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Sparks

Trump Complains Solar Takes Up ‘400, 500 Acres of Desert Soil’

Is that a problem? Let’s do the math.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump has been warming up to the idea of electric vehicles in recent months, and he used the debate podium on Tuesday night to announce that “I’m a big fan of solar.” But don’t get too excited: He apparently can’t name three of their albums.

During a heated back-and-forth over Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on fracking, Trump started to get worked up about what will happen if Democrats win the election. “They’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead,” he warned. “We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant?”

Trump went on: “By the way, I’m a big fan of solar, but they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil.”

Trump has a history of exaggeration, but this is neither particularly hyperbolic nor as concerning as Trump would have you believe. About 34,000 acres of public land are currently devoted to solar energy, and a common estimate is that the U.S. would need to expand solar to an additional 700,000 acres to meet 2035 renewable energy goals. That’s about 1,100 square miles, or 1,555 Trump-sized solar farms (or 0.031115% of the entire United States, per Clean Technica).

And while it’s true that most utility-scale solar photovoltaic facilities are only a handful of acres, it only takes about five to seven acres to generate a megawatt — so a project of Trump’s reckoning would generate about 65 megawatts, which, as Mads Rønne Almassalkhi, an associate professor of electrical and biomedical engineering at the University of Vermont, pointed out, isn’t all that shabby:

The U.S. government also recently determined that some 31 million acres of public land in just 11 states are not on “protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitat” and are close to transmission lines or “previously disturbed lands,” and therefore hypothetically suitable for solar development. To put it in simpler terms, solar takes up a fair bit of land but: Desert big.

To be sure, there are absolutely valid concerns and debates to be had over siting and the environmental impact of solar farms in America, regardless of how small their ultimate relative footprint will be. And Trump could have raised those arguments. But from what he showed us on Tuesday, he doesn’t make a very convincing fan.

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Sparks

What Happens to a Landfill in a Hurricane?

The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.

A hurricane and a landfill.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?

No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”

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Sparks

How Climate Change Is Supercharging Hurricane Milton

And made Helene so much worse, according to new reports from Climate Central and World Weather Attribution.

Helene destruction.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.

A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.

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Sparks

JD Vance on Climate Change: ‘Let’s Just Say That’s True’

“For the sake of argument.”

JD Vance.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

We didn’t have to wait long for climate to come up during tonight’s vice presidential debate between VP hopefuls Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz — the night’s second question was about the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene and fueled by warmer air and waters due to climate pollution.

Vance started off his answer innocuously enough, extending his thoughts and prayers to those affected by the hurricane and then proceeding to some campaign boilerplate. “I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air and clean water,” Vance said up top, echoing Trump’s claim that he wants “absolutely immaculate clean water and … absolutely clean air,” from the presidential debate back in June. (It’s worth noting, of course, that his policy choices tell a different story.)

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