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The Smithsonian’s natural history museum tackles climate change in an unexpected way.
A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany somewhere unexpected: the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils.
I hadn’t been to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., in more than a decade, but some friends in town had convinced me to join them on a visit. I waved hello to the taxidermied elephant, took a right at the information desk, and entered what I had, in the past, simply called the dinosaur room.
The hall was filled with animals lost to the ages: the cast of a plesiosaur swam along one wall; the bones of a giant sloth munched on fake leaves; a giant bronze millipede crawled over a bronze log; and a Diplodocus stretched lazily over my head, its neck extending over the path that bisected the room.
Like most of the other bones, the dinosaur had its feet on the side of the room that dealt with past apocalypses. The hall houses a single exhibit, called Deep Time, and is laid out so visitors travel backwards through time as they progress down the path; black pillars planted a few dozen feet apart mark the arrival of various mass extinctions. Here is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs (66 million years ago). There is the Permian extinction (252 million years ago, the worst extinction ever), when volcanic eruptions coated our world in ash clouds and greenhouse gases. But the other side of the room concerns itself with a different kind of apocalyptic force entirely: us.
“Humans spread, extinctions follow,” declared one sign near a wall detailing just how much biodiversity we’ve obliterated in the last few thousand years (74% of the large animal species in North America; 97% in Australasia). “In the near future, most extinctions will be connected to human actions,” said another. As I finished reading a panel about fossil fuels, I turned and caught the eye (socket) of the Diplodocus.
The David H. Koch Hall of Fossils had got me good. I hadn’t expected to find climate change in the fossil room, but there we were: humans as a geological force.
The idea, said Scott Wing, a Smithsonian paleobotanist and co-curator of the Deep Time exhibit, was to create a cathedral. “Cathedrals are designed for the contemplation of your existence,” Wing told me. “We’re doing that through science and not religion. I want visitors to hold two contradictory thoughts in their head: We are small. But we are also big.”
There’s a classic analogy in paleontology, repeated so often as to be a cliche: If all of geological time were a clock, humanity would appear less than a second before midnight. It’s easy, in the face of time and climate change alike, to feel as if our actions mean very little on a planetary scale.
But the Deep Time exhibit, which opened in 2019 after a 5-year renovation and a much longer design process, argues otherwise: In a hall that’s designed to mimic geological time scales, humans take up as much space as three extinction events. A few steps down from the panels about human-related biodiversity loss, I found a series of short films highlighting the various ways people are trying to mitigate climate change — coral reef restoration in Hawaii, for example, or no-till agriculture in West Texas — and a panel that provided tips on how to open conversations about climate change (“find common ground; share success stories”) with people who might not want to talk about it. This extinction, the exhibit seems to say, can be avoided.
Nothing in the exhibit was particularly new to me; I’ve been thinking about climate change, professionally, for a few years now. And yet I felt as if I had traveled to the center of the Earth and had a conversation with Atlas about the best ways to brace an intercontinental shelf between one’s shoulders.
“We are the beneficiaries of a living planet that has been evolving over inconceivably long spans of time, and we’re among the first generations to recognize their capacity to change the planet in very substantial ways,” Wing said. “I want [visitors] to go away feeling powerful, and I want them to feel fortunate to have the inheritance that they have.”
The hall’s late namesake, the notorious fossil fuel executive and climate change denier who spent untold millions lobbying against climate legislation, is perhaps emblematic of that power. David Koch’s $35 million donation was the source of much consternation among Wing’s team at the Smithsonian and activists alike, but — as the Smithsonian made clear to The Washington Post in 2019 — he had no say in what went into the exhibit, and provided crucial funding to make it come to fruition. The same man who waylaid carbon taxes helped, perhaps unwittingly, make space for climate change alongside Tyrannosaurs and Triceratops.
I walked down a ramp, past more signs detailing the various ways our planet died in the past. Paleontologists have, of late, found their field taking on newfound relevance. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, Wing’s specialty, is widely called the closest analog to modern-day climate change. That era, like ours, saw a massive spike in greenhouse gases (one theory suggests volcanoes are to blame; another says the seas belched methane), and the fossil record points to a rapid rise in global temperatures, deep-sea extinctions, and intense ocean acidification.
Details on life during that time are still murky, but scientists suspect insects, in need of more energy to keep up with rising temperatures, mowed through leaves like the proverbial plague of locusts, palm trees sprung up in Wyoming, and algae bloomed on the ocean surface, choking the fish below. All, for the most part, plausible visions of our future: the difference now is the rate at which we’re putting carbon into the air, which handily beats any period in our planet’s history.
Humanity has its own deep time, and much of it is filled with mistakes. When the fossil hall was last redone, in the early 1980s, the Alvarez hypothesis — which found evidence for the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs — was still considered too new and unproven to include in the room’s design. Instead, curators had to jury-rig a retrofit, finding room among the dinosaur bones for the story of their death. Today, there is an entire section of the hall dedicated to the rock, culminating in a short film complete with a dramatic rendition of the day it hit.
We often lose sight of our collective chronology, aside from the occasional misplaced desire to return to our paleolithic roots. But perhaps sitting with our past is a way out of climate doomerism: if we are a geological force, and the Deep Time exhibit would argue that we are, then we ought to give ourselves the space to act like one.
Our memories are short and doom is common, both on our feeds and on our planet, but the exhibit was just as much about recovery as death. After every apocalypse came a resurgence: to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, life, uh, found a way. Our solutions are not perfect, and we may well blow through every climate target we’ve ever set. We have caused nearly as much warming in a couple of centuries as volcanism likely did over millions of years. But the galaxy-brain message of deep time would suggest that, if we can beat some piddly volcanoes at warming the planet — and, ideally, we won’t — we can also hasten the recovery. So why not try our imperfect solutions, patchwork as they may be? Install your heat pumps and compost your veggies and reject your plastic bags and try sucking carbon out of the air, I say, and, ever so slowly, our bubbling pools of magma will cool.
Just, please, let’s not blot out the sun. No need to go full volcano.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.