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How do you promote ‘beating the heat’ in a city that desperately wants them to win?
Miami has two heat seasons and this year, against all odds, they happen to overlap.
The No. 8-seed Miami Heat have played deep into June against the Denver Nuggets in the NBA Finals after having notched an improbable series win against the No. 2-seed Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals and hung on for an all-important road win in the best-of-seven championship series that started in the Mile High City last week. Though Miamians are no strangers to winning, the 2023 team’s endearing underdog narrative has ignited Heat fever across the county, and country, with many former Floridians making the pilgrimage home just to root for their team.
Quietly, though, a group of public officials in Miami-Dade County is doing everything in their power to ensure that the heat doesn’t win.
A former high school basketball player herself, Jane Gilbert is aware that rooting against the heat in Miami is practically sacrilege. But in a sense, it’s her full-time job: Gilbert is the city’s Chief Heat Officer. The first-of-its-kind position was established to strategize and mobilize against Miami’s extreme heat; for her, the heat season runs “the opposite of our basketball season,” from May 1 to October 31 each year.
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Though the position of a Chief Heat Officer has now been replicated by Phoenix, L.A., and a number of international cities including Monterrey, Mexico; Athens, Greece; and Dhaka, Bangladesh, Miami-Dade County was “the first community in the world to establish an official Heat Season” and Heat Officer post, Daniella Levine Cava, the Miami-Dade County mayor (not to be confused with the mayor of the city of Miami or the mayor of Miami Beach), told Heatmap. “This initiative is critical to help us prepare and protect people, particularly the most vulnerable, from the threat of this ‘silent killer.’”
Extreme heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States, although it’s not the highest profile, especially in a besieged state like Florida. For most Americans on the outside looking in, climate change in the Sunshine State manifests as rising sea levels, hurricanes, and Governor Ron DeSantis’ increasing denialism. That’s not necessarily how it’s experienced first-hand, though; in fact, when low-income communities in Miami-Dade were asked their top concern related to climate change, it wasn’t sea level rise or even hurricanes that they pointed to: It was the heat.
Heat is different in Florida than in the Western United States “where you get the extremes, those heat waves,” Gilbert explained to me. “Here we have chronic high heat.” While the danger for populations in places like the Northwest is a lack of preparedness for extreme heat events, “what we worry about [in Miami] is A/C-insecure and energy insecure populations where they can’t afford the utility bills anymore because of the combination of all costs.” Then there’s Gilbert’s nightmare scenario: a “widespread power outage during a hot time like we had with Hurricane Irma in 2017,” when 12 nursing home residents died from heat exposure.
Chronic extreme heat will be a fact of Miami-Dade’s future. The county already has 50 more days with a heat index over 90 than it did half a century ago — “I’ve been here 27 years, and I feel the difference,” Gilbert told me. Studies have found that Miami-Dade will “likely suffer the most extreme change” in temperature of any region in the U.S.
Gilbert, who was appointed to her office as part of Miami’s overarching Resilience Center program in 2021, sees much of her job as reaching the right people in a voice that they’ll be receptive to. That’s both literal — PSAs are distributed in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole — but also involves the more delicate art of building authority and trust. Reaching an “elderly single woman,” for example, “is different than a construction worker; that’s different than a pregnant mom with young kids.”
Adding to this trickiness, of course, is how to get the word out about the Miami heat without getting it confused with, you know, the other Miami Heat. When researching this piece, I found that even a specified Google search of “extreme heat Miami” turned up superlative results about the basketball team. “It’s both a blessing and a little bit of a challenge because certainly I don’t want [the message to be] ‘Beat the Heat,’ right?” Gilbert, who’s a fan of the team, said. Luckily, the Heat basketball team seems amused by the connection too: “They sent me my own personalized jersey when I was appointed,” Gilbert added, “which was very nice.”
It’s unclear at this point how far the Heat will make it in the finals; if they lose on Friday night, they’ll be down 1-3 in the series, putting them on the cusp of what would be a heartbreaking, if anticipated, defeat. But for Gilbert and her team, the days ahead are all about pace, discipline, and hustle. There’s a long season ahead and it’s just getting started.
Read more about the wildfire smoke engulfing the eastern United States:
Your Plants Are Going to Be Okay.
Why Are the Canadian Wildfires So Bad This Year?
How to Stay Safe from Wildfire Smoke Indoors
Wildfire Smoke Is a Wheezy Throwback for New York City
Wednesday Was the Worst Day for Wildfire Pollution in U.S. History
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And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.
The Bureau of Land Management says it will be heavily scrutinizing transmission lines if they are expressly necessary to bring solar or wind energy to the power grid.
Since the beginning of July, I’ve been reporting out how the Trump administration has all but halted progress for solar and wind projects on federal lands through a series of orders issued by the Interior Department. But last week, I explained it was unclear whether transmission lines that connect to renewable energy projects would be subject to the permitting freeze. I also identified a major transmission line in Nevada – the north branch of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – as a crucial test case for the future of transmission siting in federal rights-of-way under Trump. Greenlink would cross a litany of federal solar leases and has been promoted as “essential to helping Nevada achieve its de-carbonization goals and increased renewable portfolio standard.”
Well, BLM has now told me Greenlink North will still proceed despite a delay made public shortly after permitting was frozen for renewables, and that the agency still expects to publish the record of decision for the line in September.
This is possible because, as BLM told me, transmission projects that bring solar and wind power to the grid will be subject to heightened scrutiny. In an exclusive statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires told me via e-mail that a secretarial order choking out solar and wind permitting on federal lands will require “enhanced environmental review for transmission lines only when they are a part of, and necessary for, a wind or solar energy project.”
However, if a transmission project is not expressly tied to wind or solar or is not required for those projects to be constructed… apparently, then it can still get a federal green light. For instance in the case of Greenlink, the project itself is not explicitly tied to any single project, but is kind of like a transmission highway alongside many potential future solar projects. So a power line can get approved if it could one day connect to wind or solar, but the line’s purpose cannot solely be for a wind or solar project.
This is different than, say, lines tied explicitly to connecting a wind or solar project to an existing transmission network. Known as gen-tie lines, these will definitely face hardships with this federal government. This explains why, for example, BLM has yet to approve a gen-tie line for a wind project in Wyoming that would connect the Lucky Star wind project to the grid.
At the same time, it appears projects may be given a wider berth if a line has other reasons for existing, like improving resilience on the existing grid, or can be flexibly used by not just renewables but also fossil energy.
So, the lesson to me is that if you’re trying to build transmission infrastructure across federal property under this administration, you might want to be a little more … vague.