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A tale of two coal economies, one post-industrial, one industrializing.
For those living near the Port of Baltimore, the transportation and storage of coal on its way from mines in the Appalachian Mountains to far-flung foreign kilns is “a mundane but ever-present imposition,” Chloe Ahmann, a Cornell University anthropologist, told me. Ahmann once worked as an elementary school teacher in Curtis Bay, a residential neighborhood adjacent to the working port, and wrote a book on the area’s post-industrial present.
“There are stories going back generation,” she said. “Coal dust covering everything in the neighborhood — bicycles, porches, windowsill. People wipe coal dust off their windows as a daily ritual.”
With the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and subsequent shutdown of the port, that coal now has nowhere to go for the foreseeable future. Baltimoreans don’t want it, but its intended recipients thousands of miles away in India most certainly do.
“The top recipient of U.S. steam coal shipped from Baltimore by far over the past five years has been India, where the brick manufacturing industry has been a major customer,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a report on the impacts of the bridge disaster. In January alone, the Port of Baltimore exported almost a million tons of coal to India, up almost three-fold from January of last year, according to Argus, a commodity data provider. In total, 17 million tons of thermal coal — the type used in power plants and brick kilns — left the U.S. via Baltimore in 2023, S&P Global found by analyzing Census Bureau data.
India is the world’s second largest consumer of coal after China, and coal accounts for over 70% of India's emissions from burning fuel, according to the International Energy Agency. (In contrast, coal accounts for a fifth of the United States’ emissions from combustion.) About a quarter of India’s emissions come from industry, much of which uses coal in its processes, including steelmaking, and cement and, yes, brick manufacturing.
Brickmaking in India is often done on small scales by local producers, but even so, its energy consumption is “comparable to the organized construction industries such as cement and steel,” according to research published in Nature India. Many of those bricks are used to build homes, part and parcel of the country’s astounding economic growth. Along with its steel and cement industries, brickmaking has transformed India — whose inflation-adjusted per capita GDP of around $1,800 in 1990 would have made it one of the world's poorest countries today — into the third-largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world.
The same brick industry that produces the literal building blocks of India’s homebuilding sector is also responsible for immensely damaging particulate pollution. The combination of coal and biomass used to fire brick kilns is responsible for around 75 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions — comparable to the total emissions of Washington State, Arizona, or the 2021 California wildfires — and 100,000 tons of black carbon emissions, according to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition.
Air pollution in South Asia is one of the largest public health problems in the world. India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh all ranked in the bottom 10 of 180 countries for air quality, according to the Yale University Environmental Performance Index. In 2019, air pollution was estimated to account for around 1.7 million premature deaths in India. “Brick kilns, involving the burning of low-grade coal, are one of the major sectors that contribute to air pollution in South Asia,” a World Bank report said, with the brick industry making up over 90% of particulate emissions in some South Asian cities and 15% of the most dangerous small particulate emissions in Delhi.
In a story that will be familiar to much of industrial and post-industrial America, these industrial processes are both an important economic engine and an obvious detriment to health locally and are contributing to the climatic changes that are already having devastating effects in South Asia. Efforts to regulate the brick industry have already run into complaints that efficiency requirements will be too expensive for cash-strapped businesses and will result in lower employment in the sector.
In the vertiginous world of globalized capitalism, different regions using the same resource — the Appalachian coal mines, the Baltimore port, and the Indian brick manufacturers — can all at the same time be at different stages of industrialization and post-industrialization, with differing attitudes toward the coal that powers and pollutes them. In South Baltimore, the people living with the dust from the coal pier no longer sees any positive relationship between industrial activity and their own well-being, Ahmann told me.
The Baltimore and Ohio railroad, which has been part of the rail conglomerate CSX since 1980, began construction in 1827 and has long shipped coal from West Virginia and other Appalachian states to the East Coast. Baltimore’s Curtis Bay neighborhood, where Ahmann lived, is adjacent to a coal pier operated by CSX. “It’s an iconic local scene, right by a local playground, stone throw from several elementary schools and homes,” Ahmann said, making the neighborhood both “heavily industrialized and very much a lived-in place.”
While the Maryland government trumpets direct and indirect employment at the port of around 15,000 people, that’s about half the number that worked there in 1970.
“It’s no longer the case that industry is a major employer in South Baltimore,” Ahmann said. “It’s not like it was 40 years ago, when everybody knew somebody whose livelihood was attached to industrial production in this place.” Instead, people in the area “cobble together lives from low-wage service jobs,” she said. Overall, manufacturing employment in Maryland has been roughly cut in half since 1990.
In late 2021, a CSX coal facility in Curtis Bay exploded, damaging nearby homes and spreading tremors for miles. Following the blast, a coalition of community groups and the Maryland Department of the Environment investigated particulate pollution in Curtis Bay and found coal dust “present throughout the community,” with coal dust coming from the terminal itself, as well as train and truck traffic.
“We should not have open air coal piers period, and certainly not in a residential area behind a playground,” Ahmann said.
Among the many fears locals are nursing as the Key Bridge lies in ruins is that the coal will simply pile up at the port as long as it remains blocked. “These piles are going to grow every day,” Ahmann told me, describing it as “stark visual evidence of the untenability of this situation.”
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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.