level below which you’re fine and above which you’re screwed. What we see is the more smoke you’re exposed to, the worse off you are, and so our goal should just be to reduce our exposure as best we can. How to message that effectively is not something we have a crisp social scientific answer to yet.
A lot of the advice has historically been that you should stay at home with your windows and doors closed. In California homes that is not very protective because California homes tend to be not very tight. In my view, just telling people to close their windows and doors is not sufficient for protecting health. They need some sort of active filtration — portable air filter, central air — to do that.
The other thing that’s happened in California, and I’ve seen this with my own kids — should we cancel school on really bad days? The assumption is that kids are better protected at home than they would be in the school environment, and that’s just not obviously true. It could be the case that for many kids, schools are better. We don’t know, because we do not have comprehensive measurement of indoor air quality, and this is a huge failing that we need to fix. Just as we measure it pretty comprehensively outside, we’ve got to do the same thing inside, and we just haven’t done this.
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All of the administration’s anti-wind actions in one place.
The Trump administration’s war on the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry has kicked into high gear over the past week, with a stop work order issued on a nearly fully-built project, grant terminations, and court filings indicating that permits for several additional projects will soon be revoked.
These actions are just the latest moves in what has been a steady stream of attacks beginning on the first day Trump stepped into the White House. He appears to be following a policy wishlist that anti-offshore wind activists submitted to his transition team almost to a T. As my colleague Jael Holzman reported back in January, those recommendations included stop work orders, reviews related to national security, tax credit changes, and a series of agency studies, such as asking the Health and Human Services to review wind turbines’ effects on electromagnetic fields — all of which we’ve seen done.
It’s still somewhat baffling as to why Trump would go so far as to try and shut down a nearly complete, 704-megawatt energy project, especially when his administration claims to be advancing “energy addition, NOT subtraction.” But it’s helpful to see the trajectory all in one place to understand what the administration has accomplished — and how much is still up in the air.
January 20: Trump issues a presidential memorandum temporarily halting all new onshore and offshore wind permitting and leasing activities “in light of various alleged legal deficiencies underlying the Federal Government’s leasing and permitting of onshore and offshore wind projects,” while his administration conducts an assessment of federal review practices. The memo also temporarily withdraws all areas on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing.
March 14: The Environmental Protection Agency pulls a Clean Air Act permit for Atlantic Shores, which was set to deliver power into New Jersey.
April 16: The Department of the Interior issues a stop work order to Empire Wind, a New York offshore wind farm that began construction in 2024. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum accuses the Biden administration of giving the project a “rushed approval” that was “built on bad and flawed science,” citing feedback from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
May 1: The Interior Department withdraws a Biden-era legal opinion for how to conduct permitting in line with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that advised the Secretary to “strike a rational balance” between wind energy and fishing. The Department reinstated the opinion issued under Trump’s first term, which was more favorable to the fishing industry.
May 2: Anti-offshore wind group Green Oceans sends a 68-page report titled “Cancelling Offshore Wind Leases” to Secretary Burgum and acting Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals Management Adam Suess, according to emails uncovered by E&E News. The report “evaluates potential violations of Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) and related Federal laws in addition to those generally associated with environmental protection.”
May 5: Seventeen states plus the District of Columbia file a lawsuit challenging Trump’s January 20 memo halting federal approvals of wind projects.
May 19: The Interior Department lifts the stop work order on Empire Wind after closed-door meetings between New York governor Kathy Hochul and President Trump, during which the White House later says that Hochul “caved” to allowing “two natural gas pipelines to advance” through New York. Hochul denies reaching any deal on pipelines during the meetings.
June 4: Atlantic Shores files a request with New Jersey regulators to cancel its contract to sell energy into the state.
July 4: Trump signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which imposes new expiration dates on tax credits for wind and solar projects, including offshore wind, as well as on the manufacture of wind turbine components.
July 7: The Environmental Protection Agency notifies the Maryland Department of the Environment that the state office erred when issuing an air permit to the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, also known as MarWin, because the state specified that petitions to review the permit would go to state court rather than the federal agency. The state later disagrees.
July 17: New York regulators cancel plans to develop additional transmission capacity for future offshore wind development, citing “significant federal uncertainty.”
July 29: The Interior Department issues an order requesting reports that describe and provide recommendations for “trends in environmental impacts from onshore and offshore wind projects on wildlife” and the impacts that approved offshore wind projects might have on “military readiness.” The order also asserts that the Biden administration misapplied federal law when it approved the construction and operation plans of offshore wind projects.
July 30: The Interior Department rescinds all designated “wind energy areas” on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, which had been deemed suitable for offshore wind development.
August 5: The Interior Department eliminates a requirement to publish a five-year schedule of offshore wind energy lease sales and to update the lease sale schedule every two years.
August 7: The Interior Department initiates a review of offshore wind energy regulations “to ensure alignment with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and America’s energy priorities under President Donald J. Trump.”
August 13: The Department of Commerce initiates an investigation into whether imports of onshore and offshore wind turbine components threaten national security, a precursor to imposing tariffs.
New Jersey regulators also decide to delay offshore wind transmission upgrades by two years. They officially cancel their contract with Atlantic Shores.
August 22: The Interior Department issues a stop work order on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind project set to deliver power to Rhode Island and Connecticut, citing national security concerns. The 65-turbine project is already 80% complete.
Interior also says in a court filing that it intends to “vacate its approval” of the Construction and Operations Plan for the Maryland Offshore Wind Project.
August 29: The Interior Department says in a court filing that it “intends to reconsider” its approval of the construction and operations plan for the SouthCoast wind project, which was set to deliver power to Massachusetts.
The Department of Transportation also withdraws or terminates $679 million for 12 offshore wind port infrastructure projects to “ensure federal dollars are prioritized towards restoring America’s maritime dominance” by “rebuilding America’s shipbuilding capacity, unleashing more reliable, traditional forms of energy, and utilizing the nation’s bountiful natural resources to unleash American energy.” The grants include:
September 3: The Interior Department says in a court filing that it intends to vacate its approval of the construction and operations plan for Avangrid’s New England Wind 1 and 2, which were set to deliver power to Massachusetts.
The New York Times also reports that the White House has instructed “a half-dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry,” including asking the Department of Health and Human Services to study “whether wind turbines are emitting electromagnetic fields that could harm human health,” and asking the Defense Department to probe “whether the projects could pose risks to national security.”
September 4: The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as Orsted, file lawsuits challenging the stop work order on Revolution Wind.
At the start of all this, the U.S. had three offshore wind projects that were fully operational and five that were under construction. As of today, the Trump administration has halted just one of those five, but it has threatened to rescind approvals for each and every remaining fully permitted project that hasn’t yet broken ground.
The tumult has rippled out into the states, where regulators in Massachusetts and Rhode Island are delaying plans to sign contracts to procure additional energy from offshore wind projects.
Looking ahead, we can expect a few things to happen over the next few weeks. We’ll see the Interior Department formally begin to rescind permits, as it indicated it would do in numerous court filings. We’ll also likely get an opinion from a federal court in Massachusetts in the case that states filed fighting Trump’s Day One memo. Orsted also said it intends to ask for a temporary injunction, so it’s possible that Revolution Wind could resume construction soon.
It’s been barely a month since Jael dubbed the Trump administration’s tactics a “total war on wind.” While the result hasn’t been a complete shutdown of the industry, it seems he might still be in the early stages of his plan.
The Nimbus wind project in the Ozark Mountains is moving forward even without species permits, while locals pray Trump will shut it down.
The state of Arkansas is quickly becoming an important bellwether for the future of renewable energy deployment in the U.S., and a single project in the state’s famed Ozark Mountains might be the big fight that decides which way the state’s winds blow.
Arkansas has not historically been a renewables-heavy state, and very little power there is generated from solar or wind today. But after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state saw a surge in project development, with more than 1.5 gigawatts of mostly utility-scale solar proposed in 2024, according to industry data. The state also welcomed its first large wind farm that year.
As in other states – Oklahoma and Arizona, for example – this spike in development led to a fresh wave of opposition and grassroots organizing against development. At least six Arkansas counties currently have active moratoria on solar or wind development, according to Heatmap Pro data. Unlike other states, Arkansas has actually gone there this year by passing a law restricting wind development and requiring all projects to have minimum setbacks on wind turbines from neighboring property owners of at least 3.5-times the height of the wind turbine itself, which can be as far as a quarter of a mile.
But activists on the ground still want more. Specifically, they want to stop Scout Clean Energy’s Nimbus wind project, which appears to have evaded significant barriers from either the new state law or a local ordinance blocking future wind development in Carroll County, the project’s future home. This facility is genuinely disliked by many on the ground in Carroll County; for weeks now, I have been monitoring residents posting to Facebook with updates on the movements of wind turbine components and their impacts to traffic. I’ve also seen the grumbling about it travel from the mouths of residents living near the project site to conservative social media influencers and influential figures in conservative energy policy circles.
The Nimbus project is also at considerable risk of federal intervention in some fashion. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, Nimbus applied to the Fish and Wildlife Service for incidental take approval covering golden eagles and endangered bats throughout the course of its operation. This turned into a multi-year effort to craft a conservation plan in tandem with permitting applications that are all pending approval from federal officials.
Scout Clean Energy still had not received permission by the time FWS changed hands to Trump 2.0, though – putting not only its permit but the project itself in potential legal risk. In addition, activists have recently seized upon risks floated by the Defense Department during development around the potential for the turbines to negatively impact radar capabilities, which previously resulted in the developer planning towers of varying heights for the blades.
These risks aren’t unique to Nimbus. Some of this is a reflection of how wind projects are generally so large and impactful that they wind up eventually landing in a federal nexus. But in this particular case, the fact that it seemed nothing could halt this project made me wonder if Trump was on the minds of people in Carroll County, too.
That’s how I wound up on the phone with Caroline Rogers, a woman living on Bradshaw Mountain near the Nimbus project site, who told me she has been fighting it since she first learned about it in 2023. Rogers and I chatted for almost an hour and, candidly, I found her to be an incredibly nice individual. When I asked her why she’s against the wind farm, she brought up a bunch of reasons I couldn’t necessarily fault her for, like concerns about property values and a lack of local civil services to support the community if there were a turbine failure or fire at the site.
“I still pray every day,” she told me when I asked her about whether she wants an outside force – à la Trump – to come in and do something to stop the facility. “There have been projects that have been stopped for various reasons, and there have been turbines that have been taken down.”
One of the things Rogers hopes happens is that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s bird crackdown comes for the Nimbus project, which is under construction even as it’s unclear whether it’ll ever get the take permits under the Trump administration. “Maybe it can be more of an enforcement [action],” she told me. “I hope it happens.”
This is where Trump’s unprecedented approach to energy development – and the curtailment of it – would have to cross a new rubicon. The Fish and Wildlife Service has rarely exercised its bird protection enforcement abilities against wind projects because of a significant and recent backlog in the permitting process related to applications from the sector. Bill Eubanks, an environmental attorney who works on renewables conflicts, told me earlier this week that if a developer is told by the agency it needs a permit, then “they’re on notice if they kill an eagle.” But while enforcement powers have been used before, it is “not that common.”
Even Rogers knows intervention from federal species regulators would be a potentially unprecedented step. “It can never stop a project that I’ve seen,” she told me.
Yet if Trump were to empower FWS to go after wind projects for violating species statutes, it is precisely this backlog that would make projects like Nimbus a potential target.
“They got so many applications from developers, and each one takes so much staff time to finalize,” Eubanks told me. “Even before January 20, there was already a significant backlog.”
Scout Clean Energy did not respond to requests for comment. If I hear from them or the Fish and Wildlife Service, I will let you know.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Newport County, Rhode Island – The Trump administration escalated its onslaught against the offshore wind sector in the past week … coincidentally (or not) right after a New England-based anti-wind organization requested that it do so.
2. Madison County, New York – Officials in this county are using a novel method to target a wind project: They’re claiming it’ll disrupt 911 calls.
3. Wells County, Indiana – A pro-solar organization is apparently sending mass texts to people in this county asking them to sign a petition opposing a county-wide moratorium on new projects.
4. Henderson County, Kentucky – Planning officials in this county have recommended a two-year moratorium on wind power, sending the matter to a final vote before the county fiscal court.
5. Monterey County, California – Uh oh, another battery fire in central California.