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Election season is about to heat up — literally. The question is whether voters will care.
Of the 158 days left to go before the presidential election, 94 of them will fall during the summer. Such an alignment is not entirely a coincidence — the 29th U.S. Congress designated the first Tuesday in November for voting in order to avoid summer planting and the autumn harvest — but in 2024, the overlap between the hottest months of the year and the feverish finale of the presidential campaign is especially apropos.
Fire agencies have warned of an “above average” wildfire season in the Southwest, northern Great Lakes, northern Great Basin, and Hawaii. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued the most active hurricane outlook in its history. The western Great Plains and the intermountain West are in a worsening drought. Forecasters at AccuWeather predicted widespread heat waves over much of the eastern and southern United States in the coming months. Emergency managers are bracing for the “new normal” of deadly summer rainfall.
But will a wet, hot, climate change-driven summer be enough to tilt the election in someone’s favor?
We know that climate-related issues can swing elections — clean air and water, cheap energy, and creating new high-paying jobs all poll exceptionally well. Voter interest tends to drop off, however, when these things are framed as climate issues. And on the darker flip side, the realities of living in a hotter world, including “unchecked migration, economic stagnation, and the loss of homeland,” are “precisely the kind of developments that have historically fomented authoritarian sentiments,” Justin Worland argued in Time earlier this year. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly proved eager to go toe-to-toe with President Joe Biden on things like clean energy, electric vehicles, and climate science.
But how much extreme weather events themselves could swing the November election is far less clear. Research suggests that even living through a traumatic event like a wildfire or hurricane isn’t necessarily enough to convert you into a climate voter. “Experience matters, but I don’t know that it matters in the way that people wishcast it to,” Matto Mildenberger, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has studied the relationship between proximity to wildfires and pro-environmental voting, told me.
As Mildenberger explained, “In order to experience a wildfire or a heat wave or a flood and have that galvanize you into wanting to see more ambitious climate action, you’d have to experience and understand yourself as a victim of climate change.” For decades, fossil fuel interests have worked to undermine the scientific narrative and cast doubt on the links between extreme weather and climate, which is why even Republicans who experience disasters firsthand still “fall back onto stories about how there have always been wildfires, there have always been droughts.”
In other words, this is not a chicken-or-egg enigma. How voters already think about climate change is what shapes their ensuing narratives about disasters. Peter Howe, a professor of geography at Utah State University who studies public perceptions of climate change, conducted a survey of research on behavioral outcomes in relation to extreme weather that reinforced this idea. He found that “extreme weather may reinforce opinions among people who are already worried about climate change, yet be misattributed or misperceived by those who are unconcerned.”
There is evidence that linking climate change with extreme weather could actually backfireat the ballot box for green-minded candidates. A 2022 study led by Rebecca Perlman, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Republicans who saw references to climate change after a wildfire became less likely to support an energy tax that would “protect against future wildfires and other natural disasters.” Concerningly, this pattern even showed up (albeit with “weaker and generally nonsignificant effects”) among Democrats and Independents, leading Perlman and her coauthor to suggest that “on the margin, attributing weather-related natural disasters to climate change may be a losing political proposition with voters.”
Perlman confirmed that she would be “surprised” if extreme summer weather had “much impact on voting at the national level” when I reached her via email. But that “doesn’t mean it will be precisely zero,” she went on.
Mildenberger made a similar point. Though a hurricane or a wildfire is unlikely to peel Republican voters away from Trump (and might even push some deeper into his arms), if you take a more regional lens, then you could “easily expect extreme weather events to reshape how people are prioritizing their vote, or their likelihood of volunteering, or how they’re talking to their friends and family about the current administration.”
But while hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and heat waves can confirm Democratic priors and motivate liberals who wouldn’t otherwise have voted, Matthew Burgess, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, warned me against lumping all conservatives together as uniformly undisturbed. “Even deep red parts of Colorado get worried about drought and water scarcity,” he pointed out.
Burgess’ research has found that Independents and liberal-to-moderate Republicans worry about climate change only slightly less than moderate-to-conservative liberals do; it’s conservative Republicans who are set far apart from the rest of the electorate, sometimes skewing results. In other words, while many studies look at extreme weather events and climate change attribution and frame the results as Republicans versus Democrats, the actual split in how voters interpret extreme weather events might be better framed as between the most conservative Republicans and everyone else.
The bigger question, in Burgess’s mind, is whether extreme weather could ever rival issues like crime or inflation, which generally affect a greater portion of the electorate, for a place in voters’ hearts. “If you had a really big natural disaster that directly affects a broad swath of people, and whose link to climate change is really clear — that would be the type of thing I would expect to have an effect” on voters, Burgess said.
Admittedly, it’s scary to imagine what exactly that event might be. A massive wildfire season with smoke that blankets the entire country or breaks out in a place we don’t expect? Hurricanes that pummel both the East Coast and the West Coast? So much flooding that whirlpools appear in the streets of American cities? Or something we haven’t already experienced and maybe haven’t even anticipated?
If there were ever a summer to find out, it’d be this one. It’s another “hottest year ever” on Planet Earth, and even if Americans don’t ultimately vote like it, that truth will remain.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.