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It’s flawed, but not worthless. Here’s how you should think about it.
Starting this month, the tens of millions of Americans who browse the real-estate listings website Zillow will encounter a new type of information.
In addition to disclosing a home’s square footage, school district, and walkability score, Zillow will begin to tell users about its climate risk — the chance that a major weather or climate event will strike in the next 30 years. It will focus on the risk from five types of dangers: floods, wildfires, high winds, heat, and air quality.
The data has the potential to transform how Americans think about buying a home, especially because climate change will likely worsen many of those dangers. About 70% of Americans look at Zillow at some point during the process of buying a home, according to the company.
“Climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, said in a statement. “Healthy markets are ones where buyers and sellers have access to all relevant data for their decisions.”
That’s true — if the information is accurate. But can homebuyers actually trust Zillow’s climate risk data? When climate experts have looked closely at the underlying data Zillow uses to assess climate risk, they have walked away unconvinced.
Zillow’s climate risk data comes from First Street Technology, a New York-based company that uses computer models to estimate the risk that weather and climate change pose to homes and buildings. It is far and away the most prominent company focused on modeling the physical risks of climate change. (Although it was initially established as a nonprofit foundation, First Street reorganized as a for-profit company and accepted $46 million in investment earlier this year.)
But few experts believe that tools like First Street’s are capable of actually modeling the dangers of climate change at a property-by-property level. A report from a team of White House scientific advisors concluded last year that these models are of “questionable quality,” and a Bloomberg investigation found that different climate risk models could return wildly different catastrophe estimates for the same property.
Courtesy of Zillow
Not all of First Street’s data is seen as equally suspect. Its estimates of heat and air pollution risk have generally attracted less criticism from experts. But its estimates of flooding and wildfire risk — which are the most catastrophic events for homeowners — are generally thought to be inadequate at best.
So while Zillow will soon tell you with seeming precision that a certain home has a 1.1% chance of facing a wildfire in the next 30 years, potential homebuyers should take that kind of estimate with “a lot of grains of salt,” Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, told me.
Here’s a short guide for how to think through Zillow’s estimates of climate risk.
Neither First Street nor Zillow immediately responded to requests for comment.
Zillow has said that, when the data is available, it will tell users whether a given home has flooded or burned in a wildfire recently. (It will also say whether a home is near a source of air pollution.)
Homebuyers should take that information seriously, Madison Condon, a Boston University School of Law professor who studies climate change and financial markets, told me.
“If the house flooded in the recent past, then that should be a major red flag to you,” she said. Houses that have flooded recently are very likely to flood again, she said. Only 10 states require a home seller to disclose a flood to a potential buyer.
First Street claims that its physics-based models can identify the risk that any individual property will flood. But the ability to determine whether a given house will flood depends on having an intricate knowledge of local infrastructure, including stormwater drains and what exists on other properties, and that data does not seem to exist in anyone’s model at the moment, Condon said.
When Bloombergcompared the output of three different flooding models, including First Street’s, they agreed on results for only 5% of properties.
If you’re worried about a home’s flood risk, then contact the local government and see if you can look at a flood map or even talk to a flood manager, Condon said. Many towns and cities keep flood maps in their records or on their website that are more granular than what First Street is capable of, she said.
“The local flood manager who has walked the property will almost always have a better grasp of flood risk than the big, top-down national model,” she said.
In some cases, Zillow will recommend that a home buyer purchase federal flood insurance. That’s generally not a bad idea, Condon said, even if Zillow reaches that conclusion using national model data that has errors or mistakes.
“It simply is true that way more people should be buying flood insurance than generally think they should,” she said. “So a general overcorrection on that would be good.”
If you’re looking at buying a home in a wildfire-prone area, especially in the American West, then you should generally assume that Zillow is underestimating its wildfire risk, Wara, the Stanford researcher, told me.
That’s because computer models that estimate wildfire risk are in a fairly early stage of development and improving rapidly. Even the best academic simulations lack the kind of granular, structure-level data that would allow them to predict a property’s forward-looking wildfire risk.
That is actually a bigger problem for homebuyers than for insurance companies, he said. A home insurance company gets to decide whether to insure a property every year. If it looks at new science and concludes that a given town or structure is too risky, then it can raise its premiums or even simply decline to cover a property at all. (State Farm stopped selling home insurance policies in California last year, partly because of wildfire risk.)
But when homeowners buy a house, their lives and their wealth get locked into that property for 30 years. “Maybe your kids are going to the school district,” he said. It’s much harder to sell a home when you can’t get it covered. “You have an illiquid asset, and it’s a lot harder to move.”
That means First Street’s wildfire risk data should be taken as “absolute minimum estimate,” Wara said. In a wildfire-prone area, “the real risk is most likely much higher” than its models say.
Over the past several years, runaway wildland fires have killed dozens of people or destroyed tens of thousands of homes in Lahaina, Hawaii; Paradise, California; and Marshall, Colorado.
But in those cases, once the fire began incinerating homes, it ceased to be a wildland fire and became a structure-to-structure fire. The fire began to leap from house to house like a book of matches, condemning entire neighborhoods to burn within minutes.
Modern computer models do an especially poor job of simulating that transition — the moment when a wildland fire becomes an urban conflagration, Wara said. Although it only happens in perhaps 0.5% of the most intense fires, those fires are responsible for destroying the most homes.
But “how that happens and how to prevent that is not well understood yet,” he said. “And if they’re not well understood yet from a scientific perspective, that means it’s not in the [First Street] model.”
Nor do the best university wildfire models have good data on every individual property’s structural-level details — such as what material its walls or roof are made of — that would make it susceptible to fire.
When assessing whether your home faces wildfire risk, its structure is very important. But “you have to know what your neighbor’s houses look like, too, within about a 250-yard radius. So that’s your whole neighborhood,” Wara said. “I don’t think anyone has that data.”
A similar principle goes for thinking about flood risk, Condon said. Your home might not flood, she said, but it also matters whether the roads to your house are still driveable or whether the power lines fail. “It’s not particularly useful to have a flood-resilient home if your whole neighborhood gets washed out,” she said.
Experts agree that the most important interventions to discourage wildfire — or, for that matter, floods — have to happen at the community level. Although few communities are doing prescribed burns or fuel reduction programs right now, some are, Wara said.
But because nobody is collecting data about those programs, national risk models like First Street’s would not factor those programs into an area’s wildfire risk, he said. (In the rare case that a government isclearing fuel or doing a prescribed burn around a town, wildfire risk there might actually be lower than Zillow says, Wara added.)
Going forward, figuring out a property’s climate risk — much like pushing for community-level resilience investment — shouldn’t be left up to individuals, Condon said.
The state of California is investing in a public wildfire catastrophe model so that it can figure out which homes and towns face the highest risk. She said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal entities that buy home mortgages, could invest in their own internal climate-risk assessments to build the public’s capacity to understand climate risk.
“I would advocate for this not to be an every-man-for-himself, every-consumer-has-to-make-a-decision situation,” Condon said.
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The Republican effort at permitting reform by way of the reconciliation process appears to have failed — or at least gotten washed out in the “Byrd Bath.”
Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee announced late Thursday night that the chamber’s parliamentarian had advised that several provisions of the new reconciliation bill text violated the “Byrd Rule” and thus were subject to a 60-vote threshold instead of simple majority rule. The parliamentarian has been going over the Senate bill for the past week and her rulings on more sections of the bill are expected this weekend.
The permitting reform plan drawn by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee essentially allowed project developers to prevent environmental reviews from being subject to litigation if they paid an upfront fee of 125% of the review’s expected cost. A similar provision was included in the House bill.
Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon White House, the ranking member on the Committee, described the permitting language as “turning the National Environmental Policy Act into a pay-to-play scheme” and “a scam ripe for Trump-style corruption.”
Clean energy groups have historically supported efforts to streamline and speed up permitting (and many environmental groups have opposed them), although typically bipartisan ones, like the legislation worked out by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the previous Congress, that never gained support in the House of Representatives. Environmental groups have long worried that permitting reform, even bipartisan bills, would benefit the fossil fuel industry by disabling checks against massive oil, coal, and gas projects, whereas the renewable energy industry often sees as an opportunity to more quickly and cheaply advance their own projects.
Payment of the fee would also impose a one year timeline for an environmental impact statement, the most extensive type of review, and a six month timeline for an environmental assessment. The timelines were not ruled out by the parliamentarian, according to the Senate Budget Democrats.
The payment aspect of the plan was crucial to give it a shot at surviving the Byrd Rule, because it meant that the provisions decreased the deficit and thus could be argued to be primarily budgetary in nature (the same way, say, a new tax is).
While the parliamentarian or the Budget Committee didn’t disclose the justification for ruling out the judicial review provisions, Bobby Kogan, a former Budget Committee staffer who works at the liberal Center for American Progress, told me that the provision could have tripped up multiple provisions of the Byrd Rule.
“My guess is that judicial review is presumably outside the jurisdiction of EPW and it’s also probably non-budgetary. If it was budgetary, it’s probably merely incidental — it’s fundamentally about permitting,” Kogan said. “Almost certainly, the judicial thing was killed for merely incidental,” Kogan told me.
A Senate Budget spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Republicans in the Senate could simply drop the provision or force the whole Senate to take a vote on it — but that vote would be subject to the 60-vote threshold to defeat a filibuster.
While the parliamentarian’s ruling probably means that this attempt at meaningful permitting reform is likely dead, the Trump administration and the Supreme Court have taken several whacks at the National Environmental Policy Act, with the Court recently ruling that agencies can limit themselves to the immediately environmental impact of government actions and instructing lower courts to give more deference to agencies’ reviews.
A new “foreign entities of concern” proposal might be just as unworkable as the House version.
In the House’s version of Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act Republicans proposed denying tax credits to clean energy companies whose supply chains contained any ties — big or small — to China. The rules were so administratively and logistically difficult, industry leaders said, that they were effectively the same as killing the tax credits altogether.
Now the Senate is out with a different proposal that, at least on its face, seems to be more flexible and easier to comply with. But upon deeper inspection, it may prove just as unworkable.
“It has the veneer of giving more specificity and clarity,” Kristina Costa, a Biden White House official who worked on Inflation Reduction Act implementation, told me. “But a lot of the fundamental issues that were present in the House bill remain.”
The provisions in question are known as the “foreign entities of concern” or FEOC rules. They penalize companies for having financial or material relationships with businesses that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and, most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
The Inflation Reduction Act imposed FEOC restrictions on just one clean energy tax credit — the $7,500 consumer credit for electric vehicles. Starting in 2024, if automakers wanted their cars to qualify, they could not use battery components that were manufactured or assembled by a FEOC. The rules ratcheted up over time, later disallowing critical minerals extracted or processed by a FEOC.
The idea, Costa told me, was to “target the most economically important components and materials for our energy security and economic security.” But now, the GOP is attempting to impose FEOC restrictions liberally to every tax credit and every component, in a world where China is the biggest lithium producer and dominates roughly 80% of the solar supply chain.
Not only would sourcing outside China be challenging, it would also be an administrative nightmare. The way the House’s reconciliation bill was written, a single bolt or screw sourced from a Chinese company, or even a business partially owned by Chinese citizens, could disqualify an entire project. “How in the world are you going to trace five layers down to a subcontractor who’s buying a bolt and a screw?” John Ketchum, the CEO of the energy company NextEra, said at a recent Politico summit. Ketchum deemed the rules “unworkable.”
The Senate proposal would similarly attach FEOC rules to every tax credit, but it has a slightly different approach. Rather than a straight ban on Chinese sourcing, the bill would phase-in supply chain restrictions, requiring project developers and manufacturers to use fewer and fewer Chinese-sourced inputs over time. For example, starting next year, in order for a solar farm to qualify for tax credits, 40% of the value of the materials used to develop the project could not be tied to a FEOC. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 60%. The bill includes a schedule of benchmarks for each tax credit.
“That might be strict, but it’s clearer and more specific, and it’s potentially doable,” Derrick Flakoll, the senior policy associate for North America at BloombergNEF, told me. “It’s not an all or nothing test.”
But how companies should calculate this percentage is not self-evident. The Senate bill instructs the Treasury department to issue guidance for how companies should weigh the various sub-components that make up a project. It references guidance issued by the Biden administration for the purposes of qualifying for a domestic content bonus credit, and says companies can use this for the FEOC rules until new guidance is issued.
Mike Hall, the CEO of a company called Anza that provides supply chain data and analytics to solar developers, told me he felt that the schedule was achievable for solar farm developers. But the Biden-era guidance only contains instructions for wind, solar, and batteries. It’s unclear what a company building a geothermal project or seeking to claim the manufacturing tax credit would need to do.
Costa was skeptical that the Senate bill was, in fact, clearer or more specific than the House version. “They’re not providing the level of precision in their definitions that it would take to be confident that the effect of what they’re doing here will not still require going upstream to every nut, bolt, screw, and wire in a project,” she said.
It’s also hard to tell whether certain parts of the text are intentional or a drafting error. There’s a section that Flakoll had interpreted as a grandfathering clause to allow companies to exempt certain components from the calculation if they had pre-existing procurement contracts for those materials. But Costa said that even though that seems to have been the intent, the way that it’s written does not actually achieve that goal.
In addition to rules on sourcing, the Senate bill would introduce strict ownership rules that could potentially disqualify projects that are already under construction or factories that are already producing eligible components. The text contains a long list defining various relationships with Chinese entities that would disqualify a company from tax credits. Perhaps the simplest one is if a Chinese entity owns just 25% of the company.
BloombergNEF analyzed the pipeline of solar and battery factories that are operational, under construction, or have been announced in the U.S. as of March, and quite a few have links to China. The research firm identified 22 firms “headquartered in China with Chinese parent companies or majority-Chinese shareholders” that are behind more than 100 existing or planned solar or battery factories in the U.S.
One example is AESC, a Japanese battery manufacturer that sold a controlling stake in the business to a Chinese company in 2018. AESC has two gigafactories under construction in Kentucky and South Carolina, both of which are currently paused, and a third operating in Tennessee. Another is Illuminate USA, a joint venture between U.S. renewables developer Invenergy and Chinese solar panel manufacturer LONGi; it began producing solar panels at a new factory in Ohio last year. The sources I reached out to would not comment on whether they thought that Ford, which has a licensing deal with Chinese battery maker CATL, would be affected. Ford did not respond to a request for comment.
Hall told me he would expect to see Chinese companies try to divest from these projects. But even then, if the business is still using Chinese intellectual property, it may not qualify. “It’s just a lot of hurdles for some of these factories that are already in flight to clear,” he said.
In general, the FEOC language in the Senate bill was “still not good,” he said, but “a big improvement from what was in the House language, which just seemed like an insurmountable challenge.”
Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, had a similar assessment. “Of course, the House bill isn’t the only benchmark,” he told me. “Current law is, in my view, the current benchmark, and this is going to have a pretty negative impact on our industry.”
A statement from the League of Conservation Voters’ Vice President of Federal Policy Matthew Davis was more grave, warning that the Trump administration could use the ambiguity in the bill to block projects and revoke credits. “The FEOC language remains a convoluted, barely workable maze that invites regulatory chaos, giving the Trump administration wide-open authority to worsen and weaponize the rules through agency guidance,” he wrote.
On storm damage, the Strait of Hormuz, and Volkswagen’s robotaxi
Current conditions: A dangerous heat dome is forming over central states today and will move progressively eastward over the next week • Wildfire warnings have been issued in London • Typhoon Wutip brought the worst flooding in a century to China’s southern province of Guangdong.
Hurricane Erick made landfall as a Category 3 storm on Mexico’s Pacific coast yesterday with maximum sustained winds around 125 mph. Damages are reported in Oaxaca and Guerrero. The storm is dissipating now, but it could drop up to 6 inches of rain in some parts of Mexico and trigger life-threatening flooding and mudslides, according to the National Hurricane Center. Erick is the earliest major hurricane to make landfall on Mexico's Pacific coast, and one of the fastest-intensifying storms on record: It strengthen from a tropical storm to a Category 4 storm in just 24 hours, a pattern of rapid intensification that is becoming more common as the Earth warms due to human-caused climate change. As meteorologist and hurricane expert Michael Lowry noted, Mexico’s Pacific coast was “previously unfamiliar with strong hurricanes” but has been battered by epic storms over the last two years. Acapulco is still recovering from Category 5 Hurricane Otis, which struck in late 2023.
AccuWeather
An oil tanker collision near the Strait of Hormuz is raising environmental and security concerns. The accident in the Gulf of Oman involved the Adalynn and Front Eagle tankers. It caused a “small oil spill,” according to the Emirati government, but Greenpeace analyzed satellite images and said the oil plume stretches some six square miles from the collision site. “This is just one of many dangerous incidents to take place in the past years,” said Greenpeace campaigner Farah Al Hattab. The Strait of Hormuz is a choke point for oil shipments, with about one-third of the volume of crude exported by sea moving through that route. Oil prices have been on a roller coaster ride since Israel launched airstrikes against Iran on June 13. Ships in the region have been reporting more GPS navigation interference in recent days. “If the conflict continues, we expect these interferences to continue as well,” Jean-Charles Gordon, senior director of ship tracking at research firm Kpler, toldThe New York Times.
North Carolina lawmakers finalized a bill repealing a mandate that directs electric regulators to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 70% by 2030. The mandate was part of a landmark 2021 law aimed at dramatically reducing the state’s power plant emissions. While at least 17 other states have similar laws in place, just two – North Carolina and Virginia – are in the Southeast. The new bill’s supporters say that the interim emissions goal would require energy providers to switch to more expensive power sources and that the costs would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher power bills.
Confusingly, regulators would still be asked to work toward carbon neutrality by 2050, even while the short-term emissions goal might be nixed. “Not having any target, even an aspirational target, could mean that we don’t stay on track to get to our 2050 goal,” Democratic Sen. Julie Mayfield said. The bill now goes to Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s desk. There’s a chance he might veto it, but “with over a dozen House and Senate Democrats voting for the final version, the chances that any Stein veto could be overridden are higher,” The Associated Pressreported.
The United Kingdom issued long-awaited environmental guidance that it will use to determine whether new oil and gas proposals should be approved. The guidance requires that developers estimate and include scope 3 emissions – or the downstream pollution from burning oil and gas – in their drilling applications. This “will ensure the full effects of fossil fuel extraction on the environment are recognized in consenting decisions,” the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said. The government will consider these emissions, as well as other factors like “the potential economic impact” of a project and a company’s efforts to remove carbon dioxide when granting or denying approval. The guidance will help determine whether major new drilling projects from oil giants Shell and Equinor are approved for the North Sea.
Volkswagen Group unveiled its first fully autonomous production vehicle, the ID. Buzz AD. The electric robotaxis will target corporate customers and mobility services. They “come packed with everything that’s needed to operate them,” explained Iulian Dnistran at InsideEVs. “What makes this solution interesting compared to other ride-hailing platforms is that it enables anybody to start an Uber or Waymo rival without investing hundreds of millions of dollars in research, development, and certification.” The shuttles are slated for launch across Europe and the U.S. next year. Tesla recently announced that its first Robotaxis would hit the streets in Austin, Texas, sometime this month.
Volkswagen
In a new peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, researchers conclude that offsetting the potential carbon emissions from reserves held by the world’s 200 largest fossil fuel companies would require planting new forests that are larger than the entire continent of North America.