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This is how the climate apocalypse arrives: In a haze of smoke, petulance, and tribalism.
Let’s start with the obvious: Social media can be a cesspool in the best of times. And for folks in New York City, this week is not the best of times — they’re choking on smoke from Canadian forest fires, struggling to breath, or even see the city’s major landmarks very well. It’s the worst wildfire pollution event in U.S. history, one that will almost certainly leave a trail of excess deaths in its wake.
Naturally, a few folks took to Twitter to mock the media coverage — and New Yorkers for whining.
\u201cNew York: \u201cOh my God guys, the sky is full of wildfire smoke! This is the end of the world!!\u201d\n\nWashington, Oregon, & California: *covered in soot, drinking whiskey and chain smoking* \u201cWildfire smoke? Really? You don\u2019t say?\u201d\u201d— Kevin Maloney (@Kevin Maloney) 1686151184
Some complained that the media is too East Coast-centric. (OK, there’s often some truth to that.) That nobody really pays attention when California or Colorado or other places west of the Mississippi face similar emergencies. (Not true.) That New York’s experience is no big deal. (Reallynot true.)
“I care very deeply about our collective lungs and, broadly, the state of the planet,” Politico’s Megan Messerly wrote on Twitter, “but there is not nearly as much interest in wildfires and their impact on air quality when they are hurting the West or anywhere else outside of the D.C. and New York media bubble.” The media, she suggested, “should care more about wildfires everywhere, all the time.”
“Zero shade for the New Yorkers dealing with this — it’s awful — but it's wild to see the way East Coast media is suddenly doing wall-to-wall coverage of something that's been reality on the West Coast for a decade,” added the Salem Report’s Rachel Alexander, who linked to a New York Times article that was first published last year before the East Coast was affected by wild fires.
“California lives in near-permanent fire-and-smoke crisis and it barely rates New York covered in haze from fires for two days and it consumes Twitter like the end times,” Australian writer Neil McMahon wrote. “Guess where all the journalists and big newsrooms are.”
These were among the more thoughtful comments. You won’t be surprised to learn there were a few snarky posts as well.
How to respond?
We can start by agreeing that climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the entire world, and there can never be enough coverage of its effects and all the ways — and places — human life is becoming more difficult as a result. Heck, that’s why the publication you’re reading exists.
But the Twitter commentary is also a troubling signal of what might lie ahead.
Get one great climate story in your inbox every day:
As climate change gathers momentum, we’re likely to see a growing number of petty and not-so-petty scraps over who has it worse, who needs more help. Why isn’t my problem getting more attention? Why are they getting all these resources? And the consequences will be more meaningful than the irritation sparked by a few social media throwdowns.
Climate change is a “catalyst for conflict,” the United Nations says in an explainer on the topic. The livable parts of the planet are being pushed away from the equator and toward the poles, which suggests there will be more people competing for shrinking shares of land, food and water in the spaces that remain. Already, the U.N. notes, “droughts in Africa and Latin America directly feed into political unrest and violence.”
The United States won’t be exempt — if Americans can’t live in Phoenix, they’ll have to move somewhere. Indeed, we’re seeing the effects already: Immigration is one of the most-divisive issues in American politics right now, and it’s driven to a large extent by climate refugees fleeing places in Central America that are too hot and too poor for many migrants to remain and thrive. That trend is only going to become more pronounced.
Some Americans want to welcome those refugees. Others want to build a wall. And some see the clash as an opportunity to build their own power.
Just think what our politics might look like 10 or 20 years from now.
We humans are excellent at drawing us-versus-them lines, and that’s never more true than when times get bad. Intramural squabbles are natural in times of emergency — but they can also be a diversion from facing and fixing the broader forces that got us to this point. Wall-to-wall New York Times coverage of the city’s smoke crisis isn’t reallythe big problem here.
Maybe a few Twitter comments about that crisis don’t actually mean all that much. Or maybe social media is the canary in the climate crisis coal mine — a harbinger of harder, meaner, more selfish times to come.
Read more about the wildfire smoke engulfing the East Coast:
The 5 Big Questions About the 2023 Wildfire Smoke Crisis
Wednesday Was the Worst Day for Wildfire Pollution in U.S. History
When There’s Smoke, Getting Indoors Isn’t Enough
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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.