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Let’s not work together to solve climate change
When the Paris Climate Accords were adopted in the waning days of the Obama administration, the predominant tone of coverage could best be described as unconvincingly hopeful. Informed observers understood that the agreement had significant limitations, among them the lack of any enforcement mechanism for its commitments. Nonetheless, it was widely trumpeted as the first serious effort by the international community to tackle climate change. Most important, it was the first truly global agreement, embraced by nearly every country on the planet, to deal with a truly planetary problem.
Then, within months of going into effect, the United States announced it would withdraw from the agreement. Given how difficult the original negotiation was, the rising tide of nationalism that the Trump administration exemplified seemed to presage doom for any follow-on accord, and perhaps for the Earth’s climate as well.
And yet, in the years before the U.S. officially rejoined the agreement under President Biden, the news on the climate front got dramatically better. Not that the problem of climate change was solved — it certainly wasn’t. We’re still overwhelmingly likely to face more warming than the 1.5 degrees Celsius that governments of the world agreed to in Paris, with many disastrous consequences. But the true worst-case scenarios are much less likely now, and the prospects for a successful transition to a net-zero world are far better than they were only a few short years ago. The hopefulness, in other words, is starting to get more convincing, even as the tide of nationalism continues to rise.
Is it possible that national competition could, ironically, be helping us solve a problem that seemed insoluble without intense international cooperation?
The most important reason why the worst-case climate scenarios have become less likely is the rapidly dropping cost of alternative energy, which have made a transition to a lower-emissions energy system much more achievable. But what has suddenly accelerated the transition timetable is not climate change but Russia’s war in Ukraine, which disrupted global energy markets and made abundantly clear the geopolitical risks of reliance on imported fossil fuels. While the immediate impact of the invasion was to boost the burning of high-carbon fuels like coal and wood, it has also sent renewables to the top of the European security agenda, prompted a serious reassessment of nuclear power, and bolstered the position of electricity producers like France — whose grid is 70% nuclear-powered — in intra-European energy negotiations.
That shift is likely to be enduring, and again, not only because of the risks of climate change. National security and economic prosperity simply have more political urgency than saving the planet. Thanks to Putin’s war, national and planetary concerns are now more aligned than opposed.
There are deeper ways in which a new atmosphere of national competition has bolstered the climate agenda, however. The increasingly nationalist turn of American trade and economic policy has been something of a double-edged sword for the energy transition. On the one hand, “buy American” rules have made it harder for the Biden administration to achieve its goals of building out wind and solar energy. But those goals are themselves part of an increasingly robust industrial policy driven by national economic security interests and backed by hundreds of billions in new spending.
Indeed, if the U.S. government hadn’t sought to build an American alternative-energy sector, national economic interests might continue to favor fossil fuels as a counterweight to relying on Chinese suppliers for solar panels, batteries, and other renewable parts. Meanwhile, if the United States does cut through the red tape that obstructs the building of many new energy projects (and new transmission lines), the primary reason won’t be to meet its goals under international climate accords, but to secure the country’s economic future.
If the world is to succeed in preventing catastrophic climate change, the same dynamic has to take root in China. As the energy transition has accelerated in Europe and America, China has emerged as by far the world’s biggest contributor to climate change, despite also being the world’s largest supplier of parts for solar and wind power generation. The primary reason is China’s addiction to coal, which is rapidly deepening in blatant contradiction of China’s own pledges. China’s frequently stated reason for this decision is national self-reliance and an emphasis on development at all costs.
In fact, though, new solar energy has gotten so cheap that it’s more economical than existing coal plants. China’s increasing investment in coal is well-understood to be a development dead-end, but it’s an important sop to provincial governments with high levels of employment in the coal industry. The risks of climate change are unlikely to spur Beijing to challenge these interests — but the prospect of being on the receiving end of climate-based tariffs might garner more attention, because they would pose a risk to other crucial industries like steel.
Even when it comes to the developing world, it may be possible to channel increasing competition between major powers in a climate-friendly direction. Countries like Tanzania and Ethiopia have an opportunity to leapfrog to a more sustainable energy system based on renewables and nuclear and an electrified transportation sector. As during the Cold War, both the United States and China have powerful incentives to subsidize that transition and thereby win influence in (and important contracts with) these developing countries.
China’s once-heralded “belt and road” initiative resulted in a great many boondoggles, but green energy (along with communications and surveillance technology) are among the areas where China’s efforts continue to expand. In a competitive international environment, the United States and Europe are sure to want to compete — and the climate could benefit.
None of this is to imply that international cooperation doesn’t have a vital role to play in combating climate change. At a minimum, an atmosphere of good communication and scientific cooperation is essential to understanding what is happening to the planet we all share. The adaptation agenda also absolutely requires assistance to flow from north to south. A major war, meanwhile, would certainly lead to a host of direct environmental harms, with the drive for victory taking precedence over all other considerations.
But international agreements can also be great forums for kicking the can down the road, while competition has a way of sharpening the mind and creating a sense of urgency. That urgency is something climate activists have always felt, but found difficult to inculcate in the populace at large. Every nation has an interest in preventing the worst consequences of climate change from coming to pass. If that interest can be aligned with other, better-recognized interests of national security and prosperity, the prospects for rapid progress on the climate front will probably look a lot rosier.
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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.