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Disasters are already spurring Americans to renovate their homes.
Home remodeling is something of an American subculture. Shows like Property Brothers, Fixer Upper, and Flip or Flop have sold us on the glamour, the righteousness, even, of taking hammers and drills and panels of drywall to old houses and making them appealing to Brooklynites with babies, replete with stainless steel and minimalist tiling. All that work doesn’t come cheap: The remodeling industry, as of 2021, is a $500 billion juggernaut.
But remodeling is good for more than just aesthetics: It’s also, increasingly, becoming an essential tool for living with the effects of climate change.
According to a new study from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), Americans are spending more money on repairing houses that were damaged by disasters — between $20 and $25 billion in 2020 and 2021, up from an average of $17 billion in the 2010s and $12 billion in the 2000s. These huge sums alone indicate the increasing toll disasters are taking on Americans; both 2020 and 2021 saw at least 20 so-called “billion-dollar disasters,” or single disasters that caused damages north of a billion dollars each.
“Historically, people focused on improving their homes,” said Carlos Martín, project director of the Remodeling Futures program at JCHS. Take, for example, the stainless steel and crisp tiling: They’re primarily aesthetic improvements that might bring some side benefits, like energy-efficiency. “What we're seeing now is that it's almost an even balance [between upkeep and improvements],” Martín said. “More people are doing repairs just to keep up their homes.”
In part, this is just because American housing stock is the oldest it’s ever been: As of 2021, the median age of owner-occupied homes in the country is 41 years old, and they’re starting to show their age. As extreme weather becomes more common, however, those repairs will be even more pressing; a well-maintained home will be better insulated against the forces of nature, whether they be headline-grabbing hurricanes and wildfires or the more quotidian snow, hail, or wind that is responsible for nearly half of the money spent on repairs in 2020 and 2021.
The problem (surprise!) is money. Remodeling is expensive, and while policies like the Inflation Reduction Act will help homeowners pay for climate-mitigation upgrades like heat pumps that will reduce household emissions, there’s no policy analogue for disaster-mitigating upgrades. Homeowners usually only receive assistance after a disaster hits, in the form of insurance payouts.
“Unfortunately, our climate policy is disaster policy in this country,” Martín said.
American housing is already deeply inequitable, and the cost of preparing for — or repairing after — a disaster only deepens that inequity. Households of color make up only 27 percent of all the homeowners in the country, and they tend to be less able to pay for renovations: according to the report, white homeowners have nearly three times as much median wealth as Black homeowners and nearly double the wealth of Hispanic homeowners.
These disparities are dominoes: Lower-income homeowners tend to only be able to purchase homes that are already in a less-than-ideal state, which drives up the cost of repairs. This leaves them more vulnerable to damage from extreme weather, which can send repair costs even higher.
The result is that, more often than not, homeowners just wait and see if a disaster hits — and if it does, to rely on insurance payments to rebuild. This can sometimes mean their homes are repaired to a higher standard, using new materials that weren’t around before or, if they were entirely destroyed in a disaster, built to new codes that may include better hardening against storms.
This is, of course, not a solution at all, for the simple fact that it forces people to wait until their home is destroyed to have a chance at ... preventing their home from being destroyed. And, because insurance companies are insurance companies, most homeowners — particularly if they’re not rich and lawyered up — have to wait interminably long to have their claims paid out. Houstonians, for example, are stillrebuilding after the damage caused to their city by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Some privately-administered incentives for disaster preparedness do exist, usually in the form of insurance companies offering lowered premiums for making changes such as installing storm shutters or raising houses in hurricane-prone areas. But those upgrades still come with large upfront costs, and the programs aren’t available everywhere.
People also tend to underestimate their personal risk, which means they undervalue the benefits of mitigating that risk. They might be willing to invest in electrification and energy-efficiency upgrades, such as a heat pump, new refrigerator, or an electric vehicle, because those products have a dual use: They lower the climate impact of a household while also providing an increased level of comfort for its inhabitants. Disaster-proofing, however, only proves its worth when disasters hit. Flood insurance is a classic example: Insurance companies see an uptick in flood insurance sign-ups in the immediate aftermath of floods hitting a region, but policyholders tend to drop their coverage if there are no floods for a few years.
As extreme weather becomes more common, this might be less of an issue. “If these events are more frequent, people will realize there‘s a benefit,” Martín said. “Just because then they don’t have to wait two or three years, or for their insurance to kick in. They’ll see the immediate benefit.”
That makes creating policies to fund preventative remodeling — an IRA for disaster-proofing, essentially — even more pressing; as the most recent IPCC report made clear, the world needs to both acknowledge and prepare for the effects of climate change while still trying to reduce emissions.
Martín also thinks the country is badly in need of a national conversation about property insurance akin to the health care shifts we saw a little over a decade ago with the implementation of Obamacare. One way to start is by establishing a framework that would incentivize insurance companies to help defray the costs of protecting homes; doing so now would inevitably reduce the downstream costs for government, insurance companies, and homeowners alike.
It would also provide a way to preserve the deep-rooted relationships people have with the places they call home. While it’s easy to just tell people to move away from disaster-prone areas, that does little to acknowledge the realities of how people live — or the fact that climate change is going to affect every place on the planet in different ways, and some of the best adaptation measures will be found within the places we live and work.
“There are lots of other climate effects,” Martín said. “Flooding from sea level rise or hurricanes is only one effect. You can't build a seawall for heat.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.