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First it hit Chicago and Milwaukee. Then Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. Now it’s back in New York.
Smoke from far-north wildfires returned to the United States and Canada this week, canceling concerts and summer camps, and sending up “Code Red” air-quality alerts across the continent. On Friday, four of the five cities with the world’s worst air pollution were in eastern North America.
The wildfire smoke’s return raised the specter of a long, hot, smoky summer. When wildfire smoke first smothered the East Coast in early June, the fluorescent sky seemed almost like a curiosity. Historians had to go back centuries — to New England’s “Dark Day” of 1780 — to find an appropriate comparison.
Now, they only need to remember a few weeks earlier. Much like how the successive waves of COVID-19, once a terrifying and confusing new reality, slowly became a tedious (but no less dangerous) fact of life, the wildfire smoke has become — and will probably remain — a part of the East Coast’s summer.
Pending a meteorological surprise, the wildfire smoke is likely to return periodically throughout the rest of the summer. The smoke probably won’t fully go away until late September or early October, when Quebec’s fire season ends.
“A lot of the wildfires are in western Quebec, right near Hudson Bay. About 34 wildfires have been left completely to burn,” Matthew Capucci, a Washington, D.C.-based meteorologist, told me. Recent weather patterns have been so dry — and there’s so little rain on the horizon — that almost nothing suggests those fires are likely to go out any time soon, he said.
“Nothing’s gonna put the fires out. They’re gonna keep burning,” he said. The first real break in the pattern is likely to come with the return of hard snowfall and cold weather in three or four months. Until then, every northwest wind will bring clouds of smoke to the eastern United States and Canada.
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That is despite any fire-fighting that Canada can manage, Michael Wara, a senior researcher at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, told me.
For now, hundreds of American firefighters are essentially on loan to the Canadian government’s firefighting effort. America can spare those hotshot crews because few wildfires are raging in the Lower 48. But as fire season heats up south of the border, those firefighters will have to return home, and Canada will have fewer resources with which to battle the flames.
The location of the fires also makes them particularly tricky to fight. Many of the blazes are in remote, unpopulated stretches of boreal forest. Almost no roads exist to carry crews close to the blaze; few airfields, if any, are close enough — or large enough — to allow federal air tankers to operate in the area and drop flame retardant.
“To understand the landscape, go watch an episode of Alone,” Wara said, alluding to the History Channel reality show where 10 people must each survive by themselves in the remote Canadian wilderness for months at a time. “That’s what we’re talking about here.”
This is the worst Canadian wildfire year on record. More than 29,500 square miles of forest have burned, an area larger than the state of West Virginia. In 1989, when the previous wildfire record was set, it took 12 months for that much forest to burn. But this year has already surpassed the old record in barely more than six.
Climate change has warmed the Canadian boreal forest faster than almost anywhere else in the world. The biome’s average temperature has already increased 1.9 degrees Celsius, or nearly three and a half degrees Fahrenheit, since the mid-20th century.
“These ecosystems are out of equilibrium. They have to change. And one of the ways that ecosystems change is that they burn,” Wara, the Stanford researcher, said. “We can’t really prevent this. We can’t really control what is essentially a planetary-scale process of fire.”
Perhaps the worst news for the eastern United States is that wildfire smoke is most likely to hit the region during periods when the weather would otherwise be coolest. As The Washington Post has reported, eastern summers normally have a predictable rhythm: southerly winds bring hot, humid air, while northerly winds provide a respite of cooler, drier air. But this year, those northwest winds will bring clouds of eye-watering smoke.
For the past few years, western North America has been walloped by two climate-change-related disasters: extreme heat and seasonal bouts of wildfire smoke. Marshall Burke, a Stanford economist, has said that wildfire smoke has caused some of the biggest economic losses of climate change so far, at least out West.
“For California, extreme heat and extreme smoke have become the fingerprint — or even the footprint, since it feels like you’re being stepped on — of climate change,” Wara said. “I think the East has been somewhat spared from that so far, thankfully.”
But that holiday may be ending. The East Coast is facing a long, hot, smoky summer.
Read more about the wildfire smoke:
Fireworks Smoke Is Coming for Already Smoke Cities
How to Stay Safe from the Wildfire Smoke Indoors
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Jesse and Rob go back to basics on the steam engine.
Just two types of machines have produced the overwhelming majority of electricity generated since 1890. This week, we look at the history of those devices, how they work — and how they have contributed to global warming.
This is our second episode of Shift Key Summer School, a series of “lecture conversations” about the basics of energy, electricity, and the power grid for listeners of all backgrounds. This week, we dive into the invention and engineering of the world’s most common types of fossil- and nuclear-fueled power plants. What’s a Rankine cycle power station, and how does it use steam to produce electricity? How did the invention of the jet engine enable the rise of natural gas-generated electricity? And why can natural gas power plants achieve much higher efficiency gains than coal plants?
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It’s interesting thinking about the deployment of steam and these Rankine cycle generators in the late 19th century for us as people who care about the power grid. These are interesting techniques as they’re deploying electricity for the first time. But the use of coal to convert water into steam and the use of steam power actually comes way earlier than any of this, right? Like, it’s steam. That is actually the 19th century — the core 19th century and late 19th century, especially — energy medium. And actually, the history of the 19th century energy is switching from wood and hydropower to coal-powered steam.
And already by the time that the Pearl Street station is built in New York, the United States is crisscrossed with steam engines. Our economy already runs on steam. It’s actually the application of steam and coal — which at that point are kind of old and fundamental technologies to economic function — to power generation. They didn’t have to make any huge discoveries around steam and coal. They were already using steam and coal in factories, they just weren’t intermediating it through the electricity grid.
Jesse Jenkins: That’s right. And in all these cases, you’re just trying to convert that steam, the expansion of that steam, into motion, whether that’s the pistons of a steam engine or the pistons of a reciprocating generator attached to a dynamo in Pearl Street, or, in a lot of factories, just a bunch of belts, right? That would then move equipment throughout the facility. It’s just a lot easier to move energy around, and more precise to do that as electricity. And so over time, the devices in industrial facilities all converted over to using electricity directly, and then you could generate your energy somewhere far away.
And this is the other, second advantage of steam turbines. What made Westinghouse so successful is that they have large economies of scale, so it’s a lot cheaper to generate power from a big steam turbine than the equivalent amount of power from a lot of little steam engines. And that wasn’t … I mean, that’s true for reciprocating engines, but they kind of top out, given their complexity.
The Pearl Strait station generators were in the 100-kilowatt scale. I think there were six of them, originally, so 600 kilowatts, and they only powered a few hundred lights, which is remarkable. These lights, the original lights, were incredibly inefficient, so it took something like 1,000 watts or more per light bulb. Whereas again, now we’re down to like, 10 to 15 watts in an efficient LED bulb. But anyway, they were in that kind of hundreds of watts scale, and that kind of maxed out the scale of the reciprocating engines. Steam turbines you could increase and increase and increase into the megawatt scale, and by doing that utilities or generators were able to lower the cost of energy while expanding customer bases.
Mentioned:
Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, by Alexis Madrigal
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
The Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online clean energy programs equip you with tangible skills and powerful networks—and you can continue working while learning. In just five hours a week, propel your career and make a difference.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The Senate told renewables developers they’d have a year to start construction and still claim a tax break. Then came an executive order.
Renewable energy advocates breathed a sigh of relief after a last-minute change to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act stipulated that wind and solar projects would be eligible for tax credits as long as they began construction within the next 12 months.
But the new law left an opening for the Trump administration to cut that window short, and now Trump is moving to do just that. The president signed an executive order on Monday directing the Treasury Department to issue new guidance for the clean electricity tax credits “restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
The broad safe harbors in question have to do with the way the government defines the “beginning of construction,” which, in the realm of federal tax credits, is a term of art. Under the current Treasury guidance, developers must either complete “physical work of a significant nature” on a given project or spend at least 5% of its total cost to prove they have started construction during a given year, and are therefore protected from any subsequent tax law changes.
As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin previously reported, oftentimes something as simple as placing an order for certain pieces of equipment, like transformers or solar trackers, will check the box. Still, companies can’t just buy a bunch of equipment to qualify for the tax credits and then sit on it indefinitely. Their projects must be up and operating within four years, or else they must demonstrate “continuous progress” each year to continue to qualify.
As such, under existing rules and Trump’s new law, wind and solar developers would have 12 months to claim eligibility for the investment or production tax credit, and then at least four years to build the project and connect it to the grid. While a year is a much shorter runway than the open-ended extension to the tax credits granted by the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s a much better deal than the House’s original version of the OBBBA, which would have required projects to start construction within two months and be operating by the end of 2028 to qualify.
Or so it seemed.
The tax credits became a key bargaining chip during the final negotiations on the bill. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska fought to retain the 12-month runway for wind and solar, while members of the House Freedom Caucus sought to kill it. Ultimately, the latter group agreed to vote yes after winning assurances from the president that he would “deal” with the subsidies later.
Last week, as all of this was unfolding, I started to hear rumors that the Treasury guidance regarding “beginning of construction” could be a key tool at the president’s disposal to make good on his promise. Industry groups had urged Congress to codify the existing guidance in the bill, but it was ultimately left out.
When I reached out to David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in energy tax credits, on Thursday, he was already contemplating Trump’s options to exploit that omission.
Burton told me that Trump’s Treasury department could redefine “beginning of construction” in a number of ways, such as by removing the 5% spending safe harbor or requiring companies to get certain permits in order to demonstrate “significant” physical work. It could also shorten the four-year grace period to bring a project to completion.
But Burton was skeptical that the Treasury Department had the staff or expertise to do the work of rewriting the guidance, let alone that Trump would make this a priority. “Does Treasury really want to spend the next couple of months dealing with this?” he said. “Or would it rather deal with implementing bonus depreciation and other taxpayer-favorable rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill instead of being stuck on this tangent, which will be quite a heavy lift and take some time?”
Just days after signing the bill into law, Trump chose the tangent, directing the Treasury to produce new guidance within 45 days. “It’s going to need every one of those days to come out with thoughtful guidance that can actually be applied by taxpayers,” Burton told me when I called him back on Monday night.
The executive order cites “energy dominance, national security, economic growth, and the fiscal health of the Nation” as reasons to end subsidies for wind and solar. The climate advocacy group Evergreen Action said it would help none of these objectives. “Trump is once again abusing his power in a blatant end-run around Congress — and even his own party,” Lena Moffit, the group’s executive director said in a statement. “He’s directing the government to sabotage the very industries that are lowering utility bills, creating jobs, and securing our energy independence.”
Industry groups were still assessing the implications of the executive order, and the ones I reached out to declined to comment for this story. “Now we’re circling the wagons back up to dig into the details,” one industry representative told me, adding that it was “shocking” that Trump would “seemingly double cross Senate leadership and Thune in particular.”
As everyone waits to see what Treasury officials come up with, developers will be racing to “start construction” as defined by the current rules, Burton said. It would be “quite unusual” if the new guidance were retroactive, he added. Although given Trump’s history, he said, “I guess anything is possible.”
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.