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On public lands for solar, Harris’ Pennsylvania problem, and record-breaking humidity.
Current conditions:Conditions in the central Atlantic appear “conducive” to the possible formation of Tropical Storm Francine over Labor Day weekend • A cold front is relieving the more than 20 million Americans who were under a heat alert this week • An “exceptionally rare deluge” could bring rain to parts of the Sahara Desert for the first time on record in August.
On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management released its Final Utility-Scale Solar Energy Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement and Proposed Resource Management Plan Amendments — a mouthful more commonly known as the Western Solar Plan. The idea is to “drive responsible solar development to locations with fewer potential conflicts while helping the nation transition to a clean energy economy,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement.
To speed up the approval process of solar projects, the Western Solar Plan identifies 31 million acres of public lands across 11 western states as available for potential development, singling out regions that would bring solar “closer to transmission lines or to previously disturbed lands” and avoid “protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitat,” according to the BLM. Individual projects would still need to be authorized through site-specific environmental reviews and public comment periods.
CNN’s Dana Bash pressed Kamala Harris on her former opposition to fracking on Thursday night during the candidate’s first major sit-down with the press since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Asked if she stood by her 2019 statement that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris stressed, “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.” Harris said her “values have not changed” and that “we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate,” but that she has become convinced “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
Harris has had weak recent poll numbers in Pennsylvania, where the fracking industry employs about 24,000 people, and which could be a deciding factor in the November election. The Trump campaign has seized on her potential weakness there, telling Axios in the aftermath of the interview that Harris “has promised to ban fracking and kill good-paying energy jobs in Pennsylvania and across the heartland.”
Saturday, August 31, marks the end of meteorological summer (even if real ones know summer doesn’t end spiritually until next Tuesday and astronomically until the 22nd). And yes, this was another one for the books: Specifically, summer 2024 was the most humid in 85 years of record-keeping, and likely the most humid summer on Earth, as well, The Washington Post reports based on calculations by the climate scientist Brian Brettschneider.
“June 2024 and July 2024 both set records for highest dew point for their respective months,” Brettschneider told the Post. “I expect August 2024 to be a record too. Summer 2024 should break the record set in summer 2023.” Humidity notably makes extreme heat more dangerous, a process that is accelerating because warmer air caused by climate change can hold more moisture.
Just over half of Americans (52%) would support a bipartisan law that made it easier to build new clean energy projects and benefit some oil and gas development, a new poll by Heatmap has found. “That’s good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass under this presidency: a bipartisan proposal from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry,” writes Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer.
Though many people polled said they didn’t know enough about the bill to make a call one way or the other, those who did were largely in favor, including 58% of GOP voters, who were a little more amenable to the compromise than Democrats. “This all suggests that the permitting reform deal could remain largely depoliticized as Congress continues to debate it through the fall,” adds Meyer. “If you were to summarize respondents’ reactions to the survey, it might look like, ‘Sure, whatever, sounds good.’”
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At least seven teenage athletes have died in the U.S. in August during or immediately after football practice, with experts saying extreme heat may be to blame. Three of the deaths — 15-year-old Javion Taylor of central Virginia; 14-year-old Semaj Wilkins of Alabama; and 16-year-old Junior Leslie Noble of Maryland — were linked to heat, while others involved traumatic head injuries. But heat can also increase the risk of brain injuries, Kei Katawa, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Indiana University Bloomington, told NPR. “At that point, your brain [already has] asymptomatic heat exhaustion — pre-heat exhaustion. And then on top of that, you sustain head impact. It has a potential of amplifying head impact effect,” he said. Since 1960, at least 157 football players across all levels of the sport have died of heatstroke, according to The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research.
A “daring team of three Tesla enthusiasts” is set to embark this week on a six-day, 460-mile round trip journey from Dawson City, Yukon, to the Arctic Ocean … in a Cybertruck. The drive — which is intended to promote “the sustainable energy future through electric vehicle travel” — is off to a bit of a rough start, per Futurist, which reports the adventurers have been struggling to reach their starting point due to northwestern Canada’s limited charging infrastructure.
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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.