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A conversation with Danielle Arigoni, author of the new book Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation
When we talk about climate solutions, we often hear the word resilience. It’s the catch-all term for all the things we’re doing to prepare for the impacts of climate change — things like building seawalls and hardening homes and switching to renewable energy sources. But planning for the future is a tricky thing, and, argues Danielle Arigoni, author of the new bookClimate Resilience for an Aging Nation (Island Press), there’s one section of American society that is left out of resilience as we think of it today: older adults.
Arigoni spent much of her career working as an urban planner for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but it was only once she started working at the AARP that she came to see how aging populations were often left out of urban design considerations. Now the managing director for policy and solutions at National Housing Trust, Arigoni spends her time working on climate-friendly affordable housing solutions.
Resilience, she writes in her book, is not just a matter of hardening physical infrastructure to keep the natural world out, but should incorporate the social connections that shape our days. As the country’s population ages, designing climate solutions that take older adults into account will be crucial not only for saving the lives of older adults, but for creating a more just future for everyone.
I spoke with Arigoni about her research, and what a more aging-friendly form of resiliency looks like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How does climate change affect older populations in particular?
I mean, in a lot of ways. Certainly in disasters, we see that for a whole bunch of reasons, whether it’s mobility, or frailty, or cognitive decline, older adults are not able to respond in the same ways that younger people do. I think that’s partly a failure of emergency management to anticipate those conditions.
But even outside of disasters, we see that older adults oftentimes are living from a precarious financial standpoint. Fifteen percent of older adults live at or below the poverty line, which means they just do not have any available funds to decamp for a few days to safer ground or to weatherize their home or to stockpile resources.
And all of those things compile to a set of circumstances where older adults are either living in homes that they can’t afford to heat and cool in response to changing conditions, or they’re living in places where their homes are deteriorating because of climate impacts and they’re unable to fix them, which then sets off a kind of snowball effect of health problems as well. Something like 80% of all people over 65 have two or more chronic conditions, and when that gets layered on top of extreme heat and wildfire smoke and indoor mold and all of these other things, that multiplies the effects.
Does heat affect older adults in a different way from the larger population?
Heat is the deadliest extreme weather phenomenon in our country, and 80% of the casualties are older adults. And that is for a lot of reasons. To begin, older adults can’t process heat in the way that young bodies can; our ability to sweat changes as we age. So that’s part of it.
But heat also complicates and sits on top of underlying medical conditions and prescriptions. So there might be symptoms of heat illness that get masked because they resemble the effects of things like heart disease, or COPD, or respiratory challenges, or the effect of the medication, so it goes untreated.
And then when you layer on top of that the number of older adults who live alone, who may not even have someone to recognize that they’re starting to be disoriented and lose their balance, or that they are sitting in a house that’s 80 degrees when it really needs to be set at 72 because that person is too afraid of what their utility bills are going to cost that month.
All those factors compile and really just accelerate the risk for older adults in extreme heat. Extreme heat also isolates people further; they can’t go and knock on a neighbor’s door to ask for help if it’s 110 degrees out.
In your book you pointed out that there’s a link between where older adults live and climate risk.
Yeah, something like 50% of the older adults in the country live in about nine states. And those nine states are, for the most part, the states where climate risks are the greatest. So it’s places like California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona, the last of which just saw six straight weeks of 100 degree temperatures this summer. And yet Phoenix is one of the fastest growing areas for older adults. So you have to, at some point, stop and kind of scratch your head and wonder how we can better inform people so that they aren’t moving into areas where they are taking on greater risk.
Phoenix, to its credit, has already said they’re stopping new development because they’re running out of water. That was a recognition of the intersection between resources and habitability and development patterns. I don’t think we’ve necessarily done that, for the most part, in many communities. I think that’s a decision no local official wants to make. They don’t want to say they’re anti-growth.
There’s an interesting political conundrum here. Some of these places, like Florida and Texas and Louisiana, are places with legislatures that aren’t, shall we say, very climate-forward. And these older adults you’re concerned about might not care much for it either. So how do you navigate that?
It has to be education, right? There’s something in the lived experience of seeing that hurricane season is becoming longer and more frequent. That is testing even the presumptions of people who’ve been in Florida for a long time thinking they can live through it. When you’re experiencing more and more disasters to the point that it’s truly interfering with your well-being or maybe your financial viability —, like if all of your money is tied up in your home and your home is now in a floodplain, for example —, it prompts some very real and very timely conversations about what to do. So it’s just a matter of time before the real cost of being in some of these places becomes hard to ignore.
There’s a section in your book titled “Climate Planning and Disaster Resilience Tools Generally Fail The Age-Friendly Test.” What does resilience look like today, and how is it falling short for the elderly?
I think one arm of resiliency is the energy efficiency and carbon reduction set of activities, which is where we’re striving to reduce our carbon emissions. And we’re going to put in place a whole bunch of policies and programs to drive down the cost of that initiative. Another pillar is in hazard mitigation planning. FEMA unlocks a lot of hazard mitigation dollars for states and communities that have completed a plan before disaster strikes.
So those are kind of two disparate pillars: One is climate mitigation, and the other is risk mitigation. Neither of those think about age in a concerted way right now. In the requirements that FEMA just updated for state hazard mitigation plans that had been in place for like nine years, there’s one mention of considering demographic change when you’re writing your plan, but they don’t say you should project who your population is and what their needs are.
I think it’s a real missed opportunity, because those mitigation plans set the course for all the FEMA funds that follow. Oftentimes they become a vessel which other public resources are poured into as well. If you’re not identifying the needs of older adults right at the outset, you’re really missing that nuance in terms of what risk mitigation looks like for them.
Similarly, on the climate mitigation side, there’s a whole set of activities around, for example, making New York state a great place to age, but they don’t tie into the climate plan that New York state has put in place. Wouldn’t it make sense if we focus those investments in bringing utility costs down, in incorporating renewable energy and making energy efficiency investments, in those same places where we know older adults are already paying too much for their housing and are unable to afford to keep their utilities running or upgrade their homes? That would reduce their risk too.
I’m curious about the shortfalls of the solutions that we do build. I think a lot about how in places that are hurricane-prone, for example, you see a lot of houses on stilts. And I’m wondering if there’s just a simple mobility problem here.
I think that there’s sometimes a failure to acknowledge mobility challenges, certainly with elevating homes, but also just in terms of accessing transportation options, and relocation or evacuation options. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t accessible elevated homes, I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t seen any with my own two eyes. But I don’t necessarily know that that’s a really thoughtful solution. Even when we think about cooling centers that are being established for heat waves, it’s great that those exist, but I’m not sure that planners are always thinking about how people are getting to them. Those kinds of breakdowns that are part of the problem.
The harder conversation, frankly, is how do we relocate people out of harm’s way when elevating maybe is not going to be a very sustainable solution? Relocating is such a thorny topic, I think particularly so for older adults who may have lived their entire lives in one location. The notion of moving and being displaced because of climate change is a very, very difficult kind of identity crisis. It’s a pretty philosophical challenge, in addition to all the logistical challenges of moving your home, your community, and your livelihood.
What does climate resilience geared towards older populations look like? It sounds like you’re advocating for essentially an overhaul of a lot of things, because there are all these interconnected systems.
Yeah, it’s not a simple solution. When I think about what a climate-resilient community looks like, it certainly includes all the hard infrastructure that you would want — sea walls or levees, the sort of infrastructure that we think could mitigate risk. But it would also include a lot more thoughtfulness about how we’re designing our communities to live in every day. So thinking about different ways of designing housing, for example: how do we create communities where there’s more housing choice, so people can live in smaller units that will consume less energy and encourage more organic interaction than you see in suburbs? Hopefully they’ll be fueled by renewable energy as well so you’re eliminating that utility cost burden that is really problematic for low-income older adults.
There’s also making sure we have a robust transportation system so that you have not just a public transit system that works and gets people where they need to go every day of the year, but is also designed in ways that allow people to still use it when it’s hot. That means shade and seating, maybe even cooling factors at bus stops. Because otherwise, this transit system will not serve people if it is too hot outside. So you really have to think holistically about all of the elements that it takes to make a more climate resilient place.
I would also say communication and social connectedness is a huge part of it too. A good number of older adults do not have in-home internet or smartphones, so they don’t access the internet on a daily basis. So if you’re relying upon these systems to notify people or to get them to sign up for things that are going to reduce their risks, then you’re probably missing a whole bunch of people. So how do you cultivate a multi-pronged approach where you’re using all the levers you have available to you, including people like home health aides, or service organizations like Meals on Wheels, to get information to people in ways that they can access and utilize it?
Your point about home health aides reminds me that you drew a connection between climate and COVID-19 in your book. What lessons can we learn from the pandemic that can be applied to climate change?
Tragically, what we learned is that older adults are viewed as expendable. I think we somehow accepted the fact that a wildly disproportionate number of people who die from COVID-19 were older adults. It didn’t cause the kind of outrage that I think it should have. And I think some of that same thing is happening here with climate-fueled disasters.
COVID taught us the importance of getting information and support to people in their homes. I think there’s this presumption that when we plan for nursing homes we’ve checked the box, we’ve covered older adults’ needs. But that’s only true for a very small number of older adults — the vast majority live in their homes, often alone, particularly older women. And so how do you get services and information to folks in their home in ways that understand and appreciate their mobility challenges?
It’s interesting that so much of what you’re talking about is communication. I feel like when people hear the word resilience, they think of these big plans to transform the built environment.
I think communication is a huge part of why we’re here. And by that I mean the inability of these different siloed technical fields to communicate with one another. Emergency management and hazard mitigation people use a very different language than aging advocates do, who use a very different language than sustainability advocates do. They speak different languages, and they report in different structures, and they’re funded by different agencies. And never the twain shall meet. There are not a lot of opportunities where those things come together like they should.
My hope is that by communicating more effectively with aging advocates in terms that they understand, using programs that they are responsible for administering, they then see climate change as part of their mission. It needs to be the same way when talking to emergency managers about hazard mitigation plans: We can begin to unpack the unique needs of older adults that might be falling through the cracks in terms of their existing planning efforts. We really need to create this middle ground of understanding.
Do you have a favorite solution? Or maybe a favorite place that has implemented these solutions well?
The one that comes to mind — and I’m a little biased because I went to school there — is Portland, Oregon.
During COVID, they developed a framework to get supplies into the homes of an array of people in the city, to ensure they had what they needed, whether it’s food or diapers or adult incontinence supplies. These are things that were really important to get to people. Then they layered that with really effective community-based organizations that could reach committees that were hard to reach. So they had a Latino group reaching Spanish speakers, they had an Asian American group reaching Asian immigrants, and so on.
After the pandemic, Portland was able to use their relationships with those groups during two summers in which terrible heat waves hit the region. They quickly deployed those same organizations to get portable heat pumps into people’s homes, and they prioritized low-income older adults. They were able to do that because they’d already cultivated that tradition of serving people in that community through trusted organizations. And I can’t help but think that it saved lives.
What do you think the federal government should be doing differently around climate resiliency and aging? Are there particular policies you’d like to see that target aging populations?
I think it needs to happen at all levels, from the local to the regional and state levels. And that can be accelerated by work at the federal level. So for example they could require that hazard mitigation plans, and applications for HUD programs, or BRIC, which is a FEMA program, have to include an analysis of demographic change, and what that means for people over 65.
That’s a step forward, because then you’ve got state planners and local leaders thinking about what their aging population needs, because the share of older adults is only going to grow, it’s not going to diminish.
Similarly, the Older Americans Act is going to be reauthorized soon, and that funds all kinds of agency work that supports home and community-based services so that people can age in place. There’s a real need there to acknowledge the fact that climate change is going to interfere with some people’s ability to do that. And that might mean that they need more utility assistance, because now they have to run the air conditioner longer or put the heater on more frequently. Or it might mean that they need different kinds of supports, like making sure these folks can evacuate during a flood.
Is there something you found in your research that people seem to constantly get wrong?
There’s a general impression that older adults are living their best lives, they’ve got their retirement savings and are going on cruises and playing golf. But it’s just not the case for so many older adults. Something like half of all people who are unhoused right now are single people over 50. There’s a whole set of upstream financial challenges many older adults face, including paying way too much of their income for housing because rents have skyrocketed and they often have fixed incomes. Not to mention all the other expenses that go along with getting older, such as prescriptions. So climate Is a risk magnifier financially as well.
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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.