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Don’t let the political process intimidate you.
Driving less has a lot of benefits. You’ll be healthier than your vehicle-bound peers, about a third of whom don’t walk for more than 10 minutes a week. You’ll cut carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane emissions. In the process, you’ll probably realize how awful America’s public and active transportation infrastructure is — and may want to do something about it.
The same goes for just about any action you’ll find in Heatmap’s guide to decarbonizing your life. Should it be easier to get a permit to install rooftop solar panels? For sure. Should there be more public chargers to support EV adoption in your community? Without a doubt.
It can be especially overwhelming to think about getting involved in your local political processes when it comes to mobility because the cards are stacked so heavily in drivers’ favor. But it’s far from impossible. Here’s Heatmap’s guide to advocating for better transportation options and infrastructure in your community.
This might be the hardest step of all. To take transportation as an example, most American cities and towns were literally constructed to get drivers from point A to point B as fast as possible — meaning that their design is often actively hostile to anyone who wants to walk, bike, or take mass transit instead. If you put your mind to it, you could probably devise a dozen ways to make your immediate neighborhood friendlier to carless commuters.
Transportation for America’s transit advocate guide has several suggested starting places, including advocating for additional late-night service on a particular bus route, improving access to transit stations or stops (known as first- or last-mile connectivity), and pushing for shuttle services to connect riders with jobs. Petitioning for something like a bike lane, new sidewalk, safer intersections, or a missing crosswalk is another good place to start.
“Focus on one individual project,” Alexa Sledge, the communications director at Transportation Alternatives, a New York City nonprofit promoting non-polluting, safe, and quiet travel, told me. Being clear and focused on what you want — and, importantly, not getting overwhelmed or pulled in multiple directions — will help you achieve your goal. Strong Towns, a nonprofit that supports transportation advocates, calls this step the “humble observation:” identifying where people are struggling in your community and zeroing in on the smallest first possible step to help.
Here’s the excellent news: You aren’t in this fight alone.
Pretty much every major city and metropolitan region in the U.S. has its own transportation advocacy group these days, and you’re potentially just a Google search away from locating yours. (If you can’t find a transportation-specific group, look into local climate or pedestrian organizations, which frequently have overlapping objectives.)
It’s important to link up with others not just because they might already have identified priority projects in your area. Advocating for structural change requires, by definition, allies — and unfortunately, car-centricity is so dominant that transit advocates are often forced to prove the obvious community benefits of things like better bus routes or protected bike lanes.
If you don’t live in an area with an active transit group, nationwide organizations like Transportation for America and Strong Towns can connect with to get the tools, resources, training, and advice you need to start gathering allies.
How do I change a zoning law? Or weigh in on a renewable energy project near me?
Maybe you’re reading this guide because you’re interested in advocating climate-conscious zoning reform or want to weigh in on a wind farm nearby. There is a “profound diversity” of processes to do so from municipality to municipality, and no one-size-fits-all approach. That’s why it’s extra important to get involved with a local advocacy group; veteran organizers in your area can help you navigate the labyrinthine processes of your specific local government.
That said, here are a few things to keep your eyes peeled for:
There is an old urban planning joke about how traffic woes could be fixed by adding just one more lane. (They can’t be). Alas, this is also something of a federal policy; even though the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set aside $36 billion to “transform our transportation system,” many states used their flexible funds for things like widening roads. Mass and active transit are often only an afterthought when it comes to funding: the Capital Investment Grants Program, one of the most significant federal programs for transit, is on the chopping block every budget-writing session, and programs like the Highway Trust Fund puts as little as 13% toward mass transit.
It’s our elected officials who make these decisions, though — and it’s their job to listen to their constituents. Here’s a handy page for determining the relevant senators and representatives to contact about federal funding for transit and active mobility policies; for local projects, you’ll want to reach out to your city council members, whose names and email addresses or phone numbers you should be able to find on your city website. And if you feel you’re getting brushed off by city staff when you reach out, focus on the smallest possible steps forward and be persistent (you can learn more strategies here).
The truth is, most people don’t go to their city council meetings. “When you really get down to the local level, there often aren’t as many people fighting, so you really can make a big difference,” Sledge said. Speaking up at hearings, town halls, public comment periods, or city council meetings can result in significant change and progress.
But let’s face it: Because most of us don’t have experience in local activism, telling someone to “go to a city council meeting” is much easier said than done. “The thing to remember is that your city council members work for you,” Sledge said. “They are elected members of your government, and you vote for them, and they are paid with taxpayer money. It’s part of their job to listen to you.”
Doug Gordon, the cohost of The War on Cars, a podcast about the fight against car culture, also suggested taking some of the pressure off yourself. “Don’t feel like you have to give the rousing patriotic speech in defense of the neighborhood bike lane,” he told me. “Just go and listen, and maybe if all that’s asked of you is to raise your hand when they ask how many people support this project, and that’s all you do, great.”
You don’t necessarily need to show up at a town council meeting or a representative’s office, either. Sledge suggested taking smaller steps like a phone call or email, or even just talking to people in your immediate community (for example, if you want a crosswalk outside your kid’s school, start by talking to the school board or other parents). When approaching someone like your city counselor, use language like: “This crosswalk is really important to me. How do I get this done?”
1. Depending on the project you’re pursuing, look up when your local transportation authority is inviting public comments ( here’s an example of what that page looks like in New York City). You can also search for when your state is holding public transportation hearings (here’s what Oklahoma’s looks like) and contact the relevant representatives to express your views. Most likely, though, you’ll be looking for your town’s public meeting schedule (here’s an example of San Jose’s) and seeking a special session related to transportation or a regular business meeting. Virtual hearings have also been common since the pandemic.
2. Research beforehand to learn how to comment publicly in your city or town. This may involve signing up on the town’s website or on a sign-in sheet when you arrive at the hearing.
3. In most cases, during the public comment portion of the city council meeting, you can address the council on any public issue (it does not have to be on the agenda). Again, check your city or town’s website to learn the specifics of procedures. Also, be aware of the time limit for your comments; generally, you’ll have about three minutes.
When you’re called on:
During your comment, you will probably see a timer somewhere in the room to help you track how long you have left to speak. The best comments are short and concise. Even if you’re frustrated with the process, be polite; remember that your comment can be seen and cited by anyone, including the media. Speak slowly. Here’s a guide for making an effective public comment from the National Resources Defense Council, with a sample script.
“If changing the system was easy,” writes Strong Towns, “we’d have done it long ago.” Many campaigns take years to come to fruition — being persistent and building a consensus, so advocates are working together toward the same cause, are two of the biggest lessons for success that Transportation for America stresses in their case studies.
It may take getting creative. Join the greater transportation advocacy community; listen to relevant podcasts, read related books, watch relevant YouTube videos, and learn from other campaigns. “You need a website, you need a public petition, and you need a T-shirt, because otherwise you’re just somebody with an opinion,” Rob Goodspeed, a founder of Trains Not Lanes, which successfully convinced Michigan’s Department of Transportation to drop highway expansion plans, told Streetsblog.
And when you do finally succeed? Celebrate. Promote it. Share your lessons with other organizers. Then identify a new project and begin again.
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On the worsening transformer shortage, China’s patent boom, and New York’s nuclear embrace
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Erin is still intensifying as it approaches the Caribbean • Rare August rainstorms are deluging the Pacific Northwest with a month’s worth of precipitation in 24 hours, threatening floods • Hong Kong has issued its highest-level “black” rainstorm warning multiple times this month as Tropical Storm Podul lashes southern China.
President Donald Trump’s order to keep large fossil-fueled power stations scheduled to retire between now and 2028 operating indefinitely will cost ratepayers across the United States $3.1 billion per year, according to new research from the consultancy Grid Strategies on behalf of four large environmental groups. If the Department of Energy expands the order to cover all 54 fossil fuel plants slated for closure in the next three years, the price tag for Americans whose rates fund the subsidies to keep the stations running would rise to $6 billion per year.
The problem may only grow. The agency’s existing mandates “perversely incentivize plant owners to claim they plan to retire so they can receive a ratepayer subsidy to remain open,” the report points out.
With electricity consumption hitting new records in the U.S., demand for transformers is surging. The years-long supply shortage for power and distribution transformers is now set to hit a deficit below demand of 30% and 10%, respectively, in 2025, according to a new report from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Complicating matters further for manufacturers scrambling to ramp up supply, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is throwing clean-energy projects into jeopardy and sending mixed signals to factories on what kinds of transformers to produce. At the same time, tariffs are raising the price of materials needed to make more transformers.
“The U.S. transformer market stands at a critical juncture, with supply constraints threatening to undermine the nation's energy transition and grid reliability goals,” Ben Boucher, a senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “The convergence of accelerating electricity demand, aging infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities has created constraints that will persist well into the 2030s.”
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A worker in a Chinese electric vehicle factory. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
For years, China was known for ripping off the West’s technology and patenting cheaper but more easily manufactured copies. Not anymore. China applied for twice as many high-quality clean energy patents as the U.S. in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of the most recently available public data. The European Patent Office, which supplied data to the Times, defines a “high quality” patent as one that has been filed in two or more countries, indicating that the company or individual involved has a strong competitive interest in protecting its idea.
The growth in China’s intellectual property ambitions is a sign that Beijing’s strategic push to ramp up academic research and industrial innovation is maturing. “It is the opposite of an accident,” said Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which created a database of global research on technologies that are critical to nations’ economic and military security, including clean energy.
In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed the New York Power Authority, the nation’s second-largest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, to support the construction of the state’s first new nuclear plant since the 1980s. Albany has plenty to sort out between now and the 15-year deadline for completing the project, including selecting a site, picking from one of the many new reactor designs, and finding a private partner. But one thing isn’t a problem, at least for now: Public support.
New Siena polling I covered in my Substack newsletter yesterday shows that 49% of registered voters in New York support the effort, with just 26% opposed. Both sides of the political spectrum are largely in lockstep, with Republican support outpacing that of Democrats by a margin of 55% to 49%. That’s lucky for Hochul, who will need support from the more politically conservative upper reaches of the state where the facility is likely to be built. For more on the technical and political considerations in play, here’s Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the plan.
It seems like everyone is abandoning their net zero goals. But not insurer Aviva. The company’s chief executive, Amanda Blanc, said the British giant remained committed to its carbon-cutting goals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, The Guardian reported. With rising profits propelling shares in the company to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, Blanc said, “extreme weather conditions, climate change, and the impact that that has on our insurance business that actually insures properties” meant Aviva needed to “remain committed to our ambition.”
The red-headed wood pigeon once seemed on the verge of extinction. The population, endemic to Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, fell to below 80 individuals in the 2000s. But once its main predator, the feral cat, was removed, the bird made a remarkable comeback. A team of researchers at Kyoto University set out to find out why the expected problems from inbreeding never occurred. Per a press release: “Their results revealed that the frequency of highly deleterious mutations in the red-headed wood pigeon was lower than in the more widespread Japanese wood pigeon. This suggests that, rather than hindering it, the pigeon's success was likely rooted in its long-term persistence in a small population size prior to human impact.”
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.