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:
Our deliver-everything era is crashing into a hotter planet.
When my phone dinged with the delivery notification, I raced outside to get the package into my apartment. I was not afraid of parcel theft, but of the sauna-like temps outside. One of 2023’s unbearable summer heat waves had descended upon Los Angeles, and my wife’s package of cosmetics contained creams and solutions with very specific instructions about how they should be safely stored. They weren’t the kinds of things you want to leave out in the sun as the thermometer approaches 100.
This year’s record-setting temperatures come at a time when Americans have fully embraced the power of online shopping. We have just about everything delivered — not just the durable goods that have always been sent through the mail, but perishable items like makeup, medicine, and meal prep kits. That adds up to a lot of extra deliveries happening during the dog days of a climate-changed summer.
The first thing to worry about are the men and women in the trucks. While office workers can turn up the air conditioning to mitigate extreme summer temperatures, delivery drivers spend their sweltering days getting in and out of vehicles that may or may not have AC. This summer, a U.S Postal Service letter carrier in Texas died while working on a day with a heat index in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Media reports have found drivers from parcel services like UPS and FedEx who say they suffer heat exhaustion from working in a truck with only a small fan to keep them cool, or are afraid to spend too much time in the vehicle’s unventilated cargo hold on a hot day.
Those organizations are now making changes to counter the increasingly dangerous summers. UPS reached a deal with its union to put AC in new trucks bought after January 1, 2024, and to retrofit old ones with solutions such as heat shields. In some areas, USPS has considered changing its delivery schedule, allowing drivers to start earlier in the morning to beat the afternoon heat.
These changes should help to protect drivers. But what about their deliveries? Packages sent during summer spend plenty of time in hot distribution centers and in the blistering backs of trucks where drivers fear to tread. If nobody’s home when the delivery comes, boxes spend hours or days in sweltering outdoors temperatures. The phenomenon has led to many social media conversations in which users ask one another whether their boxes full of delicate fragrances or HelloFresh meal prep kits are still safe to use or eat after long exposure to this insufferable summer.
Meal kits are shipped in temperature-controlled packaging meant to endure a day or two outside, with insulation and cold packs in place to keep food from warming up in transit and spoiling before it ever gets in the fridge. Abigail Dreher, the associate director of corporate communications for HelloFresh, told me that the company already optimizes how temperature-resistant it makes its packaging based on climate. Somebody receiving the ingredients to make golden chicken schnitzel in Tucson, Arizona will have their food packaged with more cold-keeping power than someone who, say, orders a kit for chicken wings in Buffalo.
As summer temperatures around the nation rise, though, shippers will need to use more and more insulating materials. “We test for temperatures up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit,” Dreher says, “and every year we plan for a 3-degree Fahrenheit average increase in temperatures, which increases the amount of cold-packaging going to hot destinations used year over year.” So far, however, HelloFresh has been able to offset this increase in packaging by using less insulation for meal kits bound for colder places.
That’s good news for sustainability, because while many insulating layers used for shipping are curbside-recyclable, some must be thrown away — including those gel packs used to keep shipments cold. “We are continuously searching for biodegradable/compostable alternatives to our gel packs,” Dreher says. “However, we do not yet have a solution that can be sourced at the scale which we need.”
The same trend goes for not only food but any contents that must be temperature-controlled. Medication, says GoodRx, “can change physically or chemically” when moved or stored in extreme temperatures. Medicines like insulin that must stay cool come in cold packaging, and many temperature-sensitive drugs are shipped with color-changing test strips or some other safeguard meant to tell the recipient whether the contents have been exposed to extreme temps.
The most likely outcome is that more shoppers will be caught in no-man's land upon opening their packages. If that meal kit delivery has sat under the sun for hours — and the steak inside is still cool, thanks to the packaging, but maybe not as cold as it once was — should you still cook and eat it? If that box of medicines endured a day in the 100-degree heat, but doesn’t look any different, should you take them, or send them back? A sea of judgment calls await.
Another possibility: higher shipping costs. Merchants who sell heat-sensitive products already have a variety of temperature controlled shipping options at their disposal, from specialized hardy containers to keep cargo at room temperature or colder to real-time temperature monitoring to “cold chain centers” to keep items cool while they await distribution. In addition, sellers may be tempted to choose faster shipping options to minimize the in-transit exposure to summer temperatures — costs that, no doubt, will be passed on to the home shopper.
Read more about daily life on a hotter planet:
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 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.