You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Despite what some climate change apologists might have you think.
Does everything actually suck right now? Or is it just the end of January?
It can be difficult to tell. We’re officially in the thick of what Americans consider to be the worst time of year, when complaining about the weather is an acceptable salutation and feeling “blah” is the basic condition of being alive. Even setting aside seasonal affective disorder — a condition linked to limited daylight, and thus not directly affected by climate change — studies have shown that people have a lower quality diet in the winter, and body weight usually reaches its peak this time of year. Physical activity, which is also important for mental health, dips as the weather gets worse, and research has even shown that people with Alzheimer’s disease experience more severe symptoms when the planet is tilted away from the sun.
Some have taken these winter blues as an opportunity to question the basic premise that climate change is bad. “The chief benefits of global warming” include “fewer winter deaths” and lower heating bills, Matt Ridley argued in The Spectator in 2013. Former President Donald Trump even has a quasi-annual tradition of tweeting something like “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” during cold snaps this time of year.
Winter is, in fact, warming faster than any other season in the United States, with some parts of the country on track to lose over a month of freezing days as soon as 2050. Even if you do believe — correctly — that climate change is a global catastrophe, unless you’re a skier or snowboarder, this might sound like a good thing. So, as sacrilegious as it feels to ask, could a warmer planet make us healthier in the wintertime?
When I asked Leslie Davenport, a climate psychology educator at the California Institute of Integral Studies, if she expected milder winters to impact people psychologically, she answered immediately. “Oh, one hundred percent!,” she told me. That doesn’t mean she thinks the impact will be positive. She said she has heard people “who are a little more on the climate denial end of things” make comments like “this is great, it used to be so cold and now I can go golfing,” she told me, but “I can’t honestly call that an upside.”
Far more often, Davenport said she hears from people experiencing a sense of “unsettling” as they notice winter isn’t as cold or as snowy as they remember it being. Some might even express a feeling of “solastalgia,” a neologism that describes the sense of displacement or nostalgia that arises when a place changes environmentally. “Whether it’s the loss of snow, or areas that are drier or hotter or wetter, it is like, ‘Well, this is not the town I grew up in or the place I chose to move to because it has changed so much,’” Davenport said.
While there might be an abstract appeal to the Los Angelesification of winter nationwide, it would be a mistake to count on climate change making the season “better.” Quite the opposite, actually — warmer winters could make winter much worse, especially for those living in midlatitude cities like New York, London, or Amsterdam. “I have observed, in my travels and my research and in talking to people, that it is often much easier and more pleasant to cope with winter weather that is slightly below freezing consistently than weather that is slightly above freezing consistently,” Kari Leibowitz, a health psychologist who is working on a book about winter mindsets, told me.
Cold temperatures can actually improve our lives in several ways, Leibowitz argued. For one thing, snowfall “opens up a whole bunch of winter opportunities” like sledding, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, and all those winter sports that get people out of the house. That helps combat some of the bluesiness that otherwise comes from moping around indoors when it’s too gray and rainy to do anything active. Frozen lakes offer opportunities for skating and hockey, plus “there’s also a lot of beauty and intrigue in ice — you know, icicles and frozen rainstorms,” Leibowitz went on.
Snow, meanwhile, “reflects the light, so it makes the darkness of winter feel much, much brighter,” Leibowitz said. “And most people think it’s really beautiful — it’s clean and fresh and it smells good.”
Of course, winter weather can be dangerous, too, but “places that are colder and have really frozen winters have good infrastructure for dealing with that, and houses tend to be better insulated and heated more efficiently,” Leibowitz said. Bad winter weather can also give us much-needed permission to rest.
While there are certain places further in the south, such as Atlanta, where winter might genuinely become more pleasant as the planet warms, “there are far more places where the end of winter is just going to mean places are dark and wet,” without the upsides that come with the snow and freezing temperatures, Leibowitz stressed.
Michael Varnum, the head of the Culture and Ecology Laboratory at Arizona State University and a specialist in seasonal psychology, did find one positive. “Nobody likes to feel down, or to look at their waistline and see it’s grown,” he told me. “So potentially, there could be some upsides there.”
Naturally, much of how you feel about winter will depend on the climate where you live. In general, though, “we are somewhat more insulated from the changes in temperature that come with the seasons than we were, say, 10,000 years ago or even a couple hundred years ago,” Varnum said. Feelings of climate anxiety and distress tend to be highest in Indigenous communities in or near the Arctic, where the cold weather is a part of cultural identity and inheritance. Likewise, Davenport told me, in “places where there tends to be a lot of snow” like Japan or Finland, “there’s talk about things like ‘winter grief,’” where a milder winter makes it so that “certain rituals or holidays that have been planned in the past can’t happen anymore or as consistently.”
Many Americans, too, lose a sense of themselves when winter gets milder. “It’s what a lot of us love about living here: our winters,” Erich Osterberg, a Dartmouth climate scientist, told The New Hampshire Bulletin in 2022. “It’s more than changes to the climate,” he added, “it’s changes to our livelihood and our culture.” I encountered similar comments from Minnesotans when I was looking into how an unseasonably dry winter is imperiling this year’s cross country ski season: “Spiritually, this is terrible,” Claire Wilson, the executive director of Minneapolis’ Loppet Foundation, recently told the Star Tribune.
Winter doesn’t have to be dreaded, Leibowitz said — much of one’s enjoyment of the season comes down to mindset. But it does seem to matter that winter is actually, well, wintery, too. Whether that’s a question of our evolutionary seasonal biology (winter appears to be an important trigger for the human reproductive cycle, for one thing), or a matter of our cultural practices, or something as simple as snow being more fun than rain, it’s hard to make the case that warming winters will leave us better off.
“If you want me to find the psychological upside of anything, I could maybe do it,” Leibowitz confessed. She added, though, that “a lot of people think, ‘I hate winter, I hate the cold, I would be happy if it was warmer all year round.’ But people underestimate how much there is to be lost in losing winter.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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.