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Wealth bias shows up in the strangest places — including, according to new research, PurpleAir sensor data.

Everyone loves a public good, and one of the classic examples is clean air. When I breathe in clean air, no one else gets any less of it, and you can’t exclude people from enjoying it.
But how do we know whether the air we’re breathing is clean? And is that information a public good?
A team of economists from universities across the U.S. published some answers to those questions this week in a working paper via the National Bureau of Economic Research.
As their research subject, the economists looked at PurpleAir, which promises more localized and frequently updated air quality readings beyond what the Environmental Protection Agency can provide. Once purchased (for a price of $229 to $339, depending on the model) and installed, the censors report their air quality readings to a map that anyone can access. The company’s sales took off in 2020 after the epochal wildfires up and down the West Coast.
The study considered air quality readings from PurpleAir monitors in California from 2019 to 2021, including the fires and the consumer response to them. Then the researchers matched those readings with census tracts and the demographic information associated with them.
What they found is that PurpleAir monitors tend to be “clustered” within certain geographic areas, and that those geographic areas tend to be wealthier. Not surprisingly, pricey air monitors have a customer base demographically similar to that of other gadgets bought by early adopters. In other words, PurpleAir monitors’ locations don't so much track pollution levels as demographics.
On Thursday afternoon, the PurpleAir map showed 15 outdoor sensors in and around Bakersfield, California, a majority Hispanic city of 400,000 people in California’s Central Valley that the American Lung Association ranks as either the most or the third most polluted American city, depending on the metric. There were 13 active, meanwhile, in the famously ritzy San Francisco neighborhood of Pacific Heights, with a population of around 20,000. (We reached out for comment to both the researchers and PurpleAir but hadn’t gotten a response from either as of press time.)
Of course, the relationship between income and pollution is not random — quite the opposite. On the global and national levels, there is an inverse relationship between air pollution and income, with people in low income areas more exposed to harmful pollution.
While the economists called their finding “unsurprising,” they also said it raised the concern that the monitors “may actually increase health inequalities” by allowing people in better-covered areas to “improve their health through avoidance behavior,” thus making it so “the benefit from these monitors are more likely to accrue to the higher income individuals that adopted them.” Since PurpleAir monitors “are more present in less polluted areas,” the data they collect has less “social value … since the places that would benefit the most from information that could encourage pollution avoidance behavior are precisely the ones least likely to have this information.”
This means that “in areas where pollution is the highest, and thus avoidance behaviors are potentially the most effective, people have less knowledge of their pollution levels, even when conditioning on income and education.”
The researchers found similar correlations of PurpleAir monitor usage and race, with “monitor adoption … lowest in areas with a higher share of Black or Hispanic populations.”
These findings also mean that the people spending money to learn about the air quality where they live are also getting very little value from their monitors, as they are both less likely to live in a heavily polluted area and more likely to be well served by existing air monitors. In the slightly bloodless language of academic economics, the authors wrote, “Technophiles may purchase monitors for reasons that are quasi-independent from the value of information that the monitor provides, including a competitive desire to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ and thus drive high levels of spatial correlation in monitor adoption.” If people are getting PurpleAir monitors because their neighbors are, it’s probably a sign that they don’t need one.
For the public to truly realize the promise of more particularized and frequently updated public health data, collection can’t merely be left up to the vagaries and patterns of the consumer electronics market. An “optimal” policy, according to the researchers, “will require supplemental provision of monitors where the private market falls short” — or to put it more bluntly, government action. Public health will have to be public.
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A letter from the Solar Energy Industries Association describes the administration’s “nearly complete moratorium on permitting.”
A major solar energy trade group now says the Trump administration is refusing to do even routine work to permit solar projects on private lands — and that the situation has become so dire for the industry, lawmakers discussing permitting reform in Congress should intervene.
The Solar Energy Industries Association on Thursday published a letter it sent to top congressional leaders of both parties asserting that a July memo from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum mandating “elevated” review for renewables project decisions instead resulted in “a nearly complete moratorium on permitting for any project in which the Department of Interior may play a role, on both federal and private land, no matter how minor.” The letter was signed by more than 140 solar companies, including large players EDF Power Solutions, RES, and VDE Americas.
The letter reinforces a theme underlying much of Heatmap’s coverage since the memo’s release — that the bureaucratic freeze against solar decision-making has stretched far beyond final permits to processes once considered ancillary. It also confirms that the enhanced review has jammed up offices outside Burgum’s purview, such as the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees wetlands, water crossings, and tree removals, and requires Interior to sign off on actions through the interagency consultation process.
SEIA’s letter asserts that the impacts of Burgum’s memo stretch even to projects on private lands seeking Interior’s assistance to determine whether federally protected species are even present — meaning that regardless of whether endangered animals or flowers are there, companies are now taking on an outsized legal risk by moving forward with any kind of development.
After listing out these impacts in its letter, SEIA asked Congress to pressure Interior into revoking the July memo in its entirety. The trade group added there may be things Interior could do besides revoking the memo that would amount to “reasonable steps” in the “short-term to prevent unnecessary delays in energy development that is currently poised to help meet the growing energy demands of AI and other industries.” SEIA did not elaborate on what those actions would look like in its letter.
“Businesses need certainty in order to continue making investments in the United States to build out much-needed energy projects,” SEIA’s letter reads. “Certainty must include a review process that does not discriminate by energy source.” It concludes: “We urge Congress to keep fairness and certainty at the center of permitting negotiations.”
Notably, the letter arrived after American Clean Power — another major trade group representing renewable energy companies — backed a major GOP-authored permitting bill called the SPEED Act that is moving through the House. Although the bill has some bipartisan support from the most moderate wing of the House Democratic caucus, it has yet to win support from Democrats involved in bipartisan permitting talks, including Representative Scott Peters, who told me he’d back the bill only if Trump were prevented from stalling federal decision-making for renewable energy projects.
SEIA has deliberately set itself apart from ACP in this regard, telling me last week that it was neutral on the legislation as it stands. In a statement released with the letter to Congress, the trade group’s CEO, Abigail Ross Hopper, said that while “the solar industry values the continued bipartisan engagement on permitting reform, the SPEED Act, as passed out of committee, falls short of addressing this core problem: the ongoing permitting moratorium.”
“To be clear, there is no question we need permitting reform,” Hopper stated. “There is an agreement to be reached, and SEIA and our 1,200 member companies will continue our months-long effort to advocate for a deal that ensures equal treatment of all energy sources, because the current status of this blockade is unsustainable.”
In a statement to Heatmap News, Interior spokesperson Alyse Sharpe confirmed the agency is using its “current review process” on “federal resources, permits or consultations” related to solar projects on “federal, state or private lands.” “This policy strengthens accountability, prevents misuse of taxpayer-funded subsidies and upholds our commitment to restoring balance in energy development.” The agency declined to comment on SEIA’s request to Congress, though. “We don’t provide comment on correspondence to Congress regarding Interior issues via the media,” Sharpe said.
The senator spoke at a Heatmap event in Washington, D.C. last week about the state of U.S. manufacturing.
At Heatmap’s event, “Onshoring the Electric Revolution,” held last week in Washington, D.C. every guest agreed: The U.S. is falling behind in the race to build the technologies of the future.
Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, a Democrat who sits on the Senate’s energy and natural resources committee, expressed frustration with the Trump administration rolling back policies in the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act meant to support critical minerals companies. “If we want to, in this country, lead in 21st century technology, why aren’t we starting with the extraction of the critical minerals that we need for that technology?” she asked.
At the same time, Cortez Masto also seemed hopeful that the Senate would move forward on both permitting and critical minerals legislation. “After we get back from the Thanksgiving holiday, there is going to be a number of bills that we’re looking at marking up and moving through the committee,” Cortez Masto said. That may well include the SPEED Act, a permitting bill with bipartisan support that passed the House Natural Resources Committee late last week.
Friction in the permitting of new energy and transmission projects is one of the key factors slowing down the transition to clean energy — though fossil fuel companies also have an interest in the process.
Thomas Hochman, the Foundation of American Innovation’s director of infrastructure policy, talked about how legislation could protect energy projects of all stripes from executive branch interference.
“The oil and gas industry is really, really interested in seeing tech-neutral language on this front because they’re worried that the same tools that have been uncovered to block wind and solar will then come back and block oil and gas,” Hochman said.
While permitting dominated the conversation, it was not the only topic on panelists’ minds.
“There’s a lot of talk about permitting,” said Michael Tubman, the senior director of federal affairs at Lucid Motors. “It’s not just about permits. There’s a lot more to be done. And one of those important things is those mines have to have the funding available.”
Michael Bruce, a partner at the venture capital firm Emerson Collective, thinks that other government actions, such as supporting domestic demand, would help businesses in the critical minerals space.
“You need to have demand,” he said. “And if you don’t have demand, you don’t have a business.”
Like Cortez Masto, Bruce lamented the decline of U.S. mining in the face of China’s supply chain dominance.
“We do [mining] better than anyone else in the world,” said Bruce. “But we’ve got to give [mining companies] permission to return. We have a few [projects] that have been waiting for permits for upwards of 25 years.”
Flames have erupted in the “Blue Zone” at the United Nations Climate Conference in Brazil.
A literal fire has erupted in the middle of the United Nations conference devoted to stopping the planet from burning.
The timing couldn’t be worse. Today is the second to last day of the annual climate meeting known as COP30, taking place on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belém, Brazil. Delegates are in the midst of heated negotiations over a final decision text on the points of agreement this session.
A number of big questions remain up in the air, including how countries will address the fact that their national plans to cut emissions will fail to keep warming “well under 2 degrees Celsius,” the target they supported in the 2015 Paris Agreement. They are striving to reach agreement on a list of “indicators,” or metrics by which to measure progress on adaptation. Brazil has led a push for the conference to mandate the creation of a global roadmap off of fossil fuels. Some 80 countries support the idea, but it’s still highly uncertain whether or how it will make its way into the final text.
Just after 2:00 p.m. Belém time, 12 p.m. Eastern, I was in the middle of arranging an interview with a source at the conference when I got the following message:
“We've been evacuated due to a fire- not exactly sure how the day is going to continue.”
The fire is in the conference’s “Blue Zone,” an area restricted to delegates, world leaders, accredited media, and officially designated “observers” of the negotiations. This is where all of the official negotiations, side events, and meetings take place, as opposed to the “Green Zone,” which is open to the public, and houses pavilions and events for non-governmental organizations, business groups, and civil society groups.
It is not yet clear what the cause of the fire was or how it will affect the home sprint of the conference.
Outside of the venue, a light rain was falling.