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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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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.