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On carmakers’ quarterly reports, Shell’s climate case, and solar panel fences
Current conditions: The Ohio and Tennessee Valleys could experience long-track tornadoes today • Gale-force winds killed at least four people in China’s Jiangxi Province • A winter storm watch is in effect across New England.
Major U.S. electric vehicle manufacturers including Tesla and Rivian are expected to report on their first-quarter sales and deliveries this week. Expectations for Tesla are pretty low, according toBloomberg, with analysts forecasting global deliveries of about 449,080 vehicles, down 7%. “Some on Wall Street are even braced for Tesla’s first sales decline since the early days of the pandemic.” But hey, Tesla might win back its title of “biggest EV seller” after Chinese rival BYD reported a 43% drop in quarterly sales. Analysts expect Rivian to deliver 16,608 vehicles, up 18.9% over Q4 of 2023. Stellantis, Ford, Toyota, GM, and Honda will also release Q1 reports this week, so stay tuned.
Fossil fuel giant Shell is arguing in The Hague this week that a landmark emissions ruling was legally defunct. In 2021, a district court ruled in favor of environmental group Friends of the Earth Netherlands and ordered Shell to cut its greenhouse gas emissions (including scope 3 emissions) by 45% by 2030. “This was the mother of all climate cases against corporations” because it opened the door to copycat cases, Klaas Hendrik Eller, an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam’s center for transformative private law, told the Financial Times. Shell is appealing, insisting the order lacks legal basis and that companies cannot be held responsible for their clients’ emissions. Friends of the Earth will argue that the scientific evidence shows burning fossil fuels is causing global warming and that “Shell has a responsibility to act in accordance with climate science and international climate agreements.” A ruling is expected in the second half of this year.
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More than 30,200 fires were detected in Venezuela between January and March, the highest number ever recorded for that three-month period. The region is suffering from intense drought driven by human-caused climate change and the El Niño weather pattern. Researchers are worried these fires are a sign of things to come. “Everything is indicating we’re going to see other events of catastrophic fires – megafires that are huge in size and height,” Manoela Machado, a fire researcher at University of Oxford, told Reuters. More than half of all the fires burning in the Amazon rainforest are located in Venezuela.
A case of avian flu has been detected in a human in Texas, marking the first such case since the virus was recently identified in cows across several states, and only the second case in U.S. history. The current outbreak of H5N1 has decimated bird populations across the world and also spread to mammals, including seals, mink, and now cows. Health experts worry the virus could mutate to become easily transmissible between humans, but so far there is no evidence of that happening. Still, “every single time is a little bit of Russian roulette,” said Ashish Jha, who led the Biden administration’s pandemic response. “You play that game long enough and one of these times it will become fit to spread among humans.” Researchers say climate change is altering birds’ breeding habits and migratory patterns in ways that leave them more vulnerable to bird flu.
The price of solar panels has dropped so significantly that some households in Europe are using them as fencing in their yards, the Financial Timesreported. Skyrocketing production out of China means solar panels are cheap and getting cheaper. But at the same time, installation costs for rooftop solar remain high, prompting some DIY-minded homeowners to roll up their sleeves and install panels as fencing. The panels don’t get quite as much sun as they would on a rooftop, but they still work. No word on what the neighbors have to say about it. Peculiar garden aesthetics aside, the solar glut has “brought Europe's solar makers to their knees,” Politicoreported recently. Manufacturers want the European Commission to step in and help them. In the U.S., the cost of a solar panel is now half of what it was last year, and falling.
As of yesterday, anyone living in Colorado can get a $450 discount when buying an e-bike thanks to the nation’s first statewide e-bike tax credit.
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New research published today in Nature shocked even the study’s own authors.
Hurricane Helene is, by conventional measures, the deadliest hurricane to strike the continental United States since Katrina. At least 182 people have been confirmed killed by the storm, with hundreds of people still unaccounted for. Although all hurricanes are deadly, only a handful of storms have killed more than 100 people since 1950. Or at least that is what we have long thought. New research suggests that these conventional tallies may be a vast undercount.
Several years ago, two economists and public policy researchers — Rachel Young and Solomon Hsiang, now of Princeton and Stanford — began to study a seemingly simple question: How many Americans do hurricanes kill each year? According to the federal government, the average hurricane kills 24 people after making landfall. That seemed likely to be a modest underestimate. Economists know that natural disasters can have a long tail of suffering; Hsiang expected the real number to be a “single digit multiple” of that figure — perhaps 50 or 100 people per storm.
Yet when they ran the numbers and looked at mortality in places affected by storms, they were initially perplexed by the results, Hsiang told me earlier this week. The numbers they came up with didn’t even make sense at first.
“It was months of us trying to understand what we were looking at,” Hsiang said. “And then once we realized what we were seeing, it was years of us checking our work to find what we missed.” Only when it was clear that their work resembled other American public health statistics — specifically, that the white-Black mortality mirrored what has been found in other studies — that the horrifying truth sunk in.
The finding: Hurricanes are hundreds of times deadlier than anyone has realized.
Their study, which was published on Wednesday in Nature, finds that the average hurricane kills 7,000 to 11,000 people after making landfall in the United States. These previously uncounted deaths happened not during a storm or in its immediate aftermath, but as a long, slow trickle of mortality that plagues a region long after the clouds have cleared and floods have abated.
In any one year, the number of storm-related deaths is not very high. And yet a wave of excess deaths is visible in population data for at least 15 years after a storm hits an area, they found.
“It lasts for so many years, and because there’s so many storms hitting so many states, once you add up, it becomes this enormous number,” Hsiang told me. When added together, hurricanes’ long-term death toll exceeds American combat deaths in all wars, combined. The number so dwarfs previous estimates that it suggests tropical cyclones alone are a major determinant of public health across the United States.
Kerry Emanuel, an MIT meteorology professor who studies climate change and hurricanes, told me that the results were “truly astounding” and “persuasive,” although he noted that he is not an expert in the statistical approach used in the paper.
“Summed over all hurricanes, this amounts to three to five percent of all deaths near the Atlantic coast,” he said. “I expect this result will prove controversial and will be followed up by many other studies of long-term mortality from natural disasters.”
The paper fits into a growing body of research on what others have called the hidden or invisible public health threat of environmental threats. For years, researchers have known that air pollution and heat waves, seemingly silent hazards, can in fact kill tens of thousands of people. Lately they have begun to apply the same techniques to other hazards, with outsized results.
Officially, Hurricane Maria killed 64 people when it struck Puerto Rico in 2017. But when researchers surveyed households across the island months after the storm, they found the death toll was closer to 4,600. (The territory’s government later revised the official figure to 2,975.) These deaths were caused not by the cyclone’s high winds or torrential floods, but rather by secondary effects of the storm’s destruction. Maria took out the island’s power grid and road networks, for instance, and preventing people with heart attacks and strokes from reaching the hospital in time.
That paper was written six months after Maria struck the island; this new hurricane paper considers a wider time horizon, finding that more than 80,000 Americans die each year as a result of a hurricane, whenever it occurred. Black people were disproportionately killed by the aftermath of hurricanes, at least partly because a larger share of the country’s Black population lives in storm-afflicted areas. About 37,000 white deaths each year are due to a prior tropical cyclone.
How could such storms cause such a long tail of deaths, affecting areas 10 or 15 years after they come ashore? The paper cannot answer those questions today. But Hsiang and Young hypothesize that hurricanes cause extreme economic distress, which can resonate for years or decades afterward. “If someone suffers a loss and can’t invest in their business, then it will have ramifications for their income long into the future,” Hsiang told me. “If someone is on a fixed income and their garage is destroyed, and they pull from their retirement funds to fix the garage, then eight years later when they face a big medical decision, they might choose” a cheaper or less effective form of treatment.
“When you talk to people, you hear stories like this,” Hsiang added. The time and money invested in dealing with the storm is often a “pure loss,” even if some of the damage ultimately gets reimbursed. “Even if you have insurance, that just means you already paid for it in some way,” he said.
Storms cause disruption in other ways. They can break up communities and social networks. (If children move away, for instance, their parent can face higher medical bills.) Hurricanes can also impose high costs on states, towns, and cities, which may then have to reduce or restrict other services as a result.
“When you think about how communities rebuild — local municipalities and states — they also play a lot of games with their budget” in the aftermath of a storm, Hsiang said. “If they spend a lot of money to rebuild a bridge or boardwalk somewhere, does that come out of some social program 10 years later? Or building a new NICU hospital?” That could explain why an infant — even one born 15 years after a storm struck a given area — could face a higher chance of death.
Young and Hsiang think that these economic drivers are most likely to be the big reason for the excess deaths — the effect is just too big and drawn out to make any other cause likely — but other possibilities exist, they recognize. Hurricanes could be deadly simply because they are highly stressful events. “We see an effect on cancer rates and also cardiovascular illness. Stress matters a lot to those,” Hsiang said. It’s also possible that hurricanes unleash contamination into the environment that then makes people sick. A flooded basement can become a breeding ground for mold. “There’s gas stations in every town. What chemicals come out when there’s flooding?” Hsiang wondered.
The paper may also help resolve a riddle in American public health. On average, Americans die earlier in the eastern half of the continental United States than in the western half. This effect is worst in the Gulf Coast and Southeast but persists to some degree in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
The paper suggests that hurricanes may have something to do with this geographic phenomenon. For infants, people below the age of 44, and Black people of all ages, hurricanes may explain a large share but not all of the mortality gap.
Even when the candidates aren’t talking about it, it’s still there.
Earlier this week, ProPublica published an investigation revealing that the Heritage Foundation, home of Project 2025, has been flooding the federal government with Freedom of Information Act requests targeted at federal employees, meant to discover which have used words including “climate change” and “climate equity” in emails and chats. A few hours later, JD Vance and Tim Walz met for what will likely be the final candidate debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, and got one question about climate — the same quantity asked of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in their debate last month.
The campaign is not quite over, but the role of climate change within it can be seen in these two stories. Climate has been a vital issue in this presidential race, but one that has been largely muted. Only occasionally has it intruded into the attention of those who weren’t already following the issue closely. But we’ve seen enough to understand that the next few years will be vital in shaping the government’s climate posture and the nation’s future.
Despite profound differences between the parties in both their beliefs about climate change and their policy preferences, there was some degree of convergence in their rhetoric. Smarter Republicans understand that Trump’s brand of flamboyant denialism is not a political winner for a national audience, and they’ve attempted to offer something more subtle. That’s why we saw Vance turn the climate question he got at the debate into an answer about boosting manufacturing, after admitting that “a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns” and noting that China is the world’s biggest carbon emitter. A viewer who knew nothing about what the Republican ticket actually wants to do might think the GOP is only slightly less committed to climate action than its opponents.
Walz’s response was that under the current administration, the country is already producing more energy than ever and boosting manufacturing. Which reflected another reality that came into focus in this campaign: While Democrats still favor restrictive regulation in some areas, their primary climate policies revolve around carrots rather than sticks, tax incentives and subsidies for states, businesses, and consumers to create a broad-based transition to a green economy. Those are the policies they want to talk about.
That shift makes their climate arguments far more politically appealing — and their legislative achievements potentially more durable. The enormous subsidies contained in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are making their way disproportionately to red states, which is why plenty of down-ballot candidates from both parties are lauding the jobs being created with government help. There may still be some vigorous debate within the GOP about whether they should try to repeal the IRA if they get the chance, but the mostly-carrots approach is now firmly embedded in Democratic policymaking, as is the idea that climate optimism is a savvier way to persuade the public than dire warnings of a frightening future, even if that’s what we do face.
Nevertheless, there will likely be no big-spending climate legislation resembling the IRA coming out of Congress in the near future. Control of the Senate sits on a knife edge, with Democrats needing to win nearly every closely contested seat to hang on to their majority. Even if they do and Harris wins the presidency, they may well decide that they took their shot and succeeded already, and therefore devote the once-per-year reconciliation bill (which cannot be filibustered) to other priorities. There are areas of bipartisan interest, including permitting reform, that could speed the development of clean energy projects, but they may wind up more limited in scope.
If Republicans take over the White House and Congress, on the other hand, the future is less clear. They may attempt a repeal of some of the IRA, along with the other major bills passed during the Biden administration, but much of their focus will probably be on what can be accomplished with executive branch authority.
Which is why all the scrutiny that Project 2025 has garnered has been one of the best things about this campaign, proving enormously instructive on a range of issues, including climate. More voters than ever now understand that when we elect a president we also elect a huge apparatus of governing. Policy is made at a variety of levels, and thousands of civil servants no one has ever heard of can do a great deal to improve or undermine people’s lives.
While Trump may deny that Project 2025 is his blueprint for governing, it certainly reflects his climate intentions and those of the people who will serve in his administration. He shares with the project a commitment to changing civil service rules to put loyal apparatchiks in positions throughout the federal government, and a devotion to fossil-fuel-friendly climate policies will be a key requirement for many who want to take those jobs in agencies including the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. All that has become clear to a great many voters.
The vice presidential debate may not be the last time the candidates are asked to address climate; if nothing else, there will probably be a few more natural disasters in the next month, which could push the issue back on the agenda. But while we can’t say there was a detailed debate about climate in the 2024 election that grappled with our present and future in a nuanced way, one can’t really say that about any issue. The climate debate we got was far short of perfect, but it probably left voters knowing more than they did a year or two ago. Given the degraded state of so much of what passes for democratic deliberation, that isn’t so bad.
The conservationist group thinks it has the goods on the Bureau of Land Management’s new Western solar plan.
The Biden administration is trying to open a lot more Western territory to utility-scale solar. But they are facing a conservationist backlash that may be aided by the views of scientists within the federal government.
Yesterday, activists pushed back against the environmental review of the Bureau of Land Management’s new Western solar plan that would make more than 31 million acres available for utility-scale solar applications across 11 states. The BLM is trying to meet the next two decades of demand for renewable electricity while avoiding the kinds of environmental and social conflicts that stymie individual projects. But it appears key stakeholders filed protests against the environmental review, including counties that would host new solar farms and Republican politicians, as well as the whistleblower advocacy group PEER we wrote about last week.
Today, however, we’re going to focus on the protest filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, which submitted to BLM what amounted to the contours of a lawsuit.
The protest argued the environmental review of the plan not only failed to adequately protect the Mojave desert tortoise – a species protected as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act – but appeared to make “arbitrary” decisions to open potential tortoise habitat and travel areas. Per the protest, the review did so without clearly explaining how it took into account guidance from the Fish and Wildlife Service, the primary species protection agency.
Zooming in, scientists at the Service said in a power-point presentation dated April of this year (that CBD happily pointed out is available online) they supported excluding occupied tortoise habitat and translocation sites from the solar plan. Employees at the Service also gave CBD guidance documents they submitted over the past year to the Bureau that outlined “extensive criteria for exclusion” that activists say were not followed and weren’t reflected in the review documents previously released by the government.
Why does this matter? Well, it could determine whether the decisions relevant can hold up in court. CBD is using the word “arbitrary” because it’s a standard followed under the Administrative Procedures Act, which forces government officials to show their work and demonstrate they considered all available information submitted to them.
CBD’s Patrick Donnelly – who we spoke with at length in our first edition of The Fight – authored the protest filing. Donnelly told me the acreage relevant to the tortoises totals only about 200,000 acres of the almost 12 million that would be available for solar under the plan, so the grievance shouldn’t be a herculean endeavor to address.
“We’re trying to go into the protest process with an open mind, not cynically,” he told me, “and make this plan a lot less harmful.”
Still, if CBD escalates, the Bureau will have to show how it went from getting these recommendations to landing on the acreage it opened to solar. It could also shake the certainty of developers with applications within the solar plan area already dealing with tortoise protection advocates on the individual project level, like EDF Renewables’ Bonanza Solar project north of Las Vegas which has a draft environmental review in public comment.
Proving a government decision is arbitrary requires demonstrating the move was not “reasonable and justifiable,” Ankur Tohan, an attorney at K&L Gates, told me. Usually the bar for the government to prove itself is “relatively low,” and courts are “very deferential to an agency” as long as “the agency’s action took into account the relevant factors.” The problems arise for the government if “the internal analysis is contradictory,” Tohan said.
Personally I’m having trouble figuring out how the Service’s initial recommendations were internalized at BLM – though I am assuming they were handled in some way, as otherwise the Service would presumably stand in the way. BLM does acknowledge that “design features and project guidelines” were modified to “better avoid impacts to species where not excluded” and said developers “shall configure solar development projects to maintain existing desert tortoise habitat.”
I asked BLM to explain this, but they declined to answer questions on the matter. “The BLM has no comment at this time,” BLM press secretary Brian Hires said, citing the need to “review all protests.” So I guess we’ll have to wait and see!