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A summer school program in Roanoke, Virginia, could change the way people think about heat.
According to legend, the ghost of Lucy Addison still roams the halls of her namesake middle school in Roanoke, Virginia. She’s particularly fond of the basement, where the art and technology rooms are.
So when Brian Kreppeneck got a few thermal cameras for a summer program he was running this year, he knew exactly how he was going to teach his students how to use them: with a ghost hunt. He took them downstairs to the auditorium, shut off the lights, and had them train the cameras on things like the air-conditioning vents, a digital clock blinking in one corner, and the empty auditorium stage.
“And wouldn't you know it, as we're looking at the auditorium stage, a little mouse ran across the auditorium,” Kreppeneck, a science teacher at the school, told me. “They screamed and ran out, and that’s how they learned to use the thermal cameras.”
The cameras had a use beyond ghost-hunting and scaring schoolchildren (and mice): The students were going to use them to measure temperatures in and around their school. Over the course of a week, they pointed the cameras at all kinds of things in the world around them, from basketball courts baking in the sun to the shady ground underneath trees. They also clipped sensors to their shoes, which measured ambient temperatures as the kids went about their days. But that was just the beginning.
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“We wanted to develop a curriculum where students learn both about the problem of urban heat, and then also are able to connect that with potential solutions that come from urban planning,” said Theodore Lim, assistant professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech and the designer of the summer program. “We want them to feel like there are things that [they] could do in [their] own neighborhoods to help mitigate some of those temperatures.”
Urban heat is a longstanding, intractable problem. Study after study has shown that cities are noticeably hotter than surrounding rural areas; this is called the Urban Heat Island effect. Many studies have also shown that the hottest parts of most cities tend to be the areas that house lower-income communities and communities of color, thanks to a dearth of vegetation, tightly packed buildings, and an overabundance of construction materials that radiate heat like concrete. Richer neighborhoods, meanwhile, tend to be lusher, with more space between buildings and, often, building materials like wood or brick that do a better job of dissipating heat.
But understanding just how the built environment affects heat is pretty hard. Meteorologists and weather apps tend to draw data from sensors at airports, which can’t give us any insight into the contours of heat within specific neighborhoods. The numbers we see on our phones often don’t reflect the temperatures we feel; a neighborhood by a river or a park, for example, would be much cooler than a neighborhood with high concentrations of concrete and asphalt, yet residents in both places would see the same temperature in their apps or on TV.
After a week of collecting data with another teacher, the middle-schoolers came back to Kreppeneck’s classroom to figure out what all the numbers had to say. Put together, the data from the thermal cameras and the shoe sensors created something few of us get to see: a personalized look at how the built world around them shaped the way heat worked in their lives. As Lim and Kreppeneck expected, the temperatures the kids experienced were often higher than the temperatures measured by the sensors at a nearby airport, sometimes by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit:
Temperatures collected by sensors on students’ sneakers compared to temperature recorded at a nearby weather station. Courtesy Theodore Lim
Each colored line represents the data from a student at one of the five schools that participated, while the black line represents the temperature reported by the weather station at a nearby airport. If we follow a few of the blue lines, which represent students from Addison middle school — the one with the ghost — we see some of their personal temperatures spiking high above the black line. This could be for a few reasons: maybe they’re playing basketball on a concrete court, or eating lunch outside, or walking around a neighborhood with few trees.
But on each day, when the black line is at its peak, we see almost all of the students’ temperatures dip far below it. That was when the kids were cooling off indoors, often in air-conditioned buildings. As day turns to night, we see temperatures at the weather station dip below what some of the kids experienced indoors. By the next morning, as the kids start going about their days, their lines spike above the weather station again.
“Before they did this activity, if you asked one of these middle school kids if humans can control the temperature outside, they’d say no way,” Lim said. “But then they start to make these correlations: Humans make decisions about where to plant trees, or where to build parking lots, or what color different surfaces should be. And so we kind of do control the outdoor temperature.”
This kind of realization also shifts heat away from being a personal issue that can be solved by, say, drinking water or cranking the air conditioner, to a systemic one. There’s something kind of freeing about this: Lim said that instead of being ashamed that their families might not be able to afford air conditioning, the students came to recognize that their neighborhoods were historically hotter because of decisions made by other people. Northeast and Southeast Roanoke, for example, both saw higher temperatures than the Northwest and Southwest quadrants, and the entire city was significantly hotter than the rest of Roanoke County:
Temperatures recorded in each quadrant over the course of the summer program. The bars show the range, while the boxes are the average. Courtesy Theodore Lim.
Armed with their temperature data, the students spent the second week of their summer program in Kreppeneck’s class learning about urban planning and mapping out ways their own neighborhoods could be redesigned to mitigate heat.
“As science teachers, we’ve always struggled to make the connection between science in the classroom and home,” Kreppeneck told me. “There’s always been some sort of a wall there, where the kids just think science takes place in the classroom. But giving them a real-world project made these concepts transcend the classroom.”
Kreppeneck also talked to his students about activism and advocating for change. This was the idea of Virginia Tech’s Lim; activism gives the kids a sense of agency over their built environment, and it also encourages them to start conversations with the adults in their lives who previously might not have paid much attention to climate change, whether due to a lack of information or the impression that it didn’t impact them. But climate change continues to push global temperatures higher — this September was the hottest on record — and the effect of climate change on heat is becoming increasingly harder to ignore. Creating policy to deal with those changes, however, is a difficult task.
“In Roanoke, as is probably the case in many cities, there's kind of a lot of contention between the government and some of these more vulnerable communities because of the history of urban renewal,” Lim said.
As Martha Park writes in a beautiful illustrated history for Bloomberg, northeast Roanoke was a thriving home for black and immigrant residents prior to urban renewal, a policy James Baldwin once called “negro removal.” Then, in 1955, the city declared the area “blighted,” seized the entire neighborhood through eminent domain, burned the buildings to the ground, and even exhumed nearly a thousand bodies from the local cemetery, dumping them in a mass grave outside town. Today, the area is mostly pavement and industrial parks.
“There’s a lot of mistrust on both sides,” Lim told me. “I’ve found that using youth-based community science is a relatively uncontroversial way of getting at some issues that actually do have very deep systemic causes.”
This was the third year Lim ran his program in Roanoke. In earlier years, Lim ran the program by himself at just one of the schools; this summer’s group, consisting of 130 students from all five Roanoke middle schools over the course of six weeks, was by far the largest, and Kreppeneck and another teacher took over most of the day-to-day. Going forward, Lim hopes it’ll turn into something more than a middle-school summer program; community leaders are talking about putting together a climate action plan for the city, and he’s exploring the possibility of creating programs at local high schools and churches that build on the middle school curriculum. The idea is to get the message about heat, and the solutions for it, out into the community in as many ways as possible.
Kreppeneck’s already planning on incorporating urban heat into his syllabus for the spring semester, expanding the two-week summer program into something that the students can engage with on a deeper level.
“My hope is that the kids will start talking about it, and start taking ownership,” Kreppeneck said. “Watching the looks on their faces, watching how the wheels started turning as to how they would change their neighborhood, it was very rewarding. If they believe in something, they can make change. It starts with them.”
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Current conditions: Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo is blanketed in a layer of toxic smog • Temperatures in Perth, in Western Australia, could hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It is cloudy in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are scrambling to prevent a government shutdown.
The weather has gotten so weird that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding internal talks about how to adjust its models to produce more accurate forecasts, the Financial Timesreported. Current models are based on temperature swings observed over one part of the Pacific Ocean that have for years correlated consistently with specific weather phenomena across the globe, but climate change seems to be disrupting that cause and effect pattern, making it harder to predict things like La Niña and El Niño. Many forecasters had expected La Niña to appear by now and help cool things down, but that has yet to happen. “It’s concerning when this region we’ve studied and written all these papers on is not related to all the impacts you’d see with [La Niña],” NOAA’s Michelle L’Heureux told the FT. “That’s when you start going ‘uh-oh’ there may be an issue here we need to resolve.”
There is quite a lot of news coming out of the Department of Energy as the year (and the Biden administration) comes to an end. A few recent updates:
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, does not expect to meet its 2025 or 2030 emissions targets, and is putting the blame on policy, infrastructure, and technology limitations. The company previously pledged to cut its emissions by 35% by next year, and 65% by the end of the decade. Emissions in 2023 were up 4% year-over-year.
Walmart
“While we continue to work toward our aspirational target of zero operational emissions by 2040, progress will not be linear … and depends not only on our own initiatives but also on factors beyond our control,” Walmart’s statement said. “These factors include energy policy and infrastructure in Walmart markets around the world, availability of more cost-effective low-GWP refrigeration and HVAC solutions, and timely emergence of cost-effective technologies for low-carbon heavy tractor transportation (which does not appear likely until the 2030s).”
BlackRock yesterday said it is writing down the value of its Global Renewable Power Fund III following the failure of Northvolt and SolarZero, two companies the fund had invested in. Its net internal rate of return was -0.3% at the end of the third quarter, way down from 11.5% in the second quarter, according toBloomberg. Sectors like EV charging, transmission, and renewable energy generation and storage have been “particularly challenged,” executives said, and some other renewables companies in the portfolio have yet to get in the black, meaning their valuations may be “more subjective and sensitive to evolving dynamics in the industry.”
Flies may be more vulnerable to climate change than bees are, according to a new study published in the Journal of Melittology. The fly haters among us might shrug at the finding, but the researchers insist flies are essential pollinators that help bolster ecosystem biodiversity and agriculture. “It’s time we gave flies some more recognition for their role as pollinators,” said lead author Margarita López-Uribe, who is the Lorenzo Langstroth Early Career Associate Professor of Entomology at Penn State. The study found bees can tolerate higher temperatures than flies, so flies are at greater risk of decline as global temperatures rise. “In alpine and subarctic environments, flies are the primary pollinator,” López-Uribe said. “This study shows us that we have entire regions that could lose their primary pollinator as the climate warms, which could be catastrophic for those ecosystems.”
“No one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded.” –Heatmap’s Jeva Lange writes about the challenges facing climate cinema, and why 2024 might be the year the climate movie grew up.
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.
Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”
I have a slightly different take on the situation, though — that 2024 was actuallyfull of climate movies, and, I’d argue, that they’re getting much closer to the kinds of stories a climate-concerned individual should want on screen.
That’s because for the most part, when movies and TV shows have tackled the topic of climate change in the past, it’s been with the sort of “simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing” that The New Yorker’s Richard Brody identified in 2022’s Don’t Look Up, the Adam McKay satire that became the primary touchpoint for scripted climate stories. At least it was kind of funny: More overt climate stories like last year’s Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ show in which Meryl Streep voices a whale, are so self-righteous as to be unwatchable (not to mention, no fun).
But what if we widened our lens and weren’t so prescriptive? Then maybe Furiosa, this spring’s Mad Max prequel, becomes a climate change movie. The film is set during a “near future” ecological collapse, and it certainly makes you think about water scarcity and our overreliance on a finite extracted resource — but it also makes you think about how badass the Octoboss’ kite is. The same goes for Dune: Part Two, which made over $82 million in its opening weekend and is also a recognizable environmental allegory featuring some cool worms. Even Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a flop that most people have already memory-holed, revisitedThe Day After Tomorrow’s question of, “What if New York City got really, really, really cold?”
Two 2024 animated films with climate themes could even compete against each other at the Academy Awards next year. Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, one of the centerpiece films at this fall’s inaugural Climate Film Festival, is set in a world where sea levels have risen to submerge the Golden Gate Bridge, and it impresses on its audience the importance of protecting the natural world. And in Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, one of my favorite films of the year, a cat must band together with other animals to survive a flood.
Flow also raises the question of whether a project can unintentionally be a climate movie. Zilbalodis told me that making a point about environmental catastrophe wasn’t his intention — “I can’t really start with the message, I have to start with the character,” he said — and to him, the water is a visual metaphor in an allegory about overcoming your fears.
But watching the movie in a year when more than a thousand people worldwide have died in floods, and with images of inundated towns in North Carolina still fresh in mind, it’s actually climate change itself that makes one watch Flow as a movie about climate change. (I’m not the only one with this interpretation, either: Zilbalodis told me he’d been asked by one young audience member if the flood depicted in his film is “the future.”)
Perhaps this is how we should also consider Chung’s comments about Twisters. While nobody in the film says the words “climate change” or “global warming,” the characters note that storms are becoming exceptional — “we've never seen tornadoes like this before,” one says. Despite the director’s stated intention not to make the movie “about” climate change, it becomes a climate movie by virtue of what its audiences have experienced in their own lives.
Still, there’s that niggling question: Do movies like these, which approach climate themes slant-wise, really count? To help me decide, I turned to Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that encourages environmental awareness both on set and on screen. He told me that to qualify something as a “climate” movie or TV show, some research groups look to see if climate change exists in the world of the story or whether the characters acknowledge it. Other groups consider climate in tiers, such as whether a project has a climate premise, theme, or simply a moment.
The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, however, has no hard rules. “We want to make sure that we support creatives in integrating these stories in whatever way works for them,” Read told me.
Read also confirmed my belief that there seemed to be an uptick in movies this year that were “not about climate change but still deal with things that feel very climate-related, like resource extraction.” There was even more progress on this front in television, he pointed out: True Detective: Night Country wove in themes of environmentalism, pollution, mining, and Indigenous stewardship; the Max comedy Hacks featured an episode about climate change this season; and Industry involved a storyline about taking a clean energy company public, with some of the characters even attending COP. Even Doctor Odyssey, a cruise ship medical drama that airs on USA, worked climate change into its script, albeit in ridiculous ways. (Also worth mentioning: The Netflix dating show Love is Blind cast Taylor Krause, who works on decarbonizing heavy industry at RMI.)
We can certainly do more. As many critics before me have written, it’s still important to draw a connection between things like environmental catastrophes and the real-world human causes of global warming. But the difference between something being “a climate movie” and propaganda — however true its message, or however well-intentioned — is thin. Besides, no one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded; we want to be moved and distracted and entertained.
I’ve done my fair share of complaining over the past few years about how climate storytelling needs to grow up. But lately I’ve been coming around to the idea that it’s not the words “climate change” appearing in a script that we need to be so focused on. As 2024’s slate of films has proven to me — or, perhaps, as this year’s extreme weather events have thrown into relief — there are climate movies everywhere.
Keep ‘em coming.
They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.
Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress.
It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.
When those talks died, they also killed a separate deal over permitting struck earlier this year between Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. That deal, as I detailed last week, would have loosened some federal rules around oil and gas drilling in exchange for a new, quasi-mandatory scheme to build huge amounts of long-distance transmission.
Rest in peace, I suppose. Even if lawmakers could not agree on NEPA changes, I think Republicans made a mistake by not moving forward with the Manchin-Barrasso deal. (I still believe that the standalone deal could have passed the Senate and the House if put to a vote.) At this point, I do not think we will see another shot at bipartisan permitting reform until at least late 2026, when the federal highway law will need fresh funding.
But it is difficult to get too upset about this failure because larger mistakes have since compounded the initial one. On Wednesday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan deal to fund the government — which is, after all, a much more fundamental task of governance than rewriting some federal permitting laws — fell apart, seemingly because Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided they didn’t like it. If I can indulge in the subjunctive for a moment: That breakdown might have likely killed any potential permitting deal, too. So even in a world where lawmakers somehow did strike a deal earlier this week, it might already be dead. (As I write this, the House GOP has reportedly reached a new deal to fund the government through March, which has weakened or removed provisions governing pharmacy benefit managers and limiting American investments in China.)
The facile reading of this situation is that Republicans now hold the advantage. The Trump administration will soon be able to implement some of the fossil fuel provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso deal through the administrative state. Trump will likely expand onshore and offshore drilling, will lease the government’s best acreage to oil and gas companies, and will approve as many liquified natural gas export terminals as possible. His administration will do so, however, without the enhanced legal protection that the deal would have provided — and while those protections are not a must-have, especially with a friendly Supreme Court, their absence will still allow environmental groups to try to run down the clock on some of Trump’s more ambitious initiatives.
Republicans believe that they will be able to get parts of permitting reform done in a partisan reconciliation bill next year. These efforts seem quite likely to run aground, at least as long as something like the current rules governing reconciliation bills hold. I have heard some crazy proposals on this topic — what if skipping a permitting fight somehow became a revenue-raiser for the federal government? — but even they do not touch the deep structure of NEPA in the way a bipartisan compromise could. As Westerman toldPolitico’s Josh Siegel: “We need 60 votes in the Senate to get real permitting reform … People are just going to have to come to an agreement on what permitting reform is.” In any case, Manchin and the Democrats already tried to reform the permitting system via a partisan reconciliation bill and found it essentially impossible.
Even if reconciliation fails, Republicans say, they will still be in a better negotiating position next year than this year because the party will control a few more Senate votes. But will they? The GOP will just have come off a difficult fight over tax reform. Twelve or 24 months from now, demands on the country’s electricity grid are likely to be higher than they are today, and the risk of blackouts will be higher than before. The lack of a robust transmission network will hinder the ability to build a massive new AI infrastructure, as some of Trump’s tech industry backers hope. But 12 or 24 months from now, too, Democrats — furious at Trump — are not going to be in a dealmaking mood, and Republicans have relatively few ways to bring them to the table.
In any case, savvy Republicans should have realized that it is important to get supply-side economic reforms done as early in a president’s four-year term as possible. Such changes take time to filter through the system and turn into real projects and real economic activity; passing the law as early as possible means that the president’s party can enjoy them and campaign on them.
All of it starts to seem more and more familiar. When Manchin and Barrasso unveiled their compromise earlier this year, Democrats didn’t act quickly on it. They felt confident that the window for a deal wouldn’t close — and they looked forward to a potential trifecta, when they would be able to get even more done (and reject some of Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly compromises).
Democrats, I think, wound up regretting the cavalier attitude that they brought to permitting reform before Trump’s win. But now the GOP is acting the same way: It is rejecting compromises, believing that it will be able to strike a better deal on permitting issues during its forthcoming trifecta. That was a mistake when Democrats did it. I think it will be a mistake for Republicans, too.