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While hurricanes often dominate summer worries, climate change is supercharging the risks from your typical unnamed rainstorm.
When a slow-moving storm soaked Vermont with two-months worth of rain on Sunday and Monday, there was a ready comparison at hand: Tropical Storm Irene. The August 2011 storm similarly caused widespread flooding and resulted in more than $700 million in damages. While damage assessments are ongoing from this week’s storm, more than 200 people had to be rescued throughout the state as floodwaters surged, and early images show extensive public and private infrastructure losses.
Governor Phil Scott referred to the recent onslaught as “Irene 4.0” on Tuesday, while the National Weather Service’s Burlington, Vermont, office has repeatedly made its own Irene comparisons to drive home the danger residents continue to face from floodwaters.
However, this was not a tropical storm, which means there’s no name or ranking to refer back to. Instead, it was the sort of no-name summer storm that has long been a feature of the region but is now intensifying due to rising temperatures.
“We're not used to thinking about summer rainstorms as being a really dangerous hazard,” Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “But with the effects of climate change, maybe we should be.”
For many in the Northeast, unpredictable storms are a regular feature of summer months: sheets of rain that slice through the humidity, often ending as abruptly as they began. They might even be welcomed, the accompanying clouds offering a brief reprieve from the baking sun. Such storms are more common from June to September in this area since there is typically more moisture in the air and heat, which can together create atmospheric instability.
The Washington Post described the Vermont storm as a “typical summertime weather system that encountered a powder keg of atmospheric conditions,” including a combination of pressure systems which slowed down the storm’s movement. An official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the Post that the agency’s modeling — based on historical data — would place a storm like this happening in the Northeast at a “1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year.” But climate change is altering that calculus, with warming conditions correlating with an increase in rainfall quantities.
When it comes to thinking of “really dangerous” storms happening over summer months, it’s probably those tropical systems that come to mind. Gathering over the Atlantic Ocean, they can blow fast enough to be labeled a hurricane before heading for the coast — or, as Irene did in 2011, making their way further inland. But there’s a marked difference in how hurricanes are approached by officials and the public compared to summer storms.
For starters, due to the perceived threat tropical storms pose, they are meticulously tracked from conception to see if they fizzle out or develop into a swirling system worthy of a name. According to the NOAA, the reason you might see your name as a hurricane hashtag over the summer months is “to avoid confusion and streamline communications.” Wildfires receive location-based monikers for a similar reason.
Some researchers have advocated for expanding the label to other disasters, saying they help communicate risk. Last year, Seville, Spain started naming heat waves in hopes of better alerting the public of their risks. Greece is doing it, too. Kostas Lagouvardos, research director at the National Observatory of Athens, told The Observer he believes people are “more prepared to face an upcoming weather event” if it is named.
There is also a set scale in place for hurricanes, though it only takes into account wind speeds, not precipitation. Though it’s an imperfect system, it still offers a way for officials and the public alike to assess the potential risk — something that can be challenging to communicate with no-name storms.
“I would think that if there's a difference between a tropical or summer storm system, it is probably the surprise of people that a summer storm system could actually do something like this,” Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of Floodplain Managers, told me.
“Yet the data trends have been very clear now for probably a good decade that we're going to have more intense rainfall events.”
As climate change makes your average summer storm more dangerous, Weber told me researchers are trying to understand how our expectations correlate with protective actions, such as evacuating or stocking up on supplies. It’s a question researchers are posing not only to the public, but also to government agencies and emergency managers, who are tasked with communicating risks to the rest of us and setting relevant protocols in place. The Federal Emergency Management Agency shared its own concern about “conventional natural hazards” in its 2022 National Preparedness Report, explaining that the combination of existing vulnerabilities and hazards intensifying beyond current expectations could be “catastrophic.”
In Vermont, behind many of the comparisons to 2011 was the acknowledgement that the state has dealt with this sort of disaster before. Ultimately, when it comes time to address the damage, Berginnis says the approach is the same whether flooding stems from a hurricane or any other storm. Vermont officials also understood they would likely deal with a bad storm again — the state recently established a Flood Resilient Communities Fund to support locales looking to mitigate flooding damage.
State authorities realized at least two days ahead of the storm they would require additional resources, NPR reported, and they began reaching out to other states for help. On Tuesday, President Biden approved Governor Scott’s request to declare a state of emergency, making Vermont eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Both flooding and hurricanes are hazards identified in the Stafford Act, which dictates which natural disasters can receive such federal support. During a press conference Thursday, Governor Scott announced he would also be requesting a major disaster declaration, which, if approved, would unlock additional federal aid once the recovery process begins in earnest.
Unfortunately, Vermont is not there yet: Scattered thunderstorms are forecasted to begin Thursday and last throughout the weekend.
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On presidential proclamations, Pentagon pollution, and cancelled transmission
Current conditions: Over 1,000 people have evacuated the region of Seosan in South Korea following its heaviest rainfall since 1904 • Forecasts now point toward the “surprising return” of La Niña this fall • More than 30 million people from Louisiana through the Appalachians are at risk of flash flooding this weekend due to an incoming tropical rainstorm.
The Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky.Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
President Trump on Thursday signed four proclamations allowing certain highly polluting industries to bypass regulations established by the Biden administration. In addition to chemical manufacturers that help produce semiconductors and medical device sterilizers, the proclamations singled out coal-fired power plants and taconite iron ore processing facilities for two years of exemptions. Taconite is a low-grade iron ore primarily mined in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Minnesota, which is then processed for use in the production of iron and steel. Trump justified the move by arguing that compliance with the current emissions rule for coal-fired power plants raises the “unacceptable risk” of shutdowns, “eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects,” while the iron processing emissions rule “risks forcing shutdowns, reducing domestic production, and undermining the nation’s ability to supply steel for defense, energy, and critical manufacturing.”
The proclamations allow industries to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency standards that predate former President Joe Biden’s tenure. Trump justified the pause by claiming the former administration had mandated compliance with “standards that rely on emissions-control technologies that have not been demonstrated to work.” Researchers have previously found that air pollutants related to coal power plants cause nearly 3,000 attributable deaths per year. Taconite iron ore processing facilities produce harmful acid gases, including hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, as well as mercury, which have been linked to numerous adverse health effects.
Separately, the House passed Trump’s $9 billion rescissions package late last night, which includes cuts to international climate, energy, and environmental programs like the Clean Technology Fund. Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio joined Democrats in objecting to the bill. Trump is expected to sign the package Friday. An additional rescissions package is expected “soon.”
The Pentagon’s 2026 budget will enable the Department of Defense’s planet-warming emissions to grow by an additional 26 megatons, or about the equivalent of 68 gas power plants, a new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute found. The U.S. military was already the single largest institutional polluter in the world due to its “vast global operations — from jet fuel consumption and overseas deployments to domestic base maintenance,” as well as its manufacturing of weapons and vehicles, the think tank notes. With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Pentagon’s budget will exceed $1 trillion in 2026, representing a 17% increase over 2024. Its emissions, in turn, could grow to the point that if the DOD were its own country, it’d be the 38th largest polluter in the world, producing more CO2 emissions than the Netherlands, Bangladesh, or Venezuela. But “the Pentagon’s true climate impact will almost certainly be worse” than what the researchers found, The Guardian notes, “as the calculation does not include emissions generated from future supplemental funding such as the billions of dollars appropriated separately for military equipment for Israel and Ukraine in recent years.”
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New York’s Public Service Commission decided Thursday against moving forward with a major transmission project that would have had the capacity to deliver at least 4,770 megawatts of offshore wind power to New York City by the early 2030s. The commissioners said they were unable to justify “charging ratepayers for the multibillion-dollar project when feds are stymying” offshore wind, New York Focus’ Colin Kinniburgh reported on Bluesky. “We will continue to press forward regarding infrastructure needs for offshore wind in the future once the federal government resumes leasing and permitting for wind energy generation projects,” PSC chair Rory Christian said.
The canceled Public Policy Transmission Need determination was not specific to a particular offshore wind project, but rather was intended to match New York’s general offshore wind ambitions when it was approved in 2023. But as Heatmap has previously reported, Trump’s crusade against offshore wind has been a “worst case scenario” for the industry since day one, and, per ABC News 10, effectively “eliminates any reason for building new power lines in the first place.”
Microsoft has inked a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep, a waste management startup, for an undisclosed amount. The companies boasted that the deal, which runs through 2038, represents “the second-largest carbon removal deal to date.” Vaulted Deep, an Xprize Carbon runner-up, diverts organic waste from landfills and incinerators by injecting it into wells thousands of feet underground using fracking technologies, which it says ensures over 1,000 years of durability, TechCrunch reports. Since Vaulted’s launch in the summer of 2023, the Houston-based company has removed 18,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Microsoft, meanwhile, has slipped behind its 2020 goal to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it generates by the end of the decade due to its rush to build out data centers.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s reorganization and downsizing are set to continue, with the agency offering another round of buyouts and early retirements to staffers in offices it aims to restructure, Politico reports. Among the affected offices are the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, which the EPA said it seeks to tweak to “better address pollution problems that impact American communities by re-aligning enforcement with the law to deliver economic prosperity and ensure compliance with agency regulations,” as well as the Office of Land and Emergency Management, which works on Superfund and disaster response issues. The Office of Research and Development, the Office of Mission Support, and the Office of the Chief Financial Officer are also affected.
Separately, in a preliminary decision earlier this week, the agency moved to block the state of Colorado from closing its six remaining coal-fired power plants by 2031. Colorado was attempting to codify the retirement dates in its Regional Haze Plan, which is typically used to protect the air quality of federal wilderness and national parks; however, the EPA rejected the proposal, according to CPR News. “We believe that the Clean Air Act does not give anybody the authority to shut down coal generation plants against the owner’s will,” Cyrus Western, the administrator of EPA Region 8, said. Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate for the Center of Biological Diversity’s environmental health program, claimed the EPA’s move shows the limits of what climate-conscious states can do on their own. “We may have state rules, but they won't be federally approved,” Nichols told CPR.
“There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.” —Heatmap Pro’s Charlie Clynes, in conversation with Jael Holzman about his new project tracking all of the nation’s county-level restrictions on renewable energy.
New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.