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We didn’t know it was coming. We didn’t know where it came from. We still can’t nail its climate change connection.
What happened?
No, seriously — what happened?
Last week, the American megalopolis, that string of jewels on the old Atlantic coast, found itself shrouded by wildfire smoke. New York City’s air turned ashen and dun, then glowed a supernatural amber. For the first time in who-knows, sightseers standing at the U.S. Capitol Building could not see the Washington Monument, a mile and change down the Mall.
You could list the sports games canceled or flights delayed, but what was oddest about the event was the sheer ubiquity of it. This was one of the few news stories I can remember where you could look up from whatever article you were reading and see the story itself, softly lapping at your window.
And then it was gone. By Friday, the haze had blown out to sea.
It was, in retrospect, a strange time — deeply strange, humblingly strange, strange before almost any other quality. More than 128 million Americans were under an air-quality alert on Wednesday night — roughly the population of Germany and Spain combined — but scarcely 36 hours earlier, nobody had known to prepare for anything worse than a moderate haze. The country’s biggest wildfire-pollution event on record arrived essentially out of nowhere.
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One of the main modes of journalism today — but also, frankly, one of the main frames of our whole cultural apparatus, from TikToks that lightly gloss Wikipedia articles to rampant right-wing conspiracism — is that of the explanation. Everyone explains what’s happening to each other, as it happens, at all times, and therefore makes the world seem rational, empirical, and less frightening. Yet with the wildfire smoke, what is so striking is how little we understood. Nearly every important step in the story was misapprehended as it happened.
We didn’t know that the smoke was coming, for instance. On Tuesday morning, meteorologists predicted that the same moderate haze that has hung around all season would again hit the East Coast. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation put out an alert saying that the air quality index, or AQI, might rise to 150 across the state.
They did not forecast — nobody, as far as I can tell, did — that the worst air pollution in decades would soon wallop the state. By Tuesday night, New York City’s AQI had already reached 174, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. As I walked home in D.C., I could see tendrils of visible smoke hugging the upper stories of apartment buildings.
This prediction failure gave the ensuing response a halting, confused quality. How could such a massive event come out of nowhere? Not until Thursday afternoon — when the smoke had nearly passed — did the federal government advise its workers that they could telework or take vacation time to avoid the bad air. On Friday, New York closed in-person schools, just in time for blue sky to return.
I find it hard to blame them. This was an unprecedented event in part because the fires were so far from where they affected. Everyone had seen the videos of smoke besieging Portland and San Francisco in 2020, but back then, the fires had been near those cities — a couple hundred miles away at most. Where was the smoke coming from now? The Adirondacks were fine. Vermont was’t burning.
Here, we misunderstood again. Many outlets — including this one, at first — initially reported that the smoke came from Nova Scotia, where large and destructive fires had raged the week before. But those fires had been doused over the weekend by some of the same weather pattern that was now ferrying smoke to us. In fact, the smoke had come from the boreal forests of northern Quebec, more than 500 miles from New York City.
Why were these fires raging? Not even Canadians could give a good answer. With fires in Alberta and Nova Scotia gobbling attention and resources, the Quebec fires had seemingly been an afterthought until their smoke blew into Toronto and Ottawa, which happened only a few hours before it arrived in New York. Suddenly, a secondary event had become the main event.
On Wednesday, I talked to a Canadian climatologist who seemed hazy about why Quebec was burning in the first place. “I think this situation is kind of similar to Nova Scotia,” he told me, blaming that province’s warm, dry spring for the blazes. But this explanation — which appeared in many outlets — was only somewhat true: While Quebec had suffered a warm May, it was not in drought.
We did not understand why these fires are burning — and honestly, we still don’t. President Joe Biden said that the smoke provided “another stark reminder of the impacts of climate change.” I am not so sure. There’s no doubt, to be clear, that climate change will make wildfires worse across North America: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that hot, dry “fire weather” will increase throughout the 21st century. But, again, Quebec is not in drought. As for today, no climate-change signal has appeared in eastern Canadian wildfire data. Their connection to climate change is far less clear cut than it is in, say, California’s blazes.
Yet neither would I condescend to someone who does blame climate change here. When something like this happens, how can you not cite the planet’s biggest ongoing physical transformation? If climate change makes flukey weather more likely, shouldn’t we at least consider it being responsible for some of the flukiest weather in decades? The thing about unprecedented events is that you lack precedent for them.
Not that we completely lack an example for this. In 1780, the sun was blotted out across New England. Nocturnal animals came out; people fretted in the streets and abandoned their work; the Connecticut state legislature considered adjourning for doomsday. Not until a decade ago did we finally learn that the “dark day” was caused by Canadian wildfire smoke drifting south.
Which suggests that this might be a once-in-250-year event. But maybe it’s not any more. Maybe with climate change, it’s a once-a-century event. Or a once-in-a-decade event. For now, the sample size is two.
So I wonder: If it wasn’t climate change, would it matter? The pandemic has already taught us that indoor air quality matters, that unseen particles floating in the air can do serious harm. No matter what happens with the climate, Canada is too large and unpopulated to fight every wildfire; neither can it manage the same kind of labor-intensive forest management that California might attempt. East Coasters should come away from our own dark days with new compassion for people out West — and those across the world — who must deal with wildfire smoke on a seasonal basis, not to mention the fires themselves. Regardless of climate change’s role in this fire, it makes wildfires more likely: We should continue to try to decarbonize as fast as we can.
But as for local policy, perhaps our aims should be humbler. We now know (again) that a great cloud of wildfire smoke can blow up on the East Coast at any moment and poison our air. We don’t need to know everything to protect ourselves and our neighbors from that. Air filters cost hundreds of dollars, but not thousands; in new multi-family buildings, they are built into the ventilation system itself. Perhaps the right lesson from this outbreak should be to change our expectations, and think of indoor air filtering like brushing your teeth — a habit essential to our hygiene, to be used by all, and to be provisioned for those who cannot afford one at the public expense.
Maybe that’s prudent climate adaptation. Or maybe — in the wake of COVID, Canadian smoke, and who-knows-what-comes-next — it’s just new common sense.
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On drinking water, a ‘rogue’ discovery, and Northwest data centers
Current conditions: Today marks the start of the Eastern Pacific Hurricane Season, and meteorologists are monitoring two potential areas of tropical development• Millions in the Great Plains and Eastern U.S. face risks of thunderstorms, large hail, and tornadoes • Steady rain continues Thursday in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where at least 100 people have died in flash floods.
1. Trump administration backtracks on promise to protect drinking water from forever chemicals
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it plans to rescind four Biden-era limitations on pollutants in drinking water. Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, also called PFAS or “forever chemicals,” are linked to many serious health issues, including certain cancers; as I’ve covered, they are common in products advertised as stain-proof, nonstick, and water repellent. The EPA’s decision follows Administrator Lee Zeldin’s claim less than two weeks ago that “I have long been concerned about PFAS” and “we are tackling PFAS from all of EPA’s program offices,”E&E News reports.
In the Wednesday announcement, Zeldin backpedaled from his initial call for action, claiming the agency is looking into “common-sense flexibility in the form of additional time for compliance.” He also pushed back on claims that the agency is weakening PFAS standards, per The Washington Post, saying the EPA is looking into revising the limits and that “the number might end up going lower, not higher.” Water utilities, which have balked against the high cost and difficulty of filtering PFAS out of an estimated 158 million Americans’ drinking water, praised the EPA’s delay as “the right thing.”
2. Security experts discovered ‘unexplained’ pieces of communication equipment in Chinese-made solar power inverters
U.S. energy officials have discovered “unexplained communication equipment” in some Chinese-made solar inverters, Reuters reports. Inverters help connect solar panel systems to the electric grid and allow utilities to conduct remote updates and maintenance; because China makes most inverters, power companies typically use firewalls to prevent foreign communication with the devices.
Security experts reportedly found the rogue devices during inspections. Though the sources who spoke with Reuters did not share the manufacturers of the inverters, similar communication devices were reportedly also found in some batteries from “multiple Chinese suppliers” over the past nine months. A spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in Washington pushed back on Reuters’ report, saying, “We oppose the generalization of the concept of national security, distorting and smearing China's infrastructure achievements.”
3. Northwest data centers could ‘cannibalize’ clean power in states with lower environmental protections: report
Sightline Institute
The Northwest has one of the country’s highest concentrations of data centers due to the region’s tax breaks — including low or no property taxes for many in Oregon and sales and use exemptions on equipment purchases and installations in Washington — as well as its below-average renewable power prices. But utilities “working across state lines could shift renewable resources to serve Northwest data centers, making up the difference by burning more coal and gas in places that lack strong environmental protections,” Emily Moore, the director of climate and energy at the sustainability think tank Sightline, writes in a new report.
One such example is what’s being done by Avista, an electricity service in eastern Washington and western Idaho. To meet the needs of a new 200 megawatt data center in Washington, as well as to comply with the state’s Clean Energy Transformation Act, “the company indicated it would add 95 megawatts of gas capacity in Idaho and then shift wind resources that would have served Idaho customers to Washington,” Moore writes. In essence, Washington is “cannibalizing” clean power currently serving Idahoans, and Avista is polluting “more in Idaho to make up the difference.” The report goes on to propose policy paths for Northwest leaders, including accelerating the buildout of the region’s congested electric transmission system, since “a right-sized modern grid could let data centers tap wind from Montana or sun from California instead of encouraging them to locate in states with no commitment to clean power.” You can read Sightline’s full report here.
4. BP chief economist warns China is winning the ‘new energy’ race
Michael Cohen, BP’s chief U.S. economist and head of oil and refining, warned this week that China is winning the “new energy” race with its clean technology supply chains and electric vehicles, Fortune reports. At the Enverus Evolve oil and gas conference in Houston, Cohen said the U.S. is at risk of failing “Econ 101” if it slow-walks on renewables due to resistance from the Trump administration, supply chain issues, and interest rates. He projected that global oil demand will peak in the next decade, with renewables rising from 15% to 30% of the global energy market between now and 2050.
A new report by Carbon Brief appears to back up Cohen’s analysis. The report says that renewable energy sources in China produced enough electricity in the first quarter of the year to “cut coal-power output even as demand surged,” with CO2 emissions down 1.6% year-on-year despite power demand growth. Carbon Brief adds that, if sustained, the findings would “herald a peak and sustained decline in China’s power-sector emissions.”
5. Trump family Bitcoin business adds personal stakes to energy policy
The Trump family is poised to have a fresh personal stake in U.S. electricity and energy policy as Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. plan to take their Bitcoin mining firm public, E&E News reports. According to the announcement earlier this week, American Bitcoin — co-founded by Eric Trump — will merge with Gryphon Digital Mining Inc., which is already publicly traded.
Initially a subsidiary of Hut 8, an energy infrastructure partner with more than 1,000 megawatts of energy capacity, American Bitcoin boasted that with the merger, it will achieve “mining leadership” by leveraging Hut 8’s “energy advantage, rapid execution, and proven team.” Cryptocurrency mining is highly energy-intensive, accounting for an estimated 2.3% of the nation’s electricity use last year, and President Trump’s aspirations to have it “mined, minted, and made in the USA” are part of what his administration has used to justify its energy emergency. With American Bitcoin, the Trump family is also “delving deeper into the energy space where federal policies under Trump intersect directly with access to electricity and fuels,” E&E News writes, noting that Eric Trump stated at the launch of the company last April that “We’ve got the best energy policy in this country. That policy is only getting better.”
Penguin Random House
Nigerian author Abi Daré has won the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize for her novel And So I Roar. The book “follows fourteen-year-old Adunni from her life in Lagos, where she is excited to finally enroll in school, to her home village where she is summoned to face charges for events that are in fact caused by climate change.”
Tax credit transferability is a wonky concept, but it’s been a superpower for clean energy developers.
One of the most powerful innovations in the Inflation Reduction Act was a new vehicle to finance clean energy projects. In addition to expanding the nation’s tax credits for climate-friendly projects, Congress gave developers freedom to sell these credits for cash. If a battery factory couldn’t take full advantage of the tax credits itself, it could transfer them to someone else who could.
Now, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee have proposed getting rid of this “transferability” provision as part of a larger overhaul of the tax credits. A draft bill published on Monday would end the practice starting in 2028.
Nixing transferability isn’t the bill’s most damaging blow to clean energy — new sourcing requirements for the tax credits and deadlines that block early-stage projects pose a bigger threat. But the ripple effects from the change would permeate all aspects of the clean energy economy. At a minimum, it would make energy more expensive by making the tax credits harder to monetize. It would also all but shut nuclear plants out of the subsidies altogether.
Prior to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, if renewable energy developers with low tax liability wanted to monetize existing tax credits, they had to seek partnerships with tax equity investors. The investor, usually a major bank, would provide upfront capital for a project in exchange for partial ownership and a claim to its tax benefits. These were complicated deals that involved extensive legal review and the formation of new limited liability corporations, and therefore weren’t a viable option for smaller projects like community solar farms.
When the 2022 climate law introduced transferability across all the clean energy tax credits, it simplified project finance and channeled new capital into the clean energy economy. Suddenly, developers for all kinds of clean energy projects could simply sell their tax credits for cash on the open market to anyone that wanted to buy them, without ceding any ownership. The tax credit marketplace Crux estimated that a total of $30 billion in transfers took place last year, only about 30% of which were traditional tax equity deals. In the past, tax equity transfers have topped out at around $20 billion per year.
Schneider Electric, which has long helped corporate clients make power purchase agreements, now facilitates tax credit transfers, as well. The company recently announced that it had closed 18 deals worth $1.7 billion in tax credit transfers since late 2023. The buyers were all new to the market — none had directly financed clean energy before the IRA, Erin Decker, the senior director of renewable energy and carbon advisory services, told me.
It turns out, buying clean energy tax credits is a win-win for brands with sustainability commitments, which can reduce their tax liability while also helping to reduce emissions. Some companies have even used the savings they got through the tax credits to fund decarbonization efforts within their own operations, Decker said.
By simplifying project finance, and creating more competition for tax credit sales, transferability also made developing renewable energy projects cheaper. Developers of wind and solar farms have been able to secure upwards of 95 cents on the dollar for transferred tax credits, compared to just 85 to 90 cents for tax equity transactions. The savings go directly to utility customers.
“State regulators require electric companies to pass the benefits of tax credits through to customers in the form of lower rates,” the Edison Electric Institute wrote in a policy brief on the provision. “If transferability were repealed, electric companies once again would rely on big banks to invest in tax equity transactions, ultimately reducing the value of the credit that flows directly through to customers.”
Many of the companies that can’t count on tax equity deals will still have other options under the GOP proposal. Tax-exempt entities, like rural electric cooperatives and community solar nonprofits, can use “elective pay,” another IRA innovation that allows them to claim the credits as a direct cash payment from the IRS. For-profit companies developing carbon capture and advanced manufacturing projects also have the option to use elective pay for the first five years they operate. All of this raises questions about whether axing transferability would furnish the government with meaningful savings to offset Trump’s tax cuts.
But the bigger danger for Trump would be his nuclear agenda. Prior to the IRA, low power prices meant that many nuclear operators couldn’t afford to extend the licenses on their existing plants, even ones that had many years of useful life left in them. The IRA created a new tax credit for existing nuclear plants that made it economical for operators to invest in keeping these online, and even helped bring some, like the Palisades plant in Michigan, back from the dead.
This wouldn’t have worked without transferability, Benton Arnett, the senior director of markets and policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, told me. Going forward, finding a tax equity partner would be nearly impossible because of the unique rules governing nuclear plants. Federal regulations require that the owners of a nuclear power plant be listed on its license, so bringing on a new owner means doing a license amendment — a headache-inducing process that banks simply don’t want to take on. “We’ve had members reach out to tax equity groups in the past and there was very little interest,” Arnett said
While a few plant owners might have enough tax appetite to benefit from credits directly, most have depreciating assets on their books that greatly reduce their liability. “Without transferability, for many of our members, it’s very difficult for them to actually monetize those credits,” said Arnett. “In a way, nuclear is disproportionately impacted by removing that ability to transfer.”
In February, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright declared that “the long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration.” But so far on Trump’s watch, between the proposed loss of transferability and early phase-out of nuclear tax credits, plus cuts to loan programs at the Department of Energy, we’ve only seen policies that would kill the nuclear renaissance.
On Trump’s Gulf trip, budget negotiations, and a uranium mine
Current conditions: Highs in Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin could break 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday afternoon, with ERCOT anticipating demand could approach August 2023’s all-time high of 85,500 megawatts • Governor Tim Walz has called in the National Guard to respond to three fires in northern Minnesota that have burned 20,000 acres and are still 0% contained• The coldest place in the world right now is the South Pole of Antarctica, which could drop to -70 degrees tomorrow.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
The White House on Tuesday announced a $600 billion investment commitment from Saudi Arabia during President Trump’s trip to the Gulf. In exchange, the U.S. offered Riyadh “the largest defense cooperation agreement” Washington has ever made, with an arms package worth nearly $142 billion, Reuters reports. The deals announced so far by the White House total just $283 billion, although the administration told The New York Times that more would be forthcoming.
Among the known commitments in the health and tech sectors, the U.S. also reached a number of energy deals with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, Aramco, which agreed to a $3.4 billion expansion of the Motive refinery in Texas “to integrate chemicals production,” OilPrice.com reports. Aramco additionally signed “a memorandum of understanding with [the U.S. utility] Sempra to receive about 6.2 million tons per year of LNG.” (Aramco is responsible for over 4% of the planet’s CO2 emissions, according to the think tank InfluenceMap, and would be the fourth largest polluter after China, the U.S., and India, if it were its own country.) Additionally, Saudi company DataVolt committed to invest $20 billion in AI data centers and energy infrastructure in the U.S.
Senate Republicans are reportedly putting the brakes on the House Ways and Means Committee’s proposal to overhaul the nation’s clean energy tax credits and effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act. “[S]ome Senate Republicans say abruptly cutting off credits and changing key provisions that help fund projects more quickly could stifle investments in energy technologies needed to meet growing power demand, and lead to job losses for manufacturing and electricity projects in their states and districts,” Politico reports. North Dakota’s Republican Senator John Hoeven, for one, characterized the Ways and Means’ plan as a “starting point,” with “some change” expected before agreement is reached.
As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reported earlier this week, the House proposal “appears to amount to a back-door full repeal” of the IRA, including cutting the EV tax credit, moving up the phase-out of tech-neutral clean power, and eliminating credits for energy efficiency, heat pumps, and solar. But as she noted then, “there’s a lot that could change before we get to a final budget” — especially if Republican senators follow through on their words.
The Interior Department plans to expedite permitting for a uranium mine in Utah, conducting an environmental assessment that typically takes a year in just 14 days, The New York Times reports. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the fast-track addressed the “alarming energy emergency because of the prior administration’s Climate Extremist policies.” Notably, Burgum also recently issued a stop-work order on Equinor’s fully permitted Empire Wind offshore wind project, claiming the project’s permitting process had been rushed under former President Joe Biden. That process took nearly four years, according to BloomberNEF.
Critics of the Velvet-Wood project in San Juan County, Utah, said the Interior Department is leaving no opportunity for public comment, and that there are concerns about radioactive waste from the mining activities. Uranium is a fuel in nuclear power plants, and its extraction falls under President Trump’s recent executive order to address the so-called “national energy emergency.”
Clean energy investment saw a second quarterly decline at the start of 2025, but nevertheless accounted for 4.7% of total private investment in structures, equipment, and durable consumer goods in the first quarter of the year, a new report by the Rhodium Group’s Clean Investment Monitor found. Among some of its other notable findings:
You can read the full report here.
A Dutch environmental group is suing oil giant Shell, arguing that the company is in violation of a court order to make an “appropriate contribution” to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, France 24 reports. Amsterdam-based Milieudefensie previously won an historic precedent against Royal Dutch Shell in 2021, with the court ruling the company had to cut its carbon emissions by 45% of 2019 levels by 2030 because its investments in oil and gas were “endangering human rights and lives.” Shell appealed the decision, moved its headquarters to London, and dropped “Royal Dutch” from its name; subsequently, a Dutch appeals court sided with Shell and reversed the 45% emissions reduction target, while still insisting the company had a responsibility to lower its emissions, Inside Climate News reports.
Now, Milieudefensie is suing, claiming Shell is in breach of its obligation to reduce emissions due to its “continued investment in new oil and gas fields and its inadequate climate policy for the period 2030 to 2050.” Sjoukje van Oosterhout, a lead researcher on the Shell case for Milieudefensie, said in a press conference, “The impact of this case could really be enormous. Science is clear, crystal clear, and the ruling of the appeals court was also clear. Every new field is one too many. That’s why we have this case today.”
AstraZeneca
UK regulators this week approved the use of AstraZeneca’s new medical inhaler, which uses a propellant with 99.9% lower global warming potential than those currently in use. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that the discharge and leakage of planet-warming hydrofluoroalkane propellants from inhalers was responsible for 2.5 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents in 2020, or about the same emissions as 550,000 passenger vehicles driven for one year.