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“An eye-smarting, throat-irritating twilight gray hung over New York, New Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester all day,” reported The New York Times, warning local residents that “today is to be warm, which would prolong the four-day smoky haze plaguing the East.”
True enough. Only, The New York Times published those words … back in 1953.
It’s been smokier in New York than California this year, with the Air Quality Index (AQI) hitting triple digits across the East Coast on Tuesday due to air blowing down from Canada, where there are more than 400 active fires. In addition to triggering a region-wide Air Quality Alert for more than 8 million people, all the smoke gave Manhattan the appearance of being in a brownish cloud:
\u201cWildfires burning in Canada are sending smoke into the skies across the northeast. On the left is New York City yesterday afternoon and on the right is the skyline this morning.\u201d— Drew Tuma (@Drew Tuma) 1686055700
\u201cWestern wildfire smoke is thick today #nyc #wildfire #nbc4ny @NBCNewYork @StormTeam4NY\u201d— Steven Bognar (@Steven Bognar) 1686049577
\u201cYIKES! Thick smoke from Canadian wildfires pouring into New York City this morning. #Wildfires #NYC #NYwx\u201d— Mark Tarello (@Mark Tarello) 1686051810
Before the success of the Clean Air Act, scenes such as these were common over Manhattan — though not due to wildfires. Building incinerators, rampant coal burning, and vehicle emissions would regularly cause stagnant “killer smogs” that made “downtown Manhattan [look] like a Cloud City” during the mid-century. One such event, in 1966, is thought to have killed as many as 400 people.
Smog covers New York City in 1953.Library of Congress/Walter Albertin
More smog in 1970...Library of Congress/Bernard Gotfryd
...and again in 1973.The National Archives/Environmental Protection Agency/Wilbert Holman Blanche
The smoke in New York this week is not directly comparable to the 1960s and 1970s in terms of concentration — the inhalable particles (PM
2.5) circulating on Tuesday were concentrated between 52 micrograms of pollutant per one cubic meter of air (that is, “52 µg/m³”) and 70.2µg/m³, depending on time of day and where you were on the East Coast. That’s still over 10 times the World Health Organization’s annual air quality guideline and “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” but a far cry from the 100 to 200 µg/m³ annual average concentration of fine particle pollutants that sickened and killed New Yorkers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Still, wildfire smoke is nothing to sneeze — or rather, cough — at; there is no single AQI number where the air stops being safe to breathe. That said, researchers have estimated that people of all ages are 1% more likely to die of nontraumatic events like a heart attack or stroke on days where the PM2.5 value is above 20.4 μg/m3 (that is, less than half the concentration in New York on Tuesday). The cumulative effect is bad too: People are “2% more likely to die on the day immediately after a smoke event,” Crosscut reports. There are also increased cancer risks from living near wildfires, another study found.
Though there have been major national improvements in air quality, contemporary New Yorkers are still no strangers to bad air, wildfires or no. From gas stoves that renters can’t avoid to subway platforms to trucks, buses, and power plants that spew cancer-causing particulate matter, we may have air that is technically better than our arch-rival Los Angeles’, but it still definitely isn’t great. That gives us all the more reason to pay close attention when it gets even worse.
Some throwbacks should stay in the past.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.