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Three important things, plus one very unimportant thing
Hello from Dubai, where the United Nations’ annual climate conference — that is, COP28 — officially began today.
This was an enormous day for climate and environmental news around the world. Not only did COP28 begin with a surprising (and important) accomplishment, but the Environmental Protection Agency proposed cracking down on lead pipes, one of the biggest remaining sources of water pollution in the United States. Tesla is also set to release — and announce a price for — its gargantuan Cybertruck today, one of the most contentious electric vehicles launches in history.
So let’s get down to it.
1. COP28 officially began. This afternoon, the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — or COP28 — officially began. It will run here at Expo City at the southern end of Dubai until December 12.
It was not, technically, the only climate conference that started in Dubai today: Technically, three conferences kicked off. That is because since the world adopted the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 — which is the big, arching UN treaty to do something about climate change— countries have stacked other agreements on top of it. So today was also the beginning of CMP18 (the 18th Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol) and CMA5 (the fifth Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement).
2. The conference launched the loss and damage fund. This was a welcome surprise. For years, countries have debated over “loss and damage” — essentially, what richer countries that are responsible for most global warming so far owe to poorer countries that are dealing with its consequences. Last year at the COP in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, countries agreed to establish a loss and damage fund for the first time. They’ve been hammering out the details over the past year — at the insistence of the U.S. and Europe, the fund will be hosted first by the World Bank — and today the fund was officially launched, or in UN parlance, operationalized.
Germany, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates all gave money to the fund. The U.S. donated the second smallest amount, after Japan.
3. The World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2023 will be the hottest year in human history. Since temperatures in July, August, and September destroyed all-time records, this sad milestone has been more or less expected. But today the World Meteorological Organization, a UN-associated weather body, confirmed that 2023 will be the hottest year ever measured.
Tomorrow, a subsection of COP — the World Climate Action Summit (!) — will begin. This is the part of COP where various world leaders come and speak to the negotiators.
This year sports a perhaps underwhelming set of world leaders. Neither President Joe Biden nor President Xi Jinping will be attending. The highest profile elected leaders will probably be President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom. King Charles III is also coming.
Following this event, but also overlapping with it, will be a period with lots of big announcements. Investors will announce new projects and investments. Companies will announce new voluntary climate-action coalitions. Countries and cities will announce new coalitions of voluntary action. It will be fairly hard to tell which of these actually matter in the moment, but some of them probably will.
Then there will probably be a news lull for a few days. Finally, at the end of the conference, negotiators will hash out the details of this year’s joint statement.
Even though COP officially starts today, it was largely uneventful here in Dubai. No world leaders spoke; the only big news was the loss and damage fund. Many news articles heralded that COP has begun in Dubai!, without saying what, exactly, that means or how people are spending their time.
Let me decipher it for you. While COP is an international media spectacle, it’s also an enormous in-person conference — and it is subject to some irreducible geometric challenges. This year, those challenges exist on a new scale: With more than 80,000 people attending the Dubai proceedings, this is by far the largest COP ever. (For comparison, about 50,000 people attended the Paris COP in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was adopted.)
Here is what I mean: Today, everyone had to pick up their conference badges and lanyards. That is what happened at COP today. A small suburb’s worth of people — including me —waited in a line to go through security and show a chipper UN employee our registration papers and get our photo taken. The line was about 1.2 kilometers long (literally— I corroborated that with my Apple Health data) but it was run efficiently and cheerfully.
According to a forensic reconstruction of my activities, compiled chiefly from an Uber receipt and the timestamp on some iPhone photos, I arrived at the conference center at 12:25pm and had a name badge almost exactly two hours later. I began keeping a journal when I realized that I was unlikely to get to the front of the line any time soon.
12:25 p.m. I arrive at Expo 2020, the nearest dropoff to the conference center. A man with a UN badge tells me to join a line without providing any details. I decide to follow the late Soviet rule that if you see a long line, you should just get in it.
12:35 p.m. A quasi-status system immediately makes itself clear. Some people have green lanyards, which entitle them to enter the Green Zone, the “trade show” part of the COP, which is governed by the U.A.E. Others have blue lanyards, which let them the Blue Zone, the official UN part of the conference.
1:14 p.m. We are handed aluminum Aquafina cans, a thoughtful gesture. Many of the people near me in line seem to be in their 50s and 60s, and the subtropical sun is hot and unrelenting. They must be starting to lose it out here.
1:18 p.m. Studying the can, I notice it is labeled “Still Drinking Water.” I find the “still” to be ontologically reassuring. It is good to know that this is still drinking water. Thank goodness I am not losing it like all these middle-aged people around me.
1:35 p.m. A 30-something man in line is wearing a t-shirt with the words “Dinosaur Facts” on it. Highlight of my COP so far.
1:46 p.m. I dimly realize that Sydney, Australia, (where it is 8:46pm) is closer to Dubai time than New York is.
1:51p.m. It strikes me that COP and Disney World are plagued by the same problem: very long lines. But if this were Disney World, we would have encountered several entertaining animatronics by now.
2:19 p.m. I finally reach through security and waiting in the final room: to receive my pass. As soon as I get through, I realize I have been silently standing in line next to a very famous environmental justice academic for an hour. With that opportunity already squandered, my COP begins.
Read Robinson Meyer’s last dispatch from COP28:
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Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.