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On Trump’s VP pick, Alaskan oil, and the pull of the moon
Current conditions: A year’s worth of rain fell in one day in China’s Henan province • A tornado reportedly touched down outside Chicago’s O’Hare Airport • The heat index could reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit today in Washington, D.C.
Donald Trump has tapped Hillbilly Elegy author and Ohio junior senator J.D. Vance as his 2024 running mate. In recent years Vance has become a vocal climate change skeptic, casting doubt on the role of carbon emissions in warming the planet. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange and Matthew Zeitlin write, he is a champion of the fossil fuel industry, especially in his home state of Ohio, where his 2022 Senate campaign received generous backing from the oil and gas industry. He is also a prominent critic of the use of environmental, governance, and social standards in investing, otherwise known as ESG, which he has called “a racket to destroy what we still have so that a few people on Wall Street can make some money.”
Last year Vance introduced a bill that would repeal federal tax credits for EVs (Electreknoted that “Tesla’s stock erased 2% worth of gains following the VP pick announcement”), and another that would double maximum penalties for climate change protesters. He has called for greater exploitation of the Utica Shale, a geological formation that runs under Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York that contains an estimated 3 billion barrels of oil and natural gas. He has slammed President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act as “dumb” and said it only makes Americans poorer, but The New York Times notes that in the years since the IRA passed, Ohio alone has seen more than $12 billion in clean energy investment.
The Biden administration may move to protect more land in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve from oil development, E&E Newsreported. The 23-million-acre reserve holds millions of barrels of oil and is where the contentious Willow oil project, run by ConocoPhillips, will be located. Other oil and gas companies are also eyeing the region for exploration, but environmentalists say “the region’s outsized vastness and ecological value” should be protected. More than 40 Indigenous communities rely on the resources and wildlife in the reserve. Earlier this year the Biden administration restricted new oil and gas leasing on 13 million acres of the reserve, and will soon invite the public to weigh in on whether more land should be protected. The Trump administration opened most of the reserve to fossil fuel exploration efforts in 2020, but Biden reversed that move in 2022.
For billions of years, the gravitational pull of the moon has tugged at the Earth’s oceans and slowed the planet’s rotation. In this way, our nearest celestial neighbor has been the dominant influence on the length of our days. But new research out of Switzerland concludes that human-caused climate change will “surpass the moon’s influence” in this respect, as huge amounts of water flow from the melting polar glaciers into the oceans toward the equator. The researchers estimate that if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t significantly reduced, the melting ice could lengthen days by 2.62 milliseconds a century by 2100. The melting is also altering the Earth’s axis of rotation, which is changing the dynamics of the Earth’s core. “We humans have a greater impact on our planet than we realize, and this naturally places great responsibility on us for the future of our planet,” said Benedikt Soja, professor of space geodesy at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zurich, and an author on the new research.
A carbon sequestration startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has raised $37 million in a Series A funding round led by Equinor Ventures. The company, 44.01, promises to trap CO2 underground and turn it into rock. It has already completed pilot and demonstration projects, Bloombergreported, and will use the funding to commercialize its technology in Oman and the United Arab Emirates and expand internationally. 44.01 is backed in part by Altman’s investment fund Apollo Projects, and won an Earthshot Prize in 2022.
The results of a new study underscore the important role Indigenous groups can play in helping to protect vulnerable environments. The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, used satellite imagery to examine deforestation levels in the Brazilian Amazon and found that areas protected by Indigenous communities had deforestation levels that were 83% lower compared to unprotected regions. The Amazon stores roughly 150 billion metric tons of carbon, so preserving its rainforest is important to protecting the climate. This study’s results “demonstrate that returning lands to Indigenous communities can be extremely effective at reducing deforestation and boosting biodiversity to help address climate change,” the authors wrote.
Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered that wildfire smoke can have “unanticipated beneficial effects” on vulnerable conifer seedlings because it reduces the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground, thus protecting the young trees during extreme heat.
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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.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”