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Things could’ve been different in South Carolina.
As a climate-concerned citizen, one of the most discouraging things about Donald Trump’s all-but-inevitable confirmation as the 2024 Republican presidential nominee has been thinking about parallel universes.
I don’t just mean the ones where the conservative Supreme Court has a shocking change of heart and disqualifies him from the presidential ballot, or where Nikki Haley, against all odds, manages to win her home state primary on Saturday and carry the momentum forward to clinch the Republican nomination. I’m talking about an even greater fantasy: A world in which Trump doesn’t dominate the news cycle, in which South Carolina conservatives have a real debate about the energy transition, and in which the climate conversation hasn’t been set back years by culture war-mongering and MAGAism.
Laugh, sure, but squint and you can almost see it. South Carolina, where the 2024 campaign heads this weekend, is unique among early primary states for having a conservative base that is potentially more open to climate-related issues than people in Iowa or even Nevada. Though the state tracks closely with the opinions of the average American Republican on things like risk perception of global warming and policy support for green issues like regulating CO2 and renewable energy, South Carolina voters have also elected several conservative politicians unusual in their openness toward climate issues. Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s held his office since 2003, has been described as “too green for the GOP,” once even working with then-Senator John Kerry on a climate bill that would have capped greenhouse gas emissions. Even Haley, the state’s former governor, broke with most of the 2024 Republican primary field by saying she believes human activity is causing climate change and worsening extreme weather.
Graham and Haley’s environmental records are far, far from ideal. Still, their unlikely receptiveness to at least some climate science seems to suggest a constituency with a certain level of open-mindedness about green policies. The polls appear to back this up, too: In a summer 2023 study by Conservatives for Clean Energy-South Carolina, more than seven in 10 general election voters in the Palmetto State said they support the continued development of renewable clean energy; the same number said they believe in climate change.
Again, this is only natural when you look at what’s happening in the state. The Inflation Reduction Act is expected to bring an estimated $15 billion in investment in clean energy and storage to South Carolina by 2030, in the form of things like EV battery plants, 73 solar companies, and a lithium processing facility that claims it will produce enough material to support the manufacturing of an estimated 2.4 million EVs per year — that is, 200,000 more than were sold in the U.S. in all of 2023.
South Carolina also stands out in the southeast as being particularly forward-thinking about climate resilience; it’s hard to live in the state and not have extreme weather at the top of your mind. Some 210,000 South Carolinians live in flood-prone areas, the Southern Environmental Law Center reports, and homeowners insurance is increasingly difficult to come by or afford. The state also sits squarely in the path of intensifying Atlantic hurricanes. All of this might seem incongruous with local Republican voters’ middling levels of climate concern, but as writer and professor Susan Crawford told Heatmap last year, “At the state level, certainly, you’re better off not talking about the human causes of climate change” — even as you’re quietly addressing them.
The absence of climate from the primary conversation isn’t just because of the damage that being called an environmentalist does to a Republican’s reputation in the year 2024, though. An early-season primary debate even acknowledged that the climate issue has become so big that Republicans ought to be discussing it. But because Trump is the party’s frontrunner, any conversation about climate, clean-energy jobs, or resilience was over before it could start. While Trump has hardly been shy about attacking EVs and “the green new scam,” his rants are reductive, making climate a negative buzzword rather than a policy issue that can be debated. Haley has spent her time and energy focusing on Trump’s scandals and deflecting his attacks rather than talking about what South Carolinians have to lose if Trump guts the IRA as he intends.
That’s not to say Haley is some great defender of the climate agenda; she isn’t, and needless to say, it’s never good when Rex Tillerson is the one on the right side of an issue from you, as he was when he defended the Paris Agreement against the then-U.N. ambassador’s calls to extract the U.S. from it. But the shame is that Trump has snuffed out any sort of conservative debate about the climate in South Carolina before it could even begin.
Dwelling on the would’ve- and could’ve-beens, of course, is a fool’s errand of which I’m now wholly guilty. This is the reality: Trump is queued up for another win on Saturday, one that will effectively be the nail in the coffin of the Haley campaign even if she’s vowed not to drop out of the race. Voters won’t decide the next four years of the climate agenda in the U.S. tomorrow — that happens 255 days from now, in November. That means the timeline still isn’t fixed, but boy, it sure feels that way.
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On the storm’s destruction, wildlife populations, and shipping emissions
Current conditions: Large parts of Pennsylvania are under a frost advisory today and tomorrow • The remnants of Hurricane Kirk killed at least one person in France • A severe solar storm is expected to hit Earth today.
Hurricane Milton is headed out to the Atlantic after raking across Florida overnight, and as the sun comes up, residents are assessing the damage left in its wake. Milton made landfall near Sarasota as a Category 3 storm, bringing heavy rainfall, dangerous winds, and flooding. St. Petersburg reported 16 inches of rain, which meteorologists say is a 1-in-1,000-year event. The storm also triggered more than 130 tornado warnings, possibly a new record. The Tropicana Field Stadium in Tampa sustained significant damage. While deaths have been reported, it’s not yet clear how many. More than 3 million people are without power.
Before the storm hit, the Florida Department of Financial Services issued a rule that requires insurance claims adjusters to provide an explanation for any changes they make to a claimant’s loss estimate, The Washington Postreported, calling the move “a groundbreaking win for policyholders.”
The World Wide Fund for Nature published its 2024 Living Planet Report yesterday, which tracks nearly 5,500 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles all over the world. It found that wildlife populations plummeted by about 73% between 1970 and 2020, as illustrated in this rather bleak but very effective chart:
WWF
Latin America, which is home to some of the most biodiverse regions in the world, saw the worst losses, at 95%. Freshwater species experienced the greatest decline at 85%. There are some success stories, such as a 3% increase in the mountain gorilla population, and the incredible comeback of the European Bison, but generally the report is pretty heartbreaking. It underscores the interconnected nature of the climate crisis and nature destruction. “It really does indicate to us that the fabric of nature is unraveling,” said Rebecca Shaw, WWF’s chief scientist. The report comes days ahead of the start of the UN COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, where delegates will discuss concrete ways to stop biodiversity loss.
More than 100 CEOs from some of the world’s biggest corporations have published a letter urging governments and the private sector to boost efforts to keep Paris Agreement goals alive. The letter, signed by the heads of companies including Ikea, AstraZeneca, A.P. Moller-Maersk, Bain & Company, Iberdrola, Orsted, and Volvo Cars, calls for governments to:
The head of the International Maritime Organization this week called on the shipping industry to do more to cut emissions from the sector. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The IMO recently set a new industry-wide target of a 20% emissions reduction by 2030, and net-zero by 2050. But the IMO’s Arsenio Dominguez said there is more to be done to hit these goals. That includes “low hanging fruit” like reducing ship speed, charting routes according to the weather, and cleaning the hulls of ships to reduce friction, The Associated Pressreported. But in the long-term, he said, the industry will need to switch to cleaner fuels, which have yet to scale.
Long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy, closed a $405 million Series F funding round this week, bringing its total funding to more than $1.2 billion. Form uses a novel method for storing energy, combining iron and oxygen to make rust, a process that the company claims can be used to store and discharge up to 100 hours of battery power. As renewable energy production ramps up, new ways of storing variable energy from wind and solar is essential, and Form’s latest fundraising underscores this need. Canary Mediareported that Form’s technology isn’t proven at utility scale yet but the company is working on commercial deployments and broke ground on a project in August to provide energy to a utility in Minnesota.
Some dragonfly species have evolved to have darker wing spots as a breeding advantage. A new study finds these dragonflies have also evolved to be able to withstand higher temperatures.
Noah Leith
Let's dive deep into the campaign against the so-called “high-risk” cables.
One of the biggest threats to American offshore wind is a handful of homeowners on the south Jersey shoreline spouting unproven theories about magnetic fields.
Within a year of forming, the activist group “Stop The High-Risk Cables” has galvanized local politicians against the transmission infrastructure being planned for wind turbines off the coast of New Jersey known as the Larrabee Pre-built Infrastructure. The transmission route, which will run a few miles from the beaches of Sea Girt, New Jersey, to a substation nearby, is expected to be a crucial landing zone for power from major offshore wind projects in south Jersey waters, including Atlantic Shores, a joint venture between EDF Renewables and Shell that received final permits from federal regulators last week.
The only problem: while state regulators have been busy planning the route for the transmission and selecting who will build it, opponents have managed to win the war of public opinion. Activists have clearly turned their neighbors against the plan, pushing the mayors of the four boroughs targeted for Pre-Built Infrastructure to come out against the project. And this weekend Jack Ciattarelli – who narrowly lost the race for the governor’s mansion last year and is running again in 2025 – joined activists rallying against the project and is now campaigning on ending the project and cable landings like it.
Since federal regulators control the waters, what this means is, unless Democrats hit the electoral jackpot over the next year, offshore wind in New Jersey could be screwed – even if Kamala Harris wins the White House.
What makes this more dire is, this isn’t any ol’ transmission. For other offshore wind projects like Empire Wind, states have forced developers to design and construct their own transmission landings, creating a somewhat disorganized situation resembling electrical spaghetti. New Jersey’s offshore wind transmission meanwhile has been studied for years and is supposed to minimize development on the shoreline. This means the combat over this cabling could decide the fates of multiple offshore wind projects – and the first major proactive plan to reduce beach-level environmental impacts that stymie offshore wind in the first place.
So I decided to dive deep into the campaign against the so-called “high-risk” cables. After a series of interviews with organizers and a mayor critical of the state’s processes, I’ve been left feeling this relatively small transmission project represents a true test for democracy’s role in climate action. Could a small band of organized individuals be all it takes to hold back decarbonization at the pace scientists say is necessary, no matter how many climate laws are passed?
Sea Girt resident Kimberly Paterson remembers when she first heard about the cables. Someone had left a postcard on her door about the project. Before that, the professional executive leadership trainer had devoted her activism to preserving maritime forests on the beach. Once made aware of the transmission cables though, she and her small coterie of environmentally-conscious neighbors got active.
Paterson said they also started getting looped in with an existing network of activists concerned about offshore wind infrastructure. Those activists included familiar characters to the fight over New Jersey offshore wind development.
People like Mike Dean of Save the East Coast and Cindy Zipf of Clean Ocean Action, who’ve spread theories without evidence about a spate of whale deaths being tied to pile drivers for offshore wind. She says her group’s work is focused on the cables, not offshore wind, despite the close allyship with these other actors. As she simply put it, “There’s a circle of people that you meet.”
“We do like to work with others, and communicate with others, but we’re not officially tied to any of those other groups.”
The group also started canvassing, making signage for homeowners, and holding public events. As calls for action grew, so too did the political focus on the area, as state legislators and members of Congress took up the issue.
“We have created an absolute firestorm here,” Paterson told me. ‘It is unbelievable what we’ve accomplished.”
The group is focused on what they believe to be the health risks of simply being near high-voltage power lines.
To understand their fears, think of an electric current going through a wire. The more current goes through a wire, the higher likelihood of electrical waves emanating from the current’s pathway. That’s where “electro-magnetic fields” come into play. These fields are all around us and even Earth emits them. It’s the result of an excess of energy.
The World Health Organization classifies even low amounts of electromagnetic fields as a possible carcinogen, citing studies around exposure and childhood leukemia rates. But as many environmental and health experts note, studies to date have not really linked cancer occurrences to prolonged exposure to these fields. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management says the electro-magnetic fields created by cables for offshore wind “are well below the
recommended threshold values for human exposure.” So like whales and wind, it’s something to watch out for, but there’s no evidence to date of a danger here.
Nonetheless, seeking to calm any resident’s fears of magnetic fields, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities last week convened their first public hearing within the planned development area.
At the event, numerous officials came and spoke to the project’s safety, including the executive director of the Board. They even played a long explanatory video from a consultant they hired to review the electro-magnetic fields that would come from the cables. The full presentation laid out numerous examples of what they said were similar underground and underwater transmission lines with magnetic emissions that had no discernable impact on public health, including lines in the New Jersey-New York region.
One person moved by the presentation’s efforts on magnetic fields was Mike Mangan, mayor of Manasquan, one of the boroughs that may be selected to host some of the transmission infrastructure. Mangan told me he joined with other mayors to press the state for more transparency on the cables at the behest of concerned constituents. But he didn’t know what the state knew about the magnetic fields.
“I’ll just be candid — I was ignorant on a lot of that,” he acknowledged. Mangan said he still has “a few very serious concerns” but “I think they addressed some of the bigger concerns,” including the magnetic fields.
I’ll admit, I felt the same. So far in The Fight, we’ve chronicled examples where there are at least somewhat reasonable concerns about renewable energy development – stuff like batteries sited in wildfire risk areas and solar farms in imperiled tortoise habitat. But in this case, I watched the entire presentation online and left thinking this was essentially a non-issue.
Yet Paterson says she was unconvinced by the presentation. The projects they’re citing aren’t comparable, she claims. And then she has a laundry list of other complaints about the potential cables.
Hearing her talk about the transmission, you’d think she just doesn’t want this built under any circumstances. So I asked her if, given her allies, the goal is to stop offshore wind. An avid wildlife painter, she says no, and that she’s “very strongly in support of alternative energy.”
Well, okay. Maybe it’s political or partisan then? I asked her who she’s voting for in this year’s presidential election. “I don’t like anyone in the election to be quite honest,” she confessed, self-identifying simply as a “libertarian.” She then added: “I love the idea of Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.] revolutionizing our health-care system. That makes me very excited.”
Last week, Heatmap published a risk index of the top 10 renewable energy projects worth watching for potential cancellation or major blowback to the energy transition.
We listed Atlantic Shores in the top five, primarily citing the project’s current role as a focal point for opponents to offshore wind up and down the Atlantic coastline. Hours after the risk index was published, Atlantic Shores received its final approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Despite that win, we’re leaving the project on the index because the cables have to be built too – and that stands to be a more stressful fight.
It wasn’t supposed to be hard. In 2021, New Jersey passed a law granting the Board of Public Utilities the authority to supersede local governments opposing easements and other permits for offshore wind transmission cables. But that law’s permissibility under the state constitution hasn’t been tested yet, thanks to the cancellation of Orsted’s Ocean Wind project, which was set to be the likeliest battleground over cables before Atlantic Shores.
State officials are expected in the coming weeks to lay out who will actually build the transmission infrastructure and the route it’ll take from Sea Girt to the Larrabee substation. Between the day of that announcement and the completion of construction, a lot can go awry. Donald Trump could win the presidency and, as opponents of offshore wind expect, revisit permitting decisions for projects like Atlantic Shores. Or a Republican like Jack Ciattarelli could win the governor’s mansion, and that person could take any number of steps to undermine the cables like leaving the local control law undefended in state court if it’s challenged.
All this risk to the energy transition, started by a handful of actors with unfounded claims about magnetic fields.
I asked Atlantic Shores for comment on the opposition movement. They did not get back to me.
However, I did hear from the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, a consortium of developers trying to build offshore wind off the state coast. “While we are advocates of civil discourse and engagement from communities, we urge residents to be mindful of prevalent misinformation,” said Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the alliance, in a statement sent to me Tuesday evening.
“By following best practices in environmental science and engineering, such as proper siting, minimizing disruption during construction, and adherence to all state and federal regulations, this infrastructure can be safely and responsibly integrated into our communities and local and regional power grids to provide resilient and reliable power to New Jersey homes,” O’Connor continued.
I also heard from Anjuli Ramos-Busot, executive director of Sierra Club’s New Jersey chapter, who contacted me last night after Atlantic Shores and the offshore wind alliance brought my reporting to their attention.
“Let us be clear, the microwave in your kitchen emits more electromagnetic currents than cables buried deep underground covered by insulation and concrete,” Ramos-Busot said in a statement. “This technology is vetted, goes through rigorous permitting standards, and is safe and responsible for both the environment and local communities.”
Candidly, I’m holding my breath on whether Sierra Club’s words will win over these concerned shore residents.
With consequences that are extremely real.
Maybe Sharpiegate wasn’t so funny after all.
You’ll recall the micro-controversy from 2019, when then-President Donald Trump said that Hurricane Dorian was headed toward Alabama (which it wasn’t), and officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were pressured to back up Trump’s mistake. It culminated in Trump presenting a map in the Oval Office on which someone drew a bubble atop the projected path of the storm so it would stretch into Alabama, apparently with a Sharpie.
At the time it was troubling but comical, a representation of how the cult-like adoration Trump demanded would distort the work of government in idiotic ways. Five years later, with a storm surge of misinformation pouring over the country in response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, it looks more like a harbinger of things to come.
In any crisis, some measure of confusion is inevitable. Rumors spread and misunderstandings proliferate, fed by fear and desperation. The most extravagant varieties of misinformation are often either short-lived or confined to a minority of the population. That has not been true, however, when it comes to Helene, and it looks like Milton will repeat the same pattern. This time, the misinformation is more explicitly partisan than ever before, and it portends a disturbing future in which every natural disaster could become not just a challenging task of rescue and cleanup but a simultaneous fight against falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
It’s not that disasters have never been political; presidents are often judged by how they react (anyone over 40 knows what the phrase “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” refers to), with politicians discredited or elevated by how they performed and the opposition taking the opportunity to criticize the administration’s competence. But Trump has given that familiar criticism a particularly venomous cast, claiming not just that the disaster response is falling short but that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are intentionally ignoring the victims because of who they are.
Trump has focused in particular on three falsehoods: First, that the federal government is abandoning hurricane victims in areas where there are lots of Republican voters; second, that funds for recovery are unavailable because the Biden administration gave them to undocumented immigrants (“they stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”); and third, that the $750 distributed immediately to survivors to enable them to obtain food and other basics, known as Serious Needs Assistance, is all the aid anyone will get.
It was like a bat-signal: As soon as Trump set the terms, conservative media and influencers swung into action, repeating Trump’s bogus claims to their audiences. And then things took a strange turn.
To bring a conspiracy theory into the mainstream, you need individuals and outlets who serve as disinformation linkages, connecting the crazier people and ideas to those with legitimacy. In this case, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, played a key role, and she had a message: The weather is being manipulated by a shadowy conspiracy with powerful technologies at its disposal. “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X to her 3.7 million followers. “Anyone who says they don’t, or makes fun of this, is lying to you.”
As evidence, Greene and her allies offer the fact that many people have proposed geoengineering as a solution to a warming planet, which in their eyes means it must already be taking place, and that’s why these hurricanes came to the Southeast. And who is “They”? It might be the government, but to many, it’s obviously the Jews.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories around the hurricanes are swirling on the fetid sewer of right-wing hate and misinformation controlled by the world’s richest individual. As the Washington Postreported, “The attacks, which include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X.”
The tide of misinformation can be partly explained by the calendar. “What’s different about this natural disaster is the timing,” says Danielle Lee Tomson of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. “We’ve never had such an incredible, devastating natural disaster within weeks of a presidential election that has impacted two swing states,” North Carolina and Georgia. That gives purchase to the claims that there are conspiracies afoot to change the outcome of the election.
In 2024, it may have been inevitable that a disaster would be tied, however implausibly, to the “one narrative to rule them all this election cycle, which is that of non-citizen voting,” Tomson notes.
Disaster makes people search for answers that give order to chaos and suffering. Even answers that describe a world of sinister forces can be weirdly comforting, by assuring their adherents that they are among a select group who understand the reality most people miss. Amidst the chaos, you can grasp onto whatever bizarre belief you choose.
In the future, we might expect that any climate-linked disaster — hurricanes, floods, heat waves, droughts — will become fodder for this kind of misinformation, not just passed around from person to person but driven from the top of the political food chain.
In effect, this is the inverse of the kind of climate misinformation we’re more used to, which goes under the heading of “denial”: denying that temperatures are increasing, or that carbon pollution is a problem, or that human activity drives climate change. Since the occurrence of a hurricane or fire or other observably extreme event can’t be denied, this new kind of misinformation actually posits not just that the effects of climate change are real, but that they’re worse than you realize. It isn’t just that people have lost their lives or their homes due to a disaster, but that the disaster was engineered by sinister forces (including but not limited to the government) to accomplish a nefarious political goal.
So yesterday’s climate denier could become tomorrow’s climate obsessive, seeing in every disaster the hidden hand of the same global conspiracy that is creating all the world’s problems. “Climate change is the new covid,” said Congresswoman Greene; “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled.” It’s not fake, it’s a plot, one getting worse with each upward tick in global temperatures.
Of course, misinformation comes in a variety of forms — some downplayed Milton as a way of arguing that the elites are trying to frighten you — and even debunkings can be a path to elevated social media clout when so much focus is on these events.
It may be, as Tomson argues, that it takes something like an impending election to turn conspiracy theorizing around disasters up to 11. “We’ve never seen such an opportune moment to repackage disaster for political gain,” she told me. But the effects of climate change will only grow more intense and dramatic, and there will be political actors looking to turn them against their opponents — and frightened people ready to believe the worst.