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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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On a Justice Department crackdown, net zero’s costs, and Democrats’ nuclear fears
Current conditions: Hurricane Lorena, a Category 1 storm, is threatening Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. with flooding and 80 mile-per-hour winds • In the Pacific, Hurricane Kiko strengthened to a Category 4 storm as it heads toward Hawaii • South Africa’s Northern Cape is facing extremely high fire risks.
The owners of Revolution Wind are fighting back against the stop-work order from President Donald Trump that halted construction on the offshore wind project off the coast of Rhode Island last month. On Thursday, Orsted and Skyborn Renewables filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accusing the Trump administration of causing “substantial harm” to a legally permitted project that was 80% complete. The litigation claimed that the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management “lacked legal authority for the stop-work order and that the stop-work order’s stated basis violated applicable law.”
“Revolution Wind secured all required federal and state permits in 2023, following reviews that began more than nine years ago,” the companies said in a press release. “Revolution Wind has spent and committed billions of dollars in reliance upon this fulsome review process.” The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut filed a similar complaint on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, seeking to “restore the rule of law, protect their energy and economic interests, and ensure that the federal government honors its commitments.” Analysts didn’t expect the order to hold, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, though the cost to the project’s owners was likely to rise. As I have reported repeatedly in this newsletter over the past few weeks, the Trump administration is enlisting at least half a dozen agencies in a widening attack meant to eliminate a generating technology that is rapidly growing overseas.
After the cleanup in Altadena, California.Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Department of Justice sued South California Edison on Thursday for $77 million in damages, accusing the utility of negligence that caused two deadly wildfires. Federal prosecutors in California alleged the utility failed to maintain infrastructure that ultimately sparked the Eaton fire in January, and the 2022 Fairview fire in Riverside County, The Wall Street Journal reported. The fires collectively killed about two dozen people and charred more than 42,000 acres of land. “Hardworking Californians should not pick up the tab for Edison’s negligence,” said Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. Attorney for California’s Central District, where the lawsuit was filed.
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It sure sounds like a lot of money. In a new research note released this week, the energy consultancy BloombergNEF calculated the total cost to transition the global economy off unmitigated fossil fuels by 2050 at $304 trillion. But that’s only 9% above the cost of continuing to develop worldwide energy systems on economics alone, which would result in 2.6 degrees Celsius of global warming. That margin is relatively narrow because the operating costs of cleaner technologies such as electric vehicles and renewable power generators are lower than the cost of fuel in the long term. The calculation also doesn’t account for the savings from avoided climate disasters in a net-zero scenario that halts the planet’s temperature spike at 1.7 degrees Celsius. While the cost of investing in renewables, grid infrastructure, electric vehicles, and carbon capture technology would add $45 trillion in additional investment, it’s ultimately offset by $19 trillion in annual savings from making the switch.
Microsoft has signed a series of deals that tighten the tech giant’s grip on the nascent carbon removal market. With new agreements that involve direct air capture in North American and burning garbage for energy in Oslo, Microsoft now accounts for 80% of all credits ever purchased from tech-based carbon removal projects. The company made up 92% of purchases in the first half of this year, the Financial Times reported, citing the data provider AlliedOffsets. By comparison, Amazon made up 0.7% of the market and Google comprised 1.4%.
We are still far from where carbon removal needs to be to make an impact on emissions. All the Paris Agreement-consistent scenarios modeled in the scientific literature require removing between 4 billion and 6 billion metric tons of carbon per year by 2035, and between 6 billion and 10 billion metric tons by 2050, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote recently. “For context, they estimate that the world currently removes about 2 billion metric tons of carbon per year over and above what the Earth would naturally absorb without human interference.”
At a hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the two Democrats left on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress they feared Trump would fire them if they raised safety concerns about new reactors. Matthew Marzano said the “NRC would not license a reactor” that didn’t pass safety standards, but that it’s a “possibility” the White House would oust him for withholding approval. “I think on any given day, I could be fired by the administration for reasons unknown,” Crowell told lawmakers, according to a write-up of the hearing in E&E News.
Hitachi Energy announced more than $1 billion in investments to expand manufacturing of electrical grid infrastructure in the U.S. That includes about $457 million for a new large power transformer facility in Virginia. “Power transformers are a linchpin technology for a robust and reliable electric grid and winning the AI race,” Andreas Schierenbeck, chief executive of Hitachi Energy, said in a press release. “Bringing production of large power transformers to the U.S. is critical to building a strong domestic supply chain for the U.S. economy and reducing production bottlenecks, which is essential as demand for these transformers across the economy is surging.”
All of the administration’s anti-wind actions in one place.
The Trump administration’s war on the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry has kicked into high gear over the past week, with a stop work order issued on a nearly fully-built project, grant terminations, and court filings indicating that permits for several additional projects will soon be revoked.
These actions are just the latest moves in what has been a steady stream of attacks beginning on the first day Trump stepped into the White House. He appears to be following a policy wishlist that anti-offshore wind activists submitted to his transition team almost to a T. As my colleague Jael Holzman reported back in January, those recommendations included stop work orders, reviews related to national security, tax credit changes, and a series of agency studies, such as asking the Health and Human Services to review wind turbines’ effects on electromagnetic fields — all of which we’ve seen done.
It’s still somewhat baffling as to why Trump would go so far as to try and shut down a nearly complete, 704-megawatt energy project, especially when his administration claims to be advancing “energy addition, NOT subtraction.” But it’s helpful to see the trajectory all in one place to understand what the administration has accomplished — and how much is still up in the air.
January 20: Trump issues a presidential memorandum temporarily halting all new onshore and offshore wind permitting and leasing activities “in light of various alleged legal deficiencies underlying the Federal Government’s leasing and permitting of onshore and offshore wind projects,” while his administration conducts an assessment of federal review practices. The memo also temporarily withdraws all areas on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing.
March 14: The Environmental Protection Agency pulls a Clean Air Act permit for Atlantic Shores, which was set to deliver power into New Jersey.
April 16: The Department of the Interior issues a stop work order to Empire Wind, a New York offshore wind farm that began construction in 2024. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum accuses the Biden administration of giving the project a “rushed approval” that was “built on bad and flawed science,” citing feedback from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
May 1: The Interior Department withdraws a Biden-era legal opinion for how to conduct permitting in line with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that advised the Secretary to “strike a rational balance” between wind energy and fishing. The Department reinstated the opinion issued under Trump’s first term, which was more favorable to the fishing industry.
May 2: Anti-offshore wind group Green Oceans sends a 68-page report titled “Cancelling Offshore Wind Leases” to Secretary Burgum and acting Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals Management Adam Suess, according to emails uncovered by E&E News. The report “evaluates potential violations of Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) and related Federal laws in addition to those generally associated with environmental protection.”
May 5: Seventeen states plus the District of Columbia file a lawsuit challenging Trump’s January 20 memo halting federal approvals of wind projects.
May 19: The Interior Department lifts the stop work order on Empire Wind after closed-door meetings between New York governor Kathy Hochul and President Trump, during which the White House later says that Hochul “caved” to allowing “two natural gas pipelines to advance” through New York. Hochul denies reaching any deal on pipelines during the meetings.
June 4: Atlantic Shores files a request with New Jersey regulators to cancel its contract to sell energy into the state.
July 4: Trump signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which imposes new expiration dates on tax credits for wind and solar projects, including offshore wind, as well as on the manufacture of wind turbine components.
July 7: The Environmental Protection Agency notifies the Maryland Department of the Environment that the state office erred when issuing an air permit to the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, also known as MarWin, because the state specified that petitions to review the permit would go to state court rather than the federal agency. The state later disagrees.
July 17: New York regulators cancel plans to develop additional transmission capacity for future offshore wind development, citing “significant federal uncertainty.”
July 29: The Interior Department issues an order requesting reports that describe and provide recommendations for “trends in environmental impacts from onshore and offshore wind projects on wildlife” and the impacts that approved offshore wind projects might have on “military readiness.” The order also asserts that the Biden administration misapplied federal law when it approved the construction and operation plans of offshore wind projects.
July 30: The Interior Department rescinds all designated “wind energy areas” on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, which had been deemed suitable for offshore wind development.
August 5: The Interior Department eliminates a requirement to publish a five-year schedule of offshore wind energy lease sales and to update the lease sale schedule every two years.
August 7: The Interior Department initiates a review of offshore wind energy regulations “to ensure alignment with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and America’s energy priorities under President Donald J. Trump.”
August 13: The Department of Commerce initiates an investigation into whether imports of onshore and offshore wind turbine components threaten national security, a precursor to imposing tariffs.
New Jersey regulators also decide to delay offshore wind transmission upgrades by two years. They officially cancel their contract with Atlantic Shores.
August 22: The Interior Department issues a stop work order on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind project set to deliver power to Rhode Island and Connecticut, citing national security concerns. The 65-turbine project is already 80% complete.
Interior also says in a court filing that it intends to “vacate its approval” of the Construction and Operations Plan for the Maryland Offshore Wind Project.
August 29: The Interior Department says in a court filing that it “intends to reconsider” its approval of the construction and operations plan for the SouthCoast wind project, which was set to deliver power to Massachusetts.
The Department of Transportation also withdraws or terminates $679 million for 12 offshore wind port infrastructure projects to “ensure federal dollars are prioritized towards restoring America’s maritime dominance” by “rebuilding America’s shipbuilding capacity, unleashing more reliable, traditional forms of energy, and utilizing the nation’s bountiful natural resources to unleash American energy.” The grants include:
September 3: The Interior Department says in a court filing that it intends to vacate its approval of the construction and operations plan for Avangrid’s New England Wind 1 and 2, which were set to deliver power to Massachusetts.
The New York Times also reports that the White House has instructed “a half-dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry,” including asking the Department of Health and Human Services to study “whether wind turbines are emitting electromagnetic fields that could harm human health,” and asking the Defense Department to probe “whether the projects could pose risks to national security.”
September 4: The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as Orsted, file lawsuits challenging the stop work order on Revolution Wind.
At the start of all this, the U.S. had three offshore wind projects that were fully operational and five that were under construction. As of today, the Trump administration has halted just one of those five, but it has threatened to rescind approvals for each and every remaining fully permitted project that hasn’t yet broken ground.
The tumult has rippled out into the states, where regulators in Massachusetts and Rhode Island are delaying plans to sign contracts to procure additional energy from offshore wind projects.
Looking ahead, we can expect a few things to happen over the next few weeks. We’ll see the Interior Department formally begin to rescind permits, as it indicated it would do in numerous court filings. We’ll also likely get an opinion from a federal court in Massachusetts in the case that states filed fighting Trump’s Day One memo. Orsted also said it intends to ask for a temporary injunction, so it’s possible that Revolution Wind could resume construction soon.
It’s been barely a month since Jael dubbed the Trump administration’s tactics a “total war on wind.” While the result hasn’t been a complete shutdown of the industry, it seems he might still be in the early stages of his plan.
The Nimbus wind project in the Ozark Mountains is moving forward even without species permits, while locals pray Trump will shut it down.
The state of Arkansas is quickly becoming an important bellwether for the future of renewable energy deployment in the U.S., and a single project in the state’s famed Ozark Mountains might be the big fight that decides which way the state’s winds blow.
Arkansas has not historically been a renewables-heavy state, and very little power there is generated from solar or wind today. But after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state saw a surge in project development, with more than 1.5 gigawatts of mostly utility-scale solar proposed in 2024, according to industry data. The state also welcomed its first large wind farm that year.
As in other states – Oklahoma and Arizona, for example – this spike in development led to a fresh wave of opposition and grassroots organizing against development. At least six Arkansas counties currently have active moratoria on solar or wind development, according to Heatmap Pro data. Unlike other states, Arkansas has actually gone there this year by passing a law restricting wind development and requiring all projects to have minimum setbacks on wind turbines from neighboring property owners of at least 3.5-times the height of the wind turbine itself, which can be as far as a quarter of a mile.
But activists on the ground still want more. Specifically, they want to stop Scout Clean Energy’s Nimbus wind project, which appears to have evaded significant barriers from either the new state law or a local ordinance blocking future wind development in Carroll County, the project’s future home. This facility is genuinely disliked by many on the ground in Carroll County; for weeks now, I have been monitoring residents posting to Facebook with updates on the movements of wind turbine components and their impacts to traffic. I’ve also seen the grumbling about it travel from the mouths of residents living near the project site to conservative social media influencers and influential figures in conservative energy policy circles.
The Nimbus project is also at considerable risk of federal intervention in some fashion. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, Nimbus applied to the Fish and Wildlife Service for incidental take approval covering golden eagles and endangered bats throughout the course of its operation. This turned into a multi-year effort to craft a conservation plan in tandem with permitting applications that are all pending approval from federal officials.
Scout Clean Energy still had not received permission by the time FWS changed hands to Trump 2.0, though – putting not only its permit but the project itself in potential legal risk. In addition, activists have recently seized upon risks floated by the Defense Department during development around the potential for the turbines to negatively impact radar capabilities, which previously resulted in the developer planning towers of varying heights for the blades.
These risks aren’t unique to Nimbus. Some of this is a reflection of how wind projects are generally so large and impactful that they wind up eventually landing in a federal nexus. But in this particular case, the fact that it seemed nothing could halt this project made me wonder if Trump was on the minds of people in Carroll County, too.
That’s how I wound up on the phone with Caroline Rogers, a woman living on Bradshaw Mountain near the Nimbus project site, who told me she has been fighting it since she first learned about it in 2023. Rogers and I chatted for almost an hour and, candidly, I found her to be an incredibly nice individual. When I asked her why she’s against the wind farm, she brought up a bunch of reasons I couldn’t necessarily fault her for, like concerns about property values and a lack of local civil services to support the community if there were a turbine failure or fire at the site.
“I still pray every day,” she told me when I asked her about whether she wants an outside force – à la Trump – to come in and do something to stop the facility. “There have been projects that have been stopped for various reasons, and there have been turbines that have been taken down.”
One of the things Rogers hopes happens is that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s bird crackdown comes for the Nimbus project, which is under construction even as it’s unclear whether it’ll ever get the take permits under the Trump administration. “Maybe it can be more of an enforcement [action],” she told me. “I hope it happens.”
This is where Trump’s unprecedented approach to energy development – and the curtailment of it – would have to cross a new rubicon. The Fish and Wildlife Service has rarely exercised its bird protection enforcement abilities against wind projects because of a significant and recent backlog in the permitting process related to applications from the sector. Bill Eubanks, an environmental attorney who works on renewables conflicts, told me earlier this week that if a developer is told by the agency it needs a permit, then “they’re on notice if they kill an eagle.” But while enforcement powers have been used before, it is “not that common.”
Even Rogers knows intervention from federal species regulators would be a potentially unprecedented step. “It can never stop a project that I’ve seen,” she told me.
Yet if Trump were to empower FWS to go after wind projects for violating species statutes, it is precisely this backlog that would make projects like Nimbus a potential target.
“They got so many applications from developers, and each one takes so much staff time to finalize,” Eubanks told me. “Even before January 20, there was already a significant backlog.”
Scout Clean Energy did not respond to requests for comment. If I hear from them or the Fish and Wildlife Service, I will let you know.