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He’s got the best climate record of any president in history. Few voters have any idea.
The presidential election next year is, alas, already kicking off. Several Republicans are trying, and thus far totally failing, to oust Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP nominee. President Biden is laying the groundwork for his campaign.
As far as subjects for campaign discussion, it’s a decent bet that climate change might be a major one for the first time. Scientists say it’s highly likely that 2023 will be measured as the hottest year ever recorded, and America is no exception. Practically the entire summer has seen a brutal heat wave across the South, and extreme weather has hammered many states. Most recently a sudden devastating firestorm in Hawaii, likely fueled by climate change, burned much of the city of Lahaina to ashes and killed a reported 53 people. And hurricane season has barely started.
But Biden is struggling to sell his climate record. A recent Washington Post poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapproved of his record on climate change. At the same time, large majorities both favored the core elements of his major climate achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, yet also had no idea what it was. This fits with a Heatmap poll conducted earlier this year.
Convincing Americans Biden has done something big about the biggest problem facing America and the world is vitally important. But it won’t be easy.
On first glance, this is rather strange. After all, one of the biggest political dramas of the 21st century centered around the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last year. Indeed, much of the 117th Congress was taken up with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia slowly and agonizingly tearing out each piece of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, and then seemingly killing the entire thing. Democratic officials, climate activists, and liberal voters alike fell into despair.
Then out of nowhere Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Manchin came back with a last-minute climate bill. And despite Manchin insisting on a few distasteful handouts to fossil fuel companies, overall the IRA was a huge success. It included for the first time a full 10 years of subsidies for renewable power construction and production, giving industry the confidence to invest. It made nonprofit utilities and government entities like the Tennessee Valley Authority eligible for subsidies as well, also for the first time, along with dozens of smaller initiatives.
That, together with the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill, plus interlocking IRA rules requiring investment and raw materials be sourced from the U.S. or certain friendly countries, has fueled a massive boom in domestic construction. Solar and wind farms, battery factories, and other installations are shooting up across the country. Much remains to be figured out, but overall the IRA is arguably the greatest accomplishment of a Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.
But voter ignorance probably shouldn’t be surprising. While political junkies were obsessed with the drama in Congress, such people make up a tiny minority of the population. For average people, this was just one more inscrutable political drama out of hundreds that seemed to have little bearing on their lives, if they noticed it at all.
That confusion is made worse by the deliberately misleading title of the bill. The IRA might actually have eroded inflation on the margin by encouraging more energy investment, but let’s be real: This is a climate bill. It was so named because inflation was the obsession of the moment, and pretending that it would cool prices helped get it over the finish line.
The problem is made worse still by the dire state of local journalism across the country. A core political element of the IRA structure is that it spreads green investment out all over the place, so as to build broad support. (Indeed, more investment is going into conservative states than the administration apparently expected.) Before Google and Facebook devoured the advertising industry that used to support journalism, there would have been detailed local coverage of each new project, but now only the largest cities have extensive local coverage, and even there publications have suffered.
This wouldn’t be a problem for Republicans, because they have a vast propaganda apparatus that blasts party messaging across the country through Fox News, local news channels owned by right-wing oligarchs, tabloids, and so on. But the Democratic Party establishment failed to build something comparable. (In fact, it did the opposite when it shut down ThinkProgress in 2019, apparently because CAP executives were irritated by the unionized lefty staff.)
As Alex Pareene writes, “The Democratic Party, by and large, relies on corporate mainstream media to do its messaging work and is then constantly furious when this strategy fails or backfires.” It’s a dubious strategy when it comes to, say, The New York Times, but it is completely impossible when it comes to local publications that don’t even exist anymore.
The 2022 midterm election cost almost $9 billion — or nearly half the value of the entire newspaper industry — split roughly equally between the parties. The 2020 election cost $14.4 billion, and in that one Democrats outspent Republicans by about half. Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath alone raised $88 million for that state’s 2020 U.S. Senate race, only to lose by almost 20 points.
If I were a wealthy liberal who donates ungodly sums to the Democrats, or someone running their PACs that raise billions in small-dollar donations, I would consider spending some of that money buying or setting up journalism publications in strategic locations— not to provide vulgar shrieking propaganda a la Fox News, but straightforward liberal-leaning coverage. Another option would be to conduct consistent messaging operations around the IRA in general, rather than a sudden blast of ads keyed to specific races when election day comes around.
It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t pay off immediately, but the strategic value would be immense, especially given the low marginal value of a dollar spent on traditional campaign efforts. Again, just think of the political power of Fox News. President Biden has a strong climate record, but to get any credit, voters must first hear about it.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.