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Skiers, snowboarders, and cross-country athletes are in mourning for snow.
On January 15, as the first major winter storm of the season screeched across the U.S., Minneapolis’ Theodore Wirth Regional Park remained cold, hard, and — most stubbornly — brown. “We continue to be denied any measurable amount of snow,” read the park’s trail report for the day. “Frozen dandruff-covered dirt is our destiny for the time being.”
In a few weeks, over Presidents Day weekend, the park is scheduled to host the United States’ first cross country skiing World Cup in more than 20 years. For an event like that, “dandruff-covered dirt” simply will not cut it. “We’re really excited to have a great event there with tons of friends and family,” Gus Schumacher, a 2022 Winter Olympian in skiathlon, told me. While he still has hope, the Twin Cities’ snow deficit remains around 18 inches for the season. “We have to cross our fingers for some winter in the next month,” he said.
For the 30 million Americans who enjoy snow sports every year, this sort of finger-crossing has become as much of a pre-season ritual as tightening bindings and waxing skis. While scientists have long taken note of dwindling snowpack — the Fifth National Climate Assessment, released last year, specifically cited winter recreation as a pending cultural and economic victim of climate change — data had only shakily linked snow level to human-driven warming until recently. This month, a study published in Nature confirmed that it’s not all in our heads: Some parts of the U.S. are losing 10% to 20% of their snowpack per decade because of anthropogenic climate change.
Perhaps even more concerning, the study’s authors found that snow loss has a tipping point: Once the average winter temperature in a region warms beyond 17 degrees Fahrenheit (-8 degrees Celsius), snow loss rapidly accelerates, even with small temperature rises.
In spite of headlines about arctic blasts and photos of buried football fields, snow levels in many parts of the country have remained worryingly low at the midpoint of this year’s meteorological winter — and temperatures, on average, remain high. In early January, most ski areas in the U.S. were only operating half of their lifts, “which is unusual for this time of year,” Chance Keso, a senior news producer for On the Snow, which tracks ski conditions, told me. “Typically,” he explained, “we would see most resorts almost all completely open by this time of year.”
The recent storm systems have helped somewhat, Keso said — Alyeska, a ski area in Alaska, “passed the 400 inches mark a few weeks ago.” But even Buffalo, which received record snow in January, is tracking behind average when the whole season is considered. In California, where the ski industry is a $1.6 billion business, snowpack is only 57% of normal.
Likewise, meteorologist Sven Sundgaard wrote for Minneapolis’ Bring Me the News that this winter has been “pretty weak” in Minnesota. It has been cold, no doubt, and yet “nowhere in the state reached 25 [degrees Fahrenheit] below zero, which should EASILY happen in a January cold snap in northern Minnesota, even in our much warmer climate,” he said. (This week, temperatures are expected to be 10 to 15 degrees above normal across the state.) On the Snow reported that, as of Monday, “snowpack levels across Minnesota are currently 73% of normal.”
Counterintuitive as it may be, researchers expect climate change to bring more snow to certain places, as extremely cold parts of the world warm to more snow-friendly temperatures and increased precipitation from a warmer atmosphere results in more flurries. Parts of Siberia and the northern Great Plains appear to be experiencing a deepening snowpack of over 20% per decade, Justin Mankin and Alexander Gottlieb, the co-authors of the Nature paper, found in their research. But just because snow loss hasn’t hit an area yet doesn’t mean it won’t soon; “basins that are hovering right at the edge of that cliff, for whom major snow losses have not yet emerged, are about to see the snow losses emerge,” Mankin said.
Despite the worries about Minnesota’s upcoming World Cup, Susanna Sieff — the sustainability director for the Switzerland-based International Ski and Snowboard Federation (known by its French initials, FIS) — told me that event cancellations for the six Olympic snow sport disciplines this season have so far “been on par with previous seasons.” A spate of foiled World Cups in Zermatt, Italy, Beaver Creek, Colorado, and the French Alps in late 2023, she said, was “due to inclement weather and not lack of snowfall.”
Still, Sieff admitted that “for those that needed a wake-up call, the last few years have certainly provided it.” 2022 was especially bad for competitive ski and snowboarding — the organization canceled seven of its eight early-season World Cups for lack of snow. This month, FIS released an updated sustainability action plan that runs through the 2026 season and includes a particular focus on mitigation, environmental justice, and responsible stewardship. (Protect Our Winters, an environmental advocacy group that put me in touch with Schumacher, the ski athlete who serves as one of their ambassadors, has pressured FIS to be more transparent given the existential crisis facing competitive snow sports. My father is a longtime FIS event volunteer.)
Resort operators are increasingly using machine-made snow as a fall-back plan — as Schumacher told me, in cross-country, “we ski on warm, manmade snow far more than was the case 10 years ago.” It’s also common for XC events to move to alternate venues where snow can be stretched further. For example, Lillehammer, Norway has hosted a World Cup race in nine of the past 10 years. But “since I came on the World Cup in 2020, we haven’t been able to use the marquee trails built for the 1994 Olympics,” Schumacher said.
Even this “fake” snow is imperiled. “Snowmaking is not a climate solution,” the National Ski Areas Association, an industry group, has made clear. “It is an operational tool.”
It’s also expensive. Snowmaking can eat up to 15% of a ski area’s operating budget, draining the pockets of small and independent resorts. The consequence is yet another illustration of how climate change hits “the most vulnerable system and the most vulnerable people in that system,” Mankin said. “The ski industry is a really clear example of where you’re going to see consolidation onto better resourced, higher, more exclusive mountains that have the ability to produce human-made snow — and which are more difficult for the general population to access.”
Since the 1970s, ski areas in the U.S. have dwindled from roughly 1,000 locations to only about 470, according to SnowBrains, a ski and snowboard publication. It’s a trend climate change is helping to accelerate. That, of course, means fewer areas for athletes to compete and practice, as well as fewer local hills and trails for would-be athletes to fall in love with the sport.
For those in the snow sports world, this is nothing short of heartbreaking. The average American already doesn’t watch snow sports and “shouldn’t really care” whether cross-country or downhill skiing competitions survive, Schumacher told me. But the consequences are bigger than just competitive and recreational snow sports having shorter seasons of poorer quality or becoming more exclusive. A lack of snow is also about critical watersheds that are strained when snow doesn’t fall in the mountains, leaving ecosystems damaged and agriculture unirrigated. Heck, it’s about hardy, stoic Minnesotans losing what it means to be hardy, stoic Minnesotans. “What they should care about,” Schumacher said of his fellow Americans, “is the effects of climate change that come after the death of snow sport as we know it.”
Mankin told me something similar. “What happens in winter,” he warned, “doesn’t stay in winter.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.