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This weekend, millions of Americans were reminded that we are living in extraordinary times. At moments, it almost seemed like you could feel our place in the great continuum of history — at once stretching backward to those who came before us while also extending forward, onward, to those who’ve been passed the torch.
I am talking, of course, about the Twister sequel.
Twisters touched down in theaters last Friday, nearly 30 years after its precursor was released on LaserDisc and VHS with a message from the FEMA administrator to “never try to outdrive a tornado.” For Hollywood reboots and the meteorological sciences both, three decades is an eon; Twisters’ lead actress, Daisy Edgar-Jones, was born two years after Twister premiered, and while Helen Hunt’s Jo had dreamed of improving tornado warning times in the mid-1990s, the Millennial storm chasers in Twisters own drones and plausibly discuss snuffing out the storms entirely. (Speaking of warnings: There are spoilers ahead.)
Twisters is a movie that loves science and shows its work. Director Lee Isaac Chung reportedly consulted researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and elsewhere to get the basic facts right, and in the opening minutes of the film, the screenplay debunks the common “one Mississippi” method of calculating a storm’s distance (in case you’re not familiar, here’s an explanation); casually references Lagrangian mechanics; and features a memorable PSA on why you should never use an overpass for shelter during a tornado. Twisters protagonists work for, or use taxpayer-funded technologies from, NOAA, the National Weather Service, and the military — a particularly meaningful inclusion at a time when government-funded science is under open threat by one of the leading candidates for highest office.
Even Twisters’ lack of focus on climate change is relatively accurate: While it might feel odd for there not to be an obvious climate nod in a weather disaster movie, scientists still haven’t demonstrated a strong correlation between global warming and tornadoes. Suggesting otherwise might actually have done more damage to public understanding by blurring the line between a frightening enough reality and Hollywood fiction in the name of topical relevance.
Still, Twisters does take some dramatic liberties. At one point, a weaker EF1 tornado breaks the blade off a wind turbine, which probably wouldn’t happen. The most egregious liberty, however, comes at the end of the film, when a tornado runs through an oil and gas refinery and wreaks havoc on the town of El Reno, Oklahoma. “The shelters are full; we’ve got to get everyone to the movie theater!” one character shouts when it becomes clear El Reno is on the verge of catastrophe. (I bet Warner Bros. loved that one.) But at just the moment when the tornado rips out the wall of the theater, turning the defacto shelter full of innocent people into the suck zone, Edgar-Jones’ character Kate is able to deploy a technology that decreases the moisture inside the twister, making it instantly collapse and dissolve.
To be clear, this is about as scientifically accurate as a Sharknado. Though the mechanics are real — Kate shoots the tornado with silver iodide, currently used in cloud seeding, to induce moisture, then saps the storm of water using sodium polyacrylate — the amount of absorbent material required to actually “tame” a tornado would be impossible to deploy. A twister also wouldn’t vanish instantly even if enough chemicals somehow could disrupt its moisture content. As Kevin Kelleher, a scientist who consulted on both Twister(s), told The New York Times, it would likely take closer to 15 to 20 minutes for a storm to — again, theoretically — collapse.
What is more interesting than Twisters’ dubious tornado-taming technique, though, is that it’s a rare positive example of geoengineering in an American film. Prior to Friday, the most memorable example of geoengineering in a widely seen movie was in Snowpiercer, where an attempt to correct global warming goes so awry that Chris Evans is forced to live on a train and eat babies. (This is a safe space from discussion of Geostorm.)
Twisters never reaches the point of exploring the ethics or potential downsides of Kate’s geoengineering experiment, and the credits roll over magazine and newspaper articles lauding her for “Taking Weather Science by Storm.” But Chung, the director, doesn’t let the moment pass entirely unremarked upon, either. The movie showing in the theater when the tornado hits El Reno is Frankenstein — perhaps our most famous parable about the hubris of playing God.
Movies don’t need to be accurate to be good, but Twisters nevertheless makes research and data the objective, nerds the hot heroes, and real-life scientists the background extras. In keeping with its dedication to science, it also takes geoengineering out of the realm of the dystopic; while there are plenty of people still staunchly opposed to climate modification, it is also no longer “one of climate science’s biggest taboos,” as my colleague Robinson Meyer has written.
Far more importantly, though, Twisters is a blast. It never tries to be anything more than what it is: a popcorn-worthy romantic disaster movie. Accuracy is just the cherry on top for us weather nerds in the audience; as one character rightly puts it: “Smile man — science is fun.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.