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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 Bloomberg compared 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 is clearing 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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On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, 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: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Join clean energy leaders at RE+ 25, September 8–11 in Las Vegas. Explore opportunities to meet rising energy demand with the latest in solar, storage, EVs, and more at North America’s largest energy event. Save 20% with code HEATMAP20 at re-plus.com.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Since July 4, the federal government has escalated its assault on wind development to previously unimaginable heights.
The Trump administration is widening its efforts to restrict wind power, proposing new nationwide land use restrictions and laying what some say is the groundwork for targeting wind facilities under construction or even operation.
Since Trump re-entered the White House, his administration has halted wind energy leasing, stopped approving wind projects on federal land or in federal waters, and blocked wind developers from getting permits for interactions with protected birds, putting operators that harm a bald eagle or endangered hawk at risk of steep federal fines or jail time.
For the most part, however, projects either under construction or already operating have been spared. With a handful of exceptions — the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, the Atlantic Shores development off the coast of New Jersey and the Empire Wind project in the New York Bight — most projects with advanced timelines appeared to be safe.
But that was then. In the past week, a series of Trump administration actions has presented fresh threats to wind developers seeking everyday sign-offs for things that have never before presented a potential problem. Renewables developers and their supporters say the rush of actions is intended to further curtail investment in wind after Congress earlier this summer drastically curtailed tax breaks for wind and solar.
“I don’t think they even care if it’ll stand judicial review,” Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, told me. “It’s just going to chill anyone with limited capital from going to [an] agency.”
First up: The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.
When it announced the move, the DOT claimed it had “recently discovered” that the Biden administration had “overruled a safety recommendation for dozens of wind energy projects” related to radio frequencies near transportation corridors, suggesting the federal government would soon be stepping in to rectify the purported situation. To try and support this claim, the agency released a pair of Biden-era letters from a DOT spectrum policy office related to Prairie Heritage, a Pattern Energy wind project in Illinois, one recommending action due to radio issues and a subsequent analysis that no longer raised concerns.
Citing these, the DOT stated that political officials had overruled the concerns of safety experts and called on Congress to investigate. It also suggested that “33 projects have been uncovered where the original safety recommendation was rescinded.” DOT couldn’t be reached for comment in time for publication. Pattern Energy declined to comment.
Buried in this announcement was another reveal: DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.
At the same time, the Department of the Interior unveiled a twin set of secretarial orders that went beyond even its edict of just the week before, requiring that all permits for wind and solar go through high-level political screening.
First, also on Tuesday, the department released a mega-order claiming the Biden administration “chose to misapply” the law in approving offshore wind projects and calling on nearly every branch of the agency to review “any regulations, guidance, policies, and practices” related to a host of actions that occur before and after a project receives its final record of decision, including right-of-way authorizations, land use plan amendments and revisions, and environmental and wildlife permit and analyses. Among its many directives, the order instructed Interior staff to prepare a report on fully-approved offshore wind projects that may have impacts on “military readiness.” It also directed the agency’s top lawyer to review all “pending litigation” against a wind or solar project approval and identify cases where the agency could withdraw or rescind it.
Then came Friday. As I scooped for Heatmap, Interior will no longer permit a wind project on federal land if it would produce less energy per acre than a coal, gas, or nuclear facility at the same site. This happens to be a metric where wind typically performs worse than its more conventional counterparts; that being the case, this order could amount to a targeted and de facto ban on wind on federal property.
Taken in sum, it’s difficult not to read this series of orders as a message to the entire wind industry: Avoid the federal government at all costs, if you can help it.
What does the future of wind development look like in the U.S. if you have to work around the feds at every turn? “It’s a good question,” John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, told me this afternoon. The challenge is that “as we see more and more of these crop up, it becomes more and more difficult to move these projects forward — and, somewhat equally important, it becomes difficult to find the financing to develop these projects.”
“If the financing community is unwilling to take on that risk then the money dries up and these projects have a lower likelihood of happening,” Hensley said, adding: “We haven’t reached the threshold where all activity has ground to a stop, but it certainly has pushed companies to re-evaluate their portfolios and think about where they do have this regulatory risk, and it pushes the financing community to do the same. It’s just putting more barriers in place to move these projects forward.”
Anti-wind activists, meanwhile, see these orders as a map to the anti-renewables Holy Grail: forcibly decommissioning projects that are already in service.
On the same day as the mega-order, the coastal vacation town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, threatened legal action against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind project that experienced a construction catastrophe during the middle of last year’s high tourist season, sending part of a turbine blade and shards of fiberglass into the waters just offshore. The facility is still partially under construction, but is already sending electrons to the grid. Less than 24 hours later, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative legal group tied to other lawsuits against offshore wind projects, filed a petition to the Interior Department requesting that it reconsider prior permits for Vineyard Wind and halt operations.
David Stevenson, a former Trump adviser who now works with the offshore wind opponent Caesar Rodney Institute, told me he thinks the Interior order laid out a pathway to reconsider approvals. “Many of us who have been plaintiffs in various lawsuits have suggested to the Secretary of the Interior that there are flaws, and the flaws are spelled out in the lawsuits to the permit process.”
Nick Krakoff, a senior attorney with the pro-climate action Conservation Law Foundation, had an identical view to Stevenson’s. “I’m certainly not aware of this ever being done before,” he told me, noting that the Biden administration paused new oil and gas leases but didn’t do a “systematic review” of a sector to find “ways to potentially undo prior permitting decisions.”
Democrats in Congress have finally started speaking up about this. Last week four Democrats — led by Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum arguing that the secretarial orders would delay any decision related to renewable energy in general, “no matter how routine.” A Democratic staffer on the committee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the letter, told me privately that “fear is where this is headed.”
“They’re just building a record that will ultimately allow them to not approve future projects, and potentially deny projects that have already been approved,” the staffer said. ”They have all these new hoops they have to go through, and if they’re saying these things aren’t in the public interest, it’s not hard to see where they are going.”