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New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
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And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.
The Bureau of Land Management says it will be heavily scrutinizing transmission lines if they are expressly necessary to bring solar or wind energy to the power grid.
Since the beginning of July, I’ve been reporting out how the Trump administration has all but halted progress for solar and wind projects on federal lands through a series of orders issued by the Interior Department. But last week, I explained it was unclear whether transmission lines that connect to renewable energy projects would be subject to the permitting freeze. I also identified a major transmission line in Nevada – the north branch of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – as a crucial test case for the future of transmission siting in federal rights-of-way under Trump. Greenlink would cross a litany of federal solar leases and has been promoted as “essential to helping Nevada achieve its de-carbonization goals and increased renewable portfolio standard.”
Well, BLM has now told me Greenlink North will still proceed despite a delay made public shortly after permitting was frozen for renewables, and that the agency still expects to publish the record of decision for the line in September.
This is possible because, as BLM told me, transmission projects that bring solar and wind power to the grid will be subject to heightened scrutiny. In an exclusive statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires told me via e-mail that a secretarial order choking out solar and wind permitting on federal lands will require “enhanced environmental review for transmission lines only when they are a part of, and necessary for, a wind or solar energy project.”
However, if a transmission project is not expressly tied to wind or solar or is not required for those projects to be constructed… apparently, then it can still get a federal green light. For instance in the case of Greenlink, the project itself is not explicitly tied to any single project, but is kind of like a transmission highway alongside many potential future solar projects. So a power line can get approved if it could one day connect to wind or solar, but the line’s purpose cannot solely be for a wind or solar project.
This is different than, say, lines tied explicitly to connecting a wind or solar project to an existing transmission network. Known as gen-tie lines, these will definitely face hardships with this federal government. This explains why, for example, BLM has yet to approve a gen-tie line for a wind project in Wyoming that would connect the Lucky Star wind project to the grid.
At the same time, it appears projects may be given a wider berth if a line has other reasons for existing, like improving resilience on the existing grid, or can be flexibly used by not just renewables but also fossil energy.
So, the lesson to me is that if you’re trying to build transmission infrastructure across federal property under this administration, you might want to be a little more … vague.