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On floating cars, subway slip-‘n-slides, and a whirlpool in Brooklyn
It’s raining in New York City, which means two things: You’ve for some reason heard about it even if you live nowhere near the Tri-State area, and also nothing is working.
As a metropolis that runs on the fumes of pure defiance and chaos magic even during the best of times, New York was understandably struggling to stay afloat after a month’s worth of rain fell within a few hours on Friday morning. Subway staircases transformed into white-water obstacles more befitting of Action Park than America’s most populous city, while trash cans embarked from their curbside moorings, destined for unknown shores. Cars — half-submerged and looking curiously hippopotamine — nosed their way through the city’s new waterways. The Central Park sea lion exhibit overflowed with, well, sea lions. A manhole outside Joe’s Pizza in the East Village caught fire, the result of short-circuiting electrical cables. In Brooklyn, inexplicably, a whirlpool appeared.
Major flooding in Brooklyn today. Trains shut down and the only way out of the station is through this.— Seth Chinnis (@Seth Chinnis) 1695994430
The downpour of rain is turning NYC into a raging river. \ud83c\udf0a https://t.co/o8Ni7gjBGF— New York Post (@New York Post) 1696006803
With Friday already the eighth wettest day in Central Park’s 154 years of recorded history, preliminarily the wettest day ever at JFK Airport (with 7.88” inches since midnight), and inches more rain still to come, Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency and drew comparisons to Hurricane Ida, which killed 11 people in basement apartments in Queens in 2021. (At least six people had been rescued by the FDNY from basements by Friday afternoon, The Washington Post reported; so far, no deaths have been recorded). Mayor Eric Adams, who’d spent the evening before the storm celebrating his Sept. 1st birthday with a fundraiser, “defended his failure to address the public about the storm until almost noon today,” The New York Times reported.
Warning or no, the city that prides itself on not slowing down even to sleep squelched to a soggy standstill ahead of the evening commute. Trains were out of service, or running with severe limitations. Kids were marooned at school. Terminal A at LaGuardia Airport remained closed, with more than 3,000 flights delayed due to the storm.
And yet — undeterred by the reminder that we live in a city made up of islands waiting to be reclaimed by the sea or that all this is one more chilling sign that our warming atmosphere can hold more water — some plans, in that New Yorker way, stubbornly held. Around 2:30 p.m., the New York Film Festival cheerfully shared that it had released more tickets for its opening night film.
The show must go on! You just have to wade there.
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It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Departments of the Treasury and the Interior to review their treatment of wind and solar, part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill — the same bill that also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to a series of subsequent orders by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that effectively froze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7. A NextEra spokesperson provided me a statement from the company after this story’s publication saying it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.”
This article was updated after publication to include a statement from NextEra.
A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.
A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.