You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Last year, William Shatner went to space with Jeff Bezos in a stunt that was intended to drum up feel-good headlines for the Amazon founder’s private aerospace company, Blue Origin. What Bezos’ PR team had likely not counted on was Captain Kirk returning to Earth trembling and weeping, with a frightening soundbite: “Is that death? Is that the way death is?”
Shatner was experiencing the overview effect, the profound and transformative sense of grief, awe, and protectiveness that comes from seeing Earth from space. And while gravity-observant non-billionaires might not be able to replicate that precise experience when earthbound, staring at globes for the better part of 15 years can probably get you pretty close.
“It definitely does make you think about how we are affecting the planet and how no one seems to really be taking it seriously,” Peter Bellerby, the founder of Bellerby & Co. Globemakers, told me on a video call from his workshop in London.
Bellerby, essentially, makes little blue marbles for the home consumer. He claims that his team at Bellerby & Co. are “the world’s only truly bespoke makers of globes,” an otherwise nearly forgotten art form that he fell into after failing to find a worthy globe to gift his hard-to-impress father for his 80th birthday. Having previously worked as a house flipper and the manager of a friend’s music venue and bowling alley, Bellerby was between jobs in 2008 when he decided he’d handmake his father’s globe, rather than resort to buying “a cheap, modern political globe” or “an expensive and very fragile actual antique,” he recounts in his forthcoming book, The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft.
Peter Bellerby.Euan Myles, Bellerby & Co. Globemakers
Bellerby’s obsession grew, and soon he was employing a part-time painter and woodworker, at one point even using a globe to recompense a friend’s labor, and taking commissions to offset costs. (Today, Bellerby & Co.’s pocket-sized globes start around $1,321 and can top $75,000 — much cheaper than a seat on Bezos’ New Shephard rocket, but the privilege of perspective is still going to cost you). Bellerby also began to realize what had been lost by the shift to mass-produced plastic globes: Lacking competition, makers had started to cut corners and get careless. “Some of the globes produced in the 1960s and ‘70s did a better job at wiping out entire countries than many dictators,” Bellerby writes.
Globemaking is just another version of map publishing, Bellerby further stressed to me, and while mass-produced globes are allowed to fall out of date, the bespoke nature of handmade globes allows his to be a little nimble. “We print all our globes a few months before they actually shipped to a customer, so they’re bang up to date,” he told me. But there are certain limitations, too: Unlike atlas makers, who have the luxury of closely examining small changes to coastlines due to things like climate change, Bellerby has a much more macro perspective of the planet’s shifting geography by virtue of his medium. “The scaling we are using, even for our large globes, is one in 10 million,” he went on. “So you don’t see the effects [of climate change] that much.”
Painting The Churchill globe.Toby Essex, Bellerby & Co. Globemakers
In the decade and a half that he’s been a globemaker, the most significant reworkings (for climate purposes, anyway) have been to locations like the Aral Sea, and even that he partially chalks up to the fact that “the mapping probably wasn’t there 15 years ago to keep it up to date.” His team has also been keeping an eye on Antarctica, and he mused to me that “maybe we should be doing globes with the different — particularly Antarctic — ice sheets. But also in the Arctic Ocean, [since] the extent of the sea ice is reducing dramatically.”
This sort of zoomed-out perspective has, indeed, been its own kind of opportunity. While Bellerby’s clientele is typically more interested in personalizing the globe with an image of the family dog than receding ocean ice, the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare frequently uses Bellerby & Co.’s globes in his works. In one particularly striking sculpture series called “Earth Kids,” Bellerby supplied temperature heatmap globes that are used as the heads of Shonibare’s manikins. In one of the pieces, “Fire Kid (Girl)” from 2020, a character bends her head over a book titled Climate Studies while her temple — the southwestern United States — glows with a blush of “hotter than average” red.
Though something as ever-changing as global warming might seem strange to render permanent with an expensive, labor-intensive, hand-painted globe, in a sense it’s also the entire purpose behind such an artifact. They are “a historical document,” Bellerby explained, and intended to capture the world as it existed at the moment it was made. And while I wondered if that would make globes that have become outdated by the effects of climate change more valuable for future collectors, Bellerby pointed out that only very recently have globes and maps actually been very accurate at all; “outdated,” then, is not much of a value-add when basically everything you are collecting is.
What’s the purpose of a globe, then, really? Certainly, it’s not actual navigation; Bellerby rolls his eyes at films that nonsensically stick globes in the background of a sea captain’s quarters. Rather, they might help to “remind us of how minuscule — and insignificant — we are,” Bellerby hypothesizes in The Globemakers. “And how wonderful the world is, a beautiful planet floating in space, spinning within an infinite universe and an evolution of time so long that it is hard to comprehend.”
The Livingstone Desktop Globe.Bellerby & Co. Globemakers
Call it the overview effect but without the mortal terror of staring into the black void of space. “One thing about making globes — it really does make you care about the planet and does make you think about things more,” Bellerby told me before racing off-screen to retrieve a globe that he then angled to show me the enormous blank space of the Pacific Ocean.
It’s a spot that I’ve looked at a million times, usually when I zoom out too far on Google Maps. “It kind of makes you believe that, maybe, it will help us out eventually,” said Bellerby, who’s looked at it a million times more. “Because we’re doing so much to deforest everywhere. You would hope there’s a limit to how much you could do to an ocean that vast.”
And for a moment, we both went quiet, staring at the planet between his hands.
Editor’s note: This article was updated after publication to clarify details about Bellerby’s work.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.