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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 In one of his most recent papers, which has not yet been peer reviewed, he and his co-authors analyzed the influence of smoke on air quality over the past two decades, using satellite imagery of smoke plumes to disentangle how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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The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.
When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.
But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.
But, he told me, “Don’t let this headline conclude that battery manufacturing in the United States will never work, or that sodium-ion itself is uncompetitive. I think both those statements are naive and lack technological nuance.”
Opinions differ on the primary advantages of sodium-ion compared to lithium-ion, but one frequently cited benefit is the potential to build a U.S.-based supply chain. Sodium is cheaper and more abundant than lithium, and China hasn’t yet secured dominance in this emerging market, though it has taken an early lead. Sodium-ion batteries also perform better at lower temperatures, have the potential to be less flammable, and — under the right market conditions — could eventually become more cost-effective than lithium-ion, which is subject to more price volatility because it’s expensive to extract and concentrated in just a few places.
Yao’s paper didn’t examine Natron’s specific technology, which relied on a cathode material known as “Prussian Blue Analogue,” as the material’s chemical structure resembles that of the pigment Prussian Blue. This formula enabled the company’s batteries to discharge large bursts of power extremely quickly while maintaining a long cycle life, making it promising for a niche — but crucial — domestic market: data center backup power.
Natron’s batteries were designed to bridge the brief gap between a power outage and a generator coming online. Today, that role is often served by lead-acid batteries, which are cheap but bulky, with a lower energy density and shorter cycle life than sodium-ion. Thus, Yao saw this market — though far smaller than that of grid-scale energy storage — as a “technologically pragmatic” opportunity for the company.
“It’s almost like a supercapacitor, not a battery,” one executive in the sodium-ion battery space who wished to remain anonymous told me of Natron’s battery. Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that — like Natron’s tech — can release large amounts of power practically immediately, but store far less total energy than batteries.
“The thing that has been disappointing about the whole story is that people talk about Natron and their products and their journey as if it’s relevant at all to the sodium-ion grid scale storage space,” the executive told me. The grid-scale market, they said, is where most companies are looking to deploy sodium-ion batteries today. “What happened to Natron, I think, is very specific to Natron.”
But what exactly did happen to the once-promising startup, which raised over $363 million in private investment from big name backers such as Khosla Ventures and Prelude Ventures? What we know for sure is that it ran out of money, canceling plans to build a $1.4 billion battery manufacturing facility in North Carolina. The company was waiting on certification from an independent safety body, which would have unleashed $25 million in booked orders, but was forced to fold before that approval came through.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Natron’s founder, Colin Wessells, stepped down as CEO last December and left the company altogether in June.
“I got bored,” Wessels told The Information of his initial decision to relinquish the CEO role. “I found as I was spending all my time on fundraising and stockholder and board management that it wasn’t all that much fun.”
It’s also worth noting, however, that according to publicly available data, the investor makeup of Natron appears to have changed significantly between the company’s $35 million funding round in 2020 and its subsequent $58 million raise in 2021, which could indicate qualms among early backers about the direction of the company going back years. That said, not all information about who invested and when is publicly known. I reached out to both Wessels and Natron’s PR team for comment but did not receive a reply.
The company submitted a WARN notice — a requirement from employers prior to mass layoffs or plant closures — to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity on August 28. It explained that while Natron had explored various funding avenues including follow-on investment from existing shareholders, a Series B equity round, and debt financing, none of these materialized, leaving the company unable “to cover the required additional working capital and operational expenses of the business.”
Yao told me that the startup could have simply been a victim of bad timing. “While in some ways I think the AI boom was perfect timing for Natron, I also think it might have been a couple years too early — not because it’s not needed, but because of bandwidth,” he explained. “My guess is that the biggest thing on hyperscalers’ minds are currently still just getting connected to the grid, keeping up with continuous improvements to power efficiency, and how to actually operate in an energy efficient manner.” Perhaps in this environment, hyperscalers simply viewed deploying new battery tech for a niche application as too risky, Yao hypothesized, though he doesn’t have personal knowledge of the company’s partnerships or commercial activity.
The sodium-ion executive also thought timing might have been part of the problem. “He had a good team, and the circumstances were just really tough because he was so early,” they said. Wessells founded Natron in 2012, based on his PhD research at Stanford. “Maybe they were too early, and five years from now would have been a better fit,” the executive said. “But, you know, who’s to say?”
The executive also considers it telling that Natron only had $25 million in contracts, calling this “a drop in the bucket” relative to the potential they see for sodium-ion technology in the grid-scale market. While Natron wasn’t chasing the big bucks associated with this larger market opportunity, other domestic sodium-based battery companies such as Inlyte Energy and Peak Energy are looking to deploy grid-scale systems, as are Chinese battery companies such as BYD and HiNa Battery.
But it’s certainly true that manufacturing this tech in the U.S. won’t be easy. While Chinese companies benefit from state support that can prop up the emergent sodium-ion storage industry whether it’s cost-competitive or not, sodium-ion storage companies in the U.S. will need to go head-to-head with LFP batteries on price if they want to gain significant market share. And while a few years ago experts were predicting a lithium shortage, these days, the price of lithium is about 90% off its record high, making it a struggle for sodium-ion systems to match the cost of lithium-ion.
Sodium-ion chemistry still offers certain advantages that could make it a good option in particular geographies, however. It performs better in low-temperature conditions, where lithium-ion suffers notable performance degradation. And — at least in Natron’s case — it offers superior thermal stability, meaning it’s less likely to catch fire.
Some even argue that sodium-ion can still be a cost-effective option once manufacturing ramps up due to the ubiquity of sodium, plus additional savings throughout the batteries’ useful life. Peak Energy, for example, expects its battery systems to be more expensive upfront but cheaper over their entire lifetime, having designed a passive cooling system that eliminates the need for traditional temperature control components such as pumps and fans.
Ultimately, though, Yao thinks U.S. companies should be considering sodium-ion as a “low-temperature, high-power counterpart” — not a replacement — for LFP batteries. That’s how the Chinese battery giants are approaching it, he said, whereas he thinks the U.S. market remains fixated on framing the two technologies as competitors.
“I think the safe assumption is that China will come to dominate sodium-ion battery production,” Yao told me. “They already are far ahead of us.” But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build out a domestic supply chain — or at least that it’s not worth trying. “We need to execute with technologically pragmatic solutions and target beachhead markets capable of tolerating cost premiums before we can play in the big leagues of EVs or [battery energy storage systems],” he said.
And that, he affirmed, is exactly what Natron was trying to do. RIP.
They may not refuel as quickly as gas cars, but it’s getting faster all the time to recharge an electric car.
A family of four pulls their Hyundai Ioniq 5 into a roadside stop, plugs in, and sits down to order some food. By the time it arrives, they realize their EV has added enough charge that they can continue their journey. Instead of eating a leisurely meal, they get their grub to go and jump back in the car.
The message of this ad, which ran incessantly on some of my streaming services this summer, is a telling evolution in how EVs are marketed. The game-changing feature is not power or range, but rather charging speed, which gets the EV driver back on the road quickly rather than forcing them to find new and creative ways to kill time until the battery is ready. Marketing now frequently highlights an electric car’s ability to add a whole lot of miles in just 15 to 20 minutes of charge time.
Charging speed might be a particularly effective selling point for convincing a wary public. EVs are superior to gasoline vehicles in a host of ways, from instantaneous torque to lower fuel costs to energy efficiency. The one thing they can’t match is the pump-and-go pace of petroleum — the way combustion cars can add enough fuel in a minute or two to carry them for hundreds of miles. But as more EVs on the market can charge at faster speeds, even this distinction is beginning to disappear.
In the first years of the EV race, the focus tended to fall on battery range, and for good reason. A decade ago, many models could travel just 125 or 150 miles on a charge. Between the sparseness of early charging infrastructure and the way some EVs underperform their stated range numbers at highway speeds, those models were not useful for anything other than short hauls.
By the time I got my Tesla in 2019, things were better, but still not ideal. My Model 3’s 240 miles of max range, along with the expansion of the brand’s Supercharger network, made it possible to road-trip in the EV. Still, I pushed the battery to its limits as we crossed worryingly long gaps between charging stations in the wide open expanses of the American West. Close calls burned into my mind a hyper-awareness of range, which is why I encourage EV shoppers to pay extra for a bigger battery with additional range if they can afford it. You just had to make it there; how fast the car charged once you arrived was a secondary concern. But these days, we may be reaching a point at which how fast your EV charges is more important than how far it goes on a charge.
For one thing, the charging map is filling up. Even with an anti-EV American government, more chargers are being built all the time. This growth is beginning to eliminate charging deserts in urban areas and cut the number of very long gaps between stations out on the highway. The more of them come online, the less range anxiety EV drivers have about reaching the next plug.
Super-fast charging is a huge lifestyle convenience for people who cannot charge at home, a group that could represent the next big segment of Americans to electrify. Speed was no big deal for the prototypical early adopter who charged in their driveway or garage; the battery recharged slowly overnight to be ready to go in the morning. But for apartment-dwellers who rely on public infrastructure, speed can be the difference between getting a week’s worth of miles in 15 to 20 minutes and sitting around a charging station for the better part of an hour.
Crucially, an improvement in charging speed makes a long EV journey feel more like the driving rhythm of old. No, battery-powered vehicles still can’t get back on the road in five minutes or less. But many of the newer models can travel, say, three hours before needing to charge for a reasonable amount of time — which is about as long as most people would want to drive without a break, anyway.
An impressive burst of technological improvement is making all this possible. Early EVs like the original Chevy Bolt could accept a maximum of around 50 kilowatts of charge, and so that was how much many of the early DC fast charging stations would dispense. By comparison, Tesla in the past few years pushed Supercharger speed to 250 kilowatts, then 325. Third-party charging companies like Electrify America and EVgo have reached 350 kilowatts with some plugs. The result is that lots of current EVs can take on 10 or more miles of driving range per minute under ideal conditions.
It helps, too, that the ranges of EVs have been steadily improving. What those car commercials don’t mention is that the charging rate falls off dramatically after the battery is half full; you might add miles at lightning speed up to 50% of charge, but as it approaches capacity it begins to crawl. If you have a car with 350 miles of range, then, you probably can put on 175 miles in a heartbeat. (Efficiency counts for a lot, too. The more miles per kilowatt-hour your car can get, the farther it can go on 15 minutes of charge.)
Yet here again is an area where the West is falling behind China’s disruptive EV industry. That country has rolled out “megawatt” charging that would fill up half the battery in just four minutes, a pace that would make the difference between a gasoline pit stop and a charging stop feel negligible. This level of innovation isn’t coming to America anytime soon. But with automakers and charging companies focused on getting faster, the gap between electric and gas will continue to close.
On the need for geoengineering, Britain’s retreat, and Biden’s energy chief
Current conditions: Hurricane Gabrielle has strengthened into a Category 4 storm in the Atlantic, bringing hurricane conditions to the Azores before losing wind intensity over Europe • Heavy rains are whipping the eastern U.S. • Typhoon Ragasa downed more than 10,000 trees in Yangjiang, in southern China, before moving on toward Vietnam.
The White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare to reduce personnel during a potential government shutdown, targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue, Politico reported Wednesday, citing a memo from the agency.
As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange warned in May, the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal civil service mean “it may never be the same again,” which could have serious consequences for the government’s response to an unpredictable disaster such as a tsunami. Already the administration has hollowed out entire teams, such as the one in charge of carbon removal policy, as our colleague Katie Brigham wrote in February, shortly after the president took office. And Latitude Media reported on Wednesday, the Department of Energy has issued a $50 million request for proposals from outside counsel to help with the day-to-day work of the agency.
At the Heatmap House event at New York Climate Week on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer kicked things off by calling out President Donald Trump’s efforts to “kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth.” The born and raised Brooklynite praised his home state. “New York remains the climate leader,” he said, but warned that the current administration was pushing to roll back the progress the state had made.
Yet as Heatmap’s Charu Sinha wrote in her recap of the event, “many of the panelists remained cautiously optimistic about the future of decarbonization in the U.S.” Climate tech investors Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert charted a path forward for decarbonization technology even in an antagonistic political environment, while PG&E’s Carla Peterman made a case for how data centers could eventually lower energy costs. You can read about all these talks and more here.
Nearly 100 scientists, including President Joe Biden’s chief climate science adviser, signed onto a letter Wednesday endorsing more federal research into geoengineering, the broad category of technologies to mitigate the effects of climate change that includes the controversial proposal to inject sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. In an open letter, the researchers said “it is very unlikely that current” climate goals “will keep the global mean temperature below the Paris Agreement target” of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. The world has already warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius.
Earlier this month, a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers argued against even researching technologies that could temporarily cool the planet while humanity worked to cut planet-heating emissions. But Phil Duffy, Biden’s former climate adviser, said in a statement to Heatmap that the paper “opposes research … that might help protect or restore the polar regions.” He went on via email, “As the climate crisis accelerates, we all agree that we need to rapidly scale up mitigation efforts. But the stakes are too high not to also investigate other possible solutions.”
President Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Leon Neal/Getty Images
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans to skip the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil in November, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. He will do so despite criticizing his predecessor Rishi Sunak a few years ago for a “failure of leadership” after the conservative leader declined to attend the annual confab. One leader in the ruling Labour party said there was a “big fight inside the government” between officials pushing Starmer to attend the event those “wanting him to focus on domestic issues.”
Polls show approval for Starmer among the lowest of any leaders in the West. But he has recently pushed for more clean energy, including signing onto a series of nuclear power deals with the U.S.
The Tennessee Valley Authority has assumed the role of the nation’s testbed for new nuclear fission technologies, agreeing to build what are likely to be the nation’s first small modular reactors, including the debut fourth-generation units that use a coolant other than water. Now the federally-owned utility is getting into fusion. On Wednesday, the TVA inked a deal with fusion startup Type One Energy to develop a 350-megawatt plant “using the company’s stellarator fusion technology.” The deal, first brokered last week but reported Tuesday in World Nuclear News, promises to deploy the technology “once it is commercially ready.” It also follows the announcement just a few days ago of a major offtake agreement for fusion leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which will sell $1 billion of electricity to oil giant Eni.
Climate change is good news for foreign fish. A new study in Nature found that warming rivers have brought about the introduction of new invasive species. This, the researchers wrote, shows “an increase in biodiversity associated with improvement of water in many European rivers since the late twentieth century.”