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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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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.