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On blackouts, Big Oil, and crowdsourcing for weather disasters
Current conditions: Heavy rain in southern Brazil killed at least 10 people • Flood watches are in effect across North Texas • It will be 75 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny today in California’s Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, which has just been expanded by 13,700 acres.
Democratic lawmakers testified at a congressional hearing yesterday that Big Oil companies were guilty of decades of “denial, disinformation, and doublespeak” on climate change. The hearing followed the release of damning internal documents suggesting executives from major fossil fuel producers sought to “deceive the public about the enormous climate crisis we are in and the role that Big Oil has played in bringing it about,” said Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight committee.
Heatmap’s Jillian Goodman was watching the hearing and found the most interesting part to be when Sharon Eubanks, who led the Department of Justice case against Big Tobacco, called for an end to the hand-wringing about what should be done, and suggested the DOJ swiftly launch an investigation into the petroleum industry, the outcome of which could force it to change the way it does business. And that, Eubanks said, is the point of all this — not extracting money, although that’s nice too, but rather to force companies to operate in a more open and honest fashion. “I myself am not a lawyer, of course, but it might be time to listen to Eubanks,” Goodman wrote. “She seems to know what she’s talking about.”
A new study published in PLOS Climate shows how climate change is driving power outages in New York. Between 2017 and 2020, about 40% of the power outages that plagued the state were the result of extreme weather events – mainly flooding and intense precipitation. Many of the areas most exposed to outages have overlapping vulnerabilities, like low-quality housing or lack of green space. “Eastern Queens, upper Manhattan and the Bronx of NYC, the Hudson Valley, and Adirondack regions were more burdened with severe weather-driven outages,” the study found. In Queens, neighborhoods such as Jamaica, Flushing, and Richmond Hills experienced more than 100 outages over three years. “We’re focusing on New York state, but power outages are a growing problem nationally,” Columbia University’s Nina Flores, lead author on the study, toldBloomberg. A recent report from the nonprofit research group Climate Central found that the number of weather-related power outages in the U.S. have doubled in the last 10 years or so compared to the decade prior.
A federal appeals court yesterday dealt what could be a fatal blow to a long-standing climate lawsuit brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. Juliana v. United States was originally filed in 2015 by plaintiffs aged between 8 and 18 who said the government’s support for fossil fuels had contributed to the climate crisis and violated their constitutional rights. The case was ordered dismissed in 2020 when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals basically said Congress, not judges, should decide the nation’s climate policies. A federal judge in Oregon allowed the plaintiffs to adjust their suit and said it could go to trial. But the Biden administration petitioned the court to dismiss the case, and so it has.
“The case had long been a potential bright spot for such youth-led climate litigation that has usually failed to take off,” Politicosaid. “This is a tragic and unjust ruling, but it is not over,” said Julia Olson, lead attorney at legal nonprofit Our Children’s Trust. “President Biden can still make this right by coming to the settlement table.”
This is one of many youth-led climate lawsuits filed by Our Children’s Trust. Last year a similar suit was successful in Montana. In June, a lawsuit brought by a group of Hawaiian young people against the state’s Department of Transportation will go to trial.
The growing effort to monitor and crack down on greenhouse gas emissions could be hindered by a new kind of flaring, The Guardianreported. Venting natural gas into the atmosphere produces a flame that can be detected by current satellite imaging technology. Some oil and gas facilities have started using “enclosed” flaring devices, which they claim can reduce noise and light disturbances for surrounding communities. But “it also means [flaring is] not visible from space by most of the methods used to track flare volumes,” said Eric Kort, a climate and space sciences professor at the University of Michigan.
GoFundMe’s “Weather Resilience Fund” launches this week, Axiosreported. The fund will raise money to help communities that are vulnerable to extreme weather build resilience and adapt, starting with California's Central Valley and Imperial Valley. The crowdsourcing site is seeding the fund with $1.5 million, and all donations are tax-deductible. The platform told Axios that natural disaster crowdfunding campaigns are becoming more common as climate change leads to more frequent extreme weather events. The site has seen a 90% increase in natural disaster fundraisers over the last five years.
More than 40 million students across Asia and North Africa have missed out on school in recent weeks due to extreme heat waves.
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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.