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In succeeding as his father, I’ve failed him as a citizen.
My son Conor recently turned 14. When he was younger, I’d felt a low-lying dread about what it would mean to be the father of a teenager. I knew that he’d one day engage in the same rituals that I once had: the eye rolling, the whatever, Dads, the prizing of friends over family. And though all of this is now happening, I recognize it for what it is. None of it offends me, because at his core, he’s the same carefree kid he’s always been.
Of course, much is different, and in some ways worse, for him now than it was when I turned 14.
A wave of studies now show that teenagers are sadder and more anxious than they’ve ever been — even in times of war or Watergate or Limp Bizkit. New technology is the crisis’ obvious driver; as The New York Times recently wrote, the decline in teen mental health has coincided neatly with “the introduction of the iPhone (in 2007) and the rise of selfie culture (around 2012).”
But if smartphones and social media are a leading cause of adolescent stress, the threat of climate change would seem a logical runner-up. As recently noted in National Geographic, over half of respondents to a 2021 Lancet study of children and young adults believed that “humanity is doomed” — and a similar number “said concerns about the state of the planet were interfering with their sleep, their ability to study, to play, and to have fun.”
In Conor’s 14 years of living on America’s East Coast, he’s experienced both Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Ida’s floods — with each in their time described as a once-in-centuries event. And though he’s so far avoided the sadness that social media can bring, I’ve lately been wondering what he makes of our troubled Earth. Has this winter — in which January was nearly 10 degrees above normal — unnerved him as it has me? He’s a pleasantly average kid, a lover of baseball and Fortnite and hanging out with friends. I know what the Greta Thunbergs of the world make of climate change. But what about the kid who I eat dinner with every night? I was embarrassed not to know. So I asked him if we could talk about it, fearing that I’d uncover a well of anxiety.
We sat on a couch in our basement, where he normally plays video games — and where, during the Ida downpour in 2021, my wife and I had frantically plugged holes in the wall to keep water from pouring in. He seemed a little confused as to why I wanted to discuss climate change; this was not a normal part of our evening routine.
“So is climate change something that you ever think about?” I asked as we settled in. “Is it something you’re conscious of?”
“It’s not really something that I think about, like, constantly,” he said. I didn’t know if this meant that he thought about it occasionally — that he had to force it from his mind — so I asked him about the mild winter. When people blamed climate change for something currently happening, did it give him pause? After all, our hotter predicted future has undoubtedly arrived. “I don’t really know,” he said, “because I don’t really remember before it wasn’t like this.”
I found this upsetting — he, like any other child in 2023, can’t properly gauge his worry because the recent past is his only measuring stick. It’s normal for Australia to burn, for California to run dry. It’s normal to wear shorts in January. But he didn’t seem upset. So I asked him the question that I didn’t want to ask: Does he worry about what the future may bring?
“Not really,” he said, shrugging. “Because I feel like I don’t know that much about all of it.” Only a few minutes in, his tone had already drifted toward one of polite detachment. It was becoming clear that he had no particular interest in climate change. “If I asked you … do you ever think about the stock market? Would you give it the same amount of thought?” I asked, a little exasperated. “[Climate change] is just not a thing?” “Pretty much,” he said, almost apologetically.
Conor is intelligent; he gets good grades and is funny and thoughtful. He’s not callous or unfeeling, and, at least in an abstract way, I know that he cares about the Earth. Though he might have joined the 29% of respondents to the Lancet study who said they felt “indifferent” about climate change, I would never use that word to describe him. So as my questions failed to stir him, I realized that, in trying to do right by him as a father, I might be failing him as a citizen. Because climate change is very much “a thing”; it might be the only thing.
For all of his 14 years, I’ve tried to shield him, as much as possible, from terrifying things that are beyond his control: shootings, sickness, governmental collapse. I largely avoid troubling subjects whenever he’s around, and climate change is the most troubling subject of all. So when I do address it, I tend to sand off the edges: I acknowledge that, yes, January was warm because of climate change, but also because of La Niña, a Pacific weather system that both heats the air and allows me to change the subject. It seems natural to me that I haven’t wanted to drop the full weight of climate change upon my child’s mind. I don’t want him to feel that his future might not be as open as his present seems to be. But now that he’s coming of age, that protective approach seems less defensible.
Throughout his childhood, I thought it would be enough to do the right things without articulating their necessity. He’s a vegetarian because my wife and I are vegetarians; he recycles because we recycle. There are solar panels on our roof because, well, we had them put up there. He knows why these things are good for the planet, but he clearly doesn’t understand the urgency behind them. I don’t want him to be anxious, but I also don’t want him to lack awareness. It’s a delicate balance: to be environmentally conscious, yet also mentally strong. As someone who lays awake at night, worrying about our degraded earth, I’m not quite sure how the two things fit together.
“I want you to understand that everyone’s actions have a result, even if it’s a tiny thing like leaving your light on,” I said to Conor in the basement, referring to one of his particularly maddening habits. He nodded, possibly convinced, as I went on. “It’s going to be your world … and I want you to be equipped to go out into that world and make the right choices.” This was all true. And yet I now knew that I had to do more to “equip” him: to find a way to give him the facts of the problem without marring his happiness.
After a while, I understood that I’d squeezed as much on the topic from him as I was likely to get. He simply didn’t know enough about climate change to have a real dialogue, and for that the fault was mine. “I guess I’m a little surprised that it’s not something that you give any thought to,” I said, “when it’s 60 degrees in February.”
“It’s nice football weather,” he said, smiling the smile I was so determined to preserve. About this, he was right. It was nice football weather. But it was also a harbinger. As I’m learning with Conor — who’s so neatly poised between childhood and maturity — it’s possible for two things to be true at once.
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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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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.”
The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel grants awarded from the $7 billion Solar for All program, the final surviving grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, by the end of this week, The New York Times is reporting. Two sources also told the same to Heatmap.
Solar for All awarded funds to 60 nonprofits, tribes, state energy offices, and municipalities to deliver the benefits of solar energy — namely, utility bill savings — to low-income communities. Some of the programs are focused on rooftop solar, while others are building community solar, which enable residents that don’t own their homes to access cheaper power.
The EPA is drafting termination letters to all 60 grantees, the Times reported. An EPA spokesperson equivocated in response to emailed questions from Heatmap about the fate of the program. “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law,” the person said.
Although Solar for All was one of the programs affected by the Trump administration’s initial freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funding, EPA had resumed processing payments for recipients after a federal judge placed an injunction on the pause. But in mid-March, the EPA Office of the Inspector General announced its intent to audit Solar for All. The results of that audit have not yet been published.
The Solar for All grants are a subset of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, most of which had been designated to set up a series of green lending programs. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin accused the program of fraud, waste, and abuse — the so-called “gold bar” scandal — and attempted to claw back all $20 billion. Recipients of that funding are fighting the termination in an ongoing court case.
State attorneys generals are likely to challenge the Solar for All terminations in court, should they go through, a source familiar with the state programs told me.
All $7 billion under the program has been obligated to grantees, but the money is not yet fully out the door, as recipients must request reimbursements from the EPA as they spend down their grants. Very little has been spent so far, as many grantees opted to use the first year of the five-year program as a planning period.