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Experts explain what you can do about the smoke engulfing the East Coast and Midwest.
Canadian wildfire smoke has descended upon large swaths of the Midwest and Eastern United States this week, and as of publication tens of millions of Americans are living under air quality alerts warning them not to go outside. As my colleague Jeva Lange writes, the air in New York City today is reminiscent of a time before the Clean Air Act existed.
Wildfires, for the most part, have historically been the purview of the West; East Coasters, accustomed to hurricanes and blizzards, have mostly managed to avoid the fallout from forest fires. That’s not quite so true anymore, and this week’s smoke is a likely preview of how things will work in the future. So how should people react when smoke makes its way to their cities?
To find out, I called up two doctors from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health: Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics, population, and data science; and Kimberly Humphrey, an emergency physician and a fellow at the school’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. I spoke separately to Dominici and Humphrey; our conversations have been combined and edited for length and clarity.
Dominici: I think the way to think about it is not to be overly panicking, but maybe it’s a day to not spend hours outside exercising. For people that have compromised immune systems or existing respiratory or cardiovascular diseases, it would be good to limit outdoor exposure as much as possible. So don't panic but be cautious.
Humphrey: Smoke from wildfires is a complex mixture of things. The thing about wildfires is they can burn anything. If a house is burning, for example, you have really complex mixtures of whatever is in that house that’s going into the air.
The one that we really worry about is the fine particles, which are known as PM 2.5 (i.e. particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers). They’re very little particles that people breathe in which have really significant impacts on heart and lung function, particularly in people who have chronic health conditions. But the impacts are still significant for people who are healthy previously and have no underlying health problems. It can cause coughing, wheezing, difficulty breathing, eye irritation, and short-term issues with lung function, even in people who don’t have any previous problems with their lungs.
Dominici: It’s not like walking by, for example, a construction site. You can see that dust, and those are not small particles. Those are coarse particles that make you cough or sneeze or bring tears to your eyes. That’s actually good, because you’re basically filtering them out. But these small particles, you don’t feel them. They penetrate very deep into the lungs, and then they cause inflammation that makes our immune response less effective.
Dominici: We know that these exposures to high-level fine particulate matter have both an immediate effect and a very acute effect. So we see an increase in, for example, hospital admissions, which go up the same day and the day after. But there have also been lots of studies that have documented that this effect can last for a very long time. We see chronic effects including effects on cognitive function like an exacerbation of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
Humphrey: The first thing we would say is stay inside, shut your windows, stay away from the smoke, maybe buy an air purifier, exercise indoors.
But one of the tricky things with giving this kind of advice is that wildfire smoke affects people who are from disadvantaged socioeconomic communities more predominantly. And those are often the people that can't do the things that we would recommend to protect their health. For instance, many people have to go out to work or may be sleeping rough or have housing insecurity, and they don't have access to well-structured houses that protect them against wildfire smoke. So there's a real inequity there about the ability for people to follow the advice to keep themselves safe.
Dominici: You can totally take your dog for a walk or your kid to the playground, but if your child has asthma that’s something to watch out for. Maybe don’t spend hours outside, and make sure you have their asthma medications. People with pre-existing conditions should contact their primary-care physicians and discuss if they should potentially change their medication dosage to make sure their exposure to smoke doesn’t exacerbate whatever problem they have.
Humphrey: We’re seeing health impacts at levels below what the EPA recommends as safe levels of PM 2.5 exposure, so when our apps say “sensitive people” it’s probably actually a message for all of us. It’s important, I think, for people who call themselves healthy to understand that you can be a marathon runner and any exposure to wildfire smoke is going to have some kind of impact on you.
Humphrey: It’s very similar to COVID, so cloth masks and surgical masks offer some protection, they’re better than nothing, but they’re not as good as N95 masks. We’d recommend a really high-quality mask like an N95 because it does filter out those very, very tiny particles and offers really good protection.
Humphrey: I think we have the tools. What’s missing is education. So many people have access to air quality data, it’s on an app or on the internet, but they need more education about what to do with it. I’m very, very concerned with the socioeconomic inequities in particular. It’s a lot of the same issues as COVID: All of these issues are really, really hard to solve but are part of this whole piece.
Dominici: In a certain way, COVID has been a wake-up call. We are much more cautious about what’s in our air. I think it’s always important to keep in mind that when we’re talking about the health effects, we have to really understand that they’re a manifestation of the climate crisis. It’s not something we’re going to see in the future. It’s something that’s happening right now.
Read more about wildfire smoke:
The World's Wildfire Models Are Getting Torched
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On the new Transportation secretary, California’s fires, and energy storage
Current conditions: Storm Herminia moved over Europe, bringing severe flooding to Spain and France • The air quality is low in Mumbai, where a panel is considering banning vehicles powered by gas or diesel • It’s chilly but sunny in Washington, D.C., where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face the Senate Finance Committee in his confirmation hearings to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
A lot happened in Washington yesterday. Chaos erupted after the Office of Management and Budget dropped a two-page memo ordering a pause on federal grant programs that “advance[s] Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” According to Heatmap’s Jael Holzman, the freeze targets programs including vast swathes of the federal government most relevant to the energy sector, from major Energy Department cleantech research offices and labs to all implementations of energy tax credits, including those in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also includes essentially all work at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a Commerce Department subagency that produces climate science and weather forecasting. The order was set to take effect at 5 p.m. but a federal judge temporarily halted enforcement of it until a hearing on February 3.
Also yesterday, Sean Duffy was confirmed by the Senate as the new Transportation secretary. He wasted no time, signing an order to roll back former President Biden’s fuel economy standards aimed at reducing emissions. His memo said the standards “put coercive pressure on automakers to phase out production of various models of popular (internal combustion engine) vehicles.”
Human-caused climate change increased the likelihood of California’s wildfires by 35%, according to a rapid analysis from the World Weather Attribution. Warmer weather, drier conditions, and a longer fire season all supercharged the fires, the group said, making them not only more likely, but 6% more intense. It also found that the state’s dry season has gotten about 23 days longer, and the likelihood of no rainfall in the last three months of the year has doubled since pre-industrial years. “What makes [these fires] ever more dangerous, and what is something that the government of California alone can definitely not do anything about is human-induced climate change,” said WWA co-lead scientist Friederike Otto. “And drill, baby, drill will make this much, much worse.” The study hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.
General Motors reported solid Q4 earnings for 2024 yesterday that beat expectations, but it’s the year ahead that investors are worried about. The automaker’s shares fell after the earnings call because analysts don’t think the company is prepared for potential policy changes under President Trump. “In our view, the guidance for 2025 leaves no room for errors, and also does not include impact from regulatory changes in the U.S., especially on tariffs and BEV support,” analysts at Bernstein said in a note. GM CEO Mary Barra said the company’s EV business was moving toward profitability. The Chevy Equinox EV saw an 85% quarterly increase in sales, and the GMC Hummer EV had its “best sales quarter ever.” Tesla will report its Q4 financial results this evening.
In other EV news, Volkswagen has reportedly canceled the U.S. rollout of the ID.7 electric sedan. We might have seen this coming. The company delayed the original rollout, which was slated for last May. Now, a company spokesperson toldAutomotive News the “ongoing challenging EV climate” in the U.S. was the reason for the decision to pull the plug.
The large trade group that calls itself “the voice of the solar industry” is calling for a major ramping up of U.S. energy storage by 2030. The Solar Energy Industries Association wants to see 10 million storage installations deployed by 2030 so the country can reach a total of 700 gigawatt-hours of installed storage capacity across the grid. For context, current installed storage capacity is an estimated 83 GWh, and there are about 500,000 storage installations. Current projections suggest the U.S. will have 450 GWh of storage capacity by 2030. The group calls on states, regional transmission organizations, and the federal government to speed things up, and offers some suggestions for how they might do that:
SEIA
Raised levels of heavy metals have been detected in the soil surrounding the Moss Landing Power Plant in California’s Monterey County, where a massive battery fire burned for five days earlier this month. KQED reported that scientists at San José State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories found “a hundreds-fold rise” in toxic metals including nickel, manganese, and cobalt in the topsoil within a two mile radius of the plant. The findings contradict those of the Environmental Protection Agency, which said its air monitoring didn’t find any evidence of harmful toxins released from the fire. Residents near the plant have reported health problems like headaches, nosebleeds, and nausea in the weeks after the blaze. The metals detected are linked to long-term health problems including lung disease, cancer, and Parkinson’s disease.
The Doomsday Clock was updated yesterday. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board moved it from 90 seconds to midnight to 89 seconds to midnight, “the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its 78-year history.”
Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
Among the many, many, many actions President Donald Trump took in his first week to curtail clean energy and climate policy in the U.S., he issued an order freezing all wind farm approvals. It’s anyone’s guess what happens next. On the one hand, we know the president hates wind energy — as he reiterated during his first post-inauguration interview on Fox News last week: “We don’t want windmills in this country.” But the posture is also at odds with Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency and vision for “energy dominance.” Plus, it’s Trump. There’s a non-zero chance he’ll change his mind.
But let’s assume the wind leasing and permitting freeze stays in place for the next four years. Trump also plans to “conduct a comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending” existing leases, which could upheave projects already under construction or built. How do we make sense of what this all means for climate change?
First let’s look at what’s in the pipeline: If the pause on new leases and permits for offshore wind remains in place for the next four years, but all pre-approved projects get built, the U.S. could have about 13 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
Three operating offshore wind projects currently send 174 megawatts of power to the U.S. grid. There are four projects under construction up and down the Atlantic, which are expected to generate about 5,021 megawatts once completed. Seven additional projects have all of their federal permits, and if built, could generate 7,730 megawatts. That’s a bigger “if” for some than others — three of the projects have not yet found anyone to buy their power.
13 gigawatts falls far short of a goal that the Biden administration set at the beginning of his presidency to deploy 30 gigawatts by 2030. But it was already becoming clear that the U.S. was going to miss that target. Last summer, the American Clean Power Association, which represents the offshore wind industry, projected that we were on track for about 14 gigawatts by that year, with 30 gigawatts achievable by 2033 and 40 gigawatts by 2035.
Cutting emissions sooner is, of course, better than later, but this doesn’t necessarily veer us off course for the longer-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, either. One of the most comprehensive looks at how to decarbonize the grid is Princeton University’s Net Zero America report from 2021 (co-led by Jesse Jenkins, a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast). The study models the economic development of carbon-free energy systems under a number of different scenarios in which energy demand grows more or less, and where renewable development is more or less constrained. Across all of them, offshore wind makes up less than 1% of the power system by 2030, with between 5 and 10 gigawatts deployed — numbers that may still be achievable. It then grows to between 1% and 7% of the system in 2050, with anywhere from 30 to 460 gigawatts deployed.
While the national picture looks okay, it’s a much bigger deal regionally. For population centers on the East Coast, which don’t have enough available land to build the onshore wind or solar resources necessary to decarbonize, offshore wind is a linchpin. When modelers try to decarbonize states like New York or New Jersey without offshore wind, they end up with lots of transmission capacity to deliver clean power from wind and solar farms all the way in the Midwest — a prospect that’s no less, and potentially much more politically fraught than offshore wind development. Unless other clean energy sources like nuclear or geothermal power become cheap and abundant, there’s no clear alternative path for a place like New York City to get to zero emissions.
State goals also become nearly impossible if no additional projects are able to get through the permitting process until at least 2029. New York State, for example, plans to deploy 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035 so that it can achieve a carbon-free grid by 2040. It currently has just 1.8 gigawatts in the pipeline, with the potential for another 1.2 if Empire Wind 2 bids into the state’s next solicitation. Maryland’s goal is 8.5 gigawatts by 2031. It has just 1 gigawatt on the way. Massachusetts aims to procure 5.6 gigawatts by 2027. It has contracts for 3.4 gigawatts, but less than half are fully permitted.
Yet another way to think about the emissions consequences of this permitting pause is in terms of opportunity cost — the projects that will be delayed, assuming it lasts four years, and the lease areas that will go unsold.
The Biden administration held several offshore wind lease sales, and currently executed leases have the potential to generate more than 36 gigawatts, according to project development documents filed with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and federal estimates. But the projects planned for these lease areas are in various stages of development, and some of them, like plans for floating offshore turbines in California and Maine, have many technological hurdles to solve. A four-year pause will affect those far less than the 16 gigawatts’ worth of projects that have already started the federal permitting process.
The unsold areas represent a much bigger loss. The clean energy think tank Energy Innovation found that the U.S. has potential to build more than 1,000 gigawatts of “highly productive” offshore wind projects, meaning the wind is strong and constant enough to keep the turbines spinning more than half the time. We’ve leased less than 1% of that.
But by another measure, the opportunity cost for offshore wind might not be significant considering the trajectory we’ve been on. Every year the Rhodium Group, a clean energy research firm, models expected future technology deployment and its emissions implications based on existing policies and market conditions. The group’s 2024 report found that wind energy as a whole would reach 20% to 25% of U.S. electricity generation by 2035. Those estimates include just 9 gigawatts to 12 gigawatts of offshore wind, with the vast majority from onshore installations.
That brings us to the implications of pausing onshore wind development, which are arguably worse.
To date, the U.S. has installed about 152 gigawatts’ worth of land-based wind farms. Under the Net Zero America scenarios, that number should more than double by 2030. But deployment has slowed in recent years. The U.S. added just 6.4 gigawatts to the grid in 2023, down from 14.2 in 2020. While the 2024 totals haven’t been published, we were on track to add 7.1 gigawatts last year. We’d have to add more than three times that every year, starting this year, to meet the Net Zero America study’s 2030 projections.
Onshore wind deployment has been held back, in part, by transmission constraints. If the new administration clears hurdles to building more power lines, it could help speed things up. Also, since many onshore wind projects are built on private land, Trump’s order won’t have the same sweeping effect that it will offshore. But as my colleague Jael Holzman reported, the impact could still be far-reaching. More than half of all wind projects under development may be affected by the pause, as many are so tall that they need approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration. Energy-hungry projects like data centers may end up turning to natural gas, instead.
Trump’s executive order labels the pause of leasing and permitting as “temporary,” so all of this is still hypothetical. Perhaps a bigger existential threat to the industry would be if Congress decided to cut the tax credits for wind energy or wind them down earlier than currently planned to pay for the continuation of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, many of which expire this year. But since the tax credits are now pooled together with other energy sources that Republicans support, like nuclear and geothermal, under "technology neutral” credits, that would be a lot harder to do.
Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman talk Canadian tariffs with Rory Johnston.
On February 1 — that is, three days from now — President Donald Trump has promised to apply a tariff of 25% to all U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico, crude oil very much not excepted. Canada has been the largest source of American crude imports for more than 20 years. More than that, the U.S. oil industry has come to depend on Canada’s thick, sulfurous oil to blend with America’s light, sweet domestic product to suit its highly specialized refineries. If that heavy, gunky stuff suddenly becomes a lot more expensive, so will U.S. oil refining.
Rory Johnston is an oil markets analyst in Toronto. He writes the Commodity Context newsletter, a data-driven look at oil markets and commodity flows. He’s also a lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. He previously led commodities market research at Scotiabank. (And he’s Canadian.)
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Jillian attempt to untangle the pile of spaghetti that is the U.S.-Canadian oil trade. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Jillian Goodman, Heatmap’s deputy editor. Robinson Meyer is off this week.
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:
Jesse Jenkins: I want to come back to what would happen if Trump did impose these tariffs, but before we get there, I think it’d be helpful just to understand a little bit more about what life looks like on either side of the border.
You mentioned that Canada has become dependent on the U.S. market for export. My understanding is that the refineries in the Midwest — because they are now used to just using a single source of crude rather than, say, a coastal refinery that might have to be more flexible because they could get crude from Venezuela one day and from Saudi Arabia another day, or something with different qualities. My understanding is that the refineries in the Midwest have become pretty specialized and optimized around refining specifically Canadian crude. Is that correct? And if so, what, what are the features there? How challenging would it be for refiners to switch to other supply in the U.S. if all of a sudden Canadian crude becomes 25% more expensive?
Rory Johnston: Yeah, and you’re absolutely right. So — and I had mentioned earlier, that one aspect of this entrenched relationship is this physical infrastructure, and this other point is this business mode optimization around the specific blend of crude.
Now, for those that aren’t aware, crude oil is not one thing. It is an endless cornucopia soup of hydrocarbons that, generally, we can divide along a two-part axis. On the one hand you have gravity or density, or weight of the crude. And then the other side you have sulfur concentration. Sulfur concentration is always bad because, you know, sulfur’s bad — acid rain, we want to get rid of that. So that costs money to extract. And then the density or the gravity, we talk about this in API gravity. The U.S. crude, like shale crude — that’s often what we call light, tight oil — is often 40 degrees API gravity or higher. It’s very, very, very light. That’s lighter even than WTI, the benchmark itself, whereas Canadian Western Canada select, which is the kind of primary export blend of Canadian crude, is at 22 degrees gravity. Way, way, way, way heavier. One of the heaviest major marketed crudes in the world and the largest, heaviest, marketed grade in the world in terms of size of the particular flow.
So what happens is, well, when you look at the actual blend that is consumed by U.S. refineries, it’s not that they consume a heavy blend of crude. Their blended refinery slate is more of a medium grade. But they have so much light crude, particularly from areas like the North Dakota Bakken, that they need heavy crude to blend and get that kind of medium grade in the middle.
So — to your point, though — that needs to happen. And particularly if you want to, let’s say, keep consuming more U.S. domestic crude in the United States, then you need heavy crude to blend with it to meet those refinery specifications.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.