You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
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.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.
That means big, bad things for disaster relief — and for climate policy in general.
When Hurricanes Helene and Milton swept through the Southeast, small-government conservatives demanded fast and effective government service, in the form of relief operations organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet even as the agency was scrambling to meet the need, it found itself targeted by far-right militias, who prevented it from doing its job because they had been led by cynical politicians to believe it wasn't doing its job.
It’s almost a law of nature, or at least of politics, that when government does its job, few people notice — only when it screws up does everyone pay attention. While this is nothing new in itself, it has increasingly profound implications for the future of government-driven climate action. While that action comes in many forms and can be sold to the public in many ways, it depends on people having faith that when government steps in — whether to create new regulations, invest in new technologies, or provide benefits for climate-friendly choices — it knows what it’s doing and can accomplish its goals.
As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever. Unfortunately, simply doing the right things — like responding competently to disasters — won’t be enough to convince people that the next climate initiative will do what it’s supposed to.
The number of people expressing faith in government today is nearly as low as it has been in the half-century pollsters have been asking the question. That trust has bounced up and down a bit — it rose after September 11, then fell again during the disastrous Iraq War — but for the last decade and half, only around 20% of Americans say they trust the government most of the time.
It’s partisan, of course: People express more trust when their party controls the White House. And the decline of trust reaches beyond the government. Faith in most of the key institutions of American life — business, education, religion, news media — has fallen in recent decades, sometimes for good reason. The net result is a public skeptical that those in authority have the ability to solve complex problems.
Changing that perspective is extraordinarily difficult, often because of the nature of good and bad news: The former usually happens slowly and invisibly, while the latter often happens dramatically and all at once.
Take the program created in the Energy Department under George W. Bush to provide loans to innovative energy technologies. If most Americans had heard of it, it was because of one company: Solyndra, a manufacturer of innovative but overly expensive solar panels. Undercut by a decline in prices of traditional panels, the company went under, and its $535 million loan was never repaid. Republicans made Solyndra’s failure into a major controversy, claiming that the program showed that government investment in green technology was corrupt, ineffective, and wasteful.
What few people heard about was that the loan program overall not only turned a profit at the time (and for what it’s worth, it still does), it also provided help to many successful companies, even if a few failed — as any venture capital investor could tell you is inevitable. The successes included Tesla, which used its federal loan to ramp up production of the sedans that would turn it from a niche manufacturer of electric roadsters into what it is today. Needless to say, Elon Musk does not advertise the fact that his success was built on government help.
More recently, the hurricane response has shown how partisan polarization can be used to undermine trust in government — especially when Donald Trump is involved. Trump took the opportunity of the hurricanes to accuse the federal government of being both political and partisan, delivering help only to those areas that vote for Democrats. Soon after, he promised to do precisely what he falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, saying that if he is president again, he will withhold disaster aid from California unless Gov. Gavin Newsom changes the state’s water policies to be more to Trump’s liking. “And we’ll say, Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,” Trump said. And in fact, in his first term Trump did try to withhold disaster aid from blue states.
What sounds like hypocrisy is actually something much more pernicious. As he often does, Trump is arguing not that he is clean and his opponents are dirty, but that everyone is dirty, and it’s just a question of whether government is in the hands of our team or their team. When he says he’ll “drain the swamp,” he’s telling people both that government is corrupt, and the answer is merely to change who gets the spoils. If you believe him, you’ll have no trust in government whatsoever, even if you might think he’ll use it in a way you’ll approve of.
We’ve seen again and again that people want government to perform well and get angry when it doesn’t, but they don’t reward competence when it happens. Which is why making sure systems operate properly and problems are solved is necessary but not sufficient to win back trust. Government’s advocates — especially those who are counting on it to undertake ambitious climate action both now and in the future — need not only to deliver, they have to get better at, for lack of a better word, propaganda. Policy success is not its own advertisement. And despite his ample policy achievements, Joe Biden has not been a charismatic and effective messenger — on the role of government, or much else.
Ronald Reagan used to say that the most frightening words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”; the oft-repeated quip was at the center of his incredibly successful effort to delegitimize government in the eyes of voters. To reverse the decline of trust so people will believe that government has the knowledge and ability to tackle climate change, the public needs to be reminded — often and repeatedly — of what government does well.
Touting past and present successes on climate — and disaster relief, and so many other ways the government solves problems every day — is essential to building support for future climate initiatives. Those successes are all around, it’s just that most people never hear about them or take them for granted. But promoting government as an engine of positive change should be as high a priority for climate advocates, including those who hold public office, as discrediting government was for Reagan and is for Trump.