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Of all the imaginative ways to die in New York City — getting pushed in front of a subway car, flattened by a falling a/c unit, clocked by an exploding manhole cover, etc. — perhaps the unlikeliest is Death By Toxic Black Mold.
That hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it ... all the time. Every New Yorker seems to know someone who’s discovered the inky starbursts in their building and had months of migraines, runny noses, and sore throats snap into horrible clarity. Toxic black mold. With a name like that, how could you not be terrified?
Fungi have been a little more top-of-mind lately, though, because they’re everywhere.
I mean that beyond the literal sense that “fungi are everywhere,” which they also are: We’ve found them in Antarctica, gnawing through Shackleton and Scott’s century-old huts; at the bottom of the ocean, in multi-million-year-old mud; on antiseptically clean hospital walls; and at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Naturally, they survive “surprisingly well” in space.
Over the past decade or so, fungi have begun to infest our stories as well. This is particularly true of horror and sci-fi, including HBO’s recent The Last of Us adaptation, which expands on the 2013 game’s fungal zombie backstory. In 2017, Star Trek: Discovery introduced the idea that the whole universe is connected by mycelia, a concept explained to viewers by the fictional astromycologist Paul Stamets — not to be confused with Eldon Stammets, the mushroom-obsessed serial killer from season one of Hannibal (2013), nor the real mycologist Paul Stamets, after whom both characters were named (Bryan Fuller, a Stamets superfan, worked on both shows). Other memorable fungal sightings in fiction include Mike Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts (2014); multiple Jeff VanderMeers but perhaps most obviously Annihilation (2014, with a film adaptation in 2018); Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020); and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020) — though there are many more. Taking a full inventory, it can almost seem as if, over the course of about a decade, writers collectively realized fungi are the perfect monsters: efficient, unknowable, hungry.
On the one hand, of course. We’re repelled by mold and mushrooms for the same reason we’re disgusted by rats or insects: They are symbols of death, disease, and decay, a reminder that in the end, we’re nothing more than fleshy neighborhoods for “postmortem fungal communities.”
But if there is something primordial about our fungus revulsion, there is something obtuse about it, too. Our lives have been entangled with fungi’s for as long as we’ve been human. The oldest dental records ever studied, belonging to cannibalized 50,000-year-old Neanderthals, indicate ancient hominids ate “primitive penicillin,” possibly for the same medical purposes that we use the mold-derived antibiotic today. Otzi the Iceman was wearing Birch polypores on a leather thong around his neck when he died. Some (admittedly fringe) scientists even believe mushrooms were the spark that set our Homo erectus ancestors on their journey to the higher consciousness of Homo sapiens.
What, then, soured in our multi-millennia-long human-fungus relationship to make us — as mycologist David Arora puts it — the “fungophobic society” we are today? The medical community’s acceptance of germ theory, and our modern obsession with cleanliness, are components, surely.
There is another possibility, too: The closer we’ve looked at fungi, the stranger they reveal themselves to be, and the richer and more possible our wildest fictions become.
Mushrooms might seem to sprout abruptly and at random. But in truth, they’re just the visible fruiting body of a much larger subterranean organism. Great speculative fiction works much the same way: While a story can appear to have sprouted from nothing, it’s been fed, just below the surface, by a tangle of science, headlines, and current events.
In the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945, for example, fiction warped the horrors of nuclear science for films like Godzilla (1954), Them! (1954), and Tarantula (1955). And after the moon landing in 1969, Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Alien (1979) all wondered who else might be up there?
When it comes to mycology, though, science is still getting started. Fungi didn’t even become their own taxonomic kingdom until 1969; before then, scientists just thought they were really weird plants.
Westerners have long approached fungi with suspicion. “The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and colour never matched before … Death sprang also from the water-soaked earth,” Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in Sir Nigel (1905-06), using fungi as an ominous mood-setter. Edgar Allen Poe wasn’t a fan either: “Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior” of the House of Usher, he wrote in 1839, “hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves.” Folk explanations posited that mushrooms shot from the ground where lightning struck, and “a vast body of Victorian fairy lore connected mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills, and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland,” explains Mike Jay in The Public Domain Review.
Brits were especially revolted by the “pariahs of the plant world,” to the great disappointment of R.T. Rolfe, who penned a rousing 1925 defense titled Romance of the Fungal World. In Shakespeare’s day, it was questionable if mushrooms were even safely edible; “a hogg wont touch um,” warned Edmund Gayton in his 1695 Art of Longevity. Americans inherited this wariness — “the general opinion [in the U.S. is] all forms of fungus growth are either poisonous or unwholesome,” observed one cookbook writer in 1899 — though many were beginning to come around by the late 19th century, taking cues from the more adventurous eaters of France. Not every culture has been quite so squeamish: mushrooms have long been cultivated in Asia; are a staple of Eastern European, African, and Slavic cuisines; and Indigenous groups throughout the Americas have likewise long enjoyed all that fungi have to offer.
The reevaluation of fungi in refined English society came about almost entirely by accident, via the fortuitous contamination of Alexander Fleming’s staphylococci cultures by the genus Penicillium in 1928. Still, it wouldn’t be until the second half of the 20th century when fungus science really started to get weird — even weirder, you might say, than fiction.
Because the fungi, it appeared, were talking to each other.
When ecologist Suzanne Simard captured the public imagination by describing in a 1997 issue of Nature how trees use webs of underground fungi to communicate with each other, networks — conceptually — were already having a moment. The internet, and the “network of cables and routers” that comprised it, had been around since the 1970s, mycologist Merlin Sheldrake explains in Entangled Life, but when the World Wide Web became available to users in 1991, network science started informing everything from epidemiology to neuroscience. Nature tapped into this buzz by coining the “Wood Wide Web” on its cover to describe Simard’s research, and in doing so, mesmerizingly blurred science-fiction, tech, and biology.
The oft-quoted theory of the Wood Wide Web suggests that fungal threads called mycelium colonize root systems of forest trees, and in doing so, facilitate the exchange of defense signals and other “wisdom” by moving nutrients between plants. “Mother” trees, for example, can supposedly nurture samplings in their communities by shipping excess carbon via fungi. Reviewer Philip Ball went as far as to marvel in Prospect, after reading an account of these and other systems in Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, that “fungi force us to reconsider what intelligence even means.” (Sheldrake’s enthusiasm for the Wood Wide Web is more restrained; he uses it disparagingly to illustrate “plant-centrism in action”).
Ball wasn’t the only one awed, though. References to the “alien language” of fungi began popping up everywhere in popular science writing, as McMaster University’s Derek Woods has observed. Paul Stamets’ Mycelium Running helped bring Simard’s research to a more general audience in 2005, while Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2015), and Simard’s own Finding the Mother Tree (2021) followed — not to mention “dozens of imitative articles,” TED talks, documentaries, and offshoot studies. As recently as last year, The Guardian was trumpeting that “Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’.”
Some scientists have since raised doubts about the Wood Wide Web, characterizing the research as potentially “overblown” and “unproven" — but it’s a good story, isn’t it? Not to mention a rich jumping-off point for writers who were paying attention to the headlines. One can trace a line directly from Simard’s research, through Stamets’ amplification, straight to Bryan Fuller’s mycelium plane in Star Trek: Discovery.
Yet the phenomenon, as described, sounds far more Edenic than the terrifying, often sentient, man-eating, mind-controlling, city-conquering fungi that have overwhelmingly appeared in modern sci-fi and horror. Is today’s fungal antagonist just a product of those centuries of folk superstitions? Or is something else in the zeitgeist making our skin crawl?
Let’s return, for a moment, to the ways I’ve imagined dying in New York City.
Though the chances of being taken out by a subway or an unsecured a/c unit are slim, they have, tragically, actually happened. But when you start to look into Deaths by Toxic Black Mold, the picture gets a lot murkier.
Few people, verging on none, have definitively died of black mold exposure. You wouldn’t know that, though, from the headlines of the early aughts, which are peppered with celebrity lawsuits over mold, culminating in TMZ tying the mysterious 2009 and 2010 deaths of Clueless actress Brittany Murphy and her husband to mold inhalation (ultimately disproven by their autopsies).
But mold hysteria didn’t originate in Beverly Hills. It comes from Ohio. In the mid ’90s, 12 babies in Cleveland died of lung hemorrhaging and the main suspect was an outbreak of black mold allegedly brought on by unusually heavy rains. CDC investigators found all of the afflicted infants lived in homes with bad water damage, and, in many cases, those homes also had Stachybotrys, a moisture-loving black mold. Soon, stories linking the fungus to the deaths were making national news.
Reevaluations of the outbreak later cast doubt on the correlation. In 1999, the CDC walked back its initial assessment, citing “serious shortcomings in the collection, analysis, and reporting of data.” More skepticism followed: If Stachybotrys is common wherever there is water-damaged wood, why were only babies in the Cleveland area being affected? And how do you explain that some of the babies lived in homes where no Stachybotrys was ever found?
Still, the story stuck, and the link between black mold and a whole host of health problems, including many that remain completely unproven, took root in the public consciousness. Soon, everyone was suing over black mold. “A single insurance company handled 12 cases in 1999,” mycologist Nicholas Money writes in Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores; by 2001, “the company fielded more than 10,000 claims.” The Washington Post likewise observed in 2013 that “experts say mold is not more prevalent these days; instead, we are more aware of it.”
Hypochondriacs eyeing mildew spots on their bathroom ceilings weren’t the only ones reading about deadly mold, of course. Writers were, too. And now fungi had two strikes against them: They possessed a weird alien intelligence and they were dangerous.
Then came the possibility they could control our minds.
The parasitic fungal genus Ophiocordyceps is at least 48 million years old. It has likely survived as long as it has because of its stranger-than-fiction method of propagating: Ophiocordyceps spores infect an ant and “hijack” its brain, forcing it to abandon its colony, climb a high leaf, and affix itself there with a bite. The ant then dies, still clinging to the leaf with its jaws, and the fungus sprouts out of its body, raining spores down onto other unlucky ants.
Humans turning into, or being consumed alive by, fungi had long fascinated writers (see: “The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson from 1907, or Stephen King’s 1973 “Gray Matter”). But with our increased cultural awareness of Ophiocordyceps in the 21st century, fungal mind control went from being a revolting body horror trope to a plausible sci-fi starting point. Neil Druckmann, the creative director of The Last of Us, has said he learned about the fungus from a 2008 episode of BBC’s Planet Earth, and he went on to use it as the basis for the zombies in his 2013 video game.
Though Druckmann was an early adopter of Ophiocordyceps, the fungus didn’t exactly remain obscure. “Zombie fungi are not known to use humans as hosts. At least yet,” The Columbus Dispatch wrote in 2014 (and filed, cryptically, in its “how to” section). The X-Men comics introduced “Cordyceps Jones,” a “talking parasitic fungal spore, intergalactic casino proprietor, and notorious crime boss,” as a new villain in 2021. The New York Times even saw fit to inform its readers, “After This Fungus Turns Ants Into Zombies, Their Bodies Explode.” Try scrolling past that.
Through this process of scientific discoveries, eye-catching headlines, and a little exaggeration, it took only a handful of decades for fungi to make the leap from “pariahs of the plant world” to the perfect horror villain. The climate crisis will likely be a further creative accelerant. Thanks to intensified hurricanes and flooding, mold will be an ongoing issue in homes nationwide. Plus, fungi are nothing if not survivors, and some are already pushing past the climatological boundaries — and antifungals — that used to contain them.
Even The Last of Us added an explanation in the HBO adaption that the warming planet is what allowed Ophiocordyceps to evolve and make the leap from cooler-bodied insects to comparatively hot humans. The good news is, mycologists say this is all but impossible in real life due to the vast biological differences between humans and ants; the bad news is, a deadly fungal pandemic is absolutely possible and, shocker, experts say we’re not at all prepared for it.
At least, not institutionally. Fiction has already hashed out how Fauna vs. Funga could go in a hundred different ways. Sometimes, the fungus comes to us from outer space. Sometimes, it possesses alien sentience; other times, it just represents the indifferent efficiency of nature. Sometimes, it takes over our minds and turns us against each other. Sometimes, it brings us together to fight back.
Fiction is also beginning to wonder if those villainous fungi might just be our friends. Think of those universe-binding spores that connect us in Star Trek, or the fungal-facilitated hivemind in a popular Hugo Award-winning series, which likewise eludes a straightforward antagonist narrative. It only makes sense: If spores are intelligent colonizers, well, so are we. Maybe the next step will be to put our heads — or at least, our hyphae and neurons — together.
Because while science reveals fungi to be weirder by the day, it also further reinforces that we can’t live without them. They nourish us, heal us, relieve us, protect us, and one day, maybe, will save us.
And oh, how they entertain us.
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Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.
On China’s Paris pact with Europe, Trump’s mineral geopolitics, and Google’s CO2 battery bet
Current conditions: The record-setting heat roasting more than 100 million Americans in the central U.S. is now headed for the densely populated Northeast • The American Samoan capital of Pago Pago faces “imminent” flash flooding on Friday amid days of rain • China just set a record for the highest number of hot days since March in its history.
The Palisades nuclear plant on the shore of Lake Michigan.Holtec International
Three years after the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan became the country’s last atomic power station to permanently close, the facility is set to become the first in U.S. history to reopen after a final shutdown. On Thursday afternoon, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its formal approval for the plant’s operating license, putting the single-reactor station on track to restart later this year, the plant’s owner, Holtec International, told me. With just 11 days to go before its license expired, Palisades’ previous owner opted to close down May 2022 rather than make necessary upgrades to continue operations. The Biden-era Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy put up more than $1.5 to fund the effort. Despite freezing funding for other projects, the Trump administration shelled out the money to Holtec.
The project still faces obstacles. Holtec still needs to finalize repairs at the plant, which are subject to another NRC review. Anti-nuclear activists, meanwhile, vowed to appeal the NRC license. Still, Holtec’s President Kelly Trice said the NRC approval “represents an unprecedented milestone in U.S. nuclear energy.”
As the U.S. seeks to dismantle its climate regulations, China and the European Union signed a pledge Thursday to work together on cutting emissions. The document, dubbed “the way forward” following the 10-year anniversary of the Paris climate accords, called the 2015 pact brokered in the French capital “the cornerstone of international climate cooperation” that “all parties” should implement “in a comprehensive, good-faith and effective manner.” The two global powers also reached a deal for the emergency export of rare earth metals from China, which dominates their global trade, to European factories facing shortages of the materials, according to The New York Times.
The diplomatic communique comes as the U.S. goes through the process to quit the Paris Agreement for the second time. In 2017, Trump waited weeks to initiate the exit, and the protocol completed around the time of the 2020 election. That allowed then-President-elect Joe Biden to signal his plans to rejoin immediately, rendering the American withdrawal a brief hiccup. This time, however, the rules allow the U.S. to leave in about a year, and Trump started the process on his first day in office.
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Just over a week after the Pentagon made a landmark investment in the United States’ only rare earths mine, President Donald Trump elevated his minerals adviser to the Nation Security Council. While the Trump administration did not confirm what Copley’s new position would entail, an industry source told E&E News the job change was a promotion for the military veteran and former mining executive, who would now serve as “both the White House mineral and supply chain czar.”
The move comes as China has sought to leverage its grip over global supplies of minerals such as rare earth metals and graphite by tightening export restrictions. While Trump’s military investment into California rare earth producer MP Materials may mirror China’s strategy of government funding for critical materials, Beijing has another thing going for it: Strong demand from electric vehicles. Therein lies what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin recently called the “paradox” of Trump’s mineral policy: He’s making it easier to mine but eliminating the demand pull of electric vehicles and wind turbines.
Google has invested in small modular reactors, nuclear fusion, and even old-fashioned hydropower to shore up a steady supply of electricity for its reactors. This morning, the tech giant announced a strategic investment into carbon dioxide batteries, as I reported earlier today over at Latitude Media. The startup Energy Dome houses its technology in white, inflatable shelters similar to what you see over the courts at professional tennis tournaments. But inside is equipment that compresses and liquefies CO2, stores it in carbon steel tanks, then turns the liquid back into pressurized gas when energy is needed. Once reheated, the carbon dioxide is pumped through turbines to generate electricity for up to 24 hours at a time.
Headquartered in Milan, Energy Dome already had a deal for pilot plants in Wisconsin, Sardinia, and India, about eight hours west of Hyderabad. But Google said it plans to deploy the technology across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Maine is speeding up approvals for nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy to make sure projects can tap into federal tax credits before the Trump administration cracks down, Canary Media's Sarah Shemkus reported. State regulators gave developers a July 25 deadline to take part in the fast-tracking program. The state is seeking enough bids to meet about 13% of its annual electricity demand. The program will give preference to projects sited on property where water or soil is contaminated by toxic PFAS, the cancer-causing substances known as “forever chemicals.”
Not all states are as welcoming of renewables. In Ohio, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported yesterday, 26 out of 88 counties have “established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited.” The key to getting around local opposition is early community outreach and building a base of support for a project.
Consider the lobster, but listen to the shrimp. A new study in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that listening to the high-frequency sounds snapping shrimp produce “can be used as a real indicator of coral resilience,” Xavier Raick, postdoctoral fellow in bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said in a press release. “Snapping shrimp’s abundance is a mirror of coral cover. So if you have more corals, especially very big colonies, you have more snapping shrimps, and then you can use their sound as a proxy for the reef, structure, and health.”
Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.