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The oldest climate story isn’t about a wildfire or a hurricane, a heat wave or a drought. It’s about a flood.
“The deluge is terrifying not just for its destructive capacity but also for the way it undoes all that has been accomplished, brings us back to the fathomless chaos of beginning,” The New Yorker’s Avi Steinberg writes of this most primordial human fear, the story of which has been echoed across cultures and religions from the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Bible’s Old Testament to the Ancient Greek Deucalion Myth to stories told by Native peoples across North America. It might also be humankind’s oldest cautionary tale: When the rain starts and the waters begin to rise, pay attention.
In the United States, floods are the deadliest extreme weather phenomenon after heat waves. In particular, flash floods — which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration distinguishes as flooding that “begins within 6 hours, and often within 3 hours, of ... heavy rainfall” — often take people by surprise, or are dangerously underestimated.
With Hurricane Hilary threatening to dump potentially a year’s worth of rain on parts of the southwestern United States in the span of 72 hours, learning how to react to rising waters ahead of time can be life-saving. This is what you need to know.
Unlike learning your personal wildfire risk, which is relatively easy, it can be frustrating to try to figure out the flood risk of your home.
FEMA publishes flood maps (you can search by your address here), but the shading key can be hard to make out and I had difficulty getting the images to load. I had my best luck navigating to this version of the map, clicking on the location I was interested in, then clicking to the second page of the pop-up information, where you will see “Flood Hazard Zones” followed by a letter. The letters B, C, and X designate moderate- to low-risk flood areas (though the risk in these locations is not non-existent!) while high-risk areas are marked with A or V.
An example of where to find your individual flood hazard zone on the FEMA flood map.FEMA
Personally, I preferred the clear information laid out at RiskFactor.com. The website told me my neighborhood’s risk (I live by the river in New York City, so mine is “moderate”) and the number of properties in the area that have a “greater than ... 26% chance of being severely affected by flooding over the next 30 years” (for my neighborhood, 16%!). The website will even estimate the “max depth of flooding” of a specific home or building for this year and in the next 30 years.
If you are in a moderate- to high-risk area on either map, you should take steps to prepare for a flash flood. Even if you score lower, you might want to consider preparing your house because minimal risk doesn’t denote zero risk.
Either way, you should read the below section about “what to do if you’re in a car during a flash flood,” since such a scenario can happen to anyone.
You don’t have to wait for a flash flood warning to begin to prepare for the worst. But if you’re in a situation where you can anticipate flooding — like much of Southern California, Nevada, and southwestern Arizona can right now — you should prepare ahead of time to run errands so you won’t need to leave the house during the storm. Keep in mind, the best way to stay safe during a flash flood is to not encounter the flood in the first place.
Make sure you have enough food for several days, as well as enough pet food for your animals. Also be sure to pick up any prescriptions or medications you might need. Anticipate any other reasons why you might need to leave your home and try to prevent or limit them ahead of time.
Confirm that the contents of your “go bag” or emergency evacuation kit are up-to-date. Here’s a generic checklist of what should go in it, as well as a version in Spanish.
Check the batteries in your flashlights and charge backup batteries for electronics like cell phones, in case the power goes out.
Clean up your yard if you have time; secure outdoor furniture so it doesn’t get blown around.
Prepare electricity-free entertainment options (now is the time to start brushing up on gin rummy).
Check on neighbors or relatives who might not be aware of the coming storm or have made preparations yet.
I can't believe I have to write this, but absolutely do not order Doordash or Uber Eats or food or products from any other courier service during flash flood conditions. Doing so puts other people in direct danger. Your ramen craving can be satisfied later.
Never wait out a storm in a basement or an apartment that is below ground level if you live in an area with moderate to high flood risk; move to a higher floor or find a different location to shelter in. Even if your home or basement has been okay in previous rainstorms, major flood events can overwhelm city sewer systems and back up water into areas it hasn’t reached before. As Reza Khanbilvardi, a professor of civil engineering and hydrology at City College of New York, told Gothamist after Hurricane Ida killed dozens in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut in 2021, “Apartments in cellars and basements can be death traps.” Paved urban areas can be especially dangerous in these conditions.
Follow potential evacuation alerts on your phone or on a radio (yes, they still exist!). Sign up for alerts now if you haven’t already.
Seal your important documents in a gallon-size freezer bag or other waterproof bag if you anticipate needing to evacuate, The New York Times suggests.
Unplug electronics and move any valuables to higher floors or locations if you have time to prepare for an evacuation.
If water enters your home, evacuate immediately with your go bag. Do not wait or try to retrieve any additional items. One of the most common ways people get hurt during flash floods is by waiting too long to evacuate. Use your best judgment — if it feels safer to climb to a higher floor than to try to drive to higher ground, do so, but avoid sheltering in an attic where FEMA warns you could get trapped. “Go on the roof only if necessary,” FEMA writes, and “signal for help.”
Do not attempt to walk or swim through floodwaters. Six inches of moving water is enough to knock an adult off their feet. Electrocution is also the second-biggest cause of death during a flood after drowning; never attempt to turn off a circuit breaker box or touch appliances if you are wet or standing in water.
If you come in contact with floodwaters, be sure to wash that area of your body very well when you reach safety.
If at all possible, avoid driving during flash flood conditions. Of course, this isn’t always possible — often people are out when they get caught in a storm. The National Weather Service reports that nearly half of flash-flood fatalities are vehicle-related and the “majority” of victims are male.
First and foremost, never, ever drive through floodwaters or around a roadblock or barrier. “Turn around, don’t drown” is a well-worn NWS slogan for a reason. Just 6 inches of flowing water can move a car and just 12 inches can carry it away — it doesn’t matter how good of a driver you are.
Additionally, even if the water looks shallow, it might not be. “Do not attempt to cross a flooded road even if the car in front of you made it through,” meteorologist Bonnie Schneider writes in her book Extreme Weather.
If your car stalls in water, first responders want you to remember“seatbelt, windows, out.” Do not waste valuable time trying to call 911 and wait for rescue. Unbuckle immediately so you are free to move. Then roll down the windows so that if the car’s electrical system shorts out, you still have a means of escape. (As a backup, buy a “Lifehammer” to punch your way through the window and out of your car. If you do not have a Lifehammer or something similar, the pointy metal ends of a headrest can work in a pinch, The New York Times reports.)
At this point, there is “no right answer,” Joseph Bushra, the medical director with Narberth Ambulance, told WHYY. You need to assess the situation. If it is safe to exit your car and escape to higher ground, do so, but plan your path before getting out of the car and remember, just 6 inches of water can knock an adult over.
If it is not safe to try to make it to higher ground, then you need to get on top of your car. Turn on your hazard lights to make the car visible to first responders. Evacuate children first, starting with the oldest child, and tell them to hang onto whatever they can, The New York Times advises. Once you have evacuated and are on top of your car, then call 911.
It’s not called a “worst-case scenario” for nothing. So what do you do if you end up in the water during a flash flood?
Your number one priority should be to try to get out of the water as quickly as you can. Climb a tree, a building, a car or truck, or head toward any available higher ground.
If you are forced to swim, move perpendicular to the current. Keep in mind this is a last possible resort: “People need to realize that most people who lose their footing in a flash flood don’t get out,” Julie Munger, the founder of Sierra Rescue International, told The New York Times.
If swimming to safety isn’t possible, the Riverside County Fire Department recommends orienting your body so you’re on your back, with your feet down-current, so you can use them to move debris out of the way. “Most victims in swift water die when they get pinned against obstacles, or get trapped in submerged debris and vegetation,” the department writes. Get out of the water or on top of something as quickly as possible — and hold on tight.
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Current conditions: States left flooded from recent severe storms are now facing freezing temperatures • Firefighters are battling blazes in Scotland due to unusually warm and dry weather • Hospitals in India are reporting a 25% rise in heat-related illnesses compared to last year. Yesterday the country’s northern state of Rajasthan reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, about 13 degrees higher than seasonal norms.
President Trump’s sweeping new tariffs came into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, rattling the world’s markets and raising the risk of a global trade war. The levies, which include a 104% tariff on Chinese imports, triggered a mass sell-off in U.S. Treasury bonds, hiking yields as investors worry about a potential recession and flock to alternative safe-haven investments. The price of oil fell for the fifth day in a row to its lowest since 2021, with Brent futures at about $61 per barrel, well below the $65 level that oil producers need in order to turn a profit drilling new wells nationwide. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained recently, the tariffs are an outright catastrophe for the oil industry because they threaten a global downturn that would hurt oil demand at a time when oil cartel OPEC+ is increasing its output. Trump’s slate of tariffs will impact the cost of just about everything, from gasoline to e-bikes to LNG to cars. China imposed retaliatory tariffs, increasing them from 34% to 84% in response to the U.S. escalation. Meanwhile, the European Union will vote today on whether to impose its own retaliatory fees. European shares plummeted, as did Asian and Australian stocks.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported today, a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told Pontecorvo. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The White House issued several executive orders on Tuesday aimed at boosting U.S. coal production and use, pointing to rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence. The series of orders direct federal agencies to:
Trump also said he plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to spur mining operations, “a move that could put the federal purse behind reviving the fading industry,” Reutersreported. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, and its use has been in decline since 2007. As of last year, wind and solar combined surpassed coal for U.S. electricity generation.
President Trump signed a separate executive order on Tuesday that targets climate laws at the state level and seeks to remove threats to U.S. “energy dominance,” including “illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources — particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” The order references “state overreach” and suggests that some state and local governments are overstepping their constitutional authority in regulating energy through interstate trade barriers or fines on energy producers. It calls out New York and Vermont for their climate change superfund laws that require fossil fuel companies to pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. And it mentions California’s carbon cap-and-trade system.
The executive order directs the U.S. attorney general to compile a list of all state and local laws “purporting to address ‘climate change,’” along with ESG, environmental justice, carbon taxes, and anything involving “carbon or ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions,” and put a stop to their enforcement. “The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “We are a nation of states — and laws — and we will not be deterred. We will keep advancing solutions to the climate crisis that safeguard Americans’ fundamental right to clean air and water, create good-paying jobs, grow the clean energy economy, and make our future healthier and safer.”
Wood Mackenzie issued its annual U.S. wind energy report this week. It finds that 2024 marked the worst year for new onshore wind capacity in the past decade, with just 3.9 gigawatts installed. Through 2029, the firm expects developers to install another 33 gigawatts of onshore capacity, 6.6 gigawatts of offshore capacity, and carry out 5.5 gigawatts of upgrades and refurbishings. The five-year outlook marks “a 40% decrease quarter-on-quarter from a previous total of 75.8 gigawatts.” The report warns of enduring “uncertainty” thanks to the Trump administration’s attacks on the wind industry. “Growth will happen, but it’s going to be slower,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek. “[Trump] has managed to get some projects canceled, and he’ll make things more of a slog over the next few years.”
President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of international talks to decarbonize the shipping industry and vowed to reciprocate against any fees on U.S. ships, Politicoreported. The International Maritime Organization's Maritime Environmental Protection Conference is unfolding this week in London, where negotiators are trying to agree on a policy to curb shipping pollution through carbon taxation. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Trump reportedly sent a letter to the conference saying “the U.S. rejects any and all efforts to impose economic measures against its ships based on GHG emissions or fuel choice. Should such a blatantly unfair measure go forward, our government will consider reciprocal measures so as to offset any fees charged to U.S. ships and compensate the American people for any other economic harm from any adopted GHG emissions measures.”
“What’s next, a mandate that Americans must commute by horse and buggy?”
–Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to Trump’s executive orders aimed at revitalizing the U.S. coal industry.
Rob and Jesse get into the nitty gritty on China’s energy policy with Joanna Lewis and John Paul Helveston.
China’s industrial policy for clean energy has turned the country into a powerhouse of solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturing.
But long before the country’s factories moved global markets — and invited Trump’s self-destructive tariffs — the country implemented energy and technology policy to level up its domestic industry. How did those policies work? Which tools worked best? And if the United States needs to rebuild in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, what should this country learn?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with two scholars who have been studying Chinese industrial policy since the Great Recession. Joanna Lewis is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She’s also the author of Green Innovation in China. John Paul Helveston is an assistant professor in engineering management and systems engineering at George Washington University. He studies consumer preferences and market demand for new technologies, as well as China’s longstanding gasoline car and EV industrial policy. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: One kind of classical hard problem about industrial policy is selecting the technology that is going to eventually be a winner. And there’s a few ways to get around this problem. One is to just make lots of bets.
One thing that’s been a little unclear to me about the set of technology bets that China has made is that it has seemed to pick a set of technologies that are now extremely competitive globally, and it did seem to pick up on those technologies before Western governments or firms really got to them. Is that entirely because China just made a bunch of technology bets and it happened that these are the ones that worked out? Is it because China could look ahead to the environmental needs of the world and the clean development needs of the world and say, well, there’s probably going to be a need for solar? There’s probably going to be a need for wind? There’s probably going to be a need for EVs? Or is it a third thing, which is that China’s domestic needs, its domestic energy security needs, just happen to align really well with the direction of development that the world is kind of interested in moving in anyway.
John Paul Helveston: All of the above. I don’t know — like, that’s the answer here. I’ll add one thing that’s a little bit nuanced: There’s been tremendous waste. I’ll just put that out there. There’s been all kinds of investments that did not pan out at all, like semiconductors for a long, long time. Just things that didn’t work.
I think where China has had a lot of success is in areas where … It’s like the inverse of what the United States innovation ecosystem does well. China’s ecosystem is really driven around production, and a lot of that is part of the way the government’s set up, that local provinces have a ton of power over how money gets spent, and often repurpose funds for export-oriented production. So that’s been a piece of the engine of China’s economic miracle, is mass producing everything.
But there’s a lot of knowledge that goes along with that. When you look at things like solar, that technology goes back many, many decades for, you know, satellites. But making it a mass produced product for energy applications requires production innovations. You need to get costs down. You need to figure out how to make the machine that makes the machine. And that is something that the Chinese ecosystem does very well.
So that’s one throughline across all of these things, is that the technology got to a certain level of maturity where production improvements and cost decreases were the bigger things that made them globally competitive. I don’t think anyone would be considering an EV if we were still looking at $1,000 a kilowatt hour — and we were there just 15 years ago. And so that’s the big thing. It’s just production. I don’t know if they’ve been exceptionally good at just picking winners, but they’re good at picking things that can be mass produced.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
That’s according to new research published today analyzing flows of minerals and metals vs. fossil fuels.
Among fossil fuel companies and clean energy developers, almost no one has been spared from the effects of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. But the good news is that in general, the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today.
That’s according to a timely study published in Nature Climate Change on Wednesday. The authors compared countries’ trade risks under a fossil fuel-based energy economy to a net-zero emissions economy, focusing on the electricity and transportation sectors. The question was whether relying on oil, gas, and coal for energy left countries more or less exposed than relying on the minerals and metals that go into clean energy technologies, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and uranium.
First the researchers identified which countries have known reserves of which resources as well as those countries’ established trading partners. Then they evaluated more than a thousand pathways for how the world could achieve net-zero emissions, each with different amounts or configurations of wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, and electric vehicles, and measured how exposed to trade risks each country would be under each scenario.
Ultimately, they found that most countries’ overall trade risks decreased under net-zero emissions scenarios relative to today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told me. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The authors’ metric for trade risk is a combination of how dependent a given country is on imports and how many trading partners it has for a given resource, i.e. how diverse its sourcing is. “If you have a large domestic supply of a resource, or you have a large trade network, and you can get that resource from lots of different trading partners, you're in a relatively better spot,” Davis said.
Of course, this is a weird time to conclude that clean energy is better equipped to withstand trade shocks. As my colleagues at Heatmap have reported, Trump’s tariffs are hurting the economics of batteries, renewables, and minerals production, whether domestic or not. The paper considers risks from “random and isolated trade shocks,” Davis told me, like losing access to Bolivian lithium due to military conflict or a natural disaster. Trump’s tariffs, by contrast, are impacting everything, everywhere, all at once.
Davis embarked on the study almost two years ago after working as a lead author of the mitigation section of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a report delivered to Congress every four years. A lot of the chapter focused on the economics of switching to solar and wind and trying to electrify as many end uses of energy as possible, but it also touched on considerations such as environmental justice, water, land, and trade. “There's this concern of having access to some of these more exotic materials, and whether that could be a vulnerability,” he told me. “So we said, okay, but we also know we're going to be trading a lot less fossil fuels, and that is probably going to be a huge benefit. So let's try to figure out what the net effect is.”
The study found that some more affluent countries, including the United States, could see their energy security decline in net-zero scenarios unless their trade networks expand. The U.S. owns 23% of the fossil reserves used for electricity generation, but only 4% of the critical materials needed for solar panels and wind turbines.
One conclusion for Davis was that the U.S. should be much more strategic about its trade partnerships with countries in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Companies are already starting to invest in developing mineral resources in those regions, but policymakers should make a concerted effort to develop those trade relationships, as well. The study also discusses how governments can reduce trade risks by investing in recycling infrastructure and in research to reduce the material intensity of clean energy technologies.
Davis also acknowledged that focusing on the raw materials alone oversimplifies the security question. It also matters where the minerals are processed, and today, a lot of that processing happens in China, even for minerals that don’t originate there. That means it will also be important to build up processing capacity elsewhere.
One caveat to the paper is that comparing the trade risks of fossil fuels and clean energy is sort of apples and oranges. A fossil fuel-based energy system requires the raw resource — fuel — to operate. But a clean energy system mostly requires the raw materials in the manufacturing and construction phase. Once you have solar panels and wind turbines, you don’t need continuous commodity inputs to get energy out of them. Ultimately, Davis said, the study’s conclusions about the comparative trade risks are probably conservative.
“Interrupting the flow of some of these transition materials could slow our progress in getting to the net zero future, but it would have much less of an impact on the actual cost of energy to Americans,” he said. “If we can successfully get a lot of these things built, then I think that's going to be a very secure situation.”