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Will air quality anxiety make us rethink the Fourth of July?
Of all the topics I’ve become an expert on in the past month — carbon-fiber submersible hulls; Yevgeny Prigozhin; the cultural evolution of orcas — by far the least useless has been the Air Quality Index.
While I used to have a caveman-like grasp of the AQI scale (red! bad!), multiple “smoke events” in the Midwest and East have since made me hyperaware of what I’m inhaling. Now I’m a person with opinions about the merits and limitations of AirNow vs. Purple Air vs. IQAir. I make observations like “it’s gonna be a hazy one” out loud to myself on the subway platform. A neglected Wirecutter-recommended air purifier, purchased after an apartment fire (long story), has been re-established in my living room.
It is as one newly-minted AQI aficionado to another, then, that I wanted to let you know to prepare for degraded air quality on the Fourth of July. Not because wildfire smoke is blowing back into the United States — though it might be doing that, too — but because nationwide, Independence Day and July 5 are often the highest average particulate pollution days of the year due to fireworks. In fact, The Washington Post has had to caveat its coverage of the smoke over D.C., saying "Thursday was D.C.’s third-highest non-4th of July smoke pollution on record" (emphasis added).
Before you come at me for trying to “cancel the Fourth of July,” understand that I have a solemn respect for our God-given right as Americans to gloat over the British by blowing stuff up. Some of my most cherished childhood memories, in fact, are of contributing to the sulphuric fog that would hang over the unincorporated lake where we’d go to shoot off mortars as kids. (Still hate Piccolo Pete’s, though).
But fireworks also release a lot of PM2.5, tiny particulates that can penetrate deep into our lungs and wreak who-knows-what-kind of havoc on our bodies, and that is also released by wildfires. PM2.5 is, importantly, one of several pollutants factored into the AQI. New owners of air quality monitors, purchased to keep an eye on recent wildfire smoke conditions, might notice readings tick up into the “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy” territory on Tuesday night due to the celebrations.
In particular, the stuff that makes fireworks so pretty — heavy metals like copper, lead, sulfur, aluminum, arsenic, and iron dust — are not exactly things you want to be inhaling. Though recent research on daily mortality and fireworks-related air pollution has been so far inconclusive and is ongoing, one 1975 study found an 113% increase in respiratory illness treatments on the Fourth of July, the New York Post points out.
What that also tells us is that we’ve known about the air pollution from fireworks for years. That there hasn’t been a bigger public expression of concern might depend on a variety of things: that firework smoke pollution decreases rapidly after the 5th so exposure is fairly limited, but also that the fun of fireworks outweighs their (mostly invisible) tolls. It’s also very likely that relatively healthy Americans just haven’t paid that much attention to air quality before.
Now, though, that’s changing.
Interest in air quality began to spike in 2018 — then the largest, deadliest, and most-destructive wildfire season in California history — and grew further in 2020 when smoke turned San Francisco orange, Bloombergdeclared “smoke apps [are] the new weather apps,” and Apple added air quality recommendations to the iPhone’s native Weather app. Attention to air quality spread east this spring when New York City broke the national wildfire air pollution record. This week, the Canadian wildfire smoke returned and put more than 100 million Americans — nearly a third of the country, from the midwest to Vermont and as far south as North Carolina — under air quality alerts. In New York, the sky once again took on a sickly yellow-gray look and dramatic red sunsets returned; Midwestern cities had the worst air quality in the world earlier this week. As a result, many Americans are paying closer attention to the AQI than ever before; many others are paying attention for the first time.
A number of cities are reportedly reconsidering their fireworks shows as a result of the latest plume of wildfire smoke. “If [the Fourth of July] was today, we’d cancel,” the mayor of the Cleveland suburb of Solon, Ohio, told Cleveland.com on Wednesday, when the local AQI was around 244. “It is impossible for us to predict what will happen for the holiday celebrations on Monday and Tuesday the Fourth,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul similarly warned her state on Thursday, adding that residents ought to be “very, very vigilant before you plan your outdoor activities.” In Montreal, Canada Day firework displays, scheduled for Saturday night, were preemptively scrapped.
Of course, the irony of all this fuss is that sitting near a firework display has about the same effect as sitting in moderately dense wildfire smoke. I’m not saying either is a brilliant idea; the two compounded, certainly, would be rough on the lungs. But in the great American tradition of being free to make reckless decisions about our own bodies, it’s likely most celebrants this year will have to navigate these kinds of decisions for themselves.
After all, what could be more patriotic than that?
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.